[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

276



SD took our peace deal, and wants..... everything  i'm impressed, they asked for not just all our cities but all our resources as well, and for us to revolt to slavery.... that takes some real dedication to scrolling down in the diplo screen



civac re-ups cow, cool. they took little enough damage from mjmd's nuclear attack that i don't feel that we can plausibly hit them within 10 turns, so i feel good about this - we probably need our own nukes to crack their border cities. now the NEXT cow timing will be a tricky decision as i do think we'll be nuclear-capable within 20 turns, though not 10 (we might be building nukes in 10t but i don't think we'll have any completed yet)

they want us to stop trading with mjmd too but i don't think so..... not until we are ready to commit to actually joining the coalition. no reason to piss them off early and eat ICBMs that might otherwise have gone elsewhere - i think the benefit to india of open borders + resource trades pales in comparison to that consideration. not to mention if they both have OB with us, there is some prospect of them fighting with ground troops in zulu land eventually, which is a pretty inefficient way for troops to be used imo. honestly i think it may be actively good for civac for us to have OB with both sides here, they can pick off india's planes with their scouting units and then what is india going to do, fortify our cities with their own troops so they can stash bombers there?



well, we managed to lure some ottoman tanks out to go fighter-hunting at least... they didn't get the daieisho bomber with their longbow but they did clear out a fair number of the other planes

separately, i'm really impressed with just HOW unhealthy these coal plants are making our cities.... daieisho is just size 13 and is unhealthy even with environmentalism! ugh.... are we actually going to have to build grocers and public transportations (!) to fix this.... well, at least grocers are otherwise-good buildings (+3 health, +25% gold for 150 hammers is good, i think?), and i think with enviro we should manage to avoid public transportations in most places. still though i was kinda hoping to start making, like, UNITS now in these coal plant cities....



at least lalibela's doing ok thanks to harbor health, which is good because we.... are kinda gonna need a navy no matter what we do from here....



anyways we finished a ton of coal plants again and our GA-boosted MFG is closing in on 3k while everyone else is sharkfinning.... i guess that's something
 



we've reached the long-anticipated point of being able to 1-turn mininc executives endlessly from 3 different cities so that's cool... that should account for a 78-point MFG jump every turn until we run out of coal plant cities to send them to, at least as long as our finances can support it (and they should be able to for a while, thanks to the ludicrous power of ikhandas )
 


ok, work ethic, i am sad to say, is going to need a public transportation  or to be drafted out of unhealthiness range but, as you can see, it's working on a great person so we really can't do that yet....



hmm.... well, that's another option - try to hurt india by retaking naufragar cities from them.... sadly i think nauf could have defended this one, but for the bombed-out rails
 


so interestingly, due to all our cities working a ton of biology-enabled specialists, they all got around 3-400 GPP during this golden age.... so it's actually not inconceivable that a fourth GA could be in the cards for us if the game goes long enough. we'd have to rely on some luck from the dice though



ok kinbozan.... you have four unused desert hills, each of which is worth 3 gold and 3 hammers... this town has served us well and powered us through some tough economic times but... i think it's time for it to go :') wow do i ever derive just enormous amounts of perverse joy from burning fully-matured towns just because i can
 


well, here is a big argument that nauf could, hypothetically, make for their continued existence.... you need happy to draft off of, and i need as many of these mininc resources as i can scrounge together.... perhaps we can reach an accomodation (haven't sent that deal yet though as i'm not sure if these prices would be considered extortionate or not...) aaaand then i realized gold is a mininc resource and so maybe i shouldn't be trading it to everyone, whooops...



