[BTS] SGOTM 15 - One Short Straw

[Dhoomstriker]

We really stick it to Genghis and Shaka, capturing both of their capitals. Booyeah:

Spoiler:

[Dhoomstriker]

In examining the F8 -> MEMBERS screen, I happened upon a crucial detail: Huayna can be a Full Member but is not eligible to be elected as the Religious Leader, nor is he eligible to be our opponent in a Religious Victory vote, since the Huayna/Mansa TEAM must be a Full Member, and Mansa is not a Full Member. Therefore, it looks like Cyrus is going to win the next AP Resident position:

Spoiler:

I'm not positive, but I think that we want Liz to win it, which may or may not make it easier for us to get elected ourselves, since if Cyrus was the Resident and we captured the AP, I don't see any reason why Cyrus would lose his position, but Liz' status would be ambiguous, as she would have lost the AP... it may be the same case in the code but it may not be. Anyway, we might as well vote for Liz to be the next Resident for that reason, plus so that she'll like us a bit more and might decide to delay putting us in some serious pain with her Redcoat army.


Also, apparently I was wrong earlier and Cyrus DID build The Spiral Minaret, according to the F9 -> TOP CITIES/WONDERS screen. He also has the Mausoleum... which we earlier thought was a great thing to have happen, but now we realise that it is placed at the opposite end of the map.

[Dhoomstriker]

Of course, if we declared war on Mansa/Huayna, even if we didn't attack them but just blocked them in with Galleons, Mansa would almost certainly switch to Theocracy, which would make him a Full Member of the Apostolic Palace and therefore their team COULD become our opponent.

Anyway, I'm winding down and will probably be handing the saved game off soon.

We've kept Beshbalik stocked with Knights... I haven't quite had the numbers to consider attacking the City but have been able to Bombard it down to 0% Cultural Defences.

We have reinforcements that just arrived 1NE of the City which could help in an attack next turn, or else we could wait for the units coming from Turfan--some of which just unloaded from boats--to also join the party.

There's a Great General in Karakorum... as I said, we lost our Scout, so I'm not sure what to do with him.


It should only take a couple of turns to take down Bulawayo... we might even take it down next turn as we have some Horse Archers that could join our stack from behind, while the units guarding the Horse Archers can wait for the City to be captured before moving, say, to garrison Bulawayo itself.


I have moved our Sun Tzu Super Medic from kwaD to Nongoma... he still has movement points but I skipped his turn so that he can stay inside of the City... and we can send him to join the stack of units outside of Ulundi next turn, which might as well just heal in place rather than spending time moving into Ulundi first.

There is a Knight to the west of Ulundi... it may attack Ulundi and kill a defender... so be it.


We lost our Spy at Shaka, so we only have 1 Spy right now... it's on a Caravel headed toward Huayna.

[Dhoomstriker]

Unhappiness is an ever-increasing problem. Rather than building Courthouses, I've been slipping in Forge and Market builds where it seems to make sense to do so.

For example, NC has grown into a Unhappiness, so we could probably whip a Market there. In the meantime, I sent an Archer toward the City but we could use another one to support said City.

Zlat is also Unhappy, while other Cities across the empire are probably going to get even more Unhappy next turn, thanks to all of the warring that I just finished, so we may need to queue-up even more Buildings that would get whipped next turn.


I don't really have a great Galleon chain set up anywhere... I just had a couple of piecemeal ones... they did the trick for a while but we could definitely use some improved Galleon-chain management.


Actually, I won't move the stack of Cats + 1 Treb + War Elephants at Turfan. It may just be better to leave them in the City. It's hard to say. They could feasibly all move 1E GRiv Cottage Road, 1NE GH Mine, 1NW P Road and then get next to Beskbalik in 2 turns instead of 3 turns by marching north. Or, they could just stay in Turfan to prevent Genghis from trying to attack it without leaving our stack semi-vulnerable in the open... or we could send along, say, the Spearman with that stack... I'll leave it up to you to decide.


There's a War Elephant on a Galleon in Akkad that is acting as a passing-by Military Police unit... next turn, the City will build itself an Archer and that Galleon can drop its payload off in Nobamba.


I think that our Workers have accomplished most of their main tasks, but we may want some around the front lines for building Roads or something.


It doesn't look like it'll be easy to build a Fort passage to the north-west of Karakorum, but we could potentially, eventually build a Fort chain along the water there, depending upon what we see.

We could even capture the Worker that is NW + W of Karakorum, but I wasn't sure if we wanted to commit too many units to do so... actually... can our Super Medic capture him and then come back to safety from being a City defender at 1E of Karakorum? Probably, right? I'm getting tired, though, so I don't want to risk it if I'm wrong. I should be right, though, so that should be a free Worker and some extra map intelligence for you.


