[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[Tarkeel]

ok, to my shock and disbelief, it looks like we CAN afford to 1-turn assembly line.... but.... why does it say "final tick: 765" there instead of the full cost of the tech...?? and the "final tick" value goes down if i swap more cities to research, as i'd expect if we are actually going to come up just short of finishing the tech.... that must be a UI glitch in one direction or the other, but is it that we won't actually finish the tech despite the green bar saying that we will, or is "final tick" incorrect and the bar is right?

actually you know what, posting this now to officially ask if lurkers have an answer as to whether i should trust the progress bar or the "final tick" dialog here.... as you might imagine i have a crapton of rifles 1t from completion that i REEEEALLY would rather not have actually complete as rifles

There is (or at least used to be) a visual bug there, which seems to be related to overflow. The bar is correct, the tooltip is usually correct but not necessarily on a turn where there is overflow coming in.

[williams482]

That's a civ 6 looking screenshot all right.

I like the offer to join in attacking mjmd in 20 turns. We should have a very serious production base and something resembling a credible military at that point, and it seems likely that at least Nauf will have built something more legitimate by then as well. SD I'm not sure about, is he close enough to industrialize in that timeframe?

I'll stand by my earlier take that the longer this goes, the better your chances are, and the more value you'll get by gambling on the internet. You've got a huge empire with enormous yield potential, and in that some inherent defense in depth against nuclear strikes simply by having so many cities. In a world where one or two of mjmd's top culture cities get burned, you're a serious contender, and if you can make off with the internet in that situation I think you'll be favored.

Just keep hanging on.

[ljubljana]

There is (or at least used to be) a visual bug there, which seems to be related to overflow. The bar is correct, the tooltip is usually correct but not necessarily on a turn where there is overflow coming in.

thank you so much, much appreciated!!!! siiiick 1t assembly line, never thought i'd live to see the day

That's a civ 6 looking screenshot all right.

I like the offer to join in attacking mjmd in 20 turns. We should have a very serious production base and something resembling a credible military at that point, and it seems likely that at least Nauf will have built something more legitimate by then as well. SD I'm not sure about, is he close enough to industrialize in that timeframe?

I'll stand by my earlier take that the longer this goes, the better your chances are, and the more value you'll get by gambling on the internet. You've got a huge empire with enormous yield potential, and in that some inherent defense in depth against nuclear strikes simply by having so many cities. In a world where one or two of mjmd's top culture cities get burned, you're a serious contender, and if you can make off with the internet in that situation I think you'll be favored.

Just keep hanging on.

yeah.... my thinking has started to trend in the following direction: clearly mjmd being beaten militarily by SOMEone is necessary for us to win this game, at least because their culture cities have to be burned, but also because we likely can't get to domination before they can launch anyhow. i would like that someone to have been civac, but it looks very strongly like that's not going to happen - their production numbers have been stagnant for a long time now and they are barely above ours, and we don't have even one factory built yet  we are catching up with the ottos in all demographic categories now which is a bad bad sign for them, i think as time goes on the power gulf between them and india will only widen....

so that means we have to help if we want india to ever get beaten.... now, maybe we side with india in the coming showdown instead, with the plan being that we carve up the world together with them and then win the resulting 1v1. but i ask you, which is more likely: that we will become strong enough to fight india alone after fighting the rest of the world with them, or that we will become strong enough to fight civac alone after beating india in a dogpile? i imagine it's the latter - all we really need to fight civac is to industrialize and catch up in military tech and we can outproduce them making units of similar quality, while i'm not sure how we will ever get to that point vs india unless we can gain much more in the war vs the rest of the world than they do. given that they are much stronger than us now and their most obvious target in SD is much weaker, i find that pretty implausible...

i definitely plan to go for the internet if it's available. however..... i imagine we need to grab the nuke techs first. i think becoming a nuclear power is a prerequisite to being able to help fight mjmd, and the rationale for my 20 turns estimate is that that's about how long i think it would take for us to get there..... i'm guessing that we should be able to slam out astro, physics, and electricity at least during the rest of this GA, but then even the most direct path (artillery - fission - rocketry) still leaves 3 expensive techs left to deal with, and that path has us skipping destroyers and fighters which seems seriously questionable. and then there's the actual production time of the nukes - we are fortunate enough to have a number of high-hammer cities, but even a 100 hammer city will still take 7-8 turns to grind out a tactical nuke. if our goal is to have a wave of nukes ready to go in 20 turns, we need to research at least 6 techs after AL in only 13 or so turns, which seems optimistic to me - maybe 25 turns would be a better estimate..... a dedicated beeline to the internet, on the other hand, would probably take 20 turns just to get the tech, and then we have to build the wonder, and THEN we have to start producing nukes..... i'm just not sure any window of military advantage we might get in this game will remain open for long enough to survive such a delay

