[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[williams482]

I think waiting a doubling up is the right move here? On the basis of greater safety and the assumption that the empire eating two turns of anarchy is going to have very little in the way of yields for that turn regardless, and that the free specialists should scale relatively well in recovering whipped-down cities. Of course a number will be citizens who are a half step shy of useless, so that's not great. A second anarchy turn is a pain, although there are definitely better times to have an anarchy turn than right now would have been.

I hope this works out.

[ljubljana]

i hope it works too 6 dead cuirs is not a great omen lol but them's the dice

there is also the third option of just staying in slavery and whipping every time we have a city on too many plains farms i do think that we will regrow faster than we could get rid of with just drafting so that's probably not totally useless. eta on the next golden age is WELL into the t200s but if we do that we can at least save 1k beakers from banking research (enviro beats merc for late-game econ civic IMO with this many windmills)

[ljubljana]

maybe i should have asked ginger for a peacetime turnsplit last turn.... something like "hey, i attacked greenline and sense that you might pile on, please preserve the current order if you do so". but a) that's a 3-way split and b) i didn't want to give the the idea if they WEREN'T already planning to..... anyways this turn they moved before AND after greenline lol so we probably lost a turn on The Race in not asking for such a thing. grrr

oh and greenline played a 4-minute turn.... interesting

the other reason to stay in slavery, btw, is that our infra situation is....  i have not really highlighted this but in our hand-build core cities we have like.... 7 libraries, 6 markets, 7 courthouses, ONE forge.... it is conceivable to me that drafting units while whipping buildings could be a comparably effective economic catchup lever to (spending two turns in anarchy and) doing the double-swap.. and yes, we retain the flexibility to whip 30 cuirs again if someone decides we look edible

[ljubljana]

Turn 184 - Zululand



yeah, that's what i thought. so what, is there not a way to ask, in a way that will be commonly understood, for 30 turns of peace as part of an actual peace treaty? if there is, i would love to hear what it is besides attaching 30 gold on first one side, and then the other.... i would NOT have accepted peace for 10 turns if i knew giving up ankyra was the price for the full 30. but as it stands, with our forces committed in the south, i am prepared, at least in principle, to accept something like this.

maybe on the turn after peace was signed i should have offered just 29g for 29g, withOUT a cow attached? would that have made it clearer that i EXPECTED the agreed-to duration to be honored? ugh

well, it's clear at least from these "negotiations" that we control in ankyra a very valuable piece, not because the size 3 city is especially powerful (great wall or no) but because it holds outsized emotional value in ginger's mind as their third city and due to the backstabby nature of its capture.... i consider 20 turns of peace a worthy return for something like that, but.... i don't think i will accept right now, because i am not so sure i actually trust ginger's commitment to deals lasting longer than 10 turns at this point. i know they view the FIRST 10 turns of cow/cow as sacred, but perhaps for a longer deal like this they might be smiling with a knife behind their back ready to come at us on turn 194. so if we are going to trade ankyra for a long cow pact, maybe we'd better do so closer to the end of our actual enforced peace....

i reject the deal and do not send a counteroffer. for now.

the other nice thing about keeping ankyra is that it will require a huge commitment of material to take back at this point.... it's up to 45% defenses with a castle and will hit 65% by the time war breaks out, so they need a full stack of cats if they want to get through our (20-unit) garrison efficiently. so that means a war would require a dangerous division of forces for them between the north, where tilt-bait ankyra is, and the south, where our actual units are.... with that in mind i am not yet sure of how catastrophic a stab from them would be. it is also true that if they are preparing to attack us in the north where their city is, that probably means they are NOT rushing south to pile on against greenline or finish off dreylin.

i'll think about it. i may yet reoffer something like this closer to the deadline but for today, i will think about it.



