[SPOILERS] ljubljana embraces the dark side

[marcopolothefraud]

I would 100% settle Venetian Arsenal. Use your Nan-Madol Missionary to see if there's any Nubian settlers poking around the area before you send your own settler, of course. VA seems to be the only city that could stand to benefit from farms*, and there's a juicy gems tile too. After you settle Venetian Arsenal, I would harvest the stone to rush walls (or a campus), and use the other two charges to make production-boosting improvements.

*There is a downside to putting farms in Venetian Arsenal, and it's that a Nubian invasion could pillage our farms to sustain itself. But I have a sneaking suspicion that we can outproduce and out-tech the Nubians soon, so that in the event of an invasion, Venetian Arsenal might be damaged but not taken.

I don't have anything to say about government. However, I don't think Grand Master's Chapel is really that important - it seems like a big waste of hammers into something that would struggle to pay for itself.

[ljubljana]

The thing about the VA site, though, is that other than that gems, a few forests, and the one plains hill, the tiles up there are pretty poor, barring any fortuitous flooding. Though, now that I'm looking at it more closely, I guess the VA site as pinned could borrow a bunch of tiles from Gran Colombia, which has plenty of forests to spare. As far as initial production in VA goes, my plan is to harvest the stone into the +6 Lavra, then build walls with Limes, which I'm confident we can make happen in the next 16 turns.

Unfortunately, I'm not as confident about us out-teching the Nubians in the medium-term. They conquered another city-state this turn and have a wide lead in empire score, with 82 to our second-place 70. While their beaker output is lagging now, I expect it to explode once they lay down campuses in all their new cities and start converting their strong holy site locations into Monumentality settlers.

I disagree about the GMC - faith-rushing military units is hugely impactful, especially once we're not in Monumentality next age and have nothing else to do with all the faith. We can get a free Cossack for only ~500ish faith IIRC, which will probably be only 5-ish turns of faith income after t100. If we build the GMC, then immediately faith-rush 5 cossacks on the turn the tech comes in (in addition to however many we manage to produce or upgrade in the meantime), this could yield a very strong attack if we get the timings right. The early t100s seem out of reach for this plan due to our lagging tech and badly lagging gpt, but I do think we could stitch together something like 10ish Cossacks by t120, half of which would come from the GMC, which could be enough to take out one of our neighbors if the global tech pace doesn't improve between now and then.

[MJW (ya that one)]

I've just noticed your naming scheme. These are possible new cities

-Tactical Declaration (tactical declarations of war)
-Scythia
-Pillaged Farm (CS pillage farming ban)
-Maori (this is lower on the totem poll after the advent of worldbuilder, so should come up after the first 3 but before the next 3 because it got actually banned.)

Things that haven't been banned but could be if you run out
-Austrila (you can tactical DoW other civs, so this can get a separate entry)
-Sumer
-Reeds and Marshes (pantheon)

I'm sure that new banned things will come up before you plant 6 cities.

[ljubljana]

I've just noticed your naming scheme. These are possible new cities

-Tactical Declaration (tactical declarations of war)
-Scythia
-Pillaged Farm (CS pillage farming ban)
-Maori (this is lower on the totem poll after the advent of worldbuilder, so should come up after the first 3 but before the next 3 because it got actually banned.)

Things that haven't been banned but could be if you run out
-Austrila (you can tactical DoW other civs, so this can get a separate entry) 
-Sumer
-Reeds and Marshes (pantheon)

I'm sure that new banned things will come up before you plant 6 cities.

Ooh, I forgot about the Maori - good call! Yeah, one thought I had was that, after we run out of banned things, we can transition to things that we, as players, subjectively think should be banned...in which case Work Ethic would be an obvious choice, if perhaps a little on the nose given our overarching strategy .

