Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[darrelljs]

I swear Pindicator posted a 1.5 Cat/Rifle ratio to ensure max collateral damage on an incoming stack, but I can't find it anywhere. Does anyone have that number handy?

Darrell

[darrelljs]

http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthrea...#pid394796

So no, what he posted was after running 1:1 cats vs. rifles, you need 1.5 maces per rifle to clean up.

Darrell

[sunrise089]

So we had a nice long stream and chat session last night, and the majority view that emerged was to focus to the Apolyton threat first, since...

1) They're the most committed to the war. CFC could still go elsewhere or may not attack for several turns after T176.
2) While losing Starfall on the CFC border would be painful, after that city falls CFC has a long march before they can take additional cities, and have to do so on a pretty narrow front.
3) On the other hand, Apolyton could split their stack after taking The Gauntlet and threaten several cities. By keeping our army in the west we force them to keep their stack together, and then we can attack the main stack once we have sufficient forces.
4) Having our army in the west also gives us some flexibility to make opportunistic attacks on civplayers after T170. It's possible a bold attack on that front plus a political offer could get us an early peace from that enemy.

I have some misgivings with this plan, but whether we want to fight Poly and then CFC or the other way around we'll ultimately need a host of units to do so. Lets look at the Poly-first plan and see how our army shakes up.



That's a lower bound on what we might face, assuming Poly stops drafting this turn. It also assumes we do Speaker's plan - overflow all of our cat builds into knights and muskets (I went with a 8:14 split, but that could be adjusted), slave them next turn. The numbers in my spreadsheet are deployable (so not garrison units) but may not be all at the front in time. If we slave knights in the more distant cities we should have everything I listed within range by T173 or so though, which is probably good enough for purposes of these calculations since we're not hitting the Apolyton stack until it takes The Gauntlet and then advances onto flat land.

Using the above numbers, we should be able to max collateral onto the enemy stack. After that both muskets and C1 maces (our most hammer-efficient attackers I think) have around 44% odds. So we're probably looking to lose almost all of the cats, and then about 17 additional units. That's...actually not all that bad.

If we go with my estimate of 32 rifles, 5 jans, 20 mixed older units, and 30 cats on t170, that means we'd probably only do a little more than half of max collateral to the rifles. Estimated losses would be the cats and 35 additional units.

This is just a starting point. It ignores the civplayers front (hopefully their small stack and lower tech level means we could use units drafted and whipped in threatened cities, but realistically some of our existing units will need to be sent south) and of course it ignores CFC where our only current plan is to send around 10 post-T170 draftees into Starfall to make CFC commit their 1move stack to taking the city rather than sniping it with knights (our units would then withdraw).

The larger point I'm trying to make though is that if we do decide to focus on the Apolyton threat first, depending on how much additional drafting Poly does, and depending on how large their existing army is, we may or may not need even more units to handle the other fronts even if we're giving up land for time.

[Zargon]

Taking on Poly's stack first seems... questionable. Their stack will be the hardest to kill, their stack will be doing the least damage, and their stack won't actually be on flat land until what, the 3rd or 4th turn of the war?

Yes, we don't want to totally evacuate the Poly front, letting them fearlessly split their stack. We don't want to do that for any front.

I think I'd like to leave knights in a position where we have the option to go for CFC first until we have to commit them one way or another. What is the travel time for a knight from Starfall to, say, Mano?

I feel like I'd prefer knights to muskets in the upcoming whips. Knights are a little worse vs rifles and a little better vs everything else, and they have lots more mobility. 2 knights in the right place is better than 1 musket in the right place and 1 in the wrong place.

Is the current line of thinking that we'll need to suicide all our cats to demolish the Poly stack? If so, is 36 really enough? Granted, we'll need a lot less cats for the lower-strength maces and muskets and knights in the other stacks, but, uh, we're already working with a lowball estimate for Poly's forces, assuming they're just going to sit on their hands for the next 2 turns.

[scooter]

There are a lot of problems with it, but here's the most obvious problem with defending Starfall heavily while we left Apolyton walk all over our western cities: Apolyton's stack is real, quantifiable, and it can attack 5 turns sooner. CFC's stack doesn't really exist yet. We know Apolyton has 30ish rifles right now. We know CFC has 0 cannons right now. Those are the facts. We are going to look extraordinarily stupid if we're sitting units in Starfall while Apolyton walks all over all the cities we just captured from Inca. CFC will sit there and laugh hysterically.

[Zargon]

Sure, if Poly marches in on turn 170 instead of 175, that tilts in favor of attacking them before CFC. Leaving knights with the option to go for CFC also means leaving them with the option not to.

If Poly and CP march in on turn 170, I feel like we'd be much better served smashing CP first (while leaving a credible strike force loitering around Poly's stack, to prevent them from splitting it), because they're heavy on 2-movers who can do damage faster than Poly.

If everybody comes in on turn 175, then what we do will depend on how much of what everyone has.

I agree with not committing anything to Starfall 100% until after turn 170.

[antisocialmunky]

If nothing happens by beginning of T171, would it be feasible to build a ton of wealth to try and get rifling in closer to T175?

[pindicator]

Actually, I like it. The advantage of going after Poly before CivPlayers is that we know where Poly is going to attack. CivPlayers is a bit of a guessing game. If we guess wrong with CivPlayers then we lose time trying to chase them down. Going after Poly first we will know where their army is going and then can react to where CivPlayers invades. Also, Poly is the only team we've seen build up anything that resembles a credible threat. CivPlayers has hardly whipped and as Scooter pointed out, CFC has 0 cannons. Although they could have a good amount of knights.

One concern with going against the Apolyton stack first: if we are going with the estimate of 32 rifles, 5 jans, 20 mixed units, and 30 cats... we need to do a WB test to see just how much damage our 36 cats could do to a group like that. A lot of the collateral could be soaked up by weaker units and cause us more losses.

There's the psychological advantage of it too: the Apolyton stack is probably the biggest weapon they have. Crushing that could put the whole war in question for them.

And don't worry about losing the catapults. We will make more

[Cyneheard]

Note that Civplayers likely just whipped 9 knights.

[Ichabod]

Considering the knights built by Civplayers, should we get walls + Castles in BbB and Ditchdigger? When can we get our stone back from WPC?