[SPOILERS] Bismark of Sumeria (luddite + Atlas1998)

[luddite]

How much do you know about mackoti's production? How many turns worth of base-production did the latest set of battles cost each of you?

Well let's see. Here's the production graph. You can see I've made a big shift towards commerce in the last few turns, plus some whipping.

It looks like he has about 2/3 my production right now. According to demographics, i have 84 production, which gives him 56. I lost 470 hammers, he lost 870. So that means i lost 5.5 turns of production, and he lost 15.5. Ouch.

Of course, demographics aren't everything. They don't include slavery or chopping. It might be more accurate to say that, With his 5 cities focused on production, I'd expect him to produce about 2 units per turn, maybe slightly less. So the 21 units he lost (not counting this turn) would be 10.5 turns. That's probably overestimating his production a bit- he must be running some scientists, to be able to tech metal casting so fast.

[luddite]

So, recent events have caused me to re-evaluate my strategy. I don't think it's possible for me to build up my economy as long as mackoti is doing his best to destroy me. In particular, I'm worried, that he might tech machinery and attack me with crossbows. I need to kill him. Besides, his capital will make a fine prize Here's my knowledge of his land.


The plan is to send all of my units in between Hagi and Dobrin, so that he can't defend both. He'll have to split his forces in half, or attack me. As long as I have enough units to survive his counterattack, I can win. Then I'll raze his southern cities, and take Hagi after I've got catapults. Right now I've got 21 vultures, and I doubt he has much of an army at all. Incidentally, i can get visibility on his cities in about 10 turns.

[Cyneheard]

Re: Dazed:

I built a combat odds calculator as an Excel spreadsheet. I should probably put it together and post it in a final form at some point, probably after PBEM4 and 10 are done so that I'm not helping my opponents out . It still needs some work that I haven't gotten around to doing (The UI needs to be a LOT cleaner, right now it's a mess for anyone else to use, and I should also implement mounted withdrawals. I doubt I'll try to implement catapult-type withdrawals, from dealing max damage to a target, because that's not easy to do).

[NobleHelium]

Sometimes this game seems really weird. I win all the low % battles, and lose all the high % ones? wtf??? Well, as long as I win in the end, I'm happy

More experience than the reverse.

[dazedroyalty]

Re: Dazed:

I built a combat odds calculator as an Excel spreadsheet. I should probably put it together and post it in a final form at some point, probably after PBEM4 and 10 are done so that I'm not helping my opponents out . It still needs some work that I haven't gotten around to doing (The UI needs to be a LOT cleaner, right now it's a mess for anyone else to use, and I should also implement mounted withdrawals. I doubt I'll try to implement catapult-type withdrawals, from dealing max damage to a target, because that's not easy to do).

I've always thought it odd that with all the Civ fans out there, no one has made a combat calculator that was easy to use and accurate. I know they are fairly common and used all the time for online games like Travian and HOMM Kingdoms. Whenever you get this done, I'd love to have it! (If you want to pass it along sooner, I promise not to share with any of your enemies!)

Luddite, how does the mod you use work? Is it RB approved?

[Nicolae Carpathia]

There's an ancient one from back in '05, but it's horribly out of date ever since Warlords and BTS changed the mechanics. It's also kinda scary how unintuitive attacking using counter-promotions works, but I've finally worked it out.

Luddite, how does the mod you use work? Is it RB approved?

I think it's safe to say that we're allowed to sim using whatever tools we want.

[luddite]

This is the mod I was talking about
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=310415

I don't use it in the actual game, I just use it when I want to sim a complicated battle. The main benefit is that it tells you how likely you are to do various amounts of damage, which helps a lot when you're trying to use several weak units to overwhelm one strong one.

[luddite]

I guess it's been a while since I've done a diplo update. Here's a series of emails I've had with sleepingmoogle.

Since we're approaching turn 115, and my war with mackoti is still raging on (he's going to retake a city this turn), I thought I'd bring this up again. Have you renewed your NAP with Mackoti, or is there a chance you could enter the war? If you enter, we could defeat him quickly, carve up his territory, and then I can focus on containing Parkin. Without you, I'm worried that this will drag out a long time, and really prevent me from expanding east.

