Turn Tracking Thread

[Sullla]

While we're waiting for the next turn to begin, let's look at the tech situation. We have Alphabet tech now, and that allows us to see where the last remaining laggards stand relative to our team.



Realms Beyond
All Ancient Techs (17)
All Classical Techs except Compass (13)
Paper, Feudalism, Machinery, Civil Service, Philosophy, Engineering, Guilds (7)
Liberalism, Education, Nationalism (3)
Total Beakers = 28,566
25 cities / 155 total pop

We still have the most beakers researched by a good margin, although the gap has been closing in recent turns. Our tech rate should increase dramatically once we get out of our current war and integrate the captured cities. (We have six cities that are size 1 right now, costing us a lot while contributing almost nothing, for example.) Printing Press is also worth quite a bit, once we finish the tech. And finally, it's also important to keep in mind the tremendous number of Golden Ages that other teams have been running through in the last dozen or so turns. CFC, Apolyton, CivFr (two Mausoleum GAs!), UniversCiv, WPC, and the Germans have all recently run Golden Ages or are in one now. This is another reason why other teams have been closing the gap, so it's not quite as bad as it might have seemed.

CivFanatics
Techs Ahead of Us: Banking
Techs Behind Us: Drama, Paper, Education, Liberalism
Total Beakers: 22,446
20 cities / 141 total pop

CFC has pursued the tech path most similar to ours. We've both gone pretty heavily for the bottom of the tree to enable a military conquest with knights. This appears to be working out well for both of us, although it remains to be seen how the CFC/CivFr war will shake out. I would expect them to go for some combination of Education and Printing Press next on an economic push, but it's also possible that they could go for Gunpowder as well. If allowed to settle the Spanish territories freely, CFC will be almost as large in size as our team in the wake of our German conquest. They are the biggest threat to win the game alongside CivFr.

CivFr
Techs Ahead of Us: Music, Printing Press
Techs Behind Us: Philosophy, Liberalism, Education, Nationalism
Total Beakers: 22,086
19 cities / 134 total pop

CivFr hit the top of the tech tree very hard, getting an early Aesthetics/Literature to claim the Great Library and various other marble-boosted wonders. They also beat us to the Music Great Artist by a single turn. However, this has left them weaker in the central part of the tech tree, as they still don't have Education, Nationalism, or even the prerequisite Philosophy for these techs. (It was nice of them to cheapen the cost of Printing Press though!) Outside of the lack of drafting, CivFr also has excellent military capabilities and can counter CFC's knights with their own knights and elephants. They have also claimed a very large amount of territory and will be a major threat to win the game in their own right. We should be praying that this CFC/CivFr war continues and escalates, as it would be about the best possible result for our team.

Apolyton
Techs Ahead of Us: Banking, Economics
Techs Behind Us: Iron Working, Literature, Aesthetics, Horseback Riding, Drama, Calendar, Construction, Engineering, Nationalism, Liberalism
Total Beakers: 21,366
17 cities / 94 total pop

Apolyton has taken a very strange path through the tech tree. They have more Medieval techs researched (7) than Classical techs (6). They've essentially ignored anything even the least bit military-related to go full on economy. And indeed, they pushed for early universities, whipped them out with their cheap Philosophical trait, and got an early Oxford up in their Bureacademy capital. In the current Golden Age, their GNP looks extremely impressive with that 1300 figure or whatever.

However, Apolyton is pretty much at the height of their power curve right now, and it's only going to decline from here. Their teching power is based on a tricked out capital city with Academy and university and Oxford, which would be awesome on a Tiny map, but scales poorly on this Huge map. Apolyton is far lower in population than the other strong teams (CFC, CivFr) and has zero room for further expansion. They will inevitably be outdone in the long run by teams with more population and more territory. By the end of the German war, we're looking at roughly double Apolyton's number of cities, and once those captured locations have the chance to grow up to a decent size... well, you get the picture. See what's going on in the current Pitboss 8 game, for those who aren't involved in the game themselves. Over the long haul, more territory and more population will trump a smaller, vertically inclined empire.

There is a sharp dropoff to these next two teams.

UniversCiv
Techs Ahead of Us: Printing Press
Techs Behind Us: Polytheism, Monotheism, Literature, Aesthetics, Horseback Riding, Drama, Construction, Feudalism, Philosophy, Engineering, Guilds, Nationalism, Liberalism
Total Beakers: 16,560
18 cities / 138 total pop

This team is the reverse of Apolyton, as they went for mass horizontal expansion instead of vertically teching upwards. The result is that they are very significantly behind in technology compared to the power teams. UniversCiv did the best to maximize what they could get from the tree though, going pure economy like Apolyton, with a crazy deep beeline to pick up Education and Printing Press (thanks for making them cheaper!) while still missing basic techs like Monotheism and Construction. They have no military techs worth mentioning, just maces, and they are a very long way away from any Gunpowder weapons. They have also just about reached the natural limits of their expansion (which is roughly 20 cities for most teams on this map) but do have the good luck to border the pitifully weak WPC. If I were them, I would have looked to attack WPC already, but they have chosen to go the econ route instead. Perhaps down the road. UniversCiv has been kind of mediocre the whole game, not as terrible as WPC/Spanish but not really competitive with the top teams either. They never write back in diplomacy either. A strange team to figure out.

CivPlayers
Techs Ahead of Us: Theology
Techs Behind Us: Construction, Feudalism, Machinery, Philosophy, Engineering, Guilds, Nationalism, Liberalism
Total Beakers: 15,516
15 cities / 89 pop

These guys are in the unfortunate position of being the most squeezed team in the game. They started between our team and CivFr, and were boxed in terribly on both sides. It didn't help either, of course, that CivPlayers paused expansion to build both the Oracle (beating us by one turn) and the Apostolic Palace in the early portions of the game. Now they are stuck between the two strongest teams on the map with nowhere to go and few available options. They actually have a decent monk economy going, but the lack of territory and population is an absolute killer that dooms them in the long run. Note that CivPlayers recently teched Education and has been whipping out universities; they are sitting on 1600 gold that they will presumably start burning through as soon as they're done with Oxford. Their tech position is probably a little bit better than UniversCiv in truth.

And then we plummet off a cliff to the final two teams.

CivForum.de / Germans
Techs Ahead of Us: none
Techs Behind Us: Literature, Aesthetics, Alphabet, Drama, Calendar, Code of Laws, Metal Casting, Paper, Machinery, Civil Service, Philosophy, Engineering, Guilds, Liberalism, Education, Nationalism
Total Beakers: 6786
10 cities / 44 total pop

These poor guys have had a game where everything seemed to go wrong. They were pursuing a rapid expansion strategy when WPC decided to go crazy and attack them. WPC razed their sixth city and forced a whole bunch of defensive unit whips that destroyed their economy. When they were finally beginning to rebuild from that disaster, we attacked them (again with WPC) with a vastly superior army. They did manage to reach Feudalism for longbows, and Construction/HBR for elephants with gifted ivory, but that doesn't look like it will be enough. Hopefully they are in the process of suiciding their army to destroy WPC's army, leaving our team to take the spoils of conquest. These guys deserved a better fate.

We Play Civ
Techs Ahead of Us:
Techs Behind Us: Priesthood, Polytheism, Monotheism, Literature, Aesthetics, Horseback Riding, Alphabet, Drama, Monarchy, Code of Laws, Compass, Currency, Metal Casting, Paper, Feudalism, Machinery, Civil Service, Philosophy, Engineering, Guilds, Liberalism, Education, Nationalism
Total Beakers: 3942
10 cities / 80 total pop

These guys absolutely suck at tech. WPC was actually behind the Spanish by 1000 beakers before they were eliminated, if you can believe it. We wondered why they never spread Hinduism as a religion; it's because they lack the techs for monasteries or Organized Religion. We wondered why they weren't connecting their dyes, it's because they didn't get Calendar tech until T149. They still do not have Currency tech. They've researched 4 Classical techs and 0 Medieval techs, at a time when the power teams have entered the Renaissance. WPC is so hilariously far behind that they are a sitting duck for anyone who chooses to conquer them. The best units that they can build are swords, dog soldiers, and catapults. We are probably about 15-20 turns from rifles at the moment, and CFC/CivFr/Apolyton are in about the same position. There is no way that these guys are going to survive until the end of the game.

