[SPOILERS] Chevalier Mal Fet and Marcopolothefraud lead a Soviet Down Under

[MJW (ya that one)]

You are good to transfer cities that were ceded in the peace deal a few turns ago but not any independent CS conquests or those Russia founded on its own.

Normally this should happen on the turn the war finishes but we are making an exception here because it's the first time we are encountering it in a team game and very little time has passed. You also had an unusual benefactor but you'll see what I mean at the end.

This doesn't matter because you lost anyway, but here you go:

I'm sure you did not intend that as an allusion to the last archipelago game that went this late but that's where my mind immediately went  Now what does that say about my mind, I will pointedly decline to consider...

Random thought for Woden: if we do make it to The College Dropout, I should probably make the initial capture and then gift it to you once Australia is dead. That way, I can sail the Dreadnought into that little lake where it should be able to hit The Blueprint, as long as it is not on a hill.

We should do another diplo game, they are fun

Can't trade College Dropout because it is his capital and Firaxis doesn't think you should be able to trade capitals (probably because the AI is too stupid to not trade its capital away). 

I think we have made it pretty clear we are far from conceding. With MJW's involvement in the discussion, it might have something to do with rules. Him being the unofficial keeper of the Civ 6 ruleset, he seems to jump in when rules are discussed. The only rules I think we have had major discussion over the last few games are pillaging, city state abuse, and city trading (in this game). I think pillaging is pretty much a given in this game and no further discussion is needed. City States are pretty much dead and I can't really see any need for discussion unless Team Russia/Australia were talking about it for additional resources but what can an Industrial, a Military, and an unreachable Cultural City States have to offer in resources that pillaging can get. Now, city trading, that could be interesting. With Australia quickly losing ground, are they considering a life boat trade if we get close to killing him? Or now that they have peace with Indonesia/China are they considering shifting cities to Australia? Russia is hurting for amenities and getting rid of those worthless off-coast cities on the island that suboptimal settled could help reduce his amenities needs. Could they be discussing slowing us down by shifting those cities to Australia? That would delay his conquest but with battleships coming online soon, it would only slow us down a little bit. Could they be discussing some other form of city swapping that would make it hard to kill Australia, like all coastal cities to Russia, all interior cities to Australia? 

It could be something completely different for all I know but they are discussing something that has people interested.

Edit: Whatever it is, I hope it doesn't slow down the game. We have had a great last couple of turns and it looks like we can get it around again tonight.

[williams482]

On T175 Russia crushed the Norwegian fleet after similarly crushing the Phoenician, and opened the gate to invading the two cores. There was no naval opposition in the area, and the cossacks were more powerful on land than anything the other two civs could muster. Now, 13 turns later, Norway has suffered no further damage, has rebuilt its fleet, reached battleships first with a 5 turn lead, and already upgraded a dozen. Meanwhile Russia lost a ton of units and has made no gains, it even lost three cities by transferring them to Australia. How did this happen?

The problem was that there was no plan. Williams said so himself in the T174 report:

Mood for today: cautiously optimistic. I think we're a little better than 50/50 to win the naval battle here with enough strength remaining to continue projecting power in this theater. What comes next if we do, I dunno.

Without a plan it's hard to focus and without focus it's hard to make gains (unless you have an overwhelming force). So while Williams has been extremely good at fighting the battles here and in his incredible defence in PBEM18, the attack on Phoenicia was very similar to Kaiser's attack on Canada - a little here, a little there, but no direction for the war or defined objectives that will move the game closer to victory and as a result nothing of value being accomplished. On the other hand Woden has had a clear focus and has been steadily following it.

What could Williams have done in the last 13 turns? I believe the best would have been to attack Norway right away, starting with Wodin and moving clockwise. The point of the original attack on Phoenicia was to escape the Norwegian fleet, capture cities that are easy, and use them as a staging ground for a ground attack on Norway. But with the Norwegian fleet destroyed and Ljubljana getting high city strength via ironclads and medieval walls, that plan no longer made sense. The Norwegian cities would have taken longer to crack but Woden's entire core would have been pillaged by now including several campuses and IZs that would have yielded science and maybe even taken Russia to first to battleships. The GP would have gone preventing Woden from faith-purchasing units. Oil and coal resources would have been captured. Phoenicia isn't able to extract them yet, Norway has to do it all itself so capturing the Norwegian sources would have been much better. And the power difference between Russia and Norway, which is the most important thing for winning the game, would have been much more in Russia's favour.


