[SPOILERS] Out of retirement and into the fires of war. yuris125, Pitboss 68

[yuris125]

Commodore decided to be annoying and win a 32% with his trireme against ours in the inner sea, near Gruul Smash. Had to whip another one to stop him from pillaging the fishing net, and probably will have to get yet another one, as he will get a promotion on his

Spotted the first catapult in Thoth's capital

Other than that, a quiet turn - no surprise it turned around so quickly tonight and we got a second one

[Ginger*]

What is your desired window for making advances or do you plan to statically outpace your opponents with the land you've claimed?

[yuris125]

I think we can keep advantage over Thoth and Commodore with the land we have, but not against Miguelito and his wonders (now that we're in Hereditary Rule era and cities grow big enough to work coastal tiles, his Colossus is going to be very important). I think at the very least we need to take over Thoth's land

To do that, we need crossbows to protect the stack against praets. Unless Thoth sends in an attacking stack and we kill it, we wait until Machinery. And I while I'd rather do it sooner, I think we can afford to get Currency first, so that our main production city can help with Machinery research by building wealth

Against Commodore, since the main attacking force was melee units until very recently, dog soldiers were creating problems similar to praets. Now that we have horse archers, technically we could build a stack sufficient to attack. But we would be fighting at tech parity, and I don't have eyes on his main stack and don't even know its composition. Unless an opportunity presents itself (e.g. I see signs of Miguelito attacking him from the other direction), I think the plan is to wait until knights to attack Commodore. Based on GNP graphs, it seems very likely that we will get knights well ahead of him

So in short - chill and protect our land for now, attack Thoth with crossbows, attack Commodore with knights

[yuris125]

So I actually have been thinking (since Commodore has been annoying).... I said we don't know his stack composition, but from what we saw last time he tried to be annoying, it is heavily horse archer-based. And I said we would be fighting him at tech parity, but that's not true, we have Construction, which unlocks not only catapults, but also a unit with bonus vs mounted, and which I always forget about for some reason - but luckily I spotted in the queue just now. We have war elephants

If we put together a stack of 6-8 war elephants, half a dozen catapults, and some random axes and bowmen, we might be able to do serious damage to him. He doesn't really have a counter to war elephants at the moment, C2 Formation spears are good, but catapults do a number on them. And the rest of his forces are dog soldiers, swords, and horse archers - none of them do especially well against WEs

I've been thinking Thoth should be our next target, but his praets are going to stay relevant for a very long time, probably even into the knight era. Our advantage vs him will be in numbers. Whereas vs Commodore, we can have advantage in unit quality - and it is entirely possible we have a window right now

Nauf, stop me from doing stupid things

[naufragar]

[naufragar]

(More seriously, just beware how quickly horse archers can ruin catapults with flanking. It's toned down in our mods, but if enough horse archers survive, goodbye catapults.)

[yuris125]

A question - do naval units get double XP from combat? If so, is it base game behaviour which I just never noticed? I don't see it mentioned in change notes

As I reported a couple turns ago, Commodore attacked our trireme with his, won at 32% odds, his trireme was left at 0.4/2 hp. I thought ok, he will get a promotion out of it, I'll just whip a new trireme to protect our seafood and it will be fine. However, he did move in and pillage the fish, with trireme now at 1.6/2 hp and promoted to C2. It wasn't glowing blue when I first encountered it, so he got two promotions out of the battle. (This is what made me say he's being annoying last turn)

So our freshly whipped trireme only had 47% odds against his. I took the fight (not like the odds were getting better) and won. Now our trireme has 4 xp points rather than 2 I expected




Started war elephant production. Unfortunately it will take about 10 turns to get the stack I'd be happy with. Big Red Dragons can just about get one every 3 turns, and I would like it to build 3. In the capital, once it gets stables for the second promotion, we can whip one and slow build one. Gruul Smash can contribute one unpromoted one (it doesn't even have barracks), and Boros Burn can get one out, but only shortly before the attack (I don't want to show them to Commodore prematurely). See-Scape I want to focus on great person production (it's currently running 4 specialists for the next one), so don't want to whip it, and its production is too low to slowbuild 60h units

[mackoti]

I am prety sure a batle under 80% gave 3 experience and under 50% gives 4 but this is not from code but just from observation.

[naufragar]

According to Cyneheard's combat calculator, attacker's XP is 4*(Defender's_Strength/Attacker's_Strength). Defender's XP is halved. Edit: Strength here being the modified strength, not the base strength.

Low odds battles can get you a ton of XP. (Makes me want to play a game as Charismatic.)

[yuris125]

Ahhh I see, so it's just the attacker getting more XP. And I thought it was 2XP because we rarely take fights with bad odds. Now it makes sense, thanks!

And yeah, Commodore got a double promo out of a single attack thanks to CHM, when our 4XP was only good for 1 promo