[SPOILERS]The Tyrant realizes that once the world burns it gets really boring....

[spacetyrantxenu]

I wonder why Sisub declared war on Kuro? Their borders don't even remotely touch each other.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

My thought was just trying to troll all the players by forcing yet another turn split on us.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Not related to the situation at hand, here's our current culture map.




We know everyone's location except for Azza. His borders are hard to find because he's both far away and has few cities. Remind me, who kicked him around earlier? We can infer his location based upon who was gobbling him up. I just got to thinking about that after looking at F4 and seeing who doesn't know who yet. Retep has the fewest contacts, he's missing like four people. So he's the most isolated and potentially at the edge of the map. But for all the contact we have with our neighbors (and the same with everyone else -- borders are close everywhere), there is a lot of black on the map. What's out there? I haven't thought about the map in a while, but I wonder if there's a big chunk of land waiting for someone to grab it. Maybe one day when we aren't busy killing or whatever we can look into that question.

OK, back to the war planning. Kill the chariot near Tyler with Tyler's spear, grab the workers with Tyler's warrior, and make Sisub decide whether it's worth risking a chariot to take them back.

Elsewhere I suggest falling back to inside our borders. If he wants to be suicidal and send his stack into our territory while Suttree is taking cities on his other front, well that's one way to help eliminate him....

[spacetyrantxenu]

BGN will post a turn report tomorrow but the short version is that we killed the chariot outside Tyler and snatched the two workers Sisub had in our territory build a road. Why they were there remains a mystery. They're covered with a spear/chariot I believe, so if Sisub wants to throw 3 or 4 chariots at the tile to take them back he can feel free.

We offered peace, though, so he may not have the opportunity to counter attack. I don't care if he takes the peace offer or not, I don't think he's played well enough to deserve a chance at surviving. But it's in our best interest to have peace for the moment since we can't do anything right now to annihilate his stack of units pinning down the north. So the hope is that if he takes peace with us he'll actually, you know, defend against Suttree's attacks and make Suttree kill that stack. So for the love of Civ and anything holy, Sisub, put that stack in one of your cities and make Suttree spend his army to kill you. Stop giving away cities so cheaply.

Our score boost is Calendar coming in. Workers are surely lining up to build plantations all over the place as we speak. We'll be happier than ever and just as unproductive as ever very soon.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Wetbandit helped himself to one of Azza's cities. So Azza is down to one now, right? Maybe he dies before Sisub after all.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

T123

Ok, this game is getting interesting in a morbid car wreck sort of way.



As jokingly predicted, Sisub has (apparently) decided to throw his weight against us. Best case, he's just reinforcing Yar Tshes to prevent us from taking it. Worst case, he's throwing us the middle finger and has decided to give us CIV's version of FFFFUUUUUUU by invading on his way out of the game.

Here's the problem I have with this: You have a hill and an additional 20% cultural defense (60 vs. 40) by defending at DZ With Curl, your CAPITAL. DZ, with all of its better developed cottages, is much more valuable anyway. If you can't hold the line at DZ, you won't be able to hold it here, plain and simple. Tactically, this position is even more insecure. If the goal is to play to win, this isn't a winning move. If a player plays with any other goal in mind, it's a garbage move and has the potential to upset the balance of the game.

Let's assume that Sisub (Halvgud I guess?) is playing rationally. What is the gain here? Survive another three turns? I just don't see the strategic benefit. All this does is lets suttree walk into yet another poorly defended or undefended city. By my count, this is at least the third such city capture for suttree: the Colossus city (razed), the awesome flood plains/shrine city, now the capital. I am also dubious of the defense at Sisub's city next to suttree's culture bomb, as I'm pretty certain that Sisub got his stack slaughtered out of position in suttree's land instead of using the defender's advantage in the city. All in all, this terrible performance has handed suttree a tremendous haul of land and cities, and population that wasn't whipped into units, all at a bargain basement price. If this was unintentional and just bad play, fine, I'll live with it. But, now that he has a stack that can actually defend a valuable city, to move that stack out of position to defend (best case) a strategically inferior city or (worst case) to invade an opportunistic neighbor (who admittedly has also walked into an empty city) seems to go beyond just bad play.

I won't outright say he's intentionally handing the game to suttree, but I'll ask a Fox News type question: Is Sisub intentionally handing the game to suttree?

Thank you, Daily Show, for that clip. One of my favorites. Anyway, the turn:

So, Sisub's chariot killed my chariot last turn (50/50 fight) flawlessly. Rather than taking the gains, he pushed in further, and followed up with two workers to... build a road that only I can use?



I'm not sure what the goal is here, looks like pure fantasyland to me. We need workers, so I want to capture with the spear and then force Sisub to attack my spear in the jungle with his chariots if he wants them back. Slow movers can't get there before I can move away. So, I take the 50/50 fight:



And of course I lose, but SpaceWarriorXenu is nothing if not a murder of wrecked enemy chariots, and wins both rounds of combat. Wheee!



