[SPOILERS] swans will bite u

[williams482]

I had fallen behind a bit on your Sumo posts, but caught up in full now. This is cool! I knew Hakuho's name thanks to a Brian Philips essay from a decade ago, but basically nothing else about the sport.

I gather from the typical shape and size of these wrestlers that being (relatively) small. quick, and sneaky is not a reliably winning formula. Does stuff like Terutsuyoshi's leg pick only work if it's completely unexpected, and a prepared opponent will just keep as low and stable as possible while bulldozing the smaller guy out of the ring? Or is it possible for someone of that size and shape to be consistently competitive with the best of the really big wrestlers?

[ljubljana]

re asanoyama districts: my original plan in which i did build a holy site there would have put it on the plains farm, then the campus would pave over the maize. then we could put all the other districts next to the campus to get its adjacency as high as possible - a harbor in the water to the NW, maybe a theater on the jungle. but whether or not skipping the HS is actually a good idea probably depends on if feed the world can grow it large enough quickly enough to make up for "wasting" a district slot on an HS that is not useful for TAD's TRs. that, and also on the relative importance of working all its tiles - feitoria will actually be quite strong and workable at 2f/1h/5g, but before cartography it just has a lot of blank coast. from that my read is that a holy site here will probably be good eventually but might not be urgent like it is in the mainland cities...

the 30 GPP number presumably comes from the 30 GPP that we earned this turn from the double projects. not sure why the game decided that is "excess" GPP though when we needed every cent of it to get the prophet on time...

oh you mean this essay?

yeah, things like leg picks normally rely on surprise to succeed and do leave you in a pretty bad position if they're anticipated, in this case directly underneath your opponent with their arms at your back in a sport where you lose if you touch the ground... however, smaller wrestlers usually have a whole array of tricky moves like this that they can draw on, and countering a leg pick requires different techniques to countering, say, a henka at the tachiai, so you can potentially still catch someone off guard even if they are expecting something tricky. there is also an extent to which agility helps with more traditional sumo as well - in particular, if you can manage to dodge someone's attacks and find a way to get behind them, the match almost invariably ends immediately in a rear push out, and smaller wrestlers are the best at that.

i'd say smaller wrestlers are uncommon but not always unsuccessful. terutsuyoshi has stuck in the top division for 3 and a half years now mostly through sneakiness, and hasn't seemed to be in danger of falling out until recently. of the 42 top-division wrestlers, i'd say maybe 5 or 6 could be considered small and/or agile and/or tricky, depending on how generously that is interpreted.....but among them are two sekiwake and both maegashira 1 from the most recent tournament. and while most smaller wrestlers in this mold don't make it all the way to yokozuna, there is one glaring exception: Chiyonofuji, who won 31 titles in the 80s, was a bit taller than Terutsuyoshi but otherwise fit this pattern and looked like this:

by the way, i strongly advise you to not google any of these guys' names for a little while as google tends to immediately serve up spoilers

[williams482]

Yup, that essay!

I shall refrain from doing any additional independent research on this subject for the time being.

[TheArchduke]

Quick headsup.

I am going to:

https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games...t-lan-2022

could you cover the turn from tomorrow till Sunday?

[ljubljana]

woahh!!! this looks freaking amazing :D

yes will do

[ljubljana]

turn 39 - japan

unfortunately i had to rush with this turn a little bit as i have to be somewhere in *checks watch* 5 minutes ago lol

but i didn't want to delay further....



i swapped to colonization and committed to a settler after the shrine, so i can at least get the third city's holy site up in time for the era change and not unconscionably delay the GP (trader plan would require trader - settler - builder to chop HS at third city - GP). that may mean teru's campus was sacrificed on the altar of getting this religion first :| but that's not the end of the world, 3 era score is not going to break our calculations either for this age or the next by itself, and in theory there may be a chop-based plan that could speed things along

also we did get the 30 faith from the "excess GPP". i am leaning towards reporting this in the tech thread as a possible bug, williams/lurkers please stop me if you think that's unnecessary

[ljubljana]

only important international development: banzai turned up with a third tech, from the classical era judging by the 1 era score they got, which looks very strongly like CelNav. so we can expect to see RNDs from them starting in, oh, about 5 turns, which will fix their boats problem nicely. uh, sort of, 2 free RND boats does not an anti-thrawn defense for make, but it's a start. i think we'd better start thinking about more boats ourselves pretty soon, though. teru will probably start one after the shrine, and i expect to have at least one city on boats for literally the whole rest of the game after that to leverage Victor. and maybe TAD can build a few along with their second trader after the current settler wave? as soon as my capital gets the GP up these traders should be worth their weight in gold...

since it is currently 11 PM on Tues, Oct 19 Austria time, i'm interpreting TAD's ask for me to cover the turn "starting tomorrow" as beginning with the next turn, if it shows up after TAD is asleep. TAD, please correct me if that's incorrect, and also let me know if there's any specific instructions you'd like me to follow! otherwise i'll continue your builds as they are (which i assume are two settlers from our steam discussions) and start scouting a bit with your boats

[ljubljana]

re: teru's campus - pretty much any plan that gets it done by t61 involves starting it post-state workforce and pre-poliphil for a 55 hammer build. with the trader and borrowing the capital's jungle hill it will get up to 13 hpt for a 4t build with a bit of overflow, not too bad. we are on track to finish this shrine t47, so we'd have about 9 turns to grow to size 4. at 58 hammers required we'd need to average 6.4 food surplus to make that happen - is that possible? depressingly, i fear the answer is "not really" even if we do the trader right after the shrine, and even that means delaying the galley buildup which is sketchy af. i have a bad feeling that there is no realistic plan that hits both the campus ES and the holy site ES by t61, which means we'd have to take one or the other in classical while trying for a dark age, a terrifying prospect D:

woods chop only saves 2t on that too. can we at least grow to size 4 by t58? that requires an average surplus of 5.2 which is much more doable...but which also commits us to a trader and builder before the era ends, which is not too palatable either...

