[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[Sullla]

Looks like a day went by and nothing happened, no one played their turn. What is this, a PBEM game? Maybe I won't even miss that much on my 4 week vacation.

Good luck scooter, whenever we get a turn again.

[antisocialmunky]

Edit: Well that didn't take long before someone screwed up.

[scooter]

Well... Civstats says REM took a bunch of cities from pindicator, so I logged in to survey the damage. I got a couple diplo windows:

1) Donovan offered OB if we gifted him a spare cow and silver. I said sure why not.
2) Dreylin re-offered the map and 20g trade. So I'm going to hope that's confirmation he's not going to backstab us?
3) REM offered us white peace.

REM is now at war with us, pindicator, and BGN. Quick note: Physics will be slightly harder (though not impossible) to get this turn due to loss of REM routes.



So we lost a spy, explorer, and an ironclad. The spy was inevitable, and the explorer (that was poking around in REM's land) must have relocated to an easy-to-hit place. The ironclad isn't much of a loss either considering it's basically obsolete already. The boats you can see on this tile should just escape southwest through the fort, plus we have the fresh Destroyer from Haber behind here.



Pindicator lost this front city and had his oil city burned.



He also lost a front city down here I think.



And he lost this one. Civstats tells me there's one other city I'm missing for 5 total (4 captured, 1 razed). So this is pretty bad!



As for us - well we can wipe out this ministack. We've got a Destroyer, Ironclad, and Privateer all within range of this. Although I need to count the tiles for REM's two northern Destroyers first. If they are in range to easily counter-attack, it's probably not worth it. It's just an option.

-----------------

So where does this leave us. Here's my feelings.

1) I don't think we can afford to sit this one out. If we take peace with REM, pindicator will die and die quickly. REM will then not only have a tech/mfg/power advantage over us, but he'd also have 50% more cities than us, and we'll have no neighbors other than Dreylin or REM. I think we clearly cannot allow pindicator to fall to REM.

2) I think our land play is to get our spare units into pindicator's land to cause a stalemate where REM cannot advance.

3) We need to get a few more Destroyers out so that we can defend our island. We also need those airships so we can see if REM switches gears and comes at us.

4) The thought of gifting pindicator our oil crossed my mind, but I don't think we can do that. He needs land units, not boats right now, and we're the one who needs some boats.

Sullla, any thoughts? Do you see another option here?

[rho21]

The obvious other option is to blow up as many REM units as possible, take the peace, then attack pindicator and see what you can get before REM gets there. Looks tricky to take enough even to maintain parity. And then BGN comes under the hammer, with no threat from you to distract REM. Hmm.

[Sullla]

Well, here we are again. An enemy team threatening to run away with the game, as one of the weaker teams gets pummeled. Didn't we already do this once before?

I did have a chance to look around in-game and play around with some of the builds. (I also did the worker micro - on my phone, ha!) I think that we should finish Physics this turn so that turn next turn we can crank out a round of airships from most cities. I also tried to have our cities with drydocks building destroyers so that we can get the second promotion on them. That means we'll be limited on destroyers for the time being but hopefully with enough to hold on.

I agree with scooter on the big overarching question for the turn: I don't think we can afford to sign peace with REM. That would guarantee that REM rolls over pindicator, and if he gets to 30 cities while already ahead in GNP + tech, with no one else having more than 20 cities, it's a game over situation. That's why REM offered peace: he knows that 10 turns of enforced peace with us plus 7 remaining turns of enforced peace with Dreylin means enough time to win the game. We can't let that happen so we must stay at war.

Now that does not mean going on the offensive! We should stay at war and bide our time for the present. I advise in the strongest possible terms that we do our best to defend what we have right now without caring about pindicator. Once our cities are secure, then we can think about counterattacking. In particular, we need airships in the skies both for visibility and for the naval war. Right now, we are helpless against his destroyers since he can airstrike our ships, followed by them automatically losing to his full-health ships. That's why we need to finish Physics on this turn, then build the airships next turn. I'll feel infinitely better if we can survive these next two turns without losing any cities.

