[SPOILERS] JR4 tries his luck in PB 37

[JR4]

Gavagai razed this city. He couldn`t possibly hold it in the long run. Also, United Palaces is under siege. It still looks like Joey has all under control there, though..

As expected Dark Savant landed another big force on Mist`s Iron. Let`s see if we can cope with that.

[JR4]

TURN 190

Dark Savant moved up his 4 Frigates NW of Mist. He killed off a Galley which I forgot about. The Ethiopian Frigate took a couple of hits. Those 5 movers are nasty indeed.. At least we had 7 Frigates in range so with a couple of lucky rolls we could get a good hammer exhange.

C1 Frigate          -       C1 Frigate               -   32 %    -    Loss
C1 Frigate          -       C1 Frigate               -   32 %    -    Loss
C1 Frigate          -       C1 Frigate               -   32 %    -    Loss.  
C1 Frigate          -       Injured C1 Frigate   -   80 %    -   Loss

Seriously? That was a minor disaster indeed. We should be able to clean out the rest of them now, right?

C1 Frigate         -      C1 Frigate                 -   94 %       - WIN. Finally.
C1 Frigate         -      C1 Frigate                 -   94 %      -  Win
C1 Frigate        -       C1 Frigate                 -   99 %       - Win
C1 Galleon        -      C1 Frigate                  -   82 %       - Win

The Galleon got 5 XP now and can be promoted next turn. We basically had to get rid of those Frigates. There is an Ethiopian Galleon in Lakeside which could potentially kill off a 3.7 strength Frigate next turn. If he moves up another few Galleons to Lakeside we might be in some trouble. 5 movers can fork a lot of our island cities. We should raze it if we can but first we have to see whether our defenses in Mist hold. We have 11 CG2 or G2 Muskets there now and 2 Longbows plus all those Knights. We don`t have more than 2 Catapults so I thought it would be better to give DS another chance to step wrong. The Walls complete eot, giving us a nice bonus. He could bombard them down but it`ll take a couple of turns, buying us more time. A Galley was upgraded to a Galleon as we simply have to be able to ship in more troops. It cost 110 gold.

   

On a brighter note, we got a Great Merchant this turn! So we can start a Golden Age when we want to. We`re saving gold on Steel but could go for e.g Nationalism instead. Sugabala grew into unhappiness this turn. It was whipped for a Ship of the Line (as was Kokejin) so hopefully we`ll keep our military edge for a while. DS shows 6 turns to Mil Science now. Our Knights are moving eastwards now, in order to board ships asap.

Bulugan started the Heroic Epic. It`s a 4 turn build.

[JR4]

Graphs and demos:

As much as I`d like to attempt for a raze of an Ethiopian city on the eastern front, I don`t think we have the resources to do so. Iirc, we only have a single Galleon on that sea body.

The Ethiopian Galleon in lakeside is the only one visible. I think the rest are in Steadwick but we should take into account that they could be elsewhere.

Also, we`re building a Fort on the Incense. We badly need more happiness. (I meant to type Fort but somehow mixed it up with a Plantation).

[RefSteel]

Wow - there's a lot to take in here.

I'd kind of like a more complete overview of the war theater: What do we have in the other island cities? The two Ships of the Line coming off the docks will definitely help a lot! It's going to take time for them to reach the front though. In fact, taking a step back and looking at this strategically for really the first time, I realize what should have been obvious much sooner: Once Gav and Dark Savant made peace, given Mist's location relative to the mainland, we should have abandoned our plans to take it and just sued for peace ourselves after taking Tularean Forest. (Razing Mist and/or Lakeside would also have been an option, but it's a bit late for that now.) This is easier to see with hindsight, after Gav's attack on GJ, but I should have recognized it even at the time.

