[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

Turn 160 - Zululand

once AGAIN i am a little time limited...... so uh..... i sure hope nothing important happens THIS turn 

starting this one off with a warning/worry, as much for my documentation as for yalls feedback (though ofc i want that too) - do you think mjmd's gameplan in this one could be cultural victory? normally this is mediocre cheese in MP at best but in this game "traditional" military wins are looking unlikely, and this is kind of the perfect setup for culture - a shitton of wonders and a good setup for going for more (sistine  though thankfully this is still on the board, for now) and both neighbors looking super inert. i am not too sure who would stop them if they went for it.... i guess the most plausible candidate is US and we only "neighbor" them by the MOST generous definition of "neighbor", and would otherwise have nothing to gain from their conquest

but.... tbh i have never done a culture victory in civ4 before, so i have no idea how quickly they can manifest when carried out by human opponents. i am dimly aware that the path usually looks like 1. get sistine 2. tech liberalism for free speech 3. go to 100% on the slider and 4) win in some number of turns. no idea how much of a window we'd have between steps 3 and 4 though



so GT attacked out and killed the hill-pillaging longbow, which i moved to 1NW of aksum so that it would at least contribute SOMEthing to the attack. they took good damage in doing so though and cleared the fortify bonus on one of their stronger crossbows, which i think is acceptable value for the unit. and with no new units appearing in aksum, and the city still at size 4 but very likely not to be next turn when they can whip another iron unit, yeah, i think this is the turn

you can also see that lalibela has started the dreaded second jewish monastery, which i REALLY didn't want to have to build.... at least it is on pace to become a very strong hammer city pretty quickly, as is ura, stronger than any other pair of coreligionists we own except hinduism's takakeisho + kotozakura. and i am NOT picking hinduism, as um, the hindu holy city



coooould be better positioned, just maybe.... i wonder if ginger views this as a reason to go in against dreylin first - their economy should be starting to really suffer under non-AGG unit support, and while our border cities are useless to them financially until they push far enough to actually work some of their tiles, trout's shrine will be profitable as soon as it's out of resistance...

anyways, yes, time to go in...

but first we stall some more!



before we can flip to nationalism + theocracy, we need all of the following techs:

- polytheism
- monotheism
- aesthetics
- drama
- philosophy
- nationalism
- theology

luckily most of these are cheap as hell and have multiple KTBs (not philosophy though!). i THINK we want to choose a research order that maxes out on prereq bonuses at least, 20% savings on philo equates to a not-to-be-neglected 1288 * (1 - 1/1.2) ~= 216 beaker savings, and while in theory we don't ever NEED to pick up drama, it pays for itself in KTBs on music and philo and we are probably going to need a few theaters for golden age insurance.... and of course the globe is really powerful when mass-drafting if we have a city that can grow every 2 turns and is otherwise content to not really do anything (and we may have this in GT's gondar)

so do we run up to philosophy first to take our shot at taoism, or do we do literature first to start working on the national epic in (TBD but most likely hoshoryu?) i don't know..... but thankfully i don't have to know as aesthetics is the first tech along either path  we are capable of, um, 2-turning it at breakeven.... which is not a GREAT sign for how quickly we are going to get all this research done

hey look another distraction



"filler someday", welcome to someday  if we can spare the worker labor (a big if....) this should get off to a very fast start with 4-food FP farms to steal and a chopped granary. we even prechopped the forest 1N.... not exactly intentionally (we were fleeing GT's axe) BUT STILL



confirmed musket sighting in drey's land.... ginger still had now DoWed yet and with our peace now just 5t from elapsing i'm actually getting nervous again.... they double-moved relative to us last turn, so i managed to lose sight of their stack, even..... but since we have vision in most of ginger's core, that means it must be either AT the dreylin border right now... or uh, repositioning in order to stab us, which we would richly deserve if they did go for it  perhaps i will show them our shiny new knight this turn just to advertise that, uh, we aren't QUITE as far away from gunpowder as our motley crew of longbows might make it appear....



ok, after one thousand years of stalling and ten of simming, NOW it's time. battle of aksum.

