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

[roland of gilead]

I can hit that ironclad a little t rodeo mind?

[williams482]

Meaning shoot at the Ironclad at Rodeo? Sure, why not. It's already got two promotions, the third is likely a long ways away.

[roland of gilead]

Meaning shoot at the Ironclad at Rodeo? Sure, why not. It's already got two promotions, the third is likely a long ways away.

I hit it with a caravel, a caravel fleet and a wall shot. 

took it to about half health. 

I requested your diplo favour. 

Dido got the trade deals and kaiser less grievances.

[williams482]

Half health? Nice, that's better than I expected. I might be able to kill it without sacrificing too much.

[roland of gilead]

Half health? Nice, that's better than I expected. I might be able to kill it without sacrificing too much.

That's what i figured. Yeah about half. 

I had a Caravel finish so it had to move out of the city anyway so attacked with it. 

Had the walls and that left the Caravel fleet still in the city. 

I can move al zawari to the city so it heals fast

[williams482]

I don't believe he helps ships, unfortunately. Some time after PBEM7 he was patched to only work on ground units.

[roland of gilead]

I don't believe he helps ships, unfortunately. Some time after PBEM7 he was patched to only work on ground units.

That's unfortunate.. especially as i have so few land units. 

might use his charge then.

[williams482]

Turn 192:

Voting results:



We picked the right civ to vote for, but still came up 1 vote and a tiebreaker short. This is good though, the Raiders have spent their favor and can't contest any potential emergencies. Weirdly, Kaiser voted to embargo me, a choice I'd love to see explained. Have I unwittingly angered him, or was that a misclick?



Nobody thought this one was important (it isn't), so Team Sandbox got their choice (the true neutral option of Kaiser's irrelevant Japanese civ) by virtue of turn order. Kaiser this time cast a vote in our favor, aiming for more grievances against Norway.

There is one emergency available, but it's of no value whatsoever to us:



Woden has researched and swapped into Democracy, which has one military slot and two wildcard slots. He is not running either of Wars of Religion or Oligarchic Legacy, which explains in large part how Roland was able to do so much dammage to his ironclad at Rodeo. He is instead running away:



As I've said on previous turns, this is exactly what Woden should be doing with his ships. Get the heck out of here, come back with destroyers in a frighteningly short timeframe. I'd love to pursue, but I won't be able to attack anything this turn, and if this is a trick (Woden could, for example, have a policy swap in and and be waiting just out of view to change back to the military cards and pounce on pursuing fleet). Pursuit could apply pressure and theoretically make it tougher to find the time and space to upgrade, but I'd be going in blind through a space where Ljubljana has full visibility, probably ceding a first strike that would be very painful still.

It's possible the solitary Punic caravel is a trap, or just a scout unit they hoped would keep out of my view. I could kill it without difficulty, but that would leave whichever unit does the deed well out of the way, and an unpromoted caravel corp which can't coastal raid just isn't a very valuable unit.

By withdrawing, Woden has ceded to me the chance to blast his capital as much as I am able, and possibly open up some pillaging opportunities down there. I don't have ships well positioned to hit the city this turn, and it will be a real slog to blast through all those defenses, but I can take some solid shots at Abugida to give our cossacks a clearer path down there, and we could start blasting away at (W)Odin the following turn.

Those caravel upgrades last turn are going to really hurt us going forward. We have two coal left, which I see little choice but to spend upgrading our only Rolling Barrage frigate, and we're currently producing 12, consuming 17 coal per turn. Add the freshly upgraded battleship, drop Drill Manuals, and those numbers become +9, -18. Every coal unit will be taking a -6 penalty next turn, and -9 for all subsequent turns once we make our policy swap next turn. Shit, maybe upgrading that frigate isn't a good idea after all? If I don't do that, Our units will only be at -3 next turn, then drop to -7 the following turn and the full -9 a turn after. Or hold at -6 if we leave Drill Manuals in, which seems increasingly sensible as it's effectively +3 combat strength on all coal units. Worth noting, of course, that (W)Odin does have a coal source just off the coast that we could certainly make use of.

If this push forward and subsequent retreat was an intentional deke from Woden, and not a planned attack that fell apart when I sniffed out his detachment in the East China Sea, then I am extremely impressed. He got me in short term battle-winning mode, then pulled the rug out from under me and left me limited in my ability to do anything useful with my ships in this area. Nicely done there (and I suppose poorly handled on my part).

