[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[williams482]

This strict no-diplo living room LAN party idea sounds fabulous.

As for why Dreylin didn't accept the city...  ???

If legal (which I believe it is) then taking the city back is clearly to the coalition's benefit because it restores borders and at least some defenses, and to Dreylin's benefit because they get a city and make things more difficult for Ginger. The exception would be if Dreylin thinks the easier to capture, low-value city dangling there would be a beneficial distraction, possibly forcing Ginger to chose between reclaiming it and throwing maximum force at a more valuable prize? I guess that's possible.

If you still have the city next turn, definitely offer it again. Too bad there's no "liberate city" button on the city capture screen like in the later games.

[Magic Science]

No, it would be legal as long as you didn’t use words and only communicated by handing specific items and numbers of gold pieces back and forth.

[ljubljana]

Turn 174 - Zululand

so, managing expectations for this one: due to the lungfish fiasco there is a strong chance that we open the turn to many inefficiently-taken casualties.... luckily i did not see any one-movers in range, but if there are cuirs, probably even injured ones, each one will take out one of our lil units very very easily... would have been nice to pillage the roads leading to the city but, in a major pre-war logistical mistake, we have no 2-movers at ura with which to safely do so..... i'm working on fixing that but it will still be a minute before we can recapture drey cities and expect to actually HOLD them. still i do feel this is an area (maybe even THE area) in which we should try to be pushing, due to the unexpanded cultural borders and long supply lines through which ginger would have to send reinforcements



ginger would like all of my cities for peace  ok, we've hit that stage in the war, fine - i'll play along by asking for all their bab conquests. hopefully that conveys that the reason for our obstinancy is strategic rather than a) personal or b) arbitrary

but look at that.... we still have 29 cities? really! i do see some ominous green dots on the minimap though so maybe they just cut our escape routes but still, better than i expected

those green dots are



blue dots from the lake.... and indeed i see no ginger units around at all, and nobody died this turn either.... really? i mean, ok, if you say so.... that certainly makes me feel tempted to try to hold onto this for 3 turns somehow, at which point we can build culture and pop the borders ourselves while adding 20% defenses..... oh wait..... make that 45% defenses  but the dreylin city to the east just fell this turn so we can probably only successfully do so through heroic amounts of pillaging, which, as i've mentioned, we do not have the forces in place to do this turn without getting all our guys killed...



hey, does anyone know if there is a way to tell if an opponent has city vis against YOU, other than by guessing? i do not think we are ever going to hit the threshold we'd need to get it against ginger again (unless i ALSO run the EP slider for a turn.....) and greenline's EP lead makes me a bit nervous...

in aksum, we've started a..... started a..... hang on, lemme go throw up for a second....



yeah, we finished the ikhanda with one turn to spare before the tech comes in for the heroic epic, and with just 2 great military instructors available, it looks like the best thing for us to crank endlessly from here is 3-promotion cuirassiers. we can hit 10 XP on mounteds in theocracy + nationhood for such a thing, but not on 1-movers, and the difference-maker is.... this thing. 60 hammers into the building that i hate irrationally above all others (mostly for not getting the construction bonus from being AGG). this is the only one though! that much i promise you  though you will have to decide for yourselves how much you feel such a promise is worth

check out the glorious +11 food surplus, by the way.... aah, this city is my favorite mistake



in the north, jans have appeared tied-downedly at ginger's cities.... but this MIGHT be the turn to try to take the southern forest. it definitely IS the turn to use the impi i added in the northern forest to complete its secret mission, to pillage prussa's corn  one of my biggest fears at this point is that they pull out another golden age and prussa is a monstrous GPP city (it just produced a prophet) so if we can't burn it, slowing that roll could be pretty significant...

anyways, forest has a pinch cuir and two axes on it, so we would lead with two of our *cough* sorry misspoke *cough* our two non-GG knights, finish with judiciously-chosen HAs, and probably take the tile at a non-horrible hammer exchange rate? we would leave our attackers nominally exposed but 3 tiles north of their road network (giving thanks to the brave impis who gave their lives NW of attaleia to make that true) so ginger would have to both combat-road over and commit cuirs to take them out, probably not a great trade for them. hmm hmmmmm that's worth serious consideration imo

here, though, is some strategic terrain we can get for free (or almost for free):



