Yurn 143, 270AD

[notyoueither]

Why? We knew thay had 14+ ansars and 11 or more riders out there. Why are we surprised when an understrength contingent got destroyed?

I am not trying to criticise, or point fingers. I am trying to prompt more realistic plans for this game. You do not stab fingers out into the night and not expect them to be cut off.

The bright side is that those 11 units killed many, no doubt. Unfortunately, there were 25+ units there to kill them.

Also of note is that ND did not have enough themselves to do the job. GoW had to finish it.

[Harovan]

What exactly did we have on that hill?

[notyoueither]

8kn, 3p, 8c, 1 settler

[Harovan]

I suppose we're talking about the hill where the 4/5 Rider is now.

I would have felt better if it were 8p, 3kn.

I can't do any maths right now, but I suspect, their losses must have been significant, too. I wouldn't be surprised, if what we see is all they have in the theater. Are all of these units Ansars/Riders? Probably yes.

[vulture]

The c's are catapults, right?

IIRC the knights and pikes were all fortified. According to the stack calculator, the average losses expected from attacking our stack with (up to) 25 riders/ansars are 10.2 losses from each side. We did worse than that, obviously since we lost all our units (we had a 30% chance that one or more would survive against 25 attackers). The subset of trials where we lose all our units, the attackers lose 8.9 on average (9 being the single most likely). It is 90% likely they lost between 4 and 12 units and 99% certain that they had between 3 and 13 casualties.

I think it is fair to say that barring pretty good luck for us (aside from losing all those units that is) we came off second best in this battle., despite having better than 50-50 odds in each individual fight.

Annoyingly, they managed to get most of their wounded units to safety, so we can't even pick those off to even up the odds.

We know of 11 of their units out of the anticipated 25 or so, so 14 are unaccounted for. We have about a 0.6% chance that we killed 14 units, so lets not count on that. They likely have another 5 or so riders/ansars guarding the GoW southern cities (while ND have probably flooded their taking with defenders by now).

[Arrian]

DAMNIT!

We got our asses kicked. They killed 11 3-defense units, on hills, with 8 cat shots for backup. Holy ****ing ****.

We are no longer in a position to pursue offensive operations. At least not for a while. We need reinforcements.

I guess we should try and kill that elite Rider (with our recent luck, the little bastard will retreat and get away).

-Arrian

[Harovan]

I don't know. They must have had significant losses too, And lots of units, who stand to heal. They don't have defenders down there, so every kill (rider: 3 defense, ansar: 2 defense) will be a big achievement. I'm unsure, but may be we can even slug it out... We should take out the elite rider, have a look around and then debate what to do next.

[vulture]

The only units who can be reached this turn are two riders on hills. All the ansars are out of range, and can use their 3 movement and roads to get into a city to heal before we can catch up with them.

We still have 14 knights, 13 MI and 12 pikes running loose in the south, which gives us enough to drive them out of those cities eventually, but at the expense of being vulnerable to a second wave from GoW (ND can of course stack Ansars pretty much wherever they want to).

[Cort Haus]

Now that ND have committed themselves in the South, can we immediately retaliate by landing a force on their coast while their Ansars are unavailable for a couple of turns? Or would an EF get smacked up by the GoW second wave which has been left holding the fort while ND attack?

It would be good to hit them back while their troops are recovering from their victory in the south. I suppose the alternative is to forget the North, reinforce the southern forces and just defend Spain.

[vulture]

I'm not convinced ND have committed themselves in the south. We've been at war with them for 13 turns now, and they've been in GA for most of that. Their GA started on turn 129, and now we're on turn 143 - that's 14 turns of GA, with their production at the start of 108 shields per turn. It's probably increased since then (a GSIA report would be informative). That gives potentiall 1512 shields to play with. Ansars are cheap - 50 shields? Or is it 60 - can't remember. Allowing for about 80% efficiency (due to shields wastage - they may be able to micromanage better than this though) that gives them up to 24 ansars if they are building them directly (and nothing else, assuming 50 shields / ansar). Allowing for some pike production to bolster their captured cities, they could easily have another 15 ansars waiting further north, which is enough to cope reasonably well with many attacks.

BTW lets not get too upset about this - don't let them get the psychological edge as well. We (probably) had some bad luck, but lets plan the next moves as though none of this had happened, just working on what we know of their dispositions and what troops we have to work with. Leave the blind panic for others to do. And on the bright side, we are 20 gpt better off than we were...

EDIT: corrected some numbers

SECOND EDIT: the mullering that GoW has likely taken to their Riders (most of the casualties come from them, while ND got to pick off the wounded knights) makes the chances of a GoW backstab less likely. Their forces are weaker than NDs now by some margin - they lost those troops, and have not gained the productive cities that ND has. ND is doing rather well out of this war, and GoW have gained very little - all they've done is effectively to enable ND to consolidate their gains at very little risk to themselves.

Wonder if we could persuade ND to go for a backstab.... but I really, really doubt it.

[Arrian]

It still stings like a *****, though. That's the part about PBEM that I hate - we have no way of knowing for sure what their losses were. And that's gonna drive me nuts.

-Arrian

[OPD]

GoW will have 8 cats and 2 workers 44441 of Barcelona, if GoW did take the brunt of the losses they may be badly equiped to defend them. If we kill the 4 HP elite rider we can get 4 knights there and be able to hit the catapult stack with these next turn. Losing the cats suck but we may be ATM defending them makes GoW vunerable. Would they put riders on open ground to defend them? If they did would it be worth our while to attack them with our knights?

[Arrian]

Can we get our knights in position for an assault on the Alamo next turn? RP can hit first with their med infs, and we can clean up with knights.

Given the numbers (hopefully) needed to destroy that big stack of ours, I figure the Alamo can't be heavily defended.

-Arrian

[OPD]

Originally posted by Arrian
Given the numbers (hopefully) needed to destroy that big stack of ours, I figure the Alamo can't be heavily defended.

If we threaten the stack of cats they may divert troops from the Alamo to cover for them


I think the ND units next to the Alamo are they as cover so that GoW can use units for these recent activities.

[OPD]

Whats more GoW may move the catapult stack NW next turn so they can be in Alamo and take a shot at the RP stack the turn after. If they do this (assuming they don't disband them or have already disbanded them) then if we can take back the catapults and take the Alamo, with RP's help, we could get the cats into the city and take a shot at the ND stack before their turn stopping them from taking the city back.