[Spoilers] Chevalier Gives You Something to Cry Aboot

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Kaiser's got no good options. He invested too heavily in infrastructure and not enough in units - he's had a science edge for long enough that he should be able to roll out tanks and planes and not be mounting a defense with field cannon and anti-tank armies. He's also now reaping the whirlwind of his earlier half-hearted attempts to conquer Canada: he utterly failed (obviously, we are still here, as is Bruins) and so he was entirely dependent upon domestic oil production...while his single-minded focus on torching us led to him neglecting the northern tundra sites so Phoenicia could snap them up uncontested.

Now that Kaiser has made his bed, though, what is the best way to lie in it?

I think his dogged determination to defend his districts is dooming him, here. Kelly Grayson is defensible, but he needs to pull back behind the river line and hit Woden as he comes up. More of his army should probably be in the north, at Ed Mercer. I would pull the units defending against Brazil out and throw them at Phoenicia. I know that means opening his districts to looting and his south to Brazilian invasion, but again, no good options.

Now, a defense at the river opens up terrain for Woden's artillery. The counter to that: Kaiser should spend his limited oil not on tanks or artillery, but on planes. Biplanes can reach out and torch an artillery each turn, forcing Woden to either bring up anti-air or commit his own planes to defend. It looks like Kaiser hasn't done that, yet, so instead he needs to park his own artillery in his cities in order to be able to reach out and touch enemy artillery that gets close, like he did against the BB assault on his cities earlier.

Can he win? No, obviously not. But that might slow Woden down enough that something else can break his way diplomatically.

Oh, and I would grovel before England. I'd need sub to stab Woden in the back to have any chance at all. I'd also try to get Canada to distract Brazil somehow, which, lol at that ever happening, but one last time: No. Good. Options.

[williams482]

Turn 211 World Congress:

You mentioned Kaiser trying to get us to distract Brazil? Well, he's trying:



If we were a real contender, if we could actually do something with that +3 strength, +1 movement, if we cared about Egypt for any reason other than the cultural alliance protecting cities on the opposite side of his territory, I'd seriously consider this. As I mentioned in the previous report, the bonuses are pretty damn solid, and Kaiser has all kinds of reasons to want it to go through, but nobody else has any incentive to pile on and Ichabod has more than enough favor to block Kaiser's votes. For us, there's an added incentive to stay away, because being in a war with Brazil gives suboptimal another non-denunciation method for declaring war, using a military alliance. We really don't want that on the table.

Thus, I have but one sensible choice to make:



And that's that. Sorry Kaiser, maybe next time either kill us properly or don't try at all.

[williams482]

Turn 212:

Kaiser's emergency proposal suffered a predictable fate:



And we get an unexpected boon: our alliance level with Suboptimal has increased! This lands us the boost for Chemistry, which is definitely nice, but more importantly we now share vision. Were, I wonder, are his units hanging around these days? Barry, mostly:



As for the full force of Suboptimal's military, we can see:
- 1x Battleship armada, 87
- 1x Battleship fleet, 80
- 1x Ironclad armada, 87
- 1x Ironclad fleet, 80
- 2x Ironclad, 70 = 140
- 4x Sea Dog, 50 = 200
- 1x Tank corps, 90
- 1x Tank, 80
- 1x Cavalry, 62
- 2x Field Cannon corps, 70 = 140
- 1x Field Canon, 60
- 3x Musket corps, 65 = 195
- 2x Musket, 55 = 110
- 1x Pike&Shot corps, 65
- 1x Pike&Shot, 55
- 1x Bombard, 55
- 1x Sword, 36
- 1x Archer, 25
- 2x Siege Tower

That totals 1647 milpower, which is wrong. The actual figure is 1552. None of the units are injured, and I've double checked the unit strength values against the civilopedia, so I'm not sure what's up there. I have backed up this save for double checking at a later date.

More importantly, Suboptimal's current deployment seems pretty ambivalent about attacking us in 4 + 5 = 9 turns. His fleet (which is much smaller than I expected) is a long ways away from our coastal cities, and the portion of it not pictured above consists of one Ironclad fleet near Nora Barry which our galley encountered earlier, a sea dog obviously exploring the fogged ocean southwest of Brazil, and these two ironclads:



Their placement isn't perfectly optimal, with one tile of vision overlap, but it sure looks like this is a screen against a potential invasion force. Prudent, I suppose, but hardly an aggressive place for these units.

