RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[antisocialmunky]

Non-rebels? What about 'The Union' with this ACW theme?

Show dem Rebs who's boss.

[Speaker]

Apologies for being relatively absent from this thread the past week or so. I changed my PW at Realms Beyond, but forgot to write it down, so I couldn't log in from work, which is where I do the majority of my posting. Anyways...

Here are a couple of diplo mails from today:

Hello.

Are you satisfied with what you've witnessed? I'm ready to restart the negotiations for peace. Are you? I want to make one thing clear though, I'm willing to be neutral in this conflict that has arised. I've already secured peace with everyone, except you. We could include a clause that breaks the NAP in case I declare war on someone. If I understood correctly, that's what you meant with keeping your options open. That is, unless you were lying about wanting peace with me.

Anyway, get back to me soon please!
~ Jowy

We are about 6 turns away from our T160 NAP running out with Jowy, and he has made 0 effort to build any units since our last war. He has expanded back out to seven cities, and is trying to strong arm us into a longer NAP, to allow him to build units. Well, we're not having any of it. We will be declaring war on T160 or 161, depending on how the unit micro works out. But the question is, how do we respond to him?

We'll do our best. Currently the unit count is 33 to 25 them but we have 2 cities to defend, one of which is shrined. We'll see, he may have more and/or our newly made cats could delay him further. Any more triremes running up my coast would be greatly appreciated, like the one you got going.

Had a talk with plako and he thinks the 4 missing prats are probably with jowy possibly with athlete. Athlete has 4 prats for sure; whosit got 4 cats 4 HAs in the galley exchange (pretty certain about last sentence).

The trireme he references is doing a bit of exploring. It was initially set to be a sentry for the southwestern coast of Gettysburg, but once it got over there, it found Inca's territory, so I felt it was more secure than we initially thought, and I decided to improve our map information. The other side of the world is much closer than we thought, though we probably should have known that.

[Sullla]

I don't know how to respond to Jowy either. Give me a little while to think things over. Have to work on one of those regoarrarr emails that has tons of words but doesn't commit to anything in any direction. :neenernee

Here's a picture showing our trireme, and the closeness of slaze's Inca territory:



The little nub of land that sticks out one tile NW of Djenne is the Equator of the Donut; you can see a similar little bulge on the other side of the worldwrap. slaze's IKZ team started in a symmetrical position to our team, so his capital should be located just to the NW of Fetret Devri, where our capital would have been if we hadn't moved south on the first turn. Of course the better question has to be, how did Kathlete sneak a city onto that island past slaze? It's a pretty bold claim, now that we know the city is sandwiched between us and slaze! Given that slaze is our neighbor across the worldwap, and not Kathlete as we earlier thought, the chances of a boating attack in the Gettysburg vicinity are probably lessened.

Militarily, Speaker and I don't think slaze is facing the crisis he makes it out to be. Yes, it's serious - but come on, he's got longbows and catapults on defense against mostly horse archers and axes! That's just not that dangerous. Even Praetorians fare poorly against longbows entrenched in cities. We faced a lot more than 33 units earlier, when we had no catapults, no longbows, and zero assistance from any other teams. slaze might lose a city or two - but that has as much to do with his overexpansion as it does the true threat of this situation. We'll see.

Here's a compilation shot of us doing some preparations in the north:


It looks like we'll have roughly 8-10 maces, 8 horse archers, 6 catapults, and some leftover axes and spears when we declare war in about a half-dozen turns. Speaker has some ideas about how to do this, which we'll share later on, depending on how things go with the unit micro. We need to see exactly how many units we can whip before making our final moves.

Next turn (T155) will be a fun one, as we discover Feudalism and lightbulb Machinery. A couple turns to whip and reposition units, then the show can begin.

Elsewhere, Nakor discovered Alphabet and it appears that he did a Great Scientist lightbulb of Philosophy, judging by CivStats. That would give him Taoism, for a second religion (probably not that important). I'll check it out and confirm when I log into the game today to play our turn. Just waiting on Dantski to finish turn.

Speaker had an idea of how to respond to Nakor's email: feign outrage over their declaration of war against plako!

Dear Nakor and DMOC of Holy Rome,

We appreciate the gestures that your team has taken towards building friendly relations with our team, and were warming up to the idea of signing a new Non-Aggression Pact of some sort. However, your declaration of war against Korea was a great disappointment and setback. Yes, we understand the whole Mutual Defense Pact with Whosit. But the conflict between plako and Whosit was a purely local affair, which had nothing to do with Holy Rome. There was no need for your team to become involved.

We feel the need to stand by our friends in Korea. In the event that your team would launch an attack against plako, we would feel the need to respond in some fashion. Therefore, I don't believe that we can sign a new NAP at this point in time. If you and Whosit are able to reach a peace deal with plako, then we may be able to work things out.

Best wishes,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

We honestly don't have any real desire to get mixed up with Nakor at present. But we think it's better to leave that option open in case we need to. Plus, the uncertainly of what our team is going to do should help keep Nakor on his toes, and prevent him from sending a big attack force against plako.

EDIT: Dantski just played his turn, so I'll log into the game and see what the new turn has to offer.

