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novice · December 31st, 2020, 09:44

The counterattack should be pretty brutal?

Gaspar · December 31st, 2020, 18:31

(December 31st, 2020, 09:44)novice Wrote: The counterattack should be pretty brutal?

That's certainly the idea.

In the immortal words of Vagan - "I've had rougher tussles in bed." Kappa

Finished t118 last night and played t119 today. I can safely safe that SDs initial attack has officially failed. Here's what he has left in our lands at EOT119.

[Image: t119a.jpg]

Updated K/D Totals:

Killed
15 CKNs (900)
3 Axes (105)
1 Spear (35)
1 Chariot (30)

1070 hammers

Lost
5 Catapults (250)
2 Horse Archers (100)
2 Archers (50)
1 Chariot (30)
1 Worker (60)

490 hammers

So yeah, I guess that counts as comprehensive. It isn't quite that cut and dried, as we had to whip a lot of pop into stuff that wasn't Cataphracts, etc. But it certainly didn't do anything especially positive for him. Its very difficult to win a war with 1-movers at tech parity. When he attacked, we didn't have any HAs or longbows, we built 13 HAs and 3 LBs. Maybe he thought we wouldn't swap back to Slavery at the end of the GA? Answers on a postcard. I think ultimately the idea of attacking us before we had phracts is reasonably sound but he needed either Serdoa to jump in with him or to have gone in a bit earlier. The war/peace attempt worked in our favor, because we've seen 21 CKNs but he only had 12 ready when we spotted them with our chariot. Presumably he was amassing them from around his empire, possibly hoping to wait for Engineering to come in to expedite the gathering.

Nonetheless, we're at t119 and he does have Engineering and we do have Guilds. We've only begun to amass Cataphracts, so we're not going to be going on a Chinese raiding party just yet, but that is obviously the goal. If we can kill off the remaining CKN in the above shot without letting them get back to Guangzhou, that would be a huge win for us. We still have a fair number of HAs healing at the moment though we should be able to take a few shots with them next turn, depending on what his retreat path looks like. Shoutout also to the C1/Cover LB we have that has killed 2 CKNs on the attack. The majority of our kills have come from forcing him to defend, as it is obviously preferable to attack into the CKNs so you don't suffer the collateral.

Here's a look at the power graph:

[Image: t119b.jpg]

Some of you might be asking, well that's interesting but what ELSE is going on in the empire?

"When the time comes to strike an emperor strikes without hesitation. To entertain doubt is to dance with death." -Izaro

[Image: t119c.jpg]

"Hunt or be hunted, exile!" -Einhar

[Image: t119d.jpg]

Gaspar

So... we had one of those turns I suppose you have to report. First, a little mood music:

There's a fantastic montage from Match of the Day 1998 after Arsenal clinched the title at Highbury with a 4-0 over Everton which featured that famous Bould to Adams goal, but its a little short so I gave you the full song here.

Anyway, bottom line was this was the turn we had to hit Guangzhou before it got very tricky. Main reason for that is twofold - 1. He has Engineering and pikemen are the best possible defenders against our entirely mounted army right now and each turn gives him more opportunities to upgrade/whip them and 2. The stack with the remnants of his Cho-Ko-Nu attack force is 1NE of the city and will be able to defend the city where they get to take advantage of those CG promos, cultural defense, etc. as opposed to the open field, where we've, frankly, slaughtered them. We were hoping to only find one pike in the city. Welp.

[Image: t121pre.jpg]

For those scoring at home we have 13 2 or 3-movers which can hit the city this turn and he has 10 defenders. Now, its only 6.5 serious defenders, depending on how you feel about the axeman, but 2 of our HAs are pretty damaged and will only be useful against the catapults/chariot/heavily damaged units. So basically, we can afford 3 losses but those losses have to be good losses where you do real damage to a good unit. Now Noble is very good at finding breakpoints/working out combat permutations so you can tilt the odds in your favor a bit but I would say we were looking at maybe something a smidge less than a coinflip to take the city. The Cataphracts are very good units, but we only have 4 of them, 1 of them is slightly injured and 1 is our super medic which we'd really rather not lose. Anyway, looking at that... well, here's the beginning of our chat log:

(For the record, that's a running gag about save scumming battle results based on things that we have seen happen previously in games, not a thing we would ever consider.)

