[SPOILERS] ljubljana embraces the dark side

[ljubljana]

IIRC the green and yellow smiley faces are based upon grievances (or lack thereof) plus some other hidden factors - they don't mean much in MP.  Red = denounced, blue = declared friend.

Oops, right, I completely forgot about the existence of the SP-centric green and yellow smilies - my comment about a "green smiley" above was intended to refer to the blue DoF smiley, at which I now realize it badly failed . But, yeah, I tested this in SP, and it looks like the option to declare a surprise war should be greyed out for an accepted DoF, which it isn't in Ioan's case; I guess that confirms that it wasn't accepted. I don't know why the interface told me Ioan accepted our deal the round after we offered it, then...my only guess is that maybe that notification was carried over from the previous round, during which Ioan did accept our 1g for 1g deal?

Hmm...if our settler weren't most of the way there already, I might be rethinking the Matterhorn site right about now. The promotion is very powerful, sure, but we'd be making a dangerous enemy if Ioan considers it a forward settlement and is looking to leverage their legions to kill someone in 20-30 turns; maybe what we should be doing now is settling towards thrawn while they're preoccupied and can't efficiently punish us. That'd probably mean surrendering the Matterhorn promotion forever, though, since we'll be strongly disincentivized from settling new an NW in the next era. As a right-thinking Russian player, I don't think I want to give up on 70 strength, hills-ignoring cossacks quite that easily, even if there's an argument that doing so is the smart, conservative geopolitical play .

[ljubljana]

Turn 52



The world's most unfortunate scout wanders into range of our entire garrison at Scythia. We pick up a nice promotion on the northern archer as a result .



Here's an updated shot of the Matterhorn area. 1W of the Matterhorn is looking like a great campus site - +3 immediately with an easy boost to +4 from district adjacencies. I'm very much hoping the tile 1NW of the Matterhorn is something other than jungle, as it'd make a great +4 Lavra (at least!) while both boosting the campus to +4 as well and allowing us to settle on the woods to lock down sole access to the promotion. If it is more jungle, I doubt it'd be worth delaying HBR (and the city now too) to get the tech to chop it, but it'd be something of a shame nonetheless.

Ioan founds a third city and gets a nice boost to both science and culture. They also just built a settler last turn, which I think means they're going to get a fourth city quite soon as well! Wow, we're really starting to fall behind on expansion here - after this campus, a fourth and perhaps fifth settler in Hungary seems like a must while the capital slowly crawls towards the AH (without wasting any of our precious forests if we can help it, of course). We also need to build a horseman somewhere too, unfortunately; I'm not really sure how that's going to shake out, especially since we may need to build it at full cost without the Military Tradition policy (which is off the all-important Theology path). Perhaps settler - horse - settler could work in Hungary without slowing us by too much more?

[ljubljana]

Turn 53



Lots of important news in that screenshot there. In order of significance:

1. Ioan accepted our DoF, awesome! Protection from legions until t83 is quite a coup, especially since we know their DoFs with CMF and Archduke run out before then. I am a little nervous that their motives are, uh, less than entirely sincere, though, due to

2. Loyalty pressure. We're pretty close to Roman territory at this point, and we know that Ioan has a second settler out on the map from an empire score drop earlier. Could they have accepted this DoF with an eye towards peacefully setting up a border city in this region, just as we proposed it for what was in part exactly that reason? If we're in a settling race with Ioan, we may not have much of a head start; their settler popped two turns ago, and it looks like at least one of their cities is quite close by. I think we should be on track to get some kind of settlement up in time before being locked out of the region completely, but if we get greedy and delay for the woods or jungle chop, we could get punished for it. Interesting! Which brings me to

3. Ugh, more jungle 1 NW of the Matterhorn. With HBR due in 6 but 8 turns left in the age, I decide it's worth it to dump exactly one turn of research into BW as the warrior finishes defogging the adjacencies up here and scouts the approach of any Ioan settlers. If 1NW turns out to be a +6 Lavra on a silver platter or something, or if I change my mind and decide that exclusive Matterhorn access is too powerful a tool to surrender this easily, I may give up the HBR ES and push for BW first, in which case research will finish on the exact turn that our builder is ready for the chop. If not, or if the risk of getting beaten to the site by Ioan seems too high, I'll swap back to HBR and pursue the original woods chop plan. Either way, expect an appeal shot + tentative pinmap once we have a more complete picture of the land up here.

