[SPOILERS] Woden and ljubljana like boats

[ljubljana]

Um, I am mildly intoxicated rn (and so will not be playing the turn for a few hours) but isn’t that Australian fleet partially in first strike range? My lead frigates have 8 movement... I doubt I can kill more than the two frigates and a caravel fleet but could be worth it, especially if we want a fight before WoR + SP pops anyways...

[Woden]

Um, I am mildly intoxicated rn (and so will not be playing the turn for a few hours) but isn’t that Australian fleet partially in first strike range? My lead frigates have 8 movement... I doubt I can kill more than the two frigates and a caravel fleet but could be worth it, especially if we want a fight before WoR + SP pops anyways...

Yes and do it if you think you can get a decent first strike. I think I could get a ship or 2 if he tries to flank you.

[ljubljana]

It would be 3 or 4 ships tops, and even that would likely require caravel attacks. Do you think that’s worth it? Would be nice to kill those frigates...

[Woden]

It would be 3 or 4 ships tops, and even that would likely require caravel attacks. Do you think that’s worth it? Would be nice to kill those frigates...

Sure, no time like the present and time only helps him.

[ljubljana]

Opened up the save, accepted your alliance renewal, and...



79 = 65 base + 10 vs cavalry - 2 emergency + 4 WoR + 2 flanking. No alliance boost! What the fuck?!

I am BEYOND furious about this, the stupid interface selling us out on THE MOST critical turn of perhaps the entire game, the one turn that we had in which to first strike Australia! God damn it!

afjiewpjdaijoewandoiewa I am STEAMING, but I guess I have to play the turn now anyways. But there is no way I can attack Australia without +5 CS on my ships, and with them presumably able to hit back without my +5 on defense either. Shit

[ljubljana]

Turn 184 (part 1, lol) - Phoenicia

Is it a graphical glitch, or is it reality? Well, we have two free attacks this turn with which to get a signal on that:



Frigate attacks Cossack, into -11 displayed strength differential.  According to the damage formula, the expected value should be 30 * e^(-11/25) = 19.32, with minimum 15.46 and maximum 23.18. And my roll is:



...less than the minimum? ...okay...



Crossbow vs. Cossack, into -39 CS differential. That is very unlikely to tell us much, as the numbers involved are just too small to reliably draw any conclusions... The expected value should be 30 * e^(-39/25) = 6.30, with minimum damage 5.04 and maximum damage 7.56. And the roll is:



...more than the maximum! Interesting 

So either my math is wrong, or the given damage formula, which seems to originate as a heuristic rather than from any provided documentation (because why would Firaxis tell us how this game works), is not quite right. Or, we are both right and I got very unlikely outlier results twice in a row and there is some funky business with rounding going on.

But with one extreme low-end roll and one extreme high-end roll, I feel pretty confident that the displayed CSs are, in fact, being used in damage calculation. If that frigate shot were actually using the -6 CS differential we would have with an active alliance, the damage range would be 18.87 to 28.31, punting our roll of 15 from "0.5% chance if they round down from 15.5" (I mean that literally, 15.5/19.32 = 0.802, so this is a 0.5%-odds lowroll) way out into "impossible unless they're secretly using Gaussians" territory. Therefore, Occam's razor is that the displayed figures do reflect reality

I could have gotten one more data point if I had attacked out of the city with the new Pike/Shot, by the way, since the displayed Cossack health was after a city range strike. But I did not want to do that, as I did not need the P/S attack to kill, and I would lose a support bonus on my vulnerable flatground campus P/S corps, plus leave my P/S unit out of position and unpromoted for next turn. The final Russia deploy:



The 5 missing CS will be killer on defense, especially for the hilltop corps which can be triple-attacked. But if they go for it, we stand a good chance of taking out the eastern promoted corps in return (which is the one with the bonus against anti-cav units). In a cruel tragedy, the unpromoted Cossack corps in the yellow, which attacked my hilltop P/S for no obvious reason and is therefore almost certain to promote next turn, could probably have been killed with the alliance in effect, but the numbers just did not good look enough without it, as you can see in the screenshot in my previous post. In retrospect, maybe I should have sacrificed the crossbow to take a shot at it...

