[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[williams482]

Flip odds aren't really a function of culture except that they require the city owner to have less culture on the tile than the foreign empire (exactly where the cutoff is in this situation I'm not sure, but for a city with only one foreign empire applying culture, the foreign empire having >50% will do it). Once that >50% culture has been attained, flip odds get modified by stuff like how many defenders there are, if the two empires share a religion, if the two empires are at war, and some others.

In practice, I think you'll be stuck with a flip risk in both of those cities until the end of the game unless you can get a whole bunch of culture in there. RFT is probably doomed without a massive full time garrison, and given that ti barely has any tiles I'm not convinced it's worth having at all.

[ljubljana]

hmm. cfc agrees with you about the mechanics, which is dispiriting....at least we're paying for the garrisons anyways (it's not like i'm just going to disband those impis) and tbh i do not think they are too far out of position if we have them sit in those cities until they are needed (it's a pretty central location and close to our empire's point of narrowest width, which is where i think we are most vulnerable to 2-mover attack)

i do think CTR is worth having though despite its issues, at least for now... if we discount the cost of the garrison, it comes with a courthouse and market (and free mercs merchant) which already makes it roughly break even at size 1. and it doesn't control many tiles, but as a draft camp working sugar + 3 grass farms + plains farm, it's better than a fair few other cities we have. if we do gain the sugar NE of the city center eventually, that's our only domestic source of it (mjmd is apology-shipping us some right now for free but who knows how long that will last). and if we thnk mjmd is the favorite to win here, we probably shouldn't give them a free city unless we can actuallt extract some value from it... idk, maybe i'll open the turn to us being 5%-ed and this will be moot but i think that for as long as it doesn't cost us anything, we may as well try to hold it? that could change once people stop building cavs (functionally obsoleting the impi) but we're still some ways away from that, i think us and ginger are still the only ones with miltrad, believe it or not

[ljubljana]

205

can there be an experience /
more essentially human /
than waiting all day for the turn /
and when it comes /
not wanting to play

ginger took ages to roll this one though, and when they did, played a double in less than half an hour. so..... sensing intense levels of burnout there, for sure. though, unfortunately, i kinda suspect it's burnout of the form "i will do nothing but make military units and slam them into you over and over for the rest of the game" but what can you do, really

well



got 5%-ed...... well, nothing we could do really - this was the earliest we could reasonably have moved a flip-suppression stack in there anyways. i'm going to politely try to buy it back with capture gold from this turn, i think..... if nothing else, i guess this is a reason for them to accept our 25-turn NAP, as otherwise they're probably not capable of holding this without dropping a gigantic, counterproductive stack in here.  i am pretty sure we do need SOME city in this area for strategic reasons though... hence the settler in hungary rush. i waited on using it for a bit, being unsure of which way the flip risks and the potential greenline city captures would break, but now is probably the time for it. we really do not want to allow a situation where the capture of exactly the single city of DotF will bisect our empire 



huh.... well, this is kind of my bad.... somehow i thought whipped units with overflow would actually produce even during the anarchy turn. ooooops. you can see on the milpower charts that ginger's mass unit builds are already starting to show, and we are about to fall behind india....



anyways, no bigass unit piles have appeared anywhere, and the greenline stack in the capital looks unmoved, so i do think the triple city capture will go off this turn (though they can probably retake ouch if they are willing to spend the units on it)



lost a 97% taking pillage farming.... luckily the attacking unit was an impi

but then in the attack on ouch our luck kinda abandoned us.... lost our two best (combat 3) cuirs back to back at ~75% odds.... another died in the south at similar odds for a total of 3 dead cuirs this turn..... depressing. but at least it means we can capture ouch with an impi and not expose anyone important to the ravages of the counter

and a bit of good news in that screenie as well, in that we actually got the ghost culture roll required to mount a Real Defense in ouch...

anyways, at this point i offer all our gold to buy CTR back. probably not going to happen, but worth a shot, right? if they do sell it to us, it will be cleared of indian culture on its first-ring tiles, which is pretty much what we need for the city to be functional



scouting chariot reveals that VA has some real defenders..... the F5 method reveals that greenline's remaining stack in the capital is

