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[Niklas]

If they land on our shores, we should so nuke them if we can.

Like General_W says, please run a new test to see what happens to the spaceship if the capital is moved by a palace build. I would be quite surprised if that would kill the spaceship, even while it seems obvious that disbanding the capital (just like losing it any other way) would (as the old test shows).

 

[donsig]

I took a save from one of my old GOTMs and played it to a point where all spaceship parts are built except the engine. The save is attached where the engine is set to build in 4 turns and the palace is set to build next turn. I made sure I built Apollo in a city other than the capitol and the one building the palace. (We built Apollo in The Arboretum.) Abandoning the capitol does destroy the space ship (a pop-up says the ship is destroyed) but building the palace does not! (I played it through to launch after building the palace. The building of the engine is not disturbed except for the change in wasted/currupted shields due to the new palace location.)

So I say we go ahead and build the palace in The Gulag. If SABER landed any armor to attack The Gulag it would take two turns for them to reach the city. (The Gulag could be reached in one turn by 4-move units like armies containing only cavalry or modern armor.)

The Arboretum is within reach of modern armor landing on the west coast. I used the test save to see what happens when the city with Apollo is abandoned while sill building the engine. The spaceship remains and it looks as though the engine will continue to build but it does not, and no message is given. The city just switches over to something else on the next turn and all the stored shields are gone. So, SABER can stop us by taking our capitol or our Apollo city. Luckily, nukes do not destroy city improvements.

I'm all for nuking SABER if they land on our shores. Since there are no objections to building nukes I'm considering building an ICBM in The Igloo and rushing a tactical nuke in The Red Tape (after disbanding some newly drafted mech infantry). If SABER lands perhaps we can reach a consensus on using them. Note that building the ICBM in The Igloo and the palace in The Gulag leaves us without a back up prebuild. Any objections? I'm torn between building an ICBM now and leaving The Igloo alone. We could always switch The Igloo on a later turn. An ICBM would be very handy to have next turn, though. If SABER's transports come within our sight we could nuke them before they unload. How about building an ICBM in The Red Tape? Rushing would be 1320g but as Paul noted earlier, conscript mech infantry are worth 108g. We have 9 coastal cities that could draft this turn and we could probably draft in an interior city or two as well. Comments?

Proposed plans:

• Switch The Gulag to the palace (which should build next turn).
• Switch The Igloo to either ICBM (which would build next turn) or something else that would save the shields (like the engine).
• Try to expose SABER's spy and try to replant (and re-expose) if we fail.
• No garrison in The Nursery.
• Try to ensure our 4 stacks of land units are not in high risk nuke areas.
• Draft in all our coastal cities and use the units to short rush per below:
• Build ICBM in The Red Tape and settlers/workers in our coastal cities in preparation for abandonment next turn if necessary.
• Will not switch The Silo over to the engine yet.

Any objections to the plans. I will try to play tomorrow night, in about 20 to 24 hours from this post, but can't promise.

 

[Niklas]

I like it. Go ahead!

 

[peter grimes]

I'm not OK with nuking Saber just yet, but that shouldn't interfere with the rest of the plans as Donsig laid them out...

That said, I think the Igloo should switch to the Engine, rather than an ICBM. I don't see why we should bank a weapon we're not all in favor of using at this point.

Am I missing something important here?

 

[dl123654]

I think any city that is prebuilding spaceparts should not be building nukes, rush buy nukes if we are going to use them.

 

[General_W]

Wonderful news on the palace, Donsig! Thanks for doing that test. Moving the capital to the Gulag will give us some much needed breathing room.

Like dl, I hate to lose another engine back-up build - but since we're vulnerable at BOTH our capital and Apollo sites (Hooray we didn't build it in The Chamber!!) - I think we just need to get this done before Saber can totally massacre us. Can we dare to hope that Saber doesn't know that destroying our Apollo Project will prevent our launch?

