[PB25-SPOILERS] The Lunacy of the Reign of HAK Continues

[HitAnyKey]

Well, the fun continues.....NOT! LOL

First, the demos:

AAAARRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!! RUFF!!!!! WTF were you thinking, gifting me Galleons right next to Commodore's Caravels? You just gave him some more XP for his Caravels and wasted some good galleons....

Here's the situation at Anxious where Comm just dropped off a landing party...

More to come in later posts...

[HitAnyKey]

Here's the situation around Sore and also showing what's inside Sleepy & Happy:

[HitAnyKey]

These are the Cuirs I have on the Galleons to possibly make an attempt to raze Dragon Herdsman this turn.


It'll be a tough call to attempt it, as it'll likely cost us most/all of these Cuirs.

[HitAnyKey]

So we took a shot at Dragon Herdsman....
Here are the battles that happened....

And VICTORY as the result...

The city is no more....the last C1 Cuir that successfully razed the city got the honor of taking a long walk off a short pier to keep himself from giving XP to one of Commodore's units.

Then I went up against the stack of ships he had in the Port of Anxious. And as you can see by all the green in this log, it went well.

Won a couple of very low odds battles (27%, etc) and even a couple of battles in the 60-70%

This shows what he has inside Quiet Riot right now that I need to keep my eye on.

It sure is nice to have the feeling of something victorious, and seeing us have more green in the log than red.

[GermanJoey]

What are your civics right now?

[HitAnyKey]

What are your civics right now?

Ummm.....Rep, Nationhood, Caste, Mercantilism, & OR. If we ever get a golden age I'd like to switch into Theocracy, I think.

[HitAnyKey]

So....big decision here that I'll have to spend some time thinking about. So will think about it while I do some work today, which means I'll likely have to finish the turn later this evening or something like that.
First we have the Demos:

In the first 3 screenshots you can see that I did a whole lot of manipulation in order to just barely get Chemistry this turn. But the next screenshot is the important one.

After taking the first ones above, I went through every city changing them multiple times between Wealth and other things trying to get the best mix of Wealth builds and having cities working on other builds. As you can see below I have some cities completing units, some that would be getting near completion on a bunch of Frigates (since the Caravels would upgrade to those....I am correct about this, right?)

There are 19 total cities building Wealth for me. This does really hamper us in other ways by delaying other builds. So this is where the decision comes into play. Do I do this turn of Wealth builds to get Chemistry next turn or do I just get Chemistry on the following turn? Basically trying to decide if getting it next turn gets us anything huge that outweighs just waiting a turn to get it.

More Green for us!!!

Commodore used 2 of the Rifles (which he must have given G2 (they didn't have those promos last turn) to try to dislodge the single Rifle I had inside the fort. He lost the first 27% fight and then the next 76% fight. Yay!

This is the situation over at Sore. I haven't had time to count up units or analyze this yet. Will have to do so later.

Back over here....

I'm tempted to try to kill this stack of his. I have two Cavalry available that can hit first, and follow up with Rifles. Basically if I do this, my plan would be to promote one of the Cav's to F2 (maybe). Try to hurt that Rifle and retreat. Then use the other Cav to hopefully be able to kill either the Knight or the Musket. Not sure which one would defend, but I assume it would be the Musket. Then I'd either stop there (to kill more stuff later) or attack with the non-CG rifle to kill something else if the odds look good. I'd likely have to stop there since I can't risk leaving the city too underdefended with wounded units or having some die.
Basically if my first Cav attack doesn't wound the Rifle enough, I'd possibly stop there (or just kill the rifle with the other Cav, if that is still the target). I'd need to leave the two Rifles inside the Fort (and probably the wounded one as well, promoting him to CG2) to keep him from trying to use his Knight to destroy the fort.
Also need to consider pulling all my ships out of Anxious and into the lake. As much as I'd like to move on Battle Island (while Comm is distracted in the north), it's just not going to happen. I can't get enough units into this area quickly enough.
Anyway, that's it for now...I gotta get some work done and come back to this thought.

