[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[Tarkeel]

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%)

Technically legal but scummy, of the kind where people will refuse to join games with you in them. There's a few of us that think it should be banned.

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

You could also leave the forests pre-chopped, and road them instead.

[ljubljana]

ok! thank u for warning me away from the path of being a scumbag

Turn 103 - Zululand

still no CoL discovery to open the turn.... we need to catch one more of these to be in at least a 50/50 for the religion..... i still don't really believe we are FAVORED to get it, per se, but hopefully if you try enough 30% shots at first-to bonii eventually you will be expected to have ONE of them work out. ginger is still saving AFTER seeing us with 3t to go on CoL btw, so looks like they at least have not decided to race us. and actually upon double-checking, it turns out EVERYONE is still saving except superdeath (who was saving until last turn so should tie us at worst) and greenline (who we at least tied in the currency race so might be slightly behind in tech). fingers crossed.....



poor GT's settler has been reallocated...

note that for the first time i think all game, we have fallen BEHIND ginger on total power....... this cannot stand of course and as soon as we know the outcome of the CoL race one way or the other, i will resume doing real builds. i am NOT going to ride mass wealth builds all the way to construction, that seems too greedy and short-termist to me. also fwiw we don't see any troops massing on our border, and it looks like the Great Wall gives 10k soldiers which surely is responsible for a significant fraction of this spike



we have the first village in zululand at abi/hoshoryu (and are undoubtedly last or close to last to hit this benchmark - ginger has a TOWN already). you can see we whipped a settler at hoshoryu for happiness reasons, so we once again don't have any unhappy citizens, as it should be. takakeisho would have spawned one but i had 4 of our chopping workers divert to hook up our last ivory to pre-empt that (wouldn't have been enough for hoshoryu though which was 2 points in the hole).

we are really having to, like, MAX out commerce over the next two turns to hit this CoL timing.... we have EVERY city on wealth except for hoshoryu (whipped settler) and wakamotoharu (whipped worker), which will go back to wealth next turn for the final push. we are even pinching pennies via tricks like swapping tomokaze and ichiyamamoto to a 3h plains hill forest instead of the 1/2 plains forest just for one extra gold... as a result of all that, it LOOKS like we are pretty certain to barely make it but.... we were supposed to found a city this turn with the Kirishima settler this turn and i don't really want to delay that...... and since i haven't simmed this out i really have no idea how much it will cost us to do so...... it gets to work a hamlet from turn 1 which is a good sign for it not being a huge hideous net negative, but it's city 15 which is obviously a bad sign lol. well, we have a margin of, uh, 3 gold right now and are going to grow 2 cities next turn and swap another 2 onto wealth so i THINK we should be safe to settle..... where by "think" i mean "feel, based on no simming or quantitative evidence of any kind"



you can see in the SW we have at least started on the road to kinbozan (and of course the road north to ichiyamamoto is also on the menu for the immediate future). the new city itself is naturally spending its one hammer per turn on wealth



yeah this is gonna be really damn close. we will need 13 gold over the next 2 turns to make it.... hoshoryu will add 8 gold from swapping to wealth, wakamotoharu will add one (1!)..... and there are a few bare plains hills we could swap to over grass cottages, river wheat farms and the like that if needed to add literal pennies each.... i move our scouting impi in ethiopia back into our border to save 1 gpt, which is actually a full 2 gold if we keep them there for 2 turns....



now we gotta sim to see if chops put directly into wealth (eg while we are building wealth, with overflow saved up from a previous build) are wasted.... and it LOOKS like this should work like we want it to, but would love a wise lurker to confirm or deny this i still don't really want to put tooo much faith in abusing mechanics i may not fully understand though in case there is some nuance i'm missing that will cost us some hammers at atamifuji. so i will attempt to delay with roads and the like where they are not prima facie ridiculous things to build and only cash into wealth such chops as represent a full wasted worker turn not to do so



our recent and ongoing settling binge will continue pretty immediately with the fish and silk spots in the north, which have been put off longer than i would have liked to as it is (especially the fish which we have really no excuse for delaying to city 16[!]). but i am wondering how much priority we should put on settling the REALLY abysmal filler spots like these two. i think after currency, a city working 5 riverside plains farms and nothing else would probably still be profitable, or could be if we were to put it on wealth - takayasu cost us only ~10 gpt to found so if the costs here are similar it will not take too long for them to pay back. on the other hand we are reeeeally starting to enter the next financial crunch period (breakeven would be 20% without all the wealth builds). i don't really think we should wait all the way until serfdom but i guesssss maybe we can at least not compromise our recovery by whipping their settlers at takakeisho and mitakeumi....

