Designing our invasion

[Shiber]

I figured this deserves a thread.

Originally posted by Arrian
I would start with med infs + pikes and a settler.

We have three basic options for an invasion:

1) Inchon-style landing inside RPs territory.
2) Inchon-style landing outside RPs territory (SE coast).
3) Leave out the settler, and rely on capturing a coastal city.

I need to look at a recent map before I decide which I want, but it's definitely between #1 and #2. It just depends on which one provides us with the best protection for our forces and the best opportunity to deal damage to RP (read: capture/destroy their core). Actually, time required to reinforce is another key factor. Landing in the SE, outside their territory, means our galleys will take longer to shuttle over more troops. So I suspect #1 is the most viable approach.

Pikes, Med Inf, settler. Then go back for cats & knights.

How many galleys do we have available for this?

-Arrian

Our forces as of 90 BC:
10 Galleys.
19 Medieval Infantries.
24 Pikemen.
14 Catapults.
8 Horsemen.
13 War Chariots.

[Theseus]

We'll have Chivalry, yes?

Why not start with 21 Knights and 9 Cats?

[Shiber]

We may want to take some precautions... who knows, RP might spot us with a scouting galley and attack our ships, and might sink one galley with two units on it (imagine if its the one carrying the settler, OUCH). Therefore I suggest that we leave one of the galleys in the invasion stack empty; that way, it'll be attacked first, and we won't have any chances of losing units on sea unless RP attacks and wins with two galleys, which is much less likely.

So we have 9 galleys that can carry troops. Assuming that we're going to take a settler, that leaves us with room for 17 combat units. We'll need pikemen for sure, and medieval infantry to fight back against our attackers and to capture our first Spanish town if we're going to land right next to an RP town, but I suppose that there's also room for a few cats. They'll certainly come in handy against the fortified pikes that we're likely to meet inside our first target city, they'll be very useful if RP sets up walls and we'll have to take them down, and they can fight back against the RP units that are likely to attack our Inchon site, saving us some pike casualties. All in all, cats will serve as all-purpose units in the early stages of this invasion, useful for both attack and defense.

[Shiber]

We already have Chivalry, but I wouldn't take so many knights, certainly not when we start off.
True, knights have both the advantages of pikes and medinfs and move twice as fast, but they're also expensive. If we lose a pike while defending, or lose a medinf while attacking, we lose a costlier unit. Besides, there's not much need for manueverability when we start, which (according to my vision) will look basically like this: land next to an RP town, establish Inchon, attack the nearby town and only then call the knights ("Here comes the cavalry! Tam-tadam-tadam-Tadam-tadam-tadam-Tadam-tadam-tadam-Tadam-tadam-tadam-Tadaaaam).

[Theseus]

OK, some empty Galleys.

But why anything but Knights (A4D3) and Cats (and maybe a Settler) in the first wave?

[Harovan]

No or not so many knights! At least not in the 1st wave. The first landing will have to secure a foothold and maybe take ~2 coastal cities as base. It should consist of 1/2 pikes, 1/4 cheap attackers (medinfs) and 1/4 cats. Knights are way too costly and we don't need the mobility yet. They also provide only 4 attack. The retreat bonus doesn't yet count, because we haven't yet a place to heal, and to ship them back lasts too long. The 2nd wave should contain 1/3 pikes, 1/3 knights and 1/3 cats. The 3rd wave should contain knights only, or maybe a few of the other unit types, after seeing what we lost.

[Arrian]

10 galleys. So 20 units. Though I thought 1 galley was otherwise occupied.

So let's say 18 units in the first wave.

1 settler
7 pikemen (definitely including our elite)
6 med infs
4 catapults

Second wave:

5 pikes
8 med inf
5 cats

Third wave:

5 cats
13 mounted units (knights and elite WCs)

Fourth wave:

as needed.

Theseus,

The reason is that Knights are expensive units. If we can avoid it, I'd rather not have them defend. Ever. Pikes are 30 shields and defend just as well. Med Infs are 40 shields and attack nearly as well (just can't retreat). Knights are 70 shields (or rather WC+100 gold or Horseman+80 gold) and have a mobility advantage, true. But much of that is negated by what looks like rough terrain in Espana.

In short, the slowmovers are far more expendable. Better to secure a safe haven with them and then bring in the knights, than to subject our knights to possible heavy casualities in the initial assault/counterattack.

-Arrian

[Theseus]

God, where is my head today.

Aaaand I was thinking caravels.

Doh.

[Arrian]

Oh, I wish! Caravels would make this much easier.

We are supposed to work out an Astronomy for Banking tech deal with Lego, but I'd imagine that the war would be underway by the time the techs are actually swapped.

-Arrian

[Aeson]

One of our Galleys is heading around to RP's Iron with 2 Pikes right now. We need to establish an Embassy with RP too. Now would be best, as they will probably be suspicious when we do establish it, and we'd rather give them some time to forget about it before the actual attack comes. A few investigations of cities will pay off more than upgrading a similar number of Knights. We may even want to pay another civ to do wartime investigations (using Banking as bait?). We also will want to keep our units out of cities (especially Olibanum Gale and Whirlwind), in case they investigate us.

Definitely we need 2 Galleys up north to watch the crossing. Think of them as Grog Galleys. We probably want 4-5 more Galleys if we're going to do this. If we are going to devote a lot of our troops to Spain, we need all the warning time we can get. Our worst case should be that we see a landing party coming, and have time to block all possible landing sites within range of the ships with WC's/Horsemen/Workers every turn.

