GT still has about 90% of our milpower (which is itself ~90% of nauf's)..... so unless there is some kind of delay such that the Yeha engagement is not reflected in the current numbers, they must still have either a major stack somewhere (we STILL have not seen the 7+ cat stack from the west at the start of the war) or five 11-unit garrisons in each of their cities.... well, addis ababa we can see has just 4 units (and looks pretty galley-snipable) but maybe the others all have 11. either way i doubt the capital is undefended, more likely GT is planning to make a last stand there with a 30-unit pile or something
Turn 144 - Zululand
ok, what do we have to deal with today.... a lot, most likely. sent early cow/cow to drey and ginger to see how safe a serfdom swap would be. and yeah, it's the last turn of the golden age so we have to commit now if we're going to do that, as well as do a gigantic pile of whips if we do choose to revolt, including 3 settlers that i hopefully/delusionally started last turn for such a purpose. unsure about religion as well - buddhism was definitely wrong, we have exactly one monastery right now and it's jewish, plus i'd rather strengthen neighbor-of-our-neighbor mjmd than possible nauf-enabler gavagai, even if gav looks more behind in a vacuum. but not sure if judaism or no religion is correct. and matara, where i am likely to face consequences for the delirium in which i made our last move
. AND a possible engagement with GT's triremes. yikes
drey is down to extend as well, so these 10 turns will take us to castles in the border cities and relative safety. serfdom it is probably, unless i see a compelling reason not to, which means a big pile of whips it also is
and the very scary interturn went....
about as well as it possibly could have for us. we actually DID convince GT to abandon matara, and it looks like the garrison is heading north for the prophesized last stand at the capital, oh the road to which GT has alertly stationed an xbow on the forested hill south of the lake to prevent our G2 longbow from cutting them off. they also did kill our two bait axes coming up from kinbozan with crossbows, which we should now be able to ice with horse archers in return (at least that's true for the visible one which took a ton of damage killing a cover axe). i think once we take matara, the road 2N of the city will revert to neutral, so we actually could probably beat down the former garrison as well (2 axes, 1 xbow, 5 pikes), although we'd probably have to trade a few catapults for the privilege and it might do just as much to speed nauf to aksum as it would to speed us. of course with GT's milpower it could be that the garrison turns around and attacks lalibela instead of defending the capital, which IS potentially worth preventing....
and the northern trireme situation, where it looks like GT did indeed not see our boat production. i could just go around GT's ships now by moving through WTK, but that diverts them east where wakamotoharu DOES have a pillageable fish and would need to make even MORE unnecessary triremes.... better just to attack them i think, which we can at least do from the safety of the city center so any wounded triremes can't get countered. i think 3 C1 triremes + next turn's whipped galley (which note that they can't escape from either) should suffice
ohand we finished that forge in mitakeumi that i was debating 5 turns ago and then never updated yall about lol
....huh?? why the fuck do we have vision on exactly THIS GT city? we do get city vis via espionage points next turn, but we don't have it yet and we can't see inside any other GT cities...? this one has buddhism which is our state religion, but i don't see why that would make a difference either?
