|
Post by Sullla on Jun 26, 2011 11:59:31 GMT -5
We successfully took the first Adlain city of CEO Sprite with minimal losses: First we had to bombard down the city defenses (behind walls) which took 8 catapults to pull off, including 5 of them with the Accuracy promotion. That's effectively equal to 13 normal catapults... insert standard complaint here about Beyond the Sword making walls/castle far too effective at stopping bombardment. Then Speaker sent in five suicide units, four catapults for collateral damage and one unpromoted musket to injure the top City Garrison III longbow (which had remained untouched by collateral damage for whatever reason). After that, everything cleaned up and we only lost a 90% odds drafted maceman... except for one hitch, as two horse archers were somehow grouped together with a knight, and died attacking. Sheesh. So instead of losing 6 units, the accidental grouping caused us to lose 8 units. Yeah they were only horse archers, but it still was frustrating. The total losses were: Our Team 1 musket 1 maceman 2 horse archers 4 catapults 8 total units = 49k Adlain 2 longbows 2 crossbows 2 maces 1 camel archer 1 horse archer 1 catapult 1 axeman 10 total units = 69k Which would have looked significantly better without the horse archers, heh. Anyway we still came out ahead, and we don't even need to come out ahead, as we can easily trade units with Adlain and come out victorious in this war. If you take our military and combine it with Moogle's, our total strength is roughly 3x or 4x stronger than Adlain's. Plus, as he loses cities and whips population, his resistance will grow weaker over time. This really wasn't a battle that he should be tried to fight. After the main battle, Speaker spotted two unprotected Adlain workers that our Guerilla II musket could reach, and so we grabbed them too. Free workers, nice! That leads us to where we are now: We are moving on Greater Profit next, following the northern hill tiles for defensive protection. (We are on flat ground on the wheat tile for this turn, unfortunately.) Because of the distances involved, we won't be able to take Greater Profit for several turns; it's looking like we take the city on T185 or T186, depending on how many units are inside. If the defenses are light, we can probably take it on the first turn, while if Adlain choses to make a stand there, we'll have to wait for more catapults to arrive for bombardment. Just have to see what he does. Down in the south, we're hoping to take the unguarded New Debt next turn. Again, if he's willing to give it to us, we'll take it. (We do have to be a little careful there, however. A strong attack out of Spaceweed Drift could put some pressure on Angle. I don't think it will happen, but always consider the worst possibility. I'll probably put one turn of production into a musket at Angle so we can whip it in an emergency situation.) Moogle is also pressing down from the north. He still needs two more turns to get next to the Adlain city up there, so probably three more turns to capture it. Where he goes after that, we don't know yet. Hopefully he just goes to take the other Adlain cities in the northwest, so we don't have to race him to the prizes. A lot depends on where and how Adlain defends with his units. We have the inside edge to get the capital and most of the cities. We revolted from Nationhood into Free Speech (yay towns!) and from Theocracy into Organized Religion. This increased both our costs and our science slightly. Our "GNP" went up by a large amount though, due to the 100% culture boost from Free Speech, which is pretty hilarious all things considered. I did some minor whipping, although I don't want to lay on the whip too hard while we're also drafting and fighting a war. Over the next 5 turns, I'll be able to whip some sort of building in most of our cities, trying to time them for when cities are 1t away from growth as usual. At our current research rate, we should discover Rifling tech on either T188 or T189. One of the two, so 7-8 more turns in all. I will hold off on revolting back to Nationhood until that time, as there's no point in drafting muskets when we're just a turn or two away from redcoats. We should be able to draft 22 cities on that next cycle, which is a lot of power for the Parkin invasion. Depending on how the Adlain war is going, we may or may not reveserve a few of those units for the fighting in the west. We can also upgrade any unit that happens to be highly promoted if we're willing to spend some gold... A couple of City Raider redcoats might be nice to clear out those CG3 longbows and crossbows! In any case, we'll figure it out. Mace -> rifle upgrades aren't particularly cheap, but they are indeed doable. The key question for next turn is where to move the Guerilla II musket: back to guard or own stack, or further into Adlain territory on a scouting/recon mission? I'll let Speaker decide. Other than that, so far so good on the start of the war.
|
|
|
Post by Speaker on Jun 26, 2011 17:49:11 GMT -5
Yeah, sorry about that. The first thing I did when I got into game was ungroup the units. Then randomly, in the middle of the battle, after attacking with 3 other knights, 2 horse archers decided to attach themselves to a knight.
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jun 26, 2011 18:11:55 GMT -5
Adlain played his turn. He left the southern city still empty. I'm thinking that at the start of our turn, we move:
- The Guerilla musket SW onto the grassland hill. - The Sentry horse archer NW onto the hill.
That gives us visibility inside Spaceweed Drift and Greater Profit, as well as most of the eastern half of Adlain's territory. Depending on where his units are located, we can then figure out whether it's worthwhile to capture his little southern city (ie probably not so much if there are 5 camel archers sitting in Spaceweed Drift right now).
