September 10th, 2024, 16:06
(This post was last modified: September 10th, 2024, 16:08 by ljubljana.)
Posts: 2,830
Threads: 8
Joined: Apr 2015
268
well, big, big, massive double-turn today.... SD hasn't played yet but clock's getting low due to my turn-holding scoundrelhood so i'm sure it'll roll before we're done playing, or soon thereafter
been feeling guilty as hell all night over this but too late now
oil for silk huh? it's an interesting idea but we, um, don't actually have the ability to make any oil units as of now.... worth considering if our tech path doesn't run through refining though
DANG that's a bigass stack of ottoman ships.... with up to 20 tanks on them, so not much realistic prospect of stacking enough defenders to prevent them from cracking the coast (though i will try). i'm.... not too confident this is going to work though, i think mjmd has more than this
and here is the significant fleet that they have chosen to divert towards our north coast.... well, time to see if civac is as good as their word i guess
i think my interpretation of our NAP is as follows: i won't take aggressive action against them for the next 10 turns if they don't, even if we end up in a technical state of war due to the defensive pact. frankly it's not like i even COULD do much to hurt them anyways at this point  but if they invade us and burn kirishima or our coast then all bets are off of course.
culture countdown is starting to get kinda close, or i'd feel more conflicted about thinking about a side-switch like this
university to overflow into statue
nishikigi FARM, thank u besties
williams i owe you a bureau and unisuff analysis....
bureau: we're making 77 base commerce and 58 base hammers, to become something like 96/78 in the GA. bureau costs 110 gpt and inflation is 67%, for a total cost of 184.7. so it is a net loss; we can expect it to generate about 48 commerce and 39 hammers = 87 total goldhammers, to cost us about 100 gpt. but i think that's worth it to secure and accelerate the statue (probably?) (maybe?)
unisuff: we own 71 towns now, 3 of which are about to be bulldozed.... so 68 hammers, and from a quick glance i think about half of them are not making hammers now (grass or FP towns that are either non-riverside or in non-levee cities) so let's say half of those hammers will be boosted again by the GA, so it's more like 102 base hammers = 127 after the ubiquitous forges. for specialists, i see that we are currently working.... 34 non-mercs specialists for 102 base beakers... omg that's the same! they're both medium upkeep so no difference there.... we actually do need the reps happy in a few places but that's kinda marginal (i think city state rush is the only one of our top 5 cities that will actually become unhappy without reps....). i might draft off of some of those specialists in the next 2 turns due to the looming-looking war which is a point against it.... but then the statue /should/ come online after 3 turns which would of course put reps way ahead. idk, could really go either way on this one
anyway not done yet (and SD extended so might not be a double after all) but big question looks to be whether we should actually cancel the defpact with india or just go to war but accept that we can't really actually do much to help...... i think the latter is probably right, i don't want to openly torpedo our good relationship. but i increasingly feel kinda out of my depth in the diplo with this game so shrug
September 10th, 2024, 17:02
Posts: 2,830
Threads: 8
Joined: Apr 2015
omg you guys
September 10th, 2024, 19:40
Posts: 1,499
Threads: 0
Joined: Dec 2017
Okay, so what the heck could those Ottoman transports in the north be up to?
It sure seems like there's a huge attack coming against mjmd, which SD is apparently involved in as well. But those ships in the north are nowhere near Indian holdings (unless the ice is deceiving me and the world wrap is secretly toroidal) and would presumably be quite useful in attacking India. So we have to consider the possibility that they are coming for us, a second oathbreaking sneak attack delivered under cover of a NAP deal. But I'm having trouble believing it.
I see several plausible explanations (and i'm sure there are others as well) :
1. These ships are a threat, insurance against us taking the defpact wardec seriously and pressuring Ottoman holdings by forcing us to respect the threat of naval attack all around our coast. Making no effort to hide them makes sense if the objective is deterrence. If this is their purpose, the ships could plausibly be empty to make sure all actual ground troops are being thrown in against India.
