(May 9th, 2024, 15:33)williams482 Wrote: My instinct is "no" on immediate slavery swap. You don't just need units, you need tech: tech you are only going to get if you can keep your economy in tolerable shape. Eating a turn of anarchy to crash your economy to whip out a bunch of obsolete and/or predominantly defensive units in the face of a possible but hardly guaranteed attack into your existing prepared defenses, boosted by a wonder you chopped out pretty much exactly so you could hold those cities with fewer defenders.
Slavery now cuts the chances of you being invaded now. I wager it also substantially cuts into your chances of winning an offensive war (with outside help) against Ginger, and cuts your chances of actually winning even further.
Chill.
i'm not good at chilling but i think this is right... and yes, is the whole logic by which we're in serfdom now in the first place. so basically we did all this defense-maximizing shit (chichen itza, picking tokugawa in the first place, early castles + spamming PRO longbows) in the hopes that, in pretty much this exact situation, it will get ginger's stack to wander into dreylin's land, hoping we don't intervene because our army is in ethiopia, instead of into our land, looking for easy gains because our army is in ethiopia. if we are WRONG about that and ginger does invade us, we lack the forces in place to defend and are going to lose a line of cities i think, at least at first, while we slow-swap to slavery and whip a pile of guys. but that's effectively the gamble which we built around this run so from a win-maximizing perspective it's probably best to see it through, as much as that offends my nervous and impulsive disposition
at the risk of rationalizing i also think that's what i'd do in their position? ginger is in a tough position geopolitically here and probably does not believe they can win a 2v1 against two larger empires, but they must know they are likely to face one here.... if they come at us while drey's army is at liberty to intervene, they will certainly face a 2v1 and will do so immediately, while if they go for drey there might seem to be at least a CHANCE that zulu will be too busy to do anything. or more specifically, too busy to do anything IN TIME - their best bet is prooobably to try to defeat us piecemeal, which means defeating drey's standing forces and making gains on them before we can mobilize, and then hoping we'll accept their drey conquest as a fait accompli
of course a lot depends on what signals they're receiving in diplo... they will probably beg one of us for a NAP extension soon to delay the 2v1 but it's looking like they won't get it. so the wildcard is greenline. if they're splitting drey with ginger i expect greenline to accept our long-term NAP extension from last turn, or likewise if they're focused westward and want us to be free to contain ginger.... but if they are coming for US, naturally they'll be more circumspect lollll
(May 9th, 2024, 17:28)Commodore Wrote: That empire overview actually made me MORE ignorant of the status of your empire.
yeahhh i'll try to give yall a better overview for this turn, as part of the uh traditional t151 overview lol (.....is THAT why everyone's posting today?)
well, nauf DMed me asking to not be in a turnsplit anymore so now we can procrastinate playing for 12 hours again
Turn 151 - Zululand
ok which nerds are gonna jumpscare me with diplo today
gav wants silk on account of being in total collapse mode - superdeath has taken 2 more cities and has kicked us out of the top spot in city count. this looks bad, guys.... naufragar is presumably heading over to intervene but it looks like either nauf or superdeath is fated to monsterhood, which is nnnnnNot Good for our chances of winning lol. i wonder if we should poke mjmd or nauf to intervene.... well anyways, of course gav can have their silks which it sounds like are just going to carpet the way to a whip frenzy
man, so this is why all the games end at knights huh? because as soon as they hit the field the game immediately consolidates into front-runners, who can often just cruise to a win from there?
gav wants gold as well and they will get that also, of course
and that's it. greenline DID NOT accept our NAP extension but well, it did include a "stop trading with ginger" clause so that COULD be why.... i guess..... i'll send them a straight cow/cow to try to verify but this is a black omen
GT has left an exposed worker on their iron and in range of an unpromoted longbow
i suppose it makes sense to take it, and probably to pillage while we're at it to cut off even their theoretical ability to continue to whip crossbows. they haven't been doing that though, which suggests wealth builds to me.... but i suppose that leaves us another avenue of killing the city, which is to pillage EVERYthing and try to bankrupt them with unit costs. this would be really really slow of course, and at a time when we can ill-afford to be slow, but we could probably preserve quite a few units in so doing....anyways, this time i think i want to keep GT's worker... if they attack, at least their first attacker would almost certainly die and we stand some chance of getting a 2 for 1. and if not, free worker :D only punish i can see is that they could then use units to block our LB from getting into the aksum fight, and that's almost as good for us since it draws defenders away
i also think i'm going to make the hard (well, not THAT hard) decision to roast the last town at aksum.... the future of this city, if it has one, lies in monstrous HE-dom so the town is not as impactul as in other locations. aaaaand we need the gold really really damn badly lmao
look at that beautiful Z of our invading troops, btw
behold, west point eligibility
as you can see we have reached the point where our stack has at least a theoretical capability of taking aksum. i think i want to wait 2 more turns for the last two cats though. that also has the advantage of healing up this and one other longbow, two of our three axes, and a couple of marginal HAs in gondar, in time to participate.