I like the WPC players, and they seem to be nice people. At the same time, they are unbelievably backwards in tech, and their land would make a perfect addition to our empire, as it wouldn't extend the borders much at all. Let's try to stay friendly for now, but be willing to keep our options open down the road. Attacking with rifles and cavs (when our Turn 200 NAP wears out) would be laughably easy. Maybe...

Anyway, I hope this helps make it easier to see where all of the teams stand.

[Sullla]

Turn 155 - 900AD

This will be a bit of a short recap, since we've gone over many of the issues in this thread previously over the past five days (!) that this turn lasted.

This was the central German front at the start of the turn. The Germans still don't have much more than skeleton garrisons in these cities. We're in excellent position to capture Webringen and Weil der Stadt next turn. As for Wismar:



These are the borders of the city once the German capital falls. We moved three workers (and two covering maces) onto the white dot desert hill tile two north of Speed Racer. Next turn, we plan to capture Webringen with a heavy emphasis from our drafted maces, and then send the knights (stationed in a position to fork Webringen and Weil) over to the east via this path. Wismar can then be hit on T157, and should be pretty lightly defended.

Here was the northwest front at the start of the turn. Wazleben was still defended by a single quechua, and we had 78% odds to kill it with our war chariot (and a further 71% odds to kill it with our injured knight if the war chariot would lose). Fortunately, the war chariot did its job, and did it flawlessly, winning without taking a single hit:



We picked up a decent amount of capture gold. Wanzleben was razed because the location would have been swamped with Apolyton culture and impossible to defend; here's a picture of what that would have looked like:



The Apolyton borders have been drawn in green. That is not a position that we want to defend. Our plan is to put a replacement city two tiles south, on the red dot indicated above.



And this is how the settler is getting there. We swapped Frozen Jungle this turn, it will be whipped T156, move across roads T157, and found a new city T158. We're reasonably confident that we'll get to this spot before CivPlayers or Apolyton can poach the location. Apolyton would almost certainly need to have a settler already in the area to beat us, which is rather unlikely.



This is the current view of the area. Apolyton's borders should expand to fill in the hole in their culture next turn. Our replacement city will be on the tile east of the sheep. Let's hope that Apolyton doesn't try to get aggressive up here.

This is the current view of the central front. We should be able to capture both Webringen and Weil der Stadt next turn without too much trouble. Our stack of 11 catapults will actually get to do something for the first time in the entire war. We've also nearly managed to get through the German cities located on hills; that's been a real pain in the neck. Thankfully their cities in the north and east are mostly on flat ground.

Overview of German cities, and their cultural borders, for future reference.

WPC and the German team have had the expected bloodbath up here, with a lot of units traded on both sides. It's a shame that they didn't manage to kill off a few more units, but WPC did essentially wipe out the axe and catapult reserves of the German team. We were left with the chance to attack a crippled German elephant with our war chariot at 90% odds... which we then lost. At least this bad dice roll didn't hit us at a critical moment. WPC supposedly has another dozen units piling over the border next turn, so we'll see what happens. I'm dubious that WPC will manage to capture even this one city, I guess we'll see. They are pretty amazingly incompetent at all of this.

Our economy is still limping along towards Printing Press at minimum science rate. At least the capture gold took us from making ~150 gold this turn and took that up over 200 gold. We've captured enough cities that courthouses have now become more economically efficient than markets in most cities. As bad as things look now, the combination of finishing Printing Press, ending the German war, bringing the captured cities online so they can contribute economically (instead of having the current size 1 cash sinkholes), and a healthy dose of courthouse whips should salvage things in time. We're looking to come out of this war with about 35 cities under our control, while most other teams have about 18-20. I will happily take a temporary poor economy in return for a huge lategame edge. We'll also run some Wealth builds for a while when this war end. It will work out OK.

We should have the all-important Turn 156 come back around to us sometime on Sunday. I should be able to play and stream the turn sometime that day, hard to say what time until we get closer to it. Then I'll be leaving on Monday (July 1) for two weeks of vacation; scooter has been kind enough to volunteer to hold down the fort while I'm away. Hopefully we will be into the mop-up stage of the war and can focus on rebuilding our shattered economy back into top shape.

Livestream for this current turn (not that interesting): http://www.twitch.tv/rbciv/b/423158772

[Sullla]

Turn 156 - 920AD

The battle for the German capital.



I needed to play this turn right when we could finally log into the game. (Thanks again German team for not ending turn and making us wait 12 hours for no purpose at all.) Here's what we could see off in the northwest. For some reason, there are four CivPlayers horse archers moving around, including one with Sentry promotion. We have no idea where they are going or what they are doing. Maybe we should ask them in diplomacy (?)

There were some calls to pillage the roads over by the Apolyton border, out of fear that they will poach the opened up terrain over here. I would advise that we don't do this, in part because C&D build tracking suggests that they are not building settlers in any of these cities, but more importantly because we specifically told Apolyton not to pillage tiles in neutral territory when they were doing so against us earlier. We would look incredibly hypocritical if we started pillaging next to their border right now. Only do so as a last resort to stop them from settler. Our own settler will be ready to claim this location on Turn 158.

Here's the main front. The Germans actually pulled units out of their capital this turn, leaving two longbows and an axe inside. They also had two longbows and a spear inside Weil der Stadt. Unfortunately, both cities were located on hills, which is always a giant pain when facing longbows. Even with catapults to drop defensive bonuses, this was going to be a bloodbath. (There's little purpose in suiciding catapults with so few units on defense. Collateral damage would not be that helpful here. Our knights already have much higher base strength than the longbows, we just needed to remove those endless defensive modifiers. Plus, the maces are actually much more sacrificial and easily replaced than the catapults.)



11 catapults dropped the defenses from city walls all the way from 60% down to... 20%. Yes, walls are way too strong in Beyond the Sword. (Castles are even more laughable, -2% per shot with 100% starting bonus. We'll set them up in border cities for T170 and dare teams to attack us.) Then it was time for the poor drafted conscript maces to go over the top:

Battle of Webringen
11 cats drop defense to 20%
Mace vs G2 longbow 1% LOSS
Mace vs G2 longbow 1% LOSS (no damage)
Mace vs G2 longbow 1% LOSS (no damage)
Mace vs G2 longbow 1% LOSS
C2 knight vs G2 longbow 69% WIN
C1/Shock elephant vs G2 longbow 84% WIN
C1/Shock war elephant vs axe 98% WIN
CAPTURE WEBRINGEN

The city capture picture did not take for some reason, I pulled this off the Livestream, so excuse the picture quality. The actual battle results were on the unlucky side. We had two straight maces go in and fail to get a single hit on the Guerilla II longbow - we lost 8 straight rounds of combat in a row. We had 14/40 odds (35%) to win each of those rounds, so losing 8 in a row was a real kick in the rear. Losing 3 maces instead of 4 would have been more in the range of expected odds. But this is the most abstract part of Civ4 gameplay; you can't control the dice, only set things up ahead of time and hope for the best. We did get the key win with a knight at 69% odds, which balanced things out somewhat. It could have been worse.

Webringen had a granary and Academy inside survive capture. Not great, but better than Worms (where nothing survived).



