[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

well.... i don't know about BEFORE ginger has industrial and combustion, but i'm hoping to get there not long after. ginger needs their 6 techs, while for AL we need what, chemistry, steam power, constitution, education, economics, corporation, and AL itself? yeah, hard to say if we'll gain ground on them or not in the meantime.... our GNP is still bad but at least it's still improving quickly, and will do much more of that if ginger does leave us alone for the next 20-30 turns. meanwhile we're still pretty far from being topped out on commerce tiles and have lots of major GNP spikes yet to come (RP if we're still on wealth builds, wakamotoharu and the capital hitting size 14 again for the trade route boost, and of course abusing the monstrous power of biology should we make it there). i am hoping to pull a similar GA into representation swap to finish off AL as well, should we live long enough. meanwhile ginger's food stat has been stagnant for a while now and i think most of their commerce spikes come from individual bank and market builds (wall street in the shrine city and oxford...somewhere...being major exceptions)

i'll also say that as an AGG civ, to a certain extent i think military builds are econ builds (albeit on a longer time horizon as wealth). if ginger stays peaceful, each cav we make is a cav ginger also will want to make to keep up, which means both of us lose out on 120 hammers into wealth or an econ building while ginger has to pay a full gold for each cav compared to our half a gold, so for each cav that us and ginger both have, our economy catches up to theirs veeeery slightly. and of course if ginger does not stay peaceful we'll be happy to have gone for them.... i don't know how many that's enough to justify, so maybe we don't slam out troops this whole time, or only slam them out from those cities that already have all the essential infrastructure in place (which issss not many of them....). but should we not make an exception for the period just after rifling comes in (which in this case means just before thanks to in-queue upgrades)? modernizing our military seems pretty economically urgent to me given that ginger has a live attack window that will otherwise cost us two of our best commerce cities if they go through with it...

re bio: yeah, that's the plan. however.... i don't know about this whole rivals fighting other rivals with scary power spikes thing naufragar maybe, but machine gun-capable mjmd is pretty much immune to being threatened by anyone save a victorious ginger anytime soon. if you think our economic situation is bad (and it is), naufragar's and superdeath's are WAY worse, at least IMO. neither has rifling yet, and while nauf is i think on it now, i believe SD still lacks printing press. neither has military tradition either, and while they do have grens and cannons those are dead-end military techs that do little to help them resist mjmd's tank push that is probably on the menu not long after ginger's is. we are going to have trouble getting to infantry in time with our gnp that has passed theirs and our food stat that is soaring ahead - i have no idea how either of them will manage it if anything it might be more likely that mjmd doesn't intervene when we get to bio because they are busy conquering superdeath....

re: benchmarks and things.... it's tough to be sure as i really don't have a good sense of how quickly our economy will recover from here. we should know much more in about 10 turns when all the really easy GNP spikes are behind us and we're actually working all of greenline's towns...

[ljubljana]

217

lol, ginger extremely suspiciously rolled the turn but did not play a double. I Wonder What That Could Mean 

if we did get stabbed again though i'm feeling pretty over it. whatever, i've put way too much of myself into this game already



well, apparently not.... or not yet, anyways. they did swap to nationhood at the end of the GA though, as i feared, which is pretty much a dead giveaway anyways. they didn't attack anyone else either, so i'm really not sure why they didn't play the double.... maybe they want to attack THIS turn but that would have been a double-move? or maybe they were just tired and didn't feel like it, they did play at midnight PST where i believe they are based

you can see our economy is really taking the fuck off now with us up a cool 150 GPT from last turn. that's enough for replaceable in 3, if i'm not mistaken. so.... NOW am i supposed to swap back on to military production?



finally sufficiently unashamed of the gnp graph to report it lol



ging is maintaining EP spending.... they have i think one more turn in which to stop before i feel compelled to switch back over to them  no OB even for incense either, which coooould be because they don't trust us but is probably just because they're planning to kill us dead



instead of doing anything about the imminence of our demise, let us stick our heads in the sand and look fondly upon size 14 aksum, now providing 3 gold trade routes to like 3/4 of the empire. we are really getting close to 1-turning cuirs now.... you can see i even windmilled over the iron in preparation for replaceable parts. likewise, pretty much every worker we have is frantically windmilling elsewhere as well

oh and another thing.... it's almost out of health! for the time being we have a hilarious solution to that though. see the crab 3 north of the city that i never hooked up? guess what resource we actually don't have any other domestic source of  of course i'd still rather trade for it than invest 30 hammers = 30 GOLD into a work boat, but i've been trying all game and nobody wants to ship their crab to us  never thought i'd have THAT problem in a PB...

speaking of, um, resource trades.... where is mjmd's shiny new corporate HQ?



