[SPOILERS] ljubljana embraces the dark side

[marcopolothefraud]

Does anyone have thoughts on what the major mistakes we made were or which other paths we should have taken to increase our winning chances? I suppose we could have dropped one of the ES stretch goals and just hoped to make it up somewhere else, on the assumption that everyone else's high ES totals implied we had a better chance of that (correctly, as it turned out) than of deterring Nubia with just 3 archers and DoTF.

Well, seeing that you have the most culture of anyone, I don't think you're that behind. In my single-player experience, it's very rare to have 2 cities have 4 pop each so early, even on Prince with tribal villages turned on. I think this is because your extra 8 tiles per city meant that you were constantly working 4 or 5 yield tiles (and now 6 yield with faith). In hindsight, it seems like delaying a builder for Craftsmanship was a mistake, because thrawn never properly attacked us (apart from that scout). In the grand scale of things, it's not too bad of a mistake, though.

Was our hypothesis correct about the GP's adjacencies? Does Scythia's HS have +3, and does Hungary have +2?

[ljubljana]

Does anyone have thoughts on what the major mistakes we made were or which other paths we should have taken to increase our winning chances? I suppose we could have dropped one of the ES stretch goals and just hoped to make it up somewhere else, on the assumption that everyone else's high ES totals implied we had a better chance of that (correctly, as it turned out) than of deterring Nubia with just 3 archers and DoTF.

Well, seeing that you have the most culture of anyone, I don't think you're that behind. In my single-player experience, it's very rare to have 2 cities have 4 pop each so early, even on Prince with tribal villages turned on. I think this is because your extra 8 tiles per city meant that you were constantly working 4 or 5 yield tiles (and now 6 yield with faith). In hindsight, it seems like delaying a builder for Craftsmanship was a mistake, because thrawn never properly attacked us (apart from that scout). In the grand scale of things, it's not too bad of a mistake, though.

Was our hypothesis correct about the GP's adjacencies? Does Scythia's HS have +3, and does Hungary have +2?

I'm not so confident about thrawn not having properly attacked us, to be honest - the main reason I was so fatalistic about our chances in that post is that I still view an attack as fairly likely, and it's hard to imagine us remaining competitive if that's the case. They finished a pair of Pítatis very recently on t40 and t42, and are now up to what I think is 6 (!) in total. If they're coming for us, they probably started moving out either with 4 in the late t30s or just now with 6; in either case, I don't think we'd necessarily have expected the first troops to arrive by now given the distances involved. Moreover, they're clearly going for someone given the crazy milpower spike, and since their other neighbor is one of Rome with an early UU, Zulu with a fearsome veteran at the helm, and Persia with both, we might still be the favorite to be targeted even with DoTF and a relatively good military score. If no troops show up by t50, I'll feel much more confident that we're safe on this front, but as of right now I'm still very concerned about a Nubian attack.

I also think the jury's still out on the Craftsmanship boost skip - we only have a +3 campus spot and a GP now because we used a charge on a marsh clear, so hitting the boost would have required not just moving things around in the build order but actually adding another builder to it, at the expense of either a monument or a slinger. The former would by this point have cost us more culture than the boost is worth, and the latter would leave us extremely weak-looking now instead of merely fairly weak-looking. Moreover, we only need to have accelerated the second Pingala promotion by four turns with our SW beeline to have it pay for itself anyways, which I think is quite possibly the case relative to timelines in which we had gone CoL - FT - Craftsmanship or something like that.

As for the Lavra adjacencies, I'd need to look at the save, but IIRC Hungary and Scythia are both at size 2, which I think is what we expect - Scythia has +1 from woods, +0.5 from districts, and +1 from the GP, and Hungary has +0.5 from woods, +1 from districts, and +1 from the GP, both of which round down.

Hmm, I hope I'm not overreacting by delaying the third city settler by this much. If our campus is looking safe enough to do a second archer in Hungary first, I might maybe swap Scythia onto the settler a little early (ie, next turn), then return to finish up this archer. We could get bit fairly badly by this delay if we end up failing to found our third city (likely at the Matterhorn) before the era change, which will either cost us 3 ES worth of Dark Age headroom or force us to delay the Matterhorn city. As currently scheduled, it'll be close, with the settler finishing at around t52-53 and then having 5-6t of walking time to get to the city site - those 3t of extra delay could easily end up making the difference here.

