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[SPOILERS] scooter Expands the Empire Across the Sea
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Ironically I did just note to Zed-F and Tarkeel approximately 10 mins before Ref's comment that I had just played "the easiest turn in about 6 weeks" as it seemed like nobody was advancing at all, and players were in fact defending. I switched to Wealth/Research builds over the last couple turns as a result, and Railroad ETA was 1T, Combustion ~5T. I have been taking screenshots, so if it's of interest, I can probably catch up on reports over the Christmas break to some extent. Or at least show some of the decisions I've had to make. The tactical situation has been less thrilling for a bit as most fronts settled into a bit of a naval Maginot Line, but obviously that was the ideal strategic situation.
My quick unspoiled insta-react is that Mao of Carthage was basically the correct choice for these settings, and the rest of the game sort of unfolded from there. The naval tech situation had funny contradictory effects. On one hand, it made it difficult to really do invasions, which made it nearly impossible to make a serious attack from behind. On the other hand, it made it difficult for me to land a killing blow, which led to the game lasting longer than I expected. Instead I had to settle for turtling and teching. Which was fine, but defending 4 naval fronts is a bit stressful as it's so easy to make a mistake. I made a possibly big one a couple turns ago that thankfully went unpunished that I'll cover here when I get aa chance. There was also a brief window right before the week off where I thought Cairo was going to end my game, but without the Airships I might have seen it 2T later which would have been fatal I think. All in all a fun game, but I would not play these settings again. I'm glad I did, but once was enough. The map was very nice and was the perfect fit for this style of game. I'm glad we were able to salvage it, because this game looked mega cursed early on. Finally, an extreme thanks to Tarkeel for constant measured input and helping me narrow in on Mao/Carthage pregame and to Zed-F for always asking the right questions in a way that kept me from overlooking things. https://civ.zulan.net/pbspy/game/159/ If anyone would like to login and look around, feel free to do so. You need the PB74 mod, and the password is "Scooter" (The password was set by Commodore  )
I'm going to try to catch up before reading other threads too much, but who knows if I'll stick to that.
The last real report was on T187 in which Superdeath slammed his stack into the southern city on S Island. So I'm going to pick up from there. I did occasionally dump a bunch of screenshots into imgur and send them to Tarkeel/Zed-F for some input, but I've never really written them up. But I do still have them all, so I'm going to endeavor to do this now. There will be some jumps, but I'll go chronologically. First off, other things from that turn. Turn 187 The suicide into S Island from Superdeath was covered already. He did recently tell me it was an accident, so I'm curious to see his thread. Other things from that turn.  This was the beginning of my Cairo concern. It did look mostly defensive to me, and he had given me a fish-fish signal at some point, but this looked suspicious to me. I started checking it every turn, and I started setting up defensive transport chains to Skinny Island as needed. I also began prebuilding forts on Skinny Island to expedite if needed. But I wasn't sure he was joining yet. I got a couple Airships rebased to be near him the following turn as a result of seeing this.  This was the situation with Superdeath on the other front. At this point I had a lot of Grens over this way, so I began noodling on a plan to kill Ocmulgee. The idea was to relieve cultural pressure significantly as well as deny him the mobility of moving through the canal. The city was not on a hill, so just 5 Frigate bombardments, and it would be a very easy raze I felt. My main aim was to take this front off the board, because I could not defend both this and Cairo while also holding Yuris on the other side.  Just a shot of the Yuris main front.  Airships were a big focus. One of the things I realized quickly is that my empire was effectively split in half. There was everything east of my main continent. Those cities could supply the Yuris front. And then there was the western half - or everything else. The problem I had was that my toughest enemy (Yuris) was on the half with less overall production, but it took too long to send units from west -> east. One of the ways I mitigated this was building Airships in the west, and then rebasing them by Yuris. That effectively allowed me to reallocate production from west -> east. Then I could let the east spend most of its resources on Grens/Frigates. I did build a few Airships in the east at the beginning, but it was generally helpful. Turn 188 This was the turn I saw the aftermath of the SD suicide attack on S Island, but there was an operation on the other front.  The issue here was not only was this on flatland and 0% cultural defenses thanks to Frigates, but 1) I could see his Galleons were (basically) all on the other side, and 2) I could even ping the top defenders here with Airships. As a result, this city was extremely vulnerable and would likely be very inexpensive to kill. I basically could get odds on every fight.  I was starting to worry more about Cairo. Initially I thought he was going to aim at Ice Island which was barely defended, though it did have the pop to whip quickly if needed.  Bing's Caravels left for a few turns which helped me out, though they would return later.  Taj Mahal landed this turn, ensuring enough extra GA to basically end the game.  Meanwhile, I was setting Pale for the endgame. Drydocks post-Taj would be a 2T build, but from then on it could 1T a Frigate every single turn. This was important because I had approximately 1 Frigate in this area, which boded poorly when I would soon realize Cairo had 9 (and counting) Galleons and another half-dozen Privateers ready to go.  Kremlin was at 3T at this point.  My Bing front was virtually undefended. However, he never did get Galleons. So what I did was set up my Airships such that one (located in Nap) would recon Bing every other turn while pinging a unit of Cairo's on off-turns. Because Galleys moved so slowly, this let me watch for him to try something without dedicating many resources towards it.
