[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

215

no-meds mode is over, but now we are in insomnia mode, oops.... so please excuse any delirium (or don't, if you don't feel like it)



so ginger has passed us in milpower, and while they aren't going all-in on troops right now, they are building them at a steady clip. and they 1-turned economics and are about to do the same with corporation. with assembly line next. it is monstrously expensive at 8k beakers, but their gnp in golden age mode is uh, 2600. i count 2 turns left of their GA - coming out of it will hurt their research rate somewhat but they should still hit AL in maybe 6 turns. at which point we will have, um.... printing press? and partial progress towards replacable? yeeesh

soooo yeah it's gonna be rifling next

now can i come off these wealth builds to make more troops, i don't know.... we will need significantly more cats if we want to tackle a bigass infantry stack in 10 turns, for sure. but we will also need to actually have rifling in 10 turns. lol, shit yall, what a mess this is turning into  probably almost time to start begging mjmd for loans, at any rate



i am, at least, going to make a brave attempt to get us to PP in 2 turns, which is our next major economic inflection point. it's tricky but i think we can make it happen by swapping, what, 71 gold's worth of these wealth builds to research, and coming off ikhandas and granaries in the places that are still on them for a turn to make up the difference, if we have to. in theory we then shoooould be able to do RP in 2 and rifling in 3 if we could magically run max science on them both, which is a delusional fantasy  therein would be the purpose and timing of the monster loan requests.... if, um, if there is anyone with the cash to grant them to us (which there currently is not...)



perhaps i'd better bite the bullet and drop these 2 GGs in aksum, in a blind exercise of trust in naufragar that i REALLY hope i don't come to regret  i really didn't want to do that, but another 400 hammers into west point is a totally delusional proposition right now. that gets us to 17 XP on new horse units, and with one more GG from a ginger war (or west point, if there is no ginger war) we could start cranking future commandos. and if this backfires and nauf attacks us, then that's a different kind of GG

and then the really hard question: do we draft more muskets, now or in the near future, even if it costs us precious time in the race to rifling? i have to admit, there is a part of me that's very much inclined to - they may not be great units, but they are hitters, and a sufficiently gigantic stack of hitters is probably what it will take to batter down the horrible infantry stack ginger is likely to throw at us in 10 turns. can we really afford to turn down efficiently-produced units in that time period, however obsolete they may be? but equally, there are not too many places we can draft from that would not be exceedingly painful - like, draft off of grass village painful, or take a city with 9 draft unhappy back up to 12 painful, that kind of thing. yuck. how i dream of a future where the conquered cities in the south can help - we are almost there but not quite...



at least we got our tiles back :O no 1-turning us from the fog, not anymore



ok, they're willing to fish us.... but what about this? wouldst thou go this far? ostensibly they may be building troops because they can't trust us not to come get them after peace is up - can we do anything about that? i am confident that allowing mutual scouting will favor us as the ostensible defender, since their attack could come anywhere along a gigantic front and there is no good place for us to position our stack unless we have sight on theirs. and we are not making progress in the EP race, but perhaps its continued existence is making them uneasy.... if they are down to let us mutually scout one another, i suppose i am down to put our EP elsewhere for a minute and, i don't know, see if that helps. here's the EP sitch for future documentation so we can tell if they dial back their spending or not

according to the EP graph



our per-turn numbers are similar - i guess i don't know if that's because they're running mercs spy specialists they'd rather not run, but even if it is i think the BPT they'd make back by switching off them is not enormous.... i think it's worth our time to at least attempt to de-escalate, for a couple turns if nothing else, given that they still could easily swap to nationhood and try to kill us with drafted infantry but they have not quite committed to doing so yet

actual EP numbers, for future reference, with me having swapped off ginger for the first time in ten thousand years



now would i be so willing to cool things off with ginger if i thought we had no chance to win, and were still playing for the silver medal of "stop ginger from winning"? nah, probably not..... which i guess means i DO think we still have a chance?? not an enormous one, sure, but it's better than superdeath's or naufragar's i think, and the horrific SD/mjmd sharkfin above, coupled with SD razing the buddhist holy city that i expected to go to india, is a huge blow to mjmd's chances. i'm not sure what our chances are (ginger is back in favorite status imo) but to my great surprise, i think they're still nonzero.... but they rely pretty heavily on ginger not slamming 50 infantry into us in the next 9 turns. sooo gotta do whatever is in our power to keep that from happening i guess