As for the ground forces, Suboptimal has gold and Oil in spades, and could rapidly upgrade his way to an army probably strong enough to take our current cities, but one I'm confident we can slow to a crawl once the era change rolls around. Notable here is only a single siege unit, a bombard sitting right next to his capital, with no observation balloons or Aerodromes anywhere. With Ironclad + Battleship city strength, Steel defenses, and some ranged support, it will be a bloodbath trying to take our cities without something that can shoot the walls at range. One unfortunate wrinkle is the disappearance of the Bastions policy, obsoleted at Civil Engineering. That card served us very well in the Egyptian war, and it's really freaking dumb that we'll be denied it in the next conflict.

Bottom line, I'm going to keep watching his troop deployments for the next four turns, but I don't think Suboptimal is planning to go after us militarily, and if he does we'll have a warning and be in a good position to stop him.

Woden did accept our trade offer, bumping all of our cities up to content status. I free up one of the Scientists at Kings to work the rice tile, taking the city out of starvation, but leave the other. Red Wings will finish a Frigate next turn and waste all the overflow in the process, so I temporarily reassign tiles to get an extra 5g without delaying the unit build. The builder outside Kings removes a lumber mill, ready to chop into the Coal Plant after the Factory completes next turn.

On the Unic/Egyptian front, Kaiser digs in behind his cities while Woden sits back out of reach, pillaging districts and slowly chipping away at perimeter defenses:



The story on the Brazilian front is much the same:



Our explorers defog more of Brazil, finding nothing of great interest. Soon the mounted scouts will need to turn around and head back home, just in case the English really do turn on us, but for now more leisurely pursuits (like battlefield reporting) are appropriate. Woden has researched the game's first Atomic era tech, unclear which one. 

Scores:
 

[williams482]

Turn 213:

We open the turn to some puzzling diplomatic events:



The gossip screen doesn't clarify things much:



Apparently, either Kaiser somehow forced his way past a wall of tanks, then punched through ~100 HP of fortifications and ~200 HP of city health in order to liberate the city state last turn, or the city state loyalty flipped back to being a city state instead of a free city, but somehow Kaiser either retained suzerain status, or was re-granted it for some reason, just for Woden to take the city again.

Most confusingly, Kaiser somehow invested envoys into Bologna on both t212 and t213. Kaiser has yet to play his part of t213, and if the city flipped due to loyalty it shouldn't have happened until the interturn (I think?), so this only makes sense if he really did take the city, while only losing 27 points of milpower. He does seem to be missing rather more units than that, however, and milpower does update strangely, so maybe he did? My goodness.

Speaking of milpower, I calculated Suboptimal as having 1647 milpower last turn. His official figure has jumped from 1552 to 1645. Let both of these things be further reminder that the milpower calculation is very silly and only calculates once per turn per player, I believe at the very beginning of the round prior to any builds being processed. 

By the look of things, Suboptimal completed a battleship and a fifth sea dog this turn, which should show up as +120 milpower next turn. Both are currently deployed right off his southern shore. The ironclad perimeter between England and Phoenicia/Brazil remains stationary, and his troop buildup around Barry appears largely unchanged. Most interestingly, his single Bombard is has moved away from the Canadian border, right next to Cleggy on the northeastern shore. It's entirely possible that this is a rudementary effort to conceal his true, malevolent intentions towards Canada, considering the speeds at which units can cross his lands by rail, but the much greater distance between his strongest naval vessels and our shores remains quite comforting. We can only see one city build, Foggy Dewhurst, which just built that new Battleship and has set to work on a campus project. The next scientist is the notoriously low-value Alan Turing (boost computers and a random modern tech). Theoretically the closest civ is us, at 725/855 points, England is an eternity away with just 60 points accrued. Is suboptimal trying to grab this guy and use him before the era rolls in 6 turns so he can get slightly more beakers out of the boost? Or does he just believe a conversion rate of 1h for 0.15 beakers and 0.22 GPP is the best value for his production? I'm baffled, but as someone focussed entirely on not losing cities, I'll gladly take it.

