[PB78] Underdogs and undercats: The Mrrshan warlords visit the world of Civ IV

[williams482]

That diplo reads to me as SD and Gav "agreeing" to a join attack on Dreylin, but SD is suggesting that we could actually join him against either of those two belligerents. Which seems to be typical of SD's perpetually untrustworthy diplo.

I think encouraging SD to backstab Gav can only be good for us, but I have no faith that he will actually do it and going against Gav with no help would be extremely not ideal. Most likely we can hold the Gav border, but Magic would come crashing in on our other side and do real damage there.

I also think that Reticuli has to be the Heroic Epic city. It's base production can get over 36hpt when capped out on pop, which is nearing the threshold for 1t knights. It's a production monster beyond the capabilities of any other city in our empire and we know units are the most common, most valuable thing we'll be investing mid/late game hammers into.

I am loving the quality of reporting thus far. Thanks for keeping us in the loop!

[Donovan Zoi]

Thanks and right back at you, my friend!  It much easier for me to stay on point when I have a savvy group of consultants who are also invested in the outcome. 

And yes, I’m afraid I got my epics mixed up, as HE in Reticuli is settled policy as far as I’m concerned.  I not so clearly meant the National Epic due to the surplus in great food tiles.  I’ll edit my post now.

The above scenario is exactly why I’d like us to stay in popcorn mode until we get a clearer picture of any chaos that eventually goes down around us.  And the way this thread has been going so far, I’m really confident we’ll arrive at the proper decision if the arrows start turning in our direction.

[xist10]

I don't really think you want to be involved in a war at the moment.

I'm not sure how "safe" the border with Dreylin is, but I think, I would warn Dreylin (if you want to take action).

I think, the KI doesn't attack from a city, if they would have fewer defenders than attackers with a loss.
So the chokos should stay in the city.

[Donovan Zoi]

Turn 127

A bit of a slow news turn except….




We’ve completed the set!  Magic came back with Fish and we now have AI diplo peace with everyone.  I’ll watch for major changes on the Powergraph, but we should be able to grow and tech unhindered for at least the next 10-15 turns.  In fact, another 5 cities will gain +1 pop next turn. It would have been 6 but I added 2 Workers to the queue to exploit our peace window based on Xist’s observation.


Second Thoughts on Zhou




We surrounded the 3 Archers defending this barb city, but now I don’t feel so good about taking Zhou given our prior maintenance talks.  So now my options are raze the city or bail, and if the latter I’ll likely earn the C3 Sword (7/8) promo.  But I think we’ll get at least some conquest gold, enough to get a 3rd turn of research at 100%.

I really didn't want to take a chance on Shady with al the Melee units. I’ve brought a Cat down from Yarrow, which I should have done last turn, as I’m hoping this unit will be enough to weaken the ChoKu in Shady if it strikes. We'll double back there shortly if we're not too late.


Religion Watch




Now that Monasteries are a requirement, I’d thought I’d give you a look at where we best need them.  And I found this discovery fascinating – we have 4 religions within our border!  That’s a potential 4 monasteries in our most commerce rich cities.  I believe even 2 of these buildings will be more cost effective that a Market in a possible wealth economy.

So at some point we’ll start with one, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself – we don’t even have any Libraries yet.

The Map

For fun, here’s each civ territory zoomed out. 

thrawn/DZ




I still think we are the owners of the largest plot of land.  You can really see the spots we still have available for settlement, but all in due time.


Gav




A tall and skinny landmass.  We could effectively split his nation in two by taking Pataliputra.  And the Lahor/Calcutta pink dots stand out much more.  Sadly, I think it's best we tend to our own for now, because Gav is a threat to Plyco and more importantly, Reticuli.


Superdeath




Just as tall as Gav, but a little bit fatter.  Must be all the fast food…  

Quayal and possibly Herculis are really the only two places we’d be at risk from him.


Dreylin




Probably the smallest in size, and based on shared borders you can see why the two above have their sights on Drey.  I can’t recall which Incan city had the ‘Mids but if it’s Spock, then Gav has the best shot at it.  Sssla is the only site with any tension really.