question 1 from the sim is: how many of our (10) 5XP catapults do we max out on barrage promos with, and how many do we give city raider in the hopes of redlining a unit AND keeping our cat alive? promoing all 10 to barrage is tempting but i find that it's a bit overkill as then our last few cats are only hitting 2-3 units with collateral instead of 6, and that was without them pre-collateraling a crossbow for us by attacking out. so i expect that i will eventually go for CR2 in a handful of cases, but we lead with barrage 3 of course

the first 8 guys, all barrage 3, are about as doomed as you might imagine, attacking in at 1-5% odds and getting crushed but doing 6 huge 1.1 damage hits to various defenders. and then we reach a point where the top defender is a crossbow that a CR1 cat gets 20% odds against. i decide to try our luck at promoting a cr2 cat at 40% odds.... it dies, but then the NEXT CR2 cat has 64% odds.... which also dies  but i'm feeling good on the collateral damage pace and we still have 6 cats to gog

in the end, despite taking 4-5 46% odds fights and the one in which we were favored, we only managed to save one cat, a below-median result, and we also didn't get many of the nice cat -> pike shots that we are hoping to maximize in the next phase to ease the burden on our horse archers. that takes us to here



now we are supposed to send in CR2 macemen to crack the top crossbow defenders. one thing that DID go well in the cat phase though is that all but one of the city garrison crossbows is badly redlined. so our first attack is at only 83% but the rest should be better. we do win all 3 of those, but then our great general-boosted morale mace DIES as similar odds  depressing, and the first major unexpected loss of the attack....



now the critical step, in which we use our longbows to chew through as many of these pikes as we can get to present themselves as defenders, to ease the path of the horses, at mostly 70%ish odds. we do have a few longbows that got promoted to shock somehow though, which means they won't be able to help out in that respect... but they can still hit now-fully collateraled crossbows at similar odds

we have a few 5XP bows that can be promoted for this phase, in addition to the many that we gave guerilla promotions to in order to make this landing possible in the first place. technically promoting combat 2 here is better for the future of the unit, but taking shock and cover gives us better odds right now where the situation is most critical. i go with the immediate option, and the first attacking LB wins with 1.0 health remaining, quite possibly having been saved by this decision

by this point our luck has started to take a turn for the weird.... we win all but 2 of the 75%+ longbow attacks (better than average and i've seen WAY worse) but the game throws a few archers at us as defenders, and we are left with a few more fully-healthy (so um, 3.3-healthy) pikes than i usually like to see



at this point we charge in with the horsies but attacking those pikes is a rough proposition, with about coinflip odds for even our best horsie to live. risking 2-3 of those attacks is fine is fine but we're looking at 6, not amazing. or we try to pull some kind of trick to do damage to a few more of those pikes....

one such trick that i like is using two of the axes to take risky attacks vs the top crossbow defenders, to force the axe to defend against the cover axe. if we can kill THAT, then the combat 2 + shock impis get favored attacks against the pikes. not sure it would work here though as there are still 2 fairly healthy crossbows, even though we killed quite a few... or our archers can attack pikes now, but at really bad (19%) odds. both of those plans trade real attackers, who we may well need on cleanup duty, just for the chance of making a horse archer breakthrough come quicker....

in the end, i decide it's best to just power through with the horsies. first horsie (combat 3) actually wins and takes out the fresh formation pike! and with the other at 2.4 health from killing a cat (i think), now the combat 2 horse has a coinflip to live as well (it dies though). a few C1 horses go to the meat grinder and trade wildly divergent results, the first dying without doing damage, the second actually winning, and the third, now 8/5 XP umiuma, winning without TAKING damage! and the fourth wins AGAIN! then the last one dies but now we have achieved a breakthrough with 2.4 health left on the top pike. who gets a kill without taking damage at 30% odds but then dies

anyways, the point of all this is the last 5 or so attacks, where we run over the top crossbows that were giving our axes trouble, as well as a few archers, and the last healthy pike at 90%. it is at this point that our longbow on a boat takes its own attack, and wins as well, without taking damage. the guerilla 2 longbow who is out of position, btw, ALSO won without damage so if this does go 2 turns, it will be hard for GT to snipe. we're getting a little down to the wire now



this, i suppose, is why you always bring ALL your units who are physically able to fight, even obsolete and injured ones, to this kind of seige.... GT is down to 11 defenders, all BADLY injured, and we have 17 remaining attackers, all VERY obsolete  best odds from here actually comes from a CHARIOT, who gets 81% attacking an archer (but it dies...). then we have to trust our cover and city raider axes to win dubious 70%s against crossbows (but they do). cleanup crew does not have the easiest job in this iteration as they have to take quite a few 80%s against archers and such, but they mostly win, and one consequence of this (and the very good luck we had with the horse archers) is that we get our great general, whose emergence from this combat AT ALL was looking like a coinflip at best, earlier than i ever saw him in sims, with 7 defenders left to go



before too long we are facing 990% odds and it finally becomes clear which way this is going to go



back when i had the patience to name our units, impis had a "civ3 zulu cities" name. so this one is the very first impi we ever produced all game long, and gets to take out an enemy capital:



looking inside...



