Some big news is that dtay took another of Carthage's cities, Shag Vermin, with his megastack. That isn't surprising, of course - the interesting thing to note is that he took some truly massive losses in the process. Based on his change in rival top power, where he was around 2.05M last turn before drafting 4X yet is now down to 1.85M, I estimate that he lost somewhere around 250k-300k soldiers in total. Meanwhile, Carthage is down to just 860k, whereas they were at least 1.1M last turn, I think. I believe what happened is that Chumchu attacked out with his cats and Knight stack, and then dtay attacked back with cannons, yielding a huge bloodbath.
On my end, I took another island down. (with another 75% Knight dead. My poor horsies must be sick. )
(terrible building haul. =/)
I think I need to back away, at least temporarily, from Crested Eyrie, the island that both dtay and I are contesting. (I decided this after I played, while eating lunch, but when I went to log back in just 25 minutes ago, Chumchu had already played!!) You can see Crested Eyrie in the screenshot I took last turn, of dtay's conga line.
I've got, IIRC, 6 Frigates and 3 Galleons nearby this turn, while dtay has 8 or 9 Frigates. However, I can see in F5 that he has 25 Frigates in total, with only like 2 in his sea with Gavagai. So, another 15 or so are in his conga line. I have.... 23? ish? Frigates in total, but 7 are in my west, guarding against Krill/Gavagai. Meanwhile, my other 10 are up near Carthage's Northwest, bombing down Castles so that I can continue to take the valuable islands up there. I could contest CE if I sent them all down, but then my campaign up north would suffer, to the point where Chumchu (who now has 6 Frigates and 3 Galleons in total that I can see) could even push me back. On the other hand, it is questionable whether dtay even wants to bother taking this island. He can bomb it down easily, but then he still needs to use 2 boatloads of muskets to take it, and the recent land battle suggests that he is desperate for troops. There's also this huge dip in the Zulu's CY graph:
What I'm fairly sure is going on here is that dtay has overdrafted and is now starving his cities down to justify drafting even more. I only have visibility on 4 or 5 of his cities left, but at least 3 of them were like this: 1-2 unhappy points from WW/drafting, working just a few resource tiles, and having assigned to them many, many specialists despite their GPP bar being nowhere near a new great person.
So, if dtay decides to take the city, then OK, that slows down his mainland conquest and hopefully lets me raze more of those valuable cities. Crested Eyrie is more of a defensive position for him than a dagger he can use against me anyways; it doesn't fork anything more than Seattle already does. If dtay decides that he can't afford the troops to take and hold the city, I can come back on T190 with Galleons full of drafted rifles and a now-consolidated Frigate fleet and take it like that.
I still think dtay's biggest problem in this war is the lack of canals. Like, take a look at this screenshot from T185 that I just marked up:
He has three 1-tile fort spots to choose from that allow completely bypassing the Seattle peninsula, or, if he doesn't want to waste a good tile, two deserts. He coulda used those paths to a.) more quickly bring reinforcements to the front, b.) boat Lifeblood on the first turn of the war with a 5-mover Galleon (its not visible in this cropped SS, but it Lifeblood is sea-accessible from the NW, and, IIRC, Lifeblood had just a single Chariot garrison when dtay first invaded) or c.) dump a big load of G1 muskets 1S of Lifeblood in draw some of the Knights from Shag Vermin away, whose culture it was crucial to eliminate quickly to facilitate building canal reinforcement pathways marked near Zodiac Spire. With these quickly put into place, dtay would be able to bring cannons almost all the way up to Carthage's capital without fearing of being harassed by Knights en-route.
At any rate, if dtay goes too slow here, he's not gonna end up taking very much Carthaginian territory. I've let up on drafting temporarily (drafting just 1 or 2 a turn) because I'm expecting to have Rifling done at EOT T188, at which point I will be able to draft 4/turn for at least 5 turns in a row, I think. I don't think dtay can get it before EOT 192, by which point I'll already have heaps of them on the field.
