[SPOILERS] swans will bite u

[ljubljana]

Turn 26 - Japan



made the right call on the camp clear at least :D

next turn is The Turn for us with the pantheon, first galley, AH, and a builder buy all coming online. going to hit up TAD on steam (which i now have to use on my phone) to talk about the next purchase and see if i can't talk them into giving me their gold on a provisional basis in case teru has a first-ring honse

checked the GP screen and confirmed it beyond all doubt - chevalier has a holy site. if they are going for the first religion they are likely to GO for it, with holy site first in their second city as well plus a project in the capital. if they do that, i am not sure we can trivially beat them while also hitting our Geneva timings and cramming in all the builds we need before the era change.

in theory we could do something desperate like hard-build an early shrine in hakuho? or BUY a shrine in hakuho? it will pay back quickly once feed the world comes online, i GUESS, but ewww i hate hate hate that from a growth curve perspective, 30 turns is a loooong time to wait for an investment to pay off

question 2: how much do we actually care if they snipe the first religion? missing FtW would be a huge problem for our intended strategy but i suppose we could pivot to a choral music-centric backup plan. we have enough rivers that our cities don't actually NEED FtW housing to hit size 7, granary will be enough, although one imagines that would leave quite a few seafood/feitoria tiles empire-wide unworked in the midgame. but on the bright side there is a good chance THEY are prioritizing choral music to accelerate mercs, which is certainly the move i'd make as indonesia. so maybe we do our best but don't do anything crazy and just accept it if we miss out? i dunno, let me brood on it

for the second belief at least we don't have too much to lose, as one of Crusade and Tithe (and DotF if i neighbor thrawn) is guaranteed to be available and i'm torn between them anyways. and i wasn't really expecting to get to stack crusade + tithe anyways

spreadsheet part 2:

not much thankfully. chev's belated second civic, pop growth or monument for krill. thrawn picks up a stray ES but nobody else did so it's not a contact

[ljubljana]

re chev racing us: actually i think they might! unlike russia our advantage is not THAT huge with no extra prophet points from our cheap HS. we only beat them by 2t at the capital, and if they go holy site first in their second city and have a stronger-starting one than teru, they could beat us to the HS there and pull ahead. and if they don't beat us, all they need is a project (and for us to NOT run a project) to inch ahead. we do have a trump card coming in a fast third holy site at geneva, but they don't know that, so from their perspective i imagine a race seems fairly viable.

they would be incentivised to race too as i imagine they consider whichever of FtW and Choral Mudic they have their eye on to be integral to the overall gameplan (just as i am tunnel-visioned on FtW even though CM is strong too), and won't want to risk US beating THEM and messing up THEIR strategy. so while i believe the most likely situation is that we have different first-choice beliefs, most likely us religious civs are both going to blow resources on an unnecessary religious race, to the benefit of exactly thrawn. lovely

so until we see otherwise i think we should treat this as a serious race against a competent opponent who will be trying the question then becomes what, if any, extra measures do we take to win that race? that depends on the marginal value of FtW over Choral Music, which i think is substantial but i'm not quite sure HOW substantial, times the odds that they would actually take FtW, which i think are less than 50% but i'm not sure by HOW much. so i gotta brood over this for a while ig

one Fact though is that this does weigh somewhat against river goddess next turn as it is way weaker if we do miss FtW...

[williams482]

If we lose this race, will the next prophet be a 60 point or 120 point acquisition?

If the former, I don't know how much we care. I'm personally willing to gamble that Chevalier is after culture, not food, and although I think Crusade is clearly better than Tithe or DotF in this situation, I'm not psyched about dumping resources into a race just for that. If it's going to be a more expensive prophet though, our whole GA plan is thrown in the wringer and we do need to fight for it.

In either case, if we're going to fight for it then our best play is a carefully timed project. 45-50h for 12-14 GPP (dependent on tech/civic progress), completed on the same turn we recruit the prophet. We lose the turn tiebreaker, but we already have a lead and we can expect that lead to grow slightly (thanks to our faster holy sites) unless Chevalier invests more than we do via shrines or multiple projects. That means we should be able to squeeze out a win here without being too crazy, but timing will be important to make sure we don't spook Chevalier into throwing even more assets into the race.

Missing on Feed The World will make River Goddess less good in the short term, but still very strong. If we get anywhere in this game we will have painful amenities issues, and those issues will hurt our mid- and lategame growth curve substantially. I think putting a little more consideration into a culture pantheon is rational if we might miss out, but +2 amenities in most of our core is still very strong.

