[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[Commodore]

I have two coins. If I have 30c, and one of my coins isn't a nickel, how do I have 30 cents?

[ljubljana]

right, it could also be pop growth and a warrior but i think that's odd too, there are already a bunch of 10-cent spikes i'm attributing to pop growth (see: two in a row 8 turns ago), and it seems a bit late to me to still be making warriors.... especially after, again, they also have a ton of 20-cent spikes i'm attributing to what is already kind of an excess of those

unless one of your coins is the negative 10-cent whipping anti-dime

edit: wait i just realized we don't have a 20-cent coin LMAO im so good at math guys

one of my coins isn't a nickel

is the answer that the other coin is a nickel?

unrelated: starting to realize another reason CRE would have gone crazy on this map (AGG/CRE kublai especially!) is just that it could pull a bunch more chops into range at the second and third cities for a rush lol

[ljubljana]

not sure i'll wait for this before playing, but does anyone know where i can find documentation on the teleport rules? ginger and i both had a warrior on the plains hill between our cities last turn, and in testing what happened:



it looks like the declarer's unit teleports away, towards their city, and can move again that turn, but the direction of teleportation seems unpredictable...



also, what is the way for us to prevent "playing teleport games" according to the rules if neither of us wants to leave this hill tile for sentry reasons? should i leave the tile this turn if i want to attack next turn?

edit: ginger moved their warrior here



which i think is sufficient to prevent any issues since i can fortify in place and not expose us to combat worker shenanigans. but it would still be nice to know if i theoretically would be allowed to move to the forested hill if for some reason it seemed like the correct play (and it would give us the same visibility plus a higher defense bonus against this warrior if they try to attack it)

[ljubljana]

Turn 55 - Zululand

looking like Mjmd of nebu of india borders in the fog, yes?



the giant moat between them and greenline is interesting.... i guess that's one way to create a natural-ish border i am glad that we in contrast have no reason to ever really prioritize naval military techs



operation defog a route to GT is complete. next up: operation get natsuko away from here as sneakily as possible before she is eaten by some dumb unit. looks like it will be very hard to defog routes to anyone beyond GT or Ginger, though, as we'd have to be able to scout their respective internal coastal waters to be able to do so :| not sure if there is a good way around that beyond just kinda hoping they let us have open borders



not sure how wide a berth i should give ginger's units this turn given that war can be declared next turn. i could have gone SE but in the end opt to be cowardly and take the long way around, mostly because there are still some fogged tiles SE of mitakeumi that could be barely closer to us than to any other civ, while anything we'd find heading SE would be clearly Ginger's. it would kind of suck to get this scout killed now and leave them unscouted for a potentially extended period of time when there is a world in which they could contain settlement targets. plus we need to maximize our chance of eventually reaching ginger's eastern neighbor and i don't think going right by their southern border in range of possible warriors is going to accomplish that



ginger's scout was at the marked PFH last turn, so i'm guessing if they're scouting optimally they'll end up on the PFH NE of hoshoryu next turn - if they do that our chariot can eat them. if not, it depends on where we think they went.... if they're NE of the road we can easily just check there, if not we could, i guess, wait a turn for them to move onto the forest NW of the t56 plains hill and then swoop in to trap them from the south. luckily there is no way for them to step across the road and escape to the south without us knowing, so i think if we do this carefully we should be able to block them from contacting GT (again, seemingly a really really big deal to deny them the chance to coordinate an attack against us)



opted just to move the chariot up and fortify the warrior in place. we can maintain vision on the city center this way while making it unappealing for them to start roading toward us, and if their warrior moves towards Kirishima we can ice it at very good odds with our chariot. two chops coming in next turn to complete this CG2 archer i keep going on about. the main downside is that it's not clear we are 100% guaranteed to block ginger's scout getting through with just the one chariot in the west, but if worse comes to worse we could whip or chop the takakeisho chariot to complete the trap from the south. obviously i don't exactly relish doing that but keeping them from contacting GT could honestly have really high medium-term value

remind me, we know that ginger does NOT have sailing tech as of now right? because if they did we'd be able to swap resources (given that it is pretty vanishingly unlikely that they don't have enough of their north defogged to give a route to kirishima)

as for what i DO relish doing



More Workers More Chops!!!!!

mita worker looks weird but the point is the borders will expand just in time to get full credit for the chops in the SE if we go there immediately after producing it. and yall know how i feel about leaving chops unexploited for even a single turn lol. these two workers will take us to 8 which is normal for this stage of the game

then after that mita needs.... well....... another worker for the wheat I KNOW don't @ me

capital maaaaay chop the chariot to completion to strengthen our scout trap and give an escort for the south (actually leaning towards this as of now) but otherwise i think the settler for the gold may actually be our next most urgent priority (!!!)

edit: since we moved after ginger this turn, the rules are that we must wait to move after them next turn as well if we intend to declare war, yes? otherwise that would be "double-moving into war"? if so, is that also true if there is a significant but not certain chance we will declare war?

[aetryn]

Denying Ginger contact with GT is at most a short-term benefit. Eventually he'll get a work boat out of a coastal city and use it to scout and there's virtually no way we'll have enough culture on our north coast to block him given we have not prioritized it and it seems dubious prior to Calendar. It also requires us to never give him OB, which may be something we want to do anyway. I'd probably just let him by unless you think we're going to face a 2-on-1 in the next 25 turns or so, as I think the diplo hit of killing his scout isn't worth the short delay of him getting contact with GT.

I agree with Ginger probably not having Sailing yet, as it's not going to be a high priority tech until the need for OB trade routes to prop up the economy becomes evident - we're getting to that point but it's really in the 5-6 city range that the economy starts to strain. Does BUG tell you anyone has it? Or do you not have Fishing researched and you can't tell?

