[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

217

lol, ginger extremely suspiciously rolled the turn but did not play a double. I Wonder What That Could Mean 

if we did get stabbed again though i'm feeling pretty over it. whatever, i've put way too much of myself into this game already



well, apparently not.... or not yet, anyways. they did swap to nationhood at the end of the GA though, as i feared, which is pretty much a dead giveaway anyways. they didn't attack anyone else either, so i'm really not sure why they didn't play the double.... maybe they want to attack THIS turn but that would have been a double-move? or maybe they were just tired and didn't feel like it, they did play at midnight PST where i believe they are based

you can see our economy is really taking the fuck off now with us up a cool 150 GPT from last turn. that's enough for replaceable in 3, if i'm not mistaken. so.... NOW am i supposed to swap back on to military production?



finally sufficiently unashamed of the gnp graph to report it lol



ging is maintaining EP spending.... they have i think one more turn in which to stop before i feel compelled to switch back over to them  no OB even for incense either, which coooould be because they don't trust us but is probably just because they're planning to kill us dead



instead of doing anything about the imminence of our demise, let us stick our heads in the sand and look fondly upon size 14 aksum, now providing 3 gold trade routes to like 3/4 of the empire. we are really getting close to 1-turning cuirs now.... you can see i even windmilled over the iron in preparation for replaceable parts. likewise, pretty much every worker we have is frantically windmilling elsewhere as well

oh and another thing.... it's almost out of health! for the time being we have a hilarious solution to that though. see the crab 3 north of the city that i never hooked up? guess what resource we actually don't have any other domestic source of  of course i'd still rather trade for it than invest 30 hammers = 30 GOLD into a work boat, but i've been trying all game and nobody wants to ship their crab to us  never thought i'd have THAT problem in a PB...

speaking of, um, resource trades.... where is mjmd's shiny new corporate HQ?



yeah ok, makes sense, shrine + HQ + wall street seems standard enough. i wonder how idiotic it would be for us to try to sell them mininc resources? in the context of our hideous desperation for rifling i'm sure thinking about it

ok got to go do an interview now, will finish turn later oops

[ljubljana]

going to close with shots of ginger's pop so we can try to divine where, if anywhere, they are drafting from on future turns (and thus where along the front the attack is most likely to come)







missing pop 12 sheepshead at the extreme south end of their territory. i offered SD, the only one who is shipping them lux (ivory), incense to stop trading with ginger - our best hope at this point may be that they happy-cap themselves and so can't really slam out the troops in sufficient quantities to overwhelm us

i think next turn is the time to beg for loans - everyone is running max GPT after presumably finishing a tech, and i think it would only take 2/3 acceptances to get us to rifling 3t after rep parts (and thus 4t after ginger hits assembly line). fingers crossed that the others are down to continue to offer financial support to their beleaguered buffer state...

if ginger does go for the timing attack i believe the plan is 1: offer them peace, conceding whichever city they went for, then 2: offer them me revolting to slavery in exchange for all their cities, then 3: offer them peace again

[williams482]

Yeah, shit. The lack of a double turn, continued espionage spending, and revolt back to nationhood (how much commerce are they conceding by staying out of Free Speech?) is enough in aggregate to tip me back over to recommending those economy-dooming military builds. We don't want to complete anything that isn't a cat before rifling comes in, but starting the prebuilds, absolutely.

This was always the most likely outcome, but until the signaling got this strong I think it made sense to play for hope. No longer. Oh well.

If Ginger accepts that peace deal you describe, what would you do with the 10t peace that's worth ceding a city outright?

Finally, I hope the interview went well!

