this + try for hanging gardens in the dumbass silver city if we steal the stone, or right here in kirishima which pulls in a bunch of third-ring chops right as math tech comes in
What were you trying to illustrate with your last screenshot?
I fully support building Impis. The danger unit soon will be Horse Archers, so having units that can defend against them is good in case our neighbors get agitated. Build more than just one per city - we should probably have 2-3 in the Ginger city alongside the archer to just head off any desires to attack us before Catapults.
As for the plant, some thoughts:
It looks over his side of the midway line, and while he may not yet know where our capital is, we have to assume he will eventually. Some people are irrationally triggered by this, even if they ignore a spot for ages in favor of other expansion. I'm not saying avoid it for this reason, I'm just pointing out there's some possibility of a vendetta-for-taking-my-spot war. My personal feelings are that you eventually lose claim to territory you haven't settled or at least surrounded by your borders. If I left a first ring expansion vacant to go off and settle up on someone else and still hadn't settled it 100 turns into the game, I kind of feel like it's my fault if I haven't taken it by then. This is a second ring spot and so ought to have even less protection. But it doesn't matter what I think here so much as what GT thinks.
We look REALLY stretched out. We're going to struggle to defend this territory effectively until Engineering, and even then it will be a challenge. I'm not sure if the extra spot, as good as it is, is worth adding to that.
Given our earlier mixed messages with Ginger, I'm not entirely sanguine about making both our neighbors irritated with us, especially given the difficulty with defending the widely spread cities if both attack us. Strategically, I'd rather let GT think we're nice friendly people right up until the moment we declare war. Again, not sure that's decisive, just something to think about.
Do we have any non-awful options that lead to a more contiguous empire? Also, have we thought about which cities will specialize in hammers vs commerce?
re the last screenshot: instead of getting all cute with a capital academy, maybe the play with the Kirishima Great Scientist is, um....just to bulb Mathematics. It would hit sometime in the t91 range, and could give us a shot at the Hanging Gardens if we do plant on GT's stone. It would also give us, like, a turn 96 Currency even if we're badly overexpanded, which is the furthest up the "currency time * number of cities when we get there" expansion curve that I've managed to push any of these plans. Kirishima's borders hit third ring at right around the same time to bring several chops in range, and would be a strong candidate for building the HG...or we could get a ton of failgold from missing the wonder, which might be even better as at that point we could be in the driver's seat for the Code of Laws religion and just generally in position to jump really far up the Classical tech tree. Of course, that's leaving aside the question of whether the HG is even worth its 280 effective hammer production cost (with stone, but also counting the aqueduct). We'd be getting it on roughly 12 cities, but most of them will have granaries and so will gain less than 20 effective food, for a less than 1 to 1 hammer to food conversion rate, though if we then immediately whip it all away maybe the hammers-to-hammers rate is higher than 1 to 1... I'm aware that building the HG with a bunch of cities is pretty much considered a power play, but to be honest I've never felt like I fully understand how that follows from the math involved?
re the plant: it is definitely over the midway line. Well, the city itself is ON the midway line but the pigs we would be grabbing are 2 tiles into GT's territory. I am pretty confident GT regards the pigs as "theirs" and, even though we've had a city right next door for ages and they have kind of unconscionably delayed settling the spot, I do think they'll be pretty pissed and start looking for ways to hurt us. The question is, what can they really DO about it.... behind a river, with walls, and stacked full of Protective archers and shock axes, it's hard to envision a way for them to efficiently crack it before catapults, and if they wait for catapults, we are highly likely to beat them to Construction tech and once both sides have cats I'm told it is almost impossible to attack efficiently. They could enlist Ginger to come at us too, but they'd face the same problem at Kirishima. Which is not to say it wouldn't ruin our game for them both to declare on us simultaneously and whip/chop out as many troops as possible to come kill us with, but the gamble would be that it would be sufficiently inefficient to do so that GT would have to swallow their pride and let it stand, or that GT would attack but not get Ginger to sign on and therefore fail to meaningfully hurt us. I mean, say you're Ginger and GT came to you right now proposing war against us - would YOU say yes? Even if we can't trust the person we're pissing off to behave rationally, I feel like at least Ginger will (and if it IS a winning move for them to both whip up as many troops as possible and attack us right now, well, why aren't they doing so already? and why aren't WE whipping troops ourselves and proposing a joint attack on GT with Naufragar?)
