[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[aetryn]

Ginger and Dreylin both signalling peace makes sense to me. Ginger is racing ahead in research and has no need to fight a war now, while Dreylin is, well, his neighbor and needs to prioritize containment. Ginger will want peace from you as long as he can get it, I expect, while Dreylin will be hoping you wrap things up with GT as rapidly as possible so you can join him in a leaguer against the Ottomans. That's how I read it, anyway.

Agree with aetryn that this probably means Nauf is going to be friendly, especially since Superdeath is at peace and you know he gets restless quickly whenever that happens, so Nauf has to be looking over his shoulder. All in all he makes a natural ally. Gav/MJMD are wild cards and I don't know how they fit into the geopolitics just now. Maybe get into a slapfight with each other.

There's also Greenline. Don't know how much military he has but the big concern is that he and Ginger split Dreylin, fixing Ginger's land problems and giving Ginger a natural ally on the other side, who also sorta-borders us and could apply pressure in a war. Or Greenline could join Gav and split MJMD. Or it could continue to be peace and love over there (well, not from Gav, war is inevitable there, but we could see Gav vs SD round 2/3/whatever number we're on already).

Normally I'm not super fond of early Gunpowder but it might be important here to defend against Janns from Ginger, since they get bonuses against horses, archers, and melee (but not gunpowder) units.

[ljubljana]

yeah, i don't think ginger necessarily actually WANTS to attack us now, per se.... i'm just not sure why they'd give us, a long-term geopolitical rival, a free hand to divert ALL our troop production into GT, when we're pretty obviously not going to invade the ottomans until we are at least finished in ethiopia. what do they have to lose by at least making us spend some longbows fortifying the eastern border? unless they think that declining peace signals will make us freak out enough to abandon the GT attack in anticipation of needing to defend a full-scale invasion from them, or piss us off enough to bump them up on the rankings of our next potential target...?

what do you guys think ginger's medium-term plan is from here, besides build taj and spiral minaret completely uncontested? they'd be running away with this if only they had more land and a less crappy corner position, so surely they must attack SOMEone in the nearish future, but i've also been saying that for 50 turns now and it still hasn't materialized.... they'll reach rifles and cavs ages before anyone else, but i think there is some question as to whether 14 cities is enough to produce them in the numbers they'd need to just run over someone 1v1. on the other hand they are coming up on a good attack timing with janissaries - finish taj asap while we are still distracted as they research to gunpowder, swap to nationhood, and run someone over. if they can there quickly enough before we are finished with GT and/or have our own muskets, they can probably make gains against either of us.... if they wait for rifles or gren/cannon they will get there with nobody else even remotely close, but face an almost certain 2v1 situation unless they can enlist an unsuspecting greenline. not sure if that's really the better play for them, especially as with the CtH change to drafting (jans cost one pop, rifles now cost two in contrast to vanilla BtS) they will be significantly harder to mass and still can't exactly walk over tokugawa muskets

yeah, sadly (or not so sadly for me and my love of UNITS and PROMOTIONS) i think early gunpowder must be the move..... only question i think is whether we do it and guilds before or after the engineering/CS pair.....

also, thoughts on how we can signal to greenline that they'd better not help ginger split dreylin? you'd think they'd know better but still worth saying something if you think it can be done unambiguously....

i agree that nauf could make a good ally.... their prospects for invading us without getting superdeathed from the other side seem, uh, poor, unless they really trust their current stack to swipe and hold our GT gains AND believe they can then peace out with us to avoid a 2v1, which seems like it'd be wishful thinking on their end. and it would be nice for us to have them as a counterweight to superdeath (though less nice than it was before SD whipped a shitton of pop to lose a city to gav) and for them to have us as a counterweight to ginger.... but it's equally clear that nauf's unlikely to win the game without further military action. not sure if it makes more sense for them to split superdeath with gav (who might be too weak to help) or split us with ginger (who might be too STRONG to then be beatable afterwards), but i think it could realistically be the latter and we probably shouldn't assume they won't have an eye out for SOME kind of opportunity to knife us in the back... i also do not really trust nauf, or people generally, to be nice to us in the future JUST out of gratitude for us having helped them in the past, however massively, if it becomes in their strategic interest to NOT be nice to us. but maybe that says less about reality and more about my perception of it

