[Spoilers] Harry Hydra Tours his Hit Charitable Thoughts

[Old Harry]

Turn 204

We finally take Plains, for the loss of one knight.


So where next? We switched to Vassalage and Theocracy - we'll have a load of units completing over the next few turns, so do we take more islands or concentrate on SD's mainland?


In other fighting news Gav burnt one of Superjm's cities. Does this mean that this is as far as he wants to go?


Demos and power. Judging from the power graph Superjm is toast, I'd be surprised if Gav doesn't gobble him up real quick. Maybe we need to do some vulturing? Krill definitely should, but his 10 minute turns suggest he's somewhat checked out.

[Mardoc]

How's it going? Looks like you've managed to claw your way into second place?

[Old Harry]

Turn 212

We've had some pretty involved turns so not much time for reporting. So what's got us into second? Well I'm not sure why Krill has stagnated so badly but we built a bunch of wonders recently and are now running three shrines, which helped us get to steel five turns before Kirll. We revolted to OR so we can build some drydocks and try to maintain the naval superiority that this map requires. Our long-term plan is to build cultural infrastructure in four cities on the basis we don't think we can stop Gav and/or Krill destroying one of them, but we might be able to hold the other three.

Short-term we need to do more to improve our position, so we've stayed at war with Superdeath while he builds loads of rifles, Mr Cairo re-declared taking a couple of SD cities on the first turn of the war but losing one straight away. Attacking SD's mainland does seem dumb given that he's got more powerful units than we do, but, well, it's fun!

In other war news Gav has torn through Superjm like a hot knife through even hotter butter - I give him five turns to live. Krill has tried to lessen his prize by taking an island city and burning two mainland cities, but this picture makes me sure we should avoid thinking that Krill is our best buddy at any point. Our stack is more mobile and would shred these easily if they moved forward, but it's still annoying to have to leave so much power up here in the back of beyond rather than using it to slow/bring down the leader.


Going back in time a bit we spent turns 206-8 dithering about vulturing some stuff from SJ, eventually bringing our knights back to help with our current main aim, The Great Lighthouse (defended by 9 rifles and 8 longbows). We landed a bunch of knights with a musket for cover on turn 210, then refilled our boats with lots more units. There are a bunch of very under-defended cities here, but SD has had rifling for ten turns now - he must have a stack of something somewhere, right?


So on t211 we sent in nine CKN to scratch up the defenders like so. Can you see a stack of 12 catapults behind the list of defenders? That'll be relevant in a little while. As will the rifle that killed our sentry horse archer.


Our seven amphibious grenadiers get 70-90% and win 5 battles. Two of the knights we landed take pinch and lose at 35% each but hurt the defenders enough that our non-amphi grenadiers start winning, leaving the odds good enough for our beachhead knights to tear through the injured longbows, leaving the dregs for more of our boat-bound units to easily mop up. And we get this delightful message.


The lighthouse immediately leaps into action raising our income by 150 gpt. Now how do we hold on to it?
Step 1: Kill the rifle with a pinch grenadier.
Step 2: Kill the 12 catapults with 8 knights.
Step 3: Profit!


So that was it for turn 211. This turn we discovered that Superdeath has a lot more units in reserve than we'd feared. There are 20 rifles wandering around the place, but perhaps they'll be too spooked by our amphi grenadiers to try to take back the city? Everything scarpered back into the city or onto boats after this pic. There are 8 cats with the stack W of Raging Goblin that we need to keep an eye on too. Being second in turn order is pretty nice for us in this situation, because if he does recapture then we get the chance to take the city back so we're holding it when the extra trade routes are applied at the end of the turn.


Next steps are to use our GG medic to heal up and send our boats to fork Black Lotus and Mox Ruby (actually empty - the sign is out of date) next turn. Then we'll also try to hit Elvish Mystic (also empty) on t213 and hopefully ChannelFireball on t214.


Thinking long-term Gavagai will finish with SJ soon, and while I'd love it if he turned his attention to Krill I suspect our Superdeath conquest will be his next target. So we need a sentry net covering all of this. And if we could spare the units I'd love to alpha-strike his ports to ensure we maintain naval dominance, but that'd be bound to make krill turn his attention our way again, so lets hope the Mexican stand-off continues...


Krill's probably ahead of us on SOTL, but must be behind on frigates. Gav has a bunch of privateers (at least 25 between him and Krill and more in the fog I presume), but only just started making frigates and galleons, so should be behind us overall.


