[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

hey, is there a cap on research overflow, as there is for production overflow?

also, if i whip a unit (say, 27 knights), hit enter, and then discover a tech that obsoletes that unit at the start of the next turn (say, military tradition), will i get 27 in-progress cuir builds or will they come out knights due to some special whip exception for upgrades in-queue? worldbuilder SP testing SUGGESTS that they will come out cuirs, at least in base BtS, but i figure i'd better confirm that before i make any impactful decisions based on it

both questions are relevant to our ga timing, natch.... i gotta figure out EXACTLY how many beakers we will have to play with over the next 8 turns before i pop this thing...

edit: are we supposed to get drama on the way to miltrad and make this "globe theater" thing..... eventually globe city + 26 normal cities is almost enough to draft at max rate continuously forever without outrunning happy.... but we don't have any cities with the food surplus to 7->6 draft every turn (wakamotoharu and aksum are closest but are strictly earmarked for other national wonders, oops....) and the globe itself costs a nauseating 600 hammers counting the theaters... seems like a probable no for now but maybe i'm underestimating how transformative even a half-efficiency globe city can be? if we do go for it and are not deluding ourselves about getting an every-turner i guess wakatakakage must be the choice as the 10-food surplus-capable city that is otherwise the crappiest lol (all we're missing out on by keeping it size 7 forever is coast pretty much)

or we cancel heroic epic plans in aksum and draft guerilla 2 muskets there every turn... but then our military instructors are working at half efficiency - better to HE-produce guerilla 3 muskets every turn right?

[ljubljana]

169

logs in right at the start of the turn for the third day running






guess what, we were right to be paranoid! here comes the defensive double-move, since we are not technically in an official turn split, since to ask for one would have given our plans away 



ginger beats us to logging in as the turn rolls by mere seconds (greenshot's timestamp on the first screenie is 11:51:44), with potentially MASSIVE in-game implications. to wit: if they double-move defenders to cover their border cities, attacking this turn will no longer be realistic, and because we are now moving after them this turn, it is now illegal for us to attack at the start of next turn too! so unless we want to sit around for two full turns in which we DON'T declare war (and that's IF they don't race us as the turn rolls again next turn), they have now seized the first position in the turn order for the coming conflict and gained a full turn's worth of unit movement relative to us 

we have moved before them every turn since t161 btw, including the turn in which they logged in 7 minutes into our round

this is by FAR my least favorite thing about multiplayer civ4, and i don't think there are any individual mechanics in 6 that aggravated me as much as this does (although tbf civ6 is definitely a more aggravating experience overall )

i quit to desktop in disgust. time for some MOO3

edit:



well, now what? they logged in twice but didn't end turn....am i even allowed to log in now? i'm guessing that by rule i have to wait until they're done, but isn't the fact that i'm doing so a dead giveaway that i am considering a wardec this turn? which they still have time to react to?

[ljubljana]

i actually don't think i'm permitted to do that by the turnsplit rules.... my understanding is that, if i think i'm in a split or should be in one, i'm supposed to be doing my best to play my whole turn in one session and not log in again after the other person plays until the new turn starts, and am definitely not allowed to take any meaningful game actions between player 2's turn and the turn rolling. not sure if declaring war constitutes a "meaningful game action" if i don't move any units, but my assumption is that it does.

however i'm not 100% on that, and lurkers feel free to correct me - if it is legal to log in after the other person moves, see what the position is, and then (possibly) declare war to lock in the turnsplit, then yeah i definitely should have done that

[williams482]

I would hope there's some legal way around this, because what Ginger just did seems gamey as fuck. Also, called it.

Ugh.