Sound good?
|
|
|
Post by Speaker on Jun 27, 2011 7:23:05 GMT -5
I had to run to work, so I logged in and moved all of our units on the combat front. Now that I think back to the PB2 nonsense....I hope it is okay to not do all our stuff at once. We have the whole 12 hour time block, right? This was the first thing that greeted me. Tarkin can't win by Apostalic Palace, can he? Admittedly, I don't really know how that thing works. It's never seen in MP. As expected, we captured this undefended city. There are an assortment of Longbows and Crossbows in Spaceweed Drift, and a couple Horse Archers. We didn't gain cultural control over the farm, so we couldn't move the two maces in this turn. I guess he could attack the city, and take it back, in theory, but I doubt he will. Here's the main combat area. I'm leaving the Knights in CEO's Sprite for a turn to heal. They can catch up next turn. I'll be pretty busy today, but I'll try to be on AIM, in case you want to chat.
|
|
|
Post by Speaker on Jun 27, 2011 7:24:00 GMT -5
Oh, one more thing (TM)....probably shouldn't post that picture of the combat area on the RB forum. It is too much like the pictures I posted in PB2, I think. Also, I misspelled crossbow.
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jun 28, 2011 14:49:27 GMT -5
Turn 183: I'm going to be gone this evening with limited Internet connectivity, so I went ahead and played the turn. I didn't hit "End Turn", so you can check things out tonight if you want, Speaker. I moved our Guerilla II musket a tile NW and pillaged the road there. This helps to ensure that Greater Profit is completely cut off from the rest of Adlain's territory. He literally can't move units into or out of the city, even if he wants to do so. We also got vision into Two Grand, which has a single longbow inside (almost surely whipped last turn). Doesn't look too formidable. Unfortunately, I made a significant tactical error in the south. What we should have done was move the workers + maces onto the forest tile last turn SE of New Debt. Then this turn we could have roaded the tile and moved the maces into the city. Instead, the workers and maces were on the tile NE of the city, the grassland farm tile. I wanted to move them both onto the forest tile to road it, and I clicked to move the maces there... forgetting that the tile was in Adlain's borders, so our maces moved on tile into our borders and stopped there. Meanwhile, the workers continued moving into the forest tile, now unprotected. ARGH! An incredibly stupid mistake on my part, sigh... Now Adlain can recapture the city fairly easily if he wants, and snag our two workers in the process. Our own cities are safe (plenty of musket/catapult reinforcements still streaming in) but I have bungled the tactical movements badly down here. If you see a way to salvage this by moving the knight, go for it. At present, I'm just hoping that Adlain is too apathetic to go for New Debt, or will think we're trying to set a trap here or something. If by some chance he doesn't attack, we can get those maces into the city next turn (via the road through the forest) and a couple of muskets will be arriving shortly thereafter, which will secure the city. But this turn he can take it easily if he wants. Should have just moved the two maces into the city... he wouldn't have attacked against a knight and two maces. Sigh... Things look pretty good in the north though. I moved up our units and now they're on the two hill tiles. We should be able to take this turn in two turns, on T185. I don't think we bother moving to the hill tile south of the city, just take the river penalty and attack from the east. There are only four units here that mean anything (2 longbows + 2 crossbows) and their lose base strength makes the 25% river crossing bonus not that great, IMO. We can do this the next two turns: T184: Bombard with catapults next to the city, rest of the stack moves up. This includes two workers onto the tile east of the city. T185: Bombard the rest of the defenses (with Accuracy cats moved up), suicide a unit or two and take the city. Workers road the hill tile and all of the units not involved in the fighting can move SW-S and be only two tiles from Two Grand. I've drawn in the cultural borders after Greater Profit falls, and they should look like what I have above. From there we can push on to the capital, or head south and take out Spaceweed Drift, whatever we prefer. CEO Sprite is completely safe, he can only reach the city with two horse archers and there are several musket defenders inside. The lack of roads in Adlain territory just kills his mobility... I successfully got a Hinduism spread in Carib. Our cities are configured like this for future minority religion spread: Confucianism/Buddhism: too many cities to count Taoism: Saxon (currently building monastery), also Goth Hinduism: Carib (currently building monastery) Christianity: Angle Judaism: none. Will probably use Anasazi, which doesn't have the religion now. The AP election results came in, with Parkin getting voted the winner. He cannot hold a victory vote because Adlain and mackoti do not have Christianity in any of their cities. So that's a good sign... however, regoarrarr voted for Parkin instead of abstaining. Not sure what's going on there. In order to win the game by AP vote, every civ in the game needs to have a city with your religion, and at least one other civ has to vote for you (so that you can't cheese yourself the victor - this was added in patches). Therefore we're safe for now. If mackoti and Adlain both got Christian cities though, then we could potentially lose the game. I don't think the game admins would allow Parkin to gift cities to mackoti/Adlain and then have them vote him the winner, because that would be in horrendous bad faith from a sportsmanship perspective. So assuming that's off the table, we should be safe. If Adlain and mackoti both die, however... we could possibly lose if regoarrarr was willing to vote Parkin the winner. I will probably try to spread Christianity around to our high population cities once this war is over to help ensure that that doesn't happen (although then we'll get religious unhappiness from fighting Parkin... sigh. The Apostolic Palace is one of those things that I think the game would have been better off without.) Overall, I'm feeling pretty lousy about this turn because I goofed with the macemen in the south. It will suck if we lose that city, but nothing to be done now. Hope that Adlain continues to mess up while playing and turtle in his own cities!
