[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[retep]

Duh I'm idiot of course you need paper

TBH I thought that Mardoc will be in a worst position by now. So I think that if you attack Azza with Knights he could most likely get engineering by then making conquer him much more difficult. He is smart so by now he probably knows that at some point you are going to attack Azza and then foloow with him.

Anyway knights are definitely better but I grow impatience for blood. What can I say, I'm lurker is my nature

[Fintourist]

I'll do a proper report next turn again, but here are some quickies..
- Our scouts keep meeting new people, we found plako's and AT's borders and and a WB from HAK. We have now OBs with all of them
- Great Scientist is on its way to Alfie, next turn we start teching..
- Lots of stuff is apparently happening globally (I bothered looking at score changes for once..)
a) dtay whipped a shitload of pop (lost 19 points), he is possibly planning to take advantage of CH-Whosit-situation
b) AT must have razed a big city of yuris. 10 points lost there
c) Similar story between xenu and Q, Q lost 7 points
d) Dazed razed a large city from Furungy and maybe took a small one.
e) I might have missed others, but these were the ones that I found quickly enough..

[Old Harry]

We had a bit of a general chat so some of this will be repetition for FT:

Workers
I noticed we've only got 16 workers for our 19 cities. Given how much FIN coast we have to work that's not so bad, and FT has got all the new cities up and running nice and quickly, but if Gertie needs to stagnate I think a few more workers are the way to go.

With Guilds coming soon we could start laying down a few workshops. The Sacrificial Altar actually makes this a difficult decision - nerfed RTR 1-pop whipping is going to be great for us, probably better than +1 hammer Caste workshops would be and much more flexible, so I see us staying in slavery until the 2-man golden age (where I think we'll switch to Merc/Caste to generate more GP points, getting us to Free Market by the end). After that I'd guess we'll be in Caste System for the rest of the game, switching to State Property in the 3-man golden age. So we don't really need a lot more right now.

GP points
At the end of the GA Cornelius will have about 156 GPPs, if it continues making 6 GPPs we'll have the GM t145. It could be earlier if we pollute with spy points.

Kirby will have 100 GPPs. It wants to get the National Epic, then as many specialist buildings as possible and grow, so I'd guess it'll be t135 before it starts pumping GPPs again, but with a library, Theater and SA it'll produce 15*2=30 GPPs per turn, so it can sandbag the 300 GPP GP and race to the 400 GPP one in four turns. So I'd guess our next GA will be about t150.

Marmalade and Englebert should just run specialists when they want to stagnate, they'll be useful in the next GA. I changed Englebert back to be running the scientists - it's only growing onto coast otherwise and I think we might want the scientist for an Education bulb to get us to Economics. Let me know if you want me to change this back.


Thinking about attack plans, this one would let us hit his capital on the second turn of a war. If we have Engineering and road the two indicated tiles.


This is probably the best we can do without Engineering. One-movers can keep up with the stack going via Dig Up if the trees are roaded too.


Then while I was thinking about attack plans I got paranoid about Hello Joe's pigs tile. From there Cornelius can be burnt by two HAs and Flossie by three. Everything local had moved except the zone defense Axe, so I thought the best plan was to scout the tile with the Axe... And it turns out my paranoia was paranoia . Sorry! A spear in Cornelius wouldn't go amiss though.


Finally I tested the colour of the borders north of Pindicator and I'm fairly sure its WilliamLP's Mongolia who we've already met, so no need to break our necks to make contact.

[Old Harry]

Just took a look, I didn't move anything but did set Lucky to a SA after it's lighthouse finished (it'll make +9 food until size 12!) Unless you wanted to whip units here? It could start an Axe that'll upgrade to a Mace...

Academy!!!111!!11!one


Heh, the crazy multipliers we're getting on Monarchy mean that we're #2 for GNP (after the lurkers) with 453 at 0% research. Right now 100% GNP is 860, but after you build the Academy I'm betting it'll be 1000. I can't wait for the Academy/Monarchy/Golden Age spike!

It looks like poor HAK is being dogpiled. Anyone seen this bug before - we can see wars between people we have and haven't met if one of our other contacts (the lurkers) has met both. Perhaps that's an international gossip feature...


As I said I didn't move anything - I'm sure Fintourist has got plans going on everywhere - but keeping an eye on Azza's paranoia tile would make me happy.

