[SPOILERS] Pindicator emerges from the wilderness to play pb74

[pindicator]

And he didn't play again last night. I regret pushing for a 36 hour window: Amica has continued to wait to play until the last day possible since it happened, and that means I probably will have to extend the timer because I won't have an opportunity to play my half of the turn as I'm in the office tomorrow.

[pindicator]

165

Long overdue for an update here. Was planning to show off our push to conquer Amicalola next turn, as our pikes had finally moved into place, but scooter accelerated that plan.

Finished Paper this last turn, which means we can finally start building galleons.



Have one settler out but we'll need more soon as we start finishing up our galleons. And Commodore is quickly filling up the world.



Next up we are going Alphabet on our way to Printing Press. Need to get the economy moving.

Only 2 people know Education - probably Gavagai and Commodore. It's really a 2-superpower race and the rest of us are trying to figure out how to survive.

Scooter moved out:




Disappointed that I did not have all my knights near Philips - but perhaps he doesn't attack in that case. As it is, I have 31 knights and 5 horse archers that can hit that stack. I think that's enough to start killing catapults with flanking? Either way, we are getting 70% odds on our attacks so it's quickly agreed that we go in:

Lost the first battle, but then won the next 7 and all his C1 War Elephants were killed. On our second victory:




Earned a Great General, but he spawned all the down in Palouse so no tactics to be had - instead he settled in Cispus where we can make 11xp Knights now.

On our second loss Scooter/Amicalola earned their Great General:




Luckily spawning on the island where we can deal with him when we are ready.

We hit a rough stretch of RNG with the regular elephants and lost 6 of 8 battles at one point. On our second But overall we did well: 18 War Elephants, 3 Horse Archers, 2 Spears, and 2 Crossbows killed - and in return we only lost 7 Knights and 2 Horse Archers. So about a 75% win rate overall. Disappointed that there were no catapult kills from flanking damage. The tooltip shows his healthiest catapult has less than 40% HP so I think we got unlucky there. Or not - I really don't know the details on how flanking works.

I moved all the units up:




Let's see what happens on Scooter's next turn.

[xist10]

[pindicator]

166

Scooter attacked in, which was really the only choice he had. He lost all his catapults, 11 horse archers, 2 elephants, 1 crossbow, and 2 axes.

He killed 2 knights.




I moved up any 1-move unit that was in the green for HP, along with all the cats, and covered them with a pair of fresh knights that had not yet made it to the battle. All the badly wounded units or knights stayed in place and healed with the help of a couple new medic units (1 knight and 1 pike - redundancy in case on ended up dying from an attack, and also because we'll probably want a medic knight for later on). Next turn we should be able to sweep away the last bit of Amica's army and just leave him with the island city.

Unfortunately for scooter and Amica, we're now talking about leaving him to sit there for a while.

Because we have all these knights and want to put them to use:




Funny enough, Metal is keeping his army outside of his borders(?????)




I don't understand why he's doing this - he's not at war with anyone. But if we can get a sizeable enough force over (i.e. need more galleons) then we can take Seoul and unload knights into Seoul, moving them to fork the remaining 2 mainland cities all in the first turn of a war. Potentially we can finish metal off in 2 turns. It all depends on his garrisons over there.

And we finally do have galleons now. The first pair came off the line this turn. The southern one out of the capital loaded up our settler and a longbow and is headed to the island off our coast.




We are starting a settler in Esteros d'Ibarra to get the northern crab spot. Also, while putting this together I noticed there is an island in the fog on the way to Metal - so we're starting a settler at Koko Head once it reaches size 6 and will triple whip that.

Empire-wide shot:




We need settlers, workers, missionaries, infrastructure, galleons, longbows, and growth. Seems easy.

[pindicator]

170

I think Amica/Scooter has 2 more turns left to live.




If Scooter hadn't used his GG to give all the units in the city 1 promo then we would have been getting odds with just our knights. But now we have a load of 12 catapults landing next turn, and then attack on t172.

And all those t- signs? Going straight to metal next.

[pindicator]

172

Scooter just about gave us a heart attack last turn when we noticed the city counter had gone up to 2.  But I went back through some screenshots and realized there was only one place the city could be.  We moved up our chariot and thankfully scooter hadn't sent a horse-archer escort to go with it:




We also unloaded our catapults last turn, and so this was the turn that the island city fell.  Bombarded with 9 catapults, then sent 3 in as sacrifice.  Unfortunately we proceeded to lose both of our C3 knights to 80% battles, but we cleaned up after that.

And Amicalola is eliminated.




A fine job he did of torpedoing both of our games.

We still have some play though, even if we aren't going to win this thing.  We are 3rd in city count with 25, but Gavagai and Commodore both lead the way with counts in the 30s.  I took some time to figure out tech, and it doesn't look too pretty there either:

• Gavagai - 41k
  
• Commodore - 35k
  
• Ginger/Miguelito - 29k
  
• Picadilly - 22k
  
• Us - 20k
  
• Plemo - 19k
  
• Donovan Zoi - 12k
  

and it gets ever increasingly bleak from there.  A special shout-out to Metal who has somehow gone 172 turns without researching Currency as well as a single religious tech.  I'm rather impressed.  It's actually why we were rushing galleons north to pick up our knights and invade him.

Sadly, Donovan Zoi is going to beat us there by just a couple turns.




Our warrior had been scouting metal out, so I know that he has nothing at home right now.  His stack is off invading GKC and while he helps Ginger kill GKC off, Donovan is going to get metal's 4 mainland cities quite quickly.  However, we are scrambling and will be attacking metal next turn.




