Turn 147 - Zululand
uh oh, gt's posting again.... last time that meant something important happened...... could be nothing but i fear for our beautiful stack of dumbasses
relatedly we STILL haven't seen the big cat pile from western theater at the start of the war. i am starting to think it must have been run down and killed by nauf somehow, or perhaps it was spent trying to delay nauf's conquests a turn or two.... but if they were hiding it all this time and it appears now it could be quite effective as stopping us
fhqwhgads blogging
i've gone completely back around and now believe i'll make the heroic epic in aksum, if we can get it, after all... yeah, the real aksum.... i would love to save the crab and whales (oh, especially since whales are a lux we otherwise have no access to) but that's a 200 hammer investment from the settlers plus whatever buildings i raze plus maybe 6 or 7 pop points wasted.... probably not worth it from a tempo perspective.... and then the big reason which is that in aksum we would have something not every other player will have.... a heroic epic west point city stacked w great generals that can make ships.... so +2 movement from the nav promotions on all our ships which, if this game is like civ6, is devastating. or hell, just +30% strength on them which is a huge deal in a world of pure strength vs strength naval battles on 10% defensive bonus coast. an attack vector with this could look like: sneak in astro research at some point, seize control of the seas (we are already planning to beeline chemistry and milsci anyways for unrelated reasons!), mass-produce AGG amphibious muskets, and.... not just raze someone's coast, but because we're PRO, we can try KEEPING the captured cities and just galleon-dropping a shitton of city garrison 3 muskets in them on the same turn as we capture. imagine that appearing in your backlines from the fog
ugh ok. time to face the music. the civ4 background music. as i open the damn turn
welllll shit you guys:
we are actually going to get gondar....? i scarcely dared to dream of this outcome but here it is.... they left just a pike + crossbow pair in the city to slow us down (and they'll certainly at least make us spend attacks we don't want to spend, there's no really efficient way for us to kill such units) and seem to be going for a final, cataclysmic stand in aksum. addis ababa's garrison seems to have pulled out as well for the same reason. unlike at matara, there's not really any way for us to stop either group from reaching the capital. so whichever one of us takes the city will have to grind through an absolutely massive, 20 unit pile of medieval defenders. if each cat does, what, about 0.7 damage to 7 units, we would need about 12 to get everyone down to the 3.3/6 collateral damage maximum, which we don't have - not a great start
and then we go in with what, horses and impis? our 3 macemen, and longbows on offense? yeah, there is a fair chance that we simply don't have the kind of force we'd need to grind through this city.... but we're also not going to get another chance to try for it once nauf's enormously superior units make it up there (they inexplicably did not advance this turn, for inexplicable reasons...?) so i'm thinking we'd better take our best shot at it anyways. and in the meantime, just be careful about how many units we throw away into the attrition meat grinder (so translation: we probably do need to bomb out the defenses at gondar instead of piling up the horse bodies so we can sweep northward as quickly as possible)
anyways. GT's pike has wandered into range of a random axe from kinbozan, which is about as efficient a matchup as we're likely to get against it. i think we should go for it at these odds, this pike ties down multiple perfectly good units on defense at matara while it remains alive and i'm not about that. attack and
c1 axe vs c1 pike (65%): we actually won, amazing!
soooo now that we've been playing for fully 45 minutes, anyone wanna check the event log....?
mjmd making moves! and.... GT attacking gavagai? i have to admit i initially misread that as mjmd attacking gavagai which WOULD be a development...
well, not a ton to do here but go for it i think. with a turn's lead on nauf's catapults, i think it's safe for 3 of ours (we still have the accuracy cats from the lalibela attack long ago) to stop to bombard and hopefully preserve a unit or two in expectation. and then what, pile up the horse bodies? well... all our 1-movers died so i am not sure i see much other choice... at least with the horses there is a reasonable enough chance of retreating while still doing a bit of damage, which is more or less what we're going to have to go for i think. it's not like our impis get odds against the crossbow after all... and i don't dare risk a cat just to damage ONE unit with collateral...
for the first time in my life i promote a horse to flanking TWO.... coin flip to live, 60% chance to do damage seems better than 20% to live, 80% to do damage from a combat 1 horse.
