[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[williams482]

It looks like the CtH nerf for corp HQ payments applies to all corps, not just mininc. So Spreading either corp gives mjmd 3 base GPT * multipliers.

Airships could see subs in base BTS, but this was explicitly removed in CtH.

thought: civac's milpower has been stagnant for some time, so they are almost certainly working mostly on nukes in lieu of conventionals right now..... in theory we could, on the turn we plan to attack, send them 2 requests to nuke india's capital while conspicuously swapping research to milsci since they can see our tech choices... then if this is interpreted correctly and they nuke out all the defenders, we can burn the city with a commando morale paratrooper..... this is one of their legendaries and it contains the kremlin, btw nod

I like this plan. It seems like as good a way as any to effectively coordinate with Civac about a key objective.

edit: well..... ok on further testing, apparently ONE single jet fighter stationed 10 tiles away can shoot down arbitrarily many paratroopers in a single turn..... soooo this unit might be WAY less useful than i hoped. read the fine print before committing to a strategy yall.......

Ahh... that does make them quite a bit less useful, doesn't it.

[Tarkeel]

It looks like the CtH nerf for corp HQ payments applies to all corps, not just mininc. So Spreading either corp gives mjmd 3 base GPT * multipliers.

Yes, this was supposed to apply to all Corp HQs. I still think they should have been 2 gold base.

edit: well..... ok on further testing, apparently ONE single jet fighter stationed 10 tiles away can shoot down arbitrarily many paratroopers in a single turn..... soooo this unit might be WAY less useful than i hoped. read the fine print before committing to a strategy yall.......

Ahh... that does make them quite a bit less useful, doesn't it.

Still pretty realistic; you need to lure out their fighters with your own before jumping.

[ljubljana]

ahhh yes, i see how i misread the cth changelog now.... frankly tarkeel having played exactly one of these games i very much agree with you, it's beyond wild how much advantage you can wring out of just having the mininc inc HQ, since realistically in situations like this it seems like everyone else needs to spread it anyways or just get utterly swamped in hammer totals by those who do... (but maybe that is an unrepresentatively ikhanda-driven take)

wait, airships could see subs in base bts but fighters couldn't (according to civwiki)?? is.... is there any kind of, like, logic to that, or was it a bug the whole time?

yeah well, worst-case, a paratrooper is still just a significant upgrade over an infantry - 20% more strength for 14% more hammers would be a good deal on its face (not as good a ratio as the rifle -> infantry upgrade but still decent), but the kicker is that our hand-built toku paratroopers (c2 + ambush + drill 1) should be able to take on tanks (with just c2) 1v1 and win pretty convincingly despite being cheaper units. so even if we never actually airdrop it's still not bad. we can even make them amphibious and use them as hilarious fake marines if we have to

re interceptors: apparently the same logic applies to /bombers/ which is very concerning..... we really need to take out ALL the jet fighters guarding a location (so, within 10 tiles of that location!! can they really intercept from that far away, for real?) before sending in any non-fighter planes and it doesn't seem that there is a cost efficient way for us to do so...... that's pretty troubling and makes me question the logic of this whole "time the attack to coincide with a big bomber wave" idea.... but winning the air war is really the only edge i can think of that we might realistically be able to get on them in time for it to matter maybe dear beloved civac who i'm sure thinks the world of us after our weeks of stonewalling and full year of mutual antagonism would be so kind as to send in their own jet fighters on the same turn as we do and maybe nuke a few of the more interceptor-heavy cities remotely for us.... unfortunately it's a little awkward that our team has one power with relevant production and one power with relevant tech, while theirs is just one power with relevant production and tech....

