[NO PLAYERS] PB25 Lurker Thread - Then Happy I, That Lurk and am Belurked

[Dreylin]

Just a very quick response; how much competitive MP have you played vs. SP? The reason I ask is because you didn't mention Knights once, and around here the generally accepted wisdom is that 2-move units are more valuable than 1-move. Think lightning fast attacks before the opponent can respond, forking cities and generally using mobility to find the weak spots. Larger territory means larger borders and more point to defend.

I agree that quantity can make up for quality, but you can't fall too far behind because it's often impossible to catch up. In this case it may be a cramped enough map that it is a worthwhile attack, but I'm not a good enough MP player yet to pass an opinion on that.

[Old Harry]

Hi Mr C, welcome to the forums!

I agree with Dreylin - 2-movers are the issue. Half of HAK+Mindy's northern neighbour (who is closer than they imagine) recently beat everyone in a 33 player game to Knights by at least five turns, while the other has a reputation for happily warring with no regard for the consequences.

Taking cities from Grimace means HAK suddenly has a long border with Comotay that's very vulnerable to 1-movers let alone 2-movers. Either Knights or Horse Archers could chop him in two, then the production advantage is lost as you can't concentrate your forces. The trouble with a long border is that you need X units in every city where X is the number of units required to hold off your attacker's stack, whereas your attacker needs Y units, where Y is the number of units required to take one city. And if X and Y are similar then with three cities the defender needs three times as many units.

With perfect map-maker knowledge I'd put a couple of cities north of HAK's cap, on hills, with culture and reinforced very strongly with spears, then longbows and walls. Then I'd expand southwest (to stop people stealing his back-lines) and east and onto the island as quick as possible. Of course he doesn't know he's racing for the SW and island as well so its easy to get distracted by a juicy neighbour.

HAK is a smart enough guy who gets sidetracked by wonders, doesn't try too hard and doesn't plan things enough. From what I've seen so far Mindy may be the perfect teammate to stop all that happening. I just hope it doesn't mean Mindy's warrior inclination throws the spanner into their works instead .

[Mr. Cairo]

Thanks for the quick replies, I will try and keep playing devil's advocate in favour of an early HAK attack, since I think that is the best way to encourage debate and therefore increase my MP knowledge. (Although my primary motivation for wanting HAK/Mindy to do this axe rush is for the lurker fun)

Just a very quick response; how much competitive MP have you played vs. SP? The reason I ask is because you didn't mention Knights once, and around here the generally accepted wisdom is that 2-move units are more valuable than 1-move. Think lightning fast attacks before the opponent can respond, forking cities and generally using mobility to find the weak spots. Larger territory means larger borders and more point to defend.

I haven't played any competitive MP Civ 4, and I suppose that 2-movers are a lot more important when fighting against an opponent who doesn't just put everything into cities waiting for you to attack (the AI), but I just don't see that knights would be able to take any of HAK's cities efficiently by themselves unless HAK messes up. Longbows behind 40% cultural defenses and walls are really enough to make any attack pre-Rifling require siege units, and I don't see HAK leaving any cities within reach of Commodtay's 2-movers defended by anything other than longbows behind walls. To me, reacting to an invasion by a neighbor with superior productive capabilities and a numerically superior force (even if it is technologically inferior, ei: knight-less) with a counter invasion, with one- or two-movers, can only be a mistake. In such a situation, the defender, with less units, less cities, and a tech advantage in the form of knights, would want to use their units (especially their knights) as efficiently as possible. Attacking cities defended by longbows is not an efficient use of units. I would instead want to wipe out my opponents invading stack(s) with as few losses as possible, and would therefore use my knights for that purpose. Counter-invading, even if it's only with 2-movers, invites, at best, a war of attrition that the player with the city/production advantage should always win.

Taking cities from Grimace means HAK suddenly has a long border with Comotay that's very vulnerable to 1-movers let alone 2-movers. Either Knights or Horse Archers could chop him in two, then the production advantage is lost as you can't concentrate your forces. The trouble with a long border is that you need X units in every city where X is the number of units required to hold off your attacker's stack, whereas your attacker needs Y units, where Y is the number of units required to take one city. And if X and Y are similar then with three cities the defender needs three times as many units.

I can see that having a long border with Commodtay would be an issue if you're thinking about how to defend against an attack, but HAK should really never be thinking about defending v Commodtay after they've absorbed Grimace, but always thinking aggressively. In that situation you don't need to defend each of your cities with enough to stop the opponent from taking it, just enough to make it costly. If you have an advantage in cities, and therefore production, you can afford to lose 1 city if it costs your opponent a lot of units, and you can afford to spend a lot of units taking their cities. Both cities and units are a lot less individually valuable to a larger civ than to a smaller civ.

