[PB37 SPOILER] Coeurva, Bacchus -- Cyrus of Carthage

[Bacchus]

Actually Mandrake as a lightening rod is a red herring. It's better to just blast past it and attack mainland cities and come back for Mandrake at leisure.
My idea, which I didn't communicate sufficiently, that Mandrake can serve as a base for a counter-strike, especially with Nav promoted boats. The best defense is not trying to protect the other island cities (impossible), nor try to fight navally (even more laughable) but just have a sufficient force to break out and threaten a couple of key razes. That would be enough to make any attack from your side mutually destructive enough that it wouldn't be appealing. We didn't get on the same page with Couer though, and I was distracted, so the actual action on the theatre turned out to be a half-assed mess.

Regarding dtay, we were fully worried about him in the mid-term, and we did all we could to bolster up.

Regarding "keeping you pointed at China". Erm, that was our plan. But then, instead of going after China, you started very aggressively settling the sea between us. Don't pretend that you were focussed on China and we distracted you, that is not what happened. Sure, in your thread you kept writing how you are gonna pivot to China, but only after putting just a couple more highly-promoted units on your islands.

[Bacchus]

Also, because the subject of Wealth builds comes up a lot, and Coeurva is doing himself a bit of an injustice, I would post this:

Our GNP was just high. We pushed it even further with Wealth, and probably too much, but the real problem was 1) not getting Courthouses in time, 2) being 1st power for dozens of turns without doing anything with it.

In fairness, regarding the latter point, we had a very boisterous Dark Savant, who also kept building units in considerable quantities, and preventing us from actually using our army in the south against Yuri. But regardless, that was a far bigger failure that the attack on Inca, which just had to happen to keep the game meaningful for us, as I see it. I see no gameplan that makes sense with Theocratic Charismatic Krill sitting in Mandrake, I may be narrow minded, but I just don't see how that situation could have been managed, and I don't like living under a hammer.

Relevant power graph for illustration. What a waste of hammers and gold:

[Coeurva]

Felt we have to take and hold Mandrake to avoid our game being completely hostage to your actions. With Mandrake and NavII we at least posed a credible counter-punch thread, so I saw it as a keystone of any diplomatic solution. I didn't really count on you understanding our plans, and you didn't, thinking we just want to wage war against completely hopeless odds, but there wasn't much else to do.

Yeah, that was my idea as well. For me, the importance of capturing Mandrake was not really its placement (except that it was the most exposed target) -- it was to shift the balance of production queues from 4:8 to 5:7 (or 6:7 because Mandrake would have opened up another city site for us), which one could argue is still a shift from "hopeless" to "hopeless" when the advantaged player has access to C2 galleons (whose importance I severely underestimated -- chalk that up to newbieness, Krill ). In any case, since Krill had not yet begun producing his navy at the time, we would have had a better chance to match him later, and he'd know this, and perhaps that would, oddly, have served to stabilize our mutual border. And we needed to keep the islands we took from Savant to stand any chance against dtay's massive production; but we saw them as under constant threat from Krill, and this is what he correctly claimed in his thread even before we had gone to war -- he could always have taken them.

If we could have achieved peace with Mandrake in our hands, the plan was to send Galleons across the channel to the other ocean to attack Joey.

I think the plan was actually to send these galleons west to attack Savant's west -- if dtay ever allowed us to -- or to support a possible Mongolian attack on him, in the hopes of getting their assistance against dtay later. (We did manage good diplomacy with Mongolia throughout the game.)

Why on earth would you attack someone and then just expect them to say,"ho hum, ok, I guess I'll take this loss." This is utter stupidity.

Because you were poised to attack China, and would absorb it uncontested if Krill chose to invest resources into defeating us instead, and Krill would certainly have known this. Therefore, I thought that by attacking Mandrake, we'd force him to choose between China (and producing land units in his ports) and our eastern islands... and that he'd choose China, preferably -- buying us time and improving our potential production in that sea, so that we could perhaps fend him off later if he chose to come back; or ideally, we'd settle into "mutually assured attrition" ("destruction" was never really in our cards here) and thus stabilize our border. Since Krill has just said we had "nothing he wanted", I don't see why he expects us to be seeking a different kind of "diplomatic" solution. Arguably, the situation was unsalvageable ever since we had created the power vacuum resulting from the CML war in that sea.

Also, what the hell gains did you expect to make attacking me? I had exactly one island in that sea and it was something like 20 tiles from your capital. Or were you actually thinking of attacking my mainland?!??

We thought of a lot of things, including a one-off idea to capture the hopelessly distant Confucian holy city from Mongolia at some point -- uh, no hard feelings? But no, I didn't earnestly consider attacking you at any point. We had a vague idea of raiding TGLH by burning a Great General on XP for some swords if it ever became sensible in-game; it never did. We saw you as a potential enemy because of your strong position and our diplomatic commitment to Mongolia (the Khatunate's mileage may vary) -- but long-term only, and we'd have been willing to work with you to some extent, probably roughly as you felt about us in-game. Good thing for us that Savant ended up ticking you off more than we did...

On that note, our only gold resource was something like 20 tiles from our capital, which is the main reason we settled as absurdly towards you as we did (five cities in a line), since Savant's play of early circumnavigation (which I'll never get tired of being impressed by) paid off.

Also, if we have no defense against you, as you say, doesn't it make sense to fight you to the death and immediately, before your machine is quite switched on and fully in place? Why delay the inevitable, if the time is only working against us?