We are absolutely super stretched out though.... I am pretty much relying on our trait combo, and the 2 movement of our soon-to-be giant pile of Impis, to carry us through this era. I guess it has done so thus far (if Ginger was going to attack Kirishima they just passed up the best chance they'll get until catapults) but settling in GT's face would definitely test that. On the other hand....the win condition for us in a 10-player game sort of IS for us to leverage AGG/PRO to secure more land than we really deserve, and then ride that to a conquest down the road. Maybe we have already done that by establishing our borders at Hoshoryu and Kirishima so early, and settling one more city length toward GT would be taking it too far.... or maybe it would be worth gambling to secure a fifth very strong site for ourselves and seriously weaken the rival we are most likely to someday conquer. In such a large game, I tend to favor gambling as long as the odds of holding are reasonable...but yeah, whether they ARE reasonable is an open question.
We do have other options, but whether they are non-awful is a matter of debate lol. The favorite would be the fish + horse spot 3 tiles north of Hoshoryu, but it's super backlines, only adds 5 of its own land tiles, and would have to cannibalize Hoshoryu's cow for a long period of time to contribute anything useful. There is the silver spot in the southwest, but that's even further from the rest of our empire than the proposed plant and the city itself is garbage save the silver itself and coming with a decent number of chops. As for something defensive to help stitch our territory together, well, I certainly agree on the need for this, but here is what the region between Hoshoryu and Takakeisho looks like:
We could, in the interest of safety, settle extremely cannibalistic spots in this region that steal, eg, the Horshoryu wheat or the Takakeisho wheat, but as far as snowball plays go, they look horrendous and are probably better delayed until we are literally out of other options... We could also settle the midway spot between Tobizaru and the capital:
but while I do plan to do so in the reasonably near future, this spot is also crappy and contributes even less than the fish + horse spot. I was thinking maybe we can grab this spot with a whipped settler in Mitakeumi soonish, and have Hoshoryu produce its own settlers for the spots nearby in the interest of cutting down on travel time?
What city eventually claims the silk? Is that one of the filler spots you are talking about? We don't need to settle silks this second but we don't want to invalidate settling them either. Might be good to dotmap if you can - you can either use Paint on a screenshot and put the dots on that way, or you can just use in-game signs on the spots you mean, but those are much harder to read. Otherwise it's quite hard for me to get a sense of what the overall settling pattern looks like.
yeahhh the silk spot is horrendous as well, with no food within a million miles except the sheep at kotozakura which we'd be cannibalizing. i figure we'll settle it (on the northern coast) when we get calendar and uh probably not one second earlier lol. i will whip up a dotmap at some point when i'm not on a train ehehe......
re this plant idea: the plan would be basically finish settler next turn -> 1t on ikhanda -> 1t into axe as we grow to size 5 -> double whip axe -> overlow into ikhanda -> overflow into impi. but i have to check that that doesn't lose to GT throwing their spear and axe at us literally the second we settle and also having like a chariot coincidentally in the area. probably i'd move our scout back eastwards to assess things before committing (and to its certain death if they immediately come for us)
guys, i'm going to need to be talked out of trying to make a play for GT's pigs....
