[SPOILERS] naufragar is in for a penny

[naufragar]

Mack continues to grind me down.


He didn't kill any units, but damaged some severely. I've moved a pike from Commander's Keep to the fort (there's now a fort). This means there's only two muskets and a chariot in the city, but hopefully that's enough. I wonder if that is a stupid unnecessary risk. You can tell from the combat log that the units he used were amphibious. I wonder how many more amphib units he can get? It's not a cheap promotion, and I have to hope he can't produce them right out of the box, but a stable, barracks, theocracy, vassalage gets him pretty darn close. He'd only need a great general. Forgot to check his civics. We just have to hope he has trouble fielding amphibious troops, although everything around Commander's Keep is promoted to Combat 4, which might as well be amphib. I made the questionable choice of promoting a musket with medic. Perhaps that's overly optimistic. We'll see if it dies this turn.

Oh also, somehow, my cities coming out of revolt for Mack cut off my internal trade. Commander's Keep is well and truly alone. Note my 9 gold per turn at zero science.  

Adrien is pushing culture out of Ethioranje, which is clever. He's taken an internal lake tile from me.


Guess I'll take a breather from units down there to get some culture? Idk. That seems silly. I cut the roads on the western side of the island to make forks more difficult.


Still worried about Mack's marines. Hope I left a large enough garrison in the Keep.


Edit: Forgot to give global picture:


After the age of knights, things are quieting down. Presumably, the leaders are waiting on rifles and cannon. Elkad is down to one city, so perhaps I'll outlast another player, which at this point is what we're playing for. Mack and I have been at war for 26 turns. But who's counting? I'll be able to cross off two MP milestones: dying to knights and to galleons.

[naufragar]

What was happening in the game? It's hard to keep focus when the turns stretch to 48hrs. Hmm. Oh right! Mack was paper cutting us to death:


We lost a pike, but our xbow survived. I think he completed another galleon, so next turn he hits us with six units. I've pulled the injured crossbow back into the city to heal, which means I'm basically ceding the fort tile, which in turn means that he won't need many more amphibious units and can start shipping cats over. (Which, in its turn, means it's time to start the dry whips of muskets. Days numbered.) I checked Mack's civics, and he's not in either vassalage or theocracy, so I don't know where he's pulling all these amphibious units from.

[naufragar]

I have captured 4 cities this game, 3 from naval invasions. I don't know why I wasn't able to raze Liberty Rock (something to do with my culture being dominant, perhaps?). So, I can't deny it from Mack permanently, but I hope this makes him raise his eyebrows while checking civstats. My galleys could threaten the lightly defended cities he has around here, but he should be able to get musketeers or knights (darn two movers) to defend if he cares at all. We'll see how he reacts.

Unfortunately, he's hurting me a lot more than I can hurt him:


He has a foothold. It's over. (More than it has previously been over.)

My garrison:



2 miscellaneous thoughts: We used to have a smilie that was giggling behind its hand. What happened to that? And, man, this turn pace.   Comes with the territory, I suppose.

[Mardoc]

I have captured 4 cities this game, 3 from naval invasions.

Congratulations! Tenacious to the end

I don't know why I wasn't able to raze Liberty Rock (something to do with my culture being dominant, perhaps?).

Yep, can't raze your own cities, and I'm pretty sure culture is how 'your own' is measured. At least you get your cultural borders back immediately and no revolt time in the city...

[naufragar]

Congratulations!  Tenacious to the end

Thanks! It'll take me three turns to get to another Mack city, which is 18 tiles that musketeers and knights can travel, so if he respects the naval threat at all, he has time to defend. The nice thing about getting borders back is that I might have time to get a unit or two into Liberty Rock just to make it annoying to take.

From civstats it looks like I haven't lost Commander's Keep yet. What's the Les Mis song? One more turn?

[naufragar]

Mack apparently accomplished his war goals and was game to let me keep the city I sniped back a couple turns ago.




Ok, so listen folks. I'm second to last on scoreboard. I have three cities all surrounded by bigger neighbors. Those cities are vulnerable to boating. This peace offer gets me ten turns of not getting shelled.

On the other hand:


It would take Mack 6-8 turns (or more) to get his galleons down to Adrien-isle, so this peace treaty only guarantees me ~two extra. Do I think Mack would keep the peace when the treaty is up? Actually, I do. His entire south is like the pic above. (City visibility is a wonderful thing.) The only place with any troops is Commander's Keep. He pretty clearly wants to grab the presumptive Astro islands away from TBS. His gains from finishing me off would be marginal.

I didn't take peace. I've moved up to attack Factory Drift:


I didn't sim this attack. Just kinda eyeballed it. If we can break through, we can also grab Citadel Station and start being a real pain down south.

