[Spoilers] Fintourist and Old Harry have nothing to see here

[Old Harry]

Turn 168

So Mack's only visible action was to show us his zone defense maces. I'd guess this is to try and lure us in to get creamed by stacks of Janissaries.


We checked for a 1-mover threat at Eridu.


Then moved 5 knights in to threaten the city. If his 1-movers move this way then they won't be able to get back to Ur in time to stop us hitting it on t170. 2 movers are a different matter.


We unloaded our mace, cat and 2 knights at Krillingen. More in hope of stretching his defense than of taking (razing) the city. We'll see. Is there a fingers crossed smiley?


In the east our plans for Barcelona will come to fruition next turn. I hope these two catapults aren't sniped by Mack's remaining knights...


Long-term Caste>Slavery and lots of cities from mostly_harmless>one city from Suttree. We aren't going to come out ahead in this war are we?


Power and Demos (this a smaller power decrease than I'd hoped, but perhaps enough?):

[Old Harry]

By the way, I'm not sure I answered on the use of the artist. I think it'll be about the same length of time to get gp's out of cannae and om. So the only problem is if they are both scientists.

I have a feeling we're in a fight to the (our) death with Mack now, and the artist bomb is our best chance of hurting his core. So I think its worth the risk. If we do have a window before he builds up his military again its going to be short, so we either take some cities now or sit back building cats and cuirs to suttree him when he comes back at us. Either way we're probably just delaying the inevitable, but hey, its worked for suttree for a long while!

[Fintourist]

By the way, I'm not sure I answered on the use of the artist. I think it'll be about the same length of time to get gp's out of cannae and om. So the only problem is if they are both scientists.

Unless I'm mistaken Om would be significantly faster, but with our whipped empire GA can also wait for our amazing recovery...

I have a feeling we're in a fight to the (our) death with Mack now, and the artist bomb is our best chance of hurting his core. So I think its worth the risk. If we do have a window before he builds up his military again its going to be short, so we either take some cities now or sit back building cats and cuirs to suttree him when he comes back at us. Either way we're probably just delaying the inevitable, but hey, its worked for suttree for a long while!

Yeah, I don't think Mack would want to be at war with us. He would surely prefer just teching peacefully for 30 turns and then eating us with tech advantage. We are doomed to lose this war unless we keep trading units with 2:1 or better ratio, which is unlikely. So yeah, this is not going to end well, but our hands are pretty much tied, with angry suttree and capable-of-sniping-cities mackoti it's not really realistic to fight a war against dtay or ichabod far away from our southern front. (I would love to see some opportunistic strikes against someone though, TBS?) As a conclusion, it's fine for me to skirmish in the south as well as we can, hope that mack does something crazy stupid or someone joins our fight, and then eventually lose due to that enormous MFG+GNP difference and simply keep cursing the map, m_h and suttree..

[Old Harry]

I'm assuming we switch to pacifism/caste for five+ turns if we ever peace Mack, which speeds Cannae up considerably. With Nationhood we can even consider caste without peace...

How much war weariness is Mack likely to have so far? Should we be planning for a peace offering just in time to clatter into Suttree? Those roads he just built give me the feeling Sut is coming for us once peace expires in five turns. Note - check if he's got MC yet, as engineering may follow.

[Fintourist]

I'm assuming we switch to pacifism/caste for five+ turns if we ever peace Mack, which speeds Cannae up considerably. With Nationhood we can even consider caste without peace...

How much war weariness is Mack likely to have so far? Should we be planning for a peace offering just in time to clatter into Suttree? Those roads he just built give me the feeling Sut is coming for us once peace expires in five turns. Note - check if he's got MC yet, as engineering may follow.

Sure with Nationhood Caste works again just fine.

If our play works superbly, we take Barca, but there is nothing more available and we get peace with mack, then finishing Suttree off could be attractive. Engineering (pikes) could make suttree a lot of sense..

[Old Harry]

Turn 169 appetiser

Oh mighty Commodore, lead us into battle against the infidel Bacchus!


Some interesting and odd things in the event log - TBS lost their first city to dtay's stack of muskets and cats. TBS ate a turn of anarchy to revolt and got a great general. Dhal got a great general in a city that he then lost, but there was no "GG is dead" message - so did he survive? Finally Dhal captured this barb city. I have no idea what he's up to...


We're not taking Krillingen this turn - Mack finished a Jan. Do we run away back to Om, or keep the units here for the pressure?


Mack hasn't played yet so I didn't move anything. Only six hours left on the clock.

If everything goes perfectly I'd expect us to burn Ur and get Barcelona, following up with a threat to Plainsfood which means Mack offers us Eridu, Krillingen, Uruk for peace.