[ljubljana]

Turn 44



Another turn, another quiet moment of holding our breath in the face of impending annihilation. This turn won't be the last of those either, as it turns out. Thrawn's milpower is up to 250 (!!) - ours is now finally over 100 (despite what the lying interface says, of course), but it's still hard for me to imagine withstanding a committed attack from them even with DoTF. Thus, Hungary starts a second archer...though, as you can see, I'm now spooked enough about our long-term prospects if we keep delaying expansion like this to swap Scythia onto a belated third-city settler. Still no third cities on the map yet (is it me, or has this been an unusually slow game in terms of expansion? I guess that's what happens when everyone picks rushing civs ), but they can't be far away at this point, and falling behind in expansion is a good way to compromise our winning chances in the event that we're not about to be attacked. That 9-turn ETA is probably more like 7 with Colonization incoming - with 6 turns of travel time to the Matterhorn site, we only need to dodge the era change warning for a few more turns to be guaranteed to successfully waste the ES. 

After that city, we'll start pushing west towards thrawn, claiming the faith-rich Ladoga/Peipus area to accelerate our Monumentality snowball and race thrawn to MT. There's an argument that we should claim this area before the Matterhorn site from a snowballing perspective, actually, since the Matterhorn area is weakish from a production standpoint and might be an overextension in the direction of our northern neighbor. I'm receptive to this line of thinking, but I also don't want to give up on the crazy super-cossacks provided by the Matterhorn down the road, and the strong holy site we'll get at the Matterhorn will go some ways towards rectifying the production and faith deficiencies. Of course, perhaps the most important consideration is the lack of confidence I have in being able to successfully settle anywhere west of the capital with thrawn on the warpath like this .

Since Hungary's building another archer and still doesn't have an ETA on its campus, our builder is still standing around aimlessly with its last charge until I'm sure we won't need to speed that along with a chop. The obvious thing for it to connect is the sugar, but we can't really safely do so right now given its exposed position relative to thrawn...I'm actually contemplating sending this builder along with the third city settler, to pull off the following neat trick: chopping the jungle where our Lavra will likely want to go on the same turn we found the third city, so that the hammers from said chop actually go into the Lavra as snowballing purposes demand. I'm not totally sure if that's the best plan, but I think it's worth considering, since there's no way we're going to have time for another builder before city 3 is founded.

So Scythia's building this settler next, and Hungary's going archer - campus. What do we build after that? Scythia wants the Ancestral Hall ASAP, but it'll be a little while before it's available; other medium-term necessities are the fourth city settler, the trader, a round of increasingly-badly-needed builders, and the shrine to fund our obligatory missionary purchase to spread Work Ethic to cities 3-5 as soon as they get their Lavras up. I'd like for Hungary to build the fourth city settler rather than Scythia, which needs to grow up to size 7 for its campus as quickly as is practical, so maybe that means the handful of turns Scythia will have between this settler and the AH can go towards the shrine and trader? Then Hungary can go campus - settler to take advantage of Colonization's relatively strong hammer efficiency, while our first Monumentality purchases can start catching us up from our continuing and increasingly counterproductive disdain for builderkind.

Though the next few turns will be fairly quiet on our end, they nonetheless constitute an extremely critical inflection point with respect to the overall course of this game and to our ultimate performance therein. Thrawn's military score is tracking suboptimal's PBEM17 score very closely - at this point in that game, sub's Pítatis had just moved into pindicator's territory and begun the ages-long battle over Wealth of Nations, and I expect we'll know very soon whether thrawn's hoping to do likewise to us here. If not, they're very likely hitting Unmet Player instead, and we should have a strong chance to compete if that war turns into a lengthy stalemate. But if so, well...we'll just have to manage our expectations, batten down the hatches, and prepare to fight on defiantly to prove to our future neighbors in future PBEMs that we're no easy target .

[marcopolothefraud]

Sigh...if only you had a sacrificial unit, like a scout, that could fog bust and warn you about thrawn's army. I would settle the Matterhorn, I guess, and not worry about any "northerner" attacks. Odds are, if our northern neighbor saw the Matterhorn, they would probably push south and find us too. Hungary's just 1-2 moves away from the Matterhorn.

I don't think you attached a proper screenshot of the Matterhorn - the t34 picture of it is the clearest image that I can see - but I can see quite a few grassland hills that could turn into mines (2 food/3 production) without seriously damaging the Appeal around them. I also see some rainforest that we could chop for some Appeal. If we settle Matterhorn City *just* close enough to Hungary, then we can probably position a campus next to 2 mountains too. Hopefully there's a Geothermal Fissure nearby to give us even more adjacency, but we won't know unless we scout the area.

