[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

high on the list of life's lil joys: in between visiting my digital archivist friend and my math professor friend, squeezing in the civ turn at a tiny lil cafe in santa monica that i will almost certainly never visit again while thinking about all the unique smells from human history that we have no way of preserving or even meaningfully describing, and that are therefore pretty much lost to time forever. we can guess at how ancient rome looked and sounded, but not really how it smelled.... well, probably really really bad, but other than that lol

the morning of april 21st is well-known as international dazed delirious deep-thought-contemplation day

oh and unlike the cafes in san francisco this one has wifi AND outlets!!! and maybe even a bathroom!! god how our collective standards have fallen

anyways i have very little faith in my ability to make intelligent civ decisions (....is THAT what i usually make?) in such a context, but the turn waits for no one

Turn 135 - Zululand



well, fuck! bravo, that is VERY nicely timed and probably puts paid to any delusions we had of making it beyond lalibela in the initial wave. they didn't get machinery THAT long ago and engi is expensive, i did not anticipate them turning up with it that quickly.  well at any rate, machinery is DEFinitely the next tech choice now as crossbows of course beat these badly, and if they spent a bunch of money upgrading pikes as seems to be the case, they probably aren't too close to having feudalism as well

that said... as scary as pikes and 3-move roads are... it looks like their zone defense stack has probably retreated to lalibela, and two now-unfortified pikes is the kind of defense that to me says "bumrush down with a horde of obsolete impis". probably not going to get easier than this to take the city and it will continuously whip units otherwise. so how many shock impis would we have to throw into the meat grinder to kill two unfortified pikes on a hill? we have 9, and another 4 unpromoted.... according to vodka we have 98% odds to win with such an attack and would lose on average 6 impis to take out 2 pikes, for a hammer exchange of roughly 210 for 120.... that's not exactly efficient, but it IS efficient in the context of a long war where we can reasonably expect this city to otherwise be continuously producing units that eventually total more than the 90 hammer deficit we'd take in attacking. not to mention the impis are probably only otherwise useful on cleanup duty really (esp given that their stacks are probably still mostly crossbow and axe), and here is a chance to get a not-terrible exchange rate for them that weakens GT to the tune of a core city. i will think about it but i feel pretty likely to go for it as of now.



GT has also moved up a scouting warrior at kinbozan, into a position where an impi in the city could reach out and kill it. now is that unit bait with an axeman behind it that will then ice our impi and leave the city undergarrisoned? well... when i last scouted matara, it had an axe/spear pair but they were in the city itself, so they would not QUITE have had time to move the 3 tiles necessary to defend this warrior in just one turn after being declared on.... except, wait, WRONG, GT just got engineering! so they totally could have done so and this is probably a trap, which i won't be taking. and yes, i am now a bit concerned about defending this city and am in the process of shifting a few axes over to relieve it, and maybe an HA or two as well now that they are looking super obsolete on the main front...



anyways, we're starting to mass THESE guys on the greenline/ginger border. and given that this GT war is increasingly looking like it will be long and grindy and not at all a slam-dunk, you can maybe see my rationale for stacking them with chichen itza in action a little... i think we are at VERY high risk of someone trying to snipe a border city or two in the upcoming era, unless we can make doing so look as close to literally impossible as we can by piling those cities high with CG2 longbows that require multiple turns of catapult action just to zero out the city defenses...

also, is it true that promoting fortified units removes the fortification bonus? civwiki says so, which is why i pre-promoted this guy to CG2, but of course i'd rather save the promotions until the last possible second if that turns out to be incorrect

i decide it's a good idea to trade (well, assuming GT is down to spend units to kill a nauf xbow on a forested hill that is guarding it) one of our scouts on the GT/nauf border to assess GT's relative view of the threat level of us and nauf by checking to see if their main stack has moved. if it HAS moved, we can expect it to reach lalibela.... well, not quite in time to prevent capture but certainly to threaten REcapture (from 3 tiles away no less...) and the answer is



this is maybe a biiit smaller than last turn but i think the difference is in axes, so the bulk of the stack and, most critically, the 7 catapults therein has not moved. now obviously they'll be whipping cats in every city now (i imagine...?) but it'll take time to assemble them and the more time we can get without them in the field, the better odds we'll have of taking and then standing up defenses at lalibela

ok, brooding over it lengthily has not un-convinced me about the adulis attack, especially as moving up a scouting chariot reveals no recapture stack in immediate range



