UNGY-04 Who do they think they are?

[Rusten]

I'm going to need a skip or a swap as I'm swamped up until next friday. Thought I'd be able to get to it today, but something came up so it's going to be hard finding time now.

Uploaded the current save although I didn't do anything except ending turn yet. Maybe some small things I don't remember. It doesn't matter whether you play from this save or the 1670 one.


Roster:

Mystyfly
Ungy - just played
Rusten - skip
Silverbullet - up now
Pigswill

 

[silverbullet]

Got it.
I will play the turn sometime in the next 48 hours.

 

[silverbullet]

I paused my turn for some consultation. We seem to be popular.

We survived the attack by Japan. Upgrading the longbow and rush buying artillery did the job against his amphibious attack. Toku doesn't bother us much after that so far.

I started scouting Shaka's land with zeppelins. He has a quite a large army of grenadiers and cuirassiers, so I decided to go for the capital first, to minimize war weariness- we are close to our happiness limit. I also started some anti-armour unit, just to avoid the penalty of riflemen vs. grenadiers.

I traded 2 modern hapiness wonders with WK for copper and coal and gold (I prefered to trade him resources that will not let him grow his cities further).


Joao lands this on our land:

I get suspicious and I scout this with our caravel:

We could ignore Joao and just defend as well, or we could switch our plans and attack Joao and later Toku. Joao doesn't have chemistry, so landing units on Charlie's land is safe for now. From there we can take Portugal and later Japan.
Shaka will be eliminated once we have infantry in this case.

I recommend switching the war plans to Joao. We should make peace with Toku when possible, taking him after Joao is gone. At this stage we should be able to run 2 wars in parallel - toku and Shaka.

If we go with this plan, we can stop rush buying now and research assembly line and combustion while the fleet is on its way to Joao (combustion first may be better to avoid negating the GLH).

Some other notes:
1) we can trade biology but we don't need it that much. I would wait until someone agrees to trade electricity.
2) Are we sure WK is not after us? How long ago was he cautious with us? Was he pleased with us when he started having enough on his hands?

I will continue this game after getting some feedback. If you prefer, I can just continue it as I see best.
BTW, I might not have network access in the next few days. If you don't hear from me anything in a day or so, pigswill can take over.

 

[pigswill]

I'm not sure we need to be picking a war with Shaka when he's busy with Chuck, we're at war with Toku already and it looks like we could soon be invaded by Jo. Why not postpone the war v Shaka until after we've wiped out Tok and Jo?

 

[silverbullet]

I'm not sure we need to be picking a war with Shaka when he's busy with Chuck, we're at war with Toku already and it looks like we could soon be invaded by Jo. Why not postpone the war v Shaka until after we've wiped out Tok and Jo?

that's exactly what I was proposing:
War with Joao,
Defend only against Toku->get peace
Attack Toku
Research assmebly line and combustion
rush buy an army to wipe Shaka

 

[pigswill]

Sry Silverbullet, misread your post. "At this stage" meant after stomping Jo rather than now.

 

[silverbullet]

Well, I am sorry for my poor language skills, probably should have said "at THAT stage"

 

[silverbullet]

I started moving our fleet of galleons towards Joao. It will take a while for them to get there, and we have quite a good military, so I took the opportunity to build some infrastructure - levees, grocers, walls street (in capital), ironworks(mayapan).
I started researching economics->corporation->assembly line. We lose about 100 beakers per turn on the turn that corporation comes in, however, Joao declared war on the same turn and Napoleon switched to merc on the same turn too, so we would probably have lost at least half of it anyway even if we hadn't teched corp.

Scouting with zeppelins I find that Toku isn't sending any new ships.
An interesting situation in Portugal:

Toku's army is trapped in lisbon as long as he is at war with us!
Toku will make peace on turn 251 for some gold, but I want to wait at least until we kill this army. It will be a good target practise for our artillery.

We use our good friends the holy romans for a good invasion point to Portugal.

I left the game where we our out of cash, having just researched assembly line, and left only 1 elephant defending Evora. I will leave the joy of capturing it to pigswill.

