RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Sullla]

Today nothing happened with the game, as we are currently Paused for athlete. (Just as well, I was gone all day.) However, I receieved this really cool PM from slaze today. It's long and awesome, so I'll just post it in its entirety:

Here's some shots from the end of last turn, when we were talking ingame.



Pretty straight forward, not much to say.



The only other multi unit square that I have visibility of is the one you can see, the 10 units in Hoth (Actually not true, as later this turn I found a jann and longbow over by what was Kashyyyk, but that's over by me). The units shown are in Dantooine (with the single longbow next to them). I can say that all his cities have been pretty much 1 archer/longbow each for some time, except for the collection of units you've seen retreating from you and seem to be collected in Hoth/Dantooine. About turn 201/202 he began to move some units toward your border (cats janns etc in H/D) and gathered the knights in D. But with the way our war has gone, with both of us spending so many units, the core of what he had has pretty much been destroyed. All he has (save maybe 3-5 units in the fog and that might be over-speculating, he doesn't seem to be hiding anything from my visibility) is pretty much what is shown. True it seems like he's been whipping like crazy this turn so add 4-6 janns/knights to what is shown, but it you have anywhere iin the neighborhood of 75 units then you should blitz full steam ahead.

Great stuff! I thanked slaze and said that we'd love to see more such pictures if he had the time to take thm. It pretty much just shows what we already thought, that Kathlete was sending the house against us and leaving nothing in reserve, but there's a difference between "thinking" and "knowing."

Speaker, here's the "advice" message I'm planning on sending to Dantski, so you can look it over:

Dear Dantski,

While we're in the current pause, let's try to figure out a plan going forward, assuming Nakor is going to declare war against you. Here are our suggestions:

1) If you have the Great Peope for a Golden Age, you should swap over to Vassalage and/or Theocracy civics. I don't know if you do have two Great People; we assumed not, since you just finished a recent Golden Age. If not, skip ahead to the next point - you can't waste turns in Anarchy right now.

2) Swap your cities to muskets and start whipping them. You should try to avoid whipping at the swapping penalty (ie only whip when there are shields in the box) but the idea is just to get the maximum number of units possible ASAP. Look back at slaze's example from when he was attacked for a great example of how to get a large army in a short time. You want muskets because they're by far the best defensive unit you can build right now.

3) Set research to 100% gold, to have cash for upgrading units as needed.

4) We discover Rifling tech next turn (Turn 209). We will try to get you some rifles to help out, but there's something else you can do on your end. You can build muskets, gift them and upgrade gold to us, then we can upgrade them to rifles and gift them back to you. In other words, even though you lack the tech to build rifles, you can still upgrade your current units to rifles by going through our team. It's not cheap:

Musket to Rifle = 110g
Axeman to Rifle = 245g
Skirmisher to Rifle = 275g

But it can be done, and it's the best way we see to get a bunch of rifles in your cities in a hurry. With your current treasury of 700 gold, and a couple of turns of 0% science, we can probably turn 10 of your muskets into 10 rifles very quickly. Fun surprise for Nakor!

5) Nakor is just researching Horseback Riding tech this turn; he still lacks Military Tradition tech. That means he currently has zero two-move units; any attack that comes is going to be all slow movers. This should give you some time to work with. Once we have eliminated Kathlete (hopefully no more than 10 more turns), we should be able to turn and send our main army south against Nakor. Hang on for now, slave out a TON of muskets, we'll help turn them into rifles, and make him pay for every inch of territory!

We want to be honest: this is going to be really rough on your economy and teching. But you should be able to survive, and it's better to be slaze and behind in tech than Kathlete and eliminated, right?

Good luck, stay in touch,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

What do you think? Both about the message and the advice.

[Speaker]

Both the advice and the message look great to me.

