[SPOILERS] swans will bite u

[williams482]

We should probably proceed as if that's a Norwegian river, but it's not a guarantee yet.

On Further consideration I emphatically do not like the shrine build ahead of the galley. The faster that galley is out the more good it can do for us as far as defogging extra tiles in whatever direction. That's extremely time sensitive, and it's a fast build. The shrine first is arguably time sensitive in that it does get more GPP faster, but:

1) I don't think Chevalier is going to race us.
2) I don't think we should be willing to make significant sacrifices to win if he does race us.

Monumentality and Twilight Valor are more important than Feed The World. Further, knowing who is where and what they are up to ASAP is very valuable, and exploration has all kinds of random stuff that could throw us a curve ball and cost us nine turns of time towards a contact. For those two reasons I want to be as sure as possible that we get our six contacts before, and not after, the era roll. And the faster galley could make a very big difference there.

[ljubljana]

ok, yeahhh i'm willing to defer to your wisdom here. i think i should put one more turn in the shrine to avoid hammer wastage (galley is a 3t build at size 3 with 11 hpt but a 4t if even one turn comes at size 2 at 8 hpt) but i'm probably down to swap to galley. i do want the shrine built ahead of when the actual religion comes in but we have some wiggle room on that. if chev DOES race us we can still make a project starting t35 if we have to in order to shave off the last few turns :/

re rivers: i thought the game picked randomly from the list of all rivers once it is out of names for the discovering civ.... but idk. next turn i'll check and verify that we have seen all the japanese ones at least. i am not sure if it has a bias in favor of names from the same culture group though in which case we could suspect that norway has run out themselves and got here first

[TheArchduke]

I disagree. I have 1 galley west at Geneva which can explore, 1 to explore east and next turn 2 to defend the trader. I can stay on the builder for the harbor boost and switch the capital to a quick galley at any time.

Build a shrine for now.

   

[ljubljana]

Turn 33 - Phoenicia



Geneva attack is ready to go and will start next turn. With numbers like this, I expect two galleys can take the city in 2 turns, but we can trade one turn on that ETA for our first galley promotion. Not sure what I'll end up doing.

Gems tile at Geneva is very very nice too, both in that it offers an unexpectedly fast route to fixing the amenities crisis (which in turn means I can potentially do Writing after Pottery) and because it opens up some more Feitoria spots. I can see 5 visible now, which is not too bad, and it would be very surprising if there is not at least one more in the NW. That plus its fast Campus time and the fact that we don't need to hard-build a settler for it should make it a decent second Feitoria spot after North Channel Island after all. City #5 does kill one of the precious Feitoria spots as currently pinned, though, so it may need to be moved somehow, possibly 1NE to an otherwise idiotic inland location... At least that spot has phenomenal first-ring tiles of banana + PFH + horse, and can plausibly open HS - shrine - temple to really race up to size 7 for the harbor...

Teru chops into the HS for a decent t34 uptime. The second charge will probably go to mining the hill the builder is standing on, and then....not sure. Probably I will want to do SOMEthing to accelerate Geneva's HS, which needs to finish in the next 10t or so and looks like it might come up short of doing so. Maybe I should buy and mine the newly-revealed gem tile, which would be worth not just the 1 hammer from a mine but 10% yields at both the second and third cities?

fun fact: if it looks like Teru may not hit size 4 for the campus in time for the era score, we actually have the backup option of a discounted +3 campus in Geneva . I am about 15 turns from Writing and it will only be a 10t build or so (49 base hammers with the discount) so actually that's totally plausible. Wow.

re rivers: definitely at least one of us is out of river names:



Never seen a tile on THREE different rivers before Those belong to Inca, Ethiopia, and Cree/Canada respectively, so a culture group bias seems pretty unlikely. TAD also has the Pearl River right on their home island, which is from China's list...

Abroad, we inch back into first in the domination rankings again, which is somewhat reassuring... and we finally get a hint about what krill's been up to as they finish a third city settler! Wow, very fast. I guess I should be concerned that we're falling behind on expansion here...except I guess I should have my own third city in like 3 turns anyway so :shrug:.

One thing I have found increasingly strange and disconcerting about the scores over these last few turns: why has thrawn NOT taken a city-state yet? They had a 5 turn lead on me for the "two boats at the nearest CS" breakpoint, so we've reached the point where the lack of a CS capture suggests their boats are doing something...else. Best guess is that a bunch of them are either deep scouting for foes (perhaps in 3-ship wolfpacks capable of picking off isolated cities) or that their home city-state is somehow so overpoweringly strong that they'd rather keep it around than conquer it. Hard to imagine what CS would meet that criterion, but Mogadishu did for us, so maybe? That lends a bit of credence to the "CSs hand-picked for the civs" theory...but if so, Geneva is not a great choice for Japan as their suzereign bonus is literally worse than useless not only can any team turn it off whenever they feel like by DoWing us, but using it actively encourages other teams to attack us to blunt our science rate. Definitely no compunctions about eating them ASAP on my end

oh yes and we got a fourth tech this turn when all but two other civs don't even have 3 yet. Thanks, Geneva! As a reward for your services, the generous Japanese administration will grant you swift incorporation into the empire, where you shall have pride of place amongst all our city-state conquests

i am REALLY starting to get concerned about the other teams' preparedness level for thrawn, though. chevalier, woden, and banzai still have ZERO boats between them judging by era score. chev's team might be ok if incurian spams enough but if thrawn finds woden/banzai in this state they, and by extension all of us, could be in deep trouble... but i guess i should be happy that this fact, coupled with our trading off the top spot in dom rankings with thrawn, means we should have successfully avoided broadcasting to them a giant flashing "please come eat our delicious trade routes" signal to them, as we were so worried about pre-game...

I disagree. I have 1 galley west at Geneva which can explore, 1 to explore east and next turn 2 to defend the trader. I can stay on the builder for the harbor boost and switch the capital to a quick galley at any time.

Build a shrine for now.

Ok, I am fine going either way on this. If TAD has a strong preference for shrine and williams has a strong preference for galley, I guess I should probably defer to TAD as they are the one who will actually have to suffer firsthand the consequences of my bad decisions  But I definitely encourage you guys to try to hash out a mutually agreeable solution, which I promise to follow And either way, the next two builds will probably be a galley and shrine in some order...unless I am tempted by either a project or the trader for Teru......

also, while i am indeed pretty worried about the era score situation and agree that we need 3-4 explorers out ASAP, i think it's needed more to secure Monasticism and Free Inquiry than because we have any real chance of missing Monumentality for Japan. With 7 ES so far, we have the following ES points almost guaranteed before the end of the era:

GP + first religion - 4 points
classical civic + tier 2 government - 3 points
+3 campus - 3 points
+3 holy site - 3 points
camp clear at Hakuho - 3 points

that gets us to 23 already, so pretty much any extra ES, eg from even one contact, will put us over the edge. so for japan i think the main impetus for getting scouts out asap is more for wasting classical ES than it is for securing ancient ES......not that that makes the scouts any less urgent, though, as if we make the last contact in classical it will be reeeeeally hard to still sneak under the dark age threshold D:

also also, what if instead of buying Teru's monument, I instead bought a crapton of tiles, eg plains hill and gems at Geneva + PFH at Teru? Right now, size 2 Teru can only work the one plains hill and the dyes, which is a weak tile that wastes half a food to the housing penalty - buying the PFH would trade 1 faith + 0.5 food for 2 hammers and get the shrine down to an 8t build. Plus Teru's second ring is so full of fish resources and the like that it will take forEVER to grab the PFH the normal way. And Geneva has garbage tiles in the first ring and is likely to overwrite the plains farm with a holy site. Buying the two mineable tiles would get us to 7hpt which is decent for the early game, but otherwise we will have pop sitting around working fish to grow the city onto nothing, which seems suboptimal, to say the least Or perhaps if Geneva comes with a monument, we can buy just the plains hill and let the repaired monument grab the gems...whenever we, uh, get actually get around to repairing it...

and actually, Geneva needs fast hammers way more than teru does at this point as the stretch goal of monument repair AND holy site before the religion pops seems to be in play. so maybe i should send the builder to Geneva ASAP and just plan on two mines there

[ljubljana]

btw, i think the way this opening has played out is a decent case study of why Japan is still a top-tier water map civ even in NFP and was really a steal for us as the seventh pick - people understandably focus on their midgame science potential, but their early-game is actually kinda phenomenal... they are one of three civs with effective access to a galley UU to snowball early with CS kills, and, uniquely, they can build out wolfpacks of that UU WHILE landing an ultra-efficient early religion to set up further acceleration with monumentality. add in feed the world and it's really quite the overall package. i think exactly Norway can outexpand them in the first 60t by killing more CS faster, but Japan eats CS more efficiently than all the other non-Phoenicia civs, and Monumentality comes online right around when Cothons do and should counteract them nicely from a settler-spam perspective. all in all i am cautiously optimistic that we might actually have a top-3 water map civ here, at least as measured by early snowball

and god, imagine what this would look like if work ethic was unbanned

[williams482]

Is the golden era threshold 24? I thought it was 27.

