[SPOILERS] Blut und Eisen: Deutsche Einigungskriege

[spacetyrantxenu]

T162 - Clobbering time! AKA, where I get some revenge against the Greeks. (Sort of) short report here, I have to be up early tomorrow morning.

I forgot to take a picture of the garrison before I started, but it was basically the same as last turn I think, except he used whatever promotions he had available. By the last unit this is what we had:




Another research grant.




Lots of work for our firing squads now.




Ready, aim, fire!




I first promoted a knight to sentry and sent him forward onto the hill near the capital to get a look around and make sure I wouldn't be putting my stack at risk to anything visible. Not much I can do about whatever is in the fog, but I still think I have time to get this done before the catapults arrive.




I found an honorary warrior in the capital and an archer in the other visible city. Jackpot. CH revolted into nationhood this turn so I'm sure he'll draft maces in every city in this area starting next turn. It's kind of crazy, although this is an enormous map he and I have so little territory that it's strange to be able to draft five units per turn. Obviously the happiness hit isn't important when you're facing the loss of cities. He'll draft, I'll attack anyway. That's how this war will play out. He'll also whip defenders (I forgot to double check but if he took a turn of anarchy to get into nationhood he'd have had to swap into slavery at the same time if he wasn't already in it before, and I think he was). So I could see quite a bit more defenders than the single unit I saw here, but I'll take my chances, I have 11 healthy knights, I have to be able to kill something else with that. If the capital's defenses look too strong next turn I'll move to the tile marked KANSAS. Veteran PB5 readers will recall that any tile labeled KANSAS can fork an entire continent. Well, I see two cities here and it looks like there's more land to the east of the capital so maybe I can get a third city if there's a city on that tile visible 3E1S of the capital. That would be great, and dilemma inducing for him. If he defends the capital too well maybe I can still get one (or two) more cities. If the capital defenses seem impossible to overcome I still have a chance to withdraw my surviving knights south back toward my boats if I can clear out the culture from Annie. I want to abuse CH as much as possible but not with a complete disregard for sanity. If the attack looks hopeless I'll try to save whatever units I can for my OCC.

In the west (and north now) I had a major setback this turn. I had completely missed that once plako captured my capital this turn he would have a clear shot at my stack that was wounded from wiping CH's northern mounted force on the previous turn.




To make things slightly more annoying, CH did score a kill or two himself, since plako's culture removal opened the roads for him, too. I don't know, even if I had seen this outcome I think I still would have attacked CH's stack. It wasn't like I was ever going to get a better chance to kill that many of his important units. It just makes the hammer trade a lot less favorable. Oh well, the net result was the same as pretty much anywhere else in this campaign. I'm bleeding Greece dry while holding off France as long as I can. Sometimes plako gets a better body blow on me than I intended, but the outcome isn't terrible. His strength wasn't terribly reduced in the bargain, so he can spend it against Greece later while I try to outlive them.

General overview, plako holds the center and all advantage on the battlefield now. I won't be making any further attempts into his territory, I've played all my cards in the west. It's all about the Battle of the Bulge in the east and seeing just how far I can break through before I'm stopped. I'm holding the fort at my new (temporary) capital, but plako is two turns from having that as well, I think, depending on what he does with the stack of knights in my old capital. I dry whipped a knight this turn in the new capital and will dry whip a mace the next turn. I think I can evacuate both of those units along with most of the garrison, and I won't need all that excess population soon.




The units will all die against plako's siege if I leave them in the city, but I may have more opportunities for fund raising if I load them on galleys and sail east.

I didn't include the event log with all the combat from last turn, so here's the logs from T161 and T162 (read each image from bottom to top for sequential order):










End of turn demographics, it's looking grim now!




I grabbed the updated power graphs for T163 when I rolled the turn. Yeeouch! Plako is going to love this. He may not like that I'm burning his future Greek cities, though.




That looks like mutually assured destruction to me. Mission accomplished?

Edit: Looks like CH already played his next turn, just as soon as I rolled it. And whipped/drafted heavily. The portal shows that his score decreased from 577 to 559. So yeah, more things to kill next turn.

[spacetyrantxenu]

[spacetyrantxenu]

T195 - Where does the time go?

[Ceiliazul]

Lol, love the logo. Thanks for the report... why are you still alive?

[spacetyrantxenu]

I'm still alive because I'm too mean to die.

