Ranamar and Lewwyn, ministers for Bismarck of Mali

[SevenSpirits]

Finally, the report. Apologies for the delay. (Also, I only remembered to take a few pictures, dangit.)

t145:

After scouting the map with airships, I saw that GES now has 4 battleships - 2 newly produced in cities close to the oil. This was probably the last turn we could pillage it with a privateer. Luckily for us, it was also the first one we could do so. Done!

I then checked out what we could do with our galleons. The western one seems better suited razing a poorly-defended 9-pop northern coastal city than killing 2-3 defenders out of many in 18-pop Maximum. So:



Killed a rifle and an axe. Razed, of course.

One decision I had to make here was whether to rescue the marine on the hill, who razed a city last turn, in exchange for only being able to bring along two active marines. In the end I decided to leave him there and not take the risk that the rifle won a 96% battle. If our hero is still alive next turn, we've another galleon on the way that can swoop in and return him to safety.

Our second tireless galleon had just razed a city in the east and reduced another to a single musket defender, at the cost of one of its three marines. The one-musket city was reinfored by two Rifles after the turn rolled, so I turned elsewhere:



Casualties: one janissary, one size 12 city. In a break from procedure, I deleted the marine as it was fairly wounded and in range of many units. Don't want any unnecessary war weariness. That's all we had in range this turn - next turn will be better though. We've still got 3 marines left between those two galleons, plus two full transports that will be in range of Musical cities, plus a galley with 2 marines. (lol) All told we're in range of 10 of his 15 remaining cities, though of course we can't kill more than a couple. Also we've completed a bomber in Numenor. So right, domestic stuff:



Notice anything different? That's right! Most everyone is happy and healthy.

This is because we lost 27 population due to whipping. I revolted to Police State / Vassalage / Slavery and whipped pretty much every city, including quite a few builds from scratch. Why from scratch? Well:

* Kremlin makes this just as efficient as whipping not from scratch normally is. (Which, with powered factories everywhere, is pretty efficient.)
* In fact, it's 1 hammer more efficient than drafting, no joke. 94h for 2 pop with the whip from scratch, 93h (infantry) with draft. But we get more experience if we whip, and less anger, and don't have to run nationhood for a turn just to do 6 of them.
* We want to whip a lot, because we have tons of unhappy+unhealthy people, each of which is literally just -3 food. (If not more! Every pop is worth more than 1 unhappy nowadays because of emancipation anger and war weariness. Thus for example I 3-whipped one city leaving it with just as many working citizens as before, but a much better food situation.)
* We simply can't whip enough if we don't whip from scratch. It will be almost all 1-pop whips and we can only do it once every three turns at most, and we'll stack anger doing it multiple times.

So anyway, we finished a lot of builds. More than you can see even since we had things queued up behind a couple.

So then, police state. I think it's approximately breakeven in hammers compared to Universal Suffrage (helped by the fact that we're building almost only units) and it gives a bit of happiness in the form of reduced war weariness. I made a sign in game to switch back to USuffrage next turn but I don't think we should. We'll have lots of overflow we'll want to multiply.

Finally, vassalage. The reason for that is to make all the boats we produced this turn have 10xp -> 3 promos -> C3 or Nav2. Ships are going to be really important... But it's an expensive civic compared to free speech, we lose 200+ cpt. (~1 marine) So we should switch back next turn. Also we should switch back to caste. The turn AFTER next, we can go back to slavery or USuffrage to rush more things, if we need to.

So OK, I swapped civics, and whipped the shit out of everything, and made our population much healthier and happier. Sweet!

Here's a diagram of our marines after ending turn. Unsurprisingly, we got many new ones this turn. The rest are already en route to Musical cities.



You can also see that we have 7 transports and 3 galleons already. So I guess we should focus on battleships now. We also have our first bomber as I mentioned. (The real plane cities all just finished their airports, but Numenor needed to whip something and having a bomber on the inner sea seemed pretty cool. And the XP's less important.) We are actually going to have to build a mix of fighters and bombers.

Me <-- Figured he might as well look up how planes work. Turns out fighters counter bombers pretty hard. But luckily they also counter fighters! So we just build both I guess. Planes in the cities with airports, battleships in the cities with drydocks, marines elsewhere, for now.

One lat note on that military advisor pic - you can see what everyone's researching.

GES: Flight. He's going to have four turns (t147-150... his oil is still missing t145-1466) to build planes (and other oil units) in, before we can declare.
Yuris: Assembly Line. He'll finish it next turn and from then on we'll have to face drafted/whipped/upgraded infantry which will have odds on our marines. So next turn is the last easy-mode razing turn.
Commodore: Industrialism. That means he'll be able to make marines, and put them in galleons, which would be the most annoying possibility for us given our primarily-machine gun defense. Possibly GES could lend him oil for a turn too and he could (after researching combustion) upgrade to transports, but I doubt they'll do that.

[NobleHelium]

You probably know this already, but just a reminder: carriers only carry fighters. Fighters in-game basically represent the lighter planes that fit on ships, whereas bombers represent the USAAF heavier bombers that based out of land.

[SevenSpirits]

Yeah. However, our cities are close enough to enemy cities that we can bomb from there.

We may want to build a carrier or two if we end up having a big air arms race, to put fighters on leaving the city air slots for bombers. But I think we'll probably just make as much navy/marines as possible.

[Ranamar]

If we ever get to Stealth (haha right...) we can hard-counter fighters, of course, by having a 50% chance of ignoring interceptions. That's a loooong way off.

