[SPOILERS] ljubljana embraces the dark side

[ljubljana]

Turn 65

Suddenly, everyone else except Ioan is up to at least 5 cities, and thrawn's up to six:



Ioan also didn't accept (or reject) our RoP offer for some reason, I wonder why? Maybe we'll find out in a few turns... Actually, I don't know how the game reacted to us proposing a GPT deal, then reshuffling tiles such that we no longer had enough GPT to pay for it...it's possible that the deal in fact got cancelled before Ioan saw it. Maybe I'll try proposing again in a few turns if we still hear nothing back.

Not much to report this turn in terms of our development, but, wow, we're really falling behind here. I'm increasingly unsure that Theology and Monumentality actually pack the kind of punch we need to pull ourselves out of this hole... I really wish we'd gotten more scouting in earlier, and in the relevant directions (towards at least one culture CS), such that one of our early monument builds could have been a settler instead. In retrospect, I think that would have made a big difference in terms of faith-showballing, especially if we had settled at our fourth city spot.

[ljubljana]

Turn 66

Okay, I increasingly do think that our earlier offer to Ioan may have been accidentally cancelled before they saw it. Thus, I re-propose the following:



If Ioan holds to the letter of this and doesn't take advantage of our RoP, we'll have until t96 to prepare for them, by which point legions will no longer be any kind of a threat. If they do stab us in the back, we'll at least make a few pennies off of their betrayal, and perhaps have weakened their attack by a legion by delaying an upgrade. Actually, depending on how the Matterhorn promotion works, it may not even weaken us much against Ioan's attack to give them access - if they attack us from flatground onto a hill, will we both get the bonus, or just us? In the latter case, simply being careful to hold the hills around RS should allow us to retain most of the defensive utility provided by Matterhorn control. I think this deal is unfortunately about the best we can really do as far as gold for GPT is concerned - I'd have liked to wait until we can offer 3 GPT for a larger lump sum, but...there isn't any configuration of workable tiles that will give us a large enough surplus to propose such a deal - at least, not without swapping to God King, which I am not about to do just for the sake of this diplomatic misadventure.

Thrawn, as predicted, keeps on rolling with a declaration of war against Rapa Nui, which we are once again in no real position to do anything about. Archduke is up to two campuses, the first player to do so, though we're not far behind ourselves. Theology and a settler next for us next turn, IW + AH the turn after, then the campus, with a double city founding coming in the next 3-4 turns as well. Hopefully that's quick enough to start pulling us out of our increasingly concerning empire score deficit, especially since our faith income is scheduled for takeoff over the next 10 turns.

[ljubljana]

Turn 67



Theology comes in, finally accelerating both our faith income and production (16 hammers/turn in RS, which is barely 10 turns old!). We swap over to Maneuver for the next few turns as well - we're going to start a horseman in Scythia next turn (after the AH finishes) and in RS the turn after that. We could actually finish the campus next turn in RS with a bit of micro, but I'm not doing that, since we won't have enough horses for the second unit until two turns from now and I don't want to waste any production.

Hungary finishes up a settler, then starts a watermill to sneak in the eureka for Construction. After this next round of builds, I expect to swap into Ilkum and start catching up on builders, ideally with Liang in place, and start our big lumbermill push. After RH, we're going to head towards Limes as quickly as possible - it looks like we should be able to just barely sneak that in before we need the walls up on t83. Finishing the Games and Recreation inspiration will be a squeeze, but I think we're barely on track to make it if we delay growth in Hungary to micro the watermill, which we can get in 6 with maximal production emphasis.

I'm still procrastinating a bit on picking a final location for city 4, but will need to commit pretty soon since our settler has almost arrived. I'll likely decide based on a combination of loyalty concerns at the city north of Mweru, the relative number of breathtaking tiles preserved by each site, and the ability to chop out a quick Lavra at the new city.

After that, the city 7 site will indeed probably be our next target, likely with a settler faith-bought in RS. Hopefully, we can connive to time this synchronously with its next builder build, such that we don't have to waste the jungle chop at its Lavra site, but I'm probably not going to go too far out of our way to make that happen. I'm still a bit worried about its defensibility from Ioan, though, so maybe I'll rethink that over the next few turns.

