[SPOILERS] Chevalier Mal Fet and Marcopolothefraud lead a Soviet Down Under

[williams482]

Turn 158:

Industrialization completes:



We have two sources of coal in our territory, one already hooked up, the other currently lumbermilled but soon to be connected by the nearby builder:



Marco also has two sources:



Japan, England, Phoenicia, and Norway also appeared to have two each. Strangely, Indonesia seems to have three, one in the third ring of Hermanos:



And China controls at least two, both around Joe Aribo:



There's another in a somewhat awkward spot in Sakhalin:



And finally, another unclaimed source on the island west of Svalbard:



Industrialization has revealed the locations of Flight and Electricity. On the whole this is good news, our path to Steel is boostable with two privateer builds. It looks like we can maybe get this done before the Raider war.



Obviously we are still at war with Team Sandbox. I have counteroffers waiting (I anticipate unreasonable demands), but it's very clear to me that we cannot surrender Hermanos, and should probably be willing to invest in defensive ground troops to protect that coal, and we should certainly take a crack at two settlers to get the most accessible unclaimed spots. The ability to support three more ironclad fleets per source is an enormous benefit, and will keep us even with the Raiders if they do manage to get the techs for coal and ironclads in time.

So, what is Suboptimal after in exchange for peace? Literally every city on Sakhalin, including Shikishima. We expected nothing less, of course, but I hope you at least recognize the insanity of making demands like that when you were the aggressor who lost predominantly because of your own gross mismanagement (and Chevalier's stubborn application of the Zapp Branigan defense). If Russia/Australia coming out of that war on top makes us your forever enemies, so be it. My only regret now is not obliterating Alfredo Morelos, or hell, taking Valletta too. Would have got us another coal source.

(Sidenote, am I spoiling anything important in revealing that Chevalier's read on this situation from 50 turns ago was 100% correct? I've unilaterally decided that I'm not)

Because we are most certainly trapped in a forever war with a pointlessly stubborn and clearly inferior adversary, I'm putting serious thought into assaulting Diamonds. That gets us one obvious benefit (three more coal) and will further limit Suboptimal's ability to harass us. With Steel defenses, the city will be virtually impervious to whatever China tries to throw at it, and the coal can't even be pillaged because it's under the city center. The problem is that, even with our army from Sakhalin shipping over in just a few turns, we'll probably need Military Science units to make real progress here. That's an investment of four turns worth of research and probably some Niter, for a long term benefit to our naval power as we try to execute a timing attack with a very clear deadline. Bah, no good. Oh well. I do kill his knight with the city + crossbow + courser, but I'm 100% going to lose the courser in retribution next turn because Roland has a Pike and Shot unit two tiles away:



Oops. Here I go again getting distracted and making bad tactical decisions.

Oh, and did I imply we could build settlers for those unclaimed coal resources? lol. Alexsandr, our Ancenstral Hall city, currently needs 10 turns to build a 530h settler. We're hard capped on 6 ironclad units, 9 once I get a builder all the way up to Hermanos. I might even wind up leaving a bunch of them one turn from completion just to avoid being stuck unable to heal the ones we have in the field.

I start tech research on Electricity, and swap civics research to Mercantilism. My plan is to bring Electricity to boost+1, then swap to military science. Once Mercantilism completes, knock out as many privateers as seems reasonable given available production queues relative to resource incomes and stockpiles, boost Electricity, and complete it before moving on to Steel. I hope to time Military Science to complete shortly after the start of the war, while our planned army of coursers and Men at Arms will be en route to Raiderland and ready to upgrade as they make landfall.

We are going to have to make tough calls about policy slots. Come wartime, we'll have a bunch of military policies (Press Gangs, Conscription, Wars of Religion, Professional Army, Retinues, Drill Manuals) all competing for three military + wildcard slots. We can increase that all the way to four slots if we drop Theocracy and it's faith purchase discount, which we also don't want to do. So that's going to be fun.

To tell the truth, playing turns has been a bit of a slog and with other stuff going on for me right now, It's been difficult to devote serious mental energy to the turns or to larger scale strategic planning. I'm also frustrated that Marco hasn't been participating here, so I'm worried that our combined military edge is going to be frittered away by lack of coordination and ultimately allow the Raiders to first strike the Aussie fleet, then trap and destroy the Russians.

