[PB60] Lazteuq and Civac

[Lazteuq]

Turn 139- They razed Oxhuitza and offered peace. I declined for a few reasons:

• They've already made the gains, now they need to defend them. If we give them 10t of peace, that's just making it easier. I made the mistake of giving unnecessary peace treaties in 56.
  
• Superdeath will likely be coming in to help in a few turns, and I don't want to abandon him. We want to keep their stack tied up in no-man's land.
  
• Jowy is definitely committing to the GKC attack, so we're pretty secure on that front.
  
• Our production is substantially better than Amica/Van because of police state, AP buildings, and a lot of base tile hammers, so we can afford to take slightly uneven hammer trades.
  

I noticed that they've refrained from pillaging any of our seafood. It's like they were holding back because they wanted us to accept the treaty. They razed a couple cities though, that doesn't exactly count as restraint. Anyway, now that I declined the treaty, they'll probably pillage everything they can see with galleys.

I sent Superdeath a copper-copper to reaffirm commitment to war. His stack hasn't moved yet, I assume he's waiting for reinforcement to come up from the south.
I offered Jowy 5gpt for his extra dye.

We only killed 1 catapult in the loss of Oxhuitza.
Now in the south we have a problem: Since they have engineering and we don't, we can't attack their stack without being attacked first. They did not overextend like I hoped. Maybe it would have been better to evacuate the units after all, to bait them into chasing us farther north. They're probably aware of the Superdeath threat.

I'm trying to decide where to consolidate units: The north or the south.
Our northern border is probably a better place for us to attack. Even there, I find it hard to imagine capturing more than a border city or two. It will take about 6 turns for us to launch a serious attack in the north. I'm setting up roads as preparation.
We'll want a couple sentry 2-movers for any counterattacking.
Catapults and to a lesser extent war elephants will still be relevant for a very long time, so I'm not concerned about building too many.

I think we'll need Astro pretty quick. Amica/Van surely want it, they already have Optics. In fact, they might be researching astro right now!
Right now we're not researching anything. Literally zero specialists.
In 3 turns we can swap civics again, I'm thinking of doing some final police state whips and going back to Caste/Rep, and maybe OR or Pacifism. We'll want to build a lot of ball courts and perhaps still go for Taj or Liberalism with the help of Great People. Pacifism really makes a lot of sense for us when combined with Caste and Rep, just as long as we have enough spare pop and food to actually run specialists. With all this unit whipping we might have a problem there.

[civac2]

You can possibly advance in the south by founding a city and thus reclaiming cultural control of some tiles. This is obviously very situational but there should be a settler with the southern stack.

I'd be fine with going back into Rep to alleviate the happiness issues and perhaps research a bit but do not switch out of Theocracy or Slavery. We
should absolutely wait for SD to make his move. If he does not we can go back to building. If he does attack we need to seriously commit. That would be an opportunity to take down Amicalola a notch and exact sweet revenge while we are at it. Don't half-ass it.
Even leaving Police State is somewhat questionable if just for the signal it sends to SD.

Do they have city vision?

Sentry chariots are vital.  Make 2-3 of those. When/if we advance we will have to sacrifice one of them occasionally to gain deep vision.

[Lazteuq]

Don't half-ass it.

Don't worry, I'm intensely aware of this and I really don't want to repeat the mistakes of PB51. 
Amica/Van offered peace plus 10gpt. I declined.
Superdeath signaled his commitment to attack the Izamal area with this:

He's got a new city and roads on the border down there so his stack should have an easy approach. I don't know why he says 6 turns though. If his attack is actually 6t away, we'll end up attacking in the north at roughly the same time as SD attacks in the south. We'll have a small stack available in the south as well, but not a large enough force to stand on its own.
Superdeath has a scout in our north, so he should notice we are massing units there instead of the south. Hopefully he's not too annoyed by that.

By moving units inland instead of along the coasts, I think we can redirect our focus to the north without Amica/Van noticing. They may be wondering where our units are, but they don't have any conclusive evidence. For all they know we might be massing units right next to Uxmal. That would be the simpler play for sure.
Bad news: Amica/Van are PRO and have engineering, which means they can easily whip out a castle in most cities. I don't think we'll be bombarding much.

