[59] Miguelito and Rusten move stacks to berimbau rythms

[Miguelito]

Again, I am very doubtful of our success here. Picc has some excellent opportunities to drive this home.

But yes, all in. I am near certain that he will launch his spaceship before we even meaningfully touch upon his coast. So we (or Amica) will have to burn the capital, again within the next 20 turns possibly with an army and fleet that we are just starting to build (and Amica has all his stuff precisely in the other direction).
I hope we can afford to at least keep researching. Research is the bottleneck to our spaceship anyways, hammers should sort out themselves.

So what happens if we're successful? At that point Picc is out of the running, because we have to devastate him in order to achieve the objective here. It might be necessary to follow up with Frozen, but he is teching slower than Picc now and has a lot less hammer potential. Of course the real threat will be Amica. He has been researching better than us, has surpassed us in city count, and with Cereal Corp and Kremlin his hammer potential might be close to ours. Mind that he can't whip spaceship parts though, nor convert food to research easily. We might end up throwing ICBMs at each other and then civac wins? Build the UN for nonproliferation?
Basically I would expect him to pressure with military while we try to hold the straits; meanwhile we hopefully would tech at about his level and get the spaceship a bit faster.

[Miguelito]

Amica's running wild:


74 cities now . Does he need new build queues because his old cities are full of whip anger? Should he have Cairo raze/refound them ? On that note, does his plan for war vs Piccadilly involve a previous Cairo invasion... ?

[Miguelito]

oh FFS somehow we ended up 8 beakers short of Robotics... how does that happen? I understand that with cost adjustments you sometimes fall into red numbers and the slider adjusts on the interturn, but that wasn't the case here, we still have some 2k on the bank. No border closures, no cities razed between me logging off and the turn rolling
So we built a bunch of battleships that I had rather be missile cruisers, and more importantly we still can't start building mech infantry

[vanrober]

oh FFS somehow we ended up 8 beakers short of Robotics... how does that happen? I understand that with cost adjustments you sometimes fall into red numbers and the slider adjusts on the interturn, but that wasn't the case here, we still have some 2k on the bank. No border closures, no cities razed between me logging off and the turn rolling
So we built a bunch of battleships that I had rather be missile cruisers, and more importantly we still can't start building mech infantry

maybe someone took a city making it below the population of the trade route and losing a couple of coins?

[Miguelito]

This might be the worst turn yet. On top of the Robotics fu, I misclicked and upgraded 3 units to stupid infantry, costing 800 gold. They're in Arabia, but I think I can get them on the transports in time, at least. One is C2, yay.
This possibly will cost us 1 turning FLight next turn.

Amica will need maybe 2 more turns for Tarkeel, after which he can go for Donovan/superdeath, who will have no way to resist either (last turn they were still losing cities to Tarkeel ). So Amica is getting that whole continent and it's getting pretty scary. We'll have our whole army and fleet facing precisely the other way. Anyway, Picc needs to be stopped, the rest gets figured out later. As always when I don't know how to go about a problem here my first though is nukes.

Edit@van: that's what I meant above with no city razed,  but I worded it badly - afaik no city on the map was razed or conquered after I played. Amica was logged in, but they had made all their conquests earlier already. the other two were Frozen and Picc who are at peace with everybody.  my best guess right now is that Amica whipped massively and that affected trade yield sufficiently

[Miguelito]

In today's Miguelito Micro Mishaps, I somehow thought that missile cruisers cost 250h, but in fact it's 260! That leads to a rather ridiculous number of 7 queue upgraded battleships finishing a turn later. I don't think that this will be the reason to postpone the invasion though. Furthermore, did you know that while infantry doesn't queue upgrade to mech infantry (before Flight that is), MGs do? I did not, and instead mostly prebuilt marines - who will not be overly useful against Picc's MGs.

Doesn't matter, last turn was worse . And yes the unit upgrade misclick cost us a turn on Flight. Doesn't matter too much though, but still horrible because we just don't make much gold.

In uplifting news, Piccadilly got a second prophet a few turns ago, and now his GA is over. I counted 2prophets, a scientist and the fusion engineer. No idea if he has an older distinct GP left. He kept Caste and switched from Pacifism to theocracy. So he can get a GM out, depending on how much he prepared during the GA, but hopefully he'll have to wait a while, which can only be good for us. Theocracy tells us that he is preparing to defend himself somewhat; but I had feared nationalism and slavery and it hasn't come to this yet.
Oh how I wish I had taken theo as well.

[Miguelito]

For the moment we can finally claim top population. I guess it will not take long for us to lose it to Amica though (although he is producing through the whip mostly I suppose). Power ratio is also catching up to Amica.
Piccadilly is spreading Mining Inc, assumedly to get spaceship parts out faster.

[Miguelito]

Amicalola is now tearing through Donovan / superdeath like a hot knife through butter:




crazy stuff. He'll end up with 120 cities, double our count. That is, if he stops there and doesn't straight up follow up with Lazteuq, who at least is about to get AL (Charriu has already had it for a while, and also has at least some destroyers in the water).
I am debating with myself whether to defend Lazteuq, take him over, or bunker down in our territory. But for now it's still 100% focus westwards.

[Miguelito]

Are guided missiles ever worth it?
We have all those launch tubes on missile cruisers, but given that they don't do collateral I don't quite see why we would...?

[Ginger]

Do they have to be loaded onto the cruisers in port or rebased directly to the Cruisers? If they can be rebased to the Cruisers I suppose they can serve the purpose of very rapidly transferring MFG from home to the frontlines to replenish or sustain action across the map.