SGOTM 15 - One Short Straw

As long as we have the two workers at Zlatorog, should we build the fort in the chokepoint? With our culture there, we won't suffer any war weariness and we should ahve excellent battle odds. Of course we only get 3 WarSuccess for defending, but what the heck.

I only get around 300 DoP trade points for 21/0 WarSuccess, assuming Power 200/180, 15 cities 60 pop (all guestimates). Not including the unknown-to-me factor for him DoWing us. It goes up to about 470 if we kill 2 mroe units and cpature his city while losing two of our units.

How much do we expect to need for COL?

What's Hammy's power now?
 
ok, what can I do?

1) I'll send the cat from Delhi to act as MP in Zlatorog, meaning the two axes there are good.
2) Marble whips its pike this turn, and that should get there in time.
3) This is the last turn of HE in Delhi. I can build two axes in two turns, for sure, and then resume normal scheduled programming.
4) I'll start a pike after the forge in Zlatorog, just in case.
5) There's no real point in marching axes up from the SE, they'll just loiter down there, although I'll put them in position to make a move in case of another stack.
 
Interesting concept, LC. I like it. I think you're suggesting:

1. Defend the choke point with a fort and kill Hammy's stack.
2. Capture the wheat city, which will require us to divert some of our Hatty stack toward the Hammy front.
3. Threaten another Hammy city.
4. Get CoL in a DoP.

I like it! :goodjob:

BTW, I suggest we take a DoP with Cyrus and taking Fishing now. I'd rather not have him in war mode building up units.
 
As long as we have the two workers at Zlatorog, should we build the fort in the chokepoint? With our culture there, we won't suffer any war weariness and we should ahve excellent battle odds. Of course we only get 3 WarSuccess for defending, but what the heck.

I only get around 300 DoP trade points for 21/0 WarSuccess, assuming Power 200/180, 15 cities 60 pop (all guestimates). Not including the unknown-to-me factor for him DoWing us. It goes up to about 470 if we kill 2 mroe units and cpature his city while losing two of our units.

How much do we expect to need for COL?

What's Hammy's power now?

Hammy has about 0.9* our power, (ours is 214).
We're not going to get anywhere near the ~970 needed for CoL.
 
@ ZPV What techs does Hammy currently have that he can trade?

IIRC, Hammy's settler party for the wheat city consited of a sword and a settler. Am I right? If so, let's assume that he's built another archer there (or better yet, a worker). If we bring one treb from Delhi along with the stack that defeated Hammy's SOD, we should have more than enough units to take the city with no losses, especially since the cultural defense in that city is 0%.
 
@ ZPV What techs does Hammy currently have that he can trade?

IIRC, Hammy's settler party for the wheat city consited of a sword and a settler. Am I right? If so, let's assume that he's built another archer there (or better yet, a worker). If we bring one treb from Delhi along with the stack that defeated Hammy's SOD, we should have more than enough units to take the city with no losses, especially since the cultural defense in that city is 0%.

He can trade CoL and Fishing.

The city is on a hill and has no resources in its inner ring. "No losses" isn't that likely. I'd really rather not capture it yet if I don't have to. If it gets us a tech, fine, but he doesn't have one cheap enough.
edit: I was miscalculating the cost of a DoP. Just a sec.
edit2: CoL isn't cheap enough even if we capture the city.
 
He can trade CoL and Fishing.

The city is on a hill and has no resources in its inner ring. "No losses" isn't that likely. I'd really rather not capture it yet if I don't have to. If it gets us a tech, fine, but he doesn't have one cheap enough.

I didn't realize it was on a hill. If we did capture it, I'd vote to give it back to him after the war.

In any event, since we're not likely to get a tech out of the deal, I agree that we build enough units to secure the choke point and continue our focus on building up for the Hatty front.

Do you have a plan for "securing the choke point" so that we can keep the game moving? Or do we think we need to stop here?
 
Do you have a plan for "securing the choke point" so that we can keep the game moving? Or do we think we need to stop here?

This post details some basic plans. I think that's enough for me to continue - although it'll have to wait for half an hour due to my need to eat :eek::rolleyes::mischief:
 
That looks good.

Do you plan on building the fort? What about a road at Zlatorog-S? Do you plan to get Fishing from Cyrus this turn?

EDIT: Oh yeah, enjoy your dinner.
 
That looks good.

Do you plan on building the fort? What about a road at Zlatorog-S? Do you plan to get Fishing from Cyrus this turn?

Fort: no. 10 worker turns for not much gain (and a loss against the CR1 swords) are not a luxury we can afford to spend.
Road: yes, of course.
DoP Cyrus: yes.
 
Fort: no. 10 worker turns for not much gain (and a loss against the CR1 swords) are not a luxury we can afford to spend.

Good point. I guess forts are really only good if you're garrisoning them with units that get a city defense bonus like archers.
 
Here's my basic analysis:

1. We haven't met anyone beyond Hatty, so for all we know that's a dead-end. I wouldn't put it past Neil to place Toku closer than Hammy to lure our SoD into a dead-end. He's done everything else to slow down conquest. In any case, we don't want to over-commit SoD-size in that direction till we konw for sure.
2. We're already close to having a big enough SoD for Hatty, imo. (Give or take a handful of seige weapons + a pair of pikes.) So we anyway need to start thinking in terms of an SoD for Hammy.
3. So I would focus on the bare minimum with margin-of-safety number of units directed immediately toward Hammy, while continuing to achieve our full stack-size asap for Hatty. (What ZPV listed sounds good for now.)
4. Allow Hammy to suicide his two stacks (CIShockSword+HA and 5-unit-SoD, on two consecutive turns, right?).
5. Plan to stay at war with Hammy till our Hammy SoD is ready to move on his cities and beyond.

