[Spoilers] Fintourist and Old Harry have nothing to see here

[Hashoosh]

Are you guys missing any battle letters that need filling in? I was actually giving it some thought the other day. For some reason

[Fintourist]

Cripple and leave to fester works, just depends how you do it.

For example, in PB games azza tends to die a lot, but the only game his conqueror managed to win was in PB5 when I killed him using that tactic. Basically need to be able to cripple him, and then manage any aggression from him and from your other neighbours, so you can build up again, defend and consume him at hte same time 25 odd turns down the road. You had to do that and contend with mackoti, which is the main reason that tactic isn't the easiest to pull off.

Yeah, I think you can somewhat estimate from veteran players how they will react in certain situations. E.g. that Azza will put up a fight when attacked and you should be prepared for that. Here we did not really know much about suttree and his thoughts so the decision had to be made pretty much only based on previous PB13 events. This was also a bit different as we were not expecting to really attack suttree in near future. The plan was similar to what dtay & plako probably also had: Get a good share of land, weaken your neighbor a bit, come back in 50 turns and then take his land.

Anyways, I think we were able to manage suttree's aggression (we actually lost our first units to him last turn ), but the thing is that we did not expect so much aggression and most definitely did not want to build such a big defensive army. I don't have the graphs at hand, but to put it in perspective suttree's military was equally big (measured in power) as mackoti's invasion army was at the time mack attacked m_h. Meanwhile I think TBSJ and Dhalphir built more or less a defensive army and continued developing, which caused dtay, TBSJ, Dhalphir and plako to settle at power levels that were roughly 30-40 % lower that ours and suttree's (probably almost 50 % less actual units). If suttree had reacted the way TBSJ did, it would have been great for our economic development, our military would not have been a huge pile of cheap shock axes and bows (that were economic way to deal with current threat, but will obsolete much quicker than e.g. cats and HAs) and most importantly we could have taken a bigger share of m_h's land if we had not been forced to be prepared to fight off 15+ axes, 15 cats and several spears any turn (now we only got 1 m_h city and that was also pretty much due to unexpected peace deal we got). Anyways, all that did not happen and we got the valuable "river valley", but paid a damn high price for it.

So what I'm wondering is that should we have known that this is going to happen with certainty/high likelyhood? Was our risk-reward ratio simply weak in this situation? Was there some reason why it was to be expected that suttree reacts stronger than I think that Dhal/TBSJ did respectively? It's easy to say in hindsight that some other approach could/would have brought better results, but that's not exactly the same thing as making a bad decision. So I'm interested if lurkers think that we screwed up, got unlucky or what.

[Fintourist]

Are you guys missing any battle letters that need filling in? I was actually giving it some thought the other day. For some reason

According to our spreadsheet we are currently missing U, V, X & Z

No idea if we ever get that far though (just saw from civstats that mack finally took a city from suttree)

[Krill]

Can you explain, in detail, why you chose to use the unit composition that you did to manage the threat from Suttree, compared the other options available to you?

[Hashoosh]

Are you guys missing any battle letters that need filling in? I was actually giving it some thought the other day. For some reason

According to our spreadsheet we are currently missing U, V, X & Z

No idea if we ever get that far though (just saw from civstats that mack finally took a city from suttree)

U - Ulm (Austerlitz) or Utah Beach or Utapau (for some star wars goodness)
V - Vittorio Veneto!
X - Xiangyang (had to google for this one)
Z - Zanzibar, shortest war in history iirc

All you need to do is take over those Ichabod cities! Utah would fit pretty well for an un-opposed landing? Good luck, for what it's worth (lim -> 0, approx.) I'm rooting for you guys.

[Fintourist]

Can you explain, in detail, why you chose to use the unit composition that you did to manage the threat from Suttree, compared the other options available to you?

Hmm.. let's try. As you might remember we defended with axes and bows.

We knew suttree's stack composition (first lots of axes and some spears, later lots of axes & cats and some spears, we took his horse resource and he did not trade it from anyone so no 2-mover threats). Since we are RBMod AGG we had barracks in pretty much every city, which ment that we were able to produce shock axes everywhere, which happened to be excellent units to fight this specific stack. C1/C2 Shock axe was a cheap 35-hammer unit that got odds against every single unit in suttree's stack. Shock axes also targeted cats, which means that if suttree puts 15 cats next to our city: with 15 shock axes we can destroy most of his cats and then our city defenders (mostly cheap bowmen and axes) get odds against remaining attackers. The situation basically was that if suttree puts 35-40 units next to our city, we need to either kill those cats before they attack, wipe the whole stack or have a lot of bodies in the city so that we can survive collateral & 20+ hitters.

We also built bowmen as city defenders in most places because they worked well against barbs and in hill cities they remain relevant still when fighting maces. They were not so much built for suttree, just to be regular MP units at border cities.

Other relevant options at that time were pretty much cats and HAs (we did not take HBR or Construction too early, partly because of the following discussion). The thing with cats was that:
1. 50-hammer unit that is expected to die when attacking suttree's stack
2. They are only useful against suttree's stack if we can actually attack out and have enough of them. Let's say we first need to sacrifice ~10 cats and then we still need to have enough units that we can kill 35-40 bodies (or at least more than half of them).

