[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

well, turn's otherwise over and i wanna stop thinking about this....

i think to preserve the possibility of a surprise ankyra strike, and keeping in mind that i think the nauf stab lowers their threat level considerably, i'll send SD the less-ambitious proposal



mjmd counteroffer i'm just going to go with as written, hoping that nauf's DoW on SD frees up a reevaluation of the situation on their end



for greenline.... i'm just going to be straightforward about it, cancelling our standing cow deal and offering



oh and ginger's golden age is finally over, and they are out of nationhood for good unless they take an anarchy turn, so if the surprise factor fails i HOPE we can start to gain ground on them with natural and then drafted production...

[ljubljana]

turn 166 - zululand

very sleepy but gotta at least START moving before ginger to preserve turn order



mjmd is going to be no help at all  15 turns? man, you know i can't wait that long, dreylin will be nothing but a hollowed-out shell at that point... they also want cow for fish still in a standalone deal which i will give them

here's my response, i guess



in addition to echoing cow/cow. who knows, maybe they're willing to send their 10 knights to attack ginger, if not against greenline? i can dream right

superdeath accepted our weird proposal though. which means they now lack for silver since greenline was their source, and we still don't have gems. i'm gonna offer them our source - technically we only have one silver but there is a second at one of the GT cities that i haven't hooked up yet. i feel bad about trading with nauf's enemies but i think the need for as much happiness as possible happiness to draft with overrules that. if nauf is upset we can cancel in 10 turns if drey is willing to trade with us again (and um, still actually has surplus to give...)



nice..... i logged out for half a second and ginger logs in.... and now it's an illegal double-move to attack them at the start of next turn, right? just perfect. note also the city count, drey is DYING and shows no signs of offering meaningful resistance





drey decided not to whip their size 18 capital down, and now it belongs to the ottomans. just... game over man. i wrathfully send greenline the following demand, not that it's going to matter really



wish i could propose "concede to ginger" in the trade screen....

actually, well, i took another look and if we want most of our HAs involved we do need one more turn to position anyways. so we MUST move as soon as the turn rolls NEXT turn to avoid a repeat of this scenario



lol, look at our damn demos.... superdeath has started whipping down and ginger's out of GA so they are hilarious good! too bad we're talking about concession 



yeah greenline, nice idea to 2v1 dreylin.... really going to gain a lot of territory out of that 



we did find the reason they went for optics, which thankfully was not my feared astronomy beeline. you know, that makes a lot of sense  so most likely our ships are going to have to stay in our own territory to keep our seafood online, unless we're willing to tech that ourselves...

note for their next "real" research ginger has chosen banking.... another indication that they think the war's pretty over, with them out of golden age even and therefore presumably planning not to swap to mercantilism but to, like.... build an actual-ass bank??



nauf has a pretty nice stack invading sd, like it matters. guerilla 2 on those grens too, it looks like



our random-ass guys we pulled out of the well, scattered in ones and twos across the countryside to limit the number that they can scout at once.... maybe the fact that half of them are facing away from ginger's borders (had extra movement points, so might as well) will help them feel secure? 

what do you guys think? still worth uselessly spitting on ginger in most likely 2 turns even if there isn't any dreylin left to save? probably no other options right - if this is a good time for ginger to fight us, they'll just wheel around and hit us (or greenline) once they finish with drey, so probably it is at least as pessimal for their win-prob to go in now than it would be to wait. i guess conceding is another option, but even if i were ready to do that i'm pretty confident that at least superdeath, mjmd, and greenline (who would be helping us if they thought the situation were that dire, right??) are not, so we'd better come up with SOMEthing to do if we're going to be here for A While

man we shoulda impi rushed these nerds on turn 55 when we had the chance

[El Grillo]

man we shoulda impi rushed these nerds on turn 55 when we had the chance lol

Truly a Toku-of-Zulu sentiment.