[ljubljana]

heh, well.... there is an update which is that ginger rolled this last turn as well, and DID play a double-turn. so that particular element was probably coincidence that we can chalk up to them playing in the middle of the night. and i guess i do have to admit that if i nap-stabbed someone, and then they came at me with more NAP offers afterwards (!!) and these big puppy dog eyes saying "don't worry about it, i forgiiiiiive you, you can trust me, just open your borders real quick <3" i guess i'd be at a least a little suspicious and i mean it is true that i'm only still trying to do diplo with them because WIN WIN AT ALL COSTS and would definitely attack them if i profitably could so really they'd be right to be mistrustful (though i still wouldn't nap-stab them back)

as for free speech - probably a lot of commerce, but they do lack for liberalism and its prereq philosophy (granted they would have been 1t researches during the GA) so it's not quite true that they are just straight-up giving up that commerce; FS would need to pay back the cost of those two techs before the game is decided to be the right move and perhaps they are skeptical that it will. i have also read in past ginger threads that "they like to be in one of slavery or nationhood at all times" for safety's sake, and i can see wanting to have infantry drafting available in case we decide to throw our 40 cuirs at one of their border cities (any one of which we could in theory force our way through, at hideous cost). so there do exist peaceful reasons for the swap....... but the balance of probability is definitely not that those ARE their reasons

the peace deal would, um.... well, it's more that i would offer such a peace deal if i think we will otherwise lose the target city AND several more cities behind it before we can stabilize, which is what i think will happen if they are really serious about this push. so it's not so much that i have some grand plan to save us with those 10 turns as it is us conceding one city to save others lol

and yeah. ideally we can keep enough cities on wealth to not jeopardize our 2t RP research, but other than that i'll switch to military next turn. honestly it's about time for that anyways - we are definitely close enough to rifling that any hammers we invest now are going into cavs, and the whole point of rushing rifling in the first place, IMO, is to slam out a crapton of cavs as quickly as possible afterwards so we can minimize the length of ginger's window. on the bright side i think we are now close enough that we won't delay rifling toooo much in so doing, and should be able to get a cav wave out before, like, the capital is under threat

thankfully infantry are so damn slow that even if they have a wave of them about to in-queue upgrade from rifles (as i would do) just gathering the stack together will take some time. one aspect of defender's advantage in situations like these is that we only need our tech to come in by the time they are in our territory, while they need theirs several turns before. normally that is not too significant but here it's looking like just the right amount of time to get us back up to "only" one generation behind lol

edit: lurkers would tell us, or strongly imply something, if we are the last holdout in concession to mjmd, right? the combination of playing sub 15 minute turns, a long gap since the last post in their thread, plus an attack like this are suggestive of a "just give it up already" attack of the kind that are launched when someone feels that their neighbor is letting the game go on too long. personally i think it's way, way premature for ginger to be conceded, but i have a history of being ludicrously far off in my evaluation of such things so, yknow, let me know if ginger thinks their position is concedably bad, then probably objective analysis would say that ours is as well, or at least that it will be when ginger throws 50 infantry at us. and well, while i still think it's early, i can't deny i'd feel some serious relief to not have to spend hours on this game every day anymore

[ljubljana]

218-219 double

well, ginger posted in their thread.... and then greenline posted  if THAT's not a dead giveaway, i don't know what is



lol, you wanna run that by me one more time?

various other diplo from them too - they will take my fish and war with ginger, or my horse + iron + war with mjmd. ok

ginger, you will note, is on military science now, so they shaved the last turn off assembly line somehow. awesome :D and now they evidently have commando plays available (or why research it)

it takes 20 XP to get a CHA leader to commandos.... and until recently they were in theo/vassalage, so their west point city would have, what.... 14 XP on new horse units, plus however many settled GGs they have? well, we killed 2 in the last war, and while they got another on the final turn, i do not thiiiink they had two more, so i suspect there is not yet a commando factory (and if there is, not sure what i can do about it lol). now, annoyingly, they can a commando + morale cav with just one GG (26 XP required for this with CHA), which means any city within 9 tiles of their border is at risk if undefended. so in summation: thank goodness we still have 60 impis sitting around so we can stack 3 of them in every city in range

ok, but if they have AL early and are coming for us, we'd expect drafting to have happened this turn. did it?







