[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[Commodore]

Did I miss any other scenarios?

"The Oxjowy"
Azza spitefully keeps all forces poised against Mardoc and hands you the game.

[Fintourist]

Heh, the oxjowy scenario would work us well enough, assuming it also includes Azza using his units in a mutual massacre with Mardoc. But there is also the scenario, where Azza marches everything against us and we don't respect quantity's power over quality and thanks to some weak rolls lose a whole lot of units and have to retreat..

@OH: I don't think we should PM Azza just yet, but we would like to play the turn in the evening so maybe if Azza has not played in 6 hours or something like that, we need to react..?

Btw, Azza sees currently 9 not 5 of our knights unless I'm mistaken. In the screenshot I see 5 knights that are just our of his vision range. Not that I'm saying that anything should have been done differently. Getting all our fire power to Azza front is more important than hiding our units.

Btw, vol.2, the axe from Kirby could also start heading towards No Homers? I forgot to mention this idea in our chat.

@retep: After we have taken PMW and No Homers the next phase is more about dancing and reacting to what Azza does. If Azza does not reinforce Boo-urns we could consider capturing/razing it, but if Azza plays conservatively and defenses properly his remaining cities we are better off waiting our reinforcements (especially a wave of cats). Consolidating the PMW and No Homers area might already be a bit tricky due to Boo-urns having 3rd ring borders. If Azza marches everything towards No Homers I think we might be able to score big time, but PMW is a completely different story.

If T129 goes the way we expect we have already captured half of Azza's empire and destroyed more that 50 % of his production power (and his metal and ivory), which means that we are not under an enormous pressure to finish the job. It seems Azza was producing mostly military anyways so I don't think our attack changes his production choices that much and we should just wait until we have the critical mass that enables us to take rest of his cities with so little losses that we can soon carry on and start looking at Mardoc.. OK, I don't want to sound too overconfident, so let's state this again: There is a realistic chance that we play this attack too greedy and talks about owning this whole continent will look stupid in 50 turns, but hey, I think one always needs to think big and even more in a 33-player game..

@vA: We were hoping that Azza would still have only 1 axe + 1 spear in Hello Joe and we could take the city easily by using a mace for killing the top axe and killing the spear with an axe (+ having one axe extra in case we get an unlucky roll). It was not possible to stage 1-movers in a way that we could take Hello Joe on T129 and Azza would not see those units in advance --> this is the reason there are not more maces in range to attack the city as we speculated that one random mace just born EOT127 in Flossie and a couple of city defender axes that have been hanging around there would look non-threatening to Azza.

Unfortunately the new axe from Azza means that we can't kill the spear easily with 1-movers and we might need to risk a knight when taking the city. So as OH said, we probably send a mace in first and then see if we could reduce the chance of losing a knight by sacrificing an axe or an axe+archer (if we just use 2 knights and 1 mace to take the city it's basically a 50/50 chance when it comes to not losing a single knight or not). Axes and archers are by no means useless or lightly expendable units, but in this case accepting a loss of a cheap unit might be sensible and reduce the amount of grief that RNG could cause us..

[Fintourist]

Turn 129 - teaser

OH will most likely do a proper report later today, but here is one summarizing screenshot in case there is someone who can't wait




RNG was not really on our side this time, but if we look at the big picture the losses were still fairly acceptable.

[Old Harry]

Did I miss any other scenarios?

"The Oxjowy"
Azza spitefully keeps all forces poised against Mardoc and hands you the game.

When did Jowy do that?

Other random note: In his PBEM60 thread BobChillingworth admits to being BarryLyndon . How did whoever knew know he was a smurf? Was that you Fintourist?

Turn 129 - To Business!

Hmmm hopefully Commodore's prediction is coming true - no movement detected on the Azzian front. All his visible cities are exactly as well defended as they were last turn (although we didn't really give him any other option with how we timed the declaration). Oddly he finished chopping into his capital this turn and then didn't delete the worker - we'll just have to make sure that build doesn't complete. He 2-whipped the cap and 3-whipped Hello Joe and PMW. (I'd be interested in a graph that shows how the turns in anarchy vs the pop you get on capture influence productivity of a city - I'd rather have a small, fast starter popping borders quickly in most war situations, but I'd like a rule of thumb for how long it'll take for the value of a big city to overtake a little one after capture.)

Down south it looks like he's not planning to threaten Zzzap. Anyway we'll start on the capital.


