[SPOILER] Jowy - Peter of Egypt (Green Game)

[Tatan]

Even with my vast force of catapults, this stack is untouchable. I can build more cats and resist, but honestly this stack is Armageddon-Incarnate. I haven't done the sims yet, but it is extremely likely that I will have to evacuate Alexander, and just hope that I can gather enough troops to destroy the stack eventually. Seifer managed to gift me a bunch of knights and a grenadier, but that won't save me as things stand currently. Honestly, my best hope now is that Kyan does something stupid, like splitting his stack, but I highly doubt that he will. And it likely won't matter anyway.


I haven't given up... but this move just damaged my cockiness attribute by about -98%. More next turn.

[Tatan]

Ironic that as soon as I have more time to report, there is so much less to report on. Guess I'll go update PBEM4.

What was that? :rolleyes: Alas, I was home sick at the time, and before I could begin- [TMI-checker: God, that's disgusting! Why would you want to tell that to anyone?! Ugh.] -only 8 purple spots left! So anyway, now I'll get reporting on the most recent turn... no, wait, it appears I have another turn in my inbox! Time to play; if I'm lucky, there'll be enough time later for a double-report.

[Tatan]

Kyan's stack is moving up slowly and cautiously, looks like he is planning on bringing his entire army up to bear on Alex. Notice the rifle mini-stacks trailing behind; I think a constant trickle of enemy units can probably be expected. But also exploited.

After some kibitzing with catapults...


Knights have relatively good odds [~70% on average], so I start sending them in. Which is when I realize that I made a horrible mistake based on an inadequate understanding of the road system . Turns out, if a knight comes down from Alex, hits the stack, and successfully wins/withdraws, then it only has enough movement to get to 1SW of Alex. In otherwards, right next to bad ol' Kyan's army. Augh. Ultimately, I still go through with the attack, because 5 suicide cats are too many to go to waste, but the hammer trade-off ended up being pretty horrible.

Mayan Casualties [Total: 584 hammers]
8 rifles

Egyptian Casualties [Total: 699 hammers]
5 cats [165 hammers]
5 knights [300 hammers]
4 maces [188 hammers]
2 axes [46 hammers]

At least the Egyptian Casualty figure already includes those who will die on Kyan's turn. Unfortunately, this is even worse than it looks, because all those survivors will simply give Kyan more exp [because yes, I forgot to delete them]. Silver lining, this will at the very least screw up the formation of some of his units, which might allow me to ambush some wounded units next turn.

Also on the bright side, Seifer's forces continue to trickle in, while I send 6 cats up to his borders [ETA 5-6 turns]. Why? Catapult + 120 gold = Cannon . Expensive, but necessary for breaking through those gigantic stacks Kyan seems to raise without breaking a sweat. Heck, the man just built the Statue of Liberty [and yes, I've been experiencing Emancipation for quite a while now].

But I have bigger things to worry about. Yes, bigger than 20 rifles. Bigger than 30 cavs. Bigger than the inevitable waves of infantry I'll be facing if I hold out long enough. My friends, TT is launching a naval invasion.



Oh, god! The horror! Flee, for your god-forsaken lives, flee!

[Tatan]

The giant traveling carnival that is Kyan's army rolled on through, my remnants from the Raid of Fools disintegrating thoroughly.



But at least I'm getting rifles! So, yeah, if you've been paying attention to the stack composition in the last few turns, you'll know that staying would be total frickin' suicide. And Kyan had the irritating foresight to bring along two workers, so if he captures and keeps the city, he can road the tile the stack is now on and use cavs to attack anywhere in a very large radius:



Yellow line is my new borders [give or take a couple tiles], cyan line is Kyan's new borders [if he keeps Alex], and dotted red line is the area within which Kyan can attack.

Thus, I know that I must retreat; but where? I can't huddle out in the open, because cavs will rip me to shreds, so trying to play zone defense and cover multiple cities is out. Thus, I must choose: Shiva in the SE, or Leviathan in the N/NW. Pros/Cons:

Shiva
+Large cultural borders give me control over the battelfield.
+Near enough for my whole stack to move to Anima in one turn.
+Holding Shiva forces Kyan to deal with the city before moving onto Yojimbo and to a lesser extent Anima.
-Not one of my better cities, with most of its improvements pillaged and very little production.

Leviathan
+One of my best cities; has the Heroic Epic [in retrospect, a mistake on my part].
-Is already tenuous due to close borders with TT.
-There is only one route out of Leviathan [the road 1SE of the city], making it a death-trap.
-Holding Leviathan only really covers Fenrir, and not even very well at that.


So, I guess by now it's pretty obvious where I fled to.



With a single CG2 longbow and one whipped musket as defense. Leviathan is doomed as soon as Kyan so much as glances at it. In fact, therein lies the problem: as soon as Kyan moves his whole stack right next to one of my cities, I am forced to abandon it, because there is simply nothing I have right now that can hold up against that army. Forcing Kyan to move up his whole force one tile at a time to each city will delay him a lot, but I still lack a means of driving him back. The cannons and other auxiliaries from Seifer are going to be critical, because unless Kyan splits his stack and allows me to isolate and take on each portion individually, I'm helpless.