2. these ships are targeting Nauf for some reason we have yet to work out; perhaps to establish airbases closer to Ginger's land?
3. This is a ground-based sneak attack against mjmd's northern flank. This is my crazy pet theory, and something I might have tried. mjmd is unlikely to expect a modern attack from that flank, which might allow a few surprise razes, especially if there are some high value cities over in that part of the world. I think it's supported by the lack of air power on display here: even a single carrier full of fighters would go a long ways towards breaking our defenses, especially if the plan was to knock the top defenders into low health and then grind through our piles of ancient trash over the course of multiple turns. But carriers are totally useless for an army intent on overland maneuvers.
If and when we think that we are safe from Ottoman attack, and we think we can break the treaty without revealing a surprise attack on mjmd, we should drop our defpact. I am doubtful that we'll get a chance to do that, so your plan to accept the wardec, take no aggressive action, and look to make peace when politically expedient is probably the way to go.
September 10th, 2024, 20:16
(This post was last modified: September 10th, 2024, 21:49 by ljubljana.)
Posts: 2,830
Threads: 8
Joined: Apr 2015
yeah, it sure could be a second NAP-stab but at this point.... why? i'm not really sure how it helps them, and i don't think 40 tanks off of two transport groups are going to hold our cities.... they could BURN our cities sure, but we're not their main competition to win the game, so what does that get them? the only reason i can think of is to force a concession to india out of us if they're sick of playing the game, but i don't think things are so hopeless for them that that's likely....
i think i've been assuming 1) is the most likely explanation. it makes some sense that they'd want something to threaten us with in case we DO try to take offensive action against them or interfere in some meaningful way. in theory they could then take one of our cities and offer to return it for peace, or something like that. i don't think the transports are empty per se - i did see a fair few of their land units disappear from their defensive stacks in their land last turn - but a lot of those units were cavs, so i suspect they're not exactly "fully loaded" either. and yeah, non-amphibious tanks and especially cavs without air support are not exactly a slam-dunk blow off of boats into a rifle pile....
3) would be SO funny, i really hope it's 3. and if it is, it fits with my conjecture that nauf will join this attack at some point as well (no movement form their stack yet, but they have rails and it wouldn't take long to reposiiton). nauf certainly has enough cannons to make progress if most of india's forces are diverted, but some "real" units from ginger would really help cover them.
the really big question i have that i'd like your opinion on: should we be joining this attack instead of merely failing to obstruct it? as big as that fleet is by civac and SD, i think india's may be bigger. and the worst part is that they are attacking into the teeth of india's air force, so if the fleets are comparably strong civac's will get bombed to hell and then stackwiped. they really need a massive advantage in locally concentrated modern tech units to pull this off, and i'm not seeing it, not with just TWO carriers, as capable as such a force is of toasting our obsolete ass.... i don't know how much navy mjmd has been building but, while it's mostly been destroyers that i can see, i don't know how many they have and i think destroyers still beat bombed-down battleships handily. tbh i think a direct attack with the force we can see would probably go so badly that there's an outside chance that this deploy from civac is just that, aggressive positioning designed to take control of this ocean while massing for a future conflict.... and about spoiling the surprise, civac has already done that by moving out, that sea is full of mjmd destroyers and i think their stack ended its turn like, one tile out of range of one...
so i have a bad feeling that if this is really an attack against mjmd, it might be about to faceplant. i want that to be good for us since it's a lot of wasted hammers for our longest-term adversary, but civac has to do real damage, like burn some mjmd cities damage, not just get wiped. if that happens and this navy just dies along with most of SD's army on those galleons, is the game just over? india just rolls through a bunch of SD cities and wins, or turns on the slider and hits culture unopposed, while civac has to slowly rebuild on a much smaller production base, right? so maybe we have to join in just to force the game to keep going.... although i likewise have less than zero idea of what WE could do to really hurt india with rifles and cavs and not even galleons of our own. maybe what we're supposed to do is try to convince civac to delay until the rest of us have factories online and are somewhat caught up in tech, and then dogpile india? i guess i could try that....
of course our relations with india have been so good all game, and they have been so nice to us in noted contrast to the ottomans, that i'm very hesitant to repay that with treachery. but is this close enough to the edge of "the game's over if we don't" that we now have to?
