[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[aetryn]

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

Desync when they join generally gets fixed by just logging out and back in again, in my experience.

Two thoughts:
It's worth considering how the opponents will react, but sometimes I feel like you're channeling Vizzini from The Princess Bride ("But if I attack to the east, then Nauf will eat GT by himself and be unstoppable, so I clearly cannot choose the cup in front of Ginger"). There's always some configuration of opponents' response that can make whatever you plan to do backfire. Some of it you simply have to rule out because it gives you no chance to win the game if it happens. Sometimes you have to take a chance anyway. I definitely wouldn't let the possible prospect of Nauf attacking GT early make you rush your preparation. Sure, it could happen, but Nauf's got a builder set of traits and he's (so far) behaving a lot like a builder. GT has a more aggressive set of traits but is behaving defensively. My money's on GT's "default plan" being to sit tight until he makes it to Muskets or at least a better attacking era than now, and then wants to use his UU to go attack. While opponents will often have quite detailed tactical plans (how to make a particular invasion work, or how to build a wonder), most of the time their strategic level thinking isn't as elaborate.

Second, I'd say make sure you leave yourself in a position to win/compete if you do win your war. If you delay Irrigation chaining until after the attack, and that leaves a bunch of your cities unable to develop (which seems to be what you've indicated by how badly short of food many of these cities are), while Ginger and others are building size 15+ cities. with all improved tiles Owning land we aren't using effectively AND a tech deficit CAN be recovered from, but it's quite a tall slope to climb unless the rest of the world gets bogged down in wars and we can recover in peace. That could happen, but why make a plan that requires it? I'd suggest our preference should still be to recover the economy and get to Knights and then attack. If we see a clear opportunity (GT stops building all military, and we clearly outweigh him, or GT starts a war with Nauf) we can adjust. But I don't think worrying about what Nauf does is worth messing with our default plan if it hurts our snowball too much. Don't be fooled by SD eating Rickety - that was an unfair matchup. The vast majority of wars are HARD even on the winning side if both sides are competent. I'm fine with you deciding you need Vassalage for an effective war and want that instead of Bureaucracy, but delaying CS too long is still a mistake unless you've greatly exaggerated how capped many of these cities are - I'd even still argue for CS first if there's enough time before Golden Age time.

[Miguelito]

Just stop playing clock games before it becomes a habit. If you think they might snipe something of yours just follow turn order

edit: oh I see that it read resolved already and I was replying to a quoted content, nevermind.

[Tarkeel]

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

This is exactly how you should not do it and you have already claimed the first half of this turn by logging in. Declaring war on someone that has played half their turn is a surefire way to get a reload. It's impossible to defend against any opportunistic snipe, and turn pace is usually important enough that it's ok to do it defensively.

[ljubljana]

@mig i am confused, what were you responding to? i agree, and am trying my best to disclose to lurkers anything that i'm worried might be a clock game.....

@tarkeel yeahhhhh point taken, in retrospect the option i picked was pretty much the worst of both worlds...... ginger did not attack so in this instance it looks like it won't cause a game disruption, but i apologize..... in this situation, do you think i should have moved before ginger or waited until after they played?

@aetryn yeahhhh pretty strong agreement with all of this. nauf is playing a builder's game so far but....... i mean, the point of being a builder must be to build TOWARDS something if one is playing to win, and since i don't think it's possible to win one of these games without killing someone i think that something more or less MUST be an attack...... the question is at what tech breakpoint are they planning to suddenly transition to military....... i would guess the answer is generally "as soon as they have a decisive edge over a neighbor UNLESS continuing to build will lead to a more decisive edge (as it might if they want to chain MoM GAs and attack immediately after that)"...... for nauf i hypothesize that the answer is "whenever they run out of MoM fuel / decide they need to save the next GA for post-conquest consolidation"...... imo knights in 24 turns (t135ish) seems to fit this timeline well and we should be ready to pounce if that happens

a bit confused by what GT's strategic-level plan could be at this point though.... it seems likely that the economic delta between them and both their neighbors is only going to grow from here, and i doubt muskets will present much of an attack window if both nauf and us will also get there quickly. it still seems like their best bet was to partition a neighbor with the aid of a third party as early as was feasible or MAYBE right now after being first to construction, and i'm a bit unsure as to why they haven't tried that...? maybe the fact that they haven't means my sense of the strategic picture is incorrect here and there is some other strong option for them that i'm missing?

