[PB72 SPOILERS] Aetryn learns humility

[Mjmd]

I mentioned in discord to Aetryn that I maybe should have suggested settling Fortitude as 5th instead of Faith, but how many people go charging in with just axes at this point in the game............ Especially when your opponent is agg Rome and you expect them to you know wait until praets. Faith is a much better food city and didn't steal food from Humility which made sense from a development point and you know common sense military assessment.

As I said to Aetryn don't ever try this, 19/20 times your forces will evaporate to chariots.

Something this picture reminded me was to at least do one chop into Fortitude for a granary. Two chops if there are workers available. Would be nice if this city can start producing pronto.

Its going to hurt to chop forests into units vs using those workers for cottaging or saving forests for math / forges boost / org boost, but it is what it is.

[aetryn]

T71-72: The enemy doesn't have perfect information

I open turn 71 to find:




Hm, well that's interesting. He hasn't gone for Patience, so maybe I get to keep my bacon for now? I still couldn't stop the pillage if he moved both axes there, but there's no reason for him to move east if he intends to go north, so I expect this is just an attempt to fall on the west flank of Prudence in a combined assault with him southern troops (now bolstered by a second axe, as expected, out of sight to the south). That means 4, or maybe even 5 axes (his soldier count just went up about that much again), which the current defenders can't survive. Also, he has unexpectedly moved to threaten my chop site, meaning if he moves the closer axe to the cow this turn, I have to choose between losing the chop or losing a worker.

My response in the west is to switch Patience to an axe first, then a skirmisher since he can't possibly attack the city for a couple turns (and both finish in successive turns whichever order I do them in). In the east I move to chop another axe out. In the south I... hope I don't have to 1-pop whip a Skirmisher, but depending on how he moves I might have to. In the north, I try to recover from my mismanagement of Humility to slotting in an Axe to finish in 2 turns. Oddly enough, there's only 1 turn lost here in producing the axe (and Humility is quite hard to 2-pop whip axes in anyway, because it has so much base production). 2-pop whipping a granary at max overflow and 2-pop whipping an axe at max overflow are oddly equivalent actions. In both cases you're really 1.05 pop whipping the current thing and 0.95 pop whipping the next thing in the queue without costing additional happiness. In this case I got 1.05 pop of Granary whip and 0.95 pop of axe whip instead of the other way around, but then a turn would have been lost anyway due to not wanting to dry whip the axe and having to work suboptimal tiles. And this way regrowth starts earlier and I start filling the granary. It's probably a wash, honestly.

I also kick around the idea of sending a reinforcement to Prudence from Diligence. If I don't do this next turn he could cut the road with an axe on T73 and I won't be able to make it into the city. But I don't want to let the eastern axe participate and Diligence will be chopping another axe soon, so hopefully I can hold out a few turns. This was probably a mistake though - eating a pillage of a not-even-riverside cottage, or even of pigs, would be clearly better than losing Prudence.

Fortunately, the enemy doesn't have perfect information:



He's paused a turn to consolidate his western axes before proceeding! Maybe he's even still not sure of his destination for this stack, hence poking the scout in to peek at Patience? Either way, it lets me finish my chop and delays any attack on Prudence until T74, letting me chop a Skirmisher this turn and 2-pop whip an axe next turn. And I'm clearly going to need those troops if he does come east with that stack, because there's a third axe in the south now and 5 axes is an invasion force I won't be able to easily handle. So I decide I have to move the Axe from Diligence now  - he can't cut the road next turn, so it will make it, and unfortunately that means I have to 1-pop whip Diligence, otherwise he could advance his axe one turn before I have a replacement, threatening the chop that lets me get the replacement. This is all very destructive and could have been spent on wonders or something else useful down the line, but none of those wishes will matter if I'm dead in 20 turns, so needs must. I have to at least hope that all this wandering his army around outside his territory is costing him some extra maintenance, though he is Aggressive and thus doesn't pay as much anyway.



