Power Rankings: Episode 42 – S4

Leman:

If I’m being honest I wasn’t too excited about Rome coming into this season. They seemed, to me, to just be another Italian civ. Maybe they’d build a nice little empire on the Mediterranean but fail to project power out from that. They ended up being a much scrappier underdog than I expected.

Rome kicked the game off with some decent settling, forming the bones of an empire that looked a lot like what the Normans built last time. Rome fought with some of its neighbors but they really didn’t get going until their wars with Mamluks, wars that left the latter all but completely eliminated and the former holding massive Egyptian cities. With that decisive victory, Rome continued the game by throwing hands with anyone within striking distance. They took cities from Royal Hungary, Burgundy and even Sierra Leone, rising all the way up to 15th on the PRs.

However, despite Rome’s scrappy, underdog war declarations, they were never quite able to put together an economy that rivaled the top players. As their neighbors fell, one by one, Rome found themselves sandwiched between rival superpowers: Sierra Leone in Africa and Faroes in Europe. However, that didn’t stop them. In fact, at Rome’s peak, Rome handily and surprisingly defeated Sierra Leone, pushing deep into the Sahara.

However, all of that was cut short by the Faroes who declared war right as Rome was winning in Africa. While Rome was able to make it out of their war with Sierra Leone with their gains intact, they were no match for Faroes.

Or so we thought. Rome put everything they had into stopping Faroes at the Alps. And it worked! Faroes was able to capture a few colonies in Spain, France and Corsica, but never was able to break into Rome’s Italian core. It took everything they had but Rome was able to hold off the strongest civ in the game at the time.

Unfortunately, they had nothing left when Sierra Leone came back. In subsequent wars Sierra Leone forced Rome out of Africa, out of the Mediterranean, and out of Italy, leaving Rome with Antioch in Greece (and just enough troops to eliminate Kazan of all civs, like what on earth?). Most of what Rome was left with had to be gifted to Faroes for a final peace.

Rome was left with just that single Greek city during total war. And it only took two turns for that city to fall to Pontus. But Rome wasn’t quite done yet. As heroically as they had held off Faroes, Rome managed to limp into Rome one final time, before finally being eliminated by Sierra Leone in their eponymous capital city.

Leman:

Osage has got to be one of the most memorable civs in the whole BR. They kicked off the whole thing by kicking around, and eventually killing Shawnee. They beat back the much, much more powerful Pueblo, even after Pueblo had citadelled right up to the Osage capital. And then they even killed Crow and warred with Yellowknives during their rise to power. And despite all these achievements Osage never amounted to much in the first 600 turns of the game. Their early warmongering left their stats in the dust, their diplomacy in tatters, and their reputation among the PRs underground. They spent the vast majority of the midgame skirmishing with the Taino and being cut in half by various more powerful North American civs.

The turning point came when Wahgi decided that it would build millions and millions of troops, sending their military all across the world, carpeting far away lands with peacekeepers. And Osage looked at that and thought - “I should do that.” And do that they did. While Wahgi’s carpets were oppressive and suffocating, Osages were quirky and charming. The underdog snapped up cities from the strangest civs, taking cities from Rome, Dzungars, and Ikko-Ikki thousands of miles from their North American core in a scattershot attempt to recreate fan favorites from years past like Finland. Everyone loved them.

Then, in a cruel twist of fate, Osage was taken down during its prime - a recurring theme in this season. Right after grabbing a few Ikko-Ikki colonies from under their noses, Yellowknives decided to put an end to Osage’s shenanigans, and cut their North American neighbor down in the blink of an eye. They were left with a single city and 100,000 troops scattered around central Asia and western Australia.

Unsurprisingly, in Total War, it didn’t take long for New Holland to take out Osage’s final city during total war. But Osage wasn’t quite done yet. Pawhuska’s soldiers were still out there. Popping up in random places. Like Merv. Or Irtysh. Each city capture only lasted a mere turn, the Osage were never able to hold any territory for long.The wily sniper was last spotted in Pataway, only for his insurrection to be put down by the Palawa. That seemed to be the end of the Osage in the civilization battle royale.

Or is it?

Pawhuska still has a fighting force of 11,866 soldiers spread throughout the world. Who knows what they’ll do in the next episode.

Lasqueto:

They're back, they're gone, and they're back again? Nebby needs to install a revolving door on that sub.

Okay so there's gonna need to be a little explanation. The sudden Kalmyk rererevival isn't just pluck and opportunism; it's a bug, but a hilarious bug.

Basically, their UA spawns a cavalry unit at the capital when a city converts to their religion. Sounds simple enough, right? The issue is, Emerald forgot to check if they still own their capital, or control their religion. It's still firing! You might have seen a few wandering Kalmyk knights over the past few episodes. Those weren't survivors; the UA was tryna spawn them in Astrakhan and they got kicked out due to the lack of open borders.

