[SPOILERS] Scooticator and Pindooter give a sporting try

[scooter]

Nice opening salvo! How many cities would you count as a success for this war?

Thanks . Depends partially on mackoti. I'm going to shadow him over the next 7ish turns and see if he's gearing up for round 2 or if he's content to leave me be. If he's gearing up for round 2, I would be reasonably happy taking all the cities on Legends (those are gimmes either way), and the top column of roughly a half dozen mainland cities. That would be me at +10 cities and would effectively cripple Bigger. I would keep pushing troops and finish him off when I can.

If mack is content to leave me be (or at least not attempt a mainland invasion), I'll happily keep pushing until I get that Confucian shrine, which is the real jackpot here. I don't especially expect he will be, but I was suffering from serious RL war-weariness against mack due to the intense logistics of high-stakes naval combat, so you never know when that might affect him too. He might just view the idea of running over Old Harry with Cuirs + Cannons as more fun. It's a long shot, and I'm not banking on it, but it's a possibility.

[scooter]

Bigger still hasn't ended turn yet (he is logged in and I'm assuming playing his half of the turn now), but he did quickly send me this peace offer:



If that doesn't mean anything to you, don't worry. I've been spending weeks staring at his cities and planning around his cities, and I didn't know for sure where several of those were either . So, here are the 7 he offered:



This already suggests we aren't close to a deal. Only offering a pop7 city that is a goner without the other 3 which are large and more significant prizes.



Odd that he's not offering me all 3 of these when he knows I can take them all. Why is BaconFlank being starved? (later-edit: I bet he's attempting to generate a great person of some sort? I can verify next time I'm in since I have city visibility.) Anyway, those two cities are indefensible for him, so that's not really anything substantial yet.



I don't even want these. They're Azza's, so I would probably just return them. Besdies, islands on the east side (away from Mackoti) are more valuable than these islands on the west side.



The one on the left I'm planning to return to Azza, as suggested earlier. Bacon Jane would be a nightmare because it would be crushed by Azza's culture on one side and Baconator's on the other (in the first picture).

So I didn't accept the deal. I thought about counter-offering, but I think I'm going to wait until next turn to do that. The rationale is that I haven't shown him that much on the mainland yet, so he may be underestimating what I've got by a tad, so my initial offer may come across as unreasonable (and therefore spiteful) to him. I definitely don't want that. I figure he may see his situation as a little more bleak next turn, and therefore be a little more likely to take a deal.

Taking cities for peace has serious benefit since he's put tons of infrastructure in these cities, so the chance to keep all that and use the population immediately would be pretty significant. Not to mention I believe it helps a little in the cultural crush situation if I'm not mistaken. Also, in a hypothetical peace deal with Bigger, I'd like to stagger my peace treaty with him with that of mackoti's. Hypothetically, I could take a peace deal with Bigger 5T into mack's peace deal. Then 5T later try to negotiate a new peace deal with mack. If that's successful, I come back at Bigger 5T later. That's my general thought process anyway.

[scooter]

Turn 195

Turn is like 2/3 complete, and I'm gonna need to sleep on a couple decisions. So, first the bad news. Bigger did counter-attack kinda how I hoped, but the results didn't go exactly as I hoped.



He wiped out the forward mainland stacks. In a vacuum it's not a significant setback, but I checked on the odds. Here's how the attacks went, odds are from his perspective:

50%: bigger
50%: scooter
81%: scooter
89%: bigger
21%: scooter
50%: scooter
48%: scooter
48%: bigger
48%: bigger
48%: bigger
48%: bigger
87%: bigger
50%: bigger

Him winning 5 consecutive coin flips there at the end was a real bummer. Overall there were 9 coin flips, and he went 6-3 in those attacks. That's certainly not outside the realm of probability, but that's not at all what I was hoping. The real bummer here is that Cho-Ku-Nus can collateral cannons (catapults cannot), and now he knows this. Last turn he was building cats which made me assume he didn't know this, but now that he knows.. Much more concerning though is this:



He's bringing everything up from his Azza front. That... is not what I want to see. I'll circle back to this at the end of the post, but it's time to give him an out - a peace counter-offer. None of this stuff is scary, but the 4 CKN + 4 catapult stack is why all these units are still moderately dangerous. First though, let's get to the action.



I'm not going to do the usual combat log post-script for all of these for somewhat obvious reasons.



