[SPOILERS] Woden and ljubljana like boats

[ljubljana]

Turn 138 - Phoenicia



TCS should fall next turn, although it isn't on exactly 0 health (I don't think) so it's possible that we might not be able to take it if CMF blocks us. Next turn, I will move on to Economy Drive, so please leave as many of the tiles within 2 of the city open as you can so that I can get 5-6 shots in. It took 10 shots to redline TCS, so I am expecting to need something similar to that over the next two turns to take ED - hopefully that is doable without skimping on any pillages, though maybe I will get lucky and be able to get away with just 9 since my frigates are a little more promoted. After that, I'm tentatively thinking that Jobs for the Boys will make a good next target since it will be easier to crack than Official Visit and will alleviate loyalty pressure on the other captured cities.

Note also that by hitting one of my ships into the red but not killing it outright, TAD has kindly given me my first double-promoted frigate, which takes Rolling Barrage for a total of +17 CS against district defenses.

What do you think we should do if CMF blocks your pillage? Hopefully he won't bother since it won't delay the city capture, but it is a possibility...I don't really want to delay the capture a turn, as it will give TAD more chances to kill my frigates. I do not want TCS and Economy Drive to gang up on one of my frigates in the channel between them, which would probably manage to kill it. I am open to arguments that the pillage is more impactful than losing a frigate, though, if you believe that to be the case.

Also, how many ships do you expect to commit down here? I am not sure 6 will be enough if TAD starts going for your caravels, since you will have to leave many of them exposed to get all your pillages in but will also need to keep a few healthy to actually take the cities. Hopefully TAD will be distracted by my nice shiny frigates and go for those instead, though.



In the north, I see that your ships have finally revealed TAD's capital, which was apparently right here next to me this whole time. No wonder he was so unwilling to just let Akkad go - it was closer to his capital than to mine!

Luckily for us, it is relatively exposed and can be hit by 6 frigates per turn. I thought about a decapitation strike here with six freshly-upgraded frigates while we're still working on the south, but look at that damage projection - ouch! We will need the GA plus a crack team of Bombardment frigates from the south to take it down. Therefore, the plan I propose is this - mop up the four cities in the south as quickly as possible, then divide up the frigates down there, sending the relatively fresh ones (including any frigates you have in the area) west without the GA to attack exposed Kaiser cities in that area (which will have less defense strength than TAD's cities), while the GA and promoted frigates sail north to Open Government. Does that seem workable to you? I am hoping for each of these fleets to contain 8ish frigates, which I consider the rough minimum for such an attack force to be able to take cities while remaining self-sustaining, so I might reconsider if we take higher than expected losses in the south.

You can also see that I have left a few caravels behind in case TAD tries any pillaging. We need as many frigates as possible in the south IMO to prepare the southern attack force, but these caravels can stay up here for now.



The clock is ticking on the CMF war, not that we didn't already know that. I like CMF's city renaming here  - hopefully his (justified) sense of righteous anger on behalf of MPF will keep them at war until we have time to consolidate our gains against TAD/Kaiser.



At home, I am bravely starting a discounted campus in Hieratic and a trader in Demotic. The latter city needs an aqueduct soon, being housing-capped - probably after this trader. I am not yet sure where I will send the trader - probably to Nsibidi to speed its growth and lighthouse, but I might keep it here to grow the Pingala city. I might need to buy the IZ tile at Nsibidi (thank you, tile picker) to get its discounted IZ down - that prospect brings me no joy, but at least we have roughly a billion gold to burn (great job with the pillages, by the way!) in case that's how it has to be. When the age rolls over, I might swap into Veterancy too in addition to Isolationism, since I will have so many cities on harbor buildings, including Cuneiform's shipyard (after a 2-turn aqueduct, lmao).

In answer to your question, yeah, I did post and then delete it, about the minutiae of the attack on TCS this turn. I was thinking about attacking with a caravel to make sure it was on exactly 1 health, but then I accidentally moved the caravel in question  so I deleted the post out of embarrassment . In retrospect I think the attack went fine anyways, though.

