Okay, I missed this post of yours.
I'm kind of leery of these remarks when we seem to keep getting surprised about not being able to get a Cease Fire with an AI.
That's why I posted the formula, so you can verfiy my homework. The key issue is whether we DoW or the AI does, because the duration is doubled when they DoW. If I make a mistake, that's most likely why.
I'm confused. How can we move our units into Babylon to defend it from Cyrus if you are predicting that Cyrus will already have his units in Babylon?
I talking about your scenario. You suggested that Cyrus might NOT enter Babylon if we gift it to Shaka. Okay, well if Cyrus doesn't enter it, then it's empty, right? (Unless Hammy puts his chariot in there.) So we just DoW Shaka and walk right in with our entire stack.
As you say... if we have a complete stack... but the way that you're talking, we're supposed to be fighting Cyrus' stacks individually, meaning that, as per what I understand you to have suggested, when we capture Babylon, we'll have two stacks of our own, so then we're more vulnerable to losing units in the weaker of our two stacks.
Now we're talking about my split-stack scenario, 5 units per stack. If Cyrus were to send one stack to capture our axe at 1n, then 1) that stack in on a tile with no road, and 2) that stack is on the opposite side of Babylon from our second stack that got split off when our defenders that moved into Babylon. So Cyrus' second stack can only attack our defenders in Babylon. There's no conceivable way for them to attack our second stack without going through our first stack.
Have the rules of City-capturing changed? The last I saw, a City only went down by 1 population point when it was captured. Given that assumption, we're going to make it go down by 1 population point when we recapture it, no matter whom we recapture it from. So, there's just an extra 1 (or 2, if my assumption is wrong) population points at stake here.
Cyrus will capture the City because, according to ZPV, he will get his turn before Hammy. So, the City will be in revolt for Cyrus for the same amount of turns as it is in revolt on the current turn, minus 1 turn. It's hard to tell, but ZPV's screenshot makes it look like we have 8 more turns of revolt, although maybe it's 3 turns.
Regardless of which number it is, that'll be enough turns to avoid Cyrus pop-rushing (2 turns of revolt for an AI = we get 3 full turns before the City comes out of revolt, since our turn comes first).
You're absolutely right. My bad. I simply forgot about the city being in resistance.
How many units are we willing to lose via fighting Shaka just for an increased chance of keeping a Courthouse?
I don't think we'll lose any. In fact, I higly doubt he'll even get any units there to attack us. But he could, so we should assume worst-case scenario, I suppose, simply because our overriding priority is not the courthouse, as you say, but Currency and 4 cities from Hammy. In fact, the difference in priority is vast.
We captured more than 2 Cities from Hammy and he still isn't talking to us. I'm skeptical about how capturing 1 City from Shaka will make Shaka be willing to talk with us AND be willing to make Peace without us having to give him something as part of the Peace Treay.
Btw, I keep forgetting to mention that Hammy was willing to talk until we lost four units, a xbow at Borsippa, 2 cats, and a treb. We're not currently worried about Hammy being willing to talk though. He'll talk when we've accomplished our goals, because our WarXuccess will be huge and the number of turns elapsed pretty large too.
Shaka is a different issue. We immediately get 10 WarSuccess from capturing undefended Babylon...
Apparently, I do, since we keep being surprised about the times when AIs won't talk with us.
We haven't been surprised, as I mentioned above. I've just forgotten to double the number of turns when they DoW us.
I'm not sure how throwing away units from our stack like that is to our advantage if we can keep Cyrus hiding in his City due to him owning it (Babylon) and then picking the battles of our choosing to avoid losing any units other than the already-dead Axeman in Babylon.
In general, humans are at an advantage when they don't delay. Delaying capture tends to aid the AI who is slow to react, but can overreact if you give him time.
That is... going under your assumption that he will teleport to the north... I'd almost suspect our Axeman to be returned to our stack (which, if true, would be one point in favour of gifting Babylon to Shaka), since my experience with teleported units is that they return either from whence they came or in the direction of your empire--I'm not sure which one, but time and time again that's how it seems to work when there is a "tie" in terms of teleporting distance. That's all anecdotal evidence, though, so I could be wrong about where our unit would get teleported.
He can't teleport to our stack because our stack is in Hammy's culture. You've never experienced that happening because it doesn't happen. Yes, the code (I detailed it in SG12) tends to teleport units closer to our homeland. More specifically, the code revolves around calculations to the nearest city. But the distance moved counts double compared to the distance to the nearest city. So in this case, moving 1 tile farther from Borsippa, doubled, will surely come out less than moving several tiles closer to Borsippa, doubled, to the nearest unowned tile.
We would need to declare war on Shaka in order to attack any units in the City.
Right.
You also said that you think that Cyrus will send his units there. So, I'm still not sure how we can defend from that City with enemy units occupying it.
Again, you're mixing my scenario and your scenario.
1. YOur scenario: Cyrus leaves Babylon empty, we walk in.
2. My scenario 1: Cyrus splits and puts 5 units in babylon. We DoW Shaka and capture, leaving 4 units plus some trebs in Babylon to defend against 5 Cyrus units, unless we decide to CF.
3. Scenario 3: Cyrus puts 10 units in Babylon. We can only capture in 1 turn if we add two kill-units to our main stack, and even that's iffy because we only have 5 undamaged trebs.
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By the way, playing the Devil's Advocate to your plan: What happens if let all of Cyrus' units move into Babylon. Then we kill off part of his stack but lose some of our own units in the process. Okay, now according to you, we'll pick and choose when we kill off the rest. Uh oh...Cyrus just brought in a second, follow-up stack. Damn! Why didn't we capure babylon and CF when we could have????
and are blocking direct access to SHaka's nearest city, as you can see in the picture. So it seems to me that we want to capture these two cities in addition to Dur-K and Babylon.
EDIT: We should check for a CF option after every single battle with Cyrus, unless things are going well and we want to demolish his stack while we have a chance...
). I really hope that is the case because if Cyrus captures the city, our trebs will have a field day on Cyrus' stack at 0% defenses. Unless he liberates it back to Hammy...
We would have had roads by blind luck if you hadn't brought that up (unless ZPV already analyzed that).