[ljubljana]

logged in to check my positioning and got a flurry of diplo from superdeath, who wants:

world map for world map and stop trading with mjmd (ignored)
world map for world map (accepted)
incense (ignored)
incense and war with mjmd (ignored)

idk how to signal neutrality without upsetting them too much... giving them incense does serve our strategic interest but i think it would upset india too much to be worth it (if india notices at least). maybe if they're really far whipped down and headed for collapse i'll think about it? but the reality is that even if we weren't in a long NAP with india, piling in against mjmd seems suicidal from this position maybe i will apologetically give them cow/cow and war with ginger on my end to attempt to signal something along those lines...

i guess i could offer them incense for stop trading with ginger (now or in the future). they are sending ging ivory for 3 GPT which is something i'd like to stop.... could be worth it but i think only if ginger doesn't want to re-open borders, if there actually is a chance to get a detente between us i'm not going to jeopardize that

also

Ginger?

maybe i'm reading too much into it, but this does not soooound like someone who's in negotiations with them about 2v1ing us....

i really don't understand why ginger is so demoralized right now they sure seem to be - ever since the battle of RFT, they have been playing 5-15 minute turns, procrastinating the turn for a long time, and sometimes even missing the 24 hour window like today. i acted pretty similarly after they stabbed us initially and it was because the prospect of playing a doomed-looking game filled me with dread and despair (my version of a 15-minute turn is a 1-hour turn, but i swear i was rushing)

but honestly i'm just confused as to why the position seems so bad to them...? like, they didn't really lose the war with us - sure, maybe it was a strategic setback in that they didn't save greenline, but in macro terms, our overall hammer exchange was about even according to the power graph, and they did an enormous amount of damage to our economic recovery by making us whip so far down. they are also an era ahead of us tech, and just saw their main rival for the win get embroiled in a hot war that looks increasingly quagmirey, with a big power sharkfin to match. either i'm badly misreading their mood, or one of us is WAY off in our evaluation of the position..... regardless of the circumstances, for there to exist a gulf in our perceptions as wide as (me: i think ginger is the favorite or at worst a close second) vs (ginger: position is so hopeless that i dread playing the turn every day) is just bizarre to me

[williams482]

I think that if we feel Ginger is a massive favorite over us, we feel that peace relatively favors us over them, and Ginger isn't really playing carefully and their mood seems pretty grim, then the correct gamble to take is betting that they don't attack us just yet, and take actions which make de-escalation on our border more likely. In that vein open borders seems good, infrastructure development seems appropriate, and although pushing to rifling is still worth doing, crushing the economy further and further into the pit of despair is probably not wise. So yeah, stop drafting, and be very careful about unfavorable loans.

The reason to get rifling without immediately crash building units is so that you can crash build (and draft, and possibly upgrade) when you need to. It means that you have the ability to exploit your strategic depth to build an army even if you are "surprised" by a Ginger attack, gambling a couple border cities against the benefit of actually building some infrastructure while there remains hope of continued peace. It also means that in the worst case, you have the tech to throw all the production of your hypothetically doomed empire into making an invader's life as miserable as possible.

So, chill, embrace hope, try to play nice, and build some banks (or whatever). If ginger jumps you in nine turns then oh well, you're going to lose, focus on making their campaign a miserable one from that point on.

