[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

211



lollllll apparently india WAS the real target! that's some pretty gorgeous misdirection

note also nauf flipping to mercs outside a GA, just like we did  of course they can do it in one turn...



decided i'm concerned enough about the potential for ginger to mass troops during this GA to do something i REALLY don't want to do.... and swapped off our mass wealth builds in favor of mass military once more, dropping us from 100 GPT back down to 25  feel free to say so if yall believe this is in error of course (in which case i will chill, or do what passes for chilling in my little ljubljana universe)



at least operation have-a-food-graph is going ok



obliquely threatened ginger with this sentry chariot (which reveals what is actually a pretty nice target if we had our forces in place) and am debating sending them fish/fish just for fun. since i wouldn't trust the paper it wasn't printed on there's probably no point... but also no harm in trying just in case they are somehow willing to de-escalate the border? except, perhaps, insofar as we'd like to get them on defensive, rather than offensive, unit builds to the extent that we are able

[williams482]

I'm not sure about the military builds. They're all cats which hold their value relatively well, but our economy is so shit, and (whichever of) rifling/steel such a substantial increase in our ability to handle the types of soldiers you anticipate from Ginger (infantry), that it just doesn't seem worth cranking obsolete military now at the expense of your tech pace.

It's a gamble, but trying to fight off infantry with cats and cuirs isn't exactly a sure thing either, and the tail outcome of continuing to research is a lot better than the tail outcome of cranking out another massive yet obsolete military.

[ljubljana]

yeah.... the reason i went for another cat wave is more because i'm nervous ginger may be cranking the military right now, with the purpose of fighting off at the end of the GA before they even get to infantry. but you're right, i'll change them back

edit: or... i was going to but then ginger rolled the turn before i could. oh well, a few more cats can't hurt i guess, and now we have hammers in the next wave in case we do decide we need it to happen sooner

[ljubljana]

212



last turn of ginger peace... greenline attacked out with their cats but did little damage thanks to our impi stack  so i think we bomb the defenses this turn while healing the collateral with our woodsman 3 impi, then go for the elimination at the start of next round

lol, ginger researching education in 2 turns at breakeven. so it looks like they still have that, econ, and corp to go as AL prereqs, which i think means they are not quiiiiite going to have it at the end of the GA. but they will be on it for sure and will probably have a fair bit saved up

exposed-to-ginger cities are looking, well



not amazingly well-defended.... we can probably get 4-5 real units in WE and RFT which are the ones exposed to 1-turning from the fog. you can see that some of our sumerian conquests are just now finally coming into drafting eligibility so i do have a few new muskets streaming down from those. they could take WE and RFT for sure but it means exposing themselves to possible impi + cuir counterattack and i'm not sure i think they would risk that. either way, not a whole lot we can do to up our defensive game here if we're not into throwing away 11.2 health cuirassiers against fortified pikes on a hill (i am not into this)



scouted the eastern border a little bit, anyways.... no way to guarantee we don't get 1-turned, but i do believe our cats are both safe and in range to go for RFT should it get captured this round. not.... that that's going to do too much without hitters but i'll worry about that later



well, uh... found the superdeath stack in egyptian territory, apparently via open borders signed immediately after their brief war ended. mjmd is really skimping on the attack force (just 8 rifles and the rest is knights and cats) and frankly is in some danger of being wiped here

and i did switch most of our cities back onto wealth, as williams suggested. this is the turn to go for paper and commit to the rifling path, i think - greenline is giving us a KTB on it and it looks like we will be killing them next turn bar some dramatic reversal of fortune



believe it or not that ginger EP number has remained pretty constant for a few turns now.... i think they might have given up on denying us EP visibility. in less than 5 turns we'll start to get vis on their cities if they don't start spending again.... with that in mind, and the cultural situation at RFT and WE (which are both 5ish turns from getting their second-ring tiles back), i did send them fish/fish - there is pretty much no chance that they accept this but may as well try, if we have reason to believe we will be substantially better-prepared to fight in 10 turns than right now

[ljubljana]