Taking a size 14 city (Bigger's Moai city at that!) gives some serious cash.



Love it when the city comes with the granary/lighthouse combo. So much easier to get it going immediately. Onward.



So this was a mistake that I didn't notice until I was renaming these pictures . I had another unit on board that got higher odds into the 60s, but somehow I mistakenly attacked with this one. Regardless, I won. I had units with better odds, but attacking with these wounded units allowed me to do something nice next.



Winning that dice roll let me clean up with the second wounded unit on board (the one I meant to use first).





Little lousy on the buildings remaining front, but I'll live. Anyway, it seems obvious that Bigger's goal is to try to make me bleed in the central area, because he's completely abandoning the eastern coast. My goal now is to go ahead and hit his wide open eastern side, and hopefully use that to get a peace deal that improves my border with him. He can't actually invade me - I have too much stuff. I also really can't capture that western city for at least a few turns if he stacks it that much in it, but I CAN run wild and capture/burn cities that are far more valuable to him. So the goal is to make him see that so that he'll give me those western cities and we can be done. So let's start on the mainland.



Easy win.



So this is why I wanted to win those mediocre-ish odds on BaconFlank, it let me capture this one easily...





(shiny)

...and put a solid defender in it:



The city S-S-SE-SE does have a pinch Knight in it, but that's not getting odds on a full health CG2 Grenadier. If he really wants to throw everything at that city to re-capture it, I'll have CR amphib grens to re-capture it, and I'm sitting on a brand new Commando Knight that I can use to really screw him up if I want (think burn "Bacon" in that picture straight off a boat). My hope is he recognizes all this and takes the deal I'll offer so he can get back to finishing off Azza. Out on the west side:





Pressing the liberate button for once.



First time I've ever done that in a civ game.


I also cleaned up some random units:





That means there are now 0 Chinese units on Legends island - the one remaining city is empty and should not be able to complete a unit (even if it does, I have enough to take it next turn). So it's time to construct my peace offer. As much as I want to be greedy, I decided to be more conservative and offer something I think he might actually take.



I realize those names mean nothing to you, so I'll repeat some pictures in a spoiler tag so you have a reference.

1) The westernmost city (Bakon). Defensible for him, but not nearly as valuable as other cities that aren't defensible.



2) The city directly west of here (BaconWrap) - I moved a few Knights into position to threaten the city, and I have a Commando in reserve. He MAY be able to save it one more turn, but overall it's not defensible with how much he's sending out west.



3) BaconRib - the empty city southwest of here. Totally indefensible for him and will fall next turn regardless.

I strongly considered asking for 1 more - Baconator, the next city by Bakon in the first one, but it would be quite nice if he just takes this. The reality is getting these 3 cities fully intact is more valuable than capturing 5-6. None of these 3 are really "core" cities for him, and it lets him keep his army fully intact to go finish off Azza. If I were him and had full knowledge of what I can do, I would take it. If I were him without full knowledge... I think I would take it, but it depends on if he's making a rational decision or emotional decision. I should be able to extort some sort of peace deal one way or another, but him taking this deal before I start just sailing down the coast and razing everything in sight would be nice. I'm also strongly considering sending some 2-movers through Azza's land - just doing all I can to stretch him thin so he either takes a peace deal that I like or backs away from that front city.

[scooter]

Just cleaning up from the turn, I also did this:



He can definitely save Bacon Wrap if he commits to it, but I thought I would pressure him a little further here. The real question is if he'll use his GG down here in Baconator. Like I've hinted at, I'm still sitting on a Commando Knight, so I've certainly got options here if he decides to counter-attack this. It also takes away from the west front so he has that many fewer hitters against my main stack if I decided to move in again next turn. For now I'm holding before moving in again - I've got about a dozen highly experienced Grenadiers that are only just now joining the front, so that will be particularly nasty to him, since they along with the cannons will happily ignore his walls. I just need a few more units to be able to absorb the type of collateral he's running around with, and those will certainly help provide that.

The real point in threatening this is to give him a taste of me coming down the east side if he doesn't take peace. The Knights aren't a whole lot of help against walls, so my general plan here is to try to threaten backline spots with Knights and amphibious Grens. That'll either draw defenders away or force him into a favorable peace deal. Either way, I should be fine.

If he accepts my offer, I'll probably give him pretty full reign to do his thing with Azza - it would put me over 40 cities, which I would be very satisfied with for the time being.