now, if this is our strategic plan, there is still some question of whether we should actually communicate it to civac.... maybe we have more to gain from keeping our options open. in particular, if civac gets annihilated ahead of our timetable, we will then have to pivot to some kind of longshot backup plan, which, depending on the extent of the annihilation, will probably consist of attacking either civac or naufragar and trying to race mjmd to domination using the one military metric - physical ground-traversal speed in enemy territory - by which we are competitive with the modernized powers. we might also have to try such a pivot if mjmd launches a full-scale invasion of superdeath in that timeframe, as in all honesty i am skeptical that even a rest-of-the-world coalition will be able to keep them too busy to make progress versus rome in such a scenario. (if there's any hope of actually stopping an invasion of SD, it might be in diplomacy - the only reason i can think of for mjmd not to attack them in the near future is for fear of pushing us into the ottoman camp, which is why i'm considering an SD defpact.... once we're sure or at least willing to gamble that the ottomans will not turn on us, of course....) anyways, i don't particularly want to win by stabbing civac either - your mileage may vary on whether a vague assurance that we'll join them in 25 turns vs india, followed by us bailing if conditions change before then, constitutes a stab, but it doesn't feel great to me (although, really, how does one avoid this kind of thing when it comes to war plans in AI diplo?)

but there is much to be gained by talking to civac as well. for one thing, there is morale - if they thought this joint attack with SD was going to work, theirs must be in the toilet now, and i don't see much reason for them to fight on as things currently stand. all they really have going for them in what is essentially a 1v1 with india is their fourth golden age, which looks well-timed for nuke production, but idk if that's enough to keep this from looking like a concedable position to them. of course, RB rules will force them to keep playing, but i think they'll need to be taking it seriously if our dogpile is to succeed - the dreylin situation is a pretty good illustration of the degree to which undermining an ally's morale inhibits their ability to resist militarily, imo. and in addition to demoralization, two other emotions they might be experiencing now are frustration and desperation, both directed at mjmd's zulu enablers.... if we are refusing to join them when it's obvious that india needs to be stopped, their next-best option might be to attempt a solo conquest of zulu, especially if mjmd launches an invasion of superdeath. now, maybe we haven't quite hit the "refusal to join them" threshold yet (we did just cow them, and so far they've made no effort to reach out to us about a coalition) but if they start sending us diplo and we start ignoring it, that's a different story, and maybe one in which we have to fight the ottomans mostly-alone sooner than we will be ready to. one nice thing about the (inherently duplicitous) position of having a formal defpact with mjmd while negotiating with the ottomans is that it does give us some negotiating leverage - the longer the great powers have their hands stayed due in part to not wanting to push us to join the other side, the, uh.... the longer this game is actually going to go on lol, which, as you've said, pretty clearly still favors us at this point IMO

to be honest, i'm about to log in to belatedly play the turn, and i'm still not sure what i'm going to do. if we are going to talk to civac, this is a good turn to do it though; they haven't yet logged in to see the picture i posted above, and it'll probably feel like a real kick in the teeth when they do. if we want them to feel a little less like conceding or rage-burning some zulu coastal cities, this is proooobably a good time to reach out lol

it definitely gives me pause to turn on india like that (hell, i've BEEN pausing for the last 50 turns or so ), since i stand by earlier statements i have made of the form "if we can't win, i want to keep the ottomans from winning as a stab-reprisal" and "a victory for our gamelong BFF india is a silver-medal outcome for us". joining an ottoman coalition increases the odds of an ottoman win by quite a bit, and if we consider silver-medal outcomes and second-place finishes to have value in the RBCiv iterated game, then there is real risk to us. but..... i don't think that i do. with civac in charge of the ottomans i'm not sure we should still bear them any ill will for the stab, and if it's winprob-maximizing to join the ottos and we still have appreciable winprob, i suppose we had better do so. sorry when you read this, mjmd <3 i hope it's what you would have done, too



