[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

also, in Civ IV can't you not use roads in foreign culture anyway, or does that not apply to open borders?

[aetryn]

also, in Civ IV can't you not use roads in foreign culture anyway, or does that not apply to open borders?

Normal units can use roads/railroads in your borders, unowned lands, and anyone with whom you have Open Borders. Commando promotion units can use all roads/railroads, so uh, watch out for that if we get to the point where that's an issue. When I played my Greens game MJMD had me leave rail chokepoints garrisoned with obsolete troops just to impair any shenanigans. "Just another day for Joe Maceman guarding the rail depot".

I suspect it will apply to you in neutral lands when you have Construction, but I'm not sure and this is a pretty rare scenario.

[ljubljana]

re construction: oh, really? ok, i shall go bridge-hunting then. and the winner is...

um..... i don't know...... other than ginger who we checked manually with scouts, i think every opponent has at least one defogged location where i'd expect to see a bridge, and i don't think i see any... respectively, we have

naufragar



GT.... wait, hang on



that guy SW of adulis is a bridge, isn't it? but then why is there NOT one between the hill the scout is standing on and the plains tile S of it? and why is my scout taking 2 turns to move to the highlighted tile? was my scout method incorrect and do we NOT actually get to use opponents' bridges until we also have construction?

well, regardless of the cause, our desperately-positioned, warlike neighbor turning up with construction before anyone else seems like an emergency to me, enough so that i think another round of nationwide wealth builds to get us there ourselves before they can build enough of a stack to pounce seems to be in order. that will take 4 turns... painful as it is to delay markets and courthouses even longer (and the still-unused fish tile in the north!) i am not sure we have a choice. this is probably the only time GT will ever get a military tech lead over a neighbor for the rest of the game, i think they HAVE TO jump on this window, whip a stack, and attack someone ASAP if they are still playing for the win here. and i still think we are a better target for them than naufragar as i don't think nauf and superdeath even share a border, not to mention they have a (i think old but) still active crab for crab:



maybe this is an overreaction (and i can be talked down if yall think it is) but i'm getting alllll kinds of alarm bells going off here. we did sign cow/cow with GT on t101, but it will take at least 4 turns for them to build a stack anyways so i don't think that means too much. i am going to send gingac a cow/cow extension of our own as well, i think, to try to sniff out whether GT has planned a joint attack w them within the next 10 turns

anyways, you read correctly about no finished markets yet.... i have been trying to only whip civilian units for the time being, to minimize turns spent not-growing, and, well, maybe have gone a little too hard in that direction post-currency as it seemed like expansion was more urgent in its immediate aftermath than whipping buildings...

re tobizaru, the problem with that city is that it looks like this



in order to grow onto both gold tiles, i have only been able to whip it once, at the very beginning of its growth curve for the monument - other than that it has been working the gold and two floodplains while sloooowly growing this whole time. and even now, it doesn't feel worth coming off the gold mines to whip either.... it seems more correct to crawl to the ikhanda and library over the next 25 turns (maybe whipping the end of it once we hit size 6) than to spend a large number of those turns with an unworked gold.... but if you guys think that intuition is wrong, or have a suggestion about what build order we should be doing here, pls let me know!

[aetryn]

Yes, GT has Construction. The road algorithm doesn't always show bridges at every location if it has other priorities, but he has one that you spotted and must therefore have it. I believe the rules for using bridges is whether the moving unit's player has Construction, as nonsensical as that is from a realism perspective. Maybe your unit thinks bridges are troll homes and not ways to cross rivers until you learn to build them yourself?

I'd go to Construction now but I would try hard not to use Wealth builds at this point, as you are already behind in infrastructure. What's the different in completion times with and without wealth builds? Even if he whips out a stack he'll have to gather than together before he can invade and he needs hitters too. If we keep ducking infrastructure this WON'T be the only time GT has a tech lead over us. Development is more important than traits.

Tobizaru needs another couple flood plains farms so you have the food surplus to do some whipping. You can replace them later with more cottages. And definitely never build Wealth there again, this city needs every hammer for internal development.

[ljubljana]

well, whatever is happening in the next 10t, at least it's not a joint attack with ginger



without wealth builds, hmm, we'd need to save enough to support roughly 2 and 1/4 turns of 100% research, at which we're currently losing 138 GPT. we have 74 gold and are saving roughly 40/turn without wealth, so we'd be looking at about 6 turns of saving up another 240 gold, then 2-3 turns of research, so 4 turns with wealth builds and ~9 without. of course there are also compromise positions in which we run wealth for 1-2 turns to get the bulk of our savings done, or in which we run it only in those cities that would otherwise be building military or 18-turn courthouses (kotozakura, daieisho) or are planning to produce most of their infra via chop anyways (ichiyamamoto, tomokaze)

[Tarkeel]

someone has made it to construction this turn, so if it turns out to be one of our neighbors there is some urgency in following them, perhaps enough that we should contemplate returning to wealth builds soon. but construction produces only a very generic-looking 4k milpower spike, so i don't think there is an obvious way to tell if that's the case.... unLESS.... would we be able to use roads in their territory to cross their rivers if they have researched construction tech?