In the north, Faith is lined up perfectly to finish the granary, put one turn into the lighthouse and 2-pop whip it the turn after growing to size 4... but I can't justify such a greedy play in the middle of an invasion I'm not sure I'm going to repel, so Axe whipping it shall have to be. The harder I make this for him the more turns I buy for borders to pop in Fortitude and those horses to come online.

Also, oddly enough, no Praetorians so far. It's JUST possible that I lost count of axes and he pushed one out a couple turns ago, and it just hasn't arrived yet. Maybe he doesn't have Iron in borders. And now that I think about it, I'm not sure I ever accounted for the 10k soldiers that Iron Working would have brought. I can't have misread one of the 12k bumps that I interpreted as double axes because I've seen pretty much all those axes. Bing's land does look like it has quite a bit of jungle, so maybe it's possible that Bing has Iron Working and not Xist? I won't count on it (unless I go back and do an extensive analysis of every turn demographics shots I've taken), but it is interesting.

[aetryn]

T73-74: The Killings at Second Hamlet

Our second cottage has grown up... and is currently being threatened by the enemy.



On the whole, though, we don't look too bad. He's separated his axes in the west again... to break a road that was barely useful anyway because of the river crossings. I now have enough forces in the west to advance and harry him from behind (the second dot on that tile is just a scout). 2 axes and a warrior won't crack through the forces in Prudence (2 skirmishers, a spear, an axe, and another axe finishing at the end of the turn). And his eastern axe continues to camp on a hill and wistfully observe the bacon sizzling down in Diligence. The plan is to connect horses T82, and if he hasn't managed to do anything useful by then I should be able to dislodge him at that point.

Military production between us is broadly similar, when you account that I have 3 extra cities not yet ready to build military:



But his food is significantly worse, reflecting his lower city count and probably also city quality:



(Btw, the single largest thing I dislike about playing with or against Mali is the difficulty seeing the graph lines).

So, since he's under a bit of time pressure here to do something useful with these axes, let's set a bit of a trap. The new Hamlet is an obvious pillage target, he probably needs to cross the river to attack anyway, and since I have a new axe being built at Diligence it doesn't need its axe this turn, so we'll send it a ways up the road like so:




If Mr. Jealous-Of-Bacon comes off his hill, the new axe + the Skirm, and if necessary the warrior can clean him up.

Next turn we see this (apologies for the action to the side of the peace treaty offer):



Three things to notice: he's moved to pillage, including to the predicted new Hamlet, he's settled a 5th city again somewhere I can't see (probably for Iron), and he's decided he's probably overextended himself and wants out of this war. While I'd like peace, I'd also like to do a bit of damage while he has Aggressive units parked in easy to kill places. So the axe from Diligence goes in and... well apparently the Roman axe was too busy thinking about the loot he was about to get and not about defending himself because yikes:




I don't think this can even be called a battle!  So, uh, better to be lucky than good?  The victorious axe moves into Prudence, which is now pretty much impregnable against his current force. But I'm not without mercy, and I'd like to preserve those cow pastures, so I'll let the other axe go if he wants peace now. I also move my settler produced ages ago for City 8 that has been idling in Patience forward, covered by a scouting warrior and the Skirmisher/Axe pair. If he gives peace (and maybe even if he doesn't), I should be able to settle it in a couple of turns.

Meanwhile Bing has already settled his 8th city and OH BOY THAT FOOD LEAD:



I don't know whether this was his land, if he's somehow hacked IMP onto his leader when we weren't looking, Civac's micro assistance or just Bing doing a really good job of using his land, but this is a FAST start. Fortunately I am very, very far from Bing and he's literally smack up against Greenline, so it's someone else's problem for a good long while.

[shallow_thought]

Just quietly enjoying the calm (temperate?) way you're dealing with this. How much chance do you think you're going to get to whack axes with chariots? It's going to be a different problem for at least a short while once Praetorians appear. What's the plan for dealing with them until you've (hopefully) established enough of a tech / land lead to obsolete them?

And I feel you're getting enough value out of Mali's UU right now to make the dodgy graph colour worth it .

[aetryn]

T75-76 - Change of Plans

Turn 75 greets us with the welcome relief of peace. I can play turns back to back! I can get my empire back to a focus on economics and growth. I can finally settle that pigs and wine city I'd picked out all those turns ago...




