Ranamar and Lewwyn, ministers for Bismarck of Mali

[Ranamar]

Right, so, Turn 151 in pictures.

Our war weariness is relatively low, presently, and we had a big chunk of cash, so I decided to switch us out of Police State into Universal Suffrage. Unfortunately, "low" is not "nonexistent". This was the state of our great civilization after the 1-2 unhappiness from not having war weariness mitigation anymore hit us:


I sorted it by food because, while the number of faces is significant, the degree of starvation is arguably more significant. Turning culture up to 10% got rid of all the starvation except for -2 food in Barad-Dur. Barad-dur also has serious unhappiness problems including 5 (!) war weariness faces:

A Jail could cut out one or two of those. (I say two because I get the impression that WW is calculated, the reductions are applied, and then it is converted into faces. On the other hand, that might not pay off by the end of the game even with its ridiculous production multipliers.

Turning Culture up to 10% also gained us a bunch of production at the cost of not much gold.
Before, we had this:


Immediately after turning it up, with most of the governors disabled, we had this:


That's 70gpt for 70 hpt right there!

After I went through and fiddled with all the cities, I managed to squeeze almost another 50 hammers out of it:


In the end, I think I managed to squeeze almost 2 hammers out per gold I lost, which is vastly better than cash rushing... and that's not counting the food added as well.

Yes, I spent awhile working on that ingame. That's why I wanted to share. :neenernee

Afterward, we built a fort and sent a galleon through to take some cities. First, we hit Port, adding to our spree of destroying Holy Cities. I'm half-tempted to declare a crusade against centralized religion in the UN thread.


However, after that, we still had two marines on our galleon, and there was another handy city nearby. We even had pretty decent odds for it, too:

The second Marine had similar odds, despite the fact that only the first one had a City Guardian promotion. Obviously, we won them both, or I wouldn't be telling this story.

As discussed previously, we kept this one. It's not half bad, and definitely superior to Numenor, with two land tiles to work that aren't shared with anyone else and two food resources, once it comes out of revolt.

No really jawdropping buildings, but starting with a Granary is nice.

Other than that, well, I don't really have pictures of the Commodore front, largely because I didn't really do anything there other than kill an ironclad with a battleship and shuffle boats around.

[SevenSpirits]

Looks good.

T152:

OK, so first thing was to build the fort and sail through it into the middle sea.

Pictish Point had three token defenders. It wasn't even worth bombarding or bombing.

Also killed 3 of his 4 galleons. I had to promote two boats to Nav2 to do so, but a) this isn't necessarily bad and b) it's nice to get rid of those stupid ships.

Uh, and you can also see in that shot that I captured Cimmera. Marines + tank + 2 knights did the job nicely after some heavy bombing.

After looking at the locations of his workers, I determined I could cut his rail network in two and he wouldn't be able to fix it this turn. DONE!

And uh, that's pretty much most of the combat. I moved a big stack up to Corinthia, and triple-bombed the defenders so they won't be quite full strength next turn.

Shuffled our navy around so his one stupid battleship and his ironclad can't hit our transport ships.

Sent the next wave over:

Note: there are several irritating things his battleship could do. (Luckily he has to pick just one.) I'm hoping he attacks that undefended, empty transport instead. (The undefended FULL transport is out of its max range.) This plan was inspired by having several useless empty transports. Apparently we shouldn't build any more.

Over by Luddit's oil, I used our great general to give 5 battleships 4xp each. If he doesn't react we should easily be able to take out his navy and oil next turn. Awesomely, our battleships all have at least 8 range, and his have 6 (max 7) range. So he can't attack us, but we can attack him.

Over here, I left one marine as a garrison but picked up the one that razed Port. (Good call on not deleting him. Looks like Luddite's checked out.) So two marines are in the boat and would enjoy attacking that city on the left with the cannon next turn if it's not reinforced enough. We have fighters in the area too.

Here you can see where we could have built a jail for 5 hammers, but I decided to build a unit instead because it was better. :neenernee

Most of our army, and demos:

ALSO: I figured out how to get more entries in the event log. No scroll bars but you can use the scroll wheel on the mouse.

So here's what happened since last turn (reading bottom to top, but first pic first, then the second one).