213

well



let's go

first off i think i have to use the cats, since nobody in our stack actually gets odds against the top defender. should have enough to hit everyone once on average, a big deal for a defense stack that relies as heavily on strength bonuses as this one does



mjmd is hanging out this morning to watch greenline the movie 2000 with us



looks like we were about right with respect to collateral.... got some fairly good rolls against the longbows but there are still 2 uninjured. muskets have 25% odds to kill the top defender, c2 cuirs 50% just to live... i think we go in with muskets first due to the huge preponderance of pikes



looks like we are going to be 1 XP short of a super-healer ((( oh well, nothing to be done except let greenline live another turn and that would cost us a minor fortune in unit upkeep plus leave us out of position to meet ginger...



optimized for not losing cuirs and it worked - we lost not a one taking the city. we did lose a ton of muskets though.... not to mention we failed to use as many impis as i hoped (i used all the CR2 ones to weaken pikes, some of which got some heroic 20% wins, but it didn't seem worth simply tossing the rest into the meat grinder once the cuirs were getting 90% odds)



lol and then i immediately misclicked the pillage button instead of stack split and screwed up logistics for this turn, nice! so now a bunch of 2-movers who might have been in range to defend against ginger now will not be...



mjmd razed one of the scooter cities.... i think that's good for us? anything that they don't capture intact is probably good, rebuilding infrastructure is a pretty monstrous task that is at this point somewhat unlikely to pay off before the end of the game, imo



and here is the other half of mjmd's attack force, in what looks to be a pretty vulnerable position to superdeathian ambush...

also of note - mjmd turned up with railroad! of all things this turn. which is NOT on the assembly line path, which is good news for us i suppose

oh, one more thing: as of last turn, for the first time since kirishima was founded ten thousand years ago.... our empire is contiguous :O borders expanded at nishikigi in the west just in time to link up with the second-ring at CTR, which was connected to hungary rush via the filler city i settled between them. and... then this turn CTR revolted again and we captured another city so it's not contiguous anymore but this is definitely the longest i've gone in a pangaea game without that being true

also is it me or is it a little eerie how similarly-shaped ours and mjmd's empires are (modulo rotation and reflection).... maybe that's why they have been so unaccountably non-hostile towards us

[ljubljana]

oh shit i just had a lil idea



how's this for trying to cultivate good relations with india? you warn me that ginger's coming from the north to take my cities, i warn you that SD is moving their stack through egyptian territory. not sure i thought of this quickly enough for them to actually do something about it but i tried. idk how much goodwill it will realistically buy us to do this (and i also have no idea how to signal that there is also siege and a couple of grens) but at least it establishes that we got the message last time...

perhaps i should worry that it's not in our strategic interest to give them intel like this since they are a much bigger threat to eventually kill us than we were to them during the ginger war. but i still feel terrible about the dreylin thing (and, yes, even the ginger thing as well, a little bit) and am willing to give up a bit to try to be a good ally for now, as long as we're not obviously throwing the game by doing so. and frankly, after nauf didn't pile on when we were fighting for our lives against ginger, they are in the "i won't attack you unless a) you are dying anyways or b) there is no other viable path to winning" bucket, and not only does that also come at a cost to winprob but the fact that i'm willing to create such a bucket suggests that maybe mjmd could be as well?

[williams482]

The precairity of your situation, and the extremely clear battle line drawn with Ginger, makes any friendships you can form a positive to my eye. If you get run over by Ginger you are dead (and Ginger wins), if you two stalemate probably neither of you have a real chance regardless, and if you manage to flip the table on Ginger than you probably become a precarious favorite who will need diplomacy to break your way anyway. In none of those cases does giving mjmd a slight upper hand in conflict with SD hurt you very much.

