RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Speaker]

To KAthlete defence (even if he might have overlooked it), the advantage of retreating to the capital with all available units (compared to try to defend) is that it will be either
- 3t gain because you have to slow move your cat/treb to take the fortification (culture) defence down

Yes, he will gain a few turns.

- a bloodbath for both of you because you will attack against 80% cultural defence (so you probably will lose more than 1 attacker per defender)

We have 16 catapults, and will bomb the city down to 0 and then collateral. It will not be a bloodbath...for us.

I have no idea which direction it will go since I have no idea how valuable are your units right now for you (are you ready to sacrifice a lot to gain 3t?)

C'mon, you have no idea how it will go? Even if he somehow pulled out a miracle....he has 2 cities left on the mainland. What's the point? He's done.

My personnal opinion is that he probably should have try to stand at Hoth, especially if it was on a hill

Yep. He wasted all his catapults, killed 5 of our units (by getting lucky), and then retreated.

[Sullla]

No offense Jabah, but as Speaker said, the whole "retreat everything into your capital and defend there" simply doesn't work in this game. I remember a game early in testing, when my Firaxis QA bud James tried to do that. He hit my stack with catapults, I waited a couple turns and healed with a Medic unit while bombing down defenses, and then slaughtered everything he had. All it does is delay the attacker. If you're trying to kill the invading units, retreating to your capital and sitting there is one of the worst plays you can make, because you lose all of your population in the process. (Population = whipping/drafting = more units.)

I don't care how many longbows or janissaries Kathlete tries to build, they're not going to win against cavalry once we drop the city defenses. And we'll be getting our Medic III Great General up and running this turn, so any attempt to hit our stacks with collateral damage will essentially be useless. Ooops, we heal 30% health even in enemy territory. So much for your catapults. And yes, our preferred victory at this point is Domination. We don't care about Space, Culture, or making friends via diplomacy. Everyone other than plako and Dantski dies.

Let's get to the bad news first, over on the western island:



Why is Vicksburg starving?!? Oh wait, it's "coastal blockade", the single worst feature added in the last expansion. Kathlete's dinky little galley is able to deny us from working TWENTY-FIVE coastal tiles, and cut off all of our resources from this island. Vicksburg has basically been crippled completely, due to the presence of two little galleys. It's even more absurd up at Big Bethel: despite the fact that we have a trireme parked on top of a crab resource (1 NE of the city), the Ottoman ships can prevent us from working that tile by instituting a coastal blockade. They don't even have to attack our own defending ship! Coastal blockade overrides everything in this game. It's literally impossible to defend your own sea resources, since the blockading ship doesn't even need to control the tiles to deny access to resources.

I'll just stop here by pointing out that Alex Mantzaris (alexman) put this into the game over vehement protests by Speaker, and that he's a farking idiot who had no business directing Beyond the Sword. Good thing he no longer works for Firaxis....

Speaker, it's not quite as bad as it looks here. I roaded our rice and wheat which added +4 health and helped mitigate the starvation a lot. We also get +3 happy back next turn as a draft penalty wears off, and that along with a whip on the caravel to bleed off some unhappy pop should get us into a safe zone at Vicksburg. Doesn't change the fact that this game mechanic is stupidly broken though.

Main front:



Guess what? Mos Eisley is abandoned and empty! Bet you didn't see that one coming!

Speaker, my thought is that we make our main attack along the white arrows. That path will be cleared of culture once Mos Eisley falls, and then we can proceed along the small white arrow on the following turns. Much better than simply moving southeast, as we can avoid having to attack across a river when we reach Endor.

The orange arrow is my suggestion for moving the cuirassiers from Tatooine into Dantooine this turn. Then, since they're two movers, they can catch up with the main stack next turn. Obviously Kathlete can capture back Tatooine if he really wants to do so, but he'll be attacking across a river against muskets/rifles on a hill. Rather doubt he'd do that for a size 1 city that he already abandoned earlier.

The yellow square is where we can merge our Great General onto our Medic II horse archer this turn. Just make sure we line up the unit micro correctly for the XP Sprinkle effect, taking a couple of cavs to 10XP in the process!

We can also clear the hill north of Dantooine of muskets this turn; no one-move units of Kathlete can reach it anymore. Those units can join the main attacking stack or go guard Mos Eisley, whatever you prefer. (We can probably start moving up some of the Hoth muskets too.) Anyway, I'm sure you know what you're doing, no need to belabor the unit micro here.

For the curious, Kathlete's capital currently has 7 knights, 8 janissaries, 12 longbows, 4 cats, and 1 pike inside. Yes, it's a lot of units. No, it won't stop us once we get our main stack up there. If we don't kill them all on the first attack, then we pause, heal up with the Medic III unit, and get them on the next attack.

