What happens after the war?

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Arrian
We will take horrific casualties if we have no cats.

Over 50%, most likely. But who cares, afterwards there won't be anybody around to support all those troops for anyway. If we would get lucky, and every single units wins, we're probably going to kill-off the surpluss anyway.

DeepO

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Velociryx
* No matter which way we choose to go, we could "pop till it hurts" at the tail end to get 4 additional axes out the gate, and then rebuild our population while they're on their way...providing a substantial buffer in case the RNG gets strange.

Right... forgot about that one.

We might want to try to work this into a 30-35 turn timeline (meaning 20-25 turns of production). Forget settler or worker, simply build 4 skirms, 4 axes, and pop another 3 out in 5 turns. Add one upgraded warrior, and rush everything forward... we're talking about 7 skirms, 8 axes, plus 1 skirm at home defending. Against what... 7 archers max? 8?

EDIT: And "ditching everything" should still mean a drive toward pottery, since the boost in coin that will give us will more than offset the delay in getting those two techs (and we'll need the granary for the Wine site whip machine in any case).

Can't agree with you there. 21 turns of work cut out for our worker, if he wants to chop a second forest. an extra 11? for a cottage fp. I'm pretty sure that in that timeframe, we can get more out of our land by running 0% research and upgrading warriors.

DeepO

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Arrian
I would want a barracks anyway before building our strikeforce (as opposed to skirms for choking purposes), cats or no cats.

Is that an aestethic wish, Arrian-the-builder?

A barracks is worth 2 units... without doing the math, it looks to me like the sooner we leave, the less impact a barracks will have.

DeepO

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Velociryx
I'll get behind whatever plan is decided upon, but once we decide, we need to stick with it and play it out.

DeepO

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Velociryx
and in that case, there's no real advantage to NOT switching.

there's the risk that they're not on to us, and we're spoiling the surprise for them.

However, what is the advantage of switching now? It's not game-mechanical for sure, as we're SPI. So what dirty trick comes to (your) mind in displaying our might?

DeepO

[Hot Mustard]

If we go the Peace for awhile route, then we hand Vox a huge intelligence factor, don't forget. (i.e. Religion spread to our cities.)

I am starting to think we need to come up with a purely RUSH attack strategy - Skirms/Axes. If a 2nd city would be a net gain for short-term (maybe 30 turns) unit production, then great, but otherwise let's focus on our attack stack.

There wouldn't have been much point declaring early war if we sue for peace now, or wait for Cats, or wait medium-term for more cities...

And the longer we let Vox live, the greater chance of them making another contact.

Yes, the price will be high - but we should have ample time to let our wounds heal afterwards.

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Velociryx
Are we interested in speed?

Well, I am

If so, HOW interested are we? What corners are we willing to cut to get it fast?

I've given some ideas above this post (it's in there somewhere, I'm sure!). I'm willing to take it to the extreme, if that puts us over the hill. But we need to be sure, and have sufficient margins. After all, Vox can pop-till-it-hurts too.

If it sounds like we need a settler, let's do that. But this will take us to at least 45 turns before they fall. We can't reach catapults sufficiently early enough to be part of that, though.

No, again, what do you guys think on upgrading warriors, stopping research? It will give us the advantage we seek, but comes at a high research cost. However, 20 turns of no research is offsetted by 20 turns of the Voice in our possession...

What does 20 turns of gold, without cottages, give us, calculated in hammers? Does anyone know how muw much a warrior-axe upgrade costs by heart?

DeepO

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Blake
I also want to point out that by choking them at all we are comitting to Vox building up their military, if we really wanted a quick kill we should be letting them build up a false sense of security.

You mean with peace, and letting them build a worker, and use it? I definately need more convincing than that, the turn we find we've got copper and they don't!

So at the moment I favor peaceful expansion, basically keeping enough units on hand to keep Vox in check. We don't need to suffer high upkeep costs, we get a free ride with 4 units in hostile territory, 4 units should be enough to keep The Voice under control.

To really keep them under control, we'll need to have more than that rather quickly. The problem is otherwise we lose the blokkade of units. They won't attack us (unfortunately), but we sure don't need a war party heading our way.

DeepO

[DeepO]

I wonder, would it be an idea to do a fake attack on Vox? Provoke them into whipping to size 1, then retreat, wait 10 more turns, and really kick them senseless?

DeepO

[Mudhut]

Originally posted by DeepO

To really keep them under control, we'll need to have more than that rather quickly. The problem is otherwise we lose the blokkade of units. They won't attack us (unfortunately), but we sure don't need a war party heading our way.

DeepO

But any Vox unit outside the Voice is good for us, yes? Because a field battle will be at much better odds than any battle in The Voice. We will know when they leave, and knowing where your enemy's units are is everything.

BTW, we really should rename this thread... none of us are talking about what happens *after* the war, we're all talking about how to win it!

[Velociryx]

But again i want to stress the point that if Vox really hole up, we can't dig them out with axes.

This is the only point I really disagree with Blake on. I am SURE we can kill them with a combination of Axes and Skirmishers, no matter what they do. The ONLY way they can make it hard for us is if they pop rush themselves into oblivion, and then, it's only a short term "fix" because they will kill their production.

Blake has already illustrated that with no chopping at all, our capital can keep pace (and slightly out produce them WITH chop...we win hands down if we never let a worker out to do his thing, and THAT doesn't count our second city.

