[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[scooter]

Alright, posted in tech thread, and I also shot BGN a PM with just a link to the post so he gets it.

He normally seems to play right when he gets home from work (5ish), and I think I'll get home a little early today. So I think we should be okay.

I'm honestly not sure now whether or not those units are unloaded. I thought for sure that they were, but seeing the Galleon above the Infantry in the unit order seems to indicate that they are not. That would be a crippling blow to all this. So let's hope BGN doesn't jump in without reading his PMs.

[Dp101]

Could we get a power graph in the next report please?

[Sullla]

Ok, hopefully we'll have the ships thing sorted out soon. Here's what I was going to post before that snafu:


I have some more screenshots to add when I get home, but for now I wanted to point out that Dreylin and OT4E did a very good job of defending. They did not make some kind of obvious mistake that we’re exploiting, aside from not catching that we could promote all our ships to Navigation II (which is a really niche case: drydocks + Vassalage + Theocracy + Pentagon, something you’ll almost never see in practice). That stack of cavs that they put behind Dolphins was a really nice play, able to reinforce whatever city we landed next to and counter-attack on the beaches. From Dreylin’s perspective, they were thinking that we would have to land our units to attack Dolphins, and that we wouldn’t be able to attack amphibiously since there’s only one tile that allows that, which they had guarded by two ships of the line. In other words, they would have a turn to airstrike our units and then hit us with their cavalry, which would have good odds to win. Their cavs would be able to flank away any siege units we brought with us; they probably expected us to land a group of infantry and cannons. And then even if the cavs died, we’d be attacking into a city on a hill with 40% cultural defenses, a city which Dreylin would have a turn to reinforce by drafting/whipping more units and moving them in from other nearby cities (Hedgehogs is only 3 tiles away for example). It was a good defensive setup.

But we threw them completely off with the 3-promotion ships. That allowed the ironclads to take out the ships of the line, which cleared a path for the frigates to bombard out (most) of the cultural defenses, and then allowed a bunch of galleons that looked to be “too far” away to hit the city. Scooter made the call to build that spy a few turns ago, and that turned out to be a genius play, letting us see those cavs ahead of time. It’s too bad we didn’t have another of the galleons 1 move closer to Dolphins, as that would have allowed us to kill all 6 of the cavs while they were sitting there unpromoted on flat ground. Oh well. But we got half of them, and that will help our invasion along markedly. Hopefully we can capture Hedgehogs next turn; a lot depends on what units Dreylin has sitting around that we still can’t see.

In the south, we may have a legitimate chance of razing Dreylin’s capital, although I think they’ll be able to get enough units in there to rule that out. Dreylin and OT4E have to be sweating at least a little bit given how many cities we can reach with our ships. There’s also a good chance that we opt to sail the ships back to our territory and head home. The airships make it dangerous to spend much time outside of our borders, at least not until we have sufficient ironclad cover for our frigates and galleons. Remember, the goal is to gain more land for ourselves from this war, not simply hurt Dreylin. Going on suicide runs to hurt Dreylin will only throw the game to REM.

We really did hurt Dreylin this turn though. I took a Demographics screenshot from the beginning of the turn and after we played, and Dreylin was down almost 300k power rating (we went down about 80k). His Food stat also decreased from about 570 to 510. I see on CivStats that REM played his turn, so I wonder how much further damage REM did. I’m kind of hoping that BGN is slow to play the turn and we can get another look at the numbers before Turn 323 ends. Where this all ends is anyone’s guess, but we got in a pretty good shot on the game leader this turn

[abuzeus]

I know it's one tile off, but will you rename the city of Dolphins back to its rightful name of Antiseptic?

[scooter]

So the units were still technically aboard the Galleon. Needless to say, I unloaded them and then verified the Galleon is showing as empty now. That... could have been bad. Learned something new about unload mechanics today.



Here was the state of things after REM played. Sure looks like he'll be capturing Silkmoths next turn unless Dreylin has considerable units in the fog.

I did check the demos, but Dreylin's soldier count was identical to back when we played our turn, so REM didn't do any sort of combat. Not too surprising.

It does start to confirm my suspicion that the Donovan region isn't really seeing any serious action, which means there's a lot of Dreylin units unaccounted for. I'm starting to get pretty paranoid. If they aren't capturing Donovan's cities (he hasn't captured one in over a week) and they aren't sparring with REM, what are they doing exactly? They surely can't get to Gasparland in time, and what's the point of having them if he can't get some value out of them.

So I have this nagging fear he'll send some at our northwestern front - particularly the Radio-Dynamite area. Of course, he could send them at REM too, but it's better to be extra paranoid. I've been toying with trying to block the passageway with our ironclads, but I'm afraid all that does is give him an airship target that he would easily clean up with Frigates. Anyway, we've been adding units as a fast pace in that area, but we may want to consider promoting some of the city defenders over this on our next turn just in case. Any thoughts?

Finally - yeah I think we should name Dolphins back, but I didn't want to do it this past turn. I guess it's a silly fear of jinxing it before Dreylin's had a chance to respond.

