[SPOILERS] ljubljana embraces the dark side

[ljubljana]

Got it, thanks for the clarification! I guess we'll just have to see what happens. That is, unless someone offers us a DoF this game and we actually get to see for ourselves what happens, which I'd say has an approximately 0% chance of ever happening .

[ljubljana]

Episode 92: Babylon the Great has Fallen

CMF lost 47 empire score points this turn, more than half their total, and thrawn gained 42. At the same time, thrawn DoFed one of CMF/Archduke - probably the latter, unless the former somehow bought themselves 30 turns of peace by giving up most of their cities. If it's Archduke, that's a blaring red flashing signal that we're up next. And why shouldn't we be? DoTF is fine and all, but we're long past the point where that's going to make much of a difference. So what does the thrawn front look like?



Yup, that's us being scouted, all right. We're lucky we had a horse in range, or that archer would pillage our Lavra next turn, after which thrawn might actually be a threat to snipe Hypatia with their enormous faith income...not that they're all that likely to go for her instead of 5 settlers . As it stands, we're probably going to lose our pet barb camp next turn - alas . I go ahead and move our crossbow down such that, if they take it, we'll at least finally reveal that we have the tech for them. I'm definitely going to put something off to knock out more HCs now for the possibility of knight upgrades, and I'm now very glad we accidentally ended up on Mercenaries research right about now - we're probably going to need it . I might blow off whatever our plan after knights was going to be and go straight for coursers next, too - that'd be unboosted and sad, but could at least start to staunch the bleeding here.



Ioan looks non-aggressive, moving units around threateningly but not declaring war. But...I re-offer them a DoF this turn anyways, in desperation. We absolutely cannot afford to have troops tied down anywhere other than on the Nubian front at this point, even if we lock ourselves out of a Cossack push in so doing. Ioan's not actually making more legions or anything, so hopefully they're more scared of us than we are of them.

Wow, does this thing look a lot more over now than it did a turn ago. I'm not ready to concede or anything, nor close to it - come pry your victory from our cold, dead hands, thrawn! - but we'd need several significant and, frankly, pretty implausible diplomatic breaks to retain any kind of a chance at this point.

[ljubljana]

I just woke up in the middle of the night with the idea that maybe we should just bite the bullet and get Castles next instead of Stirrups? There are a number of reasons I didn't want to do this, namely a) it would lock us out of building more horsemen to upgrade, b) coursers are notably weaker then knights, and c) we'd be both giving up on the castles eureka and complicating the push for the military science eureka, but maybe it's the right play for this situation anyways... At least if we upgrade a bunch of coursers now, the gold spent will constitute a partial investment towards cossack upgrades...

In case someone hasn't noticed and wants to join - New Civ 6 PBEM

Ahh, notice that too late.

However, congrats Thrawn! 

This game was a nice experience but it consolidate my initial impression that Civ6 was NOT designed for multiplayer games.    Too many features and tricks which make almost any attempt to have a reasonably balanced game close to impossible.

This, of course, smells extremely strongly like a concession. There's a good chance that we're the only ones who haven't conceded yet, tbh... My inclination is definitely to press on and see how hopeless this really is (our bpt's going to at least double in the next 10 turns! and we're probably just 20-30 turns away from cossacks! can it really be that hopeless?), but if the lurkers and everyone else are tired of playing and are annoyedly waiting for me to hurry up and concede already, I guess I'd consider it just for the sake of not irritating people by dragging things out for what can't be more than a 5% chance to come back. It feels like we should at least see a) if thrawn attacks us and b) how much damage they immediately do in so doing first, though...

[ljubljana]

I think we are waiting on someone.

Wink wink, nudge nudge. I know, I know, it just breaks my heart to give up now with our game-long strategy this close to coming together . But I also don't want to force everyone else to take time out of their days, continue to make posts, etc, just so that I can live out my fantasy of trying to stalemate thrawn with crossbows for 20 turns then somehow turning the tide at Cossacks. Idk, what's the right thing to do here from an etiquette perspective? I do sincerely believe we have a chance to win, but a) I acknowledge that the magnitude of this chance is somewhere in the 5% range at best and b) I probably only think that because I'm a noob and don't know how over this really is. Sigh.

[suboptimal]

We all sign up for these things knowing that our Turn 1 optimism can be crushed into also-ran status very quickly. If you feel you have a chance stalemate with crossbows while heading to cossacks, give it a shot. If you pull it off you've got a good comeback story. However, if you get overrun and you're doomed, pull the plug instead of playing it out to the bitter end. Just keep reporting, so the other players can see your thinking in the turn reports.

[ljubljana]

Don't worry, I'm so invested in this game that I doubt I'd be physically able to keep myself from reporting at this point . ...I know I can't be the only one who was having a rough time IRL due to various things going on in the US over the past few months, but it's hard for me to overstate how much playing in this game has helped me keep it together more broadly . I'll happily concede the instant it becomes clear that we have no chance rather than maybe a 5% chance. But I think this position deserves to be played out for at least 10 more turns to see what happens (unless we get overrun even faster than that, naturally).

