[SPOILERS] Bismarck of Mali (NobleHelium and Lewwyn)

[NobleHelium]

You going to bombard for a turn first? I think that's a good idea most likely, especially if he uses his cats immediately. We can just heal up and attack later. The deer stack is very well defended.

[Lewwyn]

You going to bombard for a turn first? I think that's a good idea most likely, especially if he uses his cats immediately. We can just heal up and attack later. The deer stack is very well defended.

That's a pretty good point and it may well be worth doing that. It will give him an extra turn to build another unit, but if we knock 24% of the tile defense out that makes ALL his LBs and pikes weaker.



So we're ready. We'll see what Ellimist does.

Education completed EOT. Ellimist will get Philo and Taoism. I couldn't get Philo in 1T without a bit of overflow.

10 knights to Kuro's border in 4t

Demos:


Looking fine.

As I said next turn. Nothing much else happened this turn. Though I did see a new knight in Regulus... Not worried.

[NobleHelium]

Meh, the only real point in getting/denying Taoism is just in case of a cultural victory attempt. And most likely we'll be able to roll over the world before that happens. We save ~70 beakers letting him research it first.

Might be worth it to bombard for two turns actually. Really depends on what he does with his cats.

You did the other monastery in Calcium already? Not really sure if the theatre is worth it, although we could build Globe. Not really worth it though unless we're AW for the rest of the game.

[Lewwyn]

Yeah I'm gonna whip that theatre so hard.

I'm drunk. But not worried about shit. Games in the bag.

[Lewwyn]

I do not remember my above post...

Finally got the turn again. I need some time to fix the SS tho. Quick version. I attacked because he built another cat. We lost the cats and 3 knights, but nothing else. Also we lost those knights on battles of 70%, 65% and 75%... so yeah my RNG still sucks. We logically should have lost only 1 knight. (I won a 34% battle with the first knight.) Everything else was above 50%.

I'll report more fully later with the screenie.

[NobleHelium]

Losing only 3 knights sounds good to me. That's not how probability works. Just because all the battles were over 50% doesn't mean we shouldn't have lost any of them.

Alphecca should be renamed Iron (unless you founded a new city before it which I doubt). Next city we found is Cobalt. We want to refound the Fomalhaut location soon I think.

Waiting patiently for pictures...

[Lewwyn]

Well we'll have to wait a small bit. I didn't get all the pics before I closed and when I tried to open Civ4 later it crashed. I may need to reinstall Civ4 to get it working again.

And yes I know its not how probability works.

[NobleHelium]

Pics pweeze.

[Lewwyn]

Okay, figured it out, had to clear the cache.

So upon opening the save:



Here we see their troops and our troops after Ellimist sacced to cats into the main stack. He built another cat so I figured since he had so few units, built a cat and would continue whipping cats until we took the city I decided I should just go for it. Plus I hadn't played a civ turn in days and was itching for action.

So I smooshed the 6 cats into the city:



Here you can see how dmged his units were. Collateral is pretty hefty. No real need to worry about bombarding with that kind of dmg.

Next I attacked with the knights. The maces were getting the longbows and I figured I might as well attack with the 10 power units. I started with an uninjured 2XP knight that I planned to Sacrifice. He won tho From there I just used a stack attack because I was getting great odds:



See after that first battle everything was good, just got unlucky with a few knights there. Overall though minimal casualties I think. Now we can start shipping these units towards Kuro.

Here's the city:



We got a granary and a mint which are pretty much the most important buildings anyway. If we hadn't gotten buildings I was going to raze the city since it would have simply been easier to settle and rebuild without the old Ellimist culture and unhappiness. But these buildings were enough to stay my hand.

About Kuro:



I think this is a plan worth trying. We have about 11 knights on the inner island. If we send 6 on this plan that still leaves 5 to be shipped to join the main front. Also we have 5 maces and 2 Xbows moving towards the front as well. They will be good for guarding cats as we approach. Plus there are 10
knights on the way and 5 from the inner island makes 15. In any case we have time to think about our options.