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jun 29, 2011 15:46:28 GMT -5
Well, we got lucky: ;D I was keeping an eye on CivStats all day, and when Adlain logged out without an increase in his score, I knew that we were safe. (He would have gotten a population increase of 1 if he had attacked and recaptured New Debt, which would have appeared on the score tracker.) So he did nothing but turtle in his cities again, and my mistake didn't wind up mattering. Whew. Old saying about lucky and good, heh. First thing I did this turn was VERY CAREFULLY road with our two workers, and then move the two maces into the city. I also moved one musket in the direction of New Debt, so we will have a garrison of 1 knight + 2 maces + 1 musket next turn. We can move more units down here if desired, but I don't think it's worth it. There was also a catapult that I had in this area for insurance; my tentative suggestion is to stick that into New Debt as well, not for any real military purpose, but more so for deterrence value, like "we're ready to collateral you if you come after this city." Entirely up to you though, if you want to send it north, by my guest. I moved the Guerilla II musket down a tile SE again to give us the above visibility on Spaceweed Drift. (Speaker suggested we build one musket specifically to have G2 on it, and wow, has this guy ever been worth it! Two worker captures, pillaged an important Adlain road to isolate Greater Profit, and continuing to give us total sight over the whole southern battlefield. This guy has been worth his weight in gold!) Adlain is pretty much just streaming additional City Garrison longbows into the city. This is a decent number of units, but it will die without much fuss when our main stacks walk up next to the city. And with every unit promoted down the CG line, New Debt is in little danger. Don't get me wrong, Adlain could retake the city if he really wanted to, it would just cost him far more units than it's worth. If he didn't attack last turn, he's never going to do it. Before moving the Guerilla II musket, we had vision into Two Grand. There are now 4 longbows in the city instead of just 1. (All promoted City Garrison, even though in a city on a hill Guerilla II would be the stronger promotion.) Again, I don't quite know what Adlain is trying to do here tactically. These little garrisons in each city are pretty easy to whittle down. I mean, he's pretty screwed regardless, but still not so great. Defending piecemeal rarely works. More detailed explanation of what's going on at Greater Profit. Once again I've drawn in the post-capture borders, since they explain a lot more of what we should do here. First of all, our advanced maces/muskets that were on the hill tile east of the city last turn moved SW, to end up directly south of the city. Now they can attack next turn with no river crossing penalty, so we have plenty of suicide cannon fodder there (about 20-25 units on that one tile!) All of the catapults on the tile E of the city stayed there and bombarded, which dropped the defenses to zero. There were no walls in this city, which surprised me. (I didn't check, I just assumed that a Protective civ would whip walls in any threatened city. It costs less than 1 population point!) All of our other units moved up a tile, and are now sitting on the tile east of the city. They can attack if needed, although they probably won't have to aside from a couple of suicide cats. Our knights are on that tile, and they can move NW across the river before attacking so as to avoid the penalty. So next turn we'll take Greater Profit and the borders will disappear as marked above. Our two workers on the tile E of the city will then immediately road that hill tile, which will allow the vast majority of our units up there that didn't take part in the battle to move to the circled yellow tile. (This should include every catapult that didn't suicide.) Then we move next to Two Grand on T186, and capture it on T187, keeping the offensive rolling along. As such, we do *NOT* want to move any reinforcements onto the hill tile (marked with a big black X) because there's no road there and they'll get stuck in the back. Our muskets on the wheat can stay there or move one tile west. Up to you, as they can reach the gold circle tile next turn either way. Our reinforcement muskets want to move onto the wheat tile, which blocks any path for Adlain horse archers back to CEO Sprite, and also allows them to reach the gold circle tile next turn too. Hopefully that all makes sense. I could have done the moves myself, but wanted to run it by you first. Moogle should take Profit Share this turn. I'll try to ask him where he's going next with his units, although maybe it will be clear when he moves them post-capture. That should clear any danger coming down from the north around those mountains. If Moogle wants to take Merchant Haven, I say to let him have it. It's not that good of a city. However, if you want to make a play for it, we can send a smaller force to circle around and come down from the north. Maybe worthwhile, as it would be nice to lock Moogle out of the south entirely in the postwar world. We'll have to see how things look in a turn or two. I am going to be traveling again tonight, and will have my laptop with me. Hopefully I should be able to log in and move around workers, check builds, and all that jazz. If not, I'm sure you can handle it. I'm also leaving for vacation in about two weeks; we'll definitely still be at war then, so things will probably get a bit messy. But we'll manage. Let me know what you think when you get a chance to look at the game.
|
|
|
Post by Speaker on Jun 29, 2011 19:41:34 GMT -5
I pretty much had the same thoughts as you. I'm not sure exactly what to do with the stragglers that are coming late to the party. I think there are 3 or 4 muskets and 3 or 4 catapults. Maybe just send them all to New Debt, so he has to keep a garrison in Spaceweed Drift?
