[PB60] Amicalola and Vanrober: Gone' Fishing!

[Amicalola]

T187-188 - Gathering Storm
We've been wondering where Jowy's units are massing, because we've known he's upgrading something. This turn we got our answer:


And it's a scary one!  That was actually somewhat unlucky for Jowy too, he had 70% odds on even the two losses. So the Vikings are looking crazy right now (seriously how has no one picked this civ in CtH before?!). They also have 20 knights in the south, although we can more comfortably hold that. But the whole of Lazteuq's coast is probably going to be ravaged, because I'm not sure there's much we can do about those grenadiers (yet). Well played, Jowy. Note that I panic-whipped a Ship of the Line before realising that Remora was obviously going to get razed next turn too.

That's not the only storm, though. We've known about Mjmd's stack here:



And Superdeath's stack in his own territory. But the latter was joined by an additional Mjmd stack seen here:



And that is a absolute crapload of units. I'm whipping more urgently now than I was down in the south - I got way too cocky because of the tech situation. You can also see my desperate attempt to pop 3rd-ring borders at Stingray. If we can last the next 10 turns without dying, we're pretty set. But I wasn't giving the opponents anywhere near enough respect for those turns, especially Jowy and his uber-berserkers. The peace treaty with Mjmd has 2 turns left (1 after this turn) - let's see what happens...

[Amicalola]

T189
We can upgrade units too:


That photo was taken last turn, when spent 1300 gold upgrading 26 knights->cuirassiers. This turn, we attacked Surtr, which was defended by mostly knights:


Total losses for both sides were 6 Cuirassiers and 1 Knight, and 3 Muskets, 2 Pikes, 2 Catapults, and 23 Knights. And Surtr. We got lucky with the knights, and unlucky with the cuirs (same situation as with Lazteuq  ), and overall it was a roughly average result. But that result was still really good!

Jowy did raze Remora, as expected, and this coming turn he gets to have a crack at Toadfish. We crammed in as many defenders as we could, because it's on a hill and this feels like the best place to make a stand. I'm not sure if we're favoured to hold or lose Toadfish, actually. 



Lazteuq has been building galleys in Altun-Ha. 


We should have put the turnsplit back on, knowing that, but I didn't really think about it, and I guess he didn't either. Now if he double-moves us he can also hit Toadfish with 6 units. I'm not too fussed if he does so, because we technically double-moved him this turn anyway, and if he'd move his ships first we mostly wouldn't have changed our own moves (although it sucks to be left wondering). I sent him a message about getting the turnsplit back in some form though, since it seems necessary again. We're pessimistically assuming that the whole of Laz' coast gets razed over the next few turns.

[civac2]

Hey, congratulations again. You played a great game.

Haven't read the thread yet but vanrober let slip in his PB61 thread that you attacked because our border city was greedy. Is that true? I'm somewhat curious about your diplomatic algebra. Did you expect SD to backstab you when you attacked? The jungle area near our borders seemed quite exposed.

[vanrober]

I would say that there were several reasons. 
You made that city (izamal) 1 tile more south to try to steal the rize from us, and we found that really annoying.
Then you started making tons of culture and working GArtist to steal it from us, and by that time you already had AP and were going for CS, we thought you were going for Taj and Amica felt that play was what Tarkeel and him did on PB58 and identified that you were running away if we let you do that for free, so since you were avoiding any defensive tech and you barely had 3 axes around, we took PRO xbows to make a little harras getting Izamal to spread Christianism and push destroy the other city settling us one tile closer to us. We had the seas with carabels and we thought it was the moment to slow you from the wining spot, so that we could get a bit of advantage in tech and production to kill you some turns after. But then you didnt take the peace when we were giving a decent amount of gold to pay of a bit our incursion, SD started making weird moves and we felt we were losing into a dogpile, so we started going guilds and whiped all cities to grownd, even Izamal and Pike instead of making the Christ missionaries we thought in first place.

Then somehow SD thought he wasnt making any gain (Or i guess that, since i didnt read any thread yet) and gave us peace to atack Mjmd (who was the other runner away) And that pretty much set us as favourite to win.


So in the first place we were annoyed by Izamal and the culture pressure, and then we found the opportunity to atack and it worked out.

Im sure Amica will explain it better, but he is really busy

[Amicalola]

Hey, congratulations again. You played a great game.

Haven't read the thread yet but vanrober let slip in his PB61 thread that you attacked because our border city was greedy. Is that true? I'm somewhat curious about your diplomatic algebra. Did you expect SD to backstab you when you attacked? The jungle area near our borders seemed quite exposed.

