Lizzy's rise to greatness

[Dinner]

Indeed it is. But we are not responding.

[OzzyKP]

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

[mzprox]

We have two janissaries already and we will have some more. I really start working on the roads now, both in the west and in the east.
I'll make my point why we should attack rb then we can discuss it. Right now I see no other way. Today i had a chat with rb's represeantative, they wanted to persuade us to sign nap which I had to refuse, but i told them we wouldn't have the strength to attack them anyway.. which is not really true. If aztec and cfc could help us divide their forces we can attack them.
But: the main point is that rb wanted nap with us so they and maya could kill cfc easily. if that would happen the game would be pretty much over I think. Then we and aztec wouldn't have a chance against maya&egypt.

[Dinner]

The Maya are slaving away building up a large army and I notice we haven't slaved a single one of our UU which was the main reason for picking the Ottomans. Yes, riflemen are better but how about we get one or two of our UU to at least guard the western border? It would be nice as a flavor event sort of thing to do if nothing else and it might deter the Maya from attacking us (as we're most likely their target as the graph still shows us as the weakest country by far). Lastly, we still haven't bothered to build any roads to the west which is something I've been bringing up for like 15-20 turns. Look, I know you have a fixation with attacking RB, even though you now say we're not going to really attack them, but it seems to me we most certainly can beat the Maya's maceman army if we try so why don't we put the bulk of our efforts there as that would actually get us something?

Put a token force in to say we're helping the others against RB since they're not seriously going to be a threat to RB and instead take as many cities as possible from the Maya.

[mzprox]

We revolted into Nationalism, slavery, org religion. Now it seems we will require more gold from aztecs than I expected if we are to finish rifling by t163. We can borrow some from india too if needed, we must not delay it. This is the last turn of our golden age.

[mzprox]

They did not win yet, they just have the best chance.. for now. but this may change. We should not underestimate the damage we can inflict on them without a full invasion.

[Dinner]

So all of this for nothing really?

I guess we're destined to lose this game then because RB will win unless someone cuts them down to size.

[mzprox]

We estimate that both RB and maya coul get rifling around t175 so this opportunity window now is not big at all. Everyone is already rushing for rifles.
We would need to wait till t175 before we attack, we need time to build up our army and we also need to wait till cfc1s nap with egypt ends in t175.
It may turn out that the best we can do against egypt is that we harass them (attacking from the sea for example)

[Dinner]

One thing is for sure and that is the second someone sees our riflemen word will spread quickly and everyone else will be rushing to get their own. We will likely have a short window of opportunity which we must take advantage of for expansion; when we have our first and likely only true military advantage. During this window we will need to help cut RB down to size (just down to size but not knock them out) but we'll also want to take at least half of the Maya's land as well.

Anything less is a waste of an opportunity IMHO. BTW our next scientific goal should be to improve our siege engines and eventually to also get cavalry.

[Hercules]

I guess it depends on when we expect war to come and what we'll face. How far away from rifling/grenadiers do you estimate RB or Maya are? How long are we going to have this rifleman advantage?

good questions

[OzzyKP]

I guess it depends on when we expect war to come and what we'll face. How far away from rifling/grenadiers do you estimate RB or Maya are? How long are we going to have this rifleman advantage?

[mzprox]

If you check one of my earlier prediction you can see that i expected rifling around t167-168, now it seems we will get it in t163 partly because of the loan from aztecs, partly because our economy did better. This means we would had only 3 turns to draft janissaries before riflemen become available so it worth waitng for the better units. we will still draft a few janissary, but not as many as I thought back then.

I was thinking a lot about what to do after rifling. i think we should get some older techs.: aesthetic, literature, drama. We need these techs to build two important national wonder, the national epic and the globe theatre. (and later the heroic epic). These national wonders will be of great use.

then i'm not sure.. i'd probably go for constitution-corporation...assembly plants to get to infantries eventually
we could go for chemistry-steel->to get cannons. I think this was suggested before and definately not a bad thing to do.
or we could go music-military tradition to build some cavalries, but i1m not sure we are productive enough to build many of those.

[mzprox]

one thing we coould do is to switch to free religion and continue to spread buddhism for extra happyness. We could get 2-3 more religions into our cities and free religion would mean an extra happy face for each. It also cheaper than org religion and gives 10% research bonus. However we wouldn1t get the 25% production bonus for buildings and without state religion we wouldn't be able to steal for very cheap (not that we want to steal anything for now)

[mzprox]

I was considering all religious civic, but all in all I think still rg religion is the best.

I will open a new thread called "war room" soon, where we will discuss everything related for war events and plans.

[Dinner]

Why organized religion? Isn't there theocracy or something which will give our units a +1 to experience thus allowing us to make up our deficit in unit experience?

Edit: Oh, we don't have the Christianity tech yet.