The Counterstrike

[AutomatedTeller]

transports carry 6 units, right? I think we won't need more than 12 - we might be able to get away with 6 units. If we use galleons, we should have 8.

it kind of depends on what we are facing - if we are facing pikes, knights and MW, then we will need to A) blockade their ports and B) pillage the rubber on SCI, to keep them from upgrading to infantry - they will be able to upgrade to rifles, but I think that 6 infantry with frigate/bomber support will be able to take out rifles and should be able handle what they have there. Infantry is tougher and we'll probably have to kill infantry with bombers.

If we send only 6 or 8 units, we will need to be able to get more in quickly, though. If we send in 12 (2 transports or 3 galleons), we might be able to get away without as strong a second wave.

If we are dealing with middle ages units, we can also make some of the troops AC, to deal with MW and pikes that aren't upgrade.

Big question is: what are we facing and how many are there?

I'll make some assumptions:

I think they have 3 cities up there, so they need to block 7 tiles. If they are using 1 unit per tile, that's 7, 2 per tile is 14, 3 per tile is 21.

I'll assume that they haven't been reinforcing it with modern units, that most of the units there are medieval units. Lets say they have 21 units, 7 MW, 7 pikes, 7 Knights. I don't think that 14 MW and Knights can take down 12 infantry and maybe not 6 infantry.

Hmm.

I am thinking now that 6 infantry, some of which can be drafted if we want, and 6 AC, might be able to sweep the island. We need to know if they have barracks on the island, as well.

 

[donsig]

Paul, on our next turn can you give us a screen shot of SCI (preferably with lots of our ships nearby)?

 

[Paul#42]

I will. I plan to block SCI entirely. IIRC it was just two towns there.
I wonder if they have navy around there to break our blockade...

Should we trigger our GA on that occasion?
I'd think rather later when our tech alliance is about to run out - but to have it now is also appealing because a boost now might give us the edge over BABE in a upcoming war...
Maybe when we got bombers?
Ah, best might be when we got all tiles improved (finally) ...

I switched The Chamber to a cola plant to achieve 90spt for 1-turn-inf or guerillas.

We will upgrade four or five of our caravels to transports in The Marina on D-Day - 2.
Two will leave on D-Day - 1 and the other two will carry units, ship chained to SCI on D-Day. Maybe a third with reinforcements on same turn to arrive on D-Day + 1.
Two caravels will remain on EWS duty down south - maybe prepare a shipping to west if SABER fails to take their SCI.

Wait... Upgrading caravels to transports is 150g each
Maybe we should do a compromise: The Marina would need 10 turns to build a transport, we could have one built by #194. We upgrade another one for 150g. That's 12 units capacity. And we use four caravels (or three galleons = 90g for upgrading) as the relay in our ship chain. They are slower (4/6) but provide the same stats for sea battles...
The combined movement of 6+4 tiles is just sufficient from The Marina to the jungle tile or the NE mountain tile.

 

[donsig]

I think we do not want our golden age this early. We shouldn't need a GA to retake SCI. I liked the idea of using our GA to try to enhance our prospects of getting SETI and the Internet. I'm also leery of spending a lot of gold on naval upgrades but as we get closer to flight we'll understand our gold situation better. My gut feeling is that pushing full steam ahead on research may be be more important than getting SCI back a couple turns earlier. If we can stay far enough ahead of SABER on SCIAA we might be able to research navigation (for Magellan's) or espionage without having to share them with anyone. Getting ahead of FREE on the tech tree also gives us some chances at an SGL while an extra turn or two of bombing SCI helps deprive BABE of war happiness which could bring them to the peace table once we get SCI.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

I like the planning of 4 caravels and 2 transports!!

 

[Paul#42]

If we want to land on the jungle (my preference), we'll have to start our invasion from The Whale Pond instead of The Marina, because transport 6 + galley 4 = 10 tiles and that's just enough to reach the mountain south of Oka...
But that means just mobilization will take place one turn earlier. Of course it raises the chance of detection by GONG's vessels. But they should be far away by then.

BABEcolony has the only harbor on SCI. Should I start shelling and blocking the harbor next turn? Or should we rather wait till it's too late for BABE to draw their stack of 3 frigates (east of The Nursery) there? They'll probably need ~5 turns to get there. Unless they smelled the rat...
That would mean we'd start to show our plans in turn 190...
I tend to try it rather soon.

If we shell a town with MP, will we first only hit units till they are redlined before we can hit buildings and population? That's what I recall from my few epic Gotms...

