Turn 175 - Zululand
well, let us find out
apostolic palace, huh? what is left in CtH that this can even do? i see that assign city, force peace, and religious victory have been removed which prevents my greatest fear, that our civ will be ruined by unhappiness by having to repeatedly defy attempts to AP-res ginger's cities back....
in the south
ginger has not retaken lungfish but has sent over a scouting jan to check out our defenses, in what i must imagine to be preparation for so doing. and.... ginger has EVACUATED flounder
well, why on EARTH would they do that? what could they POSSibly be worried about....
in the north
not much action other than some significant-looking redeploys to cover the exposed bits of geography that we have not yet managed to take. the hill at aintab is the most significant and has 2 jans and a pike on it, in response to our threat to combat-road over and take that hill with our longbow pair + musket. so that's fair enough, but we still CAN take the hill to the SW of those guys, the removal of whose road will add a turn to the amount of time it would take to attack mitakeumi and takanosho from that hole. so probably worth doing, especially with the river giving defensive cover to the pillagers
in the NORTH north
we're up to two jans on the hill at prussa. which is a good decision as i indeed WAS thinking about trying to take it this turn
our sacrificial corn-killing impi died but i noticed something else.... check out the farm 1N of the dead corn, which is ONLY providing a gold! that's right, all their irrigation to this area comes from that ONE farm W-NW of attaleia... which is a farm that we could pillage, to strip another 4 food from ginger's frontline cities here uncertain if that's correct, per se (we are getting real low on impis) but worth consideration, yes?
oh and in the event log, superdeath made peace w gavagai! so in a 1v1 vs nauf they are not exceedingly unlikely to collapse and nauf may even be hands-full. i mean, just LOOK at their (nauf's) power rating
so... to walk into the empty city, or to not walk into the empty city? i choose..... the answer will SHOCK you.....
still has a courthouse and granary after multiple captures, wow! unlike lungfish, THIS city i will make a full effort to keep. on our side of the mountain range, and just 3 tiles from ura, it is almost impossible for ginger to defend, and opens up the whole hilly border region between former babylon and the ottoman heartlands to guerilla pillaging not to mention salmon is just 3 tiles away from flounder and could probably be targeted as well
see the janissary under the "combat road" sign? that's actually 5 units, 3 injured jans and two axes... and, unless ginger has their own combat workers already in place here, i think they have evacuated too late as next turn we can probably combat-road over ourselves and kill them, depending on how many of our ura defenders we shift up here (hence the sign)
thirty, three-zero first civ to 30 cities wins the game, right? ....right? 
apparently because of the way math works with the +100% from spears vs mounteds (subtracting 6 strength from them, instead of adding 4 to us), a sufficiently buff impi is actually semi-competitive with a cuir?? ok, NO more throwing these guys away, at least not the formation ones.... and actually, we can straight-up manufacture formation impis now in much of our core, or COULD if we were to cut our own iron supply.... food for thought at the dawning of the cuir wave, i suppose.... anyways with that in mind, i'm choosing to cut ginger's and *checks notes* our irrigation up here via the wounded horse that beat an axe on the forest last turn instead of an impi... that also means that any cuir that comes out to kill the horse would have to end its turn in pike and, indeed, impi range which is fine with me
the desolation of the land.... isn't it beautiful? :')
despite my earlier delusional optimism, greenline is, of course, still refusing to See The Light of what i consider to be their clear strategic interest. this is the world's last, best chance to stop ginger, you have loads of lightly-defended dreylin conquests you could take, and still you refuse to do anything? their tech deficit vs ginger is, well, yeah, frankly pretty serious but come ON man, those cities have wounded janissaries in them and you can at least make knights..... WE got kills with maces and longbows, you could too if you really went for it....
sigh. ok, i don't like it, and i know yall told me not to do this repeatedly, but.... perhaps i'd better stop making demands and start making offers:
it's not as good as if dreylin got the city back, but sumerian ownership would put one ring of culture there, which is more than zero, and they are CRE so the borders wouldn't take THAT long to expand, if one or both of us can find a way to defend it. i can't guarantee that ginger won't almost immediately take the city back with cuirs, of course, but if greenline is willing to switch sides, i hereby vow that after all subsequent recaptures of the (almost indefensible for either us or ginger) lungfish, i will gift it back to them. perhaps greenline would be a phony ally (as, so far as i can tell, they have been to ginger) but i'll trust them just enough to let them prove it to us, this once. i DEFINITELY am willing to give up a size 2 city in exchange for greenline not knifing us in the side if we start to make gains vs ginger, if that's how this plays out....
