Gaspar and NobleHelium - More Arguments About Buildings & Food.

[NobleHelium]

So yeah the turn took an hour to go through yuris-Commodore-Mist. I don't know whether I should laugh or cry...

[NobleHelium]

Played turn 136.

We finally finished the SoL. Unfortunately it seems the SoL does not behave like the HG and the Taj, and the subsequent cities did not get to work the extra specialist this turn. We discovered Coal at Alcarnus, giving us an extra three adjusted hammers this turn. We also have Coal southwest of KA which currently can't be worked, but it does improve a potential future city site there. Commodore has Coal at Kiki (grunt) as well as east of his Oil near his capital.




We should finally finish off yuris next turn. We're finally starting some much needed Courthouses in the conquered lands, and we also further increased our power lead as Commodore's power has not gone up. Expenses are now over 500 gpt. Next turn we'll start a few leevees. We also lost our southern Spy, so we trained a new one as replacement.

We'll swap back to Representation next turn, keeping Pacifism although it's getting very expensive (about 50 gpt before inflation - compare to Bureaucracy at 32 gpt). Assembly Line will take 4-5t. Then we'll swap into OR for building Factories.



Just noticed the 36 Life Expectancy...I guess that's yuris who only has three health resources in a size 13 city?

[Gaspar]

So the big news of the turn is the final battle vs. Yuri. Spitefully, he moved out/deleted all 5 of his workers that had camped in the city. I don't think he could have gotten them anywhere to gift them to someone so I guess its okay though I'd be pissed if he gifted them to someone. Anyway, enough about that. Here's the battlefield:

A little mood music...



Against that, we have:

3 Catapults, 10 Cho-Ko-Nu's, 7 Knights, a Maceman, 2 Axemen and a Chariot.

ROUND 1 FIGHT

Sent in 3 sacrificial cats, 2 promoted Barrage leaving us this battlefield:



Amusingly, Geronimo was born to uh... die.

C1 CKN vs. CG1 LB @ 5.4/6 (3.7%) = LOSS, down to 2.9/6
C1/Shock CKN vs. CG1 LB @ 4.9/6 (9.6%) = LOSS, down to 1.5/6
C1/Cover CKN vs Ivan @3.4/6 (24.6%) = LOSS, Ivan down to 1.7/6
Unpromoted Knight vs CG1 LB @ 4.4/6 (52.5%) = WIN!
C3 Knight vs CG1 LB @4.0/6 (88.8%) = WIN
C3 Knight vs CG1 LB @3.8/6 (89.6%) = WIN
C2 Knight vs CG1 LB @3.4/6 (95.3%) = WIN
CR2 Mace vs Unpromoted LB @ 3.4/6 (92.1%) = WIN
C2 Knight vs Unpromoted LB @ 4.0/6 (91.2%) = WIN
C3/Cover CKN vs CG1 LB @ 2.9/6 (91.8%) = WIN
Davy Crockett (C3 CKN) vs. Ivan the Terrible @1.7/6 (96.9%) = WIN
Oh, Davy
C3 CKN vs. CG1 LB @ 1.5/6 (99.4%) = WIN
C3 CKN vs Unpromoted Axeman @ 2.7/5 (99.8%) = WIN and Bursa is ours.



GG Yuri



City comes with Granary, Forge, Market and settled Great Prophet.

We then made this civic swap:



And settled this:



Swap to Rep plus completion of SoL plus elimination of Yuri plus plus plus... meant we had to rejigger all the cities this turn.

A little pressed for time so I'm just going to slap on demos and I'll talk a bit more about domestic matters later.

[NobleHelium]

Mist lost Bravery to davy? Seriously?

I hope you moved that spear into GoH by the way, that's kind of why it's there...

[NobleHelium]

Played turn 138.

Last turn of the GA. We popped two GPs this turn, an Artist out of Cathedral and a Spy out of DO. I noticed two mistakes that Gaspar made last turn, but then I made one myself this turn. Here's a look at F1.



The finished build is a Rifleman. Obviously next turn we will rectify those huge negative food balances, which were used to take advantage of the last GA turn. As you can see we've laxed on the military builds significantly, because we're now ahead by about 250k power and Commodore's is not increasing at all.

davy also requested Dye and Sheep again, which we again declined because we're not butting our business into their fight. Not to mention that davy is still giving all his resources to Commodore and all that.



Power graphs show significant losses on the part of davy, and of course Mist lost his city. davy gets a GG.

