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Is that character a variant? (I just love getting asked that in channel.) - Charis |
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[SPOILERS]The Tyrant realizes that once the world burns it gets really boring....
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Okay, I'll bite: Are you top Crop when you fire all those Rep specialists?
If only you and me and dead people know hex, then only deaf people know hex.
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I could test it and see what happens but honestly we're not running enough specialists for that to matter. That goes back to a previous post and "SE: we're not doing it right."
Played: Pitboss 18 - Kublai Khan of Germany Somalia | Pitboss 11 - De Gaulle of Byzantium | Pitboss 8 - Churchill of Portugal | PB7 - Mao of Native America | PBEM29 Greens - Mao of Babylon
To that point, though, we'll be running more specialists soon, I'm pretty happy with how we've grown the last dozen turns or so and our workers are going to be having trouble keeping up with tiles over the coming turns. During the golden age we'll likely be running quite a few specialists and stagnate growth a bit (pulling off farms, not cottages wherever we can). But getting the irrigation chains completed in our dry cities is going to help with the SE a lot.
Played: Pitboss 18 - Kublai Khan of Germany Somalia | Pitboss 11 - De Gaulle of Byzantium | Pitboss 8 - Churchill of Portugal | PB7 - Mao of Native America | PBEM29 Greens - Mao of Babylon
Looking good. I've been pretty busy this week, so not a lot of time to check in. I think after the GA is going to be a perfect time to eat Sisub. It looks like suttree is going to have his hands full with Oxy, whose single remaining purpose must be to drag suttree down with him. So, we will probably have a free hand in dealing with Sisubstan.
Looking further ahead, identify where we can run a TON of merchants to set up a bulb for Guilds. If we get our 'Phracts out soon enough, is a weakened suttree a possible target? I don't know much of the geography further south, but he'll probably be a softer target than WilliamLP after Oxy chews on him for a while. I think land is our only chance in this game. Just take as much as we can and wring beakers out of scientists. We can tech with a low slider rate if we have enough specialists in play. At a quick glance, techs we'll need for a bulb: Merchant - Alphabet, Sailing, Paper (costs 60% of Guilds)... GE - Engineering (equal cost to Guilds. ugh) Artist - not gonna happen Definitely check our current techs with my assumed techs to open the bulb. I haven't kept a close eye on what we've researched lately.
I'll drop the last turn's shot of F6 here for purposes of the current tech discussion (T146). I think all that is missing is CoL and CS off to the right.
 I don't think we'll be able to bulb Guilds too easily, it's going to take normal research. What do you think about tech direction, beeline to Guilds now or divert for Aesthetics? Or Paper is an option too, we have stone for UoS. And if we go with the AP religion for the hammer bonus we'd already be building temples and monasteries. And with that in mind...later on in the not unlikely event that we spawn another Great Prophet we could think about bulbing Divine Right once we clear Theology (which we'll want for theocracy anyway unless we build SwedPaya). But that stuff is all rather peaceful, Guilds is more fun right?  Who knows if Oxy will be successful enough against Suttree to make an invasion of Suttree later an option. I mean, everyone without rifles is subject to be attacked with cataphracts, but those with longbows/pikes will have the best chance of not losing cities. I think it's a given that killing Sisub is the right thing to do (no one should have to live like that), but pressing on into Suttree's land sounds like a mistake. He would have to still be dealing with Oxy and under stress in the process to make it worth while, I think. If we're presented with a weakened backline defense yeah, absolutely smash in with OP knights. But if not we can probably find a squishier target somewhere else. Suttree isn't the leader anymore in any case (even though he is still ahead of us in my opinion right now), so we may be better off trying to slow down someone else. WilliamLP is top dog but he has good military tech. We'd have to judge that one carefully. Honestly, as dumb as it seems, Retep may make an ideal target. He seems to be in full farm mode (even though we lack his graphs, that's what I remember from last time we had them). He isn't far away from us, just across the water. We would have to be very careful in how we approached him because we'd either have to invest in a lot of galleys to float a herd of 'phracts over to him or we'd have to stage in the north and attack from the west. That probably denies us quite a bit of the forking advantage we'd have, given that his west isn't core territory and the land seems to be a long, snaky stretch. His cities may not be placed such that we could cause him to split his defenses. Or it could be fork city, it's all unknown until we get up there, I suppose. I think he has researched Paper so we may be able to trade maps with him. Since he hasn't met everyone that would probably be more to his benefit than to ours. But if we're thinking about having a go at him, his maps would be invaluable. I think I'll offer a trade for them and see what happens. The good thing about attacking Retep is that he seems to be in a fairly isolated corner of the map. He still doesn't have a full set of diplomatic contacts, if that tells you anything. Or maybe he just did a terrible job of scouting. But I think he's isolated. Grabbing his land wouldn't extend our border much with anyone in that case, so it would be more land without more defensive need if the map shapes like I think it does. Of course, that would be assuming we could digest all of his England and that's not very likely. Another thing to think about is that he'll have Redcoats coming on later in the game. We'd probably want to have done something to him by then to mitigate his ability to produce swarms of them because as far as I can tell we are his nearest neighbor, so those guys would probably be pointed at us....Ah well, these are all problems for later. Played: Pitboss 18 - Kublai Khan of Germany Somalia | Pitboss 11 - De Gaulle of Byzantium | Pitboss 8 - Churchill of Portugal | PB7 - Mao of Native America | PBEM29 Greens - Mao of Babylon
Wetbandit's score went up 52 points when this turn rolled. Whoa. Best guesses? Wasn't a bulb, that would have happened during his previous turn but he had whipped two cities that turn for score decreases, no increases during the turn. Has Azza been dead about 20 turns, so he's getting land points on captured cities? And population growths, and finishing a technology, and maybe a wonder or national wonder? Or multiple wonders/national wonders? Since I basically don't know anything about him I probably won't find out unless it was a world wonder (or two).