As for dividing up TAD's cities, I kind of think the east coast cities should go over to me eventually so they can get a 6f/7h domestic TR with Cuneiform. That means giving up on a Wisselbanken TR in Cuneiform, but that's okay, Cuneiform is capped on good tiles anyways and doesn't really need to grow past size 13 for a campus (as its fifth district, lmao). I think we might get more value out of sending domestic TRs from these cities to Cuneiform and then Wisselbanken TRs to your capital, which we should be able to grow just as strong as Cuneiform given enough of those. I haven't done the math in any detail, though, and am open to any division of TAD's lands. We may even want to consider just letting you keep all the TAD and Kaiser cities, since you will be much more technologically advanced and can bootstrap the area faster by getting factories up ASAP and then make better use of the extra production queues. If that would maximize our odds to win as a team (though I'm far from sure that it would), I will happily agree to it even though it means fewer cities for me in particular .

edit: Oh yeah, I guess we are getting spies soon from Diplomatic Service - do you think we should build those? I am inclined to think so, one advantage we have over CMF is more total spies, which means one of us will have a diplomatic visibility edge against him when the war comes. 225 hammers is a lot, but Cuneiform at least can knock it out somewhat quickly.

[Woden]

My boats should be able to average 30 damage, so having a city with a little bit of health is okay. They only heal 20 HP a turn. I am a little confused as to why you think TAD can damage your ships once the walls fall. I guess if he were to get a ship out before we take the city.

Your northern group of Caravels, what are you planning with them? Are they going to sit and patrol or are they going to head towards TAD's capital and prevent him from mustering a decent fleet? I suggest sailing them over towards TAD's northern holdings and kill whatever he is staging over there before he can put together a decent fleet of frigates. And see if you can find where Kaiser's "navy" is stationed. They may be planning to collect in the north and then push when we are on the opposite side of their island. We need to prevent that and the 6 or 7 caravels plus 3 of mine should be able to handle what they have now.

For spies, yes we will want to build them but they can't go to allied cities so we have a little time to get them out. If marco accepts my DoF, that will give us some time to get spies established in Russia. I think my alliance with CMF ends in little less than 20 turns.

As for domestic versus international trade routes, at this point in the game I think international routes will be better. Using a 4-to-1 ratio of gold-to-production, each route to Cuneiform is is worth 2 food and 8.5 production (5.5 production = 22 gold that can be used anywhere). We don't necessarily want to grow TAD/Kaiser's cities too big, as the tax on amenities will hurt everywhere. As for growing Cuneiform, we should grow that city as big as we can. You can build/buy all the district buildings and work those plus each population above what can be works does provide some production to the city. I think you should also reconsider having Pingala in the city and Magnus elsewhere for your domestic routes. Nothing needs to be decided now but think about it.

The plan to go south with the Frigate navy is good and I think we can take TAD/Kaiser out quicker than getting stuck around his capital. I think we still need to have ships up there to prevent a larger navy from being built but once we take Official Visit, we can go for Jobs for the Boys, then sail west.

At Economy Drive, I will clear out my Caravels except for the one on the Harbor. I don't want to leave an opening for CMF to plug and block taking the city. He has 2 caravels in the area and moves between us. If you clear it out, he could plug the holes before I get a chance to take the city. That will leave you 5 slots open with a 6th that is range of both Economy Drive and Official Visit. Leave that tile open on your turn and I will pillage the mine the turn after and move back to the harbor. Then you can occupy it that turn to remove the walls completely

[ljubljana]

Oh, does the city range strike go away when the walls go down? That, uh, makes sense . Turns out I am a huge noob who has never taken a walled city before against another human .

The northern group of caravels will sail towards TAD, yeah. I am not sure what they will find there...his milpower indicates not much going on except maybe a few quads, which will most likely hide in the cities, then upgrade en masse to confront us. We should be able to take them if that happens, though, since TAD does not have too many cities for them to hide in.

