Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[mostly_harmless]

Sullla, on 1:04:00 in the stream you said you wanted to bring irrigation to the rice tile at Wismar. That rice is irrigated next to a river. No need to farm over any other cottages
Am I missing something?

mh

[Sullla]

Turn 160 - 1000AD

This was probably the most interesting turn of the entire Demogame thus far, fitting for 1000AD. It's going to take a while to summarize everything that happened.

First things first. At the start of the turn, we had a 50/50 chance to get a Great Scientist or something less useful. Fortune was kind to us and we successfully landed the Scientist that we wanted. After an inordinate amount of calculations done last turn, we had just enough beakers invested into Printing Press to lightbulb the tech immediately. Printing Press added about 50 base commerce to our empire's sagging economy, essentially taking us from break-even rate at 15% science to break-even rate at 25% science. And the benefits will only scale with time, as the base commerce from villages and towns gets fed through more commerce multipliers in cities. We also are growing onto a large number of mature cottages in the captured German cities, which will start to manifest itself over the next 20 or so turns. This was a big, big step forwards for our team and will help propel along the economic recovery.

Then the fireworks started to happen. While chatting with WPC in-game, one of our players accidentally mismoved our main stack of military units out of position. This unfortunate event meant that we needed to ask for a reload of the game, which was granted. However, the reload of the game wiped out CivFr's playing of their turn, and when we actually played our turn, we unpaused the game and didn't give them a chance to run their turn before their timer ended. This was an honest mistake on our part, but it forced a second reload of the game, and it meant that we had to play the military portion of our turn a second time. Since we had done really well attacking the Germans the first time around, this was far from ideal, but nothing to be done for it.

Here was the military situation at the start of the turn (or after reloading... twice):

Our giant clump of units was sitting on the tile east of Wittenberge. The German team had moved the bulk of their units off to the southeast, in an attempt to take the WPC city of Huron River (just on screen above the minimap) before the end came. I don't really blame them for doing so, since WPC completely ruined their game with the early game war. Why not screw over the team that killed your chances of being competitive? I would probably do something similar.

In any case, that meant two longbows inside Warendorf (with only 12% defensive bonus from WPC's earlier failed catapult attack) and a group of longbow, elephant, and spear inside Willhelmshaven, with 40% cultural defenses intact. Neither city was on a hill, thank heavens. That's a decent defense, but we were pretty confident that knights could blitz through both cities, and that would then open up the ability for our one-movers to hit the German stack on the hill tile with the pigs. We had done that the first time we played the turn, and planned to repeat the same moves as identically as possible.

Now here's where things get interesting. WPC wanted us to knock Warendorf down to a single redlined unit, and then let them capture the city. You could make an argument that they deserved to control this location since they had thrown so many units (in stupid fashion) after it, and we all would have been fine with them capturing the city, if they could do it with their units. But... have us do the work and then give them the city? When they couldn't take it themselves? That was a much more shaky proposition. When we played the turn the first time, we attacked with a knight vs longbow at 68% odds and won, then attacked again knight vs longbow at 76% and won again. No chance to redline anything for WPC. We kept the city. When replaying the turn, WPC asked us again to redline a unit and let them capture it. We told them that we didn't think we should replay the turn differently on a reloaded game. And, in fact, the dice rolls proceeded in identical fashion:

Warendorf
C2 knight vs CG2 longbow 68% WIN
C2 knight vs CG longbow 76% WIN
CAPTURE CITY, 80g, no buildings

Apologies for the terrible quality of images pulled from Livestream, I should have taken the screenshots while playing. Anyway, WPC was in-game at the time, and their turnplayer was not pleased at all with our actions. Things got a little real, leading to this conversation (read from bottom to top):




Which of course I immediately regretted doing. Yes, they baited me into an argument, but that's still no excuse. As I tell people with League of Legends all the time, "the other guy started it" is no excuse. You have to be the bigger man and not get sucked into these exchanges. Part of the reason why I became angry with them was the fact that while talking to WPC - a conversation that I did not want to have in the first place - one of our knights was mismoved AGAIN on auto-explore, just as what caused the original reload in the first place. Argh! Talking to these idiots was causing headache after headache for our team.

