[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

202

i have been messing up the pace of this game (and, um, the quality of my moves therein.....) by waiting until the last possible second to play my turns..... oops. i am really tired of waking up in the morning and having to immediately confront this though. hopefully after a few more days we can shift things so i can do my turns in the evenings again

.....



i... i think ginger made a mistake :O

they did about what i probably would have done, and fanned out a ton of single rifles to scout all the tiles in range of RFT. but.... there is one such tile that was not in range of such scouting, inside of DotF, and that's where i stashed our whole army last turn. check it out: they have 40 horse in RFT, a large number of which are injured, and we have 29 healthy cuirs in range as well as 28 impis (actually a few more than this if you include stragglers) and, operation-determinatively, the whole 16-unit garrison in work ethic as well. doth the worm turneth?

[Miguelito]

[ljubljana]

start by, in desperation, using 3 of our 7 cats in the area against a 2-unit c2 rifle stack on a hill (the desperation is of the form: we are desperate for every unit in range of RFT to actually get to attack it and not some lesser target). then a drafted pinch musket dies and another pinch musket and, what else, an impi clean up



SE of that, a single unpromoted rifle in the desert is covering 2 of ginger's 5 precious combat workers in theater. that would be a nice target even if it wasn't in the way of our attack vector, and a drafted pinch musket can almost get odds straight-up. it dies, but it has a friend....



around this time, i realize that we're actually not supposed to promote our impis to formation for this operation, oh no. on this glorious day, more than 200 turns into the game, we will be attacking with CITY RAIDER impis

1SE of that desert, we have a single janissary on a forest covering ANOTHER combat worker.... this is the situation that drafted pinch tokumuskets were put on this earth for though and we can get 28% odds with the first attacker. we only have one in range that is not needed for RFT but



he WINS at the 28%! so that's 3/5 of ginger's combat workers captured, and i KNOW how irritating those are to replace outside of slavery  the other two are under a single cav + single jan 1E of the one we just captured.... i'd love to go after them but everything that can hit them is also in RFT range so i'm not sure we'll have the spare units to do so.

now the (likely 80+ combats-long) moment of truth: can we really just isandhlwana these guys right now? 40 units in the city and, according to my revised count, we have 61 (in DotF) + 8 (straggler impis) + 22 (units in work ethic) = 92 total attackers, every single one of which dies horribly to a cavalry 1-on-1, none of which is a catapult, and the majority of which are ancient age trash. but a LOT of ginger's horse units are pre-injured (no healing last turn from their murdering of our poor cuir + impi + cat stack since they moved into the city instead). so we need to lose between 1 and 2 units per cav if we want this to be successful....

for comparison, here is how a city raider 2 impi does against the top cav:



modal outcome is that we take it down to roughly 70 HP... 15 * 0.7 = 10.5, which does die most of the time to a pike or cuirassier of ours, but not all the time, and certainly not after promotions. on the other hand that is ginger's #1 strongest unit on the board right now and if the average health of one of their cuirs is under 10, our odds should improve quickly. no way to sim it, or even to vodka it really, so i have to trust my instincts and those say "go go go"

sooooo did it work?

....



i lost a lot of high-odds combats (including this one AND the next two in a row), but most of those were impi combats



but yeah it did work. i fucked up the execution a bunch as usual as i kinda assumed the borders of the city would snap back after a recapture, not that we would inherit the 2 turns of resistance from when they took it from us...? which means, oops, our whole stack could be counterattacked pretty easily depending on how many 2-movers are in the fog. but whatever



so i really can't sugarcoat this: my deploy is garbage and extremely vulnerable to counterattack if they have more than a handful of 2-movers in the fog. i had pillagers in range too but messed up my attack order in such a way that i didn't actually have enough of them to save our attackers or the city. nice.... so this could still turn into a catastrophe if there is another 40-unit cav stack just out of sight lol. but i mean.... if there IS a surprise stack sitting just out of range because they expected a surprise stackwipe this turn, i'd love to know why they didn't just combine the two stacks in the first place

hit enter and.... we went from solvent to insolvent mid-turn because we ghost-cultured ourselves, losing the tile 1E of RFT that wasn't actually in WE's borders which contained our entire attack stack. and then our units went on strike and we lost an impi  nice

edit: guys can i rename the city to isandhlwana (if it's still ours next turn) or is that too mean

man.... in just a couple of turns we've had me commit a huge blunder, then ginger overextend in another huge blunder, then in taking advantage of that me also committing another possibly huge blunder (attacking too early with potential pillagers and exposing our attackers to a counter). not to mention me blundering 20 cuirs on the first turn by scouting ginger's stab force and deciding not to do anything about it. this is turning into one of the worst-fought wars in the history of RB, isn't it.... with, let's not beat around the bush, the vast majority of that coming on my end

[Krill]

Oh my, CR2 Impi into a cav stack is just beautiful to behold.

[williams482]

You just wipped how much Ginger milpower off the board here? 20 cavs and 20 cuirassiers is (I believe) 15000 * 20 + 12000 * 20 = 540,000 soldier count eliminated? If those are correct guesses about how soldier count values those units.

I don't know where they were at soldier count wise before this, but that's a whole bunch. I doubt they have much left to strike back with.

