Proposals and Odd Ideas re: our war...

[Shiber]

DeepO, GoW also shed off two riders northeast of Pamplona. What happened to them anyway?

Anyway,
in order for an assault on the south to work, we need to catch GoW unprepared. We have to create a convining illusion that we are moving most of our forces to the Pamplona theatre, which means that we have to move a few more knights there, as well as several slowmovers (I suggest pikes, they'll be useful if ND attacks and we'll have to move into the open in order to attack them and won't have any movement left to retreat).

[DeepO]

one moment... I was a bit mistaken: we don't have to use the flats, we can go over the hills. And we can't reach Valencia in 3, but need 4 turns. There is an extra hill there I didn't remember

Ah, yes... 2 more riders up North (don't know where they went, we'll have to check our own save for that). So at most 9 riders, probably about 6... 1 in Valencia, S, Me, Mu, leaving between 2 and 5 free riders somewhere in the open. And I'm not sure, but weren't 6 riders already damaged? They would most likely not be used in the attack, seeing as how cautious GoW is with their troops.

DeepO

[Velociryx]

Hmmm....well, if it'll take four turns, then they'll all be healed anyway....no good, unless we can do it faster. If not, then we may as well take a couple extra turns to really put a solid force together (at that point, it won't matter anyway, since they'll all be healed)

-=Vel=-

[DeepO]

Shiber, about those 2 riders missing in the North: most likely they are being led to Salamanca. If the moved last turn towards S77 or S47, they can reach S next turn... full health. Which gets the number of riders back to 11 max (not including possible reinforcements from the West)

DeepO

[Velociryx]

okay...in the spirit of the title of the thread, here's an odd idea.

Problem: We're in neutral territory, and enemy units can heal (speaking of the coming campaign in the south).

Possible solution: A semi-permanant, roving "camp" complete with our borders, to block off strategic turf.

We don't NEED to enclose the borders of the entirity of the southlands, we just need to block off the best terrain.

I'm writing this without the benefit of looking at the map again, but it occurs to me that a couple of wayward settlers accompanying our strike force, could do this quite handily. If we spy a group of enemy troops parked on a hill, daring us to attack and healing every turn, our response could be to simply build a city right next to them and put them inside our borders. No more healing, and now...a quandry. Relocate, attack the city, or face repeated bombardment.

Doing this, will of course, necessitate a greater focus on pikes, and the continual feeding in of more (and more settlers) to maintain our lines and secure our "camps" and when the troubles have ended, these "temporary cities" can be disbanded, or kept if in good locations.

Not saying that the entire war should be fought like this....it would be painfully slow, BUT....I can think of a couple of locations off the top of my head where it'd be a stellar, and unexpected move, and it would simplify the logistics of keeping some of the region's more favorable terrain firmly in our hands, or at least prevent enemy troops from healing up in good terrain. They want to stop to heal? Fine, let them do it in the flats and run the risk of getting waylaid by our two move troops.

-=Vel=-

[Velociryx]

The other thing we need to do in the southlands (and this is in keeping with the theme of re-taking cities and using temporary "bridge camps" to extend our borders--is to isolate, limit, and constrict the area that the enemy forces can reasonably expect to operate in.

True, it is impractical to nail down all of the territory with our borders. We could do it, but the effort it would take is not worthy of the forces presently there, HOWEVER, where we have borders, we can also have extensive roads, and our two move units, inside our borders and on our roads, can run rings round their 3-move attackers. This will not completely nullify their movement advantage, as ours comes with a couple of strings attached, but the benefits we'll see from it simply cannot be overstated, IMO.

Roads and borders will win us this war....

-=Vel=-

[notyoueither]

Hmmm. Good thoughts.

How many cities should do these settlers? Cyclone is bulking us up on workers. We have 5 on the way to the boats. 1 more to bring us to 6. Then she and Sandstorm can provide us with the settlers we want.

[zeit]

I like the idea of popping a few cities to slow them down, but it'll take some time from now... Our focus should be on how we take the Valencia, and set a perimeter to defend the area until we push against S. I think a time frame is in order as well- how long before we could land or move forces towards V, without compromising B?

We better take this one step at a time, though like I said, as a strategy, popping some towns might be a nice counter against 3-movers.

[Velociryx]

NYE: Not exactly sure on the number of settlers needed, and not sure there's a solid answer for that (on the thinking that some of our "temporary camps" might get overrun by the attackers when we place them....so much the better though....if/when that happens, the battle is taking place in a place of our choosing (ie - better to have them rush us in the flats, inside a newly created town than to have us rush them in the hills). So we lose a couple of "camps" that way? Doesn't matter, from a pure shield-cost perspective, we're still coming out ahead, if we're defending those places mostly with Pike, given the shield cost difference of the units they're losing.

