[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[Old Harry]

Oh, yeah, I forgot you mentioned that one before. Carrot could start a Settler next turn for that site.

We need eight universities for Oxford. This is a list of cities that will be getting them, with a non-whip time for building. Whipping them will be painful, how far should we go?
- Alfie - Got
- Butterscotch - 17 turns
- Cornelius - 16 turns
- Flossie - 20 turns
- Watercress - 15 turns
- Yam - Library needed, chops available, we'll know next turn

Then we need two more from this lot:
- Ophelia - Library needed (7 + 18 turns working max hammers without the whip)
- Veggies - 20 turns?
- Snowdrop
- Rocky
- Brocoli - Library needed


Ophelia and Veggies are the obvious ones, but Snowdrop and Rocky might be able to beat them to it... Once Alfie starts it'll take about ten turns, less with a bit of an overflow cascade from a Cat, a Longbow, a Pike and the Aqueduct.

[Ceiliazul]

What did you decide about religion? What religious civic are you in atm?

[Old Harry]

Its the opium of the masses .

Seriously, most of our cities are Hindu (which is giving Pindicator a ton of money). We're in Organised Religion now and we'll make use of Pacifism in the next GA. After that we could use OR or Theocracy depending how much infra we think we'll need before GA #3. We're not likely to research Liberalism any time soon so no Free Religion for us .

[Old Harry]

note to self: forbidden palace...

[Fintourist]

I logged in and checked how the new turn is looking, here are couple of random comments:

- GermanJoey asked for 500 gold in exhange to 60 gpt. I decided to trust him and accepted that deal. I don't think there is a real domestic reason, which would have conflicted with getting 100 gold from this arrangement. GJ is one of those civs in the north that possibly have a chance to still climb into a winning position, but I doubt this trade would be the main cause if that happens..

- BGN is looking good. Previously in this thread I've stated multiple times that despite his high score he is in reality behind and something needs to be done before he really becomes a game-winning threat. Well, now BGN has made that stuff happen. He is already up to 33 cities and new ones keep coming. Economically he is still a bit behind us and has some catching up to do, but he has by far the most attractive neighbor portfolio from all contenders. Meanwhile I think our biggest problem will be that soon we might only have 3 neighbors, BGN, pindicator & dtay...

- Dtay gets Mil.Trad in 2 turns and is not far away from Rifling and Cavalries. As much as I like the pure economic Corporation path I think we really want to get some techs that enable us to produce something more useful than knights. Next point is related to that:

- We got a Great Scientist from Englebert. I think I like the idea of using it for a Astronomy bulb. Galleons are units that will be useful for a long long time and navy will most certainly play a major role in this game already from a defensive perspective.. We should be able to get our 2-man GA with GPs from Kirby and Gertie (with Cornelius as a back-up). We might want to head for Cavalries soon ourselves too so that we can realistically attack someone in 25-50 turns, but building 10-20 Galleons is certainly something that puts us onto path towards new conquests too

- Mardoc has (no surprises here) 4 LBs and a scout in Communist, which probably means that we can release him from playing duties. I'm sorry for Azza that he has been forced to hang around for so long, but that should not be too long either.. We started our war against Azza 30 turns ago and as much as I bitch about our RNG it must be considered a huge success that we have come so far that we are about to finish Mardoc. Obviously we've had great geopolitical luck, but unfortunately others have had it too and as said, when I look at our new neighbors things don't seem too bright. Well, , a lot can happen for example in Cyneheard-pindi conflict.

[Mardoc]

So how did that last battle go?

[Old Harry]

Turn 159 - the fighty bit

So, two civs fall in two turns. Can we make it three?


First up a couple of Barrage Catapults:
- Cat vs CG2 LB 0.2%... LOSS with TWO HITS!
- Cat vs injured CG2 LB 1%... LOSS with no hits

Well that's a pretty good result. We'll have a 50/50 fight for one C3 Knight, then three where we get 80%+. Question is do we sacrifice a third cat (leaving only 6 in our whole army) to improve those fights to be 90%? I decided no and used him to bombard another 4% from the walls.

- C3 Knight vs injured CG2 LB 52%... WIN! (down to 2.0/10)
- C3 Knight vs injured CG2 LB 82%... WIN! (down to 2.4/10)
- C3 Knight vs injured CG2 LB 84%... WIN! (down to 6.2/10 and up to 17XP)
- C3 Knight vs injured CG2 LB 88%... WIN (down to 1.0/10)
- C4 Knight vs injured Scout 99%... FLAWLESS WIN!