Once you get Horsemen, would you feel safe about fog busting and looking west?

[ljubljana]

Sigh...if only you had a sacrificial unit, like a scout, that could fog bust and warn you about thrawn's army. I would settle the Matterhorn, I guess, and not worry about any "northerner" attacks. Odds are, if our northern neighbor saw the Matterhorn, they would probably push south and find us too. Hungary's just 1-2 moves away from the Matterhorn.

I don't think you attached a proper screenshot of the Matterhorn - the t34 picture of it is the clearest image that I can see - but I can see quite a few grassland hills that could turn into mines (2 food/3 production) without seriously damaging the Appeal around them. I also see some rainforest that we could chop for some Appeal. If we settle Matterhorn City *just* close enough to Hungary, then we can probably position a campus next to 2 mountains too. Hopefully there's a Geothermal Fissure nearby to give us even more adjacency, but we won't know unless we scout the area.

Once you get Horsemen, would you feel safe about fog busting and looking west?

Yeah, I wish we had a scout for this purpose as well. Unfortunately, I can't point to any place in the build order where one would have been worth building over a unit that can actually fight, though... I'll probably eventually make one once our cities have enough production that this is trivial compared to actual unit, but probably not before then. I'll definitely feel better about fogbusting when we have horses, and are hopefully a little less militarily pressured in general.

Turn 45



We lay down the campus at Hungary, due in just 5, so our archer build there is not at all dangerous and will be allowed to complete first. The dawning of Pingala also finally kicks our culture into high gear - EE in just 3 now, which means our science will soon get a similar boost to cut down the HBR ETA substantially. Don't look now, but I think we're now favored to get PoliPhil by the era changeover as planned, though it's going to be a tight squeeze if so.

I'm not actually sure HBR is our next research. I really want it to be, for obvious reasons, but we may need Mining or even BW to allow the Lavra placement at the Matterhorn city, which gives me pause. I'm willing to make a pit stop at Mining to this end, but BW is a substantial investment and seems like a bridge too far - I'm willing to take a somewhat-suboptimal Lavra placement on the woods next to the Matterhorn (which would start at +3 anyways) if it speeds us to HBR given our tenuous geopolitical situation. Our builder is sort of aimlessly wandering around at present, but I do think we're ultimately going to want it to go with the settler to chop out said Lavra ASAP, which means we need another round of builders sometime between now and the HBR boost, eg, in 15 turns or so. We should have time for that to be right after PoliPhil though, so I think that's my plan. To recap, this means the tentative near future build orders are roughly settler - shrine - trader - builder - AH in Scythia and archer - campus - settler in Hungary, with more archers mixed in as the thrawn situation demands (of course). Hmm, HBR's actually not as expensive as I thought, though, so we might actually be only 10-ish turns out from it if we really push...maybe we do actually want to pasture these horses now and just eat the lost chop if we have to, since it'd be super nice to both get HBR in 10 turns and to waste more ES by doing so. Oh, or we could do a second builder in Scythia before the campus, maybe, and then quickly hook up the amenities at the third city as well? Idk, I'll think about this some more when I'm less sleepy and hopefully come up with a more sensible solution.

Here's the appeal up by the Matterhorn site, by the way:



Not exactly beautiful like the spots west of the capital, but serviceable enough, especially with jungle chops. I'm tempted to send either the warrior or Hungary's next archer up there ahead of the settler to scout a bit and see what the terrain to the north of the Matterhorn looks like - I imagine it would go some ways towards rectifying the appeal situation, and may even provide an open Lavra spot to enable a Mining skip. I'll probably start sending the warrior in that direction on the next turn, actually, since we'll have a fifth archer by the time it gets far enough away to meaningfully weaken our thrawn defense.

[ljubljana]

Turn 46



286!!  How in the world did thrawn gain 36 milpower this turn? Did they build two units and then have one or more get injured as well? That would be a great sign for us if so, since this is about when we'd expect the Pítati hordes to reach their target and so is at least somewhat suggestive of that target not being us. In that vein, CMF actually took the second spot in the milpower rankings from us this turn - I didn't mention this at the time, but they also did so for a turn back in the early 40s before we finished our most recent archer to reclaim it. That means at least two military builds in a short window of time, so the odds that they're thrawn's other neighbor are quite high IMO. If that's the case, it's another good sign for us - the Zulus are probably the softest non-Russian target on this map from a purely civ-based perspective, terrifying demigod though their leader might be .

