[Spoilers] Slowcheetah Slinks Ahead (Well Hopefully)

[slowcheetah]

Turn 2 of the war.

Sians reply saw the fall of my city of Samsun (my naming scheme kind of ran out of steam), and a stack of Cavs, rifles and cannons outside of Thull. Nowhere else had any military action aside from manevouring troops inside my own borders.




I responded by eliminating his big stack, and removing the seven strong cannon stack from behind Samsun with rifles and cannons, I guarded the injured stack with MG's. It was pretty simple. Hit with a little collateral (planes and cannons) and then mopup, I think even some macemen got to contribute.

Turn 3 of the war

On turn 3 I actually took back Samsun (had got enough infantry to hold it) securely. Again simply used planes to reduce defenders and attacked with infantry. Perhaps more worryingly Konya had a big stack of rifles and cannons next to it. However, I realized that I had plenty of healthy infantry nearby, infantry got very good odds even without planes hitting the stack. So I attacked with as many infantry as I had at 90% odds whittling the stack down. I didn't have enough units to finish it, but it nullified an otherwise very dangerous amount of collateral.




Turn 4

The remains of Sian's stack turned tail and ran. Unfortunately, I don't seem to have any pictures of this (not even blurry ones :P). But suffice to say I killed it with some more cannons and rifles.



This turn also saw the fall of Daze. Defended by an Mg and I believe a LB it was again an example of planes for damage, cannons to bombard and infantry to kill.



Turn 5-The final war turn.

This turn saw another transport play. I forted the tile south of an unpronounceable cityname. And attacked with with 2 infantry and a rifleman and some fighters in a successful attempt to remove a longbow. I also attacked with a settler wanting to refound immediately on the island. I ended up just keeping the place though because it's rather tricky to attack and can act as an airbase even in revolution.



I also moved up a load of troops towards Sian's city of alphabeat and shredded the current inhabitants with fighters. Unfortunately, I dont have a picture of the actual troop stack and they came from all over the place which I can't be bothered to redo.



To avoid this post becoming even more picture heavy I'll do one final post with overall conclusions.

[slowcheetah]

The war probably would have worked out well. I think the powergraph plus the demographics screen shows why. I would have the tech for tanks in 3 turns, and would have a sizeable force of them built up in 5. I could then begin the invasion proper, drilling through machineguns which were a problem for my current best killers (infantry). Both of Sians land oil sources were easily vulnerable, and once I'd cut them off he wouldn't be able to stall me with fighters. I had a large tech window until bRICK would become dangerous, at which point I should have subdued Sian to the point that taking on the rest of the world was easily possible. I also had the Pentagon which I don't believe I mentioned.




The game overall

In the first game I played here (29g), Catwalk and I ran a pyramids economy. In that economy we relied solely on specialists, I think we built one cottage in the entire game. As soon as we got past liberalism our techpotential fell off completely (Sian's attack may have helped there). Anyway, here I did actually build cottages in some of my core cities, which allowed me to have a more powerful research centre. I then used workshopped later cities, it meant they became useful much quicker either building wealth, units, or cultural buildings to grab borders. I think I played a specialist economy much better in this game (admittedly it was the only one I've ever tried).

I also think I made some pretty good decisions. I managed to grab the pyramids (although luckily I don't think Sian was actually competing), which set up my early game. Subsequently, I won the battle for the Taj Mahal by half a turn (which certainly snowballed me further ahead of bRICK), and then I attacked musicman at a good point for a short, relatively painless war. Admittedly, I was helped by his lack of defenses, something Sian and bRICK certainly didn't find when they tried to take down Azza. I also went for communism much earlier than everbody else. I don't really understand this, the Kremlin would have arguably been better for both Sian and bRICK than myself as they were primarily running US, and State property is a massive boon even if you are planning on running corporations later. The maintenance savings were astronomical. I definitely made quite a lot of errors (the principal large meta one being NE in my capital) but I think overall I played quite a sound game.

Thank you Serdoa for the map, it was nicely lush, and the water left some interesting strategic possibilites; although I gather from the lurker thread you guys were hoping for more violence. Thanks also to the other players, I definitely enjoyed the ride .

[Catwalk]

Congratulations on your first win, couldn't have done it with me