[SPOILERS] Magic Science and Mr. Cairo in Pitboss 40

[Magic Science]

Turns 119 and 120 – 100 and 125 AD
Did I forget to mention the war? I forgot to mention the war, didn’t I?

   
Okay, so there is a war going on. The War on Music is sputtering back to life, as shallow_ru declared war on RFS-81+haphazard1 again back on Turn 117. It remains to be seen if the silver-tongued diplomats of Golden Void manage to pull off yet another miraculous peace treaty, or if this is finally the hour of their doom. However, I think that the chances of this being the final stage of the War on Music are good. I think this due to something Tank found just last turn: an Orphan catapult, visible on the grassland hill two tiles north of Bad Beginning. Catapults should enable them to take Golden Void at a reasonable cost thanks to bombardment and collateral damage, although I’m not sure how long it will take, as I’m not sure how long ago shallow_ru reached Construction/how many catapults they have built.

OT4E must be considered in regards to this conflict as well. As I paranoidly (that’s a real word? ) posted before, OT4E entered a turn split on Turn 117, and has remained in one since then. The source of this turn split wasn’t him deciding to unleash his horde of modern armors on Geneva and Sofia as I had feared, and Turn 117 was the turn shallow_ru declared war on RFS-81+haphazard1, so I think that OT4E is at least considering the possibility of intervening in the War on Music again in a similar way to his previous intervention. That is, swooping in and disrupting the Unlucky Orphans’ war effort. He has enough power to do it, I think.

Also, the city of Proximate Peril was renamed Lemony S this turn. Maybe the Unlucky Orphans felt that its name was too inauspicious for a border city? Post-Engineering and post-jungle chopping, Proximate Peril Lemony S can be attacked out of the fog by two-movers with no warning.  Just saying...

   
This turn, I finally spent a while doing the math and the planning for the MoM attempt in Lhasa. Due to the city’s weak growth rate, I am only going to be able to whip one thing, not two like I had been thinking, for overflow purposes, and it is going to need to give up working its two cottages during the construction process, as it won’t have enough population to work them as well as the quarry and the mines. Sad, and possibly avoidable if I had planned better, but the MoM is far more valuable than ten turns of cottage growth. The plan is to whip the chariot on Turn 122, then start the wonder on Turn 123, the same turn the marble quarry should be finished. Lhasa will grow back up to size five one turn later, enabling it to work the floodplains farm, the marble quarry, two of the grassland mines, and the desert hill iron mine to produce the wonder. It will be starving at one food lost per turn, but it should have enough food banked to avoid losing any population before the MoM is done. All three of the forests within Lhasa’s BFC will be chopped along the way to accelerate the project. The date I have for the wonder being done is Turn 135, a twelve-turn build time.

   
I also spent some time thinking about who might be credibly competing with me for the Mausoleum. First, I looked at who has access to marble. It turns out that Charson is the only player to have marble connected so far, although I can see that Superdeath could easily connect marble if he wanted. OT4E might have marble hiding in the fog, but he has had stone connected for a decent amount of time now, so I would expect him to have linked up marble already if he does have access.

The other thing I am paying attention to is which players have Calendar. So far, I have not seen any plantations or Calendar resources from anyone, so it seems that either no one has Calendar yet, or no one has had Calendar for very long. Unfortunately, it seems that shallow_ru falls into that second category. I’m not sure what else all of those workers standing on Calendar resources could be doing besides building plantations. Tank also saw a worker standing on a silk resource when he was scouting further south a turn ago. Fortunately, I am confident that the Orphans don’t have access to marble, and they don’t have a great concentration of forests in one place for a quick build via chopping.

   
This leaves Superdeath and Charson as the most likely competitors, I think. It’s hard to imagine the teams without marble beating those with marble to the wonder unless they have a long head start, which they don’t seem to have. Galura, pictured above, would be a very nice spot to try for the Mausoleum for Charson, if he chooses to do so. It’s better than Lhasa, at least, but that’s not exactly a high bar to clear.  Look, Lhasa, I love all of children cities, but some of you are pretty weak, okay? As for Superdeath, none of his cities that I can see seem very good for a MoM attempt, but I guess that at least one of his newer, western cities probably has enough hills and surviving forests to make a run for it.

[Magic Science]

   
Commodore curse it, I just knew Shaka of Rome would be the death of me.

For those who don’t want to count, that’s 18 praetorians, 7 axemen, and 2 chariots.

