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

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

No more bloodshed just now. Probably not until retep comes in blazing with redcoats. Or suttree drafts a wad of units for revenge.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Looks like retep has begun drafting. Can confirm when one of us is in game by checking if he is in nationhood or not, but that's going to be the end of him being squishy. Time to stack up our coastal cities just in case he is insane and tries to attack.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Yup, confirmed, retep adopted nationhood, theocracy, and slavery. He's powering up. Whether for deterring invasion or coming after us who can say, but if I were him I'd stay on my side of the ditch and tech to victory. With that said, our stack doesn't have anything to do right now so if he wants to sail across we'll have a welcoming party healed up by next turn and can have it repositioned to attack around our capital region three turns from now. Retep won't have an invasion fleet by then anyway since he just started whipping -- no way he sends in the first five or ten redcoats as the invasion force. He'd have to draft for five or six turns to build a solid stack to take and hold cities. The trouble gets to be, though, that his forces are now eminently replaceable and ours are a bit more costly (1 pop redcoats vs. 2 pop phracts for us), and pinch or not that won't work out well for us in the long run if he presses it. We'll see what he does, though. I don't think an attack on us does him any good in terms of winning the game -- he just settled two more cities last turn by the look of it, why not keep expanding that way as long as it's possible?

[spacetyrantxenu]

Retep now has 22 cities with space to settle more until proven otherwise. We have 24 at the moment with a plan for adding several more quickly to fill up the old Sisubistan area. That will bring us to 28 cities. For comparison, William has 23 cities, wetbandit has 22 cities, Molach has 15, Suttree and Oxy both have 11 cities, and Kuro has 6 cities. For expansion opportunities only Retep, wetbandit, and William likely have warm climate tiles they can add to their totals. Everyone else can expand onto tundra and ice, well, except Kuro who is kind of out of ice to settle on. Seriously, Kuro deserves a refund for the time he spent on this game, unless he had killed William early he wasn't going to have a chance with the land he had.

[spacetyrantxenu]

By the way...we're capped on number of cities maintenance now. We need some more courthouses pretty badly. Each one remaining to be built is worth 3-6 gpt. Not that our economy can really recover before this game ends but still, they'll help.

[spacetyrantxenu]

We're now spending 38 EPs per turn against retep (0% EP slider), and as of this turn we are at 829/337 against each other. We need to get to 375 EPs currently to get his graphs back and I'm sure that number will increase over the next several turns. I'm not going to track all of retep's EP allocations but I assume he's running a heavy load against both us and Wetbandit.

This is one part of the game we didn't do well at and I'm sure it didn't help our economy at all. We just didn't build enough courthouses. Why? Remember that loooooong stretch where we didn't have access to slavery?




Everyone doing decent in this game built more courthouses than we did. I suppose if I go back and reread this thread later I can second guess whether we should have eaten anarchy turns to swap back to slavery and finish whipping in our infrastructure, but who knows.

Other graphs (missing retep for now):



















Demographics:




We'll be #1 in land area next turn just with the barbarian city coming out of revolt. And we have borders popping in three of the former LOLsuttreean cities. That will add 24 tiles, plus 9 more from settling another city this turn. Speaking of settling the city, I assume we need to settle the one west of what used to be Colossus City, next to the corn and cow. I went ahead and pillaged it with two full health phracts, so the city is ready to settle now. I think we should settle that one before the other sites because it has the most food available for rapid growth. The city we should settle after that is in the west against the border with Oxy to go ahead and close that down. Then we'll have two more to settle around where Learning used to be. I've provided names for all of these spots. This is the Supper province of the Possum Kingdom.




We're going to have spare silk beginning next turn. Let's offer Oxy the silk we have now as a gift, we'll replace it next turn when the borders pop in the southwest city. I don't see any harm in giving freebies to him, he's been helpful and I'd rather not have any reason for conflict along his border. The only thing he would get out of trying to cram in a city on that border is silk anyway, so we may as well head that off if we can. Also, an amusing idea popped in and out of my head...what if we gifted him a small stack of phracts to use as he pleased? It would relieve us of some expenses, but no...I think we need to hang on to all of our power to deter any ideas Retep might come up with. Still, it was funny to think of it. Would Suttree be pissed? Oh yeah. Would Oxy relish throwing free units at Suttree to burn the border town. OOOOOHHHH YEAH.

Finally, since we cleared the culture out of Memory Rock we now see Retep's cities on the F8 Victory Conditions screen:




The culture shows where he went the half-Parkin on his wonders. That's all I ihave time for this morning, the only units I moved were the two phracts to pillage the cottage tile where the next city is going. We got 9 gold from the pillaging. Let me know if you need any input for this turn, it's all yours. I may not log in again before I'm gone early tomorrow morning. Thanks for covering, have fun.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Thanks for the report. I took some pictures yesterday but didn't get around to posting. Is unit gifting legal? Even if it is, I won't trade any units away. Retep may becoming for us, somehow seeing us as a potential threat with so much land and such a large army still intact. But his reading of the graphs should tell him that our economy is based solely on fitting armor on horseback and killing things.

Yes, courthouses. And yes, not for the first time, that fucking awful run of GP spawns at low odds. We almost certainly should have just eaten the turn of anarchy. Oh well.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I don't know if it's legal or not, but I wouldn't do it anyway, we need to hang on to our power. It was just a fun thought.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Oh, also, do we really need to gift a free luxury to Oxy? I mean, we gave him a refund on his gpt offer. Let's not get crazy. We're still the biggest, baddest mutherfuckers in the medieval age here.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Have you checked civstats? We can't have enough friends. Looks like three civs are beginning to draft. Please post the tech screen and see what civics the other apparent drafters are in. Retep is surely rifles, Suttree will be musketeers, but I'm not sure about wetbandit. Can we tell if he has rifling yet?


We're going to have spare silk, it's there something we need to trade for? If not I'd still give it to Oxy.