[PB59] Pindicator's One Thread to Rule Them All

[pindicator]

Turn 136 in Pindicator Got Too Busy in Real Life to Report

Things that happened and that I forgot to take a screenshot of:

• Frozen traded maps with me so now I can see where all of Amicalola's cities are. Also: this greedy boy stretched far and wide in his islands. For him to throw a fit over me claiming "his" fur like he did seems a little greedy of him now.
  
• New Amicalola trireme appeared at An Echo. We promoted to Nav-2, pillaged the crab, and moved on
  
• I don't see us razing another city short of Amicalola blundering badly. I thought about hiding the Nav-2 promotion and not pillaging, but the city layout to the north means we can't really surprise him and run from the new trireme at the same time. So I see us pillaging fishing boats and maybe killing a worker before this is all over.
  
• At the core, Amicalola moved up his stack to the hill 3NW of Underhill. Only 3 knights but I expect many more are behind.
  
• Walls in Underhill finish EOT
  
• Naufrager is sitting in Underhill with his stack of eles, horchers, and catapults.
  
• Whipped a galley out. Maybe there's a chance i can go through mackoti and catch Amicalola by surprise?

[pindicator]

Turn 137 in Dying in the Best Possible Way

I love this game. I've never had a better death



Edit: Naufrager tooltip is wrong. He declared to bounce his stack outside my lands, and then moved adjacent to the city. Large stack is the stack right NW of my city.
The horcher i arrow to likely pillaged the road in an attempt to keep Amicalola from taking the city, but Amicalola has 2 workers with his stack.

In what I can only think of was a collective "we've had enough of pindicator's shit" moment, Naufrager and Amicalola made peace with each other and now Naufrager is going to try and reap the rewards by declaring on me. Just brilliant!

I suppose Naufrager thinks he's going to get the rest of my cities for this, but what you have to keep in mind is the turn order. It goes Naufrager -> Me -> Amicalola. So Amicalola is up next.

So with that in mind I have emptied Underhill. Let's see if Amicalola can resist an empty city

I did make a rash move, and before I realized I should just empty the city I did just recklessly throw my last 2 catapults against his units, thinking that I might as well if I was going to lose to him anyway. One of them even won their 25% fight! So Underhill has a single catapult with 0.4 health remaining. But it probably would have been better to hold onto those catapults in case an opportunity arose.

And so I spent the rest of the turn putting together opportunities.




You know, it took me forever to realize that it was Mackoti on my island? All his login name games confounded me. Anyway, I probably should have been reaching out to him earlier. I don't expect him to take this, but i do want to let him know there are opportunities. Or rather, after I am dead there are two possibilities: Amicalola and naufrager go at each other's throats and mackoti has opportunity, or Amicalola and naufrager team up to take down mackoti in which case I want to warn him. Not that he needs warning, but still.




Sadly our boating days are about done. The best odds I could see here were to land the sword on the island, but the waters are getting increasingly hostile for our wounded galley. Perhaps I should have taken the two workers last turn that i had an opportunity to snipe, but it's more fun to keep the tension unresolved.

And lastly, I still have 7 two-movers and lots of potential targets that naufrager does not have covered yet







I doubt I'll get to do anything with Baggins - and really if I did I don't think there's enough naufrager culture there for me to raze it. But there are some weak looking cities up north!

I love this game. It will be a shame that i won't last much longer.

[pindicator]

Turn 139

I really don't understand naufrager's last war declaration here.




I failed to realize he had 2 horchers in range of Chubb in the south and so I whipped the wrong unit to completion. Sadly the spear there killed his first but then lost to the second and the city was lost.

But he burned it? Is he just hoping to deny cities to Amicalola? But then why leave himself so open? In any case, he's going to end up losing more cities to me than I am to him and that's just sloppy.




He could have just signed peace with Amicalola and withdrawn and been far better off.

But here I also had free shots on a number of horse archers, and was a couple of points away from a GG myself and so I killed those units and:




I really wanted to use this guy to take a shot at Hornblower. Moving one wounded horcher up I could see that the city had a GG, an archer, and a catapult within. He also had two visible horchers in range, so that he could move 4 defenders back. He could also use the GG to run south, attach to a war elephant, and bring a 5th defender in. So with best visible defense that was 5 defenders against 5 attacking horse archers. And even if he didn't spot the GG trick then I still would need to win several coin flips to take the city. I tried to find a way to bring a war elephant or something else north but could not spot it. So I went north to Madras with my stack




And again here: I don't understand. Did he just empty his garrison at Madras for this shot at denying Amicalola? It looks like naufrager just expected me to sit back in my cities and let him attack like I was the AI. But now his garrison is so out of position that 1) Amicalola is going to take the city before him and 2) he's going to not be able to retreat back to Madras in time to save that city. So yeah, did I just tilt him or did he just really mis-manage this last war?