SD on the other hand HAS been reaching out, repeatedly, so i'm pretty sure they'd take a defpact if we offer it straight-up..... but i'm not so sure i'm ready to go there yet. that would be a public break with india, which could easily backfire and lead to mjmd revoking our defpact and then civac pouncing on us. i think we'd better negotiate with the ottomans first, and probably at least get some factories up and start working on this growing milpower deficit lol. i can only hope that war is not actually five turns away - and frankly it probably isn't, at least not aggressive war by the ottomans, as i don't see any option for them in the face of that kind of naval advantage save for retreat

civac logged in 3 minutes after i did btw, as i was typing this out, which uh greatly complicates any plan that involves sending them diplo this turn so they feel less like their teeth got kicked in lol. and actually a bit unsure about what RB rules for this situation are - what if they wanted to attack me this turn? are they supposed to log out now, wait for me to play, and thereby telegraph that something was up? i mean, i guess so....



here is dear takakeisho with its wheat re-farmed and the rest of its windmills mined. i tested it and we should be ok to survive losing 1 hammer from the copper passing into ottoman territory..... but only just. yeah.... once again it looks like we are going to finish a crucial build with exactly, to the penny, the number of hammers required, and with an exactly empty food box.......

and as i watched with mine own eyes, civac did retreat their southern fleet while the northern fleet kept on sailing westward to hopefully not burn aksum

[Tarkeel]

civac logged in 3 minutes after i did btw, as i was typing this out, which uh greatly complicates any plan that involves sending them diplo this turn so they feel less like their teeth got kicked in lol. and actually a bit unsure about what RB rules for this situation are - what if they wanted to attack me this turn? are they supposed to log out now, wait for me to play, and thereby telegraph that something was up? i mean, i guess so....

More or less that.. Which is why rule #1 is play your turn as soon as possible, and avoid clock games and split turns. Sure, there are times when that is not possible. It's also why people are encouraged to state in their threads some turns in advance that they are planning to attack so the lurkers know they're not just playing clock games.

[ljubljana]

got it got it, thank you for the heads-up! i don't even know what it means in terms of if they attack us next turn.... is that a double-move or not, if we literally took our turns at the same time during the previous round? i..... guess i should take it as a sign that they probably are not thinking too seriously about such an attack that they were willing to be logged in at the same time as us

speaking of which...



i had to gather a gigantic stack of units in work ethic because of this dumbass worker..... if he roads the forest tile he is standing on, and there is enough combat railing done, 40 cavs will come into range of 1-turning the city. UGH..... hopefully civac will understand the defensive nature of my stack and not build the damn road. and if they do, hopefully they will also understand if i declare war on them just to pillage it.....



anyways, sending them my traitorous proposal... hopefully the 25 turn timer doesn't get us just completely laughed out of the negotiating room lol. i can't add war with mjmd on their side too thanks to the defpact lol but presumably the idea is clear enough

edit: i'll probably send SD the same thing next turn as well so they don't feel completely spurned..... and as far as SD's nearness to industrializing, they are not that close they are on rifling tech now, due in 2, although i think they have only 4 techs after that for AL (economics, constitution, corporation, and AL itself) and we've seen how quickly those can go by if you have the GNP for it. but anyways a significant rifle/cav/cannon force would still be more credible than what they have now, and as we've theorized before, is enough to dent a tank stack efficiently (and they are AGG just like us so they will have the same super-cannons). along these lines, i actually think there is an option 4) for civac's northern navy that we haven't mentioned yet btw, which is just to drop off 20 tanks in SD's land to help keep them from collapsing

[ljubljana]

if the interturn went according to plan, we will have discovered techs on what is now 4 consecutive turns

271



siiiick we got the guys :D naturally, a few cities that were scheduled to finish rifles this turn won't quite have enough for the more-expensive infantry..... but every other city will start a factory. maybe there are one or two judgement calls (hoshoryu may do oxford first, aksum perhaps wants to crank a few commando infs) but that should be more or less it. starting next turn i think every single city other than hoshoryu and the weaker fillers will be on a factory

surprisingly we make just enough beakers to make it 5 straight turns by 1-turning astronomy at breakeven. i think i'm not going to do that though since i don't actually know which tech we want next (combustion to make a few destroyers to spot a nuke sub sneak attack is the other strong candidate)



