[Spoilers] Chevalier Gives You Something to Cry Aboot

[civac2]

Ah, that makes a lot more sense. These mechanisms are a bit convoluted but sound OK (if you are not Canada I suppose). 30 turns is a lot though.

[williams482]

Turn 229:

Combustion completes:



Penguins has permanently lost it's Holy Site and Hockey Rink tiles, now sunk beneath the waves:



Interestingly, I can now build a new Holy Site in Penguins if I am so inclined. This is good news for Suboptimal, whose attempts to throw together flood barriers are too little, too late to save the Theater Square at Compo:



The next sea level rise will happen in 8 turns, and will flood both the campus at Stars and the entertainment complex at Red Wings. That will cost us 14 bpt, 4 clefs per turn, and 3 amenities. Frustrating, but unavoidable, especially if we want to prevent the rest of our empire from being overrun.

On that note, Ichabod has rejected our DoF. Interestingly, he has reduced the defenses at John Lamarr to nothing and place the city under siege, but declined to capture it this turn:



Finally, Isaac did fall this turn, leaving the crippled John Lamarr (and that settler) the final vestiges of free Egypt in the world:



Is Ichabod attempting to force Woden to deal with occupation penalties for longer? Woden obviously took more and better Egyptian cities than Ichabod did, and hampering their usefulness hurts Woden more than it hurts Ichabod. Alternately, Ichabod may simply be waiting a turn to pillage the last few tile improvements at John Lamarr before ending things.

The prebuild plan seems to have worked out rather well so far. Blackhawks and Kings are two turns shy of completing tanks, Stars is four turns out. As for the existing units, time to throw some money around:



This bumps Blackhawks up to 105 defense strength, and increases all unoccupied cities by 20 strength. We already had a milpower edge over Ichabod entering this turn, and these upgrades plus the extra troops rolling of the assembly lines are only going to widen the gap. Ichabod surely has more production capacity than we do, but his supply lines are long. Ichabod did enter the Atomic era tech tree this turn, probably for Advanced Flight, and then spent a net of 1706g. His milpower only rose 7 points but that's on a one turn lag anyway. That's enough gold to upgrade an awful lot of biplanes into fighters, but not enough to outright buy even one fighter or bomber. The scouting units I can advance safely don't reveal very much:



Research resumes on Scientific Theory. Urbanization is right at or just shy of boost and will be boosted next turn, so I put a turn of cultural research into Conservation. It suddenly occurs to me that I'm kind of an idiot, I should have moved Victor to Blackhawks some time ago. Moving him now means I lose the free promotion on the artillery corps that will be built in Bruins next turn, and is too late to grant a (more useful) free promotion to the Tank coming out of Blackhawks in two turns, but extra garrison strength, extra city strikes, extra defense strength for units, and the ability to break a siege by spending our surplus governor promotion are all well worth that price. Wild and Bruins are plenty safe as far as loyalty is concerned, Victor isn't needed here any longer. Off to Blackhawks he goes.

Blues actually expanded to a tile adjacent to the Jets oil source which Kings can claim, allowing us to purchase that tile one turn sooner than we would have, as soon as we have the cash on hand to do so. Putting in the discount card is definitely not worth doing, it's a clear net loss relative to Triangle Trade or Natural Philosophy if it's in play for longer than one turn, and we won't have any easy ways to swap off it. If we had the updated Monarchy card slots we could replace something currently occupying a military slot, but we don't and can't. 245g it will be.

Way back on t226, Suboptimal did settle the Flames location, more or less. The city of Glenda sports three delightful seaside resorts, worth a combined 14gpt and 14 tourism. No word on if Canadiens will ultimately be settled. It certainly has less in the way of potential tourist destinations.



Kaiser, for some reason, has decided he's going to set to work railroading my territory until someone kills him. Thanks, I guess. And yes, with a single crippled city to his name, Kaiser is still beating us in score.

Scores:

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Darn, I was hoping Ichabod was too concerned about an English invasion or a Punic backstab to want to expose himself to us, but regrettably he's correctly decided that his only shot in this game is to try to eat us quickly and hope that Woden and sub don't pull ahead in some other way while he does so.

The defenses look a lot more solid with the upgrades, but of course fighters will mostly annihilate our troops in the open field and will pair well with artillery to let him grind forward. BUT we definitely have enough to bloody his nose a bit, and besides - an outnumbered, against-the-odds fight with a backwards army? Welcome to frickin' Canada, babe.