Mao of Carthage was good here, certainly. Bing's empire could have had a better result if handled differently; America is doing well in PB81 and PB82. But the game plan to maximize Mao of Carthage's economy is much simpler than the game plan to maximize CRE/PHI America. The latter can be oppressive in the right hands, but you need to know what you are doing with it.
The settings did make for a considerably less dynamic game than normal, so it makes sense that this might be a 'once-in-a-great-while' kind of map/settings choice. Hopefully everyone had some fun, regardless. 
Next turn was probably the height of my despair as a lot of things looked bleak. Or rather, they felt bleak even though they probably were not really.
Turn 189  Including my biggest setback of the war. The setback here was not necessarily that he took the city. I was planning for that and even had an evacuation plan. The issue was that I thought he needed another turn or two. Yuris of course had the units sitting on the hill and had bombed down the defenses, but those were not nearly enough. However, his Galleons disappeared from the other front and everywhere north of here, so I knew they were on their way here. So did a vodka test with what I thought was thet absolute worst case scenario - which was a ton of Amphibious Samurai joining. And it showed me winning something like 95% of thet time. Instead he not only wiped out my defenses, but he also did it comfortably. My general assumption is this was a bad test somehow. For example, I was mostly guessing on promos. Anyway, while it was bad to lose 5 Grens and 2 Muskets, the bigger problem was that I had Frigates and Airships in here too. 3-4 boats and another 2-3 Airships all destroyed at a time of the game where that stung a lot. In addition.  This was when it clicked into place Cairo was fully aimed at my mainland and was actively loading up. I know it looks like I have a decent amount of defenders in Aren/Outlook, but I assure you the vast majority of those "defenders" are airships and archers at this point. And there were absolutely 0 units south of it. He also had 3-4 Caravels floating in this bay, so he had perfect vision on me.  I panic swapped into Nationalism and began drafting 3 Muskets every turn. I also spent more $$ than I would have liked upgrading units to Grens.  This is a nice highlight of my desperation. I grabbed a warrior and GG. I loaded them on a Galleon and led as GG there. Why? Because 1) It was the best upgrade $$ bang for buck (Warrior -> Gren for free), and 2) Getting the Galleon to 5 moves was the only way to get the unit in "on time" I thought. Cairo never did attack, so maybe those boats were mostly empty, but at the time I thought the attack was about to come. My initial plan was to use this GG to Morale trick + Commando the Superdeath Pyramids city which was frequently empty. That all went out the window when I realized what Cairo was doing.  At least one front was good, although at the time I wondered if it would cost me not having all these units on other fronts. But this city had just one reasonable defender. Sent in the airships to chip top defenders, and then sent in the units.  You can see thet cultural relief at Bawaiting, and also how his boats now needed to commit to a side of the island. Had I gotten Cairo to stay out, I would have kept pushing and trying to conquer his mainland. But instead what happened next was me frantically chaining these units back towards Cairo. Fortunately removing this city meant I could do most of the defending with Frigates + Airships and less with units.  Also in part because SD had sent all his units to the other front and was going to take another swing at S Island that this time seemed likely to succeed.
I was wondering during the game how come our navy on the Yuris front always seemed on the back foot, apart from the fact that we just had extensive borders to defend in general. This loss of frigates at S island is part of the reason why. I didn’t realize we’d had more than just ground unit defenders there.
