[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

225-226 double

sheesh, my procrastinating these turns until the last possible second is getting kinda chronic.... i don't even fully understand why, either, these are supposedly builder turns?? i guess i'm just afraid of getting my heart broken again  



ok, what is this? an implicit commitment to help us defend, but without actually accepting the defensive pact? and a warning of the ottoman troops massing at RFT/WE that we can now see with our own eyes? well, seems like the diplo de-escalation went about as well as we could reasonably have hoped.....

note ginger taking the poison pill early(er than they need to if beelining tanks) and researching scimeth! yayyy no more monasteries



i'm ashamed to admit that last turn i did something even sillier than a courthouse with aksum.... i made an aqueduct D: otherwise it would be unhealthy now at size 16.... anyways, i'm wondering if it might be time to start building up rifles here to deter snipe attempts from ginger and nauf, if we are not going to take the paranoid detour to optics so we can scout for any horrible galleon attacks



and, yes..... mjmd is building RAILS through our territory. i'm not sure whether to consider this an act of ultimate friendship, or one of total disdain. it makes me a little nervous, though

sheesh, clearly my decision to theme this game after sirian's epic 12 report touched a nerve with the RB gods.... i sure never expected the parallels to go THIS far.... and um, given the conclusion to that story, we'd better hope this is as far as they go.....

this would be a powerful vector for a stab if they have even a small number of commandos (thankfully they don't have milsci yet but it would be easy for them to get there and they have the GGs in place to make it happen). and we technically have 5 more turns on our 25-turn NAP from the greenline conquest period..... but if mjmd and ginger do decide to coordinate to take us down, there is little we can do to stop them anyways, so probably all we can do is kind of close our eyes and pray that we can take them at their word. even though india pointedly did NOT choose to extend our cow/cow, as i asked them to, despite their seemingly-accepting defpact response



lollll and yes, ginger has apparently already started making galleons - this guy MUST have been in-queue upgraded which suggests SOME kind of plan for their near-term use. aaand i have not the faintest idea of how the hell we're supposed to defend against such things  so every city on either of our coasts is now potentially subject to galleon snipe from the fog?? well fuuuuck that noise (( seriously, wtf am i supposed to do about that.... i really do not have the units to cover all the openings this creates, and all caravels would do against a 6-mover galleon is provide a little notice of our impending demise

actually, we can be a bit clearer than that about what they appear to be doing....



it would seem they are spitting 6-mover galleons out of zephyrion, which is likely their heroic epic city..... and they are headed south. the joy. after hitting enter another galleon appeared in zeph to seemingly confirm this theory

to produce such a unit, they need 13 XP, which means what.... theocracy + west point + drydock + a settled GG? that makes me awfully tempted to discount the possibility of GG commando shenanigans buuuuut that's probably a silly and self-destructive impulse. which is why i'm stacking 3ish impis in every city within 6 tiles of the coast  really it should be every city within 9 (commando + morale cav) but i don't currently have enough impis for that D: at least not in position (since i'm also stacking them in the south coast)



do cavs, in fact, rule? time to find out, i guess...





been slacking on this but here's ginger's pop in case we need to start tracking their draftees again...



sent mjmd this diplo, to call attention to the fact that i expect a possible attack from the sea as well

really unsure about if i'm supposed to divert to compass and optics now (a 3t research in total).... this would be a significant slowdown on our One True Research Goal.... and while it would make us slightly less helpless against galleon strikes, that is really only barely true; we could get ourselves 1 turns' worth of warning of such an attack, but what exactly are we supposed to DO about it? it's not like optics gives us any hope of fighting off their fleet (they can build frigates and SoL now) and all we could really do is stuff troops in our coastal cities, which i imagine we're going to have to start doing now anyways if we want to actually have a chance to hold them against galleon attack.....

i'm going to save gold for now, since we can, but then i'll be very interested to hear yalls' perspective. either way i'm probably going to chill on the cav spam for the moment in favor of rifle spam (including some emergency draftees in our very exposed south)

[williams482]

One turn of warning is 1-3 more rifles and ??? more two-movers that can congregate on the spot Ginger plans to attack. Presumably these will be attacks straight off the boats, meaning the units which aren't extremely experienced amphibious-promoted units will be taking substantial penalties on top of the existing defenses. Cramming a whole bunch of cavs in those cities could be pretty effective.