sheepshead, under the interface, is down to size 11 so that's one. then ceasarea and hadrianopolis in the north, and ikonion on the east coast. so they are drafting at max rate and it's mostly in the north, which suggests that they share williams' feelings about takayasu/kirishima as the best border targets



EP spending, which has continued unabated. fine, time to switch back over. so be it then....



nauf is researching again which is concerning, since it means they will not have much gold to loan to us. i will ask for cows and said loan this round, to hopefully get an extension before revealing how desperate we are. then if they accept i will beg them to help me in war with ginger, and perhaps ask for a defpact as well. the latter wouldn't explicitly help us much even if accepted but it would at least signal to ginger that no pile-on from america will be forthcoming. and then for mjmd i will just straight-up send them copper/copper + war with ginger first, and then an enormous loan request second lol

[ljubljana]

yeah this is pretty much what we need to make this happen lol

not going to ask SD quite yet in case that's overkill, but i did ask nauf as well. bleah

did the math btw and apparently 7-5 drafting a rifle trades 31 food for 110 hammers, so better than 3 to 1 but not quite 4 to 1, which is what we get working an RP windmill. drafting gets the hammers immediately and where we need them, of course, but natural production gives a unit better suited to attacking into infantry. naturally the plan is to punt on any serious thinking about it and do as much of both as we can support

[ljubljana]

the lights are going out all over zululand.... we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime

switched everyone at the front to cats, and as many cities as i could to cuirs without falling short on RP this turn. next turn i will swap every available plains farm to a plains windmill and then mass-swap the rest to cuirs as well. and then we'd better hope to god we get our loans and can start matching ginger's infantry drafting with rifle drafting of our own

and if we must die, let us die hard, and die kicking

[williams482]

Drafting in the north suggests to me that the attack would come in the south, as these units obviously need time to walk to the front. Unless Ginger is planning on double-drafting his closest cities, which he might? Seems pricey with two pop drafts.

EDIT: More than that, I'd be careful trying to draw conclusions from those draft sites. They don't have a clear pattern to them and could be aimed more at causing confusion than synchronizing with travel times to what would be a predictable point of attack.

[ljubljana]

well, let's hope so - it will seriously take them 7 or 8 turns just to walk their draftees from their northern cities to an attack site in the south. if we are still that far out from a war declaration i will start to feel better about our chances

it's pricey to double-draft, yeah.... but if ginger wants to actually kill us (instead of just ending our game) they have to do it, right? 30 infantry from a wave of single drafts really doesn't seem like a sufficient stack for conquest at this point in the game. hell, i think we could handle that many right now - 20ish cats should fully collateral them down to str 14, and then a cuir + pinch musket from a garrison probably kills. in my estimation they will want at least 40-50 plus whatever lower-tech stuff they were building in the last 15 turns to really make progress. certainly they could assemble such a stack but i think they'd need to use mass in-queue upgrades, draft everywhere, and really commit to mass infantry builds instead of being tempted by factories at the same time. we'll see if that's what they end up doing....

to be honest if they are planning to attack us now, i'm a little confused as to why they didn't spend the whole golden age mass-producing troops. i am very confident based on the power graph that they didn't do so, and i mean, just because they're technically not state of the art anymore, it's not like a 60 unit cav stack to supplement their infantry wouldn't be an emphatically relevant military asset against cuirs and muskets... from my point of view, we can probably kill (with heavy losses) one or the other of a giant cav stack and a giant infantry stack but attacking with both at once probably gives them their best odds to force their way through and trigger a collapse. unless the whole plan behind their attack is just to hurt us and knock us out of the game rather than conquest, but i really don't think that a half-focused attack that leaves zulu alive but with no chance to win and vengefully spamming cavs from 30 cities will be profitable for them in the final 1v1 proxy war with mjmd (in which we are, of course, the proxy )

[ljubljana]