Shaka recently got a Great General... in Ulundi... which we killed before he could use it.


It probably makes sense to whip the Market in GEL and probably the same thing with Kyoto, particularly sine both Cities are likely to get even Unhappiness next turn, what with them being big-sized Cities after we decimated a couple of AI stacks of units.


Cherokee-2W has fallen under the Cultural influence of Liz' Canterbury City. She's still an incredibly long way off from a Cultural Victory, though.


I did end up putting down signs on the map in Liz' area, although non-Redcoat units were just usually grouped under the "other" units category.


Yeah, maybe Nippur didn't NEED a Theatre, but it'll get us 2 Food Resources (the GCow Pasture could go to Nongoma), plus then we work on reducing Shaka's Cultural influence in the area. Whatever.

In fact, we might not even want to worry about building many Buildings in Shaka's area and we could just whip his Cities down for units... why? Well, he's probably our best candidate for a Voting Buddy and that'll still probably be the fastest way to win, what with so much craziness in terms of having to go to the far ends of the map just to take on Mansa and Huayna.

There are also a lot of unfilled spaces in Shaka's area, since his Cities aren't very tightly packed, where we could fit in several extra Cities that we could Liberate to him. In fact, with so many of those, plus possibly letting him have some of Hammy's junky northern Cities, we might even just keep some of Shaka's main Cities for ourselves without needing to Liberate them.

Also, we can easily 1-City-Challenge Shaka in the northern City of Ondini, which seems to be out of the way.

He has an ex-Barb City called Angle in the east, but I don't know if we can walk past there or if it will be a dead end. Presumably, Cyrus will be beyond there, since Cyrus was able to come from the western side of our landmass with units, and we should be able to access that passage to Cyrus without having to kill off Shaka, since Ondini is so far out of the way to the north.


So, good luck, ZPV, and let me know if you have any questions. I'll upload the saved game shortly.

EDIT: Here's the link to the REAL saved game.

[Dhoomstriker]

Most of Shaka's remaining Cities (not counting the one that we currently have a stack next to) had between 3 to 4 units in each. By the time that you arrive at those Cities, there will be more defenders, but the good part is that I think we've seen the last of his mobile stacks.

Genghis, on the other hand, can probably keep fielding more units, but that's just a guess based on how he was able to keep filling-up Karakorum and Beshbalik.

[Dhoomstriker]

Given their graphs, the 'Ducks built the Hindu AP and won that way. Either that, or they played a really long last session, but doing so isn't their typical style. Of course, there are always new players with new ways of doing things, but I'm doubtful that they would play an extremely long final session when there's no time pressure of an impending deadline.

EDIT: I take that back. They likely went with the idea that we discussed earlier... Lightbulb or Oracle or self-tech Theology, gift it to an AI, and possibly gift a Great Engineer and/or some Missionaries and/or capture their Cities and spread an alternate Religion into said Cities and then return the AI those Cities then wait for the AI to manually build the AP, given that they received Theology so much sooner than all of the other players.

Actually, given that you can just Liberate your way to victory, you don't necessarily need to be that goofy... just build the AP yourself and be done with it... your Voting Buddy could just as easily be Buddhist as them being Hindu when the AP was Christian/Jewish/etc. So, super simple... just abuse Liberating, and it's a cake walk. Either way, Liberating not having a cap is exploitative. Probably the only reason why Neilmeister didn't jump in and stop us (like he did for our Perpetual Anarchy via Religion + Civic swapping idea last game) when we pretty much said in our thread that it was exploitative, was that other teams were likely already talking about doing the same thing.


Anyway, we'll play our own game and either pull off the best Domination win or one of the best Buddhist AP wins.

[Dhoomstriker]

The Satsuma Barbs have a wandering Axeman but since we own The Great Wall, you can pretty much ignore said unit.

[Dhoomstriker]

I wonder... if Cyrus became the Resident and we reduced his vote count significantly, would that matter? Probably not.

What if we eliminated him, though? That might have an effect, but it might be an effect that we don't want to see happen, such as the next Resident Election arriving sooner than we can capture the AP.

So, if we don't do any testing at all before getting to the AP Resident vote, my recommendation is for us to vote for Elizabeth to be the Resident.

Ideally, we'll either do testing before playing more (sorry, I am too exhausted to do any tonight) or at least will pause play before the vote comes up so that we can figure out who would be the best candidate for us to vote for being the Resident. But, lacking said time or inclination to do any testing, I'd say just vote for Elizabeth and hope for the best as a result.

[Dhoomstriker]

Originally Posted by LowtherCastle

So is May 21st also the deadline for the wooden spoons?

Just how many Cities are you envisioning chain-Liberating to an AI, anyway? Nearly all of them?

[ZPV]

Well played, Dhoom!

Got it.

