[spoilers] - pindicator is excited for the next Realms Beyond league mechanics

[pindicator]

150

It's the turn for moving all my pieces into place before we kick things off.




We got our great merchant out of Torment, Commodore & Elkad went into their second golden ages, naufrager the Regular Roman went to peace with Old Hitru who then decided to push everything on towards Elkad, taking a city, and Elkad realized he needed to be whipping yesterday.  (He's probably also pissed at me for not joining in, but I just don't see it working out for me Elkad.)  Meanwhile Rusten decides its his time to expand and hits 2metraninja taking a city.

I'll join in next turn.  Here's my main force:




Unfortunately not every galley has 4 move, so we're not able to unload knights directly into the city and move forward.  So we will move forward with the 3 movement galleys first and take the city when some knights off of those, then I will use the 4-move galleys to unload and move knights forward.  Those 4 move galleys will then head back while the 3 move galleys likely continue on along the coast.

In the west, I have a 4-move galley with a horse archer and a longbow ready to snipe a city Mouse has left undefended for some reason.

In the east, I had another galley with 2 camel archers to see if I could snipe the island northwest of Nemesis.  Unfortunately mouseferatu moved a unit up 1 turn too early




Really unfortunate luck here.  I moved the galley towards the west in hopes of just playing things cool.  If he plants the city where the settler is there's no way for me to try to take Ushijima by sea: I was originally going to stage where Mouse's workboat is now but that clearly won't work if he settles a city next turn. So we'll see what happens here.

Here are the only defenses I've managed to spot so far:




We're getting towards a decent number of catapults, but I don't see any hitters to follow them up. If his plan is to whip out hitters he's going to be too slow to stop my initial wave. What probably will happen is he'll retreat the catapults when I make my initial advances - and that may end up having us come to a stalemate as I get closer to his capital. However, with everything being coastal I'll be able to hit his coastal cities while piles up in the capital. Which in turn means I'm going to need to start getting collateral builds going.

[pindicator]

The empire:




And some notable cities:













City Builds:




Demos:





So I have 4 settlers in queue right now, mostly on Gemling Island. I've been trying to decide where to put them because I realized they all shouldn't go on Gemling. 1 of them definitely takes the last good spot on Gemling with the Rice/Gems/Clam fp location. Another one is going to take the fish location south of Ambush. I could try to grab some spots in the south or the west. Somehow the sugar in the west is unclaimed and it would be nice to reach out to get that.

[pindicator]

151

We're at war, and hopefully we are getting all the bad luck out of the way early.



Rusten is rolling over 2metraninja, but that may be just an opening attack. OH is also rolling over Elkad here, but there's no event notification there because I don't have sight on those cities.

So I declared war and immediately realized I had made a huge error in my planning:




Thankfully I did have some 4-move galleys and they all had camel archers on board, so we were able to move forward:




With attacks of 86% and 79% both succeeding we took the city. The 4-move galleys moved up and dropped off their camel archers in the city and the 3-move galleys moved up 1 tile.

In hindsight this was still the best outcome for me. There was no way to get closer without tipping Mouseferatu off to the invasion force. However, unloading the galleys into the city was a mistake: there was no force within range of this city and I could have threatened the next city with my boarded camel archers. Now I cannot hit the next city in the turn following by land or by sea. Speed is certainly something I need all of here.

I moved up both the longbows in Torment, using one to kill mouseferatu's chariot that had teleported there with the war declaration. I also upgraded my own chariot to a camel archer for 200g, using the war bounties of this turn to fund it.

In the west:




The first bit of the attack went to plan with my longbow capturing the undefended city. Then moving into the city and unloading the horse archer: the horse archer had a 75% chance to win, but withdrew from the attack doing no damage. I probably should have made this a camel archer, but honestly I was not expecting this city to be defended since the larger city to the south had also been undefended.

In the east:




Unload and move the galley back. Unfortunately here I had only been able to use upgraded horse archers for this galley since everything was too far south. My camel archer has a 65% chance to win against the axe, and with Mouse likely whipping next turn that's an attack I'm going to have to make. It will take several turns for reinforcements to arrive here, so if this doesn't take the city then I won't be able to take it until I get larger reinforcements.

I do have caravels finishing, which can carry 1 unit here. So I may be able to move some units in faster.

Here is the state of things at the end of the turn:

[Miguelito]

That shrine raking in 54 gpt already,awesome! I also like how your multicontinental empire shapea up with the Ambush peninsula right in the middle (moreso I'd we count Mouse's territory as yours ). I think you've gone a long way from what I felt was one of the more difficult starts, keep it up!

[pindicator]

Sleepy, but I finally got to play the turn.

I'll do a write up with tomorrow's, but the odds fell poorly for me again and Mouseferatu's city on the island stands with a single damaged archer. He only whipped twice, however, so I don't know if he realizes what he needs to be doing.

When the turn rolled I saw that he had whipped pikemen

[pindicator]

152

Mouseferatu cleaned up my retreating horse archer outside Miya Atsumu, so the goal of quickly taking Baresh Island out on the first turn of the war fell through.  Maybe I should have brought a camel archer instead of a horse archer - but again, I figured both cities would be undefended if the border city was undefended.

In the east at Wakatoshi Island, would we also come short?  Our first camel archer did not have the best odds:




And won!
The second camel archer had better odds, at 75%.  This would win the city and give me a direct route to his capital.




Now I wish I would have brought more galleys this way.  Unlike the west, there was no reason to suspect that he would have a lightly defended city.  This was just poor planning, punished by another unfavorable dice roll.

In the main theatre of battle, there weren't any fights but we moved up.




Mouse had only whipped twice this turn which seemed like a mistake.  Perhaps he had only 2 cities on units going into this turn and didn't want to be inefficient?  But when I ended turn and saw the units come out it was a pike in Ushijima on Wakatoshi Island, and a pike in the central theater in the city of Hoshiumi.

