[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[aetryn]

The GP bulb-paths are also included in the game, on the F6 Tech-screen. On the right side there's a list of all the GPs, you can hover over them to see their complete plan. They also show two icons: The top is the tech they would bulb right now, and the bottom is the one the would bulb when all your queued research is completed.

I've found this doesn't quite work right in all cases. It tried to tell me I would Bulb Civil Service with a Merchant when Metal Casting was still in the way.

If I had to guess it was because I was playing hotseat and one of the other players had Metal Casting, and BUG can't cope with Hotseat.

[ljubljana]

@aetryn i think i'm good re subs, but thank you so much for the offer! i will indeed let you know if that circumstance arises

i too was (am?) a software engineer - not sure if my /future/ is as a software engineer, per se, but it is what my degrees say i'm trained for lol

ginger building: i think it couldn't bave been the HG because it would require a Hammam for them, right? i didn't see one in their capital last turn, though maybe i didn't squint at their city closely enough lol

GP bulbing: looks like bulbing Biology is out because of the ridiculous bulb beaker formula - 1500 + 3 * population? is that really right? the pop term will always be SO much smaller than the flat 1500..... if this is the case i think bulbing anything after about printing press is kinda a waste of time (although we maybe should bulb printing press.....)

Mjmd - he could have monarchy but just not have revolted, right? i am not sure why you would do that but they're waiting on, like, a specific type of GP to use on a golden age (eg don't want to waste an engineer on it, maybe they want an academy too). or maybe there is some other way that i don't know about for nauf to have engineer points than by being the one person who has metal casting (although i don't think so?)

ok, Turn 81 Zululand, about which i will be chill and normal:



uh oh, another great engineer on the board... this one likely being saved for something. but i suppose the same logic applies to GE wonder insta-completes as does to IND - if we too can insta-complete eg MoM on the turn we get the tech by chopping 10 forests, we're just racing against their tech progress anyways. and on this map i am kinda getting the sense that anyone could in theory just drop a city at 10 forests and do essentially what we're considering (although maybe they don't have 10 workers just lying around lol)



do diagonally adjacent water connections count for trading purposes? it would be reeeeally nice for the scout to go NW-NW-SW next turn instead of wasting time moving onto a useless forest. but we're trying to get a connection with naufragar eventually so i don't wanna do that unless we are 100% sure it still counts



we have taken gingac's research visibility away. we will see if they spend next turn to re-establish it.... if we end up both spending all 4 points on each other, they will stabilize in a place such that they don't have research vis, right? i am pretty willing to do that if it comes down to it



uh... what else is there for us to talk about again? our little settling party on its way to city #9, with the workers having "wasted" their two road turns and now ready to farm when we settle?



oh i pinned all our terrible filler. Takakeisho needs the library started now, Mitakeumi has stronger production and can do an impi first. the worker south of the capital is going to go mine (and possibly connect? idk if this is worth it) the new city's copper, so we will need another for this area soon.... i do not really think it can be the ivory worker either as the immediate southwest (silver, MoM try which i think needs to get started early for the monument) is our most likely next settlement target and we need roads in that direction. i may whip one out of the capital soonish as it is on the cusp of running out of tiles to work. or perhaps we can slow-build one in mitakeumi after the library

in general i am going to try to chill about whipping between now and when currency comes in. not COMPLETELY chill mind you but we really gotta commercemaxx if we want that nice t97 timing. i'd like to get one or both of the SW sites in before then (which probably do have to be whipped) but i thiiiiink we can mostly otherwise get away with growing like normal humans

wakamotoharu has its fish and is therefore also relieved from suckdom  it will work some alternating subset of non-road grass cottages and i thiiiiink two plains ones for +4 food surplus. idk if that's right really but i'm feeling pretty desperate for economy still

note that all of our first four cities can contribute settlers now more or less just as easily - and mita and hoshoryu have both done so already. kirishima COULD but we can't pay for more cities so we're doing this math bulb thing. we are definitely commerce-limited on expansion speed, as i imagine are all civs at around this point in the game...... which is making me really question whether (non-FIN) IMP players are really likely to end up with more than their fair share of land in the long run....



did civac stop cottaging this seaside hill? whyyyy i wanted to take a vacation there :')

[aetryn]

Hmm. There's a limited amount of places to get Great Engineer points this early.  Pyramids and Forges are pretty much it. It's possible (with America's building) that Nauf has Metal Casting, built one Forge and ran an Engineer in a city that was full of GP from Carnegie, then used it to build Pyramids in another city that was almost full of GP from Carnegie. Or he built two forges and ran two Engineers. Since only one person has Metal Casting, and Nauf built Pyramids (Nauf DID build Pyramids, right? What does the Top Cities/Wonders page say?), the second GE must be his even if it was born in a city we don't see yet?

