Old Lurkers

[aetryn]

Is losing a city this early a death knell for Kaiser/CMF? I also do not know if both teams are not really engaged, or communicating more in Discord or elsewhere.

It's certainly not a great sign, but I don't think it's a death knell since that was a center line city site and they can possibly contest the rest of the center line. The reporting hasn't been good enough to tell if there was anything valuable there like a wonder or a lot of buildings, but it's not likely that they would be built in such a forward location. The biggest problem is the loss of the production queue + all the lost production on dead military units, some of which have to now be rebuilt for security, and all the orders spent fighting that could have been spent building or harvesting. But the other team had to spend a lot of orders fighting too, so both sides are going to be underdeveloped. But losing further cities would really be a disaster, particularly if it largely takes Kaiser out of the game and leaves CMF standing on his own.

I was hoping the pairing of vets with new people to the game would result in more tutorializing and back-and-forth communication in the team threads, but it doesn't seem to have materialized - I think everyone just got really busy and this game was one of the casualties.

[aetryn]

I'm seriously questioning the wisdom (and I'm sure Kaiser and CMF are now too!) of pushing so aggressively against Carthage, who has a very strong early military advantage due to barbarian recruitment. It's true that Orators can also recruit barbarians, but they have to do it with legitimacy and both sides had one of those anyway, leaving Carthage's buy-tribesmen-for-cash ability to be a major difference-maker. Settling the center site early in the face of Carthage was already pretty aggressive. Maybe it would have been better to strongly defend it and not overextend? By harassing the other city sites, Kaiser more or less forced the opposite team to concentrate and focus on military, when they might have just accepted the city plant and not sought early conflict. Now the result is a lost center city and scrambling military to defend the core. I suspect the lost turns/econ potential gained by the harassment were not worth the cost in this scenario.

The question is do Bruindane and Ginger keep pushing or accept their gains and go back to building up. They haven't had a chance to upgrade their mercs much, and strength 3 units are just not a real great investment on the attack. If they pause to upgrade, they let Kaiser reinforce but strength 6 units will overpower anything Kaiser can build right now. On the other hand, it sounds like some of the players aren't far from T2 military units, and if Kaiser can research and build a few of those in the meantime the attack would fizzle out. Personally I'd like to see this game go on longer than the equivalent of an Axe rush in Civ 4, but it's not clear if the players are really all that enthused by the game at the moment.

Update: From Kaiser's last report, he's nearly at Chariots and plans to rush them out, so I think it would be clearly right to stop pushing and upgrade. A horde of Strength 3 units can get eaten for lunch by chariots due to Rout. This ability allows the chariot to attack a second time if it kills a unit and another unit is adjacent to the unit killed - you can end up killing 4 units with one chariot in certain circumstances. There are some units that are immune to Rout (spear-types, mostly) but none of those are in play here. You could argue "why not push and force Kaiser to burn civics rushing those chariots in the face of an invasion", but if you invade with most of your forces and get them killed easily by chariots, now the boot is on the other foot and you have an undefended city at risk from invasion. Because nearby units can move FAST in Old World, you really have to keep an army-in-being and committing and losing your entire army (or a wing of it) is a major setback.

Combat Mechanics: Units do (6 * Attack / Defense) damage, rounded up if Attack is higher than defense and down if the reverse is true. Absent promotions, Chariots (Strength 5) will hit unupgraded tribal/barb mercs (Strength 3) for 10 damage, killing them in two hits, so two chariots could trigger a bit of routing and 3 will start to make it really bad. The next tier up (Warriors, mercs upgraded one time) is 8 damage, which is a lot better but still not great. Defenders do at most 1 damage in return except when you have a Tactician general. Attacks the other way are bad too - Stregnth 3 hits chariots for 3 damage, and Strength 4 hits chariots for 4 damage. These numbers get even worse if Kaiser has good standing with the unit owner's family, and thus has a military strength bonus to those units.

[GeneralKilCavalry]

Probably not the best place to ask but oh well: has there been any extensive discourse on here on the merits of old world vs. humankind, especially for multiplayer?

[aetryn]

I'm seriously questioning the wisdom (and I'm sure Kaiser and CMF are now too!) of pushing so aggressively against Carthage, who has a very strong early military advantage due to barbarian recruitment. It's true that Orators can also recruit barbarians, but they have to do it with legitimacy and both sides had one of those anyway, leaving Carthage's buy-tribesmen-for-cash ability to be a major difference-maker. Settling the center site early in the face of Carthage was already pretty aggressive. Maybe it would have been better to strongly defend it and not overextend? By harassing the other city sites, Kaiser more or less forced the opposite team to concentrate and focus on military, when they might have just accepted the city plant and not sought early conflict. Now the result is a lost center city and scrambling military to defend the core. I suspect the lost turns/econ potential gained by the harassment were not worth the cost in this scenario.

The question is do Bruindane and Ginger keep pushing or accept their gains and go back to building up. They haven't had a chance to upgrade their mercs much, and strength 3 units are just not a real great investment on the attack. If they pause to upgrade, they let Kaiser reinforce but strength 6 units will overpower anything Kaiser can build right now. On the other hand, it sounds like some of the players aren't far from T2 military units, and if Kaiser can research and build a few of those in the meantime the attack would fizzle out. Personally I'd like to see this game go on longer than the equivalent of an Axe rush in Civ 4, but it's not clear if the players are really all that enthused by the game at the moment.

Update: From Kaiser's last report, he's nearly at Chariots and plans to rush them out, so I think it would be clearly right to stop pushing and upgrade. A horde of Strength 3 units can get eaten for lunch by chariots due to Rout. This ability allows the chariot to attack a second time if it kills a unit and another unit is adjacent to the unit killed - you can end up killing 4 units with one chariot in certain circumstances. There are some units that are immune to Rout (spear-types, mostly) but none of those are in play here. You could argue "why not push and force Kaiser to burn civics rushing those chariots in the face of an invasion", but if you invade with most of your forces and get them killed easily by chariots, now the boot is on the other foot and you have an undefended city at risk from invasion. Because  nearby units can move FAST in Old World, you really have to keep an army-in-being and committing and losing your entire army (or a wing of it) is a major setback.

Combat Mechanics: Units do (6 * Attack / Defense) damage, rounded up if Attack is higher than defense and down if the reverse is true. Absent promotions, Chariots (Strength 5) will hit unupgraded tribal/barb mercs (Strength 3) for 10 damage, killing them in two hits, so two chariots could trigger a bit of routing and 3 will start to make it really bad. The next tier up (Warriors, mercs upgraded one time) is 8 damage, which is a lot better but still not great. Defenders do at most 1 damage in return except when you have a Tactician general. Attacks the other way are bad too - Stregnth 3 hits chariots for 3 damage, and Strength 4 hits chariots for 4 damage. These numbers get even worse if Kaiser has good standing with the unit owner's family, and thus has a military strength bonus to those units.

Still following this game, though it's hard to make out what's going on since only one of the four players is really reporting. Clearly I was wrong in this assessment and the Carthage/Egypt team is grinding out a win by continuing to pressure Kaiser/CMF while Egypt econs away. Will clearly win in a double points victory eventually, either through conquest of the remainder of the Babylonian or Roman cities, or through continued upgrading on the Egypt/Carthage side.

It sort of feels like this is the equivalent of Civ6 PB1 here, which was a comparatively short game won through a comparatively early war. I'd hope for more Old World games here but kind of sad this one didn't get more attention, so who knows?

[yuris125]

I have been lurking, but yes, unfortunate that reporting has been limited