[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

221-222 double

trying to convince myself that i've stopped caring about this game and have accepted defeat-with-dignity so that i can log in every morning without heroic amounts of anxiety..... and would you believe that it's not working



i don't know how to read this, but it looks important. they'll give us aid in 10 turns, but is the work ethic rider here just to keep us from accepting, or is this a hint that ginger is gathering their stack at work ethic....??

anyways no loans came through, as you can see..... at least nauf did blessedly accept the cow extension i coupled it with



well, here is a hint about what the mjmd diplo means. SD gave up trying to stop mjmd from rolling over egypt (which was a pretty doomed effort anyways, tbh) and, oh my GOD look at the power numbers! apparently SD got absolutely creamed in their last exchange with india somehow.... i guess we'll never know exactly what happened but that's pretty shocking. so that means mjmd's milpower is freed up now.... does the 10t count then represent them shifting troops over to zululand on rails, and then actually helping us with their /units/? i can dream right

speaking of which, scooter is down to one city that has workers on defense.... so this game's about to be great powers ONLY.... or maybe it's more accurate to call it a bipolar mjmd/ginger cold war-style system, with the rest of us as proxy battlegrounds



soooo the border city mjmd took from greenline hit FOURTH-ring borders this turn and now is stealing all our first- and second-ring tiles and requiring more crash-built theaters instead of catapults THIS IS FINE

lol, idk if i've built this many theaters in the whole rest of my civ4 career..... in most circumstances they are pretty crappy even in cities that badly need the culture but i think mercantilism is an exception dang, it says something about civ4's balance relative to 6 that even one of the uselessest-seeming buildings is actually not so useless in some situations. or maybe it says something about me that i think that, namely that i am wrong

wait hold the phone yall



ginger stopped EP spending! that 1852 number is the same as two turns ago :O

ok, but where are the draftees this turn. they moved twice since we last played, so we are looking for 8 in total







comparing from last turn, i count fillerion, herring, minnow, haddock, clownfish. so concentrated in the south this time, and notably, i count only 5 out of 8 draftees possible...? their milpower has not really shot ahead of ours with a ton of in-queue-upgraded inf builds either. combined with the EP spending this is the best news we've received in this game in a while



also relevant: this infantry in sheepshead, drafted on their first turn of AL access, has fortified in place rather than try to join a stack somewhere..... 



here is the last person who even might give us a loan.... it would only shave a turn off the (6t) rifling ETA, but that's still worth doing i think..... but first we need to hit enter to see how much they retain after they dump a turn into their current research project



once again i will extremely selectively highlight the food graph which is the one metric by which we're doing well



mjmd nooooo (((( oh you poor bastard.... that is their FOURTH great prophet by my count, coming just in time to ruin their gorgeously-timed third golden age for factory production



chop overflow finally finished slow-building its granary.... just in time for mjmd's culture to take our pigs away!!!! rude >



at kirishima something similar has happened with ankyra/meleti taking over one of its second-ring tiles..... at least we still have the precious hill that gives us visibility into ankyra city, i guess



and then we discover that last turn ging restarted EP spending again in a major frowny-face move, in presumed response to us restarting spending last turn because it looked like they weren't going to stop oops

anyway our economy is starting to look semi-respectable even with most of our hammer cities on unit builds - that 500+ gpt number is actually pretty wealth build independent, other than in cities that a) have little hope of spitting out a cav in time to matter or b) already have an almost-finished one in queue. it is looking increasingly likely that we are going to live long enough to have to consider the logistics of a biology push.... specifically, do we wealth-build there, do we try to catch up on infrastructure while unboostedly researching there, or do we just crank military the whole time? not sure what the answer is.... i'd like us to stabilize with a reasonably-sized power edge over ginger (keeping in mind that if they aren't cranking troops, they must be cranking factories, so they can surge ahead of us pretty quickly when they have a mind to). and with rep parts in we now have a ton of newly-competent hammer cities that need forges, which seems reasonable to prioritize to me. other than that though i am not quite sure how we're supposed to play this...

[ljubljana]

so what do we think mjmd's supposed to do now that they're at peace with superdeath? their main long-term advantages over ginger seem to be 1) mining inc (so spread this asap, obviously) and 2) their having in superdeath a softer target for expansion than (i'd like to think that) we are for ginger..... acting on that by attempting to conquer superdeath is probably what i'd do, but i'm not so sure infantry will be sufficient to do this against someone who can whip 25 cities all the way down into cannons and rifles. so what, do they tech to tanks while otherwise doing nothing? that doesn't seem right either.....

if we're pretty confident that mjmd views this as a two-horse race between them and ginger, maybe they do stand to gain by turning the proxy war between them into a real war? now that their military is freed up they certainly should put it to SOME use that furthers their odds of winning, i would think.... the trick would be to hurt ginger without disrupting the balance of power to such an extent that zulu is able to move back into the contender tier. i wonder if a surprise amphibious attack using the transports they are one tech away from (am i reading this right that these only require combustion and oil access, not astro?) to burn the ottoman coast could have merit

and while i'm fantasizing, maybe they'll stick machine guns in all our border cities and gift us 10k gold so we can catch up on tech

[williams482]

Can we see the power graph sharkfin?