Episode 74 - We May be Lucky, but Thrawn is Good



No way - Tithe is still on the board! Wow! Ok, forget this swordsman then - we need to absolutely spring into action here. Temple at Scythia, due in 7, though it'll be 6 after we finish our lumbermills. It'll then take one more turn to accumulate enough faith for an apostle, if we make no other purchases in the meantime. At this point, there's not much doubt in my mind that this is the right play over 1.3 additional settlers if we can swing it - 21 GPT from Tithe would completely resolve our horrible cashflow problems and leave us in a position to actually credibly threaten a Cossack push! That is, assuming that we are actually allowed to choose Tithe when enhancing the religion - I've never done this before, but civwiki suggests that it should be the case, since we don't yet have a Founder belief.

Uh...upon perusing that page, though, I gaze a little too deeply into the Palantir and (finally) realize a crucial and absolutely horrifying fact about the true nature of this universe and our place therein. Work Ethic is a Follower Belief...which means thrawn's DF-enhanced cities to our north that our religion leaked into will all get the bonus hammers from their superpowered holy sites. Oh crap . I'm not sure what we could reasonably have done to avoid this (since they surely would have taken Work Ethic if we hadn't), but this revelation is a major boost to my perception of thrawn's position in this game, from "favorite" to "budding runaway".

Wait...that also resolves something strange I had been kicking around in the back of my head for a few turns - namely, how did our religion manage to already spread in Bortus despite the weakish nature of the religious pressure mechanic? Did...did thrawn buy a missionary of our religion in The Second? And is their plan now to spread our religion domestically for Work Ethic while spreading their own religion in foreign lands to leverage Crusade? Moreover, did they found The Second where they did specifically because we'd be unable to stop our religion from spreading quickly to that location?

Oh, crap. That's a staggeringly brilliant series of moves, if so. We can take advantage of this if we actually manage to grab Tithe in 7 turns, to be sure...but with a major production edge in addition to their already substantial expansion advantage, I'm really starting to think this game is slipping away from the non-thrawn contenders. We'll have a good shot at taking second, if so, due to our isolated position and our own production edge over the other non-Nubian civs...but still, ouch.



Here's the promised shot of the NFP area, from which my newfound vague consideration of going for this site with the Nan Madol settler may now be evident. The VA site is probably still the better idea, though, since it's a little less exposed and can swap onto the extra Breathtaking lumbermills at Gran Colombia to help with faith-snowballing. NFP is probably our next post-Tithe target if we can swing it, though.



For completeness's sake, here's a shot of the north as well, flush with unremovable barbarian camps. Luckily, our horse is in position to swing around and cut off that activated scout, which might otherwise be in position to cause us some real problems up here. Since I swapped Scythia off of the sword, I might change RS to one after the builder, to avoid completely wasting our Agoge swap . That'd mean delaying the Engineering eureka, though, which is admittedly somewhat suspect, so I might also just eat the lost gold instead - Tithe will pay for that misplay incredibly quickly, should we actually manage to land it.

[marcopolothefraud]

What does "eat the lost gold" mean? If I understand it correctly, you already have the Construction eureka, so why do you need a builder -> swordsman in RS?

Other than that, poor Ioan. He seems to only be making 4 faith per turn - how is he going to capitalize on his religious bonuses? I guess we'll just have to see.

[ljubljana]

What does "eat the lost gold" mean? If I understand it correctly, you already have the Construction eureka, so why do you need a builder -> swordsman in RS?

Other than that, poor Ioan. He seems to only be making 4 faith per turn - how is he going to capitalize on his religious bonuses? I guess we'll just have to see.

Whoops, that was a typo. RS's plan was to build walls next under Limes for the Engineering eureka, but I'm thinking about doing a sword next instead (and walls after, ofc) so we don't get absolutely nothing out of having swapped to Agoge for four turns. The "lost gold" was in reference to the gold we're losing by not being in Mercenaries instead...but it's only 28 gold, which isn't really that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, especially if we do land Tithe with our apostle push.

Yeah, I'm not really sure what Ioan's overarching plan is with this religion. I will say this, though - in conjunction with legions, it does have the effect of insulating them from the prospect of being thrawn's next target, since it'll be difficult to make Crusade work against an opponent with an already-established competing faith. That's probably not exactly what they had in mind when they started building holy sites, and is pretty cold comfort if it's not really going to accelerate their snowballing much...but I think I'd still rather have Ioan's position than, eg, TheArchduke's .