I'm making this attack rather than accepting peace, because my civ is obviously dead either way, but getting more build queues and more places to hold out in preserves me a little longer, I think. I'm taking the time to write this out for two reasons. I would like Mack to be able to read why I decided to keep up a hopeless fight. I'm very aware that my original attack after he invaded Rusten and now this one could be seen as going against my self-interest, and I know that could be annoying for someone trying to win the game. I'm not trying to spike Mack. I believe that both of those moves were made for the right motives (although we can talk in a post-mortem about whether jumping into the Rusten conflict was actually a good idea). The other reason I'm laying this out is so that if I ever play another game here (assuming this one doesn't drag on unto the heat death of the universe), I'd like potential neighbors to know that I'm not some crazy loose cannon.  


Hey! Speaking of:


But that's a ways away. 1 tile SE of the cannon is Mack's catapult defense force. (Have I mentioned city visibility is amazing?) Also pictured is the reason that TBS, try though he might, will not win this game: Rusten's Hinduism shrine must be making just gigantic amounts of money.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Since your relevance in this game is more or less at postmortem phase (sorry!), here are my thoughts. Your decision to attack mack was correct, IMO. The only way to ensure that he wouldn't just pick off all the civs surrounding him one by one, including yours, at his leisure was to try to induce a dogpile. With him already at war with Rusten and trying to war/peace you into submission, you threw him a curve ball. The bad news for you was that Cairo and/or I didn't join in. Cairo may have not (probably was not) been in a position to meaningfully do much. I could have declared war, and other players in the game may say perhaps that I should have, but at that time I was preparing to hand the civ off to someone new when my son was born in a few weeks and I didn't want to bog the replacement down in a hopeless, grinding war. I also had not invested much until very recently in military. AGG/CHM doesn't always do great at keeping up in expansion and I was holding onto filling up the available land with both hands and had little grip left to lift elsewhere at that time. Notably, after Aretas' demise, I was surrounded on three sides by IMP civs so expansion parity was incredibly difficult to manage without considerable care and attention.

Other in game considerations I had at the time include: 1) Astronomy islands that I hoped to get at least a small piece of; 2) I already had a decent chunk of good land having claimed some of mack's Aretas Lebenstraum; 3) As a healthy, economically relevant Boudica (agg/chm is hell to fight near tech parity), I assumed that mack would more or less leave me alone and pick on easier targets, allowing me and/or permanent sub to more or less farm away in peace; 4) The only other real challenger to mack was TBS so if he wanted something done about the running away leader he needed to be the one to do it, not the (at that time) approximately 10th-12th place (but positioned well to grow) civ.

In a counterfactual situation where you declined to accept the war/peace offer and did NOT invade mack but rather sat back in a defensive posture AND were able to induce one or more neighbor, particularly me/Khmer replacement player to do the same, it is possible that some sort of containment strategy could have been effected whereby mackoti would have had to more thoroughly garrison his borders and could credibly expect to be knifed if he did a hard push into one of the neighbors. This could have had the result of lessening the pace of mack's gains and minimizing the amount profit margin as he would have had to invest more in all attacks to achieve the same results that he has done. But this suffers from the obvious problem of incomplete information by the anti-mack coalition: How would we really know when or if mack was making a hard push into a fellow AMCM (anti-mack coalition member)? The distance across his civ's empire was and remains non-trivial and it is impossible to assume that all members would be able to get a scouting unit safely inside all AMCMs' borders to understand the situation on a turn by turn basis so as to act with unity and appropriate tactics against the mack menace. So this scenario suffers from the same problem as most would-be dogpiles, that is, with incomplete information each member contributes what s/he deems to be the minimum required and hopes others do the heavy lifting. This typically ends in failure for the dogpile.

With free astronomy islands available, I don't think it is feasible to assume that any of us would have preferred to invade mack for marginal at best gains against heavy investment rather than tried to get that free land over the sea. 

I'll also state since I don't see the harm in doing so that the lurker thread mostly agreed with you about not accepting mack's initial war/peace offer during his Rusten invasion. Your tactical waging of the campaign, however, appears to have been quite a learning experience. 

Thanks for all the good reporting!

[Mardoc]

Since your relevance in this game is more or less at postmortem phase (sorry!), here are my thoughts. Your decision to attack mack was correct, IMO. The only way to ensure that he wouldn't just pick off all the civs surrounding him one by one, including yours, at his leisure was to try to induce a dogpile.

Agreed.  Plus, him attempting to lock you into peace was a pretty strong indication that he was at least temporarily weak.

It didn't work, but I can't think of anything that would have worked better.

Your tactical waging of the campaign, however, appears to have been quite a learning experience. 

Thanks for all the good reporting!

That reminds me - I don't think you could have known at the time that Rusten was going to have tactical issues too.  Your play would have worked a lot better if Rusten managed to hold his territory longer, so that you got to fight Mack inside of friendly culture with allied help, instead of neutral culture. And if you'd had success, then maybe that would have changed the mind of other potential dogpilers.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

My decision would not have changed due to out of game reasons (handing civ off to replacement player). But Mardoc, you make some good points too. Rusten did have some issues of his own that contributed to nauf's problems.

[superdeath]

I may have contributed to rustens situation some :D