So what now? Civstats says we still own Mist (even bearing in mind he might have been able to attack amphibiously as well as from the Iron tile) but if he's reinforced his stack on the Iron with significantly more units, I would actually consider evacuating all our mounted units, both cats, and (if I'm reading the locations of everything correctly) probably some 0-fortify Muskets, onto Galleons. (If we have more Galleons in reach that I didn't see that would allow us to evacuate even more, then that would also be good, I think, all assuming we can be sure he can't hit our Galleons themselves. I'd probably leave two fully-fortified Muskets and both Longbows in the city regardless though.) Don't get me wrong: We can probably hold Mist if we really want to, at least if he doesn't take it in the next turn or so. But that city has probably already cost us more than we'll ever get out of it, and continuing to hold it will continue to get more costly as time goes on. Of course, this is gambling that Dark Savant will accept peace once he's taken Mist back, but I feel a lot more confident of our ability to hold islands that aren't right on top of his core.

(Also of course, it's possible he did attack, including amphibiously, and failed to break through anyway. If that's the case ... well, we'll have to see.)

There are other considerations of course: Will he really sign peace if we "let" him have Mist back? Do we want to sign peace just now, when 10 turns will be just about enough time for him to get MilSci and push out some Ships of the Line and Grennies? And after all, this is the first real MP war we've been involved in (everything else being just a surprise attack one way or another, quickly resolved). It's great practice for dealing with overseas combat on tiny, hard-to-defend islands, and that sort of thing. True, you never, ever want to be involved in a long, drawn-out defensive war like this, where we have no further gains we can make offensively, but it's still good practice, and good fun, and there's the key strategic question: How do we get out of this war? If we can wipe that stack out, maybe we get peace. If we can threaten to raze Fountain Head with a stack he can't kill, that might do the trick (and if not, hey, bonus, we get to raze Fountain Head!) - but I don't think we're stronger than Dark Savant by a wide enough margin (yet) to do any of that, so if we can't see a better way out of it, the war may well drag on until we can.

On peaceful buildery stuff: How many Universities have we finished? Borte I know, and I'm pretty sure of Toregene, and I know Sugabala was building one for a while, but beyond that I'm not sure. I guess the question is: If we can get peace with Dark Savant (or just take a turn off military to whip some of the Unis we've started) how soon can we get to the 7 we need for Oxford University?

All of this pertains to the Golden Age, of course. Honestly, under the circumstances, there's a strong argument for launching it right away - unless we're expecting to (re)grow a lot of population in the next several turns (including whipping a lot and then regrowing). Is there any reason we'd want to save it? I guess if there's something we're going to want to Engineer and we're getting another Great Person very soon that has a high probability of being an Artist or Scientist or Priest, that might be worth waiting for, although convincing the game to use the right GPs for a Golden Age can be a little tricky.

Part of the question is also this: How feasible is it to just keep saving money until Oxford? That is, how close are we to finishing our seventh University? With all our gold multipliers around the empire, and considering Oxford looks to me like a 4-6 turn build in a Golden Age, depending on how much overflow we can put into it and whether we can do the whole thing in OR, it seems pretty feasible, and we could get a lot of tech (while having lots of gold early on in case we need it for emergency upgrades instead) with a few turns of GA 100%-gold to burn through (especially as others may be paving the way for our KTB).

[JR4]

TURN 191

A couple of very interesting things happened this turn. Krill declared on Carthage again. How is the 3 top civs teaming up against the weakest one fair? Heh, I guess civ never was meant to be fair. Also, and more importantly for us, Joey and Gavagai signed peace! Maybe this is the time to stab DS, Gavagai? Dark Savant didn`t attack Mist this turn but he bombarded the defenses down to something like 2%. As DS now has to watch his back, the decision was made to hold firm in Mist. It was a tough decision to say the least. If he gets odds on our units it could get ugly but if he can`t break through we have an excellent chance of wiping his stack. Next turn we`ll bring in a couple of Grenadiers and might be able to whip a Castle, so I think he should attack now. Exciting times ahead.
   

As you can see we`re now in Organized Religion. It`s sort of a gamble to go out of the XP civics at this stage but the Oxford University will help us out in a big way. Slavery was kept for two reasons. We need to be able to whip out defenders to our island cities if things were to go wrong and we also need to whip out the 7th University in D-mishi. All the others will complete in 4 turns at the latest. Also, we did a number of whips this turn in order to get more high XP units on the battlefield asap. The civic swap was made after the unit whips.

