[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

thank you! luckily they say it should only be a few days this time, as opposed to the months of previous disruptions....

as for the game, it may be secondary, but the amount of luck involved is probably higher  i increasingly think one giant wave of cuirs is not going to be enough to break ginger. maybe enough to take cities off them, especially in weakly-held babylon, but i don't think it's enough to break their core.... still, it's not like we have other options really.... now that the hammer exchange in the war looks to have been roughly even so far, i think making peace now would herald an inevitable win for them unless accompanied by some other major strategic development. maybe we have options for such a thing.... the most obvious would be the very cathartic option of rolling into greenline instead, but ginger could pile on from the other side and take much of our potential gains away unless the two of them have an active cow/cow / general alliance agreement (which they well might...) still that option also involves whipping a fuckton of cuirs and i definitely don't see a straight-builder option for us from here, so

178

burn the earth! leave it behind!



sheesh... the dreylin remnants MADE PEACE WITH ginger.... i don't know for how long (obviously) but is sure looks like 28-city us in a death struggle with 24-city ottomans is going to be the status quo

you can see that ginger has razed the indefensible, um.... whatever the city on that plains hill was named  which is pretty expected given how indefensible it was. but.... in my opinion they have overcommitted somewhat in so doing, leaving a full 5 cuirs in range of ura and whatever other reinforcements we might have in range (which, it turns out, is a lot). maybe killing that scouting jan on the hill 1S of where the city used to be was a good move, denying them the scouting intel they would need to know not to do this? well, admittedly they won't be FREE kills (we only have one pike in range, and our next best attackers into cuirs are knights and one single formation musket) but i feel we had better take any opportunity we can to semi-economically whittle down their numbers...

first i threw one cat sacrificially into the stack of 3 cuirs (dies, shocker), then the pike into the combat 3 cuir at 71% (dies....)
combat-road over and attack with the formation musket at 2/3 odds (wins)
combat 2 musket at 28% wins! so that evens things up a bit odds-wise
guerilla 1 musket against the very injured cuir that killed the knight (97%): wins, and hopefully will bait them into throwing additional cuirs into this situation

ok, that's the northern stack of 3 cuirs killed not-too-inefficiently.... they were promoted formation, so i did not use the knights here, which means they are the best attackers we have against the southern cuir pair, against whom they get pretty bad odds.... but of course i'd gladly trade 2 knights for 2 cuirs if that's how it plays out, and our odds to win ONE of the two attacks at 27% odds are decent.

c2 knight vs c2 cuir, straight-up: dies but does.... ok damage? honestly not even great damage but it's down to around 8 health. but then the second one wins!
combat 2 musket draftee has 72% to clean up.... and dies  but NOW they are really badly injured and we can finish them off with a guerilla longbow lol

so 5 dead cuirs, and we lost a cat, a pike, a knight, and a musket - not a spectacular hammer exchange rate, but a good one and one i don't mind having taken. we do have a few exposed guys of our own now but i certainly don't mind that... if they want to commit more units into this area, they can be my guest

ok i did some simming, first to double-check that the shown progress bar on techs during the last turn of a GA is accurate (can't have us coming up just short on miltrad, obviously ) and then that a whipped knight this turn will ACTUALLY come out a cuir (it did in my tests, which had better accord with actual observed reality next turn....) and then



ARE YOU READY???



ARE YOU RRREADY??



CAN YOU FEEEEEL IT????



