[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

Turn 115 - Zululand

play tonight when i'm really tired and out of it or play tomorrow when it's 12 hours later and cost us turnpace? well, i know the correct answer (during builder turns anyways) but idk how much content i can provide



gav back in slavery.... unknown whether this means they intend to murder someone or just whip what i'm sure is reeeeal badly-needed infra



thebes is still size 11 but the rest of their cities seem to have taken a real pounding. well, yeah, as with GT i think they are far enough behind that they MUST go kill someone pretty soon to compete... the question is, superdeath or mjmd? don't see how it could be SD without outside help and nauf doesn't seem in position to grant it but who knows??

i suppose i could send our scout over and actually SEE some of what they whipped... it's retreading old ground but could be worthwhile? but then again we'll know soon enough if an actual war starts



ura is still above the doom threshold re cow. let's see... t116 whip ikh, t117 overflow to library, t118 whip library means we need med by t119ish for the fastest possible monastery... can we do calendar first? well we can apparently get med in 1t at breakeven at this point so maybe!



meow. looks whipped, size 6 is reeeal low for a capital this late... but still if there is some larger push behind this i haven't seen evidence yet. probably just worried about falling behind on power ratings on account of the fact that they are



kirishima deserves a highlight at its moment as the platonic ideal of a perfect civ4 city. takayasu is well on its way to becoming the second, lesser coming of this platonic ideal. ginger's border cities both have new (un-nicknamed) axes this turn, presumably in response to our own continued impi builds.... maybe i should keep some of those a bit further back huh. mostly the point of our builds is to go against their knights so i'm quite happy to see them spend hammers on axes. i guess it makes sense though as maybe if we magically had a way to throw all 9 units here at ankara a turn ago it would have fallen



size 1 city has 4 buildings and 42 hammers into a fifth. god is there any other rush in this world quite like mass deforestation



somehow i missed GLH and colossus in the same city for a merchant factory

[ljubljana]

me during builder Turns



kind of an awkward GE for gingac, no? idk what they can realistically get between here and guilds without a major beaker diversion.... maybe they could go for an aethetics wonder (parthenon?) but while that's cheapish it will still delay the knights push. genuinely unsure what i would do w him... if chichen itza was still on the board, maybe go for that to help secure my flank against whoever i don't attack, but of course it isn't

btw, i realized it's not just HBR but also iron working that will give us notice of, like, immediately incoming knights. there are 3 iron enthusiasts so far and we know them all from the trade screen - GT, SD, and dreylin, of which the latter clearly went for it for jungle clearing. even greenline who just settled a city full of jungled sugars apparently does not have it yet. so maybe once ginger hooks up iron or researches HBR, it will be time for us to start putting safety turns into military everywhere and perhaps some panic-whipping, but until they have done so, we know we are at least 2 turns off from them even being able to start assembling a knight stack.



Ura still at 50/50 on the cow, which i don't understand.... they've been putting 4 culture/turn into the tile for more than 2 turns now, right? and we only have 7 culture on the tile ourselves (or at least the city is at 17 culture total, which i think should mean that). so how is it possible for them not to have overtaken us by now? am i missing something in the culture formula....?

anyways yeah, now we're supposed to whip the ikhanda and overflow into the library so it can be double-whipped as soon as we hit size 4 again. but do we whip it this turn or next turn? city is at 22/26 food and growing at 6/turn so.... next turn i THINK it will be at 16/28 if my understanding of granary math is correct, then 22/28, so we can't grow again until 3 turns from now even if we whip down to a size 26 food box. ergo, whipping now as opposed to next turn does not speed up the library, so we should wait to work the oasis for one more turn and put this turn's production directly into the library....

well, but there's also the option of just 1-turning meditation now and overflowing into, and then 1-whipping, THAT next turn.... which is actually faster from a short-term culture accumulation standpoint since it gets a 2-culture building up one turn sooner. that might keep us from getting enough hammers into the library to 2-whip it quickly, but i don't really think so, it would take us a second to regrow to size 4 anwyays, esp after we lose the cow. but maybe that's the reason to do the library first, while we still have enough food to actually hit the more expensive growth up to size 4...