Not to be one of those people who wails and collapses under the weight of a snowflake, but frankly there is really not much I can do in this situation. The victory or defeat of Kyan is pretty much up to what Kyan himself does. Sure, Seifer can send aid, but how much, and for how long?

Unfortunately I opened this turn to some bad news. It turns out Kyan did have some troops moving towards me via Malakai's land. Two smaller stacks by the looks of it. Lost Hills (a newly placed, undeveloped border city up north) was razed and he dropped another stack off using a couple of boats just outside my coastal city The Hub. It consists of 4 cavs and 2 rifles, so not a lot, but it has kind of caught me off guard. I could only get 3 rifles into the city so I expect it to fall next turn. That's a little unfortunate and possibly preventable if I had played more cautious, but the city is commerce city and wasn't contributing to building units so hopefully it won't be too punishing. I don't know what Kyan sent north to destroy my other city but it surely couldn't be much compared to what you're facing. I'll have to organise a bit of a defence to cover this new front which means the troops that I could freely send down to you will be slightly fewer now.

I mean, if Seifer is forced to delay sending help because of 4 cavs and 2 rifles, I really can't hope for too much, can I? Oh, and this also means that my evaluation of Malakai is back to untrustworthy puppet.

tl;dr: Please tell me Kyan is role-playing Napoleon and his rifles will die of frost-bite. 15 0n133 h0p3!1!

[Tatan]

Wow, the save! So many possibilities, I wonder what this new turn holds?



And on that fun note consider this thread necro'd.

[Tatan]

Philosophy: in! I can research Nationalism now, but instead I began running 100% gold, to give Seifer some help with upgrading my catapults to cannons.

I thought this was particularly amusing:



Why, of COURSE! For what use have the Egyptians for war?!


On the Seifer front, he lost a city as expected:



No troops have been sighted since, although Seifer is once again nervous about a naval invasion [personally, I find it a bit far-fetched, considering how much easier it would be to simply kill us over land].


Kyan, also as expected, made use of roading and moved his army towards Leviathan:



He decided to split the stack, probably to prevent my troops in Leviathan from retreating.

But fortunately, Leviathan has plenty of troops on its own that I don't have to retreat! Look, good sirs, upon this glorious garrison!



...

Since I didn't have enough combat workers in range for an emergency road, these troops were all basically doomed. Fleeing to just outside the city would have only separated Kyan's troops a bit [and I couldn't really take advantage of that given that anyway], so I left most troops within the city in order to damage Kyan's cavs as much as possible [for stalling purposes, obviously]. Since the knights wouldn't be getting any extra boni, though, I decided to send them on a sortie against that stray rifle you see 1SW of the ruins of Alexander [there was also a cav underneath, but it was at like 3 strength]. First knight, promoted to C1+Pinch, has 25.4% odds. So I go in.

And don't deal a single point of damage. At that point, I didn't want to throw the other knight away needlessly, so I keep him in the city.

That ax, though, won't be doing a single bit of good in or out of the city. So, the brave soldier sallies forth... on an [SIZE="4"]ADVENTURE!!![/SIZE]



For greatness! For justice! For... okay, if he lasts more than two turns I swear I will promote him to War Leader Of All The Copper-Blades. Seriously, an ax roaming around in the age of cavalry?

[BTW: since I'm now an omniscient narrator, having played several turns ahead, in addition to being a mediocre writer, I'll just add here that the previous passage was TOTALLY FORESHADOWING]


Anyway, that left only a few brave souls against the Mayan destroyers.



Think of a Spanish conquistador clashing with the vast [STRIKE]Mayan[/STRIKE] Aztec hoards... only they have the guns.

Anyway, in a show of spite, I did what I should have done with Alex and whipped Leviathan down to size 2.



Unless he's insane, Kyan won't be keeping this city anyway, but by reducing the size he will at least get less capture gold.




Meanwhile, I decided to relocate my stack here. Why? Well, if Kyan does something stupid, I'll be in a position to take advantage of it. But at the same time, I can also cover every city Kyan can march towards.


Oh, and apparently I didn't take a picture of this, but TT moved the galley + trireme pair to just two spaces away from Fenrir, the next coastal city over from Leviathan. I noticed this immediately, and made myself a note to move a few knights into the city [oh, believe me, I had plenty nearby for just such a purpose]. I even made a physical note, in-game, so that I wouldn't forget.



Foreshadowing.

[Tatan]

[Note: somehow I lost all the pics for this turn, sorryz]


Subtlety...

Oh, and apparently I didn't take a picture of this, but TT moved the galley + trireme pair to just two spaces away from Fenrir, the next coastal city over from Leviathan. I noticed this immediately, and made myself a note to move a few knights into the city [oh, believe me, I had plenty nearby for just such a purpose]. I even made a physical note, in-game, so that I wouldn't forget.

...has never been one of my strong suits.

Tatan,

The deaths of my many citizens have finally been avenged. My unbeatable navy has exacted painful and permanent revenge on the heathen city of Fenrir.

