Well delaying the war by 10 turns means we have more time to build our units and co-ordinate our attack. Even though we delay the war by 10 turns, it will result in our war being a lot more efficient.
Those 10 turns we delay will be spent actually productive and we will spend less turns in the war as a result. We will also be more hammer efficient since Trebs are MILES better than Cats and MUCH more likely to survive and will be good upto Rifles even (I assume we will be having at least one war early one; snowball effect blah blah). War will be shorter, so post war recovery will be shorter. Also, if an AI doesn't have as many cites, they are a lot more likely to unit spam, so even if we do take some of his cities now, he will just give us a lot more hell later on. Those cats would've died and we'd need to build more units, ie a waste of hammers cos if they were trebs, a lot of them would have survived.
We are likely to also be more efficient with hammers since we won't be building more than necessary units and will be so fast that we could take multiple cities within a matter of turns; the end result being a lot of our newly captured cities won't even need garrisons initially to defend.
@SH, re commute time, I've taken that into account.
For example, if we build 4 galleons in production (or Zhou or Westfish) and direct trebs and maces/xbows whatever to Bay of Benginal, it will take it 6 turns to get there. We set that mini stack up. (Perhaps another one or two extra depending on any extra cities)/
Get 3 galleons in Paris built and direct some units towards it and send galleons towards Vienne.
3 units 2N2E of Verlamion.
3 units 1N of Durocorturm.
Once all units are in position:
T0:
Declare war, raze Durocorturm with mini stack 6.
Galleon 1 move to 1S of Camulodonum and empty mini stack 1 to 1W of the city.
Galleon 2, 3 and 4 move 1W of the grassland copper and empty mini stack 2 to 1S of the copper.
Move our mini stack 3 1SW towards Verlamion
Galleon 5 and 6 empty mini stack 4 1S1E of Vienne.
Galleon 7 empty mini stack 5 2E of the hill pigs for unknown city.
T1:
Mini stack 1 captures Camulodonum
Mini stack 2 moves 1E
Mini stack 3 captures Verlamion
Mini stack 4 captures Vienne
Mini stack 5 captures unknown city
Mini stack 6 will heal if necessary otherwise it will head towards Tolosa.
T2:
Mini stack 1 move 1E towards Tolosa
Mini stack 2 capture Bibcarte
Mini stack 3 move 2S2W towards the coast to be shipped onto a free galleon.
Mini stack 4 moves west or north to take any other lightly defended cities
Mini stack 5 continues west for more cities or waits until joined by mini stack 4 OR get back on galleon to capture coastal cities.
Mini stack 6 continue towards Tolosa.
T3:
Dependant on our scouting right now
Anyway, I hope you get the gist of what I'm thinking.
Summary:
Trebs>>>>Cats
Engineering=more planning time and time to build units
Blitzkrieg means we get all our cities faster giving Brennus less time to react or even bring his SoD.
The above assumes really high efficiency and we can get everything to synergise but in 3 turns, we have taken more than half of Brennus's cities giving him next to no time to retaliate.
Galleons mean that we could also be ready to finish off Rams as soon as we want.
Subject to changes once we discover his stack
Edit: Test it out in a random game, the AI are completely incompetent when it comes to multiple front wars.
thats 560 hammers! (or 8 Maces) (or MoM & 3 Maces)
. I'm really sorry. I'll post all the trades as a mash-up in the following spoiler:
. It really bugs me since we spend so much effort making sure we get one or two gold here and there and then I go do something that stupid, sigh.
