TheArchduke tries his best not to be overrun again as Pericles

[Bacchus]

That's a proper carpet. 8 support on the central horses makes them nice and tough.

We also could hardly wish for a better positioning of oledavy's units, especially that lone northern horse, which is in terrible trouble AND can't be repositioned to assist Lafayette. I was really afraid that he would be occupying the tile where your promoted horse is, that's a really key tile. Now that we hold it we have both strength AND flexibility, especially as terrain towards HK looks clear.

We have to assume that hoplite dies on Oledavys turn. But what's next? Might he counter-attack BA in force? I know I would be tempted, but that would be a terrible gamble.

Overall, I think this attack ends up being perfectly timed, but we need to play very, very carefully. As we already learnt in the previous skirmish, advantage is pretty fragile, we are weilding a glass knife here. But as long as we are precise in our movements, it can cut very sharp.

[Bacchus]

Is the battering ram ready BTW? A cool thing we could try and do is circle south and bring the ram up to Schuyler from the jungle right on the turn when we attack with horses. Unless the ram needs to be on the right side of the river.

[shallow_thought]

Really appreciating the reporting. I hope you have some idea of how much interest this game is generating. Some of that is down to the events, a lot is down to the effort all the players are putting in with their threads.

EDIT: of course you do, because sensible people are posting their appreciation in the tech thread so you can all read it. D'oh. The point still stands.

[Bacchus]

Don't rush to play the turn in the morning, take a screenie and let's think about it.

[TheArchduke]

Oh my, Oledavy, that was exactly what I wanted.

I am not sure if I would have done something else, but the hex where the swordsman is poisoned, even behind the river. 3 archers shots and 2 horseman attack and that swordsman is toast. The only horse he did bombard can promote and one horseman can cross the river, blockade the city and damage his twice promoted archer substantially.

The hext NE of Lafayatte is way more important then the one SW of it.

Anyway, that is my plan, giving you time for input as this is crucial.

My estimate is that he can kill one horse by focus fire in this case but will loose 1-2 more units next turn.


   

   

EDIT:UPDATE: Used Paint to show more quickly what I mean.

[TheArchduke]

Also, I think another important second rule of this early warfare, his archers are vulnerable for this and the next turn whilst they shoot, mine not, another important advantage that Oledavy had for a long time on the southern part of this front thanks to the damn encampment.

[Bacchus]

Oh wow, so many tasty targets. Will calculate. I think I will come up with two plans -- a more aggressive and less aggressive one, just for you to have alternatives to pick from. Expect before 4.30pm.

[TheArchduke]

I will be curious what you think, I am not sure how any other target is juicier then the Swordsman, which is the only one who can really endanger a horse atm.

The other players are getting uppity, 12 hours already. I will wait if you got a terrific, better plan. I am failing to see what.

[Bacchus]

I think the overall spirit of the plan is good, my own thinking went the same way when seeing the picture.

Sanity check

Let's see how likely is it that the Swordsman falls.

We have two promoted archers, shooting 30 into 40, and one shooting 25 into 40. Let's take the 90% likely* damage for each of them -- it would be 16 for the stronger ones and 13.7 for the weaker one (assuming the weaker shoots last into a damaged unit). That's 45.6 total damage, the horses will have to deal 27 damage a piece. They will be hitting at 36 + 5 general + 2(flanking) versus 36 + 4 (oli) + 5 (river) + 4 (support) - 2 (damage). That's -2 difference, so on expectation, the horses will be dealing JUST enough. In other words, it's a coin-toss.

How can we deal with this? One idea is to bring the Hoplite across the river, to lend a further +2 flanking bonus. He will also lend support on oledavy's turn against any counter-attacks, plus moving him onto the stone moves him out of the range of the encampment bombardment. So we should probably do that regardless. Still, if the sword dies, and we only have something like 60% chances, we will have a horse that's just taken ~30 damage standing across the river from our main forces, open to at least two shots from archers, including a double-promoted archer with his ridiculous 37 base strength, and a horse attack. I think we will end up trading 1-for-1, without gaining much of a positional advantage, and that's the BEST scenario, in 40% of the cases the sword would still be alive.