[ljubljana]

reporting the first half of the turn; i'm so tired and might need a nap before the second

whew, ok. civac played for ginger so

216

unfortunately it is pretty significant for civac to take over on this turn, as i have no idea how their reaction to our open borders request and EP dial-down would compare with ginger's. that could mean we get it when we otherwise wouldn't have, but i think it's more likely they'd reject it and let ginger decide. no idea if they're in communication over discord or what, though, and from the lack of posting in their thread, there's some chance that if they rejected OB then ginger will never see the offer..... in that case i guess i'll have to think about reoffering it, even though usually doing that on consecutive turns is something i consider too annoying to be a good idea. awkward...



yeah. no OB, and assembly line due in 4t (though not really as the GA will end soon). maybe what i'll do is counter with OB plus a lux on our side - it's not an annoying re-offer of the same exact deal, costs us nothing, and should tip their hand a bit about how soon they plan to attack. and yeesh, the hits keep coming for poor mjmd.... see that great prophet? a while ago we spotted TWO great prophets and a scientist just chilling in their capital this would have been a perfectly-timed third GA for factory building too - i can only imagine the rage and dismay that must be going on in their thread right now



aksum reaches a milestone - its first 1 turn cuir with no whipping, just natural production and overflow in 2 turns it will hit another - the magic size 14 growth is a "strong level-up", in sullan final fantasy I　 terms, that will magically add a third gold to all of our cities that are sufficiently far away. which at this point is.... almost all of them



messed around with our finances a bunch.... and we can just, just, JUST get to printing press next turn without going broke or going off any ikhandas or granaries. but i think next turn we'll have to (hopefully take out loans and) switch back over to mostly military builds. if ginger's coming for us we are way short of everything - most urgently cats, but i'd also like to start pre-building a wave of cuirs, to be in-queue upgraded to cavs once we unlock them



just going to ever so slightly starve magnus to shave a turn off the FP.... don't worry about it



another massive confrontation brewing between mjmd and superdeath over scooter's capital (most of the stack inside is SD's)

TODO: SD diplo, ginger diplo, EP screenie, double-check finances

^^ you guys don't see it but i do this almost every turn so i don't forget to do stuff before i hit end turn

[ljubljana]

I think that if we feel Ginger is a massive favorite over us, we feel that peace relatively favors us over them, and Ginger isn't really playing carefully and their mood seems pretty grim, then the correct gamble to take is betting that they don't attack us just yet, and take actions which make de-escalation on our border more likely. In that vein open borders seems good, infrastructure development seems appropriate, and although pushing to rifling is still worth doing, crushing the economy further and further into the pit of despair is probably not wise. So yeah, stop drafting, and be very careful about unfavorable loans.

The reason to get rifling without immediately crash building units is so that you can crash build (and draft, and possibly upgrade) when you need to. It means that you have the ability to exploit your strategic depth to build an army even if you are "surprised" by a Ginger attack, gambling a couple border cities against the benefit of actually building some infrastructure while there remains hope of continued peace. It also means that in the worst case, you have the tech to throw all the production of your hypothetically doomed empire into making an invader's life as miserable as possible.

So, chill, embrace hope, try to play nice, and build some banks (or whatever). If ginger jumps you in nine turns then oh well, you're going to lose, focus on making their campaign a miserable one from that point on.

heh.... so the thing is, "crash" building is not really the right word for it, since in addition to no functional economy we also have no functional production  other than mighty liability aksum (how long does it have to live before not selling it to nauf ends up paying off?) and a few cities like magnus that we could make strong producers by cutting off growth (but that's wrong, rifle drafting converts food -> hammers at a 2:1ish ratio) our next strongest baseline producers are down at around the 15ish HPT range. so if we want to crash-build cavs, in particular (which i believe are what we need to beat an infantry horde), the minute we get rifling, what we need to do is crash-build cuirs over the time period between now and then, so we can in-queue upgrade and thereby magic a cav wave into being

