[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

bahahhahaha hahaha ohhh mannn how long have yall been facepalming over there just waiting for me to /specifically ask/ that mechanics question instead of just assuming that it wouldn't work    yeahhh womp womp

ok so.... what does that mean for the levee build? if we had been building units this whole time, as maybe we should have been, we're 9 base hammers over the rifle 1t threshold, which is (pretty close to) what the levee produces.... so it would then have effectively been a 9 * 1.25 = 10ish gpt econ build. which at an 18-turn payback horizon is actually pretty efficient! but.... maybe not efficient enough to be correct over more commandos, except... we will need some kind of hammer acceleration in aksum eventually to 1-turn infantry, so best to get it done as quickly as possible (i'd rather "waste" 3 commando rifles on a 3-turn levee build than 3 commando infantry). so i think the levee was still correct to build when we did, even if making libraries and markets and such afterwards was not

now.... what about the factory and coal plant, which we actually will have to make a call on pretty soon? aksum's 59 base hammers mean that these will be a roughly 44 gpt econ build, at 400 total hammers (a bit less than that in practice as we are just short of 1turning infantry with HE + forge, but filling that gap is of course even more important).... ok, that is VERY efficient, more than anything else we've been contemplating here. or, if the overflow is not boosted by the heroic epic, it could be correct to switch some of aksum's hammer tiles back over to gondar after the factory is up, and in that case we actually can effectively use the factory hammers on units, if not at the HE boost..... but we're giving up, like, probably a good 5 or 6 commando units to do these things, and thaaaat's a lot of commandos that we will never, ever actually recoup in any form from the 44 gpt..... yeah, i'm undecided about this. we'll have to see how i feel when we hit assembly line (if we hit assembly line) i guess..........

well thank you very much for saying that refsteel, as now we can at least finish off the last 50 hammers in this bank (i'm not going to leave it at 150/200 hammers indefinitely, even though it might be correct since it still costs a commando to finish it....) and then slam rifles forever without worrying about overflow micromanagement  wow, it really shows how civ6-brained i am that i just kinda assumed that 4 would also suck about overflow like all the other games in the franchise do....

[ljubljana]

264



ironworks next turn!!! which probably means today since 8/10 have played :O

by which i mean 3/5 of course, but my brain still thinks of it as 8/10 and is happy to log on to zulan and see that "wow, 6 have played already, the turn's going to roll soon!".... essentially the turn timer has a granary now lol



levee :D and yeah, i think the jail and its precious 2 spy specialists are more important than other build options here (and at democracy tech i may even make a security bureau after it!). and um.... time to run the single turn of +2 food that abi needs to run to not starve while making our gp, before i forget



so a bunch of cities wrapped up their last econ buildings that will be done before the GA this turn.... what are we supposed to do now? starting a 10-turn bank seems a bit silly when i expect us to have assembly line done within that timeframe (and thus desperately want to make a factory instead while we have GA production online). i guess we could make cannons Just In Case.... but in actuality maybe build research is correct? i am pretty worried about our AL timing, especially if we do go for the dump 4k beakers into democracy plan....

in at least some of these cities it's probably actually right to start a uni next turn en route to oxford.... but probably only the ones that are out of stuff to build like DotF here, not the ones that are sitting around unable to get a bank done in time before they have to start a factory



we're not the only ones who have been longingly eyeing enviro this whole game i guess



well, this is a bit awkward.... work ethic and ouch!, who i grew to size 20 so i could draft back to size 18 without losing trade route yields, are, um.... actually giving 5 gold trade routes to all our core cities above size 15, which there are quite a few of now..... i guess we've reached the point where the population of the /destination/ city is starting to have a significant impact as well........ to which the solution is probably just to grow these cities as large as can reasonably be managed (which, in a city with essentially all farms like work ethic, is pretty damn large )



and um.... some of these cities are REALLY going to benefit from the enviro health lmao



well.... this does not spark joy  our good friends the ottomans have apparently decided to move their suspicious transports in the direction of our north coast..... lovely

[ljubljana]

265

in which i probably should have waited for civac to see where their battleship + transport group goes.....



wooooo!!!!! i can see my house from heree



now we throw six completely random cities on university (the seventh will be hoshoryu, projected home of oxford) (and of course they're not actually random random, just chosen based on who will finish before the golden age starts rather than which ones will actually have the best beaker yields)

[ljubljana]

