(February 26th, 2014, 12:57)Krill Wrote: Can you explain, in detail, why you chose to use the unit composition that you did to manage the threat from Suttree, compared the other options available to you?
Hmm.. let's try. As you might remember we defended with axes and bows.
We knew suttree's stack composition (first lots of axes and some spears, later lots of axes & cats and some spears, we took his horse resource and he did not trade it from anyone so no 2-mover threats). Since we are RBMod AGG we had barracks in pretty much every city, which ment that we were able to produce shock axes everywhere, which happened to be excellent units to fight this specific stack. C1/C2 Shock axe was a cheap 35-hammer unit that got odds against every single unit in suttree's stack. Shock axes also targeted cats, which means that if suttree puts 15 cats next to our city: with 15 shock axes we can destroy most of his cats and then our city defenders (mostly cheap bowmen and axes) get odds against remaining attackers. The situation basically was that if suttree puts 35-40 units next to our city, we need to either kill those cats before they attack, wipe the whole stack or have a lot of bodies in the city so that we can survive collateral & 20+ hitters.
We also built bowmen as city defenders in most places because they worked well against barbs and in hill cities they remain relevant still when fighting maces. They were not so much built for suttree, just to be regular MP units at border cities.
Other relevant options at that time were pretty much cats and HAs (we did not take HBR or Construction too early, partly because of the following discussion). The thing with cats was that:
1. 50-hammer unit that is expected to die when attacking suttree's stack
2. They are only useful against suttree's stack if we can actually attack out and have enough of them. Let's say we first need to sacrifice ~10 cats and then we still need to have enough units that we can kill 35-40 bodies (or at least more than half of them).
HAs had similar logic:
HA is a unit that gets odds against suttree's axes and cats, flanks cats, but it again costs 50-hammers and first 5-10 units are kind of wasted as they target spears (and as city defenders they are not too attractive builds anyways).
---> we felt that only couple of cats or HAs do not really help us surviving and 500-hammer investment for 10 cats/HAs was too much at that time as we were trying to keep as many cities as possible supporting our development and building workers+settlers+infra.
Ok, this post is kind of confusing, but the overall daily thinking went pretty much like this:
1. Damn suttree has again added X units
2. Now we are not safe with our current defenses
3. Hmmm, we can add 1-2 shock axes quickly and then we are safe again
4. Hmm.. Or we could build a stack of cats or HAs and be also safe and have useful units later if this conflict ever ends, but then our core cities need to participate in whipping as well and stop whatever they are doing
5. Let's go with an axe, expanding into west/wherever, building workers and infra is too important, we don't want to spend 500 hammers for units or 1500 hammers for invasion army on top of our current military that is already no. 1/2/3 in soldier points..
So yeah, I'm assuming that your point is that HAs and/or cats would have been useful in fighting suttree (or we should have beelined something better?), but we decided to go with smaller hammer investment (shock axes) and tried to maximize our economic devolopment elsewhere. At first we were also a bit hopeful that the military build-up would end as suttree's attacks failed and it became fairly clear that he can't get a city from us (it eventually kind of did as he switched into non-threatening lbows and we got to maces/knights/muskets). Aaand the marginal cost of 1st useful HA/cat was just so big. Investing into better more useful could have been a good move, but as I tried to explain, this all happened during a pretty crucial and intense expansion phase, which affected our willingness to put together the hammers required for stack of HAs/cats.
Rough example/exercise: (not the numbers that we actually had in game, but close enough)
Let's assume that your opponent puts 15 cats + 18 axes + 7 spears (1-promo units) next to your city (on a hill and 20 % culture). You already have 6 shock axes and 9 1-promo bowmen available. You can build 2-promo axes, 1-promo cats or HAs and 1-promo bowmen. What effective ways do you see to deal with this attack (what would you build)?
--> we kind of went with 6 bows and 12 shock axes (for a total of 18 shock axes and 15 bows) for an additional hammer cost of 570h.
Detailed and confusing enough? :P