[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

question for lurkers: i tested my statement about "if you nuke my units, we will go to war", and it looks like i was wrong:



i apparently can't nuke the sword stack because of the scout sitting next to it, and we get this message about "Cannot nuke friendly territory or units". my questions are 1) is this interpretation accurate and do you know of any way to get around it, and 2) how does this interact with the 10-turn enforced peace from a warpeace? if i were to warpeace mjmd for instance, they would not be able to break it by nuking a tile next to one of my units, right?

edit: asking in reference to the following idea of questionable sanity, assuming we log back in next turn to several captured SD cities and the coalition plan looks doomed: swap research to military science and warpeace both civac and mjmd they should each have a reasonably strong incentive to accept, since rejecting commits me to at least 10 turns of fighting on the other side. if one of them accepts, ok, a side has been chosen for us and we are at least safe against sneak attacks from the other for 10t. and if both accept, that's the free hand we need to race india to the nauf/SD border... especially if we see signs that nauf plans to make their new war with india a hot one

[williams482]

Uhh, wow. Grats on statue, grabbing Fascism and those filler cities seems clearly correct, and whoo baby is shit hitting the fan.

The warpeacing plan is interesting, but it seems like it probably just gets a bunch of nukes thrown at you?

I think one way or another though, now is the time for military science. I wager you'll need those commandos very soon.

[ljubljana]

it probably just gets a bunch of nukes thrown at you?

you mean if the others reject the peace and just take war, or if they accept the warpeace and then we conquer much of nauf in the 10 turns?

yeah, it's a pretty desperate idea; probably only worth going for if there's no other realistic option (say, if mjmd will obviously run over all of SD in very short order)

uh.... do you have any thoughts about what we're supposed to do now, by any chance?

edit: reminder for me that we prob now want transports in the coast, not destroyers.... just in case

[ljubljana]

did they burn one of my cities just for funsies or...??

[ljubljana]

275

well, let's check the damage.... i could have sworn SD's fleet was too far away to threaten our south coast cities last turn, but..... to be honest, i was distracted by the fireworks and wasn't paying close attention to it. it's possible they were in range to raze one or maybe even two cities down there. which is a feels-bad moment, but.... i keep saying i love SD, and this IS the authentic SD experience  if they did burn our cities, i hope they had fun, i'm sure this game has not been much fun for them in a while



or apparently not (still 48 cities according to the score box). i guess the wardec is just a threat to try to get us to join the mjmd dogpile. which, well, we sure have to spend this turn thinking about that don't we.....



it does cut off our long-standing gold for gems deal, so i guess i'll try this (not that i'm really expecting anything)

anyways, we finish 7 or 8 factories, start coal plants, you know the drill. takakeisho finished its executive and immediately maxed out on overflow, leading to significantly more gold income than expected and this very funny screenshot



hmm, we might maybe have overshot here a lil bit, don't you think?



2 captured cities, one each of SD and nauf, and it looks like the plan really is to fight the rest of the world at once here.......

and well..... here is, and i really hate to say this, a major contribution that SD has made on behalf of team rest-of-the-world





spite-whipping down like this really should be banned, in my opinion. the worst thing about it is that it's actually pretty effective - if this game is ending in the next 20 turns (as is almost certain) it seems pretty clear that a size 1 SD city is not really going to contribute to india's wincon in that timeframe. so whether or not this is done makes a big difference in how much mjmd can expect to gain from this conflict, and also in how urgent it is for us to do something (still pretty urgent, but game may still be worth continuing if we fail)

of course, the sad thing is, if they had whipped all this pop down into actual units instead of spite-whipping.... whatever they spite-whipped.... they actually could have killed a few of these indian stacks i think. this stack for instance



is totally killable even at SD's level of tech, by one or two rounds of whipped cavs and cannons



would anyone like to do some target practice on this SD knight  in particular i wonder if we have any units that are close to the commando promo and might get there with a little extra push



i'm a bit surprised they're not doing this but... civac could (and would be more than welcome to) use one of their scouting units to walk into kirishima and kill this mjmd airship



okayyy time to put my literal money where my stated opinions are re mining inc



what a sickeningly gorgeous city, that languished in terribleness for literally 200 turns before suddenly ascending to godhood



even terrible hungary rush finally finished its 20-turn levee :D oh the sublime joy of builderitis



starting next turn, most of our production core in former GT will be fully industrialized and capable of spamming units. and i will swap civics back to nationhood, and probably start drafting at the max rate as well. the question is, what do we DO with that...?