Green Knight vs Axe 65% WIN (down to 0.5/10 but with 3XP)
C2 HA vs Warrior 96% WIN
And we get the city with 140 gold and a Granary! Fintourist and I are having an argument about how good this city would be as a HE city - it's not as good as I was hoping for hammers and already has four villages, so perhaps we'll just have to build a bunch of infra instead .


Next up Hello joe:
C1 Mace vs Axe 66% LOSS (Axe down to 3.0/5)


Which means that our two Axes are going to end up fighting Axes, not the Spear so the Knight will have to take a 65% risk against the Spear . But wait, we have an Archer! If we suicide an Axe against the axe the Archer might get a go at the Spear...
C1 Axe vs Axe 9% LOSS (Axe down to 3.4/5)
Archer vs Spear 0.9% LOSS (Spear took six hits!)

Unit costs!

Green Knight vs Injured Axe 98% WIN (down to 2.0/10, 2 XP)
3XP Knight vs Injured Axe 99% WIN (down to 8.4 and 4/2 XP)
3XP Knight vs Warior 99% WIN (down to 7.6 and 4/2 XP) And we get a Great General in Gertie
5XP HA vs injured Spear 96% FLAWLESS WIN (7 XP)
We get 86 gold and again a Granary!


Then Prove Me Wrong:
F2 HA vs Spear 1% (50% withdraw) FLAWLESS LOSS


Green Knight vs Spear 29% LOSS (Spear down to 1.8)
C1 Knight vs Injured Spear 98% WIN (down to 8.3/10)
We got 131 gold and another Granary . Also the Ivory is now out of his culture and next turn we can disconnect his copper, leaving him with just horses hooked.


That's a very productive turn . Although the RNG could have been a little kinder. Lets see what our options are next turn:


Oh no! An Elephant. Well at least he can't build any more... Azza has nothing visible in the pipeline to counter-attack us next turn (we can't totally rule Horse Archers out). Annoyingly our visibility on Azza's cities disappeared - we put 20 EPs into him and he put 4 into us, so I don't understand why that would happen - any thoughts? I think we need to see what the situation with Boo-urns is next turn, if he hasn't reinforced we put all our 2-movers where they can hit it on t131, if he has reinforced then we're waiting for our supporting Cats and Maces to catch up. We're shuffling a bunch of units towards the front and with Engineering in a couple of turns that'll get quicker.

In foreign news we met Xenu and GNP tech checking reveals these results:
- Engy 593 (one civ knows it)
- Paper 567 (none)
- Aest 593 (one civ knows it)
- Phil 593 (one civ knows it)
- Banking 567 (none)
- Compass 567 (none)
- Gunpowder 567 (none)

Demos and power

[TheHumanHydra]

Cool stuff. It would suck if he were hiding his stack 1NW or 1SW of Boo-urns and planning to ambush our stack in the event of a successful attack.

[Old Harry]

Cool stuff. It would suck if he were hiding his stack 1NW or 1SW of Boo-urns and planning to ambush our stack in the event of a successful attack.

We *should* get visibility on his cities again next turn or the turn after...

[Fintourist]

Other random note: In his PBEM60 thread BobChillingworth admits to being BarryLyndon . How did whoever knew know he was a smurf? Was that you Fintourist?

I dunno, that Irish adventurer/scammer nick pushed us into that direction immediately, which is kind of evident from our player analysis (and apparently others thought that too). There was a short discussion about it in tech thread in July including this post from pindicator :P

I think we need to see what the situation with Boo-urns is next turn, if he hasn't reinforced we put all our 2-movers where they can hit it on t131, if he has reinforced then we're waiting for our supporting Cats and Maces to catch up. We're shuffling a bunch of units towards the front and with Engineering in a couple of turns that'll get quicker.

We need to evaluate our options here carefully and not play too greedily. Even if Azza's stack from Dental Plan would not be wandering towards us already, it is something we need to take into account when it comes to Boo-Urns. Here is a possible scenario:

2nd half T130: We move our 2-movers into attacking range
1st half T131: Azza moves his stack between DP and Boo-Urns
2nd half T131: We take Boo-Urns
1st half T132: Azza's stack can attack Boo-Urns

So regardless how we look at it, when we take Boo-Urns we need to be immediately able to defend it in a way that 5-8 cats and 20-30 hitters is not a problem for us (even if Azza would not react, he will always be able to throw his stack at us in 2 turns time). There are roaded hill tiles W of Boo-Urns, which makes attacking out more difficult than what it will be near No Homers.