[ljubljana]

well, let's see what the position looks like.... i guess it's POSSIBLE this is just a coincidence and they are not anticipating any incoming, and double-moved their cuirs AWAY from ankyra..... that's not exactly likely, but if they did double-move us to defend as i'm expecting, i'll probably just eat it since we're not formally in a turnsplit and (now that i've had a day to brood) i'd rather not add "rules lawyer" to the list of things i did this game that will make people not want to play with me in the future... but thank you for sharing, and thereby validating, my rage about this

to a certain extent, maybe we're in the "win stupid prizes" stage of playing stupid timer games..... though obviously i, as every rules litigant does, believe my position is special and different and therefore justifiable, maybe i can't (defensibly) be too mad about ginger camping the timer when i was pretty objectively ALSO camping the timer

as for preventing races like this in the future, it seems very hard to do under the current split rules, and i'm not sure how to rewrite them either.... obviously we could have asked for a peacetime split or declared early, but this attack can only work with significant surprise factor which that would have spoiled. the best i can think of (off the top of my head) is that maybe realizing you might be on the verge of being attacked should be like realizing you're in a settler race, and players should maintain the existing turn order after so doing. but unlike in settler races i think it breaks ai-diplo if the expectation is for targets to PM potential attackers something like "hey, i think you're about to attack me, so we're in a turnsplit now".... not to mention with that rule we could easily end up in a situation where, eg, one player starts to build up and ALL their neighbors think they could be the target, and then there is an undeclared, turnpace-killing 5-way turnsplit.... blah. would love to hear lurker suggestions on this, if anyone has one

anyways, i am still highly likely to declare this round or the next regardless of the outcome, to follow our diplo commitments, and because if they are doing defensive double-moves i think it's fair to say there isn't much surprise factor left to preserve but it's possible all i will do is declare and advance a few pillagers/pikes to start taking ginger's hills. if it looks like we can't take ankyra soon i may spitefully burn down ALL of its forward towns to speed us to militrad still, even if we can't threaten cities until our big wave of draftees comes out, it should still help drey a bit to pillage ginger's windmills (actually a surprising amount of their production capacity comes from hills RIGHT on our border) and force them to defend for real. not the outcome we hoped for obviously but better than leaving drey out to dry for even longer i think

[ljubljana]

ok, shall we P this FT then?

start by ripping the bandaid off and checking the position in the east...

no wait, start with diplo



dreylin wants silk.... huh? but you've already got silk.... well, i'm guessing their source is coming under threat soon (check the city counts, down to 9 this turn which is in gav territory....) so i'll accept



mjmd wants our map....? are there areas you HAVEN'T appreciably explored already? well, i'll accept this too i think - no sense denying info to a potential ally-by-necessity

bandaid ripped and..... omg NO shot.....



:o

there are a few places they could be hiding guys still if they have calced out where we have vision, like the iron 2S of attaleia and farm 2E of ankyra, but our scouting impi has just enough movement to check those and they are both empty...

so our first move of the turn is....



to wonder wtf is going on with the corn at aksum? aksum has not popped borders and gondar just has second-ring; we have no cities that control the tile and you can see that the culture there is displayed hilariously as "0% zulu".... the tile is surrounded by our tiles on all sides but SE, which must be the trigger for us getting it, but that was also true last turn and we DIDN'T have the tile then.... i guess this specific check is delayed by a turn for some reason? (gondar's borders popped just last turn) anyways obviously we farm there asap duh



wide-angle shot of SD starting to fall apart a little bit, losing cities to both nauf and mjmd. or.... nope, they gave candy corn to mjmd for peace. ok, is THAT a sign that we can borrow your 10 knights please please pleeease?

we do have another annoying thing to think about this turn and that is MATH



at max science, losing 403 GPT, we are putting 698 BPT into nationalism pre-GA, for slightly over a 3-turn research. does this check out? raw cost of nat is 2898 beakers and we have 67 invested, with 1x KTB and 1x prereq bonus, so the adjusted research should be 698 BPT * 1.23 = 858.54 BPT.... and 2831 / 858 = 3.29 which is about what we're seeing in-game. ok cool!