[Sullla]

Looks like athlete is back and the turn has started moving again. A pair of emails came in from Dantski and plako:

Hi KA's

Thanks for all that info. The excessive slaving will begin once the game is unpaused (wasn't lat time I looked) and I'll be upgrading the most likely to be hit city (Kumbi Saleh) units first. I definitely feel that city is HRE's best target and most likely place to attack.

Not sure how useful sending units to you will be considering I'll need every unit I can get at the front line and will be exhausting my treasury on upgrades. I'll try to gift a few units in border cities when I can with gold to upgrade them when possible.

I've certainly given this some thought and tried to see where should I defend and what's expendable.

Also if for some bizarre reason I had an opening, I could tech myself upto Grenadiers in 10 or so turns.

-Dantski

Yeah, not sure he really gets it. Hopefully Dantski can hold out long enough for us to finish conquering Kathlete and get our full army back down to the southern front. (I don't hold out much hope for his mainland cities. Maybe Dantski can save some of his scattered island holdings.)

Hi,

We can't assist militarily. We're weak and we don't have anything to match rifles. However please let us know, if there is something else we could do.

You probably have noticed that HRE has Chemistry so I had to guess Steel and Cannons are pretty close for them also.

plako

Umm, thanks? We should try to lean on Korea to help out in some way. Everyone sitting back and doing nothing as the smaller powers get gobbled up is the tactic we used to take down the opposing 4-way alliance; that showed the folly of doing nothing to help your allies out. Korea should be able to send over some gold for upgrades if nothing else.

We should be able to do the turn tonight, Speaker. I'll take some pictures once Kathlete's 12-hour window has ended this afternoon.

[Speaker]

[COLOR="Yellow"]Sullla EDIT: Going to post some pictures from before we played here. It'll make more sense that way, trust me. I love being a moderator sometimes...

Kathlete attacked our units on the hill on his half of the turn. Sent in the catapults first, then attacked. (Read the results from bottom to top):





Oops, looks like maceman Darrelljs bit the dust there. Sorry!

We lost a total of five units (most of them losing at 30-40% odds. Kathlete was a little lucky here, although he was taking quite a few low odds shots, so he was going to win some of them.) Kathlete lost 4 knights and all 6 of his catapults, so that was pretty much an even exchange, maybe a little in our favor. Here was the situation when we started playing:



No defenders at all in the south!!!



OK, now back to Speaker's post.[/COLOR]

Another day, another 2 cities captured. The pain train keeps a-rolling.




Oops, in taking the screenshot, I forgot (again) that I was going to raze the city. To which Sullla asks, "uh...why do you keep doing that?"

Dunno. I'm stupid? Sorry 'bout that!


Sullla will post some more screenshots in a bit, but Kathlete hit our stack on the hill with 6 catapults, and then all his Knights and a few Janissaries. He won 5 or 6 battles, all of them with <45% odds. I should have built a couple more two-promo Muskets, and then he wouldn't have had any chance to attack us on the hill. He has also won 2 naval battles with 30% odds. Kinda lame, but whatever. It won't matter. I killed all those units before they could get into the city with our Cuirassier in Bothawui. They now fork the two cities.


Here's the units Kathlete has left.


Kathlete's capital is empty. We could have moved some Cuirassier up to attack it next turn, but meh, we'll wait until we have enough force to hold it.


In non-war related news, we used the Great Prophet for a shrine, which is worth 40 gpt, and will be worth more after we allow our new Ottoman conquests to become chosen people as well.


Research on Rifling finishes next turn, so naturally I have timed it so several Muskets will finish next turn and auto-upgrade in queue to Rifles. I'm not sure if they will all have enough hammers to finish as Rifles, but they'll be done faster than if we had waited. We also chose not to draft this turn, saving the unhappiness for rifles.

[darrelljs]

Endor used to be called Paris.

EDIT: And I must say I am totally disappointed at this fight. The staging was great (and the city fork was nice) but without any resistance its just boring. I miss the 5v1 days, those were some nail biting (and educational) turns .