lalibela meanwhile has 4 crossbows, a spear, and a pike. certainly not nothing! but equally i don't think it's close to enough to stand up to our 1-moves once the city defenses go down. admittedly it will take a fair few cats to crack potentially, so i think i'd better start churning out the endless stream of replacements from our core.... but notable is the LACK of any really strong city defenders to shred our cats as they attack in, eg longbows.... if the top defender is still a pike or CG1 crossbow when we get there, i'd imagine city raider cats should get non-terrible odds and collateral down the defenders enough for our axes and elephants to clean up

ok, adulis attack. i guess the reason even 13 impis still had 2% odds to LOSE to just two pikes is that this kind of attack, where a ton of weaker units attack into a small number of strong units, is probably very prone to variance, specifically the variance in how many attackers it takes to deliver the initial few "first scratch" hits after which subsequent attackers have snowballingly better odds. so fingers crossed

first shock impi does well! doing 2.3 damage to one pike, which i imagine to be well above expectation
second one does 1.6 damage which might ALSO be above expectation. now our next attacker has nontrivial 8% odds to actually win
third impi does not win, and does less damage than the first two. pikes now at 3.7 and 3.6 health and we have 22% odds
fourth impi dies but NOW the pike is redlined at 1.9 health
fifth impi dies at 35% odds but now both pikes are below warrior strength. now we have 76% odds to win with even an UNpromoted impi, which would create a shock impi - that seems worth doing as i'd like to preserve enough shock ones to keep open the opportunity to do this kind of thing at like, ONE more city defended only by pikes, should we be presented with one. or we can take 76% odds with a horse archer for a second chance at the sentry unit which we still don't have. ok no THAT is a better idea and is the one i will be going for
horse archer wins! and i deem it worthwhile to try to make a second sentry unit as well, given that much of the upcoming action is likely to involve darting around on combat roads and the like to look for tactical openings
but then the second horse dies at 80% odds (((( and now we don't get more than 1 XP from any attackers so we can't get a second promotion out of this, balls.

but i mean, obviously i'm not THAT upset about it:



so we ended up slightly below expectation due to my greed, losing 5 impis and a horse to kill 2 pikes, create a sentry horse, and capture adulis. pretty nice gold payout too - does this come directly out of GT's treasury and thereby mess with their research rate? or does the game create it from thin air?

adulis comes with no buildings at all :[ but a city's a city and the land is good, and with 4 pop we can immediately whip a granary and go from there. main threat of recapture is apparently going to come from galleys most likely - i will (semi-?)permanently station our least valuable impi SW of the city to scout for such things



rough situation at EOT. longbow to cover the more vulnerable 2-mover stack so it doesn't get mauled quite as badly by an attack out of lalibela. they would need quite a bit of help from units in the fog to even crack through to the core of unpromoted HAs here, and i don't think they have many units that get odds attacking into this group even post-longbow. they could do it with a shock pike but that's about it and it would only hit a less-valuable impi.... thanks once again to the heroic power of that unit btw, which just captured a city in the medieval era and is really putting in work to make this attack feasible tactically



sure, i think this is fine by me. 40 turns from now is well into the t170s, which should be enough time for digestion if our war is successful.... and yeah as you say something THIS far out can't be considered that hard of a commitment i THINK

[Tarkeel]

Capture gold is created out of thin air.

[ljubljana]

one more food for thought/lurker feedback: i think with the appearance of GT's pikes, engineering is now the tech choice for us after machnery. CS still doesn't look THAT urgent (i expect to stay in vassalage even post-GA, maces are slow and don't seem THAT much more impactful compared to xbows) and knights will not speed us up much if GT is whipping pikes everywhere. probably better to slam down protective castles on our borders to drive the point home about how useless it will be for ginger and greenline to whip up stacks and pile on, plus enhance the tactical flexibility of our existing units

after that reassess based on the state of the war but probably either CS or guilds -> gunpowder. certainly whichever of those i do first, the other will come immediately after. gunpowder in particular we have no business delaying for even a second after guilds as tokugawa

definitely swapping to vassalage during the GA, unsure about slavery vs serfdom. i don't wanna whip much during the GA but those castles in places like hammer-starved takayasu and kirishima won't build themselves

[williams482]

That was definitely the right decision to attack those two pikes, and it paid off. Hooray for Impis, and RIP to the brave departed.

