Hm. Interesting lol. Thanks for the praise, however I wouldn't agree that there is shame in losing. Also, not sure what you're referring to about the gc, sounds like something happened on irc I'm not aware of so won't comment on that.
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Here is some analysis/summary on the war for anyone interested
Leading up to the war was almost as interesting as both kds grew. We initially had no plans of putting up "calfs", however we grew 60k -> 75k acres and started growing when simians was 75k acres. Probably naively assumed simians would be about 75k acres when we got there, but when we got there they were 85k acres. This was about.. 5 days prior to war, 3 days prior to notice date. At that point we decided the best use of our growth and pool was to grow an elf 3k -> 6k, 3k -> 4.5k, and then grow everyone else evenly about 300-400.
At that time simians had been growing everyone mostly evenly, and this growth would have put us at 85k acres with potentially two UB elves with enough wpa to be able to hold onto peasants, while simians growth had gained them core size advantage but no real UB advantage.
Once they saw what we did, they countered by doing the same thing except more extreme. Put up two 5k+ acre halfligns (one grew 3.7k -> 5.2k with all land coming in after our 48h notice) as well as two 5.5k acre humans and a 5.5k acre undead, in addition to growing their whole core more.
Leading up to the cf expire date, simians big provs were sititng on 10+ ppa, lower gc than us, and some provs were still underpoped. We decided to notice them on jan 1st right when notice expired, and got fully trained up and converted by march 1st.
The decision to hit into their fort wasn't a very hard one, simians didn't really give us any options.. Humans sitting on 7-8 ppa still when notice expired, if we didn't hit them they'd outpump us on their 17% extra acres with togers. So, we had 7 dwarves on 20% rax each making 1 hit on march 1st into highest elite humans with lowest hospitals. Around the time those armies returned we fully waved them with an emerald.. which was sent 2 minutes too early... we wanted to send into hostile, someone sent before hostile was given.. 25k specs wasted
In our hostile wave we were able to 1x a human 1x an undead with a lot of our attackers, which gave them decent enough incoming through fort, while we had some provs 3xing undeads who needed more incoming. Our kills in hostile wave were pretty crazy.
@lord sampaun, at start of hostile they had 4-5 undeads able to break our TMs and maybe 3-4 humans that could do it and not completely suicide. Our hostile wave managed to drop 30-50k O on some key humans and 20kish O on some key undeads.
In Simians' declare wave they semi chained our top 4-5 O dwarves, taking them out of nw range of their top humans but also not removing any offense and giving us an even better chaining spread than we already had. Their declare wave removed some tpa and lot of d specs on our top O dwarves (had our dwarves on 3.5-4 tpa with tds in), but it allowed us to chain their top 3 O undeads pretty deepily. No GS or hospitals on the top O undeads helped that too.
In our hostile wave and our declare wave we also got a couple hits in on faeries, and each wave in war we had a few provs whos armies were unaligned dropping their two faery mys and one faery rogue. Because of this, about 48h in we were able to 1x faeries 2-3x other provs, and the faeries were using so much mana on LL that MS and other ops became pretty thin.
After our second wave in war we had secured 3 faery UBs, 2 elf UBs, and had given them a halfling/rogue and halfling/mys UB (though.. i think we could have broken them just oor). Was just a mater of time before MS ate the humans alive, and we were eventually able to have our faeries tapping humans and staying UB.
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Theres unbaised timeline of events from my perspective
here are things i think simians could have done differently;
- Used your two hits on march 1st to hit down our 4.5k elf 2x.. if you hit a faery/rogue 2x you probably could have dropped D enough to be able to take him down in war.
- Declare wave wasn't very damaging long term, could have either hit down our faery rogues while you could to be able to take them later, or actually deep chained low incoming acre provs.
- Pre war growth - i'm not sure how much your push from 85k -> 100k acres helped you 24 hours prior to notice date. Seemed like a lot of expensive growth too, growing 4k -> 5.5k acres.
- Set up.. not sure if this a legit thing you could have done differently or not
but, having 3 mystics, having one of them being a halfling and growing 3.7k -> 5.2k (had about 12 mwpa at 3.7k acres), and having the two faeries breakable seemed asking for trouble. Also, dwarves > humans, orcs > undeads. Humans seem bad in long wars, undeads can't get the crazy OPA orcs can at start of wars, chain undeads early shell humans seems straight forward counter to your set up.
- Controlling our offenses - kind of related to declare wave, but our "weak" orc clerics you spoke of were on 12-15 epa and 115-140 opa. Granted our dwarves had similar numbers, but were also on high gs/hosp with good BE. There were multiple waves were I screwed up and left high O provs with very bad incoming acres, not sure it was taken advantage of once.
Overall though great war though, we had a lot of fun