[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[Tarkeel]

There is a turn of grace between losing cultural control and actually losing the tile, likely to give you the option to respond. Similarly for city vision.

[aetryn]

Re: Strategy and Ginger.

Ideally we don't want to fight someone that's ahead of us. We might HAVE to, because they are going to fight us, or because they will win the game if we don't. But we should try to avoid those fights, because we probably won't win them and if we do, it will probably be a grinding war.

So right now: Is Ginger stronger than us? I'd say yes.
Is he going to fight us in the near future? Not necessarily. There are several reasons Ginger might prefer to go after Dreylin. 1) Dreylin's not AGG/PRO Zulu in an age where Impis are strong. 2) Dreylin seems less strong than we do and 3) Dreylin's border with Ginger appears messier. Couple that with the Ginger sending us peaceful signals, and I would tend to believe that Ginger doesn't plan to attack us in the near future.
Is he going to win the game if we don't attack him? We're WAY too early and his lead isn't that dominant.

So yes, I would absolutely echo peace signals with Ginger and continue to. We'd much prefer to go the other direction and have them go the other direction. If they kill Dreylin and we kill GT, we still might be able to work together against Greenline given we now share a border with them. The longer we can have a respectful peace with Ginger the more we can concentrate resources other places than militarizing that border.

[ljubljana]

Yeah, I'm basically in agreement re Ginger. We are not likely to ever be WEAKER relative to them than we are right now, with them just finishing HG and at the crest of their power curve while we still have a significant amount of land left to settle. I think the longer we can delay conflict w them, the better, at least unless something changes.

Turn 95 - Zululand

THIS time I do think it's cleanly correct with respect to the letter of the settler race rules to wait to move after greenline, so I have done so.



Alert! GT is showing a gigantic power spike, though we have now reached the stage where the increments are small enough that I don't think it's practicable for me to squint to figure out exactly HOW large.... It is neither HBR tech nor Iron Working as our number of KTBs (1 and 2, respectively) is unchanged since last turn.... best guess is Mathematics, but that still requires quite a few military builds to have finished as well. We are also suddenly down to 4th in troops, and even with graphs on naufragar now in, we still do not yet have graphs on anyone with strictly more than us.... hard to imagine that 7-city Gav or Mjmd might be ahead of us, but by pigeonhole principle at least one of them now literally MUST be.



Mjmd lands a late Judaism, Gav is presumably trying to vulture one of the last two Rickety cities, though whether they are close enough to do so is an open question.



Yeah, nice.... we get to work the pigs for exactly 2 turns and now we have conveniently hooked them up for GT... With the library, we should see them again in uh.... 30 turns..... and that's if we can prevent them from throwing down a filler city with them in the second ring to try and take them back permanently. ugh, I increasingly think we need to prioritize this filler spot despite its garbagehood just to prevent that from happening

Wherever this big pile of new GT troops is, it is at least not right on the border with us. But I am going to keep that chariot looking around for it for the next little while, I think.



In the grand tradition of three-letter aggressive border city names, I present Ura, a fan-favorite upper-maegashira known for spectacular in-ring acrobatics and unusual winning techniques:



Civ4 Ura is not going to fuck around with its build order - walls FIRST, to be chopped out next turn as the stone is hooked up in the north. Then we overflow into the granary, with the hope of finishing it right around when the food box is halfway full at size 1. I will also not fuck around with chopping these border forests - if greenline lets me, those are the first two actions I will take with our pair of workers down here.

And as for why greenline decided to prioritize this foodless site over the triple-resource spot that we claimed.... well, williams, you called it - the ONE resource-eligible tile in the region that we hadn't managed to defog turned out to contain a silver :| which gives them a surplus, even, which I am sure they are salivating over trading for one of our golds, or just denying us long-term for the sheer joy of it. Good think we have a backup....

[aetryn]

Well, the really long term solution for owning that pig is very likely to own or raze those GT cities. So let's not contort our game too badly in the meantime to try to stop him from claiming them for a few turns. It's irritating, sure.