there is some chance GT will try an end-run to raze gondar sometime in the next few turns.... defensively we are trying to strike a balance between keeping enough units on the corn to force them to send a lot of troops if they want to do that, and enough units in the main stack to ensure that we can respond by taking the city if they DO try for something like that. i will probably maintain a roughly similar distribution of forces until our planned attacking turn (t154) at which point there will be no reason not to move everyone up in one calamitous megastack
nauf's cats are on the move, which bespeaks both confidence in our ability to take aksum and terror in the face of superdeath.... their knight pile is pretty intact as well. i expect them to come in from the other side to try to keep gav alive as soon as they're in position to do so.... but not sure what their odds are. unfortunately the range of "good" outcomes for us is pretty narrow - SD walking over gav uncontested and nauf triggering a reversal of fortune are both bad, we need a lengthy 3-way stalemate.... which could happen but i'm really not betting on it....
ok, before The Strain Of Command starts to get to me too much: zoomed-in-er overview:
NE core/ginger frontier (yeah, unfortunately our core IS the ginger frontier....). our formal NAP lapses on t154, the exact turn on which kirishima and takayasu will finish their castles. we are spamming troops but only have about 10 LBs in the area currently, and no offensive or counterattacking units.... i have also realized that we need castles in at least kotozakura and wakamotoharu as well to worsen their odds if they go for knight forks, and maybe the capital too. and we ALSO need safety turns in multiple different unit types at all these cities so we can whip on consecutive turns if they invade.... but we only have time for one of those things before the NAP expires, and as you can see i've gone with the concrete unit mass for now.
we can probably force them to take their time with ONE of these cities (probably kirishima) by piling it high with a 15-unit LB and pike stack. that means conceding takayasu but that city, size 8 though it may be, is glorified filler anyways... and more importantly, it never expanded borders so it has no cultural defenses against janissaries D: on the bright side though, i'm realizing that ginger made their 20-unit cat stack BEFORE swapping to vassalage and theocracy. which, unless i am mistaken, means they should just have 3 XP each from the barracks, which means they CANNOT mass-promote to accuracy. 20 cats are not enough to crack kirishima's walls + castle + CI defenses in one or even two turns, i think.... and if they try they will be in for a delightful surprise as its fourth-ring borders are due to pop in 9 turns, likely right in the middle of such a siege
moreover i think they still have to use collateral even after the walls are down as i think a max-fortify CG3 longbow still does well against a shock janissary. maybe not THAT much collateral, which might mean they won't take too many losses getting through at that point, but maybe at that point we're just supposed to pull back to WMHof course, if that's our plan (abandon takayasu, defend kirishima and mitakeumi), we can expect their knights to run past our hard points and pillage us straight to hell, while cutting off kiri from the second-line cities to force us to let the longbows die. which is why we have some workers over here doing high-density roading - we will not be GT who constantly missed tactical opportunities due to having a too-pillagable road network. and once we do flip to slavery, it will be mostly pikes that we mass-whip here, not longbows, so we can put paid to such an idea.
you can also see i elided the mention of our newest city, tamawashi. who, for his 17ish-year pro career, has never missed a bout due to injury, and is therefore known as.... "the iron man of sumo". iron man. iron. i am so clever
(depressingly he DID have to miss bouts last year when his whole stable was banned from competing due to a COVID-19 case... but according to the japan sumo association, that doesn't count and his no-absence streak is still officially live according to the record books)
oh and another reason why we must defend mitakeumi if possible is that it's 9 turns away from producing an essential great person for the second golden age.... if the city dies JUST before that would happen it would be catastrophic. but if we CAN squeeze out the great person, atamifuji will be about 12 turns behind and we could possibly launch a purely yields-boosting golden age to crank out a gigantic wave of troops with which to throw ginger back into the sea. andalsoresearchsteel
the south, where we are depressingly underdefended in the event of a greenline attack. hopefully they are ALSO not prepared to bomb through castle defenses, as that's pretty much all we'd have going for us in such a scenario. so far i've only really seen ancient-age trash and defensive units (their own longbow piles) on this border, with a minimum of catapults, against with CG3 125% defense longbows will inflict horrifying losses on a unit-for-unit basis. but...we just don't have that many units
naturally that's because i have spent the last 20 turns constantly coming up with excuses to justify moving LBs over to either the ginger or GT front. unless there is a wave of knights and cats just offscreen (and their milpower rating does not suggest this) i am guessing they could take ura by really piling up the bodies, but hard to see them making much progress beyond that...by the way, in just a few turns we have gone from just nauf having to guilds to 4 people having it. nauf and ginger are confirmed, and i think the speed of gavagai's collapse suggests that superdeath must be the third. so who is fourth? let us ask the GNP graph
i guess it could be greenline, but goddamn, if it's not dreylin i don't know wtf they are doing. and from their diplo i am gathering that they DO know wtf they are doing, so i think the odds are good that greenline does not quite have knights as of yet.
on the subject of graphs, btw, here is the one on which our entire remaining win probability is predicated:
the northwest, former GT border:
we're mostly done with a wave of backup cats, as you can see, which it looks like we will be able to save for ginger. what do we do after that? more cats, pikes, and the first of our own knights all seem like solid ideas. the heroic epic city will be in this neighborhood as well, probably to be established after we hit gunpowder (uh, assuming we DO hit gunpowder). still going back and forth on which one, though - aksum is better both in hammer count and ocean access for navigation-promoted ships, but i really don't like how exposed it is to nauf in the event of a future conflict with them.... i guess we could rebuild the HE if it burns (...right?) but we wouldn't get the settled GGs back and those are the most irreplaceable element
actually.... i wonder if aksum might ALREADY have a settled GG
GT spawned two and only used one that we've seen, and i think a few CG2 crossbows have appeared of late for which i can't think of any other source.... if so then our decision gets pretty damn obvious
