[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[aetryn]

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.

Either way, the point is the same. We don't need vision of these tiles for trade until after Astronomy, which is ages and ages away.

[Tarkeel]

Correct. The one tile you did need vision on is the road outside Mjmd's borders, and even that is likely to be cultured before it matters.

[ljubljana]

vwaufvweyuavuyweavyueaw

turn first sleep later

i gotta stop um leaving the house and getting back at midnight with the turn unplayed

nnnnnnnn



sorry bb, ginger beat you to the punch... but i will send back a wheat for wheat when rejecting, i think, both to avoid hurting their feelings and because it would really be nice to get some assurances be ohhhh oh god wtf is that in the city count



yup. exACTLY what i was planning to do but 10 turns faster. right down to discovering currency the turn before. i think it's even the same number of cities we were going to do it on too. fuck man. welcome to mega-first

so post-mortem - what could we have done to speed this up by the full 10 turns we would have needed to match their pace? frankly, i am not sure.... we are really not close on hammers or commerce, and funneling all our chops into expansion both delayed our cottages relative to them and ensured that we would not have a ton of 30-hammer forests around to math-chop into settlers when the tech came in. they must have pretty much done their equivalent of our early-game deforestation push right now... and obviously they are not BEHIND for having failed to expand as quickly, and indeed the HG has just catapulted them waaaay ahead of the field. man! is that the answer, that i chopped too greedily and too early? maybe i've badly underestimated how much early teching speed can turn into expansion speed via, what, pretty much exactly this lever..... fnuhhhh i'm too tired to really comprehend it right now but



demos tell pretty much the same story. remember we were first in crop yield like, two turns ago

ok, so abi micro is off now bc no reason to rush to the stone, and an affirmative reason to rush the pigs. what do we do with kirishima's forests? probably just chop into the market, or like, save for filler city infrastructure. kirishima's POP is a little harder.... grow onto cotttages is the move, obviously, but now we're about to SLAM into the happy cap there and we can't really whip into settlers for lack of the ability to afford the cities.

sorry yall no more detailed commentary tonight i am SOOO done w thinking for today

but bravo gingac  very very well-done

[aetryn]

Given that we saw Ginger settled on a stone city and with mysterious chops apparently doing nothing earlier maybe he got failgold on Pyramids and that powered him to Currency.

Also, don't discount the extra citizens Ginger might have had for many of these turns because of Charismatic (and possibly earlier border pops because of cheap Monuments that led to picking up important tiles). I've been playing around with Charismatic recently and it does help the early game more than I expected.

But yes, this is ultimately the cost of mass deforestation just to support the immediate expansion phase of the game. We probably still have more workers than Ginger, but he's ahead in other areas.

[ljubljana]

i think we can say with pretty high confidence that those were settler chops... they have settled something like 6 cities in the past 3 or 4 turns and don't have enough strong cities to have whipped ALL the settlers.

i know in theory CHM should be giving them extra population here, but.... in practice i don't think they've been taking advantage of it? i've been squinting at their empire pretty closely and i don't think i've seen a size 7 city yet (maybe constantinople got there for a turn or two)... and we have that without any external happy sources, unless you count ginger's fur trade

hmm. well, even if it cost us HG, i still am happy with deforestation into expansion based on how it positions us relative to the REST of the field. while ultimately ONE opponent can forego early expansion and catch up in their new plants with the HG like this, it'd be quite a gamble to rely on that, and i still like our position relative to everyone else who was slower to 9 cities and missed HG just as hard as we did.... i feel like this is the kind of strategy that makes sense if you have half-price aqueducts and are rushing the tech anyways and can be therefore pretty confident that you won't miss HG (indeed i don't think there was much chance of anyone sniping it this early while still getting worthwhile value from the wonder) but that maybe is not so applicable in generic circumstances.

of all the civs that could suddenly turn into a monster overnight, all in all i'm pretty glad it's ginger. they are so squeezed on land that i think we are still destined to eventually surpass them in city count.... and maybe more importantly, they only have 2 neighbors and we are one of those neighbors, which means the other teams should be thinking to themselves "only a dreylin + ljubljana dogpile can rein in the runaway now, therefore we better not attack either of them or ginger will pile on and just win the game". and maybe we should start thinking about when we want to try to make that 2v1 with dreylin happen in the medium-term.... they preeettty much have a tech advantage locked in for most of the medieval era i think though so idk when we'll next be able to get favorable hammer trades. so maybe the plan is just to do our own expansion wave and outgrow them on the strength of our landgrab, while somehow establishing with dreylin that if ginger knight pushes one of us, the other needs to come in from the other side asap (is there a canonical way to suggest this? i imagine not really)

[Tarkeel]

i know in theory CHM should be giving them extra population here, but.... in practice i don't think they've been taking advantage of it? i've been squinting at their empire pretty closely and i don't think i've seen a size 7 city yet (maybe constantinople got there for a turn or two)... and we have that without any external happy sources, unless you count ginger's fur trade

In the early game, CHA isn't used to grow taller but to stack more whip anger.

