[SPOILERS] Pindicator emerges from the wilderness to play pb74

[pindicator]

112

Canceled OB with Amicalola.  Canceled the Fish for Wheat deal.  We're attacking him in 3 turns and we're taking the 2nd half of the timer.  Normally I don't see the need to state something like this, but Amica really seems to need turn extensions when we don't play our turn early, so I want to make it abundantly clear.  T114 we will play after him, and T115 we will play after him and declare. 

Canceling the OB will certainly signal hostility to him, but more importantly I didn't want him to see the big shift to horse archers:




Because they're going to be very good horse archers.




Free flanking will be nice for some withdraws, but more realistically it's going to mean a couple of sentry chariots.

Here's a screenshot of our forces moving up:




I scouted as best I could before canceling the OB.  I see 3 catapults for Amicalola, and the 3rd is too far back to get to Waimea Canyon in time.  I expect some more to be whipped, but I don't think he gets more than 4 or 5 total.

With what we have gathered here, I'm hoping for 30 hitters and 11 catapults to invade.  There may be a chance we can get some galley shenanigans.  That part is still unclear.

We're about to overtake Plemo for top Power too:

[Qgqqqqq]

What are your war goals?

[pindicator]

World domination, naturally.

Waimea Canyon is central to the north. It's why we planted it there and why Amica pounced so quickly once we did. Bare minimum would be to capture it and stuff it full of longbows. Scott needs to be burned as well, and then that opens up his core.

I don't think he sits back in Waimea. I expect him to retreat his forces and then we're both stuck with large stacks facing off against each other. Which means there's nothing to be done except build more units.

[pindicator]

114

Denouement




Really unlucky to have scooter at the helm here. Not saying Amicalola is a bad defender - I rather don't know enough about him to gauge him - but I do know scooter is cautious and competent, and those things together means I don't see much of a chance for us scoring a decisive victory here. More likely we take Waimea Canyon and then have to burn everything else nearby just to be able to hold that one central spot.




#1 in power - #2 in GNP.

That crop yield is why we have to invade, however. Seems we got the short end of the map script when it came to food.

It's no secret that we're coming. Scooter immediately switched tech from Calendar to HBR, after all, and has been whipping several cities per turn. This will be a protracted conflict and pushing for anything more than Waimea will be very difficult.

[pindicator]

115

Perhaps if RB organises the greatest worldwide dogpile in history we can shorten the problem?

I'm doing my part!

[pindicator]

116

I've said to Hitru and aetryn privately that I think we hit a bit of bad luck here with scooter taking over for Amicalola during this stretch of the game. I honestly don't know enough about Amica's games to state how good of a tactician or defender he may be - but I do know scooter and I know that he is going to put up a dogged defensive effort. Who knows, this might even energize him to play better; war declarations have done that for me in the past. And since his initial civ isn't doing so hot this situation might seem like a fresh start for him, in a way. I even said as much when I notified scooter & aetryn of the war declaration on t115:

Hello,
War has been declared in the jungles of PB74.  Please know you have the first half of the turn split in the upcoming aggression.

Scooter, honestly I'm cursing my luck that you're at the wheel here.  

Enjoy the carnage,
Pind

With that in mind, I did expect scooter to leave a token force in Waimea Canyon (I'm not accepting Amicalola's renaming of this city, eschewing my normal convention for captured cities) and retreat his main army, trading time for units. Still, I did not imagine some of the wrinkles we spotted:




Scott was reinforced with the units that had been playing zone defense west of the city, and there's no chance of taking it this turn. The two woodsman-1 axes northwest of Waimea are a nice defensive wrinkle - something I'm not sure I would have thought of. Things like this I attribute to scooter being at the helm. Like I said, he's a dogged defender.

In any case, we have to go forward to see what he has in store for us. So 10 catapults bombarded defenses at Waimea down to 10% and then the remaining cat suicided in to weaken up defenders. Lost a vulture on the first 18% attack, won with the next on a 41% attack, and then lost another to a 77% attack, but then the city fell. (Even hammer exchange there, which is good enough in my estimation: 2 archers, 1 spear, and 1 axe dead vs 2 vultures and 1 catapult.) Resulting in...




Renamed immediately back to Waimea Canyon.

I can't understate how great the free flanking promotion has been for us here. I had a chariot back in Cathedrals with some experience and so that was promoted to sentry. We moved it up to Waimea and spotted the main stack:




Scooter has been whipping catapults since he took the helm and has amassed a good number. Not a ton of hitters; however, I think his latest round of whipping has to be horse archers to make up for that. We have a relatively short window to make gains before this turns into a slog and we either get stuck in an impasse at Waimea or have to do another couple rounds of whips in order to keep our unit production up.

