[59] Miguelito and Rusten move stacks to berimbau rythms

[Ramkhamhaeng]

There was never a time when we needed Elvis more.

[Miguelito]

what happens when he's out of money and unable to pay for his costs
Is Picc allowed to spend the money he has in the bank, even if that accelerates his bankrupcy (and accordingly aggravates the effects of the bug)?

This was indeed discussed over the last couple days. Ultimately it was decided:
- when Picc is out of money he  will enter strike
- Picc is allowed to spend the money he has in the bank

Details of the discussion can be found in the lurker thread after the game.

I must say,  I am pretty unhappy with this ruling.  in my understanding it means that Amica gets 15k gold most of which might not correspond to commerce generated in game. 
Picc being able to spend this money might be game deciding (he can rush buy a nuke, or upgrade another dozen or 2 artillery).
Strike is completely irrelevant to him with just 7 turns remaining until he wins.
Well I guess this is probably better for us than white peace,  as it blocks new income for Picc. But in the race against Amica it means 2 free techs for them,  by means of a bug abuse (ofc not entirely,  some of that gold will get generated).

I understand that there is no better course forward than to accept the lurkers' ruling,  given my incomplete picture and ignorance of your discussion.  but I've voiced my objection.

[Miguelito]

I'm trying to get over the fact that this exploit is allowed. I'm not there yet. Meanwhile I'll try to report the last turn 241 (7 left!), because of course turns are quite interesting.

diplo:




the nerve!
Look Amica, our entire army is over at Picc's trying for there to be a game left to play for us in 7 turns time. No, that's not quite true, because I had to divert from that in order to stop you from taking over the neighbour continent meanwhile (it is nothing but token ground forces, but the fleet is becoming pretty substantial). I'm running wealth builds in order to be able to rush buy more nukes to throw at Picc. No I don't need war with 2 neighbours so you can pick off whatever remains of us afterwards.
Fwiw we have a cease fire, no peace treaty.
I sent them offer along these lines


5 per resource. That's more than before but should be worth it. I hope to get at least this little bit of help for my efforts. I was also tempted to demand 750gpt or 1500, but I can't because he has turned up the slider


Here I am trying to signal to Charriu that I'm still on his side:


I hope he notices that it's a cease fire and not a treaty between us and Amica. Him peacing out with Amica and possible turning towards us would be bad.
I was hesitant to send the same to Lazteuq, because a time may come where we will in fact have to backstab him.

Mr. Cairo meanwhile must see us desperate: 


He sent more offers with 20/resource. Let's see: 1 resource should be 0.37 Mining hammers (not quite, my WB test gave me 10 for 26 resources and 25 for 64, but 26*0,37=9,62 and 64*0,37 = 23.68. But I suspect it's rounding up and the actual number might be closer to 0.38 and the third decimal cut off in the civpedia, then it would check out). So we'd pay Cairo 54gpt for every Mining base hammer. We currently have about 60 cities with the corporation. Not even all of them have forges though, and obviously less have factories and plants (been busy building units, you know the theme...). I can check next turn, but we might be looking at something like a 1.6 to 1.7 effective multiplier? Then on top comes the increased corporation maintenance, which I would have to look in game to figure out, but it should be possible to estimate (here is a per city formula, which should also work with an empire wide effective value).
Basically, it might not be as much a horrendous trade for us as I first thought. I still don't want to pay as much, but I will try and offer 10 per resource maybe after looking at the maintenance increase.
Him asking for so much would make more sense if he had other buyers. civac, Ichabod and Frozen all have spread Mining vastly. However he has just been sitting on the resources for close to 50 turns now.

This has me wondering:


What is he trying to tell me? Is it an actual demand? Why 19? What's up with corn? He declared on civac and took three cities (kept the mainland, burned an island). I can't make sense of it, but sent him 20 gpt in case it was an actual demand. Can't have trouble from that side right now.



I also make a cheap attempt:


They could take some cities very easily, but I can understand if they don't feel like kingmaking. But maybe if we snatch the capital at some point they might at least help to eliminate Picc quickly and cancel the dust-to-gold spell benefiting Amica.


Ok, I have some actual in game screens as well. However I was pretty upset after logging in and did not capture everything.

So, Piccadilly after getting peace threw some artillery followed by modern armour and infantry (and a war elephant ) at the port city of Mercy. I had semi garrisoned it, so he killed a number of mech infs, a modern armour and a few other units. He also sank some 5 transports that had unloaded a stack there last turn, and maybe some bombers, not sure. Sounds pretty bad, although the transports at least will not really be needed. We got a GG on defense at least, and also got some very sweet revenge:


So he had left this stack of 7 modern armours out of reach of our land units. It was at far higher health originally, but with bombers I could bring them all down to 50%. As it turns out, a guided missile always takes exactly 12 points off an MA, and I had exactly 14 in store. Finished them to the last:


So to answer my earlier question what guided missiles are good for: (semi-) far ranged units that can kill, that's it. Here they were really cost effective, in what was a perfect storm for them.

