RR11 - Takeshi's castle

[r_rolo1]

Ok, sorry for the delay ... and sorry for the crappyness of the next pics editing ( done in a hurry yesterday )

I wanted to post clean slates but my imageserver is acting wonky with them, so I'll just post the maps with the arrow work on them...

First, Genghis war:

Spoiler:

IMHO this can be done with the current means in the northern border, barring some moves from European powers in the area. The Korean stack marches on Besbalik ( crappy city, but it would drop heay culture pressure on the real stuff ) and the major army marches on Yanjing ( with the option of reinforcing the Korean stack ). Then we march on Turfan ( That is a NP city if I ever saw one ). I reserved the option to march on the Mongol cap, but it should not be needed to cap him ( and I would prefer to not meddle more in that area for the moment ) and the mongolian cap should not interfere much with our conquers. The rest of the cities is too far away to matter.

Now onto the Sal war ( I cut the Chinese part because that one is obvious ). First the march to Baghdad:

Spoiler:

Basically is the inverse of the Alexander march onto India First we take Ghazni, then Nishapur and then straight into Mesopotamia ( that should take us between 11 and 15 turns ). I also dropped 2 options to a after Baghdad: to Mecca and to Cairo. I'll discuss that later.

Anyway I still think we are light on siege in this area ... The cities are on hills , Sal is pro and I've seen some CG I, Guerrilla II LBs in Ghazni

Now onto the after Baghdad. Plan A:

Spoiler:

This involves a major naval action in the Red Sea, with drops to attack basically all the cities in the shores of it via sea. This would be the fastest way of making the advance given the lack of railroads for the foreseeable future in the action area, but I have doubts that we can develop the navy to this in the timeline we are talking about.

Don't worry about the mess of the arrows near Mecca and Medina. It is just to signal the options between a direct landing on the cities and dropping the troops for the siege ( or simply to skip Medina ). I also added the option for land march onto Cairo and Mecca, as stated in the previous pic.

Plan B

Spoiler:

A more realistical aproach IMHO. Our Baghdad stack, using the OB we have with Justinian, strikes Cairo ( by my maths it should take 5 turns to go from Baghdad to Cairo using the roads around Jerusalem ). Then our transport fleet ( that will need far less investement than in Plan A counterpart ) takes part or the whole stack and drops it on Mecca. Movement plans on Aksum are also despicted , both by sea and by land. This will probably take a little longer than plan A , but it seems more solid.

What plan do you prefer? Not that it will matter for next set ( that should cover the march on Baghdad ), but I think this needs to be decided before the next player gets the game.

BTW a roster:

r_rolo1 -on deck
Thy_Spellcraft
nocho
Brian Shanahan -just layed
Liquidated -MIA ( hopefully your comp gest fixed soon )
lymond - UP

[lymond]

Rolo- You are a master military strategist

I need to take a closer look at the save to check our forces which I will do soon.

I'm liking plan A simply as I think a naval landing will confuse Sal, while are land forces move down from the north. I'm just not sure where we stand right now on the naval forces. Conceivably, we could start the march of troops up north while preparing our naval attack, as it will take the land forces some time to move west.

I will prepare to prep and play for this game, but if we hear from Liquidated I'll yield to him.

I will probably draft more liberally in Lin'An as I spread it around to other cities.

[r_rolo1]

Second strike , lymond. Wrong thread ... unless I became Fleme by some miracle

[lymond]

Oh Crap! Sorry, Rolo! I did mean you. I just came here from perusing the other game I have going on and forgot to flip the switch in my brain

[r_rolo1]

Don't worry, no one saw it besides me, by the looks of it

Our navy is not as powerful as our army ...

Spoiler:

Ok, that was a understatement. Our navy is almost as powerful as our airforce and it is all in the wrong place, to add

That is why I prefer plan B , because it requires not much more than making some frigates to cover a bunch of transport ships ( that can even be those 6 or 7 galleys or upgraded versions of them ). Plan A would require probably much more in terms of naval units and there are limits of what we can put in the water in such a small ammount of time.

