Ranamar and Lewwyn, ministers for Bismarck of Mali

[SevenSpirits]

Can you not attack battleships in land forts? Or was it just that you didn't think about it / see it until your ships were out of moves?

Boats can't attack land at all. He's got 4 land units there so we can't kill it with a marine either. (Don't have any left in range anyway.)

[regoarrarr]

Boats can't attack land at all. He's got 4 land units there so we can't kill it with a marine either. (Don't have any left in range anyway.)

Interesting - so this would seem to be a fairly decent defensive strategy if he is outclassed by your battleships. Though I guess it's just as good if he put them in a city (and had enough land power to stop you from taking / razing the city)

So here's a question for you - just trying to learn more about modern warfare. If you were in their shoes, what would you do / have done?

[novice]

Please don't teach Rego modern warfare.

[regoarrarr]

Please don't teach Rego modern warfare.

When I wrote that post I wondered if you (or one of the other folks from PBEM17) would think that was what I was doing.

While I'll confess to having it in the back of my mind, mostly I'm just curious because I very rarely get to see it / do it.

[SevenSpirits]

So here's a question for you - just trying to learn more about modern warfare. If you were in their shoes, what would you do / have done?

To some extent you can already see what we would have done. Because we did it!

However assuming I had to take over one of their positions not too far in the past, I'd do the following.
* Get a resource for ships (oil or more likely uranium first, given the tech situation) ASAP and build lots of ships. Then prioritize refrigeration and oil/light. Don't concede naval superiority. Make it so a strike on a city actually costs my opponent his transports.
* Build way more military in general. The graphs this game are very telling. Our opponents did not take military as seriously as we did.
* Build enough airships that you have as full map knowledge every turn as possible.




Almost all our crop yield loss is self-inflicted. We've been converting pretty much as many resources as possible into units every turn. It's just crazy to, when facing that, build public transportations and other crap like that.

Modern war on this kind of map is NOT pretty. It's basically impossible to defend sufficiently; the best you can hope for is to not get into a fight in the first place. You can have attacks launched against your cities directly from other players' cities! The only way to avert that kind of thing is to kill their city first. Wars in this environment should see painful loss of cities on both sides. Having NAPs with equal powers is critically important because fighting an equal opponent just means bad things for both of you. And if there's someone with much MORE power than you, you need to do everything you can to address it.

The way I think of it is like the evolution of single combat. In the old days you could wear chainmail and carry a shield and a sword and be reasonably good and them, and fend off someone who tried to hurt you with the same. But this is more like you have a shield and a machine gun. Get yourself as many bullets as possible, put the shield in front of your face, and don't ever stop shooting.

If I were in their shoes right now, I would try to concede.

[Ranamar]

Pretty much what Seven said... We've won this game with ships. Nobody has really challenged us on the naval front. Luddite challenged us on that front, and even razed one of our cities, but we had enough ships in the area to eliminate most of his battleship strikeforce in the counterstroke, and he never really recovered. Most of the others didn't even have Astronomy for a long time, and Seven has expertly used this as a bludgeon to convince people they didn't want us fighting them, which gave us time to tech in peace with twice the cities of everyone else.

Some other things to notice on those graphs... we have basically three spikes in power, and all of them tapered off to flat, rather than actually dropping. The first one was our knights, which you can tell by the fact that, around when it ended, our crop yield went waaay up as the cities we took from Mr. Nice Guy came out of revolt. The second hump is slower... that's when we built the first level of or modern military: Machine Guns. The third spike, well... I think we complete at least one unit per 2 cities every turn now... possibly more... and that's ignoring the fact that we've been drafting every turn too. (Actually, the draft, at 3 units per turn, would be practically noise in that consideration.) Yuris, meanwhile, has one spike when he went to war with GES, and then dropped back down, and the others don't really have more than that.

Meanwhile, it's kind of telling that we've been hitting a lot of these cities with, like, 1 or 2 transports. I've noticed I've been getting bothered when the number of attackers needed per defender gets significantly above 1-for-1. We can so frequently hit that number that it's ridiculous. (I'm also notably conservative when playing this game. We could do it fine without the bombers, too, but it costs more units. Occasionally, we've even done so.) Commodore actually has large numbers of Infantry, and if he's not drafting his cities into the ground, he should, because it's better for him than to have us burn them to the ground. The problem is, if we can get the units in the right place, we could probably even drown him in a human wave at this point... but that would give him lots of opportunities to make things cost us a lot more than him, rather than the way it is now.

[SevenSpirits]

Save's in and I'm relieved to see he took the bait and killed the correct transport.

I don't think we'll actually be able to take any cities this turn. Probably my fault not getting the logistics right last turn. Note that ships can't move through forts in neutral territory so no point in trying to fort the culture-free space on the commodore/france land bridge. We will however be able to bomb the jewish holy city and may wish to pick off some defenders afterwards - there are two transports in range I think. Then we can take it the following turn.

