[Spoilers] Old Human Tourist: Empress of Azteca

[Fintourist]

Turn 227

Nothing too special happened this turn and it's way too late for a OH-quality report (sorry!) :P

TBS has started a Golden Age and has some cities in great artist duties. Elensafar will be really fast once he hits the slider and Weldyn will be decent too. The 3rd city will need some artist-bomb support. If our attack is a success and we manage to burn Frontline that should be a major delay for TBS. At least so far I haven't found a decent back-up culture city.

TBS has annoyingly many destroyers and bunker build is a great choice in Lashing (where we are heading). No need to abort the plan, but we should consider bringing further navy towards TBS so that we can comfortably keep the control of the area even if he upgrades ships heavily. (TBS needs to save gold on t228, upgrade on t229 --> next couple turns are under control also in the "worst case scenario".

Let's see what happens and how well TBS reacts. There are so many moving pieces in the area that at the very least we are giving him a decent opportunity to make mistakes. TBS is a good player though, so we might need to satisfy ourselves with slowing him down a little bit, but who knows, maybe we can achieve a bit more than that. Next turn and especially the one after that should be interesting..

[Old Harry]

Turn 228

So two sneaky things from TBS this turn, first up he went for the decoy boats with his destroyers, but how did the destroyers manage to get back into Lashing? They were supposed to be stranded in international waters, ripe for the taking! Well it turns out that TBS closed borders with dtay, teleporting them back so they only needed one or two spare moves to get to safety . Also note HAK retired to AI .


The second is pretty bad news - it looks like TBS did something to do with getting coal from dtay to allow him to get overflow that wasn't divided out at the end of last turn, but then gets the Ironworks multiplier this turn . Between that and his newly-launched golden age this means he'll beat us to Eiffel by a turn. Unless we can do something about it next turn... -6 health is pretty funny, especially if your base production is 129 . This is what we should aim for with Zucchini!


Zucchini looks a bit sad in comparison - no Levee, much lower pop . Perhaps we can grow it a bit by the time we want the Internet?


We moved the fleet into position and bombarded Lashing this turn. We also have ten bombers in place to hit Lashing next turn (only 8 can hit highlighted Kharbranth, which is still our primary target).


Right now we have 16 Destroyers while TBS has 15 but he can upgrade seven more Frigates next turn... Fintourist did a few sims and decided if he has:

15-18 Destroyers vs our 16: we are happy if TBS attacks
20 vs 16 --> it will be more or less an even trade, we should win more battles, but we might lose a transport or two
22 vs 16: it can go either way, with some luck we are fine, with bad luck we suffer decent losses
~25 vs 16: we should retreat

We've got six more Destroyers on their way, but might be vulnerable for a couple of turns...

Anyway we're still not seeing a buildup from BGN - just a couple of transports in range of our coast still, so the attack goes ahead (barring catastrophe).


Demos and power

[Ceiliazul]

Those moves from TBS are pretty cool. You might even say... bad ass.

Stuff like that is why playing against humans is more exciting than ai. And victory is much sweeter when you win anyway!

[Ceiliazul]

Demos not showing.

See you losing visibility on dtay?

[Old Harry]

Demos not showing.

See you losing visibility on dtay?

Fixed and yeah, we put ~3000 EPs into TBS to be sure we have investigate city, but a couple of spy missions meant we lost visibility on dtay. That should be rectified before he gets Railroad (which is a worrying tech for us).

[Fintourist]

Those moves from TBS are pretty cool. You might even say... bad ass.

Yeah, indeed. The loss of our old 4-mover ships was more of a oversight from our part. We just did pay enough attention there, as the stakes weren't that high. However, using teleporting as a tactical element shows that TBS knows what he is doing (which is of course expected here).

However, what's going on with the Eiffel build is something I want to know after the game. I remember thinking that TBS is playing stupidly reg the Eiffel city as he had 400+/150 hammers in an artillery build. There must be something in the overflow mechanics that I'm not aware of, otherwise I can't see how he managed to get 129 base hammers overflow from that build. His base production was also exactly 129 base hammers, coincidence? somehow related? Aaaanyways, well done TBS I'm always interested in ways to optimize micro and either I'm missing something here or my understanding of overflow mechanics isn't correct.