Up north, I had landed by sword and had a little better than 50/50 chance against his archer. I took my shot




And lost. Now with a 0.4 galley (hey, did I win another low-odds battle without realizing it? I thought i was at 1.2 strength after promoting!?) and no more units it appears this case of herpes has run its course.

I asked mackoti for some resources to keep going




I had to resend the deal a 2nd time without the GPT as I dipped below 10gpt after moving units and whipping cities. But I need the happiness: my island city is so unhappy it can only work 1 tile at size 6. Naturally I whipped it again.

But that's about it. We should get to whip 1 more city and then it's just waiting for the galleys to show up.




Yeah, one last try with the galley. Let's see if Naufrager just assumes it's unloaded.

[pindicator]

Also the galley is a backup plan to live a few more turns. If naufrager blocks it from advancing then I stay in place and at the last moment invade mack to capture his city and keep going a couple more turns

[pindicator]

Turn 139 in the Scouring of the Shire

I have no words




I mean, you burn this right? There's no reason you keep this, right?




Right?

Remember the turn order: Amicalola goes next. So if I want to promote the tensions between my two backstabbing neighbors and put them at each other's eventual throats so that they both lose the long game, well ... it makes sense to keep the city and let Amicalola be tempted into taking it. I even renamed the Chariot to "Free XP".

And then I sent the horse archers south. Because of course naufrager left his stuff wide open

He left an opening for his galley, and so I unloaded and deleted the boat:




I pray for his sake that he has units in the fog and can cover that city next turn. Because if he isn't and I'm able to burn yet another city then ... I just have no words.

Also, let's see if Amicalola is smart and lets my horse archers continue south. He should get a hint as to what I'm doing here and that he can just stay out of my way / have things happen to his benefit. Silly me killed a spear with a horse archer before realizing I had a chance at something more down here. Anyway.

Oh, and I offered to buy Mackoti's Corn and Rice with all the raze gold I got from Madras. My last city is both unhealthy and unhappy.

[Hitru]

I must say I love what you are doing here! Do not go gentle  into that good night

[pindicator]

I must say I love what you are doing here! Do not go gentle  into that good night

I think we're about done, sadly. Unless Lewwyn gets some miracle a dice roll / mistake by my opponents I'm just waiting the inevitable galleys, and they're already coming in from naufrager.

Turn 140 in One Hell of a Ride

Amicalola did get the message - both messages - by leaving my horse archer stack alone. He also took Bad Neighbors, but I'm not sure that's so much him getting a message as him going "Oh look, shiny city!" and taking it without thinking about the consequences.

However, naufrager did have units in range that I had not seen and they pretty much cut my stack down:




My War Elephant, Endangered Species, was able to promote to Formation and kill one more Horse Archer. The Chariot pillaged both road and pasture. And that was the end for my mainland army.

My naval forces met success, and there were no units within range to cover Bangalore - which got a rather funny name change.




It's probably a little off saying this while on the verge of annihilation, but next time take more consideration before poking the bear, naufrager.

With that, I deleted all my mainland forces. It's just the island now:




And some funny name changes from Amicalola as well

Anyway, I saw galleys coming in from naufrager when I burned Just Die Dammit, so Walls are the next thing to make. However I think we have time for one more unit whip first. So I would recommend the following:




Turn 140: Construct most of the Walls
Turn 141: Swap to Sword and get 9 hammers max
Turn 142: 2-pop whip sword for max overflow, Max Hammers
Turn 143: 1-turn Spear
Turn 144: Finish Walls

Bump up the walls if he ever lands with enough to threaten the city.
As far as units, I would recommend Swords and Spears. War Elephants seem nice but they really don't get any defensive bonuses and so the base 6 strength of Swords is going to shine through on defense.

See if you can hold out until I get back. It's a week from now, so .... 3 turns?

[pindicator]

Turn 147 in The End of All Things

Let's talk about endings.




Last turn I had a hunch naufrager would go in and so I cold-whipped an axe. This turn that axe is the only surviver with about 10hp remaining.

Next turn will be the end, unless Cairo or Amicalola swoops in first.

My first reaction was to whip the catapult in production ... but that won't offer any defense. So I deleted the axe, deleted the workers. Maybe somebody sees an empty city and decides to raze it out from under naufrager

I broke up with my girlfriend yesterday. Endings are tough, man.

