[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

hi!

so from your stated timezone and pointer-dereferencing username, i'm getting the strong sense that we may be geographically co-located (SF bay area for me). if so, would you be interested in playing turns in this war while glaring at each other from across my living room? sticking strictly to ai-diplo, of course (which the lurkers suggest means we should communicate only by passing each other variously-sized piles of coins)

Hahaha, I did grow up in the bay but live in Oregon now. I'd have been down to play turns in person except its not a duel, there's other players in the game lol

awwww

edit because i can't help myself: ginger logs in for 12 minutes, asks for a 12-hour extension (?!), and now civac is checking out the position too? seems like something's up.... this seems VERY out of proportion to the moves we made in the actual war last round, which were pretty minor and tactical in nature.... do i dare to dream that perpetually-inert (but theoretically knight-possessing) greenline has finally made their move? surely the strategically correct thing for them to be doing now is to vulture loosely-held dreylin cities away from ginger while they are apparently hands-full defending their core, right...?

[ljubljana]

Turn 175 - Zululand

well, let us find out



apostolic palace, huh? what is left in CtH that this can even do? i see that assign city, force peace, and religious victory have been removed which prevents my greatest fear, that our civ will be ruined by unhappiness by having to repeatedly defy attempts to AP-res ginger's cities back....

in the south



ginger has not retaken lungfish but has sent over a scouting jan to check out our defenses, in what i must imagine to be preparation for so doing. and.... ginger has EVACUATED flounder  well, why on EARTH would they do that? what could they POSSibly be worried about....

in the north



not much action other than some significant-looking redeploys to cover the exposed bits of geography that we have not yet managed to take. the hill at aintab is the most significant and has 2 jans and a pike on it, in response to our threat to combat-road over and take that hill with our longbow pair + musket. so that's fair enough, but we still CAN take the hill to the SW of those guys, the removal of whose road will add a turn to the amount of time it would take to attack mitakeumi and takanosho from that hole. so probably worth doing, especially with the river giving defensive cover to the pillagers

in the NORTH north


we're up to two jans on the hill at prussa. which is a good decision as i indeed WAS thinking about trying to take it this turn  our sacrificial corn-killing impi died but i noticed something else.... check out the farm 1N of the dead corn, which is ONLY providing a gold! that's right, all their irrigation to this area comes from that ONE farm W-NW of attaleia... which is a farm that we could pillage, to strip another 4 food from ginger's frontline cities here  uncertain if that's correct, per se (we are getting real low on impis) but worth consideration, yes?

oh and in the event log, superdeath made peace w gavagai! so in a 1v1 vs nauf they are not exceedingly unlikely to collapse and nauf may even be hands-full. i mean, just LOOK at their (nauf's) power rating 

so... to walk into the empty city, or to not walk into the empty city? i choose..... the answer will SHOCK you.....



still has a courthouse and granary after multiple captures, wow! unlike lungfish, THIS city i will make a full effort to keep. on our side of the mountain range, and just 3 tiles from ura, it is almost impossible for ginger to defend, and opens up the whole hilly border region between former babylon and the ottoman heartlands to guerilla pillaging  not to mention salmon is just 3 tiles away from flounder and could probably be targeted as well



see the janissary under the "combat road" sign? that's actually 5 units, 3 injured jans and two axes... and, unless ginger has their own combat workers already in place here, i think they have evacuated too late as next turn we can probably combat-road over ourselves and kill them, depending on how many of our ura defenders we shift up here (hence the sign)

thirty, three-zero  first civ to 30 cities wins the game, right? ....right?



apparently because of the way math works with the +100% from spears vs mounteds (subtracting 6 strength from them, instead of adding 4 to us), a sufficiently buff impi is actually semi-competitive with a cuir?? ok, NO more throwing these guys away, at least not the formation ones.... and actually, we can straight-up manufacture formation impis now in much of our core, or COULD if we were to cut our own iron supply.... food for thought at the dawning of the cuir wave, i suppose.... anyways with that in mind, i'm choosing to cut ginger's and *checks notes* our irrigation up here via the wounded horse that beat an axe on the forest last turn instead of an impi... that also means that any cuir that comes out to kill the horse would have to end its turn in pike and, indeed, impi range which is fine with me



the desolation of the land.... isn't it beautiful? :')

despite my earlier delusional optimism, greenline is, of course, still refusing to See The Light of what i consider to be their clear strategic interest. this is the world's last, best chance to stop ginger, you have loads of lightly-defended dreylin conquests you could take, and still you refuse to do anything? their tech deficit vs ginger is, well, yeah, frankly pretty serious but come ON man, those cities have wounded janissaries in them and you can at least make knights..... WE got kills with maces and longbows, you could too if you really went for it....