We'll find out in just two turns whether builder (4 turns) before campus (5 turns) is safe in Hungary. It pains me to make a builder without the boosting policy in place, but I think that's the right decision if it gets the chop into the Lavra in the third city without delaying HBR. If so, I'd like to use Hungary's builder for the chop and Scythia's for the horse pasture, to start building up a horse stockpile for when the tech comes in, though there's some chance that'd delay the city founding my a turn, which isn't ideal. I'll definitely wait at least one more turn before formally committing to this plan, since the era change notification could easily come next turn and force us to scramble to get the campus up next instead. I, uh, am not sure how I feel about my having let this builder kind of hang around uselessly for almost 10 turns now...but given our need to get this campus done in time and my own uncertainty about how much time we had before the era change, I'm not sure I think it was a mistake per se, though it definitely needs to be addressed soon.

I'm juuust maybe starting to breathe a little easier on this turn - the wounded thrawn unit is very suspicious, and t46 is starting to get a little late for the first Pítatis to show up here given the distance between our capitals. I also belatedly note that thrawn didn't settle towards us, if the loyalty map is to be believed, which would of course be the standard move if they were committed to an all-in against us. I definitely just jinxed it by saying that, though, and if 6 Pítatis step into range at Scythia next turn and run us over, I'll have only myself to blame .

Also, I don't know why I didn't do this 45 turns ago, but CMF's PBEM18 thread tipped me off to the fact that I might want to give lurkers access to our spreadsheet . I'll edit it into the first post too so it's at all findable in the future.

[marcopolothefraud]

the Zulus are probably the softest non-Russian target on this map from a purely civ-based perspective, terrifying demigod though their leader might be.

Hell, I think they're even softer. Unlike CMF, you had to sink a few hammers to invest in religion, but you also started with extra tiles - and lots of those extra tiles have unbelievably strong yields, and +6 defense bonuses. Maybe Zulu-land is also as lush as ours, or maybe not.

15 culture/turn is massive! Just where is it coming from? I count 5.2 from Scythia's 4 population, 1.2 from Hungary's 4 population, 4 from 2 monuments, 1 from Scythia's palace, and 1 from the city state envoy. That's only 12.4, though...

After Political Philosophy, where are you going to head culturally? Theology, with its +100% Holy Site adjacency, seems almost mandatory. But Recorded History's +100% Campus adjacency is great too, and you'll want Defensive Tactics for walls too.

Is Hypatia the Great Scientist up for grabs? Is it worth running the +2 Scientist points wildcard, and maybe even a Campus Funding Project?

[ljubljana]

the Zulus are probably the softest non-Russian target on this map from a purely civ-based perspective, terrifying demigod though their leader might be.

Hell, I think they're even softer. Unlike CMF, you had to sink a few hammers to invest in religion, but you also started with extra tiles - and lots of those extra tiles have unbelievably strong yields, and +6 defense bonuses. Maybe Zulu-land is also as lush as ours, or maybe not.

15 culture/turn is massive! Just where is it coming from? I count 5.2 from Scythia's 4 population, 1.2 from Hungary's 4 population, 4 from 2 monuments, 1 from Scythia's palace, and 1 from the city state envoy. That's only 12.4, though...

After Political Philosophy, where are you going to head culturally? Theology, with its +100% Holy Site adjacency, seems almost mandatory. But Recorded History's +100% Campus adjacency is great too, and you'll want Defensive Tactics for walls too.

Is Hypatia the Great Scientist up for grabs? Is it worth running the +2 Scientist points wildcard, and maybe even a Campus Funding Project?

I'm not so sure about that; softer from a mechanical perspective due to the late-breaking nature of their military bonuses, maybe, but CMF's growth has been keeping pace with or exceeding ours as far as I can tell from empire score tracking, and they're a fearsome Civ6 player tactically who is considerably less likely to just kind of fold when faced with a rush like this than, uh, I am . Unless they were really taken by surprise, I think a thrawn attack against CMF is more likely to turn into a PBEM17-style stalemate than a conquest.

I think the rest of the culture is from the envoy being worth 2/turn (apparently that change was bundled with the NFP DLC in such a way that it didn't end up making it into this game) and Pingala's +15%. I'd hardly call it massive, though - the standard for that has to be this game.

