SGOTM 19 - The Shawshank Redemption

If we can finish a couple of Roads near Gaul at P Silk at Gaul-1NW and P Copper at Gaul-1SW (guard the Worker for the Copper Mine Road to avoid death by Horse Archer) then units coming from the east can arrive at Edirne 1 turn faster.


With some good planning, both of Edirne and Samsun can fall, rather than having our main stack march back east then return west to the Istanbul area, spending several turns, during which time Napoleon can spam more units and we may lose our time window to declare war on Huayna.

Dhoomstriker said:

I still don't see a Mace and a Cat threatening Thessa...

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And where exactly would that cat have come from? We can easily take this city without any cats with the likely outcome of losing 1 mace, 2 at most.

Dhoomstriker said:

We can pick off Asoka's Archer near Cnip for 2 XP on a Mace (although we could still lose said battle).

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Not worth it.

Mitchum said:

WTF. HC only has 90 gold on the table right now.

Hmmmm... I wonder if selling HC dyes for 1 gpt did it. Has anyone EVER seen this happen before?

What to do now?

EDIT: I guess that's what I get for performing the non-controversial moves while we discussed the rest. I had no idea this could happen.

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I have seen the opposite happen (selling a tech for gold, and seeing their gpt disappear), so the two are connected in the code. I dont remember ever seeing it happen in this direction before however...

LowtherCastle said:

@Mitchum: I haven't counted the turns, but I'm thinking of the maces around Thess rallying to do a pincer's on Toledo, while our other stack comes from Samsun toward Santiago.

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OK. That could work. I missed this point among all of the other posts in the thread. So these guys head west and north and should get there at about the right time.

We can draft a few more units from Sheep and Trumpster and still be Alex to Thess.

WastinTime said:

HC's gold:


give HC Gold for "adopt Caste". (it will only be 1 turn on anarchy for him)
How much gold does HC want?

This will free up his gold and we sell him Paper for a lot.

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Will this approach still work 2 turns from now?

WastinTime said:

Yea, I always take the gold first.

Hold on, let me think if there is any way to reverse that.

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Sorry guys. I was trying to be efficient with my time and doing the easy stuff while waiting for approval on the trade. I didn't know the gold would leave the table.

The bright side is that we can keep our monopoly on Paper for a bit longer.

Just to make sure it does not get missed... WT has a very interesting suggestion as the last post of the previous page (I missed it the first time the page refreshed, and just saw it by accident just now...)

Dhoomstriker said:

Ankara Fort within our Cultural Borders. Fort for the Galley. To get around the Coast Ice squares.

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The decision was to hold off on this. We can revisit it but we may a) have other options for a galley, b) not even need one, c) could run several artists later if needed or d) build 2 forts to navigate the ice.

I'm fine either way but before I played we decided to scale back on the artists we're hiring.

Just to be clear, we don't care about Thess... we'll raze it (Size 2 and 2 Forests means not keeping it)... and its Cultural Borders are not large enough for Alex to capture it on the turn that he declares war... it is a newly-built City growing to Size 2 that I would fear... so, yeah, if you can keep the number of defenders in Thessa small enough by Bombarding and then occasionally picking off units with a Mace such that Asoka won't have enough Archers to send out a Settler Party, that would be ideal.


Units head west to Edirne, not Toledo. People definitely want to capture Edirne. People definitely want to capture Samsun. We have 100% consensus on those facts.

Play the Great General that we know you are and take on both targets at once so that everyone is happy... western army hits the western target, eastern army hits the eastern target.

WastinTime said:

HC's gold:


give HC Gold for "adopt Caste". (it will only be 1 turn on anarchy for him)
How much gold does HC want?

This will free up his gold and we sell him Paper for a lot.

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Repeating....In case anyone missed it.

This will work. It's the anarchy that gives us a shot at the gold before he spends it.

WastinTime said:

HC's gold:


give HC Gold for "adopt Caste". (it will only be 1 turn on anarchy for him)
How much gold does HC want?

This will free up his gold and we sell him Paper for a lot.

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I have not made the trade yet. HC wants 185 gold... we could try to beg him to revolt to save our gold but Dhoom doesn't want us to beg...

If he'd put this 185 gold back on the table plus the 350 plus more, then we could try it.

@ WT

I've been slowly reading the posts and responding to them. I eventually got to yours.

Cat from Lali can arrive at the gates of Thessa in 4 turns' time... oh, there's a Forge going up there first... fine, after the Forge.

Dhoomstriker said:

Samsun before Edirne so that we can get Alex to go for Kublai by first declaring war on Huayna and getting Kublai to go for Huayna. It will be too expensive to bribe Alex against Kublai unless Kublai is in a war, which means a war with Huayna, which we have a strict timeline for (Kublai staying Pleased toward Huayna).

UNITS FROM THE EAST can take Edirne.

UNITS BUILT NEAR THE END OF THE GAME OR FROM HQ CAN GO FOR KUBLAI. We risk making those late-built and HQ units obsolete by going for Kublai earlier.

Let's talk some sense into ourselves here.


EDIT: Anyone who wants to go for Edirne first needs to lay out a plan to take down Alex's units or else it's a no-go plan.

