LowtherCastle said:
Even if our warriors lure an archer out, it's difficult to prevent it from returning safely to Kyoto. 1N of Kyoto's sheep is Grass, so we could kill that archer if forest doesn't grow there. Other tiles are either hills or forest, so killing the archer might be difficult.
Hmmm, good point... the Peaks don't give us a lot of leeway... ideally, the Warrior will be 2 squares away from the City, so that the Archer will end its turn outside of the City.
Once an AI City has more than 3 defending Archers, any further Archers that it builds it is happy to hide out in the City, unless you give it an opportunity to attack a weaker unit, such as a heavily-wounded unit or a Warrior.
The BtS AIs are less susceptible to Worker lures but they really can't resist an "easy kill" lure. I'd much rather use a cheap Warrior than a more expensive wounded Axeman as the lure.
The flip side of the terrain problem is that if we can manage to cut off the roads (say, by an initially-invading pillaging party), we could leave just a single path, which could then be cut off, forcing the Archer to spend 2 turns marching back to Toku's capital.
Another point is that said Warrior defending from a Forest or a Hills Forest square will receive a Defensive bonus, too... which, Toku is still encouraged to attack us, could actually make the Archer get so badly wounded in attacking our Warrior that the Archer could still end up being an easy kill.
And, if not, yet another thought is that there's always the retreat ability of Catapults--if an enemy unit is wounded, the Catapult will retreat at a certain amount of hitpoints remaining...
I'm not quite sure how the math works, but let's say that a Catapult retreats when a unit is at 60% hitpoints. Well, if by attacking the Warrior, the Archer is down to 80% hitpoints, our Catapult may only need 2 successful hits (just making that number up) before it can successfully retreat, after which the Archer might be an easier kill with an Axeman.
Still, it's probably not nearly as good of a situation as luring a Barb Archer out into open terrain.
Mitchum said:
3. I like hooking up Nature's Candhi to our empire. The extra happiness was needed shortly, at least in my testing. Although a warrior MP in each city
Well, that's just it. Having an unconnected City which can build Warriors can also provide us with Happiness...
One way to look at it is that a small-sized City does not need +1 Happiness, while a larger City without a Military Police unit will have 2 Unhappy faces... meaning that a Warrior will be a better investment than connecting-up a Happiness Resource, minus the fact that you're needing to pay maintenance costs for said Warrior due to having a large standing army.
We'll want some Warriors for the future, though, as you say, unless we're willing to spend more Hammers building Archers... but, in the meantime, we pay a bit in terms of Commerce (no trade route to one City and more Unit Costs).
Ultimately, as you say, we may be better off just building a Library in that City, but I think that a balance can be struck by using the outside-of-the-Cultural-Borders Forests to speed up the creation of the Library. I'm just not sure if we should aim to be building a Granary and whipping Warriors... I mean, we could whip Warriors for overflow into a Library after having fully-Chopped a Granary, which might actually turn out to be a best-of-both-worlds type of option... and once we've hit the Happiness limit, we'll be wanting to nearly stagnate growth by hiring Scientists anyway.
Mitchum said:
5. Be aware of a DOW from Hammy when we declare on Toku. Maybe we need two extra axes; one for Toku's archer and one for the NW choke point.
Last game, weren't we okay with just using Warriors at a choke point?
What situation might make that approach fail? If, say, an AI first marched an army up to our borders and then declared war by trying to "move into" our Cultural Borders?
If "yes," then we should be okay with just 1 Warrior at the chokepoint, since the scenario that you describe does not involve Hammurabi planning for a war but more that he is reacting to our declaration on Toku and thus won't have units at the front lines that would be close enough to kill the Warrior... if he's not close enough to kill the Warrior, his pathing algorithm should prevent him from sending any units that could kill the Warrior, right?
Mitchum said:
6. Delhi's border pop brings Zlatorog's two forests into its BFC without a border pop in Zlatorog.
Ohhh, excellent point! I like it! Which City will get the Forest Chops, though... the one which is closer to the Forests or the one whose Culture covered the Forests?
Mitchum said:
7. We have to remember to use our used-to-be spawn busting warriors as either MPs or archer bait. I forgot about using them in my save, leaving them fortified where they were...
Which is why I explicitly listed every Warrior in the PPP; even if the action is "stay Fortified," then we at least won't be forgetting about these units.
Mitchum said:
8. Do we want libraries in more than 3 cities?
Do we want Libraries in more than TWO Cities? If you only need 2 Great Scientists for now, can't we wait until we have The Great Library before generating a Great Scientist to Lightbulb Philosophy?
Other teams may be building The Pyramids for Representation, Lightbulbing Philosophy (and making use of it since we were all forced to research Hinduism, meaning that there wasn't a relative opportunity cost for them to spread around a State Religion), and teching up the tech tree... perhaps Lightbulbing Paper and Education for an early Liberalism for, say, Cuirassiers.
We just need to keep enough of a focus on our strategy, which is to take over AIs early in the game and leverage their land to further fuel our war machine.
Building 1 more Library (particularly if we can do it while whipping up an army, such as my suggestion of whipping Warriors into a Library in Nature's Chandi) sounds like it wouldn't hurt our war machine too much, but I'm not really convinced that we can justify generating a 3rd Great Scientist so early without Philosophy... if we REALLY want a 3rd Great Scientist, we should re-evaluate our entire plan and consider doing something like Oracling Code of Laws, having Delhi start on another Great Scientist ASAP, Lightbulbing Philosophy, manually spreading-around Hinduism, turtling up, and completing The Pyramids. It's still doable, but I prefer our Oracle Construction + war plan, and if we stick to our plan, then building any more Libraries that in necessary to generate our 2 Great Scientists for Machinery + Engineering seems like it will hurt our strategy more than help it.
We can always generate additional Great People in the future, once Hinduism has been better spread.
Besides, we might really want our 4th Great Person to be a Great Engineer to see if we can pull off the gift-the-AP gambit... something that other teams who don't go to war early won't be able to execute, unless they really butter-up Toku or Hammurabi, meaning that they didn't perform a Worker steal. Then, they'd also need to spam Christian Missionaries (or whatever Religion comes with Theology) and simply pray that Toku/Hammurabi converts on their own... whereas we will have more flexibility... gift a Great Engineer to a different AI that will Open Borders with us who, say, is an AI that founded and is running a non-Buddhist State Religion. Then, we can move in and capture said Religion's Cities. Much cleaner.
In other words, there is a potentially good synergy with the Great-Engineer-gifting and an early war approach, given our "two Toku prison," with the assumption that at least one other AI is both meetable and will give us Open Borders (probably the trickiest part will be that an AI that met Toku might hate us by -2 for having declared war on their friend).
Mitchum said:
9. Looking closer at the map, we can declare war and capture Osaka on the same turn (depending on what's happening with the cultureal battle over the corn tile).
Oh yeah, I forgot about that part. Well, in that case, capturing Osaka on the first turn of war is a no-brainer move. Why let Toku whip the City down to Size 1 and up in whipping anger when we can just take the population (minus 1) off of his hands immediately?
(+2