 

[AutomatedTeller]

I think we should bombard, yes. I don't think we can wipe out the harbor with 4 frigates, though.

On our landing - can we reach the mountain NE of the jungle with bomber? I don't think so, but if we can, we should think about that tile.

Plusses of that tile are better defense and ability to heal. Minuses, of course, include not being next to the town.

 

[donsig]

We don't want to destroy our harbor, do we? Nor do we want to destroy our railroads on SCI. We could block the harbor with five ships. I think in C3C units get targeted first so bombard away. Let the BABE frigates come. We can run back to The Whale Pond and maybe they will chase us and come in range of our flying h'watchas. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of BABE units to bomb so retaking SCI should not be too difficult. There are only two pikes that could turn into infantry. Yes, we will be able to reach the mountain NE of the jungle with our bombers in The Whale Pond.

 

[Paul#42]

They have no rubber hooked up yet - but I don't know when they will have it on SCI if we block BABEcolony. Does the map also show barracks (like the harbor) or is that hidden to us?

They might rush a harbor in Oka as well. That would require another 3 ships to block...
They don't have salt or Iron hooked up there so they cannot build pikes, knights or frigates there
edit: But they might have built some more frigates on their home continent... What if we face a whole fleet of those?
I guess we should have some caravels as EWS for SCI ready...
We need more ships! But we also need harbors, unis, markets...

I'd not count on taking any of those towns, in good tradition our units will find some piles of rubble...

As the landing spot I'd prefer a tile next to a town, if the jungle is still there, I'd take it (also to get our bounty of two slaves). If not I'd prefer the mountain south of Oka. We won't need time to heal our units so there's no need to stay outside their cultural borders.

 

[donsig]

They have no rubber hooked up yet - but I don't know when they will have it on SCI if we block BABEcolony...
They don't have salt or Iron hooked up there so they cannot build pikes, knights or frigates there

Well, they have no iron, salt or rubber hooked up on SCI. That doesn't mean they don't have them on their home continent. Blocking the port not only stops rubber from going home it stops resources from coming in.

I'd not count on taking any of those towns, in good tradition our units will find some piles of rubble...

Are you suggesting we burn those cities? Why? I don't have calculations to back this up but I doubt the flip risk is very high. Why waste our time rebuilding perfectly good cities and harbors?

EDIT: Ah, yes, they can abandon the towns. Perhaps we should start thinking how to approach BABE in an effort to keep these viable cities.

Landing in the jungle sounds good to me. Landing any where on SCI sounds good to me.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

if we can land, we should be ok - I don't see them sending enough frigates to cause us a problem and bombers can take care of whatever ships they bring.


From the screen shot, we have 2 vet pikes, 4 vet MW, an elite MW and 5 vet knights to contend with. I'd assume there aren't any other forces on the island, because I think they would have them out, blocking. If that is what we have when we invade, we should definitely land on the jungle and we should probably bring a settler with us - and I'm thinking that a combination of infantry, AC and artillery - and maybe a settler - would be good.

I'm thinking 4 infantry, 2 artillery, 1 settler and 5 AC - the artillery would be used on BABEColony or anywhere else that can't be reached by bombers. I am pretty sure the forces on the island wouldn't even attack 4 infantry and would likely just retreat into BABEColony, taking two turns in the case of the pikes. They might retreat into the other city, I dunno.

 

[Paul#42]

artillery - okay. Did not think about that. I had guerillas on my mind for their defensive free shot but arties do the job also. Not sure if we have th money spared to upgrade our Hwatcha's. 120g each, right?

Can't wait to see our ACs in action again. I hope they perform better than cavs in the first world war...

In case the rubber is hooked up before we attack - I'll try to pillage that source but if BABEs are aware they'll put 3-4 units there so we cannot redline all of them...
But then we can shell their empty towns at least...
Yes, I'd like to destroy the harbor. There's no better picture than a rioting town you just shelled the turn before. That gave me quite a blast last time

Next turn our frigates will shell BABEcolony. Maybe we get past that knight and can count the ships in there.
They still MUST have a decent landing force out there.
I don't think they disbanded all of their ~20 ships...
But I don't think it's on that island.

Man, I can't wait to play!!

 

[donsig]

We should save gold for science and h'watchas for emergency GA activation. What about getting a caravel or two over to SCI? They have limited units on the island and if they try to stack some on the rubber we might be able to land a couple rifles somewhere...

I still think it's worth trying to save the harbor for our own use.

