[Spoilers] Gavagai, Bacchus and Elizabeth Form a Romantic Trio

[retep]

Two days and no updates?

[Gavagai]

Two days and no updates?

They game has been stuck, that's why. I played a turn today. No pictures, but our settling party ran into an Egyptian warrior. He is at 1.8 health and has a promo available.
If they would want to choke us - and that would be an obvious and rational thing to do for them - it will delay our copper mine for 5 turns. It will delay metal units, delay third worker, delay second settler, delay basically everything. Of course, we won't be settling floods in this scenario and probably will need to through a junk city as our #4 to at least claim Ivory.
Frankly speaking, I'm at a loss about what we were supposed to do here. The reason why we have no military is the fact that we have built three workboats. It's 90 hammers which could be six warriors. And we are still behind Egypt in food/hammers, so I don't see how could we afford not building them.
Well, plan B is to Oracle Monarchy and to grow vertical. But I'm really sceptical about this plan. Building Oracle means not building settlers and sitting with three cities for, like, forever.
OK, I really feel depressed about this game at this point.

[Bacchus]

There is no tragedy yet. The egyptian warrior is 2NE of our copper, 3NE of the city and with our warrior protecting the copper. He can go 1SW, 1W, 1SW and then attack the city (alternatively 1SW, 1S, 1SW) and we can't chop in time. We cannot defend both the metal and the city, so we will have to allow him to camp. After he camps, we have the equally gut wrenching options of researching archery; attacking a fortified, promoed camper on the hill with warriors and not developing copper at all. Also, we might have a lucky break and score some horses, glory be to Krill and God, but we can't really count on that.

Before we decide what to do with the camper, we need to decide what to do with the build queue and worker. Gav so far suggested mining the copper until we have to withdraw, building a warrior, and double-attacking as soon as that is finished. I don't like this approach, as we will have about quite high odds of losing both warriors and the city, gut feel tells me about 20%. If it does work, it gives us the best results, though -- we will have the mine online in the soonest possible time, given the circumstances. I would say retreat the worker and build a grass mine on a hill shared by our two cities, build a road between them, tech AH, see whether we have horses, build a worker in the city, then, if we don't have horses, bring up the warrior from the capital, build some more, and attack. With mine and cows, the city will be able to build 2 warriors in 5 tuns. Or maybe we should even tech archery, how long would that take? Archery will actually give us reasonable offensive capabilities, and will at least keep us in the running for the floodplains region.

As will be clear to the reader, this is a question of choosing between an insurance approach (guaranteed mediocrity) and a double-or-nothing approach (luck out on the hill and win big, or pretty much lose the game). The question is really whether the level of development that we can achieve by being cautious will be sufficient to keep us well in the game. If not, we should go for the gamble. Also, we would have to see exactly how much of a gamble is the gamble, I might be irrationally pessimistic.

We also considered the option of settling the cow-corn spot, but our tech choice precludes drawing any benefit from it.

Generally, we are at the hard end of a collision between a pure seafood start and a plains hill, wet corn, cow start. This was never going to be pretty, our only hope is that Egypt don't realize the extent of their advantage and don't pursue it aggressively. If they do, there is really not much we can do short of ruining our game to resist the early-turn onslaught. I guess if we gave religion a miss, we could have had AH by now, which would mean that the second city is not tied to that one tile, but still, we couldn't have protected both the pasture, and the city.

[Bacchus]

Actually, here is what we can do:

We tech archery now, grow the city to 2 from the cow, worker builds the shared grass mine and a road, we bring up the capital-built warrior up the road. We whip the archer, kill the camper after softening him up with a warrior, give the archer guerrilla, heal him up and send him north. The city builds a worker first off the grass mine and then the copper mine, and a chop. We tech AH, workers pasture the cow, city builds axe, perhaps with a chop. In the flood region, if the archer sees the copper un-protected, we deny it; if it is protected, he goes to kill the gold.

[Gavagai]

I think we should be able to chop out a warrior in time to hold on copper. Also, archers suck against axes and they should have some by the time our archer is able to reach their territory.