Anyway, at that point, this happened...

NobleHelium:
okay
well we have that HA on the workers
that one can promote to shock
Gaspar:
uh
lets do that and send it in
bc i accidentally let go on my goto
and uh, it won
NobleHelium:
erm
well i guess you were feeling lucky after all?
Gaspar:
lol
NobleHelium:
well
that was a 0.8% battle
i do not remember ever winning a 0.8% battle before
Gaspar:
me either
NobleHelium:
well i guess we're committed now?
Gaspar:
uh
we could still conceivably decide not to
NobleHelium:
yeah i guess
Gaspar:
though that is the best possible result to start we could have
i guess other than one of the damaged ones winning a .01 battle or something
so i guess
NobleHelium:
yeah i'm a little shaken by this heh

I'm on a roll
I'm on a roll this time
I feel my luck could change

[Image: dice.gif]

So yeah, that is how we came to begin the Battle of Guangzhou

5.8 C2 HA vs C1 Pike @ .8% WIN

At this point, Noble proceeds to spend 45 minutes calculating breakpoints and the determination is that we need to clear the Drill II CKN so we then can use a C3 Phract which will actually get odds the unpromoted pikeman. The first 25 of those are him figuring that out and the next 20 are us debating whether to use the slightly damaged unit or the GG. Eventually, Noble suggests I misclick the GG and send it in. Kappa

Queen Hyrri Ngamaku (C2 Morale GG Cataphract) vs D2 CG1 CKN @ 78.2% WIN

After I smugly point out that Drill sucks as it is a win-more promo, we have the pike vs C3 phract battle we wanted. Its still only 67.1% odds but that's better than we could have otherwise expected...

C3 Cataphract vs Unpromoted Pike @ 67.1% WIN

We're feeling good at this point, but we still have 2 C1 CKNs to clear so we're not out of the woods yet. We discuss that since we've yet to use any of our three allotted losses at this point the optimal strategy would be to send the fresh HAs in to soften the CKNs up so we're not risking the remaining phracts, one of which is damaged and the other of which is a super medic, so we decide to send a healthy C2 HA in...

C2 HA vs C1 CG1 D1 CKN @ 11.8% WIN

I mean...

The head of state has called for me by name
But I don't have time for him
It's gonna be a glorious day!
I feel my luck could change

It is, indeed, better to be lucky than good. At this stage, there are only 2 serious defenders left and we haven't lost a battle. No reason to change tactics here though, so we send the other healthy C2 HA in...

C2 HA vs C1 CG1 D1 CKN @ 11.8% Withdraw, CKN down to 1.2

Even the losses are good, softening the CKN down to worthlessness and we didn't even lose the HA. I don't know what to say, we have never been this lucky in a battle at RB before.

We then started to debate positioning ourselves to be in the best position to withstand the counterattack, since the odds were definitely in our favor. Noble wanted to use another HA to soften the last CKN up, which was just a vanilla PRO CKN with D1, CG1 while I wanted to use the 11/12 phract since it was the last serious defender. Noble got quiet for a long time, which I assumed was him doing calculations, which led to this exchange:

Gaspar:
ok
im sending the phract in sorry not sorry
uh
well we won
barely
NobleHelium:
i was pissing
Gaspar:
sorry
i guess i was feeling my luck a little too much

C2 11/12 Cataphract vs D1 CG1 CKN @ 65.3% WIN

All clean up from there.