this may be unwise but we should also think about what things would look like if our next move was not to help contain ginger but to attack nauf with superdeath. i guess it would have to be have to happen at the same time as ginger invading dreylin with greenline or we would be incredibly tempting for a stab. but if they manage to line that up, our choices become to join a 2v2 with dreylin vs ginger + greenline or to try to arrange to be on the right side of another 2v1 against nauf. i am not sure we would win the former, and the latter probably doesn't lead to a game loss - if ginger gets to 20 cities by splitting dreylin and we and SD both get to 30 by splitting nauf, ginger is still short on land relative to their rivals and i think the game dynamics will basically resemble the situation we have now...

re greenline, mjmd, gav: all three of them need to make big moves pretty soon in order to contend, i think, and with ginger likely to snap up all the relevant wonders and first-to bonuses for a while i am not sure what that can be BESIDES attacking someone. if i'm greenline, i would find zulu a poor target because it leads to an indefensible empire and dreylin a poor target because they'd then neighbor a runaway ginger, so i guess i think it's most likely they try to hit mjmd with gav while hoping us and drey can keep ginger in their box? gav seems less clear-cut... i see why they poked superdeath as it led to getting much more of a share of the inca land than they would have otherwise, but now there's no way they can safely attack in the other direction. and perhaps greenline will see that and conclude that mjmd is ALSO a bad target, and so they have no good options and might go with one of their other two choices, which are both disastrous for us .

related: greenline keeps upping EP spending on us to the point where they deny us even GRAPHS, i guess because they have so many EP from ziggurats that they can do whatever they want with it. last time we had graphs, they were around ginger/dreylin level militarily, but i'm wondering if you guys think it's worth diverting EP from the city-vis push vs GT to regain greenline graphs for a turn or two just to see if that's still true...

[ljubljana]

[turn 138 - zululand

i've been foiled



matara's borders expand to third-ring on the exact turn we were going to attack it, so our combat workers can't combat-work  to be honest though, we would have been foiled anyways as we only had 3 impis to work with here and that's certainly not enough to break 3 pikes behind what are now 40% cultural defenses. ok, so not we pull back and formulate a new plan...

and yeah, nauf did obliterate debre berhan as you might imagine and is moving onto their next target



which is evidently one of qohaito or gondar. if GT's western stack of old is holed up in the gondar area to prevent us from forking it with the capital, as i more or less expect, they might be in range of it soon.... it could be advantageous to us to hold our troops back and consolidate for a few turns in the hopes of inducing nauf to absorb the brunt of it...... certainly if GT stays focused on defending against us, they can probably prevent further gains (perhaps excepting matara) until we have some actual medieval units massed in-theater lol

as for GT's deploy against lalibela



evidently i misunderstood how sentry works, as our horse here does NOT get vision on GT's capital.... well, anyways, they haven't advanced anything into theoretical range of lalibela and neither of the roads has been repaired yet, so i think our brave pillagers did buy us the turn we need to get lalibela out of resistance before GT attempts to retake. that is worth the chichen itza bonus and 2 extra longbows in the city.... one more turn of grace should get us the walls as well via forge dry-whip (i think? it needs to produce 18 hammers and 15 * 1.25 ~= 19?) at which point we can feel better about moving our cats out, i suppose



we have our first of many, many 5 XP longbows.... i won't pre-promote most of them, but this one i will to show off to dreylin and greenline about what their approximate odds of bumrushing a border city with ancient age trash are likely to be  naturally ONE longbow, no matter how city garrisoned, is not enough to REALLY deter anything, but the plan is to use this GA to have ura produce a stack of 4-5 of these to be ready in time for drey's next cow renewal (and likewise at the ginger border)

risked a sentry horse (they are a bit less valuable now that we can mass-produce them) to reveal more of the matara area



should have done this beFORE moving up the little longbow/axe/impi stack in the SE smh.... i have just been really careless about this over the last few turns, and it's only a matter of time before i get punished and fritter away essential troops.......

