[SPOILERS] swans will bite u

[ljubljana]

oh, difficulty level could indeed be the culprit as this test was on prince. i'm not sure i have the time to retest on deity now but i will at some point. though it sure is strange for something that specific to be explicitly linked to difficulty :/

re what choice do we have: yeah, i don't know. i guess the choice is between fighting galleys at the bananas, which could raze the city quickly in the next 4 turns before we have our own ships out but which we will quickly gain the upper hand on, or fight horses at the lake, which i think are unlikely to threaten the city itself but will remain a problem for longer and potentially force land unit builds, and could turn disastrous if it turns out the camp can eventually spawn men-at-arms. idk what the right answer is - i alerted TAD to this discussion via steam, i'd say let's see what they think and go with that?

[williams482]

Uhh, shit. I just miss-clicked into the lurker thread and got a glance at the top of the map. I didn't see much that seems obviously useful, but spoilering what I did see here:

There are jagged, tundra-heavy land masses along the ice of the north pole. The slice I saw looked to be about half water, not surprising. No other details stuck with me.

Lurkers, would you judge that as harmless or not? I'd definitely prefer not to drop out of my dedlurker spot for fatfingering a link.

[RefSteel]

Am I understanding correctly that you didn't mistake which thread it was, you just accidentally clicked a random part of the screen and saw a piece of map before you realized what had happened and closed the window?  If so, I would say you can just play on, and try to make sure you don't make use of the information you saw.  As Sullla has said often, this can be hard to do, but one consideration might make it easier:

In part because of the Great Map Debate in the tech thread, there were a lot of maps posted in the lurker thread, some of which were rejected, some of which were from other games just for comparison purposes, and some of which were early versions of what eventually became the real map after significant revision.  I don't actually know which one you saw (the part of the map you described seeing in spoilers wasn't one to which I was paying much attention even when I was making ill-informed-due-to-never-having-played-civ6 comments on the map, so I can't identify which you might have seen just from that) so if there's any advantage to be gained from your spoiler knowledge, it's not clear to me whether you're better off avoiding it so as not to feel like you cheated in case you win ... or whether you're better off ignoring it to avoid accidentally disadvantaging your team with potentially-incorrect information.

[ljubljana]

perhaps in addition to whatever the lurkers think, you might want to post something in the tech thread and ask if the other players are ok with us following lurker consensus on this? i would hate to lose you (god that would be so sad ), but i would also hate for other players to feel like our team had access to spoiler information after the fact or like we were less than fully-disclosive, even about something that sounds exceedingly minor :/

[williams482]

Am I understanding correctly that you didn't mistake which thread it was, you just accidentally clicked a random part of the screen and saw a piece of map before you realized what had happened and closed the window?  If so, I would say you can just play on, and try to make sure you don't make use of the information you saw.  As Sullla has said often, this can be hard to do, but one consideration might make it easier:

In part because of the Great Map Debate in the tech thread, there were a lot of maps posted in the lurker thread, some of which were rejected, some of which were from other games just for comparison purposes, and some of which were early versions of what eventually became the real map after significant revision.  I don't actually know which one you saw (the part of the map you described seeing in spoilers wasn't one to which I was paying much attention even when I was making ill-informed-due-to-never-having-played-civ6 comments on the map, so I can't identify which you might have seen just from that) so if there's any advantage to be gained from your spoiler knowledge, it's not clear to me whether you're better off avoiding it so as not to feel like you cheated in case you win ... or whether you're better off ignoring it to avoid accidentally disadvantaging your team with potentially-incorrect information.

That's actually super comforting. You're correct, I clicked accidentally and hit one of the pages (no idea which) of the Lurker thread, and bailed as soon as I realized what had happened. If there's a good chance the extremely generic information I picked up didn't even belong to the right map, then I can't imagine there's an advantage to be had there. 

If another lurker feels differently, or feels this is worth a mention in the tech thread, they should say so. If not, I feel okay about this.

[ljubljana]

Turn 22 - Japan



into the unknown...



Everything is prepared - holy site and sailing and foreign trade and TAD's trader and both second cities all ready to go. One off note is the camp, which we will redline next turn, our last with Discipline, but are not favored to kill. That's fine though as we probably want the warrior to promote-heal anyways while we wait for the escaping scout to set its sights on something other than our holy site. Next turn, I swap to Naval Industries (and NOT to Urban Planning which could drop us into a tie with thrawn in the pantheon race per williams' calculations) and start galleys in both cities, the new city working the dyes to start and the PFH in 4t when we no longer need the faith.

