TBS finds Superdeath's title Ominous

[The Black Sword]

Two people know HBR. One of them is likely GKC of Mongolia, but I can't figure out the other and there's a lot of people who I'd rule out. There's a chance it's Commodore. I think I'd better build some spears to be safe. If he comes with Praets we'll have time to whip the axes, that's not so true of horchers.

[Lewwyn]

Secondly, I realised I misplayed when I was voting on city gifting. The mod has turned city gifting off, which means you can't properly express your displeasure by asking for all your enemy's cities. Pretty big oversight on my part. 

Yeah you really gotta hear the lamentation of their women.

[The Black Sword]

We had a dicey year in 550BC when that Roman power spike finally showed itself:


I screwed up here, should have already have whipped Tianjin, instead of having crazy thoughts about lighthouses. And my galleys should have been in position to ferry the units in Shanghai into the city too. Can't remember my reasoning there. 

That left Comm an opportunity to take the city, depending on how many units he had on his boats ...


Turns out that number was 2. I survived with 2 units to spare, so if he'd been able to fill the last two spots this blood-soaked little island would have fallen. We both won one unfavorable in the combat list above, my chariot defending his axe and his first HA victory. Since he had more unfavorables than me I got a bit lucky. I'm curious if he simmed it how many times he could have taken the city.

Anyway, the following turn reinforcements flooded in and the window was shut. We also birthed Geronimo for our trouble. I've been attacked with HA or earlier in all of my last 3 games btw, it is nice to always get the GG to unlock the Heroic Epic at least. 

After this pitched battle, we resorted to piracy. Burning ships in port:


Double teaming them on the high seas:


Culminating in a rare and majestic beast:


A Geronimo-inspired C3 galley! 

[Lewwyn]

That galley is the hero we all deserve.

How badly has the war slowed you if at all?

[The Black Sword]

I was thinking the war probably slowed this thing down 2t:


I could have saved 1 extra turn on production by putting more hammers into an overflow chain and I think I would have saved at least 1 turn on tech. But we got it anyway so I can't complain too much.

The first attack hurt the most - it cut my furs at a time when happiness was really tight and I was planning for them to be connected. Since then we've mostly managed to defend quite efficiently and we've had the second furs hooked in the south. 

Still we've probably built about 500h more military than you might expect against a normal neighbour and that would have snowballed into other resources. I think all my latest island cities would be further along in their development.

This turn we've joined all the other cool kids (Joshy and Miguelito/Rusten) on Currency:


Joshy currently makes 80gpt while the French team makes 150 with Financial and the Colossus, but we'll be making something similar I think. I should post a set of graphs soon, but the rest of my continent is not really doing all that much better than Commodore, so it seems we have a good chance of conquering the whole thing in the long run. Superdeath is whipping himself quite an army though, of what I presume are horse archers. I've sent some warnings to Tarkeel and Joshy and they are beginning to respond. SD shouldn't be able to make significant gains, not with the jungle no-mans land and the cultural depth behind that, but defensive screwups do happen...

My long term plan is to throw a 12t golden age immediately with my next GS. We'll try generate 3 scientists to bulb Machinery and Astro while we should still be able to make it rougly to Guilds by the end of the GA. Getting to Astro slows the Guilds time a bit, but I'm not super confident that a simple Knight rush will be enough to beat Commodore. If he can hit my knight stack with a bunch of Catapults, Praets and War Elephants I'd need a lot of extra production to come out on top. So I'm thinking of softening him up first by taking all his island with Galleons and CKN. My technological edge will be more effective the more we avoid big stack-on-stack combat.

It doesn't really slow Guilds down all that much either since most of the tech comes from bulbs. I need to tech Compass to open the Machinery bulb, so we're only spending 1k extra beakers on Optics, but that's a pretty good tech. It gives +1happy from whales, +1 trade route from Circumnav and some early caravels will probably be useful. I've finally managed to release a galley sailing eastward for circumnav, but this map is so long on the East-West axis we'll still be pretty late. There is some fogged ocean where some Galleon-accessible land could be hiding too.

I considered some sort of Liberalism run with all these beakers and scientists also but I find it hard to see how we'd do more than just liberate Astro anyway.