I wouldn't be surprised if Gav has higher soldier count that we do - we know he's been fighting, so it makes sense for him to have a decent army. I assume Superdeath is probably top power, Gav is second, GT is third, and then us. Possibly GT is concerned about being squished between an unoccupied Nauf (since SD is busy in the south, and probably will continue to at least be threatened by Gav) and a spiky Zulu and is building up some troops just in case. It's also possible GT wants to attack Nauf. Is GT still running poorly in other metrics? Building in place is not a solution if everyone near you is building faster, so GT may have concluded he needs to go conquer someone now and not wait for Oromos. Probably doesn't need any action now, but we should definitely keep an eye on it.

What's the tech priority after Currency? Are we still going to try for the Code of Laws religion? When do you expect Construction and Calendar to provide cats on defense and allow us to hook up our Calendar resources (silks, right?)

[ljubljana]

yeahhh, long-long term we'd like to kill GT but like;;; i don't want our plan for making Abi a decent city to run THROUGH that, you know. if circumstances dictate that we must split ginger with dreylin or something, it would be nice to still get the pigs.... at least nice enough to seem worth accelerating a filler city we were going to want pretty soon after currency anyways.

re tech path, well.... with ginger as far ahead as they are and with no religion of their own, i don't really think the CoL religion is realistically going to fall to us. i think making a MoM try makes more sense as we have the city/chops/marble hookup in place for it already and i do not THINK there is any site in gingerland with enough forests to instantly chop it out as Atamifuji can. so i'm thinking the tech path will be currency - 1t to finish sailing - calendar - construction/CoL in some order. how does that sound?

also, i learned from reading an old SD report on the bus that apparently people actually build /wealth/ in this game?? and that's one of the reasons currency is an economic bottleneck? wow, is that true...? i think i literally would not have even thought to consider that lmao..... i am not too sure we can afford to divert hammers from military but if we do try to run some wealth builds, maybe we can shave time off this calendar push. not sure how quickly i can get the workers in place though.... i would LIKE to have simmed all this out, but the sim is now way behind reality and i'm not sure i have the kind of time to dump into this as i was during the opening.... sorry if and when performance inevitably suffers as a result

Turn 96 - Zululand



awwww.... is this an appeasement pig? that's sweet of them <3 i guess there are people out here who might tilt hard enough to declare war about losing an important food tile like this? and maybe i should be posturing as such a person so that i will get more appeasement pigs in the future, huh?

well, we hardly need the health as of yet, but i'll accept, as i think (in the context of them sending this because they think i'm pissed off) anything else would be perceived as an aggressive signal. i would like to send something back to them as a thank-you, but we don't have a surplus of anything we actually need.... well, i guess my thank-you can be an offer to swap our fish for their crab, or something like that? that's a deal we'd want to do anyways as we will eventually have a second fish, but have no way to get a native source of crab....



shit man, guess that answers that question. this is horrific.... i guess we should be glad gav WAS in position to vulture as otherwise SD would just be eating an entire other player's worth of cities here. sheesh, i feel so bad for rickety

here is how close to the wire we cut it on currency:



YUP. as in the sims, we are going to make it next turn by a margin of single-digit gold... 60% science would be at -36 which we don't have the gold to run for a turn. i am probably going to have to pinch pennies in the worst way by swapping tiles around, and maybe even running a scientist for one turn to INCH us over the line here

speaking of which, a second person hit currency, so looks like we will be (tied for) third.... i guessss that timing's ok? at least, given the extent to which we have been cosplaying as someone in a hideous unsalvagable economic crash here



UHHHH.... exCUSE me?? that is a settler in matara, and a stack of 'FOUR workers attempting to road through the hills... don't tell me they are actually going to reach 7 tiles away from the rest of their civ to poach our gold and spices??? i mean, it pretty much must be that right.... they don't need to try for the silver and nothing else in the area is worth settling. i.... guess i just figured they'd recognize the towering indefensibility of such a plant and not try it? well, as far as our scouts can tell there is ZERO military escort accompanying this settler (save for, like, literal warriors) soooo even if our settler can't beat them to the spot we sure as hell can do something about this

ok good thing i spotted this before committing on that resource trade because i am NOT going to send them happy nicey peace signals now....

