SGOTM 14 - One Short Straw

[LowtherCastle]

No response from bbp yet, so I suppose I should just keep playing. Maybe bbp can play some turns this weekend after my next upload.

I think the fastest way to set up the route to Zulu is a canal on Ragnar's spoke. His enculturated southern coastline extends something like 14 tiles and probably requires capturing at least 3 cities, plus maybe some inland.

I think to finish fast enough we'll need 3 or 4 fronts, two in each direction.

Looking forward, we'll have to move our Oz flotilla past Mansa before DoPing. Dhoom, are you unable to do any of your testing on what it will take to capture Oz?

 

[LowtherCastle]

Alas, looks like that lake at Agra somehow connects it to the outside world. So no warrior pump. We'll have to make some archers before Feudalism.

 

[babybluepants]

Sorry, late night...

I can play some turns tmr, if you like.

I think the barracks investment is questionable at the moment. We need to attack Liz soon, so I think I'd prefer more units in the short term. This is never easy to determine, though. You're probably right in building them. It just seems like our reinforcement flow has slowed down for now.

I would love to get some scouting on England... The WB can't see very much, unfortunately. Ideally, we can take both York and Hastings at the very start of the war. Hastings troops can't converge on London very quickly, so we'd need the York stack to be able to do so. We can steal one turn by moving galleons into the lake at York-NW, but that's about it.

In India, it looks like we can take Lahore eventually. The main stack can move into the SW city pretty quickly. We can probably consider jumping ahead to Ragnar after that, though we might be better off taking Hyderabad, as well. It would be nice to know his iron location.

Ragnar: judging by GW location, his capital should be just about directly SW of Hyderabad. You agree? It's probably not coastal. The galleon next to Lahore could swing to the India/Viking bay and do a bit of scouting.

Edit: xpost

 

[babybluepants]

Ahmedabad probably doesn't need to build culture. I'd speed up the WB build by 3h.

Ivory borders pop in 1t. We can move the fogbust warrior into MP duty.

 

[babybluepants]

When we attack York, we should also have a worker asap, to fort 1 SW. Is it possible to canal from London to York? I'll check in WB. Edit: no, ofc not.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Here's why we have TRs with Zulu now:



Thank you, Mansa!

 

[babybluepants]

Mansa and Monte are expanding into the hub fast... That's not so good.

Is Drama really useful? If we're settler-spamming, we already have a Caste Artist + 1h culture build. That's a 2t border pop exactly. We might also end up capturing the SH from Zulu. The culture slider may help get a an extra tile by speeding up a border pop in an established city, I suppose. I'm just wondering if that was really a good choice of tech. FS would help pop borders in a single turn, but that's really far down the tech tree (we'd need all of Paper-Educ-Philo-Lib). Whatever, we can't really get anything else useful, so Drama it is.

One silly thought: should we build Notre Dame? It's expensive, but Bombay has 5 chops and could 2pop a granary for near 30h OF. That's 360h out of 550.
Edit: that's a total of 275h for 2 happy per city. We gain, what, 20 whips potentially? On the other hand, we could build a bunch of units that would quickly move into Ragnar. It's probably best to avoid expenditures of this sort.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Not possible to canal from York to London. Each fort must be next to some body of water.

I've been forgetting to pillage cottages. That will give us the boost we need to survive the maintenance costs, I think. It'll probably add up to an extra 1000g in the end. I'll make a chariot for that purpose after capturing Lahore.

 

[LowtherCastle]

I'd take MoM before Notre Dame, but we don't need either, I don't think. Asoka is going to be our unit spammer for the south, so the homeland can focus on LIz and GK. The only other wonder we might consider is the FP after we capture 6 chs.

I noticed the hub spamming. Sucks, but that's life. They won't have many units or walls and hopefully will be mostly flat. Actually, it might be easier to capture them than build them, except for the resistance times. They'll probably be very low pop too, so only 3t resistance. If not, we raze. It doesn't really matter if we have to DoW Monte in the end, just as long as we can afford the maintenance.

 

[babybluepants]

Yeah, I think Bombay should get a granary quickly and then push out some units. Just chop everything into them. Don't know if barracks there pays. Probably... We only lose 62h towards a unit, which isn't even a mace or treb. The chops make it happen quickly.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Anyway, now it's clear to me that our explorer at Zululand needs to defog the eastern side of the Zulu spoke and over to Ragnar's spoke (dangerous). Then our offensive cleans up Asoka rapidly and immediately targets Ragnar's northwesternmost spoke city. Once that city is canaled, we're good to DoW Liz. That's for sure the fastest way to do that and it should be relatively stable.

On the barracks, not having more 3/4XP trebs is killing us. We need the second promotion for the 24% bombardment. We're going to encounter more and more walls and we can't afford the lost time. The predominant factor for this decision is not amount of units, but amount of time attacking.

xpost

 

[LowtherCastle]

Yeah, I think Bombay should get a granary quickly and then push out some units. Just chop everything into them. Don't know if barracks there pays. Probably... We only lose 62h towards a unit, which isn't even a mace or treb. The chops make it happen quickly.

Yes.

Glad your around. I'm about ready to play on. It's slow going cuz I'm playing carefully. Not doing a PPP is risky, so I need to check and doublecheck everything.

 

[LowtherCastle]

On the trebs: I think I'll settle the next GG in the city producing trebs fastest. Building 5/2XP trebs is exactly what we need most right now, imo.

 

[LowtherCastle]

On the barracks: When we switch to vassalage, we'll be building 5/4 land units. That'll be huge.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Ahmedabad probably doesn't need to build culture. I'd speed up the WB build by 3h.

We get the iron with the border expansion.

 

[babybluepants]

It has religion. Border pops in 3t anyway.

 

[LowtherCastle]

I hit <Enter> and two catastrophes befell us, one after the other.

1. Genghis the Crumb DoWed. Our gpt went from +19gpt to -57gpt.

2. Ragnar won the Apostolic elections.

So we need to handle both asap. I'll try to figure out exactly what war success we need against Liz to accelerate her willingness to talk.

Bbp, maybe you could check the AP info on how soon a vote will come up. What we need to do is cease fire the turn before the vote, then re-declare the turn of the vote (or something like that). Rinse and repeat. Because the AP is Buddhist and we have 6 cities, including Washingtion, with buddhism, so we can NOT afford the -5 for refusing to abide by a resolution.

 

[babybluepants]

Yes.

Glad your around. I'm about ready to play on. It's slow going cuz I'm playing carefully. Not doing a PPP is risky, so I need to check and doublecheck everything.

You're doing fine. We're obviously not playing to our usual standard, but that's been the case ever since I took over. Not much we can do about it.

I have a school review all day, so you're on your own in a couple of hours. I could play some turns tmr, if you like.

Edit: xpost

 

[babybluepants]

How did he DOW? Is there a stack somewhere?

 

[LowtherCastle]

How did he DOW? Is there a stack somewhere?

That's the thing. I can't find anything anywhere. I uploaded so you might check. The only thing I can figure out is that our wb happened to be in one of his cities. FOr crying out loud, what a piece of dreck. Oviously I wouldnt' have done that, had I known of that possiblity. Britshicks.