In short, there's no concievable way that they can build up a sufficient defense force (even at 60% cultural defense) to withstand the assault we could deliver. Not if we're doing our job with the choke (and if they come out to try and break the choke, it makes things several orders of magnitude easier for us).

re: Goldmine vs. Floodplains....IIRC (and I don't have another window opened up, so I might be wrong here), Vox has one of each, do they not? A FP and a Gold Mine? Even if not, the GM wins hands down in the short run (ripping thru all the early game techs), and the best of all worlds is to have our capital working on FP cottages to improve them AND reaping the short term kick of the GM to rush thru all the early techs.

re: making the switch to Slavery now....I like the idea of advertising to Vox, cos they'll HAVE TO research BW next, if they're not already. We can steer them down the tech path in that way....and then, when they find out that they don't have copper and we do, they may well concede (if they're really p*ssies and if we offered them a deal (surrender and join the team)....winning without firing a shot, simply by showing strength? Oh hell yes.

re: defense in the second city - IMO, warriors will suffice, and once we get 4 skirms in their face, all pursuit is gonna break off of the warriors...we can call our little non woody guy home for garrison duty...they're not slipping past the chokers, and if they do, they don't know that we might have more on the way (and we could, if they tried to run the blockade), AND we'll get to fight them in the field. Minimal defenses at home should be just fine (and it ties up fewer hammers).

re: Vox's popping till it hurts...yep, they can, but if we have two cities, then their "hurt" will only be half as effective as ours, and remember, they NEED the five turns of fortification and the sixty percent to just be marginially superior in combat (at 40% cultural bonus, their Archers are 5.25 vs. a 5 str. Axe (or 4 str. Skirm). One skirm can WRECK a fully fortified archer, making the second skirm almost a given to take him down, and of course, it gets better with axes. Two cities producing and Vox hasn't got a prayer.

General notes re: city investment - I'd value Vox's destruction and the simplification of planning that would give us AT LEAST as much as I'd value the Oracle. At least. That, plus the cost of a settler would be my target. I'd not want to lose more than that amount of hammers on units, and even without catapults, we wouldn't. That's the beauty of attacking them.

-=Vel=-

[Velociryx]

Having said all that, I'll now argue from Blake's perspective.

Speed is expensive. The faster we do this, the MORE expensive it becomes in terms of hammers lost (troops killed). And, Blake's right....we could grow semi-peacefully (continuing to choke them) and kill them with next to no losses sometime after we get catapults.

From a hammers spent perspective, this would be, FAR AND AWAY more efficient. Blake likes MM perfection, and I can completely understand his vantage point here. The wait and destroy them leisurely plays perfectly with that focus on efficiency.

So the question before the group really comes down to this:

In this instance, are we interested in doing it in the most efficient manner possible, or are we more interested in the FASTEST way possible.

Minimize hammers lost?
Maximize turns gained in control of their city?

That's the essence of the choice.

-=Vel=-

[Hot Mustard]

What is the progression on war unhappiness over time?

[Blake]

re: Goldmine vs. Floodplains....IIRC (and I don't have another window opened up, so I might be wrong here), Vox has one of each, do they not? A FP and a Gold Mine? Even if not, the GM wins hands down in the short run (ripping thru all the early game techs), and the best of all worlds is to have our capital working on FP cottages to improve them AND reaping the short term kick of the GM to rush thru all the early techs.

Nope. The value of the gold is in that it's cheap and easy to hook up. That counts in the early game. But once pottery is available and there are spare worker cycles, it's not nearly as vital.
Also Gold is A LOT more valuable for non-fin non-river.


Vox wont poprush into submission until the last minute...
But even then they those archers are no slobs. 50% city defense, +40% culture defense, that starts out at 5.7. Some will have partial fortify bonuses, so to be assured of killing them we need almost double the hammers in units.

I also have an interesting algebraic proof of sorts.

We need to get twice as many hammers as Vox, at The Voice.

We have only double production.

When you consider we are 10 turns behind the curve (because of travel time) it'll actually take forever until we have twice as many hammers - the series converges on 2.0 but doesn't reach it.
It takes 25 turns to reach a 50% superiority. At that point we could probably rely on roll luck, I mean at any time we can try and rely on roll luck, but I don't like it. It's really the %age chance of it working.

If we go up to 17h/turn with chopping it may take as little as 25 turns to reach a 2:1 superiority, but that does rely on Vox being properly contained - they have a large cultural border and might be able to sneak a worker off into the tundra to chop.

That's why I say we need to leverage exponential growth. It's completely risk free, no ritual to appease the RNG god (which may or may not work) just bury them with truly insurmountable numbers and/or technology.

Okay here's game-test results.
What I did was create a city a lot like The Voice, garrisoned by 8 non-promoted archers. I then attacked it until it fell or all units died, with the following attacks:
8 Archers is 200h.
12 Axes is 420h (2.1x)
16 Skirms is 400h (2x)

None are promoted.

I ran 16 trials and recorded wins/losses - negative indicates that the archers won, the magnitude is the number of survivers. I fought to the death and promoted with city raider or combat+cover. Unpromoted axes, if they win vs full hp archer, get 5exp and can immediately upgraded Raider II. Ditto for skirms and Combat1+Cover.



Ignore for the moment the fact that it's just difficult to achieve the 2:1h ratio, and please tell me.
What is your plan to appease the RNG God?

[Velociryx]

One other point of contention I found, upon reflection.

These two statements:

a) Floodplains are the most overpowered terrain type in CIV.
and
b) Ixnay on the Ipwhay.
seem to my brain to be at odds.
I understand that the more you work, the more surplus you have, however, given the truth of statement "a", then it seems quite logical that the quicker you can make improvements to the most overpowered tiles in Civ (such that they're even better), the better off you are, which is, IMO, a reason for whipping out that second worder, rather than a case against it.
$0.02
And to the WW question...I don't know, but that IS another reason not to mess around with a two thousand year war....

PS: IMO, we should not only switch to Slavery now, we should contact them and tell them that they don't have copper and we do....and offer them a clean surrender.

-=Vel=-