Jowy took the Dye trade, and our happiness issues are somewhat solved for now. On the other hand, Jowy's galleys are going back north so we need to keep close watch on them still. I think he's just using the galleys as unit transport within his empire because they're faster than roads, but it also gives him the option to strike us if he gets a peace deal with GKC and his berserkers start to get bored.
It looks like GKC built enough triremes to stop Jowy's triremes, but maybe doesn't have enough land units. GKC does have Crossbows, which is good news for him (and us). Not sure if he has Catapults or not.

A combat settler would have been great for taking away Amica's road movement in the south, but they already beat us to it and built the city of Pike where their stack is. Now we really can't approach it easily. I'm still working on a settler anyway for whatever happens in the future.
I think they're close to having city vision. Our espionage costs about 1.7x theirs, and it costs about 1400 EP for us to see into their main cities. So I think they need around 800 and they are at 600-something. I wonder if they're using the EP slider or if this is purely from courthouses.

[civac2]

If my back-of-the-envelope calculation is correct Amicalola has city visison in every single city of ours. This is equivalent to him having a non-sentry unit standing in everyone of our cities. So he can see one tile around flatland cities and two tiles around hill cities but forests/hills block his vision. I gathered the units you sent northwest in the floodplain valley where they should be out of sight. He did see them in previous turns though.

[Lazteuq]

Turn 143. Civac explained why his espionage math disagrees with mine: The base cost of city vision is dependent on how many total EPs the target (us) has generated. With all their courthouses, they have generated several times more EP than us, so the cost disparity for city vision is a lot more than the 130%/70% shown on the Espionage screen. They pretty much certainly have vision on every city of ours, and have probably had it for a while now. That sucks. I have no idea what to do about it. I'm not complaining that espionage is overpowered, just that it's annoying and has little counterplay. I think it's not very important to the game and I kinda liked vanilla where it simply didn't exist.

Anyway, they've had city vision for a while, so they surely know we're setting up for an attack in the north.

First I moved a sentry HA to scout things out: Bream itself has just a castle, an archer, and a catapult. But there is probably a defensive stack hidden just outside of our vision.
I moved up our northern stack to the forested hill, which is 16 hitters and 7 cats. We can be attacking Bream in 2 turns. I expect them to retreat off the hill 2N of Bream, and then I would like to get a sentry unit on that hill for extra vision first thing next turn.

In the south, I moved up our somewhat smaller stack, which has 9 hitters and 4 cats. Not enough to challenge the city of Pike on its own, but enough to keep their attention divided if/when Superdeath attacks.
Superdeath does appear to be moving a stack toward the border so we might be synchronizing attacks next turn. That would be cool for shock factor alone. Maybe he's waiting to get Engineering next turn or something. He's still 3 tiles from the border so I hope that's what it is. On the other hand, his trade deal that we saw on t140 would indicate t145 or 146.
Amica/Van are in a golden age now. They have Vassalage so their units get 2 promotions, just like ours.
The caravels and galleys on our shores are a painful but mostly acceptable nuisance, except for the Moai city of Calakmul. It is suffering greatly because the blockade has cut off its luxuries. I'd forgotten about how good blockades are against island cities. If we resettled the razed city of Coba maybe we could re-establish the trade connections?

It looks like Jowy has stalled out against GKC. I think GKC has lost enough land and progress that he will die eventually but it will be slow.
Jowy has 5 galleys that could hit Izancanac in 2 turns. I don't think he will though, he hasn't had vision on the city recently so it would be a shot in the dark. I'm going all-or-nothing and leaving just a warrior in Izancanac. If he wants to, he can make this a two-front war and get some easy gains (and completely put us out of the game by doing so).

We get a great person out of the capitol in 4 turns. It's about 60/40 prophet/engineer. If it's an engineer, Taj looks really good. If prophet, maybe we should just pop a golden age whenever this war ends, and then use the scientist for a bulb or GA#2. I feel like it would be too wasteful to run a GA during war, but that's exactly what our enemy is doing...

[Charriu]

Turn 143. Civac explained why his espionage math disagrees with mine: The base cost of city vision is dependent on how many total EPs the target (us) has generated. With all their courthouses, they have generated several times more EP than us, so the cost disparity for city vision is a lot more than the 130%/70% shown on the Espionage screen. They pretty much certainly have vision on every city of ours, and have probably had it for a while now. That sucks. I have no idea what to do about it. I'm not complaining that espionage is overpowered, just that it's annoying and has little counterplay. I think it's not very important to the game and I kinda liked vanilla where it simply didn't exist.

