[SPOILERS] Scooticator and Pindooter give a sporting try

[scooter]

Turn 143

Stream happened. If you click the above twitch links that I spammed, you should be able to find a replay of the stream. I'll try to recap things for you here, though. I'm only going to report on the combat side of things. Pindicator is going to wrap up the domestics later. There were a couple global events, but those can wait. Let's dive right in.

The Battle of Nine Valleys

This is the gold/ivory/fish spot we tried to take earlier in the game. Let's do that first. We had a minor snafu in finding out that one of our galleys does not have Nav1 (LOL). Thankfully we have an extra galley, so it won't hurt us. So he added a chariot into Nine Valleys, but all that means for Zerks is an extra XP. The first defender is the only real defender - CG archer - so here we go:



CR1 Zerk vs CG1 Archer (86%) - WIN (0.3health)

Off to a good start. From there it was a romp against two vastly inferior units.

Unpromoted (C1) Zerk vs Spear (99%) - WIN



C1 Zerk vs Chariot (99%) - WIN and capture

Somehow I missed the screenshot of the actual capture, but here's a look inside 49ers.



We've had that name ready for literally months . Granary + Market sounds fantastic to me. The city never had a lighthouse anyway, so that wasn't going to happen. So we're off to a good start, 0 casualties taking that city. Next let's look at the battle of Red Spring Hold. That city had a spear + 2 archers and... wait where is the spear? Live on stream, and I couldn't find the spear . He's had that thing in there for doooozens of turns, and now he moves it out on the exact turn we're moving in. Rough luck for him. So we just needed to kill two archers here (on flat ground). We have several 5xp Knights, but we chose to use 3XP Knights promoted to C1. The strength ratio was just good enough that both would get 2XP and a promo with a victory, which also lets us preserve all of our 5XP Knights. Sounds fantastic. Soooooo.

C1 Knight vs CG2 Archer (91%) - WIN

Leaving us with the cleanup:



C1 Knight vs CG1 Archer (96.5%) - WIN and capture



We made a large chunk of change on these two captures. Good, because it cost us a large chunk of money to upgrade those Knights! Red Spring came with a granary as well. Final combat log:



0 casualties so far for the good guys. Anyway, we spent a few minutes deciding on where to put units. Quickly, here's a little overlay of what he had in the region:



So there's the disappearing spear hah. 1W of the city he used it to cover 2 workers that were not possible for us to reach. So this left us with a decision. The 1 Knight 1E of the city was vulnerable since there are 2 spears in range of it. We brought along an axe + spear, which were ideally going to cover the workers 1NW of Smoke Springs. The problem is this wounded Knight is kinda vulnerable, and him having more than one spear in range (plus a C1 axe) made me kind of leery, since I don't want to lose a 5XP Knight if I can avoid it. So here's what we ended up going with:



1) Use the C1 axe to cover the Knight 1E of Red Spring. If spears come, the axe should handle that rather easily. If he attacks with the C1 axe, the Knight will defend and win pretty easily (it's still 6.8h + C1). That should save us a double promo Knight.

2) To offset the lack of an axe to cover the workers, I left behind a trailing Knight to combine with the spear to cover the worker. That Knight isn't nearly so vulnerable to Spears because 1) only one spear in range and 2) it's full health (and C1) so he can't even get odds. It does mean that Knight cannot join the forking group next turn, but given we suffered 0 casualties, I think this will have been worth it - especially if it saves a Knight in the process. In theory he could use everything and maybe kill one of these groups, but if he wants to fight this war on flat ground and hand us Smoke Springs for free, I'm completely fine with that. I suspect he will not.

3) That leaves us with 9 Knight inside Red Spring Hold, 8 of which are full health. The 9th gets a second promo next turn, so it'll be really close to full health itself. So we'll have 6 double promoted Knights and 3 single promoted Knights. Also, the Knight 1E of Red Spring is eligible to move forward next turn too, so we'll have 10 Knights ready to go next turn. They will all move onto the grass hill tile that I have marked with a sign. That forks the capital (Rhuidan) and Colrada Hold. So on T144 both of those cities can be hit. As an added bonus, on T145 we can also hit the capital with 4-5 Zerks from the boats .

Depending on what we see next turn in those two cities, we'll want to start considering when it's best to hit Alcair. Will depend a lot on what he has on defense in those two forked cities.

So there you have it. Overall, pretty fantastic start to the war.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

[pindicator]

I had chatted a bit with scooter about turning on the beakers for construction, after he mentioned all the capture gold we got. He said we should wait and that sounded good enough, but when I got in the game and saw that we could 1-turn Construction at 80%:



Sorry Scooter, but the extra mobility of going over rivers is worth cashing in on that now, especially being in a war.

I'm a bit surprised by our continued growth in tech rate. Right now we breakeven around 300bpt and our top end is 500. We're no longer in a golden age, but I could swear when we started the golden age just 12 turns ago, those were our bpt numbers on the first turn of the GA.

I marked all our workers in the screen. From top-right to lower-left:

Blue - workshop for Bills. Really couldn't see anything else for him to do, and Bills will want that production. Or we can cancel the action next turn and move him somwhere else
Purple - chopping for irrigation. When we get a settler for the cow/horse spot this will be helpful, and the hammers are helpful now for getting more knights out.
Yellow - roaded this turn, not sure what to do next turn. Probably will finish the cottage with brown next turn, but I really want to farm the villages at Red Wings, or send these guys northwest to continue improving Pirates.
Brown - cottaging for Bulldogs. I think he needs to help road towards 49ers after
Red - chop and farm for Orioles. But probably a road first
Orange - roading towards 49ers

With Trailblazers I really wanted to get it growing again, so I swapped tiles like so:





It's the only way to max out trailblazers, but it also means we need a grass farm to break even at Red Wings.

[NobleHelium]

Not sure why you wouldn't finish Construction. I don't get it.

[scooter]

Yeah I was thinking save gold just because next turn we'd have a better idea on if we wanted to upgrade more units, but I didn't mess with the slider, so I really didn't expect we could knock the whole thing out for just 110 gold. So yeah, that's a no-brainer.

Turn rolled, Nakor played in 7 minutes and whipped only twice. Sooooo that's a pretty fantastic sign right? I'll try to pop in around lunch time, but I'm not sure if I will be able to or not. We'll see.

[scooter]

SNEAK PREVIEW.

Pindicator is in-game right now taking a look. We're chatting a bit. This just happened in chat.

pindicator: ok, moving one knight
scooter: so is he just huddling units into cities? that's kind of what I expect
pindicator: we can capture 2 workers this turn maybe...
yeah, he moved all his loose units around Smoke Spiral into the city
oh wow
oh wow wow
scooter: whaaaaat
his cities are like empty right? hah
pindicator:
scooter: hahah yesssss

[pindicator]

quick pics before i run to work:

One praet moved north towards 49ers


And in the south...


Everything is in Smoke but nothing in the capital

[scooter]

Ohhh wow. I noticed 4 defenders total across two cities when you first sent me the pictures. Did not notice we were talking 1 warrior and 0 spears out of those 4.

Anyway. For sake of ease and speed I think we just take Rhuidean and Colrada with Knights next turn and let the Zerks handle Mayene and Alcair, even though Alcair is not coastal. Then we can regroup and figure out for certain how far we want to push this.

Lurkers: If you have a team you'd really like to see one of these new cities named after, speak up.

[pindicator]

Also, i forgot to mention (for the lurkers): Engineering in 3 turns

[Atlarge]

You should name these teams after relocated franchises. Browns, Braves, Giants, Dodgers, Sonics, etc.