Lurking the Seven Seas

[Jabah]

From my limited understanding of civ6 you can't trade city unless you have 100% loyalty so captured or pressurised cities would be difficult to trade anyway as per the general limitations of the game.
Regarding this specific trade. Having the English city building a low cost harbor before trading is definitely going to be borderline. On the other hand I could understand the frustration if England did found the city for the colonial bonus and a bug prevent it from happening (if it is a bug).
They probably should make it clear and ask the other teams ?

[williams482]

Suboptimal finally got the right idea about who he should be attacking, so we've got a bloodbath of a Indonesia/Russia war upcoming. If Chevalier can get walls up in time Shikishima seems like it should be a pretty defensible location, but the narrow straits there aren't exactly helpful for the kinds of suicide swarm tactics the Russian navy will be relying on, and the city ranged strikes aren't going to be very effective unless Chevalier can upgrade a crossbow soon enough to boost them.

[williams482]

The one hitch to that is that Sacred Places is a founder belief, and will only apply to the founder's cities (China in this game, Indonesia in the hypothetical).

[Sullla]

That would be a neat idea but I think it's still being too clever for its own good. I don't think Indonesia should ever build a Holy Site district at all - everything should be geared towards the upcoming jong attack. Campus districts for sure (because every nation always needs science and Campus districts are the only way to get it) along with Harbor/Commercial districts for gold and trade routes... and that's basically it. Any production going into a Holy Site district is production not going into settlers/builders/useful districts and not accelerating the snowball. Indonesia gets enough faith from its civ ability and Earth Goddess pantheon, needing to build a Holy Site district + shrine + temple is a waste of time. Put that production into more cities and more quadriremes to be upgraded into jongs.

It's unfortunate for Chevalier that the city he settled for safety against suboptimal is the very thing that's bringing suboptimal down on his head (after the initial plan was to attack Norway instead). Whoops. The exact same thing has happened to me in some of our past MP games and it speaks to how hard it can be to anticipate how other players will react to your moves. There's so much room for misunderstandings on each side. This is the correct decision from suboptimal and roland because if they don't attack Russia right now and slow down the Russian snowball then this game is going to be lost 30 turns down the road. I don't love the preparation from Indonesia and China for this attack, they needed to be coordinating for the last 30 turns to have as many jongs hit the water at once. That means saving lots of gold, having as many quadriremes ready for upgrading ahead of time, and so on. They've done a little bit of that but it feels like they'll have 5 ships when they could have had 10 ships with better planning. (China in particular puzzles me, I don't understand what goal roland is trying to achieve. His cities are nice and all that but there's no clear direction visible. Also he has like 2 cities which can actually build ships on a water-heavy map, what the heck?!)

So this attack is going to hit a lot weaker than it could but I wouldn't be surprised if it succeeds anyway because jongs are so incredibly overpowered for their era. How much damage does suboptimal need to do in order to knock Russia down a peg? I don't think burning the equatorial Russian cities is enough if the homeland is left untouched. Well it should be fun to see regardless. Chevalier has been a good tactician and he's been reading this game much better than most of the other players, I'm looking forward to seeing how this plays out.

Also darkly amusing that China and Australia will both contribute virtually nothing to this war. At least marco gets another 10 turns of doubled production!

[Jabah]

Are Jongs able to be in ocean tiles on their own or do you need to have the proper tech ?
(even if not) Since they have range2, I don't think CMF blocking point is going to work as expected if Sub get enough Jongs, he should be able to kill more than 2 galleys per turn and overrun the blocking point.

[Sullla]

Jongs are not able to enter ocean tiles unless the corresponding tech (Cartography) has been researched. But there's another crucial bit of information that the players haven't spotted yet:




The scrambled tech tree has decided to place Square Rigging (i.e. frigates) at the very beginning of the Renaissance era! Frigates are actually unlocking before caravels in this game. This is one of roland's screenshots and I don't think that he and suboptimal realize how bad this will be for them. Jongs are not going to have 30 turns to run around uncontested on the map, they're going to have more like 10 turns before the other teams hit Square Rigging and can counter with their own frigates. Chevalier in particular is researching Apprenticeship tech at this moment, he'll finish it in 5 turns and then spot Square Rigging immediately behind it. If he can get there in timely fashion, suboptimal's attack plans will fall apart in a hurry because Russia can easily outbuild Indonesia with all of those Work Ethic Lavras. This is something that roland and suboptimal should be discussing but have barely mentioned. It's a fascinating twist that should shake up the action since no one is expecting frigates to unlock this quickly.

