[SPOILERS] PB1- Mardoc buys a can of paint for Thoth and Ellimist

[Thoth]

On balance, I'm agreed on the City States revolt for the orcs. Even though that requires we spend 300ish beakers on Carto, it's probably worth it. Doesn't delay Feud or IW, and I think most later techs are more 'nice to have' than 'essential'. Which describes Cartography too, come to think . But yeah, we want to swap out farms for cottages, at least in the Foreign Trade civ that's mostly mature cities. Which means aristo's gotta go.

Carto will be post Smelting (more hammers! W00t!) but pre-IW. The Elohim can currently 1t it. We're gaining BPT every turn in Elohimia. We can afford the "detour". CS will be worth even more relative to Aristo once OSH's next settler pair gets ferried over to the Hublands.

We'll have the worker turns to complete a lot of farm-->Cott or WS conversions t122, plus additional conversions as cities grow to target sizes and get converted to full hammers/commerce as appropriate.

It takes 10t under FT to grow a cott to a Village, so a swap to Conquest t132 will see us with a bunch more Villages (and a few more Towns) to help soak the lost tr commerce and increased maint cost of Conquest. By that point, we'll have cleared all our Need techs and several Want techs if we chose to tech rather than just cash rush Ogres post IW, so we'll be able to afford the teching hit from the lost gold. The extra promo from Conquest would be very nice to have (Ditto: Engineering, Alteration, OO, AV, Fanatacism, Necromancy, Elementalism.......)

But that's for a bit later.

Seems like overkill to me. Couldn't we do the same with just ritualists, or vampires, or Hasted Chariots, or...

Hmm. On the other hand, the gnomes have a lot of coastal cities too

OO is cheaper than AV (not sure by how much off the top of my head, but AV will cost ~3500 beakers, OO is a lot cheaper than that).

Cultists can wreak some havoc on this map and we have Spiritual Orcs, plus Team Wizzard are known to have at least one blue water port.

And AV/OO isn't either/or.

[Thoth]

another thing in favour of some OO action: We have delivery systems in place (ie 3 orc and one Calabim galley) to make a highly entertaining task force....we just need some appropriate boots to get on the boats.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzgaPEm-HYA

[Thoth]

Liti is lakeside.....


Let Orctania Rule the Waves

http://youtu.be/yHNfvJc99YY

[Mardoc]

I would certainly enjoy ruling the navy from my desk .

And OO would also help us keep all the islands for ourselves, which is a huge bonus as well.. And help break choke points, and in general turn up the pressure another notch. It's a perfect religion for some Spiritual action - 5 turns in, knock out a handful of Cultists (say, 10?), and move on to another religion.

Yeah, let's go for it...eventually. Still want Feudalism, Smelting/Carto/Iron Working first at an absolute minimum. It's arguable that we want Fanaticism before OO, too, and perhaps a mana tech or two (enchanted blades would be a very nice boost to Ogres/Vamps/Moroi)

I'm less convinced by Conquest. Another promo on our new units would be nice, yes, but as nice as continuing the quick pace on all our teching? There's still a lot out there that we want. And...if we get a solid amount of collateral on the board, then we can get our promotions the old fashioned way - by killing the foe

[Thoth]

I would certainly enjoy ruling the navy from my desk .

And OO would also help us keep all the islands for ourselves, which is a huge bonus as well.. And help break choke points, and in general turn up the pressure another notch. It's a perfect religion for some Spiritual action - 5 turns in, knock out a handful of Cultists (say, 10?), and move on to another religion.

Agreed on all counts. Shiner Bock has Warrens, >20hpt with Smelting and no religion. So with OO we can knock out a temple pdq and then either line up some Zealots for upgrade (for spreading and insta temples to propagate the swarm ) or swap immediately (which will cost us gold and happy. We can soak both if needed) and push out Cultists directly.

Yeah, let's go for it...eventually. Still want Feudalism, Smelting/Carto/Iron Working first at an absolute minimum. It's arguable that we want Fanaticism before OO, too, and perhaps a mana tech or two (enchanted blades would be a very nice boost to Ogres/Vamps/Moroi)

Feud/Smelt/Cart/IW first for sure.

OO is cheaper than any of the follow up alternatives, and we can be getting our OO toys in place while we tech up to AV and get some AV spread happening. Then swap the Orcs to AV and get some Spi Ritualist happy love going on.

I'm less convinced by Conquest. Another promo on our new units would be nice, yes, but as nice as continuing the quick pace on all our teching? There's still a lot out there that we want

There is always a lot out there that we *want*.....but once we have the techs we *need* (Feud/IW) everything else becomes lower priority and can be delayed a bit. Bear in mind we won't be able to swap into Conq until t131 at the earliest (132/133 would be better for cot development) so we'll be racking up some teching yet before we throttle back for extra military punch.

[Thoth]

OO is 938 beakers.

1t post Smelting/Carto. Maybe only 1/2 a turn depending on beaker overflow.

Let's do it.

[Mardoc]

Methinks we've hit a soft spot. Killed a Malakim city this turn, only losing the scout we'd sent as bait to draw off the garrison. That pulled two Fawns far enough out of position that there's a good chance we get to kill a size 10 Malakim city next turn - it's currently only defended by a solitary warrior. We can see three Fawns that can reinforce it, if they have roads in the fog in the right spots, but we've enough firepower in the area to kill four units if need be. So it all depends on what's in the fog, in the end.

In the east, we *think* that we can be sorta safe by tearing up more roads. They can certainly Snowfall us, but it looks like they wouldn't be able to follow up with hitters. This turn. Although they did fireball one of our griffons - looks like the Air Force reign of terror is over.

