[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

Dreylin was my guess too

and the answer is



they really could be a monster this game. i am not sure i like anyone's position right now better than SD's, they aren't really behind in city count, are certainly not behind in average city QUALITY having conquered the incan core, and have a shitton of land to REX into and now the financial resources to do so...... i almost want to call SD the favorite from here (it's still probably naufragar but i WANT to be able to say it's SD)

yeah, i would not be surprised if MoM is sniped. but it's encouraging that nobody who really wants it has made it to currency yet (other than ginger and i checked, they don't have 10+ forests at any single city site anymore). idk if IMP nauf wants MoM SO badly that they'd hit up calendar BEFORE currency....

if the wonder does get sniped, my instincts are that the best solution to the chop "problem" is the simplest one - just turn the 10 chops into 3 settlers for the rest of our filler spots. that will accelerate the point at which we can grow our strong cities up onto the happy from the market + calendar lux(es) by a full whip cycle and is probably more impactful than saving them for some remote long-term project...

[aetryn]

Dreylin was my guess too

and the answer is



they really could be a monster this game. i am not sure i like anyone's position right now better than SD's, they aren't really behind in city count, are certainly not behind in average city QUALITY having conquered the incan core, and have a shitton of land to REX into and now the financial resources to do so...... i almost want to call SD the favorite from here (it's still probably naufragar but i WANT to be able to say it's SD)

yeah, i would not be surprised if MoM is sniped. but it's encouraging that nobody who really wants it has made it to currency yet (other than ginger and i checked, they don't have 10+ forests at any single city site anymore). idk if IMP nauf wants MoM SO badly that they'd hit up calendar BEFORE currency....

if the wonder does get sniped, my instincts are that the best solution to the chop "problem" is the simplest one - just turn the 10 chops into 3 settlers for the rest of our filler spots. that will accelerate the point at which we can grow our strong cities up onto the happy from the market + calendar lux(es) by a full whip cycle and is probably more impactful than saving them for some remote long-term project...

Interesting. Probably capture gold + Iron Working not being THAT expensive a diversion.

Yeah, I was assuming America might just go directly to Calendar and come back for Currency. It's the kind of thing you'd do if you want to cash in that Engineer immediately, and were worried about someone else taking it. We can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that if they do something like that they've at least had to pay by delaying Currency.

[ljubljana]

Turn 97 - Zululand

everything is worth what its purchaser will slay 4 it



gav, the one SPI civ amongst us, has swapped to HR as befits their SPI-ness

ok, how fast could we get calendar? it's a 4-turn research at 100% science, but of course we don't have anywhere near the kind of financial resources we'd need for that. at breakeven (30%, BEFORE founding the wave of cities we're about to throw down) it's 11 turns.... we cou.ld in theory speed this up with massive wealth builds, but not sure if that's worthwhile.... if we DID stick wealth builds in every city that doesn't have some compelling other project to work on (kirishima's market, and the axe i just whipped in Daieisho for the greenline border are examples) we can be there in like, 5-6 turns.... maybe that's worth doing if i can divine a way to get the workers in place quickly enough? ok superdeath, lend me your sword <3

but in the same breath.... a second player is on HBR, and judging from the power graph it could be GT.... nice. or perhaps they just finished a bunch of units, as we did




our scouts have found Mjmd's capital:



with 7 total cities, 6 of which are visibly accounted for, it appears that they've barely had time to expand northward (ie, us-ward) at all....

of note, the colossus is in DrunkenSailor63, not the capital (of course, as it is not coastal...) - the city does have 2 mines so i guess it COULD have hand-built it, but seems like an equally plausible case for consuming one of the missing great engineers

right, i totally forgot to foreshadow this, but we do have one settler (one....) in place to found the turn currency comes in



we love this man! many rikishi start their professional careers as young as their mid-teens, but not Ichiyamamoto - he not only went to college, where he did amateur sumo but was not exactly a standout, but then joined the civil service afterwards and seemed set for a long career as a normal human that would not have seen cities named after him on english-language civilization boards.... but a long-deferred dream was eating away at him the whole time, and at the age of 23 he petitioned the JSA to waive the normal age restrictions so he could try his hand at professional sumo wrestling. and.... now he's kinda making waves in the top division! he's not in the TOP of the top division, by any stretch of the imagination, but neither is this city ever going to be a top city lol. but we love him so a city he shall receive



ok, we immediately chop two forests into kirishima's market so operation grow-onto-cottages (and eventually onto specialists) can get going. and i THIINK i think i juuust maybe think there is a way to get MoM in 7 turns, 6 if we're lucky and our aim is true.... multiple factors prevent us from going faster than that - it is about the soonest we could get the tech and the soonest we could whip out the workers and get them in place AND that is the very turn atamifuji's borders expand to get all the required chops in range.