13 pikes
6 longbows
2 vultures
1 maceman
6 cats

eww.... luckily there is nothing there that can kill a musket easily even after quite a bit of collateral. i will have to think for a minute but i suppose the best approach is probably just to pile the whole family into one bigass stack and go hit them. i just wish i hadn't gotten our cats killed - neither of these cities is really conducive to direct assault unless we reeeeeally do not give a damn how inefficiently it is done



couldn't figure out a way to defend ouch without exposing cuirs to possible pike attack, so instead we did this: stuck 4 strong muskets in the city, then parked a nice recapture stack outside in the hope that they get the point  ginger finally started sending them horse and iron this turn, so whipped knights might be in our future.... not exactly the thrilling thought, but certainly par for the course. there may be some serious and uncomfortable pillaging in our future to avoid irritating snipes. the cities don't look whipped as of yet, so i don't think any knights are about to gallop out of the ether to retake our captures and set us back the cost of several expensive buildings, but worth worrying about for future turns... size 13 and size 10 - let us remember that

terrifying fact from the event log: ginger spawned a great merchant. and i know they have a prophet saved from our first war. they didn't start a GA - yet - but if there is an extra GP sitting around, or they spawn a new one in a reasonable timeframe, i can definitely see them swapping to slavery and whipping it all down just like we did into a mega-cavstack and obliterating us. not much we can do about that possibility except, i suppose, start investing heavily into a unit that beats cavs one on one....

to be totally honest with yall, i think there's a great chance ginger could simply rebuild from here, make a stronger army than we're capable of fielding in our whipped-down state, and crush us. i don't think they even need external help to do it. so.... i guess we must hope that said external help will not be forthcoming. if it is we will definitely crumble, so for the next long while i think we will be heavily dependent on mjmd and naufragar deciding that ginger remains the bigger threat....

[ljubljana]

trying to decide how many of greenline's villages and towns we're supposed to burn over the next few turns..... especially the ones on hills and plains seem highly unlikely to be worked for the roughly 15-20 turns it would take to pay back the pillage cost, and the gold we'd get is frontloaded so we can survive whatever ginger has brewing. on the other hand, our whole win path is predicated on having a viable economy even after gingerpocalypse part 4....

[ljubljana]

after brooding on it all night, i'm pretty sure it has to be rifles. more than that, it has to be rifles as quickly as we can possibly get away with, otherwise we are in deep shit even if all ginger does is build up with natural production and then attack us again. it will take probably until the end of the peace for them to make 40 more cavs, i think, which is fine - we could handle that many a second time with what we currently have. so probably what they will actually do is not attack us with a handlable stack, but wait maybe 10 more turns until they have 80 and attack then. this is the point at which we'd better hope to have a nice big pile of drafted and in-queue-upgraded rifles to match them....

i think i've been thinking about drafting all wrong, especially now that we're out of slavery.... 2 muskets is better than 1 rifle, true, but that's only the relevant tradeoff if our drafting rate is food-limited. it is now and will be for a minute still, but once we reach size 5 again with all our cities, i am fairly sure we can set up a steady-state such that we are drafting from every city every 10 turns, regardless of if the draftees are rifles or muskets.... and in that case, with no other lever for turning pop into units, of course we'd like the draftees to be rifles. not to mention that the sustain factor is starting to become relevant now that it's clear we're not going to hold this position by surviving just one ginger all-in

so how to get there.... one problem with this whole mercs-to-rifling idea is that many of our cities are only getting engineers (or worse, spies) as their free specialist, which is not much help for our economy (though the spies do make a grotesque 6 EP each with nationhood and a castle....). so i have the sense that at least the free-engineer cities (other than heroic epic city aksum of course) should probably be on (forge-boosted) wealth, at least until we are close enough that we can start pre-building rifles.....

and then there is the pillaging. i think the hillside villages and towns have to go - i am pretty sure that a grass hill windmill, at 2/3/1 after rep parts, is just better than a grass hill (PP-boosted) town at 1/1/5... a food is worth around 2 hammers in an endless-drafting context, and then 4 hammers is worth 4 commerce just via wealth builds. the grass towns i'm probably not deranged enough to kill unless i start feeling even desperater. plains towns are tougher - i'll take a 1/1/6 river plains town (as far as i can tell all of greenline's plains towns are riverside) over a river plains farm at least until biology, but do these greenline cities actually have the food to work them while in a drafting loop? or more concretely, would i work that tile while drafting over a grass windmill that those cities also have a ton of in range? if not - and perhaps even if it's close in view of the desperate nature of our circumstances - these should probably go as well...