Given the quality of the land we had we're pleased with how well the religious game is paying off here, the graphs tell the story. The final uptick on GNP is the Great Lighthouse with tech turned off, with it on we add another 30% this turn.


Eclipsing Krill (and his one-civ's-worth of land), but our 2.5-civ's-worth just can't compete with Gav's 3.5-(soon to be 4-)civ's-worth of land so we have to hope that politics and boats even this contest up.


How are we still behind Krill on crop yield? We've conquered one and a half neighbours FFS!


Goodbye Superjm. We may never really understand why you marched your army into Gavagai's territory to be slaughtered leaving you horribly exposed, but I bet the lurkers had a good laugh about it.


Demos.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Excellent update. Thanks!

[Mardoc]

Excellent update. Thanks!

+1

Do you have cultural competition?  Or just the basic risk of having the cities burned?

[Old Harry]

Turn 213

Excellent update. Thanks!

+1

Do you have cultural competition? Or just the basic risk of having the cities burned?

We've got Sistine and five religions (two well spread, one in a few cities and two in a couple of cities so far) so I don't think anyone else is going to beat us to a cultural victory without breaking some of our cities...

On to the fun stuff! SD recaptured Mox and Time Walk and reinforced ChannelFireball with five units. We've got five grenadiers and all our fingers crossed.


We win the first, 66% battle, then the knights defend at 73% and we win the next two battles ... but we lose the fourth fight and we're not burning this city.

Let's take the Great Lighthouse back again then shall we. Four rifles to kill:


- Amphi grenadier vs CG2 rifle - 66%... LOSS
- Amphi gren vs rifle - 91%... WIN (2 hits)
- Amphi gren vs rifle - 91%... WIN (3 hits)
- C1 gren vs injured rifle - 99%... FLAWLESS WIN!
- gren vs injured rifle - 99%... FLAWLESS WIN!


We left the city empty, but a couple of pinch grenadiers are 1E of the city, out of range of his forces, but ready to recapture next turn. We captured and deleted all the workers too. I hope. I've been a bit forgetful recently.

Mr Cairo should take Carthage this turn. Looks like most of SD's rifles are up north (at least 24, with 3 more arriving as the turn rolls), hopefully letting Cairo's primitive army take the smaller cities down here.


Then we revolt to nationhood/vassalage which saves 43gpt. Over the next five turns we can draft twenty muskets, of our fishing villages these are the ones with the spare happiness:

Cities to draft:
Fight the Power can do 4
Jimmy can afford 1
LITD can afford 3
O Death can afford 2
Po L can afford 4
Run On can afford 1 - should stagnate on specialists.
Swing Low can afford 2
YouRMySunsh can afford 2
Latchmere needs 1 for MP

I forgot Demos and power, so this is the foreign news section:

[Old Harry]

Turn 221

Okay, I missed a few more turns. So what happened?

First up Superdeath evacuated his capital, leaving just two rifles behind. This was handy since we lost several grenadiers on the attack. We weren't sure that SD wouldn't counter attack and since we were low on grens for constant recapture we burnt the city.


By t216 we'd purged this end of the continent of the orange menace. Again ChannelFireball was burnt because SD's culture could cause us problems while it was in revolt.


So the reason SD was sending stuff south was to try to drive Mr Cairo off his continent. We helped Cairo out by killing a couple of rifles, allowing him to stay in the war. Superdeath's main stack of 15 rifles and 17 cats is in Carthage now. If it comes back at us we could be in a bit of trouble, but we're adding grenadiers to the Great Lighthouse city at a rate of knots.


This image brings the war up to date, we've dropped a bunch of knights to hit Raging Goblin, a small stack of grens to hit Ancestral Recall and we've got a strike force on our boats poised to hit AR or one of his island cities. Fingers crossed for next turn.


But what about the wider game?

Gav finished Superjm off last turn, meaning he can concentrate on consolidating his lead and figure out how to keep both us and Krill at arms length. We've got a bunch of frigates scouting him to figure out what he'll do next with his galleons. This seems to be the biggest concentration of his navy but he also has a bunch of frigates scattered around doing scouting work for him.


So how do we win the game?

Well right now we think we have a much bigger navy than Gav, but his mfg is double ours at the moment (he's in a golden age), so that won't last long. Our boats are mostly around SD's land, so we could move to hit the coast around Gav's original and new cap in the very near future... If we can burn enough of his coastal cities its possible that we can level the playing field somewhat. But that means letting Superdeath off the hook. Would SD take advantage of that?