[Sullla]

OK, Turn 96 has arrived and it's time for Jongs to make their appearance. It wasn't clear to me how many of the ships suboptimal would have in his initial wave, how many ships are we talking about?

Up at Al a lot of changes happen. First off I see that jongs are 185 gold to upgrade, not 165 gold as expected. I upgrade the three that are in my territory. Turns out I have enough gold to get it all done. Three warriors upgrade, the first one gets me an envoy in Yerevan. I’ve got 192 gold left and will upgrade the remaining quad at Al next turn. Income is at 19 gold per turn. Not too shabby, all things considered. The upshot is that my base city defense is now 35.

After borrowing gold from China, the grand total is... four Jongs. And only three of them could be upgraded on Turn 96, the fourth one has to wait an additional turn since there weren't enough water tiles available in which to be upgraded. And on top of that, the upgrading is taking place back at the Indonesian capital, not at any of the cities on the central big island, because all of them were planted inland and thus don't have coastal spots available for upgrading. So the Jongs will need to spend 3-4 turns moving to their target instead of being ready to attack immediately. On top of this, suboptimal spent additional gold upgrading 3 warriors into swords - why? What purpose do the swords serve? The Jongs get their strength bonus from being in a formation with any military unit, warriors would have worked just as well here. That was gold that could have upgraded another quadrireme into a Jong.

Then there was this decision:

I’ve got 196.6 faith. There’s a temptation to buy a builder for 95 faith - Under African Skies could use a couple of cow pastures for a little extra production since it’s only got 1 production right now. It grows to 3 pop in four turns so two pastures and it’s got 4 production per turn. It’d delay a jong purchase by two turns but cuts the wall build time to 10 turns. I could also harvest in walls at Proof, which also makes way for the Commercial Hub. I think getting walls up everywhere on Big Island (no more than 10 turns at any city) is important enough to spend the faith, so buy the builder at Under African Skies.

And now additional faith goes into a builder purchase instead of saving it for naval units. Indonesia can outright purchase Jongs via their unique ability, or alternately purchase quadriremes and then upgrade them into Jongs with gold. There's no excuse for diverting faith off into a strategically irrelevant builder purchase at this point in time! Either Indonesia should be using their faith for internal development with Monumentality, or it should be used for a big naval attack. Instead we seem to have a half-hearted attempt to do both simultaneously which is likely to result in disaster. This "invasion" just doesn't look very scary to me:




Where is the big Indonesian fleet? Sure, the interface reads 465 for military power, but Indonesia units are scattered everywhere around the globe. Without being concentrated they won't achieve anything other than being picked apart and defeated in detail. And the craziest thing of all is that I had to use one of roland's screenshots to understand the military situation because suboptimal didn't even post a screenshot of his Jongs appearing on the scene!!! This should be the culmination of the last 30-40 turns of planning and it doesn't even warrant a single image. This might sound like something minor but it's not; you can tell what players are focusing on by what they post about and the lack of interest in the Jongs tells me that suboptimal's heart isn't in this attack. He's much more interested in playing around in a Civ sandbox on the central island than taking the steps needed to defeat the other players. (I don't want to be too mean to suboptimal who writes awesome reports and seems to be a great teammate. But this has been a common issue for him stretching across many Civ6 MP games, way too much meandering around with no goal in sight. Thrawn you need to be a dedlurker for suboptimal in a future game to help him out.)

Related question: what the heck is China doing in this game?! China has zero ships and apparently won't contribute so much as a single unit to this conflict. I think roland has exactly two cities that can train ships at all right now and they appear to be off in wonder-land right now. Just because China can build a wonder doesn't mean that they should; in particular, I've always that the Oracle was a huge trap. Put that production into something more useful.

