June 18th, 2024, 21:20
(This post was last modified: June 18th, 2024, 21:21 by ljubljana.)
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yeah, i probably am..... i mean one very important (generally, but not in our gamestate really) thing they do is take down castle defenses in a reasonable timeframe.... and with city raider, as actual attackers into cities (with era equivalent defenders, as you say) they are probably extremely fearsome. but that steel tech is MEGA expensive and we have precisely zero (well, imprecisely zero  ) economy as of now.... it feels to me like the main thing we will need siege for in the forseeable future is collateralling down stacks of technologically superior invaders, and i guess at specifically that job cannons do not seem like enough of an improvement (if they are one?) to justify such an expensive research...
June 19th, 2024, 11:50
(This post was last modified: June 19th, 2024, 11:50 by ljubljana.)
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Turn 187 - Zululand
uh oh.... greenline played an EIGHT minute turn today, which in my elevated state of paranoia smells like attacking out or at least making a meaningful defensive decision, which is exactly the kind of thing we're trying to prevent here. ugh.... well, not excited to open this one
first, i guess mjmd's borders have expanded to steal the greenline sugar. this is now the second time someone has offered us the resource in such a situation (abi pigs is the other) which makes it almost seem like a convention
big movement on the tech front! mjmd cashed liberalism for rifling AND naufragar finally hit steel. mjmd made peace with ginger as well
lol.... the mjmd city across the water from CTR picked the worst time you could possibly imagine to expand to 4th-ring borders  so it now looks pretty unlikely that we can stop it flipping to them. i of course would have burned it had i somehow deduced that this would happen.... well, so it goes. i really don't want to have to dow on them to recapture-and-burn (but if the city does flip away ofc i probably will)
as for greenline
they did do SOMEthing, but not something on my list of fears from last turn.... they have split the stack in magnus, leaving a significant-but-crackable force inside and retreating half the knights and most of the cats to.... and undisclosed location..... that location is not south unless they did a FULL retreat back to the capital area. so is it east, to the forest from which it could threaten to recapture RFT if we take it this turn? if so we may actually have the chance to hit them this turn depending on, ugh, on the dice with respect to which tiles revert to neutrality this turn  ((((
well, CTR just has 3 units inside and we get 80% odds on all of them, so i think we can at least attack the city without worrying too much
lol, second cuir to attack lost at 77% without damaging the spear..... and then we had one retreat, which i first thought was bad but is actually probably good - this way we can take the city with a SENTRY cuir to gain some crucial tiles of extra visibility before deciding whether to keep it or not
well, no cats in range, so it's conceivable that we could hold the city, but..... the stupid unknowable tile reversion mechanics are ruining another turn for us tactically, preventing the cuirs from moving on to work ethic AND blocking our 1-movers from making it inside. ugh. have i mentioned my UTTER LOATHING for this game system yet by the way  
note that the desert N-NW of the city is indeed closer to "our" city of DotF than to any sumerian city, so that ruins that theory....
