RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Speaker]

to be honest, I think athlete let the timer run out because he had a very narrow window of playing opportunity every day, and if he did not let the timer run out he would eventually miss out on turns.

He logged in numerous times every day, and just chose not to end his turn, for whatever reason (I'm sure he had one, and I'm sure it was based on self-interest).

[Sullla]

Adding on to Speaker's posts above, our turn went like this:



I know it's a repeat image, but I took the same picture, and darn it if the whole thing isn't worth showing twice! Net total for the turn:

We Lost
8 catapults
1 cuirassier
52k total

We Killed
8 janissaries
12 longbows
1 knight
1 pikeman
160k total

Better than 3:1 in our favor, despite being the attacker. (OK, we did have an advantage in tech!)



And that was the end of that!



Moving on to the spoils of war, we rechristed Endor with its original name of Paris, in tribute to the vanquished Byzantines. I can see why this spot was fought over in the early game, as it's a stunningly good city location. Not good enough to plant here before securing copper or horses , but really great land regardless. Paris retained much of its excellent infrastructure, with granary + forge + both gold buildings (market/grocer) and even an Academy! We'll just need to add library, university, observatory, and bank to get an outstanding commerce city. For the moment, we simply run max food (+7 per turn) and grow onto more and more mature cottages. No whipping here! Grow grow grow onto those towns.

Best of all, the Mahabodi (Buddhist shrine) is already providing 42 gold/turn for our empire. Makes a huge difference, let me tell you, and we can further spread the religion to all of our core cities. Not to mention adding a bank here. It's almost unfair that we now control the shrines of the world's two most dominant religions...



As zakalwe correctly guessed, we used one of our excess Great Artists on a culture bomb in Paris, judging that this was more useful than saving for a third golden age. (We already have another Artist to trigger golden age #2 when needed.) There's some weirdness going on with the borders around Yavin, but that should be fixed next turn when the game rechecks some of its numbers after city captures. Then we'll have a very secure border over here with slaze, and cultural protection for one of the best cities in our empire.

Elsewhere, Hilton Head's recapture means that it still has to wait a few turns in resistance, however nearly all of the other Ottoman cities are up and producing under our control. They're small in size still, mainly filling up their granary boxes, but give us 20 turns here to grow them all and grab all those tiles.... Good stuff will result! Fort Sumter and Harper's Ferry will pop their borders next turn, and Hoth will come out of resistance finally. "Hoth" was originally named Athens, but since that name has some bad memories for our team, I went ahead and called it New Byzantium instead. Should be a very, very strong city for us immediately, and a great military base for the future.

Sure looks nice seeing all that purple Indian culture spreading all over the map! Much better than that icky green stuff.



Here's a picture of the slaze army, which is currently holed up in Yavin IV. Mostly horse archers and catapults, with a few other units thrown in. We're honestly not quite sure how Kathlete managed to lose cities to this force, given that he had janissaries and knights... Also would love to know what's up with that City Raider III QUECHUA, of all things!

Speaker, I drew in the borders of our two choices for the new border city in the south. (Will be planted next turn with our settler.) Blue is safer and easier to defend, while Red has significantly better terrain from an economic perspective: an extra sheep and copper resource, while also lessening the overlap with Hilton Head. Let me know which you prefer.

Good thing we started that settler five turns ago, eh?



New Demographics. We're, um, doing well. I think the key stat there is the Production one, where we outstrip Nakor 393 to 216. That shows that while he's a strong researcher, roughly equal to us in GNP, Nakor simply cannot match our huge production edge. We will try to make that decisive going forward in the future.

Also, I looked at our huge costs and State Property civic should save us nearly 200 gold/turn after factoring in maintenance and inflation (!!!) That would get us up to 70% science, well over 1000 beakers/turn, not to mention adding tons of production from our many, many workshops that we've been laying down. Sounds like fun! That's where our tech is heading next....

[timmy827]

Net total for the turn:

We Lost
8 catapults
1 cuirassier
52k total

We Killed
8 janissaries
12 longbows
1 knight
1 pikeman
160k total

Better than 3:1 in our favor, despite being the attacker. (OK, we did have an advantage in tech!)

Also, once you get to large stacks with good numbers of siege, the attacker has a big advantage over the defender:neenernee

Just curious - why do you use the Soldier - demographics to score battles rather than hammer cost?

