[SPOILERS] Small Wunders and Izzy of Inca: The fat lady sings

[WilliamLP]

Merry Christmas,

If you feel like playing a turn (or more if they roll) go for it!

Considerations:
- I don't know if we have peace with Commodore or not. If not, we need to figure out if the workers at Magic Flute can be attacked by the W2 mace or not. If so the NW one should be covered by, probably 2 or units, so we could kill the mace if it attacks and kills the longbow. If he threatens Magic Flute as well, 2 units in the city is probably fine to win the counterattack. Use judgement on all this, obviously.
- The chops (or just one if the SW worker needs to abort) should go into a terrace... though a lb is a tempting chop it's less costly to move one or two more in from the mainland. I think I feel like at least 1-2 more lbs should go to the island, maybe even a cat.
- Ichabod shouldn't be able to see that we have a sentry chariot. I think it moves SE to see his potential staging tiles by La Bohome then moves back.
- The scouting chariot in the NE also moves E to see the hills in his territory, then moves back again so he doesn't know we're being vigilant checking him out over there. The scouting W2 quechua can go wherever.
- Longbows can be 1-whipped, please don't use 2 pop or more for one. Please don't whip La Traviata since it's very slow to grow and would like to work more tiles.
- Everything's basically going to La Boheme. But, check how many turns of peace we have with Retep, and we need to be aware and have something within range of that many moves to potentially defend Rigoletto when peace runs out, and also some units with a couple of moves of Hoffmann in case Bacchus is deciding to get frisky.
- There's an archer somewhere in the interior that is heading up to Tosca which just needs a dedicated military police unit to avoid unhappiness problems down the line.
- Turandot could build another elephant or a longbow. The elephant that finished is going SE obviously.
- Worker micro is whatever you feel like. Some of them are building watermills. Try to get every city pop working an improved tile.

[WilliamLP]

So, back to this game.

Nakor is dead! That's two down. Cheetah can't be far behind.




Commodore didn't want peace. The W2 mace forks both workers and Magic Flute itself. His galley delivered a missionary and another archer. Clearly that round of transports didn't expect heavy resistance.

The southern worker has to abort the chop, there's no real choice. The north one put one turn in a road to keep the forest for defense for a turn. There's a longbow and a chariot on it, and I don't think he'll risk attacking the bow. Magic Flute has 2 axes - if he attacks and kills one he'll lose the mace in a counterattack.

Magic Flute gets 2 additional longbows next turn. They're actually faster to move combining a galley load than they would be by land.






All is quiet on the Ichabod front. We're number 4 in power, and 3 of the top 4 are visible on our graph.

[WilliamLP]

Turn 149:

It's a stalemate on the contested island. Commodore cash upgraded his other archer to a longbow. So if we didn't know already, he's serious about his stake up there. The terrace up there finishes this turn with a chop.

Ichabod defense:




There are 11 bows in Boheme right now, with a bunch more filtering in. A lesser defense force is sitting around Manon for insurance. As of now, we're guaranteed to have a few turns of warning if Ichabod moves in.






The trireme seems like a reasonable bit of insurance to have.




Ichabod finishes guilds this turn. I wouldn't be even a little surprised to see a mass of whips into horse archers to promote to knights in the queue. But... our defense isn't exactly paper thin. He could be looking at this graph thinking "aww crap" and considering other plans. But you don't exactly build the number one military in the world and rush to guilds only to defend, do you?

[Ceiliazul]

you have the 90% of their army and you're three turns from guilds... who are YOU attacking?

not discounting your analysis, just gently lobbying for BLOOD!

[WilliamLP]

you have the 90% of their army and you're three turns from guilds... who are YOU attacking?

Shhh, you might awaken Mindy.

[MindyMcCready]

Ding!

Yeah, Ichabod's gotta have either cold feet about hitting us, or he's already heading the other way to the island. We're looking about as inhospitable as a region could.

