[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[AdrienIer]

Normally the boat on the red box is teleported towards your capital, it should be the southern spot then.

[Fintourist]

I'll just post it here as well (we discussed the plans briefly in chat): Thanks OH for illustrations and planning work. Previously I was leaning mostly towards Dreylin attack, but I'm liking the pindi attempt more and more. BGN-attack would possibly even be the most interesting one, but as we have an opportunity for real gains here I still consider it more like a last resort. With real gains I mean hindu shrine + enough quality land from dreylin and/or pindi, which might give us a fair chance of winning this thing. Mutually destructive war with BGN would drag us both down and improve the chances of other players (TBS, dtay, Krovice). Even though I don't give much value to finishing 2nd: As long as we have other competitive options that include a smaller risk of dropping outside of Top 2 we might as well prefer those.

Well, anyways, something needs to be done, otherwise BGN certainly runs away with the game. We have still a while to think about this and see how things develop.

[Old Harry]

Thanks Adrien - I assume you're right, but I want to cover every eventuality (the one that I didn't cover was that they might teleport SE and be miles away from our target, but that totally ruins the plan so I didn't consider it ).

We're firmly in second place now, but we just don't have an easy opening on BGN like we did with dtay avoiding Astronomy. I think our best chance actually might be TBS going for the culture win - in which case BGN needs to do something to stop him and we might be able to sneak past. As Fintourist says we need to be ready for developments.

Keeping an eye on Boldly's tech direction is going to be important. His GA production is 1500 to our 950 so even without Kremlin/US/Slavery he's able to massively out-produce us. Luckily for us our main production cities are all near to him, while his cottage core is close to us, meaning he's less likely to try anything. Unluckily for us he doesn't need to try anything . We're going to get Assembly line in about seven turns, I think Factories and Coal Plants will be high priority then. How do you feel about building Wealth in cities currently building Rifles to get AL earlier and queue-upgrade the Rifles to Infantry?

I think we'll be neck-and-neck on tech if we skip communism and he skips democracy - if he wants US then that gives us a slight edge, but I'd expect massive wealth builds to propel him somewhat. We have a decent espionage advantage right now, so we could get *city visibility* and then perhaps *investigate city*? In the short term it might be more use for us to get city visibility on Pindi and/or Dreylin to smooth those invasions, but it also might tip them off that we're attacking and knowing exactly what BGN is up to is more likely to give us the edge we need against him...

[Old Harry]

As an addendum, once we have Assembly Line we'll see if BGN is going for Steel, Biology or Physics, which will inform our tech path. At that point I think our choices are:

Immediate economy:
-> Sci Meth -> Biology
The best option for growth. If we can get away with it this should really be our priority.

Immediate navy:
-> Steel -> Railroad -> Sci Meth -> Combustion -> Physics -> Artillery (Cannons! Dry docks! Airships! Transports! Destroyers!)
Will allow us to defend our continent against all comers.

Powerful army and navy:
-> Steel -> Railroad -> Sci Meth -> Combustion -> Physics -> Electricity -> Industrialism (Cannons! Dry docks! Airships! Hit Musicals! Tanks! Battleships!)
Our AL beeline allows us to cut out Artillery altogether and get Industrialism for only one extra tech. To be fair its 25 000 beakers worth of extra tech, but Fintourist's tech spreadsheet makes me think we can get it by T212. Invincibility both at sea and on land, but no Transports...

Hybrid:
-> Steel -> Railroad -> Sci Meth -> Biology -> Combustion -> Physics -> Electricity -> Industrialism (everything!)
Attacking Pindicator on t204 would require Railroad but this route only puts Biology off for a couple of techs.

You may be able to see that I'm enjoying the tech spreadsheet!

BTW, who do you think would like to buy Destroyers/Battleships from us? German Jojo is right next to TBS and seems to like a fight, but he is a fair distance away.

[TheHumanHydra]

I think I agree with Fintourist that Pindicator is the most promising target.

* He has the shrine.
* Conquering him also opens up the possibility of conquering dtay's adjacent colonies.
* Conquering him leaves Dreylin as a buffer-zone between our new conquests and BGN, making it more difficult for him to intervene to stop or reverse our conquest, and making them more defensible from him in the long-run.

I feel like the attack on Dreylin leaves us vulnerable to intervention from BGN. In an ideal world, I would like to attack BGN directly, but that usually seems to be inefficient in Civ, even though the prospect of burning his capital and shrine city is appealing.

Just my thoughts.

