Ranamar and Lewwyn, ministers for Bismarck of Mali

[SevenSpirits]

t147 was in some ways easier - there was hardly any combat. But actually it was a lot harder. Here's why:



That's right, Luddite has moved enough troops into the ocean to bombard our defenses at Lorien to 0% and then attack with 7 units. I carefully looked at this save and last turn's and concluded that he had at least 4 marines and a tank in that transport/galleon. In addition to threatening Lorien, all the units except the galleon have 6 moves and are thus also threatening the less important but still productive Angmar and Hollin.

All this even though we have a NAP through t150. Well, I don't feel good about breaking it, so I just defended Lorien. I put 7 units in there including several different kinds of well-promoted modern units, so he'd have to get absurdly lucky to take it. The other two cities I left less well defended. If he's willing to throw away his word (and GES's) to take out a minor city, that's OK. However, to be honest, it's only OK because we'll be able to counterattack with some planes, six battleships and a couple transports if needed, remove all his current navy, and have casus belli to attack him up to three turns early.

This all took a while to puzzle out. But anyway, the rest of the turn:

Yuris upgraded a bunch of guys to infantry and/or built/drafted a bunch more. Therefore, it's no longer profitable to attack him. We could still raze cities but we'd lose more than one guy per, so I'd rather preserve the Marines for real opponents. Therefore there was only one target this turn.



Killing Love Radio makes the center, basically the only place where yuris can attack us, safer. Plus we have this bomber, I mean we gotta use it right?

After bombing, I sent in the tank at pretty decent odds (75 maybe?) but it lost against the one irritating infantry defender. After that, the marines cleaned up.



There's a cav there which I really would have liked to kill. However any of our units that did so would be exposed to counterattack by railroad. So I settled for sacrificing an axe to delete itself and three workers.

I ran three artists in Bag End to pop the borders early. At end of turn, we have deer!



As you can kind of see, I've also stationed some defenders in our new city of Nurn. It's our new "front" city.

Our other troops that were harassing yuris have been recalled back home, towards here, the most likely staging point for our attacks due to the large amount of open sea.



The battleships are already here, transports are on their way.

Domestically I revolted to USuffrage/Nationhood, rushed a few things and drafted three infantry. I turned gold up to 100% so we can rush all we want next turn (and draft of course) before revolting back to Police State / Free Speech. (lol)

Here's the power graph (one turn out of date):



A shot of most of our modern units. There's also a dozen each knights/cannons, plus some longbows/warriors, but they're really only usable for defense.



End of turn demos:



3 million power, more than twice the rival best.

We're going to need it.

[NobleHelium]

I do consider the pillaging of the oil platform to be a breach of the NAP by the way. HN units only work when you can disguise your identity.

[Ranamar]

I do consider the pillaging of the oil platform to be a breach of the NAP by the way. HN units only work when you can disguise your identity.

It would appear that Luddite agrees with you:

So, I declared war on you in-game this turn. But as far as I'm concerned, the war started when you attacked my oil platform 2 turns ago. You'll probably still win since you're so far ahead now, but we'll see how it goes.
-Luddite

I can't say I terribly blame him. I have to admit that I didn't give that action enough thought back when it happened. But yeah, when there's only one privateer on the entire map... it seems kind of silly to say, "well, you can't prove it was me."

[Lewwyn]

Awww. He got Angmar.

[NobleHelium]

How many cities is yuris down to now? I was going to post this the other day just as the forum went down.

[Ranamar]

Playing turn 148.

Hooboy. Seven did a wonderful job hurting people and breaking things, but now I get to pick up the pieces.

First. I'm going to have to check all the cities to clean up the micro Seven did last turn, so I'm going to set default military builds to everything that asks what we want to build next. Correction: Default wants to build Cannon. I set them all to Marines, and some of them will be changed to other things.

Second. Happiness. We gained some WW almost certainly from losing a city. We also gained 2 religious war unhappy in all our cities.


(Worst cities -9, -7, a couple -6)

Notes say to switch to Police State and Free Speech after drafting and rushing units. Police State gets us -50% War Weariness, which will probably save us around 3 per city that matters. Switching from Nationhood to Free Speech, meanwhile, will lose us 2 in all the cities that have a barracks, which is many of them. All in all, it's kind of a wash. However, it means I'll get back to happiness later. Also, Barad-Dur will be finishing Rock & Roll at the end of the turn, which will get us another 2 happy in all cities.

For my first pass through the cities, I basically just turned all the governors back on. Also, a couple of the cities with a barracks had overflow production of over 120 hammers and were on a border with Commodore. (Actually, checking again, it looks like I just queued tanks at border cities. I should reconsider all of them that don't take just as long to produce a Marine.) They're building tanks, for the eventuality of fighting him and a first strike on the city he has there, because they should be able to get there and hit it in one turn from the cities. (Thanks, rail net.) Cities with dry docks and no barracks are building battleships. I decided Numenor gets an airport and should rush it: This will allow us to draft from there and then immediately ship the unit to wherever it actually needs to be. Unfortunately, that's something like 40% of my rush budget. (... and, somehow, I had never realized there was a penalty for rushing from scratch. Oops. I could have saved us ~120 gold by rushing it next turn instead of this one. Well, live and learn.)

I need to go figure out which cities have airports so I can build airplanes there instead of Marines.

I'm getting tired. I should really leave the rest of this for the morning. I didn't want to think more about building units, so I went to deal with the force Luddite had sent to raze Angmar. The bomber in Lorien did its thing to the battleships. Then, I promoted the battleship in Lorien to C3. It attacked at 86% odds or something and won. I promoted a 10xp battleship from our staging area to C3 and won with that, too. I then promoted the 8xp one to C2 and cleaned up (94% or so) the last battleship. I probably could have done with not promoting it twice: then I could have taken promotions afterward to heal it. Ohwell. It can take one next turn, and there are several on the stack to cover it. An unpromoted battleship cleaned up the transport at 99% (and no damage...), leaving the galleon to be destroyed last. The fighter in Lorien did an air strike on the infantry that razed Angmar, followed up by our C3 tank. It handily won at 94% odds.

Karl Strauss had only a warrior defending; it was razed for almost $200. We'll probably lose the Marine, but he'll put up a good fight, being C2 Pinch.

[Lewwyn]

Did we whip pop off in all those unhappy cities? Like whip from scratch?

[SevenSpirits]

I do consider the pillaging of the oil platform to be a breach of the NAP by the way. HN units only work when you can disguise your identity.

Maybe if you signed a NAP it would be. Our NAP was specifically "no declaring until turn X". I wrote it myself! (Not that this was hard.) I'm tired of people signing unbreakable agreements with boundaries that are open to interpretation (that just seems like asking for disappointment and anger) so I make sure the ones I sign are extremely well-defined.

[NobleHelium]

Oh. I didn't realize that. I see luddite treated it as a NAP though, not sure if he was around when GES signed it? GES could have just told him that there's a NAP.

[SevenSpirits]

Unfortunately, i don't know what it is. So... what were you thinking for the next tech? I'll admit I haven't given it enough thought, myself, but, obviously, Mass Media is right out, until we get the next AP resolution.

The two really viable options I see are working our way towards Stealth and backfilling Music and Military Tradition for West Point ... and then working our way towards Stealth. I suppose we could shoot for Modern Armor instead of Stealth Bombers, but that both seems silly and actually requires pretty much the same techs anyway. If Operation Rock & Roll goes well, I think we really should get music and West Point. If we don't have a unit like that around then, well, I guess we can't, but... it feels like something worthwhile, because it shouldn't take too long to build and won't take more than 2 turns to tech. (Besides, it'll probably give us a nice backlog to plow back into the Stealth line.)

Like Noble said I don't think teching anymore is that good. Here's how much various things cost right now, in marines.

1 marine ~= 200g.
1 turn of Vassalage instead of = 2xp on all units produced for a turn, maybe 10 units on average, ~= 200g = 1 marine.
1 marine ~= 1 turn of 10% culture = 2-3 happy everywhere.
Music + military tradition ~= 9 marines.
West point itself ~= 4 marines

Since we're talking ~20xp per marine via vassalage, we'd have to get 5 units * 13 = 65 units built in the west point city before it even paid back the investment! There's just no way there are 70 turns left in the game.

We may want military science for the ability to take commando. We may want fission for the ability to have a land-based resource for ships. (I've parked our 0% research there for now.)

We might also not be able to spend all our gold, and in that case I think we'll want to get some of the late military techs. (Maybe computers/Robotics for example, or up to satellites and then there are several options.) But we can definitely just sit on 0% for the next few turns.