[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

242

before seeing what happened this turn, i have semi-arbitrarily decided in favor of steam power is that good

hahaha, what?



what do you mean, "unhealthy"? how did i not see this coming 



boAt



recorded for future reference....

[williams482]

Cannons seem like the only unit in reach that could plausibly do something about tanks, so I definitely think we should be going in that direction. Obviously no harm in waiting while we build up gold, of course.

Levies are what, 180h? In SP I usually whip them, but that's not an option here. Are they a good enough ROI hammer-wise to make Steam Power the priority tech?

[ljubljana]

heh, well..... to be honest, we've hit the point in the game where i don't really know  i'm really not sure how long it's been since i actually BUILT a levee, let alone in a circumstance where the game was still competitive such that ROIs needed to be contemplated.... at first glance, i guess you can see from the screenie that takakeisho's levee is worth a ridiculous 13 hammers times forge, which is something like a 12-turn payback horizon which is crazy good, but that's the best one we have available although a decent number of the others are close. aksum's 11 hammers is up there too as you can see and is multiplied by the heroic epic, but um..... that's actually a little bit awkward because aksum can 1-turn rifles already so adding more hammers at this point doesn't actually translate to more units, so all it would do is let us overflow into infra backfill more efficiently, not exactly what we want to be prioritizing in our HE city....

all told, i think around half of our 17 levee cities are in the 8-10 base hammer range that i consider "fairly strong", and the rest are more dubious, 6 hammer things with a roughly 25-turn payback horizon. i guess that's still better than some of these forges we've been prioritizing, and while our food demo is world-leading by an increasingly large margin our mfg situation is still pretty desperate at around half of the leaders (though it is a) propped up in practice by drafting and b) still in recovery mode as we grow back onto the windmills i stopped working in favor of bio farms)

at least if we go for steam power first i don't think we'll lose out on the chance to mass cannons. we'll still get the tech a good few turns before ginger hits industrial, and i'll prebuild a bunch of cats before it comes in to get a head start. i am bit more worried about missing out on /railroad/ before ginger can attack us (if ginger has it and we don't they will get a lot of scary tactical opportunities that we can't easily respond to) but that's off the assembly line path anyways (as is steel....) and as far as fighting off tanks with rifles/cavs/cannons goes, we are a little short on the rifles and cavs component to, i think, so no harm in building up those in the meantime while we wait on the cannons

i don't know, those thoughts are pretty disorganized as is my usual wont  i have to admit i am really tempted to go for steam power just to see the glorious, full-power 3/2/2 plains farm yields i've been dreaming of since the early game, and there is a significant danger of my rationalizing an otherwise-incorrect choice here that i'm going to have to guard against

[ljubljana]

really starting to have a guilty conscience about ignoring all these.....

both in terms of "am i screwing over my friend" and "am i making the wrong decision for zululand by insufficiently reining in the runaway"......

[ljubljana]

243

^^ if i decide not to report, that post counts as my report

*crosses fingers for nothing having happened that is sufficiently noteworthy to mandate a real report*

.......

*copy-pastes 10 or so empty screenshot tags anyways*





more than half of our cities are growing next turn so that's amusing

switched hoshoryu to a cat after taking that image in the name of setting up to overflow an extra turn of production into levees, should we go that route



ep update showing ginger's restarted spending, that i have restarted spending in response to...



i am posting the food graph because i would like to feel good about myself

edited to add:



LOL wtf??? are.... are they sending troops TO SD by galleon, like, for real? <33

[El Grillo]

That seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do

When you have a chance, can you check the Statistics screen and show how many of each tile improvement you have?