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jul 1, 2011 9:41:36 GMT -5
Here's an update for our successful attack on T185: We started by moving the Guerilla II musket further into Adlain's back lines. The unit started on the hill 3N of Spaceweed Drift, and then I sent it straight southwest. The first move revealed the garrison inside the city, which I screenshotted here. While it might look very tough and impressive, at the end of the day that's still just a collection of longbows. We can take this city pretty easily with our main army, and with even less difficulty once we finish Rifling tech and upgrade a few choice City Raider maces to redcoats. Anyway, these units don't matter that much right now because our Guerilla musket continued moving another tile southwest... onto the only road connection between Spaceweed Drift and the capital. Whoops. That could be considered a tactical misket on Adlain's part. ;D At this point, Adlain almost has to attack our Guerilla musket on the hill, even though his best unit for doing that is a Combat II mace. If he does not attack, then we pillage that road next turn and his army gets trapped inside Spaceweed Drift, stuck inside a pocket of resistance with no Dunkirk miracle to get them out. They can sit in there and rot while we go take the capital. Home of Opptuni was also completely empty of defenders, although for some reason there's a crossbow on the hill tile west of the city (despite there being no road there) so the city itself is in no danger. I'm hoping that Adlain will choose not to attack our musket, as I would love to sever his road connections further. But if he does, we should take down at least one of his units, hopefully two. City Garrison units make a poor choice for attacking out of your cities. Greater Profit already had no cultural defenses, since we had bombarded them down the previous turn. The only real question was how many suicide catapults to send in. We used four of them, at which point in time our best knight was getting 85% odds, and after that it was a slaughter. Even City Garrison III longbows die quickly once they get hit with some collateral damage. (Remember that longbows have a low base strength, and become powerful units due to a whole bunch of combat modifiers. Drop their base strength from 6 to 4 with catapults, and they die pretty easily, even with +100% added on.) Our only real loss was a knight that sadly passed away at 89% attack odds. Unfortunate, but when you carry out a bunch of attacks in the 85-95% range, odds are that one of them will go against you. So our losses were extremely light to take this city: 4 catapults 1 knight Total = 30k Against: 4 longbows 1 crossbow 2 horse archers 1 axeman 1 catapult Total = 54k While that doesn't look particularly great, keep in mind that just trading units is enormously to our advantage, since our military is so much larger than Adlain's. We're also the ones attacking, and getting any kind of favorable unit trade while on the attack is almost always a good sign. I'm pretty happy at how our losses thus far have been very minimal. Basically, we just need to keep building more catapults to replace the ones that we invariably have to suicide against each city. Another interesting point worth mentioning: Adlain has all of these little cities, but only a couple of them have barracks in them. He only had five barracks in his whole empire: Seizewell, Greater Profit, Profit Share, Spaceweed Drift, CEO Sprite. That's all. We've taken two of them, and Moogle should capture Profit Share next turn. This is significant because without barracks in his cities, he can't produce triple-promoted longbows/crossbows and claim the City Garrison III promotion. That extra 30% defense on the final promotion really makes a difference, and I've found so far that the CG2 units are far easier to kill. By eliminating some of his best cities right away, we've done much to prevent the whipping of elite units. Facing a whole bunch of 3XP longbows isn't all that scary, even if Adlain is Protective and all. Situation map at end of turn: We're taken three cities so far in 5 turns, including two of Adlain's best. Profit Share should fall next turn, although Moogle has been very slow about taking that one. The city had walls, and he didn't bring very many catapults (none of them had 5XP to take Accuracy promotion) which has slowed the attack considerably. Most of our units are on the tile 2S of Greater Profit; they will move next to Two Grand on T186, and should be able to capture it T187. We're probably going to raze that city, as it's the weakest of Adlain's cities by a wide margin, and there's really not much reason to keep it. All of the others look like keepers. The cultural borders are currently bugged, something which should clear up next turn when the game rechecks tiles to see which ones should be receiving culture. Because Moogle has been so very slow at moving up in the north, we should be able to capture Merchant Haven ourselves, which is a nice city and would form a strong post-war northern border along with Greater Profit. Tactically speaking, while the main stack moves along the southern route through Two Grand, units that have healed up and/or are reinforcements arriving at the front can take the northern path around the mountains and capture Merchant Haven. We should be able to rest T186, move onto the pigs T187, move next to the city T188, and capture it T189. I don't believe that city has much of anything inside it for defense, and we'll be able to cut off the only road by which reinforcements could possibly arrive. Hopefully it will be pretty straightforward. (One of the keys to this campaign has been Adlain's poor road network. Each city has been isolated from the others, preventing him from shuffling units around. Spaceweed Drift has been cut off from the north the whole time; Adlain still can't get units from Spaceweed into Two Grand, which would make things vastly tougher there. Once we move on Merchant Haven, his northern cities will also be completely isolated from the south. And furthermore, once the capital falls, Adlain's north/south/east/west cities will all be cut off from one another. Then we pick them apart one at a time at our leisure.) Currently it looks like we will be in position to take the capital on T191. Once Seizewell and Spaceweed Drift are taken, that will effectively be the end of the war. I think we will finish around roughly T205. We should be able to capture 14 of Adlain's 18 cities, with Moogle getting the northern 4. Everything has gone according to plan so far, hopefully it will continue. Then we can worry about the next battle against Parkin...
