[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

yeah... one nice feature of this "bulb math" plan is that it is pretty generous about how much we can expand before needing to pause like that - we bulb math t91, then currency is like a 5-turn research at 100% science, so as long as we save enough for 5 turns of research beforehand we should be ok....

i'm a little bemused about, like, what we should be actually building between now and then lol. troops are fine up to a point but are going to get diminishing returns pretty soon if we can avoid a GT war. ikhandas will take 30 seconds per city. workers i do think we need, like, 2 or 3 more of but probably not more than that. i guess that leaves libraries, which i've always thought of as kinda weak in general, and making settlers but lesving them sitting around while we wait for the economy to recover. well, maybe if libraries are all we've got then they aren't so weak after all?

[aetryn]

yeah... one nice feature of this "bulb math" plan is that it is pretty generous about how much we can expand before needing to pause like that - we bulb math t91, then currency is like a 5-turn research at 100% science, so as long as we save enough for 5 turns of research beforehand we should be ok....

i'm a little bemused about, like, what we should be actually building between now and then lol. troops are fine up to a point but are going to get diminishing returns pretty soon if we can avoid a GT war. ikhandas will take 30 seconds per city. workers i do think we need, like, 2 or 3 more of but probably not more than that. i guess that leaves libraries, which i've always thought of as kinda weak in general, and making settlers but lesving them sitting around while we wait for the economy to recover. well, maybe if libraries are all we've got then they aren't so weak after all?

More or less. Unless you have a religion (in which case you have temples, monasteries, and missionaries to build), I usually find there's a bit of a lull in production before you hit the Classical techs (after which you will almost never face this problem again, as buildings start to become more frequent and also very expensive). Any city that's going to have riverside cottages should probably get a library. I'd build 2-3 Impis for every border city + 1 each to garrison the new cities you found when Currency lands, and of course you need the settlers. You can keep them in your borders to avoid roaming charges until you're about to discover Currency.

Your plan for Great People then is:
1st one bulbs Math?
Second starts a Golden Age? What's the timeframe on that? We want to have Monarchy and ideally Feudalism by then (and if we are aiming at a religion, we want the religion too).

Who has the religions? Do we have OB with any of them? It's not fun to feed them money via shrine but ultimately we want a state religion and if we get someone else's we don't have to race to found our own. Though shrine income is going to be pretty decent on a not-lush map.

[ljubljana]

i am still not completely sure on whether we bulb math or go for an academy with the GS. but probably the former, both to smooth the way to currency and to make a hanging gardens try. as for subsequent GP, the next one needs to be for a GA for sure, which fortunately (?) we are far far away from realistically being ready for tech-wise. as far as where, if we can get the HG, i guess we may as well do another one in kirishima once it grows onto its cottages

dreylin has hinduisim; we do have open borders with them but no trade connection. buddhism i have yet to see in the wild. i do intend to try for the code of laws religion if it's still available around t100; i had a brief thought about going for monotheism as well since we just picked up masonry, but it doesn't seem worth diverting from the strict currency beeline. it is looking like..... well, like if we expand out to 10 cities we indeed do not quite have the financial headroom to start currency research immediately after bulbing math; it would be something like a 2 turn delay for (10 cities x t98 currency) on the Expansion Curve. or we could stick to 9 and try for the t96 currency which is as fast as we can get it i think. but both of those still feel way too slow expansion-wise and i almost want to advocate for more like 12 cities and a t105 currency.....

ps does anyone have a link to a resource about how overflow in this game works? apparently i'm going to need some tight management of it at hoshoryu over the next few turns...

in particular we are going to encounter a turn like this in the near future



my understanding is that the overflow from this should be something like

114 + 12 - 60 = 66 -> cap by cost of ikhanda = 60 -> divide by 2 for AGG = 30. then on the following turn




29 + 34 - 45 = 28 hammers overflow



ok, maybe that understanding isn't as incorrect as i was expecting. lol but i should probably know about these things anyways

and note that this plan does waste 3 hammers so maybe overflowing into the ikhanda next turn is not the move (although it's possible the sim has diverged from reality slightly on this point). could do a 1-turn worker instead if GT is playing nice

edit: guess what, if you get hanging gardens with a size 1 city working a 0-food tile and with no 2-food tiles in range, the extra pop starves off during the same interturn that it is created

