[SPOILERS]The Tyrant realizes that once the world burns it gets really boring....

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Whatever, our people need relief from the whip, not new gods to worship. The sooner they kill our enemies the sooner they'll find their relief.

Mindy, who is Mr. Furious? Sounds like a nice guy.

I'm sure she's talking about you, but I can't find the post.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Oooooooo I remember now, yeah. It was from the end of AT/Krill's thread in Pitboss 9. I thought I already replied there?

Edit: I found it. Yeah, that's me.

No worries.

[Commodore]

How old are you guys to miss that reference?

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Getting older every minute. And I'm not a big fan of his movies, so I probably missed it.

Suttree is a tricky bastard, I'll give him that. But does he have enough horses to knock us off the continent? That's the question, because he's one bad decision from finishing sixth or seventh locked in a death match with us...




We thought this might happen, so we'll see. I'm sure his plan is to counterattack and kill our weakened force. Good tactical play, but the wrong strategy if he wants to win. I'll get in the mud if I have to and no one wins.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Suttree has chosen unwisely.

Congrats to retep or William or wetbandit or whoever. This game just became a jihad against LOL, SUT.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

T177

The RNG wasn't so kind to us this turn. I forgot to take pictures of the combat log afterwards, but we lost several 80%+ fights and had poor showings on our suicide/scratch fights, in some cases failing to get a single hit with odds of winning as high as 40%.




The two catapults hit the garbage more often than I would have preferred, only doing light damage to the longbows. Luck of the draw, but annoying. After this, we had a few bad rolls on the undamaged guerrilla2 LBs/xbows. Eventually, though, we cut through the tough stuff, ate up the trash, and took the city. Capture gold was ~160g. Here's what I was eager to see:




As surmised by Xenu, suttree has used his gold stockpile to upgrade mounted units to Cuirassiers. That's not the end of the world, but in conjunction with the Musketeers they will cause us plenty of problems. We lack collateral (cats) to shred this stack and decided to cover our damaged cataphracts rather than try to hold the cities we have just conquered. Learning is 7 tiles away and is safe this turn, but Lesson and Thesis would be hit if suttree moved in. He has four workers, so could actually road both of the plains tiles in the south of Thesis and get units into the second ring of Beside You for an attack there next turn. This is a fairly unlikely play, though, so we decided to cover up our damaged invading stack instead.




We have two combat5 phracts and a couple of combat4 phracts holding things together over here. There is a single damaged chariot in Thesis, the honor guard waiting to be killed, and a phract in Lesson. He can hit our stack NE of Lesson with 18 Musketeers and 10 Cuirassiers, plus other units that we potentially cannot see. I renamed The Tour Guide to The Elephant Never Forgets, somewhat blurring the lines between diplomacy and no-diplo. I recognize that suttree is cornered and out of expansion room, and that Oxy has maintained a large stack of units, so suttree may see us as a better target. But, we're CHM and have Phracts, so he may well have a better time using his troops somewhere else.

This probably forces us to stay in Police State/Slavery at the end of the golden age (we were going to keep Theocracy/Mercantilism anyway, and probably have to swap to Bureaucracy from Vassalage to have any economy to speak of), which means we'll just continue building units against suttree. We won't be able to get to Astronomy to do any damage to retep, so this game is probably over. But, WilliamLP still has the Mausoleum and is gaining land in the north vs. Kuro, and wetbandit apparently can settle the entire planet from his back yard. As for us:




We've taken what we can profitably take and hold without friction. We could snipe Horace Dodge and Purdue for certain, and perhaps John Dodge as well, which is decent enough, but that would leave us very close borders with WilliamLP for not a ton of profit. With suttree looking thorny in the way south, we decided to call a halt here and offer peace to Kuro and transition surplus phracts back to our core. I'll kill off the barb city over the next couple of turns. Not pictured here are a couple of phracts 1N of Kuro's bronze (moved after I took the picture). If he declines the peace offer, I can burn his cities for gold and offer peace again.




No surprises here, just more units. My biggest concern is that suttree moves on Beside You before we can extract our forces from sisubland. Whether we kill off sisub's last city will depend entirely on what suttree does. I'd rather leave the city as a buffer than sap my strength and then have to immediately fight suttree. The sad part is that whatever suttree takes he will likely keep with his Musketeers. A CG promotion or two and we'll really have to bleed to recapture cities.




I am not in fear for our existence, we're still quite healthy on troop count, but we do have a fair bit of strength spread out and are locally outgunned in the south. Our Golden Age will end soon, making the whip even more important if things get ugly with suttree. We'll need to throw together some catapults if he makes a move toward our core. Unfortunately, if he wants Sisubstan at the discount rate, there's not much we can immediately do to dissuade him. Good tactical play if he attacks us, he'll just have to be content to fight it out until someone else wins.

For us, winning has been an uphill battle since the beginning with this slow civ and not great land, and this (attacking with phracts) was our best chance to make some gains. We've been too long delayed by bad decisions/RNG rolls (the GP fiascos) and that has allowed suttree enough time to cause us problems integrating what should have been an easy conquest. If we are unable to transition from wartime civics to improve our economy, we won't get to Astronomy in anything close to the near future in order to prevent retep from running away with the game. His GNP is ridiculous compared to ours and is very strong compared to even his best competition. I'd give anything for a narrow isthmus to England. I think retep has a glass jaw, rightly focusing on economy and neglecting military, given his geography. I'd love to have away to get at him and even things out some. Oh well.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Nice ninja.



War, then. Forever.

[MindyMcCready]

Oooooooo I remember now, yeah. It was from the end of AT/Krill's thread in Pitboss 9. I thought I already replied there?

Edit: I found it. Yeah, that's me.

No worries.

Damn work restricts YouTube,...

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

I have a meeting at 9p. Do you want to grab the turn? If not, it will have to wait until tomorrow.

[NobleHelium]

How did you get those C5 phracts, from a GG or just base and fighting?