[SPOILERS] Chevalier Mal Fet and Marcopolothefraud lead a Soviet Down Under

[roland of gilead]

Good initiative buying the walls to shoot back. Is there really anything left to pillage over there? The Raiders may not even know what the interior looks like.

 a campus certainly.

They may have thought it could take the cities. which it could have.

we surprise for them at least.

[roland of gilead]

doesn't look great up in the china sea but you get next strike i suppose


that berserker is heading to you and kaiser is gone

[williams482]

Looks like two destroyers, a caravel and a battleship killed. Less bad than I'd feared, but things are still very very bad up there.

I will play the next turn or so, try to kill as many ships as I can and hope for the best, but our win probability for the game is exceedingly small. I cannot imagine a scenario where I come out of there with enough ships to actually take cities, and I don't think we have any credible chance of building a whole new fleet strong enough to challenge what Woden has already shown he can build anew.

Battle plan is to defend with my few destroyers, avoid attacking their Norwegian counterparts, and tear into the battleships with whatever ships can reach them.

[roland of gilead]

If anyone can do it it is you.

[williams482]

Turn 199:

Bruindane accepted this offer too (why oh why did I not try something sooner? I was looking for missed opportunities, that's an enormous one!), so my battleships and ironclads will finally be fighting at full strength. Woden found and sank both of my privateers trying to sneak into his western coast (probably with a destroyer, because those units can actually see naval raiders), and killed a cossack with a battleship fleet that just showed up in Thor. So clearly he's got ships all over the place, while we're essentially limited to the force engaged at Finnmark. Even one of the cossacks I believed would be unreachable most certainly was not, Ljubljana has more units swarming around down there than I anticipated:



This is unwinnable. I will still go forward now with trying to make the biggest mess I possibly can, but I have lost all real hope of victory.

Now for the battle that cannot possibly win us the war:



First off, engaging here at all is already a nontrivial decision because we now have five oil stockpiled and could upgrade a round of privateers and ironclads to superior units. Tactically that's just asking to die though, there are no safe harbors for us to shelter in and we need to be taking the offensive to remove enemy attacks from the board, not withdrawing in an ultimately futile effort to strengthen ourselves.

The natural way to approach this is to try to wrap around the destroyer screen from both ends, targeting as many battleships as possible. I'm going to start from the north, where step one is clearly to one-shot the Phoenician destroyer with my injured ironclad, who takes six damage in the process. Then we have to batter through this injured destroyer as efficiently as possible. It seems like the best bet is to spend my two destroyers here, in tandem they are favored (but not guaranteed) to get the kill. The first attacks for 31 and takes 27, the second gets a bad die roll and deals just 32, taking 30. Our privateer finishes the job, and here's our opening:



What I would like to be able to do is chase off the admiral, but that's clearly not an option here. He makes the difference between +25 and +30 for our ironclads and battleships against Woden's battleships, +30 being the threshold where a one hit kill is a tossup. Clearly that's a very valuable difference, we just can't possibly reach and dislodge him with the limited number of attacks available to us.

Now lets see how much of an opening we can make in the south, and distribute our attacks on the battleships as efficiently as possible from there. I have a destroyer too far back to reach a battleship thanks to ZoC from the Norwegian destroyers, so it smashes the Phoenician caravel fleet (a tile I am willing to occupy, unlike the tile Ljubljana's ironclad currently fills). That ship is attacked for 66 damage by an ironclad of my own, then finished with my frigate. A 80 HP caravel attacks the battleship behind for 34, then one of my northern battleships (boosted by an admiral) moves just close enough to finish the job. My southern battleship moves up to take a shot at a battleship fleet 1SW of the Norwegian admiral and gets an awful roll, 32 when 40 was expected. My destroyer is now just 32% to finish it. I send the destroyer in anyway and am rewarded with another awful roll, just 52 damage (taking 16). Eesh. We might get him with the injured ironclad in Asahi later, depends how other things shake out. Here's the situation now:



I now have two battleships, one frigate and three (functionally two) ironclads left to use. I need two hits from basically whatever to kill a battleship, so either I try to go after one of the battleship fleets (not viable without serving up my own battleships on a platter to die in counterattack. Like they're not going to die anyway.) Ultimately I decide to move one more battleship into a very exposed position to shoot a Norwegian single to the south for 71, and finish it with the healthier of my two southern ironclads. A frigate and ironclad combine to take down the northernmost battleship, and my last battleship blasts another of it's kind for a decidedly non-lethal 72. Finally I decide why the hell not take out that crippled battleship fleet with my crippled ironclad, and upgrade the one unit that couldn't get involved in a meaningful combat this turn (a caravel) into a fresh destroyer. Here we are:



Final tally for the turn: sank one frigate, one caravel fleet, one ironclad, one destroyer, three single battleships, and a battleship fleet. That's not bad, and probably enough that we'll still have some striking power left once Woden has delivered his counterpunch next turn. I'm anticipating the ultimate result will be a draw or a tactical victory for Russia, but strategically speaking Woden will have done enough damage to win the game.

