[SPOILERS] swans will bite u

[williams482]

(right, what i'm missing is that monumentality and the GMC used to not exist lmaoo)

Bingo. Man this game was different at/shortly after release.

[TheArchduke]

Well, my rotten luck with the CS quests continues.

Difficult to conquer but not impossible with a super-early galley.

   

[TheArchduke]

1 NW of the sheep looks like a great second city, with the coffee to work next.

It also provides a hiding space for 1-2 ships to rotate.

[ljubljana]

Turn 10 - Japan

We live in interesting times! My quest for Mogadishu is also garbage, train an archer (lol no), and, though we did establish in tests that Japan galleys at least can muscle through a one-tile access point over a period of 6ish turns, it's still a bad break compared to the wide open attack at Geneva.

Or....or is it?

What was Mogadishu's suzereign bonus again?



oh SHIT yes 

I can't believe I'm saying this, but should we keep them around and have you pour literally every single envoy you ever get over the whole course of the game into them? Maybe even with early Mysticism and Amani as the first governor instead of our planned double-Victor? I can't think of any other CS this would be true for, but I genuinely believe that bonus exceeds the value of an extra city for Portugal if you can hold onto it. That alone will take us from "desperately defending our traders vs thrawn in the early game" to "literally almost totally untouchable by them for lack of anything to pillage". And it's thrawn, so as soon as they recognize that they should shift targets immediately to not-us :D

And with just one tile of access thrawn can't even efficiently kill it if we have ships to contest with! This could be an enormous, game-definingly huge break of luck in our favor if we play it right

Meanwhile, at Hakuho:



The plan is to work the PFH until the monument gets the jungle hill, then swap to that to, hopefully, complete the settler right around when the city crosses 15 food in the bank to avoid dropping to size 1. Then, on to 4-turn galleys working 3 turns @ 8 hammers and 1 turn @ 9 hammers.

We also have spotted our first barb, and they are indeed offshore! We are definitely going to get good use out of our early galleys, that's for sure. We may not be able to buy your trader the instant Foreign Trade comes in with these things running around, as getting it pillaged would be a devastating setback. But delaying 3t until the first galley is about to come out is not too bad, all things considered.

I cannot believe Mogadishu spawned right next to Portugal with one tile of access, AND Geneva spawned in a Feitoria-paradise spot after I specifically called out their PBEM20 incarnation for that upthread. That is such a crazy coincidence, that I wonder if it might not be a coincidence.... If Kaiser and suboptimal hand-picked city states for us, and ALSO hand-picked them for the other teams as well, the Mogadishu draw might not be as big a break as I claimed above. Though it is a bit hard to come up with a CS bonus as strong for any of our opponents as Mogadishu's is for Portugal

[TheArchduke]

Damn, I knew there was a commercial CS with that bonus, but I did not even luck.

This is crazy. Yeah every single envoy should be poured into this CS and we need to protect it.

This changes things a lot, we need to consider if we can protect a CS enough.

[ljubljana]

yeah, i only noticed because it showed up in one of our test games and i spent a good 20 minutes fantasizing about it showing up in the real thing

protecting a CS when other players are REALLY trying to kill it will be tough, yeah, and i'm not sure it's been done successfully in past PBEMs. when Woden liberated Akkad last game, Chev sent 2 caravels over and killed it almost immediately, and we couldn't do anything because we had a DoF with them. we will have to defend Moga like part of our own territory and aggressively DoW on anyone who sends suspicious squads of units towards it, and/or block the harbor with some of your ships to force them to attack us to get to it. we will also have to be really really careful about who we sign DoFs with, but we were going to do that anyways

i am not really sure how we can defend it from others simply getting more envoys there than us, though, which they would only have to do for one turn to get a nice couple of pillages in. hopefully they will spend at least their mysticism envoys somewhere else before they scout out Mogadishu. or perhaps they have hand-picked CS also and will want to get their their bonuses online ASAP as well. you will probably have to take Amani at some point and have her never leave Moga, but when exactly to do that is a bit uncertain IMO.

edit: one thing i forgot in the report - everyone grew this turn except Banzai, for some reason, confirming that we all have mirrored first rings. we are also still only 3rd in domination rank, so thrawn+krill have indeed also gone for a double economic build opening...

[TheArchduke]

We also need to synchronize our tech and culture paths a bit.

How about a bit of a play and talk this evening/night?

[williams482]

Holy cow, Mogadishu! That is an amazing break in our favor, although that quest sucks. Maybe Portugal can manage to buy an admiral sometime in the classical era? But yeah, definitely keep them around.

Unfortunate that Portugal will have to be the one blocking within their territory, not Japan. Crusade plus the innate +5 would make a peacekeeping force nearly invulnerable provided adequate reinforcements, at least until better ships come into play.

[ljubljana]

well, i guess as Japan i could defend moga by, uh, DoWing them? but if TAD is suzereign I am not sure how that interaction would work, or if it would cost TAD all their envoys to be dragged into war with them for a few turns...

@TheArchduke sure! i'll be free starting in an hour or so

[ljubljana]

Long shot, but does anyone have any idea why some of the resource tiles are not displaying in the UI for me?



eg the two crab tiles NW of TAD's capital, one of which is under the barb galley. I can see them in TAD's screenies, but not in mine, for whatever reason... I hope this doesn't have anything to do with the "animated time of day" setting I turned on for this game, which is otherwise gorgeous, but I'm sure I'm going to make some stupid decision at some point this game if I am persistently unable to see all the resource tiles :/

edit: another one of the resource tiles that's not displaying is the, um, plains marsh coffee 1E of Mogadishu, but that tile is so illegal that if I were the game engine, I'd refuse to display it too