yeah ok, makes sense, shrine + HQ + wall street seems standard enough. i wonder how idiotic it would be for us to try to sell them mininc resources? in the context of our hideous desperation for rifling i'm sure thinking about it

ok got to go do an interview now, will finish turn later oops

[ljubljana]

going to close with shots of ginger's pop so we can try to divine where, if anywhere, they are drafting from on future turns (and thus where along the front the attack is most likely to come)







missing pop 12 sheepshead at the extreme south end of their territory. i offered SD, the only one who is shipping them lux (ivory), incense to stop trading with ginger - our best hope at this point may be that they happy-cap themselves and so can't really slam out the troops in sufficient quantities to overwhelm us

i think next turn is the time to beg for loans - everyone is running max GPT after presumably finishing a tech, and i think it would only take 2/3 acceptances to get us to rifling 3t after rep parts (and thus 4t after ginger hits assembly line). fingers crossed that the others are down to continue to offer financial support to their beleaguered buffer state...

if ginger does go for the timing attack i believe the plan is 1: offer them peace, conceding whichever city they went for, then 2: offer them me revolting to slavery in exchange for all their cities, then 3: offer them peace again

[williams482]

Yeah, shit. The lack of a double turn, continued espionage spending, and revolt back to nationhood (how much commerce are they conceding by staying out of Free Speech?) is enough in aggregate to tip me back over to recommending those economy-dooming military builds. We don't want to complete anything that isn't a cat before rifling comes in, but starting the prebuilds, absolutely.

This was always the most likely outcome, but until the signaling got this strong I think it made sense to play for hope. No longer. Oh well.

If Ginger accepts that peace deal you describe, what would you do with the 10t peace that's worth ceding a city outright?

Finally, I hope the interview went well!

[ljubljana]

heh, well.... there is an update which is that ginger rolled this last turn as well, and DID play a double-turn. so that particular element was probably coincidence that we can chalk up to them playing in the middle of the night. and i guess i do have to admit that if i nap-stabbed someone, and then they came at me with more NAP offers afterwards (!!) and these big puppy dog eyes saying "don't worry about it, i forgiiiiiive you, you can trust me, just open your borders real quick <3" i guess i'd be at a least a little suspicious and i mean it is true that i'm only still trying to do diplo with them because WIN WIN AT ALL COSTS and would definitely attack them if i profitably could so really they'd be right to be mistrustful (though i still wouldn't nap-stab them back)

as for free speech - probably a lot of commerce, but they do lack for liberalism and its prereq philosophy (granted they would have been 1t researches during the GA) so it's not quite true that they are just straight-up giving up that commerce; FS would need to pay back the cost of those two techs before the game is decided to be the right move and perhaps they are skeptical that it will. i have also read in past ginger threads that "they like to be in one of slavery or nationhood at all times" for safety's sake, and i can see wanting to have infantry drafting available in case we decide to throw our 40 cuirs at one of their border cities (any one of which we could in theory force our way through, at hideous cost). so there do exist peaceful reasons for the swap....... but the balance of probability is definitely not that those ARE their reasons

the peace deal would, um.... well, it's more that i would offer such a peace deal if i think we will otherwise lose the target city AND several more cities behind it before we can stabilize, which is what i think will happen if they are really serious about this push. so it's not so much that i have some grand plan to save us with those 10 turns as it is us conceding one city to save others lol

and yeah. ideally we can keep enough cities on wealth to not jeopardize our 2t RP research, but other than that i'll switch to military next turn. honestly it's about time for that anyways - we are definitely close enough to rifling that any hammers we invest now are going into cavs, and the whole point of rushing rifling in the first place, IMO, is to slam out a crapton of cavs as quickly as possible afterwards so we can minimize the length of ginger's window. on the bright side i think we are now close enough that we won't delay rifling toooo much in so doing, and should be able to get a cav wave out before, like, the capital is under threat

thankfully infantry are so damn slow that even if they have a wave of them about to in-queue upgrade from rifles (as i would do) just gathering the stack together will take some time. one aspect of defender's advantage in situations like these is that we only need our tech to come in by the time they are in our territory, while they need theirs several turns before. normally that is not too significant but here it's looking like just the right amount of time to get us back up to "only" one generation behind lol

edit: lurkers would tell us, or strongly imply something, if we are the last holdout in concession to mjmd, right? the combination of playing sub 15 minute turns, a long gap since the last post in their thread, plus an attack like this are suggestive of a "just give it up already" attack of the kind that are launched when someone feels that their neighbor is letting the game go on too long. personally i think it's way, way premature for ginger to be conceded, but i have a history of being ludicrously far off in my evaluation of such things so, yknow, let me know if ginger thinks their position is concedably bad, then probably objective analysis would say that ours is as well, or at least that it will be when ginger throws 50 infantry at us. and well, while i still think it's early, i can't deny i'd feel some serious relief to not have to spend hours on this game every day anymore

[ljubljana]