Diverting three turns of research to make that happen seems potentially worth it, although not a slam dunk? The alternative is to accept that you're going to lose cities to amphibious attacks and plan to hit back somewhere else in return, or to hope Ginger isn't coming for you. The later of which seems pretty unlikely.

[williams482]

Having thought a little more about this, I'm still undecided on the correct course, but a couple thoughts occur:

- the correct defense against amphibious attacks here is to accept that they will happen, and simply look to make them as painful as possible. You have many cities, the vast majority of which are not coastal. This is the same principal of maximizing strategic depth as with ground combat, except that there's a very big distinction in how much force can be practically brought to bear via the ocean, balanced by a wider area which can be hit at any given time. The response to that is to spread out, but aggressively shift troops (ideally mounted troops, which don't care about fortifications and match up less poorly with infantry) to either defend or counterattack depending on the anticipated attack strength. In this context, an early warning system is a huge help in allowing you to rally your mobile stacks (and allocate your drafts) to the trouble spots.

The counterpoint is that any scouting assignment with caravels vs galleons is a suicide mission. Galleons get ~75% odds in that matchup if memory serves, with the caravel needing better than +30% in bonuses to level the playing field when defending. In order for a scouting network to function persistently, we need to be able to constantly replace the caravels that Ginger will be constantly slaughtering, promoting his own ships in the process. If I were ginger and facing a caravel net, I'd just kill the caravels with a couple 2-3 ship galleon stacks, kill any future ships as they appear, and wait a few turns before smashing my amphibious troops into a choice target undetected. So from this angle, a scouting net could get you some amount of delay, but it probably won't allow you much more warning against the real attack.

Now, stalling for time does favor us, but does burning 3t of research plus a bunch of hammers in (possibly doomed) coastal cities in search of those delays actually favor us? Unclear. That is a definite win for inland infrastructure builds, and the coastal cities are vulnerable enough that burning their hammers on ships isn't as much of a cost; probably prioritizing short term stuff like wealth and units in those cities is a good idea regardless.

All in all, probably not worth it? But really hard to say with certainly.

[ljubljana]

227-228

yeahhhh i mean..... the thing is that, at least along the south coast, with 6-movers there are spots where they can station galleons to fork all three of our cities there simultaneously. so it's not like we really would get extra time to shuffle 2-movers between their possible targets  i do think warning would help more on the north coast but based on their galleon movements (pre-opening this turn, anyways) they don't appear to be headed in that direction. agreed about cramming cavs in the cities though, and hell, even cuirs get... if not exactly what i'd call "acceptable" odds, at least non-terrible ones



(though this does get a bit more terrible if the infantry can out-promote us which they probably can)



EP screenie, plus ginger raced through scimeth and is now going for the physics great scientist. i have not the faintest idea how they went from 4t to finished with the tech just like that, and their gold reserves were not drained to do so either, which suggests a bulb. if that's the case though i completely missed where they acquired a spare GS to do so with.... unless they've been saving it for a looong time



hit size 14 and leveled out growth in one of our strongest remaining cities to try to do this lmao. 14 being the threshold for 3-gold trade routes in most places so we got a significant econ bump from waiting, FWIW



the fact that they are apparently massing here (in their territory, to avoid paying roaming fees) also gives us some warning as it is within range of our impi scouts via open borders. and there are a few small bright sides: one, they only range CSR from this position, and two, so far as i can tell, these ships are stocked mostly with cavs as that's the unit that has been mysteriously disappearing from the defensive stacks in their territory. their cavs are promoted enough to take amphibious, yes, but that still foregoes the third combat promotion that they could otherwise have.... such units should not trade too favorably against a rifle stack. and i do not think that they can manufacture amph infantry quite so easily, and non-amph infantry should lose attacking off a boat into a pinch cav.... so stockpiling such things in CSR specifically seems like a reasonable goal for the time being, and if these ships ever leave the fiscal safety of their borders then we can go on high(er) alert



i can't find mjmd's bigass stack, and suspect they have repositioned.... i guess i'm glad they're not attacking US but still far from the best-case outcome