if we choose to keep it, the city comes with granary, courthouse, and forge, which is quite a haul. but if burning it removes the cultural borders this turn, that is probably the correct choice.... i do not want to pile a billion units in here where they could be easy prey to both the knight swam and whatever they have in (border city with dreylin, with whom they are at war!) work ethic.... and i can't even sim out if burning it removes the odious culture either as, well.... i don't know what happens if i exit out of pitboss while this dialog box is open, but it can't be good 
anyways posting while the dialog box is still open; if any genlurkers know if razing the city will fix this, please say so in the meantime i'm going to go read through old mechanics threads to see if there is any discussion there
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yuck... well, i forced williams to sim it and it looks like razing will not fix the border issue. so no reason not to keep it, i guess, despite that exposing the city to almost certain recapture
ok, well, they do have two workers in range of our sentry horse that we could go for, and i sure as hell am tempted. but.... i think it's more important to defog all the tiles within three of the plains tile NE of RFT, so we can get a sense of how much of a death trap it would be to try to save those injured cuirs. we could stack 26 more cuirs on that tile, in range of what we can only assume are all their knights, one visible pike, one visible cat.... and whatever the garrison in WE is. that last one, of course, is the difference-maker and i think we need to check it out more than we need to kill their workers, unless we are content to simply leave the injured to their fates.... (not to mention we'd also be declining to push our stack forward which is a big nope as well
well, looks like we should be able to guard the injured safely enough.... but fuck, dude! can you imagine if we could move 16 cuirs onto this hill, as by all rights we SHOULD be able to? ughhhh i am STEAMING about this lol
well, with the cats and some of the knights in magnus having retreated to god-knows-where, the question of whether to push our 1-mover stack onto the PFH kinda answers itself
they can't cat us down from the fog if we have vision on literally every tile in range 
yeah, with the irritating culture situation i think piling everyone on to protect the injured is the correct move. just one cat in range and it's hard to imagine they have enough guys around to crack a full 30 cuirs without collateral
now there is some question of division of labor with respect to the rest of the cuirs between joining the magnus attack and the RFT/work ethic push.... i feel confident that we want SOME cuirs to head for magnus as the only guys we have that get odds attacking into longbows and pikes on a hill (yeah dude, a combat 2 cuir is narrowly favored against a pike on a hill.....). but equally 30 cuirs may not be enough to seize the SE if they reallocate their cats and knights maximally annoyingly.... well, cuirs on the PFH are special, to the extent that we can get them, as they fork magnus itself and the ministack on the windmill, and they can attack said windmill stack without exposing themselves to a counter. so maybe we drop as many as we can there, and (most of?) the rest can head to RFT? that is a roughly even division, i, uh, i hope that's good
EOT, i think.... i absolutely hate that the culture mechanics are costing us both a turn on our SE advance and the chance to try to hold RFT this turn as a result i am also not going to offer ginger ankyra this turn, as i was planning to, as i don't want them tempoing us into work ethic.... we have 4 turns left on our formal peace treaty. i sure hope they are still willing to accept next turn or else we are screwed
hopefully the stress that this puts on their position is sufficient to force them to abandon magnus in the next few turns.... at any rate, i definitely think they have to give up the windmill hill now or we are about to trade one catapult for 8 units....
otherwise, i think our plan is to use our guerilla 2s (we do not have a lot of them but what we have will have to do) to take the hills surrounding magnus and isolate it so we can eventually get our 1-mover stack to the other PFH, directly east of the city. i think the city will fall convincingly after that even if there is a huge stack inside
closing with domestics, sort of..... do not be fooled by all those infra builds. other than abi and WMH, every city that is "working on infra" has a cuir available to whip if we decide we need it. so i think the checklist before going for mercs is basically 1. decide if we will need one more round of whipped cuirs or not, 2. if not, whip specialist-providing infra in cities that still lack it, and 3. whip a few essential buildings in the greenline conquests (so culture in our dumbass inevitably-flipping-to-india cities). but i don't want to leave it too long either... if we are committed to mercs then every turn we stay in slavery we get further and further behind tech-wise....
June 19th, 2024, 16:30
(This post was last modified: June 19th, 2024, 16:32 by ljubljana.)
