[Spoilers] Shallow Thought and Hitru's series of (unfortunate?) events

[shallow_thought]

Spent over an hour in game, looking around and chatting with Hitru. And what did we actually do? Nothing . We looked at using cuirs we have in Elkad's territory to burn either Iron Man or Star Lord. A rough estimate suggested we'd need most of our stack to get through the rifles though - he had two rifles in hilly Star Lord, three, including a C1CD2 on in flatland Iron Man. We decided that cold war serves us better than hot for now (I found time to sim later - a better player would have done that first, of course - which showed that my estimates were a little pessimistic, but we'd still need to commit 8-10 cuirs for one city, of which we probably wouldn't get back any survivors once the counterattack came in).




We will also be in a better position to threaten GROOT (former Almaty) if we wait a little. Next turn PP3 pops 3rd-ring borders, which grabs a key tile and lets us position our cuirs to one-turn the city. Cuzco will follow suit a turn later, which should make us more secure there and give us some options. We'll also detach some troops from our big defensive stack to Olaf, from where they can threaten Black Panther.




But we're gaining by sitting still - so long as Superdeath doesn't build up enough offensive force to attack before we can make use of Rifling. He's been drafting hard, so a lot of his power is in one-movers, but the graph is still a worry.




Still, our plan now is keep Elkad happy that we're ready to help him defend, but not to declare war unless we have to actively help him. War-peace between us and Superdeath risks letting him eat Elkad. One reason for this decision is that Elkad moved his stack to the north, away from SD, presumably to cover against Magic Science. Oh, and Magic Science cancelled all his deals with us other than OB, so we're happy to have strength in Cuzco.

[shallow_thought]

Logged in to an offer of iron for our spare wheat, dye, sugar, rice from Magic Science. If that's the price to keep him in the war against Superdeath, sure. Except that he has already made peace . We send cow-cow and stone-stone to Elkad, trying to communicate that we have no intention of attacking him and are prepared to declare on Superdeath if he actually advances again. But there's not a lot we can do to help Elkad against MS, other than not supplying him with lots of resources of course . On the SD front, he has unsurprisingly reinforced some of his vulnerable cities. We could probably still burn Star Lord, but Iron Man is now officially too tough to crack. Black Panther remains vulnerable, so we've detached a few cuirs to Olaf as planned, just in case.

The Cuzco front is more interesting. Our border pops (with another to come from Cuzco next turn) have made us a lot more secure, and let us set up to one-turn GROOT. Ideally we'd like to be able to move our troops further away from Elkad's border to avoid any possible misunderstanding, but at least the hills prevent us from accidentally threatening Sofia when the treaty runs out. Next turn ... .




SD continues to stack troops in the ring of cities around IQ. I'd be a lot happer if we could just get eyes on the highlighted tile, but no - he can one-turn us from the fog.




Demos continue to favour us - except that SD has nearly closed the power gap. The countdown to Rifling continues (7t): we've decided to try to trim this by a turn or two with a little bit of wealth building - AA is the first proper production city to switch to that in a long time, maybe followed by BeaB next turn. And we'll probably try to rush the last turn, jump from 3t to 1t to try to avoid any last-minute interventions from anyone who has tech visibility. But mostly it's still units, units, units, including enough cats to shred any super-stacks of rifles he marches up. Hopefully .

[shallow_thought]

All is still quiet with us and Superdeath. He now has 4 rifles in Black Panther, so our cuirs get sent back to deterence duty in our big, visible stack covering IQ and Olaf. He's also packed more rifles into Iron Man and Star Lord - some serious damn turtling going on there. Magic Science continues to have fun with galleons. I'd rather he was doing it at SD's expense than Elkad's, but he captured Sofia. He's left a single musket in the city - I wonder if this was some sort of bait to try to get us to join him against Elkad, or a misunderstanding based on the deal he got out of last turn? We're not interested right now.




We've been mostly focused on the power graph recently, but here's the full big four. You can see that we're still well down from our peak, but have done rather well relatively out of all the bloodshed. If nothing happens before we can build rifles and cavs of our own in numbers, we should be able to get an edge, for all that SD may well still be ahead in absolute beakers with Lib and Econ. We're not sure what he's researching now, but he's down to 1 (one) gold from 85 last turn. Chem->MilSci could lead to us having to face commandos, or he could be working for Compass->Optics (but I'd have expected more progress) for some sort of defence against MS. But it's pretty much got to be one of Chem, Const or Compass.













Yeah, that power graph is still a problem. We're 5t from rifling, working towards it at 50% slider, and cannot hope to match his military production without it. Maybe a big burst of research/wealth could pull a turn off that at the end? In the meantime, we're hoping that his gain is all rifles (he continues to draft), and that we can deter any attack with the threat of cats/cuirs on the counter. But my feeling is that if he wants to win he needs to hit us soon and see if we crumble. Don't put the popcorn away just yet .