218-219 double

well, ginger posted in their thread.... and then greenline posted  if THAT's not a dead giveaway, i don't know what is



lol, you wanna run that by me one more time?

various other diplo from them too - they will take my fish and war with ginger, or my horse + iron + war with mjmd. ok

ginger, you will note, is on military science now, so they shaved the last turn off assembly line somehow. awesome :D and now they evidently have commando plays available (or why research it)

it takes 20 XP to get a CHA leader to commandos.... and until recently they were in theo/vassalage, so their west point city would have, what.... 14 XP on new horse units, plus however many settled GGs they have? well, we killed 2 in the last war, and while they got another on the final turn, i do not thiiiink they had two more, so i suspect there is not yet a commando factory (and if there is, not sure what i can do about it lol). now, annoyingly, they can a commando + morale cav with just one GG (26 XP required for this with CHA), which means any city within 9 tiles of their border is at risk if undefended. so in summation: thank goodness we still have 60 impis sitting around so we can stack 3 of them in every city in range

ok, but if they have AL early and are coming for us, we'd expect drafting to have happened this turn. did it?







sheepshead, under the interface, is down to size 11 so that's one. then ceasarea and hadrianopolis in the north, and ikonion on the east coast. so they are drafting at max rate and it's mostly in the north, which suggests that they share williams' feelings about takayasu/kirishima as the best border targets



EP spending, which has continued unabated. fine, time to switch back over. so be it then....



nauf is researching again which is concerning, since it means they will not have much gold to loan to us. i will ask for cows and said loan this round, to hopefully get an extension before revealing how desperate we are. then if they accept i will beg them to help me in war with ginger, and perhaps ask for a defpact as well. the latter wouldn't explicitly help us much even if accepted but it would at least signal to ginger that no pile-on from america will be forthcoming. and then for mjmd i will just straight-up send them copper/copper + war with ginger first, and then an enormous loan request second lol

[ljubljana]

yeah this is pretty much what we need to make this happen lol

not going to ask SD quite yet in case that's overkill, but i did ask nauf as well. bleah

did the math btw and apparently 7-5 drafting a rifle trades 31 food for 110 hammers, so better than 3 to 1 but not quite 4 to 1, which is what we get working an RP windmill. drafting gets the hammers immediately and where we need them, of course, but natural production gives a unit better suited to attacking into infantry. naturally the plan is to punt on any serious thinking about it and do as much of both as we can support

[ljubljana]

the lights are going out all over zululand.... we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime

switched everyone at the front to cats, and as many cities as i could to cuirs without falling short on RP this turn. next turn i will swap every available plains farm to a plains windmill and then mass-swap the rest to cuirs as well. and then we'd better hope to god we get our loans and can start matching ginger's infantry drafting with rifle drafting of our own

and if we must die, let us die hard, and die kicking

[williams482]

Drafting in the north suggests to me that the attack would come in the south, as these units obviously need time to walk to the front. Unless Ginger is planning on double-drafting his closest cities, which he might? Seems pricey with two pop drafts.

EDIT: More than that, I'd be careful trying to draw conclusions from those draft sites. They don't have a clear pattern to them and could be aimed more at causing confusion than synchronizing with travel times to what would be a predictable point of attack.

[ljubljana]

well, let's hope so - it will seriously take them 7 or 8 turns just to walk their draftees from their northern cities to an attack site in the south. if we are still that far out from a war declaration i will start to feel better about our chances

it's pricey to double-draft, yeah.... but if ginger wants to actually kill us (instead of just ending our game) they have to do it, right? 30 infantry from a wave of single drafts really doesn't seem like a sufficient stack for conquest at this point in the game. hell, i think we could handle that many right now - 20ish cats should fully collateral them down to str 14, and then a cuir + pinch musket from a garrison probably kills. in my estimation they will want at least 40-50 plus whatever lower-tech stuff they were building in the last 15 turns to really make progress. certainly they could assemble such a stack but i think they'd need to use mass in-queue upgrades, draft everywhere, and really commit to mass infantry builds instead of being tempted by factories at the same time. we'll see if that's what they end up doing....

to be honest if they are planning to attack us now, i'm a little confused as to why they didn't spend the whole golden age mass-producing troops. i am very confident based on the power graph that they didn't do so, and i mean, just because they're technically not state of the art anymore, it's not like a 60 unit cav stack to supplement their infantry wouldn't be an emphatically relevant military asset against cuirs and muskets... from my point of view, we can probably kill (with heavy losses) one or the other of a giant cav stack and a giant infantry stack but attacking with both at once probably gives them their best odds to force their way through and trigger a collapse. unless the whole plan behind their attack is just to hurt us and knock us out of the game rather than conquest, but i really don't think that a half-focused attack that leaves zulu alive but with no chance to win and vengefully spamming cavs from 30 cities will be profitable for them in the final 1v1 proxy war with mjmd (in which we are, of course, the proxy )