Oh.

Well, I can see why he wanted peace now. It would have been very hard to defend that city with his flanking axes trapped out of position or destroyed and a long reinforcement trail. And I had actually speculated that those axes were in the area in the first place to reserve that city site for him, because otherwise his use of them made no sense: he didn't profitably use them for flanking, advancing them against a city he could have attacked from the south with concentrated forces, losing one. Unless he had a flanking plan or was keeping an eye on a city site, he would have been much better served to have them near his ultra-agressive valley plant so it wasn't so easy for me to raze it.

On the other hand, this is going to be a difficult city for him. It's farther from his capital than Prudence is for me, and we've seen how bad maintenance is on this map. It's immediate neighbor isn't anywhere near as productive as Patience is, and it only has one neighbor to lend immediate aid, compared to Prudence which could draw from both Patience and Diligence. It's also right next to my military pump city. I have FAR shorter attack lines than he has defensive lines on this city. It doesn't even get the wines. Why did he settle here?
a) There's iron somewhere here. Very well could be either on the city center or one south. You know, assuming he actually has IW, which I still need to go back and look at demo screenshots to check. Or maybe I'll just get surprised when he builds a stack of Praetorians and rolls over me.
b) He can see this is my only westward outlet and desperately wants to cut me off... from... land that's going to be contested with Bing and Greenline. Seems pretty unlikely, but maybe he's all-in on hurting me at this point.
c) He has nowhere else reasonable to settle. The land on this map is weird enough that this could be true. Just give him a mountain range blocking him off from going east from his capital, and I can already see that west of him is highly mountainous as well. This is consistent with his aggression over the Valley of Prudence and his slow settling when we ended up at war.

Well, whatever his reasoning this is a problem for me. I was really looking for another luxury here. I have a settler already built and would like to cash it in for a city. I can't reasonably even settle any of the city sites marked on the map even though there's technically a way to road outside his territory just from the tenuousness of being able to keep the road open. So where do I go?

Here's the east:



Luxuries, though luxuries I can't use for ages. But not a lot of food.

How about the west?



Two double-food sites. Of course, I have no land route here since the only way around the western mountain range starting at my capital is near the wines where Rome just planted a city. Am I really going to take to the sea to settle on a map with non-connecting local seas?

Spoiler alert: Yes, yes I am.




Here's my reasoning: There's two double food sites over here and they can support each other. There's also a long river with some ideal cottage spots next to it. The double crabs site is actually pretty close to my capital, and pretty good for me as Financial, even if it does nothing but work Crabs + Water tiles. If I can build an effective province over here, I might be able to justify settling the head of the wines valley, tenuous road link and all, simply because the cities up here can support that city with workers and reinforcement troops and such. It's not really any less vulnerable than an eastern site that's open to attack out of the fog to the south, and I can probably station a spotter near the wines area and have like 10+ turns warning before he invades this area. And I know he's already scouted it, and probably has no reason to come back up here, so it may be a very long time before he even realizes I have a city up here.

Here's the southern part of the Malian Empire:




Damage from the war was pretty limited. He pillaged a couple roads, and forced me to overwhip Diligence and Prudence. Diligence will build a worker, maybe even 2 workers, to let some whip anger fade, and Prudence just wants to get up to size 4 so it can work some more cottages. Meanwhile Patience with a shiny barracks and lots of production from copper mines + regular mines will continue to build troops for Round #2. Which might be me going after this exposed city. Or might be him attacking me. I suppose we'll see...

[aetryn]

Just quietly enjoying the calm (temperate?) way you're dealing with this. How much chance do you think you're going to get to whack axes with chariots? It's going to be a different problem for at least a short while once Praetorians appear. What's the plan for dealing with them until you've (hopefully) established enough of a tech / land lead to obsolete them?

And I feel you're getting enough value out of Mali's UU right now to make the dodgy graph colour worth it .

Tech... lead? What is this technology thing you are speaking of ? I don't think my economy has room for such things. My currently projected finish date for Masonry is something like T90 . In one of the screenshots above you can see I'm making 1 gold. At 0% science.