Our island cities have a pretty weak defense now that all units are being transferred to Mist but they`ll get another few defenders from the mainland soon. A number of our cities have been whipped hard over the last war turns but I don`t feel like we really had a choice here. The Golden Age was put on hold for a turn or a few turns in order to let our cities regrow a bit.

[JR4]

Graphs and demos: Funnily, 6 out of 7 civs lost power over the last couple of turns. The world is an increasingly dangerous place to live it seems.

[JR4]

Finally, I took some overview screenshots (all taken early in the turn). Vulcania has a second Galleon that was moved in later. A single Ethiopian Galleon is still in Lakeside. Annoyingly, the interface won`t let us see exactly how many units DS has on the Iron tile. Does anyone know a way to get around that?

Whitehall, which is on the Carthagian mainland was captured by Joey and kept I think. So that`s ambitious. I don`t think dtay is interested in a direct conflict with Joey but let`s see..

EDIT: Yes, we`ve got 2 Universities right now (in Borte and Toregene). The 5 others are under construction. I really like the idea of saving gold until Oxford completes. Borte should certainly try to get a lot of overflow in 4 turns time in order to get a head start on it.

[OT4E]

May be there are better ways to fix it but what I can recommend is thr following. Top 15 defenders are shown as individual units others are shown in groups. As I can see there are 27 units on iron tile:
- 7 catapults
- 6 pikes
- 1 crossbow
- 1 maceman
- 6 oromo
- 6 knights

[RefSteel]

I think we're okay this turn (I'm typing this before Dark Savant has played T192 so I'm not 100% sure) but: Always, always remember that Dark Savant has 5-move Galleons. If he commits (or has committed) a GG to the task, he can even make an 8-move Galleon, or two 7-movers. Defending Mist may be reasonable as long as it doesn't cost us a real city, but remember that Dark Savant can potentially strike deep into our territory with up to three C1/D2/Amphibious/(Cover or Pinch or Formation or Shock or...) Oromos per Galleon. We can defend against that obviously, but we do have to make sure we are defending against it.

Krill declared on Carthage again. How is the 3 top civs teaming up against the weakest one fair? Heh, I guess civ never was meant to be fair.

Heh, yeah. And in some ways, this is a good thing. dtay was going to roll over Carthage without any help. GJ and Krill are just playing vulture here, and they're helping Chumchu get out of a lost game a little sooner, which Chumchu - as a replacement player especially - probably appreciates in a way.

Also, and more importantly for us, Joey and Gavagai signed peace! Maybe this is the time to stab DS, Gavagai? Dark Savant didn`t attack Mist this turn but he bombarded the defenses down to something like 2%. As DS now has to watch his back, the decision was made to hold firm in Mist. It was a tough decision to say the least. If he gets odds on our units it could get ugly but if he can`t break through we have an excellent chance of wiping his stack. Next turn we`ll bring in a couple of Grenadiers and might be able to whip a Castle, so I think he should attack now. Exciting times ahead.

If it's true that he should attack now, then we should have evacuated the city. If his best chance to attack is now, but it's still a lousy chance, then he shouldn't attack now; he should either sit on the iron as long as he can just to annoy and disrupt us (if that's his main goal here) and/or to await future opportunities, or offer peace to get his units teleported back to the mainland and reposition in case Gav moves on him again. (This raises an interesting question: If Gav attacks and then Dark Savant offers peace, do we grant it? I guess that's the sort of question we want to face....)

I'm not at all convinced that this is his best turn for him to attack though. For one thing, I wouldn't bother whipping the castle: My understanding is that in these circumstances, it would double the city's defense bonus ... from 2% to 4%. (If you check the event log for Dark Savant's bombardments, you'll see that the first one already reduced Mist's defenses to 18%. That's because the city was still recovering from our bombardment, so it only went up to 22% or something when our walls completed instead of the usual 50.)

Also, we did a number of whips this turn in order to get more high XP units on the battlefield asap. The civic swap was made after the unit whips.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work. The units only check to see how many free xp they'll get when they are actually produced, no matter when or how the hammers go into them. So what you tried here would have worked if we had drafted units, since those are produced immediately (though with only half-normal xp of course) but the whipped units still won't come out until EoT, by which time we're already out of Theocracy. On the other hand, when it comes to our last turn in Mono, we can whip buildings before the Civic swap for a bit of extra overflow (since the whip hammers will get the OR bonus, but the excess will be "demultiplied" as if they didn't have it) and whip units either before or after the swap and still get the xp.

