[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[El Grillo]

is there a way to make the interface hide ginger's units so i can stalk the buildings they make here lol

I think [ctrl+B] is what you're looking for.

[ljubljana]

thanks!! in exchange for this helpful piece of information a worker has been named after u as per the traditional idiom

[aetryn]

yeah; i guess the reasons i am drawn to academy are that it seems strategically important to get as large a jump on ginger's city culture-wise as we can, which means a fast library in kirishima, and then if we're already investing in that, an academy seems more impactful than usual here given that most of our land is abysmal commerce-wise, so it's a higher effective multiplier on our total commerce than usual. but that presupposes that "better than usual" is enough to get all the way to "viable" which may not be true.

certainly it's not an either-or thing; kirishima's long-term fate is definitely to work as many cottages as feasible while maintaining +4ish food (is this right?), but the question is whether academy + culture war acceleration is worth delaying the growth of those cottages by a significant amount. "when in doubt, quantify" but i don't reeeeally know how to easily do that in this instance.... but what i can do is sim it out and compare to my "yes academy" baseline sim, which hits currency roughly t98... the competing build order in kirishima would be something like double-chopped worker -> worker makes cottages, kirishima whips granary -> THEN double-whip the library the next time it hits size 4. i do think this is the one spot we should really prioritize an early library even if we don't go for an academy, but how early we have to do so to maintain control of the plains hill that lets us see into the city is up for debate and depends on what ginger does of course

It's hard to compare because cottages time frame payoff isn't necessarily T98. It's more like T150+ when you're trying to race to Medieval techs, or beyond where you want Liberalism first or are picking up Printing Press. But by then it's too late to put cottages down - the game will likely be decided before they ever mature to towns. I think it's fine to put a library in, I'd just try to get at least a couple riverside cottages going before that.

[aetryn]

aetryn you were right



by convention this soft-commits us to, what, 10 turns of peace? also, how will we know if it's accepted? or is the standard convention for "accepting" this to just send the same offer back?

Generally it's 10t of peace + general peaceful intentions, at least for now. That generally also means no pink-dotting, no culture bombs, no sniping workers, etc. Usually people aren't really hard about the 10t thing and attack on turn 11, it's just the generally accepted "at least this long before I consider anything aggressive". To accept, you have two options. If you want it publicly known that you have peaceful relations with Ginger, you can accept. If you don't, you echo it back. Here we want to consider whether we want to startle GT by showing we have peace with our other neighbor, possibly meaning he needs to prepare more defense, or if you'd rather he NOT react. I'd lean toward keeping it secret I think, because we don't really want GT to build any more military than he's already planning to - he's not a big econ threat, so we don't need to disrupt him, and we don't want him disrupting us.

more FP down here for ginger and us to fight over, it looks like. not sure how worth prioritizing this area is given the distances involved and the badness of the intervening land though. one question is whether we would rather scout southwest next into land we might someday think about settling, or straight east to try to find ginger's other neighbor.... leaning towards the former but i can be convinced

At this point meeting other players is more important than distant settling information. We also want to confirm the location of GT. There's a possibility that instead of 5 players north and 5 south, there are 4 north, 4 south, and 1 east-and-west at the end of the continent, if it's surrounded by ocean and not continuous wrap. So Ginger might have GT as a SE neighbor rather than a S neighbor or something else like that.

[El Grillo]

Yeah, you tend to end up with the early cottages built in your core, then a bunch of boosted farms/mills/workshops in the midgame, and (if you're lucky) mature cottages captured from opponents. We've seen some players try to skip the early self-grown cottages, but it usually doesn't work out.

