Era of defense

[plako]

My planning has been pretty sloppy lately. All 3 of my games needing my full attention is a bit too much. However I'll try to get Castle up in OTR and as many maces as possible. Only other coastal city we really want to preserve is MoM one, but we can live even without it. Hoping ~8 maces on OTR on T140. That should be enough to keep the city in case all their galleys have 2 Berserkers in them. I'll be drafting OTR twice and bring some maces from nearby cities also there. We'll lose our island holding and possibly GT, but those are way less important cities. Island can whip mace before the action starts. Focusing on triremes might also be worthwhile. They don't have that many of them to protect their boats, but there just are too many priorities here.

Another focus are WIFOM and BM. I'll position most of the troops in the middle point between the cities. If they go heavy on sea then their land attack will be much weaker. Main threat will be the mobility of Knights.

Techwise we could also consider Optics. Being able to sink those ships with good odds would be great asset and denying circumnav from the Vikings would be valuable.

[pling]

My planning has been pretty sloppy lately. All 3 of my games needing my full attention is a bit too much.

Sorry I'm not contributing to the planning But I pretty much have nothing useful to say.

That should be enough to keep the city in case all their galleys have 2 Berserkers in them. [...]
Another focus are WIFOM and BM. I'll position most of the troops in the middle point between the cities. If they go heavy on sea then their land attack will be much weaker. Main threat will be the mobility of Knights.

I think if they have 8 Beserkers in that flotilla we can see, then that's approximately a fifth to a quarter of their army (depending how you count cats) - they'd have 8 Beserkers/13 Knights (or any combination adding up to 21) and 10 cats for the land portion right now.

Actually, I've just realised there's more galleys under ours - another 4? Which would make it 16 Beserkers, possibly, leaving 13 Knights or Beserkers (I've got them all as Knights in the spreadsheet) and 10 cats for land.

[zakalwe]

I took a quick look and snapped this picture:




That's our military on T140. I see Gillette have workers in several places along our border. I wonder if they're planning to split their stacks.

About our next tech. How about Monarchy, so we can hook the wines?

[plako]

Monarchy is good idea. I don't know if we can avoid Hereditary rule though. Drafting just creates too much unhappiness.

[zakalwe]

We might need monarchy for hereditary rule, too...

[novice]

Iron Working for pikes would be good too. Or does anybody have iron for sale?

[pling]

Iron Working for pikes would be good too. Or does anybody have iron for sale?

Politically speaking I'd've thought we only had a chance with Pirates ... and they don't have Iron Working.

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Just spent a bit of time double checking some C&D stuff & getting screenshots to make figures for the T140 history post. As I updated the C&D thread by editing posts I wanted to draw people's attention to the fact that Gillette got Engineering T139.

plako - when you play next turn can you do the city screenshots please? I didn't take those coz I wanted to be sure they have the right builds for T140. I did the graphs tho. Thanks

[pling]

Trying to make a picture to show our plans for the incoming Gillette war, and I'm not sure if I've been following what's going on closely enough so figured I'd get feedback before I write the T140 post - does this look right?




White line is our culture borders, black line is fog line.
L=longbow, K=knight, A=Archer, W=warrior, w=worker
Red lines are not routes that will be followed, just indicative of final destination.

Basically if I've understood right our plan is to stuff all those southern Maces into OTR (which already has 2 Maces, an Axe & a Spear), and gather all the rest onto the tile marked with a red dot which is one move each from WIFOM & BM.

Presumably those little green men are busy reporting our troop movements back to Gillette.

Other things that occur to me looking at the picture - the land invasion could come from beside their southern city, there's 2 workers to the NE of it which might've just roaded that tile. They've also just roaded where the workers are near the northern two cities - looks like it's pointing towards BM? So perhaps that's indicating two land armies, one pointed at each of WIFOM & BM?

[plako]

Great shot Pling. I think I'll keep most the maces finished in the N and NE there. T145 is not far either and we should also prepare defenses on TEAM border.

I'll try to figure out minimum amount of units that are needed to keep OTR safe from sea landing. I think 6-7 behind castle would be ok. Others moving SE will be positioned so that they could reach WIFOM and some of the other coastal cities.

Other spot to occupy is between BM and WIFOM as you've painted it and I've mentioned earlier.

I'll also try to keep DeerSlayer. Probably trying to get walls+castle also there. Mai-Tai probably will be 1 turned, but I let that city go. Only 1 mace will be defending there.

Concerning techs IW could also be useful enabling X-bows that are pretty good defenders against Berserkers. I think I'll go for Monarchy after all. Having those wines is pretty important.

[zakalwe]

Can we build a round of archers, and then get iron working to upgrade them? We can afford to blow some cash now, with the most critical techs researched. And we only need to upgrade them on demand.