C1 M3 Morale GG Cataphract vs Axe @ 95.6% WIN
F1 Sentry HA vs Chariot @ 90.1 WIN
5.8 C3 HA vs Catapult @ 97.9 WIN
4.4 C2 HA vs Catapult @ 91.3 WIN
3.8 C2 HA vs DMGed CKN @ 96.6 WIN

Pull me out of the air crash
Pull me out of the lake
'Cause I'm your superhero
We are standing on the edge

[Image: t121b.jpg]

We renamed it to Crystal Veins, after the zone where Dialla activates the rapture device to break through the beast's outer hide to get inside. Seemed apt, also two mineral veins at the city in silver and iron. It came with a granary, forge and market, so we only lost the library of captureable buildings (the barracks and monument were not.) Not to mention we got a turns worth of burn from the capture gold. We were able to take 2 shots at his CKN stack after the culture receded and we were able to road the tile SE of the city, we won one and lost one at 65% odds, so OMG RNG SUCKS! Kappa

We then piled all the 1-movers you see in the picture above into the city, so there's almost no chance of it falling next turn.

It was a long, stressful but ultimately successful turn. SD lost approximately 57k power. The attack, overall, was really bad for him. If he had all those units in his cities defending, we wouldn't have been able to take anything without overwhelming numbers. Instead, we've been able to kill loads of his CKNs out in the open. I think he's been able to collateral us exactly once this whole war. That said, if his goal was to make sure we didn't win, he did a good job there. We had to do a lot of unpleasant whipping and while it worked, as every serious unit you see in that picture was built after he refused our war/peace, we have no doubt fallen further behind Lewwyn AND allowed Rusten to catch up a bit. The likelihood is we have to share the spoils of all our hard work as well, as Serdoa is almost certainly jumping in on SD this turn and I expect he will take Nanjing with no effort at all and Shanghai with some effort. Then its a matter of a race to Beijing before Serdoa's uneasy truce with us becomes even more uneasy.

I'll try and give a bit of an overview of the coming battlefield as well as the molting husk of our empire tomorrow. For now, this took way too long to write.

novice · January 3rd, 2021, 05:43

Awesome stuff.

Gaspar · January 3rd, 2021, 18:55

No chance I am reporting this turn but there was enough blood that its worth a brief update:

SD razed Mud Flats, our small fishing village in the north.
SD counter-attacked into our Crystal Veins stack and killed everything in the city except for one heavily damaged HA
We counter-counter attacked his remaining units and killed every pike and CKN in reach.
We pillaged the banana and the road on it so that he cannot reach CV.
We lost a worker.
We captured a different worker.
Serdoa wardec'd SD as expected this turn and will clean up.
We will likely take Macau next turn.
We've had to build a bunch of triremes because SD built a bunch of them.
Lewwyn's power is spiking.
Rusten continues to sit on his ass doing nothing while he waits for Lewwyn to win, apparently.

Gaspar

I suppose its time for a full report since we're probably in danger of losing everyone's interest again. This has been a super interesting game but the turns soak up a lot of energy so I just don't have any impetus to report. Also, I'm not sure how interesting we are specifically since Lewwyn is kicking all of our asses. Anyway, let's do a bit of the state of the game post. The first area to discuss is obviously the war...

Superdeath

The Chinese-Exile war has continued apace since The Battle of Guangzhou. Or maybe this is like Manassas since we renamed it and we should call it the Battle of Crystal Veins. Either way, we took Macau last turn and renamed it to The Ledge. Regardless of American Civil War references, things have slowed down to a trickle. This turn, we sent our sentry HA in to SD territory and saw this:

[Image: t124e.jpg]

6 pikes and CKN on a hill w/40% culture is uh... too rich for my blood. In a perfect world, we'd chew through that, but a perfect world doesn't have Serdoa perfectly positioned to slaughter our damaged units after we take the city. Not really after a Pyrrhic victory, friends. So for now, we wait. The only action in the war took place in the water, off the coast of Beachhead, where SD is leading a trireme flotilla around the cape at former Mud Flats to try and raze another city/pillage our nets.

