Turn 108, 410 BC

[vulture]

I have to echo everyone else's sentiments that it's great to finally see Inchon and Inchoff in action. But how gutted will we be if we open up the next turn's save and see nothing but fog of war in both areas... (not that Vox appear to have the forces in place to achieve this).

Would now be the time to bring up my plan for invading the core by bypassing Elipolis (subject to seeing how well it is defended - they seem to be moving all their spears south for upgrading) and landing 8 or 9 from Wittlich City, putting us in striking distance of The Voice, Miller Town and Wittlich City, so they'll then need to spread their defenses between those three towns and Elipolis as well - when most of their force is in the south.

I think that finishing off the eastern stack is a priority now as well, 'cos we're going to need all those troops that are currently tied up defending against a pretty small attack force. But then, I think everyone already knows that.

[alva]

Great work again guys
-
I checked the tech tree and noone seems to have anything beyond us.

[alva]

Oh, and Lego has gone into anarchy .

[vulture]

Has anyone calculated the culture flip odds for Inchon?

Can someone with the save post the current total culture ratio for us and Vox, and the ratio of the distances of Inchon to both captiols? Ta very much.
At a rough guess, if they have a bit more culture than us, then we are running a risk of culture flipping, especially if we lose a few troops. Building a temple would reduce the chance slightly (going from 5 Vox tiles in the city radius, down to 3).

[zeit]

Whatever Vox manages to do against the Inchons, it's gonna cost them, unless they get extremely lucky. I hope they don't have any suprises up their sleeves around Elipolis.

Unless Vox has Immortals on Inchon334, there can be no offensive resonse from Vox besides a bombadment attempt against Inchon, and two Immortal attacks against Inchoff. According to what we'll see around there at that time, we'll have to decide whether or not to rush walls on the two towns. I leaning towards walls in Inchon no matter what.

Our priority right now is getting more offensive troops to Inchon, which looks like it could definitely hold for 2 turns, and that's why I was suprised to see that no units were moved towards monsoon for board the newly constructed galley. I suggest we put one Pike and Med Inf on that one, or even two Med. Infs.

[OPD]

Originally posted by Shiber
what do you think of Inchon? (the landing plan that was carried out this turn)

It looks and feels audatious. But really it's superior tactics GS has a far superior production base and now more units. The landings are a way of exploiting this w/o too many casualties. It has a touch of "shock and awe" about it maybe you guys want them to give up. They have no iron and we can take the fight to anywhere we want they must know it's certain doom time. It would have been interesting to drop a pike or two in thier homeland to have a look around and see if they could take them down.

Originally posted by nbarclay
Do we want to switch EotS and Hurricane to horsemen for a little while since Vox doesn't seem intent on eating into our pike supply as much as it looked like they might?

I'd agree with this. We have alot of them especially with the ones on the east mountains soon to be freed up and it's going to be hard for vox to kill any more pikes w/o iron and immortals

[Arrian]

Would now be the time to bring up my plan for invading the core by bypassing Elipolis (subject to seeing how well it is defended - they seem to be moving all their spears south for upgrading) and landing 8 or 9 from Wittlich City, putting us in striking distance of The Voice, Miller Town and Wittlich City, so they'll then need to spread their defenses between those three towns and Elipolis as well - when most of their force is in the south.

I was thinking along these lines as well. Let's get a bunch of troops up to Inchon, make sure it's secure, and then we can decide whether or not we want to make another landing (I think it's probably best if we do).

-Arrian

[Shiber]

Originally posted by vulture
Has anyone calculated the culture flip odds for Inchon?

With so many troops in Inchon, it must be impossible to switch the city (it can be derived from the formulas that with enough troops, cities can become unflippable; I'm sure that 9 combat units garrisoning Inchon is plenty enough).

Still, we could use more cultural buildings. Perhaps we should build some libraries in our core, maybe after we've freed up the pikes holding off the immortals near Sandstorm.

[Arrian]

We're definitely going to want libraries and such soon.

