Dear All, why nobody write about situation? Or everething clear? Or (because we are not expected to win this) somebody lost intrest? As I know in our team Ignas best Knight expert, but I have not read his coments for a very long time. Really I do not understand what's going on.
Last week has been quite busy, at work as well as at home. Saturday evening I finally finished GOTM85 and yesterday I read everything that you guys have posted here. So I'll try to add my thoughts now.
And everybody:
Don't loose hope! We had a pretty good start, and why should we not be able to catch up with Spooks and klarius again?
Can Ignas and Lanzelot (and next players) provide me information how many "Knights" (other units ar 0.5, say) they have lost in total and how many City they have captured. Just 2 figures.
I still have all CivAssist archive files of my turnset, so I can give you the exact numbers. However, the PC, on which I played that turnset, is currently packed up in a box: the house got new windows last week and the week before, and we packed up everything that doesn't like dust... So that'll have to wait till later this week.
We can take care of those 90 tiles at the point in which our military sailing for their final conquests. That way, any military we would otherwise be building would be too late to be useful anyway.
Agree. Building Kts (and perhaps settlers for overseas resettling, see below) is now prio 1. We need to crack the AI resistance, before they stack even more units...
Looks that most part of the game will be "island invasion excersise". And (based on our experience) things not goes well sometime. It is important to understand whats going wrong and not to make the same mistakes on next Island. It is hard to analise your own playout, because it is allways impression that "I try my best but RNG...". In fact statistics works in general and we have to adjust to this somehow. Game have many parameters and as soon as we understand the Macro-behavior the better. That's why I did some calculs to find out optimal way and ajust style. Theory based on "simple assumption", that City capture rate proportional to amount of "Knights" and losses proportional to amoun of captured Cities. We may take it from rule of thomb, but better to varify it somehow.
However, no matter, what these coefficients are "SQRT" at post #26 is "universal". Basically it explain what is better on current stage of the game : capture more Cities or save Knights for future players? Answer is "save more Knights is better".
All of us however try to do "opposite", in Ignas, Lanzelot and my turs it was "resonable" but still big. I wonder why? Is it "wrong theory" or it is our intuition wrong? and instead of split Knights to 33 groups better to capture each island in one or two turns?
Few words about
I've so far written nothing about the situation because (I think - not sure about DWetzel?) I'm so far the only player not to get involved in "major" combat operations - so apart from what others are saying as they return from the front, I don't really know what it's like "out there".
I think that intuitively it is wrong to delay somewhat--but that may be because we are asking an incorrect question. Or maybe I just am not understanding the math.
It seems that in the present case we are limited more by our ability to bring force to the enemy (e.g galley capacity, and the turn "lost" every time we unload a galley onto land) more than our knight production capacity.
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I have not the mental capacity to put this into equation form, but it seems as though focusing on number of knights lost may not be the "right" question. Intuitively it seems right to bring "just enough" force to each island to attack and defend against counterattacks, assuming that we can produce enough knights in the interim to invade the next island, almost regardless of the result on the first one.
Here is my experience of "what it's like out there" and my thoughts on these topics. First something on the mathematics: My "feeling" tells me, that it should be very important to minimize losses, because a unit that survives takes 1-2 turns to heal and can then attack again right away. But a unit that gets killed, needs to be re-build in the core, up-graded, sent to a port town and then shipped all the way back to the front. Also the time to ship units from one island to the next adjacent one is much much shorter than to ship them all the way from the core to the distant island. So in my understanding the "Loss rate" should be a more important factor than the equations currently suggest?! Perhaps the equations don't put enough emphasis on two factors: the time needed to transport replacements from the core to the front and our limited galley capacity. (I think the factor "f" reflects this a bit, but perhaps not enough?!)
Just as an example, if there are enough units left from the war in Greece, they (+ a few reinforcements from the core) can already strike at Mongolia much much earlier than if you had to ship a complete new army from the core to Mongolia! In any case, moving cautiously and avoiding losses feels like the right thing to do here.