uhhh ok i might be the dumbest person alive lol. we do have odds to live vs this chariot if it turns around and attacks us (and it would have to randomly move onto the desert to even see us). but maybe i shouldn't have assumed going for the worker snipe would be quite this easy lol
ok, road neutrality did indeed happen as predicted and it looks like we have options.... our 2-mover pile could be in range of hawulti in the south next turn, but it's possible both that the city's garrison is too large to take and that nauf has too many guys around and will get there before we will. or we could push on gondar, maybe pillaging 1S of the former matara garrison to keep it from interfering. actually we should probably do that either way so they can't just turn around and take it back tbh
matara kept its forge AND GRANARY yessss be still my heart
nauf's megastack is chilling in yeha for some reason.... implying to me that they know something we don't know about gondar, perhaps that it contains the pile of cats we keep failing to locate lol. but moving up our surviving chariot shows that to not be the case.... gondar has just 6 units in it, 5 of which are pikes, and our cats can even beat nauf's to the city center now if we go for it. or likewise at hawulti, where both nauf's knights and our 2-mover pile are 2 turns away... we are going to run into turn order issues here though, as nauf and i don't have a formal split between us and it looks like either city's long-term owner could come down to who moves first.... as much as i would love to just kind of claim the first half of the turn by virtue of the fact that i moved first THIS turn when it became obvious (to me anyways) that we need to establish a formal turn order, i'm not sure that's exactly how this works.... actively soliciting lurker feedback on this one
so hawulti actually DOES have a 9-pike pile in it, which is more than gondar has, and either target would require us to commit our cats, and probably nauf as well unless they are willing to brute-force at major losses to their knight pile. there is a part of me that wants to feint at hawulti with our 2-movers this turn and ACTUALLY go for the 1-spear garrison in massawa in the southwest
we couldn't really hold it in the event of a conflict with america, but potentially we could arrange a city trade with it for one of america's eventual prizes. the city does have silver, 3 of its own floodplains, and an oasis, which probably nets out to "better than hawulti", if marginally
well anyways, there are a few combats that i think are pretty obvious... cleaning up GT's random units SE of matara, for one
longbow vs 3.8 health crossbow (71%): wins and can promote to guerilla 2 now (it was in the first wave of LBs that lacked 5 XP). and hey, they actually killed the other axe with their own combat 3 axe, so
chariot vs c3 axe (74%): dies pathetically without doing damage
lmao, we are seriously 0 for 2 on chariot vs axe combats..... we don't even have any guys that get odds on it anymore
i'll take a 74% fight with a chariot but i don't exactly want to risk an HA on this at WORSE odds..... but now our brand new g2 longbow is exposed and i don't want to lose them either... mannnn
make the first whip of the turn and the background music changes.... "we don't want to go to war today, but the lord of the lash says nay, nay, naaaay!" for the first time this game, to my surprise. how the game has become aware of the fact that this turn is very likely to set my single-turn whip record when all is said and done, i have no idea
okay i'm going to take a break from this theater and go for the triremes, where i'm at least reasonably sure of what the correct play is
c1 trireme vs unpromoted trireme (50%): wins!
c1 trireme vs unpromoted trireme (50%): wins again! amazing
wow trireme on trireme warfare is amazingly destructive, pointless, and random but at least the randomness has broken in our favor this time... and yeah, better to lose a chariot against a strategically worthless axe than to lose a difficult-to-replace trireme in advance of an attempted naval landing
sigh... i then moved around a bunch of workers to distract myself but that's wrong! i'm supposed to be in serfdom at the end of this turn so i just wasted a crapton of worker turns
(((( oh well at least i caught it before moving ALL of them....
while we're on the theme of potential civics-related screwups, let's just get the whipping out of the way now before i forget about it. the unstinting lash demands:
longbow in kinbozan
settlers in daieisho, abi, ura
galleys in wakatakakage, adulis, lalibela
sentry chariot (since i keep wasting all of ours....) in hoshoryu
halfway through that unholy whipping frenzy i realized another reason today is a very special day
yup, look at that! i mean really GAZE upon it. yep, you know what that is.... a TOWN in hoshoryu!!! on turn 144, the first actual-ass town in our empire has matured! never mind that ginger had towns 40 turns ago while we were still working on getting our first village
ok after a lot of brooding, i think it's sane to trade 2-3 cats for GT's 8 medieval defenders fleeing matara. it means nauf is less likely to be stalled at taking aksum, but equally it means WE are less likely to get stalled there, and i think most of our probability of doing so basically comes from the surprise factor and from being a few turns ahead of nauf in moving our main stack up there. so if GT stacks 20 defenders in the capital and the battle for aksum becomes attritive, i'd say nauf is more likely to come out on top with their superior unit comp. plus anything that pushes the pace of conquest probably comes out to a net positive even if it helps nauf make gains too, as we'd like to transition into "rebuild and shift focus to ginger" mode as quickly as is feasible. plus our cats are 3 turns from gondar either way, so as long as we don't spend TOO many here i think we can still threaten to beat nauf to the city (which again, is not happening if 8 more medieval defenders appear inside next turn lol). plus the tile we would attack from is one of the few that is both threatening to future targets and definitely safe from counterattack barring a LOT of very specifically-positioned combat workers
it is very funny that barrage 2 gives +10% against melee units, which comprise essentially the whole GT stack. i may send a g2 longbow in first against the one crossbow in the hopes of saving one or more cats.... and i mean, 23% odds to live is a LOT higher than the 5% our cats are getting...
