The West Tower

[slaze]

Mavs - What if we load our crossbows currently being built on the mainland and use them to capture a weak Q city?

So far the general flow of this is towards the mainland. But overall, Mavs is desperately thin just about everywhere. The original island has 2 units (AP city is empty) and the mainland isn't much to speak of either. Similar to what Snaaty has said earlier, I am in agreement that when the time comes we may be using the Mav civ very recklessly, abandoning swaths of land to concentrate a force to be put to some use if need be. earlier Snaaty had mentioned keeping the home island while abandoning the mainland. i'd say that both are hard to defend, so the jury's still out with exactly what we do there. But in terms of the current turn, Mavs still has some work to do before it can make an assualt on a Q city (10-15 turns minimun). A quick turn of events against us and we may not even be able to get the chance

Merlot - The two settler positions worry be a bit because I fear we may be limiting the growth ability of the barb city (which we plan to capture) and Circus. .

If you'll notice, the northern city forgoes the clams along the amazon coast; they won't be usable by any city if we settle there. My thinking here is purely defensive. And the overlap is very intentional. With farms and mines everywhere the cows won't be the only growth tiles, and I'll swap tiles between them like crazy. I doubt we'll ever get these above 4-6 pop we'll need to whip these so much.

But it still a turn or two before these get settled.

 

[Snaaty]

i´m not too happy with the wardeclarations from mav. side. so far, nobody has bothered to plunder our seafood there which would be really easy with a combo trireme/caravel and would cripple our whipping power drastically...

capturing the barb. city is a good plan. i wanted to propose that myself. it controlls more or less the whole peninsula.

concerning the 2 settlers:
city placement is nice. decent food, and on hills. normally settling 1 off the coast is a little but in this special case (and also beeing on hills) its best we can do. packing cities close to each other btw. is always best you can do (overlap is great in general, cause you can share tiles and can already improve some tiles before settling said city)

-> the cental city the enemies settled:
they settled this crappy city there so merlot cant settle any city in the centre of the map and get acess to the other side of the map via this city (tradeoutes to merlot´s ele-city)

if they would have settled it differently, we would have been able to settle a city close by, connecting merlot-mav seas via a fort

something i think will be important soon:
- getting the second eles hooked up for mavs. in case the others get plundered via a spy.
- roading towards the center of the map in the mavs. land
- getting 3 food tiles improved for each city on the central peninsula (optimal whipping point). even farms on green stuff will do here

where are the workers from team mav.? and how many do we have? do we still need a worker on the home island of mav.?

defending the mav. home island:
to provide a more or less OK defence, we should get
- walls up in all 3 cities
- put 2 cbs in each city with CG 2, fully fortified
- place 2-4 cbs more in the center of the island, so we can move them in any city if needed.

to capture a city they would then need at least 2 ships full of berserkers and they would have to hit by surprise. off course this is doable, but that at least would drain quite some ressources for them they will need for defence on the central peninsula and for attacking the merlot island.

 

[SunTzuWarrior]

I'm okay with the settler positions, you're right, the defense bonuses are great.

I also agree we should take the barb city.

I like Snaaty's defense plan on the mainland. I would build walls after each city has atleast 1 cb, then complete the building of my army.

 

[SunTzuWarrior]

I almost feel like our judgement day is here now that the alliance has Astro. Nevertheless, the alliance will have to coordinate their attack to take Merlot on land, our armies are strong enough to withstand an attack from one team only.

If we get a chance in Merlot, we could build some Trireme's and double fortify our most strategic seafood plots. This would give us a key defensive bonus and a possible chance to sink a rival ship with our 2nd ship.

 

[slaze]

naahhh. In multiplayer experience counts. We don't want to send them free treemes.

Our sole existence hinges on the cdz "_____ for astro" trade but it ain't happening. Everything from this point forward is based in making things as hard as possible for the remaining teams. Feudalism is of high priority, etc....

As far as seafood, the rules are thus, caravels cannot blockcade, but s long as war is declared they can occupy a seafood tile to deny it from the enemy. Q is not doing this. Q is...... well making money. they have ~1000 gold, up +50 each turn. Why? i cannot say. I'll just check next turn's power to see if they made an "astro" move and do what i can.

The trick is the Amazon trick. Did they upgrade and fill galleys by their city and is circus dead next turn?

I think no (they'd have to kill out trirem on the way). The reality is we have the alloted turns left to absorp galleon attacks but CONCENTRATION OF FORCE is severely limited.

