Speaker's super top secret thread for the purposes of world domination; Neener Neener

[Speaker]

More than the 5 knights/4 rifles Sullla mentioned? (I'm assuming the fast workers under guard were doing a combat road to bring more)

That was the entire "invasion" force.

[Sullla]

OK, full update time. (I should probably be working instead of typing this, but the game is just too interesting right now.)

As Speaker said, Thoth tried this strange mini-invasion with 4 knights and 5 rifles. We really don't know why he thought he would be able to achieve anything with this, since our team is a full era ahead in tech. Here's where they were at the start of Turn 180:



The knights were sitting next to Headbutt Pulv, a city that they had 0% chance to capture with the rifle and machine gun defenders. The rifles were hanging out on that hill next to the city. At this point all of those units were already dead - they couldn't escape back to their territory without our team railroading up to the border and killing them. Instead, the stacks further split up, with some of the rifles moving next to Headbutt Pulv, and others moving to the forested tile indicated. We ended up with 2 rifles/3 knights next to the city, and 2 rifles/1 knight on the forested tile. (How could the rifles move there? One was Guerilla II and the other was Woodsman II. Forested hill gave double movement to both.)

Of course, none of this mattered much because we have railroads for near-infinite defensive mobility. Note the big stack of infantry, rifles, and cavs next to Wish. Speaker sent over some of his units and saved my behind:



The infantry went first to clear out the top rifle defenders, and then it was a romp from there, forest defense or not. We were a bit on the fortunate side, losing only a single unit in the mopup of Thoth's ministacks. Killed 8 units and lost 1 cavalry, I believe. We had odds on every battle, but did win a couple of 70% battles, so the dice were being kind. Regardless though, the attack didn't come even close to succeeding. Not quite sure what Thoth was thinking here. It's basically impossible to invade a competent player who's a full tech level ahead, and railroad tech makes it even more impossible.

More importantly, Dave and I have been skirmishing over in that western sea, and Dave has mostly been winning the engagement. Here's where things stood two turns ago, on T180:



So for the last five turns or so, I stopped my shipbuilding production to build factories and power plants instead. Dave did not stop his own production, and he's been drowning me in a sea of frigates. I killed 5 frigates earlier for the loss of some of my own, and Dave added about another 15 or so. Mass quantities of frigates! I honestly was not expecting him to build so many of them. To make matters worse, my ironclads had been completely useless, since Dave just danced around them endlessly with his superior movement. Dave's frigates are also superior in the 1 vs 1 matchups, because he can pop into Theocracy as a Spiritual civ and get double promotions on all of them, while I can't do the same thing without burning a turn of Anarchy. (Besides, I actually prefer Organized Religion right now for factory construction.)

The net result was Dave swamping me with more frigates than I could stop, and double-promoted ones to my single-promoted units. This has been a bad combo... After dueling over the islands for a bunch of turns, Dave finally had the mass frigate numbers to slip past me, in the picture above. This was obviously very bad, with Dave getting past the cities I didn't care about (the islands) and over to the ones that matter, my real coastal cities.

On T180, Speaker and I decided to split my stack of ironclads and frigates as you see above. That weakened the stack considerably, putting 2 ironclads and 2 frigates on the tiles seen above. We did this to block movement to the northeast, to my #1 most important coastal city of Crescendo (the Heroic Epic city, building an aqueduct above). Secondly, we were hoping to bait out a fight from Dave by splitting the stack.

He responded this way on his half of the turn:



Oh no! Dave made a very nice move, heading further south and pillaging all my seafood resources at Absolute Zero. He also coastal blockaded, denying a massive stretch of tiles and sending my coastal cities into huge starvation deficits. In the background, more ironclads double-promoted to movement 3 and more frigates continued to move forward. I am really, really boned at this point in time.

Speaker and I thought this over, and ultimately kept my naval units split, placing them on the marked X tiles above. We had two rough goals here. First of all, we again wanted to deny movement to the northeast and Crescendo, where a coastal blockade would be devastating. (Crescendo is my only coastal city with factory + coal plant finished, and can build 1 destroyer/turn with the Heroic Epic. I cannot afford to lose control over there.) Secondly, we thought that if Dave moved his stack further east, we could pin them against the coast and deny them the ability to retreat. Finally, we still were hoping to bait out a fight from Dave. My ironclads had been 100% useless so far, and the opportunity to trade ironclads for some frigates, with the defensive bonus, was very attractive.

