[Spoilers] Dreylin's short visit to a late Era

[Dreylin]

My sims say we can't take it next turn if he has a 7th Infantry in the city, and even with 6 it's dicey.

Turn after if we add 4 units IBT and we use 3Cats to attack and take the top off, we have an excellent chance to take the city with 7Inf guarding and a pretty good chance with 8Inf (likely outcome). But often with last / next to last unit.

Now to see if I can scrounge up a couple more units without endangering anything....

[Dreylin]

Landed 12, 15 more next turn:

[Dreylin]

REM is pushing forward:

[Dreylin]

I think this means we're 1 turn too late. If we were able to take ZO next turn, we could have pillaged the marked tiles to cut off his access routes and I think held without giving him an immediate opportunity to hit our stack or the city. Without an immediate strike opportunity, I think things could have settled into uneasy peace without coming to blows.

Now with those Workers roading next turn he can have that ~8 unit stack sitting in range of both the city and our wounded Cavs 8 of it, and I'm reasonable sure we can't pillage enough to block them from attacking.

I didn't confirm, but I'm pretty certain we don't have Workers in range to road SW of Guineafowl and kill his Workers.

So 2 choices that I see are: land everything elsewhere and look spiky for a couple of turns until we have Inf in the area, or 2 land everything as planned and prepare to burn the city. We then run a massive whip in Chameleons for a Settler and replant 9 on the coast, I think.


Fake EDIT: Oooo, no I'm wrong - we could pillage the Pigs and the forest road he's just built out from under his stack, because the borders won't immediately reset themselves!

That might be just enough to keep us from coming to blows - unless he's hell-bent on war.

[Dreylin]

Ugh, just realised that REM hasn't ended turn, so he could still be planning to move a bunch of that stuff forward (& on the other side too). He's pretty bad about not playing this game all in one go - even after getting burned by BGN.

[OT4E]

I would be more happy if we just killed his cavalry defending in the city, covering the winners with machine gun, but I doubt you have left such option for us.

Lets see what the next turn brings us. I am not sure that we can escape without war with REM at all. And I definitely do not like just giving him all the DZ's land. If that turns this way, we'd better pull everything back and wait till he makes his step.

[Dreylin]

I'm pretty certain that we don't have enough in the South to take out his Cavs, even with a couple of them redlined, sorry, I pulled everything I could to try to get at ZO.

Thinking about it further, I'm beginning to be a bit less positive about avoiding war with him as well. Consider: he can see our tech, so knows that we are 2t from completing Assembly Line, but likely also knows that is only by bending our entire civ towards it. There's a high likelihood that he could disrupt that by a) cancelling OB next turn after we've played, and if that's not enough; b) disrupting a city or two by putting units on tiles. Even if we still get AL at the end of that, we have nothing pre-built and would have to dry-whip to get Infs the turn after. Not ideal.

How about this as an alternative: next turn we dial back research to a comfortable 2t to AL, then we start Rifle builds in most cities such that on t321 we can whip them with sufficient overflow to auto-upgrade to Infantry over the turn roll. We can also revolt to Theocracy, so that everything in the Core is 2-promo.

[OT4E]

Delay with factories is bad and can cost us more. Both scooter and REM have comfortly industrialized. Running after them without factories will put us behind again. While we can start drafting on T321 and start filling possible weak spots like island cities, fronts against scooter and REM. By T325 we will have 10 factories with plants and 15 infantries.

If we now whip core, we wont be able to deliver those infantry immediately where we need it anyway.

REM made mistake by going for Electricy instead of Railroad if he was going to enter full scale war with us. But our problem is logistic also. It showed that we had 29 Cavalries last turn but we cant get them in position. Lets say 5 of them are in the Gasparland, but it still means that we have a couple of dozens around.

If we get them aboard and make fort in the right place, we will be able to kick REM away. Lets not rush anything imho and take the best position we can.

To get AL in we can switch some more cities on research and pillage some cottages around DZ's former cap.

[Dreylin]

Faster Factories are great in theory, but I'm not sure that we can afford to not build a round of Infantry first.

And if we're building a round of Infantry, then isn't the best way to do that to pre-build and the whip t321? If we complete AL next turn, it's not like we can pre-build anything because /everything/ will be on Wealth/Research builds. Yes we can Draft 3Inf on t321, but is that going to make a difference?

[OT4E]

Thats 6 infantries by T322, your scenario give us lets say 15 by T322, but they can still be in not optimal locations and I can hardly imagine we deliver them in time. Where do you think we need infantries first of all?

We can make some prebuilds in cities without big base production, like 1 tile island city on stone, new recovered nettwerk and probably some other hot spots. I only do not like having our core whipped, thats 6-8 infantries, we can live without imho. In Military academies I think we can push 1 turn infantry by itself.

What exactly steps of REM we fear the most of all? Is there anything 25 cavs + 5 infantry cant deal with?