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ok, tried just the smallest stab at attempting anti-mjmd diplo.... sent this to naufragar
and something analogous to superdeath but with silver and stone exchanged instead. that's in reference to this area
it wouldn't be game-changing, but either of them could snap up a few cities' worth of very easy gains here, and it would deny mjmd a few free mercs specialist, some happy, and a decently-sized chunk of raw commerce. if only they weren't so worried about EACH OTHER (i finally spotted nauf's main stack and, as you might imagine, it's right on the superdeath border and now has a cannon in it)
but, sent on the turn when mjmd cashes liberalism, hopefully it will successfully imply that we fear they are pulling away from the balance of power
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Turn 188 - Zululand
alright let's deal w this
yeah, that's a reasonable outcome. ginger is heading to finish off dreylin, so their troops are in theater with the potential to intervene.... greenline recaptures RFT and kills our sentry HA at work ethic
and i think this is a basically reasonably try at defending the hill? cuirs, in particular, are not great into any of these units (they get odds but not the kind of odds we want) and cats are a bit inefficient against only 5 units. probably correct to go for it though, obviously the strategic urgency kinda demands it
well, the pike that retook RFT is at 3.8 health, should be an easy kill.... but with whom? sentry cuir only gets 80% odds... would be really nice to see what's 2t away before keeping the city, as it was last turn, but i don't want to take a 20% chance to lose a unit in service of that.... it would also be nice to take it with a unit who can then retreat out of range of counterattackers but then that's a unit that can't hep kill WE..... eh, well, the best anti-pike unit is a c2 + shock cuir we have right next to the city, so i'll go for that i think and leave the option to retreat from the city open
YES WE GOT THE DAMN ROAD THIS TIME thank you lord sid  ray:
and believe it or not the granary actually survived capture-and-recapture
ok, before i do anything stupid i'm gonna need to see your catapult deploy
oh yeah? well. observation 1 is that work ethic is dead if we go for it, the cats are just one tile out of range of the best hill to attack the city from.... observation 2 is that we could actually attack them right here on the forest, potentially. we have 32 full-health cuirs in range and i only see the 5 pikes and a vulture as far as units that get defensive bonuses.... then there are 9 knights, 14 cats, and 4 HA for 33 units total. we do also have 2 reasonable-health injured cuirs and one full-health HA from last turn that could attack as well..... hmm. i think it's conceivable that we could manage a cleanup, but only just.... probably more likely that we'd leave a few units critically injured but alive. that is unless 33 units' worth of flank attacks is enough to kill some of these catapults?
ok, i'm gonna sim this as i think it merits serious consideration. our assets in range are
1x formation cuir
2x c1 + shock cuir
20x c2 cuir
3x c1 cuir
1x sentry cuir
4x 5 XP cuir, unpromoed
1x 3 XP cuir, unpromoed
2x half-health shock cuir
1x c3 HA
1x 1.2 health cuir
simming, simming, simming....
oh fuck you guys
did you know that a combat 2 cuir gets NINETY PERCENT odds against an unpromoted knight....
and i think we can say with confidence that there aren't pikes in range to counterpunch because we can SEE the pikes that are in range, on the windmill hill, where they are also about to die this turn. and the tile we'd be attacking from is just out of range of the garrisons of two different cities, or of cats they might produce there between turns, and we could even move up 1-movers that were supposed to go to RFT to cover the wounded..... oh jesus yall i think this is it
simmed it 5 times until i got the worst-case start i wanted, where the pikes go 5 for 5 on the initial coinflip attacks. even then we still cleaned up with 6 attackers to spare thanks to the magic of flanking....
LOL.... yeah i thought i sniffed out a stack on their border last turn....
not a huge one by any means but still.... The Sharks Descendeth
so i'm wracking my brain for any reason not to go for the big stack wipe.... and not really finding one.... i mean, the 5 knights in magnus can reach us but that's not enough.... there could be more cats in the fog? i mean i guess so but come on, this HAS to be worth it. passing up the chance to kill fourteen cats we can see because there MIGHT be more in the fog? absolutely not, aint no way. of course we have to go in
first we start with 5 instances of this, more or less
in which a cuir gets almost even odds to live attacking into a pike in a forest...
no wait, first we cross our T's and get the info we can get for free, from the sentry cuir we are already planning to use in the attack
oh! well, that's interesting; there actually ARE more units in range. are 2 knights, 2 cats, and 3 vultures enough to change my mind about whether this is a good idea, no.... but there could be even more back there and i don't like that? nope nope that's dumb as hell of course we gotta go for it...
and then we won 3/5 coinflips outright, even though the coinflip was worse than 50% and those were just the odds to survive....