[ljubljana]

okAY who's ready to suddenly have an air force kinda

281



well, the big international news is another swap to slavery from india.... so not a bad chance at all that we wake up tomorrow to a nuclear-tipped stab.... whatever their intent is, they whipped far enough down to drop below us in MFG so SOMEone's gonna get it....

it really says something about the power of, i guess, christo redentor + the kremlin specifically that mjmd and civac got the nuke techs at the same time (hell, CIVAC built the manhattan project, even), but mjmd has built like 20 ICBMs total and i still have not seen even a single one from the ottomans...



sd is MAD..... maybe mad at us ("1500postzululol").... not unjustifiably so of course. but i ask you, what exactly was i supposed to do that would have had any chance of slowing this down again? me with my giant stack of rifles and cavs vs nukes and tanks, horribly exposed border with 3 cities 1-turnable by indian 2-movers, and laughable lack of relevant military tech? well.... probably more than what i did, which was nothing  sorry friend, i def earned the rant i'm likely to receive in a turn or two  i thought i had to industrialize first or i would just splat against them without accomplishing a damn thing, and had to hope i could do so fast enough that it wasn't too little, too late.... unfortunately it looks like it probably was....

admittedly i haven't sent them any real indication of my plans other than the 25-turn offer however long ago that was.... so from SD's perspective we're def just gleefully ignoring their collapse.... i was going to send them diplo about it last turn, but i'm worried the "and give me all your cities" rider wouldn't work on them anymore and they might just ACCEPT to mess with us and get us to go to war early....



aaaanyway check out Ultimate Filler over here rocking 80 hammers/turn with literally some of the worst land i've ever thought about settling (no i'm not in denial you're in denial)



sigh... all is vanity



the actual reason civac's milpower has been stagnant is that they apparently have been taking a beating somewhere out of sight (and very much not out of mind....) they're now significantly below us in power, and sufficiently below us in mfg that there's not much hope of them catching up? yeah idk about this one yall



very good chance we wake up tomorrow to a faceful of nukes based on this graph tbh. if that happens i might be down to call it (i know i keep saying this)

or if not that, probably civac will wakeup to said faceful.... which, what does that mean? if civac is no longer viable as a military entity after this turn (and they're getting kinda close to that point) are we supposed to turn on THEM? unlike both india and america (who has wisely packed their core densely with obsolete troops to block commandos) i am pretty confident we could do horrific things to the ottomans on the first turn of a war-of-stabbing, like, take 10 or 15 cities-horrific, and might only need bombers to do it.... of course, i did just promise to attack india with them in 6t, but is there an amount of damage they could take from a nuclear attack that should make us change our minds? they in fact did not respond to either of our claims that we would attack india (though yesterday's claim was in response to them asking for us to stop trading w mjmd....), and we'd be out of cow range at that point (but obviously it's still a megastab that would be pretty tough to ethically rationalize frankly without resorting to "you did it to me so i can do it to you" logic) (might be our only chance though if india ruins them this turn but leaves us alone)

^^ maybe semi-ignore this idk i was feeling desperate.... i may try this but only if the coalition looks completely non-viable by the time we have units in position (and in sufficient quantity) to do something

[ljubljana]

hmm, well..... mjmd played and posted and we have no PM from them...... this might not say much for its broader strategic correctness, but i think it's looking pretty likely that by not being at war with mjmd currently, we have redirected at least one wave of nukes towards someone else..... i am pretty sure that based on the MFG graph above, we would now be the correct choice to nuke if we had joined the coalition immediately, so while it's a bit cowardly of us (ok, of me) to survive by sacrificing others on the altar like that, it is also not nothing.... and i'm not sure i'm convinced that attacking before we had the ability to hurt them would have been correct for us if it meant eating a bunch of nukes now, as much as civac might (quite understandably!) have wanted things to go that way....

(ofc all bets are off if they turn out not to have used the nukes and we see a swarm of fast workers scuttling towards our border next round

[ljubljana]

well, i'm not much closer to psychologically accepting my defeat, but i did start drafting the letter i'm going to send to takakeisho after the game finally ends, following the news of his shocking burnout-induced retirement after dropping from sumo's second-highest rank. which will lose all of its poetic resonance if we somehow turn this into a burnout-induced comeback win. so they say that's the first step

in a discord group chat with williams and an unnamed third party, summarized my feelings as

