[SPOILER] Krill rambles on

[Krill]

Reminder to lurkers that I will need a pause this turn.

Moving was successful other than the utter failure to get windback chair and a warddrobe up a flight of stairs. So need to buy a new wardrobe. But on the plus side I have a wireless hotspot I can connect to until fibre is hooked. Just need to deal with a few more lawyer things at start of next week and then I'll be sorted.

[TheHumanHydra]

Moving was successful other than the utter failure to get windback chair and a warddrobe up a flight of stairs. So need to buy a new wardrobe.

Eh, you don't need clothes to play Civ.

[Krill]

I need clothes to do my job and pay the leccie, fibre and mortgage until my streaming career takes off.

BTW the turn should roll around 0730 GMT. I doubt I even wake up until 0800. I should be able to play shortly after this though: joys of laptops etc etc.

[Krill]

So...yeah. Declared on TheWannabe. Poor guy hasn't played much MP IMO, but worst of all his luck sucks.

Start of turn, as I rolled it, this is before TW move:




When I logged in, the axe was on the stone and one archer moved onto the grass hill mine. Burgdoferi was gaurded by a lone WC and prompty murdered by a C2 HA:

Order of Battle:

HA, C2, v WC, unpromo: 88.9%. WIN! 4hp remaining B. Burgdorferi captured and kept.

OK, bit closer than expected, but that is why you don't fuck about with promotions.





Got the granary, so score. I'm keeping hte city, I'm here to stay.

Then the battle of the stone stack:

HA, C1/Shock, v Spearman, unpromo/hill: 26%/14% retreat. WIN! 34hp remaining
HA, C1/Shock, v Axe, unpromo/hill: 77% WIN! 68hp remaining

OK, is this just unlucky for TW. You can't account for losing a 75% battle on defence unless you are ahead and expect an attack; he is neither. I then attacked the archer outside the newly renamed Bloxwich:

HA, C1 v archer, unpromo/hill: 89%: WIN! 68hp remaining.

I then spent time figuring out how to kill the final stone archer to enable the attack of C. Dipthereriae. I could use one more HA, but that meant I'd only have 5 for the attack on the capital, and TW has enough gold to upgrade that warrior and might just finish a spear due to overflow and normal production in his capital.

So I attacked with the sword and would put a second worker on the stone to road, and damaged HA could take the city if there were no units in it next turn:

Sword, C1/Cover, v archer, unpromo/hill: 85%: WIN!. 4hp remaining

Fuck, almost attacked without promoting to be able to promote to W2 and attack C.Diph without needing the HA, had I don' that, would have lost the sword.

Final attack:

Chariot, unpromo, v axe, unpromo: 95%: WIN!. 70hp remaining.

6 battles, all won, 2 battles with odds almost lost units, and 1 battle I had 40% chance of losing the HA but I won. So...I'm taking this run of events as lucky.

Final positions:








Yes, that is only 1 warrior in his capital, and a spear 89 of the coper city. I have 2 5XP HA and a 3XP chariot threatening the city. One HA is C1/shock with a river in place, so the spear does not have odds on attack. I doubt I can take C. Diff next turn. That city makes 20hpt, so I would need to tech Construction and a sword/cat stack to take it out due to number of HA it can build.

If I can take and hold C.Diptheriae, E.Coli and Bloxwich for now I'm fine with that. C.Diff I need to take before pressing on though, although I may try and take the single city south of the horses depending on events next tun.





That power level, I just wiped out 25K soldier points and it's low...I know TW has IW, BW etc but not sure of HBR. Still, the progress of this war so far is outstanding. If he gets no spears into his capital or C.Diptheriae next turn then, well, I'm going to have to reconsider war aims.

[Krill]

Dropbox maintainance is delaying some pic uploads, sorry about that, out of my hands.

[Krill]

Also figured out order of battle for C. Diff, assuming no units were produced on the interturn and the spear is moved into the city.

HA, C1/Shock v spear, unpromo has following odds of each individual outcome for the defnder winning:




The odds are not 100% correct, but because the HA has retreat odds, there's a slightly better chance of the HA doing a specific amount of damage but not dying. ie getting in 3 hits and then retreating. I'm ignoring that retreat chance, it's just a bonus if it occurs.