I also made another incursion attempt against his wounded units in Silent. The results are debatable, to put it mildly:


cons:

• lost 8 units to kill 4, and most to vile infantry that is not really worth it. Tbh all of the last six fights were <50%, some more towards 25%, but I didn't expect to lose them all.
  

pros:

• got that MA down.
  
• all of our MAs survived . Lesson learned: more of those! (they are so much better at this not least because they can take city raider)
  
• it is possible that we can better afford to lose 8 units than him 4, and I am not yet in a place where I think much about what will happen after this war, in case we succeed (well I do think about it, but I don't like the picture much anyways ).
  
• It is just infantry getting the promotions, and many of them had 3 promos already and may not get a fourth. That is what I tell myself  
  

In case you were wondering, the bombers below had not hit Silent but his last stack of healthy Modern Armours further west in Niani (under the event log).



F5 shows progress being made in our mutual disarmament, compared to last turn:





Our main advance:


Still on flat ground, but with most of his units wounded Picc is increasingly toothless, or so I hope



Here we are concentrating firepower:


I had figured it made sense for the dry buy to be in a low production city, so it would not get as much overflow... but actually that does not make any sense, welp.

Demos.


Ya congrats Amica on that GNP fruit of your treason . Looking at this screen, I really should not think too much what is supposed to happen after the Piccadilly war, or I might just send him peace as well.

Also I didn’t settle that city to prevent a canal with its culture. I wasn’t aware that culture could control the 3rd ring until now.

 well, it was a consequential decision, as the location of that city triggered me to turn this war nuclear.

Why on the wine then?
Actually I might settle two such cities back home as well, to block Amica's access, which might become necessary yet (assuming that civac stays on our good side). Just difficult to make the investment right now, but it needs to be done early to accumulate the 500 culture....
I get the feeling that Noble and Lewynn did know what they were doing when they placed these.

[Cornflakes]

I don’t remember for sure why I settled that location, but … I don’t think I ever researched Monarchy so I settled there share a couple mainland tiles to the east.

[klops]

oh, wow, I didn't know that nukes are THAT expensive, or is it a tweak of cth? So, basically one per turn? ok, with some monster production, you should be able to build a couple "the slow way". oh wait... thats the small rocket? not even ICBM? uh...

That stack of MechInf and Tanks looks scary. I am not experienced in this kind of battles but I wonder how Picc will kill those if he never gets more than 50% health on his side.

That sign at mercy is nice. Reading about the battle, I had a perfectly fitting voice from old StarCraft in my head, when the spacemarines shouted "rock and rolllllll!"

[Miguelito]

oh, wow, I didn't know that nukes are THAT expensive, or is it a tweak of cth? So, basically one per turn? ok, with some monster production, you should be able to build a couple "the slow way". oh wait... thats the small rocket? not even ICBM? uh...

That stack of MechInf and Tanks looks scary. I am not experienced in this kind of battles but I wonder how Picc will kill those if he never gets more than 50% health on his side.

That sign at mercy is nice. Reading about the battle, I had a perfectly fitting voice from old StarCraft in my head, when the spacemarines shouted "rock and rolllllll!"

CtH tripled the cost of nukes. I'm pretty curious how we'll assess the balance of that after the game's over, I suspect they might still be too cheap,  but we have not seen them in action yet. note that I am dry rushing here (without putting hammers into the build for a turn first),  which increases the gold coast per hammer.  but time is crucial here.

I don't think Picc has enough left to kill that stack (unless he nukes it,  which is part of the reason why allowing him the gold exploit is so annoying*),  but he doesn't need to either.  he can just keep moving his capital while we play whack-a-mole. There is not enough time left for this stack to reach all of his cities one by one.

* I should elaborate. If there was no treaty between Amica and Picc off choose Picc would have a lot more money to buy nukes,  so in that sense we're benefiting from it,  but if they were still at war Amica could just bomb his one remaining Uranium every turn,  and then the question would be if Pic gets some from Dulland. We can't do it,  because we have the first half of the timer and the mine can easily be rebuilt every turn until we take the area. I was totally counting on Amica to do this, and then they sign peace the very turn we finish Manhattan Project. Well maybe Amica would gleefully have allowed Picc to nuke us anyways, duh.

