Out on the Rim [Mr. Cairo spoilers]

[Mr. Cairo]

I may have been found out, or SD guessed based on my EP spending:

There used to be more LBs in that city, and some others are coming down from the north as well. If they're all headed my way it'll be a problem. I'll know more soon as I start to get city visibility on the rest of his empire. I may end up having to take the most direct route and land en masse outside Phyrexia. Which will less than ideal. He might be able to slow me down long enough to get to Rifling and get enough of them.

He might just spot my entire fleet this turn as well:

Depending on where that Privateer goes. After taking this screenshot I moved that stack of WEs and stuff closer, so that next turn I can swap out some of the units in that fleet, mainly Xbows for WEs, just for the higher base strength. My army really isn't designed for a long fight unfortunately.

I also moved my anti-Gav stack closer to this side of my empire. Partly because it's not enough to do anything if Gav invades, and partly because his behaviour isn't very indicative of planning an attack against me. Just out of sight to the south of that last screenshot are a couple Gavagai Privateers. he's been moving them along my southern coast for a few turns now, in numbers too great to be for scouting. But if he were planning to attack me he'd surely want to keep them on our border to control the seas between our landmasses? Right? In any case this attack is a bit of an all-or-nothing kind of deal, so I'll need it all.

I also decided to whip my National Epic:


If SD sees my fleet he might cancel our Marble-Stone deal (and if he doesn't I would want to anyway, although he already has Walls/Castles everywhere), so I 3-pop whipped it. I can still run 4 specialists, and without the Spy I'd have a lower chance of getting a second Great Spy.

That GA will be very important. Either my initial attack will be successful and I'll use it to power out more reinforcements. Or it wont, and I'll want the GA to get a bunch of economic buildings in my cities to try and salvage something out of this game.

[Mr. Cairo]

I logged in to test ramk's thing that speeds up loading time only to see a peace treaty offer from SD. I had to reject it to leave the game, but I feel I should message superdeath to tell him why i had logged to avoid any confusion over turn-splits etc and that maybe he should log back in to re-offer so that I see and can respond in the appropriate time? I don't know if that's an ok thing to do, can any lurker advise?

[Mr. Cairo]

well, I send the PM, and he's gone and logged back in to re-send the peace offer.

To be honest, I only brought this up since I'd been thinking that I would accept and forget about the whole attack plan and try and do some economic stuff back home. But now, I've decided what the hell, let's go for it anyway. I'll probably fail, attacking someone with plenty of cities and slavery over the sea with only caravels to carry units isn't exactly a good plan, but it's better than staying home and doing nothing until everyone concedes to like in PB 41.

Accepting and attacking in 10 turns wouldn't work either since that would give him time to get Rifling.

[Mr. Cairo]

Right, so, war against SP. I expect a bunch of Longbows and Catapults from Superdeath, and possibly Muskets. I almost would prefer muskets since they're more expensive and therefore there'll be less of them, while massed Longbows can be very effective. If it looks really unpromising I wont hesitate to give up on the whole thing. But I hope not. I still think I can out-produce superdeath in units, his advantage will be in reinforcement speeds, while my advantage is my larger initial military. I do hope to set up a nice galley/caravel chain system to ferry units across. I'll also be saving cash and upgrading for the foreseeable future, mainly WEs into Knights.

[Mr. Cairo]

My army lands outside Phyrexia next turn, or at least, enough of it to take the city, since it still only has 1 longbow in it, so I'm thinking there are more units and catapults waiting out of sight to attack what I land there. So I'll drop off a few catapults, some Xbows, a Longbow, and a Mace.
I've been quite successful on the sea, all of my Privateers were built under Vassalage so they can take C1, while Superdeath's can't, so I've killed a couple on the oceans, as well as 1 scouting Caravel that was at the other end of my empire. But the biggest fight on the seas came this turn when I attacked 4 of his Privateers on his coast. I got lucky and won 3 out of 4 50/50 battles, so I only lost 1 Privateer. I also got a great general, but of course he spawned on my Moai city without anyway of getting to the mainland (where I'll make a medic), so that's great.

[Mr. Cairo]

So far so good:

Took three catapults to weaken the Longbow & 2 Maces enough for 2 Knights & a Mace to take it. I only have three Catapults left with this force so I'm not sure about continuing on right away. I think what I'm going to do is join some of these units with my first batch of reinforcements and sail up north to Modern Masters, I'll either be able to take it or it will reveal SD's own stack, which I'm assuming is out there, I remember seeing Catapults being built when I had EP-vision of one of his cities.
Speaking of EP, we both spent a turn maxing the EP slider at the same time, so neither of us is going to get vision on the other any time soon.

