[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[Old Harry]

Nice discussion here! I was planning to respond to everybody, but that must wait.. I went in to see how the situation looks like and we have BIG news!

Mardoc went in and attacked Dental Plan!!

Here's the situation:

We had a quick chat which boiled down to:

Me: I think we should let Mardoc double move us, I wonder if I should pm him to say he shouldn't wait on us next turn as blah blah blah...
Fintourist: Mardoc double-moving has 2 downsides:
1. he might move his units our of our range
2. we need to attack LBs that are inside a city

So I think we've decided on Option 4: let Azza play, then we'll declare on Mardoc and move in to vulture everything. Capturing Dental Plan should give us one turn of cultural grace - allowing us to move freely and hit his stack and/or Orange.

I'll have to look at the power graphs to see if this could be a ploy by Mardoc to get our stack out in the open to be hit by some units he's holding back, but that's pretty unlikely because while Mardoc's chariot was scouting us I was carefully keeping our knights hidden. He saw perhaps two or three, so either he thinks our attack force is gassed and he can afford to take DP and hold it with longbows *or* he's just so pissed at Azza's capital raze and throwing everything he's got at him. Having read some of his other games I'd guess the former, but who knows?

I'll be watching like a hawk for Azza to play tomorrow. I may also PM Mardoc after the turn rolls to say we'll be declaring on him so please don't double move us.

My biggest worry is how I'm going to sleep tonight

[Old Harry]

A quick analysis of Mardoc's power reveals that it was the same as Azza's was before we took Boo-urns. We know that Azza had:
26 Axes
6 Spears
2 Archer
6 Catapults
1 HA
1 Welly
1 Warrior
1 Galley
= 234 000

About 8000 points from population, about 60 000 from tech (Iron Working, HBR, Alphabet and Construction + all the ancient techs) and 8000 from walls in various cities. A total of 310 000.

Assuming Mardoc is at a similar level of tech, has built some Barracks and has ~50 pop that leaves him about 200 000 points of units.

We've seen:
3 longbow
3 Welly
10 Archers (I'm including the MP units from his back lines here)
9 Cats
2 Axes
11 Chariots
1 HA
= 179 000

So he could have five Spears or three Wellys hiding in the fog, but more likely he's been building PRO Longbows which will be much more annoying long-term. I don't think that's enough to put us off attacking though.

[Old Harry]

Conducted some diplomacy:

Hi Mardoc,

I thought I should let you know I just logged in and declared war on you - so our turn order is Azza-Me-you. We should get the turn finished in the next 6-8 hours so I hope it doesn't cause you any trouble (beyond the obvious in-game trouble...)

Apologies,
Old Harry

Thanks for the heads up; I was just about to play since I noticed Azza was done.

I'm sure I'll have more to say once one of us is dead .

Forgot to mention: this shouldn't be a problem with schedule so long as the pattern continues. Most days I wouldn't be able to play at this time of day regardless. 6-8 hours from now is the start of my most consistent play slot.

[Old Harry]

And now, for the Regoararar memorial 4-in-a-row prize: I jumped into the game to make sure we got the place we wanted in the turn order, but I thought a couple of screenies would help. Azza added an Archer, but only had one promo-heal on each of his Spears, so even green Horse Archers get odds on them (I think we'll want to use Knights just to be sure though).


Also, this gives us a great opportunity to split Mardoc in half - I hope we can take or raze Orange this turn (if we keep it we can road to it next turn, so there probably won't be any trouble holding on to it) then hit the new capital Infrared quickly too. After which he's going to find it hard to consolidate new units from his northern and southern halves, letting us eat him bit by bit.


I presume he has Iron Working so we're not going to be able to remove his metal units, but Longbows are the best thing he has now so that wouldn't help us anyway. He's currently researching Machinery, but not very fast so Engineering and Pikes are still a while away. I dunno how we're going to take Blue. Perhaps BGN will help us out?

[Old Harry]

Turn 134

The answers to my mental notes
- Pindicator mostly has Warriors running around his land right now
- dtay does not have visibility on CH's cities - EPs are 80/60
- Five in a row!

