[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

logged back in because of this



that plains hill road that our longbow is standing on is going to keep GT's road connection alive with the rest of the world via the river, isn't it

it had a mine on it at the start of this turn, which i logged in to pillage, but unfortunately we had just the one unit in range.... at least NEXT turn we can cut them off for real if that turns out to be the case

also, this:



yeah they are REALLY pissed that we're still trading ivory for wines with ginger. what do you guys think, is it against the spirit of fish/fish to cancel that deal? we DO have our own wine source now so it's sort of redundant, but we need borders to expand at gondar and to build a winery in order to claim it. mostly i just don't want to do anything that could be perceived as not good-faith by ginger as that seems like the one way we COULD still bring the spearhead of their stack down upon our head

maybe if we do decide it's too early to cancel, i will at least send SD the message that we'll stop trading w ginger in 10 turns or something, to hopefully temper their wrath a little

[aetryn]

Resource trades come with a built-in cooldown. If you're past that, I don't think anyone interprets fish for fish meaning "I promise not to cancel a resource deal I don't find favorable any more".

I think at this point the primary thing is whether we want to tip Ginger off to worsening relations though. You might prefer to give him very little warning about war when we go in (though he'll probably scout our forces moving back and be at least somewhat prepared).
But equally you might want some goodwill with Superdeath for later.  I'd probably signal in some way but not actually cancel the trade yet, just to avoid tipping off anything more than you can.

[ljubljana]

yeah, my thoughts are similar. they are using the happy to draft so we don't want to supply them forever but..... the reason you buy happy resources off your neighbors and then draft is presumably because drafting INTO unhappiness would be worse. so it seems like it'd be worse for ginger, and thus better for us in a war, to let them draft to their happy limit and then cancel the ivory deal than to cancel it now and give them a warning to stop drafting, yes?

Turn 159 - Zululand



our push for EP vis is in the process of succeeding against ginger.... and um, it has been 10 turns since they finished taj and they are still getting golden age production.... do we not get a notification if they chain 2 GAs together? and they are apparently picking up compass as their next tech, which i don't really understand unless it represents a prelude to astronomy to dominate the seas with galleons, privateers, and amphibious cuirassiers. we have less than zero hope of stopping that, of course, but at least our exposure to coastal attack is limited and composed mostly of weak cities



oh gdi.... gt does indeed still have a trade connection with superdeath, which they used to whip a thirteenth pikeman this turn (((( and it has formation, nice, though i think lack of fortify bonus should cancel that out. i pillaged the road on the plains hill but the trade screen says they STILL have iron.... maybe because the river goes to gondar, via which they can use OUR trade network to reach superdeath. well, no realistic hope of cutting that off unless we DoW SD, and i'm not going to do that to deprive GT of one last turn of iron (not least because they'd have to dry-whip a fourteenth pike if they want to produce one this turn, and they don't have the pop for that anymore)



great scientist in atamifuji. so as you can see there is a tiny chance that our plan fails and we don't get a golden age..... the autogovernor apparently decided to work a scientist in mitakeumi for one turn at some point, and unfortunately i did not catch it in time. so we have a 3% chance of a catastrophic, game-ruining double scientist pop - delightful. but if we had gone with the original plan of 2x merchant + 2x scientist in kirishima we'd now be staring down the barrel of a FIFTY percent chance of that so uh, good thing i obsessed over that for hours and hours back then



anyways, i think we go in next turn. we do get 2 more attackers on each of the next 3 turns if we choose to wait, but further delays would take us further out of position vs ginger, of course, not to mention allow them to whip all the way down to size 1, which i'd like to avoid if we can manage it. you can see i have arrogantly started to build some roads IN ethiopian territory to allow our units to evac if we do pull off the conquest next turn

as for whether we would get our precious third great general by attacking next turn, well...... my sims have us getting somewhere in the range of 82-87 total XP..... and as you can see we need 85......

if ginger is going for astronomy we might need to back away from this plan to do the heroic epic in aksum though. it might just be too exposed to burning from the sea, even if we drop a bigass pile of muskets in there

[williams482]

If they are actually getting trade access to Iron through your own territory then that's just whacko.

Fingers crossed for the attack on Aksum.

[ljubljana]

i mean. the operating theory BEFORE we pillaged the roads was that they were getting it through nauf's territory, who they are also at war with. not sure why the game would treat our territory any differently.....

damn smugglers

--------

with the GA hopefully incoming, we need to start thinking about great person generation again, which i am not too thrilled about.... kirishima is no longer a candidate as i grew it onto 4 new plains cottages in distant anticipation of oxford, devouring its food surplus. wakamotoharu WOULD be a good option with our highest theoretical food surplus and with +1 GPP for free from moai, but..... i think it's too exposed to ginger (from both sea and land) and also i uh forgot to build literally a single specialist-granting building there ever LMAO (it was stuck on moai for forever, and has been on units ever due to the unending wars). atamifuji worked for the 300 point GP only because chichen itza did half of that by itself; obviously that's not an option for the 500+ point costs of the next GPs (watch this space post-biology though)

so what options DO we have? we need a national epic city pronto and i think hoshoryu and mitakeumi are the best options, probably the former because mita is still a ginger border city.... so micro to get a full food box in hoshoryu and NE finished when we pop the GA, then run 2 merchants, 2 scientists, and a spy. we probably have to build a theater/temple/forge in some combination as well, so that after the 500 point GP, it can start on another one that is guaranteed not to clash with the first.

and then what? we have a few dirty-pool options like mitakeumi, takakeisho, and abi, but they all have flaws (too exposed, too high hammer opportunity cost, also too high hammer opportunity cost alTHOUGH NE + ironworks in abi would be an interesting combination for the distant future). and i do not see an easy way to guarantee 3 non-clashing GP.... we could run specialists in 4 cities and cross our fingers but that has its own drawbacks. i also think caste system, even just during the GA, is out of the question as we have hit the "working 50 farms" part of the game and i don't think we can drop serfdom just to stick 5 artists somewhere to make the dice rolls feel better.

we could also just..... NOT get a third golden age and try to get into our endgame civic configuration now.... i would be content with running nationhood, serfdom, vassalage, and theocracy (note that these are exactly ginger's civics lmao) for the rest of the game. but that leaves economy which is messy as we have no non-blank options yet. we could research banking for mercantalism but that's a major, awkwardly-timed beaker investment for what i consider to be somewhat speculative benefits (i do not think the free specialist currently comes out ahead of dropping back to domestic TRs, even PRO ones, in most cities, although further warring may change that). and i think we prefer environmentalism for the endgame since we're beelining the tech and i think at bio we will average something like 4 worked windmills per city). but we could just swap to that at the anarchy turn and free up a ton of foodhammers now from long-payoff-horizon great person stuff (which we would use on more troops, duh).

i would like to say that skipping the third GA saves us philosophy research, but it doesn't as we need it for nationalism anyways. but in thar vein, if we do philosophy next after gunpowder we actually might accidentally found taoism, as it is somehow still on the board lmao (ginger got there via divine right). not that we have that much we could DO with taoism but it is very funny (and there are a few eligible spots in the west that would make good use of the holy city culture)

[ljubljana]

so um.... sources are telling me that nationhood conflicts not with hereditary rule, as i had somehow managed to convince myself, but with ultra-mandatory vassalage? dropping which would cost us a promotion level literally everywhere unless and until we research theology and spend roughly one vigintillion hammers converting every damn city to mjmd's judaism?

ok, i am starting to get Bad Plan vibes from this. if each of our first wave of draftees also has to shoulder the cost of a missionary from some other city, AND are sapping strength from our naturally-produced troops in the meantime, it'll be some time before we can hit the efficiency levels with it that ginger's already getting. yeah that's nice, just real nice....

[williams482]

Umm, whoops? I assumed swapping out of vassalage and accepting less xp to get a swarm of units with three free promotions out was an expected tradeoff here. Especially if the units we are likely hard-building the most of are either 1) mounted, and likely to hit promotion breakpoints with just stables, or 2) siege, where our free barrage promotion solves the most critical promotion break point (accuracy) already. That does mean the draftees would only come out with 2xp for a promotion from the handful of cities already blessed with Judaism, but combat 1 drill 1 plus another promotion after surviving any kind of combat is still reasonably strong for units produced so cheaply.

[ljubljana]

hmmm well. i am not so sure accuracy is the critical benchmark for siege in this situation, where their major function is to give us any kind of a chance against ginger's gigantic stacks.... over the course of ten thousand aksum sims i have developed an increasingly large crush on barrage THREE, which gives +50% extra collateral by itself, as good as barrage 1 and 2 combined.... AND +10% against gunpowder for no apparent reason!

and as for stables..... we have no stables i am also not quite sure how many mounted units we want to make generally as they compare pretty poorly to tokumuskets anywhere except for in enemy territory on flat ground. i might make a few cuir rounds when we get there but other than the one knight i randomly made in the capital to parade in front of our neighbors, idk if i'll make any more

meanwhile the one promotion our draftees woild be missing is pinch, which represents a huge swing between our draftees and theirs

that said, i don't think we're beating ginger (in war, or in the game if no war and they therefore eat drey) without drafting.... i mean just LOOK at the power graph - we are second in troops and down to 0.7x their milpower and falling fast i think we just have to bite the bullet and embrace judaism..... there are at least a few tricks we can pull to make it a little less painful, like hiding almost-finished naturally-produced units in the queue until the rabbis arrive, and preferentially spreading to more draftable cities where we can....

i gamed out (well, brooded over) just bailing and doing the biology rush instead but.... while i think we could get there pretty fast (idk maybe 25 turns?) we don't really have anything to DO with the bio pop besides run inefficient specialists until we tech even more. and in the meantime ginger eats drey, but ALSO bio might be scary enough to then get us dogpiled instead of them despite that..... seems better to try to make gains against or at least box in ginger with drafting now while the world is begging us to do something, and THEN pop a third GA and seek to become inevitable by teching bio on like 35 cities (we can hope)

also thought about seeing if we can found taoism and then spread thst around instead, it being a required prereq for nationalism and all, but we would be starting some 5t later and we already have uh, one jewish monastery as opposed to 0 taoist. lmk if you think that shouldn't have been enough to dissuade me though lmao

[aetryn]

For trade access, the problem is that Superdeath is not at war with you. Resource trades work as long as EITHER party can trace a valid trade route to the other, and since you don't attack Superdeath's caravans of iron, they arrive unmolested.

[ljubljana]

yeah..... and just to make sure, closing borders with SD would not be enough right? i'd have to actually attack them?

well, if we're attacking aksum this turn i guess i think it's better for them to have had iron last turn. it could tempt them to overflow into a pike that they will never complete (since they finished one last turn, i think there is no way for them to get ANOTHER this turn with aksum down to size 4). they also can't dry-whip an archer.... i guess they could still dry-whip an axe but they'd have to be REALLY confident this is their last turn for that to seem worth doing

but if we end up taking two turns to take the city and then they actually get another pike than that will no longer be true...... if that does happen (it hasn't in any of my sims but one of them came down to the last unit) maybe i will DoW SD