[SPOILERS] Blut und Eisen: Deutsche Einigungskriege

[spacetyrantxenu]

I'm not sure, but it probably isn't anything to do with me having generated more EPs than him. The only boost to that I've had since I started the game was building a castle in my capital.

[spacetyrantxenu]

T152 - Plako has sent his first musketeer into the theater. Since this war halted my research with only 25% of Gunpowder complete I won't be able to field pinch promotions. He captured the copper city, as expected. Well, I say as expected, I half thought he would raze it, but he's in this to gain land.

Interestingly, he's using spies in the next front city, looks like he's spreading culture. Maybe to shorten the period of resistance after capturing the city? Or to instantly pop borders once resistance is over? That's probably it. Give him credit, he uses all the tools in the toolbox. I mostly ignore the espionage game (in MP and SP) because I don't enjoy tinkering with it but if there's anything plako can do to give himself an advantage, he does it. That's part of what makes him such a good player. Anyway, I had to abandon the city under threat this turn because plako has over 20 hitters that can attack after he knocks down most of the defensive bonus with his cats/trebs. He would then spends a few more cats against the city defenders and wipe everything, losing only a few cats, so it is not worth giving him combat there. I'll withdraw the defenders and live to die another day. I'll send the garrison NE toward my size two gold city so that it can escape toward my capital if he decides that's the next target. From his siege positioning, though, I think plako is planning to capture my south before taking on the area around my capital and moai city. That's good for me because those are the highest population cities remaining under threat and it will take some time to convert all the population into units. By going south I get more time to do that, and of course, send the units produced to fight Greece.

On the other front, I captured and deleted three of CH's workers that he left uncovered on his southern coast.




I don't know why he didn't cover the workers even though they're in a hot war zone. My galley was clearly visible. I also pillaged a clams tile along his northern coast with another galley, because if he has a navy somewhere it isn't near me. I could have captured and deleted another two Greek workers in the north this turn if I had loaded a unit onto my galley a few turns back. If I'd loaded a pair of knights (that I couldn't spare) back then I could have razed a coastal size 12 Greek city this turn as well, since CH apparently felt confident that my boat was empty and couldn't attack. That was a foolish risk, he had no way of knowing, and it's a small thing to just move two more units into a big city defended by a single obsolete phalanx so that a lone galley can't possibly burn the city. Or...to whip a trireme and sink the galley in the first place rather than accept risk behind the front lines and getting your seafood pillaged.

I moved/scouted/deleted a worker into Greek territory to find the catapult stack and again it was about where I expected it. It's in the Greek city of Britta, positioned so that it can move into my territory next turn. CH also moved a few units out of Chang in the north toward the cat stack -- two pikes and three maces. Anyway my previous assessment looks correct. He has everything positioned to move into my territory next turn so that he can then try to attack my ivory city on T154. The attack was supposed to include the 16 cats + 11 or 12 knights + a few pikes and maces, from what I could see. Let's see if he still wants to try his luck without the knight stack. My only fear about eliminating the knights is that he won't invade if he doesn't feel like he has enough hitters, and then I won't get a chance to kill his catapult stack. But if I don't attack the knights and he buries the catapults under all those other units I won't have enough knights available to flank them all away anyhow, so I guess I'll just kill what I can this turn and hope he's insane enough to move in with the rest next turn anyway in spite of the missing hitters. If he does I'll be able to bring my collateral to bear and try to mop up the rest. If he doesn't, I guess that means plako will have a little more fighting to do to conquer Greece when he's done with me because I won't have been able to eliminate most of the Greek army for him. I went ahead and killed CH's mounted stack at the cost of three catapults. Maybe he'll still move in next turn, here's to hoping.




Around the empire I did the usual whips where possible. Most cities get whipped every other turn now, until they run out of population. I'm taking it a bit slower in cities that aren't under threat yet, but plako likely won't be picking up any cities larger than size two. And CH won't be picking up any cities at all.




I haven't seen any movement from Wetbandit though I did get his graphs back. Maybe it was just the EP inflation thing, he still hasn't spent any EPs on me.