sigh. i murdered the hill at aintab, but i don't know if this is enough defenders.... the musket and double g2 longbow on the hill i feel ok about, i don't think ginger would attack across the river, or that it would really be an efficient trade for them to do so. but these two, guarding our pair of combat workers, are a bit more vulnerable. i would like it to require either multiple cuirs in the fog or combat workers for them to break through here, and this does accomplish that, but if either of those things does exist in range then they could get us here. blah. all i can really think of to hedge against that is to shift some 2-movers over so we can (probably, maybe) counterattack if they try it.... but then that cuts down on our zone defense at the attaleia forests
bluh. what an annoying game eventually i gave the knight c1 and pinch and moved it up as well - not perfect, but i'm now confident that these three units can defend against the two jans + pike unless our luck is really abysmal, so they'd probably need both combat workers AND cuirs in range to get our workers
lots of other defensive problems and troop deployments i could comment on but everyone has been waiting long enough for the turn to roll lol
grr. actually we are not done here yet..... i moved my g2 longbow out of lungfish to scout, on a lark, and what do i find but
the bigass cuir stack itself. or... ok, actually that's a really SMALL-ass cuir stack. enough to kill the city, sure, but... enough that we can't set a little trap for them? maybe not now (oh no, absolutely not now) but on a future turn...?
for now though, there's very little we can do.... i retreated all but the scouting longbow (who is too exposed to get out) to the hill NW of the city, where a g1 musket i just drafted out of ura can do its best to guard against cuir snipes. if they leave the road out of the city unpillaged we can think think about counterattacking but i rate that as somewhere between "not going to happen" and "NOT going to happen"...
ok enough of this. i don't wanna deal w this turn anymore
sigh, so much for this "gift the city to greenline so they'll DO something" plan.... i guess we're fine if ginger goes first and takes it, but if greenline goes first, accepts, and then the city is immediately recaptured, they will probably think we acted in bad faith. and it will take a while for us to recapture to be able to regift it to them, it looks like.... so i think this idea was another in the continuing series of my diplo blunders... hopefully that exact series of events won't happen, but if it DOES, we will need to think of some seriously apologetic thing to do to avoid having created a blood enemy here... like, some "gift them nishikigi instead with an identical copper + cow rider" level of apologetic thing... idk, what do you guys think? other than "that was a bigass dumb mistake you nincompoop"
edit: well, ginger logged in first so that's probably non-operative, thank goodness
well, let us find out
apostolic palace, huh? what is left in CtH that this can even do? i see that assign city, force peace, and religious victory have been removed which prevents my greatest fear, that our civ will be ruined by unhappiness by having to repeatedly defy attempts to AP-res ginger's cities back....
in the south
ginger has not retaken lungfish but has sent over a scouting jan to check out our defenses, in what i must imagine to be preparation for so doing. and.... ginger has EVACUATED flounder
well, why on EARTH would they do that? what could they POSSibly be worried about....in the north
not much action other than some significant-looking redeploys to cover the exposed bits of geography that we have not yet managed to take. the hill at aintab is the most significant and has 2 jans and a pike on it, in response to our threat to combat-road over and take that hill with our longbow pair + musket. so that's fair enough, but we still CAN take the hill to the SW of those guys, the removal of whose road will add a turn to the amount of time it would take to attack mitakeumi and takanosho from that hole. so probably worth doing, especially with the river giving defensive cover to the pillagers
in the NORTH north
we're up to two jans on the hill at prussa. which is a good decision as i indeed WAS thinking about trying to take it this turn
our sacrificial corn-killing impi died but i noticed something else.... check out the farm 1N of the dead corn, which is ONLY providing a gold! that's right, all their irrigation to this area comes from that ONE farm W-NW of attaleia... which is a farm that we could pillage, to strip another 4 food from ginger's frontline cities here uncertain if that's correct, per se (we are getting real low on impis) but worth consideration, yes?oh and in the event log, superdeath made peace w gavagai! so in a 1v1 vs nauf they are not exceedingly unlikely to collapse and nauf may even be hands-full. i mean, just LOOK at their (nauf's) power rating
so... to walk into the empty city, or to not walk into the empty city? i choose..... the answer will SHOCK you.....
