[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

yeah, CI would definitely be mission creep, and even though i have historically been a static defense apologist i agree that they suck badly unless they are very hammer efficient (eg, PRO walls with stone at border cities that cost 17 hammers each).... although i suspect they are a bit better in Civ4 than in other games as it sounds like the alternatives to attacking into them (bomb them down, strip-pillage, just go around them) all require exposing your stack to collateral from massed catapults, which the experts say is how wars are usually decided at equal tech levels in Civ4

as aetryn says, our other options are also bad, but we are not quite as hard-committed as i guess i implied earlier - we have spent 3 of the citiy's 11 chops, 2 of which went into a normal and reasonable granary, one of which is in overflow but could just become a normal and reasonable ikhanda or 1/4 of a courthouse, and the other 8 of which are sitting around roaded with 1t to go on completion. so the third bad option of "wait 30 turns and chop 3 knights", or maybe "chop the courthouse now and then 2 knights", is still on the table. although i am not confident the marginal military value of 3 knights in 30 turns really IS greater than that of CI now.... if ultimately we want to use these chops for the purpose of "secure our eastern flank against ginger while we attack GT", and we expect the fight in the east to roughly take the form of them slamming a big knight stack into a big impi/longbow stack, i maybe would rather have what amounts to a free city garrison promotion on those impi and longbows than 3 more knights (or indeed, 7 more impi) to add to that pile. i don't think it's anywhere near a slam dunk either way though...

and yeah, sorry about only really describing the micro plans here.... i will try to make somewhat usefuler illustrations in the future. i really appreciate you putting so much effort into doing your best to spot stuff anyways i am not sure i regret committing to the 1-turn plan to get MoM in the first place as i do think it was the only way we had a shot at it, and MoM would have been really impactful for us since it would let us safely stay in serfdom for a long period of time without painting a big "attack me, i can't whip" sign on our backs... but the downside risk was always somewhere in this ballpark and maybe i did get a little too wrapped up in grandiose-but-unlikely plans to really accurately weigh the cost-benefit

relevant question btw: does CI affect cities in resistance? if so, it has some applications in offensive warfare as well as one thing that i'd worry about when splitting GT with nauf is nauf immediately turning around and trying to steal our GT holdings before the borders expand to claim the roads. if a significant portion of our offensive stack consists of stuff like guerilla 2 tokugawa muskets i think CI could somewhat mitigate that risk

[xist10]

Cities in anarchie have no (extra) defence - this means walls, cultural defence and CI.

[ljubljana]

Civwiki claims otherwise, but simming confirms that you are correct.... did this change at some point in the dev process, or is civwiki just wrong for no reason here? i guess the point of wikis is that sometimes this happens lol

[aetryn]

If the chops aren't done yet, I'd save them (though getting the courthouse up early could be a good use of a couple). Whatever you choose to use them on later will probably be better, if that's an extra few units, or more infrastructure, or part of a different and more useful wonder later. With them already roaded and prechopped you can use just 1-2 workers and apply them very quickly.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

With such a wide empire just dumping your overflowed chop into a courthouse and banking the pre-built chops for an emergency seems like a decent enough move.

Side note, in VI, so many bare plains would mean death (cf. Canada, PBEM19, RIP us). In IV, that doesn't seem to be an issue, probably because there's more sources of production than woods. But I still twitch to see the vast swathes of emptiness in Zululand! Although, in my experience, it is quite accurate:


(I think this was Gingindlovu? My notes on this photo are poor).

[El Grillo]

Yeah, bare hills in Civ4 are (eventually) fine tiles with windmills, cottages, and mines all making sense in different scenarios. On maps this brown, a lot of pop will probably end up stagnating on Civil Service chained plains farms, anyway. Ancient Era starts typically don't make it to Biology, which is where you can really start using all the tiles/improvements you want, e.g. with workers putting in temporary farms, growing to max sustainable size, and then putting in your actual improvements.

[ljubljana]

yeah well....i hate the giant stretches of plains too (ESPECIALLY coming from VI), but it's not like these cities have enough food to use them if they were forests - atamifuji is going to struggle to get the food just to work its two ivory tiles, and will probably have unworked hills sitting around until biology (and i'm more or less assuming the game will end before then or not long after). so idk what else we can even do with the tiles besides farm them and just kinda hope the +1 commerce from serfdom civic is enough to make them worth something. in VI i would keep some of the forests and try to grow onto them with feudalism farm triangles, but in IV it seems like there is just ZERO prospect of ever doing so on a timeframe that is quick enough to matter (although experts, if you have ever seen people save forests on spec for biology instead of mass-chopping at sites like this instead please let me know!)

i guess in this way the civ4 pattern of urbanization maybe resembles real life more closely than in VI.... right now our population (in terms of where people in a country like our Zululand would actually live) seems to be very tightly concentrated in two or three river valleys in and around our three or four good cities with most of our geographical area only nominally subject to our jurisdiction, as i guess was the case in most countries in this time period historically... but i think it's a good sign for the future that we HAVE such wide stretches, as if the game goes long enough for them to actually be worked we will end up with a much higher pop ceiling than eg ginger, who has roughly the same number of cities but squeezed into a significantly smaller land area

we do have some reason to think this game MIGHT go long at least due to the wide distances between players and lack of any (living...) FIN civs who otherwise seem to have some degree of inevitability if they reach a sufficient size by the late renaissance... so i don't feel too bad about investing some of our expansion energy into investments like our recent very brown border spots. and both our traits are late-breaking economically too, so maybe in this field we will actually end up as one of the better-scaling empires long-term