Magic Science




Probably the biggest mystery and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.  Most of the borders with us are de-escalated, being either roadless or coast.


Other Updates

–SD completed his shrine
–Magic just popped a Great Engineer
–Gav gets currency in 1
–We get HBR in 1

[thrawn]

Tricky situation re Dreylin and I agree with your assessment. It would be easy in the short term and difficult in the long. Probably Gav suggested it to diffuse a potential dogpile that could be forming against him, and it will be an easy target that will give Gav a little more consolidated land than the long line his empire currently is. And SD probably wasn’t hard to convince since he’s had some inexplicable hatred with Dreylin all game long.

SD’s message looks like he’s suggesting to join the dogpile with Dreylin, but I’d definitely try to swing him to the other side. For example horse-horse and war with Gav, and then another message without horse just war with Dreylin + war with Gav + 20 gold to show that the Dreylin would join. That how I coordinated the Magic dogpile and it should be clear. You could also send a message to Dreylin without a resource, just war with gav, war with SD, 15 gold which I believe he’ll correctly interpret that war will be coming to him rather than us asking him for alliance.

24 horchers is serious and they can even be split in two fearsome stacks. I suppose this is Gav’s way to keep the others in check. Do we have enough cats and spears/other hitters around Reticuli to be certain to win if he attacks? I think that’s the key point to defend as Phyco is probably too far for him to send a significant force that way.

Great that Magic also responded, maybe follow that up with iron/iron and war with Gav? We do have a couple of friction points with Magic, namely Shady, we aren’t far from Marathon and he may want a buffer city for security, and Quayal is getting resources that should have been his, but he has a lot of friction with everyone and we may be the lesser evil.

Re barbs, you won’t get almost any capture gold from Zhou because the city got settled just before you took over and is only 2 pop. I think it will be around 10-15 gold at most. Also since SD has claimed the crab already, it will be very hard to claim it back, so it looks better to raze and resettle 1E and get the fish instead. Economically won’t be bad since it brings a new silver and will pay for itself.

For Shady not sure if it’s better with a cat or without - there is a 85% chance you’d lose the cat when you attack the CKN vs 78% to lose a fresh CR2 sword instead. So you can just attack with a CR2 sword, and then follow up with the CR3 swords against the longbows and they’ll get close to 90% odds, and it should be easy to finish off the CKN with another sword or the archery/CR1 dog after that.

Shady will definitely give you a lot of capture gold so I’d say go for it asap before Zhou because SD and Magic can show up there at any moment too. Then with SD being so unreliable I’m starting to feel that keeping it would be better but either way should be good.

Whynil - looks good but also give it the lake as it would get 3f from the lighthouse as opposed to only 2f from Fierias.

Re monasteries I don’t think wealth economy will work well on this map because it’s food rich but most locations are hammer poor or average, and there will be a lot of fighting so we’ll need those hammers for units. But as you say that’s a lot into the future.

2nd in food looks amazing!

Btw you are doing a great job and if I sound critical here and there it’s because I don’t have much time and focus mostly on what can be tweaked! And seconding Williams about the high quality reporting

[Donovan Zoi]

Hey thanks, thrawn! Yes, I am really enjoying the discourse and have no problem with a bit of constructive criticism if it helps us reach our goals. Before I joined the RB community, I cut my teeth in the Democracy Games forum at CivFanatics (including a brief mod stint), so I actually thrive on building consensus and defending my positions. The last game I played (PB74), I was mostly entertaining myself and no one else with 2-3 paragraph dissertations on the latest scout moves, so I find the game-relevant activity here extremely refreshing.

And I apologize for the slight delay in responding. I am a year-round US tax preparer with only 6 days left to the extension deadline. So this is essentially crunch time for us as we deal with all the last minute folks that still haven't been corralled since April. And here at RB, it seems the turns are coming fast and furious now that I'm settled in, so I'm trying to temper my notorious turn lengths so I can spend more time reporting.

So just a quick reply here and hope to get a better post out to you tonight, so the screenies I took don't become old news.