...and actually, even some of our weak filler cities are (arguably) strong enough to get in on this hot new industrialization craze  build order in this city was literally granary - ikhanda - forge - factory. a 9-turn factory is maybe arguably not actually worth it but in this case we'll grow onto the 6-hammer iron in 3 turns which should make things clearer. but either way i'm feeling pretty damn good about having settled this spot



keisho did evidently lose the hammer from our copper flipping in the interturn, but looks like our aim was true and we will get our 3-turn statue with exactly enough hammers and no food left in the box..... assuming literally not a single other unexpected thing goes wrong lollll. however it looks like it won't matter as nobody even tried to race us so if we do lose the turn somehow it's probably fine



oh did i mention.... after eons of paranoid culture building..... takanosho has 2 sick new farms  i also belately realized we're supposed to farm over the cow pasture here as well lmao.... 2 hammers for 1 food is definitely a worthwhile trade if that 1 food enables working an extra windmill



this city is capped on happy waiting on draft anger to expire.... so what to do? well, i gave all its food tiles to neighboring DistrictDiscount and am working a bunch of specialists and OCEAN tiles of all things, which are worth a nice 3 gold each in enviro and a golden age  now just imagine if we were FIN....



yall think i should settle this little crack between nauf and mjmd's territory? it would be very useful to have as an airbase and would pay for itself pretty quickly too with a SoL rep specialist and three trade routes.... but maybe it's too provocative? idk



you know.... at the risk of being extremely dumb, i'm thinking about going for fascism's free GG next turn if it's still on the table.... mostly for denial purposes (i do NOT want the ottos being able to slam 5 commandos into our core off a ship with it) but also because we should maybe be thinking seriously about a swap to police state at the end of this GA.... it conflicts with representation (OUCH) but there's a chance that it still comes out ahead in terms of yields if we're spamming units, i'll have to do some math to check....

not to mention, these paratroopers actually seem like kind of a sweet unit?? they're a 4 strength upgrade over an infantry for only 20 additional hammers, not bad at all, plus they're gunpowder units and should therefore get the 3 free tokugawa promotions. unlike marines they don't require a diversion from the nuke tech path (i mean, fascism is a diversion but it's much cheaper than industrialism, of course). and there is that airdrop ability..... i know they can't attack after using it, but i'll have to test if they can still pillage.... either way, imagine airdropping guerilla 2, 24-strength units on every hill within 5 tiles of our enemy's territory, and if they don't kill them we'll pillage all their windmills...... and of course, it gives aksum a stronger commando unit to spam endlessly.... commando paratroopers, now THAT would be really funny



tested kremlin cash-rushing and it looks like it's still a little worse than a 2 to 1 gold-to-hammers conversion ratio. and that's gold to total hammers, not to raw hammers, so in a city with +100% hammer multipliers and no cash multipliers it's like trading a 4 gold tile for a 1 hammer tile....

so specifically as regards mining inc, each city we spread it to gives 9 gpt to mjmd in their wall street city (apparently this is a CtH nerf from the previous value of 12), which translates to about 4 hammers/turn in production if they use it to cash-rush. it costs us about 8 gold * inflation ~= 12 gpt in maintenance in our recipient city. and we receive 13 * 2 = 26 hammers/turn after multiplier buildings. seems like a very clear win to me, clear enough that i will probably try to spread it as widely as possible... in fact, i will think about making an executive our first build in takakeisho post-statue and sending it deep into our southwest (ichiyamamoto strikes again...?), so that if the capital is somehow disastrously surprise-razed from the fog, we won't completely lose access to the corp



tested paratroopers and THEY CAN both pillage and kill noncombatant units and empty cities......... so if a city is nuked from orbit and all the units inside are killed, a commando paratrooper has an effective range of.... ok, actually still just 10 tiles since it apparently consumes half our movement to paradrop in the first place. but the pillaging is simply enormous as it means we can cut rail access and completely ruin the production capacity of a border city at a stroke.... or we could surround and cut off civac's oils, both of which are within paratrooper range of our border. finally one last nightmare move i have in mind - paradrop commandos (or use weaker ones like rifles) behind enemy lines and go for the workers, so they are unable to re-rail over to the location of our attack and we actually could create a commando with slightly higher range via GG if we take morale mid-rail traversal (....although i think any unit can do this, not just paratroopers). yeah i definitely want to mass these guys if at all practicable. aaand it also means that if our opponents eventually pick up fascism we're going to have to stick guys semi-permanently on all of our own hills to prevent our victimization by a similar tactic....