[Commodore]

i know in theory CHM should be giving them extra population here, but.... in practice i don't think they've been taking advantage of it? i've been squinting at their empire pretty closely and i don't think i've seen a size 7 city yet (maybe constantinople got there for a turn or two)... and we have that without any external happy sources, unless you count ginger's fur trade

In the early game, CHA isn't used to grow taller but to stack more whip anger.

It's amazing for that. CtH Washington is actually the fastest REX leader available, I think.

[aetryn]

i know in theory CHM should be giving them extra population here, but.... in practice i don't think they've been taking advantage of it? i've been squinting at their empire pretty closely and i don't think i've seen a size 7 city yet (maybe constantinople got there for a turn or two)... and we have that without any external happy sources, unless you count ginger's fur trade

In the early game, CHA isn't used to grow taller but to stack more whip anger.

It's flexible. If you somehow stumble over a monster commerce site you can certainly keep the pop and use it for that instead. It also means you have to focus less on grabbing early happy resources, which can make your expansion path more natural.

So those settlers could have come from whips and the chops still have been to failgold. Skipping the turns needed to save for the cash is usually a decent way to speed yourself to Currency.

[ljubljana]

Turn 90 - Zululand

GT did NOT resend wheat-for-wheat..... but perhaps they didnt know they were expected to, since my wheat/wheat was in response to them offering a resource trade. well, unless they somehow have construction, there are only 2 GT units in immediate range of the pig, so i am going to try our hand at hooking it up



you can also see there is an extremely obnoxious GT warrior right next to where our next city is supposed to go, whose existing is causing me to have to cover both the settler and the worker with military units, and the worker just to the east has to waste a turn (!!!) because there no units in range to cover what i want it to do, which is more 1W and road the next ivory. grumble grumble grumble



look at this nerd, scouting with a chariot just to freak us out.... good thing we built impis in all our exposed cities, as aetryn so wisely recommended. you can see i've chosen to whip the settler in kirishima (for the southwestern gold site) on schedule even though the HG is no longer on the table - this is because i think it DOES still make sense to found a crapton of new cities as soon as currency comes in or shortly thereafter, even if we can't get them to 2 pop immediately after. that, and mitakeumi here needed to start a whip timer

great scientist next turn! i had weird little thoughts about trying to revive the academy plan now that MoM is looking dicier but naaaah, i think bulb math into currency asap (into settler 4 more cities asap) is probably still the play. not to mention we did time a ton of chops to come in next turn anyways and i don't want to delay key infra like the granaries in tobizaru and abi



or... i suppose we COULD revive plans to push for this greenline-bordering horsewheatcow site. it probably will not be here much longer aaaand we do now have roughly one more settler in the pipeline than we were going to due to kirishima now needing to whip a settler soon to avoid slamming into the happy cap. and it's a fine site that can work the 3 resource tiles, oasis, and 5 plains cottages (or 3 cottages + 2 farms if we want to irrigate the wheat eventually) for a non-negligible contribution to our snowball (certainly less negligible than some of the other worthless filler we're about to start on)



lol

[ljubljana]

vvvvvvvvvvvvv

turn 91 - zululand



THERE we go that's what i THOUGHT <3

and upon clicking through



ooookay, NOT what i thought. wheat for wheat, then copper for copper? what does that mean.... something like "we're chill.... but if you piss us off prepare to be arch-enemies forever?" fair enough and fine with me - we've already done the only thing i plan to do that is likely to piss them off between now and when we try to start conquering



well hmm. they have aggressively moved the adulis garrison forward. but it's hard to imagine this is anything other than a normal reaction to us moving 3 units to the border lol. well, what they have NOT done is move more guys up in range of our little worker defense stack, so at least for THIS turn we can fortify as nonthreateningly as possible and put another turn into them pigs. i'm a bit nervous about NEXT turn when in theory 6 units could move in range but if we can bluff our way past that one we will be done here

AAAnyways burying the lede of our extremely normal gameplan



we will be fifth to mathematics... here we go, although it wasn't really particularly fast



so one turn of roughly breakeven research plus 5 of 100% will get us our turn 97 currency. there is at least nobody besides gingac with THAT tech (that we know of) although i knew that already from checking everyone for GPT deal availability. you can see i have mistimed the libraries at both mitakeumi and hoshoryu lol.... i don't think it's worth delaying currency to postpone the 100% turns until they come in though as each currency turn is worth ~20 GPT while the cities combine for just 15 beakers as of now. but we CAN put the breakeven turn at the beginning at least

fittingly, we are running out of good-quality land at riiiiight about the same time as we are running out of san'yaku mainstays... my theming for the garbage filler cities will be maegashira wrestlers (those in the top division but not particularly close to the top OF the top division) who are either rising stars or whom i have some sentimental attachment to for one reason or another. and the rising starest of them all:



meet 21-year old megastar-to-be Atamifuji, stablemate of Terunofuji, whose first three top-division records were one losing tournament.... and then two consecutive 11-4 second-place finishes :O for comparison, the standard for promotion to the second-HIGHEST rank, ozeki, is the equivalent of three consecutive 11-4 tournaments, so if this had happened beginnning in the named ranks instead of at the bottom of the top division, we'd be talking about an ozeki candidate  of course it is not exactly comparably difficult to GET an 11-4 at the top of the division as opposed to the bottom, but details, details