It should be an ongoing thing, but once we get bulked up on workers over on Bob, we should be constantly readying 1-2 new settlers, both for the temporary camp idea, to replace cities that are nixed during the prosecution of this war, and to found new ones when we clear patches of land where new cities would be viable.

Ziet: Couldn't agree more....we gotta act in the short term and plan in the longer. To that end, my sense of it is that as soon as we get 4-5 pikes in the vicinity of Valencia, we can at least park on the hill overlooking it and threaten....use it as a staging area.

Doesn't matter that they see the attack coming....difficult to reinforce Valencia for them, given the distances involved, and our forces are closer in any case. No way could they beat us to the punch, and if they tried, our forces will take the city before their reinforcements arrive, extending our borders there and our options.

-=Vel=-

[DeepO]

we've got one settler ready, I believe... so at least that's one

One question that has been nagging me for a while now (I asked it before, but it never got answered): When do cities autoraze exactly? I thought that the moment a city was over size 1, or if it ever build up culture it would no longer autoraze. Meaning in this case that the RP cities are all safe: They were at at least size 2.

Is this correct, or does it get reset when a new civ takes possession of a city? I mean, RP having 2 pop in a city which is now owned by GoW at size 1, would that autoraze or not?

DeepO

[Velociryx]

That's a good question, and one I'm not entirely sure of the answer these days! Even if all the cities are safe from that, there's still the possibility that in our coming battles, our opponents will simply start to raze, rather than capture cities, so we'll still see some (potential) need for settlers to fill in those gaps, plus others to use as "camps" and "bridges."

Was thinking more about the "border bridge" concept earlier. The first place I see a use for one would be in the flats, right next to the hills, between Valencia and....that other burg down that way. Capturing Valencia will give us friendly borders there, and if I'm remembering the map correctly, a "camp" at the base of the hills NW of Valencia would link the borders AND put the hills inside our sphere of influence (no nasty surprises coming over the hill, and no healing ON the hill for our enemies.

With pike support in both, it would consolidate our position there, and isolate that...other town whose name escapes me.

Sort of a mid-range plan, but...something that tickled its way across my brain.

-=Vel=-

[Velociryx]

The more I think on it, the more I'm digging the idea of nixing our own iron for five turns as Arrian proposes....this works ESPECIALLY well for us because we can do it, build up a wampum lot of upgradeable troops, upgrade as many as we can with cash available, get back to building "da big guns" the old fashioned way, and continue to upgrade what cheap troops we could not afford to upgrade initially each turn.

This solves two very big, important problems for us.

First, it gives us lots of troops right NOW. Important because RP's need is immediate, and the bestest way to start putting the pressure on is not to wait any longer than is absolutely necessary to get a substantial force over there to HURT our enemies. We've got enough there to hold, but not to hurt. That needs to change, pronto.

Second, we've got ships and nada to transport on them. By nixing the iron, we'll give our Trannies plenty to do! (another, corallary consideration is that, if we have a city on Bob with a barracks, we can transport cheap troops....that way, IF something bad happens, and a trannie gets sunk....no great loss...MUCH better to lose 2 warriors on the deep blue than to lose 2 MI's. We can just swing said warriors by the local Bobian barracks, hit the ol' upgrade switch, and presto...insta meanie. That way, our transports can start getting the goods over there quickly, and we can upgrade wherever's convenient, then ship the newly armed and dangerous troopages off to wherever they're needed (the south in the immediacy, obviously).

-=Vel=-

[DeepO]

The whole point is: do we have enough to hold right now? We'll be without new troops for about 7 turns...

(Oh, BTW, it wasn't Arrian who proposed it first, this was mentioned a couple of times before the past few weeks )

DeepO

[notyoueither]

Who ever in the world mentioned cutting iron? I can't for the life of me remember who suggested that...

[zeit]

Please don't forget that using this method is a super-expensive venture- not only we need to actually upgrade the horde of those lousy wimps, but we also need to pay upkeep, while they are sitting at home, doing nothing.

OTOH, if we plan this right, and make sure we have enough money to make one big upgrade just when we've connected the Iron, and make sure we have what it takes to ship the boys to the front quicly, this means a HUGE boost to our military on Bob, and probably be able to launch an offensive quickly.

We need to weigh this seriously- hoarding money now isn't necessarily a bad thing, we'll want to research at flank speed soon, which means a nasty deficit. We also have RP to support, but perhaps this is actually good reason to get our army even bigger quicker- win something for RP.