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

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

T172

Only three whips this turn, all single pop, and all for overflow. The units would have finished this turn without the whip, but I wanted overflow for next turn. All other cities are beginning a second unit build, to be either finished or whipped next turn.




We had several 1t phract overflows from last turn. A couple chops this turn should let us finish another slew next turn, then it's hammer time.




This is a bit of a clusterfuck, but it's what I had time for. Sisub has mostly a longbow and trash everywhere. He may have some units in reserve in the fog that I can't see, maybe cats and a counterattack force? I'm not expecting too much though. I probably should have skipped the eastern stage tile and just put those units at the Learning stage tile and moved in next turn, with the wave to follow to finish the mopping up. Despite the whipping, we're still on schedule for Engineering at EoT 174. That will help get the second wave into position. We can attack out of the fog at Thesis and Learning, and fork three cities (Learning, Lesson, and Renewal) with the eastern mini-stack. I promoted one cataphract to sentry to get visibility on Thesis this turn. Xenu, if you have a major disagreement with this plan, speak now or let 'em die.




Retep showed a couple of triremes, so I backed my easternmost sentry back to the other sentry tile with the second Trireme. The garrison of the island city is shown. We could kill that island without much difficulty.

I forgot to take any pictures of the northern theater that is going to thwack Kuro, but we finished two cataphracts in the far north, and a third on the island which will load onto a galley next turn. The island city will overflow for a 1t phract at EoT. I loaded the two workers onto a galley and sent it north. They'll combat road to Kuro's marble city. This is pretty straightforward. We'll just throw superior units at his trash and wait for WilliamLP to meet us in the middle.




We're going to have a real army in a minute. I noticed that WilliamLP has put a little more effort into defensive garrisons in his border cities. Good.

[spacetyrantxenu]

The plan looks fine to me, forks, spoons, and knives. I'd suggest stacking up our triremes that are scouting retep so that he doesn't get any ideas about taking a cheap shot at them with his triremes. Although he's being a bit dishonest about pushing his triremes to the border and hiding the galleons. I know he has a few of them by now, he'd be a fool not to.

I think we're agreed on the north, we'll take our three cities and see if William wants to provoke us over those shitty ice cubes. Then again, we may not care about provocation for much longer if we can quickly cross off our first two items from the agenda and move onto the third.

The Agenda:

1. Kill Halvgud, the Sisub, longterm interim leader of Sisu(b)stan, the Red kingdom.
2. Kill Kuro, the ice king, formerly known as Kuro the Turn Holder (but not anymore), hater of seafood and ruler of the Barren Northern Wastes.
3. ???? (This is where it gets fun for the lurkers I assume).

Someone's name will be written in red for the third line of the agenda at some point. We'll whip too many phracts to just stop at the first two, unless we get invaded in the meantime by someone else. Which I guess is the same thing as #3, just put their name on that line of the agenda and away we go.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Also, I'd be tempted to declare war on Retep before we invade Sisubistan and offer him peace for a 10 turn NAP while we're busy playing at soldier. What do you think about doing that? I don't see a circumstance within the next 10 turns that we'd want to engage him anyway, we just don't have the boats to go after him and I don't want to be dealing with a galleon based counter invasion if I can help it right now. We don't have trade routes to impact, I guess we should check our current resource trades with him and reoffer them after a peace is accepted, if we're getting anything valuable from him.

