[SPOILERS - El Grillo & Charriu PB51] One step at a time

[El Grillo]

Pics next turn, perhaps.

GKC took me up on my offer and declared war on Plemo, asking for some gold in return which I was happy to oblige. I sent more requests to Ramk and Lazteuq, but my hopes aren't very high that they'll engage. Who knows what GKC is actually committing here, one of the painful consequences of fighting vanrober was that he managed to snipe some of my Sentry WCs in that area with Impi and I now I've lost vision on that front. Even if he can just threaten action and force Plemo to split his Knights and Catapults, it'll be worthwhile.

My one-mover stack finally got back to the capital, and I think the play is to just move in ASAP. The Knights will all be healed and I can still use the damaged Catapults to bombard. More bodies to soak collateral are also welcome, and most importantly fewer turns for Plemo to draft. He somewhat surprisingly swapped to Caste in his Golden Age so he can't whip for a couple more turns, so this is our one window to do damage. The stack moves next to his city in 2 turns. On the naval front, he's withdrawn his EIM such that I don't think any more coastal razings are likely, and I'm not stopping C3 Galleon production from the HE city. The hope I'm clinging on to is that somehow we can beat Plemo's land army, and as he hunkers down in his mainland cities, I can put together a strong enough fleet to take some of his islands (probably not the treasure island since he can just draft those cities for all the happiness he can muster) with less effort.

If I allow myself to be inappropriately optimistic for a change, a big fleet of C3 Galleons seems like a great asset in a post-Plemo-hegemony world where no one else knows Astronomy

[El Grillo]

Here's the invasion force. The peek into Rotterdam is current as of this turn.

I have:

20 Knights
15 Catapults
8 Pikes
2 Maces
2 Crossbows
2 Longbows
3 wounded Axes
2 wounded Spears
3 sentry WCs
6 combat Workers

Next turn, we road the grass and move everything onto the plains hill 1 SW of Rotterdam.

A few more are trailing in, but I think I'll consolidate them for defense or (in my irresponsibly optimistic version of reality) an amphibious southern attack. Hopefully this is enough to make Plemo sweat a bit. He just finished Printing Press, not Music towards Military Tradition, and he's out of gold so maybe the window isn't quite as small as I had thought. He will be able to swap back into Slavery soon however, and has massive stores of pop to whip away.

GKC must have actually made a sizable attack, because Plemo attacked into it, fell below 1st in Power, and generated a GKC Great General.

Ramk offered iron-for-iron back. Lazteuq remains silent. Superdeath earned another Great General. I hope they're having fun over there :V



I'm not even that surprised to find what looks to be ANOTHER treasure island in the outer sea. Didn't Ramk's script get rid of all the floodplains/forest/jungle on unnatural tiles? Guess not, those are water floodplains and tundra oasis deer. Fun times, at least it doesn't look like there's room for another, except in the middle of the inner sea.



The naval theater. I'm trying to leverage forts and ports to counter his extra movement point, and raw numbers to fight his EIM's strength advantage. Not only do I want to clear my waters to fix my fishing nets, but my irresponsibly optimistic version of reality requires that I regain some measure of naval initiative, so here we are. Perhaps I would be better off with a dozen more Knights and no Galleons, but I doubt it. I've sunk 5 EIM already at 1:1 exchanges and even if most of them were unloaded, letting Plemo gather his forces and raze my Heroic Epic city would've been disastrous. My Classical fleet of 4 Caravels and 4 Galleys is sheltered further west, where I don't feel confident venturing out yet.




And despite all this, this is why I'm still convinced the game is still over. Even if we get a glorious 3v1 going (Lazteuq clearly won't be participating short of divine intervention) Plemo should have enough pop and time to limit his losses to a handful of mainland cities, and then reach the next tier of units and present us with the classic dogpilers' dilemma of who wants to go first, take the heat, and let the others claim the spoils... Then, thanks to his wonders and traits and treasure islands, he'll still be able to compete and can probably take the rest of the outer sea islands from vanrober and GKC to get enough pop to keep pressing ahead. We'd need to take Amsterdam and The Hague for this to actually change things, and those are deep behind the front lines.

[Charriu]

I think he only got rid of the forests because those were the only ones found

[El Grillo]

Ah, I suppose so. Well, the next few turns will certainly be interesting. Ramk has a Chariot shadowing my army so this is where he decides whether or not to stab me deeply once my army is committed and damaged. I left one sentry WC to watch, just in case, but still... I just have to trust that he understands the situation that even if he were to take a big chunk out of me, an insufficiently damaged Plemo would still beat him in the long run.

[Kurumi]

Is Plemo hurting on trade routes due to current wars or no? I guess there's ocean tiles that they can use, right?

Is Maastricht on a hill? I can't tell.

[El Grillo]

Plemo has big enough island cities and is running Rep/Merc. Maastricht is on flat land.

[Kurumi]

Plemo has big enough island cities and is running Rep/Merc. Maastricht is on flat land.

Aw, so trade routes ain't that big. What is your preferred city capture route?

[El Grillo]

I think we want to raze mainland cities, pillage those towns, and look to capture islands. More realistically, Plemo defends easily and we just call the game like I’ve been asking for.

[El Grillo]

Plemo has 13 Catapults and a few hitters in vision, and it looks like GKC broke pulled back after one round of combat, so it comes down to how many Knights GKC was able to move out of position, and if they're in range to get back to Rotterdam this turn, or hit the stack. You can also see some of Ramk's forces forcing up to perhaps take advantage of a weakness at Leiden. We exchanged some trades while both logged in this morning that I think convey being on the same side here against Plemo.

I bit the bullet and promoted my Knights to C3 instead of waiting two turns to be able to take Pinch.

Somehow, Plemo has once again found a way to hide his tech rate and finish Replaceable Parts 2 turns after Printing Press with seemingly not a lot of gold left. Perhaps he manually built Taj and the Great Engineer he got earlier bulbed it? Did he have close to a full turn's amount of overflow? Or am I not properly calibrating how quickly you can tech when you have probably 1500bpt research? Anyway, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Plemo somehow has Rifling completed next turn as well.

In the best of worlds Plemo's forces are out of position and he decides to fall back instead of spending his Catapults here. What I actually expect to happen is that my forces are one turn too late from properly coordinating with GKC, and so Plemo's Knights are back in position and he can trade off profitably enough that my offensive immediately fails.

[El Grillo]

Opened the turn to a peace offer from Plemo. And wow what do you know, he did it again and made my worst-case scenario come true, Rifles everywhere and a Knight stack in range. He battered my stack on his turn a bit, but I saw no way to withdraw without losing the rest of my Catapults to Knight flanking anyway, so I just threw everything at the city without bothering to sim it out and predictably barely made a dent. I logged out without finishing the turn with a few wounded low-value units left, but I should probably just delete them instead of leaving them as EXP fodder.

Apparently I'm still 2nd in Power after losing 30 units like that, so I'm left really curious who's insisting that we play on.

I think the play here is to just delete the rest of the stack and send back a peace treaty and just play 1-minute turns for 10 turns. I think that's the most emphatic way I can communicate to the other players that I want the game to end while staying in the spirit of AI diplo. Maybe I tech Paper so I can send maps to everyone who might be in the dark about the island situation.

EDIT: Yep, let's go with that and wash our hands of this. Deleted the units, sent back a peace treaty, set all the cities to wealth builds so I can 2-turn Paper, and the plan is to just send my maps and press End Turn until the game is called.