[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[aetryn]

North of Superdeath - It's full of jungle. You can't chop jungle until Iron Working, so cities there are pretty useless until then. Expect this to fill up as soon as Superdeath gets Iron Working. Conveniently, he's Rome and wants it anyway right?

Neighbors partitioning us - it's always a fear. But you have to assess what your neighbors are doing and you have to make reasonable plays. Chopping out one wonder isn't going to trigger "Zulu is running away with the game" thoughts. Other people are building wonders and will do things too. We may be fairly early to currency but I expect others to have a good tech pace. The only way we get dogpiled for running away with the game is if we're actually running away with the game. Worry about that when it happens

I like seeing that Ginger/Dreylin border as it will be hard for them to totally demilitarize that, which makes it hard for them to attack the other neighbor. Not impossible. But harder. GT is messier. He could go either way. Disrupting Nauf would be good (unless it triggers a SD pile-in and total collapse), and this is the time before PHI-bulbing is strongest. He'll have to do something before everyone reaches Catapults or he's probably got to wait to Knights, and does he have the tech speed when squeezed on land to get there? I'd be very wary of GT, but his most likely attack unit (Horse Archers at this point) is countered okay by Impi, so I wouldn't think he would come at us. I'd get in the habit of checking Known Tech Bonus (the little numbers in the research screen) on Archery and Horseback Riding. Mostly those won't get teched until someone wants to build HAs, so it should serve as a bit of a warning sign. Of course, without score mode on it's much harder to assign techs to people that get them. With score, if you see GT went up by the amount a tech gives you and KTB for HR went from 0 to 1 you can assign him that tech. Here we really have no clue. We MIGHT consider Alphabet post-Currency just so we can see what other people have (though they can then see what WE have, so it cuts both ways).

[Tarkeel]

We MIGHT consider Alphabet post-Currency just so we can see what other people have (though they can then see what WE have, so it cuts both ways).

Another thing to consider is that Alphabet doesn't directly tell you what techs other people have, only what you can trade and they can research. This can then be used to deduce what others have, but it is work.

[ljubljana]

Turn 84 - Zululand

well, we know SD has iron working:



the famous roman grassland mines are a cornerstone of world topsoil supply



whooo holy border tension batman. the city is founded on stone as well, in what is suspiciously almost certainly part of their own HG bid. and sheesh, LOOK how crappy the city is otherwise, and it prioritizes a faster stone hookup over getting gems in range? yeah they are certainly going to try for it



the sumeria/india moat kept going south for so long, i was worried there might actually not be a land border between them, with all the unbalancing that would entail. thankfully (and i guess, in the grand scheme of things, expectedly) this is not the case

halfway through the turn:



wwwwait what?? naufragar is trying to contact me? that can happen?

i clicked on their name and the deal screen opened up.... but it must have been a misclick as nauf closed it immediately. no idea what kind of bizarre real-time negotiation nightmare we would have been thrust into if one of us had attempted to propose a deal

anyway you can see i decided on a worker whip in the capital and a plains river cottage with the worker from the ivory. i tried simming stuff like whipping the silver city settler now and all it did was ruin our currency timing. apparently the only thing more damaging than whipping off pop when we're researching the tech is whipping NOW, when we're saving for it, and then founding more cash-devouring plants. not that i won't do some of that but probably only the MoM city between now and the turn currency comes in (and that only because the MoM city NEEDS a monument first to pull all its forests into range)

oooookay let's talk about some scintillating Micro Details. the goals for the next 15 turns are:

- currency t97 (or, less specifically, currency before we run out of funding)
- found a bunch of cities when currency comes in
- hanging gardens ASAP after currency, if it's still on the board. 
- be in position for a try at MoM as soon as 4 turns after currency (if we get a bunch of failgold from missing HG)
- chop and whip granaries everywhere that doesn't have one and finish libraries in the core cities

how quickly is ASAP for the hanging gardens? the plan is this:

• t89 - put 3 hammers into impi at Kirishima
  
• t90 - put 3 hammers into axe at Kirishima
  
• t91 - discover mathematics, switch to max hammers (or close to it, details TBD), put 6 hammers into aqueduct at Kirishima
  
• t92 - triple whip aqueduct
  
• t93 - overflow into HG, complete as many chops as possible to maximize failgold for the backup MoM push
  
• t94 - double whip impi
  
• t95 - overflow into HG, complete any chops we couldn't do t93
  
• t96 - double whip axe
  
• t97 - overflow into HG
  
• beginning of t98 - HG completion!
  

