Shyuhe-6.5 - War!

[Ralph_Jackson]

Don't rush Burn Em Down....

You might want to layout a pre-play plan of what you are going to do in your own language as it is a great way of getting your plan straight and letting other people input!

Ralph

 

[BurnEmDown]

OK, playing now!

 

[BurnEmDown]

T0 - Changed Sakae's and Akkad's production to workboats.

T1 - Isabella appears near Camu, as expected, I move 2 Pikemen on the forested hill and 3 workers to chop.

T2 - Random event: we get +448 beakers towards MT, which shaves us a turn off . Isabella attacks the pikemen and loses 4 Conquistadors while we lose only one pikeman. Nappy attacks with a lone Knight near Texococo and kills a LB, tho it dies right away From our mace (has 0.5 STR). Monty also attacks Tenochtitlan with a Grenadier, and we lose a crossbow, but then Monty loses his Grenadier as it has only 6.2 STR left. GE born in Babylon, let him sleep.
I move an ele and formation-promoted knights on the hill, as our pikeman is very weak.

T3 - Izzy sent her stack to it's death, only 2 wounded Conquistadors remain, I kill off one with the knight and move it back to Camu. Workers chopped the forest.

T4 - Izzy appears with more troops, we really need rifles here! I move some knights on Camu and promote them to CIII+Formations. Our stack at Tenoch is also ready to move out next turn, tho I fear for Tenoch's defensive abilities, perhaps we should send some knights down there to defend against Grenadiers?

T5 - Nappy and Izzy attacked Camu simultaniously, weakening our defenders seriously, Fortunatly tho, Nappy is weakened and I take most of his stack while losing 1 knight (he has one knight left with less than 1 STR). Our workers will chop off more jungles near Camu soon. Boudica's troops near Dur also appear to be very large and I really don't like the situation there :S.

T6 - Boudica attacks... Seems we lost most of our troops at Dur, including E. Lee! Looking at the graph it seems we're dropping in power, right now we are about equal to Boudica but Izzy's power surpasses us. I whip some troops in some cities, hoping they can help defend Dur. I move our stack on towards Teotihuacan in the east.

T7 - OK, I just don't know what I'm doing wrong... I think the picture in the message explains everything. Note that I wasn't able to move troops from Camu to Dur due to Izzy's stack, which now got twice as big too! I'm going to put the save here too, in case anyone wants to see how bad our situation is.

I'd really like someone else to replay from Shyuhe's save, see if you can defend the cities better than me, and I'll take it from there.

 

[shyuhe]

I'll see if I have time tonight to look at it.

 

[shyuhe]

Well I played some more turns. I'm confused as to why you were having such a hard time defending the cities Burn I think you need to use more suicide catapults to soften the toughest defenders. The AI's too stupid to attack cities with high culture defense so you can whip out a few catapults while massing knights, then just go to town on the AI.

I forgot to take screenshots of the slaughter but I killed off lots of troops with minimal losses for the most part. The only "stack" that did damage was Nappy's stack that I couldn't dislodge before it attacked. He managed to kill Ivan But we have a new GG sitting in GG ready to attach to a chaiort (or something) as a healer!

On to the report:

Turn 265 - a GA is born. Whoopdi doo. We can save him for a GA when we need to change civics.

Turn 266 - Izzy's conquistador stack is gone. Hurray combat 3+formation knights And sacrificial catapults. Man siege is so broken in this game...

Turn 268 - Ivan dies to the French. We also lose some CG defenders so I queue up some muskets in some cities and start whipping stables in anticipation of MT.

Turn 269 - All looks under control.

Turn 270 - Izzy sends some more conquistadors after us but they're on flat land. We get 70% with our combat 3 + formation knights against them and it becomes a rout.

Turn 272 - I played up to turn 272 because of this:

Tenochtitlan is also out of revolt. It has 2 settled GP + a GG

Here's Gandhi's stack that hasn't moved for a couple hundred years:

Boudica is trying harder:

Nappy has one coming after us as well. At least it's coming to Camu instead of Tenochtitlan (which is lightly defended).

Fred is one tech away from rifling. We're going to need suicide catapults + curi's pretty soon. I think the Monty excursion stack should continue after him - Monty looks like he's pretty much gassed:

From his culture borders, I'd guess 2-3 cities left. Unless he has one waaaaaay down south but it's probably crap if it's that far.

We also have about 1900 EP on Boudica. We should tech alphabet soon to open PP as well as spies. Also, we can burn the GA to start a GA and swap to nationalism if we REALLY need to. I'd rather not draft muskets but if the circumstances demand it, well...

PS. Don't build workboats. They're not worth the hammers as Boudica will come to pillage them. We're better off concentrating on land as the AI is (unsurprisingly) too stupid to try an amphibious invasion if it sees a land route.