On the home front, I upgrade two privateer fleets, a single privateer, and three frigate fleets. That single could have been a third submarine fleet had I not bungled my attempt to merge those ships last turn, but most likely I'll take destroyer casualties at Finnmark and be able to upgrade it next turn too. Here's the general lay of the land up there:



These upgrades are a far cry from sufficient to wrestle back control of the seas here, but they will make attempting to siege down any of my cities that much more difficult, and also mean that Woden can no longer operate single ships with complete impunity (although the absolutely pathetic speed of submarines, just five tiles per turn with the great lighthouse, will still make ambushes difficult). This guy could be in for a bad time:



The financial situation is obviously dire as well, although I can paper it over with 658g worth of pillaging this turn. Of course that can't possibly be maintained as my cossacks are not long for this world, but I doubt I'll actually go into negatives before surrendering. I do wonder if Bruindane would have accepted a mere 500g for that coal. 

I decide to change things up at Asahi and spend faith on a field cannon instead of a cossack. Last unit I expect to buy there in any case.

I do wonder if the Raiders realize what horrible shape I'm actually in here.

Shikishima and the units inside do some real damage to a Norwegian ironclad pillaging off the coast, and my crossbow corp at Vladimir Monomakh steps forward to do some far less significant damage to the berserker:



That was definitely a bad decision, Woden stands a real shot of being able to kill the unit next turn. I should have stayed put on the campus, keeping +10 strength for that unit's garrison promotion, and killed the berserker when it came in range of it's own accord.


Oh well. On to turn 200.

[williams482]

Worth a mention that I was completely wrong about the composition of this Norwegian fleet, figuring they would be (once again) mostly melee ships. My plan from two turns ago to try just slugin' it out in the narrow corridor north of Asahi would have been a dismal failure, as I was plainly out-gunned at range and in melee. If Woden had held the line with Destroyers, moved up the battleships, and started blasting at my few frontline destroyers instead of bothering with the cities (assuming he could, for all I know those ships were still coming up from the west and couldn't reach me) then the battle drags on a fair but longer but he comes out of it the clear winner with a lot more of his ships still alive.

Because I was given a chance to attack first on t198, and because Woden surprisingly didn't have enough melee ships up here to effectively screen the battleships, I was essentially forced into a more optimal strategy than the one I was planning to use and ultimately able to do much more damage as a result.

[roland of gilead]

Better to be lucky than good.

[williams482]

Turn 200:

I expected casualties at Finnmark, and I got plenty of them. Here's the situation:



All told, my losses here are 4 battleships and 2 ironclads, plus three dead cossacks in southern Norway:



That leaves me with zero battleships on this front, although I do have two frigates still which can be upgraded. Those units must survive if I'm to even pretend I still have a chance. Now to see if I can finish off the last of Woden's ships.

My first thought was that I should start by targeting the admiral, but I think the smart play here is to do exactly the opposite. It only boosts two units, including the destroyer fleet sharing a tile with it, and both those units are quite fragile as it is. If I can avoid attacking that Admiral then Woden won't be able to move it anywhere useful for quite some time, meaning he can't use it on another front, or even to boost the battleship which ran away into Buyniy (which I most certainly will try to recapture quickly if I can).

First, my static defenses shoot the only unit they can reach for a combined 31 damage, and our healthy destroyer in the area finishes the job. Our privateer moves up to provide a flanking bonus on the northernmost destroyer, then sinks the crippled battleship. That northern destroyer is then tag teamed and sunk by two ironclads, taking 24 and 29 damage, with the second striker (now redlined) earning a promotion. The southernmost destroyer is surrounded as best I can to maximize flanking bonuses, then my healthiest remaining destroyer swoops in to finish the job. Halfway there:



I'm going to have to get a little lucky to kill everything this turn, so I take a gamble on surrounding the single battleship with four total units and attacking at 57% kill odds with an injured ironclad. That die roll does not go my way with only 87 damage dealt (8 taken), so the caravel finishes the job at a loss of 11 HP. We're now down to the two frigates and three injured destroyers, which certainly won't be able to clean out that battleship and the two remaining Norwegian destroyers, so this becomes loss mitigation mode. I hit the battleship with the weakest (47 HP) destroyer and clean it out with a frigate, then use the remaining two destroyers (one of which can promote, and does) to wall off the Norwegian destroyers from the center of my formation. Those two ships can probably tag team the weaker of my destroyers here, or take out a crippled ironclad, but they can't trade destroyer for destroyer evenly. Finally, my three promotion frigate moves into Asahi and upgrades. Final state of things for the turn:



The cossacks pillage where they can, but their days are clearly numbered. The one furthest south is completely doomed and could not reach any pillageable tiles, the others should hang on for another turn or two but are sorely limited how much further damage they'll be able to do before they are overwhelmed. As I think I've remarked before, these evenly scattered mountains are awful for massed cavalry, as they create so many choke points and prevent proper swarm tactics.