And off topic, my scouting chariot abroad stumbled into a nasty little scene. Looks like Caledorn is just about dead. Boldly has a big stack of knights outside the current capital. So I won't be the next to die in any case. Also, FinHarry got a nice event. I'm guessing the reward they took was to get a free flanking promotion on all their knights. Like they needed that. I think we need to take another look at the combat promotion events and quests. Things like this really don't have a place in a MP game. It would be fun in SP for sure and makes plenty of sense there, but just like the free combat promotions plako got, this kind of thing can have a severely unbalancing effect on a MP game. I don't imagine their neighbors are very happy about that event.

I'm still waiting for the RNG to give me a bunch of free giant death robots so I can clear these invaders out of my land. That's going to happen, right?

[spacetyrantxenu]

I'm still waiting for the RNG to give me a bunch of free giant death robots so I can clear these invaders out of my land. That's going to happen, right?

The western front, 880 AD.

Wenn Sie die 48 Einheitenstapel in der Mitte meines Territoriums ignorieren, habe ich alles andere gelöscht. Ist dies nicht ein Sieg der eigenen? Ich habe alle deutschen Städte, die bleiben wieder vereint, keines nun unter verdammt Feind Kontrolle bleiben. Die ganze Welt hasst Deutschland und versuchen, uns zu zerstören, aber wir trotzen sie alle! Wir werden sie alle bis zum Ende kämpfen! Und dass sie uns hassen umso mehr, lassen Sie uns hoffen, dass es so ist! Denn wie wir letztendlich besiegt und sie siegreich sind, werden sie so schwer verwundet, dass kein Sieg kann süß schmecken. Tatsächlich ist alles, was sie fühlen Reue und Schmerz, Trauer um ihre Toten, ihre verkrüppelt, und ihre verwundeten. Sorry für den Tag sie jemals im Kampf gegen Deutschland konzipiert! Wir werden weg sein, aber ihr Leiden wird zu ertragen, und wie bitter und boshaft, wie das ist, wird, dass UNSER SIEG sein!

The western front, 900 AD.

T155 - Plako has assembled all his attack units onto one tile SW of Minzeflussdorf. He has taken three cities around the edge of my empire and has as many units in my territory as I do. I have 21 knights, he has 22. I have 14 catapults, he has 13, plus 5 trebuchets. He's bringing musketeers in now, too, up to 5 now. I'm down several build queues and have whipped the rest mostly into oblivion. Obviously time and production are on his side. At equal present strength in theater (if you could call it that, since I have to defend all my cities and he only has to attack one at a time) the cause is obviously lost, and that's ignoring the fact that I'm still at war with Greece and that CH will probably now only move in once I've committed my strength to attacking plako. So in any event the war is lost, it's just a matter of when I lose it.

I can keep trading cities for time, but that no longer is important, really. I've mostly whipped the units that can matter. At this point plako's production advantage is simply too great to overcome by delaying for time. About all I can do now is hit him and hope to do significant damage, so that his conquest comes at some kind of cost. I mean, he's already paying a great economic cost to buy my land, since all these units he's producing in a caste/workshop economy aren't being used to build things that directly speed research, things I assume the contenders to win the game are spending their hammers on right now. Plako is having to spend his hammers investing in land so he can try to catch up (too late though), so there's a the up front cost to his war. But maybe I can kill enough units that he has to spend more time building more replacements to finish me off and get to the returns portion of his investment. I just want to make the upfront costs higher, the returns lower, and the payoff window later because that's all I can accomplish against him at this point. Not victory, but delayed dividends. Prosperity delayed is prosperity denied, at lest for a time.

