[SPOILERS] Lurkerloos and map discussion

[flugauto]

It's a short term vs long term choice and Brick is long term here. If he (quite likely) survives his choice is right. If not, well...

[Krill]

Because walls are 50 hammers without stone and Barracks are only 30 when AGG. The walls would only just be half way completed. He would just about be able to slave the walls now.

[mackoti]

This might have been a good time to build city walls instead of the completely useless barracks. (Yes, I know that barracks give culture in RB Mod, but 20% cultural defense wasn't changing the odds of this fight.) Not sure why most people completely forget about city walls over and over again in these games.

perhaps he doesnt have masonery .

[Sullla]

Oh come on. They're 90 turns into the game at this point. Anyone can research Masonry easily at this point. Xenu declared war almost a dozen turns ago, and his military buildup was exceedingly obvious on the Power chart. You don't need to be running elaborate C&D numbers to see what this means:




I see three forests in the first-ring of that disputed city. Chopping out city walls would be trivially easy, and make Terrapin almost completely invulnerable to attack. If Xenu tries to bypass the city and go around it, well, that's another 4-5 turns of time bought to prepare more defenses. Brick has just chopped/whipped out about 150 shields worth of military to defend his frontline city. And he's not bothering to construct walls that cost 50 shields and make his city impossible to take in the pre-catapult era?

I think this one is pretty obvious.

[mackoti]

Oh come on. They're 90 turns into the game at this point. Anyone can research Masonry easily at this point. Xenu declared war almost a dozen turns ago, and his military buildup was exceedingly obvious on the Power chart. You don't need to be running elaborate C&D numbers to see what this means:




I see three forests in the first-ring of that disputed city. Chopping out city walls would be trivially easy, and make Terrapin almost completely invulnerable to attack. If Xenu tries to bypass the city and go around it, well, that's another 4-5 turns of time bought to prepare more defenses. Brick has just chopped/whipped out about 150 shields worth of military to defend his frontline city. And he's not bothering to construct walls that cost 50 shields and make his city impossible to take in the pre-catapult era?

I think this one is pretty obvious.

From his screenshots looks like he his broke(i supose thats the right word) for some turns now,and well masonery would take for him a long time .Not everyone think like you Sullla gettting some research power not just loads of cities.

[timski]

One can always argue that Brick should have seen all this coming, and been ready with Walls and Workers and whatnot. But our understanding of their situation does benefit from more context:

1. With a weak opening economy Brick desperately needed to focus on the non-military game for the long-term. So one can see why Masonry wasn't high on their list of tech priorities at the outset. This also meant they were reluctant to trash their economy even further by immediately switching onto a war footing when Xenu first declared.

2. Xenu's initial declaration was ostensibly to scout the city with a single wandering unit. It wasn't immediately obvious that Xenu would be prepared to trash Xenu's own economy in order to produce enough units to take the border city. Indeed, even Xenu acknowledges the act wasn't terribly rational.

3. Once Xenu's power had started to spike, the short geographic distances involved gave Brick very little time to respond. Brick whipped, but their weaker economy meant that Xenu retained the advantage.

I agree that Brick didn't respond well (or really at all) with Workers around their border city, but a part of that was because the way Xenu had already constructed a road just south of Brick's territory. That road meant Brick had to cover any southern Workers with enough to units to repel an unseen invasion stack. That clearly wasn't going to happen when Brick was struggling to find enough units to fortify the city itself. While Brick could (and should) have chopped the northern forest into something useful, that single chop would probably not have been a game-changer.

No doubt Brick could have played it better, but I can see why things played out as they did.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

versus

[Euler]

The galley situation is going to depend a lot on the turn order. Whoever moves their galley first on t98 will be spotted by the other, giving the second mover a chance to unload their units and sink the other galley and all its cargo with it. I haven't read closely enough to see who will move when.

Also, I thought this was ironic:

In-N-Out is well away from the main front and given that there are islands in sight, is a logical place for them to build a galley for overseas settlement. In which case, they'll already have naval assets in play.

Just the opposite.

[Ceiliazul]

I agree with sulla re: walls in Terrapin. Since Brick pinpointed the forever war immediately, he didn't need to wait for the power spike to get his mortar making going.

Commodore's galley? Eh, touchy. Say Commodore has the initiative. Would he risk a GG galley in a 30% fight (coastal defense against him) Tough call.

[kalin]

For Commodore, not losing his iron city is reward enough justifying losing the galley and GG axe. In his shoes I would not risk the galley if I had the option. A 4-move galley has potential that the opponent needs to account for.

It makes me think of WW2 (or was it WW1?) when the British fleet could have destroyed the German one but the Germans avoided battle and stayed in the port using only the potential of their fleet to not allow the Brits to do whatever they wanted with theirs.

Found the reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_in_being

EDIT: It was WW1 after all.

Kalin