Turn 52:
Moved the scout again.
Babylon is working on a Lighthouse. Also switched Akkad and Nineveh to Axemen (not shown, obviously; more on that later).
Also related, I switched to Mysticism, leaving Iron Working 1 turn away from completion. I switched it back before the end of the turn, though.
Turn 53:
I get Iron Working and a Classical tech score increase. Finally getting Mysticism for the Masonry discount and because I need to go down the religious part of the tree eventually in order to get Hereditary Rule and other good shit.
My iron:
Plako's iron:
A significantly more convenient spot. Both irons are 4 tiles from their respective capitals as the crow flies, but mine is at least 5 tiles by land, not considering the extra forests which slow me down further. Not really that big a deal, though, and the forests give me more free hammers anyway.
Iron Working rockets me into #1 for power.
City builds as I ended turn. Considering I don't actually know the location of any cities besides Hamburg and Berlin, it's fairly obvious what the target was.
Turn 54:
Emphasis on 'was'. After a lot of thought and discussion with a friend, I decided to cancel the attack on Plako, for now at least.
The original idea of attacking Plako occurred to me after he founded Hamburg. I referred to Hamburg as "quite the Pink Dot" in an earlier post. It might not technically be, being closer to Plako's capital than mine, but it's 6 tiles from his and 7 from mine. If it's not a Pink Dot it's as close as you can get to one without technically calling it that. It takes several tiles closer to my capital than his.
Regardless of how close it is, Hamburg has a huge amount of available food. It would make a fantastic Great Person farm, which plays well with Philosophical's huge GPP bonus in this mod. Whatever Plako's exact plans for the city are, he definitely considered the long term payoff of the city enough to risk founding it far from his capital, close to a player who he has never played against before, who is playing an aggressive leader and could very possibly not know who he's messing with and do something crazy and attack out of nowhere. I felt that it was foolish to let it stand and grow and begin to pay dividends. Even though I'm not attacking him right now, I still think if I leave him alone too long he'll get the snowball rolling with his cheap golden ages, bulbs and academies, out tech me, then run me over with Knights.
In my original attack plan, I would have founded Akkad where Nineveh is now, and hooked up the horses first. I would then chop and whip chariots out of Babylon and Akkad, attacking Hamburg around turn 42ish. Part of the idea was to have the chariots ready to complete, then whip overflow into another 1 turn chariot the next turn. This gets a lot of military out before Plako has time to react to the spike in power and whip units to defend Hamburg. Four chariots (120 hammers) take Hamburg (100 hammers to found), and whatever is left rushes to Berlin. Since Plako could not have copper hooked up, having settled for food and horses, and having lost his source of horses with the fall of Hamburg, he would be pretty screwed at that point. Even if the war went as well as it could have possibly gone, I'd still only have 2 more cities than before, and they'd be significantly further away than if I had simply settled the ample available land, thus costing me much more and slowing my tech rate. The distance would make it harder to defend my holdings from the others, who would certainly not simply sit on ass and wait for me to get a double sized empire off the ground.
I decided that there was no rush to get the attack out, and that I might as well use 1 movers instead of 2 movers since the forests and hills around Hamburg would negate the movement advantage of Chariots, which would also get no defensive bonus from the terrain. Hamburg's border expansion would add the hill 1W of the oasis, whose vision was blocked by forests. Waiting for the borders to pop would not give me any fewer turns to march to Hamburg. I couldn't get there before +20% cultural defenses without coming with significantly less force, so there was very little reason to attack immediately. I went for my original settlement plan, putting Akkad where it is now, by the copper and pigs.
The new plan started as "put enough hammers into axes to allow me to whip overflow for another axe immediately in all 3 cities, then stack all 6 and attack". I modified that to 3 axes from Nineveh, 2 from Babylon and 1 from Akkad. This limited the time I would be waiting for units from Akkad to walk to the front. I might have actually built the axes faster the original way, but I chose the second way to try to make the power spike as quick as possible and give little time to react. The switch to Mysticism instead of Iron Working was meant to avoid the huge resultant power spike and since I would have to delay the invasion to settle for the iron wherever it turned up and build swords.
