[SPOILERS] swans will bite u

[ljubljana]

Turn 21 - Japan



Settler moves, Hakuho swaps to PJH and nudges the HS towards completion, and warrior heals in preparation for two straight attacks before we swap out of Discipline. I remember to swap onto Sailing, thank goodness, which will complete with FT on the turn both cities start boats. The barb scout is moving disquietingly... williams, please tell me it can't pillage our HS if I kill the camp  that would be a total disaster and would undo all the benefit from what's looking like a fairly quick camp clear. If a pillage is a possibility, I may need to leave the camp alive on low health until the pantheon pops  Luckily we should have a 2/3 chance of the scout moving back into this little peninsula and not towards Hakuho - if it does so, I think we should be safe to clear the camp.



TAD is also being menaced by an aggressive scout, which now threatens to move onto the lake city site and delay TAD if they were to head that way. Worse, a city there would almost be guaranteed to face a camp activation almost from the moment of its founding, which one warrior may not be sufficient to repel. As scared as I am about the defensibility of the banana spot (and I am very scared about this), maybe the barbs are making the decision for us on this one - if the lake city would need to build early warriors for barbs, I guess it's probably not better... At least if TAD's warrior moves on to the cotton next turn, there seems to be little danger of the scout making it past the isthmus to activate on a Portuguese city...

Abroad, krill is the first to a second tech, and all the size 1 capitals regrow to size 2.

[williams482]

Damned barbarians.

Unfortunately I don't know if the barb scout will opt to pillage when it's in "revenge mode." I know it will prioritize attacking the victorious warrior if it is within reach, but I'm not sure what it will do if it can see the city, or if it's out in the middle of nowhere when the camp falls. Definitely the safest option is to refrain from killing the camp until we're confident the scout isn't right up next to Hakuho.

For Portugal, I think we have to take a chance with the less defensible spot. A barb camp activation would be a disaster; based on the surface area of the island there's a ~70-80% chance the camp has one of iron or horses within five tiles. This game is technically on prince difficulty and barb spawn rates are much lower than they are at the difficulties we normally use in singleplayer (I remember being shocked that an activated PBEM18 camp was spawning a sword merely every other turn), but against swords or even the weaker version of horses that won't stop them from overwhelming us.

We'll have a decent number of boats on the water quickly, and we can even park one in the city permanently if we feel it appropriate to do so. Based on era score tracking the only person who could have a boat in the water right now is Krill, and we'll know exactly when the first bireme or longship completes. And as long as we have forces necessary to prevent a random raze, we'll be fine.

It is a risk to settle that city early, no question, but it's one we can handle. Unlike a couple of barb swords on t26 or whatever.

[ljubljana]

i think, at the very least, the camp wouldn't throw swords at us, as i think advanced units (other than galleys/quads) only spawn if more than half the civs have the tech needed to build them. re horses though: it looks like 4/7 horse-eligible tiles on TAD's island are within 6 tiles of the camp. But the only three that are NOT in camp range are all in the first two rings of TAD's capital, and since it would be quite a break with precedent for both horses to be in range of the capital, I have to imagine it is highly likely that this would be a horse camp if activated.

yeahh i would imagine that the risk to the banana spot comes not so much from random opportunistic razings, which we could prevent with a few galleys in the area, but from ease of conquest vs something like a norwegian 6-longship death squad once it has overwhelmed our defenses in the area. such a squad could appear from the sea without warning, kill TAD's ships, and then take the city in 2 turns and raze it before the rest of our ships have time to reinforce the area. the spot NE of the lake at least doesn't have THAT particular problem... However, we are going to want to found this city 2nd or 3rd in either case I think, and I'm not sure it will make too much of a difference which order we choose unless thrawn hits us BEFORE TAD has their third city settler out on what I'm guessing will be around t40. That...could totally happen if Portugal/Norway are neighbors though - thrawn is probably 3-turning longships in the capital right now and will have 4 on t32, probably enough to raze this spot if they catch us even a little bit out of position... At least if we delay the banana spot, we can figure out if Norway is TAD's neighbor or not before we commit to settling it.