Domestic TRs to Cuneiform are worth 6f/7h with Magnus after I swap to Isolationism, and would really do a lot for jumpstarting my sad food-starved cities on the home continent that can't really be replicated with gold. But that might be worth less than an international TR to your capital, which will give 4f/4h between the two cities and a bunch of gold too. I don't know what the right play is...I do think it is to run some domestic TRs for now since my cities are still so small and need to hit size 7 for infrastructure, but I can be convinced. I don't have any city other than Cuneiform that can reasonably serve as TR hub, though...it has 4 districts after this turn including the GP, and the next best is...two districts (campus + Cothon) at Linear A. A Magnus route to Linear A in Isolationism would give 6f/4h, so if I end up going with domestic TRs and running 10ish of those we are talking about trading 30 hammers/turn (or 20 food/turn if we stick with Cuneiform routes without Magnus) for something like 8 beakers and culture/turn by moving Pingala to the capital. Not sure if that is worth it...I might just move Pingala to somewhere like Geneva instead which will grow quickly once it has the lighthouse and a 6-food TR up. Or maybe the answer is that I should just run only foreign TRs to your capital in Wisselbanken and drop Isolationism. I don't know that I think that's the answer right now since my cities badly need food to grow to size 7 for IZs and scientist specialists, but idk, I'm open to arguments either way. Once my cities are up to size 7, I do think moving Magnus will become the more clearly correct option.

Pingala is also serving a useful purpose in Demotic by acquiring a bunch of tiles that I would otherwise need to buy, which is still relevant now since it still needs its campus tile, but yeah I'm not sure it's worth it when the city is stuck at such a small size for lack of housing. Maybe what I should do is reallocate the first new domestic TR to Demotic and immediately build an aqueduct there after this trader...

Sounds good re: Economy Drive. I agree that we will need to occupy one tile at each of these cities with one of your caravels going forward if we want to keep CMF from blocking us...that's pretty annoying as it means I will get one fewer frigate shot per turn, but I guess in theory your caravel can help out too with Akkad allowing it to do full damage to walls. That is probably not a very efficient trade of health though since TAD's city might be able to kill you in return...

[Woden]

T138-Vikings
After a bunch of pillaging, we are the proud owners of a new city...
   

With Victor in the city, it is only losing 0.3 loyalty. Once the monument is repaired, it will start gaining loyalty towards me. Add in the Golden Age, there should be no problem holding this city, especially since it looks like both Kaiser and TAD don't have enough for a Golden Age themselves (both are in the 70s for era score).

I did find and pinned Kaiser's frigate just west of Jobs for the Boys. CMF did block one of your bombard spots at Economy Drive but you should still be able to shot from 4 spots. He was only able to 27 HP damage to my caravel at Economy Drive, so I don't think he can do much against them. We will see since the caravel near Open Government was already hit once by the city and now he has a frigate in the city. 

I brought Reformed Church down to 2 turns and switched off of it. It should be discounted after the era change and I don't need War of Religion right now. Best to save a little research. Did the same with Siege Tactics. It is about 40% and when the boost arrives, should be at 1 turn after the era change. I will put a few pillages into Metal Casting next and then switch to Astronomy or Mass Production. It will be a bit before we get more mines pillaged since I hit all but one on TAD's east coast. I did hit TAD's frigate at Official Visit, so hopefully you can kill it with a frigate shot or 2.

Also note, a coastal pillage takes up all the movement points, hence the caravel stuck near Open Government. I though it would only take 3 MP but I could not move the ship after pillaging the iron mine. It costs 3 MP but uses all you have when you do it. Good thing I pillaged that one first before the one at Economy Drive. There I was able to move the caravel on the harbor and then moved the one next to it to pillage the mine, leaving a tile open for one of your frigates and keeping the harbor covered.

Edit: forgot to mention, marco accepted the DoF and roland (or his sub) rejected it. We have until T169 to wipe out Kaiser and TAD before we fighter CMF. I also re-directed one of my new traders to Hod to see if I can get a trading post in 30 turns.

[Woden]

Oh, does the city range strike go away when the walls go down? That, uh, makes sense . Turns out I am a huge noob who has never taken a walled city before against another human .