now let's estimate the marginal beakers we would add at 100% by popping the GA. starting with the library cities, of which there are 8 - takakeisho, mitakeumi, kirishima, hoshoryu, tobizaru, abi, atamifuji, ura - working a total of 14 + 10 + 16 + 10 + 10 + 11 + 7 + 11 = 89 commerce-producing tiles (pretty much the only tiles we are working that do NOT produce commerce are non-river pigs, cows, and copper mines) for 111.25 marginal beakers from the GA. then in the non-library cities i count 9 + 15 + 9 + 7 + 9 + 9 + 10 + 9 + 9 + 7 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 4 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 3 = 124 more beakers (don't ask about the size 14 city without a library.....). so added to our raw BPT we get 933 raw BPT in the GA, which should put 1147/turn into nationalism. that IS NOT enough to 2-turn the tech, which is what we need to happen if we want to do our little 5-turn swap to slavery. so not only do we also have to save this turn so we can actually survive 2 turns of max deficit research, we also need some progress into the tech beforehand. one turn at breakeven (40%) adds 279 raw beakers = 343 adjusted beakers, after which we would have 2488 remaining - still too much to finish in 2t, but now it's close. most likely we could get over the line by running a few carefully-chosen wealth builds for a turn so we can go above 40% on the one turn of breakeven research we need. or.... by burning to the ground a few carefully-chosen towns

so 2t from now, t171, looks like the right timing for the GA.... IF we are going with this slavery plan. the question then becomes: is getting to military tradition in the 6 turns of GA research remaining actually possible outside of serfdom? the number of farms we are working is, of course,



completely catastrophic  i count 32 at library cities and 50 at non-library cities for a total of 90 raw commerce down the drain if we swap to slavery.... so our max beaker rate in slavery + GA is about 843 raw BPT, while losing 400 gold/turn.... total raw beakers we need is

aesthetics: 444 remaining / 1.32 (4x KTB) = 336
literature: 322 / 1.23 (worst-case we only know of one person, GL builder naufragar, confirmed to have the tech) = 261
music: 966 / 1.26 (two people must have this one, miltrad-haver ginger and sistine-builder mjmd) = 766
miltrad: 3220 / 1.23 = 2617

so 3980 raw beakers required. we could do that in 5 turns of MAX research in slavery, but of course we don't have access to that kind of gold in reserve.... we also have a similar problem here to the nationalism one, where we can't convert gold into beakers fast enough - miltrad requires more than 3 turns of max research by itself, but we need a turn each to finish the 3 physical prereq techs that we lack, so we'd need to rely on overflow tricks to actually get there.... 

so as i see it our options are, in some combination:
1. run hundreds of GPT in wealth builds during the GA so we can afford that kind of research cost
2. accept that we will be slaving into knights and muskets, not cuirs, at GA's end
3. pull a monstrous amount of gold out of our asses via pillaging, specifically of the four fully-mature riverside towns at ankyra (which, let me not hesitate to remind you, is a city we are hoping to eventually hold on to - though i suppose it's not so bad if it ends up as a pure production city that we eventually hold on to)
4. delay the GA yet ANOTHER turn (turns?) to save, which means delaying drafting!
5. ask for a loan and hope it works out?

we need to decide if it's worth making the slavery swap even if we don't make it to miltrad in time.... if it isn't, the right time to fire the GA is now, no, it's yesterday - every turn we wait delays the onset of drafting, which represents a huge tempo loss. even the 2 turns we must wait to get nationalism on turn 2 of the GA is a tempo loss, we get nationalism in 4 turns under that plan but we could just maybe have it in 3 if we popped the GA right now. but popping a cuir, or even a knight (maybe), out of every garage is, needless to say, quite the incentive, and one suspects it's the kind of thing we will have to go for if we really want to contest ginger's monstrous milpower lead

ok, enough stalling (is there ever such a thing as "enough stalling"?) - onward to glory

here is our super innocuous, totally defensive-in-nature stack in kirishima at the start of the turn:



and here it is now:



now all these longbows are stuck with guerilla promotions instead of city garrison, and therefore useless on defense.... except for the defense of ankyra, which unlike all of our actual border cities, is in fact on a hill

of course we have more to attack with than that:



3 horses NW-W on the hillside resort town, to pillage.... not that town, which guerilla bows can reach, but the one EAST of it, which they cannot unless i was willing to sacrifice combat odds by having to cross the river on offense next turn (i was not). four impis on the kirishima stack tile, not to defend against cuirs but to pillage the town NORTH of ankyra. and the rest of our 2-movers 1W-1SW of the city, where they can turn around and threaten meleti next turn should the opportunity present itself. as well as out three pikes from kirishima, whose plan is to combat-road into the city and fortify there to stretch their promotions (a cuir that promotes pinch will face a pike, one that promotes shock will face a musket...) 36 cowboys on ottoman territory, all told, with 33 in range of the city next turn

so..... now what?



well, we have a few standing areas of concern.... one is that dreylin is being hollowed out so quickly in the south that we might actually have incoming soon at ura, or god, at castle non-building daieisho, which i was really hoping would be safe for a few more turns:



so option number one is to shift units south to cover that threat and the threat of a greenline attack (they rejected our cow-cow from a few turns back...) option number two is to use some of our OTHER forward-facing garrison units to try to threaten meleti as well, in the brief window of opportunity which we might get before the next mass of cuirassiers appears to fling us back from whence we came. that window could be really really brief though - if we actually advance guys up next to meleti next turn, i can actually see quite a few cuirassiers - speficially these guys



who could, if they turn around now, be in position to paste us if we make a play for the city (which i think we'd have to burn anyways, we have little hope of holding something on flatground at this point imo). in the end i decide it's best not to push our luck with some play with guerilla bows there - MAYbe we can change our mind next turn but for now i think we need those units to hold against any random cuirs they might put together between-turns.... and maybe to reinforce ankyra so we can, just maybe, try some dubious tactical bullshit in ANOTHER location.... 

so half of the reason for ankyra as the choice of target is because it's furthest from the dreylin-murdering cuir stacks, and the other half is that it's on a hill..... but the THIRD half



is that narrow corridor of tiles north of attaleia where ginger never put a city. we KNOW they didn't as we have visibility on all 14 of their original core sites, and there are no roads leading to that area. in fact their road network up here is SO bad that, once we cut the one road leading to ankyra, they have no way to reach that top row of coastal tiles, even with a 2-mover. those are roadable tiles, and we have 4 workers around ready to road them. and where do they lead? to prussa, which is the shrined christian holy city and apostolic palace location  and you may recall that we have two great generals just sitting around from the GT war, which i was GOING to use in aksum for a commando factory.... but we don't HAVE to do that....



tsuyuko, and all our scouts in drey's territory, ends her turn in a threatened city in case ginger is in position to take it with zero units to spare. and..... in case they have a 0.8 health unit to spare, i will give her guerilla 1, just in case

sent ginger and civac the following PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WukYrrTH3ms&t=506s

in a unanimous vote of 3-0, the zulu chiefs of staff have adopted a resolution stating that "we should have impi rushed you nerds on turn 55 when we had the chance". thus, you will see upon opening the turn that we are at war. zululand will be joining dreylin in the second half of the turnsplit.

may sid have mercy on our souls,

ljubljana

second-place youtube clip for inclusion in that PM, now for your eyes only:

https://youtu.be/A_HjMIjzyMU?feature=shared&t=225

[williams482]

Oh, now this looks promising. Any idea where that trio of cuirassiers actually went?

I think, without doing any math myself, that with the influx of pillage cash it makes sense to play for MilTrad and curassier whips. With that said, knight whips plus 50g upgrades is still pretty good, essentially saving 1/3rd of a whipped pop per unit (on average) in exchange for 50g per unit. Given that we're sticking in serfdom long term and should have cash to spend (even if we'd rather not if given the choice), and want to preserve tiles to work/pop to draft where possible. So whipping knights and upgrading them en-route is a tempo improvement which leverages the resource we're prioritizing in our long term civic choice.

It's unfortunate that we have to eat five turns of no serfdom bonus in a GA when that serfdom bonus is so valuable, but a round of knights/cuirs is worth it here.

