RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[P&nny]

Speaker, Sulla,

Congratz on this (now) very likely win !

More than good play, it was an amazing write-up; Speaker told me he's suprised I kept on reading this, but let me tell ya that the way you kept entertaining us was excellent !

I wish I could have been part of it !

On a serious note, if/when you guys are planning to start a new Pitboss at some point, you absolutely have to let me know ! I'd be super interested to reproduce such a public Pitboss experience !
The only little critic I have is that some of the players of this Pitboss were too inexperienced with the game (in general and/or MP). I can surely get very skilled & very reliable player into this, not so many people are aware of the quality of Pitboss here I would say.


Thx for everything

[novice]

Except no one ever reported so we never had a clue .

[darrelljs]

You really need a river system to get those extra hammers .

Darrell

[Speaker]

Turn 226

I asked Dantski to play before me and he bombed down the defenses of Gao and hit with the remaining 4 catapults. This gave us great odds and turned the fight into a slaughter. We lost our first Cavalry at 65% odds, and then everything else was 85%+ and we didn't lose a battle. Our cavalry are getting pretty highly promoted, with most of our main stack (20 or so cavalry) having 3 promotions. I held off capturing the city to allow Dantski to do so, and pop the culture back out. After he does, I may be able to kill a half dozen (or so) cannons that are stacked behind the city...or push on to Crydee. Hmmmmmm. I think I like that idea better.


Here is the situation on the inner sea. I almost feel bad doing this because coastal blockade is such a stupid, broken feature. But oh well. At least in this case, we do have real, actual control of the seas, so the blockade makes some sort of logical sense. Still, sea combat has many issues, namely lack of units so there isn't a real rock/paper/scissors effect like on land. Also, boats in enemy territory get full movement, while land units can only advance one tile at a time. In any event, these poor cities are starving at a frantic pace.


Here is the action in the outer sea. Again, we are blockading his cities, and have already taken two islands. I doubt we'll be able to do anything on the big island. Those cities are all big enough to draft/slave enough units to defend. But we'll keep the pressure on and force him to draft and slave.


Here's the current state of our army. It's pretty substantial at this point, especially considering 2/3 of the cavalry have 3 promotions.


Korea finally captured that barbarian city that grew in the ruins of Jowy's final stronghold. We probably should have just kept that city for ourselves. We'd have developed the whole island by now.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Cavalry promos for this stage of the game (imaging that it actually matters)? Do March or Blitz make any sense?

[Speaker]

Cavalry promos for this stage of the game (imaging that it actually matters)? Do March or Blitz make any sense?

No. Makes them far too vulnerable to "properly" promoted units.

[zakalwe]

Very impressive military strength. I guess part of the reason for that is that you never really took any big losses on the defense, so it's just been growing steadily? Did anyone ever engage one of your stacks? I'm sort of left with the impression that you've been doing all of the attacking, choosing when and where to fight, but maybe that is wrong...

[Sullla]

Indeed, as scooter pointed out, it doesn't do anything for the community if sunrise and Munro used the lategame civics for great productivity if they never posted anything on it. Yes, Munro had some pictures of individual cities, where you could look at the tile yields and figure out what he was doing. But he never spent any time discussing what he was doing or why he was doing it - you'd already have to be an expert at Civ4 to see what was going on. I do think that makes a difference... otherwise you're Da Vinci with the genius mechanical drawings that no one ever saw in his lifetime.

I had some Internet connectivity and a chance to take a look at how we're doing in the game presently. (Korea and Inca haven't shown any great desire to throw in the towel, so for the moment at least, we're going to continue playing our turns as usual.) Let me give you some pictures of the Holy Roman front after Speaker and Dantski finished their turns:



Business as usual up here in the north. Our catapult stack is one north of Tekkeda, and then we have a bunch more units SE-E of Bull Run. Because we have the advantage of cultural borders everywhere, I don't think Holy Rome can hit us anywhere without us having tons of units in position to counterattack in force. Bas-Tyra is pretty much a tactical sink for Nakor, forcing him to leave a huge garrison in place that can't do anything useful in this war. Meanwhile, we're dancing around and using Dantski's borders to strike him again and again in weak places. Very, very fun.



Here's the current situation on the western part of the front, with Gao's re-expanded borders post capture. Hey, wasn't Holy Rome outside Timbuktu just a couple of turns ago? He he. We're pretty much pure cavalry down here, with the Great General Medic III horse archer dishing out the healing. Dantski has a ton of muskets to kill redlined defenders, and he's building catapults nonstop for suicide duty. It's been a darned good partnership, in all honesty. We could not have achieved the results we did without Dantski. We have the quality, he has the quantity.

What are those cavalry doing in such a forward, exposed position? I dunno, but Speaker told me this when we chatted:

Speaker: depending on how aggressive nakor is, we'll lose 4 cavalry
Speaker: but i killed 6 cannons and a rifle with those 4 cavalry

Sounded good to me! Note: these killings were in addition to the ones in the picture Speaker posted above.

This probably comes as no surprise, but we are hurting Holy Rome badly. Their Soldier count has fallen all the way down to 1493k, when it was flirting with 2000k before. It continues to drop despite them building military nonstop in every city. More seriously, Nakor's GNP has fallen down to about 900, which doesn't exactly compare with our current 1911 rating. (We are #1 by a wide margin in every Demographics category that means anything, but I'll spare the picture here to save time.)

I really like what we did with our research. All that beaker overflow from the other techs has us finished with Scientific Method already, and then we add another 1000+ beakers into Communism next turn. It should take us 2 more turns at most, possibly even 1 more turn if we have a ton of overflow. (See if we can complete the tech in 1 turn, Speaker. It's worth burning through 500 gold at 100% science if it gets us into State Property/Uni Suffrage Golden Age earlier.)

Finally, look again at that last picture of the front lines. Hey, isn't Crydee the city right next to Nakor's capital? Why yes, yes it is...

[Jabah]

I think there is a 'rule' problem with your last turn... mixing your and Dantski's units to maximize the damage was not really legal...

From the 'rules' ™

Joint attacks

If two players want to attack a single target i.e. a city belonging to a third party, Civ C, then they must move sequentially. ie Civ A attacks with all of its' units, and then Civ B attacks with all of its' units during the phase of the turn belonging to them. Civ C must wait until the phase of the turn belonging to it before it may counter attack or promote any units etc as proscribed above.

edited - to make it sound purely factual (I had no intention of making it sounds more than that and couldn't find the proper wording in english at that time) - so I hope no one will take offense

[BCAgamer]

It's honestly too bad I didn't join realms beyond before now, but I've been enjoying lurking this game for a while. I don't think you've won yet, but I just want to say great job anyways! =)