[pb46 spoilers] Hitru lurks again

[Old Harry]

Turn 178

I played a quick 2-hour turn today, so let's have a bit of a report!

We started our fourth golden age last turn, got Steel and Music and will complete Mil Trad at the end of this turn (this event helped ).


We've started building the Ironworks in XML (our best hammer city - a little sad considering it's only size 8 - where we'll probably put any future wonders) and next turn will start West Point in our Heroic Epic city TalkingHeadMessage. With five settled great generals (hopefully six soon), a barracks, stable, and colosseum that gets us to 20XP (22XP with the sixth GG) on mounted units. So at the end of the golden age we're contemplating switching to Vassalage and Theocracy for 26XP and commando right out of the gate. We haven't decided quite how we'll use them just yet...

We captured another city from Elkad last turn and have a bunch of shiny new cannons ready to land next to Fallen next turn and help us roll over the remaining four core cities after our shiny new frigates bombard down the defences.


Overseas Commodore made short work of Superdeath. He has a pretty spiky border over here (not shown are the 25 knights and 10 horse archers SE of Frankfurt) so I wonder where he's going to point his army next? It'd be nice if he contests Rusten's attack on Dark Savant, but we should probably beef up our sentry net around his coast.


Demos and power. Pindi should finish Baii (Mousferatu) off pretty soon. Perhaps we can point him at Gav next? Rusten's Borsche cities are all out of revolt, so his crop is racing away and we're only just ahead on MFG because of the golden age. Unless Dark Savant puts up a bit of a fight the game is slipping away.

[superdeath]

Takes 26xp to make commandos? damn

[Old Harry]

Turn 179

Takes 26xp to make commandos? damn

Yup. Unless you're AGG or CHA...

We landed a bunch of stuff. we're hoping not to lose all four cannons next turn, but we might.


Meanwhile we're wondering if we should use our future commandos against Rusten or Pindicator. It's hard to hit Rusten from the fog, especially as he's got a decent sentry net set up. But hopefully he won't realise just how many great generals we've made so far. Naval flanking would be vital for some of the attacks, as would knocking out his sentry boats. Right now the holy grail would be burning Porpoise - his Forbidden Palace city - which should hurt his economy real bad.


Demos and power. Gavagai's power is going through the roof. Is that a function of being neighbours with Commodore, or is he planning to hit Pindicator, or maybe even GKC or Dark Savant?   If it's Pindi then we might decide to help him out...

[Elkad]

The fort on the wheat at Heorot. I was hoping you'd 2-move a bunch of knights into it and let me pound it with CR units. You don't get the city defense bonus because it's my fort , but I get the city attack bonus into it anyway. Would have been fun. But you went around instead.

Your blockades and trade routes.

I logged in to a total blockade a couple times. That's why I was scrambling to build forts in odd places. Forts are cities for trade purposes.
At least once I had to find a vulnerable boat to kill to get the routes as well.

The wheat tile over the sea from Lucifer. You never pillaged it, or even put a unit on it. I needed that 4 food desperately, and you let me have it the whole time. Lucifer never starved, only whipped a single pop, and other than that whip turn, 1 turned units the whole time.

Leaving my caravels hanging for you to cleanup was a misclick. Being down circumnav hurt me a LOT on naval maneuvering, and the way the map is laid out, the center civs were at a disadvantage. I couldn't even get a spy to give a reasonable amount of help, everything was north-south. Once I finally got a boat to the north edge of the map, it just cruised straight across. I got circumnav finally the last turn I played.

How close was Lucifer to holding this last turn? You only had 20 hitters on the ground vs my 34 defenders, so a lot came off boats.

[Hitru]

That fort was neat idea, we were close to falling to that trap (actually OH wanted to do just that ).

That explains all of your forts, I had forgot about using them for getting trade routes.

That wheat tile might have been our mistake. Truth be told I did not think about that particular tile that much, it kind of escaped attention as we were looking at actual war plan and it was on "our" continent. But in general we did not want to starve your cities too much as we wanted to capture them with big pop (we were really happy when you swapped slavery away for a while during war, for example). And we did not want to attack your core before cannons as killing stacks of your longbows was annoying at best. In the end it worked out pretty well for us as Lucifer will be really productive city with 11 pop out of the gate.

We thought moving caravels where they were was probably either misclick or just miscounting of tiles.

Lucifer was real nailbiter! In the end we had 2 spare units, GG medic chariot and drafted musket with no promos, both in ships.