LOL. i guess "disabled" here just means "requires all opponents to vote for you"  i will abstain, being pretty uncommitted on the question of whether we want ginger to win

as for the greenline position



no units attacked, and they retreated some of the garrison (the cat and 2 chariots) but not all of it. and yes, city garrison 1 has appeared on their longbows.... i suppose leaving them in here in the city where they at least have full fortify bonus is the most likely way for them to get a kill with them, and probably correct. especially since our cuirs might be able to run down and kill the cat this turn once the roads revert to neutrality, depending on which tile it went to

and re whipping



looks like they whipped some cities, but not all of them. i see magnus, CS rush, longship spam, No Hill Start, RFT, District Discount, and Pillage Farming at smaller sizes than last turn. so i suppose we can expect a wave of, in the worst case, 7 knights plus any more they have streaming back from the dreylin front to be ready for us in, say, 2 turns. as for the other cities, maybe they were on infrastructure or something...? eventually i expect we will have to consolidate our forces to keep making progress but i think not yet, not this turn. this turn we keep going and try to make progress before they become capable of wiping even a 12-cuir ministack



hungary rush and CTR, in contrast, did NOT whip, and now the road has indeed opened up to let us threaten them. DotF did whip, but as the first-mover they are too late to whip a unit there, so all that does is deny us some pop.

c2 cuir vs cg1 glongbow, 75% to live: teehee of course it DIES, though not without causing significant damage
let's try that identical combat a second time: wins at VERY low health
shock cuir vs spear (81%): wins
c2 cuir vs spear (81%): wins, great general born in ura. fine, losing 1/4 75-80% battles is not unexpected, yall just scared me there for a little by making it the first one
god of war UESUGI KENSHIN vs the weakened longbow (86%): DIES noooo my baby (((((( that's just so damn sad (((( well, glad it's not a cuir at least
then the other g2 bow can clean up for free at least



so in today's episode of tile control rng, there are still several tiles WAYYY outside of range of any sumerian cities that remain in their control. but... we did get one! that one road SE of DotF will let us move into range of magnus this turn, and that's all i care about (and is why the cuirs are right next to the city instead of 2t back, even though greenline might in theory have had units in range in the fog).

who knows why the game decided to award us that tile, but not the others further to the east.... could it be that the game checks first-ring tiles for neutrality reversion when a city is captured, but not all tiles, and magnus has 4th-ring borders popped and that's why they still control the rest of the first ring? but then why did we get the tiles to the north of the city and the second-ring lake tiles to the west....? i am going to try my best to develop a working hypothesis over the rest of this war, but i really don't know wtf is going on

one explanation that fits the data is this (at least if magnus does have 4th-ring borders): sumeria gets to keep any tiles that are either still within the culture of an existing city, or are both NOT first-ring of the captured city AND are closer to a sumerian city than to any enemy cities. it would have to be specifically enemy cities instead of foreign cities though, the lumbermill 2E of the city is closer to lungfish than to RFT and it is still theirs...

and to my signficant surprise



greenline already has a big fuck-off stack of guys in magnus, that could easily wipe our 13 remaining cuirs if we push for magnus this turn. way too early for this to be from the dreylin border and obviously they can't have whipped it, so they must have been here the whole time on zone-defense duty and greenline's war with dreylin must be phony. well friends, this is why you always always always scout with sentry units before committing to a deployment

note also: if this stack has been 1SW of the city instead of in the city itself, i WOULD HAVE pushed our cuirs forward on the assumption that most of their troops must be on the dreylin border, as i did last turn at DotF. so they were really really close to getting us here 

so that probably settles it - we are going to have to give up ankyra to not get stabbed.... maybe not this turn, but in the near future. this is a situation which requires care, delicacy, and probably 1-movers and catapults, and i don't think we'll be able to handle it through mere straightforward application of a bigass blunt hammer. for the time being i think we go around magnus while moving up 1-movers - they can't defend it, hungary rush, and RFT all simultaneously like this, and i suppose it's ok if this city holds out a bit longer as long as we're otherwise continuing to make gains. fortunately (and this time i did NOT plan this) i do think hungary rush is probably doomed next turn as only the knights can make it there in time and our cuirs north of DotF are JUST barely close enough to The Hill NE of the city to add some real force to our attack there if they do decide to stick their 10 knights inside on defense

man, nothing in civ4 is ever routine, is it?