so this impi is standing on a broken rail, and the other impi is just NW of another.... what happened here? oh, that'd be the power of bombers..... interesting..... and with fast workers india can insta-repair these rails whenever they feel like it, while nauf has to wait a turn to move workers onto the hill? ouch...



oh.... if we do plan to warpeace mjmd, this man represents a strong argument for doing it /this/ turn - john maynard keynes..... he is clearly headed to our territory on a trade mission, so it's actually worth a few thousand gold for india to accept the warpeace. hmmmmmm. but if that's how this is gonna go, i have to figure out if a nauf attack to deny mjmd the spoils, with commandos and a gigantic hammer edge but not really anything in terms of a tech edge, is even remotely viable.....



hmm... betraying nauf would not be costless though, and probably wouldn't be as easy as i'm imagining either unless they totally get wiped by india in the meantime.... these little ministacks, while totally doomed in open combat with us, are, i think, enough that when fortified in their cities, we would need to use way more commandos than we can afford to break through.... and that means a slower advance and not much chance of successfully racing india to the sea here. i do think we could take the border cities on the first turn of the war and that's something (it's probably 6 decent cities we could deny india at least) but advancing further probably requires exposing slow-mover stacks to collateral and that's sus as hell

but what's the other option? some kind of wait-and-see approach? just do nothing, continue to industrialize, accept that all of superdeath will be conquered and just trust that we can beat a 50-city india with civac's help? seems sketchy at best, by which i mean, seems like there's not a damn chance in hell of it actually working

sigh. and while i think india would (probably?) take the warpeace, what guarantee do we have that civac would? if they see that we've warpeaced india (they move second so they would see that, in a situation where india accepts) they should be pretty pissed off and assume we mean to join india's side for real. in that case, why accept a peace deal?

maybe we just sign two non-public cow/cow pacts instead and just kind of..... trust that nobody will NAP-stab us while we go off attacking naufragar instead? seems pretty foolish given past circumstances lol, but maybe these guys at least care about preserving their out-of-game reputation enough for it to be viable.....

and the last option is to join the global coalition against india now, or to try to find some way to make that happen in the next few turns. but this sacrifices our border cities in former greenline immediately, and i can see no real way to slow them down at our current tech level except maybe by sending a large stack through nauf's land to try to raze former SD cities..... and if we're at war with india, we will need those units to defend not former SD but current zululand......

shit yall. it might be smart to wait a few turns before committing but we also need to make a decision now about whether to block the indian great merchant or not..... ewwww this is a set of facts which i dislike  (posting early in case any of yall have feelings to share lol)

i also have some interest in pitching an alliance win to india rather than stabbing our game-long best friends in the heart.... we probably are not /currently/ in a strong enough position to get such a thing accepted but maybe in some number of turns we might be

[ljubljana]

THAT is a commando gren..... oh jesus, how many of those do these guys have? do THEY have a commando factory they have been pumping grens from forever? ok, that is a serious threat and one i think we have to respond to by a) killing the ones we can reach with cuirs and the like and b) trying to get white peace with them if possible....

i killed 2 of the commando grens, and the knight (which took out a cav at 14% odds ), and will offer white peace.... hopefully that sends a message (and hopefully it's the message we want to send, too, namely "look i like you and want to help but i am not gonna respond to threats and/or bullying" ) otherwise i fear they will look for softer flanks and underdefended core cities, and we do have those things.... meanwhile i think it's prudent to try to do physics next (ahead of milsci) for the scouting, just in case

[ljubljana]

another potentially big problem.... if we don't close borders with india, civac's about to get their oil cut off! there is a bomber in daieisho, and apparently the ottomans have not yet thought of sending guys around through our territory to kill these stray mjmd air units...