2 questions:

What was your naming theme?

And why did you snipe that city from us when we were in war with TBW? As I said we really wanted to attack you later as hitting your longbows with knights did not look that great idea, but then you sniped city from us and made sure we can't trust you not to do it again if we send our army towards Baii/Mouse, for example?


You really made us work in this war with 50+ PRO/CHM NA longbows (and your mass caravels were real pain in the ass too).

[superdeath]

Elkad wins the record for most archers/longbows built as NA right?

[Hitru]

How many did you have again? But at least quality is on his side

[Elkad]

I didn't have the tallest stack. But I did build more. 77LB, and 7 upgraded from archer.
Coming out with 19xp at the end (and I "wasted" my last general, so I could have gotten to 21 for 5 promos + D1&D3 on the last 3-4 of them)
25 xbows. Incidentally, if you'd just gone pillaging (or just stood units on all my tiles) after you took my Maoi, my army would have vanished due to strikes. I was building wealth in my capital at the end to keep it alive.

Naming was Niven/Pournelle collaborative books, starting with the finest sci-fi story ever written.

You were already going to attack me, were trying to build cities in my only remaining expansion route (the barb city and the islands NE), and had eaten my only rational opponent before I could get to him (TBW). I didn't check your thread that far back, but I feel like you were going to hit me, and swapping to TBW happened because I smelled it and pushed boats up to block you. If you'd gone for Pindi there instead...

Plus you had issues with Krill (taking *his* land from TBW). Someone has to be first. Taking a city is the best way to tell your other neighbors I was serious and hope they jumped in as well. Krill flopped on his war with you and ate TBW (and then quit), and Pindi never budged. I even powered up his shine deliberately. His religion was no better a choice than any other, I wanted him to have the coin.

I'd like to think without the super-easy privateers, I'd have been OK much longer. Your sea control was too perfect, and I had to chase down the same route. I'd have happily smashed triremes into caravels at 4% odds for a long time, since the hammer disparity actually isn't that bad, while I grabbed Engineering or something, but 0.02% vs a privateer was hopeless. So I had to GA and bulb Optics instead. (and I got that scientist out just in time - that's why I was sending workboats to their deaths, to get single turns of fish output)

With Engineering, I'd have had more flexibility - even if I didn't get there early, your assault on my Maoi would have been much harder. I made you back off once there, and with that extra road move, you'd have been forced to bring up even more units. And pikes of course, but they don't compare to the road advantage.

The dice weren't kind to me either. 9 50% withdraw units (g3) hit you outside my capital. I got one withdraw. I was counting on some surviving and the general promote-healing them. And the last battle. You got a near unbroken string of wins at 88% on all my units. 1-2 early defenses might have made the difference. (would also help if I'd remembered to turn on autopromote for that last longbow built at the flip).

I'm aware of confirmation bias, but I'd like to see a log of actual vs predicted. Still doesn't match losing a CFC game because I bounced 2 shock chariots off a single unpromoted axe on flat ground, but there are several times it stung.
When you are down, you need 3-1 numbers. Or 2-1 and at least average luck. Every time I tried at 2-1, I didn't get the luck.

[Hitru]

Of course we were expanding as hard as we could to every direction. does not mean that we would have attacked you. We did plan for that though, which is kind of given.

But we chose to atttack TBW becouse he was weaker and did not have those annoying longbows. If you would not have attacked us I could easily see that we would have preferred to hit Baii instead (and we were planning for that too).

But if you hoped for a dogpile vs us and considered war between us to be just a matter of time (which it probably was) then I understand why you attacked and tried to make something happen. And I respect that a lot (as I also respect how you defended as hard as possible until bitter end, even if that is one big factor why Rusten is currently ahead of us).

And I think taking religion from Pindi was good diplo move, he was your natural ally.

If you would have got engy that would have made things considerably harder, although after we cut that road we were not that worried about it anymore. Yeah, we would have made more pikes if you would have got engy (or be close enough, we saw your research).

We did indeed get pretty lucky at some point in that last attack, but that was after we had sent 11 cannons with odds from 20%-65% and losing 9 of them (with quite many flawless losses to boot). So I think in big picture neither of us can be too unhappy about rng (for example we performed pretty bad when we attacked your big carave stack for first time). And in any case, in big picture it does not matter for us if you would have lived for 1 more turn. Agreed that you should have used auto promo as that would have lost us few more knights over this war.