Demos:



Tech is good. We can get Liberalism in 2T at this rate, which means we do need to do 1 or 2 turns of gold.

In any case we're now crushing everyone. We have more than our share of the main ring on both sides + the entire inner island now. We need to rebuild the one city on the inner island, but with Caravels we will be able to keep that unassailable since Ellimist only has one city on the inner ring, Kuro has 0 and Jkaen has the one. We could probably peace Ellimist and ride our tech out to victory but it might be more fun to keep both Kuro and Ellimist at war and slowly pick at them with higher tech units as we get them. I've started a bunch of infrastructure builds and only Carbon is building units now.

Argon might build a cat or two, we'll see. For now it finished a theatre for culture and an extra happy. I won't whip the city anymore since it has 8 unhappy from whipping. But we got maybe 10 knights from continuous whipping out of that city. It basically was almost enough on its own to supply units to fight Kuro. That left the entire rest of the empire free to fight Ellimist. One city that we demanded for participation in the war has supplied that war almost entirely. What a good deal for us.

[NobleHelium]

Okay, great. We definitely should not have razed Alphecca since that doesn't remove his culture - his culture is tile culture, which would still be there if we were to refound the city. Only way to get rid of the culture is to eliminate the player from the game, otherwise your best bet is just to pump your own culture into the city. He really doesn't have that much culture there anyway, just look at Potassium - we're already getting close to majority culture there.

We finally captured a worker I see.

I like the Kuro plan in general, I was already thinking of attacking him behind the front anyway by unloading knights. Most likely he's got like one archer in that city and that's it. I don't think we need to whip another galley out - we already have three galleys in the inner sea, we can just move them to the southwest. I don't think it matters much if we're a few turns slower, since I doubt he's going to see an attack from that direction coming. I'm also not sure if that's the best location to land - if we can land somewhere else and fork multiple cities that would be better. Remember he built a new city after we razed Karkat, inland to the west of the Karkat ruins. Six knights is a decent amount, but if we can get Astronomy and whip out a fast galleon for another three knights that would be better.

Let's get lots of infrastructure in the new cities, and we need two more missionaries. One for Alphecca (before it comes out of revolt and we whip the library preferably) and one for the refounding of Fomalhaut. Remember we lose Stonehenge when we get Astronomy. I see your signs about where we should refound Fomalhaut - I'm not really sure either but I think Ellimist's location is fine. The hill would normally be better, but our cities can grow very large now so we might as well catch more coast tiles and have less overlap. Speaking of that, we should prepare to take the barbarian city - I think we can just build 2-4 amphibious knights in Carbon and whittle the defense down. The workers on the inner island can start building forts on the southeast diagonal near Aluminum, on the farm tiles - we can just leave them 1t to completion until we're ready to go.

Oh and we need to start the Forbidden Palace in Sodium if you haven't, unless you think there's a better location for it.

And speaking of Carbon, we need to decide what to do with the new GG. Either we settle it and get three promo ground units, or we attach it to a 6+ experience unit (probably just a new knight out of Carbon or whatever) and unlock West Point. West Point is hideously expensive as everyone knows, but I think we're in a fine position to build it. The question is whether we want to unlock it now and build it, or wait until we get another GG either from further fighting or Fascism.

We should probably build a couple pikes along the Ellimist border just in case since he's starting to build knights now.

Theatre in Argon is good, we need happiness there, yeah. I think we should cottage over those farms and use it mostly as a normal production city - it'll take the copper tile soon, which will give it decent production when combined with the two grass mines. We should give the clam to Manganese if we haven't, Argon will be fine with just two food resources since we're not whipping it anymore. We should do a galleon in Argon also when we get Astronomy, since we lost our trireme there and Kuro might get frisky. Plus we can terrorize Kuro with it since he's ages from Optics.

We should only need one turn of gold for Liberalism. We're at about 40% breakeven right now and we have more than one turn's worth of gold already. I guess if we end up doing that GP trade with Jkaen we'll be bulbing Printing Press. After Liberalism we might need/want to tech Nationalism next - Ellimist might go for it since he's teched Philosophy now. Obviously we'll want to build the Taj.