Grand Strategy: The Road to Victory

[notyoueither]

No ****.

We are going to garrison our interior cities when the age of Marines arrives, right?

[vmxa1]

I tipped my hat to H_E, but I have to fault the opposition for the outcome. Anyway the announcement will kill any chances of that working now.

We will need another play.

[asleepathewheel]

Great thread, but Tiberius made a huge mistake. I hope that one of us could catch something like that before it bites us in the ass.

The moment someone can build marines, we withdraw everything into the cities or coastal mountains. We place galleons and frigates a few spaces from our cities to keep a look out. We don't tolerate any, any penetration of our seas. the former wittlich city gets garrisoned with 20 spanish rifles or hopefully infantry. We build a ton of artillery (thank god they are resourceless, we might be killing stuff with guerrillas!!) and smash them the moment they land. Railroads and artillery are the key.

I don't see hot enamels maneuvers as being all that great, its just a huge mistake by his opponent. Keeping the empty transports in his water was a great move, I wonder how he explained that to tibi without tibi killing them.

I know that tibi didn't have bombers, but I was just thinking that it would be cool if air support would be defensive like artillery. Not bombers, but fighters I suppose. Say the first unit could attack, and then the bases would be alerted. Also I wish that artillery could kill outright naval units.

[vulture]

Why garrison interior cities? Tiberious's mistake wasn't leaving the interior undefended, it was not guarding the coastal cities enough.

Consider, for the sake of argument, that we have 5 coastal cities and 5 inland cities. And 50 units to guard them. Should we put 5 units in each city (scenario A), or 10 in each coastal city and none in the inland cities (scenario B).

To take one inland city you need to take a coastal city first. In scenario A, the invader needs to overcome 5 units with his marines, and then another 5 with whatever non-marine invasion force has come along for the ride (cavalry or tanks). In scenario B, he needs to overcome the same number of units, but only using his marines. If he has any non-marine attackers, B works better than A.

In a more realistic example, more than one inland city can be reached from the beach-head. Then the choices become defending with 5 units aganist marines, and then 5 against land units for each city, vs defending with 10 units against marines and having undefended cities. This depends on the ratio of marines to land attackers IMHO, and also the ease of movement between inland cities. With no armies built yet, and marines not getting an amphibious assault bonus in PtW (AFAIR) I think we'd do better defending just the coast, if we can get a lot of defenders in each city. But a lot depends on looking at what 2 move and 3 move attackers can reach from any given beach-head (not forgetting the mountain-travelling abilities of Ansars, since ND should keep some of those around for mobility purposes).

My suspicion is that throwing everything into preventing a beach-head will turn out to be better than defending inland cities, although if that goes wrong it does so catastrophically.

[DeepO]

Do either forts or coastal forts help against Marines?

Oh, and I agree the focus has to be on defending the coast, (including all hills where a settler can be plopped down), but leaving your interior cities completely empty is asking for trouble. Only 1 defender per city would have prevented the devastation of losing all those wonders...

DeepO

[vulture]

Good point - 1 unit per city with 50/50 odds would have in itself halved the number of cities lost in all likelihood. Do you think we can encourage Lego to learn the wrong lesson from this?

[DeepO]

let's not encourage Lego for anything... it will likely go back to one of the Bobians, they would use it to picture us as manipulists.

DeepO

[vmxa1]

That is what I was trying to say (gently), that it was a complete lapse by Tibi. In that game as in ours, there is a lot of water. You should have lots of ships and especially transports. This means you should be able to ring a few cities with ships. Thus forcing those transports to attack the ships before they can do anything.

If you have a large nunber they would have a big problem getting past them to even use the marines.

I still don't understand why you would not have flight, when you know the others have marines. Of course in C3C bombers are lethal, but still.

I just don't see how you could ignore transports running around you territory. As I mentioned, one or even two that are far enough apart to not be able to land in the same turn is one thing.
The number he tolerated was insane.

[asleepathewheel]

wouldn't that make you sick, to play a game for over a year, develop your civ that much, and then screw it up over a very simple mistake? I would hate myself for being so careless.

[DeepO]

I think one of the reasons why it was so easy to take his land was because he was massing his forces to attack H_E. He mentions 2 large SOD on his border, only a few turns after his maneuver... one of those is likely from Tiberius.

And it would make me sick, but then again, we're not exactly flawless here either... the game hasn't been lost for him yet.

DeepO

[Arrian]

I too was surprised he didn't freak out when he saw bunches of transports off his coastline.

But there were many mistakes made:

1) failure to take the threat posed by the transport seriously enough
2) failure to accurately calculate the full range of H_E's Magellan's-boosted transports (note the cities closer to the ships were much more heavily guarded)
3) failure by H_E to nail the Hoover city!

Anyway, we've discussed this in the last turn thread and here, and I think we understand that we must do a better job.

I figure we need picket/blockade ships + heavy garrisons in "at risk" cities (cities within range of a 1-turn strike. This means very carefully working out which cities could be hit. It is the most likely place for a mistake to be made) and coastal mountains + a large garrison in Elipolis, regardless of whether or not it meets the "at risk" criteria stated above, because several RP cities will be "at risk" cities. That means RP is going to have to gear up their military by the mid-industrial era. Lots of infantry for their cities.

Here's what worries me:

We can make ourselves difficult (costly) to conquer, but I do not think we can make ourselves invulnerable, or even close to invulnerable, and have anything left over for research and other city builds.

If we garrison our cities properly, there is still the weakness of a more standard coastal landing. If we try to garrison the cities AND the entire coastline, we will be spread too thin.

The attacker has the advantage of being able to concentrate their force (especially given the proximity of N. Stormia to GoW's coastline). The defender must spread his forces to counter all possible threats. Result: the attacker has the advantage.

Of course, that works in the reverse. They could be scared of the same thing. I hope they are.

-Arrian

[DeepO]

One of the key points against Marines is going to be Magellan, IMHO. Maybe we should put that wonder on our list of "the Road to Victory"

DeepO

[asleepathewheel]

I can easily see a situation where they offload maybe 10 inf and 15 cavs (once they see the sea wall gone) next to a city. It would take a lot for us to deal with such a group, pulling units out of other cities. Then either that civ or another attacks a city a few spaces away, weakened severely.

I can also see a scenario where ND lays into a city with marines, captures, then gifts the city accepted to GoW, who offloads their entire army, we have no empire at all the next turn. Seriously, played right, at the right spot or two, and we could have zero cities one turn.

[Cort Haus]

Yes, Magellan would help (our wish-list of wonders grows long) - and so would Radio.

How many more Marines to get through a multi-infantried metro with radar towers and Civil Defense?

[Arrian]

Magellan's... ack.

If we feel it's a strategic necessity, we need to make Hurricane's Copernicus prebuild into Magellan's (and Tempest can do Cop's). Seriously, I think that's probably the only hope of getting it.

The key to our defense will most likely be a line of fortified (for the extra tile vision) picket ships. They will be our late-industrial age Grog. If one or more of them disappear, we know we have incoming.

-Arrian