THEREEE we go, mjmd finally pops a non-prophet. so they are about to GA and surge ahead like crazy too. lovely  well, if they are actually on our side i guess it WILL be lovely, but who's counting on that....



turns out ging did not EP us this turn, for whatever that will be worth:



here are the forges you ordered, williams (highlighted is the most embarrassing among them)



but we are still finishing up the cav wave at the same time, and i've also been drafting at max rate for the time being until i feel more secure about our southern holdings. we are almost caught up to ginger on the power graph, at least until they start spamming factory-boosted infantry everywhere



spotted the mjmd stack, which is now starting to look suspiciously like an anti-ginger defense stack for THEIR south coast.... i wonder if our cryptic diplo last turn is what tipped them off that ginger went for astronomy?

anyways, here's what we've got in OUR most exposed city....



not a lot in terms of "real" defenders, but the impis and muskets should help significantly - they will need at least 8 galleons full of units to crack that. of course they can do more with less via forking but hopefully the 2t or so it will take to reposition to hit VA or PF will suffice to allow us to get some rifles in those cities as well

[ljubljana]

Having thought a little more about this, I'm still undecided on the correct course, but a couple thoughts occur:

- the correct defense against amphibious attacks here is to accept that they will happen, and simply look to make them as painful as possible. You have many cities, the vast majority of which are not coastal. This is the same principal of maximizing strategic depth as with ground combat, except that there's a very big distinction in how much force can be practically brought to bear via the ocean, balanced by a wider area which can be hit at any given time. The response to that is to spread out, but aggressively shift troops (ideally mounted troops, which don't care about fortifications and match up less poorly with infantry) to either defend or counterattack depending on the anticipated attack strength. In this context, an early warning system is a huge help in allowing you to rally your mobile stacks (and allocate your drafts) to the trouble spots.

The counterpoint is that any scouting assignment with caravels vs galleons is a suicide mission. Galleons get ~75% odds in that matchup if memory serves, with the caravel needing better than +30% in bonuses to level the playing field when defending. In order for a scouting network to function persistently, we need to be able to constantly replace the caravels that Ginger will be constantly slaughtering, promoting his own ships in the process. If I were ginger and facing a caravel net, I'd just kill the caravels with a couple 2-3 ship galleon stacks, kill any future ships as they appear, and wait a few turns before smashing my amphibious troops into a choice target undetected. So from this angle, a scouting net could get you some amount of delay, but it probably won't allow you much more warning against the real attack.

Now, stalling for time does favor us, but does burning 3t of research plus a bunch of hammers in (possibly doomed) coastal cities in search of those delays actually favor us? Unclear. That is a definite win for inland infrastructure builds, and the coastal cities are vulnerable enough that burning their hammers on ships isn't as much of a cost; probably prioritizing short term stuff like wealth and units in those cities is a good idea regardless.

