The Council

[CommandoBob]

Sent to The Council after we played Turn 295 but before it was sent to Babe.

Dear Fellow Star Gazers,

The news from the land of the Free is not as cheery as it once was. Orange mushroom clouds have disgraced our land, not once or twice, but three times. Our capital is cutoff from the world and many of our citizens are unhappy and unproductive.

But it did our heart good to bless the dwelling place in Saber known as Baldric with the gift of a mushroom clould of light blue. Yes, it is better to give than receive. Sadly, however, the microphones on the cameras were turned off at the moment of impact, so the mushroom cloud was only seen, and not heard.

We have you sent images of Baldric after this wonderous event, and also images of the Saber fleets as we have found them. These fleets are not focused on The Council; all the carriers are south east of Sugar-Free Wheaties.

Two items of mutual interest. One, with Freedom Cental being isolated at the moment, our trade deal is now broken. Once communication is restored, which we hope will be next turn, we would like to continue the Wine for Spices trade agreement that we had before, if this is still acceptable to you.

The second item is not good news. Saber is now building Space Ship parts. Only two right now, but surely more will come. Now is the time for The Council to reach the stars, while Saber is focused on Free.

And if The Council wishes to bestow upon Saber such a gift as Free gave them, we assure you that such a gift would be warmly received.

Sincerely yours,

Art Parry
aka CommandoBob

Let FREEdom ring,
Let the white dove sing...

Attachemnts

xcBaldric245

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xc11NW245

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xcSaberFleet245

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[CommandoBob]

Sent while Babe held Turn 296

Dear Dark Blue Companions,

One item we forgot to tell you about in our last missive.

More bad news.

Saber has built the UN. And they will not be holding UN elections, not with them at war with the entire world.

We gloated too much over the light blue mushroom cloud hanging over the land of orange and this critical piece of information just slipped right past us.

Sincerely yours,

Art Parry
aka CommandoBob

Let FREEdom ring,
Let the white dove sing...

 

[CommandoBob]

Received from The Council, while they held Turn 296.

Dear brothers in blue,


These are sad and momentous times indeed. For good or ill... the end is near.




There's no way you could know how much we wish we could help. It's unbelievably frustrating to be at this stage of the game and have so few options. Our tales of woe about our devastated production capacity haven't been exaggerated. We're starting to dig out - and rest assured, our three cities that have any production capacity worth mentioning are all focused on building the last SS part needed. Now we're focused on trying to prevent sabotage. Unfortunately, the requirements of a backup plan (in case the RNG doesn't come through for us) are going to effectively prevent us from joining your nuke war with Saber.


An enormous tactical blunder on our part left our entire navy exposed at sea, and when Saber launched their surprise attack on us (like in 2008 or so?), we lost the whole thing. We've only managed to rebuild a pathetic handful of boats - we have two nuke subs (second one just completed on the inter-turn). They stand at your disposal... is there anyway we can deploy them to aid in your sea battle against Saber? Just tell us where to sail, and we'll do it. Both nuke subs are currently stationed in The New Yard... about the only spot they're certain to be safe from Saber's bombers.


We don't have any tactical information on Saber's forces that you don't already have - if we spot anything that there's even a chance you can't see... we'll pass it along to you immediately.


Let us know. It's going to be a close run thing. The motto of the blues in these trying times must be: never, never, never give up.


To victory!


General_W, speaking with the voice of The Council

 

[CommandoBob]

They are going for the win and I can't blame them. If the roles were reversed, we would do the same.

 

[CommandoBob]

Sent to The Council after we played Turn 296 but before we sent the game to Babe

Dear Fellow Star Seekers,

We do appreciate the use of your seagoing vessels but hate to put them in harm's way. Scouting would their best usage, if they can do so with any danger.

The two underwater vessels in The New Yard could be used to intercept and destroy any Saber Transports that you many find. We sank two of them 5S-1SE of The New Yard, along with some other riff-raff, too. Only the Destroyers remain. The Orange Sub is no longer a problem.

We've attached the last sightings of them, both far out and zoomed in. Plenty of targets for everyone.

Tell your sailors that the people of Free greatly appreciate their service and sacrifice.


Sincerely yours,

Art Parry
aka CommandoBob

Let FREEdom ring,
Let the white dove sing...

xczSH244

Spoiler :

xcSH244

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[CommandoBob]

Sent to The Council while they held Turn 297.