we are now in a turnsplit with GT, with them moving first. and yes, this disadvantages us in the race.... but there was nothing we could have done about it as they rolled the last turn and played twice. ughhhh, feels bad man

ok, ugh;;; i'm too sleepy for this. i'm going to think on it, maybe overnight and maybe just for an hour or two

FUTURE ME: DO NOT ROLL TURN until you decide on the currency scientist

edit: is it dirty to move my scouting chariot through GT's borders via their right of passage to try to impede this plant :[

[aetryn]

Ginger's less likely to care about religion given he has 4 happy over a stock civilization. That's not to say it's not feasible he'll go for it, but I'd expect he would prioritize other things higher. With two people valuing wonders out there it doesn't seem likely that Ginger (or us, for that matter) are going to aim for the Monk wonders, and without that control of a religion is really only happy without waiting for a random spread and shrine income, and we're already getting late in the game for actually getting a shrine in place in any kind of reasonable timeframe. Seriously, if you don't built a wonder that gives Priest points, pick up a religious spread so you can build multiple temples, have Philosophical as a trait or spend your 100 GPP person on a Great Prophet, it's surprisingly hard to generate them, since you're stuck on one Priest specialist in most situations. We probably value the happy higher than Ginger does, and we mostly don't want to feed an early religion holder who probably WILL get a shrine, but we probably aren't getting a shrine or building monk wonders either, so maybe we don't care that much. But Courthouses are pretty nice anyway, so there's an argument for going to Code of Laws pretty soon anyway.

What wonders have fallen since the engineers came out? I think you reported that MJMD built one? That might have consumed his engineer, but we still expect Nauf to have one, right? If so, MoM is a pretty dicey play unless we absolutely can one-turn it. I think I'd probably gamble on religion over MoM, but either could bust.

GT may be completely out of reasonable land to settle. Doesn't make an indefensible plant any more defensible, but might explain it.

And while you should try not to build Wealth, it's necessary sometimes to eke out a needed tech in a shorter timeframe. It's also good to have that building option if you don't need any more military units for some reason.

[scooter]

also, i learned from reading an old SD report on the bus that apparently people actually build /wealth/ in this game?? and that's one of the reasons currency is an economic bottleneck? wow, is that true...? i think i literally would not have even thought to consider that lmao.....

Currency being an economic bottleneck is like 80-90% the +1 trade route, to be fair. That coincides with being completed right around the time of the game where new city maintenance starts to shut down your tech, so getting that injection bends the maintenance curve a bit. Ability to build wealth is definitely not the main reason the tech is so valued, but there's definitely some situations where it can be useful.


1) Getting to a key tech sooner when it matters. For example, a first-to bonus of some sort (Music/Liberalism, or unlocking a key wonder). Or maybe unlocking a civic that will have certain benefits that outweigh the loss of production. Basically if your whole empire benefits massively from hitting a tech 1-2 turns sooner, it can make a lot of sense to speed it via Wealth/Research. What's an entire turn dedicated to Wealth if it wins you the Liberalism race?


2) If you are super broke and still need to tech, it can be an OK stopgap. It would be better to not be broke to begin with, though. This is especially true if you already have a big standing army, as building more units might just cripple you further economically anyway.


3) Storing overflow/chops. When you build Wealth, you only funnel in base hammers - all sources of "burst" production are held in the background. So for example, let's say you're researching a tech that will unlock a wonder, but you have limited workers, so you want to complete some of the chops before the wonder is even available. One option would be to "store" that chop with a Wealth build.


4) There can be niche situations such as having good production modifiers. Wealth/Research are impacted by production modifiers, so an 8h base city with a Forge will give you 10g/turn when building Wealth. If you have a true production city with Factory/Ironworks/etc, this city can be a serious needle-mover late-game and fund your research if you are in a stage where you need the beakers more than the hammers.