no scary moves from greenline yet and we have the walls up at ura now, so i continue to be antagonistic towards GT.... i WANT them to see our troops closing in on where they want to plant, so we deliberately move 3 guys onto the gold hill in range of their warrior to send that message. but i think we do NOT want them to see the settler.... the ideal situation, IMO, is that they can be influenced to hang back with their settler for just a few more turns until they can bring enough military to be definitely secure against the kind of military presence we can bring to bear here... which would give us the time we need to sneak into our preferred spot first. of course, they will probably respond to this by massing troops at the northern border, so i am going to move as many troops as we can spare (away from the ginger border and) in that direction as well.

i am realizing we did exchange a wheat for wheat somewhere around t90, and i'm a little nervous that these aggressive troop deployments may be in violation of that.... clearly i am CONSIDERING military action here, even if no plan has us actually declaring war until t100. but... these guys are the ones using it as cover to establish a pretty aggressive border plant. but on the third hand, we do not have the moral high ground in that respect either as we have THIS guy in place for next turn



whose purpose in my mind is "just" to lock out any attempt to use the abi pigs and permanently establish control over them once abi's borders hit third-ring, but which may well be viewed as an aggressive border plant in its own right. idk, if yall think i'm being too cavalier about this, let me know and i'll try to tone it down in, um, some way....... to be identified later.......



ok, here are the extra troops GT is sending SE to defend their plant.... if they wait for the axe/spear pair to settle, they can make it to a spot that invalidates ours on t101, exactly the same turn as we'd be able to settle. if they also wait for the axe who is 2 tiles further back, they will be too late by a turn..... but it's also reasonable to worry that with 4 total units, two of them axes with chariots as the only counters in range, they might be able to just force through and take our city if we settle one... i don't THINK so but they have better reinforcement capability for the moment as they have better road access....

i could move this chariot 3SW into matara now to put them in a horrible position, in which they are forced to declare war to kick us out of their territory or let us take a crack at delaying their worker stack... but i think that's too slimy. that would be abusing an RoP during a wheat-for-wheat to impede what i view as an aggressive plant, and i don't think the long-term hit to our (my?) rep is worth it. besides, we could use the unit on the NW front as well if war breaks out. i will deescalate juuuust slightly and move it back to somewhere less rule-flouting, unjustifiedly pissed off though i may be

heh, this silly little game looks like it's heating up in a hurry along multiple axes at once, as civ games are wont to do. here we gooo

edit: oh, ok. i will face reality - clearly i am being overdramatic about the prospect of GT gaining a city in the southwest and forcing us into a worse spot. it's long-term indefensible for them anyways, and it's not like it steals the entire region - just some of the floodplains and maaaybe the spice (admittedly THAT would be kind of a disaster but we do have some prospect of trading for it). it's probably not worth a war if that's what it takes to prevent it.... i will try to win the settler race through intimidation but i'd prefer losing the spot to actually having to fight them now, and certainly to doing some slimy shit that trashes our RB reputation. i do like being pissed off but maybe these last two turns have been on the wrong side of the "use military to bully neighbors and enforce borders WITHOUT actually committing to a mutually destructive conflict" line

[ljubljana]

man, fast turnaround.... it's still today and there's a second turn AND 8/10 people have played so i really can't delay until the morning...

Turn 98 - Zululand

as you can see from the tech thread, we have outlived SOMEone at least



sailing means we have trade routes with the whole (remaining) world now.... anything interesting? i ask, to procrastinate thinking about the GT situation

well, firstly, i think it's obvious we should send greenline an opening fish/fish.... right?? that portends weakness i guessss but hard to see a friendly overture backfiring into receiving an attack when we have 1.4 times their power. and it's worth doing from our end because our troops seem to be needed in the west to harass GT, and we have no land left to contest w greenline anwyays, so may as well let the border cool off yes?



actually here is something - dear superdeath has found gems on the other side of the world, even though dreylin has refused to part with theirs... well, they don't need our ivory but we're pretty close to hooking up an extra gold at this point - why not offer a 1 for 1 swap and see if they bite? silver might not be distributed in clusters as far as we can, but the gold was and we know there are at least 2 gems in the east w ginger/dreylin.... maybe SD/rickety got awarded a cluster of them as well

also what's this "iron" lol



mitakeumi has 70h overflow from the worker whip (post-PRO multiplier) and i'm going to pull tarkeel's trick of storing the overflow in a wealth build.... not because we need to save it for anything but just because it's needed for our 5-turn calendar time. so this is going to work right? i can switch to wealth, then swap back to market in the future, and all this overflow will not be wasted?