Dear Understanding People of The Council,

Please forgive us, but we forgot to mention in our last missive that we sent you some luxuries.

Hope that you can enjoy them!


Sincerely yours,

Art Parry
aka CommandoBob

Let FREEdom ring,
Let the white dove sing...

 

[CommandoBob]

Sent to The Council after we played Turn 297 but sent before we sent the game to The Council.

Dear Brothers in Blue,

The people of Free are grateful for your offer of Dyes. We graciously accepted them and our Fashion Designers already have plans for a new line of clothing based on those new hues. You have helped make some of our people very happy.

But not the civil sevants of Free. Now the Interior Decorators are wanting to do an extreme makeover of the Palace in Freedom Central, which means chaos, relocation out, relocation in and confusion to those who keep the place running, while the guys in unbuttoned shirts and neckerchiefs will tell each other how great their ideas are as they slap each other on the butt and giggle.

I'm sure we'll like the new palace, once it is done.

Blast off as soon as you can!

Sincerely yours,

Art Parry
aka CommandoBob

Let FREEdom ring,
Let the white dove sing...

 

[CommandoBob]

Sent to The Council before we sent the game to them, after Turn 298.

Dear Friends in Blue,

We are greatly saddened by the nuclear devastation you have just suffered. We hope you are able to recover quickly and reach for the stars very, very soon.

As you probably already know, we have suffered several such attacks. And inflicted such attacks, too, but mostly on military targets, and even Baldric qualified as that.

To make things even worse, Saber has landed units on our mainland. While we have whittled them down a bit, our capital of Freedom Central is threatened and could possibly be taken next turn. The attached image is from the end of our Turn 298 and shows the Orange Infected areas of Southeast Free.

We have sent you the knowledge of Stealth.

The Galaxy Awaits The Council!

Sincerely yours,

Art Parry
aka CommandoBob

Let FREEdom ring,
Let the white dove sing...

xc242

Spoiler :

 

[CommandoBob]

Sent to The Council after we played Turn 299 but before we sent the Game to them.

Dear Fellow Lovers of Deep Space and All the Mysteries of the Universe,

We thank you so much for your generous gifts of Dyes and Sanitation. But the poeple most talented in the use of Dyes were in Freedom Central and Thessauronicleus, both of which were captured and razed by the Obliviators in Orange this past turn. While we of FREE could appreciate the skills and abilities of the dye users, their absence and the ensuing silence is quite nice. Planing meetings can now focus on how to hold FREE together and not on how much cherry is in the cherrywood conference table and that it clashes with the particular shade of off white/bone/glistening pearl/colonial cream....(sigh) some things are now much simpler.

Saber landed only long enough to take out two ciites. Our dreams of reaching the stars are now dead and lie in the ruins of Freedom Central. Without guidance from down below, our space ship parts are drifting in space out of control. If you can find them feel free to use them in any way you can; everything still should be under warranty.

Only The Council now has the smarts and the parts to live beyond the confines of this world that Meleet gave us.

Saber forces have also departed from FREE. We had weaken their two invading armies, but could not find the transports they were on this turn. We did find and take out 4 Carriers and hopefully some of those nasty Stealth Bombers, too.

We have sent you our World Map this turn.

It just now occurs to us that Saber may want to go the stars also, in order to prove the alleged superiority of Orange over any and all shades of Blue. We suspect that might be their dream, but the reality should prove to be far different.

Sincerely yours,

Art Parry
aka CommandoBob

Let FREEdom ring,
Let the white dove sing...

 

[CommandoBob]

Received from The Council before we opened Turn 300.

Dear CommandoBob and all our blue allies,


The news of the destruction of Freedom Central brought howls of anguished despair from the depths of every councilor’s heart. We know the orange butchers are now certainly sailing for our shores, hoping to stage a sequel to their mass murder. Freedom Central will not be forgotten – we’re renaming our command module “the Freedom Central” module.

We hope this will bring some tiny measure of comfort and pride to your people.


Rest assured, that if it’s at anyway within our power, we will not let the Orange menace spread their disease beyond this world. Despite the bombing, despite the attacks, despite the nukes, we continue to plod towards completion of our ship. We are now repositioning what’s left of our military to do our level best to repel the inevitable invasion.