"Hey, quit horsing around." i throw him and... he dies pathetically BUT does get in the expected singular hit. next, well... the odds of the next guy aren't really that much better than 20% to live, 80% to do damage, unless i want to risk a combat TWO horse (i do not want to do that). man, don't tell me i AM supposed to throw in a cat here (it gets 20% odds to retreat vs the crossbow). but... well, that requires us to actually have a unit with which to efficiently beat down the pike after if we do redline the xbow, which we don't really other than the valuable and still not a sure thing GG-promoted morale axe.... i send in another horsie
c1 HA vs 5.3 health pike (21% to live): LIVES :D pike now down to 3.7 health and from here things should snowball
c2 HA vs 3.7 health pike (15% to retreat, 25% to win, which would be worth 5xp for a promotion): OMFG HE WON we lost just one horse killing a pike on offense??
c2 horse vs g1 crossbow (almost exactly the same odds as above, so winning here would ALSO be worth a promotion): retreats, doing a shitton of damage
c1 horse vs 2.9 health crossbow (92% odds, would be worth 2xp for a promotion here too):
gondar kept its market AND GRANARY yessss
the rng gods wink at us with an on-theme great general, as if i could somehow fail to see the hand of the divine in a combat in which we traded one horse archer for a pike, a crossbow, and a city
we didn't do this last turn because of our mighty phobia of getting our cats killed but i think it's time for a celebratory free upgrade... so we can use longbows on offense and FOUR maces against GT's capital
ok so, now what? first things first, of course we cannot allow a counterattack against gondar. and second things second, we need to stare at this game board until we come up with a way to advance our guys into the teeth of a 20-unit garrison without getting our cats murdered. seems to add up to a hideous fuckton of pillaging to me...
fyi according to WB the horses will still defend against crossbows even on a hill (which i was worried would put our mace over the top and therefore in harm's way...) - relevant to our choice of how many troops to use on dubious pillaging missions and how many to gather into the stack. also relevant - the 25% malus from attacking across a river does still apply to HAs that otherwise do not get defensive bonuses
----
ok, after a break for lunch and quiet contemplation:
chop's already gone, but i decided that the possibility of building some goodwill with ginger is worth a slightly more defensive settle. also, this one has more chops coming quickly as it's first-ring to a chop, which the other site no longer is, and takakeisho is on pace to grab it another chop in 8 turns. so those will respectively go into the castle and granary, and we then have a third chop to do with what we will (very likely a courthouse or just a longbow). unfortunately it is juuuust a bit too early to move our worker onto the forest though as we don't want that chop going into the walls at what would then be wasted overflow...
anyways, with the idea of razing aksum looking increasingly delusional, maybe it's time to spend our other two settlers as well. they are headed for this filler spot
which aims to turn kinbozan's two floodplains farms into 6 riverside plains windmills (way better tiles than kinbozan's non-river desert hills...) and this spot
which has dubious value as an actual city (we're talking size 7 max, working 3x oasis, 3x windmills, and an incense) but it claims another lux, multiple copies if no one tries to swipe them, and a tremendous geostrategic position in the heart of the central desert. with a castle on a hill, it should be really difficult for nauf to crack if they decide to turn on us someday, while opening up an annoying attack vector into their ethiopian gains
trying to think about what it would take to cover our two cats with remaining movement points against an attack out by GT's capital garrison if we advance NE of gondar (pillaging the road and corn farm 1N of gondar, ofc). i see 5 pikes in range of that tile after the pillage...we have an injured shock axe who could cover from last turn's stack, and a full-health shock impi. and there are a few units that were one turn behind but could now move up on our lovely new road network.... that's worth another shock impi, plus a longbow who really wants to promote guerilla 2 but who could, i guess, promote shock instead and stand over the cats to be a Real Defender against whom the pikes would not even get odds. i mean, i suppose that's enough.... they can attack with everything and get one attack against a cat, but that exposes enough of their units to a counter that i think it's ok for us. they could cover with a significant portion of the former gondar garrison though, which gets messy... they would need to leave enough to not get the capital sniped, with 7 units that will be in range next turn (3 off of boats), but there might be a way to do both which would not be great for us
then we have to either defend gondar against its former garrison or sacrifice two more units to pillage the NW road.... this is a bit easier than pushing the cats though as they'd be attacking onto a hill across a river, so we can block the pikes with just regular old unpromoted impis which we have a few of to spare. then 2 C1 horses for the 2 crossbows in range, and the mace will probably eat SOMEthing, and i think this aspect shouldn't be a problem
ohhhh man you guys, i um... i found GT's hiding workers...