[antisocialmunky]

You could rename it Chemotherapy as Drey has spread like cancer. Also fun fact, the original chemotherapy drug is derived from Mustard Gas so it kinda fits for a war situation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_mustard

[Sullla]

Finishing up with some stuff from the end of last turn that I didn't have a chance to post until now. After scooter logged out, I saw this move:



This rifle wasn't doing anything important in Penicillin so I used him to grab the two Dreylin workers on the hill next to Dolphins:



If Dreylin wants to try and attack the rifle on a hill with the +75% defensive terrain bonus, he's welcome to try. I also promoted the unit to Medic so that we'll have a unit in the area to help our wounded guys heal up. Better to waste the otherwise undesirable promotion on a unit like this.

Note also the galleon under the interface west of Penicillin. It was sitting in Dynamite doing nothing important so I promoted it and moved it towards the front lines, covering it with an ironclad in case there was a random frigate just out of sight. Very unlikely, but no need for chances. This will give us another 6 mover for unit ferrying up here.

Turn 324 has since rolled, and I have good news / bad news to report. The good news is that Dreylin's Golden Age is over:



And with no teams in Golden Ages, suddenly the Demographics look a lot better for us:



We're still third. But it's getting a lot closer now! Dreylin added about 150k in power rating while we added about 125k in power rating. I'm unsure how much REM managed to gain between turns. However, it does show that this is probably not a sustainable war for Dreylin. Strong as he is, he can't face down our team and REM at the same time. As always, the details will be in the tactical execution on all sides.

And that's the bad news for the turn: little Hedgehogs has built a frigate this turn. A frigate, of all things! Look at that picture above one more time:



Our galleon to the south, with three highly promoted infantry, will surely be sunk. That is a very harsh blow to absorb, and may cost us taking Hedgehogs this turn. I'm kicking myself for not seeing that possibility last turn - scooter even mentioned that we had a frigate with leftover movement points. We could have covered the tile SW of Hedgehogs with ease! I mean, it was a stupidly bad spot of luck to have a frigate finish on this turn in Hedgehogs - which was *NOT* whipped and as you can see has no mines or workshops for production - but we could have avoided this. Always have to think about the worst possible scenario and be prepared to prevent against it.

I'm legitimately bummed out about this. Sigh. Dreylin probably won't play until tomorrow, so we'll have to wait and see what other unpleasant surprises like in store for us on his half of the turn.

[scooter]

Yikes . I really was assuming he'd be building an Infantry in Hedgehogs since what good will a Frigate do when we're sailing Ironclads into the region. Apparently now I know what good a Frigate will do.

That's pretty discouraging and will definitely slow us down. Guess we need to hope for better news on the other front.

Dreylin is taking his time on the turns, so I'm not going to rush tonight's turn if he doesn't get his done at an earlier time. If we delay it tomorrow, we delay it to tomorrow. These couple turns are crucial, and we're already seeing how costly even the most obscure mistakes could be.

[scooter]

Logged in to take a look around. I'll play tomorrow.



Airships make this look worse than it is, but it's still bad news. He did indeed sink that Galleon which was a pretty big blow, and REM took Gaspar's former capital. We're quickly approaching a point now where REM may be the real runaway since these last few turns have put a serious dent in Dreylin. Anyway.



I neglected to mark his boats. That's 4 Frigates, 1 Galleon. All unpromoted.

Airships are a pain, and good Frigate placement from Dreylin means we really can't make any headway down here - we're 1 tile out of range of Ducks with the direct path cut off. That's really a shame since it has just that single Cav in it. I'm not seeing a good option for us here.

FWIW - the Privateer still has 2 movement points left.



I really wish we had stuck a unit on this boat just in case. I think Dreylin forgot to account for this (unless there's a Frigate sitting on that fogged tile). I suppose we could do something crazy like board our GG + Infantry, promote to Morale, and then use the new movement point to burn the city amphibiously? It would at least get rid of those pesky airships. Don't really want to give up our ticket to West Point, though, because the Infantry would split the GG XP with the Galleon I'm pretty sure.



This garrison wouldn't be too intimidating if we weren't down 3 Infantry because of you-know. But he's definitely piling units in pretty quickly. Few other notes:

* Hedgehog got reinforced with 1 Infantry, so its garrison is now an Infantry pair - one healthy and one slightly wounded from last turn.

* His Frigate won flawlessly, but our SOTL gets very good odds against it.

* This:



Dreylin apparently used one of his airship bombards on that. I don't know if it means anything? (It took me forever to figure out which Infantry it was he bombarded.)

[scooter]

To be honest, it's awfully tempting to offer Dreylin peace. He and REM are on pretty equal footing at this point I think. We've picked up one city and can easily add another (re-settling that spot we razed from Dreylin), and most of our army is still intact. Then we could:

* Go nab Sector 19 (the holy city) from Donovan.

* Switch to a tech burst and get ourselves Combustion

* Try something else then?

I dunno, just spitballing. I'm struggling to see how we're going to make gains - it seems like we're occupying most of Dreylin's attention while REM gets the bigger prizes. Maybe we should force them to fight each other by bowing out and pursuing something else?