What happens after the war?

[Blake]

Btw I'm all for offering them the chance to surrender and join GS.

[Velociryx]

My plan would be:

a) keep the choke in place to minimize their hammers (per your earlier notes, this gives them 6hpt)...our capital alone can produce 12 (again, if I'm remembering your earlier notes correctly). That by itself = double production (assuming that with the choke on, they can't chop).

b) we CAN perform limited chops (the seventh forest, the one we'll get when our borders next expand--we may get two...not sure--and two others adjacent to the city (countered by hooking up health resources as we get time for it). This further widens our hammer lead

c) second city. We've already established that our capital alone will be twice as productive, so the second city (which can be made into a whip machine) will be gravy, and should be able to at least match them in production.

d) IIRC, travel time of ten turns is with no roads. If we road connect the capital and the wines site (and we must, if we want both cities to produce axemen), we cut into that time significantly. We can further reduce it by dedicating one worker (under the protection of our chokers) to road right up to their gates.

I DID forget the archer 50% city defense bonus, and that certainly does make it somewhat more costly, but again, with the advantages we're arranging against them, there's just no way they can win.

Add to all of the above the fact that we can "pop till it hurts" at the tail end (giving us another 4 Axes), and there's just nothing they can do.

They CAN'T wait till the last minute to pop down to size one, cos they can only do it once per turn (at most, sacrificing two pops), and IF they wait, then they forego the 25% fortification bonus (which makes it easier for us).

Of course, all of this assumes that they play the perfect defensive game with a mind to inflict maximal pain on us before they die.

The odds of them not making any mistakes, and/or of not getting rowdy and wanting to try to launch an attack are next to zero.

I won't say it's outright impossible, but also, I won't say we should base our plans around them playing flawlessly. They haven't so far, and there's no reason to believe they'll suddenly improve that drastically.

$0.02

-=Vel=-

[Blake]

I DID forget the archer 50% city defense bonus, and that certainly does make it somewhat more costly, but again, with the advantages we're arranging against them, there's just no way they can win.

We know they can't win. They know they can't win. But it's possible they can make us lose if they are smart and we are stupid.

They CAN'T wait till the last minute to pop down to size one, cos they can only do it once per turn (at most, sacrificing two pops), and IF they wait, then they forego the 25% fortification bonus (which makes it easier for us).

There's not that much difference between +90% and +115%. It's still losing odds for any unit we throw at them. The units can still hold the city just fine if the RNG gods hate us.

Of course, all of this assumes that they play the perfect defensive game with a mind to inflict maximal pain on us before they die.

The odds of them not making any mistakes, and/or of not getting rowdy and wanting to try to launch an attack are next to zero.

I won't say it's outright impossible, but also, I won't say we should base our plans around them playing flawlessly. They haven't so far, and there's no reason to believe they'll suddenly improve that drastically.

It's not really that easy to screw up dying slowly. All it requires is not being careless with units. So far they've been anything but careless with their units.

The biggest screwup they could make is training a settler, in effect dividing and conquering themselves for us.

There are lesser screwups they could make, like sacrificing units to try to break our choke.

But I'm going to need to see evidence of these screwups before I'll condone going in for the kill.

For now it seems safest to get the second settler and second worker.


If they:
Aggressively try to break the choke, or aggressively attack wines and lose units, this is a green light to destroy them with just our two cities.

If they:
Extremely passively fortify all their archers in The Voice and maybe slip a worker out to the outlying land to chop more archers. This is a red light for attack, we'll be entirely dependent on RNG luck.
What we should do is expand to 3 cities, maybe even 4. Get construction, whip out a bunch of catapults, destroy them.


Basically if they want to come out and play, we let them. If they want to hole up, we let them.

The fundamental problem with a fast attack is it IS based on RNG luck, lets not leave things up to chance when we don't have to. If they throw away a third of half of their army (or hammers on things other than army), then sure we can outnumber them 3:1 and it's not a risky fight. But it's premature to commit to such a strategy, we need to know more about Vox's strategy.

[Velociryx]

Still disagree, but as I said, I'll go with whatever the majority decides.