It's not a coordinated super stack, it's just literally everything we have available.  The lead galleon can hit Incheon next turn and has a knight that can promote to Amphibious if we find Incheon as lightly guarded as we found when our caravel passed by.  The rest of the northern group might turn south and join up with the southern knights, but I haven't decided where to attack first.  GKC does not have Engineering so it may be best just to hit as many cities as possible by the sea.  In fact, with how badly he's taken some hits lately he may not have anything to defend with.

Our second wave needs to go pick up the catapults, pikes, and longbows.  I brought a few but we'll need more to stake our claim.  Also, the settler is for the Rice/Sugar spot marked on the map.  No idea why that hasn't been settled yet.

Meanwhile, I'm hoping Commodore doesn't think about changing the deal he made with us:




I sent him a War with Gav & War with GKC message combined with some fish to remind him of our past deal.

We're never going to have Infrastructure Week


A parting shot of the empire now that Amicalola is finally gone:

[pindicator]

173

You know what? Peace is boring.




I miscounted and we actually couldn't reach Incheon this turn with our galleon. Actually even if we could he's got 2 galleys sitting right off the coast blocking us from reaching the city.

So we dropped off 6 knights and set up to attack a lot of cities next turn:




Metal's stack reappears but it needs to chew through GKC's garrison before he can return. Still, this might be enough to slow down Donovan Zoi. And we need to keep an eye out because if he decides to send those our way then we could run into issues ourselves.

But next turn we probably declare on GKC. There can only be 1 blue civ!

[pindicator]

From Civstats, DZ took Seoul and Pusan.

Also, i think it's hilarious that metal has basically walked his stack all the way through Ginger & Miguelito's lands to get a surprise attack factor on GKC - only to slowly walk that stack back to hit the city right on his border.

Edit: If metal was tricky he could have sent GKC a peace offer once DZ attacked - if GKC accepts that could teleport metal's stack to a spot where he could immediately hit DZ's invading army.

[pindicator]

It's going to take a while to write up the turn, so I'm just going to give the setup portion for now. Very eventful turn, very successful turn - had great dice rolls and only one stupid misclick of an error.

Now, what we found when I logged in:




Metal had not captured Wonsan, and had not recaptured one of the cities from DZ but instead had captured Rheims in the middle of GKC's territory! Further, instead of using his stack to attack and capture Wonsan he is slow moving it across GKC's empire - what!? He tried to kill our warrior but lost a 75% attack with a chariot - that will be a big hit to him in other ways as I pillaged the road that warrior is sitting on. I also used the worker I captured to scout ahead a bit and see what was in Rheims.

It's sunny, I'm going to go run and then I'll report on the turn. But Gavagai was also in the game the same time as we were and PBSpy shows a very eventful turn for the two of us:

[pindicator]

174

I figured the best place to start was Incheon. Or rather, the simplest. 6 knights vs 4 defenders: 2 war elephants and a couple ancient era units. Our first knight was promoted to Formation and won it's 80% fight flawlessly. Then the C2 Knight up against a C1 Elephant at 70% - another win. And the remaining knights cleaned up the spear and axe without a loss:




One down.

I might have messed up this next one. I used one of the southern galleons to go after Rouen next, but it may have been better to come down with the unloaded boat of knights up by Incheon. (Or not, we have some opportunities now with those knights so it's not exactly clear.)

Rouen was defended by a single War Elephant. 10xp Knight was promoted to Amphibious and had a 70% chance to win:




More awesome.

Next I wanted to go after Rheims. Metal had taken the city from GKC and left it garrisoned with a healthy C1 elephant and a very hurt elephant. I knew I could unload directly into Rouen and then hit the city. The only problem is I rushed the attack.




Don't ever assume a fogged tile is empty! I did that and just go-to moved the formation knight straight over and it ended up going in the fog to go around the 3 hwacha that were there. Stupid mistake. So now I needed to grab another galleon to unload to get another formation knight out. Also: 3 hwacha needed to be killed so I was going to need another galleon full of knights for that as well.

Anyways, three successful attacks later we were up again with another 80% attack: formation knight vs C1 elephant. And another win. Then a mop-up win against the very injured war elephant:




Decided we needed to try for Orleans too even though there was only 1 galleon full of knights left. And Orleans was guarded by a Longbow. C2 Knight without Amphibious only got 32%, but that was good enough to go for it. We lost our first and only unit on that 32% attack and we almost won - got it down to 5hp. Then mopped up:




Oh, i forgot to take a screenshot but Avignon has 3 regular archers inside the city and another longbow on the forest NE of the city. We'll probably need to bring the trebuchets there - or even skip that city and move ahead to Lyons and Marseilles first.

Anyway, I also dropped off the settler on the rice/sugar spot, and moved up the remaining knights in the north that didn't get to be used. And the turn ended up looking like this when I was all finished:




Our warrior by GKC's city pillaged the road on the jungle hill. I doubt it survives, but this may also delays metal's stack from coming in another turn. Also - why didn't metal attack with his stack? He could have taken Wonsan easily but instead is slow-marching through GKC's territory. At this rate he's going to lose all his cities and never use his army.

I also unloaded the longbows directly into Rouen and moved them up - going to stash them inside Rheims for now, and probably move another one farther up towards Orleans.

Next turn we'll be able to found the city and unload the galleons directly inside. If DZ does not kill off metal on his turn then we'll be able to move 9 healthy or mostly-healthy knights onto the hill where his elephant+spear combo is now.

It's about 6 tiles between the loading point by God's Thumb and unloading side of Rouen, so we can do that trip about every 3 turns. That's not too bad, and we are up to about 9 galleons now. Making them everywhere. But in 4 turns we get Gunpowder and then it will be a lot of privateers to help protect the fleet.

4 cities in 1 turn is not that bad. Also, we settle city #30 next turn.