[SPOILERS] Churchill of Portugal: Gallipoli Part II

[spacetyrantxenu]

I have to say, that's disappointing, but even more so given that you should have moved your eastern boat first to get a better view of the situation.

2 Axes, Chariot, Impi vs. what? You said 6 units on the 3 galleys, plus the axe, but I can't see what other than the axe that is disembarked. In any event, I'm guessing that you had at least 2 axes and 2 spears? That would have been sufficient to prevent getting mauled by scooticator's stack if you landed on the adjacent forest for +50% defense, so probably that was your best move. Then the trireme would be forced to attack 3 galleys, you'd get the 10% bonus as defender, and your two surviving galleys could mop up his trireme.

I'm praying that you unloaded your galley before taking a 4.4% fight?

Yeah, I unloaded the troops before attacking, give me at least some credit! Yes, in retrospect I completely misplayed the attack and didn't evaluate all of my options. I need to get out of the habit of playing turns before I go into work, because doing that at the end of every turn (on weekdays anyway) doesn't give me enough time to look at a situation and leave it unplayed if I need time to think things over, or ask for advice if there actually is anyone not reading the other relevant threads. This is one of those situations where mechanically I knew the right answer (I even mentioned it in the same post after I described what moves I made), I just couldn't piece it together at the time when I needed to. Yes, the correct move would have been to not declare war, sail the two northern galleys through the trireme, unload all three boats from the "combined" tile, and just wait for the trireme to attempt a 3 on 1 attack of my boats. At the time, though, sailing through the trireme while at peace didn't occur to me because I had an "at war" mindset, obviously you can't sail through a boat while at war, hey, let's attack the trireme! If I was playing earlier in the turn I would have probably not done anything down there and thought about it more because I wasn't pleased at all with having to roll the dice on the first galley attack damaging the trireme enough to let the attack continue. Team > playing solo for cases just like this. More options under consideration would have defintely improved my results here.

I don't remember my exact troop composition, but no, Scooter's stack would not have posed a threat to me. I mean, if he had attacked sure he could have weakened me and made attacking the city harder but he wasn't going to wipe my seven units with his four. Unless the Zulu have some kind of combat voodoo that they've been using so far that makes them invincible. That may actually be happening with the way they've rolled through India so far. Maybe 4 vs. 7 is odds they can handle?

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

FWIW, I'm not spoiled in this game, so feel free to bounce ideas my way. I've nothing better to do now that my game is over.

[spacetyrantxenu]

FWIW, I'm not spoiled in this game, so feel free to bounce ideas my way. I've nothing better to do now that my game is over.

You just need to get yourself into another game.

[Ceiliazul]

I'm spoiled but still reading. :-)

[spacetyrantxenu]

Several turn reports missing but at this point who cares. This is going to be a problem:




A lot of my forces are on boats on the southern end of the continent. Another chunk is garrisoning New Fish up by Serdoa. Most of the rest is providing HR happiness in the southern end of my area. Apparently using all the production at the good hammer producing border city to provide HR garrison for the big southern cities was a bad idea. That and there is a mostly finished settler stuck in the queue that is about to get wasted. What a kick in the nuts, just when the economy was back on track too. Now I'll whip everything to the bone and still lose half of my empire before I turn the tide. T128, high water mark. T129, knee deep in it.

I guess I should have looked at the scoreboard and noticed I was at war at when I logged in (where was the war horn, anyway?), I would have declined Azza's OB offer. I had offered OBs to him before but now I won't be needing those last two trade routes...I already had a full set minus two routes before the offer, now it's just gravy to him.

If this doesn't answer the question about who would have been a better neighbor to the south, I don't know what does. If Scooticator hadn't run all over India I wouldn't have dogpiled on, and my troops would have been much less out of position -- most of the southern expeditionary force came from this northern border.

Shit, now I have to go to work thinking about this mess.

