Turn 244: 1270 AD

[Cort Haus]

OT: Like the teenage Kicks sig, Alva Is that a memorial for John Peel?

[DeepO]

Originally posted by alva
Not a big fan of the law of averages then, are you?

Oh yes, but on another level. With big battles, you know that the outliers die out, and get more to average. If you calculate before hand that with a stack of 100 units attacking, you will have 70 kills, it will be unlikely that you only have 50 kills. OTOH, if you only have 10 battles to fight, it makes sense that if you expect 7 kills, only 5 will die. You only need 1 tank-defeated-by-spearman to completely change the outcome of the battle, while if you fight with 100 units, you 10 of those.

Again, this is a bit of belief, as mathematically, chances are equal. But if I fight 1 battle, I accept I can get lucky, or unlucky. If I fight 10 battles, I only accept getting lucky twice.

This is different from fighting 5 battles, and saying: okay, so far I was unlucky, time to get lucky to 'get average'. That doesn't work. The second half of the battle is independent once the first half has finished.

We used this in the BB attack. After bombardment (which went well), the decision was made to continue. Doing it in steps increases our odds overall (and no combat calculator can compute that). If you don't take into account the decision, you'd think that we got very lucky, while in reality doing it in 2 steps improved our chances considerably.

DeepO

[alva]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
OT: Like the teenage Kicks sig, Alva Is that a memorial for John Peel?

Yeah, sort off. I really liked the guy but I didn't know the song before.

It's one of me favourites now though.
-
DeepO

[DeepO]

I'm working on the large map, but there is one thing painfully obvious: we know too little of Lego to be any help in planning our way up North. We can, apart from the likely cities already identified in the South, have a good guess at one other city, and that's it. This is not going to work, either we need their map, or we need explorers.

CH, did you mention to MZ already that the spy failed? You might want to ask him if he is willing to fund our attempt to steal Lego's map. We only need it to decide if we will get to them or not, so I'm a bit hesitant to fund it ourselves.

DeepO

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by DeepO

CH, did you mention to MZ already that the spy failed? You might want to ask him if he is willing to fund our attempt to steal Lego's map. We only need it to decide if we will get to them or not, so I'm a bit hesitant to fund it ourselves.

DeepO

I mentioned that the spy failed. He said

Damn

Btw, spying is RNG dependant if I recall correctly, that is, whatever moves you guys already did you have to re-do them and THEN spy (just in case you loaded the save and tried to spy immediately... this might have also messed up your naval attacks)

-MZ

I'll ask about the map costs - how much is it again for a safe steal? (We will pick up some gold from Lego cities this turn. {edit - and ND might pay too})

[Cort Haus]

To MZ:

We'll probably have to try to steal Lego's map to make a coherent plan. Trouble is, cash is tight and we have at least a barracks to rush next turn. Not sure what the cost is, and maybe ND can chip in, but can you help?

[Cort Haus]

They really should go for that. If we get the map and pass it on to ND, they can spy otherwise unknown cities for GoW.

[Aeson]

I think it's time to take Quanto. We need to decide what non-moveable troops to take with us to do so. I say only take 1 Marine in the Transport that can't quite make it. With only 4 Settlers we aren't going to be refounding Quanto or a shore city nearby.

[DeepO]

Something else: we can't wait on this forever. So here is an idea: no matter what happens, I'd like to use those 7 non-moveable forces to try to hold on to Quanto 2 (1 is not so ideal, as it doesn't connect to as many RR tiles). As we can move MI up there later too, the best choice I think would be to put 7 infs on that tile. Later, we can decide on the exact troop formation, as we would also need to keep NI 6 for it to be of any effect.

Which means that we can decide later on what exactly is to happen, but at least we can move our transport which will not be able to reach Quanto with 7 infs and 1 marine, and take Quanto.

That's step 1.

Step 2: update our city information, and move the second transport with 4 settlers and 4 tanks into Quanto. This is also the same for all scenarios.

Step 3: capture the explorer with a marine (which are now free to move again). Probably use the wounded one, but that is not so important right now. Use the explorer to scout our borders (without losing mp!), to see if we can spot anything else. I doubt it, but you never know.

This can all be done without a decision on what the rest of our plans are going to be. The rest, however, is something else.

Step 4. Load all other troops into boats, and chain them into Quanto. We do not know what kind of troops we're going to take. If we let GoW do it themselves, without trying to interfere, we better take a couple of MIs with us for defense of whatever we might want to keep. Say 5 MI, the rest tanks. the 2 explorers join us as well.

However, if we don't try to help GoW, I would prefer to put one of those transports out in the open sea, to create a backup hub 3. Next turn, 4 more settlers are going to be worth more then 8 tanks are worth now, if you can't reach anything. We don't have the forces to create credible forks on multiple cities right now, and only a couple of settlers will get us to those forks next turn, with possibly all of our tanks instead of only a small detachment.

So, I'm in favour of loading the 7 infs and 1 marine into a boat, and sail to Quanto. It's about time we capture a city!

BTW: does anyone know what is going to happen with our transports, once we destroy Quanto? I don't want to exploit this... are they just put one tile out of the city, in the open sea?

DeepO

[DeepO]

huh.. cross-posting again.

CH, 338 gold for the map. And please tell MZ that we know we can't mess with the RNG, which is why each and every move has been logged so far. Plus, for as long as possible, I'm going to keep the safe open, so we don't need replays. That chaining gets on my nerves if I've got to do it too often

DeepO

[Cort Haus]

Note on the RNG:

Further to MZ's comments (above), it may not only be actively random events that move the RNG seed. I found in a PBEM that an attack I assumed to be the first RNG event of the turn was resolved differently when I replayed the turn. Might the game generate random numbers elsewhere - like the 'random' advisor's messages perhaps? Could other interface or graphical elements invoke an RNG number if selected?

If the turn crashed now, I'd fear for the replay.

[Jon Shafer]

If you disband a city all naval units in it are destroyed.

[Aeson]

After Quanto I think we should move 1 Transport in. 4 Settlers are obviously going. 1 Explorer can be sent N/NE from Quanto. The other Explorer can explore the S from NI. Between them they can map out a good portion of Lego, and every tile we uncover will make stealing the map less costly. That will leave us with Lego's Explorer, but I'd rather steal the map before we capture it. That's because we can't use a N Marine to capture it until we've Taken Sand and Yellow at least.

That leaves 3 slots open in Transport1. 3 Tanks.

Then we will be in position to plan how to proceed.

[Cort Haus]

from MZ:

We went 100% tax last turn for any eventualities so we can help, ND was also going to do some spying for us but since that won't be necessary anymore we can "divert" that money to you.

Also, I'm not sure if I said it clearly but what I was referring to was that if you loaded the save to spy then the result would be different than if you played your moves and THEN spyed and that perhaps spying beforehand would end up changing the results of your attacks (hence why you have to spy after moving what you have already moved).

(I replied that we're clear about the RNG sequence.)

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Trip
If you disband a city all naval units in it are destroyed.

Wow - good point.