[SPOILERS] scooter, pindicator, and Huayna Capac try some fast Zulu cuisine

[scooter]

Ok, I've got two turns to report on, and I think it might get a little unwieldy if I lump them into one, so I'll do last night's turn (T80) before moving on to today's turn. First, the turn started as any good war turn starts - by flipping off the other player:



I hope that communicates my feelings towards Khmer adequately. Anyways, I took a peek with one of our unpromoted Impis:



So here's the deal. He's got 3 unpromoted archers (I'm considering CG to be unpromoted up here since we're fighting out of cities) on that forest by Subway. That's tough to crack. I technically get odds on it with my axe, but it's not appealing, and it's going to be a tough one in a few turns when his fortify bonus gets up. The cover Impi is also badly wounded, or else I'd be up for taking a shot at these guys this turn. So we'll have to wait until we can add another axe via chop, and I think we're going to add a chariot from LJS too. Possibly whip in that Impi at Mcdonalds too, we'll see. Anyways, this opened an idea up to me, which isn't as crazy as it first sounded.



Leave Subway defended by only axe + wounded cover Impi and dare him to take the shot. The Impi will go up to roughly 2.8 health (ended up being 3) at end of turn, and it's cover. He's not beating an axe straight up whatsoever, so this would mean in order to take it, he'd need to 2v1 the axe and beat a cover Impi straight-up, which is fairly unlikely. However, Commodore likes taking shots like these, so I'd rather the Big Huge Dice Rolls happen when they're in our favor rather than his. Also, the two south Impis are in a position where they can threaten Hidden Valley. If they move 2SW, they're in range to hit it the following turn. I theorized he's a little dry on units there, so it's just a flexibility thing. I doubt anything comes of it, but if he does something odd, it's just another option for us. Domestic front:



Basically, let's just deforest ourselves an army and see what happens. I set two workers to chop in the southeast. One should be for LJS, the other for In-N-Out. It'll give us a bunch of overflow out of that worker. We can actually do something domestic with that one if we want, but the idea for LJS is to cancel Azza horse next turn and get us a chariot. Commodore whipped something this turn, and of course it's an axe. So we'll need ourselves a chariot at some point here - Impi spam is going to be less productive until that dang iron is disconnected.

Azza is fine FWIW - Commodore managed to send him the iron for copper/gold. That'll get canceled if we can disconnect iron - but my point is Azza is building Praetorians right now so he's totally fine without the horse. Hopefully he wasn't mid-chariot build or something. So after the settler, let's go chariot:



I assigned the one forest to LJS after taking this shot FWIW so that it wouldn't miss again. We'll have this chariot EoT83.

[scooter]

And here's the turn I played this morning. Turn has since rolled again and Commodore played immediately, so we're up again for a 3rd turn in a 12-13 hour span. Great turn pace right now. Anyways, I mentioned he probably whipped an axe. I believe it was in the capital:



However, I hadn't been able to log in all week so I don't actually know what the pop figures were at prior to yesterday's turn. So I theorized on T80 the axe completed in Lakeside, but who knows. So there's going to be a few turns before it shows up, and we should be able to track its movement as a result. He also chopped this forest:



That's almost assuredly a unit, quite possibly an axe. I'm pretty concerned about that actually, we'll see. So the feint at Hidden Valley is not going to happen. ALSO, he brought in a chariot:



Yayyyyy. Time is ticking until Willowbrooke pops its borders too. Power graph shows the grim story:



He's just got a lot more at his disposal at the moment. If you can't beat Saruman, join him. So we'll chop ourselves an army too and hope the ents are likewise forgiving. The settler that we went ahead and finished is moving:



Canceled Azza's horse:



So I went ahead and started a chariot in LJS as planned. I'll pop into the game pretty soon here and see what mess he's made for us this turn.

[scooter]

PUZZLE TIME.



I despise the time/effort it takes to sim out a battle, but it may be necessary here. I just wanted to post this for lurkers to see - to see if you want to think through the defending yourself. There's a lot of possible reactions here, and I'm working on the puzzle right now.

[scooter]

Pindicator - my recommendation is that we put one of the two Impis in Subway and cover the chopping worker with the other Impi. This will expose us to a 6 on 3 attack in Subway next turn, but I think our odds of survival are enough to make it worth it. The odds of him winning aren't trivial, but they aren't amazing either. Plus it's his best chance - his window will close soon so maybe he'll go for it. I think the risk of not finishing the Subway chop is even higher.