[Speaker]

Elsewhere, Nakor discovered Alphabet and it appears that he did a Great Scientist lightbulb of Philosophy, judging by CivStats. That would give him Taoism, for a second religion (probably not that important). I'll check it out and confirm when I log into the game today to play our turn. Just waiting on Dantski to finish turn.

He did. I saw in the log that Taoism was founded by HRE.

Dear Nakor and DMOC of Holy Rome,

We appreciate the gestures that your team has taken towards building friendly relations with our team, and were warming up to the idea of signing a new Non-Aggression Pact of some sort. However, your declaration of war against Korea was a great disappointment and setback. Yes, we understand the whole Mutual Defense Pact with Whosit. But the conflict between plako and Whosit was a purely local affair, which had nothing to do with Holy Rome. There was no need for your team to become involved.

We feel the need to stand by our friends in Korea. In the event that your team would launch an attack against plako, we may feel the need to respond in some fashion. Therefore, I don't believe that we can sign a new NAP at this point in time. If you and Whosit are able to reach a peace deal with plako, then we may be able to work things out.

Best wishes,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

I would just change the one word I highlighted in red to slightly less commital.

[Sullla]

Indeed, as Speaker said Nakor took the Philosophy lightbulb and founded Taoism. Not in any of the cities that we have visibility on, unfortunately. Our espionage spending tells us that Nakor is researching... Paper tech next. Perhaps he is going straight for some kind of Liberalism beeline (?) That's not the worst play in the world, but here in a No Trading game where you can't parlay Liberalism into 3 or 4 free techs via trading, it's a little less powerful than in your standard Single Player game. And Nakor would have to pass up on a lot of helpful techs (especially at the bottom of the tree) to get to Liberalism quickly. Guess we'll have to wait and see what happens - for all we know, he might swap his tech and not even research Paper next!

Turn 155 saw us discover Feudalism, and pop our Great Engineer for Machinery:



St. Albans could switch directly over to maceman, having finished its horse archer this turn. The builds in Spartansburg and Fort Henry will be auto-upgraded at the end of this turn, and then we can whip next turn. Speaker and I will have to decide how many other cities to swap over to maces for a quick 2-pop whip. (I'm thinking Chance and Fred at the very least, and possibly Antietam and Hampton Roads.)

One of the best things about Great Generals are the free upgrades:



Boom! Our two Great General axes are now Great General maces. And I renamed the "Hi Whosit" unit to something more appropriate for a war against Jowy...

I thought it would be best to turn off our research for this turn, thus the 0% (and +203 gold per turn) in the screenshot above. This way we can upgrade two Shock axes to macemen, and then have some money leftover in the treasury in case we need to do an emergency upgrade later. If we make sure to keep 150g in the bank, we can turn any axe into a mace, or any archer into a longbow. That would probably be a good idea, just to be safe.

Can't think of anything else to say at the moment, Speaker and I will probably talk over how to play things later today.

[Kyan]

Have you guys considered getting a catchier name for your power bloc than "non-rebels"? Because you should.

Non - Rebels...
No - Rebels
No-Rebels
Norebels
Norbels
Norbles!

Rebels vs Norbles in my oh so humble opinion

[Speaker]

Looks like things are finally heating up, Sullla!

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Boom! Our two Great General axes are now Great General maces. And I renamed the "Hi Whosit" unit to something more appropriate for a war against Jowy...

How deep is the thinking on the promotion lines for those two pieces? (I ask as a player who has attacked the AI, but never a human).

Mobility, I understand, as motivated by the need to keep up with the two-movers.

But I don't have the context to decide if the promotions are simply to uberbuff the General against spears/pikes, or as an attempt to harvest an even larger share of the defensive chores, or as a two way piece, or perhaps even all of these. Or maybe I'm overthinking a decision that's really just "ooh, stars!"

What promotions are planned for level 7?

[Speaker]

How deep is the thinking on the promotion lines for those two pieces? (I ask as a player who has attacked the AI, but never a human).

Mobility, I understand, as motivated by the need to keep up with the two-movers.

But I don't have the context to decide if the promotions are simply to uberbuff the General against spears/pikes, or as an attempt to harvest an even larger share of the defensive chores, or as a two way piece, or perhaps even all of these. Or maybe I'm overthinking a decision that's really just "ooh, stars!"

Remember, they were axes who we needed desperately to survive the 5v1 dogpile earlier. The promotions were given then. The extra movement point (called "Morale," not "Mobility") was necessary for more defensive flexibility at the time, but it will be very nice to have two two-move maces that can keep pace with our Horse Archers, and provide some defensive cover.

What promotions are planned for level 7?

It will take quite a lot of battles to get to that point, so we'll just have to wait and see.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Sigh - I had just looked up Mobility vs Morale when writing that question, then typed the wrong one anyway.

Remember, they were axes who we needed desperately to survive the 5v1 dogpile earlier. The promotions were given then.

Yes, that's part of what I'm trying to (belatedly) figure out. Given the stack composition of that earlier era, what defensive match-ups do we actually want, and do the promotions on General Axe change the match-ups that get generated?

Or put another way: do we ever want the mounted units defending?