Josh's Civ 4 memoir. Chapter 2

[Amicalola]

T104
I'm reporting this in-depth for a few reasons. Partly it's because I want to help my Green understand what and why I'm doing it, to learn and mentally stay in the game. Partly it's because I've been wanting a go at Classical-Era warfare for some time, and this unexpected subbing is a great chance. Get ready to learn alongside me! Anyway, the turn. 

Jesse moved his units onto the hill, from the forest. Here's the situation at the start of the turn. 



I want to bait him into either attacking me on defensive terrain, or moving onto flat-ground himself. Sure, we could just hunker down and wait for catapults, but I don't think that's the winning play. We have to smash Jesse as hard and fast as possible if we have any chance of catching up with the leaders going forward. So I moved half our units onto this forest:


Jesse shouldn't get odds attacking into either of our stacks, and if we're really lucky he'll move 1N or 1NW. More likely is that he'll either retreat or stay in place, in which case we'll attack that hill as soon as the numbers favour us. I have 2 additional combat-workers on standby to improve the cows, in case we somehow can't prevent his chariots from being able to attack Cowcity or IncenseCity; I'm pretty sure either of those are safe even if he beelines them. 


In foreign news, vanrober was bribed by bellarch for OB, at a steep 8gpt payment. I think that's extremely cheeky, considering the circumstances.  Still, I suppose the strong do what they will, and once I saw that, I couldn't let us miss out on the action. This turn, Bellarch+Mjmd (who's playing a close role, it seems), accepted my own bribe-request at 5gpt. It sure was nice of them to build Vanrober and us the Great Lighthouse.  More seriously, I'm not sure the GLH is a great build on this map, with few trading partners and no visible islands, but maybe I've just been spoiled in my last few games and they'll prove me wrong.

I'm going to send scouts into Bellarch/Mjmd's lands immediately. I think they're extremely likely to attack us at either Construction or Guilds, and maybe even sooner. The best ways for us to avoid that (that I know of) are to scout out any potential stacks, and have strong defences. "Tall fences make for good neighbours," I was recently told. I like that proverb.

[Amicalola]

T105
I opened the turn to this:


I. Um. That might be a little bit optimistic, Jesse.


Jesse did indeed retreat his main forces, but sent those 3 chariots to the north. Construction is in, meaning our units can finally cross bridges. I really don't want those retreating units to make it back to GemCity, especially those Drill archers. Unfortunately, our praetorians only get 35% vs. those axes on the hill. So, after parsing that for a while, I...


Road the forest, and attack!!  

Our first 3 praets died but did decent damage, and the 4th actually won. Then our axes cleaned up most of the rest, and some hidden chariots were able to deliver the final blows.



At the end of that brawl, we'd lost 3 praetorians and killed 4 axes, 2 spears and 2 archers. That might look lucky, but according to vodka it's actually the exact average result - Man, Rome is fun. I covered our final victorious chariot with a spear and axe, so I don't think Jesse can attack that next turn either. 




In the north, the two workers I mentioned last turn build a road on the cow, as planned. 


Thanks to that, we can get that praet+axe into CowCity, and the northern praet + whipped chariot in IncenseCity. I also decided to use our Great General, Leonidas, to make a Morale praetorian 4 tiles away, that can also garrison CowCity.


This transforms our 9% chance to lose the city into <1%. Barring something extraordinary, neither of those should fall. And hey, we can give that praet City Raider later and turn it into the most obnoxious forking-HA you've ever seen in your life! That seems fun.

Jesse's galley is pillaging the north, but this turn he left us an opening. 


Our galley was finished in GoldCity this turn, and if Jesse had moved 1S we would have been screwed, with the choice of either a 33% roll or losing the fish. But now, Jesse is the one who has to make that choice.

[joshybravo963]

Good work great general amicalola. Very glad we could begin the push back and start enclosing on gemcity. My only question would be why morale praet instead of a medic? 

It's frustrating how I don't seem to understand vanrober, he seems to go to war with us for trading with bellarch and then trades with bellarch himself. I'm losing all hope trying to understand his motives.

Now that we've got catapults let's get all the remaining forests chopped and into battle to finish off JesseL before bellarch or vanrober can backstab us. Also good decision on taking the 35% against axes,  sacrifices have to be made :D.

[Amicalola]

Good work great general amicalola. Very glad we could begin the push back and start enclosing on gemcity. My only question would be why morale praet instead of a medic? 

It's frustrating how I don't seem to understand vanrober, he seems to go to war with us for trading with bellarch and then trades with bellarch himself. I'm losing all hope trying to understand his motives.

Now that we've got catapults let's get all the remaining forests chopped and into battle to finish off JesseL before bellarch or vanrober can backstab us. Also good decision on taking the 35% against axes,  sacrifices have to be made :D.

A couple of reasons. Partly that I wanted to get an additional praet in CowCity - 0.1% is much better than 10%. But much more so because even if I go for HBR now, it'll be a while before we can get any HA's, and a CR3+Morale praet will be like a HA on crack. I'm really excited to see what we can do with it! :D 

Medics are great though, good thinking. Probably the next GG will be a medic chariot, choosing a chariot over a praet because we won't want it to fight any battles. We can be a lot more gung-ho with our GG's with Imperialistic, which I've never really gotten a chance to play around with.

I'll probably have to wait a few turns before invading Jesse, because catapults will take a few turns to whip, and slowly trundle along our borders. We'll get there eventually though.