although, update: actually, after we get replaceable, it may be better for those cities that can to come off non-river plains farms and onto plains hill windmills in the military scenario, especially a) if the city in question has a forge or b) if it lacks a realistic chance of hitting size 7 in time. that trades 1 food for 3 hammers which is better than the rifle-drafting rate, and the hammers go into cavs which are almost certainly more important to mass right now than even tokurifles. and in turn that means i'd better set all our workers windmilling over the next few turns ok, now that's interesting, when i finish the turn i'll redo the micro with that in mind

also, call me delulu but i am not so sure it's over-over if they attack in 9t. we can afford to have one or two border cities burned (even if one of them, kirishima, is still among our very top cities overall). we just need to efficiently defeat their stack and recapture anything they take. who knows, if we manage to do that, we may even find ourselves in position to make minor gains against ginger (seems unlikely, but i think we would have last time if we hadn't peaced out)

question for you, williams: what would you do in ginger's position here? i think "attack now", "build factories while teching to tanks and attack then", and "race us to space while seizing any 2v1 or 3v1 opportunities" are all viable but i'm having a hard time thinking objectively about which is correct. ofc there is clearly an inextricable emotional element to this that could sway them in either direction (attack asap because fuck the zulu? don't attack so the game's less effort?) but ignoring that, i'd love to hear your take on the strategic situation (and actually on the strategic situation for as many players as you're up for writing about ) and then follow-uip question: if you are ginger and you do want to attack immediately, WHERE along our giant front would you send your stack?

[williams482]

That's an interesting question.

If I were Ginger, and I knew what I actually know about what you're thinking in here and how horribly ravaged your massive empire is, I'd play for tanks. I wouldn't want to come back with a cav stack considering you apparently have six million impis hanging around ready to be thrown into the meatgrinder again, and although infantry are very strong, they are also slow and vulnerable to cav+cat attacks. Tanks are fast, yet another substantial strength bump, and will hold value long enough that the veterans of this war will be valuable in the next war, likely to start very soon after you are eliminated and consist of attempting to conquer land taken off you by other players.

My logic here is that while time favors you, that's only true if you can use that time to tech up and develop your civ so that your 40-odd cities can actually build relevant units. You clearly don't want to do that and would instead prefer to build a massive swarm of obsolete units that can (with substantial losses) hurt an infantry stack but will be just short of utterly hopeless against 28 strength tanks. The tanks will also move much faster, allowing me to more quickly dismantle your empire before you scrounge up yet another army of units just barely large and strong enough to give me serious trouble. Even if you can't build units naturally in the time you'd have while my infantry stroll from one city to the next, maybe you double-revolt back to slavery and whip out a bunch of cavs? That seems like something you'd do with your back against the wall, you've more or less done it already this game.

Without knowing anything about how you are thinking about this extremely broad, shallow, and underdeveloped empire of yours, I'm not sure. For one thing I'm thoroughly enmeshed in our side of this conflict and struggle to separate out what I already know about your mentality and plans. But I think I'd be tempted by tanks and factories anyway, especially considering that as Ginger, I'm apparently rather fond of building a monstrous infrastructure empire and then turning it into a dominant military the conventional way. Tactical speed also remains a substantial factor here, as even if I'm guaranteed to win the battles in the field, the time it takes me to crash through your cities and take them for myself is crucial for maximizing the spoils that go to me instead of Nauf or mjmd.

As for where I'd attack, I can only be myself here (I don't actually know much about Ginger's playstyle) but I'm fond of going for the kill as fast as possible and here that means Takayasu. It's by far the strongest of your border cities, and although the garrison is substantial, that also means that if I can rip through it I'll have dealt with that much more of your existing military. I know that you have considerable depth to chew through and that many of these cities are bad enough to be indistinguishable, so I want to start my war by taking out one of the exceptions, and hopefully following shortly after with another exception (your capital).