then there are two more 80%s into combat 1 knights (and note that all of their knights COULD BE combat 1 right now.....) and we did lose one of those. but then the rest of the combats look like this
and we don't lose any of those....
and note that this is really not a victory attributable to our tactical execution, really, but once again to the damn tile reversion mechanics, but this time working in our favor. for whatever incomprehensible reason, LAST turn the game didn't give us the tile we wanted, and our whole offensive stalled for a turn, and THIS turn it did, and greenline's entire stack died as a result. really fun and healthy mechanic to have in a strategy game.... do you guys think they might have been relying on the assumption that the game would not give us different tiles than on the previous turn when they committed to their deploy? if so this is going to be the mother of all gut punches and i totally sympathize with the fury they are likely to feel when they get the turn
so finishing off the stack does reveal a bit more - visible counterattackers are 3 knights, 3 vultures, 4 cats, and the 5 knights and one chariot in magnus. not a serious threat to the survivors i think, but might be enough to get me not to go for work ethic this turn as i would like to. idk, i'll do a bit of my usual brooding on that one....
right and there are the guys on the windmill hill but as i mentioned earlier those guys are toasty as well
cuirs get odds but only barely, and no one else does? yeah, i suppose it seems appropriate to spend exactly one catapult here. then we do lose one draftee at 70% and one at 90% (!!) but the rest clean up
with 14 catapults just killed and the rest not in range save 2 in the city, there is a case to be made to throw caution to the wind here and just step right onto the wheat, so the cats can bombard next turn and we can plausibly crack magnus a turn early. a case that i admittedly bungled somewhat by attacking into the hill defenders with the wrong units and impulsively moving the guerilla guys onto the hill as well where they can't help defend.... but in any case, in addition to their 2 cats we have 18 hitters (though some are ancient age stuff) and i can put 23 units onto the tile, most of which should still get odds against a hitter after 1 or 2 collateral hits? eh, it goes against my cautious positional instincts but that's probably worthwhile. pretty sure after a turn like this one we're supposed to turn up the damn heat and step on their throat or something
so work ethic we could threaten without tooooo much of a commitment.... they did whip last turn so in theory they could get the two spears we see right now, the 3 vulture + 2 knight stack, and whatever unit they produce between turns inside for next round.... if they do all of that the 8 cuirs we have in range would not quite be enough but i consider that a bit unlikely? of course this amounts to the usual tradeoff of tempo vs the safety of (in this case) our enormous pile of injured cuirs, which does have 4 cats, 8 knights, and a few random 1-movers confirmed to be in range...
well, one thing i'm NOT going to try to do is defend the city... ok, strictly speaking i will throw a CG2 musket in there so a recapture is not totally costless but no more than that... if they want to spend a knight to take RFT back for a turn they can be my guest the rest of the 1-movers i think we need as collateral absorption to cover the wounded
otherwise though, i think the circumstances call for a fair amount of aggro
surely SOMEwhere on the board, we are going to lose units this interturn that we would rather keep, perhaps even injured units that could have lived at full health..... but equally i think things are going to have to give for them somewhere, at magnus or at work ethic or just in terms of letting us take the trade we took against their stack without facing a significant counter. though.... just in case, i am going to do another round of whippings and draftings; not a full one but enough to replace the losses from this turn and a few more on the interturn, should we incur them...
and, yeah....
believe you me, this brings me no joy.... and the rage that i feel towards these dealbreakers (if that is their intent) is substantial. but.... we just killed 38 greenline units this turn.... you had better believe that any inkling of noninterventionism they might be feeling is not going to survive receiving THAT news...
June 21st, 2024, 20:39
(This post was last modified: June 21st, 2024, 21:12 by ljubljana.)
