[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

ahhh welll. ok i admit it DOES make sense that knights wouldn't be able to take cover from things.... i guess i'm too used to the age of empires horse -> archer -> infantry RPS triangle

Turn 119 - Zululand

hahahahaha wtf



um. any guesses?? i don't know if i am even going to TRY to parse this...... other than that MAYbe they have aggressive intentions towards someone in.... 12 turns....? the full list of resources they offed is dye, fur, gems, sugar, and ivory, if that means anything to you guys

also, if i were just SLIGHtly more chaotic evil than i actually am, i might have accepted..... i can think of worse deals than three cities in exchange for me declaring war on the rest of the world (also of course there is the not-so-small matter of me not wanting to make a farce of our precious game, but i thought about it lol)

aaaand THIS one requires more thought



GT wants a 30-turn non-aggression pact?? that's civ6 DoF length. on the one hand, it'd be nice to FOR SURE guarantee that ginger cannot dogpile us during their incoming aggression window, and i think 30 turns is roughly how long it will take for us to be ready to fight GT ourselves. but on the other, naufragar could attack GT before then and we'll be in deep shit if we lock ourselves out of the possibility of vulturing.... if rejecting a normal cow-cow indicates aggressive action in the next 10 turns, can i assume rejecting this deal will tell GT to prepare to fight in the next 30? maybe that is not a reaction we want to provoke if we have some designs on fighting him in, like, pretty much exactly 30 turns....

i think it's a close enough call from my perspective that i wanna submit it to the deliberation of the council (eg you guys) before deciding if we're going to resend it or not. thoughts?

relevant info:



GT's units, which until now have been peacefully deployed in various defensive spots along the lalibela-adulis border, are massing in lalibela. i'm getting a weird feeling about this.... a feeling that SOMEthing might be going on at the GT-naufragar border. perhaps we'd better send our internal scouts over in that direction and see if we can spot anything....

if GT does get attacked, like, now, we have locked ourselves out of intervening until t127 with our cow/cow.... but that's about how long it would take to put together an attack stack anyways, i think. in the absence of signs of knights i maaaay move a few impi back in this direction JUST in case that one spearman left in adulis is looking a little lonely....



IW watch reveals a third discoverer.... not sure if we can divine who it is until they actually hook some iron up though

[Tarkeel]

IW watch reveals a third discoverer.... not sure if we can divine who it is until they actually hook some iron up though

There is actually a way, but it's a ton of work. Civ4 is extremely leaky, and will show you the tile yield for the owner of the tile. This means when someone discovers a new resource (like iron) you can go through their territory and hunt for a tile yield that only makes sense if the tile has a resource you don't have the tech to see. I wouldn't recommend spending time on that though.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Do any of Superdeath's luxury offers correspond to particular cities or to particular players? That might offer a clue as to his mind. Not sure how to parse the three city offers - could mean something like "you and me against the world, hey?" but the nuances escape me.

As for GT's offer, I think if I had not extended the DoF with you and Woden in PBEM20, I would have won pretty easily as we could have intervened sooner to stop the mass pillaging and overrunning of ENgland/Japan - apart from Marco flaking, and my traveling to South Africa a month before the decisive battle (I think I would have won the war) it's my biggest regret from that game. So my advice is not to lock yourself in to 30 turns, but offering a shorter - 10 turns? 15? wheat for wheat might be acceptable.

[ljubljana]

yeahhhh so, going through to look at the cities SD offered, they can be found here



two are former inca cities (scotcharoos is the former cuzco that founded confucianism); white queso might also be, but if it is, we didn't get there in time to observe its conquest. other than that, they don't appear to have anything in common, and they are also not ALL of SD's inca conquests as monster energy was excluded

no idea what the luxes could mean really..... SD is the only one with dyes hooked up, so that doesn't seem to correspond to anyone else in particular. as for gems, i think they, dreylin, and ginger have native sources, and fur is quite widely distributed (as the only two luxes that can be hooked up as early as hunting, i think everyone was given either fur or ivory)

i would be down for a ten-turn cow/cow, but we are already under one that just started 3 turns ago. if GT is panicking about something, i'm not too sure it's in our interest to extend that until we know we won't need to pounce imminently. because as you'll see...