War goal is to delay, obstruct, interfere, be annoying, and generally survive until the game is over, yeah?

[williams482]

Indeed. Operation quagmire is go.

Broadly speaking, the plan is to protect the tanks, artillery, and promoted field cannons where possible, but obviously I still expect losses from there. The Pike and Shot and Musket corps are meat shields, nothing more, and are there to soak up as many hits as they can so our range units can get shots off. The Cavalry are also extremely expendable, and I'll be looking out for any opportunity to use them aggressively to kill more valuable units or break up airbases.

How Ichabod chooses to execute the first turn of this war will tell us a fair amount about his tactical plans. Time is not on his side, so he's going to need to push forward a little more aggressively than would otherwise be ideal, suffer losses when we counterattack, and replace his dead with production and prayer as appropriate. If he decides to sit back and just pelt us from a distance with planes, I'll respond in turn, and just try to make sure I have more meatshields available to rotate in for whichever units are injured.

Tech research is full bore towards AA guns, civics will push for armies, then eventually Fascism. We'll have a policy swap either next turn or the turn after, in which we'll drop Professional Army and maybe Chivalry in favor of whatever card will help us build field cannons and pike&shot. I'd really like to get military academies done for the Fascism boost and cheap construction of armies, but as long as we're at war that's going to be tough to justify over more units, now.

If Ichabod does declare on us, I'll immediately ask Woden for as many horses as we can get. As with the last war, fast but plainly obsolete and expendable attackers are going to be very helpful to us here. We want lots.

[Kaiser]

Watching Egypt get steadily ground down and run over by Phoenicia:

I earned that!

This was a great game with a frustrating conclusion, at least for me and I fear for you as well at my hands. Enjoy it, I will keep lurking

The city would have lasted 3 turns, but it would have kept my former cities for that time in occupation.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Watching Egypt get steadily ground down and run over by Phoenicia:

I earned that!

This was a great game with a frustrating conclusion, at least for me and I fear for you as well at my hands. Enjoy it, I will keep lurking

The city would have lasted 3 turns, but it would have kept my former cities for that time in occupation.

You might enjoy this early turn report of mine, one I'm particularly proud of. 

Also, we've been blocking sub from settling Avalanche for quite a while - it was one of half a dozen crude hacks we had to resort to to keep Wild from being subsumed by Eleanor's loyalty ability. Letting sub get a new city there even via Egyptian city-flipping is just impossible.  

You are welcome in exile in the court of Blues! We've been in such grim circumstances here for so long that gallows humor is all we have.

[williams482]

Hello Kaiser, and welcome to our little corner in the halls of the damned!

Enjoy the thread (especially the linked gem of a t38 report). I know I'm looking forward to reading yours, you had a monster start and I'm curious how you made it happen. We did get a little sassy in here about, well, basically everything, so my apologies if anything reads as particularly harsh.

[Kaiser]

Thanks, no worries I am aware that I played a nasty neighbour and can understand that you were not to pleased with the situation you were forced into.

I started with the link and so far it has been a great read, I fear my documentation is a bit more rudimentary

[williams482]

Turn 230:

Scientific Theory completes:



No war declaration against us just yet, but Ichabod has declared on Venice and knocked it's meager 80 strength walls down to 215/400. He appears to be checking out our defenses:



I consider giving him open borders just so he can see for himself that we are indeed ready for him, but telling him exactly what we have and exactly where is in truth a really dumb idea so I won't. Woden is clearly also interested in what our territory looks like, something he may actually be totally ignorant of, as I don't think we've seen Punic explorers in our lands before:



Ichabod's attack on the final remaining city state is a problem not only because of the strategic considerations, but because we're getting 20 gpt from our envoys in that city state and losing that is going to hurt. The strategic considerations are substantial, though. Oilers will fall, all 6.5 culture of it. When it does, and attack against Stars becomes a viable option. Our navy will be able to contribute to the defense of the city, but we're going to really need an encampment down between Stars and Blackhawks in that case. It's a 17 turn build (ouch) and Stars still needs to put another 3 turns into it's tank, but we have chops on hand and a policy card we can pick up too. I move Magus from Kings down to Stars to be ready to assist, and place the encampment directly between Blackhawks and Stars (one tile east of the tile I had pinned, which won't be in our borders until much too late). Ideally I'd chop the tundra forest hill 2NE of Oilers into this district, but in any realistic scenario a builder attempting to do that will be picked off by Brazilian troops, so I'll have to settle for chopping one of the tiles between Stars and Penguins. The district costs 335h, and I definitely should have placed it last turn when it would have been an entire 4h cheaper. We'll probably chop after finishing one more tech, worth 189h with Magnus, +30% for Veterancy is 245.7h. That leaves just over 89h to go, four turns of production with Veterancy in place. I'll probably swap to working on it next turn. I think we can hold out long enough to make that a reality.

