AT loves it when a plan comes together!! [Spoilers]

[AutomatedTeller]

the trading is going to freaking kill me. Now everyone has construction but me and I'm now worried Jowy is coming after me, since he gave construction to Commodore (he traded, but i don' t really know what he got - currency?. We'll plant the last city, and just start building military.

Once we plant that city, we'll have the most cities in the world, btw.

If I could trade Metal Casting, we'd be fine.

Cornflakes picked up calendar, btw. Dunno if he's going to trade it or not - my guess is not until he's built MoM, which is fine with me.

[AutomatedTeller]

well, we are probably fine, anyway. I shouldn't worry too much - we have collosus, are financial and have a shrine.

Next turn, I have to remember to adopt buddhism - get an extra happy plus, of course, bonuses on buuidligns

[MindyMcCready]

I don't think that you've done badly on tech trading. So long as you stay off the top of the scoreboard, others will still trade with us. Some population reducing whips might be in order before setting yourself up for a trade. Given the Jowy situation, that might fix itself.

That is a worrying sign that Jowy traded to Commodore. What about TT? It looks like he doesn't have it either. How close is TT to Jowy?
If we see Jowy trade to TT well that'll be a sure sign that we are the target. I wonder if he's debating on who to attack. I suppose he could just want neither of his neighbours to have it for defensive reasons. Still, him selling to Commodore, suggests that that's not the line he's thinking along.

When we get Construction DO NOT SELL IT TO TT!!! We want to sway Jowy's impression of low hanging fruit as much as possible. And how fast can we get it anyway? If we're showing catapults as he's gearing up he might just send his army the other direction.

I also think that we should get a Trieme in the water. Flash it to Jowy as a warning sign that we can starve out his capital. He can't easily deal with a Trieme at this point. We'll need 2 of them if we see that he has any type of navy.

We need eyes past L.A. Law. We also need eyes past C.H.I.P.S even though its unlikely that he'd come this way.

If we draw the short straw anyway, we'll probaby have say 10-12T before Jowy can put together a decent army? That gives us time for defensive bonus at LALaw. A wall would buy us a lot of time or cause Jowy some casualities with our archers. We should also watch for whipping as a sign of imminenet hammer dropping.

10-12 turns also gives us time for a barracks or two I think. That'll really help our archers . It'll show up as power to further dissuade him I hope.

Last thing, I'd really want to more heavily weight catapults. If we're not picked the catapults will have a longer shelf life than the archers and allow more flexibility if we go on the attack down the road.

[AutomatedTeller]

I should probably play more Civ games where I"m not ahead in tech trading - it makes me more nervous than it should

i agree - once we get construction (7 or 8 turns), we build a bunch of catapults. We will need 3 or 4 to defend LALaw against a reasonable stack.

Till then, I'll build a rax in NYPD Blue and a spear and some dogs - dogs have higher power ratings than archers. Some more archers from other places and try to get them to 2 promos with barbs, if we can.

I have a worker that got created in NYPD Blue who will finish off the western road network - we are very light on workers right now and have a poor road network. 3 chariots might mess up LA Law right now.

I agree about trireme - but we have a lot of things to get and that's low on the list, i think.

Eyes on Jowy:

1) Scout - cheap, fast.
2) archer - cheapish, not fast, can help on defense.
3) Spy - expensive, slow, might get caught and lose us eyes.

My thoughts are the scout for now, a spy later. What do you think?

[MindyMcCready]

Can you post the power graphs? Determining the relative power difference between TT and ourselves could help our assessment of the risk. If we don't have graphs on TT we should put all of our EP on them until we do.

Other things:
1. How fast could we get Feudalims? We've got writing and Monarchy so 700 beakers - 40% around 400 beakers? Looks like we're cranking out 40-47 bpt at breakeven. So 10 - 12 turns or so? Well that would definately make us a tough nut to crack. We'd totally be ready to pink dot everyone and seize control of the north of Lake Blue.
-We'd likely sacrifice our run at the GLib, Music GA and all that. But this might well be worth it if we can send Jowy the other way.

If we made such a move immediately, we could land that and trade it around with whoever gets left out of the construction trade. TT's going to have to research it if nobody else.

2. Assuming we stay the course on the GLib run, could we try to get it in the capital? We've got pretty strong production there I think and if we get the tech first it might be enough. If we're interested in that then the library build and a forge and religion should be focussed on the capital. This could be pretty powerful with bureau.

3. If 2 is of interest, we could still try to turn those forests around CHIPS into the Parthenon. No prep work needed there. Just direct forests --> Wonder.

[MindyMcCready]

Definately agree with the scouts. We want Jowy to see us as non-threatening but defensively minded. Scouts do a good job there. They'll move faster and make it back to whatever city is under threat so that they can soak up collateral damage. A spy is definately threatening (we'd be suspicious if one was found in a boatable city for example) if discovered and an archer won't make it back in time if Jowy has HA, which he will if he comes a knocking.

