[SPOILERS] Out of retirement and into the fires of war. yuris125, Pitboss 68

[yuris125]

Big foreign news - Thoth moved his catapult stack out the capital and towards Miguelito




Miguelito has had crossbows for a while, and while he's been wonder spamming, I pointed out before how he's been keeping up in military strength. I wonder if he's got a stack incoming to attack Thoth

If Miguelito absorbs those catapults and we don't have to fight them, I'll be oh so happy And we probably still have some turns to prepare, especially with the geography making it easier for us than for Miguelito to attack Thoth (thanks to how the river goes around his capital). But I did finally start moving to clear Thoth's stack from the gold, roading the tile E of See-Scape and bringing 4 war elephants from the stack I showed yesterday. I don't want to show the entire stack to Thoth yet, but I do want to have units in range in case we need to start marching quickly. Not waiting for crossbows means we likely lose at least one war elephant to the spear; I'll decide on it next turn, after have a better idea if Miguelito's attack is actually happening right now

Research-wise I decided to go for Literature for Heroic Epic before continuing on to Feudalism and Guilds

[civac2]

I almost asked if you have a unit to enable the HE. HE is a killer application in this game.

[yuris125]

Yeah up until now I could get away without one, and was hard to spare beakers for Literature detour. But definitely want it in place for knights, will be so quick to pay back and a huge help. And yeah we had that discussion but I'm pretty sure our starting archer enables it

[civac2]

Oh, that would be a question otherwise? I would have thought you have plenty level 3 units.

[Cornflakes]

Starting archer would not enable HE. You need to actually promote a unit 3 times, not just have 3 promos.

[Tarkeel]

Starting archer would not enable HE. You need to actually promote a unit 3 times, not just have 3 promos.

Pretty sure the starting archer will, as I set it to lvl 4 (Ie, promoted 3 times).

[yuris125]

Funnily enough, this game has had a lot of tactical stand-offs, but very little actual combat. There wasn't a battle lasting more than a single turn - mostly an attacker retreated upon seeing my defending stack, apart from that there were cases when the opposing stack was wiped (our early game attack vs Thoth, Commodore landing a stack of melee units at Boros Burn) or one occasion of successful harassment (Commodore killing my catapult stack with amphibious swordsmen attacking off 4-move galleys). Bottom line is, very few units saw more than one or two rounds of combat. So no, I don't have a HE-enabling unit apart from the starting archer. Although I might have one after the attack on Thoth, since a lot of the war elephants involved start double-promoted, and Crossbows built in Big Red Dragons will be double-promoted as well. But if not, we have to hope the starting archer enables it

[yuris125]

With tactical manoeuvring around the gold hill, I managed to draw out a couple of praets. This is Thoth's stack defending the hill now




With this, I moved most of my stack into See-Scape. Some catapults are still hidden behind the city, but if Thoth chooses to fight on the hill, we will need all these units




He might choose to abandon the hill as well, and I wanted to have the first crossbow ready before showing the stack, so that if he does choose to retreat, we have at least some units to place on the hill and defend it ourselves

Thoth has 13 praetorians, now that we see almost all of his territory (there might be some still invisible in the SE corner). That, plus half a dozen catapults, is quite a force, and I'm still not sure how exactly we're killing it. That's why I've been trying to draw out units onto the gold hill - but chances are, Thoth will either make sure he commits just the right number of units, or just retreats and consolidates the stack defending his capital. We don't have that much flexibility - ultimately, the only units I can keep out of his sight, but in range of the combat, are 3 horse archers. And according to calculators, even a good combat for us ends up in an evenish hammer trade - would've been great in a duel, but not when Commodore is waiting for an opportunity to pounce

All of this is just for one city btw (assuming the war goes well enough for us that we do capture cities). Hard Luck is almost certainly getting razed, it's a no food city, Thoth needed it to work the pasture and the iron, but if we do take his capital, both these tiles are in range of other cities

Miguelito now gained research visibility on us. I wonder if it's too easy to unlock

[yuris125]

All of this is just for one city btw (assuming the war goes well enough for us that we do capture cities). Hard Luck is almost certainly getting razed, it's a no food city, Thoth needed it to work the pasture and the iron, but if we do take his capital, both these tiles are in range of other cities

By the way, the above still makes me wonder if attacking Thoth is the right play at all, or if we should go after Commodore. On one hand, power graph-wise, Thoth has the weakest military. On the other hand, he still has access to the strongest units available. With only a single city to defend, with 60% cultural defences and on a hill, he has a great defensive position. And if we do take his capital, that gives us a border with Miguelito, and we will have to worry about defending from him

Commodore has multiple cities, and while he is about to unlock longbows, it will be harder for him to get units in the right place without exposing anything. Plus he doesn't really have anything that can effectively attack into a crossbow + war elephant stack (he does have catapults, but we don't know how many)

I hate being so indecisive about it, but maybe the play is to knock Thoth off the gold hill, and then turn around and march towards Commodore..... Winning the war against Thoth will be bloody and won't gain us that much

[yuris125]

Thoth did give up the hill




For now I put a crossbow and 2 war elephants there (war elephants to protect against Thoth's war elephants). Next turn I will add a guerrilla 2 crossbow, and move the workers to rebuild the road, then rebuild the mine if they survive

After thinking about it yesterday, I'm fairly certain that we should be targeting Commodore and not Thoth. The big reason is that if (or rather when) we lose a big chunk of units against Thoth, Commodore has the means to capitalise, and has shown willingness and desire to look for vulnerabilities in my defences and send harassment forces to exploit them. Thoth doesn't - not when we have a unit which counters praetorians

It has been so difficult to attack in this game because to put together a good stack on one border, you have to expose the other, and if an opponent sees your exposed border and a dip on your power graph, they're bound to try to take advantage. Commodore was the only player so far who risked exposing themselves this way, and he could do it because we absolutely had to keep units on Roman border - even if we were in a good position, we could lose the game at any point if a praetorian stack showed up when we weren't ready. But with crossbows in play, praetorian threat is pretty much behind us - we can commit a lot more to fighting Commodore




Next turn I'm going to once again peek into Commodore's land and see what he has on the fogged tile 2N of Yellow Comet, and then decide how to proceed. I think our first target should be Blue Moon, simply because our attacking stack cannot be flanked there. If we take it, we continue along the northern coast and threaten his capital - the capital has to be attacked from the north due to the river shape. And then... we'll see