g2 longbow vs c1 crossbow (23%): dies but does 2 damage to the crossbow, so it's not top defender against anything anymore
b2 cat vs formation pike (8%): dies but does good collateral
b2 cat vs 5.2 health pike (44%): dies and gets just one hit in
b2 cat vs 4.4 health pike (53%): dies again
and now our stack is pretty undercatted with just 5 surviving and i'm starting to get "this was a huge mistake" vibes D:
g2 longbow vs 3.8 health pike (78%): wins, taking a ton of damage
shock WE vs 3.3 health formation pike (61%): dies miserably, nice
medic elephant vs 3.7 health pike: (57%): dies AGAIN, because fuck me right
and now nothing left really gets odds on the pikes... at least we do have one more longbow that i saved, hoping to not take damage as then GT's crossbow could kill it but things are bad enough that we lack that luxury now i think.
g2 longbow vs 3.3 health xbow (90%): DIES, wtf???
axe vs 3.5 health axe (68%): wins finally
shock impi vs 2.8 health axe (39%, we're REALLY thin here guys): wins
shock impi vs 3.7 health pike (57%): dies
shock impi vs 3.5 health pike (67%): wins but we really can't spend more impis if we're going to push for massawa, which now looks like our best bet of making something happen with what's left of this stack
flanking horse vs 2.3 health pike (74%): wins for another sentry unit to replace the ones i blundered and am continuing to blunder
flanking horse vs 2.5 health, but less promoted, pike (75%): wins, see above
c1 horse vs 0.8 health pike (99%): wins
c1 horse vs stupid dumbass crossbow (99%): wins
so with pretty miserable combat luck, especially at the beginning... well, we still traded 8 pretty out of date units for 8 medieval ones. but i don't think i would have taken the attack if i knew things would go THAT badly.... most of our stack's offensive potency is kinda down the tubes now and i think we blew it on having a shot at taking gondar. yeah that's nice, real nice....
moused-over stack is in the city, selected stack is 2N of it where we fought the garrison. next step from here, i think, is still to threaten some combination of gondar and massawa in the far south. 5 cats is still enough to take an underdefended city, it would just be a little dicey... or, with our still decent-sized pile of horses and um, 3 remaining impis in range, we can bumrush down the one spear in massawa, probably even if it turns into a pike next turn. i don't think we can do both at the same time but still, even taking one or the other of those cities plus what we have already equates to a not-too-terrible split.
you will also see that all the carnage has brought us close to another GG, and at this point i think i will go out of my way to try to promote a 10XP unit manually over the next few turns and will just settle them both in whatever our heroic epic city looks most likely to be. 4 is the threshold for commandos in the distant future but with 3 we can spit out 10XP guerilla 3 muskets which i like the sound of.... and even "just" 2 clears the threshold for triple-promoted knights, not that i'm really sure how useful those are considered to be.... but i think one of those gives heroic epic by itself anyways, yes?
well, quadruple-check that everything's safe and we've whipped everywhere we want to, and time for serfdom i suppose. and no, i will not be swapping out of vassalage for bureaucracy, i still intend to spam units pretty hard for the next while, especially after we hit gunpowder. maybe we can afford a modest infrastructure week that consists of dropping PRO castles everywhere and then finishing off our complement of courthouses but that's about all i can really envision right now
and i see that we got a buddhist spread in kirishima, which makes my decision: back to no religion so all religions will give us +1 culture. and i think a 60 hammer monastery is not a bad buy in kirishima even regardless of the cultural impact.... it is worth 6 beakers per turn (at 100% science in a GA but still). takayasu is also going to start a library as a pseudo-wall.... it's worth a bunch of beakers, yeah, but also that city has NO culture so it's a 20% defense boost vs janissaries as well...
another exhausting turn.... and i'm pretty sure mistakes were made, ESPECIALLY tactically where i've been sloppy as hell (i have elided big-time just HOW many sentry chariots and horses i have allowed to die to pike snipes for no particularly compelling purpose). but whatever, three cities plus a fourth filler we can now make between tomokaze and matara is fine, if we can keep them.... now we grow grow grow onto our our one area of comparative advantage, raw tile count, until the end of the world... while spamming what is, i guess, our other area of comparative advantage, bigass stacks of 4-promoted longbows and muskets behind castle walls + CI, so we can KEEP that advantage in raw tile count...
ok civ4
