A Record of Joey's Journey to Immortality

[GermanJoey]

T150.

So, I invaded Donovan, finally! Krill and Coeurva seem to be really going at it, so now is my best time to strike. I sent about 40-45 units in between two fronts;





(A lot more Knights joined these guys by T150, thanks to Engineering)

I've already taken Sitka, which came with a forge (cool):




Bombed it down with 4 Accuracy cats, then attacked with 2 CR2 ones, both of which survived somehow. After that was just high-90s cleanup with 1-movers. I then moved a stack of like, IIRC 15 horsies within striking distance of Donovan's capital, which had only 3 units inside. If he doesn't reinforce it, it will fall next turn. (however, he probably will)

On the other side, I bombed down with 2 Accuracy cats but didn't try for the city... a C3 Knight only got 70% odds, and taking that city this turn wouldn't really advance that front much faster since I won't have the forest roaded until next turn, so I decided to wait a turn to bombard it again first. Instead of letting my Knights sit idle, however, I moved them around the city to fork Fairbanks and discovered a stack of 4 horchers. So, it woulda been pretty bad if I took Nome on T150.

Krill's capital is pumping out Macemen now, but as far as I can tell he's sending all his units to his western Navy to fight with Coeurva.




Oh yeah, I'm in a Golden Age. Something something about a Moai in a Golden Age:




I'm going to generate 3 Great People this GA. The first was in Masked Moon, which rolled a 20% Great Engineer (had 45% odds for a scientist) on T148. Next is here:



(will be an ~87% scientist)

And the final one will be in my NE, which will be something like a 60% scientist. I need one of these 3 to be a Scientist to throw into Astro in 3 turns... and the chances of that are 1 - 0.55*0.13*0.4 = 97.14%. Should be OK, right? I guess there's also the possibility, if the rolls go bad, that I could just... throw a 3rd GA. I'd want to fight for Lib to justify that though.

Demos:




Rival second-place MFG (and probably GNP too) is Dark Savant in another MoM GA. His power has shot up a lot and he has Caravels prowling around my western coastline now, which is making me antsy. Rival 2nd place power is Gavagai. I took a peek at the T151 demos/graphs before I logged out and I'm at 914k, Gav was at like 823k, and Couerva seemed to be just underneath that. At any rate, I should easily clear my 1M soldiers goal even if I suicide a considerable number of Knights on Donovan's city walls.

Other news:

dtay is 1 turn from Nationalism, which is frankly shocking. Does he have a guaranteed GE coming? Because the Taj no longer is boosted by Marble in this version of RtR, and Nat doesn't do him a lot of immediate good otherwise. Or does he want to Lib something extreme, like Constituion or MT or whatever? If he screws around too long without Astro he is gonna be in some seriously bad shape.

I'm still not sure what Gavagai is planning to do, but I'm putting a few castles on my northwestern coast just in case. They're only like, 30 hammers with stone (lol Pro) and they bring in a trade route! So why not!

Any questions?

[GermanJoey]

apparently we're doing full fucking diplo in the tech thread now, what the fuck ?!??

[CFCJesterFool]

apparently we're doing full fucking diplo in the tech thread now, what the fuck ?!??

[Ichabod]

What are your plans for the GEng?

[GermanJoey]

apparently we're doing full fucking diplo in the tech thread now, what the fuck ?!??

For those who missed this: Coeurva posted a long anti-Krill rant inside what I thought looked like joke-spoiler tags in the tech thread, and I yelled at him to delete the post. Apparently he misunderstood Krill's post of saying "In a trololol state of wrecking everything I can" as being about their war, instead of about us needing to pause+reload for yet another Krill misclick. And apparently now Couerva is having a further meltdown and wants a sub???  What the hell has happened between those two this game? For awhile I had thought that they were just having a minor slapfight over an island or two, but just in the last few turns, since I've had vision on Krill, I was surprised to see him go full-tilt into revenge-mode, and now Coeurva is flipping out too?? What on earth. I mean, the islands they're fighting over are pretty good, but they're still just some islands.

At any rate, it made me realize something that makes this map especially interesting: because the islands are lusher than the mainland, they're really worth fighting over. However, they don't bring in a lot of hammers, being low tile-count islands, so you still need to supply muscle from your mainland. I think this balance works really well for a fun water map... makes you want to fight over the sea, makes sure you can bring lots of stuff onto the sea, and keeps dimensions tight enough that an attacker doesn't have to win an invasion with their initial attacking stack because new units have to travel 7-8 turns just to get to the battlefield. (e.g. PB22)

[GermanJoey]

What are your plans for the GEng?