have funnnn  they can dislodge us by throwing enough units up here but i'm trying to get a sense of how conservative an attacker ginger is in circumstances like this. a pinch, combat 2 cuir has about even odds to survive but i don't know how many of those they have, or if they are willing to risk them attacking cheaper targets like this one, and into a position where we might have impis in range to revenge-kill them if they try it. if we can establish units up here, then the road west of meleti starts to look like a pillaging target which would be a significant gain. we are also getting useful intel out of this as well from the janissary parade, as opposed to a cuir parade  (and since they are out of nationhood those look hand-built)

ok, with nothing better to do (and being really tired of brooding) let's go for it at this southern attaleia forest. unlike the northern one, it is in range of the city itself, so if we take it i think it forces them to respect the possibility that we could walk a bunch of 2-movers from ankyra up there and threaten their core, if they try any offensives into zululand. and the hammer exchange looks non-terrible also. also also we can get the last kill with the second move of our sentry chariot (!) which is just too cute lol

combat 2 knight vs c1 + gpinch cuir (32%): dies but the cuir is critically injured, down to 2.9 health
shock knight vs axe (96%): wins, thank goodness
combat 2 + shock horse vs axe (76%): wins
sentry chariot vs cuir (90%): you have captured a, um.... a forest....



woodsman 2 pike moves up there and gleefully obliterates their dumbass lumbermill  so we lost a knight and the doomed impi on their corn to kill a cuir, two axes, a lumbermill, a corn farm, and gain a nice strategic tile from which to, hopefully, freak these guys out. best-case they take inefficient trades attacking us, and i'm thinking of showing our galleys via a fort 1NW of ankyra so they can believe they are full of 2-movers, and so must keep enough guys around to respect the threat of us moving 8 invisible knights onto defensive terrain right next to attaleia. translation: PLEASE keep building those janissaries. anything but cuirs and combat workers is fine with me



at lungfish, there are really two choices for the immediate future: one, sacrifice ALL our longbows in the area to cut the roads leading into the city, or two, sit inside and wait for ginger's cuirassier swarm to come kill us. well, in the knowledge that they DO have workers in this area (what better to kill drey with....) i am not sure cutting the roads is really going to do anything permanent, to be honest.... i think we fortify the longbows in the city, forcing ginger to choose between coming in force to kill us and wiping out the last four drey cities. if they choose the former, drey lives a bit longer, and if the latter, maybe the city holds out 3 more turns to get its defenses up, at which point i will invest real units into trying to hold it (if draftees can be considered Real Units....) could move a few units SE from ura as some kind of either reinforcements-to-be or future recapture threat, but i don't think so as i have other, stupider things in mind for those guys...

last thought: i'm getting really tempted to pillage our own iron (or ship it to a foreign power) to re-enable impis and chariots as builds.... i can't tell you how much use we have been getting out of cheap 2-move pillagers and the nonzero threat that impis still pose to a cuir mob. not sure i'll actually go for it (we have a LOT of knight builds that i don't want to delay either) but man, every unit is precious in this game (says me, the waster of impis).... and i really wish the game would let us queue up older units without going through that kind of (possibly exploitative) trouble...

[ljubljana]

If you still have the city next turn, definitely offer it again. Too bad there's no "liberate city" button on the city capture screen like in the later games.

i do still have it, and i wasn't thinking about this, but dreylin still hasn't moved yet and you're right that i have nothing to lose by offering (it's in just as much danger now as it was last turn). i will resend the offer

and actually



there IS a liberate mechanic in diplo, although i don't think it would appear to dreylin as such

[ljubljana]

oh one more last thing to mention....



not only has superdeath decisively held against nauf (seemingly), they are WINNING their 3v1 (with mjmd on a 10-turn break after taking a city for peace)... so almost certainly no help for us from the west.

in doing so SD has whipped themselves very far down again though and shows no signs of making gains, either



i continue to wonder.... if the war with ginger were to end soon, before we whip away this gigantic food lead, with us in possession of ankyra and maybe 2 or 3 dreylin border cities (say, a 30-26 lead vs ginger in post-war city count) would that really be an end-of-game situation for us? with us probably roughly matching their pace to next-gen military tech while the drey cities regrow and work on basic infra stuff? i guess it likely still would be but i'm far from certain, and we might need to think about it if it looks like we won't be able to collapse ginger with a massive slavery-fueled thrust into their core...

[williams482]

It doesn't look like Ginger is interested in that hypothetical peace deal anyway.