[aetryn]

i am still not completely sure on whether we bulb math or go for an academy with the GS. but probably the former, both to smooth the way to currency and to make a hanging gardens try. as for subsequent GP, the next one needs to be for a GA for sure, which fortunately (?) we are far far away from realistically being ready for tech-wise. as far as where, if we can get the HG, i guess we may as well do another one in kirishima once it grows onto its cottages

dreylin has hinduisim; we do have open borders with them but no trade connection. buddhism i have yet to see in the wild. i do intend to try for the code of laws religion if it's still available around t100; i had a brief thought about going for monotheism as well since we just picked up masonry, but it doesn't seem worth diverting from the strict currency beeline. it is looking like..... well, like if we expand out to 10 cities we indeed do not quite have the financial headroom to start currency research immediately after bulbing math; it would be something like a 2 turn delay for (10 cities x t98 currency) on the Expansion Curve. or we could stick to 9 and try for the t96 currency which is as fast as we can get it i think. but both of those still feel way too slow expansion-wise and i almost want to advocate for more like 12 cities and a t105 currency.....

ps does anyone have a link to a resource about how overflow in this game works? apparently i'm going to need some tight management of it at hoshoryu over the next few turns...

in particular we are going to encounter a turn like this in the near future



my understanding is that the overflow from this should be something like

114 + 12 - 60 = 66 -> cap by cost of ikhanda = 60 -> divide by 2 for AGG = 30. then on the following turn




29 + 34 - 45 = 28 hammers overflow



ok, maybe that understanding isn't as incorrect as i was expecting. lol but i should probably know about these things anyways

and note that this plan does waste 3 hammers so maybe overflowing into the ikhanda next turn is not the move (although it's possible the sim has diverged from reality slightly on this point). could do a 1-turn worker instead if GT is playing nice

edit: guess what, if you get hanging gardens with a size 1 city working a 0-food tile and with no 2-food tiles in range, the extra pop starves off during the same interturn that it is created

T98 currency isn't terrible, depends on whether that city site is contested whether it's worth losing 2 turns on Currency. T105 currency is pretty bad, as post-currency everything accelerates again and losing 7 turns on that is just painful. I wouldn't plant any cities that don't secure border space and/or give us a resource we can use right now. Filler sites can all wait until after Currency when they will largely pay for themselves with +4 commerce from trade routes. As you may have noticed, we don't have a ton of useful things to do with hammers until Currency, so we want to get our core cities the buildings unlocked they will need to spend many turns building. It's fine to aim for the Code of Laws religion after Currency (though check if someone gets Currency before we do, as it will be hard to beat them), but otherwise it's actually better to pause in between Currency and Code of Laws because both are expensive buildings and you'll need some time for pop to regrow and whip timers to wear off.

Speaking of, we will probably need to 3 or 4-pop whip markets, so it's fine to grow into unhappiness prior to currency (and Code of Laws also). Given we have Ivory, are trading for Fur, and can see Silk, those are going to be great for our city sizes.

Do we have any idea on city specialization yet? We'll want at least 2 major production cities for the various national wonders that boost those - these should generally skip Libraries/Universities (but want Markets for the happy), and just crank out units. We probably want at least 4-5 commerce specialty cities that will mostly work cottages and whip buildings when needed, and might do the occasional extra whip when it doesn't cost a cottage tile we're trying to develop. Then we'll want most of the rest to just be whipping cities for now - 5->3 or 6->4 whip cycles for units, settlers, and workers.

[ljubljana]

re city specialization: well, not really.... Kotozakura is the crappiest from a commerce perspective while otherwise having all land tiles, which would make it a front-runner for heroic epic, but the land there is so poor food-wise that in practice such a city would just work 5 mines and a ton of plains farms prior to biology, which i'm not sure is really good enough for the HE. On the other hand, I'm not sure it's compelling to bulldoze (or decline to build) riverside cottages in service of making a better HE city. Actually, our new border city with GT, Abi, might have the highest theoretical hammer ceiling, but that requires passing up the configuration that works a FP cottage and three riverside plains cottages (and eventually a bunch of windmills) which idk if we can afford, especially now that we're in the economic crash phase of the game :| and the answer probably isn't "the HE city has yet to be founded" either because those all kinda suck lmao