 

[Snaaty]

good thing there is no seafood on our main islands

concerning the mav. cities:

- i would whip them all except the capital (including the 2 others on the starting island)
- try to keep a small passage from capital to mainland open
- the other cities whip, whip, whip. i wouldnt bother defending them too hard. 2 units, and if an enemy lands nearby with a bigger army, run and unit the units to our main stack (which we hopefully will be able to get with the limited time that remains)

-> general focus on the basic plan in getting as many units from mav. to merlot side. dont bother defending the mainland mav. cities. try to keep the road to the center open as long as you can. pool units in elephant city. once most cities are burned down or taken, advance towards the center and try to unit units with merlot.

-> in my opinion, not much point in getting lbs, cbs do fine. most damage we can do hitting enemy stacks going for us in the open. holing in in cities isnt really the best plan i think. maybe optics for better naval vision, so we can see better when ships come for us?

 

[SunTzuWarrior]

For defense I like lbs with catapults to damage stacks.

I like the idea of creating a stack that could escape to Merlot but at the same time I don't want to simply give Mav up without some fight. We shouldn't let them simply take our cities, make them earn it as much as possible.

 

[Caledorn]

I'm curious.

At the present moment we're awaiting a reply from CDZ on a very friendly and honourable missive from the King. How long do we want to wait for a response before we consider it a "dead end"?

And my follow up question then is: Is using threats a feasible next move towards one of the teams? Either CDZ or Amazons. CDZ would, sadly, be the most logical team to approach with threats, since we know their military is a good bit weaker than the Amazon military... With threats I mean something along the lines of "We see that we're going to lose, but if this is the case, then we're going to make sure you guys don't win either by doing as much damage as possible to you guys before we are eliminated."

Obviously, by doing so, we are totally dooming ourselves, because we'd need to move a lot of military to the southern part of the continent - thereby making ourselves vulnerable to attack from the Amazons on the northern part. But the question is: at what point is it inevitable anyways, how long we want to prolong the inevitable, and how we want to do it..

 

[Snaaty]

my guess is the following:

the 4 allies have a contract along the following lines:

the alliance lasts untill both, mav. and merlot are dead. 2 teams get the mav. land, 2 teams get the merlot land. the teams going for mav. have to do the fighting there, the 2 teams going for merlot have to do the fighting there (seems logic, doesnt it?) untill this is achived, they will happily trade techs and work together.

but imagin the following scenario:

we manage to get a decent sized army from mav. to merlot, by whipping everything down into oblivion there (say, 20 units). then we give up all cities there, leaving them exposed without city defenders at pop 1 (not that we have any choice, as soon as the army marches, we are dead there).

then we pool units with merlot and juging from the cities we are founding as merlot, we can hold out quite a bit there and with enough units from mav. we can even really hurt 1 of the enemies there.

-> 2 teams of the alliance grow superstrong and dont face any resistance. the other 2 will soon find out that they cant win the game like this

-> continuing the alliance for the 2 weak teams only means suicide on the long run. if they really are playing to win the game, they should react on that somehow...

-> this is the only chance i see for us to break the alliance. mav. has to be sacrificed for merlot to survive and we have to get as many units from mav. to merlot. no idea if it will work, but it´s the only straw i see right now we could grip...

 

[whb]

Some random mad thoughts:

I'm beginning to wonder if we don't actually need to do anything. Since the workboat, however long ago, we are the only ones to have done any attacking.

There are a few effects that could be protecting us:
1) A perpetual "if we wait a few more turns we'll have an even bigger advantage, so we should just wait a bit longer" trap. ("let's just wait for Maces" followed by "let's just wait for Knights" followed by "let's just wait for Riflemen"...)
2) Teams not wanting to send their militaries out to war with us, lest their neighbours opportunistically backstab them
3) Teams not wanting to spend on military and fall behind their allies (competitors) on development
4) Although they have a tech alliance they might not have a military one, and might actually want our help attacking their neighbours when they are ready (but don't want to talk about it early lest the other teams get wind of it).

Or they could just have been waiting for Astro, but we should be able to spot that by whether there are any sudden spikes in troop numbers.

 

[SunTzuWarrior]

Some random mad thoughts:

I'm beginning to wonder if we don't actually need to do anything. Since the workboat, however long ago, we are the only ones to have done any attacking.