[ljubljana]

is this normal

is this the number of improvements a) self-built, b) owned (incl. by conquest), or c) worked? i assume one of the former two.... i'm pretty sure the only mines i'm actually working are the 3 golds, 1 iron, and 2 copper (the latter all on flatground where i couldn't windmill over them)

meanwhile of the farms, i can find only 4 that are NOT being worked (3 for lack of pop, 1 for being out of range of any city, at the site of a former dreylin city that ginger razed). amusingly, we have more unworked TOWNS than that..... just in this screenshot:



in general, if yall recall i built like 17 workers in the opening which seemed ludicrously excessive at the time.... aaaand actually, to my own surprise (and probably because of all the pillaging i ALSO did), we still have yet to deliberately idle any of them or build roads just for the sake of building something :D (though that will not last much longer natch)

[ljubljana]

actually, idk how much blogging i have in me but there's been a shortage of big overview shots lately..... yall can have 8 at roughly the magnification i use so you can vicariously experience my life.....

[ljubljana]

244



man, i really want to start spamming markets and banks so we can make SOME kind of convincing economic turnaround here.... but these are just so bad! really, 100 hammers for a building that will average under 3 GPT and pay back in, like, 40 turns? frankly i'm not sure we have 40 competitive turns left in this game..... ginger and mjmd will have nukes by that point



india scores the other power corp for this setup. i thiiiink this is good for us? better our friend to have it than our enemy, and with both HQs and the holy city packed in one spot (presumably with wall street also) ginger has some chance to raze it and inflict really catastrophic damage



lol, even aksum is perfectly timed, completely by accident, to overflow into the levee. which i do think i'll build as aksum's unbuilt library and market would not be garbage, and building a levee here now may save us a factory and coal plant later



hoshoryu's cat looking gorgeous from that perspective as well



gondar grew on 3 straight turns and is now finally leveling off. by which i mean, entering the period of endless drafting off specialists that i envision for all these farmvilles eventually

[ljubljana]

245

some experimental observations on the mysterious turn-roll OOS errors



SD got one after rolling the turn, then i logged in while SD was logged in for their double, and then i got OOS as well. logging out and logging back in myself did not fix it, but then when SD logged out, it mysteriously WAS fixed for me, mid-login 




finally we have enough of a caravel net to start feeling secure about our north coast (and thus transfer the little rifle piles i have left there over to the real fronts)

once we make it to railroad (and note that we do also need steam power to make rails unless someone will ship us coal...) some offensive options will actually open back up versus ginger



a well-placed road and rail on the labeled hill + slamming cavs into ankyra until it falls + 5 commando rifles could take this whole northern area, including double holy city prussa



stonefish, home of the pentagon, could be burned in more or less the same way.... road up to herring, slam cavs into it until it dies at hideous cost, then use commando rifles to burn out the undefended city, with plaice and codstantinople burnable in the bargain as well.....



depending on how ginger's forces are positioned internally, a pre-emptive strike to cut off their oil before they can finish a wave of tanks is potentially in the cards as well. if we time it right, we can cut them off oil (this plus another one tile from our border at herring are their only sources) while they have a wave in production so they waste a ton of hammers as well without turning them into tanks. so the ideal attack timing would be something like 1t after they get industrialism, so probably roughly 12 turns from now, which also juuuust barely lines up with the timing with which we are likely to get railroad if we don't run large-scale wealth + research builds

i am trying to think through whether it is worth giving up our neutrality to do such a thing, though. mjmd might support us, but to be honest i fear we would merely stalemate ginger with such a move unless we can burn or sneak through captures of a significant amount of their core in so doing. then while we do that, mjmd probably just kills superdeath to end the game......

going to devote at least some mental energy over the next few days to analyzing the possibility of an alpha strike like that.... williams, would appreciate your insights as well as always  i think we want to decide in the next 2 turns, since we need to either overflow into aksum's levee or just start cranking the future commandos asap until we have enough to raze all the relevant targets.... not to mention 2t from now is around when we'd want to send mjmd a 10-turn war proposal to get them interested

we would probably also have to 1-turn military science in some sneaky way so they don't redistribute troops..... we could do that by playing in the second half, switching research to milsci when we are 1t from another tech, then setting every city on research and hope they don't notice us picking up the wrong tech in the foreign advisor window. but that could be playing clock games since it requires us to move second to get around their research visibility, so i'm hesitant to do it..... alternatively we can just get milsci now, visibly, and see whether they do anything in response if we feel that's too shitty (but they probably would, i know i did when THEY got milsci)