[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[aetryn]

Part of the problem is that it doesn't matter what I would do in GT's position - it matters what GT will do, and that's fundamentally different. Trying to read the state of someone who may approach the game differently is just hard. That being said, I think GT doesn't have a lot of good options at this point. His opening is fine, but he didn't get a great land grab, a bunch of wonders or anything that stands out. His traits are mostly military. He hasn't made use of his UB to grab many extra tiles that I can see (not that it's very good at that, mind you). Charismatic was mostly a gamble on an economic play (either lots of whipping, which needs lots of food, or lots of happiness, which also needs food in order to be able to work more tiles) that doesn't seem to have matched with the way the map ended up.  He's ages from his UU and may not feel like it will be relevant when he gets there due to falling behind. What is the correct play when you are well back but not last in a 9-man field and have little expectations of a power bump from one of your abilities?  There are basically two options:

1) Sit tight, keep your powder dry, do the best you can and hope that someone makes a mistake or geopolitics break your way that you can get a windfall and move up.
2) Make some kind of move, maybe even a desperation move, and hope that it's successful and you're able to use that leg up to get back into the game.

Personally I favor the first - there's enough strangeness that happens in these games that if you're at all relevant you're not usually totally out of it. But others will say this is playing not to lose and prefer to roll the dice even if you need a natural 20 (or many of them!) to make it work out. It feels like GT is in the latter camp.

Let's say that GT is not getting help from either Ginger or Superdeath. Does he prefer to go after Zulu or America? My guess is he hopes to catch Nauf busy trying to accomplish some Great Person task or maybe build a wonder and can't fight him wholly without compromising his economic position, which may lead to mistakes. The traits also lean that way. Nauf's IMP gives him a few more Great Generals out of war but otherwise GT will have the promotion edge significantly, whereas against us it would be more minor, or even a promotion disadvantage in certain units. Impi are also still kind of annoying at this point too. So I think in this case - no assistance from anyone - going against Nauf makes sense.

Do we think GT is getting help from Superdeath? Honestly, I'd be pretty surprised. First - Superdeath seems to have communicated something to us, which would be unusual behavior if he was planning a 2 on 1 with our neighbor on that side. Why should he let us know we might have an opportunity to mess with GT and therefore make his job harder conquering Nauf? Granted, his message was pretty cryptic and it's hard to know what he meant by it. But I'd really just expect radio silence if he was going after Nauf with GT. I also very much doubt Superdeath feels comfortable demilitarizing a border with Gav. Yes, in theory they could agree to go the other direction and have a grand arena style showdown of two huge empires in the lategame. But that rarely works out, and I feel like it's out of character for Gav, who usually seems to prefer aggressive relations with his neighbors and taking the advantages he can get along? I don't know, that's just the impression I get.

I would probably not signal anything to GT, but also make no aggressive moves to buildup forces before the war or a couple turns into it. He'll know that we might go after him. But he may be desperate enough to go in anyway and hope that we see him doing the favor of messing with Nauf's game as important enough to let him continue. Which... well, we might up until the point that Nauf turns the tide.

I think awful filler is probably okayish. It contests minimal tiles from Ginger's side and mostly just claims tiles nobody is working. The river tiles are nice, though with little food it's unclear how well we can use them. I think it's unlikely Ginger ever settles in that spot so there's little denial value in taking to prevent him from doing so. Up to you if you feel like this city is worth the probably minor hit to relations from settling it. I definitely wouldn't put anything important there.

[Tarkeel]

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

Yes. It's on a hill, and he has a flatland tile N-NW with flatland inbetween.
(Changes of heights will grant vision for an extra til if there's no blocking feature)

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).

The monk wonders lose a lot of luster when SciMeth obsoletes monasteries though.

