[SPOILERS] Stonehenge First: scooter's thread

[scooter]

T150 fights the battle of Myr

Interturn festivities:



Killed a couple units, but that's another half dozen units wounded which really hurts. Nice to have a sentry here btw. You have no idea how tempted I was to move SE-SE to put me in range of the capital next turn. That would be GG if it worked. The problem with that is that tile is in range of BOTH Myr and Lys, and some collateral and piling on with those units would put me in huge danger of losing my stack. I do bet the capital is empty given he's not in HR, but still.

I will say, Myr has gone from Size 10 to Size 5 in just one turn. HMMMM. This is one of my least favorite things about fighting in Civ4. That's just dumb IMO. I don't do it because I think it's spiteful, but I do wish city defenses were dependent on city size or something. That'd be a lot more logical. Anyways, I decided to go for it with Myr. The top group of units are tough to crack, but it will be close. Somehow I forgot to take a picture of the event log (I'll do it next turn, no way I'm trying to reconstruct this battle)... I spent some time just looking at the save last night, but knew I needed to wait until today to play it. I took it one battle at a time, probably about 10-15 minutes just going step by step. Lost a lot early, started winning as the odds went over 50%. Luck seemed fairly even, I won a couple nice battles and lost several I had no business losing. I get to the end and... NO WAY:



ONE UNIT SHORT. And... look at the health on that thing. 0.1/12!!! That's just brutal. In related news, my 3rd attack from the end lost at odds in the 80s, and I'm pretty sure it was this exact grenadier it lost to. Just unreal. The nice thing is I get to save my stack by retreating across the river:



At this point I'm kicking myself for not having one more unit in range... There's a chariot in Jeff I thought about moving, and I didn't. I'm frantically scrolling all over at this point trying to find something, and all I can find is a newly created Cav that is 1 tile too far away. Sigh. Wait, do you see it? Yeah, that Knight there that's yellow? For some reason I had convinced myself it was yellow because it had used 1/2 moves attacking... Then I remembered that's dumb because I had no units on that tile to start the turn. Sure enough:



Burnt down of course. Nice to strike a serious blow to Commodore here, though getting him to spite-whip it down to sz4 might have been enough to be honest. Anyways, I'll retreat now. I'm going to grab Military Science because I want to build a Military Academy with my GG I have sitting around. I need to watch out for Pindicator now:



It's 2v1 mode now, so I need to watch out.

[scooter]

Correction: NH pointed out to me that huge pop drop was more likely a dry Grenadier whip. He's probably right of course, sorry for insinuating Commodore spite-whipped it . A true spite whip would be sz1 anyways, which I have seen in several PBEMs and I'm never impressed by it.

[dazedroyalty]

I'm confused by "spite whipping." Clarify what you mean, please. It seems to me that doing whatever a player can do to defend a city not matter how hopeless is never "spiteful" but the only way to play the game with honor. I'm trying to imgaine how it could be spiteful. I guess you might mean whipping useless buildings when a city is about to be lost. I've never heard of that happening though.

[NobleHelium]

Yes, he means the latter. It's been done before.

[scooter]

Yep, what NH said. Whipping more than one thing in a turn basically. I actually don't know why I even brought it up here since Commodore clearly did not do that (and has no history of doing so), but it does happen from time to time. I'm not a big fan of deleting workers as you die and/or handing them over to somebody else either, but that's less terrible IMO.

[scooter]

So I have this sick feeling I may have lost Jeff, my Heroic Epic city on my east side that borders Pindicator. He moved in a stack last turn, but that stack was obviously not nearly enough. I moved in my entire mounted stack, upgraded a unit, shuffled defenses, etc etc. However, his post in the banter thread has me wondering if he has more 2-movers than I thought, and now I'm nervous. The main problem is that he attacked 1T too soon. My 2-movers were largely unhealed, so a lot of them will not be greatly effective defenders. I dunno, I'm just nervous but I haven't been able to open the save yet. Losing that city would be a real blow.

This is the problem with my situation. I got far enough ahead that this is legitimately a 2v1 now, and I'm not nearly far enough ahead to actually win that fight. So... I really don't know what will happen here.

[scooter]

The city stands, but I'm not sure about next turn. Again, it would've been really nice to get one more turn of healing on my units.