Stuff like that is why playing against humans is more exciting than ai. And victory is much sweeter when you win anyway!

Totally. I don't know yet whether we get to enjoy victory in this game (this turn might already be interesting), but playing against humans is really the key for me when it comes to enjoying civ. I guess I have played less than 20 single player games until the victory / to the point where victory is certain. During the last couple of years I have sometimes started new games, but I always end up getting bored latest in the mid-game when I should start conquering land or something. I just can't get myself motivated enough to pay attention to micro or take care of unit logistics unless I'm competing against humans. I guess participating in tournament games here or at other civ sites would be a compromise, but MP is simply a lot more interesting for me.

[Old Harry]

Turn 229

Damn that Eiffel Tower build!


Damnit - how do we get our carriers to join up with the northern fleet without exposing them to TBS's destroyers?


Hang on... where is TBS getting his coal from? dtay has two and he's giving one to TBS - one of which is supplied by BGN and the other is in this hill. If I'd had the spies on this tile already we could have just cut it and then we'd get a coinflip chance at Eiffel. So we'd need to use a fighter to air strike the tile .


And going back to an old bit of work - we can teleport our Carriers from the green tile so that they can join up with our fleet as it heads NW looking for a way in.


Oh, yeah, should have mentioned - it doesn't look like we're making a breakthrough at Kharbranth or Lashing this turn . So our fleet will move NW to fork four TBS cities and see what he does.


To business! First we bombard one mine. Then another! Then a third!


Then we declare war on dtay and... Success! Our boats are now poised to strike TBS western flank next turn.


The first Fighter failed to unhook dtay's coal, but the second one did. And now we just have to see if the coal deal gets cancelled before TBS completes production in Varelth. We're fairly sure that dtay can't just broker the coal he's getting from BGN to TBS. Can he?


With a little bit more bombarding our boats are in place to fork four cities next turn. TBS has to give up on one of them, right? Our bombers rebased to William's land, we've covered them and they can hit a couple of cities next turn...


In other worrying international news BGN has Military science and could hit one of our coastal cities with two transports next turn and commando his way to Zucchini - I blocked the city with some Destroyers, to remove the temptation.

Demos and power

End of turn update: From score increase it looks like TBS got the Tower - Fintourist logged in to check - any idea what went wrong?

[Commodore]

You can't normally broker things, but I don't actually know what the mechanic is for this situation, where you get your natural source(s) unhooked. Also, can you see this turn's order? Could be TBS resolved first, then Dtay's resolution hit and the deal got cancelled.

[Fintourist]

You can't normally broker things, but I don't actually know what the mechanic is for this situation, where you get your natural source(s) unhooked. Also, can you see this turn's order? Could be TBS resolved first, then Dtay's resolution hit and the deal got cancelled.

Yeah, not sure what's going on there. OH tested this in a sandbox and there we successfully cut the resource, but in the game the deal was still in place after the turn roll. Kind of disappointing as we spent quite a lot of time for calculating how many tiles we need to bombard, how do we teleport our units etc.

***

Well, at the very least this makes it even more clear that we need to deal with TBS' culture attempt in this game and these small delay actions probably won't be enough.

***

About the big picture: I have a lot of respect of TBS as a player and I would not mind losing to him in that sense, but even if we screw ourselves by stopping his culture run, I think we want to do it. The southern part of the world has had a higher concentration of competitive civs, most notably dtay who had to be stopped from reaching a too strong position --> I'm not fine with losing this game to a distant civ, who has been relaxing behind the leaders the entire game and now goes for a culture victory. Do not get me wrong, TBS is an awesome player and a culture run is certainly another nice twist that makes this game pretty epic. But benefiting from maximum distance from most competitive civs and sneaking a victory in semi-isolation is not the way this game ends. Although, if we throw everything we have against TBS and he manages to defend it then he of course deserves the victory. I guess my point is that we aren't going to passively watch by even if it means that we need to focus on TBS while BGN manages to conquer enough land so that he can win the space race or we leave us vulnerable to back-stab.

[Commodore]

That's poop. I would rather have had your position than TBS' any day, even before considering the crappy mapmaker shafting him on coal.