Northern Pike
Deity
- Joined
- Jul 29, 2003
- Messages
- 6,673
We should take the final two cities on the Celtic island easily enough next turn. Our problem there is to get our units off the island without wasted time, given that our Carracks in the area have less than half the transport capacity required. So, we should change Faro, Oporto, and Yaroslavl to Carrack builds right now, despite the waste of shields, and rush Carracks in Novgorod and Alesia. (Rushing a harbour in Alesia is a good idea, BTW, but it can wait a little.) This (counting the depleted elite off Novgorod) will give us a force of eleven Carracks in the area to begin next turn, with which we can land the army and thirty other units next to Cumae on the fourth turn of the next round. Overseer, if you aren't clear on how this schedule is possible with differential naval movement, just ask.
The force from the Celtic island, with which we hope to accomplish a lot, should not be diverted to Japan. Our Japanese campaign may go slowly for a while due to lack of units, but the efficient way to reinforce that front is with new units shipped from Nineveh. We should immediately rush three more cav within a turn's move of Nineveh (Nineveh, Rostov, Cacela), so that the reinforcement available in Japan in two turns will be six cav rather than three. After this we should leave a ship chain in place between Nineveh and Kyoto (or Edo), rather than keeping all our ships in the theatre in one lump.
I'll repeat Elephantium's warning that we have to stop our war with the Japanese at some point to gift them a refuge, and the same applies to the Romans.
We'll need to gift the Iroquois a refuge next turn before returning to war with them and taking Grand River, and since letting them have Future Retirement Home would be too risky (see below), we'll have to rush a settler before hitting Enter where it can found a retirement city next turn. I'd rush the settler in Zimbabwe and found the refuge two tiles NW of Zim, since enemy towns sandwiched between our own like this cost us the fewest tiles; perhaps we should have recognized this earlier. Or if the next player finds this alarming, we can just rush a settler in Philadelphia and found the Iroquois refuge in the American tundra. A site on the Inca island would not be as good, since it would be too close (for flip purposes) to the Iroquois cities we'll be keeping.
In the case of the Mongols we can just follow the usual course of gifting them a refuge before we declare war. I'd land on the hill S-SW-SW from Grand River, and probably take the fogged-out northwestern Mongol city before lunging for Karakorum; this should give us a chance to assess how much they have to throw at us. It's important that while we conduct this campaign, our nine Carracks in the region should move to the positions from which they'll ferry our units from Mongolia to Germany and Greece. If they just loiter around the Iroquois island until we finish with the Mongols we'll lose a lot of time.
We shouldn't retire any more civs to the tundra on our home continent, except perhaps when we're just about to win; that region is too crowded and we'd be courting disaster. So we shouldn't gift away Future Retirement Home (it would be better to re-name it), or Castelo Branco. There are acceptable sites for two tundra refuges each on the American and Inca islands. But in fact, there's nothing sacred about the principle of putting retirement cities in infertile terrain at this point. The sites two NW of Hlobane, two NW of Zimbabwe, and two NW of St Petersburg all look good to me; they may only cost us three tiles apiece towards domination, whereas the coastal refuges we've been founding typically cost us nine.
It looks as though researching to Magnetism for shippable three-unit armies would cost us about four thousand gold--the price of thirteen cav or twenty-five Carracks rushed from scratch. It's not an obvious choice, but I'd still rather have the cash for rushing. We can't have Magnetism for another eight turns; and not too long after that, if we play correctly, our armies will be on the last islands they'll need to reach, and will be able to receive their third units even if we then can't ship them. What we should do instead is use our next Leader to rush the Military Academy, which--since the math works out very favourably--will raise the attack value of our two-unit cav armies from seven to nine. We don't need units any stronger than that to finish this one off.
Of course, we would rush the Academy in any town near the Leader where a cultural expansion would be helpful. Having it in a core town where we could actually build armies means nothing at this point.
The force from the Celtic island, with which we hope to accomplish a lot, should not be diverted to Japan. Our Japanese campaign may go slowly for a while due to lack of units, but the efficient way to reinforce that front is with new units shipped from Nineveh. We should immediately rush three more cav within a turn's move of Nineveh (Nineveh, Rostov, Cacela), so that the reinforcement available in Japan in two turns will be six cav rather than three. After this we should leave a ship chain in place between Nineveh and Kyoto (or Edo), rather than keeping all our ships in the theatre in one lump.
I'll repeat Elephantium's warning that we have to stop our war with the Japanese at some point to gift them a refuge, and the same applies to the Romans.
We'll need to gift the Iroquois a refuge next turn before returning to war with them and taking Grand River, and since letting them have Future Retirement Home would be too risky (see below), we'll have to rush a settler before hitting Enter where it can found a retirement city next turn. I'd rush the settler in Zimbabwe and found the refuge two tiles NW of Zim, since enemy towns sandwiched between our own like this cost us the fewest tiles; perhaps we should have recognized this earlier. Or if the next player finds this alarming, we can just rush a settler in Philadelphia and found the Iroquois refuge in the American tundra. A site on the Inca island would not be as good, since it would be too close (for flip purposes) to the Iroquois cities we'll be keeping.
In the case of the Mongols we can just follow the usual course of gifting them a refuge before we declare war. I'd land on the hill S-SW-SW from Grand River, and probably take the fogged-out northwestern Mongol city before lunging for Karakorum; this should give us a chance to assess how much they have to throw at us. It's important that while we conduct this campaign, our nine Carracks in the region should move to the positions from which they'll ferry our units from Mongolia to Germany and Greece. If they just loiter around the Iroquois island until we finish with the Mongols we'll lose a lot of time.
We shouldn't retire any more civs to the tundra on our home continent, except perhaps when we're just about to win; that region is too crowded and we'd be courting disaster. So we shouldn't gift away Future Retirement Home (it would be better to re-name it), or Castelo Branco. There are acceptable sites for two tundra refuges each on the American and Inca islands. But in fact, there's nothing sacred about the principle of putting retirement cities in infertile terrain at this point. The sites two NW of Hlobane, two NW of Zimbabwe, and two NW of St Petersburg all look good to me; they may only cost us three tiles apiece towards domination, whereas the coastal refuges we've been founding typically cost us nine.
It looks as though researching to Magnetism for shippable three-unit armies would cost us about four thousand gold--the price of thirteen cav or twenty-five Carracks rushed from scratch. It's not an obvious choice, but I'd still rather have the cash for rushing. We can't have Magnetism for another eight turns; and not too long after that, if we play correctly, our armies will be on the last islands they'll need to reach, and will be able to receive their third units even if we then can't ship them. What we should do instead is use our next Leader to rush the Military Academy, which--since the math works out very favourably--will raise the attack value of our two-unit cav armies from seven to nine. We don't need units any stronger than that to finish this one off.
Of course, we would rush the Academy in any town near the Leader where a cultural expansion would be helpful. Having it in a core town where we could actually build armies means nothing at this point.
but take the city with ease
