[SPOILERS] scooter Expands the Empire Across the Sea

[Zed-F]

With getting Chemistry in ~2t, is the intent to poke at Yuris as well in the next 10 turns of peace with SD? Or is he too much better-defended overall than SD (who has been under-invested in military for a long time) for that to be easily done with small probing forces? I think we are safe on the water there, but not sure how easy it would be to break through his defenses on land prior to Grens.

Any appetite for eating some of Bing's land before Grens, or is there too much chaff to blow through?

[scooter]

Some shark fins for Yuris and Bing. It was a serious fight. I don't understand why they couldn't just sign a peace that ceded the city. Bing had way more units, and the city was almost worthless to Yuris. Why did they burn hundreds of hammers over it? My skirmish with Superdeath is downright trivial in comparison.





Whew, look at this from Superdeath. This underscores the value of all the pressure. This is a combination of whips and almost certainly mass-hiring Rep scientists to try to finish Astronomy.





I threw this out to Yuris, largely because I expect SD is trying to pitch him a 2v1 against me, while Yuris has been friendly towards me all game. I could invite the 2v1 and try to get them to concede now, but a bogged-down war would also do the trick at considerably less personal risk. Also, this might afford me the chance to retry razing the Pyramids.





Here's Ice Island's progress. Maiden Fort is getting its Crabs hooked next turn. The Galleon 2N of Drene is carrying a missionary (from Letheras) that will convert it next turn in order to pull in the Fish. I've dropped off 2 Longbows for this area that I'll reposition along the south - likely reloading that one and sticking it in Maiden Fort. I've got 3 workshops down and counting, and these tiles will be bonkers during the next GA. Letheras I micro'd this past turn to complete its Granary, and now is growing towards sz1 and will get a modest Granary boost on the way to size 2. Work boats are still needed, especially as Trate is about to pop its borders as well.





Big coin flip coming next turn. Rooting for a Scientist here.





First Musket built in Black Coral. One more turn until Chemistry, so the Superdeath razes did indeed speed it by 1T. I plan to queue several immediately.

[scooter]

With getting Chemistry in ~2t, is the intent to poke at Yuris as well in the next 10 turns of peace with SD? Or is he too much better-defended overall than SD (who has been under-invested in military for a long time) for that to be easily done with small probing forces? I think we are safe on the water there, but not sure how easy it would be to break through his defenses on land prior to Grens.

Any appetite for eating some of Bing's land before Grens, or is there too much chaff to blow through?

Bing's cities are too well-defended. He's built Walls and/or Castles in a ton of his frontline cities and well-stocked them. He's got the #1 military in the game. His economy is also miserably bad, so with him it's a case where it's better to just wait him out. He's saving gold at like 40gpt right now.


As for Yuris, yeah I'm gonna try to get a look at his front cities with a nearby Caravel, and if he leaves stuff wide open, maybe I'll prod. Most likely though I won't be able to. What I've seen looks like a better defended front than SD's skeleton military, and also I am low on viable attackers right now. I lost a few units in this SD expedition, but I've mostly been replacing them with defenders. This mass expansion does require I defend those cities, and right now several are wide open which I'm in the process of fixing right now. This is why I figure I should feel him out about messing with Superdeath, even if I don't know how game he would be.

[Zed-F]

Bing's cities are too well-defended. He's built Walls and/or Castles in a ton of his frontline cities and well-stocked them. He's got the #1 military in the game. His economy is also miserably bad, so with him it's a case where it's better to just wait him out. He's saving gold at like 40gpt right now.


As for Yuris, yeah I'm gonna try to get a look at his front cities with a nearby Caravel, and if he leaves stuff wide open, maybe I'll prod. Most likely though I won't be able to. What I've seen looks like a better defended front than SD's skeleton military, and also I am low on viable attackers right now. I lost a few units in this SD expedition, but I've mostly been replacing them with defenders. This mass expansion does require I defend those cities, and right now several are wide open which I'm in the process of fixing right now. This is why I figure I should feel him out about messing with Superdeath, even if I don't know how game he would be.

Sounds like we are unlikely to make too many waves in the near future then. Though did Bing just finish Engineering recently for Castles? I know he had researched construction but had thought he was some ways away from following that up with Engineering. The last pics I saw of your caravel exploring his territory suggested he built Chichen Itza, though.

[scooter]

Yuris is interested, or at least he's claiming to be interested. Speaking of Superdeath.





He did finish Astronomy. It will be telling to see if he goes mass whips now that he's got it or not as I'm trying to gauge how much fight he has in him for this game. I'm a little sad that one player did get Galleons before I got Frigates, but in this cases it was by < 1 full turn. I did beat the rest. Yuris meanwhile has Civil Service and only needs Paper for Galleons, so I would expect him to complete that within the 10T timer we've agreed to. I am unsure how hard I really want to commit, but at the very least I will plan to get a bunch of Frigates on the water which should allow me to control things. It will also let me bombard defenses which is the biggest barrier to most amphibious attacks right now.





