Top Secret War Room

WARNING - Materials contained in this thread are considered TOP SECRET.

Let's keep this thread very concise and to the point. No spamming, no nonsense. Those that cannot abide by this will be given a seat as a galley slave in one of the Admiral's powerful vessels.

POTKISS has given us direction to plan for war with MIA. This thread shall not debate the pros and cons of such a war. This thread shall plan on how to prosecute such a war if the civilian authorities deem such a war to be in out best interests.

Limitations that need to be taken into considerations:
1. No roads through the jungle and swamps.
2. Little intel on the location of MIA resources. We do know that they have not hooked up iron or horses as of turn 73.

Evaluation of enemy forces:
1. Hoplites – say no more.
2. We now have a “strong” military compared to MIA. So with six warriors, three GS and two curraghs, they have something less than that.
3. We presently have three GS with which to prosecute the war with another three being built at this time.

Evaluations/research needed:
1. On average, what type of losses can we expect in GS v. Hoplite battles. This will be critical in planning how many units to send south on a campaign. We’ll need some probability experts on this.
2. Given the symmetrical nature of the world, where are the most likely locations to MIA resources. Fog gazers?
3. Flip risk of keeping cities. More probability experts.
4. How far will our roads be through the jungle by the start of the war. This will be critical for resupply/reinforcements. The nearest MIA city is seven turns from the end of our road network at this time. Bean Counters, Inc.
5. Possible MIA counter-attack strategies. Critical for homeland defense.
6. And of course our strategy. I would like three viable options here.

Edit - After studying the game, I see MIA iron east of Athens.

WooOOOOoooOoOT!!!!11!1!!!onehundredeleven!!1!!!!

This is getting exciting. I'll shut up now .

EDIT::: Useful Content follows.

Offa's city capture calculator is awesome for establishing odds of a stack taking a city.

The road will be done at a rate of 1-tile per turn. Republic in 10 turns. So this is our time limit correct?

Here is our known or assumed intel:


Yellow dots are deduced city locations
Yellow circles are probable city locations.


@ Tubby - POTKISS has given us 12 turns as our earliest launch date.

Here is a first look at a war plan preposition:


The light blue are some scout paths. I have requested two horsemen be built out of barracks-less cities.

The red dots are proposed rally points for a blitzkrieg approach.

Initial objectives will be resource denial and road cutting. Razing out lying cities will deny intel on our troop movements and hurt their economy.

I seem to recall from one of the transcripts of diplo with MIA that they are reserving at least 2 goody huts in the hope of getting techs. Is there any way we could work in an, um, accidental popping? Perhaps the scouting horses could make a detour on their way home?

GS vs Hoplit issue:

They seem to all be in 1-6 towns, with a few possible 6-12 cities. Several are hills though, and Athens may be a hill city.

Assuming they have 1 hoplite in a hill city:
1 GS: 20%
2 GS: 55%
3 GS: 77%
4 GS: 90%

Assuming they have 2 hoplites in a hill city:
3 GS: 35%
4 GS: 55%
5 GS: 70%
6 GS: 85%

Considering the possible inconveniences of terrain, their offensive unit baits, etc. I suggest we go for 2 stacks of 8-10 GS, to be on the safe side and be ready to respond to threats the throw at us. Keeping the stacks full of GS and not bringing slow units make a much more expensive attack team (losses taken are all GS), but a faster and more mobile, making ducks and runs possible.

Making that 2 stacks of 6-8 GS with 4-5 cats each is also good, but slower. If we add catapults to our efforts, and if they (hoplites) are not all veterans, we could get up to 60% capture of a 2-hoplites hill town, with only 4 GS.
In this case, I would also recommend a few spears, reg or vet, to ensure a bit of flexibility between the GS stack and the catapult team. Considering we don't have 1000 years to prepare, I recommend this one, where losses will be more expendable.

On flips:

I don't know the full maths of flips, but culture at this point is nil. The only thing with a remote chance of flip to worry about is capturing Athens or ring 1 cities with Athens still in place.

On current plan:

I like the scouting paths and GH ideas. As for the actual stacks, I'd personnally send them right for the money and let the reinforcement troops get rid of outlying cities. 1st targets upon declaration would be, to me, Look Here and Gorin (or even the town SE of it). This should split their forces and unbalance them overall.

Concur, the intel from scouting horses is crucial.

We can also use embassy investigations of visible cities to unveil the map a little further, particularly when we get a look at the twon SE of Gorin.

Bede - excellent point on investigations.

B-e-F - Thank you for the thorough analysis. Given this data, I think the prepositioning blitzkieg idea is flawed. I am leaning towards one large stack with a side venture to deny resources.

Harriet - good point on the huts. I will work it into the plan.

Bede's point is valid about the embassy investigations. We'll need to drop to zero research for a few turns pre attack to get the gold for the investigations. What's it cost to investigate a city 40 dubloons more or less?

I have a hypothetical question - if there is one GS, three spears and 5 cats in a stack, which one is visible?

so what happens if we send a stack for the hoplites to swarm to down the middle, one to raid the iron to the east and the pillaging red beards to southwest?

To maintain our interior lines and be ready for any suprises that MIA throws our way, we need a communication road between Senility and Effing. Our guys go places twice as fast.

The KISS plan on the other hand, is to dump a SoD into Effing and just take the cities in order on a path towards Athens with cats and GS.

