SGOTM 14 - One Short Straw

[babybluepants]

Ragnar Theater
Capture Bjorgvin and Jelling EDIT: and Roskild on or before T153 and immediately CF. CF on T153 at the latest, no matter what. Ragnar's last city will be captured in 1t, preferably on T154 so we don't have to give up some city because of his lousy proposal and probably independent of the Shaka Theater, or before taking that mini-stack toward Nodwengu. Ragnar's last city might autoraze, but if not, let's keep it (along with all the other cities). We can just settle the dotmap city 1 tile further west, no probs. Btw, the last proposal FAILED because Shaka voted No!

Can't imagine losing any vote from this point, especially after the Bjorgvin capture.
Those three cities will fall in 2t. If we need to CF in order to get troops into the last city, I'd take it to save WW.

 

[babybluepants]

LC,
If you wanna play on for 4-5t, feel free.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Ulundi has the Statue of Zeus. That will have to be our first Zulu target. That requires building the Zulu Mountain Pass straight away. Ulundi falls on T+5 if all goes well.

A galleon built in Vijay arrives at Oz 13t later, so the last galleon that could arrive would have to be completed on T162. That seems just fine to me.

The only relative unknown now is how to get the last few tiles we need for domination and working out the settler logistics. Settler shouldn't be too hard since we'll have galleon chains set up here and there. We can add a few more tiles to the count from Shaka's land, which is upwards of 130 tiles and the little land jutting out above his Neilmeister Mountain Decoy.

 

[babybluepants]

You mean Monte?

 

[LowtherCastle]

You mean Monte?

Nope, Shaka. Ulundi has SH, Angkor, Zeus, and the AP. Quite a haul, but it won't do us any good. Just prevent the bad.

I wouldn't have noticed if Dhoom hadn't asked about the Hagia Sophia, which hasn't been built yet.

Edit: actually, the good will be for warring, because that monster must be spreading some culture around and without it, in the core of his landmass, our units might travel faster by land from city to city.

 

[babybluepants]

Where do we build the settler for the Zulu mountain pass? Jute?

Edit: with the 3 chops, we could settle that city on T+6. Something like:
T0 - switch to settler for 15/100
T1 - switch to granary, chop comes in for 58/60
T2 - whip granary, chop comes in for 65h OF (5g converted)
T3 - finish settler with another chop
T4 - load galleon and move
T5 - land
T6 - settle
Could probably tighten that up somehow...

That would allow us to land at Ulundi as soon as T+7, assuming we have troops and galleons available. I'd like to capture Zeus asap.

 

[babybluepants]

Nope, Shaka.

Ok. You confused me with the adding tile comment. You mean there's more tiles to be had than you noted in game?

 

[LowtherCastle]

Ok. You confused me with the adding tile comment. You mean there's more tiles to be had than you noted in game?

Exactly. THe Shaka area, expanded, can give us close to 160 by my current estimates, including plopping down 2 or more fresh settlers.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Where do we build the settler for the Zulu mountain pass? Jute?

Okay, it's coming together slowly. Details:

1. T+0 Archer lands in kwaDuk. T+2 On a hill overlooking Ulundi, he composes a dirge.
2. T+2 Three 5-mvmt galleons take on the appropriate units for Ulundi and move into position (from the north) for a T+4 DoW and landing.
3. T+0 Agra starts a settler that will settle the Pass on T+4, allowing additional units into the Gulf of Zulu, as needed.

 

[Mitchum]

Things are definitely coming together with your plan, LC. Be sure to build enough seige as most of our other units should stay alive.

When do you plan to play?

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Another random thought about attacking the Wizard: if we have a couple of unpromoted Macemen, those might be more powerful than a couple of extra CR III Maces at one point in the attacking. In particular, let's say that we reduce the Wizard in strength, attack with a strong unit, fail to kill him, and are faced off against Barb Archers or Longbowmen.

A Maceman could then promote with Combat I + Cover (Anti-Archery) + whatever other random promo, which may cause the Wizard to once again come up as the top defender (and if the Wizard did not come up as the top defender then we'd still get a useful promo to use against said Archer/Longbowman).

EDIT: Note that I said unpromoted Maces instead of unpromoted War Elephants since War Elephants can't get the Cover (Anti-Archery) promo.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Things are definitely coming together with your plan, LC. Be sure to build enough seige as most of our other units should stay alive.

