[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

I'd say just do it. We've got a good plan to knock out the wonder in a relatively short timeframe and we won't be too badly off if we're beat to it anyway thanks to the failgold. No need to get cute here, delaying one turn to give the others two fewer turns to respond doesn't seem likely to matter much. Even if someone is sitting on an engineer, they'll have plenty of time to pull the trigger on it regardless.

ok, i am going to scout around to see if any of our foes have saved-up great engineers but this sounds right to me. i will say though that the downside risk is actually pretty high.... if we miss the wonder we will get maybe 1k failgold (which, uh, is a 1 to 1 conversion from hammers invested, right...?) but will have spent like 4k beakers on the tech, so we will still be out a ton of commerce from the attempt....

258

i am starting to realize, perhaps a bit belatedly, that with ginger about to field bombers we are critically short of another wartime commodity - workers..... what good are preplaced rail networks if ginger can simply bomb them out, then waltz the tanks in to where we can't strike back because we lack the labor supply in place to instantly repair them? so we are going to need a few workers permanently stationed in every critical area, and single workers permanently fortified on any hills in the road network so they can't cut us off on a tile that we can't reroad that turn..... ew

so according to williams' statue plan, i think the following turns, of which we have 8 until ironworks completes, should look essentially like this:
3 turns of gold saving
1 turn of max research into each of education and constitution
1 turn each to finish constitution, overflow into and finish education
1 turn democracy with overflow and possibly large-scale research builds

yeah, counting last turn, i am proposing to run 5 turns of max research on only 4 turns of saved gold.... that's a problem as our breakeven is still around 50%  do i have a solution to that problem, well, no....

thus, starting on t261, the plan is to swap back over to research for about 5 turns, so any banks or markets that finish after then will not actually produce yields until significantly later. so i'm thinking we start mostly swap over to starting libraries this turn, aiming for them to finish up around the start of the research period.... and those cities that already have their libraries, and can't finish their next-best cash building in time to get a benefit from it during a demo push, are good candidates for military builds, which might in this case mean workers



so perhaps atamifuji is such a city? it can 1t a worker but will not finish a market in time for a demo push, although that bank is pretty valuable and would come online in time for AL

also omg remember our gpt number from last turn..... uh, today's number is different 

and yeah, i trickled just a tiny bit of EP into nauf last turn to see their research, with which they are annihilating corporation tech and are going to badly beat us to assembly line with their 12-turn GA  we are still up scimeth and bio on them, as well as nationalism + miltrad (or MoM would be obsolete) but that's honestly quite nice! would love to see them relevant in an anti-india dogpile if it comes to that



and then i realized somehow takakeisho is only 7 turns from ironworks, not the 8 i apparently misremembered. sigh. i mean that's good of course but there goes all that micro lol

ok, 7-turn demo plan would look like

- still save for 3t
- 100% into rep
- breakeven into rep, or whatever is needed to get us to 1 beaker remaining
- 100% into rep to get overflow
- 100% into demo and now we MUST run massive research builds everywhere to 1t it

so i think it still holds that we're good to delay non-science infra in favor of workers everywhere that we don't expect to finish the next cash building in the next 3 turns of savings, as long as we /do/ still finish it in around 8t when we must begin to save again....?



mjmd looking suspiciously like they want to settle a cereal + mining inc city in the middle of nowhere (that eastern worker is building a windmill in a spot out of range of any of their cities).... right next to our city which is just about to pop fourth-ring borders.... so why don't we juuuuust nudge that along just a lil bit real quick  there's no way they'll ever know that the city didn't just naturally pop borders at a really inconvenient time, right?

did yall know that once every ten thousand years, under the wan light of the waxing moon



we can draft a six-promo rifle out of aksum  that has to be some kind of record for a draftee, right?

ok, update on india settler:



it's already in position, and the second, western fast worker (building a road) indicates that the plan is to go to the desert hill already in their territory, so this is pointless and i should just build useful things and not be annoying just because lol (also it's nishikigi's turn for the draft anyways)



i wonder if we're close enough to infantry (and to representation specialists + environmentalism coast which are both much more painful to draft off of) that it's time to chill a little with all the mass-rifle drafting actually.......



