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

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Note to self/Xenu: Swap engineer to merchant in ML this turn.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Kuro just played a three minute turn. He isn't going to attack us, now or later. He's done with this game.

[spacetyrantxenu]

T192 - William offered us 140 gold, maybe not as much as you wanted but since he already has the goods it's tough to haggle a price now. Accepted.




Did you previously offer OBs with Suttree? We still don't have them and he has already played this turn, so if you offered he declined.

William has quite a number of frigates in the water around I Burn, it would be nice if he would either attack Retep or gift some of those to us. And considering the nice garrison you've built up there, yeah let's try to hold the city. If Retep wants it badly enough it will cost him quite a few redcoats, plus William will surely attack Retep and gank the city while his forces are weakened after the assault, if he even takes the city from us.

What do you think about selling The Icebox back to Kuro? That would present a difficulty to Retep. If he wanted to take the city he would have to declare war on Kuro and break the only open borders that he has. Not that it matters that much since Retep is still in mercantilism, but Kuro and Suttree are the only players with active trades with Retep, so at least there would be an impact. I don't know what we could get out of it, but we could at least we could cost Retep something to take the city. We don't have enough defenders up there to amount to any kind of real defense anyway, and very limited population for further whipping. Up to you. Kuro is about to pop borders in his junk city he crammed in to the west, at which time he'll take over the fish tile and we'll have no food in that city. Let him figure out how to make the food stretch between those two.

I guess the one thing to say against this idea is that we do control the marble for now. To make use of that I've set Beside You to begin building the Heroic Epic. It's a 3 turn build and if we can hold The Icebox that long it will be a small victory. That would lead me to want to settle the GG in Beside You as we discussed yesterday, and churn out highly promoted units there (3 promo mounted). Even if we swap out of vassalage and back into bureaucracy that city will still do 3 promo units, if we keep theocracy, which I think we were going to do.

Back in the north, I changed the build in Cold Beer from work boat to wealth. Let Retep build his own work boats, I'd rather have the 2 gpt. I know borders pop in two turns, and you can whip the work boat a few turns after that to net the fish...but it will be pillaged anyway and we won't be able to whip anything productive from the fish food fueled growth before the city is captured anyway, so I say wealth build there. One paragraph too much over that city, but veto if you want. Oh, and the workers in the north, the ones we don't delete after using them to sabotage useful improvements, how about using them as scouts so we can bring home any military units that are doing that job now? Unless we have sentry promoted units doing the jobs the workers can do the same thing through William's territory, or Oxy's, and we can (possibly) use the chariots to clean up redlined units that Retep is dumb enough to drop off on our mainland shores.

I didn't move any units or change any other builds that I didn't mention here. I dropped the engineer for a merchant in ML, as you requested. I'll leave the remainder of the turn for you to play, but I think the main thing we need to figure out is whether this is the turn to revolt. You completed quite a lot of builds last turn so there are a lot of empty city queues, making this an OK time to start the swap. Here's the break down. To change one civic is a one turn revolt, two or three civics is two turns, and three+ civics is three turns. So if we want to keep vassalage and only change police state for representation, it'll only cost us one turn. But as destroyed as our economy is we probably need the bureau-cap to do its work to pull us out. I think this war is nearly over, I don't think Retep will test us on land, unless he's a complete fool and just doesn't want to win the game. (This is in spite of me possibly having renamed a unit....You'll find it in the capital, it's a simple exhortation to take a step across the English ditch. ) Anyway, I would say make the double swap into representation and bureaucracy. Losing the -50% to war weariness from dumping police state shouldn't matter, I saw 1 unhappy face anywhere in the empire due to war weariness. I saw a lot more pissing about fighting our religious brothers, but that lot needs to shut up or I'll send them all to the gulag and enforce another religion. A swap to Buddhism would only take one turn. Not that it's probably worth it at this stage of the game.

So as to when we should make the swap, the determination probably comes down to deciding whether it's important to do it now while a lot of build queues are empty, or if we should wait a few turns for Beside You to finish the Heroic Epic. Considering I think we won't have a marble supply in a few turns it may not be a bad idea to build it and then do the swaps. By then Retep will probably be close to finishing taking away our icy northern cities and we'd lose the marble anyway. May as well use it while we have it. Plus that gives us a few more turns to waste whatever population remains up there, which admittedly isn't much. We can probably whip two or three more muskets up there at the most, which I'd be tempted to just march through Kuro's land back toward our mainland rather than feeding Retep XP defending in those junk cities.

Anyway, let me know if you want more feedback, I didn't want to move units without knowing what you were planning regarding positioning. But make sure to check F1 and set builds for our cities, since I logged in already (with minimize popups turned on) you may not be prompted to do it.

One graph, power.




