[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[Tarkeel]

they did not have construction when we got it, but now i think we can't tell as they have no river crossings eligible for bridge placement (i wonder if this is intentional??)

It's probably intentional but for other reasons than denying bridge-scrying. One of the key issues in managing workers is building the right amount of roads. This often ends up with a zig-zag pattern to give your roads most reach. Similarly you'd avoid the need to cross rivers where not necessary. All in all this often results in very few places for bridges to appear. Looking at my own empire in PB66, I can only find a few bridge crossings for exactly these reasons.

re janissaries, i am wondering the same thing and would also love to hear about examples of this unit killing people in these games, if people can think of one.... or of muskets generally being the decisive attack unit in any situation where they are NOT given some special promos like guerilla to turn them into 2-movers

I think the last game to feature active Janissaries is Commodore in PB53.

[ljubljana]

@aetryn - oh, really interesting point re the Great Engineer bulb idea..... that seems like it has the potential to be quite strong and definitely would have caught me at least completely by surprise if you hadn't mentioned it . i am a little unsure about why they'd research machinery if that is their plan though.... it doesn't get them any closer to muskets unless they go through guilds, and, as you've mentioned, it seems like it actually gets them further away by opening up engineering as another expensive tech they have to clear out of the way first. for my own reference and that of my fellow civ4 noobs, the great engineer bulb list looks like this



the GE can bulb the first tech in the list that they a) do not already have and b) are eligible to research - gunpowder is fifth from the left in the third row. techs that come before it in the list, and that they must therefore either research or NOT be able to research to bulb gunpowder, include:

- construction: we know they can research this, as they have both hanging gardens from math and walls from masonry. so to bulb gunpowder they must research this
- metal casting: they have been able to research this for a long period of time, since it just requires bronze working and pottery. so they HAD to get this tech as well, which opens up machinery. since we can see windmills from machinery, we know they have indeed researched this tech already
- machinery: i guess since they needed to clear out metal casting, there actually was no way to bulb gunpowder without going through this tech, which answers my earlier question about why they'd go for it under that plan. but if they must get machinery and construction, that opens up research on
- engineering: an expensive tech (as expensive as guilds, only 300 beakers cheaper than gunpowder itself) that they must become eligible to research at some point before bulbing gunpowder, and that they must therefore also clear out of the way

so it sounds like, compared to a knight attack, a janissary attack via bulbs requires a) getting really close to guilds anyways, as machinery is required to bulb gunpowder, and b) requires an expensive diversion to engineering that costs most of the beakers you would save from the bulb. not saying they won't bulb gunpowder (or engineering itself, which gives +1 road movement and is hence a fine logistical enabler for a knight attack if you have the GE sitting around), but it seems like the easiest way to get there in this plan is just to go through guilds instead of through the toweringly expensive education (2900 beakers, 1000 MORE than gunpowder). so it seems to me like you'd typically get a larger mass of attacking units by going through guilds, building up some knights while you work on gunpowder, then adding janissaries when you can then by avoiding to guilds to go straight for gunpowder

re iron working: if my understanding is correct, we know they aren't one of the three who have it because according to the diplo screen, there are three people out there with iron sources hooked up and available for trade - superdeath, dreylin, and GT. nobody has civil service yet. and re the HG, i think rushing them was probably the correct play with their position even if it didn't produce GE points given their early math and cheap UB aqueducts, so i'm not sure how much them having built them supports the theory that they're going for a gunpowder bulb. but the GE can do a lot of things right now via bulb that are pretty useful, so i'm starting to think that SOME kind of bulb play is more likely than sitting around waiting for taj.

tbh, the more i think about it, the more value i see in them just using it to bulb engineering once they hit construction. that should speed up whatever attack they are planning significantly by letting them achieve the necessary prerequisite "critical mass of attacking units at a border" status a few turns sooner, via letting the newly-produced units in their backlines get to the border quicker. the same extra road movement, and some strategically-placed castles, also makes it a very powerful DEfensive tech, which helps them hit the OTHER necessary prerequisite for offensive war, namely: "become secure enough on our other border that, even if our other neighbor piles on the minute we attack into the one neighbor, we will not lose territory". if they have 3-movement roads and castles in their border cities, we will have pretty much no prospect of taking their cities if they send their knight stack at dreylin, which means they get to fight a 1v1 that they are quite likely to decisively win... or symmetrically, castles on the dreylin border would give them a free hand to devour US...