CNO requests intelligence update on the opponents. is there any to really worry about?

one note that I just thought of.... Catapults can't go through Jungle.

Maybe some of the core workers can come down to help with that effort?

Sir Bugsy said:

Evaluations/research needed:
5. Possible MIA counter-attack strategies. Critical for homeland defense.
6. And of course our strategy. I would like three viable options here.

Click to expand...

The strategy I've thought of would be called "Operation Trojan Horse".

The strategy would be to have Donut get some boats in the MIA area to distract them. We could offer to do the same for Donut with TNT. Even landing some MW's on the outskirts to create a diversion. In the meantime, we are using our military campaigners plans of attack.

We could also package a deal for poly, (since MIA will be researching this as well) and HBR (now so we can get horses out) in exchange for republic and map making. We would be the first to the MA if this happens since we'd be researching construction at that point.

It could also help with any counterattack MIA would consider. The cats we build would stay home since they'll be hard to protect and are the best way to combat a group of hops by bombarding their defenses.

All of this is contingent on getting Donut to agree.

Keep it simple people

Just tell nuts to keep quiet (at the right time) and then go pound MIA with cats and GS. Bring enough workers to road thru the jungle. Tell FE it's the highway to heaven that we're building so we can trade more lux.

Trojan Horse won't work until galleys are available. If Map Making will be available soon, I think it is a very viable option.

I like the Admiral's single stack moving south from EWR to Athens. Most of those cities will autoraze. Catapults will not be an option, they will slow us down and we won't be able to get them through the jungle.

A third option could be spliting our forces to rendezvous at Athens. Diagrams to follow.

I would spend the worker turns to cut roads through the jungle to get the cats down there. Once we are out of the woods they won't slow us down any more than holding in place to heal up the wounded. It appears that MIA doid a real fine job of spotting their towns a single road move apart so the attack sewquence should go pretty quick and having 1/2 or more of the stack healthy enough to roll right on is worth the loss of a move with the Gallics. And having a defensive shot against an attacking archer is almost like having a three point defender in the stack.

The Gallic speed really comes into play when you can hit an advancing counter attack then retreat into the stack, rather than in a blitz attempt.

Whomp said:

The strategy I've thought of would be called "Operation Trojan Horse".

The strategy would be to have Donut get some boats in the MIA area to distract them. We could offer to do the same for Donut with TNT. Even landing some MW's on the outskirts to create a diversion. In the meantime, we are using our military campaigners plans of attack.

Click to expand...

IMHO, don't tell anybody anything until the war actually started.

Beorn-eL-Feared said:

Considering the possible inconveniences of terrain, their offensive unit baits, etc. I suggest we go for 2 stacks of 8-10 GS, to be on the safe side and be ready to respond to threats the throw at us. Keeping the stacks full of GS and not bringing slow units make a much more expensive attack team (losses taken are all GS), but a faster and more mobile, making ducks and runs possible.

Click to expand...

imho, the more units the better. 1 stack of 16-20 gs's would be better than 2 8-10 GS's. An overwhelming SoD is best against a human. If fact, I would argue for 1.5x that many GS's (24-30), but I'm not sure we can build that many quickly since it seems we want to have 3 settler pumps as well. However, with that number, we can forget about the cats. Speed kills, and the GS has it so let's use it.

I'm leaning towards one large stack (around 12, or so) starting from Effing and going straight towards Athens. Woodridge -> Gorin -> Look Here -> yellow dot -> Athens.

They're all size 1 or 2 (except possibly the dot), and since they have even fewer units than us, I would bet most or all have only 1 or 2 defenders, but some may even have none (workers don't count towards strength right? Like we're strong to them, not because of our workers?).

If we can hit them fast enough, they won't have time to reinforce with Hoplites. I feel cats would slow the main stack down too much. The smaller groups on the outskirts could use cats, then all come together at Athens if it's not taken already, and needs reinforcements.

I suggest that the next person to play the turn should right click on each visible city to see what the terrain is under them.

Another option is to leave all cats back home for the inevitable counterattack (by possibly all 3 other teams...).

@ IroP (and whoever else cares),

Military Strength is
I'll add the tile check to the todo unless I get a chance to grab it then I'll do it myself . But this could be done in any of the existing saves. So I guess I can do this tonight maybe tomorrow then report back.

EDIT::: Got this out of the 74 save that we sent to the Nuts:

Flaxon Musk - grassland
Woodridge - Desert
Gorin - Hills
--> Look Here <-- - Hills
Virtuoso - Grassland
Athens - Hills

The town to the east of Athens slightly poking out of the fog is most likely grassland using the flipped mirror theory.

EDIT:EDIT:: I did some calcs with the town capture calc from Offa and with 2 vet hopiltes in a town on grassland, 80% of the time, 5 vet GS will take the city. If the town is on a hill, 6 GS = ~75% and 7 GS = 85%. What percentage are we looking for here? 99%, 90% or is 75% good enough?

Thanks, Tubby! So, since workers have 0 A/D, they don't add anything to strength. Good.

I noticed in the Geeks & Numbers thread that MIA have a size 6 city called Heron. That's obviously right next to Athens, but which dot could it be?

EDIT: Whoa, I didn't even see Virtuoso! Hmm, at least it's on a grassland. But 3 cities are on hills...maybe heading straight for Athens wouldn't be such a good idea...or we could bring more GSs or cats.