[pindicator]

Post Mortem

I've been wanting to write this up for a while, but holding off until the inevitable end.




It's a shame that I couldn't even get to the Renaissance Age and the true Civ4 MP middle game with this leader/civ combination as that would have been where the fun would have been had. Glancing at some other threads it appears there were in fact Astronomy islands to be found and I could have been a great shape for picking them up. CHM EIs would have ruled the waves for an era at least.

Things that Went Wrong

1. Expansion
It may be easy to say that I just had a slow-starting civ and leader traits and that I was always going to be out-expanded by IMP/EXP India, but being out-expanded by IND/ORG Ethiopia was inexcusable. I made a number of small mistakes that when combined together put me way behind the expansion curve:

• I planted the capital on the wrong tile. It didn't even dawn on me to check planting on the plains hill and going work boat first, but that was the superior start for a Fishing civ.
  
• I forgot the early game maxim of only growing/expanding onto bonus tiles, and opted to grow several cities much higher onto early cottages. Putting the capital on early cottages and growing that city tall was a good way to get my economy going, especially with an early academy. Growing Chubb and Took to large sizes only slowed my expansion down.
  
• My 3rd city location of Took added very little to the empire. It was a backline city that only added 1 wet wheat tile to the empire. Doing it over again, I should have either stretched for Hornblower or Chubb with this 3rd city to claim more resources. But I was too stuck on efficient worker turns and sharing food.
  
• Two libraries was one too many. Those 90h would have been far better as 3 more units
  
• I also think I went for the wrong fur island in the end, and this again was out of not wanting to wait on galley turns instead of larger strategic choices. Don't let the micro drive the macro!

2. Over-reacting to Naufrager's Attack
This one is a little more nuanced, because at the time I knew something was coming and I knew I could defeat it if I pulled all hands on deck. However, I relied too much on Amicalola judging the geopolitics and leaving me to expend myself in defending against naufrager. I never should have left him such a wide-open opportunity to raze multiple cities, even if it was a poor strategic choice by him to do so. A single archer in each city would have been fine and would not have changed my ability to defeat naufrager. Indeed: if I was able to grab peace from him without those cities then I certainly could have spared enough of a defense to keep from tempting Amicalola like so.

In addition, I should have appealed more to mackoti. (I shoudl have also realized it was mackoti and not some newbie.) After he gifted me copper I should have started cultivating him as a friend at that point on and trying to pressure him into attacking naufrager. That might not have worked but it should have been attempted.


Things that Went Well

1. Early Academy and Growing the Capital
It seems so long ago, but there was a time where I had near-tops GNP and the largest city in the world. An academy-fueled capital that was growing onto cottages was driving my early empire and I'm disappointed I didn't get to see how far it would take me. While some of the details were not done well, I think the strategy was correct and I would do it again in the same position. (Although maybe I would found on top of the plains hill and open work-boat first next time.)

2. Playing my Neighbors Against Each Other
Once it became a 2v1 situation I feel I did a very good job of turning it into a 1v1v1 and making my opponents more worried about the other person gobbling me up than focusing on defeating me themselves. I still need to go through their threads, but I would guess my demand of Amicalola giving me peace in exchange for declaring war on naufrager was enough to get naufrager suspicious of his motives and what kept naufrager from coming back as soon as our first peace treaty was up.

Later I would do something similar in masking my build-up of units to invade Amicalola as a defense against naufrager, and then as soon as naufrager and I signed peace sending my full army against Amicalola. Ultimately I fell short of my goal there but it put naufrager into a position where he had to defend my territory against Amicalola or risk the whole of it falling to Amicalola. (And when he ultimately tried to grab it for himself, that was exactly what happened: Amicalola got it all.)

It also made defending fun. I don't know if I'll ever just cower behind walls and wait for the end. You're just accepting defeat at that point.

Any other lurker comments or critiques? I think I covered the main points.

Off to read some threads!

[Krill]

Turn 147 in The End of All Things

Let's talk about endings.




Last turn I had a hunch naufrager would go in and so I cold-whipped an axe.  This turn that axe is the only surviver with about 10hp remaining.

Next turn will be the end, unless Cairo or Amicalola swoops in first.

My first reaction was to whip the catapult in production ... but that won't offer any defense.  So I deleted the axe, deleted the workers.  Maybe somebody sees an empty city and decides to raze it out from under naufrager

I broke up with my girlfriend yesterday.  Endings are tough, man.

Life is shit, but can you go to the bar yet?