Again though, this was poorly handled and will not be repeated. If anyone starts to chat with us in-game, we need to say "sorry but you'll have to go through our diplo team, I can't say anything right now." That would have been the proper way to handle this situation. Hopefully this won't matter very much because WPC is so weak and irrelevant, but it was not a good situation, and needs to be avoided in the future. Mea culpa.

Anyway... with Warendorf down, we repeated the same attacks as we had done before at Willhelmshaven. Our combat luck was slightly better on the reload; we ended up with the identical results (two knights dying to take the city) but it didn't rely on winning a 35% battle like we did the first time:

Willhelmshaven
knight vs CG2 longbow 25% (LOSE, 1.9 health)
C2 knight vs war elephant 50% (LOSE, 1.6 health)
C1/shock knight vs C1 spear 68% WIN
knight vs crippled longbow 99% WIN
knight vs crippled war elephant 99% WIN
CAPTURE CITY, 73g, granary

This screenshot demonstrates why we had to take both German cities this turn. Their capture removed the cultural borders in the area, which allowed us to leapfrog forward with the one-movers and start smashing the German stacks to the east, which were left completely exposed. I mean, I totally understand why WPC was frustrated here, getting nothing from this war, but we didn't really have much choice when it came to these cities. (Outside of razing them and getting nothing ourselves, which was not acceptable to most of our team.)

Now it was time to go after the German stack on the pigs hill tile; here it is in more detail:



That was a picture kindly sent over by WPC at the start of the turn. Uh... probably won't be getting any more screenshots from them. The war elephants meant that this stack was pretty strong against knights and maces (Combat 3 + Shock?! yikes) but it was vulnerable to our own barely used war elephants. We sacrificed two Barrage catapults to knock off the health of the top units with collateral damage, and then, well, the dice were VERY kind to us:

Pigs Hill Stack
Suicide 2 barrage cats
C2 elephant vs C3/shock elephant 69% WIN
C2 elephant vs C2 longbow 82% WIN
mace vs C2/shock elephant 39% WIN
C2 knight vs longbow 96% WIN (GG born)
C2 elephant vs C2/shock axe 97% WIN
mace vs quechua 99% WIN, CAPTURE WORKER

We lost two maces in this attack when we did it the first time, and lost zero on the replay. This led to many jokes of "let's replay every turn!" in the chat channel from everyone watching on stream. While this was lucky, it wasn't ridiculous or anything either; winning at 40% odds is hardly beyond the pale. In any case, we picked up a second Great General (probably going to merge into our Globe Theatre city so that our draftees come out with 2XP instead of 1XP) and even captured a worker, while losing nothing beyond the two initial cats.

Then we repeated the remaining moves from the first playthrough, starting with moving the Sentry war chariot onto a hill tile to reveal the remaining German cities:



Not the strongest garrisons up here, 1 axe and 1 quechua. We went ahead and killed the unpromoted horse archer with a knight at 98% odds, and then set up to capture Wesselburen next turn with a group of 3 knights and 1 war chariot (hey it gets great odds against the axe). We also moved up an injured knight to the sheep tile south of Westheim, which can take the city if there's only a quechua in there next turn (unlikely but hey you never know). Speaker pointed out that we could have used the Great General Medic III chariot with 3 moves to attack Wesselburen at 80% odds and capture it this turn, which would have been an awesome power play... but we didn't see it the first time we played, and that really would not have been fair to do on a replay. I really should have noticed that when we did this the first time on Sunday evening. It would have been really slick, but oh well. Instead, we used the Medic III war chariot to capture the two German workers over in the east, and indeed getting 2 free workers (plus the 1 worker captured on the pigs hill tile earlier) wasn't a terrible use of the unit either.

