[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

that's the way i'm leaning as well. it's really odd that we have no way of communicating... well, pretty much anything in the context of peace deals..... even in retrospect i have no idea wtf ginger's offers giving us 1 GPT for peace, then asking for 93 gold, were supposed to mean.... maybe the 1 GPT says "ok, we accept that you have come off very slightly better in this conflict, so please take that and nurse your ego" and the 93 gold (which was all the gold we had at the time) indicates peace until t193...? but if so i feel like asking for a round number like 90 gold would have been clearer, now i'm just confused and am basically hoping my proposal will get across clearly and not have its interpretation muddled by whatever they thought they were offering last turn.....

[ljubljana]

181 part 2

in case you were wondering how SD managed to take two cities off a technologically superior naufragar



holy still-relevant praets and bigass knight pile  honestly i am getting more and more impressed with SD's fighting ability the longer this game goes on, they have just been facing pile-on after pile-on and are somehow still getting bigger!



what do you guys think? how's our cuir pile looking?

note i am actually whipping a worker in daieisho for combat duties.... that's a little sad but i do think it's correct; we need 8 workers in theater to make the initial thrust work by my count (1 road each on a desert, floodplains, and plains) and we are one short thanks to ginger's poaching (or, more accurately, my squandering)

one question that i don't quite know the answer to is whether we're supposed to delay.... not a lot, mind you, but maybe one turn so that the other 10 or so cuirs that are 1-6 tiles behind can be part of the initial wave. ostensibly it's fine to have these instead be a 10-unit reinforcement stack that arrives a turn later but a lot depends on various unknowns about how many units they have in theater, especially knights and cats.... if they do find a way to wipe a significant portion of our cuirstack we are in deep shit of course



ok wait, please tell me there's a way to know if these guys have city vis against us or not ((( i see when i mouse over dreylin, who we have a similar number of points into as we do into greenline, that we need 349 to get vis on their smallest city; that's not way more than what greenline has invested in us.... that is so nasty, do we really have to guess about whether they have city vis, and put points into them now to deny it if we think they do, but if not then AVOID putting points into them for fear of tipping our hand? ughhh

anyways i went with the "put EP into them in case they have city vis" plan since i stupidly parked our whole stack next to daieisho before thinking about this. please tell me if there is a way to tell though as i'd love to not have to do that (((

[Miguelito]

Fear not:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/t...ge.638613/
But pick a comfy seat, it's a bit of a read

[ljubljana]

omg amazing thank you <3333

while i'm demanding to be provided w resources, does anyone know the mechanics of how defensive pacts work? in particular, what if ginger signs one with greenline and we then try to attack greenline during our 10 turns of enforced peace with ginger? does that break the pact or does it break the enforced peace?

[williams482]

My gut check is that waiting a turn to mass an extra 10 cuirs is worth it. Greenline may be distracted and may not know you are gunning for them, they also don't have much to redeploy against you anyway.

[ljubljana]

maaaaybe. we'll have to see what they do (in particular if they start whipping like crazy lol). greenline may not have much to redeploy but we very much are still in a race here, against ginger and mjmd vulturing.... especially with ginger, who, if we move fast enough, we can possibly even beat to some of the last dreylin cities before their enforced peace is up

but i will say that ginger does not seeeeem to be redeploying for such an event right now. the cuirs they had in their core to defend against us are still there even though by game mechanic they will for sure not be needed for at least 9 turns. if they remain still there when we have to make our decision i am more likely to wait, but if they are gone we might just have to gun it

edit: we are also in a race against greenline whipping their cities down lol. for instance i am pretty confident it is right to attack their border city on turn 0 of the war, even though the cuirs will likely take some losses against LBs on a hill, just to preserve the population both there and in every OTHER city that we manage to reach a turn faster in so doing

[RefSteel]

does anyone know the mechanics of how defensive pacts work? in particular, what if ginger signs one with greenline and we then try to attack greenline during our 10 turns of enforced peace with ginger? does that break the pact or does it break the enforced peace?

Defensive pacts override peace treaties: If Ginger and Greenline establish a DP and you subsequently declare on Greenline, Ginger will immediately and automatically declare war on you, ending both the defensive pact and your peace treaty. (And when I say immediately, I mean immediately; e.g. it doesn't matter whether Ginger is logged in.) As you correctly inferred earlier however, any player who is already at war (with any other player) can neither propose nor be sent a proposal for a Defensive Pact with anybody. (Likewise, if you have a DP with someone and then you declare war, no matter on whom, your DP will be broken and your pactmate will not automatically declare war.)

