TheArchduke makes the transition from CIV V to CIV IV..

[Sareln]

I thought this game was over...

Greetings Sareln.

We have realized the error of our ways and want offer peace with the following conditions:

1) Danville returns the following to your civilization:
The city of Iconium
The city of Dyracchium
A settler to reestablish the city of Trebizond (as soon as built)
An additional settler
4 workers (as soon as they are done a plantation)
Gold happy resource

2) Byzantium accepts peace and immediately offers the following in-game agreement:
Open Borders

3) Byzantium and Danville agree to a NAP of 20t length (to t153)

4) Byzantium, Danville, and the Mushroom Kingdom jointly declare war on xenon on t134 (commitment of forces in your capitol)


if 4 is unacceptable for NAP or diplomatic reasons, it can be replaced by:
4a) Danville gifts the following to Byzantium:
1200 gold
4b) Byzantium gifts the following to Danville:
10 Cataphracts

Also willing to negotiate within the limited diplo rules available to us.

Thanks,
waterbat

I am NAP'd with Xenon through T147, so option 2 then. It's T132 right now.

It will be fascinating to see why this deal was offered later in life.

[Sareln]

I want to add a map-trade and I need to evaluate whether or not I can actually put that Cataphract gift together in good time.

[Sareln]

Sareln, why did you counteroffer Waterbat asking for all of your cities back instead of just the subset he offered?

Well, I'm already smaller than everyone else, and I need to push for as much as possible in the peace as I can get, otherwise I won't be serving the stated goal of the game of trying to win no matter the odds neh? The resources aren't as important as the pop points, land, etc.

Honestly, the deal is a temporary one I think where I die on 20T from now instead of 4T from now. Losing half my stuff twice after already being behind will do that to a team.

[Sareln]

Or earlier.

Right after I hand over those phracts, could've really used them.




Ooh, well. Why did Azza hold the turn for 30 hours while playing his other games... I want to finish this up.

[Sareln]

Should've swung last turn superjm, now I have muskets and you're going to need siege or frigates to take my capital.

[Sareln]

Actually, while I'm thinking about it, a few warfighting key-points for superjm.

In your first attack, you were able to gain control over the area where my horses were located, even razing the city that worked them, but you never cut the supply (they remained under capital cultural control), even when it was in your power to do so quite easily. This was huge, as you'll recall that the key to the stalemate was my being able to double-whip horse archers the entire time. These units gave me extra move and strength and the movement advantage over your knights since my roads weren't up with engineering. Without mass HA's to do things like maul the slower Cho-ko-nu's trying to catch up with your Knights ranging ahead, I would've been dead on that war straight up since you're 2-move knights were stronger and just as fast as anything else I could have fielded. Either that or I'd have to beg up some horses from someone, but given what a low opportunity cost that one move held for you, you really needed to do it and at least force me into that position.

Second, this attack here with boated rifles against the capital and smaller stacks against the outlying cities. You needed to bring siege or something else to bomb down the 80% culture barrier of the capital. Pure massed rifles looks sexy, but as you're seeing here, it can't get the job done in the time-frame I think you were planning on. You pretty much have to assume that I've got a huge stack of Catapults socked away somewhere and I'm going to use them on any reasonably large concentration of troops due to the tech disparity. Now, I know steel is an expensive tech, but if you can get to rifles, you can get to Chemistry for boats which can bombard - so yeah. Enough boats to bring this culture defense down and it's a foregone conclusion. Now it's not.

[Sareln]

Oh good, he brought cannons...

[superjm]

Dunno if you're still reading this thread but...

Actually, while I'm thinking about it, a few warfighting key-points for superjm.

In your first attack, you were able to gain control over the area where my horses were located, even razing the city that worked them, but you never cut the supply (they remained under capital cultural control), even when it was in your power to do so quite easily. This was huge, as you'll recall that the key to the stalemate was my being able to double-whip horse archers the entire time. These units gave me extra move and strength and the movement advantage over your knights since my roads weren't up with engineering. Without mass HA's to do things like maul the slower Cho-ko-nu's trying to catch up with your Knights ranging ahead, I would've been dead on that war straight up since you're 2-move knights were stronger and just as fast as anything else I could have fielded. Either that or I'd have to beg up some horses from someone, but given what a low opportunity cost that one move held for you, you really needed to do it and at least force me into that position.

Oh god you're absolutely right. Until I read this post it hadn't even occurred to me that I could have done this. That would have made things a lot easier for me.

Guess that's something to keep in mind for my next game!

Second, this attack here with boated rifles against the capital and smaller stacks against the outlying cities. You needed to bring siege or something else to bomb down the 80% culture barrier of the capital. Pure massed rifles looks sexy, but as you're seeing here, it can't get the job done in the time-frame I think you were planning on. You pretty much have to assume that I've got a huge stack of Catapults socked away somewhere and I'm going to use them on any reasonably large concentration of troops due to the tech disparity. Now, I know steel is an expensive tech, but if you can get to rifles, you can get to Chemistry for boats which can bombard - so yeah. Enough boats to bring this culture defense down and it's a foregone conclusion. Now it's not.

You're absolutely right. Here's how it went down (at least from what I remember): First off, I thought you would have noticed but I ran the EP slider on you for a turn for the express purpose of getting City Visibility on you. As a result I knew even before waterbat attacked you the composition of almost your entire military. I was planning on waiting a little longer to declare on you the last time since you had a bunch of phracts, but I noticed most of those phracts were gone, prompting me to take the opportunity to attack. I wanted cannons though and they weren't quite ready to join the attack yet, so I took the 12 units and parked them there, hoping they'd survive collateral+phracts. Perhaps I could have waited until the cannons were ready to perform my initial attack, but I guess I was thinking I'd force you to use your catapults immediately. Once those were gone and my rifles healed up, the cannons would help out the rest of the way.

As for your earlier post regarding my passivity, perhaps that was the case. In hindsight I was likely too cautious in the amount of resources I spent to attack you and it might have served me better to just spend a few turns whipping everything and leaving no doubt as to the outcome. Incidentally, I accepted peace because A) I had almost all slow movers and it was going to take a long time to assault your capital givens how large the borders were, and B) war weariness was close to becoming a crippling concern.

It was fun playing against you though, you had a doomed position from the start but still did everything you could to keep yourself alive and improve your own position

[Sareln]

Yeah, I still had my eye on this . I saw the EP spending but really couldn't do anything 'bout it obv. Figuring out how much force is enough to get the job done efficiently is a hard problem, but yes, in this case you were definitely overcautious. Though perhaps you had to be with actual diplo flying around.

[superjm]

I had a lot of units on the Xenon border since that border was pretty contentious (and to be fair it paid off when waterbat pulled me into war with him as I was able to make an immediate landgrab with little issue) but that was about it as far as diplo goes. It was just a failure on my part to assess how much military I needed to finish things off on your end.