eastern spot is theoretically still up for grabs w ginger though which does make me nervous. although hoshoryu's borders are about to expand next turn to invalidate most of the REALLY infringing plants they could make

[williams482]

Using wealth to store chops does work, same as with any other kind of overflow. I've chopped into wealth plenty of times in singleplayer games.

Also, I learned just a couple days ago that the "wasted" overflow production is not actually wasted, but turned into gold (after modifiers are stripped out). After some crude testing, it looks like the order of operations is:

1) complete build
2) check total overflow against the cost of the completed build, and set aside any overflow in excess of that cost
3) divide production modifiers out of both the saved overflow and the "wasted" overflow
4) assign the remaining "wasted" overflow directly to the treasury.

So deliberately wasting overflow is less efficient than wealth (no production modifiers) but doesn't require currency and can be created with whip and/or chop overflows, while wealth builds will instead hold chops and overflows in reserve to put into the next build.

[ljubljana]

wait whaaaat??? wait that's wild. and the game doesn't tell you anything about this having happened, you will just mysteriously end up with more gold than would otherwise mathematically make sense and just have to notice it?

Turn 104 - Zululand

well, 5 other people played within an hour of the turn rolling so i guess i'd better do that too

steeling myself before opening the turn to CoL having fallen 1t before we'd get it.... it would make karmic sense given that we spent exactly that turn on Calendar in our fruitless MoM chase. if that does happen.... well, at least we are getting closER to these first-to bonii - missing HG by 10t, MoM by 4t, CoL by 1t would suggest we're doing increasingly plausibler things lol. if that does happen though i'm going to sleep on the second half of the turn as we would have decisions to make

ok no more procrastinating



yeah seems about right

ok, the reason i'm procrastinating the turn now (well, besides sadness) is this - i didn't wanna have to argue for it for risk of looking (and indeed of being) dumb as hell, but i want to make chichen itza anyways for the effect and to use the GPP just to make the 2-person golden age easier to hit (or perhaps for a prophet in the event that we decide to go for the philosophy religion, though i doubt we'll do that). i think our geopolitical position as leader in city count but with squeezed enemies on all sides is super precarious, and CI, in addition to being really conveniently timed when we have already invested in the chops and want to do something with them, is one of the few wonders that directly helps with that. static defense is famously bad but like.... i am told the main push we have to fear in the upcoming era is with knights, and if we force those knights to have to bombard defenses to take cities this push a) no longer benefits from knights' extra move and b) would be a sitting duck for collateral. and like, in expectation we don't need to shave THAT much off the probability of a knight attack for CI to pay for itself in terms of win probability. in particular i want to use it to justify delaying engineering so WE can go get knights quickly (and civil service which is also critical in this position), and then do our best to kill someone (GT) while CI helps shield our exposed backside from ginger

yall may now commence talking me out of this

[Tarkeel]

Also, I learned just a couple days ago that the "wasted" overflow production is not actually wasted, but turned into gold (after modifiers are stripped out). After some crude testing, it looks like the order of operations is:

Actually, this is a bug-fix from BUG; a mod which mainly does visual things, and has been incorporated into CtH. Here's civac talking about it:

Well yes. Sort of. There was a problem with overflow conversion in that the production multiplier were not divided out. They were for the normal production overflow into the next item but not the gold generated from excess overflow. So you could do things like print money by making warriors in your HE city. The apes at Firaxis patched it but broke it completely because this simple bit of math was too much for them.