[Image: t124d.jpg]

We anticipated that action and got some ducks on the pond ourselves. Where our northern trireme is there was a Chinese trireme at the beginning of turn. The first attacker was C1 at 50/50 and died, the second green and cleaned up flawlessly. It will be interesting to see if that galley, which has 2 CKNs in it, turns around or sits and waits for the additional triremes to show up. We're not ready for that right now, but we should be by the time he shows up. Other than that, its a case of what we have we hold and we stay ready to jump on an opportunity should it present itself. Speaking of opportunists...

Serdoa

There's still the same uneasy truce with Serdoa. He took Nanjing last turn and this turn renamed all his cities off of what I'll assume is stuff from the Mandalorian? I assume this because I recognize them as Star Wars names but I only know a few of them, so I assume its from the new thing, which I haven't watched. Anyway, Nanjing is now Sorgan. He only has a couple units in there and if 1. We weren't benefitting from trades with Serdoa 2. We had the room to build settlers and 3. We didn't have bigger fish to fry at the moment, we could definitely take the city and burn it and replace it with a city east of the clam and 2S of the banana, which would both make better use of the land and be quite a bit easier to defend.

[Image: t124a.jpg]

Serdoa also took Shanghai this turn. His army is mostly a bunch of lightly or unpromoted HAs which mostly don't pose a threat to us, save for the part where we have spent a lot of our city garrison type units in the war with SD. I find it intensely irritating that SD attacked us, when we were still deciding between who of he and Serdoa to attack, we spent a ton of pop building a mobile defense out of thin air which means we have a lot of HAs that would be phracts had that not happened, and Serdoa takes advantage by taking 2 cities with a bunch of HAs himself because SD wasn't defended down there because he was too busy with us. That's the most run-on sentence in history, but I'm annoyed. Regardless, Serdoa might have bigger problems on his hands because...

Rusten

[Image: t124b.jpg]

That's certainly an interesting combo. We've used Police State with the mids before - I don't realistically think its worth it unless you're SPI, but Rusten is. Just weird to combine it with a GA and Serfdom - generally speaking, PS is something you want to whip with, particularly given he's built about a million Sacrificial Altars in the last 10t or so. Anyway, whatever the mechanics of it, he's definitely gearing up for war. I would assume he's after Serdoa as they've had a hostile border all game but either trying to grab some scraps off SD, crunching Bob before Lewwyn can or trying to hit Lewwyn himself all probably make more sense. /shrug

Lewwyn

[Image: t124c.jpg]

Ol' Weeb Fox himself is certainly up to no good as well, as you can see by the steady power increase there. He's second only to us and our power is slightly inflated by the fact that Cataphracts are worth 12k soldier points a pop and nobody else can build anything remotely that high. Lew may have teched guilds - we can't really tell because we were first to it but most of that power isn't Knights, because its been a gradual climb. He may actually just be spamming Longbows tbh, its hard to tell because we can't see into any of his cities except Mei where he has a lone archer. That city was mainly settled to set a border with us, I assume. Both Civil Service and Engineering were teched this turn - Lewwyn, Serdoa and Bob are all burning. If I were a betting man I'd put Lewwyn on CS and Serdoa on Engy, but that's only speculation. Either way, if Lew is really playing smartly, he'll see none of us are going to get a big win out of SDs demise and just keep teching along and land Taj, then maybe go kill someone with his UU. Not that he can't crunch Bob, but really, he doesn't need to since he's winning the peace.

I swear I'll take some pictures talk about us at some point in the near future but we're still at the nearly every city in the empire on unit builds stage. Its not all that interesting.

Here's EOT Demos...

[Image: t124f.jpg]

novice · January 6th, 2021, 03:10

(January 5th, 2021, 21:02)Gaspar Wrote: I find it intensely irritating that SD attacked us, when we were still deciding between who of he and Serdoa to attack, we spent a ton of pop building a mobile defense out of thin air which means we have a lot of HAs that would be phracts had that not happened, and Serdoa takes advantage by taking 2 cities with a bunch of HAs himself because SD wasn't defended down there because he was too busy with us. That's the most run-on sentence in history, but I'm annoyed.

