Turn 162 : 470 AD

[Cort Haus]

missed the end of the last sentance, which should read :

"or starting to fortify the seawall in preparation for Marines. as asleepathewheel suggested"

[Cort Haus]

TS, I'll echo your analysis of Lego too. They must be bookies' favourites by a mile.

What's good, is that I still find the game interesting despite our having little chance of winning. Maybe for some of us the thought of being an also-ran is intolerable - and I'm not looking forward to getting destroyed in the late game, if that is to be our fate, but until then it'll be fun to still be a part of it, and to do the best we can.

Even if we had been 'successful' in the Bobian War, and seized Alamo and the rest of the south - could we have held it in the long term? Lego might have fully joined in to defeat us - or we'd still be meatgrinding now while Lego soared on unscathed.

[asleepathewheel]

Originally posted by Arrian

As to how to deal with them, well, have you seen the stuff H_E posted about his PBEM amphibious assault on Tiberius? It was, I admit, brilliant. Unfortunately, Tiberius is a Legolander, and will undoubtably now have an intimate awareness of the dangers of such a move. Also, that move could be used on us as well!*

Link please, or a brief explanation. Damn the map for putting us within one turns launch from Bob.

[Arrian]

Link: http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...26#post2636126

Last page of "On the Utility and Use of Marines" in the strat forum.

****ing scary.

-Arrian

[Arrian]

Cort, thanks for the worker analysis.

Some of this depends on what Cyclone is doing. Is it actively pumping?

Re: sandstorm, is it a fully-capable 2-turn worker pump (+5 food, 5 spt?). If so, I say switch the current build to a library, finish that, and then pump workers.

If not, we should still use it to build workers, but we need to fit in other builds in between (cats?).

It looks like we have 6 workers poised to join cities soon, which would bring us down to 16 workers. That's not TOO bad. Throw in some worker builds from Cyclone and Sandstorm, and we should be ok.

Re: fortressing the coastline... the problem for us is that once Marines roll around it probably makes the most sense for them to hit us in cities anyway. Holding our coastline once marines are out there seems counter-productive.

The basic problem is that when marines show up, if one of the big boys really want to take us down, they can.

The best we can do is to have a ton of artillery and infantry lying around so that we can garrison the hell out of cities that are at risk + coastal mountains. Then they either have to hit heavily defended cities, accept nasty casualties going up against units foritified on mountains, or land on flat ground, and let us counterattack. edit: given this, if we build fortresses, I propose we do so only on our coastal mountains.

It's still an ugly situation.

-Arrian

[Tall Stranger]

WOW!

That could ruin our whole day.

Forgive me if this question has been asked and answered, but does control of all/most of Bob plus control of all/most of Stormia meet the land tile requirement for a domination victory? Likewise, does Lego's continent (name?) plus Stormia make a domination victory possible? (Set aside the pop requirement for now.)

If so, we are ideal targets, and the only question will be which rival tries to kill us first (my guess is a Bobian). Other than sustained defenses, which will be increasingly difficult to maintain given the productive capabilities of the other three powers, I can see no military solutions to this problem, at least until MI (and even then it's iffy.)

[Cort Haus]

Memo to self : always write long posts in Notepad, not the 'poly box. I use 2 PC's, and trying to exit a city with the wrong keyboard clears the text field in the browser with no undo. That's twice in a row I've lost everything.

I'll be concise. Cyclone can get +5 food per turn (or rather, +10 food in two turns) and is producing workers every two turns.

Sandstorm cannot get +5 food. It has two flood plains but no other decent food tiles (mnt and desert) - being squeezed between Arashi, Tempest, Hurricane and EotS. If it was smaller it could maybe produce workers every three turns.
It already has a library, in fact, and could have a settler in 490AD. (should have 22 shields next turn, I think)

[Arrian]

I see two possible reasons for the major powers to invade us:

1) Someone trying to trigger domination by taking Stormia.
2) Someone trying to preempt such a move by someone else, by taking Stormia first and holding it, hoping to win via SS.

That's if Stormia + Bob and/or Stormia + Legoland is enough.

When figuring that out, one should probably also include Vox's section of Legoland, because I'm sure Lego could roll over them without much effort.

-Arrian

p.s. I agree, TS. In the end, we simply don't have the production power to be truely safe. All we can do is make invading us really expensive. But the problem is that invading anyone else would be even more expensive.

p.p.s. At some point pre-marines, RP is going to need to beef up their defenses. Their cities are the logical invasion point (sorta like Calais in WWII, and even though that didn't happen, it only didn't happen because the Germans fortified the hell out of it).

[Cort Haus]

If I recall from my tile-counting days during the GoW negotiations, it's :

Stormia : ~ 200 tiles
Bob : ~ approx 750 tiles
Lego : ~ 400 tiles (exluding approx 80 New Voxia)

So Lego plus Stormia is not enough. Bob plus Stormia is. We can be sure that if ND eat GoW then come for us, we will not be facing ND alone! Count Vondy won't have it.

[Arrian]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
Memo to self : always write long posts in Notepad, not the 'poly box. I use 2 PC's, and trying to exit a city with the wrong keyboard clears the text field in the browser with no undo. That's twice in a row I've lost everything.

