[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

203

split the difference by begging beloved superdeath for an extension over discord... and then ginger logged in as i was asking and played a 15-minute turn. well, that's a good sign, obviously, but i'm still bracing myself for the counter. i did promise SD i'd play right away though to no procrastinating, much as i would like to



so apparently the statement that "you can't look around before accepting a deal" is not quite as true as i thought..... you CAN still click around on the minimap and the game will take you there. so i have clicked to the site of our battle last turn, which i believe shows that ginger has retreated wholesale and not taken any opportunistic counterattacks. i see no reason not to accept - we are obviously supposed to go smash what's left of greenline now and we may as well clear out the the threat of ginger stabbing us in the side while we do so. not to mention there are a few ginger units lurking in greenline cities as defenders that we'd otherwise have to contend with, plus it would get those horrible caravels off our damn fish tiles (am i supposed to research /optics/ next and start 1-turning caravels from aksum??)

speaking of mr line, this is interesting....



oh...? whereforemst all your units going, sir? does a pile-o-pikes here connote a LACK of pile-o-pikes at district discount, the last place that i saw one?

ginger killed our medic during the cuir + impi stackwipe...



but i found another one lying under a rock  if i can win a few more battles with him, i will juice him up to 37 with a GG for the W3 + M3 combo



nauf on the move, evidently.... these guys were in OneTrickHedgehog last turn and i think represent the main body of their army...

anyways. i feel confident we are supposed to reconnect our iron this turn - we ended up with, um, seventy surviving impis across the empire after our little stunt last turn..... i'm confident that they're worth having and even paying for (worst-case they'll make a good anti-flip garrison at hungary rush), but also i guess i have to admit that we probably don't need more lol

less confident about whether we're supposed to immediately pop our double civic swap. i don't want to underestimate what's left of greenline to our detriment, nor the potential for ginger to come right back to war (with mjmd's help) in 10t with a fresh stack that now outfights ours if we're out of slavery... i would kind of like to whip at least one more nice wave of cuirs before committing to the swap, but... where exactly are those cuirs going to come from? it will not shock yall to learn that we don't really have a lot of cities that are cuir-whip capable...



lolllll yeah guys, i told yall it was bad.... and from this mess, i'm supposed to extract another 10 or so cuirs on this turn and (let's say) exactly one more turn after that? oof....

i also don't even know what happens if you revolt to anarchy while already on strike and with 0 gold.... does the strike continue? if so, can we forestall it if we pillage something to get just a tiny handful of extra cash?

re greenline defenses in DistrictDiscount:



sentry chariots r great

eventually settled for this



now to, um.... figure out how in the hell i'm going to get us out of strike range this turn

switched onto a ton of those moneybags tiles that i guess i was previously ignoring during this war (in my defense they are mostly stuff like 2h/5c desert hill gold) and added wealth builds until we were at, uh, +5 gpt roughly, at which point i got bored and decided to just kinda hope we didn't become suddenly insolvent again for no obvious reason.... i've set up as many units as i can to be whippable next turn, then i think we revolt. nice knowing you slavery

[ljubljana]

I suggested it, you did it. Ideas are cheap, execution is expensive. And pillaging your own iron to get impis back in play was something you thought of months ago. But still, I'm flattered! 

I do wonder if there's an opportunity to take the offensive against Ginger while they are reeling from this. We know they are in a somewhat, uhh, fragile position after a far less damaging turn not long ago, and keeping the pressure on to try to force further errors could be very profitable. Still, I suspect your instinct of trying to push through the complete conquest of Greenline is the better way to spend the reprieve we've (hopefully?) bought here. 

I wonder if there's anything to be learned from mjmd warning you about the attack on RFT. Clearly that means they considered Ginger more of a threat than us at that time and perhaps that has changed, but they could also be trying to shore up relations. Is that something we can/want to try strengthening given our concerns about their tech situation and upcoming culture flips?

yeah... i thought about it, but all of ginger's cities still do have rifle defenders and we have no way to efficiently chew through even a small number of those in a city.... not to mention, well.... we are really badly gassed in terms of whip capacity (as you'll see from the report) and we haven't had cities large enough to actually draft in ages. my inclination is that we must use this reprieve to find some kind of way to start teching again, while making military progress as efficiently as possible, while also continuing to produce enough troops that we won't be sitting ducks when war is redeclared. peace with ginger gives us 10t in which to try to do that, for sure... staying at war with them will give us until they feel like coming back for more, which might not be as far off as that.....

