[Spoilers] Shallow Old Human Tourist Hit the beach!

[Old Harry]

Turn 153

Well this is a pickle. Instead of attacking and giving us the 1xp we need to promo-heal and time to just heal this axe is taking the scenic route. Next turn we'll have two Maces on the scene to take ass and kick names but this turn Yuri's Revenge faces an existential threat. Fortunately we need three really bad rolls to lose the city and the axes might continue to chicken out of taking the first <1% battle.


Meanwhile this is shaping to be a nice city (SW of the spear).


Can Krill go back to the lurkers lounge? (You know that answer already, right?)

Treb vs CG2 D1 Archer - 72% withdraw... LOSS - only 1 hit!

But he hit every unit in the city


CR2 sword vs CG2 D1 Archer - 94%.... WIN (2 hits)
CR2 sword vs CG1 D1 Archer - 95%.... WIN! (5 hits!!!!)
CR2 sword vs CG1 D1 Archer - 95%.... WIN! (1 hit)
C1 Mace vs CG1 D1 Archer - 98%.... WIN! (2 hits)
C2 Sword vs CG1 D1 Archer - 92%.... WIN! (4 Hits :D )

So, we have 2 imms, 2 xbow and amphi xbow left. This is going alright isn't it?


C1 Imm vs CG1 D1 Archer - 63%....
LOSS - 2 hits...
Xbow vs CG1 D1 Archer - 74%....
WIN! 2 hits
Robert E Lee vs CG1 D1 Archer - 99%....


WIN!!!! And the 1xp he needs to take Morale!

The city falls (we got about 50 gold) and the granary survives. As does a great engineer.


Next up we revolt to HR/Mercantilism/OR to get some happiness, free specialists and spread religion and build buildings. Before:


After the switch and after I've changed all the engineers to be merchants. Not as much of a jump as we'd hoped from Mercantilism, but OR is pretty expensive.


We switch to Judaism too. Have we been unlucky with random religion spreads?


Demos and power.

[Fintourist]

Turns 154-155

OH has been couple of days offline and I've been slacking with reporting. So let's catch up a bit.

Domestic focus is somewhat in Australia. We settled 3 new cities on T154 and have again 3 settlers in the area:




What you are not seeing in the pic... are workers. Yeah, we have 5 for soon-to-be 8 cities on the continent (I guess we are ferrying 3-4 more during the next couple of turns though). Yeah, this is suboptimal, but hey thousand priorities etc and we just need to get these cities down before somebody else claims them. Speaking of which, we have spotted 2 TBS galleons in the area. It's a bit far away for him, but I can see him contesting the spots here if he is out of space elsewhere:




In our corner of madness Toku and Elkad were staring each other with reasonable stacks (Elkads Hwachas just outside of pic)

I was actually a bit pessimistic and was expecting just passive staring (as Elkad has not attacked yet), but luckily that's never the case in this corner. Later during the turn Toku sniped Ulsan, which still had ~8 units inside)




Ulsan was kind of on our own menu as well, but we are still more than happy about the event. Pusan and Ulsan are forkable, so fingers crossed for some blood here..    (Elkad already sent in couple of maces into wounded stack, but pulled off from the attack. He needs to get his Hwachas in range)

Demos & Power:

[Old Harry]

Turn 156

Xenu built the apostolic palace. We should build lots of Jewish buildings! (If only we were Spiritual for cheap temples! ) This is a good time to start spreading Judaism.


TBS has landed his first settling party. Getting the juicy northern part of Australia. We're making a lot of progress ourselves though, and already have the lion's share, but I'd expect TBS to push as far inland as he can to stake out his claim and then backfill. We should try to do that too.


More exciting possibilities in Australia.


We'll get Engineering this turn which brings new possibilities - Castles in our big trading cities, Notre Dame for failgold, faster moving settlers - so we need to build roads, possibly before improving resources, to try and beat TBS to the prime territory. (This is assuming that we'll stay peaceful with him with whatever border we come up with.)


Finally Toku and Elkad are gathering their stuff for a big clash (Toku hasn't played yet this turn).


Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

Turn 157

We get Engineering and Pindicator completes Notre Dame before we can get a single hammer into the damn thing.

In Australia TBS shows up near our territory on the west coast and settles on the north coast. There's a pretty large chunk of land still fogged up north. My guess is it looks something like this.


So if we're racing we can choose not to settle the rice/iron/copper city straight away and instead push north, but rice/iron/copper could push out a 5-6 turn settler itself, so I'm torn. Red shows possible movements for existing settlers, purple for W2 mace and axe, orange for the settler that will make landfall next turn. Annoyingly a barb warrior stops us building a road that would speed that settler. The crossbow in Dark Souls got badly hurt defending against an axe last turn so it only gets 80% attacking the warrior, which isn't worth the risk. Next turn we're settling 1N of the sugar for a bit more visibility.


We can fit 9 more cities on Australia if we get the X and something in the fog to the north, we've got 3 settlers in transit and another 3 ready eot. Hopefully we can claim more than 9...


In the end we settle Faster Than Light for rice/iron/copper and it'll chop a settler to keep the expansion rolling. It's working a citizen to get the settler a turn quicker.


Mack has paper and it looks like he'll push on for Liberalism unopposed. Which means he could claim Steel or Scientific Method... We figure that he's only Gunpowder, Music and Paper ahead of us, but he's got a lot of cash, so won't take long to get Education and Lib too.


On the Toku-Elkad war front Elkad threw his army away. It looks like he moved into the fort SW of Pusan and crashed everything against the walls of the city, then Toku mopped up with minimal losses. Toku should roll over him fairly easily now, so we might try to snipe another city or two before he can. But when he's finished we need to be very wary - possibly even before that - our peace runs out in 3 turns and he whipped 9 times this turn.