Good news: Russia did not quite kill Runic's walls somehow (with 5 frigate fleet shots, wtf?), and I got to take a potshot at a triple-promoted fleet. Great news: the former Hieratic is looking like a tough nut to crack, inheriting 275 health of urban defenses, 70 defensive strength, and spawning a bunch of free line infantry to repel the invaders! I think I prefer that to if it had flipped to me  And Izumrud will do the same next turn, leaving these Cossacks with nowhere to run. And yes, the AI line infantry did in fact knock the Cuneiform Cossack into kill range for me on the interturn, thank you very much

As for Australia, not sure what to do, which is why this is part 1, of course. But advancing 2 tiles to stay just out of their range is very predictable, and they will not give us another chance to first strike them again (they only did so last turn because they didn't scout my fleet, thanks to your ZoC-blocking IC). Australia also discovered another tech this turn, presumably Siege Tactics, so we are on the clock and have 6t to Steam Power, tops, and cannot afford any more slowdowns or setbacks. I am thinking of trying a WIDE flanking movement to the north to try to trap them in that little bay containing The Low-End Theory and Illmatic...

[ljubljana]

Ok, I think I need some advice on this one... Not having the alliance means an attack this turn is out, I think, much to my chagrin I probably could kill only the 2 frigates and one caravel fleet, and would get torn up on the counterattack as I can't get better odds than this:



and do not have enough caravels to keep them from getting to my frigates. The numbers situation is also looking pretty bad, those two ships I defogged in the NW have +6 as well...hopefully there is no third layer behind this line...

My proposed flanking move is into the gap between the two islands, with the GA roughly 4 tiles NW of your pair of IC. If we are playing the game of using our 3 move advantage to push them back 3 spaces per turn, going up there allows us to push from the north, which means they will quickly run out of room when they get backed against their own cities and will then be forced to take a first strike. And if they don't anticipate my move, I might be able to hit the northern portion of their line next turn, which would have a nice advantage in that some of the southern portion may not be able to reach me on the counterattack.

But the move has disadvantages too in that I won't be able to scout fully to the NW of the fleet's new position (though I highly doubt they have ships all the way up there), and I may be scouted by the reinforcement ships coming down from Anoch Sun (which will then be cut off and dead though, so that's good). The barbarian pin indicates the furthest the Anoch Sun frigate can reach on its next turn, assuming the 6 movement points I saw were a UI glitch and it actually just has 5, so it may see some of my ships if it scouts in just the right location.

The other option is probably just to advance two spaces to the SW by your clads. That will keep my ships by their cities, and eventually force them to choose whether to leave ships by The Low-End Theory. But pushing them back like that is quite slow and their ships can retreat west forever. We may be able to get The Low-End Theory like that but I doubt we can kill the fleet unless they make another mistake with positioning, and we are looking at roughly 6t left until they get clads and WoR (possibly both on the same turn).

Let me know what you think of the NW move, and I will finish the turn as soon as I wake up tomorrow.

[Woden]

I am not seeing the +5 for a military alliance on you units. See if you can send me a military alliance request. If you can, then the flag on my leader picture is bugged out and we don't actually have an alliance. Send me one then. If you can't, it is bugged out but we are in an alliance and looks to need a turn to update or it is bugged out and we won't get the +5 CS anymore. Actually, if you can't send me an alliance request after accepting a renewal I would say that is a bug that warrants a turn reload and don't accept my renewal request and just send me an alliance because it is obviously bugged and not getting the CS bonus could be game breaking.

As for your NW attack plan. It could work with the bonus of being able to hit any ships he has coming down from assaulting Anoch Sun. He might also open up a path to his coast that I maybe able to exploit in a few turns when my pillaging ironclads make it over here. One downside I can see is that if he holds his position, you will need to attack him in open ocean and his numbers will help him where if you hug the coast, it is not quite as open but still open enough that it might not matter versus going NW. On the plus side, I don't think they will be expecting you to sail around that island and that could throw them off enough to make a mistake or have to change battle plans, maybe?

[ljubljana]

Looks like I was able to send you an alliance request after accepting renewal, which...definitely shouldn't be the case, to put it mildly, but I did it. And yeah, the flag is definitely bugged out - it was still there even at the start of my turn, when we definitely weren't supposed to have an alliance (it did indeed expire this turn, according to my notifications).

[ljubljana]

Turn 184, Part 2 - Phoenicia

Well, I did get scouted, but in the fun way:



Three free kills coming back from Anoch Sun. Seems worth taking, especially since I can cut off the rest of the returning AS force as well. There was also a privateer just to the north of my ships that got similarly trashed by my low-health fleet. Not a bad outcome for this miserable turn



Kill ratio vs Australia is currently 15 ships for us (1 galley, 2 privateers, 4 frigates, 8 caravels) for us to 0 ships for them. And yet, it feels like we have barely dented their numbers at all...

Let me know if you get my alliance request, and if you have the +5 CS? I believe I successfully sent you the request, but not sure how this game processes such things when they conflict with renewals. If you didn't get a request, feel free to send me one, lmao.