[ljubljana]

yeah, that's essentially my logic as well. i am not sure how much weight mjmd will put on any "friendship" we might have when attacking us becomes strategically imperative..... but that fact that /i/ am putting some weight on it when deciding not to attack naufragar suggests that the answer might be nonzero. furthermore, while helping mjmd might be considered "helping the favorite" at this point, it does fit with our secondary aim of "if we cannot win, make sure ginger loses"

i agree that flipping the table on ginger is probably our only path forward at this point (and, well, the fact that there even might still be such a path is pretty remarkable...). interested to hear your thoughts on when and how we should try to do that. i want to say that it could never happen while we're behind an era of military tech, but actually that may not be true - at the end of the last war i think we might have been able to take some border cities at significant cost, had i not decided to focus on softer sumerian targets instead.... but i don't know if knocking them down to, say, 25 cities after a stackwipe would help us that much - if we are still behind in tech it probably can't lead to a full conquest, and if we get an upper hand in our 1v1 that then stalemates, that's pretty much the single scenario in which foreign intervention from the west is most likely...

the other option is to "catch up in tech" and hope to outproduce them on equal tech footing, but i'm not sure there's enough game left for that to happen. if it does happen it won't be until the extreme lategame.... ie, there is no way we're matching their time to tanks, but perhaps if we are left completely alone to develop for the rest of the game (and uh, choose to act on it by building actual infrastructure instead of endless wealth and unit builds....), we can match their time to modern armor it's also not out of the question that we could win an always-peace space race from here, but in reality we'd need mjmd to really faceplant in the west and i think that's unlikely. perhaps things would look different if we acquired even more land (from, eg, betraying naufragar) but not only do i really not want to do that, but it'd probably prompt a game-ending 3v1 anyways...

of course in reality we probably don't get to choose if we have a window to hurt ginger it will probably be after another failed attack from them; i don't think we'll get anywhere invading into their prepared defenses....

[ljubljana]

214

well, let's take a look.... one thing we do know is we are not opening the turn to a ginger attack, as they moved after us last turn and before us this turn, so if they DoWed it would be an illegal double-move. their power graph has also not climbed anywhere near as quickly as i would expect if they were going for a second attack in the cavs-and-rifles era (especially with GA-boosted production!), so one is inclined to suspect they are crash-building infrastructure now and plan to either industrialize before hitting us, or relying on large numbers of drafted infantry. but.... i don't want to put too much stock in that as they could be hiding units in-queue (which i know is a trick in their playbook from their greece game). as far as we know they might have a cannon, cav, and rifle 1t from completion in every city, and the plan at the end of the GA could be to finish all three everywhere while swapping to nationhood and running us over. if that's the plan, we need to be cranking military from every city at max rate now.... but if the plan is to wait for assembly line, we need to somehow both race to rifling AND try to keep up with their infra push with one of our own. yeesh

also of note is that they have been consistently playing 15-minute or less turns since the end of the last war, which suggests extreme (and in my mind unjustified?) demoralization.... i am not so sure if that's good for us though. it would increase the odds of doing something careless, of course, but i think a rage-fueled, mutually-destructive all-in is also more likely. it really depends on what kind of player ginger is when they feel that they're losing (even if unjustifiedly) - i do not have a good sense of this aspect of them tbh, and probably need to do a bit of reading with that specific question in mind

to my great surprise



ginger returned my fish? heh, maybe they are more willing to de-escalate tensions after THEY attacked US than the reverse. i guess that makes a certain amount of sense; certainly after our stab at ankyra, it makes sense that i was perfectly willing to be peaceful afterwards while they were out for blood. could it be that now that we've both viciously tried to kill each other, and both failed, we've actually balanced out the weights on the emotional scales and can cool things down for a while??

well, based on their past betrayal, i'm putting pretty much zero trust in their fish deals at this point lol. but i'll keep my end, obviously (like i was going to attack them anyways), and who knows, maybe it will mean something. i think that, for now, peace favors us for as long as we can get it. certainly i'm happy to have 10 turns, if that's really what this means, to fix the cultural situation on the southern border (eg, the situation in which work ethic and RFT can both be 1-turned from the fog), get all our cities back up into drafting range, and perhaps even make it to rifling. naturally i won't de-escalate the border at all but maaaaybe i'm down to slow down on the musket draftees a little (which i have still been peeling off where possible even during this quote-unquote regrowth period)



this gorgeous city is out of resistance  it still lacks a granary and must now laboriously slow-build one, but still - isn't it beautiful  meanwhile ouch is using both foods to try to grow onto the rest of the conquered towns as quickly as is feasible... so all in all, still some very significant sources of untapped GNP in greenlinedia. according to my calculations, we are just 4-5 turns out from printing press which will constitute another major cash infusion



and our deranged forbidden palace plan should finish at around the same time



pillaged all the roads on our side of the new mjmd border to reduce a) tensions and b) our suceptibility to commando tricks



