[SPOILERS] Woden and ljubljana like boats

[Woden]

What do you think the deal is with this? If TAD stabs us, they'll lose this trade route and therefore won't actually gain a CS bonus in combat against us from the diplomatic visibility, right? So that means TAD is probably just running this for the gold? If they are going to get a combat bonus from it in the event of a war, I think I'll have to run a TR of my own back to their capital, even though I really don't want to.

If it completes and he gets a trading post, he will gain more diplomatic visibility and possibly +3 CS. Doesn't go away with war (it is related to one of Mongolia's unique abilities; they get a trading post at the start of a trade route which means they get +3 CS).  The good thing here is that it is most likely a long trade route and probably won't be done by the time they can declare war but it might be a good idea to send one his way anyways and probably send it from old Akkad (closer, shorter trade route). If you both have trading posts, the +3 CS is canceled out.

[Woden]

What do you think is the right approach for us to take militarily in the upcoming turns? I'm kind of tempted to show off our ships, do a little damage, maybe trap part of their navy (or at least cut it off from the Russian mainland) if we can, and then have you offer peace + 30g-for-30g in exchange for maybe 1 or 2 Russian cities. CMF would probably have to take it to retain any kind of chance to compete, and peacing out early would make it a little less likely that sub completely conquers Russia and then runs away with the game. If we destroy CMF's navy and commit to a longer war of (attempted) conquest, I think sub would get the vast majority of the spoils by virtue of having Jongs to blast down city walls and enough ground troops to set up sieges and actually take cities on the Russian mainland. There's really only so much progress we can expect to make with only melee ships against targets other than CMF's navy, and I'm not sure we want to see Russia completely collapse if we won't be the main beneficiaries.

I think the right approach will be a war of harassment while improving our empires. We want to keep CMF in war mode to slow his development. We can't go into full war mode, as we need to improve our empires. That being said, I did start a battling ram in Hod (old Rapa Nui) to take the walls out Mikasa, due in 8 turns. I don't think we should put too many resources into war with CMF, just enough to prevent him from focusing on improving his cities. If we can take Mikasa, great. Beyond that, we will have trouble keeping cities with loyalty. If we somehow, catch him with his pants down and all his forces are over by suboptimal's attack forces, then we can burn his cities to the ground but I doubt CMF is that stupid. My expectations right now are just to annoy CMF and get experience for my longboats. Sit in the ocean and take pot shots at his galleys without him being able to counter attack and raid anything I can.  I need more cities before I can think about a full on attack. As for you, best to make sure your western flank is protected from an attack by TAD/Kaiser, it will come. TAD is not the type of player to forgive and forget, he will want "his" city back.

I doubt suboptimal will make much progress after taking the off-island colonies until he can get Cartography. There are lots of choke points where CMF can jam his Jongs up.

[ljubljana]

Sounds like a plan to me - I'll send the next trader (from the Cuneiform lighthouse, not the one in Geneva which I need badly to speed the builder there) over to TAD from Akkad even though that's pretty inefficient from a development perspective. At least I should get some decent gold generation out of it. By "complete" do you mean that the trader has to arrive in a TAD city, or does the route have to complete its full 20t duration? If the latter, maybe I do have to use the trader in Geneva to get this done before the DoF ends...

As for defending my western flank, that's definitely my priority. This strike on MPF is just opportunistic - my plan is for my ships to spend 10ish turns over there, raze 1-2 cities, and then immediately start heading back to Akkad to be ready for TAD. I might need to do something similar with the Russian attack force too depending on how much buildup TAD is doing and whether we can get them to pile on vs. Russia or not (maybe I'll ask about that this turn? or in a few turns after I'm in position to burn the MPF city?). I could also just have my core cities all do 2-turn biremes again after they get their lighthouses up if we need to keep the Russian force in place.

