[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[williams482]

Congrats on finally getting your meds! The Adderall shortage has been brutal for a ton of people.

Regarding Heroic Epic, I really do think Koto is a completely viable spot. It can work the city center, sheep, copper, and three grass hill mines for a food neutral 16hpt at pop 5, which is plenty to be a viable early-game military pump. Civil Service means two grass farms which can support a plains mine for 20hpt at pop 8, and then however many 1hpt plains farms we have happiness for. With a forge and Heroic Epic, that's 45hpt: two turn knights. Plenty strong enough to be worth the national wonder.

Abi might be even better, though: it gets 17 hpt at pop 5 working pigs, stone, horses, and two plains hills, and can easily get to the magical 24 at pop 9 working a floodplains cottage, floodplains farm, a grass hill mine, and a plains hill mine. The only downsides are the vulnerability of it's food source and the plus/minus of being close to one front but further from other potential fronts. Assuming you remain at peace the spin-up times should be similar enough not to affect the choice, which points to Abi as the superior HE site, but I think either city is plenty good enough to feel happy about sticking HE there.

I'd be shocked if GT took that garbage flat ground spot you are trying to dissuade them from. Literally the only incentive they could have to plant there would be to fight for those pigs and I guess the stone, while the grass hill settlement is far, far superior in basically every other way. Doesn't hurt to pound your chest a little just to make the choice easier, but I'll be a little surprised if they are even considering that as a possible city site.

[ljubljana]

yeahhh re HE it seems like a tricky question that depends on how short-termist we want to be, which is usually "very" but maybe not in a long game? Kotonowaka and Abi have an almost-comparable ceiling in the knight era, but at levees Abi will blow past it and probably never look back.... i think we will seriously miss having a stronger HE site when Kotonowaka is failing to 1-turn tanks, if things get that far. But if we farm over Abi and make it the HE city, not only do we lose out on the commerce potential of dumping its +7 natural food surplus into plains river cottages, but we ALSO have to steal tiles from Hoshoryu to do the same..... I do not know if we can afford that with this river valley representing a good fourth of our potential cottageable land area. I wonder if there's a "standard" answer to this in the meta? You'd think river cities would always have higher hammer potential in a vacuum, but I feel like comparative advantage would almost always favor cottaging them......

re the garbage site: i agree, it'd be a total rage-plant with very few redeeming factors for them over the nice clam/fur site. they would probably eVENtually win the pigs but at the cost of totally wasting the clam and the whole coast to the north and northeast (at what could be their best Moai candidate too). GT doesn't reeeeally seem like the type for that.....but yeah, it doesn't hurt to be discouraging anyways and i think there is even a chance that they will delay settling there now that they see the full size of our stack - if we WERE coming from them, i don't think they could defend both lalibela and the fur city against 7 units with three copper units and a handful of warriors. we might not be planning to actually attack them, but they can't know that and it would sure make ME nervous to settle a city that creates an immediate defensive liability next to my power-spiking neighbor who is massing troops on the border........ wow it is fun to be sociopathic zulus who oscillate between scaring the shit out of you and loving you forever based mostly on whether or not you're willing to trade them furs lol

re tech i guess in addition to sailing/MC we could think about dumping our 7bpt into polytheism (maybe judaism will stay alive long enough for us to take a crack at it?) or into HBR. But I don't really get what the point of horse archers is if we're not attacking cities..... we hardly care that they have better odds vs mounteds than chariots with all our impis running around, and is it that helpful to only get killed by spears somewhat less comprehensively than a chariot would? or is the point that with stables you can do shock horchers which do get odds on spears? with respect to sailing/MC i do favor sailing as of now, that gives us a passive benefit with no investment while MC requires hammers to do anything and we are about to be really really chronically short of those.