Hey! Finally got a nice building haul! Another dead Knight to show for it, but at least it's only one this time; I had enough Muskets to throw away this time to ensure that the rest of my attackers survived.
Rifling in 2T, but I'll need the capture gold from Stygian Terrace (Carthage's Moai) next turn to do it. I'm running a heck of a lot of gold to finish it on time - around half of my MFG I reckon, with the rest is split 50% on ships, a cannon at Heavenly Star, and my Ironworks at Anchorage - but I figure that being able to draft Rifles makes up for it.
Dtay is a little closer to Rifling than I thought. Being in a turnsplit made me miss the fact that he finished Printing Press with a huge amount of overflow... I think that used a GS bulb on it, and then dumped a ton of overflow onto RP. At any rate, he finished RP on the same turn as me, to my surprise. However, he hasn't started his slider on Rifling yet, and only has 950g while saving gold at 325gpt. (ouch) Figure he gets at least 500 capture gold in the next few turns and that the tech takes him 3.5 full slider turns... that'd be a Rifling ETA of 5 turns or so. So, I get a 2-3T window over there, if I want to try for Crested Eyrie. I'm still not sure if I want to, though.
OTOH, a new worry of mine lately, that has been very slowly, but ever steadily increasing each turn is regarding what Krill and Gavagai are up to. They've been acting odd.
First, Krill; he was beelining MS, but then stopped short just before finishing it a few turns ago, and has since been saving gold. Furthermore, he's been building trebs from his HE capital. An optimistic interpretation is that he realized he didnt need MS as fast as he thought he would (perhaps he was worried I would attack him) and is building trebs as future cannon upgrades due to not wanting to build muskets right before he has Grenadiers. A more cynical explanation is that he'll use his huge gold store to upgrade many CR3 Maces to Grenadiers and try to take a stab at me. He knows I have cannons, but he also knows that I've thinned my southern garrisons a bit (he has 3-4 workers crawling around my territory) to speed my assault on Carthage. I still have a good bit down there though, and he hasn't moved his Galleons into boating range (although he moves them around every turn to try to defeat my EP-vis so I could be overlooking something). He doesn't finish MS until EOT though, so I wouldn't expect an attack for 2 more turns at minimum.
More perplexing is Gavagai. I hadn't noticed anything particularly suspicious from him until just this turn. He has 2 medium-sized naval stacks nearby... in other players' territory. One stack is, IIRC, 4 Frigates and 5 Galleons in DS's territory a few tiles west of Castle Kalindra. The other is, IIRC, 2 Frigates and 6 Galleons in JR's territory, ~5 tiles NE of United Palaces. He's also got a few more scattered ships around. I have no freaking idea what's going on here, although I drafted 4 muskets up here just to ease my mind a bit. Gavagai also doesn't finish MS until EOT, and also has a fairly big gold store. Upgrading Jans->Grens isn't quite as good for him as it is for Krill, however.
I think I can repel one of these two without too much trouble, perhaps with some minor losses, but both at once would be tough because it would certainly induce dtay to pile on. And I don't think its likely that either one actually wants to attack me... for Gavagai especially, my cities over there wouldn't be worth the trouble. And furthermore, if Krill attacked me than Gavagai could hit him from the back and take his shrine. But still, I can't help but be paranoid about what they're doing. I wonder if I should dump some of the units I've been keeping on ships (for mobility purposes) to show them that I actually have more units over here than they can actually see?
Needless to say, I definitely want Steam Power before MT as my next tech. I need Ironclads to protect my seas stupid Ships of the Line, blegh. What a shitty unit... both of them, I mean, both Ironclads and Ships of the Line. Building either one of them leaves an incredibly bitter taste in one's mouth, with Destroyers being right around the corner and leaving these pieces of junk more useless than Warriors.
Steam power is good for other reasons at least. I've got a few good cities that would benefit a lot from Levees, and I should finish SP just a couple turns after my Ironworks finishes for an extra +50% production there.
