[SPOILERS] swans will bite u

[williams482]

Holy crap.

Okay, loss mitigation mode. Presumably we're taking one of the culture pantheons. Where did the horses wind up?

[ljubljana]

breathe in, breathe out.

next best options are either culture pantheon, or divine spark for a a big lead in the religious race, +1 faith at our holy sites thereafter, and extra great scientists in the midgame after portugal buys me a ton of libraries as is already my implicit plan. the latter would be an unorthodox move though, so i think i'd better get your + TAD's input before possibly passing up a culture boost with pingala skip in the pipeline

[ljubljana]

here is the honse situation:



so no first-ring at teru, but we do have horse + sheep at our presumed third city. of the culture pantheons, i imagine open sky is better as we have more eligible tiles, are more likely to actually work the eligible tiles, and it leaves festivals still on the table for TAD who should be a contender for the fourth pantheon and has a ton of plantations.

[ljubljana]

at least i feel like i can say with confidence that we pulled every available lever here and COULD NOT have done anything different to accelerate it further. we built a 3t HS immediately after the settler, and kept god king, AND worked faith at the second city. the only thing i can think of is delaying the second city settler to do the HS and that seems crazy, plus i'm not sure it even would have shaved the 2t it looks like we needed.

guess we should have met a religious cs

[williams482]

Well that basically rules out the reconsidered southwest city location (and makes the old spot appreciably stronger in the process). Settling on horses would be silly without a very good reason. GotOS seems like the very clear best choice here.

[ljubljana]

well, ok, let's reconsider festivals which does require zero tile buys instead of one at every city (ouch), and i am noticing now that TAD's galley unveiled a fifth plantation resource for me at a suddenly decent-looking third or fourth city site in the northeast with banana + cotton. and according to our pinmaps teru's sheep is slated for paving to boost 2 campuses

big disadvantage is that would take festivals off the table for TAD who has a WAY stronger festivals setup than their GotOS setup. but festivals has to survive 3 more turns for that to materialize which could easily not happen

not sold on divine spark? with a culture pantheon on board Choral Music is starting to look pretty redundant, and if chev is racing us (as river goddess suggests) they really could take FtW which is overall a lot stronger for all purposes other than rushing to mercs, and fits very well w chev's growth-oriented playstyle...

edit: and actually, why would they take river goddess over a culture pantheon as indonesia if they are NOT going for FtW - the synergy between those two is the whole reason RG looked so strong. that should be a dead giveaway, right?

[williams482]

Damn, you're probably right about Chevalier's plans. I don't really like Divine Spark in general, it doesn't really snowball and the long term benefits are pretty minimal (more great scientists, which is fine I guess, and +1 faith per holy site which is arguably better). It would help us lock down feed the world... but just as Chevalier's pantheon choice makes him targeting FtW more likely, doesn't our inability to land that pantheon make FtW less valuable to us? The food and housing will certainly be a net positive, but it also brings us closer to growing into unhappiness, and ripping through the culture tree towards Feudalism, Upgrade cards, Military Alliances, Wars of Religion, Privateers, Fleets, Fascism, etc sounds pretty attractive to me.

[ljubljana]

hmmm, it makes FtW a bit less valuable but i think it's still way better than CM. especially as Japan, we badly need size 7 for our extremely late harbors, and as much food and housing as we can reasonably get to work all our production tiles now and, crucially, all the feitorias later too. with 2 feitoria, hakuho now has 9 workable tilies in just the first two rings, for instance, and i dunno when we'll ever get up to that size otherwise at a pathetic +2 food surplus. and it's the same story at most of these other cities too.

no, i think FtW is strong enough here that we'd better fight for it. how do we do that? one option is to take divine spark and build a big lead, perhaps even swapping teru to HS immediately to do so, then buy early shrines and sprint down the growth curve.... the other is to run a project, which comes at the opportunity cost of a monument anyways, and basically cross our fingers that chev doesn't do the same... and without GotS things are a lot harder as geneva's holy site will take Some Time to come online

not to mention if chev does land FtW + River Goddess as indonesia their team will be huge favorites to win the game. like not as bad as work ethic russia but not outside of that ballpark either. and you'd better believe Kaiser regretted not swiping WE from Russia last game i think it's pretty likely that in chev and inc's discord rn they are begging me not to take DS to contest FtW, which is a decent enough reason to do it imo

[ljubljana]

yeahh i'm tilting aren't i. ok, let me drink my coffee and come back to this in a bit when i can be more objective.

in the meantime, please look at this pantheon list and verify that the words "god of the sea" and "river goddess" are not present on it in case i am blind

[ljubljana]

finally, appeal sitch in case nerfed earth goddess is worth a look:



doesn't look like it to me, too many of these tiles MUST be mined

el grillo, don't think i don't see you posting in the lurker thread about the first major ljubljana freakout of the game

messaged TAD on steam btw - i think this is probably important enough that i'd better wait for their input, and indeed for his consent if i go off the deep end with divine spark