The spiteful, vindictive side of me regrets what I'm about to do, though. Greece may well get to move in and pick off my two northern cities soon, which I will definitely be indignant about. If there's any way I can manage to deny him those while still resisting plako I'll do it. But it's time to hit back somewhere against someone. Plako is in theater, CH is not, so I'm going after plako. I'm going to try and recapture the three cities plako has taken from me so far during his campaign against me. He has so many units accumulated in his stack (48, 14 of which are siege) that I couldn't inflict grievous loss on it in any event, even if my siege was in range. But I can at least make him walk slowly through my culture for a few more turns as he backtracks and retakes the cities I'm about to retake. This will be a temporary gain and a permanent loss, since I can't replace my units that are about to die, but I'm not going to get a better chance to attack smaller stacks of his units spread around after this, and attacking small stacks is really the only chance I have to kill any appreciable numbers of units. Once I lose Minzeflussdorf (next turn) I'm not going to have a culture+roads mobility advantage that allows me to fork several targets anymore, so I have to make the play now, even as feeble and temporary as it is.

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward

The battles went well, I only lost one bad roll, losing a 95% battle of a knight against a wounded WE. I'll take it. I liberated all three cities, at least for the moment.




When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!

Moments of satisfaction are fleeting at this stage of the game. At least I feel good looking at this turn's portal log:




It obviously won't last, but neither will I in this game and this is about as close to a moral victory as I'm going to get. So here's the western theater as of the end of T155:


The western front, ~919 AD.

In espionage mechanics news, Plako's espionage/spreading culture trick worked as expected, so even if I hadn't abandoned my spice/whale city last turn (that I recaptured momentarily this turn) he'd have overrun my position anyway. As soon as the espionage-precultured city came out of revolt for him it had popped borders, allowing his mobile stack walkup access to the city. Neat trick, maybe I'll get to use that one some day. I had dry whipped a spy out of the threatened whale city before he captured it last turn, so maybe I'll get to do something fun with it. Unfortunately in the mod it costs way too many EPs to poison city wells, even Greek ones.

Around the empire I made the few whips I could. My capital is a shell of its former glory, damn the Greeks and French. But it's provided another catapult for next turn. Elsewhere, a few more miscellaneous units. The recaptured cities are configured for max MFG and building are wealth, along with the fatally threatened Minzeflussdorf (which I've abandoned the defense of given the adjacent position of plako's unstoppable death stack). Those four cities which have 5 population among them will produce 86 gold this turn, if you can believe it. That's about the best I could get out of them. I'm saving gold for Gunpowder again, no more unit upgrades. Hopefully I'll make it to pinch promotions and will be able to bleed plako a touch more. There isn't much else I can research that will matter anyway.

Tangential to the main action, and maybe plako reported it, he took some unkind rolls and lost a naval engagement along our northern coast, losing four triremes on the attack and getting zero kills. I withdrew for repairs, but hurray to the German navy! My southern "fleet" withdrew further and will be replenished by another trireme next turn, as they continue protecting my galleys that are still busy ferrying units about along the southeast coast between the one major production center I have left down there and the war theater. It won't last forever, but while it does I'll keep trying to bleed my enemies while I can.




Happy November! DEATH TO THE LAWLESS ENEMY AGGRESSORS! LONG LIVE GERMANY!




Preview edit: Sadly, I took a look at the portal and I didn't even hold all those cities long enough to post a report. Plako took two cities from me. I assume they would be Minzeflussdorf in the center of my empire (left undefended against a 48 unit stack) and SchafSchalchten in the southwest, which was only guarded by the victorious axe that finished the liberation attack. What I don't know is how many other units I lost in that area, or back up around Pfennigspeck where I had positioned quite a number of units, hoping to force him to send his army back west. It may well be that he decides to just forge ahead with his army and leave my forces encircled, or he could have really hammered my damaged attack force with his siege. I don't know and really don't care. All I know is that, at least as of T155, the German Empire held.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!
"Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

[spacetyrantxenu]

T156 - Plako razed Minzeflussdorf as expected. There would have been no way to garrison that city completely surrounded by my culture. His army moved back toward Pfennigspeck, which I again evacuated. Most units retreated back toward my capital, but a few followed a different plan. Plako had also reconquered SchafSchlachten (the border city down by Marseilles) but only garrisoned the city with one musketeer. One C4 knight took care of the musketeer and I now have seven knights of various levels of health in the city. I don't expect he can hit the city and retake it on his next turn, unless he has quite a few knights and musketeers in the fog behind Marseilles. What is interesting about the situation for now, is this (I call it the Marseilles Option):