Nope, Construction is weird and depends on the unit owner and not tile owner. If you had Construction, you would be able to cross rivers freely in foreign territory. One way to tell is that roads that cross rivers straight on will get a cute bridge graphic instead of the current pier.

[Magic Science]

And as with Construction, so with Engineering, but without the graphical component.

[ljubljana]

Turn 108 - Zululand

GT rolled the turn but didn't play twice, which is always concerning when it's one of specifically my neighbors doing it.... but maybe that's just because the timer was running REALLY low and they don't have time... anyways i can't fall back asleep so i guess i'll play very early lol



missed this last turn, we have our first serfdom enjoyer, of what i expect to be a LOT of serfdom enjoyers in this game, which, as aetryn has mentioned, almost certainly includes us. at least what we can do is use our first GA to (swap to serfdom and OR and HR and bureaucracy and) generate the two great people for the second GA, so anyone who's paying attention will know that we COULD pop a GA and swap back to slavery at any time if attacked, i guess...



yeah, as predicted, looks like we will not be beating dreylin to this one. which in the grand scheme of things is fine by me, the spot's pretty awful for us with no way to secure the wheat long-term, and this is a good border for us as it looks like they will only really directly threaten ura, which is already a greenline border city. i will maybe try to move a feeeew units around annoyingly to encourage them to settle on the plains instead of the hill, but all i'd really be going for is to delay them a few turns at worst



i did end up whipping this one last settler anyways though, for the northwestern fish spot. mita's always a good place to do that as we can swap its cow over to the capital to avoid wasting the food surplus for a turn, and with judicious tile shuffling in this case we can avoid leaving any hamlets or resources unworked for a turn. mita was also out of tiles and using the horse that we really need at takayasu to top off the granary before the food box hits half-full. but yeah we'll overflow into the market from here and should be able to grow onto plains farms for a while now that we have sufficient workers in the area



kirishima finishes our first PRO market and is starting to actualize our long-term vision for it as cottage cheese capital of the world.... wakamotoharu is on the corn this turn for micro reasons, so it's working the cow and 5 grass cottages....



whatever GT's long-term plans, they have now had construction for a full round and have not whipped a bunch of units out yet... although i guess THAT could also be why they didn't play the second turn, so they can save their mass-whipping until after we move. well, for now i have decided on the middle road of "some wealth builds, but not where we are close to essential financial infrastructure", and will watch this space closely and react accordingly



cottages asap in kinbozan or a FP farm first? hmmm.... i say just cottages, i think. the city needs two early whips, one in 3t for the monument, and another 10t later to finish off the granary in conjunction w the spice chop. so the farm would get us there slightly quicker, but at the cost of 7(!) worker turns which we are badly short of in this corner of the world, and would delay cottage growth which at turn 108 and still making new cottages we are already really behind the curve on..... as you guys have rightly observed, we are pretty behind on tile improvements (even though i'm whipping worker #17 this turn, thanks, uh, me for making chichen itza.....) and idk if i can justify spending time on a "temporary" tile improvement like a micro farm when we still have cities suffering for lack of permanent ones...

lol wtf:



so we have a gav settler... and THREE workers.... out building roads on the border of SD's holdings in former inca.... i guess they are really intending to settle RIGHT up on (kublai!) rome's border to take that corn. not sure i'd feel comfortable making that move against someone like SD, but gavagai knows this game infinitely better than i do ofc



do you guys think pillaging a road GT made in neutral territory would be viewed as a violation of cow for cow? we would obviously be doing so for purely defensive purposes but idk, maybe they have a sentimental attachment to their worker turns like i do. of course maybe we don't actually WANT to do that as this road does offer a pretty convenient attack vector for us as well

only two demos that matter:



i do mostly think these suck because of our recent and ongoing whip-fueled expansion binge, and will eventually recover because of the same whip-fueled expansion binge... but we'll see! uh, at least they are pretty damn tokugawacore lmao

[El Grillo]

do you guys think pillaging a road GT made in neutral territory would be viewed as a violation of cow for cow? we would obviously be doing so for purely defensive purposes but idk, maybe they have a sentimental attachment to their worker turns like i do.

I can't speak for GT, but I'm sure some players would take this as an impolite/aggressive action, I think the general interpretation leans more in the direction of "I spent worker turns on it so it belongs to me" than "it's in culturally neutral territory so it's fair game".

[aetryn]

do you guys think pillaging a road GT made in neutral territory would be viewed as a violation of cow for cow? we would obviously be doing so for purely defensive purposes but idk, maybe they have a sentimental attachment to their worker turns like i do.

I can't speak for GT, but I'm sure some players would take this as an impolite/aggressive action, I think the general interpretation leans more in the direction of "I spent worker turns on it so it belongs to me" than "it's in culturally neutral territory so it's fair game".

Probably at least this early. In 50 turns maybe he doesn't care as much (and relations will be much more based on actual game position rather than the kind of posturing that happens early in the game). And in any case, I see no reason to get rid of the road, it might be very useful later. Hills can't easily be roaded by combat workers (except by India of course), so if we want to use this as an attack vector later the road will be handy.