The trouble with Shaka as a voting buddy is that we'd need to liberate 18-20 cities to him. We just don't have that many cities that he'd take. We'd also still need to capture London
I still think either conquest or Domination would be quicker - once we've got the AP we could knock out the other AIs within 20 turns fairly easily. I'll work on putting some galleons in place to move to Huayna and Mansa, in any case.

[Dhoomstriker]

I don't understand why we'd need to liberate so many Cities. Minimally, we just need to Liberate 3 to 4 Cities... 3 Cities if you get +1.5 Attitude for a single City or 4 if you get +1 Attitude for a single City.

All that you need to do is get more credit than you take in penalty for declaring war on an AI (-3), then repeat the process a bunch of times.

Obviously, if you can liberate more than the minimum number of Cities, the process will go quicker. However, we were planning on having the amount of Cities roughly be 6 Cities.


It's like how you can get +4 Fair and Forthright Trading but can also get -4 You Traded with our Worst Enemy... they balance each other out. But, imagine that there was no cap on Fair and Forthright Trading and no cap on You Traded with our Worst Enemy... but you would get +2 for trading a tech to one AI and then -1 for trading the same tech to a single other AI that you always traded with. Over time, you'd get more positives than negatives. That's what we're looking to do here.

Obviously, if we can build or whip some Settlers and have those "filler Cities" that exist inside of Shaka's previous Cultural Borders count as Liberatable Cities, that'll give us 4 Cities to work with... plus then we can decide which of Shaka's existing Cities we are okay to lose all of the Buildings and population in.


As for Galleons... we probably want to focus on Liz first... yes, Redcoats are tough to combat, but imagine Infantry or Machine Guns. She won't be that far off if we leave her be.

I think that the Galleons need to stay 100% focused on delivering units to the north as quickly as possible.

Use the Caravel + Spy to scout out what Huayna has and possibly do the same at Mansa with a boat, but otherwise, we want to stay focused on the north so that we can send everything that we have at Liz after neutralizing Cyrus (or perhaps even delaying the attack on Cyrus if we feel that we have amassed enough units to go after Liz at that point).


Killing Liz not only gets us the AP but also prevents her from teching too far ahead... meanwhile, it's not like Emperor Level Mansa + Huayna are going to get to Riflemen themselves, but Deity Level Liz will catapult herself into an even greater nightmare the longer that we leave her be.

[Dhoomstriker]

Just remember that next turn, people are going to be significantly Unhappier than the current turn.

So, "loose" units that are moving around like Trebs or Archers may actually end up needing to stick around to be temporary military police... unless you feel comfortable whipping Markets. For example, Delhi might need one of its Trebs back out of the 2 Trebs that were headed SE of the City toward the mini Galleon chain.

[Dhoomstriker]

As you say, Huayna and Mansa shouldn't take too long to kill, but I'd hold off on sending any units (including Galleon chains) their way until we've taken a good chunk out of Liz' Cities. Until that time, I don't see us reasonably justifying starting another front against Huayna + Mansa.

[ZPV]

Originally Posted by Dhoomstriker

As you say, Huayna and Mansa shouldn't take too long to kill, but I'd hold off on sending any units (including Galleon chains) their way until we've taken a good chunk out of Liz' Cities. Until that time, I don't see us reasonably justifying starting another front against Huayna + Mansa.

Yeah - I just meant making sure the forts are in place, and we have the capacity to whip/move galleons to where we'll need them. Aside from that, all focus is on the donut.

[Dhoomstriker]

If there are complaints about Motherland Unhappiness by leaving Shaka alive, then just put Pikes, Crossbows, and Trebuchet rocks into people's hands and send them off to war. The remaining citizens will eventually stop complaining once there are only a handful of them left.

[ZPV]

Originally Posted by Dhoomstriker

I don't understand why we'd need to liberate so many Cities. Minimally, we just need to Liberate 3 to 4 Cities... 3 Cities if you get +1.5 Attitude for a single City or 4 if you get +1 Attitude for a single City.

All that you need to do is get more credit than you take in penalty for declaring war on an AI (-3), then repeat the process a bunch of times.

Obviously, if you can liberate more than the minimum number of Cities, the process will go quicker. However, we were planning on having the amount of Cities roughly be 6 Cities.

It's 1.5 per city - however, we have -17 visible attitude, (so -19 actual attitude), so we need to pick up 27 attitude points, which is a lot of cycles of liberating+recapturing. There are a few turns of refusing to talk in between each DoW.

Ok, I guess it can be done.

It's hard to say whether it's worth the war weariness - if I find that we can definitely get to Huayna+Mansa fairly quickly after Liz, then it's probably better to kill Shaka off.