266

ohhh my god i go to sleep and now it's the next turn and mjmd and naufragar are both logged in.... we're gonna double AGAIN today  what kind of turn 266 turnpace is this?? well whatever it's not like i wanna think that hard about this anyways



woah!!!! i offered this, sort of in desperation (and to signal that i have no aggressive intentions with our copper/coal border settle), at the end of last turn, to assess their willingness to actually negotiate with us about a potential side-switch leader-dogpile.... and unlike the last three times, they accepted! well that's interesting..... i assumed they didn't accept the last two times for one of two reasons: a) not wanting to commit a replacement ottoman player, or returning ginger, to 10t of peace with us that they might not actually want (more likely) or b) uncertainty about how this interacts with our mjmd defpact. i'm actually not sure about b) myself.... if they attack india, dragging us into war with them, in the next 10 turns, would that be considered a NAP-break on their end or on ours? well, hopefully they're accepting because they're not planning to do that (i personally would probably not NAP someone if i planned to attack a pactmate in 10t) but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it i guess. i think there's little chance they will attack india in the next 10t anyways, they won't have nukes online by then and i'm not sure i see much of a path for them to hurt mjmd before then

also check out our gnp  turn 257 is when i declared "watch this space" with +780 at 0% science, less than 10 turns ago....



turn one of the world's jankiest overflow chain



kirishima unbound :O unsure of if this hermitage build is real or not but it might be!

and then i realized



THEIR hermitage is just across the street in ankyra (very large building with the blue roof). ohhhhh. well that explains a lot  and yes, the pins do not lie - they finished a SETTLER here last turn, for purposes unknown.......



microed our army of random-ass merchant specialists a bunch to get to here on economics research...... but i'm terrified that between-turns the game will find 9 extra beakers hidden under a rock somewhere due to some arcane trade route recalculations or something, and we will then accidentally 1-turn it D: how can i be confident that we've left a large enough margin for that not to happen? anyways i microed some more and got it to what should be 25 beakers from completion next turn, at least according to the interface... and a 2t economics timing, as civac would see it, shouldn't appear toooo suspicious either (of course we could 1t it at max at this point but we might just be researching at breakeven instead, for all they know)



just going to highlight the naufragerian border for a sec.... yall remember a time, not that long ago, when we were the ones with the tiny stunted cities while their pop was surging ahead?



listen i'm just pre-watermilling. juuuust in case. just... don't worry about it ok

[ljubljana]

ten thousand yeeeeears PB75

267

ended up doing even MORE paranoid micro to get us to 42 projected beakers left on economics. so where did we end up actually?



sick, actually at 42 left! so one last paranoid check to make sure nobody got demo (naufragar was the one i was worried about but they turned up with scimeth) and set research to max and all the cities that are out of econ projects to research builds.....



step 2 in the world's jankiest overflow chain



operation actually-work-our-coast-tiles-in-preparation-for-enviro (hmm, that's kind of a mouthful....) is looking surprisingly not bad! of course i sacrificed a LOT of potential draftees to get us here but, this close to assembly line, i imagine that's an appropriate and non-terrible trade



well, we're all set up to, if all goes according to plan, wait for civac to roll the turn, slam into democracy, and then golden age right as we overflow 88 base hammers into the statue..... it might not be the Right Move but it'll be fun at least  and i mean, we're on 46 cities here, surely it won't be BAD either....

and then we research-build to assembly line. we actually can 3-turn it at max research as of now, although we probably won't quiiite have the bankroll to do so (looks like we can manage about 5 turns at max, which will be this one + 1t demo + 1t corporation and then there are only 2 left for assembly line). but then we will have a giant influx of golden age commerce to speed us along, plus our university septet completing, and we have the option of large-scale research builds as well. i am hoping against hope that we will manage to 2-turn assembly line at max, which will give us 5 turns of GA production with which to build factories (in orgrel). not quiiiite how a, um, Good Player would have drawn it up, but decent enough for our purposes. and that would mean we're just 5 turns from assembly line, believe it or not :O

man, who knows how this game ends, but i really am pretty happy just to be here.... i definitely did not think actually living to factories was the most likely outcome when we got stabbed 60 turns ago.... and now we have to think of a tech path for /after/ that? well.... as far as that goes, i'm starting to have second thoughts about skipping combustion and flight, as much noise as i've made about how much faster the artillery path is. we are seriously just unbelievably exposed right now in both the sea and the air, and perhaps our first priority had better be fixing that. if civac really is going to give us 10 beautiful turns of not fighting them, i guess we'd better come out on the other side of that with at least the credible ability to defend specifically aksum from seaborne nuclear attack.... submarines are the preferred method of tac nuke delivery in MP, right? and we need destroyers to see those?



this is with a 14-hammer mining inc.... i haven't quite calced out what ours is going to be but we're at 8 hammers now and have a LOT of mines on the relevant resources coming online over the next few turns.... we are not quite capped out on hammers in this sim but it's close, all we have left is the deer that breaks our open border deal with civac (oooof), workshopping over the final towns at a much worse ROI than the watermills (ouchhh), and workshopping over the wheat (ughhh wait actually for 3 turns that's not so bad)... but i actually think shaving the turn might be doable!