[williams482]

That would be a major problem. The big questions to me are:
1) does Ginger realize where we're going (I imagine it's predictable but not certain)
2) does Ginger recognize this play is possible
3) is Greenline cued in enough to agree to a defensive pact
4) would Ginger consider that a violation of the NAP

My guesses would be probably, yes, probably, and

This is an argument towards declaring war as soon as we have sufficient forced in theater to kick things off.

[ljubljana]

@refsteel thank you so much for this info!!!! as upsetting as it is for this to be the truth i am very glad to now know that it is so

yeah, i wish i had thought of that move before signing peace... i mean, not that i would have done anything differently (probably?) but i wish i had thought of it

i think for 1) there is a CHANCE that the answer is no.... mostly because in their peace offers with us, they asked for war with naufragar, so seemingly they believe that attacking gassed, exposed (their border with us is horrific from a defensibility perspective) nauf is the best strategic choice. as well it might be if we weren't in a long NAP with them and (imo) pretty committed out of gratitude for their earlier help to not attack them unless it is not just strategically best but strategically MANDATORY.... that doesn't mean that they shouldn't offer greenline a DP if they think of it anyways, but i'm guessing they see nauf as our most likely target and greenline as probably second most likely

for 2), you'd certainly think so.... however, if they were going for it, they did already have a chance to propose a pact this turn which greenline could have accepted on theirs. so we do know that they at least did not already have it in mind when they offered us peace, so hopefully there is some chance they either haven't thought of it or have some other reason to not go for it.... honestly, with all their cuirs running around and now without a target until the mandatory drey peace is up, it might be because they intend to make greenline a target THEMSELVES in the not too distant future

3) you'd have to imagine they would, right....? i can't think of any good reason not to but

WAIT

wait hang on hold the phone....

they can't offer greenline a DP because greenline is still at war with dreylin

oh how i would LOVE for that to be the fact that seals their doom

[ljubljana]

ok, so let's game it out.... a lot's going to depend on turn order here unfortunately but i don't know what we're really supposed to do about that (besides possibly assuming a peacetime split where we move last of the three)

worst-case, greenline sent drey peace on their turn and "tarkfish" (currently logged in) is about to accept. in that case, there's nothing we can do to stop a DP unless we log in outside of the current turn order, which, since we'd be obtaining a concrete advantage from doing so, strikes me as slimy.... i think the general rule should prooobably be interpreted roughly as "if you think you will get a benefit from logging in outside your position in an unofficial turnsplit, don't, and also you are now bound by it as though it were an official split" but others may disagree.....

if the current order of ginger -> greenline -> us holds, and greenline did NOT offer peace last turn, then we do have options.... well, sort of. if we move between greenline and drey (as we did last turn but not on any of the previous turns), we can at least declare war on our turn (between when greenline offers peace and drey accepts it) to prevent a DP. but that is a turn BEFORE we will actually have any units in position to attack..... if we instead move after them both, we can at least see if greenline offers, and then drey accepts, peace before committing to an early DoW against greenline, but that doesn't catch the less-likely reverse-case (if drey offers and greenline accepts) and also would be a violation of the FOUR-way turnsplit that we now find ourselves in if the rule really is "if you see an advantage to be gained, do not move outside of the order you moved in on the turn you discovered the advantage"....

seems like unless we are willing to do dubious turn order things to beat the DP, there is some chance that we will not be able to prevent them signing one in time. if THAT happens, what is our play? i think we have to DoW greenline anyways, if we get nothing out of this cuir stack we will certainly lose the game. but then i will send ginger a peace deal immediately with the number of turns remaining on our NAP attached....

unforunately it seems unlikely that there is a convention regarding who is at fault if a DP breaks a peace between players who have a NAP (but lurkers, please say so if there is).... i certainly don't feel bound to not attack greenline, a player against whom i made no promises to not take aggressive action, just because a third party signed some deal with them. and if i signed a DP with someone and then a NAP partner attacked them, i think i WOULD feel bound to at least not take aggressive action in the resulting war until the NAP duration was up. but we are not ginger and if they do do this, we call their bluff, and then it's not a bluff and we have to fight a 2-front war, they will have scored major coups both diplomatically and positionally against us

here is some info though: tarkeel just rolled the turn for dreylin, did not play a double, and ginger is now logged in. so it's a safe assumption that tarkfish and greenline are still at war, which hopefully means greenline did not immediately spot this line and resolve to make it possible ASAP...