[SPOILERS] Dazed and scooter play Stalin of Vikings and make a big mess

[scooter]

OK, this turn. Saw that Mist logged in and played and then Brick looked around, so when I got teh chance to login at lunch I took some after pictures. First, I made a not so great mistake at the copper:



I used the promotion on City Raider!! Argh. I thought that would give me good oddson the attack, but it only gave me like 58%. On top of that, not like I would have won the second attack anyways. So I pillaged with the almost-dead Zerk and backed off with the healthier one. At best, at least I know he can't dislodge me off the hill without serious casualties. Anyways, that led to this:



Apparently he had good amounts of workers sitting around . Annoying. Still, this'll take 2T for him to improve, and I might still get an opportunity here, Would be much better if I had shock instead of CR1 though. Anyways, he did attack my (empty) galley:



We won, so that's fine. On the domestic front, I let Baskerville grow temporarily:



Swap back to settler next turn, but I wanted it to grow since one of the stacked whip unhappy went away. Settler push needs to start happening for sure, so Baskerville and Redhead are both working on them now while their whip unhappy dies down. Plus SoF is occupied with the Market and Scarlet is occupied with... well...the biggest domestic news of the turn of course:



Let's hope we don't get screwed on a coinflip.

[scooter]

I'm thinking of not really wasting time on getting right down to Notre Dame. It's not even about racing anyone - it's that the sooner we get that happiness it's of immediate benefit in many of our cities.

Also for tech - I've decided it's run to Optics to pop out a quick Caravel time. I think we've still got a window where we'll win this run. Plus getting Harbors @ Compass is a real nice boost for GLH + international IC routes. The extra visibility on our galleys will also be useful.

[scooter]

Okay, big turn. There's big news on the war front and on the domestic front, so this first post will be the war front, then I'll get to domestic planning which is much less exciting. Anyways, we left off with a siege of Crabgrass that looked like this:



If you remember I was seeing odds around 68% or so for my top attack, which I wasn't thrilled about, however I did bring Catapults. Thanks to my barracks, I promoted both of them to Barrage and sent them in. It did leave me questioning if I shouldn't have just sent one in as this was my top battle:



Sign me up for those odds! I don't think I regret sending both catapults as it was nice to lose 0 units, but if he saves the city next turn I'll regret it. I think this was the best play though. Anyways, I won that battle, however this was my next:



So my question is this - why was this battle not first? This is 87.8% odds, the first was 93.6% odds (the Zerks have identical promotions). Seems like this should have been top defender right? Is first strikes screwing things up? I'm not sure what happened. Anyways, the battles went like this:

Zerk vs Archer 93.6%: WIN
Zerk vs Vulture 87.8%: WIN (why was this not the first fight?)
Zerk vs Vulture 89.5%: WIN
Zerk vs Archer 95.2%: WIN
Zerk vs Archer 98%: WIN
Zerk vs Archer 96%: WIN
Zerk vs Archer: 98%: WIN

7-0, a clean win. Awesome. The 7th actually came straight off a galley that was bringing a new Zerk in which was fun, as I actually forgot it was even in range! Yes, Vikings are awesome. Oh yeah, and we got a great general. We need to decide what to do with that. We could pop out a chariot and use it on a medic, but I'm not sure if that's worth it. I'm thinking about sending it to the front lines instead and just scattering experience on these Zerks so we can get them all to CR3.

So anyways, the post-fight situation looks like this:



Annoying thing about the cat damage is these guys will get to heal a lot, but we should be able to clean this up just fine. Best he can do is maybe whip an archer with no fortify bonus, but this city SHOULD fall barring a bunch of reinforcements... Which is entirely possible, so I'm wary of that. We'll see. We have 2 full strength Zerks ready to go, a CR2 and a CR1. We have a heavily wounded Zerk on the boat which has an upgrade (CR2) available so it will heal. Other than that, we have 3 5.something/8 Zerks with no promos available... So this is not a done deal, but it's something to be optimistic about anyways.

So that was the battle. Some sharp eyes will have picked up on the other big news, but another post about that coming up after this.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

You really like your wonderspam don't you?

