[SPOILERS] Scooticator and Pindooter give a sporting try

[pindicator]

Yeah, that's a good way to look at things. I work with someone who went to Michigan and lived near the Michigan State campus. She isn't taking it so well today.

Keep finding fun goals for the game, even if it isn't to win

[scooter]

Turn 207-208

These pictures are several days old, but I finally found a few minutes to go over this stuff. Kept moving on Lewwyn.



Easy enough.



Kept. Not an amazing city, but when it immediately comes with 4 Free Market-enhanced IC routes, yes please.



Unfortunately, each time I burn one of these I lose a unit since he can counter-attack it. Anyway, I did offer Lewwyn peace for these 3 cities:



To no surprise, he rejected it. I plan on capturing all those. Here's his deep south:



Kinda barren . Just burning so they can no longer be useful to him, plus the raze gold is useful to me. What I've been hoping is Azza would put this to use:



That's not awesome, but compared to this...



Azza could do some damage. Anyway, T208 was a mostly quiet turn, except for this:



Kept. Gonna keep the cities on this island because why not.

T209 came to me, and I played a good bit of it. I think I might have some time here soon to report on that too. The mackoti peace is up soon:



So he can declare on the first half of T212 if he wants. I'm using airships and a few boats to watch the waters for signs of a naval push. Nothing yet. But during this turn (T209) I'm starting prep to have things in place in case he does make an attempt. I think Plako's explosion and the mutually assured destruction thing we have should dissuade him (by that I mean - I can attack with ease on the waters, but I can't defend everything easily, so we could seriously damage each other).

[scooter]

Turn 209

Turn is half done, but I took pictures for this half, so here we are. Capturing and burning is on the agenda. Global news:



Lewwyn gave me a bunch of xp, but Mackoti triggered the golden age I feared was coming. I'd kill to get into state property like he's doing, but I can't do it at the moment... or anytime soon for that matter. I'd guess he's planning on using this golden age to get levees and factories built.

Before I start the conquesting, let's get a cash infusion:



That was less than I was expecting, actually. I had a formula I was using, and apparently it either doesn't work, or I just have no clue how to use it. Regardless, still useful. Let's get more of a cash infusion from the capturing/burning segment of the turn.



I did also use grens to kill those 3 units on a hill. I lost the first attack against the Rifle, but the other two went down easily.



Nice, very well equipped. More.



Lewwyn curiously renamed these after it took me like 20 minutes to figure out how to ask for these 3 for peace a few turns prior .



Also nicely equipped, lucky me. I would be more concerned about defending these from Plako, except for this:



Almost all of Plako's coastal cities have these type of defenses - that is to say very bad. I could burn probably a half dozen of his cities at once if he tried to cause me problems. It's still tempting to do now because I'm afraid of him getting too big, but I don't see the point in ensuring a world where mackoti wins, which I would surely be doing by trying that.



Burned and deleted the unit. He had a sizable force in here, and he abandoned it once I started bombing down the defenses.



Also burned. Sniped a pair of boats too for some more xp:



Lewwyn seems like he would prefer to hold my units down on his front with me than save his cities, so I'm not sure what that says about his plan other than he just wants to mess with me. Fair enough I guess? Maybe he's hoping mackoti will save him or something, which I don't think mackoti will be super inclined to do if it means Plako runs away with things.

FWIW, my plan is if mackoti DOES do that, I'll take the fight to him and indirectly ensure that Plako does win (I don't say that in a spite way - I just mean if he wants a duel he'll get it, and I'm near-certain Plako will win if that happens). Simple enough. I doubt this happens, just answering a question that I imagine lurkers are wondering but are terrified to ask.

Steam Power done, so I'll build some rare ironclads on my mackoti front. Given my +2 movement, they are more useful than you would reasonably expect.

FWIW, my post earlier about city counts is already out of date. Plako captured that barb city (lol) as well as another Bacchus city since then. That's what I mean by the equation changing frequently. Anyway, turn rolled, and I have two sources of coal, so that's nice.

[scooter]

Keep finding fun goals for the game, even if it isn't to win

Yep, goal right now is to use tanks for the first time against humans (not counting the one time I did a modern era duel). That just sounds fun. If I can conquer the whole continent south of me, that would be fun. Those are my two general goals. There's still a decent chance doing those could result in a win, but we'll see. Primary goal is keeping it fun, because time/energy for me is still very up and down. One of the many things I learned from PB8 is that literally any game can be enjoyable if your goals are fun and attainable.

[scooter]

I think the power graph tells a few interesting stories:



1) Commodore's army is comparable with Bacchus.
2) All that mass-upgrading for Lewwyn still has him at a level below FinHarry and Ichabod. Now, granted, Lewwyn has muuuuch less pop than those guys so his army is still pretty dang impressive, but it's not that scary for a cannon/gren heavy defense. He could walk the entire thing into my borders right now onto one tile, and I'm pretty sure I could wipe most of it in 1 turn.
3) Mack hasn't really built anything significant in awhile. My west coast has not stopped building navy since we got Drydocks built. For example, I've only seen like 8-9 SOTL from Mack. I've got over 20 over there now, and I'm adding airships currently. So I'm feeling pretty okay about my situation there too.
4) Plako is going to continue cutting through Bacchus without breaking a sweat . Nicely done by him, but of course I'm not surprised.