Ichabod has very nearly destroyed Steve Newton's encampment, and I expect him to press forward next turn:



Kings has complete it's factory and starts a coal plant, ostensibly due in 9, but reduced to just four with a 166h chop. Red Wings completes our first Frigate and starts another, due in 5 after I revert my tile micro from last turn. Penguins and Stars complete frigates of their own next turn. Stars would have wasted 12h overflow and saved none, so I micro it to only waste 9h overflow in exchange for 1g. Gotta love these badly thought out overflow mechanics!

This latest update is a significant boon for us, adding an extra +1 amenity for Arenas. This puts us at +3 empire wide, without Retainers in place, and before completing an EC at Wild or a Hockey Rink at Stars. That's enough flexibility that I'm now thinking more seriously about trying some major food chops at Blues. We almost certainly can't fit that in this era, especially with 20% food mallus attached to that incredibly fortunate World Congress project which will expire one turn after the era roll. I'll try to work out a more concrete plan in a future report. 

On the topic of loyalty issues, I remain totally baffled by the continued -17 malus on Wild. Marina, Smiler, and Compo all have theater squares within 9 tiles. Barry does too, but it doesn't have any great work slots yet. Marina And Smiler have five great works each, Compo's doomed, waterlogged district has two. That's 12, so five unexplained. The next closest theater square is Howard, 11 tiles away from Wild's city center, although it is within 9 tiles of Wild's borders. That couldn't possibly be how this stupid thing works, could it? Or is it counting tiles from the city center which owns the great works? Damn, that must be it. Howard is nine tiles from Wild. Likewise, Smiler is nine tiles away from Kings but has a theater square 10 tiles away and is clearly the only city that could be causing Kings' current -5 from great works. Well great, at least now I have an explanation. It's stupid, but it is an explanation.

Both Steam Power and Nationalism are two turns from completion. For boosts, we absolutely must upgrade an ironclad (360g with professional army) this era, and we would be wise to get three corps (boosting Mobilization) before that deadline as well. One luxury target occurs to me: Electricity, which requires a plausible two privateers. Privateers cost the same as Frigates but are 5 points weaker in ranged strength, and don't upgrade until Electricity. If I felt that Suboptimal was likely to launch a naval assault against us in the immediate future, frigates would be an obviously superior option, but that looks increasingly unlikely. We have the right cards in place to build these things right now. Red Wings can work on one instead of a frigate, still due in 5 with no policy changes, and Penguins can start one after it's frigate completes, on track to finish 4 turns later (5 turns from present). That's exactly on schedule for us, but it's completely inflexible: dropping Press Gangs even for a turn will push us off that timetable. What we can do is plan to delay Nationalism and ultimately finish it in 5 turns, on t218, simultaneous with the privateers completing. We make sure we have at least three pairs of mergeable units ready to go on that turn, and then drop Press Gangs for Professional Army to upgrade the Ironclad, and form our three corps. That should get us our three possible boosts on the last possible turn to get the full beaker amount for them. 

Do we lose any research efficiency with this plan? Our only other viable, useful place to dump culture before Nationalism completes is Natural History. It is currently at 420/1050 thanks to the boost, and will drop to 420/840 when the era rolls. With pop growth at Blues next turn, our culture rate for the subsequent 4 turns will be 94.4 (which, incidentally, way better than 30 turns ago), so a total of 378 clefs (rounded up). With the boost, that would be a total of 798 clefs at era roll, neatly under the discounted cost of the tech. Perfect.

Trading military power for a relatively low priority tech boost is definitely a gamble, but it's one I feel pretty good about. By my calculations, the battleship armada currently in Barry would need 8 turns to get from it's current position into firing position outside Red Wings. Nothing Suboptimal is doing now points to him forming an invasion fleet that can easily defeat an ironclad, three battleships, and two privateers in the immediate aftermath of our alliance expiring, and his MO from earlier turns and earlier games supports my theories about his short term plans. Red Wings starts on the privateer.

Our explorers are nearly finished defogging Brazil. With so little land unexplored, it seems very likely that Killamanjaro, Matterhorn, and Lake Retba are the only natural wonders on the map.

Scores:

[williams482]

Turn 214:

Penguins and Stars have completed their frigates, as expected. Penguins starts a privateer, due in 4, Stars another frigate, due in 6 (although in practice later, because of the policy). Stars reverts the previous micro assignment and goes back to a long term optimal production configuration.