how.... how did this even HAPPEN...?
well, ginger is readying an absolute fuckton of catapults.... there are another 8 or so in attaleia on our border, plus 5 or 6 macemen, with research set to feudalism. i think we will see the push quite soon, either at guilds straight-up, or with gunpowder discovery timed to coincide with a nationalism swap via taj (probably the latter). against whom though? we will have castles in all the border cities by the time our current NAP expires, which even 30 cats will not be sufficient to reduce in one turn, and i think it's reasonable to expect each of our CG3 longbows to take at least one unit with it even on defense. they could make progress against us but it would be slow going, especially once we start whipping said longbows out of 21 cities every damn turn lol. so while they could come for us, i don't think it's too likely unless they can arrange a dogpile. but do we have any way to stop them from making gains if they go in against dreylin? well, we could be annoying at least... if we reroute our full military from the GT front after someone takes aksum, we could possibly take a border city or two.... but i'm not too sure what stops a stack of, let's say, 20 cats and 40 janissaries besides walking into a comparable stack from dreylin, which they seem unlikely to be able to field, or maybe burning themselves out against, like, 5 or 6 cities worth of longbows behind castles...
ok enough - i NEED it to not be my damn turn anymore. if this deploy loses to GT attacking out of aksum and then piling the gondar garrison on the tile to defend the wounded, so be it.... i think we have nothing better and i don't want to wait around for nauf's cats to catch up. we have only a slight lead on them, slight enough that i think we want to have the defenses bombed out BEFORE the bulk of our cats make it next to the city, so if they sit back and defend the extra turn we are getting for 2 of our cats could be significant (coupled with the bombard cat i plan to drop off on the longbow tile 1E of aksum next turn).
whatever man. just no more this please <3
uh oh, gt's posting again.... last time that meant something important happened...... could be nothing but i fear for our beautiful stack of dumbasses
relatedly we STILL haven't seen the big cat pile from western theater at the start of the war. i am starting to think it must have been run down and killed by nauf somehow, or perhaps it was spent trying to delay nauf's conquests a turn or two.... but if they were hiding it all this time and it appears now it could be quite effective as stopping us
fhqwhgads blogging
i've gone completely back around and now believe i'll make the heroic epic in aksum, if we can get it, after all... yeah, the real aksum.... i would love to save the crab and whales (oh, especially since whales are a lux we otherwise have no access to) but that's a 200 hammer investment from the settlers plus whatever buildings i raze plus maybe 6 or 7 pop points wasted.... probably not worth it from a tempo perspective.... and then the big reason which is that in aksum we would have something not every other player will have.... a heroic epic west point city stacked w great generals that can make ships.... so +2 movement from the nav promotions on all our ships which, if this game is like civ6, is devastating. or hell, just +30% strength on them which is a huge deal in a world of pure strength vs strength naval battles on 10% defensive bonus coast. an attack vector with this could look like: sneak in astro research at some point, seize control of the seas (we are already planning to beeline chemistry and milsci anyways for unrelated reasons!), mass-produce AGG amphibious muskets, and.... not just raze someone's coast, but because we're PRO, we can try KEEPING the captured cities and just galleon-dropping a shitton of city garrison 3 muskets in them on the same turn as we capture. imagine that appearing in your backlines from the fog
ugh ok. time to face the music. the civ4 background music. as i open the damn turn
welllll shit you guys:
we are actually going to get gondar....? i scarcely dared to dream of this outcome but here it is.... they left just a pike + crossbow pair in the city to slow us down (and they'll certainly at least make us spend attacks we don't want to spend, there's no really efficient way for us to kill such units) and seem to be going for a final, cataclysmic stand in aksum. addis ababa's garrison seems to have pulled out as well for the same reason. unlike at matara, there's not really any way for us to stop either group from reaching the capital. so whichever one of us takes the city will have to grind through an absolutely massive, 20 unit pile of medieval defenders. if each cat does, what, about 0.7 damage to 7 units, we would need about 12 to get everyone down to the 3.3/6 collateral damage maximum, which we don't have - not a great start
and then we go in with what, horses and impis? our 3 macemen, and longbows on offense? yeah, there is a fair chance that we simply don't have the kind of force we'd need to grind through this city.... but we're also not going to get another chance to try for it once nauf's enormously superior units make it up there (they inexplicably did not advance this turn, for inexplicable reasons...?) so i'm thinking we'd better take our best shot at it anyways. and in the meantime, just be careful about how many units we throw away into the attrition meat grinder (so translation: we probably do need to bomb out the defenses at gondar instead of piling up the horse bodies so we can sweep northward as quickly as possible)anyways. GT's pike has wandered into range of a random axe from kinbozan, which is about as efficient a matchup as we're likely to get against it. i think we should go for it at these odds, this pike ties down multiple perfectly good units on defense at matara while it remains alive and i'm not about that. attack and
c1 axe vs c1 pike (65%): we actually won, amazing!