Speaking of that Norwegian detachment, a little cleanup. Our caravel sinks the redlined battleship, two ironclads and a frigate send the remaining ironclads to the bottom. It's possible there are more ships lurking out here, but my money is on "no":



Our privateers in the Tethys blow up two coal mines and an Industrial Zone, then set up to make a run at the Library and Campus in Tibbets Brook:



Privateers near Svetlana take out a lighthouse and take a potshot at a city state line infantry which is closing in on our territory. Interestingly, the other Line Infantry is already injured: did it meander too close to Hod and get shot at by city defenses, or does Woden have an actual unit in the area? Hopefully the former.

This is the great person I can claim:



Mimar Sinan's ability is completely and utterly useless; his value to Russia is exclusively as another immortal scout, of which we have many but could find use for another. If I pass, the only other player anywhere close is Woden, who will face the same choice. If I claim Mimar, Woden will be at 204/855 on one of these Modern era engineers:

- Alvar Aalto (+1 appeal to all tiles in a city, useless)
- Nikola Tesla (one IZ gets +3 range and +2 production on regional buildings, decent but nothing more given the current state of the game)
- Robert Goddard (+20% production towards Space Race projects, eureka for Rocketry. Anyone seriously think we're going to space?)

So, claiming this engineer isn't going to give Woden any radically better opportunities any time soon, and I can get some value from him. Done. Mimar sets aidl from Borodino and will be asked to scout Cape Matilda ahead of our privateer force. 

Oh hey, turns out the stuff I wrote above is wrong. Woden is now 25 turns away from Gustave Eiffel, who is more useful but also highly unlikely to be relevant to the outcome of this game. I was operating under the false impression that great people were drawn from the subsequent era, not the current one. Oops. This system is dumb, I blame society, yada yada yada.

It also occurs to me that I've probably been overreacting to the prospect of Norwegian destroyers. They are very scary units, that much is certainly true, but there can only be a narrow window in which Norway has them and I don't. Further, although I trail Norway enormously in coal income, that icy wasteland with three oil sources I intend to settle in a few turns should leave me rough parity in that resource. And once both of us have Destroyers and Battleships in play, we're basically back where we started: I have the bigger fleet that still has a significant a combat strength deficit relative to Woden's cities, except now my ships have three range instead of two and can chip away without suffering casualties. Plus, although (W)Odin itself is a formidable target, Balder, Hod, Heimdal, Freya, etc are all considerably softer and can likely be blasted down and captured in two turns. With careful screening from Great Scouts, I can force Woden to either cede his eastern coast, or actually attack me.

I do still have to avoid any confrontation for the period when Woden will have an enormous edge in unit quality, and I need to make sure I keep pillaging enough to cover the (non-discounted) upgrade costs of these destroyers.

So, I'm going to kill that ironclad that took out the coal mine, then work south along the eastern coast blasting whatever I can. That first step is easy enough:



Because I'm leaving these two stragglers, I do need to make sure I don't extend the rest of my fleet too far down, to make sure I can hit back if Woden has ships in range of these two and opts to attack them. I still want that decisive confrontation between our existing coal based fleets if I can get it, I just know there's no good way for me to force it.

If I had two ironclads which could attack this turn I'd be able to capture Abugida, but none are in range. I'll have to settle for a drive-by recapture of Izumrud. Four battleship shots, a frigate shot, an ironclad, and finally a caravel blast down the garrison, and it's deja vu all over again for the good citizens of Izumrud:



As usual, I get the city for three turns before it flips. I also took a long range potshot at Abugida with the remaining battleship, three cossacks acting as spotters and hoping to actually get pillaging done next turn. I can't risk leaving that unit exposed to counterattack, so several more ships move up to screen it, and the remaining ironclads huddle within Ching Shih's aura of tactical brilliance. That battleship is not well positioned, out of reach of the admiral and too far south to assist against a possible counterattack, but a sizable majority of our ships are positioned to respond:



Now for the situation at Matilda. Roland did some nice damage to the ironclad outside Rodeo, but the +10 extra strength it gets against ranged attacks is going to make it prohibitively difficult for my purely-ranged force to kill it without exposing far too many of my ships to a fatal Punic counterattack:



Patience seems to be the play here. Woden is likely to continue probing forward with the ironclads. If either ship advances half their movement, they won't see anything. Move past that, they'll bump into a privateer (which will no doubt die) but be in a relatively vulnerable spot where either I can swarm it, or Ljubljana will have to push his fleet into more dangerous waters to provide cover. This would be a relatively good turn for them to do that, as I won't have my +2 privateer movement back until my t194 at the earliest, but I should still be able to do some damage if they do.