[ljubljana]

i would imagine it would be another 60-point classical GP since we are nowhere near the medieval era.....but i am not sure how confident i am in that. lemme check thrawn's pbem19 and see how much they paid for it.

yeah, at this point i think i have been won over by RG over a culture pantheon. if we miss FtW it will reduce our need for amenities, however we actually suddenly WILL need the housing. +2 housing from RG happens to be exactly enough for 8 housing for the harbor at a riverside city with no other improvements, eg Hakuho, so it could save us from a lot of granary builds down the road. the bigger question is how seriously we should consider passing on GotS for RG...

i think you are right about the best "fight for it" plan. the short-term question is whether we delay the galley at teru (and thus the geneva attack) to start the cheap HS to avoid losing our lead if chev's second city goes HS first. i did not start it THIS turn because one turn's wait will ensure we don't pave over the honse. but we should think about doing that next turn, which would delay geneva attack by 2-3 turns depending on the math

gee i sure hope thrawn doesn't stumble on indonesia while they're sitting around building full-cost holy sites instead of boats

speaking of which, i am getting nervous that chev will hit mercs REALLY fast with culture pantheon and choral music, like, t90 fast before people have cartography. maybe in addition to TAD rushing there i should do so as well, at the expense of construction + apprenticeship hammers

[williams482]

Delaying Geneva by 2-3 turns makes no sense if Geneva would get it's own HS up at least 2-3 turns before we ultimately get our prophet. We'd be picking up extra GPP now only to give them back later. And that's before the security/exploration/non-faith yield considerations.

And all else equal, we don't want this to look like a legit race. The less Chevalier feels the need to pull out all the stops, the better.

[ljubljana]

for the record i should state that i'm thinking of crusade as a primarily defensive tool, and a pricey one at that as it requires missionary investment. i think it is badly overrated on water maps offensively for one simple reason - the decisive battles here will be fleet-to-fleet ones, which almost never take place anywhere near cities! moreover, there is no real way to actually get a missionary right up next to an opponent's city in the first place without, uh, killing their fleet first. it would be more useful pre-cartography but we are unlikely to execute major offensive action in that timeframe anyways. i'm not saying we won't find any applications for it but i really won't be bummed if we settle for tithe/DotF unless TAD's closest neighbor is exactly thrawn

edit re geneva: yeahhh, i mean we do lose GPP points net with galley first as we accelerate geneva's HS by 2-3t but delay teru's by more like 5-6t, and in a prophet race the numbers are small enough that even pennies matter. but i do think the security concerns and etc probably outweigh that, as geneva is a race too against the unseen vikings next door

edit2: guys, TAD's getting 1.5 faith from the HS TR times portugal and is on track for a t30 pantheon with no investment! wonder if that will actually be fast enough for festivals?

[williams482]

I'm viewing Crusade as a better version of DotF with some fringy future offensive bonuses. It's definitely not much help in initial fleet battles, but it does help a bunch in blasting down city defenses (especially in the back end of the frigate era when cracking fully leveled walls takes bloody forever). Standard doctrine on RB is basically not to worry about that side of things, but I just lost a game (which you just won!) because I beat the fleets but couldn't crack the toughest cities; If I could have gotten crusade in play in that situation it would have made an enormous difference.

[ljubljana]

yeahh that's a very good point. the cost in missionary faith is serious business as i'd guess most cities will take a full missionary to convert starting in the midgame. but the limiting factor in speed of conquest once you have beaten someone's fleet does seem to be the city wall sieges, and it will make a big difference in terms of completing a conquest before someone stabs you in the back to stop the runaway. iirc, the reason i didn't have my whole fleet at diomede was because half of it got tied down seiging Kaiser cities to the point where our DoF was going to lapse before i could reposition it...

if this game gives us a window to conquer someone, i think we are going to have to gamble on a VERY risky DoF with our strongest rival... there's no real way to complete a conquest without it i think as even appearing to be on track to decisively win a war means an immediate dogpile vs good opponents. that is unless they are tied up in a hot war themselves, but even last game i'm pretty sure you guys would have peaced out w sub and stabbed us in the t140 range if not for our DoF, at which time all our assets were in england. of course, taking such a DoF in this context invites a first strike on us....but perhaps that will be what tips our foe over the line into accepting it?

[williams482]

Speed, powerful set defenses, and good use of defensive chokes can reduce or negate the effect of a DoF first strike. Notable that I technically had the first strike on you in PBEM20, and yet we had several rounds of brinksmanship before you ultimately declared on me.

The chance to strike first unopposed is absolutely relevant and we should be careful about ceding it, but I'm actually less worried about it as a lead up to a potentially game deciding final battle than I am in more midgame situations when cities are generally more vulnerable and fleets are more likely to be caught and destroyed in port. For that specific situation, we should be willing to take a DoF.

[ljubljana]

yup yup, my thoughts exactly

i really wonder if the wall upgrades meta from last game is going to persist into this one. it's kinda funny to me how the conventional wisdom for ages was that they are way overpriced and never worth building....until PBEM20 when they showed up en masse from every single team. i still think ships are better unless you are in a "base race" scenario, but maybe one takeaway from pbem20 is that these are more common on naval maps than we'd expect...