Asked TAD to follow their own direction re the second city:





Seems reasonable to me. That ocean to the north has ominous connotations re Norway, but it should help significantly with barb defense as a single galley NW of the city can cut off attacking galleys behind a one-tile choke. I think as long as there are not multiple barb ships in range next turn, we should be more or less safe to settle...

Any international news? I hope not, I haven't even looked at the scores yet and this part always frightens me a little bit....

....ok fine i'll do it.

in order of observation:

- Incurian gets Foreign Trade, reasonable enough as it's bireme time for them
- Woden gets a second tech after 9t of research, I'd imagine Mining

and that's it apparently! that was easy

[ljubljana]

feeling dark and broody about that barb galley in the north. with the new city defending at 13 CS, a barb galley will do ~60 damage while taking ~15 in return, which could be enough to take the city over 4-5 turns through healing. luckily it is not that bad as one turn after founding, TAD gets a galley and the city will jump to 23 defensive strength and take "only" 40ish expected damage while doing 22, enough that one galley should have no chance to crack it. but if a second galley comes along in the next 4-5 turns and we are unable to occupy the tile NW of the city due to the barbs getting there first, we could be in serious trouble, and without the money to rush-buy military if it looks like the city might die...

i definitely think if there are two visible galleys when TAD gets the save, it's not safe to found the city next turn - with 2 attacking galleys the city will die in 3 turns for sure, and TAD's galley won't be ready to help out until one turn too late. and if there are no galleys in range i think we risk it and found now. what if there is just one visible galley, but it's in range of the city center, as i suspect is the most likely outcome? i don't know....i wonder if we should wait a turn to be safe so we don't take any of those 60 damage hits at 13 defensive strength, and to buy TAD's galley one extra turn to get into position... waiting a turn to found is painful but the city being razed would be game over, there's no way to come back from something like that

do we have a backup plan for if TAD sees two galleys in range when they open the save? i see two options: wait and see if they disperse, or reroute to the lake site at the cost of at least 1t of movement, maybe more if the scout gets in the way. neither are what i'd call appealing choices :/ the second is probably better to ensure we at least get a city...

[ljubljana]

i have thought of another way we could lose the pantheon race - indeed, that we could already have lost it: krill gets a tribal village reward from clearing barb camps, and ES tracking suggests they may have done so on turn 18. i am not sure if sumeria gets to pick which reward they get, or is assigned one at random, but if they pulled faith they could already have the second pantheon. this would produce a characteristic 1 ES jump, which i don't see, but it could be that the 3 ES on turn 18 represents 2 from the camp and 1 from the pantheon, if crossing the 25 faith threshold is calculated mid-turn (i doubt that it is, though). but either way, a second camp clear could vault them to the front of the pack at any time...

re pantheon choice, my current thinking is GotS > Open Sky > Festivals > River Goddess. but i could still be swayed on RG, i dunno. the housing might be a bit anti-synergistic with our gameplan since FtW comes with it, but amenities will be huge and comes online as soon as we take Geneva. it all depends on whether we can find another way to satisfy FtW Japan's heavy amenities requirements. right now i see five luxes in easy reach of the start - dyes, cotton, incense, pearls, and turtles - and a sixth in coffee will come online eventually as Mogadishu has an extra, so TAD can send me theirs once they are suzereign. 24 amenities is enough for 50 pop with the palace's +1, which i suspect FtW will just blow by in the midgame. and with no duplicate luxes visible so far, i do not see many ways to fix this via trading... if we end up with no extra amenities source, we might hit the point where each extra pop point is a net-negative pretty quickly - 10% yields in a core city is likely more than one pop can produce starting in the midgame. in the worst case, if growth rate in this game is limited more by amenities than by food supply, we might not be able to grow larger than our rivals without barrelling into unhappiness, which would leave our FtW investment totally useless once our cities get up to size and the Colosseum may not be a great answer as Woden will have happiness problems too with their fast start too and GEs to rush the wonder with...