[ljubljana]

hmmmm. i know comeback wins are significantly more common here than in civ6, but i was kinda of the impression that they mostly consisted of second- and third-place empires coming out on top after a leader gets dogpiled... are there examples recently of someone who was "well back, but not last" coming back to win? if so, what pattern did they follow?

hmm. i agree that it doesn't make much sense for SD to have communicated with us if they are planning to dogpile nauf. however, geopolitically i think it makes a lot of sense for SD to join GT, assuming that by this point the huge void we saw 30 turns ago between SD and nauf has been filled in and they are actual neighbors. nauf is at some risk of outscaling SD longterm but seems to still be far behind militarily, and with GT's help i think they stand good odds to win if not interfered with..... of course that's a big if with gav on SD's other side and us on GT's. but i know SD is pretty aware that fighting is the strongest aspect of their game, and seems to tend to attack players they perceive to be stronger builders when it's reasonable to do so in order to play to their strengths (see: holkan-rushing krill based mostly on a perception that having such a strong econ player as a long-term neighbor was a losing prospect for SD). i don't know much about nauf's reputation really, but based on their game so far and landing MoM as PHI america, i could see similar logic applying

i think your approach of sitting tight, not signaling to GT, but not going into buildup mode either is a good one. i will try to weave in juuuust a few more courthouses in order to not freak them out (as we probably should be doing anyways, ofc )

re awful filler, the more i think about it, the more i prefer miserable filler anyways.... as you say there is not much reason for ginger to take the awful filler spot, and if neither is contested, i think the extra chops make miserable filler faster-starting and therefore better. and it is both on a hill and more defensible from a "not irritating ginger" perspective

@tarkeel: yeahhh my confusion was in cases where the hill tile is a knight's move away from an enemy unit or border, and where ONE of the two tiles between them contains an obstruction but the other does not. but yeah according to WB it looks like having one unobstructed tile between them is enough to grant vision

[ljubljana]

Turn 123 - Zululand

omfg



going to spend the turn contemplating this but my initial impulse is to exactly mirror this deal back to them.... i guess SD envisions two duels here, one between him and nauf and one between us and GT, and the piece of info they are missing is that GT is likely to join their attack. well, a geopolitical breakdown in which all 4 links in the SD-nauf-GT-us chain are at war with all neighbors seems to favor the ones on the ends who aren't in 2-front wars, of course. this runs some risk of creating a monster rome, of course, but nauf is stronger than GT right now and i gather that gavagai is somewhat more likely to pile in from SD's other side than ginger is from ours. seems like the kind of gamble that has respectable enough odds to be worth taking in a game where, as one member of a 9-person field, we require variance to break our way to win in the first place

click through and LOL OMG



hahahaha. ok. right, i will split today's post into two then so yall can help analyze while i play the rest of the turn. major question: am i a double-dealing scoundrel if i mirror BOTH these deals? reasons i might be include: i am formally in an NAP with GT until t127 (before i'd actually attack but not before, you know, now), i am telling nauf i will help them while telling SD that i don't strictly mind if they hit nauf from the other side. reasons i might not be include: the main thing i am conveying to both of them is that i intend to attack GT if and when war breaks out in the northwest, which is true



we have at least a 5-turn window before ginger starts whipping knights. although no AP insta-complete is surprising except....wait do i just need to scroll down to see it..... OH shitttttt

[Tarkeel]

hmmmm. i know comeback wins are significantly more common here than in civ6, but i was kinda of the impression that they mostly consisted of second- and third-place empires coming out on top after a leader gets dogpiled... are there examples recently of someone who was "well back, but not last" coming back to win? if so, what pattern did they follow?

*cough cough* PB58 *cough cough*

@tarkeel: yeahhh my confusion was in cases where the hill tile is a knight's move away from an enemy unit or border, and where ONE of the two tiles between them contains an obstruction but the other does not. but yeah according to WB it looks like having one unobstructed tile between them is enough to grant vision

Yeah, as long as one of the two paths are "available" you can see the tile.

[aetryn]

Right - event log check should be first in the turn. I'm not much in the habit either from playing too much single player.

So as expected, SD is going to be too busy to participate against Nauf. This is again good news for us.

My expectation is that SD's message means he does not want us to help Nauf too much in his war with GT, as he'd prefer Nauf be weakened without him having to do anything. No matter how much you may WANT Superdeath to do well, he's currently the front-runner and we don't want Nauf to be particularly weak next to him and make for an easy next conquest when he can get peace with Gav. So I would just ignore Superdeath's communication. He's going to be busy with Gav, and we're far from him. We're also not jumping into the war immediately, which should be good enough - we have plausible deniability in saying we only came into the war to make some gains ourselves, which SD shouldn't really have any problem with.