Also related: how is Australia losing money with the smallest military in the whole game? I have no idea what marcopolothefraud is doing with his internal economy to be this broke. It's a serious problem for the Russia/Australia team that one of the players is dead broke when it comes to income. But he's actually training ships now and will get another 10 turns of doubled production when the next war declaration hits and that's going to help a lot. I would rather have a bankrupt Australia that's actually putting ships in the water over a China that can't contribute at all militarily.

[Alhambram]

Seem that Australia is losing money due maintenance costs of districts and its buildings while at same time having too few tiles with gold to work with (improved plantations for example) and lack of harbors and commerical hubs.

Regarding China, I already did warn in my turn 50 report that China might neglect navy over wonders which did happen after all. I do regret that I stopped dedlurking Suboptimal in PBEM 18 since september previous year, otherwise I might have helped him further in that game.

[Sullla]

Chevalier is spitting fire in his thread:

He's coming at me with four Jongs!? And he can't even upgrade all 4 on the same turn??? I've been preparing like mad for a BEST-CASE attack by 6. Instead, suboptimal not only can't even muster that much, but he squanders fully 20% of his possible force on...swords? The hell are swords gonna do, man? Jongs are your killer app! Anything in range of the coast, you take! Anything outside of the range, you ignore - three whole swords certainly aren't going to do much! 

I'm sorry, guys, but this is a catastrophic blunder by rolandoptimal. They have two real advantages over other teams: Roland's ability to build wonders for the price of a builder, and suboptimal's full-era-in-advance frigate, supplemented with some things like extra builder charges, faith-purchasing naval units, kampungs, etc. And so far, they've...well, Roland seems to be chasing wonders without much of a gameplan in mind beyond "wonders are cool." Note his Petra city - he built great wall improvements on Petra desert hills, preferring to stack more culture over production in that city. The only military smaller than Roland's in the entire game is, er, marco's, but Australia has financial difficulties and a bit of a blundered opening as an excuse. He's fixing it and is growing and learning. Does...does Roland even know he's made a mistake? 

And as for suboptimal...This is what he does every time. He's half-assed a navy and half-assed monumentality, so he got 4 kinda crappy cities on the island, nothing on his mainland (he has more cities on Sakhilin than he does on his starting continent! Is it all a tundra-ridden wasteland like mine? Or...is he doing his baffling habit of refusing to settle productive land again?), and a pathetically small contingent of jongs. 

Let me say again: this is catastrophic for that team. Their BEST chance to win the game was to build a force of (resource-free!) jongs and conquer a neighbor with it. Now, the best prospect for conquest would be either of the two lagging teams on either flank, of course - Woden has only longships and not even that many (although, as we've seen, he could 100% swarm a small force of jongs to death, even better than I could, with his production bonus, combat strength, and best of all, ocean maneuvering to let him truly swarm.), and if they hit them while that team was busy with the Central Powers or launching hare-brained attacks on us across the map they'd have a decent enough prospect. But we're the bigger threat to win the game, so, fine, fair enough. I sort of expected this ever since I triggered the "3 more cities than anyone else!" era score, which was a bit of an alarm. 

But even if you attacked Woden or me or Kaiser, you can't expect to just show up with a token jong or two and expect us to fold, man! You need force! You're squandering your best shot to win the game by half-assing like FOUR total jongs and expecting to sweep all before you! Unique units aren't "I win" buttons, my guy, they're assets and you still need to use them to win. Jongs are tough customers but by no means invincible, and shit, I think Russia could handle this attack singlehanded. Australia will probably be able to hold him off provided Marco is disciplined about sticking to galleys in his dockside cities. 

EVEN IF we weren't prepared and sub captured, say, Rodeo, and sank the Russian navy near Shikishima in a first strike (God, I hope sub is hoping to do that. He'll be disappointed when he finds both cities entirely deserted of defenders.*), how on earth would 4 jongs make enough progress to, say, knock Australia out before every other team hits Frigates? What's suboptimal's plan once everyone else gets frigates? Does he HAVE one? What's roland's plan to win the game? When will China bestir itself? Does he have one? 

