Clarification on where to defend from a Lion--in a Forest, if at all possible--and more tips for avoiding them while being able to fight "on our terms" as much as possible
T18 Hit space bar with warrior until lion appears.
...
T22 Warrior kills lion. I checked the combat log and the warrior did in fact get a fortify bonus (I never knew that).
While my tip about using the Spacebar (similar to clicking on the unit's Skip Turn icon) will give you a 5% Fortification bonus per turn, it was not my suggestion to stand out in the open and fight the Lion.
A Forest will give you 50% Defensive bonus, while Fortification in the open will only give you 25% at maximum.
My suggestion was to wait in place for a few turns in order to allow the Lions to live for longer and to fog-bust for us. My suggestion was also to allow us to "react" to the Lions--you can't react if you move first. But since the Lions move only 1 turn at a time, you can let them move first and then be able to get away.
What I would suggest is:
If a Lion appears next to Warrior 1 within the first 3 turns of play, then retreat NW. Be sure to put a sign on the map where the Lion was last spotted, as well as the turn he was spotted. Why retreat? Because the other Lion is likely still nearby. It's the rapid attacks of 2 Lions that are really concerning.
If a Lion appears on the 4th turn of play (T22) or later, we can take a chance that the other Lion has moved away. There is still a risk but it is a much smaller risk than when two Lions were spotted next to each other the turn prior, as would be the case on T18 when Unclethrill starts to play. At this point, you could move onto the Plains Forest River square.
If the Lion is on that square, then I would again suggest retreating NW.
Why is NW so good, though? Can't the Bear come up? Well, the Bear can come up, but we will see him from across the River and will have 1 turn to move away from him if he does appear. So, no, the Bear can't be up there, because our current position would allow us to see the Bear and he wouldn't be able to sneak by to the north past our current position.
The eventual goal is to get Warrior 1 onto EITHER Forest--the one to 1E which is the Plains Forest River square OR the one located 1E of the Marble, which is where we want him to be on or around Turn 50.
However, there is no rush to get into a Forest if doing so gives us a big chance (as is the current case) of being ambushed by 2 Lions within 1-3 turns of each other.
So, the best spot to fight from is defending from a Forest. Better still would be defending from a Forest against only 1 Barb unit within a few turns of the next battle. Even better would be to walk on the Forest when no Barb units are there, so that each time pressing the Spacebar would increase our defensive bonus by 5% more, on top of the Forest's bonus, up to a maximum of 25% Fortification bonus.
So, the idea is not to fight in the open. Far from it. The idea is that:
a) Let's try to help Warrior 1 to survive. Warrior 1's best chances are when he doesn't have to fight a battle when he is wounded. Thus, we will hope that after a few turns, the Lions will move away from each other.
b) If we keep the Lions alive for a while longer, then they will act as fog-busters. For example, even if we will a Lion, a more dangerous Panther (2 Strength + 2 Movement, so it will almost certainly attack once it spots us) or a Bear (3 Strength, ouch!) could spawn in its place (that's what happened to me in BLubmuz' game where he'd moved into the Forest on Turn 18 and gave us the saved game for Turn 19--a Panther appeared and killed my Warrior).
Lion 1 had to have moved somewhere since Irgy's last turn. It could have gone 1NW (there is a 33% chance of this having happened), which is why I don't feel safe immediately moving 1N. Moving 1N would put the Warrior in position beside both Forests, but we might die immediately from fighting Lion 1 in open terrain without any Fortification bonus. That's an unacceptable risk.
Moving west right now doesn't help us, as we would simply be giving up terrain and map intelligence.
No, what we want to do is get to a Forest, but we don't want to do so when 2 of the Lions are close to it, only when 1 of the Lions is close to it.
So, if a Lion comes after us immediately, moving to the Forest won't help, as we'll likely die the next turn from dual Lion attacks. If we don't get dual-attacked immediately, we'll still very likely die within a turn of two from the other Lion coming to eat us.
Think of it a bit like playing chess, where each Warrior or Animal is a Pawn, but each Pawn has the movement type of a King (1 square in any direction--horizontal, vertical, or diagonal). The difference is that the Barbs are FORCED to move every unit once per turn. Our only advantage, besides terrain bonuses and fortification bonuses, is that we DO NOT HAVE TO MOVE on a particular turn--we can choose when to move.
After a few turns, the Lions will likely be farther apart from each other, so moving to the Forest will be less risky once they've spread themselves out. We can't know for certain how the Barb units will move, as it's randomly done by the game's seed, but what we can do is INCREASE OUR CHANCES of them not both attacking us at once on the turn that we move into a Forest.
What if the Bear comes from the south? Well, then we can take the risk of moving to the Forest and hoping to get Forest defensive bonus plus the Defending-across-the-River bonus, or better yet, having the Bear wander away again. In this case, it is riskier to move 1NW, because there are TWO Lions that we don't know the location of. At least with 1 Lion being visible, going 1NW has the smallest chance of all of our moves of encountering Lion 2 while still being 100% certain of not encountering the Bear. 1W would be an even safer move purely in terms of us being able to avoid the second Lion, but it would put us in the risky situation of encountering the even more dangerous Bear.
What if by moving 1NW, the Lion still follows us? Well, if the Lion is now to the SE of us, move 1W (to give us a good chance of being able to run away if he keeps following, while still having played long enough for other units to be far away and for new ones not to have spawned due to our 5x5 radius and the Chasing Lion's 5x5 radius) or possibly 1N (in the hopes that the other Lion is not up there--which is why I didn't say 1NE as 1NE has a much greater chance of us encoutering the other Lion). If the other Lion is somewhere to the north, and it isn't in the one square that could attack us if we moved 1N, then it should appear on the next turn, as Barb units are FORCED TO MOVE. If it's not there, then we can probably keep "running" 1NE and then 1E onto the Grassland Forest that we want to fog-bust from.
Summary
Avoiding Barb units is not an exact science. All that I can do is try and pass on my probability-related tips, my suggestion that you try your best to only get into combat when in a Forest, you try to keep the Lions alive for a bit longer, and you try to avoid fighting multiple fights right after each other. The rest, I'm afraid, is up to luck.
). Probably we are the only team that decided this. Maybe it will give us a win, maybe not... time will tell.
