[SPOILERS] The Wild Card

[Ceiliazul]

good report! i didnt realize you had actually sent troops toward Azza, how far did they get?

[The Black Sword]

I've been gradually paring down the plan as dtay's intentions became more clear. It was probably pretty foolish to keep it up as long as I did but I was also emboldened by the success Lewger have been having vs Azza.

A Knight and a Horse Archer spent 1 turn on a boat in the south before I turned them around and called off the expedition for good, that's the furthest the troops got.

For reference:

HA -> Knight 140g

Chariot -> Knight 200g

Axe -> Mace 125g

Archer -> LB 95g

Spear -> Pike 95g

[Jowy]

It's the showdown a thousand years in the making!
He's only got one worker making the road so it doesn't seem to be a priority for him. I wouldn't declare over it.
You should send over that ship sentry you've got a sign for.
We've only got 3 catapults. We'll need more if we want to ever attack his main stack. Just holing up in our cities probably won't work since he's got so many targets to choose from.
Of course we're also lacking in every other unit
Theocracy could be worth it, slavery I'm not so sure about. It could be useful in smaller cities with no production tiles or in emergencies, but I reckon we're past the times when it's worth it to whip every city.
Don't back down from strengthening the military this time. The gambit did pay out before, but with all the free land gone and big powers competing against each other and swallowing the smaller player's lands, we are bound to get attacked at some point whether the culprit is Dtay or someone else.

I really should be logging in and checking stuff out, but dang this non-turnplayer gig takes a goddamn ton of time if you wanna stay up to date and have something constructive to say
My apologies!

[The Black Sword]

Thanks Jowy.

I've been mulling the situation about that road over though and I think we should attack. We should be safe from immediate counter attack and we gain some xp and kills. So, what are we losing? We're essentially at war anyway, there's no where else those troops can go. Dtay will come when his troops are ready, assuming anything else would be silly, so any change in the timetable should be good for us.

As for strengthening the military, I definitely think we need to commit this time. Apart from the National Epic in Hiram, I think I should probably switch every city to military builds for the time being. It's frustrating to see hammers sunk into buildings sitting there in the queue but there is nothing for it.

[The Black Sword]

Went for it ...


Victory! Next Knight had 98% odds before promotion so I saved those to heal. 8 more xp to a GG.





I didn't delete the worker, if he has a 2 mover in range and wants to sacrifice it, that's ok I think. I might go back in and upgrade those 3 extra HAs.

Pics of our front cities:



(This can steal hammer tiles from Sleeper if we see units moving this way and need to get the castle out quickly). I upgraded the maces and LBs this turn so they could start building up fortification bonuses.

Overview so you can see what we're building:

[Jowy]

Bold move, you've got balls kid

[The Black Sword]

Thanks .

We appear to have gotten away with the worker, but the real army is incoming.



Yeah, no problem with him double roading to that tile in 1 turn.



War elephants were something I had forgotten about, Hopefully C2 Knights will still have odds, particularly if we get some collateral off.



Selected is the defenses in Popinjay, highlighted the stack 1SW of Bagabond.



Selected is the units in Bagabond and highlighted those in Modular Man.

I'm running out of units to upgrade, also I'm a bit worried about our happiness levels if he pillages that front Ivory.



This guy could have come out a lot earlier but I've delayed him to increase the odds of a scientist instead of Merchant. With half price Markets and Grocers, a merchant should be easy to generate in our NE city for the golden age.

[The Black Sword]

Having to play these turns in the morning is quite annoying.



24 cats showed up. While I expect he has more hitters around the place, I don't reckon he has another stack of cats like this. The cats are necessary to crack the castles, so this is the stack that we have to worry about.

I need to do some simming to see what damage our Knights will do to those cats via flanking and how much damage we need to put on that stack for the knights to get good odds.

Surprisingly enough, dtay also showed up with a stack of galleys:



I just assumed he'd cede the seas to us tbh. It is a bit annoying because I only have a galley and a caravel up there(on the ocean tile) but I think it's a positive for us tbh, that he didn't turn them into 250h on land. I gave Sleeper enough overflow to 1t another caravel next turn, then presumably our caravels can safely pick off a galley each, get a promo and it's 3v3. Those 2 kills would probably give us our GG too, should think about what to do with that.

The question though, is whether those galleys are loaded. For the moment, I could afford to leave some of our knights in Modular Man to be safe. I don't think he can have all the galleys filled tbh, that would be a crazy move knowing we have caravels. Still there might be a few units, maybe the bottom two galleys filled?

Another point to take into account is that I haven't seen his GG anywhere. I assume he used it to sprinkle xp, and that's how he got the pair of formation elements. Should be careful of the morale promote off the boat trick trick, we have a LB and the newly built Knight in Sleeper to block it for the moment.

[The Black Sword]

Better get on that simming to figure this out. I don't think we have enough cats in range though. At the least, we have another turn as he has to bombard the castle. We should strongly consider giving up Bagabond though as we mass the cats, it isn't that valuable.



80% odds.

[The Black Sword]

Did some testing:

Maybe catapults aren't so good for us. His stack is almost half catapults itself and that absorbs a lot of collateral.

Knights really rock, they start getting odds really quickly even on his formation units. Only problem is that they're a lot more expensive than muskets.

Flanking isn't as powerful as I suspected, probably due to RB mod decreasing damage by half. Seems very unlikely that we actually manage to kill any cats, though we can really injure them. How much that reduces their effectiveness I'm unsure.