Retep's lack of continued build up tells me he was willing to make a modest/low investment to grab only our island cities. If he was coming for our mainland he'd have powered up a lot more than what he has. My guess is he'll finish taking the north and offer a white peace. He'd have to be out of his mind to think we would pay for peace. At this point war is just the same as peace to us, really. We have to pay for these troops either way, at least at war we can get some of them killed and reduce our costs.

Bonus time, I added a couple of signs tracking the extant of the winners' bracket Land Grab Challenge:




I drew in the lines showing the current limit of expansion for the three civs still expanding by settlement. Retep is closest to the middle of the contestable area, which was the obvious outcome from the geography, and he still has more in easy reach to settle. Wetbandit is nearly out of decent islands to expand into, at least until he puts galleons into the water (surely he has by now, though). William can still expand up the chain through the sheep and into the island west of Kuro (that Kuro can't reach without Astronomy). Seeing all of this makes me wish two more players had signed up for this game and started out here in the backwater. It would have been tough on them not having as many contacts, but it would have been at least better for the game's balance for someone else to have contested settling these islands instead of them all being a win more button for the leader. With GLH + ORG, I don't think settling these cities costs Retep all that much. Anyway, same song I've already sung before.

IM me if you want to talk about the turn or when to revolt.

[NobleHelium]

Brothers of the faith unhappiness should be tied to the religions in the city and not your state religion.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Brothers of the faith unhappiness should be tied to the religions in the city and not your state religion.

O rly....that sucks since BTS lacks the inquisitor unit some mod helpfully added in. A game mechanic with no counter, alright! Yeah yeah, war weariness has the same effect, but at least it is the result of some game action you can control. Not that it's still a good feature of the game itself. And the solution is evident, more happy or stop the war. Anyway, +1 to knowledge, I've been Noble'd.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

The gold that WLP sent is the last of my requested price of 1000g. I didn't count it exactly, but I'm satisfied that he has paid his obligation. He's a standup sort of guy.

T192

In an effort to not bury the lead:






This was the first turn that we could break the peace deal and I didn't want to wait around to find out what suttree's intent is. That's 15 Cuirs and 35 Musketeers. I'd prefer to not have to deal with them. All I wanted out of this, really, is another 10t of enforced peace, so that's what I offered. I wouldn't mind offering back a couple of those cities for a permanent peace, but 1) I have no way to determine whether or not suttree would make any peace deal lasting and 2) I don't want his culture swamping our new southern cities. So, we'll hold the line where it is now and see if he can take these badly whipped cities from our cold, dead hands. Or, see if he has any stomach for continued warfare of a grindingly hellish nature. Suttree, focus on PB16, it's a better bet!




All that we can see of suttree. I just did this to double check my visual count of his stack.




Elsewhere, WLP spawned a GA. Good for you, go enjoy some nice music. And remember who helped to make it happen (+2 diplo). This guy!




Enemies teching, we're not. Nothing new. Retep appears on his way to snagging the Statue of Liberty, having finished Constitution and opened up a path to Democracy. He can also research Steel, but I see no immediate need for him to do so.




I debated whether to start this here, but ultimately it will take too long to get it set up in a better food city in the south. Swamp People was our original choice, but it has been whipped mercilessly and will be a long time recovering. Another good candidate is one of our new cities that is currently +11 at size 3 (wet corn, grass cow, banana), but again, I think it would take far too long to finish the NE there. And, we're not guaranteed to have marble much longer, so we'll put it in the capital.




Not a ton of muskets now. Yes, I declared war and immediately switched to economy. If suttree wants to make a long war, I'll swap back to a ton of muskets and phracts and go rock his world again, doing the same dance as before, trading cities and land for an opportunity to wipe his stack at great odds. I can build settlers more easily than another massive stack. The only difference would be that this time I'd press the attack. I don't want to have to do that. Also, I don't want to give retep an easy time up north. I think honestly that suttree doesn't want to play this out and will take the white peace. If honor requires that he kills my scout, fine.




Ok, can I just get 25t of peace to enjoy building up my flabby blob of an empire? I could turn this thing around. I wouldn't catch anyone and win, but I could make a better showing that this.

[NobleHelium]

Suttree is not playing in PB16...

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Hmm. I'm not sure why I thought that he was. Well, the statement is still just as misleadingly accurate as before. He's not going to win this game and he wouldn't have any better chance of beating Seven, so it's a wash.

[spacetyrantxenu]

He's playing quick turns here lately though. He can mentally check out without picking up a new game to play, that's what I'd love to do at this point.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Why are we building temples? Do you think the game will last another 40 turns for the AP hammers to pay it off? Looks like our isn't needed for happy as Beside You is capped anyway. And, depending on what Suttree does with the peace offer, better to try out Buddhism now? It's probably too late in the game to change state religions, certainly not worth eating anarchy to do it.