[pb72 spoilers]: the esteemed gentleman's literature and book club

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screenshots from the current turn:













I believe Aetryn just grabbed Chemistry. I will be sad if he uses my slowed teching as an opportunity to steal Cereals from us.

[Tarkeel]

Aetryn still needs Corporation to found anything, you can see he's yet to research Constitution (or Economics for that matter).

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Aetryn still needs Corporation to found anything, you can see he's yet to research Constitution (or Economics for that matter).

I do think it is possible he could get to Corporation and Biology before us if he went on a direct beeline. We do need to get Railroad first to get MinInc online.

Not much happened the current turn. Bing got Spiral Minaret and education, but he doesn't really have the setup to get the most out of Minaret, since his state religion isn't even spread to all of his cities. Perhaps he will knock out some temples in his GA. I'm more concerned about him getting Oxford done quickly.

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Steam power is in, and we do have coal:




Sadly one source will need to wait on Biology to have the food needed to pave over its windmill.

I toyed with the idea of building some levees, but that will have to wait. Bing's power is continuing to trek up and we will need a solid wave of units to ward him off if he goes whip crazy post-GA. I am thinking it might be necessary to turn off tech for a couple turns and upgrade all of our ancient trash if he does that. Nothing else would give us an immediate unit infusion, besides revolting back to slavery (avoid at all costs).

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North korea finally advances in the south:




Xist make a big mistake I unfortunately couldn't capitalize on, leaving all of his 25 catapults guarded by a single pike on a tile within reach of my land. But my phracts were sadly too far back to move in and squelch that immediately. Oh well.

25 cats is a lot of cats. But I have even more phracts then that. What I'm not sure is whether it makes more sense to hold in the city or attack out. I have a castle there, but Xist has stubbornly built so many fucking accuracy cats that the castle won't hold for long. I have 7 cats of my own that can either soak collateral or weaken his stack before the phracts attack. I have 10 or so garrison units on the city site, half LBs / CBs and half muskets.

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Also: with my coal hooked up, I can build ironclads before galleons! Ever seen that before?

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trying to sim and very much disliking the worldbuilder tools. No good way of giving a group of units the same promos.




The annoying factor here is that Xist got double GGs during all the fighting (almost certainly helped by some lucky dice rolls), so he can slap formation on all of his stupid pikes even without vassalage. Also, flanking appears to have been nerfed significantly in this mod, so even if I win 5-10 combats with the phracts I don't end up killing more than 2 or 3 cats per sim.

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To answer my quandrary further, I tried fiddling with vodka for the first time. I gave Xist's side 25 cats 20 praets and the 15 pikes against 5 muskets, 3 lbs, 3 CBs, and 28 phracts. Vodka said that if we huddle in the city (even with the defences assumed to be bombed down) we will win pretty much all the time, although with casualties? I'm not sure I read it right, but it seems that hunkering down is the way to go if he keeps advancing.

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This "worse than worst case" (not all of xist's cats can take barrage 2, assumes he knocks defenses to 0 before any attacks) sim has us winning 100 out of 100 times. we should be good, unless i set it up wrong

[Tarkeel]

Rule 1 of Vodka is to increase Iterations to atleast 1K, preferably 2K. Rule 2 is that order of units matters, but it looks like you've set them correct. What matters in the result isn't just the win %, but also losses taken for both sides. Lastly, Vodka should only be considered a worst case, you can usually do better by properly picking your fights.

Eyeballing it looks tight; not a slam dunk for either side. Do we have any cannons in range? Don't underestimate them as defenders, they don't get collateral'ed.