My spy shows a garrison that looks vulnerable to the forces I have available next turn. If he doesn't reinforce I'll try to raze it. From my reading of cultural borders in the area I don't think he can bring any of his main stack to defend even after capturing Pfennigspeck again, so he'll either have to reinforce from any units trickling forward (I expect more musketeers and knights) or move the garrison from Lyons, whatever that consists of. My spy will be able to help in that regard next turn, but of course by then the dye is already cast in terms of whether I'll be able to overcome the defense or not. If he brings sufficient units to bear I'll just remove the knights from the border city back into my interior and abandon the city again, and wait for the next time he captures it. I'm hoping to force him to raze everything, so I'll continue doing the hit and run attacks until I run out of knights to attack with.




I'll probably lose my whales city again next turn since I again evacuated its defender. In the meantime, it's building wealth for me. If I lose it I'll try to get it back if he again doesn't garrison it. And if he does garrison it, I'll try to kill the defenders. Perhaps I can force a raze there, too.




The cat and mouse game continues. In the meantime...I still don't know what CH is doing. He's still sitting on his hands and slowly building up his power again it seems. He missed a chance to attack the north while I was fighting down in my southwest. The bulk of my army is now back at my capital within reach of the north, so if he moves in now he'll have to fight me. Wait and see with him, I guess.




Power report: Proof that I still have a force in being. So what if it spends more time running around in circles avoiding a pitched battle? That's the only way I'll keep it intact and keep myself in the game. Once the hammer falls, it's curtains for me. Keep dancing!




Bonus time: Isn't this ghastly? But that power number is still respectable. It's higher than CH's at least, and that's surprising for this stage of the game.

[spacetyrantxenu]

T157 - Plako covered Marseilles adequately so there was no sense throwing away knights in a raze attack. I withdrew my units into my interior. I sent my spy forward into Lyons, and the garrison of that tile is interesting. I found 2 catapults, four trebuchets, and a morale medic 3 archer....So plako spent his recent General on the archer. Once again the free combat 1 promotion on his archery units pays off. That was a seriously great event he got. Well, that and the free combat one on his triremes.




Anyway, the other units in the city are a pair of workers. I would expect their purpose to be to build a road on the tile 1N of the rice so that a stack of musketeers/knights could approach Meeresfrüchte in one turn, cutting it off from reinforcements. It makes me wonder how much time I have to burn the population in that city, but it's been producing so well that it's been whipping a knight basically every other turn (whip, overflow, add one turn production to avoid the whip penalty, whip again). It's hard to improve much on that in terms of output, so this city may well end up captured with some population intact. I'm still producing knights there because they can escape to the capital if the city comes under threat. I don't see much use in stacking in as many longbows as possible at this point, as it would just force plako to spend his siege stack here. He'd lose catapults, I'd lose longbows and the city, and it wouldn't really change the battle situation all that much. He wouldn't have to spend so much siege that I could freely collateral his stack and really try to wipe it. I don't have enough hitters available for that anyway.

So I'm just holding the fort at my capital for now. I did send my siege stack north toward Stoßzahn-Stadt because I think CH will try his hand up there soon. He's trickling units forward as he produces them, it looks like. At least I think he is; the number of knights and macemen in the area slowly increases turn after turn. It will be kind of funny if he keeps delaying and finally invades about the same time plako's army gets up there. It would be nice to hammer the Greek stack and let the French mop up my forces and win the field. I can imagine a situation where I crippled both my forces and the Greeks', only to see plako declare war on CH and wipe the remainder of his stack while it's damaged. I'd probably chortle in my joy if that were to come to pass.