HAs had similar logic:
HA is a unit that gets odds against suttree's axes and cats, flanks cats, but it again costs 50-hammers and first 5-10 units are kind of wasted as they target spears (and as city defenders they are not too attractive builds anyways).

---> we felt that only couple of cats or HAs do not really help us surviving and 500-hammer investment for 10 cats/HAs was too much at that time as we were trying to keep as many cities as possible supporting our development and building workers+settlers+infra.

Ok, this post is kind of confusing, but the overall daily thinking went pretty much like this:
1. Damn suttree has again added X units
2. Now we are not safe with our current defenses
3. Hmmm, we can add 1-2 shock axes quickly and then we are safe again
4. Hmm.. Or we could build a stack of cats or HAs and be also safe and have useful units later if this conflict ever ends, but then our core cities need to participate in whipping as well and stop whatever they are doing
5. Let's go with an axe, expanding into west/wherever, building workers and infra is too important, we don't want to spend 500 hammers for units or 1500 hammers for invasion army on top of our current military that is already no. 1/2/3 in soldier points..

So yeah, I'm assuming that your point is that HAs and/or cats would have been useful in fighting suttree (or we should have beelined something better?), but we decided to go with smaller hammer investment (shock axes) and tried to maximize our economic devolopment elsewhere. At first we were also a bit hopeful that the military build-up would end as suttree's attacks failed and it became fairly clear that he can't get a city from us (it eventually kind of did as he switched into non-threatening lbows and we got to maces/knights/muskets). Aaand the marginal cost of 1st useful HA/cat was just so big. Investing into better more useful could have been a good move, but as I tried to explain, this all happened during a pretty crucial and intense expansion phase, which affected our willingness to put together the hammers required for stack of HAs/cats.



Rough example/exercise: (not the numbers that we actually had in game, but close enough)

Let's assume that your opponent puts 15 cats + 18 axes + 7 spears (1-promo units) next to your city (on a hill and 20 % culture). You already have 6 shock axes and 9 1-promo bowmen available. You can build 2-promo axes, 1-promo cats or HAs and 1-promo bowmen. What effective ways do you see to deal with this attack (what would you build)?
--> we kind of went with 6 bows and 12 shock axes (for a total of 18 shock axes and 15 bows) for an additional hammer cost of 570h.

Detailed and confusing enough? :P

[Fintourist]

U - Ulm (Austerlitz) or Utah Beach or Utapau (for some star wars goodness)
V - Vittorio Veneto!
X - Xiangyang (had to google for this one)
Z - Zanzibar, shortest war in history iirc

All you need to do is take over those Ichabod cities! Utah would fit pretty well for an un-opposed landing? Good luck, for what it's worth (lim -> 0, approx.) I'm rooting for you guys.

Thanks!

[Krill]

I was going to post after the game, but I don't really see it as a spoiler now.

The way to have handled Suttree requires more depth than noting which units are effective counters to him, it's all about the strategy of containment. So city placements, research aims, every needs to be designed around the minimum necessary to contain Suttree regardless of what he does to hurt you. Then you are relying on his metagame skill to understand that harming you gains him nothing, but he has other options that are "kind of" mutually beneficial for the both of you, namely other directions to expand. Unfortunately, this is where I can't really comment because that would contain spoiler knowledge, so I'd have to come back to this once the game has ended or you guys are dead.

What I would do in your theoretical scenario is note that Suttree has invested 750 hammers into cats, 630 hammers into axes and 245 hammers into spears, for a total of 1625 hammers, and Construction as a tech. Personally, I'd have either rushed to HBR or Construction (I think you messed around with Alphabet?) most likely HBR as my first Classical era tech if I knew I needed to spend 1000's of hammers on units, because those hammers would be able to cover a significantly larger area and to react to others as needed. That would be realised, as you said, by potentially greater gains against mh (and long term weaker mackoti). A combination of chariots, HA and bowmen will deal with any and all barbs (I do agree that bowmen were a good choice regardless, because they will always deal well with barbs). The chariots and HA can be trained to 5XP and rotated out for new ones, this limits the cost of city improvements, but the main unit producers should still have gotten cheap stables.

Ideally, I wouldn't have built more than 2 axes, but that's just me (even in PB15 as AGG I think I built 4 axes and 4 swords in the entire game). You pointed out that a few HA aren't enough, and I agree, you do have to just go overboard on building them. The other advantage to that though is that if Suttree moves in his 1600 hammer stack, and you are sitting there with 1200 hammers of HA (that's 24 HA, similar in size to the stack I had in PB15) and 500 hammers of cats, either his stack dies, and you get a GG or two, or you just run past him and take all his cities. Most likely do both. You only need to remove the cats from the equation and he can't get odds on you cities, and F2 HA have 50% chance to withdraw. So you could either go for the kill or just try to flank away the cats, and he can't get odds on bowmen in cities; in fact after a few flanked cats, you might get reasonable odds with a cat or two and could then throw bowman at him with odds.

