[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

yeah, on reflection i think you are correct - we have probably reached the stage of the game where it is more useful for us as an attack vector into them than the other way around.....

Turn 109 - Zululand

i have to say, one thing that IS nice about not being in any wonder or religion races or border crises is how much less anxiety i get when opening the save lol



drey wants corn/corn.... ok man, so show me the nice nonaggressive place you settled..... well, is what i'd like to say but really we have no reason to antagonize them. if anything we NEED a strong drey to keep ginger boxed in and if we're going to concede border spots to SOMEone this is the right person to concede them to. wefniowfe lemme look around and then think about if i'll take it or not



well, here's an affirmative reason to take it.... greenline moved up a vulture/spear pair to guard their worker and we now need troops to defend both ura and the worker down here, who is about to start pasturing the cow when borders expand next turn, so we can't keep all these units up here just to be annoying. not to mention they have an aok fine, i won't commit until later in the turn but i'll probably accept, and it's time to extend fish/fish with greenline as well since we signed t99. that does mean drey will settle on the hill 3 tiles from ura (that we have pinned as "ewwwww") but um, as the name implies i am not too beat up about losing that spot, and the only tile it might swipe from our city is a bare plains hill



no large-scale whipping or power spike from GT as of yet. so aetryn i think you made the right call about going to construction now but being selective at worst with our wealth builds. not.... that i really understand how GT is planning to win the game if not construction rush into an attack at the catapults window, but whatever i guess....? idk it always makes me nervous to feel like i don't know what someone's gameplan could be, as that usually means i've overlooked something and am already barreling towards my doom, but maybe that's just the trauma talking from one too many thrawn games <3



ginger is semi-ominously roading in our general direction... well HOPEfully they are about to turn north to meleti, which would actually be convenient for us too as tsuyuko keeps having to go ALLLL the way around via constantinople with the current setup. but maybe we'd better take some steps to discourage the (unlikely but i guess possible) sniping of what i consider to be "our" filler spot between aintab and mitakeumi



wakamotoharu, having, uh, waited carefully for enough production to decay into thi in-queue impi to allow a double-whip, does so to overflow into moai and free up the corn for kirishima. again, not sure if i should be doing the lighthouse here first....any opinions? i guess i probably should tbh as moai will be worth only 1 hammer withOUT the lighthouse up and the lighthouse is worth the more valuable 1 food..... ok, maybe that and the ikhanda actually should come before any more military into moai whips



woah! suuuuper forward plant by gav on the superdeath border, with just an archer on defense.... sheesh, even i would start a war over THAT..... i guess this is the kind of risk gav needs to be taking at this point to catch up, having just crossed double-digit city count, but even then i'd think trying to split mjmd makes more sense than poaching from kublai rome who has no other close neighbor....

moving haruko SW reveals THREE praetorians in the former inca city, no less....



finally reached the point where idk what we're supposed to be doing with our EP.... ginger stopped spending on us and doesn't have research vis anymore, so i see no point continuing to spend on them, and no need to antagonize GT with what would likely be a fruitless push for vis on them (...right?). so i guess the next best thing is graphs on whoever in the west we judge to be our most credible long-term rival, whom i consider to be superdeath? seems like sorta a waste but less of so than just doing the red queen's race with gingac forever



speaking of which, i really hope the interior of this half of the continent is as desert-ed as it appears..... with the civs on this end way less cramped than in the east, if there is much good land here we are just going to LOSE to superdeath and naufragar in the long-term as they just keep peacefully expanding forever..... that dynamic seems to place a lot of urgency on us easterners to do SOMEthing to improve our position by at least the knights era, hence my somewhat-exaggerated focus on exactly that kind of attack. frankly it's enough to make me wonder if we need to be attacking into the much stronger ginger with dreylin instead of splitting GT in such a way as to hand even more land to naufragar.....

