This game feels very impish

[The Black Sword]

Mack is disturbingly close to the biggest shrine in the world. Rusten has the lowest power of everyone I have graphs on ...

[The Black Sword]

I spent a lot of time in game this turn, needed to come up with a plan. Mack has indeed taken the Hindu shrine and I don't see any Rusten stacks about, I can't really see him losing the game from here. But we'll see if we can muddy the waters a bit first.



The short version is that we're going to build the Taj Mahal. Winning the Taj is really important because it is on the path to Constitution. Representation will be worth over 200bpt, after Banking+Guilds it's the strongest economic tech for quite a while. But if you add the cost of Nationalism+Philo, which don't do much economically, you double the cost of this. If you win the Taj Mahal you more than pay off this extra cost. Additionally I need two revolts to get into Merc and Representation, it's tough to get both in a single golden age and I don't want to throw my 3 people golden age until the late game. A 16t golden age should do it. This has been on the back of my mind for a while, since Mack has gone(I think) for both Knights and Astro. Along with Engineering, which is necessary for conquest, that's a whole load of tech he's getting and I'm not. So despite his better tech rate, I have a chance of denying it to him. Drafting musketeers probably also looks tempting to him. It's risky, because if you spend 5k beakers on a tech and you miss the payoff(Taj), you set yourself really far behind. But when I'm losing, higher variance plays make more sense, if mack does try to race me and loses, he's pulled back into the pack. If he wins, well he was going to win anyway.

So that's why the Taj looks important to me. I'll be generating 3 GPs shortly, for a golden age and a trade mission. One will be probably 50% chance for an engineer, which I could also use to shave a 2-3t off the build. I've got 7 forests and a decent overflow chain built up, so I've got a good build time even without him. I'll then try tech straight through to Banking and Constitution by the end of my golden age. I'll probably generate a pair of GS to double bulb Chemistry to keep me safe at sea. I'm delaying Longbows, Knights, workshops hammers and the Merc Bonanza a couple of turns, but I think it is still worth it.

You can see I'm doing a bit of wealth building this turn to hit Philo first and put up a 'stay off my lawn' sign. In general I've been doing no wealth building and will try to keep to that policy unless I see someone racing me. Hammers need to go into workers, settlers and military.



I am 4-5t from getting circumnav. You can also see plenty of more Astro land for the pickings, so I think the policy should still be to snowball rather than claim land. Tbh, I'm guessing there's astro islands/continents pretty much everywhere around the mainland. Wouldn't be too fair otherwise.



Going to settle the two x spots next probably, along with taking that barb city. Lost a macemen to one of the archers.  Commodore still has his main army over by Gav and I think we both benefit by being nice to each other, so I'm not bothered about things like covering workers over here. It makes me slightly nervous that he is doing it though.



Barbs continued to be mean to me, a spearman killed one of my HAs over here(I had 66% odds, being C1, shock, and in a city). Heading to settle inland next, probably by the clams.



The first size 2 island city! 

I have a minor stack over by the Rusten border btw. Since this is probably soon to be the mack border, I should reinforce with cats and war elephants to defend against a knight stack. There are 3 cities in ex-superdeath land that I want to take and at least 1 island city. But I think it's more important to let Rusten concentrate on mack than pile on right now. I think I might as well send my stack into Rusten lands and help defend for the moment. It's not big enough to do much, but maybe it can slow him down and force him to concentrate more units to take each city. I can always teleport home if necessary. The island in particular it might be better to leave alone, mack's natural ports will be on the other side of the ocean and we'd have a decent chance of defending the island from him. He might be suffering some WW by the end of the war.

[Zed-F]

Thanks for the update. Good luck with Taj!

[Mardoc]

I'm not used to a post where the player spends several paragraphs on stealing a wonder from a foe and then concludes with 'oh, yeah, and I'm also going to declare war on him, I think'.

[The Black Sword]

Forgot my audience was a bunch of bloodthirsty lurkers.

[Mardoc]

Forgot my audience was a bunch of bloodthirsty lurkers.

I can't say your priorities are wrong. Taj ownership may matter more than what you do with a minor stack, plus you can't exactly plan your fighting when you're aiming to react to the situation while you can plan how to get the wonder.

But it's true I'm here for the blood

[The Black Sword]

Not sure what I'm doing with that stack atm. I'm 4th in power, Dreylin is one of those above me, Mack is obviously another. The 3rd person I have pegged as either Pindicator or Naufrager. Pin who has coincidently dumped a boatload of EPs into me and will have city vision soon if he keeps going. Naufrager is pressuring Mack, I want to help but I don't want to have to build another stack to defend at home too ...

[Zed-F]

How go the turns? Circumnavigation acquired yet?

[The Black Sword]

I thought I had circumnav 2 turns ago, but now I think it might not be on:


It seems to be available in the mod, maybe the water threshold isn't high enough? If anyone has any theories(that you're allowed share obviously) I'd like to hear them. I checked the turn log and it doesn't look like anyone beat me to it. In addition to delaying the rest of my island cities by 1-2 turns, it also delays the Taj a turn ...

I'll try to give a proper report soon, the turns are quite complicated and that doesn't leave much energy for reporting.

[The Black Sword]

I think I figured out the circumnav issue. RtR changed the threshold to 55% - http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showt...3&page=189 and the map is only slightly more than 50% water. This should be put in the changelog somewhere.