[aetryn]

Yeah, bare hills in Civ4 are (eventually) fine tiles with windmills, cottages, and mines all making sense in different scenarios. On maps this brown, a lot of pop will probably end up stagnating on Civil Service chained plains farms, anyway. Ancient Era starts typically don't make it to Biology, which is where you can really start using all the tiles/improvements you want, e.g. with workers putting in temporary farms, growing to max sustainable size, and then putting in your actual improvements.

We did make it to Biology in 72, but that was a tiny game with 3 very closely balanced players for a large part of the Medieval/Renaissance that led to a stalemate geopolitically, allowing us to all tech up farther than we might otherwise get. Seems unlikely here.

yeah well....i hate the giant stretches of plains too (ESPECIALLY coming from VI), but it's not like these cities have enough food to use them if they were forests - atamifuji is going to struggle to get the food just to work its two ivory tiles, and will probably have unworked hills sitting around until biology (and i'm more or less assuming the game will end before then or not long after). so idk what else we can even do with the tiles besides farm them and just kinda hope the +1 commerce from serfdom civic is enough to make them worth something. in VI i would keep some of the forests and try to grow onto them with feudalism farm triangles, but in IV it seems like there is just ZERO prospect of ever doing so on a timeframe that is quick enough to matter (although experts, if you have ever seen people save forests on spec for biology instead of mass-chopping at sites like this instead please let me know!)
i guess in this way the civ4 pattern of urbanization maybe resembles real life more closely than in VI.... right now our population (in terms of where people in a country like our Zululand would actually live) seems to be very tightly concentrated in two or three river valleys in and around our three or four good cities with most of our geographical area only nominally subject to our jurisdiction, as i guess was the case in most countries in this time period historically... but i think it's a good sign for the future that we HAVE such wide stretches, as if the game goes long enough for them to actually be worked we will end up with a much higher pop ceiling than eg ginger, who has roughly the same number of cities but squeezed into a significantly smaller land area
we do have some reason to think this game MIGHT go long at least due to the wide distances between players and lack of any (living...) FIN civs who otherwise seem to have some degree of inevitability if they reach a sufficient size by the late renaissance... so i don't feel too bad about investing some of our expansion energy into investments like our recent very brown border spots. and both our traits are late-breaking economically too, so maybe in this field we will actually end up as one of the better-scaling empires long-term

I think the field is just too big for this game to go VERY long. It's less the danger of a runaway economy and more than danger that people get too spread out in power and get devoured one by one in an unequal pattern. For the game to remain interesting enough to continue, you need a close balance of power and that's just pretty hard to have happen.

[ljubljana]

hmmm well, we will see.... in our corner of the world i do think there is a lot of potential for extended stalemating, with us, ginger, dreylin, and greenline all very close to the same size and probably pretty closely matched in teching/troop massing ability as well. i don't really think things will stay peaceful over here for THAT long (a losing move with superdeath and naufragar likely to grow enormous in the west with little opposition), but what i could see happening is something like us splitting GT with nauf while ginger and greenline split dreylin.... if THAT happens the survivors will all get bigger but probably stay pretty stalemated as far as 1v1 interactions go. it seems like most of the scenarios in which someone on this side of the world ends up much larger than the others involve us ending up on the wrong side of the diplo and ourselves being split between GT and what would then be a runaway ginger.... or maybe greenline solo-conquering mjmd or something

[Tarkeel]

we have spent 3 of the citiy's 11 chops, 2 of which went into a normal and reasonable granary, one of which is in overflow but could just become a normal and reasonable ikhanda or 1/4 of a courthouse, and the other 8 of which are sitting around roaded with 1t to go on completion.

This is what's known as pre-chopping.

Civwiki claims otherwise, but simming confirms that you are correct.... did this change at some point in the dev process, or is civwiki just wrong for no reason here? i guess the point of wikis is that sometimes this happens lol

The wiki was created long after the game was completed, but it's communaly edited so you can fix it if you want.

Yeah, bare hills in Civ4 are (eventually) fine tiles with windmills, cottages, and mines all making sense in different scenarios. On maps this brown, a lot of pop will probably end up stagnating on Civil Service chained plains farms, anyway. Ancient Era starts typically don't make it to Biology, which is where you can really start using all the tiles/improvements you want, e.g. with workers putting in temporary farms, growing to max sustainable size, and then putting in your actual improvements.

We did make it to Biology in 72, but that was a tiny game with 3 very closely balanced players for a large part of the Medieval/Renaissance that led to a stalemate geopolitically, allowing us to all tech up farther than we might otherwise get. Seems unlikely here.

Always hard to tell how long a game will last, but 66 also made it there.