turn 112 - ljuljuzand



as we settle our 17th city (the younger brother of wakamotoharu, who actually had a much faster rise to the top and even has a top-division tournament win under his belt, but has been sidelined for a year with a heartbreaking ACL tear.....), so superdeath is up to 18. and i am not too sure if we should be rushing to match that, as our remaining fillers are two plains spots that can do NOTHING until we have civil service (literally they add no two-food tiles of their own) and a plains river spot that is within what i consider to be our natural zone of control but is also right on ginger's face and also fails to really add that much. yeah, initially-successful landgrab or not, there is just only so much we can do against someone with 1.5 civs' worth of useful territory and not much of a slowdown on growth curve. one can only really hope that gavagai and nauf are able to grow strong enough to contain them (or, if we are emotionally on team superdeath as i am, we can hope for NOT that as our second-most preferred outcome to actually winning ourselves )

we are now mutually spending EP on each other btw, which i intend as, and hope is reciprocated as, a badge of cautious respect

haven't been highlighting it but SD and i have had some pretty friendly and enjoyable exchanges in the ingame chat too (non-game related obviously)..... could this be what "bonding" is like?? :o

anyway you can see WTK has a monument chop ready to go (FINally i get some micro right in the post-sim era) and after that will quickly chop out the granary and overflow into fishing boat. or, now that i'm thinking about it, maybe hokutofuji should do the fishing boat as the timing is a little problematic (need t123 FB to hook up the fish asap, WTK will get 50 hammers + a 30 hammer chop between now and then which is not quiiiiite enough for both a granary and an FB). well, starting the lighthouse is just as useful and hokutofuji has a few more chops than is strictly necessary so maybe i will go for that



greenline logs in as we are playing and kindly allows us to finish our precious COW pasture omg <3 yeah, ura is just going to blow past all the other cities in this area, at least in terms of hammers, and i am feeling quite good about our decision to prioritize this spot. also greenline seriously played their whole turn in 90 seconds AS i was typing up this tiny lil paragraph..... lowkey highkey jealous of their capacity for chill

finally remember to tech the check screen, a second player has construction so we will be third.... for as crappy as our economy is i am surprisingly not too concerned about our teching rate. ok, time for more bridgegazing



yeah, a wave of "my neighbor has construction so i must get it to signal readiness to defend" propagating outwards from GT makes sense



i blew it with the worker micro at hoshoryu a little bit, which is now super out of tiles waiting on the plains farms.... ok, maybe i will countenance ONE tiny little single-whip here to top off the market and overflow into the courthouse while we shuffle our guys around



ichiyamamoto makes the depressing decision to come off the silver mine to grow onto its 2 riverside plains farms. and uh you can see what i mean about the food-capping situation, this city is hard-stuck on size THREE until CS (not that it's much better afterwards)



kinbozan has ROADS glorious roads! we are roughly 5t out from finally working the full line of cottages at tobizaru (will swap daieisho onto the hamlet tobi is currently growing). and then with our sad but nonzero +2 food surplus, we can indeed belatedly start to whip libraries and stuff... in retrospect i think we delayed the monument at daieisho a bit too long as it would like to grow onto those two plains tiles across the river now but whatever, catapult double-whips are fine too i guess

[Tarkeel]

@tarkeel yeahhhhh point taken, in retrospect the option i picked was pretty much the worst of both worlds...... ginger did not attack so in this instance it looks like it won't cause a game disruption, but i apologize..... in this situation, do you think i should have moved before ginger or waited until after they played?

It's impossible to combine simultaneous turns and avoid all possible double-moves. Most of the time I'd prioritize getting the turn played, especially if your double-move is of a defensive nature such as it was here. The exception is cases where you're slipping past guarding units and such, which this was close to. But in general it's usually better to play.