[suttree]

Nothing happening in my game, so thought it would be interesting to work out the odds on a two warrior attack on the copper hill.

For initial attack:

25.0% win
05.3% 0-hit
11.8% 1-hit(83hp)
15.7% 2-hit(66hp)
16.3% 3-hit(49hp)
14.5% 4-hit(32hp)
11.6% 5-hit(15hp)

The odds of losing on the second attack are:

83hp 58.2%
66hp 38.4%
49hp 12.2%
32hp 03.7%
15hp 00.2%

So if you were entirely committed to attacking with both warriors, odds of losing the city would be 19.4%. Since you'd probably call off the attack if your first attack went poorly, the more meaningful stat would be odds of losing one warrior. At the 32hp threshold, odds of winning would be 50.6% (25% both warriors survive, 25.6% one dies) and odds of losing both warriors would be 0.5%.

I haven't checked the Egyptian thread recently so don't read anything in to this, but are you certain Jester and Nakor are playing the same game as you? Just showing one or two warriors might bluff them off the camp. In fact, doesn't your plan rely on Egypt underestimating your aggressiveness? Perhaps even one warrior on the copper hill will deter for the sake of maintaining the peace or saving the warrior or whatever - they can't see your city.

I guess what I'm saying is, don't talk yourselves in to a hole. You know it's rational for Egypt to move next to the city; they might not.

[Gavagai]

Of course, they are thinking differently. I can't fathom why the hell they even wanted to build so many warriors, dragging us into a stone age arms race; so, I can't exactly say that I'm reading their minds. But if they already have excess warriors, it would be double stupid for them not to abuse this advantage. The problem is that it's quite easy to deduce the size of our military from our power graph. They know that the warrior they see is the only miitary unit we have. They will know that our hill has copper after we settle a city. Why wouldn't they want to camp on it?
My current idea is to settle cow/corn spot now and to settle our third city 1E from Copper. Worker will chop a forest into a second warrior in a corn/cow city. As I was smart enough to move up a worker and a settler first and only then moved a warrior and spotted an enemy, we will lose a settler/turn and a worker/turn on that - a loss which could be easily evaded. Very stupid mistake but what can you expect if you are playing turns early in the morning and half-conscious? It looks like time of early-in-the-morning play has passed earlier than I anticipated.
(By the way, I once played a turn in a different pitboss game right after I came back home from a dentist with anesthesia still active. I felt myself perfectly normal mentally but somehow screwed up all my worker micro terribly. After that I decided that I should never play while being high on drugs.)

[Gavagai]

Oh, completely forgot: thank you for doing a sim for us. That was really nice on your behalf and also helpful.

[Oxyphenbutazone]

I can empathize with people attacking you irrationally

[Bacchus]

So if you were entirely committed to attacking with both warriors, odds of losing the city would be 19.4%. Since you'd probably call off the attack if your first attack went poorly, the more meaningful stat would be odds of losing one warrior. At the 32hp threshold, odds of winning would be 50.6% (25% both warriors survive, 25.6% one dies) and odds of losing both warriors would be 0.5%.

Hurrah for gut feel, it was only 0.6% off. When I played with the calculator, though odds of winning with the first or second warrior came out as 75%, which is slightly worse than what you had. Thanks for looking into the odds regardless, mine are probably wrong. Did you count that the Egyptian will have combat by the way?

In any case, we will let them move first, and we will only respond where and when necessary, our thoughts were just preliminary, so that we have some idea of what to do, should he move towards us. And, like Gav, I really don't see why on earth they wouldn't move the warrior to threaten the city. Peace nets them nothing.

My current idea is to settle cow/corn spot now and to settle our third city 1E from Copper.

I don't know. I did suggest this in the morning, but I don't actually have any arguments to support this option, we are two techs short of switching this city on, and Egypt will be just as able to harass it as the copper one. And X turns later we will still have to deal with the warrior camping the copper.

Guerilla archer will have strength 5.1 on a hill, not counting for fortify, which is enough, as the axe will have to win 6 rounds of combat to our five.