Sun Tzu was born. Sun who?

 

[silverbullet]

going further should be pretty straightforward.
Some thoughts:
*Shaka should be killed on the earliest convenient opportunity so he doesn't become a threat.
* The island can produce a lot of military, but with Japan's ships of the line it's risky to transport. We could wait for combustion, but I see our galleons can get from our coast (protected by ironclads) to Toku's coast. It's worth considering getting 4 frigates and maybe 5 galleons there. Some would die to toku, but with Zeppelins weakening potential attackers we will not lose all of them and will be able to land some units on toku from both sides.

Alternatively we could just have the island producing infantry and artillery to be picked up after Toku is dead (to kill Shaka).

* We should probably upgrade our rifles in Evora after capturing it.

* WK and Nappoleon still have enough on their hands. The only thing that can make us lose this game is if they both attack us, so watch them closely to make sure it doesn't happen. I am almost certain that WK was pleased before he had enough on his hands, but let's keep a close watch on these

* WK is not going cultural yet. He might be going for space. I think it's better for us because we will dominate the world long before he reaches anywhere near alpha centauri. If he chooses to go for culture we have to change plans and kill him, or at least raze 1~2 cities.

 

[pigswill]

Maybe capture Evora, upgrade some rifles to infantry and head over to Lisbon. Trash Tok's army then get peace with Japan and continue with Portugal. Peace with Tok will allow us to move troops from north island in relative safety in the short term. Once Jo is finished we can then decide on the next target.

 

[silverbullet]

Sounds like a plan. Toku needs to die sometime soon because of culture problems and risk of war, but we can afford 10 turns of peace. Charlie is worth keeping for now for some tech trades. We should be fine in any way we choose as long as we keep a close watch on WK

 

[Rusten]

Haven't been able to look closely at the situation yet so I don't feel comfortable making comments. Just wanted to say that I'll have a lot of spare time again starting this saturday, so expect comments and rants then. I could slide back into the roster after pigswill.

 

[pigswill]

Oh dear. Just played my turns so I shall no doubt experience the Rusten Rant. But at least we're still alive. Winning? Hard to say... but definitely alive. Report to follow soon.

 

[pigswill]

1735.
Jo has reinforced Evora. Doesn't help him much as it still falls.
Shaka's at peace with Chuck.

1740.
Shaka adopts emancipation. Has he turned into a pink fluffy bunny-rabbit? He doesn't even have enough on his hands!
Tok decides that his army is bored cooped up in Lisbon and they stroll over to Evora.
Bit inconvenient as I'm trying to spend our money on upgrading rifles to infantry and of course our artillery's CR promotions are wasted pounding a stack in the countryside.

1745.
Tok's decided that his beaten up army has had enough country air and they scurry back to Lisbon. Our stack is still upgrading and healing.

Miscellaneous builds going only. Mainly infantry. A few grocers for health, customs houses to try to increase trade income. Nothing very exciting.

1750.
Wang has built the Eiffel Tower. Are we sure he's not going cultural? Maybe he's just obsessed with phallic symbols. Not much else happens.

1755.
Slightly more interesting. Tok's army has been annihilated and Lisbon is ours. Tok offers theology + 390g for peace so I accept it.
Mutal completes Wall Street to earn us even more money. I immediately increase science slider to research railroad. At the moment we've got artillery and sea transport. The bottlenecks are ground troops (infantry being built) and the slow pace of reinforcements to assemble our next task force of Glorious Liberators. Railways will greatly speed things up. Railroad in five turns.
Wang no longer has enough on his hands (ever since he built the Eiffel Tower in fact. Hmmm, strange).

1760.
Napoleon only wants us to cancel our deals with Wang. Forget it pal. Oops, he's no longer pleased with us.
Ironworks have been built.

1765.
Jo sends a few trebs our way. Oliver Cromwell makes a brief appearance before retiring to the countryside. Now Napoleon is hands free. Obviously its been passed over to Shaka (wheohrn) and Chuck (ditto). Make a deal with Shaka: stop trading with Jo for 360g. Doesn't buy a peace treaty but at least it weakens them both slightly. Chuck wants steel for milsci and some gold, I consider then decline.

