Timmy's Modern Minigame

[timmy827]

Adv 60 Report

SCORE SUMMARY:
Took Tokyo T311
Beijing T314
Constantinople T317
Gergovia T323
Total score 39+36+33+27 = 135

Nice scenario concept! Took quite a while to get started, very different to have so many decisions at the start of the game. (Kudos on supplying the 4 airships for planning purposes). I’m assuming most people reading this played, so I’ll skip the overviews of our 4 targets and our civ (also since it’s the start of the game, anyone who didn’t play can DL the save, send out the airships, and have a far more detailed look than I could do with screenshot).

A big wildcard of course was the barb choko horde. Honestly did not know what they would do; can you edit unit AI’s in world builder? Have a general idea of what each AI would do, and how ‘normally spawned barbs’ act, but this was new. The possibility that most of them would attack basically sealed the decision to send the starting army northwest, with barbs and Qin as first target.

For our tech choice, I thought it was actually pretty obvious to get Radio and have Bombers as the new weapon of choice, being able to do safe, longrange collateral from the sky much more attractive than Tanks or Artillery. After some thought, went Communism first. It would delay bombers by some turns, but has useful production bonus and we could profitably build fighters and infantry for a few turns. Also would fix all the starvation problems (lots of workshops), and workers could replace weak tiles (the immature cottages) with workshops. So did that with first turn tech, and this on the 2nd turn.


As for builds. Had some thought of trying an all-cav ground force to go with the bombers but decided not. We have a lot of old one movers, many can be immediately upgraded to Infantry (start with almost 3K gold, only planning to tech for 6-7 turns and won’t need that much gold for 100% research) and others can be eventually upgraded to Infantry (planned all cash after Communism and Radio). But only 6 Cuirs at the start, no other old knights/HA etc, so can’t do the same with Cav upgrades. So decided the core would be 1-movers. And the target cities are not too deep in enemy territory; a cav force would only save a couple of turns and be a lot more vulnerable to counterattacks. (Hoped I could pepper the AI stacks with bombers before they could attack my ground forces, but Byzantine and Celts both had large enough empires that wasn’t guaranteed. ). The same logic convinced me to not bother with Fascism and any paratrooper drops.

CONQUEST PLAN:
As mentioned, most of our starting forces go northwest. The hordes are the low tech enough that a hodgepodge of new and old units should work. The southern empires (Justy, Boudica) look stronger and will wait un.
(The different wonders in different target capitals was an inspired theory but I think almost all of my conquer-order was driven by relative military tech and such instead. Curious to hear how much it affected other player’s plans).

For Toku, I almost missed this:

So unless something screwy happens like a GArtist bomb in Kagoshima, it appeared we could slip ships in this way (since we weren’t attacking Justinian first). If I hadn’t seen this would have been stuck researching Fascism and trying an all paratrooper+airpower attack, glad I didn’t. So I set our two western cities to each build a transport, and prioritized the new Inf there; on turn 307 the ships set sail with 8 Inf total.

Of course, the transport plan has its risks with committing to it early. I should have airpower coming online to support them by the time they land, but if I come up short I’m really screwed. If I can capture the city, I will be able to airlift in one infantry for defense per turn but could still be in trouble if Toku amasses a counterattack group. One advantage of the paradrop approach would be that you can ‘pause before pulling the trigger’ if you decide you need 3 more paras on the turn you’d DOW. Nevertheless, seeing that Toku had no big stack and knowing the AI keeps its units spread out across all cities, thought this would be the least expensive option and not too risky.

One item that was interesting was it was hard to tell exactly what techs each opponent had. In a normal game with NTT you can work backwards from ‘Can Research’ in all but a couple cases of the OR prereqs; but was harder here.

So above(from 309, 4 turns in) you can see that Justinian must have Railroad despite missing its prereq Steel. And that clued me in that the AI’s could have ‘unnatural’ tech progression via scenarion editing - which meant this screen was harder to decipher. For example, Boudica ‘can research’ rocketry, so must have either/both Flight or Artillery - despite lacking their prereqs Physics and Combustion.
The AI techs appeared to jump around quite a bit the first few turns as well - perhaps they started with a lot of beaker overflow like us (?). I’m curious if it was set up that way, and if so whether the AI tech choices vary significantly between reports. I’m not sure how I felt about this, the tech guesswork seemed a little at odds with giving the airships at the start for near-perfect scouting. On the other hand, I can see arguments that too much information would make it too easy. Nevertheless, I felt pretty confident that Toku couldn’t actually build Modern Armor or the other superadvanced units, and the few he had (Some of Celtia and Byzantium was out of range but Toku’s land was small enough that one recon basically showed you everything) were not going to do much. Thus I was confident with the transport plan (and only two of them, loaded and sent ASAP, instead of a larger force) for Japan, and no paratroopers, outlined above.

One final note - there was a decent haul of gold to be had at the beginning:

Forgot picture but also got a very nice 300g beg from Boudica - she was also hands full, good to have guarantee of safety while most of the army would be in China. I should have begged Justinian too but at game start I thought I might start war with him inside of 10 turns .