of note: greenline discovered nationalism this turn. cool, i think that's what i was hoping for (what are they going to do, eat an anarchy turn so they can draft macemen?). still no gunpowder and they need music and miltrad as well for cuirs, so i don't see any realistic prospect of them catching up on tech at this point. they are pretty much out of gold as well, as you can see, so probably even drafted muskets are not within reach before they are down a bunch of cities



yeah, hungary rush is looking toasty. no catapults around for them to counterpunch a stack on the hill with, and i don't care if there are knights in range if they have to throw them into combat 2 cuirs. the question is, how much force do we commit here and how much do we save for a potential thrust towards RFT next turn...? we need enough that we can take the city and hold it even if we have to attack 10 knights across a river in order to do so.... and that "hold the city" is tricky as they could move the 1-movers out of magnus as well to do zone defense and i'm not sure we'll get the roads we need on the turn we capture hungary rush to pillage enough to prevent a recapture. so i am leaning towards "use overwhelming force here and give up on RFT for now". that is slow as hell but really, what else are we going to do - i do not think failing to capture hungary rush next turn is really compatible with long-term success of the war effort



well, here is what we have in range of hungary rush if we do not take anyone away from the DotF attackers to help out. i rate that as not enough to take the city if they move every available 2-mover from magnus inside. so i'm taking some away from DotF.... and if the plan is to hit hungary rush with such overwhelming force that there's no point in them moving the 2-movers inside, i expect them not to do so, in which case there is not much point to keeping units around to threaten RFT next turn, since if we do that, they will still have 14 2-movers they could move into the city to defend. so i think we should just move essentially all of our attackers in range of hungary rush now, so that in theory we could hit their stack next turn if they try to threaten a recapture with the 1-movers next turn. it is also good insurance in case they add a small-but-manageable handful of extra defenders on top of all the 2-movers, eg, some of the knights they just whipped



yeah... i had a whole unhinged screed planned out about this but i'm just not feeling it right now.... i'm trying to figure out a way to get the third golden age without clashing great people, even double scientists, which i keep catching myself thinking is fine since we can just bulb towards biology instead of launching the GA. hahahahah WRONG, it is not fine, even after bio the 800 point great person would then take over 20 turns to come in from scratch in national epic abi. i think our endgame civic configuration of environmentalism + representation has to come as close to the discovery of bio tech as possible to close the tech hole we are whipping ourselves into....

to make that happen (in mercantilism which shaves like 8t off the GA time even after the anarchy) we need 6 specialists in WMH, and need them on as few types as possible so that abi, for the 700 point person, can swap to a configuration that doesn't conflict with whatever type the 500-point person turned out to be. we also need to run the priests here since our 57-point head start from moai statues comes in the form of prophet points. so that adds up to

- in wakamotoharu. run 4 merchants and 2 priests for the 600 point GP
- in abi, start with 2 scientists, 2 artists (hence drama research...), and an engineer for the 500 point person while slow-building a courthouse, swapping to a spy when available
- then we hope that the 500 point person pops an engineer or spy. it probably won't though, in which case i do have a plan, but yall are not going to like it

of course that doesn't quite explain the forge whip in WMH but... if this city is about to churn through that much infra in succession, the forge will pay for itself in the course of doing so, so no reason not to build it first i think



EOT position..... we still have reinforcements trickling in, and a LOT of guys healing east of GGGA (10 2-movers). but for the most part our units are here and engaged. unless we have to coin-flip our way through 12 knights across a river next turn, i'm expecting our numbers to roughly hold steady at around 50 cuirs in theater, as we are too far whipped down to even use the draft anymore, let alone whip more 2-movers. hopefully that will be enough!

lurkers, thoughts on if we should give ankyra back to get ginger's word (for whatever that's worth) that they will obey the full 27 turns left on what i thought was our peace deal? i'm leaning towards it.... they kinda ran circles around us diplomatically which sucks, but a size 3 city (great wall or no, strategic positioning or no) is a small price to pay to make sure the rest of this invasion is successful. there is one big reason to hesitate though which is that the failure of negotiations might make them less likely to pile on vs greenline... so the timing is also a question even if we do plan to ultimately give the city back, since we don't want them to get a free hand to go after RFT or Work Ethic (or dreylin) either...

[ljubljana]

Turn 185 - Zululand

what's that? greenline played a second 3-minute turn immediately so i can hop right back in? sweeet



yeah looks like all they did was slam that whip button so hungary rush is ours pretty much without a fight



we have to leave a few units here to prevent recapture but we only have the knights to worry about, no 2-movers in range. i will also park a couple impi on the desert hill windmill (which even improves their odds against knights, lmao) and cut the road next turn

in the meantime... no more fucking around you guys. i think we have to give ginger the city back. not much time to think about it either, if they log in and see that greenline is now down 3 cities i think that meaningfully worsens the odds of them accepting. it sucks to lose a city without a fight but i think these guys piling on is the one thing that can save greenline....



