Hye, Niklas started this with his "send maces toward Hammy" line!
In my response to that (post 864) you'll see I was urging caution, although I was implicitly agreeing with the idea that we needed to expand violently. My response was incomplete, though, since I didn't mention anything about expanding south. Though as you'll recall, I've been pushing for quite awhile for the isthmus site
. I'd love to expand down there (and want to prioritize that way before warring), but I'm afraid that Joao will beat us to it and/or the barbs will make it too difficult.
Admittedly, my perspective wrt war is probably distorted by usually playing on Immortal, where I'm always behind in tech and warring is almost always the only advantage/option I have. This is Monarch and we're doing very well on techs, so warring isn't nearly as necessary to win. That doesn't mean it isn't just as desirable given that we want to win ASAP via Space Race, though. OK, the Sushi bit was weak, but more land and cities means more beakers and hammers--eventually. I don't know for sure if warring now will pay off by the time we need to win. But the point about us not having enough production to build an ideal
war machine because we have so few cities is exactly the reason we need to get more cities, so we can build a
space machine. I absolutely agree that we need to try to expand south, but I'm not sure how far we'll get. In that respect, I agree we should prioritize that over whatever near-term mace action Niklas was (?) contemplating against Hammy. (It would be nice to hear more about that from the guy with save, eh?
)
BTW, I haven't looked at the save recently, but Akkad has (or at least had) lots of forests, which we'd be able to use because of all the food around there. Babylon also has lots of forests and even if they got chopped, we could make a few farms (don't forget Bio) to support lots of workshops. Isn't it also on a river (for levees)?
Now as for what to do about the barbs, I have very serious doubts about being able to build enough maces or whatever to post everywhere along our coast to defend our land. Bonanza can't grow very far without irrigation, but we'll need a long vulnerable irrigation chain to do that. One barb (or spy) sneaks by and pillages a key farm and the whole chain collapses. Without a large defense effort, anything on the coast is vulnerable to pillaging and/or attack and we'll be bled dry. Atlantis has 20 sea hammers plus iron. With a [Edit: Heroic Epic, Military Academy, and forge--Rolo's list now linked from the Reference section] they can crank out a LOT of units. We must blockade Atlantis--triremes are cheaper than maces or crossbows and a heck of a lot more effective in cutting Atlantis down to size. How many maces will we need to defend everywhere we need to? 3 or 4 triremes should be more than enough, and once we have even a partial blockade it'll cut their production way down. (Or am I wrong about how barbarian production works?)
The problem, of course, is that only Athens can build triremes (once we get MC) where we need them--is it up to the task hammer-wise? If not, we'll need help from Sparta and will need 2 forts to bypass the ice floes. I think this must be our second priority (after building a settler for the south with a mace or two for protection).
So for now, I agree that settling the south (which I think will require blockading Atlantis to be effective) should take high precedence over war preparation, apart from building triremes once we can. After we've settled as much as we can (or want) then we can talk about whether or not we need to go to war.
I'll war just as much as the next guy.