If you definitely can't make progress against Ginger and Dreylin somehow manages to secure peace themselves with a reasonable chunk of their empire intact, then it's a reasonable thing to consider. However I highly doubt that leaving ginger to conquer and rebuild Dreylin's territory in peace is going to be a winning move for you, and it puts a potential target on your back for 1) having a strong position in the demographics, and 2) an apparent willingness to just kinda let your powerful neighbor get bigger.

Remember that you're describing a scenario where you are unable to break through against an opponent in a two font war with (by the time this would come up) tech parity, no slavery, and a severely whipped down core. Sure you're behind in power now, but a round of whips plus the constant drafting will change that, and you only have one front to really worry about. You should have a meaningful advantage in this fight, and I wouldn't bet on that being preserved if Ginger can take a breather.

[williams482]

As for the "liberate" button, that's basically just flavor text for cities the game thinks "should" belong to their empire instead of yours. I believe mechanically it's the same as any other city.

[ljubljana]

what's this about "a" round of whips

if we're swapping to slavery at the end of the GA, that means we can STAY in slavery until economic recovery becomes more urgent than military buildup. we are AGG, so we can probably whip down REALLY far without striking (witness GT supporting 30 units in just their capital). the way i see it, our options are: 1) keep every city that can draft at size 7 and whip everything else down all the way or 2) take a break from drafting (the next 10 turns should be plenty to start draft clocks in all the relevant cities) and whip EVERYTHING down all the way

but yeah, i am basically in agreement about your geopolitical assessment. we are not going to get a better chance to hurt them for a long time, if ever - hitting rifles and cavs may not collapse us (i don't really think it will) but it will definitely preserve their core from cuir-powered attacks.... and at any point they could bite the bullet and swap to nationhood and slavery at the anarchy turn if they really feel that they are in danger of dying. it's starting to feel like "trapped long-term in a mutually destructive death struggle" is a more likely outcome than conquest, but i guess the conquest odds are still better than our odds of winning if we peace out...

[williams482]

Drafting is a better hammer exchange rate than whipping (in addition to continuing to work actual tiles) so keeping cities large enough to draft 6->5 is worth it. Whipping down to perpetual 4->2 cycles is probably the best thing to do with the lesser sites that can't grow that large or don't have five good tiles to work. Keeping cities at draftable sizes also leaves you a reserve of population that can be whipped down in truly dire circumstances.

And, yeah. I'm theorizing that one big round of whips plus the continuous drafting will get us pretty close to Ginger's current power rating. Maybe that's generous, but regardless we won't be stopping at one round.

[ljubljana]

oh is it still 6-5 for drafting? somehow i thought CtH raised the size minimum but i don't see that in the changelog - good catch! in that case VERY few cities of ours can't draft eventually before, and during, the burn-it-all-down period.

that said. while drafting is a better pop to hammer conversion rate.... whipping is a better HAPPY CAP to hammer conversion rate, and we are not far from that being the limiting factor.... most of our mid-sized cities can sustain two, MAYbe three rounds of drafting before any more will create unhappy citizens, and those are only good for cuir 3-whips really large cities like kirishima and wakamotoharu can only draft once before they'd hit unhappiness problems, at least until we lower their pop through other means.... not to mention there is the time factor, which we do not have much of....

i want to keep enough cities around size 6 that we don't have to actually pause drafting until after the decisive action of this campaign has taken place.... probably cities close to the front, such that we remove cities from draft eligibility in a wave going from west to east so no draftees get left behind. i think i'm about 2 turns away from feeling secure enough about our frontline cities to start preferentially drafting in the extreme west, in service of that aim... other than that though, i think the necessity to slave as much as possible is pretty grim and absolute.... once we start slaving, i think the gamestate becomes pretty simplified: either we break ginger immediately, with the first monstrous wave of 50+ cuirassiers, or we lose. what could be more dire a circumstance than that

i do think this whole discussion has revealed the solution to the "swapping out of serfdom will ruin most of our tiles" problem. the solution: burn through so much pop that we're not working those tiles anymore then if we do swap back to serfdom with anarchy we can do so when we are at ROCK bottom and have little to no GNP to lose (but all the ginger cities can tick down resistance and all ours can tick down on draft + slavery anger). if we REALLY do this right, we can use the anarchy turn to keep our units from striking

edit: in a perverse sense, it might be a good thing at this point that all our strong cities are RIGHT next to ginger..... kirishima and wakamotoharu can actually contribute third and fourth whipped cuirs to The Battle while western cities are probably too far away for more than 2 to reach the front in time...