Lizzy's rise to greatness

[Dinner]

Has anything happened in the last five days?

[mzprox]

There was a new turn since then, these are the most important news:

As it was expected cfc has stolen assembly line, entered into golden age and the Pentagon will be theirs.. there is nothing we can do about it unfortunately. they finish the whole thing in just 6 turns thanks to their big production. The soonest we could finish it by purchasing is in 7 turns, but it would be quite expensive.. not sure if it would worth it at all. Cfc told me that they are working very closely with uciv.. giving them some money and they allow them to steal for ultra cheap. They got AL for like 2k esp point while it cost us 9k research point.
If we won't have the pentagon i think one more reason to switch to theocracy soon and still be able to produce lvl 3 units.
On the mayan front we are advancing further, in this turn cfc army will join ours. I will try to reduce our participation in this war. I can't really go back on my "promise" that we will split maya land equally with cfc even if they are late to the show, at least let them work.. and the main battle is still ahead of us. We lost less than 10 units so far and got 7 cities. Most of them are already productive.
Big question what to do after t240. I don't really want to choose side.. but aztec is trying to get us on attacking cfc and I've heard they are also negotiating with cfc about making an alliance against us (doing this while they are at war..).

[Hercules]

From what you've reported, I kinda feel closer to Cfc now.

[mzprox]

I think there will be big wars. Any civ who would go for culture or spaceship would be attacked by the others anyway, so it is probably better to just prepare war. Right now I try to build factories+coal plants in most of the cities then let them grow until and during golden age and then slave a huge army (tanks and bombers by then).
honestly i wouldn't care too much of cfc and cp would join forces against us, because I believe that war wouldn't be that succesful and would end before causing us too much harm: my reasoning is this: they attack us, we lose some cities and power, but the power balance between cfc and cp would shift. Since we won't be too much of a threat it will not be in their interest to go in a full scale war against us, but to turn on each other.
In any case I think it would be better if our nap ended in t245 instead of t240 so I will propose it. Right now i don't really build units except in a few cities, I stopped drafting too, but after our golden age ends I will slave in a huge modern army, a hundred tanks or more. Our military strength will be a top one once more.

[Dinner]

From what you've reported, I kinda feel closer to Cfc now.

Yeah.

[mzprox]

only now we have a new turn.. too many pauses.

I'm afraid I have to report bad news.. Finally maya has decided to attack our main army and we have devastating losses.. about 30% of our total military strength has been destroyed (about 40-50% of our army on the mayan front) and mayas losses are much much less. I don't know how many cfc troop joined ours but they too have lost many units.
Unfortunately civ combat mechanics highly favors those who attack first with sieage and 30+ cannons were thrown on us. Cavalries are strong units with 30% withdraw chance and flanking damage to our own siege. that 30-40 cavalries killed all our sieges with only flanking damage. We have lost about 30 riflemen, 7 machinegun and some cannons, cfc have lost about 20 units too or more.
As for other bad news it seems aztec has clear upperhand in militay strength over cfc and takes cities in each turn. This is not what was expected.
now it's t222, we have nap till t240... I1m sure cfc will blame us for extending the nap with aztec from t230, but it was a logical decision then.
I'll need to talk with cfc about the situation, but it is possible we will halt our advances for now and try to defend our cities. Recently I did not build many units, I focused on economy ( that's why we have 29 factories and 22 coal plants already), but from this turn I will increase unit production to cover our losses.
In the war cfc got 3 cities from maya, we got 8, Maya still has 12 more, including their core cities. So the war is not a failure and we will overpower them eventually. I'm more concerned about cfc right now. I want to see power balance betwen aztec and cfc. I thought uciv would help cfc, but appearently they are not.

[OzzyKP]

Yikes.

[mzprox]

I talked with cfc, they have confirmed that they won't send more units any time soon to the mayan front and after analyzing the situation I think it's better to just hold our position and don't try any risky move. The truth is if maya had played well we couldn1t had took even these cities. They made big sacrifices, but bad strategy moves so far (actually they just ignored the game). If they would start play strategically they can still cause problems. Maybe they have started to listen to aztec.. I also see aztec workers coming to maya land, most likely to build railroads in the area. This is dangerous, because then all the captured cities will be in danger and It's questionable whether I will have the strength to protect them.

[mzprox]

I have spent an other few hours trying to figure out what to do: We have 3 captured cities right on the mayan border. We could defend one or maybe two, but not 3. however if we let them retake cities that will cause border pop and other cities will be in danger and if we fight with divided forces that means that our losses will always be much higher. there is a serious risk that they will recapture most if not all the cities we got from them..
Eventually we will destroy maya, but the cost of this war will be very high (ofc it is still much higher for maya, who can at least no longer help aztec with science)

[Ben Kenobi]

So let's see. We're involved in a war where we are helping a stronger power, who's also stabbing us in the back?

