[SPOILERS] Churchill of Portugal: Gallipoli Part II

[spacetyrantxenu]

T212 - Great, well since people are still reading here's a short report. Commodore took a city off the Zulu but unfortunately not the big Moai city. This is looking more and more like an opportunistic swipe than a full invasion, so me not joining in appears to have been the right move (so far).




The former city of Qdoba (formerly Bad Fish before that, I think) was only guarded by an archer, I could have taken it any time if I had wanted to, but obviously that trashy little city wasn't worth stirring up a hornet's nest. But to Commodore what's a little more Zulu animosity? Unless Commodore gets dedicated and commit a real invasion force I wouldn't be surprised to see peace taken soon and these two grudgingly being neighbors again.

Things could be heating up on the eastern continents, though. I think Slowcheetah's failed invasion of the Zulu may really come back to haunt him. It seems like Plako senses weakness in Slowcheetah's empire and may be planning an attack. Plako has recently spent a lot of espionage points against Slowcheetah (it must be nice to have so much economy that you can "waste" it that way!), but I don't know what level of visibility it has bought him yet. Maybe you guys can figure it out for the lurker thread:

Uh, that's a spike or two:



And it seems specifically targeted to me:



Plako has the lead in land area and population, at about 19% and 20% respectively if I remember the F8 screen correctly. It's good to be the leader but he hasn't won this game yet. If he managed to digest a significant part of Slow's empire, though, that could inch Plako closer toward reaching critical mass and bounding ahead. But that's getting far ahead. Slow is wounded but he still has significant power, and he's a lot more likely to be better at defending on his own land than he was in the boondoggle naval fiasco he went through on the attack against the Zulu. So say I, based upon nothing at all.

Slow isn't that far behind Plako in power, surely he could muster a credible defense when needed.



I checked Plako's EP allocation against Serdoa, it's basically a state of detente between the two of them. I think they're happy to have their own sides of the Brick Channel for now.

Around my empire, the same old boring routine. Build units, etc.




I have added a few more infrastructure builds than normal since I'm still in OR for now and probably won't be forever. I assume at some point I'll dump OR for theocracy whenever I tech Theology. With nine cities there's only so much infrastructure you need when you're in survival mode. But I'm adding a few temples (+2 hammers for my terrible production cities, that will take 40 turns to pay back but who knows, maybe I'll last that long...or will 80 hammers of units make that much of a difference?), still putting out the last forge or two, and a stables for Blue Fish. I assume I can whip muskets in my other cities and build knights with the heroic epic, so barracks + stables + (eventually) theocracy and CHA means I should get some good promotions on my mounted units. Certainly not enough to scare Serdoa since he'll have cuirassiers but still, I'd rather give myself a chance in the field.

Demographics:




100% science and still last in GNP. Maybe I should have added a pair of scientists somewhere to not be last for a change?

[Oxyphenbutazone]

Those costs are huge for such a small empire... your military must be impressive

[spacetyrantxenu]

I haven't built any courthouses since my maintenance costs aren't that bad with so few cities crammed into such a small area, so that's contributing a bit. But I'm sure the bulk of my costs are unit support and inflation at this point of the game. Inflation is really bad because although it is a problem for everyone I can't overcome its effects nearly as well as the other players because my economy is so much smaller. I don't know the mechanics of the inflation stat at all, but I know it goes up over time as your empire is supposed to be growing. My empire's economic growth plateaued a while ago when my last cottages matured into towns and when people started taking cities from me, so I have been more and more subject to economic stagnation via inflation costs. But building gobs and gobs (those are official values) of junk military units is expensive, too. My military is not impressive, it's just big and expensive.

I'll post F2 soon so you guys can dissect it if you want to.

[Merovech]

So all that military is just kind of sitting there as a deterrent to invasion, with no offensive plans?

[spacetyrantxenu]

For the most part, yeah. I can do some limited offensive things against the Zulu if an opportunity arises (at the risk of my economy being blockaded into oblivion since I can't counter their navy), but going on the offensive against my other neighbors (Serdoa or Plako) would just be stupid. Well I guess Commodore is a neighbor now, too, but I'm not attacking him and cancelling all the nice resource deals I've been getting from him for the last thousand years. He's been propping me up so that I can provide some kind of military counterweight in the region, just with spare resources of his. I'd probably be dead or much smaller by now if I hadn't been getting his help, which would be bad for him since it would have likely meant that Serdoa would be that much bigger.

All that aside, my troop composition is heavy with defensive units. Longbows don't make great attackers when your rivals have Gunpowder.

[spacetyrantxenu]

T218 - Plako offered me 10g for free, I assume (for now) it's so that I let his privateer pass through my lands unmolested.



Looking southeast from Old Fish at the enemy ships near the shore. We need fire arrows!

Like I'm going to attack it, I don't have anything that can kill it. But I took the cash and hope he does no harm as he passes through. And maybe he'll sink Slowcheetah's galley, I'm tired of looking at it.

I wonder what is the point is of Plako building privateers, though. It has 5 movement, giving away the fact that it is his boat, so he can't do typical privateering things and get away with it. Maybe it's just a better exploration vessel, with the free sentry promotion. In which case maybe he won't take the opportunity to sink any of my boats it passes by (not that I plan to leave any boats in the water as he passes through). Hopefully Plako is out to show the peaceful benefits of a good scouting vessel.

For a better look at more aggressive positioning of privateers, have a look at what Commodore is doing to the Zulu west coast:



Arrrrr!!! Thar's gold in that thar ocean matey, pull it out with big nets! And starve the peasants, arrrr!!!