@Peter & Paul (& Mary?) - I'm not sure how to persuade you two on the Nuke since you're not advancing a rationale for not using one. I have to presume it's out of some sense of honor - but I'll remind you that we never promised to not nuke Saber. That would have looked something like this:

Dear Saber,
We've decided to promise to never nuke you, ever. No matter how much you attack us, no matter how many cities of ours you burn to the ground, no matter how many of our units you kill, no matter how many times you use nukes on us - we still won't nuke you.
No strings attached!
You're welcome!
Signed,
The suicide pact Council

In fact, what we agreed to was a treaty that banned use of nukes. It was never a unilateral promise. Everyone on the team (including you, I suspect) would have argued loudly against making a unilateral (and suicidal) promise.
The treaty that we agreed to is now broken. Either mistakenly by us, intentionally by Saber, or by some willful misunderstanding on either side... but any which way, the large orange pollution tiles in our land testify to the fact that the treaty is well and truly broken.

A failure to respond with nukes at this point, aside from being C3C malpractice, could only be construed as encouraging the use nukes against us as a consequence-free tactical option.

We should pour whatever resources we can spare into nuking the orange menace as many times as we can.

Remember the Gulag!!


Plans all look good Donsig! Don't forget the worker roads - we may need to do some serious maneuvering if Saber lands.

 

[donsig]

I will be playing the turn in a few minutes. I will not switch The Gulag to a nuke, we'll keep those shields in the bank. I also don't want to build an ICBM in The Red Tape. It's a coastal city and ICBMs can't be moved, so if we wanted to disband our coastal cities we'd have to use the ICBM or lose it. So we will build the cheaper tactical nuke in The Red Tape and I'll see if there's an interior city where we can build an ICBM without spending alot of gold. As Paul noted, just having nukes will complicate SABER's efforts. The Council can decide the issue of using the nukes if and when SABER lands.

 

[peter grimes]

Well, from what FREE said it sounds like worker trades are out. What do we think about incurring the unhappiness from lost trade in exchange for 2 workers (by declaring war on FREE)? My first impulse is that it doesn't make much sense, but I'd like to hear from other people who are more familiar with the situation first.

 

[donsig]

FREE sends us horses and we will accept.
We lost furs, spices and silk.
The Gulag builds the palace.
We also build three workers, two tactical nukes, a privateer and three settlers.
No sabotage but SABER did an excellent job of destroying The Silo's production capabilities. We are now eleven turns from completing the engine.

Looks like we have 15 workers and 5 slaves available (plus a few worker/slave pairs that are in place to build roads this turn). 5 of these workers and two slaves are stranded S of The Igloo and so can only get in place to do improvements next turn. That leaves 10 workers and 3 slave to do something useful this turn.
We still have our three privateers (plus the new one) and nine jets.
Given the loss of luxes we might as well turn the lux slider way down and conserve our gold. Looks like we can go down to 20% and hire specialists in The Red Tape, The Hideaway and The Phoenix (2 and build a worker since this makes a food shortage).

EWS moves:

Spoiler :

• Jet in Chamsuris' Cove recons 4E-1SE of Chamsuri's Cove.
• Jet in eastern airfield recons 3S of The Chamber.
• Privateer northeast of Chamsuri's Cove moves 4NW-S.
• Jet in The Aerie recons 4NE-1E of The Whale Pond.
• Jet in Northern Airfield recons 4N-1NE of The Whale Pond.
• Privateer west of The Whale Pond moves E-N-3NE.
• Jet in western airfield recons 8NW of The Red Tape.
• Privateer west of The Greenhouse moves 5S.
• Jet in western airfield recons 4SW-2W of The Phoenix.
• Jet in southern airfield recons 5SW-1W of The Nursery.
• Jet in The Treasury recons 5SW of The New Yard.
• Jet in The Treasury recons 5S of The New Yard.
• Privateer in The Phoenix moves 2S-3SE

.

No rival ships were spotted.

So all that remains is to improve that tile near The Silo (I'd mine it - the city is starving but we have settlers to add later. Could irrigate it and the one good tile if The Council thinks we should save the city pop), position workers for next turn, decide if land units should be shuffled again and decide what to build in the coastal cities.

