[SPOILERS] Pindicator promises brighter days ahead

[Lewwyn]

I'm halfway through the turn. My internet disconnected and its not coming back up yet. Hopefully it doesn't take to long. I was writing up a post to respond before it died.

I can finish the turn when I get internet back, but most of the obvious stuff is done. Still have some worker stuff and a couple knights and elephants. We need to put a couple elephants in Thebes, 1 in the Bangor stack and 2 in the stack that attacked Notgav. Also need to move the last HA out of Giza, leave it empty. The Heliopolis stack is next to it and can recapture easily if need be.

We lost 15 units and killed 17 all told. The sword is still alive and he has an elephant and longbow behind the sword. 4 injured units over by Giza that I couldn't kill. Nothing close enough. I don't think we hit the sword, which is a shame because it's going to have like 8xp from winning a 9% battle, but if we killed it the unit that did so would die. Of course we could then kill the unit that killed it likely. Soooo.,.

Are you going to have time or are you off to your parents?

[Lewwyn]

Also plako is on the move and will take a city this turn. Notgav should be down to 9 cities by the eot.

I'm not too worried about comm. if he attacks us, oh well. Have to take some risks here. Almost everyone seems to have more cities than us. I.E.: dtay has like 3 more cities than us even with our newly captured 4 cities. TBS is definitely more ahead of us and I think comm knows it. If he hits us he knows TBS runs away.

[pindicator]

I jumped in for a little bit but I didn't get to finish up. Mostly focused on city MM and tile management. The capital has war weariness so there's a CKN that was passing through that got re-routed for garrison duty. Moved a tile at Lundby (don't need to work the bare forest to get the wonder in the 8-turn timeframe I quoted last turn). Not much else done, sorry.

Finish up as you best can - or if I dont' hear from you i'll assume that your internet is still down and post that we need a pause.

[Lewwyn]

Internet came back but I'm putting daughter to bed. I think I can finish in an hour.

[Lewwyn]

So while losing those units was not ideal, it will be good to have his large HA stack dead. I don't know if he realized we could kill it. He probably didn't think so, because he had a couple xbows and a spear sitting on a forest and probably thought we couldn't break it with just the spears he could see. Unfortunately for him we had 2 new knights in range and a couple CKN in Thebes that we could sac to soften him up. We wiped the stack with only one bad roll on a knight at 90%, and still came out on top in terms of units (though likely not hammers) for the turn. That's good for us, we can absorb that loss much more easily.

Plako on the move:



That's more units that NotGav can't afford to lose. He apparently lost 4 units! defending Bangor from Comm judging by unit health. I am not sure why he didn't retreat them, but he didn't and that makes it easier for us as well.

Here's my plan to take both Memphis and Byblos in 2 turns:



Each of our stacks on the flat land there have 2 elephants as well as at least 1 spear each + CKN. They should be safe from HA stacks at this point as we have eliminated a lot of them. I left Giza undefended because I couldn't get the large stack in there this turn. But its fine because we can easily take it back (and kill more units) if NotGav takes it back.

Next turn I want to move a big 1 mover stack onto the hill NE of Memphis and a stack of knights+HA (plus some other defending units) onto the hill SW of our culture S of our new city. The 2 movers can hit Byblos from there. There is 1 Xbow there. You can see he has a few more units around memphis but not much and most are injured. We shall take advantage. More knights are coming:



Looking good.

Even with the losses we are still 3rd in power:



And doing well with tech.

I sent Espionage to Commodore. We will get city vision on most cities with 2 turns of EPs.

TBS is annoying:



That is a mace getting loaded onto a galleon and I assume the other Galleon is headed south with units as well. Worries me a bit. I don't think he wants to attack us, but maybe he's trying to go settle more islands we can't see beyond the fog? I have no idea... Compass>Optics>Theo next I guess. Another GA and civic swap.

Overall I'm feeling good and fine.

[pindicator]

Hey, good job all things considered. I think it's a good plan for advancing. If we get those cities and hold them I think it's safe to say that Not Gav will be broken at that point.

How far south do we push? In a grander strategic sense we could just keep going and try to smash right through plako. He is hurting with the constant warfare he's had to go through. But he also has knights as well so we would not enjoy the same tech advantage. We may also decide to come back to plako and take a bit of a consolidating effort to get new cities online and our forces better prepared.

Or we could just aim to end with an easily defended border with plako which would let us pivot north next.

I'm at the coast for the next 30 hours, and do in fact get the blank civ list screen when I connect. But with the pause I think I'll be able to get into the game by the time we're up to play next turn.

[Lewwyn]

Yeah I also considered the Plako thing. We need more information before we decide. For notGav I say we get as much of the land as we can. I want the islands and the coastal cities. We just need more land. as noted on demos we are 11th in land. How crazy is that.

[Lewwyn]

Plako took the city as expected. One think about plako that makes me less worried is he is consistently spending only 10-20 minutes in the turn. I think he's pretty checked out. I'm not feeling a lot of aggressiveness from him.

[Lewwyn]

Okay so he took Giza back and we had no actual battles. I took Giza back again with an unpromoted CKN that I can upgrade to city defense. Then I needed to know what was in Memphis. So I was thinking about what unit to send I just figured I'll send an elephant:



He has 7 eles, 6 HA, 2 Xbow, 3LB, 10 Sword, 1 spear, 1 archer, 3WC (including his medic), 7 cats + whatever is whipped this turn. Call it 34 hitters and 7 cats.

For reference we can get 42 units onto that hill with the elephant next to Memphis. (That doesn't include a couple units, I need to get a more accurate number, I was a bit rushed)

I vote we go whole hog. We'll be on a hill we have some injured Spears that will soak up some cat shots, then on our turn we can promote them and use for hitters too. We have to kill this army at some point.

[pindicator]

I think we go too. Our stack of spear, WE, and CKN is a good counter to what he has.