Dare you enter the Whizzard's Realm? Magic and Mysteries abide.

[El Grillo]

Oh, I thought you had taken screenshots of his land XD. I was going to keep recording the routine screenshots to free you up to highlight more interesting things. I took one screenshot of what we can see of the battlefield, though:




I think it's better to stay on the Rifling plan, too. Being able to build somewhat-respectable watermills might be helpful if more production is in order.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Oh, I thought you had taken screenshots of his land XD. I was going to keep recording the routine screenshots to free you up to highlight more interesting things. I took one screenshot of what we can see of the battlefield, though:




I think it's better to stay on the Rifling plan, too. Being able to build somewhat-respectable watermills might be helpful if more production is in order.

That ministack in drill sargent should be able to pick off some wounded units at least. We can get an idea of what is going on too. It's 3 turns before we can land those knights and declare, and we can take some other units too in the second galley. I would like to do this in case he gets a pike in there. It's all going on here!

[El Grillo]

Yes, exciting times indeed. I do have to wonder though how the northern hemisphere plans to respond to mackoti's invasion. I'd have to guess that he left behind enough reserves to discourage scooter and plako from whipping out an army to nip at his flanks while his main forces are out of position. So even if we're generous and say he has 30-35 cataphracts in the field, I would expect at most 25 of them to be participating in the attack. If roughly half of them have seen combat and are a bit damaged, that should give the Ottomans a few turns to get back into Slavery/Nationhod and maybe tech Gunpowder too. I think it would be bad news if he gets completely overrun too quickly.

EDIT: I realized the Ottomans lack Nationalism for drafting. Yikes!

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Yes, exciting times indeed. I do have to wonder though how the northern hemisphere plans to respond to mackoti's invasion. I'd have to guess that he left behind enough reserves to discourage scooter and plako from whipping out an army to nip at his flanks while his main forces are out of position. So even if we're generous and say he has 30-35 cataphracts in the field, I would expect at most 25 of them to be participating in the attack. If roughly half of them have seen combat and are a bit damaged, that should give the Ottomans a few turns to get back into Slavery/Nationhod and maybe tech Gunpowder too. I think it would be bad news if he gets completely overrun too quickly.

They don't have nationalism for nationhood though. So it will be a slog of whipped pikes I guess. 

Sadly facing astro they are limited to what they can do. All he needs is a half decent border force at each isthmus and it will really discourage attacking. 

I'm ok with all this - he paints himself as the large target to kill, whereas we have a rather stronger eco currently. A bit like what happened to khmer in 33. I would imagine that we could convice Scooter to side with us against a large Mack, and RMOG given their previous encounters!

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

I looped around seeing what could hit his cities this turn. I think it's fair to say whoever faced this would struggle, and just so happened they were out of slavery so a perfect storm...

I was bumping someone so I fled quickly. This is before mistolin have been able to play.

Will they go golden with the GS? At least they can use before Mack moves. That's however 10 units at least that can hit that city there. Possibly more in the black. meh. Oh well.

Peruse at lesuire. Also RMOG have astro now.

[El Grillo]

T247:

Advisor screens:

City screens:

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Well he bulbed sci method with that last GS, but the worst is yet to come. Mack took that packed city, yet had not moved a lot of his units! Hopefully they retreated to their cap to get more culture defence and a hill. Otherwise Mack has a lot of units that aren't injured...

They begged for iron which I gave, then I offered wine/silver/ivory and then a map trade. Would be nice to get an estimate on when Mack could come knocking. I am wondering whether it would be worth ninjaing the city Mack has captured on the shore with Hogwarts, and also Mistolins coastal city there. Essentially to prevent galleons coming into play in the future. Would be counter productive if we got into a long war though.

Have not had time to build any stables still either. I'm thinking a theocracy switch when Oxford is done could be useful depending on the game state.

Finally Scooter and us ploughing all EP into each other is a little counter productive now, he could a useful anti Mack ally. With the recent change of play, I have put all on Mack. We can start getting city vis on those conquests in 6-8 turns

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

I'll post pics when I can get back to a PC

Showing 2t to RP and Mack is 2t to gunpowder. Likely will get that in 1 with overflow.