a big pile of new naufragarian rifles have joined the gigantic entire-army-sized stack in the middle of america. 60 cannons (!!) will keep you alive for a good minute i guess



well this is depressing (and yes, it does indeed shave a turn off the 13-hammer levee). probably not worth windmilling though as possibly-culture-building ankyra looks like it's going to take the tile back (((



in other news i have finally deemed it acceptable to take takanosho off of culture duty, now that it has fourth-ring borders. and the two other terror tiles are at.... 51/48 (takayasu) and 54/45 (takanosho) which are both surprisingly close, so mitakeumi does stick to culturemaxxing for now. kirishima will be a horrible long-term defensive problem for us but if it's the only spot they can 1-turn from the fog we can pack it with defenders and stand a reasonable chance of surviving, and counterattacking, a stack that tries that through the sheer weight of our numbers

now here's a graph i haven't highlighted in a minute but have been obsessively focused on for the past 20 turns:



oh here's something pretty, check it out:



for the first time all game, every hill in range of a city in this little border range is being worked! (uh, unless you either go north to abi or SE to the other side of those mountains but dw about that)

i was supposed to scout everyone's territory for saved great engineers this turn but i didn't because i forgot, pls don't let me get away w that again next turn

also i guess it would be smart to move our own great engineer over to takakeisho, or somewhere else where the others can conspicuously see it, to bluff having a plan to rush the status ourselves. upon re-evaluation, really it should be US who the others are afraid to race for it, since we actually DO have a GE saved up.....

[ljubljana]

260

uh oh.... this time naufie did the dreaded "roll the turn but don't play a double move"..... did something happen? will ANYTHING happen in this game besides me blissfully watching our stunted wasteland cities grow bigger and bigger off of the magic of biology?

well here is one thing, our first



we have hope!!!

so what to build here now? of course i made the bank because the more efficient options of library and PRO market were taken already..... but we're still in econ mode.... do i dare make a 150-hammer GROCER just for the commerce bonus, in a city that is nowhere close to needing the health? i mean, maybe?



well, no wars or anything, if that's what i was afraid of (and it was).... and ottomans started another nuke-path tech. thankfully it is rocketry which i suspect to be suboptimal - they should probably do fission first to get a head start on the manhattan project, right?

and nauf kicked us off their research vis, apparently none-too-pleaseadly lol. ok fine, i guess i'd better stop trying that if i want to not sabotage our relationship



and wow, just like that pretty much our whole front line with ginger is railed



managed to do some emergency workshopping and railing to shave one last turn off the ironworks ETA, with exactly 0 overflow hammers.... which is good because IW eats overflow, as it turns out: the hammers we overflow into it will have the IW production bonus divided out of them during the next build, even though IW was NOT active when they were fed in, so we will actually end up with something like half as many base hammers going into the next build as we put in......





a summary of our current projects.....



SIGH. ok, well, maybe that's the end of our statue plan ((( on the other hand, with this turn's great scientist, ginger is now just one GP away from their fourth GA (!!) so perhaps they wouldn't burn the engineer on it just to deny us? ok, the dominant factor in whether or not this is doable is now going to be minimizing the length of time during which we expose ourselves to a snipe from these guys.... if we are lucky we can drop into demo research when they are like, 1t from fission or something, to maximize how annoying it would be to swap projects and take it from us. or we just give up now

as i see it, the plan that is somewhat-viable is as follows:
1) swap to demo with overflow the turn before we pop the GA to 1t it
2) overflow the maximum IW-nerfed overflow from a bank into the statue (which appears to be 88 base hammers, since 88 * 2.25 = 200)
3) statue is a 4-turn build from there in organized religion and bureaucracy
4) ginger is 1t slower in the race with us as they will have to 1t demo themselves on the turn we overflow into the statue
5) hope civac does not have a city that can put 600 hammers into the statue (GE will add about 900) in the 3t it will then take us to finish (possible, but not certain; however, if we are lucky, their best hammer city will be committed to the manhattan project at this point)
6) maybe win a same-turn tiebreaker? or, by threatening such a tiebreaker, convince civac not to try to rush it?

either way, if we are going to make this happen, we are very likely going to have to deliberately move after them on the turn we finish constitution so we can set research on democracy without giving them time to react on the same turn. and that is deriving a competitive advantage from turn order, and therefore feels a bit scummy...... lurkers, is that scummy? if it is, what is the correct thing to do here? deliberately move BEFORE them so that they DO get to take advantage of their research visibility 1t sooner? play as soon as i can, let the chips fall where they will, and if "as soon as i can" happens to be before civac on that specific day, then i just don't try to build the statue? i am pretty sure they DO have a city that can put 600 hammers into the statue if they have FOUR turns in which to do so, so the turn order is going to have a major impact on whether we can pull this off......