Chemistry in and we did get a Scientist roll. This leaves a decision at Unta. As you see right now our Scientist odds are 13%. By working all 5 specialists, those odds will increase. I haven't done the math on how much they'll increase, but I'm ballpark guessing into the high teens. I do have an alternative.





I could fire the Scientists. This would delay the GP by 3 turns, and instead of odds in the high teens, I would probably see something closer to 10%.


3T is not a huge delay to meaningfully improve our odds. 9T would line up exactly with the Yuris/SD possible conflict - regardless of how hot it actually would be. This might open up a world where I sort of try to have it both ways. In this world, I could spend the 9T pushing a bit harder for boats/units, whipping a bit more. Then upon completion, I could flip the GA and enjoy the MoM Golden Age and try to zoom ahead further while using a nice standing army/navy to force SD/Yuris to whip themselves silly in conflict. Sort of like what I just did to SD while happily teching.


In contrast, 3T delay and I still get another Scientist means 3T less to react to the new situation it puts me in. For example, a viable path might be using one to bulb Education and go Lib Economics or something, denying that while getting the Merchant needed for the Golden Age. Or just tech Economics and sandbag Liberalism for something really big. Waiting longer sort of hurts, although I could mitigate it by just saving a ton of gold. In addition, it makes tech a bit awkward.





See, right now I'm really well setup for a GA in 6T. Banking and Philosophy are both 3T techs, and those are the ones I'm targeting for civic use in a GA. Of course, Meditation is still required, but it's so cheap at this stage that it wouldn't add a turn. So it's a tricky call. I also just in general like being able to get those GA snowball rolling sooner, however it's undeniable that the newer cities would benefit slightly more by being 3T further along. Hard to say.





Frigates queued. Here's one that will come out quite quickly.





In general the empire is split right now. Half is producing military - primarily more mature cities - and half is producing buildings - primarily newer cities.

[Zed-F]

I think what we'd like to do as far as war aims go (aside from burning Pyramids) is take peripheral islands on SD's eastern side, which is closer to our capital than the other side of SD's empire, so might have more reasonable maintenance costs and be less annoying to Yuris if we grab them. I don't think we want to come out of this with no new territory at all, whether claimed in principle or in fact. We do want to pay less for the lands we get than Yuris does (assuming he does go in for a real attack -- he should want to, he's got his UU now), so I don't think we necessarily need to push hard for SD's core cities except if he appears to be collapsing entirely. To me this does suggest that we don't mind delaying our GA for a few extra turns to keep standing up our new colonies and get a few more units out.

If that's the route we choose then I agree that it makes the most sense to just save gold for our last 3 turns prior to the GA as a hedge against getting a bad die roll, so we can immediately turn around and tech Economics ASAP, fire our GA, tech Military Science, and either lib Steel or sandbag Lib for later (perhaps after getting it down to 1T). We won't want Free Religion during our GA while we need to be in Pacifism, but it might be potentially something we want toward the end of the GA. If we don't get the bad roll, we just spend that gold reserve on teching straight to Military Science, and decide what our next tech objective is after that.

That said, we can still build units while in a GA and almost certainly will, just without the whip. If we do keep the scientists and get burned for it, we can still go for Economics; we won't have that 3 turn gold reserve to speed it but we'll know we need to do it 3 turns earlier, so that feels kind of like a wash. So I don't think the difference between these plans is really massive, and either should work. I guess that's a point in favour of minimizing the odds of a bad roll.

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Thinking about it from SD's perspective: IIRC he has Galleons and XBows (but not Longbows) -- in principle he could defend ok against Yuris with Galleons and Samurai.
- He could throw everything against us and let Yuris grab stuff for cheap, just to spite the player in the lead who burned a couple of his cities and try to make more of a game (for others) out of it. As long as we go cautiously and have enough Frigates he can't really hurt us, but he could make our progress much slower than Yuris's if he does. This is the sensible thing only if he wants to be out of the game ASAP. Usually SD likes to try to hold on, though.
- He could defend reasonably well against Yuris and just try to protect his core against us. This is the 'sensible' thing if he wants to keep playing, since he's much more able to defend his core with interior lines than he is his periphery, when everything has to move by sea.

I kind of think SD will fall more toward the latter than the former. He's not usually the sort to fail to defend against a threat when he has a chance of trying to do so, IIRC.

[Tarkeel]

I agree with most of what Zed has to say.

