[SPOILERS] Small Wunders and Izzy of Inca: The fat lady sings

[MindyMcCready]

Other than the Retep defense force, most of what else we have is split fairly evenly between two fork tiles: 2W of Don Giovanni, and 1SW of Manon.

Believe it or not, we could finish Monarchy in 1 turn! This, because of overflow snowball by over-researching the end of Mono and then Fishing. But sailing is more crucial. I'm thinking Monarchy comes before CoL though (and it will come very quickly), just because we can get immediate benefit from the wines, while we don't have hammers to spare for courthouses right now.

Not sure what your composition is in those 2 stacks, but we need fortified spears in our cities. Since all 3 of those front line cities and be hit out of the blue the stack defense approach is too reactionary.

Also, if Ichabod wanted to he could move a fast mover stack to that forest 2S of Manon out of the blue. Looks like you're chopping that forest for the Hoffman walls which is good.

[WilliamLP]

Actually, Ichabod can hit both cities out of the blue. Yeah, let's whip those walls in.

Sure, I was right on the edge of whipping them last turn (1 turn before growth). But I'll do it this turn.

[WilliamLP]

Whoah, slowcheetah took a city from dtay! It must be on that eastern island. This is kind of a bad sign if he's making military efforts away from Ichabod.

[MindyMcCready]

Yep, those tea leaves aren't looking so good. Cheetah's power is really, really low. Not sure why he'd want to go after dtay unless he's crossing his fingers & vassalizing.

Look at all those forests! I hope that this picture is old,...

Any chance of an update before the weekend?

[WilliamLP]

Yep, those tea leaves aren't looking so good. Cheetah's power is really, really low. Not sure why he'd want to go after dtay unless he's crossing his fingers & vassalizing.

Look at all those forests! I hope that this picture is old,...

Any chance of an update before the weekend?

I report the turns as they roll!

[WilliamLP]

After being among the last to play for the whole game, my spidey sense says Bacchus really wants to establish the first half of the turn order. We'll see who has less of a life.

[WilliamLP]

Was greeted with:




I turned this down. But this is an extremely strong indicator that he wants to disconnect Cheetah's resources really soon and wants to freeze our copper so that we can't trade or gift it away. And indirectly, it says he's probably not going to go full-force at us. (Unless it's a really elaborate ploy!)

Retep's peace expired, but there are no signs he has a timing attack ready. I declared and offered peace again. I don't see harm in letting him have 10 free turns, and the worst outcome is he doesn't take peace and we have to be watchful for an attack at any moment... which we do anyway.

We have foreign trade routes now. Here's what demos at 100% on Monarchy (2 prereqs) would be:




This is actually really good! This costs 95gpt, but we actually make 70gpt right now (down to 65 after whips). Monarchy is due in 2.

I settled the seafood city Tosca. (I could have called it "Pearl Fishers" but it would be too obvious for C&D.) I also whipped the two sets of walls on our Ichabod border.




Trying to claw our way back to relevance.




If Ichabod goes hard to war, we're going to be quite competitive with his GNP, at least for a while.




We'll see if Bacchus can build enough to do damage to a city with walls when we know something is coming. It's possible (maybe even likely) he's coming with cats and elephants.

[MindyMcCready]

Yep, those tea leaves aren't looking so good. Cheetah's power is really, really low. Not sure why he'd want to go after dtay unless he's crossing his fingers & vassalizing.

Look at all those forests! I hope that this picture is old,...

Any chance of an update before the weekend?

I report the turns as they roll!

And that's appreciated! Thanks. No doubt it's a lot of work.

[MindyMcCready]

Was greeted with:

I turned this down. But this is an extremely strong indicator that he wants to disconnect Cheetah's resources really soon and wants to freeze our copper so that we can't trade or gift it away. And indirectly, it says he's probably not going to go full-force at us. (Unless it's a really elaborate ploy!)

We're going to have to think carefully what we want to do here. I don't really want to give Ichabod an easy ride into Cheetah's land. I'd be totally comfortable with that course of action if I thought that Cheetah would be able to hold out. But its not looking so good on that front.

Wetbandit's pretty much irrelevant on second thought. He may well challenge Ichabod's control over that island,...but he'd never go beyond that as an ally. Worst case would be Ichabod killing Cheetah but losing the island - we'd be facing a bit of heat over that one.

Ideal situation: Cheetah holds out, Wetbandit challenges for that island and Ichabod responds while we hold our borders. Too much depends on Cheetah and his unfortunate city layout unfortunately.

I think that we should seriously consider the pillage to break the trade and then re-hook up. The good thing there is that Ichabod has nicely packaged the deal so we'd only have to cottage over one of the tiles to break the trade. As they say, all fair in love and war. I'm going to include proxy wars in that too. :LOL:

I wouldn't underestimate the back-stab value here. Ichabod gets the all-clear; sends his units clear to the other side of the landmass cuts resources and then boom! resources back up and WilliamLP's victorious army crushing though Ichabods western cities. Yeah,....something like that. :LOL:

Retep's peace expired, but there are no signs he has a timing attack ready. I declared and offered peace again. I don't see harm in letting him have 10 free turns, and the worst outcome is he doesn't take peace and we have to be watchful for an attack at any moment... which we do anyway.

