[SPOILERS] By the Rivers of Babylon, FIN has no effect (on krovice)

[flugauto]

If you were Ruff, would you pillage your own land?

[Krill]

No. I will not pillage my own land or whip more than once a turn because I find that distasteful. I think that whipping more than once to spite an opponent should be banned. If ruff tries to pillage his cottages all his units will die and it will be easier to take his cities. I'll also make it my aim to fuck ruff up in every game I play with him because I disprove of it.

[Thoth]

No. I will not pillage my own land or whip more than once a turn because I find that distasteful. I think that whipping more than once to spite an opponent should be banned. If ruff tries to pillage his cottages all his units will die and it will be easier to take his cities. I'll also make it my aim to fuck ruff up in every game I play with him because I disprove of it.

[Krill]

I wonder if there is a way to make Villages and Towns unpillageable like roads are.

[flugauto]

I wonder if there is a way to make Villages and Towns unpillageable like roads are.

It is easy to make. Why only Villales and Towns?

[Krill]

Because those are the tiles that need significant investment to reach. Cottages And hamlets not so much. Removing 30-70 Growth turns is almost impossible to replace late game and skews play styles back towards mass workshops.

[Krill]

Shit, next turn is going to be interesting.

novice, I've calculated the number of units that Ruff has to play with. He has 24 catapults and 29 hitters in Boston. I expect there to be additional units added to the city next turn either through build completion or moved in, but there are 53 defenders minimum.




I've stripped out 6 muskets onto galleons, plus 2 rifles from the island, on top of 3 rifles in the stack, 19 knights and 29 muskets. I only have 17 cannon though. Still, we have 59 hitters and the cannon will soften up the strongest defenders.





I've had to play a slightly risky gambit to open up the possibility of taking Boston next turn.

There are 7 rifles, 11 cannon and 8 muskets remaining in Marblehead for 26 defenders; Ruff has the option to slam 24 cats into the stack and then attack with his 29 hitters and potentially retake the city however his 29 hitters includes a warrior, 2 archers, a spear, 1 Xbow, 5 pikes...a bunch of junk that must hit muskets to win and take the city. Because we are defending with cannon, any cat that attacks a cannon will not do collateral damage and thus will not assists as much in wrecking said muskets. I'm not sure what Ruff is going to do, but I'm pretty sure that he has to micro that battle amazingly to throw cats at the rifles to uncover the cannon, get his knights to have good odds against the cannon which involves throwing away more cats at each cannon, and then he has to have enough cats left to wreck the muskets to open up the weak units to retake the city.

Can he do that? He can try, but I think the odds are amazingly low unless he somehow has constructed another knight stack in the fog. He would likely kill quite a few units but it would hasten his demise a few turns.

His other options are to retreat next turn and give Boston up, attack the main SoD, or to sit in Boston.

If Ruff retreats again like he did at Lynn, I then have to defend Marblehead and Boston, and try to raze Lynn and replace with a settler from Marblehead. Then move the garrison from Marblehead up and just leap frog forward razing cities as we go. It'll be slow and painful and we are going to start running into rifles if we do that. I don't think is going to be an enjoyable experience but it's the only way to play it that doesn't leave us getting a section of a stack annihilated trying to hold cities.

If Ruff attacks the main SoD it's going to get pretty banged up but those 17 cannon will nullify most of his cats, leaving only 7 assuming he hits each cannon once with a cat. He would probably have to throw a couple at the rifles anyway, and I suspect the remainder will still hit cannon rather than muskets. That leaves his 13 knights to attack and although he has pinch on most of them I suspect that the rifles may eat a couple then the knights will start attacking my knights rather than any muskets. The junk won't matter. I'll lose units, but I doubt I'll lose much in this scenario, the cannon are good defenders.

If Ruff sits in the city it's going to be a blood bath. CR2 cannon will murder everything, it's not even funny. The frigates will clear out the last 5% city defense bonus but a CR2 cannon has 66% odds against the CG1 musket with 25% fort...and any CG2 musket without fort has the same odds. Against maces, cannon get 77%, and 95% against knights.





I think the right choice for Ruff is to retreat, it hurts me the most, but if BGN enters the war then Ruff is retreating towards there and he is going to be playing this out for a very long time and god knows how it affects all three of us.





Oh the GNP sucks. Next turn with Corp it may be a bit better, we also have a good chunk of buildings completing.







Trying to figure out the timetable for OU. I think that I'm going to take the wheat back and the plains hill mine plus mine the two windmills and suck up the food deficit. That gives us 20 base hpt, for 35hpt after modifiers. So long as we overflow 11 base hammers we can get OU in 11 turns, and given the rifle build it should be possible to micro to overflow that many hammers. We can't start OU until the university completes at OT which is not due to finish until eot T198 which means we should finish OU eot T209.

