[SPOILERS] This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land. But Mostly Mine.

[Ceiliazul]

Sheesh, please tell me you plan to rename those cities soon!

[fluffyflyingpig]

Multiple turns without new wars? You are slacking! Declare war on more people ASAP

Lurker scum.

Ruff was logged in for over an hour this turn. Usually he takes ten or 15 minutes. You may get your wish yet. I don't think he took that long to dot map the borderlands. I think I'll start loading up the southern galleons and maybe look at my options. Fighting him now is not my preference but preemptive war is a thing, right?

Or, I could be making this up just to keep your hopes up.

Some spoilsport killed the ISDG thread flamewar , so I need somewhere to fill my daily quota of rabble-rousing. The flamewar died just when we dragged sommer in. Some people are just no fun.


Seriously, good work with the attack.

Also I am confused by the naming scheme. Is it National Parks, Yellowstone landmarks, or random NPS related stuff? Please hurry up with the attack so we have more park service things and fewer mystery numbers.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Oh, the hubris/genius dichotomy can't be known until fifty turns from now or so.

But I am rather amazed that your 2v1 appears to be such a romp. Enjoying the Cossacks? Could you have done it with simple Cavalry?

I am enjoying the Cossacks. They are tremendously helpful. Interestingly, vs. Q, who could have built a swarm of 'phracts, they are less meaningful than vs. Nakor who can now build Cuirs. The way the war with Q has turned out, with him stuffing everything into a single city in a last stand defense, Cavs would have been nearly as effective. There was one combat sequence where he attacked me at his central 60% culture city (the one that ultimately only had a warrior and two scouts to defend) where he lost some combat rolls using WEs. But given the size of my stack, I had 8-9 Cossacks available, this is only a matter really of him doing more damage in the fights that he lost. Not decisive. For Nakor, I've felt comfortable leaving 4-5 Cossacks as city defenders, even after using these same units as attackers. So they would be defending with damage already. The +50% bonus vs. mounted means that Nakor can't effectively use his mounted without first doing some heavy collateral, but even this has less effectiveness because of promotions available for me. In the best case, he can collateral my Cossacks down to half strength, so 7.5 vs. his cuirs at 12 strength. But I typically have 3-4 promos available on most of my Cossacks, either by upgrading combat veterans from my previous wars or because I have a military pump that is probably the best in the entire game:

This picture was from nearly a month ago. The only change is that I have completed West Point, so all mounted units come out with 17xp now, so either combat4 or combat3/formation. C4, even after being hit with maximum collateral is what? 11.5? And then gets the +50% vs. mounted. Assuming Nakor has combat2 available (barracks/stables easily manageable in most cities by this point) that leaves him 14.4 -50% so 7.2 vs. 11.5. Numbers aren't my strong point and I'm doing this in my head, and this also ignores that damaged units are not really as effective as healthy units at a similar strength, but it illustrates the problem for Nakor in being able to concentrate forces and then counterattack in force against his tightly packed cities. All I really need to do is place units strategically in positions that prevent Nakor being able to get around them to counterattack cities with collateral, and even then as long as I have 1-2 healthy Cossacks with promos available I can bleed Nakor heavily in the exchange. He's been dry whipping so his unit replacement cycle is nearly at an end.

I've used some Rifles as defenders as well and they also get a bonus vs. mounted (25%), in addition to terrain bonuses. If I didn't have Cossacks I would have had to build more Rifles as defenders. The biggest difference is that if I had to build regular Cavalry over Cossacks that I probably would have just had to build more of them. So either I would have taken a little longer to declare on Nakor or I would have had to include more cities in the military build up to wage both wars. As it is, I've probably only dedicated 30% of my cities toward the wars. Everywhere else is still investing in infrastructure, mostly Granaries, Forges, and then they holy triumvirate of Library/Research Institute/Observatory, with a handful of hammer specialists building Barracks/Stables. Because of CRE/PHI, the RI/Observatory are discounted and because I make a lot of hammers I intend at some point to switch from building basic infrastructure to building wealth and making use of the enhanced research rate. This is how I intend to manage the ballooning tech costs later in the tech tree. As I've said before, I expect the game to continue for a long while yet, so buildings are still a good investment. They are also a way of hiding my strength from opponents. If I simply built wealth and teched faster I'd just stand out in the crowd. KTB will keep contending opponents right with me. I think investing in buildings will pay more dividends over the course of the game and will make me less of a dog pile target at this point. But I'm sure I've already put a larger target on my back by eating two neighbors at once, so who knows.