Turn 120 - Zululand



nauf is beginning to show a spike in milpower, having pulled even with us and ginger. GT is up to 5 visible catapults that we can see... we played before them this turn and after them last turn so i don't have an update on their deploy, but i'll be keeping an eye on it. hoping to send our chariot through addis ababa to the border itself to see what, if anything, we can see



ginger's great engineer, whose movements were bothering me earlier due to the prospect of a rushed wonder in ankyra, is evidently just sitting here - they have already moved last turn and its position is unchanged. so too are those new axes, who are seemingly signaling a defensive posture that we're supposed to not feel compelled to respond to. ginger's been a very good neighbor about this, really... no escalations in the border cities themselves beyond what is needed to repel impis, no suspicious border roads. seems like well-managed diplo with what is surely a pretty unnerving neighbor to me

aaaaanyways behold!



krishima has almost by accident tied gavagai's capital as the largest city in the world.... you're welcome, everyone else, for your 1 extra gold via trade routes i would love to semi-permanently give the cow to takayasu to let it grow onto the cottages a LITTLE quicker, but with 20 food in the box and needing to run a -1 food deficit to work all 4 specialists, we can't do so without making compromises....i gave it away THIS turn because it gets takayasu to growth in 1, but i think kiri takes it back afterwards. we could grow to size 12 in 4 turns here too if we wanted to but idk, i have heuristically decided not to make that compromise as i rather expect that even with CS first we are within 17 turns of serfdom availability from here. i expect we'll run a ton of specialists DURING the GA as well to work on the 400-point GP (with atamifuji presumably going for the 300-pointer) so really either way it will be some time before we get those riverside plains tiles online....



also worth an update: we are almost halfway done with moai in WMH here, via the tried-and-true whip + overflow method... the plan, as you can see, is to finish it by making a bunch of impis in this way (not cats as they overflow less efficiently) until it's done, then to grow onto the water tiles. kotozakura meanwhile will probably whip the end of that courthouse when it hits size 4, and overflow into.... idk, maybe a settler? so we don't have to spend a bunch of turns not-growing when we decide to produce it? we will want a small number of settlers soon i think, i think civil service is the right time to polish off those of our internal filler sites that need farm chaining to have, um, any two-food tiles at all lol. and yeah, cities like this and daieisho (about to do the same via whip-overflow from a monument) that can't grow anyways and must whip SOMEthing seem like the right place to make them.



ura whips the library at the perfect 59/90 hammer theshold to maximize overflow. juuuust don't look too hard at the safety-turned archer whose 6 invested hammers are decaying starting next turn.... idk how people run safety turns in border cities without being compelled to either let this happen or to build military that you'd reeeeeally rather delay until after infra.... post-whip, this goes against all my intuition as a foodhammers equivalencist but i think the oasis is the right tile to work over the horse, as long as we are whipping away the extra pop, one food is seemingly worth MORE than two hammers in a city in the size 2-4 range..... god is that a weird statement to have be true



hokutofuji, after much deliberation, whips the ikhanda this turn so it can come off the unimproved silks. aaaalthough in retrospect, maybe i could have used a little more deliberation as perhaps whipping the fishing boat and chopping into the lighthouse would have been better....... on the principle of "try not to chop into something you COULD be whipping". anyways don't look now but abi is 5 (!!!!) turns from third-ring border expansion and WTK is 4 turns from its own border pop, with a work boat that will be ready to go when it gets there. and with extra food coming for WTK, hoshoryu can have its cow back, and can lend its wheat to long-suffering tomokaze... the west is pretty stagnant right now but it might not remain that way for too much longer...

[ljubljana]

Turn 121-122 - Zululand

too emotionally drained for the turn last night = double turn in the morning



i still don't know what's going on yet, but our intuition looks correct - GT has COMPLETELY cleaned out the border, only one spear each in lalibela and adulis. time to seriously consider opportunistically pouncing to try to take them. i won't do it before the cow/cow runs out on t127 but we should be prepared to go in case they do not have more units in the area when that happens. going to transfer a handful of impis from all fronts in preparation. could be a good time to extend cow/cow with ginger too, as they still lack visible knights from what i can see but there's a good chance they are NOW within 10 turns of having a stack of them

ok, i'll have to think about ginger but i at least cancelled and re-offered fish/fish with greenline. obviously there is no way we will have designs on them in the next 10 turns and looks like our ura defense force could use a vacation in ethiopia



nauf adopts HR randomly in the middle of the GA. which is to me a weak suggestion that they only JUST hit monarchy (and are therefore at least 2 techs from guilds still)



still no sign of nauf units, but GT is even transparently building a road right up to their border.... don't tell me this is an OFFensive stack.... and, oh shit, is that what superdeath meant with the 12-turn component of their iron proposal? a coordinated attack against nauf in 12t? well, if that's how this is going we had better intervene if at all feasible, idk if SD will be stoppable if they absorb most of nauf as well and then have only the two most behind-looking civs for neighbors.....




we are annoyingly looking to be one hammer short of double-whipping this settler as soon as we hit size 4 in daieisho, which will cost us a turn of growing.... mnehhh. the plan is for it to head for the ginger border spot i think.... imo the risk of pissing them off by doing that is probably outweighed by the need for crumple zone. however.... would that be viewed as a violation of cow/cow if we sign an extension? i don't exactly consider that an AGGRESSIVE border spot per se but idk if the convention is that ALL border settling not happen during an NAP

someone else has HBR, by the way.... nobody has a characteristic power spike yet but that seems to usually be delayed by a turn, so we'll see it as soon as we hit end turn. whiiiiich i guess is going to be right now......

ok rolling turn....

