It's Clobberin' Time! Raging Barbs Highlands Tokugawa on Monarch

[haphazard1]

Roster:

Zalson
RFS-81
haphazard1 (just played)
Brian Shanahan (UP)
shallow_thought (on deck)

[Brian Shanahan]

Will look at the save tomorrow, just about ready for bed.

One question, how many spies have we and how much EP on Iulius? There's always a non-siegey way around castles.

[RFS-81]

I love that picture of the power graphs

You mentioned stealing a tech from Mansa Musa, but did you try to steal any techs from Julius?

[Zalson]

Did you add any cities?

[haphazard1]

We do not have any spies in Rome at the moment; the one we had in Rome itself was caught on the second turn there. We have one spy in our capital (the tech stealer who finished his mission) and a couple up north watching the barbs.

EP...we have some, but not a huge amount. Enough for passive spying, but for major active spying we would probably need to run the espionage slider. Not sure that is worth doing just to bypass defenses, when siege units can take them out just as easily without spending commerce. A big part of our army is one-movers anyway, so we are not moving fast with two-movers and needing a way to drop defenses for fast stacks. We could move to that approach, particularly if we get Military Tradition and cuirassiers (and later cavalry). But right now we need siege units anyway to fight Rome's technologically superior units.

The power graph is looking a lot better. We crushed a big Roman stack at the start of my turnset and another big stack at the end, while building a ton of units, so our military position relative to Julius is a lot better. But that was the main focus of my turnset; I got a few economic buildings done but not many, and we could use some more workers. And maybe some settlers if we want to grab any more of the north before the AIs do; I think we would be better putting our efforts into conquering Rome. If we can take out Julius, or at least seriously hurt him, then I don't think any of the other AIs will be able to stop us. Shaka's power is rising steadily, but hopefully he will expend his strength against Willem and not bother us for a while.

If we leave Julius alone with his double golden age (or does he have Mausollos? Triple golden age? ) then he is going to keep teching and building big stacks to hit us. I recommend we go take a few of his cities, if we can.

[Zalson]

I think spies can steal from any city, not just Rome. is there a specific reason we dispatched a spy all the way to Rome?

I think the cost of 1 turn of espionage to drop a city to 0 defenses for 1 turn might be worth it. Then we can use the catapults for collateral instead of besieging. We will need like 60 catapults or 30 trebuchets to drop a Chicken Pizza Castle city to 0% in one turn. Then we have to wait a turn to collateral, unless we have like 10 more trebs or catapults.

That's a lot of opportunity cost in catapults. We can use 2-3 40h units instead to drop the defenses in 1 turn, at a cost of, what 50% of commerce? It's 2,100 hammers or significantly less in EP.

I think we should definitely try to conquer Rome but the nice thing about the northern cities is that:

1. They're super cheap (100 hammers)
   
2. They protect the core
   

We should only settle the best spots but we should attempt to do both. Conquer Rome and expand northward. Cities like Advanced Wars and ... the old Incan Gold city aren't going to be able to contribute a lot to the war effort.

I agree we need to take the fight to Julius; we just have a bunch of priorities :P

Oh and I agree on Mil Trad after Nationalism. Let's get currassier on the field.

[haphazard1]

It is not necessary to reduce a city's defenses to zero in one turn; 10-12 trebs is plenty to reduce defenses over a few turns even in a castle city. And then you have them for doing stack damage, keeping your main units mostly alive and gaining XP. It does require a steady flow of replacement siege units, but that is going to be true in any case when we are attacking technologically superior units.

But that is up to the next player. I just prefer to spend my commerce on research, rather than revolts in cities. If we were going with a mostly 2-mover army then spies and revolts would definitely be attractive.

The spy in Rome was there at the start of my turnset; I believe it had been used to reveal/map out Rome's territory and just happened to end up in Rome, which is way back in the southeast corner of the map. Since it was already there I had it remain stationary to start building up the discount, but it was caught the next turn. For the Mansa steal I used one of the northern spies which had finished exploring that area, and just went to the closest Mansa city.

The old Incan cities are mainly contributing economically; Advanced Wars is one of the places I kept building economic buildings to multiply the shrine income. Buddhism is adding a lot of gold to our treasury every turn.

Now that the war situation is (for the moment) stable we can build some more settlers for the north; there are still some decent spots like the multi-furs site that should pay off pretty quickly. But I was rather busy building troops almost everywhere for a while; Julius is a major threat if we leave him alone to build more troops. We need to hit him hard while we can; if he techs to rifles and starts sending rifles and cavs at us we will have big problems stopping that.

Forgot to mention, there was an AP vote to force Julius to return Gao to Mansa. Voted in favor, and it passed. Might as well use the AP against Rome when we can.

[Zalson]

It is not necessary to reduce a city's defenses to zero in one turn; 10-12 trebs is plenty to reduce defenses over a few turns even in a castle city. And then you have them for doing stack damage, keeping your main units mostly alive and gaining XP. It does require a steady flow of replacement siege units, but that is going to be true in any case when we are attacking technologically superior units.

Against the AI, this works. I'm more thinking that optimally, we'd want to remove the enemy's ability to respond. Although I'm not sure 30 trebuchets is an optimal play, though.

[Brian Shanahan]

Ok I've had a look at the save and everything looks good so far. I've looked at the espionage situation, and we've enough EPs to spy bonk 1 1/2 Roman cities into revolt (if a spy was sitting in the city at no discount). I switch all focus onto him for now, if I got enough for two or even three revolts that'd probably be enough to turn the tide from a slog to a strong victory.

I've queued in a few more spies around the empire, and I've set Cholo to Samurai building, I'd love to get a few CR3 Sams so we can upgrade them to CR3 rifles (it's not an especially good move in MP but CR3 rifles and later infantry absolutely murder other units in SP).

I'll look to get out some settlers during the set, in backline cities and burn through Nationalism. I'm not too gone on Cuirs as they are a very quickly outdated unit which has no advantages against contemporaries. I'd much prefer rifles and cannon so I'll see where I go after Nationalism.

Edit: Will play tomorrow night and report.

[haphazard1]

Good luck, Brian!

Cuirassiers only become quickly outdated if tech is actually progressing rapidly. Until rifles they are the strongest units we could build, and rifles are quite a ways off yet; teching the path through to Replaceable Parts and Rifling is not going to be quick with our economy.

Having some city raider samurai does sound good, if we can finally get on to offense and not just playing defense as we have been. And having them for later upgrades is very useful.