Luckily, I should have Cartography/Mercenaries ready to go with something in the neighborhood of 1000 gold for upgrades when TAD can declare war. I think we should be good on the GA situation too...TAD will get the first one in the next era, but is only making 8 points per turn, so I should still hit 120 points for a Medieval GA before the DoF ends and TAD takes them all. It's a shame that I've now made an enemy for life out of England, since we'd probably both be better off focusing our next attacks on our other, weaker neighbors who won't have GAs and will have spent the last 30 turns bogged down in war...

GA bonuses don't stack any more, right? They will most likely have 2 Medieval GAs when war starts compared to my one, which could be a problem if they do...

[Woden]

Sounds like a plan to me - I'll send the next trader (from the Cuneiform lighthouse, not the one in Geneva which I need badly to speed the builder there) over to TAD from Akkad even though that's pretty inefficient from a development perspective. At least I should get some decent gold generation out of it. By "complete" do you mean that the trader has to arrive in a TAD city, or does the route have to complete its full 20t duration? If the latter, maybe I do have to use the trader in Geneva to get this done before the DoF ends...

Trading posts are added when the trade route ends.

[ljubljana]

Okay, I'll have to use the trader in Geneva, then. I'll try to find one with a city 11 or 12 tiles away from Akkad, which civwiki suggests would complete before TAD can declare war. Even if I can't do that, though, I'll start a slightly longer one - even if it's not finished when the war starts, I actually have an ace up my sleeve here in the form of the Bireme's unique ability preventing nearby TRs from being pillaged .

I should also probably pay attention and see if I can spot the TAD trader and shadow it with a bireme - if it has to make two trips or one long trip, maybe I can threaten to pillage it if TAD declares war.

EDIT: Or, wait, surely embarked traders move 2 spaces per turn like every other embarked unit, which means I'm dumb and should look for a city 22-24 tiles away instead. Does that 21 next to the clock icon by the TAD TR indicate the total number of turns until the route completes? If so, I could simply run the reverse of that TR, but as always I'm skeptical that the interface is actually conveying correct and useful information here.

Sorry I'm so deeply ignorant about how this mechanic works - I am genuinely unsure if I've ever made an international trade route in Civ6 before, since there's never any reason to in the early-game and I rarely play SP long enough for them to be a good idea .

[Woden]

Trade routes end when war is declared and no trading post will be built if it is interrupted by war. For trade routes, I believe the magic number is 11. If the route last 11 turns or more, it is only once there and once back, if it last less than 11 turns, it is twice there and back. There is a formula:

a = Game Speed Multiplier (can be found from the GameSpeeds.xml) 100 for standard
b = Trade Route Length = Number of trips
FLOOR = Mathematical floor: Rounds a decimal value down. Ex: FLOOR(100/11) *0.1 ))+1 = FLOOR(0.909) = 0+1 = 1
c = FLOOR((a / b) * 0.1) + 1
Amount of turns = c * b * 2

Note: an 11 turn trade route takes 22 turns to complete (11 turns there, 11 turns back)

The way it is set up, trade routes that take 11 to 19 turns last a shorter time than trade routes that take 10 turns because of the 2 trips. Also note, the trade route length is not what is given in the trade route screen. That is absolute length (as in direct distiance between the 2 points), where you have to count the tiles on the give route for trade route length. Don't ask me why, just a place where Firaxis was too lazy to put in actual useful information.

And embarked trade routes only move 1 tile per turn.

[ljubljana]

Oh, so does that mean TAD's TR is going to take 42 turns to complete according to the clock? That's definitely a good sign for us, since they can't have started it earlier than 1 turn before the DoF became active and so we'll have a chance to pre-emptively declare war to stop it from completing. If I can get a TR up that completes before the DoF ends, maybe I can even end up with the diplo visibility advantage in that case...or maybe it means I should just take the 2f/4h at Geneva now and not worry so much about equalizing the number of trading posts. Idk, I'll check and see what my options are when I load the save.

EDIT: Apparently, in Gathering Storm, being in the Medieval era, like I will be next turn, adds 10t to the minimum duration of all trade routes (according to that civwiki page) . That will mess us up and make it impossible to get a TR that will complete before TAD can redeclare war... I guess the next best option is to get one that will finish slightly before TAD's TR finishes so at least they can't DoW on the turn theirs completes to cancel ours and block us from establishing a TP.