Alright, so now some of that warfare this was allegedly about

First riddle answered - on T306 most of the barbs piled into this fort, It might have been nicer for them to charge at me so I could hit them without defense boni, although the fort meant I could use the nice CR2 promos on the cannon too. Most importantly, that rail tile meant I could charge them, with first strike and this turn. 10 cannons all withdraw (at 77% odds each, nice!), and all of the starting Infantry, Curs, and Muskets attack. After that, majority of the barb survivors charge! Aftermath (sorry for the longbow detail covering some of my units):

Lost only a single Musket on the attack and nothing on defense! The Longbows and other old units are perfect for this - spread all that Choko collateral around, so the Inf and MG stay strong enough to keep winning battles. Unusually, there was actually occasion to heal with a Woodsman III musket-medic - not typical you can get 8XP gunpowder units before a GG medic, but this scenario is one of those times. There were about a dozen more barbs in the fog, but after a 50:1 kill trade I wasn’t very worried
Another great thing about that starting rail:

I could ‘recycle’ some of those defending Inf as part of the Japanese invasion force dearting this turn (307). With enough XP for Medic Transport, they’ll be healed by the time they land.
One nasty surprise a couple turns later:

Ouch, that border pop really stung. You can see at end of 309 I had cleaned out the rest of the barbs and moved workers up, on 310 I should have been able to rail that hill, DOW Qin, and move the main stack (hanging back healing) through. But the border pop basically throws all the motion back two turns, blech. I also think I compounded my problems by moving the whole group into China. Qin’s horde was considerably smaller than the barbs, if my ground forces easily beat the latter I really didn’t need them all for China; especially since the extra delay meant I could have some Bomber support for sure (Radio finished on the 309-310 IT).

But the other plan went off without a hitch:

Toku did a whole lot of nothing when I landed my Inf on 310, and the Modern Armor didn’t matter since I had enough unopposed planes to half-health them. Only lost one on the attack, could move 3 full health in this turn + one airlift, enough for safety. Toku continued to do nothing as far as counterattack, and would talk surprisingly quickly with a peace deal on 314. Nice to not need to worry about it, although meant airlifting one Inf post attack, or even arguably putting 8 on the boats initially, was overkill; these guys were basically uselessly stuck for the rest of the game here. (I suppose that would be one advantage of doing this with paratroopers - once you got Toku to sign peace, you could paradrop them back home and possibly get more use out of them).

Finally, one other move was Vasslage->Nationhood on the last golden age turn. Now that I’m largely switching builds to Bombers, the extra XP not so useful and the coming Chinese happy wonders would give me some drafting headroom. Speaking of which…

Not much to say here, bombers, cannons and Infantry against only about 25 chokos. You can see some guys returning already (my belated realization I brought more than needed-argh. If I never sent them in I could have moved on Justinian a bit sooner probably).

Yes, Justinian. Boudica was more advanced and I felt best to save her for last, once the whole Chinese stack had returned and healed. Started next turn:


Sorry about missing the details on my ground stack - in orange, going directly to Constantinople on the diagonal. The long border caused some issues - above you can see I built airbase forts I’m not using (not quite enough garrisons yet, don’t want to take risk on say a ‘lucky’ cav beating an inf in a fort and taking 4 bombers with it!) Also had to keep a few guys in my border cities that were in Byzantine cav range. But the great news was that Justinian’s main stack was well within range on the turn I DOW’d and the bombers did their work. With most of them at 2/3rds health, he would retreat them to Nicaea, perfectly out of my way Nicaea was deeper, but still in range of some of my bombers and as long as I kept peppering it, they stayed put, so it was pretty easy to go right to Constantinople:

My ‘2nd wave’ group returning from China very usefully captured Antioch, the only non-capital city I bothered with. That helped close off some of the cav raid worries (though Gordium was still vulnerable) and might have helped in making Justinian willing to sign peace as soon as I took Constantinople. Finally, with the move above I was able to have some of my infantry warped back to Antioch instead of Constantinople (where they would be trapped by Byz culture).

So 3 down, one to go!

Boudica’s tech had advanced the most by the time I attacked, whatever her odd setup was initially, by the time I went in she was fielding considerable paratroopers, SAM Inf, and had some fighters on top of well promoted Infantry hordes. SAMs are really not too bad for the bomber swarm (they can only intercept once/turn, don’t always do so, and very rarely shoot down a healthy plane in one go) but the fighters were surprisingly hard to deal with. Fighter/fighter battles are disgustingly swingy compared to ground or naval combat between equal/near equal units, and here I seemed to lose more than my share of tossups without scratching her planes. (Did have good luck against the Choko hordes, so can’t complain too much…) Even the partial success (I lose a fighter, but score a hit and knock hers down to 50% health) could cause issues - my remaining healthy fighters would plink a ground unit (Boudica’s failed their now-50% intercept chance) and then the half health fighter would intercept and down a bomber. Strange little corner of the game mechanics. I really don’t “get out enough” in terms of either playing enough Immortal/Deity, or MP such that I have experience in lategame, tech-parity wars. Its possible I really have never dealt with AI fighters before!