Is there any chance we might be able to get some luxury items back from you asap? Some we-love-the-firstcouncilor-days would be helpful in boosting our sadly meager production. Also, we're having a tough time keeping track of Saber's navy - so any intel you have on their location would be greatly appreciated!


As always, please don’t hesitate to let us know if you think of anything at all we can do to help – aside from beat these orangies at their own game!


Your brothers in blue and in mourning,

General_W,
speaking with the voice of The Council

 

[CommandoBob]

Sent to The Council after Turn 300 was played but before the game was sent to The Council.

Dear Seekers of the True Blue,

We are very honored that you would consider naming part of your greatest achievement after our fallen capital. Honored, indeed.

And forgive us for not noticing your need of luxuries. Our own troubles have occupied much of our time and our surplus of luxuries went unnoticed. We have now sent you Spices, Silks and Furs. We also sent Iron. We know of no good reason why you might need Iron, and anything that could give you a reason to have a need for Iron means something very bad has happened. Should the need arise (and we hope it does not) you do have that resource available to use.

In addition, we sent 1000 gold, for you to use as you see fit. It is a gift, not a loan.

It had not occured to us that Saber might be planning to de-Apollo-ize you as they did us. After their landing we expected them to follow up their invasion by landing more units. Running away as they did never even crossed our minds.

Given the concentration of units that were off SE Free, their quickest path to you would be go sail between Saber and Babe, and land on your NW shores. A smarter route would have their ships hugging the cities and coastlines of NE Saber, and then land on your SE shores where your cities are few.

We have sent you screenshots of where we found and did not find the Orange navy. We spotted three carriers, all SE of Free; we could not locate their last remaining carrier. We saw only two transports, and they are no more.

The stars are very near. Grab them while you can!

Sincerely yours,

Art Parry
aka CommandoBob

Let FREEdom ring,
Let the white dove sing...

xoc11se240

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xocSEF240

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xocSF240

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xocSN240

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[CommandoBob]

Received from The Council while we held Turn 301.

Dear Brothers in Blue (and you, too, CommandoBob),


SABER continues to detonate nukes over our lands. We are struggling to finish our spaceship but it is very difficult under the circumstances. SABER has been targeting our resources, our production areas and our workers. We suffered 3 nuke strikes around our final SS part building city. We would beg of you to please send us any resources/luxuries that you see we have need of. We won't even know for sure what we need till we get the save.


Also, we hate to keep asking for things since we're already so far in your debt, but we will also likely need more workers to clear the radiation and the damage and to rebuild our roads and mines. Is there any way you can loan us some workers? We would be glad to take them with us when we leave this Meleet forsaken world. Any members of FREE's ruling elite, yes, even CommandoBob, are welcome to join us as well when we launch for a new and more peaceful world where anyone caught wearing orange will be shot on sight just as a precaution.


We are not sure if our possession of the small island city off one of your continents is enough to allow us to transport workers back and forth. If not, this could always be rectified by FREE temporarily gifting a city to The Council. The bigger our workforce the faster we can launch.


We know we're asking a lot - but it's only because you've been such wonderful allies and we know that you have the same passion for defeating the oragnies that we do.


Go Blue!


The Council

 

[Elephantium]

Is there anything we can do to cripple SABER, even at the risk of losing our starting island to invasion forces? At this point, I don't care whether we win or lose; I just want to deny SABER a victory, the treacherous dogs.

 

[CommandoBob]

We could take all our forces on the mainland and invade Saber. Right now, if I read the tea leaves correctly, Saber is focused on The Council, and would not expect us to do such a thing. We have several transports in/around Debt-Free. If we kept the Saber naval forces around 11NW busy...we might sneak a force onshore.

The most direct route involves one turn at sea. I think we would want two turns at sea, heading SW of Debt-Free before we turned to NW and Saber's coastline.

On The Council's request for workers:

The workers in question would have to be in our capital, right? Gifting a city with workers inside the city means that those workers are still ours and are trespassing.

We have several workers on the mainland but I don't remember the count. Some are making roads, some rails, some clearing damage (maybe). We have some settlers in Gong; we could send them to The Council and let The Council capture them, but that will take at least three turns (no transports in Gong, they would have to be rushed this turn and set sail next turn). The city, The Old Gong Isle, is one a tile city, so no way to unload settlers/workers into it.

