[SPOILERS] JR4 and RefSteel have a plan

[JR4]

TURN 296

Mr. Cairo came up with a.. one sided offer. He`s probably trying to break the alliance by offering deals that are "too good to refuse" to us. I still decided to reject it out of principle. Other players certainly gladly would have accepted it. Oh, and Wetbandit signed peace too. For 55 gold per turn - which is more than we were offered last turn.

   

Wetbandit already has a few Destroyers around. Those units are scary as Ironclads are no match for modern warships.

[RefSteel]

Wetbandit already has a few Destroyers around. Those units are scary as Ironclads are no match for modern warships.

Yeah - this relates to (one of) the difficulty(/ies) of making a dogpile actually work: We don't want to hit Mr. Cairo if all it does is to hand wetbandit the game. And wetbandit certainly won't do anything that he thinks will hand us the game. So we both have to walk a tightrope of creating or maintaining a balance of power-in-the-form-of-expected-win-probability between ourselves while crippling Mr. Cairo's victory attempt - while of course each hoping the other overestimates his chances. (And wetbandit will certainly be trying to trick us into thinking his chances are worse than they are if he sees a way to do it!)

Hmmm ... could we see a screenie of the Top 5 Cities screen? (And the Culture and GNP graphs might tell us something too)....

[JR4]

TURN 297

Mr. Cairo`s culture push makes sure that he`s got the top three cities in the world according to the F9 screen. He`s way ahead of us in total output of culture but at least we`re solidly in second place (not that it matters much or anything).

   

We do need to find a way of stopping Mr. Cairo plus not letting Wetbandit or even Superdeath run away with the game. Right now it`s kind of hard to predict how the game will end but I`m still confident that Mr. Cairo is in the driver`s seat, (though his chances of winning has dropped a bit when Donovan razed a city a couple of turns ago). We`re still waiting for some big military tech before planning for an attack. We`re making a credible 926 gpt at max tax but as a result our tech rate isn`t really any good. 1300 beakers in the mid 1850s? Could have been better..

[RefSteel]

Okay, that's interesting. I can't really tell just from looking at that information, but it doesn't look like there's a clear second place player. (And you're right that we shouldn't write superdeath off. He would like nothing better than for wetbandit and us to take down Mr. Cairo's culture attempt while wreaking destruction on all three of our civs, and he remains . He certainly has a lot more land area than we do!)

Also, I'm not surprised by those top 3 cities, but the next two do surprise me. It's even possible that Mr. Cairo doesn't really have a clear fourth city, though this is really, really uncertain; my inference that he did was based on extremely out of date information. (Even at the time, and that was some time ago itself!) And I'm not sure if this matters much, but Superdeath's culture graph looks really weird. Did he culture-bomb a city at some point (maybe around the beginning of his GA)? And then was he running Free Speech until the end of his Golden Age, and did he then revolt to something else? Or was he just running a billion artists during (and just prior to) his GA, and then dropped them all? Or did Something Else Weird happen?

[JR4]

According to PbSpy Wetbandit captured a city from Cornflakes which in turn reacted by making 7 whips. Maybe we should pile on?

[JR4]

TURN 298

Wetbandit did indeed declare war on Cornflakes and captured Cuzco which is an isolated city to the NE of Cornflakes`core. Wetbandit has a scary stack in Frankfurter, just N of that city. Hamburger was whipped down to size 6 this turn (Cornflakes is in war civics now, of course).

And then the was horns sounded again....

   

Yes, we declared war on Cornflakes too! It`s a gamble but what can you do? I`m hoping for a swift strike on Cornflakes to get a little bit more land but this might be playing into Mr. Cairo`s hands.

Machu Picchu had been a thorn in our side ever since it was founded. It was lightly defended with a couple of Rifles and some junk.

Infantry          -     CG1 Rifle          -  31 %   - Loss
G1 Infantry     -    Rifle                  - 63 % -  Win
G1 Infantry     -    CG1 Longbow -  63 % -  Win
G2 Rifle            -   C1 Pike            - 78 %  -  Win
C2 Cuirassier    -   Rifle                 -  97 % - Win and Macchu Picchu is ours! We kept it. It`s defended by 3 Machine Guns, a Pike and a Cuirassier.

Then we cleared up a couple of stray Knights on the brder at 99 % and 74 % odds. A Machine Gun is protecting 3 wounded units next to the city. If Cornflakes wants to he can easily recapture the city but that will cost him quite a few Knights..

Superdeath got a Horse for Horse offer. Surely he can`t refuse that. Or maybe he`ll stab us, who knows? Anyway, we have moved the majority of our army west so let`s see how the situation looks next turn. We could consider moving in everything and hope that our MGs keep our stack safe. I`ll think about it.

For the record,  fully expect an angry response from Cornflakes but this game has been too quiet for too long.

[shallow_thought]

FWIW, I suspect you've done the right thing. The best chance here is for you to split try to split Cornflakes amicably, and use the extra build queues to help turn on Cairo before it's too late ...

[JR4]

FWIW, I suspect you've done the right thing. The best chance here is for you to split try to split Cornflakes amicably, and use the extra build queues to help turn on Cairo before it's too late ...

I hope that you`re right about that. At some point we have to do something (more than waging a cold war on Mr. Cairo). In this current war we have total control of the air (Cornflakes hasn`t researched Scientific Method) and more advanced ground troops as our Machine Guns and Artillery are just brutal to deal with. Cornflakes is going to whip and draft dozens of Infantry in the coming turns and those are no joke, even at this stage of the  game. I wonder if Donovan and Superdeath join the feeding frenzy. This could easily get ugly with four massive armies running around in an area where the culture just disappears. Sigh, I wish we had a spare Artist around for tactics.

[Hollybombay]

How would you rank everyones chances/ how they have done this game?

[JR4]

How would you rank everyones chances/ how they have done this game?

I`ll get back to you tomorrow when I have more time.