 

[Paul#42]

We should save gold for science and h'watchas for emergency GA activation. What about getting a caravel or two over to SCI? They have limited units on the island and if they try to stack some on the rubber we might be able to land a couple rifles somewhere...

I don't think we should land there with a couple of units. But to fake a landing might help keeping the rubber pillagable.
Those rifles I'd rather upgrade to Infantries anyway.
That's also a better investment than upgrading Hwatcha's to artilleries.

I still think it's worth trying to save the harbor for our own use.

I'm pretty sure he'll rebuild a harbor before we will land if we destroy it next turn. I'd rather build a harbor on my own than letting them have rubber on SCI without even connecting the local resource (if our blockade is broken).
But I'm also pretty sure we won't destroy the harbor. Third hit might destroy it but our frigates' RNG is too lousy...

Facing Inf fortified in towns is not too nice - but not critical because our bombers can reach Oka and bombers eat Infantry for lunch.
If BABE should raze Oka, we simply resettle it right there and move our bombers there, too.

 

[Paul#42]

For analysis I opened the 186 save from BABE again. Because I was really surprised by our unhappy people.
At the start we had no war weariness.

We must have got it by hitting units or by destroying the harbor. Can anybody explain that to me?

I had thought we'd get unhappy by losing units, towns and having any number of units on enemy soil. But by destroying a harbor?

I'm completely at a loss.

Here's an extract from Oystein's article:

The following describes the effect for a human:
Add 1 wwp for each
- lost unit without defence value
- improvment pillage/bombed
- unit that are bombard down to 1 hp
Add 2 wwp when a human attacker is defeated
Add 2 wwp when a unit with defence value is attacked. (Even if you win)
Add 16 wwp when a size 1 city is captured 17 wwp for bigger cities.
What if your cities get bombed?
There is a bug for these penalties. For a human-AI battle, the AI gets the same penalty as the human (he gets penalty for taking human cities, but not for losing his own). For an AI-AI war both gets the penalty the first AI should have. There seems to be no problem with human-human battles.

It seems like the attacker is also charged? Strange system...

 

[AutomatedTeller]

it's having units in enemy territory, which we did by having units there. Probably any turns we had units in the culture border of BABE. I'm surprised, myself, but that's the way it is.

 

[Paul#42]

it's having units in enemy territory, which we did by having units there. Probably any turns we had units in the culture border of BABE. I'm surprised, myself, but that's the way it is.

That's what I know, but this ww level 1 we did not encounter at the beginning of the turn but only after we shelled some units (redlined one) and destroying the harbor.

The units inside their cultural border are responsible for one ww-point very turn. It seems our permanent redlinining of BABE units only delayed reaching ww level 0...

edit: I've avoided any battles and any units inside BABE's borders for at least ten turns. Our war weariness came to level 0 at least ten turns ago. By lowering war weariness every turn without active warfare by a point, we should have had some ten points to play with when I started war last turn. Make it three redlined units, one destroyed building and one turn (now two) of units in their cultural borders. How did we lose those ten points?

At least we shouldn't reach the next level just because BABE's frigates sink our vessel on the Westside...

 

[Paul#42]

BABE placed three units (=12 hp) on the rubber - swamp is cleared so the road will show up next turn
No chance to pillage that this time.

The three units also make it a bad place to land, I'll prefer the mountain S of Oka now. That makes The Marina a good starting point for our transports. 4 caravels will be waiting on the shallows to do the relais.

Looks like our Outfield in The Marina prepares to make a play at home. Hit the cut-off!

We need rubber on #194 or #195.
Diplo-mates, faites votre jeux!

 

[AutomatedTeller]

I'm fine with them putting more units there - the more there, the fewer elsewhere, where we WILL hit.

I'd like to set up our forces in such a way that it doesn't look all that much like we are setting up for an attack, if we can - make it look like we are setting up a screen, until we move the caravels into position a turn earlier. And keep our destroyer/cruiser hidden!! unless those are bomber prebuilds?

 

[Paul#42]

I'd like to set up our forces in such a way that it doesn't look all that much like we are setting up for an attack, if we can - make it look like we are setting up a screen, until we move the caravels into position a turn earlier.

That's what I plan.
Still I might try to redline those three units, I don't think Whomp will judge that attempt to pillage the rubber as a presign of an attack

And keep our destroyer/cruiser hidden!! unless those are bomber prebuilds?

No, those are serious builds. The Ways is not on bomber duty and The Admirality starts bomber prebuild in #194 (to switch in #195, complete in #196).
(I'll have to re-calculate these builds...)