We can even go plan C to give more time to the naval buildup:

Spoiler:

Baghdad->Cairo->Aksum then load onto Mecca. That is by far more time consuming than A but it is pretty safe and gives us time to build a decent navy.

Just a last reminder: Charlie and Peter are willing to part some cash and their map for peace. I think we should take it ...

[lymond]

Couple of questions:

1) What is the shipyard event?
2) Why don't we have OB with Mansa?

Okay, first of all, I think getting up a navy is certainly within the realm of possibility. Upgrading the galleys we have is plenty - that's eighteen troops right there. In fact, I would just upgrade a few. Then it's a matter of a few Frigs for defense and bombard.

However, I think we are very light on cannons. If fact, I would be building almost exclusively seige in most cities. With draft and existing troops, I think we are fine as far as the meat troops.

We need some upgrades, which means I will be using up the gold and likely keeping the slider down to 0 for several turns. OB with Mansa raises our gpt nicely, but we have no friends for free gold except for tech trades, which I don't see any good ones at the moment. We might want to pick up MT soon though since we will have horses.

For Arabia, I'm a bit concerned about not enough siege units at the moment. Even with our great rifles, protective LBs are still tough. I think I should wait a couple of turns before attacking so that I can upgrade units and get out some more cannons in the vicinity. Once started, it will take quite a few turns to get to the Mecca region at which point I may have a naval assault ready. Question: Nishapur is marginal. What about a straight beeline to Baghdad after taking Ghazni.

Mongols: I'll attack in 1 turn. Again, I'd like to see more cannons here, but I can upgrade a few trebs here and considering GK is a bit more backwards I think that will do. GK could be a bit pesky with his keshiks as I'm sure he will send some into our borders, but we can pick those off easily. GK can be one of the harder AIs to cap regardless of how many cities you take, so we may have to march on Karakorum.

China - I assume I should take them out. Not sure what they have in the way of troops, but I assume a few rifles and a couple of cannons should work. Problem is he may just sit there whipping out protective muskets. I'll just have to check the odds and hopefully hit him quickly.

I do think it is a good idea to start focusing on navy. The home island can probably focus mainly on naval units for short term. We can use this force to head to America after Arabia I guess.

I will make peace with Charlie and Peter and hopefully Iz and Rag later.

Are we going to settle Indonesia and Australia?

I can play tonight or the weekend.

edit: I assume Aksum is our final target. If Sal caps before then, should we take it.

[r_rolo1]

Ok, let's discuss those points...

I think the event was this one:

Event164
	Better Coal
	Prereq: own plot with Coal AND Mine
	Obsolete: None
	Active/Weight: 75/100
		Result:
1.+4 production from coal plants
2.+2 production AND +1 health from drydocks

There is other event involving drydocks, but it does not seem what Brian described.

The OB with Mansa ... must have been a oversight. Feel free to mend that.

I agree with your analysis. We have the potential for plan B with ease, but I'm not so sure we can pull plan A out without sacrificing the siege buildup ... and we will need a lot of siege. That is why I agree with getting some more cannons and some more turns of peace to make them.

I slotted Nishant to the capture simply because it will allow us to drop rails to the frontline and free of worries reinforcements. That is the only alue of the city in the war and we can even give it back to Sal after the war.

Aksum is the last line. It would be helpful to have it , but it is by no means necessary. I'm expecting a high casualty rate, so we will probably need more cities for Sal to drop out the hat than usual.

China has 6.3 times less army than us, something close of the Aztec power. That probably means a good bunch of pro muskets indeed... But as we can't dow China without dowing Sal, we can also add some more cannons to the anti-Chinese stack as well.

Mongol war is to start yesterday I think that even trebs will do : GK is not pro and the cities are all in flatland. The nearest garrison is 2 CG I LB, one cat ( accuracy ) and a C2 Shock mace, nothing serious.