so if we pull this off, t97 will literally go: finish currency, found 3-4 cities, which then immediately gain the extra pop the turn after founding. and..... if we FAIL and currency is NOT in t97, founding a bunch of cities will put us into catastrophic econ collapse and push currency way back, and everything's a total disaster. in my sims the margin for whether we finish currency on time of not has often been in the single digits of gold. so everything's fine, this is going to be fine

in the following screenshots, any pin (which, in an unanticipated handicap to our civ pick, are reeeeally hard to read in white on zulu yellow) of the form ALLCAPS-# represents a constraint - a task that MUST complete on the specified turn. then we work backwards from those to establish a micro plan.

first, the southwestern "target" region:



that far SW city looks reachy, and it is, but it's at least closer to us than to any other capital (10 from us, 13 from GT, 17 from greenline by my count). the reason i'm prioritizing it is that with spice and gold both second-ring, it reeeally wants to be on the HG raft to insta-whip a monument, then chop + whip a granary 10 turns later. Tobizaru's CHOP91 is the turn math comes in - annoyingly it only doubles the very end of the size 2 growth cycle, but chopping pre-math does not accelerate the build so i'm not sure we can do better. ROAD94 on that floodplain saves a turn of settler movement. MINE98 on the silver is because, um, if we do finish the HG that turn it will immediately plunge us into unhappiness otherwise



listed turn times for SETTLERWHIP are the turn we whip, not the turn after when it completes. capital settler is for the gold site, mitakeumi settler (i guess, i am not in love with this part) for the silver. we can squeeze one out of kotozakura first but we have to chop into it to do so. and then a TON of CHOP93s... some of these are a little aspirational though as i think going for all 4 would leave some cities (Wakamotoharu in particular) working unimproved tiles. but on the other hand, i don't really expect t98 to be quick enough for the gardens, so we want to make some sacrifices to get these in as early as possible, since in some ways our real target is actually the Mausoleum.... (uh, lemme just look up that failgold formula real quick lol)



abi's border pops t90, one turn before math. then we chop-complete the granary and start the pig pasture. stone quarry needs to finish t93 to boost the first HG turn. that forest with 3 things on it is the route to, and chop into, the MoM city (monument). and the northern city is aspirational, tbh.... i haven't yet succeeded in getting it up in time but it'd be nice

edit: sim notes for me
- mitakeumi needs to be SETTLERWHIP90, capital SETTLERWHIP94. mitakeumi was somehow a full size small in the sim than IRL (???) so ingame it will crash into unhappy at size 7

[aetryn]

Turn 84 - Zululand

well, we know SD has iron working:



the famous roman grassland mines are a cornerstone of world topsoil supply



whooo holy border tension batman. the city is founded on stone as well, in what is suspiciously almost certainly part of their own HG bid. and sheesh, LOOK how crappy the city is otherwise, and it prioritizes a faster stone hookup over getting gems in range? yeah they are certainly going to try for it



the sumeria/india moat kept going south for so long, i was worried there might actually not be a land border between them, with all the unbalancing that would entail. thankfully (and i guess, in the grand scheme of things, expectedly) this is not the case

halfway through the turn:



wwwwait what?? naufragar is trying to contact me? that can happen?

i clicked on their name and the deal screen opened up.... but it must have been a misclick as nauf closed it immediately. no idea what kind of bizarre real-time negotiation nightmare we would have been thrust into if one of us had attempted to propose a deal

anyway you can see i decided on a worker whip in the capital and a plains river cottage with the worker from the ivory. i tried simming stuff like whipping the silver city settler now and all it did was ruin our currency timing. apparently the only thing more damaging than whipping off pop when we're researching the tech is whipping NOW, when we're saving for it, and then founding more cash-devouring plants. not that i won't do some of that but probably only the MoM city between now and the turn currency comes in (and that only because the MoM city NEEDS a monument first to pull all its forests into range)

oooookay let's talk about some scintillating Micro Details. the goals for the next 15 turns are:

- currency t97 (or, less specifically, currency before we run out of funding)
- found a bunch of cities when currency comes in
- hanging gardens ASAP after currency, if it's still on the board. 
- be in position for a try at MoM as soon as 4 turns after currency (if we get a bunch of failgold from missing HG)
- chop and whip granaries everywhere that doesn't have one and finish libraries in the core cities

how quickly is ASAP for the hanging gardens? the plan is this:

• t89 - put 3 hammers into impi at Kirishima
  
• t90 - put 3 hammers into axe at Kirishima
  
• t91 - discover mathematics, switch to max hammers (or close to it, details TBD), put 6 hammers into aqueduct at Kirishima
  