Also, I just went ahead and quadruple-checked in SP if enhancing religion from this position would, indeed, allow us to pick Tithe, and it looks like this is in fact the case...assuming nobody swipes it with Stonehenge in the next 7 turns, of course . Even if that does happen, though, it's not a disaster, since we need the temple eventually to inspire Divine Right anyways, and we can just spend the apostle faith on settlers if need be. Actually, we may want to start working on a second temple soon too, if we end up going for Theocracy - maybe we could start it Hungary after the builder(s), if we decide to go that route?

Oh, and if we're going to be ready to make a Cossack push, we need to settle the Bad Horses City™ sooner than later. I don't really want to prioritize it over GH/VA/NFP, but maybe after those cities? I imagine something in the t90 range would be fine, being worth an extra 2 marginal horse units by t110.

[ljubljana]

Episode 75: Me, Paranoid?

We open the save to the following pop-up:



This is annoying, but, unfortunately, it was probably unavoidable - Mohenjo Daro's quest was to spread our religion there, which was going to happen eventually on a timescale over which we had essentially no control. Thus, we have to eat ES - we're now at 42/58, which is closer than I would like given how early in the Classical Era it still is.



Here's this turn's most important development - is that Roman trader heading towards us? If so, that's a strong indicator that they're not plotting war at t83...as is the fact that their military score has started to crater rather than spike. I'm not about to delay the walls up here or anything, but I am feeling increasingly confident about our relations with Rome in the short-term, at least.

Note also the builder about to finish in RS - what should we have it do? The GFH lumbermill seems mandatory, but other than that, we have a good deal of flexibility. Ideally, the builder will help RS grow to size 7 as quickly as possible, which requires at least some additional housing, either 0.5 points from a plantation or 1.5 from two plantations and a farm. The other somewhat compelling candidate use for a charge is to harvest the rice, which might provide a more immediate boost towards size 7...though admittedly it's somewhat difficult to see that as particularly efficient if the city won't have enough housing to actually finish growing to size 7. After the builder, I think I'll drop one turn into one of a swordsman, the monument, or the library to avoid spending any hammers on walls without Limes in place, then start the walls as soon as Defensive Tactics completes.



In the west, I do finally decide to commit to VA next, since it's still better than NFP in terms of faith-snowballing, and because the NFP site has some amount of positional flexibility if thrawn starts settling in that direction, while VA has almost none. I don't see any Nubian settlers up here yet, and the travel time's quite short, so hopefully we should manage to land this spot without problems. I briefly contemplate settling 1NE of the current pinned site to get the rice in range, but I don't think I'm going to, as that would put the city center on the wrong side of the river during a potential war with thrawn.

Scythia's temple is due in 5, the same turn on which it hits size 7. That's very convenient, as we can then immediately lock in its campus, though I'm not completely sure whether its next two builds should be campus - settler or settler - campus. This probably depends on RS's plans, actually - that city will likely also want a settler reasonably soon, but not until it has at least locked in its Commercial Hub. Depending on how long we expect that to take, I may try to time the Colonization swap such that we only need to swap into it once, at which point we can then do a big wave of hand-built settlers in all the core cities in position to do so. That might not actually be feasible, though - we'll have a better idea once the builder comes in next turn and starts solving the RS housing crunch, I imagine.

Oh yeah, once Liang's duties are complete in RS next turn, I'll probably start moving her to Hungary to boost the builder there, or perhaps to NM if we decide to do a builder after the monument there. At that point, we can move Victor up to RS to show him off to Ioan, in the hopes of further reducing the odds of a t83 attack.