We had a request to see the current tech situation:



The only things cropped out here are the Ancient Age techs (which everyone pretty much has) and the Industrial Age techs. Nakor has Steel and that's it for the new era. The total number of beakers each team has researched is down at the bottom, although it's an estimate and not the exact amount. Nakor and our team are very close overall, with him slightly ahead, and Korea is a very distant third place. I'm really interested in seeing how Nakor researches once his Golden Age runs out (3t, I think) and Kathlete is dead to stop feeding him cash. Probably not as impressively!

Interesting email from plako to report:

Hi,

Apparently Athlete is giving up and has offered us island city NE from mainland (I don't remeber the name). What is your opinion concerning this? Do you want to get it?

Best regards,
plako

I asked for a little more clarification:

Dear plako and Broker,

Which city is he offering you: Alderaan, Anaot, or Kirdo III? You should probably take Kirdo if offered - it's far away from our cities, and we're not close to capturing it. If Kathlete offers you Alderaan, which I doubt he's doing, you could accept and then gift it over to us. :D

Anyway, let us know the exact city and we can give you more feedback. Cheers,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

For the record, I don't think we would ever give away a city to another team. Sometimes abandoning a city for strategic purposes is necessary - see Shiloh #1 in the early game for us - but that's completely different from giving up, noobing away all your cities, and gifting the rest away to other teams. athlete should be ashamed of how he played at the end of this game.

I've got another post coming up in a bit on managing our new cities, after I get some lunch.

[regoarrarr]

The yellow square is where we can merge our Great General onto our Medic II horse archer this turn. Just make sure we line up the unit micro correctly for the XP Sprinkle effect, taking a couple of cavs to 10XP in the process!

Is there a way to micro this other than putting multiple units on the same tile with the unit you want to attach the GG to? Like put 10XP on one unit, 5 on another, 3 on one and 2 on the final one?

Or what exactly do you mean here?

[Sullla]

I think we might as well rename cities as they come out of resistance - a symbolic passing of authority from one empire to the next. Here are my thoughts on managing the new Ottoman conquests:



K = Keep; that is, leave the cottage in place
WS = Workshop
F = Farm
WM = Watermill

Sunrise is a pretty good city, leaning towards commerce over production. We'll eventually gain control of that crabs tile (being in the first ring) for a nice +8 food surplus - no additional farms needed. Four of its cottages have matured to the point that we'll want to keep them, and then we can go and add workshops on all the rest. Under State Property civic, that gets us up to about 20 [base] shields/turn with a sizable food surplus. The infrastructure that survived on capture was pretty sweet too, with a granary for growth, courthouse for maintenance savings, and market to enable a free Mercantilism merchant. Once the food box fills up, this city is going to grow really fast.

Overall, not much worker labor needed, as this city naturally is in good shape.



Perryville (former Corulag) has even better infrastructure inside, and a lot of nice resources. But it's squeezed tightly amongst other cities, and has to be managed very carefully. For example, the wheat resource to the east actually has to go to Dantooine, which otherwise lacks any food. That leaves Perryville at a much more modest +4 food from the cows, which we'll improve by farming over a bunch of those cottages as indicated. The arrow indicates an irrigation path for Bothawui, which very badly needs those farms extended up to the north!

Anyway, we keep a couple of highly developed cottages and bulldoze the rest for farms or workshops. Over the immediate next few turns, Perryville takes the cows and iron to pop cultural borders immediately. (This also serves a very useful defensive function, blocking Kathlete's knights from reaching this city.) Next turn, Perryville can use the expanded borders to grab the wheat and stone resources, while passing the cows and iron to the city immediately south (which will allow it to pop borders as well). After that, we can micro the city each turn depending on food and need - probably try to fill up the granary food box of first one, then the other ASAP for fastest possible growth.

So... I'm going to request that Speaker let me micro these cities and not change the settings over the next few turns. K thnx l8r.



Bentonville/Bothawui is the red-headed stepchild of the Ottoman conquests. This city makes Thebes/Fort Henry look like a veritable paradise in comparison. It has no resources at all - the wheat is needed by Hoth and the silks by Dantooine. All of the tiles to the north and east and south are claimed by other, better cities. The only tiles it gets to itself are the six tiles to the west, just a bunch of normal grassland tiles.

Nevertheless, we'll turn this into a productive city in time. Cities this small (I doubt Bentonville will ever get much past size 7) don't really work as commercial cities. You're better off just skipping all the infrastructure and using them as garrison towns, so that's what we'll do here. I don't even think we need the theatre, to be honest. We can get border expansions in this area from other, better accompanying cities. I'll probably change that over to a forge.

