The war has started.

[sunrise089]

@Sunrise: When are you planning to play the turn?

In about 5 minutes.

[sunrise089]

Soooo's post about worker actions and my reply in the turnplayer thread got me thinking about our looming offensive. Obviously we can't draft Oromos until we get some more techs, and even knights are still out of the picture. We do need to think about timing though, and possibly try to get some cats from backline cities in the near future.

Basically Cape Town and Pink Dot are producing units to keep pace with Templars and Imperio; and even that isn't a perfect system as Imperio's main stack has run away into the fog. The units Pink Dot is building will eventually go on the offensive (Templars don't have enough units that will survive the first turn of our offensive to threaten Pink Dot), but our main army in the north is still tied down. Therefore we'd like to have enough catapults built by the time we discover guilds to be able to emphasize knight production and then Oromo production in turn.

Anyways, I don't have a perfect plan, but lets try to think critically about which builds in our backline cities are worth delaying the start of our offensive over.

[sooooo]

Hmm, it's a good point. Let's see. Airstrip One has a gap of 5-7 turns between finishing a missionary and starting the taj mahal. It could build a catapult then. I wouldn't go for a stable in airstrip one as was suggested by someone else. China Beach needs to build 2 workboats after its settler - after that it could probably whip a knight or a stable. Something Fishy is chopping a stable after the settler is triple-whipped, but after that it could build a horse archer that will probably turn into a knight when we get guilds (do we have an eta on that by the way?). That's about it I think. The other cities need to get their core buildings finished before they can build units.

[mostly-harmless]

Good idea. First thing: Do we have a list of targets we want to attack?
Opening up our trade routes would be nice, so Jerusalem or Chichen Itza present themselves.

mh

[sunrise089]

@M_H - I'd plan on attacking Jericho and then marching SE. Jericho doesn't appear well defended, and it's close enough to Cape Town where we could shift units down without too much risk. Plus, once we have Jericho our border actually becomes easier to hold because we can keep the Cape Town army a little bit further south.

If we go strait to Jerusalem we go off our road network and let the Templar army between our offensive stack and Pink Dot.

[mostly-harmless]

Of all the recent threads, this is likely the best to suite the below issue:

Militar upkeep is currently responsible of 29 out of 96gold we have to pay each turn. I looked into ways to bring those numbers down a bit, but there is really not much we can do:
- increasing civ population by 4 pop points is giving free support of one additional unit. However, we are forced to whip and will be forced to draft soon, so rapidly increasing our population just for the sake of lower military upkeep is not really realistic.
- disbanding obsolete units is also not desirable at the moment
- moving units back into our cultural borders will somewhat relieve the financial strain. For every two units not within our culutral borders we pay 1gold supply. The six 2movers on the neutral road network costs 3gold each turn. This will be remedied once, PD pops 4th ring in ~13turns. I will leave it to sunrise to decide whether he thinks he can park the 2movers somewhere else. The single fogbusting archer in the north will be relieved of duty once Frozen Clams pops the 2nd ring.

Apart from that, there is not much we can do, sadly.

mh

[ruff_hi]

Apart from that, there is not much we can do, sadly.

There are two other options:

- lose some of our units killing theirs
- take cities to fund military upkeep

[sunrise089]

So we're on the eve of Operation Joshua and we're getting a bit jittery. I confess even I'm a little nervous, since a 2-year game has a lot higher stakes than another ancient teamer played in the MP lobby. I wanted to throw out the main short-term outcomes of our Jericho attack and our likely responses. Of course the most important question is whether to keep or raze Jericho, but we'll discuss that during the attack, based on casualties.

1) We capture Jericho and Templars don't have reserved troops well positioned - We send horse archers to try to take (and raze) a second city on the cheap.

2) We capture Jericho and Templars move their army to try and retake the city, or have lots of additional troops nearby - We cut the roads connecting Jericho to the Templar lands and dare them to attack a city with 7 healthy catapults without elephants in their stack.

3) We capture Jericho and Templars move their army against Pink Dot - As discussed, we weaken the Templars stack with our knights and send our horse archers home to defend.

4) We capture Jericho and Templars move their visible army and another sizable army from the fog against Pink Dot - We slave the snot out of our southern cities and/or revolt into nationalism right away and take a short term population penalty to save the city, while Templars still loose theirs.

5) We capture Jericho and Imperio moves a naval expedition towards our lightly defended northern coast - Again, if there are multiple ships, we slave our northern cities to create emergency defenders.

All the above is just sort of idle speculation running through my head right now, but I type it out to illustrate a point: without double-moved allowed, and with 2-movers and engineering and slavery, it is very hard to capture a city except through a very short distance attack against a very lightly defended point.

[sooooo]

I would doubt very much that Templars would advance on Pink Dot. Even if they do I think we can hold the city. I think the scenario that we should develop a plan for is: We capture Jericho. The CT/Chichen tile flips to Imperio and they park a stack outside Cape Town. At the same time, the Imperio stack in the south moves north to try to recapture Jericho. Do we have enough cats/troops to defend against both of their armies in two different locations? Probably we do, but I'm just throwing it out there to come up with a plan.

[Swiss Pauli]

As I wrote in the Templars thread:

6) Templars move too many reserves into Jericho, and we decide to retreat.

[sunrise089]

Very true Swiss, I don't know why I forgot to type that after thinking it over.

@Soooo - Jericho and Cape Town will have a wonderful road connection, so units parked on the plains tile 3S of Cape Town could cover both cities. Nothing would make our defense easier than Templars shifting their stack north and letting us see it.

[sooooo]

OK, let's get to it!

[sunrise089]

@Krill - I think we should discuss the turn timer due to the new 3-way war.

The way I see it, the order should be RB->Imperio->Templars. Why?

1) RB move first during the last 3-way war.

2) Templars declared right near the end of their turn. (right?)

3) RB almost always moves before Templars and Imperio even when they are allowed to move at any time.

Do you agree? If not, I had better race home and get our moves in now

[Krill]

RB ended turn first, right? So you're first in the new turn order.

[sunrise089]

We definately ended our turn first during T162. The turn that started this morning (for me), T163, hasn't ended yet for anyone on our continent. Does RB need to make sure we end this one first as well?