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Turn 189 - Zululand
OKAyyy we left a lot of exposed units last turn (after taking some good trades).... How Did That Go?
answer is......
apparently well.... looks like they threw a few cats at our stack attackers from last turn and a few random knights.... around....? but only got one kill. this however is NOT good for us:
greenline ABANDONS scythian 2x horse, which had a substantial garrison in it last turn, to mjmd, evidently to spite us very cool, very cool. from someone who has talked about being upset when THEIR targets kingmake in their own past threads i rather expected better. but well, i suppose i can't cite the line in the contract that obliges the conquered to be fair to the conqueror...
so we will just have to express our rage on the battlefield work ethic is ours this turn, magnus looks like a close call
with no walls or castle, 4 cats should be enough to remove the defenses, leaving 1 to go in for collateral. but you can see that they did promote their knights and such this time, so no more 90% odds attacks for us (....other than in work ethic where there actually is still an unpromoted knight). we do have a few more attackers than what's immediately visible here, but only just.... the remainder are a few guerilla 2 guys arriving just in time from the north, and the 3 impi + cuir ministack i had scouting on Hungary Rush Hill in the west. so total assets are
1 full-health formation cuir
2 full-health c2 cuirs
1 full-health c1 cuir
1 full-health sentry cuir
1 11.2 health c1 cuir
1 11.2 health c2 cuir
1 11.2 health sentry cuir
1 8.3 health c2 cuir
1 7.7 health c2 cuir
1 formation knight
1 formation musket
1 g2 musket
1 8.3 health formation musket
1 8.3 health medic musket
1 cr3 mace
1 7.3 health cr3 mace
5 longbows
1 5.4 health longbow
1 5.6 health drill 3 longbow
1 formation pike
2 shock + formation impis (lol these guys have been through A LOT)
1 medic impi
and the single barrage 3 cat for collateral.... 24 attackers against 21 defenders, some worthier of the title than others
also, checked the top pike and they only have 10% fortify bonus.... so simming this is going to be a real mess...
.....
simmed it out, kind of, and.... it's close, but not THAT close.... we need the combination of collateral and more hitters to crack them here. ok, fair dues, we can wait one more turn. well.... i mean, with mjmd advancing in the south and apparently going to face ZERO resistance in so doing we really CAN'T wait one more turn, but if that's what the numbers say.... in 5 tries i won just once and left pretty inefficient numbers of not-dead units more often than not. not sure if the simming idiosyncracies favored us or them (i gave them all full fortify bonus, but fully healed all our units) but i think i'm not willing to risk a blown attack on it
blah. at least i can make myself feel better by killing work ethic
no losses this time, and we got the pike 1SW of the city too (at 75% odds on flatground)
spotted something else "fun" (for us anyways) just in time
just two domestic horse sources huh? and one has zulu troops already standing on it while the other is about to go neutral at scythian 2x horse? hmmmmmm How Interesting 
you know, i was all set to be totally normal today. just completely cool and measured. no derangedly rushing off into battle with wounded units, no hare-brained schemes cooked up based on insufficient scouting. and then, in conjunction with realizing that greenline will likely lose horse access for next turn's production cycle, i noticed something else....
yall see mr "out of range??" there? here is what it is out of range of:
- new units produced in chop overflow this turn
- new units produced in district discount this turn
and, unless they are willing to clear the 3 guerilla 2 units on a hill just S of the city
- the 6 knights still in magnus!!!
here is what it is NOT out of range of
- attacking no hill start
hmmmmmm
moving does reveal a fresh pike that would be in range (and there is a cat in the city as well) but like, it's just ONE....
future me i just want you to know that if you wake up to these units having been absolutely wiped off the face of the earth that it seemed like a good idea at the time and that i meant well.... (that is 3 vultures + cat + warrior in NHS, and two archers, a warrior, and TWO GREAT SCIENTISTS [damn, that's some really rough luck, i'm sorry ] in the capital...)
wh...huh? heroic epic???
well, kinda.... but with just 51 XP to go on the next great general it is west point time already so we can start building up those 17 XP dumbasses in preparation for The Technology.... i think i will probably 4-whip the forge here straight-up next turn and then, for as long as we are in slavery, build west point by double-whipping a cuir and then overflowing.... which, to be fair, should still get us a cuir here roughly once every 3 turns
well, time to vaguely threaten mjmd.... i am willing to concede the border city to them, but no further; so we offer this
and this
mjmd does not have a native source of pig so i can't include that amongst our ChopOverflow signifiers...