the other thing we should start probably start doing is pillaging our own conquered farms in neutral territory, with the intention of rebuilding them later.... these greenline cities will not be ready for plains farms for some time, and we have a ton of workers around with few relevant tasks left to do. 5ish gold from a farm is not much but i would trade a worker turn for 1 gold at this point, and this is a lever by which to do so.

also going to start making an effort not to have units end their turn outside of neutral territory when it's possible. not exactly sure that it will be, since we also have to successfully take the remaining sumerian cities at the same time, but we can try....

at this point i am almost hoping that mjmd invades greenline again and goes for venetian arsenal.... i'm confident we can take the capital in the next 7t before the ginger peace deal is up, but two cities is a tougher ask, with both requiring cat support to crack efficiently. as you might imagine i am not too thrilled about the idea of ginger attacking while we still have a ton of injured cuirs sitting around after a costly attack against the last greenline cities.... it is pretty urgent to eliminate them somehow before our next ottoman war, in my view, as until we do, most of our captured cities can't draft because they fail the 10% zulu culture requirement D:

[El Grillo]

Civ6 and the tile-pillage-driven economy says hi. The idea that otherwise-idle Workers can generate commerce by rebuilding pillaged improvements is especially funny to me.

[ljubljana]

greenline could name their city "pillage farming", but couldn't prevent it from being pillage-farmed...

[ljubljana]

feeling antsy so i'm gonna pre-port



SD rolls the turn but does not play a double

anyone wanna take bets on what happened....

my first thought is that any outcome other than a downer instant-peace like the last round of SD vs nauf is prooooobably good news for us... and that the most likely is SD finally finishing off egypt. indeed that would probably be the /best/ news for us - denying those easy cities to budding runaway mjmd, strengthening our natural ally in SD without giving us a land border with them, and maybe even drawing rome and india into conflict? sign me up but really it could be anything... SD and nauf have history of course, and SD sent me an ask to DoW mjmd a while back (when i was, um, busy....). even further back, i sent THEM an ask to DoW mjmd.... but having scouted the kind of defenses india has in their northwest reach, i'm not sure that's as good an idea for them as i thought it was 30 or so turns ago

the big fear is that, if one of our larger neighbors has been attacked, the other will feel freed up to help ginger kill us.... all i can say is, our temporary and ever-so-delicate peace with the ottomans can't have had better timing. even so, this theory that i have, that the others shouldn't pile on because it would throw the game to ginger-of-the-endless-zulu-border, might have to do a LOT of heavy lifting in the coming turns..... i'm not sure how deluded it is of me to think that (hey, i'm allowed to have delusions, at this point it's all our civ really has left ) but it at least seems to me that a) either of them could easily spark a zulu collapse and pick up 5-10 cities but b) ginger probably gets most of the rest and would end up with 45+ cities to the others' 30 in a post-zulu world... it sure seems like our path, to the highly limited extent that there is one, runs through them deciding to better their positions vis a vis ginger in the west while we keep the ottomans contained, and only then go for the 3v1 against us. and then we need that fortune-seeking to fail somehow, say, by SD surviving a nauf + mjmd 2v1 (which has happened before, in this game!). unfortunately, other than being strategic about our NAPs, there is very little we can do to meaningfully impact the odds of that...

btw, SD, player of a record number of PB games, and me, player of 4 games, have spent almost exactly the same amount of time online according to RB's statkeeping..... not sure how i'm supposed to feel about that...

[ljubljana]

206

well, scooter be postin.... which is strong support for my hypothesis. i can only imagine how many knights (on both sides) must be getting toasted down there right about now.... question is, is mjmd going to do anything? in retrospect our timing was real unfortunate on both offering them a NAP and to buy the city back - knowing what we know now we should have offered a nap FOR the city. oh well though; not a huge deal really



but okay! not only does mjmd take the nap but they even sold us the city back! that's good for us.... what's less good is uh... well, you can see we're still losing a fuckton of money at 0% in mercs + serfdom.... um, uh oh? anyway i echo this with the timer ticked down one, just to reaffirm our commitment in light of the situation in the west (which is superdeath vs scooter, as predicted) and make absolutely sure they know it's a duration. somehow these last 30 turns have made me less trusting that people are interpreting these deals the way i thought was standard, weird, why might i be feeling that way

