[SPOILERS] By the Rivers of Babylon, FIN has no effect (on krovice)

[Krill]

Rough plan: withdraw as many units as possible from Willow Lake and put them on the staging tile between DS and RC. From this tile, can move them over two turns to a galleon stack on the coast, once loaded, that stack can reach JD immediately. The following turn hit Ruff and take his three west coast cities and see what we can get there.

Only additional tactic would be to load up say 3 galleons and try to reach Ruffs northern coastal city on the same turn. If we did that we could theoretically get his entire core in 2 turns. We certainly have enough units to do it and we wouldn't even need to withdraw any cannon do do this, just need the knights and muskets. We'd have to use Frigates to strip out cultural defense, but we wouldn't need many.

The only cost is that we need to build about 20 galleons...which we probably don't have the time to do properly.

[Krill]

Tech situation: We can generate between 700 and 730gpt at max tax depending on how I set Willow Lake up (that city is awesome...but we already have it close to the happy cap at size 10, max we can get it to without a market or Forge is size 11 IMO). We have 1150 gold saved, we the critical techs we still lack are Music, Mil trad, Mil Sci, Rep Parts and Rifling. On the economy side we are missing Constitution and Corp (for the extra free trade route).

Three people have Constitution: OldTourist, Plako and TBS.
Two people have Rep Parts: dtay and BGN.
Two people have Rifling: dtay and BGN.
We are the only team with Steel.

OldTourist are not going for Rifles and Cav for an invasion of dtay: obvious path for them is SoL and then Corp then go back for the military techs but I don't know how long that takes them. It'd take us, building wealth at least 10 turns to get Democracy and Corp, but then again we only have about 25 cottages. They gotta have more.

tl;dr I think we need to save gold for longer and see what happens. I set research to Music this turn at 30% to finish it in 1 but I'm going to set it back down to zero. Rep Parts is really hard for me to not research at 100% from next turn due to the extra hammer on mines and windmills, it would land eot T183 (1 turns saving gold then 3 turns of research at 40%, 100%, and 100%).

dtay doesn't seem to be researching anything at the moment, still saving gold. His tech lead has disappeared compared to the leaders but he still has the advantage of obliterating anything we put in his land. Of course, we do the same to him if he steps foot in ours. 35 cannon will do that.

[Krill]

For the lurkers. And novice.

That's a lot of muskets. I've stopped drafting so hard now, because you can see the upkeep is painful. I've started some courthouses to try and help out, but what we really need is for dtay to have an Atlantis event. GNP at breakeven is 7th on RP.

[Ceiliazul]

That f5 pic looks like you gained a couple squares near Bell Preston... nice job in the bissection.

Yes, difinitely a lot of muskets and cannon. Thats a murder hole for anyone entering. What is Ruff's tech situation?

[Krill]

Yeah, when Avendale was razed it reset the culture borders because the only tiles dtay could keep were those that Bell Preston and Tarkir had within their respective borders. So we gained two tiles between his cores. We are also gaining ground on the tile 77 of Willow Lake, such that we should have it in less than 10 turns. At that point we can't be single moved at Willow Lake and our defensive position gets a hell of a lot stronger. We would be able to put a stack of cannon on the deer tile at FP and it could hit any slow mover stack that assaulted RC or WL (DS is basically dead if dtay wants it, our only defence there is stuffing it full of units, once we get Rifling I'm tempted to draft it back down to size 8).




I don't think it was a good play though. Wasting 2 artist bombs for a size 10 city is not worth it, and all we've done is replace dtay as #1 with BGN and OldTourist are still chugging along. Which is why I'm using a strategy of minimal aggression to dtay. We don't benefit from attacking him, but I'm willing to play the civ as an anvil that OldTourist can batter dtay against. If they want to stop pressing dtay then I'm not going to do anything to slow dtay down except to defend what is ours. I will not threaten his cities, I won't pillage his nets. OldTourist would view us as a threat and invade us to take whatever we gained (or even just stop pressing dtay themselves).

[Krill]

Need to play the turn when I get back shouldn't need a pause unless I crash in the shit weather.

[Krill]

I've just gone and checked, we have way too many units to dump onto galleons to attack Ruff ie we are production limited on Galleons. The only concern in withdrawing troops from Willow Lake and around RC is that dtay will see us retreating. The obvious option is to only withdraw knights from WL, and leave everything else which would make it look like we don't fear a cavalry alphastrike. This makes sense as we are starting to get the culture defense back at WL, it is already at 20% and rising; C2 Cav have less than 50% odds again the C2 or CG1 muskets in that city.

IMO, this works fine. with Boldly starting his attack on Q we are against he clock and need to pump out the galleons. I'm 1 turning them out of Cf, going to make a further 4 over the next 6 turns. I'll get a few more out of FR as well, plus time to position. Upgrade the two galleys we have, I believe that in 7-8 turns we should have about 13-14 galleons. We will have minimum 5 frigates to bombard Marblehead.