by my count our standing NAP lasts until t196.... i will adhere to this but make no further promises if they try to vulture further than that one (very strong!) border city...
then ginger gets another ankyra offer with 21 on the countdown (i am not sure if offered deals remain on the table if a whole turn passes between when they are offered and when the other party sees them) and that's the turn.... time to go be a human lol
June 22nd, 2024, 16:49
(This post was last modified: June 22nd, 2024, 16:50 by ljubljana.)
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Turn 190 - Zululand
guys check out my sweet dual-monitor setup
fhgfhagf we love opening the turn. what could be less stressful
ugh. i gotta divest my feelings from the outcome of this game
yeah, i should have accepted this 2 turns ago when i had the chance. now with greenline collapsing they won't take it back, so war is coming soon. and the worst part is, i can't even declare that war as i still feel bound by what i perceived to be the terms of the peace deal we signed..... so what, we just have to sit here indefinitely with ginger able to attack whenever they feel like it and pretty much nothing we can do about it? wonderful
mjmd didn't respond to our gentle threatening either, so.... definitely seems like the dogpile is cometh-ing, and soon, as we probably deserve at this point
ok, so there is this.... mjmd makes peace with greenline, and idk how the hell this happened but now there are indian knights in dreylin territory for some reason??
well, good news second.... greenline is looking pretty checked out. we're in the "pile everything in the capital" stage... but NOT in magnus where the big stack from last turn remains, asking to be collateralled to death. and there is just a warrior in no hill start, which whipped a unit that will never come out. i mean at that point, why not leave it empty.... i'll definitely take a free 2 XP on whatever unit i want, which in this case is a horse archer for whom that 2XP enables a future great general -> morale commando cuir play
and now magnus
where we go in without simming because we're about to get mega-stabbed so obviously we can afford to wait no longer....
surprisingly few casualties after the 4 barrage 3 cats... i think we got quite lucky overall. still had to use almost everyone but i did preserve the most important guys to preserve: a few almost-healthy cuirs to go after longship spam, and the 4 barrage cats to take out the defenses at Chop Overflow, should we get a chance to do so before being megastabbed (editor's note: this is an absurd delusion lol)
too much ghost culture again so we can't really advance anywhere else... and i'm not sure we can hold no hill start either in which case it'll all come back next turn note that we are suffering from the cuteness of my own stupid horse pillaging last turn; if there was still a road on that tile we COULD move on DistrictDiscount, but there isn't.... of course, we had no way of knowing, and planning for, that fact ahead of time due to the apparently-random nature of the mechanic. i DID HAVE a plan to hold NHS this turn too but it also relied on there being no ghost culture which i guess was delusional of me (1NE of the city should be neutral, in which case i have a few muskets that could have made it). as it stands i probably should have burned the city, literally none of its buildings survived
well, i find this a bit hard to believe but vodka says we in fact do hold NHS if we stuff everyone inside, subject to the usual caveats about no extra guys appearing between turns... if that's so, we'd probably better go for it as i really cannot begin to describe how badly those stupid tiles to revert if we're going to defend our conquests against ginger's menacings
i do really need to know one thing though.... what happens if you whip a horse unit, lose horses, then regain horses the next turn (say from an external supplier?) does the whipped unit get produced, or do you need to switch back over to it first? and has the game considered just having the answer be the latter, for my sake...?
a quick sim suggests that they SHOULD need to actually swap back onto the knight for a turn... so we should be safe from getting owned by new knights as well (and of course most of the old knights just perished at magnus).... so maybe we do just try to hold the city. if they do decide to attack out and somehow we vodka'd wrong or something and we get wiped, (ginger can royally screw us even harder than they are already going to and) at least we can pick up the pace of our attack on the capital...