The tl;dr answer is yes, I could have managed both wars without Cossacks, but I would have had to invest more in military or have had to wait longer to declare, at least on Nakor. But the timing was right to attack Nakor now after his war with wetbandit, so that could have ended up a missed opportunity that would cost me a bit more later.

I also want to point out that I haven't won this round of wars yet. Nakor and Q will certainly die, but wetbandit and Ruff may see this as their best opportunity to make a meaningful impact on the outcome of the game by attacking me. If they do this, I'll have to sprint out more units to consolidate my gains and discourage further participation by the teams that could really hurt me, OH/Fin and Krill/novice, though distance and other geopolitical considerations may keep Krill/novice from joining against me in this round of wars. I'm sitting on enough GP to fire another GA just in case of this eventuality. The GA is my insurance policy that allows me to whip and draft in an emergency, in addition to just swarming out more troops by natural production.

Sheesh, please tell me you plan to rename those cities soon!

I plan to rename those cities soon. I'd like to finish the conquest so I don't disrespect Nakor. But the naming scheme is horrible. Same policy for Q, but I immediately renamed Pokemon. I can't bring myself to have a city named like that. I think I just named the city RENAME.

Multiple turns without new wars? You are slacking! Declare war on more people ASAP

Lurker scum.

Ruff was logged in for over an hour this turn. Usually he takes ten or 15 minutes. You may get your wish yet. I don't think he took that long to dot map the borderlands. I think I'll start loading up the southern galleons and maybe look at my options. Fighting him now is not my preference but preemptive war is a thing, right?

Or, I could be making this up just to keep your hopes up.

Some spoilsport killed the ISDG thread flamewar , so I need somewhere to fill my daily quota of rabble-rousing. The flamewar died just when we dragged sommer in. Some people are just no fun.


Seriously, good work with the attack.

Also I am confused by the naming scheme. Is it National Parks, Yellowstone landmarks, or random NPS related stuff? Please hurry up with the attack so we have more park service things and fewer mystery numbers.

I think it was time to close that thread down. Nothing was being accomplished and I had to restrain from replying to a few inane bits of bullshit. One of these days I'm actually going to read War and Peace somewhere besides as trollbait by Xenu. Nicely done on his part!

My original cities are locations within Yellowstone National Park. Then I have Caledorn's cities that I didn't rename. Then former England that I renamed a combination of US and English National Parks. I think I'll continue the national parks theme for subsequent cities. If you have a favorite, make a request and I'll name a city for you.

[fluffyflyingpig]

I'd like to see Haleakalā and Volcanoes please :D

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

T183

The wars continue.

Nothing unusual happened here, just some easy kills.



Ease of victory apparently didn't slake the invader's thirst for wrecking every building. Come on guys!



Q whipped a pike. I killed it at 75-ish%.



Well, at least the attackers didn't kill the cereal. After Q played his turn I got an ominous gchat message from Q saying "Muahaha". I was worried that he had some secret plan and had damaged my stack at the fortress city on our border, but apparently he just recaptured this city. Ah, well that's just one less unit in the other city out this way. Easy come, easy go. I'm guessing I'll end up losing the granary too.



The city east of 5047 had too many units. This city had three units, the strongest defender giving my ~75% odds to win. I won all combats and put the injured units in the city to defend, risking my boat. Nakor apparently didn't counterattack. I think his turn lasted four minutes.



Now that's more like it!





Wetbandit is rebuilding his power. Just hold steady over there a bit longer, if you don't mind. I'd like to heal up and consolidate my forces before starting to work on you. More seriously, I'm probably going to have to live with wetbandit's continuing presence for a little while. I'm going to be stretched pretty thin with my current force levels and all these new cities to garrison. My pressing military need is to build up a respectable navy that will prevent OH/Fin in the east from wanting to meddle in my affairs. I'd like some boats for the west as well, but this is less pressing given the distance to Krill/novice.



