[SPOILERS] Blut und Eisen: Deutsche Einigungskriege

[spacetyrantxenu]

That's kind of a long way off. Gunpowder and masses of pinch/formation knights are a more obtainable solution to the plako problem. I'm using vassalage/theocracy over the preferable bureaucracy/organized religion for a reason after all. At least I'll have the initiative within my own borders, not that it counts for much.

[Ceiliazul]

What is the tech state/rate for those in your neighborhood?

[spacetyrantxenu]

Sunday night Q&A with Ceiliazul continues!

What is the tech state/rate for those in your neighborhood?

It's hard to say for certain without reading the tech screen where possible and doing serious C&D work, which I've not done, but following along with my neighbors on the demographics screen gives a general idea. That, and watching the borders for any new death weapons technology. As far as tech goes I think I'm about even with Greece (BaII/Oxy) and maybe a tech or two behind plako with his Lighthouse powered economy. I'm fairly competitive in technology despite my lack of bureaucracy, mostly because I'm OK with researching nearly everything at a significant discount. I don't have to be first to any tech, really. I just don't want to be late on important military tech. I recently teched Engineering, it was a quick 3 turns of 100% research so I'm sure someone else has it, but Civil Service has a much more deflated cost, at only 1.5 turns of research. I'll be picking that up soon and will probably at that point be about even in military tech, unless plako already has Gunpowder and has been carefully hiding musketeers. I'm pretty sure Greece doesn't have any important military tech that I don't have. That's it for my landmass.

Among my other neighbors the only ones that matter are The Black Sword and German Jojo, as they have the only other advanced economies adjacent to me (beyond plako and Greece). As they're across my northern ditch and as I very strongly control access to that ditch, their military power is not a concern for me at this point. TBS may be a bit behind in tech at the moment, if anything, as he was busy grabbing Furungy's lands, but that won't last long if he's even behind at all. I don't have Jojo's graphs as I haven't been able to spare the EPs to get them, but I don't see him as a threat to attack at all, so I'm not that worried about getting the graphs. That would change if I ever saw him (or TBS for that matter) put a significant navy on the water in our shared channel, but for now I'm busy dumping EPs on Greece to slow their widening EP gap against me. Since BaII took over he took it upon himself to erase my EP advantage that had allowed me research visibility against them, and since they've invested in a few courthouses they have more EPs to spend than I do, and they seem to be spending them all on me.

Anyway, Jojo may well have a faster rate of research than I do, he has a big empire and a very safe position on the map, he hasn't had to waste a lot of his economic output supporting a large standing army like I have. I just walked a chariot all through his empire, it's ridiculous how many cities he has that are safely defended by one unit. I have...two internal cities that are similarly "safe", and they're each only one city removed from being on a hostile front. My military expenses are definitely a brake on my economy and other than plako (recently) I don't think anyone around me has a similar constraint.

The continents to my south are less relevant as those players are probably all going to be absorbed by someone at some point. I guess you could say the same thing about me too, but whatever. Q is in the process of being reduced by Ruff, but I don't know how far that will go. His economy isn't great though and he certainly doesn't have Engineering yet, at least I assume not from his unit positioning down there. I don't know if he'll get to bring his cataphracts into the game before it's too late (well it's already too late but you know what I mean). Wetbandit is in better shape than Q for sure but his economy isn't that impressive either and he's had neighbor problems, not just with me. The F4 relations screen shows he's had some problem with BGN, two wars being fought between them. I don't know his other neighbors but there may have been blood there too. All in all, I don't expect any trouble from the south unless plako launches a naval campaign from his southern island.

So basically the relevant threats remain where they've been, plako to the west and Greece to the east. Since long posts like this one go down more easily when backed up with pictures, I logged back in to grab graphs and pictures related to the text above.

Techs: Pictured, OH/Fintourist as Victoria, Dtay as Mao.



Score: This shows the relative Haves and the Have Nots in my neighborhood. Tech inflates score and can hide true rankings, but this graph does reflect the truth that in my neighborhood Krill/Novice, TBS, and plako are going to be ahead of me, I'm about even with Greece, and wetbandit and Q are dying on the vine. These positions will be more or less accurate per cluster through the rest of the graphs below.