yum yum delicious industrialization ok now just.... nobody look at us funny in the next 5 turns ok. civac that means you!!! our NAP supposedly goes until t276 and so is beautifully timed to get us through the trough of our defenselessness here but they gotta adhere to it and SOMEhow i can't stop worrying about it even india could in theory freak out and stab us with their increasingly-overwhelming might.... now WHY they would do that when we're their only friend in the world, i'm not sure, but we don't have a live NAP so i mean, it could happen....... they'd have to be reeeeally really confident that we're on course to eventually overtake civac for second place if not interfered with to make it reasonable though, i think, i hope

lemme see if i can find the t200 comparison pic



maybe one should expect as much after 70 turns of recovery from even the desperatest-looking positions but..... at least from my civ6 MP experience i sure didn't

[ljubljana]

procrastinated for so long out of sheer dread of the prospect of having to think about the strategic situation that we now get to / have to play a double lol

272-273

well, there are worse things in this world than a double-turn in golden age mode

been ruminating a lot over fascism tech..... a GG in this era of warfare is a powerful thing. civac needs 20 XP for commandos and can manufacture mounted units at 5 (barracks + stable) + 2 (pentagon) + 2 (theocracy) + 5 (west point) + 2 (if they swap to vassalage at some point) = 16 XP for sure, if they have no GGs settled in zephyrion (and surely they have at least one, right?). so a GG can commando-promote a whole transport full of cavs, which can burn any inland city of ours in which i have stashed fewer than 5 units (this is why i have 3 impis on defense in pretty much all of our cities, and why i am still not regretting having kept 60 impis around in the first place ). or with ICBMs online, they can convert each ICBM into a burned city, up to probably around 5 (need more testing of how many units live a nuke strike on average, at a very high level it seems to be about half).

this is bad enough, but what really scares me is this: with 16 XP units already trainable for sure, and likely 1-2 GGs unaccounted for (i really wish i had been keeping track of how many GGs they've both earned and spent; we've seen and killed 2 ourselves but no way of knowing what they used conquering dreylin), they are close to a commando factory. i do not quiiiiite think they actually have one online yet, as if they do, it would be in zephyrion and they should never have stopped training cavs there (and i've been watching closely and it's been on ships and tanks for ages). that is, assuming they need the stable to hit 20 XP and those aren't commando tanks  but that would require 4 settled GGs (since they are not in vassalage now) which i think is impossible (we have only earned 6 total and we fought 4 major wars this game).

but the scary scenario for us is this: civac fights a war of annihilation with mjmd, gets 1-2 GGs from it, and then can sneak in the fascism GG and swap to vassalage in their fourth GA and boom, instant commando factory. this could easily be determinative in a 1v1 war with us, and i think it is prudent to escalate the cost of this as far out of reach as possible. it's a delay to nukes but it's still a military tech, and i think represents a meaningful shift in the likely outcome of a nuke + commando war between us, which is what we're trying to optimize for by beelining nuke techs in the first place. so i will probably go for it even if we do not plan to swap to police state.

not to mention, while the denial value is the main argument for going for the GG here, obviously WE could make good use of it ourselves. not as good as they can since we can already mass-produce commandos, but a morale + commando unit could be very helpful for the specific task of sniping an mjmd culture city.... or we could use it to unexpectedly add movement to a transport full of units, that kind of thing. i'm sure i'll think of something

oh and paratroopers. i would also like to be able to rationalize the use of tokugawa paratroopers please

now watch as i open the turn to mjmd snagging the GG out from under us 

SD's response to our 25-turn proposal:



but civac did NOT respond. well that's ominous!



lolgraph

OH YEAH i almost forgot





chichen itza and statue of liberty: name a more iconic duo

i bet this is the first game of civ4 at RB in which someone built exactly those two world wonders, and no others

also check out that utterly nauseating 1-turn factory..... that's with zero overflow and no, it's not close (we are dropping 345 (!!) hammers into it and might still manage a 1-turn even after we farm back over the workshops)

ok now lemme just spend like a full 15 minutes scrolling through all our cities to reallocate our shiny new specialists to their proper roles (of engineers, to accelerate all these factories, which is a nice side benefit i hadn't thought of when going for this build.... instead of what the game apparently wanted to do which is put them all on spies )



oh shit yall, civac actually moved their worker off the forest without roading or chopping in response to my bigass stack in work ethic <3333 hooooly awesome i cannot believe it

and you can see that they have decided on advanced flight, of all things, as their next tech to allow for gunships and (probably the real reason) jet fighters. it's an optional tech along the space path, which tells me they agree with us that this game will likely still end militarily, and i thiiiink it's a bit of a tell that they are not that close to a commando factory since, and when is the last time THIS has come up in a game, advanced flight obsoletes the stable and there is no easy way for them to replace those 3 XP it gives (not to mention gunships obsolete cavs anyways)



so i did choose to settle this niche - as you can see, the city itself is already worth having, making 17 beakers/turn and 5 hammers at size 1 while costing only 10 gpt * inflation in maintenance. maybe it won't be worth it after the GA ends, but of course it will come out ahead again once it starts growing onto the 5 wasted desert hills it has in range.