Then it was just as much of a slaughter at Weil der Stadt. Worse, actually, since we didn't have catapults to bombard down the defenses here. 0 XP mace against Guerilla II with a first strike, 75% tile defense, 25% city defense, and 75% hill defense works out to strength 8 versus strength 16.5. Ugh. Well, uh, the bloodletting is good for the economy in unit support costs! Come lads! Time to cross the Somme:

Battle of Weil der Stadt
Mace vs G2 longbow 0.5% LOSS
Mace vs G1 longbow 0.8% LOSS (no damage)
Mace vs G1 longbow 0.8% LOSS
Mace vs G2 longbow 2% LOSS
C2 knight vs G2 longbow 64% WIN
Mace vs G1 longbow 53% LOSS
CR mace vs G1 longbow 85% WIN
CR mace vs spear 95% WIN
CAPTURE WEIL DER STADT

Even though we lost five maces attacking here, I'd say that we were relatively fortunate. The odds were extremely low here, significantly worse than at Webringen. We got 2 hits from the first suicide mace attacking at 0.45% odds, the second mace got 0 hits (which sucked but was understandable), the third mace got 1 hit, and the fourth mace did his job like a pro and managed to get 3 hits. We won the knight vs longbow battle at 64% and then had our only real turn of bad luck when we lost the following 50/50 shot against a damaged mace. So it could have been better, but this was about as expected. We still have not lost a knight yet in this war, which is really nice. Those are by far our best units, and we'll definitely need them as we push to close things out.

Weil der Stadt came with a granary and colosseum inside. We ended up losing 9 maces to kill 6 German units (four longbows, one spear, and one axe) this turn. Far from a great trade, but to take out two of their core cities, and their capital, I'll take it.



Here's a little peek at the German evacuation from our Sentry chariot. There are two elephants and a spear on the tile southwest of Wittenberge. All of the white dot tiles are also empty of units, which we could see when the Sentry chariot moved southeast onto the grassland hill tile. Now here's the big overview picture:

Most of our units are concentrated around Webringen, either inside the city or sitting on the tile to the southwest where we attacked. The tile north of the CFC chariot is currently bugged; it is not controlled by any German city, but still remains in their territory. This should get cleaned up next turn when the game rechecks cultural control (we hope). There are two workers on the tile west of Worms, they can move N-NE-N and road the bananas next turn, which will allow the units inside Webringen to move W-NW-NE and start pushing on Wien. Thankfully Wien is the last German city located on a hill. (The armchair quarterbacking about the bugged culture tile is a little silly. None of us had any idea that was going to happen. Let's just move on to more important issues.)

Our knights have shifted over to attack Wismar next turn; we have 10 knights and a war chariot in position. The Germans have surely whipped a longbow on their half of the turn, but there's not nearly enough there to stop knights. (Plus that city is NOT on a friggin hill.) Based on what we know of the German units, there shouldn't be enough to stop us there. Hopefully, we'll take the city and keep pushing north.



And here's an overview of what remains of the Germans. They started with 15 cities and we've taken 8 of them so far, hopefully 9 next turn. It would be really nice if WPC would take a city or something, but don't expect them to give us much of anything. We'll need to see where the Germans are concentrating their units before we can plan out our next advance. Mounted units against Wismar for now, slow movers look to move on Wien, and we'll go from there.

I would not convert everything over to economy stuff yet, we still do have more work to do up here and we will run short if we don't keep replacing units. Don't get complacent and assume that the Germans are finished. Anyway, here's a link to the Livestream of this turn: http://www.twitch.tv/rbciv/b/424000720

We still have quite a bit of economy stuff to work on before this turn is done. I'll be off traveling on vacation for the next two weeks, and scooter is going to be covering the turns. Best of luck, I'm sure everyone will handle things just fine.

[scooter]

Turn 157 - 940AD

Ooookay. This really wasn't that complicated of a turn, but we agonized over every single unit movement, so that's how it works. In attacking Wismar, we debated over whether to use a C2 or an unpromoted on the longbow. What we DON'T want is to lose 2 units to the longbow, so the first attack needs to damage it enough that it's high odds the second time around. We calculated that in order to do this, we needed to score at least 2 hits. An unpromoted Knight has 80% chance of getting 2+ hits, so we did it:



3 hits, wonderful. Sent in the shock Knight on the Spear at 66%, won, then cleaned up the longbow:



Nice bonus: the longbow strength was just barely high enough to be a 2xp battle, so we picked a 3xp Knight, which can take a second promo next turn. Anyway, Wismar is captured at the loss of 1 unpromoted Knight . Got some buildings too:



Perfect. Log here:

unpromoted knight vs cg2 lbow: 12% loss (3.1/6h remaining)
shock knight vs spear: 66% win

So then what? Well, Wilhemshaven has just a single spear in it:



We debated long and hard whether to set up a few Knights to take it next turn. We ultimately decided not to, because:

1) That's much closer to the German army. We'd rather them be tied up in the north than decide to come south and mess with us.
2) We would almost certainly have to burn the city, as we didn't have enough in the area to hold it. (We also need to decide if this city should burn or be captured)
3) This is the least important of the 4 reasons, but WPC could potentially be unhappy, not sure.
4) Finally, we want to make sure Operation Wien is a success as it's a more valuable move. Let's look at the west:



Tons going on here.

1) The random mace 1NW of Webringen. There was some fear CivPlayers could gift those 4 HAs to Germans, and they'd hurt us. This is the only tile they could gift it on. We ran a WB test, and you cannot gift to a team under this condition - when sharing a tile with their enemy. This is just a precaution that ensures the gifting is impossible next turn.

2) Yes they could take a 50/50 shot at a Knight with the Elephant, but if we attack the elephant in the city it makes no difference. So if they want to take that shot, that's fine with us.

3) We'd like to capture Wien with 2-movers next turn, so we brought almost all of them. 11 Knights, also 2 War Chariots because why not. Wien produced a unit last turn (likely that catapult headed east) and did NOT dry whip, so it will likely not produce a unit EoT. This means we could very likely face a maximum of 3 real units. Could be less since German team seems set on defending only against WPC. In that case, blitzing the city next turn with Knights lets us do this with our big 1-mover stack:

This would be a significant speed boost in our conquest plans, also keeping them on hills as they walk up to take Wittenberge. Next turn we can see exactly how many units are in Wien and run a sim. If the costs are too high, this doesn't prevent us from just advancing slowly. However, if it's only going to cost us a few Knights, that's a good trade for speeding up the war by a couple turns. We checked Apolyton again for signs of a settler:



Nothing, so we will safely resettle next turn:



My favorite part of the turn was probably the Worker Wall:



Yeah man, I dunno either . I did make one misclick with the settler down by Let It Snow. Really sorry about that - it'll delay the settling of that ice island by 1T. I'm just glad I saved the misclick for an iceball settler instead of military units . Here's demos:



And to cheer you up, here's my favorite graph:



WPC and German team slamming into each other, CivFr going up while CFC takes a hit, etc. Good stuff.

[scooter]

Turn 158 - 960AD

So the turn went pretty smoothly. Only 2 hours this time instead of 3, so maybe that'll be less intimidating to watch. As I posted earlier, there was just two longbows in Wien.



The Battle of Wien went very smoothly:

Wien
c2 knight vs g2 longbow: 22% loss (4.0/6h)
c2 knight vs cg2 longbow: 22% WIN
c2 knight vs wounded g2 longbow: 71% WIN, 98g

Really solid dice rolls there, and a granary/lighthouse to ice the cake:



We moved up our sentry chariot to see things in the vicinity are also pretty empty, so we've moved everything forward:



Wittenberg is defended by a single Quechua. They really do seem set on defending the WPC front. If it remains lightly defended, we will probably just blitz it with Knights again and move up. The bulk of their army is in/around Warendorf and Wilhelm, so that'll be the big battle. After that, it'll be easy to mop up the northern tundra cities which should be basically empty. We did move up some combat workers into Wien:



This is in case we need any combat roads up at the front. In theory they could pillage an important road, and these guy will be ready to fix it. If they are not needed, they'll jump down and do the banana plantation next turn when Webringen's borders pop. We set it up to have 7 workers total in range of the banana next turn. If we have a use for these workers, we'll use the other 5. If we don't, we'll use these 2 and 3 of the other group. I believe we'll want Webringen working the banana and Denial working the corn. For reference, here is the garrison of Wilhelm that I posted prior to playing the turn:

We do have enough in Wismar to protect against those, but we'll keep an eye out. One thing we may want to discuss:



Eastern Dealers grew last turn, and rather than work a coast, we feel it's best to hire a Priest which will speed up our great person by 1T. (We don't need to turn on PP this turn, but starting next turn we'll want to.) I think speeding this up is way better than working coast, but I'll leave it here in case we want to talk about it. This is our favorite city to debate after all.



