RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Speaker]

Looks like Korea either planted two new cities or captured them, or.... Either way, let's send them a congratulations, Sullla.

Obviously he planted them, since nobody lost points. Capturing a barb city is possible though unlikely.

[Ashain]

Rampant speculation is fine, though.

I'm gonna go with that stack of yours is designed to put tie down those praetorians somewhere to open up other possibilities, though that is an awful lot of cats...

[Sullla]

Alright, so we can finally pull back the curtain and reveal some of what Speaker and I have been planning. To start, we have to go back to the offered peace treaty from the Kathlete alliance that we received about two weeks ago. Speaker and I spent some time thinking this over, and ultimately we decided it wasn't in our interest to accept. Yes, 20 turns of peace would have been nice, but how would that benefit us if those four teams simply came back and attacked again as soon as the grace period was up? We're confident in our abilities, but winning against 4 vs 1 odds is asking a lot. Ultimately we decided that we had to continue this war - while we had a relative military advantage - and do our best to cripple one of the teams opposing us. Obviously Jowy was the main target there...

We had some notion of going after Thebes. However, a city on a hill with walls would be a difficult nut to crack, and even if we took the location, Thebes wasn't really worth having. It has no food bonuses, after all! We had no intention of getting sucked into a Verdun style battle, with massive losses on both sides. I'm sure that's what Jowy expected us to do, attack him right where his defenses were strongest. Instead, we decided to do an end-around maneuver through the Ardennes a la 1940.

You saw our big stack of catapults and axes last turn. What you didn't see was our stack of Mounted units, which we had very carefully hidden out of sight. That meant that when we moved at the tail end of this past turn, it came as a complete surprise to Jowy:



6 horse archers and our 2 Mobility Great General axes moved along the arrowed path (with workers roading), only to find... 1 phalanx and 1 archer on defense in Sparta. Ooops. That could be constitued a tactical mistake on Jowy's part. We were able to catch him with his pants down here because we had never shown any units here in the west (always keeping them very carefully hidden) and because our other stack drew attention to the east. And because we played the turn in total cheese fashion, moving the units up with 1 minute left on the timer, Jowy had no opportunity to whip defenders. Unless he's got a big stack within 2 tiles of Sparta, that city looks to be toast.

We also moved up our large stack too:



Kudos to our Fast Workers for building an instant road on that forest tile! I wonder if Jowy considered that move (?) It's not something that anyone other than India can do. Our slow-movers can now move up next to Argos on this current turn, meaning that if Jowy runs off to go protect Sparta, he's going to lose another one of his core cities. Either way he's in some pretty deep doodoo.

Jowy's only saving grace is that he was gifted those 8 Praetorians from Whosit (without that, he would have virtually no chance). He does also have Construction tech, so we can expect to see some catapults. For those reasons, we'd be willing to make peace with Jowy in exchange for a city or two, rather than push this fight to the bitter finish. I'm really curious to see how he's going to respond. Jowy didn't whip any units last turn, which was very puzzling. I guess he was confident in his defenses (?) We'll find out soon enough.

Apologies for not posting more recently, but secrecy was a huge part of this whole plan. The big stack of slow movers is really a giant decoy - the horse archers are the true threat!

[regoarrarr]

So did you submit a peace offer to Jowy?

Sparta raze or keep?

[VoiceOfUnreason]

You saw our big stack of catapults and axes last turn. What you didn't see was our stack of Mounted units, which we had very carefully hidden out of sight.

Those were pretty obvious, by not being seen.

...and our 2 Mobility Great General axes

That, however, was very clever.

[BobRoberts]

Thanks for the update! Looks like some nice attackery there.

If you don't mind the question, was wondering where your units came from? How many did you already have and how many were recently pushed out? Did you apply the whip a lot, or hand build some?

Best of luck with the smushings!

[T-hawk]

Apologies for not posting more recently, but secrecy was a huge part of this whole plan.

Do you have reason to believe that your posts here are leaking to the other teams? I haven't seen anything that would suggest that. Every other team has shared openly; no other team has deliberately kept a plan secret without posting. (Unless of course there are unrevealed plans at the moment, but to date nobody has made a secret plan and then revealed it.) I understand a cautious approach as a high-visibility team, and surely your flair for the dramatic reveal, but you are the only team operating in this manner.

While Whosit's Praetorians were en route to you, there was much lurker consternation about whether news of that would leak to you beforehand, but it doesn't appear to have happened. And Speaker sniffed it out logically anyway (unless he did get tipped off by lurker posts.)

[Speaker]

We feel like this attack is the key to our game, and don't want to risk any spoiler leaks. even something as simple as "isn't Sparta awfully lightly defended?" would have been a disaster for us. Remember that these threads are for us to share our game with the rest of the community, and at times, we may err on the side of caution. That is our right, I think.

[darrelljs]

So if Jowy leaves his stack in Thebes, will you move to the Forest SW of Argos? It seems like his best move is to place his stack 2W of Argos, so he can garrison whichever city you threaten. What would you do if he did that? It would not bother me at all if you wait until after he moves to answer .

Disclaimer: I have not read Jowy's thread in some time, I have no idea what he is thinking.

Darrell

[antisocialmunky]

I don't really mind if the secrecy allows for some Dramatic Flair. Really everyone has the right to post however they want. Otherwise we'd kicked Dantski out for never updating his thread *ARGH*.