[PB64] naufragar's bingo parlor for assassins

[naufragar]

Comparing the previous screenshot with the one from t152 shows that he also burned a plains mine 1SW of my new city. Wtf??? Are we enemies? I thought we were friends?  Kinda puts his Alphabet+Compass research in a different light...

You know what's amazing? Every single war that I've ever declared has either been for defense or after outrageous provocation. It's amazing how I've had to fight so many wars but have never been the aggressor.

[Miguelito]

The problem is clearly your excessively peaceful reputation. People assume that provoking a war with you carries low risk, because you wouldn't hold a grudge, and overall always act in a rational and predictable manner.
(Seriously, while I don't agree on everything, it seems that you've done some pretty successful diplomacy third game)

[naufragar]

Thanks! You're very kind to overlook the two times I had to surrender cities in humiliating peace deals. And I can't count this game a diplomatic success until I've avoided Amica using his astoundingly superior army to overrun my completely undefended north.

Superdeath was indeed able to conquer some of Gavagai's territory:



The red X marks Gav's Pyramids city. (Superdeath kept it, but it disappeared from my map when it changed owners.) Because I did such damage to Gavagai's cavalry, I suspect that the majority of his army is now axes and crossbows, which will take a long time to march from the Eastern front to this new Western one. Worse, when Gav lost the Pyramids, he lost his Representation economy. He had tooled his entire empire to work with Rep: lots of farms feeding lots of scientists.

I've highlighted a couple of Great Scientist births. The Close to Home mod nerfs Galleons by requiring their builders to have unlocked both Paper and Astronomy, so I shouldn't panic about an Astro bulb just yet, but it's on my mind. Ginger is something like 5 or 6 water tiles away from me. It would have to be a diabolically tricky plan to evade my notice, but I'm paying Ginger the compliment of thinking him that tricky.

[naufragar]

Wow, I've missed a lot of reporting. Been busy. But dear Amica is motivating me to report:


Where are the catapults going, buddy? We even exchanged fish for fish a little while ago.  I've been coasting on very little military, so I whipped out a couple of knights.

[naufragar]

You know what's amazing? Every single war that I've ever declared has either been for defense or after outrageous provocation. It's amazing how I've had to fight so many wars but have never been the aggressor.

I'm not sure what the provocation here was, but it must have been severe:



Oh, yes, I know. Everyone else was grabbing bits of Gav's empire and I didn't want to be left out. Highly provocative.  Here's what remains of our Ethiopian friend (I don't have knowledge of all 6 cities):


Amica and my relationship continues to be very tense. Amica was able to snipe 2 (very good) cities off Gav and get peace the next turn. Neither he nor I wants to get bogged down when the other has armies free to reposition. This brings Amica up to a cool 17 cities to my 13 (mostly tundra iceballs) and Ginger's 10. So far, I had thought I had a GNP advantage, but...





I've been busy and haven't had much time to give big overviews of this game. Frankly, it's nuts. You've got Amica, who's been comfortably in the lead since the start of the game but has had to constantly make moves to maintain that top spot. Well done.

We've got Ginger, who accumulated a dragon's hoard of commerce and tech, got to knights, and...took one city off of Commodore? As I've said multiple times before, it's hard to tell just how strong or weak Ginger's position is. I thought he was going to cut through Comm and get Colossus but...

Commodore is again playing the most magical game of civ I've ever seen. Admittedly, I'm not paying much attention to my East (hope that doesn't bite me) so I haven't noticed all the sleight of hand, but every time I turn around, Commodore pulls off another stunt. In the face of losing two cities to Ginger's knights, Comm somehow negotiates for Ginger to give him one back? I have no idea what's going on there. I'll be honest, my entire "defense" against Comm and Ginger is diplomatic: look guys, you both know I'm no friend of Amica, so if you attack me you're making Amica stronger. But magic tricks like this make me paranoid that one or both of Ginger and Comm will look my way eventually.

Superdeath is a hero. He earned 2 great generals in 1 turn fighting Gavagai! I think I've been an ok ally. I think I gave him the opening, but I'll try to be an even better ally to SD in the future. He's done great work.

And Gavagai. Well. I have to admit, I have no sympathy. We could have had him, SD, and me tearing into Amica instead of the coalition we have now.

The future is insanely complicated. Firstly, it's hard for me to tell just where the front runners are. Amica's removing all the hurdles to his economy and is up to 17 cities after taking Gav's 2 greenest, but my gold saving rate is still about 50-60% greater than his. Ginger I thought was momentarily unstoppable but he's been stopped. I have no industry and no army so I can't really make any gains. Who wins this? My terror is that the winner will be the first person to capitalize on a neighbor's mistake, and I'm nothing if not mistake prone.

How do I win? 

[naufragar]

A near-run thing, but our two attacking knights survived.



I suspect Gavagai doesn't have many or even any troops nearby.

In fact, this turn I became the #2 in power.


But since I haven't gotten any more troops... everybody else must be taking a pounding. (Everybody but Amica, of course.) Ginger's power dip changes the geopolitical landscape significantly, I'm afraid. Will have to think more.

[naufragar]

Opened up the turn to a loan request from Amica:


No, I will not help you shave a turn off your Optics timing, giving you the Close to Home Circumnavigation bonus of +1 trade routes in all your Protective cities for something like 200 gold per turn. No sir.

By the way, Amica is being sneaky:


He's only researching at half power, but I believe he has enough in the bank to burn through Optics in ~2-3 turns.

Got diplo from Superdeath as well:


After the game, I'm going to ask SD what his messages mean. This is the second one that's been incomprehensible to me. I sent him back a message that I am completely onboard with a joint attack on Amica. I spent quite a long time trying to see if the resources above indicated war targets, but I couldn't find an appropriate match.

