[pb74 spoilers] Miguelito and Ginger bring about the end of the world

[Miguelito]

metal declared!


I don't know why he would have his axe stroll along our border all this time if he was going to go in, but maybe it was unplanned but he couldn't ignore our low power. good thing we whipped last turn.
Now the warrior has to hold the capital at >95% odds, should be fine.
Offered a treaty, anyway. Might come back to bite us if he wants to pink dot towards the sheep.

metal keeps adding power though:


But he's João! There should be a more productive use for his hammers!

Of which he has plenty, to be sure:


Which is a smart thing for Johnny of course, but only if you then invest it into snowball stuff

[Miguelito]

metal didn't try for the <5% and returned peace. So now we can settle our copper safely. Meanwhile, MS, who accidentally settled it with his second city, hasn't even connected it. In a few turns we'll have 2 WCs, but doing anything would be quite silly, right? Especially since he's Cre so we can't get a surprise in. Or well, we could if we play after him...

The big question though is which dot to settle for copper. Ginger is set on red, and is telling me to be an adult and not throw the food away. I'm still not sold though.
Let's see...

Red pros and cons:
+ gets the clam
+ shares the capital clam
+ gets 3 further coast tiles, and more shared with the capital. As Ginger has pointed out, it is a pretty decent Moai spot, and we get +100% on it with Ind, so should see to build it early
+ enables the other red dot, which is the ideal border city towards metal
+pretty good prophet rearing city at size 6
- requires one, better two quick workboats for a measly 4f each.
- would need to tech Fishing, and then soon afterwards Sailing. Otoh I just remembered that we're Org and get a discount on lighthouses...
-doesn't make a strong land claim towards the west

Yellow pros and cons:
+ gets the wheat quickly with two workers available so no further investment, although it's just a 4f (+1h) tiles 
+ lays the groundwork for orange dot / connects it much better than red does
+ already claims the gold, although we probably settle first ring for it before yellow would pop borders
+ can avoid naval techs for a lot more time
- the obvious, it orphans the clam and all those coast tiles
- the other yellow dot is a little worse then the second red one, however it's also further south so helps more with the landgrab there

The crucial point is orange dot, which I really want.
From this screenshot it looks like this would be a cheeky plant right into the midspot between 4 civs (found DZ up NW). But actually, that's everybody's 2nd/3rd city borders, while ours is from the capital, so it's quite reasonable. 
But it's quite far from red dot and I feel it might be overly exposed/disconnected for defense. 
The hill 1N would be much better, but I doubt MS would tolerate it. We could sacrifice the FP 1S as well and settle there. 
I think it's quite likely, and Ginger agrees, that if we don't settle first ring for the cow someone will take it with their first ring, like metal could with a 2 cow city.  So if we settle for gold e.g. on the desert tile SW that city will likely only have shared drywheat and the FP for food. Still ok, but not stellar.

If anybody else tries to settle for the wheat 5 tiles from our cap it's war unto death.

After writing this, I'm leaning red for the first time, but not quite swayed yet.

In international news, Tarvac took and kept! Dreylin's capital. Also a GG was born, how does that happen on t45? Tarvac are Imp, but still impressive. Maybe they won some low odds battles for a bunch of XP? Dreylin can hardly be blamed (from my knowledge). He's whipped 6 pop already, so not like he rolled over. Best guess is he got caught by chariots, maybe also he just didn't settle for a ressource with his 2nd city?

Oh and xist settled a city which must be his 2nd only? Unless he masked it with a whip...

[Ginger*]

Red pros and cons:
+ gets the clam
+ shares the capital clam
+ gets 3 further coast tiles, and more shared with the capital. As Ginger has pointed out, it is a pretty decent Moai spot, and we get +100% on it with Ind, so should see to build it early
+ enables the other red dot, which is the ideal border city towards metal
+pretty good prophet rearing city at size 6
- requires one, better two quick workboats for a measly 4f each.
- would need to tech Fishing, and then soon afterwards Sailing. Otoh I just remembered that we're Org and get a discount on lighthouses...
-doesn't make a strong land claim towards the west

Yellow pros and cons:
+ gets the wheat quickly with two workers available so no further investment, although it's just a 4f (+1h) tiles 
+ lays the groundwork for orange dot / connects it much better than red does
+ already claims the gold, although we probably settle first ring for it before yellow would pop borders
+ can avoid naval techs for a lot more time
- the obvious, it orphans the clam and all those coast tiles
- the other yellow dot is a little worse then the second red one, however it's also further south so helps more with the landgrab there

The crucial point is orange dot, which I really want.

I'm not certain if I want to settle Red dot first, but I am certain it should be settled. However I am very greedy when it comes to ignoring defenses and Mig rightfully wants the copper asap, so we probably will settle it first.

I'm gonna address some of Mig's points to make my counter
Tech cost: we're dumping beakers into MC rn, not an immediate cost to go fish or sail

Claiming Orange dot: we need to settle that sheep between us and Metal. his little expedition shows that he's hamfistedly trying to convert Joao into some more permanent relative gains. He's going to be cheeky and grab it if we let him. We're preparing the second settler to go there anyways. So either way, yellow or red plan, orange dot is at best 3rd in line right now, and I'm of the opinion that with the second western red dot on the sheep, we are close enough to orange.