• t92 - triple whip aqueduct
  
• t93 - overflow into HG, complete as many chops as possible to maximize failgold for the backup MoM push
  
• t94 - double whip impi
  
• t95 - overflow into HG, complete any chops we couldn't do t93
  
• t96 - double whip axe
  
• t97 - overflow into HG
  
• beginning of t98 - HG completion!
  

so if we pull this off, t97 will literally go: finish currency, found 3-4 cities, which then immediately gain the extra pop the turn after founding. and..... if we FAIL and currency is NOT in t97, founding a bunch of cities will put us into catastrophic econ collapse and push currency way back, and everything's a total disaster. in my sims the margin for whether we finish currency on time of not has often been in the single digits of gold. so everything's fine, this is going to be fine

...

Will look at the screenshots later, but two points here:

We can hold on a city founding a turn or two if we have to if missing Currency is going to cause a death spiral. If we miss HGing them, not the end of the world. Better to HG sub-optimally than to destroy everything through economic mismanagement. So I think we're not nearly so risky here as you might have thought.

Of more concern, you're planning to triple whip, double whip, and then double whip the same city? It MIGHT get to grow once in there in one of the overflow turns? That means it will be size 9 to start, or 8 if we get a growth turn? Just making sure you've accounted for the pop you need.

Also, crazy stone plant from Ginger may have been competing for Pyramids, which pretty much requires getting stone by settling on it if there's competition, which, if so, would mean apparently 3 players went for it? That would also explain his capital chopping. I mean, we don't KNOW that Nauf was going for Pyramids, but it seems likely that's what he intended the Great Engineer for. There's a non-zero chance he beats us to math and then uses the Engineer for that, but hopefully not. Is PB75 the game of Multiple Pyramid Strategy Collision? Which is better than colliding multiple pyramids together, I suppose, if less entertaining.

[ljubljana]

yeah, i'll certainly delay founding rather than ruin the currency timing. but imo wasted settler turn is at least comparably bad to wasted worker turn so i will try my best

yeah kirishima is a monster, or will be once we take its power limiters off. it is starting the whipping at size 7 and getting TWO growth turns...

re the pyramids plant, i suppose... not sure i really see the synergy with ottomans but i guess they're always a good wonder? idk, i haven't built them in this epoch of my civ4 career and the benefit is non-obvious (for non-SPI) so honestly i don't really know how best to value them. you would think HG makes more sense if they rushed math and have a half-cost aqueduct UB....but then again HG on 7 cities is a little underwhelming

yall want to see some hot and extremely cherry-picked demos (oh you know you do)



this is if we set our research to 100% on sailing lol, so obviously not exactly representative

the one with the big lead in hammers is probably greenline according to graphs, which makes sense given that their land looks like this

[ljubljana]

Turn 85 - Zululand

UM......



what's wrong with this perfectly normal screenshot, you might ask? compare city counts from last turn... Mjmd is BACK DOWN to six cities, in a no-barb game..... the culprit is not anyone we know according to the foreign advisor. translation: i think we found gavagai..... if india gets devoured, egypt's neighbors will be rickety and greenline, with us not even remotely close enough to rein them in.......

i wonder if greenline will pile on? they probably should if Mjmd is at the point of losing cities. but should WE encourage them to do so by asking them for war with Mjmd (now or in a few turns?) idk if we'd rather have a monster gavagai (who doesn't border us and would distract greenline) than a weaker gav and a stronger greenline (who DOES border us).... if they DO pile on they may have even more to gain from this than gav does, ziggurats seem like a perfect tool for paying for early conquest, especially if the targets are core Mjmd cities with presumably strong food supplies.... foreign secretary CMF, would love to hear your thoughts at the next council meeting



anyways in addition to phi america i now wanna play AGG/ORG sumeria next game



call to power's looking really explicitly whipped to the bone, too, in marked contrast to the other capitals. jeez how bad IS it down there



