[Spoilers] Harry Hydra Tours his Hit Charitable Thoughts

[Old Harry]

Turn 226

The glorious Chinese empire can no longer stand for the unprovoked aggression of the vile Inca against our peace-loving Aztec neighbours, so let the game-ending world war begin! (Okay, we're being a little impatient, attacking a turn early, but I reckon we can hit 15 or so ships this turn and Gav's sentry net should let him know what we're up to next turn anyway.)


So we started by killing as many galleons as we could - stopping Gav bringing troops to our cities is a high priority. Unfortunately they were all empty.


We also hit as many privateers and frigates as possible. These were on the western front where we're intending to do the most damage to his infrastructure.


We were only in range of one city this turn, but more will follow next turn.


All the fights were at least 65%, but we got really lucky (read bottom-to-top). That great general will allow CS to pump out commando cavalry once it builds West Point and a Colosseum. We lost 28,000 soldiers this turn, Gav lost 142,000. That brings the gap between us down to a mere 781,000 soldiers. Let's see how bad the retaliation is next turn.


In domestic news we revolted to Police State/Nationhood/Caste/Merc/Theocracy so that we can build boats faster and draft some rifles in our vulnerable coastal cities (I think we have two non-coastal cities that we don't need to worry about). Our costs go down by about 100 gpt but we lose 300 representation beakers. Declaring war cost us about 50 beakers per turn, but it cost Gav about 150 gold - we should have closed borders with him ages ago!

Demos and power.

[Old Harry]

Lurker question: Are we allowed to liberate cities to Mr Cairo?

[Charriu]

That's actually an interesting question that came up briefly after PB40. You have differentiate between gifting one of Mr Cairos cities and the liberation option on conquering a city. With the current trade settings that we chose the first option of gifting back cities is not allowed. But the liberation is actually not so clear. Personally I would say liberation is allowed. My reasoning is that we decided to disallow trading cities, because players can screw up the game by bad behavior. I don't see this problem with liberation, mainly because it's a one time option on conquest and therefore can't be done freely at any time by any player.

[Hitru]

We are only speaking about liberating city to Cairo immediately after conquering a city. Liberating city later on is IMO clearly against rules.

[Old Harry]

Turn 227

Krill fish/fished us back - so looks like he's just going to sit back and enjoy the show.

In the east Gav's big stack of boats is on it's way down towards our islands meaning he's not so worried about Krill's navy (did Krill fish/fish him? ). If we can get first strike on these boats we might come out ahead on the fight, but I presume he'll keep them shielded and most of the SOTL we have down here are only 4-movers, so this could get nasty.


So the positive news is we've got some cities to attack - first up we take a 20% shot at Robinson.


We win! It's a keeper and we can hit Clarke next turn, but Gav has three frigates (upgraded from triremes) here to obstruct that. We left a couple of frigates here for him to take 50/50 shots at - we've got more following on that should mop up if he tries that.


The next target city is Avignon - we lost a knight and grenadier to burn this one.


Then a CKN walks into the empty Grenoble and we burn that city too. I think reinforcements may be on the galley, in which case our CKN is dead, but good to know we got here just in time.


Finally we killed a few more boats and positioned to hit three more cities next turn.

Demos - Two turns ago Gav's (golden age) hammers were 1700 to our 1100. This looks better, right? His food's also down by 50 while ours is up 50 in the same period.

[Old Harry]

That's actually an interesting question that came up briefly after PB40. You have differentiate between gifting one of Mr Cairos cities and the liberation option on conquering a city. With the current trade settings that we chose the first option of gifting back cities is not allowed. But the liberation is actually not so clear. Personally I would say liberation is allowed. My reasoning is that we decided to disallow trading cities, because players can screw up the game by bad behavior. I don't see this problem with liberation, mainly because it's a one time option on conquest and therefore can't be done freely at any time by any player.

We are only speaking about liberating city to Cairo immediately after conquering a city. Liberating city later on is IMO clearly against rules.

Come on lurkers who don't have an interest in this team, now's your chance to chime in!

I had a brief chat with Krill about liberation and his thoughts were:
'Fwiw, that's something that I think falls under [the category of city trading] because we ended up reverting to "No city trading", but in new games it could easily be allowed. Liberation can cause unit teleportation so cheese is still possible'

If we don't get a clear consensus a pm to Gav or a tech-thread post may be necessary.

[taotao]

That's actually an interesting question that came up briefly after PB40. You have differentiate between gifting one of Mr Cairos cities and the liberation option on conquering a city. With the current trade settings that we chose the first option of gifting back cities is not allowed. But the liberation is actually not so clear. Personally I would say liberation is allowed. My reasoning is that we decided to disallow trading cities, because players can screw up the game by bad behavior. I don't see this problem with liberation, mainly because it's a one time option on conquest and therefore can't be done freely at any time by any player.

I'm kind of on the fence here. In theory I'm ok with it, but I really don't like a situation where your opponent can't hit your wounded units. So it should be allowed, but only if your opponent and the liberation beneficiary have open borders (or at the very least aren't locked into a peace treaty?).

[Mardoc]

'Fwiw, that's something that I think falls under [the category of city trading] because we ended up reverting to "No city trading", but in new games it could easily be allowed.

I lean toward this interpretation. No city trading was chosen as the rule because it's simple and bright-line. It covers more than just the problematic cases, specifically in order to make the rule simple and easy to notice and enforce.

I wouldn't mind new rules that clarified that liberation is allowed, but I think mid-game is the wrong time to make the rule more nuanced. If you can arrange for Cairo to recapture his cities, that's within the rule, but I think that's the limit.

[Old Harry]

Turn 229

Thanks taotao and Mardoc, luckily I don't think liberation will come up for reasons that will become apparent.

To business - this the war is going suspiciously well... Last turn we burnt Gav's moai city and captured a size 3 city (captured rather than burnt so that our grenadier could escape with his life - I thought he was worth more than the city while Hitru disagreed, the coin toss favoured me). Gav recaptured the city on his turn, but it's crippled now.

This turn we successfully deceived Gavagai as to our intentions. First we made him think we weren't interested in Banks - Bellamy is the more developed city that we could have been aiming at - but our 6-move galleon let our grenadier kill his injured cavalry and burn Banks without a hitch. We also got lucky with a couple of coin-flip fights against frigates here and we're positioned to threaten Gav's original capital Plato next turn.


We also made Gav think we were ignoring Lyons in favour of Amiens and Rouen to the north (which he heavily reinforced), but this 6-move galleon dropped a Cho-Ko-Nu to burn down the empty city for us.


Finally it cost us one grenadier to capture Toulouse - hopefully this city will make a good base of operations against the north eastern Incan coastline. Gav has a stack of six boats just SW of here that we hope to kill next turn, however he's likely to put into a well-defended port where we can't kill them.


The reason we're unlikely to need to liberate any cities is this little stack here. Cairo is looking serious about getting his stuff back - starting with Remy next turn.


So there has to be a downside to war, right? In the east Gav finally played his hand ... and it's a strong one. He has 35 frigates, 25 privateers and 10 galleons here and has dropped off 9 cavalry, 6 cannon and 17 rifles which will take MSL on turn 231.

We have 10 SOTL, 20 frigates, 5 galleons and a handful of land units in the area so we can't take him on toe to toe. We're going to need to fall back and try to get more boats and soldiers over here. Losing MSL and NobodyKnowsTheTrouble will hurt, but hopefully we're doing more damage to Gav than losing these cities will do to us. We'll draft the two cities next turn.


Demos and power. Number one baby! Everyone knows crop yield is for losers, right?

[mackoti]

Gavagai is ready to concede.What is your toughts?