Reload request explanation - I went to move a Galleon with a pair of Knights to take a city of Chumchu's, but the game lagged and somehow it unloaded the Knights on an adjacent tile instead. And I need those Knights to take the city before dtay can in his part of the timer. =/
Man, I've been meaning to update for awhile now, as so many things are happening, but I've been sooOOooOooOooo busy. Still am, unfortunately. So let's be quick.
First, to my shock, Gav did invade me on T189:
My most generous interpretation of this invasion is that it was his idea of some sort of karmic balancing act, where he kind of pointlessly invaded dtay and put him behind somewhat, so he did the same to me so that I wouldn't run away with the game without ever being hindered. I say that because if he actually thought he'd make gains here he is an idiot. Why not dive back in on DS while he's stuck in a forever-war with JR and I'm messing with Carthage and dtay?
I do have to admit that I made a minor mistake in that I left the fleet I had set aside to guard my western holdings on the side of a canal closer to Krill, so perhaps Gav thought I commmitted 100% of my navy to Carthage/dtay due to poor scouting? And indeed, my fleet was 1-turn away from being able to obliterate all of his troops by attacking out (as I had 15 units on Galleons, about half of which were cats and cannons), so I that's definitely a positioning mistake... my land forces were enough to hold Krill at bay were he to dive on me, so I shoulda balanced my navy better I guess. Anyways, the result was that Gav was able to attack and lost like 18 units (jans/trebs/Knights) in order to raze two tiny island cities and kill 2-3 muskets, 3-4 archers, and a pair of longbows, IIRC. Those cities were just drafting posts running wealth, although the one did have a bit of infrastructure (courthouse, forge, library) that won't be replaced. The loss will cost me about 75bpt for maybe 30 turns in total, significant but too terrible. More tragic is my lost routes with Gavagai, which costs me an additional 100 commerce per turn or so.
Half a world away, the war on Carthage continued unhindered. Stygian Terrace fell with a nice bit of infra:
But, unfortunately, it is culture-crushed from DS's city across the bay, which I think is a bug. Chumchu threw his navy at me, which didn't do too much damage until I tried to clean up his ships at mostly 75%-80% odds, and lost like an extra 4 or 5 that way, arrghh. That wasn't so bad by itself, but it did prompt dtay to dive on me, cleaning up four more of my ships and then throwing me a peace treaty. So, more routes lost (IIRC, between the two lost cities and the two lost sets of routes, my max bpt dropped ~250bpt), but I was actually elated by this. I was actually scheming trying to figure out a way to trick dtay into giving me a peace treaty, and he hands me one of his own accord! I had three main reasons:
1.) Give me time to catch up on Navy (i.e. with slowass Ironclads) plus build levees. I'm not sure if this one worked out... more on this in a bit.
2.) I reaaaallly wanted to capture Pomewater, a mainland city that, due to its odd geography, could only really be accessed by the enemy as if it were an island:
But of course, despite having 12 attackers for 5 defenders, I rolled THREE FLAWLESS LOSSES IN A ROW, and then the fourth attack landed but a single hit on the top-defender. So that resulted in this, after a final insult of losing an 85% battle right at the end:
And dtay got the city for free, pretty much. =/
3.) and finally, I wanted to scorch all of Carthage to the ground:
At least this one worked out. Man, I razed sooooooo many towns. Also farms and watermills, etc. I probably netted a good ~1k or so in raze gold that I wouldn't have been able to get otherwise. Unfortunately, my secondary plan to then capture all of Carthage's workers failed due to not having enough troops because I flushed most of what I had on hand down the toilet at Pomewater. Alas.
Anyways, the situation as of now is that I'm still in a much stronger position than dtay, but probably wouldn't be if we were to declare permapeace and try to finish with a space race. I've got double his MFG, a solid tech lead, and about ~400k soldiers more than him. So, I think I need to put pressure on him so that he can't recover his under-built and over-drafted core nor make his new land turn a profit. This is complicated by the fact that much of my troops are more spread out, while he's got much of his stuff in a giant naval megastack. IIRC, he's got 43 frigates, 1 Privateer, and 9 Galleons, presumably full, that he's gonna move into position to try to wreck my shit next turn. My navy is, IIRC, 24 Frigates, 4 Ironclads, and 1 Privateer, so quite a bit smaller, although my stuff is overall more highly promoted. I think that it's most likely that he'll move it into the gulf of Masked Moon, popping my undefended size 1/2 fillers as he goes. Well, those are no big deal... the problem is that area is my industrial core, with 4 of my strongest shipyards. On the plus side, that is my industrial core, with 4 of my strongest shipyards, and they're all pumping ironclads in preparation. Hopefully I can scrap together enough of them to deal with his few 3-star Frigates, at which point my own 3-star frigates can hit his 2-stars, etc. We shall see!