CTR has 2 vultures and an archer inside.... so we can kill it next turn with a bare minimum of cuirs. we also do need some to sit in hungary rush in case they try to knight it but the rest can go NE to prepare for RFT. i just hope we are fast enough to beat ginger there...



i've set our penguins a-marching.... luckily for us, greenline never roaded any of the four tiles W and S of this one, so we are safe from 1-mover attack out of magnus unless there are combat workers in the fog. i sacrificed a sentry HA to check for this and other than the one tile directly S of magnus, we are confirmed safe. of course there are still 11 knights in magnus that can hit us but with our units on a hill, we will trade efficiently if they try that. they would also have to attack from the tile 1W of our stack in order to not take the river crossing penalty as well, and that tile is very exposed and would allow us to wipe any survivors on the counter. you can see that i've also exposed two cuirs to pillage SW of DotF to enable this more (we don't have enough 1-movers to defend both the cats and the city)

still i am not certain that they can't break through to the cats if they throw all the 2-movers at us so i will probably add a few cuirs, just in case. then the rest can reposition to run up the side of RussiaFreeTiles next turn. once again, by complete accident, our stack that threatened Hungary Rush is JUST close enough to consider joining against RFT next turn



realized after almost fully committing to a deploy that there is a way for them to threaten our workers or to retake DotF, if there are knights in RFT... with combat workers in the fog, or if they swap to serfdom, they can road both desert squares and then send knights up to attack us. so i hastily piled a bunch of cuirs onto the tiles where we have workers... especially the desert hill E of DotF which MUST be roaded next turn or we lose a turn of tempo. it is arguably worse for us to lose those workers than it is for them to retake DotF, so both tiles get a similar amount of defenses.... which means there are not many spare cuirs to cover the cats and 1-movers headed for magnus. oh well.... if they attack this turn, i, uh, hope we roll well

well, this turn's deploy was pretty unhinged and has plenty of potential to go wrong..... as long as the only troops they have are the ones we can see we should be fine, but, lol when has that EVER been true...



next turn we will have fully paid off our loans to nauf and mjmd and will actually be MAKING gold at 0% science again  see see, i am a good and honest debtor (pay no attention to the 150 gold we pulled out of thin air on the strike turn...)

finally, before i hit end turn, there is the question of whether to offer ankyra back to ginger for the NAP... well, i really don't want to do that without lurker discussion.... and i suppose it depends on the position we expect to be in 6t from now. there is a downside to offering before we make it to the cities that border ginger, which is that it is possible that ginger is holding back from piling on against greenline because they are not sure they can hold any gains they might make in the area against us, if they think WE do not feel that we are under a NAP that will outlast the enforced peace. right now if they run a stack into RFT and WE they will beat us to both of those cities and to a fair bit of greenline's eastern holdings.... i do not want 40 cuirs to come charging into our territory in 6 turns, but i also do not want that to happen.... i would be more than happy to trade ankyra for a cow deal in.... let's say two turns, if everything goes according to plan and, by that point, we own RFT and have Work Ethic in range. but do we think they'll still be willing to accept such a thing if greenline has lost 5 cities by that point and seems headed for a speedy collapse?

in the end, i think i won't offer this turn and will gamble on them still being willing to accept 1-2 turns from now, at which point i probably will make the offer. but would love to hear yalls thoughts on that and could definitely be talked into logging back on again to offer it

[williams482]

Is there any precedent for players attempting to realpoltik themselves some extra concessions onto an agreement they already view as binding? It seems plausible that Ginger could be trying to take advantage of your apparent uncertainty about an agreement that I would think is about as cut and dry as a peace-treaty-with-extended-NAP can possibly be.

Now if that's not what's going on, I'm still not certain I like the idea of giving away Ankyra. As you've stated it's a valuable crumple zone which Ginger seems to be focussing on more than they should; it's also a heavily fortified position that even cavs aren't going to be able to trade efficiently against without artillery support, and it protects a much more valuable core city behind it. For a guaranteed 20 turns of peace (beyond the enforced period) that's probably worth it, but we're talking about a treaty you thought you had already secured, and which you have stated you would consider a dastardly act if it was broken. Why are we giving up a fortified border city to reafirm that deal which should already be in place? Are we really confident that we'd get the diplomatic situation we're asking for, and that Ginger would consider the full 20 turns binding instead of just the initial 10?

If I may get a little tilty in the other direction here, I say that if they want to break the NAP we thought they signed to get Ankyra back, they can break their word and crawl through a swarm of fortified longbows to do it. Or they can just respect the treaty they already signed.

[ljubljana]

hmmm.... i am willing to give them just the tiniest, smallest benefit of the doubt about whether there is any chance they just didn't understand our meaning behind the peace deal, and here is why: on the prior turn they offered an incomprehensible 4-part peace deal, with one component being a deal in which they asked for 93 gold. surely they didn't intend for that to be a 93-turn deal, right? i have no idea what they thought they meant, but perhaps they are interpreting our 30 gold offer in light of whatever different thing they believe attaching gold to a peace deal means? idk, it does strain credulity a bit but if they ARE trying to use diplo to leverage the threat of breaking an agreement to get more concessions that seems a little over the line so idk

Turn 186 - Zululand



heads up yall - remember to cancel your loan payments manually when their duration expires, because apparently the game doesn't automatically do that for you 

well, i guess one thing that makes blitz warfare so effective - here as, i suppose, in the real world - is the shock and awe factor.... greenline maybe can't hold this position but they could be extracting losses and forcing tough decisions, for sure. but they haven't played more than a 5-minute turn since the war started and seem completely demoralized. now how do we nerf THAT aspect of 2-movers...



a new pike actually appeared here between turns! it wasn't whipped either as they didn't whip last turn..... and if it was naturally produced, well... with what? the 2 hammers/turn this city makes on its own? must have been wandering around near the city but just outside our vision.... anyways, the top cuir only get 32% odds attacking it so we are likely to lose stuff attacking here... but we did bring extra units and you guys know how i feel about waiting (typically i do not favor waiting)



this time the game made sense - everyone won the battles they were favored to, so we lost the first cuir that had to attack the pike but nothing else.

despite its size, the city kept a courthouse, market, and, thank goodness, granary.... unfortunately, both this city and hungary rush are culture-crushed by mjmd from across the water and are going to require anti-flip garrisons and whipped libraries to stay under our control. and without a granary, this spot would have taken ten thousand years to work its way up to any kind of culture. before borders pop, it is seriously going to control just one sugar, one non-lighthouse coast, and a desert, which is starve-at-size-3 territory, nice. so i suppose the plan should be to 1-whip the only thing we can with the dying pop - a wall - then do a second 1-whip on a castle (thank u pro <333), then build culture working the sugar and a citizen? it would still take us way too much time to pop borders but i can't think of anything faster



greenline went for an interesting and, i'd say, a good zone-defense play, moving their maces and a longbow to the tile 2S of the cat stack. this prevents us from taking the choke (which you can see i have helpfully labeled "choke" so i don't forget) and will allow them to reinforce RFT next turn with both 1-movers and 2-movers if we go for it. that is enough to allow the city to hold out a turn if they do it.. hmm. that is appreciably awkward for us, good move

i have to think about the best way forward... surely sticking a bunch of guys on the forested hill (have funnnn) is part of a solution - that's a great tile for us, from which we can stage attacks on magnus and make holding the choke difficult, if not impossible, for them. i will have to do some simming about what it would take for them to get odds though - they would have to almost fully collateral us down to do so but they do have the cats in range to do that...

in contrast, the plains hill our catstack is on now is NOT safe for next turn... we know there were 4 workers at RFT and, unless we find them in the course of playing, they could be lurking behind the choke in range of combat-roading the floodplains. so our choices are: advance the cats to the forested hill with our hitters, where they will absorb collateral but give greenline some chance of killing them, or retreat them to where they won't do anything.... hmm. yeah this requires simming before committing



and then we DID find the workers, neatly just out of range of the floodplain

ok well, RFT lacks for meaningful defenders so i think some sort of two-pronged approach should work.... move most or all of the 1-movers to the forest hill and dare greenline to collateral them down, and move the cuirs in range of RFT? they can defend one or the other but if they go all-in to hold RFT, that leaves only pikes and cats to hold magnus, and i think they will lose control of the choke, at which point one city or the other will have to go down....