Off the coast of Navarin, that ambush mentioned earlier looks plausible:



The city, battleship fleet, submarine fleet, single sub, and single privateer combine to send that destroyer to the bottom. Not quite the ideal wolfpack at this point, but that's something. We are also virtually guaranteed a golden age if the game runs another 21 turns, which it almost certainly will not.

I've expressed already that I think the game is probably hopeless. With only two frigates/battleships left in the north I'm substantially less well equipped to make progress against Raider cities than I was after Diomede, and we all remember how that turned out. Woden spent some chops in his last full-scale fleet rebuild and will have to build more expensive units without the benefit of policy cards this time, but he still has a substantial naval presence, and his slow buildup will certainly beat out my attempts to rebuild a navy from scratch while under active siege. Even if we made peace and both set off to rebuild unobstructed, he's got 36 cities to my 20 once loyalty situations resolve themselves, with a similar edge in the all-important modern resources. Never mind an enormous advantage in both research currencies, meaning he'll get armies/armadas, Fascism, and the next tier of units first, and keep that edge for far longer than the brief spans I was able to squeeze his battleship and destroyer windows down to.

Emotionally, this feels like giving up early. And for all I know the Raiders think this situation remains genuinely tenuous. But I can't imagine their internal economic situation is as precarious as mine is, and I know I can't hurt their production and research capacity as much as they are clearly capable of hurting mine.

I have passed my turn, in the event that Bruindane or Suboptimal are inexplicably operating under the belief that they can come back and win this thing, but I believe this game is over.

I concede to Woden and Ljubljana

[roland of gilead]

They have won this via a war of attrition at the end but i would say them doing so much better in the semi final war is the real route to victory.

Williams you Woden and Lubijana have all been excellent over these turns.

[williams482]

I'll try to write up a more detailed retrospective later, but I want to say (without looking in their thread just yet) that I am really impressed with Ljubljana and Woden's play in this game, and they absolutely earned their comeback win. I'm sure I'll get around to griping about things they benefitted from (while ignoring the things we benefitted from) another time, but just to hit the highlights of the moves that won the game for that team:

- Ljubljana out-dueled Archduke around Akkad. Whatever the circumstances, that's no mean feat.
- Woden and Ljubljana efficiently dismantled England and most of Japan despite the best efforts of the Russian fleet to intervene, pillaging themselves back to technological relevance in the process
- Woden rebuilt that captured core quickly enough to completely turn around an otherwise lagging research rate and became the tech leader seemingly overnight
- On four separate occasions Woden or Ljubljana got their hands on a critical military tech just in time to prevent me from making progress against their cities. Woden researching and upgrading ironclads just ahead of the war declaration, Ljubljana doing the same the turn after my breakthrough at Diomede, Woden completing Steel just a turn before I was able to take out his ironclads, and Woden researching and upgrading destroyers just as I finished upgrading battleships and was in position to start blasting his capital. The timing is "lucky" in a sense, but really these are the direct residue of the extraordinary economic turnaround mentioned above, manifest in perfectly timed military bonuses.
- Woden completely rebuilt the fleet he lost at Diomede, stronger than before and faster than I thought would be possible.
- Ljubljana pounced on and destroyed the Australian fleet, opening up the conquest of Australia's northern holdings and ensuring that Russia would not have a sheltered place to keep pumping out reinforcements. This would have been a sidenote if I'd been able to break Norwegian defenses, but with the Russian offensive stalemated control over those seas meant that Norway had the space to rebuild, but Russia did not.

I'll add on that Woden and Ljubljana were very active in exchanging advice and ideas for the duration of the time I was lurking in their thread, and judging by the rate at which posts were made from then on, that continued up to the end. Not only was this a brilliantly executed victory, but that level of collaboration and effort, on a game that dragged on for 14 months and surely looked utterly hopeless at points, really captures the spirit of this sort of team game, and the RB community at large.

Congratulations fellas. You earned this.



(side note: This post is going to seem really silly if we wind up continuing because Bruindane or Suboptimal decide they are perfectly happy rebuilding and gunning for a culture victory or something. I'm hoping that's not the case, but if it is... I'll keep playing.)