With two cities, we can *easily* have 3x Vox's production. 2x is all we need to ensure the win. 3x makes it a foregone conclusion. The hammers lost (and we will lose units, sure), are more than made up by the fact that we:

a) secure another capital site (which is, pound for pound, superior to most other city sites out on the map, on account of the fact that they're weighted to have more goodies)

b) we secure that site sooner, rather than later--less chance that something outside our control happens and it suddenly becomes impossible to defeat them (ie, there are three of us here and they cut a deal)

c) gold's gold, and they've got a mine we could use, pottery or no. Cottages eventually surpass it, sure, but until they do (tens, if not scores of turns down the road), the GM out-produces them, and the quicker it's in our hands, the better off we are.

d) The GM is the functional equivalent of a second palace, and for that reason, plus the ease of planning, their destruction is EASILY worth most of the hammer cost of the oracle + a settler....given that we're unlikely to loose that number of hammers in the effort, there is essentially no downside to the attack.

The main thing that waiting for cats does for us is minimize hammer loss. I completely understand why it's attractive to you, given the efficiency you strive for in your games.

I'm simply arguing that minimizing hammers lost does not always lead to the optimal outcome. Sometimes speed is its own efficiency, and I believe that we're looking at one of those times.

However, I also understand that the clock is ticking. I feel like I've presented the argument to press the attack without cats as well as I can, and I feel that you've given the counter point masterfully.

At this point, if there are no "third options" on the table, we need to come to a firm reckoning of what we're gonna do, and then ram our chosen strategy down their throats.

I stand ready to support the team no matter what, but we need a decision.

-=Vel=-

[Blake]

I'd like to present the case for a 3rd and 4th city to make maximum use of the floodplains near our capital. The most basic idea behind a city, is instead of sinking 100 hammers into 3 axemen to sit around with their thumbs up their butt until reinforcements arrive, you sink 100 hammers into a settler, who then goes founds a city which builds the 3 axemen (and lots more other stuff).


Here's how quick a floodplain city grows to size 4:
2 growth: 22f @ 3fpt = 8 turns
3 growth: 24f @ 4fpt = 6 turns
4 growth: 26f @ 5fpt = 5 turns


Here is the kind of yield you can get back out, and the turns to get that decent return on investment:
No Granary:
4 Axes 1 Skirm - 33 turns, 165h
5 Axes 1 Skirm - 35 turns, 200h
3 Axes 3 Skirms - 33 turns, 145h

Granary:
4 Axes 3 skirms - 39 turns, 215h


I was also thinking.
That improved copper tile. Sure would be nice to use it.
And you know what else would be nice? Another +1 happy. That would enable a whipped floodplain city to still be happy at size 4, which is the sweet spot for whipping axemen.

The following screenshot may shock you:

Grog's Winter Retreat

This city would immediately increase our happy cap by +1, the city tile yields +3c, with the +1 trade it brings in 4c - probably enough to cover upkeep, with it being so close to the capital.
The +1 happy will pay off suprisingly quickly if we don't quickly get other happy sources (5 happy is very much a sweetspot). The benefit is it effectively brings in +1f a turn in every happy starved city (ie being whipped). Say for instance we have 2 floodplain cities, both with granaries. So the 1f becomes 2h. 10 turns after being founded it's produced 40h from the happiness and 60h from the city tile+copper - that's some quick payoff.

Additionally it would scare away the Barbarians and help protect our copper.

As for two other cities, each with 4 floodplains?



This would make a very tight and productive core. No culture needed. No additional happy or health needed either. We could quite literally tech straight to Construction after Pottery. The idea would then be to whip 5-6 catapults out of the two floodplain cities.

Just an idea for quasi-peaceful rapid growth strategy with extreme emphasis on efficiency and which gets straight to the point. Using a crude estimate it would take 45 turns from now for the total and risk-free elimination of Vox by Catapult. And we'd be packing 50-60b/turn research.

[Krill]

Blake, what is your opinion on the usefulness of a city 444 of EotS?

[Velociryx]

I like the plan...I do. But understand that it's not "just" three cities you're talking about.