These methods are only going to buy us a couple of turns..but, well, we'll train our first Vamp this turn, and assuming the Calabim Great Person is anything but a Merchant, we can have golden age #2 and thus first Vicar in two turns. It's going to be tricky in the east, and we're almost certainly going to lose Saltus at least, but we can probably make this work out.

Still mid-turn, Thoth's planning to finish in the morning, or else we'll pause and all finish it together tomorrow night. Ellimist, if you have the time, could you double-check our counting in the east? It would really suck to lose that stack, and now that they have double Snowfall, one mistake on our part will do it in.

[Ellimist]

Looking at the garrisons...

As far as actually attacking the city, their units are all at least 3 movement away. They only have one mud golem available to road the gems, and after that it's 3 spaces to walk. Spellcasters can be next to the city with 2 moves, though, so any puppets that don't expire this turn can make it.

In addition, there are 19 spellcasters in atrium of time that can attack us with their puppets and 1 spectre

Here's the garrison at Liti:



Notable:
I'm assuming that they can have haste next turn. They have alteration and it shouldn't be long before they do.
The skeletons can't reach us because they have 2 moves and can't be hasted. The best they can do is provide cover for something.
None of the puppets that have already been summoned can actually attack Saltus next turn either.

That leaves maybe 10 real units they can hit with, plus illusionary djinn, 4-5 real summons and a bunch of puppets if they're willing to expose their spellcasters a bit.

Most of their units simply can't reach us, and even if we assume all of them can promote to more mobility, several of them can't promote at all (wood golems, summons, puppets).

Snowfall will hurt a lot, but they will have to extend a bit to reach us and we may have additional opportunities as a result. I'm pretty sure we can hold out, but I don't know if the puppets will be able to kill a lot of our units if they snowfall us twice.

[Thoth]

As Mardoc mentioned, we re-adjusted our Western borders slightly:

(we burnt the city). Note that there are 3 Malakim workers underneath the Fawns on the Ivory.


Ending turn produced our first 1t Vampire from Zinfandel and....

Calabim GA and Anarchy free swap to Empy coming up next turn.

[Mardoc]

(we burnt the city). Note that there are 3 Malakim workers underneath the Fawns on the Ivory.

Yeah . Unless they have something both awesome and fast in the fog, our worst case next turn is ganking three workers and running away . Good chance we can get at least one more city, and possibly the workers on top.

Ending turn produced our first 1t Vampire from Zinfandel and....
Calabim GA and Anarchy free swap to Empy coming up next turn.

Excellent! I was nervous about that 20% Merchant chance .

Should be able to build a Vicar next turn, too, right? Just need 56 base hammers in Riesling, and last I looked it was at about 44 - a little bit of GA and some overflow ought to push us to 80.

I really want to strip away their Djinni, even if we can't follow up and kill stuff, it should at least push us back to a stalemate. Which we can then hopefully break with a mess of vampires.

Anyway, if we can get control of Team Clown again, then the next 10-20 turns should be enough for victory. Maybe we can even win this before the vamp GA ends .

On the subject of Vamps - it's not too long before our limiting factor is Feastable cities, hopefully. So where do we see each Vamp getting to, in terms of promos? I suggest we want four categories:

Spectre launchers: Mobility I/Spell Extension I/Death II. 10 XP required, which means 5 Feast XP from somewhere. Extra promos probably go Combat for Empower promos. We want lots and lots of these, so let's not go crazy on trying for Empowered spectres in lieu of simply more of them. Once we have those three promos, this is a unit that has a 6-move threatened zone. Could maybe leave off Spell-Extension for a 2-move Spectre and no Feast required.

Regen: Mobility I/Body II. 5 XP, can have these right from the assembly line. Don't want very many, but a couple per front would be very useful. Don't bother to give them anything else, just keep up with the stack and cast Regen every turn. Could double as Haste casters if we separate from Shamans for some reason.

Stack Protectors: Mobility I/CIII/Spell Resistance/Cold Resistance (CV/Drill), possibly more resistances and more combat promos. Six promos, 21XP minimum, more preferred. Could easily use 12 promos on these guys if we went for CV/Drill IV. Could perhaps burn a promo on Death II for uber-spectres on top. These are the ones that need to Feast a lot. We want enough of these to protect a stack after it's hit by Snowfall and 2 Djinns, and we want them to be able to absorb a pair of Snowfalls and then a horde of weak summons. I'm not sure what the right ratio is between Combat and Drill promos, but ideally we'd have at least three of these guys per stack, and both types of promotion

Combat monsters: Mobility I/CV/Other (drill, shock/formation/etc, spell resistance) No real upper limit on the XP these can use; perhaps we'd best stop at 21 Feasted for MobI/CV, and pick up other promotions by killing stuff? These would be intended for cracking top defenders of stacks, not for absorbing what's thrown at us, so Drill is less important.

In summary: I think we really want two categories of Vamps. Vamps with just the XP they're born with, or maybe one small Feast for one extra promo, who are there to cast one spell every turn (usually Summon Spectre, sometimes Haste or Regen, or even Summon Skeleton). And a handful of vamps for direct combat, with lots of combat promos and promos tailored to the current biggest threat - right now that's Snowfall, but later on it could be other things.

I don't see much value in a partially promoted vamp - unless we really pile on the promotions, they'll be more valuable as summoners than as direct fighters. And I don't want to burn a lot of population making Empower V summoners, not when there are other good uses for that pop (like, say, being a hammer/turn on getting us more vamps). Either we want to go all the way, and make a really fearsome unit, or we want to stop with 5 or 10 XP and just pile up a mass of them.

Sound reasonable?