sigh. ok, i don't like it, and i know yall told me not to do this repeatedly, but.... perhaps i'd better stop making demands and start making offers:



it's not as good as if dreylin got the city back, but sumerian ownership would put one ring of culture there, which is more than zero, and they are CRE so the borders wouldn't take THAT long to expand, if one or both of us can find a way to defend it. i can't guarantee that ginger won't almost immediately take the city back with cuirs, of course, but if greenline is willing to switch sides, i hereby vow that after all subsequent recaptures of the (almost indefensible for either us or ginger) lungfish, i will gift it back to them. perhaps greenline would be a phony ally (as, so far as i can tell, they have been to ginger) but i'll trust them just enough to let them prove it to us, this once. i DEFINITELY am willing to give up a size 2 city in exchange for greenline not knifing us in the side if we start to make gains vs ginger, if that's how this plays out....



sigh. i murdered the hill at aintab, but i don't know if this is enough defenders.... the musket and double g2 longbow on the hill i feel ok about, i don't think ginger would attack across the river, or that it would really be an efficient trade for them to do so. but these two, guarding our pair of combat workers, are a bit more vulnerable. i would like it to require either multiple cuirs in the fog or combat workers for them to break through here, and this does accomplish that, but if either of those things does exist in range then they could get us here. blah. all i can really think of to hedge against that is to shift some 2-movers over so we can (probably, maybe) counterattack if they try it.... but then that cuts down on our zone defense at the attaleia forests  bluh. what an annoying game  eventually i gave the knight c1 and pinch and moved it up as well - not perfect, but i'm now confident that these three units can defend against the two jans + pike unless our luck is really abysmal, so they'd probably need both combat workers AND cuirs in range to get our workers

lots of other defensive problems and troop deployments i could comment on but everyone has been waiting long enough for the turn to roll lol

grr. actually we are not done here yet..... i moved my g2 longbow out of lungfish to scout, on a lark, and what do i find but



the bigass cuir stack itself. or... ok, actually that's a really SMALL-ass cuir stack. enough to kill the city, sure, but... enough that we can't set a little trap for them? maybe not now (oh no, absolutely not now) but on a future turn...?

for now though, there's very little we can do.... i retreated all but the scouting longbow (who is too exposed to get out) to the hill NW of the city, where a g1 musket i just drafted out of ura can do its best to guard against cuir snipes. if they leave the road out of the city unpillaged we can think think about counterattacking but i rate that as somewhere between "not going to happen" and "NOT going to happen"...

ok enough of this. i don't wanna deal w this turn anymore

sigh, so much for this "gift the city to greenline so they'll DO something" plan.... i guess we're fine if ginger goes first and takes it, but if greenline goes first, accepts, and then the city is immediately recaptured, they will probably think we acted in bad faith. and it will take a while for us to recapture to be able to regift it to them, it looks like.... so i think this idea was another in the continuing series of my diplo blunders... hopefully that exact series of events won't happen, but if it DOES, we will need to think of some seriously apologetic thing to do to avoid having created a blood enemy here... like, some "gift them nishikigi instead with an identical copper + cow rider" level of apologetic thing... idk, what do you guys think? other than "that was a bigass dumb mistake you nincompoop"

edit: well, ginger logged in first so that's probably non-operative, thank goodness

[ljubljana]

technical question: if i set my research to 0%, then make a loan request of something like 40 gpt for 300 gold, then set research back to 100%, will the person i requested the loan from still see 40 gpt on my side, or will it look like i just asked for 300 gold straight-up since i "no longer have gpt to offer"?

edit: technical question 2 (and in this case i would welcome being told that the answer is that i'm a nincompoop): why is it that, in the actual turn, when i hovered over an impi attacking a cuir, the cuir lost 125% to its strength and so the fight appeared competitive




but when i sim out the CUIR attacking the IMPI, the IMPI GAINS 125% instead and gets annihilated



PLEASE tell me this is not the way it actually works in game....

edit: tested it out in WB with n=100 and the results were distressingly close to the displayed, asymmetrical odds

cuir attacks: 96/100 cuir wins
impi attacks: 29/100 impi wins

[ljubljana]

anyways, it's a new turn so i logged in and sent mjmd and naufragar monster loan requests, 60 gpt for 500 g each, and set research to max on miltrad which is where it will be at the end of the turn. and then i logged off, i need a break lmk if this is not going to work mechanically in terms of them actually seeing the gpt on our side while we are at 100% research, and therefore mess up everything as a result

[xist10]

1) GpT trades remain, if if you change the research rate.
2) Yes, the cIV Combat system is a bit difficult to understand.
Generally speaking, all combat boni are applied to the defender - with the exception of the Combatpromotionline.
This allows so funny things, like a (combat2) elefant attacking a (combat2) knight is expected to win the fight, but if the knight attacks, the knight is expected to win.

