[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

it was not possible to get the sentry unit in there, sadly... it's one of the units tied up N-NE of lalibela, as it had to kill a pike in adulis last turn to be promoted.... but it DID give us the vision on the strait west of lalibela that we needed to even think of this move so we're already getting value out of it

yeah, i am not sure if my aggressive move with the 2-movers was correct... we'll see based on how much they hit us with from the fog (in particular if they have cats in the fog). i do not think it will be TOO much though as i don't see a reason for them to have thought to mass units at the capital last turn.... based on their moves so far it LOOKS like they are trying to send everything to lalibela directly to try and hold it instead of holding troops back for the counter. but i definitely agree about us needing to move as urgently as we practicably can, which is ultimately the reason i went for it and why i do think i'll be hitting lalibela next turn. if their move here should be to "trade cities for time" to assemble a stack capable of wiping ours, i think it is a natural countermeasure from us to trade (obsolete) units for NOT-time :D

i also agree that it's odd for GT to have not whipped the capital..... in general they've been significantly less aggressive about whipping than they might have been, there are still quite a few size 8 cities sitting around that could have gone through multiple whip cycles by now if they were assuming an attack. i suppose that with 11 units seemingly about to be in lalibela, and the prospect of reinforcing it while we spend time to bombard, maybe their plan was to stall us out there while they try to buy peace with naufragar on the other side, and they are keeping some pop in reserve so they can compete economically if they manage to get out from under the dogpile somehow. if so, that plan will probably look pretty non-operative when they open the turn now and i wouldn't be surprised to see every city whipped next turn

and yeah, i think it's only a matter of time before the stack comes for us if we keep making gains. but they have now dawdled long enough that i think they're out of time to prevent us from forking the capital and gondar before it can intervene, which is about as far as we could have reasonably expected to get before fighting it anyways i think. if we can take lalibela and raze one of the capital/gondar, i THINK that should tip us over the edge into being able to 1v1 them even if nauf peaces out (not that nauf seems likely to do so right as their knight window is hitting)

[ljubljana]

Turn 136 - Zululand

still kinda in zombie mode from the intense late-night seder yesterday..... but the turn waits for no religious holiday



so the gav/superdeath war has ended.... almost completely inconclusively despite the significant amount of material exchanged, other than gav gaining and keeping possession of nutty bars. i mean, settling up aggressively around it as gav did and then attacking to secure it has worked out pretty marvelously in terms of landgrab..... and for SD it, i suppose, makes sense to drop out of this stalemated war and immediately pounce on naufragar now that we're obviously for real about helping them. wonder what the odds of that happening as soon as SD's stacks make it to the other side of their territory are...

drey did NOT return the cow/cow i sent at the end of last turn, which makes me nervous..... but actually i'm not sure they've had the turn yet so i'll be chill about it for today at least. going to send ginger an extension request as well which i would be surprised if they accept, but i mean, i've been surprised before. some combination of the those two outcomes will probably determine if i feel safe enough to (temporarily?) drop slavery for serfdom

and re GT, their reinforcing stack turned around and no attacks were made against our units. lalibela has 8 units inside, divided evenly between crossbow and pike, after another double-whip, and it looks strongly like this will be the turn to attack it



williams, as usual, your prediction has immediately come true.... GT's stack is on the move. guess we have a date with it soon  looks like their plan is to recapture lalibela and prevent us from making gains elsewhere... they can reach the city on their turn 139. most likely i'll leave just longbows on defense there and try to get them to a) take losses to crack those and then b) expose more of their stack to collateral than is advisable. if our main forces tangle directly i think we're in the regime where whoever strikes first with their cats will win

anyone know off the top of their head how engineering affects road movement in neutral territory? i remember reading about this in a recent PB, and the answer being NOT what you would expect based on the behavior of similar techs like construction, but i can't remember the exact citation as of now D: unfortunately it looks like it's about to become very relevant to our situation... we may have reached the limits of what we can take with direct force now that their stack is on the way (well, MAYbe we JUST barely have time for a sneaky capital-gondar fork still but would have to raze if so) and are entering the positional/attritive phase of the war, where we might have to rely on nauf making gains on their end and our combined 3-1 edge in cities to grind them down