speaking of power-spiking, check it out:



i love being a nuisance i really wonder how much this will force our neighbors, already 2 cities behind us on expansion, to run further non-economic builds just to allay their anxieties..... they are both kinda starting to look at risk of Falling Behind which would be amazing for us. i think once this cow for cow elapses with Ginger i might not renew it, just to keep them worrying about us. also it's probably pretty demoralizing to neighbor an erratic sociopath who could ruin your game at any moment and demoralization creates mistakes in a way that is difficult to quantify but not any less real than, say, tilting over diplo slights

[aetryn]

yeahhh re HE it seems like a tricky question that depends on how short-termist we want to be, which is usually "very" but maybe not in a long game? Kotonowaka and Abi have an almost-comparable ceiling in the knight era, but at levees Abi will blow past it and probably never look back.... i think we will seriously miss having a stronger HE site when Kotonowaka is failing to 1-turn tanks, if things get that far. But if we farm over Abi and make it the HE city, not only do we lose out on the commerce potential of dumping its +7 natural food surplus into plains river cottages, but we ALSO have to steal tiles from Hoshoryu to do the same..... I do not know if we can afford that with this river valley representing a good fourth of our potential cottageable land area. I wonder if there's a "standard" answer to this in the meta? You'd think river cities would always have higher hammer potential in a vacuum, but I feel like comparative advantage would almost always favor cottaging them......

re the garbage site: i agree, it'd be a total rage-plant with very few redeeming factors for them over the nice clam/fur site. they would probably eVENtually win the pigs but at the cost of totally wasting the clam and the whole coast to the north and northeast (at what could be their best Moai candidate too). GT doesn't reeeeally seem like the type for that.....but yeah, it doesn't hurt to be discouraging anyways and i think there is even a chance that they will delay settling there now that they see the full size of our stack - if we WERE coming from them, i don't think they could defend both lalibela and the fur city against 7 units with three copper units and a handful of warriors. we might not be planning to actually attack them, but they can't know that and it would sure make ME nervous to settle a city that creates an immediate defensive liability next to my power-spiking neighbor who is massing troops on the border........ wow it is fun to be sociopathic zulus who oscillate between scaring the shit out of you and loving you forever based mostly on whether or not you're willing to trade them furs lol

re tech i guess in addition to sailing/MC we could think about dumping our 7bpt into polytheism (maybe judaism will stay alive long enough for us to take a crack at it?) or into HBR. But I don't really get what the point of horse archers is if we're not attacking cities..... we hardly care that they have better odds vs mounteds than chariots with all our impis running around, and is it that helpful to only get killed by spears somewhat less comprehensively than a chariot would? or is the point that with stables you can do shock horchers which do get odds on spears? with respect to sailing/MC i do favor sailing as of now, that gives us a passive benefit with no investment while MC requires hammers to do anything and we are about to be really really chronically short of those.

speaking of power-spiking, check it out:



i love being a nuisance

I'd probably go sailing at this point. 

MC: Forges are sllooooow and while I probably have a love of them more than most people and would seriously consider building them at most cities for the 2 happiness boost, I would only do that pre Currency if I either Oracled MC much earlier or was IND. MC otherwise unlocks nothing we need - this is not the map location nor the civ for a Colossus play, Machinery is a tech for significantly farther in the future, and we've pretty much chopped all the forests so Lumber Mills aren't going to do us much good (side note - I actually quite like LMs if the game is going to be long, as this game might be. You lose the one-time hammer boost of chopping the forest, but LMs are just as good hammers as a mine on a hills tile, can be put on flatland for a food-neutral 2-production tile, come with 1 free commerce and pick up an extra one from a river, so they are good improvements, and it saves worker labor not having to chop the forests. But more importantly, once you get to the industrial era and you want to put up factories and power plants you really struggle for health and keeping 4-6 forests around for a +2-3 health boost could be the difference between a city being able to support an additional pop point or two. It's a very, very long-term play I suppose, and it's probably wrong to like them so much, but you do retain the option to chop the forests if there suddenly is a pressing need - military or wonder-related).