at least in theory attacking GT will give US some access to the unclaimed land in the western center as well, but what we can see of GT's south looks like this



which is, um, highly unappetizing to say the least

well, ok, i offered greenline a fish/fish extension..... if they accept, is there ANY way we could force drey back from this border spot? it seems to go against the entire point/wincon of tokuzulu to, um, ever concede anything without a fight if it is remotely possible not to do so..... they can have a spear and 2 chariots in the city if they settle next turn, and if we empty our ura we could threaten an attack on our turn with 3 impi and a chariot, which shoooould be enough to force them to wait for the axe who is one turn behind. if they DO wait for the axe, we can add an archer and chariot. according to vodka we have.... ugh, 26% odds to win if we attack in the correct order (archer first it looks like)

not good enough that i'd actually start a war over it, but maybe good enough that in dreylin's position i wouldn't settle in the face of it..... 

ehhhh. nah, this is pointless, we're not really going to try to take that spot since it'd be awful for us without the wheat.... and what tips me over the edge is that i failed to scout every tile on the greenline border from which a 2-mover could reach ura if they finish a road on the floodplains this turn. i'd have to leave the city COMPLETELY empty to delay drey's plant by another turn and though the downside risk is small, with fish/fish about to run out with them i don't think it's worth it. sure, take your wheat/wheat and your border city, please use it to squeeze gingac more and eventually kill them with our grateful assistance

wheat/wheat resent, turn rolled, nothing too interesting happened on the turn change. i could play a double-turn now but my cognition is SUFFERING this morning, i'm just gonna walk the dog and chill for a second

[ljubljana]

Turn 110 - Zululand

not too sure anything especially noteworthy is going to have happened in the last, like, 2 hours but



got through elesa in my BW2 nuzlocke with a work up raticate and a dream so idc really

LOL:



check out mjmd pinkdotting gavaga AT THE SAME TIME AS gavagai is pinkdotting superdeath

i guess this isn't THAT bad of a pinkdot from a distance-to-capitals perspective (11 tiles from both) but man is it a lot closer to the nearest egyptian city than the nearest indian city



we found where GT's settler for the kinbozan area got reallocated.... yikes.....



uhh exCUSE me sir, someone's workers aren't showing a whole lot of will to live today :<

well, ok i guess maybe they just want to mine one of the hills that has +1 commerce. still though maybe i'd better shift a few troops down here juuuust in case they decide to try sneaking some poachy settler through the gap



dreylin has indeed taken the border spot as pinned. grrrr you're lucky i'm (out of position and) nice :<<<< and that the vast majority of the tiles you're poaching are worthless as hell. i guess it's encouraging that they're going for spots like this as "early" as city 14 as it does show their squeezedness somewhat



great wall-boosted ankyra hit third-ring borders this turn, we're at 186 culture in kirishima. they shouldn't be gaining on us YET since GW is just 2 culture and our library has doubled already while theirs shouldn't have.... but we are going to have to do SOMEthing here culturally in the nearish future if we want to retain our forest and hill



the plot thickens in the west as nutty bars is surrounded on BOTH sides by egyptian cities.... maybe the point is to make this spot long-term indefensible for SD. eg, if they attack out one side with praets, 2-movers can get them from the other side. still, not sure this is who i'd be picking a fight with in the circumstances but akhentaten is a strong enough spot and they are far enough behind that maybe they see themselves as not having much choice



road network in the kinbozan area finally starting to take shape... note also the monument to be whipped next turn (then granary, then grow onto FP cottages forever)



granaries coming online via chop at our new cities, finally (in the east takayasu gets one in 2t), and i'm otherwise bowing to the wisdom of the courthouse-market party  ichiyamamoto and tomokaze will next chop out courthouse and monument -> courthouse, respectively, unless anyone disagrees



hokutofuji half-chops a granary, the future fish city has a worker in place to pre-chop its essential monument. ginger is being a cool kid and making us cover both worker and settler with two different impis... but yeah, we have 2 chops here as well to accelerate the likes of hoshoryu's market



next turn we will be DONE with (kirishima's half of) (the grass half of) the NE river valley cottages! and only 11 turns behind schedule (though of course we are only just now coming into the pop to actually work them anyways). unsure of if i want, like, one single grass farm at takayasu or not in addition to perma-stealing mita's wheat... i don't thiiiink so though, +4 food surplus is probably 



pictured: hard evidence that GT is at least not so about-to-attack as to whip cats before markets