Hmm, I wonder if I should consider offering Ioan an iron for horses trade in the near future instead of blowing all our iron on a swordsman? We'd obviously rather have another horseman now than a sword, and presumably they'd rather have two legions than a horse. If I'm still feeling not especially threatened by them next turn (eg, if their trader continues moving towards RS and their milpower doesn't spike), I'll give that some consideration, I think, perhaps with 1g for 1g added as well to signal continued friendly intentions. I wouldn't have done that 10 turns ago, but at this point, I doubt they can easily convert that iron into two more legions with which to come kill us in the next 7 turns anyways. If we do end up doing that, we should probably also hook up the second iron at GC sooner than later...though I don't know if it's worth delaying a Breathtaking lumbermill to do so.

[marcopolothefraud]

The Ioan diplomacy is great news! If he's docile and his military strength is decreasing, then we'll have an easier time settling Goody Hut.

On the other hand, thrawn's military strength has jumped another 38 points in one turn, most likely as a result of healing and the creation of a Pitati Archer/Swordsman/Horseman. (Your spreadsheet doesn't have a table for resource stockpiles, I think - maybe you should put them in.) How can we stop him while our Declaration of Friendship is still ongoing?

According to https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/f...ad.600534/, it takes 63 food to grow from size 6 to size 7. You have researched 13 techs and 12 civics, so your chops/harvests would yield 43 food. You should double check my numbers, though.

[suboptimal]

Growth from 6 to 7 requires 66 food. 15 + 8 x (6-1) + (6-1)^1.5 => 15 + 40 + 11 => 66. The actual value of food needed to grow can be seen (to one decimal point) by opening the growth/amenity pane in the city view.

Since that post / Vanilla the chop/harvest formula has changed in two critical ways:

- The # of techs and civics has increased to 77 and 61, respectively (from 67 and 50).
- Bonus resources had their base value dropped to 20 (recent patch) and are no more valuable than features.

The CivFanatics post is also missing two FLOOR() functions in it - one around the 100xMAX and another around the entire formula. The actual formula is

FLOOR ( [Base Value] x (1 + 9 x ( FLOOR ( 100 x MAX( [# Techs]/71, [# Civics] / 61 ) ) / 100 ) ) )

13 techs / 77 ~ 0.1688, 12 civics / 61 ~ 0.1967, max = 0.1967
FLOOR (100 x 0.1967) / 100 = 0.19
1 + 9 x 0.19 = 2.71
FLOOR ( 2.71 x 20 ) = 54

Another takeaway from this is that your civics progress is what's currently driving your costs. Until the tech fraction gets higher than the civics fraction new techs will not increase any game progress related costs.

[ljubljana]

Unfortunately, I'm not sure we can do anything to slow thrawn down while the DoF is ongoing, other than continuing to build units and walls to make them at least commit some troops towards border defense. I'm definitely also concerned about their spiking milpower, though, especially since it seems like it's likely coming from higher-tech military units. Also, good point about the resource stockpiles in the spreadsheet - I'll go ahead and add that now.

Thank you for the harvest/chop math! Yeah, I don't really want to leave RS with insufficient housing for 20 food worth of growth...I think I'll just order up another builder in this region to harvest the rice, or do so with the last charge of one of Hungary's upcoming builders.

Oh, another thing to think about - both Medieval Faires and Exploration will be very difficult, if not impossible, to boost, which might end up punting Merchant Republic too far in the future to work well with a Cossack push. If that happens, perhaps we could get the GMC via Monarchy instead...I've done this in SP, and don't really like doing so most of the time since it disallows the uber Monasticism + Scripture + Natural Philosophy combo, but it could be a good choice here. We can then get Divine Right before Mercenaries, build the GMC while researching the latter, then do a mass faith-purchase and upgrade on the turn Mercenaries comes in, assuming we can also get the tech situation together in time. That would entail building another shrine and temple somewhere, though...I suppose Nan Madol's a good place for this, since it needs something to build while it grows to size 4 anyways? I guess we could even try a fast Monarchy - Theocracy push if we're comfortable delaying Feudalism, which could let us land the otherwise difficult Castles boost. There is one other reason to do Feudalism next, though, which is that it gives the boost for Stirrups, which I think we'll want even though it's off the Cossacks path to boost the horrifyingly expensive Military Science tech.