[ljubljana]

thank you!!!

lol, that is so deranged. i thought the whole point of moving away from individual attack and defense values (in civ3) to "strength" was to SIMPLIFY combat

anyways got a hungry and walk-requiring dog lookin at me but then i'll play. maybe. at least i'm not last this time (although i bet i WILL be by the time i actually finish....)

[El Grillo]

Dog tax?

[ljubljana]

176

ginger took lungfish, of course. our longbow defender came kinda close to killing a cuir (closer than i expected really) but not close enough. other than that, still no movement of any kind, really....



mjmd accepts our NAP extension and WOAH, look at that! BOTH mjmd and nauf took our loan requests, i was expecting neither! so we WILL REACH military tradition in 3 turns' time without compromising our troop production in the meantime! well.... kind of. we are still 100 gold away roughly but if we have to run wealth in, like, two cities it's not the end of the world. or (and this is more likely) we hope that our post-slavery economy is still strong enough to finish that last bit of the tech at less than 100% (it probably is, but that limits the number of tiles we can whip off of that aren't specifically non-river plains farms). yeah, the plan is to whip off a ton of tiles on the turn BEFORE we get miltrad, into knights that will then come out queue-upgraded cuirassiers.... i sure hope that works (my sims say it does)

good thing too, because.... you can see that ginger is 2t from printing press, but what that doesn't show is their 938 gold stockpile.... they only took 5 turns to research it even though that gold pile has barely been declining and their GNP is still recovering.... where is the difference coming from, pillaging? capture gold? surely not wealth builds? hopefully whatever the answer is it's not sustainable, otherwise they will have rifling in probably just another 15 turns or so, if that  would that be enough time for us to slam a 50-unit cuir stack into their core, yes.... enough time to conquer them, probably not!



ankyra is about to come out of resistance and we're moving last... so it looks like we Have Held it, at least long enough for it to pick up the defensive bonus we need for our longbow pile to get odds on cuirs. say it with me: "fear the chicken pizza!"

next task is to build.... culture, with our newly-discovered music tech, to pop borders for 20% more defense (only unit ginger has that castles help against is catapults and i don't see any of those up north). and to try our hand at reclaiming this dumbass peak tile, so we can hide, say, 50 cuirs 1N of the city center. we really have to keep close watch on this culture number to see if that's remotely possible though. from my understanding we should be putting 27 culture/turn on the tile (7 base + 3rd ring bonus) from kirishima while meleti should only be adding its base culture/turn... the fact that we're only up to 15% this long after capture is not a great sign.... at this point we could add a culture build at kirishima to speed things up but i'll only do that if it seems like it will make the difference, otherwise we have 15 pop that needs pretty urgently to be whipped into cuirs



SOMEone got greenline to cancel deals with us.... can we tell who? actually no.... we can tell from the "you have negotiated a trade embargo" malus who the other party was when we are the third party, but NOT when we are the victim, because we don't get to see how WE feel about everyone ELSE  i guess since i'm tokugawa here, i'm just supposed to know what my own diplo pluses and maluses are.... in which case of course i've been set on "furious" for towards greenline for a while now  WAY moreso than ginger who's been playing a great game and who i really like and respect despite our ongoing death struggle. but somehow i always end up growing rather fond of the players i death-spiral with/at the hands of

anyways of course that's a dead giveaway for a potential invasion, lovely. if greenline really DOES pile on and throw a whipped knight stack into muskets-behind-castles at ura, well.... congratulations sir, you have thrown  maybe more likely that it's just ginger trying to make sure we don't do an end-run around lungfish using sumerian roads, but still, we'd better up our (exceedingly thin) border garrisons just in case

as far as offensive military action goes, i think the only place we can think about that this turn is in the south. move our least-valuable longbow (mr drill 3....) forward to scout the lungfish garrison and



so one thing to note is that is actually not-too-inefficiently beatable, if we could throw everything we have in theater at it. but the road getting pillaged means we'd be subjected to cat collateral unless we can pull a fast one somehow (maybe kill this one jan and drop a guerilla musket + single worker there and dare ginger to take the bad odds to remove us?). but what is MISSING from the stack we saw last turn? the second cuir, all the siege, and the two workers.... so if our plan is to combat-road over and attack the little wounded-jan-and-axe stack we saw leaving flounder, the siege is out of range, but the cuir will get a kill, and the workers, if in salmon, could enable a strike against flounder while the garrison's away. it really depends on how much ELSE is around, not a question we can answer easily without committing to the combat-road. i have half a mind to promote one of our new knights to sentry, if only to see what the situation is in salmon... and we do lack badly for sentry units down here - i have rerouted one from the north but it's still a turn away, and really we need two, one for flounder and one for lungfish