Our island cities have a pretty weak defense now that all units are being transferred to Mist but they`ll get another few defenders from the mainland soon. A number of our cities have been whipped hard over the last war turns but I don`t feel like we really had a choice here. The Golden Age was put on hold for a turn or a few turns in order to let our cities regrow a bit.

The trouble is of course that we didn't have a strong enough exit strategy back when we started the war with Dark Savant. We didn't have enough of a tech/power/ships edge to raze his mainland coastal cities, so we couldn't seriously threaten to do much more harm than taking the two cities we wanted, and couldn't destroy his ability to strike back (since he wasn't that far behind us on naval tech). When we were planning the attack, we kind of assumed our exit strategy would be, "He'll be happy to get peace on our front while Gav makes big gains against him - or else with his forces split, our exit strategy will be Gav eliminating him from the game." But we should have planned for more contingencies than that, especially once they made peace.

Annoyingly, the interface won`t let us see exactly how many units DS has on the Iron tile. Does anyone know a way to get around that?

Sure! It's a bit annoying, but: Count up his units in all the other visible locations, then go to the F5 screen and click on his (Shaka's) portrait. That lists the total number of his units that we can see. So subtract the other known unit stacks from that total, and what's left is the number on the iron! (Back when Civ4 was in its heyday, I regarded this as pretty bad interface design, but apparently Civ6 has since taken "pretty bad interface design" to a whole new level....)

[EDIT: Wow, okay, OT4E's suggestion is a much easier way to tell the actual unit count on a given tile! I didn't know it worked that way!]

Yes, we`ve got 2 Universities right now (in Borte and Toregene). The 5 others are under construction. I really like the idea of saving gold until Oxford completes. Borte should certainly try to get a lot of overflow in 4 turns time in order to get a head start on it.

How best to get that overflow depends on how many hammers we just put into the knight and which turn we begin the Golden Age. To make it a 4 turn build, we would need to be in a GA in Bureau+OR and get 24+ base hammers of overflow (so 42+ hammers of apparent overflow in a unit). If we could get 35+ hammers of base overflow (so 62+ apparent overflow hammers in a unit) we could revolt back out of OR after the minimum 5 turns - so one turn into the Oxford build - and still complete Oxford on the same T199. If we already have at least 61h in the Knight that Borte started last turn, this is very doable; otherwise, we would have to either start the Golden Age sooner or wait a bit longer before revolting back to Theocracy.

Assuming Borte can make 27 base hpt (34 in a GA) by running an engineer and two priests, we could do something like this:

T192: Start a Cat (delaying the Knight) using an Engineer and two priests to give 47hpt.
T193: Keep building the Cat with the same specialists.
T194: Cat complete with 25 base overflow; resume the Knight with the same specialists.
T195: Knight complete with a good amount of overflow; start Oxford University with the same specialists. Launch a Golden Age.
T196: IF we have 172+ hammers in Oxford, we can swap out of OR without delaying the build.
T197: IF we have 248+ hammers in Oxford, we can swap out of OR without delaying the build.
T198: IF we have 324+ hammers in Oxford, we can swap out of OR without delaying the build.
T199: Oxford University Complete. Turn all Borte's specialists into Scientists.

Note that if we really do save gold all the way to Oxford, that's a fairly long-term play (unless we have to burn all the gold on unit upgrades). We'd probably be able to leave research on full for 20 turns if we live that long - and even longer if we collect Divine Right along the way (e.g. just before Nationalism so we get a pre-req bonus out of it) and build the Spiral Minaret to complete our Monk Economy Triad.

[DaveV]

Annoyingly, the interface won`t let us see exactly how many units DS has on the Iron tile. Does anyone know a way to get around that?

If you hit <Ctrl>I, the boxes at the bottom of the screen go away, the list moves down a few pixels, and you'll be able to see 3-4 more units. The other alternative is to load the game on a screen with more vertical pixels.