You know I'm going to recommend infrastructure as the place to put all our hammers. We have 50% more cities than everyone else, they're ahead on tech and development and development is in investment that yields much better returns in the long run than wealth if we can stay alive and largely intact. It's also looking increasingly plausible that our rivals are looking to play the long game as well, given Ginger's apparent half-hearted drafting and willingness to pull espionage spending off us, but of course I've been caught in the whirlwind of conflicting information around "What Will Ginger Do?" and have no real confidence in any direction.

And trying to fight the culture war for our first ring tiles does seem well worth a few mercantilism theater builds. We need those tiles!

[ljubljana]

yeah. at this point i do think i can get on board with infra over wealth, as long as we can first reach a point where we feel confident about our security situation. wealth building to rifling i think was correct just so we can not die (losing our land edge being sufficient to constitute dying) but once we get there i think we reassess. wow, never thought we'd live long enough to actually do another infra push..... the nice thing is, while ginger is building factories everywhere, we actually have more efficient factory builds of our own to do, which are called "the enormous number of forges we never got around to building" lmao

223

well, ginger has come at us.....with



a resource trade request  hehe did i scare u

well, we don't actually need the gems as SD is trading us theirs for gold. we also DO need the health actually as aksum's about to run into the cap and they're asking for our only deer. but i will of course try to find some avenue for appeasing our looming threat of a neighbor. the only thing they have to offer us is banana, but i might take it just so we can give them something of value while not giving ourselves health problems in so doing

ginger is going for astro now as you can see. on the one hand, that's not on the tanks path either. on the other, well.... i don't exactly relish the thought of our whole coast being vulnerable to coordinated galleon snipes. this will probably force compass and optics research out of us to at least set up some caravel screens for such a possibility but ughhhh we really can ill afford to spend beakers right now on anything not directly on the path to biology either




haha, i consider this to be worth a screenshot.... of all the cities to somehow become cav-capable, i sure didn't expect this one!

here's the sharkfin, and ginger's drafting-fueled surge



no idea why the rendering is so bad though.... i can barely even see where ginger has ended up



ginger is still spending a bit of EP but they only dropped 30 into us last turn, far less than their potential. that's few enough that i'm down to give it a turn or two for them to shut it off completely before i return to trickling in a similar amount



also worth spotlighting is what is by far the largest stack of cannons i've ever seen.... honestly pretty happy to see them continuing to invest in units that die really badly to cuirs, let alone cavs. not that i think we can attack into this but i imagine much of our continued friendly relations is due to how poor the unit to unit matchup is for them. wild that one of our neighbors has a military that is obsoleted by cuirs and the other has one that crushes even cavs....



somehow we've recovered to the point that, with sufficient wealth builds, we might actually be able to shave a turn off rifling and get it in 3 (with sufficient wealth builds). and then, sigh, i can finally make some of those so-called "buildings" i guesssss

ok, gotta scout for another 8 draftees because i'm very good at not procrastinating the turn
 






i count ZERO 

so that probably seals it - we should be on track to live until after ginger's factory push. now does that mean we're supposed to come off these wealth builds and accept a (1 turn) hit to our rifling time to start investing in williams' so-called buildings NOW? maybe....? let me see what that would look like rq



spotlighting the absurd production in GT's former core - matara, lalibela, and of course aksum are all among our top hammer cities, and the latter two have almost-finished cuirs in queue and so can afford to be on wealth. and, um.... all of which are still uncourthoused after all this time, as we have not once been able to take a break from spamming military since we acquired this region  i'm..... not too sure about this courthouse in aksum, which costs us 2 17 XP cuirs and isn't even west point, but it's worth a ridiculous 8 GPT (!!!). normally i never build anything besides units and unit-producing infra in the HE city but perhaps this is worth making an exception? lalibela, matara, and equally-ridiculous meisei further south have courthouse yields in the 6-7 GPT range



