[SPOILER] Take my love, take my land, take me where I cannot stand

[Grimace]

Turn 51

Adrien offered me peace twice again this turn. Declined both. I think he may be regretting his decision to start this war now, because his expansion (and mine, as well) is going to be drastically hampered. I just don't care as much, since it's the principle of the thing. I don't want to lose the game, but at the same time I play my personality, and unnecessary harm done to me or mine is one thing that I will hold a huge grudge over. So I sent him back an offer for peace in exchange for his city again.

My two vultures moved into the ideal position, where they can threaten the three tiles adjacent to his city, requiring him to split his phalanxes if he doesn't want me moving next to it. Which means when I can concentrate my forces, I can either hammer under the weaker stack, or if he leaves a tile unprotected just move next to his city and hammer it.


The vulture 2NE of Zoe just killed a barb warrior for 1XP and suffered some damage. The vulture 2NE of Captain Mal was just produced. And a third vulture is coming East from Wash. The idea is to concentrate all of my vultures in the one tile those two currently occupy, 2W of Adrian's city. After the next round of vultures, I'm going to build 2 spears as I noticed he has horses in his borders right now, which means I will likely see Chariots fairly soon.

[Grimace]

Turns 52 & 53

Turn 52 was uneventful. I produced a couple of vultures and started moving them forward. Everything static on the Adrian front.

Turn 53, however, had some interesting developments.

First, I found Sian to my west.


His borders are about 13 tiles west of Captain Mal.

Also in the above screenshot you can see my newest city which was built:

Jayne!

With the forested plains tile to work he'll get a fishing boat the same turn the borders expand, so he'll be able to get the fish in 6 turns.

And finally, I decided to take a chance and attack 1E from my 2 vulture stack onto his single phalanx on an unforested hill. My unpromoted vulture died, but wounded his phalanx badly, and my second C1 vulture finished it off while taking no damage (and gained 2XP to put him at 5 and earn a second promotion...assuming he survives). This put me next to his (unprotected!) city.


So far as I can tell he has just the two phalanxes for defense. According to Cyneheard's combat calculator, they have 27% odds to kill my vulture, which sounds wonderful to me.

So he basically has two options:
1) Kill my vulture. He could take a risk and hope to get a lucky kill on him from one of his phalanxes...probably the northern one, since he has another vulture coming up from the south. If he kills him with the southern phalanx, that lets me move my southern vulture onto a forested hill which will me him even harder to dislodge and put me next to his city. And if he fails with one and has to finish him with the other, he's really in a world of hurt. I think this is the less likely option.
2) Retreat both phalanxes into the city. It has 20% cultural defenses and it's on a hill, so his phalanxes will have good defensive odds against even a C1/Shock vulture. However, this surrenders the surrounding terrain to my units (all hills and forests), which means once he does that he'll not easily be able to bring them out again. And as you can see in the screenshot, I have 5 vultures that will be there in 3 turns or less (the vulture 1NE of the lake is actually a stack of two), though he can't see them. I think this is the more likely option.

If he reinforces with no more than one more phalanx, I should be able to take raze the city in 3 turns.

I guess he could also just retreat all of his units and abandon the city, but at this point it's not a foregone conclusion, so I don't know why he would opt to do that.

[Dreylin]

Why is Jayne not building a Monument; the city needs a disturbing statue:

[Commodore]

Why is Jayne not building a Monument; the city needs a disturbing statue:

[Grimace]

Definitely one of the best scenes in the entire show.

[Grimace]

FYI, I hope to have a long overdue update tomorrow. Just been so busy lately I haven't had a lot of time in general to do updates.

tl;dr version is I was unable to build sufficient force to raze Adrien's city, took peace for his offer of 5gpt, and resumed building. I have HBR & IW -- horses hooked up, no iron hooked up but it's within the borders. Will be building up a new force of horses for round 2, as I'm bottom of the scoreboard and need to claw my way back up.