If we gift a city to The Council, with an airport, does the airport remain? We have three airports in Gong, as best I recall, but I don't know where. That provides a slow feed of workers, one per turn per city, which doesn't help that much. Well, we could build an airflield with a worker and gift the nearest city to them. Then they have to garrison the city, capture our settlers and airlift them to their new home.

(Rambling out loud....)

Let's say we gifted an airfield city to The Council on this turn and gift them as many workers as possible from the mainland. On their turn, after they accept the city and workers, they declare war on us. We lose some luxuries and do they. However, we can send our settlers into their territory and let them be captured, thus giving The Council some fresh blood in slaves. We cut our unit support costs some. We might be able to get some slaves in return.

Well, we could gift them some workers and the city this turn and let them decide about a DoW.

 

[Elephantium]

If we can manage naval superiority in the area, definitely send an invasion force.

As for workers, we can sell/gift any workers in our capital to other civs IIRC. Phony-war shouldn't be necessary.

 

[CommandoBob]

Sent to The Council after Turn 301 was played but before the game was sent to The Council.

Staunch Sufferers of Involuntary Chemotherapy,

We share your pain as ugly splotches of orange fester on our once pristine mountains, lakes and grasslands, too. The perpetrators' own land also suffers from these vile, citric scabs, but their people have largely been untouched by this war. We need a biological weapon that is lethal to people of orange but a life enhancer to those in various shades of blue!

We are more than willing to loan/gift you workers to clean up your land. Howver, there is no place in the diplomacy screen for us to send you any! And since diplomacy is one of the last things we do each turn, we did not have any good options on how to do this.

It looks like we must physically get workers into your hands and/or lands and let them be captured/loaned to our Dark Blue Brothers, which means a war. If that is what it takes, we are willing. That interrupts our luxury flow to each other, so we are going to have more unhappy and cranky citizens on both sides of the ocean, but that cannot be helped.

We could gift you a city near The Old Gong Isle and build an airfield just before we gift the city to you. There would need to a Transport in The Old Gong Isle, so as to move a unit or two into the new city. On your turn you would have to declare war on us and capture two workers that got 'left' inside the new borders. We could 'feed' you two workers per turn this way for a while, happiness permitting.

We have some time to discuss this before the game gets back around to us.

We sent Horses to you.

We've spotted 4 ships off your south coast line, but see nothing on the west side of The Council. There are two groups, eBattleship and eDestroyer to the south and 2 vDestroyers closer to your coast.

Sincerely yours,

Art Parry
aka CommandoBob

Let FREEdom ring,
Let the white dove sing...

xc239aa

Spoiler :

xc239fc

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[CommandoBob]

PM from Donsig before we played Turn 302.

Hi Commando_Bob and everyone else at FREE,

SABER continues to bomb us and our need for workers increases every turn. When you tried sending workers last time did you have any in your capital city? If we are able to trade workers they will move instantly from your capital to ours. (Physically capturing workers and loading then on transports seems risky given SABER's large navy.) If we still cannot trade workers even when you have them in your capital city then we both need a city on the same continent (probably the continent where one of us has a capital). If you gift us a city (preferably not a coastal city - we don't want to open any doors for SABER) then we'll be able to send workers back and forth. We could gift you a city but we don't have many left and those we do have are either building spaceship parts or workers.

We would appreciate any help you can give us with workers as SABER has become very good at destroying our production capacity.

Thanks,
The Council

 

[CommandoBob]

Reply to Donsig via PM.

Dear Donsig and fellow True-Blue Die-Hards,

We are considering gifting you a city, but the details are hazy at the moment. I sketched out a plan last night, but have had no responses to it.

As you know by now, our trade routes are broken since The Gulag got nuked last turn. We are not sending you anything and vice versa. So if we have to go to war to get you some workers, now would be the time for that to happen. We've both already taken the happiness hit due to the lack of luxuries, and that was a big stumbling block in a phoney war.

Sincerely yours,

Art Parry
aka CommandoBob

 

[Elephantium]

DID we have any workers in our capital when you looked at the diplomacy screen?

 

[CommandoBob]

DID we have any workers in our capital when you looked at the diplomacy screen?

Yes, we did. I even fortified them.

I will try again with Turn 301 when I get home. Or someone else can, too.

I thought it would be easy as pie to send them workers, which is why I put it off until the end of the turn.