PS. When posted this originally I declared Norway as a favourite due to its more robust position and future prospects. Then I reconsidered as it looked like Woden was going to rush into Williams's fleet giving him a chance for another decisive victory, and with battleships he would have been able to start destroying the Norwegian cities uncontested. In the end Woden decided to be more cautious and that didn't happen but a lot still hangs on the next battle. If Williams hooks the 3 new oils and upgrades many subs his fleet strength won't be far behind and tactical combat is one of Williams's biggest strengths. So it's still hard to say despite Norway's growing advantages.

I did ask what I did wrong, and this tells it pretty well. I think you're exactly right that I failed to properly pick out a winning objective and drive on it, instead frittering around the edges with some semblance of "if I take enough cities I'll win." This is a really striking reminder of how damned hard it can be to step back and really think clearly about the bigger picture, especially because in the moment I thought I was doing that.

I think without the Raiders managing their marvelously timed defensive upgrades I probably bass ackward my way to the right result, because assaulting the really important cities isn't slow and costly enough that I'm inclined to go after something easier, or if those "easy" cities aren't still slow and costly enough that my advantage is whittled away. What I needed to do immediately after Diomede was recognize that I needed to take out important Norwegian cities, accept that I would take nasty losses to my frigate force in the process, and do it anyway. Instead, I essentially decided that I didn't have enough frigates to sustain the kind of losses I expected to take assaulting (W)Odin, and thus I had to go after softer targets, skipping over the whole "will those softer targets win me the game" thing.

This is the same logic that had me force the fight at Diomede instead of attacking Freya in the beginning like Thrawn believed was the right call. That choice did work out for me, but the margin there was razor thin and the benefits of winning it were definitely less than the benefits I could expect by taking Freya quickly. I'm still not sure the timing on that would have actually worked out (could Ljubljana have intervened while I was still trying to whittle down those ironclads? I suspect so, although I would have had the speed to force a first strike in a more wide open combat zone which would have been pretty favorable as well) but it's definitely a path that could have worked out.

The obscene attrition my cossacks suffered in Raiderland feels extremely wasteful in retrospect. As noted I did not have a plan at the beginning, being grossly overconfident in their ability to absorb city strikes and keep on pillaging, and even as I coordinated them better with each other I failed to properly connect their efforts with the actions of the fleet, limiting the effectiveness of either group. The terrain was clearly unfavorable, but that was known from the very beginning and something I should have been able to account for.

I think it was the perfect moment to end the game. You still had a chance especially with Woden going for nukes which would have given you enough time to try something, but the game would have dragged on and your odds would have been significantly worse than what you had so far.

I appreciate this. I had some reservations about ending things while I did still have some kind of chance, but it was an extremely narrow chance that required a lot of time and a lot to go right. To some extent the Raiders won the war emotional attrition along with the actual battle of who can replace their ships faster, and I'm okay with that.

I'll still approach you with extreme care if we ever play though

I'm flattered, and of course the feeling is mutual. Maybe someday.

[roland of gilead]

Woden and Lub used the map very well. That strategic Encampment blocking that straight for example.

[williams482]

I am still wondering about privateers.
- visibility.
Looking at woden thread if seems that traders can see them  (the one he saw and shot by Geneva ).
If that is true Williams probably doesn't know since he has placed privateers next to 2 traders this turn and in places where they will be killed for free.

Oh bloody hell. The thought that traders might be able to see adjacent privateers simply never occurred to me, but of course they do. This isn't Civ V where traders are severely limited relative to normal units in terms of vision range, I should have figured that parking a privateer on or adjacent to them would get it noticed. This does explain how Woden so consistently destroyed privateers I figured he'd need to be very lucky to find; I was not shy in the slightest about parking them next to traders. Oops. 

In revisiting what I should have done, following Diomede I had nine frigate fleets and two privateer fleets in the main group. Three of these were Rolling Barrage promoted and one more had the Bombardment promotion, the rest were Line of Battle. (W)Odin had 93 defensive strength (it shows 90 because the +3 from hills isn't displayed on the map), 400 wall HP, and enough ranged strength to two-hit frigates. Had I immediately assaulted it on t176 with the maximum six frigates, keeping the Rolling Barrage frigates where the encampment can't hit them, and focussed my cossacks there to get the city under siege, I would have done the following:

t176: 73 off the walls, 11 off the garrison
interturn: Lose one frigate, probably the bombardment one. Move in a LoB replacement. 
t177: 75 off the walls, 38 off the garrison
interturn: lose a LoB frigate, move in a replacement. 
t178: 83 off the walls, 74 off the garrison
interturn: lose a LoB frigate.  
t179: three frigate shots take 62 more damage off the walls, then any melee unit I please can waltz in and take the city. 