[Old Harry]

Turn 191

Golden age is over . BGN built the Kremlin in one turn . Then he finished Q off this turn too .


BUT! We got our Great Artist and these city ruins that we've carefully been cultivating pay out the mother-lode! We got the first load of beakers, then Fintourist took a 50/50 gamble with 420 gold to get some beakers towards Steel, but he got four times as many towards Assembly Line instead! Wooot! Now the question is can we get this event again or should I just bulldoze the two city ruins that we've been keeping for this purpose?

Event2 City Ruins Prereq: City Ruins in your control Obsolete: RADIO or REFRIGERATION or PLASTICS or SATELLITES or ADVANCED_FLIGHT or ECOLOGY Active/Weight: 90/1000 Result: 1.you get 15% of remaining tech cost for a tech 2.you get 15% of remaining tech cost for a tech AND pay gold (5% of tech cost) for a chance for 3 3.you get +15% of remaining tech cost for a tech

The other news is that Krovice signed peace with dtay to concentrate on Ruff, this is pretty good for us, because the more of Ruff they can eat the less BGN will get, and then at some point we can get them to dogpile him with us .


Not a lot else to say about this turn. We're building six Galleons at the moment - aiming to have at least 20 in place to attack Pindicator (thanks THH, I agree with all those reasons - in fact I was wondering if Pindi would let us use his culture to take dtay's border cities , but we perhaps don't want a fight on two fronts at that point.) We need to work out where we'll be drafting to get to the invasion force in time once Assembly Line comes in. You can see that our Rifles are strung along our coast to deter any thoughts of invasion from our neighbours.


Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

It sounds like we're all fairly happy with a Pindicator attack. We know a lot about his troop distribution circa turn 188 - 190, but things could change by turn 204.


If he gets Rifling (I think he's heading Constitution-Economics right now) and adds Rifles or Cavalry to his stack or cities the odds for C2 infantry drop to about 80% per fight, meaning we're less likely to get through the whole stack. Or if he adds more trash units the Cho-ko-nu's are more likely to survive the initial attack. This is troubling, so I'd like to see his stack and cities on t203 and t204 to allow us to attack with the appropriate number of troops. We could:

1. Spend Eps to get city visibility
2. Keep tracking our scouting worker back and forth across that continent over the next ten turns
3. Hold the worker in dtay's lands until t203, then move him to see the stack and holy city

I don't think 1 will work as his stack is out of range of his cities, so how do our military psychologists rate 2 and 3? If he's paying attention he'll know that we have city visibility on dtay, so there is no reason to keep our worker in his lands. Then again he might be checked out enough that if we don't irritate him by continually nosing around he won't think of us attacking as a possibility...

[TheHumanHydra]

Can you use it to 'scout' Dreylin, then have it casually circle back, maybe moving a ship up too so it looks like you're preparing to bring it home?

Or maybe just blatantly park it in/near his stack; maybe he'll think we just want to see if he makes a move toward dtay so we can join in?

[Old Harry]

Turn 192

Not a lot going on this turn again, Wang Xizhi isn't going to mention to Leif Erickson that Gertie would give him a much better return than Alfie...


Automated Teller has an Astro isle too. Lots of workers, no settlers. Hmmm...


We've started getting city visibility on BGN.


An overview of Pindicator's land for planning purposes. Chatted with THH and Fintourist and the wandering worker strategy is go.


Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

The drafting plan (first draft)

We can start drafting Infantry on turn 195 and we can build railroads on turn 201 and onwards.

The black circles on these maps are where I think an initial railway network would be useful - we'll be drafting from the tundra mostly. Note the wide berth it gives Alfie... We could draft from the pink diamonds but they're a bit too valuable. The red diamonds will mostly draft off coast, so those are our best targets. The first number is my guess at how many Infantry the city can produce naturally, the second is the number it can draft.


The turns to be drafted on are as follows - we can bring three drafts forward to t197 as we see fit, but this schedule gets all our drafted infantry to the Galleons on the pink square on t203:


- 195 - 5
- 196 - 5
- 197 - 2
- 198 - 5
- 199 - 5
- 200 - 5
- 201 - 5
- 202 - 5
- 203 - 3
- Total - 40
The yellow line is the railway I expect us to build first, the pink lines are ten, twenty and thirty tiles from our boats, and the numbers are the turns on which each city will draft.

Kipple (the iceball at the south pole) can probably draft once, but we'd need to upgrade a galley to a galleon to get it to our fleet.

So do we want 40 drafted Infantry or do we skip some in the more valuable cities? This might help decide which are the valuable cities: