[PB66 Spoilers] Miguelito and Ginger split the bill

[Ginger()]

The flurry of diplo we've received in the order it came

                           


Gavagai wants to sell us Ivory, hasn't seen our Ivory-Fur trade with Amica yet. I think we are top world approval rating, definitely were last turn. 

Amicalola is Not Pleased by our fence sitting with the Open Borders question. I think we acquiesce. It seems everyone but us got easy copper hookup/snowball and luxuries, Amica is no exception, coupled with Washington's EXP/CHA and we don't really have a choice but to accept. Bonus points is that we'll get city vis. But will all the seemingly hammers that Amica has dumped into Libraries and Barracks, I suspect they target CoL after Currency. 


Domestically we're doing some micro like timing Library/Rathaus/Settler whips and choosing tile improvements for new cities, otherwise stuff continues slowly with an emphasis on growth. Our discounted UB is now worth 4gpt in nearly every city, so our GNP explosion will happen very quickly once our F/H situation catches up to it.

[Miguelito]

I voted against giving OB, and reoffered Crab/Crab. Imo it's unlikely that Amica would declare just because we deny OB, and giving it to them is solely to their advantage, because we already have very good vision into their land, while they are probably not yet (fully) aware of our disastrous geography. Even if our refusal of OB leads them to suspect that something is fishy, it's still better than letting them know for certain.
this turn they attempted again:


I didn't respond, feeling that all that can be said has been said.



Why I'm reporting though is because we are, for the moment, above average in food

[Miguelito]

t 100 deserves at least a picture dump:





poor Tommy will finally be allowed to grow














Ignatius had to build his own WB, but now we're getting started here.


We converted to Confucianism for some measly OR hammers here (also the upcoming library whip in Expeditus). Need to take what we can get, as it's hard to get buildings up with no hammers at all.


saddest of fillers founded mostly because we had a settler at hand and workers around, but it will help with cap cottages starting next turn.




Mjmd's island city is pretty terrible for us, as he can strike basically anywhere on our coast. Also he's defending it in earnest. And it can only be attacked from a forest, over a river, great.

[Ginger()]

We felt a surge of optimism after Pyramids landed and our crop yield shot up decisively, at one point we were 3rd in crop yield, behind Gav and Mjmd.
That has dimmed somewhat as we have whipped a lot of pop away on libraries in border cities as well as missionaries and settlers. I usually hate whipping, but if you're going to get these builds out eventually, might as well get on with it and do it at lower pop counts, less food lost.

Spiritual really is a funny trait at times, actually imposing a hammer tax with your missionary spam 

Plemo seems to have been able to digest Magic Science without suffering economic troubles, we say 44gpt in his trade bar last turn 

Our strategic outlook remains the same, keep our heads down, wait for our growth to catch up. Get our lovely 4-5 gold buildings for 60 hammers and try and hightail it to Civil Service so we can irrigate all this damn rice. Should've picked Inca smh my head  
Sit and chill and let our economy tide us over. Aside from the rep happy we've only worked a specialist for one turn to date, which is pretty pitiful for turn 100, but the food situation is a bit upsetting. Everything needs to grow faster, and yesterday. We have the best Food -> Commerce conversion of any civ with ORG/Rathauses/Representation but so little food. Personally, I blame the early game monuments  
Maybe our strictly inferior capital and Mao's Long March for copper had something to do with it. I'm not sure how this map passed lurker review tbh, but we've already harped on this point enough I feel

[Miguelito]

I'm not sure how this map passed lurker review tbh, but we've already harped on this point enough I feel

nah I don't think so. Lurkers, let's play a game of "which of these coppers is not like the others"

we have not defogged the capital, but Uppsala is sd's second city.




Barbary was Jack's second

Can you tell which one is special? A little hint: Most of these require a 3-5 tile walk from the corresponding capital, but there's one that sticks out... . Not sure yet? Well let me tell you, it's not one of those with a 5 food tile in the BFC, because that's all the other ones! No, the mapmaker took the greatest care that a certain trademark dry rice could only be irrigated from the opponent's territory even at CS, isn't that funny . One more hint: It has no river or early luxury resource in range either!

Next time in our salty surveys: Want to boost your GNP by a risky Pottery rush and building the earliest cottage on the map? Noob, just start next to a gold tile, how hard can it be?

[Miguelito]

and just so you don't say that you get nothing but whining:






The cities graph is not 100% precise, as I had to make adjustments at times when my count from PBspy and the in game scoreboard diverged. The whip graph surely also has errors, but I'll never know where.

The cities show superdeath recovering from delaying his expansion due to building SH and GLH, and he has a whole uncontested peninsula to settle yet, plus who know what more in other directions. Mjmd of course very strong, and Plemo now not too far behind, but it also shows that he has always been doing pretty well. We are solid middle class, but with two late traits that wouldn't be too bad, if we were leading in economy, which we ain't.

Ginger has said that he hates whipping; well I have always been a happy whipper, and lately he has been more enthusiastic than me. It's showing in the graph, you could think that we're preparing an invasion, but none of this has been millitary
Tarvac whipped a whole lot early, leveraging Mehmed.
Plemo has been whipping little all game, which a) should give me pause regarding my own enthusiasm, and b) makes Magic Science's downfall really dubious.

[Ginger()]

Speaking of whipping, we have been trashing a lot of population lately, in a situation where our inferior growth and tech are showing very strongly in the demographics. I would argue our poor position is the result of a snowball stunted by geography, but it’s also because of a strong neighborhood. Amica with Washington is doing the Khmer thing and Vanrober’s Zara has recently equipped several forges (a lot of spare pop I guess).

So why weaken ourselves for Missionaries, Courts, Libraries and Settlers for more stunted filler cities pre Currency? And why abandon my usual heuristic of keep cities at happy cap and whip there instead of cycle whipping them?

Missionaries are primarily motivated by a desire to raise happy cap, with OR salving the cost of the initial investment. Of course our upcoming Theology bulb will give us access to an additional promo tier without deep-diving in Monarchy and Feudalism. In hindsight, knowing that we’d land pyramids, Monotheism was a likely error. But with it teched now it makes sense. Sure you could argue it’s leader synergies leading us astray from the holy Currency beeline, but the cost has been sunk. Personally I blame the map again, without SPI or CHA this start would’ve been disastrous.

But why weaken our ability to respond to an invasion and whip infra at low power count? Well that answer is two fold, we hope to skirt by on reputation and deterrence. I’m not a competent battle commander, but Miguelito is. And to top it off we have Police State access. Also we need to win, not prevent a loss. Early leaders win by keeping up pressure and forcing hammer trades and snowball erosion. We cannot play that game, we would just fall apart. And simply put, we need to utilize our courts, our asymmetrical advantage, otherwise we lose.

So why whip heavy instead of grow and slow build? Well that’s simple, Courts and missionaries pay dividends over the time they’re active, it’s not like an army or wonder or growth micro where as long as you have it by a relevant turn count it’s good—it’s a continuous payback, not a step function. Furthermore, with the urgent demand for production of multiple items, we conserve more food by whipping at lower population numbers. So we’re a period of immense squeeze but the recovery will be faster.

---

To wrap up, I’ll talk about the timing and the neighborhood. As far was we can tell, Mjmd has the mass to cripple us in the east, but he’s probably far too busy teching towards empire-wide modifier and recovery techs like Currency, Metal Casting, CoL. That’s probably what motivated his unit movement threats and clam-clam offer. Having accepted the clams, we now have 10 turns of sacred peace, the likes of only SD and Commodore would break.

Vanrober appears to have been pretty well squeezed out by Gavagai in the initial settling races, that or he fell victim to Krill aggro like we did, except instead of a far flung copper and no-lux, he got a total lack of expansion blobs. We also did squeeze out some land from Vanrober with our Santiago pinkdot, but that was a necessity the way our copper was located, the border would’ve been atrociously long and unnatural otherwise.
All that said, VR will probably be making units out of those forges soon, and I am concerned.

Amicalola, dearest Amicalola. Their ‘fun and casual’ pick has been succeeding pretty tremendously, EXP Khmer buffs one of the already strongest growth curves under Washington. We got pink dotted by that city of High Knob, something we were unable to contest because of our copper placement (the  impacts and repercussions are long lasting). As much as we’re trying to avoid a fight with the Khmer, if we ever shrine Hinduism, High Knob will need to be “purchased” as a buffer. In the short term, Amica launched a GA shooting them up to >140mfg and about as much gold (praying that there are some wealth builds hiding in those numbers). As a result we are nothing but food to a Ballistaphant attack, and are crossing our fingers and praying that our signaling and luxury gift and player skill means more to Amica than our OB refusal and very low power.
This GA is also likely a grace period, Amica won’t be whipping a stack, and while hard-built chariots might be a threat, we otherwise have 8 turns to prepare for whatever is coming. I should also make a note that we do have tech vision which will give us a little forewarning on Construction and HBR.

This time crunch is the final decider in trying to expedite the “industrialization” process of spreading religion and erecting infrastructure, —it’s something that we need to do to win, justifying palpable risk—and we need it down quickly, so no half measures

[Miguelito]

wSo basically I'm on the same page with Ginger here - we are ever behind Amica / Plemo / Gavagai, both in terms of GNP and MfG. The former might be resolvable with our UB and Representation, for the latter we don't really have a solution. We have the emergency measure of PS, but overall it seems that either others just have developed their empires better or found more and better food sources on top of luxuries*. Amica is helped by Barays of course, which often have been dismissed, but with Exp actually have a quite decent payback time.

* of course I wanted to prove it, because I like suffering. Here is our diplo screen with Amica:


We have some trades going with them: corn for fish and clam for clam. I have counted all the connected and unconnected food ressources in our empire and arrive at:

wet plains wheat
dry corn
3 dry rice
pig
3 clam
wet corn
1 crab
1 deer
2 sheep
1 plains cow

On these tiles we generate 52 food, accounting for lighthouses. We also have some lighthouse lakes and settled on a sugar.