[Commodore]

For example, if you would be able to run wealth in a single city with at least 3h of production, you could have the tech at 60% this turn without all the scrimping and saving.

[ljubljana]

thank you for the detailed explanations! ok, so maybe there is a case for running wealth to accelerate Calendar in particular.... i'll take a look next turn and see how quickly we can get all the workers in place

re GT, yeah, they ARE out of reasonable land to settle



yeah frankly, if this were me, the next two cities on my list would be one to use the Abi pigs that are already in the border, and trying to take the gold spot.... i do get it and i am sympathetic w their plight (which i did go out of my way to create after all, lol).... i think what i'll do is send some units to the to force them to send escorts and hopefully delay them a little while, and in the meantime settle our border spot in the north so they can't secure control of the pig. GT can settle in a spot that takes some of the floodplains around turn 99, but i don't think they can beat us to the gold if we're willing to take a suboptimal spot for it. we can be 1N of the gold on our t99 as well, which is not perfect (oh is it ever not perfect) but at least it gets the tile that matters most.... and yes, if GT reaches this far towards us it will be REALLY hard for them to defend it long-term. idk i guess i've cooled off about it a LITTLE lol



woooo PRO walls with stone :D how is overflow going to work from this exactly? i assume things will get subtracted out in such a way that we won't get the full 50 hammers.... but either way, clearly there is no point to putting MORE than twice the hammer cost of the walls into them this turn, so may as well work the wheat over the horse

well, we found the horcher researcher



aaand very likely rival best in milpower too, as speculated

ended up running the one scientist for currency in Mitakeumi, which is our one city working on a civilian unit this turn. i think next turn i will start whipping and repositioning workers for our MoM push. currently we have

- 2 in the SW about to mine the silver
- 3 in the NW doing various tasks at hoshoryu/abi
- 1 at Takakeisho hooking up our deer

we can get, i think, 3 from whipping at our good cities in the area (with Abi's pop pretty firmly reserved for the library imo).... so we need to obtain a tenth somehow. i may just bite the bullet and send one of the Kirishima chop workers on the looong road back west.... that kinda sucks but we already have unworked cottages over there so probably not a huge snowball loss

i noticed i was wrong, GT is sending a spear with their settler, it is under our scout at Mataya. but....



i think we can handle one spear

notice how zulu absolutely shines in this map situation btw - no other civ could threaten this plant with units that actually beat spears while ALSO retaining the flexibility to run back over to the greenline border if needed. the impi is a beautiful unit even without mobility

edit: re currency, i guess i'd better check who the other player with it is while we are still able to... any guesses? i'll give you a hint, it is NOT who i thought it would be.....

oh @aetryn re wonders, the colossus is the only one that has fallen recently. i am starting to suspect one of those GEs might have just been settled.... i am not suuuper famiiliar w the payback horizons involved but this is starting to look like a LONG time to keep one just sitting around and not contributing anything

[aetryn]

Currency guesses:

Unlikely to be MJMD (too many wonder builds, must have diverted to some odd techs for that reason), or Greenline (almost certainly went to Priesthood first for Ziggurats). America would kind of be the obvious choice since they're probably doing better for research, but we also know they went to Metal Casting for Forges. We know Superdeath diverted to Iron Working since he has Praets and Gav got HAs, which should also slow down a currency push. So that leaves Dreylin and GT. I will guess Dreylin.

Engineers: It's likely one engineer was used on Colossus (if MJMD or Nauf built it). Other engineer could have been settled but I can see one of them beelining Calendar over Currency to use it for MoM - especially America which will have specialists to spare and can easily get 3 GAs out of it before it expires. We can go ahead and proceed with the plan, just don't be surprised if it gets sniped in the next couple turns. What would we do with all those forests if it does get sniped? Not sure what our best fallback option is. Save them for Sankore at Paper if we do manage to land a religion? That's a LOONG way away.