gonna try this as well, which pays back for us almost immediately (next turn we will have 6 mininc cities, so 4 more resources is worth 0.75 * 4 * 2 * 6 = 36 hammers/turn on the first turn and will only get better from there.... and sent them two more asks of copper/iron for 20 gpt. enabling my mining addiction will actually do quite a bit for keeping me onsides in this war, i'm actually more worried about mjmd seizing nauf's gold and copper supplies in the desert than i am about the actual territory they're picking up (for now anyways)



civac has unloaded that force from their northern navy that i was so worried about.... and yeah, with 4 workers and, indeed, the settler we saw them make in ankyra, aboard they probably weren't cracking any of our coastal cities.... so where are they going  williams, it looks like your theory about an attack from an unexpected direction is pretty likely to prove correct... however, yeah, for now i guess i'd better do my due diligence and shuffle some defenders around so they can't raze gondar or matara, should they be so inclined



check it out yall - we have one, singular real ship!!!! :O
 


ok, now for the hard part.... reps or police state? i count.... 110 specialists empire-wide, with most cities having a library and nothing else, so reps should be worth roughly 357.5 beakers/turn. that's the easy one.... and swapping to the high upkeep civic will cost us 28 gpt * inflation = 47.6 gpt as well, so let's say reps is worth about 400 net beakers/turn right now.... though we will surely draft off much of this over the coming turns

police state, if we are exclusively spamming military units, is..... much harder to estimate. we are in golden age now, incompletely industrialized, and about to start a mininc wave..... so what does all that add up to...? our current mfg is 3025, is that total base hammers or are modifiers reflected? i see that orgrel is NOT reflected (changing a city from a building to a unit does not change the mfg) but everything else seems to be (changing the engineer at takakeisho to a scientist subtracts 7 from the MFG, not 2). and then.... ugh, with all the different hammer modifiers involved i can't think of a good way to derive total base hammers from this besides counting. so.... counting

.....

.....

.....

one eon later: base hammers outside of golden age would be 

98 - 18 + 29 - 10 + 37 - 14 + 61 - 20 + 55 - 16 + 22 - 7 + 38 - 9 + 38 - 15 + 68 - 13 + 49 - 13 + 52 - 15 + 70 - 14 + 49 - 15 + 18 - 5 + 28 - 10 + 23 - 7 + 28 - 8 + 22 - 5 + 53 - 10 + 51 - 14 + 52 - 14 + 51 - 15 + 32 - 11 + 23 - 6 + 66 - 15 + 58 - 12 + 28 - 10 + 53 - 15 + 52 - 14 + 37 - 10 + 22 - 9 + 20 - 5 + 26 - 7 + 47 - 16 + 48 - 17 + 52 - 10 + 39 - 9 + 27 - 11 + 7 - 2 + 43 - 11 + 31 - 9 + 27 - 6 + 30 - 9 + 29 - 8 + 29 - 8 + 13 - 3 + 6 = 1337 WOW that sucked lol

but we also will spread 13-hammer mininc to 45 more cities for 585 more hammers, so that's 1922 base hammers total when topped out, more or less. 1922 * 0.25 = 480 marginal hammers if we're spamming units which DOES beat representation, especially if we feel that a hammer is more valuable than a beaker both generally and in this specific situation...... hoooowever. we really have to be spamming units everywhere for that to hold. if a significant number of our cities are making random infrastructure buildings like all these grocers and the bomb shelters i expect to put everywhere, or on wealth and research builds to alleviate the impact of both the corps and the lack of representation, police state will not come out ahead. is that gonna happen?

well..... clearly our win condition here is military, we will never win a space race and i think there's little point in trying. i imagine that, once our cities are health-neutral and industrialized (so, for the core, within the next 5 turns) every remaining build will be a unit or wealth/research. i also think we can safely pivot away from wealth and research builds once we reach nuke tech, as i doubt anything from the rest of the tree will represent a better build than just more nukes.... other than perhaps SDI which, ok, is actually pretty far down the tree at laser tech and would still require SOME research power, which likely means some cities building research, to attain. and the internet, should we go that route....

hmmm. well, these next 5 turns, in which we are desperately researching towards nukes and will be building units in only a handful of cities since we won't yet be fully industrialized, might matter a LOT.... if we start out 2000 beakers in the hole from 5 turns of losing reps before PS starts to really pay out, and the margin is small, it could take a looong time for PS to come out ahead.... not to mention it will take at least 10 turns just to spread mininc around



nope, tech hole is just too deep, and the amount of non-unit builds i think we'll have to do if we go for PS is too significant. PS will come out ahead eventually but we just have barely any cities ready for nonstop unit production right now, and reps probably gets us to nukes faster. but if we DO get a fourth GA of course i'll go for it

MAN i sure hope this is right...



finally an answer to this question i've been worrying about for 10 thousand years lol

[ljubljana]

heh... big flurry of posts in the lurker thread.... usually that means SOMEone's being a vacillating dumbass and dragging things out too long, and needs to either concede or DO something

i think we'd better figure out what we can feasibly do to hurt mjmd. unfortunately our border with them is a total disaster - 3 huge cities can be 1-turned, and cutting the roads to them doesn't even help because of fast workers.... and then there are 2 cities on the little inland sea between us that can't be defended either, because india's cities there can get transports out and take control of the water before we can.... i HAD a plan for that but it requires paratroopers which we don't have the tech for (pillage all the roads to the city on the same turn as our cities build galleons, and maybe then we have something....). and not to mention our south coast is totally indefensible and will be certainly burned as soon as india can get the transports over

we can send stacks through nauf's territory to try to prop them up.... if they need it which i'm not sure they do.... there is one city of theirs that is super dead but their core seems to not be under threat yet really. we can also send stacks over to SD, is that worth doing? maybe we can kill some units but they'd be trades.... and does it really make much of a difference to kill a size 3 SD city and make india build a new settler? it would be one thing if we could actually hold the ground over there.... unfortunately the core of SD is completely doomed, SD whipped down but i think not for troops, just on the biggest thing they could find to spite india.... so india will be at 60 (admittedly very crappy) cities in about 10 turns and there isn't a ton we can do about it. so, you know, either we FIND something to do that will at least slow that down, or we find a plan to get to 60 cities in the same timeframe ourselves (attacking poor nauf)

i'll take a more serious look next turn but like.... if we're losing 3 size 15 cities on the first turn of a war with them and 4 more once they build a transport, i don't know what the point is.....

or, i mean.... if it's the usual thing with me in endgames, and mjmd is pissed that the game's still going and everyone else is pissed that they're still playing.... well, i still regret taking too long to throw it in after (Civ6) PBEM19 and that could push me over. williams, i might request your evaluation of if the situation looks like that here

[Tarkeel]

heh... big flurry of posts in the lurker thread.... usually that means SOMEone's being a vacillating dumbass and dragging things out too long, and needs to either concede or DO something

There have been a few instances of lurker threads exploding because someone mentioned a book/film/game and everyone started discussing that...

[williams482]

I dunno, this seems reasonably up in the air to me still.

It does sound like paratroopers would represent a substantial tactical advantage. How far out are they if you take the nuke path, and how far out if you chase the Internet instead?

[ljubljana]

after last turn's obliteration of physics tech, we will need only flight for paratroopers. i'm not sure how badly dropping out of GA will tank our economy, but i'm hoping to 1-turn something with overflow next turn; that could potentially be flight, but i'm also tempted by electricity and its hundreds of free gpt from our hundreds of windmills. of course, flight also unlocks fighters which are also a substantial advantage given that our territory is crawling with indian air units at this point and fighters are the only practical counter to those....

electricity also unlocks bomb shelters, which we might maybe want to stick in all our strong cities before attacking the power whose favorite pastime is mass-whipping ICBMs idk if people build those in "normal" circumstances, but at 100 hammers they are really cheap, and if they save a factory or coal plant from nuclear annihilation that seems well worth it. however the rest of this game goes, i think it's pretty much guaranteed that we will be on the receiving end of someone's nukes at some point....