just 2 bros chillin
well, last time combat workers were a weakness for ginger..... let's see how many they brought this time
once again we have The Best Wonder to thank for the instant 25% defenses at DotF and RFT, the latter of which will come online JUST in time to meet a potential attack force.... all these cities will build culture as well until the first-ring borders pop to make that 45% as well, natch. so almost as good as a non-CI core city....
another thousand-hour turn, another deep sense of dissatisfaction to confront.... we can dive for the capital pretty soon if ginger doesn't come piling in immediately as soon as they are allowed to by game mechanic (and way sooner than they're allowed to by my interpretation of good-faith dealmaking), but of course that's not going to happen. i really need to get over this damn game, it is affecting me WAY too deeply right now and this level of salt does not become us (me)
June 23rd, 2024, 12:23
(This post was last modified: June 23rd, 2024, 12:32 by williams482.)
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Hang in there, buddy. 
Looks like things are going reasonably well on the Greenline front, at least, looming stabs notwithstanding. And Chichen may still be paying off for you.
Tarkeel subbing in for Dreylin may be good for you here, as I fully expect them to put up a committed defense against whatever Ginger is currently throwing at them. LOL never mind, Dreylin dead. That was quick.
I'm also maintaining distant hopes that Ginger is intentionally messing with you about the NAP, and considers it active. I definitely don't think you should take any preemptive attacks against them until the originally proposed turns are up, to maintain moral high ground if nothing else. We'll see.
June 23rd, 2024, 13:49
(This post was last modified: June 23rd, 2024, 16:07 by ljubljana.)
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191
EXHALE
omg i have been SO stressed out about this dumb game
i do not know why ginger wants an apparently-arbitrary 28-turn duration now (until what, t220?) but obviously i'm slamming that accept button at this point. you can see from the tech thread and scores that apparently all 3 dreylin cities died at once last turn, and if ginger were dedicated, using their open borders with greenline to run troops through their territory, retake their cities, and then gift them back to greenline on the same turn so we can't counterattack, i think they could substantially reverse our conquest and roll us all the way back up to DotF/Hungary Rush even with a numerically inferior force. so yeah, please take your city back
mjmd wants cow/cow and this one i need to think about. i'm not about to attack them (i view them as having accepted our deal about the greenline split and want to respect that) but if CreeTradeRoutes flips (and we do not have enough troops to stop this if the dice break the wrong way) we may need to walk a guy over there to recapture. idk. probably i will echo this? but let's play the turn first
liberate mechanic!!!!! wow i love being an AI
and we're not the only ones
does this indicate naufragarian desire to turn their shiny new cannons on us now? well.... it could but cuirassier stack is the hard counter to gren/cannon yes? so while i don't want to deal with that (and REALLY don't want to get aksum and its x2 military instructor + heroic epic combo razed) there is a part of me that wants them to bring it....
oh and
uh huh.... ok. well that might nix my OWN idea to offer SD a defpact but.... i don't understand why they'd even bother with this? it's not like either SD or ginger is in any kind of position to actually help each other during wartime...?
miscalculated a bit and GGGA stacking is one food short coming out of resistance and therefore due to starve... ok, so what do we whip? granary is the obvious answer but that actually still effectively wastes a pop point by whipping 3 pop into a 60h granary instead of 2 pop in a turn... walls are the least wasteful option in terms of pop but it also might be a minute before we actually WANT walls + castle here.... maybe just the ikhanda as a definitely useful build that costs the fewest pop? i guess so....
except, with ginger peacing out i think we want to do the mercs swap as soon as possible, which might mean 2 turns from now, straight-up. that means we don't get 2 more whip cycles here, which means we do granary just to make sure it gets whipped at all, yes?