There are a few effects that could be protecting us:
1) A perpetual "if we wait a few more turns we'll have an even bigger advantage, so we should just wait a bit longer" trap. ("let's just wait for Maces" followed by "let's just wait for Knights" followed by "let's just wait for Riflemen"...)
2) Teams not wanting to send their militaries out to war with us, lest their neighbours opportunistically backstab them
3) Teams not wanting to spend on military and fall behind their allies (competitors) on development
4) Although they have a tech alliance they might not have a military one, and might actually want our help attacking their neighbours when they are ready (but don't want to talk about it early lest the other teams get wind of it).

Or they could just have been waiting for Astro, but we should be able to spot that by whether there are any sudden spikes in troop numbers.

You bring up an interesting idea, one that may very well be true. If they were waiting on a certain tech, I would think it had to be Astro, too many good players to just let the status quo go past Astro. If we dont start seeing a massive spike in troop #'s, there is certainly something up.

I think we've heard enough to know that the alliance is already a bit fragile but too wary of breaking the certain alignment. If we dont see the spike soon, our strategy and our chances may change big time.

 

[slaze]

There are a few effects that could be protecting us:.

I think your train of thought is solid, especially regarding sirius / Q but disagree somewhat with amazon. Amazon has been whipping regularly for like 9 turns now.

But yeah, the others are at mav army status, I guess we'll see if that changes

 

[slaze]

Ahhh....



So I'm going through the turn and i find this. I'll get to the turn in 8 hours or so but our troop situation is the highlighted xbow and the archer up top, 2xbow +_2axe 4S of the amazon stack and another 3xbow 1SW from there. And then another axe (shown) 2 holkans in circus and 2 more archers, one wandering up the amazon cove and another parked on a hill W of circus. Nothing really coming from the mainland immediately except a spy and then we have 3 troops, 1 xbow 1 axe 1 holkan, in the CDZ horse city with a galley that can get 2 of them to arrive and leave circus next turn.

I'm think of putting the highlighted xbow and the archer (promoted to xbow) in sangria and most everything else in turnpike. Although I really wouldn't mind attacking that stack even on hills with the like 7 xbows we may be able to put together. Thoughts much appreciated.

 

[Ronnie1]

Do you think they may head to the barb city first to grab as a foothold?

I they go straight east there is no saving that city IMO.

 

[SunTzuWarrior]

I agree with moving the xbow & Archer into city immediately and using the rest of our stack to fortify Turnpike.

In Sangre I would go ahead and change from granary.

 

[Aivoturso]

I agree with Ronnie1 that if the Amzons would move to E or SE, we'd lose at least one of our cities. I'd prefer not losing Turnpike since it is in much better position for defending The Circus.

My suggestion for this turn would therefore be moving the stack near Vandal NE this turn. This gives us the most degrees of freedom for next turn. If the Amazon stack moves E, SE or S, we could move to defend Turnpike. If Amazon stack moves away from sight (likely to capture Vandal) the stack could be moved to W. If Amazons would then capture Vandal, we could immediately attack the weakened stack from the other side of the town.

BTW, it is also possible that the stack is still waiting for reinforcements. They probably didn't land every troop on the stack this turn anyway.

 

[slaze]

I did the moves but the turn still needs to roll over.

Wounded xbow + archer in sangre, and everthing else move NE. Once they show their next move we'll hach a much better idea of what's going on here. I sorta doubt that the thing got landed all at once, i'm thinking this is something inplace to pounce on Vandal as soon as it gets taken; a trap i suppose. But that kind worries me that this will get built up some more. right now, once the initial 2mace+xbow are dealt with, it's a stack that could be opened up on. That said, I worry their eager to throw some more xbow/mace on top of it before it gets moving - much harder to deal with then.

We'll have to see what they do. If they run for sangre we can only sacrifice the 2 units but I think Turnpike is secure. Curiously the city stack we're more familiar with (the maces & xbows from recent screens) are more or less still in the city (this turn: 5 units in city, 2-3 units possibly 2 tiles up their coast).

 

[Ronnie1]

If they run for sangre we can only sacrifice the 2 units but I think Turnpike is secure.

You could pull those 2 units back and not put up any resistance in Sangre at all as an option.

 

[slaze]

You could pull those 2 units back and not put up any resistance in Sangre at all as an option.

noted. Where i'm gonna miss those units is if i'm trying to mount some kind of attack. As far no resistance in sangre, i kinda like the resistance - they should get a good kill ratio when they die. But yeah, If that stack fakes us out and bypasses those two I'll sure wish I had them on the attack further down

 

[Ronnie1]

Do we have any Horse Archers? Being able to flank that stack may work out in the long run.