In other news, plako captured (abandoned) Wurzig-Wale again, and razed it this time. I lost a 71% roll in a knight vs. musketeer battle, had to clean up with a second knight to eliminate the unit responsible for razing the city. So far plako's earnings from the war consist of presently holding Pfennigspeck (which I expect he'll be able to keep this time) and razing two of my cities. I've abandoned SchafSchlachten again, which he'll surely retake next turn, but I'm not sure if I'll get another opportunity to liberate it again. It's getting harder to keep my units in position to counter his stack's location, as it's closer to my capital now. When I lose the capital I'm going to lose the cultural protection that has allowed my free movement up to now. Without that cover I'll be exposed on roads in neutral territory, at which point either plako or CH could catch me in the open and reduce my fighting force. Obviously that has to be delayed as long as possible. Hence, sending risky forays to recapture my cities is probably less likely than it was before the fall of Minzeflussdorf. When it fell I lost a lot of cultural coverage across the south of the empire.

Still fighting:

[Commodore]

Let 'em take only dust and bones.

[spacetyrantxenu]

This will require a few sims to be run. Sorry for pausing the game but I can't build a sim and run it in under an hour, as that's how much time my play window has before both my son arises from a nap and before the clock expires.

Current state, CH finally moved in. I have to decide whether I can kill enough units to be worth spending my strength, or if I should withdraw and hit him elsewhere, abandoning my north. Either option is valid -- if I unite all my units and ignore my own defense I can do a lot of damage to him while his units are stuck in my north. The main thing I need to sim here is how much collateral his 22 catapults will absorb when mine attack the stack. That's going to eat up a ton of my hits and may make attacking the stack impractical.

The east front:




The Duncan Option:




Duncan is basically a slam dunk to do it. I don't know if it will succeed or not, but that would probably require two bad rolls to fail. There should be a size 12 city razed this turn. As for my own size five city, we shall see.

[spacetyrantxenu]

I don't have time to write a full report right now, as I should have gone to bed hours ago, but here's the short version for T161. Both plako and CH are going to be pissed when they log in and see the next turn. CH is missing a stack of 12 units that were going to attack me in the north next turn and he probably can't avenge himself against my units that did the job. That combat spawned a Great General in an extremely opportune location, enabling me to take a shot at plako. One 75% battle later, and we have this in the west:



I had just finished Gunpowder this turn so that was good timing on the pinch promotion. And the morale promotion.

In the east, CH is going to get an unfortunate surprise when he logs in. He's probably going to receive the same city burning treatment next turn:




If I've been tracking his visible units and his power graph properly I'm assuming that he can't have that many units defending his cities behind the front. If I can get into the back line cities maybe I can wreck a few of them before he brings sufficient force to stomp my stack. In any case, I've owed Greece a burned city for a long, long time.

If you fight with me, you're gonna have a bad time.

I mean, you'll probably win, but you're gonna have a bad time until then.

Edit: I guess I'll finally need a new poll option. The winning poll vote turns out to have been "Knigs vs. Pikes". Too bad no one chose that option!

[Ceiliazul]

Props on your method of defending. Even with an axe to grind against Greece, you're defending both sides and not going all ahab on CheaterHater.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Well, about chasing our white whale...we're quickly moving toward the next phase of the game where what plako does matters less and less and, instead, the prosecution of eastern theater action is what moves the narrative forward. The secondary theme will be discovering the timings and processes of plako's ultimate and inevitable continental supremacy, and what he does once that is achieved. After both of those stories unfold we'll be left to dealing with the matter of final German elimination, which will either require someone to undertake a naval assault or the entrance of Wetbandit into the conflict.

My expectations are that: plako will have mainland Germany subsumed within ten turns; my invasion of Greece will result in the liquidation of the entire force I appropriated for the invasion, along with a currently unknown number of Greek cities, probalby in under seven or eight turns (or however long it takes to get his siege on the scene with enough hitters to fend off my attack); no one will bother to eliminate me for quite a while, and if I am not eliminated soon after being reduced to the one extra-continental city that I will not be eliminated for a long time afterward, since my intervening production will be employed in making my conquest costly and possibly unprofitable. This third point is obviously conjecture and without any basis in evidence, but seems likely to me. If I build a large defense force who is going to bother breaking it to capture one city? The key to enabling play of the long defense scenario is that I will need to begin the One City Challenge with a substantial existing defense force, to deter an early conquest attempt by any of my near term war-wearied enemies. To that end, the coming turns and plako's movements will determine the timing of my final abandonment of the German mainland and the preservation of the necessary OCC defense forces.