I'm going to play later, I just had a look around. I'm debating the merits of emptying it out vs defending. I've got a bunch of redlined Cavs in the city now and it would be helpful to be able to save them.

[scooter]

T151-152 sets the background

Ok, before I attempt to report the current turn, I need to set things up. I last showed you T150 where I razed Myr. On T151, I retreated:



Lost just one random Knight to his Pike. Could have cleaned up the Pike, but I'm not interested in trading units to kill a wounded and outdated unit. So I pulled m my units from there into Britta with the hopes of healing in a central place. Then T152 comes around and, bleh, I had a feeling this would be coming soon:




I did make a mistake here. When he moved in, obviously these 2-movers were nowhere in sight, so he had nothing to really be afraid of. I moved these in and I felt pretty safe. Yeah there's quite a few wounded units, but he also has just 12 hitters vs my 26 defenders. That's a lost cause. I know he's got those HAs and probably has some Knights, but no way he can take the city. He'll probably be surprised at the number of 2-movers I have and/or be counting on them to be down in Commodore land. This still might have been the case, I don't know. However, look at the time-stamp in the upper right hand corner. Yes, 1:15AM. Golden rule of PBEM is to never play a very crucial turn of the game at that time unless you're totally wired, and I was not. Anyways, I didn't keep very well in mind what would happen the following turn even if I survived. I could have probably gotten a couple more units in range for the current turn, so if I just barely lose the city that's on me. If I lose it and he has several units to spare, then it may not have mattered. Anyways, that brings us to the current turn, which I will split into a separate post.

[scooter]

T153 surveys the field

Deliberated longer on this turn than any so far. Here's the attack he made. Bottom-to-top obviuosly:





Obviously he had a ton of Cavs which I wasn't for sure was the case. Definitely did some cash upgrades of his HAs. Anyways, I had to think long and hard about whether to defend and hope to save the city or bail and possibly lose my entire mounted stack. I spent a couple hours thinking about this. I didn't do any calculations, but I just tried to think it through logically. Here's what it looks like:



Ok. I included the capital here because he has 2 fresh cavs and 2 chariots that are capable of hitting the city, the rest are not. May seem weird to include the Chariots, but look over in my city - I have a 0.3/15h Cav in it! That's just a body. And really, that's a body in the same sense that this is a body:



It's technically still breathing. So there's that. Anyways, so the bad news is out of my 16 defenders, a whopping 10 are mounted. 8 total units have a health of 2.6 or lower (AKA not beating a chariot), so once those start defending things are brutal.

There is good news though. First, a lot of his units are very heavily wounded too. I also count 6 units that are below that totally arbitrary 2.6h number I chose, so maybe things aren't quite so gloomy. In fairness, many of his units will get promos, especially those that only have 1, so an important qualifier. More good news: although I have just 16 defenders, there are 0 cats and only 21 hitters in sight for him. If that's all he has, I do believe I will keep the city for this turn. I only need to win 6 battles in that scenario, and considering I have 4 good-ish Rifles that will likely win once apiece, there's some shred of hope here. The real question is - what does he have BEHIND the city? If he has 5 fresh cavs for instance, I'm probably done here. However, after thinking it over, this seems very, very unlikely. He hasn't had Cavs access for long, so he likely did most of this by upgrades, meaning those units were already there. It's not like they're streaming in from his other cities. There's no way he would've held units out of the attack, so it seems unlikely he'll have more than 2 cavs behind the city and/or more than 4 mounted units total.

In light of all that... I chose to defend and see what I can do. Obviously you see units streaming in. The thing is, even if I hold this turn I'm still in real danger the following turn, depending on what happens. You see all those units, but only 3 of those are Rifles. I can whip and draft 2 more next turn, so 5 more Rifles and a couple Cavs next turn, but 2 of those Rifles are Guerilla which is useless in my one and only flatland city.

So... The turn is officially passed on, so I'd like to poll the audience. What would you have done? Would you have defended or bailed?

(no sims, combat calculators, or calculations of any kind were used in planning this defense. seemed appropriate to avoid those given the theme of this game)

[SevenSpirits]

I'd try to defend. But, I have no idea how it will turn out. Good luck!

Also this is the sort of situation where you wish you had a supermedic for next turn.