[SPOILERS] Smackdown Game Thread

[Zed-F]

Any status updates? There appears to be a war going on, but nobody's reported on it in any detail over the last week.

[SevenSpirits]

It's hard enough playing this game let alone reporting. Wow. Ridiculous logistics. Can't keep everything in my head at the same time.

* LAM settled the western jungle city. A few turns later we showed up with a large army. They retreated their 7 axes and 2 archers despite only having vision of 2 of the 5 catapults. I guess they are learning. We razed the city.

* We finally had the EP to divert for 2t to get graphs on RMOG.

* We teched up to feudalism and revolted Sumeria to HR, Vassalage, Theo. Did I mention we built Paya? Man. Btw, RMOG engineer-rushed MoM.

Here are some screenshots from t77. Sorry.

t77 is 1-2 turns ago. I'm not quite sure on the timings, but these things are also true:

* Marble city founded. Marble will be hooked 5t after.

* Sumerian capital is growing up to size 15 or 16 and will produce a lot of gold.

* Sumeria is settling New Sumer with great gusto.

* Rome has its hands full producing missionaries for Sumeria.

* HBR in and Sumeria took the horse back to build some 4-7xp HAs.

* LAM has followed us to both Construction and Metal Casting.

* LAM got a city on the center island. Dang, we thought 4H or RMOG had that covered.

* Next up is Literature -> Music, then we need to think about Civil Service and related timings.

* We'll probably capture the RMOG city near our NE Roman city in a few turns. Oh yeah, that city popped out a scientist (not the ~25% engineer). We are saving it.

[NobleHelium]

What kind of tiles are you planning to work at the Sumerian capital?

[mackoti]

water tiles ,mines, and 3 speacealists.
I plan to get moai there.

[SevenSpirits]

Battle of AccordianPlayer. They just got their border pop this past turn, for 20% defenses. I ran 10% culture last turn to keep possession of the tile we are now about to road. That cost us 19g. Hopefully it's worth it!


We have:
1 Axe, 1 Spear, 1 Praetorian all with 0xp
2 Catapults, 2 Longbows, 1 Archer all with 3xp
C1 Morale GG Axe Heinz "Go on ahead, I'll ketchup" Guderian
Total = 2 cats and 7 other units

They have:
2 C1 Axes, 25% fortify
1 Axe, 25% fortify
1 Axe
1 Catapult
1 C1 Holkan, 25% fortify
1 C1 Holkan, 5% fortify

I did a couple of sims before turn got to us, and if we attack it seems the median result is that they are left with 2 heavily wounded units, and we still have 5 units and a catapult to capture the city next turn. So even though they snuck both an axe and a catapult into the city, we will still go for it.

First, of course, the catapults. Bombarding is not an option, it doesn't do much compared to attacking and doing damage to all their units. We are in a big hurry to crush them this turn. So the real options are CR1 (City Raider) or Barrage1. In this case, I noticed in sims that Barrage did not let us pass any important thresholds on the non-attacked units, and in fact, the top two defenders (axes with full fortify and C1) were our biggest concern. So I went with CR1 on both cats, for a greater chance to redline or at least hurt the top defenders.

CR1 Catapult vs C1 25%Fort Axe: 32.3%

LOSS and we only get one hit in. If we got zero hits here I would be inclined to abort the attack. But one hit (17hp) takes it below the other axes who only lost 10hp.

CR1 Catapult vs C1 25%Fort Axe 90/100hp: 52.8%

WITHDRAW. This time the axe only gets one hit in and is redlined. Great news and the attack is ON.

C1 Longbow (obvious promotion) vs 25%Fort Axe 80/100hp: 85.4%

WIN. In fact the Axe gets zero hits in. Lucky us! (Of course the first strike helped a little bit.) In this battle, I believe an extra C1 promo on the axe would take our odds down to about 61%. So I was very happy to open the turn and see that this axe wasn't promoted.

C1 Longbow vs C1 25%Fort Axe 73/100hp: 78%

WIN. So this is the axe which we only got one hit on with the first cat. Even though it had slightly lower HP, it had better odds than the last axe because of the C1, see? This one defended after the other one because defending isn't based on combat odds directly, but on strength ratio. Having 7hp less made a bigger difference in strength ratio than 10%, but it didn't make as much difference in the actual fight because it didn't change the number of hits we need to kill their unit.

Praetorian vs Axe 80/100hp: 82%

WIN. So far all odds-on victories, but it's lucky that we are winning all of these.

Now we have a problem: our best remaining attackers are axes, but since all their units except the catapult are melee, the catapult defends. And it does well vs axes. We have three realistic choices here:
1) Attack with Heinz at 68.1% due to his C1 promo and tomato-y goodness.
2) Attack with our unpromoted Axe at coinflip odds
3) Attack with a spear at worse than 50% odds (don't remember them)

Mackoti chose this:

Axe vs Catapult: 50%

WIN. That's pretty nice.

C1 Heinz vs C1 25%Fort Holkan 78/100hp: 96.3%

WIN. As a bonus, Heinz took no hits, and reaches 10xp.

Now only stragglers are left. There is the 5% fortify holkan, and the redlined axe, defending. And we have an unpromoted spear and a 3xp archer. Both will attack the holkan, and remember, holkans are first strike immune so strong vs archers.

Spear vs C1 5%Fort Holkan 78/100hp: 47.0%

WIN. RNG gods smile upon us today.

Cleanup. We don't promote, planning to take CG 1 and 2 after winning. If we win...

Archer vs C1 25%Fort Axe 25/100hp: 95.5%

WIN, obviously. We get 41 pillage gold and the city has the granary and lighthouse both still intact. (Monument and library die automatically.)

We keep the city because we have a lot of units in the area, just killed quite a few RMOG units, have higher power than them, and will have a great artist there to bomb the city in three turns.


I feel bad for RMOG. But also, damn, it feels good to win all the coinflips sometimes.

[SevenSpirits]

As if that weren't demoralizing enough for RMOG, We also had a minor skirmish in the New World.

We'd had an archer and spear scouting out their settling, and they had an axe and war chariot defending it. Meanwhile we were building up 3 horse archers to raze their city, but we forgot they could/would pop borders with a caste artist (me) and didn't realize that this would reveal our city tile to them (Mackoti). With a horse archer and settler revealed, and their units chasing ours, we moved in a turn early.

C1 Horse Archer vs Axe on hill is 65.7%, with some retreat chance too. We won it, obviously. Then the spear cleans up the War Chariot.


Marble plan is coming to its conclusion. Rome gets marble first.






Rome is also getting some overdue expansion in.


LAM front is calm. Maybe they don't think game-long hot war is a good idea after all.

[Ichabod]

Wow, those were some big wins. And the GA bomb will be salt on the wounds...

Can we pillage the road on the desert tile 1NE1E of Accordion player? Or that will become under our control with the GA bomb?

[SevenSpirits]

Wow, those were some big wins. And the GA bomb will be salt on the wounds...

Can we pillage the road on the desert tile 1NE1E of Accordion player? Or that will become under our control with the GA bomb?

Don't know yet whether it will be under our control. We need to get some of our own culture onto the tiles in order to calculate their culture.

Right now it's all 1-movers in the area except for our valuable 2-move Heinz. So, probably not pillaging it for now. Ultimately it doesn't provide any real protection anyway, since they can just re-road it when their hypothetical units arrive.

[Ichabod]

Wow, that Stone city from LAM is extremely good.

[mackoti]

It is indeed , they got very good land, better then ours and i thiink HHH didnt bothered to much to expand on the other continent.But after pb7 i promised i will not complain about any kind of map i get.