Well...actually, now that I think about it, TAD really might be running this TR for the gold and not as a prelude to war. Apparently GP + CH + Cothon means it's worth a disgusting 11 base GPT, and probably more because it's a naval TR which apparently multiplies gold yields in a way I don't fully understand. I wonder if the route could be worth enough that it was a mistake for me to build a CH there (ES notwithstanding)...if they send enough TRs to Cuneiform, that CH may end up providing more GPT to our biggest rival than it does to me... I guess others will eventually build CHs too, so it's probably not worth passing up a +5 CH in Free Inquiry (+7 if you count the boosted adjacency to the Cothon) just for TR denial value.

Unrelated: woah, I just learned that as of the February patch, the IZ doubling card (which comes online at Guilds, at the same time as the CH card) now uses a military rather than an economic slot! Well, that sure does make Guilds more of a priority in 30t or so. I'm planning to do CH-market in Demotic next and the second market in Cuneiform eventually to get the boost. My IZ-capable cities will probably build those before campuses while I'm in Free Inquiry, and will try to grow to size 7 before or soon after the next era change to fix the resulting horrible science crash. Cuneiform will never hit size 13 for a campus, but I don't really care since a +6 IZ and +1 hammer to all my TRs is more important. That plus Isolationism will boost the Cuneiform TR yields all the way up to 4f/7h in the Renaissance, and I can't think of anything that could possibly be more beautiful on this nasty food/production-starved map . I'm pretty sure you were right about optimizing for production TR districts at Cuneiform, btw - I've been constantly tempted to throw in a food district to get my cities up to size, but honestly they mostly don't even have any decent tiles to work after size 7 anyways, so the extra hammers will be more impactful long-term.

[ljubljana]

Mid-turn discussion:

Well, Apprenticeship came in, and...oh crap:



That is NOT what I wanted to see . I can't delay Square Rigging at all, really, because that would mean delaying Cartography and I really can't afford to do that - it's 22 turns away as listed, which will only barely come in before the DoFs end as it is. But I also can't discover Square Rigging without first building at least one and preferably two rounds of quads in my core cities to upgrade. I'm not sure what I should do now...do I delay lighthouses to build a round of quads? Do I delay buying the lighthouse in Cuneiform, probably with the goal of hand-building it at the expense of a settler, because I now need to keep this 480 gold banked for the frigate upgrades that now need to happen in addition to the caravel upgrades? Do I buy the niter tile at Cuneiform because I now need as much niter as I can possibly get as quickly as I can possibly get it? My instincts tell me that the answers are yes, yes, and yes, but I thought I'd run this by you first and see what your reaction is. I reeeeally don't want to have to crash-build military now at the expense of development, but if Square Rigging shows up in 13 turns (assuming you finish Machinery for the boost) and I have zero quads and have to hand-build frigates without Press Gangs, I'll be in really bad shape.

EDIT: The lighthouse in Cuneiform is a 5-turn build, so if we decide that I have to hand-build it to save for frigate upgrades, I'll give up roughly one settler in opportunity cost, since that is also about how long it takes settlers to build there. As for the quads, Linear A and Cuneiform can do them in 2-3 turns, and the rest of the core will take 5t or so. That's a big deal, since it will seriously hurt both the growth and hammer sides of the snowball to have to delay lighthouses and traders for 5t everywhere, but maybe it's not a bigger deal than having to hand-build 280-hammer frigates. Idk, it's a really tough choice, and I badly wish Square Rigging had appeared literally anywhere else in the Renaissance era. This is one dynamic that I don't really love about the tech shuffle, since sometimes it just throws random curveballs like this that totally wreck your development plans on short notice...