Which frees the spear to capture/defend the workers. I then covered these guys up with the new chariot (pictured) in Swamp People. Yay. So, I've taken what I can take from Sisub, and after gobs and gobs of gchat with Xenu, which I can post for the morbidly fascinated if you want, we determined we gain nothing further by fighting with Sisub if he's just going to pack his units into Yar Tshes or whatever it is. Thus:



Note: I did not leave the text in the offer as pictured. I think...

So, if Sisub was simply moving all his defenders out of his strategically more important capital to buy himself three more turns of life, well played, Sir, and he'll take the offer. If, however, he's giving us the finger, he'll decline and move north of his city next turn, or position to recapture his former cow/clam city that we took last turn. I misclicked/mismoved an axe next to his stack, so he'll eat that unit most likely. Ugh. Not a time to be wasting units, for sure.

Anyway, that's all the Sisub situation for now. Here's other stuff:



I thought about changing builds, but we need commerce here like crazy, so even a slow market is necessary when we need more units to tie up Sisub. I swapped off some cottages to push up the GP just in case we need to swap into state property. 4t until we get a GP.



Fail gold, not units. I decided that we need to cash in on Moai and TGW ASAP to have enough cash to get to Construction so we can whip out some stacks and wipe that idiot stack, if it comes our way. If it doesn't invade, then fail gold was a better build anyway.



Next turn The Boathouse will resume its previous axe build.



After growth at EoT, What We Have will work max production for two turns, including a chop next turn, all for TGW. That should be 135h. The following turn I think we'll finish TGW in Happy Face and get started with Construction with ~225g in the bank. Then we can start leveraging Moai, which I could finish on T126 but now will hold to build in more cities.



A chop will come in next turn, as well as the sugar plantation completing. Units/happy, just what we need.



Granary finishes, then maybe I'll whip a second worker. We will have another city planted up here soon. The galley will pick up the settler from Mister Love next turn. At the moment, we lead the game in city count.



Third time's the charm! Nice city name, eh?



Here's what we know. Draw your own conclusions, I got nuthin'.



Crop yield should improve soon. GNP will remain in the tank for a while, but if we can just avoid a ruinous invasion by Sisub, we should be ok pretty soon. That's all for now. I have been crazy busy today (first day of class and lots to do) but wanted to get this out for comments before playing the turn, which I can now do. There's nothing like a little controversy to get some comments, so please, fire away!

[flugauto]

Is Sisub's power graph like 30% above yours?

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

By that shot, I'd say closer to 20%. But, that is as of a couple turns ago. There is always a lag. Without doubt, he has lost some of that power in the last few turns. Possibly some units, but definitely some population. Also, he's not likely to be able to continue building units at the same rate as I can, so I'm not terrified. If I need to slave out an army, I can, but I'm hoping to not have to.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Any other questions? Fire away! We've almost caught up to whatever insanity is taking place in Kuro's thread. MOAR VIEWS!!!

[spacetyrantxenu]

So apparently I'm a murderer and a tyrant. That's what I learned from this.

Yeah, Sisub invading us would be really annoying and painful to put down, but in no way fatal. He has two cities right now, and the way he's (out of) positioning his army he's about to be down a capital too. So he can whip in a unit per turn for a few turns until he's out of population. No, that doesn't scare me. Suttree continuing to march north in the wake of Sisub's shattered army, though, would scare me. I don't know exactly what he has in his stack but it isn't dying so there's bound to be a lot of capability remaining in what he could send at us if he wanted to. I don't think that would be fatal either, though, given how long his supply train would be, but that would probably be really painful to put down, and economically crushing to recover from. So that's pretty much worst case scenario, that Sisub spite invades, we kill his stack at a heavy cost, and Suttree invades right in behind Sisub's force when we're weakened.

I have no idea what will actually happen but the likely outcome should involve Sisub taking peace and Suttree having to kill the red stack. That's if Halvgud is thinking about this at all and isn't just trying to rough us up before he dies. If that's what he's up to...well OK, have fun here while you can I guess and enjoy

(PB14 spoiler)

...the beating your team is going to receive in PB14 if you and classical_hero go through with the plans you've talked about so far..although I guess some of the harm is already done with the leader/civ picks...

What else from last turn...Yeah, I still don't know what's up with the Red/Green war declaration and the subsequent red double move. Clearly not paying attention, or oblivious to that particular rule. I guess it's a good thing we've been last in the turn order against Halvgud, that way we can control the double moving...although now that he obviously double moved Kuro I'm going to point out that he double moved us to get the settler safely on his galley the turn it sailed away...that would have been another free worker for us. But I'm not mad about it, we'll just have to make sure he dies, if Suttree doesn't handle it first. Research Constructions, whip cats, annihilate anything that is still red and alive and be done with it. That's my recommendation for the near term. Let's treat him like an unproductive death camp employee and help him disappear.