[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

i really wonder how the geopolitics are going to play out from here..... ginger of course will hate us forever and it's only a matter of time before they come back for more, no other way for them to win i think. but what about nauf and mjmd? i think there's some reason for optimism that they might not join the pile-on.... mjmd has no easy approach to our territory, as we are now protected by the same moat that kept greenline safe from them for so long.... and then nauf, as i'm mentioned, is at a serious compositional disadvantage attacking with gren/cannon into cuirassiers. both of them have SD to worry about if they send their stacks east, and mjmd would be foregoing what should be an easy conquest for them in the gav remnants if they come for us. and there is the big one, which is: if we get dogpiled and collapse, why on earth would nauf or mjmd expect to benefit from that more than 30-city ginger who is already ahead of them and shares a gigantic land border with us? sure, if nobody matches us in land for the rest of the game we will eventually win, but in a world without zulu, wouldn't ginger become such an overwhelming favorite that it doesn't make sense for the others to join in?

idk... if i'm mjmd, i might juuust maybe think the winning move from here is to tech to infantry while crushing gav, then negotiate a split of superdeath with nauf to catch up on territory, on the (very likely correct) assumption that zulus will be too busy holding the ottoman wolf by the jaws to do anything about it. at least, that's the theory behind the pretty ridiculous-looking position we've ended up in.....

soooo... what do WE do if that's their plan? rebuild an economy as quickly as possible is a start of course, but then what? obviously we can't save gav, but what about SD? unfortunately we really are entering a long period of time in which it will indeed be true that taking even one eye off ginger will mean certain death.... that is, except for the next 28 turns (apparently), but our only viable expansion prospect in that period would be a naufragar split with superdeath and not only do i really not want to do that, i'm not sure it would even be good for us...? would 10 more cities really be worth a) neighboring monster SD instead of friendly and increasingly behind nauf and b) removing the threat of said superdeath if our neighbors try to all-in us?

[williams482]

I had a nice time away up at camp.

This is pretty much the strategic situation we expected from signing a Ginger NAP and crushing Greenline, the big difference being that we've gone from being glad to border mjmd in hopes of spoiling their culture push, to being extremely worried about them out teching everyone and trying to eat us. I think your general thoughts about how the balance of power is likely to shake out are about right, and from there it probably comes down to political and tactical execution.

What is the worldwrap situation on this map? How much ocean is there between Ginger and SD? Attempting to partition Ginger with Superdeath looks pretty damn unlikely, but if combined with a very long NAP it could be a way for the two of you to stamp out Ginger's threat without us becoming the singular obvious runaway in Ginger's stead.

Our plan for the next 28 turns has to be primarily econ focused, but I wonder if there's any way for us to get our economy back and roaring without looking absolutely terrifying to the other players, especially without looking more economically effective than we actually are? We'll probably wind up with 40 cities give or take, 30% more than anyone else, and although the quality of those cities is much lesser we're still going to have some scary looking demos and long term economic capability to match. If our economy is fairly assessed by our opponents, then hopefully their responses prove proportionate to our capabilities and things work out okay. If we look much stronger than we actually are, though, we'll get dogpiled and collapse.

This is not a new problem in these games and I have no specific ideas for how to deal with it. Just throwing that out there.

[ljubljana]

worldwrap is cylindrical, and... i don't know how much ocean separates SD from ginger, but from the minimap it looooks like at least another SD/gingerswidth. not an impossible distance for an intercontinental invasion, but first they'd have to tech to astro while nobody else has to on an already kinda shaky-looking economy, and then they'd really need assurances from us that we'd let them keep their gains no questions asked for the whole rest of the game, which of course we could do easily if they need galleons and a multi-turn transit time to reinforce. is SD that trusting? i'm not sure i would be....but worth looking into.

i think it's more likely SD tries to get us interested in splitting naufragar (actually they already tried to get us interested in this some turns ago). this could be efficient for us if it happens right after greenline (so, before our 50-unit cuir stack meets with obsolescence at the hands of naufragerian rifles) but then it is us that will have to be implausibly trusting... we would then neighbor a 35-city SD with lots to gain from attacking us and be highly vulnerable to a 3v1 from the remaining powers, and frankly even if we could take 10 cities off of nauf for free i'm not sure that would be worth it..... maybe if we can get like, a 100 turn NAP from SD then it would be the right move, but THAT would be a such a long-term commitment that i don't think i'd trust anyone to actually stick to it, or even to accurately interpret what we're proposing... still maybe i'm underestimating the extend to which we need to be valuing LAND MORE LAND above all else right now; we paid SO much for this stack in terms of development that it's conceivable that even a complete conquest of greenline will not be enough for it to have paid off....