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jul 2, 2011 23:27:04 GMT -5
Update from a generally unexciting turn (T186): The issue with this turn was waiting for Moogle to play and waiting for him to capture Profit Share. Obviously you can see he did that eventually (above), but that was a bit of an issue while playing. I waited until there was one hour left on the timer, at which time I had to leave for the rest of the day, and Moogle still hadn't played yet. So I did the best I could with our own moves: - I moved the big stack in the south next to Two Grand. - I moved pretty much all of our other units in the area into Greater Profit, from which location they could head north or south next turn. Remember that with the sad death of our Guerilla II musket (killed by an Adlain horse archer at f*cking 0.4% combat odds!!!!!) we no longer have visibility on the big stack from Spaceweed Drift. Adlain had the potential to move all of those units into Two Grand and make a stand there in that dinky little city. I figured that if he did move up all those units, we could wait one extra turn and move up our knights to get in on the fighting. If not, then the small garrison would be easily overwhelmed by our maces/muskets/catapults even without mounted support. As of this point in time, both Moogle and Adlain have since played their turns, and the picture is a bit clearer. Moogle did indeed capture Profit Share, losing a few catapults and pretty much nothing else. However, although Moogle played the battle correctly from a tactical perspective, he messed up strategically by building too few catapults. He actually has way more knights and maces than he needs - his army has been stalled out due to lack of cats! He only has 4 cats left after suiciding, which is obviously far from what he needs. So I imagine his offensive will be left spinning its wheels for a couple of turns as he rebuilds more cats in his own cities. I'm going to send Moogle a message and suggest that he head for The Vault or Grand Exchange next. ("Hey we're about to capture Merchant Haven, where do you think you're going to move your army next?") Meanwhile, with the disappearance of those borders in the north, we're now in great shape to move on Merchant Haven. Adlain has *NOT* reinforced Two Grand, and thus the forces down there should be able to overrun that city without any real trouble. (Just 4 longbows on a hill, none of them even CG3 promoted.) The first thing I want to do next turn is move our Sentry horse archer onto the pigs tile, which will reveal the garrison in Merchant Haven. I expect that there will be almost nothing in there... If it's mostly empty, we can move some knights on the forest tile SW of the pigs and take it the following turn. If there's a decent garrison, we wait one extra turn to move up some cats and muskets, then take Merchant Haven on T189. In any case, it should go down pretty fast, and that will wrap up our future border with Moogle. (It will also prevent Adlain's three remaining northern cities from having any effect on the rest of the fighting.) Everything else will keep pushing on Seizewell, which is getting mighty close now... Our Great General will be able to create a Medic III horse archer next turn, which will significantly speed up our recovery time in Greater Profit. Most of the units moved into the city this turn, so next turn they'll be getting 10 (default) + 10 (city) + 10 (Medic I) + 15 (Medic III) = 45% health back. Basically back to full health in 2t even if on the point of death. Good stuff indeed. In other news, Parkin has hit turn #25 of his Golden Age with no ending message appearing, so he has indeed popped his third Golden Age. At least we're now on turn 25/36, getting somewhat close to the end of this thing... plako popped a Golden Age on this same turn and revolted into Theocracy. (This is plako's second Golden Age.) He's supposedly going to be running gold once he gets Rifling in a turn or two and then doing massive rifle upgrades. Someone (either plako or Parkin) has passed us for the top spot in Power, and they SURGED passed us, going from 1044k last turn to 1252k this turn. That's a lot of units from someone... Unfortunately for us, Parkin is not totally stupid and finally seems to be building some defensive units. Damned stupid idea to give someone 40 turns warning to prepare for a fight. I know how you feel about NAPs and all that. In random news, luddite finished Chichen Itza this turn. He's going to discover Rifling next turn and obsolete it. Uh... worth it? 2t until we get Rifling ourselves and turn on the draft once more. We'll have close to 40 redcoats (although probably only 25 or so in position) when the attack on Parkin begins. Should be fun. Adlain dropped to last place in score this turn. 14 cities remaining.
|
|
|
Post by Speaker on Jul 3, 2011 6:16:19 GMT -5
I logged in and played a bit. Have to run to work, so I don't have time to post the screenshots I took, but I suspect you will be pretty happy with what transpired.