If you're wanting to speed research and offset rising maintenance costs, then all those FP's are gonna need cottages, and two workers is insufficient to that task. We'll need three, at a minimum (and likely four, if we want to get serious about it). For whipping, we'll need at least one granary, and likely two (one for each of both new FP cities)....so we're talking about centuries before we even start thinking about building Axes for the war we started a couple centuries ago, and if we're going to be that uber conservative with our hammers, then we may as well toss a barracks in everywhere too (in order to maximize the effie of the troops we do build, when we get around to starting). So tack on another couple hundred hammers before we get started.

In all that time, we run the very real risk of something outside the realm of our control happening that makes it significantly harder to kill Vox. That's bad, given that we were the aggressors in this war, and they're likely not gonna be terribly forgiving about it.

We have already declared a war against our near neighbors. The longer we wait to bring the matter to a conclusion, the more dangerous it is for us.

I certainly don't mind waiting till we found a second city....in fact, I would consider a second city to be essential to the success of the plan, but we could play this game forever, could we not? I mean, why rush for catapults? If we REALLY wanted to do it efficiently, we could just keep choking them and wait till we get cannons....then they'd truly be screwed.....

....except that sooner or later, we're just gonna need to get in there and get the job done.

What would ultimately convince me to go the peaceful route is this:

* By what turn would we be able (at approaching and surpassing 3x production--founding a second city at the wine's site) to kill Vox with just axes?

* By what turn would we be able to kill vox by growing three new cities, getting catapults, building all the associated infrastructure and then attacking?

* What's the approximate difference in turns between these two?

* What do we gain by taking the faster route vs. what do we delay?

-=Vel=-

EDIT: I guess what it comes down to for me is...I don't quite get why all the focus on coddling our hammers....hammers are hands down the *easiest* of the three cardinal resources to get, because EVERYTHING can be converted to hammers (even at this early point in the game, we can get hammers via tile production, chop, and food (pop)). They're the most abundant resource we've got. So...we lose ~7 Axes in the attack. Why's that a bad thing? Comparable benefits to completing the Oracle + building a city, and no one would argue that those hammers are wasted, and the city sites you mentioned aren't gonna go anywhere. I'm just not seeing a downside.

[Blake]

* By what turn would we be able (at approaching and surpassing 3x production--founding a second city at the wine's site) to kill Vox with just axes?

3x production? Can't be done. Okay. About 70 turns from now.
That assumes Vox follows the simple strategy of spending every hammer on archers and garrisoning every archer in The Voice, until they are forced to stop, at about 15 archers, by upkeep. Even assuming that Wines produces 10h/turn constantly from the day it is founded, it would STILL take until turn 60 for 3:1 superiority.

2x production? Again assuming Vox use a simple die slowly strategy, about 45-50 turns.

You can graph this, create one graph - Vox's hammer "Stockpile", increases by 6h/turn. Parallel to that, EotS hammer "Stockpile" increasing by 12h/turn, but delayed about 8 turns due to travel time. Then you can add wines city at 6-10h/turn (and about 19 turns behind The Voice), but you need to FURTHER move EotS back to about 15 turns behind The Voice to account for settler training time.

I'm sorry, but if Vox choose to pursue the most straightforward die slowly strategy, then we simply can't kill them quickly with Skirmishers or Axemen. It's not like it's complex or difficult to do, it's merely lame and spiteful. (And I should think they have plenty to be spiteful about, we have plenty of great land and we're going to destroy them anyway, just because we're greedy *******s).

A city only takes between 10 and 20 turns to pay back (for example to grow to size 4.9 on pure floodplain requires 24 turns - at that point the 4 population can be whipped for 120h). So if at any point our plan doesn't involve Vox dying within ~25 turns, we are still better off founding cities.

In 25 turns we can train 8 Axemen from EotS. In that same time (+7 turns travel time) The Voice can train about 7 archers. And they have that final last-stand of 4 archers from whipping.

So that's just to give some indication of time scales. 45 turns is not a long time. Heck, it'll be a good ~17 turns until Wines is even founded.