4. We have what looks like a nice +4 campus/Lavra site in the east there, interesting. It's in range of our original plant, but I don't think that's the best use for it, since any Matterhorn city can get an equally good campus up in the jungle. Instead, I think we should save this for a potential second city in this area - another consideration which favors settling on the woods, if we can make that happen in time.

5. Ioan got 4 faith from somewhere this turn, huh. Did they just finish a holy site or something? I guess their GPP score next turn will give us the information we need to definitely assess this...

6. We need a name for our third city . If we can make it to the Matterhorn, it'll obviously be named after the banned pantheon, but I have an incredibly pendantic question for the lurkers about this name. Should we go with "Religious Settlements" because that's technically the full name of the pantheon, or "Religious Settlement" because, well, it's really just the one settlement rather than plural settlements, and going with the singular seems to have a nicer flow to it IMO? I will defer to whatever the first and/or loudest and/or most generically convincing lurker has to say on this extremely silly matter .

I may ping thrawn soon to let them know that formal peace with us is still on the table, in anticipation of the need to start settling westward in the near future. I'll do my best to time this such that the 10t window we'd get from an acceptance lines up with us having settlers already on the map, but when I do make an offer, I think I may include the same 2gpt payment from earlier, which they're surely aware is all that we have to offer. If thrawn feels short-changed, they might reject us again and start to contemplate turning east if they either make peace with or conquer CMF. 60g still seems to me like a small price to pay for smoothing over relations with the world's dominant military power and biasing their expansionistic impulses towards directions other than ours.

[marcopolothefraud]

https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Loy...y_citizens
Those tiles that are marked -4 loyalty pressure are both 7 tiles from Hungary, which means they're receiving 12 loyalty pressure from us, and 16 loyalty pressure from Ioan's Rome. They must have a 4pop city 6 tiles away from that spot, or an 8pop city 8 tiles away from that spot (almost impossible).

I think you should name it "Religious Settlement", and pretend that a Mr. Religious and Mr. Settlement cofounded the city. Are you worried about floods/volcano eruptions at all? What's the natural disaster setting for this map?

It seems to me that thrawn's military strength is rapidly decreasing (310 on t51 to 282 on t53). Given his science rate, we're almost guaranteed to reach Horseman and Swordsmen before him, and hopefully with Work Ethic we can produce them a lot faster than he can too. (Check his resource stockpiles just in case :/) I don't think there's much of a reason to still pay him Danegeld, and I would go with a white peace.

[ljubljana]

https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Loy...y_citizens
Those tiles that are marked -4 loyalty pressure are both 7 tiles from Hungary, which means they're receiving 12 loyalty pressure from us, and 16 loyalty pressure from Ioan's Rome. They must have a 4pop city 6 tiles away from that spot, or an 8pop city 8 tiles away from that spot (almost impossible).

I think you should name it "Religious Settlement", and pretend that a Mr. Religious and Mr. Settlement cofounded the city. Are you worried about floods/volcano eruptions at all? What's the natural disaster setting for this map?

It seems to me that thrawn's military strength is rapidly decreasing (310 on t51 to 282 on t53). Given his science rate, we're almost guaranteed to reach Horseman and Swordsmen before him, and hopefully with Work Ethic we can produce them a lot faster than he can too. (Check his resource stockpiles just in case :/) I don't think there's much of a reason to still pay him Danegeld, and I would go with a white peace.

I'm not sure about the natural disaster setting. I am a bit worried about volcanoes and floods, but much less worried than I was before the patch that now keeps these events from permanently removing the Work Ethic boost .

Thrawn's military strength seems to be fluctuating rather than declining, presumably as their units are wounded/killed but continue to be built in large numbers simultaneously. It went up again this turn (t299), so I'm not really sure that the war is tilting one way or the other as of yet. CMF hasn't lost a city or anything, though, and is a master tactician from what I can tell, so that's at least not a discouraging sign.

Turn 54



Here's this turn's Important Screenshot. No settler visible from Ioan, and we can also just barely see the borders of their city to the north, which is just far enough away that the woods spot would lock down this area much more completely than the spot 1 SE of it. In addition, that spot is substantially more defensible, both due to the natural geography (look at all those beautiful hilled choke points in Ioan's direction!) and because it would grant us sole control over the Matterhorn for a permanent movement and strength advantage over Ioan when defending said choke points. With that in mind, and because the woods city has slightly stronger yields in general and better accomodates another strong city in this region (on the jade, maybe?), I decide to get greedy, and keep research on BW, sacrificing 1 ES on our Dark Age margins to make a play for the woods spot! Thus, when we inevitably miss the Dark Age by one ES in a fit of cosmic justice, we'll at least know exactly which of my decisions deserves the most blame .

