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

[pindicator]

Played some of the turn, moving the chariots that are headed south to try to get some free xp off the barbs, and the workers. The loading and the galleys is untouched and you'll have to finish that scooter.

First off, Commodore is not bothering to hide is intentions come turn 112:



Fine by me. Now I know we need to redo the plan for LJS to start whipping earlier and get every hammer possible out of that city by end of t111. Larger strategy question: Do we try to leave units behind to slow him down or use our roads to race him to White Castle? Sadly we cannot pillage roads within our culture; we have to wait for LJS to fall first.

At LJS this turn the 3 workers chopped in the galley. Next turn we start a Catapult. LJS also had 1 point of whip anger fade off and I put that citizen to work on a plains mine.

When that galley completes, please have it pillage the clams by the city formerly known as McDonald's. I pillaged the cottage (that I don't think we ever worked), and I'm tempted to pillage our hamlet too, except that may give away to Commodore that we don't plan on putting up a defense at LJS.

In N Out worked pigs & plains mine per the plan.

White Castle is still growing on a chariot. (There's a sign at White Castle that says Settler @ 4 and that is incorrect. Settler starts on turn 107 when we're at 19/26 food. Please double check citizens are working Clam, Lake, and Farm this turn; I dont' recall that I checked. Next turn we swap to Clams, Lake, and Grass Mine.

And then our Impi found what we were pretty sure we would find:



I also labeled the spot for our final settler. Sadly there isn't a good 1-tile island with a food source (well, there is but it's in the south and completely in the wrong direction). There's another possibility farther east: a 2-tile island with Clams and Horses; but India would see that and we can't alert them to our presence (especially if they're playing the isolationist game and not sharing maps).

[NobleHelium]

If we have enough movement we should pillage the fish instead of / in addition to the clam. We'll get gold for that.

[scooter]

I'll login to finish things off in about an hour tops.

One thing we should keep in mind - we're going to lose our copper/horse when LJS falls. We may be able to get a copper/iron/horse gift from somebody, but we can't bank on that. So anything other than catapults/archers/galleys needs to be finished from city queues before LJS falls.

Pindicator - did you ask for any freebies in the foreign department? If not that's fine (I'll do it when I'm in), just wanted to make sure we didn't double up on any requests or something.

[scooter]

Finshed the turn, verified we're working the correct tiles. Offered map trades to Serdoa/Azza again (as long as we have no India maps, every 3 turns or so seems like a good idea). Also, I tried this:



Worth a shot right? He's not using it currently. I like our chances here - we saved his bacon with the horse gift earlier, so I'd like to think he'll throw us a bone here. Plus it always is nice to prop up a struggling team. Only reason I figure he might reject it would be if he's afraid of angering Commodore, but I still think he'll do it. Anyways, this would help out In-N-Out especially as it's in anger and pretty much will be constantly until we lose it. Oh, Azza has also not completed turn, so he'll accept or reject before this turn ends, which means we could get the benefit this turn rather than just next. If we see him play soon, we should pop in to see if we need to assign a tile at INO.

By the way, we will have the option to upgrade our White Castle warrior pretty soon here. I'd hold off on doing that - we may quickly run into a situation where we're struggling on the unit support front - but it's an option we have.

[pindicator]

We got the happy!
Time to re-work the plans.
This is going to give us an extra whip in every city, which roughly means an extra unit from every city.

Edit: As for horses & copper, we should hook up the copper at White Castle by turn 112 or 113 at the latest. That will keep metal unit production going.

Edit #2: Please don't end turn on t105. I'll have a new plan up by end of day tomorrow. 3 cities isn't that hard to do. This of course means more whipping - can you say extra galley out of In N Out?

[scooter]

So I popped in to take a glance at things and was greeted by this:



Well cool, met another person. That's nice I guess. I accepted because why not. Wait, what's this?



HAHAHA. Serdoa, you win +5 best friends points . Or, I'm assuming it was Serdoa since Pindicator logged in after Azza but before Serdoa. Anyways, let's see what we've got here:



Unfortunately, core cities are not up here. This is unfortunate. But, the good news is at least the core cities are on the west coast of the island:



Sorry, just noticed crab symbol is covering the city size indicator down south. It's a fair-sized city. Anyways, I've given zero thought into the impact this has on our plan, just wanted to post these immediately.

[scooter]

Reactions:

1) He has no copper. Cool.
2) He DOES have iron - at "IW" of course. From straining my eyes looking at tile yields, that appears to be his only source. This is good, because that'll be the first city we take (we'll probably ignore CC at first, it's not hurting anybody). Unfortunately the desert hill lets him see across enough water that we can't amphibiously grab it from the fog, but we can land on the hill out of the fog and take it the following turn. If we play after them (logical choice since we play after Commodore too), they won't get a chance to whip any more metal units.
3) He also has horse, but Impis won't fear that too badly. We can probably use a few Impis to sprint across the island to SM
4) The bulk of our units will of course remain on the galleys and head for Flight of Frenzy. If we easily capture IW and then manage to capture FoF, this mission has a real chance of success.
5) Kind of an odd dotmap. CC in particular is a head-scratcher. We can't afford to do much razing though, I think we'll mostly have to capture because we can't afford the settlers. CFCJester is a SP guy I think, and it really shows here. Well, it's fine long-term, but he's going to have a nightmare of a time trying to defend these.
6) Tonight I'm going to check and see on buildings the cities has - IW in particular is what I care about. If it has a culture building, it'll pop before we get there which will mean we need to rethink things. CC is about to pop since it has Hinduism in it. His religion actually would make border pops for us pretty easy all things considered, so that's a perk.
7) Yes, this thread will have quite a bit of chicken counting before any hatching occurs. This is because it's succeed (and die later) or die now, and we're trying to have fun.

Any more thoughts from team Zulu?

[pindicator]

Dare we dream? I'm starting to think we actually have a (slim) chance to pull off Operation Norman Pride.
Now that we have a map we can really start planning logistics and get an invasion eta.

[scooter]

Dare we dream? I'm starting to think we actually have a (slim) chance to pull off Operation Norman Pride.

I know, I'm starting to think this is actually kinda doable. Kind of. He has 3 major assets:

1) Iron
2) Two great cities with a lot of pop to whip
3) Horse

#1 will be gone before he can whip any more units - we just have too many units for him to be able to reasonably react. #3 isn't as big a deal when we're sporting so many Impis. So the real key for us is knocking out his iron + the two big cities before running out of gas.

So the mission is simple: Capture the three west coast cities with minimum casualties. If we do that, the rest is probably mop-up. The rest of his cities are small so he won't have much room to whip. The big question is if we can make all this happen before running out of gas.

Now that we have a map we can really start planning logistics and get an invasion eta.

Yeah, let's have a chat tonight or tomorrow where we try to put down some concrete dates on target dates/tiles.

I'm getting pretty excited for this.

[MindyMcCready]

Wow, what a break. Interesting stuff. Good luck guys!