btw, i have maybe found the explanation for why the plot culture math seems different than i expected.... apparently there is a free +1 added to plot culture every turn that just comes magically from nowhere? which is especially significant in this case as we've had control over the plot for 6 turns with just judaism culture, so fully half of our culture on the tile has been coming from this free +1. so ok, if that's the explanation then it gave us a few extra turns of working the cow, but shouldn't matter going forward since we both are putting culture onto the tile now, so we should indeed be on track to lose majority next turn and control of the tile the turn after that.... and it should also not change our conclusion that we will need both a library and some other source of culture to start gaining again on their city making 4 culture/turn



bleahhh ok this area looks like it could still be usable for our rivals.... i wonder if GT is desperate enough to try to expand SW now that they have nowhere else to go? not sure it's actually good for us if they claim the land though as i expect in that case nauf would still get control over it eventually... maybe our best hope is that it's just too remote for ANYone to make it productive in the near future



ok GT, now i really need to know wtf these units are doing. you really wanna pay for TWO guys away from home just to guard your road and, i guess, watch for attack stacks from us? i guess we are doing something similar with two units in GT's territory to watch for military accumulation but at least they are on different areas of the front.... that said we could probably get away with just one at this point and maybe i should think about moving someone back into our borders to save the 1 GPT



look ma, +2 food/turn! i didn't want to farm at tobizaru because i think we're in the era where we NEED to start growing these cottages for them to pay off at all before the end of the game.... but what i will do is have daieisho take the hamlet as soon as we finish the third cottage, so tobi can start whipping off lake tiles starting at size 6, so in 8 turns. so we could at least single-whip the end of the library, or save for a double-whip on the subsequent market. probably the former though, optimizing for double-whips over single-whips doesn't seem to do anything for us in a city that will never ever ever come remotely close to the happy cap ever again



we ran out of civ3 zulu city names for our impis.... which means we have 17 total impis.....

maybe this naming theme was a bad choice as it does give info away about the rough number of impis that we have to an opponent who is paying attention..... though that may not be strictly bad for us as the worst-case for ginger in terms of our knight-edibility is that most of our milpower is in impis, so we don't really mind if they know that that is indeed the case. i wonder if it qualifies as an illegal conveyance of information though.....? if it does i can change all their names to something more sanitized

anyways this guy wants to go to the ginger border i think, the more impis we have over there, the better. might transfer a few from other fronts too as they seem stable for now and i'm pretty sure the east is where we are most likely to face an enormous swarm of mounted units in the medium-term future



in the NW, we are up to 4 worked plains river farms and are rapidly adding more... there are upsides to having 17 workers  and by the same token, i increasingly do think we need to get civil service before the guilds push (meditation excepted) - if we can only farm next to rivers, we are actually not all that far away from our workers catastrophically running out of stuff to do. luckily we can get CS in only ten billion turns at max science. ok, the real number is 5 turns at max science but that requires ~9 turns of saving first. that is if we don't dare to run wealth to accelerate it, but i indeed do think we no longer dare to do that - we seriously need to start pumping military no sooner than right after the courthouse wave completes if we want to steer gingac's knights towards dreylin. i may run wealth for like one or two turns if the workers will otherwise have to make useless roads waiting on the tech to come in, but i think no more than that



realized greenline just accepted our fish/fish earlier instead of resending. does that mean it will be seen as in force until one of us cancels it instead of the standard 10 turns?



