[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

turn 126

still abroad, reporting perfunctory but:

gav down to 12 cities, which i think indicates an SD raze. SD offered me 1 gold to stop trading with gav - i don't have the faintest idea what i'm supposed to do in response to that, so i said nothing. might change my mind and echo it though so i'm at least not completely silent, but there could be a chance it gets interpreted as me actually proposing to help somehow...?

spotted GT's main stack on the border with nauf, roughly 20 units in about a 2:1 split between axe and cat. nauf has machinery (xbows in their land) and feudalism (revolted to vasslage this turn) so knights are very nearby for them and GT, now out of golden age mode, probably has very little prospect for matching them. i feel affirmed in my desire to join this war lol

almost half of our cities are finishing something next turn due to extensive chopping and whipping. we are getting 2 courthouses, a library (tobizaru library!), and um... 5 cats :D i am trying to delay finishing military where i can to concentrate our power spike as closely as possible to when we are actually ready to attack, but these cats couldn't wait as they are mostly in cities like mitakeumi and daieisho and kotozakura where they are too far away to reach the front in time otherwise. next turn we will overflow 8 cities into horse archer ofc, unless i make the executive decision to add a few war elephants in cities very close to the front

i think this is the turn to offer ginger cow/cow, as next turn i think our power spiking will start to become hard to overlook. fingers crossed... they seem to mostly be building missionaries and, i assume, AP religious buildings..... but surely they are not far from knights either. we have almost matched them in EP after just a few turns of spending so i think we can get research vis in 4-5 turns unless they catch on and start spending on us. and maybe even IF they catch on as we will have 5 courthouses funding our spies next turn and will get a sixth the turn after

real report with both pictures and actual thought put into it coming tomorrow lol

[ljubljana]

turn 127 - zululand

cnqoiewndoiawufuioavbwreioyugtvayeruovg

mayvbe i spoke too soon i do nooooot have "cognition" in me today :| (as per my post in the tech thread i'm on 45 mnins of sleep and it was on a chair in an airport)

please let nothing important have happened last turn (why do i keep SAYing things like that)



YOOO that's important! and surprising, i kinda didn't expect them to give us ANY amount of free hand to hit GT with..... so seriously, we're cool until t137 by which time we can a) pop the great person in kirishima and b) cram vasslage longbows in any city they could threaten??



nauf would like a firm time commitment from us, please and thank you. obviously i'll look around first but i see no reason not to echo this, that's pretty much the timetable we've been planning on and the biggest reason not to jump in just took itself off the table

and



SD wants a loan...? so bestie is presumably like, at the doorstep of guilds or some such tech but lacking the gold stockpile to get there. honestly, i'm considering this - we could definitely use 50 free gold over 10 turns and i think we'd have the cash to reach feudalism by the start of the war. of course it helps the front-runner, however.... if we split GT with nauf then nauf will become our neighbor and SD will transition into a natural ally against them. the question is, is helping their tech going to be what pushes them into "no longer losing cities vs gav" or into "running over gav completely"...... idk, i'll reject for now, look around, and reoffer at EOT if conditions seem suitable

well, event log says nothing of note really... greenline starts a GA and swaps to serfdom and hed rule, same as everyone is likely to do under these conditions. now will anyone dare to STAY in serfdom when not in GA mode? right now only spiritual gav is, gingac/dreylin/greenline are all in it but in GA mode as well. we also might be the last team to the first GA, or close to it, due to my weedy math bulb..... though at least as of now it's not like we have all the civics we want to swap to online anyways. the slightly later timing shoooould work out ok for us as it opens up swapping to vassalage for just the GA turns and then dropping for bureaucracy at the end (although frankly i may just stay in vassalage full-time)



another reason to consider SD's lil loan request is that, like HBR before it, the (5x KTB-ed) monarchy is JUST out of reach of a 1-turn research, so we are going to have to do another weird 10% research turn somewhere in here and may actually have more of a gold stockpile than we need to carry us through to feudalism



