Mr. Cairo Thread (spoilers)

[Mr. Cairo]

I see your spike in power. Note that mine doesn't include my captured animals. If you attack me, I will dedicate my meager resources to making your life miserable.  You've already wrecked my economy by forcing me to slot in a bunch of units.

Thanks for letting me know I don't even need to attack now, since my economy is still just fine.

I mean, I'll still see what I can do obviously, I have a few scouts nearby so I won't be surprised by any spiders.

I'm still waiting for DaveV to send me the turn so I can have a peek at his cities and see what there is to see, and if it's worth it to send in the Centaurs, I'll post some screenshots then.

[Mr. Cairo]

I decided to advance just to the edge of his vision and prepare to attack next turn. I'll send in scouts beforehand to see if I should. I had been thinking of attacking from the hill tile 1NW of the stack, since it was definitely out of sight of any scouting units Dave might want to send, but since he's obviously preparing there's no need to maintain surprise, and I'm still out of sight of his borders. The plan is to attack the northern city. After that I can use his roads to potentially bypass the southern city and go into his backlines.

The Thane of Kilmorph I got from a dungeon and I only just learned, as I was writing this, that I can found that Runes using it without needing the tech So I think he's going to go back to the capital next turn. I hadn't thought at all about religion so far, but Runes isn't that bad, and I think Arete could be very good. In any case a 'free' holy city is always good.


Here's the power graph. I really don't understand DaveV here. He says that animals don't show up on the demos/graphs, which is all well and good, but his power should still be increasing, he has 5 cities and plenty of time to build a bunch of Warriors.
Has he been losing units in order to capture these animals? If so I really don't think its a winning strategy when faced with an obvious Centaur rush, Warriors would be more useful imo.


Demos are still strong. I could call off the attack next turn and I'll still be in a good position to advance my economy, but it sounds like Dave would not be, so it's a success already. I could hold off and come back with Catapults and Centaur Chargers with Bronze Weapons. My current tech path is Masonry -> Construction -> Bronze Working, I got Hunting before Masonry so I can get Hunters if Dave's animals do become an issue.


Oh, and the reason I haven't been replying to Dave in the diplo thread is because he hasn't named me yet.

[Mr. Cairo]

I went in to have a look. Dirt is the easier target, that Polar Bear looks tough, so I'm going to stick to the plan.

Dave had a Spider near Avelorn, I took it out, losing a Warrior and a Scout (it spawned a Baby so that was killed as well).

It cost me 4 Centaurs, getting one ~25% retreat and losing 1 ~70% battle, so ok overall. It'll take me 2-3 turns to recover the losses, and Dave lost a city so I think I'm still ahead.
I covered my workers and wounded Centaurs with Warriors.




I did debate whether to go ahead with the attack, but his attitude in the Diplo thread indicated that he would still dedicate the rest of his game to messing me up even if I didn't attack, so why wait and make it harder on me later?
I'm going to keep out the Diplo thread, at least as far as DaveV is concerned, nothing I say would make him feel better. I don't know how much of Dave's sourness in the diplo thread is real and how much is "role-play", but it feels real to me which is kind of killing my vibe tbh. Oh well.


Also, re: Dave's comment that I must be throwing everything at him, my border with coldrain is pretty secure (lots of jungle), I'm still outproducing him, and he seems to be focusing on eco right now, so I don't fear an attack from that direction. But I'll throw in a few extra Warriors over there to be on the safe side. Of course, the great thing about Centaurs is that in a pinch I can Haste them and sending them zooming to the other side of my empire.


Finally, for posterity's sake, the "justification" for this attack is that this is a competitive game that I would like to win, and DaveV has the misfortune of being the weakest of my neighbours. As the Kuriotates I have limits on my growth that the others don't so I need to use my early advantages while I can.

[Qgqqqqq]

What is the plan to gain from this? Are there any cities or resources you're hoping to hold, or is this about taking out a rival?

[Mr. Cairo]

What is the plan to gain from this? Are there any cities or resources you're hoping to hold, or is this about taking out a rival?

Taking out a rival for sure is important, if I can have only a single front to focus on (Coldrain) that would make thing easier for me later. Also, from what I remember in this game Elves are slow to get started, since their improvements take long to build on the forests, but once their forest economy gets going they're very strong.

