[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[Tarkeel]

#2: One of the good/bad things of AI-diplo is that everything has to be interpreted. I see you have adopted Mjmd's take that fish/fish is a 10 turn NAP, that interpretation is *not* universal.

wait, is it NOT?? who's out here sending fishes to each other while intending to attack inside of 10 turns? or do you just mean that for some it is considered a vaguer "no hostile intentions" kind of thing that includes, but is not limited to, a promise of 10t of peace?

Mostly the latter. Personally I use is to signify "I have no current plans to attack you" and I do not keep track of exact turns for fish deals. Something like fish and war with a third party would signal "I'm not going to intervene in that fight."

[Dreylin]

To be fair, this was a start that was hard to dot-map, but I think I'd have sucked up the river penalty and settled on the plainshill N of the city.

right, another thing i was disproportionately obsessed with in the early-game was settling such that all my cities would eventually be levee-eligible where possible. in my defense though, that did actually matter! i think the difference between my 12ish domestic levee cities and dreylin's, i think, one or two was a pretty significant factor in our lategame MFG turnaround (at least vis a vis the ottomans), especially given that we ended up getting steam power (on the way to rails) just ages and ages before progressing on to assembly line. not that it would have justified more significant sacrifices, but in retrospect i think it proved to be non-insane as a tiebreaker between otherwise close-call spots like mitakeumi and the 1N hill

Yay, I'm still getting lambasted for not factoring Levee's into my city placement! Also, you're welcome. 

The only other thing to mention was your offer to liberate Lungfish that I kept refusing; I haven't dug around for context, but I had literally no way of meaningfully defending it from Ginger so it made more sense to leave you in control. I saw a comment from Ginger that they thought it would be worse if you liberated it ... and I'm just now realising that if I'd accepted the liberation then your units could have also have stayed around to defend it even if I couldn't and now I feel foolish. 

[ljubljana]

well.... to be honest i couldn't defend it either at that point, i was mostly just launching hit-and-run attacks of annoyance to try to waste ginger's time and divert some troops away from you. the reason i wanted to give lungfish back was actually just because the cultural control of its surrounding tiles would revert back to you, which would waste more of their time by forcing them to walk through your culture to retake it instead of along roads in neutral territory. also, on the turn i took the city, there might have been ottoman cuirs in range to counterattack from the fog and i couldn't fully disconnect the road network. liberating it back to you would have kept my own attacking units safe for that one specific interturn by preventing ginger from using your roads, which would have bought my longbows just enough time to melt back into the wilderness

and... i'm not really sure we're actually, like, supposed to be planting cities 4 and 5 with levees in mind, 200 turns before we'd ever actually build one. if anything i'm the one who should be getting lambasted for the SP-itis-ness of having done so

[Mjmd]

JUST looking at your mistakes list as I didn't read much before then but in general I think your analysis is good especially on forges.

Did you really do a 4 worker opening??? Usually the choice is between 1 or 2 for future games (which I hope to see you in).

I had some questions / comments about your Ginger invasion

In other invasion news, I don't understand Ijubs. Now he did log in as I was logging off so maybe stuff will happen, but my notes say it all.

He invaded with a very large stack including a lot of guerilla 2 units that easily could have overwhelmed Ankaras ancient trash defenders. He also sent all his 2 movers towards it as well, which begs the question why promote all those units to guerilla 2 UNLESS you were going to send the 2 movers at Meleti? Now he didn't have a lot of knights, but Meleti had 2 defenders and maybe a 3rd could  have gotten in. Seems like a good use of trash to raze. Also, I'm wondering if Aetryn gave up ded lurking because I taught him way better than to keep a city touching enemy culture especially when your opponent has WAY more power than you.

10) I don't know all the factors going into you spreading Judaism, but I assume it was that it was already in a lot of cities? At that point in time I wasn't looking great, so I don't think it was a huge mistake if you think you needed the promos as you had the chance of (and did) fight the leading player. A key mistake people make is thinking wars will be easy, so planning on them being hard is almost never a mistake in my eyes.

