Good questions. Very good questions.
So, I basically decided to do all of the above on a very long car trip where I had nothing to do but think, and basically whipped myself up into a frenzy of 'now or never' re: Civac. It makes some sense (even if I botched it), and it all started with the realisation that:
We are not going to be able to fully eat Jowy for at least 10 turns. Probably 15-20. Commodore isn't going to be able to take Shimatsuken, from what I can tell. It's now better defended than Elementary was, and we had a better stack. Commodore has hitters aplenty, but still only <10 catapults. That realisation started a chain of what-ifs in my head.
'If Commodore can't take Shimatsuken, won't he either try and fail, or peace out and leave us hanging?'
'If Commodore does either, won't Jowy be able to coalesce his 2 frightful stacks into 1 literally unkillable stack?'
'If he does that, won't we be eternally bogged down?'
These are all rhetorical questions I was thinking about on the drive, and they're probably a bit melodramatic, but I actually think the core of them makes sense. We can't kill Jowy, at least not quickly. His crazy longbow strategy, while not game-winning, is basically unkillable.
Meanwhile, Civac is humming along in a MoM GA, presumably working towards Taj or next-gen military in the process. He doesn't have either yet, but I imagine he will in the next 5-10 turns, and when he gets those, it's probably just Game Over. So I decided that a dogpile very soon necessary if we didn't want the game to end right away.
Now, this makes a few assumptions, all of them longshots. Here are some:
- Civac is still stoppable. This is actually quite unlikely.
- Jowy will accept peace. I know I wouldn't, in his situation. I haven't asked yet, because I wanted to get a read on Commodore/Lewwyn and if they were willing to join vs Civac, before I backed out on Commodore here.
- Civac is planning to fight Gavagai. Of course, this is much less likely now that I have stupidly cancelled borders.
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- Lewwyn won't just immediately backstab us.
I'm not sure that
any of these are very likely, let alone all four.
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Well, the Gav one might be safe at least, since it's where his units were all going.
My biggest regret is cancelling the OB when I did. That didn't hurt Civac at all, and instead hurt us. Massive autopilot move; I just figured if we were going to fight him, we might as well hurt him economically beforehand. Uh, while he's in Merc.
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If all of the assumptions work out, we could have kept fighting Jowy for another few turns, and kept an eye on Civac's forces for longer. Oh well, add that to the long list of 'PB55 mistakes I won't make again.' The 5 turns until war would give us time to take the last northern cities at least, though we might need to 'add' another 1-2 turns on top.
I've said it many times before during this game, but I really think my biggest weakness in CIV is talking myself up into making rash, hot-headed decisions before I give myself a chance to really consider the alternatives. In other words,
mentally spiraling myself into making poor decisions. Which is weird, because I'm not someone with a temper or emotional problems in real life. I don't know why this game brings it out in me so much. It's something I need to work on, badly, in future games.
I have to admit, I kind of hope that Comm/Lewwyn are unresponsive and we can just keep fighting Jowy until whoever's left concedes. The prospect of a Civac war is quite stressing me out. We'll find out when I play the turn in a few hours.