conveniently, circumstances arose to allow these desert filler spots to be named after the three rikishi who rose from the second-highest juryo division to fight in their first top-division tournament this september (so, right now, if you're interested!)  that's shirokuma, onokatsu, and one other who we will get to shortly..... none older than 25, and all looking like pretty promising young faces of the future

to say nothing of the guy for whom we named our LAST desert filler spot



who, at 24 and in his eighth tournament ever (not just in the top division, EVER), is on an ozeki run and leading the tournament   and looks very very likely to be promoted in november

just um.... please don't ask how takakeisho's doing, unless it's about the statue of liberty

ok fine, i'll show you guys the other filler now because



i just think it's so, so funny that the game actually thinks we should settle here  (and yes, we're heading for the exact location of that blue circle)



well well well! nauf's bigass stack is on the move! apparently not all in one piece either, as you can see from the little packets of 6odd cannons or rifles fanning out in multiple directions

after scouting and zooming further out:



i'm really feeling no surer of what they're up to..... looks like they've just done a uniform-ish dispersal of ministacks through their territory. if there is a larger stack headed in some specific direction, it has been seriously diminished in number by all these accumulated little reductions....



we have lost sight of civac's southern fleet.... a retreat to their home waters looks likely. but to what end...? mjmd knows better than to follow, of course, so this stalemate and blockade seem likely to continue



the northern fleet, meanwhile, has reached roughly the center of our north coast, so now it is wakatakakage, hokutofuji, and adulis's turn to get gigantic piles of obsolete defenders shifted over to them. and this is roughly why we went for rails before assembly line despite the hideous cost to our development - man how screwed would we be right now if we lacked the movement speed to be able to do this. at least we will be ABLE to stack 40 guys in aksum when it is putatively-threatened in a few turns (even if many of those will be commandos who i badly do not want to get attacked in a city)



realize to my dawning horror that these guys are all going to have to be mixed throughout our territory in 4-unit ministacks just like nauf has done, to avoid the catastrophe of civac hitting this big stack with an infinite-range icbm.... wow do i ever not wanna do that

man it's only the first turn and i'm already exhausted.... ok, quick triple-check to confirm that i am, indeed, ok with this deeply silly fascism research, then hit enter and cross my fingers that mjmd didn't have the same thought on the same turn



tobizaru matters! kinda!



got emmmm



mjmd finishes hollywood in DrunkenSailor to shave another chunk off their finish date ((( down to 73 turns now, with, again, no use of the culture slider and no last-second great artist pops



we finish our first two factories in takakeisho and aksum, both of which can easily 1-turn coal plants, and, look out world, are about to add ten billion more..... i thiiiiink the next tech for us to just completely annihilate should be combustion, so aksum can kick out like, exactly one destroyer to scout for subs. the rest of our north coast will start on a real naval buildup as it industrializes, natch



hungary rush hits fourth-ring borders after one eternity of running artists!!!! of course that mjmd city across the water now has FIFTH ring borders so we may not even gain ground on them in so doing D: but the hope is that our having numerically more cities in this area with overlapping ring bonuses will start to facilitate real movement



shirokuma WILL become a good city, i swear to god.... idc what i have to do to make it so (but of course working 8 extra windmill equivalents is a crazy payout for this price, even adding on the 12 gpt it generates for mjmd



ugh

horrible thought: what if their plan with the northern fleet is to move it just above aksum, wait for an icbm to finish (say, in 5 turns, with our cow pact lapsing in 3) and then nuke and kill the city ) is there even anything we can do if that is the case

im so tired, no more double-turns for me

edit: mjmd, with no help from traits, is, i believe, no where even remotely close to a commando factory. they don't even have west point, as far as i can tell by squinting at their core. oh and if we were worried about it, their heroic epic city is HERE