Can we just take 15 seconds to marvel at this total lack of a road network? This is just incredible. And yes, we just walked through this area so this map is fairly up to date. Amazing stuff. Demos:



I'm fresh out of GNP jokes ya'll. Stray notes:

1) I offered a map swap with CivFr. I doubt they accept it, but it would be nice. Everyone has our maps now so I don't care about that, but it would be nice to get full visibility on their front with CFC.
2) Sooooo: I drafted the 3 cities you said (Starfall, Ditchdigger, French Riviera). We talked about drafting Mansa's Muse next turn. That may be a better use of pop there than a plains hill mine, and its draft anger will be gone after this turn.
3) I did not end turn. Noble and I went through each city, and I think we're all good, but if Sooooo et all want to browse through them and make suggestions, we can discuss that tomorrow, and I'll end turn tomorrow night. I do ask that people hold off on making spontaneous changes just so we can keep it straight. I'm not too bothered by last turn, but it's just good practice to not have multiple people changing tiles around. Don't worry, I won't end turn until we've discussed any possible changes.

[scooter]

Turn 159 - 980AD

The German team left Wittenberg empty, so we took it with a War Chariot:

We then moved up a sentry to look around.



Due to the discussion and general confusion over what WPC was going to want, we went ahead and moved to the tile 1E of Wittenberg, forking the two eastern cities.



So this is where things got weird. WPC was online at the same time, and finally they responded to our chat. They started talking to us in the diplo window, which unfortunately I missed a screenshot of. If someone wants to screenshot it via stream, knock yourself out . Anyway, so the diplo window chat went like this:

1) They asked to buy our stone for 4gpt for 10T. They need to whip walls because the German team is seriously going to attack their front cities. Judging by where their troops are organized, I think they really are going after Huron, which is hilarious. Regardless, we went ahead and accepted this. The only city on stone is Starfall on walls, and those walls are pretty pointless. So we talked about it and agreed to it. Maybe some goodwill or something, since this got more awkward.

2) Beta then said they thought what would be fair was for us to capture all 4 cities, and then gift all 4 of them to WPC. This was when I notified them that city gifting is banned, and Beta was sad and didn't know what to say. Then the chat shifted to normal chat window:



Got a bit awkward there. This is when a certain team member (who will remain nameless in this post, but surely will be outed in follow-up posts) in the chat offered to triple check the rules. They pasted a rule that more or less said city gifting when you're getting killed is banned, but it's acceptable in normal circumstances. Whaaaaat. So we were wrong? I was wrong when I yelled it 50x in our thread? We had a good laugh over the fact that we were all wrong about the rule:



AAAAAAAND that's when Unnamed Team Member noticed he was pasting the rule for a past ISDG, not the current one. Yes, city gifts are banned like we all have been saying. So, this is... awkward. The whole exchange was surreal and hilarious, which you'll see if you watch the stream. Best/worst game ever. Anyway, we'll address that in the diplo thread I guess. Moving along, somehow nobody (including me!) noticed this when I posted it in thread yesterday, so check out this goodie:



Settled great general! That about wraps it for this turn. It's time for a long debate over what to do about WPC. Demos here:

[Sullla]

Turn 160 - 1000AD

This was probably the most interesting turn of the entire Demogame thus far, fitting for 1000AD. It's going to take a while to summarize everything that happened.

First things first. At the start of the turn, we had a 50/50 chance to get a Great Scientist or something less useful. Fortune was kind to us and we successfully landed the Scientist that we wanted. After an inordinate amount of calculations done last turn, we had just enough beakers invested into Printing Press to lightbulb the tech immediately. Printing Press added about 50 base commerce to our empire's sagging economy, essentially taking us from break-even rate at 15% science to break-even rate at 25% science. And the benefits will only scale with time, as the base commerce from villages and towns gets fed through more commerce multipliers in cities. We also are growing onto a large number of mature cottages in the captured German cities, which will start to manifest itself over the next 20 or so turns. This was a big, big step forwards for our team and will help propel along the economic recovery.

Then the fireworks started to happen. While chatting with WPC in-game, one of our players accidentally mismoved our main stack of military units out of position. This unfortunate event meant that we needed to ask for a reload of the game, which was granted. However, the reload of the game wiped out CivFr's playing of their turn, and when we actually played our turn, we unpaused the game and didn't give them a chance to run their turn before their timer ended. This was an honest mistake on our part, but it forced a second reload of the game, and it meant that we had to play the military portion of our turn a second time. Since we had done really well attacking the Germans the first time around, this was far from ideal, but nothing to be done for it.

Here was the military situation at the start of the turn (or after reloading... twice):

Our giant clump of units was sitting on the tile east of Wittenberge. The German team had moved the bulk of their units off to the southeast, in an attempt to take the WPC city of Huron River (just on screen above the minimap) before the end came. I don't really blame them for doing so, since WPC completely ruined their game with the early game war. Why not screw over the team that killed your chances of being competitive? I would probably do something similar.

In any case, that meant two longbows inside Warendorf (with only 12% defensive bonus from WPC's earlier failed catapult attack) and a group of longbow, elephant, and spear inside Willhelmshaven, with 40% cultural defenses intact. Neither city was on a hill, thank heavens. That's a decent defense, but we were pretty confident that knights could blitz through both cities, and that would then open up the ability for our one-movers to hit the German stack on the hill tile with the pigs. We had done that the first time we played the turn, and planned to repeat the same moves as identically as possible.

Now here's where things get interesting. WPC wanted us to knock Warendorf down to a single redlined unit, and then let them capture the city. You could make an argument that they deserved to control this location since they had thrown so many units (in stupid fashion) after it, and we all would have been fine with them capturing the city, if they could do it with their units. But... have us do the work and then give them the city? When they couldn't take it themselves? That was a much more shaky proposition. When we played the turn the first time, we attacked with a knight vs longbow at 68% odds and won, then attacked again knight vs longbow at 76% and won again. No chance to redline anything for WPC. We kept the city. When replaying the turn, WPC asked us again to redline a unit and let them capture it. We told them that we didn't think we should replay the turn differently on a reloaded game. And, in fact, the dice rolls proceeded in identical fashion:

Warendorf
C2 knight vs CG2 longbow 68% WIN
C2 knight vs CG longbow 76% WIN
CAPTURE CITY, 80g, no buildings

Apologies for the terrible quality of images pulled from Livestream, I should have taken the screenshots while playing. Anyway, WPC was in-game at the time, and their turnplayer was not pleased at all with our actions. Things got a little real, leading to this conversation (read from bottom to top):




Which of course I immediately regretted doing. Yes, they baited me into an argument, but that's still no excuse. As I tell people with League of Legends all the time, "the other guy started it" is no excuse. You have to be the bigger man and not get sucked into these exchanges. Part of the reason why I became angry with them was the fact that while talking to WPC - a conversation that I did not want to have in the first place - one of our knights was mismoved AGAIN on auto-explore, just as what caused the original reload in the first place. Argh! Talking to these idiots was causing headache after headache for our team.

Again though, this was poorly handled and will not be repeated. If anyone starts to chat with us in-game, we need to say "sorry but you'll have to go through our diplo team, I can't say anything right now." That would have been the proper way to handle this situation. Hopefully this won't matter very much because WPC is so weak and irrelevant, but it was not a good situation, and needs to be avoided in the future. Mea culpa.