aksum is kinda ass compared to all these other GT cities that kept forge + granary or market + granary, keeping only a lighthouse (which to be fair is not bad as it does have a lighthouse lake to grow with). but we got it at size 3 which is a big deal. and.... our speculation about the city containing a settled great general WAS CORRECT which is a bigger deal and means we are smashing that "keep" button. so as soon as this city becomes functional, which in my mind means a build order of granary -> walls -> castle (not for culture this time but because it's a border city) -> ikhanda (-> maybe forge?), we can slam 2 more GGs in here for an instant guerilla 3 musket factory (even in theocracy since it is Blessed With Judaism as well)



survivors: 1 cat (bad), 3 maces (a little tragic), 11 longbows (quite good!), 10 horses (also quite good!), 6 impis, 3 axes, 2 chariots, and 3 archers. we had three extra real attackers to spare, plus an injured chariot - seems close, but i've seen closer! all told i think our luck relative to sim was about average, maybe slightly below average

so now what? aksum frees up the corn at gondar which we immediately start turbo-farming, as well as the wheat at lalibela, which i actually DELAY farming in favor of roading over to our stack of troops so they are not stuck here for any longer.

aaaand now i have to come back later for the rest of the turn because as you have probably guessed i am late as hell to that thing i was supposed to go to lmao

[ljubljana]

believe it or not, we are more than halfway done with our nauf NAP (ends t173)..... i think i will try to extend it so we can feel safe redirecting troops to the east (and so nauf doesn't Get Paranoid about where our freed-up stack might be going)

feeling a little less sure about the tech path sitch.... maybe philosophy first is better even though it's a 200 beaker waste of a prereq bonus, just because it maximizes the speed with which we can get nat + theology online (plus the outside chance we land taoism and decide to spread that instead, though frankly we are NEVER going to build a shrine for it so probably not the greatest idea....) i think i'll just save for now and wait for either you guys to guide me or my mood tomorrow to guide itself

going to start making a few more scouts now that we have finished w ethiopia btw.... i do not feel good about how out of date our intel is, especially with NObody scouting nauf's border.... i was going to use sentry chariots for this but that's wrong as we now have no way to manufacture more..... only 2 survived the GT war and i think we might need them



here's how we're going to muddy the tea leaves with ginger about our stack movement.... by sending some guys east by land, others by sea (to a port and then by land), some guys south to the america and sumeria borders (and then moving guys from THERE up to the ginger border), and staggering withdrawal times based on how injured the relevant units are, i hope we can achieve the effect of our stack melting away into the interior as far as ginger's perspective is concerned, such that they will need more than just this one scout to determine where we are repositioning too (just to make sure, they have no way to know if our galleys are loaded, and if so, with how many units, right?)

btw remember how almost all our horse archers can promote now? and remember how we just discovered the tech that unlocks pinch? in theory one VERY desperate thing we could do to increase our striking power is to upgrade some of these guys to knights.... that's very desperate and so probably a bad idea though



sigh.... aetryn, notice anything about this screen that fills you with loathing? and i don't mean the one lighthouse build although that might be a fair answer....

yeah, kinbozan, the extremely late city spot in the far SW desert that we swiped from GT around turn 100, has become the second coming of tobizaru, making 33 raw commerce BEFORE its castle is online, and.... with neither library nor market..... explosively-growing moai city wakamotoharu and kirishima cottage suburb takayasu are not far behind and also have neither library nor market... but surely if 50-hammer PRO castles are hard to justify, i shouldn't be making THOSE right on the threshold of war right?



courthouse is 120 hammers for 5.38 gold, vs the market's 100 hammers for 8.25 but only about 60% of the time when we're running cash... seems pretty similar, which means isn't the courthouse better for the EP (this city is about to give its farms to a new city to the north and so is actually topped out on size and will never need specialist slots)? and honestly i'm not sure either of those builds is better than the simple "musketman" given the current situation.... the castle might not be either except that this is actually techically a border city with greenline lol

also note the 3 gold domestic TR to kirishima.... apparently some, but not all, of our cities are getting this route, with a few cities still stuck on 2-3 +2 gold TRs when this +3 route should in theory be available.... anyone have any ideas on why that might be? i thought for domestic TRs one city can give a TR to every other city in the empire... also i'm belatedly realizing that i reeeeeally need to grow a couple more cities up into a similar size range so all these castle TRs will actually be worth the full 3 extra commerce...

edit: i suppose it is distance-based: all the cities further out that hoshoryu/atamifuji/daieisho have the 3 gold TR, but not the ones closer than that. so uh.... score one for growing a megacity RIGHT on the border with a rival, then conquering in the opposite direction? so i guess there will come a time in the growth of wakamotoharu and mitakeumi when they hit some size threshold and we get 10 extra gold out of nowhere from trade routes, and we should therefore be careful about drafting from these guys too heavily or, uh, stagnating them for a billion years on great people D:

[aetryn]

Congratulations on taking Aksum. Is GT eliminated now? (can't tell from PBSpy, maybe due to score being off). Or did he take something off Gavagai and is now someone else's problem? If so, may as well offer peace, though who knows if he takes it at this point.

Ginger cannot see whether galleys are loaded, though he will surely suspect some troops are leaving that way. But yes, impossible for him to keep track of where everything goes with just one scout. We probably do actually want to leave a few troops by the border with Greenline, as if we do end up with Ginger and Greenline vs. Dreylin and then we come in, Greenline might take his chances on unprotected border cities.

Culture victory is a ways off for MJMD at least, so let's get through the Ginger war before we worry too much about it.

At this point fixing the economy has to come after the Ginger war (at least, the first wave. If it stagnates we can re-evaluate). We can do what we can, but mostly we need cats and units right now. 

I'm pretty sure Nauf is going to be fine with us. He wants us to fight Ginger and do well, as if we don't, Ginger likely wins.

[Miguelito]

just to make sure, they have no way to know if our galleys are loaded, and if so, with how many units, right?

Oh there is a way, it involves sinking the galleys though  


Congratulations on your conquest, on to more !

[williams482]

Hell YES! Lets go!

A tense but well planned, well executed, and clearly decisive battle, won with a reasonable safety margin and yielding a substantial reward.

I really like the army dispersal plan; no idea if it will work, but it gives Ginger more opportunity to guess wrong about both if and where an attack could come, and barring that should at least give them a distraction to weigh against forming the most efficient possible invasion plans against GT.

I defer to Atryn on matters of diplomacy here, but extending the NAP seems worth doing just to reassure them that you are still going after Ginger. On that note: was the fish/fish deal you sent Ginger formally accepted and visible to rivals, or not? If yes, all the more reason to extend Nauf.

[ljubljana]

@aetryn indeed, GT is now eliminated. i never did figure out what happened with their attack-gavagai contingent.... although their milpower did drop substantially a random turn about halfway through the aksum siege with no obvious cause, so i'm guessing that was those guys getting cleaned up. agreed about everything else, and it's almost time to extend with greenline again.... we are back up to 4ish lbs in the border cities, where they still have only their own LBs and ancient age trash (admittedly 10-unit piles of LBs + ancient age trash...) so hopefully they take it....

@mig indeed.... but whether we will be on the giving or receiving end of our next conquest, i don't know if i can say for sure wait until yall see our milpower ratio with ginger when we log in this turn.....

@williams ginger did NOT accept the fish, thank goodness. i am starting to get kinda unsure about what's happening over there (why have they not moved in against babylon yet?) which makes me nervous as usual..... perhaps we are on the recieving end of a very nice bluff and they DO intend to attack us when the NAP ends. we are doing all we can to deter that of course (finishing up at aksum, continuing to pile the lbs/pikes at kirishima) but it's odd that they proposed fish/fish if they intended to waste the first half of that deal NOT attacking drey....

