[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[Tarkeel]

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

Routes get updated during end-of-turn processing or a city is built (and perhaps also razed?). So whenever possible finish the road to your new city before settling.

[aetryn]

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

Routes get updated during end-of-turn processing or a city is built (and perhaps also razed?). So whenever possible finish the road to your new city before settling.

Or in this case, defog coastal route, than found new city if you have one?

[ljubljana]

Turn 67 - Zululand

Well, as if there was any doubt that Gavagai has attacked Mjmd.... they have rolled both of the last two turns, and both times failed to play the next turn after doing so. So it's a turnsplit, with Gav, the presumptive attacker, in the second half..... nasty D:



gingac finished what was apparently a chop.... which, unless i'm mistaken about the mechanics of border spotting in the fog, is more than 2 tiles from any city border? wtf.... is denying cover to a hypothetical invading army from us THAT valuable? you can also see that at least some of their chops were indeed into settlers (6->9 cities in just a handful of turns) so there is SOME hope of beating them to the Gardens. i only see 3 chops left at Constantinople (plus one that is third-ring to both that city and their second city), which is not enough to finish the wonder by themselves...



GT force assessment: 2 axes + spears, and a third spear not visible 1W of Lalibela. I do not THINK that is a pigs-killing force, so hopefully they will not try - if they do try it could be close.....



borders, glorious borders :D

i really expected to have more to say about this turn but i guess not. there is a third person with mathematics, suggesting that our time to get there will end up roughly middle-of-the-pack - obviously since we are running 100% gold the whole time, that should portend well for our currency time



according to the pins hoshoryu needs to swap to settler next turn to whip our tenth, and by far worst, city lol. ah the joy of growing onto an endless vista of plains farms.... including, yes, quire possibly a plains ivory farm if we don't need to export it (though we well might)



micro oddity - scout here is at 11/15, so if we finish it working 3 HPT on turn 89, we will overflow 2 hammers into the t89 impi... which will put it at 5/35 and thus unable to double-whip D: to fix this, i decided to fire a scientist in kirishima to work the grass forest for this one turn, to finish the scout at 15/15, shave a turn off the growth time, and not lose time on the great scientist (since a city working 2 scientists from scratch crosses 100 GPP with 5 points of overflow). imo we want to get this scout out before we start chopping so we have some sense of how safe our workers will be on the forests bordering the Ottomans

[ljubljana]

im sickk been lying face-up in a dark room for several hours trying to resist the urge to eat all my roommate's ibuprofen. but much as i love complaining Here On My Blog, time to gaman and PMFT

Turn 88 - Zululand

we live in a stupid world



well, with this, i think the impetus to scout the coast between mjmd and ginger drops away.... right? or can a trade route take the form my city -> river connection w Ginger -> Ginger's roads through their territory -> defogged coastal path from a Ginger city to a dreylin city? that is convoluted enough that i wouldn't be surprised to learn that the TR calculation doesn't account for it.... nor am i really sure that it even SHOULD. especially since from what i gather that subroutine is what dominates the huge inter-turn times you see sometimes in lategame single player

spotted one of gingac's manifold new plants



right. as with sampsounta before it, this city is turbo-ass other than the gems, unless it cannibalizes a clam from Ikonion. maybe it will do so though? ikonion is really overfooded and will probably just slam into the happy cap if it works it all. what i am less sure about is how much we should consider the ability to steal food as a redeeming factor in our OWN filler cities, eg



midway between Mitakeumi and Kirishima would be a strong site if it was our first in the region, with horse + wheat + cow and a ton of riverside grass.... but all three of those resources are already owned by another city, neither of which can boast the triple food at ikonion. we probably do want to settle this area to help work kirishima's cottages at least (and it does redeem 8 of its own tiles) but idk to what degree we should allow it to stunt the growth of kirishima itself just to get up to speed quicker. while we have better land to claim this is a moot point but we are FAST running out of it

scouts report on another strong candidate for #1 in production:



that is a lot of mines! way more than we have, but i guess we are supplementing by working a bunch of ungulates



not sure how many units we're supposed to stick on these little worker defense stacks in hostile territory to strike the right balance between "avoid tempting a worker snipe" and "avoid freaking out our neighbors". they have 2 units on the mine 2S of adulis, so these two SHOULD be fine, but.... we will need more than that to safely hook up the pig, on a tile with no defensive bonuses and with no unit that gets odds on defense vs their shock axe (the best we can do it create a 50/50 with one of our own). i am also noooot too happy about committing a large portion of our stack to chilling for 4t on a tile where they would be really easy to first strike.....