anyways, yeah, matara is not falling to the forces we have in the area until and unless we bring up the cats. equally, 9 units is a significant commitment to its defense and does represent 9 units that are not attacking lalibela..... so do we leave a bunch of horse/impi in range of the city to force them to make good on their commitment of forces down here, but where they can NOT get into lalibela in time if they attack it t140? or do we keep them in or in range of lalibela, where they can threaten would-be counterattackers with collateral help but provide little more for the city's actual defense than physical bodies to absorb collateral from GT's cats...?



it is a little disheartening, but i think the latter is correct. until we can stand up defenses at lalibela, our plan for "holding" the city if GT attacks in 2 turns looks like the following: if they attack, we will have 4 LBs and a few fortified axes and such in the city to force them to use cats on the city garrison. that means they hopefully do NOT have enough cats to also pound the recapture stack of HAs, elephants, and cats next to the city on the same turn, which means if they take the city, we can counterpunch on the next turn, recapture, and then hit their offensive units with cats and then our own attackers. these units we are using to threaten matara constitute that recapture stack, and if we leave them here another turn, they can't make it to lalibela in time to recapture if GT goes for the t140 attack.... so better to credibly defend lalibela than to open ourselves up to losing it in exchange for MAYBE taking matara.... when the city has walls up and more LBs inside i think that logic changes and we can move out, but for now i think we hang back.... and maybe in so doing we can get the great, GT-back-breaking confrontation of stacks to happen between GT and nauf instead of GT and us....

that might mean the lil ministack 2SE of matara is about to trade inefficiently with GT's garrison attacking out.... that sucks, but honestly it's on me for rushing and thus mis-sequencing this turn. at least the LB should take out one unit and the axe has a good chance to take out another. and with just 3 pikes and a crossbow available for them i do not quite think they're capable of fulling wiping it



sigh, so ends an inconclusive turn in which all i really did was tick down the resistance counter at lalibela and maybe waste a few units.... i guess it's not reasonable to expect to make progress EVERY turn in civ4 even against an opponent who is probably on the way out long-term...

would love yall's feedback on this golden age F1 screen. i have almost completely stopped whipping for now in favor of growing our size-4 whip dungeons back onto GA-boosted tiles.... maybe i will whip that pop away at the END of the GA (when there is some hope of turning it into knights) or maybe not....

even tomokaze, which, for the longest time, had stolen hoshoryu's wheat and was double-whipping troops every time it hit size 4, is now working the terrible (but 5h/2c in the GA) plains river mine to allow the latter to grow again



next turn we will get windmill access and will want a LOT of them pretty quickly.... especially at kotozakura and hokutofuji, which i am also finally allowing to grow a bit



but which don't have tiles to grow onto either

and i guess i may as well add a southern overview



daieisho is the last whipping camp, and it too finally has tiles to grow onto in the form of river plains farms that its borders just popped to claim. maybe not worth working outside the GA, but inside it i guess they are..... i suppose all this adds up to a strategic plan that looks roughly like:

- hold back for a few turns to mass longbows and crossbows, regrow cities, and solidify our gains, maybe attacking matara if we get an opening to do so
- hope nauf confronts GT's main stack in the meantime
- when the GA ends, finish guilds and instantly whip a bunch of knights to finish GT off... or just keep growing and swap to serfdom, if it looks like a knight wave won't be needed

there's a lot of hope in that plan and i'm not sure i like it.... HOPEfully i will come up with a way to make more tangible progress sooner than this. but i don't know if it's worth whipping in a golden age into longbows to improve the odds of that...

ugh, idk man. feeling a little stagnated by this phase of the war.... realizing also that GT has 2 GGs now, which means they could snipe adulis back from the fog with a galley (GG promote navigation) and an onboard unit (GG promote morale).... fuck that noise.... and this turn generally lol

[williams482]

Honestly, things seem to be going pretty well?

Moving up units before checking the situation with your Sentry was an error, but you know that and errors will occasionally happen. And that border expansion is a tough break but hardly the end of the world or even a decisive end to threatening Matara.

It looks to me like you're doing a pretty good job pulling GT's puppet strings in multiple directions, in addition to the Nauf stack that's clearly coming for him. GT clearly isn't quite in FUCK YOU, BURN IT ALL mode just yet, or they wouldn't be committing a meaningful chunk of their current military reinforcing a weak border city that can probably hold off the stack you showed them anyway.