We'll then have to decide between founding the city ASAP and delaying two turns to get the jungle chop on the Lavra site to go into the district itself; I'm not yet sure what decision I'll make on that front. I'm considering spending fully two of our builder's three charges on jungle chops in this area to get the new city growing and quickly knock out its Lavra, with the last charge going into the coffee for some badly-needed amenities relief. If we do do this, we of course need to remember not to permanently reduce the planned campus's adjacency bonus by chopping its jungles - next turn, I'll put up some handy 'DO NOT CHOP' pins to remind myself of this .

Here's the promised Appeal shot of this region as well:



Our planned Lavra site NW of the Matterhorn actually provides just enough appeal to get the stone to Breathtaking, so building there is faith-neutral despite itself wasting a Breathtaking tile. Though it doesn't look like it at first glance, we can actually also boost the hills NE of the Matterhorn there as well with a few chops thanks to the bonus from the natural wonder. That, plus the one already-Breathtaking jungle, plus the fast +4 Lavra, should make this a decent city from a faith-generation perspective, certainly better than I initially feared given the appeal situation around the floodplains in the south.

[ljubljana]

Turn 55



As promised. I'm still not sure if I'm going to delay two turns to avoid wasting the chop...it's probably better to do so from a total foodhammers perspective, but I'm a little nervous about how weak we're looking due to still not having a third city (thrawn's was founded this turn). Also, thrawn made 173 gold and 44 faith this turn! Wow, that's a lot of pillaging. Uh, I hope it's a lot of pillaging...but because I'm paranoid, I'm of course going to check next round to make sure CMF didn't give them their whole treasury for peace or something.

Oh, and an unmet city-state player has been defeated! Wow, I guess they're not all locked away behind cliffs after all. Thrawn must have conquered one of CMF's CS allies this turn, which, okay, I guess that would explain the gold and faith surge. Hopefully that doesn't mean they're now done with their attack and about to turn on us . Unfortunately, that's probably a realistic possibility, so I might need to start building up our defenses again . Our Great Writer super-scout pops next turn, though, so we should have at least some possibility of getting advance warning if we use it effectively.

Ugh, and also, while zooming out to take this screenshot, I discovered, completely by accident, the dumbest and most broken Civ6 interface bug I've yet heard tell of:



Dammit, Civ6, why must you thwart at every turn our attempts to turn you into a good MP game ? Has anyone with more experience ever seen a pinmap leak like this before? Did I somehow do something to cause this? Ugh, and the pinmap system is so dang nice too . I'll post something about this in the organizing thread, but if we can see this pin, there's no guarantee everyone else can't see ours either, so I might need to tread carefully to make sure not to pin anything important...like I just did this turn. Whoops, I guess.

...okay, according to CMF in the organizing thread, it's possible that Ioan simply accidentally set this pin to be visible to all players. In that case, I guess it's time to panickedly check all of our pins to make sure we haven't done the same. I guess I owe the designers an apology for my knee-jerk assumption that this must somehow be their fault .

[suboptimal]

Dammit, Civ6, why must you thwart at every turn our attempts to turn you into a good MP game ? Has anyone with more experience ever seen a pinmap leak like this before? Did I somehow do something to cause this? Ugh, and the pinmap system is so dang nice too . I'll post something about this in the organizing thread, but if we can see this pin, there's no guarantee everyone else can't see ours either, so I might need to tread carefully to make sure not to pin anything important...like I just did this turn. Whoops, I guess.

...okay, according to CMF in the organizing thread, it's possible that Ioan simply accidentally set this pin to be visible to all players. In that case, I guess it's time to panickedly check all of our pins to make sure we haven't done the same. I guess I owe the designers an apology for my knee-jerk assumption that this must somehow be their fault .

This actually happened once before.  In PBEM 7 CMF had pinned a location for an Encampment and accidentally made it visible to everyone.  It turns out that with a visible pin there anyone who couldn't normally scroll over there could,  though all they'd see is unrevealed map.

[ljubljana]

Dammit, Civ6, why must you thwart at every turn our attempts to turn you into a good MP game ? Has anyone with more experience ever seen a pinmap leak like this before? Did I somehow do something to cause this? Ugh, and the pinmap system is so dang nice too . I'll post something about this in the organizing thread, but if we can see this pin, there's no guarantee everyone else can't see ours either, so I might need to tread carefully to make sure not to pin anything important...like I just did this turn. Whoops, I guess.