[COLOR="Yellow"]Hey there,

In the end a NAP extension was signed, so for now I'm unable to participate in the war. Mackoti was really interested to have me supply him with units, but that's not something I'm prepared to do.

It's a bit unfortunate to hear the war's taking a turn for the worse though.. when the NAP was extended I was kind of hoping it wouldn't go on for too much longer. :-/ Hopefully this will turn out to be a minor obstacle though.

-SleepingMoogle[/COLOR]

[COLOR="DarkOrange"]That's fine. As long as you don't actively assist him in the war, we can still be friends

Speaking of which, would you like to sign an NAP with him? To be specific, I'd like to propose that we won't

1)attack the other person
2)gift units, money, cities, or information to the enemy of the other person
3)settle aggressive land grabbing cities in the other person's territory

up to, say, turn 170. Does that sound acceptable?[/COLOR]

[COLOR="Yellow"]Hey there,

No direct involvement in the war from me. :-)

I'm a little confused about the NAP proposal though. Is it with you, or..?

-SleepingMoogle[/COLOR]

Yeah I'm proposing that we sign an NAP. What are you confused about?

The reason I proposed this NAP- with the no aggressive settling clause- is that, now that I'm determined to take out Mackoti, I'm worried that SleepingMoogle might decide to attack me as soon as Mackoti is gone, or fill up all the empty land with his cities. I don't want another war in the west!

His response doesn't make sense to me all. Who else would the NAP be with? I sent the last message a day ago, and still haven't gotten a response. I know English isn't his native language, but I get the feeling that he's just stalling me on this one.

His whole approach to this situation is confusing. I could understand why he might assist mackoti by gifting him units, to keep me busy. It would also make sense for him to join the war on my side, and grab some easy cities from Mackoti- that's why I reached out to him in the first place. But sitting on the sidelines, doing nothing- doesn't he realize that I'm going to take over all of Mackoti's land, and he'll be stuck with a much more powerful neighbor? What on earth is he doing over there?

I did notice that he's settled a city on the northern land mass, so maybe he's just hoping to grab that. If so, that's a pretty small gain compared to what he could get by entering the war, on either side.

[luddite]

And here's my recent diplo with Locke:

[COLOR="DarkOrange"]Hi Locke,

this might be unnecessary, but I felt I should bring it up anyway. I don't mind you scouting my land, and I hope we can be allies during this game. We're far apart, and we should cooperate to bring down plako and Lord Parkin. If we work together, we could both benefit greatly. However, I hope that you would not send mackoti any information about my troop movements. If I found out that you were doing that, it would make future cooperation very difficult.
Sincerely,
Luddite[/COLOR]

[COLOR="Silver"]OK we will not give mackoti any info on your units. Our scout is moving east anyway. Away from battlefield (I think). We want to move through your land and visit Parkin cities. Mackoti capture a city back from you it look like. Are you guys plannign on signing peace?

Yeah cooperation against plako and Parkin would be great. :D Do you have ideas? We dont have much info on your part of world. If you wanted to trade screenshots we'd be OK with it. Like send us your minimap and we send you ours or something. We have good picture of southern teams but not much map info in north.

Well good luck. I dont know what you do with Great Engineer we see moving around but I hope you get something good from him LOL.
Locke
[/COLOR]

[COLOR="DarkOrange"]OK thanks, that's fine. Yeah, Mackoti surprised me and I had to withdraw from a city, but I'll take it back soon . I don't think we'll be signing peace for a while, though.

A screenshot exchange sounds like a great idea. I have very little information on the south, but good maps of the north. Do you want to do that now?

I'm afraid I don't have any ideas yet for cooperation against plako and Parkin. Maybe we can trade resources if you need anything, and avoid trading with them. I'll try to settle towards Parkin and block land away from him, but it's hard to do that while fighting mackoti. Maybe you could just build units to scare plako, and force him to maintain a large military.

Anyway thanks. I was going to use the GE in the city that I lost, but now I need to change my plans...[/COLOR]

I'm being pretty open about the war with anyone who asks me. Partly that's just my personality, but also I just don't see any reason to hide information about it. They'll all be able to guess the important stuff from graphs and civstats, anyway.

[spacemanmf]

Speaking of which, would you like to sign an NAP with him?

I think this is the confusing bit...