[ljubljana]

re the cuirs, you can see in the last picture that there are a few approaching drey's city of anglerfish.... that stack is 3 cuirs and a worker, so i believe that's where they went

re miltrad, i think you're right. but we are WAY behind even with the pillaging (probably 2 turns of savings behind), and that's if there is no cap on research overflow which i'm not sure is the case. i do not see any easy solutions to that.... probably the "best" is to delay the GA but i'm worried that our whole front could be in danger from random cuir ministacks before we're in nat + slavery.... i do think we are burning the towns this turn if we can though - we need the money urgently enough, and the odds of them taking ankyra back are plausible enough, that it seems worth hurting the city long-term

note that despite their fearsome economy, ginger doesn't actually have that many cottages.... other than these four it's pretty much just the area immediately around their capital. we could be about to ruin one of their top few commerce cities

[ljubljana]

Turn 170 - Zululand


"so excited to get back to fighting" >> is nonetheless faced with a WAVE of anxiety upon opening up the first war turn. well let's see what unexpected disaster we have to deal with this time

reminder to actually check the event log first this turn, now that we will likely have dead units to think about....



wow! ok, well obviously we can't accept this but i guess if they're this desperate for peace, our timing could have been worse

so here's the event log



no dead units, no new ones appearing, and not even any of what i expected, which is for them to shift their obsolete (but still effective against longbows!) defenders either forward to ankyra to hurt us now, or backward to attaleia to impede taking that city. also none of what i was not sure we would see but thought was a possibility - swapping to slavery/nationhood at the anarchy turn. i think we will have some options here about what to do next.... i do badly want to burn their cottages but there is one big reason not to, which is the tempo loss.... obviously we are only really going to have one or two turns in which the defenses here are light enough for us to crack via the "yeehaw" method, and pillaging the towns will occupy almost our entire invading force for this turn....

so the determinative question is, how feasible IS it to push for other cities (meleti? attaleia?) over the next 1-2 turns? well, here is what we can see of the units coming home to greet us:



those are all single cuirs, so not an enormous welcoming committee... but we can be fairly sure the three cuirs sent to attack anglerfish are on their way back as well (likely in the fog on the same row of tiles as caesarea) as we have lost sight of them and there is nowhere else they could have gone that makes sense for attacking dreylin.

for reference



red box is the rough area from which cuirs could hit any units we leave in ankyra (unless we use 2 units to pillage the road), and blue box is that from which they could hit the most obvious attack vector against meleti, which is the horse tile 2W of it. so notably there are 3 cuirs that are not in range of ankyra now but ARE in range of meleti attackers, so this northern route seems like it will remain safer for longer. actually not only are the 3 missing cuirs out of range of ankyra itself but they are even out of range of 1SE of ankyra, which is the most obvious tile from which we could threaten attaleia.... but by shifting defenders they could get 2 axes, a spear, a pike, and 4 cuirs in the city next turn, which we are not cracking with our motley little band of 2-movers...



ok, what of option 2 - operation sneak (2 morale-promoted knights into prussa)? our pair of GGs is in kotozakura, and can get to the "GG stage" tile on turn 171, next turn.... which is, i believe, a tile on which ginger should NOT have vision once ankyra falls. that is also the fastest we could get a pair of 2-movers (which i do think we are BARELY capable of having be two knights) to "The Tile", 3 moves away from warrior-defended prussa. this plan seems harder for them to stop with just cuirs once we pillage the essential ankyra road, after which they will have no way to reach us with cuirs without stepping off their road network.... and since our success there is more likely to be determined by trickery than by sheer mass of 2-movers, i do not think it will suffer a tempo loss if our main stack stops to pillage this turn...

well, after stewing on this for....some time..... i decided on an attack order (longbows to soften the axes, muskets against spears to, i think, get odds against them, then horses can clean up with no spears in the way) and a general order of operations for the rest of this turn.... which is:

first, get them down to 1 redlined unit
then, pillage towns
then, walk into the city
then, combat road, pillage THEIR road
let us not screw this up!!!! the penalty for getting this wrong is seriously massive and i'd sure love to avoid it!!