Here are some of the long delayed flying camera shots that were promised earlier. OH/Fin are relying on keeping very light garrisons in their western conquests. Only recently have any units at all been seen. Right now, that is ~5 cuirs and 5 cats. Each turn I rove my sentry chariot in a roughly NE to SW line, which gives me visibility on all of the cities with signposts indicating garrisons, as well as on the sea lanes in the polar south. The "no wake zone" sign is roughly where I will be stationing the first of a couple of work boats to give complete visibility. I intend this to be interpreted as peaceful vigilance, using the least aggressive unit available to me to keep an eye on things. The thing I most want to prevent is a stack of Galleons/Frigates appearing out of nowhere because I don't have a large standing army in the east of my empire, and these are my most important cities. OH/Fin and I have benefited tremendously from mutual trust which has allowed us both to basically ignore military in this sector, which has given each of us a free hand to promote our foreign policy elsewhere to great effect. I hope this can continue.



Here is my core, along with former Caledornia which has developed nicely. I've settled several very marginal filler cities that are worthwhile basically exclusively because of Free Market trade routes. But I also have a lot of workshops, so State Property is going to be coming one of these days, depending on when I decide to fire the available golden age. I still have several techs to research before getting to my final civics.

Sapphire Pool is a great city and is one of my few that is loaded up with good commerce tiles. Right now, Tourmaline is paying upwards of 15g/turn in maintenance without a courthouse. This will be reduced when the Forbidden Palace finally comes online. I think that's in 2-3 turns. I'm sure wetbandit will notice the location of the FP and not help but realize that his empire would fit with mine in a very cost effective way after the FP completes. I hope he doesn't mind. Amethyst and Jade are commerce cities appropriated from Caledorn. Native commerce cities include West Yellowstone, Madison, and Canyon, aside from the obvious bureau-cap Yellowstone. Most other cities are hammer oriented but may have decent commerce potential through extensive coastal tiles and trade route yield, boosted in many cases by the size of the city. Lamar Valley (21) and Tower Junction (20) are great examples. I really like West Thumb, in part because anything that you steal is just that much sweeter.



Former England and current-ish Nakor here. I've nibbled around the edges of Nakor to this point. He's nearly whipped all that he can whip, so the end isn't far away. But I'm not building tons of new units, so the conquest happens when it happens. I do not fear a counterattack at this point, so it's just a matter of plodding through and healing units to send back into the breach a second or third time. Nakor built lots of cottages, so I'll be interested to see whether it is worthwhile to preserve them and build for commerce or if I should instead just pillage and start from scratch with a mass of workshops. I'm leaning toward the latter, but maybe a few commerce buildings will survive the upcoming slaughter. In his capital, where I anticipate winning an Academy, I will at least preserve mature cottages.

England is a hodgepodge of cottages and workshops. Since I razed London, and its Academy, I don't have a huge incentive to prioritize beakers in a lot of this land. New Forest, Everglades, and to a lesser extent New Forest have rivers that had mature cottages in addition to coastal commerce so these will be oriented toward commerce. Interior cites will be hammers all the way. Dreylin's cultural presence is annoying, but I don't think expanding further eastward is a good idea for me right now. However, Thebes and Memphis make awfully tempting targets and have very weak garrisons. This area is finally up and running and starting to make a meaningful contribution to my economy.



Q-land. Adrianople is being pillaged. I want the tiles to be workshops, not cottages, so I am going to extract what commerce I can through pillage coin. I've indicated the current development of the cottage industry surrounding Q's former capital and replacement and the city to the south so I can note whether Ruff pillages any of my spoils. So far he has not helped himself to any goodies. This area gets up to speed much more quickly as workshops rather than cottages, so I will probably end up eliminating most of these cottages. Nicomedia isn't long for this world, then it is a matter of suffering WW at Adrianople as little time as possible. I'm starting to be hurt by WW in a few cities now and having to get creative on positioning garrison units (still in HR). So far, no damage has been done due to unhappy faces but as soon as I crack Adrianople I will have unhappiness issues, so I want that phase to go as quickly as possible. Similar situation upcoming when I attack Nakor's capital.



Later on T183, after I played, OH/Fin fired a GA and swapped into some new civcs, including Caste and Universal Sufferage. My guess is that they're on the road to Communism for The Kremlin, so the race is on.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

T184

No losses.



Maybe Q just didn't build any infrastructure? I'm getting a much higher survival rate on presumed built infrastructure in the Nakor war.



A quantity garrison. A swarm of Frigates and amphibious Cossacks would see this laid low in no time. But I don't think that would be a good move for me just now. I know Krill is engaged in a war with dtay, but he has #1 power and I don't want to neighbor him all that much. I can take land elsewhere and leave Ruff as a buffer state.



This is a good garrison. I'm guessing all of his cities weren't like this when OH/Fin arrived on scene, else those cities wouldn't be rubble now.



