[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[Old Harry]

Turn 203

We have enough cash saved to get Biology in three turns, I think 100% this turn while we still have the Monasteries, then 90% for two turns gets us there.

The main line railroad is taking shape, it's now only two turns to travel from Alfie to Endive. BGN has no Galleons anywhere near our west coast though, so I'm tempted to pull some of the infantry that were heading that way over to the Dreylin front, to push our claims there. I drafted Quincy, Red Cabbage, Ophelia, Nuggets and Ursula. We're getting close to that happy limit in a bunch of our draft cities, so our switch out of Nationhood will be a bit of a relief.


Down to the real business of the turn. Last night the first battle was for our red-lined Cuirassier to walk into The 12 Duns, getting 106 gold and a Forge and a Granary.


Next we take Avernus and get 118 gold, a Granary and a Forge .


To slow dtay down we pillaged away a village, pasture, farm, workshop and most importantly the roads. He can't take the Shrine this turn and next turn our units should all have healed nicely. Avernus is vulnerable though .


Next up Brayle:

- C2 Pinch Cuir vs CG2 Musket 32% (10% retreat)... LOSS (2 hits)
- C2 Cuir vs injured CG2 Musket 76% (6% retreat)... WIN (2 hits)

The city comes with 123 gold, a Granary and a Harbour.

Next we walked into Shoal getting 183 gold, a Granary, Forge and Observatory. I didn't take an "after" pic, but we've moved the commando SE of the city and covered him with 2 Infantry and three Rifles, so whatever happens we'll recapture the city next turn. What Pindicator does about White Falls and Madrigal is going to have consequences for us - if he throws everything at WF then Dreylin can take Madrigal, if he hunkers down in Madrigal then he could last a while...


Demos and power

[Commodore]

Nationhood's the only + option in that column, right?

[Fintourist]

Nationhood's the only + option in that column, right?

Yeah, we plan to go back to Bureaucracy (even at this empire size it's still stronger economically than Nationhood) and by T210 we have drafted enough infantry for this game I hope.. And yeah, we need to pay some attention that we don't screw up when we lose barracks happiness in many cities. OH is mostly pointing out that we already have 9 in our main draft cities so it will be nice to start get rid of those.


Completely another matter, it can be seen from OH's report how bad the culture bug screwed us. Without it we could have reinforced Madrigal and we would have a handful of infantries sitting in Madrigal and White Falls. Now with Dreylin joining in it looks probable that we need to give up on those, at least temporarily. Oh well, as long as we don't screw up and lose our army this war will still be succesfull even if we lose Madrigal, White Falls and Avernus in the east. 10+ cities and a shrine gives us the boost that we needed at this point. Let's see how dtay reacts though in the east. It seems unlikely that he can build a new road E of shrine already this turn so we get to heal our wounds, which helps quite a lot. It's a pretty dance/puzzle over there.

Btw, I can't really decide whether I should be annoyed or if it's completely normal and to be expected what pindicator does: Sending every single unit he has in the east to our stack and leaving his cities at Dreylin and dtay border empty. In PB13 I was furious when suttree tried to make our life miserable and mack got cities without effort, but I guess here we are in position to deal with it so I can take it more neutrally and more as a normal part of civ meta. (+ here we are really attacking and not just razing a size 1 city)

Hmm, what else, currently pindi is down to 2 cities (Dreylin will take one of them this turn), but he can recapture 2 cities if he wants to. Anyways, being down to 2 cities on the 3rd turn of war is a pretty fast collapse and this war has progressed faster than I expected.

[Old Harry]

Pindicator played and didn't take a city off us - he must be turtling in Madrigal...

So what will Dreylin do? If he takes Shoal what should we do? Do we race him to Madrigal or leave him to it?

[Fintourist]

Pindicator played and didn't take a city off us - he must be turtling in Madrigal...

So what will Dreylin do? If he takes Shoal what should we do? Do we race him to Madrigal or leave him to it?

It seems dtay razed Avernus. In itself that's ok and hopefully it satisfies his bloodlust, but I fear that it sends a bad signal to Dreylin and he decides to push forward thinking/knowing that we need to commit to eastern border. Let's see whether dtay positioned himself aggressively towards Shrine.. Btw, we probably need to cover the most northern cities from dtay too. Not getting Avernus is completely fine, but I don't want to see TTD and Tandem razed.