I'm a bit hesitant to initiate anything against anyone right now since our opponents were all gracious enough to project peace with us for the moment. With that said, I'm probably trying to avoid the eventual diplo that will need to take place in a world where no one is really safe from dogpile. I'll be using this honeymoon period to put minimal builds into 2-3 units per city so we can quickly get a defense onboard without forecasting aggression on the Powergraph. But I'll read though your diplo suggestions again when I get a chance.

I ended up taking Zhou since troops were already there, but now everyone can come down to help take down Shady. More that tonight, but I don't think we'll be contested. Also the RNG gods rewarded us with 20g that may be enough to help us get Aesthetics and Med back to back. I had to go to 0% on T128 because we fell just short of completing the former.

I opened the turn and Whynil did already have the lake, so the recent screenshot must have come before I made the change that turn.

I agree that the food is great! So much so that I'll be using it to get as many CHs and Libraries built as possible before our GA. We are still left in the dust in population demos (and soldiers to a lesser extent), which may be why everyone is treating us as a non-threat right now. So let's use that subterfuge of each to our advantage by propping up the economy a bit until all hell breaks loose.

[scooter]

I suggest turning on the governor more often. I noticed it was disabled in basically every city. This may be a playstyle thing, but I try to keep it on by default, and THEN check on case-by-case to see if I need to make my own adjustments. And when I do override, I try to turn it back on shortly after. In general it does a good job 90% of the time on keeping you on the best tiles, and it helps you avoid little stuff like this.

Hey scooter, thanks for checking in.  I typically never use the governors, which likely explains a lot!  My main reason for the manual approach is so I can personally ensure that no resource gets lost in via city swapping.  But hey, I'll definitely put it in action if it allows me to whittle my turns down to 3 hours. 

Governors don't affect tile swapping from city to city if that's what you mean. They just look at a city's available tiles and pick the best ones most of the time. In my experience, it's most likely to screw up 1) when you're building a Work Boat as it always assumes it's early game when you want to max-hammer it out, and 2) when you're on the verge of growing into unhappy and you're fine with that because you have some sort of plan it does not know about (impending whip/lux/etc). Other than edge cases like that, I find it mostly makes the right choices, though you are still on the hook for figuring out the right way to tile share between cities. I mostly use it to avoid dumb mistakes.

So, while I have you....

Any idea how ChoKus will react in the above defensive scenario, you sly devil?     Kidding of course, and well played, sir.  We're perfectly fine figuring it out on our own.

I would generally expect them to behave identically to normal crossbows, for whatever that is worth? I guess the way to put it is I don't expect them to behave any differently than the AI normally would. In this case, that means I'd be fairly surprised if they attacked out as the AI rarely attacks out of cities, especially with archer-ish units, but I really do not know for 100% certain.

[williams482]

The Cho-Ko-Nus did not attack out when we attacked Sssla. It seems overwhelmingly likely that they are on the "city defense" AI mission and will remain parked in the city indefinitely.

I'd be more worried about them attacking if they were wandering aimlessly around the island. An Archer built at Mentar before it flipped to us was doing that (although fortunately it was in the city on the turn it flipped, and thus disappeared without causing problems).

[Donovan Zoi]

Turns 128-129

A New SD Message from T128




I got this message right after our discussion about the Dreylin dogpile, which leads me to believe that SD is still feeling things out.  I’m sure he has the same concerns about Gavagai that we do, but let me see if I can decipher this message.

100 Gold - long term non-aggression/alliance?
Wheat/Corn/Phyco/war - he wants me to attack Calcutta
2 Gold - in 2 turns?

So I’ve obviously missed the window on the last one, but I was thinking that perhaps we should offer Iron/Iron/100g back to him.  What is risky is that I don’t want to be called into a war with anyone in that manner, but also not interested in falling back on my word via hesitance to join any Quixotian quest he decides to pursue.  So I am perfectly fine with staying out of negotiations for now, but there’s also a good chance my silence could be punished if I don’t play ball at some point.


The Region in Question




Here lies the border between Phyco and Calcutta, the latter showing the diplo resources above.  And while I’m not happy that we lost access to the Corn here, I don’t want to take any actions that will threaten Reticuli at such a crucial moment.