[Sullla]

Four reasons:

* The Power numbers generally do a good job of representing a unit's military value. Most of the time, a unit's Soldier count rating is equal to its strength. (The one exception is that it undervalues Mounted units a bit, as horse archers are consdierably more dangerous than axemen, even though they are both worth 6k points.)

* The Power numbers are relatively small for each unit, making them easier to understand and compare. Looking at a Power ratio of 160:52 in that last battle is a lot more intuitive than a shield ratio of 1390:500!

* It's somewhat disingenous to talk of "shields" when many of the units on either side are drafted or whipped, and were never really "built" at all. Just one of the little things that bugs me - makes more sense to me talking in terms of "Power" than "build cost".

* I have all the Soldier counts for the pre-industrial units memorized from the Apolyton Demogame, while I don't know all the shield costs off the top of my head. And it also avoids changing costs for units from Quick/Epic speeds, although of course we're not dealing with that here. Hope that answers your question.



In the south, Nakor has moved up a second attack stack against Gao, which Dantski evacuated without a fight. Pretty impressive given the force they have over in the east, although once again it's a slow-moving group. We're itching to get our cavs back down here and flank away all of those lovely expensive cannons.

I talked briefly in-game with Dantski today, and reassured him that we were bringing our units back from the Ottoman territory to assist in the war against Nakor. What we would be doing and when we would be doing it, I was rather vague about. Nevertheless, I think we'll be in position to make some kind of attack in about 5 turns. We'll be ferrying more units over to the central island to defend and/or make some kind of attack against Nakor's holdings there. Already see a couple of prospects over there, and the defenses:



Are not terribly impressive at the moment (though of course they can be augmented through drafting). Nakor has a size 10 city on the coast of the center island defended by a single axeman. Hmmmmmm. We've got galleons now that could probably reach that spot....

With so much of Nakor's army in view, let's calculate his total military power and see how much of it we're missing:

Soldier Count Breakdown: Total = 1491k
Population: ~100k (should be close to this)
Technology: 118k
City Improvements: ~60k
Units: 1213k

What units can we see? Let's tally them up:

26 rifles (14k)
14 cannons (12k)
10 catapults (5k)
9 maces (9k)
7 axes (6k)
4 praetorians (8k)
4 longbows (6k)
2 landsknecht (6k)
2 spears (4k)
1 cavalry (15k)
1 trebuchet (8k)
Total = 804k

Since Nakor probably has ~200k or so units assigned to garrison duty guarding his cities, we can safely conclude that this is the bulk of his army. I would guess that the units in Dantski's lands are about 80% of his offensive forces. If we can smash those, he'll take a while to recover.

In all honesty, the single danger posed by that stack is the 14 cannons. The drafted rifles can be killed easily by catapults + our own drafted rifles or our cavalry. The cannons are the main target.

Elsewhere, we planted the city of Petersburg on the more aggressive "red" tile next to slaze's borders. (And it cost us nearly 20gpt in maintenance, ouch! State Property civic can't get here soon enough.) In the end, we had to go with the much better territory at the red spot. We figured that we can put some rifles in there, and slaze's army of horse archers won't have too much of a chance of taking it. Plus, if he does, so what? Better he attacks there than at the much superior Paris location.

Speaker is going to be travelling the next few days, so I'll try not to do anything disastrous! One last note: Nakor research shows him taking 6 turns to discover Military Science. That's twice as long as it would take us. Things are looking up in the research department...

[VoiceOfUnreason]

It's somewhat disingenous to talk of "shields" when...

You're playing CIV IV. You don't train troops to shield your opponent, you train troops to your opponent.

[Krill]

We Lost
8 catapults
1 cuirassier
52k total

We Killed
8 janissaries
12 longbows
1 knight
1 pikeman
160k total

Which of those units were drafted again?

[Kristian95]

well Sullla did say drafted or whipped

[Shoot the Moon]

well Sullla did say drafted or whipped

Because it wouldn't make sense at all to discuss a whipped unit in terms of hammers.

[Ilios]

Because it wouldn't make sense at all to discuss a whipped unit in terms of hammers.

I'm sure you mean drafted?

[Shoot the Moon]

I'm sure you mean drafted?

I was being sarcastic.