14 turns ago, I attempted to predict when our trade routes would complete, a critical source of era score that the interface refuses to outright tell us:

here's a breakdown of foreign routes:
- Red Wings -> Foggy Dewhurst: started t172, 19 tiles, completes t210 (yes!)
- Red Wings -> Compo: t176, 15 tiles, completes t206 (yes!)
- Red Wings -> Cleggy: t183, 24 tiles, completes t231 (nope!)

And the internal routes, checking from trader positions:
- Stars -> Blues: looks to complete t201 (yes!)
- Wild -> Blues: looks to complete t213 (yes!)
- Red Wings -> Blues: looks to complete t211 ot t213 (yes!)
- Bruins -> Blues: looks to complete either t205 or t213 (yes!)

Yeah, it didn't work out that way. None of those routes have completed. Apparently, Gathering Storm changed trader logic such that trade routes in later eras need to be "active" for longer than just the usual 21 turns before they complete, which is a terrible decision made far worse by this absolute fucking travesty of a user interface. We will get a single point of era score from our dedication, which clearly nobody realized would be completely fucking useless in an era where all trade routes must run for a minimum of 41 turns (not that any of the other options were meaningfully better). I am legitimately angry about this.

What does this mean? We have 117 era score. We need 130 for normalcy, so 13 more. We aren't getting any of the 8 (!!!) era score I was banking on for trade route completions and trading posts. We will get 2 for our coal plant, 2 for our railroad, 1 for a corps, and 1 for a coal unit. We can get one more point for planting our settler on desert, tundra, or snow terrain, and another for plowing through Steel before the era rolls. Doing all of those things would get us to 125/130. Unfortunately, there's no way for us to complete Refining this era, which means no chance at upgrading an oil unit for another +1. Other things we could have done if I'd realized how stupid trade routes are earlier, but definitely don't have time for now: Complete a +3 Theater Square at Red Wings (3 ES), complete a Military Academy at Bruins (3 ES).

Well actually, can we change that with chops? Both Bruins and Red Wings have forest hill lumber mills which can be de-milled by a builder on t117, and chopped on t118. Those chops will be worth 117h with Steam Power and Steel completed, easily enough to finish the 173h theater square with a couple turns of natural production thrown in. As for the Military Academy, outlook not so good. At absolute maximum production configuration after stealing tiles from Wild, with the 117h chop, we could either finish the Academy in 5t with a razor thin margin or fall short by a couple hammers, depending on how much overflow we have from the Military Engineer (we know we have at least a little bit because production times don't line up perfectly, but how much is unknownable because this game's interface sucks). The era will roll on that 5th turn, so that schedule isn't going to cut it. There is a lumbermilled jungle hill tile in Bruins we could theoretically chop, but the fastest we can get a builder on that tile is t117 with no surplus movement, who can remove the mill on t118, then the era rolls on t119 and we have gained nothing. This seems hopeless, but in the event I am missing something, Bruins does start on the Military Academy, and builders move towards their potential chop sites. A dark age would almost certainly doom Wild and even put Bruins at serious risk of a flip, we need to do everything in our power to avoid one. No matter how much the trade route user experience sucks, because it really, really does.

I direct our settler towards the Oilers location. I'll wait to settle until I know that the resulting era score will make a difference, but I intend to be in position to take advantage. I have no idea where Oil is, but thinking Monte Hall Problem style, if there were Oil in the Nubian desert Kaiser would probably have sent a settler over there right now, but he maybe wouldn't have reasonably been able to push for Oilers, so if one of those spots has Oil then Oilers seems more likely? Most likely that twisty bit of logic bears no relation to reality and tells me nothing, but what else have I to go on here.

Suboptimal this turn spent a bunch of money upgrading four sea dogs into submarines. Only one of those submarines is on his southern coast, the rest are up here, a long ways from our cities:



The freshly built battleship sure looks like it's moving steadily east, away from us, and the other units of note (ironclad screen, bombard, battleship armada) remain motionless relative to last turn.

As for nations currently at war, Woden's fleet blasts away at Ed Mercer's encampment, while his army trades body blows with the Egyptian defenders:



Woden dropped 199 milpower this turn, Kaiser lost 263 and looks increasingly precarious. The Brazilian front looks no better, as Ichabod has finished off the Steve Newton encampment, and should be in great position to push forward next turn:



Both of the cuirassiers pictured here begin to pull back towards Canadian territory, they'll be merged into a corps at some point. I shift a cavalry up to keep an eye on the front as I am able, but expect less information from this area going forward.

Our warrior and cavalry in Brazil have nearly finished their explorations, and find little of any note.

Scores:

[Krill]

This thread is majestic. Thank you for your writing

Also...Once Civ6 development is finished, is someone going to make an RB mod with a fixed UI?

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

This entire game has been an exercise in frustration, but you've done a magnificent job, williams. No one could have done better. 

I had NO idea trade routes took longer to complete in later eras, because that's nonsense on so many levels. As roads and infrastructure increase travel becomes easier, not harder! Look at Kaiser zipping his army back and forth to defend first against Woden, then suboptimal, then Ichabod, then Woden again. So trade routes should if anything finish more often. 

Okay, so, mitigating strategies. Is there anything we can get diplomatically that might be a source of era score? 

What time does our alliance with Kaiser expire? Could we "betray" him and seize those two nearby cities to bolster Bruins at least? 

In other news, I note that Woden's fancy new tech was Advanced Flight. That means he'll have bombers online soon, and I don't think anyone has the tech to stop those. It might occur to sub to build anti-air, but I also thought he'd have settled his peninsula approximately forty seven years ago and he's running campus projects instead, so I think Woden will have odds. We can't hope to stop bombers ourselves, so let's pretend Woden will never attack us and make other plans. Could we stop Ichabod if he runs through Kaiser and looks to eat Canada next? If England is opting not to invade, counting on the abysmal UI and a dark age to do his work for him (note his patience in not settling Avalanche 100 turns ago to help this along! You get 3 cities for the price of 1 settler, sub!), and Egypt is getting run over, then Brazil is our next most likely opponent.

[williams482]

This thread is majestic. Thank you for your writing

Also...Once Civ6 development is finished, is someone going to make an RB mod with a fixed UI?

Thanks! I'm glad people are enjoying this. 

There are definitely UI mods out there that dramatically improve the interface. marcopolothefraud is using one of them in PBEM20, which was discussed briefly before the game and nobody seemed to care all that much. Nobody talked about mods before this game and not suffering the random obfuscations of the base games UI is clearly a competitive advantage, so I don't think it would be appropriate for me to run that here. 

Okay, so, mitigating strategies. Is there anything we can get diplomatically that might be a source of era score?

What time does our alliance with Kaiser expire? Could we "betray" him and seize those two nearby cities to bolster Bruins at least?

Ironically, I think Suboptimal could give us an out by denouncing us. We'd be able to declare a War of Territorial Expansion, unlocked at Nationalism, which like any other Casus Belli would be worth two era score. Now, there are a handful of other downsides to that particular course of action, but it's not like we'll have any real choice if that option presents itself. 

Another possibility is trying to recruit that scientist, worth one era point. Two problems: we probably can't do that (too late for projects, not much faith/gold by patronage standards), and it won't be enough because without the Military Academy we'll be two points shy, and only one extra point earns us zilch. Opening the save to check on viability, we were at 741/855, pulling in 16 per turn. At the start of t218, our last chance, we'll be at 805/855, and the cost of patronage will be 950g or 650 faith. We will not have the faith (570.6 on t218, 574.6 if we work the incense at Bruins). Having the gold for both this and the Ironclad upgrade might be possible if we tried to max out every source of income we can get, but it would be very close and would obviously burn up any hope of making other critical upgrades. 

For the sake of completeness, here's the list of technically plausible era score sources I was working off before, annotated:

- +4 from building a Hockey Rink - DONE
- +3 from completing a Military Academy (Bruins)
- +3 from a +4 IZ in Penguins - DONE
- +3 from a +3 Theater Square (Blues or Red Wings) - WILL DO
- +2 from burning coal for power - WILL DO
- +2 for first railroad connection between cities - WILL DO
- +2 for first mountain tunnel (+3 if we are first in the world) - can't get Chemistry fast enough
- +1 for digging up an artefact - can't get archeologist fast enough
- +1 for tundra city (Oilers) - WILL DO
- +1 for desert city (Jets) - Blues cannot build a settler fast enough, even with the +50% card
- +1 for pop 15 city (Blues) - not viable with current tech progress and -20% food malus
- +1 for first corps - WILL DO
- +1 for first modern era tech - WILL DO
- +1 for first trading post in England - lol
- +1 for first Oil unit - can't get Refining fast enough
- +1 for first Coal unit (Ironclad) - WILL DO
- +1 per completed trade route - lol

Oh, but I missed one! First corps and first fleet are different Historic Moments, each provides +1 era score. We will totally be mashing frigates together as soon as we are permitted. So with everything I mentioned in my latest turn report except the Military Academy, we're at 29/30. 