In my current war, I'm still reasonably confident in my assessment that Gav's troops are all tied up with SD:


He retreated his garrison, which saved me a risky roll. Both killed at 95%+ rolls. I'll take a turn to let my slow movers catch up. This is such a janky, thrown-together force, because I have to be so damn careful about reducing my strength on the Amica border. I'm already too low. (I'll talk more about this in a second.) By the way, I debated burning Khrushchev and replanting on the coast, but the surviving forge and 6 pop disuaded me. That's how highly I value these Fin lighthouses.

Lastly, we finally found Amica's golden geese, his intercontinental trade islands:


"I deleted the polar regions, honest." Phooey. 

Ginger's power dip changes the geopolitical landscape significantly, I'm afraid. Will have to think more.

Let me expand on this. For a while, this game looked like it was a three-way race between Amica in clear first and Ginger and me in second and third, exact order debatable. So long as there are three main players, there's no point to blood feuds or zero-sum duels. Ginger just got his army evaporated by Commodore. It's possible that that's not a big problem since Comm doesn't look able to invade, SD and Gav are preoccupied, and Ginger has unlocked the wonder weapon of Knights. On the other hand, it could reveal that Ginger is more irrelevant that first seemed and this game is a contest between Amica and me. Right now, Amica and I have been cooperating. I like to think I've done good diplomatic work here. We could both make gains off of Gavagai. There was no sense in each of us dragging the other down only to let Ginger take the lead. But Gavagai is dying and Ginger seems further out from a threatening lead. At what point does Amica decide that cooperating with me is no longer helping him win? I truly don't know.

For the last ~75 turns, I've been flying blind. My empire is a horrific, jury-rigged mess. We have practically no industry, so our cities lack infrastructure. The majority of our cities only have a +4 food surplus, so our ability to whip an army is very brittle. (In fact, I am deceptively weak.) While I now have 15 cities to Amica's 17, 6 of these are tundra iceballs with a tundra deer or worse (a solitary whale or the loan of another city's tundra deer!) and 1 has all jungle tiles minus coast and 1 mine. Amica's cities, meanwhile are big and buoyed by the Protective Great Lighthouse. One of either two things is true: 1) Amica's better and more expansive territory will eventually outproduce mine or 2) By dint of Fin/Org, I can keep this paper mache kingdom together and producing money and science at a better rate than Amica, but only at the cost of hammers and soldiers. If #1 is true, I need to alter the future. If #2 is true, Amica should be preparing to savage his only competition, who just so happens to be a paper tiger.

For either alternative, no easy plan presents itself. So I do wish Ginger's power hadn't dived.

[Mjmd]

"I deleted the polar regions, honest." Phooey. 

No pictures as I've had to regen maps a lot to get a couple that I like, but basically I'm doing a tiny tectonics map at 30% water. Regen for maps with somewhat minimal polar regions. Would do some minor edits to delete some* polar region to get tile count down as well as allow some more naval movement.

Operative word was some .

One of the things I mentioned in the lurker thread is next time some idiots want a random map, maybe like a 90% random map would be better.

[naufragar]

One of the things I mentioned in the lurker thread is next time some idiots want a random map, maybe like a 90% random map would be better.

I think the idiots should have to live with their choices. "Halfway" balancing a map seems a recipe for hurt feelings when people inevitably draw the line at what's a necessary balance change differently. There are plenty of things on the map that grind my gears (gosh darn inner sea!  ) but I knew what I signed up for. I think "playing the map" is a good exercise in small doses. And you rolled a map that's produced an interesting game for all players, I think.

The turn rolled quickly, and I opened it up to more confusing diplo:


This was in response to something I sent Commodore. I'm not opposed to this suggestion in theory, but...does Comm think I already have Astro? The only way I can get to Ginger is marching some 15+ tiles through Comm's lands. I guess this diplo just means "I'm going to fight Ginger. Let's be buddies." Which I'm fine with. 

Because the south is so hilly, Gav's cities get a turn of reprieve:


He 1pop whipped both Stalin and Chernenko, so it's unlikely that my three horse archers can do much damage, which in turn means he can whip more defenders, but the end is coming. Amica's army is about 2 turns from my western border and he has yet to play. 

[naufragar]

Gav had whipped a crossbow, which he retreated, and upgraded his warrior to a spear. The spear killed a horse archer, costing me my first casualty of the campaign:


We're still pushing up with our ragtag band. We're one city behind Amica, which is very stressful. It might look like we're close, but our cities, as I've been repeating ad nauseum, are tundra fishing villages.

Amica himself produced a settler:


I wonder where that settler will go. I wonder if there's any green, rivered land he could claim...  Whatever. That fits my plans fine.

What doesn't fit my plans is Amica's new position as global GNP leader:


Amica is finishing Optics this turn at 50% tech rate, so I felt at liberty to extend his bar to where he would be if he were teching at 100%. There are no methodological issues with this at all. Worse, Optics is going to give him a Protective Intercontinental trade route in all of his cities for another 17*3=51gpt! And I believe he's been whipping harbors, so this could well be pushing into the 68gpt range. Very, very potent.

As always, does Amica want to build his economy or does he want to hit me now?

Got some more diplo from Superdeath:


I don't know exactly what this means. "Amica is your natural enemy and Amica and Ginger are mine"? I don't know. Both Comm and SD seem up for a Ginger attack, but I don't have a route to Ginger, unless I've misread the map catastrophically. Oh well. I just hope that SD pokes Amica if that time ever comes.