Basically, my plan would have worked out something like this (please ignore that Hamburg is incorrectly called Munich, or that there's gold I don't actually have in the game, or the AI civs that I incorrectly have contact with, or all the other shit that I know is wrong with my sandbox):
Six axes with chariots pouring in behind. I'm pretty sure that there wouldn't be 1 archer in the city. I'd have to look at the power graphs again, but I don't think Plako has Archery, and if he does, he got it recently. In any case, I would almost certainly have taken Hamburg, but probably not anything else. The more I thought about it, the harder it was to make the planned invasion pay off. Six axes is 210 hammers, a settler is 100 and a granary is 60. The 2 chariots (and whateIver else I would produce as required) add another 60 hammers cost (at least). If I got a granary from capturing Hamburg, that's 160 hammers gained for 270 invested.
Plako has a third city now, most likely near his copper. If he has copper, he would whip his remaining 2 cities to the ground before I could walk to Berlin. I don't imagine that I would be able to take Berlin, at least not easily.
So, if I make a very large attack, it's not likely to work and be cost effective. If I make a limited attack and only take Hamburg, Plako will come back for it eventually.
Then, there's Yuri. If I somehow eat Plako entirely in the near future, I'll have several far flung cities costing me much more than the cities I could have founded, and a bunch of empty space between me and an imperialistic leader who already has 5 or 6 cities. Yuri then settles most of the land that would have been Plako's, and Elkad settles more of the land between us than he would have gotten otherwise. I'll end up with somewhat more land that I would have otherwise, which will be significantly less developed since I spent resources on military and not workers and buildings, in between 2 guys with huge tracts of extra land, one of whom has a building that gives extra free XP to mounted units and chose an aggressive leader (Elkad).
tl;dr I considered attacking Plako, then decided not just yet, if ever.
The few hammers I have already put into military units aren't that significant right now, and they can always be used to whip defenders in an emergency.
Turn 55:
All of my cities grew on the interturn.
Akkad is finally working a gems tile. That's the main reason my GNP shot up to #1:
These are some sexy demos right there: #1 in GNP (that's with a 1.4 modifier for Masonry, but any tech with a 1.2 modifier would give me 6/7 of that GNP, which would be 54 and still #1), #2 in Mfg by a single hammer / turn, above the median and average in crop yield, #2 in soldiers with only 2 warriors and a bowman, #1 in paper population (surprising).
"Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots and of the abominations of the earth."
Moved the scout again.
Babylon is working on a Lighthouse. Also switched Akkad and Nineveh to Axemen (not shown, obviously; more on that later).
Also related, I switched to Mysticism, leaving Iron Working 1 turn away from completion. I switched it back before the end of the turn, though.
Turn 53:
I get Iron Working and a Classical tech score increase. Finally getting Mysticism for the Masonry discount and because I need to go down the religious part of the tree eventually in order to get Hereditary Rule and other good shit.
My iron:
Plako's iron:
A significantly more convenient spot. Both irons are 4 tiles from their respective capitals as the crow flies, but mine is at least 5 tiles by land, not considering the extra forests which slow me down further. Not really that big a deal, though, and the forests give me more free hammers anyway.
Iron Working rockets me into #1 for power.
City builds as I ended turn. Considering I don't actually know the location of any cities besides Hamburg and Berlin, it's fairly obvious what the target was.
Turn 54:
Emphasis on 'was'. After a lot of thought and discussion with a friend, I decided to cancel the attack on Plako, for now at least.
The original idea of attacking Plako occurred to me after he founded Hamburg. I referred to Hamburg as "quite the Pink Dot" in an earlier post. It might not technically be, being closer to Plako's capital than mine, but it's 6 tiles from his and 7 from mine. If it's not a Pink Dot it's as close as you can get to one without technically calling it that. It takes several tiles closer to my capital than his.
Regardless of how close it is, Hamburg has a huge amount of available food. It would make a fantastic Great Person farm, which plays well with Philosophical's huge GPP bonus in this mod. Whatever Plako's exact plans for the city are, he definitely considered the long term payoff of the city enough to risk founding it far from his capital, close to a player who he has never played against before, who is playing an aggressive leader and could very possibly not know who he's messing with and do something crazy and attack out of nowhere. I felt that it was foolish to let it stand and grow and begin to pay dividends. Even though I'm not attacking him right now, I still think if I leave him alone too long he'll get the snowball rolling with his cheap golden ages, bulbs and academies, out tech me, then run me over with Knights.