I am aware that this sort of thinking only really works on a map this small and crowded, and from reading a lot of older PBs here on RB, I have seen how effective 2-movers can be at lightning attacks into lightly/poorly defended cities, but I just don't think that should be a worry for HAK here, even if they do fall behind tech-wise. And, as I mentioned in my first post, I doubt that they will fall behind in tech for very long, in fact having that extra land should eventually translate into a tech lead by the medieval/ren eras.

[Dreylin]

The biggest problem with turtling up inside the city and defending with Longbows is that the attacking Knight force then just runs around and pillages away all the improvements that are giving you that superior production. It's a shame that REM wasn't able to keep reporting on PBEM61, because I think there you would have seen a really good illustration of the power that a 2-move force can have against a neighbour.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Half of HAK+Mindy's northern neighbour (who is closer than they imagine) recently beat everyone in a 33 player game to Knights by at least five turns, while the other has a reputation for happily warring with no regard for the consequences.

I had other priorities, I think. But yeah, dtay played a fabulous early game and took advantage of his weak neighbors who had warred forever. Knights were the key to his success. The critical point is how much you get out of the war vs. how much you have to invest attain your objective. Knights have much higher survivability than HAs with the same tempo to the attack. Less defender whips is often the difference between success and failure, particularly with all of the advantages that go to the defender in the early game (until Astronomy/galleons but really until bombers blast warfare options wide open).

Taking cities from Grimace means HAK suddenly has a long border with Comotay that's very vulnerable to 1-movers let alone 2-movers. Either Knights or Horse Archers could chop him in two, then the production advantage is lost as you can't concentrate your forces. The trouble with a long border is that you need X units in every city where X is the number of units required to hold off your attacker's stack, whereas your attacker needs Y units, where Y is the number of units required to take one city. And if X and Y are similar then with three cities the defender needs three times as many units.

I agree with the difficulty in defending along a broad front. I do not, however, think this should discourage them from making the attempt, unless they feel that whoever neighbors Grimace on the other side (is this Commotay?) would get half the land for free. That would be a recipe for disaster, but possibly not for HAK/Mindy, just for the rest of the field. In Commotay's position, I would likely seek to fill the vacuum created by Grimace's demise (does geography support this? I don't remember) and be happy for HAK/Mindy to take the other half, being confident that our two civs could separate from the pack and then Commotay would be able to manage the HAK problem later. This is still not a reason for HAK to avoid the attack. Finishing second (?) is better than what HAK may otherwise be facing.

Addressing Mr. Cairo's point about the effectiveness of knights, I'll just say it's better to be on the dishing end than the receiving end of a stack of 10-12 knights when your opponent doesn't have them yet. You don't have to take out the frontal fortress first. It may be tactically better to let your enemy hole up in his fortress while you sweep through the rest of the underdefended interior cities, then mop up the fortress later with reinforcements. Look at what I was able to do to Qgqqqqq (I think that's the right number of q's....) in PB18 with this tactic. You also assume the enemy will have longbows to match your knights. This may not be the case if you beeline to Guilds. To win in war, you must first win in economy and bring technologically superior units to the field. Failing that, be prepared to invest a ton of hammers and make force with blunt force trauma. While effective, this lessens the gains you can hope to make and will make it harder for you to catch up to the leading civs.

I'd love to see this rush work. Do'eeeeettt!!!

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

The biggest problem with turtling up inside the city and defending with Longbows is that the attacking Knight force then just runs around and pillages away all the improvements that are giving you that superior production. It's a shame that REM wasn't able to keep reporting on PBEM61, because I think there you would have seen a really good illustration of the power that a 2-move force can have against a neighbour.

Well, to be fair, those were phracts. Same principle, just allows a better execution because those things are hax. I had a good time with them in PB11, but that's about the only fun provided from that game. Which never actually happened, soo...

[Dreylin]

I think it's:

Commotay retap

HAK/Mindy Grimace

isn't it?

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

I think it's:

Commotay retap

HAK/Mindy Grimace

isn't it?

Are you chopping that into tiers to compete for the win or is that supposed to be the geography of the map? The intended spacing in your post didn't come through once you posted.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I think it's:

Commotay retap

HAK/Mindy Grimace

isn't it?

So

Code:

I think it's:

Commotay                  retap

HAK/Mindy                 Grimace

isn't it?

[Qgqqqqq]

Yeah, knights are terrifying, especially if you don't have engineering. You can't afford to just sit in your cities - it's a losing strategy - so the only way turtling works is if it allows you to have a confrontation with your cat stack on your terms (which can easily switch the balance, see me vs. Ruff, for example, where vastly inferior units butchered his knights). And remember, turtling isn't hammer efficient with any sort of long border - two movers can fork cities, they can hit cities out of the fog if you don't have good culture, and they can blitz using the roads opened up by a dead city. At inferior tech, they are rightly terrifying.

I think 3-promo knights aren't far off 'phracts, especially if you're behind on tech. Getting odds with no units on the attack sans-catapults is annoying as hell.