As for maces, they are useful in singleplayer because they are 8 strength and can take City Raider promotions, but they still don't get especially great odds attacking real defenses until CR3 (which obviously isn't happening). I know city raider promotions are situationally useful but aren't especially well regarded because they are meaningless in the open field, so that's a relatively minor consideration. They do also kill pikes more effectively than crossbows do (8 > 6).

How effective are trebs against human players? They are pricey and utter shit in the open field, but can be monstrously effective against well defended AI cities. And they appear at engineering alongside the clearly useful pikes, castles, and boosted roads.

[aetryn]

That was definitely the right decision to attack those two pikes, and it paid off. Hooray for Impis, and RIP to the brave departed.

As for maces, they are useful in singleplayer because they are 8 strength and can take City Raider promotions, but they still don't get especially great odds attacking real defenses until CR3 (which obviously isn't happening). I know city raider promotions are situationally useful but aren't especially well regarded because they are meaningless in the open field, so that's a relatively minor consideration. They do also kill pikes more effectively than crossbows do (8 > 6).

How effective are trebs against human players? They are pricey and utter shit in the open field, but can be monstrously effective against well defended AI cities. And they appear at engineering alongside the clearly useful pikes, castles, and boosted roads.

The only case that matters is when you're going to use siege on offense - since they're all awful at defense no matter what. Is GT likely to put any defensive stacks outside cities? The terrain could be favorable but the positional element might prohibit it, especially if he's got to keep his stack on roads to cover thrusts from both flanks. Is he likely to send a stack to attack our cities that we would want to catapult down?

The other question is whether AGG is doing anything useful for us for siege, since it includes a promotion for them too. Does that change the balance of which siege engine is better?

If there's not a clear edge to trebs, catapults are obviously much better for hurting attacking stacks, so they are more flexible and should win on the margins.

[williams482]

Free Barrage I should sliiiiiiiiightly favor cats over trebs, because it unlocks accuracy with the first promotion and two accuracy cats definitely out-bombard a single accuracy treb. Not that it makes sense to build trebs with bombardment primary on the mind anyway, of course. You build trebs because they are good enough city attackers to do more damage faster and survive their attacks more often against legitimately tough defenders.

I don't actually know which is generally more hammer efficient in a siege situation, though, which feels like the sort of question that should have a well-grounded conventional wisdom answer. It's also the sort of question that some Vodka simming would probably give some interesting answers to. I'm going to blindly guess that cats have the edge in cost effectiveness for a single siege, but trebs higher survivability (and potential promotability, although with 5XP out of the gate and no CHA, winning five battles to hit CR3 is a stretch) gives them an edge for longer running campaigns.

[ljubljana]

yeahhh maces get strong numerical odds against crossbows, but crossbows take guerilla so the ones we make will be effectively 2-movers

idk about the cat/treb question generally, but free barrage i from AGG is DEFINITELY doing a lot for us here - being able to take accuracy even before vassalage, eg, on the 10 cats we already have, should be very effective vs the defenses at lalibela we might need to start prioritizing bombardment more than i would like as GT could start whipping castles now (albeit very inefficiently without PRO, and i'm not sure they have stone either since we kinda stole theirs, will check when i open the turn). not sure if that's a better play for them than an equivalent number of units but it might be, at least in whichever city they expect to be able to assemble a decent-sized defensive stack in first...

Turn 136 - Zululand



looks like GT will have 11 units in lalibela next turn, which i take it to indicate that they intend to make a stand on defense here. i think i hope they do so... sitting in one place where we can collateral them down represents about the most favorable terms on which we can hope to take out this stack, i think they'd be much more annoying lurking out of sight (with the threat of catapults in the fog as well) until GT has enough total units to attempt a stack-wipe.

the question now is, do we wait a turn to bombard the defenses down (and then allow an attack with all the cats on the following turn instead of just whichever ones are not needed to bombard) or just go in immediately? i don't know, thankfully i don't need to know until tomorrow lol

you can see from the pins that i really wanted to aggressively move our 2-movers up 1W of lalibela to go for a fork against GT's core cities. they might have enough mass to foil that now as we can only cover with shock impis and they'd get good odds attacking into those with pikes (though whether the pikes want to take damage in so doing is an open question). but..... oh... but on the OTHER hand....... if we do make that move then we would prevent GT's 4-unit ministack from reaching lalibela next turn >:D ok that is hilarious, and merits serious consideration i think... it's risky if they have more units in the fog of course, but to some extent it makes sense to trade impis for time here i think; if we otherwise would want to spend a turn bombarding the defenses and another turn attacking, perhaps going for it makes sense, the faster we can move this front westward to where we can fork their capital and gondar (not to mention take down another production center in lalibela) the better our odds will look i think



btw, does anyone know if promoting units removes their fortify bonus or not? ginger is starting to mass some units over here so we need to do the same, and naturally i don't really want to have to pre-promote them if we can avoid it lol

worth noticing on the power rankings that superdeath somehow lost an enormous fuckton of units last turn, and has dropped back into almost even with us in soldiers...



