Keep this between us, but this is a very scary unit position by Mjmd.
Now, he's communicated that he'll attack SD, but Mjmd is capable of coming up with an Extremely Logical reason why agreements have to change. Nevertheless, I've spoken about donut map politics before. If you're attacked from both fronts, you lose (unless you're monstrously superior to both attackers as Ginger will soon be). So, since Mjmd attacking me dooms me regardless of what I do, I... sort of have to ignore the possibility.
So we advance on Superdeath:
We can take French Toast for sure. If I were to try for Pumpkin Bars, I'd also have to take or destroy Thin Mints (the city obscured in the southwest). Otherwise, Pumpkin Bars would be vulnerable via Thin Mints' culture.
We move our artillery train up. We'll need to bombard for a turn or two to eat through the castle defenses. (Probably need to do a lesson on that next turn.) Mjmd plays after me. We'll know by next turn if he's attacking Superdeath or me.
(May 27th, 2024, 08:00)naufragar Wrote: We move our artillery train up. We'll need to bombard for a turn or two to eat through the castle defenses. (Probably need to do a lesson on that next turn.) Mjmd plays after me. We'll know by next turn if he's attacking Superdeath or me.
For the record, this is why I'm not stepping up to cover Mjmd this turn.
(May 27th, 2024, 08:00)naufragar Wrote: We move our artillery train up. We'll need to bombard for a turn or two to eat through the castle defenses. (Probably need to do a lesson on that next turn.) Mjmd plays after me. We'll know by next turn if he's attacking Superdeath or me.
For the record, this is why I'm not stepping up to cover Mjmd this turn.
Mjmd did in fact declare war on Superdeath. I've made some piddly moves. Bombarded the defenses of French Toast down a few percentage points. (Very slow in the face of walls+castle.) I'll bombard for one more turn and then go in.
Tarkeel, I realize I haven't been giving you much to get a handle on the situation. I'll make a big picture overview soon™ or we can chat on discord. Thanks very, very much for being willing to keep this game running.
(May 28th, 2024, 20:14)naufragar Wrote: Tarkeel, I realize I haven't been giving you much to get a handle on the situation. I'll make a big picture overview soon™ or we can chat on discord. Thanks very, very much for being willing to keep this game running.
Feel free to ping me on Discord, username is same as here or you can find me in the RB discord. Given the situation I've been assuming there won't be detailed instructions to follow, but I would appreciate some objectives and priorities to aim for.
Finally a good turn with which to demonstrate Civ4 combat:
In the lower left you see Superdeath's defenders. (Vets, yes, I took this picture after the battle started so I had to edit back in some stuff. ) Along the bottom of the interface, you see my units. Red dots mean the unit has already acted this turn.
In the red box there's a percentage. This is the city's defense. It's increased by culture (older cities inspire strong defense) or by walls and castles. Catapults have the ability to bombard cultural defenses, so this turn and the last, I bombarded these defense down from 100% to the 32% you see here. Every turn spent knocking down walls is a turn the defender has to recruit more defenders. There's a very complex calculus between when to blitz and when to siege. Let's ignore that for now.
Walls and Castles have some interesting properties. Besides raising the defense stat, they also make bombarding less effective. Normally, a catapult takes away 8% defense. With walls, that becomes 4%. With castles added, that's just 2%. I didn't want to take yet another turn, so I decided 100%->32% would have to be sufficient reduction.
By the way, Gunpowder units (remember unit types?) ignore defense bonuses from walls and castles. (Culture still counts.) So the city had 32% defense against my knights and such but only 20ish% against my Grenadiers.
Now on to the order of battle, for which we need to understand collateral.
Catapults and other artillery weapons have the "collateral damage" ability. While combat in Civ4 plays out as one unit versus another single unit, artillery will do "splash damage" when attacking. The way this works is that no matter the outcome of the catapults attack, it will do "one hit" worth of damage to a handful of random defending units. Collateral is the key to facing down "stacks of doom." One catapult attacks a stack, probably dies because it's weak, but in the process damages 6 other units! (The one it fights and then the collateral victims.) This damage is not diminished by fortification, city defense, etc. Practically nothing modifies collateral damage. Imagine a catapult (strength 5) attacking a city with 5 longbows fortified on a hill city behind walls (total strength 15. Wow!). The strength disparity is such that the catapult essentially never wins against the defending longbow. In fact, almost 40% of the time the catapult doesn't even harm the longbow. But the longbows underneath? Each loses 18% of its health! So despite the catapult barely scratching the top defender, it's done a combined 72% of a unit's health in damage to the defenders. In other words, it has killed 3/4 of a unit despite being unable to actually hurt that very unit in a stand-up fight.
Catapults have some limitations. They cannot kill units. In fact, catapult collateral can only every reduce an enemy to half health. The units randomly chosen for collateral hits might be ineligible (by being too damaged or being collateral-immune artillery themselves), and then the collateral is wasted. Still, let's go back to our first example. Let's say that two catapults reduce those longbow defenders by 36% of the health. Suddenly, your knights that were getting 7% odds of winning against the longbows are now getting 60% odds. And all it cost you was two catapults. 100 hammers of catapults lost to kill 250 hammers of longbows. Artillery is crazy.
Back to the actual battle. I had a choice after reducing the city's defenses. Do I attack with my catapults to take advantage of the awesome power of collateral damage? Actually, no.
The city's top defender is a nasty City Garrison-promoted musket. My catapult has almost a 50% chance of doing 0 damage to it! Yes, it'll do that collateral damage, but it would take so many catapults to get that musket into a manageable shape. So instead, we attack with a properly promoted Grenadier. The grenadier only has a 27% chance of killing the musket, but it'll likely do enough damage that subsequent attacks, whether with catapults or otherwise, will be much more successful. We attack and then win! Excellent. After knocking off the scary musket, we throw three catapults at the praetorians, damaging them enough that the Grenadiers have odds in the high 80%s to wipe them out. We take the city without any Grenadier casualties. Overall, a lucky engagement.
Lots of scary math and other such in this lesson, so let's boil it down. Artillery is your key to winning battles efficiently. Sometimes a sufficiently hardened top defender needs to get weakened first. And lastly, this isn't a squad-based tactics game. It's an operations-level war game. Units are a resource, and you will have to spend your resources, whether sacrificing catapults or rolling low odds initial fights. Just try to spend your resources as efficiently as possible.
Good morning class. Frog-sensei is taking some well-earned time off, so I will be your teacher for the day. Last we saw, the brave forces of Moralia was squaring off against the southern romans, but did we stop to discuss why this war is happening? Let's take a step back:
Premise: Wars are expensive
Using your hammers for units means they aren't going into infrastructure like commerce multipliers, and even worse, you're likely using the whip like sensei taught to convert your tiles into ephemeral units. This means that most wars are not profitable even when considered in a medium-term perspective (50-ish turns).
Corollary: Expenses are relative
The one occasion where wars are profitable even in the short term, is when your victim neighbor has not allowed themselves the necessary investment into units. So finding the right balance of forces for deterrence is crucial.
Conclusion: Fight smart
The Keeper's Rulebook for Call of Cthulhu had this piece of wisdom: "Always have a plan," illustrated with this glorious quote from The Holy Grail: "Lancelot, Galahad and I will leap out of the rabbit." Whenever you're engaged in warfare, you should always know why you are fighting, which brings me to where the game is at:
The first question to ask is "why do we fight?" followed by "what gains can we reasonably extract without expenses going out of control?" Our primary objective for this war is not the annihilation and annexation of Roman lands; instead we're trying to opportunistically nibble at the edges while his forces are busy devouring the second meal of the game. We're also doing our best to prop up said meal (Gavagai) so that Superdeath doesn't become too large.
To that means, we'd like to take the northern corner of the Roman empire, where the cities of French Toast, Pumpkin Bars and Thin Mints have the interlocking culture to reinforce each other. As you can see, the culture from Pumpkin Bars extends all the way up to French Toast, so we're unlikely to be able to keep that city without the Pumpkin Bars being neutralized. Likewise, Thin Mints will exert control right up to the doorstep of Pumpkin Bars, and beyond that there's Friendship Bread.
Addendum: Always have a plan, but don't get married to it
In an ideal world where Superdeath's forces were more strongly tied up in the south, we'd have camptured French Toast and Pumpkin Bars, and razed Thin Mints. Back in the real world where a sizeable stack appears in Pumpkin bars, we're better off just cutting our losses and asking for peace.
There are other forces stirring in this world as well.
The lumbering Zulu giant has finally declared on the spindly Ottomans. We judge that it's best for us if Ljubljana has a free back to curtail Ginger, so we return the Zulu signs of friendship and spur the Ottomans: We have too much on our hands.
Good morning class. Let me take you back to a previous lesson where frog-sensei talked about collateral damage. This turn we have a lesson in why "Catapults are the most broken unit". When I first logged in, I was greeted by an offer of peace for the city of Washington, and was thinking "over my dead body." Then I saw this, and he might just get that:
For those of you who are unfamiliar with how the event log works, oldest messages are to the bottom/left, and newest on the top/right. Superdeath sent in his catapults, expending 17 of them before the hitters got to work. In the end he only lost two praetorians and a knight to massacre our garrison. In total we lost 15 grenadiers, 2 crossbows, 1 pike and 11 catapults of our own. In the end it looks like this:
Now, we still have some forces outside Washington to help defend. It will be hard to cover both New York and Washington, but a force stationed 2S of Placid Bull can both get into Washington and strike whatever steps up to New York, so we're tempted to make Thanks to the hill in our borders being the only road connection, even his knights can't hit New York without staging on a tile we can reach. He could road the grasshill SW-SW of New York, but that would take a turn or preparation where he needs to defend the workers.
Lesson of the day: Whomever gets to strike first with their catapults, wins.
) Along the bottom of the interface, you see my units. Red dots mean the unit has already acted this turn.
