RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Sullla]

Jowy has played his turn, and it looks like we have our answer:



Looks like a false alarm. The phalanx has moved away from Chancellorsville, and is protecting Jowy's settler. So I guess we didn't technically need that extra axeman at Chancellorsville, but for the record we WERE ready in case Jowy attacked, and Speaker definitely had the right idea.

Now, this presents us with a new opportunity... the chance to go and grab the vacated White spot all over again! I have no idea where that settler is going, but it's not to the White spot. (Seriously, where is Jowy sending that thing?! Maybe 1E to grab rice and stone?) We've got some military now, and that lets us send axe + chariot + archer later to secure White.

What do you think, Speaker? EDIT: Actually, we're discussing this in chat right now.

[Sullla]

Alright, we worked out an overall plan for the upcoming turns. We're going to go for the White spot and try to stay on good terms with Jowy, which was our hopes all along. If he does get aggressive on us, we research to Horseback Riding, produce some Horse Archers, and run rampant through the Greek cities.

For the moment, let's catch up on diplomacy. Some proposed messages for feedback:

Dear Jowy,

Hey, still no word from you! Before you leave for the holidays, how about we work out an agreement on our expiring Non-Aggression Pact? We could do another 10 turns, 15 turns, 20 turns - whatever you want. It looks like you'll be founding a border city near us soon, and it would soothe both our teams to know that there was no sneak attack coming from the other side.

Get in the Christmas spirit of peace to your fellow man and renew that NAP! :)

Sullla
The Killer Angels

Because we haven't talked to Dantski in over a week:

Dear Dantski,

Hey, how are you doing? We hadn't heard from you in a while, and wanted to see how things were going. I hope that your cities are developing nicely, they certainly seem to be getting a taste of the whip lately!

Please let us know if you've got anything on your mind. We'd like to stay on good terms and communicate frequently with our neighbors.

Happy Holidays!
Sullla
The Killer Angels

Dantski hasn't updated his spoiler thread since December 11, so I think he's not really paying much attention to the game right now. That's probably good news for us... Since we can see his city builds, and Dantski's not building military units, I rate the threat level from his team very low at the moment.

Let's check in on the sunrise/regoarrarr team:

Dear regoarrarr and Team Byzantium,

In your last message you asked about "sticking a needle" in either the Ottoman or Greek teams. Well, there's one small thing you can do for us: keep an eye on the phalanx/settler pair near your healing Woody II warrior Spiros. We have our own units in the area, but it never hurts to have an extra pair of eyes! We're not quite sure where Jowy stands with us; we'd prefer to be on friendly grounds - at least for now - but he's been kind of erratic lately.

As far as your end of things, did the Oracle reveal iron that you could possibly hook up? We unfortunately don't have map info on the combat zone. We'll continue to do our best to defog a sea route for possible resource exchange.

Happy Holidays!
Sullla
The Killer Angels

And since we haven't talked to them lately:

Dear Rebel Alliance,

Hey, how are you doing? We hadn't heard from you in a while, and wanted to see how things were going. Your team has quite the impressive Power rating at the moment - does that mean the war is going well? (Did sunrise's Oracle build do anything useful?)

Please let us know if you've got anything on your mind. We'd like to stay on good terms and communicate frequently with the other teams, even people who are pretty far away like you guys.

Happy Holidays!
Sullla
The Killer Angels

Nakor sent us this short message two days ago:

Dear Sullla and Speaker,

Indeed we've moved our EP towards you. We agree on spending enough to see the bar graphs only and then switch to another team.
Have you found out other interesting things we need to know?

Cheers,
Nakor

Nothing special there, we'll send back a standard reply:

Dear Nakor and DMOC of Holy Rome,

Thanks for agreeing to cap the Espionage spending once we can see each other's bar graphs. We'll go to 43 EP and stop there, as promised.

What can we tell from the Demographics? Probably the biggest tidbit is that athlete/kalin and Whosit have the largest armies at the moment - we're both lucky that neither one is next to us! We know a couple of other things, but we can't give away ALL of our secrets. :)

Happy Holidays!
Sullla
The Killer Angels

I'm certainly not going to tell them very much in the way of useful info... Just enough to stay on friendly terms, hopefully. Last but not least, we got this contact message back from Broker and plako:

Speaker/ Sulla

Well met.

We did not create a new email address for this game and I am just answering now to give our email addresses. Please reply to both of us. I put my gmail and my yahoo although I tend to send emails out of yahoo. Force of habbit.

Plako has been mostly running the show as I have been tied up with RL. I hope things settle down in the new year so I can become more involved.
I would like to mention that Rome our nearest neighbor has been very agressive and I fear bent on using his new Praets for our destruction. He was so anxious he broke a NAP to do a worker steal but after a backlash from a couple other teams relented this time but still is building towards war.

I would caution you in trusting him in the future based on his past performance.