[shallow_thought]

OK, quick one for any alert lurkers. What is going on here?




The culture on that tile is ... nada. Not zero, nothing. While we have 5% on the tile 2W. I'd expected to get that tile at the end of last turn, as well as the tile 1N of Cuzco. Not having them is making me nervous ... and SD declared and sniped our scouting axe. With a knight, which I think he then deleted, so no serious complaints there.

Is this because the "real" culture is so heavily MS, and his recaptured city (unlike a replanted one) actually does "own" the tile in some sense?

BTW, SD sent an immediate peace treaty. I have declined so as to look around, and then paused - major decision to make.

[shallow_thought]

So, our cold war with Superdeath has been upgraded to a tepid one. We decided that a treaty was too much - SD would just eat Elkad, and we're not set up to take our share (also moral issues - although I'm sure we could have got over them if the situation had been more favourable). Cease fire? Sends the wrong signal to Elkad, who has moved his big musket/praetorian stack (66 units!) back towards the SD border as would be shown in the screenshot if I'd actually taken it .

Now, that border is spiky with fortified rifles, but if Elkad decides to go in (out of boredom or frustration rather than any real hope of gains, I suspect), we'll assist. So, we've replied to the iron-iron and we'll see what happens.

I would genuinely like to assist against Magic Science, who is currently hassling Portu with frigates (and whose OB with SD lead to the loss of our gallant axe), but there is nothing we can do. Declare and capture Sofia? We can't give it to Elkad (I suspect it won't liberate to him). So we'll just keep making what use we can of MS' trade routes and hope that Elkad isn't too upset.

We do have to be aware that SD has now passed us in power (4t to rifles...). We have a lot of catapults waiting if he does decide to make a play, and Hitru has been tweaking our defenses, so SD can't rely on me making a noob blunder . And if he doesn't? The rest of the demos say that he really should. Either against us directly, or a serious play against Elkad to grab more land. Or make peace with Elkad and turn the diplo pressure back on us again ... but hopefully Elkad just isn't in the mood.




Will we come to regret not taking 10t peace with the new number one power? Stay tuned...

[Old Harry]

Sometimes culture takes more than one turn to iron itself out after a city capture. I assume it's to do with the order that players are processed at the end of the turn. No idea why the numbers aren't showing up though.

Also:

[shallow_thought]

Also:

Don't get too excited - SD sent us the peace offer again. We initially declined so as to look around, but this time Elkad has accepted (or offered himself last turn), so we've sent one back. Our main objection was to giving SD the chance to attack Elkad, so this suits us. Suits us very well actually - if SD accepts.

There is still some active warfare - Elkad recaptured Sofia. Now I will never know what was going on with that culture.




(I know it's boring for the lurkers to keep posting shots of the same bit of terrain, but I like to have at least one full-screen shot every turn, for reference).

[Old Harry]

One tip when you get a diplo window - use the F-keys to see what's going on in the world without losing the offer...

Your score suggests that you've come out ahead over the last few turns. How are you going to turn that into the win?

[shallow_thought]

One tip when you get a diplo window - use the F-keys to see what's going on in the world without losing the offer...

Your score suggests that you've come out ahead over the last few turns. How are you going to turn that into the win?

I'd love to be writing a full analysis of how we were going to ride this peace into a glorious, victorious future, but this game doesn't allow for that. A brief record of the previous turns:
- We made peace with SD.
- We finished Rifling.
- We decided that it was worth picking up Theology and building the Apostolic Palace.
- We were thinking that Compass->Optics->Astro would probably be our next move.
- Elkad triggered his Golden Age, switching to some civics that might let him reach new techs in sensible time.
- Our GNP continued to be much better than anyone else.

Our economy is only at around 20% break-even because of all the units we have, but it's still better than Superdeath or Elkad. Astro would be a solidifying play, grabbing at least our natural astro island, extending our trade routes to more of Magic Science's cities and letting us defend our coast. Winning would probably be a matter of just gently squeezing until we had concessions or tanks (it might be possible to make a move earlier).

Then this happened. Turns out that Elkad only had a ceasefire with Superdeath . And we can't do much to assist for another 8t. And that means we might have no choice but to take what we can from Elkad.




Now, I could be wrong (Hitru still favours trying to hit SD if we can build enough cavalry and Elkad can hold out). SD might just be on a raid - even trying to provoke us into rash action. Elkad defended extremely well before, and has a 60-unit stack near his capital. But this power graph suggests to me that the gap is too big this time.




We may have to grab what's in reach. Even that could be tricky: Elkad has shown no desire to scout us, now or before our war, which suggests to me he has city visibility on us, so he'll see us coming. Let's hope he feels more spiteful towards SD than us.

[Charriu]

What's your estimate on the next techs?