yeah, aksum-gondar fork looks like it's not going to happen.... if the stack moved 3 tiles eastward as we'd expect, it's in position to JUST make it into gondar next turn, and then aksum should have at least the 4 defenders we blocked from lalibela last turn in theory if it is just that in there we could try to trade a huge number of HAs for a raze on the capital, but a) i don't really think that's going to be the case and b) even if they have just 1-2 extra pikes in there i think we straight-up won't have enough 2-movers to crack it. so most likely i will end this turn feeling successfully deterred from that plan.... although naturally dragging the stack away from nauf's increasingly formidable-looking force should do SOMEthing to progress the war state even if we get stalled on our end

ok well, i don't think i'm going to be unconvinced about attacking the 8 trapped units in lalibela anyways... or of keeping it if we manage to take it, as the city has been pretty neutralized as a productive force from whipping at this point and it is the best defensive tile around for our (two....) longbows. althoughhh GT will get the borders back if they recapture successfully which i do NOT like (does that happen immediately on the same turn as recapture?) as it could set up a situation where they could retake the city AND hit our main stack with collateral on the same turn..... or retake the city from a position such that we can't immediately counterattack in response due to the borders cutting off our road access. ugh, might have to test this in worldbuilder....

...

yeah according to wb the borders DO pop back immediately, on the same turn as a recapture. lovely. so we're thinking seriously about a raze then



well, at least we can do the fun part in parallel with the unfun part. two accuracy cats and one unpromoted cat suffice to zero out the 40% defenses at lalibela, leaving 6 available as attackers. i am not really sure whether CR1 or barrage II is the correct promotion for our first cat that will almost certainly die in the attack (4% odds to live unpromoted).... so back to WB.... which suggests that we'll get about 1 extra total damage spread across the 5-6 collateraled units from BII, which i feel confident is less than the marginal extra damage from CR2 we'd do to the one crossbow that we'd be facing if the odds to live are as long as 4% is. i expect that to change once our cats have appreciable odds of actually surviving but for now i think we lead with barrage II (and as you can see i didn't have time to really do this analysis in any detail so if it conflicts with the conventional wisdom please lmk for next time)

barrage II cat vs full health CG1 xbow (3.5%): dies, doing 0.8 damage to both the defending xbow and 6 other units in the stack. which leaves.... one full-health unit.... so from taking a battle at 3.5% odds to win, our cat reduced the total strength of this stack by 5.6, MORE than the strength of the unit we lost?? and that was the EXPECTED outcome?? damn collateral damage is powerful :D so with one more full-health xbow we clearly have to take at least one more battle at odds like those:
barrage II cat vs full health CG1 xbow (3.5%): dies doing exactly the same amount of damage. now our cats have real, 10% odds to live on the attack and perhaps this is where i start taking CR promotions. they still get the best odds by quite a bit, but at the same time we obviously we don't want to overspend them here if we can avoid it. and yeah, taking CR1 takes our odds from 10% up to
B1 + CR1 cat vs 5.2 health CG1 xbow (37.9%): LIVES on 0.2 health!
B1 + CR1 cat vs 4.4 health CG1 xbow (46.3%): dies and gives GT a GG in the capital
B1 + CR1 cat vs 3.5 health CG1 xbow (87.0%): lives, but also on very low health
B1 + CR1 cat vs 3.3 health CG1 xbow (88.4%): lives at half health, but this attack might have been a mistake as we're now at the collateral damage limit. we are also now out of cats and need to have brought some real units, none of which get amazing odds even against the fully-collateral-ed stack.... the best we can do is
C1 elephant vs 3.3 health C2 pike (58.8%): dies but does good damage
C1 elephant vs 3.3 health C2 pike (59.8%): wins for our first actual kill lol
C1 elephant vs 3.3 health C2 pike (59.8%): wins again! there is still one more 3.3 health pike but then our horsies can clean up the rest i think
flanking 1 horse vs 3.3 health C2 pike (55.5% to live): dies but i think now we're in cleanup territory for real
i then proceeded to stupidly misclick a horse into the city before promoting LMAO (75% odds) and won, but now it's on an unintended tile and GT could kill it next turn unless we try to reachily defend it. this is a significant deal as it represents a second sentry unit if it lives..... it is on the tile 1W of the city center, where the capital garrison can reach it, and was intended to be 1N of the city where it would be safe. considering using my "one oopsie" but perhaps this is not impactful enough to warrant that
then 5 straight 99% battles that we of course win, including one to create something i foolishly forgot in my mass-promotion of impis to shock, namely a MEDIC impi who will eventually become our super-healer if we go for it



i am still unsure as i make this attack whether we should raze or capture. i think it depends on a) where the borders revert to without the city and b) how many buildings are preserved....