uh.... ura finishes its border chops without incident.... granary in 4 turns +- worker labor.... ok i KNOW i'm really reaching to find stuff to procrastinate with don't @ me (ok you can if you really want to)



i immediately whip 2 workers and found a new city to pile-drive our wealth-juiced economy absolutely into the fucking ground...



finally, yeah... mere words cannot adequately convey how little i want to be talking or thinking about this, but GT situation. they appear to have advanced their settler without a significant fraction of their escort - it and the worker are alone on the pinned tile SE of the triple-worker stack. they could settle on the pinned tile ("GT 99") but it looks like they probably prefer the tile that axe is sitting on (it has been fortified 1t). exceedingly fortunately, we have a chariot one move ahead of the rest of our stack, so if they opt to settle next turn or the turn after with just the axe in range, we would have exceedingly good odds to burn the city. so hopefully they will not do that and we can steal SOME kind of a march on them with our own settler.... because i don't think i can ACTUALLY burn the city without being in violation of the wheat/wheat.... well, it's a little bit of a grey area - we sent OUR half t89, and they responded on either their t90 or t91

however, the time has come when we must show our hand to GT or lose time on the race - their warrior scout (underneath the westernmost impi) can now see our settler. depending on what they do, i am in theory willing to settle a compromise (read: garbage garbage horrible garbage) spot like, 1W of the gold to at least preserve access to the two luxes. and well, i guess i'm probably going to have to as i'm not sure i really see them blinking when they're this committed... but i can dream right

oh one more observation before i sign off



HBR KTB has gone BACK DOWN to 1..... so the second player to get it was rickety, 30 seconds before the end...

ok, i need to chill.... gav is signing on, they will roll the turn when they're done, and i can NOT be online when that happens or GT will catch wind of something when i fail to play the second turn (there's some chance they just don't see our settler this turn, for instance). alea iacta etc

[aetryn]

With the peace signal BASICALLY 10 turns old, and it not really being an exact science, GT would be REALLY pushing it if he settled that in the face of the chariot able to kill it. I don't think I'd trust an old fish-for-fish that much. But if you do kill it, you're probably committed to war with GT for a while. Do we want war now? What kind of stack could we put together right now? How far are we from Construction and the ability to kill stacks with collatoral/bomb down cultural defenses? Do we trust Ginger not to take advantage of our preoccupation with GT? Is this the right tempo for war or would we prefer to wait? If we can get to Construction significantly before GT, there is a window of opportunity, but we haven't exactly been pushing military tech to hit them with horse archers or something.

Hopefully he'll back off or at least pause to let his forces come up. But I think he's probably committed here, if he has nowhere else to settle anyway. So probably time to start thinking about whether if he does settle where the axe is, if we try to burn it or not. If he does pause and attempt to renew the fish-for-fish I think we reject that, right?

And I suppose the larger question is: Is conflict with GT avoidable in the near future period? If he has nowhere else to go, and we've settled up on him, for us to avoid conflict he'd have to prefer attacking Nauf. Well, I guess it's possible, but he's got to be at least a bit salty over the harassment and border settling we've been doing. We don't want to get paranoid and assume we're going to end up in a war when we might not, and by our actions make it inevitable, but we also have to reckon with what GT is LIKELY to do in the next 30 turns, not what he actually plans to do, since we can't know the latter.

[El Grillo]

i can switch to wealth, then swap back to market in the future, and all this overflow will not be wasted?

Yep, there's no production decay with this method.

alea iacta etc

If intentional, that's great. Good luck with your plans!

[ljubljana]

yeah, i think i'm somewhere between semi-bluffing and mostly-bluffing.... this is definitely not when i would choose to start, like, an Actual Hot War with GT, we have no real prospects for efficiently conquering them (unless maybe we get nauf interested but look at their soldier count....) and ginger is cresting the top of their relative power curve and it would be a perfect opportunity for them to slip a knife in. if they do settle where the axe is, i will probably.... not fully back down per se, but settle a close neighboring city that claims gold and SOME of the floodplains and try to ratchet down tensions after that....