re mjmd: i'd like to stay on good terms with them for as long as is practicable.... but not sure how long that will be.... it's easy to imagine them piling into our greenline conquests when (not if....) ginger redeclares. on the other hand, i did spot a pretty sizable, offensive-looking stack on the border with egypt, so at least we can avoid having to fight their whole army at once until they reposition that. the culture flip situation is a real mess though.... thankfully we whipped all these silly little impis because the plan now is pretty much to pile 20 in hungary rush and 20 in cree trade routes until the end of time or the next invading cav stack, whichever comes first  i managed to get HR down from 8% flip risk to 5% this turn in so doing, and next turn i think we can zero it out (and that city's the important one ofc, with its whack of floodplains towns). CTR though is in such bad shape that i'm considering trying to sell it to india... it doesn't even control its first-ring tiles and is working one grass farm in the second ring right now... thankfully it did come with a courthouse and market so it should still make us a small profit post-mercantilism even in that state. i don't really want mjmd to have it as they're the leader right now and it would be a great city for them, but all the same i'm definitely going to look for opportunities to unload it, either for cash or as a bargaining chip

[ljubljana]

204

...riiiight, i don't actually have to play after ginger anymore



presented without comment



so we have 3 fortified CG longbows in district discount.... and i'm sad to say that, on the hill and with max fortify bonus, they all get odds on a combat 2 cuir! we have only 42% to live if we attack in.... but obviously i don't exactly think we can hesitate either. yeah, i guess it goes without saying that this is part of the reason i'm so nervous about leaving slavery....



as petrified as i am about mjmd intervening in the next ginger war, here is what i mean about their troop deployments.... each of these stacks is 10+ units large. i suppose the nightmarish shape of this border is what's really saving us, for now and hopefully for the future.... these cities are all so exposed that they really do need this kind of force in place here if they don't want SD to be tempted to come snap up what are surely the easiest targets for them anywhere on the board. which again is logic we could reinforce nicely by DP-ing superdeath, if the time comes when we are not at war

speaking of which. i just now realized that, with a few very short breaks to reposition forces, we have been at war continuously since we attacked GT on turn 134... we've been in attack target -> reposition to next target -> immediately attack next target mode for almost 3 months now. i'm tiiiired. and i guess i should be glad our economy isn't in even WORSE shape

so, looking at district discount, i really don't see another option for us other than slamming the cuirs through and accepting losses. at least there are no 1-movers in range to counter (thank you, sentry chariot that greenline didn't expose a unit to kill last turn). there could be 2-movers but somehow, after all this time, greenline never found a benefactor willing to ship them horses (or they decided pikes were just a better build?) so for the last long while i've only been seeing the one knight that escaped at magnus. things should get easier after DD at least, as none of their other front-line cities are on a hill except the capital, and that one we'll be bombing down the defenses at (and honestly, probably spending cats as well)

ginger has 3 janissaries sitting in the city too, which is another reason i'm glad to have accepted their peace deal. those would have turned this costly attack into a really serious stumbling block



we got a bit lucky on the dice though and lost only one cuir. and that one critically injured this longbow to allow us to pick up the 5th experience point for sentry on this chariot that i idiotically produced from a city without judaism  (it also killed a ginger cav to get to 4/2 in the first place)



man i love SD <333 i've been making a point to capture cities every time we've been logged in at the same time  and actually i may even be able to go for ouch! this turn as well with that ghost culture roll, which would really be something :D



well.... here's how many impis it takes to keep hungary rush from flipping.... i only wish i was joking about this.... ctr we could not quite zero out the odds on this turn, but i did get them down to 5%. no idea if we can expect that to ever meaningfully decrease with time, or what....



i was tempted to get greedy and go for ouch, but.... our combat workers were misplaced for that ooooops. could have taken it but couldn't move defenders inside, awkwardddd.... so i'll settle for forking the south coast cities and threatening ouch next turn. they might try some kind of zone-defense thing with their stack this turn to threaten recapture in either ouch or the south, or they might pile it high in ouch itself.... in the latter case we are actually pretty close to having our (4, now 5 after i whipped one in magnus) cats in position so that's not a disaster

so we've reached the end of the turn other than domestics and worker actions.... and the question remains.... are we seriously going to do the whip-and-flip now and blow 2 of our 10 turns on anarchy? yes, i think so.... i just do not see a path for us unless we start teching again and that's the only way i can think of to do that. it leaves us more vulnerable (way more vulnerable!) but frankly if circumstances arise such that we must whip this far down a second time, i think we've already lost. so it is real scary to do so, but equally i'm quite confident we're never getting a better chance



is this a new record for whip anger...? :D



yall dare me to do it

and then, and this could possibly be a mistake.... i logged back in to do this



i think our position is just too delicate to split hairs about the correct timing of this kind of thing right now.... they might be able to use this to sneak into one of the last greenline cities, but for 25 turns of them not piling on when ginger redeclares, i'll take it. i know they do NOT have the forces in place to take the capital at least; their rifles would shred the defenders and they have seige as well but they're short of hitters, only 10ish in the face of what looks like a 30-ish unit stack. and with hungary rush secured from a flip, the last real chance for this to seriously bite us should be gone unless we hit the 5% on CtR flipping this turn (in which case i'll look like an idiot lol)

edit to draw attention to the following:



ok, lurker question.... how am i supposed to tell how many units are in this city? obviously it's not just what the UI displays, since we can see a visible longbow..... it looooks like the big magnus-menacing stack from last turn has retreated here but i feel woefully ill-equipped to tell for sure i'm considering posting in the tech thread to nicely ask MS to name themselves something shorter lol but not sure if that's a mean thing for me to do or not under the circumstances