GNP: I'm competitive with plako and Greece, though a bit behind both of them. Greece is defraying costs via courthouses recently and plako has a gigantic Lighthouse that brings a nice steady passive boost. TBS has a large economic potential but is consolidating the Furungy empire right now, so he has longer periods between tech bursts. Something else to note is that I've basically not built wealth at all in this game while I'm sure plako and Greece have at times, that may also be visible in this chart.



MFG: plako used his earlier golden age to bring his IND forges online, it seems, giving him a permanent MFG advantage even though we have the same number of cities. He's in caste and using workshops, though, which is an advantage in numbers versus my slavery workshops, but I get whips to balance that a bit. This gap is probably closer than the graph shows it, although he's obviously been directly translating these hammers into power. Also visible, it's surprising how low Krill/Novice's MFG output is compared to the three much smaller empires ahead of them in this graph. But never fear, the food graph is next and they're running a pyramids specialist economy.



Food: Yeah, there's the Babylonian food advantage. I'm guessing there's a lot of farms and windmills and probably minimal mines and workshops. TBS is also jumping up this chart as Furungy's old cities came out of revolt and contributed. My growth is minimal as I'm mostly as vertical as I'm going to get (with a few harshly cyclically whipped cities as exceptions) as I'm relying more on mature cities with workshops and less on the nerfed whip for everything. Speaking of that, have a look at the Greek trend in food, it's a gradual declination. My guess is that is transitioning into workshops from farms, but they're also in slavery so who knows.



This probably wraps up today's Q&A, as six posts in two days is probably shooting my views per post number all to hell. Before this mine was the only thread trending close to the views per post of the lurker thread, but I'm probably nose diving on that chart now too. Thanks Ceil!

[von Adlercreutz]

How is the Reich doing? Have any defense plans against CH?[/align]

[spacetyrantxenu]

How is the Reich doing? Have any defense plans against CH?[/align]

The Reich will stand for another three thousand years! The defense plan is to kill every unit he sends to my territory. And if I have anything remaining to go pillage the hell out of his empire if I can.

So, yay autopromote. I burned unused promotions last turn on a lot of units that weren't going to see combat this turn to minimize the chance of the AI doing something stupid and wasting a lot of them. So of course I got a useless cover promotion on a new pike in a threatened city. Against a stack that has zero archery units in it. OH KAY.

For a more serious answer to von Adlercreutz's question, my plan is to kill as many Greek units as possible while allowing them as few gains as possible. Everything else is immaterial at this point. Ergo, plako is probably going to reap some spoils here and that's that. I can't kill the Greek stack without gutting my western defenses, so I'm going to gut my western defenses and move everything east. The shape of the map dictated that I set my defenses as a fortress and I didn't quite get everything I wanted in place before someone took a shot at me. I was close though.... I'm a few turns from getting a GP to start a golden age, but at this point it's too late because there won't be any population to get the benefit of it. And my troops were out of position because, let's face it, Oxy/BaII weren't exactly enaged parties in this game, plako has a huge army and was a bigger threat, so most of what I had was positioned that way. And again, to now fight off the Greeks will require inviting disaster in the west because I can't possibly whip in the units I need to kill the Greek stack before taking further city losses unless CH is really bad in his tactics.

Why is that? RtR (née RB) Mod works great for whipping defensive units as long as they're 2 pop whips, so up to longbows/pikes it's kind of OK. But what I need is more knights. I'd be better off NOT having Guilds playing out this defense because I could whip and swarm HAs at that stack, killing off the top units (knight heavy) with WEs and pikes, and then completely flank away all the cats in the stack with a bunch of HAs. But I don't have enough mounted to do that by a mile, and because of the mod I can't quickly 3 pop whip the knights I need to do it, it costs more pop than that and you don't get to burn 4 or 5 pop for units very many times before you're out of people to slave away. For game context, when CH attacked I was in a dangerous spot in the game where I had recently built/been building forges, had laid off the whip, and had been preparing for a golden age where I could permanently swap to caste and use a workshop economy. I had the tiles mostly improved, the cities were almost totally grown out, and the golden age was under ten turns away when Oxy/BaII bailed on the game and I got a new neighbor. That's basically where everything went to hell on me, because all of my prior planning and assumptions were completely invalidated by a new player with no investment and no prior diplomatic history with me.