 

[BurnEmDown]

Got it, will play soon.

 

[BurnEmDown]

T0 - Attached GG to chariot in Borsippa, promoted to super-medic, whipped LB in Borsippa to replace the defending chariot, sent the chariot to Camu.

T1 - Boudica attacked, one of our knights die but she loses her entire stack . Nappy also loses his stack which just arrived near Camu, almost none of our units where damaged attacking him. I started to build a Confusian temple in Babylon to counter the unhappiness, will be done in 3 turns.

T2 - MT is in, Picked Alphabet. I start to build some Cuirassiers in some of our cities, Babylon whips the temple so it can start working on WP earlier. Also, dropped research to 0% in order to upgrade some of our best knights to Cuirassiers next turn.

T3 - Sent workers to Quarry the stone for half time required for WP, for now building Cuirassiers in Babylon. Upgraded some Knights and an elephant to Cuir, gold still at 0% so we can have some for emergency use. Izzy's stack is in a position to attack Camu, but with Cuirs we can now defend it properly!

T4 - Attacked some of Izzy's troops, we lost a couple of Cuirs but weakend their stack pretty good. Upgraded some more knights too. Sent the stack from Teotihuacan to the next Aztec capital, should be no problem as it is only defended by 5-6 units, however Nappy turns up near Tenochtitlan with some force, but I send a couple of units from the city north of it to keep it safe 100%.

T5 - I finish off Izzy's stack but lose a couple more units in the process, Boudica's stack however is closing in on Camu.

T6 - Alpha is in. Nappy attacked Tenochtitlan and we lose some troops, However his stack is scattered and injured and is now easy pickings, so I destroy the rest of his stack. I attack Boudica's stack at 70% but lose a Cuirassier. Our offensive stack arrives at the gates of Monty's next capital. After we capture this I think it might be better to leave the cities north of it alone and go for the southern cities.

I end my turn set here, Our option for research are (assuming 60% with +7gpt) Paper (3) Monotheism (1) Drama (2) Constitution (10) Chemistry (9) & Compass (2).
I think Paper is good since it'll open us some good techs, and constitution is another good choice since it'll open a very good Civic and some good techs as well.

 

[Ralph_Jackson]

So a few questions for the team before I play.

Techs

Two directions to pick from as far as I can see
a) Paper and Printing press. For cottage economy boost and on the path to Rifling
b) Chemistry - Military Science. For Grenadiers to defend vs riflemen and better garrisons.

Obviously we will try and steal from Isabella to accelerate the path but still need to agree which direction to take.

The consitution - Democracy line seems less strong in our Situation

West Point

In view of the highly promoted troops we are producing anyway it seems a marginal wonder to hand build (as opposed to GE Rushing) as I would rather have the hammers in Curaisseurs than +4exp.

Views?

Ralph

 

[PaulusIII]

WP is useless in Babylon since we already have 5 GG's settled there and we want Babylon to crank out troops nonstop. Maybe in a second troop spam city which will get ironworks post-Steel, but not in Babylon.

In light of our troops being mostly mounted I'd say head for rifling because:
-we are not under an acute threat ATM - our cuirassiers can handle grens and conquistadors. We have time to tech to rifling and we can pick up economic techs along the way.
-More and more AI's are fielding grenadiers but no rifles yet so that kind of defeats the point of getting grenadiers. Unless we go for a passive defense (which in my opinion is a suicidal tactic) rifles will do better against grenadiers if we attack first.
-Rifling gives us both cavalry and rifles - which combined will keep us safe until infantry and artillery come up.
-I want a definite counter to those !@$%!!! conquistadors.

Steel might be a good idea as well. No troop stands against massive cannon collateral damage, and it's easier to get as well.

In short: I like every military direction... except grenadiers.

 

[shyuhe]

Steel and rifling are the two techs that come to mind. Steel is closer but rifling requires PP, which would help our economy. We can suicide catapults for the time being against large stacks so I say PP -- rifling.

I never thought conquistadors would be this annoying in the field I guess it's because I'm used to warring the AI with curi's against LB

I agree that WP is useless for Babylon. Unless we magically get 3 more GG in a short span of time, it's not worth building as 17 and 21 XP aren't really different.

We are close to getting visibility in Boudica's cities, which may be useful for planning defenses. Or we can use the EP to steal some techs. Not really sure which is better. We may want to consider burning the GA after we get monotheism or theology (from Boudica) to adopt a better religious tech. It'll also deal with Babylon's unhappiness.

Also, make sure we only build curi's in cities with stables. The extra 2 XP is huge since we're fighting quantity with quality here. The western border cities should just be on semi-permanent sac. catapult builds. They really cut down on losses and at 30 hammers a pop, are really cheap. Camu in particular doesn't have good tiles to work anyways so might as well slave away the pop into catapults. HR will keep the people happy

Edit: We should probably send 2-3 curi's to speed up the Monty conquest. There's lots of cottaged grassland over there (in town format no less ) that will help our economy.

