[PB64] Amicalola Gets To Heaven with Tarkeel and Ljubljana

[Gavagai]

Amica, do you want my commentary on your complaints and, more generally, my opinion on what and why happened in this game? It is your thread and you understandably take this stuff close to heart and I am going to voice a strong and pointed disagreement with your assessment. So, if my contrarian opinion is not welcomed here, it will be totally fine.

You're welcome to. But you might be arguing against an opinion(s) of mine that does not exist. For me this is a game of repeatedly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. I tend to think I have the best starting position and got very lucky in some ways. I think I played quite badly; you can read earlier how I over expanded terribly, which one could rightlyblame for my loss. The first war against you is another example that I have criticised at length. Combat has just been really grim, which is where my frustration here comes from.

Upon reflection, I think I'll better post what I was going to say in the lurker's thread. Not that I was going to post anything spoilery but in-depth engagement between a player and (currently) a spoiled lurker is probably a terrible idea because of general considerations. But yes, a big part of what I was going to say was that you were lucky in some other respects. In particular, you were lucky that other players (me included) made lots of incredibly dumb decisions.

[Amicalola]

Amica, do you want my commentary on your complaints and, more generally, my opinion on what and why happened in this game? It is your thread and you understandably take this stuff close to heart and I am going to voice a strong and pointed disagreement with your assessment. So, if my contrarian opinion is not welcomed here, it will be totally fine.

You're welcome to. But you might be arguing against an opinion(s) of mine that does not exist. For me this is a game of repeatedly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. I tend to think I have the best starting position and got very lucky in some ways. I think I played quite badly; you can read earlier how I over expanded terribly, which one could rightlyblame for my loss. The first war against you is another example that I have criticised at length. Combat has just been really grim, which is where my frustration here comes from.

Upon reflection, I think I'll better post what I was going to say in the lurker's thread. Not that I was going to post anything spoilery but in-depth engagement between a player and (currently) a spoiled lurker is probably a terrible idea because of general considerations. But yes, a big part of what I was going to say was that you were lucky in some other respects. In particular, you were lucky that other players (me included) made lots of incredibly dumb decisions.

That's also true, although perhaps the inverse is too: they (and you) are lucky in that I made lots of incredibly dumb decisions. But yeah, I suspect I would probably agree with some or most of your post

[Krill]

In particular, you were lucky that other players (me included) made lots of incredibly dumb decisions.

This should be the forum motto, nevermind QOTM.

[Mjmd]

In particular, you were lucky that other players (me included) made lots of incredibly dumb decisions.

This should be the forum motto, nevermind QOTM.

I also vote to make this QOTM at the very least, it needs updated besides.

[Amicalola]

Ruh Roh.

[El Grillo]

Totally not relevant, but seeing Zhuge Liang and Scipio Africanus riding War Elephants together in that stack made me smile. Good luck on the defense!

[Amicalola]

Totally not relevant, but seeing Zhuge Liang and Scipio Africanus riding War Elephants together in that stack made me smile. Good luck on the defense!

Irrelevance is the best kind of post! I hadn't noticed, but it made me smile too. I will play and report the turn in a couple of hours - it would be wrong to give such a climactic turn no content. I think this turn we either win or lose the game.

[Amicalola]

Battle of New Wheels
The lines are drawn, the stacks are ready. 


I don't think we clear this stack once it gets to the hill, and I don't think we can win if New Wheels gets razed. Besides, I'm kind of ready for this game to end, one way or another. This looks grim (didn't sim, obviously), but I think we just have to pray that our combat results swing around. 

We fort the hill in preparation for our navy - Naufragar's knights will quickly ruin the south, but what choice do we have? 



We send in the cannons and catapults:


We get quite lucky! Probably 2-3 more cannons should have died. The big problem is that Commodore has such a ridiculous number of catapults that they soak up most of the collateral; many of these, particularly the latter ones, only hit 1 extra unit, while many units remain unscathed.   

But we've committed, so we have to keep going. We send the forkers over, and throw our muskets and knights into the fray, taking out Scipio and Zhuge Liang for good measure:




These also get quite lucky; we should have lost considerably more units here than we did. 



Finally, we send in some of the junk, and things turn around somewhat, as we lose a lot of 40% and 50% in a row. But ultimately, I think we just needed to deal more collateral than we did in reality; we couldn't send in pikes, for example, because the vultures were mostly full health. Or mostly my unit comp was bad and we shouldn't have built as many pikemen. Having all the units sucked up by Superdeath's attack would also have made a massive difference, so he contributed a lot to the dogpile as well. Finally, we should have been greedier with removing the eastern garrisons, there's two cannons in particular that would have been pretty huge to have here. Oh well. Here's the aftermath: 


Stupid Celtic Catapults.  I'm not sure how we fare on the return hit - probably quite badly, I suspect, but I really have no idea. It was a shame that we didn't get to kill any cannons on the attack; I wonder if the order of combat should have been altered significantly to allow that, but I'm not sure. 

In a desperate bid to hold the island, Sun Tzu triple promotes two unpromoted archery units. Then I realise that was dumb and I should have used him to heal the promoted ones.  



So we got quite lucky this turn, which makes me feel a bit better about the rest of the game. The question is: will it be enough to withstand the crackback? I suspect not, but I'm quite curious to find out.

[Psillycyber]

So, how many units do they have left on that tile? Your mouse hover-over only shows your own units. I see that you do still have some full-strength hill fort defenders (if they choose to try to attack into that tile), so maybe your attacking stack won't get counter-wiped? But it's hard to tell without seeing what they have left. I have to imagine that some of their catapults died from flanking damage, no?

[Gavagai]

Was it an option to flank out the catapults with knights after cannons stopped doing much collateral?