We had been talking about threatening Stephens after taking Waimea back but this defensive setup pretty much stops that idea cold. Now even if we were to push through the axes there is the main force to contend with, and any attempt to go around would be too slow. But I know Amicalola didn't have a ton of units before scooter started and if he's been whipping mainly catapults then what is defending Curtis and his core? If we moved our horse archers up we could threaten to fork either Ford & Curtis or Curtis & Scott. I used the sentry from the Scott stack to confirm Curtis was empty and then moved a chariot from my main stack up to a hill to spy more of the terrain:




Empty Curtis and empty terrain and a catapult in the open to boot. I think I understand more what Scooter did here. He recognized he didn't have enough to defend everywhere and so he's gambled defense to holding Scott & Ford/Stephen. But he's left a window open for me to slip through with Horse Archers. I think in a turn or two that window could close, especially if he's whipping out enough horse archers of his own. But if we race all our horse archers forward we might be able to force some concessions.

Horse archer killed the catapult with minimal damage, and then we promoted to sentry to confirm there wasn't anything in Ford: just a warrior & scout in that city. So I moved the rest up. I also moved a lot of slow-movers up to the tile northeast of Waimea. There's nothing that can threaten them this turn and I want to extend our reach. Ideally we'll be able to threaten Scott and take it before things get too dicey. The turn ended with our troops deployed like so:




I forgot to highlight the troops we have outside Scott, but it is 1 horse archer, 2 vultures, and a sentry chariot. We also have a pair of workers on the banana, which will let our catapults quick shift to Scott if Scooter/Amicalola were to move their main stack into Ford to defend the core. There's also a risk of that stack being wiped out, but Scooter would have to win a couple coin flips and then potentially leave Scott with wounded defenders, so I left them in place.

I was a little upset that I missed scouting the tile south of Ford, as when I finally did move my sentry chariot I noticed two uncovered workers there. I would have sacrificed a unit to delete those workers and deny him better road coverage. Downside of playing the turn at midnight...

We offered a couple peace deals. Not sure if either get taken, but with us threatening to burn Curtis I think there's a chance:







Feudalism finished end-of-turn. Whipping a bunch of longbows next. If we get peace we're going to build wealth and rush to knights.

Note: Image hosting is being a pain with the last few pictures. The two offers we gave are: 1) Peace for Stephens and Scott, and 2) Peace for Scott, 125g and 20gpt. I doubt he accepts either, but it's possible he will counter with Scott if we really have enough to burn Curtis. I'll try to update again with the last images later...

Edit: Dropbox to the rescue. I guess I need to switch back to that...

[pindicator]

I'm officially panning OneDrive as an image hosting source. It does fine and then every now and then it just will decide not to generate embed links for your images. And when it does you just have to wait it out until it decides it wants to give you that feature again. Commodore tells me I should go back to Imgur.

[pindicator]

117, Part One

Scooter retook Waimea, sacrificing a catapult to clean up our units there. A rough trade for us, we may want to rethink multiple defenders in the near future.

He left a single axe so I retook it with the sentry chariot with our main stack.




Taking a breath to inform Hitru and aetryn of the situation before I finish the turn:




First impressions: scooter moved his main stack back to Ford, which I'm not sure he would have done if we had not moved our slow movers up like that. I think we can overwhelm the defenders at Curtis and burn it, then move our slow movers via the banana road to threaten Scott. (There are a pair of workers that will join them there.) Then we should be able to capture Scott before he has time to react and move his stack back.

[pindicator]

117, Part Two

Our first Horse Archer won at 30%, our third Horse Archer lost at 80%, and in the end Curtis still burned:




I don't understand the reason he didn't try to give Scott for peace. Maybe scooter didn't have the ability to exchange the news with amicalola. Maybe Amica is just playing on emotion. But he had to have seen that we would have enough to burn Curtis easily, and now we can pivot and pick up Scott. In fact, with Curtis burned we can keep Scott. Before I would have had to burn and replace it to the southeast.

We had a bit of a painful turn after that. There was that stack of 2 woods1 axes by Waimea that had to be removed. So I threw my 2 elephants in and lost them both - they were the only hitters that had odds over 10%. But they did their job, and even though I also lost a horse archer that did no damage, it was enough to clear that stack. We cut the roads to Waimea and moved up against Scott:




After Scott I plan on sitting tight and defending what we've captured. Hitru is talking about Stephens but I think it may be better to force Scooter to extend his defense down there.

Started some longbows and will start a few more in the core. Trying not to whip too much, but we really need to keep unit production going:




6 turns to Machinery. Maybe 5, if we get enough from Scott. Someone already has it (Commodore, I'm sure).

[Qgqqqqq]

I've no idea if this is true, but it's possible that city trading isn't permitted in the game rules?

Anyway, thanks for the update! Really appreciated.