Thoughts about how to make my death proceed more slowly coming soon…

[Hollybombay]

Thats just a small stack, you can handle it!

[Mr. Cairo]

Oh dear, that is terrifying. Masonry is a good start in the attempt to slow him down. Also, I think that PRO Archers are better at defending cities against Praets than Axes. They have that +30% defense against Swords, plus the CG.

I did a little test, An Archer with 1 promo (from a barracks say) will have CG1, CG2, and Drill1, and gets better odds than an Axe with 1 promo (C1). They're also cheaper, so we can spam them easier. Behind walls, well, without Catapults it'll cost a lot of break through.
It's probagbly also worthwhile to just give up Geneva after whipping as many pop off as possible, it's on flat land, no walls, etc. It wont cost Ot4E anything to take it.

[Magic Science]

Thats just a small stack, you can handle it!

If that’s a small stack, then what’s a big stack?

   
Between me logging out and posting about the invasion and me logging back in to look around and think some more, Superdeath played his turn. During it, he sent me the corn-for-corn deal you can see above. This seems like it is trying to signal peaceful intent, and I would obviously like to avoid a dogpile, so I declined and reoffered the deal. However, that does not mean that I trust him. If he thinks he has an opportunity to capture New Hong Kong or Almaty, I am sure that he would take it. I am still very reluctant to move units out of New Hong Kong and Almaty to defend against the Traumhaft invasion, but I am probably going to need to. We are going to need just about everything we have to even have a shot of fending off that small stack () of 27 units.

Also, let’s not leave shallow_ru out of the picture either. They could be a threat too. For now, they are probably distracted from me thanks to the Siege of Golden Void, but that siege won’t last forever. When it is over, they might decide to pivot their army north to see if they can take a piece of the Incan League for themselves. Leaving the south somewhat vulnerable to a potential attack from them may simply be a price we will need to pay to try to fight off a certain attack from OT4E, but we should still keep it in mind. At the very least, I am going to send Tank over to the Incan-Orphan border to keep an eye on unit movements in the area.

   
Geneva is dead. Even if I moved all of the units from my little zone defense force on the plains hill north of the peak into the city, the attackers would still outnumber the defenders more than two to one. Furthermore, the archers would be pretty much useless, having only about a 30% chance to win against City Raider praetorians (according the Cyneheard’s Combat Calculator). This makes evacuating the archers from the city a no-brainer. Axemen with Combat I would actually have about 60% odds to win…but the ones in Geneva are from the older, pre-barracks crop of units, so retreating seems like the best move as well. The spearman can come along with them. It hurts to abandon one of my greatest cities like this, but all of those units will be more useful fighting in other battles. For now, I will regroup all of those units with the zone defense stack and wait to see what happens. I want to have that force ready to go where I need them to depending on what OT4E does next.

OT4E has the second half, so he is going to capture the city before it can produce anything else, even via whipping on the empty box penalty. I guess that I will still whip an archer, even if it doesn’t do anything. It seems like the right thing to do, for some reason.

   
Obviously, the rest of the Incan League needs to whip an army of units in response to this, to try to stem the bleeding a bit. The main question is what kind of units? I only see two chariots from OT4E, and we already have eight spearmen, so we don’t need more of them. I probably built too many of them already. Chariots probably aren’t the best choice to build either, for the Traumhaft axemen are going to be shielded under a doomstack of praetorians, which chariots would be worthless against. Swordsmen are new and cool, but we are going to be defending, not attacking, cities, so they won’t be much help.

That leaves axemen and archers as options to focus our production efforts on. Mr. Cairo is right that archers are a little better at defending against praetorians than axemen are, and they are cheaper. However, they are also terrible at fighting outside of cities, and they aren’t that much better than axemen when inside cities (only about 5% better). I would like to retain some ability to fight effectively outside of cities, so I think that I will split production efforts between the two unit types about 50/50.

   
One interesting thing that happened when OT4E declared war was that we lost all of our trade routes, with both Charson and shallow_ru. I hadn’t realized that our only routes to both of them passed through his land. I should be able to fix that problem before the end of the turn, though, as there are a bunch of workers down on the Orphan border by Lhasa, and I think that you can build roads inside the territory of other players. If not, it will take one more turn.