[retep]

Hmm Actually regarding that hypotetical attack. I was thinking that you could stack your units in Flossie then move the necesary HA 1NW-1W to take DIg up, remove culture and use the city tile as a road to move the rest of the troops 1SW of Dig up in the same turn, so you could attack the capital the next turn. Isn't this posible?

I already guess that the border was WilliamLP

I don't think that is a bug, actually I though you already knew that. That is why I said to check F4 from time to time

[TheHumanHydra]

^ Yes, and that wouldn't require Engineering (would stage 1N of Flossie to avoid hill LoS, of course). I'd move the '2nd wave' HAs to the tile 1W of Dig Up, right on the coast, to avoid attacks from the garrison of Hello Joe on the interturn, presuming he doesn't have Engineering. As his capital is both rather isolated from the rest of his cities (ie. potential reinforcing garrisons, assuming the map is up-to-date) and far from his Mardoc border (ie. potentially lightly-defended), such an attack might have a reasonable chance of success.

[Fintourist]

Turn 118

Attack plans: Yes, staging at N of Flossie is better than in the city as the tile is hidden from Azza. And if we go aggressive it's possible to immediately target Azza's capital It depends a lot whether we think we have a force that is overwhelming enough to take Dig Up, Hello Joe, (Prove me Wrong) and No Homers simultaneously. Let's hope this helps in that regard:




for this being something real and leading to a complete bloodbath. That galley is probably not achieving anything besides tying Mardoc's units. Maybe Azza is threatening Orange or Red? Our sentry chariot will check it shortly. (EDIT: Just realized that the galley in the pic is Mardoc's What I'm referring with "this galley" is Azza's galley that is inside Mardoc's territory a bit in the north. I guess I have just mentioned it in chat with OH and not here)

Note that we also confirmed the location of Buddhist holy city and met our score leader, BGN, who has 15 cities. BGN also owns Statue of Zeus, Angkor Wat and The Great Library, which explains partly his high score.

In the north we met dazedroyalty, currently at 12 cities:




And more contacts! Krill + Novice are bordering dtay. Very good They have 17 cities and are the land leaders of the civs we have met (so very probably retep has been right, once again)




I offered OBs for everyone..

Alfie is getting bigger and better.. Still a long way to go though:




Overview shots of the mighty Azteca:







Domestic comments:

Englbert and GP points: OH has a higher preference to creating many Great Persons than me I think getting some base GPPs for Englbert is fine so that you have more tools for our next GA. When our GA ends I would say that Kirby, Cornelius and Marmalade are the only cities working specialists though.

Lucky: I was wondering if we should just put some hammers into archer just in case, but in case of emergency we can just dry-whip one..

We did not quite reach 1000 GNP, but I guess this is still a statement:




Hmm.. Actually not leading the first 3 stats and not breaking the 1000 annoys me.. So here we go:




And updated graph dump because we now have Cyneheard's graphs:

[Old Harry]

That's a better plan than mine retep. Looking at it now I don't know how I missed it .

THH - I think we'd love the garrison from Hello Joe to attack out... I really want to take Hello Joe on the first turn of fighting to prevent him whipping it, but without Engineering we can't do it without tipping Azza off. I imagine we'll just dump a handful of axes and maces next to the city and let him whip it, even though (hopefully) we'll be second in turn order and the unit won't appear.

Arse.. Azza just played and it looks like he bulbed something. He doesn't have OBs with anyone but us, so perhaps it was Alphabet? Compass isn't possible as he doesn't have Iron Working and Aesthetics is next on the list, so I bet he's planning to get some other OBs and cancel with us so we can't scout him any more... He's also just researching Archery, so that's why we haven't seen any HAs yet. I'm starting to feel paranoid again, although he is at war with Mardoc still, so either they are haggling over peace, something is happening or it's a phony war to put us off our guard. Also FT suspects he's going to build some Elephants to counter our HAs and Knights .

[TheHumanHydra]

Is CH's power a worry?

[Fintourist]

Is CH's power a worry?

A fair question, it's surely worth a worry, but he is in war with Whosit, who took couple of cities from CH earlier so I would imagine that the conflict is real and not just a phony war meant for fooling us. So therefore we have some defenders in the east, but are mostly trusting so far. Feudalism is not far away anymore so maybe we'll then whip a longbow or two in the east just to signal that attacking us is a bad idea. (CH's impi is still inside our borders and has seen some HAs so I would imagine that we don't currently look too weak for him either)