If the HA gets in 3 hits on the spear, a C1 chariot has 80% odds of winning against the spear and 79.5% odds against the axe. A C1/Shock HA has 68% odds against a axe with full fortification but 85% odds against the spear.

Ergo If I gamble one HA at the start of the attack, I have 0.7*0.79*0.85=47% odds of taking C.Diff this turn.

But wait, that's not all!

If the HA makes 1 hit on the spear, it is knocked down to 82hp and a second C1/shock HA hads 51% odds of victory, followed by the chariot/axe battle. That path has about a 5% chance of happening because it only occurs if there is one set outcome in the first battle.

So, I'm fairly sure, that if there is only a single axe/spear pair in C.Ciff when I play my turn, I'm going to sacrifice a single HA to see what I can do. There is a 20% chance I get an outcome that I can't work with (HA bounces and does nothing, or gets 2 hits in and I end up with a chariot attacking a spear at 23% odds regardless of the outcome of other battles).

Just need to find out what else TW is going to throw at me now.

[Krill]

I PMed TW, Joey and Xenu to confirm the turnsplit. We'll see how the turn timer works but I think that we're going to get forced to 48 hour turns unless TW allows me to double move in front of him in the turn order and I can't think of a single reason he should let me do that short of seriously wanting out of the game.

[Krill]

Turn played. Report due later. I have recorded each turn for upload once fibre is connected, but sufficed to say it's been a good turn for me and I need to apologise to TW for luck.

[Krill]

Turn 97:

This is where I left off on T96. I don't hacve a picture for the start of T97, but the only changes are that the warrior in E.Coli was upgraded to a spear, and the spear at C-Diff was moved into the city.





OK, I explained how I was going to attack the second city/copper city/ C.Diff, but in the end it didn't matter: The first HA beat the spear, then the chariot withdrew after knocking the axe down to 80HP so the last HA cleaned up. Wasn't even close.







So won a 28% battle and "lost" an 80% battle. If I had won both I'd have one extra worker, but I'm not complaining, am I? I got the granary, which is the most important thing. It'll build a barracks in three turns and then probably just take over military duties, but a lighthouse before the barracks is...probably better? I think it depends on when borders expand at Werbergh, the gems city from the library to grab that cow.

You can tell just how over this war is, that on the second turn of the war I'm talking about what the newly captured cities will build to help grow themselves.

This was the outcome from the capital battle:





Oh look a market, and I still got the granary?!

Then the battle for the capital was only against an warrior>spear upgrade and the HA won again outright, which is just stupid. It was a 23% odds of victory, 14% odds of retreat. It was the third HA v Spear battle, and it was the third outright victory. I've recorded the previous two turns from logging in, but seriously this level of luck is scary. The only thing stopping me from thinking it's completely unreasonable is that I've won two 85% battles on my end with my units winning whilst 1 round from dying, and a chariot retreated from an 80% attack on the axe. So it's not like I'm winning every single round of combat, but the battles that I have odds on TW is actually doing a lot better than he should do. It's just that my units don't seem to die...

So it turns out those stables really were worth the investment. I only had 4 battles this turn, but it means that TW is basically gone. That's half his empire captured and under my control, and I should be able to take out his other two big cities. 10 battles and 9 victories/1 retreat. 4 captured workers and 4 captured cities. Possibility of up to 3 more captured workers next turn.

I didn't screenshot Beechdale, the third captured city this turn, but that also has a granary.





From this position, I've reevaluated what I want from the war. I'm going to go for the city south of the horses, and then the city about 3S of that sugar. I may only have 5 full health HA, but I've no killed 38K soldier points and taken his main production cities. I put a sentry chariot onto the grassland tile south of hte cow, and saw Cholera was empty. Moved onto the grass hill SW of Cholera, and saw that TW has evacuated his cities. With the knowledge that he has whipped two of his cities this turn, but I think one of the was Beechdale, I think he knows he is dead and is going to try and make a last stand in his western cities which I'm not trying ot capture. So this is how I ended the turn:








There is a 64HP HA under that spear on the hill, overlooking a hill city with 2 archers in it. It can heal-promote next turn if needed, but I believe that TW will move a spear (that he whipped this turn) out of Cholera onto the axe next turn. If he leaves it in place, then I can sacrifice one HA to finish it. I have 2 workers in place to road the horses and move an axe spear pair into Cholera next turn to hold it (I moved them after taking hte screenshot onto the fur).

