[SPOILERS] swans will bite u

[williams482]

The converted pop will stay converted, but the new pop comes in with some accumulated religious pressure for the dominant religion already. I don't recall the exact mechanics, but I think Thrawn had a pretty good breakdown in his PBEM19 thread.

[ljubljana]

Turn 47 - Japan

Thrawn did not DoW on TAD's ships, which let TAD move past them and establish an unlikely double-attacking angle on the forward longship:



I still am not thrilled about our odds to stop the attack, though, as unfortunately I was right about the second longship coming with some banked XP and it did promote last turn. They have two options next turn, both pretty good - attack Mogadishu and just ignore us, or attack TAD and slay their eastern ship. Besides, I smell a trap - thrawn would not let us get a tactical edge on them for free unless they were really confident it would work out for them. I am guessing that either they have done the math and know they can hold us off with these two ships, or there are more ships just out of range in the fog...



In a fit of builderism, I went with the shrine next in Terunofuji. Here's my dubious rationalization: in UP, the city gets 8 hpt, exactly enough to barely NOT finish a galley in 4t (after which it will be at 64/65 hammers) and instead waste some overflow. But it CAN finish the shrine in 4, and moreover, in doing so it will overflow the magical one hammer into the galley build that we need to finish that in 4t too. So our choice here is between a galley in 5, and then either the shrine or a second, inefficient galley that wastes even more overflow in 4, or a shrine + galley in 8. Also, the city acquired the sheep this turn (instead of the fish, thank goodness), so it has a strong four-yield tile to grow onto at size 3 instead of the weak reef. But yeah, after this shrine it will be all galleys all the time here until we grow up to campus size.

The UP swap shaves a turn off Shodai's monument repair - it will start 6t galleys on t49. Asanoyama will finish this galley, then do the GP in 7t, so Victor 3 is due on t56, though I am not sure if I will build it on the plains farm as pinned or on the maize (the former would delay this timing slightly). And Hakuho will make a builder after this settler, probably chop out a galley, then make more galleys until such time as the campus build can no longer be delayed.

We should, I think, be guaranteed Monumentality now with optimal play unless someone murders Shodai or my warrior suffers some catastrophic death under a hail of unseen barb quads. If the era change warning rolls next turn, it will be tight, but we should make roughly 6.1 * 3 (we overflowed almost a full turn of culture from SW last turn) + 8.1 * 8 = 83.1 culture in the next 10t, which barely clears the 79.2 clef cost of boosted PP. I still really hope that doesn't happen as it would force us to blow chops on the new city's HS and Hakuho's campus, but I think we can handle it. And just to triple-check the math, we have

12 points already
+3 from the campus
+3 from the holy site
+3 from the camp
+2 from Oligarchy
+1 from a classical civic
+1 from contacting Krill
= 25 points exactly. We have zero wiggle room but I think we're going to be okay, barely.

As far as priorities in Monumentality, the overriding one, I think, is whatever will bootstrap our ship production the fastest. That is actually not settlers, or not right away at least - I think we first need Hakuho's trader + builder combo to hit the magic 17 hpt threshold for 2-turn Victor galleys ASAP. Then, we have another very high-impact builder buy available in Shodai, which will hit 11 hpt exactly in UP for 3t galleys with two mines and a pasture. After that, I think we can consider settlers, but Terunofuji's builder is very efficient too as it also will hit 11 hpt at size 4 with a mine and pasture, and the third charge can either add amenities + housing with a dyes plantation or add a hammer at Asanoyama with the plains hill mine. 3 builders and a trader would be an unusual Monumentality opening for sure from a snowball perspective, but I think the military situation probably demands it, unfortunately...

We are going to have to figure out how to spend our gold soon...where by "soon" i mean "this turn". The holy site tile purchase is sadly mandatory, but with the camp gold incoming I can handle that without begging from TAD. For the rest of our gold, I see two options. One is to buy the third-ring campus tile at Hakuho, which will reach an adjacency in the +7-+8 range instead of the +4 we would get by building 1W of the city center but will not offer much acceleration until cities 3 and 4 get up to speed. The other is TAD's second trader...if we think we can defend it, which seems highly uncertain right now.

Abroad, I notice that Banzai just has the one RND, not two as I reported earlier. And...krill actually has two harbors! So that's what they've been building...good call IMO, harbors are the best build in generic circumstances with free inquiry inbound. It really is starting to look like that team is setting up for a longer game than we might be led to believe, or at least establishing a backup plan in case this longship push is "only" able to snowball thrawn to 8 cities instead of forcing concessions. Still not sure this is a better move than just having krill spam galleys, but if they are going to indulge in builderism, this seems like a good way to go about it.