So here's where we stand now after a wildly unusual and exciting turn:

Warendorf is safe from any German attackers other than a couple of horse archers. They can't road the desert tile to the southeast and hit the city with their one-mover stack, we checked this in-game. We have an NAP with WPC until Turn 200, and even if they were to break that in a ragefest, they have little chance of killing 3 maces and 2 knights with their assortment of utter crap northwest of Warendorf. Willhelmshaven has enough maces to be safe from attack, and then the bulk of our units are on the pigs hill itself, where they get the defensive bonus and are in position to hit all of the remaining German units if we choose to do so. Here's where they are positioned:



This is their most formidable group, with those Great General war elephants and a couple of two-movers. (Seriously though, Leadership promo? WTF?!) Nice as this all looks, they are easy prey if we suicide a few catapults against this group, just as you saw this turn. The German stack to the southeast of this group has an unpromoted war elephant, a city garrison 3 longbow (outside of a city heh), 2 axes, and 6 catapults. They can throw both stacks against our guys on the hill if they want, but we're fine with them going after 8 strength maces with 25% defensive bonus. We'll win most of those combats since their units are mostly low base strength.

That might beg the question, what are the Germans doing? Why are their units off in the desert instead of defending their cities? Well, here's the answer: killing WPC's cities.

This is by far the strongest of the three German stacks, lots and lots of elephants in it. They are throwing everything against Huron River to punish WPC before they die, and I can appreciate the sentiment. Notice by the way how WPC didn't even have a road between their two frontline cities, nor did they reach 100 culture for 40% defensive bonus in one of their core cities 160 turns into the game. Yikes. Well, WPC did whip walls with the stone (that we gifted them!!!) but they don't have very many units inside Huron River. The Germans will likely take the city on their half of the turn timer and raze it. We'll have the option to attack the Germans or leave them alone on our half of the turn. If they raze Huron, we'll probably just ignore their units, which will magically disappear when we eliminate the German team. But the Germans could potentially capture Huron, in which case we'll have to clear out all these units, so we're in a position to do whatever we need to do. The Germans will probably die on T162, two turns from now.

Here's the north:

These knights are southeast of Wesselburen, and there's an injured knight two tiles south of Westheim. I'm still pissed that our one knight was mismoved due to chatting with WPC; we should have a 4th knight up here ready to attack. The most likely scenario is that we will take Wesselburen T161 and then capture Westheim on T162, eliminating the German team. I really hope so, I'm done with this team and want to move on to other things. Mighty tired of WPC as well.

Wrapping things up, here's a picture of our captured German cities, the new core of North Egypt:



Everything is still size 1 for the moment, but growing quickly and filling up granary boxes with food. We need 15-20 turns and then these will be extremely good cities.



Finally the Demographics. They don't look so bad when we're running at 100% science, although the GNP is deceptive because Gunpowder is a 40% bonus pre-requisite tech. Our lead in Food, Soldiers, Land, and score is pretty disgusting. If this were a non-diplo game, it would already be over. As it is, we need to get to rifles and then we're pretty much invulnerable until someone gets to infantry, which is impossibly far away right now. We'll always be able to draft an endless swarm of rifles and make invading us incredibly painful with our Great Wall + Statue of Zeus combo. You do not want to fight in our territory. Apolyton's Golden Age ended this turn, and we'll have Gunpowder in two turns to start drafting lots of muskets.

Everyone hates us because we've outplayed them all and have a gigantic lead. Good luck, diplo team.

[mostly_harmless]

... WPC wanted us to knock Warendorf down to a single redlined unit, and then let them capture the city. ... When replaying the turn, WPC asked us again to redline a unit and let them capture it. We told them that we didn't think we should replay the turn differently on a reloaded game. And, in fact, the dice rolls proceeded in identical fashion:
...

Just for the record of people reading this who did not watch the stream, WPC actually wanted us to raze the two cities now and let them resettle, which is a gross breach of the reload-idea.
At least that what I think happened from the stream.