On similar lines, I'd wonder if I could sneak a force of older two-movers across your borders intent on razing Aksum, where I know your heroic epic is, and which appears to be one of your better developed production cities. It's reasonable to assume you also have GGs in there, and regardless are going to get a disproportionate chunk of your military from it. If I had a big stacks of cavs/cuirs, I'd strongly consider signing OB with you, nauf, and mjmd, declaring war on SD as cover, and marching that stack across your land into the nominal SD combat zone intent on feigning action (maybe some pillaging) on the SD front before springing a surprise raid at Aksum at the same time my newly minted tanks charge over our eastern border. Taking out two of your best cities, including your heroic epic city, would put a substantial dent in your ability to build modern units with which to oppose me, as well as denying Nauf a very valuable developed city that they would otherwise surely take from you.

In that scenario you would still have plenty of old crap to throw at me, and would no doubt conjure up some slapshod, reckless plan to make my invasion more painful than it ought to be, but said plan would be that much less effective missing two core cities (instead of the underdeveloped former Greenline cities I expect I could take rather more easily, but with less to gain from doing so).

Again, I am not Ginger, I don't know what Ginger is thinking, and I do know what you are thinking, so it's not really a fair assessment. But that's my best guess at what I would do.

[williams482]

Oh, one more thing: If I saw you were suddenly getting three food per turn from your plains farms, I'd get genuinely worried and want you dead ASAP. 40+ city Zulu with an obsolete army and hilariously undergrown, underdeveloped land is not especially scary, but biology on this map (and State Property after it) changes everything.

[ljubljana]

215-216 double

more diplo from superdeath:



proposing us versus the world forever <3 this is sweet and i love the principle of it. in fact, were this a full-diplo game, i'd probably be down to join SD and nauf in a 3v2 against the others if i could be confident that neither would defection. however.... i'm really sorry to say this SD, but if we allied against ginger and mjmd, i would have my hands full just trying to survive against ginger, and would be in no position to offer you meaningful help against india  and i'm not so sure we even could get nauf on our side, and if we can't do that there's no winning if the weaker pair is on the wrong side of the 3v2. i'll send back cow/cow with war with ginger on my end, and stop spending EP on SD to prevent them from feeling like i intend harm....

although if i'm not spending EP on any of ginger, SD, nauf, and mjmd because i don't want to piss them off.... well, where DO i put my EP? i can stall for a minute by dumping points into scooter, but what am i supposed to do after they die? it looks like very soon i will HAVE to annoy someone with EP spending and i don't relish that eventuality



mjmd has selected with unerring accuracy two of my absolute least favorite magic the gathering cards to rename egyptian cities after



and the first of many MGs has appeared



ok, economy re-rejiggered.... with one more city each on both research and wealth than i think i need, juuust in case our finances shift slightly at turn roll (which i feel like shouldn't happen, but i've seen it before on that turn when border shifts caused us to strike mid-turn, and i don't want to blindly trust that that's the only circumstance in which it can occur). hitting enter...



well, we got PP as planned, and with it a seismic leap in our GNP, up to nearly 500 net (....with almost every city on research or wealth). and another is due after this turn, with aksum hitting Magic Size 14 to boost trade routes in probably 30 cities, magnus's FP completing, and 18 city growths (!). but that will be our last "strong level up" for a while, and while we have edged ahead of the SD/nauf pair we are still none too close to the real contenders... i still feel pretty strongly that we really must get some military builds started - if nothing else because we only have something like 15 cats total right now D: but equally, RP is a 5-turn research at breakeven with our whole MFG being funneled into it (maaaybe that comes down to 4t after next turn's growth wave).

so i suspect we are a cool 9 turns from rifling still, unless we pick up some very fortuitous loans. which, first of all, is too late to use a great engineer from abi to bulb RP, so i think i made a mistake by working an engineer there and am going to come off it for as long as i can without sacrificing time on the great person's ETA. we have an over 80% shot at either a scientist or merchant, either of whom would hugely accelerate the upcoming bio push, and if we miss, engi and artist are both strong options for golden age purposes



btw check out the food graph :O

and here is how delightful our economic conditions become if we swap everything back onto mostly-cats:



