(December 21st, 2021, 20:20)El Grillo Wrote: I’m pretty sure corps were not balanced around having 50+ input resources like this. And I see your dystopian conditions are continuing to worsen as small farms are increasingly replaced by the friendly neighborhood agri-corp. Might as well start paving over extraneous pastures too at some point… just don’t ask why a horse workshop produces an extra hammer :D
Big Cereal is caring and wise, sponsored by the Buddha himself, and surely knows best for our citizens. Small business is extraneous in the presence of such benevolence.
T228 Part One - Diplomacy!
Hot off the heels of my slightly depressed post yesterday (for which I apologise), our spirits are immediately lifted once more.
I sent Civac an offer last turn. He was reciprocal (I forgot to take a picture in my excitement, but this was the offer):
T228 Part Two - Tarkeel
Tarkeel's army is wiped, and his cities are garrisoned by 2 units apiece. Three dead tanks and several captured workers later, he is eliminated.
Which makes this my second ever kill, 4 turns after the first!
GG Tarkeel. Your cities might take a millennium to come out of resistance, but they'll be damn strong once they do. Now come lurk my thread, dammit!
Of course, this leaves the question. Do we wait a turn to attack Donovan Zoi or not? Many of my ships are not in position, in both the north and south, but his troops are also quite vulnerable currently. The whole front is a mess, really.
I can't resist a cliffhanger. And there is also some domestic activity to discuss... Three-Part report, baby!
T228 Part Three - War!!!
I decided to go for it. Speed, speed, speed! I had this axeman lying around from my old pre-invasion scouting days.
I moved him onto the corn before declaring war, and so the first move of the war was capturing an undefended Puckwudgie.
Or, wait a second. Apparently I don't understand teleportation mechanics at all. Oops. At least he kills a pikeman.
The next thing I did was busy myself taking over islands, and a city on the south coast. The odds were... lopsided, to say the least.
We were able to take Commodore's capital too, thanks to two tanks that were on 0.1 movement each at the time of attack and only 2 defenders. Realising this possibility was what made me commit.
Contingents of infantry pick off the Great Medic and its followers.
I'd been storing the initial transports in Innsmouth, and you can see they are mostly full of injured tanks that I'd been planning to heal this turn (the Great Medic knight is garrisoned here, due to its centrality).
However, one transport is full of healthy tanks, and can just make the distance to Snallygaster.
Then, the tanks are unloaded. They roll into Sasquatch, and kill most of Donovan's stack, leaving just a pikeman.
Transports in the inner sea capture RiceCity and Disco Panic.
More transports in the inner sea take out Dogman and Wuxi, so that their Cho Ku Nus can't finish.
I'm able to reinforce these cities through the magic of airlifting, which is insanely powerful. Pictured is a tank in Unison airlifting out to Disco Panic.
The first 3 bombers arrive in Insmouth and RiceCity, ready to shell the defenders back into the Stone Age.
Err, from the Medieval one.
On the southern mainland, a small stack advances forwards. These guys are hoping to take the non-coastal cities, starting with IncenseCity.
Further west I make a huge misplay, loading units onto a transport that were already loaded onto the other. Then I lose an 80% combat. This prevents me from taking either Yangzhou or Taiyuan this turn.
Our Morale knight takes out Puckwudgie, instead of the Wanderer Axe.
If the galleons in DZ's fleet are loaded, then we probably lose Old Mate Belisarius here. I was able to airlift an infantry in from the core, at least.
I'm doing my best to cut those fleets down to size, but it's going to take a while...
There are also two stacks of roughly 15 ships apiece, slightly further south towards Donovan's core.
I have a mechanics question for anyone who got through this mega-report: Can barbarians completely ruin my day in Tarkeel's territory? There is plenty of Fog in his territory, I'm a little worried I've messed up here.
Some overview shots of the north and south fronts:
Donovan's biggest stack is in the south, pictured last. However he will be whipping a lot, and because I was planning to attack next turn, my own units are highly out of position, and spread much too thinly. This is going to be a really messy war, for both of us.
I'm thinking about our Longshot Domination, because the Diplo with Civac has me all excited. We're getting to the point that I need an actual plan. The best way to do it seems to me to grab Cairo, Lazteuq, and some of either Miguelito/Charriu/Piccadilly. So I sent Charriu a deal for 'war with Lazteuq in 10 turns.' They had some wars in the early and midgame from what I can tell, so maybe there's a grudge I can use. Ideally he accepts it, because it means I can focus mostly on the east from now on. If he refuses it, I can keep playing it by ear (Charriu also cancelled a corn trade for some reason, which ruined all my micro. Very uncool ). Meanwhile, killing Cairo is probably the hardest part of that list. I offered him joint war with Piccadilly too. He's also started whipping tanks....