still has a courthouse and granary after multiple captures, wow! unlike lungfish, THIS city i will make a full effort to keep. on our side of the mountain range, and just 3 tiles from ura, it is almost impossible for ginger to defend, and opens up the whole hilly border region between former babylon and the ottoman heartlands to guerilla pillaging
not to mention salmon is just 3 tiles away from flounder and could probably be targeted as wellsee the janissary under the "combat road" sign? that's actually 5 units, 3 injured jans and two axes... and, unless ginger has their own combat workers already in place here, i think they have evacuated too late as next turn we can probably combat-road over ourselves and kill them, depending on how many of our ura defenders we shift up here (hence the sign)
thirty, three-zero
first civ to 30 cities wins the game, right? ....right? apparently because of the way math works with the +100% from spears vs mounteds (subtracting 6 strength from them, instead of adding 4 to us), a sufficiently buff impi is actually semi-competitive with a cuir?? ok, NO more throwing these guys away, at least not the formation ones.... and actually, we can straight-up manufacture formation impis now in much of our core, or COULD if we were to cut our own iron supply.... food for thought at the dawning of the cuir wave, i suppose.... anyways with that in mind, i'm choosing to cut ginger's and *checks notes* our irrigation up here via the wounded horse that beat an axe on the forest last turn instead of an impi... that also means that any cuir that comes out to kill the horse would have to end its turn in pike and, indeed, impi range which is fine with me
the desolation of the land.... isn't it beautiful? :')
despite my earlier delusional optimism, greenline is, of course, still refusing to See The Light of what i consider to be their clear strategic interest. this is the world's last, best chance to stop ginger, you have loads of lightly-defended dreylin conquests you could take, and still you refuse to do anything? their tech deficit vs ginger is, well, yeah, frankly pretty serious but come ON man, those cities have wounded janissaries in them and you can at least make knights..... WE got kills with maces and longbows, you could too if you really went for it....
sigh. ok, i don't like it, and i know yall told me not to do this repeatedly, but.... perhaps i'd better stop making demands and start making offers:
it's not as good as if dreylin got the city back, but sumerian ownership would put one ring of culture there, which is more than zero, and they are CRE so the borders wouldn't take THAT long to expand, if one or both of us can find a way to defend it. i can't guarantee that ginger won't almost immediately take the city back with cuirs, of course, but if greenline is willing to switch sides, i hereby vow that after all subsequent recaptures of the (almost indefensible for either us or ginger) lungfish, i will gift it back to them. perhaps greenline would be a phony ally (as, so far as i can tell, they have been to ginger) but i'll trust them just enough to let them prove it to us, this once. i DEFINITELY am willing to give up a size 2 city in exchange for greenline not knifing us in the side if we start to make gains vs ginger, if that's how this plays out....
sigh. i murdered the hill at aintab, but i don't know if this is enough defenders.... the musket and double g2 longbow on the hill i feel ok about, i don't think ginger would attack across the river, or that it would really be an efficient trade for them to do so. but these two, guarding our pair of combat workers, are a bit more vulnerable. i would like it to require either multiple cuirs in the fog or combat workers for them to break through here, and this does accomplish that, but if either of those things does exist in range then they could get us here. blah. all i can really think of to hedge against that is to shift some 2-movers over so we can (probably, maybe) counterattack if they try it.... but then that cuts down on our zone defense at the attaleia forests
bluh. what an annoying game eventually i gave the knight c1 and pinch and moved it up as well - not perfect, but i'm now confident that these three units can defend against the two jans + pike unless our luck is really abysmal, so they'd probably need both combat workers AND cuirs in range to get our workerslots of other defensive problems and troop deployments i could comment on but everyone has been waiting long enough for the turn to roll lol
grr. actually we are not done here yet..... i moved my g2 longbow out of lungfish to scout, on a lark, and what do i find but
the bigass cuir stack itself. or... ok, actually that's a really SMALL-ass cuir stack. enough to kill the city, sure, but... enough that we can't set a little trap for them? maybe not now (oh no, absolutely not now) but on a future turn...?
for now though, there's very little we can do.... i retreated all but the scouting longbow (who is too exposed to get out) to the hill NW of the city, where a g1 musket i just drafted out of ura can do its best to guard against cuir snipes. if they leave the road out of the city unpillaged we can think think about counterattacking but i rate that as somewhere between "not going to happen" and "NOT going to happen"...
ok enough of this. i don't wanna deal w this turn anymore
sigh, so much for this "gift the city to greenline so they'll DO something" plan.... i guess we're fine if ginger goes first and takes it, but if greenline goes first, accepts, and then the city is immediately recaptured, they will probably think we acted in bad faith. and it will take a while for us to recapture to be able to regift it to them, it looks like.... so i think this idea was another in the continuing series of my diplo blunders... hopefully that exact series of events won't happen, but if it DOES, we will need to think of some seriously apologetic thing to do to avoid having created a blood enemy here... like, some "gift them nishikigi instead with an identical copper + cow rider" level of apologetic thing... idk, what do you guys think? other than "that was a bigass dumb mistake you nincompoop"
edit: well, ginger logged in first so that's probably non-operative, thank goodness
i guess since i'm tokugawa here, i'm just supposed to know what my own diplo pluses and maluses are.... in which case of course i've been set on "furious" for towards greenline for a while now 