The sign at Mercy is there to remind myself that the actual world wonder of Rock'n Roll is in there,  so I don't raze it accidentally (I originally planned to raze all mainland cities,  but found that the situation allowed us to hold most of them,  and that they're quite valuable for airlifting in reinforcements. The alternative was to raze an island city and rush buy an airport for unlimited airlifts, but this has worked quite well so far)

[Plemo]

Isn‘t Uranium a strategic resource? If so, nukes wouldn‘t create any fallout in CtH on it.

[Miguelito]

My point was that Amica, being second in turn order,  could just have bombed the mine with conventional planes*. I actually misremembered the nuke change though,  as I thought nukes would just be unable to destroy
an improvement on a strategic resource.  So I had actually been wondering whether it made sense to bomb the mine with a fighter and then drop a nuke for fallout, which his worker might not be able to remove in one turn (at least not after 2 rounds of nuking them). But I figured it would not be worth it anyways,  unless he puts his main stack into the adjacent city somehow.  I definitely have bombed at least one random copper mine fwiw.

*This should probably be modded out as well,  as it gives a lot of advantage to being second.  Well I guess at least planes can be shot down, and you can stuff an oil or uranium tile with SAMs to make it very costly.

[Plemo]

I think being first in a modern war is clearly an advantage, especially when nuclear weapons are involved. By bombing, you can always prevent Picca's stack from being at full health for a counterattack. Nukes have taken this to a new level. It even went so far as to consider firing nukes in turn at Civforum. However, I'm not sure if that was ever carried out. There was an epic nukes battle inPB37. The two leading ones bombed each other into oblivion, so a former vassal won in the end. This was Jesper.

[Miguelito]

I don’t remember for sure why I settled that location, but … I don’t think I ever researched Monarchy so I settled there share a couple mainland tiles to the east.

I'm very curious for your thread, btw.

I think being first in a modern war is clearly an advantage, especially when nuclear weapons are involved. By bombing, you can always prevent Picca's stack from being at full health for a counterattack. Nukes have taken this to a new level. It even went so far as to consider firing nukes in turn at Civforum. However, I'm not sure if that was ever carried out. There was an epic nukes battle inPB37. The two leading ones bombed each other into oblivion, so a former vassal won in the end. This  was Jesper.

I don't know how closely you have been following here, but I made in fact a significant effort to be first in order in this war, to the point that I attacked a turn later than I could have (although the main force was still trailing).
Admittedly, I had not given much thought to the bomber issue you mentioned, but you are correct that it is pretty huge!
My reasoning was solely about nukes in fact: being first I can see when he builds one (we have regained vision on all of his cities, with the help of a little spy), in order to divert forces or prepare otherwise. I also think that he can only launch from cities - he might have a submarine in the inner sea, but I don't think it's likely giving his overall skeleton military and the relative uselessness of subs.

Being first agaisnst Picc also meant that I would always be first against Amica (until they peaced out). I am not sure yet how much it will matter there. I imagine that war to play out mostly on the sea south of Charriu, while probably slowly (I hope) retreating against Amica's avalanche through Lazteuq. So nukes will be sea based, which however also means that they'll be invisible. One important aspect is that Amica has a lot of ships with nav 1, while we don't have easy access to that because doofus me did not take theocracy (seriously, I'm considering capturing Redentor in Babylon for a turn just for that purpose). So he can have 7 move subs easily, and since airships can't see them spotting them early is difficult. Do we need stealth destroyers ? On the plus side at least for now our missile cruisers can also nuke and have 7 movement points naturally so we are at least not at a disadvantage in that regard. Until they also take Robotics, that is, and have I mentioned that they're just now getting a huge pile of gold magically summoned for themselves? (no, the salt is not going to stop flowing).

Then there is the issue of ICBMs. I don't plan on using any: The missile cruisers are excellent for launching tactical nukes, and strategic bombing of his core cities will not do much - especially with the cereal corporation they'll grow back in no time. But the reverse is not necessarily true - our best cities like Angola, Corta Cana or Igreja do Bonfim are quite vulnerable to that sort of thing, and they could also just strike at our stacks (reminder - split up stacks!) even though they might lack well positioned subs.
Now, an ICBM is not cheap for them either - with 125% bonus (including Police State) and Kremlin 1500 hammers are still worth 14 pop, in his IW or HE city it's a little over 10. So it isn't cheap, but they can definitely muster a few in a couple turns' time. Probably right after we take Picc's capital. Normally I would be researching Laser for SDI asap, but we need gold to rush nukes to catch Piccadilly. Dang, maybe it's really the best to let Picc win it.