with no construction and us moving first this turn, i believe only the chariot in DotF is in position to attack the ura worker if we start the cow pasture this turn, so i will do so, guarded by an impi and a dream as per usual. ura itself is working the new oasis over the horse this turn and should rapidly grow up into one of our best cities. now if only we had some of those that were NOT directly on the border with a neighbor lol

reminder to me to whip the monument if their borders ever hit third ring, btw.... they do not have a library in there yet, so we should be able to retain control over the cow as long as we are very prompt about doing so, at least so long as they only have CRE culture in the city. not that we won't make a library here ourselves as quickly as is practical as well, but, yknow, it'd be nice to not ALSO dump 30 hammers into a useless monument lol

also, that's a lot of floodplains farms.... that's what i like to see, i think.... as a result their food number are competitive but their GNP is...



a little unsure about science binarizing this turn... market at the capital finished in 2t, so in theory we want to run high science rates until then to pick up some commerce, but that irrevocably commits a big whack of beakers to construction, and in theory more KTB might come in the next few turns to make that wasteful or we might have some urgent desire to change research projects (that one is unlikely though as what could we urgently need to change to besides, uh, construction itself).



after construction and (i assume) the back half of calendar (although maybe not as nowhere urgently needs the happy...), we will have a research decision to make..... i can see HBR for elephants, meditation to start working our way up towards feudalism and guilds, civil service to chain farms (although do we wait for the feudalism prereq bonus for this?), engineering for 33 hammer TRs in every city (i think this is more hammer-efficient than an AGG ikhanda, though maybe not if you add 17h for the walls), metal casting -> machinery for windmills (and forges i guess but again, nowhere urgently needs the happy), or hell, even philosophy for taoism and pacifism all seem like varyingly viable options

i guess it depends, as ever, on exactly how much building we think it is correct to do before we make a move on someone militarily..... it's tough for me to see guilds before CS as correct given how many of our cities need farm-chaining to grow, but maybe something like engineering or philosophy is a bridge to far....? but both of those options do seem likely to pay off handsomely in the long game that i still think we are quite likely to end up in.....

we also need to think about timing on the first GA, which looks roughly like this:



kirishima wants to hit, i think, somewhere in the neighborhood of size 10 or 11, then run 2 scientists and 2 merchants for a 17-turn great person. so say 10 more turns of growth, then 17 turns running specialists, for something like a t137 golden age? i am guessing we will hit monarchy and civil service before then, but not sure by how much.... we could accelerate that timetable by running specialists at a smaller size but then that leaves grass cottages unworked (takayasu won't be large enough to pick up the slack for a while....) or we could probably get, like, one of engineering or philosophy first and have the timings more or less work out

and every GA-first plan foregoes the fastest POSSIBLE knight attack on GT, which foregoes civil service completely to just run up to guilds NOW (and, i guess, whip a bunch of knights and THEN swap to serfdom...?) but something like that relies on them not getting engineering, which, while expensive, is just one tech away if they feel threatened

ughhh why does this game have DECISIONS in it (because it's a good game)

edit: i see now that machinery is a prereq for engi... riiiiight i knew that

edit2: with GT evidently not whipping up a swarm of cats to come kill us with, philosophy BEFORE construction is....probably still a ludicrously self-destructive idea, yes?

edit3: in my wretched little heart i guess i can acknowledge that the correct tech path is probably construction -> calendar -> civil service -> feudalism/machinery -> guilds OR engineering depending on how feasible a knight push looks.....

[aetryn]

At this point I'm not sure we care about a religion unless we have a plan to land a shrine, and I'm not sure we do anymore. If we'd saved the forests we MIGHT have pivoted to Angkor Wat available at Philosophy and just ran like 4 priest specialists, but I generally find that trying to fit Philosophy in here makes the timings on everything else too sketchy. Sounds like more of a play if you had really peaceful neighbors and didn't care about the Knight push, but just wanted to maximize econ through the Medieval era.

As nervous as we seem to be over every enemy move I've just go ahead and finish Construction so you don't have to jump every time someone else picks it up. We definitely want Calendar, CS, Machinery and Monarchy next in SOME order. It sounds like farm-chaining would be very, very helpful to us, so I'd probably ignore the prereq bonus and the fact that we can't get into Bureau for ages, and go to CS, probably after Calendar (silks are good commerce tiles!). Also, we'll probably run Serfdom for at least the duration of our GA, even if we don't stay in it between first and second GA (which we might consider but also might be too risky), so having some time to build up more farms that get boosted by Serfdom would be a good plan.

