Lizzy's rise to greatness

[Dinner]

Some notes:

-In Kayseri instead of building wealth we should be building a library to increase culture to fight back against the cultural take over occuring. This will also improve research. We can make up the money by selling resources or borrowing more.
-Why build a galley on the inland sea? There isn't much there and there isn't likely to be much there.
-Ankara is wasting time build research when it could be building either a market or a bank all of which would help research more in the long term.
-We literally don't even have a single worker working on building a road out west. This needs to change.
-In Marsin we're building a light house when it is a border city without any defenders which is culturally being taken over by the neighboring Maya city because we're not producing any culture in that city at all. I know you want to work sea tiles to make money but your obsession is seeming more and more irrational. We should be building something which produces culture or failing that a defender is the city could be invaded by knights and taken in just two turns.
-Why even bother building a spy in Bursa when we spent most of our spy points and since RB knows we're using spies on them they've almost certainly directed most of their espionage points towards us. It seems wasteful when we could be building so many other more useful things (like a worker to build that road to the west or a trebochet).
-In aurora we could be building the Chichen Itza pretty quickly and given that we're on the verge of war and will likely face invasions from two directions and extra 25% to city defense sounds kind of good to me.
-We have an extra cow and a fish and will soon have an extra incense while Civplayers has two extra luxury goods we could trade for.
- For our settler & galley in the north we should settle on the silver resource as it is best to claim luxuries while we still can. Alternatively, settle where we can get the whale or the iron resource but none of them will be any good until we make harbors (or get the whale tech in that resource's case) so I'd really rather see one of our continental city locations built first.

[mzprox]

We will not break the NAP with Maya... that's out of the question so no attack is possible before t180.

They will not break it either. and even if they would that would be the end of maya. Don1t forget they are facing cfc's army. Btw we are supplying information to cfc about maya's army position. it is our interest that from his conflict cfc comes out victorious. then if we weakened rb we will together attack maya. at least that's the plan.
Believe me, there is nothing dangerous in the area, and we couldn't start the attack for an other 20 turns at least (till the nap lasts). Rb however can invade our cities if we fail to build up a strong enough army in the east.
Some other news:
Golden age ended, our gnp fallen back, but as predicted we will get rifling in t163, we need about 100 more gold from aztec (that's 500 altogether we will have to pay back after rifling).
We got a great scientist.. that's unortunate.. I was working on great merchants and spy+prophet to get anything but great scientist. still we had about 40% chance for GS (because of the UoS wonder) and 60% chance for the rest. This is the least useful for us, but still there are options:
-one promising is to try to trade it for aztec's great prophet they got in this turn. A holy shrine would give us 40-50 gold/turn
-hold it for an other golden age
-bulb it into chemistry for 1900 beakers.

[Dinner]

I want us to keep those two Janissaries in the west and for Mz to stop trying to move them away from our border with the Maya. It seems obvious to me that they have their army there for a reason and it isn't for defense (thus all the catapults as well as the settler to rebuild razed cities). We shouldn't be moving armies away from that border and instead should be building up defensive forces for their obvious invasion. With luck they won't invade until after we commit ourselves to a war with RB but they will no doubt continue drafting with abandon and since they have so many more cities with so much more population their army is going to be vastly larger than ours too.

[Dinner]

It is as I feared. Planning to combat a Maya invasion must be part of our strategy and we must invade them while we still have the tech advantage.

[Hercules]

Here's some recent screen shots from this latest turn: focusing on Maya.

A lot of catapults and two separate armies build up: With a sizeable force in Chinook (not shown)

Also a power graph comparison.

What I am most disappointed in is the short window of opportunity of our military tech supremacy.

[mzprox]

Just so you know: we are in the same turn for almost a week now.. wars and now multiple reloads make the game very slow.

[mzprox]

Maya and Egypt don't work together besides they have a common enemy. (they don't have open borders for example). But Maya still occupies many of cfc's troops.
We can't leave RB alone now.. without a nap with them we couldn't attack maya and RB wouldn't make a nap with all 3 of us, but then we can't allow RB to take out any of us. Besides it will be much harder to do anything with them once they have riflemen and cavalry.
I did some calculations about troop movements:
Now i believe our defense will be adequate by t170, but we will not be ready to start the attack, unless RB leavesour border not so well defended (even with roads it takes too long for our units to get from one side of our empire to the other). We however will be ready by t175 and that is the turn cfc can start with their attack too so we aim to this date. Hopefully RB will not have rifling by then.

There is no restriction on unit tradings.

[Dinner]

Lastly, about trading units... Didn't RB insist on a rule that only one unit can be traded between civs per turn? No loading a ship full of units and then gifting the ship full of units to the other civ? That would seem to limit our ability to trade units in a timely manner.

[Dinner]

Eek, Maya and Egypt are already working together? This is very bad news.

I cannot definatively say they are working together as yet but that seems more than probable; actually it is highly likely. I mean RB knows the three of us have all said we don't want to extend the NAP and magically, at the same time, the Maya decide it is time to start slaving a massive new (if not technologically up to date) army so the logical conclusion is the Maya have thrown in with RB. MZ has admitted the combined offensive against RB isn't going to amount to much and at most we'll get 1-2 cities and if we're lucky our allies will also get 1-2 tiny, over slaved cities, but it won't make it into the RB heartland so it seems that route is a dead end. If we want to win then we need to get big fast and the Maya offer the only reasonable way to do that. True, they have a large and growing macemen army and likely are working with RB (who we will be going to war with anyway) so why not just put a token force into the offensive against RB and instead put everything else we can muster into invading the Maya? At least that way we actually stand to gain something of substance and actually might improve our chances of winning the game.

To not do that seems like admitting we are not contenders and that we have no real chances of winning where as taking a big chunk of the Maya very well could put us in striking distance to the pole position. This is our do or admit defeat and die moment. We finally have the tech advantage for a few short turns so let's use it in a way which improves our position to the max. That means putting most of our efforts into taking Mayan cities since we can't take much from RB other than weak, over slaved Inca cities.

[Dinner]

I'd still feel better if we built a few more siege engines as it seems like those ones we're planning on trading for won't be ready and in place in time to be of any use. Siege weapons would really help us maximize our tiny available force so that we don't lose units unnecissarially and since we still have six or so turns (maybe more) if we actually made the effort to build them we could do so and dramatically improve both our odds and our offensive abilities.

It seems dumb to not do so.

[mzprox]

it's enough to get into the closest city of aztecs (we can get there in about 3 turns from samsun), it's still not soo fast, I hope we can do at least two turns before the war starts.

[Dinner]

Won't that take a very long time? It seems like just travel time there and back would be 20+ turns which is long outside of the time frame we had been talking about.

[mzprox]

timing could be a problem.. we will soon finish a galley in samsun which will carry these troops, also we will get a other galley from aztec which currently explores the mayan shores. then we do our best to exchange troops.

[Dinner]

OK, I didn't know that. That plan will work and is much better than I thought we would manage.

I honestly was looking around and only saw 1 catapult and thought this is going to be the shortest offensive ever. Next question: How are they going to get them to us in the needed time frame without passing through the enemy's territory?

[mzprox]

We will trade 2-3 riflemen for 4-6 catapults (1 for 2 ratio). Also we are building sieges, but barracks have priority first. (most of the sieges wil lbe slaved anyway, but i did not want to start slaving in golden age).Basically if a city still builds anything which is not military unit it will finish that and then switch to units. (except the newer cities which need some basic buildings)
I hope we can assemble an army of 25 unit of infantries (rifles and janissaries) and 10-15 sieges (catapults and trebuchets)