Anyway... with Warendorf down, we repeated the same attacks as we had done before at Willhelmshaven. Our combat luck was slightly better on the reload; we ended up with the identical results (two knights dying to take the city) but it didn't rely on winning a 35% battle like we did the first time:

Willhelmshaven
knight vs CG2 longbow 25% (LOSE, 1.9 health)
C2 knight vs war elephant 50% (LOSE, 1.6 health)
C1/shock knight vs C1 spear 68% WIN
knight vs crippled longbow 99% WIN
knight vs crippled war elephant 99% WIN
CAPTURE CITY, 73g, granary

This screenshot demonstrates why we had to take both German cities this turn. Their capture removed the cultural borders in the area, which allowed us to leapfrog forward with the one-movers and start smashing the German stacks to the east, which were left completely exposed. I mean, I totally understand why WPC was frustrated here, getting nothing from this war, but we didn't really have much choice when it came to these cities. (Outside of razing them and getting nothing ourselves, which was not acceptable to most of our team.)

Now it was time to go after the German stack on the pigs hill tile; here it is in more detail:



That was a picture kindly sent over by WPC at the start of the turn. Uh... probably won't be getting any more screenshots from them. The war elephants meant that this stack was pretty strong against knights and maces (Combat 3 + Shock?! yikes) but it was vulnerable to our own barely used war elephants. We sacrificed two Barrage catapults to knock off the health of the top units with collateral damage, and then, well, the dice were VERY kind to us:

Pigs Hill Stack
Suicide 2 barrage cats
C2 elephant vs C3/shock elephant 69% WIN
C2 elephant vs C2 longbow 82% WIN
mace vs C2/shock elephant 39% WIN
C2 knight vs longbow 96% WIN (GG born)
C2 elephant vs C2/shock axe 97% WIN
mace vs quechua 99% WIN, CAPTURE WORKER

We lost two maces in this attack when we did it the first time, and lost zero on the replay. This led to many jokes of "let's replay every turn!" in the chat channel from everyone watching on stream. While this was lucky, it wasn't ridiculous or anything either; winning at 40% odds is hardly beyond the pale. In any case, we picked up a second Great General (probably going to merge into our Globe Theatre city so that our draftees come out with 2XP instead of 1XP) and even captured a worker, while losing nothing beyond the two initial cats.

Then we repeated the remaining moves from the first playthrough, starting with moving the Sentry war chariot onto a hill tile to reveal the remaining German cities:



Not the strongest garrisons up here, 1 axe and 1 quechua. We went ahead and killed the unpromoted horse archer with a knight at 98% odds, and then set up to capture Wesselburen next turn with a group of 3 knights and 1 war chariot (hey it gets great odds against the axe). We also moved up an injured knight to the sheep tile south of Westheim, which can take the city if there's only a quechua in there next turn (unlikely but hey you never know). Speaker pointed out that we could have used the Great General Medic III chariot with 3 moves to attack Wesselburen at 80% odds and capture it this turn, which would have been an awesome power play... but we didn't see it the first time we played, and that really would not have been fair to do on a replay. I really should have noticed that when we did this the first time on Sunday evening. It would have been really slick, but oh well. Instead, we used the Medic III war chariot to capture the two German workers over in the east, and indeed getting 2 free workers (plus the 1 worker captured on the pigs hill tile earlier) wasn't a terrible use of the unit either.

So here's where we stand now after a wildly unusual and exciting turn:

Warendorf is safe from any German attackers other than a couple of horse archers. They can't road the desert tile to the southeast and hit the city with their one-mover stack, we checked this in-game. We have an NAP with WPC until Turn 200, and even if they were to break that in a ragefest, they have little chance of killing 3 maces and 2 knights with their assortment of utter crap northwest of Warendorf. Willhelmshaven has enough maces to be safe from attack, and then the bulk of our units are on the pigs hill itself, where they get the defensive bonus and are in position to hit all of the remaining German units if we choose to do so. Here's where they are positioned:



This is their most formidable group, with those Great General war elephants and a couple of two-movers. (Seriously though, Leadership promo? WTF?!) Nice as this all looks, they are easy prey if we suicide a few catapults against this group, just as you saw this turn. The German stack to the southeast of this group has an unpromoted war elephant, a city garrison 3 longbow (outside of a city heh), 2 axes, and 6 catapults. They can throw both stacks against our guys on the hill if they want, but we're fine with them going after 8 strength maces with 25% defensive bonus. We'll win most of those combats since their units are mostly low base strength.

That might beg the question, what are the Germans doing? Why are their units off in the desert instead of defending their cities? Well, here's the answer: killing WPC's cities.

This is by far the strongest of the three German stacks, lots and lots of elephants in it. They are throwing everything against Huron River to punish WPC before they die, and I can appreciate the sentiment. Notice by the way how WPC didn't even have a road between their two frontline cities, nor did they reach 100 culture for 40% defensive bonus in one of their core cities 160 turns into the game. Yikes. Well, WPC did whip walls with the stone (that we gifted them!!!) but they don't have very many units inside Huron River. The Germans will likely take the city on their half of the turn timer and raze it. We'll have the option to attack the Germans or leave them alone on our half of the turn. If they raze Huron, we'll probably just ignore their units, which will magically disappear when we eliminate the German team. But the Germans could potentially capture Huron, in which case we'll have to clear out all these units, so we're in a position to do whatever we need to do. The Germans will probably die on T162, two turns from now.

Here's the north:

These knights are southeast of Wesselburen, and there's an injured knight two tiles south of Westheim. I'm still pissed that our one knight was mismoved due to chatting with WPC; we should have a 4th knight up here ready to attack. The most likely scenario is that we will take Wesselburen T161 and then capture Westheim on T162, eliminating the German team. I really hope so, I'm done with this team and want to move on to other things. Mighty tired of WPC as well.

Wrapping things up, here's a picture of our captured German cities, the new core of North Egypt:



Everything is still size 1 for the moment, but growing quickly and filling up granary boxes with food. We need 15-20 turns and then these will be extremely good cities.



Finally the Demographics. They don't look so bad when we're running at 100% science, although the GNP is deceptive because Gunpowder is a 40% bonus pre-requisite tech. Our lead in Food, Soldiers, Land, and score is pretty disgusting. If this were a non-diplo game, it would already be over. As it is, we need to get to rifles and then we're pretty much invulnerable until someone gets to infantry, which is impossibly far away right now. We'll always be able to draft an endless swarm of rifles and make invading us incredibly painful with our Great Wall + Statue of Zeus combo. You do not want to fight in our territory. Apolyton's Golden Age ended this turn, and we'll have Gunpowder in two turns to start drafting lots of muskets.

Everyone hates us because we've outplayed them all and have a gigantic lead. Good luck, diplo team.

[Sullla]

Turn 161 - 1010AD

One more German city down, next turn should see their end if all goes well.

Here was the situation in the north at the start of the turn. The Germans whipped Wesselburen... but it wasn't enough to help them, since whatever they whipped won't appear until the start of next turn, and that was too late. Still just a single axeman inside for defense. Meanwhile, Westheim did finish a unit... a catapult. Interesting choice, considering that a longbow also costs 50 shields and they could have given it two promotions with their Vassalage civic. Whatever, we're certainly not complaining. Westheim will not be able to complete another unit before next turn, so that city is also toast.