Here's where I'm most worried:

* Zipper is extremely exposed right now. We need to reinforce with some of the units on ships in the area. I also think we have a real chance to flip the disputed tiles to the east; they are at 13% / 13% right now, and we can work a second Artist specialist now at size 3. REM has a lot going on at the moment, he might not realize that we can flip that tile. It's very much worth the attempt right now.

* Textile Island is also lightly guarded against REM. I like the idea of moving some or all of our ships into Spinning Jenny, where the units can unload as needed and the ships are safe from attack. From there, we can reinforce any of the cities on the island. Photography might need another defender or two to be safe.

* Induction Coil would fall if REM sneezed on it right now. We need to unload those units on the boats into the city, and move the ships into the safe southern sea. (Remember, we can move on pindicator's rail network if we choose to counterattack in Russian lands.)

* We will eventually want to defend these points:



This one-tile waterway in the north, and this one in the south:



Together, they block off access to our very weakly defended cities on the western half of the inner sea. If REM gets a fleet in there, we probably lose the game. However, we can't mount a successful defense until we get airships in the skies, so... well, you get the point. Finish Physics tech, build more destroyers, build airships, then start fighting back. We have to hide our ships in safe ports for the moment.

I think that's all I have for now. I'll check back in later to see what other thoughts you have. BGN did just pop a Golden Age, which should help a lot. And we are actually kind of catching up to REM in tech while all this is going on, plus we have some younger cities slowly maturing, so if we can hold out for 7 turns together with pindicator and REM and then have Dreylin come crashing in later... well, it's a slim hope but better than nothing! Good luck.

[scooter]

Didn't get a chance to get to this yesterday with festivities and all that.

So I think your last paragraph in particular is pretty much our only hope here. If we can keep REM at a stalemate for the next 7 turns until Dreylin can pile on, we've got a shot. We simply don't have enough stuff to do any real damage on our own. Pindicator did recapture a city, but he doesn't have much to defend himself with. We need to strike a delicate balance of preventing REM from just outright invading us while hopefully slowing down his conquest of pindicator enough for Dreylin to join in 7T without it being too late.

Getting airships built next turn seems like a no-brainer. It'll be way easier to do this when we aren't flying blind.

We definitely need to push Destroyers as hard as we can. My main concern now is that REM will put heavy weight on Destroyer production. If he gets enough of them, there would be nothing we could do to prevent him from waltzing into our inner sea. After Physics, we may need to add a little bit of a gold buffer in case we need to ugprade a few ships. It's really not cost-effective, but we may not have much of a choice. We can decide on that in a couple turns, though.

[antisocialmunky]

Question, do you have any idea what BGN is bringing to the table?

[scooter]

Question, do you have any idea what BGN is bringing to the table?

No real idea. I know he's got Infantry and Ironclads because I've seen those, but I don't know much else. And he was dragged into this war via defensive pact, so he might very well back out of it. Just depends on how chaotic he feels like being.

My best guess is he stays at war and ties down some defensive units from REM but is unable to make any progress at all.

[scooter]

Turn played. I'll post some more screenshots later tonight, but in the meantime, here's a fun one. I wanted to make sure Zipper was well-covered, so I grabbed the extra trailing Galleon, moved it in, then I hit the unload butto-



WRONG BUTTON.

Sigh.

This was pretty frustrating. I had to re-micro a few cities in order to ensure we still got Physics because that was 120-130ish gold completely lit on fire, and the gold loss was going to make us come up short. Anyway, it was a misclick, and I'll live with the results.

I actually didn't even notice it until taking overview screenshots at the end of the turn when the word "Transport" caught my eye. I did at least remember to unload it for real after taking this screenshot.

[antisocialmunky]

Sigh, you are triggering my PB4 PTSD, scooter.

Can you post some REM graphs in your report? I'm curious if anything has changed - if you still have his graphs.