All in all, probably not worth it? But really hard to say with certainly.

oops, didn't notice that we were crossposting

yeah, i think i've ended up in a pretty similar position to the one you elaborate here. to a certain extent, if ginger is already planning on war with us, we should be glad they are going for amphibious attack vectors as they give our rifles and cavs better odds on a 1-1 unit basis than they will ever get in the field, either on offense or on defense after cannon collateral. there should be a number of units we can stuff in our cities such that the amphibious vector won't actually lead to better hammer exchanges for ginger than just slamming into our land border, and if we can do that, all the research they put into teching to these ships, and the hammers they spent building up a fleet, will be wasted for them and allow us to catch up. if we can find a way to go through the rest of this game without ever researching compass, optics, or astronomy, that's thousands of beakers of our deficit vs ginger that we will be able to erase in so doing....

so far, ginger appears to have prioritized keeping their ships within their borders to avoid having to pay double for them (and any ground troops that might be aboard) over keeping us from scouting them. it's risky, but we might be able to get away with assuming that what we can see from our land-based scouting constitutes most or all of ginger's navy, especially since, in the few times where i've rolled the turn (and hence gotten to see ginger's production in their coastal cities), they have yet to produce a galleon that i wasn't able to account for on the following turns, or from any city north of zephyrion. following that, my strategy so far has been to defend the southern cities, where they appear to be gathering, against a full loadout of amphibious cavs/non-amphibious infantry from the ships we can see, while sticking 4 obsolete defenders in each of our north coastal cities (more in super-exposed wakamotoharu) so that if they try something sneaky in that direction, they will at least need more than just one ship to burn a city. in the medium-term, it would be nice to build up 3-4 rifle draftees in each of these cities so that they will have to bring 3-4 galleons full of real units to burn them (and a nice big stack of 10+ in aksum and wakamotoharu), but until we see actual evidence of them heading in that direction (either in the form of ships built from their northern ports or portions of their northern land unit stacks mysteriously disappearing) i am ok with adding those extra units a bit more gradually. i do think that freeing us from the need to defend the north coast would be a good application of caravels, if we had them.... but as you've mentioned, if ginger is coming for us in that direction, caravels would give us only 2-3 turns of warning in the western cities before dying, and then we'd have to rush defenders over there anyways without much hope of fighting off their actual fleet.

all in all, i suspect it's better to take the nice economic catchup lever that ginger has offered us by researching non-essential techs and building non-essential units, and push for our own economic advantage, rather than spend time investing in what would be a fairly ineffectual warning system anyways..... it is also worth note that, i took a look and, on this last turn, zephyrion actually produced a non-galleon unit (cavalry), which suggests to me that their plan may be to create amphibious capacity for their existing 25-ish unit cav stack (half of which i couldn't locate this turn, and so are presumably aboard boats) but may not extend beyond that. all told, i think we can deal with that - an amphibious cav is, after all, still just a cav, and CG2 tokumuskets fortified in cities should defend credibly against them, to say nothing of rifles...

[ljubljana]

230-231

damn, 5-player games are crazy.... i come back just 24 hours after rolling and there is ANOTHER double-turn waiting for me :O i gotta start getting better so i don't get PYFT-warred.... i mean, idk if people would do that for playing with literally 12 hours still left on the clock but that doesn't mean i wanna risk it



ceremonial cows are exchanged once more with nauf.... mjmd and ginger are both out of NAPs with us though which is nerve-wracking...



nauf warpeaced SD, mjmd GAs up as predicted



well, you guys.... i can't find ginger's galleons. so they might be coming  though for whom, and targeted where, who can say...

and then.... i really lost the plot with the rest of this turn..... i've been on and off and afk for a huge amount of time now and still the first turn sits, unrolled, to say nothing of the second turn, which i'd love to put off but i actually have no time tomorrow in which to play it..... so basically what i'm doing is trying to get enough units in our south coast cities to withstand, let's say, 6 galleons = 18 amphibious cavs or equivalent, ideally while giving ginger only a) hardish targets in muskets and rifles and b) low-value targets in impis to kill in so attacking. to the best of my ability i do not want to offer them the easy and high-value targets of cavs and cuirs (which can maybe defeat a non-amph infantry but will get crushed by an amphibious cav off a boat



wait, are you serious.... no way, mjmd JUST got a great spy in call to power a few turns ago to start the GA, how is this possibOH OMG HAHAHA WAIT NO WAY

it MUST be the physics GS! which means.... mjmd and ginger discovered physics ON THE SAME INTERTURN, and mjmd won the (random?) tiebreaker.... sheesh. never thought i'd feel bad for ginger after The Great Betrayal but that is brutal. and good for both our "keep ginger from winning" goal and our "win ourselves" goal ofc



hungary rush's flip odds have precipitously dropped for no obvious reason, freeing up more impis to go die in our south coast cities....