Commodore finally pillaged a mine outside Diamond Gates, so I pillaged the horse pasture before he can do it this turn. Alternatively I could have run an Artist at Rakkis Crossing to get culture over the tile, but that didn't seem worth it. I suppose he can pillage the road to spite us now that I think of it. He also finally popped his GA (I guess he's done scouting us) and swapped back into Bureaucracy.

Last turn Commodore moved his big stack to threaten us near Kiki, so we moved our stack in position to blast him should he move in. But he backed off this turn and moved the stack back south near Caldeum.



With yuris dead, nobody is trading with anyone anymore. We're making nearly 700 culture per turn so Commodore is probably making more beakers than us right now, with us out of GA. We will start a new GA in 2 or 3t, depending on whether we want to wait until we can swap to OR or not. We can probably do 2t to get an extra Pacifism turn? I don't know, we'll see.

[DaveV]

I've been waiting for a "Take me to the river" post since I saw the title on this thread , but it's looking as though it's not going to happen. Probably no one else remembers that song...

[Gaspar]

I've been waiting for a "Take me to the river" post since I saw the title on this thread , but it's looking as though it's not going to happen. Probably no one else remembers that song...

Huge Talking Heads fan here - I know the song. Just hadn't occurred to me.

[Gaspar]

Here's that rhythm again.
Here's my shoulder blade.
Here's the sound I made.
Here's the picture I saved.
Here I am.

For you, Dave.

I'm not really sure what to say about the turn, Noble played most of it while I was sleeping and I just finished it off this morning. The main thing really is we're prepping to go after Pentagon, which is stupid expensive. Assembly line is due in next turn which means that we'll probably go right ahead and pop our 3-man golden age shortly after getting it to do the obnoxious Factory/Coal Plant building phase. We'll also be able to build Infantry which are nice from a strength point of view but the extra 20h cost is less than welcome from Rifles. Speaking of which, here's an issue we'll need to resolve shortly:



Four coastal cities in that shot, garrisoned by a total of 3 spearmen. Once Commodore backs down and techs Astronomy, we'll need either 4-ish outdated units per coastal site or a couple modern ones.



The more important west coast sites are better garrisoned but also a more inviting target for aggression. Anyway, regardless its something to think about.

We'll probably do Railroad after Assembly Line then head towards Bombers. That means we're roughly 10t away from obsoleting our awesome Monasteries, but so it goes.

Commodore settled this to stave off cultural pressure. It will probably succeed to sufficient extent, though it also leaves another point to defend.



Here's the Demos, not bad considering Commodore is in GA and we are not though we have a tech selected and he does not:

[Gaspar]

Also - what could you guys possibly be talking about in the lurker thread? This game is well past interesting at least until we get sufficiently bored to invade Commodore.

[Gaspar]

Triple post - I just met you and this is crazy, call me regoarrarr maybe.

I was thinking about Yuri's goodbye post and I'm sure after the game we'll get a lot of "You guys played well, but..." comments. To some extent of course, this is correct. We have played well but the northern starting position was vastly superior in terms of defensibility, having the largest blackline. However I would argue its second worst in terms of land quality - only Yuri's jungle-choked start which I have no idea how novice/plako let get out was worse. But more importantly, this game was swung on good decisions by us vs bad decisions by our rivals.

Commodore in particular made two awful plays which probably are the reason we'll win:

1. He propped up Dave vs Mist for no reason, eschewing the opportunity to either invade Dave on the other end for land spoils or completely ignore that area.
   
2. He didn't invade us any of the myriad times he had the chance. Clearly, he was overly spooked by CKNs (I've gotten this sense chatting with him casually) and hence never wanted to risk it. But he had Rifles many turns before we did and was in Nationalism. A dedicated attack at any point between when he got Rifles up until maybe 5-6 turns ago would have caught us with a significant amount of our military tied up with Yuri and relying on good rolls on things like Axes vs wounded Rifles.
   

More on the second point - there's an argument to be made here that we would have defended the attack. And we may well have. But by not attacking he's simply allowed us to use our production advantage to outstrip him. We've got almost 300k more power than him now, we're going to be first to Infantry so that will only grow and I honestly don't believe he'll have another realistic opportunity this game to attack us.

Don't get me wrong - 1 was a bigger failure. I would have left Dave to Phractmageddon and tried to poach Thessia and Dave's capital. Then kept teching and maybe considered taking a poke at poorly defended Mist gains post Rifling. But by propping Dave up he earned an enemy in Mist that started the cascade of actions that caused him to lose a very winnable position. And that, more than land quality, defensibleness or Yuri's tastiness as a conquest is what put us in a winning position: We took a gamble when Commodore kept hedging. So put that in your sanctimonious pipe and smoke it.