All right, let's get our pop chops out of the way. Two 124f injections into Blues takes us to pop 15, boosting Urbanization to a hair's breadth shy of completion and granting us +1 era score. Blues, Penguins, and Capitals start cavalry, due in 3, 3, and 6 respectively, Bruins starts a 6t tank corps. Red Wings could start a 6t tank, but I decide with the relatively high chance of our navy getting involved here and the value we'd get out of having battleships instead of frigates, a 3t, 109h investment in a 21 gpt trade route is going to pay itself off pretty well. I'm also out of horses, and ask Woden to give me 84 from his 210 horse stockpile out of the goodness of his heart. He can't use the damn things, and he knows what way the wind is blowing. Not much reason not to give us a hand here, unless he plans to eat whatever part of us is left in 18 turns. If he does, I'll double down on the begging and ask for some cash too.

I'm sure if he knew that each turn we were passing up the so terribly tempting opportunity to declare a city state emergency against him for his capture of Bologna, he'd be even more excited to help out! How kind of us. Why the game is giving us that option every single turn, I still do not know. 

Civics research swaps over to Urbanization, due next turn with overflow, and tech research starts on Economics, due in 3. After that we have Replaceable Parts, 4t, and Advanced Ballistics, 12t. That's a t249 target for our first chance to start on AA guns, and in practice even later because of the smack in the face we'll get when Stars loses it's campus. The boost is to build an oil power plant, which is all of prohibitively expensive (300h), locked behind yet another tech (Electricity, 6t) and a terrible use of our limited Oil reserves. So that's great. Mobilization for Armies should be on track to complete on t238, at which point we'll be able to merge singles with corps and build armies directly. That is, if we're holding strong enough to build units with more consideration than "whatever we can spit out fastest." 

Allocation of the contested plains hill mines between Wild and Bruins is a bit of a puzzle. Bruins has other tiles those citizens can work, a choice between a 2f 2g 1 faith incense plantation, a 4g commercial hub specialist slot, and three 2h 2g encampment specialist slots. Wild technically does too, a pair of unimproved flat grasslands. So obviously the empire's overall yields are better if Wild controls those tiles. However, Bruins possesses the only military academy in our empire, and is capable of putting production into notably more efficient corps builds, while Wild is limited to single units. In essence, the trade is the more important units slightly faster and the less important units slightly slower, or 4 gold per turn. Yeah, Bruins should have those tiles. If I didn't think having more sacrificial units to throw at Brazil wasn't crucially important for our survival I'd be building a library and university in Wild for research help and to give those citizens something useful to do, but alas here we are. Inefficiency before death, always.

Our Ironclad doesn't have a ton of value in this war, but it can retake captured coastal cities, and that's more valuable than attempting to sniff out a naval invasion from a civilization with no coastal cities that would require sending their embarked army almost all the way around the world instead of just coming right at us en masse from the obvious direction. If Ichabod wants to try something like that, be my guest. I'll happily accept the extra time to build up my defenses.

Related item of note: Battleships provide air cover (90 strength) to units within one tile. Very useful ability, and should make an attempt to bypass Blackhawks for Stars just that much more difficult.

Thinking about chops again, I have three builders with a combined five charges available. One of them will put a well on the oil tile we are purchasing next turn, and one will be spent chopping out the encampment. That leaves three more without a clear plan for how to use them. Oilers has a tundra forest deer that is flooded now. The deer and the forest can be chopped for a cavalry unit each if I get a two charge builder over there without obstruction from Ichabod, and I'm allowed to chop on flooded tiles. Both of which seem pretty unlikely, but something to consider.

Scores:

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

19 turns to even start -building- AA guns is probably in "we're doomed" territory. But what else is new!

Purely speculatively on tactics, how viable would it be to somehow extract part of the army from our inevitable disaster at Blackhawks? Can we trade space for time and preserve the main army as long as possible? I don't know how viable retreat will be in the face of tanks and airplanes, so it might be that once we get stuck in we're stuck in. But it'd be nice if we could lose only a few units and pull the rest back to Blues to set up a new line, then to Kings, etc.

Honestly, though? I put our chances at stalling Ichabod >20 turns at less than 10%.