Sailing: While the trade route benefit won't help us much on this map, there's some likelihood it still will help us a bit. Any opponent's city of size 11 or higher will be better for us than an internal trade route, and while it's pretty unlikely anyone has a city that big, it's not impossible once the Ottomans hit Math+Masonry (which I assuming they're aiming for, since it unlocks their UB). It also helps our internal trade routes, since we won't absolutely have to have a road if the city site is on the coast or connected by rivers, even if those rivers aren't fully in culture. Obviously there's the diplomatic benefit of being able to negotiate, and we might pick up more resource trades if we need them. Also sailing is a prerequisite to the fairly important Calendar tech, which we likely want soon after Market. We have Silks, right? That'd be +2 happy with a markets. And we produce markets very cheaply, so we can afford them everywhere quickly, unlike Forges.

[ljubljana]

yeahhh, i am basically in agreement. i looked into polytheism and it's tempting (honestly even temple of artemis is tempting, only 2 people have the tech and we could use both the failgold and the actual effect of the wonder) but still 17 turns at min science, so we probably can't get judaisum just by meandering towards it with passive beakers. i do like that lumbermills are slightly better than mines now but.... well, i guess i'm just not sold on mines either, at least not on this map. it seems to me like the land is so barren that any one-food tile we work really had better be a resource tile or a cottage, and the rest need to be farmed over just so they will do ANYthing. which is part of the reason i've been so cavalier about the mass deforestation.... if there is one thing this land needs, more food-negative tiles does not seem to be it. i will probably make, like, one lumbermill at Kirishima, on the forest that we can't chop because we need it to impede movement of a potential Ginger attack stack....

re markets: if ginger keeps supplying us food i think they will be +3 happy, literally better than i've ever seen them this early. although i am not sure i see why we produce them cheaply, 150 hammers seems hugely expensive to me.... or is there some discount we have access to that i'm missing?

edit:



omg wait WHAT are you serious !!?! is this a CtH change? holy shit these are going to be the most efficient buildings that have ever been built and any diversion from currency is super banned

wow love that i just tunnel-visioned onto CtH PRO while literally not even knowing what the trait does

edit: upon reviewing the changelist i also apparently completely forgot we're gonna get barrage 1 on all our siege weapons lmao

[aetryn]

yeahhh, i am basically in agreement. i looked into polytheism and it's tempting (honestly even temple of artemis is tempting, only 2 people have the tech and we could use both the failgold and the actual effect of the wonder) but still 17 turns at min science, so we probably can't get judaisum just by meandering towards it with passive beakers. i do like that lumbermills are slightly better than mines now but.... well, i guess i'm just not sold on mines either, at least not on this map. it seems to me like the land is so barren that any one-food tile we work really had better be a resource tile or a cottage, and the rest need to be farmed over just so they will do ANYthing. which is part of the reason i've been so cavalier about the mass deforestation.... if there is one thing this land needs, more food-negative tiles does not seem to be it. i will probably make, like, one lumbermill at Kirishima, on the forest that we can't chop because we need it to impede movement of a potential Ginger attack stack....

re markets: if ginger keeps supplying us food i think they will be +3 happy, literally better than i've ever seen them this early. although i am not sure i see why we produce them cheaply, 150 hammers seems hugely expensive to me.... or is there some discount we have access to that i'm missing?

edit:



omg wait WHAT are you serious !!?! is this a CtH change? holy shit these are going to be the most efficient buildings that have ever been built and any diversion from currency is super banned

wow love that i just tunnel-visioned onto CtH PRO while literally not even knowing what the trait does

edit: upon reviewing the changelist i also apparently completely forgot we're gonna get barrage 1 on all our siege weapons lmao

Yeah, I mean they still aren't CHEAP (effectively 100 hammers after the discount), but they aren't as ultra-painful to build as normal. Put in 15 hammers (10 raw hammers) and it's a 3-pop whip, which should be doable. I had forgotten about the bonus as well but was taking one of the combos picked for PB76 for a test spin (Saladin of Spain) in single player and was surprised I could build Markets in 6 turns.

Not sure how much difference the Barrage 1 makes, but maybe it makes people... even less happy to get catapulted by us as they normally would be? Is there even room on the scale for how much less happy they would be?