some 30 turns after mathematics, i think this is the only other hammam for gingac so far besides the one they needed in the capital for HG. i am not too convinced the ottomans pick is working out for them as of yet.... the problem is that happy is just too easy to access on this map, even without any happy from traits/civ we can grow cities to size 11 now, 13 after calendar, and they are nowhere close to either of those. and i don't think they have 5 whip anger sitting around in all their size 8 cities either, as, well, if they did, they would presumably have built the hammams. perhaps this will change once knights come in, but each knight is a triple-whip and i don't think they can regrow quickly enough to burn all the surplus happy on that. maybe it will change once drafted janissaries come in, but while they could draft up an enormous swarm of them once they get there, i am not so sure muskets will remain effective as attacking units that late in the game... surely by the time they drop 3k beakers into nationalism research, both their neighbors will have hit gunpowder as well, and i think they'd need quite a quantitative edge to overcome attacking with 1-movers into catapults at tech parity...



when do you guys think we should claim this border spot, if at all? it nets us a not-insignificant 4 riverside plains farms, and of course the sooner we can get it started, the sooner it will contribute those farms. but maybe it would piss off gingac too much? we could also move it 2N to avoid stealing any of their tiles, and then if we do get hit with a giant knight stack, it would help shield the actually-useful takayasu and mitakeumi. ok, actually maybe i like that better.... we could have the settler out without toooo much gameplan distortion by whip-overflowing the end of the monument in daieisho in 4t and then the rest of the settler a turn later at size 4. that city would also claim some REALLY convenient mountains to give us permanent vision deep into the southern border with ginger

also we should figure out when to ask GT and ginger about renewing the cow/cow..... we want to time it such that ginger is close enough to knights as to force them to tip their hand. but maybe we want to renew with GT slightly earlier so they can't pile on. in general i think it's a good idea to stagger these so they don't all end at the same time and leave us susceptible to pile-on, but by how much? do we want a 3-turn gap between each pair of neighbors, or a 5-turn gap between ginger and the greenline/GT pair? well, our only active ones right now are with greenline t109 and ginger t107 so maybe not a bad idea to renew with GT now just to get working on the end goal of having SOME kind of staggering in place when ginger's ready to push. i will send that over and then finally close this game and get on with my day ehehehe

[aetryn]

Ultimately once we get to third ring borders we'll quickly get the Cow back and probably keep it, so I think we should generally be okay. It's unlikely Greenline will make a big effort over this cow when he has other areas of more concern.

In PB72 Greenline also tended to accept fish for fish instead of echoing, so that may just be his version of the convention. In general from what I understand in other games accepting rather than echoing has usually meant not that anything was really different in terms of intent but that the other party was happy to show off to the world his non-aggression with you. In the case of Greenline, it's unlikely we're giving any useful information away because nobody's going to expect two cross-desert players to fight at this point when we have much more significant neighbors.
 
I think I'd prefer the more defensive less provocative plant on the Ginger border, and it is a good idea to get it wrapped up I think. Having a good, stable border that doesn't irritate the other person or have any unknowns is good for relations. Having cities more defensively positioned is also good for not giving the other person any big ideas, and so good for relations.

Hopefully our tech percentage goes up as some of these courthouses complete, which might shave a turn or two off of the Civil Service push.

[Miguelito]

@mig i am confused, what were you responding to? i agree, and am trying my best to disclose to lurkers anything that i'm worried might be a clock game.....

yeah I had not even gotten the full picture, and it was a quick drive by post cause I thought you were waiting for Gingerto play to be safe from a snipe or something. Just a missed opportunity to keep my mouth shut.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

some 30 turns after mathematics, i think this is the only other hammam for gingac so far besides the one they needed in the capital for HG. i am not too convinced the ottomans pick is working out for them as of yet.... the problem is that happy is just too easy to access on this map, even without any happy from traits/civ we can grow cities to size 11 now, 13 after calendar, and they are nowhere close to either of those. and i don't think they have 5 whip anger sitting around in all their size 8 cities either, as, well, if they did, they would presumably have built the hammams. perhaps this will change once knights come in, but each knight is a triple-whip and i don't think they can regrow quickly enough to burn all the surplus happy on that. maybe it will change once drafted janissaries come in, but while they could draft up an enormous swarm of them once they get there, i am not so sure muskets will remain effective as attacking units that late in the game... surely by the time they drop 3k beakers into nationalism research, both their neighbors will have hit gunpowder as well, and i think they'd need quite a quantitative edge to overcome attacking with 1-movers into catapults at tech parity...

