[Spoiler] Kaiser has a plan

[Kaiser]

nope, game over :D

[roland of gilead]

oh well was certainly fun while it lasted.

can go read the other threads lol. or go cheer-lead Sub.

GG mate

[williams482]

Now that I've had a chance to read through this thread, good game once again. Your reporting was really excellent in the early game (as was your city development), and you continued to share what you were up to all the way until the end. Thanks for keeping that up. 

I believe I said as much in my thread, but I'll say it again here: you really did get royally screwed on oil placement, and to a lesser extent by the Rationalism change. I winced reading your plans to chop a campus down from +4 to +3, apparently just a few days before the patch notes were released. That would have drawn yet another angry rant in my thread if it had happened to us. 

I have updated above post to make it more clear for people later looking these kind of things up.

Btw, thanks for the praise, I think I maximised Egypt in this game quite well, there are not much things I regret/think we underperformed.
- Loosing the NW region to Woden has been a big mistake, the race to the South was less a race even though my cities there are better I should have prioritised settling our one non-coastel city there
- the CMF war was way to wasteful on units and showed my inexperience playing against other players, I think this ultimately cost us the strong early game position

The most lucky breaks were definetivly:
- finding 2 Science and 2 Culture CS quickly
- keeping Geneva this long (well that was undecisiveness from Suboptimal)
- The Middle Earth Flood (Wodens IZ) to win the Casa race

Strongest plays (imo):
- deciding early to look for best city spots instead of maximsing scouting, as this led us to the S instead to the NW which is one of the weaker regions of this map
- building infrastructure during the CMF war to regain a dominant position (this is probably debatable as more Military could have swung the war in our favor, but I am happy with my decision)
- Hattusa raze from Ichabod to keep him from getting a too dominant position (in hindsight Woden was swinging up to do this, but I feel our early attack there helped him decide to go against the game leader at that point)

My apologies if you're not keen to speak further on this topic, but building infrastructure during that war probably cost you the game. I was throwing haymakers to the best of my ability, but Canada spent the entire hot portion of that war balanced on a knife edge, and most of our battles had points where one more advanced unit in the right spot would have tipped the balance. We knew that better than you could have, of course, but it was pretty clear we were in a whole lot of trouble one way or another. 

You were also dead on in your initial war planning, where you pointed out Blues as both a crucial city for Canada's continued survival and the soft underbelly of the empire, and described a skeleton of a plan to send a mass of coursers and ranged support right across the desert from Bortus to take the city. Lucky me that you didn't, because that would have worked: I'd have tried to swarm your force the same way I did with the lesser units you probed our border with, but you'd have weathered whatever casualties I could have inflicted with your superior strength, and my injured units would have been stuck with a choice between continuing a slugfest in which they were obviously outclassed, or retreating back past the river line and giving you a free run at the capital. Instead, you made a number of smaller sorties along the border with troops I could mostly fight one to one with horses, then eventually brought a hammer strike against the heavily fortified Bruins (which failed only because your muskets came in one at a time instead of massed together). So I definitely give you credit for identifying the correct way to prosecute that war, but I am puzzled as to why you never actually executed that plan. 

As for the tactical side, one thing that was enormously helpful to me was the spreadsheet linked in this reddit post. I believe the rounding for unit damage is incorrect (I fixed it on my local copy), there's nothing built in to handle city defenses, and the unit strength values will need to be updated since the latest patch, but all in all this was a tremendously useful tool for figuring out the odds in any given combat, and quickly simming out the most likely result from a series of battles. Strongly recommended. 

With that said, though, don't sell yourself too short. You did win several of these skirmishes, and I think we were trading pretty much evenly overall until the Bruins attack fell apart. Not much needed to change for that war to go in an entirely different direction.

[roland of gilead]

good summary williams.

[Kaiser]

Thanks for following up on this, I came to the conclusion somewhen later as well that I threw my game when I did not push harder at you. I think I was a bit distracted with Ichabod running away and generally being a builder at heart.

So now I think razing Hattusa was a mistake over going harder for you, any yes at Blues instead of Bruins. I tunneled a bit there and was also a bit less focussed on the game sadly.

This was a great learning experience though and your thread is amazing as it gave me a very detailed opponent perspective for this war. I will try to capitalize better on my position in the future :D