2t after founding, we can have up to an archer, 2 chariots, and an impi in the city plus whatever Hoshoryu chops out. We could start chopping walls immediately and finish in 3t if it looks like we'll be threatened. i am very tempted to play the "we're tokugawa of zulu, this is what are traits DO" card here....
i COULD still be talked out of this if yall think the risks are too high. but as someone who sees people pinkdot frequently on this forum, and it sometimes working out for them, clearly it CAN be a good move in the RB meta, and i'm not sure what more favorable circumstances for it look like (other than the geographical extensiveness of our empire and unknowables about GT's personality). definitely call me out on it if i'm rationalizing here but i am really tempted.
ok, but.... there IS a midground option of course, which is this: wait until we have more military actually in theater rather than needing to be whipped out, send this settler north to the fish spot, and attempt to pinkdot with the NEXT settler out of Hoshoryu which we could triple-whip. that might be more rational (and is certainly less hotheaded), but i think there's a good chance the spot is gone by then...given the land quality we've seen so far, it's hard to imagine they have many spots left more worthy of prioritizing than this... but if people want to argue for that i will listen (and probably cave as per usual if aetryn and williams are both opposed, as per my general sense that we should mostly be governed oligarchically here)
for reference, here are the rough timings of the "guys let's be chill" plan
but like, this just seems way too slow right? even if we DO get here first they'll certainly have a settler in production and heading this way, and i think are more likely to be game-ruiningly enraged at us if we pinkdot if we steal their current settling project than if it's just after they settled twice and they have presumably not committed as many resources to the spot...
either way maybe i should log back in and resend ginger cow for cow, it's been about 10 turns and we'd like SOME kind of reassurance from them before we shift troops to this area. i could even add "war with GT" on our side and "war with dreylin" on theirs to make it clear i want to demilitarize and focus on our other neighbors (and that i am planning to piss off GT in some way in the near future)...? or does that carry the risk of them thinking we're planning an ACTUAL war?
I think the message to Ginger is fine. He may or may not go along with our suggestion, of course, but I think he would understand the message.
I'm not sure what to make of this map. It's so spread out that reaching for territory seems like something that has to be done, and yet I'm not sure that we want a war with GT, whose leader is surely best early (though not his civ, I guess). Question of how much you think you can get away with, I guess?
yeah. i'm quite curious about how many of the others adopted our approach here - naufragar in particular has NOT done so, and has seemingly done the equivalent of us dividing the Mitakeumi, Kirishima, and Horshoryu spots into two cities, each with one food resource. We could have done that too, ofc, but it felt way weaker from a landgrab and snowball perspective.... if we are going to reap rewarda from having more food per city than average, i guess now is when they'd start to manifest as we finally have all our borders popped and granaries up and the extra food actually online. if we are the only non-PHI with an early great person and have also outexpanded the non-IMPs in 20 turns, i think that will be a good sign for our approach..... and if we are dead, maybe that's a sign that it was too greedy
yeah... pinkdotting GT is surely only rational if it does not produce a war, the question is how likely is it to do so... I think rational play from GT in present circumstances pre-pinkdot would go something like this:
1. i am behind on expansion with no obvious way to catch up
2. i have no economic traits to allow me to compete with less land
3. therefore, my path to win runs through partitioning a neighbor
4. i won't be early to catapults because of reasons 1 and 2, therefore the best window to attack is either spears/axes or horse archers
5. therefore, the best plan is to expand to all the strong city sites i have and then IMMEDIATELY start building up to initiate a 2v1 against a neighbor
if this is where their thinking is, i guess the question is, how likely is us taking their spot to make them come for us when they wouldn't have otherwise? it would shorten the distances involved, but so too would THEM taking the spot and that's definitely going to happen before they'd be ready to hit us. it would accerate the timetable since there's one less expansion spot for them to fill first, but whether that makes us a more likely target in and of itself is hard to say. and there is the rage factor, which is reasonably likely but hard to predict and makes me wanna go stalk GT's past threads.
but i'm not sure it changes the question of whether we are fundamentally the RIGHT target. they apparently have two choices, Zululand which is closer and has a less experienced pilot but with a civ and traits heavily geared towards fighting, or America which is further but with economic traits. Either way, they probably NEED external intervention for this to work, which also favors us in expectation as we have friendly relations with Ginger and they have less reason to be so desperate for territory that they'd risk splatting into shock axes behind walls from Tokugawa of Zulu. Other than the rage factor, I don't think it changes the fundamentals too much - the plant is pretty defensble geographically, and if we don't think their standing border units (which appear to be one axe and one spear) can kill it, they'd have to build up before attacking and give us time to reinforce, and bu that point it hardly matters whether Horshoryu or this new plant is the city they end up targeting (maybe the new plant is even better as it gives us "crumple zone" and frees us from having to defend AT our best non-capital city).