"i wish there was a way to like.... take the pulse of how pissed off everyone is that they are still playing. i would like to continue the game a bit longer but only if it's not angering the others or causing them undue suffering..... but there is no way to assess if that's true besides guessing which i think is a flaw in RB's system for doing PBs. the position doesn't meet my standards for conceding on the face of it but normally i only concede if i can't even see like a 5% odds path to a win, which may be a bit out of step with the norm

but depending on how things are looking in a few turns when we have a credible airforce (assuming we are not nuked into the ground before then), i'd like to try either a surgical strike in india's core or to revenge-backstab the ottomans before calling it lol"

lurkers, i know i can't ask about this game, but does anyone have thoughts about how to make RB's concession protocol better, or to formalize the etiquette in some way? i hate the whole shame-concession phenomenon, and while i agree that our odds are no better than 5 or 10 percent here....i have also felt that way pretty much continuously since the ginger backstab, and i wasn't conceded THEN, so.... (the difference being that ottoman odds are now down at our level at least, "the field" odds have dropped to zero, and mjmd has picked up the rest). and there were points in Civ6 PBEM20 where i felt the same way about our team's odds and that was a game we (well, mostly Woden <3) won...

but i also hate forcing people to play out both won games and hopeless games, and prompting a ton of angry posts, feelings, and city-renamings from players i admire and consider friends. there may be a fundamental tension between these two feelings (the resolution of which may be: ljana needs to figure out how to evaluate a position properly)

(have not looked at the turn yet, doing so will very likely prompt a re-re-re-re-evaluation as has become axiomatic)

[ljubljana]

282

ok let's see em



well, the vast majority of india's ICBMs went unlaunched.... so what is this, a deterrent...? well consider me.... one who has no idea whether or not they are deterred.... well, if they want me to conclude that the coalition idea is hopeless, they're gonna have to use them aggressively and either start pushing in on nauf territory or smash civac's productive capacity. if they JUST want to deter with them, and thus it can be presumed that stabbing the ottos will immediately earn us a fistful of nukes to the face, then direct, asymmetrically-nuclear conflict w them soon is inevitable so we may as well join the coalition



here you can see some aspects of the, ah.... "plan".... time three transports to complete on the same turn we plan to declare, spit them all out at once on the inland sea and station amphibious paratroopers aboard, while hopefully paradropping across the lake to cut their roads. our best chance to not lose control of this inland sea, and the 3 weak cities thereupon, is to seize it decisively, and hopefully burn some nice mjmd core spots in doing so. if india has standing ICBMs around they could respond by nuking the transports but uh, spending a whole-ass ICBM to /maybe/ kill a transport with 4 paratroops aboard seems like a good hammer trade to me...



oooo civac sold us their mininc stuff!! ok that also leans in the direction of being a good person about this

maintenance went up everywhere too (which i should have realized would happen....) at about half the rate of hammers, so we actually paid likeee 40 + (48 * 1.7) = 120 gpt (assuming full mininc spread) for.... oh, like 4 * 48 = 200ish hammers (assuming full coal plant existence). i say good trade, although maybe not the slam-dunk i advertised it as



did some simming to get a more statistical answer about whether bomb shelters protect buildings, on a city with exactly 100 buildings inside and preserve random seed off lol....

without BS: 30 26 40 47 49 39 35 41 44 41 = 39.2 buildings destroyed on average
with bs: 38 30 36 31 38 33 43 41 34 37 = 36.1 buildings destroyed on average

so first of all that is WAY more variance than i'd expect from a 1000-trial independent random variable.... std should be sqrt(np(1-p)) = 4.8 if p=0.4, so no, actually that's fine and deviations of 10 or more from expectation are not THAT wild. i guess.....

but secondly if it just protects pop and units it's not that cost-effective.... in an interior city, saving 5 pop in a size 20 city is worth 110 food, kinda meh ROI, but that's only if we're /certain/ the city will get nuked.... i guess it helps redirect the nukes to less-defended targets (or targets not owned by me...?) if it saved buildings i'd spam them everywhere but as it stands, probably just the big vulnerable nat wonder cities and the ones on the actual border with india want them and the rest will just get cereal milled back up to size

and logging back in, there is an mjmd online again.... we've played simultaneously for like 3 turns in a row now, hmm, not a great sign when it comes to our ability to attack them and establish a normal turnsplit in the next few rounds

and i missed something.....



