Not sure what the 4 gold means if anything, and I think you all decided to avoid coded diplo mesages anyway.
I have to run.
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[SPOILERS] Will the Sun(rise) Ever Set on Washington, Mongolia?
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I just got 3 gold from Johns (didn't accept this time) so I guess it is a count down. And an offer of Open Borders from CH. Denied. Don't want him scouting out my army right before my (no doubt ill-fated) attack.
Finished turn. Printing Press did wonders for my economy. Sitting at 50% science, I think my beaker count went up almost 100, and I went from +31 to about +75 gold. It's not turn 193, and I will launch the attack next turn. Unfortunately, my spy was caught as the turn flipped, but it had wandered over to CH's capital so maybe... I dunno, maybe he'll misinterpret it in a way that doesn't signal "attack incoming!" My scouting chariot showed what CH has guarding his border with Johns and it's pretty scary. I'm getting off easy, it seems. Also, demos, I'm generally 3rd or 4th place in most things (currently 2nd in food somehow), and am clearly middle of the pack. If I wasn't stuck between the game's too giants, I wouldn't be feeling too badly about my position.
The fireworks have begun. I spent about 8 Knights chewing through the two Rifles guarding the city, but eventually broke through and razed it. Too bad, was a nice place. The loss of the city actually added a turn to CH's current research (Military Tradition) so that's nice! But I'll be facing Cav and such real soon. I coulda sworn he didn't have music still. Oh well. I positioned the remaining mounted to fork a couple cities, but CH can easily reinforce the important one to be unbreakable. I promoted everything to pinch and as many Combat promotions as I could. Who knows if those were the right promotions, but better than leaving them unpromoted. Pretty sure he doesn't have a stack of mounted nearby that can reach, but we will see. Almost certain he has no stack of 1-movers that can reach next turn, either. The counter attack will come, oh yes, but probably not for a couple turns yet.
Now we'll see if good ol' Zulu pile on or not. At least I've managed to open my wars with razes (darn shame I could only do the one this time). I mean, perhaps if I had simmed things out I might have been able to split my forces in such a way that I had a reasonable chance of getting a couple border cities, but.... I didn't. I took some screenshots but won't get those up until tomorrow. This is the end for Gravity Falls. A slow one, but it's coming.
Oh, well, guess I forgot about those pictures. I'll just do a photo dump I think.
So this is what I began the war with as my offensive arm. Pretty pitiful, isn't it?   Pretty shit odds and I recall the first attack didn't even scratch the Rifle, which had me worried, but I just kept throwing units at the garrison.    Bring enough swords to a gunfight and.....   I also pillaged a farm just because I could. Might as well be obnoxious, huh?  Glad to see that Johns got the message, but he's even MORE technologically behind than me, and I think his border was more heavily defended so I'm just wishing him luck here. This is basically the kind of war we should have been fighting 100 turns ago.  Used 1 Keshik to burn the empty Worms (deleted it after) but there was no way I was going to break that defense. Based on what it took to chew through 2 Rifles and a Spear, I'd probably need 40+ Knights. I barely have 30 units altogether. I opted to pull my forces back for now and maybe see if I'll get a chance to try and attack from a different angle.  CH just teched MT, so I'm going to be facing CAVALRY real soon. Elum is just a turn away from Astronomy, so he can pretty much take all my islands and coast cities whenever he wants. Kind of disappointed how I really fell far behind in tech, but I think I analyzed that earlier and I just didn't grab as much cottage land as I needed to keep up. On the other hand, I guess I can take some pride that I'm actually doing much better than the other 3 players.   Never had this event before. Looked it up and it seems to be bugged, but that's fine because there's no way I'm ever taking CH's holy city anyway. XD  Here's where you can see some of that vintage  I've been doing. Mabel never got a library?! I know I'm at war right now, but I'm still trying to build critical infrastructure where it's needed, and I sure need one of these here.  Most of my cities are on Muskets, Blendin Blandin is building Catapults, and Soos is doing Muskets/Knights. I might need to add some extra Knights just to replenish my mobile forces. I also need to add catapults to my core region because most of my cats are up by blendin and my little manufacturing region. I got them stacked in a spot where I don't think they can be hit but they can respond to an invasion in a turn or two. CH's cities are all spaced well. Garrisons can easily move from one city to another in a single turn. He's also clearly taking this war seriously considering how much time it took him to play the turn and I saw that BGN logged in to observe the scene. Rome shares a small border with CH, but I really doubt they'll attempt to pile on. I'm mostly worried that Rome will try to use the chance to hit the Zulu. What are my goals for this war? Well.... I figure my BEST CASE scenario is that CH blunders his army onto the wrong tile, I manage to hit it with all my cats which weakens them enough to get cleaned up by my weaker army. Then I can capture or burn enough of his cities to make some gains. As a meta goal, either I do enough damage to him that the game gets called in Elumackoti's favor, or I get wiped out. I think what grates my goat here is that if I was in a different geographic position, or rather, if I neighbored someone besides just CH and Elum, I'd think I still had a chance. I'm technologically superior to every other player, and even though my army isn't what it used to be (main stack got wiped by Elum turns ago), pretty sure I'd at least have a shot at conquering enough land from other players to get back into the game. Unfortunately, CH outplayed me on expansion, I got into a long, wasteful war with Grimace, and here we are. I think I will always be left wondering "what if." What if I had just attacked CH back then and ignored Grimace's encroachments until I had handled the real threat? I don't think I'd have had an easy fight, but I still had the sense that I had enough to make some initial gains and maybe I'd have been able to win the longer war.