re tech paths, flight is off the computers beeline but it is on the nuke path. electricity is on both. and actually.... somehow we are only 4 techs away from nukes (flight, electricity, rocketry, fission) even though we took the more expensive path through combustion and researched 2 unnecessary optionals. with some judicious research builds it's conceivable we could be there in the next 10 turns

[williams482]

It seems like Electricity is the sensible next target, if nothing else because it will accelerate whatever our ultimate target is.

mjmd's alpha strike, while hardly impotent, seems to have fizzled without really accomplishing anything truly devastating? Which seems like it would favor the slower developing Internet target. I do also agree that bomb shelters seems clearly worth it in any city that seems like a reasonable nuke target. Does anyone know if the -50% damage extend to units as well?

[ljubljana]

some quick sims for today, including, hopefully, the answer to that question.....


 
paratroopers apparently require full movement to airdrop, which is sensible enough mechanically but will alert our target to the possibility of paratrooper attack. how do we fix this? well



they apparently CAN airdrop from a fort, which is one way. if you have enough worker labor, you can fort under any tile with a full-movement paratrooper on it, and airdrop that same turn without giving your foe warning. ok, that's a start, but it still means you have to end your turn while your opponent can see paratroopers on their border....




except ship tricks work, as usual  so, this only works in fairly limited geographical areas, but the sneakiest possible attack would look like this: have transports with paratroopers on them 5 tiles away from a coastal, bare grass tile in range of the enemy. then you can fort the grass tile, move your ships in, and airdrop off those ships all in the same turn, so the opponent doesn't see the paratroopers until they have already airdropped and pillaged all the roads

nukes/bomb shelters:



i tried nuking this poor babylon city with 100 pop, 20 modern armors, and 28 buildings in it a bunch of times.... results are

without bomb shelter:
nuke 1: 4/20 units killed, 16/20 units injured 41/100 pop killed, 8/28 buildings destroyed
nuke 2: 16/16 pre-injured units killed, 25/59 pop killed, 6/20 buildings destroyed
nuke 3: 15/34 pop killed, 2/14 buildings destroyed

with bomb shelter:
nuke 1: 0/20 units killed, 20/20 units injured, 20/100 pop killed, 8/28 buildings destroyed
nuke 2: 0/20 units killed, most units now badly injured, 20/80 pop killed, 5/20 buildings destroyed
nuke 3: 19/20 units killed, 16/60 pop killed, 5/15 buildings destroyed

so it's looking like the bomb shelter helps with pop and units, but not with buildings. that's logical, i guess, but a little unfortunate as i was mostly hoping to use it to save us from having to rebuild factories and the like. using a 1500 hammer icbm to just kill 10 pop is inefficient, but if it kills 10 buildings as well that's devastating. especially since i am pretty sure the icbm used on stonefish took out its ironworks (!!) so national wonder cities are just going to be a good target for nuking and there may not be much we can do about it....

the bomb shelter itself escaped destruction in my tests, though i didn't test enough to show if that was always true

also tried filling the city with warriors to see if nuke damage is percentage-based, and actually, even 20 warriors did survive 2 nukes almost all alive (although badly injured)

as for mjmd's alpha strike, well, the nuclear component i agree didn't look very efficient, but the conventional attack against superdeath and naufragar is going great as they are up 4 cities in 2 turns. worse, SD is not really resisting at all and i think they spite-whipped down into something other than units so.... mjmd will probably pick up all of SD's territory while losing only single-digit tanks to bad rolls vs machine guns and the like, and doing so will take them as long as it takes to walk from one end of rome to the other, so about 10 turns give or take. THAT is why this might be a concedable position.... with all SD's cities at size 3-4 and no units having come out of it (so far as i can tell), team rest-of-the-world is effectively down a member....

that's probably where we would have the most capacity to do, um, SOMEthing to stop india in the pre-flight era.... we could send a stack of obsolete garbage (rifles, cavs, and cannons) through nauf territory into SD, as civac is doing, to try to slow india down. but unfortunately, declaring on india from our current position would also accelerate their momentum along a different front, the one in which they take 3 of OUR cities on the first turn of such a war... not sure if that is even a net-negative for india, let alone a net-positive for us....