send mjmd this very normal diplo offer to try to warn them that i estimate that 21 or so cavs (so,.7 galleons' worth) are on ships bound for one of our coasts (those are all of india's coastal cities on their side and our south coast cities on ours)... and then i sent cows and a defensive pact again

ok bedtime (jk it is WAY past bedtime)

[williams482]

Did mjmd only just now swap into free religion? That can affect the flip odds, giving you a (now unmatched) bonus for following the city's religion.

[ljubljana]

@williams oh uh.... you are very smart, and yep, that would do it

231-232

ginger and mjmd both double-moved us last round so i don't thiiiiink we can open the turn to a wardec and burned coast. if we still can't find the galleons this round it will be time to worry that our NORTH coast might be vulnerable to amphibious attack, from the southern galleons repositioning aaaaall the way around the eastern edge of the continent to hit us there, but them's the breaks without optics in hand and i will draft to the best of my ability to block that possibility as well...



mjmd has cowed us, thank goodness. but what of the defpact? is the fact that i can't see it in the trade screen an indication that they have accepted? nooooope. because.....



mjmd has declared war on ginger!!!!! omg.... puhLEASE tell me this means they have found and ambushed the galleon swarm....

check out ginger going for bio as well  is that scary? i don't think so actually - their farm numbers are unimpressive and, most importantly, that is off the tank path. i thiiink they will hit it in time to get us a KTB on their very end of our own bio research as well. 

speaking of which, we are seriously not that far from bio ourselves now :D our treasury is getting up there and i think it'll be time to smash our way through chemistry starting either this turn or next turn



galleon spotted in retreat...?? ok, so what's that mean..... is it "we have been successfully deterred from slamming our cavs into your coast"? is it "mjmd spotted us time to run"? well, whatever the cause, last turn was a local maximum of vulnerability for us, as we now have 5-6 rifles in the three south coast cities and the fortify bonuses are starting to creep upwards (which doesn't sound like much, but will make a huge difference in musket vs amphibious cav combats). i thiiiink i'm feeling better about this whole situation now....

hit enter and....



we got our PIGS back!!!!!! i guess with the culture build in chop overflow we juuuust inched over the line ahead of mjmd here, thank goodness



power graph showing the post-rifling surge behind which i hope to tech biology without getting killed



kinda in a race here to get all our remaining cities judaiized before scimeth obsoletes our three monasteries..... i thiiiink we are on track to just make it. only one we might miss is chop overflow, but all things considered that's ok (and not worth delaying bio over) because that city has a military instructor inside that greenline so kindly provided for us



we finally finished glorious THEATERS in our culture-crushed southwest.... with our mercs specialists swapped to artists, this area is primed to be almost-functional in the actually-not-too-distant future :O



after a few tense turns, we do have someeee defenses in the north coast, at least. we could still run into trouble but there would have to be quite a few ships i missed in the fog to cause that..... in particular i think now is as good a time as any to work on a nice big stack of CG3/G1 rifles for aksum, juuuust in case either ginger or nauf decides to pull some trick to try to reach it and end our game. aksum itself is closing in on size 18 (!!) for ANOTHER boost to trade routes across zululand, at which point it will be capped out on hammers (pre-levee), at which point it will just barely cross the threshold into 1-turning rifles forever, should we choose to do so. once our north feels safe from any astro-based shenanigans i think we will finally polish off west point here and get to work on a gigantic commando pile



even our perpetually-underdeveloped desert holdings are getting in on the Infra Push



not bad for just 7 turns of rifling access, yes?



some of these "filler" cities in our interior are already extremely funny just based on rep parts..... now imagine this spot with biology online  with chemistry coming in next turn and a great scientist all set up to bulb (most of) scimeth, i hereby proclaim us close enough to fantasize about it.......