btw our courthouse push has us tied with gingac in EP for the first time all game, and looks like it will carry us through to research vis before their next window to time a push against us. not sure if we should keep going to try for CITY vis after that or reallocate to other priorities - what do you guys think? i do think i want to avoid spending on GT at least for the moment, as long as there remains SOME chance that they are not yet tipped off, but i can see arguments for, like, trying to finish off our set of graphs or something



re GT being tipped off: they are staaarting to rebuild a military presence on our border, but there is still just one spear apiece in lalibela and adulis. still not exactly inspiring confidence if we can get enough horsies in play, i think. not sure how many elephants we want to add as cover for our catapult pile btw.... i'm thinking likeeee 3-4? but that's based on very little besides the vague sense that we want at least one per crossbow we expect to be able to attack us so they don't start chewing up our cats. so for now i think the nearby cities will do those and anything further out than, say, ichiyamamoto will do horsies.

speaking of ichiyamamoto



what a magnificent city amirite



bruh wtf is THIS worker doing....



war_footing.png



problem: wakamotoharu's whip anger is starting to look like a serious long-term problem. but how to finish off the rest of moai without it? it's not quiteeee as bad as it looks as the city does lack a garrison unit and we COULD whip a market but i don't really want it to suffer that kind of growth curve setback... ugh, don't tell me i'm supposed to make and then work one or more MINES here D:

in the end i did echo nauf's 7-turn deal, so turn 134 is looking like go time. as for SD, well..... i wanted to give them the loan but nah, it's a bad idea i think. too much danger of them crushing gav with it and becoming unstoppable..... not to mention they could just DoW us to stop the payments, which would be slimy as hell but would leave us in a seriously problematic situation. not sure if that's ever happened in one of these games but not sure i wanna risk it. plus the longer SD is occupied with gav, the longer until they can plunge the knife in naufragar's side and undo our carefully balanced diplo structure

ok that's turn one. i'll play the second one today but i gotta chill for a minute first

[ljubljana]

bwuhhhh ok not sure i still really WANT to play another one but here goes Turn 128 - Zululand

between turns, ginger adopts bureau, so they are the one person with civil service. again looks like a play for sankore, though it's certainly also just generically strong

i decide that, for someone who claims to be attacking in like, 5 turns, the number of cities for which i am making ridiculous excuses for not whipping is too damn long. so mitakeumi got a double-whipped courthouse last turn, and this turn will overflow + chop into HAs on consecutive turns.... and the capital will ALSO double-whip, from size 11, to ALSO make HAs on consecutive turns. i don't wanna whip atamifuji because it's size 5 and at +3 food surplus is growing oh so slowly onto its riverside plains farms? bestie, with all due respect this is war we're contemplating here. i'm whipping atamifuji. we have reached the point where our power spike can't really be credibly denied anymore



but at this point even the new HAs could fail to reach the front on time if we don't whip them now. so strong chance the jig is up at this point, but when you're just 6 turns out from a planned invasion idk how one's power is supposed to NOT be spiking. i am trying to pull just a few tricks like hiding finished cats in the queue at hoshoryu and abi (as well as saving THEIR double-whips for the last possible second) but at a certain point i'm not sure what else we can be doing to hide this



spotted a gavagai city that was razed by superdeath in vengeance for the battle of nutty bars



can confirm SD and naufragar finally border each other.... ok, now back to the relevant front with you, scout



nauf is at least scouting around with guerilla 2 xbows..... but i STILL haven't found whatever locus of bloodshed might exist between them. GT's stack is still chilling up by addis ababa and apparently has not advanced into nauf's territory at all.... not shockingly seeing as nauf's composition is probably more than a match for axe + cat.



