[SPOILERS] naufragar and Rusten get nickel-and-dimed

[Rusten]

Magic Science decided he could only get 12 cities peacefully and needed to pry the thirteenth from Cairo's cold dead fingers. Never thought I'd say that I hope Cairo is close to Cho-ko-nus.

I never got around to processing this in between everything else yesterday, but that's a little odd if it's a hot war. Doesn't MS share a border with both us and SD? Would've thought he'd be better off piling on SD and taking out SD's eastern jungle cities.

[naufragar]

Magic Science decided he could only get 12 cities peacefully and needed to pry the thirteenth from Cairo's cold dead fingers. Never thought I'd say that I hope Cairo is close to Cho-ko-nus.

I never got around to processing this in between everything else yesterday, but that's a little odd if it's a hot war. Doesn't MS share a border with both us and SD? Would've thought he'd be better off piling on SD and taking out SD's eastern jungle cities.

I guess I was assuming it was a hot war. I shouldn't have made that assumption since they had a little war before where no cities changed hands. This one is in fact hot:


You can see the captured city in the screenshot. I don't know if this was an opportunistic snipe or the beginning of a big naval invasion down Cairo's eastern seaboard.

Here's the big picture:


The layout on the big is not quite a rhombus. The distance from us to MSCC or Superdeath is a hair shorter than the distances between the other players. Scylla's lies on the diagonal, cutting Magic Science off from SD. (Btw, when Cairo traded maps I noticed that our river starts all the way by CheetoFuhrer. A lovely touch, Commodore. If I were more creative, there's definitely a story about that river somewhere.) In a darker mood, I was thinking about how we could have played our game differently, and if we had perfect map knowledge, the best play would have been to keep expanding along the diagonal to box in MSCC and smother Superdeath. Oh well, we didn't know.

Here's the front:


There's a galley just out of frame with two samurai. Forgive my laziness: I didn't feel like annotating this screenshot. Next turn, stragglers move to flat land. Treb bombards DD to 34. Turn after, everyone has a reunion on the hill. Bombard to 26. The galley disgorges its two samurai 1NW of DD. They can be attacked, but whatcha gonna do?  Then on turn 102, both trebs bombard to 10% and we go in and go in like the U.S. Marshals. Our samurai's odds only increase 2-3% bombarding down from 10% to 0. (I haven't reckoned on cultural defenses refreshing. Don't know how that works.)

You see a lone samurai behind our stragglers. I think I might divert that to Scylla's Window. Every turn that goes by without visibility on horse archers, I worry even more that Scylla's about to face 7+ of them. Scylla's would fall (again ) but everything else would hold. If Superdeath wants to burn horse archers attacking us, in the long term that's great, because it makes our conquest that much quicker, but in the short term, well, no one enjoys losing cities and having foreign troops on their soil. I plan to get a barracks into Scylla's ASAP, but in the meantime, the capital is building a scout for vision, who will, with luck, become our great medic. Edit: I don't know where else to fit this in the report, but Superdeath whipped 5 of his 6 cities last turn. 4 1-pop whips and 1 2-pop. It's not inconceivable that those are all horse archers. But gosh I hope not.


Note the great people counter. With enough gold stockpiled, Masonry is a 1 turn tech. If no one's landed Pyramids in 5 turns (although boak/GKC and Magic Science should definitely be able to), we should tech it just in case we get the engineer.

Again, I'm feeling lazy, so I won't walk through all the graphs. We're scourging with scorpions, so we have zero hammer tiles worked. Our power is insanely high, insane because at what cost? Here's the GNP:


Boak/GKC are in a golden age, but still. I hope that Superdeath's descending GNP means he's given up trying to reach hwachas. If that's the case, victory's only a matter of time, but lengthy victory in civ feels a lot like defeat.

[naufragar]

Nothing changes.


Notice something odd. Neither sheep nor pigs is being worked. You can see another archer being shipped in.

Superdeath founded a new city last turn. He's not feeling the pressure, I guess. We, on the other hand, want this war to be over so we can get back to teching. Our army is a gigantic strain and I'd really like to stop whipping. But, until glorious victory,   2 turns until we attack.

Sorry, lurkers, I hadn't realized it was turn 100 until I was looking back at the screenshot. The big overview post will have to wait until turn 101.

P.S. GeneralKilCavalry declared war on Magic Science. No idea what that's about.

[Rusten]

What's in the galley? 2 samurai or 1 samurai+axe/treb? edit: I just found the answer. 2 samurai OK.
Our army is no strain -- we're making 10 gpt. That's 10 too much!

When SD is broken down we should get a settler and found a city 2E of banana for ivory. That's one of the reasons I'm totally fine with DD's placement -- we have room for a filler city there to take advantage of the grassland. It will be a nice cottage city.