note also the outdated NAP sign on flounder.... we have a NAP with ourselves? nope, that's our last NAP with dreylin, who was our neighbor at the time it was signed.... sheesh



just two units in salmon.... could we actually kill that with a knight, two horse archers, and two impis? proooobably not, i think. but we know the flounder evacuees are 1N and there is probably a decent case for killing them now while they are pre-injured. hammer exchange could easily be made inefficient if there are more guys in range but we should at least make them have it, i guess. and i do like the idea of getting our guerilla bows onto the anglerfish/sampsounta corridor which is probably the most pain in the ass for a longgbow to be that i've ever seen lol. oh and.... we know we are safe from counterattack at ura from the south, because.... ginger pillaged their own road leading up to the city 

yeah fuck it i'm feeling reckless, show me what you got



woah our cat lived! at 10% odds, very likely due to the +10% vs gunpowder from barrage 3 lmao

here come the pinch draftees
pinch tokumusket vs a hand-build, combat 2, 7 health jan (a disgusting 91% odds): wins
pinch tokmuskets vs 6 health jan (99% lmao): flawless win
knight vs 4 health axe (99%): win
draftee vs 4 health axe (here we're supposed to attack first, THEN promote pinch to heal, i think, since we don't want to take shock of all things on a musket): win
pinch knight vs 2.3 health jan: flawless win

so we just killed 5 guys for free, right...? welll..... it depends on what else they have in range, of course. and on whether i'm willing to commit more 2-movers, these ones almost certain to die, to pillaging in an attempt to limit the number of units they can throw at our stack of injured guys (which i guess i probably am?) based on what we know and can guess about their force deployment i consider this a risk worth taking but certainly the potential to backfire is real as well.



position at EOT. could be an overextension, could be not. remember how i'm sort of a huge asshole though? on that theme.... i promoted these two bows to guerilla 1 but NOT guerilla 2, in the hopes of, maybe, falsely conveying to ginger that they lack the experience for the second promo.... the best-case for us here would be if they use the likely single janissary in anglerfish to attack out, letting us walk into the city if it is left empty or with one MP unit inside.... either way though, we have guerilla bows in the hills now and check out that gorgeous, beautiful road 1SW of anglerfish.... sever that, and we can neatly cut the whole ottoman empire in half until they get worker labor over to repair it



heh... after ten thousand years of misery, The Workers Have Returned  guarded by a cuir/pike pair..... is this a prelude to an attempt to take back ankyra? i don't thiiiink so, our stack there is flush with fortify bonuses at this point, about to get the 25% from chichen itza, and i don't see any cats.... so then... do they believe i won't take an inefficient trade attacking into those guys specifically to keep the north pillaged to hell? if so they have another thing coming



the first in our west-to-east draftee wave.... the goal here, roughly, is to first start a draft anger clock in the cities close to size 6, THEN whip a cuir, so that by the time the cities are back at size 6 their clock is almost up.... you will notice we did not quite get all our cities jewish in time, oops..... but too late to fix it now, after this last missionary in lalibela it's all cuirs all the time i think, at least until ginger is clearly on the outs.

[ljubljana]

177

ginger posts twice in one turn, after doing their log in -> play 40 mins -> log off for a day thing.... does that mean they had to make a significant decision this turn? or are they just reveling in killing a bunch of our units for free?



yep, they got us, big-time  11 dead units, and we only took 1 of their cuirs with us. nicely trapped  got two of our workers too, and are keeping them as we really have no way to punish this. now it is our turn to pull out of flounder as we certainly have no prospect of holding against the at least 10 cuirs we know they have down here

well, i thought about attacking out to re-capture (and delete) our own workers but vodka says we have just 30% odds to beat a cuir with two longbows and a horse archer on offense lol. so tail between our legs it is  i'll abandon flounder but try to leave it in hot-potato status. and if we are lucky perhaps we can draw them into an overcommitment here (doubtful but maybe!). i did at least win a coinflip attacking the jan on a hill with one of our musket draftees, significant in that they shouuuuld need to commit a cuir to revenge and this should make it impractical for them to scout what's in ura



we even have a ginger chariot looking to come kill one of our workers from the west.... nice



castle in meleti, walls in attaleia. which would be cool if our plan was to bomb out the defenses instead of just shoving our way through with a cuir horde...

ahhhh, well. to be honest i'm off my meds today due to Supply Chain Issues > so i'm feeling a little surly and not enthused about spending hours on the turn anyways. going to go off and stew for a minute. and tomorrow we come back, swap to slavery, and burn this ship to the ground

[RefSteel]

Good luck, ljubljana - supply chain problems are awful, and the more so when they're for something you really need to maintain your health!

(Good luck with the game too, but that's very secondary!)