[SPOILERS] Khan's Thread

[El Grillo]

Hmm, that seems reasonable. On quick, the desert hill only takes 1t longer to mine, and still takes 2t to road. The neighborhood looks pretty sparse in terms of 5-yield tiles, and the only competitive alternative I see is NE of the wheat, which doesn't have much going for it either.

Planting directly on the stone and chopping the Pyramids could be an option if there are more forests nearby (CRE helps). Do you plan to queue up a warrior between the settler and second worker?

[Khan]

Hmm, that seems reasonable. On quick, the desert hill only takes 1t longer to mine, and still takes 2t to road. The neighborhood looks pretty sparse in terms of 5-yield tiles, and the only competitive alternative I see is NE of the wheat, which doesn't have much going for it either.

Planting directly on the stone and chopping the Pyramids could be an option if there are more forests nearby (CRE helps). Do you plan to queue up a warrior between the settler and second worker?

The pyramids option is certainly one we should keep under consideration. 'Mids are awesome. 

Regrettably, barbarians were left on unintentionally so we have to be cautious. We've finished a worker so far, grown to size 2 and then switched to settler. I'm inclined to finish the settler with a chop (IMP). After that, i'd prefer a second worker over warrior but have not simmed this one hard.

[Khan]

I'm happy to give a full run down of the civ to any potential taker. Can either update here or send you the save and go through it together via discord/skype etc.

Someone must be happy to go wreck the world with cavalry?

[Mr. Cairo]

Hey Khan, I've played the turn, and if you're free I just installed discord on my computer. Or we can just discuss it here.

[Mr. Cairo]

So the plan I formed last turn was to attack Auro, since he had his stack of Knights sitting 2 tiles away from my border and I could wipe them out in T1 of a war. Well, it turns out those knights were there for a reason.


He attacked and burned the small border city there, losing 4 Knights to do so.



Knights and Cavs were already on the way there, but with things kicking off ahead of schedule, I pulled the trigger this turn on upgrading the Knights.
There are five of them, along with a Rifle, in Grand Duke:



And another five by Admiral:

The rest were also upgraded and are farther to the west.

All that upgrading put us in second place in soldier count, and with all the ones finishing up this turn we'll probably jump into first:

I decided to keep on building Angkor Wat; the Shrine plan is still going ahead.

Smaller cities are going to build Hwachas. I needed a couple cities on wealth this turn so I could upgrade a Rifle in Archbishop if he heads that way:

while getting Engineering at the barest minimum science slider.

That Chariot there I sent on a suicidal scouting mission to see what Auro had to follow up his Knights and saw this:

So that leaves his force at 8 Knights and 10 Cats, plus a few Classical and Medieval junk.

My guess is he'll pull back and hope to use those Cats to savage a counter-attack. If he doesn't I'll kill his Knights and his cats will be useless without actual units to kill units.

If he does pull back I'll probably have to wait for a more Rifles, and cross the border spread out, 3-4 units per tile. He might be able to bring everything together to kill one or two of those stacks, but then he'll be finished.

We got the GM as planned this turn as well, so a three-person GA is available. I'm going to wait until Angkor Wat is finished before firing it off and swap into Pacifism.

So although the war with Auroarcher didn't get off to the start I was hoping for, I'm still optimistic about it overall.

[Mr. Cairo]

Somehow I only ended up with one screenshot for this turn, so I'll use one from last turn to show where all the units are:

he probably has more Knights and other units in the fog. But unless he's planning to come in and attack, that looks like a defensive posture to me. And it's one I can hit with Cavalry.
Those two workers in the forest are important, I'll road that tile next turn and the turn after that they can move to the tundra tile the Knights were sitting on in this screenshot last turn, road it, and my Cavs can wipe out that stack of cavs easy-peasy.

Tech wise, Auro is going for Rifles himself, he's able to research it as of this turn and has ~400 gold in his treasury. But I can't really judge his tech power, so I'll just assume the worse and start expecting Rifles in 4-5 turns. If I can wipe out that Catapult stack, I should be able to just barrel through his defenses with Cavs and take a good number of cities before the rifles appear in large enough numbers to slow me down. If he pulls those cavs back, it'll be a little slower, but not a whole lot.


My one screenshot from this turn:

Probably not what you want to see if you're Auroarcher right now. 

[Khan]

Looks good Mr Cairo. I'm surprised Auro attacked, I can only assume that he is just taking some pleasure from attacking the obvious game leader. There is absolutely no benefit to it from his point of view in terms of his civ. I suppose an argument could be made that it might encourage everyone else to dogpile, but I don't buy it. No matter, he was both my and your target of choice anyway.

