[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[williams482]

Oh baby, look at them yields!

Agreed on the filler city being worth it. I assume you've easily reached the conquerers plateau on number of cities by now, and four plains farms plus some windmills will get big enough build stuff and draft off of with time.

Here's hoping Ginger isn't up to anything whacky. Where did those cavs go?

[ljubljana]

the cavs went south...... if they continue to do so, they will have a stack of around 40 visible (probably more on boats) in position to potentially stream across our border at work ethic. or attack mjmd, if we actually believe their claims about that

i'd like to say that i think our power differential, plus the fact that they'd be attacking with a unit that loses to our rifles pretty badly, makes this an odd choice of timing if they are coming for us. i'd like to say that, but i won't, as attacking mjmd with such a stack also seems bizarre, and maybe more so, unless MAYbe they have some kind of arrangement with SD/nauf of the kind they tried and failed to get us to agree to..... unfortunately i think i am going to have to peel off another round of draftees in the south instead of pursuing our dream of infinite bio growth forever, at least until we know for sure where they're going

well, ok, that "instead" is a bit misleading as i think it's actually no longer possible for us to draft hard enough to stop our cities from growing i drafted the maximum 4 rifles last turn at a cost of 8 pop, and we are growing 13 pop this interturn..... and with 40+ cities we're never going to run into unhappiness problems from drafting either, so we really should be able to do this forever. ideally we'd wait until we have less productive tiles to draft off of than plains windmills and hokutofuji's 2/0/5 sugars but, of course, if we need the units now we need the units now

[ljubljana]

239

lol even though our chances to win are really remote, i'm hype enough about biology that i'm back to sitting around anxiously waiting for SD to roll the turn



SD wants a defensive pact again.... and again i THINK it's too early to pick a side. but let me think some more.....



ok, so this is a concerning number of fresh infantry



yeah i don't like the look of this

i mean it IS the look we'd expect if they were actually going after india when their enforced peace is up but i am still unconvinced as to WHY they would try such a thing

ok i need to take a break, stare at the ceiling, and think about what kind of diplo we're supposed to do here.....

[ljubljana]

well, i offered ginger cow/cow again (since civac saw the last one and so might not have passed it along to them) but idk.... williams, what do you think we should do diplomatically here?

thought about offering a DP to superdeath, which would at least a) signal to ginger that we are open to a coalition vs mjmd and b) break ginger's own superdeath DP if they attack us, costing them a lux trade and hopefully complicating their efforts to build a coalition vs mjmd in a post-zulu world. right now i'm a little fearful that ginger doesn't see much use for us if we refuse to help rein in the runaway, and therefore will see attacking as the next-best option to a global anti-mjmd coalition. but.... i fear upsetting india by pacting with their natural expansion target, since our only path to surviving mostly-intact if ginger attacks now is for them to intervene on our side, as they promised the last time a ginger war looked imminent...... on the other hand, formally DPing india is probably a bad idea too since it basically commits us to war with ginger soon, not to mention mjmd has repeatedly turned down my offers of doing so anyways

also thought about offering pacts to both sd AND nauf, but then ginger could just attack nauf instead of us directly to avoid DoWing their pactmate...

[williams482]

I suspect we need to pick a lane here.

Because we're huge and we separate Ginger from the rest of the continent, and because Ginger apparently hates us or something, we need to be pretty unambiguous about alliances if we want Ginger to attack mjmd instead. We also do want to avoid having other players try to smack us for the same reasons that we took out Greenline: apparently allying with the runaway.

I also definitely understand your displeasure at turning on mjmd considering the returned city and helpful diplomatic exchanges, plus the whole "Ginger probably hates us" thing. I don't like it either. It also occurs to me that mjmd may be higher on your chances and lower on their own than you are, and view the current arrangement as a bit of a "us against the world, figure out who's on top when it's over" alliance, as opposed to a clearly subordinate one. After all, you have a massive empire and a massive military, and you have historically been prone to underrating your own position. You just need time to develop and manifest those advantages into competitive yields.

A DP with SD nudges Ginger away from attacking us (although it won't stop them from doing so; SD isn't about to come crashing in with a massive naval stack just because they are technically at war). So that's useful, and the information exchanges with mjmd muddy the waters enough that they might not take it as an instant betrayal. But that keeps us very firmly in the camp of having no certain friends and a full complement of potential enemies. Not ideal.

Maybe we can ride ambiguous neutrality for a while as we build up in peace and let the others try to knock mjmd down a peg, but I highly doubt Ginger in particular is going to let us do that. Tricky situation all around, and I have no good answers.

But definitely keep drafting.