[aetryn]

I think roughly the point is:

1) You don't need to observe turn splits over every possible way another player could affect you, especially if they are being peaceable. More turns than not a scout unit can probably snipe something, but it's not worth the turn pace negative to observe splits in this case. We live with some irregularities in order to get the better turn pace of simultaneous. The two places to be careful to observe splits are settler races and war (prepping to declare, declaring and/or in-progress). 

2) If you're going to observe a turn split, don't split your turn in two. In general, TRY to play your entire turn when you log in the first time. If this is hard - you got an unexpected diplo communication and you don't know what to do about it, for instance - second best is to log off immediately so it's clear you didn't play any of your turn, think about it, and then log in when you're ready to proceed.  If you absolutely need feedback on something midturn and need to delay, fine, but you shouldn't play half your turn before someone you're trying to turn split with and the rest after, that just gets super confusing for everyone, and in general should never deliberately play half your turn with the idea of playing the rest later (real life situations are an exception, obviously).

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Also, do we really need to panic every time an enemy military unit is near a worker on the border? Who's going to start a war with the Zulus just to whack an isolated worker, dislocating all their plans to seize a fleeting, tiny opportunity and courting a forever war that completely ruins their game? Sure, a neighbor could do that, but the odds of it seem slight enough (and the potential loss slight enough) that we don't really need to disrupt all our military deployments every single turn just to guard against the infinitesimal possibilities.

Looking at the map, honestly, Nauf looks like a decent long-term ally for you. He has a big honkin' Superdeath on his other border, and SD has already gobbled up a neighbor, so you KNOW his attention will be rather dramatically focused there. If you split GT, Nauf can grow strong enough to potentially be a very useful counterweight to Superdeath (and vice-versa), while you'll have a decent chance to be the big fish in the western pond.

[ljubljana]

haha well, fair enough, but i think it still makes sense to do our best to shuffle impi around to guard exposed workers and such. after all we are zulu - if we actually faced a real attack, we could get our impi back into position almost immediately god i love this unit and civ

i am basically in agreement with long-term allying with nauf, as i guess is almost always what you want to do with the neighbor of your neighbor. in order to start running away with this, they have to turn their econ edge into actual more territory... while we'd be helping them do so by splitting GT, i think they're likely to be fully capable of eating GT by themselves in the not too distant future, so probably better to aggressively claim our share of the spoils and try to maneuver nauf into a position where they are equal to SD and us in city count but not SO far our in front that SD and us couldn't combine to take them down. it might even be helpful for nauf to end up the #1 civ, but by a small margin.... that should line up SD pretty firmly on our side while also deterring attacks from our other neighbors, who will then see US as the "necessary counterweight" that they must keep alive and intact as the only ones who can stop a nauf win

right now i'm of the opinion that the continent is likely to break out into full-scale war pretty soon, likely right after the tech leaders hit guilds for knights, which will in particular likely be before WE have guilds..... i think naufragar and ginger will probably get there first and around the same time, in maybe 15-20 turns with us another 10 or so turns behind them. they are probably going to immediately try to use that edge to hit SOMEone.... i'd imagine nauf will hit GT and ginger will hit dreylin, ginger possibly with the aid of greenline. that would present us with a major choice - help divide GT with nauf and concede that ginger and greenline will likely split dreylin, or try to turn the tide against ginger with dreylin's help while hoping that GT can hold on 1v1 for long enough against nauf to give us time to kill ginger and THEN intervene in the GT-nauf war. thoughts/feelings? or thoughts generally about the geopolitical situation and potential for conflicts in the near future?

[aetryn]

Await developments, don't overcommit to anything. It's also okay for us to just develop while other people fight, even through the Knight window, or just vulture a bit off neighbor's wars. We've got a lot of land to develop, and while we will have to attack out to win at some point, this may or may not be the right time.

The thing is, we just don't know what other players have in mind. Maybe Nauf just wants to build all the way to rifles.  Maybe Nauf and Gavagai team up against Superdeath. Maybe Ginger goes after someone at Knights. But maybe he wants to wait and draft or build Janissaries. Maybe GT thinks he can get Oromos while the other tech leaders are fooling around with the Liberalism and Taj races and have a window there. All we can do is make the best decisions possible with the very little evidence we have.

