[spoilers] Pindicator and Regoarrarr - Bismark of Ethiopia

[pindicator]

Well if its gonna be that long i might be able to find a spare moment

[regoarrarr]

Okay I played and ended turn. We have 14 knights currently and 4 more finishing at EOT.

Scooter birthed a GE, so we shall see if he rushes Taj or UoS. No new techs that I could see - we'll have Engineering at EOT.

Where were we going after that? I saw something where you were proposing Education? I think we maybe should skip that, at least for now

[pindicator]

I thought we were doing Paper next. Gunpowder is a good possibility after that, or we can go Monk Economy and aim for Divine Right on the way to Nationalism.

This is all up for debate though, so what do you think we should do?

[regoarrarr]

I like Paper. We want to make sure not to actually discover Paper until the attack starts though, so Yuri doesn't know exactly what we have.

I agree that Gunpowder and Divine Right both seem like good techs after that. Probably only DR if we get UoS.

[regoarrarr]

Also - turn rolled. We can get Paper in 2t, but we probably don't actually want to do that, for reasons I mentioned above.

It's T185, so 5t from D-Day. We built 4 more knights, bringing our total up to 18, and will complete 4 more. I did not rename our knights nor mess with the logistics.

I do think that if it won't slow down any of our knights, that we should swap from the 0/5/2 PHM to the 1/4/2 watrmill at More Cowbell. That will let us grow that final size a few turns earlier.

Scooter got Liberalism (no surprise), and took Nationalism. Given that he birthed an engineer last turn, I think we are confirmed that our Taj hopes were nothing but a giant pipe dream.

I'm kind of thinking Gunpowder next (probably after Paper). Then we could also potentially pull off a Gunpowder for Education trade with Scooter?

Should we chop these jungles?



I was keeping them unchopped since it slows down Krill's movement should he attack us. But we are running out of things for our workers to do so we could farm / workshop those.

[regoarrarr]

As far as our workers on the new continent, here was my thoughts



* Norm and Oprah (in red) finished the workshop at Coneheads this turn and put 1t into a road. My thinking was that they finish the road next turn, then make their way down and road the eastern staging tile no later than T189, then T190 they can each finish the roads on the Yuri attack road (red dotted lines)

* Mike Myers (farming in cyan) can continue to farm

* Kevin Nealon and Lorne Michael (purple) put a 2nd turn of chopping in this turn (T185). T186 they can finish the chops - the courthouse at SB also finishes at EOT186, so we'll have a lot of overflow due to the 2 chops, which we can put into Wealth. Then on T190 they need to road the western attack road.

Sound good?

We need to start moving some of those knights and HA (16 and 4 I think) over somewhere to the west. Pretty much all the ones that are done now are for the western army, and the "stragglers" will be in the eastern army. We do need to watch out for tiles that Yuri can spot with a sentry unit, as well as break them up in case he has a spy.

[regoarrarr]

Feel free to end turn when you're done.

[regoarrarr]

Okay so I have been thinking about our impending attack, and how to make sure that it is a success (or at least improve our odds of success). I have been following PBEM38 quite a bit, and have some thoughts on recent developments there. Given that we have a bit of a lull in this game, it seems like a good time to do some introspection

I'm going to put it in spoiler tags just to be on the safe side, but I don't really consider it a spoiler - the only person I'm not sure about is Yuri and he is playing in this game so won't see it anyways - all the other players have already seen, mentioned and commented on what I'm about to say in their own threads. If anyone has any specific questions about whether they should read it, let me know. Pindicator I know that you are dedlurking Gaspar and I think you're fine

So the basic idea is that Mist and Ichabod, playing Byzantium, whipped up a massive Cataphract stack, and attacked oledavy. They managed to take 2-3 cities, then decided to attack Commodore. I don't want to get into the specifics of reasonings there since we start heading towards spoiler-ville, but they ended up razing 1 city of Commodore's, forced him to whip a lot, but then got their whole army pretty much killed. So, net-net, they got pretty much nothing from their big Cata-Stack.

Dave apparently studies military history in real life, and he made an IMO very good post in his thread about what went wrong. A few of them we have not repeated. I feel like we have got Guilds in a fairly good timeframe - Yuri may have Engineering but I don't think he has a ton of pikes. I also feel like, even without Slavery, we have produced a good number of knights in a short timeframe. We also have most of our knights with 2 promos (and some very close to a 3rd). Unfortunately, we have knights and not cataphracts

So the 2 things, at least according to Dave, were that they went into the war with a hazy goal, and early on they made a strategic error of not pushing the majority of their army into the right place.

So we need 2 things:

1) What is our goal? What criteria define "success" in this case?

2) Strategically, where are the weak points. With a 2 mover stack, we need to look for ways that we can cut off and fork his cities.

We probably need an updated map of Yuriville, though of course the game is down now . But geography is kind of working against us, since from what I remember, his land is pretty blobbish (no real choke / cutoff points).

I feel like we're on the right track here but we should spend some time here fleshing out our plans a little more past "Take those 2 border cities on Turn 1-2 of the war"

[regoarrarr]

Okay here are some pics



Normal orientation



Flying camera to rotate 90 degrees. I have also marked a tile that forks 3 of Yuris' cities. Not sure we can get our whole force down there though....

Also, with the workshop at WW finishing, I swapped off a 2/0/2 coast tile to a 1/5/0 workshop. I assume that doesn't mess up any micro?

[regoarrarr]

Here's another pic, focusing on his eastern holdings, for purposes of planning Operation Funyun



We can move towards Inferno Island, but we might be better served sailing around the south coast, forcing him to keep troops in those cities. Or maybe whip out some triremes which are pop he's not whipping into pikes. Too bad we got map-jobbed on circumnavigation.....

Also notice that Yuri spread Christianity to Kolhar this turn - thanks!!