We have 3 good targets for a landing (other than the Iron of course). Barcelona, New Madrid, and Valencia. I think Barcelona is a good 'safe' bet, as it would give us a Harbor (if they don't sell it off), access to silks, and cut off spices to RP. It's also a size 6 city with no culture (or less than 10 at this point) and not built on Hills. It's one we have to investigate before the war starts. New Madrid too. That's going to cost us about 160g or so?

If RP shows only a couple units in each city, we definitely want to take New Madrid the turn after landing though. Pikes from Pamplona, Barcelona, and Toledo would be too late to reinforce. New Madrid is going to be their Arashi... All their other important cities are on flatlands, with good defensive terrain around the city. If we can hit them quickly enough, they won't have time to fortify it like we did Arashi. Otherwise... our offensive will have to avoid the city just like Vox's did.

Then we take the coastal cities Barcelona and Valencia. We'd have cut off a Silk, and their Spices, perhaps gaining access to them with Barcelona's Harbor. It will be a good barometer for us if RP sells the Harbor, as that would seem to be a 'we are losing the city' type of play... cutting off Iron and Horses to the city. We should offer restitution to any civs who's trade is cut off because of this, but unless Lego has Astronomy by then, I can't see any civ having their trades cut off directly because of it. Spices everyone on Bob has natively, and Silks would probably just cut off RP's supply. The dangers is, if they are at war with ND and us, it will break any trade routes they have to RP when they lose their Harbor.

The exact ratio of units we use should probably wait for the investigations of the city to finalize. I'd think we'd want something like 5 Pikes, 10 Med Inf, and 5 Cats for the initial landing... more if we have the galleys of course. We need the Cats to at least take down walls if they get them up in New Madrid. Otherwise even 2 Pikes are going to be costly to kill.

I don't think we need an empty Galley along unless RP keeps their Galley on this side (and within range). From WW 14 we can make the crossing and land all our units at New Madrid 3 or 6, and RP couldn't even attack us at WW 14 from across the channel. RP would have to suicide a Galley just to see us there.

New Madrid is the keystone here. We'd need to take it, and fast.

[Arrian]

4-5 more galleys? Ouch.

Can we get away with 1 galley watching the north?

Then we build 2 more, and we have 10 available for the actual invasion (1 empty, 9 full).

OR, we could try and wait for astronomy. This makes our ships much less vulnerable to attack and allows us to bring more troops along. 9 caravels = 27 units. Settler, 8 pikes, 8 cats, 10 med inf. mmmm....

Problem is that in order to do it, we'd have to RACE for banking/astronomy (lego and us) and then probably shut off science and go max tax to pay for upgrades to our ships and then our mounted forces.

-Arrian

[Aeson]

We could probably get away with no galley's up north, but... scouting is king. If we see what's coming before it gets to us, we can deal with any possible invasion force until marines. To be safe, we should have a galley N of Port Isolation, and S. Otherwise we run the risk that GoW or RP has a few galleys S, and we never see them until they land their troops. While we could deal with such a landing, it would likely be costly.. much more so than 30 shields and 1gpt for the extra Galley.

4-5 More galleys shouldn't be too hard to get together in the next 10 turns. Tornado and Bolderberg can each build one after their Aquaduct, and we could build another 2 in Sufu and Typhoon before their Aquaducts. I think it pays off more than the Aquaducts 5 turns sooner (basically a pop point between them). We really can't think about invading before 10 turns anyways, most of our units are tied up up N. We also need to wait until the war actually breaks out before joining.

Astronomy is going to be 5 or so turns too late most likely (ETA was 15-20 turns or so right?), and I'd rather spend cash upgrading Knights and investigating cities than upgrading the Galleys. RP has no chance of sinking any of our ships if we position them right, and 10-12 galley's should be enough to get all the units over we want pretty quickly (probably faster than we can upgrade to Knights).

20 units at a time should be enough to take the landing site we choose, otherwise we definitely shouldn't be fighting this war!

[DeepO]

Definate yes to scouting! Scouting is a lot better then having to defend loads of coast blind. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if either RP or ND has a few galleys loaded up, just in case they would be attacked by either us or GoW.

As to 4-5 more galleys: another definate yes. We can build those fastly, and why risk going in with only some 15 units, when you could also bring 25 at once.

I'm not sure, but that would take let's say 10 turns to set up decently, which leaves us about 5 turns before Astronomy. Before astro, we're realtively safe, after it we need to make sure we have cleared the sea between Stormia and Big Stormia () This should be possible to arrange with Legoland, without rising too much suspicion.

However, somewhere along the line, we need to research banking as well, does this still leaves us enough gold left for necessary upgrades, and possible rushes? Currently we're making about 150 gpt, which should rise to over 200 gpt in 10 turns... banking is some 1200 beakers, right? Taking us 6-7 turns at full speed? I'm not sure that leaves enough for 21 knight upgrades alone, but it should be close. But I'd rather have some intelligence going instead of knights anyway

Although I favored EotS as a settler pump, maybe we shouldn't overdo it, and start building some knights there before it goes back to size 6. That would let us keep Hurricane for a wonder prebuild, still having enough knights around to safely do this.

As to landing spaces: If at all possible, New Madrid would be superb... but we need to be able to defend it immediately, we should expect a counter attack there in 2-3 turns with 15-20 swords, and be able to withstand it easily. Anything less has a large chance of failing our invasion.

DeepO

[Harovan]

The "10 turns to set up decently" seem to match with the NAP RP wants. This would be a nice deception.

[vulture]

I like the look of an Inchon between New Madrid and Barcelona. We have updated maps from RP now right? So their road network to Barcelona and Valencia goes through New Madrid, and it'll take them several turns to get units over the hills in the absence of roads. Depending on how optimistic we feel, we can hit either NM or Ba - Valencia probably won't be well defended, and gain a few of their reasonable towns quite quickly.