And here is my Scout closing in on the area to ensure that SD’s Phyco message was not a warning to us as I did encounter an Indian stack enroute to future super-city Lahore.  While this appears to be a defensive move, I am still going to leave the Scout to stand watch since there is a 2-tile railroad on the way to Calcutta.


Scouting Report

While we’re on the subject of scouting, here is a brief outlay of troop position so we know who has eyes on us:




Gav has a Warrior in Reticuli and a Chariot roaming from Herculis to Whynil.





Dreylin has Chariots near Obaca and just north of Reticuli near the Iranian DMZ





Superdeath just entered via our eastern border with Gav, likely showing up what we have to defend against India.  I’ve been hesitant to scout SD and risk good relations, but it may not be a bad idea to do so.





Unsurprisingly, not much to see from Magic save for a few city defenses and a WB checking out Shady Sands.  More on that in a moment.





And here’s our layout.  We have an Archer in Gav’s capital to keep tabs on Horcher passage, and the aforementioned Scout getting intel on the Lahore region


Barb Theatre




The only way I was even able to get sights on any of Magic’s troops was by sending a Sentry Chariot to the hill SW of Maalor.  We discovered a well defended Iranian city of Artemisium -- 7 units with 2 Axes just east of town, but no visible Galleys.  However, there is a fort just south of this town that could hold some ships, so I think I will need to stand watch here.  The power capital of Marathon lies just 5 tiles away, which explains the buildup to protect against SD.

There is plenty of other activity going on in this screenshot in regards to the barb war:

-Zhou fell after 2 turns pretty easily, even though last turn i sent one of the CR3 Swords from there to join the Catapult in landing south of Shady.
–The C3 Sword north of Zhou was left at 4.2/6 on T128 and is taking the time to heal.  I’ll be promoting him to Amphibious next turn to get him as close to full health as possible.
–The CR3 Sword had two perfect kills on consecutive turns but didn’t gain any XP due to the barb limit.
–The promoted Dog and CR2 took their place in the now-empty Galley to join the stack on T130.

Next turn, we will finally get to solve the mystery of what happens with the ChoKu!  I already know of course, but will keep you in suspense until I write it up. 

[Donovan Zoi]

Turn 130

We discovered Aesthetics this turn, and with enough overflow to complete Meditation at 10% research.  We’ll be able to start Shwedagon Paya next turn! 

Here's a look at next techs at 100%.  ETA’s are pretty good and the expenses  will continue to decrease as we add Libraries and Courthouses.  However, we will also lose the Wealth build in Reticuli, so the cheaper techs on this list will be the best way to weather the slider imbalance for now.




But you didn’t all come here to read about some silly ole wonder, right?  Let’s get down to the island!


Shucks, Who Knew?

In preparing for the island raid of Shady Sands, there’s no question that I had major concerns about our Melee forces against a formidable XBow UU regardless of our heavy promotions.  In fielding questions from you all, one comment stood out and has been plaguing me ever since though I didn’t give it its proper due at the time.

I think, the KI doesn't attack from a city, if they would have fewer defenders than attackers with a loss.
So the chokos should stay in the city.

It definitely sounded comforting, but not unlike Noah’s Ark, we were going to be making landfall 2 by 2.  And there were 3 barb defenders.

And as it turns out, he was exactly right!  The tagalong Catapult took the hit from the ChoKu and was destroyed, leaving our accompanying Sword at 5.7 from collateral.  And the ChoKu?  Left at 1.7 after the attack!

It made sense to counter that right away by taking out a Longbow and we had another flawless victory:







But wait, is that a Sumerian Trireme to the south?  No time to think about that right now as we emptied the Galley and sent it to pick up the Swords from the rubble of Zhou.  SD moved first this turn, so there’s no real danger to our troops at the moment.

And I lied…it looks like our CR3 Sword did take a bit of damage felling the last Archer.  Hopefully this will appease the RNG gods enough to not punish our good fortune at a later time, you know, when it really counts!  Still it looks like we have enough manpower to easily take Shady next turn, while also having adequate, if not ideal, defense for the region until we can shore it up.


I took some other screenshots but nothing major.  I’m gonna just let this post stand on its own, and hopefully reply to some individual posts later.