[Spoiler] PB42: Rusten and mackoti play Krill playing Bismarck of Portugal

[Krill]

The deal is both or neither

Come on, I'm giving you a free kick in a sensitive spot here.

[darrelljs]

I'm going to take a pass, I think you suffer more from the game continuing .

Darrell

[Krill]

Updates to come later, but OH accepted peace on T179.

He has frigates in the water and circumnavigation. I don't have enough Knights to definitively take and hold anything past Constant Sorrow. And even if I had the extra 20 Knights it wouldn't change anything, so I'll trigger the third GA this turn and blitz to Chem myself.

[Krill]

I am still planning to do the updates, but I need to go sleep. Before I do though, I need to post these graphs. The game is over, I want to say that Superjm should be given the opportunity to do something, but not with these graphs:





















If OH goes to attack Lewwyn, he won't be able to get his units back in time and I'll redeclare war and attack his core again. So OH does not have a clear path to rebuild his economy compared to Gav. Superdeath and Cairo remain irrelevant. superjm has no crop yield, no MFG, no power and the moment he does anything he gets massacred by Gav, OR Gav moves significantly more quickly to eat Cairo/superdeath.

I'm continuing to play my turns, but all I'm doing is playing spoiler for Gav now, whatever I do: I attack OH, I slow a competitor. I rebuild and consolidate, I'm removing the only target for superjm has to acquire land from. I will have Chemistry and Astro by eot185 at the latest, more likely eot184. superjm has neither and can't invade if I have frigates and he doesn't even have galleons.

[Krill]

I've got reports to write for T176 through to T181 which I've played this morning. None of the reports are humongous, and I'm not back on night shifts until Saturday, so I'll be aiming to be up to date by the weekend.




I have no real remaining faith in OH at this point. He just finished a castle in Free At Last. I did have that one turn window to attack immediately before the Castle completed, but decided against it: even if a best case scenario I figured I'd lose too many knights.





This is an obvious vector for an attack, and it always has been: once the castle is down in FaL, then any units on galleons in the FoW can easily be dumped into the city to defend, or even counter attack as needed. With that in mind, I need to put some real units into MiF, and failing that, any units to soak up attacks. HWD had a good stack in anyway.





Another reason I have no faith in OH is the galleon position is an obvious stage for the island attack. Ultimately the islands aren't holdable, but I can use the privateers to block an attack before frigates turn up. I shouldn't lose anything much here in terms of units, I just planned to withdraw slowly to buy turns. All the island and naval conflict is about a delaying action anyway, until I can trigger another GA to get to Frigates and then SoL myself.





OH is always sneaky





I decided to starve SA to get the Merchant out a turn sooner. I don'#t want to risk losing the city and the GM over a single pop point.

Some pictures of Gavs third core:

[Krill]

Turn 176




Hello OH. That Caste swap was slightly unfortunate as well.





91% odds of being able to trigger the GA on T179 now, with the GM from SA being brought forward a turn.





This may seem like a stupidly early usage of a third, and usually final GA, but FWIW, I could get a further 3 GP from the 2 NE cities, and a slow grown GP from SA if needed. Or just get 2 GP from each NE city. So one thing I do believe the new IND can do, is reliably get a fourth GA. I've not used Pacifism, so in a better played game I can see it working.









At this point, the question is how OH defends. The obvious point is that he just needs to scramble whatever land units he can to Constant Sorrow, because FaL falls no matter what he does. The not so obvious decisions he had was what to do with the navy. He has a single turn to stage and hit Sold American to harm my GA plans, but beyond that he can't know how close or how far I am from Frigates. how he intends to position and threaten my coast I can't know, but every additional turn I can delay him puts me into better defensive position to draw him away from his supply lines and then smack him on the nose. I'd need to keep his units outside the western island chokepoints, but do that and I'd be able to group plenty of frigates and construct a real stack. The land attack also puts pressure on OH to not go straight into frigate building, and delaying him positioning and pushing forward. In that sense, the land attack is itself a diversion, and the main aim is not to conqueror, but to not lose units. Given I need to build research to get to Chemistry, those units are not replaceable until the end of the third GA.

