[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[Jabah]

If I remember right ep needed for city vision is calculated for each city. You might have been looking at the ep needed for the first one in the liste but selecting another one could give you another number according to some formula including religion...

[aetryn]

If I remember right ep needed for city vision is calculated for each city. You might have been looking at the ep needed for the first one in the liste but selecting another one could give you another number according to some formula including religion...

This is correct - the number for vision is different for every city (and Investigate too). Shared religions, having the shrine, distance from your capital, and probably other factors affect this but I can't find a listing for the formula anywhere and I'm too tired to go hunting for it in the DLL tonight.

The fact that it happened one turn before getting vision on some other city (probably the capital, since that's likely to be first in the list) is purely coincidental. And when you get that vision, it won't necessarily give you his OTHER cities in your vision either.

[aetryn]

@comm wait.... shared religion HELPS city vis but doesn't guarantee it? like, to the tune of "you get city vis one turn earlier than you would otherwise have, but only if you're already right there on the threshold EP-wise"? man what a weird mechanic.... why even program in such a specific and mechanically insignificant edge case.... or are there contexts in which the effect size is NOT insignificant?

@aetryn yeahhh that's kinda what i was thinking..... what good are rifles if they have to sit around for 3 turns per city waiting for cats to slowly plink down castle defenses, and even then a rifle can still lose to a fortified musket on a hill... i see that rifling unlocks cavs as well but you'd think they'd have the same problem.... kinda feels like the (obviously necessary) drafting change hurt the unit viability A LOT.... as it stands i'd much rather have the weaker unit that is right next to the monster era-defining siege unit than big piles of dead rifles outside ginger's janissary-defended cities...

relatedly: if our tech path after engi was straight-up just guilds -> gunpowder -> (heroic epic detour) -> chemistry -> steel -> milsci, and then i used our second golden age just to whip out a gigantic pile of cannons the instant we get access to them, how mad at me would u be

Re: tech path - I'd want to know how strong the economies are of the non-Ginger players. Try and capture the GPT they are making when they are saving money. If there are no booming economic threats out there, the fact that we are RIGHT NEXT to the game leader who needs to be taken down a peg suggests either beelining military or playing for the very very long game where, if the territorial position stays unchanged, we eventually pull away in economy just due to having more land.  But then Ginger possibly just conquers Dreylin even if we have the necessary defensive strength.

The danger if there is a non-Ginger tech powerhouse out there is that they get left alone, build econ and ignore military, and accelerate ahead while we fight Ginger. The most likely candidates for this are Greenline, Dreylin, MJMD, and Superdeath. Dreylin is too threatened by Ginger I think to make this play  - they are probably also thinking along the same lines you are: get military tech and try to use it soon. MJMD I think has distorted his game too much chasing wonders. Superdeath is in by far the best position with all his land, but can he fight his own tendency and Nauf's paranoia to play a buildery game? I'd guess no. (By the way, let's be careful ourselves of Nauf's paranoia. No sketchy or half-aggressive actions toward him. We've built up a lot of good will but let's aim to keep it). That leaves Greenline, who has really favorable neighbors right now (MJMD and a Dreylin who's almost certainly looking the other way right now).

If nobody out there looks like a tech runaway threat, I think heading pretty aggressively for cannons and Grenadiers is a reasonable play. Just, if you do that, you can't whiff. Failing to seriously damage Ginger at that point will basically make it impossible to beat him to Infantry and that generation of military tech, and that WILL be the end. If we do damage him (don't even need to take him out, just take some of his land and prevent him from making progress against Dreylin), we probably have time to go heavy infra, run to Corporation (for extra trade routes and Free Market civic). I don't need to tell you how much PRO wants +2 net trade routes from Corporation and the civic.

I'd probably still pick up Civil Service first if we haven't already since being able to farm more tiles will help us build up pop for a gigantic pile of cannons.