September 10th, 2024, 22:20
(This post was last modified: September 10th, 2024, 22:23 by ljubljana.)
Posts: 2,830
Threads: 8
Joined: Apr 2015
September 11th, 2024, 14:20
(This post was last modified: September 11th, 2024, 16:45 by ljubljana.)
Posts: 2,830
Threads: 8
Joined: Apr 2015
269
alright yall time for a bigass Significant Turn for which i have been preparing for a long time
great scientist produced with exactly 800 GPP and exactly 0 food left in the food box  and hey, we got hypatia! civ6 me would be proud  anyways i see no reason not to slam that launch golden age button. here is our gold per turn pre-GA, at um, 1463, how did that happen?
and after....
wellll ok
you will notice a lot of rifleman builds..... yeah, this is my "solution" to giving up the draft - i'm trying to have every city that can do so prebuild an infantry unit, and hopefully finish most of them and overflow into factories on the turn we hit assembly line (3 turns from now....?). those that can't will just build research to speed the tech along in the meantime
demos ahead of civac in both major categories and surprisingly close to india in gnp even!
made it out to 14h on mining inc with all the random coppers and such hooked up. that's pricey though.... i did not quite realize that the cost of the corporation also scales with the number of resources connected.... so we'll be paying 15 gpt after inflation and 12 gpt to mjmd for the privilege of 14 hammers in takakeisho... of course that's worth it in our ironworks city with the 300% hammer multiplier, but it's way more of a close call in cities that will only have 200% from forge/factory/coal plant. it MIGHT still be worth it but i'll have to think about it.... mjmd can use the cash to rush stuff with the kremlin, but i'll have to do some research about how efficient that is. we probably should only spread mininc around if we are either confident that it still improves our military production relative to mjmd to do so, or if we have faith in the ottoman push to burn down their corporate HQ (i do not have faith in this as of now...)
now we have to deal with takakeisho. to match my simmed ulundi's 3t time, we will need at least 114 base hammers ((88 + (114 * 3)) * 3.5 = 1505, though rounding errors might disrupt this), and we have.... 79. that's 93 with mininc, but 91 after our mercs great engineer vanishes into the environmentalism hole. so can we add 23 base hammers here without unisuff, to take us to 100 without the engineer? note that we have 39 food in the bank and so can afford a -13 food surplus to not starve (actually this was an unforced error by me, we should have more but i workshopped over the first farm too hastily)
as usual the answer is "yes, but".... we can hit 100 hammers but look at that -17 food deficit.... well, it's actually only -14 as enviro will fix the health problem, and then on subsequent turns we can farm the wheat again (that workshop was the most inefficient food -> hammers trade we took, losing 5 food for just 3 hammers) and i believe fix the threat of starvation (we can lose up to 15 this turn and still be ok losing 12 on the two following turns). so the margin will be razor-thin here, of course, but i think we can afford to not swap to unisuff, and i suspect representation's beakers are stronger given the circumstances, so..... (quick double-check to confirm i'm ok with not drafting and then.....)
yall dare me to do it?
siiick
here are some tile yields for yall to consider
with takakeisho all set to 3-turn SoL without cereal mills, we can send that executive to where it really wants to go, national epic city abi (which has been not working 5 super powerful hammer tiles for lack of citizens....). except ooooops i knew i'd fuck up some part of this micro badly, the exec is in atamifuji which is one tile too far away.....
unless...... i actually can't believe we have the worker labor to pull off a trick like this, i thought we were pretty badly short but workshopping the wheat saved us a TON in this respect (as opposed to railing and mining 3 hills to get the same amount of hammers)
there are various mistakes i might have made in the math at takakeisho that could still make this a terrible idea but i thiiiiink that such a prospect is remote enough that i feel ok about going for it
i thiiink abi's meant to be on a semi-break right now as it grows up to size, kicks out a few cereal execs for the cities that need it badly, and finishes the jail and security bureau for more spy specialist slots (i don't dare risk popping a great person who might conflict with that produced by any other city at this point). but as you can see from the new food surplus, its days of working 8+ specialists are not behind it
we finally got EP vision on superdeath's core and the picture is not encouraging....