btw my understanding of granary math suggests that adding marginal food is worth exactly net zero if it will come in the second half of a growth cycle before the granary finishes. eg, with a +2 food surplus, the difference between finishing a granary with 4 food left to grow and 6 is..... nothing, because in 3 turns we will have 6 food stored in the box in both cases. thus, hoshoryu is still working its floodplains cottage while building a settler (where the extra food at least does SOMEthing even if it's not getting doubled via granary) instead of swapping for abi's plains cottage (where it is literally no better than working a 1 food tundra river cottage before the granary comes in).

okay, but that's an almost normal micro decision in most circumstances anyways. here is an application of the same principle that is NOT normal:



with a chop coming in to finish the granary in 4 turns, any more food we put into this city between now and then will be wasted (assuming we are not willing to come off the gold to try to grow to size 3, which i'm not). and..... well, the lake has one more commerce than the floodplains farm. so...we should be working the lake, right? and should have been last turn too, since at 13/24 food we are over the line into "more than half of the next size's food box away from growing"

puhLEASE correct me if this understanding is incorrect before the turn rolls and i'll go back and change it (obviously)

and ok, while thinking about it i see that there is a difference: we may not get extra food from THIS tile between when the granary finishes and 6 turns after that (which is how long it would take tobizaru to hit size 3 if we worked the lake until the chop comes in), but we DO miss out on spending the second half of that period at size 3 instead of size 2, which means we're not working the city's third tile for (in this case) 3 turns, which is (in this case) a floodplains cottage. ok, that's reason enough to swap back to the farm here. but i think i'll keep the hoshoryu/abi situation the way it is

ok just kind of casually poking around the various screens for fun and WAIT WHAT



they have currency on turn 88?? hence the settling binge? wow! ok, so, is this a validation of their strategy (sit on six cities and tech to it) over ours (expand out to 9 first to get all the food hooked up and worked asap)? well.... i don't know really. i feel like even though they are up a shitton of commerce on us and about to be moreso, i'm not suuuure i prefer their position.... but maybe i am overvaluing our nice full food boxes at wakamotoharu and daieisho and half-finished granary at abi more than i should be. i guess as EXP they basically have their own half-finished granaries at all the new sites, but still you'd think it'd be a faster foodhammer snowball to get those up and running asap. unless... well, unless the point is that those six cities ARE all the ones with workable non-cannibalized food resources..... but that's not true, i can see an unworked cow and sheep right there and all 6 of their original cities have been defogged



well, admittedly the land there is pretty assballs anyways, of quality no better than our kotozakura. but kotozakura is size 3 with a granary and is pretty happy with having existed for 30 turns now. but maybe their cities will all be size 3 in 30 seconds too when they finish the gardens....

or, ok, perhaps the REAL takeaway is the impact not on HG but on the mausoleum race - they do have marble settlable as well and will DEFINITELY beat us to the tech if they want it. damn. i am starting to belatedly realize that all the heavily forested but otherwise terrible land on this map is a factor that should have led us to prioritize early teching over expansion, at least relative to baseline, so we could have a shot at the important early-midgame wonders. well, if we are going to lose BOTH the HG and MoM to a single opponent, i guess we'd want it to be ginger who is pretty much at their ceiling as far as peaceful expansion goes and not monster-to-be America.....

but my real worry is... if they are THIS far ahead of us on tech, how long will it take them to beeline guilds? could we be looking at being on the receiving end of like a turn 110 knight push with CHM + hammam-powered whipping? pretty sure the "buttload of impis" strategy is not going to stand up to that. honestly there may not be ANYthing we can do between now and then that would stand up to that.....

well, seems like if the mausoleum is taken when we get to currency we had better hit construction and then engineering ASAP (esp with PRO providing a reason to prioritize castles anyways). we could even give up the MoM chase now and commit to doing that, sending out settler about to come out of hoshoryu north to the last unworked fish instead of to this otherwise horrible forest site. not sure if that's an overreaction though (as is my trademark, after all)......