In reality, at the end of t179 I controlled Abjad, and was firing on Abugida and Hieratic; Hieratic would fall the next turn while the assault on Abugida was abandoned. The principle difference here is that Woden's second strike coming from an encampment instead of a garrison frigate means I can control which frigates he can kill, so my very useful Rolling Barrage frigates are still alive. Woden could also have spread out his shots to force me to retreat ships or lose them the following turn, which might have slowed things down a bit but would not have been fatal. 

Would this have left me in a better position than what I actually did? It's not a slam dunk, but probably, yes. The lack of a Norwegian city in the "donut hole" south of Frigg means that (W)Odin controls a large number of tiles that would be pretty safe for my cossacks to rally in and heal up as needed, and (W)Odin's population would help keep it and subsequent captures from flipping. As with Hieratic there is is a coal resource here, but it's a much more valuable one because it's much harder to pillage, and it denies the resource to a civ who can actually take advantage of it instead of a civ which can't. The delay in actually taking this city was a significant driver of my unwillingness to seriously consider this course of action, but the victory at Diomede meant that I had that time to burn and was at no risk of another attack for a fair bit. From there I would have moved south through Woden's other cities, also slowly but with fairly minimal casualties, while Mitla and the privateer swarm gave ample warning of threatening military buildups. And, of course, I could have merged that privateer swarm with the main fleet instead of splitting it off to be ultimately destroyed. 

Of course, not controlling Abjad and Hieratic would significantly reduce Mitla's ability to remain under my control, so that city probably flips back relatively quickly. And the further I go the more relevant the time spent to blast down 400 HP defenses becomes. The fact of the matter is that frigates were both the best city crackers I had and very nearly obsolete against the kinds of defenses the Raiders had thrown up, so nothing I did was going to be fast enough to be truly decisive. As with the Egypt/Canada war in PBEM18, one of the lessons here has to be that actually taking out a prepared opponents with set defenses and equal tech is a very difficult task.

[roland of gilead]

Yeah you need a tech edge. Or rather a MP advantage of some description at least. .

[williams482]

I am pretty confident that as far as city captures go, Russia will probably go for me next. Not sure if they will sail around to hit my west or just ram into my east coast, but I don't see why they would attack into Urban Defenses.

But I think the most impactful thing Russia will do now that our fleets are gone is not capture cities (though their frigates will surely do some of that) but sail around our coastlines with two blobs of IC and caravels and pillage all our harbors, which we can no longer do anything to prevent. I am not sure how we can win this game if they do that. We may get to battleships 10 or so turns before them, but I am not sure how much that will help us with only a handful of frigates to upgrade and few ironclads with which to protect them. 

With the benefit of hindsight and Ljubljana's much better idea of the Raider's fleet deployment and shipbuilding capabilities than I have at the time, this also seems like a much better approach than what I actually did. I ultimately attempted this with my privateer swarm, but that was too weak a force and too late; Woden had enough ships in play by then to swat privateers aside like nothing. If I'd taken Abjad and Hieratic with no diversion towards Abugida, and from there bypassed Cuneiform and steamed around Linear A (blasting it down and taking it if the defenses were still just ancient walls, otherwise pillage and move on) I could have had my main fleet and the privateer deathball meeting on Norway's west coast in the early-mid t180s. I would have crushed the still incomplete and battleshipless rebuilt fleet there and pillaged out pretty much everything coastal, although I couldn't have taken any cities except for maybe Geneva. That probably would have been decisive, although Woden doesn't surrender easily and would still have had productive shipbuilding sites in former England, and would no doubt set to work rebuilding his eastern coast. My fleet could only be in one place at once without risking disaster, and a couple builders can rebuild most damage very quickly. 

I never seriously considered this with a full force in a reasonable timeframe because I didn't think Woden would be able to rebuild his fleet anywhere near as fast as he actually did (until the evidence was staring me in the face and eating my privateers for breakfast), and I got lost in the weeds of slowly sieging down and pillaging out the Phoenician core. Had I been driving on a strategy of using my present naval dominance to ensure future naval dominance, instead of trying to inefficiently cash it in for territorial gains, this is the course I think I would have taken.

