[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[El Grillo]

Yeah MGs are a weirdly situational unit, it turns out that not being to attack is a pretty significant drawback . Maybe if they were a lot cheaper and could be built mainly to absorb/ignore collateral, to represent stalled-out trench warfare?

[ljubljana]

LOL love all the genlurkers coming out of the woodwork to trash MGs  that's how you KNOW it's a situational unit..... and wait, marines get a bonus against them?? well there goes my one idea for using them for something....

252

ottomans will have industrial this turn! so i guess on this turn, in the worst case, they will be logging in and switching all their builds over to tanks, and we can expect the first ones to appear either next turn (if they used overflow tricks) or in 2-3 turns (if not). idk if they have any 90 hammer cities post-factory outside of zephyrion, so i'm guessing the majority can 3-4 turn tanks at worst. but with around 1500 MFG, we can expect them to gain around 8 per turn if they are really focused on spamming them



well, not too surprisingly, nobody wanted to give us loans, so it looks like rails in 6 unless we're willing to run wealth builds (which i might be....??) but we made 6 units this turn, will probably draft 4 more, and this whole southern area grew. oh and levees



mighty meisei



terrible takakeisho



ep update indicates continued spending.... i impulsively set ours back to 0% in the hopes of changing that (but it's not gonna happen). gonna try sending them cows in conjunction MAYbe with some anti-mjmd sentiment, not that i'm expecting anything (update: just sent them cows, not gonna actively plot against our ally at this stage). at least we can indicate that our buildup has defensive intent, should they be somehow alarmed by our raw power numbers (as if THOSE really mean anything at this stage)



even post-exceedingly painful drafting we still finish the turn above 1k MFG :D



culture situation is dismaying.... we're still only gaining at most 1% per turn in disputed areas, so unlikely we can get anything back before a tank attack unless they are really slow about it. worth doing anyways though? idk, third ring in takanosho would help a ton defensively, and to be honest, missing control of tiles within 2 of our cities is only going to get MORE important, not less, as the game goes on and our opponents get access to planes and nukes and the like. ughhh idk, the marginal value of this as opposed to cranking more units/levees is turning up really hard for me to evaluate.... blah. at least at takanosho we have a good excuse as gaining that disputed plains tile tile gives us 2 more bio farms, which in this food-starved location means 2 more plains windmills can eventually be worked

would love opinions from the lurkers on if i'm supposed to just switch over to units/levees instead, i'm really at a loss.... for reference our numbers are

kirishima: 51/48 ottoman but this tile has huge amounts of culture on it from gamelong conflict, and will probably flip slowly if at all
takayasu: 54/45 on the roaded hill, 53/46 on the unroaded hill
takanosho: 62/37 on the plains, 77/22 on the desert hill, will hit fourth-ring borders in 7 turns of culture building for 20% more defenses and hopefully some acceleration on the tile flip rate

[ljubljana]

another option, and i sure don't like this but it's an option, is pre-emptive war against ginger to pillage the roads-on-hills that expose takayasu and takanosho with guerilla 2 rifles. then we would only have to defend at kirishima and can pile the obsolete garbage there really high so they can't take it without a mighty tank swarm. we could do that as early as next turn if i shift some defenders around a little bit, and depending on what units they have where, there could be a chance to go for their oil as well. after i do the pillaging i can immediately offer peace. of course this does break our defpact with mjmd, but if they're planning to intervene anyways i assume they won't change their mind about that because i attacked preemptively (i hope....). that's assuming civac does not reiterate my desperate cow/cow from this turn ofc

thoughts?

edit: or, i stash some guerilla guys in range of the roads, scout their border intensively, and declare preemptive war in response to either them moving a stack where it could threaten takayasu/kirishima or to them cancelling our open borders

[GeneralKilCavalry]

Mitakeumi seems like a high prod city that is a waste to be building culture in.

[ljubljana]

Mitakeumi seems like a high prod city that is a waste to be building culture in.

would it make it better if i told you that by building culture, it is NOT building its 6-hammer levee.... which it has 60/180 hammers invested in already?

believe it or not, takanosho is actually even higher prod, in the low 30s compared to mita's low 20s.... takanosho is a bit less wasteful though as it will hit fourth-ring borders in 7 turns of culture building, which is a big deal as it then will have 60% defenses on a hill which means (fully-fortified) draftee rifles should get odds on tanks (at least before airship damage.......)

but the reason to build culture, as i see it, is the tiles 2SE of takayasu, 2E of takanosho, and 2E of kirishima under ottoman control. ginger, with a sufficient number of combat workers, can slam those cities from the fog with tank + cav stacks that i won't even be able to scout before they come in, since they can move 4 tiles along rails to the tiles in question and then hit the cities with their last 1.2 moves. for the tile at takayasu, that "sufficient number" of combat workers is TWO  so if we can't flip the tiles, there is a very good chance that we open the first turn of this war to find 3 of our core cities burned with no warning.... mitakeumi, with its fourth-ring borders, can just barely put culture on the tiles at both takayasu AND takanosho, so in a sense we get twice the return out of building culture here than at the other cities. and honestly, thank goodness it DOES have high production or we'd have almost no chance of getting the tiles back this way.... 

but yeah, i actually did decide mita building culture was a little wasteful and changed it to something better.... a theater  which, through a move that is almost too horrible to contemplate (which you will see next turn), we can exactly to the penny complete in 2 turns, and then start working double artist specialists in addition to building culture. payback horizon is around 6 turns vs just culture-building straight-up which is a liiiittle suspect, but we get compensation in that it will be harder for the ottomans to then flip the tiles back with their OWN culture builds. plus the theater also adds one singular happy face to our dyes, for what that's worth lol

though am definitely still soliciting more opinions about whether this is wise, and am open to having my mind changed. it looks like if the ottos go for the fastest possible attack timing with, in roughly 4 or 5 turns with somewhere around 30 tanks, it will be too fast for us to flip anything, but if they build up a bit more first i think we could pull it off

[GeneralKilCavalry]

Cities will be forked no matter what, even if you get those few extra tiles. I'm not sure the opportunity cost of n extra cannons makes the difference. Even building wealth/science to speed up railroad seems more worthwhile!