Played: Pitboss 18 - Kublai Khan of Germany Somalia | Pitboss 11 - De Gaulle of Byzantium | Pitboss 8 - Churchill of Portugal | PB7 - Mao of Native America | PBEM29 Greens - Mao of Babylon
If we get a GG and settle it (presumably in HF), with barracks, stables, and either of Feudalism or Theocracy (better option, IMO), we can amphibiously 'Phract retep. CHM only needs 8/8 exp for amphibious (combat 1, 2, amphib!), and that would give 9.
 Or, lacking the GG, we'd need both Feudalism and Theocracy for 9xp Phracts, but we could whip these everywhere.  I agree that this would be the unexpected move, and we could attack across the ocean in our culture and do some terrible damage. If we could capture and keep the GLH, we'd be in pretty decent shape overnight with all of these coastal cities. And we have four island cities, so even if everyone cancels borders, we're still fine.We do need more map information to do this, and we'll need a shitload of boats to alpha strike multiple cities on the opening turn of the war. Possibly we'll need a canal fort/city to the east of the city we took from Kuro, around the wheat, so that we can get at any watery backline retep cities. Go for the map trade. --- I'd leave WilliamLP alone with the war, unless he's about to win the game and others are ready to help grind him down some. suttree is going to be in a long slog with Oxy. Oxy has little else to play for, so why not? We do need to prevent WillLP from being able to dive into Oxy's rear while Oxy permawars suttree, so some forces over there as a counterweight may be necessary. My guess, though, is that WLP is playing the economic game and will only build as many troops as he feels he needs to be secure, as he's going to keep zooming ahead in economy. At least for now. He'll look to expand later, and probably toward Kuro (softest target, easiest to integrate geographically). Next most likely would be Oxy (next softest target, has to share spoils probably with Molach which isn't that good), then us (probably wishful thinking on my part, but our cities over there aren't that great and he knows you're half crazy, so the game leader shouldn't attack the rabid crazy guy).
Map trades ahoy.
Kuro - Yeah, he got the worst of it in this game. He didn't do the best with it by any means but what was he really supposed to do with this land??? I mean other than be Joao and build way more cities. This land is pretty bad. High concentration of food though, that should have been a lot of whipping units and attacking south to take better land from WilliamLP. Us taking his cities certainly didn't help him. One thing I noticed is a lack of trees on his deer tiles. I hope he didn't chop them. With as bad as the rest of his land is there were probably never trees on those tiles to begin with.  WilliamLP - He won the sweepstakes. I imagine he has had to hack away almost as much jungle as we have but that's some productive land with a lot of food and resources. He's number one in land area, boosted by the fact that apparently he has a few cities on the landmass that begins west of his moai city. That was convenient. Still, he has done a great job expanding, even taking away he southernmost city from Oxy to secure a crucial southern pass around his inner sea.  Wetbandit - Maybe not the best picture, for more details go read his thread.  Very high food capital, like ours, with trouble sharing some of the food. So he went really tall in the capital. None of his other cities are remotely the same size, to be expected. He kinda has two cores going on, which makes sense since he killed Azza and consumed his land. Azza got a raw deal on metal. His copper was on an island. I don't know if he ever settled it or if it got cut off early in their wars or what, but that couldn't have helped him. Like WilliamLP, Wetbandit has access to island cities and is settling them. He has at least one city to the north, possibly more. I can't tell because the map data here is obviously incomplete or old. There is also land to the west of Wetbandit's territory but I'm not sure if it is reachable before galleons, even if he settles on the western cow. Molach - Not great land, it's pretty brown overall. But his cities are spaced widely apart, not sure what's up with that. He should be sharing his scant food resources better than he is. Also, as AGG Rome, I don't know why he hasn't put the lumber to someone yet. He's out of space to expand peacefully. Uh, make war! Oxy would have made a great acquisition target. The Dutch don't have anything special to counter AGG praetorians, never mind that he's had tough times with Suttree in the past. Molach should have stabbed Oxy in the back and partitioned him out of existence, with Suttree on the other side. In the long term Molach is doomed, Wetbandit will overtake him and probably come after him militarily later on.  Oxy - The small fry is fighting back.  