Not sure about settling anywhere, to be honest. We don't need it, but obviously we can always profit from some extra goodies ( I'm not sure if we hae uranium in our land ATM and there is a source in Australia ...)

[Brian Shanahan]

I said nothing about an event

[lymond]

Okay, I will lay the beatdown on GK now. I'll focus draft units up there since we are a bit light there. The Arabia force is pretty strong man-wise but most of them are samurai. I can upgrade them as I take you town, using the pillage gold.

If that shipyard thing is a quest, I'm not seeing it. I guess we have to build a certain number of drydocks or something. We do have 1 source of mined coal and there is a flatland coal tile that is currently farmed.

[lymond]

There is a sign in Pagan that someone put down saying "Shipyard Event"

I think I will get that Explore over to Aussieland by way of South America. Probably some huts down there.

[nocho]

Originally Posted by Brian Shanahan

I said nothing about an event

Originally Posted by lymond

There is a sign in Pagan that someone put down saying "Shipyard Event"

Rechecked the save I uploaded but it didn't have the "Shipyard event" sign yet in Pagan, so something must have happened in your set, Brian, whatever it was.

Looking at the power ratings I think we can indeed strike GK now and needn't be hesitant with Arabia for very long either. It will be a slow grinding march, but meanwhile we replenish our forces. If indeed we manage to get a navy meanwhile as well to speed things up, that'd be great.

[Brian Shanahan]

I meant "eventually" sorry. Should have mentioned.

P.S. that is exactly why people stopped copying my notes in college, they couldn't understand my abbreviation system.

[Thy_Spellcraft]

Even though I might be too late but for the arabian war I'm not sure why we should delay the march on mekka for so long. I'd rather go for itz directly after bagdad and afterwards Aksum-->cairo. Ovr all this could save us a couple of turns as we don't need to move the way bagdad Jerusalem twice.

[lymond]

Ok...I have played.

Very good stopping point here as I played I think only 9 turns, but we have some decisions to make. Reason is that shortly after declaring on Mr. Sal, about 5 other AIs declared on him, including Peter, Just, Iz, Rag and maybe someone else.

Justinian took Baghdad pretty quickly after Sal took his dinky Thessaloniki. Sal will cap to us this turn but, of course, I don't think we want that now. We probably need to give this some thought. First, we can bribe a few of the AIs out of war like Iz and Peter. Rag cannot negotiate peace with Sal, but that also means Sal won't cap to him likely. However, regarding Just, we probably could just declare on him and take Baghdad and Jerusalem. He was probably a likely next target anyway.

I traded maps with Just for a better view.

Middle East:

Spoiler:

By eclarkdog at 2011-03-25

We have a pretty good sized army over there now and Just's big stack is likely in Baghdad, so we can wipe it out. Meanwhile, I have a decent little army in ships just west of India to help take out Arabia. Given the pathetic military of the AIs, that stack could probably head straight to Mecca and take it. Not sure if Sal would cap to Just after we declare war on the Byz, but that would be of no consequence really.

As for bribing the AI, we may have to give up quite a bit, but it's better that Sal capping to any of them. We should look to get MT in one of the bargains as it would be nice to have some Cavalry in the mix. Possibly Peter.

Also, note that there are good amount of troops in Karakorum that could move on those northern Arab cities. We can move some of the troops from Turfan over to Karakorum and leave them as defense against any Russian aggression. OR just go after Russia.

China: Probably my toughest battle since I only had a little stack to send over and he whipped a couple of Muskets. Literally down to the last man in taking Qin last city.

Former great empire of China:

Spoiler:

By eclarkdog at 2011-03-25

Mongol: Complete cupcake. Karakorum seemed like it was just settled. Nice thing about the Mongols is that they can just settle up Siberia and get some decent production to help out in wars. Thing is the AI is so ridiculously bad improving their land. We may want to gift him some workers to help out.

Mongopan:

Spoiler:

By eclarkdog at 2011-03-25

Other notes:

Unfortunately, we popped a GS in the northern city on the main island. Hoping for a mix of GPs for a golden age later.

