[SPOILERS] Parkin brings the rain down in Africa: Churchill of Zulu

[Grimace]

Turn 139

Nothing much in the world, again. GJ’s golden age ended, which is going to hurt his military prospects.

I whipped a couple of buildings (courthouse, courthouse, forge) so I can put military units in the queue. I also started shifting some units down towards my southern border with haram.



Here you can see the border with mackoti. There’s a nice two-plot-wide chokepoint between our two civs, which makes it easily defensible from both sides. He should be able to see the units I currently have in Nyala, which will hopefully be a deterrent.



Here’s the border with haram. I marked off the section that should be easy to carve out of his empire because they’re semi-isolated. On the right side of the screen you can see a path between our two civs, but it’s unimproved and should be fairly easy to defend. So even in a short war I ought to be able to capture those 3 cities without too much difficulty. I don’t know about the city I can’t see, but the other two have 1 and 2 military units in them; axes and spears.



Also the border with GJ, just for completeness. Notice that it’s a big one, and lots of space between our cities.

[Grimace]

Turn 140

Not a whole lot happening right now in game…even the war between GJ and haram doesn’t seem to have much going on. Seven built the Parthenon, but other than that, no world events.

Built some units and started moving them towards the border with haram. I’m going to make a go at those three isolated cities on my southern border once I have a few knights. My goal is to commence war in 4 turns – 1 turn for guilds, 2 turns to whip/build 4-5 knights, and I’ll have 4-5 catapults plus several macemen and get them down there. I think that should be sufficient to take those cities unless he’s able to reinforce heavily.

I also believe I’ll be able to see both mackoti and haram’s research next turn.

Power-wise, we’re currently third – only mackoti and Gawdzak have higher power than we do, so that’s both good and bad. Good that we’ve passed haram, which means that with Guilds and kaniggits we should be able to achieve our invasion goals. But bad that mackoti is still so high and he’s on our damn border.

[Grimace]

Turn 141

In world news, someone out there nabbed a GE, so I’m curious to see if a wonder suddenly appears next turn or not.

In domestic news, we generated a low-probability Great Prophet. Though not ideal, it’s not totally useless because we can use him to build the Christian shrine and generate some more GPT. We also finished researching Guilds and started building some knights. I switched research to Engineering, but we’re running at 0% science right now to build up the money to do the research. The extra road movement would be awesome, and I wouldn’t mind pikemen since haram definitely has his Ger-powered war elephants. I’m also tempted to go Paper to shoot for the University of Sankore, which would give us a nice boost to our research. Thoughts?

[Old Harry]

If you're going to be at war for a while Engineering is pretty important. I've never built UoS even in single player - how much of a boost would you get?

I'd suggest taking a war seriously if you're set on it... Go all in until its won and then concentrate on economic stuff.

[Grimace]

UoS gives you +2 base beakers for each religious building belonging to your chosen religion (in our case, Confucianism). Since almost all of our cities have both a temple and monastery, that's +4 base beakers per city (which goes up to 6 for almost all of them because we also have libraries almost everywhere). Not game-changing, but that can shave a turn or two off of research right now.

But you're right, better not to take the diversion right now with a war on the horizon and focus on techs that will be of immediate use.

[Grimace]

Old Harry, do you know how to tell how much someone has whipped by the amount their score decreases?

[Krill]

Libs would make it plus five not plus six.

[Grimace]

Whoops, you're right, +25% not +50%. Not sure what I was thinking. Thanks for catching that!

[Grimace]

Turns 143 & 144

Still not much happening in the world. Someone got a GM. Power levels are looking good for us:



Only mackoti and Gawdzak are ahead of us. Haram moved a Keshik into our territory (I had maintained open borders to try to have a little bit of a surprise), but he was about to happen across the stack moving down towards him, so I slammed the borders closed. Probably tips my hand a little bit, but I’d rather he didn’t know exactly what’s coming, which he would have if he’d had a chance to move again. If I were him I’d probably reinforce, but he has to be careful about GJ too because his power has climbed quite a bit even given the beating he’s already suffered.

We went to 100% science this round and we’ll finish Engineering in 3 rounds. I also got visibility on haram’s research and he’s got Aesthetics selected at the moment, but he’s at 0% science so that could change when he pushes the slider up.

[Grimace]

Turn 145

We got an AP vote option, but neither of them was particularly desirable – either stop the war against haram (which I want to keep going so he has to fight on two fronts) or stop trading with Gawdzak. I thought about the second, because Gawdzak is doing very well, but I’m getting half of my trade route income from him, so I didn’t want to shut that off. It’s a little bit unfortunate that haram is Confucian, because it would have been fun to at least try to vote a war against him, but oh well.

Haram did reinforce one of his cities…it now has an axe, two wellies, two cats and a spear, and he’s got a longbow and spear in the other city I can see, so closing the borders definitely eliminated the element of surprise. Shouldn’t be enough to stop me, but it’ll be costlier than it would have been. Troops are moving into place, and I should be ready to attack very soon. I don’t want to wait too long, because I’m afraid he’s going to sue for peace from GJ and get it, giving him the ability to focus on me, but at the same time I have to make sure I have enough troops available to make success probable. Boy, this is much harder than playing against the AI.

Interestingly, we got research on mackoti this round and he’s going for Nationalism. I suspect we may see a draft coming up soon.

All I did this round was whip some buildings with overflow into troops and continue moving troops south. I've also been building up a decent force on my isolated peninsula that is my north border, to defend against any attacks from haram there.