In the eastern desert, the Germans captured the WPC of Huron River, which we all thought was pretty damn funny. Total city count from this war - Germans 1, WPC 0. They also made a nice move in pillaging all of the roads in this area behind them as they advanced, ruling out an attack from us this turn. We received these screenshots from WPC showing the German units in the fog:

Note also how the Germans mocked WPC with the renaming of Huron River. I'm going to miss this team, they deserved much better in this game. Anyway, the Germans have all but one of their catapults inside the captured city, which was the key info from these screenshots. Their big collection of war elephants also won't be able to heal before we can attack them, which means we'll get odds with our drafted maces against all of them. Good news for mopping all of them up next turn. Here's how we're going to do that:



We have six workers that can get into this area by the end of the turn. On this current turn, we move our big stack onto one of the white X tiles (any of them would do). We use the only worker in range to put one turn of roading into that desert tile. Then next turn (T162) the six workers road the desert tile and two flatground tiles to the east (in yellow) allowing our stack to hit Huron River with everything we have. If the Germans stuff all their units in there, they get hit with catapults and collateraled to death. If they don't put units in there, we ignore them and take the city, eliminating their team. Either way they die.

Anyway, back to the current turn. In the north, we sent in a war chariot at 75% odds against the axe inside Wesselburen... and instead got a retreat at 2% odds. Uh, ok... Then we mopped up with a knight at 99%:

Wesselburen
C1 war chariot vs C1 axe 75% WITHDRAW
C1/shock knight vs crippled axe 99% WIN
CAPTURE CITY, 65g, granary + lighthouse + market

We debated keeping this city versus razing it and allowing WPC to resettle the location, with a slight preference for razing the city. At least, until we saw inside the city:



Granary, lighthouse, and market? That ended the debate real fast. We kept Wesselburen, and we'll make use of that infrastructure as soon as it comes out of resistance.



Here's what's left of the north. We have four knights and a war chariot in position to attack Westheim next turn. At best, there will be a catapult and a quechua upgraded to a spear inside the city next turn. It will fall, and then the captured Huron River will be the only city remaining. Honestly we would be totally ignoring the German units in the east if they hadn't captured the WPC city, since otherwise taking this spot would magically cause them to disappear. The Germans also do not have any other cities in their city list - these are the only spots they have left.

This is the east after moving forward, with the line of attack next turn in white. Good thing we have just enough workers in the area to make this happen. By my count, we have 18 maces, 8 knights, 12 catapults, 1 war chariot, and 1 elephant in position to attack Huron River next turn. That should be enough to clear out virtually everything, although it's possible that the Germans will live one more turn if we run out of sheer number of attackers. Either way, their days are numbered, and we're going to slaughter a lot of Germans next turn.

Now on to various odds and ends for the remainder of the turn.



We're going to drop off our mace and settler on the X tile next turn. We also spotted this barb city to the south of CFC, which is just outside their vision. We'll pick up a mace and try to burn this down on the return trip; we would prefer to raze this location and not let CFC get a free city in this area. The city to be founded here has the potential to be an important strategic location and naval base down the road, since it bottles up the sea lanes to the south of CFC. Plus we get another intercontinental trading route in every city. We'll be quietly settling several more of these polar fishing villages over the next few dozen turns, hopefully ignored by the other teams.



City micro. Most people wanted us to leave Tree Huggers alone and keep growing here, and also swap back to finish the 109/150 market. Alternately we can whip the courthouse and overflow into market. Give me your thoughts.



At Seven Tribes, I believe that we should 3 pop whip this courthouse and overflow into the market. We would be whipping off the brand new cottage, the plains farm, and a 2/0/3 coastal tile (after swapping with Gourmet Menu). We also will get city growths at Seven Tribes and Gourmet Menu next turn, allowing us to get two pop immediately back in this region. I think whipping is the best call here, but give advice.



This city desperately needs the courthouse, but it's a 4 pop whip and not a good call this turn. However, there's not much we can do to increase production and get it down to a 3 pop whip unless we mine that plains hill tile to the south. Do we whip anyway? Keep in mind what's going on next door as well:



We should only whip one of these two cities, and pass the good tiles over to the other city while the first is recovering from a whip. At the same time, since we're out of good tiles here, we definitely should be whipping ONE of these two cities for something. Give me a micro plan here guys.

We also have the question of using the Great General that we picked up last turn. There are basically two options: Starfall (Globe draft city) or Horse Feathers (Heroic Epic city). Starfall lets us get 2XP drafted units that come out with one promotion, although this will be rendered fairly pointless when we go into Theocracy civic later on. It would be useful in the immediate future. Horse Feathers would allow us to reach 10XP and three promos on Mounted units with another Great General + Theocracy later, and two promos on all non-Mounted units immediately. Speaker suggested that we use the General in Horse Feathers and put the city on a rotation: catapult, catapult, catapult, knight. All coming out in 1 turn each due to the overflow we get from cat builds. With the General inside Horse Feathers, those catapults would all be 5XP for Barrage II, and we could very quickly build up a catapult reserve to defend against anything from Apolyton or CivPlayers. That seemed like the best idea to me, but I don't think that using the General in Starfall is necessarily bad either. Let's get some feedback here. The General is still unmoved this turn.



Demographics for the turn. About what you would expect. Apolyton's Golden Age finally ended this turn, but CivFr's Golden Age continues onward thanks to their Mausoleum. Part of the reason why our Demos have looked bad over the last 25 turns is due to the fact that all of these rivals have been running lots of Golden Ages. (CFC had their Taj GA, Apolyton had one, CivPlayers had one, UniversCiv had one, CivFr had two of them with the Mausoleum for 24 turns of GA!) We're still in a fairly disgusting position in Food, Land, Power, Score, and even Approval Rating (we have tons of room to draft very, very hard if we want). I'm looking forward to building up the German cities over the next 25 turns.

Think that's all for now. Let's get some feedback on these cities and then we'll end our turn tomorrow.

[Sullla]

Turn 162 - 1020AD

The end of the German team. Six rivals remain.



Here was the situation at the start of the turn. The Germans somehow produced another spearman in Westheim after producing a catapult the turn before (still not exactly sure how they were able to do that in a size 3 city) and upgraded their quechua into a spear. They attacked out of the city with their new spearman and killed our isolated knight, then attacked our stack with their catapult, losing and dealing collateral damage. We had three knights and a war chariot in the area to attack the single spear inside the city. The dice were not especially kind to us here, as we lost the 50/50 battle with our knight, then cleaned up:

Westheim
C2 knight vs C1 spear 54% (LOSE, 1.5 health)
C2/pinch knight C1 spear 99% (WIN)
CAPTURE CITY, 88 gold, granary

knight vs crippled spear 99% (WIN)

Apologies again for the poor image quality, I had to pull that off the Livestream because I didn't take a screenshot while playing. We kept Westheim, picking up 88 gold in the process and a granary inside the city. Not too bad.

Still, that was only the appetizer for this turn. The Germans moved all of their remaining units inside the captured WPC city of Huron River. They didn't really have anywhere else to go, but this meant that they were an extremely easy target to focus, everything inside a city with no cultural defenses whatsoever. Here's what that looked like:

Unfortunately, the stack of units scrolls off the interface on the left side of the screen, making it difficult to see them all. There were almost 30 German units inside, a mixture of mostly war elephants, catapults, horse archers, and axes. Our big stack highlighted in the picture began the turn two tiles east of Willhelmshaven. We had six workers in the area lay down the three tiles of road leading up to the German city. This meant that every single unit pictured, plus about eight more knights, were able to get in on the action.

Huron River
CR cat vs CG3 longbow 2% (LOSE, no hits)
CR cat vs CG3 longbow 2% (LOSE, 3 hits)
CR cat vs CG3 longbow 44% (LOSE, no hits)
CR cat vs CG3 longbow 44% (LOSE, 2 hits)
CR cat vs war elephant 30% (WITHDRAW)
CR cat vs war elephant 50% (WITHDRAW)
CR cat vs war elephant 52% (LOSE)
CR cat vs war elephant 73% (WITHDRAW)
CR cat vs war elephant 73% (WITHDRAW)
CR cat vs war elephant 74% (WITHDRAW)
CR cat vs war elephant 77% (WITHDRAW)

We started out by sending in the catapults. Because the Germans were inside a city, we could get a sizable combat bonus by taking City Raider promotions on the catapults, which we determined would be more useful than Barrage promotions. In most cases, the CR promotion was taking us from 25% -> 44% chance to withdraw, or later on 40% -> 73% chance to survive. One of those jumping points in the combat odds, in other words. This was more useful than a slight increase in collateral damage; we cared much more about catapults surviving the battle to fight again, even though all these City Raider catapults will probably look really strange when we're fighting in the open later on. Better than dying though!

