[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[Old Harry]

1. CH's northern area is getting destroyed by dtay. CH lost 3 cities of which dtay kept 2. We have a new neighbor.

Gah!

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.

Good call, I dunno what he can upgrade though - perhaps he's just got Feudalism or needed a bit of cash to get it?

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..

Pausing a turn to heal up and get some reinforcements is an option, but I think a quick push to THHill (at least with the sentry chariot) could release a lot of pressure and then allow a slow approach with catapults to the rest of his area.

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

Nope, forgot - if you log in again go for it, otherwise I'll do it next turn.

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...

I'm a bit superstitious about renaming cities before the come out of revolt for some reason - they'll all get their new names next turn .

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!

Hey! That could have been 12 GPP by now!

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)

Our ~200 gold from huts kicked in later, but still meant we were one of the first to Bureau. I wonder if a lurker would like to plot up hut takings vs scoreboard position chart for us?

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

Is that because we're about to meet them or they're about to die?

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

I have a feeling everyone got Ivory as a balance thing didn't they?

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 .

You got lucky that we had a horrible jungle-choked start (let's just overlook your Suttree problem here .)

[Old Harry]

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 .

You got lucky that we had a horrible jungle-choked start (let's just overlook your Suttree problem here .)

More seriously I learned a lot from watching you romp away from us in PB13 - I think we've played better here as well as having a lot more luck with the start and our neighbours.

Freedom is slavery, land is power, neighbours are food, war is peace.

[TheHumanHydra]

Freedom is slavery, land is power, neighbours are food, war is peace.

Whoah, that's profound. New sig.

[Old Harry]

Turn 135 preview

Offered Pindicator Wine for Fur.


It looks like Cheater Hater had his army in Whosit's land, having ignored our very clear iron-gift-warning that dtay was about to anhilate him They are on their way back now, but I'm not entirely confident that he'll have enough to stop dtay's knight stack (which I didn't get sight of just yet).


Over on our new frontier the cultural borders didn't pop back yet! So should we do something about this?


Against the C2 Welly:
C2 Knight gets 62%
C1 Knight gets 32%

Against the C1 Welly:
C2 Knight gets 66%
C1 Knight gets 36%

Against the green Wellys:
C2 Knight gets 70%
C1 Knight gets 65%

Against the CG3 Longbow:
C2 Knight gets 15% (should hit 2-3 times so the next knight gets odds)
C1 Knight gets 7%
Green Knight gets 3% (should hit 1-2 times - if its two the next C2 knight gets odds)

Against the CG2 Longbow:
C2 Knight gets 20%
C1 Knight gets 17%
Green Knight gets 8%

Against the CG1 Longbow:
C2 Knight gets 26%
C1 Knight gets 21%
Green Knight gets 17%

Our Knights are a little scratched - if we promo heal we can have, at full strength:
C2 Knights: 3
C1 knights: 2
At 8-9.8 strength (can be used at a push or for mopping up):
C2 Knights: 3
C1 Knights: 1
At 5-8 strength (should really heal up this turn):
C2 Knights: 2
C1 Knights: 1

I'd guess that attacking Red directly with knights would cost us one or two Knights, then we'd need to burn or reinforce it strongly. Attacking Orange directly would cost two or three Knights. We can get two Catapults in range of orange (NE of the city) this turn and use them against the city next turn, but at that point Mardoc can promote the new Longbow. Bombarding the walls won't go very far, so we'd need to use the cats for collateral hits, which isn't worth a lot against two longbows, so I think our choices are:

1. Hitting both cities this turn
2. Hitting Orange and staging to hit Infrared

Ah screw it, I'll log in and move the chariot to the hill to see what else is going on in terms of reinforcements and what he's got in his capital.

[Old Harry]

This is what the chariot can see:


What's BGN doing here!

[Old Harry]

Turn 135 denouement

We pondered for a while, then just attacked Orange:
C1 Knight vs CG2 LB - 21%...LOST (only one hit)


C1 Knight vs 5.0/6 LB 43%...Lost (LB down to 11 HP)
C2 Knight gets 63% vs CG1 LB...LOST (down to 20HP)
C2 Knight vs Welly 70%....WIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!111! (Knight down to 10HP)
C1 9.3/10 Knight vs Archer 95%....WIN (but down to 48HP)
C1 HA vs injured LB 99%....FLAWLESS WIN
4.1/6 C1 HA vs injured LB 98%...FLAWLESS WIN
We get the city and a Granary and 128 Gold!


The gold and granary are good, but we lost a lot of Knights :/. Mardoc's Elephant force makes things difficult for us, but we have more units approaching the front and some healing this turn which should put us in a good position.


The new cities are now named for Guinea pig foods . I switched a few builds to be knights, as we'll run into more resistance now that we're fighting two wars...