....which caused an immediate desync so i had to reload the game.... but.....



both GT and nauf appear to be plausible candidates for the HBR discoverer

ok, anything shocking happen between-turns...... UM omfg



ok THAT is shocking. wow! you'd better believe THAT's a major diversion from military tech! and they somehow have spawned a SECOND great engineer just 5 turns after the first one? i frankly do not know how that's even possible and am really confused. presumably they must have hit one of these GEs at REALLY long odds. well they could now GA-swap to their new religion and immediately rush the apostolic palace which would be a wild move.... or revolt manually and rush BOTH the AP and sankore.... naturally i really hope they do something like that as i imagine it scales way more slowly than murdering a neighbor would... probably too slowly to keep up on just 13 cities long-term......

anyways in contrast to last turn we have a bunch of random domestic updates for this turn. which mostly means whipping of course. to wit



we are gonna get our damn cow back >:[ and will not be waiting for third-ring borders to pop in order to do so. and the monastery seems to serve a useful purpose in and of itself as if we do go for the border spot with ginger, it has no forests with which to chop a monument and therefore badly needs to be accompanied by a missionary



border expansion at kinbozan!!!! and chop timed to come in on the same turn. i have been planning to whip the granary for ages but you can see that we actually are in kind of a weird position micro-wise if we do that, with the city due to grow on the same turn and therefore to waste a bunch of food. so maybe we should finish it by just mining the gold and working that at size 3 instead...



both WMH and kotozakura come due for a double-whip. the former for impi -> moai, the latter to finish one of THREE courthouses that we will be completing next turn :D



here are the other two. abi has finished a market, and i'm a little unsure about what the best military unit to make now is. i imagine if we do hit GT it will need to be with MOSTly two-movers.... but equally we have fully zero cats as of now and can probably anticipate eventually having to contend with a significant detachment of GT troops. and to the extent that we DO want to make some one-movers, right at the border would be the place to do so so they don't have to spend forever traversing the countryside... i will err on the side of cats for now i guess. besides, we still don't KNOW that we are not their target and probably we'd better play it a LITTLE bit safe lol

greenline logged in and accepted the fish/fish extension, lovely. so we have to think about ginger. i think i won't offer them one THIS turn as we have to think through the implications of their theology tech and ideally i'd like to stagger theirs with greenline a bit. but probably in a few turns it will make sense, especially if GT's border continues to look pounceable. not to mention if we do get an extension in, let's say, 4 turns, we should be pretty safe to finish the kirishima great person with no need for any panic-whips



GT has made a SWORD, of all things...... which is an affirmative indication of offensive warfare if i've ever seen one lol

btw, we may not look it but i believe we are just 6 turns from civil service. two more to save, and it's just a 4-turn research at 100% science (and a 150 gpt deficit). which, yes, is just in time for all our workers to simultaneously run out of useful tasks lol



well, there's half an answer to the engineer enigma

[Tarkeel]

IIRC; you actually can't start building the AP without a state religion.

[ljubljana]

they did also swap over to the just-founded christianity as i was in the process of logging out. which, popping a great person for a GA on the SAME turn theology comes in, with a great engineer already in the bank, definitely looks timed for an AP rush, and perhaps a push to paper to hand-build Sankore with the GA production. i am pretty surprised that their plan seems to be to convert their tech edge into monk econ rather than an attack, but maybe i shouldn't be - i know those wonders are considered very powerful in the community, and maybe neither us nor dreylin looked likely to break without external help....? and with GT apparently going the other way and greenline conspicuously weak militarily, maybe they weren't confident they could get such help...

a knight or janissary attack could still be coming of course but they have passed up the chance to do it /literally/ as quickly as possible which seems to significantly lower the odds that their gameplan was hinging on it.... i guess it raises the likelihood of janissaries relative to knights as well as this diversion is smaller as a percentage of the nationalism path than of the guilds beeline

[ljubljana]

visibility rule question: can GT see the tile currently marked "STAGE" from their cultural borders? i know they will be able to if i chop the forest marked "do not chop" but i am not sure if it counts as an obstacle in this case

as you might imagine, if we do get a chance to pounce on GT, the ideal plan would be to move giant piles of 2-movers in range of both adulis and lalibela on the turn we DoW. adulis is easy but at lalibela the terrain is very good defensively and this is the only avenue for such an attack that i can see...

[aetryn]

Re: Visibility - I'd use Worldbuilder and just check. Also check where he could see with a sentry unit in any sensible place, though there probably isn't such a place in that screenshot since it's far from his cities.

