[spoiler]Pindicator's pb80 thread

[pindicator]

157

This event feels a bit too on the nose




I don't know if Thoth is going to attack me or not, but I'm leaning towards attacking his navy because i'm pretty sure he's loading up his galleons.

[pindicator]

Well, I was almost right. It was Yuri who attacked me. Thoth pulled his fleet out of range of my privateers. Yep, guess who is going to join in next?

Clearly I'm just feeding frenzy material now. I'm going to sit on this and try to think about just what can I even do. Yuri attacking is a serious threat of my plan to evacuate to the islands. Maybe I do need to just make a stand on Basset? But with Thoth on my doorstep that seems folly. I was also going to strike Comm's lightly guarded flanks this turn with my knights, but now that doesn't seem useful at all either.

Really want to just give it all to Comm and attack the pilers-on.

[pindicator]

Brainstorming:

I'm not going to be able to get the army evacuated to the east without confronting Yuri's armies.  I'm not going to be able to slow Commodore's advance either, because my idea of slowly filtering off units just won't work:  I'm going to need to move everything to confront Yuri's rifles and then push through to the islands, secure the islands, etc.  But at the same time, I probably only have 3 more turns to shuttle units onto Basset island if I choose to make my stand there - 24 more units at most over 3 turns if I keep my main stack in Labrador and make Commodore slow-play the advance.

But I need to race east to keep Yuri from taking Poodle and severing my route to the northeast islands.  So realistically I think I throw what siege I can on the boats over 1 or 2 turns and rush everything east.  Basset needs to keep whipping privateers, and I think I need to declare on Thoth and push my privateer fleet into his waters to discourage him from landing.  I can't prevent him from landing next turn but I can sink a lot of his boats if he tries it.  Holding at Basset feels dubious long term, but I don't think I have any good options.  Yuri attacking makes holding the east feel even less sure.

I'm going to have to fight about a dozen rifles to get past Poodle, and will have Commodore's army nipping at my heels.  So I don't think I can launch my knight attack into Commodore's flank - shame, I think I could have burned a city.  But now those knights need to get to the east and stall Yuri.  Also, once the capital and Labrador fall I'm going to lose a lot of cultural dominance and will not have any advantage in movement - I really do need to start evacuating ASAP.

So as much siege as I can to Bassett and the rest to try to push past Yuri in the east.  I hate it, I'll try to think of something better.

Ugh, I really made a mistake aiming for cannons instead of rifles.  I thought I had time to get to cannons and they would have helped a bunch with any landings.  But really, that is a quibble in light of being dogpiled by a group of people who are just delaying the inevitable.

[pindicator]

What do I do with my knights? That's the big stumper. Right now they are all sitting 4 tiles NE of Beagle, ready to descend on that city and the cannon/cavalry sitting there. Cut Commodore's road of supply, maybe threaten his workers or something. Or possibly strike out to the southeast and threaten Dominoes, at least get a moral victory. Besides, I was starting to realize that I likely would not be able to shuttle them away with the limited turns I have left. 

Instead Yuri attached and perhaps I should put any "last hurrah" charges out of my head and instead use the knights to hold Poodle from the 6 advancing rifles, buying time for my main army to come. Ugh, that's probably what I should do. It just feels like I finally had a counter attack to make but Yuri and Thoth went and saved Commodore from all of it but their greedy little machinations. It's resigning myself to fight both of them in the islands and leaving the mainland for Commodore. Which seems COMPLETELY backwards, but is love to hear alternatives.

[T-hawk]

Yeah, when you get dogpiled, you tend not to have any good way to go. Sorry it came to this, this game has been interesting to watch, even if Commodore's land may have been unbeatable all along.

[pindicator]

My goal for the rest of the game is to survive for as long as possible with as many cities/population as possible.

Played the turn, it was a 90 minute epic.  You're going to have to wait for tomorrow for the report, because a lot more happened than I thought - and I did change things up from my brainstorming.  Killed some units, captured some redacted.  Anyway, nice to be able to land a punch even if you're getting the crap beat out of you.

[Tarkeel]

Played the turn, it was a 90 minute epic.  You're going to have to wait for tomorrow for the report, because a lot more happened than I thought - and I did change things up from my brainstorming.  Killed some units, captured some redacted.  Anyway, nice to be able to land a punch even if you're getting the crap beat out of you.

Nothing quite like that for a morale boost! Jowy did manage to take a city of mine defended by infantry in PB58, but it cost him around 50 knights to kill 2 infantry and some assorted junk.

[pindicator]

158

Here is what I saw when I opened the save and decided to step away:




Yuri attack means the east is under quick threat.  Less important than losing the cities, I'm going to need to keep the road open from west to east so my army can retreat from the capital to Poodle and beyond.  Although with Yuri's lack of rifles, I may be able to take the stack head on.  Surely keeping my knights around for that would be a smart play and increase my odds of safety.