We also need to get more sentries out to uncover the large swathes of fog very near to our island cities...


Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

I forgot to mention that with Representation our gnp is slightly ahead of gavagai, but he's ahead RP, Rifling and education, a chunk of our gnp is culture and he's just getting a lot of very nice cities out of revolt so our window of opportunity to do anything about him is small.

?

[Old Harry]

Turn 222

This turn deserves a report too. Which is handy because Superdeath didn't play yet and I have half an hour to kill.

First up SD attacked out of Ancestral Recall, killing three of our grenadiers and a CKN (he got a bit lucky, partly on dice rolls, but mostly because I think I forgot to promote a couple of the grens), but his units are pretty beat-up now so taking the city is a formality. Before we can take AR however we need to know if we can burn Raging Goblin and create a culture-free no-man's land with which to defend AR.


Our first two knights hit the defending rifles 5 and 3 times, meaning that the rest of the fights are nice and easy and we burn the city with four knights to spare. Note the stack of rifles in position to counter-attack our knights. If they do then they'll find themselves counter-counter-attacked by a new stack of grenadiers next turn.


Next up we bring some amphibious grenadiers to bear on AR. Nice of SD to scratch his units up for us.


We win the initial coin-flip fight and everything after that goes our way. The city has a granary, an aqueduct, a forge, a colosseum and a couple of settled great generals. Awesome! We hope to take Sol Ring next turn


With the culture disappearing we settled two new coastal cities (Your Woman and Zombie) and turned our boats towards SD's new capital, Karn Liberated. We win all four gren vs CG1 rifle fights at 67% and the granary, lighthouse, harbor, forge and courthouse all survive.


All-in-all a pretty nice turn. We also had a look at naval stats and our 63 frigates and 19 SOTL compare nicely to Gav's 20 frigates and 27 privateers (that we can see - add perhaps 10 more to each total). Unfortunately Krill is stockpiling boats near our northern islands again, so we probably need to divert more of ours that way to stop him getting any ideas. We're also not far from the great general that would allow us to turn Constant Sorrow into a commando factory.


Demos and graphs. Gav's golden age still has 8ish turns to go, but when it finally finishes will we have caught up?

Some of our GNP is culture (about a third I'd suggest - anyone know if this is correct?), but this graph is still pleasing.


I don't think we'll catch up on MFG.


We still haven't caught up to Krill's one-civs-worth of food.


And we're still the poor relation militarily. Just. At some point we should stop wasting hammers on cultural buildings and concentrate on building war machines.

[Old Harry]

Turn 225

Exciting times! Gav took three cities from Cairo and earned a great general, Cairo made peace with Superdeath and asked us for 1000 gold. We're not feeling too generous, so we offered back 1300 gold for 130 gpt (hopefully I didn't accidentally offer 1300 for 13 gpt ).


Gav getting a foothold on Cairo's continent is terrible news for us - it'd let him hit our core directly. So we step up our attack schedule - we're going in on t227 unless Gav sees us coming and we're forced to attack next turn instead. Our plans involve hitting Amiens, Corihuyaracina, Avignon, Grenoble and Robinson on the first turn. Then Clarke - Gav's Moai city - should fall on t228. After that we'll try to burn as many coastal cities as we can - hurting Gav's ship production is our main aim, but stopping him taking cities off Cairo would help as well.


In the east this fight is only likely to work if we get Krill to join in. We sent him iron+fish/iron+fish - Gav's stack of 10 frigates and 23 privateers is just off the north of this picture and Krill's stack of frigates and SOTL is somewhere north of them. (I haven't seen it for a little while, I really hope he didn't send it back towards us.)


Meanwhile, to try to make it look like we're still concentrating on Superdeath we burnt Urza's tower - the amphibious knight is probably toast, but burning the city might stop SD trying to take back the empty Urza.


Here's a snapshot of our finances - our income is due to our three shrines and the merchant and priest specialists we're running. Our unit costs and supply are dwarfed by our city maintenance and civic upkeep, so we should keep building units! Gav has a lot more courthouses than us and we're running the expensive Organised Religion civic, but Hitru is convinced that after his golden age our economy is going to be roughly equivalent to his. The race to Destroyers is going to be interesting...


Demos and power.