My reasoning as well. Try to prevent cataclysm with a temporary edge before it is sure to occur. A t200 attack from Krill that takes all of our eastern islands (and perhaps razes, but at the very least threatens, all our eastern cities, forcing us to keep defenders spread too thinly) is basically as good as dtay crushing us underfoot, which would in that case occur some 50t later, but occur nonetheless.

Also Krill had like, no units when you invaded. Him thinking that he's immune to invasion despite this is one thing, but how the hell do you expect him to attack you in that situation?? You gotta actually look at the facts on the ground and not just what the map looks like zoomed out in world-view with culture lit up.

Fact on the ground: Krill could always make a huge well-promoted army / navy out of thin air with his 2:1 port advantage, HEpic + SoZ, CHM/AGG Theocracy, and strong pop base. He had no power when we attacked him, and almost-instantly converted his pop into equal power. We knew we had about 3-5 turns to do anything much, at best; we stalled at Bracken because I didn't have the good sense or whatever you want to testify by to just push for some mainland city and threaten a raze (hopefully), twelve double-promo Incan galleons show up in-theatre, ggnore. Still better than not trying it and just seeing those twelve galleons at any point. We weren't convinced that dtay would attack us before Krill would, and either would spell doom (or at least, dogpile) given the example set by Savant earlier, where Joey's attack saw him under fire from all directions.

Sorry Bacchus, but I'd say that keeping me pointed at China is a better defense than Mandrake. You might have lived.

We weren't aware you'd been pointing at China. We thought you'd be keeping them alive indefinitely as a buffer state to focus on developing your economy further, since Joey would just take half of China anyway and border you afterwards, forcing a strong commitment from you since he was the #1 in power iirc (we never had graphs on him, but supposed as much), and weakening the stability of your border with Gavagai.

In terms of strategic advantages...why were you worried about me when dtay was there? I don't buy that reasoning, dtay was just better off in tech and power and you were worried that in 40 turns I would behave threat? That just seems like... long-sightedness.

See above. You might not have had much of an army / navy when we attacked you, but that could have changed at a moment's notice because your position was simply that strong in flexibility (read: pop) after you had bulbed Astro to threaten us with galleons, although I think we'd have attacked all the more if you hadn't gotten Astro. So yeah, we escalated it ourselves with the Astro bulb, which wasn't even necessary for the Savant campaign, and a different line of play from GLib onwards might have seen us alive by the end.

I think we still get killed, or at least hopelessly crippled, by dtay in the scenario where we don't attack you -- although that's probably best assessed by dtay himself

[dtay]

fwiw - my take is you'll seem like you were far too concerned with the balance of power with krill (whether in queues or power or first strike capability or what have you) compared its importance. It's not like there's no incentive for conflict, but when neither of you the front runner wars of naval dominance start to make a lot less sense for their own sake. And if one or both of you becomes the front runner, well, good problem to have.

Bitter pill to swallow for whichever of you ultimately accepts a fait accompli, and from thence are quagmires born :lol

Yeah I think I would have still taken you'll*, either a few turns later to have more cannons or a bit slower and more expensively. It wasn't fast or cheap enough as is though.


*Presuming same tactical execution. I think you'll actually had a few misplays that made conquering you a good bit easier, basically where you let me wipe smaller stacks of knights on the offense.

[Coeurva]

We were mostly concerned with Krill because we felt that you'd end our game anyway, and hoped you'd turn against Mongolia instead (though you'd have less of a reason to attack them, since Joey would benefit more immediately). That was only possible if we could keep up a display of strength, which was another reason why I thought we "had to" go to war with Krill -- if we could somehow force the concession of that island, most likely just because Krill would have had, best-case, more immediately pressing stuff to do rather than deal with us, you might have thought us stronger than we were and reconsidered. I still think it was already too late when we found ourselves without a way to impede your progress into Russia; swords only cut it once, at best and we were hilariously slow at teching to our UU / UB.

[Bacchus]

Yeah, not conquering Russia quickly enough was as strategically game-losing to us as having Krill enjoy such an advantage on the sea, it was a matter of time before Zulu's overwhelming productive capacity would crush us.

But then, looking back, we were effectively stuck in arms race with Savant for the entire early-mid game, in addition to the ancient war against CML (which wasn't actually that costly, and probably paid back in the worker and land gains). We should have been much clearer about how much of a drag that arms race was, and the need to take decisive action to compensate. Instead, I overestimated our long-term prospects (especially failing to properly account for the dryness of our land, similar problem to Krill), and didn't push for expansionary war unless we could really be sure it's favourable to us. We did not actually have the luxury of seeking favourable engagements, we had to take more risk.

I rather enjoy how Savant kept thinking he is running a farmer's gambit, and then occasionally posted surprise in the thread that other are running "even more of a farmer's gambit".

[GermanJoey]

I think that if you had just completely ignored Krill he would have completely ignored you for probably the entirety of the game. I don't think he would have been able to stop me invading China, but he certainly could have made it more costly and take a hell of a lot longer. If you still absolutely thought you needed to take the island from Krill, the best time would have been to wait until he was actually engaged in a landwar with either Gavagai, Donovan, or myself.

[GermanJoey]

I rather enjoy how Savant kept thinking he is running a farmer's gambit, and then occasionally posted surprise in the thread that other are running "even more of a farmer's gambit".

IMHO, the term "farmer's gambit" is thrown around far too often than it actually applies. Moreso than the defender being the one taking the risk of leaving their stuff lightly defended, it's actually the attacker taking making the gambit, due to 1.) the expense and opportunity cost of making extra early military in lieu of expanding, 2.) the logistic difficulty in getting these troops to the point of attack undetected (e.g. from demo graphs), and 3.) choosing to hinge your game's success on a few random dice rolls, as early conflicts generally are.