SGOTM 13 - One Short Straw

That empty Galleon that is in the west that scouted Cathy's Cities can head back towards Willem's ex-Core Cities and can meet up with the 4th Galleon that is going towards Isabella, to form a one-turn Galleon chain with the 4th Galleon. After that, the 4th Galleon can return to Willem's ex-Core for additional reinforcements.


I'll probably leave the Warrior near Vicky where it is currently located, just in case Joao attacks while we are preparing an army for him or in case he counter-attacks us with an army while we're attacking him.
 
The Vicky plan sounds good.

I'd prefer to send that galleon to scout Izzy's west coast - she has lots of cities and we should try to find them. I think that will save more turns than having reinforcements one turn faster but I don't feel too strongly about this.

We should probably send the 4th galleon from the Vicky front to go scout Joao too -- we have no idea where most of his cities are.

I think you're good to go - it probably makes sense to play in 5-6 turn spurts to make sure everything is proceeding to plan and we're not missing anything glaringly obvious.
 
As for scouting with Galleons, I think that we can always do so later, once we've started the respective wars.

Seeing as how Isabella has 9 Cities and Joao has 7 Cities, we won't have trouble "finding targets" for quite some time.

I agree that eventually, we'll want to scout for their remaining Cities, but I think that it's a bit premature to do so now. Maybe once these AIs have about half of their Cities razed we can send out some Galleons... which we might even have units inside of, such that when they do spot a City, it can be attacked immediately.


I don't mind playing even shorter rounds than 5-6 turns if I run into troubling issues, but yeah, don't expect me to play 10+ turns or anything like that. "Two City attacks per AI" is about the limit that we can reasonably be expected to plan ahead, so we'll almost certainly want to pause play at such a time, if not sooner (for example, after we capture London would be a good time to pause play, if we haven't run into major issues before then).


I'm still trying to find an online image hosting site.

It's hard.

I've found a couple of options, but they all seem to have some sort of downside
- Log in every month and you can only upload a max of 10 Megs. Okay, well, with that limitation on how many files you can upload, I'll have little incentive to log in every month, so the pictures will eventually just get deleted. Yuck.

- Unlimited uploading but very limited bandwidth per month (and sometimes there are even limits per day!). With the amount of times that we refresh the pages in this thread, we probably won't exceed the limits, but then as soon as other teams start viewing our thread, we could end up finding the images being unavailable for an entire day (not too bad but still annoying for certain days, like a couple of days before the competiton closes and when everyone is done or nearly done) or a unavailable for a month (by the time that the images are viewable again, many people will have moved on)

- Annoying tracking of my every move, such as being heavily integrated with google and wanting to send out data to google web sites for every single page of theirs that I hit--if I block these google ip addresses with my firewall then the image site refuses to work, sigh

- Images get automatically deleted after 60 days. Umm, that situation is fine for an online auction, but not so great here where I don't want to be editing my messages every couple of months

- Hotlinking only works to thumbnails. It can be annoying if you have to look at every image in a new window


So, there might be no images from my playing time, which would suck since I really love to make the detailed reports, but I'll keep looking for an image-hosting solution while waiting for additional feedback.


What I'll probably end up doing is choosing one of the lesser evils, such as a site that auto-deletes the images or requires regular logging-in... since having images for 2 months isn't GREAT, but it's far better than not having images at all, right?
 
After my last turnset, I fully subscribe to shyuhe's approach to anger management: whip early and whip often. Now that we have more happiness resources and enough gold to use the culture slider more, cities should only be working food positive tiles. That means that Paris should be on the 5 -> 3 plan and Iron should be on a 4 -> 2 plan (i.e. only working the Iron while at 3 pops). We were able to whip out an army for Victoria in 6 to 7 turns. Units built on T0 or worth more than those built on T+1 and so on. Let's squeeze all we can out of all of our cities in the next 10 turns. From there it's all troop logistics.