[williams482]

Ironworks isn't going to eat any overflow that comes off a bank build, only (assuming you tested this?) off it's own construction. I know Forges were patched to not eat their own overflow, I gather Ironworks was not?

[ljubljana]

yeah, i did test the IW overflow thing but i was kinda delirious last night so i'm not sure if i got it right.......

i think the issue with the bank is that it's not so much that IW eats the base hammer overflow (other than, apparently, on the turn it is produced), but that it lowers the cap for overflow that can be stored..... my understanding is that the max overflow is equal to the cost of the item you overflowed into, divided by total production modifiers (or one turn of the city's base hammer production, whichever is higher). so with just a forge, we could overflow 160 base hammers from a bank, since 160 * 1.25 = 200, but with IW, we can overflow only 200 / 2.25 = 88 base hammers.

this will still put a bank's worth of hammers into the statue on the next turn (and actually more than that, since on that next turn we will revolt into bureaucracy and orgrel which do apply to the overflow) but i'm not sure there's a way for us to get more than that, unless either my claims in the previous paragraph are wrong or there's something cleverer that i'm not thinking of. we do only have 4 turns to put our overflow chain together anyways, so even if there WAS a way to get more hammers into it (with an otherwise-marginal national wonder like the hermitage, maybe?) we probably wouldn't have time to carry it out....

on the other hand, here is something resembling a positive sign:



that is what the ironworks looks like, yes? southwest of the pentagon? if so i count



49 base hammers here once it hits size 20, which is good but not in the same league as takakeisho's 57 (thanks to no levee in ginger's city). 49 * 3.5 (IW + forge + factory + coal plant + copper boost) = 171.5 hammers/turn into the statue..... right?

note also the 150 hammers ginger invested into just two health here with the public transportation.... mjmd actually has these in most of their cities at this point.... while we in environmentalism should need a nice round 0 of them reinterpreting that as a wealth build is why i'm confident enviro will come out pretty firmly ahead of rep-boosted mercs, even though it seems close from a pure "are we working more than 3 windmills/city on average" standpoint

as for my contention that we can build the whole statue from scratch in just 4 turns ourselves, well



the big thing this is missing is mining inc for 8 extra base hammers (more if we mine over windmilled irons at various cities).... it appears that we CAN spread it here with just the corporate exec and without corporation tech (which is only required for the founder, apparently? please correct me if this is wrong), we just have to keep some gold in reserve on the demo turn in order to do so. so 4-turning the statue should be doable with only near-max overflow from a bank, while saving another turn on top of that is hilariously out of reach

so if stonefish is their best hammer city, it'll be close, but i think they can't quite get enough hammers (600 at size 20) into it to rush with a GE in 3 turns. maybe they could do it with overflow tricks, or if they starve the city or add mining inc, but they'd have to do all that and expend their precious fourth great person just to force a same-turn tiebreaker.... and if they win that, the statue ends up in a spot that is pretty vulnerable to commando sniping

on the other hand, if they have a fourth turn they can definitely force the tiebreaker, and with tricks could possibly beat us outright. the difference between these two scenarios is whether we play after civac on the round in which we 1-turn democracy or not...... i'd very much like an evaluation on whether that move is legal or not as it makes a huge difference, maybe enough to decide whether i consider this plan worth attempting or not

(although really, i kinda doubt it's worth a great engineer and 4k beakers they'd lose relative to mjmd to steal the statue.... if they thought it was, they've had that GE sitting around for ages at this point. so perhaps we should go for it either way, especially since we are obviously still in the regime where variance must break our way to contend here)

[ljubljana]

saving another turn on top of that is hilariously out of reach

welllllll..... ok so technically........ maaaaaybe there is a way......

86 base hammers will 4-turn, so we'd need to add roughly a third of that ~= 30 to 3-turn. maxed-out mining inc on our territory looks like roughly 15. then three of the grass towns can be watermilled for another 9, observing that this, non-disastrously, trades 5 base commerce * our 1.5ish projected endgame commerce multiplier here for 3 hammers * 3 building wealth with the factory + coal plant. the last plains farm -> workshop is another 3.... we can either come off the non-river grass town for an engineer or workshop over it, adding cereal mills as well if we start to starve too quickly..... and some of the windmills can be mined and railed for 1 hammer each.... oh my god, that's kinda close 

but we must not windmill over the deer, much as i want to, except as an absolute last resort.... that breaks our deal shipping deer to ginger which was the condition on which they gave us open borders! (or does it, if mjmd is in turn shipping us THEIR deer? would pillaging our only deer break the deal to ginger, or would the game just have us forward india's deer to the ottomans and be left with none ourselves?)

