[Spoilers] Shallow Old Human Tourist Hit the beach!

[Fintourist]

he's offered fish-fish, signalling undying friendship

 

Yeah... 

This stuff from turn 146 is still pretty valid:

Persia is in the middle of interesting times at the moment. It feels like we have 1000 priorities that we are somehow trying to balance.

...

...let's see if our card-house stays intact for the next 20 turns. If we are given that amount of time, I think we should be able to convert our position into a decent military force.. 

So yeah, 12 turns later and we are still standing, but things are definitely getting fragile. We are starting to become a large-ish empire, but we can't truly back it up yet. Most of our cities are still non-productive and our military has some force, but it is stretched (2 major island holdings, long border with Toku).

We definitely need those 10 more turns of relative peace. Let's hope that a random berserker attack does not burst our bubble. I guess this is just part of the gamble that we are taking in order to have a shot of relevancy in this game.  

In other news, I feel that what TBS is doing in Australia is somewhat questionable. He is settling pretty damn greedily towards us and we are not liking it at all. So far we have been totally up for a mutually beneficial demilitarized Astro expansion and speculated that a strong TBS might some day clash with mackoti for us. However, at the moment, it feels much more tempting to backstab him as hard as we can - even if that would improve mackoti's chances further. Let's see if it comes to that in near future or never, but if things escalate, grabbing 1-2 additional astro cities should seem like a minor thing in comparison. 

[Old Harry]

Turn 161

Toku offered peace without killing any of our units which is great news and lets us continue to try to snipe cities from him...


C2 Knight vs CG1 Archer - 95%... WIN!

The city comes with a nice chunk of 127 cash and a forge. We keep it, because what the hell, we're just trying to piss Toku off now. When we move a knight forward it's clear that Pyongyang will fall this turn.


Now, while we can't beat Toku to Pyongyang we can use it to our advantage - we'll move our units to the white diamonds as though we're attacking the city ourselves (which hopefully makes Toku more reckless and makes him lose more units in the fight) but then we'll use the positioning of these units to double-pillage every town, village and hamlet in the area... The northernmost yellow circle is actually in Toku's culture already, but the others will give us 30 cottage-pillages. We'll only have units to do about 18 next turn, after which Toku might just pillage away the rest, but I'm hoping we'll get 75+140+120=335 gold next turn.


Toku's war weariness went from 117 to 149 so up by 33 (including -1 for the turn roll) 6 of that is the city capture and if we guess that Elkad had 10 units in the city that's 10 for winning those fights, leaving 33-6-10=17 points from losing battles - if we say Elkad had 9 units then that's 18 points from losing battles and Toku lost six units attacking. If Elkad only had 6 units defending the Toku lost seven. Hopefully he'll keep losing units taking Pyongyang...


TBS managed to out-astro-expand us - even though we're IMP. Most likely because he had more cities already to built more boats and settlers. The fact we're feeling militarily stretched makes me think that his holdings being on four different continents are even more tenuous, hence the recent drafting of Maces.

We've been thinking about using our galleons militarily now that the race for Australia is over, and two prime targets are GJ and Donovan. GJ is closer and lower on the scoreboard, but he's got a crazy number of EPs into us so he can see most of what goes on in our empire. Donovan's close to Australia where much of our navy is, but far away from our military units and production centres, so would be hard to resupply against. Feel free to draw arrows and make comments about the Sirian doctrine. Other targets include Xenu (Jewish shrine!), Toku (too powerful!) and TBS ( ) but they're somewhat less likely.


Demos and power.

[Krill]

Can you pillage towns in RtR 2.0.8.4?

[Old Harry]

Turn 162

Can you pillage towns in RtR 2.0.8.4?

Pillaging gets us 386 gold. I may have made a mistake leaving the GG medic uncovered here but I don't think anyone has units in range to make us pay. I concentrated on the more valuable towns, villages and hamlets, so Toku can pillage the cottages if he doesn't want us to do it for him next turn. There are still a lot of mines that should give us ~10 gold each to grab as well...

