Gaspar and NobleHelium - More Arguments About Buildings & Food.

[Gaspar]

Man, given the games Dave and Yuri have played I really wish we started where Ichabod did. Mistabod has played well, no doubt. But he's extremely benefited by starting between two players who refused to expand and one who refuses to get culture in his cities. Meanwhile we get pink dotted by Commodore playing his best game in over a year.

We're still in this thing, but at this point really we're relying on Ichabod to screw up to win. If he plays consistently well, I don't think he can be beaten.

[pindicator]

Any way to shake things up? If the status quo is just going to get you second place, that's usually a good place to start looking for other options. But this is CTON and you're not near Mistabod so you'd have to be creative if it comes to war.

[NobleHelium]

Played turn 87.

There's not much to talk about this turn. davy offered OB again and we accepted this time since we are no longer in a potential race for the AP. davy also bulbed Philosophy as expected, and converted to Taoism and swapped to Pacifism...



We continued scouting yuris's lands. Gaziantep looks rather poorly placed, with only a plains cow for food.

Commozul did not attack us. His worker is supposedly busy clearing jungle, but we'll see if that's true or not next turn. davy also hooked up Marble, so there's three sources of that on the map.

We're debating whether to tech Civil Service or Feudalism next. We could tech Civil Service in 3-4t if we put the entire empire on Wealth builds...something to consider. We haven't finished our temples and monasteries though.

And as for Mistabod, there is absolutely no chance that we will attack them in the near future. They are leading but by no means in a position where they need to be attacked across the map. Attacking them through any means does nothing for us at this point. It would be more productive to attack yuris, and the only reason why we haven't done that is so that we don't have to fight Mistabod when they get Cataphracts.

[Gaspar]

God I hate AI diplo. I opened the save to this:



I assume this is Dave's way of telling us Commodore is coming after Cath with HAs and Axes?

[CFCJesterFool]

Commodore is coming after Cath with HAs and Axes?

Would that be a problem? How many cats do you have? Assuming he will use axes as stack defenders, a few spears in any city vulnerable to flanking would pretty much mean he would have to attack into cats at Cath, which is pretty much stack suicide.

[pindicator]

Or he wants you to provide military help near that city. Either way i would get units there ASAP.

[Gaspar]

For the record, here's the situation there.



We have another pair of cats that could be diverted there, though we paused on cat builds to get all the temples/monasteries down post-AP.

[pindicator]

I'd consider another spear or 2. If he comes at you with a big enough chariot/HA force it could do damage, and you'd only have 1 turn warning for emergency whips.

[Gaspar]

PB5 Spoiler

So I was thinking about that trade offer some more: Dave made this reply in Commodore's PB5 thread after rego sent Commodore essentially the same trade:

I haven't read Rego's thread lately. To me it looks like he's suggesting Yuri is coming after VB with Knights?

Now, its could be a coincidence that Dave offers that trade just a day or so after making that comment. But keep in mind Dave has Alphabet and hence can see what Commodore has teched. Just food for thought.

We then did a bit of tech analysis and can vouch that at least 2 people have machinery while 1 has feudalism. Nobody has guilds yet, though.

Anyway, there's a lot of inference there but ultimately I'm beginning to think Dave was trying to tell us about incoming Knights not incoming HAs. Which means we have some thinking to do.

[Gaspar]

So short report here - both Noble and I got pretty depressed playing this turn. I ran some incredibly rudimentary analysis on what kind of sacrifices we'd need to make to beat Ichabod and/or Dave to Liberalism. Conclusion?



Yeah... that combined with the fact that we might be getting Knight'd anytime now pretty much cinched that we're going to just head down the normal path. What's the normal path, say you? Uh, in this case - F1 probably tells the story best.



OR just finished a Monastery, fwiw. Anyway, it'll take us ~3t to get our Monasteries and such down and while we do that we'll save gold. Then we'll either go for CS or Feudalism, most likely Feudalism since Longbows are looking like they'll be needed soon.



That happened in world news, since I didn't mention it anywhere. There were a few good lines in our chat tonight that I'd post here if I were less despondent. I DONT EVEN THINK WE'VE PLAYED BADLY THIS TIME.