Conquering Cities containing High Ambush

[KGB]

I'm presenting some simulation data here in the interest of helping players calculate what is required to conquer a city full of units backed up by high ambush.

Currently ambush is capped at 70%. So for every 8 units you must kill that have 70% ambush the expected losses solely from ambush is 8*.7=5.6. In other words to kill 8 enemy units you will suffer on average the loss of 5.6 units purely from ambush. Hopefully that isn't any real surprise.

So what does it mean in the context of conquering a city full of units.

Lets say your opponent has a city full of 32 cheap 1 turn Hv Infantry (the quasi-standard defender) with L3 walls (+5) bonus that you want to conquer. You don't have a hero nearby to do the job but do have access to plenty of mediocre units (Rams, Giants, Hv Calv, Mino's etc). How many men will it take to get this job done?

I ran a simulation of 32 Hv Inf in L3 walls vs 7 Giants+1Ram. So the combat numbers look like 32 units of 20 strength vs 7 25 strength giants and 1 20 strength ram. The Attacking stack killed between 7 and 14 men for an average of 10.5 units killed. So it will take at least 3 stacks (killing 11+ each) and at most 5 stacks (only killing 7 each time) stacks to conquer this city.

Now lets say your opponent substitutes in 1 Assassin with 70% ambush into his city full of 31 Hv Infantry (or 1 Assassin + several Ghosts that add up to 70. It makes only a trivial difference in the final numbers). Now how many men will it take to get this job done?

I ran a simulation again with 70% ambush and the same combat numbers (20 strength Hv Inf, 25 strength Giants, 20 strength Ram). The Attacking stack killed between 4 and 8 men for an average of 6 units killed. So it will take at least 4 stacks (killing 8 each) and at most 8 stacks (only killing 4 each time) stacks to conquer this city.

So comparing the two: Without Ambush you need 3-5 stacks (24-40 men, an average of 32) and with Ambush you need 4-8 stacks (32-64 men, an average of 48) or 50% more units to get the job done.

Here's another tip. I ran some other examples using stronger units than Giants. What I found is that it doesn't make much sense to assault with better units against the Ambush because you just lose better units to the Ambush rolls (for example if remove 1 Giant and add Big Red to the stack so all Giants fight at 35, 30 for the Ram and 50 for the RD the kill ratio is only 5-10 or 7.5 units per stack at the cost of 1 RD and it still requires 4-7 stacks to take the city). So unless the enemy city itself has high bonus's your best bet is just gobs of units at a slightly higher strength than the defender and accept the fact you need 50% more units that normal.

KGB

P.S. If you are wondering why if the Avg Ambush kill ratio is 5.6, how come the difference between the stack kill ratio is only 10.5-6=4.5. That's because the theoretical number of 5.6 assumed no kills came from regular combat. But in reality regular combat will kill some of the attacking units and so not quite as many defenders will enter into battle and get their ambush rolls because sometimes the attacking stack is killed off before 8 defenders are killed in this example because the Hv Inf and Giants are close in combat strengths.

[LPhillips]

The real difficulty is that the city will usually contain units that are nearly equivalent to your own in cost and production time, meaning that you won't face unboosted heavy infantry while you have the luxury of boosted (siege -5) 2-turn units. This is a useful illustration, but you ought to run some simulations with realistic defenders and see what happens. The gold and production time cost of the offender in your simulations is at least 3-5 times that of the defender.

In other words, you'll need that red dragon etc. in each stack to grant your units enough bonus to have that dice advantage which makes the illustration work. Further, you can't argue that his ghosts/hero balance the equation, as you will have purchased your own heroes with support units who will (as you illustrated) be effectually useless against the city, be they Assassins or whatever.

LP

[KGB]

LPhillips,

The real difficulty is that the city will usually contain units that are nearly equivalent to your own in cost and production time, meaning that you won't face unboosted heavy infantry while you have the luxury of boosted (siege -5) 2-turn units.

What the simulation shows is that the most effective way to deal with high Ambush is your own units to be slightly stronger than the defender. If it's Hv Inf boosted by +10 with a RD then yeah your own Giants in my example would also need a RD to maintain their slight combat advantage in order to achieve the numbers I got.

But overall that's not a problem of Ambush. That's a problem that cities allow bonus units to spread their power over 32 defenders. Ambush is being unfairly blamed for the fact that 32 defenders in a city share all bonus's. That's the real problem, not Ambush.

KGB

[LPhillips]

But overall that's not a problem of Ambush. That's a problem that cities allow bonus units to spread their power over 32 defenders. Ambush is being unfairly blamed for the fact that 32 defenders in a city share all bonus's. That's the real problem, not Ambush.

KGB

Apples to oranges, KGB. That's not true at all. Ambush is a special case, obviously.

As for the legitimate (and largely unrelated) discussion of stacking cities with real units (not heavy infantry), the use of many units in a stalemate in a city could of course be effectively punished by the introduction of some new abilities and mechanics, like acid/poison as seen in DLR.