soooo now that we've been playing for fully 45 minutes, anyone wanna check the event log....?
mjmd making moves! and.... GT attacking gavagai? i have to admit i initially misread that as mjmd attacking gavagai which WOULD be a development...
well, not a ton to do here but go for it i think. with a turn's lead on nauf's catapults, i think it's safe for 3 of ours (we still have the accuracy cats from the lalibela attack long ago) to stop to bombard and hopefully preserve a unit or two in expectation. and then what, pile up the horse bodies? well... all our 1-movers died so i am not sure i see much other choice... at least with the horses there is a reasonable enough chance of retreating while still doing a bit of damage, which is more or less what we're going to have to go for i think. it's not like our impis get odds against the crossbow after all... and i don't dare risk a cat just to damage ONE unit with collateral...
for the first time in my life i promote a horse to flanking TWO.... coin flip to live, 60% chance to do damage seems better than 20% to live, 80% to do damage from a combat 1 horse.
"Hey, quit horsing around." i throw him and... he dies pathetically BUT does get in the expected singular hit. next, well... the odds of the next guy aren't really that much better than 20% to live, 80% to do damage, unless i want to risk a combat TWO horse (i do not want to do that). man, don't tell me i AM supposed to throw in a cat here (it gets 20% odds to retreat vs the crossbow). but... well, that requires us to actually have a unit with which to efficiently beat down the pike after if we do redline the xbow, which we don't really other than the valuable and still not a sure thing GG-promoted morale axe.... i send in another horsie
c1 HA vs 5.3 health pike (21% to live): LIVES :D pike now down to 3.7 health and from here things should snowball
c2 HA vs 3.7 health pike (15% to retreat, 25% to win, which would be worth 5xp for a promotion): OMFG HE WON we lost just one horse killing a pike on offense??
c2 horse vs g1 crossbow (almost exactly the same odds as above, so winning here would ALSO be worth a promotion): retreats, doing a shitton of damage
c1 horse vs 2.9 health crossbow (92% odds, would be worth 2xp for a promotion here too):
gondar kept its market AND GRANARY yessss
the rng gods wink at us with an on-theme great general, as if i could somehow fail to see the hand of the divine in a combat in which we traded one horse archer for a pike, a crossbow, and a city
we didn't do this last turn because of our mighty phobia of getting our cats killed but i think it's time for a celebratory free upgrade... so we can use longbows on offense and FOUR maces against GT's capital
ok so, now what? first things first, of course we cannot allow a counterattack against gondar. and second things second, we need to stare at this game board until we come up with a way to advance our guys into the teeth of a 20-unit garrison without getting our cats murdered. seems to add up to a hideous fuckton of pillaging to me...