GT is seemingly going in pretty hard on crossbows, with most of their cities spamming them. we can only hope that we will manage to execute this attack before they show up with bows of the longer variety. it's a good bet they don't have monarchy yet as they have several wines sources in their territory with no workers on them...not to mention their GNP is at best even with ours and they have already gone for one expensive medieval tech in machinery. but i doubt our timings will be THAT far apart so you'd better believe we need to watch for them to start plantationing the wines



ashes to ashes, kages to kages

[williams482]

Those units between Liabela and Adulis look like a zone defense stack, occupying the obvious tile to prevent a fork and to reinforce whichever city comes under attack. Any attack plan on those two cities will have to include either 1) killing them, or 2) tricking them into reinforcing the wrong city.

How will a HA/Impi stack do attacking into those zone defense units if granted the opportunity? The same rough plan for forking the cities will work for setting up such an attack, although the danger to the roading workers becomes more obvious (can we spare an axe/elephant pair to defend them?). GT will see the two mover stack and the workers one turn out, and will be faced with choices:

1) use the zone defenders to reinforce the most obviously vulnerable city, Adulis. I'm guessing the most likely choice, as a "safe" defensive play.
2) use the zone defenders to reinforce the less easily isolated city, Liablela. I find this unlikely, as it only makes sense as an "I am doomed but will drag this out" play.
3) use the zone defenders to attack the worker stack and kill the road. This is extremely aggressive and sacrifices the whole zone defense stack to buy a turn or two for the cities to whip stuff. Doubtful, but if GT is in a lashin' out kinda mood and thinks an extra turn of whip cycles could replenish the damage, it's possible.
4) Park the zone defenders right where they are and await your next move, likely promoting down the Guerilla line if not already there. This is probably what I would do if those zone defenders are mostly crossbows, as HAs attacking into fortified crossbows with +75% defensive bonuses are not going to trade very well at all. The counterplay for us is then to be ready to move the slow stack up to Adulis, forcing them to either cede the city or reinforce Adulis and open up contested access to Liabela (which will itself be reinforced from the west).

Attacking is clearly the right move, but if I'm reading GT's defenses right this is nowhere near the sloppy bare-minimum arrangement it looked like, and is not going to be easy. If they have already given up on the attack and turn those units back around, this could get *extremely* bloody.

[ljubljana]

Turn 129 - Zululand

SOMEthing about the last few turns is prompting quite a bit of discussion over in the ginger/civac thread

we SHOULD be up to research vis on them when we open the turn, assuming nothing has changed, so maybe we can even get a peek into what that something might be.....



SD wants gold for gems... sorry boo, we have a source already (Dreylin).... howEVer, we COULD swap for their dye or sugar which might not be such a bad idea



to my surprise, only one player has feudalism.... and we know who it is too, with naufragar in vasslage. as you can see we are just smashing through even the medieval techs now, so probably the delay on CS will not end up quite as long as i was afraid it would. btw, i am internally starting to speculate about doing engineering before guilds, depending on how the GT war is going. it looks like knights will probably be too late to be decisive, and if that's the case, getting PRO castles seem like they would be more helpful in the "holding territory" phase, not to mention more hammer-efficient than grocers as an econ build

btw, some speculation about our post-guilds/engi plan: i think we want gunpowder immediately to get our tokumuskets online. but then what? PP -> RP -> rifling is the standard answer but that is 3 pretty expensive techs and obsoletes our precious chichen itza (which, unlike walls/castles, as far as i can tell SHOULD still work vs gunpowder units)...... i think i like chemistry and military science/steel better. for a similar beaker investment as is required for rifles, we get the counter-rifle unit in grenadiers AND cannons which as far as i can tell are considered extremely strong by the community. that path also takes us close to scimeth and biology..... if we think we can survive on just gren + cannon for a while i might seriously try to get biology BEFORE rifling, self-destructive as that may be in an AI survivor context



omg i buried the lede again PIG WE HAVE PIG <33333

i will graciously cancel the pig gift GT gave us now that we have our "native" source back.... as well as contemplate finishing the road connection to abi "to hook them up" even the hill NW of the farming worker that we were anticipating using as a staging point serves that purpose. or maybe i'm thinking about this wrong and what we should actually be doing is trying to use the pig road itself as our route into GT-land somehow