(December 24th, 2021, 17:49)Amicalola Wrote: Or, wait a second. Apparently I don't understand teleportation mechanics at all. Oops.
It's very difficult to properly take into account all of the teleport mechanics at once and correctly predict what will happen. Much easier to reverse-engineer what's already happened once you know the rules though: Here, your axe was on the corn tile near Puckwudgie with Open Borders. When you declared war, the game first canceled the open borders, teleporting your axe to the windmilled hill with the Chinese worker. Then it completed the war declaration, and teleported your axe again since it can't share a tile with a war enemy's unit. (It would have teleported to the tile 1SE of Jackalope from there, but the Chinese units there prevented that, so it teleported 2E to the grass hill instead.)
Quote:I have a mechanics question for anyone who got through this mega-report: Can barbarians completely ruin my day in Tarkeel's territory? There is plenty of Fog in his territory, I'm a little worried I've messed up here.
Krill answered this one concisely, but in a little more detail: Barbs can spawn on any fogged tile as long as no units (of any kind; even barbs prevent other barbs from spawning) are within two tiles of the fogged tile. The two unit distance even works on diagonals, but from the picture you posted, it looks like (at least) the lumbermill forest 2E of Dunwich is (or, by now, I guess was...) a valid barb spawning tile. Since there can't be many (if any other) such tiles left on the map at this point, I would expect a barb to (have) show(n) up there on the interturn. If this were Single Player or PBeM, I think you'd still have time to respond to it before it attacked, but I think barbs get to move on the same turn they spawn in Pitboss (I don't remember for sure). At least the barb won't raze a city, but it might destroy more population and infrastructure (when the barb takes it and again when you take it back) and would restart the revolt timer. And of course it might instead (or in addition; I see a Worker alone in one of those cities...) kill a unit or pillage a town or the like.
Regardless, thanks for the exciting and detailed reports!
Oh, in retrospect I phrased the barb question terribly. I had intended to ask whether barbs move on the same turn that they spawn in Pitboss, or if I get a turn of warning like (I think?) you do in Singleplayer. But you've answered the intended question as well as the actual one. Not the happiest answer, but a helpful one, thanks! I suppose we'll find out for sure when I can log in, assuming a barb actually spawned.
Thanks also for the teleport explanation, it was interesting. The part about OB cancelling first makes sense, but the second half still confuses me. Once war is declared and the unit teleports a 2nd time, why not just teleport 1W? Is it trying to teleport towards my borders specifically?
(December 29th, 2021, 18:48)Amicalola Wrote: Is it trying to teleport towards my borders specifically?
Sort of! Teleport rules, short version:
When you have a city on the same continent as your teleporting (land) unit, it starts by choosing your nearest city (on that landmass) to its current location, then looks at each tile to which it could potentially teleport. For each such tile, it takes the distance from that tile to the city it's already chosen, and adds twice the distance from that tile to the unit itelf. The tile with the smallest total "wins," and the unit teleports there. (It's also possible to teleport to a different landmass, but only in very rare circumstances: You triple the total number for those tiles.) The "distances" involved here, like most (but not all) distances in Civ4, are equal to the larger of the vertical or horizontal distance plus half the smaller of the two distances, rounded down. Ties favor the tile closest to the "bottom" of the map (as though the map were flat and not cylindrical/toroidal) and if still tied, favor the tile closest to the "left" side of the map (again as though the map had "flat" world wrap). This gets especially weird with border pops and cultural conflicts because the tiles change hands one at a time, but for a case like this, it is possible to predict where the unit will go - if you have enough situational knowledge and don't forget any of the rules! (Also note the unit will never under any circumstances teleport into a blacked-out tile you've never explored [VERY LATE EDIT: But note that on a multi-stage teleport, like the close borders + wardec that happened here or multiple jumps due to one-tile-at-a-time border popping, a tile that was shrouded before teleportation began can be defogged by the first jump and thereby become a valid destination for a later stage of the same series of teleportations.])
So from the corn tile, the axe was jumping toward Goatman while crossing the minimum distance to do so. (Actually, Cornish Owlman is the same distance away from the corn by the game's rules, so it depends on the order you conquered them in, but the windmill with the worker wins either way.) Then with the axe on the worker windmill, Goatman is again the closest city, and though the windmill to which it actually jumped requires a 2-tile teleport (cost 4) while a jump 1W to the plains farm would be shorter (cost 2) but the windmill is 3 tiles closer to Goatman (cost 3 vs cost 6) so it wins (with a total cost of 7 vs 8). The grass farm with the Chinese units would win via tiebreaker if there weren't enemy units there, but of course there were.
My assumption that the barbs will move on the same turn they spawn is based on a way Pitboss differs from single player, hotseat, and PBeM, in all of which the barbs play last: In Pitboss, everyone including the barbs plays simultaneously, so I believe the barbs are spawned between turns, then immediately move in the opening seconds of the turn, where in single player, they would spawn between turns and then have to wait while you (and all the AIs) play. If I'm remembering correctly, barb animals can attack a turn sooner in Pitboss than in other formats for this reason.