(pictured: equally-ridiculous meisei)

sent ginger cow/cow and i think i'm willing to do deer for banana too even though it only benefits them, but first i think long and hard about if we should attach open borders to it or not.... it's compelling to do so, but without a standing NAP ginger may scout our lands with it, then attack with commandos on the same turn (i say as though we have any reason to think ginger would even respect a NAP with us lol). but if we wait a turn, we might lose our chance..... i say, and then i looked at all the trade screens and discovered that only mjmd and us have deer hooked up at all and neither has excess??? are there are only 2 deer resources on the whole map?? well, not quite - nauf has one that has a camp but no road, and there is one in former egypt that is not yet in range of anyone. but still!!

in the end, i stuffed every city within 6 tiles of the fog with impis and decided to go for it and damn the consequences  this is probably the one singular chance we will get to pry OB out of them anytime soon, and if we get it and don't get punished it will yield continuing rewards for us extending into their tank push window. i thiiiiink that is worth risking the unlikely scenario in which they accept and then immediately turn around and use the intel to kill us (but uh, we'll see how worth it it really was tomorrow i guess ) and then guiltily peeled off a few draftees from those of our most-endangered cities that were stuck working plains farms (as though drafted muskets are really going to help against what ginger could bring to a war with us other than commando cavs exactly....) if they don't accept i'll offer deer for banana straight-up next turn probs

wow that sure was a long-ass builder turn..........

edit: thinking about offering mjmd a defensive pact now that we're both out of wars..... not sure what kind of deterrent effect that would have on ginger but maybe not nothing? at least mjmd has the theoretical potential to tech to ships better than what ginger can field and burn down THEIR coast if they go for ours, whereas we are pretty much stuck beelining exactly bio and then exactly assembly line for the forseeable future, i fear... but it should at least help deter nauf, should they start thinking of trying something..... however there is some danger as well - if ginger is teching to astro to try to burn down INDIA's coast, unlikely though that may be, we would run some risk of redirecting their attack to us after all

[williams482]

I don't think we should bet on a defensive pact, as it seems more likely to pull us into an unwanted war than to protect us. Remember that if mjmd is willing to sign it, then they are likely willing to enter our defensive wars without it. It also telegraphs our apparent alliance to Nauf and SD, whose potential disapproval I guess we don't care *that much* about but still gives me pause.

A courthouse in Aksum to save 8 GPT seems at least arguably worth it, but I'm puzzled by the screenshot of Meisei, where it looks like we are paying 7.87 GPT total for maintenance, and the courthouse will only cut that by 40% (considering the existing reduction from the Ikhanda). If these courthouses are actually only saving 4 GPT, that's a lot worse, probably not worth the hammers in our Heroic Epic city (although putting those hammers into West Point instead of units seems not unreasonable at this juncture).

Lets see them forges!

[ljubljana]

i thiiiiink in a city with an ikhanda, adding a courthouse on top of that takes us from paying 80% maintenance to 30%, so the savings should be (0.8 - 0.3) / 0.8 = 62.5% of the displayed number. so the meisei courthouse saves 5, which might not be worth it over more units (judgement call imo) but is definitely better than a library or market there (which add only a little over 2 GPT on average as of now). the aksum courthouse saves 8 because we're currently paying something 12 GPT in maintenance there even post-ikhanda lmaoo. that is unless the BUG mod interface is lying to me but i do not think it has led me astray so far

sadly we do not have toooo many super high-impact infra projects to work on because our cities are so small and crappy.... most of what we do have is in former greenline but those cities are still working on basic stuff like theaters so they can actually work their first-ring tiles......

i do not really know what our threshold for "worthwhile ROI" on an infra build should be, tbh..... i have a feeling that once we get close to bio it will be correct to run wealth builds again, but for now it's ok to scrounge up what we can as long as it will almost pay back over wealth in the next 15 turns or so..... at the very least, once we DO have bio we'll want a library and market in every city so we can max out on commerce-producing specialists once we run out of tiles to work uh, except for meisei which is not really ever going to have that problem lol

[ljubljana]

also, any ideas on how we're supposed to defend against an opponent who has galleons when we don't even have caravels? i'm wracking my brain but the best i can come up with is "stick 10 rifles in every coastal city that can be boated from the fog" which is not really feasible lol. i reeeeeeally don't want to have to go for optics before biology (1500 beakers incl compass) but i'm getting spooked about this

[DaveV]

no idea why the rendering is so bad though.... i can barely even see where ginger has ended up

Are you running in windowed mode? I think the fonts and graphics are set up for full screen mode, and there are some lost pixels when the text and graphics are shrunk down to allow for a window header at the top of the screen and a task bar at the bottom of the screen. The smaller your screen (in pixels), the bigger the impact. You can maximize the window (cover up the task bar at the bottom) to make the effect much less noticeable (on my screen, 1920x1080, this seems to remove all the funky compressed text and circles displaying as ovals, but causes stuff to be clipped at the bottom of the screen; e.g. on the city screen, the bottom row of icons on the draft/whip window are lost. Pick your poison).