1770 is a dull year.

1775.
With railroad one turn away I start on a bunch of workers.
We capture Coimbra.

1780.
Railroad to Combustion. Cash 100%.

We have a stack healing in Coimbra.

We have a stack 1W of Oporto.

Our island stack is on top of the oil. There's a few galleons near Izancapac.

We have a bunch of obselete units in Uxmal.

We have no screenshots.

We have a save:

 

[mystyfly]

...

We have no screenshots.

We have a save:

Would I be next in queue after pigswill? I'll be able to play next week so a swap would be nice. Have to hand in that @#°§° paper on monday, will have freetime again after that.

 

[silverbullet]

Would I be next in queue after pigswill? I'll be able to play next week so a swap would be nice. Have to hand in that @#°§° paper on monday, will have freetime again after that.

Rusten is next in queue because he can play on Saturday.

Roster:

Ungy
Silverbullet
Pigswill - just played
Rusten - UP NOW
Mystyfly

 

[silverbullet]

pigswill:
haven't looked at the save yet, but I wouldn't have taken theology from Toku. It is a 1 turn tech that costs us WFYABTA. We can still trade with our friend charlie.

Regarding WK, when I said he wasn't going cultural - I was checking his tech screen and the victory conditions screen every turn. He did not turn his culture slider to max yet. He keeps getting new techs, and his culture doesn't increase quickly.
We should watch him now with the tower, if his culture starts increasing too much, we will only have about 30 turns to raze one his cities, so make sure to check it every turn.
I think we should be fine as long as WK doesn't have advanced flight - the only real counter to artillery.

Both Napoleon and Shaka are a risk now for us. Railroads will definitely help to build a good defencive army. Maybe we can bribe Shaka to war against Toku - it will keep him busy and make him like us again once we redeclare toku.

 

[Rusten]

Got it, it feels good to have time for civ again.

I looked at the save and Shaka is back in WHEOOH.

I see that our power is > WK's power so maybe we should take the fight to him after Joao? He's the only threat to victory as far as I can tell. With financial, great cities and those culture wonders I don't like seeing him left alone even if he's still got some time to go for 50k.

WK has both combustion and elctricity so he might get tanks soon if he heads that way in the tech tree. With that in mind I think researching it ourselves before attacking is the safest move. If we're up against tanks and battleships with infantry, artillery, galleons and frigates things could get a tad annoying.

There is no unit that upgrades into a tank so if WK and us get there at the same time we should get much more of them than he will as both of us have to start from scratch.

Finishing up Joao and teching indsustrialism+combustion for a coming war vs. Korea sounds good? I'll get some more airships too -- having complete overview is sweet. I'll try to rectify the screenshot situation as well.

 

[pigswill]

We're getting some serious unhappiness from our lack of emancipation and we really don't need slavery any more. This might be a good time to swop civics (hopefully for the last time). We've got a reasonable number of infantry slowly heading east and a fair number of artillery and ships there already. I was thinking maybe we could land a brand new stack on Joao's southern coast to speed up his annihilation. It'll probably still take a set to encompass his total distraction (or even destruction).

Shaka and Chuck went into wheoorn on the same turn so they're probably ready to resume their war. They certainly dislike each other more than they dislike us.

Probably head for combustion first, upgrade entire navy to destroyers and transports and then resume research.

 

[silverbullet]

War with Korea sounds good.
Napoleaon, Shaka AND charlie who is not pleased anymore all have enough on their hands.
All of them may be after us, so complete visiblity with airships is great. We will probably need to leave a small stationary force and a railraod network to protect from coastal invasions.

Hapiness shouldn't be too much of an issue after we capture more Joao cities. We will get gems for extra +2, and eliminating a civ with emancipation will help too. Slavery is good for newly captured cities, so I will keep it as long as the war is going.
EDIT: Charlie is probably going to get those gems, but we have resources to trade for it.


We might be able to wage a quick war with Toku until our research to tanks is done. He can be a good vassal on this map once we give him good war techs, and he has some hapiness resources that we need.