Anyways, that’s getting a bit ahead of the story. Besides most tech, Boudica had the most forces, and there was a lot of motion after that first turn:

The two closest ones were not a big deal, but that last one gave me pause. Unlike Justinian, she had signifcant forces out of my scouting range - yeesh, writing the report now I think I had OB with until wartime, very sloppy of me not to have scouts zipping around her territory - and railroads to move them around. (That early tech screen showed Justinian with RR tech, and I did see some machine guns; but I think he didn’t have Steam power or coal as there were no rails). The big stack was also out of range of most my bombers this turn - I had airbases on the north shore of the lake that couldn’t quite reach. Was also worried that there may be even more units out of view but not out of range of my advancing stack. So, I chickened out (cue truck-backing-up noise):

Sacrificed a few to pillage that road, and she did exactly as hoped. With me having bomber + cannon initiative, cleaned up without much trouble.

Also had this problem:

Yikes, a bit asleep at the wheel here, was not really expect a para attack, and also had forgotten that her culture closed the rail connection with my homeland. I did have the cash to upgrade, but held off for one turn in favor of airlifting in an Inf. Then I got probably the worst RNG single-combat of my life:

Yeouch! about 1 in 150 result for her para to win without a scratch...really not too extreme as far as probability but worrisome where it happened - if I lose too many of these I lose a bunch of scenario points, instead of just having the next thing in my stack clean up...fortunately I had some plans complete this turn that could bomb the paratrooper down to easy kill for another airlifted Inf (at the expense of delaying my planes south to the main show). Total mystery why she did something clever with exactly one paratrooper while the rest moved with her ground stacks, 3 would have probably taken Beijing.

However, that was the end of real threats. My big stack’s 2nd advance went straight in without issue. And despite the losses from her fighters, a steady stream of replacement planes did their job well (this is odds on my first ground unit attack):

Was barely able to conclude this turn:

Won almost all the battles, but she had quite the garrison in there, nearly ran out of decent attackers. And that was it; neither Toku or Justinian made any moves to strike back.

Fun times, again a good idea that was just the ticket to have me complete a game.
Will be interesting to compare against others, and looks from the game thread that we will see more completions, nice. I think my one substantial error (besides overrcommiing to China; not counting the Chinese culture expansion - couldn’t really see that one coming!) was not slipping in a few workers early. Definitely many nonoptimal tiles - for what I was doing, really wanted all the weak cottages to workshops right away, and probably could have some of the other cottages after finishing Radio; many of the farms->workshops ideally as well. (It seemed good to have some food surplus and get the box half full as protection against poisoned water or war weariness starvation; however the payback of actually growing more pop in this scenario seemed low. Got some use out of drafting but not a ton). And a lot of that terrain improvement happened late or not at all between having few workers, and demands for railroads and airbase forts. Of course skipping worker builds allowed more units in the short run but the game went on longer than I initially thought, such that getting 6 or so out in the early turns might have paid off.

Final counts:

All of the air unit losses on my side are from Boudica (as are the enemy fighters). Yes, all that kvetching from me earlier was from only 5 AI planes! Good thing the AI isn’t smart enough to recon with one or two of those in advance of the war, see my bomber fleets, and get a dozen or so ready before I declare

[GermanJoey]

You did a much nicer job cleaning up the CKN's then I did! Nice game! Interesting that we both took Tokyo on the same turn despite completely different approaches!

[GermanJoey]

Timmy, did you build any coal plants in your cities or did you just spam out units from turn 1? I built coal plants everywhere initially, and I'm curious as to whether this made a difference in any way.

[timmy827]

Timmy, did you build any coal plants in your cities or did you just spam out units from turn 1? I built coal plants everywhere initially, and I'm curious as to whether this made a difference in any way.

Good question I skipped in the report. No, went all units all the time. From my notes I seemed to think the payback time was 6 turns for some of those cities, which is great for a normal game but less so here when your invasion forces leave your territory on turn 1,2,9 or so...also some of the cities without could still do 1 unit per turn in the GA so I didn't bother.

[T-hawk]

Strange little corner of the game mechanics. I really don’t “get out enough” in terms of either playing enough Immortal/Deity, or MP such that I have experience in lategame, tech-parity wars. Its possible I really have never dealt with AI fighters before!

Sounds like the scenario hit its bullseye indeed.

I don't know what happened with the AI techs. Harry?

China's culture expansion was a Great Artist in at least one of the other reports, that probably happened to you too. I'm guessing Beijing was close to producing that GA when the scenario started. (There's a nasty trick a scenario designer could pull!)

[Old Harry]

Loved your detailed report Timmy, especially the milking of the AIs at the start, I didn't think of that...

I had to adjust the techs of the AIs to make things a bit more fair - it looks like I deleted Steel and Steam Power for Justin while he was already researching Railroad, so he just continued with it . Also I clearly missed deleting Flight for Boudica, but I'm glad I did, otherwise things would have been a bit too easy. I think I should have beefed Toku up a bit more too, but that probably wouldn't have helped much against your bombers...

Beijing was making about 300 culture per turn between the wonders, Broadway, Rock N Roll and Hollywood so I think it popped borders on t309 for everyone. Again unintentional but fun .