i'd really like to raze the city with a justification along the lines of "but if we torch a clearly aggressive plant and take no more aggressive actions, surely they will just chill and accept peace after a while and not dedicate the rest of their game to dragging us down with them?" but i'm pretty sure such roads lead to the graveyard of empires around these parts. certainly if ginger is keeping their eye on opportunities to break out of their corner (and they MUST be at this point, right?) there are few better ones than us starting an immediately-stalemated war with our far neighbor

as for longer-term, i guess my "plan" for "deterring GT" runs basically as follows: tech construction immediately after calendar, which should be no later than around the same time they get it, and then build a fuckton of catapults while hopefully staying well above nauf in milpower. but.... unfortunately rickety's death combined with the large backlines between nauf and superdeath has skewed things in a way that does not favor us. nauf has for all intents and purposes only one neighbor in GT, which means GT can't really try to split them with someone and so is unlikely to gain from attacking them. which means really their only move with a chance to win is to attack us with ginger at SOME point, and probably pretty soon... i am not really sure how we defuse that situation though.... any suggestions?

seems like the two ways to do it are a) attack one of them first with the aid of nauf or dreylin respectively or b) rely on the combination of a large army, militaristic traits, and the theoretical threat of their other neighbors to stay their hand. normally i hate the passivity of option b but this seems like a really dumb time to fight, with our position relative to both ginger and GT likely to only strengthen in the medium-term. at least ginger does have a better option... if i were them, probably i'd try to split dreylin with greenline instead of us with GT, and it makes some sense for greenline too as maybe that moat between sumeria and india makes dreylin a better target for them in terms of future defensibility than mjmd.... so how do we, through the narrow window of ai diplomacy, convey to greenline and ginger that that's how we want this end of the continent to shake out? maybe we offer both of them war with GT on my end for war with dreylin on theirs, where we are in a situation such that if they decide to screw us over by accepting the deal we actually are in a position where DoWing GT would not be disastrous for us anyways?

edit: or maybe the next time it's an option, offer ginger and greenline war with GT + 30 flat gold for war with dreylin + 30 gpt? that way we will make quite a lot of badly-needed cash off the rider if they do try to accept.... where we replace "30" with whatever number we think most accurately represents our timetable (which, who knows wtf it is tbh). and we can send something analogous to nauf in the unlikely event that they are getting hungry, just to test the waters and indicate to them our desire to eventually split GT with them

If intentional, that's great. Good luck with your plans!

thank uuuuu i've been saving that one lol

[ljubljana]

rrrrr

rrrARUF RARARARF



rrrrRRRRrrhey hey no down! down boy

sorry guys my dog was at the computer

so, what is this....? the world's vaguest threat? "if you declare war on me and raze my city..... we will be at war"? not sure what the point of this is but i mean, ok.... at least this does SEEM to confirm that GT's earlier copper for copper was something they perceived as indicating threatened aggression

we click through and



LOL omfg.... thrawn you gotta see this.... I'M getting paid the danegeld????

interesting. ok, so we don't need the fur, but ACtually this suggests that we have some opportunity for extortion here. if we conclude that we don't want to raze GT's city due to the geopolitical realities (and i think we are likely to conclude this)..... we COULD demand, like, 10 gpt in exchange for cow for cow >



after one billion years we FINALLY have a hinduism spread lol. hoshoryu's a really good place for it too, it's usually near the happy cap, can run specialists times pacifism, and can serve as a half-decent military pump times theocracy



anyways GT kinda backed off, at least insofar as they didn't immediately settle and seem to be waiting on that spear (and, presumably, other guys behind it as well). of course now if they move to the tagged "GT 99" spot and settle we will have 5 units in range on our turn, and if they take the spot where the axe was last turn, 1S of that pin, they have to wait until t101 to found now.... which is still not QUITE enough for us to claim the spot we wanted (we can found on our t101 at the earliest, which is after GT due to turn order) but if they wait one more turn it will be 



ginger is sending a chariot to scout us.... nerve-wrackingly, but we do have 5 turns left on our last cow for cow so i'm not too worried. i almost whipped a settler in kirishima for the border spot (it is about to grow into unhappiness and we are not that close to being able to fix it) but like, clearly the smart thing to do is to uh, wait until we see some sign that ginger's going to try to take it before we do that. anyways i did some STUPID shit last turn, putting a turn into said settler and not even remembering to swap the food to wakamotoharu oooops



gav's capital defogged to give us the complete set. and as they say, "holy mines, batman!" note also the THREE 5-food tiles for a +11 food surplus with the lighthouse, wow! this is closer to the norm than our capital, which i think is tied with Mjmd's for the least food out of anyone.... but we do have ivory and had a shitton of forests to make up for it so i'm not too hurt. obviously if it was THAT much weaker than average you'd expect us to be like, actually behind or something



on closer inspection.... 2 of GT's stack of 4 workers are mysteriously missing this turn....? which i think means we can leave the chariot 2 tiles from the axe without provoking a wardec to road to and kill it? that at least requires them to choose whether to defend their two workers or the possible new city with their one spear, assuming nothing's one tile behind them (which is probably an incorrect assumption)