Fast capults and mass cottages seems to be the downright fasted and cleanest way to destroy them and in a way which they can't do anything about. Construction is remarkably close with such great commerce potential.

[Blake]

EDIT: I guess what it comes down to for me is...I don't quite get why all the focus on coddling our hammers....hammers are hands down the *easiest* of the three cardinal resources to get, because EVERYTHING can be converted to hammers (even at this early point in the game, we can get hammers via tile production, chop, and food (pop)). They're the most abundant resource we've got. So...we lose ~7 Axes in the attack. Why's that a bad thing? Comparable benefits to completing the Oracle + building a city, and no one would argue that those hammers are wasted, and the city sites you mentioned aren't gonna go anywhere. I'm just not seeing a downside.

Simple. Oppurtunity cost. 7 axes is 250h. For that we could get 2 more cities. The 7 axes aren't even going to get us 1 more city, put simply, it's ineffecient use of resources.

The city sites aren't going to go anywhere - but nor are they going to grow themselves a city. Each 4 floodplains is soon going to be 16c/turn (4 floodplains, each hamlet produces 4c). Combined that is 32c/turn - I just don't believe that The Voice can match that commerce output for us.

[Velociryx]

3x production? Can't be done. Okay. About 70 turns from now.

70 Turns?! No way dude....your own earlier arguments
re: working FP's had the city hitting size four in 19 turns (and hitting 4.9 in 24 turns....then pop for 120h (which is 5hpt average, plus the 1hpt that the city tile gets = 6hpt = The Voice). A pop machine (your example, copied here was with no granary) relies on that kind of growth for the majority of its hammers, which tells me that the second city could be cranking in 20-25t, tops, and as you say, that assumes Vox immediately implements the die slow, cause us maximum pain strategy right NOW, does not deviate from it at all (ever) and makes no mistakes from now until the moment of their death (assuming they don't just immediately cave if we did what I recommended earlier, switch to Slavery to advertise that we've got it, and then inform them about the copper situation... ).

re: Opportunity cost...in my mind, this must be weighed against the fact that we declared a war against Vox, run the risk of WW creeping into the equation, and run the not insubstantial risk that something beyond our control happens between now and then that renders it vastly more difficult to kill them at all.

IMO, if we didn't mean to kill them, then why did we issue the DoW? We issued it (obviously) cos we DO mean to kill them....so let's, and if we're going to kill them, let's do it sooner, rather than later. That's still the crux of my position. There's an opportunity cost for NOT killing them also, and the hammer cost of the 7 axes vs. the two cities does not take that into account (the value of eliminating a rival and securing what is essentially a peace dividend).

-=Vel=-

[Velociryx]

And just for the record, I think both sides have been well argued, and I'll be perfectly happy with whichever route we go. We have, through these discussions, provided two pretty compelling paths to head down. Both of them have the same outcome in the end....they both end in a victory for us, and neither of them carries any significant risk or downside, so at the end of the day, I see that we've got two solid options to choose from.

I'd be proud to be involved in either one, but this is something we absolutely NEED a decision about, because as everyone who has been following the thread is no doubt aware, these plans call for radically different build orders, and we're getting to the point where we need to know what those build orders are gonna be, which means that we need to decide pretty doggone quickly which way we're gonna play this thing (and again, let's not waffle here...consistency is important...if you doubt it, just think back to the Bobian war).

I think both cases are strong, and we'll do well no matter which we pick.

If we were at peace, I would clearly advocate the builderesque approach and commerce focus, because it IS more efficient in terms of hammers spent/hammers lost, HOWEVER....that's not the game situation we currently find ourselves in.

We had a good, pragmatic reason for declaring this war, and now it's time to see it to its logical conclusion.

Nye...in order to facilitate a final decision here, perhaps a poll is in order?

-=Vel=-

[Arrian]

You guys are for the most part over my head with the math, but in general I still prefer waiting for cats while we continue with a choke and build the wines city.

-Arrian

[Blake]

Don't think that the DOW serves no purpose. It keeps Vox small.