As for us we will try to survive the upcomming hostilities.
Thank you

That was quite a first message! Let's give them back a real response:

Dear Broker and plako,

Wow, thanks for letting us know about your situation. We've been lucky enough to escape that kind of aggressive play from neighbors thus far. We had heard rumors that there had been a brief war of some kind with your team and Whosit, good to get the full story. (Did he actually steal a worker, or did you manage to get it back?)

Based on our Demographics numbers, we have Whosit pegged with a very strong army as well. I have written down 4 warriors, 3 axes, 1 chariot, and 2 Praetorians - although I warn you that those are pure guesses, having not seen any of the units in question. You guys are absolutely right to be worried about an upcoming attack. Unfortunately there's no unit that really counters Aggressive Praetorians, but if you build enough axes, hopefully you'll be OK.

Although we're too far away to affect much in your neighborhood, we can try to pass on information that we collect as the game goes on. Keep in touch with us and we'll do what we can.

Happy Holidays!
Sullla
The Killer Angels

Broker and plako seem like another natural underdog to support against Whosit; they are behind in pretty much all the rankings, and will probably lose out eventually. (Whosit is one of the game leaders at this point.) But if they can slow down Whosit for a while, it's to our advantage.

So are these OK to send, or do we want to make some edits?

[Speaker]

All looks fine to me.

Perhaps we should send Chamberlain up along the coast actually and clear a path to Sunrise, since we have pulled him out of Greece's land. If we encounter some barbarians along the way, all the better.

[Sullla]

Messages have been sent. athlete saw me in-game and actually thanked us for the holiday message, which was very nice. Even though we really didn't say much, just taking the effort to talk to people can sometimes yield positive results.

Speaker, two quick points about military unit moves:

- When you bring up Chamberlain, do you mean heading east again back to the scene of the sunrise/regoarrarr war? Because having just left Jowy's territory, I don't think he's going to want to see us scout out the northern coast! (We can probably do that with a work boat a little later on.)

- As awesome as the visibility is, we should probably pull Beauregard back from the forested hill tile next turn to serve as military police in Chancellorsville. I'm a little nervous having that city empty! (We should send the extra chariots/axes up here too. There's going to be a lot of workers moving around outside the borders that need to be covered for safety.)

Here are some pictures from T74:



Some projected borders in the north. If Jowy does found one east of his current position, we'd have some pretty nice borders around here. (White would be vulnerable to two-movers, but it gets the same attack possibility against Sparta. White also shields Chancellorsville fairly well from attack.)


Our awesome capital. This the perfect combination of Financial grassland river cottages and Philosophical early Academy. Tough to pull this off with most leaders!

Most importantly, here's the Excel development file up to Turn 80:

http://www.cassiopeiathedog.net/Images/P...ullla5.xls

This is the one to download - ignore all earlier versions! I basically kept most things the same, just tweaked some of the micro to reflect our move back to White instead of Black. White comes out a mere one turn later, T78 instead of T77. And we can still get city #6 (which should be Green, I think) on the exact same turn planned earlier, T88!

So we should be set for the holiday Pause. Of course, there's always more work to slip in during the break... Like analyzing those new Demographics numbers from Nakor...

[Speaker]

Cool, I logged in and sent the new Chariot up to Chancellorsville and pulled Beauregard back off the hill. I'll look at the new Excel sheet over the holidays, which I'm spending at the in-laws'.

Happy holidays to everyone and thanks so much for following our thread! Hopefully we've taught you a bit, and kept you entertained, and will continue to do so in the new year!

[antisocialmunky]

That will be a frightening behemoth of gold and super science when Bureaucracy shows up.

[novice]

Cool, I logged in and sent the new Chariot up to Chancellorsville and pulled Beauregard back off the hill. I'll look at the new Excel sheet over the holidays, which I'm spending at the in-laws'.

Happy holidays to everyone and thanks so much for following our thread! Hopefully we've taught you a bit, and kept you entertained, and will continue to do so in the new year!

Indeed you have. Happy holidays for you too!

[Jabah]

Now that you have (or will have) some spare military, maybe you could send one (preferably charriot) to scout the coast around white dot to avoid missing a ressource in the fog (sea or ground) (that is if Jowy new city is not messing your dotmap)

[Ilios]

Is the Deer tile at Chancellorsville on a grassland hill? If not then you should change the yield in the Excel file from 4/2/0 to 5/1/0.
Also, you give the Fish resource at White dot a yield of 3/0/3 iso 2/0/3...

[SleepingMoogle]

Happy holidays to everyone and thanks so much for following our thread! Hopefully we've taught you a bit, and kept you entertained, and will continue to do so in the new year!

The amount of tips, math, strategies and general information that I've picked up just by following the PB2 threads, but this one in particular, has been staggering so far. So thanks a ton, and merry christmas to you as well!