[ljubljana]

hmmm.... what do you see as the alternative tech path to military, something like printing press + economics and then military? with respect to "if we do this, we can't whiff", i kinda think that applies to the whole ginger dynamic: if they conquer or even get a good split of drey, it's probably game over, and as the only ones who can intervene, it might constitute a whiff just to NOT get military tech and the implied threat of intervention if they attack dreylin in play quickly enough to block a conquest.... not sure how many econ diversions we can afford to make that true but i have a bad feeling abt ginger's teching rate and they haven't even finished taj yet.... i get the sense that even with a beeline ginger could still pull off a riflecav attack on drey before we hit cannons and we might have to hold them off with muskets for a while, using the golden age to spam them while we research steel tech DURING the war... maybe even fortifying some cg3 muskets in dreylin's cities if we have to (...do we still get their defensive bonus and the cg3 bonus if we do this?)

re other tech runaways who could ignore military while we try to drag down ginger: tbh i think the best candidate is actually just naufragar.... they will be second or first in territory when this war is over and have 12-turn mom golden ages to cruise on ahead with, and if they ignore nationalism they could maybe get as many as 4 of them (!!) via PHI.... as for the others, it's hard to say but the picture is not too inspiring - nauf still is the only one with guilds, and just two people with engi one of whom is dying, and those are the crucial high-impact techs of this era... i think SD had a good shot to become an econ runaway but their last war with gav seems to have hurt them badly, they whipped like hell (worse than nauf and i think on par with us) and got nothing to show for it really... now they look to be in a recovery period like us and nauf but with soon to be 5-6 fewer cities. drey i agree seems too threatened by ginger to ignore military, greenline could geopolitically but i think they are suffering from a combination of underbuilt cottages, rugged land, and a lack of serfdom as their GNP has been persistently pretty low for a while now... i don't reeeeally know what's going on in greenline or mjmd land but with just one civ's worth of good land (in contrast to SD's two, us and nauf's 1.5) i get the sense that they are too far behind to win without fighting soon - they won't outtech ginger in the short term or the larger civs in the long term so idk when else they can get more land, and 15 cities will not be enough to win even for ginger with their tech lead, let alone greenline who apparently is even with us at best

re civil service we do indeed already have it, did a 2 tuen GA research re economics tech i agree but unsure about corporation - 50 hammers for a trade route means i intend to build castles in probably literally every single city, and then corp is blank other than wall street lol. re ginger lapping the field and cruising to infantry, well... is this really game over if they haven't taken more territory? do 14 cities producing infantry really beat what will be 40 cities between us and dreylin making units one tech level behind, with us at least having cannons? i guess factories are the reason that is a much scarier time to fight them than like our muskets vs their rifles but still doesn't seem like a slam dunk, that seems like quite the numerical deficit to overcome even if all their cities have twice the production of the average drey/us city... but yeah certainly if we WHIP a crapton of cannons and then fail to hurt them and THEN they get infantry we're pretty screwed... but i guess maybe there is a plan where we go fast military to implicitly contain ginger but do NOT go crazy with whipping and an attempted conquest, and just try to win by being the biggest and most tiles havingest? but to do that we must keep ginger from killing drey without whipping a pile which seems a little implausible

[williams482]

The "religions boosting city visibility" thing is a nod to way Vanilla/Warlords worked, where a self-founded religion spreading to rival cities would just straight up give you city visibility.

I think attacking the retreating garrison stack was probably the right move, but RNGesus' fickle favor is never something you can predict. Does the damage we took in that attack really knock us out of being able to push for an unreinforced Gondar?

[aetryn]

hmmm.... what do you see as the alternative tech path to military, something like printing press + economics and then military? with respect to "if we do this, we can't whiff", i kinda think that applies to the whole ginger dynamic: if they conquer or even get a good split of drey, it's probably game over, and as the only ones who can intervene, it might constitute a whiff just to NOT get military tech and the implied threat of intervention if they attack dreylin in play quickly enough to block a conquest.... not sure how many econ diversions we can afford to make that true but i have a bad feeling abt ginger's teching rate and they haven't even finished taj yet.... i get the sense that even with a beeline ginger could still pull off a riflecav attack on drey before we hit cannons and we might have to hold them off with muskets for a while, using the golden age to spam them while we research steel tech DURING the war... maybe even fortifying some cg3 muskets in dreylin's cities if we have to (...do we still get their defensive bonus and the cg3 bonus if we do this?)

