[SPOILERS] swans will bite u

[ljubljana]

yeahhh banzai's low ES is indeed interesting. it would make some sense for them to go for a dark age + twilight valor galleys, but it's a risky play with this setup as i assume they're not going to delay their first RND until t61 (right?) and building one will give them at least 6 ES from the unique district and its free galley. it would then only take a couple of contacts to shove them unceremoniously into normality, and that's with lunatics like us and thrawn sending hordes of early ships everywhere specifically to make such contacts...

i think i agree that a fast third city for krill makes sense. it does at least counsel that they are not going for the fastest possible, most all-in early rush, which i think would want monument first in the capital, rush for military tradition + shipbuilding, then chop warcarts out of two cities and embark them in the mid-t40s. with no monuments so far they seem to still be some distance from militrad at least as they don't even have craftsmanship yet. not that such logic really makes me feel thaaaat much better with norway clearly on the warpath...

do you know if there is a visual indicator on screen of whether geneva has completed their monument (or if they have started but not completed it)? i should have been checking this earlier...i assume it's not worth delaying the conquest until they finish but it'll be really unfortunate if they haven't. you'd think they would have by now if they only have the one warrior, as they have earned at least 128 hammers so far and their only confirmed build in that timeframe is a builder...

[williams482]

There should be different graphics for a started and completed monument. The completed monument is pretty distinctive, but I've never thought to look closely at what an incomplete monument looks like.

I agree that waiting if they don't have one is probably not a good decision. There's no way to tell what they are currently working on, and that city's current production sucks.

[ljubljana]

on the one hand, this REALLY looks like what i'd expect a monument under construction to look like:



but on the other hand, they had a builder out on t15 and the monument is at least a 12-turn build with the 5 hpt we can see...



do city-states ever change construction projects before completion? or am i completely off base here?

i don't have any other screenies that are as zoomed in as the t5 one, but on t30 it rather looks like there is still some scaffolding down there:

[williams482]

I assume city states have basically the same internal development AI as any real civ, they just can't build settlers. flip flopping on build choices sounds totally plausible. Although to be honest I'm not sure what else they have to build. Have they been spamming warriors?

[ljubljana]

whatever they have been doing, it has at least not been dedicated warrior spam, as yesterday we had vision on 4/5 tiles on their little island and saw only one warrior:



and i believe CSs spawn with a settler + warrior just like human players do...though since this is a custom map it is possible that the mapmakers did not give them one.

if the builder finished t15 (the earliest i have definitive evidence for it) they made 4 * 14 = 56 hammers before then and 5 * 17 = 85 hammers since = 141 total hammers, just enough for builder + monument + one warrior. if we don't see a second warrior next turn, i am at a loss as to what they could have done with the hammers BESIDES make a monument (unless CS palaces don't give 2hpt like human ones and my math is therefore off?). but if we DO see a second warrior, it is conceivable that the mapmakers did not give them one to start and they opened builder - warrior - warrior and are 21 hammers into their next build. even if we knew that was the monument though there's probably no sense in waiting 8t for it to finish....especially since it could just as easily be a galley which would be disastrous.

or.... ugh, or, since more than half the civs are presumed to have opened sailing (everyone except me, chev, and perhaps inc, by my estimation) they COULD have opened builder - warrior - galley, in which case they will finish the galley next turn, just in time to mess up our attack. please let it be anything other than that i think we can still eat them if they do spawn a galley since we went overboard on backup ships here, but it would be a much closer affair that would leave us substantially more vulnerable to norway-sniping :| and if they spent even one turn on what appears to be a monument foundation i think we should be in the clear.

i do really hope we don't see a crapton of CS galleys out there in the fog due to all the sailing opens, though, as that totally invalidates my whole "2 japan galleys = a successful CS kill" logic. but then again an early galley COULD be an explanation for why thrawn has not taken their CS yet, and i have not yet managed to think of another plausible one

either way, if they do NOT have a finished monument i am not quite sure what to do with respect to tile buying. on the one hand it seems a bit ludicrous to buy both the plains hill AND the gems...but on the other hand, both are worth at least 3 marginal hammers over working a coast tile and at 55 gold each that is a VERY fast ROI, and if we are hand-building the monument it will be some time before both come online the hard way... the plains hill i think we MUST buy as it is at best third in line for natural pickup and WOW is that tile ever better than coast gems are more of a judgement call but it seems like 2h + 3g with amenities fixing at 2 cities is really hard to argue with...

[ljubljana]

well, chevalier is racing us:



apparently with just one city on holy site projects too as they still are not displaying the empire score bump i'd expect from a second holy site. that said, it must be almost finished by now.

ok, gotta think about this without going full tilt...