[spacetyrantxenu]

So this is way overdue and completely irrelevant at this point but I feel like writing something of a catch up report, so here it is. Remember back in the old days (see up a few posts, the turn report for T162...46 turns ago...five months ago) when I used to have an empire? No, well I don't remember it either but I have screenshots that said I did. Anyway I had an empire and then lost it when attacked from both sides. The quickest summary possible from that war is that I obviously lost the war from the start and made a determination to punish the initial aggressor, Greece, as much as possible. I was definitely going to lose every city on the French-German-Greek continent so it was a matter of finding out who would get what (plako or Cheater Hater) and how much I could make it cost for each of them. Finally, that moves us to my primary mission that I've played the game under for the last, well, 60 turns ever since that war began: Live longer than Greece. This is a grudge mode of the first order, but before getting into that I had to die as honorably as possible to the French. I think plako would agree if asked that I put up a decent or at least fair fight on his front while dedicating my strength to killing as many of CH's units as I could manage. Those were the operational parameters during the dying phase of the war. Mission accomplished, I suppose. I fought plako a bit, fought CH a lot more, and made sure plako got most of my cities as I evacuated what forces I could to use against CH later on.

Later on began after I was ejected from the mainland and began playing my One City Challenge on T165 (November 20th). From that point I made peace with plako and stayed at war with CH. I had made two evacuations of units from the mainland. One was in a hastily assembled galley fleet in the north, peeling off what units I could save from a few cities from that region. I'll show the fleet's travels below. In the south I had enough galleys along my southern channel to evacuate a lot of units into my one remaining city to ensure I could live a while longer. Those units wouldn't have been able to stop plako from killing me so they were better preserved for action against Greece. So from there, my unit movements were straightforward. the northern fleet had a long way to travel from my old northern coast to join up with my city on the other side of the continent, and the route took the loaded galleys through Greek territory the entire way. You might say this was the beginning of the pirate expedition.

Screenshots for the north fleet, starting from T162 when the curtains were going down on the north:










We'll stop at T170 for a moment for this image:




Jojo paid me off, giving away excess resources so I wouldn't take the opportunity to cheaply raze two cities. That was a smart play because if I didn't need the resources I definitely would have taken the city capture gold. Also visible I was watching CH's coastal defenses looking for a city to attack...and my spy found a great general just hanging out on the coast. That probably wasn't a good idea....Oh. And to TBS post game, I loved setting that city in CH's face. Moving on!

Yeah, so the lesson here is don't leave important units sitting undefended on the coast when a stack of enemy boats sail by. You'll probably lose the important unit. Well worth the cost of a pikeman to kill a GG.




Too bad I couldn't capture the GG and take a morale promotion, I could have killed another one. Why?! Why leave the units just hanging around?




That same turn Jojo was apparently still uneasy about me sailing through his defenseless back lines. There now, we're BFFs!




Filename: BlockadeForFun.jpg....



OK, this one isn't from the north fleet but it was something I tried to do that didn't work out. I spotted a GM in CH's territory and hoped beyond hope he would send it into plako's land for a quick mission. Here was its possible range of movement into France:




If he had he would have lost it. He didn't send it that way as far as I could tell, must have sent it over to Jojo's lands.




Back on the coast, still sailing through Greece:




By T176 I was rounding the end of the continent. Get a look at those defenses in HAK's Moai city. Must be a docile populace to be controlled by three ancient units! Still no new naval opening against Greece yet.







At this point it was no longer the North Fleet, it was the East Fleet. And it had a directional name because there was now also a South Fleet to go with it. And they were converging on a target....




Hey that isn't a lot of defense, maybe this will work...




T180, getting closer -- hey why is CH adding defense?!




T181, OK dammit this isn't going to work. ABORT! At least I ripped up his fishing nets....




If I can't attack on land I'll just blockade every sea tile, I guess.




By T185 I had moved most of the units closer to my city.




T187 I was showing my pirate colors again as I trapped a HAK boat and offered a reasonable trade (he had recently stopped gifting me rice and I wasn't thrilled by it).




I thought this was a reasonable proposition. I had closed borders to give him no options. He took the deal and sailed through.




I hadn't had much action against CH for a while but every now and then he'd wander a unit through plako's territory into my reach. I kept my boats loaded for these opportunities.




I'm an asshole, what can I say? I was hoping to delay research but it didn't work out to well. I ended up just making him move some units around to cover the anger.




On the move again.







This was funny. Borders popped on T194. Somehow this city hasn't flipped back to me, I guess because plako has kept six or seven units in it pretty much all the time.




In the east I kept sailing looking for a weakness. Not much else to do, going by land wasn't an option.