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jul 3, 2011 8:30:24 GMT -5
Actually the game is down right now, so I can't log in and see what happened. CivStats says that you took two Adlain cities, and I really want to know how the hell you did that. The suspense is killing me! ;D
|
|
|
Post by Speaker on Jul 3, 2011 13:31:24 GMT -5
The first thing I did was bomb down the city, which took all our accuracy catapults and one un-promoted cat. City Walls and especially Castles are broken in Beyond the Sword. It shouldn't take more than 4 (with walls) or 6 (with a castle) accuracy catapults to bomb down a city. I used just 2 suicide catapults, since at that point, I had ~30% odds, and figured I'd rather throw away a cannon-fodder Musket or Mace, instead of a less-replaceable catapult. On the first battle, we got lucky and won with an unpromoted Musket vs a wounded city defense 2 longbow, giving us 5/5 XP, so we can make a new Guerrilla II. I know we had talked about razing it, but in the end, I decided to keep the city, since as I studied it, I realized there were four grassands, one plains, one grass hill, and one desert hill, that didn't fit into any other cities. That's enough food to earn its own keep, either via specialist or whip. At a minimum, it could be an every-other or every-third turn Missionary pump, with a little work. I moved the sentry horse archer up, as you suggested, and oops, we forgot the line of sight rules, and can't see Merchant Haven......but instead, we see something much juicier.... I'm assuming the general spawned in one of the northern cities, and since he didn't have good roads to Merchant Haven, that was as far as it would reach, so he decided to cover it with a couple units from the city. So I moved up a Musket to kill the Longbow, and (oops, line of sight rules again, look at the city...) a knight to finish off the Catapult and General.... ...and captured the empty city. Note: Hilled cities are a lot harder to capture when they are full of protective longbows, and not completely empty. Here's a picture of the full turn's combat. I started moving reinforcement units from Greater Profit toward the capital, via the one tile mountain pass, which conveniently enough has a forest/hill on it for greater defensive cover, not that Adlain would attack out of his city or anything. I didn't move all the units though. We'll still have to decide how much to heal and how much to move. Similarly, I didn't move all our units into Two Grand yet. I'll let you figure out the hammer totals. The total was: We Lost: 2x Catapult 1 Musket 1 Mace Adlain lost: 4x Longbow 1x Maceman 1x Catapult 1x Great General It was a fun way to spend 15 minutes before work this morning.
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jul 3, 2011 15:59:13 GMT -5
Yeah that was a very good turn indeed! Here's an overhead shot after moving everything: We're probably going to put a musket on the forested tile where the Adlain longbow currently sits; I'm expecting it to run back into Grand Exchange when Adlain sees the extent of the disaster that took place this turn. Holding that one tile choke gives us total safety for our new territorial aquisitions (well, aside from Moogle deciding to attack us, which Speaker is already considering as a possibility! Not too likely though, I think.) The map certainly looks different up here from just a few turns before, as the cultural borders continue to fall. There are a ton of units moving on Seizewell now. Our Guerilla I musket on the hill SE of Two Grand can move south and reveal Spaceweed Drift's garrison next turn, so we'll be able to confirm whether or not those units moved back to Seizewell to protect it. Speaker, next turn we can move the 5XP musket into Two Grand and upgrade it to redcoat (if we have enough gold, not sure how much it costs). That will be fun once we have it set up. Parkin's power has increased massively, 500k in the past 3 turns. He's now the world #1 in power by a wide margin. This attack is looking worse and worse by the turn. Just too much time for Parkin to prepare for it. Well, we shall see what happens when the curtain goes up. At least we're tearing apart Adlain even better than I expected.
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jul 6, 2011 14:47:44 GMT -5
Turn 188: We mostly moved up our units this turn, getting them one tile closer to the capital of Seizewell. We do have vision on all of Adlain's border garrisons: Grand Exchange (2 longbows), Spaceweed Drift (same as before) and now Seizewell. The capital has about 15 longbows, which will make for a bloody fight, but one which we will definitely win with our current forces. We will probably have to sacrifice all of our non-Accuracy cats. But after that city falls, the war with basically be over. All of Adlain's units seem to be in either Seizewell or Spaceweed. We finished Rifling tech and flipped into Nationhood/Theocracy. I was watching our science, and we definitely produce fewer beakers in these civics; Free Speech is already the best civic to run in that column from an economic perspective. We'll draft our 25 redcoats and get back into it ASAP. Nakor has asked them to gather at the city of Fishfood (just north of Teoihuacan) so that's where they're heading. I tried to draft cities furthest away from Fishfood to give them time to walk there for the turn 200 attack. I'll send you my draft chart if I have to leave on vacation before we're done this round, which now seems likely. Our next tech path is Aesthetics -> Drama (theatres) -> Literature (start Heroic Epic in Apache) -> Music (cathedrals). We could technically go Music before Literature, but we get the extra 20% beakers by doing that the other way, and it's not worth it to get Music one turn earlier. After that I'm not sure... We want the following techs in some order: Constitution/Democracy: Universal Suffrage would be really, really good Military Tradition: cavalry Economics: cheap and Free Trade gives an extra trade route in every city Compass/Optics: whales Astronomy: our own galleons I'm not even sure what to recommend there. Perhaps we can wait and see where we are in 4 turns? Tentative preference for Economics because it can be teched in 3t and the extra trade route in all of our 30 cities would be very valuable. I turned down science to get some money for upgrades - we're having Nakor convert our two galleys into galleons. Having two of them on hand definitely seems worth the ~300 gold it will cost. The big news for the turn was mackoti declaring war on luddite and razing his border city. Apparently he broke an NAP to do it, which was crucial because the extra 2t luddite would've had would have allowed him to get his rifles into position to stop the attack. I don't think it's that big of a deal to break an NAP with a couple turns remaining when both sides clearly expect war to break out. The near-holy attitude with which everyone seems to regard these NAPs is pretty silly to me. (I wish that plako and luddite would have done the same with Parkin before he built a gigantic army with the 50 turns of preparation they gave him!) Nevertheless, the mackoti attack is rather ridiculous. It's a complete suicide charge designed to help Parkin win the game more easily. I guess he can do what he wants with his civ, but... kind of silly. If we had units to spare and weren't involved in the Adlain war, I'd send them up to raze mackoti's unprotected backline cities. As it is, we probably have enough on our plate without jumping into a third war. Well, mackoti and Adlain will be gone in the next 20 turns now, and then it will be just our four teams, Moogle (who is pretty much on our side), regoarrarr (the fence sitter), and Parkin. That's when it gets really interesting.
|
|
|
Post by Speaker on Jul 6, 2011 20:30:58 GMT -5
If no units complete in Spaceweed Drift, next turn will be funny. Also, I wonder where he got those Camel Archers. Upgraded with gold maybe?
|
|
|
Post by Speaker on Jul 6, 2011 21:50:26 GMT -5
OK then.