Figured. Yes, the attack ends when the walls fall. He can't start repairing them for 3 turns after the last attack. If you bring down the walls but can't take the city for a few turns, it is always a good idea to leave 1 unit behind to attack it each turn to prevent the walls from being able to be repaired. On the flip side, if the repairs take more than 1 turn, it will add a portion of health to the walls each turn you are repairing.

The northern group of caravels will sail towards TAD, yeah. I am not sure what they will find there...his milpower indicates not much going on except maybe a few quads, which will most likely hide in the cities, then upgrade en masse to confront us. We should be able to take them if that happens, though, since TAD does not have too many cities for them to hide in.

A ship in each city is not bad, massing multiple ships in a single area are could cause trouble and we want to prevent this. As you can see at his capital, he has a caravel hanging around.

Domestic TRs to Cuneiform are worth 6f/7h with Magnus after I swap to Isolationism, and would really do a lot for jumpstarting my sad food-starved cities on the home continent that can't really be replicated with gold. But that might be worth less than an international TR to your capital, which will give 4f/4h between the two cities and a bunch of gold too. I don't know what the right play is...I do think it is to run some domestic TRs for now since my cities are still so small and need to hit size 7 for infrastructure, but I can be convinced. I don't have any city other than Cuneiform that can reasonably serve as TR hub, though...it has 4 districts after this turn including the GP, and the next best is...two districts (campus + Cothon) at Linear A. A Magnus route to Linear A in Isolationism would give 6f/4h, so if I end up going with domestic TRs and running 10ish of those we are talking about trading 30 hammers/turn (or 20 food/turn if we stick with Cuneiform routes without Magnus) for something like 8 beakers and culture/turn by moving Pingala to the capital. Not sure if that is worth it...I might just move Pingala to somewhere like Geneva instead which will grow quickly once it has the lighthouse and a 6-food TR up. Or maybe the answer is that I should just run only foreign TRs to your capital in Wisselbanken and drop Isolationism. I don't know that I think that's the answer right now since my cities badly need food to grow to size 7 for IZs and scientist specialists, but idk, I'm open to arguments either way. Once my cities are up to size 7, I do think moving Magnus will become the more clearly correct option.

My comments were directed towards TAD's east coast. We don't really need those cities to grow much and it will be better for me to send you international trade routes than have you own them and have domestics routes.

[ljubljana]

Turn 139 - Phoenicia



First turn of attacks against ED goes okay. The walls will be down next turn for sure, but the city health probably won't hit 0 unless CMF desists his irritating blockading . My greatest fear at this point is that he will move all of his caravels in front of Official Visit - with only 2 frigate attacks per turn, it will take ages to work through the city defenses. If CMF does not do this next turn, you may want to move ships onto the tiles you will need and start pillaging now just so you can't be blockaded. Worst-case, we can combine to occupy 3 of the tiles next to the city this turn, which will eventually be enough to (slowly) work down the city walls even if CMF refuses to leave. For my part, if CMF does not block us, I may move up a few frigates next turn to start working on the health at OV even while the siege at ED is still in progress just to make sure we can retain custody of the tiles we need.

As you can see, I have also left my caravels in the west in a trap configuration. If Kaiser attacks your westernmost caravel with that frigate, I will have all three of my caravels swoop west and kill it. I am a little afraid that Kaiser's whole navy is behind that frigate in the fog, though, in which case we don't really have enough caravels down here...

TAD also produced a frigate at OV between turns, I guess, which took a potshot at one of my caravels? After you softened it up, I finish it off with one of my own frigates, which can be promoted now - good to see TAD wasting niter down here on giving us free frigate XP rather than on a mass-upgrade of quads at his capital.

Do you think you're going to use some of your magical free gold to buy a builder down here to repair the strip-pillaged tile improvements? One builder should be plenty if it follows behind the main army and repairs tile improvements as we acquire them, and could help significantly with getting the new conquests up to speed.



