The War Thread

Just did a bunch of testing... I took a bunch of screens for verification, but I didnt go through putting them on photobucket and all that... If you guys really want to see them I can post them.:)

So the first thing I found was no big suprise. If we land a stack of 20 Rifles and 10 Cannons, they will wipe us out in 2 turns. The first runs they will hit us with all their cats and as many Muskets and Maces as they can, which will kill most of our units and leave the rest severely wounded. If we dont retreat, the remaining units will die the nest turn.

The second thing I found out was also no big suprise. 20 Rifles and 10 Cannons is nowhere near enough to defeat what they have on MHI. We could do some serious damage, but in the end, our troops will be too wounded to finish the job, and we will have to retreat or be destroyed... This means we are locked in to the STRIKE plan. We absolutely wont have enough troops to take MHI with brute force, or by landing half our army to die to sacrifice to Catapults, followed by the other half to try to take the island.

The third thing was actually a surprise... and a bit of a disapointment. 2 Catapults are usually enough to wound a Rifle to the point where a Musket can kill it... about 50% of the time. The rest of the time, the Rifle will kill 3 and sometimes even 4 Cats before it drops below 9 strength, but usually the first catapult drops the Rifle to 12 str and the secong drops it to 7 str:(.

But that is irrelevant, because one on one, there is no collateral damage at all, so Merlot wouldnt use it cats 1 on 1. Muskets, as I suspected are better Rifle killers. Muskets wound Rifles severely at a solid 2 to 1 exchange. Sacrificing 1 musket will drop a Rifle to 1 str or less, making it easy to kill with a second unit. So if we land 6 Rifles we will kill 6 Muskets and thats all. So we have to wait for the STRIKE to kill off half their army or our invasion will fail. After that we can just land our whole stack and take the punishment from the Catapults.
 
The second thing I got to see was how a STRIKE works in the game... The first turn, there is no unit loss, its like a warning turn I guess. The second turn 1 unit is lost. Third turn 2 units are lost, then 4, then 8 and so on. It seems that the amount of units you lose doubles every turn the STRIKE lasts. So to get Merlot to lose the 50 units we are hoping for, we will need to keep them in Despotism for 6 turns. That means we will have to put them back in Despotism 1 more time. Otherwise they will only lose a couple of units... which would suck:sad: and be a terrible waste of all our efforts.

The side effect is that settles our HR versus Representation dilemna... we cant do either, at least not right now. We have to stay in Despotism to make sure that Merlot cant switch out of it and foil our plans to force them to delete units. Of course it is possible that slaze dosent know how a STRIKE works, and he will just delete a bunch of units right away to avoid the risk that he loses a bunch of Catapults randomly... but we cant take that chance. If he knows how a STRIKE works, he will try to ride it out until he can switch back into HR.

We can switch our Govenrment civic with our next GA.
 
I have completed my tests... With 3 triple-first-strike promoted Machine Guns, our stack is almost invincible against Merlot.

I tested our stack of 20 Rifles 10 Cannon and 3 Machine Guns all promoted to F.Strike 3, against a Merlot stack of 20 Cats, 20, Maces and 20 Muskets. Cats attack first and are completely wiped out, doing very little damage to the Machine Guns, and light collateral damage to the stack. Next Maces attack, because they have the best chance against the Machine guns (no Gunpowder unit penalty. Maces almost completely wiped out, only 2 survive. Last Muskets attack. End result is in our stack of 30 we only lose 1 Cannon, 4 Rifles and NO Machine guns are lost. Plus many Rifles are still strong enough to attack weaker units like LBows and Crossbows.

I think we must consider this as our attack plan whether STRIKE works or not.
 
Yeah, Machine guns rules :)

I saw and move couple of high experience xbows to be upgraded to MG. Also, lately I am looking the map and I think we can put another use to our espionage - we can put 2 spies under the catapults stack in the middle, destroy the road on the turn we land and they are basically immobilized. If we put two other spies on the diagonal, which leads to our invading site, they are immobilized once again on the next turn.

Then we can finally switch off from despotism. The strike was great strategy. Too sad it did not worked to its full.
 