[scooter]

So, event log:



We got MoM!! Awesome. Also, you see the Great General notice. Anyways, I COULD start Notre Dame right now, but I decided to slip in a badly needed Aqueduct in Scarlet:



Great person coming up soon. I really hope it's not a prophet - not sure what we'd do with him honestly. Maybe bulb something or other, but quite possibly just save for a Golden Age. Any of the other options would be fine with us. Did some whipping:



Very much worth the 2-pop whip, as it gets a BUNCH of gold for us. 4gpt immediately from the shrine alone, and that's not counting 0% gold. Also, if we can get our hands on ivory it'll be a bonus happy. Speaking of which... Worth a shot right?



He'll probably reject it, but who knows. Maybe he'll still want to boost relations. Also whipped a Library:



This city isn't worth much more than running some scientists and working Colossus coast, so it was valuable to get this Library in, especially as we approach the happy cap. Once Final Problem borders pop, we can do some chain farming if we ever want more food here.

Finally, no we don't have iron. Brick does though:



That means we will . If we don't screw things up too badly that is.

[scooter]

You really like your wonderspam don't you?

When life gives you absolutely nothing but unlimited water and lemons, you gotta make a freaking ton of lemonade . Seriously though, MoM is just awesome for us. We have a tech lead and a good shot at popping out an Engineer at some point, so Taj should be a lock for us... And we also have high amounts of GPP for more golden ages. And Colossus. We will do borderline illegal things with MoM before this thing is done .

But yeah, this is some crazy wonderspam, but I don't regret any of it. I think the situation demanded it, so we've done it. I honestly don't think any of it was a mistake, as unnatural as that feels.

[scooter]

Welp, Mist was hiding stuff in the fog:



That's a setback. We lost that other Zerk by the copper too and I think he got one of the kills. Should have kept more of them on the boat. We lost the Zerk by the copper, and then we lost 5 up here. So that city will live awhile longer. Sigh. The question now I need to give some thought to is if I want to push out more military or just hold the chokepoint for now and push expansion since he's got to be not teching not even slightly right now.

So yeah, that turn went sour. Nicely done by Mist.

[Merovech]

Well that was an interesting mix of good and bad news. When do you think you'll be able to adequately replace the lost troops?

Also, you repeated the picture of the market whip instead of what I am assuming is a trade deal.

[scooter]

Well that was an interesting mix of good and bad news. When do you think you'll be able to adequately replace the lost troops?

Also, you repeated the picture of the market whip instead of what I am assuming is a trade deal.

Sorry for the slow response - I was too annoyed to update this thread for a day or two .

Anyways, not sure on exact time. We could just enjoy this city we took and push expansion, but there's real problems with that. The main one is difficulty to kill them increases with time. Surely they'll be teching towards either Feudalism or Construction, at which point conquest becomes *much* more difficult. Also, they still have met nobody else as far as we can tell, so they've been spending EPs (Ziggurat-enhanced) on us for forever, and it just gets more lopsided and potentially dangerous the longer they stockpile EPs.

Also, sorry about the screenshot thing - it was a trade offer to Nakor where we offered a health for an ivory. Rejected as expected.

[dazedroyalty]

I finally am back and logged in... was promptly met by a bad event: rebellious slaves in Norwood. Maybe I shouldn't have logged in! I spent 11 gold and 1 pop because losing the second pop for no gold isn't worth is and I don't like running the risk of the revolt continuing next turn. Still, frustrating overall!

I didn't do much except what was painfully obvious, like workers finishing road on forest to connect Goosegrass. I am GUESSING the hindu missionary was intended for goosegrass to get borders to pop but I left that since I wasn't 100% sure that was our plan. I tentatively selected Notre Dame in Scarlet since it finished the aqueduct. Since Scarlet is at the happy cap, I switched the seafood to SoF to get SoF to grow this turn instead of next. (will mean 3 more commerce 1 turn sooner)

I tentatively selected Optics since that was our last plan.

Didn't do much else. Hopefully we can catch up on chat soon. Thanks for covering while I was away!