When do you plan to play?

Still working on a few details but today definitely, Gotta get the show on the road.

I want to figure out how long it wil take our 100 cities, so we know when they need to be built and settled.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

I want to figure out how long it wil take our 100 cities, so we know when they need to be built and settled.

Would I be correct in assuming that any newly-settled Cities will build Culture from the start plus will work the highest Hammer-producing square from the get-go, possibly netting us 2 or more Culture from Hammers per turn?


A rare exception might be working a high Food square in the case where, at Size 2, we could work two non-Food squares that would provide us with multiple Hammers? Hmmm, even then, you probably wouldn't even be able to double the Hammer-output by growing, since your second best Hammer-output square would produce less Hammers than your best Hammer-output square plus the City's Centre, thus getting this close to the end of the game we probably wouldn't work a Food Resource in such a City under any circumstance.

At least that fact reduces the burden of wanting to improve Food-based squares and thus Workers could potentially only help to improve something like a Mine for such a newly-founded City or else Chop into a building like a Theatre (chopping into Culture will not give us extra Culture, though, so accumulated Hammers in excess of the cost of the Theatre will be wasted).

 

[LowtherCastle]

Would I be correct in assuming that any newly-settled Cities will build Culture from the start plus will work the highest Hammer-producing square from the get-go, possibly netting us 2 or more Culture from Hammers per turn?

Right. And they'll chop a theater asap. We have four such cities planned, including Zulu Pass.

One of them turns out to have the iron already mined but an unknown factor, but that doesn't save any turns because it's in the outer FC, but it does relieve the workers of a job.

 

[LowtherCastle]

"Playing."

I'm going to try to squeeze in as many turns as I can before bbp comes home. That might be 1, might be 2 or 3. We'll see. I've got some distractions and I'm slow and I'm being ultra careful...I think we actually have a cjhance, but there's not too much leeway for blunders, I don't think.

 

[babybluepants]

@LC,
I don't think I can play tonight. I have some contract work that really needs doing. We'll see, but I also don't like to just squeeze it in, since the turns are really involved. You play as much as you can.

 

[LowtherCastle]

@LC,
I don't think I can play tonight. I have some contract work that really needs doing. We'll see, but I also don't like to just squeeze it in, since the turns are really involved. You play as much as you can.

Okay.

 

[babybluepants]

Any progress?

 

[LowtherCastle]

Any progress?

Yes, indeed. I'm in the middle of T153 and I've uploaded. So that's a

"Done playing."

We've captured what we expected so far. Unfortunately we've lost our foreign TRs with all but Shaka, because of Mercantilism... So we're now at -230gpt deficit spending, but our coffers are still expanding with all our plunder.

Ragnar kindly upgraded another galleon to +1 mvmt so we have four galleons loaded and headed for Ulundi. We DoW in 2t turns and land. Shaka is not heavily garrisoned, though Ulundi has five units, including 2 cats.

We've spied Ragnar's last city and Mansa has a settlement very nearby, so the AIs are fast approaching our planned city sites. We'll have to speed up our settling of those cities, just to play it safe.

I decided to go with your plan partly on attacking the Sarai area. We have two galleons down there and they could attack and win by sea, but GK has engineering, so his keshiks could counterattack leaving us with too few defenders. I thnk instead, we bring another load next turn, even if we have to attack his stack of keshiks inside the city. Better to get rid of them asap.

The Pass settler is done and ready to chain to the site, landing next turn and settling with garrisons the turn we DoW.

Anyway, take a look. I'll pick it up again in tomorrow. Go ahead and play if you get a chance.

Edit: I also decided to start sending a few trebs from the homeland toward SHaka. I decided we might need extra down there since he has lbms. So we kept that extra chain segment that you set up.

And I made a spy to send to GK and spy out his land. I switched epps to Mansa, so we could send a spy and pillage her knights, if we want.

 

[LowtherCastle]

One other fairly crucial detail if yo decide to play. I think GK will be too slow if we rely heavily on the northern route, but we wait too many turns for one of the spoke cities to come out of resistance to make a canal. The solution is to settle on the western side in the middle of the spoke. There's one tile far enough away from both cities.

That means building a settler pronto. I would build it in York (?) and 3pop it next turn. That gets it there about in time for us to take out both of those cities to remove his culture. Then 5 (hopefully) workers make a fort on the horses (faster than the forest tile).