Darrell

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Oops, in taking the screenshot, I forgot (again) that I was going to raze the city. To which Sullla asks, "uh...why do you keep doing that?"

It would appear that the Master Defense Plan is to surrender at you until your economy (or morale) collapses.

[Sullla]

We forgot to mention that we generated a Great General this turn:



He spawned in Gettysburg, and is heading off in the direction of the front lines. Looks like it all might be done by the time he gets there though! We can either use for a Medic III super-healer, or add the General into our Heroic Epic city for even more experience. Both good choices. I'm leaning more towards the Medic III unit, just because having one of them along does so much to speed up your offensive pushes. Speaker can talk me out of it though if he feels strongly otherwise.

This picture also shows some of the Ottoman naval units in the central sea, which are tearing up all our fishing nets. One caravel, one trireme, and one galley - we don't have enough ships to stop them. Sigh. Well, only 2 more turns until we get to research Optics, and then we'll be able to whip some caravels and clear the mess up.

We also lost 2 triremes this turn (one to a caravel, the other in a 30% toss of bad luck, blah) and killed a Kathlete galley with one of our triremes. At least a battle of attrition favors us in the war at sea.

Because Kathlete moved his units to cover his second city on the western island, we left our units in place over there and didn't attack. We're moving some catapults (and some rifles after this turn) over, and then we'll be able to attack and capture Alderaan.

Overall combat results for this turn. We lost:

3 cuirassiers
2 muskets
1 mace

And we killed:

8 knights
6 catapults
4 janissaries

That's 18 to 6 in total units, and 146k to 62k in Power rating. Considering how much harder it is to attack than defend, that's darned good.

Here's the situation on the main front:



What we do next turn depends on what Kathlete does. If he moves the 6 defensive units on the hill into Hoth, we'll probably just let our Mounted units rest up and heal for a turn while moving the rest of our cats next to Hoth. (A lot of these units are injured, and would really benefit from a turn of rest. Too bad we don't have that Medic III unit right now!) If Kathlete keeps his stacks separated, or moves to defend Dantooine (which has only a single knight inside on defense), then we'll probably go ahead and kill Hoth before it can build more units. Not really any good choices Kathlete can make here...



The south is very empty! Already cleaned out just about everything down here. Note that Kathlete has no more cities on the inner sea, so no new naval units to deal with in there. Just have to clear out the current ones.

If Kathlete continues to leave his capital empty - - we might send our cuirassiers up there and try to grab it. Depends what he does again. Wonder if he realizes that we can see inside with a Sentry horse archer (?) Love those Sentry units!

Regardless, this shouldn't take too much longer. Thanks to slaze, we know that Kathlete isn't hiding any units. Once that stack at Hoth is dead (and we killed about half of it already this turn), that's basically the end of this war. Sorry if it wasn't that tense or exciting.

On the other hand, Kathlete continues to gift all his income (300gpt) to Nakor every trurn, and there's no way we can keep up with Nakor when he can run 100% science every single turn for free. So we will be behind him in tech for the immediate future, and that impending showdown should be something to watch. Don't write off this game just yet.

[Dr. Nomadic]

Everybody when gifting cities/money due to being on the verge of getting eliminated: "If I can't win, I'll help somebody else do so!"

What if Dantski petered out and started gifting you money/cities/units?

[Speaker]

What if Dantski petered out and started gifting you money/cities/units?

We'll probably see about that shortly. Personally, I'd be inclined to refuse the gift and declare war on him instead. but I don't think Sullla would go for that.

[timmy827]

Research on Rifling finishes next turn, so naturally I have timed it so several Muskets will finish next turn and auto-upgrade in queue to Rifles. I'm not sure if they will all have enough hammers to finish as Rifles, but they'll be done faster than if we had waited.

What exactly happens with this? Does a musket that would have been at 70/80 hammers become a rifle at 70/110, or do the hammers get scaled up somehow?