By this point I know I'm stuck in a brawl, but brawls take too many turns to reach a conclusion, and Gav is just sitting back and growing, so I stand by my conclusion that this is game over: superjm has to attack me before I can put up a naval screen in the east, but he only has cuirs, caravels and privateers. I don't have any of his graphs though, so I need to get those to adequately understand the threat he presents.

[Krill]

Turn 177

I'm not going to show a bunch of pictures of losing a bunch of battles and do no hits. Sufficed to say that I got pretty unlucky attacking the musket, lost a couple of units and then the musket imploded against a catapult, getting a withdraw. Then everything died. Unfortunately, everything means a musket, pike and longbow.








FWIW, the maces had 50/50 odds to hit the musket twice, to a point where a treb might actually get some hits on it. If I led with a treb, then the defending pike/longbow would have taken damage from collateral, but the musket would have been untouched in over 60% of cases, and then I'd have the exact same problem of leading with the maces anyway. So I think this was unlucky.

The real fuck up is I had no workers in the stack and i forgot what 60% borders look like. At this point I knew the attack against Constant Sorrow was off, as OH had an extra turn to reinforce. If I had the workers, I'd have immediately roaded the wheat and shoved the stack SW of the peak.





This was the best I could realistically do, to try and keep the land units in place to defend Constant Sorrow.





I decided to hold FaL, if only because OH might decided to try and retake it. That's fine, I can get it to 40% borders (irrelevant given inability to hold inner ring), put a few token units in it, and then smash through with the knights afterwards. Fort the cottage, put the real units in there, and prepare the retake the turn after it's captured. Both of us can follow down this path, but again the answer is that we spend turns brawling, sucking up resources that I don't want OH to dump into a navy whilst I play catch up there.





There was an option to only lightly hold FaL, goad OH into rushing it with his knights, then burning the roads on the route to raze CS.

At best this would be a somewhat cool Pyrrhic victory. At worst OH does the same and pushes past with his knights when I have nothing between then and what I view as core cities. So I did have to put some real units into FaL to hold it.





Looks like the peace with Lewwyn teleported the units left outside Lewwyns capital to an awkward position...





Not sure if I posted this. I offered OB to Gav because I needed the commerce to get to Chemistry, I don't view this game as competitive anymore, and I want to explore his core because I'd like to know what he started with.

[Krill]

Turn 178

OH pinged me to say he had offered a peace treaty. Now, I won't lie, this is something I'd been mulling over. I have been struggling to see the downside, and can see a fair few opportunities to come from this. OH knows I got a GM. He knows I have popped a two GS, GM, GE and GA previously, but he only knows I've triggered the first and second GA's. He can't know I'm potentially about to trigger the third GA and how close I am to Frigates.

What can OH achieve in 10 turns that will help him if I redeclare war at that point? It takes him 4 turns just to get units back up to attack Lewwyn, but I'm looking at Lewwyns lands and I think he would need to move so many units...does he even have the boats for that? And if he does have the boats for that, can I then play interdiction with newly built boats and slow him getting units back to the core, where my untouched stack then presses onwards?

What if he pushes on to SoL? Well I'm in a GA, he can't pressure me due to peace, so I can turn on research builds. I'll be catching up on tech, so I should reach SoL not much after him, couple of turns, let's say 5 turns at worst. What if he presses to Steel? Cannons would change everything, but same problem for both of us applies. It takes so long to get there, but I could just stick with Mil Sci, it's cheaper, and grens will hit cannons fine. And potentially, police state as well.

I'm not going to accept it this turn though. I want an extra turn to build frigates and so I will cancel the peace offer this turn, and look at how I can play this turn and offer peace back. I know this is risky: OH could be trying to make me double guess or overthink, and he plans to attack next turn if I cancel, look around and reoffer, if I let my guard down. So paranoia moves up a gear.