In my original attack plan, I would have founded Akkad where Nineveh is now, and hooked up the horses first. I would then chop and whip chariots out of Babylon and Akkad, attacking Hamburg around turn 42ish. Part of the idea was to have the chariots ready to complete, then whip overflow into another 1 turn chariot the next turn. This gets a lot of military out before Plako has time to react to the spike in power and whip units to defend Hamburg. Four chariots (120 hammers) take Hamburg (100 hammers to found), and whatever is left rushes to Berlin. Since Plako could not have copper hooked up, having settled for food and horses, and having lost his source of horses with the fall of Hamburg, he would be pretty screwed at that point. Even if the war went as well as it could have possibly gone, I'd still only have 2 more cities than before, and they'd be significantly further away than if I had simply settled the ample available land, thus costing me much more and slowing my tech rate. The distance would make it harder to defend my holdings from the others, who would certainly not simply sit on ass and wait for me to get a double sized empire off the ground.
I decided that there was no rush to get the attack out, and that I might as well use 1 movers instead of 2 movers since the forests and hills around Hamburg would negate the movement advantage of Chariots, which would also get no defensive bonus from the terrain. Hamburg's border expansion would add the hill 1W of the oasis, whose vision was blocked by forests. Waiting for the borders to pop would not give me any fewer turns to march to Hamburg. I couldn't get there before +20% cultural defenses without coming with significantly less force, so there was very little reason to attack immediately. I went for my original settlement plan, putting Akkad where it is now, by the copper and pigs.
The new plan started as "put enough hammers into axes to allow me to whip overflow for another axe immediately in all 3 cities, then stack all 6 and attack". I modified that to 3 axes from Nineveh, 2 from Babylon and 1 from Akkad. This limited the time I would be waiting for units from Akkad to walk to the front. I might have actually built the axes faster the original way, but I chose the second way to try to make the power spike as quick as possible and give little time to react. The switch to Mysticism instead of Iron Working was meant to avoid the huge resultant power spike and since I would have to delay the invasion to settle for the iron wherever it turned up and build swords.
Basically, my plan would have worked out something like this (please ignore that Hamburg is incorrectly called Munich, or that there's gold I don't actually have in the game, or the AI civs that I incorrectly have contact with, or all the other shit that I know is wrong with my sandbox):
Six axes with chariots pouring in behind. I'm pretty sure that there wouldn't be 1 archer in the city. I'd have to look at the power graphs again, but I don't think Plako has Archery, and if he does, he got it recently. In any case, I would almost certainly have taken Hamburg, but probably not anything else. The more I thought about it, the harder it was to make the planned invasion pay off. Six axes is 210 hammers, a settler is 100 and a granary is 60. The 2 chariots (and whateIver else I would produce as required) add another 60 hammers cost (at least). If I got a granary from capturing Hamburg, that's 160 hammers gained for 270 invested.
Plako has a third city now, most likely near his copper. If he has copper, he would whip his remaining 2 cities to the ground before I could walk to Berlin. I don't imagine that I would be able to take Berlin, at least not easily.
So, if I make a very large attack, it's not likely to work and be cost effective. If I make a limited attack and only take Hamburg, Plako will come back for it eventually.
Then, there's Yuri. If I somehow eat Plako entirely in the near future, I'll have several far flung cities costing me much more than the cities I could have founded, and a bunch of empty space between me and an imperialistic leader who already has 5 or 6 cities. Yuri then settles most of the land that would have been Plako's, and Elkad settles more of the land between us than he would have gotten otherwise. I'll end up with somewhat more land that I would have otherwise, which will be significantly less developed since I spent resources on military and not workers and buildings, in between 2 guys with huge tracts of extra land, one of whom has a building that gives extra free XP to mounted units and chose an aggressive leader (Elkad).
tl;dr I considered attacking Plako, then decided not just yet, if ever.
The few hammers I have already put into military units aren't that significant right now, and they can always be used to whip defenders in an emergency.
Turn 55:
All of my cities grew on the interturn.
Akkad is finally working a gems tile. That's the main reason my GNP shot up to #1:
These are some sexy demos right there: #1 in GNP (that's with a 1.4 modifier for Masonry, but any tech with a 1.2 modifier would give me 6/7 of that GNP, which would be 54 and still #1), #2 in Mfg by a single hammer / turn, above the median and average in crop yield, #2 in soldiers with only 2 warriors and a bowman, #1 in paper population (surprising).
"Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots and of the abominations of the earth."