fyi according to WB the horses will still defend against crossbows even on a hill (which i was worried would put our mace over the top and therefore in harm's way...) - relevant to our choice of how many troops to use on dubious pillaging missions and how many to gather into the stack. also relevant - the 25% malus from attacking across a river does still apply to HAs that otherwise do not get defensive bonuses
----
ok, after a break for lunch and quiet contemplation:
chop's already gone, but i decided that the possibility of building some goodwill with ginger is worth a slightly more defensive settle. also, this one has more chops coming quickly as it's first-ring to a chop, which the other site no longer is, and takakeisho is on pace to grab it another chop in 8 turns. so those will respectively go into the castle and granary, and we then have a third chop to do with what we will (very likely a courthouse or just a longbow). unfortunately it is juuuust a bit too early to move our worker onto the forest though as we don't want that chop going into the walls at what would then be wasted overflow...
anyways, with the idea of razing aksum looking increasingly delusional, maybe it's time to spend our other two settlers as well. they are headed for this filler spot
which aims to turn kinbozan's two floodplains farms into 6 riverside plains windmills (way better tiles than kinbozan's non-river desert hills...) and this spot
which has dubious value as an actual city (we're talking size 7 max, working 3x oasis, 3x windmills, and an incense) but it claims another lux, multiple copies if no one tries to swipe them, and a tremendous geostrategic position in the heart of the central desert. with a castle on a hill, it should be really difficult for nauf to crack if they decide to turn on us someday, while opening up an annoying attack vector into their ethiopian gains
trying to think about what it would take to cover our two cats with remaining movement points against an attack out by GT's capital garrison if we advance NE of gondar (pillaging the road and corn farm 1N of gondar, ofc). i see 5 pikes in range of that tile after the pillage...we have an injured shock axe who could cover from last turn's stack, and a full-health shock impi. and there are a few units that were one turn behind but could now move up on our lovely new road network.... that's worth another shock impi, plus a longbow who really wants to promote guerilla 2 but who could, i guess, promote shock instead and stand over the cats to be a Real Defender against whom the pikes would not even get odds. i mean, i suppose that's enough.... they can attack with everything and get one attack against a cat, but that exposes enough of their units to a counter that i think it's ok for us. they could cover with a significant portion of the former gondar garrison though, which gets messy... they would need to leave enough to not get the capital sniped, with 7 units that will be in range next turn (3 off of boats), but there might be a way to do both which would not be great for us
then we have to either defend gondar against its former garrison or sacrifice two more units to pillage the NW road.... this is a bit easier than pushing the cats though as they'd be attacking onto a hill across a river, so we can block the pikes with just regular old unpromoted impis which we have a few of to spare. then 2 C1 horses for the 2 crossbows in range, and the mace will probably eat SOMEthing, and i think this aspect shouldn't be a problem
ohhhh man you guys, i um... i found GT's hiding workers...
how.... how did this even HAPPEN...?
well, ginger is readying an absolute fuckton of catapults.... there are another 8 or so in attaleia on our border, plus 5 or 6 macemen, with research set to feudalism. i think we will see the push quite soon, either at guilds straight-up, or with gunpowder discovery timed to coincide with a nationalism swap via taj (probably the latter). against whom though? we will have castles in all the border cities by the time our current NAP expires, which even 30 cats will not be sufficient to reduce in one turn, and i think it's reasonable to expect each of our CG3 longbows to take at least one unit with it even on defense. they could make progress against us but it would be slow going, especially once we start whipping said longbows out of 21 cities every damn turn lol. so while they could come for us, i don't think it's too likely unless they can arrange a dogpile. but do we have any way to stop them from making gains if they go in against dreylin? well, we could be annoying at least... if we reroute our full military from the GT front after someone takes aksum, we could possibly take a border city or two.... but i'm not too sure what stops a stack of, let's say, 20 cats and 40 janissaries besides walking into a comparable stack from dreylin, which they seem unlikely to be able to field, or maybe burning themselves out against, like, 5 or 6 cities worth of longbows behind castles...
ok enough - i NEED it to not be my damn turn anymore. if this deploy loses to GT attacking out of aksum and then piling the gondar garrison on the tile to defend the wounded, so be it.... i think we have nothing better and i don't want to wait around for nauf's cats to catch up. we have only a slight lead on them, slight enough that i think we want to have the defenses bombed out BEFORE the bulk of our cats make it next to the city, so if they sit back and defend the extra turn we are getting for 2 of our cats could be significant (coupled with the bombard cat i plan to drop off on the longbow tile 1E of aksum next turn).
whatever man. just no more this please <3