So that's a lot of vague surmising about the upcoming turns. I meant to write out a longer report about what happened last turn, since it was particularly eventful, so here's the late report. By now the portal log shows that the scenario has moved beyond what I'll report here, but I can cover that later whenever I play the current turn. The report below is accurate as of last turn, T161.

-----

To set the scene, in recent turns CH had captured my northern-most city, Stoßzahn-Stadt (Tusk City). He had a basically unstoppable amount of siege available combined with plenty of hitters to overwhelm my defense, so I made a decent stand with just as many units as I thought would be required to make him spend some of his siege. The battle didn't go as well as I hoped it would and he didn't suffer too terribly in the hammer exchange, but I had withdrawn much of my power from the city prior to the battle to be reserved for future use. At the end of T160 (last turn), the map looked like this:




Local geography, namely the next city to the west (Krabbeweizen), dictated that CH would have to make Krabbeweizen the next target for capture. Ignoring it and moving on to my capital would not have been a safe move, given the distance to the capital. So after the fall of Stoßzahn-Stadt I was certain Krabbeweizen would be the next target. I withdrew my regional defense to the south out of view, but still within range to attack if CH rushed forward to the hill tile east of Krabbeweizen. He could have only seen my units if he had placed a sentry unit on that hill, which he did not do. So the trap was set. (Ignore the catapult adjacent to his stack, I moved it there from the main stack prior to stopping to take the screen shot). Here's the map at the start of T161:




I assumed that if CH moved forward immediately from Stoßzahn-Stadt to attack the apparently weakly defended next city that he would target the hill tile his mounted force ended up on. I thought that to be more likely than choosing to occupy the grass tile 1N, since that tile didn't provide any defense bonus. My assumption of that tile selection led me to position my troops just out of visibility (excluding sentries) but within attack range. The composition of my stack included the combined evacuated defense force from Stoßzahn-Stadt and most of the non-archer units from my capital, which I expected to soon be targeted by plako (as a result of my moves the prior turn to remove my mounted stack from the capital for use elsewhere). As the screenshot indicates, my units were mostly anti-mounted in purpose, plus enough siege to get the blood flowing. The critical point to this plan (and the main reason I'm writing all this out in such detail now) is that CH unwisely rushed forward with his mounted units and unnecessarily exposed them to attack, out of either impatience to capture the next city or from not seeing the possibility of a hidden attack force. A sentry unit would have been helpful here. His stack was exposed because he separated his forward attack stack from the 18 catapults left inside Stoßzahn-Stadt. That was the critical mistake, and I'm writing this now to explain the flaw for post-game analysis. If he had kept his attack units united with his siege units, my lesser stack of catapults would have been utterly ineffective at causing collateral damage and I could not have wiped out his stack. That was the reason I had abandoned Stoßzahn-Stadt to begin with, the siege stack was impossible to overcome with the limited number of siege flanking units I had available in the area. I hoped he would make a mistake at some point and separate some of his force from his siege, and he left an opening here for me to exploit. I didn't take a picture of the battle log, but this was what the area looked like by the end of the turn:




Even in taking two completely terrible combat rolls (including a 74% roll doing no damage and losing a 94% battle), I still had enough units on hand to wipe his stack. The worst part, for him, is that he really can't even counterattack my weakened stack and kill the damaged units. That's because my stack is two tiles within my culture, so he can only hit the stack with mounted units...and I just killed almost all the mounted units in the area. Even if he did have more units to attack me, he'd be attacking into a stack comprised of anti-mounted defenders, which is a bad proposition under any circumstances. And that's before we get to the part of the report where CH probably doesn't want to move any further into my territory now anyway. More on that later, as I'm reporting the turn in the sequence that I played it. To the point, CH still has a huge force in the area, but I don't believe he'll advance into my territory with it right now after losing as many hitters as he did. He has almost twice as many catapults as hitters on hand, which isn't a very useful or safe attack posture.

