[PB72 SPOILERS] Aetryn learns humility

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Yeah, this looks like a good way to leverage your tech and production advantages - just patiently keeping the pressure on. He MUST hold Creation, which in turn means he can't be strong elsewhere. So the attack on his southwestern border should in theory be successful.

The main danger, of course, with multiple attacking fronts is the possibility that Bing can shift forces to meet each one in turn - which danger of course, is then avoided by attacking simultaneously. Will Arretium and Creation go in on the same turn?

[Mjmd]

The nice thing about both of these attacks is they are "safe". Staging for attack on Creation is within Greenline territory. Now if Bing keeps all his forces there Aetryn can't raze, so its just a trade of units. But even if its not that favorable that benefits Aetryn long term and with how low a lot of those units are and tech advantage may get at least even if not favorable trades even if Bing has reinforcements that then attack out. Arretium is even safer because with the aircraft cutting the hill roads Bing can't do anything about.

[aetryn]

Yeah, this looks like a good way to leverage your tech and production advantages - just patiently keeping the pressure on. He MUST hold Creation, which in turn means he can't be strong elsewhere. So the attack on his southwestern border should in theory be successful.

The main danger, of course, with multiple attacking fronts is the possibility that Bing can shift forces to meet each one in turn - which danger of course, is then avoided by attacking simultaneously. Will Arretium and Creation go in on the same turn?

This is leveraging my overall logistics advantage. It's probably max 25 tiles from one front of my empire to another (and armies move 10 tiles on friendly rail). Bing, because of his odd shape, has about 40-50 tiles to traverse from one end of his empire to another - and in fact there's one city just southwest of Creation that if Greenline took it would effectively cut Bing in half. I'll try to make a map that shows this but it probably requires a stitch of several screenshots and I'm not entirely sure how to do this.

I need to hit Creation next turn before those units heal, and Arretium doesn't have quite enough planes in position this turn to start that attack next turn, so they'll be one turn apart. But he can't possibly shift from one end of his empire to the middle (where Creation is) that fast. In fact, I may benefit from it if he pulls forces to reinforce Creation, they'd be uselessly in transit on the turn Arretium gets attacked.

[aetryn]

T257-258: Two attacks foiled, one attack underway

Bing spotted the threat to Creation and abandoned it, ceding it to Greenline. This preserves a bit of his army but devastates his economy, losing the cash influx from the HQ.




His army retreating is shown in red. The pink lines are his city rail connections and try to illustrate what I mean about long connections - his westernmost cities are quite a bit west even of this screenshot - The Good Earth is just north, and Velitrae is barely visible right on the edge. His primary stack is circled in purple, so you can see how hard it would be for him to move it to The Good Earth because of the triple seas and double mountain range all blocking off a huge part of the map.

So good and bad. Good, I didn't lose any troops, and Bing's research rate should be totally trashed, and Bing has the bigger army, population, and production capacity. Bad, because Greenline had better tech and now has more capacity to keep up. But Greenline also lost a LOT of troops taking back Creation, so at least should not be an immediate threat to switch sides in the war and attack me:




Meanwhile, I spotted what looked like another great opportunity to attack:



Velitrae had only 3 infantry and one artillery on duty, and I had two transports full of 8 Pinch Marines ready to land. I didn't sim this, but I would have thought that this would be a likely win for me. But it didn't go my way - 2 attacks failed to do any damage at all, and the last Infantryman survived with only about 20% health left. This wasn't a favorable hammer trade, and I've now lost the advantage of surprise here, but it will pin some more forces in place to prevent a repeat, and I can afford bad hammer trades to wear down and frustrate Bing.

Meanwhile, the Arretium attack goes in, the rails are cut, and there are 22 tanks ready to blow up the 6 defenders in Arretium. I surely ought to win that one next turn!?

Current demos look scarily good for me:




.. and I still haven't even fully spread my corps around, so those food and hammer numbers have a long way up to go. MJMD reminded me to check how close I was to victory conditions next turn, which I will try to remember to do.

Also, how am I leading on approval rate after the ridiculous amount of whipping I've been doing?