Part 2:



Commodore's choices are a mystery. Using my newfound scrolling knowledge I looked at more than just the single last combat log (how did I not know you could do this before!?) and his cavs all attacked at terrible odds. He wasn't even expected to win a single combat, but he won two. (The battleship attacks however were perfectly reasonable.) His cavs were all so wounded that our warrior was getting 95% odds on one of them. Sadly, he lost - the only friendly unit that died on our turn.

[SevenSpirits]

I was surprised by a map-for-map trade by Yuris. Any idea what that's about?

I guess he wants to know our war progress. I declined it since we weren't gaining anything from it (we scout him every turn anyway).

IIRC, the plan for the Apostolic Palace was to have everyone declare on Commodore.

I dunno if we had a solid plan but I went with this one. No downside and it's at least somewhat irritating to someone. We sure don't want forced peace with Luddite...

Commodore is really starting to use Airships. I think I'm going to start trying to have fighter intercept coverage in our major areas of operation.

OH.

I though intercept was just to protect the tile the plane is on. Silly me I guess.

That's a good idea. Though we also still haven't fully staffed our carriers yet. I build some more fighters though so I suppose we can afford it.

[Ranamar]

I though intercept was just to protect the tile the plane is on. Silly me I guess.

That's a good idea. Though we also still haven't fully staffed our carriers yet. I build some more fighters though so I suppose we can afford it.

For ground units, I'm certain that's the case. For air units, though, I thought it could cover everything around, too? If nothing else, we can stack up and give fighter cover to our fleets, though.

Also, I don't know why your log doesn't have scrollbars. Mine does... (... and has an infuriating tendency to load a stupid number of events, so the scroll button gets pretty small.)

Edit:
right: "Units that can intercept are either other enemy air units stationed within their operational range and put on Intercept missions the turn before, or ground units in the targeted tile with an interception chance (for example SAM Infantry, Mobile SAM, Mech Infantry and as of 3.17 Anti-Tank and Machine Guns)."
from http://www.civfanatics.com/book/export/html/28

[Ranamar]

I was poking around the save this morning... according to Commodore, we can take our time a bit on it because he'll be gone until Sunday, but I think I might have a lot to do at work today, so, between that and skating I don't think I'll have a chance to play it today. (After Midnight, when it's technically tomorrow? Maybe... )

Anyway, I think we can take Corinthia (Formerly French; keep it) and Nemedia (Jewish Holy City; burn it! ) without any trouble, and we can probably drop a hammer on Bossonian Mark (Moai Statues) and maybe even capture it, too. Nemedia only has 4 defenders, although Bossonian Mark has a lot more than that. (I sent Dol Amroth's Airship to its standard scout location.)

After we take Corinthia (finish getting rid of culture defense with the catapult, of course, because it's useless for anything else...), we'll completely remove his culture in that neck of the woods, and there's a desert we could build a fort on, but I think it might take switching to Serfdom. (If we had 6 workers, it'd be a slam dunk. With 5... I'm not sure how the rounding works with 5 of them.) Admittedly, it's not terribly necessary: if we kill the Ironclad, we can already get the transport under the wounded battleship up to the landing zone, but only just barely.

Oh, and don't forget to kill the cavalry over to the right in that picture and steal the two workers under it!

Photo summary:


Edit: Marked up picture instead of just showing picture.

Edit2:
On further consideration, we might not have enough attackers for Bossonian Mark... but that's because I really want to burn that other city before he reinforces it. We only have three bombers that can hit Bossonian Mark or Nemedia. If we're going to go after both, we'll probably want to allocate them 1 to Nemedia and 2 to Bossonian Mark.
Oh, also, I guess we can fort 1S of where I marked and destroy the town, instead. That's definitely buildable in one turn. On the other hand, it destroys a cottage-thing our recently-captured city could work.

[SevenSpirits]

Nice evaluation. Since you're predicting poor availability today I grabbed it and started. First off I took corinthia. Had to (for some definition of had to) use all 6 bombers that could only hit that, so none of them can rebase this turn. Other than that I used ONLY the stack we moved up to it (didn't even need to move in more tanks), plus a destroyer. So pretty much all resources are preserved. And we took no losses. I'll see what else I can do.

Oh, and those workers guarded by the walking-dead cavalry are now in our territory, LOL.

Edit: I count 22 guys on boats we can use this turn, and only a couple are wounded. I think we'll be able to take 2 cities.