I think your best move here is definitely consolidation and gentle probing, and reminding yourself that GT probably won't be able to do whatever theoretically possible move is most damaging to you. As for deploying your two-mover stack, my first thought is get them out of sight in a location where you leave your options open as much as possible in either direction, towards reinforcing Liabela or threatening Matara. Clearly you're getting good value out of that threat right now, and if GT can only guess as to if/when that stack will be back, there's that much less chance they get a serious stack together to deploy against Liabela.

Regarding a wall whip, in BTS a dry whip is 20h base. Unless CtH cut that to 15 (which I don't remember reading anything about?), then a one whip with +225% production modifiers should easily get you your wall.

[ljubljana]

yeah, i think you're probably right - just getting my weekly freakout in  the two-mover stack could easily have been 1E of its current position and out of GT's sight, which is another unforced error.... but maybe it's fine as GT has been pretty cautious w their units, and we don't want them UNDERestimating what we have at lalibela, sending an attack that they might assume will fail if they knew our true deployments.... and then have that assumption be overcautious such that the attack then succeeds anyways against our full stack

wait, a dry-whip is 20h base? lol i guess i just assumed without basis that it was half the wet whip amount as in civ3... ooops  or i mean, not oops since that's the behavior we want

another thing we need to talk about collectively: great people..... i am eyeing a swap to serfdom at the end of the GA if the war with GT seems to be headed for a swift conclusion. but problem: at least in theory this is unsafe if we get attacked. the plan to alleviate that is to first get peace renewals with our neighbors before we swap, and then to generate the great people needed for the next GA within 10 turns of that, so that if we are attacked we can launch the GA and THEN switch back to slavery. so two GP of distinct types by t155. where are they coming from?

we have two locks to get GP almost within this timeframe in kirishima (again) and atamifuji:

(screenshot TBD)

atamifuji, going for the 300 point GP, is making 16/turn in the GA and will make 8/turn after, for a t159 eta

(screenshot TBD)

kiri has an empty food box now and has to alternate between running 3 and 4 specialists this time in order to not starve... so it's averaging 10.5 points per turn, 21 in the GA. going for the 400 point GP, it will have roughly 168 at the end of the GA and then can crawl to 400 over the next 20 turns, for about a t165 ETA

so we'll have roughly 10 turns of vulnerability if we swap to serfdom under this plan and can get NAP extensions. bad, but not horrible, right? well, what IS horrible is this.... the atamifuji GP will be roughly a 50/50 shot between prophet and scientist, and the kirishima GP will be roughly 50/50 between merchant/scientist.... so we have a 1/4 chance of popping double scientists and being unable to launch the GA D: the only way we could have partially fixed this, moreover, was to be in caste system (over slavery and serfdom, during a war?) or to build an otherwise-worthless missionary in ura and temple in atamifuji (which wouldn't even change the odds THAT much...). and note that if it weren't for chichen itza, two cities with library/market would have a 50% chance of making clashing GP instead of the 25% we're getting here...

at least the extra scientist we'd get in that case would have many useful applications, with printing press and gunpowder coming up for high-impact bulbs. but we would be locked out of slavery forEVER if that happens... the best we can do for the 500-point GP is something like mitakeumi, which would have to start right now, stop growing completely, drop its GA-boosted plains farms, grass cottage, and horse (swapping the horse to takayasu for another unworked cottage), and still wouldn't get there until the early 170s. and if we get two great scientists and are relying on a GP from mitakeumi to fix it, even THEN it only has a 50% chance of doing so.... i'm almost wondering if we're supposed to just run the two great people we're doing now, and accept that if we hit the 25% chance and get attacked we'll have to swap to slavery at the anarchy turn D:

why is this "distinct types" thing a requirement for a GA anyways.... seems like a huge dice roll in a game like this and i'm not sure it even makes sense flavor-wise

[El Grillo]

Golden Ages are a period of major change in your civilization. As society becomes larger and more complex, it takes a larger and more diverse effort to produce such a change. Alice the Great Engineer's new tools might be sufficient to double the productivity of a hundred people, but it would take Alice the Great Engineer's tools and Bob the Great Merchant's logistics in tandem to double the productivity of ten thousand people, and so on.

