Ranamar and Lewwyn, ministers for Bismarck of Mali

[Ranamar]

That post was so un-Sevenlike.

You have no idea how tempting it is to just let Seven play the game.

[SevenSpirits]

That post was so un-Sevenlike.

Haha, what qualifies as Sevenlike?

In game news:

1) We have the save
2) Situation is kind of amazing.

Rheims, Rouen, Marseilles were all left empty.

I'm trying to figure out MNG's intentions. Possibilities include just wanting it to end, wanting a specific player to get specific cities (us vs Commodore), or wanting us to capture the cities so he can capture them back and damage them further. Pretty sure we should take the cities either way.

It's not clear he knows that we have troops in ships to take any given one of them.

[NobleHelium]

Calm, collected, you know.

[SevenSpirits]

First, a war recap:
We went in t98 with an initial force of 13 knights. Reinforcements have only trickled in.
t98: capture Orleans, his oldest coastal city
t99: capture Paris, his capital
t100: don't capture anything, but set up a fork
t101: capture Tours, the lesser of the two forked cities
t102: ???

Here's turn 102. I open the save to find this:

What I want you to notice is that he has literally left three of his five remaining cities empty, for reasons that will remain a mystery until he tells us. These cities are all inaccessible to our land units, but we just happen to have some boats handy...

The first boat has only the chariot, Eowyn, but even that's just what we want to capture empty cities with anyway. The galleon by Rouen has 2 knights and a catapult; I decide to send the third unit (the catapult) to Merseilles as it's more valuable to hold. (Still, if MNG put in a concerted effort over multiple turns he could take it back.)

Because of our culture bomb, capturing those cities changes the battlefield massively. Suddenly all our units are 6-move instead of 2-move, and his are 1-move instead of 2-move. The next thing I did was basically label all his units.

We have a bunch of knights. Some wounded, some healthy, and all with 2-3 promos. We have odds on pretty much every unit we can attack. We have the great wall. And all these units are in our territory.



I decided to attack his puzzling vertical column of troops from north to south. No matter where I decided to stop, his remaining units in that column would be irrelevant, having nothing within one square to attack. Then all that remained would be defending our cities.

In order to make this safe, I first built a road S of Orthanc (nee Paris). This allowed a tile for our units to attack the two northernmost stacks from that wasn't in range of the third stack (and was roaded).

Vs the knight plus spear it seemed good to send in our pike in orthanc as I didn't feel we'd need it for defense this turn. Sadly, it lost at good odds against MNG's knight. I then attacked with a longbow across the river directly as a) this was our one chance to attack a spear with a non-mounted unit and b) it was the one chance for a longbow garrison unit to attack and still stay in Orthanc due to the presence of another unit on the attacked tile. It had good odds (78% I think?) and won. This earned 3xp so I promoted it to CG1&2, healing most of the way back. Yay. It also gave 9 gg points, a preview of the party to come.

With odds never dipping significantly below ~75% and some mildly good fortune, we cleaned out the top 2 stacks.

At this point I re-counted our available knights and decided we still had plenty. So the slaughter continued:

I never attacked MNG's knight north of the river, as that's an irritating defensive position. I figured worst case it kills a knight guarding Rivendell (Rheims).

After the killing, I moved as many of the wounded knights as possible into cities to make it as unlikely to lose one as possible. Here are the remaining MNG units.

Only one knight (c1/shock/full hp) is guarding Rouen but a) it's a crap city and b) only a single mace is in range, probably getting ~10% odds. And no one's guarding Moria since no enemy is in range anymore. I just hope he doesn't try for Rouen anyway and thus get access to Moria when the borders flip back. Didn't think about that possibility while playing to be honest.

Here are all our french cities. I set them to all be working the worst possible tiles/specialists while in anarchy so our demographics look worse.

Some overviews:

Other miscellaneous turn stuff:

As you can see in the log, we got a second great general - in Lorien. I just settled both of them there.

I put BD back on more growing. It will still finish the great person next turn.

I researched banking, and first made sure no one else had it. So we are guaranteed economics unless some really implausible thing happens like someone bulbing banking.

We're already getting the benefit of the extra trade routes. Big win there. Our commerce per turn went up by about 40 with the city captures, about 10-15%.

I've marked the destinations for our missionaries. The two we just built go to Khand; the one with moves left spreads the religion so we can finally make a monastery there. The other one boards a galleon for the new world. We also have a longbow and pike that just finished and can add to our defenses over there.

[SevenSpirits]

Message sent to Commodore. We don't technically have a NAP, so need to keep good relations at this time. And I like the guy.

Hey, so we kind of slaughtered all of MNG's forces south of the river last turn in response to a tactical blunder by him and captured Rheims. Also managed to sneak in two coastal city captures in the north, woohoo! Fingers crossed that they hold, it's kind of dicey.

His remaining cities are Chartres and Lyons. I recalled our navy headed for Chartres as promised, it's all yours. I wouldn't mind if you took Lyons too, though it's a bit isolated for you of course.

We didn't have any specific deals about dividing up the spoils of this war. (I avoided that since I had no idea how well either of us would fare; I'd rather just see the effort rewarded naturally by having new cities. My only view on that was we weren't going to finish off a city you had already laid siege to, and hopefully vice versa.) Nevertheless we did coordinate with you, used scouting information, and have together brought about an insanely fast and complete fall of France. And it's been fun chatting. Mali did most of the fighting (partly since you were a couple turns later than expected, and hey, the war's only lasted 5 turns so far), but I still want to make sure you don't feel like you got a raw deal. So what would you like, what do you think is fair? (Please be honest.)

Seven

Sent to MNG:

Hey Mr Nice Guy,

Can you explain your unit moves from this last turn to me? I have to admit the abandonment of your cities caught me by surprise.