Also I have been thinking about the annoying flips, which are really a pain in the butt. Perhaps we need indeed 3-4 settlers in each attack group (turning Lisbon into a settler factory/combo is fine with me) and just raze&replace the capital and 2-3 cities with the highest flip-risk right away (or rather after gifting and retaking them to a third party, see below)? These will probably be the ones, which have accumulated the most culture, so this may also reduce the flip-risk for the remaining towns?
- Filled one Army in Greece. I know Ivan and I disagreed a little on this, but I felt strongly it was the right move. I think it's helped alot, both to take down tough city defenders and to cover our big stack so the Greek MDI wouldn't attack us.
I don't blame you here... I think, we should use our Armies this way. Better make the best use out of a size-3 Army and conquer a heavily defended opponent quickly, than to risk loosing a size-1 Army on a Chasqui... (Man, that must have been a shock for you...!)
Persia is our next prio 1 target and they have Immortals, so I vote for filling our second army in Persia and using it to best effect there.
First off, we can't "poof" away island defenders by killing all their cities. So we're forced to basically kill each and every defender to secure an island. Moreover, the flip risks on newly captured cities, especially if it is our first foothold on the island, are astronomically high.
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Also, revisiting the Pike/MDI vs Knight question, I think undoubtedly our Knight strategy is superior.
Yes, we can't "poof" in this game, but still I was very impressed by Ivan's Indian campaign and perhaps that tactic can be used again in the following way ("island attack plan"):
- Let A be the target and B a "friend" of A, which is at peace with us and has already been reduced to size 1. B should not have a RoP with A.
- Gift a far-away town to A
- Declare war, take a town and settle another town (using a settler that has been included in the attack force) in such a way, that the taken town "shields" our founded town
- Leave the captured town undefended and move the wounded units into our settled town. The green units approach the next town to be captured.
- The counter attack stack will move next to the undefended town. Take the next town. Move wounded into our settled town again and then gift the town captured in the previous turn to B.
- The big stack will now change direction and start approaching the next undefended town. Repeat that scheme until all towns are taken and gifted to B.
- Now make peace with A and then take all towns back from B.
Result: We have all of A's towns, A now has a far-away town somewhere, and a big stack of units left on the original island. A will probably have negative gpt by now and the units get auto-disbanded every turn...
Will A keep the 20-turn peace deal? If we are lucky, 20 units will be disbanded by then. However there's also the risk, that he attacks us again later, if there are still units left on "our" island. (As the example of Arabia has shown, even size-1 AIs attack us, if they are mad enough...)
Regarding Kt versus MI+Pike: in GOTM85 I experimented with both. The situation was similar, but not identical, because the islands were much bigger, so the Kt movement even more important than here. Still I think, the experience can be transferred to this game. In the beginning I tried a pure Swordsman/MI attack on Arabia, but that was painfully slow and had high losses (wounded MI remained in the open and got picked up by enemy horses). After I switched to Kts it went better. So I think Kts are the better choice. Only mix a small amount of MI/Pikes into the stack for the initial attack and for cheap cover.
But I think a few more trebuchets might help. (In PTW artillery units are almost useless in attack, but C3C is different.) Cities on hills are tough nuts and need to be cracked either with trebs (10 or so) or with a size-3 Army.
So if we attack an island, that has cities on hills, bring 10 trebs!
So we may forget all other things and focus on war vs Persia. Just put suggestions how to quit from current wars in best possible ways.
Sure, Persia is prio 1 at the moment, but do we really need to bring back our Greek forces all the way to Persia?! I would much rather advance it to Mongolia. (After finishing the job in Greece completely, and if there are still enough left.)
Can't we just sent our remaining "shippable" Army, the forces from Korea and all units, which are currently build in the core, to Persia?
Lanzelot
Because, if nothing else, we would then capture 4 cities later (and probably lose another 4 knights). I'd rather do 8 & 8 quickly.