This is the stack in Constant Sorrow. Not much, but the 4 pikes on the hill, and the 2CKN/1knight stack SE of that add up.





Now this is the meat of the situation. 5 CKN and a cat, plus whatever is built, and available to unload and attack next turn. If I position to attack Constant Sorrow, I would have 37 knights, including the sentry knight in position to attack. All of those units could get hit by a single round of collateral. 4 pikes all get odds on attack, and there are a further 16 knight visible. Add in the miscellaneous units as well, and I don't think that stack survives to retreat in a usable form. So the only realistic option is to retreat now and reoffer peace; do what damage I can, and prepare to deal with any "backstab" if the peace offer was a ruse.






As I've retreated from the islands, OH has moved forwards. I don't have any units on the carracks to retake cities, but I don't think that I could take a city, and OH would just accept a peace offer. I "know" I have to leave the cities alone. But the units, I can attack them and OH shouldn't be able to figure out whats happened until after he accepts a peace offer.

I reckon there are two remaining knights on the galleon. Can I sink it? 3 frigates and a galleon against 6 privateers and 3 carracks? I'll go with that:




All the privateers are dead whatever happens: even in peace OH can kill them. 3 frigates, the galleon, and 2 knights are 530 hammers, against 6 privateers: 480 hammers. It's a "meh" trade, but it forces OH back a little bit, limits his ability to get units to Lewwyn if he pushes that way, and delays attacks. For me, I consider that worth it. Because it also gets me a GG, which I have no use for, but it's a status thing. I also destroy two swords (one promoted to CR3, the other unpromoted but available XP) that are staging to attack FaL.

I then retreat everything, count the number of available units that can attack FaL, place that number plus 5 into FaL, and position the collateral and remaining knights immediately behind the city for a counter attack. And reoffer peace.





Something that's worth noting is I still have stone from superjm. I'm getting castles down in all the coastal cities I can. The trade routes pay back, but it really is to do with the bombard protection from frigates and CKN off boats on a quick raid. The other reason I'm building muskets, I do need to have some real units to sit behind that 100% defense to deal with knights.





My tech is crap. I'm currently paying 80gpt for units. Even then, +250gpt at max gold on T178 is dreadful. I don't really have an answer to this. The capital is perfectly placed in the centre of the empire, I have courthouses down pretty much everywhere. I just don't make that much commerce. The only answer I can come up with is this: Cottages were delayed, because of hitting the horizontal and vertical expansion limit, because of the lack of happiness. Because of the lack of good coastal cities, I couldn't rely on coastal commerce either: consequence of starting in the centre of a Big, and very limited seafood availability (I have 6 seafood resources accessible from the main continent). That's forced this empire down the route of research and wealth builds (research builds are better due to EXP grocers and markets). All religions went before we could get there, so no shrine. Mids was failed because of stone/new IND (would have gotten Mids with old IND).

More on this once the game is over, but this is one of the more enjoyable, challenging parts of playing on an essentially random map. I would very much like to play again on a random map as this game has been.

[Krill]

Turn 179

OH confirmed he accepted peace, so I got to play a double turn after an uneventful night shift.

No before and after shot for this GA, because what's the point, really? You all know the plan.




Got the GS, so GA inbound.





Keeping an eye on the traffic. Nothing really interesting.





Plato, the city in the far south, is Gav's original capital. He moved it, but TBH, he didn't have much of a choice except to rush. Easy access to happy though.

[Krill]

T180

As this was a double turn, nothing interesting to show from the map, just graphs.




Just finishing stuff off as I push through techs.





I hold that AGG/CHM was the right choice for this start. Boudicca of anything would be terrifying. ORG would be saving 90gpt. AGG would be saving 40gpt. Maybe a bit less at this point.





Look, this game is over. I know I am a broken record, but lurkers are supposed to step in when the games are won and the only players that could win want to concede. superjm has taken Education and Lib to Mil Trad! He has 7K beakers that have no meaning! The only things he has that matter are Nationhood and access to Cuirs. He doesn't have PP, so he is 14K beakers from rifles and cav. He can't invade me without Chemistry and Astro: a further 8K beakers. He is no where near a technological lead that has any relevance to this game. That means he has to attack Gav.