I like the war plans. Go get 'em!!
 
After my last turnset, I fully subscribe to shyuhe's approach to anger management: whip early and whip often. Now that we have more happiness resources and enough gold to use the culture slider more, cities should only be working food positive tiles. That means that Paris should be on the 5 -> 3 plan and Iron should be on a 4 -> 2 plan (i.e. only working the Iron while at 3 pops).
Okay, that's an easier algorithm to remember, anyway, rather than having to look at the chart every time to see if I am "allowed" to whip.

How "whip crazy" are we going to go? Would we at any point consider 1-pop-whipping at Size 3 (if the overflow can be timed correctly for that situation to occur) or would going to that level be too extreme even for shyuhe? :eek: :lol:
 
I think marble needs to do a 1 pop whip to finish the mace in its queue at some point... So yes, I'm ok with doing 1 pop whips at this point :evil:
I was looking at that one and wondering, since the interface says that we'll start to lose Hammers in it soon. We actually have more than 5 turns than the interface says, but we'll see how close that overflow can really bring us (probably not close enough) and then go for a 1-pop-whip at some point if overflow can't carry us there.


I should be able to start playing soon. It seems that the big objection that mdy had was to something that we're probably not going to do (and I definitely won't do without asking the team and getting consensus--i.e. I won't be giving away Hastings without you knowing about it), so I think that I should be okay to proceed.
 
Okay, so I have begun!

Let's look at the F4 Tech screen, shall we?


Hmmm, it seems that Isabella learned Horseback Riding. Oh well, hopefully we'll strike fast and hard enough for that fact not to become an issue. At least the Horsemaster, Joao, has yet to learn how to ride on the backs of these wild beasts (while also being able to shoot a bow and arrow). So far, all that he can do is ship them overseas to Isabella! :lol:


F4 Resources:


We have an opportunity to get Silk. I have made a trade with Joao, Silk <-> Dye.

The only other options were: Corn and Gem.

Dyes won't be of major use, since Joao does not have Drama (see above). Gems could be an issue, if he ever builds Forges, but he doesn't really have Metal Casting, so I guess I could have picked the Gem Resource, too. Corn is off of the table because we have a Barb Warrior that may Pillage (or may wander away from--you know Barbs!) one of our 2 Corn Resources next turn.

Note that when we declare war (which will happen momentarily), we will lose Vicky's Wine. You win some, you lose some. :lol:
 
We have 5 Hammers in a Barracks in Pig Mmm Fish City but no one seems to want to complete it. There is even a sign overtop of the City that reads "No Barracks." :D So, I'm removing it from the build queue.


I have set research to Paper. We don't really want Theology and although we're unlikely to ever get a tech, if there is one tech that we will research near the end of the game (because we can't find the last AI Cities), it will be Paper.


At the last minute, I remembered to manually declare War on Vicky (although I almost walked into her Open Borders--doing so would have been a bit of a gaff!):



After declaring war, I set the Cultural Slider to 20%.


I don't see anyone else online (oops, maybe now was a bad time to play?) but I don't see any reason not to push forward...
 
Wait one second.

Before you advance the turn, if you don't complete a unit in Amsterdam (I think it was Amsterdam), the barb may not pillage the corn farm and instead my beeline toward the empty city. It's an option to save our precious farm...
 
Sorry, I saw your feedback too late.

The Barbs Pillaged our Corn, but we got our swift revenge:


At least we have a Worker nearby who is ready to and start improving the Farm.

Anyway, without a second Maceman, we would have only been able to fight off one of the Barb units on this turn (T + 1), meaning that we could have been subjected to Pillaging on the current turn AS WELL AS last turn. So, I guess what I'll do is be sure to keep a unit around Amsterdam that can respond to any further Barb threats and will manually Skip his Turn on each turn so that I will be visually watching the area.


By the way, Hastings is ours and our troops shall set sail for London momentarily.
 