also, just wanted to thank you again for spending SOOO much time and energy on this thread, it is really nice to have dedlurkers who care as much as you guys do <3

also also, on logging in to double-check some of these statements i see that the turn has rolled, so More Content Incoming shortly (in like 90 minutes as usual lol)

@tarkeel thank uuuu for the info!! i'm seeing that that commodore game was not an ancient-era start, so not sure how to compare the respective timelines, but this is really helpful and will probably be more so once i get a chance to fully dig into the report  and re the road patterns, yeah, the fact that we have even 2 bridge-eligible crossings is proooobably a bit of an indictment of my own over-roading ehehehe

[ljubljana]

Turn 118 - Zululand

ok, so what delightful occurrences will have occurred after this day.... well, here's one



GT has started their first golden age, but WITHOUT any civics to instant-swap to apparently. they also did not switch religions, but a quick glance at their territory reveals that



as far as we know, 118 turns into the game, they still have not gotten a religion spread and therefore still can't! damn, civ4 really IS a series of dice rolls (as commodore says).... anyways, the motivation for starting a GA now is not obvious to me.... i suppose that, in their position, it is reasonable to start worrying about falling behind on both military and tech, and a GA will let them make a catapult stack while pushing for some kind of sufficient defensive tech to deter a likely-looking medieval-era attack from us and naufragar. but the long-term consequences of NOT having an easy GA to swap civics with on a map as serfdom-dependent as this one (and their land seems at least as brown as ours) seem like they could be severe



no super-significant changes on the tech front that i can see, but someone has turned up with aesthetics! mjmd or GA nauf for more wonders? gingac to have something to rush with the GE? it occurs to me that gingac has a nasty move available to them of rushing the parthenon right on our border in ankyra, which is indeed the direction in which their great engineer appears to be moving.... that would certainly swipe the hill and forest away from us with no realistic way to take it back, and would even give them some prospect of eventually taking our second-ring tiles with their third-ring borders! of course, it would ALSO antagonize their zulu neighbors.... that didn't stop them from making the great wall there, but the wall is not exactly the same level of tempting to capture as something like the parthenon or statue of zeus would be



glorious tobizaru has finally grown onto the full line of FP cottages :D with help from daieisho who is working the easternmost one. not sure how long we should wait before cottaging over the farm, if that is our long-term plan... i could see us leaving it for a while to whip the library, market, and maybe even courthouse, but then we run out of time for it to actually mature before the end of the game. and ura has lost its cow, as predicted, but is dumping a crapton of hammers into the library to double-whip next turn..... uh, that WAS the plan but because it lost the cow we now have to wait another turn to hit size 4 again >:[ anyways, we can now get meditation in 1t at a +43 gold surplus researching at 20%, so i'll do that, and we should get the cow back once we double-whip, overflow into the monastery, and single-whip that. i WAS going to then make a missionary for kirishima to fight the ginger culture war, but if they rush a wonder in ankyra that is so hopeless that it might not be worth doing



Operation Regrowth... we are still hideously behind the leaders in everything but city count and land area though, gingac has maintained a huge edge in crop yield since the hanging gardens build AND has as much production as golden-age naufragar. damn! ok, after this game i guess i do understand the value of the HG  our only real lever to catch up is our higher ceiling in total workable tiles, but um, that's why the plan for them now is probably to just go kill someone. you know, another thing they could honestly do with the GE instead of rush engineering is just pop a golden age the instant they hit the relevant military tech..... that would maybe give up on some civic swaps but the just gigantic pile of knights they could assemble in so doing woooould probably be worth more than some border castles lol



at least we have this gorgeous, almost fully-worked vista of cottageland to fuel our economic comeback. or, if ginger successfully kills us, to just immediately win them the game lol. if we are NOT their target, kirishima will start our specialist push at either size 11 or size 12; i think our tech pace is such that size 11 would not be too quick, but i don't really want to leave a ton of grass cottages unworked by pulling citizens off them... i suppose we could trickle in the specialists by pulling guys off tiles as takayasu grows onto them, but that is the kind of thing that is typically not whole-assed enough for my liking



