[PB25-SPOILERS] The Lunacy of the Reign of HAK Continues

[HitAnyKey]

Whoa nelly! That looks like more than our 6-8 spear defense.

I was happy with the 7 that I believed that I saw earlier. How many are you building? If we've on target for 6-8 I think that it's time to switch to offense (cats/WE/HA)

Good luck on the interview!

Yeah, not sure if I was planning to complete all of these incoming spears right away but I at least wanted to get a turn of building into as many as possible, just in case Commodore does decide to attack us and we need to do a mass whipping. Also was figuring it would probably be a good idea to have at least 1 or 2 Spears at each of the other 3 borders with GJ/Borsche/Grimace.
The spear I had in Sore is currently marching up to Hungry, so the one it completes will stay there on the Grimace border.
The spear that just completed in Anxious this turn is also marching to Hungry, so the next one it completes will stay in place to help keep the GJ border secure.
Right now the SW towards Borsche doesn't have much at all. Just an Archer in each of Ranting & Sad. So need at least a few more units down there to make sure Borsche doesn't try anything.
I already have hammers into some Cats & WE's. So will probably switch to some of those before the Spears complete. Just wanted to get some build time into them.

Just finished the interview a few minutes ago. Couldn't really get a good feel for how it went. So just crossing my fingers at this point. Anyway, time to go meet up with the family at the pool.

[HitAnyKey]

Hmm. Well Elkad looks to have reason against both GJ and MC.

We sent a message to either Elkad and/or Donnovan before we DOW'd on GJ right?

You could reoffer many of his cities in exchange for Grumpy (too bad you have Anxious rather than Cautious) as an attempt to clarify. [I always wondered what would happen if someone hit ACCEPT]. Not really sure how he could respond to us or whether it's considered ethical. On the ethical note, I've seen some stuff from both Mackoti and Seven that attempt to convey messages and I think that it's generally permitted solely because it's so easy to misinterpret.

Probably he's intending Master Commodore as his target. I wonder if he realizes exactly how suicidal that is. He'll be dead in 20T if he attempts that and not from Master Commodore but probably from GJ.

If he's taking a shot at GJ,...well that's something that we could think about. But 5T is really soon regardless. With those spears in place we should have some options.

Yes, when I was getting ready to declare on GJ, I sent Elkad a Copper/Copper trade as my signal. But I really don't know what to make of this one. Not sure if he's thinking Commodore will attack him in 5 turns, or if he's thinking he would attack Com in 5 turns? But also don't know what I could do to even assist anyway, since I'm certainly not in any position to try to attack Com. Right now Commodore is my last target. Can't even think about him until we have lots of our UU.
So not sure what kind of message I can send back that would have any good meaning at all. After all, I don't even know what your suggestion is intending to mean.

Btw, as you can see we should have CoL in 2 turns. After that will be more gold saving until we can snatch up probably IW. And then likely straight up gold saving for a good many turns while we build our UBs. I'm also hopeful that we'll finally get Commodore's research next turn. I thought I might have gotten it this turn, but he's apparently putting at least some EPs into us that kept me from getting it.

As another aside...with the founding of Grumpy this turn, I believe I'm now getting 11gpt extra from retep because of the OB, which already makes up for the 10gpt I'm sending to him. It's tough to calculate since some of this gold from trade routes would also come from internal routes if I didn't have OB with him. So not exactly positive which amounts are the benefit from the OB.

[MindyMcCready]

I was writing this up before your posts, but diverted once I saw your T113 builds and Elkad offer.

Does this next one make you have a happier day? All the Spearman builds?

Ahhh, much better. That should pretty much do it for spears. Those spears pretty much guarantee that he can't come at us with only Knights.

Also, I had sent my galley up north to take a quick peak....

And if he does so, and offers Peace after killing it....well, I'm going to certainly accept that. Since for one, I can't do anything to retaliate....and for another...that'd get us 10 turns of peace to give us some peace of mind to finish other plans for the next 10 turns at least.

I don't think that MC is going to kill your galley needlessly. However, you should be conscious that a galley is a threatening unit. It could have 2 swords on board and could fork 2 cities (not looking at the map). So MC's reaction would be to put 6 units into those 2 cities. If he doesn't have those 6 units, he will feel vulnerable. So you should avoid those types of moves, or at least be conscious that he'll take it as a threat.

Now if he happens to DOW we should not make automatic peace.

Benefits of not making immediate peace:
-MC also cannot hurt us right now or at least not do so profitably.
-An attack force moving towards Borsche would take 5T to get into position from Sleepy. An enforced 10T peace treaty should be used to our advantage rather than given out for free.
-If we're at war with MC, Borsche would be less hawkish for an attack.


In fact, if MC DOW someone other than us (and that's very likely once we get those 7 spears in the choke) then we should seriously contemplate our own DOW on MC in order to get 10T enforced peace.