The other option if you don't want to build more farms is to get the Monarchy prereqs out of the way, and you MIGHT have time to take Feudalism before CS. But that's a long way off and we should definitely have Bureau on as soon as we can get into a Golden Age, as our capital's one of our only competent commerce city, so adding 50% to that should help a lot.  

For Guilds: keep in mind you have to slot in HBR at some point before you can build Knights at Guilds, and it shouldn't be last as you'll a) want a few stables for more promotions on your Knights, and b) you'll ideally want to prebuild some units that will turn into Knights when Guilds finishes, so the Knights can hit the battlefield faster. I definitely wouldn't do HBR before CS or Monarchy, but I'd probably do it before Machinery-Guilds (and before Metal Casting also unless we need Forges for happiness). (Or given how you've reacted to KTBs, I'd consider getting HBR as soon as anyone else gets Machinery to make everyone else panic about Knights coming out. But of course, then you can't tell who else might have HBR...) There might be time to take Engineering after Machinery but before Guilds, but that will definitely slow the Knights down by quite a few turns. I'd probably do Engineering right after Guilds though.

So, basically, my recommendation is Construction > Calendar > Civil Service > Meditation > Priesthood > Monarchy > Fuedalism > HBR > Metal Casting > Machinery > Guilds. If you really have tons of spare time before the Golden Age and don't need Monarchy that early you COULD move Metal Casting and Machinery back so that you can at least build Crossbows and Maces if you need them (and probably move Feudalism to after HBR).  But that's a lot of stuff to tech at a really weak economy if we're really only 27 turns out from a GA.

[ljubljana]

hmm, i do not think it would be thaaaat hard to make a shrine. ura and hoshoryu are both pretty strong cities and can build monasteries once we hit meditation, then spread to atamifuji, which can slow-build one temple working 2 ivories, whip the other, and run grass farm + 2 priests at size 3. that plus CI plus golden age plus 8 turns of pacifism = 24 * 8 = 192 prophet points, more than 2/3 of what we need for a shrine with our third great person. it would be kind of a pain but not impossible. i don't think i'm foolish enough to delay construction for it, but i do think 27 turns is plenty to research CS and up to monarchy, and we probably have time to squeeze in philosophy if we want it (and i think we probably want to be in pacifism during the GA if practical anyways to pop the GP for the second GA, so we can wave them in front of ginger's face and thereby stay in serfdom after). although delaying guilds (and EVERY other military tech on the guilds line) is a pretty dang serious drawback if we think killing someone in the medieval era is feasible (and if nauf really is interested, why wouldn't it be)

a little unsure about whether knights actually ARE the unit we want to be attacking with.... the border with GT is so rugged that guerilla 2 tokumuskets might do better. main drawback is that that's another tech away and requires some external source of XP..... i do wonder if we might do better by simply swapping into vassalage over bureaucracy instead of trying to build 60 hammer stables everywhere..... every stable that we manage to not build in this way could be a guerilla 2 xbow or longbow to add to our attack force, and with GA production times a crapton of plains farms we might be able to spam out quite a few of them before we even have knights available. bureau is surely the better long-term econ option but if we are dead-set on a medieval-era attack i suspect we will get more mileage out of vassalage (and then bureau when we pop the 2-person GA for digestion)

[aetryn]

hmm, i do not think it would be thaaaat hard to make a shrine. ura and hoshoryu are both pretty strong cities and can build monasteries once we hit meditation, then spread to atamifuji, which can slow-build one temple working 2 ivories, whip the other, and run grass farm + 2 priests at size 3.  that plus CI plus golden age plus 8 turns of pacifism = 24 * 8 = 192 prophet points, more than 2/3 of what we need for a shrine with our third great person. it would be kind of a pain but not impossible. i don't think i'm foolish enough to delay construction for it, but i do think 27 turns is plenty to research CS and up to monarchy, and we probably have time to squeeze in philosophy if we want it (and i think we probably want to be in pacifism during the GA if practical anyways to pop the GP for the second GA, so we can wave them in front of ginger's face and thereby stay in serfdom after). although delaying guilds (and EVERY other military tech on the guilds line) is a pretty dang serious drawback if we think killing someone in the medieval era is feasible (and if nauf really is interested, why wouldn't it be)

