[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[williams482]

Trading one cuirassier's worth of production to make sure every subsequent mounted unit (which will include a bunch of cavs) gets four promotions out of the gate is worth it, especially right now when that unit won't be relevant for the Greenline war.

[ljubljana]

yeah, i did finally come around on that a little after posting, and finished the stable last turn. that takes cuirs out of aksum to 13 XP.... the question now is do we use our two great generals (who are just sitting around as of now) to get that to 17 XP. that would make 5 great military instructors in a city that is on the border with a neighbor....one who has been our best friend all game, but one who also has some reason to try to take land from us in the near future. we also have 150/550 hammers invested in west point there as well (from before ginger stabbed us..... oops) - i don't think i want to complete that one right now as this city and drafting are our only sources of new units at the moment, but maybe when we are closer to rifles it will make sense...? idk, definitely feel free to share feelings and opinions if you have some

210



yeah, this is why we have no chance to win.... i can see it now - ginger will probably just straight-up hit assembly line by the end of this GA, or close to it (just LOOK at that 2-turn steam power!). then they have their choice of switching to nationhood and knocking us out with drafted infantry or industrializing and just hand-building the infantry with which they will knock us out. sadly i think we just whipped too far down to compete.... not sure if that would have been true if ginger hadn't stabbed us (though of course we'd be about 10-15 turns ahead of this pace both in terms of regrowth and of incorporating the greenline conquest), but also possible just whipping the cuir stack and sending it at greenline was always going to lose us the game from an economic perspective. blah. if we had rifling we'd have some hope of resisting this but it looks like they will hit infantry BEFORE we hit rifles, and what can you really do in the face of that level of tech disadvantage

[williams482]

We're miles away from cannon, right?

Cuirs plus a shitton of cats can conceivably batter down an infantry stack in a counterattacking situation. It probably requires that Ginger fails to anticipate the positioning of our stacks, but that's what got us the stack wipe last war so it's possible.

And remember that we do have substantially more strategic depth than Ginger. We will have the defenders advantage of visibility and shorter supply lines, plus the ability to survive losing a few cities for larger strategic goals.

Is there any hope of securing a large loan from nauf or mjmd? Possibly in exchange for some meaningful allegiance with them against SD? Rifles (and cavs) are the most plausible of our pathways out of here, and our max spend research rate must be at least okay if we can get cash to burn.

[ljubljana]

we are maybe not miles away from cannon, but we are almost as far away as we are from rifles (all of chemisty + all of steel vs 4 techs away from rifles but none as expensive as steel tech). perhaps it's possible though. what is more of an issue is that we have no way to mass-produce cannons outside of slavery, but perhaps "mass cuir + cannon" can be supplemented with drafted muskets and that can be almost ok. the problem is, even the very depressing research rate you can see here is inflated by a ton of wealth builds, and wealth builds mean we can't build units at the same time i don't really know if i'm supposed to start spamming cats and cuirs from every city now and just accept that we're not going to make it to the next tier of tech in time or continue to desperately try to claw our way forwards tech-wise

looking at civwiki steel tech is 4600 base beakers away, and rifling is 6400.... so it's meaningfully closer, but unsure of if it's enough so to be decisive. sadly i'm still not sure how much better cannons are really going to be against infantry over what we already have. cats are more hammer-efficient at inflicting collateral, cuirs seem about as good at killing weakened units.... and the big problem with cannons is that, even if we fully collateral down an infantry stack, it will fight at 12 strength with promotions (i think? collateral maximum is 40% for all siege units, right?), and so will probably still get odds against an attacking cannon D: at that point the cannon is just a normal attacker with no collateral upside, and is probably worse at doing that job than a pinch-promoted cuirassier...

there should be a good chance of getting a loan honestly, especially with ginger in GA now the other two have to be getting worried about a collapse from us. i do intend to ask for said loans.... but they will only do us good if we are within 10 turns of whatever our tech goal is, and we really are not.... we may not even be within 20 turns of rifling D: i guess i could start begging people for gold gifts straight-up but i kinda doubt that's going to happen lol

the point about defensive depth is a really good one.... one thing that is good for us about facing infantry is that they are slow as hell. even once war is declared it should still take them 10 or so turns to do an irrecoverable amount of damage to us, and those could be 10 turns in which we finish rifling or just continue to spam units. unfortunately it is likely that the initial thrust will come at kirishima and takayasu which will mess up our economy big-time.... so um, hopefully we have entered the "spam units" portion of the plan at that point....

[El Grillo]

Collateral max depends on the unit, and you can check in the Civpedia. I don't know if it's been changed in the mod, but in vanilla, catapults max out at 50% and cannons at 60%.

[ljubljana]

wait, cats max out at 50%? then why did my cats top out at 3.6/6 damage to GT's capital defenders during the siege.... ohhhhh. is it because, when collateral is applied, the game does so by checking if the damage would take a unit below the max, and then doing NO damage if it would, instead of setting the unit's health equal to the max?

ok, if we're talking about taking down 10-health infantry, or 8-health ones via cannons, that's significantly more plausible

edit: the civpedia agrees with you, but i'm doing some sims of throwing a crapton of cats at infantry though and we don't even get close to that. it looks like we stop doing collateral when the infantry are at around 14 health which is even worse than i was expecting

vs modern armor, we stopped inflicting collateral when the stack reached this amount of health



which is not even remotely close to 50%, and actually is further from 50% than against less technologically advanced units....

here is cannons vs infantry



way better than leaving the stack at 14 health, by enough that i will think about switching to steel tech, but still not really close to doing 60% health to the defenders...

[El Grillo]

Hmm, weird, I don't know why it's doing that. The CtH patch notes only mention collateral in the context of nerfing China's UU from 60% max to 40% max.

I tested in vanilla: catapults will collateral warriors down to 1.0/2.0, and cannons will reduce warriors to 0.8/2.0, as expected. Maybe it's related to trying to collateral down stronger units?

[ljubljana]

i see the same results as you do vs warriors in CtH, fwiw

[williams482]

I think cavs and cats are the better combo than cannons and cuirs. The cats will die so fast that the primary downside to building a bajillion of them (maintenance) will be pretty much irrelevant, and hammer efficiency becomes by far the most important. Meanwhile, cavs are stronger than rifles and don't take a unit type penalty vs infantry. And, you know, they're cavs. Everyone knows cavs are awesome.

On the topic of maintenance, how sure are we that the massive swarm of impis we have is actually a net positive for us right now? How much maintenance are they eating up per turn, and is there any way we can either suicide them into a difficult target, or simply delete them, to save money and possibly protect more valuable units?

If we do decide we want to get rid of them, and we ultimately have to delete them, is there a clever time we can delete them to simulate a significant military loss? Either to lure more favorable loans from our nominal allies, or possibly to trick Ginger into thinking we've been significantly weakened on some other front?

[ljubljana]

Impi swarm is costing us 35 GPT right now after AGG. I really don't want to just delete them, as I imagine Ginger is still building a significant number of cavs for the upcoming war (their GA is coming too early to funnel all their boosted hammers into infantry directly) and they will still be hammer-efficient against those. But as far as suiciding a significant number into a difficult target.... maybe we can do that. Greenline's capital still has a 30-unit garrison inside, 19 of which are pikes, and while it's not exactly impi vs cav, city raider impi vs fortified pike is really not a bad attack either. I will probably do a fair bit of this during the coming battle; not sure how much it will reduce our maintenance bill by, but if it saves cuirs, it seems like a good call regardless.

re cavs and cats, I'm inclined to agree, especially since we can, you know, actually draft rifles. I just wish I were confident that we'll be able to actually get there in time....