sigh. well, i guess its helpful for us that mjmd is turning into a monster in that it will perhaps take some heat off us in the short term. we need to somehow get them too focused on the defensive to join in, they are definitely going to have infantry in 28 turns at their current pace (they just blew through chemistry in about 3 turns and could be on steam power now...). i think after this NAP we'd better not give them another one, for starters, and it would be nice to leverage defpacts to intimidate them a bit.... superdeath is still my first choice for a DP if they're not still ginger-aligned for whatever reason, but if not a pact with the EGYPT remnants of all things could be useful, to impose a perceived cost on mjmd for taking the otherwise free 7 extra cities there....

[williams482]

A defensive pact with Egypt would definitely be risky, but it's an interesting way to constrain the choices mjmd has, which further affects what SD and Nauf are incentivized to do. My concern would be that I think it accelerates the timetable for our involvement in conflict, and with our current resource allocations, we want to fight either right now while our cuir stack is state-of-the-art, or quite a ways down the road when we have a real economy again. That probably doesn't play nice with mjmd's consolidation war timeline.

The flip side is that it does create a potential trigger for a dogpile on mjmd if they hit some obviously scary techs at the right times to turn heads. We probably can't really fight them given Ginger's looming presence, but us being technically at war could give Nauf and/or SD enough cover to dive in if they were uncertain before. That likely requires those two being on relatively good terms with each other though, which is very much not a guarantee.

I'm getting the sense that our win condition comes down to us beating Ginger 1v1 while SD/Nauf/mjmd fight inconclusively (or at least slowly and inefficiently) among themselves. Maybe allowing mjmd to become scarier (and sharply increase their border tension with Superdeath) by eating Gav is the way such a situation could develop?

[ljubljana]

Turn 192 - Zululand

diplo: nauf extends our cow, so aksum is safe for now. by the time this one is over our cuirs should be free and they should really not have much prospect of making progress. have i mentioned how badly i DO NOT want to turn on them if we can avoid it?

otherwise, nothing happened between turns, which is a circumstance that favors us of course

ok, trying to set us up for mercs revolt next turn by mass-whipping infra everywhere that would otherwise be specialist-less. i think we're going to make it in almost every city.... except....



this one which is ONE FOOD short because i messed up and drafted at the wrong time  blah. this market won't finish conventionally for a million years either at a spot with this level of "low production". not worth waiting either though, of course.... but yeah, note that even horrible filler tamawashi is pretty close to a finished forge, wakatakakage is size 3 because it just whipped its own market, wakamotoharu has forge, market, and grocer at this point and is set up to power-grow on +10 food surplus from here and then run specialists for our distant golden age ambitions



even at nishikigi.... well, i couldn't get us to any "good" infra in time but we can whip a theater. i think an artist is better than a citizen, barely.... but only at specifically this location, at which getting third-ring borders online has strong strategic significance in the event of an mjmd war



mjmd's power starting to spike as well, and they are not in either nationhood or slavery... huh? a bit unsure about how this is possible honestly.... did they have a bunch of muskets hidden in queue or something that are now arriving as rifles? hmm. well, one thing they do still lack relative to us is nationhood/military tradition and rifle/knight doesn't inspire the same kind of primal fear in me that rifle/cav might. well, good to see them investing now (i think...?) in military that they will have to pay full price for as non-AGG, instead of later in zulu-obliterating infantry....



DotF is out of resistance, has borders popped, and is immediately one of our strongest cities  greenline left us SO many forests to obliterate, for which i am very thankful, and will be expressing this thanks in the form of the sickening 1t library you see before you  

ok, but how are we actually going to get to banking this turn....



of course the answer is the same as it ever was... conquest... sadly it looks like greenline has hit on the maximally-annoying strategy of whipping everything down to the last pikeman, so i fear that even chop overflow may take some time to recover. it will not be trivial to grind down the stack in there; they are up to 6 pikes now, which is about the point at which i think we'll need moderate-to-extensive catapult involvement to do this efficiently. we might still be a few muskets short of being definitely in position to push them, too...



managed to lose only one cuir taking DD - vs longbows on a hill, and with no time to bombard, that actually counts as a GOOD outcome. we were only 50/50 in the combat we lost.... thankfully the longbow was only 5% fortified



vultures ahoy! except.... they are not at war with greenline (yet?) so they shouldn't actually get this city.... declaring would teleport them out and then they are one turn behind our own cuir stack. so then... what is this? the only justification i can think of for dropping 20 cuirs in their territory like this WITHOUT declaring war is the "fuck you, we're taking ankyra and stabbing you anyways" justification.... i mean, what else could it be? they're not going to run halfway across the world to try to burn down some mjmd city, right?