[ljubljana]

for not attacking meleti, as i recall, i was being overly cautious because i felt that it would only take a handful jans or cuirs to stop this attack force - the situation i feared was one in which ginger had like, four cuirs in total in the area with two in range of each city but not all in range of ankyra, and then splitting the stack would have lead to both halves failing to crack their respective targets. that said i think i undersimmed this attack pretty badly which is def a regret of mine

the reason i kept the city instead of razing (which i still don't regret) is because the point of the war was to divert forces from dreylin and i was hoping to draw units north to recapture (more likely if i captured to leave 8 pop and some infra intact, and the ankyra location was the best in region defensively for my g2 longbows, which would have fared much worse on the pinned resettle tile even with the river). i also hoped to use the city as leverage in an eventual peace deal, which.... almost worked, as i did trade it for a 30 turn NAP, but then it didn't work since ginger attacked anyways it's worth mentioning that i did get, i think, 2 cuirs out of the captured city via whip the way things actually played out, which is probably better than i could have done with R&R (esp with the need to whip walls, castle, and granary first)

all in all though i think this attack was too cute for its own good.... i felt that i had to do SOMEthing to avoid defaulting on diplo promises to dreylin, but by the time i could move out that conquest was fait accompli. i think that taking ankyra through a trick, over a demilitarized border and only a few turns after a NAP expired, carried unnecessary potential for a forever war given that i was never going to kill the ottomans at that point and had little practical use for aggressive strategic positioning... probably what i should have done is just sent hostile diplo to ginger and ended the NAP sooner to force them to leave troops on our border, even though that would have closed out the chance to actually make gains on them. i mean, it's not like i made lasting gains anyways... of course at that point i thought the odds were good that sending such diplo before the war started would change ginger's target to me for an instant game-loss, but i should have bet on PRO castles + chichen itza to prevent that, and in not doing so i kinda underleveraged the PRO trait IMO. in general i think i played too cautiously this game with diplo and geopolitics, much of which i ascribe to... well, to this being my first civ4 game and really really wanting to turn in a "good performance"

re 10) i did indeed choose judaism over the other choices because you weren't looking like a long-term threat (at least compared to the other holy city owners, incl buddhism which i figured SD to eventually get) and because i had something like 3-4 cities already jewish and a monastery already built in a strong city. additionally taoism spawned in one of my weakest hammer cities (takayasu) so while that's not a huge deficit in terms of hammers, it would have still taken a fair amount of time to catch up - only like 5-6 turns probs but ofc that's an eternity in a wartime buildup period. i definitely needed the promos in both the ginger and greenline wars, but given how things turned out i should have taken my chances, and shouldn't have underestimated your comeback potential

re 4-worker opening: yes i did lol. the only good spots for 3rd and 4th cities were 7 tiles away from the capital in opposite directions, and i felt they needed to be roaded pretty quickly after they were settled for defense + PRO trade route reasons, and so that i could actually get workers over to them to hook up the food without wasting precious worker turns. so for whatever reason, 4 workers before a settler produced the best-looking sims at t50-60, and i think worked out pretty well in the actual game as well.



of course that meant that ALL of my chops at the capital went into those 3rd, 4th, and 5th city settlers to catch up, but i think that was probably correct over saving them for wonders (or whatever) given the very weird conditions of the start, with a decent second ring but no food bonuses at all within 5t of the capital other than at mitakeumi. you can see from comm's post in the lurker thread that despite this i was quite SHORT on worker labor for much of the opening - if we wanted to chop all the forests into foodhammer units ASAP while also growing river cottages ASAP and getting to + roading to the strongest 3rd-6th city spots ASAP, maybe i even under-did it a little 

maybe i over-focused on roads with this opening but i think we would have wanted 4 workers by around t50 anyways to have one for each city, and i don't think the expansion rate suffered much for doing them all before any of the settlers. but what did suffer was mitakeumi's time to the first border pop and thus getting its food hooked up, so for that reason maybe this was a screwup and i should have left hoshoryu unroaded to get mita founded sooner. hard to say definitively in retrospect without redoing the sims though ofc, and all it would have taken was a scouting warrior showing up with the chariot out of range due to no roads to totally ruin such a plan

[Mjmd]

From memory it seemed like you had a crap ton of junk. Civ4 is pretty forgiving for a crap ton of junk being able to take down a few higher tech units (especially ones like cuirs that don't get defensive bonus). If you know they are going to be a problem going long, always just raze and in this case go for the multiple raze. I get the instinct to try to distract from Dreylin, but I think it was too late for that.

One of the things I've found for starts that I'm trying to spread around is make it your 2nd cities job to do a 1 pop whip worker. Not sure how many other people like this, but I've found it useful. There is always that push for early worker labor, but in my mind your capital should be focused on settlers as it can usually do them best.