[HitAnyKey]

Another point is that Commodore now has Frigates...for a bit I was trying to figure out on which turn he snuck in Astronomy without me noticing, but I realized after reviewing civstats that isn't the case.
This turn before he started taking the cities from Ruff, he had a score increase from 2959 to 2983. So it looks like he used a Spy to steal it from someone either Ruff or Donovan. My guess is that he stole it from Ruff. The thing we wanted to do so long ago, but just couldn't get enough EPs into him to do so while also maintaining the EPs we needed on Gavagai & Commodore.
I see a Frigate sailing down from near Casdade Point, and he upgraded his wounded Caravel at former Alexandria since I see a wounded Frigate in that city too. Also sailing down from Warhorse area is a Nav1 Ironclad already. So he'll have the waters blocked again very shortly, so getting Galleons of troops over to Battle Island isn't even an option now. At least not until I have my own stack of Frigates, but by that time he'll have too many Ironclads in the waters for me to bust through.

So at this point, getting Chemistry next turn isn't as big a priority since getting out those Frigates of my own won't really help too much I don't think. So I'm currently leaning towards switching all the cities back to their original builds and continuing the military pump. And just getting Chemistry in 2 turns.

[MindyMcCready]

Concession speech:

I am so pissed with Ruff's in game actions. The outcome of his plays was just overwhelmingly obvious before he started it. Thanks Ruff.

We worked hard to put up a challenge to Master Commodore's overwhelmingly dominant start. Thank you Retep for keeping the game interesting. In the end, while the deck was still stacked against us, the game was decided not by what we did or didn't do, or by what Master Commodore did or didn't do, but by Ruff's actions. I think that I can say straight faced that his foreign policy was more suicidal that Tasunke's. That's saying a lot. The only thing that kept the game going after seeing Ruff's DOW on Donovan was hoping that MC was treating this as a duel. In the end the fruit was hanging too low to pass up on.

Good job HAK and thanks for letting me ride along.

If the lurkers can get back to us on whether Donovan is ready to concede so that I may begin to read the threads,...starting with finding out if Ruff just wanted to kill the game or if he inexplicably believed that he had more than a snowball's chance in hell of that working out.

If Donovan for whatever reason is not ready to concede I'm quite tempted to buy peace with MC at any cost and then throw our army at Donovan to kind of make the point that the game is over. If Donovan's playing for second place,...we'd like to end that sooner rather than later.

[HitAnyKey]

And here is the official concession post. I had hoped to get mine out before Mindy (after all, even though this was quite a big partnership through most of it, it is still my game to concede) but he beat me to it while I was making lunch.

I know I've said that Ruff's inaction against Commodore has basically cost us the game, but in my view we pretty much never had much of a chance. Though his leaving the cities on the island empty (except for a single LB in each one) tipped the scale this turn to make it quite obvious. Pretty much the only way for anyone to beat Commodore would have been if at least 3 people attacked him at the same time. If I was in position when he started his conquest of retep, I might have been able to do something. But pretty much everything offensive I had was over trying to deal with Gavagai, which took WAAAY longer than it should have and longer than I expected. By the time Commodore started conquering retep, it would have taken too long to get enough troops back to the Commodore front. And doing so we'd let Gavagai rebuild and run over us from the other side. So my only real option there was to just keep pushing against Gavagai.
This has been quite the game for me, as I've learned quite a lot and this is the first time in an RB pitboss that I've ranked this high and done this well overall. I do attribute a lot of that to Mindy, with doing/helping with so much of the stack/battle analysis. That's where I'm usually weakest in my games.

I have a feeling Donovan won't be ready to concede, especially not before he finishes conquering Ruff. And I fully expect him to want to try to hit me to take 2nd place, so he won't want to concede until he has done that. But if he is, then I am ready to say good game to all. If not, then I'm perfectly find just continuing a bloodbath until that time does come.

Personally not sure about the peace thing with Commodore at all costs, since I'm betting his main cost would be me giving up Sore. And I don't know if I'm willing to do that. I'd give him the SE island of Belligerent & Grump, but don't know if I'd give him Sore. Even if it's just so I can go hit Donovan while he's weak and recovering.

Anyway, for now I'll log in and finish my turn (putting all those builds back so that I don't get Chemistry this turn since there is no point in rushing it with Comm already having Astronomy) and waiting to see if you lurkers can get from Donovan info on when/if he'd be willing to concede to Commodore. With any luck he'll be satisfied with eliminating Ruff for that satisfaction and then letting the game end.
I'm also going to send blank peace to Gavagai this turn as well, just to see if he actually accepts it (which I doubt he will).

I don't like the idea of conceding, but I've also come to realize that this game is sucking up way too much of my time right now for an outcome that's basically decided. Otherwise I'd be all for fighting til the end.