[pb46 spoilers] Hitru lurks again

[Old Harry]

Turn 198

Another fun turn. Rusten did a pretty good job of covering his coast (Massawa with eight units and Mullet with seven) so we had to double back to hit Halibut where there were just a couple of units.


From here we can have some fun. We get lucky with the first commando cavalry - beating a machine gun at 22% and letting us burn Addis Ababa.


Another enterprising commando discovers a previously unknown city, which looked like a juicy prize until we realised the hill and CG2 infantry means commando cavalry get 1% and commando cuirassiers get 0.1%.


So we burn Lalibela instead. These two cities cost six of our commandos, which is a lot steeper than I'd hoped. We're doing some good damage to Rusten, and hopefully forcing him to draft hard will also cause trouble, but the sentry net he'd put up, the new ocean movement rules and us not really getting the balance of land/sea units right means the attack probably won't do enough damage to force a concession. We'll pillage and blockade the hell out of his coast and see what happens though.


The world is aflame. We could see fireworks from Gav and Pindi next turn - if Gav is bending everything he has to advance his cause while Pindi is feeling checked out we could have made the wrong decision in going after Rusten. Come on in TBW - the blood is lovely!


Although TBW really shoudn't attack GCK, purely on the basis that SayNoToInvasion is the best named city in the world (although fifty cats and xbows is also convincing).


Demos and power. Burning those cities hasn't hurt Rusen's GNP or MFG a lot, but he did lose 100 food, so we're doing something right. We'll see how badly Sci Meth hurts his economy next turn (he's got a lot of monasteries).

[Old Harry]

Hey lurkers. The rules in the tech thread don't mention unit gifting - https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...#pid712435

We'd like to give Commodore an airship or two for intel (so he can see Rusten's big stack of infantry and doesn't throw his cavalry away) and we can't find anything saying we can't. Does anyone know better?

[darrelljs]

OH,

It goes without saying the post I made in the IT thread was everyone conceding to you. I didn't ask you first because, well, it could impact the game if the answer was no.

Darrell

[TBW]

If krill is complaining about TBW failing to move his Praetorians in the way krill wanted him to (presumably into Rome) then can we just ignore krill and get on with the game?

a) krill doesn't get to play two civilizations
b) neighbor luck isn't something he can or should control
c) I presume TBW moved his praets to be protected by krill's longbows assuming he could hit us in the city next turn with +50% attack. It was a dumb thing to do, but I imagine that if Gav or beardbeard had reported on their conflict there would have been worse
d) We've never save-scummed a MP game here no matter how badly someone played, eg pb13 with nakor, pb45 with Borsche and plenty of others so I'll be pissed off if we start the first time I get to take advantage
e) we want to encourage and teach new players where they make mistakes, not accuse them of cheating when they don't follow another player's tactical plan to the letter

Of course if it's something else entirely then please let me know that I don't need to be getting annoyed.

When this happenedI figured I was going to get wiped out really quickly since you had like a dozen knights and trebuchets and I'd just barely finished Feudalism, so the best play I was able to come up with was "evacuate some praetorians and try to burn a backline city if I can before I'm eliminated". I didn't realize that the expectation from other people was for me to hole up and get sieged out a couple turns later than I was already going to.

[Rusten]

Man, during the game I knew you had to have gotten lucky, but 37% prophet and 17% GE... 

Brutal!

[Old Harry]

The 45% prophet was nice, but we had plans to get one out in the earlier second golden age we'd have had, so I don't think it made a huge difference. The engineer did feel like a game-changing event though - how far through building Taj did you get?

Of course I'd have swapped the engineer if you'd have traded Elkad and Pindicator for 2metra and Borsche...

[Rusten]

It wasn't a close race, I think I had somewhere around 450 hammers invested. I felt safe getting that wonder because the only other civ to have completed an engineer wonder was Gavagai and he was nowhere near nationalism. Not getting it complicated my GPP and it going to you made it even worse. It's a gamechanger on any map, but on one of the biggest maps in PB history even more so. It cost me the Taj GA and I'd have had another GA too thanks to the extra GPP.

On the prophet I just read your post where you said you likely would not get a shrine this game if not for that one. They're hard to generate on demand.

Of course I'm not suggesting I didn't have my share of luck too.

[Hitru]

Yeah, Taj was big for us. We maximed our changes of getting GE from pretty early on but changes were still pretty low (but I think it was slightly higher than 17% IIRC). We did fast calculation that you would have needed around 50 base hammer city to beat us to Taj and we were slightly worried that maybe our GE would not be enough.

Regarding prophet there was definitely chance we would not have gotten it, but we would have had 2 chances at it with reasonable odds, so we would have had to be (slightly) unlucky not to land it.

[pindicator]

Great job and great thread Old Harry & Hitru. I loved the naming scheme and Charriu's explanations of the files along the way. (Especially that Krill buff ... should have known!)

I think before I knew where your capital was I was trying to get everything west of the lake, but we did end up with a fairly solid border. It helped that there weren't many resources in the area to fight over That's why I never settled that plains hill - it was marked with a sign as "last f" (filler) because there were no resources it could ever hope to work and only antagonize you. You're right that my south was very good land; in the end my production cities were all down there. I would have rather had your starting land than mine, however

Glad I went to Construction when I did since that seems to have played a factor in how your attacks went after TBW. Also really lucky that me not realizing the new requirements for crossbows didn't screw me over - there was a window right when you first got knights where you would have just run me over I think because I went Machinery before Feudalism.

There were a couple moments in the game where I probably should have looked seriously at attacking you as the right play for trying for first place, but it was certainly riskier and I was happy to play for 3rd or 2nd as the game matured and I saw just how far ahead you and Rusten were. I think that kind of tenacity is what sets you apart as one of the better players/teams on the site right now. Not many people would have even tried for that late game attack on Rusten and just been satisfied for second. Kudos on going for it and pulling it off.

[Charriu]

Great job and great thread Old Harry & Hitru.  I loved the naming scheme and Charriu's explanations of the files along the way.  (Especially that Krill buff ... should have known!)

I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't found enough time for the naming scheme. But then again with so many cities on this map we would have run into problems anyway. Can't really start naming cities "City", "Unit" or "Building".