Operation "Sweetheart"

[mostly-harmless]

Obviously the name is related to the abundance of sugar near Jerusalem.

Here is the map of the lands we want to take with some assumptions on fogged tiles (tile bleeding) and road network.


Jerusalem has 60% cultural defense.
Constantinople has 40% cultural defense.

The problem with attacking Jerusalem is the terrain.
To avoid the river penalty we have to attack from the cow tile NE of Jerusalem. If we move the bulk of our army that way, we might as well capture Constantinople on the way.(?)

I also suggest to move a smaller army along the Pink Dot - Jerusalem road to a)block Templars units from sneaking up n us that way and b) take care of the bombarding. That smaller army should consist of a number of cats we only need for bombarding. It can reach the hill SW of Jerusalem in just 3 turns and would be fine with a longbow and a mace as defense once it is in place. It also blocks Jerusalem's production to some extent.

mh

[sooooo]

Yeah, I've been thinking about the logistics of assaulting those templar cities too. I think your plan is solid, having the main stack approach from the north via the plains hill (need to road that grass tile). That avoids attacking over the river and also forces templars to defend Constantinople and Jerusalem at the same time.

At the same time, as you said, another smaller force could approach from the west. This could be comprised of catapults to bombard and also a force to protect the southern city that we plan to found. It could also take part on the seige of Jerusalem but would have to fight over a river. Still, that's OK if those units are the later ones to attack and are mainly there to kill injured or weaker defenders.

[regoarrarr]

How many cats are we likely to need / want for this operation, and when? Seems like we need to be building some more here soon, right?

[sunrise089]

We need about four cats to sacrifice at each city, and probably another group of X to bombard. X is about 15/turns we want to bombard.

[regoarrarr]

So if we say 3 turns, that's 5 cats to bombard, meaning 13 cats total. How many do we have now, and when are we wanting to commence this operation?

[sooooo]

Well, how many cats and troops we have completely depends on if Imperio honour their peace deal.

[sunrise089]

Soooo is correct. Right now we have, I think, 11 cats. If Imperio makes peace we will have enough cats by the time our mounted units heal if we just make cats at Cape Town. If Imperio doesn't make peace then we'll have to take some Cape Town cats south and build more, but obviously the attack will be slowed.

[sooooo]

So Sunrise, is your plan to leave the injured units where they are healing and move the medic III towards them?

[regoarrarr]

Okay - so we have peace with Imperio. Regardless of their double dealingness or not, we have a game-enforced 10 turns at least. I'm sure General Sunrise can figure out what to do with that, right?

So, a few things that we've talked about

1. Saving Jerusalem till later
2. Settling the filler cities soon
3. Pillaging the other land around Templars.

So, let's get to planning our tactics. What we need is a handy unit list with a pic a la Operation Jericho. I can spend some time on that this evening if nobody has time before then

[Sullla]

Templars are totally screwed now. They don't even realize we've fought the whole war with an arm tied behind our back. (We should tell them after the game that we captured their border city and destroyed their invasion with HALF of our actual army. )

Let's send one chariot or horse archer (Betty Hur?) into Imperio territory with the specific goal to observe their uber-stack and pick up further troop info for C&D. Everything else (and I mean everything) is free for the next 10 turns to move south.

Here's what I was thinking in terms of some strategic-level planning in the Jerusalem region (stealing mh's map from earlier in this thread):



Militarily, we move along the two arrowed lines. The smaller siege stack sunrise talked about moves on the red line, denying Templars the use of these roads and getting in position to bombard down the cultural defenses. The main attack stack moves along the white line, where it achieves two purposes. First, it threatens Constantinople, and Templars will assume that we're heading there initially. (Which makes sense, because we probably would head there next had it not been for our treaty.) They will have to keep a fair garrison in Constantinople, and while that's going on, we carry out the second function of this attack stack by pillaging the white boxed tile, cutting off the road link between Constantinople and Jerusalem. (I'm assuming based on what we've seen thus far that Templars don't have multiple road links in their core, which may or may not be true. Will have to do some scouting when we get in there.) With an inability to reinforce their two cities, our job will be made that much easier. It's a shame that our siege units are mostly in the north though, on the Imperio borders, but we can do some shuffling around.

Then we have to consider the post-war situation and our treaty with Imperio. We will plant red dot either on the tile indicated or on the stone resource soon. I'll argue that we should also found cities on the green and blue tiles immediately upon capturing Jerusalem - like, the same turn if possible. We chop or slave out theatres as soon as possible and they culturally crush the whole area, leaving Jerusalem a worthless shell of a city to Imperio when we hand it over to them. Then, when we go to war with Imperio later on, we just raze Jerusalem and refound it in a better spot, two tiles east most likely. And of course, we also follow Dreylin's plan and ruthlessly pillage all of Templar territory back to the stone age for free cash and to give Imperio a barren landscape when they capture those cities.

Basically, we ruthlessly exploit our treaty to the letter, doing everything possible to screw over our "allies". That's the way I see it.

[sooooo]

A big at Sullla's post. Krill - you should include that one in your historian report.

[mostly-harmless]

A little improvement. The red force should go onto the mined hill SW not the jungle E of Jerusalem to deny production and block the road.

Otherwise, nice post.

mh

[Sullla]

I'm assuming we would want the 50% jungle defense bonus over the 25% hill defense. Where are they gonna go from that one road tile anyway? Further into the jungle?

[Swiss Pauli]

I assume we'll be taking Liz the Guerilla LB with us so the hill will be pretty safe, too.

[regoarrarr]

Another advantage of being on the hill is that we save a turn or two in redeploying our forces after the fall of Constantinople, since we're on the road.

And remind me - according to our deal with Imperio, we're not getting either of those 2 templar cities, right?