lolllll

trying to find their ironworks so we can know where the first icbms will pop up, but my eyes hurt from too much squinting ask me again tomorrow

i also kinda screwed up here this turn:



i had the bright idea to try windmilling this hill next to kirishima again, but after moving a worker over, belatedly realized the geopolitical context. really, they back down from roading the forest next to work ethic, and i'm going to repay that, on the same turn, by moving my own worker such that their city can be 1-turned if i choose to road?? yeah, seems escalatory and like a major diplomatic bad call. only solution was to delete the worker, which i actually ended up doing! ouch, but i'll pay 60h to avoid unnecessarily pissing off civac at this point (in addition to the not-insignificant price of never windmilling this poor bare hill)

remind me why i didn't do this while we controlled ankyra again??

oh and as yall saw, the game's out of names for the great generals.... so i guess we should make our own

[ljubljana]

at the risk of sounding even unhingeder, now might be a fine time to pick up military science..... it establishes thst we do have SOME way to hurt them if they mess w us, and also what does it say to civac about our last turn? it says, look at me, i got the fascism GG SO THAT I could make some commandos..... ergo, aksum IS NOT capable of making them already

edit: cute idea ljana but the natural interpretation is prob the opposite, and the one you had when going for the GG in the first place: look civac i need one more GG to make a commando factory, please burn my heroic epic + west point city!

[Tarkeel]

Hot tip: The Wonder screen can be swapped to show national wonders in all the cities you've scouted, which is quite useful. (I'm still catching up on some 100 odds turns since I covered for Nauf ages ago)

[ljubljana]

Hot tip: The Wonder screen can be swapped to show national wonders in all the cities you've scouted, which is quite useful. (I'm still catching up on some 100 odds turns since I covered for Nauf ages ago)

!!!!!!! are you serious time to fire my opthamologist <3

274 (that's a big number.....)

the turn wormeth (its way into my subconscious) (i'm having dreams about pb75 again....)



with coal plant in place, we have not a single item available that takakeisho will not 1-turn..... not even 500 hammer mt rushmore  i think mining inc executive is the right play though.... i don't see a way for us to catch up in MFG without spreading it around, and of course takakeisho is, so far, the only city with the ability to do so. to spread it most efficiently, my plan is to find one city to the west and one to the south of the capital that can also 1-turn executives first, ideally cities that can be reached in one turn from takakeisho without waiting on travel time. the limiting factor here will be the 3 executives that we can have active at once, so it will be important to chain 1-turn executive constructions into same-turn corp spreads to the extent that we are able to. i'm thinking ichiyamamoto for our western territory and daieisho for the south, with daieisho's first missionary *cough* excuse me, executive, going to ura who can start making inroads into former greenline (just as it did with judaism back in the day)



we finish 7 factories and start 2-turn coal plants, and oxford in hoshoryu, which starts a factory. and aksum finishes its coal plant and returns to spamming infantry as is its inescapable destiny

right i'm supposed to "check the event log" during these turns, probably not important but i guess i should do my due dili-



mjmd adopts SLAVERY??? UM.... UH OH 



so who are you going to wipe off the face of the earth with your large number of new icbms? surely not me, ljubljana, your beloved best friend who has stuck with you all game even when they probably should have been dogpiling you, and would never ever even think about betraying you right? right...?

well, now i have to think about military science for a different reason.... what if we wake up tomorrow to all of civac's nuke-capable cities having been themselves nuked? should i be preparing, this turn, to pounce upon them with commandos? oh wait i can't, still 2 turns left on the cow pact

game might just be about to end, to be honest.... if civac is about to get slammed to the point where they are not realistically able to build their own icbms, a coalition of the rest of the world probably does not beat mjmd anymore, who has not exhausted their ability to whip down for more icbms should they so desire. it's not like we can do anything to stop this, really. and of course, if the first wave finishes civac's ability to effectively oppose them, we are the natural target of the second wave

yeah, i admit i didn't see slaving down into kremlin ICBM whips coming.... that's a move civac can't pull off (and is possible only due to the christo redentor, nice!) and i suppose means we've really been underrating the gulf between india and the rest of the world here. but equally, if we had seen it coming i'm not sure there's anything we could have done. just too far behind in tech, in yields.... in everything really, and needed the ottomans alive and functional as a counterweight to india for long enough for us to catch up. sadly, it looks like that's probably not in the cards



in my tilting i forgot to build the roads before settling, due to being very smart