One highlight that I didn't give any attention just do to the nature of the lengthy turn:



I'm sure this has been discussed at length in other threads, but I just wanted to highlight this. This means that a whopping 10 cities exchanged hands on T195 alone, which is pretty staggering. That's not even counting that Old Harry apparently traded/gifted/something one of those cities over to Dtay before the turn was over.

[scooter]

Turn 196

So I logged in to this offer:



I don't know if I was necessarily ready to settle for this a couple days ago, but things have changed. The main thing is Lewwyn started logging into the game for the first time in a couple months - "Poked Bear" is Lewwyn. And he did this:



Bigger and Lewwyn approach the game pretty differently. To Lewwyn, this war would be a sandbox in which he can just kill stuff for fun with no cares in the world about longterm goals. Hence whipping to the ground. Bigger is more of a cautious, practical player. I don't really want to be in a protracted war with Lewwyn, but Bigger is more likely to just want peace so he can finish off this Azza war he's invested so heavily in. Anyway, all that to say the mental calculus for this war was heavily dependent on Bigger being the turn player rather than Lewwyn.

The second concerning issue in this screenshot (not the Civstats one, the peace offer) is that mackoti is teching Physics. He was clearly aiming for Communism and the Spy not that long ago (going out of his way to tech Liberalism first), but something changed his mind. Anyway, if I'm going to beat him to that scientist, I badly need to end the war and build research everywhere. So...



Peace. I got this city (Bakon), BaconRib (the last city over on Legends Island), and this rather pointless city:



Anyway, getting these cities peacefully is a real advantage for reasons like this:



100% Viking, all buildings intact. I'd be hopelessly choked by his culture if I had captured it. Another major bonus here is the cities surrounding this city were all losing tiles, and now they're much stronger cities with this change. Anyway, I had slightly higher aims for this war, but let's recap what actually happened. I gave Mackoti the following for peace:

3 cities
24 pop

A couple of those cities were borderline indefensible. And I got the following off Bigger:

7 cities
54 pop

More importantly, those are all in locations mackoti can't do anything about, and as a result I have to invest a lot less to defend them. Here's the city count:

mackoti: 37 cities
scooter: 41 cities

I plan to settle around 3 or 4 more cities. They're mostly junk cities, but they'll be instantly profitable. Here's the golden age demos:



GNP doesn't mean a whole lot here in a golden age nor does the MFG. The food means a little bit. What I'm more concerned about right now is population and land area. I'm firmly ahead of mackoti in pop right now, and I believe land area will narrow down a good bit once Legends island cities all come out of revolt, not to mention that my coastal tiles are worth more to me than his coastal tiles. The only real issue now is just narrowing down his beaker gap. The first real step in that is winning this Physics race. So I was pretty worried seeing 3T left, but then I checked this:



He's got research on, so in theory I don't think he can sustain this 3T pace. I've got it very solidly at 4T, and I'm probably going to flip back into Representation now and use a few specialists to see if I can't shave another turn off. I don't think I can though, because it'll dip back to 4T once this golden age expires in 2T. I just am going back and forth on whether I want back into OR or if I want to stay in Theo. Whatever I pick I'm likely gonna be stuck with until my next golden age (at which point I'll also jump into State Property - I've checked and I definitely come out notably ahead there despite uber Free Market), and that will be pretty significantly delayed if I don't land that Physics scientist. So we'll see. I'm hoping there isn't some wizardry, but it seems pretty likely to me that mackoti can't sustain that 3T pace on Physics. Preview-edit: I sure hope he doesn't have a scientist on hand to bulb most of it. I need to check the global log to see what the last great person he got was, because I really don't remember.

All that to say - back at peace. Exciting times.

[frozenmystsl]

Thanks for the great turn report!

[scooter]

Thanks for the great turn report!

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it.


Mechanics question: by any chance does anyone know how the game determines how many turns of anarchy are required for a revolt and/or can you point me in the direction of where to find this?


Anyway, I've spent some time today crunching numbers and trying to decide where to go next tech-wise. When I get some time either tonight or (more likely) tomorrow, I'll try to go into a little more detail.

[Krill]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=turns+of+anarchy

[Ceiliazul]

Aaand google fails. At least on page 1, beyond which i follow the wisdom of Randall:

[Krill]

When that was first posted 4 years ago, it gave CFC as one of the top links.

Here is the article T-hawk wrote.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=342624