These turns are getting long... First things first, I take stock of the situation. The big news is that none of our cities were captured by barbarians!!!
It turns out that no barbarians spawned at all, so we still don't know for sure when the move. But I'm not complaining! I figure out positioning that should keep the entire area safe in future.
DZ/SD are massing catapults and units by GoldCity.
They've also left many cities in the north unguarded, so I'm guessing they'll try to defend their core rather than the whole empire.
At sea, Donovan/SD did some of the dirty work for us. I'm not sure what the plan was, but that's actually super helpful for us to get their numbers down. Maybe they got unlucky with the damage rolls?
The Action
In the south, I capture undefended IncenseCity with a guerilla2 infantry.
The stack rolls on towards Kunming, supported by 1-movers behind them.
Infantry from a transport capture Yangzhou and Taiyuan, the cities I messed up last turn.
Then we also take and garrison Taipei, which should cut off supply lines from Joshy's territory to DZ/SD's core.
At Chengdu, I finally get the chance to try out bombers.
They're pretty great!
We capture the city without losses, and start bombing the southern stack as well.
Another transport takes out Ogopogo and Grassman.
The Navigation2 on these is making a huge difference, honestly. Commando units somewhere would be better, but this is still really good.
Joshy's south coast is thoroughly captured. WheatCity should fall next turn.
I'm advancing on land in the north too, but my screenshot didn't save. Oops.
Domestic/Misc.
Apparently you can station airships in other players' cities.
I had no idea about that. Next turn I'll check if it applies to planes too. Could be very useful if it does...
Charriu not only ignored my joint-war request, but also cancelled our trade deals for grain resources, and signed a defensive pact with Miguelito. Ok then.
Meanwhile, Piccadilly offered me this:
Why does he want copper? I suppose as denial to Miguelito, is the only reason I can think of. I declined, since there's no use pissing Miguelito off for 6gpt, and I am probably missing something anyway. Sorry Piccadilly, but you're winning!
But as far as us winning, there is a big problem. I've been stockpiling some troops on transports, but I'm far from beating Cairo at all, let alone doing it before we all agreed to attack Piccadilly. He's whipping tanks and was researching Artillery last time I had tech-visibility, so it's going to be a whole different fish compared to the Western Continent. I probably overcommitted troops to the DZ/SD war, based on how quickly it's going. So I'll either need to delay the Piccadilly timeline (probably stupid), or attack Piccadilly first, keep some territory, and somehow absorb Cairo in the process. That... doesn't seem very likely. I haven't really figured out a solution yet. I haven't been thinking about the Piccadilly attack much at all really, because the Western Continent has me so busy. But next turn I'll probably have to start planning that out too...
There is also the problem of how to keep Piccadilly's territory. I have the shitty situation of needing to take/raze his capital, which means I'll probably have to fight all/most of the defenders. Not sure how we'll get around that either. I guess what I'm saying is there's a lot of unanswered questions in the way of our inevitable victory.
At home, pretty much every city is now contributing fully to the war effort, with the minimum buildings required. A cheeky 2-whip gets a tank here:
Modern Things was the late arrival on the Astro island, but this is also the planned structure for basically every city on the Western Continent. I'm basically planning to whip every new city I have into the ground on units, because I can't see any way to catch up in technology regardless. It should be ~10 turns until the Western Continent starts producing troops, I think. Unlike the wars so far, I'm going to be counting on numbers and nukes in future wars (did I mention dystopia yet? ). Building 1500-hammer nukes is going to be really difficult though, it's one area that Miguelito has a massive advantage. Is there any difference between Tactical Nukes and ICBMs, other than the range limit? If not, maybe I can build the former and put them on submarines, instead of ICBMs.
(December 17th, 2021, 21:36)CFCJesterFool Wrote: Looks like you can be the first to 100 cities. Green always means Go if you catch my drift.
Happy New Year from Australia, everyone!
Edit: Thanks again Refsteel for the teleport explanation, now it makes perfect sense. Those teleport mechanics are definitely something to keep around!
I can confirm that tactical nukes and ICBMs have the same detonation effect, only different ranges. Also, yes, you can rebase planes to cities of players with whom you have open borders. I’m not sure if you can use their forts or not.
At least he kills a pikeman. 
). Meanwhile, killing Cairo is probably the hardest part of that list. I offered him joint war with Piccadilly too. He's also started whipping tanks.... 
First things first, I take stock of the situation. The big news is that none of our cities were captured by barbarians!!! 
I suppose as denial to Miguelito, is the only reason I can think of. I declined, since there's no use pissing Miguelito off for 6gpt, and I am probably missing something anyway. Sorry Piccadilly, but you're winning!