Woden added a pike and shot to the army defending Marshall Mathers' coal deposit. I attack it with a cossack corp, but only one: I screwed up the movement counting and lost the chance to attack with two and kill it. Oops.



I begin withdrawing ranged troops from Adios Hermanos. The melee units will be able to hang around and pillage a bunch of stuff, but there's no chance I'll be able to actually recapture the city so bombards and the like will be useless. I'll consider upgrading the two knight corps and/or the man at arms as we get closer to that point.

As a reminder, this is the shape of the tech tree ahead:



I am confident Woden will use his research advantage to the fullest by going after Nuclear Fission. We can do that too, but we'll be half a dozen turns behind in the best case. Is there anything here we should pursue instead that might help protect us against the nukes Woden will surely be intent on building, or should we follow in his footsteps and hope to build the bombs faster? The Civilopedia is no help at all as far as how much production is needed to knock out Manhattan project plus a few nukes, but with our Lavras and a relatively large number of chops left, we might have an edge there.

Imperator Aleksandr stops work on it's campus project (denying us all of 6 beakers next turn) and starts a discounted Theater Square, due in 6. We'll finish that, then be in position to buy an amphitheater and archeology museum to boost Natural History, saving roughly 5.4 turns worth of culture (and accelerating our next policy swap by the same amount). Here's the civics tree:



We know that Universal Suffrage is one of the two civics right below Ideology, because Woden has it and that's how far along he is. We can safely assume that whatever the other civic is it definitely isn't Totalitarianism and probably isn't Class Struggle, because those unlock governments which are enormously and slightly better, respectively, than Democracy is in an endgame wartime setting, and Woden is not an idiot. Therefore there are four remaining civics where Fascism could conceivably be, two of them gated behind the unboostable Ideology, the others split between the the first tier civics. Fascism is an enormous advantage to whoever can get there first. There's a 1/4 chance Woden has located it behind Democracy, a 1/4 chance it's behind whichever first rung civic he didn't research, and a 1/2 chance it's behind Ideology, which Woden almost certainly does not have and is an obviously stupid research target unless it happens to have Fascism behind it. Also of note, even if we boost both Natural History and whichever of the first rung civics we wind up trying, it will take us about as long to knock out those two civics as it would to get through Ideology. As the clear laggard in cultural research (even before accounting for Woden's pillage culture) and need to be taking risks. So I'm going to take that 50% chance that Ideology leads to Fascism and allows us to get that in play at roughly the same time as Woden (instead of long, long after) and start researching it. This leaves Scorched Earth (our last shot at a free policy swap for a while, we can pay 630g for the privilege as needed) one turn shy of completing, pending Woden's actions next turn.

[roland of gilead]

I can raise an emergency calling for aid for Australia but not sure what it does for us

[williams482]

Turn 193:

Ljubljana sank the privateer which pillaged Fort Lakton's industrial zone, hitting it with an unspecified attack (presumably the city strike) and finishing the job with a caravel. Dmitri Mendeleev reveals the perp:



The two privateers here could average about 56 damage combined against this guy, which isn't worth doing. Much more worth doing: hitting that campus at Tibbets Brook for two separate 157 beaker bursts, and pulling the other two back out of range for a potential future ambush. Well, three of them out of range, the other is left dangling by a misclick, but should still survive an attack:



North of Cuneiform, still no sight of the Norwegian fleet:



Two caravel fleet captains agree to an unsanctioned truce in neutral waters and commiserate for a time over a bottle. Both are well aware that neither's superiors seems to care terribly much about if they live or die, each of their assignments here is plenty proof of that. Thoughts of another way stir in the minds of both men, but duty to kin and country, loyalty to their oaths, stifles any such conversation before the words can reach their lips. In other times, other circumstances, both agree they could have been friends, but that is not their lot in this life. They depart, both unsure what tomorrow may bring.