[Jabah]

well, you can always eat 1t of anarchy in case of life or death war. It is not as if you would be stuck forever in your civics

[williams482]

Yeah, anarchy is bad but it's one dead turn (until very late in the game, at which point slavery is a dubious ROI anyway). A 1/4 chance of one dead turn, if a specific problematic circumstance arrises, is not worth crippling an otherwise promising city for 30 turns. We can live with rolling the dice on this one.

[ljubljana]

hmm, i think the downside is a little more intense than one turn of anarchy unfortunately - if we get 2 scientists at 25% odds without starting another great person, we run the risk of missing the second golden age entirely..... at that point, the 500 point great person would take 42 turns for a 4-specialist city to make from scratch, and since we're only learning that we're in this case in the 160s, that takes us into the t200s which is very likely end-of-the-game territory.... at that point it's probably better to get SOME value out of the scientists by bulbing printing press or some other tech along our endgame military tech path of gunpowder -> chemistry -> mil science -> steel. chemistry and PP are good targets but we would have to research education first, which is as expensive as either of them are, and i'm skeptical we're going to have time for universities to pay off before this one is decided.... or, we could bulb scientific method (which is BEFORE education on the bulb list) as part of a biology beeline, which i do love as an idea but which is probably pretty silly lol

we could also just not flip to serfdom but... i'm starting to get a dawning sense that being able to safely swap out of slavery, during this era when we must grow to stay economically relevant anyways, is part of what the PAYOFF is supposed to be for playing such a militaristic trait pairing, stacking border cities with CG3 longbows, building chichen itza, etc. surely the play from here is to use our edge in defensibility to make a compromise on it elsewhere in the hopes that we are still a worse target than dreylin even without slavery, NOT quadruple-down on spikiness...

here are the promised screenshots now that i'm not in an airport with nonfunctional wifi - kirishima:



atamifuji:



mitakeumi IF we ruin its growth curve for another GP



actually now that i post this, i am seeing that there is another option, one that has 100% odds of non-clashing GPs but is, in exchange, exceedingly stupid: we could free kirishima (to grow onto what could be plains farms or new plains riverside cottages, which unlike mita it actually has the food for) and have mitakeumi run two merchants and A SPY specialist, from the courthouse..... it would be a bit slower than kirishima to 400 GP with only 3 specialists and starting a turn behind, but we can speed it up by using the remaining 7 turns of our GA to crank out our empire's second forge and then adding an engineer, which takes the GP to around t168, not enormously slower than what kirishima can manage. man.... that's really really stupid but it could be correct.... not to mention if we are ever going to plant and grow the last few kirishima cottages, now is a way better time to start them than 30 turns from now...

edit: here is a shot of ginger's core, lest we wonder how urgent the growth situation is



and of magnificent Free Kirishima, now the #1 commerce city in zululand ahead of the capital



if we're going with this plan though, it may be wise to start making religious buildings here to compete with ankyra on culture as we are otherwise destined to fall behind to their religion + incentive to make all the religious buildings + great wall combo and lose that hill and forest (which is significant if this is our oxford spot)

oh and: if we do a serfdom swap we may need civil service to be next ahead of guilds :||||||

andand: do we bother with orgrel? i'm thinking no, we haven't spread anything around and the extra upkeep cost + the two techs we would need is significant....

[RefSteel]

A mechanics note on whipping walls (and taking advantage of Chichen Itza) in Lalibela: When a city's defenses are bombarded down, the reduced defenses - as a percentage of the whole, whatever that whole may be - apply to whatever future defense level it may have until they gradually regenerate over time ... and regardless of who has control of the city. So if a Spanish city has 20% defenses and you bomb it down to 10%, if the city completes a Citadel on the interturn, it will go up not to 100%, nor to 90%, but to 50%. Or if you bomb a city all the way down to 0 (as I believe you did with Lalibela) and you subsequently conquer it, when it comes out of resistance, it will not have the 25% Chichen Itza defenses, but the small fraction of that which has regenerated from zero in the interim. Adding Walls will not add 50, but only triple that tiny number (from small-fraction-of-25 to small-fraction-of-75). So you'll still be looking at a single-digit defense rating at first, slowly regenerating to full "health" over time unless and until it's bombarded again.