check THIS out - unless india nuked one of civac's great people, that should be four of distinct types, translation: babe can whip and GA-produce ICBMs :D shame on me for thinking about stabbing them (and um, why did mjmd leave prussa's natepic standing in the first strike, anyways? he got ironworks...) (wait shit can he just nuke prussa NOW and kill the spy right there??? oh please don't think of that)



pictured: mjmd not visibly furious with me for forcing them to continue the game.... (the "thing i forgot" is to test if great people, workers, and icbms can be nuked)

the answer is YES with apparently the sole exception of ICBMs. so first of all, that really shouldn't be true in my opinion (baaad game mechanic to let great people be nukable to prevent golden ages). and second of all, we gotta play first in any upcoming war so they can't nuke OUR great people as they spawn, and get a good city in the bargain too 

so in a turn or two we should know whether civac's great people make it out alive or not.... whether they can GA or not will make a major difference as far as "is this coalition even remotely viable" is concerned

anyways.... a SUPER rules-loophole-exploitative idea occurred to me, which is: what happens if i put a scouting unit of ours in prussa? they can't attack without declaring war, AND they can't declare war because we're playing at the same time..... well, i'm not gonna do that because it's rules loophole exploitative but the fact that i could means we really should probably stick to turn order here.... (but i'm not going to say anything either, that'd give a possible betrayal away, not to mention create a 5-way turnsplit lol)



well, with the awesome power of sentry scouts + airships we can get almost complete visibility on their territory, and......



i don't see them  actually i don't even see the newly-spawned spy which is baffling to me (actually though, what's going on with that...?) and lest we wonder why a stab is looking tempting, the relevant (>=12 str) units they have at home are

3 cuirs
19 cavs
15 cannons
3 MGs
26 rifles
64 infantry
2 marines
17 tanks
ONE each of fighter/jet/bomber....
2 destroyers
2 carriers
3 battleships

so really running a bare-bones defense here

it's ok guys i probably won't do it (but i sure am tempted to do it) (puhLEASE let other their great people be like, on a transport somewhere or something... a living, non-sunken radioactive transport) (you'd better believe that if we get a great person i will deposit them directly onto our one galley lol)

anyways what was i talking about? right, i'll stick 1-turn bomb shelters in the big-ticket size 20 nat wonder cities that i REALLY want to deter them from nuking (hoshoryu, abi, aksum, takakeisho already has one) and the border cities with india (where the unit damage matters, these also already have them) but i think that's it for now (a decision i will re-evaluate as more cities come into range of nuke + capture)



WOW this airship recon ability is busted to hell (i mean, i think we all know that BUT STILL, we can see everything!!!)

3 ICBMs in the visible area btw. of the three, 1 can be commandoed from the coast of the inland sea (kinda.... it's behind their capital though), 1 is IN one of the inland sea cities, and the third we could get with paradrops but the ottos would have to nuke out the large defensive stack sitting in there...



i will say this about airship recon though: THIS "waste a bunch of gold to get a WORSE recon unit button" is WAY too simlar-looking to one we might actually want to click sometimes lol



should i 1-turn a carrier just cause we can? ....i'm gonna 1-turn a carrier just cause we can  (the power of fighter scouting has convinced me to do this) (or is that wrong, since we can just stick our planes directly in nauf cities?) we're up to 7 or 8 destroyers milling around off the north coast as of now, enough to sink a small indian transport group with sufficient air support

[Tarkeel]

lurkers, i know i can't ask about this game, but does anyone have thoughts about how to make RB's concession protocol better, or to formalize the etiquette in some way? i hate the whole shame-concession phenomenon, and while i agree that our odds are no better than 5 or 10 percent here....i have also felt that way pretty much continuously since the ginger backstab, and i wasn't conceded THEN, so.... (the difference being that ottoman odds are now down at our level at least, "the field" odds have dropped to zero, and mjmd has picked up the rest). and there were points in Civ6 PBEM20 where i felt the same way about our team's odds and that was a game we (well, mostly Woden <3) won...