[El Grillo]

Well, if nothing else Barrage 1 unlocks Accuracy at 2xp, though I don't know how much non-naval bombarding people do these days in MP.

[williams482]

I'm dubious that levee availability should be a consideration for our Heroic Epic spot. If anything, Abi's substantially better long-term productive potential says we shouldn't build the epic there, and instead plan on turning it into a monster ironworks city to crank pricey lategame units from, when Biology makes the food vs cottage tradeoff much less painful.

Koto is a good production city, should be reasonably quick to spin up*, and can be cranking military with virtually no opportunity cost from then on. Abi should probably be more hybridized in the early going to take advantage of the rivers.

* Actually growing to that pop 5 limit is going to be sluggish, and might require working some flat grass (presumably with cottages) to actually get there.

[ljubljana]

took a sim out to t140 just to see what would happen (and give us focus for the midgame)







this is not quiiiite an accurate dotmap but it's close. things i screwed up include:

- Khangela should be 1W, Hlobane 1NE, which makes room for a really bad filler city directly NW of the capital
- we are missing a terrible filler SE of uMgungundlovu.... it's terrible but it's a strong defensive location for a border city
- i am still unsure of if we want to try to contest our border with greenline. as i've said, there is room for one more good city SE of tobizaru, but i am not sure how much we can afford to prioritize it given our overextended state and greenline's high MP and generally scary status

key takeaways:

- 15 workers seemed just about right for a very long time, and i think the sooner we hit that number, the better.... we have a whole continent on which to practice slash-and-burn agriculture lol. actually i expanded kinda slowly in this sim so maybe we should add a few more to that to account for needing them in place at new cities to chop granaries and the like
- even the horrible garbage filler cities should probably come pretty soon after currency, even if they're working like 2 grass farms for food we still want to get them started as soon as they'll be net-profitable i think
- we have two cities with decent food surplus but not many tiles to grow on - Kotozakura and the new city at the FP/copper south of the capital that is yes to be founded. i think while the good cities grow onto real tiles, these guys have to 6-3 whip settlers pretty much continuously until our land is filled in. which, yeah, is a big setback for koto as heroic epic city
- dark-horse candidate for heroic epic could just be mitakeumi. it has a few cottages but lacks the food to work even a single plains one really. horse + 2 cows + marble + plains hill mine + a ton of plains farms is probably sufficient production, and it's never going to not be huge so we'd get the benefit rolling very quickly. and, though i agree that this should not be determinative of where we pick.... +10 hammers from levee
- iron works might just go in the capital..... and be stacked with bureaucracy....... but it's unfortunate that it has to fight mitakeumi for tiles so maybe those ideas are mutually exclusive
- moai should not go at wakamotoharu but most likely at our silks city in the north. it has one more ocean tile and also a ton of forests to chop into it (which is more salient)
- if we miss the code of laws religion, i think philosophy is a good try. we do want pacifism before the first golden age (and a religion in at least like 2 cities) to spam GPP in said golden age
- we really are not going to be able to live without serfdom long-term..... we are seriously going to work like 50 farms with this oddball land
- i think we reeeeally want to try for MoM, especially if we miss the CoL religion. an empire full of plains farms in serfdom derives simply enormous benefit from each GA, and i think with judicious use of pacifism we could juuuuust manage to squeeze in 3 before it elapses. also ofc turns that we are in a GA are also turns we could swap OUT of serfdom in the event of an attack
- we need that first golden age FAST. i think civil service needs to be very close to our first medieval tech so we can FINALLY get going at our horrible plainsbound nightmare cities. then we want to flip to bureaucracy and power through to philosophy and monarchy and orgrel DURING the GA if possible.
- i did this to myself, but kirishima is sort of in a nightmare scenario as it is the only city with the food surplus to both work good tiles and get the second great person quickly enough for the civic swap (AND we're trying for hanging gardens there). but.....it also has by far the highest cottage count and if we dawdle on great people those cottages aren't growing D: probably no way around it but as soon as we get that second GP it needs to be exempt from both whipping and great person duty pretty much indefinitely i think
- no idea when we're supposed to go get knights
- theocracy long-term over organized religion, i think - all our units coming out w two free promos is pretty huge, especially if the long-term plan involves murdering GT with guerilla gunpowder units (our border with them is PERFECT for this)
- not sure how much food surplus is correct at our good cities, prooooobably +4? that is not a ton of plains riverside cottages but if it's much less than this i don't think we'll ever grow up to size. our cities are very widely spaced and many of them have the potential to be gigantic.... honestly growth towards the top end is so slow that i could be swayed to +5 even though that is quite a few riverside plains towns that would never get to exist
- not related to t150 but i did just remember sid's sushi is in the game
- our first 4 cities and Abi will going to grow up to be total monsters <3