I personally thought that Dave would continue to dance around my ships and continue blockading. Instead, he got aggressive and made a mistake:



Dave went for the fight. My ironclads had one promotion (Combat I), giving them a strength of 14.4 with the 10% coastal defense bonus. We checked the odds on his Combat I and Combat II frigates, and they were 9% and 5% respectively. In other words, he could kill one of those stacks, but only by suffering heavy losses in the process, and that's exactly what happened. In the subsequent trade, Dave lost 6 frigates to kill 2 ironclads and 2 frigates. One ironclad was particularly heroic, killing 3 separate French frigates before falling. Since my ironclads had been 100% totally useless before this battle, we were extremely happy with this result.

So Dave went from having 11 frigates in the waters near me to having 5 frigates in the waters nearby, several of them heavily damaged. He moved up a frigate and an ironclad to cover them, so his stack currently has 6 frigates + 1 ironclad. Odds not nearly good enough to attack them, but I doubt Dave is willing to attack my own remaining stack of 2 ironclads + 2 frigates, especially because his one ironclad is promoted with extra movement, and would get very poor odds against my Combat I ironclad (12 against 14.4, would be roughly 30%).

Overall, this was a fantastic turn for me at sea. Dave would have been much better off continuing to dance out of reach of my ships and blockading. If there's one mistake Dave's made with his otherwise excellent play, it's that he tends to be a bit too aggressive. Over and over again he's attacked at low odds in this game. My ironclads were literally only useful if someone attacked them, and fortunately that's exactly what happened. Now I have a decent shot to regain control of the seas around my territory.

Why? Because every ship on the board is now obsolete. We discovered Combustion this turn, and I'm expecting Team 3 to do the same on their half of the turn. The age of wooden ships is over. Bring on the destroyers!

[Sullla]

Here's a wider angle view of the west, showing the full scope of this naval battle:

I left my naval stack in place; we couldn't see any place to move it that we liked more than the current spot. Dave is currently blockading me at Thunder Claws, Help Pix, the island cities, and with the remnants of his main stack near Absolute Zero. I actually got some decent relief from blockading this turn, since he had to move backwards a bit.

Unfortunately you cannot get an auto-upgrade to destroyers in a build queue, because Combustion tech unlocks oil wells and you need Combustion + oil to build destroyers. Ah well. But my workers will insta-connect oil on my next turn, and Crescendo will be able to build one destroyer per turn for quite some time with the current overflow. (It falls just short of being able to build one per turn. Destroyers cost 134 shields on Quick, and I believe the city can do roughly 120/turn with all its various modifiers.) My other two coastal cities of note, Sandstorm Fury and Absolute Zero, still need to do their coal plants first and then can go permanent destroyers.

I have two more cities that are also going to do naval building for me too: Dazzle to the east, building the coal plant) and Cannon Barrage (size 15 city under the interface building the factory). Forts can get ships from both locations to the main sea, and with factories in place in every one of those cities, I can hopefully outbuild Dave's own coastal cities. His team still has no factories, so hopefully. Dave's doing a great job of using State Property civic, adding workshops everywhere for mass production. I'll do the same, eventually, as my new cities are skipping cottages for pure production. We'll see who comes out on top.

We've also saved up about 600 gold for upgrades to destroyers on the current ships, with Speaker running 0% science the last two turns. This sounds like an awesome plan, upgrade ships to destroyers and then sweep the seas of their ships, but I'm pretty sure Team 3 is thinking the same thing! WarriorKnight has saved up 600 gold of his own, which has to be planned for some kind of upgrade somwhere. I would be very surprised if they aren't planning on the same thing. Perhaps that's why Dave attacked, to clear out some of my ships to prevent upgrading? Maybe. But here again we have an advantage - because we play first in the turn order, we'll be able to get in any "first strike" from upgrading. Kind of funny that we're likely to discover Combustion on literally the exact same turn. What a close game.

Discovering Combustion finished a very long-running tech path. Where do we go now? Here are the possibilities we considered:

* Civics Path: Communism + Democracy. We really do want both of these trechs at some point, as we'll get a ton of benefit from State Property and Universal Suffrage. There's a couple of problems here though. First of all, these are still pretty expensive techs - we'd rather go back and clean them up when they are relatively cheaper. Secondly, I'm the only player on our team who can really benefit from State Property right now. Sunrise and Speaker are not large enough, although hopefully Speaker will be fixing that very soon. Finally, we'd hate to burn a turn of Anarchy for civics swap in such a close game. It makes more sense to shelve these for now, and go back a bit later after Speaker has conquered some more cities, and maybe if we have 3 Great People for another golden age civics swap.