So reg Dreylin & Pindi: It's clear that Madrigal needs to fall, and preferably pretty soon (whether we can commit enough during the next 1-3 turns is not clear though). Optimally we want Shoal-Madrigal-White Falls as our western border, but if dtay annoys us in the east and/or Dreylin decides to be aggressive and e.g. razes those cities we might need to satisfy ourselves with Tallow-Scales-Tandem as our front. Latter would mean that we got 11 cities total from this war, which is a decent gain, but of course 14 would be better. Let's see how Dreylin wants to approach this

[Fintourist]

Sorry for potentially screwing us OH (asking for a pause for Dreylin) :P

I've bitched so much about people gaining land from absent opponents that profiting from Dreylin missing his turn would have been... pretty damn lame.

[Old Harry]

Trouble is I'm not around tomorrow night, so unless Dreylin plays in the next five hours you'll have to play the turn...

[Old Harry]

GG Pindicator... I guess you must have thrown more units at us to let Dreylin capture Madrigal this turn? It probably works out better for us that way (as long as Dreylin doesn't want to go any further) due to war weariness etc. Apologies for the unprovoked aggression - but when we saw a chance to wipe your stack on t1 of the war, coupled with such a juicy shrine we couldn't resist.

I thought it was odd that after a successful ancient era war and having such a good shrine you ended up far enough behind on tech to be appetizing for dtay (to be fair everyone else probably would have against cavalry at that point too) but the way you recaptured your shrine was one of my favourite moments of the game!

Re: Fintourist's comments on tactics in the east - those ckns weren't going to last long against either us or dtay on the defence, so I think its reasonable to try to make the instigator (us) pay for attacking him. I mean, we did help him survive this long, and some gratitude would have been nice, but he could argue that was just naked self-interest...

[pindicator]

More like I threw units at you guys so he could take the city and I wouldn't have to log in again Edit - and yeah, I do have a bit of a visceral reaction against anybody invading me. Dtay got to see that when I literally evacuated my army from Cyneheard's lands and bought time, giving all my gains in that war back just to punish him for attacking me. Ah, that was a fun war

GG - I don't blame you for invading, I just wish you would have waited 20 more turns so I could finish Democracy and see the results of my Great Cottage Experiment. That GA that was born was going to trigger my Golden Age and swap civics to Univ Suffrage. Oh well...

As for why I was so far behind - I had to commit a lot to early war, thanks to being the middle bitch on my island. Never was able to catch up. In hindsight I got a little CKN happy with the war against Dreylin. Should have just kept teching, I might have been able to catch up if I had.

[Old Harry]

That was a funny war - Cynheard was trashing someone in his west while we were watching you building up to hit him, then you were trashing him while we watched dtay building up to hit you, then we built up to hit dtay while he was trashing you... Did our scout gift tip you off about dtay or was it just a bizarre thing you ignored?

Being piggy-in-the-middle was a pretty thankless task this game, I wonder if anyone managed to made it work for them. Was your cottage experiment going to be a cash-rush US economy or were you going use the extra hammer somehow? Edit: Also I don't think you were that far behind most people - its just that dtay played a blinding rush to cavalry...

Aaaaaanyway - I jumped in quickly before work and dtay had offered peace after burning Avernus. Given that his airships mean he has naval supremacy for the next ten turns or so I bit his hand off accepted. We're a bit worried that he'll bring his cavalry to try to pillage all of Pindi's lovely cottages away - if it looks like he's trying that we'll just have to pillage them ourselves and turn the continent into a production center instead .

Meanwhile, in Madrigal Dreylin has:
15 Knights
1 Rifle,
3 Mace,
5 Pikes,
4 Muskets,
4 LB,
1 Crossbow
1 Welly
8 Cats
1 Treb

And in Willow Creek he has:
17 Knights,
1 Rifle,
1 Musket,
1 LB,
3 Cats

Plus a Rifle and Musket 1W of Willow Creek makes 68 units. The fact he hasn't already attacked White Falls when he could easily have taken it makes me think he doesn't want to get on our bad side. Unfortunately it turns out we are entirely bad side, like some sort of evil Möbius strip, and with peace on our eastern front our soldiers really need something to do...

Can we put together a stack of 60 hitters to wipe him out? Fintourist is going to try to figure that out this afternoon.

If I was Dreylin I'd probably try to burn as many of our cities as possible this turn and then rapidly retreat into his culture to get the mobility advantage. However I'm hoping that he thinks he can just leave units in those cities without us being annoying...