Sub: Never half-ass two things. Whole ass one thing. 

notice that I whole-assed monumentality expansion, until the security situation freaked me out. Now I'm whole-assing defense until that's safe. Then I'll either whole-ass GMC conquest or another round of whole-ass monumentality before whole-assing some other conquest. FOCUS. Multiplayer is not single player! The AIs are terrible so you can fuck around and try to build nice pretty sandbox build queues, but against human beings you have to assume they are trying just as hard to win as you, and unless you use something you have that they don't (Lavras, cothons, breathtaking adjacencies, etc.), then you will not win.

I'm spoilering this entire rant because HOLY SHIT this is one of the clumsiest things I've ever seen in multiplayer Civ.

And more:

Three water tiles at his capital. The only other water tiles visible in the entire Indonesian empire (y'know, the civ that gets bonuses for settling on coasts, has good coastal adjacencies, and has a UI that can only be built on coast) are at the conquered city state far in the northeast. Wanna bet there's three jongs sitting in those exact 3 spots right now, with maybe 2 quads waiting around to get upgraded? 

Jongs should have 6 movement with mathematics, and I don't think he has any Great Admirals (again, refusing to build harbors...in a shipbuilding game with a shipbuilding civ. This is like a case study in lunacy)

And still more:

Serious question: Hasn't he [suboptimal] thrown away the first advantage as well? I looked over my screenshots of Indonesia. Not one district on Sakhilin is coastal. No Holy Sites, nothing. Call Me Al has the one (admittedly pretty nice) campus by the reef, but his holy site is nowhere to be seen. Now, it's true The Obvious Child might be on a bay somewhere back there, and we know nothing at all about Diamonds, which is in the fog, but neither one of those can have more than one district, right? We'd see it in his empire score.

So basically, thus far out of Indonesia, sub has gotten:

- 4 faith per turn from his capital and the conquered city-state (or I bet he'd have moved that inland too)
- 1 kampung (at the city-state)
- 1 okayish campus
- a handful of purchased quadriremes?
- a grand total of 4 jongs to terrify his enemies.

Like, jongs are the end-all-be-all of Indonesia and it turns out sub decided to more or less ignore them. He's at I believe 8 cities, 4 of them tiny, 1 the crappy city-state, and he'll get up 10 with 2 occupied tiny size 1 cities once he takes my colonies. What's his plan after that? Marco, I seriously think that Indonesia is very shortly going to be in a worse position than Australia.

And for good measure:

Woden's also made mistakes just as bad or worse than Australia/Indonesia. Woden ahs a tiny navy and no development at all, he's behind on expansion, behind on era score, behind on research. We've been at war with Norway for TEN TURNS. Australia has literally no navy and the entire Russian fleet has been anchored in the north. In that time, have we seen a single Viking raider come by, even for a sniff? At this point, as far as I know Woden has gotten literally just the one campus pillage for all of his longships. Otherwise he's used them more or less as cheap galleys to zerg into England to take a minor city-state off the Archduke.

That, uh, is NOT how I would have played the Vikings.

And I was worried that I was being too harsh on suboptimal! Chevalier has always had a good eye for the big strategic picture but he's gotten so much better at the nuts-and-bolts management of Civ6's mechanics over the last few PBEM games. He's putting it all together in this game and becoming one scary customer. If Chevalier had had this kind of experience back during PBEM7 I doubt that we would have been able to win our big naval fight with him.

[williams482]

Yeah, great posts from Chevalier in that thread.

One point I'll quibble with, I don't think the great wall improvements were a poor choice for Roland. I think the timing is problematic, either too early (wasted era score) or too late (not much of the gold generated could go into Jongs), but most of those desert tiles are flat and otherwise unimprovable, and with the way great wall adjacencies works it makes more sense to "whole ass" getting +20g and +12 clefs on those four tiles than adding a combined +4h on just the two hills via mines.

Hard to disagree about any of the other criticisms levied against that team though, and all of this does tie together.