Toku should take the last mainland city from Elkad this turn, then it's just a matter of when he gets some units onto Elkad's island. Toku's war weariness is up to 162 - so up by 14. If Elkad had 5 units in P'yongyang that's 3 losses and 5 wins, if he had 8 units it's 2 losses and 8 wins.

The highlighted Horse Archer could do some pillaging of its own which will be annoying, but if so we'll whack it next turn.


We settled three new cities this turn, effectively sealing off most of Australia from TBS. This island is the next destination - it looks like we'll need two cities to claim the whole thing so its lucky that there were two settlers on the boat...


Demos and power. Elkad's army's demise is fairly obvious here.

[Krill]

No one has any right to bitch about workshops being overpowered so long as towns are so easily pillaged.

[Old Harry]

Turn 163

No one has any right to bitch about workshops being overpowered so long as towns are so easily pillaged.

Mines are pretty good for pillaging too Krill...  


Last turn I said

"Toku's war weariness is up to 162 - so up by 14. If Elkad had 5 units in P'yongyang that's 3 losses and 5 wins, if he had 8 units it's 2 losses and 8 wins"

forgetting that taking the city gets him 6 WW so he only got 8 from fights, meaning 8 wins or 5 wins and a loss or 2 wins and 2 losses. Hopefully the latter. This turn to capture Inch'on his WW went up to 175 - up by 14 so again its probably 5 wins and a loss or 2 wins and 2 losses. I offered Elkad peace since we don't have any prospect of taking his island and waiting for him to play is annoying.

We settled two cities on New Zealand taking our income at 0% research from 34gpt to 34gpt! We should settle more cities! OcarinaOfTime promises to be a monster with four food sources in range, it's kind of a shame that we aren't likely to be running slavery again as building all those work boats will be a major hassle. We have settlers in position for the final two Aussie cities next turn and so our galleons turn their attention to scouting again. We think there's more land NE of Toku, although Mackoti may already have settled some of it. If we can't claim a slice then just having lots of galleons around Toku's north and east coast may prove useful in about eight turns...


In foreign news Mackoti got Liberalism and took chemistry with it (good for our known tech bonus, bad for our prospects of pegging him back). Xenu's soft underbelly makes me waver from my desire to attack Toku, GJ, Donovan and TBS and think about claiming the juicy Jewish shrine instead (probably worth 100gpt already). At some point we really ought to build some units.


Demos and power.

+

[Krill]

Mines are easily replaceable. Towns aren't.

That fix in 3.x matters.

[Old Harry]

Turn 164

Quiet turn apart from this fun civ 5/6 carpet of doom where Toku decided to repay our pillaging in kind. Elkad accepted the peace offer I mentioned last turn.


Our scouts re-uncovered Mackoti's Hindu holy city. If TBS wants to improve his chance of winning this game he should burn this city... The good news is that he's not too far away with TechNoir. Right now Mack has 49 cities, TBS has 51 and we have 45. And Mack took Steel not Chemistry with Liberalism, so he's well ahead on techs.


We're still not sure if our next target is GJ, Toku or more Astro expansion. To help make the decision I made another map.


Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

Turn 165

Another quiet turn. Which leads to paranoia. German Joey has been investing a lot of EPs in us, so we don't have his graphs and he can see most of the tiles in our empire and whatever our cities are up to, but he hasn't put many into Donovan Zoi, his other neighbour. Who attacked him about 40 turns ago. We're fairly sure GJ just got Guilds and he's been preparing stacks of catapults at various places. So is he just trying to get early warning of our attack or is he planning to pile on with Toku in six turns time? Last night I was sure he had a stack of 2-movers hidden somewhere (which our scouting units have missed over the last 30 turns) ready to sweep through our soft underbelly. Now I'm a little more sanguine. I think he probably only got Guilds last turn, so we need to watch out for knights getting built and where they go. This boat is going to load these two swords from somewhere in GJ's territory, I wonder if it'll make him paranoid or more confident?


Demos and power.

[Zalson]

Can you give us lurkers an overview of your build orders in astroland? And in the core? I'm curious.