[spacetyrantxenu]

A brief chat with BGN about things:

11:26:40 AM - Boldly Going Nowhere: turn played, report posted
11:27:08 AM - Xenu: cool
11:27:15 AM - Xenu: anything interesting or need to talk about?
11:27:19 AM - Xenu: i'll read it on my phone real quick
11:27:24 AM - Boldly Going Nowhere: nah
11:27:28 AM - Boldly Going Nowhere: straightforward. just building up
11:28:48 AM - Xenu: hammer time this soon, on two rounds of phracts?
11:28:57 AM - Xenu: i think we can support 3 or four more rounds of 'em
11:29:01 AM - Xenu: i think these guys are our final economy
11:29:49 AM - Xenu: talked to Commodore yesterday about it, i called it the 'byzantine snowball'. it starts way too freaking late and involves decimating (no, more than that, that's only death of 1/10 of something) ANNIHILATING your economy to go grab all the land.
11:31:22 AM - Xenu: tech comes by capture gold until your whipped cities regrow to again support themselves. by then hopefully you break even throughout the empire in terms of costs and can tech with the capital, and the wide wide empire provides the food (stored hammers) and mfg (realized hammers) for ongoing developmental needs. all good in theory, we're still in trouble in practice.
11:31:23 AM - Boldly Going Nowhere: no reason we can't take them to fight someone else
11:31:37 AM - Xenu: of course, i think we have to keep fighting until someone shoves rifles in our face
11:31:51 AM - Boldly Going Nowhere: basically.
11:31:51 AM - Xenu: spend the phracts until there's no point in spending 'em
11:32:12 AM - Xenu: the only thing -- AGAIN -- is the cruel nature of the map preventing us from really getting after the one we want
11:32:14 AM - Boldly Going Nowhere: are you advocating phractapulting WillLP?
11:32:26 AM - Xenu: well let's think about it for a minute
11:32:35 AM - Boldly Going Nowhere: His army is far to the north.
11:32:37 AM - Xenu: sisubistan, eaten. kuro's 3 northern cities, eaten.
11:32:40 AM - Xenu: those two are first
11:32:50 AM - Xenu: when that happens william is still going to be hip deep in kuro's land
11:33:01 AM - Xenu: i think a stack of 30 or 40 phracts would be devastating to his east
11:33:10 AM - Boldly Going Nowhere: it would be.
11:33:12 AM - Boldly Going Nowhere: razing spree
11:33:15 AM - Boldly Going Nowhere: or suttree.
11:33:16 AM - Xenu: but i don't know if we can hold those, so we'd have to raze it all
11:33:20 AM - Boldly Going Nowhere: we could get a lot of land off him
11:33:27 AM - Xenu: but if we attack suttree we may be able to keep some of the land we take
11:33:39 AM - Xenu: even if he will have musketeers. phracts still eat 'em even if the hammer exchange is horrible for us
11:33:45 AM - Xenu: but land is land and it's what we want more of
11:33:47 AM - Boldly Going Nowhere: we could force sutt to waste his gold on unit upgrdes.
11:33:53 AM - Xenu: ?
11:33:58 AM - Xenu: upgrade what to what?
11:34:00 AM - Boldly Going Nowhere: gold stockpile
11:34:02 AM - Boldly Going Nowhere: unit upgrades
11:34:04 AM - Xenu: does anything upgrade to muskets?
11:34:07 AM - Boldly Going Nowhere: whatever trash to muskets
11:34:10 AM - Boldly Going Nowhere: no idea.

The Suttree conversation will require more investigation. All things considered I'd rather attack cities I can keep rather than ones I'd have to raze, but popping William while his army is far away would be delicious and hard to pass up. If we can raze his three eastern border area cities (including the coastal wonder whore city that was light on defense last time I saw it) and relieve some cultural pressure that would set him back a long way in controlling that front. Regrowing those cities and rebuilding infrastructure would take a long time even if he did resettle quickly and reactivate the stored culture in all those tiles. Maybe in the meantime Hell Below could get the Hermitage built and push its own cultural influence along the border. That's all pretty long term though, and the cart is way in front of the horse there. We'd have to actually burn those cities first and we're a long way from doing that right now. Especially since Suttree makes more sense in terms of advancing our position. Attacking William would net us capture gold and would pull him back to the pack, which relatively speaking only advances Retep further ahead. So in a wider game perspective maybe attacking William isn't a good thing to do. Maybe we need to extort him, though, to make it worth our while to not attack him. I'm not above doing that if it doesn't alter the game balance of power too much and if it helps us. I'd have to think about what that means, though, what we could get from him to make not attacking him attractive to us. I guess if he shows up quickly with a large force of his own on our western border that would do it.