That blockade zone looks to be made by three privateers, but my chariot only his vision on two of them. Yo Commodore, stay on that side of the island, OK? In surely no coincidence at all, the large Zulu moai city (that Commodore nearly razed) is facing the brunt of this blockade, denied quite a few nice 2/2/4 tiles in the process. Oops. I have a feeling we'll be seeing a big stack of galleons over here to bust the blockade soon. They aren't that far away, I think there was like 12 or 13 of them probably 4 turns away to the east. In the meantime Commodore is pulling gold out of the ocean. Privateers are a lot of fun to use.

My empire is boring.




More infrastructure builds than I'd like but units are getting more expensive, I need to do something about my awful production. So forges, a few AP temples, and a seemingly out of place library build in Sad Fish. That's a solid little city up there, it can pull 17 base hpt when running an engineer specialist. Run that through a forge and we're over 20 hpt. I'm thinking about giving up the whip up there. Grow it large so it can generate a bit of commerce from the coast tiles (shut up, it's what I have), and then crank out whatever I can at 20+ hpt until someone relieves me of the city. I think whip anger there is something like 70 turns, those guys may have suffered enough already. (Or not, Old Fish just got whipped again, I think it's over 80 turns now! )

The National Epic build in Red Fish is probably dubious but I'm running three specialists there already for lack of tiles to use. Red Fish recently gave away its two shared farm tiles to Blue Fish, which needs the extra food to finish growing to full size (scheduled for 13), at which time I can workshop over the extra food to raise its max hammer output for fueling the Heroic Epic. So Red Fish runs out of tiles, has Moai for its ocean tiles, and still has extra food, so why not build the NE there? It isn't like the city is going to have much production from here on out -- the shared grass hill mine will be taken by Blue Fish soon as well. All possible hammers will be washed through the magical HE for maximum output. Any neighboring cities are shit out of luck.

What else is happening...Old Fish is still doing its frequent grow and whip another unit cycle, while Black Fish and New New Fish are doing something similar, growing, whipping a unit, overflowing into infrastructure, repeat. I whipped the forge (finally) in NNF, not much overflow, so it will be time for it to grow up again. Black Fish is going to overflow off a spy this time, it's time I had a peek at Terrapin to see how many cuirassiers Serdoa has stacked up in there. I have 43 units inside Blue Fish right now so I'm not terrified yet, but I reserve the right to shit myself if the spy sees an ungodly stack in there. But seriously, can he be coming after me? This little empire seems the definition of "not worth the trouble."

One Fish finishes a grocer this turn, makes sense to put any multiplier I can in my one big commerce city. When I finish Banking I'll have to decide who else gets banks, but obviously One Fish gets one immediately since I spend a lot more time running 0% slider than 100%. I don't know what my breakeven rate is but it's probably a lot lower than it should be for me only having nine cities. I've thought a lot about dumping down 2 or even 3 more cities on this little spit of land but haven't done it yet because settlers are still expensive (I'd rather have another knight), and to make new cities productive I'm going to have to steal the best food tiles from a neighboring city, or in the case of the far west coast, there is no food, that's just the way it is.




The Zulu golden age makes my numbers versus rival worst look even worse than they really are, but so what? My power is down to last through a combination of my recent effort to prop up production through (late late late!) infrastructure builds and the recent spate of Zulu whips to combat whatever menace is coming for them next (sure looks like pirate flags is the threat du jour). Serdoa is doing some kind of witchcraft to get his ginormous GNP value, so what if his economy is apparently twelve times my size?

[teleh]

Nice flying cameras - reminiscent of Nagrand actually. Do you have a domination victory planned?

[spacetyrantxenu]

Thanks. (Had to Google Nagrand, I never played WoW). I don't think I'd have a viable domination victory plan if AI takeover was enforced from this turn. We'll assume that happens for the purposes of this post because my human competitors aren't nearly stupid enough for it to be possible for me to win from this position. But this sounds like a RB Epic challenge waiting to happen.

First I have to kill the Zulu and absorb them as quickly as possible. This could actually be done, since my land power isn't that different from theirs (except I'm so heavily defensively focused, but still, against an AI anything will work). Their naval advantage would be annoying but wouldn't save them since I could constantly ferry units over from Bad Fish without fear of losing them. So the Zulu are killable. Next up would be Slowcheetah, or at least his islands. The AI is terrible at naval defense, so that may work too. But I'm still at at tech disadvantage and would be delivering my forces by carrack until I can somehow tech (or steal) Astronomy. But by then he could have metal boats floating around, that makes further naval invasion tough. So I'm thinking maybe I could eat the Zulu and some of Slowcheetah before that attack runs out of gas. That isn't enough for domination.

Also, the moment AIs take control I'm going to be overrun by these damn privateers that are already cruising around and I have no way to kill them short of a swarm of carracks that I can't afford to build. So maybe what I really need is to consider a different victory condition. Domination isn't going to work. Small, irrelevant players can usually only place their hope in cultural victories but the odds of me generating 50k culture three times over from this late stage of the game (without dying) would be very low.

Kobayashi Maru? I'm guess I'm still going for the time victory...the stay alive time victory.

[teleh]

Hmm.. had to look up Star Trek.

So can't win, what's the best outcome, then?

[spacetyrantxenu]

I think that question came up recently, the best outcome for me would be burining some of Serdoa's nice cities to achieve a spite victory and not die in retaliation. But since I probably would die if I tried that (and who knows if I could even burn his wonder cities anyway) the sensible thing would be to not commit Serdoa-assisted suicide.

Now if I could make a brazen attack at relatively low cost without spending too much of my power to do it and not getting out of my defensive position maybe I could withstand the inevitable reaction. But probably best to leave it alone--attacking Serdoa won't improve my standing in this game, so maybe whoever wants to pass him should attack him.