[williams482]

I remain extremely unconvinced that crushing riverside towns to shave a turn off this wonder is worth it. When does the statue benefit break even on the failgold you would get from losing it on the 4th turn?

Does a swap to Uni Suffrage for the extra hammer on towns make any sense here? I usually do that for my factory GA anyway, it's a substantial bump in production for cottage cities and you wouldn't be in it very long. Of course, that five turns out of Representation is very antisynergystic with the statue benefit and it will cut into your research substantially, so probably not actually worth it.

[ljubljana]

statue benefit breaks even on failgold..... really damn fast i think. we have 46 cities, and i think by the time the statue is online they will all be able to run some kind of non-citizen specialist (squinting at the second to last screenie, i can see hiradoumi, the newest filler, finishes its forge in 2). they do not all have libraries, but almost all of them do, so let's assume for simplicity that we'd get 46 scientists in representation = 46 * 6 * 1.25 = 345 bpt. maybe it's more like just 300 in reality, but that's still a 5-turn payback on 1500 failgold. we really want this wonder, especially since we're investing in democracy tech to try for it (but it pays even that back in only something like 12 turns if we get it)

as for paving the town(s), hmm, ok i'm sleepy but i will attempt to math it. so worst-case for the watermill is that we do decide to revolt to free speech at the end of the GA, so we're trading 7 base commerce from the town for 3 base hammers (thank you, CtH serfdom) and 2 gold post-electricity, so say 5 commerce for 3 hammers. average commerce multiplier in the capital will be.... 1.75 for beakers (probably will get an observatory, probably not a lab) and 2 for gold (no wall street here i think, i don't want to stack more valuable stuff in our capital where it can get nuked), so say 1.87 on average, and hammer multiplier will be 3 with the factory and coal plant (and forge and ironworks). so we'd be looking at a trade of 5 * 1.87 = 9.35 modified commerce vs 9 modified hammers. so a watermill seems almost as good as the town post-electricity; not quite as good during the wealth-building turns, but if we're working on an actual unit (say, a nuke) trading 9.35 commerce for 9 hammers is a pretty good deal i think. it will be worse than that before electricity, but elec is coming pretty soon on our tech path (probably <10 turns after the statue). before then, we lose 6 * 1.87 = 11.22 multiplied commerce..... but paving over the towns also accelerates the statue benefit by one turn for a big whack of 300ish free beakers. so we'd need something like 29 turns in not-electricity for the 1t of statue acceleration to NOT pay back the cost of burning the towns. does that seem legit?

also, if i'm wrong about this and we decide we really should have kept the town later, we can always farm over the watermill and run an extra specialist which makes us... 1 base gold from the serfdom farm, and then 6 base beakers from the reps specialist. that.... seems better than a non-free speech town actually, although there would be lag time between building the farm and reaping the commerce and we'd need enough happy and health to support the extra sizes.... don't worry though i'm not going to go farming over all our towns empire-wide following this logic (unless... ) (don't worry that's a joke i promise)

whether we want to actually run free speech over the draft is itself an open question that i've gone back and forth on, and i'd love your opinion on it.... FS is worth a lot of gold on 80ish towns, even after subtracting its higher maintenance, and rep specialists are very painful to draft off of, but.... ohhh man we are really going to need 40 extra infantry 20 turns from now...... similarly, we could think about free religion over theocracy (10% beakers everywhere is starting to look like a ton of beakers) but, even though that doesn't break aksum's commando-spamming, losing a promotion on all our units scares the crap out of me lol

re statue timesave, if anything, maybe we should be skeptical of whether swapping to bureaucracy is worth it.... the delta in maintenance between this and the draft is gigantic, something like 100 gpt times inflation, and i don't think multiplying the capital commerce pays it back... though maybe it's closer after GA times enviro times 5 windmills

as for unisuff.... ooooh this is a really good idea! hmm, we have like 80 towns i think, and would actually make more than 80 effective hammers since a) some of the towns are non-river grass, so the single hammer would get multiplied by the GA and b) we'd be in orgrel for those turns and the free hammer would be multiplied by that as well. so probably in the neighborhood of 100 base hammers + 1.5 (forge + OR) = 150 hammers/turn into factories, that's quite good actually. not better than representation * the statue long-term, but actually it only clashes with the statue benefit for the second half of the GA, since we are spending the first half building it. if we swap civics on the first turn and last turn of the GA (we want to be in orgrel as long as possible i think) we're talking something like 4 turns of lost rep * statue synergy, 3 turns of just losing rep on the random extra specialists we're running (which is quite a few, but not sure how many). that could be worth doing, i'll take a look when the turn rolls and see how many non-statue specialists we have. it also adds 7 hpt to the capital (actually just 5 since the plain grass town could be an engineer specialist, but then adding 2 hammers there gives us 2 more FOOD to play with via tricks like workshopping the wheat) which could work out to saving a town or two from annihilation...