Cant they jeust rebuild the road under the Cats and move them that same turn? If the workers happen to be on the same tile as Catapults, this is what they will do...

However... If we pillage a far away corn the turn before we invade perhaps they send the workers to fix it and then the plan works perfectly, because workers will lose all their movement trying to move back to the hill where the Cats are.:)

I guess we did stop their tech at least which was priceless. We also got knowledge on how to best put our espionage to use against the other teams, with less mistakes... This knowledge is also priceless.;)
 
Sure it is priceless - the SSS (SommersStrikeStrategy) is totally your invention - I never saw something like this :)

I remember what SilentConfusion told me about you when I was asking him for details: "Sommerswerd is highly intelligent, as most pitbossers are, but he can hurt you in ways you have even not think about them" :)
 
Machine guns..... foolish we had not considered this earlier. If this does work as well as you are saying, why keep expending resources on getting them on strike when we stand to gain a ton of xp from their attacking units?
 
I was trying to think through Merlot's best option to attack a stack with machine guns. I think their best tactic will be to hit with maces 1st until the machine guns are weaker than the rifles. Then hit with cataputls, followed by the rest of the maces + muskets. With 1st strikes machine guns will often no damage at all from cataputls, hence the thought of using maces 1st. Might make sense to test out this and a few other orders of attack just to make sure we are not overlooking any effective counters. And to be on the safe side, might I suggest 4 machine guns rather than 3 just to be copiously safe.

Also I assume we have F.Strike.3 xbows available to upgrade right? Because if we are instead using C3 xbows the lack of 1st strikes will very much impact the effectiveness of our machine guns as they will have increased odds of taking damage in each round of combat.
 
Hmm.. not bad points, but I guess we will be lost few units with Merlots too... Any word from CDZ?
Still no word from CDZ about joining forces against a new enemy. I think maybe they are just secure in their NAP with us, and are not interested in attacking anyone else. They have been gaining in score steadily, so maybe they are focusing on catching up, rather than fighing.

Q asked us to declare war on Sirius in-game. I did not, as it would violate our treaty. However, as 2metra pointed out we might be able to say that their failure to stay in the ETTT constitures a violation of the SAP... especially since we told them in advance that we considered it that.

We cant save them. If they have no units in their cities Sirius will capture their home Island in 5 turns and probably defeat them utterly in 10 turns.

Our best bet now is to finish off Merlot while we know Sirius is distracted with Q, and hope that Q will see that they must draft and slave like madmen in order to survive. If they do this, especially slaving lots of MGs... they may be able to bog down Sirius deep in Q territory.
 
Our best bet now is to finish off Merlot while we know Sirius is distracted with Q, and hope that Q will see that they must draft and slave like madmen in order to survive. If they do this, especially slaving lots of MGs... they may be able to bog down Sirius deep in Q territory.
Should we at least tell them (him) what we are going to do, so Q dont just decide it is not worth and lost the will to fight? I think we must encourage them somehow and even give them advices - slave MGs, switch to nationalism to draft, etc...
 
Should we at least tell them (him) what we are going to do, so Q dont just decide it is not worth and lost the will to fight? I think we must encourage them somehow and even give them advices - slave MGs, switch to nationalism to draft, etc...
This is good thinking. We dont want Q to go down easily. At a minimum, we want them to last long enough so we can get some of their land... but what would be even better is they fight Sirius into some kind of stalemate that traps Sirius army on an Island.

So I will tell Q that we cant DoW Sirius because we have a NAP with them until 1500 AD. After that we will be able to help them. Meanwhile they must draft and slave MGs amd Cannon. This way we make no commitments.
 
I only wonder what the heck is going on with CDZ? Why those guys are so low on the powergraph? And why they dont say anything about attacking MHI? Well, they may be just follow us or pretend to be stupid and land just after us to save their armies from the initial onslaught (something like Q and Sirius vs Mavs?!?).

But most worrying for me is that they dont say anything about Sirius DoWed Q! Why they are so calm with so small army? Why they just continue to tech? Are they sold us to get the second place? If they just dont give us the Combustion, but give it to Sirius, and we are doomed - they will have destroyers + a lot of money, while we will be isolated and overwhelmed.