[ljubljana]

;;;;; as i sit awake wondering "well, why NOT go for grenadiers before rifles?"

how sure am i really that we have missed the gren window.... i mean, we just wiped a stack consisting of mostly cavs with a ton of impis, so i kinda doubt ginger's next attack will rely on another one of those (or, if it DOES, then we don't really need either next-tier unit urgently since we have more than enough impis and cuirs left to do pretty much the same thing a second time). more likely i think they come at us with a rifle/cannon pile, which grens ruin utterly, probably more utterly than rifles do.... the difference in offensive potential, should we defeat the attack and want to push into outlying ginger cities, should be significant as well, especially as grens come coupled to the commando promotion (yall we are just one GG away from being able to make these WITHOUT west point lmao)

and actually, maybe i haven't given enough credit to how much further we are from rifles.... according to civwiki base costs (too lazy to load up the game), for rifles we need

alphabet: 300
paper: 600
printing press: 1600
rep parts: 1800
rifling: 2400
= 6700 base beakers

for grens we need

chemistry: 1800
milsci: 2000
= 3800 base beakers

so rifling path is more than 2x as long.... but in fact it is a bit better even than this in practice thanks to this wonderful unit called the "mace-man", which we can pre-build everywhere for either gren or rifle in-queue upgrade. that shaves a flat number of turns off the ETA when we can start making the new unit (probably like, 5 or 6 turns on average thanks to the crappiness of our cities!), after which i expect we are MORE THAN twice as close to starting gren production as to rifle production. if we are, say, 15 turns away from milsci (ouch.... but not that implausible) we have cities making 5 hammers per turn that can start on a gren right now (no questions about how the fact that that is true impacts the outlook of our actual performance in this game.....) also if we are 15 turns from milsci we gotta freaking (re-)start west point yall....

[RefSteel]

ok, lurker question.... how am i supposed to tell how many units are in this city?

I believe there's a specific limit (15 or 16; I forget which) on the number of individual troops displayed before the game starts grouping the rest by their unit types with the number of each in parens. But if there's only the one megastack for that player and you're sure of the enemies on every other tile you can see, your F5 screen will show you the total visible forces for that player if you click on their portrait, and you can subtract out the other known forces to figure out what's in the stack (practical mostly/only if the number of others is comparatively small, of course).

[EDIT: Moved edited ninja'd thing down below.]

[ljubljana]

F5 screen!!! smart thank you for that answer, i'm pretty sure that should work! i guess that doesn't show promotions but i think in this situation that's fairly straightforwardly guessable

[RefSteel]

F5 screen!!! smart :) thank you for that answer, i'm pretty sure that should work! i guess that doesn't show promotions but i think in this situation that's fairly straightforwardly guessable

Actually, I think it does show promos if you turn on "show individual units" (I think that's what it's called) in the F5 screen (just above the unit list).

Also though, this is not correct:

"mace-man", which we can pre-build everywhere for either gren or rifle in-queue upgrade.

In-queue upgrades occur only when you can build all of the unit's direct upgrades, and then you don't get a choice about which one it queue-upgrades to. (Always the one on the right in the civilopedia.) So if you build Archers and get Feudalism OR (Machinery + Iron) but not BOTH, they'll remain Archers in the queue and complete AS Archers. And if you get the necessary stuff for LBs AND X-Bows, your archers will queue-upgrade to X-Bows. For example.

[ljubljana]

hahaha, what?? wow, that's bizarre! thank you for saying so or i for sure would have built 30 macemen.... can you still deliberately select an archer to build if you have longbow access but not crossbow access, then? i guess this was my situation for much of this game but i honestly don't remember

so i guess this means that in fact the opposite of what i said is true.... muskets upgrade to only rifles, so we can pre-build them (or cavs), but not grens as i don't believe anything upgrades only into those. so i guess we're probably pretty comparably close to being able to put hammers into either the rifling units or into grens...

[xist10]

If you get to much detail, you could try to change the resolution of the screen.
And if you hover only over the flag, the display is shorter too - only one line per unit.

[ljubljana]

mechanics question: consider a badly culture-crushed city like CTR, producing 0 culture/turn naturally, that popped its borders by building culture manually. does it still add 20 plot culture/turn to tiles in its first ring (and, i assume, 40/turn to the city center) even if it's not building culture now and is making 0/turn?

also, i'm wondering if hungary rush's revolt odds are so high because the city is still mostly sumerian...... perhaps the game calcs revolt odds by looking at the ratio of your culture to total foreign culture, and only after determining that a revolt will happen, then goes down the list to determine who the city revolts to (and sumeria is excluded from this since no sumerian city is in range)....? this is one of the reasons i think we're supposed to push to finish off sumeria now.... the other is drafting, which even the cities taken at the very beginning of the war are not that close to being eligible for