On the third hand, ostensibly TAD will have at least one as-yet-unscouted city-state conquest to defend that will be even more exposed than this city, and it's not like we lose the game any less comprehensively if thrawn razes that instead I will note that these homeland defensibility considerations, which heavily motivated my and Woden's dotmap in PBEM20, had only a minor impact on the course of that game, perhaps buying Hieratic and Abugida another turn but that's about it. But that game did not have a longship rush in play which is probably the scenario in which they are most important. And we should keep in mind that thrawn will most likely pick a target post-scouting our homeland, and the presence of such an exposed Portuguese city would be a major incentive to pick us if Norway happens to be close by...

[ljubljana]

unrelated: we are gonna have tech problems if the plan to get Hakuho to size 4 by t45 involves a jungle chop :| we'd have to do mining + BW before one of AH and Irrigation, neither of which can really be delayed without risking a major growth curve slowdown (and/or paving over a horse with a holy site). So I'm thinking we'd better plan to get the trader up for a 2f/1h route from Hakuho -> second city instead, hopefully around t40 at least, which would get us over the finish line just a little after t45 I think. Where the hammers will come for this trader in our build order, I of course have absolutely no idea But I think it reinforces the need to buy the second city monument next, at any rate...

the second city also needs to hit size 4 for the campus, but we can use the discount and put a woods chop into that so maybe something like t55 is fast enough. with the sheep and fish we shouldn't have an issue with food surplus - instead the main problem will be housing, which will require two early builders to fix. but if we open galley - builder (- holy site - builder) at city 2 with a bought monument, i am hoping we can grow at +4 food surplus starting around t40. with 58 total food needed to grow from size 2-4 that should be fast enough, if juuust barely.

i'd like for the solution to involve fast shrines at one or both cities plus a substantial acceleration of feed the world, but i just don't think we can can get there fast enough. religion before t50 would require a really heroic effort and even that is too slow for Hakuho and debatably for the second city as well. but we def want shrines completing in as many places as possible on the turn we DO found the religion, if we can make that happen

[williams482]

Barbs get a tech if anybody in the world has a tech. Which is dumb as shit because it results in t30 barb Men At Arms if Babylon is in the game (and not all that much later for us, because Gaul will get there pretty quick too), but who needs common sense or game balance?

So you're probably right about not seeing swords as Bronze Working is rarely a super high priority tech, but I suspect you're also right about the horse situation too. Definitely not worth the risk to settle right next to that camp.

[ljubljana]

Barbs get a tech if anybody in the world has a tech.

oh shit, really?? yeah, in that case we won't see fast swords....we'll see fast men at arms, because Gaul can be expected to rush IW and immediately build an Oppidum, which gives them Apprenticeship for free 

so do we think Woden will open mining -> BW -> iron working from the word go? i imagine that would be a strong play, but judging by their tech pace they started with sailing instead (first tech discovered on t13) and are now working on...either something expensive or a few things at once, since they still have just one tech done. either way you are absolutely right to hone in on this and we will need to be extremely careful to not let camps activate near our cities.

honestly that is a bit maddening as there is a lot of randomness involved. what exactly are we supposed to do if a camp spawns next to our second city on turn 40 (a reasonable IW beeline date as past legion rushes have shown) and starts throwing men at arms at us? is....is that just a game over scenario? hard to imagine we will get through this game without something like that happening to SOMEone (even Woden is not immune) and it'll be a gigantic swing if it does :|

perhaps we will need a round of Agoge troops after all, when Woden appears to be closing in on Apprenticeship, just so we can defog the tiles within one ring of our cities to make sure this doesn't happen... on the bright side, we're the ones with nearby land camps NOW, so if we time our clears to coincide with Woden's apprenticeship timing we should be statistically the least likely team to have to deal with this, and may be able to use it to our advantage...