[Old Harry]

In that situation we should think about burning the city, just for the protection that affords our existing conquests... Alternatively only putting a couple of powerful units like longbows or maces in the city would make it very inefficient for him to recapture and would let us cause him plenty more trouble. Other options are to sally around to the north or down to the south where further cities are available .

I can't wait to see what our EP visibility tells us next turn! (Or the turn after.)

Also: we need to think about settling the gaps on our old border. I think we can fit two cities between Izzy and PMW and with all those forests available they could be really quick to set up. Do those settlers come after we've pacified Azza or do we want them now?

Also pt2: we need a way to pop borders for all our newly acquired cities - Music would be handy, but we're probably just going to put Barracks in production cities and Libraries in commerce cities.

[Fintourist]

In that situation we should think about burning the city, just for the protection that affords our existing conquests... Alternatively only putting a couple of powerful units like longbows or maces in the city would make it very inefficient for him to recapture and would let us cause him plenty more trouble. Other options are to sally around to the north or down to the south where further cities are available .

Just going in and burning the city would feel a bit wasteful as we probably can't do it with super favourable hammer exchange. So if possible, defending with selected units or simply having a strong enough stack to hold the city feel more tempting options. We have now 15 knights, 10 HAs + other stuff running around nearby so once the next wave of units (including some cats) arrives and we heal our existing forces I think there is a decent chance that we are strong enough to park our units next to azza's stack.

Also: we need to think about settling the gaps on our old border. I think we can fit two cities between Izzy and PMW and with all those forests available they could be really quick to set up. Do those settlers come after we've pacified Azza or do we want them now?

I don't think there is a huge rush right now. Let's whip out a big wave of settlers 5-10 turns before we land economics and can revolt into free market and found then a bunch of fillers and remaining island cities. Obviously if there are quality sites available and we have time to get a settler or two out it's completely fine to settle them already.

Also pt2: we need a way to pop borders for all our newly acquired cities - Music would be handy, but we're probably just going to put Barracks in production cities and Libraries in commerce cities.

After Banking do we get top-tree techs or try to beeline Economics? As visible in our demos this warfare and military build-up has hurt our GNP and winning the free GM might be difficult/out of our reach. I did not remember to check F4 this turn, but I assume nobody has Paper yet though. Anyways, after Banking we should probably save some gold for a while before commiting into one of those paths. Beelining Nationalism and trying to land Taj without standard Liberalism play would be kind of a cool play too, but Economics is pretty tasty.

[Old Harry]

Just going in and burning the city would feel a bit wasteful as we probably can't do it with super favourable hammer exchange. So if possible, defending with selected units or simply having a strong enough stack to hold the city feel more tempting options. We have now 15 knights, 10 HAs + other stuff running around nearby so once the next wave of units (including some cats) arrives and we heal our existing forces I think there is a decent chance that we are strong enough to park our units next to azza's stack.

Looking back on turn 123 Dental Plan only had 20% culture, so it's possible that capturing Boo-urns gives us freedom to move on the hills to the west of the city and hit a recapture force. Speculating is a bit pointless before we know what Azza is up to though.

After Banking do we get top-tree techs or try to beeline Economics? As visible in our demos this warfare and military build-up has hurt our GNP and winning the free GM might be difficult/out of our reach. I did not remember to check F4 this turn, but I assume nobody has Paper yet though. Anyways, after Banking we should probably save some gold for a while before commiting into one of those paths. Beelining Nationalism and trying to land Taj without standard Liberalism play would be kind of a cool play too, but Economics is pretty tasty.

I was keen on getting the HE and NE planted, but actually getting Economics then back-filling could be the bigger prize. We don't necessarily need to produce lots of units in ten turns time when the HE would be in place.

On the first-to bonii: Only BGN has Philosopy, no-one has Banking or Paper, I'd guess that dtay has Engineering, although it could be Krivice, to defend against dtay. If we get to Banking first and can manage not to blow too much cash on upgrades (I'd like to start saving cash once Alfie's bank is in place - we could part-research Paper until it is) then we're in a good place to get Economics, but perhaps we should be tempted by one of the bigger prizes . I'm assuming BGN is in pole position for the Taj, I have no idea who is suddenly going to break from the pack to launch the Liberalism race, but we could Lib Economics to kill two birds with one stone...