[Old Harry]

Turn 169 in toto

Some bad news. Mack got Astronomy. Given that he only just got chemistry I wonder if he bulbed it? I'm not happy. I think we need to delete these boats, and our whole strike force can't escape from Krillingen. Pleasingly our good RNG rolls continue as mack lost 75% and 55% battles here.


The knights at Krillingen are off back to Om. Meanwhile the cat and mace are going to stick around and be annoying.


And our triremes are getting deleted while the galley will run for it in the hope of winning a ~10% battle if attacked.


Next up there are just enough units in Eridu to stop us taking it. So we're running away.


Thirdly this mace is very annoying. It means Mack knows what we're up to. He's emptied Barcelona, so there is only a Longbow in there, meaning a Mace, Janissary and Longbow are somewhere else. The worst-case scenario will be if Macks knight stack is on one of the ? tiles and it can kill Stalingrad before we can get enough units into the city. Although we can avoid that by getting all of our knights in there...


Annoyingly I'd promoted all of our Knights to C2, so we can't hit the Mace with a shock Knight and only have odds of 30% so TheStick is going to charge in instead... (You can see that Mack was logged in too and was very complimentary about how well we're playing. That makes me more worried. )


TheStick dies an heroic death allowing our C2 knight to get 66%.


He wins and then our workers build a road.


We settle Stalingrad and Victor Hugo does his thing leaving our borders like this. Ur would be a nice next target, but it'd be a bloodbath.


We wondered about leaving Barcelona until next turn, since we can't reinforce it with anything other than knights. But we thought we might as well take it.


We lose at 66%, then this guy won, getting only 9 gold from pillaging and can promo-heal next turn if there aren't any knights hiding behind Gerard... So at the end of all that we have about ten knights north of Koniggratz and eight in Stalingrad, we're probably not going to make any further gains.


In other news I wonder what TBS is up to here? I'd guess it isn't scouting, since then he'd just send one FW?


Demos and Power

[DMOC]

Annoyingly I'd promoted all of our Knights to C2, so we can't hit the Mace with a shock Knight and only have odds of 30% so TheStick is going to charge in instead... (You can see that Mack was logged in too and was very complimentary about how well we're playing. That makes me more worried. )

Why were you logged in together if you're in a war anyway?

Also I would take that as a compliment. Good luck on the war.

[Fintourist]

Why were you logged in together if you're in a war anyway?

Mack has often logged in to check stuff after finishing his turn and I believe we have also logged in to see what has happened before he has finished his turn. Of course one can never be sure that the other one is not changing builds or moving units in the fog etc., but I guess we trust each other enough so that it does not bother anyone. As you may have noticed, there have been many actions in this game from other players that I don't really approve, but this is not one of them

[Old Harry]

Turn 170

Bacchus took a city off Pindicooter! Hoorah! And made peace. They must have offered this city for peace? Bad news is that Ichabod and William also made peace.


War Weariness of 48 doesn't sound too high (I have no idea how the mechnic works though, this could in fact be enormous) at any rate Ichabod lost a bunch of units in William's culture, maybe that means he's not turning round and coming after us...


Our knights are back on dry land. I assume our galley will go the same way as our mace, cat and the other galley did. Unless mack just wants to pillage and blockade us. What would he accept for peace at this point? I think the workers on the jungles around Rorkes Drift need to run away, otherwise they can be got pretty easily...


We're not taking Ur this turn (or any time soon).


Gerard is a possibility.


We could move the spy SW-S-SE next turn in preparation for threatening Plainfood the same turn. We need to know if there is a stack of catapults in range of one of the stage tiles (I favour the North Eastern one at this point).


If we pre-stage our knights SE of Stalingrad they can only hit Plainfood, but they are less likely to be detected. If we stage them on the rice we can choose between Gerrard and Plainfood and if we stage 1S of the rice we can stage on all the stage tiles. So I went for SE of the city. This means that our north is somewhat open and a determined 2-mover attack will easily kill Gallipoli, but most of Macks knights are in Ur, so I think we can risk it.


After I'd moved all our knights down there I remembered that Mack has galleons now - - so I whipped longbows in BoP and Cannae (ouch!) and moved the warrior from Agincourt down to Cannae. Cannae will hold unless there are two galleons full of Jans on their way. We need peace with Mack so badly... I think we need to move our knight stack in to threaten Plainfood next turn and demand peace. I was thinking we'd ask for Eridu in return, allowing him to make a counter offer. Of course there is a very good chance that that kills our stack of knights. But if we're not going to get eviscerated by his naval force we need to force peace with Mack somehow. I offered white peace at the end of the turn, just in case he's thinking the same...


Demos and Power