So the first 4 cats all died, two of them failing to get in any hits at all on the monster CG3 longbow. (Why didn't the Germans whip more longbows instead of elephants? I'll discuss this more later.) The third cat had 44% chance to withdraw and didn't get even one hit on the longbow, yeesh. After that, we hit on a huge string of luck, withdrawing at 30% and again at 50%, dying at 50% odds, and then hitting four withdraws in a row at 70-75% odds. The net result was that we ended up losing 5 catapults in total while weakening all of the top defenders and collateraling the living daylights out of the rest of the stack. This was a very un-Multiplayer style of combat, much more like Singleplayer where the AI will stuff everything into a city to defend.

But it worked, because after we sent in the cats, it was mopup time, and the rivers ran red with German blood:

C2 knight vs C2 spear 99% (WIN)
knight vs catapult 99% (WIN with 2 hp)
knight vs catapult 99% (WIN)
C2 knight vs catapult 99% (WIN)
C2 knight vs catapult 99% (WIN)
C1 mace vs catapult 95% (WIN)
CR catapult vs longbow 98% (WITHDRAW)
C1 mace vs C1/shock axe 95% (WIN)
C1 mace vs catapult 98% (WIN)
C1 mace vs catapult 97% (WIN)
mace vs horse archer 98% (WIN)
mace vs elephant 99% (WIN)
mace vs crippled CG3 longbow 99% (WIN)
mace vs horse archer 99% (WIN)
mace vs horse archer 99% (WIN)
mace vs axe 99% (WIN)
mace vs war elephant 99% (WIN)
mace vs axe 99% (WIN)
mace vs horse archer 99% (WIN)
mace vs horse archer 99% (WIN)
mace vs war elephant 99% (WIN)
mace vs GG war elephant 99% (WIN)
mace vs GG war elephant #2 99% (WIN)
mace vs war elephant 99% (WIN)
C1/shock war elephant vs war elephant 99% (WIN)
C2 knight vs war elephant 99% (WIN)
C2 knight vs war elephant 99% (WIN)
C2 knight vs GG medic chariot 99% (WIN)
medic 3 war chariot vs chariot 99% (WIN)

We did not lose a single battle in that sequence, most of them with combat odds well above 99% for our attackers. We also picked up a lot of experience and Great General points in all of those victories. The screenshot above was towards the end of this process, as we killed one of the THREE German Great General units that they had attached as a result of their slaughter of WPC's various crap earlier.

By the time the dust cleared, there was a single unit left:



This is actually not the same CG3 longbow from earlier, but a different C3 one. Amusingly enough, we did not have a unit able to kill this longbow - exactly one unit short! Which was fine, since the whole idea was to let WPC take the city anyway, it being theirs and all that. Still, it's a bit funny that it worked out so well.

Here's the full combat log, just for fun. As always, read from bottom to top.




Lot of green on there. Not a whole lot of red. I also enjoyed seeing my archenemy Gaius Marius fall at the tail end of the fight. Seven-time consul my ass, he never won the grass crown.



We also are more than halfway to our next Great General, gaining almost 50 points this turn in the fighting. It's too bad that this wasn't in our territory; with the Great Wall, we would have gotten another Great General for sure.

Here's the overview of the area with the Germans effectively finished. I mentioned before the war that the Germans basically had two cores, one along each of their two river valleys in the south and in the northeast. This is the second one, and the non-tundra cities are all very valuable. We need about 15-20 turns to grow these locations up to size 8 or so and have them humming along working their food resources and all those riverside cottages. Will we get that time to make this area productive? Not so sure of that.

After we did all the hard work, WPC swept in and finished off the Germans as planned:





We are down to six competitors remaining in the game, and with WPC being totally irrelevant, there are basically five other teams to consider. Three of those five teams are thinking about invading us in the near future. I love full diplo games, don't you? The reward for outplaying other teams is getting dogpiled. Every. Single. Time. Well, we'll get into our response to all of that next turn.





Demographics from before and after the Germans were eliminated. As expected, the Rival Averages went up significantly once they were removed.

Let's take a minute here and reflect on this war before we move forward. Our longterm strategy worked out more or less exactly the way that we expected. We signed an NAP agreement lasting for roughly 80 turns with the Germans way back on T70 or so, designed to last through Turn 150. At the time, the Germans were fighting off WPC's early (stupid) attack and were eager to get a peace deal with their southern neighbor. We planned at the time to expand in peace to the natural frontiers of our civ, then tech to Nationalism and draft an army to eliminate our northern rival. Because the deal was so long-lasting, the Germans appeared to completely forget that the NAP would run out on T150, and didn't initiate their own buildup until about T148. We allied with WPC and hit the Germans from both sides. They were not ready, they were significantly behind in technology, and did not fare very well.

How do we grade the German performance? I would give them something like a B- or C+ on the American grading scale. Adequate to mediocre, I would say. They received a gift of ivory from CivFr, researched Feudalism on about the third turn of the war, and then revolted into Vassalage civic (Spiritual civ). For whatever reason, they chose to whip mostly war elephants instead of longbows, which was a huge mistake. What they should have done was 2 pop whip longbows every other turn from every city. They could have piled up 25+ longbows in a real hurry, all of them with two promos for CG2, and made our life a living hell. Keep a big stack in each city, force us to march our slow moving catapults + maces up to each city... and then right when we're going to attack, leave one longbow in the city and retreat back to the next one. Keep making us do that over and over again, stalling for time, and continue to whip out more and more and more longbows. We would almost certainly have had to sue for peace and exit the war if they had done this.

Instead, the Germans mostly whipped war elephants instead. Those units were good against WPC because of their higher base strength, but elephants get no defensive bonuses and had little chance to hold German cities against a determined attack. The Germans also stopped defending their cities against us halfway through the war, or only had a token defense, allowing us to blitz through them with knights and maces, albeit at heavy losses sometimes. We barely used our catapults until the final turn of the war, opting instead for speed, speed, and more speed.

The results were staggering in the end: we captured all 15 cities in the course of 13 turns, and effectively captured a 16th city in the form of Huron River. This wildly inflated our city count; when we settle our polar city next turn, we will plant our 35th city of the game. No other team has more than 20 cities. Our team made a major gamble, effectively risking our tech and population lead in a play to gain more territory. This could have backfired horribly in a failed attack - we would have given away our lead in the game built up over the first 130 turns. But it didn't, and we came out huge winners, now with overwhelming leads in everything except GNP. It will take ~25 turns to repair the economy, after which time our lead in every category should be virtually unassailable.

But we have to survive and hold our current territory first, and the other teams finally seem to be coming after us in a desperate attempt to slow us down. The next two dozen turns could quite possibly decide this game's fate. Stay tuned...

[Sullla]

Turn 163 - 1030AD

As soon as the German war is finished, we immediately must prepare for the next threat.



Let's start with the good news first. Our economy is already rebounding nicely from our ~15% break-even science nadir at the worst moment of the German war, and we haven't even started working the cottages in the captured cities yet. This island city was a major help: our income went up by about 25 gold/turn after planting this spot, since it gave us a second 2 commerce trade route in every domestic city. As for Jack Frost itself:



The Great Lighthouse is our friend. The other teams made a major mistake by letting us get that wonder so cheaply and so late in the game (well after Turn 100). These polar ice cities are very much worth founding, and I'd suggest that we start making preparations to add more of them... if we didn't have enough problems on our hands already.