Upon taking over and with I assume no prior knowledge transfer from the previous managers, CH did the sensible thing and shored up defense in his border city that I previously could have killed any time I wanted to. He probably doesn't know that I let the city (Chang) live for 50 turns as a gesture of good will. That whole time it was defended by a single archer, nothing else, and I controlled the diagonal. I didn't even need Engineering to snipe that city if I wanted it, I just needed 2 HAs for the job. I didn't take the opportunity because razing that city would have just led to a grudge match. Anyway, CH saw that poorly defended city, recognized the dangerous situation (presumably not knowing that the city was actually safe given the prior 50 turns of me not taking advantage of an obvious tactical opportunity) and fixed it. He then set about looking at his other assets, the game board, and seeing what opportunities for growth or fun (whatever his motives are) were available, and went for it. Or maybe he defended his border cities precisely because he immediately planned to attack me, who knows. Anyway, I still don't have scouting information through to the far side of his empire, to the east (I didn't spend hammers on spies, which may have been a mistake), but my assumption remains that he doesn't have a land based eastern neighbor. I've never seen any rival unit pass my way from the east. There's really no way he could possibly safely send EVERYTHING HE HAS at me if he had an eastern neighbor. So yay for central map position being awesome -- every game I've played in since my first two games have been on maps where I've been placed in the middle territories...and each time I've ended up playing defensively. Any relationship there? Also, I'd be curious to know that out of the players who have died so far, how many were stuck in between two rivals, and of those how many of those rivals had a safe rear? No spoilers, I'll find out after the game. But I can probably imagine most of those who have done terribly in this game probably didn't find themselves in a nice, safe edge position.

Anyway, CH is able to send his entire army against me and I'm caught between him and plako on the other side. Given that I'm stuck either defending with half my resources on either border against either civ's full power (an obviously losing proposition where I get no say in the outcome and really have no way to punish anyone), or defending against CH who is responsible for torpedoing my game at this point, starting about FIVE TURNS after he took over...you can guess my plan going forward. Punish Greece, obviously.

CH is looking at this as a war of conquest since he isn't pillaging tiles with his mobile stack. And unless I can encourage him to start razing cities he'll actually profit from the war. We can't be having that. So I'll move the forces I have east to counter him, I'll lose cities in the west when plako sees the opportunity (he has a sentry chariot scouting our border every turn just like I do, he'll notice the missing units). The only thing to decide is how long to hold the cities in the west, because it will take a few turns to whip the population into units I can spend against Greece. I should have thought about that last turn, but on the first turn of the war I was in denial about how bad my position immediately was, and the near-inevitability of being pincer attacked. I didn't whip every city, thinking these big cities with their workshops would be able to produce more units in the long term if I didn't whip. Upon a second look, I think I have exactly two cities I shouldn't whip, since they both produce enough hammers that whipping can't reasonably compete and they're relatively safe and can delay burning pop for self-defense until their ends approach, if it gets that far. Everything else, including the capital, is going to be whipped hard over the next few turns. So even if I do avoid losing many more cities to Greece my economy is still ruined.

The only wild card is if plako for some reason doesn't attack. If all of his units are tied up elsewhere, like on the western side of his empire where he borders Dtay, then maybe I'm OK in the west and can take a longer view approach to dealing with Greece. I don't really think that's the case, though, because from the little I see of that area it seems like there's a channel between plako and Dtay, they have open borders, and I've never seen a land unit from Dtay appear. Sure seems like a body of water is separating them, so where exactly are plako's units deployed? I know plako's islands south of his core border Novice/Krill, but again, that seems to be across a body of water. Unless he has a land connection to them somewhere in the fog where I can't see (damn my poor exploration w/o OBs), plako could have a whole lot of units sitting idle available to attack. So I really don't know what he'll do. He does have a trireme/galley pair poking around my south, probably looking for a cheap city snipe. He'll have to try harder than that, at least. I blocked the easy kill, he'll probably attack next turn, though, we'll see.

But at this point if he attacks, he attacks. I'm past the mourning period for this game, I'm probably not going to rage about whatever happens. All of that was written down in something I didn't post a few days ago when CH decided to take over and immediately invade....That's the most civil thing I can say about it. Next time it comes up I'll just be an asshole and refuse to agree to a replacement player. People can play the games they sign up for, or don't sign up. Or whatever, I just won't play with people who quit games again.

---

Also...lolololololol....I finally took cultural control of the fish tile contested between my southernmost city and Q's on the other continent....just in time for me to not care about it anymore. This is just a few turns after losing cultural control of a tile on the Greek border (as I was chopping a jungle off it...) that allowed CH easier access into my core. I'm getting screwed by timing everywhere here. If CH had waited ten turns he would have been too late. Oxy/BaII, thanks for absolutely nothing guys. I really appreciate you quitting on the game.

