[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

yeahhh i agree about ignoring the AP, we're too close to it at this point i think and multiple religion founders have it available to research. do ALL the monk wonders work for all civs, not just the builder, or is that AP only? one nice thing is that of the three religion founders, i think only dreylin looks to be in the contender tier right now (gav and mjmd seem to have been set very far back by their war of mutual destruction...) so it may not be a disaster to spread one of the other religions around too for the monk economy if we miss sankore. that does disincentivize going for CoL somewhat but the main reason i want to is that due to a combination of distant neighbors and late sailing there are a TON of opportunities for free spreads available even though we're ostensibly late to the party. and it is a pretty high-land content map to support a ton of crappy cities, so shrine income could be considerable (and don't look mow but kirishima is both out largest eligible holy city candidate and a strong contender for the commerce multipliers already)

[aetryn]

yeahhh i agree about ignoring the AP, we're too close to it at this point i think and multiple religion founders have it available to research. do ALL the monk wonders work for all civs, not just the builder, or is that AP only? one nice thing is that of the three religion founders, i think only dreylin looks to be in the contender tier right now (gav and mjmd seem to have been set very far back by their war of mutual destruction...) so it may not be a disaster to spread one of the other religions around too for the monk economy if we miss sankore. that does disincentivize going for CoL somewhat but the main reason i want to is that due to a combination of distant neighbors and late sailing there are a TON of opportunities for free spreads available even though we're ostensibly late to the party. and it is a pretty high-land content map to support a ton of crappy cities, so shrine income could be considerable (and don't look mow but kirishima is both out largest eligible holy city candidate and a strong contender for the commerce multipliers already)

AP is the only one that works for all civs. The others are the civ that builds it only (and it doesn't matter if you founded the religion, actually, but it's a lot more obvious to spread one religion around to all your cities if your planning to do monk things). This map is good for shrine income and monk wonders because it's going to have a ton of small cities. +4 hammers/beakers/gold in a size 16+ city? Meh. In a size 5-6 city? That's suddenly a decent chunk of your capabilities. It certainly makes all those awful desert city locations semi-useful even if they never do anything else. And yes, seems like there's a lot of opportunity to get neighbor spreads going on for even more shrine goodness.

[Tarkeel]

do ALL the monk wonders work for all civs, not just the builder, or is that AP only?

The AP is special; it selects the state religion of the builder and applies to all buildings for that religion, regardless of player. The others (Sankore, Minaret, Sistine) work for the state religion of the current owner. The latter three will update based on owner, the AP will not.

[ljubljana]

sorry for the slow turn, future SD - had to wait until after GT and by the time they played, i was asleep already

Turn 101 - Zululand

our ivory bribe prompted a rare post in GT's thread, which makes me nervous..... really nervous.....



but it worked???!??? omfg they pulled back, really?! unbelievable :D



kazakhstani rising star kinbozan ("kin" meaning "gold", not coincidentally) is a sentimental favorite as i got his sumo trading card for my partner as a present about six months ago when he debuted in the top division

we have the second gold mined at tobizaru now, if not hooked up, and i'm choosing to work it instead of a bare floodplains out of overweening greed for confucianism. note dreylin's stupid scouting CHARIOT making me delay starting the wheat farm, extremely obnoxiously :< may even have to whip an impi in daieisho to guard it if they turn north.....



for the magnanimity in accepting defeat, GT gets an apology gold, an offer to normalize relations, and a firm (if inexpressible) commitment from me to not cancel the ivory gift for the foreseeable future. in theory they could use this to settle first-ring to the spice and try to take it but such a city would be unbelievable shitty from a yields perspective as well as indefensible, so i think the odds are low enough that cow for cow is safe

re CoL - gingac's still saving, superdeath is also saving. greenline is researching but at close to breakeven it looks like, with just 18 gold in the bank and no GPT on offer. so maybe they are, like, about to get it, but i think we have a shot if we keep running all these wealth builds. anyways, now that we have the kinbozan site for the time being, i think that tiebreaks in favor of chopping Chichen Itza - at least the city is on a hill and with the CI bonus it will have the equivalent of (flatground) walls