Go make him regret his insolence 

[Mr. Cairo]

Lost that other border city, I should have realised it could be attacked now that he had Engineering. Oh well, all it did was make my own planned attack on Auro this turn easier by moving most of his knights and cats out of the city.

For some reason this is the only screenshot I took of the front, not using my usual steam shortcut for them is throwing me off, I'll try and do better. In any case, I wiped out his stack of Knights and Cats easily enough, getting two retreats. Then moved on to Chaco Canyon. It was defended by three Rifles, and a bunch of other stuff, also a few Knights and Cats. I lost three Cavs killing the Rifles, getting one retreat, and won every other battle. I didn't have enough to take the city, but it only has a few Cats left in it, so I'm pretty sure I'll take next turn. I think I may just have broken Auroarcher wide open. Losing those cities was annoying, but worth it for just taking Chaco Canyon, let alone the rest of Auro's territory.

Domestically, I'm building wealth in most of my cities in preparation for another GA next turn. 


I'm going to try and run 100% science for the entirety of the GA. I'm swapping into Pacifism as well for a couple of GPs. My hope is to get Chemistry, Sci Method, and Communism during the GA so I can swap into State Property at the end of it. Since losing Mercantilism neuters a lot of Representation's usefulness, I'll probably also swap into Police State. I may even go full ham and swap into Vassalage and Theocracy (but I need to squeeze getting Theology in there somehow).

OR, more likely, I don't get to Communism during the GA, in which case I'll still hopefully be able to get another GA soon using the (probable) GProphet from Angkor Wat, the Communism GSpy, the Physics GSci, and one other GP I can get from another city.

[Mr. Cairo]

(no screenshots today, sorry)

Well, this isn't going to be as easy as I thought, hehe. Auro had a bunch of units within striking distance of my cav stack there and got quite lucky. First hitting it with a last few cats, then Knights. In 6 Knight vs Cav attacks, he won 4, and none of them were good odds for him, so he got pretty lucky. Unfortunately, he also had a few Rifles on the way that he could get into the city, lucky for me they couldn't attack this turn. I pulled back my injured Cavs, and brought them together with all the others nearby, but I may have made a mistake on where I put them, he can hit it with those Rifles, and I only have 3 Rifles of my own to cover the stack, one of which is injured. So he may well end up hitting that stack with all his Rifles and injured Knights, getting a good trade. Of course, I can afford to trade units right now, idk if he can, he's not in Slavery or Natiohood, so I don't think he can replenish those units easily, unless he's just stopped teching and is upgrading every unit he can to Rifles each turn. Depending on how things are go in the war, I may end up pulling back until I can really turn all my production power into military.

Domestically, I fired off the GA and adopted Pacifism. I got Chemistry EoT and it looks like I will be able to get to Communism before the GA ends, enabling a nice swap into Police State + State Property to really bring on the hurt to Auro. Sci Method is going to obsolete the Parthenon, which will effect my current GP timings, so for now I've got three cities just maxing out on GPP. The pool at the Prophet city is pretty polluted, so I'll probably not get great odds for a Prophet, while the other two cities are focusing on a Merchant and an Artist, with relatively pure pools. Hopefully, I'll get the Prophet for the Shrine, while the Merchant and Artist will combine with the Communism Spy and the Physics Scientist for another GA. Otherwise, well, we'll see.

I got the Heroic Epic in my capital at EOT and I'll start 1-turning Cavs from there, while my other cities are either running wealth/research or on other military, including a round of Hwachas, now that a siege of Chaco Canyon seems likely. Thoth is building up his military, but he's still pretty far from Rifles and Cavs, so maybe it's not directed at me?

[Mr. Cairo]

I am starting to get annoyed. Twice now, I've gone to put a sign down and started typing too quickly to notice that the sign didn't take for some reason, and I press space, ending the turn kinda prematurely. I've already moved all my units and my city's builds, but I hadn't finished with micro-ing my cities tiles and picking improvements.

What's the procedure on loading the save up again? I've been running on the assumption that once you've hit end turn, that's it, no do-overs. But what about situations like this, when I've ended the turn before I wanted to?

Anyway, on to the turn. Auro did not attack, and I sent a sacrificial chariot to scout (that I didn't get to delete before I ended the turn) and saw this:


I need to heal and gather a few more Rifles/Hwachas before I can attack. I think my military right now is enough to take Chaco Canyon, but most of my cities are running wealth, while I imagine that Auro is on total war setting, so I imagine that I won't be able to push any further. But once the GA is over and I'm in State Property and Police State, I should be able to outproduce him.


Here's the GA demos and graphs: