Turn 173 - Zululand
ok, let's see it.... have i blundered.... if not the queen, then a very important piece in ura?
ginger has sent us some "generous" peace terms..... well, i suppose that means we are about to open the turn to SOME kind of major military threat, though judging by the minimap it doesn't seem to be a fait-accompli fall of ura
actually nope, no one even died except for a scout, who was frankly pretty sacrificial.
ginger has also finished banking and is heading for printing press.... evidently in service of a rifling push? which i mean, sure, that's terrifying, game-ending even, if they can get there, but i'm not sure how worried we're supposed to be about it when their GNP looks like this
as for the lungfish attack
i think this looks decent-to-good for us.... there is an injured G2 jan against whom our G2 musket gets roughly coinflip odds, and then the top jan in the city is CR2 and has a probable kill against our healthy city raider mace. but the other units are very badly injured and will be cleanup. most likely counterattackers are in range but we can return the city to dreylin to hedge against that. the most important point of this operation would be not to keep the city long-term (yet?) but to take a good hammer exchange and force ginger to waste time retaking the city. flounder, the city NE of ura, we are also not yet in position to attack but i'm hoping we can turn it into another thorn in ginger's side and drain on their time and resources.
in the north
ginger respects our claim to the northern wood and has added their own, to the southern (and, yes, more important) wood.... a cuir and two axes is not what i'd call "impressive" but it does beat what we have to attack with right now. that's ok though, i think i'm fine with waiting to take it until we have more horse in range. establishing what amounts to permanent visibility on prussa (via our sentry chariot) unless they take some very bad trades to clear us out is no small thing
so um.... i just did something that i'm gonna need yall to not call me out on
hey, it redeems 8 tiles, all of which are boosted by serfdom... and it comes with 3 chops to almost pay back the cost of the settler (pay no attention that that payoff is coming in the form of a granary and ikhanda that we would otherwise not have had to build...) plus it makes me believe that we have a future in this game other than getting crushed by ginger so i proclaim that to constitute value
well, still a lot of uncertainty about how i want the shape of the rest of this turn to play out, but i'll take the little attack at lungfish, at least
musket vs injured g2 jan (45%): dies but it's very close
longbow vs the same (100%): wins flawlessly
cr2 mace vs jan (17%): dies but does good damage
7.2 health mace (yeah, we never had time to stop to heal from aksum....) vs 4.3 health jan: got emmm
uh.... 5.9 health mace vs 5 health jan (68%): wins
uesugi kenshin (heavily promoted guerilla 3 longbow) vs 4.6 health jan (88%): that's a win
um... we have to use more longbows on offense but what are we supposed to do to make them better against jans? they can't take pinch.....
...... drill 3 longbow (please don't laugh... although in retrospect i do think i should have gone combat 2) vs 3.2 health jan (92%): wins
and for the treb we should just go in with the guerilla bow directly i think so it can defend the city
wow, one whole gold
you're too kind, game....
anyways, the only way to keep our survivors from getting wiped by cuirs in the fog is to give the city back to dreylin, so i'll be doing that
not sure if i'm supposed to risk some of OUR units to try to defend it afterwards on drey's behalf... i might, but more likely i'll just leave them in range of more cruel little counterattacks like this. if our survivors continue to survive, we will have killed 5 jans and a trebuchet for the price of just one of our muskets and an obsolete mace, not a bad ROI at all
except. we could be in some trouble after all, because.... dreylin logged in as i was playing and refused to take lungfish back
that, i have to admit, i was not anticipating. only motivations i can think of are a) uncertainty about if it's allowed in the rules (we voted for 1 city per deal.....) and b) desire to screw us (but then why build the road to let us take the city in the first place? and how pissed off at someone do you have to be to turn down a free city from them???) either way, i'm sad to say that there's a good chance our brave attackers now get totally slaughtered for no reason on ginger's turn
i have adopted a new approach to combat-roading in areas that could be in range of a cuir snipe: just do it with one worker only, and leave them unguarded. that way while ginger COULD snipe the worker, the implied threat of being killed by a pike on the counterattack should be enough to keep the exchange inefficient-looking in their mind.... and ofc guarding with a stack should be even worse as they know we're rolling a decent number of cats around at this point
ok, i worried about it extensively and we are really not remotely close to finishing miltrad by the end of the GA. plus the late slavery swap not only accelerates the tech but means we can stay in slavery longer to whip multiple cuir waves. i'm going to swap to nationhood/theocracy but stay in serfdom for now. so let's draft some guys!
"hell no, we won't go!" so sayeth the citizens of mitakeumi, takayasu, ura, and daiesho, who, and i just checked this with our chiefs of staff, very much ARE going to go. and as expected, in theocracy, we are juuuust barely over the threshold where our new draftees can take pinch out of the gate and murder janissaries. or they can take woodsman and defend our dubious claim to the Forests of Attaleia
now i have to go swap a bunch of cities that are not yet jewish off their 1t-from-completion unit builds. but i think our timing was still basically good on the judaiization push. i haven't been highlighting it but we are up to 11 jewish cities, and takakeisho, ura, and late-bloomer lalibela (yup, THE lalibela) are all 2-turning missionaries. at this point most of our strong cities are jewish, it's mostly the small ones who haven't seen the light (excepting border-city monsters kirishima and wakamotoharu, but i'm somewhat hesitant to draft heavily from there as they are supplying all our western holdings with 3-gold domestic trade routes)
we also finished a gigantic number of GA-powered military builds this turn, something like 8 or 10... so all in all i'm quite eager to see the brewing spike in our milpower
assuming we don't blow it all getting pushed back due to the Lungfish Debacle >:[ really drey, you don't want your city back?? man, why the hell not?
one more thing.... i um... i know this is my fault and is also probably going to be reversed next turn, but i'm getting a little nervous about our city count.... up to 29, 5 higher than second-place superdeath, within striking distance of ginger's milpower and apparently up two cities in our war with them? these other nerds aren't about to forget that ginger is the runaway here, right? ginger? whose every city is worth about a billion of ours via the trinity? luckily it's not like greenline of "i have no gunpowder" or mjmd of "i have no gunpowder and am also about to shut off research forever" can do much about it but.....
i have now dismissively laughed off first a genuine peace offer from ginger and now what could maybe be better characterized as a peace demand... but i wonder about in what circumstances we should be considering peace with them..... in my opinion the only acceptable endgame is conquest, or at least stripping them of their babylonian gains (and of course they'd never take peace after that), but is that really true? say they were willing to give us 3 or 4 cities for peace (strictly speaking i don't think this is legal, but let's say we temporarily get up 3 cities by taking flounder and lungfish and then offer peace for a fourth), and in exchange we don't have to whip ourselves into the ground mass-building cuirs.... would the game really be over in ginger's favor after such a deal?