Things change a bit when they're at war. Now when the knight spawns, the game reads it as being an enemy unit in the city, and assumes it must have captured it, regardless of defense or hp. So yeah, as long as there's cities converting, the Kalmyks are effectively unkillable. Lacs is aware and it'll probably be patched in the next few episodes, but let's just appreciate it while it lasts. We truly a worthy successor to the likes of Laos and Castile.

CelestialDalek:

Bavaria is now the most dead civ that’s currently alive and isn’t currently alive because of a hilarious bug. Currently, their last city is in the deep black, and multiple civs have units in range to take it. They’re dead pretty much immediately on the next turn. But hey, I don’t have to write their eulogy, that’s whoever gets them next week’s job.

Leman:

Well. Noongar is gone. They got Wahgi-ed completely. It makes sense. Wahgi’s weakest neighbor collapsed almost immediately after war began. It’s sad to see, but at the end of the day, it’s what we all expected. Noongar has an arctic colony left still and they could potentially linger for a turn or two, but I fully expect Noongar to be Noon-gone next week.

Leman:

The fact that Dzungars of all civs are looking like they’re going to outlive four civs is insane. I don’t know why Goguryeo hasn’t killed them either.

Reformer:

Let’s get the positivity out of the way first: Mogadishu is surviving better than I expected! Sure, Sierra Leone has ravaged the Horn, but other than that, Ndongo and Singapore have largely been focused on other theatres, and Wahgi’s haphazard attacks don’t seem to have touched Mogadishu. Altogether, Mogadishu only lost two cities this episode! How grand. Now that we’re done with positivity, let me remind you it’s been FIVE TURNS. Mogadishu has plenty of time to collapse, and collapse they will. Mogadishu is down to eleven cities, all of them vulnerable to the first serious offensive that comes along. In the meantime, they’ll probably keep on resurrecting Qarmatians for as long as they can. Rock on, baby.

Nathanmasse:

Zheng has put up more of a fight than I expected from them.  Sandwiched between Goguryeo and Wahgi there was little chance they would either respite or opportunities to advance.  But I have to say, they’ve performed better than I feared.  The nukes they’ve been hit with are nothing short of debilitating, but their navy has done a lot of work to keep Wahgi at bay and even managed to flip one or two of Goguryeo’s cities in Hawaii.  

The bad news is their stoic defense has come at a heavy cost in men and materiel.  Their military strength has declined by 77% from before Total War, a figure exceeded only by Noongar and Bavaria.  They simply don’t have the depth to recoup these losses and I fear the collapse we began to see at the end of this episode will only accelerate in the next.

Reformer:

Ume Sámi is getting butchered by…Latvia. And Faroes are here too! Say hi to Faroes! Okay, enough of the background characters. Latvian troops are crossing the Baltic Sea en masse, and Ume Sámi does seem to be putting up some resistance, but the resistance is meager and ineffective. Ume Sámi’s performance in Total War so far is as low energy as their performance overall. Humiliating yet completely in-character. Also in-character is the fact that their stats are buoyed by their respectable tech while their military languishes. It’s just a matter of who gets more of Ume-Sámi land at this point.

Nathanmasse:

The Afsharids slide three ranks this week, as the full weight of the predicament begins to sink in.  They’ve lost 16 of the 31 cities with which they started Total War, leaving them dead-last just ahead of Noongar (-15 cities) in terms of losses.  Unfortunately, despite their best efforts, things don’t exactly appear to be improving for them either.  Wahgi has taken the lion’s share of the Afsharid’s cities, the Selkups are putting a lot of pressure from the north even with their tech disadvantage, and continuous Kalmyk revolts have weakened their position at the base of the Caucasus.  

At least Pontus seems to have faced just as much trouble from Wahgi, giving the Afsharids a somewhat stable border from which to push back to the north and east.  But there’s little hope they will be able to turn this around. They are desperately short of units and the majority of their remaining cities are either puppets and cannot build units or are in revolt (from being captured or from Pontus’ UA).   A few well-placed nukes might be able to halt the Selkup and Wahgi advances but that’s the best they can hope for in the short turn.