I'm increasingly rethinking the City Park plan, sadly, because I think we're going to run into serious loyalty problems during the upcoming dark age, and will want both another governor to move around and Victor in particular for his AoE loyalty buff. Victor's also a strong pick in general for this situation, since we're expecting an attack from Ioan in the near future and his second promotion (the same one with the loyalty buff) gives another +5 defense strength to nearby units. In fact, we may be able to get both of these promotions up before Ioan's attack even arrives if we delay Liang, which could be a great way to blunt this push without plunging even more deeply into fiscal insolvency .

Oh, also, Ioan didn't respond to our revised RoP offer. Oh well, we tried, I guess.

[marcopolothefraud]

Turn 65

Suddenly, everyone else except Ioan is up to at least 5 cities, and thrawn's up to six:
Wow, we're really falling behind here.

Cheer up - things can still get better! Look at PBEM12, where Chevalier ran Arabia and pushed a similar faith-science strategy to yours. He was hopelessly behind straight until the Medieval Era, and then he slowly snowballed to victory. A lot of games end around turn 170 - there's still a good 60% of the game left.

Thrawn's Pitati Archers are already starting to obsolete, and he seems to be leaning on religion (+8 prophet points per turn?) to stay competitive. Ioan's growing military and faith at the same time, and he might not be able to harness either bonus well. We don't know much about Chevalier or theArchduke, but their civs largely revolve on their unique units, and they're going to have to invest a lot of production into warmongering to see any benefit.


I think your production plans and settler plans are great, apart from the "fiscal insolvency" thing. Two horseman, even with the Conscription card, will be another -2 gold per turn. I can't find a source for this, but I think a watermill costs 1 gold per turn as well. A -7 gold per turn deficit is going to be very challenging to turn around, even with some Commercial Hubs and Harbors in our new cities. We can't even deliberately get the +50 gold from barbarian encampments because we don't want to push our era score. We could consider settling city 4 in a way that'll give us a maritime resource or two to harvest for gold - but that would be really hard. I wish we could milk the economy of the AI through bad trade deals

Victor's an interesting choice, and I think you've made a pretty good case for him being better than Magnus or Liang. I just worry if we're being too conservative and stack up many defence bonuses, only for our neighbors to outgrow us in gold and science, we might lose the game.

[ljubljana]

Turn 65

Suddenly, everyone else except Ioan is up to at least 5 cities, and thrawn's up to six:
Wow, we're really falling behind here.

Cheer up - things can still get better! Look at PBEM12, where Chevalier ran Arabia and pushed a similar faith-science strategy to yours. He was hopelessly behind straight until the Medieval Era, and then he slowly snowballed to victory. A lot of games end around turn 170 - there's still a good 60% of the game left.

Thrawn's Pitati Archers are already starting to obsolete, and he seems to be leaning on religion (+8 prophet points per turn?) to stay competitive. Ioan's growing military and faith at the same time, and he might not be able to harness either bonus well. We don't know much about Chevalier or theArchduke, but their civs largely revolve on their unique units, and they're going to have to invest a lot of production into warmongering to see any benefit.


I think your production plans and settler plans are great, apart from the "fiscal insolvency" thing. Two horseman, even with the Conscription card, will be another -2 gold per turn. I can't find a source for this, but I think a watermill costs 1 gold per turn as well. A -7 gold per turn deficit is going to be very challenging to turn around, even with some Commercial Hubs and Harbors in our new cities. We can't even deliberately get the +50 gold from barbarian encampments because we don't want to push our era score. We could consider settling city 4 in a way that'll give us a maritime resource or two to harvest for gold - but that would be really hard. I wish we could milk the economy of the AI through bad trade deals
 
Victor's an interesting choice, and I think you've made a pretty good case for him being better than Magnus or Liang. I just worry if we're being too conservative and stack up many defence bonuses, only for our neighbors to outgrow us in gold and science, we might lose the game.

Yeah, I don't think we're in an uncompetitive position here, really, since we have Monumentality to catch us up in expansion and Monasticism lurking down the road for a bpt spike into cossacks. We're behind now, but it's far from hopeless.

I suppose thrawn's religion push, though a little late for a really fast Monumentality snowball, could still pay big dividends through that route once they get all their desert folklore-enhanced holy sites up at the conquered city-states. It won't be too long before their faith income equals or outstrips ours with that strategy, since they have so many cities, and a wave of faith-purchased settlers from their already game-leading expansion position will be something to be feared. Thank goodness we took Work Ethic, since if thrawn had snagged that, they'd be an enormous runaway and the prohibitive favorite to win the game even at this early date. As it stands, they're still the favorite, and a substantial one, but have maybe not quite hit runaway status yet.