What about in the north? I have two more caravels behind this that are healing and one just produced that is a few turns behind, for a total of eight. Is that enough to do anything without frigate support though? I am not sure...it can kill a stray caravel or frigate easily enough, but TAD's GA is in this area and if he amasses any kind of support behind it, I think we will struggle. I think using these units to try to keep TAD from assembling more units up here is a good plan, but ultimately we will still want the GA and a bunch of frigates from OV before we attack the capital in force.



That DoF with MPF is a major coup, and will free us up to expand our infrastructure push a little before the next round of pure military builds. I would love to get most of these strong IZs up and the doubling card in place before I have to do that, which would be worth 12 or so hammers per turn at quite a few of these cities. That is one way to catch up to Work Ethic, and it's probably worth doing if we have the time, since I think it's pretty likely that the builds would pay for themselves over the course of the war with that sub-20 turn payback horizon. The cities would need aqueducts too to make that happen, but they are mostly close to housing-capped anyways, and my strategy of laying down aqueducts in every conceivable city as soon as Engineering came in to lock in the cost seems to be paying dividends as most of them are fairly cheap now.

Speaking of which, look at that 2-turn aqueduct in Cuneiform! That will take the city's IZ all the way up to +6 when it finishes, and after that it's shipyard, workshop, then 2-turn caravels with +25% experience until the cows come home (or, uh, until we tech to factories). The magic number we want at this city is 48 hpt base for both one-turn quads and two-turn caravels - at what looks like 31 hpt now, we should be able to juuuust barely get there by adding +3 from the aqueduct, +8-10 from the shipyard, and +5 from the workshop. That point is roughly 14 turns away, so we can expect roughly 8 +25% XP caravels from the city before the CMF war starts up, assuming I don't have to pause for factories. That is also assuming that I can restrain myself from building Machu Picchu (don't worry, I'm not actually going to do this), which would actually be worth quite a lot in terms of adjacencies once all these IZs go up. I do think I will start checking the gossip screens just to make sure nobody else starts it though, and I might place the wonder somewhere just so it shows up in other people's gossip screens to discourage them starting it.

I also have been agonizing over this all day, but I think I finally have figured out what my order of trader distribution at these cities will be. The one in Demotic will go to Nsibidi to grow it up to size 4 for the discounted IZ, then Demotic will make its aqueduct so it can benefit from the next trader. That will come from Linear A, which will make a trader using the lighthouse that will finish in 3t in Oracle Bones after the current quad. Then, Demotic will go back on trader duty as Mitla wraps up its lighthouse, sending its trader to Linear A so it can grow to size for its IZ while it does its library and then resumes pumping quads.

Oh, great call on trading posts in Russia. I should try to do that too if it ever seems worthwhile over more Cuneiform TRs. It probably won't since CMF will probably DoW before it would finish anyways, but maybe I will try if I see CMF start sending routes to Oracle Bones. That city gives us an interesting advantage in the trading post fight, since it can reach plenty of CMF's cities to make trading posts but CMF may not be in range of any more of my cities in which to establish his own TPs.

You can also see that I swapped off Education onto Metal Casting - I only really picked that tech because it is the most likely to lead to Industrialization, which requires it in 3 of the 4 legal locations. Hopefully we can figure out where it is sooner rather than later (is your plan still to buy two workshops somewhere?) so that I can avoid wasting too many beakers going down blind alleys here. If you don't think you can get two workshops up quickly, I might be on track to do so myself anyways - Cuneiform has one already queued up, and I think I will delay the lighthouse at Nsibidi to get its discounted IZ out, and perhaps the workshop as well, since it will need both once we unlock factories anyways.

Also, could I have your niter again next turn? I think you should have 6, which would be worth another frigate upgrade at the front. I will probably swap out of retinues for a few turns to get some use out of Veterancy when the era change comes, but obviously it would be nice to upgrade as many as possible now so they can directly impact the TAD war asap.

edit: Ohh crap, it is about time to start thinking about how close we might be getting to Nationalism, which would give CMF a huge advantage if he can reach it before us with his significant culture advantage. Unfortunately it is probably too late to locate it since we would need to declare war with a Casus Belli to do so (and as we discovered earlier, Formal War does not count). But you may want to consider spending some of your free pillage culture to reveal as many Industrial civics as possible in case we run into it (after Reformed Church and Mercantilism, which IMO is more urgent for jungle lumbermills).