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

I don't know fully how to read Civ IV demographics, but frankly it looks like the game is already over to me. You have as much food, land, and soldiers as the other two players combined, something like four times as much gold generation (and in Civ IV that fuels research and culture, yeah?), and while combined they outweigh your production, I gather in this world of whipping and drafting that doesn't matter so much. As long as you play mistake-free, I don't see how you lose at this point.

[Mjmd]

Just a note GNP includes gold/research but also culture, and culture doesn't go towards those. So to say creative construction plus free speech is VASTLY altering is an understatement still. That being said Aetryn has been keeping track of tech pace and Aetryn is ahead in both techs and pace.

But yes I've told Aetryn just to do what he can at the moment and keep advancing towards nukes. Although bombers will also be nice. To note I think Aetryn got radio down to 1 turn so those open up less painful attacks on two Bing cities. I don't think* its correct btw Aetryn to go for christo. It would be nice to switch back and forth from serfdom and slavery, but just keep pumping units.

[aetryn]

T259: Arretium falls, will Bing see the next threat?

Bing retreated from Arretium with the garrison alone the one road I couldn't burn, and because his culture is pretty deep here there's nothing I can do to stop these units from getting away. But I took the city and kept...




... pretty much everything I wanted to and more than I had any right to expect. 7 turns of Anarchy, which is an eternity, and this city will be a defensive liability until Circei falls which isn't immanent. But we still have plans for the south. Here's my updated Arretium Campaign:




Purple shows Bing's retreat, the black X near the fort is a road I took out this turn to make it... somewhat safe... to position some fighters on that fort. I put a decent garrison in that fort, but he COULD choose to hit it with his main stack to the west if he wants. But if he does that I can counterstrike from Courage and I wouldn't mind a general engagement here if he wants to push. More likely he falls back further. Anyway, the other planes move up to Arretium itself. This is his last turn to save Tlalmanalco. Next turn the Arretium planes cut the rails on the marked tiles and 4 Marines come over from Rome as shown, and I don't care how bad my naval invasion luck is, 4 marines aren't getting stopped by an axeman. I won't be keeping that city - the plan is to just burn it and retreat. I'll have to think more about how to make progress against Circei. He's built a highly annoying hill fort that guarantees connectivity from Circei to the east unless my new bombers can crack it... which will probably be the plan over the next few turns.

Meanwhile, in the east, next turn we get the chance for a tile-flip attack:




The tile marked with a check will flip to me next turn, meaning tanks in Steadfastness can hit The Good Earth with no stopping in between. He needs to reinforce that garrison or I'm pretty sure it falls next turn. Meanwhile, I built a road 2 south of Steadfastness (not pictured) and sent my airplanes to bomb rails near Chalco, to make Bing thing the next engagement is there and maybe overlook the tile flip (he mostly hasn't noticed them in the past).

Meanwhile, the first bombers roll off the factory lines next turn, and I spread Cereal Mills to another city, and I will think about founding one of the "At War Go Long" city sites on the Arretium map next turn.

[Mjmd]

Just in case game doesn't end, don't overspend units quite yet; not sure how much is in mind. Good Earth, Circei, and Chalco will all be vulnerable to bombers + tanks. Have settlers ready to resettle in appropriate spots. 

In some ways I want the game to end so I can stop seeing that Aetryn put down fresh cottages

[aetryn]

While we're waiting on the other players to weigh in on whether they want to continue, I want to reflect on what happened. The midgame was extremely tight, with me probably running in 3rd behind Bing's military juggernaught and Greenline's Mercantlism+Representation combo. How did I end up in such a dominant position with even more room to grow as I expand corps?

Some key turning points:

1) Nobody contested Liberalism. So what, all I did was take Rifling which they went for anyway? This had two knock-on effects, because nobody wanted to tech it afterward: nobody else had Free Speech (which was good for more than culture, and would have been good for Greenline's cottage heavy core), and nobody was in a position to contest Communism. Communism landed me a key Great Person to get my 3rd GA underway when the Taj plan whiffed, and gave me such a leg up on Kremlin that I didn't even need a good plan to build it fast.

2) The Mining Inc race I "lost". This was almost certainly not worth the Great Merchant Greenline spent on it, as he had Biology for AGES without a merchant to found Cereal Mills. Of course, he was also in Mercantilism to power up his specialists and maybe didn't want a second corp? Either way, this let me get Cereal Mills to pair with Kremlin which is utterly absurd. And Creative Construction was incredibly good on this map. I pushed back Bing's territory so much, and earlier I pushed Greenline off the lands he conquered from Xist. The culture also set up point #4 below. Probably on a map like this with lots of land but also lots of narrow chokes, we underestimated culture.