Turn 76 - Zululand

> waits impatiently for turn all day
> is stressed out af when the turn actually comes in



well, GT's coming for us. i realized i made a miscalculation re the walls, unfortunately.... they say they will complete this turn but that is true exactly to the hammer, so if GT declares on their turn and steps onto our PFH, they won't complete in time for the attack :| this is reasonably likely to cost an archer, nice.

well, the question is how committed they are to attacking us. i can see some pop drops in Aksum and Gondar which is certainly suggestive of military whips. is what i wrote before stepping forward with natsuko to check:



settler in the capital, and they moved after us last turn, so if it was a unit in Gondar we would be able to see it in the city now, right? ok, so likely not an immediate all-in war, and they aren't cracking Abi with an axe, a spear, and another axe that's 3 turns away. maybe they declare war next turn to check out the defenses, at which point we move in 3 more units and hopefully they'll get the picture. they can certainly be annoying and try to pillage our floodplains cottage, but i think we can set up an efficient trade for these two units if they actually try that.



these are indeed second-ring borders with greenline, so it's conceivable we could make this wheatcow border city happen. but should we? well



greenline is surprisingly ahead of everyone we know in power! with lots of weird obfuscated stuff like that gigantic 14k power increase, so we can't really get a super accurate gauge on their force composition. we at least know it's not HBR from the KTBs but that's about it. well, we could race them for it with a whipped settler in takakeisho or mitakeumi, or we can decide that spot is probably more trouble than it's worth and we'd be better off accepting Tobizaru as a border city.... it is at least a decent one defensively, with peaks blocking both of the obvious 2-mober attack routes... well, let's see what kind of forces they have in theater before making a binding decision, i suppose



ginger has a grass hill cottage.... iiii guess that's one way to make use of this wild terrain. looks tentatively like they have the reverse of our situation, with a ton of extra food but territorially squeezed and without much in the way of actual land tiles to grow onto



we continue to spam impis in the first two cities, though i am working an ikhanda in at hoshoryu and will try to do likewise at the first two cities at some point in the near future. but, again, we have to see how the GT situation is looking a few turns from now, as well as decide on if we're going to try for the greenline border city. mita in particular has to whip SOMEthing soon, and my every instinct is demanding it be a settler, but i guessss i can accept a worker instead maybe i GUESS

[ljubljana]

okayyyy guys after an 8-month delay due to the nationwide shortage (and my own kinda poor executive functioning level) i am finally on adhd meds again.... (for this month anyways)

let me know if yall notice and wild swings in my a) anxiety levels or b) general cognitive functioning lmao

[ljubljana]

Turn 77 - Zululand

If GT had declared on me, I would be able to expect a PM establishing the turn order, yes? Well, opening the turn with bated breath



...to no wardec. they DID step onto our forested hill, but because they didn't declare, our walls did complete as scheduled. now, this little ministack of theirs seems likely to annoyingly linger around in such a way as to make it very difficult to chop out the monument without exposing our workers. but i'll play the rest of the turn and kind of ponder what, if anything, we can do about that



ok, so we did only barely beat them to this site, they have a settler already on the way and it looks like they are roading their way to the furs. in theory our troops in the area outnumber theirs as of now, we could probably have something to say about that if we really wanted to.......



oh nice, chariot + vulture probably beats our chariot + impi and we need more troops down here right the fuck now. now i doubt they are going to wander off to attack Tobizaru, a city they haven't even scouted yet, without a little bit of warning but.... yup, with GT breathing down our necks I think we are NOT in a position to further stick said neck out here and try for the food + horse site. i think the copper/floodplains spot between tobizaru and the capital is probably the regrettable choice for next city just for the sake of its central location that can help contribute troops down here + reduce the geographic overexension that has come to characterize zululand



ok, back to staring at these dudes. do we know where they would be teleported if they declared war? i would really like to stage our impis and chariots in a forward position, say, SW of the Abi city center, so we can threaten to disrupt their upcoming plant and hopefully force them to pull back. but obviously i can't do that if declaring would cause them to teleport to the hill SW of their current position, and then they can attack impi vs axe at very good odds. going to try to parse through this

https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...#pid755298

in search of answers, but may not find them before finishing the turn...

just to quadruple check, it is definitely, 100% safe to leave just the archer on defense in the city this turn, right? because if they declare, their axe and spear will be teleported out and can't reach the city on their turn?