I should have chariots around for Round #2 if he comes back (or if I go after him!) I imagine that will probably take place before Praetorians arrive en-masse, though I may see one or two. I don't know how many spears he will build, as he almost certainly will know I didn't have horses during the last war since I didn't use any chariots. Whether he suspects I will have it hooked up soon or not, I have no real way to predict. I think the landform, neighbor positioning, and his picks made conflict inevitable here between us, and I really don't see how we settle down as mutual friendly neighbors and expand peacefully. It's almost certainly just a question of when the next war will kick off.

[Mjmd]

That new city reminds me of PB62 where Nauf would settle an intrusive city. I would give him peace and then he would immediately resettle it. I somewhat blame myself for not warning you, but at the time I thought peace made sense and that city has to be costing him an arm and a leg.

Speaking of which, Aetryn shared demos with me where he was 2nd in GNP....... Showing a lot of other people are also very broke. Again, some of this may be distance maintenance. Another factor is this map seems to be missing one of the crucial econ early game stepping stones I SPECIFICALLY requested. ISLANDS. Not sure how that lack made it past the lurker board of review (unless there is one way up there in the fog, but Greenlines sea is too tiny to have it looks like). Trade is also very hard due to distance. From Aetryns standpoint the only person who will probably trade with him is Bing. Greenline will only do it to scout. I doubt Xist will, but might try eventually.

Aetryn had mentioned going for Colossus and I had expressed my doubts due to the CRAWL to currency this map is going to be. However, yesterday I gave this some thought and expressed to Aetryn I think he should go for MC first. The tile boost from the wonder alone is going to be a 9-10c. I figure mint happy boost somewhere around 12c (6 cities x a conservative average of two commerce; note this in short term) and the mint 10% bonus is conservatively probably going to be around 4c. That is at least 25 commerce per turn return, which beats the HECK out of currencies measly 1c per route for a long time (again due to map circumstances). Now currency also opens up markets which is also a +1 happy and the market boost itself. However, MC is about half the beaker cost of going the currency route, which is a big deal. Get forges for the trouble which will be nice and the GP points aren't nothing. Also, then get to follow the other players up that part of the tree with some nice ktbs.

I know Aetryn has talked about building libraries with writing, but when you are only teching 1/10 turns they aren't a good hammer investment.

If don't end up needing masonry I think MC should be tech first.

[aetryn]

T77-80 Taking to the sea

Our new vessel is ready, and the settlers get on board eager to find a new life far away from Roman borders.




Meanwhile, scouts in the west find new silken luxuries for some time when the game is already long decided when I might have Calendar:




And somehow, my terrible economy barely breaking even at 0 science is rated 2nd:




These were turns of recovery and preparation. Hope, in the north, has whipped its lighthouse but needs to regrow a couple population before it really takes off. This will eventually make my economy somewhat healthy again. I hope. Faith is working on a lighthouse it will whip in a few turns, and that will help that city bring in some commerce as well. Meanwhile, the capital is growing into unhappiness, but maybe we use those people to build a Mint in a hurry at some point. Patience is doing nothing but building units as my one city with a Barracks and a very strong production base. Diligence finished a worker, and Prudence and Fortitude aren't really doing anything except growing and working decent tiles.

[aetryn]

T81-83: The lull continues

Positioning troops in case war breaks out again when the peace treaty runs out:




Commerce beginning to tick up in the north. I'm up to 10 gold per turn!




