Gaspar & Noble make their triumphant? return; mostly just get asked about "The List"

[pindicator]

Thanks for the report, Noble. Did not realize SD had tried to move a slow-moving stack all the way to Broken Bridge!

[NobleHelium]

I will try to post an update tonight. Can't have us be the last updated thread in the forum now, can we?

[NobleHelium]

Okay well I promised a report but I am far too exhausted to post a real report.  But I really need to post something since novice isn't reading the other threads so here are some major recent happenings.

1) We farmed SD's triremes which he kept sending at us one at a time for some reason.
2) We landed a lot of cataphracts next to Kaifeng and took it.
3) Lewwyn attacked Rusten who appeared to be woefully unprepared and Rusten lost three cities in two turns.  Serdoa then positioned to attack Rusten.
4) We determined that we couldn't let Lewwyn and Serdoa partition Rusten because it would leave us in a decided third place after the dust settled since we weren't making much headway in finishing off SD, so we positioned ourselves for a backstab on Serdoa. The idea here is that he backs off Rusten so that Rusten can defend against Lewwyn better. Rusten also immediately asked us to declare war on Serdoa after getting attacked, but that was after we had determined that we'd most likely need to attack.
5) This was a very risky move because SD has enough pikes that he might try to retake Crystal Veins after we moved a lot of units out of it.
6) We positioned ourselves with hopes to capture/raze as many as five cities from Serdoa on the first turn with boating and some teleport trickery, but he completed units in various cities which foiled parts of the plan.  We spent far too long debating whether we should actually attack which caused most of my exhaustion today.
7) In the end we did attack and we took the two cities on the border and razed a third with a Morale GG to reduce cultural pressure.
8) We're hoping to get peace with SD but he may very well not take it.
9) We're trying to take a couple more cities from Serdoa before seeing if he'll be interested in peace, but I realized after sending the turn that I made several critical mistakes because we were trying to rush finishing the turn so that Bob could play it. Again, extreme exhaustion from thinking about this game far too much.  I am never spending this much effort on a single game again, this is past my limit.  At least I know where my limit is now, I guess.

[Gaspar]

I'll get a pictorial history of the recent turns up either later tonight or tomorrow.

Noble is a little hard on himself, we didn't really spend an excessive amount of time on this turn, rather it came in a bit late and then we rushed at the end trying to get it off to Bob in time - that's what led to the mistakes. We've sort of learned it works better when I'm the one playing the active copy of the save and Noble is playing the backup, because I'm a little better at deciding when to cut off discussion and Noble is a lot better at advocating for discussion. When the roles are reversed, it just doesn't work as well.

[Gaspar]

OK, so let's catch up with a little bit of something from every turn we missed...

t126

The biggest news of this turn was Serdoa making peace with SD.  If the SD CKN invasion was the first domino in the chain events that likely clinched the game for Lewwyn, this was the domino that maybe started to give us the idea that if chaos was going to be our ladder, we'd better start climbing soon.  In the picture, you can see Sorgan and Shanghai (south of the "Road 1/3" sign,) the two cities Serdoa sniped off SD while he was whipping himself silly with pikes to defend against us.



t127

This was the turn where we sent SDs galley with 2 CKNs to the bottom of the sea.  SD has had a weird persistence of just sailing triremes around the cape at former Mud Flats to try and pillage nets and such on our eastern coast, so we set a trireme trap.  We sunk two of his boats on t125, on t127 we sunk another trireme at the galley.



You can see in the SW corner of the shot the trireme SD didn't know we had.  We had two damaged triremes holding promos in The Beachhead as well.  We lost the coin flip with the fresh boat and then sank the other two at 90.5% and 95.6% odds, respectively.  It was at this point where we started to realize we might soon be able to thread the needle and liberate Putrid Cloister/Kaifeng in the north.

t128

Pretty mundane here, we pillaged some tiles near Beijing.



t129

We finished Compass on t128 and started towards Optics on t129.  SD got a GG by killing our pillaging Cataphract with a pikeman.  We responded by killing his pikeman, earning ourselves our 4th GG.  Somewhere around this time, Serdoa silently broke our non-scouting NAP by sending an HA through our lands.  We followed suit by scouting him a bit with a phract.  We discovered a fair few things, but the biggest notable was the discovery of his military on Rusten's border.  At the time, we thought he was preparing for a Rusten attack.



t130

This was the turn the Archduke was assassinated, as the dominos had fallen to the point that the powderkeg was about to explode. Lewwyn declared war on Rusten, as Rusten neared the end of his golden age, in which he had adopted Police State and not improved his power to any meaningful degree. Lewwyn took the city of Impale on the first turn of war and we got a look at Rusten's Pyramids city of Inpulsa which clearly had no hope of holding against what Serdoa had:



We started to worry about the world that would be left after Rusten folded and it seemed one where Lewwyn was the even more clear global hegemon and Serdoa was his nearest rival was the most likely scenario. This was when we started to prepare the stab. While Serdoa had been a good friend all game, which is nice and all but...



t131

Rusten lost the Hindu holy city of CoC as well as the city of Gemswap, Serdoa declared and was sure to take Inpulsa next turn. While we prepped to reconquer Kaifeng in the north, we also prepared the worlds thinnest but most audacious mostly land-based alpha strike...



Not the cleanest picture in the world, but so it goes. Anyway, moving from west to east. The lone phract in the west would get teleported from its current position to the horse because Serdoa's culture would take the floodplain after he captured Inpulsa. That would allow a NE-NE strike on Akiva, which was defended by a single axeman. Our main stack was on the wheat tile by Solaris Temple. After roading the iron, we would be able to hit Ashas Ree. Once Ashas Ree fell, because Atollon only had 1st ring culture, we would be able to use a morale promoted GG to raze Atollon. We would then road 2NE of Fondor and hit that, while the remaining forces could coalesce to hit Mon Cala the following turn. Meanwhile, we loaded our southern galley with a pair of phracts which could hit the juicy southern city of Selonia. If everything went perfectly according plan, Serdoa would lose a fair number of forces taking Inpulsa which would buy us the time to reinforce the cities we took and give us a nice chunk of quality land to balance the easy gains Lewwyn was seeing in Rustenland. Also, combined with the capture of Kaifeng, we would have taken an impressive 6 cities in one turn.

A fuller t132 turn report to follow but suffice to say, everything did not go perfectly.

[novice]

I mean, reporting how things should have gone makes for impressive reports.

So if/when Rusten loses his Pyramids city, will he be thrown into Anarchy?

[Charriu]

Rusten will only be thrown into Barbarism if he hasn't researched his current civic.

EDIT: He won't get anarchy turns

[Gaspar]

Yeah, I get it. But it was necessary to show the planning so that you can see how the actual results of turn were disappointing compared to that. Because the actual results of the turn were pretty good, minus the errors Noble discussed above. I had started the big report, but then lost everything I wrote about a third of the way in, so you're going to have to wait until my frustration ebbs to get the actual report.

For the record, Serdoa did capture the Pyramids on t132 and Rusten was thrown to Despotism with no anarchy. He's Spiritual anyway.

[Charriu]

Oh right despotism is the lowest civic there. I never bother to remember these

[novice]

Yeah, I get it.  But it was necessary to show the planning so that you can see how the actual results of turn were disappointing compared to that.  Because the actual results of the turn were pretty good, minus the errors Noble discussed above.

Yeah, I meant it as a compliment, it was indeed a beautiful plan. It’s a pity this one didn’t survive contact with the enemy.