Interesting turn. Very entertaining week!

mh

[NobleHelium]

We should wait and see if we get that NAP extension with CFC before considering settling a GG in Starfall, otherwise that city will be very vulnerable...

[Bigger]

We should wait and see if we get that NAP extension with CFC before considering settling a GG in Starfall, otherwise that city will be very vulnerable...

what, who said starfall?

put the GG in the heroic epic city, not the globe city (I don't remember its name).

[Bigger]

Almost positive we only got one GG and the other is from the reload.

We could settle him in Horse Feathers. That's the long term plan, eventually spitting out triple promo units.
We could settle him in Starfall. That's the short term plan, to spit out C1 muskets for the purpose of killing collateraled rifles (64% vs 44% at max collateral, assuming flat terrain)

Those seem like the most reasonable options to me.

ok, I see.

I much prefer the GG in our HE city. security is just one reason - another is that we could actually get experience on our cats, knights, etc. and not just the cheapest draft unit.

[Mardoc]

Almost positive we only got one GG and the other is from the reload.

We could settle him in Horse Feathers. That's the long term plan, eventually spitting out triple promo units.
We could settle him in Starfall. That's the short term plan, to spit out C1 muskets for the purpose of killing collateraled rifles (64% vs 44% at max collateral, assuming flat terrain)

Those seem like the most reasonable options to me.

ok, I see.

I much prefer the GG in our HE city. security is just one reason - another is that we could actually get experience on our cats, knights, etc. and not just the cheapest draft unit.

We do already have barracks and stables in the HE city, so it's not like we'd be building 0XP knights. It's more a question of whether you'd rather have 2 XP draftables or upgrade the knights from 5 to 7 XP.

I like Starfall, myself, because I think that first promo is more important than making the 3rd promo easier.

And, well, it's one thing when it's CI maces. It's totally different when it's CI rifles, which is (I think) our next primary goal. There's going to be a long period where rifles are our best unit, and Starfall our primary producer.

[Bigger]

Almost positive we only got one GG and the other is from the reload.

We could settle him in Horse Feathers. That's the long term plan, eventually spitting out triple promo units.
We could settle him in Starfall. That's the short term plan, to spit out C1 muskets for the purpose of killing collateraled rifles (64% vs 44% at max collateral, assuming flat terrain)

Those seem like the most reasonable options to me.

ok, I see.

I much prefer the GG in our HE city. security is just one reason - another is that we could actually get experience on our cats, knights, etc. and not just the cheapest draft unit.

We do already have barracks and stables in the HE city, so it's not like we'd be building 0XP knights. It's more a question of whether you'd rather have 2 XP draftables or upgrade the knights from 5 to 7 XP.

I like Starfall, myself, because I think that first promo is more important than making the 3rd promo easier.

And, well, it's one thing when it's CI maces. It's totally different when it's CI rifles, which is (I think) our next primary goal. There's going to be a long period where rifles are our best unit, and Starfall our primary producer.

and when that time comes, Horse Feathers will be producing rifles as well, almost certainly one turning them (or something like 5 every 6 turns), and will be able to produce 2 promo rifles instead of 1 promo rifles with the GG. more importantly, HF will be producing units all game. and not always units boosted by the stables - catapults and cannons as well. there will come a time when we stop drafting, semi-permanently, and a GG in starfall would just sit there while startfall grows and builds infastructure.

[Mardoc]

there will come a time when we stop drafting, semi-permanently, and a GG in starfall would just sit there while startfall grows and builds infastructure.

There will? It sure looks like we've got a lot of enemies and not a lot of friends.

Maybe we can kill some more German units outside Huron and do both

[darrelljs]

I haven't been paying enough attention to know if this is true, but a well setup Globe city drafts a unit just about every turn for the entire game. Getting that second XP is huge. I'm not sure we'd be building that many Rifles in the HE city, either. Wouldn't we build Siege and Mounted from our HE city to supplement the masses of drafted Rifles we can get without actually spending real hammers?

Darrell