Louie asked us to switch to HR, I declined. Wasn't going to do much for our relations anyway and...well...he's going to fall on our samurai sword soon.

Built a Bud monastery in Benares so we can produce mishes after Scientific Method. Spread it so we can better use Theo.

1 Uni from Ox. Question is where do we put it. Seoul is the best science city at the moment but we might capture a better one.

Lots of Banks in process. Wall St. will be nice to have up in Benares.

Made peace with all those Euros in the first couple of turns.

Explorer is back in Caravel heading SW past South America for Australia and more huts.

I don't recall any events during the set.

edit: added the save

[Brian Shanahan]

It would look good except I see no save, lymond. Yeah my thoughts are declare on Justy too.

How dare he take what is obviously ours! Ah, well that's the problem when the big-dog declares on the pariah, everybody joins in.

Oh, and eclarkdog? Lymond is much better IMO.

[r_rolo1]

Well, it was expectable. I was with some hope that the Ai would not jump on Sal, but it looks that I was wrong

Without a sae, I can't say much more, but my gut feeling would be to vassal Sal ASAP and jump on Justinian ASAP as well ...

And I agree with Brian, lymond is much better

[lymond]

Originally Posted by Brian Shanahan

Oh, and eclarkdog? Lymond is much better IMO.

I usually snip that bit. Actually, that's an old handle I used to use on the interwebs as I had an old nickname of Clarkdog. However, apparently there was another Clarkdog out there, so I added my first initial. Never liked appending numbers. Never cared for it much either.

[Thy_Spellcraft]

Looking good so far..

ut there's still a question unanswered: Is domination swiched off? Otherwise I'm bit afraight we'll win this via domination not via conquest..

[r_rolo1]

No way we will get domination, with Africa and South America almost completely empty and Siberia so sparcely occupied ... and if we get domination is in the turn we will, due to the well known fact that if you achieve both conquest and domination at the same time, the game assumes you won by domination.

Ok, on the war with Sal: I think that it is better to bite the bullet and acept Sal cap as it is ... and prepare to strike Justinian as soon as possible. It is not the ideal situation, but we need to take the better out of the situation: Sal capped fast and we didn't had to march to Aksum to take him down, while Justinian decided to expose his attack army to our front stack in a city with low to none defensive bonus instead of piling it on Asia minor... Well, that is the core of civ IV gameplay IMHO: take the best out of the situation you got in front at all times Just don't take the city he captured out of Justinian: we don't need it and it would probably flip to Justinian ( remember, the city would not be captured ,so , no restrictions to flips )

On other issues: I see that Liz and Peter are willing to trade Scimet with us ( steam + 270 g or rifling + 1075 g for peter, steam + map + 105 g for Liz ) ... should we take it ? As far as I can see no one has Communism yet, so we might have a legit chance of getting the GSpy of it ... that would be nice to get a GA with one of our stocked GS to a civic change to SP ( and something else ? ) and Kremlin ( to boost our whip based builds ).

I like our naval build program ... now we have a decent navy . If we make peace with Sal, we can start our operation to get monty and HC out of the board, given that we can't use our navy in the Med during the Justinian war ( lack of Suez ... we will need to use the alternative route that the Israelis wanted to do via the Aqaba gulf some decades ago , btw ). That should be shooting duck exercise

I plan to start our railroad program ASAP, but it will take ages to get it finished. Will focus to link ex-China to the middle east... I guess that ( surprise, surprise ) we need more workers ... even 20 of them is little for the tasks we will have in hand in some turns ( railroad the empire , switch some improvements, improve Turfan ... )

BTW we need to discuss what we do with the ex- Mongolian cap and Nishapur. Both are crap and probably both would serve us better in the hands of their former owners than in ours. What do you think ?

In case it is not obvious, this is a got it

[Brian Shanahan]

I agree with both the city give-backs. Beshbalik may be prone to periodic revolts though if Mongol culture is high there and in surrounding cities.