[williams482]

Obsolete monasteries provide no science bonus and no more can be built, but the existing ones still allow their missionary to be built without OrgRel (and I believe culture persists as well). So no need to rush missionaries ahead of scientific method purely on those grounds.

As for the mjmd wardec, wow! That probably does mean that they spotted an incoming attack and got the jump on it, which probably does mean those galleons got smacked. I assume mjmd doesn't have a stack zipping through your territory into Ginger's core, the other plausible explanation for kicking things off right now?

One thing to keep in mind is if and how long you want to keep open borders with Ginger. Presumably you don't want to let them launch attacks through your territory on your roads to hit Indian cities, but you are getting a bunch of value out of scouting Ottoman lands right now. What's the plan if a scary stack shows up on your road network, considering that any troops that can't reach India will surely be used against you?

[ljubljana]

oh really!! ok, that's a relief. well, in that case i definitely should have been building different things in ura/lalibela since.... a while ago but no harm in promoting some draftees i suppose

there is no mjmd stack, yeah. so far as i can tell, the giant stack we saw on our border a few turns ago is now holed up in their coastal city closest to ginger. so HOPEfully you are right and the galleons got discovered and killed - i guess we'll know next turn based on the power graph. it might be more likely that mjmd just warpeaced them though, to try and ascertain whether they or we are the target (and redirect the attack towards us if possible......). ginger moved before them last round, so if they did declare and offer peace, it's still too early for ginger to have accepted it

as far as ginger launching raids through our lands, well..... i'd like to see them try i really doubt they trust us enough to try to march troops through our land directly to go hit india, since we can always close our borders at the worst possible time while they are en route and teleport them either back home or into indian territory, which could expose them to a first strike with collateral in either case. they also do not really have any stacks in position to try that.... right now ginger's offensive forces consist of a northern stack of about 40 units near kirishima (threatening, but too far away), a southern stack of about 20 units near work ethic (probably incapable of taking any mjmd cities, or work ethic for that matter) and however many units they have on boats (i think this is around 20 units as well). i suppose they could march the southern stack towards india to try and hit their border city at the same time they drop units off via boat, but that seems just ludicrously dangerous to me....

as far as what we do if they DO try that, i haven't decided yet...... what's your opinion? the ottoman border cities with us are defended by 5-8 rifles/infantry each at this point, and it's kinda hard to see us cracking one without absurd losses, but maybe we could pull it off if we annihilate their offensive forces in the area via a surprise border closure. on the other hand i think we still REALLY do not want a war right now if we can avoid it, all else being equal...

to be honest, i'd be surprised if either of them actually intends this to be a real war...... neither has anything to realistically gain from fighting the other except perhaps surprise razes, i think, especially via land forces. if we're really lucky maybe there will be some kind of naval arms race (or mjmd will reveal that they have already built a bunch of frigates and such unbeknownst to either of us??) and the two will try to decide who wins this game in a fight for control of the seas (and, i guess, for control of zulu hearts and minds). but more likely i think peace will break out again pretty soon. if either of them intended a full-scale naval war you'd think they'd have gone for combustion, which is right there after railroad, instead of wasting time researching physics and biology. and again, attempting a land war THROUGH zulu territory seems absurd and very unlikely to help either of them actually win the game

anyway, logged back in to offer ginger the world's sneakiest world map trade...... since we have not explored anywhere out of sight of our south coast ourselves, there's a good chance that, if they accept, it will show us how far their boats got..... hopefully it will reveal a line or two of sea tiles stretching all the way from ottoman territory to india, but i kinda doubt it. if it instead shows a line that stretches halfway to india and then stops, they are probably still there and waiting for us to let our guard down (or have retreated, or have repositioned to go after our north coast)