ps looks like we will get the ura cow back next turn as well.... although we are only 5 turns away from third-ring borders lol so MAYbe i did overcommit a little culturally lolol. speaking of which kirishima is down to only 57% control on the border tiles with ginger, i gotta figure out when things are low-risk enough to switch ura to a missionary, especially not that they have christianity in ankara and an incentive to pump religious buildings there. well, or we just concede that we are likely going to permanently lose control over those tiles and just try to maintain vis on their cities through scouting and perhaps espionage



speaking of which, the game SAYS we have research vis on them now but i can't figure out how to actually see what tech they're researching LMAO..... it's not showing up on the scores, maybe because of BUG mod? anyways we know they still lack courthouses because the espionage graph looks like this



so i think i will push for city vis, if yall don't think that is too diplo-ruining. as long as we continue to send peace signals (and, you know, invade our other neighbor) i thiiiiink it should be seen more as what it is, a deterrent, than a pretext to an invasion. or we could try for research vis on GT (could get there in 5t) but until they start a buildup vs us i don't think it's worth the chance that THAT of all things is what tips them off

one huge pile of whips and chops later:




re SD, we could try this:



i consider gold a little more valuable than dye as it has an early happy doubler, and to some extent we can set the price for it thanks to our monopoly. if SD really that hard up for happy resources, as we'd expect if they are doing the expected fuckton of whipping, maybe they'd be willing to pay us a small premium for it. ofc i COULD try to just sell it for GPT straight-up but there is no other supplier of dyes as of yet and i do want to secure a stable trade for them for when our own heavily-whipped cities start to run into happy problems (see: wakamotoharu).

or, another option is to ask for dyes and their surplus iron, which would let us build crossbows a few turns early without having to worry about researching IW and moving a ton of workers over to hook up a source...... and later knights and pikes a few turns faster by the same token..... of course, at this point IW is a 1-turn research at just slightly below breakeven so maybe that's silly and we should just grab it now (after feudalism) to give our workers a little more to do pre-CS and our cities a few more strong hammer tiles. ok, i'll offer SD gold for dyes + pay me and see what happens i think



sneaky pindicator the worker made a farm 1W of abi over the last 5 turns, and last turn started another farm on this tile and was conspicuously left uncancelled so GT could tell that's what we were doing. but....this turn they will make half a road instead so we can insta-complete as part of our attack

edit: one more question: is the forbidden palace typically considered worth building? if so, when do yall think i should prioritize it? we are one away from having enough courthouses to start it but...we are about to be at war so before then seems a little silly

[ljubljana]

Those units between Liabela and Adulis look like a zone defense stack, occupying the obvious tile to prevent a fork and to reinforce whichever city comes under attack. Any attack plan on those two cities will have to include either 1) killing them, or 2) tricking them into reinforcing the wrong city.

How will a HA/Impi stack do attacking into those zone defense units if granted the opportunity? The same rough plan for forking the cities will work for setting up such an attack, although the danger to the roading workers becomes more obvious (can we spare an axe/elephant pair to defend them?). GT will see the two mover stack and the workers one turn out, and will be faced with choices:

1) use the zone defenders to reinforce the most obviously vulnerable city, Adulis. I'm guessing the most likely choice, as a "safe" defensive play.
2) use the zone defenders to reinforce the less easily isolated city, Liablela. I find this unlikely, as it only makes sense as an "I am doomed but will drag this out" play.
3) use the zone defenders to attack the worker stack and kill the road. This is extremely aggressive and sacrifices the whole zone defense stack to buy a turn or two for the cities to whip stuff. Doubtful, but if GT is in a lashin' out kinda mood and thinks an extra turn of whip cycles could replenish the damage, it's possible.
4) Park the zone defenders right where they are and await your next move, likely promoting down the Guerilla line if not already there. This is probably what I would do if those zone defenders are mostly crossbows, as HAs attacking into fortified crossbows with +75% defensive bonuses are not going to trade very well at all. The counterplay for us is then to be ready to move the slow stack up to Adulis, forcing them to either cede the city or reinforce Adulis and open up contested access to Liabela (which will itself be reinforced from the west).