I expected to see more defense in that city when I started 153.  I feared getting bogged down here and now, since if there were enough pikemen behind those catapults I had seen being massed then there was a real possibility of him holding here.

[pindicator]

153

Mouseferatu whipped 7 times this turn.  7 pikes and I have nothing but Camel Archers for my attack force.  So I started some crossbows around.  I may have started a few too many infrastructure builds last turn: crossbows are good for a long time thanks to their new collateral-off-of-boats niche.  (What does China have again now that they've lost that?)  And sure enough, there's a pike sitting in Hoshiumi along with 4 archers.

I promoted to shock and took my best shot.




We got some of that luck back:  it was a win!

And then gave it right back in the next battle: I lost a 96% against an archer.  The rest of the camel archer vs regular archer fights went by the book and Hoshiumi fell.







I also earned my first great general!  After trying to decide what to do with him, I attached him to a single horse archer and gave all 20xp to that one unit.  Maybe I should have split between 2 of them... But eh, I wanted a really strong unit here, especially since I have Morale.

I moved into the city and spotted Mouseferatu made a big tactical error.




He never should have put those catapults there.  I may have won the 30% odds to kill the pike, but I was going to lose 1 camel archer on average in that fight and take the city regardless.  And now all those catapults that could have been used to hold me back in combination with whipped pikes or ballistaphants - they were all going to be lost instead.  Maybe he didn't expect me to have enough hitters?  After all, I'm not sure he has seen the galley stack.

I unloaded everything into Hoshiumi, used an unpromoted horse archer to take the workers, and then used the 3 other horse archers to attack the catapult stack.  +50% versus catapults: it turns out leaving some HAs in the stack paid off after all!

It was only after I sent in all 4 horse archers that I realized that he had a city right north of that catapult stack that was only guarded by a single catapult.  Uh, that was big miss: I had seen the catapult and just assumed it was a single unit, forgetting that I had known there was a city there.




So I took Narita and found a ballistaphant.

Against the ballistaphant I decided the best course was to kill it now and not let it stack up with other units.  None of my camel archers had good odds on it, so I suicided in one with flanking.  It died, but almost killed the ballistaphant anyway, letting me mop up with another.

After that I mopped up the remaining catapults, moved the horse archer that had captured the 2 workers up to scout ahead, and then decided to move a pair of camel archers towards Bokuto.  There is a single archer there, and hopefully they will be able to kill it - unless we find a pike there next turn.

Here is the situation at end of this turn:







The galley in the southwest is going to reinforce Barish Island with the longbow, but not before the worker unloads.

Next turn we'll take Kita, and if we're lucky we'll get Bokuto as well.  But the turn is more about getting everything moving north again and staging to strike out against YamCrab.  This is largely the last of the reinforcements I had prepared ahead of time, so I need to build any more units that I'm going to want to war with.  I need more units, I think this means.  It's possible that Mouseferatu continues to not put together the strongest of defenses, but we can't count on that.


Turn
Kills:
1 Ballistaphant
1 Pikeman
8 Catapults
4 Archers
Captures:
2 workers
2 cities
Losses:
2 camel archers

War So Far
Kills:
1 Ballistaphant
1 Pikeman
8 Catapults
1 Axeman
1 Chariot
6 Archers
Captures:
2 workers
4 cities
Losses:
4 camel archers
1 horse archer


Demos:





We finish up Civil Service this turn.  Next turn we should be able to 1-turn Paper, and then get some privateers out.

[Thoth]

[pindicator]

154

Another productive turn - 3 more cities fall




The golden age from Mouse really makes me smart at not committing enough after his Moai city.  But again- he only whips twice.  I wonder if he has a lot of multiplayer experience.  Units matter so much more against humans.  Even lots of crappy units can turn the tide in a war: I keep remembering the later half of the famous Zulu exodus game where I was fighting off rifles with maces, knights, and catapults.  Sometimes you just have to be ruthless with that whip because those cities are going to fall if you don't.

He did upgrade the archer in Bokuto to a crossbow.  I wonder if he made the same mistake I had: Machinery ahead of Feudalism.  But I had 2 camel archers set to attack, so it wouldn't have mattered:




I took the time to eliminate Kita as well:




Now kita had popped its borders - or so I thought.  Perhaps those were culture artifacts and I had only thought Kita's borders were popped?  Either way it is razed now and I'll need to replace it after the war.  I moved up a horse archer to scout Akashi and found a single pike.  That city is isolated; I have no problem leaving it for later.  Especially if Mouse isn't whipping it into the ground like he should be.

I thought that was it, but last turn I had been able to load a single galley full of camel archers, and it was in range of Yamaguichi this turn.  So I decided to try it




We won the 75% battle and then the city was doomed:  My horse archer went next, with 68%




I moved everything I could into this city, except for 2 Camel Archers that stayed in Bokuto.  There are a pair of galleys around there and I do not want to have to double back needlessly.  

I'm also seeing the first caravels from Mouseferatu.  However, I'm likely to just stay by land now.  I'll have all my camel archers landed next turn, and we'll move up to put Daichi under threat with 15 camel archers.  Finally having my camel archers banded together like that - I dont' think he's going to stop this attack, even if he starts whipping in earnest now.

I also landed 3 units up by the moai city, but I don't think I can attack next turn.  Instead I'm going to sit tight and then bring up 3 more units, then attack.  At worst I tie down resources while the main attack pushes on to his capital.

Paper enables trade, so I can see some people's tech status right now:




OH hasn't yet played, and so his selection off of Liberalism does not yet show.

[pindicator]

Also, we got a new city name today!



The cluster jewels look like a fantastic addition to encourage build diversity.