re other tech runaways who could ignore military while we try to drag down ginger: tbh i think the best candidate is actually just naufragar.... they will be second or first in territory when this war is over and have 12-turn mom golden ages to cruise on ahead with, and if they ignore nationalism they could maybe get as many as 4 of them (!!) via PHI.... as for the others, it's hard to say but the picture is not too inspiring - nauf still is the only one with guilds, and just two people with engi one of whom is dying, and those are the crucial high-impact techs of this era... i think SD had a good shot to become an econ runaway but their last war with gav seems to have hurt them badly, they whipped like hell (worse than nauf and i think on par with us) and got nothing to show for it really... now they look to be in a recovery period like us and nauf but with soon to be 5-6 fewer cities. drey i agree seems too threatened by ginger to ignore military, greenline could geopolitically but i think they are suffering from a combination of underbuilt cottages, rugged land, and a lack of serfdom as their GNP has been persistently pretty low for a while now... i don't reeeeally know what's going on in greenline or mjmd land but with just one civ's worth of good land (in contrast to SD's two, us and nauf's 1.5) i get the sense that they are too far behind to win without fighting soon - they won't outtech ginger in the short term or the larger civs in the long term so idk when else they can get more land, and 15 cities will not be enough to win even for ginger with their tech lead, let alone greenline who apparently is even with us at best

re civil service we do indeed already have it, did a 2 tuen GA research re economics tech i agree but unsure about corporation - 50 hammers for a trade route means i intend to build castles in probably literally every single city, and then corp is blank other than wall street lol. re ginger lapping the field and cruising to infantry, well... is this really game over if they haven't taken more territory? do 14 cities producing infantry really beat what will be 40 cities between us and dreylin making units one tech level behind, with us at least having cannons? i guess factories are the reason that is a much scarier time to fight them than like our muskets vs their rifles but still doesn't seem like a slam dunk, that seems like quite the numerical deficit to overcome even if all their cities have twice the production of the average drey/us city... but yeah certainly if we WHIP a crapton of cannons and then fail to hurt them and THEN they get infantry we're pretty screwed... but i guess maybe there is a plan where we go fast military to implicitly contain ginger but do NOT go crazy with whipping and an attempted conquest, and just try to win by being the biggest and most tiles havingest? but to do that we must keep ginger from killing drey without whipping a pile which seems a little implausible

The economic path is going to Banking and Education and getting multiplier buildings up, making a run at the Music Great Artist to help with GAs if nobody has gotten it yet ,maybe making a Liberalism push to prevent Ginger from getting that, Economics for the free merchant and Free Trade, Printing Press and Replaceable Parts for the yields, etc.  IF Ginger doesn't conquer Dreylin, we probably pull ahead in pure economic power just due to more land (and some of Ginger's power dropping off when monasteries obsolete). Of course, it's not all that unlikely that Ginger does attempt a conquest of Dreylin. I don't think we can go pure econ for tech. We can mix it up some - get a few key economy techs while mostly pushing military, which is hedging but might not get us to Steel when we want to - or we can go heavy toward a late Renaissance war and hope that Dreylin is doing similarly, and that between the two of us we can not only fend off Ginger but take something from him / take him out of the game.

[ljubljana]

yeahhh.... i guess i'm not thrilled by the econ path because we already have a crapton of unbuilt econ buildings, most of which are better than those, and i can't really envision us having the time to build like, 4-5 econ buildings in every city while still remaining militarily capable of ginger containment. i can see an infra week consisting of castles and courthouses making sense, but then we also have just 3 forges (2 in captured size-1 cities) and are about to unlock grocers.... i don't even think we can really get all of those up while still making enough troops, let alone banks or universities.... and as for liberalism and the music and economics great people, i'd love to compete for them but it's hard to see how ginger is anything but a total lock for them... for lib in particular they have paper already and such a gnp advantage that if they think we can contest it they can beat us for sure. maybe someone should go for ed just to keep ginger from sandbagging lib for too long but if that's the only reason to go for it i'm comfortable with that being someone else's responsibility

a hidden military benefit of PRO seems to be that this is true, btw.... we can have it both ways to some extent w 50 hammer walls + castles, while for a non-PRO civ they probably WOULD run out of efficient economic builds here if they went straight for gunpowder -> steel