border situation: two lines of tiles have reverted to neutrality. not much but obviously could be critical in preserving our ability to first-strike GT's stack. preserved buildings are a lighthouse for 3-food lake tiles and our empire's only forge  so not as crazy-impactful as saving the granary would have been, but the lighthouse will be close if we gain control of the lake tiles and the forge would otherwise almost certainly never have gotten built here and represents quite a few free hammers over the course of the game...

and, in what is becoming distressingly common, i realize the most important feature of the position RIGHT as my mouse is hovering over "burn baby burn" - we have a bunch of 2-movers in GT's face right now that we have some reason to believe if would be inefficient for them to counterattack, and lalibela represents such a bottleneck in GT's road network that we can negate their engineering advantage by, um.... just by pillaging the stupid roads  ok, that's good enough - i am not certain i can make it happen, but i am going to try to find a way to hold this city. we don't need to delay the counter by THAT much to get a pretty decent-sized pile of longbows in there (and we even brought along 2 archers we can upgrade if needed). and if we can delay 4 turns we can hilariously whip PRO walls and then instantly have 75% defenses here thanks to chichen itza...... i'm not sure trying to hold it is CORRECT per se, but it's certainly favored by our traits and setup relative to baseline, and the city is so burnt-out at this point that really all we'd lose by having to evacuate it is the tiles. yeah i guess that's good enough for me

so in summary we lost, what, 3 cats and an elephant to kill 8 medieval units and capture a city? ok i think i'm starting to get why everyone considers these things op as fuck now 

move up a sacrificial chariot to check the defenses in the capital:



ughhh. so looks like whichever group of our roadcutters is most forward is going to get pasted by cat collateral :| maybe both if they have combat workers in the fog though i don't really expect them to.... i am pretty confident it's worth cutting the farm road; is it worth expending what is probably 2 additional units to use a 5-unit stack to lay waste to this town and cut its road as well (and thereby probably shield the 2 plains farm cutters + misclicked sentry-promotable horse, which is why it's just 2 additional units)? we have some seriously crappy units we could use to do so and it would make a big difference in defending lalibela so i think so. but ugh i need a break.... i'll come back to this after lunch

one lunch later....



well, i bit.... and then realized that we really didn't have to do that as, unlike with fighting, units can still move after pillaging in this game 

so maybe i did just blunder away 5 units towards a questionably worthwhile aim.... but we will see. most of those units were crappy things like impis that we really can't expect to get much use out of going forwards. i did add two horse instead of making the stack ALL impis, so those will be a significant loss, but the point there was to force them to either use a catapult, which will probably die, or take out the horses with crossbows, one of which would be expected to die.... so basically i traded the difference between two impis and two horse for either a crossbow or a cat in expectation, which seems... maybe not a slam-dunk, but fine at least. and we did wring a fuckton of gold out of burning down the town anyways.... enough to upgrade a longbow, so we did GAIN the difference between an archer and a longbow in a hilltop border city which is not nothing either

anyways, if we're going to hold this city, or at least put GT in a position where they can't recapture without collateral exposure, what we need most is time.... time to pile it as high as we can with protective longbows on a hill that even catapults + medieval units should find inefficient to remove. we are whipping some in all our cities within plausible range, and in conjunction with upgrading the 2 archers i brought along (which i may not do, 180 gold is PRICEY) we can have 7-8 in there at around t141, plus protective walls, plus chichen itza. we have no way of knowing how many combat workers they have in position, of course, but each turn of delay will give us a significant defensive asset here. and if we can force them to burn all their cats on a big pile of super-spammable longbows, THEN we might be in position to make progress again offensively