This has been discussed before; my best suggestion is to use the in-game vassal system to formalize your concession, but that wasn't very popular.

[ljubljana]

This has been discussed before; my best suggestion is to use the in-game vassal system to formalize your concession, but that wasn't very popular.

heh. i like this idea but i guess it doesn't adequately convey the feeling of "i concede to you, but also until the game ends i will do everything possible to screw you over in revenge for nuking my capital"

282

"i do not know with what weapons world war 3 will be fought, but world war 2 will have been fought with commando rifles and paratrooper/cannon stacks" - albraham einston



YES gimme gimme gimme :D

no golden age from civac is a sad sad day. but this is a fun fun graph



zooooop



we made this many paratroopers.... which on the one hand feels like super not enough, but on the other we only have 2 turns to mass fighters before we need our vaunted bomber wave to come online

best use-case for extra paras might just be to pillage and park on their extra mining inc resources which will be a nightmare for them to dislodge :D



perpetually miserable CTR is on track to provide a third transport for us :D which, what's our timing again? this turn research radio, next turn finish radio, swap to bombers the turn after, declare the turn after that? wow we might actually make it



sooooo this is what spreading mininc inc would look like without a courthouse it does have a coal plant though so i thought this was worth it, since we will get 21 of that maintenance cost back starting next turn



speaking of which, we are out of cities with both coal plant + courthouse other than greenline's former capital (which is on the border with india, which is why it was last...). so we gotta rank the rest of these towns in order of urgency of need for mininc. my ranking is

1. any city with a coal plant, eg onosato (newly-promoted ozeki by the way!) which finishes next turn and then will do a 20 gpt-saving courthouse. gotta get those hammers multiplied as quickly as possible
2. any naval city still working on the coal plant. we have quite a few and our ship production is strictly limited by having only 9 ports, most of which are weak hammer-wise, one of which (aksum) is stuck on paratrooper duty forever, and three of which (south coast) probably cannot survive the first few turns of an mjmd war
3. inland cities still working on coal plant (kinbozan and tobizaru are examples). these are mostly older than the quote-unquote filler cities like onosato in category 1, so they do at least have courthouses
4. other, here meaning takayasu exactly (our weakest core city hammers-wise, it's still 9t out from the factory) and the cereal fillers. these don't have courthouses either though they are getting to be a pretty high priority, natch. notably i DO plan to spread mininc here as well, for a sum total of literally every one of our cities. now to find a way to capture the HQ....
5. aksum exactly, which can 1-turn any gunpowder unit it wants already and so where mining inc gives 38 gold instead of hammers (note that this is still worth eventually doing though, esp since it will very likely be nuked early on and have to rebuild west point or substitute for it with 2 more GGs - so it's a good thing we have the one from fascism isn't it)

by this metric chop overflow, onosato, hiradoumi (category 1), hokutofuji, and adulis (category 2, north coast) are next turn's targets. then the turn after we can finish off the 2s and move onto the 3s



showing off this area just bc i can.... check out all those successfully-redeemed windmills :D feeling p good about the settler ROI on this one, even though the copper is still under ottoman control (after the courthouse i may culture-build for a turn to get us to 100)



btw pretty much all of our random filler cities from 100 turns ago are now 100 hpt monsters that can max out on overflow just from normal builds

on the turn i declare war, i might pitch a 4-way draw in the tech thread. not much chance of india accepting but it could be nice to give them an off-ramp, esp given that we have been best friends all game and there's no way i'd be attacking them if it weren't the only way to keep this thing going

todo civac diplo south coast

[ljubljana]

 
now that i'm sending fighters to live in nauf's cities, i guess i'd better send some to mjmd as well so they don't feel ill at ease about all this....



newly-cerealed onokatsu proving worth its weight in gold as an airship base



realized we need to shave a turn off this third transport and am therefore resorting to ah.... Desperate Measures



attempted diplo to signal i want them to nuke call to power in 3 turns.... but they still have no ICBMs so probably not gonna happen (( i will send this deal twice to signify that we need them totally take out the defenders for us, and one nuke is insufficient...