[joshybravo963]

If possible let's take gem city without catapults and then wait at the next city. The city has yet to expand borders and fortify, so shouldn't be too bad and don't want to give them the chance to whip down our 6pop city. Of course if there's not enough praets and expecting way to many loses then we'll have to wait, but I would be happy losing 2 praets for every 1 troop of there's at least for this first city. What do you think?

[Amicalola]

T106
Jesse sent a slightly more reasonable offer this time: white peace. We didn't accept that one either. So let's have a look at things. 

And wow, here is the first thing I notice: at IncenseCity, Jesse was astonishingly lucky - his first chariot took our defending praet down to 0.2 strength!  


Thank goodness he lost the coinflip vs. the chariot, or he would have actually managed to raze the city. Of course, our praetorian can't promote yet, so there's still the issue of how to actually get rid of this chariot. Jesse can still raze IncenseCity unless we do something, and none of our chariots are in range....


Luckily, we still have Leonidas the uber-HA in the area. Note that Leonidas only barely won that fight too - those were some heroic damn chariots. 


In the north, Jesse took his 33% swing and...


Lost. At least he wasn't so lucky there. We'll whip another galley or two from the north, before we start getting stuck into catapults and praets just like everywhere else. Speaking of which, our research has taken a big hit, and I'm not sure whether we'll go for Calendar and our economic recovery, or HBR and elephants/HAs, first. We have quite a few turns of saving at 0% to decide.  


But the biggest event of the turn was in the south. The big news was that Jesse whipped GemCity for 1 pop this turn. What does a Protective player under threat dry-whip for 1 population? Yeah...   So with walls coming next turn, the pressure is really turned up. With that in mind, I decided to skip healing, road towards GemCity, and have a crack at it. First we take a swing with our strongest praet, at a coinflip:



Which we win! Vodka showed that we were likely to win the battle for GemCity (about 75%), but I'm guessing there was very high variance as a factor of Jesse's drill promos, and that winning that first fight ups our odds significantly from here. Next we send in another suicide praet:



Wo also wins!!  I guess that luck at IncenseCity evened out pretty quickly. And boy did it matter a whole lot more here. So now the order changes drastically from my sim, and we send in a chariot at 70%. Who, yeah, won. I think you see where this is going. A final shock chariot cleans up the remaining axe at 90%, and GemCity is reclaimed, with zero losses. Yeah, that was not the brutal assault I'd expected. I guess I'm not complaining! Jesse has a lone archer behind the city, which will not be enough to take it back. GemCity is ours!



It'll be interesting to see what Jesse does from here. For our part, I thought we'd have to wait to advance, but Munich isn't as well defended as I'd expected. Still, we'll see what it looks like next turn; Protective archers aren't exactly the hardest unit to spam. We also birthed a 2nd GG from that fight, who I think I'll turn into a Great-Medic. Welcome to the Roman Empire, Zhuge Liang! 

If possible let's take gem city without catapults and then wait at the next city. The city has yet to expand borders and fortify, so shouldn't be too bad and don't want to give them the chance to whip down our 6pop city. Of course if there's not enough praets and expecting way to many loses then we'll have to wait, but I would be happy losing 2 praets for every 1 troop of there's at least for this first city. What do you think?

Mission accomplished.

Our catapults were delayed by a turn, as I mentioned earlier, but we're wasting no more time. The core cities are pretty single-minded right now:


Where there's a whip! There's a way!

[Amicalola]

Hi, I have a question for general lurkers that I hope is not patronising (if it is, tell me and I can move on). I've been debating it internally all morning, and I would really appreciate some advice.

Should I be pulling my punches in this war to any extent? I got Jesse's graphs a few turns ago, and it doesn't look like he's building troops at the moment (or at least, slowly). I guess he's about to whip to the ground, but Munich being empty was a huge surprise, as well. I thought we'd be in a stalemate until Joshy came back, at least, but I'm starting to wonder if we can just steamroll Jesse with the initial wave of catapults and praets instead.

I'm mediocre at best by Realms standards, but I'm definitely not a green either. I hate smurfing as a concept, and I feel a little like one right now. It feels shitty/unkind to be beating up a green who signed up to play with others of their skill level. But then, pulling punches also feels rude, like was discussed in the Civ6 PBEM a few weeks ago; people deserve to play against opponents trying their best, and any less can be patronising. I definitely agree with that. But because this is a Greens Game (and I'm not a green), I'm more torn. So I'm not sure what to do, or rather what my mindset should be. Any advice?

[Charriu]

Would joshy have played much different with your advice? And does he wants to continue? These are the important questions

[joshybravo963]

In my opinion I the only difference I would have made was going for medic rather than morale Praetorian. Apart from that all the moves would be the same with amicalolas advice. 
I think it's not that we play too well this game, it's that JesseL played so poorly, attacking me without having an army, pushing all his units forward against someone who he knew had more units and pretoreans. What player would expect to win? We can outproduce him and have better units? 
It reminds me of my first attack against TBS, very very weak and it lost me the game, so it's a good lesson for everyone.

I don't think he got a lot of help from his dedlurker which is a shame but not our fault either. I can see mjmd taking a lot of turns for bellarch and it sounds like he is involved a lot in the game, which is good, that's how we learn but I don't think we should hold back just because someone didn't have that.
If the lurkers decide it's not fair that we smash JesseL without me then that's also fine, we can wait until my return and stack up on cats, lowering our losses going in, or attack now, either way he's going down. I don't know if vanrober will be waiting tho

[civac2]

When does Joshy get back? You playing for him is not ideal.