Then we're fighting again! First there is the chariot that Mardoc was exploring us with:
- Knight vs Chariot 99%... WIN 1 hit

Then we've got some injured units to kill


- C2 Knight vs injured spear 95%... WIN (down to 6.4, up to 10XP)
- C2 Knight vs injured spear 95%... WIN (Down to 1.0/10 !!!! up to 10XP)
- C1 Knight vs Archer 95%... WIN (8.5/10 and 5XP)
- Green Knight vs injured Axe 99%... Flawless win
- C2 HA vs injured Axe 86%... Flawless win
We take the city and get 55 gold but no buildings.


Now the culture falls away and we have one turn to polish off Mardoc's injured stacks. The only hard battles here are the two War Elephants:


- C1 Knight vs Welly 65%.... WIN! (down to 4.3)
To get odds we left that Knight on the tile 1W of Dental Plan, the rest of the units can happily attack out from the city.
- C2 Knight vs HA 95%... FLAWLESS WIN!
- C2 Knight vs LB 95%.... FLAWLESS WIN!
We're getting some flanking in too...
- C2 Knight Vs Injured LB 99%... Flawless win
- C1 HA vs Archer 96%... Flawless WIN

At this point I decided to take a break from that stack and try the other to see how many spare units we're going to have:
- C2 Knight vs Welly 66%... FLAWLESS LOSS


- C2 Knight vs Welly 66%... WIN! (one hit)

Back to the western stack, these HAs are going to sit on top of the injured knight in case the Elephant wants to counter-attack:
- C1 Knight vs Injured Axe 99%... WIN
- HA vs injured Archer 99%... FLAWLESS WIN! One of the cats is down to 0.4!
- HA vs injured Archer 99%... WIN and killed that cat as well!
So we've just got one unit left to kill, but whatever we use will then be exposed. Or will it? Morale supermedic to the rescue!
- C1 Medic chariot vs 0.2/5 Cat 99.9%... WIN and then withdraws to DP


Finally we decided not to attack Orange this turn, we think killing all the chariots is more important:
- Knight vs chariot WIN
- Knight vs chariot WIN
- HA vs chariot WIN
- HA vs chariot WIN
- HA vs chariot WIN
- Ax vs Chariot WIN
- HA vs chariot WIN and we got another great general!


As Fintourist pointed out in chat one turn ago Azza and Mardoc both still had an army and now both are gone and we lost 1 knight. We really should be able to wipe Mardoc out as well now... The log reads nicely this turn - read from left to right - also note that Xenu has reverted to type!


We're pushing on to our epics - Aesthetics is next up - because we're not confident of winning the race to Economics or Liberalism. Pindicator has joined Dtay in the race. We'll just concentrate on getting the rest of this continent first...


Demos and power

[TheHumanHydra]

Nice, very good job guys. Remind me never to play against either of you again.

Also broke your posting streak, Harry.

[Ituralde]

That's just brutally efficient. Team Badass is at it again.

Awesome plays, well reported, what more can a lurker want. Will be interesting to see where you go from here!

[Old Harry]

Thanks THH and Ituralde - its a bit of a shame that we couldn't take Orange, but the Longbow behind the walls was just a bit too much while we had all those easy targets and free XP to eat. The trouble that causes us is cultural - Mardoc's borders will pop to look like this on turn 135:


Our 2-mover stack is still intact and stronger than ever thanks to all that free XP. We could wait for our catapults to catch up and help out, but actually THH's fork hill is a great place for our 2-movers to threaten a lot of cities.


So which ones should we target? I think going for the new capital, Infrared, is obvious - taking it opens up a huge corridor in the middle of Mardoc's land. The question is which of Red and Orange should we take too? If we take Red the culture will do this (assuming 40% for Troubleshooter and 20% for Ultraviolet and Communist):


If we take Orange I think it will do this:


So if we can take Infrared and Orange then we can road right into the middle of Mardoc's land, splitting his forces and making him easier to finish off.