beep boop, don't lose sight of the broader strategic picture please! we have a big problem, and one that is largely of our own making



i've been tracking this for a minute but this is the first time i've been really worried about it.... ginger is no longer the economic runaway in this game. i am not quite sure how it happened (surely our little war didn't slow them THAT much??) and maybe this will chance when their bab conquests are not still size 5 and below, but sheesh. that is NOT in golden age mode btw, though they did just pop a great person that could probably be used shortly for that!

so is this conventional teching, or did they Turn On The Slider?



i think the former. they just picked up gunpowder and printing press, in some order, and are about to roughly 3-turn rifling or economics for the great merchant, i think. still a few techs away from cavs but they're definitely going to have rifles by the time we are in position to hurt them. and THEN they can cash in liberalism (for which they have no competition at all) and turn on the slider



here are their top cities, for reference.... how long would it take to hit 50k culture at 100% in a city starting essentially from scratch? well they have a ton of cottages, so let's assume at least two kirishima-level cottage farms making maybe 75 raw commerce, times 100% from free speech.... well, with just that it would take unreasonably long, so there must be something else they would plan to add to that.... religion would be tricky though as only 3 have ever spread within their territory. or they can just conventionally go a-conquering at cavs and rifles, against the gav remnants or the greenline remnants or us, lol

i think i made the wrong move in spreading judaism instead of waiting to get a few taoist monasteries on line. i cannot believe i'm saying that but i think it's true  i don't know if we can afford to keep feeding them more gnp by continuing to do so at this point.... but if we do NOT do that then our draftees will have little to no chance to fight off their rifles.....

ok, taking a break for simming now

[ljubljana]

well, i simmed about as much as i could get myself to endure and the verdict is... something like 3 or 4 units on the PFH, in range of everything in magnus, does trade efficiently on defense, with them having to spend a little under twice as many units to crack it whether they use cats or just go straight in with attackers. moving the whole stack onto the PFH does NOT trade particularly efficiently - for 20 of our units, we kill all their cats and like 5-6 attackers but then they get a cleanup and we do not have anyone in range to punish the survivors. that could still be the right move for us in terms of tempo though... RFT dies next turn for sure if they go for that

i also realized something else



they actually could combat-road the desert and then their knights can get into our RFT attackers. oh ewwww. ew ew ew. i mean, they'd be attacking at terrible odds but if they spam enough units through the gap they might be able to either kill our super-medic or seriously damage the RFT attack force.... ok, fine. i will try to take both hills S and SE of our stack, but with just a few units, to try and claim them for the time being and deter any attempts to squeeze through the gap with a combat road.... then the rest will fortify this turn to protect the cats "for sure" (again, barring any workers in the fog....) and get us that sweet sweet 5%. we do have many units of all kinds just to the north in the DotF area so the time will come when we can advance into the teeth of the magnus stack and take the PFH in force (maybe even as soon as next turn, with more cuirs coming in to revenge kill anyone who might survive a wipe of the PFH stack) but for now maybe it's best not to overextend

on an unrelated note



look who discovered the "chop forest" button  they STILL have not restored irrigation to prussa and attaleia btw, and attaleia + meleti have been stuck on size 7 since the war. 

also, i know, the research is pretty gross.... as of next turn, we will no longer be "no drama obama"..... i should have done this on the way to music (like, i REALLY should have done this on the way to music) but i did not realize how badly we would need a theater to guarantee the next golden age. at the very least abi



(pictured: abi) can double-forge-whip the theater to drop another big whack of hammers into the national epic. if all goes well, we should be able to start working specialists in about.... 10 turns..... so we are looking at sometime in the t230s for the actual golden age. i am sad to say that given our current beaker rate that will probably not be far behind our ETA on biology, especially since i feel that we must divert to military science on the way (formation grenadiers are probably the best counter unit we can get vs the mixed cav + rifle stacks we are likely to face during the inevitable dogpile)

if we take RFT next turn and feel that work ethic is likely to fall on the turn after, we should be far enough ahead of the pace that there will not be much vulturing left for ginger to do. in that case, i am highly likely to offer ankyra back, anathema though that might be to our notion of good-faith fair play with the greenline attack looking more involved than i had hoped, and mjmd about to liberalism rifling and likely to be very down to help even hated ginger (they are still at war for who knows what reason) rein us in, i think nothing more significantly impacts our win probability than making sure ginger is not available to pile on... even if it is only in THEIR mind that they might be considered "available" for such a thing, the fact is that if they do go through with it we can probably no longer win the game and i think we have to bow to that reality...

