[SPOILERS] Churchill of Portugal: Gallipoli Part II

[wetbandit]

Brief notes from T224-T225:

T224:

-No astro for Serdoa; but he can research bio (sci meth + chem)

-Fire destroyed a theater in Dutch lands

-workshopped with workers

T225

- adjusted EP, going to lose graphs on Slow and Com, no graphs on Plako. Adjusted, you may need to run the EP slider to keep graphs on everyone.

- completed WS on tiles around NNF, and this was a bad idea. Why? I'm just as dense and saw this killed irrigation for other tiles. Sorry. refarming next turn to get the food back online, can WS the riverside grassland farm instead. Hopefully this doesn't put NNF too far behind.

- Pindo teched Chemistry, Serdoa still without Astro. Serdoa front is very quiet.

- looks like Pindooter whipped many frigates

- knight finished, started on carrack

- Kept current builds, monitoring zulu-khmer war. No landings on zulu island yet, seems to be a big cat and mouse game, Pindooter have a sizeable army on their west coasts. Haven't seen any damaged ships either. Lots of eastern cities with 0 or 1 defender.



Zulu shots:

[spacetyrantxenu]

I made it home and can resume playing. I'll play the current turn tomorrow morning, so this is a "got it" post. Thanks for holding down the fort, wetbandit. I'll post some thoughts and replies to the last few posts later, I need sleep badly right now!

[wetbandit]

No problem, hope there isn't too much damage.

[spacetyrantxenu]

T226 - No worries, the farm is back online, it only cost us two food last turn between Old Fish and New New Fish. And I'm pretty sure I had put the sign on that tile anyway.

The Zulu and Khmer are beating each other's brains in again, mostly at sea, but there is also some violence on land. By the time I'm writing this report the turn has rolled to T227 and Civstats showed that Commodore razed a city. It seems like he's going to have to raze and resettle most of Zululand, because they've whipped up a pretty sizable force on land that could threaten any city he tries to hold unless he comes in overpowering numbers. And that may be hard to do with the number of frigates they just whipped. It looks like 11 last turn. If they keep whipping like that they're going to completely destroy their economy, but they're fighting for survival so I'm sure they aren't worried about the economy right now. I hope you guys are all enjoying following that war, I'm only seeing part of it and it's entertaining me.

The carrack finished in Blue Fish so I sailed it into Mayan waters to have a look at Terrapin's garrison:




Obviously I won't be attacking into that, but that was never the plan. I'm willing to just sit here as long as he is, and leave the border (here) the way it is. It's a bit disappointing that he has reinforced New Fish with a pair of knights. He had had only two units in there for the longest time. I could have captured the city with fairly low cost at any time in the last 20 turns or so while it was lightly defended, but at the cost of waking the bear. I never did test to see if I could raze the city, since it was mine so long ago. I assumed that since he controlled so much more of the culture there that I'd be able to raze it but I wasn't sure. It doesn't matter though, it probably wouldn't have been a great idea.

Here's the end of the turn map, not a lot to see:




I turned on research and I'll blow through Theology and Paper in two turns, and then it will probably be time to run as much espionage slider as I can for a few turns. I'll have to figure out how much cash I'll need to save to get enough to steal something from the Zulu, but I'll work that out when I play next time. I think two or three more turns should do it. I'll steal from Skippers since it's the only one of their cities with my culture and my religion. I think both of those contribute to lowering the cost to run espionage missions, right? The only hitch to this plan is that if Commodore takes Skippers before I get to steal from them I'll have to save up even more EPs for a chance to steal, and that may make me better off spending my cash directly on science. We'll see. It's going to take forever to research the next set of techs anyway, stealing seems as good an option as trying to research it myself.

End of turn demographics:




What's this, not last in everything? Oh, the Zulu have whipped away their GNP and population. So I'm not better, they're just worse. Okay. I've lost graphs on Plako and may have trouble getting them back. He's actually spending a few EPs on me to get my graphs for the first time, I think. Because of the giant total he has generated it's getting pricey to keep his charts. Oh well, it was fun running SNN with complete information while it lasted. Sorry guys. Send your complaints to Plako!

[spacetyrantxenu]

Oh, are there any questions about the build in Two Fish?

[Qgqqqqq]

A land grab in pinicaters land (with the presumption that they're getting razed)?

[spacetyrantxenu]

That's not a bad idea, but until Commodore or someone (not me) kills off those 25 or so knights they have defending their cities down there, that wouldn't be a good idea.

But I will say that carracks are caravels and can sail through closed borders....

[Ceiliazul]

GoGo Ice Isle!

Even without Plako's, the graphs are still good... keep it up

[spacetyrantxenu]

T227 - So much controversy! This is what the fuss is about:




Commodore landed a GG knight, exhausting his movement points and then promoted him morale, giving back a movement point. He then overwhelmed the one unit garrison and razed the city, TGIF. Pindicator is obviously irritated by it and I can't blame him, but I don't think Commodore did anything illegal here. He was willing to spend his general to raze a city, so it isn't like it was without cost. But it's a damn good trade for Commdore, I think. Inventive, tricky, yes -- but nothing to frown over (unless it was your city that got burned).

