T2 External Consulate - War with the Dutch?

[Bertie]

Because mad-bax has limited internet access for a short while – and because time, as always, is of the essence – I am posting this thread.

The goal of Fanatannia is to win a 130,000 cultural victory. This will require establishing many towns (at least 100) in which we will build culture (temples, libraries, etc.).

Problem: Fanatannia is geographically challenged. We have no room to expand.
Solution: Acquire more land.

Among the Term 2 External Consul’s strategies to achieve these goals are to target India and the Netherlands for war. We currently are at war with India and have achieved our initial goals for the first Indian war. Our long-established policy towards the Netherlands is:

War must be declared on The Netherlands on or before 400BC.
The aims of this war are:

a) Deprive the Netherlands of Iron
b) Deprive the Netherlands of Horses
c) Secure a source of Spices
d) Deprive the Netherlands of High Food City sites
e) Maximize territorial gain through peace negotiations

The purpose of this thread is to reaffirm the importance of attacking the Netherlands and how the objectives of the External Consul’s strategy might be achieved. A poll will be posted to confirm that we want to make the Netherlands a target of war.

In order to realize the External Consul’s strategy, it is particularly critical to deprive the Netherlands of iron; once they acquire Feudalism, they can use this resource to build Swiss Mercenaries. These are difficult for Knights to defeat in battle, much less swords or horsemen. Once The Hague expands its borders, it will capture iron within its city radius. Thus capturing The Hague should be one of the major objectives in our war. An even more important target will be Ultrecht. Ultrecht is built on an iron source, so it’s imperative that we take this city.

We note that north of Middleburg is near another source of iron. Possibly we can acquire Middleburg in a peace settlement; or we may need to plan to acquire this source of iron at some point soon.

Because Rotterdam is an extremely high food city it is vital to our objectives to capture it. By depriving the Dutch of Rotterdam’s ability to produce settlers we will greatly stunt their growth; and acquisition of this city will enhance our own ability to grow.

Capturing Amsterdam will secure a source of Spices to Fanatannia and also deprive the Netherlands of its capital; certainly this should be a target of the war. Last, Arnhem has a harbor, a valuable prize for Fanatannia. Securing this would open a sea trade route to other civilizations.

Although the location of Groningen is an affront to Fanatannia, we do not recommend that this be a priority target: our hope is that we can acquire this city as part of the peace negotiations.

We invite all citizens to contribute to this discussion. We also remind everyone that the Director of Commerce will decide when to declare war on the Dutch; and the Commander of the Armed Forces will devise a plan to accomplish Fanatannia’s objectives in the war. Because the what of our strategy is intertwined with the when of initiating war and the how of military tactics, we anticipate some citizens may raise points that will stray beyond the perimeters of the External Consul’s responsibilities. For this reason we invite the Commerce Director and Military Commander to join this thread so we can better integrate discussion of our separate responsibilities. For very good reasons, however, they certainly may elect to start threads dedicated to discussing their own responsibilities in the upcoming war.

 

[greekguy]

if you want to leave the Dutch alive after the war, i strongly think it would be a horrible desicion. the Dutch must be destroyed. no peace. no second war later. if we leave them alive, we will have a pissed off Dutch nation, with Swiss Mercenaries later on. it will then be very hard to attack and successfully defeat the Dutch. if we then kill off the Dutch entirely during one war, we can then finish off India a lot faster and easier. also, if we totally eliminate the Dutch, we will have smoother borders and will be able to sette citys on our sub-continent without having to worry about squeezing them in between Dutch settlements. keeping them alive will mean future wars will be more difficult.

 

[Nobody]

i agree with the greek gur, we need to take the entire Dutch and Indian nations out. Then we can stop our wars for a while. But Fanatia will never be great as long as we share borders with the Indians and the Dutch. We could always have a policy of take all of india and leave the dutch alone. we could bulid a large overseas empire. and go for space race victory rather than culture (because culture will need a large land area.)

so war with the dutch? i say we take out all of india first maybe a small Fango-dutch war to take the two citys between oxford and our main nation. but no big general war until india is delt with.

 

[GenMarshall]

War must be declared on The Netherlands on or before 400BC.
The aims of this war are:

a) Deprive the Netherlands of Iron
b) Deprive the Netherlands of Horses
c) Secure a source of Spices
d) Deprive the Netherlands of High Food City sites
e) Maximize territorial gain through peace negotiations

Well, I must warn you that a core Dutch city has a city built on top of an iron resource. We can capture the city directly or have our horsemen pillage all road connections to that city untill our attack force arives.

 

[GenMarshall]

In looking through the maps, We can launch a strike attack from Bombay (soon to be New London) with our Indian Attack Army (once fully healed). For this war, I would need an additional 10 swords and a couple of horsemen (for pillage and recon use) and they will launch from Roosting Tree and attack The Hague, from there, the Dutch Assault Army will regroup with the Indian Assault Army and both will attack Rotterdam. Since the Dutch City of Utrech has an iron resource under it, the first thing to do is to cut off all road connections beteen Utrech and the rest of the Dutch cities.
Ill update the battle-plan once I get the save and examane any food producing resources the Dutch may or may not have settled on.

 

[Bertie]

@CivGeneral

Some good ideas in your plan. We probably won’t declare war on the Netherlands until close to 400 BC, so you certainly still have lots of time to develop and refine your plan. I agree with many of the principles of your plan, but have a few refinements to offer for your consideration.

First, we have much of our sword army in the north, close to Rotterdam. After the troops are healed I suggest we deploy them south of Rotterdam.

Second, I suggest that over the next turnchat we deploy many of the troops that we build in a position where they can easily strike the Hague. I would suggest we have several swords in this army, but mainly horses. The swords can serve as shock troops to severely weaken The Hague’s defenses; then the horses can finish them off. Because the horses have so much more mobility than the swords, you’ll be able to redeploy them to subsequent battles much more quickly.

I believe by 400 BC we should have enough troops to take out both cities at once. We already have 14 swords built; do you think we actually need a total force of 24 (you mentioned you’d like 10 more)? That seems a bit excessive. But I gather you haven’t had a chance to look at the save yet, and as you said, your plans are still in the formative stage.

The only major difference between the plan I suggest and yours is that I propose we attack The Hague and Rotterdam simultaneously, rather than sequentially. I completely agree with you that after we annex these two cities that we should turn our attention to Ultrecht, and for the reasons you outline.

Do you think it’s possible the strike force that takes Rotterdam will be sufficiently strong to then take Ultrecht on its own (after it has healed, of course)? If so, this would permit the army that takes The Hague to turn its attentions to Amsterdam. Because this will be largely a horse army and mobile, conceivably it can reach and attack Amsterdam on the same turn that the Rotterdam army takes Ultrecht. BTW, although I agree that should we have a prolonged siege of Ultrecht that pillaging roads would be a good idea, I wonder if this will be necessary. I suspect our assault on Ultrecht will be short – one turn – and if we use horses to pillage, they’ll be unavailable to participate in the actual battle should that be necessary.

I understand that Noldodan has asked you to set build queues for the next turnchat, so I have some ideas for that which I’d be pleased if you’d consider. I suggest we’ve already produced enough spears for our immediate and near-term needs (the next 20 turns), so we should stop with those. I suggest we build primarily horses; but if you feel we need a few additional swords, certainly we should enqueue two or three more. It’d be great if we could squeeze out one or two settlers – perhaps the DP could decide which city should produce them? – and it would be good to begin building galleys for our not-so-distant war attempt to capture the Pyramids.