Gav has Economics, in a GA, in in Free Market and will have a third GA shortly after this second one finishes. That last point doesn't matter, except that it shortens the window of superjm having an technological lead over Gav.

Gav is down Gunpowder, which is known by 4 players. It's not even 2 turns breakeven tech to him. Chemistry? Astro? superjm lacks these. All Gav needs is Mil Sci and Steel and then anyone he wants to kill, dies. superjm included. Gav is in a better position to reach these than superjm is.





superjm has below half the power of Gav, and has to attack through a choke point, into siege units. Doesn't matter, cats will wreck whatever comes down that peninsula. Drafting? Irrelevant in the context of rifles costing 2 pop/draft and Gavs MFG:





You can't draft cav, you can't draft frigates or galleons. Gav has access to superdeath and Cairo and a tech edge over both of them. Go back to the power graph: neither is going to stop Gav.





The only relevance of the GNP graph is that the previous peaks for superjm were pushing to Lib. GNP is not growing for superjm. Gavs' is. superdeaths is high, and we can all see that he has no power. Probably pushing for Rifles (Note from T181, he has rep parts, so he is pushing for rifles, not that that will help him).





Last and definitely not least, crop yield.

Does anyone think that Gavs dominance is is only temporary? No? Going to do anything about it? I don't see how.

I was thinking over the weekend that superjm had a right to play this out, because he could do something. I can see now that he can't. He is slowly building a handful of cuir. That's all he can build. He has no siege. His units aren't in position, and if he tried to attack Gav now he would run into a much larger stack that is sitting at the chokepoint that has a lot of siege in it. He can't attack me because he has no boats, and all his power is next to Gav. And I'm going to reach frigates before superjm can even reach Astro.

The only other person who could make something work is OH, but we all know that his route to achieve that goes through me and I'm pressing him, not the other way around.








It's not even an impressive military IMO, and yet it's the largest in the game by 300K soldiers.






Turn 181

More pictures of Gavs holdings. Note the knights moving into position for a further attack on Cairo.







I pretty sure that this game I've had awful luck in combat, and also in the buildings left intact on city capture: the one building I get cheap through IND, and everything else disappears. Doesn't matter, the city goes straight onto walls (just to make more siege have to stay in position to knock down the culture for an immediate counter attack)) then wealth builds.





These the the only cuirs anywhere near me. The stack in the front city near Gav is the same when I checked it 4 turns ago, to when I checked it 10 turns ago. His power isn't increasing either.





Boats moving around. Nothing exciting, except a 7 move frigate.

There is a path to get frigates through the choke point without OB. I'll have it blocked off on T183 with a new settler.











Here is the anvil on which OH might smash himself, with no help from me. 19 units in the capital, 8 units in the covering stack. 7 units in the northern city and I imagine a similar number in the western city.

OH scrambled everything to cover his defense against me. If he doesn't replace those units, which he is trickling back north, then I don't see how he can expect to attack Lewwyn and defend against me at the same time. And Lewwyns cities will fall, but looking at that, OH is going to need to transport a good 40 units, just to break the capital. The number of hitters in my main stack is close to having doubled by the time I can redeclare war, just from putting units in the right places and getting those muskets out. If OH is going to try and balance, and he sends to few units at Lewwyn he may very well miscalculate and lose the stack.





Now all these privateers are at risk once they are outside my culture, but given I am about to replant Jealous Sound on a slightly better tile, this is not a problem. I can get all my privateers over the help cover Lewwyn and be a giant dick to OH, forcing him to send all his frigates over there are as far away from my core as possible. Buys me yet more time to get frigates into play.








The only second thoughts I've had so far, is that I may have been able to get into Police State at teh end of this GA if I'd done things slightly differently. I still believe that is a dumb efficiency to aim for though, because it is more important to just build Frigates ASAP.