it is about this time that i typically start to wonder..... could this somehow be my fault? did /i/ do something that /they/ might consider so slimy as to justify leading us on like that?? my recollection of events is that we attacked about 3-4 turns after a 10-turn fish/fish ended, which doesn't really meet that criterion imo.... they did offer to extend with us shortly beforehand but i did not accept or echo that offer. surely i would have noticed if i had, like, accidentally ACCEPTed that extension offer before attacking, right? that is the only thing i can think of that could have happened to justify them attacking 2 turns after taking a city for a NAP...

well, i'm still going to play as though we do have a NAP that i can trust.... if they want to DoW us and kill a large number of our injured cuirs for free, there's really not much i can do about it, right?

and just as i catch myself thinking "well, it's only 20 cuirs, we could totally take that many if we're careful" i remember that sometimes people scout before making game-defining decisions



36 cuirs in total, with combat workers and everything.... which is probably effectively ALL of ginger's 2-movers, and which they are presumably paying 36 GPT for the privilege of intimidatingly rolling around the sumerian border. where, oh where, could they possibly be going? greenline capital snipe? maybe, but not only are they behind the pace on that if they want to beat us, but the stack in there is actually pretty big at this point and it would be really inefficient for them to chew through without seige.... the biggest "fuck you" that's ever been given to me not just in a civ game, but in any game? it's possible.... surprise burning of an mjmd city, maybe the greenline border city they picked up without having to fight for it? i can dream, can't i

well, here it is, then:



i don't want to slow our roll just because i fear that ginger is about to commit what would be one of the slimiest stabs i have ever seen or heard of on these fora.... so i have left guys exposed who could have been protected to secure us from the "strangely executed greenline vulture attempt" possibility, and to keep up the pace in the event of the "attempted raze of one or more mjmd cities" possibility. if instead they are coming to kill us, that's a game over scenario and it probably would be even if we had fewer units exposed.... but in case of that, i did some pillaging to try to create a defensible corridor at magnus - RFT - work ethic. the pillagers are all killable but they can't get them without exposing themselves to an unknown number of counterattackers, and we do have quite a few.

and if it is /not/ slimy because i in fact deserve it somehow, then so be it, if that's the case then i deserve to lose too

[ljubljana]

A defensive pact with Egypt would definitely be risky, but it's an interesting way to constrain the choices mjmd has, which further affects what SD and Nauf are incentivized to do. My concern would be that I think it accelerates the timetable for our involvement in conflict, and with our current resource allocations, we want to fight either right now while our cuir stack is state-of-the-art, or quite a ways down the road when we have a real economy again. That probably doesn't play nice with mjmd's consolidation war timeline.

The flip side is that it does create a potential trigger for a dogpile on mjmd if they hit some obviously scary techs at the right times to turn heads. We probably can't really fight them given Ginger's looming presence, but us being technically at war could give Nauf and/or SD enough cover to dive in if they were uncertain before. That likely requires those two being on relatively good terms with each other though, which is very much not a guarantee.

I'm getting the sense that our win condition comes down to us beating Ginger 1v1 while SD/Nauf/mjmd fight inconclusively (or at least slowly and inefficiently) among themselves. Maybe allowing mjmd to become scarier (and sharply increase their border tension with Superdeath) by eating Gav is the way such a situation could develop?

yeah, well. assuming ginger is NOT about to stab us straight to hell 2 turns after signing a deal in which we conceded a city for their promise to not do that, in which case we have no win condition....

i certainly think beating ginger 1v1 would be sufficient for us to win the game, decisively at that.... but i also think it's unlikely to happen. certainly not while we're at a tech disadvantage, and i'd wager they have a golden age coming up soon, after which we won't have a material advantage either. i'm guessing we will catch them in tech at around assembly line (...?) in, lol, maybe like 40 or 50 turns.... and then we can start thinking about offensive action. maybe with a LOT of commandos we can pull something off, and if all goes well we will indeed have a lot of commandos by that point. but i get the sense that the later things go in these games, the more warfare favors the defender due to stuff like cannon stacks and later artillery stacks, and there may be a fair chance that neither of us will ever be able to break the other from here without outside help.