problem with our ivory gift - kirishima, which we are desperately trying to grow big to work cottages and eventually specialists for the first GA, is plunged into unhappiness and needs to whip a settler to avoid massive inefficiency. but look - dreylin accepted our gold/gems offer! so over the next few turns as we hook up ivory and gold AND silver we should be able to fix this issue



nauf's mausoleum city is sore fox, btw.... confirming that they (saved and) used the GE, IMO



despite spending all our EP on ginger for a while, they have apparently stabilized in a position that gives them research visibility :[ maybe that's good for us as of now though as most likely the best they can do is 50/50 us on CoL and i don't really think they'd bother if they know it's a coinflip at best to actually land the religion. but for now i'll swap to calendar while we save just to obfuscate things a little

oh and.... a second person turned up with calendar this turn! maybe we were not even second in this MoM race, wow!
hit end turn and



....in Ankyra, right on the border??? lol what does this wonder even do again? i guess it will help catch them up on culture a bit but not THAT much, kirishima's library is about to double (part of the rationale for building it so early was so the doubling would ALSO happen early) and we should have a pretty sizable lead by now that will take some time for them to whittle away at....

not going to play the second turn right away because i guess we should still wait for GT juuuust in case they decide to move all their guys up and DoW us or something. not that that's likely but i do feel that we may as well respect the existing turn order for one more turn

though the one thing i did do was swap research to 100% on CoL to hopefully send gingac a signal on the feasibility of them going for it. for them to strictly beat us they have to 2-turn it from here and if they're starting from scratch that required 3/2 of our GNP, which i don't believe they have.

[aetryn]

Good diplo news I guess then. That means we can consolidate some and maybe stop lurching from possible border crisis to possible border crisis. I think we've leaned pretty hard on the Impi-spikiness intimidation factor and we're now at the point where they just aren't going to be that scary anymore, so we should probably try to be nice for a while since we seem to have gotten all the land we wanted and have pretty stable borders.

Also, if the plan is still to chop out Chichen Itza if we get to Code of Laws first, we don't need anywhere near as many workers doing that as there will be very little competition for that wonder, so I'd suggest retasking at least half the work force you planned for that to go elsewhere, hopefully to improve all our new cities, or ensure we have roads that can get our troops from one side of our empire to another. Shrine will be many turns off either way since our 100 point person is already used. If that means a couple forests survive due to hammers accumulated by the actual city while the chopping takes place, we can always turn those into Knights or something later.

[ljubljana]

yeah "luckily" there isn't really anything left for impi spikiness to get us - other than some reachy ginger border sites and the greenline silver we pretty much have all we wanted, mostly at the expense of our intended eventual conquest who we'd like to keep as weak as possible. so in summation yeah i agree and will start being outwardly normal (while inwardly working out the timing with which we could split GT with nauf)

oh and while i agree that the offensive lifespan of impi is more or less at an end, i still plan to keep building a fuckton of them as it seems like they'll retain some DEfensive utility into the knights era - how does that sound? obvi when we have cats available i'll start queueing those instead

ok GT played - is it legal within the rules for me to log back in and change our research to 0% calendar again, then 100% CoL during my turn, with the intention of deceiving ginger's research visibility since they haven't played yet (and i might not have time until the morning again....)? seems gamey but i could have accomplished the same thing by just NOT changing to CoL prematurely at the end of last round (we have not put any beakers into CoL as of yet and spent the last EoT on calendar at 0%)

also



re chichen itza you're right but.... shifting workers off the forests will eventually waste worker turns, either by making us move onto the 2-move forest tile twice or by making us build unnecessary roads. not sure it seems better enough to me to save some of the forests for knights (and therefore make atamifuji crawl through the second half of CI over 20ish turns) than to just chop it out all the way (and start infra/military immediately) to justify losing 5 or 6 worker-turns

the problem is that i already moved the workers onto the forests with the timing that we would have needed to chop MoM, so actually as of this turn they're all 1t away and we have to play games with wealth-storing-overflow now to even get them all to go into CI lol OOPS. conveniently though we have 11 forests (one more than MoM needs) and CI only needs 9, so we get an extra chopped granary out of changing our target here at least

