[SPOILERS] Serdoa, Ichabod and Ex-Girlfriends - co-starring NH,Bigger and Lewwyn

[Serdoa]

Btw: The one dark blob might be slows land. I don't think we found him yet, did we?

Since slow plays Mali (at least to your overview) he is north of Sian.

Ah yeah, forgot. So we found everyone and indeed there is a whole continent to settle. Well, lets get on with it!

[NobleHelium]

I'm thinking we'll send those two workers over to Julia after building those workshops at Iris. We can do the usual whipping of a settler at Julia at size 6, timed with the vulture exploring a bit more.

[Serdoa]

Sounds good to me. Vulture needs to heal now unfortunately as I attacked the barb-warrior and despite having 99.6% odds dropped down to 50% health. Did only get 1 XP regardless as we had to high odds to win.

I haven't ended turn yet because we could move our 8 Knights onto the Vulture/Chariot-stack this turn and attack BaIIs 1 Spear, 3 Axe, 2 Worker stack next turn. We can make the first fight 12 vs 8, which should give us good odds, all other fights should be 10 vs 5 and therefore even easier. Hitting those units (especially the spear) when they are not fortified behind city walls might be worth it. We do not know what he has in his city though and our units would be on their own then and should press forward imo, leaving FeedshotGG to be taken with the next wave of Knights. We can't join them up the next turn as our other Knights have to walk for a little while longer.

Anyhow, I think that's better than letting him get those units behind cities, maybe whip walls in and suddenly we face a 12 str defender instead of str 8. For comparison check our odds in FeedShotGG with a Knight. That's doable - and hopefully not all his cities will be on hills - but if we don't have to we shouldn't imo.

(Of course there are arguments for not attacking, not the least that he has more time to prepare while we wait another 2-3 turns till our other units are around.

[NobleHelium]

I was thinking of suggesting that actually. The main question is whether we'll be able to attack using the prior forking plan before those units finish improving the sugar and get back into a city, and it seems like we might not get there in time. If that's the case, we should attack sooner and kill those units when we can, yeah. Upon further analysis I'm definitely in favor of attacking sooner rather than later since we can definitely start taking cities. However, we'll only have six knights available because the other two are out of movement. BUT we also have chariots, so really we only need to kill the spear with a knight and then we can and should use chariots on the axes, leaving the other knights healthy to push the attack. Assuming we move six knights up this turn, we end up with this situation next turn:



So basically I propose:
1) Move the six knights up this turn.
2) Attack the spear with a knight next turn and clean up with chariots. Attack with the withdraw chariot first against the top axeman. I've accounted for one chariot losing in the diagram.
3) Move the other one-movers onto the damaged chariot stack (the last winning chariot will be stranded on the eastern sugar with two workers, but that should be fine unless he has units in the jungle to the south for some reason).
4) Move the rest of the knights along with the sentry chariot onto the original fork tile (any extra chariots from the prior attack should also go here). We should have eight knights in range of that tile, seven if we're unlucky in attacking the spear (and thus need an additional knight to clean it up).
5) Move the trailing knight to the hill northeast of FSGG, enabling it to help attack the city on t148. If BaII wants to attack out with his spear at worse odds, that's fine too.
6) On t148 we hopefully take both cities and allow the one-movers 2N of TSGG to move along the newly neutral road southward toward the rest of his cities. We should prioritize taking TSGG over FSGG for that reason, but hopefully we'll have enough knights to take both cities. Remember that we may be able to reuse some of the chariots in attacking weak units inside FSGG as well. Obviously we should attack with the hill knight before using any of the fork tile knights on FSGG. Trailing knights keep following the roads to catch up. One captured worker roads the sugar while the other moves 1N to road the jungle. We'll need that road to settle the NE city.

Also, can we change Katharina's build to a christian temple to be 2-whipped when it grows a few more sizes (and thus takes some cottages back from Heidi)? I don't think we should build a missionary there because we'd have to work a mine to complete it, delaying growth. And maybe we should change Fernanda's build to a settler? We'll be a few hammers shy of 2-whipping it though, that's really annoying. We'd be able to use the overflow to finish the ziggurat though.

Remember that we'll need to play after BaII next turn (he's been playing ahead of us for the last 2-3 turns or so).

[Serdoa]

Plan sounds good, lets do it that way. I'm also fine with changing Katharina, but I would keep the Knight in Fernanda, we have cut them on several cities already. We will lose some of them, especially against spears (btw: you can expect that he has a promo on his spears saved). I also want to keep Carina and potentially one other city (probably Fernanda, thinking about it) on Knights for a little bit longer. I would add Iris too but till that city is available again we hopefully have won the war.

[NobleHelium]

I changed Katharina's build but didn't move the knights.

That city of Sa'luk of Jowy's is a captured barb city, lucky him. Clearly we shouldn't have fog busted so well in the early game. And it's also too bad that we can't threaten the city for marble (can't have resources as part of peace treaties).

[Serdoa]

Is that (no resources for peace deals) also so if you do diplo with the AI? Because if not we probably could ask for it via text I suppose?

[NobleHelium]

You can't ask for resources from the AI during a treaty, no. When you're at war you don't have a trade route to your enemy, therefore resource trading isn't possible until the war ends.

[Serdoa]

Logging in, moving the Knights.

[NobleHelium]

I logged in to check which of Nakor's cities Gavagai took and saw that Nakor asked for a map trade. (I was also checking whether Gavagai had declared war on us, breaking the silver trade, but he hasn't still.) I don't know whether we previously traded maps or if you just asked Nakor for his and he accepted, so I declined it for now. If you want to trade maps you can always propose it when you log in later, Nakor's not going to log in again until next turn anyway.