i am also deeply concerned to report that hakuho picked up a useless blank plains from cultural expansion this turn and will not pop borders again for 19 more turns :| so there is a realistic chance we would have to buy 2 tiles on the way to the campus if we want to make it happen (teru could get the sheep but the tile picker inexplicably prefers the fish rn...). that is a heck of a lot to spend on something that is not TAD's next trader

[williams482]

My general philosophy with the stupid bugs in this game is to avoid mentioning them in the tech thread unless Lurkers feel it's appropriate. Here, what's the point? It's a dumb bug, the game is full of them, and it's not like you're planning to squeeze out a bunch more free faith by further exploiting it (which you couldn't do even if you wanted to). Plus explaining it to the other players involves some (extremely minor) spoilers.

I feel the same way about the bizare extra range strength that Bastions granted Phoenician cities in PBEM20, for example. Game is dumb, and yet for some reason we still play it.

[ljubljana]

Turn 40 - Portugal + Japan

i move TAD's scout galley literally one tile to the east and make an absolutely epochal discovery:



holy shit!!!! ok, fuck EVERYTHING else i thought we were going to do with these boats, TAD's navy is going to race here ASAP and kill this CS as soon as humanly possible. i may not even wait for all the ships to fully heal since some of them (such as this one!) can promote-heal. and that goes for japan too, if there is a CS here there MUST BE an equal and opposite one in the NW and we have to get there ASAP with everything we've got before our neighbors show up.

TAD discovers craftsmanship mid-turn from my eureka, and i note with horror that they are suffering from the awful bug where a mid-turn civic discovery does not let you make a free civic swap. since the same thing happened with EE, they are stuck in god king still, and will stay there for the 10t it will take to do state workforce unless i shell out 30 gold to make a swap. i think long and hard about it, and decide to pay up  i swap to colonization and queue up double settlers in both TAD's cities after the current builds - perhaps that is greedy with this CS treasure trove that MUST be defended from the vikings, but... i am willing to gamble that they will eat all four of their CS before trying to swarm a neighbor (i certainly would), so hopefully we have just a little more time. and if we ARE going to build settlers before the next boat spam period, obviously ASAP is the time to do so.

TAD has also not picked a governor yet, it seems. i don't feel comfortable making that decision for them, so i think i'll leave it until they are back.

sure enough, just a slight rerouting of my northern scout galley finds japan's northern CS:



i am hopeful that we can pull this off with just the three japan galleys you see here (one of which can promote-heal after 2 more attacks). but i do not like the look of that barb galley - i REALLY hope it's on scouting duty and will run away instead of immediately smacking my poor galley, which has no realistic way to heal before the VC attack. i also note that VC's defense is the same as our cities, so it has its own galley out...somewhere.... i think if we time this JUST right we can forestall its intervention and take the city in 2 turns, but we have to be really careful. and all the same, i think i'm going to send TAD's fifth galley (spawning in 2t) over here just in case, though it will arrive too late to make a difference in all but the worst-case scenarios.

but if we can pull it off, holy crap. this is no geneva here - the city comes with a monument and a granary AND a holy site!!!! absolutely insane value, if we can take it and hold it.

i'm not really sure what to research here - i want irrigation, writing, and masonry before we start on shipbuilding, but i don't need any of them right now.... i provisionally swap over to masonry, since, we're going to like, NEED some walls, even if we don't yet have any decent ranged units to power them.

foreign policy: krill gets 4 ES from the first Ziggurat. Woden gets 3 from....a barb camp? and that's all for now.....

just...please let us have 10 more turns of being second in dom rankings before thrawn comes around the corner. CMF/inc and Woden/banzai have been fighting for the third-place spot lately, with CMF grabbing it last turn with their first boat and Woden taking it back this turn. that means those teams have at least 2 boats each now. i am guessing woden has 3, since they got their first boat 6t ago and it makes sense for them to be pumping them since given the atmosphere of panic that no doubt pervades the other capitals right about now. that would put chev and inc on a galley and a bireme, respectively. but that won't last, and after these settlers we NEED to catch up somehow to have a prayer of fighting thrawn. and, well, perhaps we really need to catch up BEFORE the settlers, but i am also deeply afraid of delaying expansion any longer than we have

My general philosophy with the stupid bugs in this game is to avoid mentioning them in the tech thread unless Lurkers feel it's appropriate. Here, what's the point? It's a dumb bug, the game is full of them, and it's not like you're planning to squeeze out a bunch more free faith by further exploiting it (which you couldn't do even if you wanted to). Plus explaining it to the other players involves some (extremely minor) spoilers.

I feel the same way about the bizare extra range strength that Bastions granted Phoenician cities in PBEM20, for example. Game is dumb, and yet for some reason we still play it.

sounds fine to me. lurkers, i'd like to request for someone to weigh in on this, if possible, and see if they think it warrants a tech thread mention?

also, williams, could i please have your thoughts on the settlers vs boats question? i'd hate to condemn our whole team to the dustbin by wasting precious viking prep time on stupid stuff like more cities :D i am guessing thrawn has about 10 boats at this point, and if a significant fraction of them comes around the corner in the next 10 turns with shipbuilding in tow, we will just roll over and die as things currently stand