Also, I abandoned Calendar halfway and started Masonry. We want walls for our cities (other than Cuzco, which will be getting 60% cultural defenses any turn now), and Lhasa won’t be building the Mausoleum anyway. After that, I think I will head for Construction, which should take two turns to research, although Geneva falling may slow that by a turn. It’s one of our best cottage cities, with six cottages being worked, so losing it will be very bad for GNP.

[Magic Science]

Turn 121 – 150 AD
   
To preface the rest of this report, I would like to remind everyone that the white line there is what we are up against. Yikes. May the Blood God bless me, I need all the help I can get.

   
Here is where we stand after I moved all of the units I wanted to move this turn. The signs mark the various forces currently in play, both mine and OT4E’s.

I moved some defenders out of New Hong Kong and Almaty to come help fight OT4E. About half of them in each city stayed behind in case Superdeath gets any ideas. Although, if he does make a credible attack on either city, then the skeleton guard left behind probably won’t be enough to stop it. I will need to count on him either being out of position to attack or deciding that peacefully building is the right move long enough for me to make enough units available to garrison those cities better. I also moved some defenders out of Sidon, but that wasn’t as hard of a choice, as I don’t think it is as threatened as the western cities are.

Meanwhile, in the war zone itself, I evacuated the Geneva garrison as planned, but I decided to move the zone defense stack north instead of leaving it in place on the hill. I realized that OT4E can use his combat workers (he has two in his stack) to move some units north towards Sofia next, and I would like to have the opportunity to reinforce the garrison if he moves few enough units in that direction that I feel like I could hold the city. Also, Cuzco is more important than Lhasa, so it makes sense to have my units stick around Cuzco as the default spot if neither city is under direct threat yet.

   
The demographics are already starting to plummet. Just last turn we were first in GNP, third in MFG, and fourth in Crop Yield, and its only going to get worse. I whipped five times this turn, in Cuzco, Geneva, Cape Town, Lhasa, and Sofia. New Hong Kong, Almaty, and Quebec City were spared the whip only because I didn’t want to suffer the empty box penalty, and will be whipped next turn. Sidon, on the other hand, I decided not to whip despite it having hammers invested in a unit already. This is because Sidon is the best commerce city in the Incan League, and I would like to preserve research power as best I can. There are some technologies I want to get as quickly as possible for the war effort.

The technologies in question are Construction and Feudalism. Both are obviously useful and seem clear as choices for my next two techs after Masonry, but the question is: which one do I want first? The one I research second is not going to have the benefit of Golden Age research turns, and I will probably have whipped off of some cottages by the time we start researching it, so it will be substantially slower than the first. I think that the choice of which technology to research first comes down to how desperate this war with OT4E is. If I am going to be barely holding on for dear life, or maybe not holding on at all, then I want longbows. They will be better at defending and stopping the situation from getting worse. However, if I am going to be able to defend myself from collapse already, then I want catapults. Catapults won’t be as good at defending in cities, but they can be used to try to actively fight back and drive the invaders out.

I do not think that this situation is in desperate doom mode yet. OT4E’s doomstack is, well, a doomstack, but by the time it reaches Cuzco or Lhasa, I should have an army of about twenty axemen and archers to defend, and the doomstack does not have the numbers to get through that many defenders when they are behind walls and on a hill. The situation could change if OT4E brings in significantly more praetorians or if he sends in catapults, but you would think that he would have sent as many attackers as he could right away. As a result, I want to research Construction first and Feudalism second, unless he does something so terrifying on his next turn that I become convinced we are, in fact, in “desperate doom mode.”

[Magic Science]

Turns 122, 123, and 124 – 175, 200, and 225 AD
   
OT4E offered a peace treaty!  News flash! Magic Science turns out to be clueless once again!

I made the obvious choice and accepted the peace treaty right away, but this leaves the question: why did OT4E offer this peace treaty at all? As my previous report probably indicated, I was certain that OT4E was planning to continue the war. I thought it was a sure thing that he would use his combat workers to put his stack in a position to burn Sofia, and then try to advance deeper into the core of the Incan League. That would have put me in a very tricky situation indeed. I have thought about the question for a little while, and I’m still not completely sure why OT4E offered peace so soon, but I have some ideas.

