[SPOILERS] Scooticator and Pindooter give a sporting try

[scooter]

Checking back in after a few days off. I'm still not around a whole lot just yet, but things will start slowly returning to normalcy. Anyway, looks like the turn rolled and Nakor played (whipped once! shocker!). We might be able to eliminate him this turn if everything goes perfectly, so this is an exciting turn to say the least . I think I can play it tonight (in something like 4ish hours) if we don't have any surprises in-game.

[scooter]

Also, on tech path. Any particular reason you think we'll need Caravels soon? I honestly think I'd be fine with delaying that until after Education. Maybe I'm nuts, but I think we can afford to do that.

I'm on board with your general tech path, though. And I don't feel strongly on when to slot in Optics.

[pindicator]

Optics is mostly to keep naval superiority. Nobody has challenged us yet, but I don't want to give our neighbors reason to think they can attack our island cities. I'm especially worried about Carrack sneak-attacks, so it would be nice to have some scouting caravels in the territorial waters of Commodore and Lewwyn. Plus, with a range of five they will be relevant naval units until Chemistry. Lastly, if we get a great merchant, a caravel is probably our best way of delivering him.

Will you be online tonight? I'll be home in about two hours

[pindicator]

I ducked into the game to take a peek, since it had been about a week since I last did so.

I think we'll be able to finish off Nakor this turn. He has a C3 praet in ChainRidgeStand, and also a spear, an axe, and an archer - but we have 7 knights, most of them above 90hp. It depends if the 6 berserkers are enough to take Imre Stand.

When I opened the save I was greeted with a diplo screen, plako offering OB with us. Since I had offered that last turn I accepted, and watched our gpt at 0% science jump from +199gpt to +200gpt. I was attributing it to being at war with him when we moved our galley through, but that was farther back than I originally thought. Now when i look at it, I see that we do have one trade route with plako in all of our cities:



Held is his capital, a size 12 city. He has a number of size 10 - 12 cities, but they dont' seem to be enough to gain us any additional routes. Even our island cities prefer their +3cpt route with our own capital over his cities... Maybe that will change on the turn roll.

Mackoti now has Banking. Using GNP scrying, I can see that the following techs are known by X number of people:

Banking: 2
Paper: 2
Meditation: 12 or 13
Drama: 0
Optics: 0
Gunpowder: 0
Theology: 1
Music: 1

My guess is Mackoti is going to Economics. Him getting Banking fits with that. If so, we can't get that prize. And that makes me want to go for Astronomy and raid his shores just so he isn't allowed to tech off into the sunset. But maybe Education still is the smarter play

[scooter]

Turn 149

This is Turn 149. The first shots of this war were fired on T142. How cool would it be if we could conquer all 11 cities in 8 turns. We've got 3 in range this turn. Let's give it a shot.

The Battle of Imre Stand

This has 4 defenders in it. We're gonna Zerk it off boats. Let's see what the odds are and... oh dear.



YAY FOR USING PROMOTIONS. You're going to get slightly less blow-by-blow in this report. I'm still mailing it in less than he is. Anyway, this was a massacre.


CR2 Zerk vs CG1 archer (98%) - WIN
CR1 Zerk vs axe (90%) - WIN
CR1 Zerk vs cat (99%) - WIN
c1 zerk vs spear (99%) - WIN and captured


I started getting a little lazy with my attack logs at random moments in this because what's the point, really?



Did we get another granary???



Mmhmm.

Ok, now for our first city where we can't get odds immediately. This is the only city that's in doubt on whether or not we can capture it this turn (well, we're actually going to burn this one).

The Battle of ChainRidgeStand

Hey look, below 50% odds!



Shock Knight vs C3 GG Axe (33%) - lose (3.0h)

Guess that only really happened because of the GG. Oh, that's more like it I guess:



Nice promotion use again.

C2 Knight vs Spear (65%) - WIN (4.3h)

From here I just sort of attacked for awhile and didn't take screenshots for a couple minutes for some reason.

c2 knight vs axe (68%) - lose (0.8h)
c2 Knight vs archer (72%) - WIN
<azza joined here and delayed this attack by a few mins because he's a jerk>
Shock Knight vs Praet (94%) - WIN
some sort of knight vs redlined axe (99%) - WIN and raze


Note that almost all of these units were moderately wounded which is why the %s may be a little lower than you would expect. So... 2 down... 1 to go. Bring it on.