Nakor has built a stack. I'll slow-waddle my scant catapults over from 4650 and bombard the defense. Look for this to fall in 6-7 turns? This will allow my other troops to attack, conquer, heal, and reposition for the (hopefully) final assault. Nakor, resistance is futile!





Bombard and then attack. Cats are more valuable right now than my other units because I have so few of them available in this sector and they are needed to break down cultural defense at the capital to prevent me suffering more losses than necessary. This is taking longer than strictly necessary, but I'm balancing two wars while racing others to first-to bonuses so I'm being very careful not to waste units.



Q did kill my wounded Cossack last turn, recapturing Malden. This city will fall next turn. I have three units in position to kill a maximum of two possible defenders.



Tech selected: Liberalism unto Communism. I debated whether to one turn research Liberalism but that would declare openly my intent to take Communism, which I think OH/Fin are racing toward. The fastest route to winning Communism would have been to complete research of Liberalism and then fire my GA and swap into Free Religion next turn for the +10% research bonus. I'm not quite ready to swap civics yet, though, because I'm not certain that I can reach Democracy before the GA ends if I start the GA now. Perhaps I could, but I don't want to cut things too fine because I'm, you know, waging war everywhere. The plan is to very nearly finish Liberalism, swap to SM, nearly finish that, then finish both on back to back turns with lots of overflow and HOPEFULLY finish Communism in one turn. I've been trying to get research visibility on OH/Fin but they are having none of it. With their espionage advantage they are able to prevent me getting this, but I'm still dumping points into them. Maybe they'll relent soon. Information is helpful in maintaining peace between us. As long as each knows what the other is doing and can feel safe, there is no need to escalate military power between. My hope is that they will relent and let me get research visibility once the race to Communism is over. I suppose the flipside of this could be that they have had research visibility on me given their massive EP lead and are now spending on me to keep it? I dunno.

















Alfie, OH/Fin's capital, tends to jump above Yellowstone when they are going 100% research. Or so it seems.



I'm working on recovering my land deficit!



The police blotter. And Yellowstone manifestly NOT helping build wealth when I desperately need gold to fund this push to Communism. I wonder what that is about? A catapult won't win the war by itself.

[Ceiliazul]

Setting up a kremlin cascade, hmm?

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Setting up a kremlin cascade, hmm?

It is dreadfully obvious, isn't it? But I haven't really counted hammers, just stacking a few builds for now. I still have the GE available but maybe I can save that for something else, like another GA. I may even rate that last GA as more valuable than Kremlin itself, I'm not sure right now. I just know I don't want OH/Fin to get Kremlin.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

T185

Got it back. He added a longbow to the pike and they're both swimming with the fishes now.



Fortunately, they didn't take the granary with them.



Time for some wheeling and dealing. Here are my notes while I played the turn:

check at war?

xenu 316 - teching
gawdzak (Churchill) 564 - perhaps teching at breakeven (only +24g) - at war with GJ.
german joey 1410 - teching
gawdzak (lizzie) 873 - perhaps teching at breakeven (only +45g) - war with TBS, down to two cities
gavagai 1159 (can research rifling) - teching
CH 1485 (can research rifling) - teching
pindicator 1249 - teching

likely need ~1744

requests at 30% interest:

xenu - 200g for 26g/10
Gawdzak (dazed) - 800g for 104g/10
Gawdzak (Persia) - 500g for 65g/10
CH - 500g for 65g/10
pindicator - 500g for 65g/10
GJ - 500g for 65g/10
wetbandit - 500g for 65g/10

I'm looking for some loans to speed me along to Communism. I didn't look at every civ, only those who had an available stockpile of gold and those who MAY be willing to trade some to me for a 30% profit over ten turns. I don't know if this is the generally acceptable amount or if it is enough to be worth it under normal circumstance, or if any of these civs can spare the gold under their specific circumstances, or if ANYONE would care to help the game leader at all, but it was worth a try. My intent is to serve two purposes. First, I'll have enough gold to get to Communism before OH/Fin if I don't need to produce any gold at all. Second, I can dry up the global supply of capital to prevent OH/Fin from doing exactly what I am attempting to do. I think 30% interest is fair, but I'm sure everyone won't be able to afford it. And I'm not even sure that a couple civs should accept the offer at all depending on the likelihood of that civ being eliminated within the ten turns. The Gawdzak civs being eaten by TBS and Joey right now are down to two cities for example. Probably they would not expect to get full repayment and so this would be a cheap giveaway. If that is the situation then I hope they decline the offer. But if they expect to survive ten turns maybe this is a good deal for them too. Who knows. Either way, I'd take the money. The offers:
















Well that's interesting. Wetbandit has had a settler sitting in Numberwang for a long, long time. Does the name Remote Control give a nod to wetbandit's expectation that at some point, perhaps soon, his new city (along with his older ones) will fall under the control of some foreign entity? This could be a self-fulfilling prophecy if he steals my fish! Anyway, my preference would have been for him to found the city on the wines resource but this is fine.