Quick update. It's the turn before the peace treaty with the Zulu expires. Here's a shot of the Danger Zone I mentioned in the last update:
I've got 10 Ironclads and 25 Frigates in the area now... I have more IC in the northeast, but they won't arrive in time to make a noteworthy difference probably. Unfortunately, this isn't enough to stop dtay from muscling his way in with his larger stack, so I'm trying to scramble up land units to reinforce my coastal cities. The Protective trait shall be super handy here.
Oh, and here's my Ironworks, now fully grown. I completed it 7-8 turns ago, and it got an additional upgrade when I Steam Power with coal. (fun coal fact: I have 7 coals... and have cities planted on 5 of them. ) For the last dozen turns or so, I've been pampering Anchorage to grow up to max size with a slew of workers... e.g. farming the horse, watermilling then workshopping straight rivers, windmilling the hills, etc. I think I can pump this sucker up to 100hpt base with State Property? That would be pretty badass...
Demographics comparison with dtay:
In short, I'm way ahead of him in most metrics, except for land, which isn't a problem now but could be in about 30-40 turns. Techwise; I have a full 100% slider turn of overflow from Education, while dtay has about 2/3 of Sci Method researched. So lets give him 1/3 of Sci Meth, plus Liberalism, plus an extra 600g. (~7k beakers) I'm up Drama, Music, and Steam Power (~10k beakers). Pretty close. I imagine he's going for the Communism spy next, for a GA, possibly.
Another interesting note is that dtay ran his ep slider at 40% last turn, which netted him like 900 ep or so, thanks to Nationhood, Castle spam, and a handful of Jails. He didn't get enough EP to get research visibility on me, but he had plenty enough to shut down city visibility. =/ Well, I'm pouring over 200ept on him, so he'll have to finger the slider again eventually.
Man oh man, have I been wanting to update lately, but life has just been too hectic. Gonna try to not be too wordy then.
Essentially, dtay and I are in a full-blown world war - very genuinely involving over 50% of the map and both of us taking heavy losses. I can't remember another pitboss game that ended like this, with the #1 and #2 slugging back and forth so evenly on each others' territory. Interestingly, we've each had very different approaches towards the war, both of which are kinda the result of a.) wanting/needing to fight a modern-era war in the early industrial era, and b.) the Fucking Protective trait.
Before I talk about a.), which is like, the whole point of a report, I have a few words to say about the Protective trait.
BEGIN RANT
*deep breath* Ok, here we go. I've been kinda hinting at this for awhile, but I'm just gonna come right out and say it now. The Protective trait is completely overpowered in RtR. If I didn't have the Protective trait, dtay would have gutted my big southeastern shipyard area and then leveraged that to completely take over eastern sea, or vice-versa, if he chose. If dtay didn't have the Protective trait, I would have been stomping all over him and blown up at least twice as many cities as I have.
I think the general impression people have is that if BTS Financial is a 10/10 Trait, and BTS Exp, and Cre are roughly 9/10 or so, and BTS Agg is maybe a 4/10, then BTS Protective is a 0/10. RtR tries to rebalance traits to be between a 7 and 8 or so. RtR Pro is generally considered to be about a 7.5 or so because the BTS Pro stuff is rated as worthless, barely better than nothing at all. Near the start of this game, my opinion was that BTS Pro was actually more like a 1.5/10. However, now I think it's more like a 2.5/10 baseline, and at least a 3/10 if not higher on navally maps. Combined with RtR's meta that facilitates longer games, I'd rate BTS Pro in RtR as around a 3.5 to 4. Seriously, I'm not kidding. That means RtR is at about a 11/10! Yes, Pro in RtR is better than Fin in BTS!