No idea if mistolin will take our trades. We are also ready to perhaps declare war on him NEXT turn should it be needed. 2 3xp knights in a galley in Durmstrang, 1 lb/pike in a galley on open water (not visible to mistolin but vulnerable to his galleon should he come looking) I wasn't wanting to declare so soon but Mack is chewing him up very fast... his cap should hold for a small while though. This is problematic from a turn order side of things. Perhaps I should have just waited for them this turn I suppose. Ah well they can always double move us next turn. Or we can go first I suppose, either way.

The other choice of course is that we war Mack before he has taken all of mistolin... But we need to get Scooter on board otherwise we loose out IMO. Hopefully he will notice the lack of EP spending? Probably should be more overt with an iron for iron? I reckon he might be reticent of another coalition of the needful though. Definitely safer to get an extra gold city for ourselves. I would lean to that as I can't see us getting a great opportunity to strike Mack. The other option is to show some units to him, but that is hard to do without putting them in danger.

We could just hold again, although I would imagine he will just whip units into that island city now, so probably need to do something fast. We won't beat longbows easy in there, or pikes.

Civic wise, we need OR until Oxford is done in 2t. Then should we go theocracy? Everything else should probably stay the same.

[ReallyEvilMuffin]

Images - first, the potential war site. Bubaxtons has the galley with 2 knights in from 3 of the city, and the 2 defending longbows. The other galley has a pike/longbow in. Caravel done EoT. Hogwarts was swapped back to a university to whip it before we come out of OR. Ideally we would have another caravel pre war... Tolusa west could actually do that rather than start it's courthouse I suppose. In fact I will change that now - it is 3 turns to complete, will whip next turn. Also note the forest is chopped 1/3. Otherwise shuffling things down to the isthmus to have some stuff there if mack comes knocking. With mack being so close we also kinda perhaps need to fit in astro at some point, probably after cav.

This will probably be the next GP, and with pacifism on hold, might be a little while. I would imagine we would go golden with it so type isn't hugely important. The galley is to shuffle the settler as the northern 2 might be occupied by war, and there is a fair chance we will loose one after the offloads.

Plakos border coast city with Mack is interesting. Unsure of the island statuses out there, but he is clearly spooked somewhat. He was power number 2 until our recent increase.

OU due in exactly enough hammers in 2 turns. Whip overflow useage to get in 4t total was quite nifty really!

The explorer vision. All macks forward units are phracts obviously. He is shuffling longbows to the backline cities. Mistolin has a longbow/WE pair in Gigadon and 2 longbows, 3 knights and a pike in his cap. No fortifys, kinghts all c1. River will save him this turn. He should be able to crank out quite a few pikes in the turns to come too. Irritatingly if he begged iron of us only we could hinder him declaring war and prevent builds in some of his cities. Not much to do to help that though. Also the other city taken last turn was their jungle fish site, a very recent city. I do also wonder how many workers Mack is getting for free... At least the cities might be lacking in buildings a little, and with fin not org they will be harder to make profitable quickly. 

Oh just noticed they have GUNPOWDER! woo. Jans might somewhat help them here! Also could rather derail hitting that island city of theirs. The caravel can scout next turn before any firm plans. DEFINITELY should have checked that before commiting to the movements 

Last turn - was he sizing us up? Need to beef up the isthmus city somewhat, that is where he could go for us at.

Demos... GNP zooming, but not first in food anymore, and others catching in MFG too. Will get our first watermill next turn, and start spamming them on the southern city river tiles.

[El Grillo]

Theocracy swap after Oxford sounds good, maybe send an iron-for-iron deal to scooter/RMOG/plako on that turn for extra emphasis? Or some kind of gold countdown signaling? It'll look slightly awkward if you're taking cities from Alhazard in the meantime, but I think they'll get the point and be willing to take a swing at mackoti.