[PB56] NobleHelium Tells It Like It Is

[Charriu]

How much time do you need?

[NobleHelium]

By the way AT, if we had offered peace (a treaty) after razing your horse city, would you have taken it?

[NobleHelium]

How much time do you need?

I'm not sure.  Depends on how accurate the "realtime" time remaining display is.  Most likely we will have the turn played at the latest 15 hours from now and then Amica will need some time after that. So playing it super safe would require like 6h of added time.

Also that reminds me, is the inaccurate in-game clock something that can be fixed by a mod?

[Charriu]

Ok I will add time later.

I'm not sure if the timer cam be fixed. My first guess is no or why else did Ramk & Co. Integrate the real time. But I see what I can do

[NobleHelium]

We have peace in our time! Now to rescue the economy.

[Serdoa]

Noble had a hard time convincing me as I had poured literal hours into a C&D sheet that allowed me to pretty much tell which tiles Amica worked - from the start of the game till now. I really would have liked to raze Anise but our odds would have been too low to feel comfortable.

But Amicas attack was not going to work ever regardless. We had enough units to threaten one of his cities and still had units (outside his view) available. We would have had to probably lose all our units that threatened the city to make certain we can raze it, but that would have given us good odds to be successful. And with 2 cities, 1 with ~23 whip unhappy and one with 1 pop, I'm not so sure that Amica could have produced the forces necessary to keep us at bay - but wars with metal units against metal units are losing propositions. 

As for our own city: We would have had more units in the city than he had available to attack, even with our own attack. 

Honestly, that whole attack on us was bound to fail and I can't understand why he didn't expand instead AS IMP. He could be at 5 cities by now and have more than his 3 workers as well. And he also should have known from demographics and some C&D that there was no feasible way to go to war with us BEFORE he whipped his units. I guess he really didn't want to switch after he had made his mind up. Or he thought we'd come for him... but we offered peace so he could feel safe even. Admittedly that was after his first whip orgy, but he could have at least gotten a settler out of Anise 2 turns ago instead of an unnecessary Axe.

Oh well, I fear this will be a thorn in our side later on because I strongly doubt that Amica will stop trying to go to war with us.

[NobleHelium]

OK.  Time to start reporting some of the epic.



On turn 49 we moved up next to AT's city with an axe and a chariot, joining the two warriors already in his woods.  Not too interesting.  He has two quechuas in the city that are slowly gathering fortify bonus and he has a quechua and a chariot that can get into the city next turn.  We left a chariot out of his vision 1S of Channel under the axe so that he would not have a clear picture of how many units could strike the city on t51.  We maybe should have left both chariots back (instead of having one in Channel) but needless to say I forced us to debate this far too extensively and Serdoa probably got annoyed at me over it.



On turn 50 he moved the quechua and chariot into the city.  The chariot was previously damaged from cleaning up our warrior that razed the horse city from several turns before as you can see in the log, so we had almost 89% odds to kill the chariot with the axe.  One thing I did not mention previously was that AT did attack across the river with his quechua near the horse city to try to save his city at 4.5% odds.  While a reasonable action to take and perhaps I would have done it myself, the loss of the quechua was very significant in the following turns.  Anyway, we attacked with only the axe this turn so that we could attack again with the axe next turn to take out the top fortified quechua, which was substantially harder than the other quechuas.  Since we were not attacking with the other units yet, we could move one of the chariots onto the stone to block it and also to threaten the capital.  The capital only had one quechua that only just moved back in, when AT realized that he wouldn't be able to reach the Henge city with it.  We previously positioned one of the warriors 2SW of the capital in order to pin down this quechua by threatening to move across the river and next to the capital.  The chariot is also threatening the worker on the spice.  Wars like this are often just a chess match but without complete information.

On turn 51 we went in.  We had 3 chariots, 1 axe, 1 spear, and 2 warriors attacking 3 quechuas.

91 HP CR1 Axeman vs 25% Fortify Quechua @ 96.3%: WIN, down to 61 HP
Spearman vs 10% Fortify Quechua @ 65.5%: WIN, down to 62 HP

I guess what I told AT about getting more fortify bonus was not correct because he did max out the fortify bonus by the time we attacked.  But the more important point here is that a 20% fortify quechua would be exactly strength 4 against spears and chariots, both of which are also strength 4.  So the change in odds between 15%, 20%, and 25% fortify was absolutely enormous.  That is why we needed the axe to attack twice in order to take out the top quechua which was above the key threshold.

Anyway, at this point we had a choice on the last quechua - we could throw both warriors at it which would probably take it out, or we could throw one or more chariots at it. (This is also why we attacked with the spear first, to preserve this option if it won.) If we kept all three chariots then we could use them to attack the capital.  We knew AT would have a second quechua in the capital the following turn before we could attack, so it would be 3 chariots on 2 quechuas, one of which had 5% fortify.  The 5% fortify was also super key in this case because the capital had an additional 20% culture defense, so the 5% fortify brought it above 4 strength per the above and a new quechua would be even with chariots in strength.  So the following turn if we had three chariots in range we would be take to take essentially a coin flip attack over multiple combats with 3 chariots on 2 quechuas to take out the capital and eliminate AT on t52.  This was pretty good - but there were other concerns which I will get into after the picture, since it'll be easier to understand then.  For now I'll just say that we decided to attack the Henge city with a chariot instead of the warriors. Also note that if AT had warriors and not quechuas we would have gotten great odds with the chariots and it would have been a total blitz.

Chariot vs Quechua @ 68.7%: LOSS, down to 16 HP
Warrior vs 16 HP Quechua @ 99.9%: WIN, no damage



And here is the after picture.



Now you can see in the log that we captured a worker in between the combats.  On t50 as you remember we were threatening the capital quechua with our chariot, and the worker was on the spice.  The quechua had just moved into the city and did not have any fortify, so we would get a coin flip to take out the capital.  AT cleverly moved his worker to block so that we wouldn't get that option, so before deciding on the chariot or warrior attack on the Henge city, we moved in our leading chariot onto his ivory to gather more information.  And that confirmed what we suspected - that his other worker was on the copper and that the copper mine would be finished the next turn (he previously put a turn into the mine before we razed the horse city).  Note in the west we knew Amica was nearby and that we would need to defend the captured city against a possible attack from him (which turned out to be a well-founded concern).  In addition to this, if we took the coin flip 3v2 on the capital the following turn and lost, he would get to use copper and that would be an absolute disaster.  If we didn't take the attack then the chariot would be able to get onto the copper (AT can't attack out with quechuas) and pillage it on t52 before AT could produce any metal units.  That plus the fact that if we took the Henge city using two warrior attacks most likely we would be defending with a damaged warrior most likely necessitating at least one other unit in the city anyway meant that it made all sense to attack the Henge city with at least one chariot and forego the chance at attacking the capital next turn.  After we took the Henge city we saw that Amica did not have any units in range to threaten the city, so we went ahead and moved the remaining chariot (one was lost in the attack) onto the stone along with the remaining warrior that didn't need to attack.  We know that Amica does not have horse because we have knowledge of all three of his cities - his capital, Anise, and the copper city south of Anise.  We know from the resource positioning of other players that it was highly unlikely that Anise would have horse in the two fogged tiles.

And so we captured the Stonehenge city. Amica actually founded Hinduism in his city south of Anise, but we did not know that until the following turn when his borders popped.

[novice]

And then what happened?

[NobleHelium]

Mid-season cliffhanger!

[Gaspar]

This show sucks.