yeah, even the border cities with india are mostly praetorian-defended..... shit yall. their entire gren + cannon army must be on ships right now..... yeah, i REALLY do not like our chances of keeping this game going if this attack goes off as signaled and fails....
still unsure what we should do about this civac coalition, but i'm starting to lean towards.... well, not joining outright, but offering to join in 20 turns. i think this attack is pretty toast if it goes in as-is, and that would probably be the end of SD as an independent state.... if nauf and i (and dare i hope SD as well?) can get factories up and build modern units i think we have a chance to make something happen, but i fear this is way too early and even all four of us attacking together would just get annihilated. i mean, really, wtf are SD's gren pile or even our rifle/cav pile going to do attacking off of boats into india's bombers and massed infantry?
the other option, i guess, is to let india roast civac's fleet and try to pounce on the ottomans while india carves through superdeath. however, lol  by which i mean, our best option to damage civac is an easily-countered commando strike to take some of their core by surprise while spending hideous numbers of cav to crack the infantry in one of their border cities. but how exactly are we supposed to take the rest of their territory, let alone reach a winning position in a 1v1 vs india, in such a scenario? meanwhile india will face praets and cannons in the superdeath cities....
or the other other option is to betray nauf and pounce on THEM while india carves up SD. i dislike that intensely but at least there we have a chance to succeed, unlike against civac (IMO). if mjmd starts conquering SD and a coalition looks like it won't make progress (and specifically if civac gets fleet-wiped), that is probably what i will try  with commandos we can probably expand pretty quickly through america, maybe moreso than mjmd can through SD, based solely on our not being slowed by enemy culture.... maybe there is a path for us that involves getting to the far end of SD first, and thereby denying india some of the spoils...?
September 11th, 2024, 20:48
Posts: 1,499
Threads: 0
Joined: Dec 2017
It does seem like we're reaching the point in the game where being a dick to your friends is mandatory if you want to win the game. With that said, I'm not sure either treacherous act does anything for us now.
If we were to try to join the mjmd dogpile... how? What would be the tactical plan, and how would it actually benefit the coalition generally and ourselves specifically?
September 11th, 2024, 20:57
(This post was last modified: September 11th, 2024, 21:57 by ljubljana.)
Posts: 2,830
Threads: 8
Joined: Apr 2015
frankly, i don't think there IS a good tactical plan for us to hurt mjmd..... there are various long-odds things we could try (build a boat in the inland sea and ship commandos over to then raid their core??) but they are easily foiled and i doubt we'll achieve the level of surprise necessary to pull them off. moreover once india starts putting boats in that sea, we can't really maintain control over it as they have two strong cities there while ours are all too weak to really mass ships. so we're pretty much conceding that hungary rush, CTR, and longship spam will be burned at some point (those three cities are all somewhere between "weak" and "very very weak" but it still hurts).
the best i can come up with right now (i'll keep thinking though) is essentially this: assemble our gigantic stack of 300+ units from across the empire, walk it over to the mjmd city just across the border from greenline's former core, and hope they are too busy with civac and SD and we are therefore able to take it. it helps the coalition by distracting india with more units and increasing the odds that they can burn an actually important target along the coast. frankly it doesn't help us at all, unless we think the game will end otherwise, in which case it helps us by keeping us alive that much longer  i really really don't like the idea as i'm sure you can tell..... but perhaps in 20-30 turns, with an intact civac navy at our side and the ability to field air units and maybe some nukes with our commandos, we could have more success. so perhaps the best stab attempt begins by convincing the ottos to wait, for god's sake....
September 11th, 2024, 21:56
(This post was last modified: September 11th, 2024, 21:56 by ljubljana.)