I also think these numbers highlight another cognitive dissonance; you didn't actually try to contain Suttree. If you're saying that he spent more than double the hammers you did, you were only trying to manage his threat, but you were leaving him the continued option to build up and try to invade later: you were reacting to his threat, rather than being proactive and forcing him to defend. The downside is that being proactive in axe v axe combat is basically down to stack size and presence of cats, and he had nothing better to do than build axes.

Really though, I don't think this is a great answer, but I can't really remember your early game decisions, and I think that a lot of the "failing" against Suttree comes because of trying to deal with the capital you had and the lack of early workers.

[Fintourist]

I was going to post after the game, but I don't really see it as a spoiler now.

Lots of thanks for your comments and yes, this is all so far in the past that it does not change the current game situation.

The way to have handled Suttree requires more depth than noting which units are effective counters to him, it's all about the strategy of containment. So city placements, research aims, every needs to be designed around the minimum necessary to contain Suttree regardless of what he does to hurt you. Then you are relying on his metagame skill to understand that harming you gains him nothing, but he has other options that are "kind of" mutually beneficial for the both of you, namely other directions to expand. Unfortunately, this is where I can't really comment because that would contain spoiler knowledge, so I'd have to come back to this once the game has ended or you guys are dead.

Totally, this was a pure metagame situation. At the time of our conflict suttree already had lost the game with his slow start, but so had TBS when dtay burned his cities. Both players had an option to expand to the island E of the continent. TBS went that way, suttree did not. So here we are coming back to the starting question, were their positions so different that it was clear that TBS decides to develop peacefully and suttree goes into full military mode.

In PBEM45g Sareln wanted revenge after my attack so I most definitely know that it is not uncommon that someone devotes rest of his game fighting his attacker, but I also know that this is not the way everybody reacts. My current hypothesis is that suttree has a very competitive mindset and our attack was the final straw, which made him realize that this game is simply gone. He probably thought that middle-of-the-pack position is not any better than losing immediately and thought that fighting the rest of the game brings him the most satisfaction or he wanted to make a statement that helps him in future games. Meanwhile I believe that TBS has more of an making-the-most-out-of-every-situation-attitude and after dtay destroyed TBSJ's game they simply set new lower goals for the game, kept playing and actually managed to create a decent comeback.

What I would do in your theoretical scenario...

Yeah, I agree very much here too. Of course in the game everything developed gradually. If we had known that we have to spend ~1000 hammers on units during the next ~25 turns it surely would have affected our tech choices too. We felt that we were playing catch-up since the beginning and tried to improve our economical position and Alphabet was an awesome tech for us economically. We kind of tried to show enough power that suttree would see that there is nothing to gain, but we also did not want to be proactive in the sense that encourages continuous military build-up. Since the beginning of the conflict suttree already had enough forces that it was also clear that building up our own military and destroying him early would have been way too costly. There was no chance to get an empire quickly without major losses like in mack-m_h case. (Remember also that our conflict started ~T90 as a result of settling race, that is around 30 turns before mack managed to get his m_h stack together (IIRC) so our options were to either give up the area, take it by force immediately with ancient units or take it 20+ turns later with classical+ units.)

I also think these numbers highlight another cognitive dissonance; you didn't actually try to contain Suttree. If you're saying that he spent more than double the hammers you did, you were only trying to manage his threat, but you were leaving him the continued option to build up and try to invade later: you were reacting to his threat, rather than being proactive and forcing him to defend...

This is true as well (although not really the 2:1 hammer ratio, we always kept higher power than suttree), we were reacting and trying to get away with smaller investment at this front compared e.g to your PB15 stack. We felt that engaging a "real" war would already mean giving up this game because "peaceful expansion" >> "benefits - costs from building up military and attacking suttree" We felt that in order to become competitive we needed that Eastern piece of land (to be honest that was only decent area anywhere near us) and we also had to get it as cheaply as possible. We kind of succeeded in this because we managed with only bows and axes and did not lose a single unit, but what we are discussing is that if it would have been better if we had invested XXX extra hammers into military and got earlier HBR instead of spending those hammers and beakers in our peaceful expansion. Possibly, I can't really quantify on top of my head what we would have lost, and it's also really diffucult to quantify what that unit mobility would have brought us (would HAs made suttree stop building military or give us peace? Regardless of answer what could we have accomplished with those units elsewhere? I stay with my claim that at least attacking suttree's core would not have been a good move).

Really though, I don't think this is a great answer, but I can't really remember your early game decisions, and I think that a lot of the "failing" against Suttree comes because of trying to deal with the capital you had and the lack of early workers.

I interpret this so that you also think that our starting area set us significantly behind, but are not convinced of our early micro? Would you like to give our sandbox a shot as a micro challenge if we send it to you? Or anybody else? We spent a lot of time planning our early turns and thus:
1. It would be awesome learning-wise if someone can show how to play our start better
2. "lack of early workers" is just too generic statement (for me to believe that you have analyzed our start and can say with certainty that we screwed up) ((there are couple of things that I know with certainty that we did wrong , but they aren't related to amount of workers))

[Krill]

Actually I think that the lack of early workers is because of the double fish/medium hammers start, rather than what you did.