[Maze]

Usually when a city contains 32 units I buy my opponent a beer and cheer "keep up the good work and I wish you a good work on the upkeep". Then walk around the city. Whatever he is producing there and assuming he is not defending his city only with cheap light infantry vs city income of 80 (= decent net income), it is often not worth capturing the city.
True: if you are already there with an expensive (upkeep) stack yourself and there is no other target around, you might consider attacking anyway to alleviate your own upkeep.

Some other "truths" and questions:
True: if the map offer very poor cities both on income and production and this strong defense city is the only one with red dragon vs only one- and two-turners in the other cities, you might want to capture it.
True: strong defense is also logical when this city is the (only/major) "gate" to the opponents territory or has any other strategic value. (E.g.: mountain passages and coastal cities)
Question: Are there other reasons why you would defend a city with 8+ or even 16-24-32 units?
Question: From your experience, on which maps is it quite or more likely to see these 16-24-32 units defended cities?

[Moonknight]

Maze, they're talking about situations like in Crescendo that have a stalemate match in the middle if it is North vs. South. There are four cities in the middle that quickly get heavily guarded.

There's really no good way around them without being caught either.

[LPhillips]

Ah, Crescendo...

Unfortunately, I didn't design the map around such situations. The game mechanics have changed, and I'm not sure for the better in this case. One finds that all strategies other than defensive expansion with Assassins are without value. Crescendo is perhaps the most definitive example, but the principle applies even in wide-open maps. The value of simply diverting an opponent from the shortest path should not be underestimated.

Obviously I could remove ghosts to somewhat alleviate the problem, but I think the introduction of new mechanics and units will solve it in the long run.

[kenc80]

Maze is correct in most situations. clap him on the shoulder and wish him the best. Although Ambush laden sorties from the city are still tough to deal with.

yes the Crescendo desert is the obvious exception. Even Blue Lightning at BR can be avoided.

KGB - when you start talking about not giving the morale bonus to all defenders in the city - that makes my Warlords II heart skip a beat. As I recall War2 gave the bonus to everyone just like we are here. The kicker obviously being that War2 did not have ambush.

It makes logic sense to me at least to think you could argue morale should be imbued to all defenders - think aragorn's resolute leadership at Helm's Deep. Should not all the elves and riders benefit from his presence? Likewise Gandalf at Minas Tirith. The men on the walls rally to him. I see no reason they should not all benefit.

However, cloak and dagger assassination is different and I argue it should be valued differently in cities than morale/leadership/fear/chaos.

If I'm fighting on the walls and I have a freaking dragon backing me up, I should think that would inspire me (a red dragon giving +10 in city to ALL defenders), same with the easy LOTR examples above. Let's not go crazy here.

Thanks,


Kenneth

[KGB]

KenC80,

Then an attacker should be able to place 4 (or more) stacks next to a city and attack with all stacks combined into 1 super stack (as Age of Wonders did). After all bonus's in different defender stacks can spill over then why can't the attackers stacks do the same?

What you remember in War2 is mostly playing the AI who was horribly bad at doing anything with his bonus's and never in a million years would have stuck 32 defenders in a city with 1 RD to give a bonus to 32 units. Yes, you and Bofa played a few hotseat games but your Multi-player warlording experience was limited to that. So you never saw all the strategic/tactics that you can potentially do as you can in Warbarons because you could only learn from each other and not the entire world worth of players.

On top of that Warbarons has added a lot more new skills than just Ambush, there are terrain canceling, negative hero bonus (Chaos) etc and the bonus range goes from -15 to 30 instead of -5 to 25 as it did in War2 and so on. You can build an incredible city with just L6 walls, a Unicorn, Devil, and L5 DK. Just something as average as that will turn Spiders into 19 strength units vs Hv Inf at 30 strength causing you to need almost 3 spiders to kill 1 Hv Inf which is a 6-1 production difference that only gets worse if there is a Morale/Leader bonus units in that city too. That was utterly impossible to achieve in War2.

So while I think the Dragon (or Aragorn) presence will help other stacks in the city it just won't be 100% to all other stacks because its not possible to be in 4 places at once. If you want full Big Red morale you'll need 4 Big Reds.

KGB

[kenc80]

I'll begrudgingly concede you the point but will respectfully disagree - call me old fashioned.

I guess my last point would be that this will increase the learning curve...which is growing with every tweak.

Can the community grow new players with all of these rules - or will our growth come from players poached from other strategy/tabletops? I think we'll probably see a fresh wave of players when live turns begins but I do think its worth considering the new player. I think the learning curve is getting pretty steep with all the tweaks. Hard enough for newer players to get all this. I recently played a new player and I could not get him to understand to equip his hero, much less explain negate or any of the other advanced stuff. Are we risking overload with beginners? I recently did a 1v1 with a newer player and we worked through learning to equip his hero. We talked a bit about the basics of stack construction but I never even got around to teaching him basic morale, much less negate, much less ambush!