I would send Nauf something indicating support in approximately the number of turns you'd want to take in order to be ready for war (note - NOT just when our peace agreement with GT is up, but when you'd be willing to declare war). I think given that the war has started, it's totally fine for us to start switching to more military in the next couple turns (but we really want those Courthouses, so maybe after that?) So if we'd be ready in 10 turns, send Copper for Copper and 10 gold on our side to indicate the number of turns.

Can we get an overview of the border with GT and a rough sense of troops in theater (as well as any others you consider free that could be moved to this theater)?

Re: Comeback wins. You don't necessarily have to go from say 6th to 1st immediately. Your neighbors get in a war, you vulture some cities, they fall back you move up to 4th. The 3rd player gets split and you move up by default. Then 1st and 2nd fight and mutually destroy each other and you end up on top. There's a point where you're SO far back it's implausible, but nobody is at that point yet in this game.

[ljubljana]

hmmm. i should have extended the ginger cow/cow last turn i think... i thought we'd have more time before war broke out based on GT's stack, um, not actually being at the american border yet. now it might be too late as in their position i wouldn't give us a free hand to intervene with GT. could still be worth a shot but i don't really expect them to return it

considering a detour from civil service for HBR. we do not have a 2-move unit that can attack into and respectably damage the spear/axe stacks that GT is fielding..... horse archers fill this role more credibly than chariots and impis, and elephants also trade well with knights and so we can flash a few in ginger's direction as deterrent..... HBR would require roughly 1 turn of research at max and then another turn at breakeven, so it's about a 3-turn delay on CS in total.... i do not think we will get massive worker turn wastage if we go for it. but of course HBR is off the golden age preparatory tech path which is reason to hesitate. and we do have 1-mover units in cats and axes that can fill that role if we manage to close with any GT cities



i do not see anything actually happening at the nauf-GT border.... our scout in rome is of course turning south to check out the gav border, and we have one more deep in the desert who can keep an eye on the nauf-SD border (if there is one)



and indeed the stack we saw in aksum last turn is on the move, helpfully headed towards not-us



in a first for me, i deliberately do NOT escort workers along a border with a rival, as with no units in range of them anyways, it's probably better to mirror THEIR unescorted worker and not alarm them with troop movements, even understandable ones. i also think i will NOT cancel this farm between-turns as i've been doing, so as to show off to GT that i'm not making a road

alternatively, if we are going to whip a shitton of units soon, maybe we're supposed to delay CS here to just push straight to either longbows at feudalism or xbows at machinery..... showing PRO longbows on our non-GT borders in particular seems significantly more urgent than it did a turn ago. and yes, it is pretty silly, but that is also a unit that can attack into a spear/axe pair. not as well as the mighty crossbow, but those can't secure our flanks in the same way and require iron which we don't have and would need to either research or trade for. and as discussed before there is the prereq bonus for CS if we do feudalism first. some workers would likely run out of tasks if we do that but if we end up attacking GT, some combat-related worker tasks are probably going to open up



oh yeah and we finished 3 courthouses this turn so now we should briefly have a brief EP edge... what do we do with it? pour it into GT to try to get vision in their cities? or into ginger for research vis? or we could complete our set of graphs (after next turn, only mjmd and gav will remain) but the benefits of that seem a little remote. well, before i decide for sure, what i WILL do is try to sneakily conceal that we are over 4/turn, at least for this turn:

[ljubljana]

Right - event log check should be first in the turn. I'm not much in the habit either from playing too much single player.

So as expected, SD is going to be too busy to participate against Nauf. This is again good news for us.

My expectation is that SD's message means he does not want us to help Nauf too much in his war with GT, as he'd prefer Nauf be weakened without him having to do anything. No matter how much you may WANT Superdeath to do well, he's currently the front-runner and we don't want Nauf to be particularly weak next to him and make for an easy next conquest when he can get peace with Gav. So I would just ignore Superdeath's communication. He's going to be busy with Gav, and we're far from him. We're also not jumping into the war immediately, which should be good enough - we have plausible deniability in saying we only came into the war to make some gains ourselves, which SD shouldn't really have any problem with.

I would send Nauf something indicating support in approximately the number of turns you'd want to take in order to be ready for war (note - NOT just when our peace agreement with GT is up, but when you'd be willing to declare war). I think given that the war has started, it's totally fine for us to start switching to more military in the next couple turns (but we really want those Courthouses, so maybe after that?) So if we'd be ready in 10 turns, send Copper for Copper and 10 gold on our side to indicate the number of turns.