The purpose of Ljubljana's deployment seems fairly clear: they are ZoC-blocking my units from being able to see whatever is going on just to the west between Linear B and Runic. This most likely means that there are Norwegian ships whose precise position they wish to conceal from me, or this could be an attempt to disguise their withdrawal. Woden still has not reached Combined Arms and is currently sitting on a -3 penalty for insufficient coal, so I'm not terribly frightened by the prospect of an attack. However, I am willing to continue playing silly buggers with this caravel and my writers, in hopes of spotting and perhaps slightly delaying any oncoming attacks which might crop up in the next few turns.

At Abugida, the newly ironclad and coal powered successors of the Diomede frigate squadrons, and take up the task their predecessors were denied: Blasting the walls of Abugida to rubble and waltzing in themselves. Five battleships, a frigate, a privateer, two ironclads, and finally a fresh-faced single cossack are finally enough to finish the job:



We also took out a mine in the process. And, an indicator of foolish hope: Abugida needs all of five turns to flip back to free city status. Progress! That will of course speed considerably when Izumrud flips again, but if I can take (W)Odin within that period the loyalty situation will change dramatically.

Why take this city at all? There's a fair case for bypassing it, but I felt the slightly loyalty reinforcement and total control over Abugida Bay (plus denying the Raiders vision there) was worth a slight delay. If the siege of (W)Odin is broken in the nick of time, we'll know what decision to blame for that.

That field cannon down there has one associate behind him, the garrison promotion, and a +5 defense bonus for Victor. No general in reach, but that one is likely just a matter of time as the other field cannon scampers down from the outskirts of Cuneiform. I'm going to try to throw as many cossacks as I can against this unit next turn, while simultaneously beginning the bombardment of (W)Odin. With five battleships staying out of harm's way and a -4 penalty for our coal deficit (our coal plant no longer consumes any coal when we don't have any!), one of those ships taking the first turn off to promote to +7 against districts, I project that We'll take 75 off the walls next turn with no net garrison damage, another 98 off the walls and 55 off the garrison (which will heal back 20) the next turn, and 109 more off the walls, 120 off the garrison on the following turn. That will put the city at 118/400 walls, 45/200 garrison. Our Rolling Barrage frigate can pitch in another 26 off the walls, 37 off the garrison, and we can finish the job with an ironclad while keeping another frigate and a privateer in reserve to cover for unlucky rolls. That would have (W)Odin falling on t196, when we'll likely be one turn out from Combined Arms and in a VERY good position to continue asserting our will over the Raider's homeland.

Woden can break up that timeline by pushing east again around the Punic coast, and force me to prepare for a fleet engagement instead of blasting away at the capital in peace. If his ships are in the most dangerous positions and he gets Combined Arms next turn he can probably carry out the necessary upgrades and come at me fast enough to break the siege and probably sink my fleet. If it takes longer than that, I like our chances.

By Svetlana, apparently Woden did have a unit puttering about:



I weigh my options, and decide that since this unit cannot heal and cannot one-shot my ships, shooting it twice for a combined 34 damage is probably a decent option. If it promotes I'll feel very silly, but if it's not there yet (and it probably isn't all that close, only so many combats it could possibly have been involved over here) then these two privateers constitute a genuine threat to the unit. Now, I won't actually kill it unless it turns out to be a threat of some sort: this sucker is eating one valuable coal per turn, and that's more relevant than anything obvious it can do down here.

In the frigid wastes of southern Svalbard, oil prospectors and their highly anachronistic escort close in on an enticing spot:



At Matilda, Illmatic has finally fallen, and Russian cossacks seize the opportunity to blow up the oldest place of learning in all of Australia. Woden has purchased a field cannon here, presumably to help fight off our cossacks. Illmatic is due to flip in 13 turns, unfortunately Low End Theory will also flip in just five turns. It's unclear exactly what Ljubljana's ships are up to (hopefully Mimar Sinan can help with that) but Woden's ironclads have found pastures to pillage in Sakhalin.



Outside of Marshall Mathers, my cossacks tag team the cuirassier protecting the berserker protecting the coal. I might lose one of these guys, but Woden would have to throw a few already injured units at it to finish it off, or move that berserker. And I have a privateer lurking to blow up that coal mine if granted the opportunity.



Any thoughts on future tech paths and longer term "if this continues to drag on..." strategic objectives would be appreciated. I'm almost completely caught up in the short term here, I really have no idea what the target should be past destroyers.

Roland, you are probably correct that a request for aid isn't going to help us any. If there's no combat strength or unit movement modifiers involved, it's likely not worth the bother.