[El Grillo]

That last sentence is correct.

[ljubljana]

ohhhhh boy you guys. GT logged in AS i was playing, and we had the following exchange:



i am so sorry if i did anything wrong (((((

anyways here's the move, which you can see GT's reaction to in real time lmao



the idea with my move was that, if GT advanced their settler north to the plains hill they were roading, it would be in a tricky position; our chariots and impi would then have the SW-NW move which would force the settler to turn back next turn unless the axe and spear retreat to cover it. evidently GT thought so too as that's exactly what they did (settler is under the plains hill worker). the worst countermove i could see for them was to take a 1/4 odds attack with a shock axe against an axe in a forest, which i didn't think they would do - if they DID do that and win the axe would promote again and be a menace, but thankfully we don't have to worry about that (this turn)

so the goal now is twofold - one, force the GT spear/axe pair to protect their plant so Abi can chop out the monument, and two, force GT to settle their border city anywhere other than 1 NE of the plains hill (where it could combine with Lalibela's culture to eventually steal our pigs). That spot orphans a clam, misses lighthouse access, and is on flat ground in the middle of a warzone so HOPEfully they are not going for it..... i think a border city 2N of the settler/worker plains hill makes sense for all involved, they get fur + clams + a good amount of fishing area, a nice hill plant with defensive terrain in my direction (until our guerilla 2 muskets show up anyways...). expect our units to take an active role in making it clear to GT that that is the best option over the next few turns lol.

one thing i'm still undecided about is finishing the impi in hoshoryu instead of doing a (1t) shock axe. on the impi for now as it lets us overflow into a worker next turn instead of funneling 35 hammers into making an axe from scratch. but if we actually have to KILL that axe/spear pair we are going to miss having a shock axe's firepower.

edit: actually, logged in to swap back to the axe, for the following reason: if i move 3 workers to the PFH next turn to chop out the monument, as is my tentative plan, we will need the shock axe on that tile to get odds against GT's axe if they try to attack right after the chop finishes (leaving a bare hill with a worse defense bonus)

[ljubljana]

Turn 78 - Zululand

whyyyyy am i awake



Mitakeumi has one turn into a settler, and will whip next turn, probably to get the copper/floodplains site south of the capital started so Tobizaru is less hideously vulnerable to greenline. then it and takakeisho will grow back up until happy and number of worked tiles becomes an issue. we need about 3 more workers pretty badly i think - one for Mitakeumi, one for the south, and one to cottage Kirishima. Not sure where they're coming from exactly, but a bunch of two-pop whips is a good bet. that ivory hookup at the capital is now looking really urgent, by the way - we have a full happy face literally just sitting there. i think it's urgent enough that i don't feel bad transferring a worker from hoshoryu to hook it up, even at the cost of a couple worker turns



i went with the "throw everything on one tile" approach to trying to deter GT from trying to culture-war us for the pigs and stone. if they tamely go for the clams/fur spot, cool, border established, and i will have our dudes assume a less overtly threatening posture. but if they move onto that forest, i will move the stack next to it in my best attempt at a "kindly step off" gesture. and if they decide it's not safe to settle in this direction at all without more escorts (as maybe they should? our 7 guys can surely beat their 3 and the main reason for us not to raze their plant is to avoid escalation) then great, we delayed their seventh city and weakened them at no cost to us whatsoever. oh and we are gonna chop the shit out of that monument next turn



back up to first in soldiers by a healthy margin. demos look pretty alright now, but they won't when i whip off 5 pop into settlers and workers over the next 2 turns lol. but then they will again when we mostly pause expansion until currency and grow tall everywhere



need to decide on which tech to dump our 100ish extra scientist beakers into while we wait for the Math-bulber in Kirishima. sailing makes sense for trade routes and for our one city that needs a lighthouse (the just-founded Wakamotoharu) but, you know, maybe metal casting makes more sense?? we will have 2 metals soon after all... but the ability to actually negotiate with GT (and someday dreylin! and someday nauf!) and set up resource swaps might be more compelling idk