Can we get an overview of the border with GT and a rough sense of troops in theater (as well as any others you consider free that could be moved to this theater)?

Re: Comeback wins. You don't necessarily have to go from say 6th to 1st immediately. Your neighbors get in a war, you vulture some cities, they fall back you move up to 4th. The 3rd player gets split and you move up by default. Then 1st and 2nd fight and mutually destroy each other and you end up on top. There's a point where you're SO far back it's implausible, but nobody is at that point yet in this game.

hmmm. interesting... yeahhh i guess SD has no way of signaling that their message has SOMEthing to do with GT other than asking for war with GT, but that's ambiguous enough that we could plausibly interpret it either as "attack GT" or, as you are, as "don't attack GT"..... yeah, if that's the case, probably ignoring is the safest way to avoid a perceived miscommunication that makes SD take umbrage with us, and given that they are already doing what we more or less want (fighting in a 1v1 that hopefully gav can hold on in) i guess that's all we really want from them at that stage.

re courthouses: we are actually more or less done with the 6 that we prioritized - the capital, hoshoryu, and kotozakura finished this turn, and tomokaze, ichiyamamoto, and mitakeumi are all 3-4 turns out via chop. other than that, no city has started a courthouse and not many have viable paths to making one quickly. so i think it's not a bad time to transition to military, after the courthouses where we are still working on them and immeidately otherwise. one question is how much whipping we want to do towards that end.... probably some, especially at places that are food-locked from growing anyways. and if we do THAT, delaying civil service for some kind of military tech (HBR, feudalism, machinery all seem viable) gets more attractive....

re GT theater, it looks like this



available troops (though 1-2 will be needed for MP) are: 3 impi + archer at/near tomokaze, impi + 3 axe at/near hoshoryu, impi + archer in abi. i have felt safe enough to pull 2 impis from the ginger front and 1 impi + 2 chariots from the greenline front, which will arrive before any hostilities start. we also have a scouting chariot in GT's territory right now who could be repurposed into an offensive chariot. so assuming the archers stay behind for MP, that totals

8 impi
3 axe
3 chariots

enough to threaten the tactically indefensible adulis, but much less than i'd like to have before starting a war.... so going in 5 turns is probably not feasible unless we think we can pull off a snipe in doing so that would otherwise consume significant material (so, if adulis still has only 1-2 spears on defense). which is just as well as we also a) want GT's stack to be firmly committed and/or wiped in the west before DoWing and b) don't reeeeally want to DoW immediately after our NAP ends for RP rep reasons. so 10 turns or 15 turns looks more likely. i am going to think on it a little more but i will most likely do as you suggested and send nauf the 10 turns-implying message

edit: unrelated, but how good is the forbidden palace? should i make a seventh pre-war courthouse to enable it and then prioritize building it even if we're at war? if so, where is typically considered to be the best placement? off the top of my head, atamifuji seems sensible to stack the GPP with chichen itza, but it's right next to the capital and would be a slow build. hoshoryu or abi could be candidates too if we expect to make gains in the west, but abi is also the favorite for our heroic epic city so i don't really want to consume its national wonder slots

[ljubljana]

[aetryn]

Yeah, it was the combination of the Stop trading with Nauf and War with GT that made me think "Don't help Nauf with his upcoming war with GT". Could still be wrong, of course. That's the great thing about AI diplo is that you just can't really send complex messages with any assurance they'll be understood, but that doesn't stop everyone from trying!

I'd suggest making a plan for how many troops you can produce with whips of what cities and when they can be in theater. It'd be nice to do that before committing to a timeline, but it's not like you're held to exactly 10 turns - if it's a round number it's kind of a general statement anyway. But making the troop production plan is probably a good idea anyway so you know what you have. I think diverting to pick up HBR is reasonable, since we're going to want it anyway. Lots of hills, so nowhere obvious to stage and we're not going to necessarily be able to walk into undefended cities, but if he's highly committed in the west he'll have minimal resources to divert I hope. We probably want our first thrust to be at Lalibela, since he can't possibly hold Adulis without it anyway. What's GT's land overall? How fast can he pivot resources from the west to the east? What the next prize after Lalibela to the west?