Moving on, the combat against CH had an important outcome in terms of operations along the western front:



Meeresfrüchte (Seafood) is my western Moai city on the naval front with plako. Its positioning is isolated compared to the rest of my empire, although I nominally still retain cultural control in a contiguous segment in that area. Effective control, though, belongs to plako with his huge mounted/musketeer stack stationed in Pfennigspeck. Other than sending mounted units from Meeresfrüchte directly into my capital I can't safely move units through that corridor because plako could snipe them during his next turn (unless I happened to clear out any musketeers he may have scouting the area from time to time). So basically Meeresfrüchte is isolated along the western front and can't do much other than see to its own defenses at this point. Except that Great General spawn does open up the possibility of a morale knight attacking the nearby French city of Lyons, if it has an insubstantial garrison. My spy had recently been in the city and noted a garrison consisting only of five trebuchets on the way to the front, so it was possible plako would have considered the city well behind the front lines and safe, and moved extra garrison forward to join the mega stack at Pfennigspeck. And from the current turn screenshots I saw the additional trebuchets, if there was ever any doubt as to their intended use. Anyway, my spy wasn't close enough to check Lyons so I had to risk an archer to venture forward and look. In the decision it wasn't a difficult choice to make. At worst I would lose or have to delete a more or less useless (at this point) city defender. At best I would find a garrison I could hope to defeat with one morale knight. I moved the archer forward to reveal the garrison, then joined the General with the knight on the way forward:




The sight of a singular unpromoted (and recently arrived or produced) musketeer did not strike fear in the heart of Great General Helmuth von Moltke (the Elder). As noted in the prior turn report, I had just finished Gunpowder to unlock pinch promotions and the morale promotion enabled reaching the city with movement points available for an attack. At 75% that was about the best I could have realistically hoped for. I fired the GG Knight cruise missile, and:




To my relief it appears my research grant has been funded by the French!




I wonder how much perfectly serviceable infrastructure was destroyed during the capture. I'm guessing quite a bit, although I didn't scrutinize the map prior to the attack (I already take long enough playing these turns, and I didn't think of it at the time). Viva la Resistance, eh? They won't be angry after I've put the city to the torch.




That's better! I didn't delete the victorious knight. I expect plako can clean it up on his next turn with whatever happens to be nearby, but after that kick in the stomach he deserves a chance to kill the offending unit. On a related note, when I razed CH's city of Duncan a few turns ago I opted to not delete the victorious mace. I got a lucky roll and it killed the first unit that tried to clean it up, so you never know, maybe leaving the wounded unit will accomplish more than feeding an insignificant amount of XP here. Anyway, I'm sure plako's revenge will be swift. Not to give anything away, but I already knew he'd capture my capital the next turn, so I don't have any heartburn over that. It was just a size 2 city anyway. Back to the report at hand, this is the state of the western war at the end of T161:




I had abandoned defense of my capital, except for two longbows. Against the French sledgehammer as presently arrayed any additional defenders would just die uselessly. I only left the longbows in the hope of scoring a cheap knight kill or two. And I really don't want plako to have to spend his siege fighting me, since I'm intending to withdraw everything I can outside the battle theater now anyway. I want him to spend his power against Greece. May they not outlive me! One unfortunate note, the lone musketeer on the hill marked on the map is problematic, as I didn't have any units available to clear him off the hill after I wasted a C1/pinch knight against him and did no damage at all.... The problem of course is that he'll score a cheap kill on one of my units migrating toward the southern port city Reis und Sobe (Rice and Gravy) and will have complete information about my movements in the area. Unfortunate, but I couldn't do anything about it after taking the bad RNG rolls in the process of wiping CH's northern stack.

