[PB73 SPOILERS] scooter's Oracle

[Thoth]

Well done.

[yuris125]

Grats on the successful operation!

[Cyneheard]

That's glorious.

(I did break my ded-lurker status during this war, FYI)

[Zed-F]

Awesome! I had been hoping you’d keep checking to see if you could make something like this work. Now I guess we see how Oxy takes it…

[scooter]

Thanks everyone. Hoping I can hold off the big YOLO that I know is coming. It'll be dicey.

Congrats on pulling off the assault. I bet you are feeling pretty smug about the Vikings right now.

Was always weird to me that Vikings were never considered anywhere near OP or even top-tier in our games. They're crazy good.

[xist10]

Movement is a factor, but I don't think it's that important on the sea.
Destroyer have a movement of 8 already. Even galeons get only + 25%.
Add not that much water on the most maps ( I played) and no collateral damage before battleships and planes ? You don't really need a first strike on sea. - on the coast, you want to defend.
You can't really force a fight against a viking, but thats it.

You need "only" to scout a bigger area - defending against a invasion is difficult, even without the movement bonus.
I think, zerkers could be a bit understated, but they have "only" the +10% against cities. Amphibeous is a niche and longbows should be able to trade ~ 1:1 with zerkers ? You need siegeweapons (or at least frigates to destroy the walls) and this means, you can't really pull off a quick raid.

[T-hawk]

Don't forget the galleys, way before the galleon era. That made possible razing a significant city early here in the war against Cataphracts.

[yuris125]

Yeah 4-move galleys are terrifying, and vikings with base BtS circunmav can build those at will

[Qgqqqqq]

Movement is critical on the sea. Forcing fights with navies is powerful, but the big thing is forking and projecting force. Going from 4 to 5 movement can easily let you hit an additional city. To prevent that, the enemy needs to pack units into it - increasing costs for them, tying forces down - or block you with navy - potentially fragmenting forces that can be picked off at will.

Zerkers, unlike attacking on land, often don't need to be in danger unless they're sniping. The point isn't how cost effective they're vs longbows, the point is they'll often only attack / be risked when you know you can take a city. And if every city is threatened, it's very expensive to have multiple longbows in each one, so scenarios like the above are more than possible.

[scooter]

Movement is a factor, but I don't think it's that important on the sea.
Destroyer have a movement of 8 already. Even galeons get only + 25%.
Add not that much water on the most maps ( I played) and no collateral damage before battleships and planes ? You don't really need a first strike on sea. - on the coast, you want to defend.
You can't really force a fight against a viking, but thats it.

You need "only" to scout a bigger area - defending against a invasion is difficult, even without the movement bonus.
I think, zerkers could be a bit understated, but they have "only" the +10% against cities. Amphibeous is a niche and longbows should be able to trade ~ 1:1 with zerkers ? You need siegeweapons (or at least frigates to destroy the walls) and this means, you can't really pull off a quick raid.

Oh I disagree with, well, basically all of this . So let's talk about why the Vikings are so OP on water-heavy maps like this one.


First, yes the movement matters a lot. There's a reason 2-movers dominate MP! So much about naval/amphibious combat is threatening forks and counting movement range, so being able to outrange all of your enemies on equal tech is super strong. Galleys are not supposed to be able to attack from the fog, but as T-Hawk mentioned, I got a critical raze from the fog with a Galley! And it was only possible because the Galley was able to get from my western edge to eastern edge in just a few turns due to its movement. Circumnav is incredibly powerful too, and Vikings make it easier to claim this too, stacking your bonus like I did in this game.


When you defend against a naval attack, you have two choices. You either have to win the fight at sea in a way that outright blocks attacks from the other player, or you have to stack defenders in every single city that your opponent's transport boats can reach. Obviously in this game I'm in the latter camp (while Oxy is in the former), but literally right now I would have to stack an additional city if Oxy's Galleons had 1 more range than they have, for example. But the point of a mobility edge is you have the ability to 1) have more fork angles than you would otherwise, and 2) be able to threaten attacks while denying an opponent's first strike. For example, early in this conflict I set up Galleon strikes where I could hit Oxy cities without him being able to kill my Galleons during his turn. That forced him to send Frigates to places he probably did not want to send them, and it forced him to use more military on city defense rather than attack. It bought me 2-3 turns which might have been crucial. The movement edge also let me pull off the Dunkirk maneuver where I could set up boats safely in my backlines and have them travel all the way through forts, into the channels, kill boats, and retreat back into backlines all in one turn. It was massively important.


All this emphasis on movement though really gives Zerks the shaft, and it's probably partly to do with the fact that this hasn't been their most impactful game due to the weird game dynamics. It's really important to understand that having Amphibious is not niche at all if the map has water. It's incredibly powerful. More underrated is the fact that you can stack Amphibious and the inherent city attack bonuses with City Raider promos! And then you can do things like upgrade them to Grenadiers and keep all of these promotions.

I used this to pretty incredible effect in PB5 and PB13. And this is where the Vikings can really shine in the mid and late game - gobbling up land from lagging players. Vikings are a civ that scale really well with player ability and land/tech edges, so if you can get into a good position with them, the Zerks + movement make conquest lightning fast. Profitable conquests against humans are always fundamentally about speed. The quicker you can blitz through a player, the less time they have to whip, the less time others have to prop them up, and the faster those cities are online producing for you. You use CR2-3 Zerks off 3 move Galleys to conquer one neighbor, and then once you get Astro + MilSci, you mass upgrade to Grenadiers and then mow over everyone defending with Longbows and Muskets. And of course, all of these units are coming off boats with extra range, so there's really nothing your opponent can do except have enough Frigates to sink all your Galleons. If they don't, you get to pick which battles to fight, and they cannot possibly defend all of the cities.


Finally, another important thing about the Vikings are the synergies with leaders! You have a lot of good choices. This didn't matter as much for this game, but in a larger game it's much easier to find a leader to pair with them if you're doing a snake pick or something. ORG does great because it discounts the UB that you already want in every coastal city. FIN is great because you're already incentivized to prioritize coast. AGG is pretty good too in a larger game (where leader options are more constrained) because it makes the Zerks even scarier and opens up more interesting promo paths, especially if you manage to pair it with FIN or ORG. CHM can be quite useful too as it means Theocracy + Vassalage == Nav2 boats out of the gate to really go the naval mobility route.


(Also, without Vikings, I would have been forced to concede like 3 weeks ago, and instead I just razed the most important city on the map.)