Anyway, maybe I have something productive to end on here. Krill can probably come up with plenty of design, mechanical, or thematic reasons why he doesn't like this idea, but why not let HAs persist as build options even after unlocking Guilds? Sure, you'd probably lose the ability to prebuild knights, but let me tell you, I'd rather be able to 2 pop (or dry whip) HAs right now than be only able to build knights. I can't get them online soon enough to make much of a difference, whereas HAs could be produced immediately everywhere and could begin flanking away that ridiculous catapult stack. I know this idea goes against all conventions of units being obsoleted and removed as build options (excepting UUs), but still. I'd argue there's a place for building chariots even when you can build more advanced units. I guess it's something the game designers spent a lot more time thinking about that I have here in my admittedly limited period of time ranting about the problem, but I'm entitled to it I suppose. It probably isn't a good idea, but it would have helped here.

--

Offensive report: I have a safe sentry chariot in Greek territory. I pillaged a rice farm. Pure domination. I'll rachet up my spitefulness as things get worse on the battlefield, most likely. Death to everyone!

[spacetyrantxenu]

How much flanking damage can 7 knights do to a stack containing 16 catapults?

Greek stack:
16 cats
2 WEs
4 phalanxes
1 spear

After running a sim it turns out I would need 3 or 4 more knights than I have available to almost completely flank away the catapults. The seven I have only kill whichever defenders (anti-mounted and junk) they attack and severely wound the catapults. I wouldn't get any flanking kills until knight attack number 8 at the earliest, but the money attacks are 9 and 10, where everything starts dying en masse.

---

CH chickened out and ran away with his stack after razing the next city. I killed the knights he abandoned even though plako is attacking from the west now. Ran a sim, I can attack CH's retreating stack with seven knights but it doesn't matter. I'd need 3 more knights to be able to kill all the cats via flanking attack. And that's assuming I don't lose any rolls while burning through the covering 2 WEs, 1 spear, and 4 junk phalanxes. I'd have odds on all those battles but would probably lose a few of them. Even if I won them all though, seven flank attacks against 16 cats only severely wounds them all, none will die. So it's pointless to attack. He's running away already. I guess I should send the stack at plako instead, although I really would prefer to maim and cripple Greece and let plako eat CH too.

I'll leave the argument about how sporting it is for the lurker thread, but when you're Poland between Germany and Russia you get partitioned out of existence, it's just what happens. And I would find satisfaction in seeing plako sweep Greece into whatever ditch is to their east after he's done with me. I don't find any fault in how he's played this, he's opportunistic and by the composition of his stack he was clearly preparing to attack at some point anyway. I don't think he was ready yet though, because I don't see enough knights. He's WE heavy (and obviously catapult heavy), which means that's what he has had built for defense for a long time. I think he wasn't ready to attack yet, he probably wanted more knights and more time. But CH created an opportunity he obviously couldn't ignore. Credit to plako for being active and opportunistic, he's still trying to win the game even though it's too late for him from what I know of the game state. Two empires (or three) of land isn't going to compete against the top dogs who have already been eating and getting fat for a while. Plako will still be behind in cities even after clearing out this landmass, however long that takes. Again, he's trying to win, I can't fault the effort.

But Greece, trolling, maybe fun loving Greece. Definitely not going to win the game, not gaining anything from this war unless they believe plako is a better neighbor than I am. Spoiler: He isn't. The more I think the more I want to just attack Greece with everything I have and damn the rest of it. I'm probably retiring after this game anyway, I really don't care what kind of beating I take in the lurker thread. If I can't get a game after this, it's OK with me. I spend too much time thinking about and obsessing over the MP games I play. I'm compulsive and can't keep myself from trying too hard. My login time for last turn really was about five hours as I sat in game thinking through every scenario imaginable, trying to find some way out of the morass I was in. I think I succeeded in driving off the Greeks for my efforts but it doesn't change the fact that I'm still going to be eliminated and that nothing I do will ultimately change that outcome. All that remains is to enjoy the game until then, but I haven't much enjoyed the game since my vacation anyway, I kind of lost my interest and mojo at that point. The other thing I could do would be to minimize my time investment while playing out the string, and as evidenced by my five hour session yesterday that's not something I'm capable of doing. I guess that got a bit personal and off topic for my elegant defense planning for the empire, but there it is. I'm not trying to lose but I really don't care what happens at this point, except that I want Greece to die.

