[SPOILERS] ljubljana embraces the dark side

[suboptimal]

Hahaha, would you look at that. You'd think a forest would be a higher priority for the tile picker than all those bare plains and grasslands, but apparently not. Well, I guess I'll wait to see how long our borders will take to expand to clear this, and, in the worst case, we can always do so by buying the tile or accepting the ES hit (ugh). Also, those Lavra yields aren't as high as advertised - it looks like civwiki lied to us and Mato Tipilia is not considered a mountain in-game.

I think when it comes to natural wonders that act as a particular terrain you only get the best available adjacency bonus, not all of them.  This can be checked later by seeing if a Campus gets a +1 adjacency next to Mato Tipila.

Regarding the barbarian camp it is likely that the presence of a camp results in a major tile scoring decrease and puts the tile at the bottom of the ring it's in.  The "natural" order in this case is likely crabs, lake, lake, mountain, camp. However, it's all a guessing game so it might come up sooner (I've never actually seen a barbarian camp that close to a city long enough for the tile picker to try to queue it up as "next").

[ljubljana]

Hahaha, would you look at that. You'd think a forest would be a higher priority for the tile picker than all those bare plains and grasslands, but apparently not. Well, I guess I'll wait to see how long our borders will take to expand to clear this, and, in the worst case, we can always do so by buying the tile or accepting the ES hit (ugh). Also, those Lavra yields aren't as high as advertised - it looks like civwiki lied to us and Mato Tipilia is not considered a mountain in-game.

I think when it comes to natural wonders that act as a particular terrain you only get the best available adjacency bonus, not all of them.  This can be checked later by seeing if a Campus gets a +1 adjacency next to Mato Tipila.

Regarding the barbarian camp it is likely that the presence of a camp results in a major tile scoring decrease and puts the tile at the bottom of the ring it's in.  The "natural" order in this case is likely crabs, lake, lake, mountain, camp. However, it's all a guessing game so it might come up sooner (I've never actually seen a barbarian camp that close to a city long enough for the tile picker to try to queue it up as "next").

I believe I tested a campus during the turn and found that it was +0. Also, I think our Lavra at Everest is correctly at +4, though I'll double-check that as well.

As far as the camp goes, I guess we'll find out. If a lake tile comes up next (we do already have the crabs, I think), we'll probably have to either eat the ES penalty or spend buy the tile, the cost of which would at least be partially refunded by the camp clear. I suppose I should do my due diligence as well and triple-check that you don't take ES by clearing camps with a tile buy/border expansion, but tbh that situation's nontrivial enough to set up in an SP game that I might not end up getting around to it before the turn.

Would I spend 80 gold to buy a tile specifically to avoid taking 3 ES, though? I thiiink the answer is yes, if only because that could give us the breathing room we need to take the +3 from a high-adjacency Commercial Hub instead. There aren't that many guaranteed ES sources in this era though if we can avoid contacting Archduke and CMF, so maybe we could manage both and still scrape under the threshold, but I'm not sure I want to take chances with that this early in the new era.

Update: Just re-tested tile buying, and it looks like it does successfully dodge the ES hit. Not sure about cultural expansion, but I imagine it'd work the same way, since presumably the reason this is the case is that the underlying coding logic only checks for the ES event when an actual military unit moves into a camp, or something to that effect.

[ljubljana]

Turn 70

Here's the setup for a quick takeoff at Nan Madol:



Growth and the Lavra in 3, which will put us at 13 hammers/turn at size 2. Moreover, not visible in this shot is Hungary's watermill, also due in 3 to Eureka Construction - growing onto a lumbermill will boost that to 15 hpt. On the following turn, we'll hit the faith threshold for a settler purchase, and will immediately do so. Unfortunately, it looks like suboptimal is correct and the tile picker really dislikes the barb camp tile. I mean, the mountain first, seriously? This is annoying...but is it so annoying that I'm willing to part with 80 gold or 3 ES to fix it? I'm not sure it is...a monument in NM is already a reasonable second build anyways, and should allow us to grab this tile without too much waiting. Meanwhile, I'll keep our three-archer anti-thrawn garrison down here to take out any scouts that might spawn in the meantime. If one of them activates the camp (and who knows if this is possible on the same turn the scout spawns? ), I'll probably wince, cave, and buy the tile. Obviously, hostile moves from Ioan in the north or thrawn would also change the calculus here. Actually, I think completely surrounding the camp with units would prevent it from spawning the usual stream upon activation due to 1UPT restrictions, so maybe I'll try that before caving should the need present itself.