[ljubljana]

Generally it's 10t of peace + general peaceful intentions, at least for now. That generally also means no pink-dotting, no culture bombs, no sniping workers, etc. Usually people aren't really hard about the 10t thing and attack on turn 11, it's just the generally accepted "at least this long before I consider anything aggressive". To accept, you have two options. If you want it publicly known that you have peaceful relations with Ginger, you can accept. If you don't, you echo it back. Here we want to consider whether we want to startle GT by showing we have peace with our other neighbor, possibly meaning he needs to prepare more defense, or if you'd rather he NOT react. I'd lean toward keeping it secret I think, because we don't really want GT to build any more military than he's already planning to - he's not a big econ threat, so we don't need to disrupt him, and we don't want him disrupting us.

yeah. i agree, but i guess it's ginger's decision now. i sure hope that, if they accept, they will not try to snipe our workers, because that chariot is in position to threaten quite a few and force us to whip in mitakeumi (down to size 1!) which would be a nightmare growth curve-wise. even if they accept though i assume we'll still want to guard workers in range if they are still waving that unit around

At this point meeting other players is more important than distant settling information. We also want to confirm the location of GT. There's a possibility that instead of 5 players north and 5 south, there are 4 north, 4 south, and 1 east-and-west at the end of the continent, if it's surrounded by ocean and not continuous wrap. So Ginger might have GT as a SE neighbor rather than a S neighbor or something else like that.

agreed. i think it's highly likely that there are east-west neighbors if it's not a continuous wrap, otherwise the balance would be off with the corner positions only having one real neighbor. or, i guess, the continent could be more oval in shape and those corner positions moved towards each other to compensate....

Yeah, you tend to end up with the early cottages built in your core, then a bunch of boosted farms/mills/workshops in the midgame, and (if you're lucky) mature cottages captured from opponents. We've seen some players try to skip the early self-grown cottages, but it usually doesn't work out.

oh don't worry, there is no plan that doesn't involve mass-cottaging the river valleys, it's just a question of timing i think. the capital and second city are going to get large numbers of them as soon as mitakeumi's new food resources are done in any case

[aetryn]

Generally it's 10t of peace + general peaceful intentions, at least for now. That generally also means no pink-dotting, no culture bombs, no sniping workers, etc. Usually people aren't really hard about the 10t thing and attack on turn 11, it's just the generally accepted "at least this long before I consider anything aggressive". To accept, you have two options. If you want it publicly known that you have peaceful relations with Ginger, you can accept. If you don't, you echo it back. Here we want to consider whether we want to startle GT by showing we have peace with our other neighbor, possibly meaning he needs to prepare more defense, or if you'd rather he NOT react. I'd lean toward keeping it secret I think, because we don't really want GT to build any more military than he's already planning to - he's not a big econ threat, so we don't need to disrupt him, and we don't want him disrupting us.

yeah. i agree, but i guess it's ginger's decision now. i sure hope that, if they accept, they will not try to snipe our workers, because that chariot is in position to threaten quite a few and force us to whip in mitakeumi (down to size 1!) which would be a nightmare growth curve-wise. even if they accept though i assume we'll still want to guard workers in range if they are still waving that unit around

At this point meeting other players is more important than distant settling information. We also want to confirm the location of GT. There's a possibility that instead of 5 players north and 5 south, there are 4 north, 4 south, and 1 east-and-west at the end of the continent, if it's surrounded by ocean and not continuous wrap. So Ginger might have GT as a SE neighbor rather than a S neighbor or something else like that.

agreed. i think it's highly likely that there are east-west neighbors if it's not a continuous wrap, otherwise the balance would be off with the corner positions only having one real neighbor. or, i guess, the continent could be more oval in shape and those corner positions moved towards each other to compensate....

Yeah, you tend to end up with the early cottages built in your core, then a bunch of boosted farms/mills/workshops in the midgame, and (if you're lucky) mature cottages captured from opponents. We've seen some players try to skip the early self-grown cottages, but it usually doesn't work out.

oh don't worry, there is no plan that doesn't involve mass-cottaging the river valleys, it's just a question of timing i think. the capital and second city are going to get large numbers of them as soon as mitakeumi's new food resources are done in any case

Yeah, generally riverside grassland/flood plains is your prime cottaging land, though non-riverside grass is fine too (not that we have much of that on this map!). This map will probably require some plains cottages though just because there's so little grass and generally so little food, so some of the riverside land will have to be farms, even if just to spread irrigation to the rest of the land.