In the south, we might want something else as it'll probably get killed by barbs, but between us and Jowy in the North a scout will be perfect.

[AutomatedTeller]

dont' have charts on TT. We are 4th or 5th in power - cornflakes is #1, Jowy is slightly stronger than us. The difference is getting less important - Cornflakes is something like 5 axes stronger than us, so no big deal since he has to deal with at least 2 pissed off neighbors.

I'd prefer the Glib elsewhere - glib combines really well with National Epic and running several scientists. Scientists are not great in a bureau cap, though - you want to maximize commerce (get large, work commerce tiles).

I want in the cap:

Library
Market
Lighthouse
Forge
Monastery, perhaps.
Temple, perhaps
Maybe walls if we can't make the lake ours.

bear in mind that we are on a large map - tech costs are considerably higher than standard. It's taking us 8-9 turns to get construction - feudalism is probably 16 turns away if we start it now. Maybe a little less as our commerce will rise.

We could get a lot of good from it, though. It would almost certainly mean not getting the GLib, but then, LB's are very tough. It's an interesting idea, though.

I'm thinking about running a couple of prophets in MASH along with the engineer. Assuming we can get currency from somewhere, we'll be able to build:

Machinery (Engineer)
Civil Service (Merchant)
Theology (prophet)

In 10 turns or so.

Machinery gives us Xbows, which don't laugh quite as hard as LB's on defense, but are still pretty good, theology is a fine trading tool and CS gives us bureau and can be traded...

[MindyMcCready]

This is where never having played MP, I'm really just stabbing in the dark as to what size army Jowy would show up with.

Regarding the dogs defense,...

I don't think that Jowy's going to show up with a whole lot of axes. He knows we have dogs. In the most likely scenario of Jowy showing up with an assortment of HA, Cats and elephants plus a couple of axes for stack defense, I'm not sure that the dogs are going to do anything other than die. They're hardly better for attacking out than archers as the all-too-probable shock elephants or shock HA are just going to eat them alive.

Of that hypothetical stack, elephants are the only ones who'll have reasonable odds on taking down a fortified CGII archer behind walls. If we can target a collateralled elephant with a sword we might be able to take out Jowy's best unit for getting past our archers. And swords will defend very well against HA or even elephants unless he beats down our walls/cultural defenses.

Your dogs defense (8000 soldier points, I'm guessing?) is a solid bluff, but if Jowy calls it we'll probably wish our hammers were elsewhere.

Also, I think that getting the spears and archers into the border city should come before the dogs. I think that the fortify bonus on those units are more likely to tip a battle to our favour than it would on the dogs. FAKE EDIT, I just went back to your T102 report as saw all the archers. Feel much better now.

Actually come to think of it, the only thing that a dog would defend against would be spears which Jowy almost certainly won't bring to this party given his elephants.

On the Feudalims: Right, large map tech costs. It certainly did seem odd to me that we'd be able to tech Feudalims that quick relative to the time it was taking to get construction. Still, I had to ask anyway just in case.

On the Great Library: Yes, of course. We'd want to match it to the National Epic. Makes sense. And maximize commerce. I get it now.

Last thing: Walls defense. The sooner that we can show walls the more he'll think about sending his stack elsewhere. What's your timeline for placing walls plus the necessary units into LALaw?

Last last thing: I think that you should promote your archers in LALaw. Make sure that we're showing him our CGII/CGIII so that when he hovers for odds he doesn't like what he sees. THEN,... plant a couple of spears. Hopefully, we can psychologically bruise him without firing a shot.

[MindyMcCready]

Sorry to spam here but how much soldier points is a spear worth compared to a dog soldier? If it's the same points, then the odds are good that the spear will prove more useful.

[AutomatedTeller]

Dogs are 6K and are still useful - we have barb axes floating around, plus cornflakes has a ton of impis. Plus, of course, a need to keep azza at arms length - he doesn't worry me (he's gonna attack cornflakes), but it's good to keep aware.

If jowy attacks, he will have axes - I presume he has several that have at least 1 promotion, and we have 2 dogs that are most useful by cornflakes (they are woods II and no use in the open lands between us and Jowy), so having 1 or two is useful.

archers are 3K, spears are 4K, axes (and dogs) are 6K. Elephants are 8K (as are praets). btw - I'm pretty sure that Azza is building praets - he has iron, so of course he would. Which means that cornflakes will not be attacking us, cause he's going to have pissed off praets to deal with... so that's nice We should make sure azza gets construction if he doesn't have it yet...

a few turns to get more reinforcements there. I don't think Jowy even knows there is a city there. He's got some time to go to get his elephants up - he still needs HBR, plus elephants are expensive