OH if you want to watch some of these guys in action there is a tournament (Haru/Spring 2024) going on right now

----->>>>> https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/sumo/ <<<<<-----

HIGHLY encourage yall to follow along  and also highly encourage you to tell me you are doing so and also vaguepost about it without spoilers, as i usually watch the basho with 4 of my fellow sumo-enthusiast friends and they are busy right now so i am usually going to be a few weeks late to the party



we found the Hindu holy city, which means we must be getting close to the Dreylin capital. WOW gingac is really hemmed in.... two pretty close neighbors and that dreadful corner position, and not even all of "their" land is usable as a quick glance at the border will confirm. i wonder if they have offshore islands or something to make up for it? if they DO we have seen no sign of them but is telling that they are out of room to expand, and as far as we can tell EVERYone else has room for at least 5-6 more cities



also worth note is that their 13 cities, while numerically large, are quite tightly packed together.... attaleia in particular i am really not sure i would have even founded, it adds just six of its own tiles and only one has a resource. you would think maybe one tile SW for meleti would make more sense but maybe they are too scared of getting zulued for that

also, this explains their wasting that chop a few turns ago - meleti HAD TO be founded the turn before the HG comes in, so probably their micro plan demanded that they chop that forest in advance just to save a turn on settler movement. i can only imagine how tight things must have been over there, given how tight they were for US with 10 turns of extra time

anyway time to chop 3 forests immediately after discovering math. would have been 4 but we had to delay the chop into Atamifuji's monument due to GT's stupid warrior (well..... more accurately due to my lack of foresight in not having enough units in place to cover from it)



.....ohhhhhh

well, i did kinda fear something like this might be going on due to rival worst in the demos (64 food, 19 [!?] hammers, barely a third of our first-place land area). so now we can kinda see gav's logic maybe - if they rush down mjmd, who the hell is going to stop them from taking a just enormous amount of land down there and romping to a win.

onnnn the other hand, things are looking well for my intense superdeath fandom :D as well we need them to! gavagai getting LOOONG-term SD-ed is probably where most of the win probability for "the field" comes from from this position. things are not a disaster yeeeet with Mjmd still holding on at 6 cities and nauf in position to snap up a lot of the land between them and SD if SD turns into a monster, but um obviously we'd prefer to NOT be on the other side of the world from these guys lol



of us easterners, only dreylin with their early and extensive scouting has made it all the way through to inca. so most of our other friends are going to be developing in blissful ignorance, possibly for some time.....



gingac back to research vis on us, nice. nauf is 1t away from graphs but actually i'm going to change this and go 100% on gingac i think. we can NOT have them start getting ideas about being in a race with us for MoM (for instance)



i thiiiink i've decided i wanna try for this greenline border spot now. it's contested and the gold in the west REALLY should not be, it is a billion miles from anyone and the closest competition, GT, is separated from it by a band of absolute garbage land and would find it almost impossible to defend from us long-term. we can be there in just 3 turns and then it will be very fast to chop out walls -> monument -> granary working the horse. the only thing i'm a biiiit worried about is lack of military presence in the area (all we have is 2 impi and a chariot) but tobizaru can overflow into an archer after the granary and i think with walls we should be safe from greenline ministacks consisting of a handful of vultures. 

plus i think we are at the point in our snowball where risk-reward favors this kind of thing. i highly doubt we'll get dragged into a long-term war with greenline over this plant (which, let me point out, is 12 tiles from our capital and 15 from theirs) - it's not really possible for them to conquer us and even if they did they'd be in a horrible geopolitical situation, stretching from south coast to north coast with multiple neighbors on both sides. i think the worst-case outcome is the city getting razed a few turns after it's founded and we are getting into the area of the game where settlers are cheap and it is useful land that is at a premium. i think i'm willing to gamble 100 hammers at this stage in the game on what seem like decently good odds of that not happening.

what i am less sure about is if we should also go for the "3 FP + copper" site in the near future... it is way weaker of course but it still provides 8 at least decent tiles. i think i probably will if we have extra resources but i don't want to prioritize it over the western gold, i think it'd stretch us too thin on this front while also being (just) over the line into "closer to greenline than us". i'd rather build extra troops and try to make it impractical for greenline to take it, at least in the near term.



oh hey, nauf has sailing too. thinking about it, i guess we may as well try to ship them wheat for rice now.... we don't need the health yet but we will eventually, and i think it's best to lay claim to their surplus now before someone ELSE does and locks us out of it. and it's not like THEY are likely to benefit from the health anytime soon either... similarly i decide we may as well try to swap wheat for gingac's extra clams, it's not like they're going to need health building hammams everywhere and, believe it or not, we have no way to ever get either crab OR clam via peaceful settlement