This led to what I showed in a previous post on the next turn:




HAK reinforced enough that it wasn't worth wasting my units in a non-grudge situation so I pillaged 89 gold from the town and got back on my boats. This was originally planned as a diversion anyway, as I was hoping CH would relax his guard once I was apparently attacking HAK.




T197 I kept moving north through HAK's waters, going to try CH again.




T198 I made a dumb move and engaged the slingshot, success riding on a human dice roll. Here's what happened:




My fleet was in HAK's territory out of CH's visibility. I moved my units 1E of the end of the peninsula. I should have just ended turn there, but I thought at the time CH could see that tile. Well...no, he can't. I thought my best option was to offer HAK peace, which would send me out of his territory. I wasn't quite sure where I would land at that point but it would be west, which was what I wanted. It turned out to be in Jojo's culture since I had OBs with him. That's all fine. What went wrong was the human dice roll -- I needed CH to play T198 BEFORE HAK so that my units would bounce without him seeing them to the north in Jojo's land. Well, of course I missed that roll. HAK played, took peace, and bounced my units. CH saw them and moved up six knights from the south into range of anywhere I could strike. So I blew that opportunity.

At that point my fleet was kind of stuck, unless I got OBs from HAK again. So I tried that and he opened up with me. But now CH was aware of me in the area and easily shifted defenders. No openings.




Nothing to do but wait for an opportunity now. I sailed back north toward Jojo's culture. At least up there CH wouldn't see me if I could sail away for a while. Maybe I could make him wonder what I was up to, if nothing else. (Mind you, all this time these units are costing me a fortune in upkeep for one city supporting them in enemy territory. Who needs economy?)




A few turns later here's the map. My boats are out of CH's vision in Jojo's territory. But I had an idea, I just needed some time for the deals with HAK to expire....




Waiting...




Oh, hey, this is great! What took so long???




T207-Plako takes Jeff (it has had a long time to regrow since I razed it back in the Empire days).




Time to get ready--where to attack? CH has lots of units spread out all over the place. If nothing else I've forced him to defend his rear cities, which will make things easier for plako. Remember, I'm in this to outlive CH, so helping plako is the #1 goal. Death to Greece, long live revenge!




Not much happening in the west, just enough to keep CH from sending units east to help against the main stack, I'd expect.




Ha, that's a big stack. Good luck stopping it. Actually, no, I don't wish good luck!




So of course the thing for me to do is to move a new stack of knights forward into Wetbandit's territory, right? Wait, what?




That gets us to T208. I think I'll need another post for that one.

[Commodore]

[spacetyrantxenu]

T208 - Sorry I don't have a clean map, I use lots of signs so this is messy:




I've had city visibility on all of Greece for quite a while so I can see almost every tile in his territory. I have a pretty good idea of how and where his units are positioned for defense through his lands. Plako has attacked, FINALLY, which will obviously create an opportunity for me to attack as CH's forces are repositioned by necessity to respond to whatever plako does. For this turn the weakness I could reach turned out to be the city of Annie, way to the south along the coast by my city. My attack force is on the complete opposite side of CH's territory, in GermanJojo's culture to the north of the screenshot above. I did a lot of looking and thinking about the situation and from what I was able to see it looked like I would be able to get my units forced to the south by a series of border closings. The rules for unit teleportation/relocation are pretty weird but someone has a great post explaining them somewhere (was it RefSteel? I don't want to give credit to the wrong person or deny it to the right person). I remember reading that a while back and how it discussed distances and how the game measures them. That was the background for what I ended up doing. Engage!




Step 1: I need to close borders with HAK, but I can't. But I can declare war!




By clearing open borders with him it is no longer legal for my units to be moved into his territory if for some reason I couldn't stay in Jojo's borders anymore....




Fortunately my many gifts protection payments from Jojo weren't tied to our open borders deal!




Absolutely, cancel this deal.




And here we are. Now we have a southern fleet. To go along with a much reduced northern fleet of caravels still remaining in Jojo's territory.




So, obviously this is the area I wanted to move my ships to. Annie is poorly defended and is a snap to burn now. I though I would end on either the tile I'm on now or the one marked with a Y two tiles to the west. This is from counting "legal" tiles (X/Y distances) from the prior location in Jojo's territory -- see the first image above for reference. There was a range of tiles I could use for this movement but the one I was on I thought best, as it had let me hide out of CH's vision up until the turn before engaging the slingshot. If my stack was too many tiles further west of where they were they could have ended up in TBS's lands. I could have canceled OBs with him too but at that point I'm not sure where I'd have ended up, probably in plako's lands or, if I closed borders with him, back in my own culture. Obviously that's no good, because I couldn't attack from there. So I positioned my units on approximately the same longitude I wanted them to move to and closed borders in series to guide the boats where I wanted them.