wow, big-time border tension spotted between greenline and up-to-14-cities Mjmd

we have a decision to make after civil service (or BEFORE civil service, if we a) have time for another research first or b) think CS is not worth it in the face of gingac eating us) - feudalism first or machinery first? the former opens up longbows which, for us, should be very strong defensive units - CG2 longbows in 75% defense cities seemingly get odds even on cover knights, and as mentioned earlier promoting their knights to cover means they DON'T beat our impis. the latter adds windmills, which we want several of in every city of course, and enables both crossbows and maces. thoughts? i am going to do a little math and see how many workers will run out of tasks if we delay CS until after feudalism - our economy is recovering nicely and we might actually be able to swing that for the extra KTB, plus again the sooner we can spam longbows, the less plausible a target we will look for ginger

edit: CS is a 5-turn research at max, and will require something like 7-8 turns of saving. and we have just about 12-13 turns before catastrophic lack of worker tasks sets in, i think. so unlikely we have time for feudalism first. i am feeling seriously insecure about our odds against gingac right now but maybe i just have to deal with it, hope that we are a worse-looking target than dreylin, and accept that without CS next we probably won't win the game even if they DON'T come after us

note that a major limiting factor here is the need for a 200-point great person for the golden age.... if we hadn't bulbed math, we could do a GA in like 8 turns, feudalism first, immediately swap to serfdom, AND probably make it to CS in time for our workers to have stuff to do and to swap to bureaucracy. i am beginning to accept that that move was probably incorrect, as yall predicted at the time and as i refused to listen to

[ljubljana]

nhhhh i went against my best interests and squinted at ginger's cities. we have 12/13 spots defogged, and by my count their buildings are

monument: 10
granary: 12
forge: 6
library: 4
market: 3
hammam: 2
walls: 2
lighthouse: 3
barracks: 0
courthouse: 0

by comparison we have 3 more granaries, 1 more library and market, but just 1 lighthouse and of course 0 forges. and yes, 12 ikhandas.

so looks like quite a few cities did forges before at least one of market/library, which is a pretty long-term economic snowball play for a non-IND civ...but it DOES convert pre-knights hammers into actual knights in a way that no other available builds do so i don't think it contraindicates an attack in the near-term. they also have no visible barracks, but for a non-zulu civ the smart play might be to keep them all 1t from completion until you actually start the knights to avoid tipping off your neighbors (and spiking your milpower).



does constantinople not have a library? or am i blind?

another thing i noticed



silk lumbermill. so no calendar and very likely no plans to get it in the immediate future. that coupled with no courthouses either does not really ease my mind about their plans; they have some strong longer-term econ techs available to research and despite the world's best economy, we have no evidence that they have gone for anything post-currency that is not directly on the path to knights/janissaries

edit: something for us to think about - atamifuji, with 26 points invested in a prophet and a not-too-far-away library (probably like 6t away with a chop inbound if we swap onto the ivories), could be a backup choice for generating the golden age great person if kirishima a) anticipates a need to whip for war with ginger or b) wants to grow onto plains river cottages w library and market up instead of letting atamifuji grow onto plains river farms. the downside is atami has the much smaller food box and such a plan would both be slower to the GA and horribly stagnate it at size 4 for a very long time. guesstimate is that we are ~26 turns away via atamifuji and ~19 turns away via kirishima IF we start running specialists after the next city growth to size 11 (leaving temporarily unworked grass cottages, and at the opportunity cost of riverside plains cottages...). but probably all 7ish turns of delay on the golden age would be turns that we REALLY want to spend in serfdom/bureau if at all possible. thoughts/feelings?

[Miguelito]

I've found top view (Alt+F) very useful for spotting buildings in cities.