[williams482]

Love the sneaky shipborne paratrooper idea, and nice job with the tests. So in short, the bomb shelter means they need an extra nuke to kill a city's defenders? That's not nothing.

The obvious spite-whip for SD would be dry whipping rifles/cavs/cannons, no? He wouldn't want to give mjmd more infrastructure. There's even a not crazy military case for doing all those whips instantly (following a round of draftees if Nationhood is in play).

[ljubljana]

actually, let me ask the lurkers explicitly rather than just assume: does anyone know if bomb shelters protect buildings? that makes a big difference; if they do we probably want them everywhere, but if it's just pop and units we probably just want them at the border i think. although yes, needing an extra nuke to kill the defenders is a big deal (unless the city can be reached by 2-movers from enemy territory, in which case even one nuke is probably plenty to bring our infantry into tank kill range....)

yeah, that's what i would have thought but.... his cities dropped by like 10 pop each in one turn. that's no rifle or cannon, even if you're whipping from scratch at the penalty... maybe it could be a cav from scratch, then switch to a rifle, then whip that from scratch too, and produce the units on two subsequent turns.... however we have EP vis on SD's territory and i haven't (yet) seen the big surge of units i would expect if that's what they did. i'll take a look next turn, hopefully i just missed uh, 20 cavs somewhere

[ljubljana]

277

ok, time to deal w this i guess

super exhausted though so pls don't expect more than perfunctory reporting

demos are....



still surprisingly decent even out of GA..... GNP still in first, mfg not as far away as you'd think (not to mention about to gain 70-something points from execs this turn)



civac actually sold us.... one pair of mininc resources, but that's it....?

anyone wanna guess how many billions of uraniums we have?



mmmyep.... so why isn't there a corp that consumes THESE?



mercifully few wealth builds are needed to get electricity down to 1t even out of golden age, despite (or perhaps because of...?) mining inc expenses.... although, ok, actually that does remind me that we need to run a few more than this so we can afford our 3 spreads next turn



hoshoryu is, i think, exactly maxed out, with each of those scientists worth a cool 15 beakers/turn :D



abi, free from the GA compulsion to run max specialists, is ready to grow as high as the caps allow (at the expense of every surrounding city lol)



yeah, definitely seeing some evidence of this theory that mjmd attacked nauf just to steal mininc resources.... and this could be a place to hurt them, i'm pretty confident we could take these cities back, but



here is what we would lose in exchange.... with fast workers all three of these cities can be 1-turned with tanks no matter how much pillaging we do on the turn we attack, and i don't see anything we can do about it unless we take PPTQ grinder on the first turn of the war. but THAT requires being nuclear-capable which we Are Not  or at least having a crapton of bombers in range with which to crack the garrison, to which we are a bit closer but still 2 expensive techs away

no idea what the plan is, if we even have one.... but if we wanna fight mjmd we have to defuse this border somehow. even then venetian arsenal and the rest of the south coast will be monstrously vulnerable to seaborne attack, but at least that i can maybe (...?) live with since we can stack defenders in our cities and force them to use ICBMs to crack them. not that that's great for us exactly but it's something

would love suggestions for tactics we could use to crack this if anyone sees any..... or if folks think it's worth losing 3-5 gigantic cities to join the dogpile, which i guess it might be....

this whole situation is really a testament to the continuing power of the fast worker even post-nerf and even in the modern age, btw.... that single unit is the biggest factor keeping me out of the war right now

edit: oh i should mention: i started drafting at max again. i thought coming off reps specialists would be terrible and inefficient buuut.... not if the cities in question are starving due to unhealthiness and um, we have a LOT of cities that are starving due to unhealthiness at this present moment