Here's my reinforcement chain:

I've made a couple mistakes here: only taking 5 units across in the first group (not sure how that happened) and sending that large group of caravels the wrong way round that peninsula to collect them. But nothing critical I don't think. Also, for some reason only loaded 6 units into those 4 galleys to the east, but fortunately SD hasn't played his turn yet and I'm writing this pretty much right after I played mine, so I quickly logged back in and loaded a WE & Catapult.
The workers are there to build a road from Dinosaur up to the top of that peninsula. Something I forgot to do ahead of time while planning this whole thing out.

Overall unit count:
In Phyrexia: 9 Knights, 3 Maces, 5 War Elephants, 3 Xbows, 3 Catapults, 1 Longbow
In transit/waiting for pickup: 9 War Elephants, 14 Xbows, 13 Catapults, 4 Trebuchets, 1 Mace, 3 Longbows, 1 Pike, 3 Axes, 5 Jags, 1 Musketman. Plus ~ 5 or 6 each of Trebs, Cats, and Muskets streaming in from across my empire.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

How many hammers have you invested into caravels as transport units? It has to be a metric shit ton. I'd say it would be interesting to have put that volume of hammers into wealth/research builds instead to see how close you could get to Astro/galleons, but you can't SA whip wealth/research. Maybe a better comparison would be the volume of food used in those whips and comparing that to the food (and subsequent whips) needed for galleons after Astro. I know the timing is not equivalent but this seems to be a somewhat inefficient use of hammers by comparison to a galley attack with some covering privateers.

Full disclosure: I have given this issue approximately zero thought and I'm likely to have missed something crucial with the new mod or the current game state. Good luck with the war.

[Mr. Cairo]

How many hammers have you invested into caravels as transport units? It has to be a metric shit ton. I'd say it would be interesting to have put that volume of hammers into wealth/research builds instead  to see how close you could get to Astro/galleons, but you can't SA whip wealth/research. Maybe a better comparison would be the volume of food used in those whips and comparing that to the food (and subsequent whips) needed for galleons after Astro. I know the timing is not equivalent but this seems to be a somewhat inefficient use of hammers by comparison to a galley attack with some covering privateers.

Full disclosure: I have given this issue approximately zero thought and I'm likely to have missed something crucial with the new mod or the current game state. Good luck with the war.

All these Caravels were built with the intention of attacking OH, not Superdeath. And to attack OH I needed to get in a first strike from the fog. Which Galleys couldn't do. You're right in the fact that an awful lot of food from whips went into these Caravels, but at the same time, I was only able to get that much food for the whips though spreading irrigation, which requires Civil Service, which cuts off an Astro Bulb. I also went into this game with the intention of using SA's as best as I could, so my city+improvement planning was geared towards that. But to be honest, my land is so poor, that I do think this is the best use of it.
Here's an old screenshot of my empire:


This is shit. Lots of plains, few rivers, not a lot of food. One of my best commerce cities is Engie, which is working 5 Towns by now I think. It's "food" is a plains cow and a floodplains farm. To even use all the tiles in this land I've had to farm most of the grasslands, which 'lets" me work non-riverside plains cottages. If I had focused on hammers (through Caste workshops) most of my cities would have a smaller population, and I wouldn't be able to fit those filler cities that even now are generating a decent amount of my commerce. And if I wasn't IMP/ORG Aztecs and didn't have access to 45 hammer courthouses I would have crashed my economy ages ago.
I don't have screenshots of Krill's land, or Gavagai's land (half of which was "supposed" to have been Elkad's), but it's far better than mine. As for OH, he just played very well, getting important wonders, a valuable shrine, expanding to good islands and to my own landmass, and executing a Astro bulb that let him conquer Donovan Zoi.

OK, now let's talk some more about those Caravels. I wanted to attack OH, I'd been planning it for some time, and I knew I needed Caravels to hit his islands and try and burn some of his more important mainland cities (like his Hindu Shrine city). However, OH was consistently ahead of me in power and hammers, so even with a surprise attack and near-perfect knowledge (thanks to all my EP spending into him from when he was the only civ I knew), I knew I would have trouble fighting him 1-on-1. That's where Krill comes in. In order for me to be able to launch my attack, I needed to know that I would actually end up gaining something from it. And since I couldn't catch up to OH in terms of power or tech or hammers, I needed OH to be fighing someone else. And that someone was supposed to be Krill. But Krill never committed. Looking back at my old posts here's the timeline:

Krill declares on OH turn 167. I was essentially ready to go at this point, so I whipped my Privateers. I was also hoping for Krill and OH to fight on their shared mainland border, although that was interfering with my plans to burn some of those cities since OH was running units around there.

