Hang in there, Lloyd! If only to hold up the giant Sauromatian armies for the rest of us.
If I had played the last few turns different I might have made it more interesting, but I thought he would add more troops to besiege me with the bigger army but attacked my free standing army outside the capital as well.
If I had combined a counterattack of the outside army with a break seige order it would have been more interesting at least. But not for long, I think he has more troops in the siege than I totaled all game.
I started the war without those actually, though I have picked them up in the last few turns. If I’d known their value I’d have grabbed them earlier.
As I pointed out in earlier in this thread, the main danger for a map with fixed starting positions is some joker (in this case me) deciding to beeline right for someone else’s capital early and hit them before they have had a chance to expand much. So that was the strategy I was pursuing, picking up the provinces adjacent to my capital was a secondary concern.
qfwfq
1604
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I think that this has only worked because you were diplomatically very lucky, and because Kailasa tactically misplayed his position. In my experience such a move is normally a death sentence, except in the rare circumstance that none of your other neighbors intervenes.
For example, If I’d not been attacked by Ulm, you’d have faced Caelum as well, and once the outcome was clearly against you probably Arcoscephale too. As it stands, I have no idea why Arcoscephale didn’t intervene right from the start. Something must have come up, and I would consider that fortunate for you as well.
No no, everything’s fine. We’re just, uh, waiting for the right moment.
A problem for Arcoscephale on this map is the ungainly layout of one’s empire. The capital can get some decent production going, but will be pretty far away from any areas of conflict if one does manage to take some territory. While I’m fairly confident it wouldn’t be too hard to defend against C’tis without losing much territory, it does mean that any force sent against them will be hard to support after making a bit of progress, and it will take some time to conquer enough territory to just get in contact with C’tis if they expand northward.
Honestly your outlook here completely baffles me. You seem to be counseling complete inaction since attacking anyone at all leads to some sort of counter alliance immediately forming. Which is daft, so I must be misunderstanding your point.
Conflict is the name of the game in Dom3, and if conflict is inevitable then I’d prefer to be the person striking first and hardest. It’s been working for me so far.
I can’t connect to froggyfish.net…
Well let’s just say it’s riskier than first consolidating your territory, making sure you are covered diplomatically, and gathering full intelligence on your opponent. Of course, in war there is risk, and with great risk can come great rewards… the fact is in this case I suspected strongly that you were coming right for me, but I trusted in the superiority of my bless vs the mediocrity of Ctisian fodder.
I mean, with maybe a better bless or better planned tactics, I could be the one besieging your capital. If wishes were fishes. :P To the victor go the spoils, as they say… ;)
Anyway I heartily endorse your strategy since it worked like a charm. And it so happened, my plan was to descend upon you on about turn 12 or so, so you marvelously prempted that. All in all, faultlessly played, truely.
The opposite of beelining towards another’s capitol within the first 10 turns, ignoring even independents next to your own capitol, is not complete inaction.
Typically in such games it is preferable to have an alliance. Being too aggresive early on can make it difficult to form such an alliance. Even when sharp early aggression is succesfull, you often fall prey to the early leader syndrome. Another risk is that unless you tactically trounce your target, you end up just bleeding each other dry while someone else picks up the pieces.
Such aggression works in a two player vaccum, but not when other players intervene. In Arcoscephale’s shoes, I’d have invaded your realm one or at most two turns after you invaded Kailasa. Had this happened, you would already be dead. As such, I do not consider it a strong strategy, even if it is effective from time to time.
Enidigm
1612
Of course perfect information is impossible, that’s why it works. As well as the fact that no one knows who’se playing who. By the time the rest of the world is convinced player X is truly the bad guy, the act he’s doing that presumbably is pulling the “aggro” is generally a fait accompli.
This goes back to armchair generaling of wars, ect. How did this general or that country make mistakes? Everything is easier to see in retrospect.
Perhaps because you made me pay for attempting the same thing that Nick is trying. ;-) I thought I had an agreement with Sauromatia, but it turns out that I was wrong, and you had an agreement that trumped mine. My appearing much more threatening than you at the time probably had a lot to do with this diplomatic coup.
In my experience players are generally more paranoid than that, and there’s plenty of time to gather intelligence as it takes quite some time to conquer another player’s realm – even Nick’s succesfull C’tissian invasion of Kailasa has taken 10+ turns, and he’s not yet done.
The biggest help in pulling off such a coup is diplomatically insuring that others won’t intervene, which you can never be certain of until you actually invade.
As mentioned, Arcoscephale actually starts a fair distance away from the C’tis’ home province; there’s five provinces between their home provinces. I wasn’t anywhere near ready to seriously invade C’tis at that time, since I was capturing independent provinces closer to home, and didn’t yet know about the recruitable sailor mages.
I think Nick’s strategy in general was sound; as he said earlier, he would have had 2-3 turns warning to ready an army to fight against me. Also, he would have faced a force recruited several turns earlier that would have suffered attrition from battles against independents along the way. I could certainly have been more of a threat if I was a better player, but C’tis would still have had a considerable home field advantage against any such invasion.
Perhaps. ;-)
(And yes, in our game I indeed went to the great lengths to make it happen. For my nation it was either that or to die, since EA Yomi troops are very weak in general, but they are totally useless in the early game against double blessed giants. And I didn’t feel like dying >;) )
But regardless of that, what you said is true, and I agree with it. Acting very aggressively early on, especially when you have a powerful nation/bless, almost always make your neighbors worry about your nation, and often they form coalition together against you. The chances of that happening are even higher if the aggressor manages to win his rush war and to add strength of another empire to his own while everybody else is still expanding into indeps and building up.
That was why I mentioned the sailling province in this thread, right when C’tis invaded Kailasa… I generally try to play a map in single player a bit first, and check a scenario for any funky changes if the .map is handed out. Without sailling captains, you’d definitely have a hard time getting to C’tis.
Yes, but it’s not an optimal early game solution (need to get scout in place, committing large number of troops with nowhere to retreat, potentially crippling your expansion if you lose, getting the sailor mages ready is costly, can’t bring along other commanders.) As mentioned, I could have done more if I was better, but it’s still nowhere near as easy for Arcoscephale to invade C’tis as it is for C’tis to invade Kailasa.
Hmmm. I was assuming there was also a straight sailling captain, as opposed to just a mage. That 500 for a lab is pretty steep early on.
I wonder if there is even a site that just gives Admirals or something similar. That might work better for this scenario, or even in addition, since Arco is in a fairly tight spot.
Whoa, yeah, I hadn’t tested out the site at all – I just assumed navigators were commanders who didn’t need any other facilities to be built. I’ll have to find a better site to put there. Sorry, Idar!
