[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[williams482]

I don't love the city for peace offer, but you make a reasonable case. I admit I'd rather play for the maximally profitable "tilting opponent does dumb shit" option over trying to give their rational side a better bad deal, but it's plausible that offering the city does improve their odds of accepting.

It's also possible that it makes us seem desperate, which is probably good: ginger might think we're panicking because we don't have enough troops in theater, or just terrified of their cavs, and make an over-aggressive blunder. That's definitely a desirable scenario in your knife edge plan to squeeze out a win still.

[ljubljana]

Consider me duly deterred Best of luck!

ljubljana 4-step plan for feeling better:

1. be long-time EG fan
2. EG posts multiple times in lurker thread
3. EG says nice things in your thread
4. feel better

I don't love the city for peace offer, but you make a reasonable case. I admit I'd rather play for the maximally profitable "tilting opponent does dumb shit" option over trying to give their rational side a better bad deal, but it's plausible that offering the city does improve their odds of accepting.

It's also possible that it makes us seem desperate, which is probably good: ginger might think we're panicking because we don't have enough troops in theater, or just terrified of their cavs, and make an over-aggressive blunder. That's definitely a desirable scenario in your knife edge plan to squeeze out a win still.

yeah.... i sure don't love it either...... it's a fair question, whether we should be going for the maximally-profitable mistake (so, if we REQUIRE the variance to break in our favor to that degree in order to win at this point), or if we should go for the mistake with the highest product of likelihood * impact.... i do not quiiiiite think we are in the regime yet where everything must go perfectly for us to have a chance. but i also have a history of saying exactly that thing and being wrong about it (see: every single game i have lost on RB ) but like.... in contrast to the thrawn games, we still have the most land area and the most cities by 7 and probably the largest army or close to it, right? sure, we pretty much need ginger to screw up big-time at least once, then for us to stall them out for 30 turns while everyone else leaves us totally alone, but while unlikely, is that really hail-mary territory? maybe, but i at least didn't think so when i made the offer.... we'll see (probably very soon) whether that was right lol

and good point about seeming desperate! thank you for thinking about it since i sure didn't now what else could we do to reinforce that perception, do you think? deciding how much they should try to take from us in the critical next few turns before we can reposition will be a tough call for ginger, since they know from milpower scores that the force does exist somewhere in our territory to wipe out 30+ cuirs/cavs if poorly committed, but equally i think they do have to get us back down to around 30 cities to seal in a game-over situation for us....

[williams482]

Is there a way we could cede a city to capture which would likely induce an over-ambitious followup? Just based on this game, abandoning cities is a pretty clear sign of desperate manpower shortages. The trick, of course, would be laying a both compelling and suitably destructive trap.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

I'll be honest, I got a little lost in the weeds of your posts (one problem I have is it's hard for me to tell what I'm meant to be looking at in a screenshot, which the text frequently seems to take for granted - it's actually one reason I tried to be better about highlighting the important bits in some of my later reports), so I dipped to spectate some of the other threads to try to get a clearer picture of the actual state of things.

But just remember! Keep breathing - it's only a game. Even if you get your ass kicked, as long you're having fun and learning, then you're winning.

You also tilt, when you should withdraw - and that is knightly, too.

- A Knight's Tale

Keep tilting!

[ljubljana]

ooooh. maybe.... we do have something close to a suitable trap, i think.... around 10 cats in theater plus most of last turn's 33-count of cuirs, plus random muskets and pikes and things can plausibly get a good trade i think. depends on how much they advance with....

Turn 194 - Zululand

okay, let's deal with this, i guess. first we manage expectations: even with the city attached i think it's quite unlikely ginger actually took peace, so it'll probably be a pretty bleak turn. i saw some suspicious roading on our eastern border as well so it's plausible that we will soon have incoming at takayasu and kirishima as well, which won't be easily stopped depending on their numbers. don't know how far they'll get (we have pretty thick 12-unit musket/pike/longbow stacks in all the northern border cities at this point) but we could be in for some revenge town-burning for sure. it may not be horrible to lose a few towns as i did actually under-food that area pretty badly but if they get enough to fund a push to steel tech we're in trouble.... uh, in even more trouble



huh? i don't know what this means.... i am going to ignore it i think, for fear of being perceived as having committed to something i don't understand.... maybe they're saying they won't intervene in our war, which is better than nothing. not sure if i'm expected to accept to lock that in if so, though



ginger actually burned no hill start, knowing that they couldn't gift it back to greenline.... work ethic still stands and will pop borders this turn, RFT just got there. we lost a handful of units on defense, mostly the defenders in NHS and a few guerilla muskets on hills, but we did take two cuirs with us and lost no cuirs of our own. not good in terms of hammers, but maybe fine considering that our guys we draftees and obsolete medieval dudes

S-SE of work ethic is, yep.... a sentry, mobility cuir who i am very tempted to attack  knowing how valuable sentries are on offense, and having seen them run out of actual scouts apparently almost immediately, i definitely think we take a 1 for 1 trade into such a unit if.... we actually have one of our units in range that can reliably get a kill, about which i am uncertain.... we also have, let's see, an 8 health amphibious cuir that killed NHS and an unknown number of survivors behind it. so we can perhaps pick off a few isolated units, but that's probably it for now.

well, generally i think 1 for 1 trades favor us since they are so far from home and have no way to quickly mass-produce units. so you can expect me to mostly go for them when offered...