I hope that we're not still adverse to Retep and his 170% bonus on strength 3 units. A handful of LBs on that hill next to Suit up + 5 cats to bring down the defenses and there's nothing that Retep and his 15 unit army could do to prevent it. Once the culture is gone, even a straight C2 LB would have reasonable odds 30+% on his best units. Since it'll take so few resources and we've built so much defense we're definately at the point we're we can discourge Ichabod while killing off Retep and claiming those 7-8 city sites. Done properly, we should have 1 settler ready to plant 1W3S of Suit up to make sure that we don't have any issues with Bacchus. LBs on that hill and our border issues with Bacchus should also be put to bed.

[WilliamLP]

I hope that we're not still adverse to Retep and his 170% bonus on strength 3 units.

I'm not sure when this game will be moving again but at this point, I'm considering that there may not be much left for us in this game other than to go Yolo and basically switch all cities to knights, basically after the current LB builds are done, and then hit Retep when we have 10-20 of them.

It won't be that long before the world sees rifles, but the good news is that Dtay and Harry will have them long before Ichabod (which should keep his attention), and though Ichabod is more developed than us, we actually have a semi-competitive tech rate.

[MindyMcCready]

I don't think that building up 10-20 knights to take out a 15 unit Retep army counts as a YOLO move. :LOL:

We don't need Knights to move in on Retep. He's got nothing that can dislodge a handful of G2 or even C2 LBs on a hill short of throwing his entire army away. We can bombard down his defenses to 0% with just a handful of cats while keeping nearly our full force on Ichabod's border if need be putting virtually nothing at risk. If we're still concerned about Ichabod and we want to play conservatively we could start off with as few as 10 units 5LB + 5 cats to start stripping the defenses.

We already have the cats. We have close to enough LBs to survive our absolute worst-case Ichabod scenario. We likely already have enough LBs and power to give Ichabod cold feet and we certainly will after that round of LBs completes.

Retep can't just whip an army into existance given his city size and his total army is about 15 ancient units. A C2 LB gets straight up 31% odds on those fully-fortified protective archers once the culture is striped. Add a splash of collateral (88hp?) and we're looking pretty good at 51%. He also doesn't have cats to absorb the collateral so each cat will do a heafty amount of damage. So after phase 1 strip defense is done, if we moved in with our 10 cats + 10-15 LBs we probably wouldn't lose more than 3-5 cats. Have a couple of HA or Knights ready for clean up operations of course.

At some point our concern will shift from when its lowest cost to kill Retep to "crap, Commodore (or Plako) just planted west of Suit up".

[WilliamLP]

I still think, when attacking in Civ 4, you'd better take what you think is overwhelming force sure of victory, and then double it or so.

Retep can certainly whip and build 10-15 additional archers in his 4 cities (most of them CG2) in between the time we declare and the time we could actually attack Suit Up. At 25 hammers they're extremely cost effective. I'm pretty sure he could deal with 10 cats + 10 longbows. 15 longbows, I'm not sure, but I think it would we lose more hammers than we kill. But I also don't think we can afford to move that much away from the east, unless we get a sure sign like Ichabod and HarryTourist going to war and doing damage to each other.

Knights not only are much better absolute attackers, but they also can kill any city not on a hill really easily while simultaneously threatening other things, and they also can get back in a fight against Ichabod pretty easily. We don't even really need stables because with Vassalage they get 2 promotions with a barracks anyway, and they wouldn't get a third one from a stables.

I call it a YOLO move because it's further putting us back vs the world. It's worth noting the things we're sacrificing:

- Lack of basic valuable techs: Iron, Calendar, CoL, Civil Service, Aesthetics, Lit. The 8-9 players above us have all these.
- No Moai site or even really a consideration of it yet. We haven't played the water game really, and such a city is a very large advantage.
- No HE site. This is also pretty huge.
- No Academy, no golden age in sight. Our first GP was just used to struggle for parity with a currency bulb, and the second was used for a shrine. These were both needed, but it's a key snowball piece that everyone else has. I've kind of consciously been ignoring thinking about our third GP as of yet. (I need to try a game without an early religion someday. )
- No NE GP farm city. Other teams are about to leverage the hell out of this, using scientists and merchants for 1500-2000 beakers each, and using golden ages to spawn 3-4 of them at a time.
- We're behind getting forges up in core cities, sacrificing long term hammers for more possibility of staying alive. In the long run this is a losing play vs everyone else.

[Ituralde]

In the long run we're all dead!