ok, so NHS got no attackers, but.... man, why is there STILL ghost culture up there??? we held the city for a turn, what gives? well, i guess i'd better temper my rage for a minute now that any delay at all down here is no longer game-annihilating.... anyways, you can see that longship spam was left empty this turn, and the DD + CS Rush combo is now exposed to potential (maybe even likely?) ginger snipe attempts to hit that magic three-oh, so the combined effect is probably that the capital gets to live for a few turns while we heal up all the guys, lumber down some cats, and clean up the outlying, ginger-exposed cities....
we actually can't reeeeeally easily defend this, all we have in range are a couple of G2 bows and the city is not on a hill. but their attackers are what, one knight and then longbows and vultures? i think mere CG longbows, even off a hill, are probably sufficient deterrent against such a thing. at least i hope so because
what a crazy size-1 city this is....
all i really did this round is heal up the magnus attackers and run a ton of guys up toward district discount. i threw most of our cities on wealth to get us to banking, but it barely made a dent in our expenses because that's just the kind of game we're playing at this point i may do a bit of desperate pillaging next turn to inch us over the line...
well, here comes naufragar's bigass gren/cannon stack from the superdeath border. don't you DARE come after us bestie
i don't think they'll get far if they try it exactly (in reality this stack moves at the speed of a cannon as knights are worse than useless into castles), but they could ruin our gorgeous, completely indefensible heroic epic city and i WILL cry if they do that
i sent them a cow-cow to test the waters and, yes, resent one to mjmd.... for now, i think i'm content to finish off sumeria, do the williams double-swap to mercs + serfdom, and start teching again... we could probably make some easy gains by attacking nauf but a) not for 10 turns anyways and b) probably not beyond cracking their long and exposed border, if they just signed some kind of lengthy NAP with superdeath as i suspect. i am not even certain that a full-on split of nauf with superdeath would favor us.... we would gain probably 10 cities but then face a certain 3v1, with one member of the 3 being a 35-city superdeath.... perhaps it's better to tech from this position instead, where two members of the potential dogpile at least have SD to worry about and one has been friendly with us for SO long that there's some hope of them staying out of it (or is that a delusional thing to think?). and well, given our long history of good relations i really don't want to be the ones to break the detente with nauf unless the situation really requires it for us to win the game
June 23rd, 2024, 15:06
(This post was last modified: June 23rd, 2024, 15:52 by ljubljana.)
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(June 23rd, 2024, 12:23)williams482 Wrote: Hang in there, buddy.
Looks like things are going reasonably well on the Greenline front, at least, looming stabs notwithstanding. And Chichen may still be paying off for you.
Tarkeel subbing in for Dreylin may be good for you here, as I fully expect them to put up a committed defense against whatever Ginger is currently throwing at them. LOL never mind, Dreylin dead. That was quick.
I'm also maintaining distant hopes that Ginger is intentionally messing with you about the NAP, and considers it active. I definitely don't think you should take any preemptive attacks against them until the originally proposed turns are up, to maintain moral high ground if nothing else. We'll see.
thank you <333 how was your vacation?
that was certainly my plan, but it looks like something changed ginger's mind... or you are correct and their mind never needed changing, they were just trying to wheedle more concessions out of us.... could be that with the suddenness of greenline's position going from reasonable-looking to total collapse, they didn't see much upside for them other than realpolitikily denying us greenline's land.... while i think they could have rolled us back by gifting cities to greenline, if they tried to actually HOLD anything with a numerically inferior military things would have been different
as for things going well on the greenline front.... i am starting to realize that even with 2.5x their milpower at the time of declaring, we actually probably DID NOT have enough to force through their stack if it had stayed together, and have been very lucky to have been able to keep up the pace of this war anyways.... we have seen about 30 of both cats and knights so far, lots of pikes, and a fair bit of medieval stuff and not-totally-irrelevant vultures as well, which i think could have wiped us or at least stalled us badly in a straight 1v1 if they got the first strike with collateral.... so if that's the case, imagine how invading ginger with this force would have gone  i suspect i've persistently underestimated the degree to which warfare favors the defender in this game..... if so, probably the best next step for us is to build, like, literally one hundred catapults and try to tech back into economic relevancy behind that theory...
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