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At this point, you're the only one who wants to bypass Edirne. You're also the only one who does not want to go down on KK after Nappy. You've been talking about this for a long time but no one has been swayed.

Out of curiosity, how many units would you tie up in Istanbul to protect it from Nappy's units in Edirne? Also, Edirne will break Nappy's back while beelining Samsun will not.

We can discuss this in parallel of me playing because I don't have to make a decision until next turn but my vote is Edirne next.

We've waited this long to sell Paper... we might as well wait 2 turns to see what Huayna picks as his next tech. I don't see any techs that Huayna has learned that will let him spend any more of his Gold, so it should still be in his coffers then.

Kublai and Alex won't trade Aesthetics and there's only 1 Wonder left, so they are in a race to build The Shwedagon Paya.

If one of them builds it in the next 2 turns (I'm not even sure which one to hope for building it at this point), we can pick up Aesthetics from Alex for Paper and possibly take Peace with Asoka from Kublai for Paper.

"No one has been swayed" is not a valid argument against a point. So many times, people say something and then we take it as fact that the team is in agreement when no one takes the time to offer a dissenting opinion. It is unfair to hold my messages to a different standard.


The stated claim has been to capture Edirine soon so that it can come out resistance. How you do it is up to you, representing the team, as the Active Player. I'm sure that LC will support me in this reasoning as he (and I don't have time to dig up quotes, LC, so I am paraphrasing, deal with it instead of saying that people put words in your mouth when they are things that you said) is all in favour of the Active Player making the final decision to best represent the team.

I count 3 Cats, a Mace, and a Chariot in the Addis Ababa area. With a couple of the units from Istanbul that take the longest time to heal, we can bring enough units to bear on Edirne to start Bombarding it while most of our Cats and Maces march on Konya after a brief healing spell.

We do not need all of those units to take Edirne and going in with a lighter force at Edirne may cause Napoleon to (in a good way) suicide a couple of units on our stack. Meanwhile, newly-drafted units can arrive to help finish off Edirne while our army is healing in Konya.

Dhoomstriker said:

Just to be clear, we don't care about Thess... we'll raze it (Size 2 and 2 Forests means not keeping it)... and its Cultural Borders are not large enough for Alex to capture it on the turn that he declares war... it is a newly-built City growing to Size 2 that I would fear... so, yeah, if you can keep the number of defenders in Thessa small enough by Bombarding and then occasionally picking off units with a Mace such that Asoka won't have enough Archers to send out a Settler Party, that would be ideal.

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My fear is that Alex's stack is big enough to bombard and capture on the same turn. But we can put freshly drafted maces to that task and move the ones there westward.

Dhoomstriker said:

Units head west to Edirne, not Toledo. People definitely want to capture Edirne. People definitely want to capture Samsun. We have 100% consensus on those facts.

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I hope you're joking. It will take these maces by Asoka ~12 turns to get to Edirne. I think that's WAY too late.

Dhoomstriker said:

Play the Great General that we know you are and take on both targets at once so that everyone is happy... western army hits the western target, eastern army hits the eastern target.

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I'm not sure it's possible with just 4 cats. Personally, I'd rather take care of Edirne and Nappy's stack there so we don't have to look over our shoulders the whole time we're marching on Konya.

Konya is a desert city with crap for production and Samsun is under massive cultural pressure. I don't think he'll have a bunch of units up there nor does he have massive production.

This debate can rage on for pages. I call a vote. We've heard everyone's thoughts on the subject and I'm not hearing anything new. So please cast it so we can move on:

Edirne vs. Konya -> Samsun vs. splitting the stack and trying to take both.

My vote is Edirne.

Dhoomstriker said:

Cat from Lali can arrive at the gates of Thessa in 4 turns' time... oh, there's a Forge going up there first... fine, after the Forge.

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We don't need a cat at Thess to take on 2 archers. We need cats in the west. Unless someone else is worried about a few archers too.

I'd much rather "suicide" a drafted mace at ~60% odds, a mace that will likely never see any action in the west anyway, than send a precious cat to take on some archers.

Mitchum said:

With my screen resolution, I can't tell but it appears that Nappy has a unit on the tile where Alex has his SoD at Istanbul-SW. Can anyone tell what it is?

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There isn't one there on T124 as far as I can see... the hover text has Alex's name next to all units, even for the "grouped units" that are grouped in a summary fashion due to not being able to list all units.

We would see another AI's Name there if another AI had units on that square.

Mitchum said:

We don't need a cat at Thess to take on 2 archers. We need cats in the west. Unless someone else is worried about a few archers too.

I'd much rather "suicide" a drafted mace at ~60% odds, a mace that will likely never see any action in the west anyway, than send a precious cat to take on some archers.

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If your plan is to raze Thessa, then okay, this approach is fine. I only wanted Bombarding if we felt the need to keep that City around. On the plus side, Constantinople has time to expand its Cultural Borders if we raze Thessa soon (due to Constantinople then getting a Palace). Maybe bring the Chariot along with the 4 Maces for some extra firepower. At least the surviving Maces will earn some XP toward our Great Galley General.


EDIT: Constantinople also already has a Monument, yay.