[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[williams482]

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.

All right, now I'm confused. I don't have BUG or any other mods installed; this was a 100% vanilla instance of Civ IV (the Macintosh Steam version, if that somehow matters). I had a test city building axes with +200% in modifiers, and those modifiers were definitely being divided out before the excess production was converted to gold.

[ljubljana]

Turn 105 - Zululand



yeah neat. ok this mans is getting every damn wonder unless i spite-build the literal worst one this turn lol

so what does our empire look like when NOT mass-building wealth everywhere? aka how life-affirmingly severe is god's greatest financial crash?



WMH is finally doing its ikhanda so the swarm of double-whipped impi i plant to make here to build Moai will be useful. the capital and Kirishima are on the empire's two most impactful markets, at cottages the city and 8 free gold the city. takayasu chops a granary in 5 and then will probably steal mitakeumi's wheat to grow onto more cottages. kotozakura wants a courthouse slightly more than a market, but i'll probably alternate with building military and whipping stuff to dump overflow into the courthouse for the time being. and kirishima was going to dump hammers into the market but on revision i overruled that as i'm a little nervous we're getting on the thin side here and could use another axe or two in case ginger's get frisky.



daieisho is out of tiles for the moment so it's still single-whipping troops (and in this case, finally its ikhanda) when it hits size 3.... ura can finally start growing once this wheat farm finishes in 2t, and the plan is to whip this ikhanda when it is almost finished and overflow into library, then double-whip the library to work towards permanent control over the third-ring cows. tobizaru i have decided should actually make its damn walls so greenline doesn't get any ideas (and because they cost about 5 hammers) and then it too can do an ikhanda



kinbozan had to be settled without adequate worker support in place so we could get the spot at all, so in 2t our long-delayed worker will finally hook it up to the trade network and start cottaging for a nice cash infusion. perpetual garbage city ichiyamamoto will get the granary chopped as soon as workers start fanning back out from the failed MoM play, and then will do chopped monument -> chopped ikhanda -> chopped courthouse to, quote unquote, contribute in its minimally competent economic capacity. and at least it will get a nice silver tile soon to sometimes-work in the meantime



abi i have determined to be the least worst place to whip the last essential settler, for the northern fish site, which i will start trickling hammers into next turn. hoshoryu also needs a market rather urgently and will get some chops from its shiny new third-ring border to speed that along, but i decided on an axe first to allay my worries about the western border a bit. tomokaze will get chops into the granary and then more arbitrarily-chosen infra (likely the monument and then courthouse) as the worker labor gets freed up. silk city in the north will be settled next turn and will bootstrap via chopped granary and monument, say it with me, "as soon as the worker labor gets freed up".

and finally..... yeah, i really tried to bow to the overwhelming consensus that this is a stupid idea, but i couldn't resist the urge to test my theory that this big dumb rock might be underrated in an environment where most games seem to be decided by stuff like knight pushes and manipulating inter-player diplo in such a way as to split others while not being split yourself or showing an open flank to an opportunistic rival. if we lose the game in significant part due to this i take full responsibility of COURSE and i really appreciate yall spending so much time trying to talk me down from this, sorry that this time i didn't listen.... we are 30 hammers over the cost so we will also get most of an ikhanda out of this lunacy, for whatever that will be worth

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Well, at least we had fun and that's all that matters.

Side note, could I see a power chart? I see you're building axes in the east "in case Ginger gets frisky", axes in the west "to allay my worries about the border a bit". One trap to fall into is attempting to be strong on all fronts at once, and so while it's important to keep parity with the neighbors I'd like to establish that it's actual parity and not a WWI-style arms raise (side note to the side note: I am teaching the outbreak of WWI to my 8th graders this week, can you tell?). My new worry is the distressing commerce levels - I know lots of cities in IV cost maintenance and that saps the research, so be sure not to over-invest in military and miss solving that very important problem.

[Commodore]

Could we see a zoomed-out flying camera shot of the entire empire?

[Tarkeel]

(side note to the side note: I am teaching the outbreak of WWI to my 8th graders this week, can you tell?)

Chev, are you familiar with the Pedant (Bret Devereaux)? he has some nice articles on WW1 and trench warfare and how/why fortifications failed to stand up to modern warfare. They are pretty accessible and are likely to contain nuggets you could feed your students.

[El Grillo]

Neat articles, bookmarking for later. Thanks for sharing!

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

(side note to the side note: I am teaching the outbreak of WWI to my 8th graders this week, can you tell?)

Chev, are you familiar with the Pedant (Bret Devereaux)? he has some nice articles on WW1 and trench warfare and how/why fortifications failed to stand up to modern warfare. They are pretty accessible and are likely to contain nuggets you could feed your students.

Yeah, I've read lots of Devereaux's work. He's at his best when he's doing analyses of popular series from a historian's perspective - the series on the siege of Gondor, on Helm's Deep, and the various failures of the Game of Thrones show are all excellent. He's less excellent when he wades into more modern issues & academic squabbles - his biases really show there and his writing shifts more to "this is why I should have a better job!" kind of pleading, which isn't his strength. 

I really enjoyed the recent takedowns of the Rings of Power show, though.

[ljubljana]

@commodore yes you can, although, sadly, all the unhideable pins make it a little incomprehensible




@CMF power chart:



according to the demos screen this is one turn out of date and we are back on top in soldiers as of this turn with our two axe builds, but not by a ton. i definitely share the worries about GNP though (especially as i don't exactly plan to stop expanding.....) so the next series of builds will be a ton of ikhandas, courthouses, and markets (while, uh, also not slowing our expansion to the best of our ability either lol)

Turn 106 - Zululand

spotted: gav's huge stack of HAs sitting around not really doing anything



also spotted: some territory in the egyptian heartland that eerily resembles the zulu heartland



gingac finally dialed back espionage spending on us so i guess we can do the same to ratchet down tensions without conceding research vis. although who we should put points into instead, i have no idea.... i guess completing our set of graphs probably makes more sense than annoying a neighbor with a likely-fruitless push for vis....



new city - chose the PH after much agonizing as the only coastal spot that preserves both grass farms (sigh, the only way to get to even +4 food here...) while also not destroying either of the two silks, the closest things to strong tiles we have up here...



i still have half a mind to settle somewhere like here in the near future to make use of a few otherwise-wasted riverside plains.... mitakeumi in particular is out of tiles and needs to whip SOMEthing, and hokutofuji only cost us 4gpt to settle with the instant currency TRs so i think a theoretically-contested border spot that gives crumple space to our core is a decent pickup at this point. but if you were ginger, how pissed off would such a city make you? it's clearly on our side of the mountains, which seem like the quote unquote natural border between our civs to me, but will probably pick up one or two of the hills currently under their nominal control

other places we could send such a hypothetical settler include here



a city which, while quite crappy, does claim a wheat and should lock dreylin out of stealing it back with the first-ring borders of any of their plants (although dreylin's scouts in the area suggest that this spot will not remain unclaimed for long)

or here



a strong city that would piss off greenline badly while reeeeally stretching our capacity for defense...



mjmd road to nowhere spotted.... well, it's to nowhere NOW but maybe soon it will be to a reignited border war with gav....



worker fanout from atamifuji.... major objectives are to chop infra at the 3 cities with chops left and connect the ichiyamamoto area to the SE and SW via long but essential roads through the mountains. and to hook up ichi's silver finally which finished this turn, just in time for mitakeumi to grow (uh, is what i would be saying if that city had any actual tiles to grow onto.....). other other objective is to make some tiles for mitakeumi to grow onto

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Greenline's naming theme of busted Civ VI mechanics is delightful. I think I've seen it before, too, in an earlier IV Pitboss, but regrettably I can't recall either the Pitboss or the player. Funny, though.

(are there any commerce/maintenance buildings you can whip instead of another settler?)

[ljubljana]

ehehehe.... you might have even seen it in an old civ6 pbem....

yeah, ok, thanks to being protective i believe we could triple-whip the market if we overflow into it this turn - i can provisionally swap to that. our breakeven is between 20 and 30% - aetryn, how is that as a proxy for "time to stop expanding and uncrash the econ for a while"? i guess i'm nervous because it seems like our corner of the world is close enough to "completely filled up" that any contested spots that we don't take right the fuck now seem likely to be claimed for their eventually positive, if not exactly enormous, marginal value before it becomes economically convenient for us to take them. maybe that logic doesn't apply to the ginger border spot, which i could see them not taking to avoid provoking a conflict w us, but personally i don't think we WOULD actually start a war over it if they take it so it wouldn't shock me if they do. the dreylin wheat spot i can see us leaving for geopolitical reasons (don't want to piss off, and create a border with, dreylin who we currently have a good bit of no-man's-land separating us from such that they don't have anything to gain by joining a coalition against us) but it also has an actual food resource which is more than can be said for (all but one of) the rest of our sites. idk, aetryn/other civ4-knowers, when, if at all, would you guys try to go for spots like these?