[ljubljana]

rough settling order for terrible filler: city with food > depressing ginger border city > depressing gt border city > internal plant. ginger's looking squeezed already so i think we'd better lock down the border as soon as is practicable before they do

i think the new plan is to tech to currency and then whip 5 settlers literally the turn the tech comes in lol. or: whip settlers carefully in advance, settle 5 times on the turn currency comes in, and then hanging gardens??? HG eta is like exactly t100 which is suspiciously exactly the currency eta.........

[ljubljana]

Turn 79 - Zululand

GT first before we get too ahead of ourselves...



awesome! ok, border established - i am feeling really good about this as of now. Abi is fated to be a monster city someday and if we can hold onto it, it will be well worth the effort and risk of reaching out this far



woah, someone has math! ok, unfortunately there is a good chance that puts paid to any delusions of us building the hanging gardens. one hopes it's ginger and they will want to build out more cities before cashing the HG in, which cooooould give us a shot at it? i will go for it anyways though as the failgold would be REALLY conveniently timed to boost us to CoL/Calendar/whatever



uhhh apparently you can get TWO unhappy faces per city if you leave a large enough city ungarrisoned? all our people are rioting now, but it's cool - as the CtH mod soudntrack says, where there's a whip, there's a way



problem solved :3



gingac capital spotted, and they are about to chop out....SOMEthing.... perhaps some kind of.... arboretum.... that is.... suspended......

MAN is that capital overfooded or what. i can certainly see how they looked at this and immediately thought of the ottomans. kinda sucks that the rest of the map is seemingly significantly less obliging to that kind of gameplan...



Magnus. ok, well, wherever their military is, at least it is not charging blindly through the fog towards us.... not that it would really have any reason to be? but you know me i paranoid.

damn, imagine picking a creative civ on a super creative-favoring map only to end up with a plains hill plant for copper with stone and wheat both first ring



a lil party departs Hoshoryu to hook up our extra ivory next to the extremely optimistically-named "MoM filler"



ok everyone - defensive stance! GT has been nice and obliging and so shall we, pulling back from the border and deploying defensively to do our best to avoid any escalation now that our bullying has achieved its goals  



behold the destination of the mitakeumi settler..... if someone wants to convince me to reach for the SE cowwheathorse spot in greenline's direction, please feel free to do so.... but right now i just don't think we have the force in place to hold it, nor can we without significant reallocation of troops from the GT border. this is not Abi, where we had a super-strong city with a granary right next door to whip out troops for our plant. i think in this region, Tobizaru still IS "the plant" and it's probably best to settle defensively for now to make sure we can defend it in the event of any surprises

also, as for why the next settler is going south at all, as opposed to some other direction - worker labor is the main reason. those two workers need to stay in the area until Tobizaru's borders expand in 8 turns to make some beautiful floodplains cottages, but until then there is nothing for them to do. so the only way i could think of to avoid grotesque inefficiency is to, um, put another city down here to GIVE them something to do  there is still a bit of inefficiency as they will have to spend a few turns aimlessly roading around.... but i'm not sure that's a bad thing the road we have right now is totally useless for the purpose of actually reinforcing Tobizaru....

also, realized ginger has research visibility on us, so may as well not ever visibly research math :D