Selrahc Wrote:[stuff]
Well said.
Jowy, my sense on your attack was like this:
There are a lot of things you could have done differently in hindsight...
-->More spears in your stacks....but attacking with spears sucks
-->Not splitting up your stacks...this is pretty bad, but understandable as not all humans will attack out of cities to hit exposed stacks.
-->Mismanaging some promotions...but this is also a subtle thing and kind of a learning experience.
But there were three ENORMOUS errors...
-->The Ottoman stack got spotted my India in Greek land and tipped them off about the attack...unit visibility is another thing I'm willing to cut slack on when it comes from cultural tiles or in neutral land or whatever, but not when the future enemy walks a unit into your land. I know it was tough because it was your land and Kathalete's stack, but not relaying the movement of the India scouting unit was a critical error. This could be solved by just telling the Ottomans every turn where every Indian unit you could see was.
-->The attacks coming in from too many different directions and at different times...this was the result of different NAP expiration dates, but again the COW made the critical error of not coordinating NAP ends dates, and then much worse not adapting the attack plan to accommodate them. Again this could have been fixed by regular emails specifying when everyone was free to move in, and confirming you would all go in in a very narrow window.
-->The Roman mis-move...hardly your fault, but again it's possible if Rome had talked through its attempt to be clever with its attack someone would have pointed out the OB issue and then the teleporting issue that made the problem much worse.
I don't know if you've read this thread's comments during the war turns, but despite how angry S+S got a lot of us here didn't view the attack as having much chance the change the course of the game pretty early, and totally wrote it off one the Roman Praets mis-moved. I think you will find some of your allies still view the attack as a partial success, but the hammer numbers really don't bare that out. The tough thing is that you guys succeeded in achieving strategic surprise and building solid stacks. That's the hard part! If after having done that you all had just picked a single tile to end up on in a single turn (let the Praets come later since they were so far away) and used the power of the enforced turn split to move between cities and deny the enemy the power of control-a, a lot more than 1 city would have been lost.
I know almost none of that is exclusively your fault, but as a member of COW for better or for worse you get lumped into the general criticism.