i decide to gamble with two workers on getting a road on this PFH... they would have to have either a TON of combat worker in the fog or a few workers and a 2-mover that can beat our horse in order to punish this. if successful, we could check out the defenses at matara next turn and rapidly redeploy up to 10 horse from lalibela to hit it the turn after if it seems feasible to do so. if not, we are well past the point where 2 workers is a significant loss i think, given that ours have been sitting around roading for almost 10 turns now lmao



similarly, i trade an impi for the scouting warrior of GT's in an attempt to draw troops out of matara or at least get them to show what kind of forces they have in position. well.... ok, actually what happened is i was CONSIDERING doing this, and, um.... moused over the combat to get the odds, and then misclicked into actually PERFORMING the combat.... soooo that's not wonderful and i don't know if i actually would have gone through with it given full consideration, but too late now lol. trackpads man

forgot to mention this hilarious development in gingerland:



obviously a double holy city is amazing for them.... but i guess it's also good for us?? they won't be able to stack it with wall street until pretty late in the game, late enough that we are hoping to have conquered them by then, and prussa is quite firmly on our side of a hypothetical ottoman split with dreylin. so maybe we will end up fixing our lack of exploitable national wonder cities by building wall street in ginger's best commerce city and the heroic epic in GT's capital



another reason to have pillaged the town: notice lalibela will claim no two-food tiles when it comes out of resistance in 4 turns.... which means we MUST build a windmill on the marked tile immediately or it will starve and then not be able to whip walls (or actually, maybe it can dry-whip them thanks to the forge?). and um.... guess how many turns we are from machinery, and how many turns we WOULD be from machinery if we were roughly one pillaged town poorer.... not that i'm quite sure where the 5 (is it 5?) workers we need to 1-turn a windmill will come from but clearly it's at least POSSIBLE to do so

edit: wait no, we'll be in a golden age so that's inoperative. guess i just did it for fun then :shrug:

sheesh, what a nasty complicated mess of a turn. not too confident i played it correctly either. but so it goes!

[El Grillo]

Please don't play war turns with a trackpad, for your own sanity.

[scooter]

Please don't play war turns with a trackpad, for your own sanity.

Agreed. A further suggestion that is applicable to both trackpads and mice: don't right-click war movements at all. Many common misclicks come from doing a right-click hover to see odds or whatever. Instead, press the G key for go-to. This way you have to actively do a full click in order to commit to the movement, rather than simply releasing an active click. And you can press the Esc key at any time to bail out of it.


Unfortunately I only follow my own advice here like half the time, but I can tell you which half was responsible for like 100% of my misclicks.

[williams482]

As for Engineering, if you have engineering then you move three tiles per movement point on roads. If you don't have engineering, you move two tiles. It doesn't matter where the road is or who it technically belongs to. Neutral territory, rival territory with OB, whatever. Three tiles per movement point.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Fear the mighty chicken pizza!

[Tarkeel]

yeah according to wb the borders DO pop back immediately, on the same turn as a recapture. lovely. so we're thinking seriously about a raze then

Culture is... complicated. The short version is that every tile in the game has it's own cultural counter, which is distinct from the city's culture. Razing a city will remove the city culture, but the tiles keep whatever culture they have accumulated. However the culture lies dormant until a city of the matching culture stakes a claim on that tile, at which point the old accumulated culture suddenly kicks in again. Similarly, when you raze a city, tiles which have had no other culture applied to them sometimes can bug out and stay claimed for a turn after, or at the very least stop your culture from claiming the culture. It's weird.

so in summary we lost, what, 3 cats and an elephant to kill 8 medieval units and capture a city? ok i think i'm starting to get why everyone considers these things op as fuck now 

Indeed. They can still put serious hurt on riflemen.

well, i bit.... and then realized that we really didn't have to do that as, unlike with fighting, units can still move after pillaging in this game 

Attacking and pillaging both cost a move, but you've been hill tiles which take two movement points.

Please don't play war turns with a trackpad, for your own sanity.

Agreed. A further suggestion that is applicable to both trackpads and mice: don't right-click war movements at all. Many common misclicks come from doing a right-click hover to see odds or whatever. Instead, press the G key for go-to. This way you have to actively do a full click in order to commit to the movement, rather than simply releasing an active click. And you can press the Esc key at any time to bail out of it.

Unfortunately I only follow my own advice here like half the time, but I can tell you which half was responsible for like 100% of my misclicks.