And if anyone is wondering given the increasing frustration over Marco's turn pace, even if he were willing to give me his PYDT token there is no way in hell I am playing both turns.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Observations:

* The coal is broadly as expected. No one screwed, which is good. Disappointing that Sub's coal is so vulnerable to pillage, so we might need an army. However, the Electricity -> Steel boost is excellent news. I would highly prioritize that, I think. Steel makes Adios Hermanos immune to Sandbox liberation efforts, and will also let us ignore Woden's zerkers in places like Thesa or Svalbard. 10 turns, possibly 9 with overflow? I would work on that as quickly as possible, then head for Military Science after Steel is in to coincide with our hoped-for knockout ground campaign on Raider.

* Sub's Eternal War is disappointing and a little surprising. What did we ever do to earn such enmity? Defend ourselves? Have the gall to successfully[/i sink his fleet and counterattack? Hell, before [i]every major offensive I've launched I have offered peace for less than what I could conquer, and every time he's more or less spat in my face.

Maybe taking Shikishima really pissed him off or something.

Policy notes: Combat strength and production matter most, even more than gold, I think (although that's a hard choice). With 4 spots, I think Wars of Religion and Press Gants are obvious musts. That leaves 4 to compete for 2 spots without theocracy. We COULD manage both conscription and Drill, with temporary swaps at timed moments for upgrades, if we move into...er, Monarchy? We can't take Monarchy again. Sorry. So probably stuck with 3 - do we prioritize gold or coal? One lets you upgrade Caravels as the coal comes available, the other enables more ironclads to begin with. That's not an easy call to make, but I lean towards Gold's flexibility. 6 fleets boosted by Magellan with 9ish move is still pretty deadly, and you can upgrade caravels to replace losses as they happen, giving us staying power.

Sorry the game is a drag. I really appreciate not only you volunteering (with a LOT of berating and begging) to bring us in for a landing but also the effort you put into playing and reporting. I'm also really, really happy to share both threads with you! I hope this is more fun than the constantly sinking wreck of Canada was!

6 is enough for a sizeable strike force. How quickly can Woden get his coals online?

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

I hope you at least recognize the insanity of making demands like that when you were the aggressor who lost predominantly because of your own gross mismanagement (and Chevalier's stubborn application of the Zapp Branigan defense). 

The Battle of Matilda, turn 105 (colorized): 

[civac2]

Do suboptimal's Jongs have a preset kill limit?

[williams482]

Turn 159:

Our military alliance with Australia has elapsed, he offers to renew and I accept. There's a special session of the World Congress next turn, which will no doubt be a complete waste of time. Our courser near Hermanos is dead, as expected, and Roland has advanced a knight towards the city as well. We take some potshots at the pike and shot with the city and crossbow:



We'll add a frigate to the mix next turn. Marco has a query for us:



You know, that's a damn good question. Where is Woden's fleet, and where could they be going that we should care about? I suppose step one is, how much of Woden's fleet aren't we aware of? We see on this turn:

- 8 caravels (55)
- 4 caravel fleets (65)
- 2 quads (25)
- 1 spear (25)
- 2 archers (25)
- 2 zerks (48)
- 3 zerk corps (58)
- 2 trebs (45)
- 1 chariot (28)

Thats a combined 1195 if all were healthy, in reality more like 1105 given that a few of the units were damaged. That leaves about 176 milpower unaccounted for, roughly three or four frigates/caravels/zerks, or half that many pre-upgrade units. A small enough number not to be much of a threat, and to be easily "hidden" in occupied England or floating about doing just about anything. It's good that Marco is keeping tabs on this, but I don't see any additional danger here. I compose my response:



Is this what using Twitter feels like?

We have now exhausted our coal reserves, and are "losing" three per turn. That will be canceled out by our new coal mine next turn, then exceeded again as our last possible batch of ironclads completes. I suspect we'll be stuck with a stockpile of zero for some time even after we merge these units together, but I don't think that's as much of a problem with ships as it would be with ground units. As long as they can still heal via promotion, these units weren't going to be healing naturally in the field anyway, and if they smash through enough enemy ships and tank enough enemy fire, they can help us a lot even if their survivability is poor. As is, we seize the opportunity to keep crunching our caravels, despite some, uhh, interesting status reports from the shipyards:



Hell if I know what that came from, but clearly somebody messed up.