As I recall, we do have exactly one way to get the +50 gold from barb camps - I'll have to double-check this, but I believe that settling such that the new city's borders disperse the camp does not incur an ES hit. Our cash economy is going to be very problematic until our older cities start to hit size 7, though - half of the reason I'm advocating a builder push soon is to throw down a few camps in a rather desperate attempt to start alleviating this. Our gold situation isn't quite as bad as it looks in this picture, since I swapped out of Conscription this turn to get our horsemen built quickly, but it is pretty serious. That said, I don't think we can really afford to delay the horsemen either, since Ioan's power is spiking and we just dropped to last (!) in the milpower rankings.

I'm not quite sure which route I'll go as far as governors are concerned; it probably depends on how many hostile moves Ioan ends up making in the next few turns. If we really think we're going to be attacked with legions in 15 turns and have only two titles to spend in that span, though, I'm not sure we have much choice but to stack up as many defensive bonuses as we can easily acquire, especially when the opportunity cost is only a few builder charges and one or two boosted chops, as it seems to be in this case.

[ljubljana]

Having learned my lesson from my extremely loopy t64 move, I'm going to go ahead and make some coffee and wake up a little before playing my turn. A quick update first, though: Ioan's post in the organizing thread

I assume that PMes are the best way for negotiating between players, right?

is in reference to us - we have one unread PM from them entitled "Negotiations". I'm not going to read this PM, as I'm pretty sure this isn't allowed (although, in retrospect, we probably should have been clearer about this convention during the game setup). Unfortunately, though, I don't think I could have reasonably avoided reading the title of the PM given the way the forum's PM notifications are set up, and the very fact that Ioan PMed us at all carries with it some spoiler information about their mindset. I'll try my best not to think too hard about that or to let it influence my conduct in-game in any way, though.

[ljubljana]

Turn 68

We finish the AH, which, of course, gives us a governor title that I had completely forgotten about in the above analysis. That makes this decision much easier - Liang 1 followed by Victor 1+2 is now totally feasible before t83. I go ahead and take Liang and send her off to RS, which will likely finish its upcoming builder just a bit faster than Hungary will. Meanwhile, Scythia starts the promised horse, due in just 3 with Maneuver in place.



Here's the situation at the site of our fourth city, to be founded next turn. Do we SIP or settle 1 NW? The latter gains a breathtaking tile at the city center and preserves another due to not losing the forest from SIP, and it also saves us from having to buy the tile 2W of the new city for the Lake Khanka city's Lavra, a significant benefit given our continuing financial woes. However, the NW spot is significantly more complicated from a loyalty and dotmapping perspective, as it pushes the Khanka city 1W into thrawn's loyalty zone while eliminating the possibility of a third city in the west altogether, unless we accept that city being dry and take an ES hit from being too close to MT.

Either way, I think our next move is to faith-buy the trader in the new city next turn to boost it to size 2 quickly, then faith-buy a settler in the new city as soon as we can do so. This takes advantage of the greatly reduced food cost of such a move, while delaying the city SE of RS, which I'm increasingly concerned will become a huge defensive problem in the event of a hot war with Ioan. If our only city up there is a Victor-enhanced RS, we can swap the tiles on the mountain pass between RS and Hungary to force Ioan to attack us at tiles in range of Victor, where the city's strong defensive positioning and upcoming walls build should make it quite difficult for them to do major damage to us. Defending both RS and a city on the jade, however, seems like a much taller order, since the jade city is relatively exposed, could not host Victor at the same time as RS, and may struggle to even get its walls up in time for the attack. We're also in much less danger of losing that spot to Ioan than we are of losing the west to thrawn, so landgrabbing purposes also seem to favor expansion in that direction first. Of course, just a few turns ago, I found myself coming to exactly the opposite conclusion on this question, so, uh, take from that what you will .

We're also getting a free AH builder at the new city next turn - what should we do with it? The forest with a campus pinned will eventually be a +4 spot, so I think it's not worth trying to avoid chopping it; thus, the first thing the builder should do is chop it into the Lavra ASAP for a huge boost to the growth curve. For its other charges, the situation is a bit less clear - I'd like to save some for lumbermills, but perhaps we should go with a camp instead (or two camps, if we settle NW) to get to work on fixing our increasingly dire financial problems.