Welcome to the majority opinion about the BtS espionage system here on RB. The whole espionage system is hideously and unnecessary complicated.

[Tarkeel]

It feels like an unwritten advantage of ORG is "Win any one espionage war of your choice".

[Lazteuq]

Fair enough, maybe I'll play ORG in the future.

Turn 145- I really don't know what to do. In the north we face the city of Bream, with 5 longbows and 6 crossbows, and some others, all with at least city garrison 1 and drill 1 defended by a castle. I don't see how that's possibly worth dying over. Even if we attacked immediately and won, it would be a pretty insignificant victory for horrific casualties. We only have 8 catapults up there. We're paying 20+gpt just to have a stack sitting there in their borders. Bombarding the castle of Bream away will take 3-4 turns even if we promote all the cats to Accuracy. I don't have a better idea though. We can at least tie down a lot of their units this way. So I started bombarding. I don't think they'll have have many defenders left to bring in so our odds should improve over time.

In the south we can't afford to really commit until Superdeath does. If it wasn't for superdeath, I would want to end this war now. Amica/Van's power is still higher than ours, maybe even higher than superdeath's as well. Considering their naval advantage, Protective trait, Engineering, and defender's advantage, I have no idea how we can even really threaten them. If Mjmd or Jowy attacked Amica/Van, maybe we could accomplish something, but until then I'm doubtful.
Superdeath sent deals indicating war t146 and t150 last turn. I didn't know how to react though. I'd already positioned a stack on the northern border, and I certainly wasn't going to just sit there and wait.
In the south I wanted to move a small army to try baiting Amica/Van to split their forces just before SD's attack, but then I realized Engineering means even if they do split, they will still be able to hit Superdeath's stack just as easily.

I think the AP is a big reason for our lack of miltary before this war. We put many hundreds of hammers into the wonder itself, half-price temples, and even full-price monasteries. Sure, the AP may have paid for itself in terms of direct hammer yield, but now we're down three cities with a bad economy and we lack a path forward. We have a lot of units now but no productive purpose for them.

Also last turn Jowy had a galley which could threaten Izancanac so I stacked 3 units to make sure he couldn't capture it in a single strike. He didn't attack though. Maybe that was just paranoia.

[Lazteuq]

Turn 147-Superdeath and Amica have made peace. Was I just totally misinterpreting Superdeath's diplo? Or did he just get an offer he couldn't refuse? Or was he misleading us all along? Whatever.
I think there was some naval combat between them because Amica got a Great General somehow.
Last turn I tried attacking their caravels with some of our triremes, but the first couple fights didn't go well so I gave up. 100 more hammers down the drain, oh well.

I really see no reason to continue this war. While we've got the defenses of Bream down to 14% and have a good chance to take it next turn, who cares? This war is hurting us a lot more than it hurts them. We've pushed up to the #2 spot in Power, but they're still ahead of us by a solid margin. Our economy is basically at a standstill. We've forced a lot of whips out of them, but that's about it.
I don't want to offer a treaty though, because that would give them 10 turns of guaranteed safety from us AND superdeath. I offered a ceasefire instead. Maybe if they accept we can consider attacking Jowy. We have a lot of tactical surprise-attack potential against him. I think he's overextended and vulnerable as he continues to fight GKC. However, I don't know if it would be a good idea strategically. He's been friendly enough, and he might be our best hope of a counterweight to Amica/Van. I just don't know what to do. I'm inclined to think Jowy has the highest chance of winning the game but I'm terrible at judging this sort of thing.

Unfortunately our 40% shot at an engineer from the capitol did not happen-we got another prophet instead. That sucks, but at least a prophet can always start a GA. Now we're sitting on a prophet and a scientist.

I think Optics is probably worth going for because of the circumnavigation traderoutes, and because we'll want Astro.
Taj is still an option I suppose. I think the Music artist stands as well, but not for long.

[civac2]

Well, that's bad. We are almost out of the running I'm afraid. If Amicalola accepts the offer I will have a look but he already played and we didn't get a PM from him. Maybe he reoffered a peace treaty. Would you accept that?

Currently, the favorites to win the game are Mjmd, Amicalola and Jowy in that order. I'm not that good at judging this either though. SD has maybe an outside shot.