scooty have Engineering 😦 And another wonder. I think they have built Pyramids, GLH, Oracle, MoM, ND, Collosus, Hindu shrine…I am down MC, Machinery, Engineering, Compass, Optics and CS. At least. I am up Music, and maybe Feudalism. I’m down at best 3k beakers. And probably more like 5k. I’m averaging less than 100bpt at breakeven (in other words my breakeven bpt hasn’t grown in over 30 turns).  And it’s not likely to improve in the near term because of this:

 

 

azza has built walls and researched Feudalism and started to get longbows into the city. I can wreck his stack and get odds – just – but it isn’t easy. The main needs are a lots of cats. Bombard cats lower the defences by 8%, so 6 bombard cats will lower the defences to 2%. I Would then need at least 8 cats to attack with (and consider them all lost) to then get good odds with the HA. I might get away with only 6 cats to attack with, but with azza adding units, 8 is what I will likely need by the time of an attack. That’s 14 cats total. I have 8 that can attack on T161 and only 4 of them can be promoted to bombard.

This is not unexpected, and why I didn’t stop the Nazul war after razing the new city. I knew that azza could build a walls in saffron at a moments notice and stop a straight forward attack from working. I carried on against Nazul to take as much as I could feasibly get without large HA losses and as it turned out I didn’t take any to capture the last two cities, but all good things must come to  an end and longbows are the main cause. Now I’m going to try something slightly different out.

 

 

azza has moved his garrison out of Vermillion and he has definitely moved it to Opportunism. Now, it is possible to move a stack of Ha from the tile 4E of SG and attack Vermilion in 3 turns. If I move at the end of the turn, azza only has 2 turns to respond. On a hill with fortification, I could raze vermilion for the loss of an estimated 4-5 HA if one longbow were added to the garrison. I have 20 heading to this theatre.

 

 

Cinnibar island can be attacked from the plains hill in the fat cross. With an axe on that tile (or a G2 archer or long bow) to stop azza throwing spears at the stack, Cinnibar will just fall. Move two workers onto hte hill at the same time, and the HA stack can position to hit Fuchsia the same turn that Cinnibar falls…or it can swing back and hit any stack that azza puts 1 of Opportunism. The even more aggressive play is to position a few defensive units on the plains forest to road that if azza tries to move units out of Saffron towards Fuchsia, and keep the cat stack 23 of Opportunism.

The effect of this would be that azza can’t move his units out of Saffron (via land) without bringing them into range of my cats and HA. He can’t threaten Opportunism, and I can still threaten to attack through Fuchsia into his core. It’s not infallible. I don’t have enough good units to make it work perfectly right now, I need more longbows and cats. But I don’t need to position my entire HA stack in range of Cinnibar to raze it, I just need to place enough there…and hide the rest 2 of Opportunism.

To answer someone who said I should lose units attacking azzA, the point of war is, ultimately, to take the other players cities. Not to lose units. Losing even an appreciable number of units is not a good way to wage war, because you need to replace them to hold the empire that you just captured if you wiped out the player, or to hold that little segment from the guy you just pissed off. That’s why we use suicide catapult stacks to keep the rest of the units alive, but even then, you try to get the other player to move onto the best tile for you to attack.

 

 

See the sheer lack of new units coming down from the core…

 

 

OTOH, that’s a still intimidating. I don’t want to get a huge drop in my power though, as that signals to the other players that I’m no longer a threat.

 

 

To make it easier to plan the war out, here is an overview. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to take advantage of azza, except to isolate his stack at Saffron.

 

 

Add to this the units in Vermilion, 2 spears, 2 archers and a warrior

 

 

Yay religion finally in DP.

 

 

GS next turn.

 

 

One free religion spread to Brilig in Commodore land, two religion spreads to my cities.

 

 

Now that the era of HA is about to come to an end…do I keep on building them? Do I build cats, or WE? Or maybe LB? I still think I need a few more HA, but…yeah, need to change the core of my army. But slow movers take so long to reach any of the fronts…

 

 

As I said…more cats…

 

 

A few more scientists until I can slave the court house. I need the science…

 

 

I might need to build wealth Here next turn to get CS. Maybe. Depends on the slider and costs, and with court hosues finishing I can’t be 100% sure of what’s happening.

 

 

Boring…

 

 

Turn 157 and I’m about to finish my first court house. Perhaps this was a bad move, considering it could have been 2 cats (well, near enough), but I am going to postpone the FP build by a few turns to build more cats. I need cats so much…

 

 

Boring.

 

 

Looks like cats for ever…

 

 

My second built court house. The third farm will be operational next turn, and the fourth farm the turn after that. grow to size 9 and then just work all of hills to pump out units as needed. eot T163 should be when PD hits size 9.

 

 

Maybe…maybe slave some cats out of here?

 

 

Court house next…or cats? No, another longbow, this one needs to head down to Opportunism.

 

 

To turn PRNGG onto military or not…I think not. It would require delaying growth, and growth is one of the important points right now, even though I want to take over azza I still need to grow my cities, and really need to work cottages.

 

 

I’ve stacked that much unhappiness here I really think I would need to slave out a court house before I could go back to slaving units…and with 10gpt, it’s probably a smart move.

 

 

Still waiting…

 

 

Grow…

 

 

More revolt…

 

 

Net foreign income 🙂

 

 

Nazul certainly took a hit on the crop yield and MFG. I’m now assuming that top power is azza, without his graphs I can not know for sure, but the other players with high power have taken quite a hit over the past 5 turns.