also, i realized why Gaul is a stronger civ pick than i gave it credit for at first - uncontested access to all the great engineers will make it function as a pseudo-china, at least when it comes to the high-impact naval wonders. they will be prohibitive favorites to land GLH and Terracotta, and can leverage victor 3 (which they are actually in a great position to take first with culture from mines!) and draft off England's gold (going oppidum - campus in their cities) to make a pretty fearsome Renaissance fleet themselves (albeit with no obvious way to get a Great Admiral). sheesh

[ljubljana]

i do also see some indications that there is a minimum distance between camps that is factored into spawning. if it is really 7 tiles, that means that if we were to keep our present camps alive long-term, it would rule out more camp spawns on the vast majority of our islands. not sure if that's worth foregoing the chance to unleash barb MAAs on someone else though...

[ljubljana]

did a test and, to start with the bad news: gaul has a really strong early game from the fast apprenticeship and will get off to an absolutely explosive start culturally and in terms of expansion. turn 50 is a reasonable date for oppidia coming online, at which point my second city looked like this:



on the other hand, with no bonuses to growth and oppidia first in every city their science will lag badly behind free inquiry england, which will be quite hard for them to fix in time for the frigate era. as far as hammer output goes, oppidia are no hansas and pretty much top out at +6, with even that requiring a lot of luck from good strategic resource placements and not having your best spots invalidated by adjacent city centers. the great engineer thing, while true, doesn't come online until the medieval era or so as the starting GEs are so expensive.

finally, i found no evidence for the barb MAA phenomenon, thank goodness - the camps were still spawning warriors in the t70s, even after i built a MAA myself just to check if that might be the problem:



maybe i didn't camp the camps for long enough to see it though. or maybe it was changed in a patch - the existence of this value here:

Barbarian Technology Percent Value=50

does suggest that hopefully this has been fixed, if you believe civ6.fandom.com anyway (which i'm not sure i do)

edit: i do see posts on reddit complaining about barb tech as recently as this month, so...i don't know, maybe i did do something wrong in this test? or is there a fix locked away in one of our mods? i don't get it...

[ljubljana]

SHIT i just had a HORRIBLE thought

we have an active water barb camp in the north. what if TAD's second city at the rice/bananas immediately gets swarmed by barb galleys?

edit: it might be targeting me as i did get a notification on turn 12, and TAD did not get one on turn 9....but that doesn't make sense as it saw TAD's capital first?? so i really don't trust that. i am guessing the one west of Mogadishu is TAD's starting camp since it's 7 tiles from their capital, and the one in the north is therefore mine, which could explain it. but i don't exactly trust the galleys spawning from "my" camp right now to not go after TAD's city if they see it

[williams482]

Huh. I wonder if it's linked to difficulty somehow? What difficulty was your test game on, and will it behave the same on deity? If Prince just doesn't have this particular "feature," then we're much safer.

In regards to this:

Barbarian Technology Percent Value=50

I'm not having much luck greping the game xml files for similar variables. Given civ wiki's perennial obsolescence, I wonder if that's privileged information someone posted that belongs to an earlier version, and some numbskull either intentionally or accidentally redid the functionality to only require one civ to have a tech.

As for the prospect of this city getting swarmed from the sea, yikes. Do not want. However, what choice do we have at this point? I think we'll be able to fight boats better than we can fight horses, and TAD has to get that city down somewhere or we're crushing our growth curve anyway. We'll also get a good look at the ocean off the coast of that city site when the settler moves, and if it's swarming, we figure something else out.

Barbs don't care much who the official target is, they attack targets of opportunity. Their spawn rate also shouldn't be as scary as we're used to in singleplayer games because of the difficulty level; in PBEM18 I was relieved to discover a triggered camp was putting out a sword every other turn (maybe less?) instead of the continuous spawns it would have been producing on Deity.