You rate Ginger very highly, but here you imply that they're playing suboptimally - the Ottoman pick "not working out." It seems to me that this analysis relies on two related assumptions:

a)That Ginger is intending a massive knight push on either you or Dreylin, because
b)Janissaries won't be able to really compete as decisive units as they're too slow. 

My only question is, you've been preaching the doom of knights for a few weeks now, yet no knights have appeared. Suggests to me that Ginger DOESN'T plan on dropping a swarm of knights on you or Dreylin - unless I've misunderstood when knight tech unlocks? - because if he's truly as competent as you say he is, then he surely wouldn't faff around after reaching the key tech to give his targets time to catch up in tech and build their own defenses. Then you couple that thought with the Ottoman pick, and the best place for real value remaining is the unique unit later. Are there any examples of successful Janissary offensives in other games? Is being a 1-mover really that crippling in Civ IV warfare?

[aetryn]

some 30 turns after mathematics, i think this is the only other hammam for gingac so far besides the one they needed in the capital for HG. i am not too convinced the ottomans pick is working out for them as of yet.... the problem is that happy is just too easy to access on this map, even without any happy from traits/civ we can grow cities to size 11 now, 13 after calendar, and they are nowhere close to either of those. and i don't think they have 5 whip anger sitting around in all their size 8 cities either, as, well, if they did, they would presumably have built the hammams. perhaps this will change once knights come in, but each knight is a triple-whip and i don't think they can regrow quickly enough to burn all the surplus happy on that. maybe it will change once drafted janissaries come in, but while they could draft up an enormous swarm of them once they get there, i am not so sure muskets will remain effective as attacking units that late in the game... surely by the time they drop 3k beakers into nationalism research, both their neighbors will have hit gunpowder as well, and i think they'd need quite a quantitative edge to overcome attacking with 1-movers into catapults at tech parity...

You rate Ginger very highly, but here you imply that they're playing suboptimally - the Ottoman pick "not working out." It seems to me that this analysis relies on two related assumptions:

a)That Ginger is intending a massive knight push on either you or Dreylin, because
b)Janissaries won't be able to really compete as decisive units as they're too slow. 

My only question is, you've been preaching the doom of knights for a few weeks now, yet no knights have appeared. Suggests to me that Ginger DOESN'T plan on dropping a swarm of knights on you or Dreylin - unless I've misunderstood when knight tech unlocks? - because if he's truly as competent as you say he is, then he surely wouldn't faff around after reaching the key tech to give his targets time to catch up in tech and build their own defenses. Then you couple that thought with the Ottoman pick, and the best place for real value remaining is the unique unit later. Are there any examples of successful Janissary offensives in other games? Is being a 1-mover really that crippling in Civ IV warfare?

Many successful offensives will use both 1 and 2 movers, either together or separately. Under normal tech paths Muskets have a fairly short life span, but that's because you typically ignore Gunpowder until you're nearly ready for Rifles since it has no economic benefit and so many other techs in that era do. If you have UU Musket you plan to use, you obviously CAN go there much earlier - Gunpowder is right after Guilds, after all, and if you don't care about Knights you can go there via Civil Service ->Paper->Education (which Great Merchants and Great Scientists can both contribute bulbs on) and threaten Liberalism (first to gets a free tech) and/or start building Universities. There's no reason we might not be facing Janissaries + Knights, or Janissaries + Cuirassiers if Ginger prefers to go to Nationalism early and ignore Guilds. We're still a little early for Knights to actually be showing up. You have to get Feudalism, Metal Casting, and Machinery first plus whatever economic techs you want, and tech rate is still slow enough even for Ginger that I wouldn't expect him to be there for a few more turns. So far, the only action has been a border skirmish between Gav and MJMD, and the underdeveloped green getting scarfed down by his neighbors. But wars will be coming.