I HOPE YOU'RE SATISFIIIIIED



i don't like that it says "last tick: 589" when we are only adding 537 beakers but that's the prereq bonus talking, yes? i'm going to trust the top of the UI instead where it swears to me that research will finish this turn



ok man... time for choosing. my imperial rage against you runs strong and deep, but now is your chance. you can make the correct choice, ally with us, and i'll even throw in one of MY cities, the world's only source of incense, into the bargain. that's option 1.

here is option 2



you tell ME how this is going to go babe. if they continue to spurn us there is a very real chance of me impulsively peacing out with ginger and turning the full force of my fury southwards. and they MUST know that after whipping ourselves into the ground, we have to go kill SOMEone now, so hopefully that threat will look plausible

hit enter and

[ljubljana]

179

"birds are leaving over autumn's ending /
one of us will die inside these arms"



open the turn to nothing but a pillaged road.... and the news that, oh yes



we have reached first in soldier count  and in food too? oh don't you worry, i'm very much working on that

ok, actually, THIS is annoying as shit...



meleti hits third-ring borders at the worst possible time and now we have neither a route into ankyra nor tiles to work? annoyingggg  at least our road in the far north is still operative, or will be once we rebuild three distinct road segments.... or kill meleti which is looking more appealing by the second lol

moving our sentry chariot south, i am seeing roughly 20 units that could get into meleti if the time comes, and 4 cats that we'd be in range of.... ugh. frankly, we don't have enough cuirs to crack that and are not that close, either. not really sure what the move is supposed to be for us.... for now it's gather the stack and continue to whip, sure, but like, long-term? eg, where do we actually throw it? i am not so sure....

would really like to sign a defensive pact with mjmd, as instructed by one of our signs, but evidently the game doesn't actually let you do that if you're in a pre-existing war? at least that's the only interpretation i can come up with for its refusal to let us do so

anyways one little piece of combat this turn: traded a draftee, belatedly, for ginger's pillaging g2 jan SE of ura. seems correct enough, as they would only fortify next turn and i do NOT want them having permanent vis on the city center

generally i feel that The Thing we have to do to make progress possible is get our 1-movers to DO something instead of just mindlessly getting killed out in the open, or sitting in cities that are not likely to come under threat.... which really requires sticking to defensive terrain. but there are only so many veins of that which we can use to make progress into gingerland, and most are occupied by gingish troops at this point...



i feel that the approach most likely to succeed in cracking the core (not actually LIKELY, mind you - not sure i'll go that far - but MOST likely) is three-pronged.... i see two cities that can be threatened by 1-movers without leaving defensive terrain: prussa, and whichever city is SE of meleti (we can, i think, conclude from the broken roads that there is a city there, just east of the range of hills). so we march the 1-movers up there to hopefully draw defenders in those directions, and then our 50-unit cuir pile in progress drives straight for.... most likely meleti, because it's the target we can reach fastest to carry this out. of course the problem is that whichever of their units just got kicked out of dreylin territory will be currently racing northwards to defend, so i'm not sure this is actually a use of forces that will result in, um, actually WINNING..... but really i think it's all we've got...

main alternative is to throw everything at their babylonian gains in the SE. i'm sure these are much more lightly held but... is it actually war-winning if all we do is make gains there? i think they still get to rifles and their third GA pretty quickly under those circumstances and at that point we're really not going to have much prospect of taking territory... not to mention then WE will have to hold the line there against greenline coming in from the other side

speaking of whom, the third option is to make peace with ginger and try to steamroll sumeria instead :D i have to admit, i still find this really tempting! i honestly do not really think decisive victory in ginger's core is really in the cards right now, even if we drop 50-60 cuirs on them in the next few turns. we could definitely kill greenline though! they still lack for gunpowder and their frontline cities are defended by longbows, it would be both easy and satisfying to roll in there and obliterate them.... mjmd could vulture but they don't have gunpowder either, so while they would have to slog horribly through castle defenses our guys would cut right through. or ginger could vulture but what a backstab that would be  not to mention they are probably out of position to do so and may even have a standing NAP with greenline PREVENTING them from doing so....