Offer the 3 cities back to Maya and let's switch alliances.

[mzprox]

Right now aztec is the strongest and maya though they are not that active can be considered as their allies. It would be an easy pick to join cfc against aztec&maya, but there is uciv too which with cfc has good relations. So I think right now we should stay neutral in the cfc&aztec conflict, hoping that the war will cost both of them a lot.
As for maya I'm not sure... if we retreat we will have to give up everything we got from them, that's 8 cities, and i'd rather not.
In the last few turns I've spent our resources to increase our economy, hoping that the army we have will be enough and it could had been, but unfortunately cfc did not send many troops and in this battle maya had many lucky rolls... they got 3 great generals just in this turn :/.

So the choice is this: we do a full retreat into our original cities thus preserving the rest of our army or try to hold back maya until we can send enough troops. The latter way could cause to lose many more troops and success is questionable.. it depends on how they play.

[Hercules]

Right now aztec is the strongest and maya though they are not that active can be considered as their allies. It would be an easy pick to join cfc against aztec&maya, but there is uciv too which with cfc has good relations. So I think right now we should stay neutral in the cfc&aztec conflict, hoping that the war will cost both of them a lot.
As for maya I'm not sure... if we retreat we will have to give up everything we got from them, that's 8 cities, and i'd rather not.
In the last few turns I've spent our resources to increase our economy, hoping that the army we have will be enough and it could had been, but unfortunately cfc did not send many troops and in this battle maya had many lucky rolls... they got 3 great generals just in this turn :/.

So the choice is this: we do a full retreat into our original cities thus preserving the rest of our army or try to hold back maya until we can send enough troops. The latter way could cause to lose many more troops and success is questionable.. it depends on how they play.

I vote we try to hold back Maya until we can send enough troops. We are still currently the third most powerful. But yes their big stack still has 10 cannons at least, we have a lot less. Flight would help as would airships.

[mzprox]

I did not bring many cannons because i knew cavalries kill them with flank damage. The few I brought did good service when we took those cities.
few points about future plans.
hopefully we can enter into golden age in 5 turns (depends what gps we get). During the golden age we will start building tanks and artillery, but after golden age we will slave many many tanks..I hopw we can get the no1 power or close to it.
Tanks might seem to be far away, but actually we will get combustion in 2 turns, we will steal electricity and physics from aztec as our agreement, we will get artillery from uciv (I've learned from cfc that they gave money to uciv to get artillery asap so they can steal it.. but we will steal it too ). We already have more than enough spy points in reserve to make all the stealings, but I will continue to increase our spy spending.. it will come handy, while apparently teching is a bad buisness. As I wrote before I think we will actually get tanks instead of aircrafts first.. since we lost many ground units we need those. also aztec is researching industrialism right now, we will follow them.

[mzprox]

I was thinking about victory conditions..recently I put much effort into developing 3 cities for possible cultural victory. I've spread foreign religions, build cathedrals, hermitage etc, but I think cultural victory can't be done.. simply our empires are too rich to let that happen. Just spending one turn revenue to slow down the other could look like this: producing 20 spies, putting the weakest city of the three into revolt, destroy the towns and villages around it and/or give it 8 unhappyness and -8 health.. and/or sabotaging the buildings which give + culture... I'm starting to see why rb wanted to play w/o spies. Now I regret all that effort I put into culture recently.. so i'm gona stop. Since we will leave org religion soon we won't be able to produce missionaries, so while we can I will try to spread our religion into our rivals' major cities.
The other victory condition: spaceship. I thought it is impossible because spies can destroy spaceship parts from any city, but after calculating it seems the sabotage is very expensive. Also one can finish all the parts in the very same turn-here assuming we will be at war, as it's almost 100%, turn order become very important. Turn order also very important in counterespionage. The one who moves sooner in the turn can do spy actions in every 10th turn much cheaper.
The base cost of sabotaging project/production/finished buildings is 6 spy points/hammer. with the modifiers (distance, sec. bureau, counterespionage etc) this can be much higher. So delaying the space ship this way is very expensive, but if more than one nation do it, then it can work.
Conclusion: we no longer try the culture victory. We also don1t go for spaceship-we want to avoid that the others see us as threat by pursuing victory goals. We will build an army and many many spies. we will use the spies to cripple enemy cities, by sabotaging whatever we can. towns are good target for example.

[Hercules]

That sounds like a plan.