i guess i just.... didn't quite understand how impactful falling as far behind in tech as we did was going to be, even if we acquired and kept a significant land edge in doing so. somehow i thought having 12 more cities than anyone else would like, eventually manifest itself in an economic turnaround. but what happened in practice was that the tech disparity just kept snowballing, and in order to keep our land edge we bounced from crisis to crisis and fell even further behind economically. mass-rifle drafting so we weren't dead to an infantry push. diverting to cannons, then building 30 cannons, and prioritizing rails so we weren't dead to a tank push. and all the while being way behind the leaders in all the free or hyper-efficient econ bonuses on the tree - printing press, corporation, electricity, the ability to found mining inc and cereal mills - such that even with our extra cities we weren't really catching up in beaker rate at all until we finally had time for a library and PRO market push. and now we finally found some room to breathe and got our shit together economically (by the end of this GA we will have researched something ridiculous like 8 techs in 10 turns) but it looks like it's just too late since there is just a button in the form of nukes that reads "game over, man" at the end of the tech tree....

i think now i'm starting to get why almost every conquest in this game takes place in the knights and cuirassiers era..... earlier conquests are generally not possible against strong opposition, and LATER conquests require a level of investment that sets you too far back to ever compete again in the economic game, and are unlikely to cleanly pay back before the game is over. missing all the first-to stuff in the early industrial era especially seems just devastating.... particularly corporations, which, let's just say i'm starting to see why they've been removed completely in most other BtS balance patches  mjmd went from slightly behind civac to winning in a total romp and it looks like the only real reason for this was landing both mining inc and cereal mills? and in turn THAT came down in large part to great people luck (and, to be fair, the underrated late-game power of the philosophical trait)? damn..... not feeling too thrilled about the balance implications of that set of facts.....



india whipped so far down that we are.... for the first time all game, tops in everything, for this one turn :O and on such an occasion we are talking about concession 

well, i guess this isn't a concession post just yet - i expect that with perfect play mjmd can't lose from here, but there are still mistakes they could make that might change that. maybe, having whipped all the way down into ICBMs, they now won't actually use them and will just do some kind of arms race thing? or if they do use them, maybe they will find a way to do so that is inefficient or ineffective? and well, we have been best friends with india all game and, even if they are not going to make a mistake, i do kinda want to give them a few more turns to play so they can have the satisfaction of launching a crapton of ICBMs at someone 

and in the meantime, let's get ready to shift to the backup plan, of attacking either nauf or civac and trying to race india to domination. this probably can't work at this point, but may as well try it and have a little fun playing around with commandos, yes?

of course if either mjmd attacks and nukes us, or if civac razes aksum, then my delicate heart will break a little and i probably will concede



ohhh boy, here we go, mjmd has joined the game.... are we gonna get to see this LIVE and IN-PERSON?

airships flying ominously over meleti and attaleia..... (i thought about cancelling OB with them but they logged in before i had made up my mind)









2 nukes here, killing someone's GG - was this a giant SD stack?







moved an impi into stonefish to see how badly obliterated it was, then realized that um, maaaaybe this is not the time for simultaneous turns









very disappointed that pitboss hasn't implemented simultaneous-turn nuke-o-vision, i demand a patch



two HERE as well, which i suppose was the location of the ottoman fleet



39 units in aksum, which will survive unless civac's 5 transports are all carrying 4 tanks each, they all attack twice, and they all win every battle. or if they have an icbm, but a) i scouted and couldn't find one and b) i have a weird theory that maybe they might re-evaluate our position on their enemies list after this turn



all told i actually think this could have been way worse for team rest-of-the-world - only 2 civac cities really got slammed, and none were actually razed by surprise commandos or anything (mjmd actually still lacks milsci tech, even). looks like they spent most of their arsenal trading hammers with large stacks of ottoman units, which is actually perfect for us? they are down an enormous amount of pop too from all the whippings (more than civac is down, that's for sure!) which is practically a self-nuke, or a series of them. of course, nothing can stop the land invasion of superdeath that is to follow, but there's so little time left for a bigass land advantage to pay back for them that i'm not so sure that's immediately game-ending.

and of course, none of our own assets got nuked (except maybe some impis?), so i think we're free to pick a side and our choice of unlikely backup plan to try here. i am not conceded, let's see what we can do 

Rather than send a PM, since its most of the world, I am now at war with SD, Nauf, and Civac.

quoted for truth (and because it made me giggle like a 5-year old)