[SPOILERS]The Tyrant realizes that once the world burns it gets really boring....

[spacetyrantxenu]

I'm logging in. Control your woman.

[spacetyrantxenu]

T158 (part II) - OK, well I logged in but there isn't actually much reconfiguring I can do or we won't finish Guilds this turn. We'll have 1 gold left in the bank and as far as I can tell either one or zero overflow on beakers, so that was nice and tight. I moved the last few units around, didn't see much. Oxy's stack is still huge and a potential problem. How miserable would it be if he decided to use it on us? I would have so. Much. Rage. Anyway the current board:




I guess at some point soon we'll need to come up with a tactical plan of what to kill first and how to do it. And exactly what units the plan will require. A stack of combined arms led by OP super-knights to flatten a landbased neighbor? Or a giant stack of knights with just enough boats to ferry them all over to retep? Or some combination of land and sea based for a blitz of Greenland? I think killing Kuro is something that can be done later as long as we beat William to it. Starting off against Sisub is also tempting because he's right there and we wouldn't need to spend so many hammers on boats right away. But we can kill him at any time, too, and he's only going to get further behind.

I guess it does come down to having to take on retep if we think we still have a chance at winning this game. Attacking him, hoping he screws up some and doesn't make the cost too steep, and making a giant land grab seem to be the only viable long term prospects to win. But while we do that I fear WilliamLP is going to keep zooming ahead. I really hope wetbandit/molach/oxy (doubtful!) will attack him at some point and reel him in. But out of them I think only wetbandit would have cause to do it, the other two aren't really in position to win this game.




Question up north, why is our axe off his icy hill and back in our territory? He's fog busting and keeping an eye out for Kuro. And what's the worker doing up there on the ice? Is he about to start building a road toward Kuro's ice city (that finally apparently popped borders)? Sounds like fun, like an adventure in the making.

We should get graphs on Retep in about two turns unless he starts spending a lot of EPs against us. The only thing I'm worried about with espionage right now is that he sees us spending points on him and gets spider sense tingling about an invasion. I think as soon as we get graphs on him we should swap to someone else. Probably onto wetbandit to get his graphs since he'd be the only one missing.




Anyway, that's the current power graph, we have some ground to make up. And this is interesting, even if artificial:




Yeah, that's going to last for exactly one turn. And then plummet off a cliff soon when the bloodletting begins. Anyway, ending turn.

[spacetyrantxenu]

By the way, retep is being difficult and spending a lot of EPs against us. Annoying, the math isn't on his side unless he wants to run slider. In which case I hope he does, it isn't like there is a lot of use he can get out of those EPs beyond the passive benefits he already has. I don't know the exact number (we're at 303/145 now) but now we need 160 EPs to see his graphs. I think it was like 152 last turn but I could be wrong. Anyway I think with how the formulas work we'll eventually catch him unless he's dumping massively more EPs against us than we are against him.

On the tech path discussion we can get Banking in 3 turns if we run breakeven slider (70% while we have all these wealth builds and the starving city), or grab Literature this turn. I think Banking and mercantilism is totally worth it. We don't make that much extra cash from foreign trade routes and we have several island cities of our own to spread around ICTRs. The free specialists would be delicious indeed. Literature is only going to net us Epics, and while those are great, I think the boost of mercantilsm at a time when we're about to be able to change civics again would be a good move. So Banking for now. I don't know how long it will actually take without the wealth builds and starvation but it will definitely be inside the next golden age, maybe just not at the start of it. If you have a reason why something other than Banking is best now go for it. (Oh, and a bank in ML )

I set our slider to 0% pending what we decide to do with our research. Here's what the demographics look like at the start of the turn saving cash:




Ouch. Well I guess it isn't so terrible, it's right about where we left it before the golden age. Still looking like an also-ran. Violence is the answer!

I put Mister Love on a grocer as a place holder until a decision is made. Logged out without moving any units or changing anything.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Funny enough, I moved the tundra axe in our borders to cut down on unit cost. I moved the worker up to get started on a road to the north, as well as mining that hill but we will probably just whip away the population instead.

Marble for The Parthenon would be nice, and once we get a few phracts up here we can redraw the boundary however we want against Kuro. A case could be made for a limited quick strike for marble followed by an immediate 10t enforced peace. Kill Sisub in 10t, then fill out our navy and capture GLH and go to work on retep rather than Kuro, as might be assumed.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Have to be careful with delaying against retep though. He's England, we're in the middle ages. I don't imagine he'll stop very long at muskets for defense and we already know he's made significant progress up the bottom of the tech tree. I don't have a good feeling for how far he's made his way through the middle, but I can promise you he won't delay Rifling a minute longer than he has to because redcoats are nasty motherf

[Commodore]

I think if you have any cities bigger than size 2-3 after your catawhipping you're utter failures.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I think if you have any cities bigger than size 2-3 after your catawhipping you're utter failures.

That should get us through the first turn of blood.

[spacetyrantxenu]

T159 (part I) - I played part of the turn, doing the worker moves that were obvious, leaving a few that I wasn't sure what you were doing with them. I went through the cities and cleared out the wealth builds and mostly picked back up on previous production, but there are a few exceptions.




I put some notes down on top of cities where we need to decide their role in the invasion buildup. For instance, which cities to build boats from (these won't need barracks, for example). I think we shouldn't build galleys in No Deliverance since retep has visiblity on that city from his culture. Maybe build all of our longbows there, whatever we're planning to build. That looks 100% peaceful, right?

Feel free to change any of these but the cities that are close to completing useful infrastructure should probably go ahead and do it. The cataphract in queue at WWH is an upgraded partially complete horse archer, he'll probably be the first off the assembly line. I assume we should walk him by any border we don't plan to attack to make sure they know we have them and to leave us alone. I guess this means WilliamLP, Oxy, and Suttree since they're the only nearby rivals that we haven't considered attacking for the moment.

We still need culture in Hell Below but we may just have to eat it there and lose control of the hill tile. We can't really win a culture war against WilliamLP there unless we dedicated to it, and I think we agree that building weapons of mass destruction is a higher priority right now.

I've microed tiles with an emphasis on growth again since we'll need lots of population for the upcoming whips. As seen in the picture above our estimated time to Banking is about six turns at the moment, if we ran break even. I set the slider back to 0% so we're saving gold now, probably should do that until we have enough to get Banking, or if we change our minds and want something else.

The Jewish spread into WWH worked, I'm not sure what you did wrong when you tried to spread it before at The Boathouse. :neenerneener Actually now I see I'm not building missionaries anywhere, I think you'll need to slot a few in somewhere. I loaded the one from ML onto the galley, he's unloaded in Moai city (We Steal) now, I think that's where you wanted to send him. He can spread next turn and we can start building a missionary there for I Burn.

I swapped Tyler to a 'phract this turn to get a hammer into it, like you had done with the catapult there. Dunno what we'll build there next turn.

I'll let you finish up the turn, I didn't finalize movements on our scouting units so you could see what they see. Let me know if you have any questions about anything I did.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

We can only build missionaries in cities where we have monasteries while we're out of OR. I'll take a look this afternoon and see what I can come up with. Thanks for making these changes. I didn't want to leave our wealth build up forever for everyone to assume that we somehow won the game economically during the golden age.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Also, in general (or at least until I have an hour to come up with a specific plan), try to go from low cost to high cost hammer units in the build queues. I don't want to get capped on overflow and waste any hammers. Hypothetically.