CTR's undergoing its last revolt - for real this time - until next a cavstack graces our lands



well... looks like our warning either was on time, or mjmd just survived anyways. there was a horrific battle here apparently and SD lost almost their whole knight stack, but this huge pile of units looks primed to make it to safety to a reinforcing super-medic spear and group of covering rifles. ok.... maybe we ARE going to regret giving them intel  it looks like they retreated across the river last turn before SD attacked, which might have been at our prompting? and who knows how many units that saved



memphis is actually gone though.... so that's another prize india does not get to simply walk into



and mjmd is retreating their border stack to go fight superdeath, apparently either content with our promise of a long NAP, or feeling like they have no other option...

man being at peace is weird. what do peaceful people even DO all day?



for what it's worth (and i'm not sure what it's worth):



our economy has apparently recovered roughly to superdeath and naufragar levels, at least. those two are about as far behind as we are though (up cannons and grens, down military tradition, not much progress on rifling) and i fear both are rapidly approaching "no realistic chance to win" territory.... i feel like i'm holding my breath here waiting for naufragar to make their move... they have this big cannon and gren stack just sitting in the middle of their territory and really they have to do SOMEthing with it here. hopefully they pick on mjmd's north instead of piling on versus superdeath, but i don't feel too comfortable actually ASKING them to attack our ally (especially since we can offer no military support any time in the forseeable future)

after PP, i will probably save for a few turns to see which great person pops out of abi. as long as we don't get the artist (some chance of this is unavoidable as the national epic produces artist points....) any outcome helps our medium-term tech goals: engineer can bulb replaceable parts, merchant can go for a monster trade mission in mjmd's temple of artemis capital (if they don't obsolete it by then...), and scientist, well.... scientist can bulb scimeth on the way to biology.... yeah, i'm still on that, and i've started rerouting workers to finish farming, and then windmilling, the holes in our core in preparation. not only that but.... there is just the tiniest, most insolent little part of me that wonders: if we can get long NAPs with everyone and ginger ends their GA out of slavery/nationhood, do i dare go for biology BEFORE rifling?? that'd widen ginger's infantry-over-muskets window in the short term, but it is the "economic supernova" option and perhaps we need to make a Variance Play of that form at this point. once we have bio in hand, we'll unlock my ultimate vision for the end of this game: on 40 cities with bio, we will have the food and happiness supply to draft 4 pinch- or CG2-promoted tokugawa rifles or infantry....every turn....forever.... probably with our cities still growing reasonably quickly at the same time. then grow onto all these windmills and finally reduce the game to our one area of enormous comparative advantage over the field - not cities but raw TILE count, where we lead second-place mjmd by a 25% to 16% margin (uh, although please ignore the enormous desert in our heartland that is responsible for much of that margin)

polling the room on when we're supposed to come off wealth builds and make.... if not obsolete troops, then maybe some longer-term ROI econ builds (courthouses?). pre-rifling still seems like we're asking to die... but POST rifling we probably need to crank troops for ginger deterrence (or what was the point of even rushing there). wealth builds are good in an emergency, which this is, but i'm pretty unconvinced that they represent a long-term solution to our econ problems... maybe after printing press it will make sense to do juuuust the littlest bit of tapering in places with unbuilt high-ROI courthouses (so, all of former ethiopia)

[ljubljana]

it just now occurred to me to check this while watching the new AI survivor and



notice anything..... MISSING from egypt's remaining cities? or from scooter's line in the scoreboard?

it turns out superdeath is a goddamn legend