edit: i'm also wondering if we shouldn't spread mining inc to more cities than just the capital...... it costs us about 4 gold in maintenance (~6 after inflation) and gives mjmd what, 12 gold in their HQ with +200% gold in place? in exchange for 15ish base hammers, in a city with a factory and coal plant..... that exchange still favors us by about 12 goldhammers (lol) in the 1v1 with mjmd, not to mention it helps us both against our mutual enemy civac

[ljubljana]

ok, all that bloviating aside we now have a turn

261

i actually only drafted one rifle last turn (at our one city with double specialists, gondar SW of aksum) for the first time in ages and am terrified to look at the milpower column lol

....yeah, ginger back up to 1.1 and has decided to casually 2-turn fission... and they sniped one of mjmd's culture wonders (rock and roll), which, yeah, i suppose is the presumptive reason for radio. and this is good for us because



mjmd is getting close to a potential culture win even if they don't turn on the slider...... we have to be prepared to jump on them if they do try it but at this stage in the game, it's very unclear that we can realistically do anything to slow them down



ok, this is a bit annoying.... overflow is maxed out at aksum (i think so anyways - it should be capped at our base hammers which is higher than the amount needed to make a rifle) and we can't 1-turn an economic building with it.... what to do? i suppose just dump it into a bank this turn, and at the next such opportunity, overflow into the bank and then university in sequence to hopefully 1t them both. should come quickly enough to knock out the last uni for oxford (are we really doing oxford in this game...?). each of the turns we spend doing this does cost us an individual commando though, so i'm a little unsure of if the levee here (and consequent need to dump overflow like this) was worth it...... at least the bank provides significant value that will grow moreso in 8t at the dawning of enviro

YO GUESS WHAT



!!!! 50%!!! we take the small wins here

likewise The Town down here that i've been obsessing over for ages



is 1% away.....



watermilling over this ivory should probably have happened ages ago.... man, are ivory camps just the crappiest most worthless improved resource tiles or what? at least ivory watermills are strong (1f/6h/1c is actually takakeisho's best tile! for now)



WOAH hang on where are you going?? don't tell me they're about to rush the eiffel tower :O

rock and roll was built in ironworks-builder stonefish, so whatever city they have on the more-expensive eiffel must be significantly further from completion...... that or they are misremembering whether the manhattan project is rushable (it is not, thank goodness)



i am actually seeing quite a few battleship builds from them tbh.... which is quite something (and also good news, of course)

[williams482]

I can't say I'm a huge fan of ripping up mature towns in the capital to shave one turn off of SoL. I guess it's less bad than "normal" SP situations because you aren't running Free Speech, but still. We need that commerce, and leaving the Ironworks city on wealth builds to cover for it seems suboptimal.

[ljubljana]

yeahhh...... we'll see, certainly if they burn their great engineer i probably won't go for it. especially since i'm seriously thinking about if we SHOULD start running free speech in the GA..... the cost is nationhood which is, um, really significant as it represents something like 560 effective hammers/turn if we're drafting infantry, but our cities are large enough that it's only like a 3 to 1 food -> hammer conversion rate even for infantry, and in our new civics we will probably never want to come off of windmills and even specialists will cost like 7.5 beakers each to draft.... idk, probably we still need the draft (now and forever other than the GA bureaucracy interlude) but it's worth consideration i guess

as for building wealth in the IW city, well..... um, about that. takakeisho might already be a little too strong for conventional builds.... at 60 base hammers, with IW and a coal plant, it can one-turn tanks, which we can't build yet and are nowhere close to building. the most expensive unit we can make will be a 140 hammer infantry, and even as infrastructure goes, the uni and bank are the only things left it can't one-turn, and i don't dare put another national wonder there since it will already be our prime target for nuke sniping with just IW and SoL. so if we have it on infantry it will build up overflow with nowhere to dump it and eventually start wasting it..... whiiiich might mean it is fated to build wealth until we get to nukes anyways. but i mean, 180 beakers per turn is not so bad either. and to be honest, my "plan", such that i have one, for post-assembly line is not really to heavily invest in conventional military anyways (which will probably just get nuked away) but to research-build to our own nukes. we should be able to put up some pretty staggering economic numbers in the new civics with our cities running research builds through coal plants, enough to finally start gaining some ground on the leaders who probably have to mass their own nukes instead of building research. especially since the leaders took some major diversions from the nuke path while we can head straight there...... we are like 50 turns behind ginger's assembly line time but if we go astro - physics - electricity - artillery - rocketry - fission we might honestly end up only like 15-20t behind their nuke time