well, i think it may be the correct move strategically, but would our generous creditors nauf and mjmd, who clearly lent us money and signed 20-turn NAPs with us so we could go after ginger, view that as a betrayal? probably.... ok, more than probably, almost certainly. that is a future games consideration, but it might be that our situation here, either way, is bleak enough that we should be playing for future games considerations... and i'm still in penance for the dreylin semi-stab and honestly would like to go through the rest of this one as apologetically as i can to preserve some chance of being taken at my word going forwards.... blah. i am very tempted to offer ginger a long peace deal but i won't this turn.... as williams has said, metagame hygeine, in particular when i keep ranting about it, is probably a fine enough tiebreaker between otherwise similar(ly low) odds of success plans... with the exception, i think, of if they revolt to slavery/nationhood and start drafting down, in which case we have no chance to crack them and pretty much have to get out if we can

ugh whatever it's fine who cares i'm doing fine

edit: btw check out our beautifully pristine economy in that last screenie <3

all things aligned in perfect harmony, as they should be coming from such good and faithful taoists as us

despite this i did spend 100g on cuir upgrades this turn and am likely to spend another 50 in the future (only didn't because our remaining heathy knights have just one promo). as commodore says, "if wealth builds are available, striking is an aesthetic choice"

[ljubljana]

Turn 180 - Zululand

double-turn today and perhaps i've made everyone wait for me enough this week

now that i'm medicated again and the thought of doing this doesn't fill me with loathing, that is

aand never mind, it immediately becomes obvious that some combination of discussion or brooding is required:









(yes, they sent this one again)

ginger is willing, in principle, to agree to a peace where we do not return ankyra....

well, i'm not attacking naufragar, absolutely no way. and i don't really know wtf that 93 gold request is supposed to indicate (that is indeed all the gold we have, for whatever that's worth). but.... i REALLY want to kill greenline. really really really. we have NAPs with both mjmd and nauf until t196 (not to mention nauf's losing cities to superdeath and so not too likely to intervene honestly). and we are up (effectively) 2 cities on ginger from the start of the war (once we refound the razed dreylin site) and they have locked themselves out of finishing the job vs drey for another 8t at least, which meets some definition of "slowing them down". if we can get them to agree to a long peace treaty (say 25-30t, enough for them to get rifles and cavs but probably us to get cannons as well if we really push for them) it really might be in our interests to take it and run over sumeria now. especially since we are de facto in a 2v1 right now with greenline refusing to switch sides even for a city (and thus highly likely to come piling in if we start to make ANY kind of progress against ginger), and i see no other way to get out of it besides killing them.....

to be honest, i just don't see the "throw 50 cuirs at ginger" plan working if they have no troops tied down in drey's territory and are currently racing back home as quickly as possible to fight us off. i just don't. we will have an edge in troop numbers but not a decisive one and they have the defenders' advantage. and they can definitely get all their 2-movers that were attacking drey back to the core in time to fight us there, if not the whole stack with jans and siege included. it is less shitty to our allies to stay in a death struggle with ginger for the rest of forever but i don't think we're winning that fight, especially now that it's closer to a 2v1 AGAINST us than a 2v1 in our favor. at the risk of rationalizing, don't we eventually have to start making the moves that we think are actually most likely to win us the game?

(and at the risk of rationalizing part 2, frankly, i think with greenline as unreasonably solid an ally of ginger as they have been, i feel that killing them IS an anti-ginger move.... especially if we can do so super efficiently while their cities are still defended by LONGBOWS of all things)

[williams482]

1) You are #1 in soldiers and #1 in food. You are about to turn that food into even more soldiers. You are absolutely a serious contender and deciding to play this game for the benefit of future games instead of to win now is both ludicrous and literally self defeating.

2) You will not get a better opportunity to hit Ginger than with the crest of this massive wave of whipped cuirs. You have a current military edge and a temporary but substantial production edge (via the whip), in a window of tech parity. Ginger has a smallish core of very important cities, and they are in a whole bunch of trouble if you can topple just a few of them. Which leads to...

3) Attacking the former Dreylin holdings would be the exact same mistake I made against you in PBEM20. Accept your lumps (and some more immediate risk) and hit them where it hurts, and where your rewards are greatest. Capturing far off, weaker, and difficult to defend territory is not the way to win.

