Accoding to my map guess, Merovich has LOTS of land to his west... but it's mostly tundra caliber stuff. In any case, Plako has lots of land too, and the long term picture looks pretty grim for Arabia.
|
[SPOILERS] Lurkerloos and map discussion
|
|
January 10th, 2013, 06:30
(This post was last modified: January 10th, 2013, 06:31 by Nicolae Carpathia.)
Fuck, I was intending to post this to this thread, not Azza's thread:
Hey, I just realised something. If Scooter is really going to cancel the Horse deal to Azza, Azza could potentially turn his HBR tech into something genuinely useful by trading Copper to Commodore for Horse. That could very much keep Commodore metalled, considering he could very well lose his Iron to pillaging Impi (with axe support).
3 early wars already in this game. I would not have guessed that. It seems that at least Lewger, Azza, Commodore, Scoopinhelium, Merovech and maybe plako have definitely suffered and will have a hard time when it comes to building a winning economy.
Who is our favourite horse now? Serdoa? Jester & Co.?
Scooter is playing a duel with commodore, I which he razed comm's second city for a huge early lead. In that game commodore has !still! Foiled almost all of scooters plans and pretty much dragged him back into crab pot. I'm sure it's having an impact on scooters outlook here.
When you look at the map it is hard to see why Scooter is struggling so much. In theory it is Commodore who should be struggling, having first had their (admitedly crazy) pink dot scheme punished, and then been forced to build masses of Archers just to secure border metals. But as I alluded to in their thread, Team Scooter doesn't react well to all the randomness Commodore is throwing at them.
Just look at the last few turns: Scooter (and team) advance too few units into Commodore's territory, ostensibly because they didn't like the look of one tile of road. Commodore responds, and before Scooter knows it, Scooter has lost all the units they sent in. Meanwhile on the north side of that border, Commodore almost casually steals Scooter's Worker, which was only covered by a single Warrior. Scooter evidently hadn't expected Commodore to advance with a wave of Workers, in spite of that being much the same road risk that Scooter tried to counter on the southern flank. Commodore has succeeded because their grand strategy has been focused on military, while their opponent has only seen that military deployed chaotically. Commodore is actually in full-on war mode, but by using almost guerilla tactics, manages to make Scooter think that the war isn't as hot as it now transpires to be. The result is that Scooter couldn't decide whether they're at war or not, and hence lurched between military and civilian builds, between border aggression and defense - and in all this they lost focus. The upshot is that Commodore not only steals much-needed Iron right from under Scooter's nose, but Scooter's front-line city's hinterland is getting swamped by Commodore units, such that the city can't chop out much-needed units. As NobleHelium says in their thread, I think that team will rue settling a back-line (and far from amazing) Corn city, when they could have secured the (now heavily contested) front-line Crab spot much earlier. Added: I also wanted to break down this screenshot, because it really should have given greater pause for thought than it evidently did:  1. 3 Archers have advanced out of the fog from the west, even when that land-bridge could be perfectly well held by keeping those Archers in the fog. 2. The Archers have ended their turn on flat land, rather than on the hill above. Since the hill would be better for defense, the only reason to move like that is if the Archer stack anticipated having some roads (or city equivalent) below on the following turn. 1+2 = Not only is Commodore advancing, but they can be expected to advance quickly. The safe move was therefore not to cover that Worker with a single weak Warrior, but to retreat that Worker. Arguably the whole Scooter setup was too risky anyway, with 2 Workers both chopping out the most vulnerable forest tiles available, at a time when Scooter only had enough military to adequately protect one Worker.
I'd pretty much agree with that. I think scooter shouldn't have advanced any troops beyond the crab city and just kept them back and waited to see if Commodore got any iron. Either it would pop in an already settled city (couldn't do anything about it short of invading properly) or Commodore would make a play to settle it, in which case they would have all of their troops in a central location to strike out from.
And he could actually defend his workers. |
