Dtay's Little Red Book

[Krill]

Just wondering, but did you ever think of Oracling HBR and just bum rushing us with HA/chariots?

[dtay]

I thought of the latter but I don't think I ever strongly considered using the Oracle for such. Bit of a memory problem, but I think I more strongly considered (or rather, regretted not) rushing with chariots. But by the time my scout came around and noticed how widely spaced your cities were I decided you would have enough defenses that quick gains would not lie down that path.

Do you think a chariot rush could've worked? (if time dependant, I could go back and see what turn I would have roughly started to strongly think about it).

In retrospect I think I should have considered oracling HBR more seriously, just because it would help with the #1 problem whenever I either thought about or started to ramp up to attack you guys - you could see it coming and at least make it very very costly (when I got guilds comes to mind). Would have been a higher variance strategy, but solves the albatross problem I saw coming but ran smack into anyway.

[Krill]

I don't think chariots would have done it. Because of the dot map and road layout we could cover our front cities fine with bowmen and odds on defence against chariots were like 4.4 to 7.6 without fort or promos. If you ran chariots though to raze back cities I think we would have been able to settle on copper and get the road in place to upgrade spears because we saved gold until we had the copper hooked any way. We could have brought that forward a bit iirc.

You couldn't fork DS and RC. The hills and jungles were in the way. You could fork RC and FP with FP on flatland but you had to spend three turns walking through jungle to do that. And you would have had no reason to raze FP. Makes us weaker but you also lose out trying to hurt us by. Building the units instead of expanding or grabbing oracle.

You needed to take RC and shove culture into it. If you did that we couldn't defend properly with this massive salient. Swords are close to 50/50 even with Promotions against bowmen. HA was the only thing that I couldn't handle if you attacked early. I couldn't move bowmen out of the cities because the HA would have run them down. If you'd attacked at t75 with 5 ha and 7 or so chariots you would ha e gotten rc I think. Then taken DS as it was indefensible and just stick at that border.

Then rush guilds. Eve. If you reached there t130 and not the t118 you did you would have had a 4 city front against us to abuse. And going down that route I see you more than capable of winning the game given everything else that happened.