---

6. Keep in mind that for an AP victory we want some AI with a minimal amount of "base" negmods to build on with our liberated-city plusmods. That could be Hatty if she's isolated and doesn't rack up lots of negmods for us DoWing her friends, since she won't have many friends, if isolated. Or it could be Hammy if we never DoW him. So this DoW from Hammy could be considered a "gift from a friend." :D Alternatively, we will also rack up plenty of trade points with Hammy and maybe get HBR or other techs from him in a DoP.

.
 
I would get the 3/2XP axe fortified on the chokepoint immeidately, in case the HA is somehow free of the sword, although I assume they're linked together.
 
I would get the 3/2XP axe fortified on the chokepoint immeidately, in case the HA is somehow free of the sword, although I assume they're linked together.

Agreed. With the Woody I promotion, of course.

I'm fine keeping the war on-going with Hammy knowing that he will continue to build units and likely suicide them against our stack, but that's good, really.

BTW, I don't think we can get HBR from Hammy. CoL and Fishing are the only current options according to ZPV.
 
edit: I was miscalculating the cost of a DoP. Just a sec.
edit2: CoL isn't cheap enough even if we capture the city.

I missed these edits the first time...

If we keep our war with Hammy going and rack up some war success, when we are ready to march on him and actually capture a few cities, CoL should be no problem.... unless we get it from Hatty first. :p
 
I'm continuing now. Turnset report is here.
 
Memphis was Hatty's second city, Elephantine, his fourth, so Thebes is probably to the NE, something like this:



Toku got blocked off pretty quickly.
 

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I've played to t106. We can cancel the peace treaty now, so we should decide when to DoW Hatty.
The turnset report is here
 
ZPV said:
Hammy's stack comes into view. He has a C1Shock sword, two CR1C1 swords, a C2 axe, a C2 spear, a C1 chariot, and a C1 horse archer.
Do we still have our Forest at our chokepoint?


ZPV said:
He can trade CoL and Fishing.

The city is on a hill and has no resources in its inner ring. "No losses" isn't that likely. I'd really rather not capture it yet if I don't have to. If it gets us a tech, fine, but he doesn't have one cheap enough.
Once we learn Fishing, Hammy will (likely) have Sailing to trade to us.

Capturing the Wheat City may not seem to be all that useful on the surface, but if we can bring along a Worker, we can feasibly Chop a couple of Forests, whip it down to Size 1 if it has grown to Size 2 by the time that we have Chopped some Forests, and then gift it away.

Part of our idea of wanting to gift and recapture junky Cities requires us to have "space" to place these giftable Cities. There's probably some space around the Wheat City to place additional such giftable Cities.

By the time that we are ready to give away the City (after some Chopping), we can probably give it to someone else (Cyrus if he still has 3 Cities? Shaka for peace plus Shaka having ownership of said City? Hatty if it's before we declare war on Hatty so that we can immediately recapture it and then gift it to someone else that hasn't owned it, like Shaka or Cyrus?) The idea of gifting Wheat City to an AI other than Hammy is that we'd then, in the future, be able to build another couple of nearby Cities that could be gifted to the AI that receives this City as a gift by us also first gifting them Wheat City if they don't own Wheat City at that time.


LowtherCastle said:
5. Plan to stay at war with Hammy till our Hammy SoD is ready to move on his cities and beyond.
Note that there isn't any particular rush to capture Wheat City if we're planning on staying at war with Hammy for a while--we can always aim to capture it later.


LowtherCastle said:
6. Keep in mind that for an AP victory we want some AI with a minimal amount of "base" negmods to build on with our liberated-city plusmods. That could be Hatty if she's isolated and doesn't rack up lots of negmods for us DoWing her friends, since she won't have many friends, if isolated. Or it could be Hammy if we never DoW him. So this DoW from Hammy could be considered a "gift from a friend." Alternatively, we will also rack up plenty of trade points with Hammy and maybe get HBR or other techs from him in a DoP.
One thing that has been tickling at the back of my mind is that:
I *THINK* that there is a -2 hidden negative Diplo modifier for "We lost the war to you," i.e. "We had less War Success than you in the war."

I'm not certain if the code around that functionality actually works, as I haven't really seen it happening in the past, but it is hard to tell with hidden attitude modifiers.

If that's the case, our tactic of declaring war and re-liberating Cities may have to be executed on a massive scale in order to make up for all of the negative attitude modifiers that we will suffer (-3 for a war, -2 for winning the war).


LowtherCastle said:
I would get the 3/2XP axe fortified on the chokepoint immeidately, in case the HA is somehow free of the sword, although I assume they're linked together.
Speaking of Hammy's Horse Archer, are we worried about our Axeman near Hammy being attacked by Hammy's Horse Archer? If yes, I guess that there's no point in moving him, as he should have +100% Defensive bonus as long as he is still fortified on the GHFor square.

If, of course, his Horse Archer dies and he doesn't have any additional 2-movement-point units and he sends his stack of 1-movement-point units at our Axeman and if our Axeman can safely run to our chokepoint, we'd run our Axeman away, but other than that case, I guess he should just sit tight (assuming that he's still on the GH For square).
 
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