Unfortunately, it looks like our units at Yaroslavl' were not on a Roaded square. As such, the Galleons moved too far west and we lost the opportunity to load them onto boats on this turn.

Of course, I also did not notice this fact until I had moved the Galleons 1SW to be able to pick up the units via the Road, otherwise I would have been able to still load the units on this turn. The plan to load units worked for the single Maceman inside of Yaroslavl' but was disappointingly not sufficient for our stack of units on the non-Roaded Forest 1N of Yaroslavl'. I am sorry about that fact.

Oh well, we'll get there, just 1 turn later than was ideally possible.



Things are looking good for an early war on Joao, though, and it shouldn't take very long before we have a fleet of 3-fully-loaded Galleons ready to set sail.
 
BTW, I put the "No Barracks" sign on Pig Fish so that I would remember to build primarily galleons there as opposed to maces/trebs. It's the only core city without a rax...

Push on!
 
I was wrong, anyway... thanks to launching the Galleon with 3 Trebs on T + 1, we won't need the empty Galleon against Isabella.

So, the empty Galleon will sail home with the plan of building a second on, then simultaneously attacking Willem's Cities. Afterwards, we'll want to take down Ragnar's Ivory City, to prevent him from expanding into the gap (and if I remember, I'll pillage Willem's Fish Resource there, to make Willem's Ivory City location less juicy in Ragnar's eyes).

In the meantime, things at Isabella will be good, since we will be starting the war with 11 units instead of 8! To me, that means striking at Madrid and Barcelona simultaneously.

I'm pretty much done with T + 1 so I'm pushing onwards. No losses at Hastings, by the way, and we took out an Axeman, a Swordsman, an Archer, and a Worker.
 
Oops, I almost forgot that we'll probably want a 5th Galleon going towards Isabella (the troops from which I can probably Galleon chain), so I will still need to build 2 Galleons for attacking Willem.

We'll want that since we are Treb-heavy against Isabella... 4 Maces and 7 Trebs. Too bad we aren't playing Warlords or that mix would have been about right. ;)
 
The following image should give you a decent idea of everything going on in England.

- An English Catapult attacked us from out of London last turn and died. A new Catapult has appeared there this turn (but at least it has the City Raider promo, haha). I'm about to give our highlighted Maceman unit a Medic I promo, since our stack could really use such a unit.

- Bombarding with 3 Trebs took down most of the defences, so I am to Bombard with 3 again next turn and then attack with the 4th Treb and a Mace or two (at least with the full-health Mace). That way, we'll start to pick away at the defenders.

- There is a Worker that is Chopping the Forest 1N of Hastings.

- Canterbury will die next turn, with a Treb attacking first then 2 Macemen going against 2 Archers. Vicky has an Axeman to the south of there (not pictured) but it is 2-movement-points away from Canterbury, so she's screwed there.




So, once London falls (in 2 or at worst 3 turns from now), Vicky will be down to 2 Cities! :high5:
 
I forgot to mention that we killed one of Vicky's Galleys (it had already happened in the last screenshot). You can see the victorious Galleon depicted here. What you can also see is that Vicky DID NOT settle the northern Silver location, so her 2 remaining Cities must be elsewhere.



In other news, thanks to our aggressive whipping policy, Utrecht will soon have some additional boats in the water.



Dockworker: "That leader of ours is so aggressive with his whipping schedule that he doesn't even take time to complete some of the units that he whipped!" ;)

Another fellow: "Oh yeah?" replied his buddy. "Well, at least he is able to reduce the Cultural Slider back down to 10%! Take that!"
 
Barcelona has 1 Archer and 1 Catapult. This info comes courtesy of the 3-Treb-Galleon. We will land next to the City on the following turn (it is still Turn 203, 445 AD).

The empty Galleon will be able to inherit 2 Maces and a Pikeman next turn, allowing it to land next to Isabella's Cities 1 turn later, if necessary.
 
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