MJMD isn't Spirutual, right? So yeah, he could have grabbed Monarchy and just not revolted yet. That would be a somewhat normal play, especially with metals seemingly mostly in the wasteland, and thus unlikely to be at his start. Actually, though, he's IND, he totally wants Forges. So no, I don't understand why he wouldn't take Metal Casting unless he couldn't. Or he's got some crazy strategy.

Sea connections by diagonal are fine as long as they're the same body of water (it's possible to have diagonal water tiles that aren't actually connected, as one is a freshwater lake and the other is ocean or something).

You're right, Ginger can't be building HG. But he could be building any other wonder that hasn't fallen yet that doesn't require a prereq building. Or it could have been a settler.

Different players value IMP differently. There are certainly other ways to get settlers, but it is more work. It's also nice when in a war and thinking about whether to raze and replace to have cheap settlers (also to speculate on a combat settle of a city that might not be totally safe), or when filling in cities post-Civil Service or Biology when more farm options open up. This is probably the wrong map for IMP to shine on. It's best I think in two situations. One is when there's VERY limited lands and settler races are a really big deal. Here, there's TONS of mostly mediocre land, and even the few good spots are more a question of scouting/positioning rather than just getting the settler there first. The other place IMP is great is when the land is lush, cities quickly pay for themselves by working luxuries everywhere, and you can just churn out cities until you reach like 15 or 20. This map is obviously not lush, and luxuries are not terribly common. But honestly, IMP is not my favorite trait.

It'll be a tight next 15 or so turns until Currency comes in, but at that point we can put up markets, grow pop a bit, get Ikhandas anywhere that haven't built them, go on to Code of Laws and get Courthouses, and really start making the economy hum again. Until we crash it with more expansion, of course!

[Tarkeel]

did civac stop cottaging this seaside hill? whyyyy i wanted to take a vacation there :')

When working in dangerous lands (such as borders) it's customary to cancel the worker-action in case it needs to run away next turn.

[aetryn]

did civac stop cottaging this seaside hill? whyyyy i wanted to take a vacation there :')

When working in dangerous lands (such as borders) it's customary to cancel the worker-action in case it needs to run away next turn.

I'm in the habit of cancelling all worker orders every turn (there's a convenient shortcut for this) in case I need to do partial improvements for best micro (especially partial chops). I won't use it for the first bit of the game but when things get at all complex I just get used to reissuing every turn based on the situation of that turn.

[ljubljana]

righttt i guess the most plausible sitch for the second GE is that the forge + carnegie city is also where nauf PUT the pyramids, and he used the pyramids GP in conjunction w that to have the engineer replace itself. that's a nice move! and all the more reason why MoM will have significant denial value if we can get it

Mjmd is not Spiritual, yeah. Maybe they don't have the food supply to make use of 2 extra happy yet? We certainly don't..... i also have not actually scouted any metals that are in their sphere of influence yet, so perhaps the relative greenness of the south (once all the jungle down their is chopped) is balanced in part by fewer and worse early happy sources....