Thinking about it from SD's perspective: IIRC he has Galleons and XBows (but not Longbows) -- in principle he could defend ok against Yuris with Galleons and Samurai.
- He could throw everything against us and let Yuris grab stuff for cheap, just to spite the player in the lead who burned a couple of his cities and try to make more of a game (for others) out of it. As long as we go cautiously and have enough Frigates he can't really hurt us, but he could make our progress much slower than Yuris's if he does. This is the sensible thing only if he wants to be out of the game ASAP. Usually SD likes to try to hold on, though.
- He could defend reasonably well against Yuris and just try to protect his core against us. This is the 'sensible' thing if he wants to keep playing, since he's much more able to defend his core with interior lines than he is his periphery, when everything has to move by sea.

I kind of think SD will fall more toward the latter than the former. He's not usually the sort to fail to defend against a threat when he has a chance of trying to do so, IIRC.

Superdeath is very much the kind of player to spite-defend against the instigator. In PB66 we started the un-planned dogpile against him, taking two cities in the opening move and barely managing to slog to a third, while he actively left cities empty for other players to take. It's what I expect him to do here, so I'd try to use our mobility to attack from multiple flanks since we have the tech lead.

[Zed-F]

Yeah I guess one way to prevent him from spite-defending against us and leaving Yuris to take stuff for cheap is to have some forces on the Yuris front that keep an eye on things and start burning stuff if SD tries to cheap out on defenses there, but otherwise just keep an eye on things if SD is keeping us (and Yuris) honest.

TBH it's kind of natural for our eastern core to support harassment to the east while our western core supports a more significant attack to the west to take and hold islands.

[Zed-F]

Is SD whipping a bunch of (presumably) Galleons? Yes, yes he is. Plus founding or re-founding a city.

[scooter]

Is SD whipping a bunch of (presumably) Galleons? Yes, yes he is. Plus founding or re-founding a city.

Well, it's a bit inconclusive on what he's actually whipping. What follows will be a mix of shots from yesterday and today, but yesterday I specifically took this.





As me noticing he isn't really reinforcing at all. And then after all the whips, I saw this today.






That is a Crossbow. Which is interesting because it's not a Galleon, but it's also not a Longbow. And that's when I realized something that has been staring me in the face for awhile, and it just had not sunk in.





Superdeath does not have Mysticism. CtH moved the Native American Totem Pole to Archery for some reason, so that made this possible. But no Mysticism at this stage is really something. I was so focused on the fact that he skipped Meditation to keep his bulb options open that I hadn't thought it through fully. I actually don't hate the decision. He needed to find a way to keep up with me, and cutting out a ton of beakers to beeline Galleons seems defensible - or at least the best of a set of bad options. It might have worked out OK if someone else had also beelined Galleons and agreed to 2v1 me. So I don't hate it for him at all.


Anyway, the relevant detail here is he is nowhere close to Feudalism, which means he cannot build Longbows. Given that he is Protective, it explains a bit why he would go for Crossbows. However, it leaves him fairly vulnerable to non-Mace units. Or at least, more vulnerable than you would expect a Protective player at this game state to be. It does help him quite a bit against Samurai, but they're worse at defending cities against anything else (like Muskets or Grens).





However, he definitely did add a ton of units. Now, the graph still has him in last, though he's likely about to surpass Yuris. The fact that both of them have smaller militaries than Bing and Cairo is really something. I assume Cairo is simply seeing global power go up and responding? I had the #1 military last turn, and then a hair behind Bing this turn, FWIW.





Superdeath's gold savings rate is pretty good, though mine shot up +40gpt in the two turns after this thanks to Cothons/Castles. A few other players are saving gold, so here's what I saw.

Superdeath: 293gpt
Yuris: 152gpt
Bing: 94gpt
Myself: 380gpt (end of today's turn)
Cairo: n/a (in the 100s recently IIRC)





Trygalle completed its Castle/Cothon duo. But most noteworthy was Unta growing up a size netted me +1c in every city with a Cothon that is sufficiently far away, which is about half of my cities. I need to get Pale grown up another size or two, which won't help this city, but will do similar things in all of my eastern cities. (Sheep just entered my borders and is pasturing right now.)





Meanwhile, Castle rush is happening on Ice Island. There will be a missionary whip in one of them in between soon and likely another WB pause as well, but in general I'm prioritizing the Castles heavily as they help make these extremely easy to defend. CG3 Drill1 Longbows on hills with Castle defenses against players miles from units that obsolete Castles should be very safe. And of course, more trade routes.





If Yuris doesn't follow through on attacking SD, I mean, this is the shrined Buddhist holy city. It's just wide open. I could not boat it from the fog, but I could 1) land next to it from the fog or 2) move into a 3-city fork from the fog. Seeing stuff like this makes me think I should just say forget it all, load up all I've got, and end the game. I'm taking a one week Civ-free trip in a month, and it would be nice to not make Tarkeel sub for me.





Because I've got the Frigates now too.