An alternative

North of Lafayette -- courser-promoted horse crosses onto the hill and hits the double-promoted archer. Str 36 + 5 + 5 vs 15 + 6(?) — we have a 90% probability of dealing 65.3+ damage. The damaged horse, instead of promoting in place moves to the tile vacated by the courser. Northern archer moves onto the tile vacated by the damaged horse and shoots the double-promoted archer. 30 vs 19 -- 90% probability of dealing 37.3+ damage. In other words, the archer almost certainly dies.

South of Lafayette -- only two archers shoot into the sword, Hoplite still moves to get away from the encampment and potentially absorb an archer shot.

Advantages:
Archer is dead and can't shoot with his +12 bonus next turn (assuming he is promoted for land damage).
The horse that crossed the river has +4 support rather than just +2, as in your scenario, and can't be flanked from the north
We retain control over the mountain pass tile, prevent his horse from moving onto it and potentially causing trouble.
Our archer is moved up into perfect position to shoot flexibly next turn.
We don't leave a horse hanging on the other bank

Disadvantages:
1. Damaged horse has not healed
2. Horse moved away from Lafayette
3. Archer moved up to Lafayette and potentially exposed
4. We don't get a horse across the river south of Lafayette
5. Sword lives

Offsetting factors:
1. The damaged horse is now positioned on a hill and can't be shot at due to line-of-sight. It also can't be hit by anything except that stray horseman, because hitting from the wheat tile takes 4 MP. The stray horseman can't kill in one hit. In fact, we would love him to hit with that horseman, and then use the promo to heal -- we almost set up a trap.
2. Horse would not be hitting Lafayette anyway, so we don't care so much about it moving for now.
3. The archer will have +6 support and will be standing across a river for a +11 bonus. The horse out of Lafayette, the only unit that can hit him, will be expected to hit for 44.8. The archer can also be shot and, even if support bonus doesn't apply to defending against ranged attacks (I'm suddenly not sure), the expected damage is 30 vs 15 = 54.7 So it's a little risky, but it will mean that his own archer a) doesn't shoot at anything else, b) remains exposed.
4. That horse would be on a fast track to the morgue, so maybe it's not even a disadvantage.
5. The sword has much less tactical value than the archer -- it can't hit at range, and we soften it up for killing the very next turn anyway.

Remaining questions:
Do we still want to hit the sword with a horse just once, maybe? That mostly rides on whether there is a spare promotion on one of these horses, or if one of them is close to levelling and could use the XP.

Plans for the next turn? If we follow the amended plan, next turn we would promo-heal one horse and finish off the sword (probably with just archer fire, which is the best way to do it anyway). He will bring some more reinforcements. He needs to screen the archers from our courser, so the reinforcements are probably going to be aimed at that. The worst he could do probably is concentrate attacks on the courser -- let's think about this.

Sword can't hit it. Southern archer can't shoot at it. That just leaves the Lafayette garrison horse, the newly incoming horse and the archer. The marsh prevents any surprise melee attacks. Our horse will be 36 + 5 (general) + 2 (hill) + 4 (support) = 47. Archer at 30 is expected to deal 15 damage, horse at 36 + 2 flanking is expected to deal 21, and the damaged horse would do even less. Maybe he is crazy and will bring the archer up to flank. That gives him about 2 more damage says Excel. 15 + 23 + <23 = 62. We can live will this, we might even be able to stand in place. If not, we can rotate this horse back behind the river and re-occupy with a fresh horse, whilst hitting something with it.

*The RNG scales the "base" damage dealt from 22.5 to 45, which then gets multiplied by e^(str-difference / 25). The RNG follows a uniform distribution, so to take the 90% likely damage, we take 24 as the base damage figure. The "expected" damage is 30, but there is as much chance, 50%, that LESS than 30 will be dealt as there is that more than 30 will be dealt, so you can't really rely on the 30 figure to happen.

[Bacchus]

PS. If you do go for the mass attack against the sword, and not the archer kill, I think you have to shoot twice, then hit with horses, then take the last shot, hoping to kill at range and without advancing into the tile.

And don't mind Singaboy, nobody can be expected to play a complicated turn at 5am in the morning in the rush before work.