3) Greenline losing his big attack stack to Xist. This let Bing renew his war and actually make progress, since Greenline was momentarily at a disadvantage (and had a geographically difficult empire to defend - I'm about the only one that had a really EASY empire to defend). This in turn let me dogpile in and take some key territory, which also set up:

4) Smashing Xist's stack at minimal losses. True, Xist had vastly inferior units, but he had so dang many of them and collateral to soften up a stack that it looked like it could be too expensive to conquer him in a tight balance-of-power situation(it certainly was for Greenline!). Finding and first-striking his stack really destroyed any chance of him being able to do damage and made it obvious to just power in and take over his lands.

Between all of those I ended up with a bunch of extra cities, land stolen by mega-culture, two corps producing oodles of food and hammers, and Kremlin. The rest of it was just leveraging that position.

There were of course some other important factors:

• Financial, and leaning into the trait with all those water cities - kept me right up there with tech even after losing a major commerce city to a raze and eventually made it impossible for the competition to keep up. It's just such a powerful trait as the game goes longer and longer. And yeah, the Mints were a good addition, especially since I had metal luxuries and wanted forges for the bonus happy anyway.
  
• Bing's slow strategic pace to attack Greenline, and his slow tactical pace actually attacking Greenline when at war. This meant that he had to dodge the cataphract power window, and when he did go in, it meant his gains were minimal by the time I was ready to launch an attack, and he didn't really end up keeping much of what he took (assume I raze The Good Earth - not really ANY of it). Attack windows are small in a game as tight as this one. I'm a rank beginner at multiplayer warrior, so my instinct may be WAY off, but it felt like Bing was trying to play as McClellan in the American Civil War. For all Bing did a monumentally impressive job building a massive army with minimal assistance from corp hammers, he doesn't seem to have gotten as much out of it as I would expect.
  
• The map. I had the best long-term strategic position by a mile. The Western Valley was impregnable once Temperance was well defended and well connected, and especially once Mediolanum was gone and I controlled that whole junction area, I had massive backlines. The Eastern Wastes were far, far away from anyone's capital, some bits of it very hard for others to access by land, and left open for me to claim tons of land. It was horrible land for early game, and heck, half of those cities were never much more than repeated whip cities (I think one them was up to 70 turns of whip unhappiness by the end), but land is land. I had a constrained front with everyone, especially once I knocked out Xist, and Bing was super strung out. Greenline's land wasn't as linear as Bing, but he had a bunch of cross-water colonies that were never going to be easy to defend. And it seems like MJMD and I's early game read on the map (probably a long game, tough gains in warfare because of all the chokes) was right. Maybe the others didn't mean their picks to be so militarily focused but surely someone else had a reasonable Financial (or Protective, or anything more econ-focused) combo?
  
• Golden Age Timing - my 3rd GA was very late but it also let me get into some more advanced civics than everyone else did with their 3rd GA. Actually, did Greenline ever get a 3rd GA?
  
• Some strange research decisions post Biology/Physics. Maybe everyone econ was just really falling apart, but nobody followed me to tanks, Bing didn't attempt to match me at Flight. If you're going to cede someone a massive production (from Kremlin) + cultural + food lead, you better not ALSO let them have superior units for a long time.
  

Did I miss anything? What do you all think?

[aetryn]

Just in case game doesn't end, don't overspend units quite yet; not sure how much is in mind. Good Earth, Circei, and Chalco will all be vulnerable to bombers + tanks. Have settlers ready to resettle in appropriate spots. 

In some ways I want the game to end so I can stop seeing that Aetryn put down fresh cottages

If the game goes another 30 turns those cottages might be useful!

I wasn't really building that many actually, but I was trying to get a few of my newly planted/conquered cities that had good land for it to get some more commerce, and if there was no better option, cottages were it. I hadn't spread Creative Construction for like 10-15 turns and my GNP numbers were still headed way up because I was growing pop onto water mills and mature cottages and yes, even some less mature cottages.