[ljubljana]

i mean, was that our win condition? seems clear that we needed to confront ginger sooner than now.... i kinda still think williams' assessment at the time that it wouldn't have worked (i mean, we could have killed ankyra but would have stalled vs whipped archers in the capital) is probably correct. but if not that, our game-throwing strategic mistake has to have been attacking GT with nauf instead of ginger with dreylin.... but of course we were in no position to fight ginger at that point, we only got anything from the GT war because a) all of GT's army was off attacking nauf and b) we benefitted from some seriously weird and unlikely shit happening in that conflict, like GT sending a big stack off to attack gavagai, and never building any cats after the very start of the war.... if we had attacked ginger i think they would have teched knights in about 30 seconds and stabilized easily - we might have slowed them but we'd be 5 cities behind our current position. so if there's something strategic to regret here (as opposed to micro things to regret, which i know i made quite a few of) i think the most likely candidate is indeed that we didn't try the rush. that's a little sad as we don't need more reasons for that kind of thing to be incentivized in civ

[ljubljana]

we may be spectacularly behind on spreading judaism around.... but our rabbi-spamming city, selected as such because it build a monastery for the culture loooong ago, is accidentally also our best hammer city 



(not working the cottage because i'm in the process of farming over it)

i discovered that we do, in fact, just barely have 4 draftable cities that share a non-jewish religion.... daieisho, kirishima, wakamotoharu, and hokutofuji are all buddhist. so the plan is to swap to buddhism on the turn we launch the GA, then to theocracy/nationhood 3 turns in, draft twice from those 4 cities while hiding almost-finished units in the queue everywhere else and preferentially spreading judaism to cities that are NOT those 4, then swap to judaism for good on turn 5 of the GA, and perhaps mercantilism on turn 8 if we decide it's worth going for before miltrad. it's janky as fuck but i thiiiink we can manage the two core objectives of "draft at max rate asap" and "do not miss out on any promotions"

[ljubljana]

ok, actual question for (gen)lurkers: what is the best process for keeping a turn order if ginger keeps logging in AS we are playing? we were going before them for a bit prior to that which i tried to maintain, but this turn we moved at the same time..... if i log in as the turn rolls next turn, and then ginger logs in halfway through my turn, is it then an illegal double-move for me to go first again and DoW on the following turn? is there any way to avoid that besides me breaking the turn order myself by moving AFTER them? i guess i could ask for a peacetime split but it seems pretty likely that doing so would give the attack away

[Commodore]

ok, actual question for (gen)lurkers: what is the best process for keeping a turn order if ginger keeps logging in AS we are playing? we were going before them for a bit prior to that which i tried to maintain, but this turn we moved at the same time..... if i log in as the turn rolls next turn, and then ginger logs in halfway through my turn, is it then an illegal double-move for me to go first again and DoW on the following turn? is there any way to avoid that besides me breaking the turn order myself by moving AFTER them? i guess i could ask for a peacetime split but it seems pretty likely that doing so would give the attack away

You can always let him double-move you. If there's already a turnsplit, making the turnsplit 3-way is very unpleasant.

[ljubljana]

yeah, you're right.... this attack is SUPER touch and go though, the stack we'd be attacking with is literally 10 longbows, 10 HAs, 8 impis, and a knight.... all ginger has to do to save their border city is notice something's up and move like, 3 janissaries in there. frankly, if we let them double-move us at this point, there's a good chance of that being the reason it fails. do you think the "don't be a dick" imperative to not create a 3-way split is sufficiently strong that we should follow it even if it costs us the success of an entire military operation?

strategic decision for us, btw - do we slave into this attack in addition to drafting into it? swapping into slavery for 5 turns would be catastrophic to both our economy and MFG, even during a golden age (or maybe especially during one?). but we could get an extra knight or cat out of pretty much every city... if we are otherwise talking about concession, maybe we should just accept that we're not getting cuirs in time to change the outcome of this war or mercantilism in time to swap to it during the GA, and knights and muskets en masse will have to be good enough

edit: any chance we could get to miltrad by the END of the GA, such that we'd be slaving out our own round of cuirs? it would look like this: time the GA such that we get nationalism exactly 2 turns after we launch it (we may need to either delay for this or investigate running a few wealth builds as right now we're not quite there i think...). swap to slavery/nationhood/theocracy ON that turn and start drafting. then can we get to military tradition in 5 turns of GA-boosted, but slavery-nerfed, research? i am not so sure as we can't research it in 5 turns NOW and i'm guessing our GNP in GA-but-no-serfdom will be comparable to what it is now in serfdom-but-no-GA.....but maybe if we build wealth....? if so we could let knight builds upgrade in-queue and then whip a cuir in every damn city on the last turn of the GA (even the ones that are too small for drafting if we play it right), then swap back to serfdom...

i have heard it said (somewhere, not sure where) that "the winners of PBs are often those most willing to knock over their sandcastles".... by not slaving into their attack, and arguably also by ending their GA in vassalage instead of nationhood, there are ways in which they might have knocked theirs over more comprehensively than they did. perhaps exploiting THAT is how we can still have a chance to win here, or at least to make them lose...?

