[Spoiler] Kaiser has a plan

[roland of gilead]

bombers are also the best unit in the game.

beeline?

[Kaiser]

I have cooled down a bit but am still at a loss for this decision.

I agree that it would be best to go on the offensive sooner rather than later, but on whom, CMF or Woden?
In both cases we have to watch out for Suboptimal launching an invasion beyond his fringe plundering, which would be a challenge to handle on its own. If we accept, we further delay attacking CMF as we now also need to bring a defensive force to our NW.
This also endangers AK because Woden has Battleship Fleets or Armadas around to attack there and then go for our Campus area near EM/GM like Suboptimal did.

It would probably be best to also send a Bombard to support Ichabod at Mysty Mountain. And maybe also a force to send against "The Black Gate"
But what are we gaining there, Ichabod will take the city and hopefully put Woden under pressure, but we cannot really claim any cities outside our NW, which all will be difficult to hold.

My numbers were off, 1 oil well brings 3 oil, which makes it even worse as Woden will outnumber us even more heavily, though we can field one oil unit more, yay.
I am in a pessimistic mood and checking our winning scenarios for this game with such kind of a disadvantage did not really help:

Culture
no

Diplomatic
no (we are leading with 4/20, Potala Palace would bring the 5th point so we would still need to win 15 UN votes)

Domination
We are forced into defensive mode against Woden, the only working plan here would be to conquer CMF to gain more access to Oil. In that case we want a safe border with Woden, but we also want to egalize Suboptimals MA advantage. However his stronger units do not have any GG available, so our GG could compensate.

Science
We have one city less than Woden, but I believe we have the stronger empire and GM which should be about double of Wodens best production city. This might be feasible but I expect Woden to throw nukes at us before we can win this way and we cannot defend against nukes and conventional armies.

Devastation
That would basically be the way to a domination victory while rushing nukes ourselves. We would need to amenity up like crazy to prepare for incoming war weariness. Then we would need to identify crippling targets at Woden and Suboptimal and execute nuclear strikes against them.
Woden's IZ crazy zone seems to be a prime target for that, we could place a missile silo in E of Bologna and could hit up to Rohans IZ, which is the strong core of Woden and his NE.
Suboptimal is more difficult, as we would need to replace a lumbermill at Isaac with a missile silo and then could only hit barely Compo. Howard, Marina, Barry, Swirl, Pearl would be in range as well but his productive core seems to be E of that (Compo is its westernmost city) and he could bring up a submarine to our coast and hit everything from there. Our lack of information there is really an issue as I am uncertain where we would have to hit to cripple him.
We would probably need a sub near Howard or in his ocean in the E to hit his capital (which I assue is his most productive reagion)
This only works if we can cripple them before they can fire back, which is already a big challenge with good knowledge, but we will probably be hard pressed conventionally until we get there.

I think the Domination/Devastation direction is the better play, as it also allows us defending better at conventional armies. We need to move against CMF quickly and I wonder if it would be better to delay the war with Woden further so we can arm up better the NW in a defensive style and get our troops out.
We can go to full unit in 8 turns, so I doubt projects are the way to go instead of finishing infrastructure. But I am also not sure if the Wonder plan is still valid to pursue, as it will bind our 3 most productive cities for about ~14 turns. Oxford would be a big wonder though as it would speed up our progress to Manhatten project significantly. Ichabod could race us successfully to it with his GE, but I hope he doesn't. His build queues are not very militaristic at all.

All is hinging on what Woden does, worst case would be him getting a MA with CMF or Suboptimal when theirs runs out to thenn attack with tanks and infantery into our forces. We basically can only produce anti-cav, ranged and siege as these are the only units we will be able to upgrade and have a technological equivalent to him. Maybe some cavalry to later upgrade them into Helicopters.

I am not sure I can decide this tonight

[Kaiser]

Maybe we rush Fighters to compensate into a better unit hoping that we are less screwed on Aluminium on this map?
Even nukes require Uranium, so we are really dependant on some sources being available to us.