(December 24th, 2024, 08:48)Zed-F Wrote: I was wondering during the game how come our navy on the Yuris front always seemed on the back foot, apart from the fact that we just had extensive borders to defend in general. This loss of frigates at S island is part of the reason why. I didn’t realize we’d had more than just ground unit defenders there. Yeah, I thought I mentioned it, but I may have glossed over it. I mostly tried to purge it from my memory ASAP because it had tilt potential. A half dozen or so turns before this too I had a quite bad Frig/Privateer exchange with Yuris too that lead to all of this to begin with. So yeah, the Frigate trades in general went poorly here early on. Once I started playing safer, things got a lot more comfortable. Turn 190-191 These turns were quiet with Yuris as he healed his units and then repositioned his boats. The capture on S Island meant I had some safety for a few turns on my primary eastern continent. Fighting with Superdeath continued on both fronts with different results.   These turns consisted of me knocking all Frigates to 80% HP and then taking fights that were mostly pretty favorable, and then doing my best to cover/retreat my Frigates back to heal. This mostly went really well.  One Eye Cat was one of my agonizing decisions. I didn't hover to show it here, but I had a choice between reinforcing or partially evacuating. There's 7 defenders in here, and the city is on a hill, but the cultural defenses would be 0. I had 3 more well-promoted Grens on one of the boats just off-screen, OR I had one empty Galleon that could evacuate 3 units - in this case the Grens are most valuable. My vodka sims showed I had a pretty strong chance to hold the city (70%) by piling all units in, but again that's with me guessing on promos and possible amphibious reinforcements. Ultimately this caused me to suck it up and remind myself of the win-con. And that did not involve holding One Eye Cat, especially from a player who was basically out of contention. So I evacuated the Grens. The Muskets had no choice but to stay behind and extract a nice price for their deaths. Actually, that's not totally true. I did have the ability to load them up, but it was extremely risky. There was a chance they could simply get sunk at sea along with several boats. So I opted to play safe with them as well.  This (T191) was also the turn I declared on Cairo and killed all of his Caravels. He had previously had perfect vision, so it was imperative I at least take the vision lead. He had delayed in attacking me just enough at this point that my hopes were improving here. I offered him Barcelona for peace, but he declined. The presence of his Privateers in May It Be was annoying too as it threatened my Galleons ferrying reinforcements. You can see the signs I put in the water to denote the danger zone that I needed to avoid. I had so few Frigates in this area that I was extremely vulnerable and could not really protect Galleons.  The Yuris situation on this turn. His Frigates were here, but his Galleons were not, so I had breathing room for a couple turns.  This was the turn Drydocks were queued in a ton of cities. This was the period of time where my power spiked through the roof. Kremlin had just come online too.
Turns 192-193
 The Muskets left behind took down some units with them, but this was otherwise the turn I said goodbye to S Island.  The other SD front though was an exhibition in the power of Airships as I continued to wipe 2-4 Frigates per turn at minimal losses. (IIRC that Frigate/Privateer combat loss was horrifically bad RNG.)  Longbows could now be dry whipped for two pop thanks to Kremlin. This is obvious if you've ever played with Kremlin or, you know, done basic math. But this is my first MP game with Kremlin (I think), so this was a fun realization. Longbows were instant CG3 Drill1 too, so they were quite hammer-efficient on hill cities. I believe I did this on the first turn Yuris re-threatened Kartool.  Meanwhile, the final showdown with Yuris was beginning. In this case though this mostly meant sitting back and daring him to come in and be in range of my airships + Frigates. The basic thinking on my part was to stockpile enough Airships that if he moved forward, I would get odds on every fight. In this case this positioning from Yuris did stress me a fair bit. He had partially forted the desert tile 1S of the Horses. I thought a few times about trying to get some Woodsmen Grens onto the plains forest 1NW of Nagoya. The rationale would be that as long as I held that tile, he would be unable to fort the desert tile, which severely limited his options. However, I was very unsatisfied with how well they'd hold up, so I never did it. Anyway, this positioning made me squeamish every turn. From there he could boat Kartool OR Black Coral, so I needed enough units in both to prevent a snipe. Kartool I could survive a loss to, but Black Coral was critical. This tied down quite a lot of land units. In addition. Ubaryd was technically out of range, but every turn I had to sweat about GG shenanigans getting a Galleon or two in range, so I needed to commit units to it too. In general I did more unit upgrading to Grens than was comfortable, but it had to be done. Finally, I knew he could also do GG tricks to kill Darujistan, but that was such weak value that I just decided to not worry about it.  One of the things I did during this time was prefort basically all of these tiles. 3-4 tiles around Darujistan had 9/10T into a Fort, just in case. Didn't end up mattering, but stuff like this is why these turns were challenging.  One of the other factors that tied down my boats was SD sniffing around with his Frigates. I hit them all with Airships, and he retreated. I did try to hover a couple boats towards this front in order to get some kills, but nothing ever came of it.  Drydocks were having a real impact at this stage. I had 2-3 instances of whipping Drydocks into a 1T Frigate. This was one of them.  I did have a fun plan I pulled together that never went anywhere. Cairo had been building up his navy/attackers in this city for awhile. I realized the city was on flatland, 5 Frigates could bombard it to 0, and it really was not that well defended. Due to my frantic whipping/drafting, I suddenly had a surplus of units in this area. So I set up 4 Galleons and 4-5 Frigates to try to boat the city. This was me setting that up. It never happened, but I was hoping to knock Cairo out of the war. This was the entirety of his Galleons, so if I could kill them all at port, I could free up a ton of units/bandwidth.  I had been wondering why Yuris was not whipping and even making some silly posts about it publicly. But this showed why. He completed MilSci. He wasn't whipping to preserve his tech capacity. This made me feel pretty good, as he only had the capacity to upgrade 2 Samurai per turn. At that rate, I felt I could get Destroyers before he had a scary number of them.  My military breakdown on this turn.