The course of action here is to build a whole bunch of farms, and get the city up to +6 food surplus. Grow it up to size 6-7, then bulldoze most of those same farms in favor of workshops. Since workshops are food neutral (2 food) under State Property, we could theoretically turn all six of those grassland tiles into workshops and get 3 shields/turn on each (4 shields/turn if we go to Caste System civic, which we might). That's 20 (base) shields/turn at size 6, +0 food/turn, when all is said and done. With a factory and power plant, you could get 4t infantry out of this sad little hole in the wall. Better than nothing, right?



Harper's Ferry/Ord Mantell/Kushans isn't a particularly great city. This is essentially a glorified fishing town. Literally - it just has the fish to work with, because Tatooine to the east needs that rice for food. Per his standard play, Kathlete just built cottages on every tile, which is suboptimal but we'll probably leave in place due to the difficulty of getting more farms here. Basically leave the mature cottages in place and bulldoze the rest for some workshops and extra production. This will be a solid commerce city, and that's about it.



Hilton Head (former Tatooine) is more interesting. The first thing to do is farm over to the rice tile, which I've outlined along the bottom tiles. It may make more sense to go diagonally northeast from the rice tile, which I'll look at again once Endor is out of the picture. We can keep some of the mature cottages here, but to me, this location is crying out for production, with its hill tiles and marble resource. Put down workshops on the plains tiles, some watermills on the river (3 food with State Property!) and you've got a very strong production city. Keep in mind that the sugar resource here is better used at Endor (I drew in the borders), so that shouldn't be counted in the city's overall food allocation. With irrigation on the rice and a couple of farms/SP watermills, this city should reach +6 food/turn and have excellent production.

At the macro level, Kathlete's fault was overbuilding cottages to the detriment of everything else. He literally just cottaged every single flatland tile, even the plains tiles! That works OK when you have all grassland tiles and multiple food bonuses, like at Sunrise City, not so well when food is scarce. Cities like Corulag and Tatooine have good land, but they were suffering from low population due to lack of food even before we invaded. (I have an old picture showing them at sizes 5 and 4 on Turn 200.) That's just not good enough for core cities in the heart of your empire.

[darrelljs]

I'll just stop here by pointing out that Alex Mantzaris (alexman) put this into the game over vehement protests by Speaker, and that he's a farking idiot who had no business directing Beyond the Sword.

I'm used to you being straight shooter Sulla, this pussyfooting around is just no good .

Darrell

[Speaker]

I'm used to you being straight shooter Sulla, this pussyfooting around is just no good.

Sullla, I'll check in with you tonight. I am too busy right now to post anything substantial.

[mostly_harmless]

Is there a way to micro this other than putting multiple units on the same tile with the unit you want to attach the GG to? Like put 10XP on one unit, 5 on another, 3 on one and 2 on the final one?

Or what exactly do you mean here?

Finally a post worth delurking for.

I think this refers to the following situation:
The Medic II HA might only need, say 4XP to reach his next promo. Since there is no need for it to have any more XP there are effectively 16XP left from the GG that could go to other units. So if you have two units on the tile both get 10XP each. If you have 3 units, one gets 6XP, two get 7XP. 4 units, 5XP each. 5 units, 4XP each. 6 units, 4 get 3xp, while 2 get 4XP. Since you cannot control whether the HA will be one of the two units that get the 4XP (as far as I know), the safe way is to use 5 units including the HA. Ideally you find 4 units that are also only 4XP short of the next promo and maybe even injured, so can instant-heal, when promoted.

mh

[regoarrarr]

Finally a post worth delurking for.

I think this refers to the following situation:
The Medic II HA might only need, say 4XP to reach his next promo. Since there is no need for it to have any more XP there are effectively 16XP left from the GG that could go to other units. So if you have two units on the tile both get 10XP each. If you have 3 units, one gets 6XP, two get 7XP. 4 units, 5XP each. 5 units, 4XP each. 6 units, 4 get 3xp, while 2 get 4XP. Since you cannot control whether the HA will be one of the two units that get the 4XP (as far as I know), the safe way is to use 5 units including the HA. Ideally you find 4 units that are also only 4XP short of the next promo and maybe even injured, so can instant-heal, when promoted.

mh

Okay - that's what I thought. The earlier post kind of gave the impression that there might be a way to micro which units get what number of XPs.

[Sullla]

Speaker crashed the game by selecting "Exit to Desktop" after playing the turn, so no pictures available right now. We mostly captured Mos Eisley and moved up a bunch of units.

Nakor/DMOC have "officially requested a Pause", so expect them to be declaring war on someone in the last few minutes of the turn after the reload. Probably Dantski, could be us. Guess we'll see.

[Dr. Nomadic]

Here's some stuff you could send to somebody for taunting purposes, or you could send it to athlete to make fun of his poor play:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSXnYdgutpk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbcFpmUcKyg

I WANNA BE THE GUY!!!