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

[spacetyrantxenu]

After the turn rolled Retep completed the Parthenon in his Moai/UoS city and his golden age ended.

[spacetyrantxenu]

T170 - Great person spawns next turn, no need to starve Swamp People again to do it. Odds are 94% merchant, 6% engineer, and 0% scientist. Although my inner sadist is tempted to run a scientist so we can pop another useless one next turn on 1% odds. Who cares anyway???




Microed cities to have as many as possible set to grow next turn so that we'll regrow instantly after the first round of whips. Swapped a few city builds so that no military units completed this turn. We'll save them until we change civics for the extra XP. Every city is building WMDs except for the capital, which received a third ring chop into a bank. Need to decide if the capital will participate in the whipping spree -- it IS basically the only economy we have. We can build a grocer there and save its 19 pop for economy purposes rather than spending absolutely everything in an army.

I guess at this point we need to, you know, be serious planning for the offensive. I think we need to do two things. First, get our galleys positioned to pick up several phracts and send them north to take our part of Kuro before it's all gone.




William is already at work, the good half of the land will be gone before we can get involved, hopefully not more than that.




I think we'll basically get three crappy cities up there if we hustle: Steve Jobs (marble), Bill Gates (Commodore's "best crappy city he's ever seen" silver/silver/fish/copper), and Harappan, the barb city that is size two. Kuro is still camped out to take that city even though he's being chewed up back home. Smart money would have been to walk all his units home when William invaded, I have no idea why he's still chasing the barb city. It isn't like he'll survive a final stand there anyway and if he loses any units attacking the city right now...well that just wouldn't be smart. So anyway hopefully Kuro takes the barb city and loses units in the process, we'll take it off him soon enough. So all that is step one, get in position to take a bit of Kuro before it's gone.




Step two is to gather everything that doesn't fit on our galleys and prepare to whack Sisubistan. I think we just go with the old phracts are hammers, everything else is nails routine and see what happens. Catapults are great but if we're going with all mounted they obviously can't keep up and we can't be bothered with waiting around. We can take Learning and Thesis on the first turn of the war if we're willing to forego the use of catapults, it'll just cost more. The benefit is that it keeps him from whipping off the 9 pop in Learning (Thesis is only size 2, not much trouble there). Next up we send everything to take the capital and remove most of his culture, then clean up at Renewal if Suttree hasn't moved in by then.

One note about defense against Sisub, he has a galley in port at renewal that we have no galleys or triremes to counter. So he'll quickly move up and pillage the nets at Revival, I assume. I don't care, we have the scouting work boat we can hide in port and just reconnect once Sisub is dead. I don't see a reason to waste hammers on a trireme down there. If Retep comes at us with galleons one trireme in this area won't matter anyway.

BGN, if you want to log in and do some planning (or play these turns....!) go for it. I still don't care what we do here, I'm just going along and doing the Byzantine thing since we're not getting ahead any other way (or this way either, but we're in it now).

Techs:




Wetbandit picked up Optics, Molach is still saving cash, and Suttree is burning some cash now. I looked around for a minute and didn't see Suttree's Oxford, so I don't know if he finished it or not. I'll probably look again some time later when I'm not falling asleep, I assumed he would finish it before going on with his research. I mean he's saved up gold for this long, maybe he feels like he's falling behind sitting on that wad of cash.

Demographcs:




Well, we came close to #1 pop. We're not growing as the turn rolls and we'll start liquidating our stored hammers next turn, so this is as close as we'll get. We'll have graphs on Wetbandit in two or three turns as long as Retep doesn't screw with me too much. Keeping visibility on his graphs is more important than sating my curiosity about what's happening with Wetbandit. That said, a full set of graphs on everyone will be nice so we can put together a complete game history if we want to rant about the inequities of the map or some other non-play factor that has contributed to our failure here.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

/delurks Looks good. /relurks

[spacetyrantxenu]

Fuck no you can't do that, these turns are yours hombre.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Brick, you wanna play with a swarm of cataphracts? I don't.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

I didn't think you'd let me get away with that.

I'll take a look today when I get a chance and I can run through the war turns. Just don't expect me to agonize for hours before hitting stack attack. :D

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Also, are we observing any particular play order at the moment? I noticed that retep played after us last turn, not sure about previous turns or what the other players are doing w/r/t play order.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Just make sure to promote before you stack attack.

Play order is wide open right now, we're not at war. But Retep, unlike earlier in the game, is steadfastly playing toward the end of the turn lately. He clearly wants the second half if he gets into a war, which doesn't sound aggressive, sounds more reactive to me. Sisub has been in the same position for ages, too, playing late in the turn. But I may have the worst PYFT rating out of anyone in this game (excluding people disappearing unannounced...), I almost always play late in the turn. Usually it's in the hours before I go to work, but lately it's been because I put off playing the turns because I just don't want to do it. Meh, whatever. Sorry.

It's up to you which slice of the clock you want versus Sisub, but chances are you won't get behind Retep. I noticed that last night (around midnight our time) I logged back in to pause the game for Retep, I don't know what timezone he is in but there were only four hours left so I wanted to pause just in case. Anyway, five minute after I logged in to pause it he was logged in and playing, so I really think he was waiting for me. Or I could be wrong. But I'd just count on him playing after us, I think his availability to log in any time is higher than ours.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Willingness to log in at any time is certainly higher. I'm not going to spend any more thought on the clock.

[spacetyrantxenu]

pre-T171 - I didn't move any units, just swapped build queues back to what they were before, so we have more units set to complete this turn now.




To do this turn: turn on research (Engineering!, 100% rate), start the golden age, swap civics as seen below, and start whipping cities.




We're one turn from growth in only five of our cities, but I assume we whip the others anyway. Cities I wouldn't whip: Mister Love (super capital), We Steal (will be golden age moai 2 turning boats anyway), Dirt Road (no food at all), and that's it. Cut the rest of 'em down.

I just noticed we still had a sign on the board at Magic Bullet to whip T158 for its granary. That's from where we got fucked by the RNG the first time I guess. We lost 13 turns in getting this golden age for our civics swaps. Holy shit what a fail. A 13 turn delay in massing up for a knight invasion in the late medeival era looks like a great way to not succeed. It's been a rousing start.

I don't see any tech changes this turn other than us picking up Literature.




Suttree, Retep, and WilliamLP are in cash spend phases, everyone else either saved or broke even last turn. I put up a sign at WWH for building the heroic epic there, what do you think? Probably while we're in this golden age we should use the civics XP bonus on units while we have it, unless we think we'll stay in these war civics for a long time to come. I think we have to dump vassalage for bureaucracy as the golden age ends, though, unless we're happy with the amount of technology we have right now. Dumping bureau is going to gut our science output.

Boldly, think you can completely destroy these demographics over the next few turns?




Here's what we're going for:




We want to help expand the reach of Canary Yellow to as many of our future subjects as possible. It will be the pinnacle of human development. We will bring the joys of our backwater civilization to anyone who can't resist it, or until we lose interest completely and halt the advance because not moving units is the faster way to play. But look at this map of skittles, wouldn't it be prettier washed out in Canary Yellow?




We want this:




This.




This.




Not this.





I paused the game when I logged out, 4:37 left on the clock. Us, Sisub, and Retep left to play.