BUG mod which is part of CTH fixed the bug (ironically) and thus the overflow to gold conversion works properly in CTH. One of the ways in which the 'unaltered gameplay' part is a bit of a lie.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

ok, the reason i'm procrastinating the turn now (well, besides sadness) is this - i didn't wanna have to argue for it for risk of looking (and indeed of being) dumb as hell, but i want to make chichen itza anyways for the effect and to use the GPP just to make the 2-person golden age easier to hit (or perhaps for a prophet in the event that we decide to go for the philosophy religion, though i doubt we'll do that). i think our geopolitical position as leader in city count but with squeezed enemies on all sides is super precarious, and CI, in addition to being really conveniently timed when we have already invested in the chops and want to do something with them, is one of the few wonders that directly helps with that. static defense is famously bad but like.... i am told the main push we have to fear in the upcoming era is with knights, and if we force those knights to have to bombard defenses to take cities this push a) no longer benefits from knights' extra move and b) would be a sitting duck for collateral. and like, in expectation we don't need to shave THAT much off the probability of a knight attack for CI to pay for itself in terms of win probability. in particular i want to use it to justify delaying engineering so WE can go get knights quickly (and civil service which is also critical in this position), and then do our best to kill someone (GT) while CI helps shield our exposed backside from ginger

yall may now commence talking me out of this

instead of spending a bunch of chops on a wonder that just makes our cities spikier (from reading the wiki), wouldn't it be better to just spend those chops on units instead and go murder someone?

[ljubljana]

i would certainly like to, but sadly, we don't really have access to any units that could murder someone from what i can tell.... it sounds to me like from what aetryn and others have been saying that, in this era of the game, the defensive power of collateral from catapults is such that offensive war is not really feasible until stuff like knights and muskets come on the scene (unless macemen are considered strong enough to change this dynamic? but from looking at them i'm skeptical). nobody quite has construction tech for catapults yet but i think most people are one tech away, including us, so it's safe to say that by the time we built up a sufficient stack our opponents would be crawling with them.....

it seems to me like the major danger of offensive war in this game is that the meta is sufficiently well-developed that as soon as anyone starts an attack that seems to be going well, their neighbors will typically pile in to drag them back down. so i guess i see CI as a build that will facilitate the offensive war that i DO plan to launch somewhere in the knights/musketman era. when we are attacking GT on one side, we need to be able to hold cities against ginger on the other side, and while we might be able to get a tech edge on GT i think ginger will almost certainly have knights sooner or about as soon as we will. so while killing GT with our real units in the west, we need the obsolete units we have on garrison in the east to be able to stand up to ginger's knights. that's where i see CI coming in, by helping our impi and longbows on the eastern border to get odds that are good enough on defense that ginger can't hurt us much by piling on. in particular, against a combat II knight (12 strength), our combat 2 impis defend in cities at

4 * (1 + 1 [spear bonus] + 0.25 [fortify] + 0.5 [walls] + 0.2 [promotions]) = 11.8 strength without chichen itza and
4 * (^ this + 0.25) = 12.8 strength with it

so the defense bonus seems to come roughly in the window where it will take our impis from disfavored to favored against (C2) knights on a 1-for-1 basis, which is where i would expect it to be most impactful. since impi cost 35 hammers and knights 90, i wouldn't like ginger's odds of efficiently taking cities in their position. of course they could bring catapults to bombard down our defenses, but from what i can tell, the main reason knights enable offensive warfare when they appear on the scene is because of their mobility, and if they bring a catapult stack they lose that and become very vulnerable to our own catapults that DO have 2 movement via our roads

it might still be better to spend the chops on stuff that speeds our road to knights though, which in this case would be a courthouse and a settler or two. idk, i was definitely tilting last night, so TBD if i will actually go through with this lol

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

It just feels like mission drift to me. Initially the chops were planned for MoM, yeah? Then when that didn't pan out you pivoted ot this, conditional on landing a religion so the GP points would be impactful, but that hasn't panned out either, and now we're still committed because hey, we made this nice micro plan...and I dunno, this *feels* like a mistake (I hate fixed defenses). If we have no access to units now, why not just chop later?

[aetryn]

It just feels like mission drift to me. Initially the chops were planned for MoM, yeah? Then when that didn't pan out you pivoted ot this, conditional on landing a religion so the GP points would be impactful, but that hasn't panned out either, and now we're still committed because hey, we made this nice micro plan...and I dunno, this *feels* like a mistake (I hate fixed defenses). If we have no access to units now, why not just chop later?