Trade routes. Since the minimum TR length in the Medieval era seems to be 31 turns (if I'm reading that page correctly), it seems like the best we can do is the 36-turn route from Linear A to Official Visit, unless there's another TAD city out in the fog that gives us a better option. That will finish before TAD's route to Cuneiform, I think, so TAD won't have a chance to DoW at a trade post disadvantage, and we will have a chance to do so. If TAD started the TR on the first possible turn, on t96, their TR will finish on t138, which is the same turn our TR will finish, but I think we'll still be fine since I'm first in the turn order. 12 GPT is also not bad in terms of yields, although that means TAD's route to Cuneiform is probably making them 22 GPT (!), which is pretty shocking for this point in the game... Anyways, does all of that logic seem right to you? I hate to delay Geneva's builder by not making a 2f/4h route, but I think the military applications of a route to TAD unfortunately have to take precedent.

[Woden]

You will probably need to research all the way through Machinery as it is going to take me just as long with the boost or research up to the boost and switch to something else while waiting for my boost. Finish up your current builds and then switch all your cities with Cothons to quads. You should be able to get a bunch out. Are you currently running Maritime Industries? If so, check your cities sand any city that will take close to 15 turns to build a quad, switch now and maybe anything that just started a build. Or, if it is traders, you may want to send them to my civ for gold. I think also, I am not going to upgrade the sword (holding until next turn for the era points) but rather buy the niter at my capital to start collecting it. We can pool resources and upgrade as many as we can.

As for buying or building a lighthouse, maybe keep how much gold you can get from my capital. If it is close to what it takes to build it versus buying it, might be better just to buy it to get the trade out faster.

[ljubljana]

I'm not running MI, but will switch over to it as soon as I get Feudalism, which is about as soon as I can start building quads in most of these cities anyways since they're all halfway through mandatory Serfdom builders. Every city that doesn't have a Cothon (other than Demotic which can't help and Oracle Bones which needs a monument first) is currently building one, so they wouldn't be much help on frigates anyways. Those cities are all at like 5 hammers/turn too, which is barely enough to build a quad in time even if I already had MI in. I guess I could delay Feudalism to do Theology and swap to MI ASAP...that's probably a good idea, since I need some delay on it anyways to give me time to fix the whole 6 farms fiasco. That could allow my weak cities to swap off of Cothons and onto 15-turn quads...that doesn't really feel like a good idea, given that for most of those cities a 15-turn Cothon delay costs us 90 beakers and 90 gold, but maybe we have to at this point.

How many turns do you think it will take for you to finish Machinery? I'll probably research to the boost and wait if the answer is something like 7t, I don't want a repeat of the whole Stirrups situation if I can avoid it. I'll have to check on the TR to your capital, but it's probably around the same as the 12 GPT as the better TAD routes since a GP is worth about as much TR gold as a harbor. If it is 12 GPT, that will take 40 turns to pay back the cost of the lighthouse buy, which seems not worth it, especially since I have to spend gold on my own niter buy anyways.

As for the niter at your capital, my next settler is going down there to Abugida (heading out in 2t) and will immediately chop a monument, so it will pick up the niter pretty quickly (with no other second-ring resources other than the other niter). Up to you on whether 155 gold is worth having niter access maybe 20t early. Unfortunately, it might well be worth it, since that's the timescale on which we're going to need it for upgrades apparently...

It's really frustrating that our big development push has to come crashing to a halt like this because of the vagaries of the tech shuffle. But look on the bright side - at least we're not suboptimal! They were probably counting on having a Jong monopoly for a nice long while to conquer CMF, and in reality CMF is probably like 10 turns from frigates. We know they've been able to see niter for a while because of MPF's niter colony, and they probably went on to Apprenticeship after that, and if they can see SR you'd better believe they're beelining it... Sub's Jong rush went from a great move with a real chance to be game-winning to a likely dud just like that, and now they will probably even have us with frigates and caravels to deal with in 26t, again due entirely to the vagaries of the tech shuffle... For our part, we may want to think about peace with CMF sooner rather than later and (of course) watching their niter stockpile very closely, lest we be surprised by frigates in 10t and lose a ton of ships before we can retreat safely.