Do SAM's only protect units or also districts, cities and improvements?

We could really use Potala as there are some important diplomatic cards coming up (Nuclear Espionage, Cryptography) helping to execute and defend against Spy missions which could be a major wrench in our plan.
Big Ben would be a huge boost as we have very tough decisions currently.
Oxford we probably do not get, especially not when declining as this would likely would convince Ichabod to snipe it from us.

[roland of gilead]

i think we feign a phony war v woden while taking out CMF and maybe even into Suboptimal.

just tread water with Woden. defend not attack ideally do nothing.

CMF is backwards and has several campus and obviously CH to take over.

got to be a danger Sub flips half his cities if we don't take them.

[Kaiser]

Let's hope this works out and does not backfire spectacularily :D

I want to minimise grievances (hoping it also minimizes WW) so I denounced Woden and sent this offer back to Ichabod



The big difference here is that I am offering to join a golden age war ("to arms") against Woden so I receive less warmongering penalties (25 for denouncing and none for the war) as well as have no restrictions about the cities I can conquer. (Whatever that means)

I also encoded a message that it will take me 15 turns to do anything here, hopefully Ichabod waits these 15 turns. Otherwise he is informed that I wont lift a hand against Woden for the moment. Instead I will go for the wonders and then switch over to money and units.

World War I incoming

[roland of gilead]

Yeah it's a good offer either way. Whether it is the right course off action only time will tell.

Sitting doing nothing just seems unlikely to work.

If nothing else it gives us both a better defence.

[Kaiser]

Yeah, my wife was going along the same lines, keeping the peace would only have been a fake relieve in regard to securing our NW border as Woden could jump in any time. Which would be especially likely when he sees that we make gains against CMF at some point.

[roland of gilead]

If we had a pile of oil then waiting for Artillery etc would be great but not really an option here. That's a shame and may be game losing but at least we can go out roaring hopefully if so.

[roland of gilead]

What we want is us to make inroads v CMF and Push back SUB. CMF may realise Sub is going to just consume his cities long run but we will see.

Meanwhile Ichabod does well v Woden and we mop up the north while he is fighting in the south.

We need a north and south army.

North for defending for now.
South initially defend then attack.

And a mobile reserve.

how does that sound?

[Kaiser]

Along the lines I was thinking. Army building starts in 8 turns, in the meantime we use to bolster our defenses.
We could also consider the bought units to be used for an Invasion on CMF.

North:
I want 2 more bombards in the N (AK and GM Encampment) probably upgrade 2 to Artillery to be able to better defend against boats
To hold the rivers:
1-2 FC
2 PS
We need to leave the remaining units (Curassier Corps, 2* FC Corps, FC, Bombard Corps, Ironclad) and probably add more depending on the situation and when Woden shows up with his Navy.

South:
2+ Bombards
2 FC
2 PS
2 Cavalry
2 Curassier

On top of our existing troops (2* MM Corps, 3 FC, 1 PS corps, 1 Bombard likely to be upgraded to Artillery)

West:
1 Bombard at Isaac Newton to bring down the walls of Misty Mountain would be good, we can then pull it away in direction of CMF afterward.
1 FC to secure the Bologna pass would be nice as well

A big question is for how many corps we go, to be honest, I prefer building corps right away as they help egalizing the CS difference we are going to face and save some compared to combining units. This depends a bit on units though.
FC - probably fine for the moment as normal units
PS - definetively corps as they are already in direction of outdating
Bombard - likely corps, as we rely heavily on them and can well use the added CS against boats as well as cities
Curassier - only for occupying tiles defensively, maybe we change the GM Campus protection Bombard with a Curassier Corps, but I would prefer the additional firepower here to punish raiders.
Cavarly - probably not, as we want them to counter plunder CMF and potentially Wodens E
MM - no plan of building them as we already have some and cannot upgrade them until we get significantly more oil

We also need to consider how we get our Artillery to Armies, we need to upgrade 2 bombard corps first and the build 2 normal artilleries to join them before building our third army directly.