[ljubljana]

240

yeah, i'll think about alliegances for as much time as ginger will allow us to.... but if we have to pick a side (and i agree with you that we probably do) i am just not sure how ginger can be the choice. we have one secure friend who has swapped military information with us and has recently offered to defend us if ginger attacks..... and one very insecure detente situation following a NAP-stab, with a player who for geopolitical reasons probably needs to eventually kill us to win the game  it is a bit sad because in some ways, joining ginger IS the better strategic choice (which is why i'm considering it so seriously) - mjmd has a pretty high chance of using a free hand we might give them to conquer superdeath or naufragar and finally put this game away, while ginger has no analogous opportunities. but i don't know if i can really get to a place where i trust the ottomans not to knife us in the side again. to choose their side is to go from "one relevant friend" to "zero relevant friends" and thaaaat could easily be how we backdoor ourselves into the long-feared 3v1 lol



1 for 2 at least.... but yeah, ginger won't even return our cows, how the heck am i supposed to trust them in an actual alliance situation



this i def saw coming given how fast they were to AL.... it is in stonefish, in the south, just one line of cities from our border so it's maybe snipeable?



we have to actually put a turn into west point this turn... otherwise our banked rifle overflow will be lost when we produce next turn's mandatory CARAVEL in aksum  unless i'm supposed to 1t a harbor instead to fix the health situation and add 3gpt from the trade route boost, but i think that will still waste overflow, not next turn when we make the caravel, but on the turn after



.....i don't know what to tell you  i guess 2 plains farms, 2 lakes, and 4 hills is good enough for me? plus it's an extra source of draftees, as always, and will help out with the culture war situation



farmworld looking pretty thoroughly-worked  except for such areas in which the pop literally does not exist to work the number of available farms (atamifuji, ichiyamamoto in the south)



rifle stack at the border is starting to get up there..... though i don't quite know how this is going to be enough when ginger is, yes, now just 3 techs from tanks. expensive techs they may be, and it will take a few more turns to actually BUILD the first tank wave, but all the same we'd better step on it in the direction of assembly line

[ljubljana]

241

i haven't missed a turn's reporting this game but i really don't want to report 

so this is your extremely perfunctory report



gondar also being very funny, abi-style.... not sure if working plains farm over grass town is the right play but we're going for it



now THIS is a Worthwhile City



mans knows how to make me nervous...

ok gotta go, sorry will finish turn later

[ljubljana]

you guys think we can fight off ginger's tanks with (a fuckton of rifles and cavs and) sufficiently many cannons?

there's probably no way we're getting to assembly line in time but we could start teching steel right now, and even have time to mass them....

going to do some tests to figure out what the cannon vs tank collateral ceiling is, if we can get hammer-efficient exchanges that way we might be able to keep this going for a long time

edit: for unpromoted cannons it looks like we can take a tank stack down to 16.8.... that's not terrible? we won't get amazing odds like that but it's an option if we don't think waiting for infantry is going to cut it.... and then do the rest with like, combat 2 + ambush rifles that we can mass-produce thanks to AGG? or even c2 + ambush CANNONS since they don't have to win as many rounds of combat to "win" a battle.....

[williams482]

Cannons can't take combat promotion. You could go Drill 2 + Ambush, which would unfortunately be weaker than combat but would probably work. The fewer combats required to "win" is an excellent point in their favor, as you have no shortage of hitters to finish off crippled units with, and a tank at 15% health is almost as good as dead.

[ljubljana]

heh.... if we're using cannons vs tanks, i guess what we really want to do is trick them into sticking their stack in one of our captured cities, then hit it with city raider cannons sadly we don't have the promos available to take drill 2 + ambush on a fresh cannon.... nor do we for c2 + ambush anyways if that were possible, so i really have no idea what i was talking about there lol

the thing is, steel is another "wasted" research that does nothing to speed us towards our near-term economic goals of levees (researchable right now at steam power) and assembly line (um, 6 techs away, though most of these are cheapish backlog on the education -> economics -> corporation line....). compass -> optics was arguably fine as they are VERY cheap compared to something like steam power and not being able to see galleons coming is kind of an emergency situation, but do cannons constitute the same if they delay industrializing?

on the other hand, we have a series of what seem to me to be really powerful military techs available now if we choose the steel route, in steel itself and then railroad, physics, and artillery in some order. all four of those represent a significant step up in ability to not die, while this assembly line route.... does not do that..... steam power is at least a decent econ tech by itself in this situation (something like 17 of our cities are productively levee-able, compared to ginger's, i think, 5), but constitution is blank until we pop a golden age for representation (roughly 25t away still) and edu + econ are both completely blank since i have no desire to spend hammers on the very weak university building when we don't even have any banks yet lmao. then corporation is fine to add trade routes to our non-castle cities and unlocks the possibility of cereal mills, if it's still on the board, but i'm not sure how likely that is.....

we could also split the difference and do something like steel first to start massing cannons, then steam power to semi-industrialize, then push for artillery/anti-tanks to survive ginger's anti-anti-tanks....