If so, the decisive factor would be how rage-driven they are.... from the perspective of winning THIS game, it doesn't seem rational to be rage-driven, but if you seee RB civ games generally as one big iterated game, it could be rational as it will help establish a Superdeath-like (or TheArchduke-like) reputation as one who is not to be fucked with and will sacrifice individual games just to punish forward-settles. If I were GT, and I was planning an attack and thought the choice of target was a close call, and my odds of winning this game looked like a long-shot anyways... yeah, i think getting forward-settled just might change my all-in target to Zululand.
(Note to interested lurkers, this is more or less MY philosophy for responding to things like this, and I'm aware that at some point in the nearish future I will have to sacrifice a few of my own games to establish that )
But there are a LOT of assumptions that go into conclusions that depend on them adopting my own (generally kind of unhinged) logical framework. Probably the truth is that emotional element of the rage factor is most likely to be decisive, and either they have it or (PBEM74 spoilers)
they don't, apparently like PB74 Bing who Commodore wrung enormous advantage out of forward-settling and who never attacked, even though it was equally true vs Commodore's Darius that if they were going to punish it, ASAP was the right time to do so. Bing was indeed eventually outscaled and solo-conquered in large part due to the advantage from the pinkdot (not just economic advantage but tactical as well, it ended up absolutely ruining the defensibility of their empire), as we are trying to do here
Bing's immediate reaction to the forward settle was
(October 18th, 2023, 19:32)BING_XI_LAO Wrote: That Commodore forward settle is a real loss for me. But he has it mostly roaded already, it's on a hill, and he's a good player, so I won't try to axe rush it, though I might move an axe there to bait him into upgrading or whipping, maybe.
Instead my reaction will be to settle around it including via sailing on the nearby island. If I ever get that city, it won't be before catapults.
which is pretty much the best-case scenario for us
edit: more PB74 spoilers, but VERY topical and important ones
GT was forward-settled even more closely than this would be in their previous game and barely batted an eye
then later THEY forward settled scooter and got their game torpedoed because of it.... i do not think this is a player who thinks forward-settling is some tiltingly offensive taboo
edit2: sending Gengar my first substantive attempt at "AI Diplomacy"
guessing their response will be something like cow for cow, war with GT from us, but no war on their side, indicating that they don't want to attack dreylin now but won't intervene if we get into it with GT :fingerscrossed:
I can't read your PB74 spoilers (I'm dedlurking Pin in that game). And I'm mostly a technical advisor anyway, I don't have a particular read on GT to share, so you'll have to go with what you think I guess. I do like the point about a crumple zone if we think GT is probably attacking us at some point anyway.
I guess the only point I would offer (not sure whether this is for or against, really) is that GT's civ has late advantages (non-expiring Monument for pairing with CHA, Musket) that he hasn't gotten to leverage, so maybe he isn't as committed to early rush? Honestly, I find the combination of his leader and civ a bit perplexing. It's not terrible to combine early advantages with late advantages so you can not be weak anywhere, but ideally if you're doing that your early advantage should contribute to econ more than AGG/CHA. CHA isn't terrible - the extra 2 working pop on a map this luxury poor is surprisingly decent, and cheap monuments when the resources are spread out isn't as good as CRE but it's a darn sight better than nothing - but AGG is just a miserable thing to combine it with if you wanted to actually get to Muskets quickly - take ORG or PRO or FIN or even EXP/IMP for faster landgrab. The more I see of this map the more convinced I am that AGG for everyone else is a mistake, and possibly for us too, though at least we want Barracks everywhere and that trait makes them cheap, so we're getting SOMETHING out of it early.
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