[roland of gilead]

Yeah good point one thing that put us in trouble by the end was the lack of ability to re supply.

perhaps we could have done similar.

their split fleet probably initially hindered them but when it moved on me it was a benefit.

[williams482]

To add a few points to the Wodin attack:

- The city had 93 str, but if you pillage the GP, IZ, and Campus that would go down to 87.
- Then the cossacks can put the city under siege and not take any damage because all fire is on the frigates.
- By T178 you would have had 7 cossacks that can hit the city at 71 str after wars of religion, which should have been enough to take it then. But T179 and losing one more frigate would have been fine too.

From here:
- You can avoid losing any cossacks by keeping them out of city fire and killing any nearby Norwegian units by attack-withdrawing. Engage cities with the cossacks only when the frigates are also attacking.
- You have a ton of faith and gold which goes to bombards to help the frigates. They don't do a lot of damage but you aren't going to lose them to city fire either, so you are just amassing units. The cossacks keep the bombards safe from land units.
- Before starting with the Rifling->Refining research chain, detour to Flight and get a couple of balloons too.
- With the balloons the bombards you can start working on the difficult for the frigates cities like Thor and Frigg, or simply open more tiles from which you can support the main frigate attack.

This process isn't the fastest but:
- You lose no land units at all so very soon you'll be swimming in cossacks and bombards.
- The bombards can take their time because Woden can't do anything about it. Any land units will fall to cossacks. He can't repair the walls since you are attacking every turn, so slowly you'll grind them down.
- When they are done you own Woden's entire core and it's game over.

Also:
- You get to pillage a lot of IZs and Campuses for science, while dislodging Woden's Pingala from Wodin and cutting down his campus science a lot as well as his production.
- Mitla reverting is not a problem as it has no strategic value for this plan, and this is even good because then you can liberate it to alleviate some war weariness and get 6 free envoys to boost your libraries and universities.
- Naval reinforcements from your core can arrive very quickly.
- The GMC could have been pillaged as early as T174 (in my T173 replay in the lurker thread I ended with a cossack over it) which would have halted Woden's berserker purchases in Australia.

As for the privateers I'd have immediately sent them to pillage Japan-England which was the rest of the important Norwegian cities. That continent is super snaky exposing most of the valuable tiles, and with the number of privateers you had you could have pillaged it very quickly for great gains including science and at the same time slowed down Woden significantly.

And re Ljubljana's idea I'm not a fan because by taking out the harbours you only disable new trade routes and the extra cothon bonus. The cities are coastal and can continue to build ships and Woden would have good visibility and not complete or pull back his new ships to keep them from danger, so your fleet would be spending time but not making meaningful gains.

I think my most glaring failure to understand mechanics in this game was not realizing that pillaging districts would deny the city their combat modifier. In several situations I unwittingly passed up the benefit by pillaging after shooting, and failed to notice the change in strength. 

Right behind that would be not taking advantage of Magnus' black marketeer promotion. That's hugely valuable for getting out more frigates, a crucial unit I was resource limited on, and I definitely had governor titles to spare. Not a mistake I intend to make again.

I gave up on trying to break into the Norwegian core with cossacks very quickly because there were surprisingly few roads on the Punic/Norwegian border, and Woden did a good job putting just enough units in the chokes to convince me it wasn't going to work out. Clearly, better organization and a more determined approach would have allowed me to break through, and at that point we're golden. 

When you get right down to it, going through (W)Odin really does have all the important stuff going for it. The supply lines issue is an enormous one, most of the frigates holed up in Russian cities or wiped out just north of my core would have joined the main group in the north if not for the high risk of being intercepted passing through Diomede. That alone makes up for any extra frigate casualties, and it seems more likely that this approach would have actually produced fewer losses in the short term. Certainly if it was paired with a general policy of not frittering them away like a fool attacking cities I didn't think I could actually capture. 

I guess coming around and attacking the western coast requires that Woden decide he needs to protect his holdings and thus come out and fight me, in which case I've got an equal or superior force and should be able to win decisively and strangle any future construction projects. If Woden decides to take a more Fabian tact, then I'm in some real trouble: My ability to reduce his research rate is sorely limited, he can pick off any smaller detachments I send out to try to pillage England, and eventually he'll tech to battleships and destroyers and force a decisive battle in whichever tech window (battleships vs ironclads, or destroyers vs battleships) he prefers, without me having a good place to make my own upgrades. So yes, although it could work it's a lot dicier, and relies on opponents making poor choices or an irrational degree of faith in my own tactical prowess. 