Right now we know:
GT backed off from a border confrontation with us over that city site we both wanted. Ginger has repeatedly indicated peace and made favorable trades, but also seems to really want to gain control of that hill we need for vision. We also know his border with Dreylin is more messy than his border with us (right? I've gotten that impression but I'm not sure how solid that is). We know that Gav has a huge military but is otherwise backward, and that MJMD seems to be in wonder-land. Nauf just started a 12-turn golden age and is pretty likely to chain that into another one, so he's going to look very strong economically for a while but probably won't want to whip much during that period. Nauf doesn't have Pyramids so he can't swap to Police State at the end and churn out a bunch of units that way. We also know there's a bit of a wonder rivalry between Nauf and MJMD. With MoM, Nauf would probably LIKE to get a 3rd GA before Nationlism, which he can do with PHI but is again inconsistent with heavy whipping/lots of hammer production, which doesn't want to work specialists as much. Greenline and Dreylin have mostly been quiet so far.

What I read from this:
Nauf: I doubt Nauf's gearing up for war yet. I expect we have at least 20 turns of peaceful buildering and prep from Nauf. I think it's more likely Nauf tries to vulture from either a SD-Gav war or a GT-Zulu war if he does anything at all during that period. I don't think we need to rush any fight we want to pick with GT for fear of Nauf attacking first.

GT: He appears to be waiting for more development, perhaps out of a general meta preference against Classical-era war. He could be waiting for Knights. He could be waiting for Oromos. We know he'll have to make a move at some point, but we don't know what or when. At some point we'll have to decide who we think the frontrunner is. If we think it's SD, we probably want to not weaken Nauf and so attack GT, so that GT neither attacks Nauf nor attacks us when we don't want him to. If we think Nauf is actually the frontrunner, we probably want to try to get him to attack that direction, leave him alone and see if a Ginger split is available.

Ginger: Relations have been okay so far. His trait combination is fast-starting and while CHM will still help in war, he's about at the end of the value of EXP, at last until Factories and Power Plants make health relevant. He's likely going to make a push either at Knights or Janissaries (Muskets). 

Greenline: Has interesting decisions to make. He could go into MJMD, potentially vulturing if Gav attacks again. He and Ginger could attack Dreylin. He could attack us, though that would be a very odd-shaped and hard to defend empire if he took much. He could use this opportunity to just develop while everyone else fights. I think this is a neighbor we definitely do not want to fight a war with, and he's not close enough to the likely frontrunners to be either in need of propping up or taking down so that his neighbor can be propped up. I do everything I can to maintain peaceful relations here.


Unanswered questions:
1. How's the food in Nauf-land? If it's good, he might be able to run specialists and still do some whipping at other cities. If it's bad, he's really got to choose between whip-production and specialists, and PHI+MoM should tilt him more toward specialists.
2. What kind of communications have we had with Dreylin? Has he sent us much of anything other than peace signals when we had the border issue a couple turns back? Has he suggested splitting Ginger?
3. How does GT handle grievances? He's clearly not "immediate-rage" mode, but is he "I will absolutely come back and kill you later" or "Eh, I'll keep it in mind, but it was a gamble that failed and no real hard feelings". If the former, we can't expect long-term friendship, whatever the gamestate. If the latter, we can expect GT to go with whatever gives him the best chance to win even if that's befriending us.

[ljubljana]

yeahhhh i think this basically makes sense. how are janissaries as an offensive unit? do warplans that involve big stacks of one-movers usually work this late? i always thought the problem with that was that the attacker concedes first-strike to the opponent's catapult stack, in the face of which it doesn't really matter if janissaries have +25% against the cleanup units...

agree that nauf probably will be building for 15-20 more turns, but mostly because that's how long i expect the push to guilds to take.... once they get there things could turn quickly, esp if they are still in GA mode.....