idk, how DO people defend against knight pushes in this game....? if someone gets hit by one before engineering are they usually just dead? or would putting the same number of hammers into impis as they do into knights give us a chance? that does mean more than twice as many impis as they would have knights, and an impi fortified in kirishima with 40% cultural defense SHOULD have odds on a knight (promotions will likely be C1+C2 on both sides, so it's a 12 str knight vs a 4 * (1 + 1 + 0.4 + 0.25 + 0.2) = 11.4 strength impi.... ok that is NOT us getting odds. we would have more than them but knights can fork multiple cities ofc and idk how many impis it would take to beat down a knight stack in the open field....

"when in doubt, quantify" - i guess i actually COULD know that. vodka + binary search says the breakeven point for impis attacking knights is between 17 and 18 impi for every 10 knights. 35 hammers for an impi vs 90 for a knight means that should be hammer-efficient, yes? is the idea that normal civs can't defend like this because they can't mass spears in one place, but because we are exactly zulu we don't have that problem and so are inherently a bad target for a knight push.....? anyways this is the basic logic behind why i've been building impi as military police over warriors in every city and why i expect to continue to do so lol

[aetryn]

Defending against Knight pushes isn't fun because of their speed, but basically pikes, War Elephants and catapults.

Who else does Ginger have OB with? They may not be able to fill the second trade route slot with a +2 in all cases if they don't have enough partners.
Also keep in mind that while Ginger can probably do anything with his tech lead, he can't do everything. If he goes for MoM, he's not bee-lining Guilds. Honestly, Code of Laws is the next big pickup and will almost always go long before Knights. After all, you need Courthouses to administer all the territory you plan to conquer. Also Ginger is not Gavagai or Superdeath. He will absolutely go to war, but he doesn't look on it as breathing. He may well prefer to do buildery things for a while.

I'd tend to prioritize food over a wonder spot in settling, but only if you can actually hook up that fish in a timely fashion. If we're looking at a sloooow workboat build, it might not be any better in the near term.

Sorry to hear you're sick. I've been ill for about the last 10 days, and it's not super fun.

[El Grillo]

Catapults do a lot of the heavy lifting when defending in your territory, though you may have to trade space and cities for time to get enough units in position. Even with pre-Engineering roads, you can eventually force the attacker to stand where you can hit their stack with collateral, and at point Impis will do just fine. Also, even if the enemy can get favorable odds attacking the first city, once the stack starts getting wounded, it is less threatening. Unless they have a great general for healing and extra promotions, then it gets a lot messier.

[ljubljana]

yeahhh the fish is second-ring, so while the work boat isn't too slow (we can mathchop both it and the monument) we have to wait 10 obnoxious turns for it during which it's just gonna steal hoshoryu's cow and annoy me lol

the real issue is we need to settle MoM city now if we want to compete for it.... with 12 forests worth 45 each, i believe we can only finish it with just chops if we settle early and chop a monument first. otherwise it's 8 forests first-ring * 45 + 4 outside our borders * 30 = 400 < the 450 hammer cost of the wonder... if we miss HG in a close race we can get calendar on failgold around probably t101 so this is when we want to settle it to be in position for that plan

hmm. well, maybe we can be first to MoM just by being the only one with a full 10 workers in place ready to chop lmao. we will have to whip a couple but i believe we can make that happen. they'd have to exist and be ready to move onto a forest turn 98ish.... so that's another timing thing we get to worry about

edit: better check ur math on that one ljublje. well it may still be better, we can probably get 10 workers ready but idk about 12...

[Tarkeel]

well, with this, i think the impetus to scout the coast between mjmd and ginger drops away.... right? or can a trade route take the form my city -> river connection w Ginger -> Ginger's roads through their territory -> defogged coastal path from a Ginger city to a dreylin city? that is convoluted enough that i wouldn't be surprised to learn that the TR calculation doesn't account for it.... nor am i really sure that it even SHOULD. especially since from what i gather that subroutine is what dominates the huge inter-turn times you see sometimes in lategame single player

It's hard to be sure due to the cropping, but it looks like you already have a route past the peaks, or will eventually: Trade can flow up the "border river" on the east side into Mjmd's territory. If he has a trade connection to that river, trade can then flow back down the western part inside his borders, cross the road outside his border you've defogged, and into Drunken Sailor. Yes, trade routes are complex.

idk, how DO people defend against knight pushes in this game....? if someone gets hit by one before engineering are they usually just dead?