mhm mhm this is untenable untenable unten able

shit yall. so how the hell are we going to make this happen? well.... not with cats right now, i think  if what we are trying to optimize for is "time in which we can get to a position where we can resist an infantry push", i think we need to hit rifling as quickly as possible such that, when we do hit it, we will have a wave of cavs ready to go immediately thereafter, while also having enough cats in theater that the cavs can actually kill stuff. how many cats vs cavs we need is a jusgement call based on how many infantry we expect ginger to field - in the worst-case, they are hiding rifles in-queue and will spawn an infantry from every city as soon as AL pops, so maybe 30 plus cannons and rifle/cav. so say it's a 60-unit stack with about equal infantry and non-infantry. we need one cat per every 2 units to deal 3 hits to everything, which is.... 30 cats, to probably not even fully collateral down the stack  right now we have 20, and they're split between the extreme north and extreme south since we have no idea where their push will hit  so we really need both a cat wave and a cav wave, and right now, if we do neither, we are still going to be barely started on rifling when ginger finishes assembly line. delightful

oh yeah, and note by the way that we only have 3 gold in the bank while the UI said we'd have 8 at the end of last turn. so if i hadn't dropped that extra city onto wealth "just to be safe" i think we actually would have missed printing press! nice :D



pretty sure there's no reason for them to reject this unless they're pretty certain they want war with us soon. hopefully this tips their hand.... although so too will simply hitting end turn, since i believe this is their last GA turn and therefore their last chance to either swap to OR to build factories or swap to nationhood to draft troops with which to come kill us

EP screenie from 215:



and from this turn:



so they're making around 90 EP/turn, similar to us. i'll give this a few turns to be noticed but once our lead evaporates we will have to switch back, as of course granting them city vis would be devastating

[ljubljana]

amazing, extremely detailed response, williams! thank you so much for taking the time to write all this out, and i'll do my best to touch on each point in what follows:

That's an interesting question.

If I were Ginger, and I knew what I actually know about what you're thinking in here and how horribly ravaged your massive empire is, I'd play for tanks. I wouldn't want to come back with a cav stack considering you apparently have six million impis hanging around ready to be thrown into the meatgrinder again, and although infantry are very strong, they are also slow and vulnerable to cav+cat attacks. Tanks are fast, yet another substantial strength bump, and will hold value long enough that the veterans of this war will be valuable in the next war, likely to start very soon after you are eliminated and consist of attempting to conquer land taken off you by other players.

My logic here is that while time favors you, that's only true if you can use that time to tech up and develop your civ so that your 40-odd cities can actually build relevant units. You clearly don't want to do that and would instead prefer to build a massive swarm of obsolete units that can (with substantial losses) hurt an infantry stack but will be just short of utterly hopeless against 28 strength tanks. The tanks will also move much faster, allowing me to more quickly dismantle your empire before you scrounge up yet another army of units just barely large and strong enough to give me serious trouble. Even if you can't build units naturally in the time you'd have while my infantry stroll from one city to the next, maybe you double-revolt back to slavery and whip out a bunch of cavs? That seems like something you'd do with your back against the wall, you've more or less done it already this game.

Without knowing anything about how you are thinking about this extremely broad, shallow, and underdeveloped empire of yours, I'm not sure. For one thing I'm thoroughly enmeshed in our side of this conflict and struggle to separate out what I already know about your mentality and plans. But I think I'd be tempted by tanks and factories anyway, especially considering that as Ginger, I'm apparently rather fond of building a monstrous infrastructure empire and then turning it into a dominant military the conventional way. Tactical speed also remains a substantial factor here, as even if I'm guaranteed to win the battles in the field, the time it takes me to crash through your cities and take them for myself is crucial for maximizing the spoils that go to me instead of Nauf or mjmd.

