[SPOILERS] The Wild Card

[The Black Sword]

I changed my mind at the last minute regarding that archer and moved him to the hill adjacent Jetboy. Doesn't matter though, dtay went NE:


His single axe is along on the forest now. Our force roster:

marble mine: 2 archers
plains hill: axe, 3 archers
Jetboy: 3 archers , warrior
Dr Tachyon: warrior, chariot

Otherwise single units as shown.

[flugauto]

Imagine that you took Monarchy as Oracle tech.

[The Black Sword]

If only!
Though if I could change one thing about this game, I don't think that would be it .

Here's what I'm thinking of:


Main worry has to be dtay marching NE towards sleeper. We'd probably need to hit him if he went NE NE. Hence I'm not sure about the 3 archers currently assigned to the plains hill, since they're badly positioned for that. The main aim of these archers is just to make dtay pay dearly for the hill if he wants to take it, perhaps 2 would be enough?

I'm also worried about suicide chariots cutting the road from Dr Tachyon to Sleeper, so I'm trying to bring two workers in back from chopping duties.

Not 100% sure about builds. Sleeper can get 3 units out relatively quickly, with 1 chop and 2 1-pop whips. Chariots vs archers, depends whether we have to defend the city or attack out clearly.

Chariot seems to be the right choice in Dr Tachyon, which could still be whipped again.

I'm not sure I want to whip Jetboy again, down to effective size 4. If not, getting the archer out in 2t and then starting a settler seems best. Otherwise, whip the chariot I suppose.

Fortunato is chopping out a chariot.

[The Black Sword]

Apparently there are more people than just us and dtay in the world, who knew?


So Pindicator ran into us and offered a map trade. Given the derisory state of our map that sounded like a good deal to me. Here's the other continent:



Commodore:


Pindicooter:


Nakor:


Azza:


Lewger:


I forgot to change the EPs, will we grab their graphs before switching back to dtay? Though given our sorry state, I'm not sure how helpful the info from the graphs will be,

Btw, I went with 2 archers on the plains hill and building an archer in Sleeper to defend against possible chariot attacks.

[The Black Sword]

dtay has had enough:


His troops are in a rather compromising position though, if ever there was a good time to hit him, it'd probably be now:


We have 8 archers, an axe, a warrior and 2 chariots in range.

Our power also finally caught up with him:


And we're currently paying 6gpt in unit cost.

Some factors:
Does he have settlers coming out to grab our copper spots?
If we re-offer and he doesn't log back in this turn to accept, should we attack before his troops move into a better defended spot?
I really do want to kill his annoying stack.

[Jowy]

Let's kill off the stack if we can do that with acceptable losses. Just a small taste of revenge for motivation purposes
Be sure to combat sim it. Note that if you decide against the attack, make sure everything is defended, because Dtay could also decline an offer next turn and stay on the offensive.

I'm still a bit out of touch with the game but looks like we'll be OK regardless.

[The Black Sword]

Running through a sim, and the odds are a lot closer than I'd like attacking.

Hopeful strategy:
suicide 4 archers to injure the top 3 axes
axe takes out c1 chariot at 70%
archer suicides into spear
chariot vs chariot
chariot cleans up something(spear?)
3 archers clean up(axes will still give risky odds though)
warrior cleans up

Seems there's a lot that go wrong here though, in particular I keep losing that 70% axe vs chariot in all my sims.

I guess peace is the safe option, but if he doesn't log back in and accept this turn then lets roll the dice rather than letting him move back across the river, or having to give up one of the hills.

[The Black Sword]

Changing my mind again.

We sort of need to gamble and if he takes peace and comes back in 10 turns will we have better odds on these units then? Probably not I think, with us still needing a 2-1 ratio, particularly if he steals our copper.

[The Black Sword]

I'm going to sleep on it, leaning towards attacking in the morning.

If he plans on continuing to be aggressive in the future, then attacking is the right option I think and it's better to plan for the worst. I can be talked out of it if you disagree though.

[The Black Sword]

We lost:


Archers were terribly unlucky, one already injured axe took out 3 more before I got another hit in. I probably should have stopped at some stage, but I wanted to kill something. Eventually all the archers have been suicided and the chariot is up and of course our axe loses.

I re-offered peace, maybe he'll accept without looking at the situation, even if he does, we're probably screwed when he comes back in 10 turns.