Oh yeah, and somewhere in the fog, Norway has declared on Buenos Aires. With 4 CS under their belt already, that must be one of Chev/Inc's home CS. Grim tidings, but it does confirm that those teams must be in de facto war at this point too, like we are.

edit re our gold:



it's possible we can have it both ways, actually, if we act fast. If TAD buys the trader now, their income will shoot up to around 20 GPT, enough that we can plausibly also get enough cash to buy the campus tile on time. It will depend on how long we have before the era change and whether I can save a builder charge to chop it out... but that's a good use of a chop anyways, of course, so Hakuho doesn't have to waste too much time messing around with non-ship builds

[williams482]

I'm okay taking a shot on the trader. The sooner the better, and if you guys can't control the space between your capitals then this game is over anyway. Obviously "both" is the ideal outcome here, let's make the play for that.

Also agreed on the builder/trader purchases in Monumentality. We obviously won't get much benefit from the normal REX approach with Norwegian ships hanging around ready to snipe a poorly protected city.

It makes plenty of sense for Sumeria to be on econ/long term military type builds right now. Sumerian galleys won't have nearly the mobility of oceangoing longships, and Krill only needs one or two to be in the general area of any fighting to score pillage rewards. I'm sure if a real coalition is formed and things get dicey for Norway alone, Sumeria will be in a great position to turn whatever econ investments they've made into a bunch of additional ships.

[TheArchduke]

Haha.

Well, turn onto you and we very much can concede.

Basically we are out, but judge for yourself. Panicbuilding ships to be eaten by Norway.

[TheArchduke]

Well, I concede if ljubljana agrees. Judging from domination scores everyone is sleeping and a determinded Norway could only be stopped by having no CS whatsoever.

I concede.

I guess the others will take 20 turns longer.

[ljubljana]

Turn 48 - Japan

It is as we feared:



Thrawn already has ships at MoM, and they are arriving at the perfect time, while TAD's boats are weakened from fighting the barbs and mine are out of position from the Shodai attack. My ships are 3t away, and they have a decent chance to burn MoM before then...

At Mogadishu:



Thrawn ate one of TAD's ships and took very little damage, and is probably going to clean up all four of TAD's boats with just two longships, losing nothing in the process except time on their Mogadishu attack. We really wasted our resources trying to intervene here, I'm afraid...

On the other hand, Mogadishu is such a strong city that every 4t we delay the capture by is a longship that thrawn doesn't get to build here, which is almost as good as actually killing their ships, I suppose

Yeah, this thing is over

[ljubljana]

Well, I concede if ljubljana agrees. Judging from domination scores everyone is sleeping and a determinded Norway could only be stopped by having no CS whatsoever.

I disagree about the others being sleeping - all we know about their domination scores is that they are somewhere between us and Norway. They might have been building ships nonstop since they passed us in the rankings (which was on turn 45) in which case all of us put together have greater milpower than Norway and could be a match for them.

That said, if the others have conceded in their threads I assume they're not planning on that, and I won't be the one to keep things going if that's the case.

edit: I also think the zero third city settlers we have seen from the opposing teams can only really be explained by ship spam. This level of delayed expansion is the right move, but only in exactly this game state, so I do think everyone else is also in panicked military buildup mode by now. Do I think that's enough to change things though...no, not really

[williams482]

Well, if Thrawn can knock around TAD's galleys that easily I feel pretty good saying it wasn't the religious investment that cost us the game here. Crusade was probably the only remotely realistic chance of defending against this, and even then it comes far too late.

[ljubljana]

Well, my own galleys would be faring much better with +5 in shallow waters and Embolon promotions to match thrawn's. Nah, the decision that cost us the game was the one to give me the western start and TAD the eastern one. DoTF would be online already instead of needing to wait for Shipbuilding like Crusade, and that plus Victor plus Japan galleys would give us decent odds to repel this. And if city-state rushing Japan were in the east we'd be in a much better position to contest the CS there while TAD safely mops up the ones in our backlines. Not that we could have known any of that at the time, of course...

although i will point out that if we had two Japan galleys at MoM right now instead of two holy site projects our chances would also look much much much better, so as far as decisions that we could realistically have known better than to make, i think that's still the one that was most damaging to our chances :/

i guess now we know why the lurker thread has been so quiet, because this game ended the moment thrawn's two neighbors got into a religious race...

[TheArchduke]

My new galley can not even leave MoM.

Yeah this is f.....

Hopefully we play without an instant win civ next time on water.