Not directly related to the competing plans, generally I do want to keep an eye on those gems in the south, if Metal reaches for the north to grab the cows, a play for the gems could be worth it. (Although its really exposed  ) Besides I don't particularly want to have to go to monarchy and we have only gold, ivory and calendar uncovered so far. 


About the recent pbspy eyebrow raisers, what's world top power/lowest pop? And is our 6pop cap on the leaderboards?

[Miguelito]

t47, of big losses.

First, I forgot Ginger's request and didn't look at the top cities screen before whipping.


looks like we might've been on top

Second,


38 food, how does that even work?? As far as I know the first few players started founding third cities 4 turns ago. Seems to be an outlier anyways, with 23 average. And this is after whipping, so not too awful for us

Finallly:


A granary and a settler coming off the ramps should make me happy. It's soured however by my genius idea to finish that cottage that neither of the cities can work for a while, instead of using both workers to road. That does not delay the city, but indeed the copper mine . The saved worker turn will get invested into a plains hill mine that will surely not get finished for ten more turns .

Next question is whether to finish the WC in the capital first, or rather put the overflow into a work boat. Of course that will be easy to answer, just haven't added up the hammers yet. The WB isn't super urgent, as the city will work forest/PH mine for a quick obelisk first.

Ragnarök should build a warrior for MP purposes imo, or rather the next WC? If it finishes before size 4 it would make sense. The plan then is to get the fourth settler there to be sent to the wheat/sheep spot.

Our geography allows us to lean heavily west for the first few waves of expansion, with a nice amount of backlines east and south. Let's see where that gets us.

[Miguelito]

For the record, that hill is 7 tiles from his capital, but just 6 from ours. Now skirmishers obviously make this complicated and we were seriously considering to let him get away with this for now but he's Creative. If we settle S of gold and he builds a library we are not getting the gold for the next 50 turns and will actually have to worry about him flipping our city, apart from the defense woes. Cre is really a double edged sword for a trait, as it makes you a bad neighbour and induces aggression unless you carefully plant your dotmap to avoid that - clearly MS prefers the power of the trait to push through with egregious insolent pink dots. And we will not go without our second source of happiness and only precious metal being Ind, no way. We played that game the last time and it sucks.

This city had to burn, and fast. We had two war chariots live already (but one of them far down south), and could muster two more for an attack before the border pop, with one following up. I initially counted five and felt pretty good about it, but as it turns out I'm bad at counting. Four chariots would deal with that one skirmisher easily, but if there was a second unit it would be around 50% or worse, and MS would see our 1 pop whips ( ) and should be able to reinforce in time, also seeing as he had added considerable power already lately. 

Fast forward to the current turn, the last where we can attack from the fog:



On the one hand:


He really could have gotten a second unit in there easily enough (and if just the scout). Doesn't he realize what this plant is?
on the other hand, jackpot, this should be easy enough. Vodka gives us 96% win, with 1.5 WC expected losses

Percentages are

• war chariot 1 vs 20% fortified skirmisher, 3.2% odds - FLAWLESS LOSS oof.
  
• war chariot 2 3.2% odds - LOSS, 1 hit to 85/100. It's not going great. But 2/3 of the time we still win this (I only checked in Vodka now writing the report)
  
  
• war chariot 3 10% odds - FLAWLESS LOSS again  
  
• I'm now full on tilting, so war chariot 4 (with C1) goes in with 20.9% odds and WINS with 4/100 HP remaining
  

By a hair. It's still a very bad result, as we lost most of our offensive force and may well lose the victorious WC yet if there's a unit on the  road, which is likely. It's not unlikely that MS just replants there, and we would not be able to do too much about it. If he doesn't, we will try to.

Our two initial cities now carry additional whip anger from inefficient 1pop whips, and the third city's granary was delayed to provide arms, so I'd really have preferred not to have to do this, and I dearly hope I won't have to do it again (although we definitely need additional military pretty much immediately). But there was no way we could let this stand.

I offered a ceasefire. If he takes it and then replants the city under my ass I'll clap.

[Ginger*]

In a world with a less ambitious Magic Science, one who just wanted the cow and planted 1N of this dot, I would've just said 'well played' and move on, but Mig and I agreed that losing the gold was simply not tenable. To the point where other ideas we floated included parking Axe/Spear/WC on the forest hill to permanently shred his worker micro and delay a library.

Cre is incredibly powerful at these midway pinkdots and from MS's perspective it makes a lot of sense, cheap way to claim a lot of land and inconvenience an opponent--he just should have backed it up better
that pasture and road easily could've been another skirmisher chopped. Look at PB65 to see how Cornflakes shut out Mjmd from a valuable midpoint. But also take note of the level of planning and sacrifices that went into that play as CF recognized it would draw a response.
Early axes carried the defensive burden until Cre culture could.