Actually, if we do SIP, I wonder if we shouldn't just settle the Khanka city fifth instead of that rice city? It's not like thrawn would then take the rice spot from us with it entirely surrounded by our loyalty, and the Khanka city has a much stronger Lavra and would give us a realistic chance at the western spot as well. The advantages of the rice spot, of course, are that it can be founded sooner, is stronger from a faith-snowballing perspective due to all the breathtaking tiles, and that it's a little less directly in thrawn's face than the Khanka spot. Hmm, I'm not sure...I'll have to think about this a bit more.

[marcopolothefraud]

All this talk of "the jade city", "the rice city", and "the Khanka city" is confusing me. Couldn't you preemptively name them and then change the names of each pin to make it clearer?

I think you should settle "city 4" 1 tile northwest. Even though you would give up the opportunity to harvest the Lake Peipus crabs, they would need Celestial Navigation technology, and that's still a long detour away. I think you might be exaggerating the loyalty concerns a little bit; I would settle "city 5" on Lake Ladoga before settling "the Khanka city", because that gives thrawn an opportunity to settle city 5 and block us from the better yields there. City 5's Lavra may be a little weaker, but it's still +1 and it will boost many high-appeal tiles. I also don't really see us making enough settlers to settle a "Congo River city".

Your strongest reason for not settling "the jade city" would be to avoid Ioan. I can't predict his moves, so I can't advise you one way or the other.

[ljubljana]

That's a good point, I'll go ahead and pin names for them during the next turn.

I'm not so sure about the Congo city (henceforth "Tactical DoW"). If we do delay the jade city (henceforth "Goody Hut") to avoid Ioan, and our two settlers go to the pinned city 4 ("Nan Madol") and city 5 ("Gran Colombia") spots, we'll have enough faith for another settler in just 5ish turns after the trader purchase. That settler will probably go to Khanka ("Venetian Arsenal"), and, if we manage that I'm not sure how much sense it would make for thrawn to take the Congo river spot, since it'll be badly cramped by our city placements. That spot could then be a good seventh or eighth city for us, since, while it's very close to thrawn, it's also quite defensible, being sheltered by mountains, on a hill, and on the right side of the Congo River relative to approaching Nubian forces.

As far as thrawn stealing Gran Colombia from us, my logic is this: if we have VA and NM settled in addition to Scythia and Hungary, will it really make sense for thrawn to plant their next city at the GC spot, with our cities on four sides and likely badly in the negatives on loyalty (even The Second was in the negatives before thrawn added that governor), just to deny us the land? It's not even a great spot for thrawn like it is for us - their faith comes from Desert Folklore, so the breathtaking tiles do next to nothing for them, and the spot's pretty pedestrian otherwise. I'm not sure I'm going to delay that spot, since it would accelerate our snowball more quickly than going for VA, but I do think we could delay and not suffer too much risk of thrawn swiping it.

[ljubljana]

Turn 69

In which I am justly punished for my foolishness:



Hahaha, would you look at that. You'd think a forest would be a higher priority for the tile picker than all those bare plains and grasslands, but apparently not. Well, I guess I'll wait to see how long our borders will take to expand to clear this, and, in the worst case, we can always do so by buying the tile or accepting the ES hit (ugh). Also, those Lavra yields aren't as high as advertised - it looks like civwiki lied to us and Mato Tipilia is not considered a mountain in-game. That's annoying, and forces something of a reshuffle in our Lavra placements over here to preserve some of the MT-adjacent tiles. I still throw down Nan Madol's Lavra at the rice, since it'll hit +4 with the adjacent Lavra + Campus combo, but VA's Lavra is now going at the +3 spot by the cows, which might be for the best anyways since we don't need to buy that tile.

Thrawn conquered Rapa Nui this turn, and finished the Temple of Artemis! Wow, I guess that's what they were doing instead of building more settlers, and I certainly can't say I wouldn't rather them have the ToA than 1.5 more cities. We're now tops in science thanks to RS's campus - we start a second horse there, due once again in 3. Nan Madol faith-buys the trader, as advertised, and should get off to quite a fast start with a chop into its Lavra forthcoming. We'll then buy a settler here as soon as we have the faith and hit size 2, which should be on t74ish with our finally not crappy 40 faith/turn income.

Maybe I should offer Ioan an RoP straight-up in a few turns, say, on t76ish? That should improve our chances of getting the DoF extended while not really giving them enough time to promote their whole army and immediately attack us on t83.