OK, so all that mechanics behind us now we're into a standard amphibious assault scenario. My frigate (wtf? Oh yeah, Krill gifted me one a while back. He's been gifting units around...like a huge stack of rifles/cannons to Wetbandit. Good thing wetbandit didn't want to kill me while I was adventuring on the high seas)....My frigate bombards to lower defenses. Conveniently enough, plako's two frigates on the same tile had already done the same thing, so Annie's defenses are down for me. Yay.




I had two knights with an unused third promotion in the stack, so amphibious we go.




The odds are pretty terrible but I had simmed this attack. I expected to lose a knight to kill each of the units in the city. It turns out I did worse than that but whatever. For the glory of Germany death of Greece!

C2/Amphibious Knight vs. Pike (full fortify) - 22.9% : Loss, 1 hit
C2/Amphibious Knight vs. Pike (strength 5, full fortify) - 45.3% : Loss, 2 hits
C3 Knight vs. Maceman (full fortify) - 23.3% : Loss, 2 hits
C3 Knight vs. Maceman (full fortify) - 23.3% : Loss, 1 hit
C3 Knight vs. Longbow (full fortify) - 32.6% : Loss, 3 hits
C2 Knight vs. Maceman (strength 6.6, full fortify) - 40.7% : Win
C2 Knight vs. Maceman (strength 5.3, full fortify) - 67.7% : Win
C2 Knight vs. Pikeman (strength 2.8, full fortify) - 88.1% : Win
CR2 Maceman vs. Longbow (strength 2.6, full fortify) - 89.4% : Win, city captured

So it ended up costing me more knights than I had expected from my sims, but it doesn't matter. Burn it down!




Well let's look first...not much left from what was in there before. (I've had city visibility, there's a ton of infrastructure in every city).



OK, now burn it!







Here's the area now. Hopefully plako will heal quickly and press in further. I'd like to pillage a lot of cottages and maybe raze another city. Also pictured: Krill being Krill.




Here's all of Greece:




My area plus the next plako wave:




And a shot of my city, because why not as long as I'm posting? It's the biggest city on this continent now, but since Nakor is dead and wetbandit only builds units that isn't a great accomplishment. Ignore the market build, it will only happen when I get enough overflow to build it in one turn. Units are expensive!




Expensive! Note about power, I think I had the same power as someone else when I started the turn, didn't get a screenshot though. So someone else (multiple people...HAK, Dreylin(Egypt) are presently being murdered. Fine by me, kill them all. The longer I live the higher my rank when I die...that's the stretch goal if I outlive Greece, see how high I can make it in the final rankings.




Maybe if Jojo gets serious I'll see the HAK line below mine soon. I was going to do my part and kill a chariot he had in Wetbandit's land this turn but BGN declared war and played before I did and killed the chariot first. Dammit...that would have been another promotion on one of my knights down there....




By the way, that visible power dip is me gifting two old C2 triremes and a C2 caravel to plako, along with all of my gold (admittedly, not much gold at all). I would have thought my intent would be obvious -- upgrade and give them back! Apparently he didn't like that plan and it looks like he's keeping those units. Whatever, they're mostly useless against galleons and frigates anyway. But the lesson learned there is never count on plako for anything. Actually, I had already learned that lesson after having to wait 50 turns for him to finally attack CH....I can't wait to find out after the game what he's been waiting for all this time.

OK, back to bi-monthly reporting. See you guys in May, if I'm still alive.

[Ceiliazul]

Thanks for the update! Looking at the culture encroachment on Plako/Bandit, I'm a bit surprised they've left you to your pirating ways for so long.

Before you die, mind telling where you buried all your pirate treasure? HAK's survival instinct, CH's sanity, Plako's initiative... they've got to be buried somewhere!

[spacetyrantxenu]

Ha, the pirate treasure was mostly spent on getting city visibility on CH. I'll try to pay it back on a stolen tech before he dies, although I can't steal anything useful. Other than that, my expenses at the worst got down to making 5 gpt at max tax while supporting the army. There isn't much buried treasure left.

Edit: Here's the last picture I took showing espionage graphs. I spent my gold running max espionage slider.