[ljubljana]

hmmm... but with forking, they have to actually have their 2-mover stack somewhere in our territory where we can hit it for a turn, and where it is exposed to cannon collateral. that is also one extra turn they have to spend with units exposed before taking our border cities, and therefore will probably buy the rest of our cities an extra turn to live each as well. which, first of all, means we can squeeze extra draftees out of whichever cities they go for if we think they are doomed, which already makes up some of the hammer cost of building culture. but more importantly it is an extra turn of movement for our reinforcements, an extra turn of rail building, and an extra turn of newly-produced units available with which to try to save.... if not the cities they fork on the first turn of the war, then whichever cities they go for after that....

idk, it might still not be worth it, especially since taking the tiles back relies on them not going for their own (factory-powered) culture builds to counter ours.... but if they don't end up going for a tank push, think about this area when ginger has nukes online (and we don't yet, of course). if we don't control those tiles, they can nuke our border cities and walk in without ever exposing their units.... but if we do, we'll have the whole area railed up and have a fair chance to save the cities if they have to walk a big 2-mover stack up first....right? assuming no commando factory for them, but tbh if they do have a commando factory and 40 commando cavs sitting around then nothing can stop us from dying horribly whenever they feel like it lol. fwiw i am faaaairly confident this is not the case, they need 20 XP as CHA which is west point + stable + barracks + theocracy + pentagon + 3 settled GGs (right?); we've killed 2 of their GGs personally, i'm pretty sure they haven't fought enough to spawn 3 more, and west point is in the self-founded zephyrion so they aren't benefitting from any freebies settled in captured dreylin cities

ps, if the game goes long enough and we are still alive (unlikely, to say the least), i probably WILL be rushing nukes. which means no combustion, no industrialization, and probably getting to rocketry via artillery so we can save the expensive combustion + flight researches. it seems like we still need assembly line first to actually build the nukes but after that, the directest possible path is what, artillery -> rocketry -> astro -> physics -> electricity -> fission from this position? so we're only, um, 12 techs away... that could totally happen right i mean, i don't think anything PAST nukes offers much of a meaningful increase in warfare ability, so.... once the contenders hit them, all we can do is catch up, right?

[williams482]

Honestly, I think I like the culture builds here. Extra cannon can't protect these cities if they can get hit out of the fog, and pushing from 40% to 60% borders is both a defensive bonus and a major jump up in cultural pressure on the disputed tiles. I'd even be tempted to settle "awful filler" for the sake of ratcheting up that cultural pressure and providing more of a buffer, although the unpredictable weirdness of post-capture culture borders makes that more of a gamble.

[ljubljana]

Heh. I'm tempted by awful filler too, but i am worried that ottomans would perceive it as a Hostile Act of me trying to steal their, um... unimproved plains and plains hill that they're not working? Perhaps if we see unambiguous indications that they are coming for us regardless, then it will make sense....? it can pop borders in just 2 turns with the mitakeumi horse and build culture, and then that's 20 extra pressure we're putting on the takayasu tile, plus it would eventually redeem up to 6 strong and currently-unworked tiles..... only problem is that it would be kind of a death trap until we claim its first-ring tiles - if we don't put units inside then the ottomans can immediately raze it, and if we do they will have 0% cultural defenses (for 2 turns) and be very susceptible to getting tanked from the fog... i am not sure off the top of my head how many CG promotions a rifle needs to beat a 2-promotion tank with 0% defenses, but my guess would be roughly 6

tbh, i think what i really wish is that we had tried to found awful filler like, 100 turns ago before the borders stretched this far. but i'm pretty sure we were just as worried about getting reamed by 2-movers from the fog then as we are now i do think i erred big-time in not prioritizing theaters and libraries a long time ago in all our cities that don't control their own second-ring tiles though - not sure what i was thinking there. i even had takayasu build a market "so the mercs specialist will do something", which was worse than either the library or theater would have been kirishima and takanosho have theaters NOW but they are very recent additions; takanosho doesn't have a library (or, to be fair, any commerce multipliers) and takayasu has nothing... and of course mita could have had a theater ages ago and been helping out, i just straight-up didn't realize that rails made this border so indefensible until a few turns ago (with just roads it was better since we could scout incoming 2-mover stacks one turn in advance with sentry chariots)

[williams482]

If Civac wants to throw themselves into a war with mjmd to raze a filler border city which doesn't encroach on any workable or improved tiles, then I'd say they can have it? It does cost us 100h for the attempt (so one modern unit, neither trivial nor debilitating price-wise) but the defensive benefits could be pretty significant and the city would return it's foodhammer investment quickly if allowed to survive.