i do think we have another win condition though, which is status quo forever. with a 20 city lead, i think we do still eventually catch up to mjmd on tech and win a hypothetical space race from here.... i think much of their GNP lead right now comes from mercantilism + representation and their 9000 gold jewish shrine (oops...) neither of which will scale that well into the lategame. i think modern age GNP ratios are destined to be determined by who has the most windmills with which to abuse environmentalism, and we are definitely leading in that category by a huge margin. this will be even truer the more we can force the others to militarize, which also favors us as the AGG civ...

but if mjmd can make it out to closer to 30 cities by absorbing egypt, i will be way less confident about that. i am not too sure what the others can do to really prevent that either.... SD and nauf haven't been receptive to my requests for them to kindly attack india please (though maybe i should send more). really it's up to us to use the threat of our cuirs to force them to commit (and pay for) a zuluproof stack to defending our border before going after gav.....

sigh. i guess this is why i was naive enough this turn to believe ginger intends to use their cuirs against mjmd instead of us, despite the evidence of my own eyes.... because, at this point, i think mjmd IS the favorite (after losing a city to gav pre-turn 100, no less!). nobody else has realistic expansion prospects (i guess we sort of do but our economy cannot afford to actualize them) but mjmd has a great one and is already way ahead in gnp, so they do need some reining in. maybe with ginger having promised us peace for 28 turns, they are looking for ways to leverage their cuirs as well and that's what they came up with? they WERE very recently at war with india..... (although, shit, how recently.... if they aren't going to be out of enforced peace by the time the cuirs would get there we are in deep shit)

[ljubljana]

also, SD is online and the turn is about to roll.... am i supposed to wait for ginger to move before we do to allow them the chance to grind our noses into the dust? we don't have a turnsplit and they aren't at war with anyone.... if they plan to declare on greenline and go for their city next round, i believe they would need to both have a morale cuir and for greenline to not produce another unit there between turns to beat us to it, but both of those things could happen in which case it would change who gets the city.... but given the visible evidence of them entering greenline's borders WITHOUT declaring, maybe that's unlikely enough that i shouldn't be waiting for them just to respect that this might have been their plan?

or, maybe the fact that they have units that could strike ours with a DoW, coupled with me having knowingly left units exposed for them to strike, means that i should wait to give them a chance to do that? we did sign a VERY recent NAP, which to me says that it's unlikely that they'll go for that, but is it unlikely enough that we should refrain from a double-move specifically to respect the possibility? i don't know...

not to mention, it could be argued that they double-moved US to get all their cuirs in this position last turn anyways (they rolled the turn and then played a double) if indeed their intent is now to move first and attack us...

[ljubljana]

I'm sorry I'm looking for a replacement for this game after 8 combat losses with >80% odds

i mean... shit.... this HAS TO be against us, right? i think literally nothing else is possible; there weren't 8 greenline units in range and i did check and they have 6 more turns of enforced peace with mjmd. well, it'll take more than that to even out the trade they would have taken; i counted about 20 cuirs that i thought were guaranteed dead if they went for them, which i left exposed pretty much on the assumption that their word was worth a damn

but wow. the bad blood on their side must have been spectacular for them to really go through with that two turns into a NAP, in contravention of everything they have previously written in other threads about the "sanctity of the first 10 turns of fish". i guess the admittedly sneaky, underhanded nature of the ankyra attack, even though no deal was broken, must have been real infuriating for them to rationalize this pretty extreme norm-breaking behavior. well, lesson learned for future games i guess - not only was the way i did that shitty to dreylin, it was also shitty TO GINGER, which matters if you might ever want your enemy to not be your enemy later in the game...

greenline has played now btw, ginger didn't end turn after their presumed rage-stab, and i haven't received a PM, so i still don't know if i'm allowed to log in or not guessing i'd better not though as it seems highly likely that i'll be getting said PM soon

[MJW (ya that one)]

If ginger ragequits do you think he have to get converted to AI? Because everyone is spoiled? It already happened here with Bamtas.

[ljubljana]

nah.... if a top contender ragequits, turning them into an AI just makes the rest of the game a farce. especially in this case where they have only one neighbor who can take advantage. if they're really out and we can't find a replacement, probably the game has to be called without a winner or MAYBE it can be called for mjmd, who will be way ahead in winprob now if ginger did stab us but got stackwiped by the dice, but a) i don't think superdeath would agree to that and b) i doubt mjmd would want to win that way. and c) not sure i'd agree to that either but that's a different problem lol

i thought civac was still on that team? they have not logged in much though so maybe they don't have time for turnplaying....