He suffered some abuse at Suttree's hands early on but has turned the tables lately. Just this turn he took the northern city from Suttree, making us his neighbor now. He's had to slave his empire hard to build up power and fight off Suttree, as a result he has a pretty bad economy. Unless he grabs a lot of land he's probably not a long term threat at all, high current power notwithstanding. Curiously he renamed his empire to North Korea this turn. He was formerly the Peaceful Empire. I liked that a lot better. Suttree/Sisub - OK, Sisub is so little and fits so neatly in Suttree's back pocket that's where his map ends up. We get an incomplete down in this region, but at one time Suttree was top dog in land area. I don't know how much land is hidden down there but it has to be a fair amount. I'm guessing the coast doesn't go straight across west along the line of our exploration but I don't know. As for Sisub, he may have had the best or second best starting area on the map (after WilliamLP), but when Sisu disappeared he took their mojo with him. Halvgud, content to operate a smaller empire, cheaply gave away most of it to Suttree.   Retep - Another incomplete. I offered him a map trade this turn so if he accepts I'll get his information and he'll get everything I've just shown. Chances are that he has made trades with someone by now and may not want to make a deal with us but you never know. If he has traded his map away we'll get it from someone eventually. What I know is that there is a good deal of land to the east of Retep, but I don't know if it's connected or across water, or accessible before galleons, or what. Need more info.  XenuBoldlyBrick - Compared to these other guys we're sprawled out all over the place to occupy our land. With all the water inside our culture I'm not sure how we manage to be third in land area but we are. We have room for two filler cities on our continent, one more in the very crowded central island area, and then one more to set our northeastern border with Retep. In retrospect we were way too slow in settling the north. We should have grabbed a few of those spots that Retep has, although probably only one of them (sheep/horse) would have been realistic. I guess we did reasonably well with the land grab phase. We'll flesh it out a bit more and then try to grab more land later.  Global view - There's more land out there and we have no shot at it. Hopefully the guys who do have a chance to go get it will overextend themselves in the process and become easy pickings later.  So to summarize, it could have been much worse, we could have been Kuro. Or Molach. But based on the map I have to like WilliamLP's chances right about now. The best land, the most land, and still expanding into territory that only one other player (Wetbandit) seems to be able to access. A weak, non-threat to the north and to the east us, who have shown him no aggression yet, being busy elsewhere. If WilliamLP can keep Molach and Wetbandit from trying to expand at his expense, he may find himself in a winning position in the end. Even though he's an unknown, I'll put Retep in second position right now because he has economy and apparently a lot of land, too. This prognostication is subject to change with future information about Retep, though. If someone is doing a crappy job reporting let me know if you want to see more detail on any part of the map. Played: Pitboss 18 - Kublai Khan of Germany Somalia | Pitboss 11 - De Gaulle of Byzantium | Pitboss 8 - Churchill of Portugal | PB7 - Mao of Native America | PBEM29 Greens - Mao of Babylon
I haven't played the turn yet, I took long enough puttering around with the maps that it's too late now. Will play in the morning.
Played: Pitboss 18 - Kublai Khan of Germany Somalia | Pitboss 11 - De Gaulle of Byzantium | Pitboss 8 - Churchill of Portugal | PB7 - Mao of Native America | PBEM29 Greens - Mao of Babylon
September 20th, 2013, 08:10
(This post was last modified: September 21st, 2013, 11:05 by spacetyrantxenu.)
T148 - No time for much of a report. Our power is confirmed higher than either of Retep or Wetbandit from our position in F9 and who is visible ahead of us on the power graphs. And the main news from the turn was all the map trades mentioned before.
Explored Sisub a bit and noted troop positions.  Up north Sisub is exploring and may or may not notice the lack of significant fortify bonus on the archers. Irrelevant.  Oxy is resting and healing, then he'll probably push forward again.  Demographics, running 0% science since we don't particularly need Meditation this turn. Saving cash, will run higher science slider in the GA for one turn until we're broke again.  As I rolled the turn WilliamLP finished the Great Library in Spaghetti, the same city with his MoM and two other wonders. Yeah we should boat that city when we have cataphracts, I don't care if we hold it or not. Burning it is fine.  Pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered? Played: Pitboss 18 - Kublai Khan of Germany Somalia | Pitboss 11 - De Gaulle of Byzantium | Pitboss 8 - Churchill of Portugal | PB7 - Mao of Native America | PBEM29 Greens - Mao of Babylon |