[aetryn]

I wouldn't play games with research visibility - some people find that really irritating and it's kind of adjacent to clock games. Basically anything that involves you doing something important both before and after someone else's turn is not a good idea, with the possible exception of logging back in to see if someone responded to your outgoing diplomacy request or something.

Re: chops already basically being done... well, what are you planning to do if we don't actually get the religion? Then Chichen Itza is pretty worthless to us. I probably would have scaled back the worker micro as soon as MoM got taken even if that cost some eventual turns in workers moving onto forests more than once. But it's probably too late for that at this point. Sorry, I should have mentioned something earlier - I was just thinking about "build CI with the forests from the filler city" and not about keeping the same micro plan.

Impi are decent Horse Archer defense, but they don't really trade well with Knights (though obviously better than axes). For Knight defense we'll want War Elephants or Pikes, which is Construction and Engineering respectively.

[ljubljana]

ok, changed it back to CoL then. omg no need to apologize for not fixing MY micro screwup hahahaha. if we miss the religion i'm probably going to still spend all the chops immediately, just on a settler and a courthouse instead of CI... we still have some backlines to fill and it would be nice to grow our strong cities onto market happy now instead of whipping settlers every time they hit size 6

i guess we could also still do CI and try for the philosophy religion but honestly i think that's an overcommitment

edit: not quite sure i get the knight/impi calculus though. vodka suggests that at 2:1 numbers or more an impi stack can kill a knight stack, and knights are so expensive that even spending 2 per knight killed would be a good hammer trade. admittedly that is a LOT of impi to have sitting around but i mean, we are AGG

[aetryn]

ok, changed it back to CoL then. omg no need to apologize for not fixing MY micro screwup hahahaha. if we miss the religion i'm probably going to still spend all the chops immediately, just on a settler and a courthouse instead of CI... we still have some backlines to fill and it would be nice to grow our strong cities onto market happy now instead of whipping settlers every time they hit size 6

i guess we could also still do CI and try for the philosophy religion but honestly i think that's an overcommitment

edit: not quite sure i get the knight/impi calculus though. vodka suggests that at 2:1 numbers or more an impi stack can kill a knight stack, and knights are so expensive that even spending 2 per knight killed would be a good hammer trade. admittedly that is a LOT of impi to have sitting around but i mean, we are AGG

It's more about not being as viable against combined arms stacks including knights because with collateral from catapult bombardment their base strength just isn't high enough. But yeah, the 2 move is very nice as a mobile defense force for handling forks, as both the upgrades are slooow units, so it's a good idea to have quite a number, and a flanking or forking force isn't going to have 1-mover catapults alongside.

[ljubljana]

bleahhh ok. we play the turn (102) as quickly as we reasonably can before sleep so we don't hold everyone up



roads disaster



a bunch of normal guys running around in the middle of nowhere



screwed up and left mr scouty dreylin chariot w the chance to do a worker snipe, very nice very cool. well, technically i can cover it w one of my chariots but that's sad



ginger could raze kotozakura unless i whip an in-progress impi right now, if they dow in the second half of the turn timer, teleport out, then move the chariot in. we have a few turns left on our peace timer i believe, and i know they believe it to be sacred. so i should trust them, and i do.... but not that much. i eat the inefficiency and single-whip the damn unit like a responsible city owner

wakamotoharu is depressed for lack of cottages..... i have to either put both food resources in the area into this worker this turn or work an unimproved plains hill at WMH over a river hamlet at kirishima. nice