I am realizing that, if I move before Ginger next round, our scout will have double-moved their chariot, and could leave them without an opportunity to declare and kill it which they would have had in a sequential turns game. Does that mean that according to Pitboss etiquette rules, I should move after them next round? If not, should I leave the scout where it is when I do move to avoid double-moving them? I could also send them a PM if that's the typical procedure here.
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[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy
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This is one of those parts where the rules conflict as you also have an obligation to play as early as possible. You shouldn't routinely try to play after them, but if you do believe the want to kill the scout it's probably best to give them one shot at doing so.
February 29th, 2024, 04:01
(This post was last modified: February 29th, 2024, 04:14 by ljubljana.)
well, in this case "as early as possible" here meant when i got home at midnight, at which point ginger had already played, so dilemma averted in at least this instance. they did not kill the scout. and in fact they (turn 68, zululand)
 wait whaaaat omg, we have an extra of those we can hook up! and i imagine ginger does too which is why they were offering, so we just gained an extra happy! wow, ok i have to completely redo the micro plan now but this, this is a huge deal :D got OB requests from dreylin (resending ours) and superdeath (who has a scout at our border), both of which i accepted. threw one over to GT too as i don't care too much about them scouting us as they seem destined to eventually become too weak to pose a threat, and it would be quite nice if WE could scout THEM (as well as see what's up with their world-leading soldier count). we lost graphs on ginger so i had to switch points off greenline, and i'm starting to wonder if maybe nauf is a better choice for EP spending than them anyways.... the time shouldn't be ripe for this quite yet but we need to start tracking their power so we can be ready to pile on if they attempt a GT eating. it seems moderately likely that GT will attempt to attack someone before catapults tbh, not because it has great odds of success exactly but because it seems like they may not have another win condition.... if they do not give us OB i will start getting paranoid and thinking about how we can up our defenses along this front  dreylin city 3 tiles from our candidate silver spot. butts  ginger's chariot has started to scout us, and i am wondering how paranoid we should be about it. what happens if they declare war in our territory with OB active? i know they get teleported out, but can they then move in the same turn? i'm nervous we will need to escort this guy around with both of our chariots so that it doesn't opportunistically choose to raze Kotozakura...and doing THAT would leave our defenses a little thin...  if there is a hostile chariot in the one fogged tile that i had no way of scouting, 2W from our two workers, i will cry tears (February 29th, 2024, 04:02)mackoti Wrote: Did he seen your scout? If he did and wants to kill it should declare war and establish the turn order, otherwise you are free to move as you please. They did see it this turn and decided not to kill it, but only because they were able to play earlier in the turn than I was. If I had been free earlier and played first, I could have moved it out of vision so that they never saw it, which would be a double-move since I moved second the previous round... That would deny them the chance to attack at all, which is why I thought it might be illegal.... luckily, in this instance it didn't matter, but I'm sure this won't be the last given how many random units and such our scouts are likely to encounter now that we have multiple OBs and are scouting enemy territory... (February 29th, 2024, 04:01)ljubljana Wrote: ginger's chariot has started to scout us, and i am wondering how paranoid we should be about it. what happens if they declare war in our territory with OB active? i know they get teleported out, but can they then move in the same turn? i'm nervous we will need to escort this guy around with both of our chariots so that it doesn't opportunistically choose to raze Kotozakura...and doing THAT would leave our defenses a little thin... Yeah, that's what I was talking about earlier: Scouting with chariots will make people nervous, because you can teleport out on declaration and then attack. I remember Charriu talking about modding in so that teleported units couldn't move, but I don't think that was ever implemented. (February 28th, 2024, 02:46)aetryn Wrote:(February 27th, 2024, 21:22)ljubljana Wrote: i don't thiiiiink we are too likely to miss Tarkeel's benchmark even if we do go for the academy; some of the kirishima cottages will be pretty close and won't come online until the t90s but i think we'll still make it. for paying for expansions, it is thankfully not just PRO TRs but also AGG ikhandas and the two gold tiles keeping us afloat during the crawl to currency, as well as cottages at every OTHER city. and the two scientists we'd work at kirishima are worth 7 beakers too, which is not strictly paying for research but can contribute to that I haven't had time the last week or two to follow closely, but yes, this. I worry that you are getting lost in absurd micro details and obssessing over low-probability neighbor moves, but I don't know what the plan is right now. Not the intricate micro-sims, but what is your overall operational plan at the moment? Expand to THIS many cities? Go for THIS key tech? I can't make heads nor tails of the massive amount of chopping - what's it all going for? Are we building workers so we can chop in order to build more workers so THEY can chop more workers at new cities? Are we just a massive self-perpetuating settler and worker factory? Seems to me that Expansion Uber Alles is rarely a winning strategyi n Civ IV, and the quality of your lands and cities matters a lot - meaning improvements. Can't just plop them down like in Civ VI, you ahve to actually spend TIME on them. We undoubtedly have more workers than anyone else at this point, why aren't, say, half of them getting cottages and stuff down so they have time to mature and grow your economy? The maintenance costs for these cities has to be growing excessive, and we're going to torpedo our own research at this rate. Like, cottages are not marginal!
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February 29th, 2024, 09:37
(This post was last modified: February 29th, 2024, 09:53 by ljubljana.)