note though that their milpower is still spiking and passed us for first-in-the-world this turn.... if they are not planning action against us, it seems very likely that they will jump in soon against superdeath. probably by letting SD expensively clean out the garrisons in the scooter cities and then swooping in to take them away. one of the several things that can go wrong for us here is if that happens, SD gets stackwiped defending zero-culture egypt conquests, and then nauf joins in to prompt a collapse. but well, if our game has to depend on one active RB player not falling to pieces in a situation like that, i'm glad it's SD <3 they're still in slavery, have cannon access, and have the stomach to whip all the way down to save themselves if that's how it has to be, so i'm not so sure i'd feel good about attacking into them in india's position, even if it is a 2v1



importantly, flip-into-buyback means the question of indian control here is settled without the city having to be taken by force, so we keep the buildings, and in mercs it makes us 6 gpt profit with no real effort at size 1. so it's about a 30-turn payback horizon on the 190 gold we paid, which is really not too bad, and it has a high enough food surplus to supply us with draftees within the same timeframe



who says you can't chop culture



MS killed one of our chariots with a vulture.... so we get to kill this vulture in the open with another chariot 

aaaand andandand they pulled out of the capital! wait, really? yeah man, only 5 units left there which is probably brute-forceable, 60% defenses + hill bonus or no



so looks like they're zone-defensing.... the stack S-SW of the capital contains the vast majority of their units. good - the less fortify bonus they have time to get on those pikes, the better. moreover, the tile labeled "next turn" (which here means this turn) is actually out of range of them, so it is probably where we are supposed to stage this turn...



well, here's the capital-cracking stack, more or less... you'll notice i'm pretty heavy on muskets this time, and for good reason - their defense is so pike-heavy at this point that i think it makes sense to use these as our first wave of attackers. and indeed, to avoid potential trouble with their stack attacking out, we need around as many muskets as they have pikes, lest we expose ourselves to pike-into-cuir attack. and yes.... this too would not have been possible without the ginger peace deal (WE and RFT have impis on defense right now...)

i will add a bunch of impis to our stack next turn as collateral absorption if i move into cat range, and a few cuirs are still straggling behind for... whatever reason cuirs sometimes do such things. ideally they will leave their stack outside next turn and we can just bumrush the city, but if they move everyone back i will be methodical like what a normal human would do and attack it on most likely t209. that's only barely fast enough for our muskets to get back to musketing before the ginger enforced peace wears off though, which is kind of a mess. worst-case, they defend the cap with everything right up until we take the defenses out, then evac to VA, in which case i think we have to approach VA with mostly cuirs and little if any musket cover. not sure what i'll do if that happens, so uh... hopefully it doesn't

and, i'm afraid to look at this next screen, but better just rip it off....



yeah, mjmd has steam power now and 2000 gold in the bank still. ginger started constitution this turn (...?) which is not what i expected per se, but it is on the infantry line still so i guess i've seen shockinger things.... and we are losing gold at 0% still and relying on the pillage economy so we don't strike. thaaaaat's Not Good  maaaybe i went a bit too hard with this whole "don't just roll over and let ginger kill us" plan 

even greenline has some techs we don't, including alphabet and paper on the rifling path - so actually we should try to finish those before we kill them instead of saving gold, to get an extra KTB. wow is that sad or what

but i mean, at least we are entering in era in which we'll have 20-30 city growths every 2 turns for a while, each of which will be onto a tile with at least 2 commerce. and most of our cities are still on units this turn (that last round of whips that didn't complete in anarchy as i hoped), which means these numbers are pre-any effort to concertedly wealth-build. so.... i'm pretty sure our GNP will recover quickly and we'll at least get to rifling by the time the new india NAP ends. of course, they will have infantry by then.... and whether or not that's fast enough to hold against whatever ginger does is a very open question, obviously. drafted tokugawa rifles vs mjmd's hand-built 2-promo infantry is surprisingly ok though honestly, in a city with (say) 40% defenses their natural 25% + pinch is cancelled out by our CG1 + pinch, our c1 + drill1 is maybe similar in impact to their c1, and then the 40% + max fortify is enough to barely give us odds? and 2/3 of our presumptive border cities with them are on hills, no less. yeah, it's pretty nice that every gunpowder unit is effectively a UU for us now that we're in mercantilism "for free" via the doubled-up civic swap, and with AGG still saving us a cool 70 GPT, i feel quite confident that there is no leader + civ combo we would rather have in this position than tokugawa of zulu

lurker question: now that CTR has flipped once and been gifted back to us, it can't flip to india again, right?

[xist10]

No, it can still flip - and with only 1 culture it should be flip relative fast, if the indian output is higher than 20.