Attacking is clearly the right move, but if I'm reading GT's defenses right this is nowhere near the sloppy bare-minimum arrangement it looked like, and is not going to be easy. If they have already given up on the attack and turn those units back around, this could get *extremely* bloody.

Here is GT's main stack according to this turn's scouting info:



So they have not turned around.... yet. There is a good chance that SOME of them do so once they realize how much danger there is (if they haven't yet, surely they will when we produce 8 units this upcoming interturn lol)....but if the whole stack leaves, they will lose cities to naufragar, who clearly has enough in the area to make the stack think it will get killed if it invades directly. It is too far away to reach Adulis before we can attack, and we are getting close to the point where the same will be true before Lalibela, but I do expect to have to contend with this group before we would reach the capital.... but at that point, I think it's ok if the pace of our attack slows a little as we should be able to decisively outproduce them if we can take and hold two core cities (and perhaps nauf takes more from the other side, and the cap is forkable with Gondar anyways, etc). Also, part of the reason now seems like SUCH a good time (to me) to jump in is that GT might be viewing nauf as the "primary enemy".... faced with the choice of losing cities to one or the other of us, and with splitting the stack likely to get it killed piecemeal, I could see them keeping it in this general area for longer than they quote-unquote should and letting us sneak into a very good split.

Re GT's tactical options, I'm not sure I think plan 1 is so safe, and I kind of hope they do it.... if so, we can just run around Adulis and go straight for Lalibela and the capital, leaving the zone defense ministack trapped inside and essentially able to be picked off with cat support at our leisure. Option 2 I think is a bit better for them, since if Lalibela then looks doomed they can retreat to the capital and make a stand there...although it should let us pick off Adulis pretty easily, and I'd probably do so to start slowing their unit production. 3) I think we have a way to prevent...if we move the entire 2-mover stack up onto the hill on the same turn as the workers, the crossbows will get only even odds vs horse archers on attack, way worse than they will in any scenario in which we have to attack into them, and they can't pick us off with spears either because we'll have a bunch of impis for cover As for 4), they can do this and save the units for a while, but yeah, then they don't help defend either contested city, and since they're not going to get especially good odds on offense, they might end up isolated behind enemy lines and not really contributing much to the war effort in the end.

Not sure what I predict they would do... I don't think they have many great options. If it were me, I guess I'd play for survival and for time to enlist help from my aggressors' neighbors, which means finding SOME city where I can concentrate a large enough number of units to halt the attack while I whip repeatedly from every city the first chance I get. I don't think Adulis can be that city... if we cut it off it will be doomed long-term, so I expect that in the end they'll have to more or less cede it. Lalibela would be a great choice though as there is no way to go around it to penetrate further, so it's imperative that we launch quickly enough that they don't have time to make that happen. Once we're past Lalibela, forking opportunities open up for us again as there is a vertical line of 3 cities we could go for next, so if we can force them to hole up in (say) the capital, I think we can keep them stuck there while still making progress in other areas while we build up our stack-cracking capabilities.

[Tarkeel]

Research vision will show up on the scoreboard unless you've told BUG to do otherwise. Most likely they just finished a tech and haven't picked the next one.

[ljubljana]

got it got it. well, we know it's not feudalism or we'd be getting double KTB from it (and nauf is in vassalage so they must be the one opponent who has it). so my guess is paper to line up with their recent bureaucracy swap for an unbeatable sankore. and with monarchy online for them (wines hooked up) they might just go for divine right immediately thereafter! these guys look to get the monk trinity online VERY quickly and, um, might make a great next target in the unlikely event that we can convince dreylin to join in. maybe i will send them diplo to that effect soon (eg maybe the turn sankore finishes)

[aetryn]

I really don't recommend going for city visibility through Espionage. A) it's really hard to get there without them sharing a religion of a holy city we have, and will be very easy to counter by resuming spending on us and B) Some people are VERRRRY sensitive to over-spending on Espionage against them. I don't remember if Ginger or Civac is one of these, but why take the chance? This is totally the kind of thing ("who has annoyed me more?") that could be a decision point for them on who to go after whenever they do "activate war mode".  Just get the rest of the graphs and then you'll be ready to put Espionage on GT.