Right now the questions that remain to be answered is how will MS respond and when will his next settler appear. He does have more power in the fog

[Miguelito]

I was trying to chat in game with Amica, but the G key andsomething else moved a unit. It's not worth a reload but I'd appreciate if Ramk could just move the unit back. I'll post a picture for lurkers in my thread. I'd also appreciate if we don't roll the turn before a resolution, thanks.

here is the situation. The warrior moved south, and the lack of MP is making the city very unhappy, leaving the village and crab unworked. Can this please be fixed by moving the warrior back? I was not going to move it this turn anyways.


Magic Science had to move his workers west towards Donovan/metal, since there is a barb warrior in the north. He has shown no further units but a warrior 2NE from where the city used to be. He wants peace, but we can only accept that once it's 100% certain he can't resettle this hill, i.e. until we settle for gold. As Ginger said, most plants of MS's in that area which don't threaten the gold are acceptable for us, although of course we had to invest here considerably so might not accept a subpar solution that we would have if things had stayed reasonable.  I could cut the road to the hill this turn, which led through forest, so that delays a possible replant by him by two turns (and thus we can accept peace earlier, in fact next turn if we don't see a settler on that forest).

So where to plant? The hill that MS planted on was my initial favourite as well. For us, it is not really unreasonable, seeing as it's closer to us than to him, and at maximum distance from his second city, but I still figured he'd view it as aggressive, because we'd claim all the FP for us, and mildly box him in. So I had settled to trying for NW of gold (as fifth city), or if that didn't work even something like E or W of it.

Now I'm conflicted. Having had to whip WCs will hurt us for a good while to come, so it feels like we earned ourselves this spot (assuming we can hold it). However, maybe MS going for the pink dot was a cry of desperation, because he felt he has nothing else (maybe there's a lot of tundra up north?). In which case we may end up locked in protracted war for this hill and definitely lose the game. The alternatives are

• NW of gold, which is fine and just has the disadvantage of not being on a hill against a neighour with a pattern of aggression
  
• E of gold, also not on a hill, but very compact for defense. No first ring food and both sources are shared with other cities.
  
• NE of gold is on a hill, but has just the shared cow and an uncertain floodplain for food. It is also minimum distance to MS's second city, which is at least offset by getting vision from that mountain (will need a quick obelisk to hold it)
  
• On the gold - only the FP for first ring food, and probably will not get the cow because metal can plant for it first ring. It doesn't have much going for it besides being on a hill and sending very conciliatory signals to MS. 
  

The settler gets whipped net turn, so the hill can get planted in 3.

[Qgqqqqq]

Thanks for the reporting!

[Ginger*]

Honestly I think the map is too tight To be concerned with “throwing the game over a war”. I think taking as much land as possible will improve our strength and position relative to magic science and we’re probably killing him* before knights anyways unless he’s very well-behaved, which I doubt since we’ve harmed him grievously (one could argue it’s self inflected but I doubt he’ll see it that way)

*or dying to him

My tl:dr
Play it realpolitik, claim as much as we can militarily support, mountain vision probably important, im worried about forking with the coastal city if they're far apart

Also keep in mind which plants block what, if we resettle his dot we should zone out a lot of land with the city distance rule. Also might allow us to squeeze in some pathetic fillers later in the game (hey we want AP anyways so yay)

Edit: the more I look at it, the more preferable it is to resettle on the ruins *IF we can defend it in the short term*. It forces any settles from Magic science to go at the latitude of the marble (I predict on marble or 1E), it claims the relevant resources and floodplains, and with the mountain to surveil we should be safe from forking by one movers (although a large stack of two movers could still cause complications)

[Miguelito]

Thanks for the reporting!

Glad to have you reading!




I had to whip this axe because a barb warrior showed up, stepped on the pasture, and then thankfully suicided. Would sure have prepared to whip a worker (we're still at 2), and of course MS is the culprit because if not for him there would have been a war chariot around . 
I 1 turned another axe and sent this one north, to hopefully help defend our northern plant, for which the settler was whipped. 



.... which brings us to the where to plant question, which as you'll see I'm getting a bit worked up over:


After all of this, I still don't see any that I truly like. Currently I'm back at orange as a compromise between reaping the fruits of our efforts and appeasing MS at least somewhat. Ginger as I understand it wants to go red, and I can see the case for it. Notice however how the supply line to the south will completely be in MS's vision from that peak.
Green or brown would allow us to plant purple later, although most likely metal does instead. They also can put culture on the cow 2N of copper, which we might keep then even after MS's second city gets its third ring, so "no new food" has an asterisk.
Purple, curiously, is a pretty strong city, claiming that cow by metal's second which we otherwise would never get, so settling on the cow is offset. A very petty MS could settle green dot himself. More importantly, it is pretty offensive towards metal, the city dot being the midpoint betwee our capitals.
So, how do we value security vs city quality?
Looking at the map, also notice what a crazy thing of a pinkdot this was.

My tl:dr
Play it realpolitik, claim as much as we can militarily support, mountain vision probably important, im worried about forking with the coastal city if they're far apart

realpolitik by my upbringing is "What Would Bismarck Do?", and that would definitely include considering opponents' motivations and try not to make them mortal enemies thoug...?