Unfortunately, that's all I've got for plausible options. Just for "fun," two avenues I could have pursued if I'd realized the situation we were in:
- Use the governor promotion from Civil Engineering, plus the upcoming promotion from Nationalism, to recruit Moksha and Reyna (instead of taking Amani's Affluence promotion, which was a pretty good play except that Bologna got eaten and we already had Venice's luxury). They would be almost completely useless, but having all seven governors is worth 1 era score
- Don't place a lumber mill on the jungle hill 2SE of Bruins right before going to chop out the Kings coal plant. Either chop the tile into the Military Engineer and overflow into the Military Academy, or just leave it. The fact that we have to remove the mill from the tile is costing us a critical turn here, otherwise we could finish the Military Academy with that chop.
- ON THIS LAST BLOODY TURN, I could have not placed a mine on the tile I chopped at Kings, and instead made a beeline for that jungle hill. That saved turn would have given enough time, except I placed the mine before checking in on our era score situation (oops) and didn't realize this was an option until literally just now. Damn, damn, damn. 

If there were any way to use the military engineer to hurry the military academy in exchange for delaying the railroad, that would be worth doing. Unfortunately, a railroad on the grass forest hill at bruins is required to get a builder onto the tile fast enough (fortunate that I was already sending the engineer to that tile, because as with the builder, I made that "obvious" move before checking era score). The Engineer could from there try to reach the jungle hill, but it's ETA will be the same as the builder's, and since those two units can't stack I can't have one of them remove the mill while the other chops or anything like that. Oh! I could have it chop the jungle off the banana hill 1E of Bruins. That would require:

t215: railroad current tile
t216: move to banana tile
t217: remove plantation
t218: chop jungle

That works! Bloody nick of time, and it burns a builder charge to replace the plantation plus a permanent -1 food on the tile, but that beats the hell out of a dark age. Oh thank goodness. 

So, here's the choice:

A) Max out hard for gold generation and burn 950g recruiting a very mediocre scientist (boost computers and a random modern tech) 

OR

B) Instead of putting down a railroad, chop the jungle off a banana tile to finish the military academy in Bruins. 

I think B is pretty obviously the best play even if A turns out to be possible, but I'll keep both in mind in case Kaiser decides to give us some more random gold gifts.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Shame about there being only 3 NWs. Even 1 more would have been worth 1 era score, which is highly significant right at this very moment.

[williams482]

Turn 215:

Steam Power completes:



Research begins on Steel, which will be boosted in two turns, and damn well better complete the turn after that. Eyeballing that horrific, unlabeled progress bar, it looks like it's between 30% and 40% finished, so between 450 and 600 of 1500 beakers. The boost will get us another 600, and at current rates three turns of research is another 409, plus probably at least a little overflow? That totals between 1459 and 1609 beakers into the tech on t218. Probably enough, but we need to be as sure as possible. Kings drops the rice for a scientist, falling into starvation to add another 6 total beakers to that figure. If we come up short here I'll be ripshit.

Civilian units all move as described: one builder moves next to the Red Wings forest hill, two others close in on Kings. The Military Engineer places a railroad on the Bruins forest hill, and will move to the adjacent banana hill next turn.

Except, oh, what's this?



Ho-lee forking shirtballs, we actually completed one of these bloody trade routes! Wild -> Blues didn't complete on t213 as I had thought, but apparently t215 was the time for it. That's massive, and briefly raises implausible hopes that maybe a few more of these will complete soon? Unfortunately, not only am I not told when routes will actually complete, I can't even tell which direction my traders are going, because they all render facing southwest regardless of their actual path when I load the save. I pin the current location of each trader, just to find out. If the Red Wings -> Blues route I originally projected for t211 or t213 is going east instead of west, it might also complete within the required time. That would be very good information to know.