WAIT there's a shortcut for cancelling worker orders?? i've been obnoxiously doing it manually all this time.......

anyways we have another turn beloved zulu friends



omg they actually stopped building it.....



omg, you are correct - nauf did NOT engineer the pyramids, but missed the window to do so by one turn apparently! well, at least Mjmd wasn't one turn slower - then they could have tried to eng-rush it and still lost in a 50/50 right? then this second great engineer, i guess, would have to be from the pyramids GP at VERY low odds just one turn after they were finished...? or maybe it's more likely that it's just one of the two civs we haven't met yet (but i don't think they are PHI?)



hammam sighted in constantinople. and there are TWO people with math out there now (and metal casting) as of this turn, so perhaps they were second to the tech and that's why this is later than we thought. if so it's a good bet that NOW they are chopping out the HG. we are going to have to figure out what to do with the kirishima forests if we are not even close enough to get failgold from them (who am i kidding it's just more workers and settlers :D or maybe the market so we don't have to whip off cottages for it)

gingac's gameplan is kind of in a weird spot here, to be honest.... they are now alone in last among the known civs in city count - how do they fix that? whip or slow-build settlers.... but then they are NOT growing all their cities 2 extra pop on the hammam happy, doing which as early as possible was the entire point of their picks. they could chop settlers.... but then they are NOT chopping the hanging gardens (or at least are delaying it into range of potentially being sniped) and NOT making the crapton of tile improvements they need for all their cities to USEFULLY grow two extra pop. not quite sure what they should be doing here.... i will say that if we can't get the hanging gardens, i think i'd like these guys to have it. if they forego settlers to build it and suffer a near-miss, i am really going to get worried that they have no way to win the game other than through attacking us....



golgolsgolsgoslgs GOLD! the governor insanely tried to work the lake tile instead - he is served ironic punishment by being encased in golden stocks and having yellow fruits thrown at him.

ohand first to nine cities i GUESSSS, Daieisho is Takakeisho's best friend and rival. they play GTA together it's cute (probably). i wish we had a better city to give to them but them's the breaks i guess. of course we have the ludicrous power of early gold to thank for enabling our continued expansion at this pace pre-currency

other than this new city, we are working only improved tiles and also exactly all of our improved tiles ....is what i thought before realizing Kotozakura is still 1 turn from growing back onto the copper. and then we finished the floodplains cottage at abi with hoshoryu still 1t from size 4.... ok we're working MOST of our improved tiles

[ljubljana]

might put this impi on semi-permanent GT force evaluation and border scouting duty, now that a third one for this area finished in Hoshoryu - thoughts?



ok so re diagonal coast connections: in particular, THIS is definitely fine if we defog no other coastal waters on the way to naufragar? i guess it's fine if it turns out not be since we do have other scouts in the area but they could cancel open borders and generally be oppositional i guess



YES we finally found..... wait, superdeath?? wtf where ARE they.... i guess most likely the last two civs are Mjmd's western neighbor and SD's southern one... well i am VERY glad to see scary economic megathreat naufragar has a superdeath border and not the expected one with someone with a 50% chance of being a green (sorry rickety when you read this)

just to be clear guys, if we don't win this game i am on team superdeath 100% :D not for any particular logical reason, i've just kinda been a fan of theirs for a minute now and of the way they have seemingly intimidated everyone into being nice to them in border disputes - it is about time for that to pay off for them in the form of a great game (i say with the firm intent to manifest this into being) (please let this happen and mess up naufragar)



anyway THIS guy is gonna belatedly turn west now, natch. i'd really like to assign another impi to permanent greenline evaluation duty, but i think we need this one to defog the far coast so we can ever eventually trade with the distant civs. i really think it will take a LONG time before people have road connections with each other (esp given that border roads are, i think correctly, viewed as having aggressive intent).

although actually we could have a road connection with GT if we hook up the pigs - what do yall think about that? eventually we're going to need the actual health from the resource, but i don't wanna freak them out either. well, i want to freak them out a LITTLE (enough to build more defensive military than they need to deter an attack from us) but not TOO much (enough that they'll over-build military and then we will have to respond). on GT's end the border is almost fully roaded, but.... they built those roads when they didn't think it would be a border lol



look, NW of the stone.... ginger's sixth city is a pretty aggressive-looking plant on the dreylin border :D i just wish dreylin had more military to make them worry about defending it...

WOAH guys check it out:



(tied for) first in CROP YIELD? now THAT is unexpected, especially given our start not that it was bad or anything but some of these guys have like pigs + wet corn + plains cow

guys, it's ludicrously self-destructive to go for calendar BEFORE currency right? i mean.... i know it is FOR US, but what about for Mjmd and Naufragar who are running great person-based gameplans and surely both see themselves in a race with the other for MoM? MoM is important for us (like, really important! the more turns we can spend safely in serfdom working 50 2/2/2 plains farms the better) but surely not as important as the (large) number of currency turns we would lose if we tried to beat a hypothetical direct beeline to it...