Quickpost:
Johns took a city off of CH, so that's good (sadly, pretty sure it was one of their own former cities). Swinging my mounted stack down south where in a couple turns I should be able to hit a relatively lightly defended city, unless CH sniffs out my plan and reinforces. No sign of an invasion stack yet. I know it's coming, but hopefully CH (and BGN) are a little off-balance from the two-front war. I don't think either of them realized it was coming. Really wish I knew where their stack was. In other news, CH's power is super scary and he'll start building/upgrading Cav if he hasn't already. Elum offered Open Borders + Silver and after some soul searching I accepted. I did get a nice little econ boost from that, and that extra happy will no doubt help out as war weariness stacks up. Also, might decrease the chance Elum decides to attack me. I do hate that Elum is probably getting more out of the open borders than me, but at this point it's not like I'm trying to stop him from winning. Or could if I wanted to.
CH just started his 3rd consecutive golden age. Will definitely have to read his thread after this to see how he and BGN handled their great person management. They did revolt to slavery (and nationalism? I forget). I'll be attempting to burn down another city next turn, but it will have 2-3 rifles as the top defenders (unless CH magically knows where my mounted stack went), so I expect to lose half my remaining units. After that, I'll just be trying to replenish my troops and keep an eye out for CH's counter. I'm OK with bleeding him bit by bit, but I know that this won't amount to much unless I can somehow gain a decisive victory over his main army.
My main hope right now is to tech through nationalism and get MilTrad and still have enough Knights left that I can at least upgrade to cuirassiers.  Look, I got some extra money.  I don't know how important imports/exports is, but it looks like I'm giving away more money on trade routes than I'm earning?  
Exports/Imports is a pretty meaningless metric, for reasons that are more technical than interesting. You should still aim to have an idea of who your Open Borders deals benefit the most, but the Exports/Imports number won't really help you determine that.
I have to run.
May 8th, 2015, 13:22
(This post was last modified: May 8th, 2015, 13:24 by GermanJoey.)
A negative exports-imports means you're gaining more from trade routes in total compared to how much you're giving. E.g. the GLH owner will usually have a fairly negative Exports-Imports number. Like novice said though, this doesn't really tell you much useful information. The one thing I can think of is around the start of the classical era, you can tell whether civs are starting to get alphabet by watching for jumps in the E-I numbers. That might tell you whether you might get OB from a civ you haven't met yet but expect to meet soon.
Good info, thanks.
Anyway, fun new wrinkles, eh? Rome jumping in on CH is pretty much all I could've ask for. Sorry CH, I imagine you're pretty sour/bitter about this. I finally logged in, hoping to execute another daring raid, but saw a white peace offer from CH. I declined. Also, he reinforced the city that I was going to target. Not sure if he managed to spot my stack somehow, or just had good intuition, or just aggressively reinforced everything. Might have been the latter. Only saw Knights, no Cavs yet, but it looks like he whipped and/or drafted quite a bit. My plan right now, I guess, is to keep building cats and Knights, keep my eyes open for another opportunity, or try to punish him if he walks into my territory. I might need to rearrange my units a bit more, but I'll surely have to accept the loss of a city or two if I want to hit one of his stacks. Unfortunately, Zulu lost a city to a counter attack. I'm not sure it was a major city, but poor Johns/Agent really always gets the ass-end of whatever war he's in during this game.  I miiiight have been able to kill this if I sent in enough Knights, but I decided that spending all of my striking units to kill one border city would probably be a bad choice. If nothing else, I can stay at war with CH, force him to split his attention, and hope that the three of us can rip him apart bit by bit.  |