Seven

[Lewwyn]

No idea why MNG did that. I'm betting he really didn't realize how badly the culture would switch.

Just wow.

[oledavy]

It's like Spring 1940 all over again.....except with Knights instead of Panzers

[SevenSpirits]

It's like Spring 1940 all over again.....except with Knights instead of Panzers

I've never used knights before. Holy crap are they ever good vs non-pike underpromoted melee.

I did make two mistakes this turn btw.

1) Forgot I'd been planning to shuttle a warrior into Rouen, the garrison from Dale. This would have made it impossible rather than just improbable for Dale+Moria to fall this turn. (And next turn we'll have plenty units.) Seriously hoping he doesn't even take that 10% shot, or I'd feel really dumb.

2) Forgot to give GES an ivory. Here's the chat conversation we had a day or two ago:

jtgoldsmith: your war is going too good
lol
9:05 PM If you take ivory, I am going to need that badly until I can make other arrangements or something
me: you mean from rheims?
not sure we can take that
jtgoldsmith: I am still getting it from MNG
9:06 PM I just mean, if you take it
me: yeah, sure
jtgoldsmith: I will need it
me: np
jtgoldsmith: Eventually I can find a work around
But right now, that would seriously screw me

Completely forgot about it after that since frankly we weren't going to be able to capture Rheims.

Anyway, this led to the following exchange:

Can you replay your turn and send me ivory like you said you would? You sent like half my cities into unhappiness this turn.

GES

Oh shit. Sorry, no, I can't. No way I could remember what order I attacked in.

Dude, seriously? A couple turns ago I let you guys use a second play of the turns when Ranamar didn't play the way you wanted. [Not accurate; he's thinking about this] You are costing me like 8 pop worth of commerce and hammers, not to mention slowing the growth in several of my best cities DURING A GOLDEN AGE! I specifically told you I needed this last turn.

GES

In both cases we're trying to not cheat by redoing combat. I feel really bad but we just can't do it. This was the most complicated turn all game, with knights with slightly different hps attacking in an order I could never reconstruct. You can't ask us to break the rules.

Well, he's clearly pissed about that. I think it's unreasonable to expect people to propose trades for you on certain turns, personally. It's way too easy to forget that. For example, if he'd hooked marble early in the game and not immediately offered it, I'd be bummed but not mad.

In this case, if there was a way I could remember the sequence of knight attacks I made, or if I had a save, I'd be fine with fixing it. But there's just no way. My method of choosing who to attack with was to find one that had good enough odds and then attack. And almost all our knights are different at this point, most of them being slightly wounded. And then I'd have to figure out which knight I moved where after fighting, which would be basically impossible.

[SevenSpirits]

Also have this reply from Commodore. What a reasonable guy!

Hey Seven,

That makes sense, actually, I figured he was going to be going on the offensive, he had said "scorched earth" was his strategy, which without pikes against knights means "I die in the local fields". By all means take Lyons, it's a long way around the spoke to my hub canal (now up and running, by the way, if your galley needs to get home by the north of the hub).

I'm honestly rather bummed by the lack of gains made in this war, to be totally honest. One thing is, we're all rather in a worse situation because we decided to jump MNG-ward rather than towards GES, who is, if not running away with the game, at least clearly out in front. One reason I had galleys heading towards Tours was that I had figured the Chartres/Tours/Parthian line was actually nice and stable as a border, with minimal conflict from the other big French cities. Rheims was darned close to bombed Paris, but the GLH meant that the city could basically just work coast tiles and still be a massive profit to the empire, so when you guys took Tours I was okay with it if it meant Rheims was mine. So, yeah, I do feel a little raw dealed, especially as it feels like I lost taking both Tours and Rheims due to simple turn order.

Of course, I'm not an idiot, nor am I angry, just disappointed. It would be rank insanity for us to fight over anything, with you having a huge army and the most advanced navy in the world, and me pumping out (for UU reasons) the natural counter to the mainstay of your army. Plus, well, I like to work with you and honestly if any non-GES team is going to win this it's going to take coordination on the part of Middle Earth and Hyboria. One possible solution: Because I saw Tours fall I did not do my planned chariot->knight upgrades for the three war chariots in the area. I'm on the Gunpowder beeline now, but in 1 or 2 turns I'll have it, and if you guys are on the "steal economics from GES" path, then it's not critical that I keep 100% researching towards banking. I'd pay the cost of those 3 upgrades for Tours. Now I know this would give me a natural source of spices, but I'd still be also willing to give you Parthian's dyes once she pops out of resistance. This seem like a fair trade? I know you're still riding the wave of capture gold, but unless you're absolutely getting crushed by maintenance this should even help you on the grenadiers line.

Which is one side thought, actually. I know you can't speak to the specific time frame of your GES NAP, but can you give an estimate of whether it will expire in the rifles era or the infantry era? If it's more likely that GES will start drafting mass rifles, the grenadiers are a good enough counter, especially in an offensive war, but if it's infantry, I'd rather go up the more traditional rifling route.

Until later,
-Commodore

Sent this off:

Hey Commodore, I'm out this weekend for an uncle's wedding (have to leave basically right now), let's figure stuff out when I get back, OK? Plus that way we'll see if any of our new cities fall back into MNG's hands. (We had to cut defenses kind of close and I screwed up a bit, so fingers crossed.)

Seven

See ya! Let's offer GES ivory next turn if he didn't request it, build most infra and a few longbows, tech economics, and heal up/consolidate our gains. We have one 10xp medic knight btw.

[novice]

Congratulations guys, that went surprisingly well. I have to admit I feared for your well-being when I saw how ineffective the Paris bomb was (initially). Of course you reaped rewards from it on subsequent turns.

As for the ivory incident with GES... I think GES should replay his diplo for that turn.