[williams482]

I'm used to Free Speech and Uni Suffrage being basically automatic choices in SP, which definitely biases me in favor of towns relative to the game we're playing. Your math on the watermill seems to check out, and I think Ginger's historical stated preference to be in at least one of Slavery or Nationhood is reasonable so I'm not huge on Free Speech as a long term choice for us (although, if you're really worried about winning cultural border wars...).

The commerce payoff on bureaucracy should be pretty trivial to calculate, no? It's a 50% bump on the capital's raw commerce, time's the relevant research/gold multipliers. Matching 100 gpt in extra maintenance with that boost does sound unlikely but not impossible.

[ljubljana]

free speech largely for the culture would be quite the power move.... and i do think long-term control of the kirishima/ankyra pair is going to go to whoever controls those two disputed tiles.... hmmmmmmm. i want to say that there's no way we can handle that kind of hit to our troop producing capacity, but mjmd's in free speech and they're doing ok..... maybe this is a "wait and see how deep our milpower hole is at the end of the GA" kind of question.

bureaucracy payoff would be trivial to calculate but i'm lazy and haven't done so yet i'll update when i get in the turn.

speaking of which, lurkers, in the interest of full disclosure, It Has Come Up:

this is the turn on which we have a massive strategic incentive to wait to play until as late as possible, to gain a half-turn in what will be a very close wonder race vs a player with a saved great engineer, if they choose to go for it. is this legal? if nobody says anything, i will hold the turn, but if any one person tells me that it feels unsportsmanlike to them, then i will go in the next few hours and just accept the hit to our chances. but man.... if we lose this race and the reason is that the turn happened to roll at a time close to my usual play window  still though i'd rather be sad than be considered a clock-games-playing scoundrel

(play window lasts for roughly the next 4 hours, so if i don't hear anything by then it will probably be tomorrow)

[ljubljana]

268

well, big, big, massive double-turn today.... SD hasn't played yet but clock's getting low due to my turn-holding scoundrelhood so i'm sure it'll roll before we're done playing, or soon thereafter

been feeling guilty as hell all night over this but too late now



oil for silk huh? it's an interesting idea but we, um, don't actually have the ability to make any oil units as of now.... worth considering if our tech path doesn't run through refining though



DANG that's a bigass stack of ottoman ships.... with up to 20 tanks on them, so not much realistic prospect of stacking enough defenders to prevent them from cracking the coast (though i will try). i'm.... not too confident this is going to work though, i think mjmd has more than this



and here is the significant fleet that they have chosen to divert towards our north coast.... well, time to see if civac is as good as their word i guess

i think my interpretation of our NAP is as follows: i won't take aggressive action against them for the next 10 turns if they don't, even if we end up in a technical state of war due to the defensive pact. frankly it's not like i even COULD do much to hurt them anyways at this point  but if they invade us and burn kirishima or our coast then all bets are off of course.



culture countdown is starting to get kinda close, or i'd feel more conflicted about thinking about a side-switch like this



university to overflow into statue
 


nishikigi FARM, thank u besties

williams i owe you a bureau and unisuff analysis....

bureau: we're making 77 base commerce and 58 base hammers, to become something like 96/78 in the GA. bureau costs 110 gpt and inflation is 67%, for a total cost of 184.7. so it is a net loss; we can expect it to generate about 48 commerce and 39 hammers = 87 total goldhammers, to cost us about 100 gpt. but i think that's worth it to secure and accelerate the statue (probably?) (maybe?)

unisuff: we own 71 towns now, 3 of which are about to be bulldozed.... so 68 hammers, and from a quick glance i think about half of them are not making hammers now (grass or FP towns that are either non-riverside or in non-levee cities) so let's say half of those hammers will be boosted again by the GA, so it's more like 102 base hammers = 127 after the ubiquitous forges. for specialists, i see that we are currently working.... 34 non-mercs specialists for 102 base beakers... omg that's the same! they're both medium upkeep so no difference there.... we actually do need the reps happy in a few places but that's kinda marginal (i think city state rush is the only one of our top 5 cities that will actually become unhappy without reps....). i might draft off of some of those specialists in the next 2 turns due to the looming-looking war which is a point against it.... but then the statue /should/ come online after 3 turns which would of course put reps way ahead. idk, could really go either way on this one

anyway not done yet (and SD extended so might not be a double after all) but big question looks to be whether we should actually cancel the defpact with india or just go to war but accept that we can't really actually do much to help...... i think the latter is probably right, i don't want to openly torpedo our good relationship. but i increasingly feel kinda out of my depth in the diplo with this game so shrug