I hope this is just a paranoia, but it sounds scary real.
 
Machine guns..... foolish we had not considered this earlier. If this does work as well as you are saying, why keep expending resources on getting them on strike when we stand to gain a ton of xp from their attacking units?
We dont spend a bunch of resources on espy. We have imbedded espy of like 70-100:espionage: per turn without running any spies or running the espy slider. We have espy points on Merlot, we might as well use them before Merlot dies. And the reason we are hoping for a strike is to prevent us from losing units. If they delete all their lbows, that saves us the worry that a silly Lbow kills our 3FS MG just because it is wounded down to 3.0 str. The less units they have the more chance that we get a bunch of free exp with little or no casualties.
Should we at least tell them (him) what we are going to do, so Q dont just decide it is not worth and lost the will to fight? I think we must encourage them somehow and even give them advices - slave MGs, switch to nationalism to draft, etc...
I sent cav scout a msg... no reply yet, but I told him we cant DoW Sirius and he should draft and Slave... We will see what he does:dunno:
I only wonder what the heck is going on with CDZ? Why those guys are so low on the powergraph? And why they dont say anything about attacking MHI? Well, they may be just follow us or pretend to be stupid and land just after us to save their armies from the initial onslaught (something like Q and Sirius vs Mavs?!?).

But most worrying for me is that they dont say anything about Sirius DoWed Q! Why they are so calm with so small army? Why they just continue to tech? Are they sold us to get the second place? If they just dont give us the Combustion, but give it to Sirius, and we are doomed - they will have destroyers + a lot of money, while we will be isolated and overwhelmed.

I hope this is just a paranoia, but it sounds scary real.
I think CDZ is just not really caring about this game anymore. In fact, I dont think we should give them any cities unless they ask for them or at least respond to our numerous mails to them.
 
I think CDZ is just not really caring about this game anymore.
I dont know if this is the case. I registered at their forum recently for one pitboss they are planing to start and see what BCLG100 just wrote to me:

CDZ is far more casual and relaxed than you may be used to with cfc. However, unlike cfc, we actually finish the game.

Which is non-sense, as especially BCLG100 was one of the players, who stopped playing in the MTDG2 warm-up pitboss when our alliance lost hope we can defeat Lord Parkin's alliance.
 
When do we hit the beaches? And I would agree that with CDZ being so unresponsive we should wait for them to ask for cities before gifting.
 
We are landing in 2 turns - all our military units are in position and our spies should be under the central stack till then.

If the strike start to hit them, we can postpone by 2-3 turns the landing - why we would hurry too much and give them opportunity to actually lose their units in battle rather than just disband them miserably.
 
We are landing in 2 turns - all our military units are in position and our spies should be under the central stack till then.

If the strike start to hit them, we can postpone by 2-3 turns the landing - why we would hurry too much and give them opportunity to actually lose their units in battle rather than just disband them miserably.
Merlot tried to switch back to HR but our Spy thwarted that :lol:. They are in Anarchy now, but they will be back in Despotism next turn, and then they will go on STRIKE the turn after.

And Yes all the boats are almost full. 3FS Machine Guns are loaded up which is the most important part. I moved our boats back into our territory to save money, but they can land in Merlot territory in 1 turn. We have 3 spies in The Castle who can move to their locations (hill and corn next turn, so I would say we are as ready as we are ever going to be.

General, where are you going to land? All together or seperate stacks?
 
I think we land all together on a hill somewhere.

Also are we going to be able to pick up additional units to reinforce the stack with a second landing? I would think we have the units to do so.
 
General, where are you going to land? All together or seperate stacks?
I am strongly leaning to landing together.
I think we land all together on a hill somewhere.
The same here. I also think about possible landing NW of The Castle, where Merlots cant hit us with their siege even if we dont destroy their road. With the destroyed road, we will have 2 turns before we are hit by their siege. This will allow us to take the other ~20 units to land with our initial 30, so it will be more secure for them.
Also are we going to be able to pick up additional units to reinforce the stack with a second landing?
Yes, we have like 20 units for which we dont have galleons for the first landing.
 
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