Consider: boating a small flatland city with a single fortified CG3/D1 Rifle in a takes ~5 C2 Amphib Cavalry to kill reliably, and maybe 3 full galleons-full of drafted rifles. Being able to bombard first will drop those numbers by maybe 20%. THAT'S A FUCKING CRAZY RATIO!!! And if the city has *multiple* CG3 rifles? The ratio will only get worse. Oh, and drafted 2xp rifles (CG2 + D1) are almost as effective. What this means is that a naval defender in the Ren+ eras can use what we can dub an "Anti-Sirian Doctrine" of shuffling around just few boatfuls of units to counter the forking effect of a big enemy naval stack as long as you have enough of a defensive naval stack to prevent the enemy from splitting up and blocking your ports. You then just need enough units in each forked city to prevent being boated directly. If they try to unload a stack to better their odds, well now you now where to focus your troops. It's incredibly effective.
Oh, and lets not forget the forgotten economic bonus of Pro: cheap walls + castle spam. Both dtay and I got huge benefit out of this strategy. Not to mention the vast resources these save you on defense, they're also a really good economic boost. The extra trade routes will bring in minimum 3c per city, and sometimes far more, plus the bonus defense means you'll save money in upkeep compared to keeping around extra units.
And of course, you already need to upkeep far less of a standing army in general because your cities are generally twice as hardy as otherwise. Hammers you can put into buildings, gold you save that can be put into tech, etc.
All this, and it still has the property of making your neighbors lose even if you play like shit just because you'll be that much more expensive to conquer. Fuck this trait!
END RANT
Anyways, back to the game. First, let's talk strategies.
Zulu Strategy
dtay's goal is to essentially open up a way for him to develop his land in peace. He has more land than I do and also some bonuses that I have no equivalent to (the Ikhanda and his Agg city discount). He tried to accomplish his goal by maiming my eastern seaboard, and his tool to do it is Sirian Doctrine via his Frigate megastack. Ren and Industrial era naval combat is essentially a big meat grinder - as long as I don't hold much greater numerical superiority, he can sail his Galleon stack wherever the hell he wants. e.g. I'd need 100 C3 Frigates to chew through 50 C2 Frigates just to expose the Galleons. He had lots of C3 Frigates. A Nav2 Ironclad only gets ~60% odds attacking a C3 Frigate; ~75% for a C3 Ironclad, but those are tough to actually connect with. In the end, dtay wants to do enough damage that either a.) I'm forced to accept a peace treaty or ideally b.) he doesn't even need to care about a peace treaty anymore.
Greek Strategy
My strategy is to make dtay's new land advantage irrelevant:
a.) stop dtay from consolidating his new land
b.) prevent him building good infrastructure on his old land
c.) open up a window to let me get even better infrastructure on my own land (levees and then factories)
In all three cases, I want to try to stress dtay's empire as much as possible in as many places as possible. A meat grinder war is good for me and bad for dtay, because I have more drafting spots and roughly double his production. That means he'll have to build and draft as much as he possibly can to even try to keep up with me, but eventually fail at that. (edit: here's the power graph from T206 that shows the idea
Hopefully I will be overbearing enough that I can stop unit production for a few turns to rush a bunch of factories and coal plants in a golden age. At that point, I'm betting that dtay's position will be truly hopeless.
War Report
Here's a pair of screenshots roughly showing our troop movements from T200-T205 to show how these strategies started off, from a report I was going to make a freaking week ago now:
lets split this into three fronts:
Front 1 - My Eastern Coast
In short, as expected, dtay muscled his way into my harbor using Sirian-Doctrine tactics:
But, I was able to guard myself well enough using the above-described "Anti-Sirian-Doctrine" that he couldn't make a move other than plinking an undefended size 1 filler city. I also picked off a bunch of Frigates with my Ironclads. He then ducked to the West, nailing one small city for high losses, failing on another, and then finally killing a third for high losses. We also had a huge naval battle in my territory... I think we came out about even here, although I thought I would end up further ahead? I'm not exactly sure what happened. Anyways, I was able to kill enough of his ships to force him outta my territory which was the primary objective. I also razed stupid Pomewater, this time bringing more than enough troops to get the job done. Anyways, I now have enough Ironclads up here that he won't be able to easily return.
