RPB3 SPOILERS Bismarck of India (regoarrarr, darrelljs, sooooo, sunrise089)

[sunrise089]

Anyways, so it looks like their army is:

*14 cuirassiers
*8 muskets
*3 maces
*4 pikes (ick)
*11 cats
*2 chariots
*1 Great Artist

Athlete has:

*10 knights
*5 muskets
*7 longbows
*5 cats

So, Mali would have odds in every single battle without needing to promote or apply collateral....so lets see if we can figure out any good options.

[sunrise089]

Ok, T143.

Mali adopted Bureaucracy before their GAge ended, so at least they don't plan to draft (and hence be at war) forever.

Carthage got a GScientist.

Krill DOW'd and then made peace with Byzantium.

So as far as helping Athlete goes, I gave him the following instructions:

1) Draft then slave his front city.
2) Pull everything out and get it as far back as possible, either out of range of the cuirassiers or inside a forest.
3) Draft everywhere and also slave cats w/o penalty.
4) Get gold and upgrade those knights.

Ottomans have 5 knights on the way, but not being able to upgrade units in your allies' lands isn't cool. I'd like to see unit upgrades allowed wherever you have open borders.

Because of that I can't just send our mounted stack on. I make a half-hearted move, since a) I don't know how much we want to help, and b) I don't know if we want to take gold away from teching, so I send our knights along this turn and move our HA to the edge of our territory. We can always gift the knights and let Athlete upgrade them...I'd just rather not gift away units like that. I also send our sentry HA up north as well.

Other than that, we're starting to get a halfway decent force along the Babylonian border...not enough to stop a stack like Mali brought in on Inca, but enough to stop a small exploitative raid. Over the medium term (we're probably safe over the short term due to our peace treaties) our biggest risk is Babylon and Egypt both posturing aggressively towards us, since even with mounted troops our border cities are like 4 turns distance from one another.

EDIT: Rifling in 8t. CUDDLE really needs to decide how we're allocating gold to us (we're good this turn at least), the Steel researchers, and Inca for upgrades.

2nd EDIT: Darn it Athlete, look at this:



Ok, you want to settle a floodplain city. Option A (no overlap with any other city), which you chose, gives you:

*7 floodplains
*1 lake
*3 desert hills
*5 deserts
*2 peaks
*1 grassland
*1 plains

Option B (also no overlap, dotted line above), which you rejected, gives you:

*5 floodplains
*1 lake
*1 grassland hill
*1 desert hills
*7 deserts
*2 peaks
*1 river grassland
*1 grassland
*1 plains

So in exchange for giving up 2 floodplains and 2 desert hills you gain 1 grassland hill, 1 river grassland, and 2 deserts. Not a great trade, except you've chosen to improve desert mines over floodplains anyways. And you've popped your third ring, so B city would control the same border tiles, and more tiles to the east. Oh yeah, also, your only border city in your entire empire with a non-ally would be on a hill and across a river.

I'm not saying I don't make or haven't made mistakes in this game or others, but this sort of mistake is annoying since we're being asked to spend our hammers defending this awful city plant. Front cities in game like these are disposable. Their goal is to buy time so you can defend your core empire. But planting the border city off the hill is pretty silly

[sunrise089]

Ok, this looks good for Inca, except I've lost track of the Artist.



So lets examine the stacks real quick.

*Behind Kalin's Burgers, since Mali (foolishly?) bombarded, there are 2 cuirassiers and 5 cats. Those guys can only make it 1t into the current Incan culture regardless of bombs, except the cuirs.
*Inside Kalin's Burgers are 3 cuirassiers, 3 muskets, 1 mace, 1 pike, 1 cat, and a chariot. With a bomb those guys may be able to get 1t outside Kiwi Town in 1 move. Otherwise again just 1t inside the culture.
*The main stack, 2t from Kiwi Town, is 11 cuirassiers, 4 muskets, 2 maces, 2 pikes, 1 chariot, and 5 cats. With a bomb, the Cuirassiers only MAY be able to double move the cap.

Plea: If someone could calculate the culture for a bomb of both Kalin's Burgers and Kiwi Town that would be awesome!

Since I can't figure out the bomb culture myself, I'm going to assume Swiss will continue to attack fairly conventionally. Therefore the plan, I think, should be this:

1) Every Musket or Longbow that can make it inside Kiwi Town (Pink Dot) this turn does so. The stack 3S of Kalin's Burgers should have workers road the desert so they can make it inside. Also put the Axe inside, the units from Texas city should move as we discussed in chat so they can attack past the city next turn if needed. The one cat inside Kiwi should move out to Blue Dot (see below). The goal here is to try to make them move those slow movers up and not just slam the city with 40% culture defense. Even if they bomb and take the first ring tiles they should only be able to bombard not cause any collateral.

2) All other one movers except MP units, move to Blue Dot on the grassland road. That should be ~9 cats, plus muskets, longbows, etc.

3) One movers that can't reach Blue or Pink (units East of the capital) should move as far West as they can, either 1t or 2t West of the cap.