two turns in and GT still has not moved their main stack, so i think it's safe to assume they're going to keep it here to fight nauf and try to hold us off with newly-produced. which is exactly what we wanted to see of course. yes please, lose cities to us while preventing nauf from making gains themselves  uh, assuming we CAN actually beat their newly-produced units of course lol



OH well, would you look at that! that's interesting >:D ok yeah, i imagine knights are the progress-makers nauf needs to push their front forward. unfortunately for them GT has really strong defensive terrain over here and their stack is correctly positioned to cover even avenue on which nauf could advance.... i don't quite know what tactical plan they should be adopting here even with knights but thankfully that's not my problem 

hmmm. ok, the other thing the move to 1W of lalibela with the 2-movers does is prevent the 7 units inside from ESCAPING, which i a little bit believe is the correct move for them to make here - run back to the capital, whip cats like crazy, try for a stack wipe. admittedly GT's moves so far suggest that it is not that LIKELY for them to do that, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't prevent it given the chance....



yeah fuck it, we gamble here at ljubljana dot com

cursor is over the stack N-NE of lalibela. we had to station some units here as those horse archers are all freshly-produced, so there is no other tile from which they could reach the city next turn, as is true for the stragglers from the adulis attack. hence the ridiculous-looking 3-way stack split. but because our 2-movers are cutting off road access, the other two stacks should only have to worry about an attack out from at most the 7 units in the city. the 2-mover stack of course might have to absorb more since we don't know what's in the fog, but the point is that even though their pikes will get odds on shock impis on flatground (pretty good odds at that) i still expect we'll do more damage dying to said pike in that way than we would attacking into it in a city on a hill. and of course then the victorious pike will be on flatground in the open and could be susceptible to cleanup.

in summation: once again impis are great and are the only reason a move like this is remotely possible. and again this is in the medieval era

notice also that we are extremely arrogantly moving combat workers INTO ethopian territory in anticipation of taking lalibela next turn lmao

[El Grillo]

btw, does anyone know if promoting units removes their fortify bonus or not? ginger is starting to mass some units over here so we need to do the same, and naturally i don't really want to have to pre-promote them if we can avoid it lol

I just tested via Worldbuilder, promoting a fortified unit will not un-fortify it. Upgrading a unit, however, will reset fortification back to 0%.

[ljubljana]

oh oops yeah i could have just worldbuildered which i am constantly forgetting..... sorry for asking the same question multiple days in a row when i could have just done that....... and thank you for answering anyways!

[williams482]

Isolating Liabela from the rest of GT's core with the two-movers is an interesting move. Was it not possible to get a sentry HA in that stack? I believe it would have gotten vision on his capital, which would be very useful.

I think I would have leaned towards doing a full bombard, waiting a turn, and then going in with all available cats if you had deployed the two movers more conservatively, but having done what you did, circumstances next turn will surely favor the immediate attack. Fewer units in Liabela, our units in a more vulnerable position on the far side of the city, and the possibility of injured enemy units from attacks against your two mover stack all point to moving more urgently.

At the strategic level, I think GT's deployment favors urgency as well. They seem to have allowed the bulk of their stack to be tied up defending the Nauf front, which strikes me as a conceit that defending two fronts is impossible but defending one probably leads to a slower death than withdrawing those troops into the core and trying to somehow defend in two places at once with them. That's reasonable but inevitably hopeless, and my instinct is to assume increasingly erratic behavior from the clearly doomed player here, and anticipate that stack moving to intercept us eventually. The less time we give to allow second thoughts about redeploying those troops, the better.

Interesting that Liabella clearly double-whipped last turn, but the capital actually grew. That's also not what I would expect from a player with a ton of pop to burn who knows that they are 100% fucked without immediate, drastic action and a whole lot of luck on top.