[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[Dp101]

It has been immensely entertaining so far, keep up the good reporting!

[scooter]

Thanks guys, glad you're enjoying it! I sure am. Since yesterday was so exciting, today's turn should be pretty boring, right? Well how about I just log in an-

record scratch



Well that changes the predictions a little bit. I checked and this is indeed a full 10T peace treaty and not a meaningless cease fire.



I'm still like 95% sure they aren't coming for us either. So there's two possibilities in my mind.



The obvious choice is that they're going to go wreck BGN. BGN has just 1 rifle in Panama and nothing in his capital... And just 3 cities. I'm still super confused as to what in the world he's been actually building. The evidence in favor and against:

+ He's probably the softest target in the game.
+ I didn't catch this until I logged in just now, but Dreylin apparently built a fort 1E of Chameleons which would allow him easy boating access to BGN's core.
- I've had my Explorer hanging out at that border for awhile now, and I saw no real signs of a buildup from Dreylin. Of course, I couldn't actually go in his borders, so that may just be a sign of competency.
- BGN is Spiritual and he's got a lot of population, so the minute Dreylin declares, he can draft and whip himself silly. Plus free revolt to Theocracy.

Here's the other candidate:



So Gaspar's military is pretty bad too (like us!). But there's another thing I just noticed this turn.



Somebody settled in this area very recently (that corn was not improved last turn, I've been checking), and it looks like it was Gaspar. He now shares a very tight border with Dreylin. Let's go through the positives and negatives again.

+ Dreylin's got tighter borders here than he's got with BGN.
+ Gaspar's been whipping very hard, so a lot of his cities have low population. Plus he's not spiritual. It'll be much harder for him to respond. Drafting probably won't be an option.
+ Closer proximity to Dreylin's core unit producing cities, which means shorter supply lines
- Gaspar's got far more land than BGN, so there's more opportunities for mistakes.
- Having double the cities of BGN lets him whip in defense twice as often.


So uh... any thoughts on this new development? I started writing this post assuming he was going to attack BGN, but now I'm not so sure after I write all that out.

Final note: I have not moved/done anything other than the two explorers shown in these pictures.

[Sullla]

Ummm, I'm not sure either? I think there are valid arguments for either player. BGN is doing... something strange this game, but Gaspar/Noble have settled really aggressively on Dreylin's eastern border. I think they have a city between the corn and the horses in this screenshot:



So perhaps Dreylin wants to take a swing at them, who knows. (I can only guess that Gaspar/Noble did not have bar graphs visibility on Dreylin when they settled that city!) I would go ahead and play our turn as usual, since I don't think we're planning on changing anything based on the Dreylin/Donovan peace treaty. We are probably not the target, and if we are, hopefully we'll be able to spot an attack coming ahead of time. I'll try to take a look in-game tonight and see if I notice anything else.

By the way, there's still someone out there with less Power than us, and a lot less since we've been #6 for ages now. I really don't think anyone other than Dreylin, and now Donovan in reaction to Dreylin, have much in the way of units. If that's BGN sitting there in last place, well, his days in this game are probably numbered.

[scooter]

Turn 286

I've already covered the big news for the turn, but here's the rest of it.



Coming next turn. Anyone got a city name for this one?



Radio is still churning along getting our artist out for Communism. We should steal a couple tiles from Donovan EoT. I bet he didn't expect his 35T old holy city to get trounced in culture, but it's happening.



I set EPs to pindicator. If you want to make a case for putting them on REM instead, go for it, but I think we definitely prefer to see pindicator's. I neglected to take a picture of the non-power demos of Gaspar, but I can add that later.





So we're about to spurt upward in size. We're sitting at 5 cities right now, but if we're able to capture the barbarian city on T290 as planned, that'll bring us up to 9 cities, and State Property will be coming online right around the same time. The next half-dozen turns will be very big for us, we just need to make it through those half-dozen turns without bad news sailing up to our borders.


We should think about what happens if Dreylin attacks Gaspar. If he attacks BGN, it does nothing to our plans really. However, if he attacks Gaspar, there's a few implications for us that we should at least start to think about until the "Dreylin has declared war on Boldly Going Nowhere" message pops up and makes this whole discussion pointless.

1) We would easily get the barbarian city. That would be nice!

2) We would have to consider trying to profit further by aiming at Gaspar's capital or something. This will heavily depend on how quickly Dreylin blitzes Gaspar. We won't have a ton of spare units over the next 4-5 turns, but I think we can muster quite a few pretty soon. This is probably a pipe dream, but it's important to consider everything.

3) We would have to be careful not to encourage Dreylin to just keep going and run us out of Gaspar's land.

4) This is relevant in both cases, but Donovan did just build an army for seemingly no benefit. He may decide he needs to do something with it. The ideal scenario is he either keeps buiding up and knives Dreylin in 10T OR he goes west where REM has planted so aggressively that Radio looks downright cordial and attacks him. We just need to make sure he doesn't come after us. I don't think he will because Dreylin and REM have hurt him far more than we did with Radio, but it's something to think about.

[Zed-F]

City names: it's on an island so you could go with screw propeller. Or it's near sheep and silk so you could go with a textile invention like Spinning Jenny or Power Loom.

For the barbarian city, how about anaesthesia or antiseptics for injured soldiers.

[scooter]

Can't login just yet, but Civstats says:

1) Pindicator settled a city.

2) Dreylin captured a city from Gaspar

[Tyrmith]

That didn't leave you much time to ponder.

[scooter]

It looks like Pindicator settled on the hill. So I guess that settles that - 3b it is.

I took a look at the Gaspar/Dreylin front, but I don't see any changes. I guess that confirms that Gaspar settled between them, and Dreylin took that city. I think he kept it. That brings Dreylin to 9 cities, tied with ReallyEvilMuffin. Dreylin will be a total runaway if he pulls this conquest off. Also, we jumped up to 5th in soldiers (we were 6th earlier this turn), so Gaspar took some losses.

Given Gaspar's military situation and total lack of whipping lately, he obviously was not ready for this at all. Ruh-roh.

[Dp101]

Well, at least you are not the target of the attack, and can still build your way out of this. Right?

[Athmos]

I think we better watch Donovan... He now has a sizeable army, and I'm not sure he will choose to use it against the player that has been the most aggressive toward him. He might well decide to take a swing at an easy target, like a neighbor with a small army for example...