RH next turn! I think I'm going to take Victor I based on the above discussion, unless some compelling reason not to presents itself in the meantime. We also get our first horse next turn, which will start moseying towards the Matterhorn, as will be the standard for all military we produce going forwards. In the northwest, I get spooked by the fact that our settler would need to spend next turn in range of fogged tiles to reach the GC spot by the quickest possible route, and end up delaying by a turn to play it safe. That city's on track to be founded t72, which is at least not terrible, though if I'd planned ahead better with the escorts and the settler path, we could have had it as soon as this turn, which I'm a little embarrassed about . Well, that's just something to work on in the future, I guess .

I'm tentatively planning to offer Ioan an RoP straight-up in 5 or so turns, I think. That's late enough that I don't think it's feasible for them to promote their whole army and immediately stab us when the DoF runs out, while still being early enough to help show the kind of goodwill we'll need to get the DoF renewed. I'm definitely planning to renew with Ioan if we can manage it, by the way - t113 is still early enough for a cossack attack to be effective should we choose to go that route, and closing out the possibility of receiving a legion push seems like a compelling enough rationale. Thrawn's DoF is more of a judgement call, I think...we'll see what the comparative military situation looks like and decide from there. I certainly don't want to give them free rein to snowball even further ahead with a conquest if we can avoid it, but if it looks like that conquest might end up being us, we may not have much choice...

[marcopolothefraud]

Meanwhile, I'll keep our three-archer anti-thrawn garrison down here to take out any scouts that might spawn in the meantime. If one of them activates the camp (and who knows if this is possible on the same turn the scout spawns? lol), I'll probably wince, cave, and buy the tile.

Barbarians spawn in the fog of war, right? So the camp would either spawn a barbarian two tiles away, or it might just not spawn anything at all. That'd be really nice. I wouldn't recommend buying the tile, because there's no horses or iron near it. The toughest unit it can spawn is a Heavy Chariot, and those aren't hard to defeat at all.

I'm tentatively planning to offer Ioan an RoP straight-up in 5 or so turns, I think.

What's an RoP?

[suboptimal]

Barbarian camps only spawn in the fog. Barbarian units spawn on the tile to the camp's NW unless that's blocked by units or terrain, in which case they'll spawn at the first open tile adjacent to the camp in a clockwise direction from the NW. Units will spawn when the camp's timer says so, regardless of any player's visibility on that camp. In the immediate case all units would spawn on the tile to the W.

[ljubljana]

Meanwhile, I'll keep our three-archer anti-thrawn garrison down here to take out any scouts that might spawn in the meantime. If one of them activates the camp (and who knows if this is possible on the same turn the scout spawns? lol), I'll probably wince, cave, and buy the tile.

Barbarians spawn in the fog of war, right? So the camp would either spawn a barbarian two tiles away, or it might just not spawn anything at all. That'd be really nice. I wouldn't recommend buying the tile, because there's no horses or iron near it. The toughest unit it can spawn is a Heavy Chariot, and those aren't hard to defeat at all.

Yeah, I'm hoping we'll be able to get away with not buying the tile. If the camp activates and starts spawning units every turn, though, and our garrison here is needed to fight off Ioan or thrawn, we may not end up having much choice.

I'm tentatively planning to offer Ioan an RoP straight-up in 5 or so turns, I think.

What's an RoP?

Oh, oops, RoP = Right of Passage = old Civ3-era term for Open Borders that I still sometimes slip into using .

Barbarian camps only spawn in the fog.  Barbarian units spawn on the tile to the camp's NW unless that's blocked by units or terrain, in which case they'll spawn at the first open tile adjacent to the camp in a clockwise direction from the NW.  Units will spawn when the camp's timer says so, regardless of any player's visibility on that camp.  In the immediate case all units would spawn on the tile to the W.

Thanks for the heads-up! One tile to the W is a good position from our perspective, since it's on flat ground and any scouts spawned won't immediately have visibility on the city center. I'm still not sure if they'll insta-activate on spawn, since a) Russia's expanded borders seem to interact with scout activations in strange ways that I haven't yet found a way to reliably predict and b) I'm not sure if barb units get to move on the turn that they spawn, but hopefully this at least means that the odds of that happening are somewhat reduced.