Yeah, there was value in enabling a shrine in a game where a shrine will really help. The defensive bonus was always very secondary. Now there's very little value left. The problem is I think the chops were already done, so it's just a question of what to spend that banked production on right now. Theoretically a huge mass of classical units can still win a war, just not sure it's helpful to actually go fight one when we're already struggling with economy. Chopping out a huge mass of units we don't plan to use will panic our neighbors and possibly start an actual war when they respond to power spikes. Chopping out Chitzen Itza's pretty pointless now. Chopping out a huge mass of settlers is mostly marginal spots when we haven't fixed our existing cities with courthouses (and general maturity, secondary improvements like CS farms, windmills, etc). I'm kind of shrugging my shoulders at this point as it's just kind of a mess regardless of what comes next. How we salvage the production mostly doesn't matter at this point - we can treat the land as if it wasn't forested to begin with, and the workers as if they all had vacation for a few turns and just get on with the game. If you prefer CI to any of the other bad options right now, that's fine I guess, but make sure you consider the other bad options and see if you can make more use of them.

Points to learn from:
The massive one turn chop plan might have been sexy, and it might well have been the only way to land MoM, but it was an overcommitment:
1) We really didn't need MoM that much. We already burned a Great Person on a bulb, which makes getting 3 golden ages out of MoM very very slim chance on a food-poor map with no GP advantages from traits. Even getting 2 might have been tricky. Sure, it would have been nice, but it wasn't game-winning or game-losing.
2) With a Great Engineer out there the risk of it being sniped was far too high. It's not like we were lapping the field in research. Always a good chance someone that really wanted it and had an Engineer would go there before Currency. (And I'm not saying that nobody would ever settle an Engineer, but Great Engineers are rare and powerful. I'd be highly surprised if they are settled very often, even if they have to be kept a long while).
3) Too many workers were involved to one-turn it. There was a massive cost to our worker labor schedule even if we had actually got MoM. I'm not sure that many workers on a project are EVER justified, but it would need to be totally game-changing or you just have nothing better to do with them before I'd recommend it, and we're not at the stage where there's nothing better for workers to do.
4) Too early chopping - should not chop before we discover if the chops are useful. Then at least the forests would still be around even if the worker turns were somewhat wasted. We want to backload cost, not frontload it.

Personally, I have a lot of problem envisioning Civ 4 micro from a description when I can't look around at the general empire and get a sense of things, so I'm not really any help in spotting this kind of thing - but possibly a description of the cost "X workers in transit for 3 turns, chopping for 3 turns, in transit back to their original cities 3 turns" or a screenshot with micro laid out in signs on a turn-by-turn basis might have helped me notice.

[ljubljana]

rest of the turn



oh good, ginger is sending new axes over to our side of the world. well, probably not enough to seriously threaten our cities but after this turn we must start military builds again, and maybe transfer some troops from the ostensibly calmed-down GT front. but yeah most likely this is just a response to our cow-cow ending, not an active assertion of conflict-desiringness



you can see that, in addition to some pretty grotesque road spaghetti, our workers are stalling in part by building our first, and you better believe it will not be the last, riverside plains farm..... not the most exciting thing we could be doing, to be sure, but atamifuji is indeed about to grow and has no food-neutral tiles to grow on (unless we steal hoshoryu's hamlet). i expect most of these filler cities to literally never be whipped and to have build orders that look more or less like atamifuji's here: monument - granary - (chichen itza?) - ikhanda - courthouse - that's it



"thanks" to the KTB we now have on CoL, we can drop research to 90% and take a select few cities off wealth and still get the tech next turn. and here those cities are - wakamotoharu is starting the LONG journey to moai statues, which i plan to build more or less entirely by double-whipping impis and overflowing 25 * 1.5 hammers each into the moai. i thiiink it's correct to finish moai before the lighthouse since until we do we have no real incentive to grow onto those worthless coast tiles? but please correct me if yall think getting the fish to 6 food asap is more urgent

and the other city, yeah, is kirishima of "please god finish my market asap". if our tech path is looking something like feudalism -> civil service -> guilds from here as i believe is the case, we need to grow it asap onto all its grass cottages and i think 4 specialists (2x scientist, 2x merchant) to fire the first GA. not sure if we eventually want to cottage the plains river tiles too, but i think so as with no religion in play this is all but certain to end up as our wall street/oxford city someday imo