[Spoiler] Sian is On the Road again

[Dreylin]

t148 -

Yeah, saw this coming:


But it does beg the question why he didn't start out with this...

He's now lost 23 Cavs to my 11 units on this attack:


Although he can probably use his Rails to hit this stack again, but then I have some more to hit back and we're both running out of units at this point.

C'mon Jowy, I've done the hard work here:

[Dreylin]

As a final update: after the razing of Hobbes, things settled into an uneasy cold war with no further offensive moves from either side. Pickle made several Cease Fire offers, but there was no incentive for me to take them since I had low/no WW and he should have been hurt pretty hard by the Infantry slaughter.

Once my stacks of Cannon had been replenished, I started switching cities onto Wealth builds to try and claw back some ground on tech; was just about to start on AssLine and had a Golden Age crew ready to kick off for Industrialisation.

I give Sian credit for having set up the situation to allow a counter-attack, but I award myself a moral victory for not buckling under the dogpile pressure and surviving to the end with minimal losses. 

[Fenn]

Your reporting was a treat to follow. Too bad the no-doubt-imminent counter invasion of pickle won't happen anymore!

[Jowy]

WP Dreylin! I was gonna help you out with an army this time, but Greenline didn't join back in and you handled Pickle by yourself :P

[greenline]

GG and great job defending. I didn't realize getting my second stack wiped was so heavily RNG based though...
The reason why I offered a cease fire after abandoning the city and then decided to raze it anyway was just a stupid impulsive decision. I saw how after recapturing it that Thomas Aquinas was totally swamped with culture and indefensible, and decided that I couldn't let you keep the city. Horrible decision in hindsight.
Also, I'm surprised you took peace after that. If you had moved your cav SoD forward you could have razed a few cities at least. I only had 9-10 inf and midieval junk guarding my next city and it would take several turns to shuffle the rest of my rifles/knights from the center.

[Dreylin]

GG and great job defending. I didn't realize getting my second stack wiped was so heavily RNG based though...
The reason why I offered a cease fire after abandoning the city and then decided to raze it anyway was just a stupid impulsive decision. I saw how after recapturing it that Thomas Aquinas was totally swamped with culture and indefensible, and decided that I couldn't let you keep the city. Horrible decision in hindsight.
Also, I'm surprised you took peace after that. If you had moved your cav SoD forward you could have razed a few cities at least. I only had 9-10 inf and midieval junk guarding my next city and it would take several turns to shuffle the rest of my rifles/knights from the center.

Yeah, I felt a bit guilty after the attack on your stack went so well - well probably less guilty than I would have done if you hadn't just razed the city.  I'd expected to lose a bunch of Cavalry and leave you with some walking wounded limping home, but things broke better early on and it ran from there. I took Peace because I couldn't have pushed on for 2-3t while most of it healed (remember a lot was pre-wounded from hitting picklepikkl) and I'd used up all the Cats I had available so no collateral. My experience from PB33 says that I'd have to be willing to take significant losses to move on in that circumstance and I was at such a production disadvantage it didn't make sense.

There were a couple of moments later on where I almost re-declared to run around with Commando Cavalry, but by that point it felt a little too much like kingmaking so I stuck to defensive actions. Not sure I would even have chased too actively after picklepikkl ... although I had just lined my stack up at Death since I noticed a couple of units had been pulled out to defend Workers from amphib assault.

Thanks for the kind words Fenn, always nice to know someone's reading along!

[picklepikkl]

Jeez you played so well, I learned a lot from your defensive war reporting. Great job! (ALSO JOWY WAS SUBSIDIZING YOU, THAT EXPLAINS WHERE ALL THE SHIT CAME FROM (WELL, I GUESS THAT AND ALL THE WHIPPING AND DRAFTING))

Unless they're sandbagging heavily (although i'm going to go onwards with that expectation until i see otherwise in game), from what posts i've read from them, I'm going to call Greenline and Pickle greener than green and not much competition.

I am going to be petty and laugh about this Sian quote from the beginning of the game.

[Dreylin]

Yeah, Jowy's subsidies definitely made a difference in the quality of the troops I had available to use. Unfortunately the way things played out, I think Greenline would probably have been the main beneficiary otherwise as I'd have exhausted my stack on your front and then had nothing to rush back and defend the North.

I think you have every right to a good laugh at Sian for that quote!