Era of defense

[plako]

We need plans concerning the war. I'm still trying to collect my thoughts, but here are some preliminary thoughts:
* My gut feeling is that Gillette is building up for land war. I've our galley moving towards them, but I suspect that the amount of boats we'll be facing is limited
* Pyramids city is the most logical 1st target. They can use hills to reach it with slow movers
* Our empire is quite stretched out. Long distances between the cities and our defense will be based on cats and maces. I think our beakers during the next 5T period are best invested on Engineering.
* All our efforts should go on keeping our core cities. On Gillette front BM, WIFOM and OTR. We can give up new cities near the borders if nescessary e.g. Mai-Tai, Cuba Libre and Deerslayer

[zakalwe]

I agree with those priorities.

What do we do with our scientist? Bulb towards PP or settle him so we can research faster in other directions? I guess PP still, since that's an economic boost, too.

[plako]

IMO Printing Press. Only downside are the beakers we need to invest to finish it since commerce benefit should be on par with the Scientist beaker benefit immediately. This is also pretty good time to bulb before we really start to draft/whip an army. It is clear that Gillette is really throwing all they have on this war and that means we have to follow the suite.

btw. I think we should finish walls on WIFOM, OTR and BM and put 1T of hammers to Castle so we can whip it depending on where Gillette's main forces are heading. Castle's are very hard to penetrate in this era so we'll buy some extra time to bring more units in the battle field.

On TEAM front we had to do the same on Ramune and HN

[zakalwe]

Excellent idea on walls + castles.

[novice]

Excellent idea on walls + castles.

Yup, saved our bacon in pbem23. Of course, there we had cannons instead of catapults... Still, castles+maces+catapults will save the day if we can get enough of them.

[zakalwe]

Their main target has to be WIFOM, I think, to take out the pyramids.

We could also build some archers in hammer poor cities. Then, if we research iron working, they can be upgraded to crossbows.

[zakalwe]

Another strategic concern is that BM has our copper, and also our only iron, if the intel we were given earlier was correct. So I guess they might be going for that, too. Losing metals would be bad, but at least we can research gunpowder.

[plako]

After engineering those cities are 2 turns from each other so we can switch units from one city to other depending on how they move. Also we could position reinforcements in the middle to have some units that could reach both cities in 1T. E.g. our cats could be there since they don't accumulate fortify bonus and still could hit the target behind the city in time.

btw. I'll be whipping quite sparingly now so that most of our cities would remain draftable. Also I'll focus more on Maces than cats now and change the focus after few turns. They are pretty good defenders inside castle, even if they would be hit with big stack of cats.

Our tech path will then be PP->Construction->Engineering. Haven't counted yet, but we should have Engineering ~T140. We could consider taking HBR before Engineering since a stack of mobile units that can flank would be pretty good idea too and the tech is cheap.

edit. and of course we've 2 other copper sources that we could connect.

[zakalwe]

edit. and of course we've 2 other copper sources that we could connect.

We do? I somehow completely forgot about that.

[spellman]

Engineering definitely sounds like the right move on tech. Cutting the move distances for our forces will be huge in the event of a multi-prong war.