I can play the turn tomorrow (about 24-26 hours from now), so if you have nay ideas speak up now!

 

[dl123654]

Missed last turn however have some advice for next turn, switch taxman to civil engineers, 2 production per citizen is a lot for how many shields we have left.

In fact if we are starving already, remove anyone that is not outputting 2 shields to be a civil engineer.

Taking the current turn it brought the remaining turns from 11 to 3 [5 shields to 23 (5+(9*2))] with a lot of overflow.

Changing over to lots of engineers next turn will be still 3 turns to completion, can't add settlers if starving so adding new settlers is not an option for a while.

 

[donsig]

I didn't think of civil engineers because I though they only helped with buildings. I know they don't speed the production of units. I went into an old save and it sure does look like civil engineers will speed the completion of the engine. When a city starves does it only lose one pop at a time? We have a few settlers now that we can add to The Silo. Might as well add them next turn and use them as engineers even if they can't work tiles. Though I suspect The Silo will be nuked next turn which will halve it's population and kill the workers I positioned to build roads to reconnect the city.

 

[Niklas]

Yes, you lose one pop at a time. But like dl said, you can't add settlers while starving, so that's not an option at this point.

 

[peter grimes]

What's the issue with cleaning up pollution - is it not an option until a certain tech? Or are we afraid of losing workers when Saber nukes us again next turn?

...and shouldn't we be getting a battle log from those punks?

 

[donsig]

What's the issue with cleaning up pollution - is it not an option until a certain tech? Or are we afraid of losing workers when Saber nukes us again next turn?

...and shouldn't we be getting a battle log from those punks?

We can't tell the real pollution from the irradiated goo left over form SABER's nukes. It's all the same yucky SABER orange. We can clean the stuff, we just don't have enough workers around. It's not just pollution though. The last nuke strikes not only polluted just about every tile around The Silo, they destroyed the roads and improvements and killed any hapless workers in the blast zone. I moved worker/slave pairs onto some of the affected tiles to build roads next turn which will allow the clean up to begin. BUT, if SABER nukes the city then any workers standing next to it will die. Since Chamnix is a much better player than I am he will know our surplus population could be engineers and so he will want to nuke the city to destroy half it's citizens. I'm sure he'll send us a battle log when he does it.

 

[Paul#42]

How do we protect our nukes from being nuked?
Will we have to build one every turn to ensure we have one when SABER strikes?

How do we grant instant use near landing zone?
Iirc they have a range of 6 tiles when fired, right?
Are nukes deployed like airplanes (Relocate = 1 turn) or rather like land units (moving on rails)?

I barely remember what that worked like back in Civ 2 (or Civ 1?) when I last used them...

 

[donsig]

I'm fairly sure nukes are nuke proof. We have tactical nukes which have a range of 6 tiles. I think they move via rails. IIRC we have two of them and I doubt we could make one every turn. With the game dragging on we will reach a point where our gold supply will become an issue so we'll have to be conservative with rushes.

 

[donsig]

If FREE does not gift us a city should we gift one to them? We have three settlers so we could build a city just for them. This would facilitate worker trading but it would also allow FREE to rush an airport and capture our undefended cities.

 

[Paul#42]

I see no danger at all in gifting a town to FREE other than "wasting" two precious pop for a town we'd disband later.
I'd rather gift them a spare town of ours (not on the coast of course for defense issues) and get it back later.

Even if they''d wanted to backstab us, it would take a turn and we'd smell the rat by a mile against the wind.

But I'd trust them 100% these days.

 

[peter grimes]

The priority has to remain producing that Engine. Is there a tradeoff between building a city and adding productive population to the city that's building it (The Silo? The Gulag? I can't recall). If we'll be able to add productive pop to the city in a turn or two, how does that balance against workers in a turn or two?

I don't know the answers to these questions, I just want us to remain focussed on getting that engine built asap.

 

[Paul#42]

14 settlers to capture, a town along with airfields and airport??

Now that's support!

Nevertheless I cannot believe we are not able to trade workers the way the Go(o)d Melet wanted us to...