(as for why i split the post into two, RB was erroring when i tried to post it all at once.... is there some kind of hidden, undocumented screenshot limit i was hitting or something?)

edit: guys if we lose a close race for MoM, we can pretty much chop a wonder of our choice at this filler city... is temple of artemis any good? that would take all our PRO trade routes to 3 gold (not 4) right? otherwise maybe parthenon/great library to help with our great people generation problems, or notre dame on the sheer strength of its effect (and we're going to engineering soon anyways)? also..... i'm ready to get totally laughed out of the room for this but i am giving chichen itza a look (probably not to chop but to try at slow-building). if there is ever a situation for it, overexpanded + increasingly desperate-looking neighbors on both sides + AGG/PRO for strong units to sit behind +25% defense = that situation, right?

[aetryn]

To cancel all worker orders, select one worker (that's working on something) and hold shift and click the cancel orders button, it cancels everyone at once. This works for other classes of units too, I believe, but I've never found it helpful outside of workers.

Re: GT border. I probably wouldn't leave the Impi just parked on a hill IN his borders. Moving around "scouting" inside his borders is probably fine as long as you have OB, and it's pretty unlikely he's going to track the position of your scouting unit every turn to see that you're not just patrolling a border region. At least, I can't conceive of paying that much attention to a scouting unit in my borders when I have OB over multiple days of turns. But maybe that's just me. I think you can safely improve the pigs and road them without being seen as too aggressive, given that it is a resource and we want it hooked up. As there are a lot of hills, GT shouldn't be paranoid about us roading this - any surprise invasion force still takes two further turns to reach Laliebela because of the hills. Also, if GT cancels borders so you can't go back and scout that coast tile I don't believe you need anyway, it won't matter because you won't be able to trade through his coast anyway, so no point in worrying about that. This is another reason to scout the entire perimeter of the continent if you can, so you can trade with Naufrauger by going clockwise around the entire continent if GT closes borders. Overall, this looks like a pretty good border. We're a little vulnerable on flatland but at least we're behind the river. That forest west of Abi needs to get chopped though - don't want to leave cover for an invasion force (the two southern ones are fine to leave for a later purpose though).

Re: Greenline border. I don't think we need to monitor him that closely yet. We'll want to eventually, but that sounds like a good job for a later unit when our borders are closer. Also that's an interesting naming theme. Venetian Arsenal, Magnus, Chop Overflow? Stuff that should be banned for Civ6 MP? Stuff that should have been nerfed? Cute, anyhow. I always love seeing CMF's shenanigans with the VA.

Re: Rest of the world. Good that Nauf has an aggressive-ish neighbor. Don't want him to get too comfortable buildering along in peace. I don't know whether it'd be better for the game if Rickety was next to MJMD or Gav was. On the one hand, someone probably needs to disrupt MJMD (though he's built 3 wonders already? he's got to be falling behind in other ways. Maybe he's doing a good job of disrupting himself). On the other hand, Rickety stuck between Superdeath and Gav is a) wow, what a rough green experience at RB, and b) short odds on being the first one out of the game, which would mean an extra powerful SD and Gav. Given they're on the other side of the world, maybe we don't care, but then again, if they roll over 2-3 players and have a 50 city empire this game's going to end in a hurry. Ginger might be using his extra happy to whip more often and run the timer up rather than keep more citizens working (at least for now, he can always transition to the latter later).

One request: As you uncover Nauf city centers, can we squint for Forges? Would love to confirm he has MC, and if so, how many of those he's built. Either way, with Great Engineers out there banked and MJMD seemingly trying to build every wonder possible, we're going to have very few viable opportunities. Those filler city forests could just be saved for a long time for Taj Mahal. Notre Dame isn't crazy on this map, as there's not a ton of happiness and it would obviously affect every city. I'd avoid Parthenon. We don't have a lot of food for specialists and those are going to have to be targeted towards Golden Ages mostly. Temple of Artemis only boosts trade routes at one city, so it's mostly good for the prophet points but then it pollutes itself with a merchant point. At this point, I'd say Taj, maybe some of the Monk wonders (Apostolic Palace, University of Sankore, Spiral Minaret) if we end up with a religion, and Notre Dame are the strongest wonders we could aim for if MoM is built elsewhere.