GT looks to be adding more military to our already militarized border.... idk how we convey a lack of intent to kill them without a trade connection though. as things stand i am beginning to worry we won't be able to safely hook up the pigs. i guess not running around in their land with a random military unit is probably a start.... similarly, i was thinking about scouting the ginger border again as well just to be on the safe side, but i decided against using an impi for fear of escalation - instead i'm building a fifth scout in Kirishima which has a trickle of extra hammers with no obvious applications. that's gonna wreck our naming scheme though lol. anyone have ideas for a fifth season that this new guy can be a child of



post-worker whip, Takakeisho says it has 32/30 food in the box and will grow this turn.... is that true, even though it's building a no-growth civilian unit? i'd love to say i planned that but as you might imagine my obvious mechanical ignorance indicates that i did not. but i WILL start trying to do so in the future



coastal route to nauf, and thence superdeath, about to complete next turn. will we get trade with them if WE have a defogged coastal route but no sailing tech and THEY have sailing tech but no coastal route? i haven't seen any American scouts anywhere near us so if we do get a connection, that is most likely what the situation will be

i'd love to say the same for dreylin but, as i've mentioned before



thanks to mt stupid over here i think there is no way to get a coastal route defogged other than going ALL the way around the perimeter of the rest of the continent. sooo that's more or less what i plan on doing, as you can see developing on the minimap



next turn we have our first sign-mandated micro task, moving this worker onto the forest to the SE. you can see i am taking no chances about remembering to do so lol

threw two border cities (abi, tobizaru) on archer safety turns this round out of an abundance of caution. kirishima already has one in an axe (and i don't know if walls will be worth emergency whipping once we hit 40% cultural defenses). wakamotoharu has been crawling to an impi at 1 hpt for the last 4 turns as well to open a theoretical 1-whip if we need to. naturally i wish we had more, well, every kind of unit to defend all these widely spaced plants but i guess if we did our neighbors would just militarize more. unfortunately we seem to be in a situation where, even though we are #1 in power, our borders still don't feel safe because they're so far apart, so we keep building troops, which our neighbors have to respond to by building more troops... luckily there isn't anything better to put the hammers into i guess. i am thinking about renewing our civac cow for cow but that's probably not the move right? better to keep them theoretically on their toes if we're most likely going to make the units anways? or is that escalatory logic?

edit: speaking of ginger, what are these guys doing



it had BETTER be just chopping for a border city.... if a bunch of dumbass chariots try to come flank us from the south via sneaky roads i will be Put Out. surely they wouldn't do that without at least TRYING to scout our borders, is what i'd like to think, but by that logic, to do so would spoil the surprise. bluhhh i love baseless paranoia. lemme know if yall want me to resend cow for cow juuuust to force their hand

[williams482]

anyone have ideas for a fifth season that this new guy can be a child of

Ask any Vermont resident about "mud season" and they'll tell you it's well worth naming a scout after.

post-worker whip, Takakeisho says it has 32/30 food in the box and will grow this turn.... is that true, even though it's building a no-growth civilian unit? i'd love to say i planned that but as you might imagine my obvious mechanical ignorance indicates that i did not. but i WILL start trying to do so in the future

Yup, that works just the way you want it to. The city will grow if it has the requisite amount of food, even if building a food-producing unit.

edit: speaking of ginger, what are these guys doing

Huh... well spotted, and I'm suspicious.

I think the most likely explanation here is roading to this spot to settle a city, not to launch an attack. I know we want to settle there at some point, so there's a case either way to show the flag here and make sure they know we see them, and that we have soldiers ready to respond to stuff we don't like. Whatever that happens to be.

[Kaiser]

Carnival is the official 5th season in Cologne.
It starts the 11th of November (at 11:11 am) and ends 40 days before Easter (always a Wednesday)

[El Grillo]

There is also monsoon season, which overlaps mostly with summer but does get its own name.

[ljubljana]

according to jisho exactly one of these corresponds to a japanese given name of the form (season) + (child)

tsuyuko, child of the japanese rainy season

turn 86 zulu

guys i'm so sleepy. i really hope nothing happens this turn



Coastal Route, but i'm guessing these things get updated between turns



ohhhh no, don't tell me that's another mountain placed specifically to block coastal trading  this is starting to feel like it might actually be intentional mapmaker balance, dividing the map into groups that can trade with each other pre-astro (or pre-work boat scouts) but not letting everyone trade pairwise. although why only 4 civs should be in the ginger-mjmd group i do not know



well, uh... i moved some guys around, confirmed that nobody's power was spiking ridiculously. ginger's spear/worker are in the same place as last turn. there isn't anywhere i can show an impi to them without leaving our borders and having to pay roaming fees... but they can see that we have 1 next to kirishima, and i have another that i can move into the city center. and while they did found an 8th city this turn (while i was playing mine) it is not anywhere that we can see.....



tobizaru's borders expand next turn to give us lots of cool new tiles such as desert, desert, desert, desert, desert, desert, desert hills, and desert

aaaand yes, 3 precious floodplains, one precious gold, and a FOREST. how my axe yearns for thee <3 i would already have someone there pre-chopping but at this point i think i can no longer justify not waiting for math to come in lol