We're getting catapults down there, so if he's now building longbows we will be held up a bit, but should get all his cities eventually. If he's building Wellies then we've got a bit more dancing to do, but might kill him more quickly.

Should we ignore Azza for the next ten turns or so? We could offer him peace to let the turns flow more easily, or just keep a phony war going until we're done with Mardoc. I'm inclined to the latter as we've not held the turn past the 36 hour mark yet in this war.

[Fintourist]

Some news, thoughts & stuff:

1. CH's northern area is getting destroyed by dtay. CH lost 3 cities of which dtay kept 2. We have a new neighbor. Damn. Based on power CH has a decent army so I wonder if he has screwed somehow. The only reason why I'm not ranting more about dtay gaining so much from CH-Whosit situation is that we are gaining pretty similarly from Azza-Mardoc situation.. I hope Krill+novice wake up at some point and don't simply let dtay grab 3 civs worth of land..

2. CH offered us 200 gold for 20 gpt. I thought a while and accepted. He still has ~9 cities and I really doubt that dtay can kill CH in 10 turns. So here's the hoping that the money goes for useful upgrades.

3. Mardoc played his turn and got 2 nice rolls. His WE won flawlessly against our HA west of DP and then his axe won a 50-50 battle against another HA. Covering that tile however seems to have saved the life of our victorious knight as it is still there --> probably our approach was correct.

4. Mardoc double-whipped Orange and Red (lbows or WEs probably).

5. I wonder whether we have enough power for an immidate push. We have still 15 knights in total, 1 more finishing this turn (another in queue waiting for military advisor bonus at Hazelnut). 11 of them are in range to move onto the forking tile (better known as Hydra tile) next turn, only 3 of those are full health though (many are close to full health, at least after taking promos, 2 are at 9.9/10 etc.). We have 5 HAs that can also reach the Hydra tile. Anyways, capturing a city or two would be nice as we want to reduce Mardoc's production power as soon as possible in order to cut down our own future losses. But we are not allowed to play too greedily. Losing a bunch of wounded units unnecessarily and then retreating would be stupid. Anyways vol 2, I liked your illustrations and capturing Infrared would be awesome. That city still has a decent amount of pop that could be turned into costly lbows..

6. Yay for wines! Did you offer wines for furs/dyes to pindi yet?

7. Yay for PMW and Hello Joe coming out of revolt. No Homers next turn! Did we decide on naming theme for captured cities? Keep the original names and respect their previous owners? Or name them after guinea pig nutrition...

8. I don't think we offer peace for Azza. Our flow of reinforcements should be enough for protecting nearby captured cities and even if not, Azza won't have enough vision to know it --> He probably just stays in his remaining cities and we are not in danger even if we play greedily with Mardoc. And capturing D'oh could be nice.

9. for your spy specialist at Kirby. I think I have taken it off like 3 times so far and it always comes back... This time I left it! Enjoy your +3 GPP!

10. The maximum amount of No. of cities maintenance is now already reached at size 7. We still need a couple more cities before new cities won't affect the maintenance costs of our existing cities. Our civic upkeep will be enormous regardless what we do.

11. F4 relations screen looks pretty crazy!




12. 20 % of the world knows Judaism. That religion has worked way too well for dtay. With these huge tech costs it really makes a difference if you e.g. get 2 useful worker techs from huts and can afford to go for the religious line. I'm not sure, but IIRC correctly dtay got 2 early hut techs. (at least 1, e.g. BW would have been enormous)

13. Only 6 more civs left to met! And it seems in couple of turns it's just 5! I wonder if we will find everybody :P

14. Let's offer our surplus ivory for something for someone? (too lazy to search for a trade partner now)

15. Our Moai city is starting to look pretty nice

[mackoti]

Excelent game guys,thank you for reporting.I can say now the players from RB are far beter then 3-4 years ago when i joined, you, TBs, dtay all very good players.
Seeing how you play here i think i done a good job on 13 keeping you on check .