(July 12th, 2017, 15:42)Mardoc Wrote: Speaking of secrets - the one thing I've been wondering for the past 20 turns is: How do you fight Cossacks? The most important feature of them appears to be the ability to do a true hit and run, so that you're always trading away the health of some Cossacks (which regenerates) for complete units of your foe.
I will stipulate that when you fight Cossacks you're at parity in cogs into military and in military technology; I'd expect it to be a bad idea to fight Cossacks with outdated units, but it's always going to be a bad idea to fight anyone with outdated units.
The only possibility that came to mind for me was to have Cavalry or similar in reserve, so that after the Russian player hits you and runs, they can't run far enough that you can't catch them. Then you force the Russian player to trade units instead of having zero casualties. But even there, it seems like you're at a significant disadvantage, since the Cossacks start stronger than cavalry and you're trying to fight them inside Russia for another strength boost.
You had some ideas, but I don't think you fleshed them out, or if you did, I didn't see it. What ideas did you come up with?
I have a number of ideas. Some of them may be overly specific to this game, but might be valid in the future. At any rate, I'll have a crack at it, others are free to add on.
1. Don't let an opponent with a strong economy get to cossacks.
- Simple, but effective.
The weaknesses with Cossacks are few, but notable, so the rest will be based on exploiting these. Cossacks are extremely good at single target destruction, but like all melee units they have difficulty with fortifications. Without a battering ram and facing adequately protected cities they quail. They're very expensive, and the civic to get a production modifier on them is under Divine Right. This is a civic many players will skip, so getting them at a remotely cost-efficient price requires forgoing other civics and investing a ton of hammers/gold/faith to get them built.
I think they're amazing defenders. They get a strength bonus is friendly lands, and on a friendly road network, can hit and run with inpunity. For them to attack, you need a critical mass of them. Think 4-6. The key thing is to be able to one shot cities/units and retreat out of range, and for that you need quantity.
With that in mind, I think there are some self-balancing aspects to them in that they require numbers to be used effectively offensively.
With their dependency on roads in mind, I would recommend pillaging all the roads between you and a player with cossacks. This was an option for me though, and not for Woden. Woden also was more vulnerable because he bordered Alhambram, and there was a fair bit of hit territory where cossacks could get their adjacency bonus. In that regard, when I was planning my defense, I considered it of utmost importance the I didn't lose a city. Because losing a city and giving the Russians territory begets more losses thanks to that strength bonus.
So, with these things in mind, I would suggest the following alternate/additional steps:
2. Pre-emptively attack before the player can build a sufficient number of expensive cossacks to go on the offense.
3. Prioritize Civil Engineering and city-defenses
4. Pillage connecting roads where possible.
5. Try to avoid losing territory to begin with (easier said than done)
6. Make sure to assign tiles in cities so that if you do lose a city, it doesn't massively increase the area where cossacks can operate with a bonus.
All of this is more or less aimed at the idea of being able to survive a one-shot. Limit their mobility and force them to end turn with a couple cossacks or that precious battering ram next to one of your cities. At that point, use your own units (@Mardoc, cavalry do strike me as the best counter short of infantry), to counterattack and kill them. You don't even need to eliminate an entire cossack force to stop an assault. Lowering its efficacy but killing just a couple units and removing the ability to cascade with cossacks is sufficient.
Play for time, force the player to take suboptimal battles against fortified cities, and then to have to consequently take time healing their units - giving you time to reach infantry.
I'm going to spend quite a bit of time analyzing the Sino-Russian war soon, but a few other details from that conflict stand out to me. I think even if Alhambram had had cavalry instead of cossacks, he still would have taken Jungle Cruise and Nan Madol at the very least.
Why?
1. Alhambram had a GG. That fact alone made him scary. The fact that he had a GG leading Cossacks was just icing on the cake. I think this edge actually got lost a bit in the OMG COSSACKS OP RITO PLZ NERF. Even with the same number of cavalry and a GG, he still would have been very successful.
2. Woden's territory had 1 encampment. I've really come to believe the encampment is one of the better districts in the game. You saw in the east, conflicts were often shaped by the location of these encampments and you maneuvered to avoid them or take them first. They provided hard points that slowed an invader. Each of us in the west built 2-3. Alhambram had 6. Woden had 1. Once he passed the bastion of Jungle Cruise, there was little to stem the tide.
3. Woden's territory was indefensible. I talked about this a lot around t140. Zanzibar formed a salient into Woden's territory, and it was an impossible empire to defend with even numbers and tech. There were just too many directions Alhambram could attack from. Now add to that him having Cossacks and there being a good road network.
4. Woden's tactics. I won't comment on this much until I actually delve into Woden's thread in deeper detail. I've already commented briefly on Woden's curious tech and civic choices. I'll give him a pass on DotF, as Azoth has indicated that was not an option when he grabbed Tithe. I can't fault him for not knowing he would need it earlier in the game. However, I don't think Woden realized how serious his situation was until it was too late, and instead of conserving his forces and saving them to upgrade, was throwing them around willy nilly and getting them killed. His unit losses to Alhambram were incredible, and I think if he had recognized the trouble he was in sooner, he would have saved quite a few more field cannons and musketmen to make the defense of Monsanto possible.
This fed into a final factor:
5. Alhambram's lack of unit losses. War weariness, while not as punishing as it was in Civ4, is still a big factor in this game. Conquest is naturally gated by it. The fact that Woden couldn't kill more than 1 of Alhambram's units ensured that Alhambram could absorb China with impunity, and never had to slow his rate of conquest, look into Retainers, or sue for peace.
So, there are some quick thoughts. I may add more later. My main takeaways are that Cossacks are incredibly strong, but can theoretically be countered or pre-empted. They reach a point of critical mass at some point though, and if a player has enough of them (10+), they're damn near unstoppable. That being said, I do think with the benefit of hindsight, that Alhambram would still have been very successful without cossacks for the reasons listed above. He attacked at the right time, had a good grasp of unit tactics, and probably would have taken a couple cities even without a UU. Woden was just especially vulnerable around t160, and Alhambram exploited it.
. Never count on others to do something you can do. ( That was he big reason how Lord Parkin won PB4 )
Glad to have you along for the ride!