I'm also in favor of the following:
-Whip McDonalds this turn. It'll regrow to sz2 at EoT to get right back on the gold, and it gets us the Impi 1T sooner than whipping next turn. Given the unit swarm, no choice IMO.
-Whip LJS's chariot this turn. This is only a 1pop whip. Then, a chop into LJS will finish next turn meaning we can get 2 consecutive units out of LJS.

Assuming we finish the chop at Subway, that means we get:
EoT82: Chariot from LJS, Impi from McDonalds
EoT83: Axe from Subway, something from LJS.

Poke me on chat/email for more details.

[Cyneheard]

Pindicator - my recommendation is that we put one of the two Impis in Subway and cover the chopping worker with the other Impi. This will expose us to a 6 on 3 attack in Subway next turn, but I think our odds of survival are enough to make it worth it. The odds of him winning aren't trivial, but they aren't amazing either. Plus it's his best chance - his window will close soon so maybe he'll go for it. I think the risk of not finishing the Subway chop is even higher.

His odds are below 20%, and my best guess is around 15%. Not even sure if he'll take the shot, since the cost of failure is dramatic: he'd trade 5:1 or 4:2.

[scooter]

Yeah, that's my thinking too. It's still vaguely tempting to swing that cover impi up onto the forest hill, but that might be pressing our luck too much. Plus that means Subway chop gets abandoned which makes it a no-go.

[scooter]

FYI Pindicator - I'll be around to play this in something like 4-5 hours or so.

edit: also, looks like Xenu just razed a Brick city..?

[NobleHelium]

Play 45 first.

[scooter]

Turn played as described, and I went with the McDs/LJS whips as well.

Death to Saruman.

[scooter]

Quick report. So I've been talking with Pindicator and Noble, and the reality is that we can't really win this duel under the circumstances. His cities are significantly better, and once elephants show up, this thing is over. Our only goal is just to make this as messy as possible for Commodore. So, rather than hunker down and just wait, we're going to take gambles as they come available to us. So on T83 (last turn, but played a few hours ago), we were presented with one:



If we win, cool, eliminated another archer and we've made it so that our worker on the forest does not need to be covered. If we lose, that sucks, but we finish it off with any random Impi and we'll get a promo. The issue is the fortify bonuses are a BIG deal, and they get worse each turn. So we took the shot and lost of course. The hits were 6-2 in Commodore's favor - including losing 4 rounds in a row to finish it off. This continues my abysmal run of combat luck against Commodore dating back a couple duels now. It's still only a little better than a coin flip, but it's still a bummer. Not that big a deal though. We also settled a city:



Um, ok, I missed the shot of actually settling, but we settled on that sign. Pindicator suggested the fast food name should be "something trashy to reflect our situation" so naturally we named it White Castle . So we shuffled our units like this at Subway:



Pulled the wounded (but promo available) Impi back into Subway, and had a green Impi take its place - an Impi that gets a promo from a successful defense at that. Chop went into an axe of course. So next turn. First, yay for this:



Nice commerce boost incoming. More importantly though:



Ok, so when I said the fortify bonus was a big deal, I wasn't kidding. The axe on archer odds there were around 56% last turn dropped to a staggering 30.9%. This is because the fortify bonus (and that bonus alone) notched the strength value of his archer up to 5.1, which being better than our axe's 5.0, made the odds pretty crappy. So after much debate, we unanimously decided to take another gamble. Our valuable cover Impi could still get 56% odds on his top archer. A victory would get us a 3rd promo. It would significantly risk the chance of Subway falling, but it's going to fall anyways, It will lose it's 3 western tiles this turn, so seriously it's practically a worthless city. Its only value is those forests, and he's got control of those. So we don't even mind losing Subway. But getting a win here would be a nice boost. So what happened?



He won the rounds 6-2 once again. So on our two combats that mattered, he won 12 out of 16 rounds. Story of my life in combat attempts against Commodore. Anyways go nuts on second-guessing if you're into that sort of thing, but we all 100% supported that attack and I'm not changing my mind with results-based analysis . The reality is we're going to take plenty more shots like this as the game goes because we're not winning this duel, so just about anything to increase variance is worthwhile.

If he can successfully finish us off in 30T or so, I'll take back all of most of the mean things I've said because that would actually pay off pretty well I imagine. We'll see. We'll try to make him bleed out a bit more, and hopefully a dice roll or two will swing our way some time.