156
Superdeath is whipping and regrouping at Boil It, and it's going to take some time to take down the defenses as well as heal my troops.
Superdeath attacked my smaller knight stack with his elephants on his side of the turn, losing both attacks. I didn't check, but I don't believe he had odds on either fight. Unpromoted elephants should be at 10.5 strength against 11.0 strength for a Combat 1 knight. (Why RtR also gave them the +25% knight buff.)
I had one catapult able to promote to Accuracy, but the whole group together knocks off 20% per turn. Two more are incoming but won't arrive in time for this siege. Since most of my units will take 3 turns to heal up I think we bombard defenses to at least 40% before deciding whether to push in. Suddenly I understand Krill's frustration at removing the extra barrage bonus for castles. But at the same time, Krill was always the attacker and never the defender. This is certainly buying superdeath time to get a defense together which is entirely the point of castles.
With that in mind, I highly suspect that everything is going into Boil It. And so that southern group of 5 knights moved to the Dye tile this turn so that next turn I'll send 1 of the knights to probe the newest of Superdeath's cities. If I don't see adequate defenses then I'm going to send all 5 in. Perhaps we'll be able to pull stuff away from Boil It or we'll be able to make some quick gains in the south.
Out east I hired specialists again and I'm close to my next great person
If I win the low-odds of getting an Engineer I think I bulb Engineering for the extra movement, castles, and trebs. If I get a scientist I might just sit on it for my next golden age.
And down south, I got a free Buddhism spread to Klamath, which encouraged me to swap off knight production there and finally build the missionary I'm going to need for the settler on an island down there.
Maybe I shouldn't settle this city at all and instead move the settler up north to replace Coos, but at this point I just want to settle it and get things productive. We dropped off the workers this turn and we'll start pre-chopping at least, but I won't settle or finish any chops until I get the missionary there because the city is useless without border pops. It's probably going to cost me a lot but I also am going to want this settled eventually and it's better than some of the marginal spots I've grabbed down here already.
I also started markets at Crook and Josephine. Both cities are pulling in around 30 commerce per turn and my expenses keep going up.
In general I've split up the empire into three areas. Giraland is now on infrastructure - all except Belisarius which continues to build knights - with the above mentioned markets and the cities of Harvey and Columbia finally getting their work boats hooked up and getting up to speed. The far east (Lake, Multnomah, Clackamas) are all building a round of longbows to stick into Lake because I don't trust Mjmd. Lake is going to get it's great person out and then we'll probably do another round of units before building more markets and grocers here. And my core - or really anything near the battlefront - is still building knights.
(August 20th, 2020, 07:23)Kurumi Wrote: So seems to me we should come out on top of this war sooner than later and I guess the question is: will the wonders and pops let us recover GNP wise? I understand that the plan is to worsen our neighbour's science capabilities, not overtake them through building up and peace but we can't do that to all the people that'd need cutting down to size. What's the diplo situation? Partitioning Mjmd with Cairo then building up so we can fight off Jowy?
And these power numbers are looking comfortable now.
Yeah, i guess we should think a bit about post-superdeath, but this superdeath war is nowhere near being wrapped up. The castles are going to slow me down considerably because pikes on a hill behind castle walls are something like 21 strength against my knights. So I am going to need to spend time bringing down walls, which is going to give Superdeath time to bring in more defenders, which means the likely outcome of this siege is that I spend 5 turns bombing down city walls and then throw in all the catapults so that I don't lose knights. Then we march up to the next city and repeat. (Actually, I'm hoping to rush north with knights after Boil It falls and avoid repeating this by just smashing through before he gathers another group like this - but that is still some time to come.
In any case, protracted war is not to my benefit longterm. Yet I do not regret finally moving in, if anything it just reinforces that I chose wrong by not doing this right at the beginning when I first crushed his initial attack. And yet it's the only way to go: I could not keep the status quo of defensive war and trying to build up my economy, as the burning of Coos showed me. I could not keep up with Mjmd since he could turn his whole empire towards economy while his neighbors fought defensive wars. I think the question now is do I think that getting myself up to 30 cities is going to be enough to win? If my neighbors do nothing, then yes. If Mjmd tries to attack - say Charriu, because he'll be the weakest and Mjmd strikes me as very much the Sullla school of civ4 multiplayer thought - then I need to be ready to react. So yes, it's bad that I lost a lot of population in the short term, and that my demos suck, but in the long term after we've conquered superdeath and consolidated this land + settled more cities then we're going to be in a very strong position. We have the key techs needed to defend until Rifles so we have a good long window. The only concern is that will we be able to keep Mjmd from running away to say tanks before we can get to rifles. (I don't worry about rifles. I've defended Rifles with knights and catapults before.)
And the more immediate question: which tech do I want in the near term? Engineering, absolutely. Code of Laws for when I get all these cities. Literature for the Epics. Civil Service for extra farms. Banking for my next golden age. I'd love to get up to Economics for that Golden Age too but ... that isn't happening.
I think the most pressing is still Engineering. Yes, I need to get infrastructure in, but I only have two or three cities that are up to 10gpt in maintenance costs. (That will change.) Most of my cities that could use the maintenance reduction will make as much or more with a market or grocer right now thanks to all my additional commerce. Getting +50% movement for all my units is going to be a huge help, and I can build cheap castles for extra commerce if that is really needed. I could see Literature being the right choice after Engineering for the Epics - that will be cheap to research too - and then after Code of Laws.
Engineering is just so expensive for me right now. Something like 8 more turns at my current rate, and as my costs go up that will probably go up too. But the capture gold from Boil It will be nice.
PRO: 43 (2397)
FIN: 51 (2220)
