War Tactics and Combat Sims

[mostly_harmless]

If possible, put a defender onto the galley and move into BbB and unload. To my knowledge, it will have zip movement points but will defend.
Getting revolted in BbB would be awful.

mh

[kjn]

Some screenies, to complement the ones that Scooter posted earlier of the Apolyton front.

A lone barb axe in the tundra:

CivPlayers units by Mano y Mano:

CivPlayers units by Brick by Brick:

The stacks that aren't annotated have only a single unit each (a worker and a warrior).

[Nicolae Carpathia]

They're going to be guaranteed to try to revolt BbB, and if they do that, they will have odds on all our units.

I personally had a spy + cuirassier war in my last game, and the combination of the two gives surprisingly high odds. And after they heal up, we have no stack, and they have a huge stack remaining.

I notice the riflemen, they absolutely intend to keep that city.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Double-posting so it doesn't get lost in the aether. CPers are more than capable of taking our city on the second turn of the war, and we're down a huge stack of musketeers, while they can use promotions and use that great general they'll earn.

[MWIN]

Why can't poly revolt the city? They will have enough EP, if CP doesn't have enough..,

[scooter]

So we just did a sim by stream.

Conclusion: if the city is revolted, they will get fantastic odds and wipe the floor. I think it's very likely that they'll be able to revolt it, so we need to assume we're going to lose Brick.

[MWIN]

I see that most of the talk is on brick being captured... They can also raze...

[scooter]

I see that most of the talk is on brick being captured... They can also raze...

Doesn't really change a whole lot. Obviously we'd prefer a capture, and it seems super unlikely they'd bring up defense units only to raze, but it doesn't change a whole lot of our plans if they do raze.

[scooter]

Okay, we talked through a defensive plan in the stream, and I'm here to present what our plan is, and present it to you all for comments. Let me start with the most important front. As I wrote a few posts ago, we did a sim, and if they revolt Brick by Brick, everything we put in it would get slaughtered with very few losses. We don't have precise numbers for the cost of the revolt, but we've estimated it'll cost them 400-600 EPs, and with their massive EP output and the EP slider being available, that won't be an issue. They are capable of simming too, so I think we absolutely must assume they will revolt the city. Their attack only makes sense if that was their plan, and I don't think OT4E is dumb when it comes to tactics. So we will lose it. After my first batch of screenshots, as kjn noted CivPlayers DID bring up several 1 movers that seem lined up to garrison the city. It seems like a logical bet that they plan on keeping and garrisoning the city. So our defense plan here needs to be to set ourselves up for a recapture and/or position ourselves to wipe their stack. So all that said, here's a picture, and I'm going to do my best to walk through it clearly.

THE SOUTH FRONT



There are several stray units not highlighted here, but I just picked the big stacks so as to avoid clutter.

1) We should leave a group of defenders in Brick by Brick. The point is to force them to revolt the city. We figure if we leave approximately 6 defenders in the city (4 muskets, 1 axe, 1 mace), they will have to revolt the city. Their odds will be in the 20s on those attacks if they don't revolt the city, but they'll be into the 80s if they do revolt it. The idea here is to burn all their EPs, so that once we recapture, the culture all comes back, but they won't have enough EPs to revolt the city again.

2) With this in mind, pink circle is the best staging tile. Any further south and they are vulnerable to their giant Cuir stack on the hill. Any further north and they cannot hit Brick. If the Cuirs pile into the city, awesome, we can probably wipe their stack. If the Cuirs move up north, they'll be in range, and we'll hit them that way. If the Cuirs head south, we'll have to handle that, but the city should be easy to recapture in that case. NOTE: we will still control the horse row of culture when Brick falls.

3) The one caveat here is the red box. The one vulnerability we have here is if CivPlayers has 4 workers on hand to road those two tiles. If they did that, they will be able to hit pink. If they want to fight on open ground in our culture in range of a ton of units, that's fine, but the main concern is that we put all our cats on that tile, and CivPlayers flanks them all away with Cuirs. I figure the chances they do this are on the low end, but not insignificant. We only see 1 worker that is in range of those two tiles, but we can't know whether or not they have more. The compromise here is we think we should something like 3-6 catapults on the pink circle, and place the rest on the blue circle. If they flank the cats away, the cats on the blue circle can hit those units, and cleaning up their stack will be trivial from that point. If they choose not to attack the pink circle, 3-5 cats worth of collateral should be enough to take the city, depending on how many units they place into it. And, realistically, if they just pile everything into Brick, we can afford to take another turn to set up.

4) Note the Knight stack highlighted in sign mode. Those will come down. Those will be a big boost.


THE NORTH FRONT



This is much more straight-forward. The basic plan is to move this stack of maces/cats 1NW onto the green signed tile. This is not enough to take out 17 Rifles, but if Apolyton keeps their stack split, this will be enough to take out one of the stacks. Also, if the 2-movers get done in the south are able to come up here, this combined with the Knights would be enough. Basically the hope is to use these guys to keep Apolyton honest while we deal with CivPlayers. If Apolyton trudges through our land and takes a couple cities, whatever, but these guys will prevent them from being greedy and splitting into half. Remember, Apolyton has "just" 17 rifles up here. As you'll see in a minute, they definitely sent quite a few to CivPlayers for defense purposes, so they should not have a large second wave. Finally, the Mano front:



There you see 4 more Rifles in Costalot. Combined with the couple coming to Brick, I can see now why Apolyton just has nothing at all. Anyway, the plan for this turn is to move the Mace/WE mini-stack into Mano and complete the walls. That will likely prevent them from taking Mano next turn. They may just bombard and move 4 rifles up next turn, although the walls will make the bombards pretty ineffective. If they do that, we'll probably lose the city, but this plan will make the city survive an extra turn and force them to commit rifles if they really want to take it, so this seems like the way to go.

---------

So this is our proposed defense plan. Feel free to ask question or make suggestions. I'm pretty confident this is the best way to go, but discuss away. We have almost 2 full days before we need to end turn, and I think we are 100% entitled to using every bit of that if it's what's best for us.

[scooter]

Follow-up note about that post: I shouldn't say "they would need to revolt" about Brick by Brick. They would need to revolt OR they would probably lose ~5 Cuirassers. If they want to save their EPs and lose 5ish and wound 5ish more attacking, that's an okay trade for us.