[ljubljana]

ok fine, i'm gonna go full tilt for juuuust a second, which i will no doubt regret and delete later

is this actually for real?? chevalier's team is third in milpower, with one boat between them, behind a psychotic Norway capable of spamming out a longship every 2t and likely with 5 or 6 on the prowl already. and instead of defending themselves or questing for the city states they NEED to capture before thrawn does to be competitive, they are choosing to devote their entire civ to racing divine spark japan?? unlike us it really must be their WHOLE civ, their assets have to be literally just two cities, three tile improvements for craftsmanship, a mostly-finished HS in the second city, and an HS and now a project (if that can be called an asset) in the capital. no galleys, no third city anytime soon unlike us who will get one in two turns tops. nothing but pure overwhelming desire to land whatever synergistic belief lies at the end of the rainbow (which i now think HAS TO be feed the world, since, come on, choral music is good for indonesia but it's not worth THIS)

and what do they have to do to beat us? they are at 20 points and we are at 14. let's assume for the benefit of the doubt that they will finish the second HS next turn, and that their second city can make a 39-hammer project in 5 turns (pretty optimistic i might add, since their empire score indicates only 4 total pop like us). maybe their capital will finish the second one in 3t with 12 hpt and overflow. they have to go project - project now, which will give them 24 in 5ish turns, and they will STILL be 6 points short when they finish on t38 and will need a FOURTH project, finishing on turn 40 in the capital, to put them over the edge. are they really that confident that their one-ship navy can protect their interests from norway while they do LITERALLY NOTHING for the first 40 turns, while we with our SEVEN ships are sitting over here saying stuff like "well yknow if we really want to out-expand norway, ship #8 might have a vital role to play"

god i hope they're our neighbors so we can burn their damn city-states :|

(sorry when/if you read this chev! in my heart of hearts of course i think you're the best and am sure you have a perfectly valid rationale for all this <3)

[ljubljana]

ok, wtf would we have to do to beat this dude. our projects cost 42 (hakuho can 4t) and give 13 points each. next turn we have 16 points, 20 - 24 - 28 - 32 - 36. so if we were to time the projects to complete either 6t from now if teru's HS doesn't add points the turn it finishes or 5t from now if it does, we should hit 60 when they finish.

chev has 78 hammers of project to chew through and 13 hpt max in their capital at 0 food surplus. 13 * 6 = exactly 78, shit! and if their second city has 9 hpt they can easily finish the third project in 6t, 5t even, double shit! so their eta is 6t from now and unless i can finish faster than that (and i do not think that i can) they have us by virtue of the turn order tiebreaker, because i in my hubris prioritized galleys and didn't start religious infrastructure soon enough. i cannot beLIEVE i'm about to lose a religious race as japan after completely wasting my pantheon on divine spark. god, that has to be one of the biggest blunders i've made in my short civ6 career thus far

how screwed are we without feed the world? i'd say pretty screwed - hakuho can't get past size 4 without SOME extra food, let alone growing to size 7 for the campus. teru is housing capped and would need a terrible granary to get out of it. choral music is almost ok but with no snowballing i think it's a pretty poor consolation prize - it will seriously be like 40 turns before building a 3 faith/2 culture shrine seems like a good idea... choral music is in all honestly probably completely blank for us until well into the classical era, save for maybe the capital's shrine which i only started in anticipation of feed the world

i guess i should have been planning for them to do this from the second they put down that holy site. chev ALWAYS whole-asses things...

[ljubljana]

i guess maybe our understanding of the religious meta is kinda wrong, and the actual truth is any civ can get a religion first if they are willing to spam enough holy site projects. chev's eta of t39 will not only beat us here but would have crushed their russia in pbem20 by a full 12 turns. turn 39 is literally the same turn CHINA got a religion in the last game

[ljubljana]

well, there is a way. you're not gonna like it, but there IS a way to shave exactly one turn off our t39 eta with just the double projects. and here it is: move, buy pfh + chop, move, move, chop. that gets a project in teru with room to spare, and contributes 11 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 12 + 29 = 88 hammers towards projects in hakuho, just enough for 2, which will get us there in 5t, one turn faster than chev's best time if they use no chops themselves. the cost would be pretty horrific - three chops total dumped into religious acceleration, plus a flatground grassland forest lost forever at hakuho, plus quite a bit of short-term hammer loss from not building any tile improvements with the first builder. but i don't think chev could beat it - their fastest available plan is to finish the second HS next turn while growing to size 2, spend 5t on a project there at 8ish hpt, then do double projects in the capital to finish in 6t as well. they would need chops in both cities to shave a turn off that, i think - while they could do that (indeed our whole plan would be to do that), i really doubt they are planning to do so. moreover, we wouldn't need to chop the flat grass forest until the very last turn, so if it seems like chev is dawdling for some reason (say, their holy site is late or they don't finish the next project in 3t in the capital), we will have a bit of leeway and can choose to wait the extra turn and not chop again. also, one HAS to imagine chev will see that my eta is t39 exactly to the penny on GPP with two projects, know that they can get there on the same turn and win the tiebreaker, and probably NOT expect me to chop out a third project to shave off a turn. and if they do expect it they will have only one turn of warning as hak will finish projects on successive turns - they will have to literally have a builder sitting around waiting to chop AND successfully guess that i'm chopping out a third project to beat their time...

the arguments against this are numerous, i admit. and i can already hear williams mouthing "no no no stop it just let chev self-destruct" as they read this paragraph. but here is one small argument in favor: by finishing an early project, chev has signaled that they are ALL IN on this race and are planning to crank projects in both cities until they win or lose. if they do all that and STILL miss feed the world, and instead land only the option to build culture-producing shrines that don't accelerate their snowball and are not even really that cost-efficient in new cities since they need a full-cost holy site first, i am not really sure how they will recover quickly enough to compete in this game. it is possible that inflicting that kind of damage on one of our most fearsome opponents for the cost of a few chops and a builder might turn out to be a pretty good deal...

just to confirm, work ethic is definitely definitively banned for sure, right? if it turns out that they think no consensus was reached and it's therefore legal, that might explain this otherwise bizarre-seeming move...