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jul 7, 2011 13:36:06 GMT -5
Yeah I'm not exactly sure why Adlain decided to give up one of his core cities for free like that. Even if he keeps a token garrison of 2-3 longbows, we have to wait to bring up our main army to take the city, and go through the trouble of bombing down the defenses. That evacuation made our job inifinitely easier, and he even had walls already constructed in Spaceweed. Investing so much effort into holding that position only to give it up for free seems very strange to me. I don't get this one. Speaker and I hashed out the tactical details last night. Most of our army was moving forward another tile closer to Seizewell, and so the issue was protecting our forces while they were on the move, much like defending a supply train against a harassment raid. We planned to move our advancing units onto the forest east of Seizewell, the hill northeast of the city, and also the tile west of Two Grand (the trailing reinforcements a turn behind the rest). If you look at the picture above, there were therefore 4 different tiles where Adlain's open field stack could attack us: - Attack Spaceweed Drift - Attack the forest east of Seizewell - Attack the plains tile west of Two Grand (camel archers only) - Attack Two Grand (camel archers only) Once again the speed of the mounted units was the critical factor in the equation. Just having those five camel archers complicated the picture significantly. We had to protect each of these locations against potential threat. In order: * We moved up all the units in New Debt to Spaceweed Drift. This gave us a knight, two muskets, two maces, and a catapult. (Fortunately these cities were exactly three tiles apart and there were no cultural borders in the way!) The problem, however, was that Adlain could still attack and retake the city if he threw his whole stack at it. In fact, he could take Spaceweed and then proceed on with the re-popped borders to retake New Debt as well. That would set us back significantly; I mean, it wouldn't change the outcome of the war, but it would drag it out that much longer. We had no choice but to rely on the past history of Adlain's passiveness, and hope he wouldn't go for this play. * We moved 5 muskets and 17 maces onto the forest east of Seizewell. Even though Adlain could attack this tile with his whole field army and the capital's garrison, two dozen maces/muskets with defensive bonus in forest do not fear city garrison longbows. This tile was safe, and we weren't worried. * The flatground plains tile was probably in the most danger. Even though this spot could only be hit by the 5 camel archers, all of our Accuracy catapults were going to be on this tile, and it was imperative that they be protected. We ended up clearing out Two Grand of nearly all of its units and moving some knights over to protect this tile, which we could do because... * We burned 280g for two mace -> redcoat upgrades in Two Grand. This allowed us to empty out the city almost completely, leaving just the 2 redcoats, some injured maces, and our Medic III horse archer. The redcoats would defend at strength 21 on a hill against camel archers, essentially making Two Grand invulnerable. The upgrades were therefore very important in letting us move our army forward while protecting it on the march. With our moves complete, the key question then became, where would Adlain move his Spaceweed stack that we trapped out in the open? Well... the result was unexpected: They disappeared from view entirely. I wondered if we had been attacked somewhere, but no, those units just left without fighting. There are only two potential tiles where they can be: on the forested hill to the SW, or on the corn tile next to it. We'll move up our Guerilla musket next turn and discover which one it is. The Spaceweed stack cannot possibly reach Seizewell now before we attack it on T191. I would say that Adain has been tactically out-manuevered. Speaker, Adlain did attack our forested stacked with his three catapults. They all did minimal collateral damage, and it will all be healed next turn when our Medic III horse archer moves to the same tile from Two Grand. I guess he thought we were attacking on T190 instead of T191 (?) In any case, those cats didn't achieve anything. He needed a lot more than three to make a dent. We drafted 5 more units this turn as usual. They are continuing to head for Nakor's Fishfood city. Drama comes in next turn, and I'm going to swap pretty much all of our new cities to theatres then, as the best cheap culture building available. (Did you know that not one team in the world has discovered Drama yet? We will be the first ones to get it! Everyone just skipped the tech for some reason. Heh. No Globe Theatres to worry about.) I have also started renaming the Adlain cities with proper names from the "Barbarian" city list. My rule is to change them when they come out of resistance, making a clean break transition into our empire. You are free to ignore my silliness with this. The big news for this turn was mackoti razing another one of luddite's border cities, 2 Lupu 2 Loco. This is a spot they've been fighting over since the Ancient Age. Now that mackoti has gotten the two easy targets on the border, he shouldn't have any more successes. Luddite is whipping/upgrading to rifles all over the place, and mackoti will not be long for this world. We have a scout in the area to watch the proceedings, although there's also an Adlain warrior wandering around there we have to stay away from. Nakor's Golden Age ended (didn't know he was in one). plako is in the middle of his second Golden Age, which is being used to build up his power for the impending attack. Parkin is on Golden Age turn 28/36; he discovered Steam Power this turn, and has a clear path to both Railroads and Assembly Line. He can probably just clear both of them before his current Golden Age wears off. Interestingly, Parkin has not researched Philosophy or Liberalism yet, so he cannot use Free Speech civic (which would be by far the best for his empire). He also hasn't used Universal Suffrage, preferring Representation instead... although he is in Mercantilism + Statue of Liberty, so that makes perfect sense. I'll be interested to see if he goes for Liberalism/Free Speech before his current Golden Age wears off, as he won't be able to flip civics again after that. Still hoping we get to take Seizewell before I leave for vacation on Saturday morning. If only everyone will play their turn!