But look at those weakly defended flanks.  Commodore is pushing everything into his thrust, wary of me countering and wiping out his stack.  So he's left his road network relatively unguarded.  Last turn I moved my knights into position to retake Beagle, and with it still being so lightly guarded I debated a long time about sending in the knights vs using them against Yuri in the east.

Also notice that Dominoes is out of resistance:  a culture bomb used to try and get some tiles.  Sadly I've been disappointed in this fashion before.  A culture bomb just isn't going to compete against the established culture within the core of a civilization.

I decided not to be passive:




C2 Formation Knight gets even odds against an unpromoted calvary.  Naturally we lost, and did a little bit of damage, but just to put it at that annoying threshold where a C3 knight would go up against the calvary yet a C2 Formation would go against the wounded cannon.  Promoted to Formation because I think my biggest threat is against cavalry being able to come into the area, and two victories later:




Oh yeah, that Great Artist bomb doesn't do anything against all my established culture.  Here I have a lot of decisions to make.  I sent my 2 keshiks & 1 knight to capture the EIGHT unguarded workers in the area, deleting them all.  I only deleted the 1 keshik beside the city, because while I forgot to capture the garrison in Chihuahua (renamed to Four Card) it only had 2 cavalry and both of them wounded.

But then I noticed a number of opportunities.  I absolutely caught Commodore off-guard here, and he did not seem to even anticipate this as a possibility.  For starters, that's a great artist 2 tiles south of Beagle (Omaha Hi Lo).  We're definitely going to take that.  I promoted the least-XP knight to sentry and sent him in:




Here's where I took a long think about what I wanted to accomplish.  I know I said I wanted to keep as many cities and population alive for as long as possible, but I may not get another opportunity to strike a blow against Commodore.  So while this is going to hurt my chances against Yuri in the east, I eventually decided to go for it:  sending all the knights in range (plus the GG musket) to the tile 2NE of Roulette where we will threaten the miniscule stack there.  In my favor:  Commodore is not in a golden age and not in Nationalism or Slavery.  I imagine he's going to send everything in the area to defend and I don't think that i have good odds of taking it (for instance, Dominoes is right there and probably has a decent garrison to shuffle over), but again: I think I have to take my shot now. I could have tried to retake Mutt - less chance for him to reinforce, but also closer to his main doomstack of 100+ units.

Here's how we ended up:




Final Tally for this turn: 1 knight & 1 keshik lost to kill 1 cavalry, 1 cannon, 8 workers, AND ONE FREAKING GREAT ARTIST BABY!

I evacuated the capital for Labrador. We will not slow-roll our retreat any longer: due to Yuri the need now is to race east to get to Poodle before his army does, and then try to evacuate to the islands. Yuri thankfully has not invested in his navy and so I will be best able to make a stand out there. His main force is weak on rifles and mostly knight + catapults, so we will have to see whether he slow plays this or tries to race Commodore for spoils. I'm sure he has been talking to Commodore as much as Thoth and they have some tacit arrangement. Perhaps this is even why Commodore made such a mistake in not pushing for Golden Retriever in the first place: he was only looking at getting the economically rich cities of Weimaraner and Labrador and thought to leave the dregs for Yuri. Well, I was able to capitalize on that.

A final note on Thoth:




I realized I could not stop him from landing on the island. Originally I was going to move all my privateers to the inlet 3N of Dobermann and dare him to either land now or retreat his navy. But he has an easy answer to that: he just retreats into The Black Road. From there he can shuttle his invasion forces back and forth and his fleet would never be at risk. Honestly, I don't know why he isn't doing that now. So Basset Island is a lost cause. I did drop off the catapults I had loaded up, and we will try to make a stand for as long as possible, but the purpose of this island is to now whip out as many privateers as possible. Which means I need to keep my fleet whole and not risk it.

So we are giving up on Basset. The galleys and caravels will try to escape to the east and help evacuate the main army to the Beak Islands (we're going with the bird taking flight analogy still - but I could just as easily call them "Crap Islands"). It will be dicey to figure out how long I can keep my navy in the west - but we'll try to get as much out of it as possible.

Still have some ideas for holding out in the east. We're going to have to take Yuri's island holdings to have a chance: which means I've started building trebuchets.

Finally it was nice to have some fun in a turn.

[scooter]

Final Tally for this turn: 1 knight & 1 keshik lost to kill 1 cavalry, 1 cannon, 8 workers, AND ONE FREAKING GREAT ARTIST BABY!

Great report and very nicely done!

Finally it was nice to have some fun in a turn.

I find these types of turns are much less painful and much more fun when I've written the game off and my emotional well-being is no longer impacted by if I do a good job defending or not . It's very freeing to just think let's have some fun forcing your conqueror to cover all bases and execute well while not worrying too much about the pain coming your way.

[Qgqqqqq]

Thanks for the report, and congratulations!