i can answer question 2 immediately at least - dreylin has not proposed anything all game, save this recent peace deal. we are supplying them with gold for what i imagine is an extra gems, but that was our idea.... do you think we SHOULD propose splitting ginger? i'd like to suss out their willingness to do so, but i also am leery of being perceived as having committed to what i see as the less likely of our options..... is there a conventional way to /ask/ if someone wants to attack someone without /committing/ to an attack if they say yes? i do not want some future gamer to look at us, eg, not attacking GT with nauf on t150 as we "promised" a while back as a reason to not trust future diplo from me...... and if we do propose a split of ginger with drey we will have to back out on at least one of those two agreements

Zululand - Episode 113

ljubljana's dream journal, episode 9:

last night i dreamed that we started a new PBEM, a civ3 PBEM with modern age starts
and two turns into the game amicalola sniped my capital with a marine
and i demanded a reload because i forgot they could do that
and you guys GAVE me a reload for this reason
because it's my dream and my subconscious can be delusional if it wants to



WE have tiny little bridges now :D and are bonding with GT over our apparently shared pennsylanianism. atamifuji's third pop, as useless as the other two, is about to bounce onto another plains riverside farm, to be completed this turn....

gav popped a great prophet this turn, presumably for the buddhist shrine, but no other interesting inter-turn developments from what a cursory glance reveals

the second half of calendar looks like a 3-turn research project... so i probably will go there next, hokutofuji's depressing unplantationed silk is looking at me funny. and, more importantly, we do actually have a city in kirishima that i think DOES want to get above the 11 happy we are currently capped at in the near future, so it can work all (8) of its grass cottages and run 4 specialists at the same time



GT is sending an axe and spear toward us for no apparent reason...... ok bestie, you do you..... it should be too late to take kinbozan now with 50% defenses from CI and the hill and the axe and impi inside at maxed-out fortification bonus.... but they COULD be very annoying and delay our tile improvements around here



we do NOT have a monopoly on the world's gold supply! but our hopeful speculation on the shittiness in the core of the west is looking pretty justified



updated f1 to show the degree to which we're pushing econ builds. daieisho is only on an impi because it had hammers invested that were about to decay. but once the core cities finish courthouses i expect to start pumping catapults as step 1 in our military buildup



omg, a FOREIGN trade route??!? yup, thebes has hit size 11. other than the market bonus and the ranged promotions, we are really well past the point in time where PRO is doing much for us... but of course said market bonus is really quite significant and will eventually equate to roughly one extra catapult per core city. that's more value than EXP is likely to be giving ginger at this point, at least. and i do expect the threat of PRO longbows behind walls behind CI to do SOMEthing to influence our neighbors' war plans, again in contrast to EXP.... i'm just hoping they talk about whether or not that's true in their threads so i can assess after the fact



"if blue, whip monument". well, it's blue.... DotF has hit third-ring borders and ura is now in a race against time to keep control of its cow. worse, the city JUST finished a library so we are behind the 8-ball here - they are making 4 culture per turn now and we only have 4 culture on the tile! so we have to get our shit together and whip not just a monument but also the library as quickly as possible via overflow.... AND we will need a whipped monastery to match the CRE culture. yikes! so maybe for this reason we are going meditation before calendar after all..... good thing we have loads of surplus happy to support this kind of frantic forced-acculturation.... we will probably lose the cow for a little bit but i think we can take it back without waiting a billion years for third-ring borders, thanks entirely to that unbelievably lucky judaism spread...

monument whipped, overflow into library. next turn we can whip the ikhanda and overflow THAT into the library as well, then we whip the library itself once we cross 30 hammers. that will match their culture rate but i think too slowly for us to retain the tile short-term, but if we overflow the library whip into the monastery i THINK we will be close enough to regain it within a couple of turns. this is ofc what we SHOULD have done at abi but, yknow, lessons learned and etc

well, i guess i should at least stop building this riverside plains farm i kindly started for them before i noticed 

speaking of abi



12 turns to third-ring border pop, which i think is actually 11 turns as the monument will double in 6. we are holding steady at 37% on the tile, and as mentioned, our tomokaze spot has locked GT out of building another city to contest it. pleaseeee come back, beloved porcine quislings (phrase stolen from youtube's only content creator)



^ the rest of my life