yeah, i certainly agree that they should be scared away from trying another cav stack after the last war, especially since i think pure cavs actually die 1v1 against the city garrison muskets behind 85% defenses in kirishima (and definitely die attacking into rifles). the thing about waiting for tanks though is that i do not think they are that close to tanks, and they haven't birthed any great people during this GA so it may be some time before they can speed things up with the 4-person GA. on the other hand they have an infantry-over-muskets tech advantage right now, if they choose to press it.... obviously they won't conquer us before we can get to cavs to counter, but perhaps they can do enough damage to at least knock us out as a competitor (to the extent they believe we still are one)

i'm seeing that they require the following techs to hit tanks: scimeth, physics, electricy, industrialism to build the units themselves, and then railroad, combustion for the oil wells. ostensibly this is just six techs (which is to say, it IS just four techs) but the path runs through scimeth at a pretty early date which is a massive anti-synergy with their gameplan since it obsoletes monasteries. that will cost them probably 120 GNP before multipliers, more if they're using wealth builds to get there faster. all in all it's not clear to me that they can get to tanks significantly before we hit assembly line ourselves and start endlessly drafting infantry, and if they can't, tanks will lose much of that tactical edge you mentioned because i don't think a (CR2) tank beats a fortified CG2 infantry one on one if they are not taking time to bomb out the cultural defenses...

these are just the counter-arguments to waiting though.... the counter-arguments to an infantry attack are significant too and i think you touched on all the ones i can think of. if our game enters a dead-for-sure state, i absolutely will whip all the way down into a massive cav stack and it's hard to see them putting together a big enough infantry pile to withstand that, even if they are able to do enough damage to knock us out of the game. hmmmm

As for where I'd attack, I can only be myself here (I don't actually know much about Ginger's playstyle) but I'm fond of going for the kill as fast as possible and here that means Takayasu. It's by far the strongest of your border cities, and although the garrison is substantial, that also means that if I can rip through it I'll have dealt with that much more of your existing military. I know that you have considerable depth to chew through and that many of these cities are bad enough to be indistinguishable, so I want to start my war by taking out one of the exceptions, and hopefully following shortly after with another exception (your capital).

yes, i think i feel the same way. there is one big argument in favor of attacking in the south and that is mjmd: if ginger attacks there now, while mjmd is occupied fighting SD, they can probably snap up the whole region and not have to split with india, then take their time killing the rest of our cities, otherwise there is the prospect of intervention by their main rival to contend with. i also see an argument for attacking in the center of our territory, around ura or DotF, in the hopes of severing us in two at our narrowest point. but probably going for the north, where they can do the most serious damage to us the fastest, will trump those arguments....

i ask because i'm really struggling over where to defensively position our 2-mover stack. right now it's at DotF, and so can plausibly reach either most likely attack site in 2-3 turns, but that's not fast enough and will concede a whole line of border cities to ginger before it arrives. our other options are to take the 50/50 and move it northwards or southwards, but obviously if we guess wrong that's catastrophic and we will lose a whole region. and splitting the stack seems even worse because then it will lack the power to even challenge what ginger is bringing...

On similar lines, I'd wonder if I could sneak a force of older two-movers across your borders intent on razing Aksum, where I know your heroic epic is, and which appears to be one of your better developed production cities. It's reasonable to assume you also have GGs in there, and regardless are going to get a disproportionate chunk of your military from it. If I had a big stacks of cavs/cuirs, I'd strongly consider signing OB with you, nauf, and mjmd, declaring war on SD as cover, and marching that stack across your land into the nominal SD combat zone intent on feigning action (maybe some pillaging) on the SD front before springing a surprise raid at Aksum at the same time my newly minted tanks charge over our eastern border. Taking out two of your best cities, including your heroic epic city, would put a substantial dent in your ability to build modern units with which to oppose me, as well as denying Nauf a very valuable developed city that they would otherwise surely take from you.