[ljubljana]

it's been a minute since i looked at the demos, but i know we've been hovering at just under 2 million for a while now, and if we have only 1.2 times theirs, they should still have (theoretically) another 1 million soldiers left. so i guess they could still have enough.... problem is that much of that is tied up in 10-unit jan and rifle stacks along our northern border, on 2-3 unit rifle piles on all those hills in the north that i so irritatingly invaded during the previous war, and on a 20+ cat stack from the dreylin conquest that no one ever killed as far as i know. so hopefully we're ok. it would take a LOT of 2-movers to really punish this i think, if they "just" have like, 10 cavs in range i think attacking in would only trade them for 10 cuirs, which is not spectacular as an ROI.

also, for readers who have been following only intermittently, this was all williams' idea  not only swarming impis in the first place, but what was that you said a few days ago? "what if we give up (30 units for free and) a city to make us seem desperate and lure them into a false sense of security"? that was so devious, even i didn't realize i was doing it  i expect yall to heavily recruit williams for DL in future games, this is not the first time they've saved our position and if they've stuck through 200 turns of this nightmare thread, i imagine they'll pretty much stick through anything

as for strategic next steps... we actually still have 29 cuirs, believe it or not, (pending the counter which will probably snatch away a few) and um, 60+ impis still trickling in from across the empire.... but cats are a big problem; i think we are down to just seven, and 3 of those are on the northern border (don't ask me why i thought THAT was a good idea...). still, i believe we have preserved enough real units to finish off greenline, so that's where i expect we will go next, probably whether or not ginger offers peace in the next few turns. if ginger does offer peace, i think we'd better take it; their cities are not the easiest available targets for expansion from here, and we really need to get out of this position where we're basically relying on naufragar's goodwill as our only protection from a lethal 2v1. then i think we need to swap civics and start teching again... i have been avoiding talking about it but yall do not want to know how badly whipped-down our core is. we are getting perilously close to the point where our enemies will have a window to hit us with infantry while we are still on muskets and cuirs, and ummmm i am not sure which ancient age trash unit specializes in taking THOSE down.... (it's the catapult, but that's not enough as even with full collateral they are still strength 12). meanwhile, the longer this goes on, the more strongly i am reluctantly considering rifling as our next tech goal.... my dream of hitting biology before the others get infantry is now off the table i think, and we're likely to miss the timing on grens as well if the others will hit infantry before we can really mass them. chichen itza obsoleting is still a big deal even after the others have cannons (ginger is our only neighbor who doesn't at this point) but i think it becomes more of an anti-2-mover thing at that point and with 60 impis sitting around menacingly waiting for someone to build up a cav stack again maybe it's ok to be a bit less secure against those lol. having to draft rifles instead of muskets is still a big negative (though less so if we are happy-limited and ohhhh man are we ever). but i don't think there is a unit that can reliably wipe even a fully-collateraled infantry stack other than rifles and cavs...

so am i unconceded? well... the position may still be callable for mjmd if the others get behind that, but that's unlikely. i am definitely unconceded to ginger though. i don't think this result opens up a path for us to win again or anything, but i kinda do think it re-opens a path to making ginger lose, and that's something to play for. so yeah, let's unconcede for the next few turns at least and see what happens. i definitely don't want to end up in one of those awkward dynamics where two major powers have both rage-conceded to each other lol

or, if ginger is pissed enough, perhaps we could parlay this into a share of a 5-way draw? normally i have some amount of disdain for draw offers but i think our win probability is so far below 20% that we'd better consider it. not to mention it would be the ultimate thank you to my beloved naufragar <333, who is otherwise similarly unlikely to come away with a share of the win, i fear (and who is passing up their best chance in a while to get back into contention by not pouncing on us right now). so who says no? i think us, nauf, and maybe superdeath "should" accept as our in-game odds are much worse than that; ginger "shouldn't" but you'd have to think they are feeling even worse about this game than i am now so i bet they'd be open to it. so the only really unlikely thing we'd need is for mjmd to be bored or overwhelmed or subject to the RB-usual systemic bias towards underrating their own win chances. maybe worth a shot if ginger goes thermonuclear in the tech thread again?

[ljubljana]

3 hours left on the timer and they haven't logged in yet :/ which of course means i can't either due to the turnsplit. seems like there is little chance of us rolling in time, but if i ask for an extension that will be 3 days in a row of me doing so and i hate that (and i bet everyone else would hate it even more ) i reeeeally do not want to spark more PYFT rants in the other threads than i probably already have just by slowplaying these war turns, but if i end up with like, a 1-hour window in which to play i'm not so confident i can actually hit it

[Krill]

Not being able to play because you are waiting for someone else to play first in a war turnsplit is not a PYFT problem for you, but it is for Ginger.

[williams482]

I suggested it, you did it. Ideas are cheap, execution is expensive. And pillaging your own iron to get impis back in play was something you thought of months ago. But still, I'm flattered! 

I do wonder if there's an opportunity to take the offensive against Ginger while they are reeling from this. We know they are in a somewhat, uhh, fragile position after a far less damaging turn not long ago, and keeping the pressure on to try to force further errors could be very profitable. Still, I suspect your instinct of trying to push through the complete conquest of Greenline is the better way to spend the reprieve we've (hopefully?) bought here. 

I wonder if there's anything to be learned from mjmd warning you about the attack on RFT. Clearly that means they considered Ginger more of a threat than us at that time and perhaps that has changed, but they could also be trying to shore up relations. Is that something we can/want to try strengthening given our concerns about their tech situation and upcoming culture flips?

[GeneralKilCavalry]

fascinating play with the impis there