With that said:

I think there is a solid argument to be made attacking Greenline. In the short term I share your confidence that it would work out: your cuir stack would probably crush them and get you most of their empire. Gambling Ginger having active NAP agreements doesn't seem crazy either, and you surely wouldn't be the only one to look at Greenline's minimally helpful behavior towards his nominal ally alongside his unwillingness to make a move to help take down a runaway, and conclude that turning on him is justified. And it's not like you didn't just give both the carrot and stick a pretty good showing.

However, the downside to that plan is that if it works, you'll be a big empire that needs time to prop up a bunch of conquered territory, behind in tech with an obsolete military, with a blood enemy in a very strong position to the east and a nominal ally to the west who will probably be looking at you exactly the way you're looking at Greenline now. That's a situation with some hope, but you'd have a very big target on your back.

There's also the fact that Greenline is probably going to remain a weakling ripe for conquest after your hypothetical victory over Ginger.

I wish we could get Chevalier's take on this situation, but in the absence of that I think it does come down to this: Do you think your odds of conquering Greenline AND THEN defending yourself long enough to turn a profit on that conquest are better than your chances of winning 1v1 with Ginger in a window when you should have a modest military advantage?

Either one probably results in defeat, because you're one of four(?) real contenders right now and only one of you can win. But I still like your chances better taking the fight to Ginger now over pasting Greenline and trying to deal with a dogpile later.

[ljubljana]

hmmm briefly

1 and 3 i am in complete agreement with. unfortunately i suspect ginger knows 3) to be true as well and is likely to have, well, their whole army there waiting for us. but if we don't go for greenline i agree that pushing for ginger's core and, uh, kinda crossing our fingers that we have enough, is the play. we DO pretty much win the game if we can pull it off...

for 2) my answer is "yes, and".... here's the and: i think if we attack greenline, the plan after that is NOT to attack ginger again at what i agree will be a less appealing time to do so. instead i think we just kinda put ginger in a little box, sit on it, and leave it there if we kill greenline, ginger's ONLY expansion option will be through us.... 40 city us who should have cannons and tokugawa grens and still chichen itza to keep them in the box by that point.. basically it would become ginger's mission in life to organize a dogpile against us from there, and our bet would be that mjmd and nauf are too busy with superdeath (and too worried ginger would get most of the spoils) to join in until we catch up in tech and a zulu win becomes inevitable. i think that could happen, but it's not a slam dunk, for sure

but as for winning the 1v1 with ginger now.... man, it looks bleak, even with our edge in numbers.... with no drey to distract them, we have to make gains in their core in the face of... what, literally all their cuirs and a good amount of jans and seige as well, plus more of the latter if we take long enough for all the drey attackers to get back up there? and we have probably 10 turns in which to do that before they get rifling, so maybe 8 of actual hard fighting with the full stack in place. and if we DO start making progress, i think it's highly likely both that greenline would obliviously pile on at the worst possible moment and that ginger, if no longer in position to win, will swap to nationhood/slavery at the anarchy turn and just whip cavs and rifles in our face forever until we stall out.

could we do damage, enough to stop them from winning, maybe, indeed i'd even say probably.... can we actually CONQUER them without stalling out, i don't think so. i'd guess thst the modal outcome is that we make it roughly to constantinople (all-but-eliminating ginger's odds to win, sure), and then ginger gets rifling and we still have almost 20 cities of drafted and whipped rifles to chew through, with greenline piling on with their medival crap at around the same time as well. i just don't see how that ends in a win for us, as much as i'd like it to, even if it IS our most realistic chance to make progress in ginger's core....