War Elephants trade favorably hammer-wise. Longbows in hill-cities are very hard to dislodge for their cost. Catapults will alter the equation heavily. The downside of doing hammer-trades is that you will have paid more in upkeep for your army. I've said this before, but it can help to study some knight attacks, and I've given our war against Alhazard's Egypt in PB66 earlier. See also what Commodore and Pindi did in PB74.

[aetryn]

well, with this, i think the impetus to scout the coast between mjmd and ginger drops away.... right? or can a trade route take the form my city -> river connection w Ginger -> Ginger's roads through their territory -> defogged coastal path from a Ginger city to a dreylin city? that is convoluted enough that i wouldn't be surprised to learn that the TR calculation doesn't account for it.... nor am i really sure that it even SHOULD. especially since from what i gather that subroutine is what dominates the huge inter-turn times you see sometimes in lategame single player

It's hard to be sure due to the cropping, but it looks like you already have a route past the peaks, or will eventually: Trade can flow up the "border river" on the east side into Mjmd's territory. If he has a trade connection to that river, trade can then flow back down the western part inside his borders, cross the road outside his border you've defogged, and into Drunken Sailor. Yes, trade routes are complex.

More than that, once you have Open Borders with someone you will have routes to people they have routes to even if you don't have any of them defogged. Basically you can think of it like this:

Your empire has a tiles in trade network structure that encompasses all of the tiles you can reach via any combination of trade routes on tiles you have defogged. So does every other empire. If a tile in your network borders a tile in another empire's network, you have a trade connection for diplo and trade route purposes. If you sign Open Borders with that empire, all of their "tiles in trade" are added to yours whether you have defogged them or not. So if you have Open Borders with Ginger, and Ginger has defogged a route to Dreylin, and you have open Borders with Dreylin, and Dreylin has defogged a route to Greenline, and you have Open Borders with Greenline, and Greenline has defogged a route to MJMD, and you have Open Borders with MJMD, and MJMD has defogged a route to whoever his neighbor is, you can trade with that neighbor even though you may discovered none of he tiles between Ginger and MJMD.

TLDR: You want a clean sea route to your nearest neighbors. Since in a Pangaea you can't trade beyond them pre-Astro without Open Borders, and since Open Borders gives you all their defogged tiles anyway, the only reason to defog beyond your nearest neighbors is if they haven't already defogged a route themselves and possibly aren't going to. If everyone does just their nearest neighbors and signs Open Borders with each other, and everyone has Sailing, everyone can trade with everyone. So basically, change the goal for your scout - it doesn't need to be on defog duty. It should be doing something else - either scouting the interiors of other players, or scouting more of the central desert, or spectating the MJMD war, or figuring out how much each player has expanded, or something besides defogging routes it doesn't need.

[Tarkeel]

well, with this, i think the impetus to scout the coast between mjmd and ginger drops away.... right? or can a trade route take the form my city -> river connection w Ginger -> Ginger's roads through their territory -> defogged coastal path from a Ginger city to a dreylin city? that is convoluted enough that i wouldn't be surprised to learn that the TR calculation doesn't account for it.... nor am i really sure that it even SHOULD. especially since from what i gather that subroutine is what dominates the huge inter-turn times you see sometimes in lategame single player

It's hard to be sure due to the cropping, but it looks like you already have a route past the peaks, or will eventually: Trade can flow up the "border river" on the east side into Mjmd's territory. If he has a trade connection to that river, trade can then flow back down the western part inside his borders, cross the road outside his border you've defogged, and into Drunken Sailor. Yes, trade routes are complex.

More than that, once you have Open Borders with someone you will have routes to people they have routes to even if you don't have any of them defogged. Basically you can think of it like this:

Actually, that's not quite right, trade will flow through any tile owned by a player you are not at war with. Open Borders only matters for you get trade routes to their cities; the trade path to other players can still pass through their land. The only way to stop that happening is to be at war with that part. Similarly, sea blockades will prevent trade from flowing through the affected tiles for anyone at war with the ship doing the blockade.