Have a nice day :-)

TT

Okay, normally I try to confine my cursing to my head, but I was seriously goddamn pissed off at myself after I read this. I KNEW that this was coming, and I simply forgot to reinforce. TT, if/when you read this post-game: I don't mean to belittle your success or anything, a naval invasion on that scale actually was pretty smart in that it would have forced me to draw troops away from the front as you sailed along the coast. But there is NO FREAKING WAY that a knight and a pike should have been able to kill off an entire city. Ugh. Of course, Kyan could have easily crushed the city anyway, but it would have delayed him precious, precious turns; remember, while Kyan has cut off reinforcements, I'm bringing in an average of 4 or so units from Seifer each turn, in addition to my own swarm of units.


Anyway, sorry for that rant. Kyan razed Leviathan with no losses [I think? It's been a little while.], and moved his other troops southeast. With the two northwestern cities gone, and the rest of the neraby northern coast unsettled, Kyan will have to go through Anima in order to get anywhere, giving me a solid point of defense. Shiva he will likely go for first, however, due to its massive cultural borders; taking those out would allow him to maneuver much more freely across the front. Fortunately, the two cities are only three tiles away, so I can [for now] defend both of them.


Meanwhile, Axe-Man [TM] continued traveling through the harsh Chinese lands, hoping to find [STRIKE]Mount Doom[/STRIKE] a stack of doom. But all he found was a mace sitting one tile away covering a worker. :\ It looks like our hero is in grave danger, facing his terrible weakness, Obsolescence-ite. WILL HE BE SAVED?! Stay tuned to find out... or I could just tell you now.

Ha-ha, you didn't actually think I reveal it, did you? No, looks like you're going to have to wait for the next update, which will be coming along "shortly"*.

[SIZE="1"]*+/- one lifetime[/SIZE]

[novice]

You crack me up.

[Serdoa]

[Tatan]

Over the borders and through the barren wastelands...



...to the house of Shiva Kyan goes. Nothing surprising so far, Kyan is simply regrouping all his units. However, he will have several interesting choices next turn, and I was unsure at the time of which he would take [ignore those signs, those were simply to help me think]. I saw 3 realistic options:

1)The entire stack moves up as a whole 1SE. This will make it a slow advance, but have the advantage of effectively neutering the possibility of a successful counter-attack [not that I wouldn't sim it out to see if it would be possible, of course].
2)The rifles move 1SE while the cavalry and horse archers move ahead of them, to either 2SE in order to hit Shiva or 1SE1E in order to hit Anima. This would speed up the assault significantly, but run significant risk of counter-attack.
3)The stack doesn't move at all, so Kyan can put those GGs to use healing all the wounded units. I was nervous he would do this at the time, but in retrospect it seems subpar, considering that if he wanted to do that he shouldn't have entered my borders, in addition to the fact that healing just really wasn't necessary.

Of these 3, I could only guess at what Kyan would do. So here's how I handled it:



Now, I have the opportunity to hit Kyan's stack no matter which option he chooses. But why split up the stacks? Well, Kyan has sentries, plural, so it is possible for him to see any stack that is three tiles away from him--in other words, the striking distance for a one-mover stack. Of course, the striking distance for knights is 6 tiles, so I could simply move them further away. As for the one-movers, I tried some subterfuge. Moving a sentry 1SE is the most obvious choice for Kyan, so he would probably see the southern longbow stack first. Since I hadn't shown (m)any of Seifer's industrial units to him so far, I was hoping that he would think that to be my primary stack, and not bother scouting to 1E where he could see the smaller stack of advanced units and extra catapults. Thus, there was a slim chance that he would underestimate my forces, and get careless. Now, this plan was VERY tenuous, and I never really expected it to work. But hey, all I lost was the 5% fortification bonus, so I figured why not?

Anyway, to put what I just spent several paragraphs saying () into one sentence: Kyan moved up, and I shifted around my units for maximum options next turn.

Onto more important stuff, specifically, the adventures of
[SIZE="4"]AXE-MAN:[/SIZE]slayer of most types of melee units.

So here's the result of TT's turn:

Woo-hoo, our hero lives to flee another day!

Really, why did TT do this? Did he just not notice it, or was he being over-cautious? I mean, I guess a mace vs an ax in a forest isn't *that* great of odds, but I would have thought TT had a promo in hand, or a back-up unit, or... something. But I'm not complaining, because Axe-Man has another power beyond the awe-inspiring abilities to wield axes that not even Twinkletoes could have imagined, a power he picked up on the hard streets of Leviathan. His eyes have acquired the mystical ability to absorb incoming light, focus them inside to a common point, convert those particular light patterns into chemical messages, send them to the brain, decode those messages into patterns of particular wavelengths of the visible light, and then analyze those images in order to decipher real-life events. Yes, Axe-Man has Vision-Vision.



Translation: free turn of scouting, alright! Axe-Man must now only assimilate with the Chinese, and become unnoticeable, primarily by speaking aloud phrases such as "Man, our glorious leader TT is mighty swell, and not at all the puppet of a technologically advanced dictator!" and "Gee, I SURE AM Chinese, huh? Wowzers!".