I agree about not underestimating Ginger. The Hammans aren't gone and never obsolete. He can build them very cheaply later. There will come a time when key cities at least want to get really big, and it will still be an asset. Also, keep in mind some of the extra happiness is coming from trade agreements that will fall apart as soon as war gets declared. And war weariness causes happiness penalties. Ginger has more hedge against those situations and will need to build fewer otherwise weak buildings for happy (Forges in weak hammer cities, Markets in weak commerce cities, Coloseums and Theatres in ANY city). The UU would be a problem until we get Gunpowder units of our own (Janissaries get bonuses against all our current unit classes). They will certainly murder Impis very effectively if that's the way he decides to go. I think Ginger is probably at least the 3rd most dangerous player on the map at the moment (behind Superdeath and possibly Nauf), and is close enough to us to be an immediate concern. I still have hopes he tangles with Dreylin first, but he's certainly not doing badly here. Trust me, you're probably getting much more flak over building Chichen Itza in the other threads .

For his Great Engineer, there are several possibilities. Since he may well go for early Nationalism to skip the Guilds line for a while and pair Cuirassiers with Janissaries, he could obviously save it to quick-build Taj Mahal - probably the most likely option. Notre Dame's not awful if he wants to double-down on never building a happiness building. He'll find something to do with it. I wouldn't assume it's settled unless you actually capture the city where it's been settled and see it.

[ljubljana]

logged in to respond to chev, only to discover to my great surprise that the turn has rolled already! well, i'll play in a little bit but i can't right this second - sorry future readers upset at me logging in but not playing

so knights unlock at guilds, which is



...not on this screen, because it's not big enough to contain all the relevant info, but it's right after machinery, and also has feudalism as a mandatory prerequisite.

knights themselves also require horseback riding tech (which only gavagai has) and either iron working tech (which ginger does not have) or a trade for iron (which they aren't now, but could at any time - the only excess is with superdeath, perhaps WE should try to trade for it to pre-empt that?). those techs are both very cheap compared to guilds itself, but do require a turn each to finish, and iron requires workers in place to hook up if they can't trade for a source.

we know they DO have machinery, as we spotted them building windmills on turn 111, 7 turns ago. we also know they have currency and its prereqs, and they do NOT have calendar (only 2 people do and SD and nauf both have calendar resources online). no info on CoL unless we're willing to squint at all their cities for courthouses, which i'm not right now. they did not have construction when we got it, but now i think we can't tell as they have no river crossings eligible for bridge placement (i wonder if this is intentional??)

so the question is, how far up the monarchy -> feudalism tree are they? it's more likely that they went for machinery before feudalism imo, since they did want to make windmills and monarchy + feudalism don't really do anything for them unless they swap civics, which they haven't iirc. in that case, in the 7 turns since machinery they have probably finished monarchy and gotten fairly far into feudalism, and i'd guess guilds is maaaybe 10 turns away if they go straight for it. or they could have done feudalism first for some reason (maybe to conceal from their neighbors that they're going for knights?) in which case i don't thiiink 7t is enough time to get guilds, but it might be close! either way i don't QUITE think we'd hit the stage where we would expect them to have knights if they were going for them, but, also either way, they are probably not that far off.....

re janissaries, i am wondering the same thing and would also love to hear about examples of this unit killing people in these games, if people can think of one.... or of muskets generally being the decisive attack unit in any situation where they are NOT given some special promos like guerilla to turn them into 2-movers

@aetryn please feel free to confirm or deny my nonquantitative intuition on these points.... also i am in agreement about the border city. though maaaaybe it should be low enough-priority for us to wait to learn if ginger is actually planning an attack soon, and against whom.... though i doubt a border city that defensively places will be what tips them over the edge into coming for us, its value is so marginal that maybe it's not worth even a small risk of that happening

