[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[Sullla]

A couple pictures from immediately after the turn roll:



There's the captured city. As expected, Dreylin didn't lose much of anything in the attack. It was well executed, removing the defenses and then using a handful of collateral units for just enough damage to get winning odds on the defenders. Gaspar/Noble will be gone in a few more turns.



Privateer sighting! These have to be Dreylin's units as well. I like the idea of using these as scouts that can enter anyone's borders at will. Maybe we'll have to do some of that ourselves. Also a good reminder that Dreylin is not too far away over the water to our south.



We have REM's world map after the trade went through. I was a bit surprised by what it revealed. REM might have 12 cities, but he hasn't claimed any more land than we have. I think we'll end up with roughly the same amount of territory as he has. Our tiles are also a lot better developed, although REM has some fairly large cities to his credit. I actually feel a lot better after seeing what we're up against here.

Also note the BGN city on the same island off to the northeast. Hopefully there will be some border tensions there.

Again, planning on working on the sandbox and micro plan more tomorrow. Have a good night.

[Tohron]

One little detail I don't remember you mentioning: did you offer the corn to Pindicator yet?

[Athmos]

Thanks again for the top quality reporting ! Gaspar reaction to dreylin attack (or lack thereof) is pretty disappointing tho, not winning any points for sportsmanship there...

[Sullla]

Good questions! I have not offered any deals in-game, so the question is best posed to scooter.

Micro plan and sandbox have been updated for the next couple of turns. I don't like trying to project very far into the future right now, since the turns are complex and it's very easy for something unexpected to pop up. The biggest issue was figuring out how the get the trade routes in the sandbox; I think I finally got them all correct for the current turn. Here's a quick picture of what that looks like:



The blue civ represents BGN while the yellow civ represents Donovan. I think this setup should be correct for the current turn, at least until they go adding more cities.

Here's the link to the sandbox savegame file. Scooter, based on what I'm seeing in there, we should be on line to finish Assembly Line tech at the eot 305 or eot 306. Hopefully we can ride out the next dozen or so turns until reaching that point without anything bad happening. We will be able to draft both Pasteurization and Spinning Jenny on Turn 296 before revolting back into Bureaucracy; I think we should adopt Free Religion as well for the research bonus at the same time.

The next big discussion point is going to be picking destinations for our next round of settlers. We have them coming out of the capital T298, Telegraph T300, and then another out of the capital T302... and then probably another out of the capital on T305. We get 94 foodhammers/turn, so we may as well push out some 3.5 turn settlers for the immediate future. Here are the spots that I'm thinking about.



I think we should make a play for at least one city on the island to the south, and the location I like the best is this tile. Although it misses the crab resource, we get the plains hill extra production on the center tile and the hill defensive bonus, which feels like a big deal to me in this contested region. Not only would this be a good city in and of itself, it would also help shield our southern underbelly from an attack by Dreylin. He would either have to go through this city first or else move through our field of vision, giving us time to react. Furthermore, Dreylin has no cities on this island yet, while Donovan went ahead and settled a city on one of the other islands where Dreylin already had a city present. If they wanted to attack someone by sea, Donovan seems like a better target.

If we want to make a play for this region, the time is right now, while Dreylin is still wrapping up the war with Gaspar/Noble. I think we should head here with the first settler out of Steam Engine.



I like this spot for the Telegraph settler. We can realistically only support one push into a contested region at the moment, due to our modest military strength. We may as well start grabbing some of the other strong city locations that we've left unsettled up to this point, and I like this one to grab first. The city spot is very easily reached from Telegraph with a single additional road, and the location has three resources (deer + sheep + incense) to make it a strong contributor immediately. Time to start making use of these good tiles.



I also like this city, probably for the second Steam Engine settler. It's another location that requires no military to defend it, and it brings in more quality tiles and new resources. I certainly like this spot better than either of the "deer" locations, the spot between Antiseptic and Haber Process or the land to the southwest of Pasteurization. Both of those isthmuses are low on food; we will settle them eventually, but not until other and better spots are taken.



These island cities are another possible location. Settling either one would seal up this island under our control and prevent pindicator from establishing a toehold. However, both of these would be weak locations and as a result I don't recommend settling here until we're filling in the remaining spots on the map later. I'm also not sure how eager pindicator is going to be to grab this land, given that he has better island options available to his north and south.

Let me know what you think scooter. Hope you're having a good weekend.

[picklepikkl]

scooter did mention the corn trade, but not whether pindicator ended up accepting:

I did offer the corn to pindicator. It's not useful to him at all, but it's more about the stab at a friendly sentiment.

