[SPOILERS] Cornflakes and Q Eat 'Em for Breakfast!

[Cornflakes]

One detail I forgot about ... Strategic resources were not placed well for us. Our only sources of connected iron came from Beginnerman, which is now in TT's hands. Our only other source of iron sits at Who Am I, which will be captured next turn. Without Iron we cannot build knights anymore. This is bad enough, because knights are invaluable in fighting a 2-front war. 3-promo get odds on everything in the field, and 2-promo knights get odds on everything in the field except for other 2-promo knights.

This is not the worst of the news though ... iron is required for building Cannon That faint glimmer of hope has been all but snuffed out. I offered Banking to AT for iron. Maybe he'll prop us up?

Also, we have no units in Apocalypse. TT/Bigger, with their 2-move musketeers can quickly cover a lot of ground. He could be knocking on the walls of Apocalypse in 2 turns ... If he has spies in our land he probably will be. If he doesn't have spies in our land he may still advance there directly. I don't think there's anything we can do to stop him unfortunately. The only thing is maybe crush Commodore's stack next turn and then quickly shuffle everything up to Apocalypse, but even then I don't think we'll reach there in time. It's a good 4 turns of movement.

[Qgqqqqq]

I'm sorry I don't have any time at this critical moment.
Do currasiers require iron?

[Cornflakes]

I'm sorry I don't have any time at this critical moment.
Do currasiers require iron?

Unfortunately they do.

[NobleHelium]

Yes they need iron for their cuirasses.

[Cornflakes]

Well, this is the first turn in a while with good news ... but I'll start off with the bad news first: Apocalypse is dead next turn. Ok, that's actually the only piece of bad news for the turn other than the expected capture/razing of a couple northwestern cities. Jobs will fall next turn. In the west we're going to hold Paradigm. Apocalypse was our biggest loss so far, because it has base of 30hpt (enough for 3 turn cannon).

... Which leads me to our first piece of good news. AT gifted us Iron This means that we can continue building knights in our production centers. Our only two real production centers are Postos and Blimp. Google is actually decent. I'm scrambling any workers that we can out of Azzaland, and those will pave WS on any bare tile or any Cottage/Hamlet (I'm saving our villages/towns for now).




... 2nd piece of good news ... we utterly annihilated Commodore's stack. It was too uniform, with 1 knight and then all muskets/Cats. Started as:




No diversity at all. The only snag here is that there's a river between us and his stack, and the road west of his stack has a musket (which also must be attacked across a river )




The knight in our stack came from Blimp, so it does not have enough MP to cross the river to the cows before attacking so I promote to C2 + pinch, attack across the river for 78% ... and win!

The pinch knight in his stack is now the only difficulty. Here I maybe took a bigger risk than I should, but rather than throwing the catapults in now I decided to try taking out his knight first:




67% ... and I win! We still haven't lost any knights yet. After this I thew all my cats in. One got lucky and withdrew, the others all did good service weakening the stack.




After this we got OK odds with muskets, so I sent in a stack, followed by maces at 85%.




Here's the final view. Complete annihilation, killing about 200k soldiers! We got a GG, plus 2/3 of the way to our next (GG points +100% inside our territory). I think we might actually be able to carry on the game after this and still have a fighting chance at ultimate victory ... as long as we keep getting supplied with Iron long enough to take back Azzaland from Bigger. Full combat log in spoiler. It's long and full of green

[Cornflakes]

We destroyed 12 muskets, 13 catapults, and 3 knights. We lost 4 cats, 1 musket, 1 mace, 1 impi.

Hammer exchange without including drafted muskets ... 920:300
Hammer exchange including muskets ... 1880:380 in our favor

[Azza]

he's azzaman333 at civfanatics and only has 21,353 posts as of this moment

I'd have a lot more too if it weren't for those pesky moderators.

Looking good.
I agree there's not much to say atm...

I don't think its the same azza, particularly considering how little be posts in WW.

Definitely the same one, with the same one line posts. Course, I'm sure you realise that by now.


I really wish you guys hadn't been the Zulu, it would've made my chariot zone defense a lot more effective, and as I'm sure you know now there really weren't a great deal of good locations for me to claim early in the game, at least not close to my capital.

Also, I'm still pissed that you guys decided to attack me, just to raze half my empire. Bloody Rome, it's like having a beacon shining over your head saying "RUSH ME"...

Having said that, you've played rather well to get yourself into such a strong position. I wonder how much stronger you might be had you not spent all those hammers on me.

[Cornflakes]

Also, I'm still pissed that you guys decided to attack me, just to raze half my empire. Bloody Rome, it's like having a beacon shining over your head saying "RUSH ME"...

It was nothing personal, and I don't remember Rome having any particular weight in the decision. That far western city was a bit of bad luck. Our scouting impi in the west hit AT's culture and turned north, stumbling upon your culture 2-3 turns before our galley completed. The real tipping point for war was your eastern corn plant (northwest of Volcano). Since you were Creative you would have swamped our city with culture, plus there was always game-long threat of getting boated without warning like we did to you.

Having said that, you've played rather well to get yourself into such a strong position. I wonder how much stronger you might be had you not spent all those hammers on me.

yeah, we lost about 1000 hammers in units to you in the early game where everything is more valuable. The land would have been worth the investment if we could have gotten the payoff, but just as our cities were growing up and infrastructure builds were completing TT/Bigger declared war and is now stealing our hard-fought territory for virtually no cost at all

I don't know how we didn't fall terribly behind in tech while fighting you. I think this is due in part to the fact that we are one of only 2 FIN civs, and our capital was basically driving our economy. Plus tech trading helped.

[Cornflakes]

By the way, Azza, you did put up a stiff fight overall. I was genuinely worried when your stack came from Zombie towards Paradigm. I think that planting Zombie Pitman was a mistake though. First of all it slowed down your stack for a turn, but more importantly it caused you to divide your forces when your stack that marched on Paradigm. You still would likely have overcome us if it wasn't that we got another big break when 2metra traded us horses for our only source of ivory a couple turns before. At the time you didn't have Praets yet, so HA got odds on everything plus flanking on your catapults (which otherwise do remarkably well on defense vs axemen). Towards the end I think you should have built more Praets. You had something like 25 Catapults and only about 10 actual killing units. But enough of the "what if's" ... I'm a lover of strategy and could theorize about this all day

That note about HA reminds me again of our horrible strategic resource availability When we loose Apocalypse next turn we'll loose our only source of horses, so we'll have to go begging again You may say it's partially our fault that we don't have Horses of Iron, and you'd probably be right. We do have a horses directly to our north that we allowed 2metra to settle. And we do have iron directly to our south where we allowed Commodore to settle. But still, horses were across a lake and had no 1st ring food (plains cow 2nd ring or shared pigs with Mars if we want to stretch) while Iron was across a jungle AND towards Commodore with the only food available being the grass cows which Commodore claimed early.

[Cornflakes]

Checked status: 2metra is moving considerable forces around our north towards Google. I have 4 workers who will complete the canal to the 2metra lake in 2 more turns. Then we'll see if we can't burn a couple of his coastal cities I have a spy who just entered 2metra's land. Hoth is defended by a single archer, Turfan is defended by a single spear. Spear will be mace lunch. Archer will probably require 2 attackers.