[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[Ceiliazul]

Trouble is factories come just when we can start building Infantry.

I love the realism on that design choice. Through most of the tech tree, the designers created choices between guns and butter. Sure there's some overlap, but in general the best econ tech is not the best mil tech. Then you hit AL and it simulated the real world frenzy of industrialization and mobilization for war. Best posted it in PB4 between Team1 and the ministry of silly walks.

Sure miss old davey...

[Fintourist]

Just quick additions to OH's report:

1. Dtay sent us two (?) white peace offers last turn. Consequently, it's not unreasonable to expect that he accepts our offer. Extremely interesting to see/later find out how he will interpret it though. We mean our cease fire offer as a real thing and as a start for maybe a long period of peace, but obviously it's not binding. We expect dtay to realize that we know that cease fire in itself is worthless and that we know that he knows it also --> And interpret our offer as something more than just its technical value (which is close to 0).

2. THH's point of staying in war with dtay in the hope of pindicator joining in is a very relevant point. However, as pindi already dropped out of the war earlier we just can't put too much value in that scenario. Just damaging dtay is not that valuable anymore, now the focus has shifted to our own and BGN's development. Pindi-attack would mostly be great because we might get a chance to backstab pindi and get his land fast and easy.

3. IIRC dazed built MoM and now TBS captured it. That's very nice for TBS. As a PHI civ he should definitely go for 3-man and 4-man GAs. Confu shrine is also strong. TBS is currently in a decent 3rd position overall. I don't think he has time to become the tech-leader in this game and thus win a space race if things stay static, but if we just would attack Boldly things could change... As said before, with PHI/SPI/Sistine there is also some culture win potential, but I'm not expert in the topic and I haven't tried to analyze that more deeply so I'm not quite sure what kind of sacrifices beating BGN's or ours space race time would require.

[Old Harry]

I'm guessing you meant this one Ceil?

Sounds like they never got to test if Comunism worked better than Assembly line due to team two ruining the game .

Reading back on that reminded me that T-hawk has posted some fast culture-win reports, so I dug those out to help figure out if TBS is going to be a contender - http://dos486.com/civ4/gminor99/ and http://dos486.com/civ4/adv55/. It sounds like numbers of religions is key, so lets have a look for cities with a lot of religions in his land next turn. I suspect PHI gives him a bit of a boost in creating great artists to bomb with, and actually they would be more use as great works than a golden age. But as great works only give 4000 culture a pop and he needs 150 000 culture it's all about religions, SPI temples and cathedrals. If one of his cities is coastal then we could visit him pretty soon, if not then that makes things a bit more difficult.

[Old Harry]

Peace is a bad idea if you want to catch up to Krovice's thread views.

Well dtay took the cease fire and offered open borders back. I didn't accept, but will offer them again unless anyone says that's a bad idea before I play the turn tonight.

We need another plan to win the thread war though. Maybe we can redefine the competition criteria: surely a win for us is getting more posts by lurkers - by that logic Krovice have 99 posts excluding Krill and Novice while we have 229 excluding Fintourist, THH and I or 157 if you exclude retep too. That's looking pretty healthy .

[Fintourist]

OBs are fine. We can always declare and cancel them if we don't like dtay's movements.

Unless I'm there when you actually play the turn: Make good decisions, spend our gold reserves (on research) as Wall Street is about to finish and remember galleons :P

EDIT: And burn just enough food in Gertie that we can burn the rest next turn with Representation bonus.

EDIT2: Oledavy's drawing is still awesome :P

[Old Harry]

Turn 189

In addition to saving specialists until next turn for the Rep boost I also put off a couple of unit builds to gain the XP from Theocracy next turn (wish I'd thought of it last turn .) We have a bunch of Rifles completing next turn - should the non-urgent ones wait for a queue upgrade to Infantry?

There is bad news on the international front - BGN is 1-turning Communism this turn and has the cash to carry on through Physics to grab the great scientist too. I don't know if he knew he had to do it this turn to beat dtay (neither have the EPs to have research visibility on the other) but its conceivable that he calculated dtay's tech rate or something. Also there is some odd culture going on over here - I thought cities couldn't exert cultural pressure more than 2 tiles away from their continent, but perhaps that only means they can't put new culture into the tile and that old culture persists?


TBS religions - not much spread as yet but he has access to Confucianism, Hinduism, Christianity and Judaism.


Pindicator's stack. I *think* that if Muirthemne is 60% borders then capturing Strand amphibiously and Gate of Storms with commandos would allow us to hit the stack from the SW with one movers unloaded from Strand (I'll worldbuilder it to make sure). Four move Galleons won't do the trick though, so we either need to move our stack through Pindi's waters as though we're about to attack dtay again or build more Galleons in Hazelnut.


So this is the east of the continent.