[Ceiliazul]

Your city killing spree is posted in nearly reverse order... made me laugh for some reason.

Love the reports, good luck!

[scooter]

Your city killing spree is posted in nearly reverse order... made me laugh for some reason.

Love the reports, good luck!

Thanks! Killing stuff is always satisfying, even if it's not contributing that much to my empire at the moment.

But what do you mean by reverse order? I did report them in the order I captured/razed them as far as I can tell...?

[Ceiliazul]

maybe it's just the last shot, with islandcity3 and captain bacon still intact that made me laugh.

Oh, and thanks for freeing the lurkers from that confusing naming scheme. I love that your cities/ regions make it easy to tell what is where... I lost track of the chinese cities right around city 3!

[scooter]

So... I think Mackoti just offered me a NAP or something. I logged in to pause for Lewwyn, and I was greeted by these:



First, I'm not sure what his message is saying. Well, I understand it in that he got a blank diplo window from me, but I have no memory of sending him anything . Anyway, I wondered if this was a 20T NAP offer of some sort?



Okay that's a more positive sign. I've offered that to him a few times, and he's always said no. He also offered me copper for my sugar. I was trying to figure out what this meant, and then I realized he probably just wants sugar for free since it's a rare luxury he doesn't have. Anyway, after thinking, I decided sure:



If free sugar is all it takes to give me a safe western front, sign me up. Seems he came to the same conclusions that I did regarding the global situation.

-----

The increased tech costs are having quite an effect on the game. I'm amazed at how long it's going to take me to get to tanks, and that's with heavy research/wealth building factored into the equation. I'm not sure how I feel about that. On one hand, I think the ability to keep pace means this is a vast improvement over vanilla, in that it keeps games from being called absurdly early. The GNP snowball loses some steam in this phase of the game. It also seriously encourages warfare, which is always a positive thing. MFG has been improved in this phase, tech ability reduced, so the natural decision is to use your MFG to build a huge army and kill with it.

I'm not sure how finely tuned it is. I think it's a little weird that mackoti and I (and Commodore to an extent) are having so much trouble breaking away from the pack in tech given our pretty decisive edges in tile yields. I'm trying to temper my obvious current bias here a little bit by looking at it objectively for serious feedback purposes, but I can't help but wonder if the increased tech costs should be tempered juuuuust a little bit. Not a ton, but a little bit.

I think the increased known tech bonus is good. It's very strong here, and I'm fine with that. It's just that either the known tech bonus OR the increased tech costs needs to be scaled back a bit, and I think I lean towards the tech costs. I think. It's close though - it's certainly better balanced than vanilla.

[scooter]

Stray thoughts, stream-of-consciousness style. Just as much for my benefit as for the lurkers to be honest.

1) Mack is definitely turning back. I see his main fleet retreating. Now that I have airships into my westernmost cities doing recon missions, I'm realizing just how vulnerable his islands actually are. If it wasn't for Plako, I'd be awfully tempted to go at him. Just not such a wise idea right now.

2) I'm thinking about how to crack Lewwyn. Once his main stack is out of the picture, it's a romp through the entire southern half of my continent. However, killing a stack when he's sitting on 30 CKNs, 20 catapults, 25 knights, and like 20-30 rifles is easier said than done . I have more power and higher quality units, but quantity over quality on defense is a very real thing as learned in PB8. Anyway, I'm trying to figure a way to do it that doesn't involve waiting for tanks, which are still forever far away it feels like (Assembly Line, Railroad, Combustion, Electricity, Rifling, and Industrialization are all slow slogs given the tech costs). One option is once I finish Assembly Line (3-4 turns), I grab Rifling + MilTrad real quick. They are much cheaper, and I would actually get significant known tech bonuses on both of them. Then I mass upgrade my army.

This results in cannons + cavs + infantry, which may just be enough combined strength to survive slogging into Lewwyn's stack of siege + rifles + knights. He would do me some serious damage, but once that initial stack is gone, he has nothing left to build units with since I'm burning everything else in sight. Then I could rush through the southern half of my continent and put myself in great shape. Reality is that I need to sim things out to see if he could crush what I'd bring or not. I did recently when I was considering if I had enough, and he would have easily crushed my stack had I moved inside his borders. I'm not so sure that the result will be any different with infantry and cavs, but it's certainly worth the time to check. Even just a rough sim would be helpful.

At some point I'm going to have to bite the bullet and take some serious military losses against Lewwyn. That's fine in and of itself, because I can replace units pretty rapidly, and Lewwyn's dwindling city & pop count means he just cannot. But what I can't accept is taking enough losses that I put myself in danger and/or fail to get the job done.

3) My main reason for wanting to hurry things is that I'm somewhat afraid Plako will simply keep rolling through WilliamLP next. And why not. But if I can't afford to attack Lewwyn, I'm not going to throw away my military for nothing.