Just from what we know of Amica's food through the diplo window and tradesthey have:

4 clam
3 fish
4 crab
2 pig
1 wheat
1 corn (visible, dry)
1 cow

With a very conservative estimate: pigs = 5f, wheat = 4f, 0.5 lighthouse food per seafood ressource, that's 75.,5 food, not accounting for the unconnected ressources. So a difference of 23.5

This is not due to underexpansion, we have the same city count as them. There is one dry corn in Patrick's as yet unpopped second ring that will however go to Gavagai before it comes back to us. It's just the map. It's a lush map, just not for us.
I really enjoy this game, it's a lovely civilization, but looking at stuff like this it feels like I should stop caring. Basically our path to winning requires our neighbours being completely inept, and we know that's not the case. Anyway, carry on.


Notably. Amica seems to have converted that food advantage (additionally helped with Barays) into working a lot of mines, even surpassing better expanded players like Mjmd and Gavagai, and vanrober of the many forges:



Meanwhile in food we still manage to not trail too far behind:


Especially lately, much of this goes into whipping, so I don't feel overly anxious because recovery will be quick. We're burning through a bit of the Rep happy there. Together with lacking currency this has us only somewhat competitive in GNP:


But with currency we might be looking good there, if we survive intact until then. Btw props to sd, whom I had counted out already with 4 cities on t70 (?), but who seems to be recovering quite well (and he has a big fat uncontested peninsula to settle yet). Man loves mines, so he is lagging even us in food, but in turn his MfG seems solid.


Which leads us to threats:

• Amica: I feel like the correct play for them is to get construction and HBR in the GA and then flatten us with ballistaphants and cats. They have sufficient hammer advantage, and we are behind in tech. I have precious little idea how to fight back. They have direct access to critical core cities. Cats + axes might be in reach. I also think someone would give us iron for elephants. Swap to PS (and hold the pyramids) and whip as long as we can. Bleak outlook. Hope is that a) they might have access to a neighbour they'd want to attack even more. GKC maybe? We of course have the target of Asoka of pyramids on our head. But maybe they rather see an option of an easy conquest elsewhere involving an alliance. Apparent wealth building and setting tech to CoL (at 0%) instead point to other plans, which would give us some more time. They also have not revolted during the GA and probably need to get civics techs. Can they still get CoL and swap to caste in time to swap back at the end of GA? I don't think so, even if it's 1 turned on the third GA turn?
  
• Mjmd: still busy digesting his Jack conquest, and we are on the far end of that. If he perceives us as a long term threat he might feel tempted to do some random raids. There is next to nothing that we could do to retaliate. And he has excellent access to basically all our eastern coast from that damn island. We're trying to reinforce garrisons to be at least able to hold out against a random galley, but it's thin, as we just have quite few units and the bit that we have beyond city garrisons has to be on guard against Amica. We do have a recent clam/clam though.
  
• vanrober: My lesser concern, not because he has no potential or would not be capable of hurting us but a) he's playing short ten minute turns and b) he has the Gavagai behemoth in his back which should bind a lot of forces. c) superdeath looks like an even softer target. He has reason to be mad about Santiago though, so it might still happen. We're monitoring him well.
  

The one point where Ginger's and my priorities differ a bit is that he wants to put our scarce hammers all into infra (missionaries, rathouses, occasional library/temple), while I feel like we should get some units now. He is of course correct that these units (axes/spears) will be next to useless should an attack actually happen, I just feel like we should get the power ratios up so the other players don't feel persuaded to scheming.
Given the precarious economic outlook, Ginger mostly wins the argument, and we go on the greedy path.

[Miguelito]

Unsettled grassland pig 5 tiles from his capital

[Miguelito]

"Oh, good, Mjmd border should be safe for now."



"Uh, I have a hard time seeing him get through with axes. Props to MS for achieving the tech, he lost a lot to the Romans but this should stabilize him against praets - he has not been losing any morecities in fact. Why is Mjmd running into this with axes though, surely he saw the CB a while ago?"




Curious what happens next.



Superdeath has had some lucky geography - not only does he get that huge peninsula uncontested, he also has no land neighbour to the east, and instead only has to cover NW/N on land (and his Viking pick positions him well to hold the seas ). He might even have just vanrober for a land neighbour.



GKC in fact does seem to have only one in Gavagai - pity for him that Gav is my personal candidate for most likely to win the game.
I have to point out though that it's turn 113 and there's an unsettled and unimproved grassland pig 3 tiles from GKC's capital.


Domestically we're preparing to bulb Theology in 2 turns, and finish a bunch of units in Theocracy, while also whipping some buildings first in OR. We still need to convert 4 cities but only get 1 missionary before the revolt, so that's a drawback.
And as you see, this turn we started research on Calendar, which should finish next turn, even though it's a bit tight. Worst case we have to employ some spies. We have all 5 calendar resources, so that should help us a lot, although the glaring lack of foodhammers is still not resolved easily.