[aetryn]

Honestly, I think it does us no good to field Ginger's attack slightly better at the cost of stagnation. That just means that we get peace for a time, he can tech faster than we can, and he beats us even further to the next breakpoint. Sure, it's possible to come back from a position like that if the rest of the world breaks correctly, but I still think it's better to try to thread the needle and get to Civil Service first. Since Impis are so good for us defensively, I'd stock up on those and Catapults - and maybe some War Elephants if we have those unlocked - in the meantime and bite the bullet on Civil Service. Also, Machinery without Civil Service only gets us Crossbows, not Maces  - Maces need both CS and Machinery. 

I don't have a good enough sense of the empire to really choose between the Great Person plans you have presented, and I didn't entirely understand the tradeoffs from your writeup, but since we're probably not getting a religion and don't need a Prophet particularly, I'd edge toward the faster GA unless there's significant downsides.

GT may expect to hit the appropriate techs during his Golden Age and switch into Civics at the end. Since he probably has a war planned at SOME point, or may be afraid of being attacked, he may not be willing to go into Serfdom, so may only value getting into Hereditary Rule and Vassalage here, which are consecutive techs he might be close to on the tree. Or maybe he just REALLY wanted a Golden Age.

[ljubljana]

i think you are correct re the teching tradeoffs.... we are already pretty far along the path of "invest into ginger not attacking us" and probably need to pivot now in the direction of "be in a contending position IF ginger does not attack us", on the theory that our win probability scales w the product of these two factors so, if both are about as easy to influence, we want them to be of roughly the same size... re elephants, what is your opinion on them vs knights? i see that they match up better vs knights than impis on offense, but probably worse on defense in most cases, and an elephant is almost twice as expensive as an impi.... it's hard for me to imagine an elephant performing better than 1.7 impis vs knights in most cases. an elephant stack would be less expensive to maintain, but we are AGG so surely that weights in favor of maintaining a larger stack of individually weaker units if it trades more hammer-efficiently. on the other hand we need only HBR to make elephants (thanks, native source of ivory!) so if we DO think they are worth making it wouldn't take us too far out of our way to do so

re the GA plans..... i guess the major thing i'm worried about is that kirishima is right on the border with ginger, and if we have to whip that city AT ALL it has to come off either the specialists, killing the GA timing, or highly valuable riverside grassland villages. going for a great person via atamifuji would be slower but safer. the other consideration is that to make a GP, we have to stop growing one of the two cities to work specialists; atamifuji would be missing out on low-cost growths onto bad tiles (river plains farms) while kirishima would be missing out on high-cost growth onto good tiles (river plains cottage). not sure how to use our farm/cottage valuation to determine which of those we prefer.... do we think adding a cottage now is worth adding 2 farms now? 1.5 farms? depending on what our answer is, the choice of which city we want to grow changes, and i'm not sure i get the game on an intuitive enough level yet to HAVE a well-reasoned answer

[aetryn]

It's not a huge deal, but we're going to want to be able to counterattack some against Knights - otherwise they'll just pillage us down while they bring up catapults and bombard our static defense down to 0. Not worth going out of our way for though right now.

I'd value the river cottages over the random farms, but not at 7t delay to GA I don't think + stagnating out a city that can actually grow at this point. If you're worried about the safety factor vs Ginger, that could be a reason to switch though.

[Tarkeel]

we have a decision to make after civil service (or BEFORE civil service, if we a) have time for another research first or b) think CS is not worth it in the face of gingac eating us) - feudalism first or machinery first? the former opens up longbows which, for us, should be very strong defensive units - CG2 longbows in 75% defense cities seemingly get odds even on cover knights, and as mentioned earlier promoting their knights to cover means they DON'T beat our impis.

Knights (and other mounted units) can't take cover, which is why longbows are good static defense against them.

[aetryn]

we have a decision to make after civil service (or BEFORE civil service, if we a) have time for another research first or b) think CS is not worth it in the face of gingac eating us) - feudalism first or machinery first? the former opens up longbows which, for us, should be very strong defensive units - CG2 longbows in 75% defense cities seemingly get odds even on cover knights, and as mentioned earlier promoting their knights to cover means they DON'T beat our impis.

Knights (and other mounted units) can't take cover, which is why longbows are good static defense against them.

Knights with GIANT shields to protect their horse from arrow fire would be an amusing image.