a little unsure about whether knights actually ARE the unit we want to be attacking with.... the border with GT is so rugged that guerilla 2 tokumuskets might do better. main drawback is that that's another tech away and requires some external source of XP..... i do wonder if we might do better by simply swapping into vassalage over bureaucracy instead of trying to build 60 hammer stables everywhere..... every stable that we manage to not build in this way could be a guerilla 2 xbow or longbow to add to our attack force, and with GA production times a crapton of plains farms we might be able to spam out quite a few of them before we even have knights available. bureau is surely the better long-term econ option but if we are dead-set on a medieval-era attack i suspect we will get more mileage out of vassalage (and then bureau when we pop the 2-person GA for digestion)

I'm not understanding your GPP calculus. I somewhat doubt you could have two temples done from monasteries spread by GA initiation. But leaving that aside, if you are producing two Great People for the next Golden Age you will need not 300 but 500 points to get your Prophet. That's 39 additional turns after the Golden age which is... not impossible, but Shrine around T200ish doesn't sound all that great and that city is pretty stuck in the meantime if that's all it's doing. If instead you intend to just prime the two second GA cities and not actually produce the people, that might possibly work, but might stretch out your second Golden Age for a while. What do you want to get out of the second Golden Age? Do you hope to hit Mercantilism or Representation by then? What you actually want to use that second GA for will affect the timing. Also, with two Great People sunk into Shrine and Bulb respectively, it might be really hard to get a third Golden Age unless we scoop one of the first-to bonuses in the Renaissance, so you might have to consider if you hold the second GA all the way to endgame civics, which would be VERY painful.

I definitely would not build stables everywhere. I would build them at your main production cities though. Other cities can whip cats or other necessary units.

[ljubljana]

yeahh i think we could do it but it would be pretty gameplan-distorting.... it would look like swap to meditation NOW, double-whip monastery in hoshoryu and ura asap, overflow into missionary, maybe spread to atamifuji in like 10 turns, spend 10t building one temple, then double-whip the second.... but i think you're right and it's not worth it. let's just (attempt to) kill someone. we really have to anyways if we want to keep pace w superdeath and naufragar flooding into all that open land

[El Grillo]

Sometimes the best shrine/wonder is the one your opponent graciously built for you

[ljubljana]

unfortunately none of our neighbors have been especially compliant in supplying us with those..... the great wall and hanging gardens are not exactly prime targets in that respect

Turn 111 - Zululand

greenline did not return our fish/fish renewal.... nice. idk what prospect of offensive military action they can see down here but whatever, we'll have an axe in the area soon and that should close the door on it i think. i guess they most likely just wanna force non-econ builds out of us, as one does. whatever, you do you, annoying and uncooperative bestie



nauf has their first MoM GA, grumble grumble. time to get blown past. which is another reason to ignore philo and prioritize military, we absolutely can't allow THEM to be able to pounce on GT solo before we're ready to join in



ughhhh. if ginger blatantly flouts cow/cow AND is willing to pull a teleport trick, we don't have enough units to guard both stacks of workers and all of ichiyamamoto, atamifuji, and tomokaze. i don't really think they're gonna do that but man is it ever annoying to have to think about this kind of thing every turn i'll probably have to leave a 2-worker stack expose and (plausibly but discomfortingly) hope that they value their RB rep more than a nice 120 for 30 hammer exchange



ginger has turned up with machinery, of all things. so, as more or less expected, they are already getting pretty close to guilds. i think the odds of SOMEone having to defend vs fast knights from them in the near future are pretty high, you'd better believe it's their best shot of breaking out of this corner. so.... what can we DO about that besides order up more impi and soon catapult builds? idk - no doubt it will not shock you to learn that that was what i was planning on anyways. odds that CI and the decent odds all our impi with +75% defense will have even against knights will shift their calculus on who to attack: not high but not zero either i think..... i know i at least would be planning to split dreylin with greenline from there, but either way we need to be ready to fight soon, either against ginger or to poach what we can from a collapse of drey