edit: i shamefully kept the borders with india open. fighting them now seems dumb as fuck, we have no capacity to hurt them and would need most of our military just to fend off their attacks.... and if fighting them now is dumb, so too is pissing them off for no good reason (i'm not sure i think a trade mission constitutes a good reason at this stage in the game.... esp if it means they are NOT trying for a fourth golden age). if we're gonna stab them, we need to have a plan first and the forces in place to execute it and we really don't but... i did re-up our cow with civac and tell them where the bomber is



they have a longbow right there in range, 3 tiles away, which means they can just walk up to our city and kill it for free right?

edit2: here's the other thing



nauf can just draft a fuckton of infantry if we attack them.... i am not so sure it will be trivial for mjmd to chew through them, nor would it be for us to do so with neither nukes nor bombers

gotta remember to swap civics next turn.... i'm pretty confident about nationhood and theocracy (and sticking with the mandatory serfdom and environmentalism), but very unsure about representation vs police state. we'll have to grind it out with Real Math i think.... i estimate that reps is worth 3-400 beakers per turn (maybe less if we start drafting aggressively), can police state match that in hammers for units? actually maybe..... if we spread mininc around, 50 base hammer cities will become the norm, and 12 hammers * 50ish cities does indeed beat that.... but one might justly argue that our tech hole is of more consequence than our hammer differential as of now.....

[ljubljana]

oh man, i'm feeling some of that sentimentality start to creep in a lil bit too. i don't know if i can do it.... attack beloved nauf with commandos and amphibious infantry off transports the second their guard is down? eviscerate them in their moment of existential crisis while the indian hordes bear down on them? when they have been kind to us all game and when, as ginger ripped our heart out during the greenline campaign and they had every incentive to pounce and start the feeding frenzy, they sent us cow after cow and didn't lift a finger?

maybe if they start to collapse that would be one thing, but idk if i have it in me to implement this "race to the sea" thing even if it were correct strategically. if they ask for cow (and i saw them try to ask for SOMEthing when we were both logged in) i might give it to them, one more time, and let them give it their best shot....

of course, i feel more or less the same way about mjmd and it's obvious we have to do something to oppose /them/....

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Emotions and sentimentality are a real thing in a game played by humans. The cold equations might suggest sinking the knife into Nauf, but you've also got to be a player who can live with himself at the end of the day. It's always up to you to decide what price victory, even in a Civ IV internet game! But I certainly wouldn't judge you for deciding, "No, I won't try to win that way," because I don't view the games as pure optimization problems in strategy-space, but as real human interactions. So do what feels best!

[ljubljana]

Emotions and sentimentality are a real thing in a game played by humans. The cold equations might suggest sinking the knife into Nauf, but you've also got to be a player who can live with himself at the end of the day. It's always up to you to decide what price victory, even in a Civ IV internet game! But I certainly wouldn't judge you for deciding, "No, I won't try to win that way," because I don't view the games as pure optimization problems in strategy-space, but as real human interactions. So do what feels best!

yeah, we'll see. even /if/ we're viewing these games in strategy space, there's something to be said for treating them as one big iterated game and therefore neglecting to take a long-odds shot to win this game in order to be seen as a more trustworthy ally in future games.... but it depends on how long the odds are, and that's a tough thing to quantify, right? i feel that nauf gave up a LOT of winprob by not attacking us all game, especially when we were at our weakest around turn 200, and while we have given up a fair amount ourselves by not attacking them now that we're stronger (and indeed, repaying their kindness is one of the main reasons i haven't done so), i still think they gave up more and so we retain some outstanding friendship debt (so to speak). and.... also i LIKE both nauf and mjmd (at least in the context of this game) and don't want to make them suffer  mjmd i think would understand a stab (i mean, if /i/ am ever running away with one of these games, i'd expect all my friends to turn on me), but for nauf it might feel like a real knife in the guts. we'll see, i'm pretty unsure about what the position even calls for here (and frankly, it could still be concession) but we will need to make a decision in the next couple of turns, i think. probably we'll have to make a decision THIS turn about re-upping our cow with them but i suppose failing to send a cow back is not exactly committing to a stab either