[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[Old Harry]

That rings a bell. I added it in. I think Cynheard is currently at war with Agent567 but no cities have changed hands, so we don't know if its serious.

[Grimace]

Hey Harry, how did you build that map of the world?

[Old Harry]

Pressed alt+F to get the Satellite view, zoomed out to the widest decent view, then took 20 screenshots and stitched them together using layers in Paint.net. I think some other folks have stitching program to save time, but I had some time to kill.

[Fintourist]

OH, civ crashed, will catch you later!

[Old Harry]

Turn 148

Mardoc's Welly seems to be wandering at random here. Followed by a Great General. You can't capture a GG can you? Anyway we threw an axe against the Welly at 24% to get good odds for the Knight.


C1 Knight vs Welly 85%... FLAWLESS WIN!

We sent a worker to get a look at Yellow. It's only got one Axe, and there is a Catapult poised to hit our stack. So to fork the two cities we could kill the Cat...


Green Knight vs Cat 99%... WIN (down to 4.4/10 )

Those four hits leave him vulnerable until he can promo heal next turn. So I covered him with an 8.8/10 Knight. Barring some really bad rolls he should fight off at least two assailants. Then I shuffled everything like so. We have two Knights that can hit Troubleshooter or Yellow, five cats and six Knights that can hit TS and a HA that can hit Yellow. Depending on how much we're willing to sacrifice next turn we could take both cities. FT thinks Mardoc might attack out, but I think that would be a poor choice... Also note BGN's Trireme patrolling the waters... Hopefully not the vanguard of something (definitely not as he is now at war with Azza, Q, Cal and Bacchus, at least two of which are hot wars...)


In domestic news I whipped two settlers before our turn of anarchy next turn, we have two banks finishing to take advantage of us switching research off for a bit which will take us to four in total. We'll have silver hooked in three turns (four with the anarchy) which will help a lot with the war weariness. Hazelnut is two pop from its target - at the moment it's got +6 food - with two more workshops it'll have +2 food, at which point we convert one of the farms to be a workshop. That should give us a base production of 33 which is 74 hpt. With caste it's 36/81 hpt and with Replaceable Parts its 39/87. I'm tempted to use our excess worker labour to farm all the plains and workshop two extra grass tiles, so that the golden age hammer bonus is higher .


Demos, Power and GNP . Don't worry, that's a golden age as well as Free Market for dtay.

[Fintourist]

Mardoc's Welly seems to be wandering at random here. Followed by a Great General. You can't capture a GG can you? Anyway we threw an axe against the Welly at 24% to get good odds for the Knight.

Just to clarify here, OH isn't as clueless as he sounds here. We were discussing Mardoc's sneaky play where he merges that GG with WE next turn, takes morale-promo and tries to recapture Orange/Carrot



Btw, I think it's now 20 turns since we declared war on Azza. That feels like it happened ages ago. I don't know what I expected back then, but despite some disappointments we have had our luck bursts as well and have come pretty far. We are currently behind dtay and Krovice in land area, but we are quite close to the point where we can comfortably say that this continent is ours and then we should be pretty competitive also in that respect again (krill + novice are somewhat behind us in tech and have less crop yield so it's really only dtay who we are trailing).

Many things can still go wrong, but we try to stay focused and not get too greedy (although the moves from this turn were pretty damn greedy)

[Fintourist]

While we are waiting and it's still weekend (meaning I have a chance to inflate my post count), here are couple of thoughts:

Resource haggling

1. We don't have Bananas, we want Bananas. E.g. Cyneheard has 3 pieces and couple of score leaders have surplus sources as well. However we don't have much to offer for them. Hitanykey and wetbandit have 1 source of bananas each and lack some of our resources, at least ivory, which we have 2 pieces.
2. We don't have Dyes, we want Dyes. E.g. pindicator has multiple sources and once we connect our own source of furs, we could swap our wine-for-furs trade to wine-for-dyes trade.

My suggestions:
1. Cancel our iron gift to Cheater Hater (Zulu), it's not like he really needs them anymore and offer iron-for-banana trade to Cyneheard. Yes, we don't like supporting our neighbor who has Guilds with iron, but Cyneheard is getting it already from BGN. Cyneheard is paying stone+spices for his iron to BGN so here is the hoping that he will cancel that much more expensive trade and "ally" with us.
2. Offer ivory-for-dyes to WilliamLP, wetbandit or TBS. They only have 1 source of dyes, but they all lack ivory and due to the fact that ivory is generally more useful than dyes there is a fair chance that one of them will accept.


Macro:

Have we actually commented that BGN built Taj? I think we are happy with that as BGN is "only" at 22 cities. It seems that winning Taj race was out of reach for dtay and he did the correct decision by grabbing Economics from Liberalism. Economics and Liberalism are equally expensive and I don't see dtay utilizing Free Religion or Environmentalism in the near future: The price from Liberalism was simply a boost (3600 actual beakers) in race for Communism Great Spy. Of course that will be nice for him later, but not really game-breaking by any means.

After this turn we are Philosophy, Printing Press and Liberalism behind (and Literature ahead) dtay and the gap will get bigger as dtay is enjoying his 2nd GA at the moment. That is obviously a significant lead, but we have FIN trait helping us in the late-game, (while dtay's PRO/EXP will become less valuable) 2-man GA still to spend and rest of Mardoc's and Azza's lands waiting for consolidation.
--> Situation is still in control at least on paper and we remain competitive. However, things can change fast and it will be interesting to see how players will be able to improve their position further. I think there are still 6-10 civs that can claim they have a shot on winning this if things develop well. It is still fairly easy to screw our/dtay's/BGN's game by determined attack. (e.g. dtay's army is not especially big, his western defenses are light --> Razing/Capturing 5+ former cities of CH and then creating a mutually destructive stalemate would be a decent troll strategy from us) :P

[Fintourist]

GNP . Don't worry, that's a golden age as well as Free Market for dtay.

And huge known-tech bonus from Aesthetics

+1 post

[Old Harry]

Turn 149

To solve our happy and health issues we offered Ivory to Wetbandit for his Dye, cancelled our Iron gift to CH and offered Iron for banana to Cynheard.

Fintourist bombarded Troubleshooter down to 14%, took Purge at the cost of one Knight and Yellow courtesy of a HA withdrawal (approx 50/50 not to die) and a flawless Knight win (which he claimed he'd lost, the bastard ). We made 173 in capture gold, which doesn't sustain us for too long, but is welcome all the same. We should take TS next turn, Blue on t152, Green on t154 if we wait for cats or t152 if we just throw a bunch of Knights at it. Violet could fall the same turn as Green with luck, the cats are probably more useful at Communist, which should then fall around about t155 and free us from war weary hell. BGN has a galley that could hit Yellow next turn if he wanted, but he's busy fighting a lot of other battles at the moment, interfering here wouldn't be wise.


Next we revolted to Free Market... We'll have to see what these screens look like next turn.






Oh, but hang on. Next turn?


Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111111!11!!!!!!! We checked the formula and capturing Yellow put us over the one-turn anarchy limit . With 33 cities it's 1.99, with 34 cities it's 2.02. Stupid game . Looking on the bright side we save 11 gpt in unit support costs .

Demos (not looking too good right now) and power.

[Ceiliazul]

whoo, that's gonna show up the end-game graphs... ouch!

Doesn't slow down the war though... think of it as 2t saved on war weariness.

With the 2turn anarchy, how much are you losing and how much will FM gain you? what's the payoff time?