[ljubljana]

oh yeah i don't mean to imply in any way that i think ginger's playing POORLY, or to underestimate them - i would certainly put them in the top 3 in terms of dangerousness and maybe put them above nauf, as at some point neighboring superdeath is presumably going to start impairing nauf's freedom to turn their econ edge into a land edge. i am just unsure how much i like the ottoman civ specifically... i agree hammams will be useful later when all the otherwise-efficient happy runs out, but if so that seems awfully late for a civ bonus to come online and the utility over building, like, a weak forge seems kinda marginal. but maybe most of the UBs are kinda marginal and the ikhandas that i'm comparing them to are just one of the few exceptions

and i DEFINITELY don't mean to imply that i think ginger's playing worse than /i/ am, or that i think chichen itza is anything other than the consensus biggest weed move of the game so far in the other threads lol

re the GE, yeah, after being wrong about nauf settling it, it sounds like the meta is indeed to save them and i should expect ginger to do the same. and yeah, probably for taj mahal, but isn't that a looong way away? both the tech itself and its prereqs are super expensive and have no overlap with the gunpowder techs unless you're taking that super expensive-looking path there via education... while i certainly would be scared of a push with drafted janissaries, it seems like gunpowder would come after guilds and then nationalism would come WAY after that for maybe like as much as a 20-30 turn delay relative to a knight push..... do you think that's an accurate sense of the relative timings? and if so, do you think such a push would be so much stronger than going for knights that it's worth waiting that long for?

also, um, should WE be going for that paper -> education -> gunpowder route to unlock what is effectively OUR musket UU? i feel like no as it would mess up our economy to delay serfdom for that long, but maybe that's incorrect from a "get the strongest push we can the fastest" perspective

edit: also no because we would then miss vasslage which we probably want to double-promote new muskets anyways

[ljubljana]

Turn 117 - Zululand

well, opened the turn to GT returning cow/cow, cool. so we can't get dogpiled in the next 10 turns, hopefully indicating that ginger is not already sending them feelers about attacking in the next 10 turns



plans to consider making an offer for SD's iron will have to wait as they are online...



i like chatting ingame but is this too close to disallowed diplo? if so i apologize and will dial it back



uhhhh hello there friend???? well aren't you out in the middle of nowhere. well, if this land is going to be useful for SOMEone i'm glad it's gav



found the CoL sniper :') so SD has CoL and calendar and iron working and is not only not behind on tech but a little ahead. uh, of us anyways (no comment on what that means relative to the field at large)



kinbozan actually got its second cottage up without interference from GT's weird units! borders expand in 5 at which point we chopwhip the granary, then grow until the end of time



WTK finishes granary in 2, unless i swap onto hoshoryu's cow early which i still might. WTK will definitely take it to hit size 2, i don't want to wait until the fish comes online in 7 (or more quantitatively, it seems better here than in hoshoryu because hoshoryu's food box is bigger). we will give it back when the fish is around ofc



gingac GE is on the move...? and they are moving more guys up to our border. still defensive-looking guys but.... 



GT and nauf have great people as well

do you guys think we should be putting a safety turn into military in all the cities that are definitely within 10 turns of being put on military? thought about doing this



but most of these cities are on courthouses rn and delaying those costs us a fair few gold....



i don't expect this to work really, but.... they can have our gold for their dye (they have an extra that seems to not be hooked up) and the extra iron. i would swap gold/iron straight up to keep ginger from buying it given that we too have an extra to come online soon, but kirishima will riot before our silks come in if we do that