[Rusten]

I just noticed you left the road on his ivory tile. I would've pillaged that one too because right now you're running the risk of HA's moving in real quick on your cities. I'd consider that a bit of a blunder, but not penalized as of yet.

There's a chance SD will leave the city SW of DD almost completely empty. Have you considered not dropping the samurai by DD and sailing further? But maybe we don't have enough units then.

[naufragar]

I just noticed you left the road on his ivory tile. I would've pillaged that one too because right now you're running the risk of HA's moving in real quick on your cities. I'd consider that a bit of a blunder, but not penalized as of yet.

yup. You're right. I built him a road straight to us. Pajarocu just whipped a samurai, so we can get down there in a couple turns to pillage it.

There's a chance SD will leave the city SW of DD almost completely empty. Have you considered not dropping the samurai by DD and sailing further? But maybe we don't have enough units then.

Are you sure there's a city down there? Look at the lower left of the last screen shot. I think we'd seen different borders by the grass hill mine. As far as number of units, with the galley's complement, we'll have 9 samurai and I expect to face 9-10 units. We should expect to lose 1-2 samurai (I hope...) We'll have to decide whether to sacrifice axes against healthy defenders to take the city in one turn. If the samurai do very well, I might be tempted to promote them and let them finish off the city and keep the axes, but I don't know. This is long winded. My point is: We have enough units without the two in the galley. It's just a question of taking more turns or sacrificing more axes.

[Rusten]

You're right. Looking closer it appears that his culture ends in the bottom left corner.

Given our numbers I think promoting the samurai you drop off to C2 immediately makes sense. Just to make them harder to wipe out with axes and HAs before we attack. Odds on attack will be good regardless. CR isn't *that* much better than C2, is it? And we want a few samurai promoted along this line anyway.
Minor point, but make sure there's no galley/trireme 2S of our galley if you're delaying dropping them off. Better than just sitting in place for a turn.

How soon for reinforcements from island? Maybe it's better to drop the samurai off on the jungle hill immediately (T101) and sending the galley back sooner? It will speed up whatever reinforcement is not coming from the island too with circumnavigation bonus.

[naufragar]

Given our numbers I think promoting the samurai you drop off to C2 immediately makes sense. Just to make them harder to wipe out with  axes and HAs before we attack. Odds on attack will be good regardless. CR isn't *that* much better than C2, is it? And we want a few samurai promoted along this line anyway.

Done. Weirdly, there's practically no difference between Combat 2 and City Raider 1 when attacking Superdeath's archers. City Raider is much better against the axes, however.

How soon for reinforcements from island? Maybe it's better to drop the samurai off on the jungle hill immediately (T101) and sending the galley back sooner? It will speed up whatever reinforcement is not coming from the island too with circumnavigation bonus.

Still a few turns away unfortunately. I shipped the two samurai down the moment the island finished a pair. I disgorged the samurai because next turn is the big one.

I'm running late so I can't do the big overview just yet. but I have taken the pictures for it, so expect it later.

I opened the turn up to this.


I declined it because I hate free money. Rusten, what do you think? Think we should charge him for routes? Embargo him completely?

Here's the front. I'll add some more detail to this pic for the big overview report, but for now the meat:


We attack next turn. If he whips this turn, he'll have 12 units. We'll have 9 samurai and 6 axes. If all our samurai win, we can go in with the axes and take the city out next turn. We should expect some samurai losses. Depending on how many, I might wait to send in the axes. Time's on our side. Note his size one capital. SD also whipped 4 times last turn, all one pop. These I'm more confident in saying aren't horse archers. The sooner we take cities, the sooner we can make this conquest profitable. We've got more samurai on the way. (You can see three more in that pic.) But we're stacking whip unhappy high and I would like to turn our cities from hellscapes to a paradise eventually.

[Rusten]

Done. Weirdly, there's practically no difference between Combat 2 and City Raider 1 when attacking Superdeath's archers. City Raider is much better against the axes, however.

Yeah, that's what I thought. The boon of having such a high base strength. Maybe you should even promote some of the hill samurai to C2. 
I love to see those extra samurai streaming in for the seizing of the capital later. 
I assume that's our combat workers 2W of gems. Are they about to move and road 2 NE of DD?

Note:
(1) Most of the injured units can heal at some point while we bombard the capital.
(2) Attack with the 2 straggling samurai last to give them the best odds possible (no promotion, no fortify bonus archers/axes). Need them to retain as much HP as possible.

I'm not sure we gain anything from signing OB with MS. We'll only get +3 routes from whatever island cities he has. Our domestic island routes already bring +2.

[Rusten]

I'd try to extort some gold on top of the open borders considering his position and how unimportant it is. It will grant us currency sooner and I don't think he's in such a good position that we need to embargo him. Boak/GKC have all the wonders and lots of space, even if they have been a little slow to expand.

edit: But do we have a scouted route to his cities either by river/sea or road? Would hate for the deal to be completely one-sided.