However, I think that we're best served by - after we've clearly won the war (not yet, folks!) hoarding some cash while building/rushbuilding marketplaces first. Then we build/rushbuild libraries. Then we crank up our science rate.

But first, let's Silence the Voice!

-Arrian

[Shiber]

Having a lot of culture would be essential once we start conquering cities. I agree that it is usually the optimal solution in the long run to build marketplaces first, but we need to start thinking seriously about culture now.

[vulture]

9 might not be enough though. The number of troops needed (with 5 squares in our (proposed) city radius nuder Vox control) is 5 * ratio of total cultures. I don't remember what the culture chart looks like, and it hasn't been in the screenshots for a while, but ISTR that we were lagging behind in cultural terms. If Vox has twice our culture, we are running a small risk of losing Inchon to a flip.

[Shiber]

Does anyone have any idea how many turns we have left on our GA?

[DeepO]

Culture: last I saw, it looked like we had more then half Vox's culture. Because we build Inchon and don't capture it, this means that for each foreign tile (I count 5), we'll need a defender to totally negate flipping chances. Distance to capital doesn't matter. We still got plenty of defenders, Inchon won't flip.

However, I was thinking on rushing a temple there, instead of a walls, if all goes well next turn (and we may even make it a 0-turn rush). The idea is that with any culture, we'll take possesion of the hill near Elipolis, which means we can put units there, fortify, and they can't hit us with cats (at least we'd heal). Further, we could hit Elipolis with cats ourselves from that position. Even if we would invade their core, instead of trying to breach their defenses at Elipolis, it would create a perfect diversion...

I thought some more on the walls situation, and I tend to agree that we should wait with Inchon to see if we're even in any danger. However, with enough offensive troops, we shouldn't worry, they should be destroyed before they can even attack our city (if we have a temple anyway). But, OTOH, rushing it in 1 turn doesn't cost us much, so if we want walls there, we might as well do it right away, instead of 'risking' it. The difference in cost is 76 gold for a 1-turn walls, 120 gold (rushing a worker, switching to walls, rushing the rest of the walls) for a 0-turn one. We can easily spend the 44 gold, that's not a big deal for better safety (but if we don't need to, we shouldn't do it, so leave it to the production phase of turn 110).

Galley chaining: thought about this one again too, and it might be best to do it, for one reason only: it leaves Vox without a clue as to how much forces we have in Inchon once it's built. With the current galleys, we can move 3 units/turn instantly (actually, 2 units and 4 units every other turn), while for them the galleys remain at the same position. We could even rename the galleys (which makes it easier to load the units in the right galley), and show them they remain at the same tiles...

RP: good. They're moving their capital, building loads of new cities (BTW, they almost certainly used boats for those last cities), and are taking loads of luxuries and territory. Other teams won't be too happy about that, maybe they'll cut us some slack. We're still masking our strengths fairly well (only 4th in territory, our second best city Hurricane hasn't showed up on any map yet), while they're out in the open.

Lego: Anarchy? Anyone want to take a bet they're 1 turn from completing the Collosus? They come out of Anarchy and boom... GA. Could become very interesting, very soon. They should have surpassed us in pop-points by now (which doesn't show in F11 because we have 2 size 12 cities, which are overemphasized. 4 size 6 cities are a lot worse in amount of pop, while they have more production and commerce)

DeepO

[Jon Shafer]

Originally posted by FrustratedPoet
They're JPEGs, but Nathan sends out 5 or 6 screenies every turn (a couple of maps, power and score graphs, stuff like that) so the size of the e-mail is a fairly big. The one from this turn was just over 1MB. I don't use my hotmail account for anything else anymore, so I don't mind if it gets maxes out occasionally, but if you're relying on it for PBEM turns it might cause a problem or two. Anyway, just a warning.

On second thought, maybe I'll just settle for the arriving save...

A 1 MB file by itself would pop my inbox even without any other PBEM saves in it.

[ManicStarSeed]

Originally posted by Shiber
Does anyone have any idea how many turns we have left on our GA?

I think we triggered it in turn 93 or 94. That gives us 5 or 6 turns left.
Mss