so we have a 7.6 health jan on a hill scouting magnus, which i can attack into with a c2 + pinch musket at 75% odds.... that's a win. then do i risk a combat 2 cuir against their super-scout at 80%, knowing that if i fail we'd have to combat road over to finish it off? eh, i think so, these sentry units are really high-value targets for the goal of preventing them from advancing efficiently. and then that FAILED, ugh..... very cool, very cool. so we leave 2 workers exposed to potential snipe, but then if they want to do that they probably are leaving another cuir out, so not that horrible for us either.

btw, i'm seriously considering an iron pillage into an impi wave in the next few turns, once we are whipped down far enough that cuirs will be hard to come by..... they are phenomenal at finishing off injured cuirs and attacking hammer-efficiently into stuff like that sentry + mobility cuirscout, which we had to use actual valuable units to kill this turn



managed to trade two HAs for the wounded cuir, fighting in the ruins of no hill start



mjmd apparently getting ready to wipe egypt off the fucking planet, no surprise there... not sure if we should be hoping they try to take more of greenline now or not. i guess not since our wincon still runs through finishing them off eventually, but i admit i'm hoping for it anyways just to mess with ginger's getting to fly around for free on all their roads

with no easy peace from ginger it's time to send long cow/cows to the vultures, before they get tempted to pile in. nauf first... there is some upside for them i think as it secures them from attack if we DO get peace with ginger somehow, and also upside from us to protect our heroic epic city where i am frantically whipping formation cuirs. seems fine to me. mjmd i'll wait a minute on as locking ourselves out versus them could be really bad if we do get peace, and we don't exactly share a land border or anything

i am also debating a swap to mercs anyways, even if we're still at war, assuming we are able to stall ginger's offensive.... somewhere.... and reach a military steady-state, if not an actual peace treaty. if that happens a) drafted muskets will start to look like a better ROI than whipped cuirs and b) we're going to need to reattain the capability to get techs lol

sigh. it's hard to keep giving a shit right now. no real avenues for setting any kind of conscious trap yet i think, their stack is healing in District Discount and will definitely not be foolish enough to move out before doing so. whatever man. i'll see you guys tomorrow

[ljubljana]

I'll be honest, I got a little lost in the weeds of your posts (one problem I have is it's hard for me to tell what I'm meant to be looking at in a screenshot, which the text frequently seems to take for granted - it's actually one reason I tried to be better about highlighting the important bits in some of my later reports), so I dipped to spectate some of the other threads to try to get a clearer picture of the actual state of things.

But just remember! Keep breathing - it's only a game. Even if you get your ass kicked, as long you're having fun and learning, then you're winning.

You also tilt, when you should withdraw - and that is knightly, too.

- A Knight's Tale

Keep tilting!

no worries!! i have been very stream of consciousness in this game to cut down on, well, what would otherwise be the even larger sum total of writing + playing + also editing time..... i appreciate this  i will do my best.... and as for tilting, well, i don't even need to try to do that at this point  and i will grudgingly admit that i have, and am continuing to learn a lot. it may be a while before i put that into practice in another game, but not really because of this situation, just because i usually need a long break after the last monster game to feel foolhardy enough to sign up for another one

edit: i saw "sir william" and thought this would be william the marshal.... but edward III doesn't match up with that timeline-wise..... am i forgetting someone from that era who this is based on? either way, i have not seen enough medieval-era movies for my level of history of england podcast fandom and am strongly considering spending my evening on this one instead of thinking about this game

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

You haven't seen A Knight's Tale!?!

DO THAT RIGHT AWAY.

It's an excellent sports movie about jousting. Modern music, costumes, and attitudes in a medieval setting because the writers wanted to capture the "feel" of the time. William is a young peasant who dreams of becoming a knight and making it big at the jousting tournaments. So, not William Marshal, but instead a fictional character who crosses paths a few times with Edward.

[williams482]

A Knights Tale is indeed excellent.

I'm not sure the trades you are taking on Ginger stragglers/advance units are really profitable, but I agree that they would be if you had a swarm of Impis to spend on them. This seems like a reasonable time to pillage that iron and crank out your swarm, if you can. I doubt you're building a lot of pikes right now.

[ljubljana]

195

only got 2 hours max so will be short on reporting, and possibly short on decision quality as well lol



we swarmin



we have significant stacks in both RFT and the forest SW-W of it at this point. if things stabilize, i'm eyeing both lungfish and herring as potential snipe targets.... or there is the other option, in which we hope that hiding behind a sufficiently gigantic swarm of impis will allow us to advance into the teeth of ginger's cuir and cav stack directly, and start making progress versus greenline again anyways.... we could whip up fully one hundred impis in 5-6 turns easily on this many cities. then if ginger has, say, 50 cuir/cav down there.... we advance our cuir stack behind a pair of our own 50-unit impi stacks. so what, ginger attacks in, wipes an impi stack, then is 2 tiles away from a cuir stack that wipes them on the counter? doesn't seem too profitable to me

any kind of offensive will take a few turns to mature though. first i think we need to see what ginger does. the next 3-4 turns might be pretty quiet.... ginger is healing now and will probably be ready for another advance either next turn or the turn after. will they take it and risk a stackwipe? or is the rest of their war plan defensive (of greenline) from here?

[williams482]

SUMMON THE SWARM.

Has anyone tried this sort of pure "you can't kill us all" strategy in a RB game before? Zulu in this era do seem uniquely well kitted out for it.

Just, be careful not to bankrupt yourself, because that mani impis will cost a shitton.