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

[greenline]

After everything going on yesterday, a quiet turn today. I added about 100 beakers to our research by building research in Carmilla, which lets us finish Democracy in 2 turns. Then Carmilla can overflow 50h into Statue.

Bing continues to draft a lot. I do not know what he expects to accomplish with just a bunch of rifles vs rifles and machine guns. He keeps falling more behind in tech with each turn. Cavs and cannons are much scarier units in this era.

Corp payments are very, very expensive:




It is a good thing basically every city I own has built a courthouse.

Aetryn did 1 turn corp as we had suspected. But no founding of CreCon just yet. Possible he did not have an Engineer and I was just overreacting. Or maybe they are saving it for Statue?

[Tarkeel]

Corp payments are very, very expensive:

They are, but remember that with Wall Street you get 12 gold back for every city.

[greenline]

Here's hoping the double synergy from Wall St on a shrine and an HQ will carry us.

Not much happened the current turn. Spread MinInc to two more cities - was just barely able to squeak to democracy with the gold lost. Will turn research to zero next turn, start Statue, and we will be headed to Assembly Line.

[greenline]

Aetryn founded CreCon this turn and finally cancelled our silver deal. Annoyingly have a few unhappy faces popping up in core cities, need to slip in colosseums to fix that. I tried asking bing to swap happy resources, but I get the impression he isn't interested in diplomacy.

[greenline]

Bing graciously accepted the resource trades for now, so that takes the immediate happy pressure off. Should I take that as confirmation he won't be trying some silly invasion in the next few turns? Hard to say. But this is a good time to squeeze in a round of MGs for defence. Don't need to rush to Assembly Line - I am fine if Aetryn techs it sooner because our cities will still be able to build the factory + coal plant pair much faster.

(Really wonder what Bing's gameplan here is. His tech rate must be atrocious at this point, he has been sitting on the same few techs for the last ten turns. Is he going for culture? He should at least build Sistine! Is he running the EP slider???)




Statue due in 8 turns. May drop when I get a MinInc executive over here. Having over 100 hammers per turn base in a city pre Factories is a sweet, sweet feeling.

[greenline]

And then minutes later Bing PMs me he is taking second half of the turnsplit... oh well.

[Tarkeel]

That's going to be interesting.

[greenline]

From what I can gauge of the game state, it feels like more kingmaking.

Bing had his 32 turn golden age. If his economy is so bad now he feels a rush if the only way to go, it's because he refused to tech Constitution that entire time and is stuck in HR. If he wanted to go all in on the rush, he should have gone for slavery and cavs. The drafted rifle approach is what made me think he wasn't going to attack, because it's terribly uneconomical. Do the demos suggest I am such a runaway the only way is to attack now or lose? I don't think so. My MFG is quite high, but I am slipping in GNP. Aetryn was already discovering several techs at a faster rate than I could, and the only way to keep up on my end was mass wealth / research building. So Aetryn will get to sit pretty and claim all the bonuses of the late tech tree while my research plummets as I fend off the rifle garbage wave Bing has spent his post GA turns building. I might have to abandon Xistland and send my garrison troops to defend the core.

A lot of this is just frustration at having my sand castle kicked, since this is the most competitive position I've ever been in in one of these games. But the cavalier tone in Bing's pm didn't give me the impression he gave the invasion much thought, more like he was just slamming units together just because he could. And I have to wait for Aetryn and Xist to play to see how bad the situation is. Grumble grumble.

[greenline]

After all my dooming and glooming yesterday, the situation turned out to be not quite so bad as I imagined.




This is the only direction Bing chose to press forward in. Like you stated a few turns earlier, he figured that the incredibly terrible geography made it so that he can easily swipe up these two cities without me being able to do much about it. My railnet is not yet complete enough to shuffle all the troops at the southeast Bing border in this direction. And even then, I don't have nearly enough ships to move them all.

Ultimately, this is a long term result of my failure to grab the Cow / Clam spot earlier, which was a result of me not having the economy to back up expansion in face of the crippling maintenance costs of this not so lush map. And the map for putting zero food on the metamorphosis spot in between me and the Cow / Clam. In terms of luxes and land quality definitely seems like I haven't been playing with a full hand for this game.


I haven't ended the turn yet, Tarkeel. What should we do here? I can spend some gold on upgrading the archers to rifles, but he has enough crap in that stack that both cities will probably fall.

[Tarkeel]

Do you have enough workers to chop out the lumbermill? Don't expect so. Could always do the SD thing and pillage our own improvements, and spitewhip down to 1, but that's not something I like doing.

I don't think it's worth upgrading the archers, but could fall back to Forgotten Soldier, which is the more important city of the two, since it's a port on our lake. Could even offer peace for the Good Book?