[ljubljana]

Turn Zululand



rad. ok, i take it that a) i don't need to echo this back a second time and b) we should NOT accept, because if they wanted this to be publicly known they would have accepted themselves? on that assumption i will exit diplo but ofc please correct me as needed



well, whatever it Means, their chariot is not harassing our workers so i will take it lol. this should give us the confidence we need to reroute the highlighted chariot toward the gold party



after a bit of a lull, everyone apparently completes several metal units at once.... sooo extra sentries on the GT front seem like the call lol



oh, ok, THIS is interesting. compare this to the other silver location we're eyeing in the west which is just utter garbage except for exactly the silver tile:



i am not sure how worth prioritizing the newly discovered location will be, it is really far away from the rest of our civ, arguably in the Ottoman sphere of influence, and generally would be a nightmare to defend. but i guess we should be willing to make some level of sacrifices to turn what is likely to be roughly our 8th city into something actually useful!



our brave party of weirdos is goldbound



my paranoia about worker snipes is maybe getting a liiiiittle out of hand? but of course, surely it is safer in expectation to chop these forests now than it will be in 10-20 turns...

no real decisions about kirishima library reached as of yet, but i'm working on it. hoshoryu expands borders in 2t at which point we'll stop paying a million gpt in unit supply for these worker escorts, a factor i admit i didn't really consider when i put this micro plan together.

i increasingly think we might want 1-2 more scouts so this question of defogging the SE or pushing past ginger is less either/or. not... that i'm quite sure where i'd weave them into the build orders (mita and takakeisho have pretty tight granary timings as of now) but perhaps i'll think of something in the 10-20t range



episode n+1 of a tale of two cities - ankyra has a monument. we know they don't have writing yet as SD and nauf are the only ones we can sign OB with, but i don't think it's far away given that there isn't much else they seem able to usefully research (must be sailing, i'm not sure where else their GNP could conceivably be going, unless they're the ones who missed/landed polytheism)

[aetryn]

I think you're reading the diplo right. Hopefully this should quell some of the tension in this area and they won't think we're lunatics for our initial threat.

If nothing else chariots are reasonable scouts once they are no longer needed for defensive duties (since they're pretty terrible at defense). If you don't have any time to build scouts eventually when we move on to horse-archers for our 2-move units, the chariots can take over sentry duty and the scouts can go wander.

The silver does look tasty. We can evaluate in another week or two whether it's worth a reach. I'd rather reach for silver than pink-dot GT, especially since with gold and silver we can potentially look to Forges to add even more happiness - always nice to get the luxuries that give double happiness with a building. The ones that give extra healthy are actually really nice when you hit the Industrial Era and you have all these nice buildings that tank health, but that's a VERY long way away at this point.

[Tarkeel]

is there a way to make the interface hide ginger's units so i can stalk the buildings they make here lol

You could try Bare Mode (CTRL+B) (There's a few nice ones documented here.)

by convention this soft-commits us to, what, 10 turns of peace? also, how will we know if it's accepted? or is the standard convention for "accepting" this to just send the same offer back?

That's one of the fun parts: Everybody has a different interpretation of just what this means. Some have a very strict "10t only", while my personal interpretation is "I am not currently plotting against you".

It's hard to compare because cottages time frame payoff isn't necessarily T98. It's more like T150+ when you're trying to race to Medieval techs, or beyond where you want Liberalism first or are picking up Printing Press. But by then it's too late to put cottages down - the game will likely be decided before they ever mature to towns. I think it's fine to put a library in, I'd just try to get at least a couple riverside cottages going before that.

For reference, there used to be a common wisdom of not building any cottages after T100 because they wouldn't have time to pay off. That was in an era when games were usually decided in the T150-175 timeframe though, and several games lately have gone beyond T200. Back in PB62 we cottaged more or less everything we could because costs were so high.

If nothing else chariots are reasonable scouts once they are no longer needed for defensive duties (since they're pretty terrible at defense). If you don't have any time to build scouts eventually when we move on to horse-archers for our 2-move units, the chariots can take over sentry duty and the scouts can go wander.

There's a big downside to scouting with chariots though: Because they can attack you might freak out the player you are scouting, especially in borderlands where it's possible to declare war to snipe a workerstack of undefended freshly captured city. This greatly depends on your reputation though.