Gaspar & Noble make their triumphant? return; mostly just get asked about "The List"

[pindicator]

Perhaps his production also goes down from not having lurker posts?

[NobleHelium]

That would explain why we always dominate the MFG in our games.

[Charriu]

I have some bad news concerning your civ. A bug concerning the Byzantines was discovered. Apparently you can't build your UB the hippodrome and colosseums. This is fixable, but I have no expierence in updating the mod for a PBEM. Not sure when and if that becomes important for you.

[Gaspar]

Played t107-t109

The biggest news of late comes not from our empire...



So since we were last here, Lewwyn's GA ended (seems short, no MoM, bruh?), we teched Feudalism, Lewwyn shrined Buddhism, someone got a Great Artist, we adopted Vassalage, we got an unfortunate Buddhism spread to LW, Serdoa adopted HR and we teched HBR.

Uh, wait, what?

There were two head-scratchers in there, but let me add a bit more context to the bigger picture here before we try to parse this stuff and what it means for us...



If you recall in my last report, we had made some assumptions about tech that are quite clearly incorrect. We had assumed that Lewwyn had gone Machinery on his path to Guilds and were a bit headscratched as to who had teched Meditation besides Lewwyn. This lead us to ascribing the Aesthetics/Meditation techs to the same person, basically either Rusten or Superdeath. Then on t107 someone got a GArtist. At first this didn't resonate, as we've run a lot of artist specialists in our GA for border popping/culture manipulation/etc. But then I thought about it someone and realized that the only wonder that's been built that gives artist GPP is MoM, by us and that none of our opponents had run Caste System and that... had to be the Music GArtist. We did not think anyone was close enough to it. So we discussed some more and were wondering given either Rusten or SD seemed most likely why we got the far away land bit since we have both of their capitals defogged and as far as we could remember, GPs from the tech tree spawn in the capital. Then we suddenly remembered the event log is chronological. Well the turn order is Bob > SD > Lewwyn > Serdoa > Rusten > Us. So that eliminated SD from the equation entirely. We basically had it down to 80/20 Serdoa vs Rusten, even though I don't really think Serdoa can tech fast enough for that. But, after ending turn this turn, we got research vis on SD thanks to the courthouse we completed in Solaris Temple, and...





That, of course, meant that Lewwyn had not teched Machinery after all, Superdeath had and well, t108 during turn, Lewwyn founds Mahabodhi, t108 eot, Lewwyn nabs the Music GArtist. Meanwhile, we put SD down for Engineering on roughly t117. This rate was extrapolated as we know his last two techs are Machinery and Construction and we can figure out when both fell (Machinery because we can research it so we can tell when someone else has it and Construction because we can see when bridges appeared in his territory.)

This sort of could imply both Rusten and Lewwyn are going for Nationalism through Philosophy, if Rusten is our 2nd Meditation techer as seems likely. It most definitely implies that Superdeath is preparing for a defensive war against us, by teching for CKNs and pikes. More on that anon.

Also, can we take a second to observe the glory of Serdoa eating a turn of anarchy on t109 to adopt Hereditary Rule??? If you need happy that bad, you're either whipping too hard or not whipping hard enough. Inspired by this, we offered him our extra spices for sheep and rice because we could use the health in Oriath.

The bigger question that's been re-opened up here, is who gets the gift of Cataphracts? Let's revisit those borders...



That's the Serdoan border. We're relatively happy with it. The overpowering culture of Solaris Temple means even its 3rd ring tiles are never going to be lost (GLH culture doubles next turn, fwiw) without either copious amounts of slider or culture bombs and neither of those are sure for that matter. That said, those borders mean it would be relatively achievable to boil out of the fog into Yekaterin, Novgorod and Smolensk (the island city below) and probably could even boat Chengdu on the first turn of war. Its the sort of thing that if he didn't see coming he'd just get annihilated in the first couple turns of war. Serdoa is no dummy though, so I'm sure there are hitters hiding behind at least Novgorod and probably Yekaterin. Given that we have no reason to believe he is still not teching quite slowly, I think its safe to assume we'd see no pikemen in an assault. We might see war elephants, though.



The SD border on the other hand is exactly the opposite. Given SDs penchant for being completely unreasonable with his neighbors and our own predilection towards settling the more lucrative south, we let SD very much get a favorable split on this border. He also has managed culture relatively well in Guangzhou and razed our island city of Putrid Cloister and planted Kaifeng in its stead. We also have the advantage of quality scouting on SD, so unlike Serdoa, where we can't actually see his core cities, we have a perfect roadmap to SDs core. Because SD doesn't apparently believe in overlap, it will take longer to hit several of his cities and the first battle, at Guangzhou, would likely be the bloodiest. Fair or unfair, on the surface, attacking Serdoa is a pretty easy call over SD, particularly given that SD has all of the tech he needs to compete with us. However, there are more factors at play here...

• Guangzhou contains SDs only connected source of iron, so we could conceivably cut him off from producing additional pikemen or CKN during the war.
  
• Taking Guangzhou orphans Macau (underneath the sheep) and Kaifeng.
  
• Serdoa has been a pretty decent friend all game and is not predisposed to dislike us, while SD has not done anything for us save shut borders as soon as he had other TR sources and raze one of our cities.
  
• Rusten and Serdoa have been in a pretty agitated spat for a long time and it is easy to see that if we went in on Serdoa, Rusten would go in on the western border and secure some cities while we do the heavy lifting. SD borders three other people but it isn't evident that anyone is "ready to fight" with him in the same way Rusten is with Serdoa.
  

If you took the names off the players, I feel like you probably attack Serdoa but its close. But you can't do that, so I think its likely we still go after SD, though it could be quite bloody. What do you guys think? What would you do? Any questions?

Also worth noting that SDs power is spiking, one presumes those are CKN or Cats.



In domestic news, not much is going on, really. We're quitely playing through the GA, banging out key infra and spreading Confucianism where its needed.

[Gaspar]

I have some bad news concerning your civ. A bug concerning the Byzantines was discovered. Apparently you can't build your UB the hippodrome and colosseums. This is fixable, but I have no expierence in updating the mod for a PBEM. Not sure when and if that becomes important for you.

Like, we can't build them both at the same city or we can't build either anywhere?

[NobleHelium]

Okay well I just checked and we can't build colosseums in our cities nor does a colosseum show up under Construction in the F6 screen. HOWEVER, I do see a hippodrome under Drama in the F6 screen so I am inclined to believe that you are wrong about the specifics of the bug and we can build hippodromes but not colosseums.

[novice]

I think it’s safe to assume that someone will trade iron to Superdeath.

[Charriu]

Okay well I just checked and we can't build colosseums in our cities nor does a colosseum show up under Construction in the F6 screen.  HOWEVER, I do see a hippodrome under Drama in the F6 screen so I am inclined to believe that you are wrong about the specifics of the bug and we can build hippodromes but not colosseums.

I tested it and I can say you can't build it even though it is shown.

[NobleHelium]

OK, I just checked in singleplayer in 1.4.5 and I can build theatres but not hippodromes as Byzantium. Is that what you observe?

[mackoti]

OK, I just checked in singleplayer in 1.4.5 and I can build theatres but not hippodromes as Byzantium.  Is that what you observe?

Oh, what a pity , you play Biz for the horse race.