[ljubljana]

Turn 161 - Zululand

rarely am i this excited to log in just to move workers around.... but then again rarely do i have unimproved food resources 160 turns into a game. so our first actions this turn are to farm the shit out of the freed-up corn at gondar and road the shit out of the lalibela-aksum corridor so our huge pile of units can escape:



and oh yes, the time for lalibela's wheat is coming....



decided to level off kirishima's growth for the time being to power-grow wakamotoharu in the hopes of creating more of those sweet 3 gold trade routes in our western holdings.... but um. there is one obstacle to this plan that long-time readers may remember.....



23 turns of whip anger STILL on the books from moai statues  ok, maybe i went a LITTLE overboard with that.... luckily, and almost entirely unplannedly, hed rule is totally saving us here, but still i'd obviously rather have these two axes somewhere useful like kirishima



wh-huh? first in food?? is this for real? uh.... no it's not, superdeath decided to take our graphs away this turn... better fix that



ginger still has not started diverting EP into us..... but greenline is making me nervous, they might be going for city vis.... well, not full-on or they'd get there almost immediately (sumeria, man), but they might get there just PASSIVELY at this point. we would need a full turn of investment even to get their graphs back and honestly that doesn't seem worth it with full city vis on ginger looking near-term attainable



"plucky, tricky meisei" has been in pro sumo since he was 15, and clawed his way up to the top division over many many years and now is a perennial favorite to give yokozuna a scare or even upset them outright. hoping for the same general vibe here  and if the name seems generic compared to those of his flowery neighbors, that's because meisei is the rare wrestler who competes under his given last name instead of adopting a shikona. shodai (not featured in this PB) is another example whose name is similarly real-last-name-sounding

notice we have reached the point where we are barely losing GPT at all from settling..... the new city is making 8 gold from turn 1, 5 from trade routes, 2 from a serfdom farm, and 1 from the city center...



found, um.... ok, i don't know what this is. fairly well-defended gav city, one elephant covering 5 cats, and some random mjmd knights for some reason?? mjmd is not part of either war.... not really sure what's going on here

2 tiles south of that:



at the drey border:



yeah, i guess i see the idea.... i'd sure rather attack into this than the 7 CG3 longbows + 85% culture defense + castle at kirishima...

still haven't found the gingerstack but i did at least confirm it's not in any of the three border cities with us, which leaves juuust out of sight to the east of fillerion as the most likely location



been thinking about it and maybe trying for mercantilism by the end of the GA is a worthwhile diversion.... even for some of our larger cities that claim some of our scarce foreign TR options, like abi here, it is still a net-positive due to the kirishima trade route, and if we can get wakamotoharu up to a similar size it'll be more so.... and most of our cities are still subsisting on PRO domestic TRs only at the moment. there are a few spots where the free specialist would just be a citizen but it's not as many as you'd think because most of the GT conquests came with Real Buildings, a few border cities did libraries for culture, and a few interior fillers chopped out very early courthouses (and frankly i have nothing against some free castle-multiplied, nationhood-multiplied spies in such locations...). i count 12 cities that would be stuck with the citizen, most of which are recently-founded or captured... the exceptions could possibly be prioritized for some targeted infra builds during the GA, if the situation allows for it...

[ljubljana]

ohhhh boy. i just noticed someone has CHEMISTRY already.... and it can't be ginger as we've been tracking their research since before guilds..... could we have spotted mjmd's win condition? they have the second-best GNP by a fair margin.... oh man, maybe we SHOULDN'T be spreading judaism around as casually as i was planning to

i suppose it MIGHT be drey though which would be lovely of course. they have had gunpowder for a good bit longer than we have as evidenced by the handful of muskets they already have on the board. but naturally it doesn't seem too likely that they can bang out the super-expensive steel tech as well before ginger goes in

[ljubljana]

Turn 162 - Zululand

open the turn to the lovely peals of washington's theme music.... oh joy what is it now



ginger.... wants a loan? wh...huh? is this for upgrading cuirs or something? we can see their research and they're clearly not going for a key tech at the moment....

well, 50 gold profit is 50 gold profit, but it locks us out of attacking for the next 10 turns (well, it doesn't hard-lock us out but if we do attack our profit would go down the drain). and presumably they are asking because they expect to gain some kind of tactical military advantage out of it, which we probably don't want them to have at this point. i say no, for now, and we have a good excuse for doing so as we're about to go religion-chasing.... i just hope they don't take too much offense at that



ok, this i'm taking as indicative of a DoW from ginger.... i'm not so sure we can echo it though as t165, which is the dater we originally promised to intervene (also the turn our NAP expires) is now too early for us, our guys won't be in position and healed in time. there is not much point in attacking ginger, i think, unless we can actually threaten one or more of their cities lmao. under the interface, our losses at aksum are finally reflected in the milpower scores and we are down to HALF of what ginger has and 0.8 that of dreylin...