So, after last night's panic, we actually have a margin to work with. Which of the things we don't really want to do but kinda have to for era score reasons can we leave out? Here's the list:

- Settle Oilers before we can see Oil
- Complete Steel before the era roll, wasting 300 beakers
- Chop the banana jungle at Bruins to complete the Military Academy instead of laying down rails to Wild, a permanent -1f on the tile

I think of these, saving the 300 beakers (~2.2 turns at current max-research config) is the most valuable to our stated aim of not dying in this game. Putting any beakers into Steel this turn will result in waste, so after all that excitement from earlier, I'm going to give Kings it's rice farm back and switch research over to Refining. As for Oilers, here's the plan:



Settling on the pinned tile guarantees that if there is oil here, it will be within the first two rings of the city. I think there's a case for swapping the city and Hockey Rink pins, because flooding will make the current pin coastal and we don't really want that, but it does move the snow tile 1W of Stars' fish into the third ring, for a pricier purchase and greatly reduced chance of a free Hockey Rink culture pickup. The free builder will place that hockey rink on his first turn, which the city will work immediately to build up culture for expansion onto the Oil tiles that hypothetically could spawn next to it. The other two builder actions will be spent as needed to connect oil, with other improvements a distant secondary priority.

Near Wild/Bruins, I've moved pairs of Muskets, Field Canons, and Cavalry next to each other for future corps merges. Where possible (in this case, the FC and musket) I've made sure to combine units with different promotions. I'm pretty sure civ 6 used to just take the promotions of the most experienced unit, but since I dunno when it now gives the merged unit any promotions earned by either individual. Not ideal if you're racing a unit to level 4 in single player, but in our case this is a meaningful boon.

What to do with the trader? There are several English cities which could net me 16 gpt and a smattering of other boosts, but Ed Mercer seems to be the strongest for overall yields, which I neither recorded nor screenshotted. Whatever, we go with that one. I'm curious what will happen to the trader if/when Woden conquers the city.

Speaking of, Kaiser's milpower suffered annother major blow, and a quick jaunt through his territory reveals a disturbing dearth of troops:



This is, obviously, very bad news for the long term prosperity of the Egyptian empire. The diplomatic reports offer up some bad news for us, too:



Woden and Suboptimal have a DoF. That obviously means no hope of them fighting each other, and makes it pretty obvious that if Suboptimal goes after someone, it's going to be his weak, adjacent neighbor (us). It also removes a plausible impediment against attacking us, fear that Woden might somehow sneak up behind him and capture the unsettled territory on his eastern coastline. It also makes it overwhelmingly likely that we will be Woden's next target once he consumes Egypt, because he'll be locked into peace with the other two civilizations on the board. That's decidedly not great for us. Should we lean into this and try to interfere with Woden's inevitable capture of Egyptian cities? That would slow him down, but only by the five turns required between denouncement and DoW, and it essentially guarantees that he continues on into Canada instead of potentially stopping, waiting, and turning on Brazil. That would be a silly thing for him to do, but we definitely like giving our opponents chances to do silly things. Sometimes it works out.

Suboptimal's fleet deployments are largely unchanged. The ironclad screen remains motionless, as do the ironclad and battleship near Nora Batty in the southeastern corner of his empire. The newly upgraded submarines have scattered, two of the three in the north heading towards Egypt, with the third making a beeline for the pole, while the southern one heads in our direction. Our alliance expires next turn, which makes the next few turns a major moment of truth for us. I have pinned all relevant English military units. All relevant naval vessels within a few turns of Canadian shores are pictured here:



This continues to not look like an attack. If it is an attack, it will be small, opportunistic, and quickly foiled by the appearance of three Canadian battleships backing an Ironclad. On the ground, the entirety of the danger is in those two tanks; everything else we can take on mano-a-mano in the field, and those two tanks won't make much progress against walls. On some level, I almost want suboptimal to attack us, because if he does so clumsily and loses, and we throw everything we have into the war, there's a chance we can make progress into his lands. Now, the most likely outcome of a wardec is another awkward stalemate like with Egypt, where we are eventually forced to cede Red Wings but can fight his army to a standstill and use the narrow southern straits to keep his fleet at bay, so I don't actually want that. Wouldn't be the worst way to go out though.

Scores: