[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[williams482]

Couldn't commandos break through at PPTQ Grinder?

There's only three infantry in the city itself, and one other on the rail 1NE. There's a bigger stack 2NE, but that's on your border so a conventional non commando force could break it.

I dunno if you could *hold* it, but it seems like that city is takeable with the units at your disposal.

[ljubljana]

well.... civac has posted what is almost certainly a concession post, laden with callouts directed towards me for not helping the dogpile. which, yeah, i do plan to do as soon as i find an angle that doesn't immediately toast our border cities. but there may not be one until planes or nukes, in which case maybe we'd better concede, we're 3 turns from fighters and further out from bombers or nukes and it sucks to drag everyone through the motions for that long while they seethe with resentment for my inaction. ugh, i hate this part of the game

278

sorry williams, i'm realizing that screenie was a little misleading; that scout is in a different city, and those three infantry are not the stack in PPTQ grinder.... THIS is the stack in PPTQ grinder:



is this breakable with commandos? actually maybe, but we'd need bombers or nukes to do it. bombers are 6 turns away and require a tech that is not on the nuke path.... nukes are probably 9 turns away from us being able to even start making them, and that's if we go for them /instead of/ bombers.... although i suppose we can accelerate this with mass-wealth builds but that means not massing land troops which we are also desperately short of

there are also a bunch more tanks "hiding" somewhat-nearby where our impi can scout them if he moves around a bit... so they could kill those three cities by DoWing us whenever they choose to and we can't really do anything about it, unless we attack first and can take PPTQ grinder. i estimate that it will take at least 8 or 9 more turns to get into a position where that even might be possible, and india will see the bombers fly in and can foil us easily by stacking more troops in the city or, um, simply declaring pre-emptive war and burning the border cities in which we'd presumably need to station the bombers....

really feeling the non-conceders' guilt right now if the others are posting stuff like mig and pindicator were posting at the end of PB74, of the form "i personally want to keep playing but not if it means dragging the rest of the alliance through a chore that they hate" then i want to keep going to at least get to planes and try SOMEthing. but...... if it's stuff like "i hate that i'm still playing, ljub wouldn't have a chance no matter what dumbass longshot plan they tried, just END THIS ALREADY" i might be willing to (maybe, but i'm up in my feelings now so please await another post confirming this when i am less up in my feelings)

[ljubljana]

i know man, i know.....



it's honestly not a terrible place to end the game.... we've arguably moved into second place overall i think, which is pretty good considering our condition during much of the midgame. and we could end it without having to betray either of our gamelong besties. and well, do i even WANT to still be playing, or do i just feel like i /should/? it'd be another month of 3-hour turns, at least, for no better than like a 5% chance to unseat them......

to be honest, right now at this moment, i kinda want the game to be over  but i know better than to snap-concede when i'm (waiting on the stupid pharmacy to stock my meds again and) clearly not feeling all the way there emotionally. this turn, i will prepare to attack mjmd, sooner than i think is best for us but at least it will keep the others in the game. tomorrow maybe i'll concede, i'll let you know

[ljubljana]

well, i've set up an attempt to retake massawa that would come due in 2 turns, and we can at least pillage the roads to our cities at PPTQ grinder with guerillas... there is only one fast worker in range right at this instant so they would not all fall on the first turn of the war (but on the second, they probably would....). that's about all the progress we could realistically make right now though, and i don't have a ton of hope here. still perhaps better than conceding the game lol

[ljubljana]

279-280 double?? maybe???

ugh ok let's deal w this. i guess....



i'll probably do this soon....? idk..... SD down to 10 cities, mjmd in the 50s

and ok, this one's funny



nauf revoked our open borders to try to get us to DoW mjmd.... but..... bestie..... without your open borders i can't set up the attack vector i was (possibly) going to use to attack them next turn ((( so actually this specific threat totally messed up our warplan and thus makes it meaningfully harder for us to attack them.....



and that makes 3/3 :D



yeah you see this nice pile of units nauf? i probably could have killed it next turn if you had not closed borders with me but now i can't and that means it will expand borders before we get a chance to  i get being pissed and wanting to threaten me and all, but this specific threat was super super counterproductive



we have our very own blimps now though so that's p cool



well, decision time.... we can attack nauf and take probably the whole border on the first turn of the war, but face a very pissed off civac (6 turns on our NAP though) and have to rein in india by ourselves.... or we face india and accomplish.... well, it WAS going to be something before nauf cancelled the OB, but now it will be i think literally nothing? we'd just be declaring on them as a show of solidarity, and then we'd get a bunch of indefensible border cities burned? i mean, forgive me for not being optimistic....

but then if we DO beat india with the dogpile's aid we'd be in pole position to actually win the game which is something. while a successful nauf conquest still leaves us way behind india, and civac probably will switch sides and knife us for metagame hygiene reasons (i know i would!)

and of course, option 3 is to stall for time.... tell the others we'll join them in 5 turns, desperately build an airforce in the meantime, and look for a better attack vector than the one nauf just ruined



lol, apparently i cut it too close on health and takakeisho is now actually gonna starve  nice..... unless i can find a way to emergency-farm one of those watermills but i'm actually not seeing one....... after 30 minutes poring over our available workers to try to find some combo that would fix this, i ended up committing one of the most shameful micro acts of this game and drafting from our ironworks city at least its neighbors have extra pop and can take over the tiles we lost...



did yall know that, unlike for missionaries, you can apparently have up to FIVE execs of the same type in queue at once? god i'm stupid

[williams482]

Send Nauf a "I will declare war in X turns" offer, then ask for OB. Make sure X is short and calculated to likely cover an opportunity like this one.

Your friends are fighting, you have to pick one, and you should pick the coalition over the civ currently heavily favored to win.

[ljubljana]

anyways i chose to run research builds in most of our industrial core for eot 279.... seemed better than spamming soon-to-be-obsoleted units (infantry and airships both qualify as this). hoping to get flight eot 280 but it'd be messy, thanks to our brilliant new corp-spam strategy we now need 400 more gold to spend on corporation spreading costs at the end of.... um.... every turn.... next turn i will /try/ to prebuild a round of airships for in-queue fighter upgrades (again, financial situation permitting), then the following turn we can cascade onto a paratrooper wave while we tech radio for bombers (off the nuke path, i know )



there's also this corp cost.... because we have fewer of the relevant resources and it's worth more to mjmd (12 gold per city vs 9 for mininc post-CtH nerf), i plan to only spread cereal mills to a very select number of cities - basically only the ones that otherwise lack the food to work all their tiles. ichiyamamoto is one such city and the recently-founded desert fillers are the two others, and i think that's it. hoshoryu is maaaybe arguable as well since it can eventually turn 8 extra food into 60 beakers via oxford-powered reps scientists, the key word there being "eventually"... but i may keep a couple execs around to bootstrap recovery for any cities of ours that might get nuked during the coming conflict

"hey ljana, if you were always going to spread india's corps around like this, why are you just doing this now and not 60 turns ago?" because of stupid mercantilism of all things, which we were locked into until we could GA-swap to glorious enviro.... there's a very good chance that delaying the GA to bulb scimeth will end up topping my post-game worst-of mistakes list (its biggest competitor: delaying banking tech and the mercs swap for as long as we did in the first place )



btw, after flight pops we will have caught up to within 6 techs of the leaders.... of relevant techs, they are up fission, rocketry, radio, industrial, satellites, and advanced flight, and frankly i'm not sure i think satellites and advanced flight are all that relevant anyways.... pretty surprised that they both went for AF instead of what i expected, a beeline to the laser for SDI..... nauf is not far behind us, missing electricity and combustion but i think they have everything else that matters

and yes, now that i plan to go for radio tech before nukes, that does indeed drop us right at the doorstep of the glorious Internet (3 techs from computers, 2 from nukes)..... i can't believe i'm saying this but um, let's start thinking about overflow chains i guess....... (that means a real overflow chain, with wall street, not that deranged jank we did with the statue lol) (except, wait, that only puts at most 750 hammers into the internet and wall st will then show up on the nat wonders screen the turn after we discover computers, which is a dead giveaway that they can respond to easily with an ICBM......)



remember all those posts i did about "ooh look at me i have a full page of cities making over 30 hammers/turn"

ending the turn still unsure about what i'm going to do. it's not conceding though (not yet....); let's give these hundred turns of building SOME chance to shine (or die). i am probably going to join the coalition but i don't think it makes sense to do so before we at least have an air force.... and i think i'd like to keep open the option of snapping up some nauf cities on the cheap (and probably then immediately plowing in to mjmd's attack force) if they suddenly collapse in the west after SD finishes dying.... so i'm not sure it makes sense to send nauf any committal diplo (and i like that our cancelled OB makes it seem to india like we're wavering here). but i may send civac something, we'll see...

[ljubljana]

Send Nauf a "I will declare war in X turns" offer, then ask for OB. Make sure X is short and calculated to likely cover an opportunity like this one.

Your friends are fighting, you have to pick one, and you should pick the coalition over the civ currently heavily favored to win.

ok, this is a pretty emphatic statement from my most trusted advisor, and i think i am swayed... for metagame hygiene reasons if nothing else (and for trustability-in-future-games reasons....). but i think X had better be late enough that we can accomplish SOMEthing in the first turn or two to un-ruin our defensive position in the south.... radio will be 4-turns after flight at break-even if we run no research builds (and with real units available to build i imagine we probably shouldn't....). so we can attack with a fresh wave of bombers in maybe.... 7 turns? 8 turns?

i'll send them both 7t timers and try my best (and in the meantime i'll try to plan some overflow tricks so we can get a full wave in on the turn after radio tech pops)



civac gets this as well, a request to nuke PPTQ grinder encoded by the standard method

and next turn i may send them something about helping to defend our south coast (i'd do it now but i'd rather not confuse them lol)

edit:



mjmd nukes SD's last remaining stack as we draft humble infantry out of 22-pop cities lol

on a wider scale, as of next turn it looks like we are actually going to survive to reach the modern era, and more or less intact at that..... so that's pretty cool! and a better result than i would have predicted during at least the first 80 of the last 100 turns. looking forward to seeing our land carpeted in all those fancy new slimmed-down windmills

and we managed to get flight in without research builds this turn (although with a LOT of swapping engineer specialists to merchants....) so we should have 8 or 9 fighters coming in next turn via prebuilt airships. now if only bombers had a way to do that... next turn every city that matters (except the SIX on 1-turn corp executives...) will swap to a flight-enabled unit, with the choice of which determined largely by how well the math works out for setting up overflow chains. oh, and whether the unit can reach the putative front in time, as usual (fighters with their infinite-speed rebasing should come from further cities and should be built later, generally speaking, excepting of course for this first turn when they were the only thing we could invest hammers into)

so uh...... anyone have any handy primers about how the heck air combat works in this game?

edit: why can airships see submarines? and um.... what the heck have i been making all these destroyers out of lalibela for? (part 2 does have an answer, which is, oh god, to confront the indian navy as it sails up the WEST coast of the continent after murdering superdeath.....

[ljubljana]

thought: civac's milpower has been stagnant for some time, so they are almost certainly working mostly on nukes in lieu of conventionals right now..... in theory we could, on the turn we plan to attack, send them 2 requests to nuke india's capital while conspicuously swapping research to milsci since they can see our tech choices... then if this is interpreted correctly and they nuke out all the defenders, we can burn the city with a commando morale paratrooper..... this is one of their legendaries and it contains the kremlin, btw

edit: well..... ok on further testing, apparently ONE single jet fighter stationed 10 tiles away can shoot down arbitrarily many paratroopers in a single turn..... soooo this unit might be WAY less useful than i hoped. read the fine print before committing to a strategy yall.......

[ljubljana]

NO my heart (((((((((((((

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