In that scenario you would still have plenty of old crap to throw at me, and would no doubt conjure up some slapshod, reckless plan to make my invasion more painful than it ought to be, but said plan would be that much less effective missing two core cities (instead of the underdeveloped former Greenline cities I expect I could take rather more easily, but with less to gain from doing so).

heh. this is an extremely amusing idea - i'm not sure they can do it before they have enough infantry that they don't need their 2-movers as part of their main attack force, but i could see it happening. i am pretty sure we can prevent it from working though: one of my short-term priorities once we get rifling is to stick a nice big stack of them in aksum lest nauf turn out to be less trustworthy than they seem. and as long as nauf is not on their side as well, we have a trump card if we think it might be happening - gift nauf one of our much weaker border cities (so, specifically gondar) in exchange for stop trading with ginger. not sure where their stack would be teleported in that case, but i don't think any of our targets near neutral tiles come close to the value of aksum

Oh, one more thing: If I saw you were suddenly getting three food per turn from your plains farms, I'd get genuinely worried and want you dead ASAP. 40+ city Zulu with an obsolete army and hilariously undergrown, underdeveloped land is not especially scary, but biology on this map (and State Property after it) changes everything.

yeah, i feel the same way. so in teching rifling before bio, i suppose i'm making the assertion that we must reach a position to plausibly survive even a 2- or 3-way dogpile before we go for bio, and frankly will probably have to be #1 in power by a lot to pull it off. but equally, i don't know how late we can delay it and still hope to catch up quickly enough in tech to win long-term. it seems to me like the closest to a solution to this that we have is to crank cats, cavs, and rifles endlessly while we tech up. i guess the worst-case outcome of that is starting an arms race, but arms races favor us anyways as the one AGG civ in the neighborhood, so at some point the others should have to accept us having more troops to avoid being strangled by their own defense budgets... but what do you think the right time to go for bio is?

re state property by the way, how sure are you that we're supposed to go for it here? by the time we hit communism i hope to have -70% maintenance costs in effect at all our cities, and its competition is really serious: maybe it beats mercs and its 7.5ish BPT/city with representation and libraries, but enviro and its +2 gold per windmill on a map with areas like that surrounding greenline's former capital? that i think is not too likely

[williams482]

For tech path: can you work out a rough timeline of how long it should reasonably take you to hit various benchmarks? You're crawling to Rifling and uncomfortably far from Steel, but you think you can get Assembly Line before Ginger has Industrialism+Combustion? I am sure you have a better feel for this than I do, but I was under the impression that you were in huge trouble technologically without the wealth builds (mutually exclusive with real military buildup) that are currently propping up your economy.

For stack placement: get it central and out of first-strike range, and beyond that it doesn't matter much. If Ginger comes at you with infantry you will lose the first city without a choice, and probably strategically fail to reinforce the second in hopes of pouncing on their stack after it's taken. 2-3 turns is plenty close enough for that.

I think you're right that mjmd's proximity in the south is a relevant counterbalance to the superior production centers in the north as far as which target is preferable, so it's not likely we can predict where Ginger would go. Best to play it safe and exploit your depth.

Also good point on monastery obsolescence. I haaaaaaate researching Scientific Method in any game where I get religious building booster wonders, never mind the full trinity. That's a reasonable case for trying the slow slog with infantry: take the economic hit of all that military and new city maintenance when fully powered, and deactivate the monasteries after things have stabilized. Of course reality rarely works out quite so neatly.

As for communism vs mercantilism vs environmentalism: how much distance maintenance are you paying right now? That should be visible to you in the economic advisor screen. Also worth checking on the civic maintenance cost difference: I forget how much help Environmentalism got in CTW (I know it's a substantial bump over the very mediocre BTS bonuses), but I'm pretty sure it's still a good bit more expensive. Finally, the +food for workshops and watermills is a major boost, especially the former: bio farms plus SP workshops can make any terrain monstrously productive hammerwise.

Finally, regarding the diplomatic costs of biology: it's so worth it. That's the way you turn this massive, badly underbuilt empire into something useful, and probably most of your rivals will be busy fighting other rivals with different scary power spikes when you get it. I wouldn't put it off, and I fully support a full fledged push for it as soon as Rifling is in.