What's the plan for cottaging? Are we too happy-starved to even work them for a bit? Anywhere we can get them started will help us in the long run as they mature.

[ljubljana]

cottage plan is roughly: once the workers finish the essential chopping and roading to new cities i will spam them down on every available river grass. the happy cap is not quite so constrained that we can't work any at all... most cities can grow on 1-2 and it will get better once we get the gold (and sims suggest we should prioritize the otherwise garbage silver site, and maybe sailing tech to swap luxes with GT, for a similar reason). possible exception at kirishima where i still want to whip/chop a library as soon as writing tech comes in (to maintain culture lead vs ankyra) into early academy at the capital - thoughts/feelings on that idea?

re sailing: i do not have fishing research and can't tell ehehe

re culture on the north coast: actually i disagree - the only other actual food resources we have revealed that are not clearly in ginger's sphere of influence are the two fish along this coast. especially the spot NW of kirishima which has a fish first-ring seems like we'll want to settle it pretty soon, given that the city is strong enough to whip some of its own settlers and there is nowhere else compelling nearby for them to go. that could be in time to block the work boat, esp since they shouldn't even anticipate needing it yet. and re open borders..... since we are protective, i think preventing contact with GT is a pretty good reason NOT to give it to them, especially since our culture will let us see into their border city anyways distances are so large on this map that if they don't make contact with that scout (or a work boat as you've said) it could be ages until they're able to - if we manage to delay contact into the knights era (implausible sounding i know but i think it could happen!) that would be a major return on investment imo

[Tarkeel]

does anyone know where i can find documentation on the teleport rules?

It is dark magic. Firstly you need to know there are several different ways that teleportation might be triggered: border expansion, illegal tile-placement, and declaration of war. We're mostly concerned with the latter, and it is as you say the one who declares war that is moved away. This has some interesting interactions with how Defensive Pacts (later in the game) are implemented, and in particular units that can enter borders (caravels). For the nitty-gritty details, Charriu (as always) has the answer, but the gist is this: the teleported unit is moved towards the closest legal plot with a preference for moving towards your closest city, with ties broken by closeness to the origo (0,0) plot.

also, what is the way for us to prevent "playing teleport games" according to the rules if neither of us wants to leave this hill tile for sentry reasons? should i leave the tile this turn if i want to attack next turn?

I actually have a huge issue with this rule, namely that it isn't defined what "teleport games" are. Mjmd considers parking your unit on the same tile as your opponent as playing games, while I consider it an integral part of playing defense in a simultaneous move game.

looks like it will be very hard to defog routes to anyone beyond GT or Ginger, though, as we'd have to be able to scout their respective internal coastal waters to be able to do so :| not sure if there is a good way around that beyond just kinda hoping they let us have open borders

Once the map starts filling up and the coastal tiles are covered by culture, you don't need to unfog them. You only need vision on the tiles that are uncultured, as long as you're not at war with GT that is.

[williams482]

I don't think killing the scout should be a priority at all here, certainly not one worth spending a chop on a chariot instead of econ. In tandem with demanding that city earlier, parking a sentry on the border, and being AGG/PRO Zulu, killing their scout says pretty plainly that you do not want peaceful relations. If that will be interpreted as a clumsy prelude to invasion or an attempt to intimidate them into not interfering with your expansion is an open question, but there's a good chance the answer to either will be a significant step up in military investment, which you will have to match or risk being successfully invaded. We don't want that.

Certainly researching Archery and building an archer isn't going to come across a particularly compelling evidence of peaceful intentions in this scenario. It may even suggest that you're going for an early HA play.

If we were going to cripple their ability to build metal units and slowly strangle them that way, or blitz them with chariots and Impis, then killing the scout makes sense to prevent a near-term 2v1. But we've decided both of those plans are impractical and we'd rather try to look as spiky as possible while signaling peaceful intentions and expanding as efficiently as possible without being attacked. Killing the scout will be detrimental to our peaceful expansion.

[ljubljana]

ginger has appeared with 2 chariots at kirishima



the scout kill is otherwise free though



but let me think this through, we might be in trouble if they just run at kirishima. going to have to whip or chop overflow into more units i think

considering a warpeace + kill the scout.... that signals peaceful intentions in the next 10t at least. and i know it's scary to poke them but it's not like they can't already decide to come at us if they feel like it's in their interest.... and killing the scout provides a real strategic benefit in not just the short term but potentially the medium term, it sounds from my reading like the number one way people die in these games is getting dogpiled and divided by both their neighbors, and the longer we can prevent that from even being a possibility, the better, right?

idk about archery being read as aggressive though, archers are suuuuper defensive units. like they're not really any asset to an attack stack at all right? and the point is to pre-emptively promote it CG2 so they KNOW we can't really use it on offense at all

[williams482]

I'll just say that in Ginger's shoes, if you warpeaced me while killing a scout, after demanding a city while I was looking to settle a critical resource which happened to be on your border, I'd be pretty ticked off. Neither researching Archery nor building a CG2 archer won't do much to cool me off, I'd see the CG2 promotion as making sure that if I attacked you first your defender would be fully prepared.

You're trying to walk a very narrow line by forcing your will on Ginger without doing any real damage or actually building up the military power to make a compelling threat, and hoping you don't get called on it. There's a lot of ways this spirals very badly for you. I don't like it.

If you want to be vaguely threatening but preserve an opportunity to signal peaceful intentions, move your chariot 1W of their scout. If they've been tracking the chariot at all they'll know that you could have killed their scout; they'll also know that pushing forward will give you another opportunity. Either they back off to protect their scout, or they give you an opportunity to pass on killing their scout, which would be obviously silly if you actually wanted to fight them.