The worst outcome is that Bacchus takes Suit up. I'm not a fan of forced peace with Retep for that reason.

We have foreign trade routes now. Here's what demos at 100% on Monarchy (2 prereqs) would be:

Monarchy is due in 2.

Wow, what an improvement.

Can you post our break-even turns to Feudialism? Whether we can land LBs will be pretty relevant to how much we think that we can afford to antagonize Ichabod.

We'll see if Bacchus can build enough to do damage to a city with walls when we know something is coming. It's possible (maybe even likely) he's coming with cats and elephants.

Yeah, lets see what that sneaky guy can do.

[WilliamLP]

We're going to have to think carefully what we want to do here. I don't really want to give Ichabod an easy ride into Cheetah's land. I'd be totally comfortable with that course of action if I thought that Cheetah would be able to hold out. But its not looking so good on that front.

Wetbandit's pretty much irrelevant on second thought. He may well challenge Ichabod's control over that island,...but he'd never go beyond that as an ally. Worst case would be Ichabod killing Cheetah but losing the island - we'd be facing a bit of heat over that one.

Ideal situation: Cheetah holds out, Wetbandit challenges for that island and Ichabod responds while we hold our borders. Too much depends on Cheetah and his unfortunate city layout unfortunately.

I think that we should seriously consider the pillage to break the trade and then re-hook up. The good thing there is that Ichabod has nicely packaged the deal so we'd only have to cottage over one of the tiles to break the trade. As they say, all fair in love and war. I'm going to include proxy wars in that too. :LOL:

First, Wetbandit is a team member or dedlurker with Ichabod. Fintourist / Old Harry are the team we have open borders with, on the island with Ichabod. Dtay is the guy on the northern island with Cheetah who just lost a city. So I'm not sure who you mean above.

Some of this might be different if we didn't have a guy who we just backstabbed, short on expansion room except through us, building military as fast as possible on the other side. I don't think we can afford to be without copper for any significant amount of time, or to have 4 workers on permanent stand-by duty in case we do.

To be clear, you're talking about: 1. Accept a deal that freezes our copper. 2. When Ichabod declares and disconnects Cheetah's copper, cottage our copper. (Cottaging horse wouldn't break the deal since we have 2 horse.) 3. Wait a turn for the deal to break. Re-mine copper, gift to Cheetah. The big problem here would be not having copper after this...

A less extreme option might be to try and trade an excess metal off of Scooter (they have copper + iron). We will have some surplus happy soon with HR, 2 wines, and an additional fur in a few turns. (Of course Scooter may actually be the leader in the entire game!)

I didn't report it but I'm actually trading our marble to Fintourist right now for health since we have nothing to use it for yet. Scooter might be interested in that too.

I wouldn't underestimate the back-stab value here. Ichabod gets the all-clear; sends his units clear to the other side of the landmass cuts resources and then boom! resources back up and WilliamLP's victorious army crushing though Ichabods western cities. Yeah,....something like that. :LOL:

I want to play the trustworthy iterated prisoner's dilemma metagame, actually, though it's less optimal for this game standing alone. But I want people to assume that I won't ever be the aggressor first during a cow for cow deal, etc, or something that clearly symbolizes peace. I had no problem stabbing Bacchus, because he made the first two aggressive acts.

In the long game, vs the world, Ichabod is exactly the person I'd like as a "friendly" neighbour where we could both focus on the other side. I really want to give that kind of relationship a chance to happen. I'm not sure how much of a grudge he holds for the opening game, but maybe he can see that razing his early city was clearly the rational thing to do and not spiteful.

Besides, I'm not convinced that we can't compete in the long game with Ichabod anyway. If he wipes out Cheetah, it's going to set back his econ a lot... for a while. He's going to lose units, and he's going to pay supply costs. Our tech is a lot better than I expected! I was worried before that we'd have a tough time getting longbows before he got crossbows and maces, but this now seems easy. We have future expansion the other way, both peaceful and not so peaceful. Our 2 city border with him is really not that bad, without serious culture overlap. (There's only really 1 contended tile, which I'm happy to let him have.)

The worst outcome is that Bacchus takes Suit up. I'm not a fan of forced peace with Retep for that reason.

I actually think taking what's left of Bacchus' after taking Suit Up would be much, much easier than taking it from Retep while having enough left to defend against Bacchus doing the same to us. This is if Bacchus can actually take out the 20+ unit stack in a protective city on a hill. Good luck to him!

To me, forced peace with Retep would be wonderful, since we can have workers on the edges chopping without protection, and again move all military where the actual threats are.

Can you post our break-even turns to Feudialism? Whether we can land LBs will be pretty relevant to how much we think that we can afford to antagonize Ichabod.

Sure I can try to estimate it in the next turn. I think we could have Feudalism less than 10 turns from now for sure though.