surely this doesn't actually mean they're backing down, right...? well, probably not a whole lot to do down here but advance our units and see what we see/feel how we feel/etc. i would LIKE to be able to move natsuko the scout back onto GT's road network but tensions are high enough that i don't trust them not to attack and kill her, and she is too valuable to risk needlessly (that is civ6 brain talking - in that game, as TheArchduke says, "every unit death is a tragedy" as they are so expensive and difficult to replace in most circumstances)

if they DO back down you'd better believe i'm going to pillage their roads in neutral territory lol

greenline joined while i was playing, so i had to take a break for a second - otherwise i think they can't return our fish/fish (if they try to propose a deal with us in-game it will try to "contact" us for live dealmaking instead and i don't want to and don't know how to deal with that)



yeah great gorgeous that's what we like to see. if they DID want to start something now we'd be in a messy position as most of our units have already moved GT-ward this turn.... but i guess they view Ura as a legitimate-ish border city rather than an aggressive plant. maybe because they got a city in the area too and it was apparently the location they preferred out of the two (see! see! i can play nice with my neighbors)

guys it may not look it but we are, like, 4 turns from calendar and still nobody else has the tech.... which means, much to my own surprise, it's time to move 10 workers onto the forests at atamifuji, right?



well.... sort of.... since i stopped simming significant elements of jank have crept into this plan, as you might imagine lol. we have 8 workers ready to start chopping next turn. the ninth is 1W of takakeisho - it is one turn late to the party but we have put one turn into its forest already, so we should be good there. the tenth is 1E of tomokaze - i deemed the chop into the new city's walls to be one of the two tasks more urgent than MoM, so it can finish that chop next turn, move t101, and t102 it can chop the forest 1S of Atamifuji, which has two turns into its chop already to sync up the completion time with all the others. finally the eleventh... yeahhhh, there is an 11th.... i sent over an extra from the east at massive inefficiency because i thought the micro plan wouldn't work our otherwise (again, no simming) and it turns out i was wrong and we apparently don't need it, nice. well, the eleventh just finished the OTHER essential task, the road connection to tomokaze, and will now do, um... something.... monument or granary chop at tomokaze maybe, if GT permits it....? or the essential defensive road on the NW floodplains?



i really wanted to do this to give ginger SOME idea of our preferred partition of this end of the continent, but after lots of microanalyzing i have thought up what i think is a problem with it.... if they accept and then immediately peace out with dreylin, that will break the whole deal (....right?), swindle us out of 49 gold without paying for it, and seriously mess up our delicate diplomatic situation. i really do NOT want to attach a "and give us all your cities" rider for fear that this will be perceived as indicating an aggressive stance that i don't really intend, but maybe there is no other option..... ok fine, here is what i actually did send to them



asking for what they can see is all their GPT rather than some fixed amount to attempt to indicate that this is just a vague proposal for what we should be working towards, not a commitment to a specific timeline. we could be ready sooner if we rush for guilds, but i think later is smarter so we can hit civil service ASAP and begin de-awfuling some of these cities (ok, not all the way de-awfuling but at least some awful-minimizing lol) i would LIKE to send the same offer to greenline, but they don't have enough gold lol.... only 16 and i don't want anyone thinking we want to fight that soon.... well, i will at least be on the lookout for an opportunity to do that

similarly let's at least get naufragar interested, to the extent that we can



maybe should have added the cow/cow to the ginger deal to be a little less aggressive-seeming, but i didn't think of it in time. oh well....

[ljubljana]

sooooo what if we chop 10 times INTO wealth, eg while wealth is actually in production, and then swap to MoM on the following turn?

asking because um.... well.... i might maybe have fucked up for lack of simming and moved 10 workers onto forests one turn too early NICE great nicely done well done me

[Tarkeel]

mitakeumi has 70h overflow from the worker whip (post-PRO multiplier) and i'm going to pull tarkeel's trick of storing the overflow in a wealth build....

That was actually Scooter's trick. I have done it once or twice, but it's not something I regularly do.

because i don't think i can ACTUALLY burn the city without being in violation of the wheat/wheat.... well, it's a little bit of a grey area - we sent OUR half t89, and they responded on either their t90 or t91

One of the fun parts of AI-diplo is that you really don't know what people put behind fish/fish (or analogs): some players see it as a binding 10t NAP, others is more a "no hostile intentions", or it could be a "please send your units away so I can invade you more easily".

Similarly, strategic resource mirroring usually intends some form of military alliance, but against whom?