* Health Path: Biology + Medicine. No joking around here - our cities are crazy unhealthy from industrial pollution. And it's only getting worse when oil is connected, since that adds another +2 unheathiness (fortunately can be countered with public transportation). The extra food from Biology would be really nice, as would hospitals in a lot of cities. But this does nothing for us militarily... In a close game, the health techs are luxuries we can't afford. Skip them for now, and just try to make do.

* Fight Path: Physics + Flight. Air power is incredibly strong in Civ4, we just rarely play games late enough to see it. (We should get to see it in this game at some point.) Airports are also crazy good, since you can airlift a unit to ANY city, anywhere on the map, including shared between teammates. Easy reinforcements, eh? Planes can scout with their recon, bombard city defenses, weaken defending units, and even pillage key resources.

So why not take this path? Mostly because Flight is insanely expensive to research, costing 8800 beakers on this map and having no pre-requisite bonuses. Yes, this is one of the rare techs where you don't get the 20% bonus beakers, like nearly all of the techs give you. In practical terms, that means Flight is more like 10.5k beakers in cost. And beyond that, airports add even more pollution, which we're struggling to control as it is. We do want Flight, we're going to go for Flight, but we can do a slightly stronger tech path first:

* Unit Power Path: Physics + Electricity + Industrialism. This is pretty much *THE* power play in terms of tech path, rushing straight for the big daddy tech of Industrialism. That tech gives you marines, battleships (which will be key on this map!), ability to see aluminum, and TANKS. There is no unit on the tree in this era as dominant as tanks. They simply destroy everything outdated, as the one unit that breaks the rules of the game: 2-move and also able to take City Raider promotions. Yeah, there's a reason why nothing else can do that! With our impending Pentagon, every one of Speaker's units will be triple-promoted from the start. How can the backwards teams defend against City Raider III tanks that have 2 movement and attack at strength 49? Oh, and also have Blitz as an innate promotion? Umm... they don't?

Now I don't think we'll be running over Team 3 or anything, but Teams 2 and 4 can't possibly stand up to tanks. Speaker and I will use our industrial base and rail networks to crank them out ASAP, and then overrun the backwards team as quickly as possible. That's the goal moving forward from here. It's a power play and a gamble, but our best chance to conquer more land. Add State Property civic to control costs, and try to steamroll from there.

Few people have played a competitive game this late on the tech tree, so I'm hoping that Team 3 will make some mistakes in their research. They already potentially made an error by delaying Assembly Line for so long. Maybe, maybe not - they have done great work with State Property civic, after all. But Assembly Line is a prerequisite for Industrialism, so we have a major edge in pushing down the tanks research line. (They still need Ecoomics and Corporation before they can research Assembly Line.) And going Physics -> Electricity sets us up for the other power tech play in late Industrial period: Flight -> Radio. Bombers are ridiculously good, and shred to pieces anyone who doesn't have air power. So we are probably looking at an Industrialism beeline, followed by a push to Radio. Tanks and bombers, the two strongest units in this era. We'll see if event force us to change our path.

Team 4 apparently captured a city off of Team 3 last turn and razed it. Not sure what's going on there, but it all sounds good to us! Stay tuned.

[Selrahc]

How can the backwards teams defend against City Raider III tanks that have 2 movement and attack at strength 49?

City Raider Promos don't actually boost the strength of the unit, instead they subtract from the strength of a defender. The only promo line that actually adds to attack strength in that way is the Combat line.

[luddite]

Looks like you're suffering some serious health problems. In discussing the RB mod, i suggested that environmentalism was a good civic but it just comes too late to be useful. Do you think you would switch to environmentalism if you had that option now?

[Kyan]

City Raider Promos don't actually boost the strength of the unit, instead they subtract from the strength of a defender. The only promo line that actually adds to attack strength in that way is the Combat line.

Aye and this will, unfortunately, make a big difference to the overall perceived strength if their units are considerably weaker initially.

Of course, if they're much weaker anyway, the promo probably won't be needed! Thanks for the update.

[Sullla]

I'm using City Raider III strength bonus as an approximation; it's easier to understand that way. Against a rifleman with 50% defensive bonus, it's pretty much the same thing whether we use strength 49 vs 21, or strength 28 vs 10. Very, very one sided.

If I had my choice of any civic in that column, I would take State Property. Environmentalism only comes out on top if you're running corporations, in which case you probably would have so much food you wouldn't care about boosting health.

I will show some pictures of my horribly unhappy and filthy industrial cities when I get a chance over the next few turns.

[Speaker]

Lots of interesting stuff this turn, but it's time for bed for me.

[haphazard1]

I had not previously realized that hippopotami (hippopotamuses?? ) were such cruel creatures. :neenernee

[pindicator]

Lots of interesting stuff this turn, but it's time for bed for me.

You tease!