but naturally our earlier logic applies too in that amenities problems don't matter if we can't snowball to a competitive size quickly. and while RG comes online at the Geneva kill, it goes back OFFline once we get irrigation and start founding cities at luxes, and stays that way likely until we grow all the way to the amenities cap which could take until t100. and all that time we are giving up probably 20 hammers from GotS or 5 culture from Open Sky and effectively gifting them to one of our rivals :/

if i'm going to prioritize RG, we'd better think it through right now, on this turn, so i can swap to UP and work PFH at the second city from the start for a 6-turn galley...

williams, you ran an empire that was much larger than everyone else's last game - how did you and CMF manage the amenities situation? I am seeing roughly the same number of luxes in mainland Russia as we have here - silver, sugar, gems, amber, turtles, pearls - but you did have 3 duplicates (that i can see) which could presumably be swapped with MPF for their luxes or traded to the other teams. and even so it looks like you guys were basically right up against the amenities cap by turn 100...

[ljubljana]

ok, first-pass is that GotS has too much don't-die value to pass up if our third city is mega seafood paradise Geneva, and it will retain its value well into the midgame unlike a culture pantheon. but if we get there and it's a choice between, like, RG and festivals, i will seriously consider the former.

worst-case there are various desperate moves we can pull to stretch the amenities supply, chief among them trading away my ONLY source of a lux to one of our neighbors and making TAD ship me their copy (if they are below the happy cap but i'm over it), and we can boost the priority of the pinned city 5 for its double luxes. or if we're REALLY desperate we could build entertainment complexes . discounted EC + Arena gives us 6 more pop without hitting the penalty - if we assume we will be just above the cap at all times and that each pop is worth roughly 2 yield, a ~300 hammer investment therein does pay back in a non-ridiculous timeframe. and we are japan so they might even boost a holy site or two

or, we could just dive in - while the first pop that takes a city above the threshold will likely be net-negative, if we accept displeased status everywhere we can actually get every city to -2 amenities before we hit the SECOND tier of penalties, which is 4 more pop each. 4 pop on Feitorias probably IS worth -10% yields in the average city in everything except science + faith...

[williams482]

I know Sumeria does not get to pick their camp reward. I'm not 100% sure an mid-turn faith gain can trigger the pantheon screen, but I think that has happened to me in singleplayer before. Testable in singleplayer with Norway, most likely.

As for the housing part of River Goddess, ignore it. We'd have the same conversation if it only gave amenities, they are the part that actually matters here.

Chevalier mostly handled Russia's amenities by ignoring them, and not having enough food to grow much. Most of those cities were tiny one-district tundra plants in the early game, that one district being a hilariously overpowered Work Ethic Lavra (obviously). Very few of them were over 4 pop until pretty late. By the midgame where I came in the amenity problem was starting to become obvious, and Chevalier had already build Huey to take a small bite out of it but didn't really save much. Russia was also boosted by the amenities from surplus turtles World Congress resolution that passed around that time.

By the late game, it was an absolute mess far beyond recovery. Every city was unhappy, most were very unhappy, even after making peace with Team Sandbox and giving away the captured island cities to Australia. Ironically, Russia never really had the population to get enough district slots to make building entertainment complexes profitable in core cities, as even with the painful happiness issues Lavras, Campi, and Harbors were always more powerful short term options. We probably should have built a few more in place of IZs and Encampments, but there wasn't all that much to work with.

What that comes around to is the same conclusion as before: River Goddess will be enormously powerful in the midgame and on, far outstripping any of the other pantheons with the possible exception of GotS (which may already be gone). It's just not that much of a help for that extended middle portion when everyone has enough luxes to be roughly even and is expanding as fast as possible.

Of course the value will be limited by our ability to stick holy sites next to rivers as we continue to expand, especially into enemy territory. There's a big difference between averaging, say, +1.5 River Goddess amenities per city, and +0.5 amenities per city. And trying to stay under the happy cap is likely a losing battle anyway, although prolonging our time above it (and subsequently our time above the "very unhappy" cap) does still have a lot of value.

I'm also really curious to see how much value we could extract from that pantheon.

My instinct is that we want GotS if we can get it, and that it's worth sacrificing a turn on a galley build to pursue it (~50% increased chance, I'd say). If we come up short I'm still not sure on River Goddess vs Festivals (maybe I should try some sort of sim?) but I think it's down to those two. Open Sky just doesn't give us either the immediate or long term bonuses we would need to edge out the extra amenities, there aren't a lot of pastures even accounting for the probable horses, and what is there will be slow to connect. No other pantheon is especially close.