[ljubljana]

Turn 82 - Zululand

open the turn to Mjmd asking for open borders - sure buddy. that makes a complete set. i don't see any of their units nearby about to take advantage, but i DO see one of ours - the scout in south greenline was already about to start heading Mjmd-ward. nice of them to be so obliging



here is what we have defogged of dear naufie thus far. after careful squinting at the civilopedia model



it's that guy with the lil chimney, yes? i do not think i see any others but also i am not very good at this whole squinting thing.... especially when the building concerned is that generic-looking



iiiis there a way to turn off all those map pins for these overview shots lmaoooo

yeesh, well, the point of this is to highlight how squeezed poor GT is.... they only got one ring to the east AND west of their capital, and i'm out here poaching their land with a third-ring city.... they really are going to have no choice but to fight SOMEone soon. here's hoping plausibility of conquest (is that what GT is meant to think nauf is here? a more plausible conquest than us just because we're toku of zulu? i don't get the sense that nauf is usually too accommodating of conquerors) wins out over the feelings we deliberately hurt

nauf will be ok expansion-wise though because



there is this gigantic no man's land between them and superdeath for some reason?? i think that's larger than any of the other (known) inter-capital distances.... compared to poor GT who is just the minimum 14 tiles from nauf, and drew for neighbors imperialists on one side and sociopaths on the other :/

anyway don't ask me why i'm tangenting, i'm not really driving this thing



now that i'm looking at this, iii am starting to maybe figure out a good reason for ginger to demilitarize with us (i mean, besides the obvious) - that border with dreylin is ridiculous. those are the only sources of gems and silver AND stone within their sphere of influence and it looks like they must fight dreylin for both.... compare to us who have to go some distance for silver and gold, but at least are significantly closer to them than any rivals



not that i'm not still a LITTLE worried that GT will reach all the way down here to try to swipe our silver...... but even i know that's paranoid conspiracy theory-brain talking lol

gotta figure out the timing on settling this spot, the MoM filler, and the southern gold, btw.... constraints are: we need the MoM filler turn 91 so we can insta-complete the monument with a chop, which is also about the right timing to expand borders - t101 is about the soonest we could have calendar, with t97 currency + a 4-turn research with hanging gardens failgold. SW gold city needs to be founded by when a hypothetical HG build would come in, but probably NOT before currency. both of these factors counsel t97ish i think, and it's a 5-turn walk from takakeisho (with workers helping w a road). so i figure whip around turn 91? lastly there is the silver city, which does not have a definite timetable, but i find that because it can work the silver tile it doesn't slow us to currency, and its forests are begging to be turned into a few more workers to help this MoM try along...... i may end up whipping its settler out of the capital sooner than is strictly advisable, esp as takakeisho is out of tiles to work



unrelated next topic: ginger has stopped EP spending on us, that 132 is unchanged since last turn. not sure if we should put a buffer in here or what? i don't really want them to get vis on us again with just one turn of spending that they can time when it will be least convenient for them. i'm liking this silly little 2-and-2 split as of now as when they do notice they will, hopefully, realize that we are just trickling EP to deny visibility and not going all-out in an attack prelude

idk, aetryn, you're a this-game-knower.... how worried should we be about our neighbors partitioning us? i am getting worried that if we pull a move like chopping HG or MoM we will look like we need to be dogpiled..... and yet, it goes against all my civ instincts to AVOID making the best move for our civ because i'm worried about the diplo repercussions. that's not really what we should be doing....right?

[Tarkeel]

it's that guy with the lil chimney, yes? i do not think i see any others but also i am not very good at this whole squinting thing.... especially when the building concerned is that generic-looking

That is a forge in Singing Horse, yes. They are painful to hunt for.

iiiis there a way to turn off all those map pins for these overview shots lmaoooo

Unfortunately no, and you're not the first person to ask.