Japper goes Native

[Cornflakes]

Any chance of an update from your corner of the world?

[Japper007]

Um... well... Chevalier nearly ran over my underdeveloped, barb-infested, shithole of a state. I've been spamming horses (most cities can build one every 5 turns or so and I've got about 6, it's pretty decent for hardbuilding in civ 6 actually) and killing some of his troops. I haven't been feeling up to reporting an obviously lost game by this point though. It's clear Arch is going to win, though I may at least put the hurt on Chev for backstabbing me before the consessions start coming in, out of spite if not for glory. I have btw no idea what Chev was thinking with this attack, it's stalled out now that he's lost all his melee troops, and all he took was a crappy border plant with about -0 productive tiles.

[TheArchduke]

Surprising diplo news this turn:

Chevalier has declared on Archduke, despite having only a third of his military strenght, that smells of desperation to me. Still, he does have a strong economy to back him up (at least from what I can tell with my shitty C&D skills) and maybe he saw a way to alphastrike Archduke.

Archduke accepted the DoF I sent him?  Archduke if you are reading this after the fact what the fuck was up with your diplomacy this game?
-First he denounces me on first meeting, for seemingly zero reason.
-Then he declares war and kills my scout (which didn't even have eyes on his territory yet, bar some loyalty bleed which I'm not even entirely sure was his cities).
-Then he rejects my offer of peace after the ten turn mandatory wait.
-Then he reoffers on his turn, even giving me a free amenity in the bargain...
-Now he wants to be friends? WTH man!

Is this "thinking of the opponents as AI" in action?

Oh boy.

The denounce and the declaration of war was not aimed at you at all, it was to get Rowain into a false sense of security, which seems to have worked. The DoF was to get you focused on your other neighbour and away from me. If you check through my thread you will see the logic behind all. Basically I was worried that Rowain dows me before I can get a trader through.

On your other stuff.

I am not sure if the tall start is the best way to go about the game. The first settler is very cheap and the payoff comes in quickly. Cornflakes tried this with monument first as well.

Your image hosting seems to have gone down. You do know that RB can host pictures quite good quite in contrast with other forums.

Like Alhambram, you really should chop out boosted policy stuff even with Magnus and not a library by itself.

I think the lurker thread or Chev picked up on that. Your second city plant is actually quite bad, without decent production tiles. I made this mistake myself, what you want for a city are 2f/2p tiles and not food 5 which are actually useless once your city grows into size. Makwa-Sakahikan (do go for a name theme next time) was actually quite useless production wise.

Shame that you lost the settling war with Chev, but it is a result of your playing tall strategy.

Also no idea why you stopped reporting when Chev attacked. You could get pointers on tactics and seem to have thwarted his attack and put up a valiant defense, thereby resulting in Chevalier not catching up to me.

[Japper007]

The start was starting to work later in the game but by then I was too far behind. But after ~turn 80 I built 5 one after the other in my capital while the rest of my cities could work on other things. The main issue with the strategy is that the building itself and the district cost about 3-5 settlers worth of hammers, they hardly pay off untill you have pumped out about 8.
Having a wellbuilt core is what saved my ass against chevalier though, I was able to 5-turn horsemen everywhere. His attack mostly failed because it was a bit discombobulated he got stuck in the terrain around my frontier city and by then I was in Manoevre and Urban Planning to churn out horses everywhere.

I've picked up on the food-trap yeah, but by the time I wised up this game was well under way and all my cities where settled in a civ 4 style food-only pattern.

I stopped reporting quite a bit before CMF attacked, after it became very clear you had won... At about turn 90 you were ahead of everyone in every category and had like a 1000 points of military on the second best.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

What I was thinking with the attack is that

"A)Mongolia is super-far ahead from eating two entire other civilizations,
2)I need to eat someone on my own in order to keep up, and
D)Japper has a military score of only 37 and our DoF expires soon..."

I knew you had no gold and so couldn't upgrade into swords, so I pulled the trigger even though I knew I wasn't prepared, either - I thought I had enough of an edge to make progress through mroe cities than I did, and I certainly didn't expect you to crank out horsemen so quickly! In fact, the only reason you didn't throw me out of the conquered city was DotF and our big disparity in power to start.

Once it became apparent that I couldn't conquer you before the Mongol horde arrived (and I lost a backline city to a, ah, city-state. -blush-), I knew it was over.