@williams we could probably still try for gondar, i was just being dramatic. that is, if it doesn't get reinforced like, at all.... we have something lile 5 cats and maybe 16 or so healthy attackers which does beat 6 medieval units.... but i am not as confident that it beats 8 medieval units we'll see, i think they have a big stack in the capital too that could reinforce, but perhaps if we pressure the cap at the same time we can pull something off

[ljubljana]

realizing with creeping horror that if i believe i'm in an unstated turnsplit with nauf over who gets to move first against contested GT cities, and nauf and i are in a hard split with GT, then the fact that the turn just rolled means that my 6 hour window in which to play runs from now, midnight PST, to 6 AM PST..... i don't think i can do that guys, turns have been taking multiple hours and i'm so sleepy

should i be codifying this intuition in some way, by asking nauf for a formal split? scrolling back it looks like they have been moving after me, deliberately or otherwise, since t139, so maybe informal is working well enough, but, you know, these kinds of unstated things work great until they don't

either way, this is me stating to the lurkers in advance of any possible ruling disputes that a) i believe me and nauf are in a split right now which i am attempting to follow, but b) i might need an extension on it this turn so i can sleep no idea how i can feasibly convey that in either the lurker thread or to nauf....

[Miguelito]

No problem with a note "can't play right now, need to sleep, extension please" in the tech thread. And you can pm be if suggesting that you follow your count turn order since your United were operating in the same area now. it's also fairer for GT. And nauf will bee cool with it, it's not like he has rage quit a game over turn split issues before (was it that? But no seriously, that's a common and reasonable thing)

[ljubljana]

lol did they do that? well, "crisis" averted as they did wait for us this turn as well. but this seems likely to be a recurring issue so maybe i will send them a PM...

turn 145

sooooooo because GT's remaining cities are all on hills we pretty much have maphacks now



highlighted is the garrison in aksum, which is about the same size as that in gondar. and



the naufragar megastack has moved unto the hawulti pile-o-pikes, which it will obliterate without breaking a sweat. so we have a good chance to either push on gondar or do an end-run around nauf's stack with our 2-movers in pursuit of "look mom just one spear" massawa. not exactly sure which is correct.... massawa would be easier to take of course, but it's a pretty crappy city and might turn into a geopolitical liability and possible apple of temptation for nauf, given that it's behind where their lines are going to end up being. that is unless we can engineer some kind of city swap for most likely hawulti... but not sure it's worth going through all that for such a crappy spot.

but do we actually have the units in place to crack gondar after the very bloody Battle of the Garrison... it looks like we have 5 cats, 16 full-health guys, and a few random injureds, who i am in no way above using as attackers in their own right.... maybe taking ONE turn off to heal in the presence of a medic (so... that would be this turn then). also gotta be prepared for the hawulti garrison to run up and try to retake matara now that its doom has arrived, but i thiiiink we can divert them from doing so with some judicious application of pillaging and our own pile-o-longbows

ok, before i farm over our extra ivories for the 1 marginal hammer in atamifuji, maaaaybe i'd better check to make sure we don't have any potential customers..... and to my surprise, we do! drey lacks ivory and has an extra dye, that's worth a shot, and it helps out our natural ally... generally i feel that we should get the full complement of luxes sourced up as quickly as possible - eventually we will need them and they ARE in what will eventually be limited supply once everyone ELSE runs into the happy cap, so probably best to get an active deal going as soon as possible so that in 50 turns or whatever we will have to actively get cancelled on in order to run out of luxes

also, i am feeling much less threatened by superdeath's happy levels now that their pop levels look like this



and indeed if we're worried nauf could run away with this it's in our interest to strengthen SD. so i'll offer them gold for sugar straight-up. they may not take it as they only have the one sugar but gold has a happy doubler while sugar does not, so it may still be a net positive for them. and they also might have extra sources they haven't hooked up yet

believe it or not, we are just 3 points away from HEALTH being relevant at our largest cities.... maybe i'd better go looking for some of that too...