[ljubljana]

@Dave ahhh yes, that's probably what it is.... i think i need to stay in windowed mode for ease of reporting though, so i guess i just have to deal with the compression for now

224-225 double

lol the game sure moves fast with just 5 players..... i didn't even miss a day this time, yet two full rounds have passed since this time yesterday



??? oh yeah? ok i think i can work with this! deer has no doubler so it's just -1 health per city and only aksum is large enough to be affected anytime soon, i'll take it. especially since they did NOT return our cows



but i think we messed up with mjmd diplo.... they are all set up to help us in help us in our war with ginger which we now don't expect to have to deal with anytime soon...... i guess the message i sent, intended as a desperate cry for help if we get invaded, was interpreted, reasonably enough, as us proposing OFFENSIVE war against the ottomans



and they are even building rails towards our territory ((( i think we need some way to walk this back that isn't just us ignoring them or our alliance will be at serious risk of falling apart. which means copper for copper and defensive pact imo, to imply that our request for aid was in the event of us being attacked.... that is, unless yall think we SHOULD be thinking about offensive war with ginger if mjmd has our back with their full military :O (i do not think so though, not while we're this far behind in terms of, um, every metric that matters lol)

hmmmm if i were mjmd and my zulu neighbor sent the diplo i saw, i would think one of two things.... one, they think they're about to be attacked by ginger, or two, they are about to launch their own completely insane and doomed attack into ginger. in case b), which is the misinterpretation i'm worried about, i'd feel that i, somewhat begrudgingly, must help out a bit or ginger will destroy zulu and run away with the game. but i wouldn't throw the full force of my military behind zulu or i risk them decisively coming out on top.... probably what i would do is supply juuuust enough troops to maintain the balance of power while i think about how to eat superdeath. and if that's the case, as zulu it's not in my interest to launch such a war. i think that means we backpedal with a defensive pact ask - it disambiguates between cases a and b somewhat, and HOPEfully shouldn't anger mjmd too much since if i'm in india's position, i probably don't want hot war to break out in the east right now anyways given the potential for a crushing ottoman win



ging put another 30ish ep into us....

over/under on how many tiles we will have to move into ginger's territory to find their stack?

......if you guessed "one", you are correct



25 fresh cavs and 3 cannons, plus two more in anchovy itself



nothing in the dreylinville/stonefish area



nor at salmon/perch



nor really in the north, at least that my initial wave of scouts could find. of course at this point i'm going to absolutely flood impis into their territory - one way to not get owned by fogboating is to stick scouts in every single one of their port cities lmao



yeah, mjmd has a HUGE stack of rifles and cannons all set up and ready to "help us" (according to diplo....) thankfully it is one tile out of range of longship spam should they choose betrayal instead..... that's actually enough of a commit that we maybe COULD cause ginger a serious setback if we really went for it in an aggressive war. and while this seems like a pretty awful time to fight in isolation, if we could actually win then it wouldn't be.....



time for our own Big Ol' Dice Roll ™ in abi...... i'd prefer a merchant or scientist to speed us towards biology, but the other two options are not terrible either. engi is a good first GP for the 3-person GA since they are hard to generate. and then artist at the 8% would probably be the weakest but even that has military applications. either way, after this turn abi will seamlessly transition from generating this GP to generating the next GP  it would still be quite a surprise if we are still relevant by the time a third GA could actually be popped but of course we'd do well to play for that possibility at this point



well, ok! great scientist is not bad at all could be the scimeth bulb as we've discussed, or could be the first person in the 3-person GA.... just in case we go for the latter, i stuck Abi on double artist + engineer this turn so as not to conflict (plus that gets the courthouse done in 6, at which point we can add a spy)



ginger military pile #2



please don't blow up in my face please

rifling in 2t yall! with no wealth builds and no war yet never thought we'd live to see this point after The Great Betrayal

after the tech comes in i plan to start saving, probably for a while.... 8kish beakers to bio if we bulb scimeth, so we probably want around 3-4k in the treasury to power our way there. that sounds like a ton (and i mean, it is a ton) but it's closer than rifling was when we started it (redacted) turns ago, and of course our economy is in waaaay better shape

[williams482]

Oh boy, if mjmd is actually willing to throw that huge stack at Ginger then yeah, we want this, but it seems unlikely they would commit hard enough to really make this worth our while. The defensive pact should (should!) be helpfully unambiguous as a clarification of your intentions.