Commodore has 5(!) galleys down here. Even though my admiral promoted to C4 that might be too much for him. So my short term plan is to go for Metal Casing -> Aes -> Lit. I'd really like to whip Triremes down here rather than more galleys to deal with this. Comm's tech is really poor btw, if he matches me and goes for MC instead of something like Currency he might not manage to recover. I usually hate to start trireme fights but it looks like the best option here. We want to go for Literature since we've unlocked the Heroic Epic, which is a lot of free hammers and of course the NE will help generate my scientists. I'm going to give a run at The Great Library too, but I'll treat it more as a bonus if I get it. Someone birth a GE not too long ago also. I was originally planning to go for Literature before MC to improve my chances but changed my mind when the extra boats showed up.

After that we might go for either Iron working or Code of Laws, since I'll probably need one 5t Caste period. We're delaying IW super late thanks to settling on the gems way back when. It also unlocks some yields from the iron itself and a jungle covered banana tile, along with the 2 two jungle island bordering the second continent. I consider good relations and lucrative open borders super important with those overseas guys, so I'm in no rush to settle those anyway. If I lose both I'm not too worried, so I think prioritising Lit and MC is worth it, even if IW is a good tech.

Demos are still sitting pretty:

[The Black Sword]

Insert rant I will regret later here. 

[Hitru]

Lurkers demand rant!

[The Black Sword]

So, a rant?

I think a big part of my frustration is just playing too much civ right now. I wouldn't have signed up for a 2nd game except for the fact that this was one of the big ones. And even then I was hoping a) the land here would be smaller and b) the complicated parts of 57 and 59 wouldn't overlap so much. But 57 slowed down and this became more complicated quicker than usual.

Of course Commodore's play is also super-annoying. It feels like he's been playing to make me lose, instead of trying to win himself, ever since he lost the race for Tianjin. He has no early game traits, I have two, he has to expect to lose some of these 50/50 early game races. Was he always just going to just give up when that happened? Even if I monumentally screw up and he somehow manages to win this war he'll be way too far behind to compete. Maybe he thinks if I'm left alone I'd snowball too much and he's better to fight now than fight later. But again, that's not playing to win, just playing to lose to someone else.

And the only thing more annoying than someone playing like that, is me screwing up and rewarding them for it. Which unfortunately, I've played a couple of sleep deprived turn lately and I've done that. 
-Lost a city last turn, that I had the units to cover, just placed them on the wrong tile. Didn't think the river disconnected my roads.
-Thought I'd lose a second on the inner sea. Had two units ready for the city, because I check his city every turn for him to waste 50h on another galley there. Then when I go to put the 2nd unit in the city I find I've moved him in the wrong direction. Fortunately it appears his galley was empty.
-Had whipped an axe in Tianjin, ready to overflow into a trireme. I open the next turn and it's still in the queue. I thought it was a bug at first, but I think I must have put it on a wealth build after the whip somehow. I don't remember if it was on wealth when I opened the turn.

The RNG decided my beautiful C4 galley should lose it's first 75% fight. Which was quite an important one because I lost the ability to connect my mainland and island defences.

And of course we've played this entire 30t ancient war from the first slot in the timer, which gives you one less turn to react to anything.

Joshy attacked me too btw. I was offering him a free silks and superdeath was building his massive army next door, but alright. I know I was leaving my cities empty, but I had scouts sitting on top of his slow galleys, give me a bit of credit that I'd have defenses prepared by the time you attack? He's lost 5 units to kill my 1 warrior because he brought no spears to cover my chariots, which gave me my second GG. Not 100% sure whether this was bad for me to be fair.

But in general:   .

[Lewwyn]

Yeah, playing the game in a constant state of war is less than ideal.

Rip C4 Boatface  

[The Black Sword]

Can a lurker ask the following question in the tech thread for me:

Are we allowed to use the number on a gold trade to communicate information. Eg. 5g for 5g usually means something will happen in 5t. Or should we stick to only 'real' gold trades. 

I don't want to revel any information by asking myself. Of course if there is already an answer to this somewhere that I missed, let me know.