Of course, that is basically what the Raiders did to convince me to give up.

[ljubljana]

Some quick hits on the many great moves your team made in this game:

- Civ picks. I think we as a community tend to underrate the traditionally strong generalist civs on water maps. Everyone else gravitated towards water map civs because of comparative advantage but the Russia pick was inspired, and is making me question whether water maps pull the seafaring civs into a tier above everyone else or merely into parity with the S-tier civs on a land map. It is certainly not like Russia lacked for naval striking power for lack of a ship construction bonus, that is for sure

- DoA + Work Ethic is the natural choice for this iceball start but you executed with aplomb. Seriously, I did not fully appreciate in-game the sheer margin by which your team had the weakest start of the four, Russia or no Russia. Yet who consistently led in city count for the entire expansion phase? Monumentality Russia, of course You had stellar city placement on the home continent, too, with every city save Imperator Aleksandr (I believe) capable of contributing ships and with juiced Lavras in as many as possible while still getting the tightest possible city packing. Nicely done!

- While Work Ethic may have been the obvious move, taking two civs with holy site bonuses to double up on its effectiveness most certainly was not! Great move, your team was the only one to really understand how to use the team's religion to maximize the benefit to both members of said team. Compare our religion with Jesuit Education, out of which I got, um, one library total over the whole game . Desert Folklore would only have compounded this advantage and it is a shame that didn't pan out

- I also think it's worth a mention that your team was the only one to really make good use of the offshore islands and turn them into genuine production centers. My own placements (Runic and Oracle Bones) were weak and -y, but your colonies in both the west and east were major contributors to the war effort all game long.

- Beating China to the Great Lighthouse! That was a total coup that I never even considered, assuming every impactful wonder would be theirs for sure. Big mistake, and it really paid off for your team when the time came to execute tactically. Definitely going to pay more attention to the small handful of viable wonders (which I now know includes this one!) moving forwards.

- Fighting off Jongs with nothing but galley spam and strategic daring  How many civs in these PBEMs would have folded like a house of cards to a t100 Jong attack, undermassed or otherwise? You don't need me to tell you this, but my civ was certainly among them. And while Australia was ravaged pretty badly, keeping the damage contained there was a major coup as the Russian snowball was what was going to win the game for your team, and Russia emerged not only unscathed but as the top military power in the game, which they remained for the duration.

- You had the game's best strategic vision and geopolitical awareness, as is expected by now from any team with CMF on the roster. As soon as you saw TAD's milpower declining faster than ours your team immediately prepared for an attack on us as soon as possible, even if it meant sacrificing a conquest of China - definitely the right call. Your deductive work in the Indonesian war, where you sniffed out not only that an oncoming attack was coming but also how many ships there would be and even what tiles the ships would be on and when is extremely impressive as well. I have a lot to learn from this report and it will be my bible on the "how to notice what the other players are doing" front going forward. Only mistake I can see here is signing the DoF extension to t168 with my team, our navy was badly out of position in northern Japan on t158 and our home island defense force would have crumbled to an attack 10 turns earlier. Uh, not that it did any better with the timing you ultimately went with

- You surely don't need me to tell you that your tactical execution was top-notch at both Diomede and Finnmark! Which is to say, all game long, really. Williams never made any major tactical errors as far as I can tell and I positively dread seeing their troops on the other side of a battlefield in the future

- Privateer spam in Letters of Marque was an excellent move that countered our movement advantage and our pillaging advantage while letting you spam enormous numbers of invisible ships that we had no way to prevent from first-striking us! You have no idea the depth of the primal feeling of terror that I, personally, felt as our Australian fleet huddled together for safety with NO idea of what might be lurking out there in the fog, and in what numbers. By contrast I never built a single privateer because I didn't like their weak combat strength, which turned out to be a major error since I ended up with nothing to see your invisible navy with as a result! Definitely will not make that mistake again

- Re: city defense strength, I was pretty amused to note that Russia's DS jumped up to the fleet IC level basically the turn after mine did, and I was wondering if we might have been tripped up by the same bug And yes, I have so far utterly failed to figure out the true combat formula, and I am afraid thrawn's joking suggestion to publish the "Civ6 Logarithmic Tables" may be something I actually have to consider going forwards. Do I ever dread that possibility...

- I can't thank you enough for keeping the game going and sticking this out all the way to turn 200. It was a hell of a duel, and I'm not sure RB will ever really see its equal.