Turn 194
 This was the setup for the possible strike on Cairo. I forgot that I had made this. He also was playing turns pretty fast, so I was hoping to catch him like this. Airships could chip top defenders, Frigates bombard, and then Grens go in - one of which would be Amphibious.  I also did this hoping to tie units down here. In retrospect I wonder if this alerted him.   First, I should note the one mistake I made that didn't end up mattering. A turn or two previously, Bing had his Caravel stack on the tile SD's Caravel was one. That put it in range of my Frigate stack. It was around 20 Caravels IIRC. Now, he would not be able to kill a single unit - it would be a true suicide. However, had he done it, it may have given Yuris odds on the stack by putting 1-3 hits into most units. And crucially, Yuris played between myself and Bing. Now, the Yuris stack was 5 tiles away rather than 4, but most of his boats had 5 moves or I was assuming the ability to promote up to Nav1. Basically, it seemed like there was a real risk my naval stack gets nearly wiped out, at which point I would have been in huge trouble. It was a remote opportunity that was unlikely, but there was a chance. You can see that I considered this while playing the turn. There's a question mark 1NW of the stack that was me considering the effects of moving my naval stack there. I was trying to figure out if that was better, or if it unnecessarily endangered Black Coral. So I thought about it, then swapped to other fronts, and came back to this. And then I simply forgot to move them. Fortunately Bing backed away, but as soon as I pressed Enter I said "noooo" out loud. Anyway, the primary decision here this turn was how to react to Yuris' choice to not advance on me. It was clear he was just saving gold every turn and funneling it into 2 Samurai -> Gren upgrades per turn.  He also did this - position towards Barcelona. It sort of seemed like a bluff to me. But it read like he was going to wait a few turns. So with the Cairo/SD fronts under more control and Yuris not advancing, I shifted plans.  I basically kept the eastern half of the empire on units while shilfting most of the rest over to Wealth. I would swap even more cities to Wealth the next turn. The idea here was to speed Railroad and then Combustion by a few turns. Railroad was important to me because Machine Guns on hills with 4+ defensive promos will absolutely eat Grens alive. So that would buy me more time. And then Combustion was the Game Over tech. Turn 195  Sort of looked like Bing was going to send a few units my way? I shuffled a Frigate up this way to dissuade.  Kept pinging boats with Airships just to limit options as best I could.  Cairo covered his bases and unloaded his Galleons. This meant I couldn't kill anything. However, it did relieve pressure on my core, so I swapped more cities over to wealth this turn.  This front with SD was pretty inactive at this point. If I could have gotten peace with Cairo, I was going to try to invade this continent and/or raze the Pyramids.  Empire shot on the last turn played. Railroad was due the next turn. Combustion was probably 4T out from there, +/- 1T depending on if anyone pressured me or not.
If we hadn't allowed Cairo back into the game by not prioritizing Lib quite hard enough, this would have been easier as we would have only had 2 fronts to cover instead of 3, but otherwise it didn't wind up mattering too much. We were pretty surprised by how long Yuris kept holding out hope that a dogpile could really do anything, especially when relatively few people seemed to want to build power to face us with. There is a window after frigates and before metal boats where naval parity could have mattered if our rivals had been closer to us in tech, but we were far enough ahead that such a window was pretty small, and it would have taken a lot to really set us back far enough that someone else could catch up before we got metal boats.
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Are you, in fact, a pregnant lady who lives in the apartment next door to Superdeath's parents? - Commodore |