Roster
shyuhe
BurnEmDown
Ralph_Jackson - UP
Paulus III (on deck)
GreyFox

 

[PaulusIII]

Quality over quantity? You think? We might want to see a kills/deaths ratio on this.






We killed 30 conquistadors already? Has Izzy by any chance got troops to spare?

And yes... whipwhipwhip. Find out who are doing nothing and whip them.

 

[shyuhe]

Interesting. The AI clearly favors mounted units for offense. And man look at all that siege we've killed

 

[say1988]

One question:
You have 16 Catapults built, 16 lost, and one alive? Now the other numbers I can see being off because of upgrades, but you can't upgrade anything to Catapult.

 

[PaulusIII]

One question:
You have 16 Catapults built, 16 lost, and one alive? Now the other numbers I can see being off because of upgrades, but you can't upgrade anything to Catapult.

If I count them now there are more units in limbo between 'alive' and 'dead' - we're also short an elephant. Probably a bug of some kind. To be honest I have no idea...

 

[say1988]

Upgraded some Knights and an elephant to Cuir

There is the missing elephant. And I presume other missing units are for that reason
The extra crossbow may work the other way, upgraded to.
But the catapult I can't explain (pretty sure nothing upgrades to it).

 

[GreyFox]

I am fine with going after Rifling, it is good to have printing press and replaceable parts. But I prefer Steel a little tween-weeny bit more, as it is faster, and conquistador cannot inflict flanking attack on cannons.

--

 

[shyuhe]

Steel doesn't have any economic techs associated with it though, and I'm worried that we're not teching fast enough. The other AI have trade routes where as we're stuck in mercantilism. I think PP will really help those towns we have across our empire.

I'm not sure what's the deal with that missing catapult... It looks like we magically created a catapult out of thin air.

 

[Ralph_Jackson]

So a fairly standard set of bashing conquistadors / grenadiers and pushing forward against monty.

On balance I decided to go down the rifling path and delay any work on west point until we had enough of an army in the east to take down Monty and form (hopefully) the nucleus of an army that could eventually advance against Napoleon.

I whipped in a spy to steal theology from Boudi so we could utilize religious civcs in the future.

So looking at the 3 fronts
In Dur fred was very kindly feeding us troops that were no threat so our garrison was just rapidly racking up experience without being under threat we went through 3 stack similar to this one before Fred produced something more threatening in the end.

At Camu we plonked a Woodie 2 Musket in the Jungle which let us develop the tiles to the e / N of Camu and more importantly funnelled incoming stack to the clear ground in front of camu for our Cuirassiers. Conquistadors on the hill to the SE of Camu would have been much harder to shift with the hill Bonus.

Issie’s stacks were a fairly standard mix of Conquistadors and trebs which as Shyuhe laid out weren’t that hard to deal with. The RNG was pretty balanced with us losing 1 and occasionally 2 cuirassiers to take the whole stack down.

Boudi stacks were much less threatening and usually fell without loss.

In the meantime I plonked the spy down and discovered that yes we needed to steal mono first if we wanted Theo later which was duly accomplished..

Over to the east we gradually rolled up Monty but he does have another city lurking in the far SW of our enlarged empire..

Towards the end our first enhanced threat arrived with Issi’s Cavs, although for some reason the odds of our Curaisseurs didn’t seem significantly worse versus Cavalry and the stack has been dealt with.

End of Report

Printing Press now in
At camu our troops are wounded but no pressing threat so should have time to heal. Please look after Georgy the Maceman as I want to see him with a Rifle!!

At Dur Fred is now taking the war more seriously. We have 2 Curaisseurs joining the defenders next time so should be OK.

In the East the anti monty force is moving W to pick up reinforcements (it is light on siege) so can take down Monty’s last city and then hopefully with some additional forces move against Nappy soon.

Our spy is advancing back into Boudi land and I suggest once we have Theo a Great Artist Golden Age switch to Confucian Theocracy.

We have some whippable cities for Emergency reinforcements if required.

Ralph

 

[PaulusIII]

Got it! We're looking good although rifles are slowly starting to hit the field.
Nevertheless... we'll survive! Good job!

 

[Ralph_Jackson]

Forgot to say

a) Yamamoto (with our Monty stack) has been carefully nurtured so he now has Woodsmen 3 available (which he should take) as this (I think) will stack with medic 3 and make him a super - super - Medic.
b) If we time the Golden Age right then we can aslo switch to naitonalism at the end of it as rifling comes in because drafting Rifels is a lot more attractive than Musketmen?

Ralph