Best of luck to you in future and current games here

Ps. If we had knows your eco was that bad maybe we would have done that, but on the other hand we really needed that last GG to get our commando factory going.

[Old Harry]

The fort on the wheat at Heorot.  I was hoping you'd 2-move a bunch of knights into it and let me pound it with CR units.  You don't get the city defense bonus because it's my fort , but I get the city attack bonus into it anyway.  Would have been fun.  But you went around instead.

Ha! I thought we'd both get the bonus (on attack and defence) but it turns out neither of us are right - and the game just treats it as a normal tile. As it was you had a LB in there which we decided would be too expensive to dislodge, and cutting your supply lines (Hitru's idea) was pretty appealing.

The wheat tile over the sea from Lucifer.  You never pillaged it, or even put a unit on it.  I needed that 4 food desperately, and you let me have it the whole time.  Lucifer never starved, only whipped a single pop, and other than that whip turn, 1 turned units the whole time.

I didn't even think of it. Can we claim that we wanted that city to be high pop when we captured it? I had big plans at the start of the war to capture Lucifer to stop you pumping out those high-XP units, but it never seemed to be doable, so in the end we just had to slog through to it.

You were already going to attack me, were trying to build cities in my only remaining expansion route (the barb city and the islands NE), and had eaten my only rational opponent before I could get to him (TBW).  I didn't check your thread that far back, but I feel like you were going to hit me, and swapping to TBW happened because I smelled it and pushed boats up to block you.  If you'd gone for Pindi there instead...

Pindi paid us 200 gold to attack you (although I think he was fine that we went for TBW in the end). You're right that we were going to hit you, but it was the 3-promo longbows that put us off, not the boats. That and finding out that TBW only had 36 units.

Later on we offered Pindi war with Baii while we attacked you, which seems to have worked out similarly tough for both of us! We need to figure out how to come to an amicable border arrangement with Pindicator for the rest of the game now. I wonder if offering him Gavagai while we hit Rusten will work as well?

I'd like to think without the super-easy privateers, I'd have been OK much longer.  Your sea control was too perfect, and I had to chase down the same route.  

Yeah, I don't like privateers at Paper, it'll be interesting to see if moving them and trebs to Engineering for PB49 just swings everyone to go there first. We were committed to libbing Astro pretty early so the easy privateers have worked against us as well (in that Rusten seems to have avoided Astro totally).

With Engineering, I'd have had more flexibility - even if I didn't get there early, your assault on my Maoi would have been much harder.  I made you back off once there, and with that extra road move, you'd have been forced to bring up even more units.  And pikes of course, but they don't compare to the road advantage.

I thought your tactics were top-notch this game - making us fight over every inch of land and even withdraw occasionally. Why couldn't you and 2metra have swapped places? Did you pick your civ/leader combo with defence in mind or did you get forced into that?

The dice weren't kind to me either.  

We had some strings of memorably bad results too, but also captured a couple of cities with 20% fights so I don't think we can complain too much. The RNG giveth and the RNG taketh away.

Anyway, to the report:

Turn 187

Well it's been a while but we finally exterminated the native peoples of... Oh god, we're monsters!

So Elkad teased us cruelly, retreating each time we bring our stack to bear on his cities, first giving up Fallen on t180.


Then Mote and Beowulf fell t183.


Before finally the showdown at Lucifer. With 16 collateral units and 30 hitters we'd definitely take the city in two, but with war weariness a huge issue we bent every unit we could to the task of capturing it this turn.


We began with a run of flawless defeats for catapults and then cannons that were getting around 20% odds. The number of first strikes (4-7 I think?) that Elkad's longbows and crossbows had was a major problem here. But then our knights and cuirassiers stepped up, ignoring first strikes and embarking on a stunning run of results winning a string of 70s, then 80s then 90s percent fights until we lost a couple at 90 and 95%.  With a bunch of injured units on the ground and on boats we managed to keep the odds over 80% as we mopped up and in the end we had a pike and our GG medic to spare when we finally took the city. GG Elkad!


So that leaves us with three civ's worth of land while Rusten is in the process of gaining a fourth civ's land. We found some of his power here. I'm not sure why he isn't advancing, but I'd guess DS has a stack of cats and knights in the fog somewhere. There are also privateers covered by an ironclad to the south, which is worrying for our control-the-waves strategy.


Exiting the golden age (back on t184) these were our civics, we take a hit of ~100 gpt to allow us to build commando units.


Demos and power.