It seems likely that he was never planning an extended war in the first place, and that the original idea was to launch a quick raid/land clearing expedition on Geneva (). Perhaps OT4E realized sooner than I did that it would not take long for me to whip out enough defenders to stop his advance, so there wasn’t really a point in even trying to move in on my core. In any case, I don’t imagine that I did anything on Turn 121 that would have convinced him to offer peace if he wasn’t already planning to do so. In regards to Sofia, OT4E’s actions make less sense to me. I am pretty sure that he can see the city tile, so he could have seen how weak the garrison was and that the city had no walls. Even if the One Turn’s War was originally planned to be short like it was, why would he turn down such an opportunity? He probably would have needed to raze Sofia because Cuzco’s culture is crushing it, but surely the chance to further weaken an already weak opponent that you are probably going to want to fully conquer someday is worth a try? Even if it didn’t work, (although, I don’t think I could have stopped him. I may have even retreated the garrison like I did with Geneva) it’s not like it would have cost him very much to try. In conclusion, I don’t know. Hopefully OT4E has explained his reasoning in one of the posts in his thread so I can see it someday.

Also, that wasn’t the only diplomatic thing that happened on Turn 122. shallow_ru offered me stone for free! I had planned to ask for stone from them on my turn, but they beat me to it. Stone would not have been that much of a help in the war, only saving a scant few hammers, but the fact that the Orphans sent it is a good sign. I think it means that they weren’t planning to pile on against me. Why would they offer support to me if they were thinking of attacking? I accepted, and I hope that we maintain this apparent friendliness.

   
The ink was not yet dry on the Treaty of Golden Void (I imagine that Golden Void is the go-to place for signing treaties in this world, sort of like how Paris seems to be in our world ) when I sent in the Geneva garrison to pillage the tiles of the city they had been protecting. I made 24 gold from the horse pasture and plains hamlet, and I also took the chance to cut the roads. OT4E pillaged the grassland village before me, apparently with chariots.

I find it interesting that OT4E chose to raze and resettle rather than keep the city. Geneva should have had a fair amount of infrastructure and population, even accounting for the damage from being conquered, and it would have had a long head start over a new city. Maybe OT4E was very worried about the possibility of me launching a surprise attack from Lhasa? “HillsAreBetteR” (I’m not sure what’s going on with the last r) is certainly in a worse location from a developmental standpoint that Geneva was, at least.

   
With the One Turn’s War over now, I figured that I could start on the Mausoleum plan in Lhasa again. But when I actually started to build the Mausoleum, I realized that I am an ignorant, overconfident noob. Much to my surprise, you don’t get a production bonus from marble for the Mausoluem in RB mod. I should have read the changelog more carefully. With this discovery, I decided to give up on the Mausoleum. My plan to build it was based on the idea that I would have an edge due to marble, and without that advantage I think that either shallow_ru or OT4E will be able to find a spot better than Lhasa and build the wonder faster.

   
Meanwhile, Tank found an interesting thing in Orphan land: a huge Orphan army. It even includes their great general. This seem to contradict my belief that they have been besieging Golden Void, as it seems unlikely that they could have this large of a force as well as a strong besieging force with the power that the graph shows they have. Now that they have three catapults, maybe they will move in for real? Tank will keep an eye out. This does make me wonder why they have declared war already, though.

One explanation is their latest city, Miserable Mill, which is located on the Psychedelic whale island (I can tell from trade route value). I was wondering when someone would get around to settling that. Maybe the Orphans needed to declare war to get through RFS-81+haphazard1’s culture to settle the island?

   
To wrap up this report, this is where we stand demographically in the post-Geneva (), post-Golden Age world. It’s bad. Crop Yield and MFG are horribly behind, and they don’t seem likely to improve very much. I just don’t have enough land tiles to work. I’m working almost all of the good land tiles I have left already, so there isn’t that much room for growth. At least GNP still seems decent, if we are in third despite saving gold. Hopefully I can make it to some more military technologies before things really start to fall apart.

[Magic Science]

Sorry for the lack of reports recently. Like I mentioned in the tech thread, I have been sick, so I have not felt up to the task of writing turn reports. My play probably hasn't been the greatest either. At least I have been taking screenshots, so I can write up a mega report over the turns I have missed in a day or two when I am feeling better.

[Commodore]

It's legitimately demoralizing, and when you're sick too? Nobody blames you. But looking forward to when you can report again.

[Magic Science]

It's legitimately demoralizing, and when you're sick too? Nobody blames you. But looking forward to when you can report again.

Thanks for the encouragement, Commodore. I am starting to feel better, so I think I should be able to start reporting again today or tomorrow.