edit: re contenders, i think there are still 5. not going to rate us, but otherwise in order:

ginger: self-explanatory

mjmd!!: i think their culture try is looking STRONG, with both their neighbors almost completely inert and totally incapable of stopping them. basically the only one who can is us, if we FIRST conquer greenline and then roll into india, or sd if they somehow get peace w nauf and get to 1v1 them. and they have conventional paths to win as well; i can easily see them scooping up what's left of gav while SD's away, or profiting from a late pile-on against us. they are behind in (non-culture) tech but their position is flexible and i like their odds more with every passing turn

sd/nauf: well, sd is winning the 1v1 but only to the tune of one city and a substantial military edge... i don't really think nauf will collapse in full, esp not with a tech edge and probably steel coming soon. but equally cannons don't really advance vs numerically superior knights i think. i feel that either of them can still win but they need either external help in their war or to peace out. nauf is more likely to get help (we are locked out of attacking nauf for a LONG time but mjmd should be free and interested), SD has more to gain from peace (since they can finally kill gav). not sure who comes out ahead in the final analysis

[williams482]

I had not considered the difference this would make to the mjmd culture situation. That's the flip side to all your potential enemies being able to reach you, you can also reach them. The possibility of Greenline actually doing something when the war in Ginger's territory stalls out is also a factor, although I'll admit I kinda doubt Greenline has the tech or the motivation to make a real push against you.

If you think you can get a real NAP with Ginger, then the attack on Greenline has my reluctant blessing. If you can't, I think you're just asking for Ginger to hit you at an inconvenient time while your cuirs are in Greenlineland.

[ljubljana]

yeah.... greenline's military adventures in babylon have been, um, less than inspiring, it is true.... i think they made two incursions and both times took a significant hit in the power graphs without taking any cities. as for tech, they don't have enough NOW to make a push - relative to us they are down gunpowder, nationalism, and of course miltrad which requires nationalism - but by the time we are hypothetically making progress against ginger, that will have changed, which is another reason i suspect right now is the correct time to go at them, to pre-empt the formation of a REAL 2v1 against us...

i definitely won't do it without a real NAP though. a 10-turn peace with ginger is ludicrous and way worse than nothing - all we're doing is giving them rifles and cavs for free and wasting our push timing. we would need a LONG nap for this to work, like 25 or 30 turns.... if they're not down to go the distance on that we just have to try to kill them i think, 2v1 though we will inevitably walk into in so doing

[ljubljana]

catching up on diplo



SD wants to pile on as well.... well, no, at least not until our long NAP with them ends. if the collapse is really on in 20 turns though maybe i'll think about it..... SD is likely the person we need to cultivate as our end-game ally i think - if we go in against greenline they are probably the only ones who won't hate us, and who won't be in immediate position to wish us harm. but... we can't help now, sorry future bestie

but then



...it didn't matter anyways? really, SD is peacing out right when they start to get some kind of advantage? well, i did say earlier that i thought that broadly made sense - most likely they go after gav now, i imagine. i still think SD's presence should exert SOME kind of deterrent effect to keep nauf from piling in against us, surely with SD as their far neighbor they have to be on the lookout and, indeed, actively looking to dogpile them with mjmd or SD will be the runaway. still, down to 19 cities and having squandered their window of advantage (or more accurately, having perfidious mjmd peace out for one city to squander it for them), poor, beloved nauf is in bad shape.... they slaved REALLY far down too and seem to have nothing to show for it except two fewer cities and a shattered milpower score....

on balance though this makes me favor 30 turns over 25 turns as far as peace terms with ginger are concerned... if nauf really is falling apart around t200 still, we can retain the theoretical ability to pile on, i suppose. not that i really WANT to, ofc



btw, check out that "dead to cuir??" sign on the plains hill.... there was a sentry HA last turn, who i assumed ginger couldn't kill without exposing a unit. guess we aren't the only ones with a 3-move cuir running around

anyways, the thing to do now is whip it all down a second time, and draft anywhere we can find without an active draft anger timer, then play the turn as though the war with ginger will continue

....are there such places without draft anger, i hear you ask? wellllll ok not reallly BUT STILL

what i will do is a thing i claimed i'd do earlier, where i draft specifically from the cities that are about to drop below the cuir-whipping threshold (there are a LOT of those) just to get one last unit for the road before they have to go into hard-regrowing mode

"hey ljana, how's your gnp doing??"