As gameplay considerations go, I think 4AM me was wrong about coursers - we should get a knight next, because we won't have the money to upgrade both coursers and crossbows anytime soon anyways, and the knight helps our city defenses by more while sowing up the MS eureka. Coursers will come in time, of course, but I don't think we have enough horsemen at the moment for unlocking them to make sense now, especially if thrawn shows up in force and starts, you know, murdering the ones we do have in large numbers .

Also, if Ioan declines our DoF offer this turn, I honestly think I'm going to start shifting our horses over to the Nubian front anyways. If Ioan wants to attack us to force a concession...they can do that, and it'll probably work. Such is the dire nature of our circumstances that our only chance at this point is to just kind of act on the assumption that we'll get the diplo breaks we need and then cross our fingers and hope that we do .

As far as cities go, I think settling towards Nubia is out of the question given the level of force that they're freeing up right now. That means we'll have to settle Maori (which at least blocks a potential attack route on a one-tile choke) and a city in the space left by Ioan's plant (hereby christened "DoF Holding" ). The former will have to find some way to get out walls quickly, maybe even before the Lavra, and the latter is really lackluster from a terrain perspective but at least gets an amazing +10 Lavra site (de facto +12 since it boosts the one at RS too). I think that's about as good as we can do at this point - I don't see us holding NFP or TD if thrawn starts a push there.

Should we do encampment next at GC instead of the campus? It's hard to overstate how little I want to do this - 10 turns from now, the campus alone will be worth 10bpt, more with a Hypatia library. Honestly, doing the encampment next probably just means thrawn will hit us at GC first instead of VA, so I might just go for the campus and cross our fingers. That's, uh, starting to become something like a theme around here, isn't it ?

[ljubljana]

Episode 93: The Maiden Voyage of the TK-211 Stubbornness

Meet the new mood, the same as the old mood.

I begin the turn with a huge mistake, messing up the deploy badly at Nan Madol and not realizing until it's already too late:



Hey, future me - think these things through more before committing to them! Thrawn can DoW and pillage our Lavra next turn, which would let them snipe Hypatia given the enormous faith boost they got this turn. I don't think they'd actually do that - that'd be what, 4 settlers' worth of opportunity cost - but then again, it'd be at least a 15 or so bpt swing between the two of us if they did snipe her and started making campuses. This was probably not the right decision...but I blow 180 faith to top her off . It doesn't change the number of Monumentality settlers we're going to get, and I doubt the game's going to go long enough for wasting a third of a GMC cossack to make a difference...so whatever . I wanted Hypatia, and now we have her. I doubt this deeply dumb decision did anything worse than change our odds to win from 1% to 0.9% . But, yes, Woden, if you're reading this, I pinky promise not to do that in PBEM20 .

Thrawn murdered our poor barbarian friends, rude . But they also didn't move a giant carpet of doom onto our territory, not rude . They're officially at peace with the rest of the world, though, which pretty much speaks for itself as to our odds of not being their next target.



Ioan didn't accept our DoF, but they did move their troops back, so I'm transferring our horsemen as promised. I might offer them the long-denied RoP in a turn or two, and not just for appeasement purposes - our wandering writer could use it to go looking for science CSs. If that bites us in the rear and and lets Ioan stab us in the back...well, whatever. It's not like we can possibly concede any harder than we're already likely to in 10 turns .

Oh, whoops, I was going to take a save during our turn so we can play this out in SP in case we get crushed...but I forgot . Oh well, I'll do it next turn.

[marcopolothefraud]

Why is one of the Industrial Zone pins labeled "horse"? Is there horse adjacency that you would like to gain from it? I don't see any horses at all, though...

Also, all the way back in August, I offered to "dedlurk" your game. Since then, I've realized that there's a difference between "dedlurking" (only reading that player's threads) and "genlurking" (reading everyone's threads). My bad - there's a lot of terminology to learn in these games! I still don't know what "pink-dotting" is, for example.

[ljubljana]

Oh, whoops - that's a now-outdated pin to remind me to keep a horseman there in the event of a war with Ioan. Hopefully I'll remember to clean those up next turn now that our Ioan defense strategy is "hope they don't attack".

And no worries - there definitely is! It's been great having you around, regardless of the official terminological designation under which you've been doing so . Pink-dotting is basically just an old (Civ3-era iirc) term for an aggressive settlement, from back when the equivalent functionality to Civ6's wonderful pinmap system was provided to take a screenshot and then go into MS Paint and put differently-colored dots on your planned city sites .

[suboptimal]

Why is one of the Industrial Zone pins labeled "horse"? Is there horse adjacency that you would like to gain from it? I don't see any horses at all, though...

Also, all the way back in August, I offered to "dedlurk" your game. Since then, I've realized that there's a difference between "dedlurking" (only reading that player's threads) and "genlurking" (reading everyone's threads). My bad - there's a lot of terminology to learn in these games! I still don't know what "pink-dotting" is, for example.

This was recently covered in one of the threads in the general civ talk forums: https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...t=pink+dot

The term comes from the (infamouse) Civ 4 sucession game played by Sulla and Sirian, Cuban Isolationists.

I was also seeing you pop up in other threads after stating you were dedlurking and wondering what was up. Now I know. Dedlurking and genlurking have a second distinction besides just whose thread(s) you're reading - a dedlurker is considered to be on that player's "team" and can give detailed strategic input to that player. A genlurker shouldn't do that (or ask potentially leading questions) as they have information that's not available to the player.