[ljubljana]

Some things for future me to think about this turn:

- I think I will drop an envoy into Akkad. 2 hammers/turn on units at Cuneiform is pretty marginal, but it's almost impossible for me to imagine getting anything more valuable out of this envoy. It could happen after we liberate Mohenjo-Daro, but I think I'll take a chance to realize some concrete benefit from it now.
- I am going to try to play some games with overflow at Cuneiform. Notice how the interface says I am producing 63 hammers/turn towards the aqueduct? That is Phoenicia's unique ability (+100% hammers towards districts at the GP city) at work. I wonder, though, if it is actually affecting the base production like it appears rather than functioning as a post-hoc add-on like other production multipliers. If the former, I may be able to micro tiles to get the aqueduct to one hammer from completion this turn and then get a huge whack of overflow into the shipyard in Veterancy on the following turn.
- Oracle Bones is a high-value target for the first Wisselbanken TR to your capital. I think this makes sense as it has no real way to get more food otherwise and is one pop short of working all its hammer tiles. It is a bad city now, but with a little builder love and a 2f/2h TR it can hit 20 hammers/turn, not bad for an ES plant.
- I want to find some random wonder to pretend to start in Cuneiform this turn, in the hopes that this will show up on everyone else's gossip screens and make them think my builderitis (in conjunction with the renewed DoF) has gone to my head . If CMF is checking the gossip screens (which he is) and if I'm lucky (which I might be?), maybe I can get him to think I'm not taking the possibility of an upcoming war seriously and thereby bait him into building less troops than he really should. I might go with Machu Picchu, since the misdirection there will also help make it less likely that someone will try to race us to it (though I am a little leery about alerting anyone to the fact that it may actually be a half-decent build here).

If it's not too much trouble, would you mind letting me know roughly how much of a blockade CMF has put in place when you get the save? I am still a bit undecided on whether we should try to occupy the tiles next to Official Visit and start pillaging/firing this turn - right now I think we should do it, but obviously I hate giving TAD free shots at my frigates when I can avoid it if I am not really in position to efficiently take down his walls.

[Woden]

I will send all my niter to you on my turn. As for CMF blocking Official Visit, it is really a non-issue. I will chop put the GMC in 4 or 5 turns, then buy a berserker. Since disembarking/embarking doesn't cost me any MP, he will be able to capture Official Visit in 2 turns but we may want to consider letting the city live a few turns to pillage the mines. There are 2 there that I can't reach from the east coast and it would around 180 science and 600 gold. Is the plan to go after Official Visit next? You could bombard the walls down and then park a frigate to attack every turn to prevent the walls from repairing while I move in to pillage. It will delay taking the city a few turns but I think the pillages are worth it.

[Woden]

Also, I maybe be away from internet (or at least poor access) June 11th-June 13th. Would you be willing to play both turns that weekend? I can share my PYDT token and you can access my turn through the PYDT client. I might be bale to play my June 11th turn if it comes at a decent time and should be able to play my June 13th turn in the evening when I get back but would not be able to play my June 12th turn, so iwoudl need you to play 1 turn of mine.

[ljubljana]

Happy to play both turns on June 12 and whenever you need, really.

As for our next target, I am hoping I will have enough frigates to go after Jobs for the Boys and Official Visit more or less simultaneously. I should have roughly 12 frigates in-theater when ED goes down, and split evenly between the two it should be enough. I am thinking I will then send the elite corps of promoted frigates north with the GA to take TAD’s capital, while the newer frigates can be our southern attack force that goes after Kaiser. The reason I am worried about CMF though is that he can drastically slow this down - if he blocks 3 tiles and I can only get in 2 shots per turn at OV it will take like 5 turns just to get the walls down. He might also be able to permanently deny you pillages by parking on the harbor tile and just not moving until the DoFs lapse.