[Spoilers] Fintourist and Old Harry have nothing to see here

[Fintourist]

Again rushy comments:

- no idea about defensive pact mechanisms, let's not accept before we know what we are signing. Good sign though..
- we probably can't do anything about the fact that suttree will not defend his southern cities against mack and just throws everything at us The only thing that I can think of is declaring suttree already, hope that mack jumps on him immediately and then suttree spends his cats on mack. However, I think that suttree won't bother doing that anyways and will just stack everything in Madrid and gives up his southern cities without any effort..
- market in Agi is solid
- About new city sites I also like 2 & 4 the most. The first criteria is that the city can't be hit from the fog by 1-movers like Barca. I don't think there is any spot that would be safe from 2-movers+does not have defensive tiles where mack could move a SOD.
- Unfortunately I agree with Q and you. Turn order just hates us in this game. Maybe acting after mack will help us at some point so unless RL makes it impossible for you, let's just keep the turn order as it is. It is a cold war regardless of any iron trades and pacts, because as you said, sooner or later mack will attack us. I don't believe that he would prefer a naval war with plako or pindicooter.
- Anyways, as a answer for your question: If mack gives us solid peace, we can try look for opportunities for more land (suttree/dtay/Ichabod) and try to build our economy+military so that we remain half-relevant as long as possible. It does not seem likely that in 10-20 turns we get attractive chances to attack mack.. But obviously if mack does not guard his border cities and seems busy elsewhere.. That does not answer anything I guess..

Armin Van Buuren concert today

[Old Harry]

Turn 184 depart

We're at war. Let's see what Suttree does...


I settled Tet, essentially it's a filler and buffer to protect Quantrill from Mack. It'll get a missionary from Quantrill next turn and build the granary before taking the banana and starting to grow. I wonder about popping the borders with an artist or a culture build?


Then the revolt, finances before:


Changing from Vassalage and Pacifism to Bureau and OR gives us 86gpt extra! Most of this is due to Bureau, but a little is down to our unit costs lowering by more than our civic upkeep rose. I'm perhaps being a little trusting that Mack doesn't want to hit us any further, but if we prioritise commerce buildings for the next five turns, then revolt to Slavery/Theocracy we probably come out ahead of not min/maxing things... We can put enough sentries into Mack's lands to make me confident that he doesn't plan to come at us again, so Slavery might even not be needed...


Demos and Power

[Old Harry]

He took an hour over the turn. I dunno if that's a good thing or not.

Edit: And we're ahead of Commodore on thread views! :Dancing:

[Qgqqqqq]

Defensive pact works as follows:

*If either party is declared on by another party, the other party in the pact will declare war on the third party automatically.

*This is cancelled if either of you initiate war, and cannot be signed during war.

*I am unsure how this works if you have a peace treaty with a third party.

[Old Harry]

Turn 185

Thanks Q. More diplo: I've got a guess, Mackoti is asking for a 40-turn NAP. What do you think? I offered the same back. He offered a map trade too that I accepted. If I'm right then I think we want to get Chemistry + Astro next to let us kick Ichabod off our island and keep him off it, then we concentrate on naval power to defend ourselves from Mack and everyone else...


On the Suttree front things went almost perfectly - he suicided all his cats and axes into our stack along with one longbow for the loss of two knights (the second gave him a great general, but whatever, he'll add nine spears and two cats to the city next turn, but again that won't do any good. It does leave his other cities wide open, but I'm hoping everyone is too busy/trying to keep us sweet to take them) Mack is keeping an eye on things, but without declaring so far. If he doesn't snipe those cities I might begin to trust the NAP...


I promoted three cats to accuracy and bombarded the walls down to 15% (it didn't exactly follow the -8%/-4% formula, otherwise we could have got away with only promoting two. Dunno why.) Then I used our GG medic to pillage the gems mine, which should stop the Gems for Copper, Wine and 10gpt deal he's got going with Mackoti. We need a galley to settle the 1-tile island, I dunno how urgent that city is, but it should get us warning of threats to Jamestown.


Around the rest of the empire we're completing a couple more universities next turn and Agincourt can start on Oxford once France completes it's build. Dunkirk is completing a Cuir and Issy started a musket, but other than that we're just building buildings, I'm planning to have lots of part-built units ready to complete once we revolt to Theocracy. Tet (should we rename it to begin with P? Any military disasters other than Peterloo?) is building culture this turn, then will get back on the granary next turn. I hope West Point (in Jamestown) will only take four turns, but the end of the golden age will cost 30 hammers, so we could slot in a cat to get overflow to complete it, unless we want to overflow lots of hammers for Cuirs.


On espionage it looks like dtay has research visibility on us, possibly even city visibility, (the religious element of that has been removed right?) and we're going to need to spend quite a lot of EPs to get his graphs, should we just send out scouts instead and concentrate on Mack or someone else?


Demos and power

[Krill]

Thanks Q. More diplo: I've got a guess, Mackoti is asking for a 40-turn NAP. What do you think? I offered the same back. He offered a map trade too that I accepted. If I'm right then I think we want to get Chemistry + Astro next to let us kick Ichabod off our island and keep him off it, then we concentrate on naval power to defend ourselves from Mack and everyone else...

I hope you get invaded and die (and vice versa).