Also the choke by it's very nature forces Vox to implement "Die slowly". They basically need to produce at least 1 archer, and preferably 2, for every skirmisher we put in their territory. If they can't match us unit for unit, they are doomed to be choked into submission (with units they can at least try and secure some tiles or something). So as long as we throw units into Vox territory, they are forced to keep on cranking out archers. And once it's clear that they can't out-produce us, they'll probably switch to full die slowly... which happens to use exactly the same builds as you would for breaking a choke. Isn't this pretty much obvious? What builds other than archers are going to benefit them while we choke them?

Btw for Vox, "Die Slowly" and "Cause us maximum pain" are not the same strategy....
It may be that they are, but that can only be through our stupidity.
They can die slowly causing us no pain at all, if we simply go to Catapults.

To cause us maximum pain, they want to try and counter-choke us. Sure, it's not much pain, but it's more than letting us ignore them.

I disagree with the need to make up our minds so early. I think there is near-consensus on two things:

1) Training a settler at size 5.
2) Researching to Pottery.

That gives us at least 14 turns to observe Vox and determine what they plan to do with us.

[Velociryx]

Oh, I agree that the DoW has *some* value in the here and now, and sure, we can get by for at least a little while longer without coming to a firm agreement, BUT there are keen and compelling advantages to making a decision already, and they include:

* The longer we wait to come to a consensus about what to do in this instance, the more fence sitting we'll do, and that's bad. It's harmful and unnecessary (everybody remember the last time we entered into a war without a coherent strategy up front? It wasn't pleasant). Far easier to put our heads together and come up with a plan that a) works...and both of these do, and b) is not dependent in the least on what Vox does, or does not do--I've never been a big fan of reactive strategies....IMO, if you're reacting to what the other guy does, then you're at a disadvantage....we are in the stronger position...we need to be making them react to US, not the other way around, and this is why I favor the approach that I do...all the components work together. We declared war. We choked. The choke will, in all likelihood prompt a Voxian attack while and where they can achieve local tile superiority. We switch to slavery to make it known what we do, and prompt them to match our research curve. We tell them the copper situation and offer a surrender. We replace the chokers as they meet bad ends. We build a second city and Axes and crush them. All pieces work together. All pieces build on the last..

* The sooner we come up with a firm course of action for the long term, we can stop debating various options and put all our collective brain power toward making our chosen strategy heart-stoppingly effective (not that the back and forth debates aren't fun, but equally fun would be to DECIDE and then start perfecting and optimizing....a thing we really can't do if we're forever dickering back and forth on what to do).

* The sooner we decide, we also create a clarity of purpose and a single minded vision for the team. That's important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the clarity itself which is important in its own right. If everybody is on the same page, and everybody knows what the hell we're doing, then we can, as a team (scattered all over the globe and in all different timezones) be vastly more effective. That's a good thing.

One thing we absolutely don't want to do is...fourteen turns from now, we get the save and decide in haste what we're gonna do long term, and then shoot from the hip to make plans about what will be the most important turn in the game for us. We can easily avoid that by simply making a committment and sticking with it.

-=Vel=-

[Velociryx]

I also disagree with the characterization of an attack that's guaranteed to win as being "stupidity." Perhaps not as efficient in terms of hammers (which I've already agreed with), but significantly faster, and speed has value that's not expressed in a simple hammers:hammers comparison.

IMO, the attack will play out like this:

Vox sees 4 Skirms and begins building archers.

They launch selected attacks when and where they can gain local tile superiority (battles occur outside the city...advantage US).

We continue to build Skirms and Axes to replace our losses and maintain the choke.

We build up (out of site) a sufficient attack force to crush them like a medieval beer can.

We display this force (with our own +4 axes gained via "whip till it hurts" and they find out very quickly that there's nothing they can do. Maybe they whip themselves to one, and maybe they concede. Either way, we win not only the capital, but the peace, and quite likely an early monopoly on the continent without the uncertainty of war looming over us.

As I see it, the two plans fronted approach the problem from different perspectives, reach the same end result, one saving us hammers, and the other saving us turns. I'd contend that neither are stupidity.

-=Vel=-