Not 100% sure right now. If I didn't have research vision on dtay (actually, I should have full civ vision on him this turn too!), I'd say that I'd try rushing the Taj. However, dtay already has Nationalism, and presumably has some sort of plan for it, so I'm not gonna do that. 

Big wonders remaining other than that: none. Its way too late for the AP or UoS to matter. I guess there's the SoL, but I can't see hanging onto a GE for 50 turns being worth it. So that leaves National Wonders, and there's only two worth considering there: Oxford and West Point. Either one would be a pretty good use of a GE, IMO. I doubt I'll have the prereqs for either met anytime soon though... I think the next tech to chase after Astro will be Chemistry.

Other than that, it'll just be one of three random GPs for my next Golden Age. I guess we'll see what random crap my epic ToA NE city comes up with!

[Mardoc]

At any rate, it made me realize something that makes this map especially interesting: because the islands are lusher than the mainland, they're really worth fighting over. However, they don't bring in a lot of hammers, being low tile-count islands, so you still need to supply muscle from your mainland. I think this balance works really well for a fun water map... makes you want to fight over the sea, makes sure you can bring lots of stuff onto the sea, and keeps dimensions tight enough that an attacker doesn't have to win an invasion with their initial attacking stack because new units have to travel 7-8 turns just to get to the battlefield. (e.g. PB22)

Thanks!

So do you have any plans to fight over the islands? If not, will you be making some?

[GermanJoey]

Right now... no plans, no. I am entirely focused on land acquisition via Donovan. To my west, I pretty much have all the islands worth taking (meaning, that I can keep safely without overspending), and am probably even a bit slightly overextended there. (but won't be once Astro is in, which should be soon.) To my east, Coeurva controls most of the islands there... and he's had Astro for quite some time while I only have Optics. It will take quite a long time before I could overpower him there. To my southeast lies Krill, who currently has, by far, the most powerful naval presence in the game. I have no interest in getting tangled up with that until I am strong enough to completely overpower him on land, because even then I'd have to expect to take significant losses via seas.

The question of Guilds+Engineering first vs Astro first was very interesting on this map. My gut has been telling me that Engineering is, beaker-for-beaker, slightly more valuable than Astro, meaning that the net worth of Astro is roughly double that than Engineering. At least that was the case for dtay and myself, who are actually fairly sprawled out. You wouldn't necessarily think this just from listing stats on paper - he has 33 cities, and I have, IIRC, 26 now? 27?, with each of settled in a fairly radial pattern, with numerous islands. But because the lands are fairly snaky, travel distances are relatively high as compared to the more solid/blobbish landmass that you see in games like PB27, PB33, etc.

Now compare that to the three that went for Astro first. Well, Couerva made a big mistake attacking Krill after Krill had already bulbed Astro. I absolutely agree with planning to attack him before that, but they probably shoulda called it off. If they were his land neighbor, I'd say still go through with it, but its much harder to project power via seas than land in this era. At any rate, both of them are struggling to bring new non-ship units to the front. That's not a problem for Krill so much, as he pretty much just had to move garrisons outwards and then overwhelm with empty ships, but Couerva needs land troops to do anything because Krill's ancient-stuffed cities are too expensive to breach aquatically. So then, what is Gavagai doing? Very likely he is building up a big fleet and plans to shove in the middle of someone's archipelago, forking like a half dozen cities at once, and then dismantling them piece-by-piece. Who is he doing that to? Very likely DS or Krill. I'm not sure how Coeurva and Krill's war affects his plans... on one hand, 2v1 will always ensure a rapid crumbling of the 1, but on the other hand, Krill is massively mobilized now. So I guess that leaves DS.

[Mardoc]

Right now... I am entirely focused on land acquisition via Donovan.

Well, sure, I assumed you wouldn't voluntarily open a second front before the first one is resolved.  I was thinking post-China.  How long do you expect it to take to get to a post-China world, anyway?

[GermanJoey]

Hmmm, its hard to say just yet because I haven't broken Donovan's main stack. If he makes some sort of blunder, he could be dead within 6 turns. If he doesn't, maybe twice that. If someone messes with me during this time, maybe even longer? *shrugs*