I'll be concise. Cyclone can get +5 food per turn (or rather, +10 food in two turns) and is producing workers every two turns.

Sandstorm cannot get +5 food. It has two flood plains but no other decent food tiles (mnt and desert) - being squeezed between Arashi, Tempest, Hurricane and EotS. If it was smaller it could maybe produce workers every three turns.
It already has a library, in fact, and could have a settler in 490AD. (should have 22 shields next turn, I think)

Interesting. I guess the question is how valueable is that marketplace going to be for us? If SS is set up to produce workers every 3 turns, what size would it be at, and how much commerce would that market bring in? Hmm, I bet turning it into a worker producer is best. I say build the settler and turn it over to 3-turn worker production.

So a worker per 2 turns in Cyclone and a worker per 3 turns in SS. 5 workers every 6 turns, or thereabouts. That's quite a few, isn't it? Well, first task then is to grow cities completing aqua's straightaway. Forget what I said about hanging on to a bunch of workers. If we're replenshing that fast, we can use 'em up.

What I do, Cort, is periodically copy what I'm typing via ctrl+c, so I can just paste it back in if something bad happens.

-Arrian

[Cort Haus]

If we are the Great Power's designated dinner, then we'll have been general target in the early game because we were strong, and general target in the late game because we're not. Marvellous!

[asleepathewheel]

Originally posted by Tall Stranger
Forgive me if this question has been asked and answered, but does control of all/most of Bob plus control of all/most of Stormia meet the land tile requirement for a domination victory? Likewise, does Lego's continent (name?) plus Stormia make a domination victory possible? (Set aside the pop requirement for now.)

I think the answer is, yes for a united bob, no for lego, triggering domination that is. So I think lego would have to capture a bit of Bob, not sure how much, maybe what GoW has in the north now.


I honestly can't remember the tile counts that Aeson and NYE and others did so long ago...

I have a pic of the C3C f8 screen, but can't remember if it was pre rp N.S. or after, plus it would have some of our bob holdings included, but it had us at 15% of the worlds land. So maybe all of stormia is ~12%? we could load an old save to figure that out.


edit: believe me, I didn't just copy what CH said above...really

[asleepathewheel]

Originally posted by Arrian
Re: fortressing the coastline... the problem for us is that once Marines roll around it probably makes the most sense for them to hit us in cities anyway. Holding our coastline once marines are out there seems counter-productive.

The basic problem is that when marines show up, if one of the big boys really want to take us down, they can.

The best we can do is to have a ton of artillery and infantry lying around so that we can garrison the hell out of cities that are at risk + coastal mountains. Then they either have to hit heavily defended cities, accept nasty casualties going up against units foritified on mountains, or land on flat ground, and let us counterattack. edit: given this, if we build fortresses, I propose we do so only on our coastal mountains.

Arrian, I'm glad you're still around Another case of me posting before thinking (and to think, I've taken quite heavy casualties in a recent sp game in a similar situation)

I think from now on we should just build cats and pikes, to upgrade to rifles (infantry) and artillery.

Artillery is really our only ace in the hole. We might get royally screwed again by the rng and get no rubber, but at least we can have a ton or arties to fire on the landers.

God help us if we don't ahve coal. we desperately needs rail moves to defend ourselves. otherwise....

[Arrian]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
If I recall from my tile-counting days during the GoW negotiations, it's :

Stormia : ~ 200 tiles
Bob : ~ approx 750 tiles
Lego : ~ 400 tiles (exluding approx 80 New Voxia)

So Lego plus Stormia is not enough. Bob plus Stormia is. We can be sure that if ND eat GoW then come for us, we will not be facing ND alone! Count Vondy won't have it.

Perhaps true. But if Stormia is the battleground (even if it's just a standoff), we will definitely not win this game. I know, our hopes of winning are already quite low, but that would clinch it.

The only hope we have is the major powers fighting - elsewhere, and that fight being long and bloody. This would allow us to sit around and build and/or intervene to make sure nobody hits domination.

Bob+Stormia for domination would require that ND or GoW take over the entire continent and then strike us. Most people believe ND to be the stronger Bobian, and I agree, though everyone should remember that GoW has a big equalizer for now: Leonardos. Given time, however, ND will get strong enough that Leo's will not save GoW (ND got that leader, and I'm pretty sure it became a FP down south). Ah, but perhaps Lego would. Lego's protection of GoW from us could easily become protection of GoW from ND. I doubt it's in Lego's interests for ND to overrun GoW. Or vice-versa.

In short: unifying Bob would be very difficult, because logic would dictate that Lego would intervene to prevent it. Unless Bob is unified, it makes no sense for a Bobian civ to invade us. It also makes no sense for Legoland to invade us. So, unless one of the Bobians manages to conquer the other, fighting Lego at the same time, we will most likely be left alone.

That is, of course, if logic is the basis for decision-making. We've been wrong about such things before.

-Arrian

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Arrian


Interesting. I guess the question is how valueable is that marketplace going to be for us?

-Arrian

Not very - I just did those sums too. Another 25 workers by the Industrial era sounds like just what we need.