hmmm.... on reflection i do wonder if i'm thinking too small with this "burn prussa with a GG" plan.... that is only an axe on defense IN ATTALEIA and we have two GGs.... what if, instead of pillaging the road this turn (since there certainly does not seem to be enough of a stack ready to take ankyra back immediately), we try to achieve a position where we could GG-snipe attaleia on a future turn, maybe AS WELL AS prussa? that relies on them not seeing it coming and leaving just one unit on defense, but again we're playing to our outs here.... if we do that, we may have a chance of actually KEEPING one or both of them (if the assumption on which we are keeping ankyra is that our mixed pike/LB/musket stack suffices to hold whatever our most exposed hilltop city is against whatever units ginger can spare in the immediate future)... i would, of COURSE, be quite happy to simply take/burn one or the other which such trickery but let's at least imagine what our top-end success case could look like

on the other hand, THIS is really tempting:



we can get odds on their top defender vs mounteds with just this one knight, by taking shock? and then can clean up with mounteds and not even risk our gobs of guerilla bows on a task they are not particularly well-suited for? hmm... well. the sign says "save knight" and so i think i'd better save knight.... we only have exactly two in theater so if we are earmarking them for GG tactics, it might be worth losing units just to make sure they stay healthy..... on the other hand, a shock horse does not do too well against a hilltop spear in a city - significantly worse than an LB does against its top defender..... but then the LB is a much more valuable unit to preserve at this point (i think...? what are horses going to do against cuirs?)

bluh, i'm getting loopy over here and am running out of time to even play, let alone sim. just going to go with the original attack order and not worry too much

longbow vs axe (5%): OMG he won!!!!! absolutely NO shot lmao  now he can take guerilla 3 lol
longbow 2 vs axe (5%): dies but mission accomplished, top defender is now the spears, against which our muskets get 74% odds
musket vs spear (74%): wins!
musket vs spear (74%): dies
NOW we can use the shock horse (70% vs spear): wins and NOW WE MUST PILLAGE if that is indeed the plan

*broods intensely over whether it's the plan or not*

oh you know we're going for it, i a) hate cottages and b) desperately need the cash infusion NOW, and c) it is something of a hedge against potential consequences if ginger retakes the city. i chose to get the mine as well given how garbage a tile it is to actually work (and the extent to which we are just SO hard up for cash right now). that windmill to the west i will keep though as frankly kirishima could use it...

"the fresh scent of smoke o' a burning village / who doesn't love to plunder and pillage?"

the glorious (is that what backstabbing your peaceful neighbor is?) result:


'
note the peak, which is third ring to kirishima and meleti (but kirishima has popped fourth ring borders and SHOULD be ahead of them on culture) and is apparently still under ottoman control somehow.... does the culture from now-captured ankyra not get deleted or something, such that that is now propping them up on this tile? it completely ruins our great general snipe plan if they get to keep it of course

as for buildings that the city kept....



THIS is nice for ginger to not have anymore



in the aftermath, i decide to not play games and just go ahead and pillage the road to ankyra now, with a horse+impi pair, covering them with a few formation pikes. these DO DIE to shock cuirassiers on flat ground still, but if they go that route, i think we can revenge said cuirs with an impi, and what's more embarrassing to a cuir than that...

not actually done w the turn but i think i am done w reporting.... i gotta go have a birthday party lol (from which i only occasionally sneak off to finish things up)

[williams482]

Culture borders get weird on the same turn after a city capture, but they should revert to normal next turn. If any of Ginger's cities are still putting culture on a (otherwise neutral) tile then they will maintain control, otherwise the culture borders will go away.

With that said, it looks like the borders shown are Prussa's normal 60% borders, so I wouldn't expect them to recede on that front. Ditto the 40% borders from Meleti and Attaletia.

EDIT: yeah it looks like Ginger actually wasn't expecting this attack? A 600g peace offer and some desperately bad defensive situations certainly suggest as much. In which case the excessive caution you've taken at Dreylin's expense may actually pay off!