Operation Joshua

[MyOtherCar]

I recall from some (much) earlier post that Templars even had one of their coastal cities undefended. So either they have not many units or have all they have focused on us.

[T-hawk]

I thought that it wasn't having the technology that was important, but the fact that the units are gunpowder units (eg musketmen, cavalry). I could be wrong though.

This is correct. The Castle mouseover says "Obsolete with Economics (except defensive bonus)". Whether the defense is applied depends on what unit is attacking. The game shows it clearly - the defense number for a city will update according to the unit you have selected.

Also, although Cuirassiers and Cavalry are mounted units (not gunpowder), there's an exception so that the Castle defense doesn't apply to them.

On another note, I think we can be sure that the plains tile 1SW of Jericho is unroaded. We have visibility to the roaded tile 2W of Jericho, but the road in that square shows no connections. If 1SW were roaded, the 2W tile would show its road extending to the lower-right corner of the square.

The same effect goes for the plains and hill tiles 2S and 2S 1W of Jericho which show no connection to the visible hill 3S 1W.

edit: bugger the clumsy text, here's an image pointing out the lack of road connections.

[Sullla]

You're right T-Hawk, I don't think those tiles are roaded either. Bugger of a job by the Templars to have only one road connection to their front line city - what were they thinking?! Anyway, I wanted to cross-post the info on the Imperio Soldier count from the C&D thread, since it's highly relevant here:

As of last turn (T148), Imperio soldier count was 384 and Templars were still at 318k. Our Soldier count was 492k (which increased to 522k this turn with triple knight builds! We will get a major power increase on the graph next turn.) On the current turn (T149), Imperio did not increase their Soldier count, so they did not build any new units this turn. We will have to wait until next turn to see the Templar response. They added a crossbow in Jericho, but that may have been moved into the city, not trained there.

Imperio Soldier Points = 384k

Population: 49 pop points = 24k

Technology: Sailing, Hunting, Mining, Animal Husbandry (2k each) = 8k
Wheel, Alphabet, Metal Casting, Compass, Construction (4k each) = 20k
Mathematics, Archery (6k each) = 12k
Guilds, Bronze Working, Machinery (8k each) = 24k
Horseback Riding, Iron Working (10k each) = 20k
Total = 84k

City Improvements/Wonders
Mutal: Barracks (3k), Forge (2k) = 5k
Lakamha: Barracks (3k) = 3k
Chichen Itza: Barracks (3k) = 3k
Uxmal: Barracks (3k), Statue of Zeus (4k) = 7k
Mayapan: Barracks (3k) = 3k
Calakmul: Barracks (3k) = 3k
Total = 24k

This leaves 252k Soldier points for units.

Visible/Known units:

Chichen Itza defense
1 mace = 9k
1 pike = 6k
6 longbows (6k each) = 36k
1 galley = 2k
Total = 53k

Imperio main stack
6 maces (9k each) = 54k
3 elephants (8k each) = 24k
4 horse archers (6k each) = 24k
2 pikes (6k each) = 12k
11 cats (5k each) = 55k
Total = 169k

Total = 222k

This only leaves 30k available for garrison duty, which isn't even enough for one longbow per city. We can therefore state with extremely high certainty (99%) that Imperio has no other attack force. So long as we keep visual contact on their main giant stack, we can stay one step ahead of them.

Needless to say, this is extremely good news! Furthermore, I slightly overestimated Templar military strength in my previous C&D analysis. I was using the data for the current turn with the bar graphs instead of the data for the past turn, and this led to a minor error. As I said at the top of this post, the Templar Soldier count is actually 318k, and not 327k as I estimated previously. This means that we are missing about 75k worth of units, which - while still formidable - is not as bad we had feared. If 30k of that is tied up in garrisons, we are looking at 40-50k worth of units in the Templars mobile reserve. Guess we'll find out what they have in reserve soon enough...

