Chairmen NobleHelium and Gaspar Demand Your Presence in the Collective

[NobleHelium]

Le excerpt.

me: i looked at the save
the game kinda just exploded
lewwyn jumped the gun on us
he's got 2 axes 2 immortals and a spear headed for n7 with a worker
in the tundra
n7 settled the east indies corn inland
Gaspar: yeah, saw that
me: lewwyn's planned west indies city seems fucked by mackoti on the other side of the mountains
Gaspar: yeah
game exploded is a pretty solid way to describe it
me: do we need to change our plans any
i feel like we need to pressure n7 in east indies
Gaspar: well
me: like right now
Gaspar: obviously can't settle anywhere in the east indies now
that plant invalidates all the places we discussed
I mean
we pretty much have to hit them there
or we'll eventually lose FM
me: lewwyn appears to be intent on converting our entire empire
or at least spamming missionaries until we adopt hinduism
Gaspar: well
if he really wants to do that
im happy to let him
i can live with the espionage hit
for free religion spreads everywhere

[ironstar]

Offtopic but holy crap Gaspar you would be in so much doodoo without RVP. Meanwhile we have Torres (...)

[Commodore]

Kyan has much to answer for. Mao living in interesting times?

[Gaspar]

Kyan has much to answer for. Mao living in interesting times?

Not really. I apologize for the dearth of updates - mostly its because the nature of how Noble and I play means two things:

1. We talk everything to death in chat so there's less excitement to run in here and get more opinions.
2. Because I work a lot of night shifts and Noble raids 2-3 night a week, we basically end up playing most turns at midnight or later. When you add in an average of 60-90 minute of us bullshitting through the turn, its just not any fun to come in here and tell you about it. Its time for bed.

But yeah, I hate when others do this, so I should update for you as well. No turn today because Lewwyn forgot to play/send it on so I'll try and motivate myself to pop open the most recent save and give everyone a run through our play. The short story is this: We're probably not doing anything particularly well. The long story is that the level of play is so high in this game that I think our play would have been good enough to win a lot of other games. Also, mackoti's dotmap is terrible. Like really, really bad.

[NobleHelium]

You guys will have to make do with samples of my wit in lieu of updates for now.

me: n7 actually has two cities in the tundra
the most hilarious thing would be lewwyn capturing the eastern one and us capturing the western one
then we rename the western one to "Not Ours" and offer it to trade with the eastern one
Gaspar: haha

[Kyan]

Kyan has much to answer for. Mao living in interesting times?

What have I done now?

[Gaspar]

What have I done now?

Better question, what haven't you done?

Anyway, I've been horribly remiss in updating this. If I don't do so tonight I absolutely promise to do so tomorrow.

[Gaspar]

Alright, let's take a little trip around the empire. Basically the last 20 or so turns have been characterized by us falling way behind in expansion and GNP, surging way ahead in soldier points, keeping competitive in production and bickering about the most minute worker movements. I still think we've not done a great job of staying focused on macro concerns while getting bogged down in micro concerns. But nonetheless we'll likely be attacking N7 shortly.

I'll start with domestic matters. This is the only city we've settled since we last spoke:



That will be a nice city once it gets up and running. I give the slightly zoomed out shot because that is probably the most contested area of the map. Lewwyn had a settler ready to go before mack sniped that southern site and not shown in the picture is that no7s gold city is in the West Indies. Likelihood of bloodshed in this area before the game is over: Huge. Which is why we should really get the 2nd city planted on the PH there shortly. Noble doesn't really like to expand though. Weird.

We've scouted mackoti's lands fairly extensively now. Portul Defildes might well be the absolute worst city I have ever seen a quality player found. What on earth was he thinking there? Ceilul de Bronz would also be far superior 2S of its current location. Nevertheless, he's smoking us, so can't get too smug.



The East Indies, by contrast, are primarily contested between us and N7. We had intended to settle 2 more cities there, at the yellow circles. Unfortunately N7 beat us to the blue circle by about 5t and hence we missed any chance to settle anything else here peacefully. Decent chance there's some bloodshed here as well before all is said and done.



In the south, we are furiously laying cottages at the first floodplains city and are getting ready to settle our second in ~4t, at the spot N7s chariot is on. That chariot caused Noble no end of consternation and forced us to juggle troops around a good deal. Because of it, we were unable to accept multiple N7 OB requests, since we didn't want them to see our HAs. This has probably had the unfortunate consequence of alerting them to our hostile intentions. So it goes.



In the north, as previously stated we got shut out of the Tundra as N7 slapped down a pair of cities. I suspect they're well defended as Lewwyn attacked them a few turns ago but turned around with his units in tow after a few turns of war. There's no doubt Lewwyn is public enemy number one for both N7 and mackoti. That SoZ build you see is more than anything a "WTF do we do with all these forests at this terrible city planted solely for defense" decision.



In the core cities, well... a picture is probably worth whatever words I'd put to it.



Now we have 6 Horse Archers, where shall we put them? Ho, ho, ho.

Here's our current location in the tech tree. We have everything before this but Polytheism and nothing after it. We're heading towards Monarchy via Priesthood with hopes of firing a GA with our impending GSpy and revolting HR/OR/Vassalage during it. After that? Hard to say, depends on what the others are up to. We'll feel pretty good to get back to an economic focus once Longbows are in, since nobody's cracking Pro LBs behind walls before Rifling. That should give us some time to [strike]catch up economically[/strike] make another harebrained home run play.



Here is the worlds most impressive military. *cough* As well as a decent shot at what our exploration looks like:



And the demographics, sad as they are.



Our production is actually quite competitive as both N7 and mackoti have had MC for a good while longer than us and we haven't built a forge yet. Questions, Comments, Concerns?

[Ilios]

Questions, Comments, Concerns?

Well, who are you planning on attacking, and where?

[Gaspar]

Well, who are you planning on attacking, and where?

Tend to play the military cards a bit closer to the vest but I'll do a fairly detailed military planning post on the eve of our attack.