glad you asked



having a healthy, balanced empire is good for u



settler in ura is an aesthetic choice which i may reverse. the thought is to go refound that drey city ginger burned if we get peace but it would be a dubious undertaking, with the city very unlikely to ever control its own food long-term. would be a nice buffer against ginger but idk if it's worth it over CUIRS ENDLESS CUIRS



mitakeumi looking absolutely razed to the ground, as it should be

so now you can see why i'm not too worried about ruining our economy if we do an anarchy swap back to serfdom - there's nothing left to ruin  unfortunately we do need to be somewhat careful as GPT deals, like the ones we have outstanding with nauf and mjmd, apparently DO remain active during anarchy so we wouldn't quite zero out the balance sheet.... but really, what's so bad about striking for one turn? we don't actually lose units until the second turn, right?

re the greenline border, and yeah, this is very amusing to my warped brain



i think the best place to mass troops for a greenline attack is actually IN URA... which is the first place they'd look of course, but.... every other tile within 2 of the border they can see without any active scouting, with one exception - 1NW of ura. but in the city is better i think, because, with judicious combat-roading, not only will GGGA stacking fall on the first turn of a war, but we can also move cuirs 6 SW (if DotF does not have 4th-ring borders) to threaten HUNGARY RUSH on the second turn (in addition to DotF itself of course). luckily for us, the spacing of greenline's frontline cities is.... really really bad, so i think we can probably advance fairly quickly using the nice roads that they have built for us that will fall into neutral territory once the front line is overrun....

now for one of the most impactful clicks of my short life as a civ4 player



ok, actually this is annoying and means we're risking not making our meaning clear - we cannot attach cow for cow to the peace treaty directly, nor can we even do the 30 gold for 30 gold rider except via two separate treaties.... well, i guess that explains some of the weird peace deals they were offering above.... 

i guess the way to do this is to ask them for 30 gold for peace in one deal, then offer another deal where i GIVE 30 gold for peace.... that's unambiguous, right? enough so that if they accept, we can probably count on 30 turns of peace from them at the risk of then being viewed as a deal-breaker? and then NEXT turn i can, perhaps, send them cow/cow with 29 gold attached to illustrate that i view their acceptance as a NAP commitment.....

[ljubljana]

sorry for the following jumpscare (but not that sorry)

[ljubljana]

btw, i'm starting to rethink my unquestioning embrace of pro-cannon dogma..... i tested 2 barrage 3 cats vs 1 barrage 3 cannon (which cost equal hammers) against both rifles and infantry, and in both cases the 2 cats actually did MORE collateral damage (vs rifles, 2 cats did 3.4 str in collateral vs 2.5 from the cannon).... is there something i'm missing here? sure the cannon will LIVE more often and do more damage to the unit it actually attacks but i'm pretty skeptical that that justifies research into the monstrously-expensive steel tech.... especially compared with milsci which offers real concrete benefits in the counter-unit to ginger's rifles

anyways 181, let's check on the ginger diplo



attention, greenline! your doom has come, your time is up, your number has been called, etc etc. as promised quite clearly in our generous demand that you so foolishly ignored if this course of action gets me viewed as a betrayer in future games, well, i actually think there is also a salutary future games-effect that will compensate - hopefully the fact that i, in a fit of rage, threw away what will surely be viewed as a golden opportunity to do damage to ginger in order to pursue a grudge will get people to realize that sometimes my threats are NOT bluffs

they accepted both ends of the 30 gold pact btw... which i am interpreting as a 30-turn NAP. and they had BETTER do the same or a) we're laughably screwed lol and b) i WILL view them as a dealbreaker henceforth and forever not sure if we're supposed to now send them 29/29 with a cow to be extra clear, or if we should NOT do that lest they feel like it is now optional for them to accept the NAP component

thought about playing the rest of the turn out now since i'm so hype to go kill this nerd but maybe it is more proper to maintain existing turn order (wherein i have moved after them for many turns running at this point). t183 is my eta for the attack. which you will notice is 2 turns from now