City counts:
- TBS 38
- Mack 35
- Us 33
- Dtay 25
- Com 25
- Pindi 22
- Xenu 22
- Gav/BGN 21
- Donovan 20
Everyone else has 15 or fewer, unfortunately a lot of ours are still on basic infrastructure builds so they aren't contributing a lot just yet.


Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

Turn 158

TBS is trying to grab as much of Australia as he can. So do we just claim the best spots or do we push our frontier as far north as possible and hope he's not keen on isolated cities? In other news he built Taj to continue his golden age and he started drafting units this turn. That's a bit troubling, is he drafting muskets or maces? Meanwhile Xenu built the Sistine Chapel and being Spiritual he'll be a good shout for a culture attempt.


Our furthest north city so far in Australia should be a pretty good one. The Galleon will unload it's settler even further north next turn and hopefully seal off some more land from TBS.


On the front lines Toku has moved his stack next to Seoul. I think he'll bombard for a turn and bring up knights to take the city t160. Hitru thinks he'll take the city next turn.


I drew some arrows.


Then we attacked Elkad again. Sorry Elkad, but you threw your army away...


- C1 Knight vs Archer - 90% ... WIN!!!!! 1 hit

We collect 62 gold but no buildings survive. Our stack moves to threaten Wonsan next turn. On t160 our peace with Toku runs out, so we're wondering how to manipulate that in our favour. It's entirely possible that he just whipped 7 knights and will park them on our doorstep though, so we're really hoping for another 10 turn peace I think.


Demos and power.

[Zalson]

Just wanted to drop a note to say thank you for the excellent updates!

[Old Harry]

Turn 159

Just wanted to drop a note to say thank you for the excellent updates!

Thanks, it's nice to know they're getting read.

TBS is being a dick. He's stretching to settle stuff and then backfill. Perhaps we should have done this too, and perhaps (belatedly) we are doing this now. But its annoying. Why can't he just let us catch him up easily? Huh?  


The spear moves to uncover a sheep and we move our settler to confront TBS. If we hadn't been playing after Elkad we could have got this location.


The possibilities for settling now are a bit restricted, but if we can beat TBS to two of these red sites I'll be fairly happy.


This turn Toku didn't play early - possibly because Elkad played late - but the upshot is that we'll play before him and have first shot when peace expires next turn. We're sure he's whipped another round of knights, but it's odd that he hasn't been going much harder for units. I guess he's got plenty of power to finish Elkad off so maybe he didn't think more was necessary? The upshot is that with defences like this I feel fairly confident that if he did come for us we'd do okay.


Anyway, to business!


C2 Knight vs crossbow - 75%...
FLAWLESS WIN!!!!!

The forge and granary survive.    Also when Toku played after us he didn't take Seoul, so he may be happy to war/peace us next turn.


We move our morale GG medic up to see if Elkad has a stack ready to hit Wonsan from 2E of the city, but oddly there's nothing there! The knight stack moves to threaten Namp'o and there is a worker, but he's going to escape. The idea here is that Toku won't know where the knighs have gone and so will assume we're back defending our core when we war/peace next turn, then we can use the enforced peace to take/burn some more cities.


On tech we're pondering if TBS is getting early chemistry or if we can cause him some hassle for causing us hassle in the new world. We know that Mack, Pindicator and Xenu all have paper (good news that Mack won't be able to sandbag liberalism, but he's still way ahead on the race ) so it looks like two people have gunpowder already, we know Mack has it, so is the other one TBS? He's been drafting for a few turns, but I haven't spotted any muskets yet - just lots of maces - with the scouts in his lands. So we don't think he has gunpowder yet. In which case it would have to be Commodore, dtay or Gavagai/BGN.

Tech . . . . . GNP
Gunpowder. 821
Drama . . . . 705
Theo . . . . . 879
Music . . . . .821
Philo . . . . . 821
Paper . . . . .879

Demos and power.

[Mardoc]

Thanks, it's nice to know they're getting read.

I'm enjoying them too! You're darn near the only person on the site who is all of thorough, organized, reliable, and entertaining to read. I often learn more about your opponents from your reports than from their own reports .

[Old Harry]

Turn 160

I often learn more about your opponents from your reports than from their own reports .

You really want to know what Mackoti's up to, right? So do we...

We've also been a bit worried about what Dreylin might be up to - he's got Berserkers and three turns ago got a score increase that might be Astronomy. Our cities on Westworld are fairly empty and right on his doorstep, so we've been scouting him with our galleon. Then this turn he's offered fish-fish, signalling undying friendship, so we offered the same back.

In other overseas news TBS is backfilling quickly, with two settlers landed on the north coast. The highlighted guy should settle in place. The settler 2S of our caravel will probably move inland, so we're not going to get the northern X. We still hope to grab the southern X on t162. At this point we might have more settlers than places left to settle, so we're going to investigate more possible land to the SE of Australia.


This turn our peace treaty with Toku ran out and we thought we should kill this galley just in case he has any plans.


Trireme vs Galley - 88%... LOSS!

We moved a couple of knights to cover our northern cities just in case there's something nasty on the galley.

Down south these units are in range of both Chonju and Wonsan, with a bunch of knights in the fog Toku could easily take one or both city, but with our power at parity and his stack being stuck deep into Mayan territory he won't want to get into a fight with us. We pillaged away the mine and road SW of the stack just to be sure we keep Chonju. We only advanced a handful of knights to threaten Namp'o - the others can jump on galleons now that their settling duties are done with.


I keep forgetting to note the war weariness with Elkad and Toku. This should let us guess how much stuff Toku loses to take Seoul.


Demos and power.

[Thoth]

he's offered fish-fish, signalling undying friendship