[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

agreed about committing to mining-BW if we wanna rush (or take the more likely option of not actually try to kill someone but DO make some early impis and menace people into not settling toward us so we can claim more land)

a potential attacker won't have any idea when we will actually get it

is this true? there isn't some C&D trick for figuring out which techs out opponents have before alphabet? there was in civ6...

i think people are going to know we're not close to a copper hookup if our second city is settled BEFORE we swap to slavery, we don't have any roads or visible mines, and we're just getting our third city settler out when the attack hits...

[aetryn]

agreed about committing to mining-BW if we wanna rush (or take the more likely option of not actually try to kill someone but DO make some early impis and menace people into not settling toward us so we can claim more land)

a potential attacker won't have any idea when we will actually get it

is this true? there isn't some C&D trick for figuring out which techs out opponents have before alphabet? there was in civ6...

i think people are going to know we're not close to a copper hookup if our second city is settled BEFORE we swap to slavery, we don't have any roads or visible mines, and we're just getting our third city settler out when the attack hits...

Actually, now that you point that out, there's a problem with punting The Wheel and that is unless we settle on copper OR the copper happens to be riverside, it won't be connected anyway. And even if we do settle the second city on copper, the first city can't use that copper until we connect via road, unless again the copper is riverside.

Basically we need The Wheel and Bronze Working to be able to realistically build Impi in our capital.

To answer your actual question, there are two ways they can know if we have copper hooked. Knowing Bronze Working grants military power rating that's higher than any unit, so it's fairly distinctive especially early game when there are few opportunities to build multiple units in a turn. But the opponent seeing this requires either a) we're rival best, they somehow know we're rival best, and they're tracking rival best power every turn (highly unlikely) or b) they have graphs on us, which requires a bunch of turns after contact.  The latter will happen, but it may well be another 10-15 turns before we even make contact, depending on the opponent's scouting strategies. The other way they can know is if they have our copper revealed and its in our culture they can see the tile yields.  But the real point is that they can't know when we will get it. Even if they know we don't have it this turn, if it takes 10 turns of slogging through dry plains to reach us, if they commit to the attack this turn and we get BW next turn, they'll get all that way and have no way to win, and the rusher's game will basically be over. Remember if they are going straight to BW, they are either ignoring The Wheel or early food tech. I really think it's pretty unlikely any of the players in this game does this with 14 squares between capitals.

If you want to "menace" an opponent with an Impi, I'd suggest not being so aggressive as to start a war (or guarantee a future war). All you really need to do is show the opponent you have one and fortify it on a nice defensive tile on the edge of our borders (so we aren't paying extra maintenance on it). That will force the opponent to build escorts and pull back from aggressive settles but won't put them into "You ruined my game, I might as well spend the rest of this match ruining yours" mode. We'll know more when we see who our neighbors are.

[ljubljana]

righttt so if we want to have access to impi in time for hypothetical WC, we really have to go mining - BW - wheel and delay AH for a while. but with 3 foods at the start that all require different tech, there was never really a way around that right - 6 researches just is too much to get done by t40 with just the palace.... what in the world would a mysticism civ be doing here, opening meditation and then having to choose between having axespears in time for a rush OR getting literally any food hooked up at all besides possibly one with the second starting tech? that....that kinda makes me want to try it ourselves, if we neighbor such a civ

is it really typical for the plan at the opening to be "it doesn't make sense for someone to rush us and rushing BW costs us serious foodhammers and early commerce, so we just bet on them not trying it and if they do we probably die?" i agree that there's a good chance it has the highest expected win probability if it IS sufficiently unlikely that someone tries it, but man...... if doing that is standard, a lot of games must get randomly thrown into effective no-win situations just based on neighbor and scouting luck.......

re menacing: agreed on that general plan, if we go for fast bw. do units cost extra maintenance in this game every turn they spend outside your borders, even if you're below the threshold for number of free units? also, is that extra maintenance halved by AGG? having to stay next to our city would seriously limit our strategic options

[ljubljana]

guys i caused a (minor) problem with the BW-first start by putting a turn into AH last turn



working the 3h tile on t18 now leaves us one beaker short of finishing BW in time to chop, so we have to work the ivory.... hoping that's ok and we don't lose the worker-turn that it's supposed to save us

update: here is the worker-turn i was worried about, when we are JUST at the line for finishing the second worker on t30:



thankfully it's ok, which means working the ivory was right anyways since we want to start growing after this. but we have ZERO beakers of additional slack on this plan, if we're switching to fast BW we have to commit this turn

although this is the turn we're supposed to flip to slavery so i guess it's not quite that nice

there are some ok timings here, if we don't have to hook up copper immediately at city 2, we can at least start farming the wheat just one turn after founding. the second worker comes out to start the road .... one turn before we get the wheel because i put a turn into animal husbandry >((( but i'll just chop with it instead or do the camp like a good person

[aetryn]

righttt so if we want to have access to impi in time for hypothetical WC, we really have to go mining - BW - wheel and delay AH for a while. but with 3 foods at the start that all require different tech, there was never really a way around that right - 6 researches just is too much to get done by t40 with just the palace.... what in the world would a mysticism civ be doing here, opening meditation and then having to choose between having axespears in time for a rush OR getting literally any food hooked up at all besides possibly one with the second starting tech? that....that kinda makes me want to try it ourselves, if we neighbor such a civ

is it really typical for the plan at the opening to be "it doesn't make sense for someone to rush us and rushing BW costs us serious foodhammers and early commerce, so we just bet on them not trying it and if they do we probably die?" i agree that there's a good chance it has the highest expected win probability if it IS sufficiently unlikely that someone tries it, but man...... if doing that is standard, a lot of games must get randomly thrown into effective no-win situations just based on neighbor and scouting luck.......