We get 97 gold and a granary for our trouble . Much to my relief the message about destroying the Complex Civ pops up after I agree to keep the city. I was worried for a second that he'd founded a spite city this turn ... This sort of combat log is much more like it.


Well battled Mardoc, there were a bunch of times I thought you'd fought us to a standstill - up until we captured Infrared it was still somewhat in the balance, but I don't know if we'd have done it without Azza burning your capital for us .

One question - were you as happy with the RNG as we were unhappy or was that just our perception bias?

[Mardoc]

One question - were you as happy with the RNG as we were unhappy or was that just our perception bias?

I was annoyed with the RNG. Particularly my T142 counterattack - your stack was quite wounded from taking out Red, and I thought I'd be able to kill ~eight units rather than the two kills I actually got.

There was only one turn I thought I did better than I deserved, mostly it seemed about average, plus or minus a unit or two. That last battle, for instance, should have killed one of your knights.

[Mardoc]

Glad I gave you a good fight. Out of curiosity - how long would I have been tied to the game yet if Boldly hadn't taken my island?

[Fintourist]

One question - were you as happy with the RNG as we were unhappy or was that just our perception bias?

I was annoyed with the RNG. Particularly my T142 counterattack - your stack was quite wounded from taking out Red, and I thought I'd be able to kill ~eight units rather than the two kills I actually got.

There was only one turn I thought I did better than I deserved, mostly it seemed about average, plus or minus a unit or two. That last battle, for instance, should have killed one of your knights.

It was a good fight Mardoc, GG.

I have to disagree about the RNG luck here, because we (mostly OH) put the effort and simmed all those battles and calculated our expected losses. Here's the recap:

1. The turn we destroyed your stack outside Azza's Dental Plan, went according to odds. We were close to coming our without losses, but in the end losing one knight was the expected outcome.
2. Our attack against Orange/Carrot went bad. There we lost at least one knight extra.
3. Your attack with WEs against our knights outside Infrared was an absolute disaster for us. I don't question your move here, it was probably a good use of those elephants, but your WEs killed at least 3 more knights than they should have.
4. You sent a random WE against our knight in Carrot with 20 % odds and won. In PBEM I would have probably considered that as cheating (perhaps I'm missing something), but here it of course was just a gamble move that paid off

These 4 battles and loss of those 5 extra knights more or less lost us this war, which started as an opportunistic attack. These 5 knights were exactly the force that we would have needed for taking Infrared quick and then advancing through your lands before you have time to build dozens of LBs (which later happened to some extent, but you got anyways enough time to whip your cities properly down). At this point I think the situation should have been a stalemate for a good while before we get significantly more reinforcements, but then T142 happened.

5. Our attack against Red went more or less at expected losses
6. I don't want to be too critical or unfriendly here - overall you did a great job defending but that counterattack on T142 was surely your biggest mistake of the war. It was really a battle with very weak expected result from your perspective. I can see why you feel that it was a bad RNG result for you, because you got really an amazing set of rolls in the first 7 fights and after those you in fact had a chance to do real damage for that stuck. Thank god from our perspective your luck changed in the middle of the fight and the 2nd half of rolls went our way and the end result was probably close to expected outcome (us losing couple units). (Detailed analysis of this can be found in post 775) This battle made real aggression again possible for us and it kind of made up for the bad luck I described in points 2-4.
7. Rest of the war until this turn went pretty close to expected results, Troubleshooter was a really bad fight for us though and we lost extra knights there. And we just could not get a compensating fight anywhere and lost knights when capturing every city..
8. ...until this turn! Good RNG finally saved us at least half a knight!

Glad I gave you a good fight. Out of curiosity - how long would I have been tied to the game yet if Boldly hadn't taken my island?

Probably a good while, I can't remember what you had in there, but we only have currently that one galley nearby. WW from fighting against you is significant, but our luxury resource situation is good as well --> We would have wanted to finish you fast, but it would not have been such a priority that we would have made big sacrifices for it.




Anyways, I hope I did not put my words in a too annoying way. It was a good fight and I appreciate your effort to make us bleed as hard as you could. After your mutually crippling conflict with Azza there probably wasn't too much more that could have been done. (Until that point your economy seemed solid enough that I doubt we could have dreamed of invading you before getting Cavalry or something else that is more advanced than knights).

I have one question too regarding our opportunistic attack: If we had not done it and just eaten Azza first I assume that you would have had your eyes open and built military (i.e. we would not have been able to really surprise you after consolidating our Azza gains)? Or do you think there was a chance that you just go all-economy for 30 turns and we could have just steamrolled you if we had been more patient? :P