[NobleHelium]

Nothing upgrades to muskets.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Even better, he'd have to start at zero building a musketeer force to counter. Then again, he'd probably just draft it into being so it wouldn't take that long if we're too far down the line attacking him. But better than allowing highly promoted obsolete units to get a second life against our ponies.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Nothing upgrades to muskets.

Perfect. He'd have to waste gold upgrading archers to longbows and trash to maces that we could still slaughter.

Xenu, this is a lot of fantasyland for me while I'm sober. Let's check nos. 1 and 2 off the list and evaluate from there. I don't want to throw the game to retep, but I'm not sure how to get at him if he has galleons and we don't. We could raze some cites around the edges and the island, but that wouldn't be very decisive. We'll need to pile some longbows in our port cities to prevent him getting any ideas. I'm working on longbows in ML for that purpose. The infrastructure will just have to wait. I don't trust him sitting up there not to take a swipe at us once we send our units far afield. It would be prudent of him to try to cripple us, his only neighbor with any geographical reach in his direction, while we are distracted elsewhere. That could wrap the game up for him, IMO.

But, at the same time, I'm not sure if he's crazy enough to fight us while we're in a golden age/police state/vassalage/slavery/theocracy and have phracts. That's pretty much the extreme edge of crazy. He has pikes, and so should be safe enough if he stays hunkered down on his side of the ditch.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I agree step 3 is way too long term for serious planning right now. It will depend entirely on the current state of game pieces on the board when we get there.

As for Retep attacking us like a mad man, this is a greens game and I remember wanting to attack Kuro with bowmen when he played as Persia in PBEM29 in my first game. Just because something is mad, questionable, or outright stupid doesn't mean it won't happen. But yes, we need real defense on that coast, I'm 100% with spamming longbows up there. The grocer was a place holder until you made a call on what to build. I hope we didn't put any real hammers into it.

[Ichabod]

Just came across this. Check it out for a laugh.

It's locked for my region...

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

I agree step 3 is way too long term for serious planning right now. It will depend entirely on the current state of game pieces on the board when we get there.

As for Retep attacking us like a mad man, this is a greens game and I remember wanting to attack Kuro with bowmen when he played as Persia in PBEM29 in my first game. Just because something is mad, questionable, or outright stupid doesn't mean it won't happen. But yes, we need real defense on that coast, I'm 100% with spamming longbows up there. The grocer was a place holder until you made a call on what to build. I hope we didn't put any real hammers into it.

We didn't. Although I have noticed we have a shameful amount of partially completed buildings in cities across this dinky empire. Something like 30h in a market and then 40h in a library here and there.

If I'm retep, I'm just filling up all of the good city spots on the islands with insanely powerful GLH trade routes and building a wooden wall to keep the haters out, then teching away peacefully until everyone else implodes or until someone manages to get their shit together enough to become a threat.

We still have that great stupid scientist that we can use to bulb toward something. After looking at the preference list, I think it is Alphabet, Philosophy, Paper, Education, Printing Press, before Astronomy would even be a possibility, and Astronomy would still be blocked by an earlier preference for Optics (currently blocked by Compass). The best bulb use I can see would be Chemistry after researching Gunpowder, but we'd still need to clear through Printing Press, so that's a loooong way away. The other options we have are an Academy (Mister Love, obviously) or saving for a 3-man GA (a long way away). A Philosophy bulb would clear the way to Nationalism and is probably the best short term use, but we still have to tech Alphabet to get it out of the way, which isn't a big deal.

The great merchant path to Nationalism is Alphabet, Printing Press, Nationalism. This is a little cleaner, but we'd still have plenty to do. Clearing PP to get to Nationalism would likely be slower for us than just teching Nationalism. Oh well.