And we settle our new fishing village in the west:




Justice is the virtue of giving to every person (at least) the good he or she is due. This is somewhat different than the word tends to be used in everyday life, where it most often applies to enforcement of the law against criminals. Indeed, you could say that in a sense this is a kind of justice, giving to the innocent members of society the good - the freedom to live their lives without the harm that crime causes - that they are due. But justice shouldn't be seen in a negative sense - giving someone else the bad thing they are due from their bad behavior. And in general the principle in most modern societies is only to treat criminally behavior that does harm society as a whole. Justice can often be though of as conflicting with mercy, but from the definition I give you can see that it does not, or does so very rarely. I am always free to give more good than they are due, even if they are due none. Since justice does NOT say to give to people the bad that they are due, I do not violate justice by giving them something better. The kindly employer can pay the people that work an hour or two the same as the people who work all day if he has the money and wants to! This is especially true with things like love and forgiveness which cannot be exhausted. If I gave an addict friend my life savings he wasn't due and so deprived my wife or children of things they were due, like a stable home, that would not be justice because I have not given to my family the good it was due. But I am always free to give an addict friend a listening ear, or love, or forgiveness, because I can never use those up and not have enough left over to give to others. There's no particular reason in-game why this city should be named Justice, but it's one of the Cardinal (pivotal) Virtues and I wanted to name a city after it. I suppose I could say these are refugees who lost their homes and livelihoods in the first Roman war, and I'm giving them the good of a peaceful place to live far away from the front lines. Well, at least for now.


As for this upcoming expiration of peace, I'm... really not enthusiastic about going back to war. I should attack the new city southwest of Patience while it doesn't have cultural defenses, and is pretty far from his main production base, and while I have the production and indeed the troop advantage. And yet I'm really reluctant to actually start round 2. I'll explore that in a subsequent post.

[aetryn]

Thoughts on War

Civ 4 is a game, and war is a part of that game. All players that enter into a multiplayer game like this have to expect war-as-a-game-mechanism, and can't generally take war being declared on them personally (though it might be hard in a long-running game where you become attached to your board position). On the other hand, just because something is a game mechanic does not mean it cannot be used improperly. As an example, if I am playing Settlers of Catan with family and always choose to send the robber after my annoying little brother, regardless of whether he's winning or has anything I want, or whatever, that's probably NOT just part of the game and does cross the line to personal behavior. Depending on the group it may even be considered bad form to focus the robber on a clear frontrunner - it depends on the players and their values - though if, say, the frontrunner is the only one with sheep on the map it's probably acceptable to go after them because you need sheep.  In other words, the players are still people and ought to be treated with the dignity even in a competitive game, and generally when taking an action that has a negative impact on others it's probably best to have a positive reason to do it for your own game state. In Civ 4, war also has costs. It has costs to the empire, but it also has costs to the player, in that war-focused turns can be more burdensome and stressful to play, and have to be fit into a more narrow window since they usually involve turn splits. 

The first Roman war I technically declared, but it certainly felt to me that we had been in an undeclared war for many turns, and only the timely arrival of my armies from the north prevented Xist from declaring war on me twice earlier.  This felt like simply showing that, in what was already essentially a war state, I'm not necessarily going to sit passively and defend. So, while I attacked, my goals were very limited: show that I could strike back, that I could be a tough opponent, that I wasn't going to sit there and let him harass me. Wiping out the ulta-aggressive city was more a means toward and end than an actual goal. 

Obviously he hasn't been able to harass me during the peace treaty. He did settle a site I hoped to make my own right at the beginning of the peace treaty. But that city, while a bit closer to my capital than his, is very far from either of us and I wouldn't say I have a right to that spot, so I don't take the settle as evidence of malice. The more I look at the typical terrain on this map the more I tend to believe his initial aggression was partly shaped by a lack of anywhere else to settle that wasn't directly into me. Now, he may do something in the near future when the peace treaty ends that makes me think that war state has begun again (or possibly never ended) and that may change my opinion, but right now I don't have a lot of evidence showing continued war posture on his side and some indirect evidence in relatively slowly growing Power on his size against a continued war posture. That doesn't preclude me from going to war against him, but the reason would obviously be very different - defending myself/showing I wasn't going to be bullied vs. a purely offensive strike.

So let's take a look at the game state, starting with my core strategy. My chief aims are:
1) Get a fair share of territory
2) Build a strong economy
3) Adopt defensive posture
4) Get far enough ahead in tech and be sufficiently big/strong/far away to get a concession (or just tech to space, but that will never happen in a Pitboss these days).

Those plans don't directly involve conquest, so it's fair to ask what this war is doing for me, especially if it's hurting aim 2.