Going back to the first picture, planting the city revealed no barb units anywhere in sight. I have not landed the mace or moved the galley on this turn yet; I think that we should move north, offload the mace next to the barb city, and start killing the archers. We want that city gone ASAP. I don't think that this has any bearing on anything diplomatic with CFC, and by the time we land a mace and spend three turns slowly killing the archers, the intervening 10 days of real-world time will have seen us get an NAP or the deal fall apart. I don't see how razing a brand new size 1 barb city in the polar ice would have any bearing on that anyway. We want this city removed immediately - we should start working on that now.



Up here in the former battle zone, we saved about 15 gold this turn in unit costs by moving our military stuff inside our borders. Most of the two-movers are inside Willhelmshaven, which is where the Medic III chariot is located, ready to heal up to full and then move west. The big stack of one-movers relocated from the tile west of Huron River to the tile east of Willhelmshaven, the max distance they could move. They'll be inside our borders next turn when the city comes out of resistance, and we can heal them up there pretty quickly. The default healing rate is 10% of max health each turn; the Medic III adds 25% to that, and I believe being inside your borders adds another 5%. So that's 40% of max health recovered each turn, or just about everything healed to full in two turns of rest. Then we have 5 or 6 turns to rush over to the west, where we can reach the next theatre of war in just enough time. We're *VERY* fortunate that the Germans didn't drag this our further, as even a couple more turns of war would have put us in a very dire position.

That's the good news for the turn. Here's the bad news: Apolyton has finished teching Rifling and begun drafting rifles.



There's a couple things to note on this tech screen. First and most importantly, Apolyton finished Rifling faster than we were hoping, and now has a decent amount of time to draft rifles before T170. Their steals of Nationalism and Engineering (both necessary to fight this war) definitely hurt us a lot, especially since Apolyton didn't have to waste a turn of Anarchy swapping into Nationhood. They need another 5 turns to be ready if the steals don't go down, and that would have ruled out a T170 attack. But anyway, that's in the past at this point, no sense in worrying.

Fortunately, Apolyton's threat is very one dimensional. They'll have rifles and assuredly catapults, but that's about it. Apolyton doesn't have Horseback Riding as a tech (at least not for now), which means no knights and no stables. This is the Single Player mindset for sure in action. They also do not have Theology tech, which means no two-promo units and 1XP drafted rifles. They remain in Organized Religion. A slow moving stack of drafted rifles is not as bad in practice as it sounds. Hit it with enough collateral damage and it goes down pretty fast.

That said, CivStats does bear watching, because Apolyton and CivPlayers sure look like they want to attack:



Apolyton did the max 5 drafts, then two 1 pop whips and a 2 pop whip. I'm guessing the other whips were probably for catapults. They have 5 rifles and 4 janissaries drafted at the moment. CivPlayers did six 1 pop whip and a single 2 pop whip; I assumed that they had teched Nationalism and were drafting here, but nope, they don't have Nationalism or Gunpowder. CivPlayers is running Bureaucracy and Organized Religion - no Nationhood and no Theocracy. So I don't know what's going on here from them. Knights, perhaps? It's a fair guess that if they're going to attack, it would be Apolyton with rifles and CivPlayers with knights, since the latter does have Guilds.

Also keep in mind that this could simply be a defensive move too. All of the other teams have to be crapping their pants at our gigantic military numbers and the way that we ran over the Germans without breaking much of a sweat. For me, the real indicator is what these teams do over the next few turns. If they continuing whipping and drafting like mad, then yes, we need to be concerned. I still do not think that Apolyton is willing to do what they'd have to do to stop us, which would be double or triple drafting virtually all of their cities to amass ~30 rifles. But we do need to be cautious here... just don't go nuts with the "doom and gloom" stuff, please. This team has a tendency to run away with wild paranoia about everything.

Apolyton + CivPlayers are ultimately not too dangerous, since we can concentrate units in the same area to deal with them. If CFC attacks from the opposite direction though... I really hope we can get them to sign a deal with us. The fact that the CFC/CivFr war has not seen a single unit lost on either side in quite a few turns now is not encouraging.

Let's look at some cities. We can draft 5 cities this turn, and Starfall eats up one of those drafts. In other words, we'll want to draft 4 of these cities - let's pick out which 4.



Focal Point just finished our first spy unit. We'll finish our second at Brick By Brick next turn. (We need more than two of them, but I'm not sure we can commit the resources at present. Two is the bare minimum we can get away with, so that we can run counterespionage against both Apolyton and CivPlayers.) Focal Point is a good candidate to draft this turn, but we may be better off drafting here in another turn or two. I set the city to Wealth for the moment, which is what I would run here if we were playing for pure econ. We might need to crank out 3t catapults for a while instead though. Give me your thoughts here.



Gourmet Menu is in a perfect spot in its draft cycle to be drafted this turn. Regrows next turn, drafts off a coastal tile, no current draft penalty. We'd like to avoid drafting a strong commerce city like this at all, but... rifles may be at the gates soon. Time for the locals to grab some muskets and head for the front lines?



Seven Tribes is in the exact same position as Gourmet Menu, good spot in the draft cycle and no current lingering draft penalty. We'd be drafting off the immature cottage and regrowing next turn. Remember though, we can only draft four of these cities this turn.



Brick By Brick is another potential draft candidate, although probably not for this turn given the other good spots available. We're finishing a spy this turn, and then I'd love to add 25 gold/turn via Wealth build here... but we'll probably be turning out a bunch of 2t catapults instead. Which will be needed if our neighbors come over the border in force. We also need walls + castle here, and yet we've amazingly managed to trade away our stone at one of the most critical moments in the game to have it available. Freaking WPC, I swear...



Cutting Edge can also be drafted this turn and will immediately regrow next turn. It's on Wealth for the moment after finishing its courthouse. Again, would love to build Wealth to add 20 gold/turn to our economy, but the alternative would be 2.5t catapults, and that's probably more likely.



Frozen Jungle can also be drafted, and has nearly lost its last maceman draft penalty. We'll probably draft here twice in the next couple of turns. Alternately, the courthouse is a 3 pop whip if we would want to do that instead.



Let It Snow has never been drafted before, and doesn't even have a defender inside the city right now (although it's pretty safely in the deep south). This would be another good location to get a musket out. We can also 2 pop whip the courthouse to completion if we would rather do that. Remember, we only get 5 total drafts, and Starfall should take up one of them! But yeah, we can get out a *LOT* of units in a real hurry so long as we're using the draft.

Here's an overview of our non-German core:

Adventure One and Mansa should remain on Wealth until we get to Banking tech, and then we can swap them over to banks. The four Wealth builds pictured are giving us an extra 60 gold/turn combined; with them, the break-even science rate is a little over 35%. Without them, our break-even rate is about 28% science. We're nearly up to 30% now! Again, if there were no war brewing on the horizon, I'd pull 100 gold/turn extra from Wealth builds and cruise along at nearly 50% science rate. Too bad the other teams are smart enough to stop that.

Note that our 100% science rate comes extremely close to knocking out Banking tech in 1t. Not bad at max rate either, 900 beakers/turn. Now if we could just get someone to fund us with 600 gold each turn, we could get Rifling in about 6 turns. If we want to prioritize Banking tech, we could probably run 10% science this turn and 100% science next turn and land it. I have no strong feeling about whether that would be something we want to do.



State Property civic is already worth 184 gold/turn for our team. Someday... In the meantime, building the Forbidden Palace will be worth a nice chunk of change as well. That plus a bank in Mansa would easily be worth 10% on the science slider. Hopefully in the next ~15 or so turns.



Demos at 0% science. World Power rating is up 180k from last turn, much of that in drafted units. CFC also picked up Gunpowder tech this turn, which means drafted muskets from them too if they want. We are still incredibly dominant in pretty much everything other than GNP.

Not planning to Livestream this turn or other "normal" turns unless we find ourselves in another war. Give your thoughts and feedback, without going off the deep end into insane paranoia over being attacked. If they come over the border, we'll meet them and turn them back. We are not the Germans.