[Ceiliazul]

[spacetyrantxenu]

T129 - We'll see how it goes. I'm going to lose the two front cities but if I'm lucky it'll cost Brick 1/3 of his front stack. These cities are going to be an unfortunate (and brief) delaying action but I think I can whip enough spears to stop his advance eventually. I'll lose Black Fish and Blue Fish, and if Brick doesn't push straight for the choke at Red Fish he may get Old Fish if I can't reinforce it (it's a bit off to the side, so who knows). The problem with this plan is that my iron source is going to be on the front lines and may be pillaged. I'll probably have to swing a lopsided deal to get someone else's source, but I'm eliminated from contention in this game anyway (not like I wasn't before this), so who cares what the cost is, I'll pay it and fight until either Brick conquers me or gives up. Anyway, I stared at the screen for several hours trying to figure out a plan and that's all I could eventually come up with.

Before I get to screen shots I'm sure someone is going to accuse me of spite whipping Blue Fish and being a bastard about it, so let me stop you before you get started with that. For most of the day I assumed there was no way out and was going to try to swing a deal to gift the two front cities to Brick in exchange for peace. I'd get 10 turns to build up as many spears as I could in my other cities and he could try again after that if he thought he could make any headway. Under that scenario I whipped the settler that was 55/100 in the Blue Fish build queue and when the gift went through it would teleport to my territory. Several hours later I tried to figure out what units Brick had unaccounted for in his power rating, to see if maybe I could fight off the invasion if his units that I could see were most of his usable force. So I ran the numbers, as best I can figure it the numbers go like this:

My power numbers came from this page, I hope it wasn't horribly out of date to cite the BTS 3.17 numbers. If it is, well I may be in trouble if I've vastly underestimated.

visible units power = 140,000
demographics rival best power = 276,000 (I know it's Brick because I'm #2 in power and visibly behind him in the power charts)

unaccounted power total = 136,000. Let's find it.

power from buildings = 26,000
(
trading posts = 3 *1000 = 3000
walls = 1 * 2000 = 2000
barracks = 7 * 3000 = 21000
)

techs = (min) 6000 + 4000 + 8000 + 20000 = 38000 (do I have to list these out? I'm guessing anyway, I'm sure Brick has a more accurate count in his thread).

pop = 12000 (we traded maps a few turns ago, it added up to 25. Sounds like 12000 power to me).

total visible all sources = 216,000 of the 267,000 rival best. So:

not visible = 51,000

2 galleys = 4000 (47000 to go) (I've seen two galleys minimum)
6 cities, 1 archer each = 18000 (29000 to go) (this is an estimate. He probably has warriors guarding his northern cities, but he's defending his coast against Serdoa, right? Right? So on average he may have the equivalent of an archer at each of 6 cities I don't have visibility on, and I'm giving 3000 power to each city's defense).
2 more axes = 12000 (he probably has some axes, right?)
2 more spears = 8000 (9000 to go) (he knows I have chariots, why not build a few spears?)
1 more HA = 6000 (3000 to go) (trickling in from the north?)
1 more archer = 3000 (0 to go) (or 3 warriors, or more triremes, whatever)

so possible unaccounted usable power is 2 axes, 2 spears, 1 HA, 1 archer, or some other combination of that 29000 power. This is probably completely wrong and he has another stack of 14 HAs inbound. In that case I'll see you guys in the lurker thread.

So Brick probably has some reinforcements he can send my way. Fine, I'll cover those with more archer builds, whatever. I don't have anything to attack out of my cities with, it's going to take ages to tech Construction, so I'm stuck on that count. If I had had five more turns of peace (and good research) this would have been a different scenario but that's the game. I'm using thoroughly ancient age units 130 turns into the game.

Not much else to describe for all the time I spent trying to figure out another way to handle this. I evacuated the surviving work force, moved as many units forward from my HR garrisons as I could (including the 4 archers from One Fish. HR garrison is temporarily being provided by 4 units offloaded from my galleys, until I move some of those guys forward too). I'm not really worried about unhappy faces, they're all going to be whipped off anyway. I think I hate RB Mod, because when you have the slavery nerf, haven't researched MC and can't build workshops (and don't have enough tiles to put workshops on), well you're in a bad position for hammer production. I have so much whip anger already from repeated 1 pop whips (and I've tried to lay off the whip hand lately, until now) that my economy will be ruined for 50 to 75 turns if I survive with part of my core intact, just from whip anger. If some of my army survives and can provide garrison I'll get to at least use HR to work tiles but I have to pay for the army too, which is obviously expensive.

