Turn Discussion Thread

[TheHumanHydra]

I had a dream about this game last night. IT'S HAUNTING ME.

Our turn is up again. If we decide to attack, I think we should go on chat together to play the turn. Is there a time you're free today?

With regard to attacking this turn or not, the most prudent thing to do now is maneuver around and cut their road connection like I suggested, then build up enough axes (7+) that we feel confident about taking out all three of theirs in one go. However, no one on this team is counting on us to do the prudent thing - with the exception of LordParkin's post the other day, there is no one else on this team. We can risk it. The following words from the very first multiplayer game report I ever read have stuck with me (this is Sullla speaking about building multiple workers first):

"If everything didn't work as planned, and another team happened to start nearby and rush us immediately, the game would be lost before it ever really began. It was a gambit, one we were fine with taking. We had no desire to spend months playing this game as an also-ran. Better to risk for big gain right at the start."

I am fine with whichever course we take. Maneuvering around is by far the safer; it will take us probably another ten turns to take the city if we do so (time to build two or three axes and bring them up). Attacking now is by far the riskier; perhaps we want to take that risk. What do you think?

[HitAnyKey]

I'm actually getting ready to log on in a few to play the turn, or at least start playing the turn. I'm going to go grab my lunch stuffs, and start up the game. So within 15 minutes or so I should have the game up.

I also agree that this whole thing right now is very risky. But I think it's worth the risk...plus will be more fun, even if we fail and that causes our demise.

Right now our biggest issue is that they'll have two cities up north churning out axes, and we would only have one. Though if we decided to take the longer route by cutting the road and waiting, we would have also use both our cities for axes. And that would probably lose us the great lighthouse.

[HitAnyKey]

I have not ended turn, as we have a couple things to discuss...

But first up....BIG SUCCESS for us!!



The first axe at ~35% odds took one of their axes down to 1.5 health (or something like that) before he died. A valiant death for our first city attacker.
But then our second axe (at the same odds) WON!!! He killed their axe!!!
And then our next two axes killed quechua's with relative ease. The one with promos available, I didn't promote until after the battle...and that allowed me to give him both CR1 & CR2 this turn, healing him back to almost full.
Next turn, we should be able to kill most of the rest of their units (though we might lose another axe to the one they have incoming if the RNG doesn't like us)...but we should be ok.

Now for the decisions. I moved the warrior onto the road, but never considered the fact that they would have been able to move their spear another tile after killing our warrior last turn. So my thinking that the spear would be out of range is wrong. So my suggestion is that I we just destroy that warrior now. Otherwise, the spear will be able to kill it easily, on his way to the city, and just get more experience. It won't even delay him (other than maybe needing to heal slightly).


Next up, we need to at least decide what we want to do with the two workers who have returned Animal Farm last turn. Do we want them to go chop a forest somewhere? Either at AF or over at Opportunity?
Or maybe have one of them go somewhere to chop, and the other head back NE partially to get ready to road and do more stuff around Tortuga once we hopefully take it soon?


The last screenshot for now is just to show what's going on with the scout. I suppose his best route for next turn is to go along the shore to get to the east side of Troll territory.


In any case, the most important things that we need to discuss right this moment so I can end the turn are:
1. Do I destroy that warrior so that they don't get experience from killing it with their spear?
2. What do we do with the workers? I'll think about those as well right now, but I wanted to post this so you can start thinking as soon as you see this.

[TheHumanHydra]

Excellent news! I'll have more thoughts on the battle later. As for those pressing choices:

1. I say no, make them attack it. Axes beat spears, and since their spear is damaged, we have a greater than one-in-three chance to cut their road connection with that warrior. Risk for reward, I say.
2. Chop one of the peripheral forests at Animal Farm (if we chop the one on the deer, it would permanently lower the tile yield, right? I don't think we want that), then mosy on over and chop at Opportunity?

[HitAnyKey]

Do you have a minute to hop onto chat? If so, bring it up.

Anyway, yeah, I suppose may as well leave the warrior (it's a warrior, not a spear). There's always the rare chance the warrior could kill the spear.
EDIT: Just looked...combat odds of us attacking the spear (and they haven't promoted it yet) is 3.5%. Which means they'll have at least 96.5% odds to kill our warrior.

As for the workers, as I thought about it I agree with sending one of them over to help chop the forests of Opportunity. I'll do that now.
The other worker, I realized I probably pulled back too quickly from Tortuga to get them back in our borders and not cost us money. I think I should send one back there now to go build a road on the tile I have all the units on. That way as soon as we take the city, it will be connected.

[TheHumanHydra]

Sorry, I keep hopping in and out as I do other things. I know our unit is a warrior, silly! Sorry if my writing was unclear. I'm confused about the odds ... shouldn't they be <4-2, or <2-1, for them, or >1/3 for us?

And, er, that wasn't exactly what I was suggesting with the workers, but it could work too. It's just that if we chop one of the outlying forests at Animal Farm, we get more axes sooner. MOAR AXES!

Also, this:

"I also agree that this whole thing right now is very risky. But I think it's worth the risk...plus will be more fun, even if we fail and that causes our demise."

... is exactly what I was thinking. Let's hope it pays off!

[HitAnyKey]

Forgot to post these yesterday. When I logged in the second time, I decided to take some additional screenshots of some of the combat details. This is for the lurkers and such. I only took screenshots of the battles vs the Pirate axes. The ones vs the quechua's were pretty obvious easy wins.

It was very nice to see Canis Latrans kill the axe. I about jumped up and down with glee.
Then Canis Aureus (our axe with no XP) killed the first quechua without taking a single point of damage. Then Canis Lupus took quite a bit of damage before it killed the quechua, but since it then had enough for two promos, I was able to heal him to 4.1/5 which will be of great help next turn.

And just because I took them, I figured I would also post the screenshots of our demographics after the battle but before I ended the turn, and then what they look like after the turn was ended (and Animal Farm made the next axe):

[TheHumanHydra]

So, according to the tech thread, the Pirates let their turn roll over ... without hitting our warrior with their spear. This means we can cut their road connection next turn, denying copper to Tortuga and their (possible) new city and horses (if they've planted said city) to their core.

I hope we can take Tortuga within the next couple turns. After that, we may or may not want to pause to heal; it may be possible to race our forces north-west to knock out their (as-yet undefended) capital.

I guess it's an all-out attack this coming turn. We have to remember we have a promotion sitting unused on one of our damaged axes we can use to heal him before he goes in.

[TheHumanHydra]

Well, it seems we're up again after that weird spat of technical difficulties ... are you able to log on okay, HitAnyKey? Would you like to chat out the battle together or just go ahead and play it out?

[HitAnyKey]

Had my computer running some scans and defrags because it's been giving me some difficulties so only just noticed it's our turn. I wasn't able to log in earlier, but it's because Civ was giving me some sort of error and actually crashing on me when I would try to log in. I'll try again as soon as this defrag finishes, or I'll boot up my work laptop with the external hard drive and log in from there. If you are going to be around for the next hour or so, just keep yourself signed into the gmail chat and I'll let you know what's going on while I do it.