[Fintourist]

Thanks Q. More diplo: I've got a guess, Mackoti is asking for a 40-turn NAP. What do you think? I offered the same back. He offered a map trade too that I accepted. If I'm right then I think we want to get Chemistry + Astro next to let us kick Ichabod off our island and keep him off it, then we concentrate on naval power to defend ourselves from Mack and everyone else...

I hope you get invaded and die (and vice versa).

But yeah, I'm no sure what to think about this. I assume that technically it's ok to send such messages, but I would not like communication like this becoming a habit in AI Diplo games, because NAPs suck hard. For future AI Diplo games I think it would be good to set some kind of rules about coded messages, I think Iron for Iron trades to signal friendship are fine, but I think that you should not be allowed to discuss NAPs via messages.

That said, I'm not sure how real NAP that is. We certainly do not close our eyes and just trust mack, we'll send our sentries inside his borders anyways and I'm sure that mack does not trust us either.

Anyways, implications for coming turns, let's play along with this until we can make up our minds and see how our suttree adventure succeeds. Taking Ichabod's island cities sounds like a reasonable plan (Astro bulb coming?), because unfortunately this mack-suttree crisis has probably closed the window to pile on TBS or back-stab dtay.

I'll comment on actual game stuff in my next post!

[Fintourist]

On the Suttree front things went almost perfectly - he suicided all his cats and axes into our stack along with one longbow for the loss of two knights (the second gave him a great general, but whatever, he'll add nine spears and two cats to the city next turn, but again that won't do any good. It does leave his other cities wide open, but I'm hoping everyone is too busy/trying to keep us sweet to take them) Mack is keeping an eye on things, but without declaring so far. If he doesn't snipe those cities I might begin to trust the NAP...

That's really really nice! The fact that suttree did not send his lbows minimizes our losses here. Although he will still have a chance to do it this turn I guess? I believe that those two knights are the only units we have lost to suttree in this game so far, kind of crazy when you remember how long this conflict has been.

Are our knights going to have enough health next turn to attack with good odds or do we want to heal longer?

We need a galley to settle the 1-tile island, I dunno how urgent that city is, but it should get us warning of threats to Jamestown.

It should not be urgent in the sense that we will control that tile when we get control of Madrid. But because of Free Market that city should be profitable as long it isn't blockaded and as you said, extra safety for Jamestown is a good thing.

Around the rest of the empire we're completing a couple more universities next turn and Agincourt can start on Oxford once France completes it's build.

As it seems that we won't be dead in 20 turns, it's good that our economy will only be pathetic and not super-pathetic..

Dunkirk is completing a Cuir and Issy started a musket, but other than that we're just building buildings, I'm planning to have lots of part-built units ready to complete once we revolt to Theocracy.

I like this too.

Tet (should we rename it to begin with P? Any military disasters other than Peterloo?)

I think Tet is fine, nothing can replace the city of Peterloo. Those ruins shall always remind us about the cruelty of Ottomans. (culture+granary is obviously fine too)

On espionage

I again just state the obvious, we would like to have graphs from our all neighbors, but if that goal can't be met denying visibilities from dtay/ichabod/mack is a good secondary target. Sentries inside dtay's and mack's land is probably a must regardless.

[TheHumanHydra]

I don't think I'd settle a one-tile island city just to gain extra visibility - what you really need is just to remove suttree's culture (in the works) and expand your own (way less costly than a crappy city, unless ICTRs or something).

Edit: Nevermind, Fintourist commented on this, said it would be profitable. Any other settlement (along the border) in the works?

[Fintourist]

Edit: Nevermind, Fintourist commented on this, said it would be profitable. Any other settlement (along the border) in the works?

Maybe a replacement city in the area where Peterloo was. Otherwise the situation is same as ever, we are squeezed and out of land.

I checked the situation and I really like the idea of attacking Ichabod assuming:
1. Suttree war does not cause surprising losses
2. Mack does not interfere with our suttree war in a way that leads us wanting to simply focus on him instead, we really deserve more than 1 city for all our suttree efforts, damn it
3. We actually think that we can stay peaceful with mack for a while

Ichabod does not have Compass (and thus no Optics yet). If this does not change it means that it is completely possible to boat him very effectively. It should be possible to take Spring Breeze, Stray Geese and Eyes on the first turn of war with very little losses and the fourth city west of Eyes (don't remember the name) on the 2nd turn of war. This could be done maybe already with 4 Galleons: 2 along the Northern Coast targeting Spring Breeze (and if everything goes too easy, they could raze a coastal city from Ichabod's mainland too), 2 Galleons along the Southern Coast first take Eyes amphibiously and then unload knights into captured city so that we can immedately take the next city turn after. Astronomy is expensive and Ichabod's economy is not stellar, which means that unless he focuses on naval techs during the next 15 turns it should take a while before he can counter-attack. And we also hope that he wastes his whole army with WilliamLP.

I like this plan, because it would mean that our game will still see an offensive warfare instead of just fighting mack back the next 50 turns. It would be nice to offer lurkers still a nice last bang.

Btw, if we go forward with this, let's try to organize this so that we complete the required Galleons immediately after our bulb. And let's manage it so that we put just enough beakers into Astronomy that we just finish the tech with a bulb. I'm fine with teching Astronomy manually too, but then we would probably use our GS for Printing Press, which means that there are more beakers that do not go towards Chemistry+Steel (Although PP is pretty solid too).