So let's review. My opponent settled a key location on the map that's fairly important strategically in that it contests the mouth of a large area of land that has few, if any, other land access points. I have access to that same area by water fairly easily. Controlling that location would mean virtually all that territory is "back line" to me and can't be settled by anyone else. But can it realistically be settled by my opponent anyway? Distance maintenance is killer on this map and I can already see his economy tanking just from the city he settled. I don't think he's super likely to settle northwest up in that valley. Why else is it important strategically? Well, I can't easily reach Greenline or Bing to the east (vast expanse of empty land with very rough terrain at the east edge), and this city blocks my only reasonable route west. But do I need to reach Greenline or Bing? My plan is to econ and force people to come to me and attack. If Greenline or Bing runs away with the game economically, I think I would be okay being out of position and just saying "Good job, you beat me at the econ game and I'm not playing for war this game". So while I agree the contested site is strategically quite important, I don't feel like my game is crippled without access to that spot. Importantly, I have plenty of land still to settled - I have 4 more locations I actively want to settle and probably at least another 2-3 fillers I could do. The argument is that if I don't take that city now, I won't get it any time soon. But do I need it anytime soon? It has 2 food, but so does the sheep site in the west. It has no luxuries. I especially do not really want that city right this minute - I'd like to actually repair my economy and not be running <10% science anymore. So from the standpoint of "does it make my board position better?" going to war to take that city site is okay - I wouldn't blame anyone for doing so - but I don't find it particularly compelling.

Now let's look at the proposed war from a metagame perspective. My neighbor has made aggressive picks that suggest a conquest strategy, and I'm his only neighbor, so I'm logically a target. Maybe this is a Highlander situation where there can be only one of us to go to the next round (though somehow Bing and Greenline have cooperated sufficiently over there that neither is building military much, and Bing's picks were almost as aggressive). But what I know so far is: Bing and Greenline are ahead - really quite a bit ahead - of both of us. If this was a case of one of us wiping out the other and then having the room to recover and catch up later, then maybe from a metagame perspective cutting off the enemy head is the right thing to do even if it's going to hurt short-term. But I'm not proposing nor able to fight such a war. At best this would be a "nibble" war - nibble off this city, then try to go back to peace (or at least a long stalemate while still at war). Even if I had the forces, I don't have the desire to own his southern cities - the distance maintenance would absolutely kill me.  And the two of us continuing to fight indecisive destructive wars just keeps us both down. I would hope that neither of us is taking this game personally enough that his early harassment and sniping of this spot, or my strike back would make the other party a game-long enemy. I'm under no illusions that Xist might and probably will choose impersonally to go after me because I'm the closest target. But there's some chance, especially if I let him expand out to the west where Bing and Greenline are, that he could get tangled up in things over there and decide one of them, who have been barely running any military, would make a better target. Or that he realizes that right now both of us are far back and need to stop beating on each other to try to catch up with the leaders. Because, at some point, the "I'm going to conquer my neighbor and go on to win from that snowball" has to give way to "These people on the other side of the world are running away with the game, and my early wars with my neighbor have put me far back of them, so maybe I should reconsider my overall strategy in spite of my picks". And if I'm wrong, and he comes after me in 20 turns when he's ramped up his production and has a full stack of legions? I'm willing to deal with that. I think I have a stronger economy, more food overall, and will probably be close in production. My military quality will be lower. And I may well lose. But I'd almost rather lose than spend the next 20 turns fighting a war over a city I don't really want right now perpetuating a feud with the last-placed player in the game. So, from metagame perspective, I also find war an acceptable choice, but again not really all that compelling. And that is reinforced by my desire to not be in war turns right now. They were much more stressful to play.

So I've flashed my axe stack at him, he knows it's there. He can see I have horses hooked, just as I can see he has iron (and horses) hooked, because we have a river/lake trade connection. I could move all my axes southwest to approach to the city on T84, and declare war on T85. But I'm strongly leaning toward just leaving them where they are so they are in position to go north or south if he thinks of attacking, and sending him Fish for Fish to see if maybe he's interested in some short-term cooperation.