Astronaut without sin confounds press, invites trio to control civilization

[spacemanmf]

I still can't believe that Yuri's defending his cities with single warriors, and parading a great merchant on our border though. It feels wrong somehow to not punish that.

Yeah, definitely been too soft on him so far... =)

But it's been a strategy, hasn't it. You had chance to deny him iron and thus cataphracts. Now that he has them, it's probably wise to avoid them until you get rifles.

[SevenSpirits]

It's turn 100, which I guess means we should provide an extra-nice update. Novice pretty much played the turn except for war logistics though, so I'll post those and leave the rest to him. :neenernee

As hinted at above, Mackoti proposed peace and was even willing to pay 1gpt for it. That's not enough. If we signed peace, he'd just go stomp on Luddicator and get a bunch of free cities and land and probably stuff in exchange for peace. He can't really afford to do that if we stay at war. And meanwhile, there's nothing Mackoti can really do to hurt us - we think anyway. In fact if he invaded with 25 knights, we'd slaughter them and get a couple generals and not have to pay as much maintenance anymore. And he'd have tons of war weariness and no standing army. So! Peace benefits him, we think. We offered peace if he pays 453 gold (all he has) plus 2gpt. I'd be happy with that trade. And he could go stomp on Luddicator and we could go terrorize some coastal cities with maces or something.

If he doesn't accept (and I don't really expect him to) here's the situation (blue numbers are maces/catapults/pikes):


So basically we have 25 maces, 12 catapults, and 2 pikes, and those numbers are still going up (e.g. the pike finishing in Europa). If he invades we draft 2-3 more maces and slam everything into his knights. We think we have enough. So that's the blue numbers.

The black Xs are where he can invade. X1 threatens only Callisto. X2 threatens both. X3 threatens only Ganymede. He can also come in farther south but there's not much point to doing so. These regions are all pretty much equivalent to us. We're not stockpiling troops out of range of any of them.

Finally, the red circle is a galley. This galley can move SW-SE should the situation call for it and unload its cargo of two catapults (so I lied - we have 14). It can do this because we're just one turn short of completing a fort SE of Callisto (and will leave it that way). Over the next two turns if we don't get peace, I'm planning to put more of our catapults on boats, in spaces he can't scout with a sentry mounted unit but which can reach the almost-fort SE of Callisto. This might assist in causing him to invade when it wouldn't be prudent. The boat/fort shenanigans are necessary to keep the units hidden because there's no land-based staging tile that hits X1 AND all of X3, and that is not visible to any old unit standing 1S of X2.

One last thing - in offensive war news, I used the galleon chain to get a mace and the newborn sentry chariot out west. The sentry chariot will (in a galleon) scout down Mackoti's western coast, and the mace (now in a separate galleon), is heading westward into the sea looking for Numenor and/or tasty barbarian cities.

[SevenSpirits]

Golden ages are good.

Taj Mahal finished this turn and while I'd guessed we would get a bump of about 100g/turn, instead our income increased by 160! Granted, I'm sure some of that was unrelated growth. This is good though. Next turn after we revolt to Bureaucracy and Caste it will be even better - it sure looks like we'll get to Communism in five turns now!

Plus - get ready for weird mechanical details - we're not building nearly as much wealth as we want to. Why? The order things happen in at end of turn.

1) Gold and science.
2) Go through your cities one at a time, doing for each one first culture then production then food then gpp.

Taj Mahal completes somewhere in the midst of step 2. Since we built it in our second city, every city except it and our capital benefits from an extra turn of golden age - but only for purposes of production, culture, and gpp (not gold/science)! Strange eh? Yes, if we build wealth in our Moai city it would produce about half the hammers that it would produce if we actually built something in it, because wealth builds are resolved in step 1.

Because of this strange effect, I switched out a ton of wealth builds for infrastructure/wonders - the former so we can whip them once we have Kremlin, and the latter for (hopefully) failgold.

Here are some overview shots:



And demographics before/after ending turn.



Looks like we can get Communism in 6t, and I bet we can manage 5 if we are not distracted too heavily. We'll see next turn when we switch into caste/bureau.

[novice]

Looks like we can get Communism in 6t, and I bet we can manage 5 if we are not distracted too heavily. We'll see next turn when we switch into caste/bureau.

It's amazing how cyclical our empire is with golden ages and civic switches. Two turns ago we settled some island cities and made -46gpt at max tax...