With Corp finishing end of this turn we'll have to reconsider the tech routes but I'm still tempted by Steam Power and Levees, which two people seem to have at present.

[Ceiliazul]

so if a catapult attacks a cannon not only does it get bad odds on attack it also does zero collateral to the rest of the stack? that makes can and much more powerful if true. maybe even the best defenders of the age.

[Krill]

Yeah, and it's why Machine Guns used to be bee lined, they are siege units as well and thus also produce this effect.

Cannon aren't the "best" defenders really, in this game we bee lined them and reached them maybe 5 turns before we could have reached rifles. Against dtay whom had rifles and cav from his tech lead at the time, our stack lacked high strength units. dtay had enough units to win the first battles with good odds and would also have flanked away the cannon due to the cav effect. That's why I never dared move against dtay except with extreme caution and only after we saw him take a huge pounding from Pindicator.

Against tech inferior opponents like Ruff, whom lacks both high strength units to get odds on the cannon and no units that can flank them away, they do fulfill the criteria of good defenders, that of high strength and being impervious to the effects of collateral (i.e. even after getting hit by collateral they still have odds on defense against attacking units. As they are immune to collateral this criteria is met).

Frankly, tech paths matter, and I believe the Steel bee line is still one of best methods for killing someone that is backward in tech. I'm not sure if dtay made a mistake by going for Rifling, in fact I doubt that he did because cannon wouldn't have helped him defend against OT on land but dry docks would have helped at sea. For us I think any other path was suicidal.

[Krill]

2K words for you all to ignore.

The only questions in my mind are what happens when dtay and OT clash again, and how much do I help dtay...

...

After that you get to the top 5 in score, more on them (us?) later.

What action do you think OT should have taken instead of signing peace?

Looking forward to the top5 analysis.

Well, I've had a busy few days which is why they top 5 countdown has been delayed. 12 hour night shifts can be a bit of a bitch; if you don't get to sleep quickly after finishing work, I find I don't get any sleep. And there is not much willingness to do any except drink coffee and dread getting up before leaving the next evening. But I'm free now, so I'll start the number four update.

This one is going to take a while to write, because at fourth in score is ourselves.

I think that it will be more fun to analyse our gameplay to get to this point first, before considering our future options; I'll state now that I do not believe this game winnable from this position that I find the babylonian civ at on T194. I think that given the start positions this start could win the game, but given the start positions plus the players given each start, and the random civ/leader pairings, this start probably wasn’t going to win the game.

The Babylonian start is one of the few starts that did not have a plains hill (2 hammer) start. There were two hammer tiles that could be moved to, but that would have meant losing one of the food resources (and the 6 food tile at that). BGN, Old Tourist, TBS, dtay, GermanJojo (scooter), Plako, the contenders got 2 hammers starts, so the babylonian start was always going to be slower than those starts and hence needed to find a way to catch up in expansion from the 3 turns lost on the first worker etc. Unfortunately, the babylonian start ended up pulling CRE/FIN with a large river at hte start to nullify early trait advantages and slower expansion compared to EXP, IMP, and PRO. The only ancient era advantages were free border pops and a UU that deters axe rushes (and swords?)

What some may consider the Babylonian start having was the availabilty of more land compared to most starts. I don’t think this is actually true, just that other players decisions were taken advantage of.

So given the slow start from the lack of 2 hammer plant, by T38 we were just founding our second city. Meanwhile dtay had settled his second and third cities, using EXP/PRO to build up a snowball. dtay had settled for his copper/gold/grass hill pig as his third city, and his second city for double food (Wilfork, which was to become his shrine city but more on that later).





This is the point where CRE starts to make a difference. We settled cities widely and didn’t overlap the BFC, settling for maximum food resources and trying to push crop yield and growth as much as possible.







The city locations we chose were all double food resources but lacked strategic resources. They were chosen because they gave us a defensive position that would make it harder for dtay to attack us. This was necessary because dtays faster start meant he would have an opportunity to settle this area before us if we focussed on settling strategic resources and thus would have more land, we’d have less, and he would just make his snowball bigger and faster.

This dotmap gave us more land, and makes it look like the Babylonian start position was inherently larger than it “should” have been, whereas in reality the start position should have had less land available if it followied the same settling prioritisation as other civs of getting copper, horse and gold hooked immediately. The downside was that Pottery was completely ignored, delaying cottages and commerce output which essentially meant that we could never compete in the tech race.

We were also open to a HA rush. If dtay had raced to HBR rather than getting Judaism and attacked by T70, he’d have won this game by T100 because we couldn’t have stopped him. but if he didn’t do this, then the city locations on hills and with a good road network could be covered by a HA stack on 1 central tile. It was a gambit and it paid off. The downside of the dotmap is that dtay could not be approached easily by any attack just like we couldn’t, so it can be argued that this dot map required either player to go big or go home: either winning the game by quickly killing the other, or being kept in a stalemate for the rest of the game.