Thanks! There were plenty of mistakes though, not least in the war with you guys. I actually thought the whole war was really interesting, there were a few swings back-and-forth in each direction. You guys especially outplayed us in the north when you broke that first stack, I was way too greedy there. You also really impressed me with your sheer production, even on half our cities - I'd never really seen the Pyramids + Police State in action before, and I certainly won't underestimate it again! I think there were really only two big decisive factors in the end: the first was when we were able to hit your stack with our knights on the hill outside Lakamha, and the second was when you hit us with all of your catapults but not the remaining hitters (although I have no idea why your collateral didn't hit many units - I was quite surprised by that). One thing I was really worried about at the end was you guys sallying out and retaking Lakamha, which would then let you push onto undefended Uxmal and then all the captured cities. Did you guys ever consider that? I tried to defend against it, but I don't think I did a very good job. Also, were you guys expecting our attack at all, or was it a total surprise?

Vanrober went into it, but I'll give my take on the attack as well. We attacked you for a few reasons. The biggest was that you'd just built the AP, and I knew from PB58 that the AP makes you vulnerable for maybe 10-15 turns while you recoup the hammer investment, and then completely godlike. Because we were on the same donut, I knew we'd come to blows eventually, so it seemed like the best idea to cripple you while you were still in the 'hammer recouping' phase (the original plan was to take Izamal and that island raze, and then somehow sign a peace treaty. Maybe a little bit optimistic ). There were other reasons too though - a big one was that you guys went for Theology and Civil Service before military techs, while we had crossbows, so we had a great (but temporary) matchup that we wanted to abuse while we could. We wondered if you were beelining Taj with your tech path. The other gets a whole extra paragraph...  

Which was the placement/defense of Izamal. The city could have been one tile north, and then still claimed clams/deer/gems and not threatened the rice we wanted. We actually tried to raze it way earlier around T100, but you guys got enough defenders to make that impractical (which I wasn't expecting - well played there). After that, it was always niggling at the back of my mind, I guess. To be clear, I don't think it was a jerk move to settle where you did - the whole point of IMP is to grab that contested land before your opponents can. But we wanted the rice, and we thought we could take it, so we did. Forgive me for a tangent, but I don't think IMP is quite as powerful as the meta here makes it look. If I have one criticism of players from this 'generation' of RB (definitely including myself), it's that once someone else settles land that we want, or perceive as 'ours,' I feel that we often just let them have it. Instead of challenging the IMP (or not) player militarily, we just think "oh, well I don't want to wreck both our games over one city," and content ourselves with settling an inferior site. But then the IMP players just get everything, and it's impossible for anyone else to compete! For example, we badly forward-settled Mjmd's northern gems this game (ironically as a result of the Izamal site), and couldn't have held it against a serious military challenge. But that challenge didn't come, so we got to keep the city for free. Izamal would have been pretty safe with maybe 7-10 units garrisoning walls, but from memory when we attacked there were two axes and a holkan, which wasn't very scary. It's that lack of defense, rather than the city itself, that I think was greedy. People should be willing to fight for 'their' land (or contested land) more often, especially against IMP players. We need to make them work for it! To be fair, I'm still somewhat green, and feel very much like an imposter writing my thoughts on 'meta' and 'should do,' as I did in PB61 helping Joshy; this is just my opinion.

We weren't expecting the SD backstab, nor the SD peace. We had signed fish/fish (+us giving gems) pretty soon beforehand. You can read that I was quite depressed about the game while in the two-front war, because the situation seemed totally hopeless for us. I actually think that peace was the biggest turning point of the game, since it let us whip out dozens of knights (most of our cities had 5+ whip unhappy) and fight you 1v1, where we had enough cities to just brute force it. My opinion on WW was firmly decided by this game, in preferring it on for future games. We whipped many cities 5+ times as mentioned, without CHA or markets or colosseums, and even frequently un-garrisoned, and still never had happiness problems. That's a bit silly, in my opinion, and it also reduces the value of an already subpar trait.

I don't just want to nitpick and criticise though, because a) I'm not a good authority for that, and b) I really thought you guys played a great game overall too. I believe our two empires were clearly the strongest going into the midgame, and I've said elsewhere that I think you would have equaled us at worst, or more likely been first/runaways, by about T160 if no one had attacked you. It's a real shame we were on the same donut - One of us was always going to conquer the other, so we couldn't have the lategame showdown that would have been so fun. Maybe in a future game.

[civac2]

Yeah, that makes sense. The chief problem was that we greedily skipped military techs to power up. Your read of us trying to go for Taj was correct but that was premature. We needed elephants/cats or crossbows of or own . There were more axes and holkans near Izamal but they were just as useless vs PRO crossbows as the ones you saw. I expected anyone trying to push into one of the spokes to get backstabbed and was surprised when that didn't materialize.

I left Lazteuq to his own devices after it seemed clear we had lost the war so I don't know if there were any openings later on.