[No Players] Where the Lurkers Take Their Holidays

[greenline]

He definitely has a strong position. But he needs to win a war against Ljubjana to be completely secure, given their long border. Ljubjana has more power, and other civs like Mmjd have been willing to give him loans to keep his economy afloat. By the time Ginger could theoretically grind out the zulus someone else could have gotten further ahead. So I think it is pretty silly to call it now for Ginger when he does need some geopolitical factors to break his way.

[Tarkeel]

Doesnt sound like a bad move, but honestly the only thing keeping me from making progress against Mjmd IS the frankly, broken Machine Gun. Cant touch it for ages. Have to beat a straight up 18str unit with defensive bonus's.

IMHO the way to deal with machineguns is strike them with airships and then follow up with anti-siege promoted cavalry. Yes, it will be bloody, but it's possible to break through.

[El Grillo]

I’d ask Ljubljana: Rifle/cannon fighting tanks is one thing, but how do you defend against bomber collateral without fighters running interception missions? Assuming that you’ll have full-up units and city defenses up seems a little bit optimistic.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Can someone who's been keeping up with the threads kindly give me a quick breakdown of how the world has evolved since mid-July? It's hard for me to wade through ljub's text, a bit too stream of consciousness for me to get a clear picture.

[xist10]

Only for Ljub for after the game.
I didn't want to write a long part over MG in his thread, but I really want to try to write it down.

I'm not 100% sure how I do this.
So let's start with the MG counter.
1. Modern units. Marines have a higher base strength and negate the gunpowder bonus, tanks are stronger (and have access to better promotions) and artillery has a 50% bonus against siege weapons.
2. MG are not immune to the collateral damage from bombers

3. City raider cannons have good chances against (Drill) MG in cities.
4. Flank2 cavs are surprisingly good. 50% withdraw chance is good.

MG have 2-3 main use cases.
1. Defence against outdated units. The inherent first strike makes the MG a lot better than for example infantry.
2. Stack defence after the stack got hit by enemy collateral. MG are immune to collateral damage from siege weapons, so If they don't defend against the siege weapons, they defend with full health against the other units. - This can be a city defence too.
3. Coast defence (till marines). MG relative good defenders against amphibian attacks. You can't retreat (or use siege weapons), this means 2 possible counters are not possible.

And interestingly, you can negate 2 counters somewhat if you use the better promotions you get, if you upgrade a grenadier or a crossbow.
Garnison MG is a lot stronger than a Drill MG.

I really think I forgot a few things.

tl,dr: MG are good if you have a tech advantage. They perform worst when they are top defender against enemies with at least tech parity.
Try to upgrade units to MG, not built them.

[Tarkeel]

(I rolled a double turn, so this is actually a turn after I discovered the destroyer.) Mjmd is probing my sentry net with a destroyer. He could have scouted me with airships. He could (and does) have explorers traveling on my railroads. Why does he need to test the waters just outside my cultural vision?  The trouble is that transports and destroyers are just so fast that I would need to have a truly extensive sentry net to cover every angle. I'm working on building some more caravels. In my distress, I offered Superdeath open borders.

Judging from the minimap in Mjmd's report, he's just defogging the map, but I can feel Nauf's paranoia here.

[GeneralKilCavalry]

endgame is pretty interesting here...

[pindicator]

Looks like Mjmd got his nukes out before any dogpile could be agreed on. We'll have to see what Civac has left, but that was a crazy alpha strike.

[greenline]

Do people feel nukes are balanced when you can still instakill 40+ unit stacks from across the map? (Albiet at a high cost)

[Tarkeel]

Historically games have usually been decided before nukes, and nukes have been banned. I do think the game does need them to open up the late-game stalemates, but perhaps they should not be whippable?