I do love my absurd micro details
 I am pretty guilty of not talking about The Plan at a high level very much, but there is one - it basically runs like this:Step 1. Settle all "reasonably productive" land as quickly as possible while adhering to this dictum of aetryn's from 50 pages ago: (December 20th, 2023, 12:48)aetryn Wrote: Generally I expect to spend the early game at around 30% science and the midgame outside of GAs at around 50% science, and I'm probably not aggressive enough in expanding. Ruthless maximization of win probability requires riding the line of economic collapse as closely as possible. If you wait to take the land when it's economically convenient it won't be there to take, someone else will have settled it already. This is FAR less true in single player, as the AI is a derp at many difficulty levels and won't settle aggressively even if you cheat in free settlers for them via World Builder. Currently playing a hot seat multiplayer game on Monarch with 5 AIs, and the players are all at 12+ cities, while no AI has more than 8 and France is still on 3(!). I do think it's unusual that this map has enormous areas of land that are not close to productive, and I'm not really sure how or at what speed we should be trying to utilize that. But I think any spot that contributes at least one food resource or at least 2 floodplains and some other redeeming feature like gold is sufficiently economically productive that we want to settle it in "the early game". We have 3 more such spots if we don't want to pinkdot anyone, two fish sites in the north and one more floodplains/gold spot west of the one we just settled. In addition, I think that, even though the city itself will be garbage for a very long time, the extra happy from a city at the western silver brings enough economic productivity at our actual good cities that it is worth settling early as well. There is one other spot I'm torn about - the floodplains/copper site between our capital and the just-founded Tobizaru. This spot will not contribute much economically for some time either, but we may want to settle it for strategic reasons - our gold plants in the south are otherwise 9 tiles away from the rest of our civ and seem like a major defensive liability. Such a city wouldn't help our economic snowball at all, really, but it could be a pure military pump that works 2 floodplains farms, 2 plains farms, and a copper mine and whips military whenever it gets above size 5. Then, step 2: get borders expanded, granaries up, and food tiles improved at every city as quickly as possible, slam down cottages everywhere as much as the food supply allows, and grow to the happy cap. The point of the self-perpetuating worker machine has so far been just to chop out more settlers and workers in service of goal 1, as I fear without it our city count would not be remotely able to keep up with the Imperialistic civs (greenline and naufragar) or with...whatever Mjmd is doing to beat even naufragar to 6 cities with IND/PHI India. But we are starting to steer the unwieldy snowball into this harbor now at the core cities - Takakeisho chopped the Tobizaru settler and is about to whip the granary, Mitakeumi chopped half of the granary and is also about to finish it, Kirishima double-whipped and triple-chopped the library such that the overflow is going to finish most of the granary on this interturn. That leaves cottages, and we do have workers who are on what will eventually be full-time cottage duty, but um.... right now, our borders at the core cities have just expanded and brought unimproved food resources into range, which seem to take priority. Our workers are currently on the following tasks: 1x cottage at Takakeisho (was dry wheat farm at Mitakeumi until last turn) 1x cow pasture at Mitakeumi 2x wet wheat farm at Hoshoryu 2x settler chop at Hoshoryu 2x granary chop at Kirishima 2x road to Tobizaru So other than the road workers, we are about evenly split between tile improvements and chops, and as the chops run out, even more of them will be assigned to cottage duty. Having snowballed out to 10 workers with the self-perpetuating worker machine, we should get all those cottages down PDQ. At that point, we might find ourselves with too many workers, but I don't really think so - there are just a gigantic number of land tiles per player on this map that need to be improved, and because of the distances involved, even something as simple as roading to our new cities costs an absurd number of worker turns. Once we have finished the first round of "immediately productive" settlers, we will be at 10-11 cities and 10 workers, which doesn't seem too excessive anymore and might honestly be over the line into not quite enough. Next, step 3: tech to Currency, which is always a key economic tech but is even more so with Protective, which doubles the value of the +1 trade route per city that it provides. This will give us ~20 GPT for free, and let us build markets for +2 happy cap (with ginger's fur!) and +25% gold, and then we are next to Code of Laws for courthouses to get the Zulu-and-HRE-exclusive -70% city maintenance in combination with ikhandas. Once those are up at all the initial cities, our economy should be pretty thoroughly uncrashed, and it will probably be worth starting on some of our various awful filler cities, if we have not done so already. This is basically where The Plan ends, but step 4 is probably something like: find a military breakpoint we can hit before one of our neighbors (highly likely to be GT), tech there, and kill them. It sounds like knights are commonly used for this purpose, or on such a hilly map we could try to use Tokugawa muskets with their 3 free promotions instead. But we don't really have to do that - at this point, the hope is that we will have enough developed cities that we will be generally strong and competitive and can do whatever move seems win-probability-optimal from there - it just sounds like in this game that usually means killing someone, and that's the avenue our traits and civ most lend themselves toward.
February 29th, 2024, 10:52
(This post was last modified: February 29th, 2024, 10:53 by williams482.)
That does sound like a coherent and workable plan to me.
As for the intermediate desert copper site, I do think we should settle it (after the three actually good sites you mention). It's strategic location is notable, but it's also a decent military pump: one farmed floodplains can support both the copper mine and a plains hill mine, which combined with two plains farms and the city center gives you 12hpt at pop 5. The other floodplains tile(s, depending on exactly where the city is founded) should be cottaged for Tobizaru to work long term, but copper city will probably work them in the short term to get them maturing and to more easily grow into those zero food hills. Later on maybe we shuffle tiles a bit and add windmills, but a 12 base hammer military pump in a strategic location (with protective trade routes and a sprinkling of on-map river commerce) seems worth a settler once we're confident we can absorb the maintenance costs. |
