[SPOILERS] Scooticator and Pindooter give a sporting try

[scooter]

Turn done, but some serious RNG screwage sapped my energy for the night, so report will come tomorrow morning-ish. Turn wasn't a disaster or anything, but it sucks to make the right decision and get burned by dumb luck. We had just 6 combats, and they included:

* Nearly losing our GG at 97% (reduced to 0.2 health)
* Not even a scratch loss at 97% (Cyneheard said the odds of this happening was something like 0.3% I believe)
* Loss at 63.5%

WHOOOOOO. We did win the other 3, but they were all at 88%+ odds. Anyway, we elected not to take a city for safety reasons (it was doable, just risky, so we waited since it's not like he can whip), but we are at least draining TBS's units. Shuttling more units in next turn.

[scooter]

Turn 185

A refresher on the setup:



We talked for a bit, and the plan was to capture Dinosaur Kid and then move things forward. Things quickly started to deviate off plan. First we attacked with our GG Gren, getting great odds on a CG Musket:



slighlty wounded GG CR3 Gren vs CG Musket 97% - win (0.2h!!!!!)

We lost 4 straight rounds of combat and 5 out of 6 which nearly cost us our best unit on the map. I said something in chat to the effect of "well maybe we got our terrible dice roll over with" which, in retrospect, was a horrible thing to say when we still had several combats to go.

CR2 Gren vs C1 Knight 97% - win (8.4h)

So far so good.





10.4h cr2 Gren vs C1 Knight 91% - lose NOT A FREAKING SCRATCH (< 1% odds of that happening)

Thiiiiis was hard to swallow. It's not just losing at 91%, it's not even weakening the unit a tiny bit that really adds insult to injury. Whatever, it happens. Onward.

c3 Gren vs c1 HAX Knight 88% - win (8.4h)

When you start viewing wins like this as a fortunate dice roll...



Shock Knight vs mace 63.5% - lose (3.2h)

Normally I wouldn't complain too much over a loss like this, but this one sucked a lot more than usual just because this only became a must-win due to the earlier loss. Anyway, at this point we still easily had enough to capture the city, but the great question was whether it was a worthwhile risk or not. We ended up deciding to hold off. We have the mobility advantage, and TBS isn't in Slavery, so we need to pick our battles. Did take one more quick shot to snipe the catapult in the city:



Won that one. The lousy part about this is that the 2 cats SE of the city get to live and cause us further trouble - killing them was predicated on capturing the city, so there's not much we can do about it. So now we plan our next moves.



Time to reload. In case it's unclear what you're looking at here, our "Gimpy" Galleon that cleared the defenders out of Chrysalis pulled into Browns, dropped off 2 of its Grens to heal, and picked up 2 more 5xp Knights. Next turn those units will be eligible to move directly out of Hiram off the boats. We also retreated 2 of our Galleons back 1 tile. They'll drop off 2 units for healing, and they'll pick up 6 more units. We have another Galleon that just completed too, so we'll have extra movement shortly.

Also, we noticed this little detail:



Mackoti is being forced to give his SOTL Flanking-Nav1 so that they have 4 movement. Better for us than Combat promotions, but he probably doesn't have a choice.

Some bad breaks this turn, but while we've only captured one city, we've cleared the defenders out of 3 of them, and that's with just 2 units lost. That's still pretty positive.

[pindicator]

Scooter, here's the proof about what I was telling you last night:

[scooter]

Scooter, here's the proof about what I was telling you last night:

Perfect. You can now sigh in relief.

[pindicator]

Scooter, here's the proof about what I was telling you last night:

Perfect. You can now sigh in relief.

But now you see why I was saying we need to slow the war down and not throw away CR2 grens, right?

[scooter]

Scooter, here's the proof about what I was telling you last night:

Perfect. You can now sigh in relief.

But now you see why I was saying we need to slow the war down and not throw away CR2 grens, right?

Yeah, that helps our cause quite a bit.

For those wondering what we're talking about - I was under the impression units have to be completely still in order to heal. Apparently being on a boat that's moving will still let you heal as long as the unit itself doesn't get any orders. Learn something new every day with this game.

[pindicator]

Scooter, here's the proof about what I was telling you last night:

Perfect. You can now sigh in relief.

But now you see why I was saying we need to slow the war down and not throw away CR2 grens, right?

Yeah, that helps our cause quite a bit.

For those wondering what we're talking about - I was under the impression units have to be completely still in order to heal. Apparently being on a boat that's moving will still let you heal as long as the unit itself doesn't get any orders. Learn something new every day with this game.

Taking this further, use your galleons extra movement to take advantage of healing bonuses: end your turns stacked with a medic ship, or in the ports of your home cities

[NobleHelium]

Scooter, here's the proof about what I was telling you last night:

Perfect. You can now sigh in relief.