Posts: 2,830
Threads: 8
Joined: Apr 2015
diplomatic channels are also an option, if we think those would hold any sway with them..... i may not think we have a viable tactical plan, but signing a defpact with SD as well would be pretty clear about our intentions i think, and would make it feel like much less of a stab if we turn on india after they invade rome (for instance). it'd be more or less a bluff though as we can't really defend SD's territory ourselves given the distances involved and our vulnerability to attack at home, nor do i think we'd have the capacity to hurt india ourselves for another 20 turns or so.....
September 12th, 2024, 00:46
(This post was last modified: September 12th, 2024, 02:02 by ljubljana.)
Posts: 2,830
Threads: 8
Joined: Apr 2015
270
well, we have another turn, and i'm proooobably not gonna want to deal w it in the morning so
YO i did not even CONSIDER that that might be possible.... ONE turn assembly line???? no shot. ofc there actually might be no shot that this will actually happen as we don't have the cash to sustain a turn's worth of research at this rate buuuut i'll see what i can do
nuclear launch detected!!! or at least the possibility of one.... not yet sure that i'm actually going to hilariously build wall street in ichiyamamoto but it does pack a number of boons into one location:
a) can build it fast enough to not then stagnate forever waiting on the factory
b) is not in the same city as any other important national wonders
c) is deep enough in the interior that it is not very snipable if we eventually found a corp here
d) can work all its tiles, most of which now give pretty good commerce thanks to enviro.... after we add cereal mills that is. but we probably should add cereal mills to one of meisei/ichiyamamoto because otherwise some ultra-valuable hills in this region go unworked, so it is then a positive to build wall street in one of these two as that's 8 extra food that can go into specialists or working windmills. and of the two, meisei has more desert/peaks
e) i like this city a lot and want it to thrive
BWAhahahha ok mjmd might have done our civac-discouraging work for us.... THAT is not a navy that is crackable by what the ottos have brought to this party. almost reminiscent of some of our old civ6 battles, wouldn't you say?
well, with a refutation this profound, i almost think we must send civac an offer to join in 20 turns. otherwise, what do they even have left to play for? clearly civac + SD has no prospect of ever beating mjmd militarily with half their production and a military that is already rapidly falling behind india's.... their only hope is a space race but they're way behind in GNP too and, more importantly, there's no way they can launch before india can finish off a culture win
in the north, civac's attack force (or....intimidation force...?) is still moving forward.... i am really not sure what the point is though, i don't think 20 units is enough to crack wakamotoharu (or won't be once i reinforce it) even if several of those are double-attacking tanks. now if they are going for, like, AKSUM then i will be concerned........ but even in that case, with rails online i think we can reinforce in time
nobody followed us to democracy so i thiiiink we should have the statue sewn up. or at any rate, it will probably take multiple great engineers to beat us now. uh unless
oh that's bad. 58% OTTOMAN?? well.... of all the inconvenient times for their city to pop fourth-ring borders  i think this will cost us a base hammer in takakeisho, which doesn't sound like much except for the fact that i think our margin on this build is literally like, two hammers
um wtf how did this happen....??? yeah corporation added a 4 or 5 gold trade route to most of our cities, but it shouldn't be worth even a fraction of that ridiculous jump.....
yeah.... now that they're pumping military these guys are showing fucking stratospheric power increases.... really it's a bit silly of any of the rest of us to expect to have much influence on the outcome
ok, to my shock and disbelief, it looks like we CAN afford to 1-turn assembly line.... but.... why does it say "final tick: 765" there instead of the full cost of the tech...?? and the "final tick" value goes down if i swap more cities to research, as i'd expect if we are actually going to come up just short of finishing the tech.... that must be a UI glitch in one direction or the other, but is it that we won't actually finish the tech despite the green bar saying that we will, or is "final tick" incorrect and the bar is right?
actually you know what, posting this now to officially ask if lurkers have an answer as to whether i should trust the progress bar or the "final tick" dialog here.... as you might imagine i have a crapton of rifles 1t from completion that i REEEEALLY would rather not have actually complete as rifles
|