[Dhoomstriker]

As for Cats versus Trebs against Liz... I think that we'll get a lot more mileage out of Trebs, but it will be useful to have a stack of Cats, too. Ideally, we'll be in a position to attack Liz' first City before she can come at us, so that we can use a horde of Trebs to knock down its defenders, leave a single red-lined defender standing, then hopefully have Liz keep refilling that City instead of attacking us.

In that way, we wouldn't need a single Catapult and could go purely for Trebs. The reality is that things won't work out as beautifully as I just described, so having several stacks of 5 throw-away Cats when we declare war on Liz will be of great use... toss 5 Cats at a stack and then clean it up with lesser units.

It'll still be a very bloody mess, but the more battles that we fight where Liz is defending from within a City, the better.

How realistic is it that we'd get Feudalism from Shaka, Guilds from Genghis, and then somehow tech our way through Gunpowder and Lightbulb our way up the tech tree? If that scenario doesn't sound feasible, should we perhaps go for Macemen instead?

The whole point is to just have some expendible stack defenders that won't get totally obliterated against Redcoast like will all of our current unit types, including Pikes, Crossbowmen, War Elephants, Cats, Trebs, Axes... pretty much everyone... as well as include up-and-coming Longbowmen, Knights, and Musketmen.

Until Cannons or Grenadiers, Maces are by far the strongest units to use against Redcoats, and we have to be practical that even if we get Military Science, it'll take us a good 15 more turns to amass an army of them... is that really so practical of an approach, particularly since we won't have an AI that will give us Gunpowder?

[Dhoomstriker]

Seeing as how we have less than half of the required Land Area, I think that we should realistically rule-out Domination now.

So, it comes down to whether we can capture every AI City... we could stop after grabbing London when it comes to fighting Liz, for example, if we're going to try for a Religious Victory. We feasibly wouldn't even have to attack Huayna + Mansa at all.


Yes, it can take time to wait for the right voting cycle, but if we plan ahead far enough in advance (and figure out if filler Cities can count as Liberating credit to Shaka), we can already start to get Shaka liking us more than he has been.

[ZPV]

Originally Posted by Dhoomstriker

As for Cats versus Trebs against Liz... I think that we'll get a lot more mileage out of Trebs, but it will be useful to have a stack of Cats, too. Ideally, we'll be in a position to attack Liz' first City before she can come at us, so that we can use a horde of Trebs to knock down its defenders, leave a single red-lined defender standing, then hopefully have Liz keep refilling that City instead of attacking us.

In that way, we wouldn't need a single Catapult and could go purely for Trebs. The reality is that things won't work out as beautifully as I just described, so having several stacks of 5 throw-away Cats when we declare war on Liz will be of great use... toss 5 Cats at a stack and then clean it up with lesser units.

It'll still be a very bloody mess, but the more battles that we fight where Liz is defending from within a City, the better.

How realistic is it that we'd get Feudalism from Shaka, Guilds from Genghis, and then somehow tech our way through Gunpowder and Lightbulb our way up the tech tree? If that scenario doesn't sound feasible, should we perhaps go for Macemen instead?

The whole point is to just have some expendible stack defenders that won't get totally obliterated against Redcoast like will all of our current unit types, including Pikes, Crossbowmen, War Elephants, Cats, Trebs, Axes... pretty much everyone... as well as include up-and-coming Longbowmen, Knights, and Musketmen.

Until Cannons or Grenadiers, Maces are by far the strongest units to use against Redcoats, and we have to be practical that even if we get Military Science, it'll take us a good 15 more turns to amass an army of them... is that really so practical of an approach, particularly since we won't have an AI that will give us Gunpowder?

Having 8 strength vs 14+bonuses instead of 6 doesn't make a blind bit of difference.
The first several attacks against a well-defended English city are at suicide odds, and are purely for collateral damage. Cats are cheaper than trebs and do more collateral damage. Once the odds are a bit higher than 1%, we can attack with trebs to redline them.

Grens and/or Cannons are a pipe dream. They're the back-up plan if our medieval stack doesn't work.

Expendible stack defenders? The point is to have 50+ killer units in our stack, so that when Liz kills 15 of them with her stack, it doesn't matter.

[Dhoomstriker]

So, essentially we're going to massively Axeman-rush Liz? I'd say Chariots but they won't come up on defence. That's actually a pretty neat idea... they say that pulling off an Axeman rush often requires you to attack early and that siege units can extend the life of your Axemen... but now you're adding another dimension, where sheer numbers also extend their lifetime.

Okay, I see where you're going with the Cats vs Trebs idea. Does that mean that we'll actually take the 2 Collateral Damage promos with most of our Cats? Probably, right, since the only way that we expect any of them to survive will be if they randomly luckily retreat?


I guess then having a ton of Longbowmen units, perhaps with most of them trailing our stack so that the Axemen get targeted first, can allow us to garrison captured Cities with stacks of decent City-defending units.