Edit 2: Forting the desert is freaking genius. You're right it takes 6 but we have an extra nearby, so I'm definitely doing that.

[Ranamar]

Nice evaluation. Since you're predicting poor availability today I grabbed it and started. First off I took corinthia. Had to (for some definition of had to) use all 6 bombers that could only hit that, so none of them can rebase this turn. Other than that I used ONLY the stack we moved up to it (didn't even need to move in more tanks), plus a destroyer. So pretty much all resources are preserved. And we took no losses. I'll see what else I can do.

Oh, and those workers guarded by the walking-dead cavalry are now in our territory, LOL.

Edit: I count 22 guys on boats we can use this turn, and only a couple are wounded. I think we'll be able to take 2 cities.

Edit 2: Forting the desert is freaking genius. You're right it takes 6 but we have an extra nearby, so I'm definitely doing that.

Very nice! Sounds good. =)

Also, it occurred to me later that, aside from everything I put in that picture, the rest of the turn is almost certainly going to be entirely logistics, which is generally considered routine, well, except when I devote 3+ pictures to it.

[SevenSpirits]

OK, played t153.

I decided to actually leave the jewish city alone this turn. Why? Well, razing the other two means no more uranium for Commodore! Furthermore it makes sense to attack exactly one of the two cities we can use bombers on this turn, so we can bomb both of them. It looked to me like we had enough troops to take down both other cities, so I did it. (It was close though, there was only one marine we didn't need.)

But first, taking Corinthia:

After using all the bombers it was super easy, even though he had hit our stack with some cannons. I think we exactly used every unit next to the city (other than the machine guns) - that was cutting it a bit close, haha. (We would have had to use some guys on a boat otherwise too.)

This is when I counted up our troops and decided we could probably take both his western cities. As mentioned above, doing so removes his uranium, which is allowing him to make battleships. Meanwhile I don't mind delaying the capture of Nemidia:

* It's in range of bombers.
* Unlike Bossonian Mark it's not on a hill. These two points make it the easiest of the three to capture.
* We can keep it! since those other two cities are gone, capturing it should now reveal a clear rail path from the north. Therefore we can move all those defenders we had to make for Dol Amroth / Rivendell into it and use it as a bomber base to attack more Commodore cities.

The odds were worse than I expected - somehow defenders with worse odds sometimes defended before better ones, which I wasn't expecting. So we lose a few marines and I worried a bit. I also forgot about one transport with some well-promoted troops, so maybe some losses could have been avoided.

I also took over Luddite's oil. It was our 5 battleships vs his 4, and ours were more experienced. So...

Sadly, the first one lost, but we won the rest. The great general ship attacked last and promoted morale so it could also pillage the oil platform. no more ships, planes or tanks for Luddite!

The rest of the turn was, as you say, logistics. Really annoying ones though I gotta say. One problem I had was this battleship in the fort:

I didn't see it there until too late - it could attack our carrier with multiple fighters on it and there was no way we could get a stack defender there. Argh! Therefore I tried to surround the battleship - it only has 6 moves and can only attack once so this way it definitely can't reach the carrier. There's just one problem with my plan - if he thinks to build another fort he can reach the northern transport which has 4 (damaged) tanks in it. Argh. Well, it's unlikely he'll think of that given that last turn he only attacked our caravel instead of doing one of the many more productive things he could have done.

Demos:



This is before ending turn. Afterwards, war weariness lowers our production stats, but our power rises to 4376000.

We now have 57% more power than the rest of the world combined.

What would you think about calling the game soon?

[Ranamar]

There's something weird to me about calling the game, maybe because you can't do that with AIs, but you're right. We've obviously got it locked unless someone has a big surprise up their sleeve, so, if they're willing to call it, I'd be willing to do so as well. This is actually more or less why I was saying it seems like time to just knock one of them (Luddite/GES) out of the game... save them the trouble of sitting there waiting for their demise.

As for the Uranium maneuver... yeah, that's a lot better than what I was thinking, and I suppose, since you managed to kill all those units, they won't be reinforcing somewhere else anyway.

As for the battleship, well, shit happens.

[regoarrarr]

Can you not attack battleships in land forts? Or was it just that you didn't think about it / see it until your ships were out of moves?