4) The knights should move onto Blue after verifying with one knight that they can still promote the same turn from that tile. Every knight should get promoted that you can afford. You should also ask for as much gold as you need....getting all of those knights to strength 12 this turn will be ideal.

5) Pray that Swiss doesn't promote his stack until he's ready to attack

I don't think any possible bomb puts Blue in range of enemy units, and Blue should always be able to cover the capital, so I think this plan is pretty safe.

Inca, good job at making so many units quickly. Let's all hope Mali just walks that stack 1S/1SW next turn.

[sunrise089]

T144 for India:

We picked up MilTrad, and as expected (and shown above) Inca lost their front city to Mali.

Other than that, not much. I sent our knights further towards Inca, and our HA stack remains at home (170g per upgrade...yikes!).

Sooooo, I did a bad thing. I reported a 6t ETA on Rifling to CUDDLE, not noticing that was due to our only real hammer city being set to Research as a placeholder. Therefore I've set almost every non-military city to research for at least this turn so we can make a good-faith effort to get Rifling in 6. If our allies don't supply the gold of course then there's nothing we can do.

[sunrise089]

Ok, so Mali apparently figured out they were walking into a trap and pulled back (and bombed the former Incan city). That's bad because it means they took a city without losses and their army is intact. It's good because all of those units they brought will be pretty darn obsolete in 10t, and of course Inca's army is also intact.



Mali's army is:

*17 cuirassiers
*8 muskets
*1 maces
*4 pikes
*8 cats
*2 chars

Inca's army is:

*8 cuirassiers
*2 knights
*11 muskets
*6 longbows
*9 cat
*2 axe
*1 quechua

Inca also has some stuff off screen IIRC. Still, definite advantage Mali, but the advantage is nowhere near what it was 3t ago. Unless Mali figures out something I'm missing then I think that front is a stalemate pre-rifles. Obviously the hope is we can keep some tabs on Mali's army too, in case it heads for Ruff. Really I think the big danger is about 10 rifles added to the stack (so 2-3t drafting) making it pretty much immune to mounted attacks until the rifles are killed...but that's at least 5t in the future.

As far as instructions go, it looks like all Incan cities are safe from one moves, so I'd probably just keep my units (including most of the units from Kiwi Town) camped on the tile where the Cuirassiers currently are. I might keep the longbows in Kiwi just to let them build up some fortification. Other than that I think we're just reacting on this front. I'm not sure if the Ottoman and Indian knights that are on their way should continue to head to Incan territory, but really neither side can attack the other (Inca certainly can't attack that bombed city) without new tech and/or reinforcements.

[sunrise089]

Ok, T145 for us:

First, thank you Ruff for OFFERING 250g...it may be the first gold offer I've received...ever...

Second, good news for CUDDLE - even with only researching at 60% last turn due to allies not approving gold requests we can still get Rifling in 5t (it was 6t last turn, so we didn't loose a turn) with some cities running research.

In other news Mali built Sistine and Ottomans swapped to Nationhood/Slavery/Theo/Free Market.

Interesting news in the Northwest:



So that explains all the sentry dodging. Interestingly enough the HA under our knight is named "Go Away Please." I wonder if they view us as a threat (we still have good power and we have a treaty in the south). We could actually try to kill that city in 2t if it isn't reinforced, but I expect it will be. Currently in that desert area we have a knight, HA, and 2 chars and they have 2 knights and a HA.

[spacemanmf]

Wow, India, Byzantium and Egypt appear to have expanded north/south so much that just three civs have covered the whole north/south wrap.

You mention stalemate and, given the apparent lack of wars, this appears to be the case across the whole map. Where do you see this stalement decisively breaking? When air support becomes available?

[sunrise089]

Probably sooner, due to diplomacy. One of two things needs to happen. 1) Someone get cut off diplomatically so they fall behind in tech and don't get gifted gold or units. This allows 3-4 other civs to band together and quickly tear them apart. I anticipate this would be either Egypt or India. 2) A similar thing can happen without diplo changes if every civ in an alliance can offer a credible army. For instance, if PAT members Carthage, England, Babylon, Mali, and Maya were all invaded by one decent-sized CUDDLE army that was careful not to get itself killed, that can tie all of those armies down. That would then allow the three remaining CUDDLE members to attack Egypt. The difficulty is that it's tough to block support being sent to Egypt without getting, say, the Byzantine army killed while it's in the field. And it's tough to make the attack even happen in the first place since all of the 1v1 wars would be high risk/low reward for the attackers.

Third option - an attack like on that Mali pulled against a rival that's just totally devoid of power. If, for instance, Ruff had been attack by our mounted stack (he's an ally, just saying relative power levels) 15t ago we might have knocked him out before he could get any support, or at least raze 3-4 cities.

[sunrise089]

Soooo, are you going to be able to move the workers in time? We're supposed to be pausing for Portugal until they play this turn, so that may give us a bit of a cushion.

[sooooo]

Yep, going to do it now.

EDIT: We got 250 gold from Ruff, but had to give it all to Nakor to upgrade some troops. Can only research at about 30% this turn.