[PB56] NobleHelium Tells It Like It Is

[NobleHelium]

civac is playing now. I don't know if you can verify the situation after he plays or not.

[Charriu]

I was already asleep at that time. Now it's only Gira before you. Let's hope for the best

[NobleHelium]

Our blocking maneuver was successful and civac did not attack. He logged in and out several times and my guess is that he was simming various attacks and decided it wasn't worth it. We're healing up now and will be looking to take out Angora in a few turns, freeing Flusterstorm from being swamped by culture and reclaiming it as a useful city.

Amica offered us peace last turn which we reoffered and he accepted. He's moved all the offensive units (war elephants, two-movers and catapults) away from our border and my guess is that he'll declare war on Mjmd. Mjmd has at least one scout in Amica's territory though and he was watching our border with Amica very closely and he must have seen that Amica's units disappeared. We did send him a message warning of an attack by Amica mostly for brownie points, but we're sure he must have been aware of this likelihood anyway. Mjmd's power has started to creep up again after being completely stagnant since vanrober's elimination.

[Charriu]

I assume civac also didn't declare war

[NobleHelium]

Correct.

[NobleHelium]

Gira hasn't played so we'll need a time extension.

[Charriu]

And you got one

[NobleHelium]

I sunk civac's galley in the north inside Amica's culture (but next to our border) with a caravel, which was very surprising to me since he could have just hidden in a city and I wouldn't be able to do anything. Then I offered a treaty to civac and even more surprisingly he accepted! This may be because Mjmd declared war on him the previous turn and may have sent him a PM notifying of the war declaration (I don't send war declaration PMs generally because I believe in minimum communication between players). I actually thought this might have been a war/peace because Mjmd was expecting an attack from Amica, but nope, the following turn Mjmd razed a border city (size 6). civac researched Machinery on the same turn and started drafting maces, and his elephants went away of course since they wouldn't be able to do anything productive. Gira did not do anything in response to us moving next to Angora with over 20 units, so I razed the city this turn.

Laz has built 6 triremes to defend Trebizond instead of building longbows, but that may still not be enough to stop us from landing enough knights to take the city. He actually only has 3 longbows in the city because he foolishly loaded up 2-3 of them a while ago and we sunk his entire fleet (since rebuilt) when the opportunity arose.

Amica hasn't declared on Mjmd but his units are still nowhere to be seen. Maybe he will finally declare this turn, or maybe he is walking them around the entire donut to attack us from the south. Who knows at this point.

[NobleHelium]

Gaspar has requested that I continue explaining our city names, but before I can do that I should talk about how we got to the current position.  How did we get embroiled in a war with Gira when we were attacking Laz?  Way back in my last chronological update Laz had a "zone defense" stack between Nicaea and Angora.  Gira killed those units on t128 rather easily because they were longbows sitting outside cities.




This was also the turn where we saw Laz intentionally move units out of Adrianople before Gira took it, to serve no apparent purpose other than to make the city easier to take.  Having the longbow and the archer on the hill instead of in the city did not do anything, and we killed them off afterwards.




A couple turns later on t130 we saw Gira scouting beyond Nicaea to check for our units.  He did not see anything.  We are teching Engineering here because our empire is very long vertically and we need to reduce the reinforcement time between our two borders.




After seeing that the coast was apparently clear, Gira moved his stack next to Nicaea the next turn so we responded by moving catapults and hitters in range of his stack so that he would be encouraged to raze the city.




Gira spent two turns bombarding the city before attacking on t134.




He did raze the city after thinking about it for five minutes.  Originally I was thinking we wouldn't attack and just wanted to encourage him to raze the city, but upon logging in and seeing how damaged his units were and predicting that Amica would try to organize a dogpile on us a la PB55 in the future anyway, we decided to attack and take the opportunity to destroy the bulk of Gira's army basically for free.  We estimated that he had maybe a dozen keshiks elsewhere besides his garrison units and what was in the stack.  Unfortunately I don't have a picture of the stack before we attacked, but here are the combats.

Chariot vs 72 HP Axeman @ 99.1%: WIN, no damage
Catapult vs C1 War Elephant @ 13.6%: LOSS, down to 70 HP (4 collateral hits)
Spearman vs B2 Catapult @ 20.5%: LOSS, down to 66 HP
C1 Spearman vs C1 Shock 91 HP Keshik @ 73.6%: WIN, down to 15 HP
C1 Spearman vs 56 HP Catapult @ 84.8%: LOSS, down to 47 HP
Spearman vs C1 Shock 91 HP Keshik @ 84.8%: WIN, down to 32 HP
Spearman vs C1 Shock 67 HP Keshik @ 89.7%: WIN, down to 83 HP
Spearman vs C1 70 HP War Elephant @ 89.7%: WIN, down to 46 HP
C2 Horse Archer vs C2 F2 (?) 66 HP Keshik @ 98.8%: WIN, no damage
Horse Archer vs C2 F1 (?) 44 HP Keshik @ 99.9%: WIN, no damage
Horse Archer vs C2 (?) 26 HP Keshik @ > 99.9%: WIN, no damage
C1 Axeman vs C2 (?) 25 HP Keshik @ > 99.9%: WIN, no damage
C2 Axeman vs C2 (?) 24 HP Keshik @ > 99.9%: WIN, no damage
Longbowman vs 11 HP Catapult @ > 99.9%: WIN, no damage




We moved our remaining HAs in range of Turfan to threaten it and look menacing, and also moved units next to Adrianople for the same purpose.  The hope here is that Gira would agree to peace.  Spoiler: he did not agree to peace.   But we killed eleven highly promoted units with the loss of only one catapult and two low value spears, and also got our second GG to also settle in Thoughtseize. Gira lost several catapults attacking Nicaea as well.




We finished the Colossus, which gave us something like 38 cpt?  I don't really remember anymore.  GLH was giving us 28 cpt as a comparison.  GLH is also easier to build. Nobody was competing for this which is not really surprising, I don't think there was a single other forge in a coastal city completed on the map.






Demos for t134.

[Charriu]

After seeing that the coast was apparently clear, Gira moved his stack next to Nicaea the next turn so we responded by moving catapults and hitters in range of his stack so that he would be encouraged to raze the city.

Just curious, you were able to settle Narcomoeba via the culture on the ocean tile 2NW of it, right? Must be because with Collosus built you do not have Astronomy.