Here's the remnants of his stack after the big battle:
I'm not sure why I took this screenshot, but here you go.
Front 2 - near the former Carthagianian Capital and Eastern Coast
I'm the aggressor here. First, I easily killed off dtay's last-taken Carthagianian city with the raze-and-pillage troops I had on hand. I advanced my troops forward without expecting to accomplish anything other than forcing dtay to move units to bolster his garrisons here. This is because I had numerous Galleons stuffed with troops ready to land at several spots along his coast. And thus I was able to raze another city in former Carthage, and another near dtay's southern-eastern coast. After the initial strike, I continued to shuffle troops around and harass dtay so that he wouldn't be able to load more troops onto his Galleon fleet back over in Front 1. We ended up trading a bunch of units back and forth, to my satisfaction. However, eventually this opening presented itself:
(note the road on the NE diagonal, and the catapult as the top defender)
RIP TGL! Also deleted all 10 of those workers, NICE.
Front 3 - dtay's Western Coastline
This is a new front I just opened in the last few turns. It's partially thanks to my EP advantage finally building up enough again to get full civ vis on dtay. And partly thanks to the Protective trait in allowing me to defend my holdings with far less troops. (the raze on Pomewater was also something I couldn't have done without Protective) I then noticed three things about this area:
1.) It was completely dereft of Frigates, as the infinite aqua-conga line finally conluded after dtay turned most of his naval production towards Airship spam.
2.) There was a highly suspicious size 13 single-tile island city, despite the fact that dtay is often unable to draft his full 4 units per turn. Very obviously this city is generating an important GP for him.
3.) Most of the cities were fairly lightly defended, as we had been fighting fiercely elsewhere.
So, I built a bunch more Galleons and loaded 'em up with Amphib cavalry and cannons and non-drafted rifles and dove after it! Razed one city so far (which had 2 airships and a Frigate, as a bonus) and I'm poised to hit another T211. (which is currently up, but I've just been putting off this report FOREVER).
TLDR
dtay has razed 3 cities of mine, and IIRC I have razed 5 of his? 6? I'll check later.
Starting on T207, I started shifting more and more cities from units to wealth, and on T210 I cashed in another Great Merchant for 2700 Gold at Bates Motel (my 3rd in that city this game) which allowed me to shift EVERY SINGLE CITY I have to research. On T211 I will throw a GA, which will allow me to finish Assembly Line at EOT. The Wealth Builds, the GM, the Research Builds, and the GA combine to help me finish AL about 5 turns early.
I promise to post current demos once I'm able to play T211.
I had to freaking, like, micro every single of my stupid cities to finish AL at EOT, switching Merchants to Scientists, etc. Just barely got it. The game is INSANELY laggy these days so that took like a good 20-25 minutes, blegh. Also note that I still have a pretty sizeable power lead despite not really producing any units for about 4 turns now and losing tons of them. IIRC my max was around 3.6M.
Here's a screenshot of Front 3, btw. dtay was able to stuff the city with longbows from a galley, which I saw but didn't even think about, so I only ended up having like 2 cannons and 10 hitters for 7 units. I needed to win 2 out of 4 50% battles and lost all 4 in a row, heh, so I just retreated with the remainder. Yet again, THE FUCKING PROTECTIVE TRAIT ftl.
The recent cease fire? Oh, that's because he's drowning in war weariness, probably. The reason I took it is because it's gonna be a tight squeeze to get all these factories up plus make it to Communism within 6 turns.
)
Another dead Knight to show for it, but at least it's only one this time; I had enough Muskets to throw away this time to ensure that the rest of my attackers survived.