[ljubljana]

167 pre-turn

well, no time for dawdling, or blogging - gotta see that "finished turn" from us as quickly as possible after the turn rolls, to preserve at least the theoretical possibility of attacking at the start of next turn, assuming no additional defenses appear in ankyra. i might not actually DO that if people think it's too shitty but i'm confident it's the right move to slow down ginger... well, or possibly a variant that sees us send smaller stacks of obsolete units at BOTH ankyra and meleti, but i don't think so as something like 14 units might seriously just fail to kill 8 in ankyra if they shift defenders and finish a janissary or cuir there

anyways the point, as i envision it, is to get some kind of value out of our huge pile of obsolete units, especially the longbows - really the axes and such they have on defense at the border are the only things ginger has that they can still efficiently beat. specifically ankyra, unlike all our actual border cities and unlike meleti, is on a hill, so if we can hold it long enough to whip walls and a castle there (it will come out of resistance around the same time we might swap to slavery) it is the ideal place for our longbows to defend. in other words, if the plan is to get value out of guerilla-promotable bows by taking something from ginger and then using the defensive strength of the bows to try and hold it or at least extract casualties on the recapture, it pretty much has to be a hilltop city as otherwise guerilla bows can't fulfill both functions at once

so the intention for THIS turn is the following

step 1: locate ginger's border scouts
step 2: move horses and impis, in small groups of 2-3, to spots that are both far away from the scouts and at most 6 tiles from the ginger border via engineering roads. impis preferentially go in cities to appear as though they might be military police
step 3: move 2 workers on the hill SE of wakamotoharu and start windmilling over the mine. the windmill is high on our priority list anyways so hopefully it looks reasonable if they scout it. but the real purpose is to combat-road east of kirishima next turn of course
step 4: do everything else as quickly as possible and hit end turn

[aetryn]

Re: Hindsight Analysis

The problem with regrets about attacking GT was that when we were contemplating fighting with GT we were in no position to attack Ginger, since Ginger has just bursted way ahead. There was some merit to taking what we could from GT to make ourselves stronger before turning on Ginger. The issue was we got tied down too long with GT, and haven't been able to convert that territory into net positive science/econ/units to account for what we lost. I think it's a combination of appreciation for what Ginger has done with his lead and maybe tightening up tactical planning (and in retrospect, getting all those turns back from sieging GT's capital by letting Nauf have it would have been huge for repositioning and not losing as many troops).  But it's really hard to know what would have happened if we made other major choices.

Re: 3-way splits

Right now there seems to be 2 schools of thought on how to handle a 3 (or more) way split.

Philosophy 1: Stay in the same "half" of the turn as your allies, so that each side has half the turn to play. Then you sequence your turn with your ally relatively loosely, only holding to strict order when it matters. The problem with this is that "when it matters" is highly subjective and not even clear even to the most conscientious player, since you lack information. In PB74, there's currently a lot of bad feeling over two allies NOT playing in the same turn order.

Philosophy 2: Define a specific turn order among all the people in the war, allies, or not, and stick to it. This guarantees no shenanigans but will tend to slow overall pace down. But if you're going to do this, I see very little point in trying to preserve the two "allies" on one half of the turn timer. It'd be better to sequence based on time-zone - if a US, a Europe, and an Asia player are all involved a war, it should probably go Europe-US-Asia regardless of how the 1 in the 2 on 1 is, so you have some chance of completing a turn in a day.

I'd probably go with Philosophy 2 and try to optimize slot based on when your "natural turn" is compared with Ginger and Dreylin's natural turn. I would probably try to do that even if it meant a disadvantage in campaigning. Part of the reason for this is that slow turn pace lowers morale, and low morale leads to eagerness for the game to be done and a willingness to concede. If you want the game to continue, you want Nauf and Greenline and MJMD, even if they are not currently helping you, still interested and engaged in the game, and killing the turn pace will hurt that.

That being said, good luck. Not sure what's up with Dreylin but if he's not going to do any of the lifting, not sure what is likely to come out of it.