tomokaze "borrows" the wheat to totally kneecap hoshoryu's growth, at least for the time being..... i sure have done a good job completely stagnating this food-rich region through judicious application of plains cottages..... at least one of them will finally be a plains hamlet next turn..... well, once the chopping and roading situation calms down a bit we can start spamming farms for real and alleviate this somewhat. for now i think chilling at size 6 and growing the cottages is probably preferable to whipping the market and courthouse, but as always i'm open to being countermanded on this. and if we ever run out of actual, like, TILES to work i will countermand myself

as for tomo itself, you can see the dearth of tiles is bad enough that i'm considering the first non-resource mine in our whole empire..... idk if i'll actually DO it (better to 4-2 whip repeatedly i think) but even considering it is worth remarking on lol

[ljubljana]

going to play most of turn 112 - zululand now while i have two brain cells to rub together, but documenting that i will NOT finish the turn or move an impi to cover my exposed stack of two workers until a) ginger moves or b) a lurker says it's ok. i am worried this could be construed as an illegal double-move since in a sequential moves game they would have an opportunity to declare on us and kill it here. we are under an active cow/cow and i know ginger considers the first 10 turns of those to be "sacred" (in their words) so i doubt it will matter but yknow, full disclosure and all that

aaaaaanyways



as predicted, superdeath is growing up into a big damn monster - our lead in city count has evaporated and, while we will edge ahead again next turn, i don't know if we'll ever end up lastingly ahead of them again. "luckily" naufragar seems primed to eventually equal them if the land there is still as open as it was the last time we scouted that border (an increasingly significant "if"), but unluckily those two seem far and away the favorites as things stand and we're not really in position to directly influence either.

we'd better start (who am i kidding, continue) worrying about whether splitting GT with nauf will make for a runaway nauf, but by the same token i figure the reason they're interested in the first place is BECAUSE they are gambling that they'll come off on the better end of it. if that does happen, said runaway will be sandwiched between us and a strong superdeath and i think it's at least plausible that the two of us could combine to take them down, plus that should at least give us a geopolitical shield against whoever comes out of the greenline/dreylin/ginger triangle. and, well. if we split GT with nauf that's at least better than if nauf solo-conquers them, which i rather suspect is likely to happen if we try to kill ginger instead. nauf is ALSO likely to be extremely fast to guilds with their MoM GA -> possibly into another MoM GA (probably what i'd do with that many GPP floating around).... we should probably a) start sending them more diplo signals soon to see if they'll tip their hand about when they expect to get it and b) prepare to need to pounce on GT BEFORE guilds, with HAs, guerilla xbows, whatever we can muster. in that vein, i'm starting to think about feudalism before civil service in case we need to pull some REALLY desperate shit to get a piece of GT, with stuff like vassalage -> HAs or guerilla longbows...... depends on how long we can find non-farm chaining tasks for our workers to usefully do, i suppose

ginger logged on to play as i was typing this so maybe they will finish before i do and we will indeed get to do the whole turn this session...

aaaaaand never mind, game desynced when they joined, nice. ok i'll log off for like 30 mins to give them a chance to play since my playtime is not reeeeally constrained tonight and for all i know theirs could be

[ljubljana]

well, ginger has not returned so let's play a lil more



lighthouse whip in WMH, finally, which i should have done quite a few cycles ago..... ok, NOW we whip, in succession, an ikhanda and then a bunch of troops to overflow into moai (and when THAT's done we can grow onto the coast). takayasu has come into its own as inheritor of mitakeumi's wheat and now will grow up up up onto grass river cottages itself for the forseeable future



mita and the capital are both now stuck on a pretty-sad +4 food surplus, but i think that's ok for now.... they are both pretty tile-limited until we hit CS for yet more plains farms at the capital. they can hit sizes 11 and 10 respectively before we reach that point, at which point mita will be working cow + horse + 2 grass cottages + a full 6 riverside plains farms.....



gave hoshoryu the wheat back because 4-2 whipping tomokaze while our good city sits around unable to grow doesn't seem very growth-maximizing. probably better to have tomokaze sit at size 3 working mine + 2 plains river farms (ewwwww) while hoshoryu grows onto yet more of said farms