Ok, the real action of the turn. Having recaptured Q's final western city I'm prepared to finally begin whittling down his stack in Adrianople. I waited until the very end to begin this attack so I would not have to suffer war weariness for very long if things go poorly. The downside is that I'll have to wait to heal my units between attacks, so this is going to be an attack in waves because I don't have nearly as many hitters as he has defenders, which usually will bode poorly for the attacker's success. Lastly, I decided NOT to attack with collateral first, but rather to whittle the stack down far enough so that I can get a decisive amount of collateral on all surviving defenders so that I can kill them all at high odds in a single turn, reducing the effectiveness of the GG medic. Had I used my cats now I would have injured far more units than I could have attacked with my hitters, allowing the other units to soak up that collateral for free, which is a poor use of my cats. 70.9% to kill his best defender seems reasonable, even if I don't like risking my combat4 Cossack. Spoiler: I won this particular combat.



And several others. Overall, outstanding results. My odds were always in the 65-70% range, but even so I'm very happy to have won so many. Best of all, the Cossack that killed the GG/CG3 LB didn't receive a single hit! I renamed that unit "The Incredible" Cossack. Great results, but I still have a lot of work to do here.



Another reason to save my cats if I can is that Ruff's intentions are not totally clear to me. He'll likely sit back and wait his turn rather than attack me but I can't take that for granted. He could cause me some harm if I'm not careful. I'll be keeping an eye on his catapult stack, as much as I can with out open borders. I need to build a spy someplace, as soon as I'm done building wealth as much as I am right now.



Reinforcements have arrived. This city isn't going to wait for the crawl of catapults. I have some cities coming out of resistance and I want to start working good tiles. Attack!



I'm on the losing end of the import/export battle right now. Weird. I still have 5g trade routes everywhere so I'm clueless as to how this is calculated. Otherwise, obviously I'm happy with the rest of it. Keep in mind GNP is inflated due to two arrow bonuses into Scientific Method.





OH/Fin's GA and swap into Caste is easy to see. What a difference that makes for them. Replaceable parts will be good for them too.



I assume the OH/Fin drop in crop yield is working more workshops and specialists right now. Yes, I'm a little obsessed with what those guys are doing, to the exclusion of nearly everyone else.





Hold fast, Ruff. I can be a good neighbor. Honest!

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

T186

More fighting.

Another subscription to the Communism Buyer's Club.



Looking back, I should have made this the last conquest so I wouldn't have to leave a garrison vs. wetbandit while continuing against Nakor, but oh well.



No complaints here!



I've subdued the eastern landlocked city. You can also see that Nakor counterattacked successfully at 5753, which had just come out of resistance. I left an archer defending. I could only have been hit by a single unit, Nakor's GG Medic. I didn't think he'd make that trade but it's fine with me. His GG Medic dies.



Another granary/forge combo. Thanks, Nakor!





The granary didn't survive this time.



Confirmation that the medic is dead.



Operation Nakor after action. A kill or two in this may actually be from the Q sector. I tend to go back and forth during the turn as I delay a decision here or there when the optimal action isn't immediately clear to me.



Nakor's forces and my march toward another GG. Two more GGs get me in range of Commando units in Grant Village if I swap into Vassalage/Theocracy. Something to keep in mind.







Not much hope left.



I'm going to be losing Parthenon and The Great Library very soon. I've debated whether it would have been better to have fired the GA sooner to get advantage of those wonders for bonus GPP generation but I don't want to fire the GA just yet. I'm keeping up with OH/Fin well enough without the GA and I don't want to paint a neon sign for everyone else to dog pile me without a very good reason.



Forces after this turn's casualties.



Duplicate event log. Probably a totally redundant pic.



OH/Fin are #1 MFG during their GA.





Plenty of wealth builds inflating my GNP.