I did not realize Archduke effectively has four galleys in play right now. If he feels that's sufficient for exploration and barb defense, I'm fine with the shrine.

[ljubljana]

wait i think it might actually be 25 lmao

last time i looked this up i feel like the answer was "whatever the normal age threshold is +14"

idk, either way japan should cruise to a GA barring any catastrophes (famous last words, i know...) but it is also really really important to ramp up exploration for Free Inquiry (maybe on the same level of importance as Monumentality since Portugal needs beaker acceleration SO badly for cartography) and to hedge against missing the dark age next era

i wonder if both japan and portugal want medieval dark ages? japan obviously does for monasticism, but perhaps portugal does as well to threaten twilight valor. t101-t141 is indeed where we can expect any decisive renaissance fleet-fleet combats to take place, and i can see +5 on naus being worth more than another round of FI. also i have no idea how we could even get Portugal to a GA without also dragging my Japan out of the darkness

[ljubljana]

econ things that i really want to get done by turn 50:

- 2 shrines
- trader for teru
- GP for victor 3 and to boost the trader
- geneva holy site + monument repair
- third city settler

and by turn 60:

- teru monument
- geneva + teru discounted campi
- 2 builders for stone + double plains hill mine + dyes + teru fish

are these things all feasible while still pumping at least 3ish more galleys? idk man. i am guessing teru goes HS (t34) -> shrine (t43) -> monument (~t50) -> campus and that's all its builds before the era change. and if geneva goes monument repair -> HS -> campus that will be all its builds too. then at hakuho we are looking at shrine (t38) -> trader? (t42) -> GP (t45) -> settler (~t51) -> 3 galleys (t60). but that feels way way too slow on both the boats and the settler AND doesn't even sniff the builders before the era change. yeesh. i guess i'd better prebuild the settler so it finishes right after we place the GP + delay one of the campi in favor of builders - it doesn't make too much sense to do double campi while the first two cities are still working umimproved tiles...

what an opening, man...

on the other hand, i guess i AM pretty happy about where we are compared to my PBEM20 open



but like that one was objectively pretty badly mismanaged so idk how fair a comparison that is

edit: geneva post-HS is a good candidate for one of the builders at least as i assume we want one charge to harvest the maize, and the (55 hammer) discounted campus is just a 7-8 turn build so we have some headroom. do you happen to know how much the gold harvest would be worth, though? i should hope it's more than the woods chop production numbers...if not, maybe it's not actually worth a charge...

[ljubljana]

actually guys, i am kinda revisiting the proposal to squeeze out one more quick 3t galley in hakuho before the shrine finishes. the reason is that 2 japan galleys is the critical breakpoint for eating CS, and i'd like to have two pairs of such galleys out scouting so they can immediately attack and kill any CS they might find (assuming no foreign intervention). it would be SUCH a shame if i found a CS in the north (say) with only one galley around to contest it and then lost out to thrawn or whoever :| and williams, you are quite correct that t38 is a bit early for the shrine as it will not reeeeally be worth the investment until it can leverage feed the world......

new galley would come out right around when the geneva wolfpack heals up, then we could send the new galley due north from hak and one geneva galley up our west coast and have them meet up at (and immediately attack) whatever CS they might find in the area... conquering a second CS and repairing its monument would be a major accelerant to PP and might allow for delaying the monument in teru to snowball yet faster with builders...

[williams482]

I believe gold harvests produce the same total yield as food and production harvests, so no it's not worth it to chop that tile.

The GA threshold is normal+14. I was thrown because the ancient era has a lower bar to avoid darkness than the other eras for some reason (11, with the same formula it "should" be 13). The Golden age threshold for the ancient era is definitely 25.

Interestingly, Banzailizard has all of two era score right now, both from unavoidable sources (meeting Woden and Woden spotting the natural wonder). It's late enough in the era that I strongly suspect that's intentional, and they'll be gunning for a heroic medieval with Twilight Valor galleys to hold off a classical attack. That does mean that Woden will need to handle 100% of the exploration and naval defense duties right now, and of course he also has no ships out.

The rapid second settler from Krill is also very interesting. Frantic, slightly inefficient expansion makes sense there; Sumeria has no districts that desperately need building and no military concerns whatsoever (other than barbs) with Norway on their team. Having more but underdeveloped cities also plays well with the uniques: Ziggurats can provide pretty decent research with just a few builder charges, and War Carts are cheap enough that mediocre cities can spit them out quickly.