Interesting developments. I agree that it's overwhelmingly likely that GT is going after Nauf. This is probably good for us. Better that GT dictates that war tempo than Nauf, and delaying only helps Nauf who will have better teching due to PHI bulbs. It's also far less likely that GT will immediately crumple since he's built up, which means we shouldn't expect Nauf to just roll over GT's land in 10 turns. It's JUST possible he's playing the world's biggest bluff and will somehow pivot to attack us, but movement is so slow that I really don't expect that.

If Ginger's plan is to take AP and Sankore, I think it's a good one for him. We have decent power and aren't far enough behind in tech that there would be a big edge to exploit. I imagine Dreylin is similar. We know that the monk wonders will be VERY good on this map given how poor it is, and we know that Nauf or MJMD will take them given half a chance. Windows of conquest will be there later, but the monk wonders won't and they last a VERY long time (basically the entire rest of the game). 4 extra raw production on junk cities is fantastic to help them build basic infra, and 4 extra commerce (8 if they also build Spiral Minaret) will be a surprisingly decent chunk of commerce at many of these cities that never do much except farm. The downside is temporary weakness in city count, but he if he can race ahead to Janissaries + Cuirassiers, or Rifles + Cav, he might will hit us or Dreylin at a time when it's harder to counter.  Right now, there's little we can do except prepare to hit GT when we have a chance, and try to pull ahead enough on city count to be able to absorb the attack if it comes at us.

Re: border settlement with Ginger - I assume you'd be taking the more defensive spot? If so, I think that's probably fine even when under a peace signal.

[ljubljana]

re vis: loaded up worldbuilder and they do indeed have vis. sad, but fair. i will have to do some thinking about that.... lalibela is really an excellently-placed border city, even if it was probably not intended as one.... guerilla archery units would do well here but i think the GA is the soonest we could start building such things

re ginger border, it would be on the tile marked "awful filler":



that is the more defensive spot, right? if we are worried about it, we could settle "miserable filler" first instead.... it actually gets off the ground significantly faster with 2 chops instead of 0 and a cow to steal, and it will still have river plains farms to grow onto courtesy of the ever-generous mitakeumi. downside is that it claims fewer worthwhile tiles of its own pre-windmills, and seems significantly less likely to be contested by the ottomans. or we could move it 1E or 1SE instead, but that might put us into the danger zone re pissing off ginger

re ginger and conquest windows... well, we will see.... their cities are packed pretty tightly into a small area, and i have the sense that, as soon as we get to serfdom and CS and get our cities large enough that we are actually USING most of the tiles we own, we will start to catch up on tech relative to them and probably won't fall behind again. monk wonders shouldn't be enough to outweigh both working more tiles per city AND having a larger number of cities when we both hit our respective ceilings... they are also a golden age ahead of us right now and could have probably attacked us with knights before our own GA, which may not be true at future tech windows... not to mention our neighbors are intact and in position to help now, which i definitely don't think they can count on long-term... if their plan is specifically a zulu conquest, i am inclined to think that this is probably their best window.... however, that logic doesn't seem as applicable to their situation v dreylin, so perhaps this is weak evidence that their eventual attack plan runs through babylon instead of us

there is also the superdeath angle to consider.... waiting for the mathematically highest-odds conquest timing seems correct with perfectly balanced rivals, but i'm getting increasingly worried that that isn't the case, or won't be for long. if GT is indeed building up to attack america, it seems very likely that SD will pile on, and i could easily see that ending in a monster Rome that will be too far ahead to catch up with for anyone who doesn't attack until rifles....

it seems clear from GT's 30-turn peace offer that we aren't their first choice of target, yeah. but i didn't accept that offer or send anything back, which i imagine GT (correctly) reads as suggesting that we are leaving open the option of piling on if they attack naufragar. so from their perspective, i think it should look like a reeeeeeally unsafe and bad idea to attack nauf right now, probably even WITH signals of support from superdeath. if they can get a 30-turn peace commitment from nauf instead, maybe it will be correct for them to turn on us instead... movement is slow but their stack is only a few turns from the border and they still have time to reposition before our active cow/cow elapses (5 turns from now).

with that in mind, do you guys think we should consider sending them some kind of peace signal to lock in nauf as their target, or of renewing peace signals if they ask for a shorter duration than 30 turns? i do not really want to as i'd obviously like to retain the flexibility to pounce but..... i do not see how they can rationally justify starting a war with nauf without more assurances from us than they've been provided. if we do commit to another 10t of peace (either when the active one runs out or starting now), perhaps we can hope that given their current buildup, they will be able to at least hold the line in the west for the first 15 turns, and that their border cities with us will still be on the menu once our renewed commitment has elapsed...?

and/or broader question: what would you be doing right now in GT's position? and how does the answer depend on what the zulus say in diplo?