They sign a cease-fire I think around turn 169, 170, after no fighting on the mainland. That allowed OH's Chariot in my territory, which I had been ensuring wasn't seeing my build-up, to see my Galley fleet that was going to land a force outside one of his cities on my landmass, so he was able to put some units on the hill I was going to land at, mostly ruining that plan. However, he still didn't seem to be aware of the threat to his other cities from my Caravels. But with him and Krill at peace, I couldn't risk attacking.

Then Krill declared war again on Turn 171. At this point I decided not to attack OH until I knew that Krill was actually committing to the fight. Because I didn't want to declare war on OH only for him and Krill to make peace, giving OH 10 turns to fight me which then gives Krill an opportunity to attack OH while he's busy with me. Krill was ahead of OH at this time and I had no intention of letting him get further ahead at my expense. Here's what I said on turn 171:

I'm really annoyed too, I have a shitty situation in which I can't compete with my land alone, whereas Krill has good land, and OH has an amazing shrine city (and Gav has the land of three civs now). I can destroy that shrine city, which would ruin OH's chances of winning, but unless he's already facing a real war elsewhere I'll just be making an enemy who's more powerful than me and has no plans but to kill me. I don't really like the idea of ruining my chances in order to ruin someone else's. But the longer OH gets to keep that city, the slimmer my chances become. If I wait too long OH might end up winning his war [vs Krill] and I'll lose any chance. Even if I do conquer Superdeath, it'll just make me really vulnerable to OH, since I'll be so spread out. banghead banghead banghead

By turn 172 I had seen Krill's massive stack of Knights waiting to attack OH's mainland, and so I was fairly optimistic that I would be able to launch my attack soon.

By turn 174 Krill had yet to invade OH, but I came to the conclusion that OH didn't realise the dangers posed by my caravels, since he hadn't really reinforced the cities they were threatening. I also had a lot of Privateers in position at this point.

Then on turn 175 Krill and OH sign another cease-fire, and OH is 1 turn from Frigates. At this point I give up on Krill ever actually putting any effort into this war and started to shift some of my units down to attack SD, because I wanted to do something this game. I was not interested in a repeat of PB41.

And then on Turn 177 Krill declares war on OH again, and this time actually invades with his Knight stack on their mainland. So I start to move my ships back into position to attack OH.

Turn 178 Krill takes a city with that Knight stack, OH takes some islands from Krill.

And then, the last nail in the coffin, on turn 179, Krill and OH sign a peace treaty. A proper one this time, not another ceasefire.


So over 12 turns, Krill and OH go to war 3 times, with 2 cease-fires, and finally a peace treaty. How exactly could I commit to a war with a neighbor more powerful than me unless I knew that neighbor would be fighting someone else at the same time? From this I concluded that Krill was unwilling to commit, and had given up on the game, since conquering OH is the only way he could compete with Gavagai.

So I figured why not attack Superdeath? I have this massive fleet and expensive army, lets use it.

I don't think going a different route, one focused on development and buildings and stuff like that, would have gotten me anywhere better than where I am now. I might be further ahead in tech, but I wouldn't have an army or navy to do anything with that tech. And it still wouldn't have been enough to compete with Krill or Gav or OH.

So, to sum up. It's all Krill's fault.  

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

How many hammers have you invested into caravels as transport units? It has to be a metric shit ton. I'd say it would be interesting to have put that volume of hammers into wealth/research builds instead  to see how close you could get to Astro/galleons, but you can't SA whip wealth/research. Maybe a better comparison would be the volume of food used in those whips and comparing that to the food (and subsequent whips) needed for galleons after Astro. I know the timing is not equivalent but this seems to be a somewhat inefficient use of hammers by comparison to a galley attack with some covering privateers.

Full disclosure: I have given this issue approximately zero thought and I'm likely to have missed something crucial with the new mod or the current game state. Good luck with the war.

All these Caravels were built with the intention of attacking OH, not Superdeath

... <snip>...

So, to sum up. It's all always Krill's fault.  

I agree, though with the slight edit. Relying on Krill to commit to the war first seems to have had a negative effect on your ability to commit to a course of action. This makes sense. You don't want to over commit and get annihilated in the face of a technologically and materially stronger opponent. On the other hand, it's possible (I don't really know what Krill would have done, just spitballing here) that if Krill sees you declare and sees OH's reaction, moving units south to respond to your incursion as he likely would have needed to do given the volume of shipping capacity you presented, that those cease fire deals could have evaporated and it could have been war in our time for OH on two fronts. It's hard to really say what would have happened. Being critical, vacillating between targets left you spinning your wheels. Being honest, I can't say I'd have done much different. In Civ, you can really only count on Krill to do what will benefit his civ the most. That may not have been war at that precise moment so you couldn't necessarily count on it. 