NopeCopter:

Pontus occupies a truly fascinating position in the game’s roster right now, where they are completely and utterly out of the running for the title of X4’s winner, and yet they just might be the single most important civ in the game (or at least, they’re not far behind the Wahgi). The reason comes down to their UA: when Pontus defeats an enemy civ’s unit, that enemy civ faces Resistance in every city they own that they did not found. This is a hefty punishment, stopping all production in affected cities, and it’s already been shaping Total War - the Wahgi and Sierra Leone in particular have had large portions of their empire outright shut down. It remains to be seen just how much this will impact the fates of these two powerhouses, but it could be game-changing. As for Pontus themselves… well, again, they’re not going to win, but it’s not like anybody’s in a hurry to eliminate them, either. The Middle East is pretty defensible, and with Sierra Leone and the Afsharids both busy, there’s not much to worry about for now. Make no mistake, eventually somebody will get around to wiping this vector of the Resistance Plague off the map, but it seems likely that they’ll be around to cause problems for their neighbors for plenty of turns to come.

Orange:

Well the nukes have flown, cities changed hands, and where does Nzinga find herself? In basically the same state as they started. Well, they lost a bit, had some stuff nuked, but it was overall not that bad. But the issue is, while they’ve been thinned down a bit, and Sierra Leone has too, SL still looms much larger. And also SL still has a lot of nukes left. Nzinga really needs to step on the unit production gas and start taking cities before it's too late.

Orange:

TOADY FUCKFACE PALAWA HERE GETTING SAVED BY THEIR OVERLORD WAHGI SO THEY CAN UNJUSTLY OUTLAST THE MUCH BETTER IN EVERY WAY NOONGAR. SCREW YOU PALAWA YOU DON’T DESERVE THIS, YOU NEVER DESERVED THIS. WAHGI SHOULD’VE ROLLED OVER YOU FIRST.

Leman:

Latvia had a roaring start to total war. They wasted no time putting their full carpet to use by annihilating Bavaria, pushing into Ume Sami and kicking Pontus out of Ukraine. They are one of a small handful of civs to end the first episode of Total War with more cities than they started with. Truly a feat to be celebrated – Latvia is doing excellently this total war.

That being said, I have to temper the hype a little bit. It before I list all the reason Latvia’s about have a bad episode I want to make it clear – most civs are going to have a bad time. The nature of a civ like Latvia in total war (big army, few techs) is to have an explosive opening and then falter when their standing army is used up and their production cannot keep up with the big dogs. That’s kind of just how Total War works. Latvia’s excellent, excellent opening bodes well for them though, and hopefully have had covered enough ground to weather the oncoming storm.

Latvia has used up 58% of their standing army. They used up 300 thousand troops and are left with 220,000. Right on the horizon the Faroe Islands barely lost any of their military and have 550,000 troops. In fact, Latvia might have already peaked. The Faroes have already begun pushing into Scandinavia and, off screen, made some gains. They have ten times Latvia’s production, over double their military, and are sitting 52 nukes. Latvia used up all but four. I’m fairly certain the tides are about to turn, and I hope Latvia can show the same scrappy resolve it showed in this episode, against Faroes next week.

Msurdej:  

The Selkups are in a bit of a pickle. To the east, Goguryeo holds the line, cities flipping back and forth as units are thrown into the meat grinder. To the south, Selkups are pushing towards the Afsharids, cities like Merv blinking off the map. To the west, Selkups hold the line against the Latvian advance. But Vonya is going to crack eventually. Their production isn't starting to crumble, their effective tech is 0, they can't break 90 techs, and they're about to go bankrupt. Holy Halibuts, the Selkups are just a weaker version of Wahgi. Their holding out for now, but it's only a matter of time before that green turns a shade of red.

Orange:

Well, things are in fact looking good. Ndongo is slowly being whittled down, they’re expanding into Arabia, and they’re looking to push back the Faroes. However, they are still in debt and getting barely any science, and they need those final Future Worlds technologies if they want to properly stand at the top. For now, they are just gonna be sitting here barely out of reach until they can fix this issue.

Leman:

Singapore took a lot of damage this week. They didn’t capture a single city, lost three, and had five more completely vaporized. However, luckily, all of this destruction didn’t take place in their core, but in India. Despite being right next to Wahgi’s core, Singapore was able to, honestly, kind of easily, defend their homeland against millions and millions of Wahgi drones. This is honestly key for them, had the core fallen, Singapore would have been done for. But I guess 25 techs give you some insane defensive benefits.

Singapore technically isn’t out of the woods just yet. Wahgi still has the largest military on the planet by an order of magnitude and could technically still make one last push to break them, but I think that Singapore might just be alright. The real task now is to get out from under the Wahgi boot long enough to expand. It’s no use if Singapore can weather Wahgi only to be crushed by Goguryeo later.