Our Courser by Joe Aribo seems unlikely to succeed in pillaging anything else:



The unit embarks and promotes towards Caprisan. Most likely this unit will participate in the invasion of Norway. What exactly am I doing with the ground troops on Sakhalin? By far the most useful units in the Norwegian theater will be cossacks. We don't plan to batter down city walls with ground troops, just pillage the hell out of everything we can reach while the navy does whatever heavy hitting is needed. Knights are substantially weaker, meaningfully slower, and the only unit line in the vicinity that is close to doing what we'll expect the cossacks to do. They'll also be quite useful in holding off Indochinese excursions near Hermanos, so that's clearly the place for them. Thus, our courser will head towards the staging area for our strike against Norway, but everything else is shipping out to Indochina, to fight a pointless war as best they can. I even decide to splurge on a faith purchased treb, which will be useful if we manage to kill enough units to give sieges a shot.


Probably not a good investment on further consideration, but hardly the most wasteful thing I've done in the past few turns. That courser was a real loss.

[civac2]

I communicated with a team mate using map pins before. It works pretty well, actually. Only issue is that one might miss a message. You could perhaps use Discord or the like to talk with marco. It's less hassle than the forum.

[williams482]

Turn 159 World Congress:

The discussion in the tech thread is prescient, the two emergencies are for our capture of Hermanos, and Woden's capture of the English capital:



As agreed I vote no on both, but I have no idea who proposed these and Marco had enough diplo favor to push one through if he chose to do so. We'll be in a very odd spot if he does given our agreement (and tactically, our ships are badly out of position for a war next turn).


Hopefully Marco invested in preventing Indochina from getting additional bonuses in their pointless self-inflicted forever war, instead of creating exactly the sort of buggy chaos that six other players said they didn't want. But I suppose we'll find out shortly.

[williams482]

Turn 160:

Both emergencies pass, technically:



Marco was actually unable to vote on either emergency, another example of this system being poorly designed for team play. Kaiser pushed through the anti-Norway emergency all by his lonesome, while Suboptimal and Roland combined to juice up their pointless forever war by assigning Russia -2 combat strength against their units and gaining +1 movement in Russian territory.

Um, K.

Mercantilism completes:



This was a complete surprise to me, and comes about because Marco apparently completed the civic on his turn. A notification that this was coming would have been nice, but it is still a boon for us, as I can get Privateers going in three cities and will have the boost for Electricity in just four turns. Electricity itself is at 466.7/1500 beakers, so 433.3 unboostable beakers remain. That's roughly 2.5 turns of research, so I'll have to swap off this for something else (Banking?) on t162. No great trouble there.

On that schedule, we will complete Steel on t170, two turns after the start of the war. However, we're currently on track to get Charles Darwin in 8 turns, and he's worth 1500 beakers when set off on the Eye of the Sahara. Darwin will actually be able to reach the wonder five turns after we get him (maybe four, movement rules in this game are confusing). We want Steel done on t167, so that Ljubljana will be attacking into urban defenses if they decide to drop a hammer on our cities on the first possible turn. Completing on t167 exactly is better than earlier, because the Raiders may not be aware that Steel is close, and if they are planning an attack against our cities I want them to be forced to reconsider in light of new information only at the last possible moment. So, we want Darwin recruited and active no later than t163. We cannot achieve that with a project, but a faith patronage on t163 will cost 1340 faith. That will be approximately one third of our faith ballance at that point, and seems well worth it to get Steel at exactly the right time. I have placed pins denoting Darwin's expected path through Marco's territory, to prevent any units from parking on inconvenient tiles and slowing things down by one critical turn.

Anyway, on to the forever war. I have my nearby frigate take what will likely be the final potshot at Graceland. Roland continues pillaging:



Unfortunately, the city strike plus crossbow plus frigate still falls 17 HP short of killing the knight. We legitimately will need an army here to protect the Coal and Niter, but the Sakhalin force is on the way.