[ljubljana]

Turn 71

Quiet-ish turn today, so here's a religious view screenshot:



It seems pretty clear at this point that we won't need to use a missionary charge at Gran Colombia, which is nice, but what about at Nan Madol? It's worth 24 production to speed up Work Ethic here by 4 turns, which could be worth a third of a missionary? A complicating factor, though, is that thrawn gets their religion very soon (next turn, if current GPP trends hold), which might well increase the spread time here to the point that a missionary use will become clearly the right play. Additionally, the city's growth may also complicate matters, since I think these displayed estimates assume the city will remain at its current size for the duration.

As you can see, Gran Colombia's in position to be founded next turn. We also pick up RH, and take Victor 1, reassigning policies to Ilkum/Scripture/Conscription. Scythia finishes its horse, and starts a builder, due in 3 - RS will do likewise next turn. We're going to have to do some thinking about our tech path post-Construction soon. Machinery seems like a natural next goal, since it's on the way to Cossacks and unlocks an essential defensive unit, but the timing's awkward - we can get Engineering in 10 turns with no boost, but won't get Limes in place for walls for another 6ish turns. I think the solution is to just spend a few turns of research somewhere else while we wait for Limes to come in...but where, exactly? We'll have Castles available, so that could be an option for essentially same reasons as Machinery, though we're nowhere remotely close to being able to boost it. We could also try something along the top of the tree, though I don't see many immediate benefits to most of those techs. I guess we could try Currency just to unlock the CH, but neither RH nor Hungary is that close to size 7 as of yet, and Scythia needs to prioritize its campus.

[marcopolothefraud]

Do you have Celestial Navigation yet? We'd have to research it without the boost anyways, since it'll be really hard to build 2 fishing boats, and then we can harvest Nan Madol's crab for some badly needed gold.

I think you should convert it as quickly as possible, and find something to do with its last charge. Normally (like in Singleplayer), I keep all of my Missionaries at 1 spread and use them for religious combat, but that won't be necessary so early in the game.

How much faith would it take to buy another settler? Where's our Great Writer scouting right now?

[ljubljana]

Not only do we not have Celestial Navigation yet, we also...don't even have Sailing yet . Pushing in that direction seems like a solid enough idea, especially if we want RS's third district to be a harbor...though I'm not sure we do, since we're going to need two markets soon-ish for the Guilds eureka, and I'm not sure where else we can reasonably get them besides Hungary/RS. I don't know if I want to harvest the crabs until we're actually at war, though, as I think NM may end up wanting to work that tile after it gets its harbor up. I'd say the other compelling candidate is Currency, if we think this is the only chance we're likely to get to research it between now and when we need to start getting CHs up.

I think the last Missionary charge should probably just go towards a third religious spread. The most likely site for this is at the future Venetian Arsenal, which will probably go stone harvest -> Lavra -> walls upon founding and is likely to run into problems with thrawn's incoming religion if we try to rely on natural spread to convert it.

The faith cost for another settler is something like 280-ish, so we should get there in 3 turns. Our Great Writer is maneuvering delicately around a barb camp that awkwardly spawned between it and the Ioan border a few turns ago, with the goal of investigating Ioan's troop buildup once it successfully tiptoes around the barbs.

[ljubljana]

Hmm...as pleased as I am with our having survived for this long in a hostile geopolitical environment, and as promising as our turnaround has been over the past few turns...comparisons with Archduke's PBEM17 game, which I imagine is a pretty reasonable benchmark for a strong Earth Goddess Russia game, are very unflattering. On t71 in PBEM17, Archduke had 65 faith per turn, over 50 bpt, 17 gpt, and founded their seventh city. The only arenas in which we're competitive with that game are culture and military power, which we've essentially matched.

Does anyone have any thoughts on where this shortfall is coming from? Some of it surely stems from having to build so many archers instead of settlers early to deter thrawn, which I'm not sure could reasonably have been avoided. It also seems like we slightly overemphasized culture early, and would have been better served by building half a settler or trader in Hungary instead of the second monument, though of course we didn't know how many cultural CS we had nearby when we made that decision. Finally, our scouting was anemic, which caused the above problem, because most of our units were tied down in the early game by first barbs and then the threat of a Nubian invasion. I'm honestly not sure if those factors are sufficient to explain the shortfall, either...let me know if anyone has any retrospective thoughts on what should have been done differently to streamline this start.