And this is the west. All the signs are up to date and unless I've been duped we know what is in their main stacks. If we are going for Dreylin it'll take 8 turns to get our Ships of the Line over there. Actually though neither Pindi nor Dreylin have Astronomy or Chemistry so our Frigates will do a fine job and our SotL can keep dtay honest. I want everyone to get out the crayons and draw up some invasion plans!


Krovice aren't going to be happy about this. Is dtay planning an attack, trying to make a corridor to link his two domains together or just sticking two fingers up?


Demos and power

[Old Harry]

No crayons so far?

This is my first pass at a pindicator attack, I haven't really thought about attacking Dreylin so much yet, except that we'll need lots of amphi units as his stack is on the coast.

Pindi Attack
The bad news is that Muirthemne's culture (shaded pink on this pic) prevents us hitting the stack with 1-movers.

However we can hit the stack with 2-movers by capturing Crow's Bridge. I assume Gate of Sorrows will have popped borders so will need a commando to take it. The orange arrows here are 1-movers, blue is a commando, yellow is our 2-mover hitters and some 1-movers to cover the stack. The red arrows are 4-move Galleons, the green arrow is two 6-move Galleons filled with Infantry.


Aha! But if we've got to Railroad we could combat-railroad 1N of Crow's Bridge to let our 1-movers hit the stack instead!

Depending on how many units are in Scales and Tallow we *could* capture both and reinforce them with the 2-movers that now don't need to attack the stack.

In the unlikely event that Pindicator doesn't build any more units, get any more tech or move things around we'll need 8 amphibious attacking units for the three coastal cities, between one and three commandos depending on how ambitious we want to be and 30 high-strength (drafted Infantry or C2 Cavalry) hitters to kill his stack. Then more stuff to move on Muirthemne and reinforce Scales/Tallow. So the very minimum we need is 15 Galleons but 25 might be more like it.

Fintourist's tech estimate spreadsheet gives us Railroad eot203 so I think t204 would be an excellent attack date to work towards! The only mild spanner in the works is if Pindi gets rifling in that window, but it looks like he's aiming for economic techs and Infantry deal with Rifles fairly happily anyway.

[Old Harry]

Turn 190

German Jojo won the Apostolic Palace election.


Lots more stuff going on here: BGN wins the Communism spy and is grabbing Representation to (presumably) revolt to Rep/State Property next turn. Nakor is dead. We can start building Levees and we have two sources of coal - one already mined, the other under one of the few windmills I've built . It looks like Mardoc was a bit screwed for coal along with dtay and Krovice (although we can't see all of Krovice's land). BGN and TBS have plenty of the stuff though. Also Krovice have a couple of injured Knights which might be from a skirmish with dtay.


With Wall St in place our 100% golden age cash rate is 2800 (100% science is 4000 beakers at -1000 cash).


We revolted to Representation, Nationalism, Caste System, Free Market and Theocracy.


And our finances actually improve slightly! At 50% we make 100 extra beakers and 40 extra gold per turn. Partly due to Rep specialists and partly thanks to the reduction in costs (Nationhood and Theocracy are cheaper than Bureau and OR) and thus inflation.


I ended turn, but we've still got two Frigates with movement points left that are supposed to move east then north when dtay accepts our open borders offer... Also I'm not totally clear on where our first Great Person is supposed to appear - so please check I haven't got it wrong Fintourist!

Demos and power

[Old Harry]

Here is a possible campaign against Dreylin:



- We trickle a navy including a 6-move galleon with 3 Commando Cavalry and another couple of 6-movers filled with Cavalry on to the red box.
- We have a few more boats on the pink boxes as though they are joining the red box.
- We have the rest of our galleons with as many Amphibious units as possible on the black box

Hopefully this all looks like the preparations fro an attack on BGN, so Dreylin doesn't do anything to defend himself from us... Then we:

- Declare war
- Bombard defences where needed
- Pound the stack in Giedi - we need to kill all the 2-movers, the 1-movers aren't such a worry if he doesn't have Railroad
- Take the other coastal cities
- I don't know which tile the red box fleet will teleport to - if its SW then they need to capture Memphis before Ix - if its south then we just take Ix. We unload the commandos in Ix and take the capital and Giza, then use other cavalry to cover the commandos (because the culture will all (hopefully) have disappeared - we may need to take the Cap before Giza because of the way culture disappears.)

Which attack do our military strategists prefer?

Finally this is a desperation attack against BGN (who I fear is starting to run away, he'll probably land the Kremlin some time soon) - we don't necessarily have to do this, but it could help...


- Black squares are forts - we'd need to bring boats around the south coast
- we need to find a pretext to close borders with BNG so that his sentry chariot doesn't see this
- from the northern lake an 8-move boat can drop off commandos to hit the capital and shrine.
- if we don't have an 8-mover then our targets are much less appetizing
- it may be that we can sneak a fort on the horse tile and hustle an 9-mover boat from the north at some point instead
- perhaps BGN will get railroad and make things easier for us

[TheHumanHydra]

Sorry, I've been gone all weekend. I'll have to think about this ... after I think about PBEM 65.