[SevenSpirits]

I guess we'll want to revisit future tech plans after Lib-SM-Communism is in.

I'd previously thought GP-Chemistry-Biology but I wonder if that's too pricey. Maybe we should just get Monarchy-Feudalism-Guilds-Banking-(Econ if the merchant's still there)-GP-RParts-Rifling.

Rifles would finally be a hard counter to the forces our opponents favor. Then we could follow it up with Chem-Steel and go stomp on people. I dunno, maybe I'm still being too ambitious and by the time we got there everyone else would have graduated to much better tech too. After all, a great deal of the tech we have so far is due to bulbs.

Either way I've come round to Novice's thought that we should build Shwedagon Paya. It's a way better deal than building wealth to research Theology, and we'll definitely want the civic. Let's just build it in Europa - should be a 5t build at most.

P.S. DIPLO which I forgot to mention in the report.
1) I proposed that Yuris give us 50 gold. This is the suggested tax on his great merchant's bold activities. I hope he doesn't take it as a threat/military demand.
2) I proposed open borders with Luddicator. Want to a) get more free money and b) see how they feel towards us these days.

[novice]

I've been thinking Rifles, too, and I approve of Schwedagon Paya in Europa.

I guess we should also mention that Luddicator got Music. Good for them, we decided we didn't have the luxury of competing for that on top of our other priorities.

[novice]

T102 is in - Yuri accepted our friendly request for 50 gold, and Luddicator signed open borders.

[SIZE="1"]This infomercial was brought to you by the Campaign to Steal Seven's Thunder.[/SIZE]

[SevenSpirits]

Got it.

[SevenSpirits]

Right, here we go! 6 and a bit (last turn) turns of golden age. Civics swapped to Caste and Bureau, not sure what we needed to convert population into hammers for.


Many cities started on wealth. Europa started Shwedagon Paya, due in 4. We'll get a bit of failgold for that too, from Luna. Io hired 9 merchants, only 8 of which could be displayed in the interface, and various other cities hired a few merchants or scientists depending on their multipliers.

Empire-wide, we have the equivalent of a library in every city - we make 25% more in beakers than in gold. Since that will probably go down a bit as non-libraried population will grow faster, we pretty much prefer to run scientists anywhere there's a library. Well, Io has a library AND a monastery! But we still run merchants there anyway because the GP we get in under 10 turns would do a lot more good as a trade mission, than as some guy who can bulb like a third of Physics.

Commerce is proceeding apace, and I expect to be able to swap to Communism as soon as the swap timer runs out in 5 turns.

Sian's going to lose at least another city (and surely more), but he's putting up some decent resistance. We may want to consider jumping in against him at some point and nabbing a city like Code Geass with some maces. They do OK vs Pikes, right?


Meanwhile, I'm not sure how Luddicator isn't completely fucked. Mackoti could just go roflstomp him at any moment. He has longbows and that's it, and longbows won't do anything vs dozens of knights.


In case this happens, we need to be ready to make our move. So here's the deal:


The goal would have to be razing Pharsalos. Step one is make sure the coast is clear, and there isn't a giant stack of knights waiting in the fog to screw us. The yellow-shaded area marks the edge of the land we have to scout - anything past that is out of range. We can scout this with just a couple of units - one sentry chariot on a galleon will reveal the tile with the "27 knights" sign, and can then land on the jungle and reveal all the other western tiles. Any old crappy unit can move onto the grass hill SW of the dye, thus revealing the remaining tiles.

Step two is invasion - we road NE of the pigs and move our forces in onto the pigs. We can bring a great number of maces, catapults, and a few pikes. The pikes are important because they reduce the flanking capabilities of nearby knights by half, by killing almost half the knights who try to attack the stack. If there are too many knights nearby, the attack can't work.

Step three happens a turn later - we bombard down the defenses, send in cats and then maces, and raze the city. We road the pig tile, and move some suicide units in to pillage roads. Note, the purple lines on the diagram show how where the borders will recede to.

Step four might happen that turn or might have to wait a bit - we found a city on the X, run an artist, and chop walls.

This plan is pretty much only feasibly if Mackoti commits the majority of his army in the south against Luddicator, and he probably won't. But we should be prepared for it.

[NobleHelium]

Empire-wide, we have the equivalent of a library in every city - we make 25% more in beakers than in gold.

What do you mean by this? 25% more in beakers than in gold?