Round 17: Tank and Spank
Back in the saddle again, probably for the last time in this succession game. It certainly has been fun, for the scenario that CivFanatics members rated the "worst" in an unofficial poll! I see immediately that there are, in fact, quite a few uglies still on the screen from the previous round. As Ruff points out, that's in addition to the 60 units incoming on this particular round!
Could get interesting! Here's our current status before I begin:
Our three "super stacks" of bombard units are circled above. As far as numbers go, we have 16 longbows, 5 muskets, 7 catapults, 3 trebuchets, and 1 rocket cart. Maybe someone will purchase that anti-tank gun for novelty purposes in the final round, but I'm not going to do so here! I buy a Scout to place on a hole in our sentry net, a comparatively cheap trebuchet (400g), one musket (560g), and three longbows (360g, 380g, 400g). Most of them are moving to the south, where our bombardment defenses are slightly weaker. Otherwise, I'm pretty happy with our current disposition of units.
There are 10 Doom Rollers on the screen before I even get started! Well, I kill two on the first turn and cripple another pair into the red:
Woo, go get 'em! Smash that tank with your longbow!
Too bad this scenario has so many bugs, or it would be even more fun. (For that matter, it really should have more than one difficulty level. If you could play a "Deity" level in this scenario, think how awesome that would be!)
Because these units are pretty dangerous (especially given their 3 movement), I've just been killing the Doom Rollers outright rather than crippling them for our melee units. After all, it's not like we really need the XP on our super-promoted units...
One of the Doom Rollers was bombarded all the way down to 0.2 health. Rather than use a longbow, I sent our fearless SCOUT into the fray!
Ye-hah! Show that warrior spirit!
The new units this round are Death Tracks (strength 24, movement 2) but I haven't seen more than a handful of them. With the bizarre overlapping rounds bug, I'm getting mostly Death Rollers so far, the carryover from Ruff's round. That means Zeviz will probably have mostly Death Tracks on his turnset. Confused yet?
Here's the way a typical turnset goes. Enemies move into view...
Then we blast them. Watch those purple dots in the front. This is the "after" shot from the same turn:
Boom. (What happened to all the forward purple dots? Use your imagination!
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I wondered if the round would instantly end as soon as I hit "0 enemies remaining", or if I would continue to play until all of our units finished their moves. Based on what I remembered from previous rounds, I guessed that it would be the former, so I redlined every single enemy unit in range very carefully on the last turn before killing any of them. As it turns out, I was wrong - you can indeed keep playing even beyond hitting the 0 mark - which led to this amusing screenshot:
-1 enemies remaining! Anyone STILL want to claim this isn't a bug?
That's where everything finished up. Our safe spots remained completely safe throughout the round; the AI pathfinding seems to completely ignore our little islands of safety in the midst of a sea of charging tanks. I didn't have a single attacker make it to our defending melee units the entire round, and most of the time I had unspent bombardment attacks left over. In other words, we seem to be in pretty good shape. I'm sure Zeviz will do just fine on his round. Have fun!
http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ4/SG/RBTS2/RBTS2-AD-5896.zip
The arrowed maps are always a huge help for me. Funny how having those leftover units on hand actually REDUCED the number of tanks you had to kill. (Another sign that this was clearly a bug and not the design goal, killercane - and if they wanted to make things harder, why not just add more enemies instead of having some of them survive between rounds? 
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