Similarly uselessly, if we manage to get 17xp on an airplane, C3 gets us access to Ace, which gives a 25% chance of evading interception. Lorien with an airport and West Point, the latter of which we can't build currently, will get us there at build-time if we're running both Vassalage and Theocracy. That's not worth it.

Other than that, well...
Fighters counter air strikes, yes. However, they also take some damage in the interception, and, while I don't fully understand how interceptions work, often, neither side gets killed. This means that, as more missions are flown, the amount of damage (and chance of intercept) from the fighter in each subsequent attack one will go down.

Saturation with fighter sweeps is therefore probably a valid strategy, and one we should consider. It'd be pretty brutal on the fighters, seeing as (based on the guide I just looked up) one or the other airplane will die in most of the initial intercepts, but, if we apply superior production, we should be able to blow away a remarkable number of fighters, and our bombers would then be pretty clear. As a bonus effect, if any of the fighters somehow didn't get intercepted, they'd still do damage.

Also, any fighters that are doing intercept missions won't be doing more annoying things like scouting us (although they'll try to shoot scouts down, too, I think) or bombing our units. However, I will admit that I haven't done too much in the way of air warfare in my past games, so I don't actually know my way around this much better than you...

Oh... some more thoughts... the one real value, for us, of an aircraft carrier is that it would let us get our strike units within fighter intercept range, because fighter range is a bit less than bomber range. Bombers can probably reach most targets we'd want to reach from our own territory, I think.

[SevenSpirits]

I looked into how the AP works. Since we had an election t145, we'll get the next vote t152. At that point, I'd somewhat dubiously expect we'll get the following options (assuming we're at war with everyone):


* Force peace with us (yuris and luddite get an unbreakable 10t treaty with us)
* Force peace with luddite (by us and yuris) for 10t.
* Cancel all cancellable trades with Commodore. Since we're humans, everyone can just set the trades back up again right away as soon as the resolution, well, resolves. So this might deny some people resources for a turn. Small benefit.
* Force luddite/yuris to declare on Commodore. This is strictly better than the stop trading thing, since it makes it harder to get the deals set back up again, units might be expelled, and trade route peace bonus gets reset, but not by much.

In any of these cases, luddite or yuris can defy the resolution. I guess that's good for us too.

[SevenSpirits]

Played. Annoyingly, it crashed partway through but luckily I was able to do the exact same move sequence over since it wasn't very complex and I'd taken screenshots. I don't know if I'll have time to finish the report tonight, but here's the message I just sent to yuris:

You lost four more cities this turn. We whipped out a lot of transports last turn, and put our eagerly awaiting units in them this turn, so next turn should be even more fun!

The reason we're removing all your cities is because we don't want to have to worry about them come the opening turns of the war. But by now it's close enough that if you want, you could probably take that 10t peace treaty for a health resource.

Seven

Of course his remaining cities are better defended so he's hardly going to lose MORE than four cities next turn. But it's still a good idea for him from a perspective of trying to win, so I figured why not offer? Especially since we have more transports than troops for the moment so our force (15 healthy units in range of his cities) looks a bit more intimidating than it is.

[Ranamar]

I pulled up the save, having not seen your note until I went back to check and see what we were thinking for tech after Refrigeration...

Unfortunately, i don't know what it is. So... what were you thinking for the next tech? I'll admit I haven't given it enough thought, myself, but, obviously, Mass Media is right out, until we get the next AP resolution.

The two really viable options I see are working our way towards Stealth and backfilling Music and Military Tradition for West Point ... and then working our way towards Stealth. I suppose we could shoot for Modern Armor instead of Stealth Bombers, but that both seems silly and actually requires pretty much the same techs anyway. If Operation Rock & Roll goes well, I think we really should get music and West Point. If we don't have a unit like that around then, well, I guess we can't, but... it feels like something worthwhile, because it shouldn't take too long to build and won't take more than 2 turns to tech. (Besides, it'll probably give us a nice backlog to plow back into the Stealth line.)

[NobleHelium]

I don't think Seven is planning to tech any more.

[Ranamar]

I don't think Seven is planning to tech any more.

Makes sense... I was kind of at a loss as to what to pick next. We wouldn't be able to get most of them into the field in a reasonable amount of time.

I still think we should spare a small amount to get Music and Military Tradition.

[SevenSpirits]

OK. First t146 - the last turn before Yuris would have infantry. Basically the last turn we get to kill a bunch of stuff.

First, the easy one: there's one poorly defended city (rifle + axe) that these two marines can attack, so they do!



He wins. The second rifle cleans up and is deleted.

Next, the center. I'd put two marines on this galley last turn and left it in bag end, forking two cities. I decided to go for the two southern ones as this would gain us a deer. So the galley went south.



Unsurprisingly a win. I then switched to the other city as we were light on troops and I wasn't sure which, if any, of the two cities we'd want to keep. (Yes, we might now raze one of them!)

First I sent in the bomber.



Then a tank and three marines look like they're just going to clean it up.




OK, after getting it down to one defender I decide to take out the southern city first.



It's going to revolt for like 10 turns right next to luddite's borders? No thanks. I raze it.

Then back to the northern one again.



Only six revolt turns, that's t151. Seems safe from luddite at least. And if yuris takes it back, not the end of the world.

OK, finally the western boat. It can take out Monte Carlo, seems like a pretty easy choice.



I neglect to record the capture but unsurprisingly it occurred. I promoted the Marine to G2 and let Yuris thrown stuff at him next turn if he wanted.

Finally, there was one spare marine in a transport (which I subquently loaded three more into, but they couldn't attack). He took an easy rifle kill:



Domestically, I swapped to free speech / caste after doing a few more whips. With some city micro I got refrigeration down to a one-turn tech, so hey, why not.

Demographics: