Spiritual Industries by Mackoti

[ad hoc]

The time has come, i'd spent some time thinking about which of my neighbours to err.... well you get the message and finally i decided on Nakor

two reasons really, his iron was easily accessible adjacent to the aptly named Ironpass and he was only one turn from guilds and i didn't want him to be able to get knights


Ironpass was razed and two knights are in position to pillage his iron next turn so he will be defending with Maces/Lbows and spears. My main stack of maces and cats are SW of the lake and will move onto the desert hill N of Highgarden. i don't think Nakor will be able to get enough troops in there to stop it falling the turn after.

The plan will be to take Highgarden and then move onto Sethanon and Krondor, i'm also putting a small stack together to head towards Queg. Now i've just got to wait for Nakors reposte

[ad hoc]

Open the save to find Shoot wants to swap my marble for his fur, er , Notre Dame will complete this turn so i'm not really desperate for happy at the moment and with nationalism due in six turns i'm going to run for the Taj. I've got a GScientist with another Great person due in 6 with a 60% chance of not being a GScientist and if that happens i'll kick off another GA to hurry it along.




at the front i move my stack adjacent to Highgarden





Nakors got a reasonable stack in HG but i don't think its enough, Highgarden should fall next turn. Yabon is also now pressured by just a Knight and Chariot vs Nakors Axe and Chariot

And in the north my mini stack is advancing against Queg

[ad hoc]

Oops, forgot to upload the screenshots to Pbucket but both Highgarden and Yabon fell this turn for the loss of four cats. The stack will now continue on to Sethanon. The only problem at the moment is that Nakor is only three turns away from Gunpowder and Muskets, Hopefully Queg will fall before he can get a significant number of Muskets inside to stiffen the defences.

[ad hoc]

So the south looks like this now as both Highgarden and Yabon have fallen. My main stack will arrive at sethanon in three turns, one turn after Nakor gets Gunpowder i think i'll have enough forces to take Sethanon and Queg but that may be it.

Nationalism is in this turn and i'll try for the Taj, if i get lucky with a non Gscientist i could have twenty turns of GA

[ad hoc]

Suicided my five northern catapults to reduce the defenders in Queg, lost one Knight but Queg fell



My forces are closing in on Sethanon and then on to Krondor



Kicked of another GA now i can build the Taj but Shoot has got an Engineer and i'm worried i'll lose the Taj which is due in 5 turns but there is nothing i can do to hurry it along

[ad hoc]

Password is nasaud.

[NobleHelium]

How about an update, Seven?

[Qgqqqqq]

[SevenSpirits]

OK. Sorry for lack of reporting, I've had limited time and reporting this game has been intimidating. But I can't ignore your requests. And this game situation seems genuinely interesting. I highly recommend trying to lurk this game.

Here is what greeted me the turn I opened the first save, t113:



So I didn't realize this until several turns later, but that "thestick!" in blue is him discovering liberalism. It seems pretty obvious that he took nationalism and spent his engineer on the taj, since that happened a turn later. Looking at it later btw, I'm pretty sure the gray "thestick!" was the University of Sankore.

Other than the fact that we lost Taj by 2t, quite inconveniently to the guy with the good economy who's also our low-power neighbor that we're not currently crushing...

We are conquering Nakor. Going is slow because he is creative (meaning large city radii) and spreads out his cities really wide, and because he has decent defenders (muskets and longbows) that warrant catapult/treb involvement. When I recieved the save, we had just bombarded the defenses the next city, as you may have noticed in the above event log. I captured it, in I'm sure the same way that ad hoc was planning to do. I also scouted out the garrisons of two nearby cities.


Sethanon was an important conquest as it has the Buddhist shrine, which is producing 22gpt. Both Nakor and thestick are Buddhist. The other key city to conquer will be Nakor's capital, Krondor, simply because it is the best-developed commerce city Nakor owns.

Other major items of note looking around the save:
1) We are in a golden age and have 6t left on it.
2) We are 1/4 of the way through Military Tradition. I was unsure about what to tech but in any case thought 0% was the correct setting for this turn anyway. So I changed tech to paper in case someone has research visibility on us, to confuse things a bit.
3) We are in GPP civics (caste/pacifism).

So on the third turn of my reign, t115, I took some domestic shots:

First two cities:

Here's our capital. I noticed it was your typical bureaucap except that for some reason it lacked any monasteries, despite have 3 religions present. So I built 1 monastery a turn for turns 113-115. This played into my decision to set research to 0 for 2t.


Here's the second city. It had good hammer production and I decided to immediately build Heroic Epic there since we didn't have that built yet. It took 2t to build; now we are on mounted unit duty for the coming turns. I'm not sure if I should have built a stables first.

GPP:

Our national epic city was the only city taking advantage of caste/pac at all, and it was only casually producing a great merchant at breakeven food. I cranked GPPs up to max here to get out 3 GPs by 1t after the golden age is done. While I thought a bit about which type of GP would be correct, in the end I concluded that ad hoc had the right idea with merchants. It looks like we have good opportunities to get the trade missions with Shoot the Moon, if no one else.


I also picked one of the other large cities we have (that's not cottaged and turned it into a makeshift GPP pump, for a single GP. Heck, we're getting +250% from golden age + pac + parthenon. National epic doesn't even make much difference there!

Other cities:

Here's the Moai city. It was building Sistene, so I finished it.


Here is a commerce city that, incredibly, has an academy but still lacks a library. I decided to give it one ASAP, chopping a forest that could have been used for half a granary in the new coastal city to the northwest of this one.


Here's a city taken from Nakor. Since we have music I am building culture in new cities. In this one, I even decided to go for third ring borders. The reason is that on the turn it came out of resistance, I couldn't prevent it from starving, so I just ran a ton of artists. So it was fairly close to 50 culture anyway.

View inside Sethanon, the newest capture, and the combat log for taking it:

Some data:

As you can see, we are doing quite poorly in GNP, and are mediocre in crop yield too. I think Sian, on the other continent, is in a similar position. MusicalCat on the other continent is most analogous to Nakor; he's been doing sort of farmer's gambity things and is now being conquered by Sian. Finally, thestick on our continent is comparable to Shoot the Moon the other continent. Both have good GNP and crop yield, and are ahead in tech. Shoot got economics; stick got liberalism and Taj. Shoot is doing noticeably better in crop yield and power, though. Stick is lucky that ad hoc attacked Nakor rather than him. With the Taj golden age, he can probably get to Rifling for drafted redcoats before being attacked, and he'll finally be able to feel safe.

Overall I am pretty sure Shoot is in the top position here. Stick is in second if you just look at the stats, but it's dubious because he's the one next to the top power and nominal 3rd place position (us). I think Sian is doing worse than us, but as the presumed primary beneficiary of the musicalcat's demise, he is still certainly a contender. Nakor and musicalcat are screwed.

Next update coming soon (more turns have been played). Stay tuned!

[SevenSpirits]

Man, I just don't have enough time to report. This is partially the fault of the turns, for coming around too often.

This is an intermission report with no pictures. Over the first few turns of play, I noticed and fixed a couple things.

1) We were splitting EPs over everyone. At the very least, the Nakor and Musicalcat EP spending was pretty worthless. So I put it all on thestick, the only relevent opponent on my continent. I had research visibility on all three other major players, and was the closest to city visibility against thestick anyway.

2) We had open borders with thestick, and he had like 6 warriors patrolling the edges of our territory while he ran a paper military. Meanwhile we did not have a single scouting unit in thestick's lands. And, we were only getting a couple bucks of trade route money from him, because we also have OB with an entire other continent! So that had to stop. First I positioned some workers near our border, then moved them in 5 tiles to reveal his internal city defenses, then cancelled OB and retreated the workers out of sight. It's unfortunate that I didn't notice this earlier.

3) Thestick was going to have rifling fairly soon. Like, end-of-his-golden-age soon. And I had to make a decision about what to research. Should I continue with Military Tradition? I already had knights, so getting cuirassiers was just an incremental upgrade, and a pretty expensive one. Meanwhile I clearly didn't need better units vs Nakor, and the other potential target was just a few (?) turns from a pretty brutal counter. (Btw, throughout this whole time I thought thestick was England, because his civ and flag are England's and he'd changed his civ name in-game to Minor Planets, so there was no definitive way to tell in-game. But actually he's Carthage. Grr. So yeah, I thought I would have to deal with redcoats!) In the end, as you can see in the shots above, I did indeed go for Military Tradition.

4) As I mentioned above, I shifted to a slightly higher GP focus, and scheduled 3 GPs in the national epic city, and one elsewhere. All were quite likely to be merchants, but the first two turned up as scientists. Really annoying. So I saved them for bulbing. The last two were merchants, and they are en route to Shoot's closest city, where I hope they are not turned away. After finishing MilTrad, I teched Paper and then bulb/researched both Education and Printing Press, because that seemed obviously good.

5) Oh yeah, and I asked for Musicalcat's world map for 25g. So now I have vision of most of the other continent, too!

6) This last turn, I noticed we had gems which Shoot lacks, and Shoot had Deer and Crab which we lack. So I offered Gems for Deer/Crab.

7) I realized that thestick has the Colossus, but I couldn't find it anywhere on the map, despite having vision on all his mainland cities. Weird.