[scooter]

Before I get started, I just want to say I cannot believe you found a way and went through the hassle of hooking up trade routes in the sandbox. That might just be the most impressive thing that's happened in this thread all game.

Turn 294

Let's start with the bad news.



Sullla, your sandbox has a mistake in it. In it there's an extra lake tile allowing us to work a 3rd lake on this turn and hit size6 EoT. Unfortunately we come 1 food short. We can still draft this city before leaving Nationalism, though.



Time for the Dreylin Report. He's seen the workers here, so the jig may be up on us sniping a pair of Gaspar workers. It's worth noting anyway. I don't think we'll see any retribution from him, but I'm still vaguely nervous about it because he does have OT4E whispering in his ear.



Here's his stack recuperating in what used to be Gaspar's capital. I decided to pull the Explorer back for now. I don't think we care too much about the rest of his Gaspar conquest. I moved him N-NW-SW onto the grass forest just south of the sheep. I think we should use him to poke around Dreylin's new borders here just to make sure a second wave doesn't come to try to take Antiseptic. The reality is that his army will survive this war almost entirely intact, which is pretty bad news for us. He won't be blind to the fact that we've got a smaller army but a tech lead, which may result in him trying to get some use out of it. Hopefully we can dissuade him.



Dreylin did do a swap into land consolidation civics, so there's that.



So here's what I did with the Galleon (this shot was taken after I rolled the turn). I loaded the rifle and then unloaded him into Antiseptic while also retreating the other Rifle back into the city. That gives us 4 units in the city. The Galleon can hang out on the tile 1E of the Banana, and from there if we need another unit in Antiseptic, we can transfer it from Haber to Antiseptic in one shot.



We should consider briefly what to do with this Explorer. I think we should bring him home via Donovan's land, but we run the slight risk that Donovan will dislike him poking around and will close borders as a result. Does that seem likely? BGN did do it to us earlier. I tend to think Donovan will relax about it (plus he's benefitting very heavily from our routes), but I figured it was at least worth mentioning. I'll plan on bringing him home unless there's an objection.



The good news of the turn is that upon pressing enter, the sheep tile flipped to us here at Induction. We may be able to step off the gas slightly with the culture if we want since we're no longer having to fight for any of these tiles.



I think we're starting to see some separation between the top 3 and the rest of the field. We've been adding units, but still in 4th in soldiers. Dreylin and Donovan are obviously 1-2. The question is whether it's REM or Pindicator that's keeping pace ahead of us in soldiers. I'm guessing it's REM. It would make sense, and he's got far more MFG capacity than pindicator and can more easily afford it. We only needed 2 more EPs to get pindicator's graphs, so I put the rest on REM. I think we actually got pindicator graphs at turn roll, but I forgot to take a look at them.



Overview shot after turn roll. I think we probably want a Frigate sometime soon, especially seeing how Dreylin was poking around in the waters to our south. Not necessarily for any specific purpose, but we'll want them for later anyway, so we might as well slip a couple in here and there.

I'll have more thoughts tomorrow on settling plans and other things.

[Brian Shanahan]

An idea for when ye've spare worker hours, maybe. Move Steam Power's canal fot 1 east off the hill to the grassland marked 1/4 wk, freeing up the hill for a mine. Now I'm not looking at the micro plan so maybe it's in there already.

[Kofiman]

How about "Blast Furnace" for the next city?

Or "Wood's Metal"

[Sullla]

So. We have news for the turn:



I guess that answers the question of whether we'll be able to live in peace with Dreylin. They're going to keep throwing their military around until someone is strong enough to stop them. Assembly Line tech can't get here soon enough.

I don't think Dreylin wants a serious war with us, not after swapping out of those wartime civics. I think they want the border barb city and that's all. They had a chance to capture the worker northeast of Antiseptic and they didn't take it. That suggests they just want the city. We can evacuate the 3 workers on the galleon, and the fourth worker to the west down to the southwest. Tactically, I think we promote our units and move them out of the city a tile west, onto the forested road. Those unpromoted rifles will have terrible odds attacking our promoted units in the forest with the defensive bonus. Let them capture the city, and then we can counter-attack with winning odds on flat ground. Dreylin can take the city, but we can make it painful to do so.

REM also discovered Communism tech this turn, so expect him to revolt into State Property civic soon. Scooter, do we want to try to discuss the turn over some kind of chat client later tonight? It seems like this war gives us a lot of things to discuss and not a lot of time to make decisions.

[Dp101]

Good luck! If he went for your core, do you think you could live?