It's an interesting challenge if you want to pop in and look at it.

[Krill]

Tech options are getting a bit more interesting now. OldTourist have just finished Democracy: SoL on a continent where they have 50 cities is going to be absurd if they also revolt into Rep. On top of that they have enough cities to cycle drafts without stacking unhappiness. They are set up to research constantly and keep the tech pace of the game running fairly smoothly. They also just upped the KTB to 8% per player. This isn’t a huge advantage for us because we’re actually much closer to the tech lead than most people, but it’s still there.

We research RP this turn, at 90% with some research builds (about 40 hammers worth), 100% we get more than 100 beakers worth of overflow. We also got up to 1525bpt at max research due to finishing an observatory in Ec, and 3 more people got RP. Still only 2 with Ridling though, dtay and BGN. I think 10 people have Music and Mil Trad though, which is where the decision becomes interesting.

What do we want to research next? We should have 1100 gold minimum saved when we finish RP this turn, so that’s another 1.5 turns worth of saved gold. Kind of a misplay saving this much extra gold but meh.

Music>Mil Trad, known by 10 and 7 teams respectively gives us a total research bonus of 120% on Music and 76% on Mil Trad, from optional prerequisites and 80% from everyone knowing the tech). Total cost for both is about 3000 base beakers (we already have some invested into Music from precious overflow). In other words, I think we can two turn these techs at 100% with the appropriate amount of saved gold, and build research if necessary.

This gives us Cuirs, Cav with Rifling, the ability to build West Point (5XP, 550 adjusted hammers (with RP boost to mines, RC makes 42hpt base, we have stone therefore 9 turn build), ability to build culture.

Frankly, I want to build Cav, Cuirs aren’t that interesting and we can prebuild Cav jsut as well with knights. West Point we are just going to have to fit into RC at some point, sooner rather that later is my preference. Culture build is irrelevant.

Rifling, known by 2 teams, requires 3 turns of 100% research and then anything between breakeven and saving gold on the fourth turn. It depends on how many people research Rifling before we research it. The tech will take 4 turns unless 3 other people research it before we start and we pull 200bpt from somewhere). With saving gold, looking at 7 turns.

Rifles are critical for us IMO. Yes, going to cost 2 pop to draft but they are also 100 gold to upgrade our somewhat extensive musket army in a pinch. Not that we would want to upgrade much of it at all, but we do have a good amount of 5XP muskets that we could upgrade to deal with an invasion from dtay. Cav more so though: Cav are going to enable us to deal with an invasion from dtay much more safely: if he builds cannon we need to flank them away rather than taking 50/50 shots with our cannon when we don’t have any real units that can kill his cannon.

If Cav are the main advantage then I don’t think it matters much if we go Mil Trad or Rifling next. If we think we are safe for the next 10 turns, then Mil Trad>Rifling will get WP online sooner, at the cost of having fewer rifles from drafts to defend with or to back up any attacks. We’d have the option of getting a few Cuirs as well to supplement attacks, or to upgrade the 22 knights we have to Cuirs prior to an invasion of Ruff. Knight>Cuir upgrades are 40g per upgrade IIRC, so 1 turn worth of gold would allow us to upgrade 18 of the knights: I wonder what Ruff would think if he saw us dump those Cuirs and some cannon in front of his cities.

There is one other path that makes sense though. Constitution>Corp: I think 3 people have Constitution (Plako, OldTourist and someone else), and OldTourist should have Corp before we started research into it. It would take 5 turns worth of research, I think 4 turns of 100% and something like 1 turn of 80%. So assuming 5 turns of max research as a worst case means it’s 10 turns total.

We could then build Jails, and get +1 trade route per city. That trade route would likely be a 4 commerce route in most cities, maybe 5 in some due to city size. I believe that we would get about 120 commerce per turn out of it? Maybe 150 if I’m optimistic?

OK, it’s just not worth it compared to more easily taking 6 cities from Ruff and contesting dtays southern holdings with OldTourist. I think we go for Corp after Mil Trad and Rifling are completed. I’m just not sure which one we go for first. I’m not sure what OldTourist are doing, but I don’t want to give them all of dtays southern core if they invade. I think that Tarkir is the main issue of note, it’s a size 18 city that we can’t allow them to get, either we get it and keep it for ourselves, or we raze it and replant that area. Which is going to be horrendous because CH packed hte cities in at minimum distance, but in a shooting war with OT we are going to need an awful lot of care to balance their aggression against that from dtay and BGN.

[novice]

Cuirs can flank cannons, can't they? So getting MilTrad first gives us nominally more security.

[Krill]

Yeah, Cuir can flank cannons but we are the only team with Steel at present. I'm thinking that Mil Trad is perhaps the best route to try and get WP down sooner rather than later, because I don't want to be pressed in 10 turns if dtay gets close to Machine guns.