re menacing: agreed on that general plan, if we go for fast bw. do units cost extra maintenance in this game every turn they spend outside your borders, even if you're below the threshold for number of free units? also, is that extra maintenance halved by AGG? having to stay next to our city would seriously limit our strategic options

Well remember that AH gives chariots which counter axes. Unless your opponent is doing a chariot rush you don't need BW to counter. You probably don't want to avoid BOTH military techs (BW and AH), but one is generally enough, and it's usually best to take the one that gives you the better economic boost (which can be BW if you have no animal food and chopping really helps your timing). And yes, that's the essence of a farmer's gambit. If a neighbor attacks us and the 8 other players all run farmer's gambits, it's unlikely either us or our attacking neighbor wins the game, because their econ will be set back too much. This is especially true with long distances between capitals. They have the choice of razing all our cities, which gets them basically nothing - there's no guarantee they even get the free land, and in fact it's more likely our neighbor in the other direction takes it since they've been expanding and not building military. Or they can take them, and face very high maintenance costs from the extended distance and impossible supply lines to reinforce. If we had a gem of a capital, it might be worth it, but this is pretty average land. And generally, I'd rather die fast or be in a competitive position then be overly defensive early and fall behind the snowball. Because then you're stuck playing possibly for 100+ turns in an environment where you need everything to break just right for all the leaders to get slowed down to where you have a chance.

There are two "free" supply limits, one for total number of units and one for total units outside your borders. The latter is very very low - usually scouts and workers roading are enough to consume it.  You pay maintenance for a unit in either category (including basically double if you're both over your total units limit AND your total units outside your borders limit). I don't know whether AGG works on both but I was assuming just the total number of units one. That incidentally is another reason why early rushes are painful on long distances. Let's say you build 4-5 axes and send them across 10 tiles to attack your neighbor's city. You're probably paying at least 1-2 in total units with a city count that low, and you're probably paying 4-5 gold every turn they're marching across the wilderness. 40+ gold is roughly an entire early tech they're effectively down because their units were outside borders. Capture gold can help offset that, but it's still a risk. If this was tighter borders, I'd totally buy more caution, but this game was basically set up to be as unthreatening in the early game as possible. We didn't pick Zulu primarily to use Impi or because we were too worried about an early rush, we picked it because the techs were great, we want the maintenance reduction from barracks, and the early deterrence was more the cherry on top. Yeah, the snake pick had a bunch of AGG leaders go, but my expectation is those are mostly for later-game when standing armies get large.

The one problem is Egypt. If we're next to Egypt and they decide to chariot rush us, we'll want Impi. But even then they have to choose us, and there will be a number of empires that don't have spears ready to go in the first three techs, so they may even go after a different neighbor.  Everyone else, including Rome, isn't going to be oriented towards early rushing and are less likely to be using chariots anyway. My feeling is it's far too unlikely to feel like we have to have BW as the second or third tech (I wouldn't delay it past fourth though). I'd need to see a good micro plan for Mining->BW to really be able to compare.

[ljubljana]

well, here is my first stab at a micro plan with BW first that seems at least decent:



i do like that we have not had to waste worker turns on a full road to the second city to get the TR hooked up. and we have delayed improving the cow for a very long time but it's not all bad, we have two chops coming in that threaten an impi if our second city does happen to be on copper, or it could be a very fast third worker, and i think t42 is not bad for the third city settler?

if we're settling for first-ring copper (or horses if we do AH first) instead of next to food all this nice micro stuff could potentially all go out the window though

[aetryn]

Is the deer forested or not? It looked like it was in game but it looks like it might not be in your simulation? That will make a difference on hammers. And possibly on timing if you were counting on moving onto the deer and camping it in the same turn.

[ljubljana]

as direct a comparison as i could manage with AH-wheel:



we are slightly behind on the settler, slightly ahead on the third worker (or on growth in the second city, if we choose to go that route). but the main thing to note is that we had to keep our capital one size smaller in order to maintain a similar settler timing, which is probably going to cancel out some of the extra snowball we get from the early cow hookup. granaries will come in slightly faster here but not by as much as i'd initially thought, since we haven't had enough worker labor to improve the ivory yet or the growth headroom at the capital to grow onto it. not sure i'm convinced that either way is cleanly better as of now

edit: oh and i think we're not in slavery yet which is slightly everything-worsening

[ljubljana]

deer is not forested ingame



since it isn't dependent on our tech path and might give us more information, i decided to at least do our scouting move to better inform our sims:



but honestly it didn't really other than show us some much-needed green tiles at the presumptive second city

[ljubljana]

another candidate that i don't hate: AH + wheel first, but improve wheat - deer - cow so we don't have to build as many roads or work as many unimproved tiles. second city founds on t31 with trade route established, and can start working the cow immediately without forcing the capital onto the ivory:



slow BW means there are wasted worker turns here though and we have to build an unneeded road anyways:



result:



probably cleanly behind both other options. we're not in slavery here yet either

note: 5 hours left in the turn and it's a soft deadline for committing one way or the other. one more turn into AH breaks the BW-first plan so if we do that we're committed. we can afford 2 more turns into mining before we have to switch to AH or miss out on roading to the second city. if we are still undecided by the time the turn rolls i'm planning to switch research to mining so we remain uncommitted (and because i am slightly leaning that way as of now)