...okay, according to CMF in the organizing thread, it's possible that Ioan simply accidentally set this pin to be visible to all players. In that case, I guess it's time to panickedly check all of our pins to make sure we haven't done the same. I guess I owe the designers an apology for my knee-jerk assumption that this must somehow be their fault .

This actually happened once before.  In PBEM 7 CMF had pinned a location for an Encampment and accidentally made it visible to everyone.  It turns out that with a visible pin there anyone who couldn't normally scroll over there could,  though all they'd see is unrevealed map.

Hmm, I don't think we could normally scroll over there either, and, now that you mention it, it does look like our minimap suddenly and vastly zoomed out on t53 with no other obvious cause. I guess that explains that, then.

I'll bet we're the only ones who could have been tipped off for that reason though, since everyone else a) is also in contact with Ioan and b) has done, like, any actual scouting instead of huddling paranoidly in their cities for 50 turns. Wow, if thrawn's goal by rejecting our 60g really was just to spook us into suboptimal economic decisions, it's really paid off in that respect. I guess that's why the Danegeld strategy doesn't really work in practice...because if someone's desperate enough to offer it, that usually means they're scared enough that it's in their opponent's best interest to decline .

I do have an ulterior motive for having done essentially no scouting though, which is that, if possible, I'm hoping to delay contact with CMF and Archduke until the Medieval Age. There's a huge chunk of ES that you obtain by contacting all the civs, and I was never very optimistic that we could achieve it during the Ancient Age, so the next best option with respect to keeping us on track for our Dark Age is to push this as late as possible, if we can. Unfortunately, to a certain extent this is out of our control, but I hope to at least do what little I can to increase our odds. Similarly, to the extent that we do scout during the Classical Age, it's actually very important that we avoid the coast, and particularly the coast near our capital, lest we encounter any more undiscovered city state continents and be cursed with +4 ES .

Hmm, I hope we're not in danger of running into actual loyalty trouble at Religious Settlement in the upcoming Dark Age . I'm hoping that it's position will be awkward enough to disincentivize Ioan from squeezing any more cities between it and their city in the fog, which I'd imagine will help us hold this location. I suppose we can always plan to buy a few of our Monumentality settlers over in this area to integrate it more fully into our loyalty network and forestall that possibility.

[ljubljana]

Turn 56



With bated breath, we make a frighteningly bold grab for the Roman border region, locking down control of the Matterhorn...if we can keep it. The new city of Aggressive Religious Settlement starts working the extremely strange and very strong 3/1/1/2 jungle tile . Ioan plants a fourth city on the same turn we get our third, re-emphasizing just how far behind we've started to fall on expansion . I, uh, start a settler in Hungary (as it finishes the long-promised +3 campus). After that completes, I'll likely have it build either a horseman or a library; libraries in general need to be a priority for our civ, since our bpt growth will be seriously hindered by needing to wait until size 4 for every campus.

We get some very nice flooding on the river at RS, look at that 3/1 grassland we almost founded on! This may actually lead to a slight re-evaluation of priorities for our builder - farming this grass now wastes the +1 ES from improving after a natural disaster, which could be a nice play to avoid having to choose between leaving this area unimproved for a while and taking another hit to our Dark Age margin. A 4/1 tile is really good, too, especially since we're hoping to grow this city to size 4 quickly to get its +4 campus up and eureka Recorded History.

Ovid is born in Scythia! We immediately make a Great Work, of course, to do our best to keep pace with Ioan's surging culture. Afterwards, I think I'll have him scout along the coast while we can still do so safely (for the next 5 turns), then turn north towards his semi-permanent post as our thrawn distant early warning system.

We get/waste a ton of era score this turn, catapulting us well into Golden Age range with 6 turns to go until the next era. Hopefully, nothing will go horribly wrong for us between now and then, and the dawning of Monumentality will allow us to start catching up to the other players in earnest .

[marcopolothefraud]

You're not the only one who got a lot of era score - it seems like Ioan did so as well, because his overall score jumped from 95 to 105. He spent 90 gold (probably closer to 100 gold if we factor in his gold income/turn), but probably didn't make a legion because his military score barely changed. I wonder what happened.

Now that you have a campus, you must be earning Great Scientist points. The last time I asked this question, you said that one of the more useless scientists (Aryabhata or Euclid, I can't remember) was available before Hypatia. Is that still the case? Even if we can't get her, it should be important to keep track of who can.