But now you see why I was saying we need to slow the war down and not throw away CR2 grens, right?

Yeah, that helps our cause quite a bit.

For those wondering what we're talking about - I was under the impression units have to be completely still in order to heal. Apparently being on a boat that's moving will still let you heal as long as the unit itself doesn't get any orders. Learn something new every day with this game.

You do realize I also said that at least three times in the chat yesterday in addition to at least two times before?

[scooter]

Turn 186

Where do I even start. So, here's the big news:



That's a lot of units. Mack and us have 6 turns of enforced peace left, so right now we're suddenly in a race to grab as much as we can. I tried to figure out a way we could snipe Water Lily, but there wasn't a way since we retreated Gimpy. So right now, the goal is basically just grab what we can, then deal with Mack once TBS is out of the picture. So the bright side of this is that Mack has kinda "cleaned up" things enough that we can fairly safely move much more aggressively like we need to. Here's the bulk of the navy he brought to the party:



So the other thing is it seems TBS used his units on Mack. Kid Dinosaur and Chrysalis were empty. So we need to capture before Mack does.





Almost 200g, fantastic.



I'll take it. Next, Chrysalis with the units that boarded Gimpy last turn.







Well this is easy. 2 cities captures without a shot fired this turn. Nice change from last turn. So let's see what we can do next. First off, I used the second Knight off Gimpy to do some exploring to make sure TBS couldn't counter-attack seriously.



Well... ok that's where the spawned GG went, but I don't know what it's doing there . It does look like TBS threw a bunch at mackoti since the GG showed up during his turn and he then ... somehow used the GG from KD to join to a longbow and get on an unroaded hill and promote to Guerilla? Yeah I'm super confused about that . That could not have possibly been intentional could it? I dunno. It moved onto there from the spices, and if it had G3 already it would still have had movement, soo... ok my head hurts, just gonna leave that one alone.



My first thought was "YES let's declare war, promote to C2, and kill this worker stack" and then I remembered the enforced peace. Sad that Mack got this prize. Anyway, in conclusion, Hiram is safe and can be left empty, and Chrysalis just needs to be able to beat that wounded Musket, which it can. So we're good to push forward.



Just that mace we chased away (I knew this before moving the Knight due to the spy). I moved a second Knight in range of the city to be safe. I also did this with a 3rd Knight:



Those are the eternally fleeing cats. The second one will survive and presumably set up camp in Captain Trips. Anyway, he does have Knights up in his last city:



However, mackoti can get quite a few Knights in range of Captain Trips next turn, so we really have no choice but to get those Knights in range of the city this turn, or else he'll get to take it from us. If he elects to attack our Knights with his Knights out of Musket Shrine he wont' get odds (C1 vs C2), and he'll make it much easier to kill that city quickly.


Fun with Viking Boats

I did whack a helpless Galley so we coudl pick up an easy 1xp:



Also, this was fun:



This Grenadier start its turn inside Browns - the city 2E of the sheep barely on the right edge of the screen. It ended its turn on a boat 1N of Kid Dinosaur. It road the boat into the freshly captured Chrysalis, the moved onto this Galleon (which only gets into this lake after capturing KD), loads back up, then the Galleon sails back north of the city all in one turn. It is eligible to hit Musket Shrine next turn, though it very likely will want to wait a turn. Crazy.

In terms of reinforcements, I went back, picked up 5 more units, and started coming with them. I didn't drop off the wounded CR2 Grens direcly into Hiram, because dropping them on the coast behind it gets us to TBS's last city 1T quicker, and they were safe on the coast. Speed is priority now since Mack beating us to the last two cities would be quite a disappointment.

We may not be able to hold them longer-term, but at the very least we want that capture gold and the chance to defend them.

[scooter]

So the cool thing is our jungle belt cities are starting to become useful:



This is a cramped filler city that's producing 30hpt into military units right now - it's a serious contributor. Also, I started us on a fun little trick we're probably going to make use of. So we're planning to revolt into Theo when we launch our Golden Age, but we'd like to delay that GA by a few turns so we can get some things upgraded first. The downside would be we'd lose out on some promotions by delaying Theocracy. However, by stacking builds a little bit, we can delay the completion of these units until Theo comes in, then complete a bunch in a row once it's in. That Treb has all but like 2 hammers completed. We'll finish the others to within 1T, then do a little cascade once we have Theo. We'll also pile up some overflow too - will just have to be careful not to get too much. Yay for silly micro things.



Our military is up to #3, and the gap is quickly narrowing to #1 (Mackoti). I expect we will be #1 after our next round of upgrades.