on the walk to lunar new year party i soured on this a bit, i think it's too short-termist. we reeeeally want 2 workers in place at 3/4 at founding to improve food then chop monument -> granary. that t50 is nice but if 4 has to whip yhe damn monument that acceleration will end up pretty illusory. idk i'll sim more later gotta have fun
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[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy
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Turn 37 - Zululand
....sorry guys:  we're still getting our third city on turn 43 as i said, and this significantly cuts down the window of vulnerability at NW city since we can get out a chariot from city 2 around the same time as the settler. might not be correct but i really do think it is. it will be reeeally nice to get to chop out monument and granary immediately at cities 3 and 4 in addition to hooking up the food as quickly as is practicable ok, i will admit i am just the tiniest bit jealous of this:  i believe this is GT's intended copper... it is about as far as their capital as our floodplains plant would be and, maybe just a bit??? ever so slightly better?? in terms of city quality  i am a little surprised GT hasn't settled here already tbh, and am a bit worried my scout will soon run into a settler + warrior escort and get devoured. either way, this is an obvious first 3 plant for them at the very least, so our borders might end up close together in a hurryGT got 3k military power this turn, not from a tech. i am guessing pop and a third warrior? (February 10th, 2024, 13:52)ljubljana Wrote: according to the article tarkeel linked, chariots give the same soldier count as an impi. so if i were in the fog contemplating an attack, surely i'd read zulus + rush BW + 2000 power spike as implying we built some impis and are therefore unrushable, not as us faking having metal hooked up by making chariots You need to read the BTS numbers: Chariots, Impis and spears are all 4K, while axes are 6k. I know this very well since SD in PB62 built pairs of chariots disguised as Praetorians, one of the few 8K units. (February 10th, 2024, 17:08)ljubljana Wrote: hmm.... with this choice of second city, the capital doesn't have a tile to grow onto, the second city needs the cow to grow onto the horse (i at least feel pretty sure that slow-building monument at size 1 working just the horse is not the play). It doesn't need a tile to grow onto if you whip it 
Warriors do get a 25% bonus when defending in a city, so a wandering warrior will not have very good odds (~25%?) to take a city even without a fortification bonus in play. If GT will take that chance depends on their playstyle, which I know nothing about, but the downside risk of dragging us into an ancient era war which will likely render both of us irrelevant is considerable.
As for your sims producing an unconventional micro plan - cool! You've clearly considered and tested a bunch of different options here, and you definitely shouldn't be dissuaded purely because what you've found works best in this situation is highly unconventional. Breaking from convention can absolutely play to your advantage if you have good reasons, which you do. Trust in your sims; they are going to tell you far more about this game's circumstances than generalized rules of thumb.
@tarkeel hmm, is whipping the capital worth it before the granary though? size 4 - 3 whip is 26 food for 30 hammers > 1:1, but in exchange the city has to put 6 turns into producing what i think is a suboptimal unit from a snowball perspective. for this capital, making 8 hammers/turn, that's a lot of hammers to not go into settlers...
@williams oh i totally forgot about the warrior defense bonus - ok, that does make me feel better. even with this slower fourth city plan, the third city will be relying on the second city warrior defending across a river for some time. and re conventions, i fear some of thrawn's contrarianism has rubbed off on me without the same depth of insight that justifies it in that case but we'll seeeePB74 spoilers
we've hit the stage of this game (as with all civ games i play in) where i've started having stress dreams about it.....
last night i dreamed that a) amicalola was in this game in GT's position and b) they showed up with 2 axes and a spear at fourth city on turn 50 edit: to be clear these are GOOD stress dreams because i'm having fun (not like the thrawn stress dreams)
February 11th, 2024, 19:27
(This post was last modified: February 11th, 2024, 20:32 by ljubljana.)
Turn 38 - Zululand
 GT has a copper + pig + wheat second city site, and apparently has something in the fog that's better by enough that they didn't even choose to settle it first! or perhaps they didn't want to settle toward us bc agg zulu scawwy. either way i look forward to incorporating it into zululand sometime in the next hundred turns our scout will have to turn back soon to do sentry duty against potential GT warriors. not sure HOW soon per se, but one of our workers is about to start roading towards c4 and i think we'd better not send they out completely unescorted. esp because they have to step on a forest which means we can't turn back if a GT warrior turns out to be there  anotherrrrrrr i'm at a superb owl party so i'll analyze him l8r. CHA/ORG of babylon, which i guess will take advantage of half-cost gardens on top of org's general goodness. not too convinced about babs as a civ though, and even if i were surely there are not many maps where a 1-move archer UU has lower expected value than this one... @keisho  we will belatedly join the 2-city club next turn, then will follow this 2-turn worker with a 2-turn settler (completing exactly to the penny with 100/100 hammers on the second turn), as per our completely normal opening.
February 12th, 2024, 12:25
(This post was last modified: February 12th, 2024, 12:36 by ljubljana.)
Turn 39 - Zululand
lol wtf:  this is in the east this time! dreylin where ARE you  Some GT warrior is wandering over in our general direction :| I am going to transition our scout to shadowing it until we have a chariot at the fourth city site. Will try to remain out of sight when possible, and may change my mind if it starts clearly scouting or if, upon doing the math, I discover that it doesn't have time to reach us quickly enough. But I sort of feel like GT would only be bothering to build these things if they have some interest in choking out neighbors... I may need to use the eastern scout to look for warriors around the third city settler's path too.... odds are low but i'm not too thrilled about sending anyone out comPLETEly unescorted. although i might have had this thought too late to execute on it as we only have 2 turns before the settler comes out... oh and   we're on a mission from cod too (it is traditional to have a photoshoot taken in which you hold up enormous fish when promoted to the rank of ozeki)
Both GT and Dreylin (for different reasons) are relatively new to Close To Home which changed everyone's starting unit to a scout, and may not have imbibed the meta that warriors generally aren't needed for early defense unless someone else starts building up first. They also may not have given sufficient thought to how much scouting's going to be needed on this map. I'd be cautious with them, because they may not have the same opinion that many regulars here do on early aggression, so I think screening GT's warrior is the right call. I wouldn't be surprised if he sends a couple early units to test you - apparently this is a thing in the German forum that he comes from, at least according to Xist. Still, I'd rather have unpredictable, non-meta neighbors than Gavagai or Superdeath.
February 12th, 2024, 12:46
(This post was last modified: February 12th, 2024, 12:47 by ljubljana.)
is "the same opinion that many regulars here do on early aggression" that it's mostly not worthwhile?
yeah, i agree that this is mostly good neighbor luck (if dreylin even IS one of our neighbors...). especially GT looks like a potential midgame eating target, i am not sure how boudica is going to keep up with us in expansion/economy (both PRO and ikhandas are about to really start coming in clutch to forestall economic collapse) and suspect we're likely to get a window of tech advantage over them around knights or (G2) muskets. if GT is sending units to test us, they seem to be just warriors so far (unless i'm misreading their recent 300 milpower increase as pop + warrior when it's actually a whipped chariot). but yeah, much though i really don't want to do this, i'm starting to make eyes at archery tech again looking for a way to road up to the fourth city site that does NOT end up stranding our worker on a forest with fogged tiles in range that could contain GT warriors. i think there's a path that will do it but we also need to road the wheat tile to hook up ivory which complicates things. i also think the third city settler has to be exposed to sniping for a turn in the NE to get our third city up on turn 43 as desired. but really there's no way around that and given that dreylin of "scouting our way with actual scouts" seems most likely to be there i'm not quite as worried about it |