Anyway, I've written enough, this is enough damn civ for one day. Wrap it up. Pictures.




That is what the map looked like when I thought I could swing this deal:



But the more I thought about it, the worse I felt. I'd still have to whip my empire into nothing to ensure peace after 10 turns, so why should Brick get to keep his stack intact? Just because I still harbor a grudge against Serdoa? (I do). Whatever, I didn't force Brick to whip up an army, he has to spend it. So he'll take at least two cities and we'll see after that. I didn't submit the offer.

Under the presumption I would lose those cities, parting shots:

I had previously left the city 1 food short of growth for whipping reasons, good thing I did, that's one less population for Brick to convert into a HA later. I used some suboptimal (but still commerce producing) tiles and ran specialists to avoid growing.



Same story in Blue Fish, work coast, don't grow, whip the settler, and if Brick took the prospective city trade peace deal the settler would teleport out and I'd get to build a replacement city from the 2 pop I burned to build the settler. It didn't work out that way, too bad. And if I sound defensive about explaining why I'm not being a bastard and spite whipping, it's because I am being defensive about because I know how some people are around here about these kinds of things. If it bothers you, this isn't the thread for you. I reserved the right to change my mind about my build and try to cost Brick as many units as possible by building a wall instead of hoping to get the settler. Sure, I could have built the settler, double moved that one unit to get him out of harm's way, but this isn't a double move game. And surely that's worse than changing my mind about what I want to spend my remaining population on.

By the end of the turn right before I rolled it, the map looked like this:




Those two axe builds would have been better off spears, but they were already in progress so I finished them. I need to get units moving toward Red Fish and Old Fish to save those two cities. Next up is spears, spears, spears (and walls at the last minute when needed).

I forgot to resize the game window for this one, oops. Next up, spears.

I ended turn and stayed logged in long enough to catch new demos for the start of T130. Coming right up.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I forgot to post the end of turn demographics:

[spacetyrantxenu]

T130 - As the turn rolled before anyone logged in, demos and graphs. This is no longer accurate as I'm two cities short by now.

Back up to #2 power, for now. Yay.


If this was a stock market, we'd be in August 2008 right now. Get ready, we're going DOWN.


Surely that was a 1 turn golden age when I ran 100% science?


Hopefully I just whip all my cities to the ground, rather than having them outright captured (that's the dark pink line).


As bad as my hammer output is, Brick's was never any better. He just whipped everything. I wonder if he ate the losses and went 2 pop where I kept 1 popping everything? I'd like to know from anyone who has thought more about it than I have, 2 pop whipping in RB Mod, is it worth it (not counting current dire situations where it doesn't matter how much pop I burn, I just need the units now).


It doesn't look so bad on paper. But geography is not in my favor. Brick has one front city, two archers in it. Basically everything else is free to join the attack stack. And really, just how obnoxious is an AGG neighbor? (Just realized, Brick probably has some stables built, at 2000 power each he may have even fewer reinforcements on the way than I previously thought. Also, those HAs are well promoted, a lot of combat I / shock. I don't suppose that manifests in any way in the power rating?).


Who

***insert missing espionage chart here***

Cares? Seriously, I'll get graphs on the Zulu next turn so I can measure my power against what it took to kill Nakor. And I'm sure I'll get all upset about that too. Seriously, enough of this game for now.

[Ceiliazul]

I stared at the screen for several hours trying to figure out a plan and that's all I could eventually come up with.

Before I get to screen shots I'm sure someone is going to accuse me of spite whipping Blue Fish and being a bastard about it, so let me stop you before you get started with that.

Part 1: hours??

Part 2: Whipping down a doomed city is called denial. Nothing wrong with that.