221-222 double

trying to convince myself that i've stopped caring about this game and have accepted defeat-with-dignity so that i can log in every morning without heroic amounts of anxiety..... and would you believe that it's not working



i don't know how to read this, but it looks important. they'll give us aid in 10 turns, but is the work ethic rider here just to keep us from accepting, or is this a hint that ginger is gathering their stack at work ethic....??

anyways no loans came through, as you can see..... at least nauf did blessedly accept the cow extension i coupled it with



well, here is a hint about what the mjmd diplo means. SD gave up trying to stop mjmd from rolling over egypt (which was a pretty doomed effort anyways, tbh) and, oh my GOD look at the power numbers! apparently SD got absolutely creamed in their last exchange with india somehow.... i guess we'll never know exactly what happened but that's pretty shocking. so that means mjmd's milpower is freed up now.... does the 10t count then represent them shifting troops over to zululand on rails, and then actually helping us with their /units/? i can dream right

speaking of which, scooter is down to one city that has workers on defense.... so this game's about to be great powers ONLY.... or maybe it's more accurate to call it a bipolar mjmd/ginger cold war-style system, with the rest of us as proxy battlegrounds



soooo the border city mjmd took from greenline hit FOURTH-ring borders this turn and now is stealing all our first- and second-ring tiles and requiring more crash-built theaters instead of catapults THIS IS FINE

lol, idk if i've built this many theaters in the whole rest of my civ4 career..... in most circumstances they are pretty crappy even in cities that badly need the culture but i think mercantilism is an exception dang, it says something about civ4's balance relative to 6 that even one of the uselessest-seeming buildings is actually not so useless in some situations. or maybe it says something about me that i think that, namely that i am wrong

wait hold the phone yall



ginger stopped EP spending! that 1852 number is the same as two turns ago :O

ok, but where are the draftees this turn. they moved twice since we last played, so we are looking for 8 in total







comparing from last turn, i count fillerion, herring, minnow, haddock, clownfish. so concentrated in the south this time, and notably, i count only 5 out of 8 draftees possible...? their milpower has not really shot ahead of ours with a ton of in-queue-upgraded inf builds either. combined with the EP spending this is the best news we've received in this game in a while



also relevant: this infantry in sheepshead, drafted on their first turn of AL access, has fortified in place rather than try to join a stack somewhere..... 



here is the last person who even might give us a loan.... it would only shave a turn off the (6t) rifling ETA, but that's still worth doing i think..... but first we need to hit enter to see how much they retain after they dump a turn into their current research project



once again i will extremely selectively highlight the food graph which is the one metric by which we're doing well



mjmd nooooo (((( oh you poor bastard.... that is their FOURTH great prophet by my count, coming just in time to ruin their gorgeously-timed third golden age for factory production



chop overflow finally finished slow-building its granary.... just in time for mjmd's culture to take our pigs away!!!! rude >



at kirishima something similar has happened with ankyra/meleti taking over one of its second-ring tiles..... at least we still have the precious hill that gives us visibility into ankyra city, i guess



and then we discover that last turn ging restarted EP spending again in a major frowny-face move, in presumed response to us restarting spending last turn because it looked like they weren't going to stop oops

anyway our economy is starting to look semi-respectable even with most of our hammer cities on unit builds - that 500+ gpt number is actually pretty wealth build independent, other than in cities that a) have little hope of spitting out a cav in time to matter or b) already have an almost-finished one in queue. it is looking increasingly likely that we are going to live long enough to have to consider the logistics of a biology push.... specifically, do we wealth-build there, do we try to catch up on infrastructure while unboostedly researching there, or do we just crank military the whole time? not sure what the answer is.... i'd like us to stabilize with a reasonably-sized power edge over ginger (keeping in mind that if they aren't cranking troops, they must be cranking factories, so they can surge ahead of us pretty quickly when they have a mind to). and with rep parts in we now have a ton of newly-competent hammer cities that need forges, which seems reasonable to prioritize to me. other than that though i am not quite sure how we're supposed to play this...