[mostly-harmless]

The Xbow at Jericho was finished this turn.

mh

[regoarrarr]

Okay. Hopefully the team will not be mad at me but I was talking to Memphus who posts usually over at CFC. He is on team SANCTA in that demo game along with myself and a bunch of the rest of us. So I had seen him mention at one point that he has a combat spreadsheet that he uses to simulate out battles in cases like this. So after verifying that he was not on any of the teams in our game and swearing him to secrecy, I shared the situations for this battle. (Though I guess none of this is secret as long as the Templars are actually paying attention to the tile 1NW of one of their cities )

Still, if consensus is that I should not do this, in the future I won't. I did invite him to join our team, and he also said that the spreadsheet uses some sort of AI from where he works so he can't just share the spreadsheet.

This is what he said

Ok first results are in:


You have a 93% chance of taking that city this turn.



You have two paths: (all other ones die out more than 1/3rd of the time and in my books that is too high)


1. Mounted First (as you suggested) I.E. Knights, HA then ground units

2. Maces First



Drills downs are now computing.

and then

Sending in your HA first with flanking is looking more promising.

But it depends how well the bombard does.


The info is telling me (so far) you threats are:


X-Bows. (but knights eat them up)

Pikes (this is what stops your knights above)

Your Cat’s are going to hit the X-Bows so it s telling me that they should have CR1 (fodder they die anyway but the more you hurt those units….)

It is also telling me that bombarding all the way to 0% ISNT the best option. That one extra collateral damage should be kept.


So basically:

If your Cats hurt the X-Bows you go maces first.

If they don’t you Go HA (to hit the pikes and withdraw) then knights to rip through X-Bows, then clean up with maces

[sunrise089]

Ok, interesting analysis.

What he forgets is that these units aren't only going to be used to attack this city. Promoting our horses to flanking and then using them before the knights might make sense if this was going to knock Templars out of the game, but Combat I is clearly the better promo for the long-term.

I'm not even sure about going city raider on the cat rather than collateral. There are more anti-mounted defenders in the city than anti-melee, so using the collateral promo to weaken those spears sure appeals to me.

[regoarrarr]

Do HAs have an inherent retreat capability, or is that just with Flanking?

Certainly at some probability P of retreating, it would make sense, right? After all a live HA with flanking is certainly better than a dead Combat 1 HA... And at least the first 1 or 2 that go up against a pike are all but certainly going to the glue factory

Has anyone used this mod for test odds?

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=310415

[sunrise089]

There isn't a pike in the city though, right?

My thought is this: 3 knights will fight the city defender crossbow, the mace, and then probably one spear.

The 6 maces will fight the other crossbow, the axe, and then the three spears.

With two collateral hits with cats It's not even certain we'll loose one battle. So why send strength 6 or 6.6 HAs to attack strength 8 or 8.4 spears when every other unit would attack with odds?

[sooooo]

Don't think we should waste HAs. I normally give my cats CR, but I'll bow to your generalling Sunrise. I'd send the maces in first. On instinct I'd send 2 cats in, maybe even 3.

[regoarrarr]

You are correct there are no pikes in the city. I'll have him re-sim

[sunrise089]

Don't think we should waste HAs. I normally give my cats CR, but I'll bow to your generalling Sunrise. I'd send the maces in first. On instinct I'd send 2 cats in, maybe even 3.

I do as well sometimes. Against weak defenders who the cats can actually have decent odds against, or against a city with a few defensive units and mostly mounted units and other cats inside it can make sense. But with 8 defenders all getting bonuses, and with our stack having primarily mounted units, I think it's important to weaken the spears.

[regoarrarr]

So am I correct in my thinking of how collateral works is that once we send in one cat, all the units (besides the unit that defends against the cat) will be weakened 10%? So the spears will be 3.6, the maces 7.2, etc? And then a 2nd cat would take them to 3.2, 6.4, etc?

[sunrise089]

I don't know the formula at all. My sense is that the collateral bonus like doubles the amount of collateral per attack, but I really have no idea.

[regoarrarr]

I meant just a straight cat attack - w/o the promotion.

[Zeviz]

Another reason to put collateral instead of CR on suicide cats is that we don't want them to damage crossbow so badly that spears start defending first against knights. (Unless they damage it so much that it stops being a threat to maces.)