You can also just hover the cursor while holding down alt to bring up the odds, and thus only click when you're intending to attack.

[ljubljana]

omg wait you can use G to move units??? ok yeah switching over to that forever, you are a hero thank youuu

Turn 137 - Zululand

well.... this is the great scientist turn. the war has made everything awkward about this golden age though - from atamifuji, who needs to run double scientists for the 300 point GP, being a turn away from growth and thus in a pretty awful position to immediately swap to them, to the fact that swapping to serfdom would cost us the walls whip in lalibela that seems highly likely to make the difference in whether we can hold that location against GT or not. i do not really think we can afford to delay it though - vassalage beckons and turning our huge pile of in-production longbows and later crossbows into effective 2-movers seems like an essential component of what it would take to break through to the next line of GT cities. i increasingly think it's unlikely that we'll want to leave it for bureaucracy at the end of the GA either - not on the doorstep of unlocking the tokugawa musket "UU".... not to mention the fact that i don't think we even want to go for civil service during the GA if we can avoid it, in favor of pushing through to knights and said muskets. my goal is to at least hit guilds by the end of the golden period, and hopefully make good progress on gunpowder as well, all while spamming gigantic numbers of first vassalage archery units and then knights of course. or we can still go for engineering next instead but i think with ginger and drey cowing out of potential intervention (and lalibela too weak to make a castle) most of the impetus for that has disappeared at this point and we should just go get better units

to my significant surprise, ginger and drey both renewed cow/cow... apparently they don't feel the need to even make us think they might intervene to save GT? or they are prioritizing making sure we don't start a buildup on their borders as well over doing so. so that might mean we could do serfdom for 5-7 turns if we really wanted to and not be at risk militarily on the eastern front. however



i don't really think it's worth it. we'd only get something like 13 gpt from it (pre-multipliers) as we whipped off most of the available farms. and we would lose not just lalibela's walls whip but the granary whip in captured adulis, and the ability to repeatedly in our cities that are capped around size 4 for lack of food availability. and our ability to whip a pile of knights as soon as the tech comes in.... ask me again about serfdom at the END of the golden period, when our cities will be somewhat larger and perhaps the end of the GT war will be in sight, but for now i think a swap out of slavery is, sadly, premature

you can see ginger has started on nationalism for an unbeatable taj mahal as well lol. and GT



is running 46-turn priesthood research and making only 45 GPT, which seems to all be going into unit upgrades. so it looks like they are pretty much finished as far as researching goes, and we will not have to deal with knights, oromos, or even longbows. once we can field a unit that consistently beats both crossbows and pikes (so, toku muskets or perhaps shock knights) i think we stand good odds of smashing through.

militarily



they killed 4 of the 5 units we used to raze their town, and redlined the chariot with a catapult attack, i guess choosing not to kill to avoid exposing units to a possible counter from lalibela...? we did not kill a unit on defense, but it does look like we caught their workers a little out of position - the only two we can see are SW-SW of lalibela on that plains hill, which is still unroaded, so they are still a turn away from even being able to START to repair the damage according to what we can see. i am feeling pretty good about our move tbh, there are now 19 visible GT units here, not even including the pile that left their western border last turn and that should be in gondar now. so we are facing quite the counterattack here and i don't think we stand a chance of holding lalibela if they could concentrate their force against it on turn 139.... we also did manage to save the misclicked horse 1W of lalibela, who can now promote to our second sentry unit and is thus more valuable than any individual unit we lost

unfortunately i do think i still see a path wherein they could hit us on turn 140 with nothing else in the fog, and retain the ability to combat-road 1W of the city on that turn and then crash through to any collateral we might have lurking just out of range. the difference between a t139 attack and t140 is not as dramatic as if we could delay until walls come online, but it's not nothing: the extra turn will see us move 2 more longbows into the city and, yes MJW, will see the city come out of resistance and gain a 25% defensive bonus from chichen itza to take a few of their catapults out of the fight. that's not nothing either as it looks like they have underbuilt cats somewhat - of the 19 visible GT units only 2 are cats, and it is at least conceivable that they left some subset of the 7 in the western stack in the west to threaten nauf's stack.... moreover the 2 cats we can see have been pre-promoted with barrage 2 already and are thus ill-suited to removing city defenses - awkwarddd