Finally I offered Ivory and Silk to CH for one of the two Silvers he has - he accepted . Dtay could cut off his elephant the turn after next, so this props him up while giving us extra happy once we hook Silk next turn.

Demos and power

[Fintourist]

Here is the latest set of comments that I first posted only in our chat. but, why not here as well..

some news:
1. Mardoc stupidly took a 26 % fight with his WE against our knight, obviously he won..
2. he killed our sentry chariot (as expected), this time the roll was pretty good for us and his WE took one hit and is easier to kill next turn
3. I guess we will kill 5 WEs of Mardoc next turn and if we have enough steam we move forward and threaten couple of cities..
4. dtay is absolutely murdering CH, CH's capital is gone.. damn
5 Cyneheard has now boat in range to hit Aspargus, we might want to cover it with HA/mace
6. dtay has 2 galley in range to attack Marmalade, it is very unlikely that he attacks, but we might want to play it safe and move the knight from Hazel into the city
7. dtay's WW with Whosit is 44, it seems he got everything there absolutely fro free, His WW with CH indicates that there has been at least some battles.
8. Dtay is creating an enormous and pretty much indefensible border. Are Krill+Novice just going to sit there and watch dtay grow to 40 cities? Dtay is commiting a lot of troops for CH war very far away from his core so it's (or it would have been) definitely possible to at least force him to slow down his attack, cause some economic damage through threatening some border cities or even better, take couple of cities. Hmm.. I hope they are not checked out and actually have a plan to do at least something at some point.
9. Currently we have 29 cities and dtay has 28. The problem is the disparity in land quality. ~10 of our cities are weak tundra/fishing villages, while we haven't spotted a single weak city from dtay so far.

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 .

And thanks mack! Unfortunately for us you really did a good job in 13 I think I've written this before, but before you simply got too far there was a period where we tried to search for openings and see if you would make a mistake somewhere. Needless to say, you always responded very accurately and we could not launch an attack where we could have realistically beaten you with our limited resources (and stop you from snowballing away).

...

You got lucky that we had a horrible jungle-choked start (let's just overlook your Suttree problem here .)

More seriously I learned a lot from watching you romp away from us in PB13 - I think we've played better here as well as having a lot more luck with the start and our neighbours.

This once again made me think how awesome would it be if we could somehow find out how player A would have played and succeeded if he had got the starting position of player B. For instance, what would have happened here if we had gotten Azza's start and Azza ours? I guess it's pretty clear that our start was much much better thanks to fairly safe backlines, but I would like to think that we would not have been beaten by Azza at least yet. Who knows? This is one of those mind games that I find entertaining and interesting, but is pretty much completely useless.

In PB13 context, my guess would be that mack had not won the game (or reached as strong position as he did) from our start. However, I doubt that we would have reached as strong position as mack did from his start. There were two moments/things that we probably would have "screwed up" if we had been the Ottomans. First, it's very possible that suttree's early attack would have cost us much more than it did for mack. Suttree wrote something that mack had a pre-built archer ready to whip when he attacked. I don't know what info did you have from suttree's plans, but that sounds something that we might well have missed. Another thing is that I don't think that we would have committd as heavily and so early into m_h attack as you did. Fast HBR and Construction + building a big army + counting on m_h not building better defenses: That was a big investment and risk, which in the end was an awesome move. I would bet that we would not have played that equally aggressive and thus not gotten so strong mid-game position to further build on.

[Zed-F]

Why would Krovice kingmake at the cost of their own game?

[Fintourist]

Why would Krovice kingmake at the cost of their own game?

Did I suggest something like that?

Attacking somebody for immediate gains (either tangible cities or improving their position on the continent through making dtay's life more difficult for little own cost) does not equal king-making. Krovice are 7th in score and maybe have even 3rd most cities in this game. They most definitely have potential to punish someone who does not defend his cities and create favorable exchanges for themselves.

Obviously we don't have the intel reg how the whole dtay-whosit-krovice border looks currently, but it's so long that there might well be openings. Maybe there isn't or they have other plans on how to win this game? PB13-mackoti and PB13-pindicooter are nice examples of situations where neighbors did not want to or could not stop aggressor from eating a more backward empire and it did not end up well for the ones watching on the sidelines. Consequently, if I were Krovice, interfering quickly with dtay's land grab would be something that I would definitely consider. I'm sure K+N are thinking about it to some extent and I'm just wondering whether sitting back is really the right call for them here (they got a bit of land from Whosit also, but that's definitely too little. Kind of what we got from M_h in PB13).

Similarly, if we would have a 4th person on this continent bordering e.g us and Azza, I would expect them to search for chances to improve their position at our cost.

[Zed-F]

Suppose that Krovice are rational actors and competent players, who have valid reasons from their perspective for what they do and don't do. Including things that make it seem from your perspective as if they are doing nothing.