uh.... is this an acceptance of our NAP extension or not? we offered 25g and fish/fish, i am not sure what iron/iron means in this context.... something like, yes we won't attack you IF you make good on your word and go in against ginger? usually i know it means "we will aid you in a war" but obviously neither of us has any meaningful capacity of doing that.....

would love feedback on all facets of the diplo this turn...



for reference ginger's border garrisons are:

ankyra: 2 axes + 2 spears
meleti: 1 axe + 1 spear
aintab: 1 axe + 2 spears

ankyra looks like the best target for a number of reasons: it is easiest to defend geographically, has VERY cuttable roads to the rest of ginger's territory, takes pressure off of kirishima, and is the only city we can do a 2-turn attack on using both 2-movers and guerilla bows + muskets. but the problem is that we'd also have to get through 2 drafted janissaries and an unknown number of naturally-produced cuirs. i did some sims and we would need a LOT of guys to just ride on through that without cat help against the defenses



ginger ministack of 7 jans and a cat in fillerion, and the big one has appeared 1SW of zephyrion. no DoW yet so they are still waiting.... for WHAT i am not so sure. the end of our NAP maybe, so they can try to get an extension? but what exactly are they supposed to do if we DON'T give them one, reposition to go in against us and ask drey to stay out of it? hmm.... i guess that means if we're asking drey for a few more turns to prep, we'd better ask for t170, not t175, so they are less tempted to bail.....



re tech path, i think i've decided on swapping to theocracy drafting as quickly as possible, without the 800 beaker diversion to pick up the prereq bonus on philosophy.... we are already, um, Not Close to having it done and are in danger of not finishing by the first few turns of the GA (turn 3 would be my goal to allow a second civic swap on turn 8). 2 turns to turn all our savings into philosophy, then we have another 7, 3 of them GA boosted, to get theology, its obsolete prereqs, and the very expensive nationalism? seems possible but dicey, dicey enough that the 800 beaker upfront cost of drama and aesthetics could be a difference-maker

thinking about religions, i suppose one thing we could do if we land taoism is this..... get judaism in 4-5 cities now before philo comes in, spread taoism to cities that DON'T have judaism (at least at first), then briefly go to judaism at the start of the GA to draft from the jewish cities and THEN go to taoism for the rest...? maybe that's too contrived though lol

btw, it is my joy to report that a SECOND person has chemistry now.... as far as GNP speculation goes



pretty likely to be one of SD, dreylin, or mjmd. of these, SD is in a golden age and is the only one with an empty treasury so they're definitely the favorite



mjmd's knight pile here is pretty substantial now btw? not sure what's up with that, they're still at peace w both combatants



ginger moved their scout south btw, instead of trying to follow our disappearing stack...



ok well... i'm gonna sit around and worry about it for a bit but most likely i will send drey war with ginger on t170 - lmk if yall are ok with / in agreement about that. i figure it conveys that we are a little out of position from the aksum attack but are still broadly on board with joining them, without asking for SO much time that they might seek to defect and get ginger to NAP them. it does lock US out of accepting a second NAP with ginger if they offer it but even though that would get us to drafting it seems like it'd be pretty daft at this point lol. counterarguments might look look broadly like: the above military overview and our shiny new 0.5 power ratio, coupled with the knowledge that our units are of inferior quality as well, shows that we are in NO position to offer meaningful aid against ginger, and might not be in 8 turns either....

[ljubljana]

literally as i was posting that:



well that changes things

uh, will check back in once i figure out HOW i think it changes things....

i guess there is less of a rush to formally show our hand with a DoW before we're sure we can actually make an impact with our initial thrust, at least...

btw in a few turns (once the ginger NAP is up) i plan to offer SD for us to stop trading with gav if they stop shipping lux to ginger.... it is also about time for us to stop giving them ivory for wines, though i would LIKE to not do that until we have ours actually hooked up to allay suspicion (and also because i view it as arguably a NAP violation)