[spoilers] Commodore rolls it lolrandom.

[Commodore]

My issue was missing the step on how effective the second bomb would be. Oh well.

Looks like Pindicator stopped, got thoughtful, and took back a city so he's going to be playing smart.

Perfect, I'm a little sad he didn't throw against Yuri with this, but I always expected a spend of the knight stack on my rear like this. He piled all-in with his 2-mover stack, seeing a core(ish) city only guarded by an axe, two spears, and an archer.

...I'm unconcerned. Required a spend of ready cash on a few critical upgrades of axe->rifle and spear->pike, but the reinforcing cannon hurts his stack pretty bad, and thanks to him going deep...this is my stack now. Thanks for the GG points.

His backstop was just strong enough to be annoying, so I kill one of them with the 3-move GG cav...

...and the final setup makes it hard to hit me with what he's got. There's just enough to tempt him in a couple places, we'll see.


Oh, also I took Pin's capital city but that's been the normal path:



He's giving up that shrine next, ideally. Going to have to burn a village to make it a safe advance sadly, but I suspect Pin's going to mostly play for time retreating up that long long peninsula. Can make it a nasty 20+ turn conquest that way, if he can stop Yuri from cutting him off on that side. 

Man I love these tactical puzzle turns.

[Commodore]

Retook the captive, which is nice, but also lookie here...

...THIS is going to clear a lot of culture.


In fact, sweeping that city cleared enough that the fleeing stack of knights are now in MY borders, so this is just a huge amount of GG points:


Satisfying. Although this would have been annoying if I was invested at all in his islands. Going to lose all the fleet, and ironclads will be pressed.


Oh well. The REAL news is that I'm back on researching Railroad, and levees are finally coming online, with predictably amazing results:

[Commodore]

Yeah, that sucked. Worse results than average, but eh. This one's on me.
   

Took the Confucian shrine. It's a nice 52gpt with all the multipliers, plus three more to my culture cities.
   

Dalmation is where I'm happy ending it. That nets me 34 cities and the best of Pin's core. I can win with this. Yuri getting the Long Peninsula and the northeast islands nets him a very vulnerable 27 cities, while Thoth nets the Nice Island to the north to go up to 25. 
   
All the non-Pindicators are growing very nicely.

Yuri's going to keep up with research thanks to banking this Great Merchant.
   

Krill's made it to rifles and is finally no longer lagging in power quite so terribly.
   

Thoth is highest tech rival, with Astro, Chemistry, MilTrad, Rifling, and Steam Power soon.
   
Weird to not be blazing past this era in ten turns flat. I love this tech time.

[Qgqqqqq]

Does this mod have scaling tech costs?

[Commodore]

Does this mod have scaling tech costs?

Checking...apparently. Which makes a CV attempt even better. Now I have three religions too.

[scooter]

Took the Confucian shrine. It's a nice 52gpt with all the multipliers, plus three more to my culture cities.

I wonder if shrine cities get a thumb put on the scale for gold-multipliers to survive conquest, or if this is some really good luck that all 3 of the gold multiplier buildings survived?

[T-hawk]

A shrine wouldn't affect that. It was lucky, though not fantastically so. The chance of survival is defined per building type in the XML. I think the gold buildings are each 67% or something like that, some of them can be better than 50/50.

[scooter]

A shrine wouldn't affect that. It was lucky, though not fantastically so. The chance of survival is defined per building type in the XML. I think the gold buildings are each 67% or something like that, some of them can be better than 50/50.

Ah. I checked and this is right. All three are listed as 66% chance in the XML, so the odds of landing all 3 is just a shade under 30%.

[Commodore]

Dalmation is where I'm happy ending it. That nets me 34 cities and the best of Pin's core. I can win with this. Yuri getting the Long Peninsula and the northeast islands nets him a very vulnerable 27 cities, while Thoth nets the Nice Island to the north to go up to 25. 

Looks like Pin's new job is to retain max cities/land:

[Commodore]

New Empire:

I need a deep analysis, but it's Railroad -> Corporation -> Assembly Line -> SciMeth -> Combustion next while leaning on getting a MoM golden age.