Our spy finishes it's obviously ill-advised "gain sources" mission in Connor Goldson and transfers to the Phoenician city of Demotic. Phoenicia clearly has the larger navy between the Raiders, and that city is landlocked. If it falls, the game is over. Unfortunately thanks to my clumsy decision not to tell that spy to just sit and wait until our alliances expired, we won't have the diplomatic visibility bonuses for the first few turns of the war. I highly doubt the Raiders will have been so careless with their spies.

I had resumed civics research into Nationalism, but on further consideration I think the better play is to put a turn into The Enlightenment (leaving it one turn from completion), then plan to finish Nationalism closer to the onset of war, upgrade as many quads to frigates as possible (so, five, because our stockpile cap is 50), and use The Enlightenment to swap into our prefered wartime policies. We don't actually need to start merging Ironclads yet because we have more in production than we can reasonably support already, so it doesn't matter that we're stuck with a zero coal stockpile for a little longer. Any culture not spent on those civics will go into Urbanization, which unlocks Colonialism, which unlocks the soonest possible modern era civic. 1 in 3 chance that's a new government. Democracy would be pretty marginal, but Communism would be a welcome boost (3 military, one wildcard) and Fascism (4 military, 2 wildcard, +5 combat strength, 15% reduction in war wariness, +50% production towards units) could easily be the difference between winning and losing a war which drags out that long.

I also forgot earlier that Oligarchic legacy exists. We have it, and absolutely must use it. That plus Wars of Religion is +8 combat strength to caravels and ironclads, an enormous difference in a battle between fleets. We would have a gold "income" of roughly -30 per turn without Conscription right now, and it will be worse still by the time we declare war, so I think the odd policy out for the initial clash of fleets may have to be Press Gangs? Eww. But we have the initial strength advantage, and a slight disadvantage in long term ship production, so I think it makes sense for us to put more chips in the "kill everything now" bucket, and pivot back to the production boost if the initial battles produce destructive stalemates. 

The Raiders have now passed us in total score, 1234 to 1230. Woden has 27 civics and 37 techs to our 26 and 37, Ljubljana has 25 and 33 to Marco's 24 and 30. Russia remains the only civ to reach the second rung of industrial techs, while Woden (first rung) and Roland (second) are the only two with any industrial civics.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Hm, what if we kept Darwin in reserve while working on Steel naturally? If they show up to begin besieging our cities (most likely Norwegian berserkers either on Thesa near Nikolai or on Svalbard near Graf Apraksin), then we pop him and grab the tech right in their faces, which would be a lot of wasted movement on their parts. Steel will more or less make us immune from conquest before Flight/BBs come online, and even BBs would be slow. With Norway running out of things to pillage and basically only at tech parity at the moment (assuming one of Woden's techs is the useless Currency), then we will start to pull ahead unless he devotes production to getting campuses out (which of course we could match in Svalbard if we wished, or just continue to pump military and dare him to stop). So long-term we're favored as long as we damage their empire in the process, don't let the English cities become productive.

Tactically, on the land front, I think a pair of P&S forting up on each resource, with Xbows to cover the open spaces and keep them from being shot to death, would probably serve, maybe one or two knights as a luxury to go after ranged units. Maybe they'll abandon their idiotic shooting-themselves-in-the-face (the foot kind of went by the wayside when they both got the majority of their empires razed) war at that point, with Steel defenses more or less guaranteeing us Al in perpetuity?

Re: the spy, remember you can manually cancel missions! A bit late now, I suppose. Oh, well.

Civics plan looks solid to me. Makes the best use of our limited card slots, although giving up Press Gangs...well, Woden has the same issue. Possible solutions - Forbidden City/Alhambra (we have no encampments for Alhambra and Forbidden City is expensive). Or just find a better government, no advantage over Norway there - Woden's empire pop nears ours in size now and he has his pantheon helping him out in culture.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Also, note that in terms of research Ljubljana's empire is still only about on China's level, and that's with China losing half its empire burnt to the ground! If not for Norwegian pillage abilities + Japan/England totally collapsing while having entirely coastal empires and improvements this game would already have been won by Russia long ago.