So I'm still undecided about what to do. I haven't made all my moves yet, so far I've just killed the knights CH left around. I can still attack his retreating stack and kill the defenders and flank the cats to the point that they'll have to heal for a long time before he tries anything further. In that scenario I'm not reinforcing the west at all and will probably have to just collapse the front and abandon defense up to my capital. I lose three or four cities to plako and gain the satisfaction of bludgeoning CH, who probably doesn't give a damn whether it rains or shines anyway. The other choice is to leave CH and his remaining forces intact, send everything west, probably abandon two front cities to plako anyway, retreat toward my capital, and then try to annihilate plako's forces if he tries to push in further. In that scenario I lose a bunch of cities to plako, don't get to punish CH at all, maybe eventually stop plako...until CH piles back in to my other front in the east while my focus is on plako in the west, at which time I lose cities to CH, and then lose the rest to plako. It seems that the only initiative I really have is deciding who gets my empire. I can't prevent plako from taking cities in any case and I probably can't force him to raze any, either. Whereas I can very likely prevent CH from gaining much, if anything at all, and can possibly help plako make sure CH dies later. In that case I lose an empire and win a Pyrrhic victory of sorts because I'm a vindictive son of a bitch and CH really has pissed me off with his rollicking attack. If it had been Oxy or BaII invading that wouldn't have bothered me, they were invested players. CH just seems like a guy knocking over mailboxes because someone put a club in his hand. Where's the profit? What was the point?

TL;DR - CH couldn't have been a better teammate to plako if he was actually coordinating with him. With his brilliant timing all he's managed to do is reduce my forces and get my remaining units out of position so I can't adequately defend my western border against plako. Unless his war goal all along was to only raze two cities to clear out some land I'd consider it a total failure as an investment. Guess I'll find out later. I'm sure the Greek thread will be a lark to read.

Fun auto promote fact of the day: The AI in its wisdom decided to promote two of my new cats to city raider II. Thanks for wasting the promotions! I wonder if I'm just better off not taking any promotions on new units produced in cities that are under attack by people playing ahead of me in the turn. Auto promote DISENGAGED.

--

I'm leaving turn mostly unplayed, I'll sleep on it and play at the war tomorrow. I'm leaning heavily toward attacking Greece because I'm going to die anyway. I may as well try to deny them any gains at all. A bigger plako means a deader Greece, and I can get satisfaction from that.

--

Preview Edit: And after all that I recounted and found that with a quick worker action I can get an 8th knight on scene to attack the catapult stack. Now I'll have to run the sim again and actually test for odds against the garbage on top of the catapults. I'd still need to win all the rolls in my favor to have a chance to kill the catapults, which isn't guaranteed, but it makes the payoff higher in that I can actually hurt them with just one more knight, possibly killing six catapults (one directly, five flanked) in addition to wiping the other trash. It makes it more likely I'll go for it though. Not because it's rational, but because it's vindictive. We're both dying, I just don't think Greece knows it yet.

[DaveV]

not gaining anything from this war unless they believe plako is a better neighbor than I am. Spoiler: He isn't.

QOTM!

[spacetyrantxenu]

After running the sims again with more specific stack composition it seems I was wrong in my previous assessment about the amount of flanking damage I can do to the catapults. Basically I can kill all the trash on top of the cats and do significant flanking damage to the cats, but I can't kill any of them. Attacking will therefore be kind of senseless because I won't be able to follow up the first attack with a second one to finish destroying the stack. After I attack the cats on a neutral territory tile they'll disappear into Greek lands the next turn and I can't send my knights in blindly after them, nevermind that I'll only get to move two tiles per turn and the cats will accelerate to three tiles per turn back in home culture. So I guess I'll have to wheel westward and fight plako after all.

What that means is I'll be seeing all those catapults again soon, just as soon as CH can pull together enough hitters to go with them. Lovely. I'm sure they'll reappear at an extremely inopportune time and do a nasty rear attack on me.