Fast forward to T195, and you see that we had fallen behind in tech but started a war against Ruff to claim the island between us. Well, I call it an island, it has enough space on it for 8 cities although we’ve only planted 7.




We ended up settling a dot map that stopped Ruffs ability to assault our cities with a naval invasion without giving us the option to hit his units after he landed them, blockaded a 1 tile strait and basically just stopped Ruff from having any claim on the island after T96. We should not have been able to do this: Ruff had a coastal capital and should have started claiming the island much sooner. The position of his production cities on the coast enabled this, I consider it a misplay to not go for the island before this. So we added to our land by killing 1 axe, this was our only aggressive act involving a war declaration and ended up giving us enough land for 25 cities without having them crammed in together.




Got Mids T100. So the first 100 turns of the game led to us being able to settle so many cities that other players pretty much had to kill someone to match us and a wonder that would help us to catch back up in tech given time. We had a defensible ront against both land neighbours.

The problems with our start was that we lost the neighbour lottery and the slower development that caused the tech lag gave dtay an opportunity to shut us out of the game. dtay used this time to build up a tech lead and would reach Guilds in the next 20 turns, turns that we would need to use to consolidate this position. dtay had invested in a significant number of cottages whereas we had almost none, which ensures his late game tech relevance.




The upshot of all that was that dtay was able to take the rest of the continent. We pushed him a bit and took some of Whosits land in the form of Overland Park (resettled as Pigeon English, our future IW city) and Plano. dtay ended up with a really stretched out empire and we had a block that resembled France in shape. We had to invest heavily in War Elephants to deter dtay from attacking us, delaying the consolidation of our cities. We weren’t able to invest in cottages except at Eggcorn and Old Timers because of the need for hammers immediately to build units.

By this point, every action we had taken in game was a reaction to dtay, because he had a faster start. To return to the opening point in this post, I said we were one of the few teams that didn’t have a 2 hammer plant. I firmly believe that if we had had that 2 hammer plant this wouldn’t have happened. No offensive wars could take place because it would have opened up an invasion from dtay.

I think I’ll just move forward once more to the dtay invasion and the Fall of WIllow Lake




We attacked dtay after he made a mistake and lost a stack of units to Pindicator. I don’t know why or how, except that I believe he underestimated the number of units Pin had available and the monumental damage that catapults can inflict when you have enough of them. But I fucked up and burnt two Great Artists to hold Willow Lake, that we should have used differently, maybe in an earlier Ruff attack. At this point we could no longer win the game, and it was a long shot when we attacked. I think I made a mistake to attack dtay but I can’t prove it. The failure of this attack was caused by the lack of equal units from the tech deficit and the difficulty to approach dtays cities unseen and quickly, we would always give him to long to reposition his troops that our stack could be attacked prior to reaching one of his cities. It has been the stalemate that was expected after choosing to use this dotmap.

After this point there wasn’t much that we could do.

Our options involve sitting at our current borders and waiting for the end of the game, or invading Ruff or Plako. The latter kinda requires some form of peace from dtay to be truly effective. We caught up in tech to the leaders (ie we weren’t tech laggards because we managed to get a good amount of land) but tech then started to fall off again as the players that were able to take over their continents utilised their greater output to simply research faster.

Does what we do now matter? Yes. We can be annoying to BGN if he wants to wage war on us, but he has to declare on us or take Cambridge for me to consider that. Old Tourist are too far away to really screw with but we could blockade a bit of their coast. dtay we can fight to a standstill (we are up 500K soldier points on second place and now have equal tech units to his, plus greater CY and MFG). We can’t reach TBS to affect him, nor GermanJojo. but at the same time, we aren’t really conquerable anymore.

If BGN tried to fight me, he would by necessity leave himself open to attack from OldTourist. dtay couldn’t. OldTourist are too faraway to hurt me and have to eitehr land and walk across a few tiles to reach Willow Lake...or land in dtays cities giving me the same advantage. if he tried to sail to me, I have stronger units due to dry docks and probably have a stronger navy anyway. At least until they reach Destroyers but at the same point attacking me opens themselves up to attack from BGN (or his attempt at Domination).

So whilst we kinda matter, we also kinda don’t.

My aims for this game are to finish third now. I believe that killing Ruff would put us in a similar position to TBS in number of cities, and after that we can consider attacking Plako. At least the island cities are easy to capture, but after that we would need to raze all but one of his coastal cities and push on like we have against Ruff, using the same tactics. Whether we do that is dependent on how much effort I want to put into the game.