The 4 HA stack can move 2SE onto the grass hill to threaten the southern city. I can move one sentry chariot onto the gems to scout it beforehand, and another sentry chariot onto the forest hill the spear is on to maintain vision over the theatre. The remaining health (no promo) HA can join the 5HA stack, as can the HA in Sandwell which has 34HP but just gained 5XP from killing that spear (yay GG points etc etc) for another heal-promo.

And then that's the war "finished". This is what I can see of TW military just to emphasize that point:




The combat logs from this turn (and a biut of last turn as well.

And demographics:




Thoughts on the war in a further post. Still mulling this one over, but it's obvious to say that it's been a stupendous payoff, and I don't think I've ever been so brutal in any game before, certainly not with HA.

[Krill]

Trying to reflect on what lead to this war, less so for my sake but more for the lurkers and TW when he gets to read this thread, if he even wants to.

I made the decision to attack TW around the late T70's before I actually commited to researching Currency. What made me go HBR was the idea that I'm usually passive in these games and for once I needed to be decisive. HAKs shrine is going to be huge, even if this game only started with 23 players compared to the 33 from PB18, and I want to have. But HAK borders Tsargon, so I need to move quickly to reach it. I don't want to wait until CKN to attack, I needed to attack sooner than that.

At the same time, my front cities gave great vision into TW land, showing me his city garrisons and TW, when you read this, it's probably the largest flaw in your game: there were no spears. You eventually added one spear to between Beechdale and Bloxwich, but you needed more spears. Spears are there to deal with the lack of reaction time you get from a fast mover attack, axes you can whip in as a slowmover stack of swords appears. I purposesfully hid as my HA production from you so you wouldn't figure out you needed to build them, but you should never need to see an opponents HA to build spears. You just build them.

Originally, I was expecting to just dump a large stack of HA onto the forest hill north of the ivory on T96 and attack Bloxwich on T97 and capital T98, but by hiding the road construction through the forests south of Werbergh, I manage to hide the HA closer to the front and just one move Bloxwich and kill most of your army on T96. I think that most vets would have been more aggressive to me when I moved a worker up to that forest, even declaring war to try and remove the axe/spear pair. I also took one turn longer than I should have done to chop that forest which should have telegraphed the attack.

I'm not sure of what you could have done differently in the war. You've had a grand total of one half of a turn to react and you've basically lost everything already. Everything you've done since seeing the war dec was good, but when that was mupgrading a warrior and moving a spear into a city, it's not exactly praise. If anything, I ought to be apologising for the luck I've gotten. Killing all three of the spears...look, if you're going to lose those battles it doesn't really matter what you do, you're not going to win a war by losing 75% battles.

Where does this leave me?

You can see that my costs are growing, up about 35gpt just from capturing 4 cities. When they come out of revolt, well, that might even be worse as none of them are commerce monsters. After taking Cholera and that southern city though, I'm going to just ignore my shit costs and probably spam out the remaining 8 settlers (other than hte ones in production) before progressing to war with HAK. That will fill up every remaining city location I want, and FFS, I can probably get them in the next 10 turns if I want. I'm going to have to build wealth. I'm going to even need more OB, but I don't know who would even give me any?

I kinda need Caste, but after Calendar, I'm not sure what "want". Construction to give me a few cats to add to a sword stack and just murder HAK? His shrine would be good, and then I'll just get into OR and spam missionaries. After all, even if I lose a few HA now, what do I need to kill HAK with a mere 6 cities? A 10 unit stack of swords and cats? Plus what I have now? That's be enough right? That wouldn't even take me long to build out of newly conquered Leamore, The Exchange and Dimsdale, my three production cities which are making a total of 55hpt.

Machinery is completely unneeded for warfare. MC for forges? Nah, and workshops need Caste first anyway.

Aesthetics>Literature for fail gold and the epics? Nah, don't see why I would do that, and I still need Construction for the HE anyway, as HE needs Colosseum.

You know, Construction and more capture gold seems smartest...