The Battle of Sulara Hold
----------
(note that none of these Knights we attacked with were at full health, so %s will again be lower)


Shock Knight vs Praet (73%) - lose (3.9h)
C2 Knight vs axe (94%) - WIN
Shock Knight vs archer (96%) - WIN


That leaves one more bad guy, that pesky Praet. You all ready?



Of course you are. Deep breath. Click.

C2 Knight vs praet (92%) - WIN AND CAPTURE AND HAPPY DANCE



Nakor has been eliminated.







I heart granaries. Anyway, I went ahead and did some city renaming, trying to get names of relocated teams from several major sports. With that done, here are our spoils from the war:



Not bad at all, huh?

[scooter]

Oh. Bonus picture. Yes this is us popping a hut in 780 AD.



Got some dolla dolla bill ya'll. Also, we are definitely going to claim this island pronto.

[pindicator]

And for those of you wondering, the city we burned did indeed come with a granary

[NobleHelium]

Might want to consider pillaging stuff near the razed city. Stuff closer to Azza than Lewwyn. Not sure if it's worth it.

[pindicator]

Tech Path:

Scooter and I got to briefly talk about the tech path and we're going to go straight to Education. No Optics, not yet. Sealing the deal was Noble reminding us about the Known Civ with Tech bonus that gets added on at Paper. We'll go from 25% max to 50% max after Paper, so that makes sense to get now.

We're hoping to get a Great Scientist in time to help us bulb most of Education. So naturally we need to find out the fastest way of getting a GS:



I can't do better than end of turn 155. Even if we take the wheat (as shown above) and run 9 scientists with the wheat and rice for 2 turns and starve after, that still only gets us to 296/300 on eot154. So since 155 is the turn, where can we expect to be towards Education by then?

Paper will take 2 turns, and then we'll have about 500g in the bank by then. We can't quite squeeze paper out in one. Also, try not to get overflow with Paper. If the known tech bonus works like getting forge in a city does then we'll get penalized on the overflow like getting overflow in a city after building a forge does. It'll just be a few beakers, but no need to waste it if we can help it.

That leaves turns 151-155 before the great scientist comes out. If we tech education at break-even we'll be at around 2200/3621 -- considering we have nearly 200 pop now, and can expect about 2100b out of a GS pop, that's way too much. So we'll want to save up gold on turns 151-154. We can figure the bulb amount a little closer on t154 and tech enough so we land Education at eot155 after the bulb.

Scooter - Another option is to try and tech Education before the Great Scientist comes out and then pop the scientist on Printing Press. Advantages to this way would be not needing to starve Red Wings to get a Great Scientist out. Empire-wide we will have around 30 villages and towns by turn 155. The disadvantage is we have to tech Education manually (takes longer) and we need to tech Alphabet to open up Printing Press. (Sadly Alphabet comes before Astronomy, otherwise I'd say let's tech Education and bulb Astornomy!)

I'm guessing it will take us 6 turns to tech Education without a bulb, which would be eot156. A turn for Alphabet, so the bulb goes into Printing Press on t158 and we finish the tech t160.

Or we can save up gold after teching Paper and land Education eot155 with about 900g in the bank? That's spitballing, but I think we'd be able to save a bit. It's really tough to tell until all these cities come out of revolt to be honest.

Oh yeah, I was going to show the plan to get a GS out of Red Wings. Tomorrow, I'm sleepy

[NobleHelium]

Remember that the known tech bonus only matters if you're researching something that somebody else has. If you are teching Paper -> Edu -> Optics compared to Optics -> Paper -> Edu you don't gain anything from the known tech bonus if nobody else gets Optics in that timeframe.

That said, I don't see you getting much use out of Optics right now. Earlier Education is good IF you are in a position to build universities. Too often I have gotten Education and then done absolutely nothing with it for ages (although half the time I did get Liberalism). PP is an undeniably good tech and I would get it sooner if possible. In related news, I think it's rather dubious to be farming over those villages in that screenshot...