[aetryn]

oh yeah i don't mean to imply in any way that i think ginger's playing POORLY, or to underestimate them - i would certainly put them in the top 3 in terms of dangerousness and maybe put them above nauf, as at some point neighboring superdeath is presumably going to start impairing nauf's freedom to turn their econ edge into a land edge. i am just unsure how much i like the ottoman civ specifically... i agree hammams will be useful later when all the otherwise-efficient happy runs out, but if so that seems awfully late for a civ bonus to come online and the utility over building, like, a weak forge seems kinda marginal. but maybe most of the UBs are kinda marginal and the ikhandas that i'm comparing them to are just one of the few exceptions

and i DEFINITELY don't mean to imply that i think ginger's playing worse than /i/ am, or that i think chichen itza is anything other than the consensus biggest weed move of the game so far in the other threads lol

re the GE, yeah, after being wrong about nauf settling it, it sounds like the meta is indeed to save them and i should expect ginger to do the same. and yeah, probably for taj mahal, but isn't that a looong way away? both the tech itself and its prereqs are super expensive and have no overlap with the gunpowder techs unless you're taking that super expensive-looking path there via education... while i certainly would be scared of a push with drafted janissaries, it seems like gunpowder would come after guilds and then nationalism would come WAY after that for maybe like as much as a 20-30 turn delay relative to a knight push..... do you think that's an accurate sense of the relative timings? and if so, do you think such a push would be so much stronger than going for knights that it's worth waiting that long for?

also, um, should WE be going for that paper -> education -> gunpowder route to unlock what is effectively OUR musket UU? i feel like no as it would mess up our economy to delay serfdom for that long, but maybe that's incorrect from a "get the strongest push we can the fastest" perspective

edit: also no because we would then miss vasslage which we probably want to double-promote new muskets anyways

Paper is cheaper than Guilds, though appearing farther right in the tree, though Education's quite expensive. How much cheaper is going via Guilds really? I guess they have Machinery, which is one of the techs you could otherwise delay a while. But both Paper and Education are easier bulbs than Guilds.  Actually there's a possible bulb play here with the Engineer. If they've ignored Monarchy (and thus they aren't eligible for Feudalism) and research to Paper, a Great Scientist will bulb toward Education and a Great Engineer will bulb toward Gunpowder (well, after he clears Iron Working out of the way, assuming we are SURE he doesn't have it already - how do you know he's not one of the three that do?). He probably also has to clear Engineering out of the way also, now that I look at the list again. Still, it's a possible route. I don't know if they have enough population to complete those techs with just the bulbs, but even if not it would drastically shorten the research time. Does anyone have Civil Service yet? If they do this, that's probably a really good use of an Engineer to get effectively 11.25 strength units in an era when most people are just starting to build Maces. That could also explain why they pushed HG, if they expected to need the Engineer for Gunpowder bulbing.

The reason I mentioned Nationalism/Taj is that it's on the path to Military Tradition, which allows you to get gunpowder-era two-movers. They probably don't need Knights immediately if they get Janissaries out, and could afford to skip Guilds/Banking for a long while while they head up to Music/Philosophy/Nationalism/Mil Tradition - one of which they could snag via Liberalism (which is cheaper than both Nationalism and Mil Tradition). I'm not sure they WILL. They might prefer to get the immediate benefit of Banks and medieval era 2-movers. But it's a possibility. But anyway, I think using the Engineer to help with Gunpowder is more likely.

The nice thing about Hammans is they are 40 hammers for Ginger. That's a LOT easier to pull off than a 120 hammer Forge or a 150 hammer Market. Now granted, the Forge and Market have better secondary effects and even possibly more happiness, but that's still super-cheap happiness. In a normal game we'd already have hit the point where cities were hitting the happy cap regularly. We haven't had it as much because you've been whipping a lot and our land is just terribly food poor. But presumably Ginger will build them before he plans to grow his cities. Basically it's a tempo play - it's just a really cheap happiness package. So if Ginger wanted EXP for the speed getting Granaries up and rolling the snowball faster, it's nice to leverage your trait into cheap happiness also. Hammans aren't amazing or anything, but I expect they'll be solid here and most of the reason we haven't already seen them in many cities is a combination of the weak food potential of a lot of cities, Ginger's need to mass expand over grow vertically for his Hanging Gardens play, and just not being ready to grow yet.