NopeCopter:

New Holland gets off to an… underwhelming start to Total War, owing largely to their abysmal unit carpet. Despite having 20 techs over the Wahgi, they’ve managed to lose multiple cities to the purple horde, and they’re not exactly threatening to retake them just yet. Of course, the expectation is that the Wahgi are going to collapse under their own weight before long, but whether New Holland can reclaim their lost lands and unite South America (and whether they’ll be able to remain competitive even after that) remains to be seen. Losing a lot of the eastern seaboard of North America to the Yellowknives is also rough, and means that New Holland is going to seriously struggle to break out of their home continent and unite the cylinder. On the plus side, though, they have been attacking the Wahgi holdings in Central America - it’s not a whole lot, but at least they’re not entirely on the defensive. Opinions on New Holland’s chances of winning the whole game have soured a lot as a result of this lackluster opening performance, but make no mistake, they’re still a pretty mighty civ - at least on paper. Hopefully they can prove that they can still make things happen in practice, too.

CelestialDalek:

Things have really not gone well for the Yellowknives this episode. They haven’t gone Selkups-level bad, but they’ve lost eleven cities. Let that sink in. Eleven cities. Nuke after nuke has been dumped down upon them, Goguryeo has taken their loosely-defended territories in Alaska and Hawaii, and they’ve even lost a former Mexican city to Wahgi. They’re incredibly overwhelmed, stretched across multiple fronts, and not making progress where they should be. The game plan for Akaitcho? Probably take off the loosely-defended East Coast from New Holland, wait for activities in Quebecwahgi territory to fizzle out and attack Faroes from there, and just weather the storm against Goguryeo. It’s going to be a tough path, but Yellowknives is still decidedly in the category of civs that can still win.

Lasqueto:

Part 1 of total war went about as I expected for Wahgi, i.e very well. They just had so so so many units shit was bound to go crazy. I don’t think people anticipated quite this much chaos though. Cities across the globe flipped back and forth as their peacekeepers suddenly sprang into action. Or I guess they're just keepers now; there's no peace anywhere anymore. The Afsharids and Zheng got crippled, which most people saw coming, and even civs like the Faroes got tied down sorting them out. There was a slight spanner in the works when they got hit with Pontus’ ua though - any captured cities, including all their South American holdings, went into resistance. Remains to be seen how much of an issue this’ll be, but I'm expecting New Holland will probably make gains there soon as a result.

Their swathe of newly gained cities in South Asia seem a lot more likely to stick around for now though. The Afsharids got decimated as expected, but I don’t think anyone expected them to do as well against Singapore there. Granted, Singapore’s also gotta contend with Wahgi attacking from the east as well. Speaking of which…

Closer to home is a bit of a mixed bag. Noongar got absolutely rolled in just 5 turns, but the main Singapore front has been a lot more contentious. Singapore finished the tech tree before war broke out and has better units, so it's really turning out to be a quality vs quantity kinda situation.

Overall though, a very solid performance from Wahgi so far, and they’ve been shunted back up into the top 3 as a result.

And that brings us onto the big question: can Wahgi turn their tech deficit around? Things are looking promising, admittedly. With all the peacekeepers dying, their military score got nearly halved, and their debt with it. It's likely they'll start earning science again soon, and it'll probably be quite a lot. I think it's gonna be too little too late though. Wahgi’s in debt because of their huge army, but that's the main thing keeping them relevant. If they lose the army, they'll be making science but still be stuck 20 techs behind the frontrunners for however long it takes to catch up. That delay could prove critical, especially in total war.

But hey, at least they aren't the Selkups!

Leman:

Faroes spent the opening salvos of Total War cleaning up all the stupid Wahgi troops all over France and Quebec. This means Faroes was out of the gates a little bit slower than Goguryeo or Wahgi. They managed to capture six total cities, but they lost two and had three of them nuked out of existence, so ended up netting only a single city. That’s not great if I’m being honest, however, it’s not bad and the Faroes are in a fantastic position compared to a lot of other civs.

So where is Faroes now? They have the most production on the cylinder. They lost the fewest troops last episode. And they’re starting to push into Ume Sami against Latvia. I think it’s just a matter of time before the full brunt of their navy descends upon their neighbors.

Msurdej:  

Ah Goguryeo, what to do about Goguryeo. Sure, they did a mad-lad invasion of Mexico that went nowhere, they've managed to push down into Zheng, and gain several cities to boot, but they've still got issues in terms of military and production. Faroes has better production, and Wahgi has a larger army. Thankfully, most of the massive Wahgi army has been focused elsewhere, and the Faroes are to, dare I say... Faroe way, to cause any issues for Goguryeo at the moment.And both are going to go bankrupt within the next couple of turns.Still, Goguryeo is in a solid position to continue to stay on top. If they muscle out the Zheng, bully the weak units of the overextended Wahgi, use that 6.5k gold a turn to invest in more production and units, push west against the Selkups, and it's likely Goguryeo can ride to victory from here.