[SPOILERS]Novice, Spacemanmf and Athlete4life10 are HUYANA CAPAC OF CHINA

[spacemanmf]

OK, some notes for the plan for next turn.

Firstly, we should see where Pegasus' big HA stack is. He may well have upgraded a chunk of them to knights given his iron city is under threat. The big question is where he has moved them away from being next to Britannia. If so, we need to think about our plan... but probably still go ahead.

Then we try to spy revolt Britannia. If successful we move to the next stage of our plan. If not, we try with our second spy. If that's not successful then we don't attack this turn (boo!).

If we succeed in revolting the city, we then fire a culture bomb in Speed Limit. Depending on whether we have a spy left, we could then try the Spread Culture mission to see if we gain control of that crucial square. If not, we fire a second culture bomb. (Will be interesting to see if we take control of any other squares.)

So, fingers crossed, we have control of that key city. Then send in lots of suicide cats (probably promoted to CR2 and CR1) to substantially weaken the defending units of Britannia. Then in go the one-movers sat in Speed Limit (mostly muskets). Until we take the city.

Then the two-movers and one-movers 1SW of Speed Limit go after the mounted stack.

If it all goes to plan (fateful words), we take Britannia and Uruk next turn, and Pegasus has 29 cats, 6 knights, 3 chariots, and whatever else is around to come back at us. It wouldn't be worth sending those units in since the cats don't get kills.

[novice]

Sounds like we see eye to eye on the war plans.

Since the save didn't come yesterday you'll get to have all the fun. I'll be out and about tonight.

[spacemanmf]

Ok had a peek at the save. Ruff has offered a map trade, which I will accept.

Two of our spies were spotted... but not our crucial ones!

Pegasus upgraded 6 HAs to knights, and also moved the cats next to the city...

Tonight is going to be interesting.

[SevenSpirits]

Ok had a peek at the save. Ruff has offered a map trade, which I will accept.

Two of our spies were spotted... but not our crucial ones!

Pegasus upgraded 6 HAs to knights, and also moved the cats next to the city...

Tonight is going to be interesting.

Your position looks amazing.

I think you should use your knights and a few cuirassiers if necessary to flank all his cats to death. It won't matter if he has a dozen horse archers left.

[novice]

Your position looks amazing.

I think you should use your knights and a few cuirassiers if necessary to flank all his cats to death. It won't matter if he has a dozen horse archers left.

Definitely. Kill! Kill! Kill!

[spacemanmf]

In brief: Britannia is ours and his remaining forces are not threatening...

[novice]

In brief: Britannia is ours and his remaining forces are not threatening...

Woo hoo!

[spacemanmf]

Woo hoo!

Woo hoo indeed. We got two Great Generals out of it all, which says a lot.

We also need a new city name.

I've renamed Uruk as Re-raise All-in... =)

EDIT: And SevenSpirits' suggestion of Jackpot wins...

Full turn report coming up soon.

[spacemanmf]

Right then, I think this is worthy of a few posts...

Ruff had offered to trade maps, which I accepted. I guess that gives him potential visibility into our newer cities but we can also see where all his newly captured cities are. Although we kinda could anyway with our knight. Anyway, this is boring.

The main question was: what had Pegasus done with his mounted stack? Had it retreated?

First things first, though (or I suppose second things second). It initially seemed that it was all over... when we won the AP vote...



No, not really, it was that two of our spies had been detected.

Crucial to the turn, it wasn't the two in Britannia! For about 370 EPs or so, our first spy was successful and returned to base.



But I'm jumping the gun. As you can see, another brilliant thing that had happened was that Pegasus had moved up his cat stack to W of Britannia. Not entirely sure why - perhaps thinking of attacking the stack I had put 1SW of Speed Limit. Here is the cat stack.



And the mounted stack, still 1SW, but now including the rogue half-dozen knights (I realised that nothing had been upgraded, having initially thought otherwise).



So all these units were now within range of all of our mounted units, and all the 1-movers 1SW of Speed Limit.

This is what was in Britannia.

[spacemanmf]

The next step was to see if we could take control of the crucial tile. A culture bomb was fired in Speed Limit, which changed the tile ratio to 51%/48% (damn rounding). I then tried SevenSpirits' idea of the spy culture trick. Unfortunately, it was mission failed.

So it was time to use the second Great Artist. Would it flip that tile? Would it ever! That tile was now 54(and a bit)% ours. We got a bonus tile thrown in too.



Next up, time for our siege assault. 23 catapults and 1 trebuchet were given their orders to march to their almost certain death. CR2 cats got something like 1.3% odds, barrage II got 0.1% odds, but the latter did more damage. One of each has attacked in the shot below.



Gradually, the defenders of Britannia were weakened. The latter few catapults didn't do much collateral damage since the units were almost at their lowest. Three cats withdrew, before I sent in the treb at 89% odds. It lost...



This is the scene in Britannia afterwards.



Next up, the rifles which were three squares away - 1 in SL, 1 S of SL and 1 freshly drafted, all had 95% or so odds and all won. Then it was time for the muskets in SL, since I wanted to take out as much of the mounted stack as possible.

Britannia still had some 5.7/9 muskets and 3.3/6 longbows, which meant that our C1 or unpromoted muskets only had about 65% odds. But I got a good run of luck and only lost 1 of these battles out of 11.

That left only weakened defenders, for which I got these odds or better.



And they quickly went above 95%. I suffered no further losses in taking the city. And Britannia was ours!



Granary, courthouse and ... the Mausoleum of M... a very nice prize. Pity we can't fire any more golden ages for a while.

Combat losses:

Us: 20 cats, 1 treb, 1 musket
Peg: 8 muskets, 13 longbows, 2 spears, vulture, chariot, warrior

But he was now completely open for the killer blow.

EDIT: Somewhere in the above turn we got a Great General, born in DMH.