Thanks for the rundown on your decision process. It was interesting. Good luck with Superdeath.

Oh, almost forgot, your land does suck. I see so much brown with the plains and then have to conclude that is the good part of your island with the desert shit in the north/east. This island is just gross.

[Mr. Cairo]

I agree, though with the slight edit. Relying on Krill to commit to the war first seems to have had a negative effect on your ability to commit to a course of action. This makes sense. You don't want to over commit and get annihilated in the face of a technologically and materially stronger opponent. On the other hand, it's possible (I don't really know what Krill would have done, just spitballing here) that if Krill sees you declare and sees OH's reaction, moving units south to respond to your incursion as he likely would have needed to do given the volume of shipping capacity you presented, that those cease fire deals could have evaporated and it could have been war in our time for OH on two fronts. It's hard to really say what would have happened. Being critical, vacillating between targets left you spinning your wheels. Being honest, I can't say I'd have done much different. In Civ, you can really only count on Krill to do what will benefit his civ the most. That may not have been war at that precise moment so you couldn't necessarily count on it. 

Thanks for the rundown on your decision process. It was interesting. Good luck with Superdeath.

Oh, almost forgot, your land does suck. I see so much brown with the plains and then have to conclude that is the good part of your island with the desert shit in the north/east. This island is just gross.

Yeah, I was in an unfortunate situation where I simply wasn't strong enough to do anything myself but attack SD. Attacking OH would have been much preferable, but I couldn't win on my own, which is where Krill comes in. Or doesn't. Or does. Or doesn't. I mean, it would always have been a gamble. Even if Krill fully committed to attacking OH, once I jumped in there would be nothing stopping Krill from making peace with OH then, letting OH expend himself against me, and joining in 10 turns later in a much more advantageous position, while I suffer and ultimately gain very little from the attack. That was always a possibility, the risk I found unacceptable was that I might declare war on OH not realising that Krill never intended on properly fighting OH and seeing a cease-fire or peace treaty the next turn and losing whatever advantage I might have gained had OH been himself committed to a defense against Krill.

As for relying on other players doing what benefits their civ? I don't believe in that anymore. I think players can only be relied upon doing what's best for them, personally, as a human being. And there's no real way to determine that from within the game, one can only guess. If Krill wanted to win, he would need to actually conquer a neighbor, which are OH or Superjm. He doesn't appear willing to invest the time and energy a war against a skilled opponent at tech parity, so I can only conclude he no longer wants to win. Which leaves me with no choice but to do the only thing I could do on my own, which is attack SD, no matter how unlikely it is to turn out in my favour. And because it's fun, and I like to enjoy myself in these games and wars, especially offensive wars, are the best way to do that imo.

On to the game. Not much to report on my invasion. my plan has solidified. I'll attack the next couple of cities with forces from the sea, rather than advancing overland towards them. It basically only gives SD one turn to hit my stack with Catapults, and they might be not in position to do so.

Hoever, I'm no longer the only one SD has to worry about:


OH dent me an Iron-Iron deal, and declared war on SD. He hasn't taken anything, but he does have this massive invasion fleet about to strike. At first glance, and in the short term, this seems like a disaster for me. OH get's to attack SD's core, after SD has moved units down to face me. So I do the heavy lifting and get the least rewards. However, in the long term, and if the game last long enough, it could work out for me. First of all, I wont be facing nearly as many units from SD as I would in a 1-on-1 fight. And secondly, this could finally give Krill the impetus to really commit to a war with OH. If that occurs I'll eventually be able to capitalise by not only taking the cities of DS that OH captures, and probably have an easier time of it than if they'd remained SDs, and I'll hopefully be able to actually hit the targets I'd been planning on earlier.
So I sent the Iron-Iron back to him, and now I can only hope Krill has the motivation to attack OH. In the mean time, I'm going to make an effort to reach Astro, for Galleons, which would make an attack on OH a lot easier. I'm also getting all my filler cities, which have been churning out Catapults, to swap to wealth/research builds once their current cats are done, to assist with this goal.

I also got a Great Prophet from my NE city, so a Golden Age can be started any time now. I think I'll wait a few turns to build up my bank.

Also, Gavagai is being awfully trusting:

I'm not sure if he's aware, but Privateers can still attack without declaring war, even if they no longer have hidden nationality. I could waste his entire fleet of Galleons here. I'm not going to, obviously, but I did send him a fish-fish offer just to try and confirm his peaceful intentions towards me. I still think he's not planning anything against me, but it'll be nice to have some reassurance.

edit: also realised I totally forgot to do any whips this turn, but I already hit end turn and I don't have any more time tonight, so, I guess that's just too bad for me