I sympathize. Sometimes that's just the way the cookie crumbles, and I'm not sure what you could have done to avoid this.

I'm only reading your threads on this forum so I appreciate the occasional update, although admittedly I'm not the most frequent visitor.

Brian Shanahan · January 6th, 2021, 08:21

I'm intenesly interested in informative inside intelligence.

It's just that when things get serious I tend to get quiet, as I tend to poet nonsense.

NobleHelium

Played turn 125.

So I assume you guys have noticed that I haven't posted in this thread in like a million years. I don't think there is a particular reason for this - we are spending a lot of time each turn and I just haven't had that much time to comment on the game. But now I have some time to give you guys some thoughts. Here's an overview shot of the empire since everyone has probably forgotten what it looks like by now.

Click to resize (Javascript)

Here are some random statements from me.

1) SD's attack caused us to whip a lot of HAs and a few longbows to defend and that deeply cut into the production capacity we had slated for cataphracts, as Gaspar stated.
2) SD saw that LW was rather heavily defended and probably heavier than he expected, as we were able to ferry over four (!) archers from Sarn and Ascent. (Actually we ended up not ferrying the second pair because we did not need them.) I often engage my teammates in seemingly very minor debates over slight differences in the positioning of units and every 400 turns or something it ends up being incredibly important.
3) He then decided to attack BB which appeared to him as basically undefended.
4) However CKNs are slow and we were building and moving units every turn and there was a substantial increase in forces in the combat area every turn.
5) I believe SD was rather baffled by this because after moving a decent number of units next to BB he made no effort to move the rest of his CKNs. It seemed apparent that he expected the defenses to remain the same from the previous turn, making no effort to account for units hidden in the fog that would be moved and completed on his opponent's turn.
6) We previously built four catapults which were extremely important in repelling the attack, because SD's CKNs advanced on flat land towards BB.
7) I accidentally left auto promote on while simulating whether it would work (it doesn't), and almost all our catapults were promoted to City Raider. We probably would have saved at least a couple units had they been correctly promoted to Barrage.
8) So while SD's attack can certainly be defended in that it served as a preemptive defense for a possible attack from us, it has a few flaws:
a) We may have attacked Serdoa instead, especially given how many units he had built and Serdoa had very little at the time. If you attack us and we repel it, we are certainly going to counterattack you if we can. We are not to be pushed around.
b) He executed the attack very poorly and we certainly killed most of his CKNs much more easily than we would have in a frontal assault on Guangzhou.
c) CKNs, like catapults, are really only good if you get to make the attack with them. So attacking the nearest city across the border with basically an all-CKN force is a reasonable thing to do. Once that failed he should have retreated, not tried to wade deeply into the fog of war without any cover.
9) Because of SD's attack greatly reducing the number of cataphracts we were able to build in the first post-Guilds burst, we aren't able to blitz Beijing after taking Guangzhou. I don't expect us to take the city anytime soon, but we are staying in the area in case an opportunity comes up.
10) Given that our main attack has been stymied, we are planning to clean up the satellite cities and then go back to vertical growth for a bit. I am looking to build some courthouses and maybe a library or two.
11) Lewwyn's power has surpassed ours and Rusten's civic choices make it apparent that he is also building units. So one or both of those guys will make a move, and we'll try our best to position ourselves to take advantage of the change in the macro game state arising from that. That combined with some internal improvement in the economy is what I see as our best path forward to improving our position in the game.
12) While we are certainly not getting the improvement in our game position that we were hoping for after unlocking Guilds, I don't think our position is bad and it is certainly winnable. But we will need some chaos to provide a ladder, as they say. wink

We finished Engineering this turn.

[Image: t125-power.jpg?raw=1]

NobleHelium · January 7th, 2021, 13:50

(January 6th, 2021, 16:55)superdeath Wrote: Thoughts on giving the Cataphract a -% vs pikes?

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