That power graph that you just posted. MC doesn't have any easy picking. We could potentially gain more, (or more, more easily) from 10T of peace than MC would once we're ready to roll. After comparing the DTay PB18 to this game, I'm not sure MC is going to gain much from an attack but more likely be brought down a notch relative to the world.

Oh, and I got my OB back with retep....pay 10gpt for it.

At first this seemed expensive to me. But your 0% went from 76 GPT to 84GPT (which includes the -10GPT I'm pretty sure). So if that's the case then I think that it was the right move. We can also think of it as 5gpt spread out over 20T I think.

Do you think that that was 10T of OB with him already? That seemed fast. Just so that you're aware, when you DOW you lose the 150% peace bonus until X number of peaceful turns. So trade routes with GJ for example aren't worth paying for (unless the turns have passed). And I really want to kill him for his corn+iron (+rice stranding) plant.

What I think that we should do over the next 10T:
-Primarily build military. Spears building will be done once those units come off the line. Yay! Now focus on offense.
-We need the deterrant anyway and we should be able to land 3 Borsche cities without committing everything.
-IW vs COL? Yes, I deterred you from IW earlier. Mea culpa. In my defense, I had to work out how we could stand up to MC.
-I'm not saying a slam dunk for IW,...but swords sure would be nice to have for taking Borsche cities. Time is on our side against Borsche so peace+COL is a strong alternative.
-The war alternative is to hit Grimace if MC targets him. But against those G3s,...that will be painful so we probably won't be ready for that. I'd rather just watch MC butt his head against those G3s and face a devestating counter-attack. A G3 would get (W/R/L) (33%/33%/33%) against a C2 Knight on a hill so I'd rather just stay out of that war for now.

[MindyMcCready]

Yeah, not sure if I was planning to complete all of these incoming spears right away but I at least wanted to get a turn of building into as many as possible, just in case Commodore does decide to attack us and we need to do a mass whipping. Also was figuring it would probably be a good idea to have at least 1 or 2 Spears at each of the other 3 borders with GJ/Borsche/Grimace.

Reaons #1 isn't terrible, however I think that with those 7 spears in a choke plus unknown in the fog Master Commodore will look elsewhere. We've also bought ourselves time by requiring him to get Construction + build cats.

As for spears by Borsche:
-You are a 15 city TITAN while he's been in a tiff with Gavagai (presumbaly the #1 power). By the grace of HAK Borsche gets to keep those cities. Let's not waste hammers on defensive units there. WE

Grimace is unlikely to build HA that have a what 5% chance of victory compared to his G3? G3's are better at defense, better at attack, cost less than HA,....he's going to spam these units exclusively so anything more than a single spear down there is a waste. Wellephants!

GJ,....GJ wants to contain MC. He's unlikely to cause us a hurt right now. Of the 3, he's the biggest risk but a WE or cat would still be better/more flexible.

[HitAnyKey]

Back from the pool and need to do a bit of relaxing and other stuff with the fam, but wanted to comment on something else. Not sure if you've been checking out civstats much, but something else I've noticed after reviewing it again....the past handful of turns have seen a lot of whipping from both Elkad and Donovan. I really wish I could find a way to meet Donovan...there's just no way for me to get a unit close to him. But anyway, not sure what exactly is going on but that side of the world might also be brewing for some tension. So the past handful of turns have seen Commodore, retep, Elkad, & Donovan all doing lots of whipping. Maybe later I'll actually count up (unless you want to for us) how many whips each of them have done in the past 5 turns or so.

[MindyMcCready]

Back from the pool and need to do a bit of relaxing and other stuff with the fam, but wanted to comment on something else. Not sure if you've been checking out civstats much, but something else I've noticed after reviewing it again....the past handful of turns have seen a lot of whipping from both Elkad and Donovan. I really wish I could find a way to meet Donovan...there's just no way for me to get a unit close to him. But anyway, not sure what exactly is going on but that side of the world might also be brewing for some tension. So the past handful of turns have seen Commodore, retep, Elkad, & Donovan all doing lots of whipping. Maybe later I'll actually count up (unless you want to for us) how many whips each of them have done in the past 5 turns or so.

I'll take a look.

Please change those excessive spear builds to offense or we won't be able to take advantage of any opportunities.

Seeing the whips so far my guess is that Donovan & Elkad are going to try to take a bite out of GJ. Elkad for the island and Donovan for that Creole plant. GJ's the local problem over there the same way Master Commodore is the local(and global) problem over here.

The other possibility is that Elkad is foolishly going to take a stab at master Commodore and is completely oblivious to what Donovan and GJ are going to do in response. Hopefully that's not the case.

I'll take another look at the tea leaves (whips) to see if there's any more info there.

[MindyMcCready]

Whips: This Turn/Last Turn

Borsche: 2/1
HAK: 2/3
Elkad: 4/0
MC: 2/2
GJ: 1/0
Don: 0/1
Grimace: 1/1
Gavagai: 0/2
RETEP: 0/2

So other than Elkad whipping away what little population he has i don't think that we can conclude too much here. Donovan's not showing any signs of being part of a GJ thing despite my wishful thinking.