 Another option for SD is to just take future good-will in having given them a trade that isn't maximized for value. Might be useful down the line, but hard to say with someone as mercurial as Superdeath.

[ljubljana]

aah ok, graphs it is then! yeah i guess getting city vis wouldn't give us THAT much more warning than just maintaining a good scouting presence anyways, and if it is likely to piss off gingac it's not worth it

Turn 130 - Zululand

getting that familiar pre-war anxiety again.... ofc usually it's not ME planning to invade someone that triggers it though

by which i mean, would this be the first offensive war i've ever launched in an RB multiplayer civ game?? yeesh i actually think so



moo!!

SD did not take our extortative dyes deal, not shockingly. aetryn i think you were right about this, will try to sell my gold more fairly in a few turns / when it seems like the need for the happy is more imminent than it is now

right, event log. god i'm scattered today



we are now a full turn over the research vis threshold vs gingac, and we still can't see what they're researching on the scoreboard..... what the heck...? they do have paper as speculated though as we can trade for their world map



GT's stack is still in place, and i think now they no longer have time to get into lalibela before us. and, um. of all the units they might have seen fit to build in this position, i would not have predicted THAT one



i have half a mind to attack early specifically to snipe this worker. now is not a particularly good time to allow them to chop some random unit in lalibela. our positioning would suffer pretty significantly in so doing though as a bunch of our units are timed to only show up on, like, exactly the turn we were planning to go so idk



anyway, in tomokaze, operation whip the shit out of ourselves continues.... we are at 62/50 overflow from the whip, and are adding 30 hammers from a chop, so we can make horsies on consecutive turns here if and only if we spend those turns working the unimproved hill over the plains river farm. can't say i'm thrilled about how that turned out (especially since i COULD have had a mine here if i thought we'd ever have to do this kind of thing) but at this point the end of maximizing numbers on the turn we attack justifies it i think. maybe. i'll think about it lol

anyways, stack so far:



18 exceedingly motley units..... but you can see more converging on it from every direction. given that GT has still not made any moves to reposition or reinforce their defenses here, or even scout us really, i decide not to threaten the worker and let them continue to chop in hopefully blissful ignorance. i am pretty hesitant to commit until we are definitely, for real ready in a couple turns once our various straggler guys are in position.... you can see that i timed the waves of unit production such that the cats got built first, one-movers came from closer cities, further cities built HAs and whipped aggressively, etc to maximize the number of units arriving simultaneously at the planned attack turn, so unfortunately going early means a huge portion of our force would not be in position yet... after next turn it will be at least PLAUSIBLE to go early and still make gains, but there are still quite a few HAs arriving from the east on literally exactly the planned attack turn so idk what kind of reaction from GT it would take to convince me to do that

on the bright side, we are definitely on pace to beat our target of 30 units by t134, and may even beat 40 units.... i am still a little unsure about a few marginal whips - ichiyamamoto whipping off the silver it took forever to grow onto, the capital double-whipping a SECOND time, atamifuji whipping pop that REALLY needs to be scientists during the upcoming golden age, that kind of thing. but, you know, given that this continues to be WAR we're talking about here, i'll probably do all of those.

one worry: i did sent nauf a 5-turn count last turn, and unlike on previous turns they did NOT echo it back. i shouldn't be reading too much into it probably but these guys had better not peace out... i don't think i would in their position (i mean, they spent their MoM GA cranking troops and whipping pop, surely they have to get some land out of that now right...?) but if they do we'll be pretty screwed and probably have to shamefully abort mission, or do a pathetic half-measure like DoW and demand adulis for peace. these horsies we're cranking are already obsolete in an attack against anyone other than GT, and will be end up a seriously bad investment if such an attack does not materialize