--

This turn was frustrating to play, I kept getting interrupted by people logging in. I was already in a hurry because little Tyrant didn't take a proper nap and I had to steal an extra half hour of play time by plugging him into a TV show. Parent of the year here, I think. Anyway, I moved stuff west, plako may or may not kill my copper city this turn. If he does he'll have to spend a lot of his catapults to do it. If he just bombards I'll evacuate next turn. I don't really care either way. I wish CH hadn't run away so that I wouldn't have been forced to defend against plako. Since I couldn't inflict significant damage on Greek units this turn I kind of felt forced to defend the west. Whatever, I'm going to do my best to play quicker turns and get less ulcers about this game.

Excuse me, I'll need to string up my child by the toes now, I think he's tearing down the house around us.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I wrote down my thoughts while playing the turn, this may not be very readable and it's too late at night for proofing now.

T151 - Last turn's decision to move units west to counter plako was a mistake. CH has moved seven knights into reach of my knights in a position to threaten my northern border city with him. The city probably can't fall this turn as I have more units defending than he has visible to attack, though if he has more mounted in the first hidden tile along our border he could strike from there. I doubt it though. Anyway, the problem isn't so much a decision of whether or not I can hold the city, it's whether I should kill his knight stack or hammer plako's stack in the west. My knights can hit either target.

Here's the rub. I moved all my catapults west last turn, so I have 15 ready to attack plako's stack this turn. However, I'd really rather plako gain my lands rather than Greece getting anything, so I'm hesitant to spend the cats against plako as long as CH insists on fighting. I'm OK with abandoning the city plako is threatening as it has been whipped down to size 2 now (I squeezed out one last knight for him to kill). As long as CH and plako are both nipping me around separate edges of my land I really can't defend anything without giving free reign to the other. So I think I need to embrace the idea that I will die and just abuse CH for fun until it's over. Fight a delaying action with plako everywhere I can to hold cities until I whip the most units possible, and then send everything in a beeline into Greek territory, pillaging everything as I go. If I do that I'll need to keep my catapults alive to counter the Greek catapult stack that slipped away last turn. If I'm in Greek territory I'll be the one getting hit, not doing the hitting, so they'll have to absorb some hits until I can reach his cities that need to die.

There's a decidedly less attractive third option, though I probably don't have enough boats to do it. I could do a Dunkirk style evacuation to my off-continent city (Farbstoff-Stadt, the dyes city area I took from wetbandit a long time ago). I have three galleys along the southern coast so I could evacuate six units per turn. What would I do with the units when I got them over there? It isn't groundbreaking at this point, but I could try a PB8 Zulu new empire survival plan. There are three immediate flaws with that idea, though. First, there's no guarantee I can successfully get my units evacuated before running out of time to escape. I may get some of the units away only to have the others (with diminished numbers accompanying them) annihilated. Second, I don't want the Greeks to earn any payoff from their stupid war. I can't deny them gains if my army is running away. Third, I really have no desire to play out a long, extended survival scenario again anyway. If I got my army over to the evacuation point there's really no way anyone would try to kill me to take that last city, there would just be no point. So I'd have to log in every turn and end turn. Not fun. Also, there's another possible problem. And this is a strange mechanics thing, but probably explainable in that This Is Pitboss and strange things happen. The espionage panel shows that I need 31 EPs to see Wetbandits graphs (I lost them this turn, had them last turn). F4 shows my EP investment in them at 30/0, which is where it has been for ages on end since I got their graphs. I'm guessing the EP ratio is now my 30 to his X > 0, but that the information hasn't updated on F4 for some reason, probably because This Is Pitboss and strange things happen. All of the mechanics aside, I think it's clear that Wetbandit has decided to start spending EPs on me now where he was never interested in doing so before, even when I took a city from him and could have threatened more damage to him for all he knew. That tells me he's curious about my power situation and, possibly, thinking he may be able to take the land back that I took from him before. If he's at all contemplating attacking me (and why not when I'm already being dogpiled?) he'll be positioning troops toward that end of his territory anyway, so thinking about a PB8-Zulu conquest won't really be an option. If the victim is prepared it can't work because you can't bring reinforcements. You have a fixed amount of ammo, as it goes.

So anyway that's about it for the options I can think of. I think it's telling that I'm enjoying more writing about the turns than playing them at this point. I saw the timer was down to about 14 hours when I first saw my part of the split was available to play, and the first thought I had was that I'd have to play the turn tonight and can't put it off until tomorrow. I guess now I'll have to play the turn....