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jul 8, 2011 11:11:10 GMT -5
OK here's the update for our half of T190: I moved our Guerilla musket up, and that revealed that Adlain's former Spaceweed stack had indeed moved onto the forest hill tile last turn (circled in red). That was very imporant information, as they are now uselessly out of the fight entirely. That tile does not have a road on it, and Adlain can't move onto the tile with workers and road it. Adlain also doesn't have Engineering tech, so even his camel archers can't move onto the road due west and then move north into Seizewell. They're uselessly out of position for this next fight. Those units also can't even threaten Spaceweed Drift any more; I have the Guerilla muskets blocking the only road over the hills, and only the camel archers can reach them. It looks like Adlain is also going to concede Opptuni to us next turn without a fight. My best guess is that this stack will retreat south into 18 Billion and try to defend there. Not sure though. I did go ahead and move all of our units, because it was pretty straightforward. All of the units on our plains tile last turn moved up one tile, onto the forested tile (boxed in white, with units there highlighted at the bottom of the screen). Most of our catapults are on this tile. The units on the forest tile that were injured by collateral damage last turn are all healing on the same spot (they have the "white dots" above their unit icons) and will all be full strength next turn thanks to our Medic III unit. The units that were not damaged by the collateral, and the units that were on the hill last turn, have all moved north of the city, and are indicated in yellow. These units can avoid the river crossing penalty for attacking, so they will likely all see combat action. This should be a safe location because Adlain's camel archers can't get anywhere near here, and we have odds on anything attacking out of Seizewell. The catapults which were in position to bombard did so this turn, dropping the defenses from 60% down to 45%. Our Accuracy cats should have no trouble taking that to 0% next turn. (Small issue: if Adlain were to whip walls this turn, we might be stalled for a turn bombarding down defenses. Hopefully he won't see to do this.) So it's shaping up for quite a battle next turn. We have 55 units in position to attack: 4 knights, 11 muskets, 23 maces, 14 catapults, and 2 horse archers. On defense, Adlain has a crapload of longbows (3 maces and 17 longbows). We're going to lose a number of units, but overall once the collateral damage hits those longbows will lose a lot of their base strength, and then we should clean up. That will effectively end the war, as Adlain has nothing else left aside from that Spaceweed stack. (He didn't even whip anything last turn, and he gained only 1 pop point this turn. His civ is tapped out on whipping. Cities too small, not regrowing fast enough.) Speaker, most of our cities have been drafted now. Check the draft chart tab on the Excel file (in our Dropbox) to see which ones still remain to be drafted. *DO NOT* draft Olmec or Zapotec, as they need to keep growing for Legendary city cultural purposes. We can probably go ahead and draft Cherokee, it has plenty of population already, it's working all of the good tiles, and it's already built most of the basic cultural stuff. I've had our units heading to Fishfood fortify on the last tile in our territory. We pay extra maintenance when they're outside our borders, so we may as well stash them there for the moment until it's time for the attack. I really hope that we can play the turn online together sometime tomorrow morning or afternoon, although the fact that I'm flying on two planes will make it difficult. It really stinks that we had that delay earlier this week when Adlain was unavailable for two days. If we could do the turn even 12 hours sooner, I'd feel much better about leaving with Adlain's civ effectively destroyed. But... we'll make it work, one way or another. You could actually call my cell or text me if I'm otherwise unavailable, and we could hash it out that way. It's a pretty important turn! That's all for now until Adlain plays his turn later today. (Where does the Spaceweed stack go?)
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jul 9, 2011 5:57:40 GMT -5
Well, we could have played our turn now, but Parkin's insistence on always being last to play means that we're out of luck. Thanks buddy...
I checked on Adlain after he logged in. The Spaceweed stack has disappeared, so it looks like it headed to the southwest towards 18 Billion. Opptuni was whipped, likely for a defender of some kind, not that that will save it for very long. Adlain didn't attack any of our units, and he crammed on extra longbow into Seizewell. No real noticeable change. He did whip six cities, but 5 out of 6 whips were for a single pop point. He really has just about tapped himself out on whipping. Most cities are now size 2 or size 3.
One last request: if you can, please take a screenshot of the F4 Tech screen and leave it in our Dropbox folder for me. Most of the other statistical stuff isn't that important to track, but the techs that everyone has are pretty vital. Thanks, and hopefully we'll find a time to play this next turn somehow.
|
|