Why not? What about that knight stack that had recently evacuated the capital? Its prior role was to serve as a (partial) counterweight to plako's massive stack, hoping to delay his movement on my capital. But once CH invaded the north I immediately sent my mounted stack south and east, out of sight of the Greek border but within range for future exploratory action. This is the area positioning last turn, as of T160:




I had sixteen knights in the area, but I have indeed invoked Captain Ahab and am now chasing my white whale eastward. That's what all those boats are for! This isn't the ideal invasion force, especially lacking suitable amounts of siege and anti-melee units, but I'm hoping to make up for that with sheer quantity of knights against hopefully poorly defended rear line cities, if I can make a breakthrough at the front. Since I won't be able to replenish this attack force at all I couldn't spare anything to clear out plako's musketeer. I'd rather he have a bit of a positioning and information advantage than fall one knight short of taking a Greek city somewhere down the line. I'm chasing the dragon whale here. So with the T160 image above in mind, my moves for T161 were pretty straightforward:




The four galleys disgorged their payloads onto the tile SW of the city, bringing my meager assemblage of collateral into play. The excessive number of pikes was because that's what I had available -- I've been whipping a lot of pikes since CH and plako began their campaigns, assuming I'd be dying by knight. After abandoning a number of cities I've accumulated quite a lot of pikes, and they were stationed nearby, so they went on the boats to fill them up. The two knights in the forward stack were to serve as anti-melee, just on the basis of their higher base strength, since I don't have any proper melee defenders in the stack (only one axe, if that still counts). I didn't know what was in CH's city (Jeff), but I was hoping a knight swarm with limited collateral would suffice, given that his own army is happily unable to make it in time for this battle. I think my force will do the job next turn, the question is if I can make headway deeper into Greece. I guess we'll see if he abandons the city or makes me use the catapults. I hope he defends here rather than collecting units elsewhere, but that will have to wait for the next turn to be seen. In any case, if it wasn't abundantly clear already, the battle plan will be to invoke General Sherman as I take a merry stroll through whichever parts of Greek territory seem most susceptible to plundering and burning. You know, for the research grants.

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Odds and ends for the report, here's the end of turn overview map:




German territory is going to be completely fragmented next turn after the fall of my capital. At that point further reinforcements of units moving south toward the evacuation city of Farbstoff-Stadt will be basically cut off and exposed to elimination by plako's stack. I think by now any unit that hasn't made its way south will have to turn north and await evacuation toward Meeresfrüchte. Or Greece. That should be enough to explain the galley builds underway along the northern coast.

One final look at the husk of a once great city.




This will all be purple soon. Well, hopefully some purple and the rest open land for resettlement.




For people who like this kind of information, some statistics on the carnage up to now:




I probably can't defend the excessive building of Walls, except that I'm a paranoid player and always believe people are going to try to kill me (well, I'm right!). I'll say in my own defense they were all built with stone and so only cost 25 hammers each, and that I went on to build a number of castles (with stone) that had a marginal economic benefit, as well as the obviously useful additional city defense. I don't regret the Walls, I regret being dogpiled rather than fighting a one on one battle where I could have made a meaningful stand behind any number of those Walls I ended up being forced to abandon. Another lament is the number of forges. I wish I had built about four or five less, because I was finishing those in the last few turns before the dogpile happened. I'd have rather had those hammers spent on units, in retrospect. The number completed doesn't show that I had about three more forges almost complete, which were total wastes as investments. Oh, and obviously I needed more stables, but those were going to be ordered up (with more knights) right after the forges finished. The timing for this war was just atrocious for me. I was very close to spawning a golden age, with forges, with grown cities, on workshops, and ready to run a modern workshop economy. Spectacular failure in timing there.

The combat numbers tell their own story. I've killed my fair share of knights. I don't feel bad about losing so many catapults, very few of them died uselessly. Not pictured is my own highest casualty unit, archers. I think I've lost 20 something of those. I thought I was building too many of them as I was going through the game, but my paranoia and desire to Defend Every City kept pushing me to build more city defense. They didn't make much of a difference in the era of knights, predictably. But who knows, maybe they were relevant in getting me into this era without being significantly attacked sooner.

Here's the T161 power chart. I expect it will look significantly different next turn:




And finally, a pair of demographic screens. Since I was last to play on T160 I grabbed F9 at the start of T161. Then I took another shot after I finished playing my turn. The change in power numbers is informative:




From 11th to 15th in power:




I'll be curious to see the power graph in a few turns and see where CH is after the combat from this turn (and after the next few turns as well, if my attacks are successful). And maybe I can get my power back to a respectable level, 15th just doesn't cut it!