nukes and sufficiently many commandos.... i think that has to be the plan for breaking this stalemate. we have around 10 commandos now i believe, but other than the bank and uni (and i'm not sure even those are correct but i'm greedy and hate wasting hammers...) i think aksum should never go another turn without producing a commando. it probably won't even get a factory - it does not quiiiiite have the hammers to 1-turn an infantry every turn but it's close enough, and if some of our commandos come out as slightly cheaper anti-tanks, well, i think we can make good use of those too (commando antitank attacks at 12 * 1.4 = 16.8 vs a fresh ottoman modern armor at 40 / 2.25 = 17.7......)

as for our "wincon", do we have one? not really, but if we did it would look like: ginger + allies and mjmd fight it out and ginger "wins", by enough to burn mjmd's corporate HQs and end the threat of a culture try, while we tech to and amass nukes. then: decapitation strike on ginger with nukes and commandos to take every city within 10 tiles of the border and pillage all their rails with impis so we can conceivably hold some of the cities. finally: run over whoever is left that is not nuclear-capable (naufragar, perhaps) to hit domination, i guess. probably not gonna happen but crazier things /have/ happened and i still think we are the only player with a commando factory, so it's worth hoping (and playing) for i suppose

[Jabah]

RE Aksum production : you probably could steal the last tile SEE which is a river farm and workshop it to reach over 60hpt and 1t grocer with overflow (and possibly one day build drydock and battleship ?).
Are nuke military unit regarding HE bonus ?

[ljubljana]

yeah, i haven't stolen it yet because lalibela needs it badly (ie, it will starve without it lol). sadly it's too late now as i've moved all the workers and am committed to the bank. at least it's a pretty good bank - aksum's at 40 base commerce now and will add another 16 from enviro.... as for battleships, i've been thinking about it (it is most of the reason i built the HE coastally, after all) but i'm just not sure we have enough shipyards to realistically contest control of the seas unless some of the ottoman ports get burned.... we have 5 on the north coast and 3 on the south coast (which is already a problem since we can't join the halves of a hypothetical fleet) and ours are all weakish save aksum and lalibela, while the ottos have a huge number of strong coastal cities.... moreover i suspect that, in the gamestate (of nuclear war) that we are likely to be facing if things go our way, i imagine a commando infantry is a way, way more valuable unit on a 1 for 1 basis than a battleship, even if we could 1-turn either one; hard to imagine wanting to give up 10 or so commandos for what might be a doomed attempt to put a sustainable fleet together. ohandalso we might never research industrialism LMAO, or at least i can see us delaying it for a long time to catch up in things like air power

i'm not sure if nukes count at units and am going to have to test that. but honestly i am not sure it matters - a hammer-equivalent amount of commando infantry might be a better buy even if that means foregoing the factory and coal plant. i am not sure what the proper ratio of nukes to commandos is in lategame nuke + commando warfare but i have to imagine that a ratio of "44 cities on nukes, 1 city on commandos" does not err too heavily on the side of commandos, powerful though the 1 commando city might be..... i think that currently the 10 or so commandos we have would be enough to take all of ginger's internal cities within rail range, but a) i highly doubt they'll stay so lightly-guarded when milsci is on the scene and b) there are a number of border cities that are out of 2-mover range due to hills and other intervening terrain, and we really want enough commandos to take those too.

i feel that 30-40 is a number that would make me feel somewhat comfortable and that about aligns with the timeframe in which we might have nukes online, but if we come up short i am really going to regret spending 5 turns in aksum on a library, market, and now university and bank. we also might have had west point online and started producing them way earlier than we did if i had not been so tunnel-visioned on addressing immediate military threats from ginger back in the "spam cavs while researching biology" era..... i have 4 CG3 + guerilla 1 rifles sitting in takanosho right now, and another 4 sitting in aksum, that i made before west point because i was so scared of ginger fogboating us before we got caravels..... maybe those will trick the ottomans into believing that our HE city can make only 3-promo units?

edit: one other possibility for the lategame tech path that does run through industrialism and would completely change our approach to this game: beeline computers and cash in the internet for 10 modern era techs. but that means no nukes for ages, which is silly.... right? ostensibly we are not much further away from computers than we are from nukes (6 post-AL techs vs 8)......