After PoliPhil, my plan is Theology ASAP, yeah. The Lavra doubling is of course very nice, and gives us some chance at stalling long enough to eureka RH with a quick campus in the third city with its solidly high-food setup and likely incoming trader (both to jump-start its growth and because we sure do badly need the resulting road ).

Hypatia's not up for grabs; IIRC it's the thoroughly-underwhelming Euclid. That's fine by me, of course, since we're not likely to be in any way competitive for Great Scientists anytime soon.

[ljubljana]

...wait, am I making an incredibly silly decision by researching HBR now? With only one horse source, we can make only one horseman every 10 turns...that's hardly enough to turn the tide of an ancient or classical war, even though it'll inflate our military score slightly and make our city defense strength look a bit less negligible. But...we could get walls instead and both get there faster than we'll get to HBR (since we most likely have to get Mining first anyways) and be able to build them in every city. But HBR does also let us waste the ES and incentivizes building up a horse stockpile earlier due to the eureka, hmm... I'm pretty confident that these should be our next two research targets in some order, but there's some chance I'll change my mind this turn and prioritize walls first. Idk, we'll see what the save looks like, I guess.

Since we don't really have time for either if thrawn's really already on the way, I suppose we should make this decision based on what will make us stronger at the next big military breakpoint, which is the Legion/Immortal power period starting at around t70. That seems to favor HBR first, such that we can at least have 2-3 horses and walls at t70 instead of 1-2 horses and walls, while also buying us enough time to potentially get Limes in place for the wall-building period? Or is my assumption that we don't have time for walls before thrawn hits us not actually correct? Wow, I wish I had thought about our horse shortage a bit earlier, such that I could have realized the most important reason to not let our builder dawdle around for 10 turns like I did . Well, that's just what being a noob is like, I guess .

[ljubljana]

Turn 47



EE this turn, kicking our science into high (or, at least, less low) gear as well! We start PoliPhil the same turn CMF finishes it (the first to do so) which is, wow, very fast on their part, especially for a blank cultural civ. CMF also turns up with the world's first third city! Ioan has a settler out too, having shown one of the telltale -1 ES deltas that can mean only this. Thankfully, we have managed not to fall too far behind on either culture or expansion despite our shaky start in both of these respects - t55 PoliPhil is slow, but not terrible, especially considering our just awful cultural position 15-ish turns ago, and a third city around the same time shouldn't be last by that much. We swap into Conscription/Colonization; I may put a turn into Mysticism research in a bit just in case we need to quickly switch back to Agoge to fend off thrawn.

Speaking of which, thrawn has no other military units but does clear a camp this turn, casting doubt on our speculation that last turn's drop in military score signals an attack on their other neighbor. So, in that vein of thinking...horses or walls? I agonize over this for a long time. We can make it to Masonry in only 7-ish turns, while we can't start a horse for 11 due to the horse resource issue. HBR wastes era score from being the first Classical era tech, though, which is quite significant given our slim margin for error ES-wise in the classical age. Walls are effectively more expensive than horses, since their doubling policy comes late, but we'd of course have to delay PoliPhil to ge the horseman boosting policy if we went that route. Getting HBR first means hooking up our horses now rather than the useless stone, which probably translates to an extra horse unit at t70 or so when the next timing attacks will likely start brewing. But walls would be much more effective against the kinds of threats thrawn can currently bring to bear than a single horse, which would boost our city defense strength but which would likely have to expose itself to the possibility of a Pítati revenge kill to make its presence felt on the battlefield. What finally wins me over towards switching us to Mining is a follow-up to the timing question - if thrawn's units appear in the next few turns, we could actually divert the upcoming builder from Hungary southwards to chop out walls very soon after the tech comes in, perhaps as soon as 9 turns from now, by which point we wouldn't even have started a horse. By a similar argument, we could have the horse in 12-13, which is not a huge difference, but it would of course prove a very significant one if thrawn's attack force shows up in 8 .

Ugh, that's not a commitment, though, since the third city probably wants mining to finish before HBR anyways, and after a full 30 minutes of staring at the save I'm still wavering on this. As I type out this analysis, I start worrying that maybe the ES wasting from HBR will prove more significant to our Dark Age plan that it seems, that maybe I neglected how urgent it is to start stockpiling horses ASAP for cossacks, that we could do good damage with just one horse to Nubian units by just attacking out of Scythia since its hilltop position demands that Pítatis close with it in order to fire, etc. Any perspectives or feedback on this question would definitely be appreciated .