************

I can send 10 knights + 15 cats + mace + 4 pikes + etc against plako's stack. I ran some sims, the result is that it looks like I can wipe about half of plako's stack and cripple the rest, likely forcing him to retreat and probably saving the husk of the city currently under attack. This is at the cost of all of my seige, though, meaning I won't get to launch a similar strike a second time anywhere else. I don't have the dispersed population available to whip back 15 more cats to quickly replace these. That means that when CH piles everything back in after he regroups, maybe as soon as next turn, he'll begin having success that I can't counter. I find that distasteful. On the other hand, I may not get a second chance to strike hard at either plako's or CH's full army. If I avoid combat for too long I'll die a death of a thousand cuts before I get to hit back. Really, plako, couldn't you be patient and not invade until I'd had a chance to meet the full Greek army? If this were CH's units instead of plako's I wouldn't have even run the sim, I'd have just killed everything I could and been done with it.

or

I can send 9 knights against CH's 7 knights + HA mounted stack. Result 1: Totally wiped stack with just knights, no need for city garrison reinforcement. Result 2: 3 units remained. Result 3: Finished stack with last knight. Result 4: Finished stack with last knight. Result 5: 1 unit remained, would clear with garrison.

The upshot of the sim against CH's mounted stack is that I can clear it out with my knights, at the cost of taking them out of action for a few turns while they heal. Also, it's that many fewer hitters I'd have available when it comes time to use my seige stack. If I move the knights east I can't hit plako this turn, and if I don't hit him this turn I'm basically going to lose cities in the west, there's no way around it.

******

Thinking further about it, I'm assuming that CH is moving his catapult stack north through his internal road network so that it can be applied to my northern border city over where his mounted stack currently is (his knights are there because one killed my sentry chariot and I assume the other units are covering the one that attacked). There's basically no chance he'll attack the city this turn with just those units, they would die horribly against castle walls on a hill unsupported by siege. I invite him to try it, though. With that assumption in place the city is actually not threatened this turn. I assume that he will have his collected stack assembled adjacent to the city on T153, which is 2 turns from now. If I abandon my copper city (which is doomed unless I want to spend my stack against plako) and basically write off whichever city plako targets next (I could lose the next city as soon as T153 if he presses), I'd have a lot of units available to move to the northeast to counter anything CH might try. It would be a bit of a pisser, though, if CH doesn't send his stack at me where I can hit it at the same time plako is capturing cities without much resistance.

Another possibility is that CH has moved the seige stack just outside my view in the south and will attack my less strongly held southern border city as soon as T153. If that happens I'll lose the city, which isn't a great loss as it will be size 2 by then (whips another pike next turn). If he attacks the south I should be able to have my combined anti-plako stack available to hit it (it wouldn't be committed to going north that soon). In that event I should be able to do a lot of damage to him. Anyway, that's a lot of thinking about things that may never happen. Basically I need CH to make an appearance somewhere with most of his army soon so I can hit it before I don't have an empire left to defend. If he doesn't come soon I may have to hit plako, which runs contrary to my overarching goal of screw Greece as much as possible.

***

I spent a worker scouting into Greek territory. I confirmed the 16 catapult stack is headed north, on the tile I expected they'd be on (there's a new road allowing the movement). So it looks like he's going to try for my ivory city where his mounted stack is now. Played turn, plako will probably raze his target next turn, will be interested to see his next move. Meanwhile I've prepared the best I can manage to kill CH's stack if it enters my territory in two turns where I think it will.

Long way to go before this hits zero:

[Dreylin]

Also, there's another possible problem. And this is a strange mechanics thing, but probably explainable in that This Is Pitboss and strange things happen. The espionage panel shows that I need 31 EPs to see Wetbandits graphs (I lost them this turn, had them last turn). F4 shows my EP investment in them at 30/0, which is where it has been for ages on end since I got their graphs. I'm guessing the EP ratio is now my 30 to his X > 0, but that the information hasn't updated on F4 for some reason, probably because This Is Pitboss and strange things happen.

Isn't there a modifier to EP costs based on the ratio of overall EP spend by the 2 civs concerned? I think that's the percentage displayed next to the leader in the Espionage screen. Assuming equal EP spend, the graphs first become visible at 34/0; if you've had them at 30EPs, I think that means you racked up the EPs faster than he did and secured a positive modifier; now it sounds like his overall spend is closing on yours and the modifier is going down. Of course there might be something weird & pitbossy going on as well / instead...

Bummer about the War; give 'em both hell!