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

[Krill]

Dreylin should die now. Then OT need to setup for a space victory.

[Krill]

Man, BGN is pissed.




BGN has some naval forces on the north coast of the Wetbandit/nakor area, so I'm just sitting there with the galleons atm. Just playing spoiler for a bit: I doubt BGN doesn't have land forces ready to pounce the moment I unload anything, so if I ever do it'll be to gift them to wetbandit. Other than that, I'm just going to sit there and stop BGN from attacking wetbandit or HAK.

On a geographically relevant note, Plako just invaded CH. I have a significant number of troops in that area but again, I'd rather help Plako to take and consolidate that area so BGN would have fewer opportunities to progress in territory.

In naval matters, BGN is trying to plow forward with a stack of frigates under a number of ironclads. I'm just gradually retreating now, and constantly adding to my frigate numbers. We're 4 turns from restarting research with OU in place. I think that it may be better to just research Steam Power immediately and then get a number of ironclads of our own in place for when BGN would enter Ruffs borders then murder his stack.

A final question: When should we trigger our last golden age? We have all of the GPs now, we aren't going to be using an artist bomb any more so the only questions are when, and what to do regarding civics. We could easily trigger the GA this turn and revolt into Bureau and OR to finish the last bit of infrastructure, but I kinda want to wait until OU is finished. OTOH, I do think that building Levees in OT, Ec, PE, PM and WL would worthwhile as none of those are contributing to the naval production.

I think a compromise is to start research this turn into Steam Power. It'll take 3 turns, so the upshot of it is we'll lose some efficiency of waiting for OU to finish, but I have finished the libraries and observatories in most cities already. Save gold for the fourth turn, maybe try to get coal from OT as they have 3 copies (how little of it is on the map?) Then trigger the GA after OU is complete, revolt into Bureaucracy and OR for 5 turns, cram down the minimal infrastructure we want and then revolt back into Nationhood and Theo. We should be able to finish all unit builds then just save them up for when we get back into Theo.

[Krill]

Highlight of this turn: we have 38 frigates on the map and complete a further 6-7 every turn. All 5XP. Steam Power completes eot T208, at that point only a few front line cities are going to build ironclads due to the abysmal movement.

[Krill]

Joey is going for HAK lands. This is good news, he should be able to defend these lands from BGN provided he can get the cities under his control, so I've made the decision to unload into HAKs cities and secure his southern border from BGN.





The scouts have uncovered the FoW to the extent that I know BGN can't hit that stack apart from capturing a coastal city and unloading into Crazy Place then immediate attacking with Cossacks. Or railroading out of the FoW with a stack of inf and cossacks to hit it, but I do doubt that even though he is finishing RR this turn. That is an ironclad belonging to BGN in Labotomy.





Falling down the rankings.





Nothing to see here but pain and war weariness.

[Krill]

Commodore, you and whomever you had balance the map are fucking morons.

[novice]

No coal?

[Krill]

No coal on our entire continent. 1 coal on TBS continent and he doesn't have it either. None on Plako's continent.

Our nearest coal is, weirdly enough, 19 tiles away to the SE of Cambridge in Ruffs possession.

Fucking bullshit.

[Krill]

HAK currently has a continent and an island. Joey is invading hte continent, and BGN the island. Nothing we could do to intervene on the island but the of the south coast cities are currently guarded now, and if BGN goes for the fourth I'm fairly sure we'll have the numbers to take the city back from him.

dtay also seems to be moving units around in a suspicious manner, so I'm moving units back over to that front, especially now that BGN doesn't seem to be pressing on with his navy.

We restart research next turn with about 11000 gold saved and still got gold rolling in from a number of sources, so I think we'll have about 17 turns worth of 100% research, making over 2425 base bpt.

[Ceiliazul]

Wow, that's a lot of banked breakers! Of that ~40k base beakers, how much comes from Oxford? What is your tech path?

[Krill]

Oxford will generate a measly 130-ish bpt at 100% science. Even though Eggcorn is size 20 with one specialist, it is only working 14 towns. FIN only works on 4 of them, with two windmills not yet benefiting from FIN due to not having Electricity. We have three 10 commerce trade routes.




Bureaucracy would be worth an additional 66-ish base bpt, through multipliers that goes up to about 215 bpt. However, we save over 90 gpt from using Nationalism with Inflation coming close to 50%, so we basically give up 100bpt for the additional 25% EP (which is worth maybe 15ept to us, but as it is all thrown at BGN that's basically worthless economically) but the ability to draft rifles everywhere. Given the game state right now, I value the draft ability more than I do the additional commerce (the hammers from Bureau, well, talking less than 10 from Bureau).

I'm restarting research now because it's about this point that we have enough gold to get to Destroyers at 100%; I'd have restarted research earlier if the immediate needs could be met by a cheaper tech beeline.

Main advantage to saving gold is the flexibility of tech path: nothing new there, just we've been saving gold for 20 turns or so. I'm not surprised people don't do that, but they realy should: most of our advantage. Even now I'm not sure the route to take, because I want Railroad ASAP to deter dtay doing anything stupid (machine guns) but only two people have it researched (BGN and OT). SM is the most obvious tech because if we have oil then it is easy to justify RR as the second tech, and if we lack oil then we can't build rail roads due to not having the necessary resources. If that's the case, then this game really has been a farce, and Commodore deserve the shit from PBEM 64 for all his games for the next 5 years.

Probably path is SM>RR>Physics>Arty>Combustion if we have oil. If we don't, then it's likely SM>Physics>Electricity>Arty>Fission, with a potential Assembly Line detour depending on need.

Our tech rate sucks because we never built enough cottages due to spending so many resources on setting up our border with dtay. Even though we have the fourth highest land area in the game we only have 2 cottage cities. I'm about to change one of our junk plains cities to the south to a cottage city for shits and giggles to see how long it will take to become more productive. I'm considering putting the IW city onto wealth to extend the number of turns we can research at 100% for after a levee, which would give us an additional 100-ish gpt. If we did that, coal would be worth 30gpt to us if we got it, and I have asked for a gift from OT. Given the war with BGN, I wonder if they will give it. They have 3 resources already.

On a separate note, I do think the scaling known tech bonus is working pretty much perfectly in this game. No way should we be gaining a stupid 100% known research bonus, but if we were to research AL, then we'd get 40% boost, which I think is about right: we're not going to have a tech lead but we going to be relevant. We'll have issues that we need to work around and others can take advantage of but we'll not be pushovers.