I'm not planning to play any more turns, though if you need me to get one let me know.

[SevenSpirits]

I just noticed that ophir has 80% culture, which I believe means we won't be able to hold Nemedia: we'd be blocked from reinforcing it along the rail line after all.

[Ranamar]

Save's in and I'm relieved to see he took the bait and killed the correct transport.

Good to hear!

I'm not planning to play any more turns, though if you need me to get one let me know.

Given some of our previous discussions, that works for me...

[Ranamar]

*sigh* I always forget how long these turns can take. It's mostly staring at stuff that you're just going to have to pick one way or the other anyway. Seeing as it's 1am (again!), I'm (mostly) going to post pictures later. (Actually, I was going to post pictures after all, but photobucket is down.)

A quick summary so I don't forget...

Switched to Universal Suffrage from Police State to buy stuff, but decided for some reason to stay in Vassalage rather than switch to Nationhood. I think I had the idea that it would be nice to have another turn of units getting +2 exp. I think that cost us around 100gp this turn, between lost citizens and upkeep...

Our War Weariness is at around 10-13 without the -50% from that.
It's actually kinda manageable in Police State, oddly enough, but it's really ridiculous the rest of the time. For one thing, we seem to have reacquired a Dyes, so that helps some. Nonetheless, I expect it to only go up, so a couple of cities with chronic happiness problems are getting jails whatever Seven thinks. At the level of population we actually have right now, most citizens are actually working land tiles, so the marginal output of a citizen in the couple of cities I singled out is high enough that it will ... okay, almost ... pay for itself by the time the game ends. At 2 citizens, each with a marginal foodhammer output of 4, we'd be seeing it take 10 turns to pay off. Given the actual situation as I described it, those numbers are both lowballed, and we might even be able to turn culture back down to 0%, depending on the situation.

I have to admit that I have a weird relationship with our units. There are more units that I can keep track of easily, and yet, at the same time, it's hard to find units in the places you really want them sometimes. As a case in point, Nemedia:

He's got 7 defenders in there now... actually looking at the picture I took, it was 8. Oops.
Anyway, I could bring 7 attackers to bear easily. So, I applied a pile of air strikes and then attacked... and the initial attackers did alright, but one of them lost at 90% odds. Thinking I'd just gone from "got it" to "don't got it", I called it off because everyone left could use healing and consolidated. I'll admit I made one of our battleships a medic, but, well, from my perspective that just means it gets to follow the transports around. It's the same speed as them...
Okay, that might have been pretty weedy. As we all know, I need to learn to be more aggressive. I think justifying stuff to you guys might actually help with that, because I have your example to live up to.
(BTW, I couldn't attack with the tank because I'd loaded it that turn.)

In other news, I moved a galleon and upgraded it to a transport (the latter part there probably not strictly necessary, I suspect, but it did let me cram a fourth Marine onto it...) in our island theater in the center. Due to speed, it's forking two of Commodore's cities, and there's a third one a different transport of ours can hit. I have a picture of the three, and I was thinking I'd ask you for opinions on which ones you think I should keep, and which ones I should burn. Of the ones in the picture I haven't posted yet, Hyperborea is probably safe from retaliation due to which side of a spoke it's on, Brythunia is strategically highly valuable but is also size 16 and therefore will be in revolt for forever, and Xapur is on an island, making it a pretty safe target for us and hard for them to reinforce. It currently also has a battleship berthed there, so, if we took it, we could blow a battleship away with a transport and some marines. (It's also close enough to the other island we took that we could take it and then sail the transport straight into the harbor...) We'll likely lose the transport if we attack Brythunia from the east. I don't think our transports can get all the way there in one turn from the west, though. Pursuant to threatening Xapur, I stationed 3 bombers (most I could do, actually, due to city size...) in range of it.



Okay, conclusion I came to about the picture you still can't see is that we can probably keep Xapur and Hyperboria, but Brythunia is too exposed and we should just burn it. Not being able to cross the land bridge there is unfortunate, but preventing them from doing the same is even better. Of course, the biggest reason why I think we can keep Hyperboria is that, based on visible units, it seems like Commodore is finally running out of units. I may be having trouble keeping track of all our units, but all his units are a lot more trackable... although being in an area that is between 1/2 and 1/4 the area that ours are in certainly helps!

Oh! One last thing... Luddite got flight and has a couple of fighters patroling. Our antics might not work as well against him, soon. Burning another of his cities should probably be doable sometime soon, though. I'll spring for it if an obvious opportunity presents itself. There are just enough defenders that it's not quite a sure thing, but we've got a transport forking three of his cities and he can't even see it. I should just do it instead of thinking about it soon. At least now we have a carrier in the area to give things a little extra softening up...