The view is from the north of the Zulu subcontinent facing south. See those other blue flags in the distance?




That's 28 units for the Zulu's killing pleasure. If they can. Or it could be a nightmare, which is more likely. This is going to be very bloody. Commodore essentially has no collateral damage in that stack, but he does have frigates off the coast to blow down cultural defenses. Still, without catapults he's going to have to engage withdrawal knights and hope they retreat to scratch the top defenders. I don't see a lot of defensive units in that stack so I guess Commodore is going to raze everything he has to for now and then resettle later. Break the Zulu until they can't resist and then absorb the remainder. Something like that. But they have a lot of knights now, more uberphants may have been helpful (especially given the cost versus knights). Then again, these guys can only build so many boats, right?

Here's my map, without much to discuss.




One more turn of research to get Paper (that's 2 turns of research to grab Theology and Paper, you guys would have been impressed if this was 100 turns ago, right?!), heavily discounted. I get every last-to bonus the game has to offer on every tech I research, I think. I'll be swapping to theocracy any time now, I'll probably want to queue up several units for completion before I do that to squeeze the last bit of life out of OR. We'll see. I need to stop these infrastructure builds yesterday and get back to pumping units non stop. I'm last in power by quite a bit now, though if Commodore paints the Zulu island red then I could creep back to 6th even with my moderate build up.

Speaking of numbers:




Yeah, the Zulu have whipped quite hard to defend here. At least I'm not invading them. But I think I already mentioned why I haven't taken a shot at my former silk city. I'm going to try stealing tech from it. I have no idea if this is even a good move or not but I recall you get a slightly better deal from EPs into stolen tech than from doing your own research. Maybe that isn't true here, though, since I have so many known tech modifiers since I'm way behind in tech, I have lots of libraries, and I have exactly one EP modifying building in my empire (a castle at One Fish). I'm not running an EP economy on Plako's scale by any stretch of the imagination. All I know is that I should get good pricing by stealing tech from Skippers so I'm going to try to do it.

Bonus time! Have a look at three cities that mostly don't suck. OK, only one of them is really any good, that's my Heroic Epic city. If only knights were still state of the art technology!




How about that happy cap, eh? Halfway reminds me of the end of PB6, only I'm a few hundred happy faces short. (Speaking of PB6...Lewwyn is at it again, huh? Good luck!) Anyway, I'll build as many 1T knights as I can and mix in other units to keep everything coming out of the build queue at 1 per turn for as long as I can. I'll probably swap the 2 grassland farm tiles to Red Fish periodically and run a harmless food deficit here at Blue Fish to squeeze more specialist turns out of Red Fish. Because...




...Red Fish is my National Epic / Moai city. What??? Isn't that the dumbest combination ever? OK, let me defend myself. This city was always going to get the short end of the stick with land tiles once I planned to put the HE in Blue Fish. But there is still a large food surplus and decent enough production to build Moai in a relatively short window while I expected to have access to stone. So it went here. I didn't have another good location with enough base production to build Moai quickly and with enough population to really make good use of it. So Red Fish is by default the Moai city. But why build the National Epic here? Again, it's about the food surplus. When fully grown out this city will have enough food to run four specialists in addition to the Moai coastal tiles. I don't have another city that will have that kind of food on a permanent basis for running specialists. So I don't have a better NE city option. So I made the odd pairing here, Moai and National Epic. To go along with a very questionable academy build from a long while ago. I'm don't remember if I explained the rationale for the academy at the time, but it was my best option to speed up military tech since a bulb would have gone for Philosophy, which I still don't have (or need?). The GS earned more science by building an academy here than by settling in One Fish, so it built the academy. Still maybe but I think I could have done worse.

For a city that started out so well, my capital didn't finish out well at all. The story of my game, there just isn't enough land for a really great city here. Up to size 13 this city was great. But coast tiles, well, those aren't so awesome. But they're better than being size 13.




I really don't like the bad 2/0/1 ocean tile here, so when the city grows up to size 20 that one will probably be converted into a science specialist, along with the 20th population point, and the city can run a food deficit for a while. There isn't a lot else to say here, I'm finishing up my first (only) bank soon, I don't think I can ever afford to leave bureaucracy, and I've realized the defenses here are wholly inadequate, so I'll try to shore them up soon for what that's worth.

Maybe Plako will steal a tech from someone soon and I'll get his graphs back. I'd rather post a full set soon than the 6/7 I have now.

Spies are in production, one will sail down to Skippers soon. We'll see what happens there. With my luck he'll probably be caught and I'll waste a ton of EPs.

[Oxyphenbutazone]

You don't "waste" EP's if a spy is caught, you just have to send multiple ones to mitigate the effects any crappy die rolls.