I'm sure there are resources that I can use, for example I have no resources for my Tailors near my starting location, and he might have some of those. The main resource that I would want to grab is of course more mana nodes. At some point I'll have to pivot in that direction (Adepts, Wizards, etc) and the more mana nodes the better.

Quick question to anyone who's looking, do you prefer seeing screenshots using the [screenshot] tag or the [img] tag, or may [img] under a [spoiler] tag? I've always used [screenshot], especially since for a while there I was using a very wide monitor that made using the [img] tag unwieldy (I have a more reasonable monitor now). But I spent some time messing around with the different tags in my previous post and I don't know which is preferable. Do any lurkers have an opinion?

[Thoth]

Looks like a good start to a rush. 

I pefer the [screenshot] format for pictures.

EDIT:  Changed IMG to Screenshot because WTF was I thinking?

[Cornflakes]

IMG tags preferred now. If I remember correctly the screenshot tag was implement to work around an old issue with IMG tags overflowing large images, which was fixed with a forum upgrade a few years ago (maybe more than a few years ago at this point ). And no spoilers please, except for maybe a graph dump with a bunch of screenshots that you don't talk about.

[Mr. Cairo]

I'm about to play my turn, but I was going to respond to Dave in the diplo thread with this:

@Cairo: I don't see what you hope to accomplish here. I'm willing to sign white peace.

Both of the below quotes were from before I declared war. The first one was in response to a power spike mainly caused by technology. It is clear to me that no matter what I do or did you would just try to make my life miserable from then on, so what use is a white peace to me now?

I see your spike in power. Note that mine doesn't include my captured animals. If you attack me, I will dedicate my meager resources to making your life miserable.  You've already wrecked my economy by forcing me to slot in a bunch of units.

No point in being coy any more: the dubious rush strategy is from Mr. Cairo. He's throwing everything at me, and can't have anything left at home.

But frankly it would just convince him further to fight to the death. Maybe I can make some sort of unreasonable demand to convince him he has a chance at peace? But even that would be blatantly dishonest, and I would once again have to worry about Dave committing the rest of his time to ruining my game.

So I figure saying nothing in the diplo thread is still the best/least worse action I could take there.

Thanks for letting me know re: [img] tags, I'll use them from now on.

[Mr. Cairo]

I lost the sacrificial scout by Bat, but no other visible action on Dave's turn.

I sent my one healthy Centaur out to scout, turned out the Copper wasn't uncontrolled so I needed to Sprint it (first time I've used that ability, funnily enough). But I found the vulnerabilities I was looking for:

I promoted an injured Centaur to C1+Sh, which gave it 70% chance of victory: Edit: this isn't accurate, the odds checker doesn't take into account the river crossing (thanks for letting me know RefSteel)

And a 7% chance of retreating, but surely that wont matter. edit: see above.
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So anyway, the C1+Sh Centaur retreated, and I had to burn the city with the scouting Centaur, which I had hoped to send further in, using the Ancient Forests to keep it protected (Centaurs do receive defensive bonuses, in case you didn't know). This left my C1+Sh Centaur very vulnerable. I eventually decided not to try and save it. All I could really do is cover it with another injured Centaur promoted to C1+Sh, but that Bear is still (probably) in Bat, so even that wouldn't save it, unless I sacrificed Warriors by putting them on the Plains tile between Bat and the Centaur, but then I would have just lost all those Warriors, so I decided to just abandon that Centaur as punishment for retreating.

Here's the current situation:

I plan to use the Warriors and maybe one or two Centaurs to burn/take Eclipse, while consolidating and healing to prepare the attack on either Bat or direct to his capital. I've decided to keep the Disciple in Avelorn for now, the extra healing is turning out to be very useful.

Best case scenario is he decides I don't have any units left by Avelorn and attacks out of Bat towards it. Most annoying scenario is he moves all his units (including those in Bat) into his capital and I am forced to wait until I get Catapults. Fortunately, the capture gold is paying for my research so I'm not far away from Construction.


In the diplo thread Dave only mentioned the lost Centaurs, not the Warrior+Scout that died to the Spider, so I'm wondering if that even was his Spider. Can barb Spiders duplicate like that?

[Thoth]

Barb spiders sometimes spawn babies. AFAIK they don't enter borders but it's been awhile.