Borsche and Gavagai look to be in the thick of it. You are probably freaking everyone out with your 5 whips in 2T. Given that you landed OB we probably don't need quite so much score management as I suggested earlier.

Earlier I sent an offer suggestion of Grumpy to signify "GJ". Elkad could confirm that be declining and sending back the same offer.

[HitAnyKey]

The this turn/last turn comparison doesn't show as much as I was referring to (especially since Donovan hasn't played this turn yet). He was last to play last turn and then just so far did a quick log in-log out this turn without spending much time to play (he's usually in the game about an hour each time he plays the actual turn).

So for last 5 turns (not counting this current one) we have:

Borsche: 1/3/0/0/1 (with 1 this current turn...plus founding a new city)
HAK: 3/0/0/0/0 (with 1 this current turn...the score decrease you see for me this turn was at the turn flip from losing tiles to Grimace culture)
Elkad: 0/0/3/1/1 (with 4 this current turn)
MC: 2/0/0/5/0 (with 2 this current turn)
GJ: 0/0/1/0/0 (with 1 this current turn)
Don: 1/1/2/2/0 (not yet played this turn)
Grimace: 1/1/1/1/0 (with 1 this curren tturn)
Gavagai: 2/0/3/3/0 (not yet played this turn)
RETEP: 2/0/0/1/4 (not yet played this turn)

So in the past 4 turns, Donovan has whipped 6 times...still waiting to see if he does more this turn. And three turns ago Elkad whipped 3 times and then he has the 4 this turn.
But I guess just a lot of whipping all around...except GJ.

Btw, I just logged in to switch some of the build queues and here are screenshots of both Grimace's and Borsche's new cities. Borsche did just now settle that southern spot. And Grimace just settled a southern spot too, stranding my galley now. I have plans to make another galley by one of the other coastal cities, so I suppose this one is fine to remain in these waters for now. But if I ever need it back west, I'd have to declare war to pass through his borders.






Here's the new build queue details. Started a city on a HA and flipped a few to WE's.



And while looking at things regarding Elkad trying to figure out his diplo requests.....there's this:



So at some point he became at war with Donovan. Since I haven't met Donovan I don't get to see that detail in my event log, so no idea when that happened. I'm guessing it was recent though. Will have to check civstats later to see when they might have started a turn split. So now don't think any diplo to him trying to signify GJ would mean anything at all, since he's obviously not going to be attacking GJ.

[HitAnyKey]

And these here are the hills I lost to Grimace in the culture battle. Luckily they don't matter to me anyway, since I had already stranded them from any city of mine being able to work them:



Also, here's some map details up by Elkad/Commodore. I got this info from a map trade with Elkad the same turn he sent me the weird diplo trade message:



Ok, and back to vacationing I go.

[MindyMcCready]

Some notes:

1. What's Master Commodore and Donovan got to war over? Probably just a boat passing through. I'm not sure what else that they would be warring over.
2. It seems unlikely that there's a Donovan+Elkad alliance vs MC given the geography. Elkad vs MC - good luck but no thanks.
3. Interested in a Gavagai city raze? Might put you in Grimace's good books. :LOL:
4. Nevermind the Gavagai city raze, what about Bibracate? He's going to plant there with no military. Tsk. Tsk. Do we really have a trusting relationship between us two?
5. Bibracte - that's a hilarious city plant. Does he think that he can steal the seafood with 2 larger cities putting culture in there? We will have to put some culture in there. It's not a terrible location for us though given shared food.
6. Unless you've already got a wb by Grumpy we're going to have to DOW unfortunately at some point. As I always say,...'might as well raze a city while passing through'. You probably should not listen to me.
7. Note that Grimace can see into Sore and Stressed and Hungry and possibly Sleepy (mountains, I'm forgetting the range).

8. You've turned tech on. That's not necessary, but a decision of course. So what are we going to do when we land COL? Options:
-A mass of whips to get our UBs?
-Keep building military. If we're going to stay on military, why turn tech onto COL. I'm not 100% convinced one-way or the other but I would want to say that we should beware of rising in score too early. Rathus induced tech boom might draw too much attention. Mid-range is where we want to be for now at least. I'm personally still eyeing Borsche's cities. Which way are you leaning?

9. Looks like Borsche and Gavagai made peace? Booo! Maybe the COL-Rathus is better after all.

10. As for the "vs Commodore" alliance,....I'm still drawing a different conclusion. Donovan's war with MC looks like a pass-through. Both Donovan and Elkad have something to gain vs GJ. Elkad knows that we messaged him before our GJ DOW. Maybe next time you login you can post what type of military GJ has in that city. I would love to take that from him ideally while keeping our island city. But if I had to trade,...well I'll take the corn +iron + rice thank you very much.

Regardless of who's DOWing who,...we'll keep building a bunch of military I imagine.

11. Have fun on vacation. :LOL: