[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[scooter]

Busy day, but I did have some more time to think things over.

I'm intrigued by the pindicator play, but the two things I can't get past is 1) how do we stop Dreylin and 2) how do we invade him AND prevent ourselves from getting knifed in the back by Dreylin the minute our army is in pindicator's land. If for some reason we could grab a bunch of cities real quick and sign peace, sure okay that would be cool, but I can't imagine why pindicator would want to do that.

Dreylin took two more Donovan cities, and pretty soon he'll have that many more cities. He'll still have a huge army when it's done too. At this point he should use it to ensure that neither us nor REM are afforded the opportunity to catch up in land, so the minute either of us do, Dreylin may pounce. We're especially vulnerable to this.

The thing I keep coming back to is that I don't see a path to victory that doesn't involve some degree of cooperation with REM. Either by splitting pindicator's land (to make the war very quick) or by taking on Dreylin together. I think if we don't have him on the same page, one of these will happen:

1) We fight Dreylin. We either lose horribly, or more likely fail to make serious gains in a bloody stalemate, effectively handing the game to REM.

2) We invade pindicator. REM does who-knows-what (probably invades BGN). Dreylin knifes us the minute the bulk of our army is gone, and we die that way. (To get the #s to invade succesfully AND defend ourselves successfully at the same time would take way too long.)

I don't think hunkering down and teching some more is a serious option at this point, so I'll discard that.

----

So here's my proposal.

1) Play next few turns as planned with regards to the military buildup. I think we go forward with the bones of the plan to snipe Donovan's holy city. We wait to decide on whether to execute it or not until the last minute.

2) I'll offer a horse + iron for horse + iron (maybe fish thrown in hoping he'll read that as a navy) swap with REM. See if I get any sort of reply from him. I'd include in a defensive pact hoping he'd get the idea that I'm trying to get us to work together. I'll trust him to put the pieces together on what we should work together to do.

3) Re-evaluate in 2ish turns. If we want to YOLO it and screw with Dreylin, we'll be in position to do so. If we want to pivot and take aim at pindicator, our boats will have time to return considering the numbers we'd need to pull that off. The goal of invading pindicator is the obvious: get land. The goal of screwing with Dreylin is also get some land, but it has a side-goal of trying to bait REM into piling on. How likely it looks that REM will pile on will have a big impact on the best way to go I think.


FWIW, I think our chances of winning are low enough now that I'm very open to high-risk play.

Sullla - any thoughts on this wall-of-text? I'm not going to play the turn tonight since folks seems fine with a short pause, so there's a little more time to discuss.

[scooter]

I did take a quick look in-game to see what Dreylin did:



Donovan's capital and their border city with Donovan.



Oh cool, he's within range to boat Radio. More likely he's lining up Sector 19, but we may have to shuffle a unit to cover this off.



This is what I offered REM. The one item not shown clearly by the screenshot was world map because why not. I'm hoping he'll see this and think something like:

DPact: cooperation!
Copper/Horse/Iron: military!
Fish: water I guess!
Maps: idk!

If he refuses and re-offers, I'll take that as a good sign I guess.

[scooter]

I had about 5 minutes, so I logged in and was greeted by this. I said yes, but we're stuck in a pause, so really I couldn't do anything. Anyway, seems good?

[Sullla]

Yes, sounds good. On the road now, will post more tonight.

[Sullla]

I'm home after driving for 15 hours today, which means that I'm going to keep this relatively short. I can do a more elaborate post tomorrow when I'm not so tired. Anyway, I think that we can match up with Dreylin's military better than the numbers might suggest. In the rough sandbox test that I was doing, we were adding military power at well over 100k per turn, close to 150k per turn in some cases. Give me the next 5-7 turns to build military and we won't be in a position where we need to be very scared of Dreylin.

Furthermore, this really is a good time to go after Dreylin. Our 3-4 promotion infantry will decimate anything Dreylin can build; he's 8000 beakers away from his own infantry and 7000 beakers away from machine guns. Neither is happening any time soon. Every one of our infantry can take Amphibious promotion and get odds against any defender of Dreylin's; C2/Amphibious infantry are basically invincible against unpromoted rifles. We can build 6 move galleons and strike anywhere we want. We can also build 4 move ironclads that can sink any wooden ship of Dreylin's, and he doesn't have Steel tech for his own drydocks or ironclads. I mean, what more of a combat edge are we going to get than that? We just have to defend against the current Dreylin army (large but outdated) and then we'll be in the driver's seat.

If we can get any kind of buy-in from REM, that's all that we need for this to be a success. The danger is that REM sits back and techs for two dozen turns while we do all the heavy lifting, followed by REM attacking with tanks and destroyers and cleaning up all the spoils of war. There's always a danger of that happening, but I think it's one we have to take. We can try to do a war declaration countdown in a few turns and see if there's any interest from him on that. (Offering 5g one turn, then 4g the next turn, etc.) And honestly, even if REM decides to sit back and tech his way into victory while we fight Dreylin... well, a second place finish under those circumstances would still be loads of fun, right?

Anyway, more thoughts coming tomorrow. The current worker and city builds up on the shared Google drive should be fine for Turn 315. I'm off to get some rest now.

[Sullla]

Example screenshot from the sandbox. This is a defending rifle with full fortify bonus:



Frigates easily remove the cultural defenses, then a Combat II / Amphibious rifle gets these odds. With 6 move galleons, we can fork 3-4 Dreylin cities at once. How does he defend against this? I don't care if he has airships, there's no way to do it realistically.

Like I said, we just need enough units to defend our own borders and then we should be able to take the offensive.

[scooter]

I'm home after driving for 15 hours today, which means that I'm going to keep this relatively short. I can do a more elaborate post tomorrow when I'm not so tired. Anyway, I think that we can match up with Dreylin's military better than the numbers might suggest. In the rough sandbox test that I was doing, we were adding military power at well over 100k per turn, close to 150k per turn in some cases. Give me the next 5-7 turns to build military and we won't be in a position where we need to be very scared of Dreylin.

Furthermore, this really is a good time to go after Dreylin. Our 3-4 promotion infantry will decimate anything Dreylin can build; he's 8000 beakers away from his own infantry and 7000 beakers away from machine guns. Neither is happening any time soon. Every one of our infantry can take Amphibious promotion and get odds against any defender of Dreylin's; C2/Amphibious infantry are basically invincible against unpromoted rifles. We can build 6 move galleons and strike anywhere we want. We can also build 4 move ironclads that can sink any wooden ship of Dreylin's, and he doesn't have Steel tech for his own drydocks or ironclads. I mean, what more of a combat edge are we going to get than that? We just have to defend against the current Dreylin army (large but outdated) and then we'll be in the driver's seat.

If we can get any kind of buy-in from REM, that's all that we need for this to be a success. The danger is that REM sits back and techs for two dozen turns while we do all the heavy lifting, followed by REM attacking with tanks and destroyers and cleaning up all the spoils of war. There's always a danger of that happening, but I think it's one we have to take. We can try to do a war declaration countdown in a few turns and see if there's any interest from him on that. (Offering 5g one turn, then 4g the next turn, etc.) And honestly, even if REM decides to sit back and tech his way into victory while we fight Dreylin... well, a second place finish under those circumstances would still be loads of fun, right?

Anyway, more thoughts coming tomorrow. The current worker and city builds up on the shared Google drive should be fine for Turn 315. I'm off to get some rest now.

to all of this.

I'm very much in.

[scooter]

Turn 315

After things were unpaused I re-offered the defensive pact to REM. Maybe the civic swaps next turn would be the appropriate time for a 5g-5g countdown type trade offer?



Let's shake things up and start with this. REM noses ahead of us in MFG during his golden age, but it's not as bad as I thought it might be. This is still pre-factories, though.



Settled this city here as planned. Looks terrible, but State Property has a funny way of making even these spots not-terrible.



I did some shuffling over here to keep us flexible. I loaded up the Infantry onto the western Galleon, and I brought the eastern Galleon into these waters via the newly completed fort. Kaplan is a bit exposed this way, but we know Dreylin's army is very far away, and with boats we could shuffle units in in a pinch. We should be fine.



This was my primary concern for the turn. Dreylin is almost certainly lining up S19 with those two Galleons off to the west, but what I don't want is to make Radio enticing enough for him to be tempted to go with a pre-emptive strike. So I shuffled Haber's Gren into Dynamite and Dynamite's rifle into Radio. I then went ahead and promoted these units too just to be safe.

Probably a paranoid move, but this didn't seem like a prudent time to assume, especially with OT4E co-piloting. There is slightly elevated risk to Dynamite here, but 1) it would have to come from two specific tiles, 2) it was already vulnerable to a 3 unit boating anyway and 3) I'd much, much rather lose that than Radio. So that's the rationale.



Had to squeak in a couple barracks/drydocks that were necessary. Next turn we do the Police State/Theo/Vassalage revolt. If that doesn't convince REM we're serious about toppling Dreylin, I don't know what will. Hopefully he chips in instead of being greedy and trying to let us do all the work while he techs.



One more thing. I didn't move the Galleon that's hovering around Power Loom and Penicillin. I thought pretty seriously about moving it into Penicillin, but I figured that we want a Galleon up in this region regardless. Besides, if we do end up in a conflict with Dreylin soon, we'll want to be able to threaten ex-Gasparland. So I kept him there.

[Dp101]

Now if only the turns would go faster so we could actually see all this happen sometime this year.

[Tohron]

Not to mention, if you don't clear out all the defenders in the first turn, your attacking units will have gone from 9xp to 10, so they can promote-heal and attack again. And I don't think Airships can hit units on transports, so as long as you have the superior navy, the worst he can do is reinforce the city with more inferior units (which you can kill, and then, if you haven't taken the city yet and your navy is too exposed, the Galleons can just pull back, leaving a bunch of dead Dreylin units).