[ljubljana]

guys i think i see how this might end.... with mjmd cashing out liberalism for ASSEMBLY LINE and killing us (or anyone?) with drafted infantry . they are seriously not that far away - they just got a great prophet, and are a lock for the economics great merchant, and if they have another great person saved up that's golden age. they have no competition for liberalism at all unless ginger grabs education just to make them burn it. and how many techs do they need to unlock AL? economics (likely in progress now), nationalism, rifling, constitution, corporation, chemistry, steam power.... i could definitely see them blitzing through 3 of those in the GA given that GNP stat so they could probably get there when we are still stuck on grenadiers

who among the remaining research-capable powers has any chance of going for education to make them burn it early? not us, pretty much for sure; i don't expect to ever build a university this game with how much military we're going to need to stay alive from here, and frankly with us only owning like 8 LIBRARIES in the first place naufragar's position is looking increasingly desperate and i'm pretty sure they're doing the LOOONG march to steel in the hopes of cracking.... well, who exactly? maybe they will stab me right in the heart, but with a superdeath who already took two cities off them that seems not likely... but SD's not going to break in a 1v1, they've already demonstrated the ability to field knight stacks that can wipe nauf's grens and adding cannons is not going to change that equation. so maybe they do already have some thoughts of going after mjmd's bizarrely extended northern holdings?

either way i think i'd better send diplo to both of them suggesting that india needs reining in. not... that i'm really sure HOW to convey that..... especially as we clearly will not be able to help in such a war ourselves for some time, if ever with ginger gnawing at our heels

ok, but what would an AL push from mjmd demand from us? are we supposed to ditch our current research plan and go for rifling instead? nah, i don't think so.... grens are much better at the task of saving us from the rifles of our pissed-off neighbors, and defending in cities vs infantry they should be about equal to rifles because um.... say it with me..... rifling obsoletes chichen itza...... rifles can be drafted, of course, but i am a bit unsure as to if that's actually an upgrade or not....? for two pop we can either have one rifle or two muskets, and the two muskets beat the rifle head to head a good majority of the time.... maybe the situation would be different if we have pop to burn and are limited by the number of draft actions, but uh, thaaaat is probably not going to be a problem we have for a LONG time maybe post-biology it will be but by then there's a very good chance that we will already be past the time of looking for answers to infantry and into the time of getting devoured by them

so what IS the renaissance unit we're supposed to build that does the best against infantry? cannons? naaah, that seems wrong, they still die badly when attacking and catapults are more hammer-efficient at applying collateral. cavalry? that's probably right... pinch cavalry should do okay and force mjmd of no-free-promotions to find a way to make formation infantry with, what, maybe one lifetime great general spawned so far? but then, this could be wrong but i can't shake the sense that cavs (which cost a full 120 hand-produced hammers, mind you) are only a marginal upgrade over a unit called the cuirassier that we can build already....

if yall think there is an argument that rifling should be our next military tech goal (so.... our next overall tech goal, then ) please feel free to say so! i think i still feel that military science makes more sense though. one, we are significantly closer (or.... we will be, if and when we have an economy again) and it represents less of a diversion from what i view as our core economic tech requirements going forward. two, keeping chichen itza active is kind of a meme but i think the marginal value of grens against cav/rifle stacks is not; with rifle/cuir we will not have a good answer to enemy rifles on defensive terrain, but with grens.... well, i guess we don't have a great answer to cavs, but i at least expect those to be less numerous for not being draftable..... then three, there is the drafting consideration, which, am i delusional for thinking i'd rather have two drafted muskets than one drafted rifle? and four, commandos.... we are one great general (and west point) away from commandos and it is conceivable that we could get there during this greenline war. i am not sure we have much of a prospect for offensive war between now and having an economy again but if we do, those would be how it could happen, and they could be a tool to get dogs to peace out of a potential pile as well, if it comes to that

[williams482]

I think your arguments for prioritizing stuff other than rifles make sense. Commando snipes are powerful, if nothing else because they force an opponent to deploy their troops less efficiently. A very big deal against a spread out opponent like Ginger.

I suspect you are underrating cannons at least to some degree. Against infantry who the hell knows, but against era equivalent units, the greater survivability seems like it should be a pretty substantial benefit over the similarly destructive but 100% dead cats.