well, i still do not really think we can hold lalibela against optimal play from GT here. but we have a chance if they dawdle, and if they come in the kind of force they are going to need to take it back, i think we can reasonably expect nauf to make gains in their theater in return. worst-case, we can evacuate our horse archers and at least trade our longbows for some of their precious, underbuilt cats, which is not a disaster for us either. or if the sims favor it, we could leave the horsies IN the city to try to absorb some collateral (they will probably need to nearly max out on collateral to get odds vs hilltop longbows with their 6-strength 1-movers)

still undecided on if we're spending 190 gold to upgrade our two archers in the city or not. and i NEED to decide now (actually i NEEDed to decide last turn) as every turn we delay represents a 5% loss in fortification bonus. i am leaning against right now as that delays our entire tech push by a full turn (owwwww) but i mean, if we can keep lalibela with those upgrades and will lose it otherwise then it's the correct move

in the south



GT did take our proffered misclicked impi, but our roading workers survived. i think it's reasonable to commit an impi to check out the defenses in matara and assess the likelihood that we could bumrush it down with our surviving lalibela HAs and a motley bunch of randos from the kinbozan defense force



well, a simple case of the one-pike defense, this is probably not - i am sure there are at least a couple more units around to guard against a sneaky attack from kinbozan. but the main stack, the one from the west that i expected to defend gondar, is one tile too far west to reach the city in time to defend it. if we stack a bunch of HAs and a few impis on the "stage" tile and two workers on the hill SW of it to road next turn.... yeah i suppose this is possible. at least it's possible enough that i think going for a risky HA attack against the axe that GT used to kill our redlined impi at kinbozan is not unreasonable. and hey, if we do win, that's the great general, maybe in time to do something to defend lalibela

c1 horse vs c1/cover/shock axe on a hill (49% odds to survive): dies
sentry horse vs axe at 3.1 health (92% odds to survive): wins, but is badly damaged. but at least it can take sentry now



yeah i'm down - show me what you've got. these guys are too slow to participate in an attack on matara of course, but they could help defend the city if we take it and GT redirects significant force from the lalibela attack to try to recapture. and, well - that's the idea right; our HA pile is pretty useless on defense, but it CAN accomplish something via offensive defense - attacking along a different axis to potentially defend the first location by drawing troops away



in exchange for trying to retake lalibela, GT has apparently conceded that debre berhan is going to get absolutely fucking wiped off the map by naufragar next turn. man, should we be offering THEM cow/cow as well?? i don't exactly fancy trying to take on THAT in the open field.... i will not do so this turn but would like to hear opinions.... i AM getting a little nervous that we have blundered our way into nauf getting most of the spoils from this war, with GT spending their remaining haymakers to retake territory from us while not slowing down nauf at all. not sure what we could have done differently to prevent that though.... NOT jumped on the border cities as quickly as possble at the start of the war? that hardly seems better.... i guess some of the way the split falls just depends on how the erratic doomed player decides to act, and there is not much their conquerors can really do about that....



i THINK this is the deploy.... enough HAs to cover the worker pair unless they have both combat workers and a LOT of troops exactly 3 tiles away in the fog. the rest are on the stage tile so they can get back into lalibela if GT moves up a billion troops next turn. cats healing next to lalibela with the medic unit, so that we retain the prospect of hitting them with collateral if they move up RIGHT next to the city next turn via combat workers from the fog. there are still chances for things to go wrong in multiple areas of course but i guess civ4 is rapidly turning me into a compulsive gambler

oh and lest we forget:



ok i don't think it was even worth the joke to mouse over the bulb button... i'm giving myself heart palpitations out here

swapped to vassalage and hed rule, kept slavery. converted to gavagai's buddhism as we have 2 spreads of that and 1 of everything else, and gav seems the least likely to be thrust into contention if we spread it around. research to 100% on machinery, due in 2, at which time we probably will overflow a bunch of these longbow builds into crossbow builds

domestic addendum:



guess who's third-best commerce city is about to finally have both library and market (it's ours after a double whip + swap FP cottage to daieisho) :D this and moai are the only non-unit builds in zululand as of now. moai is very close to completion as well and will wrap up at some point during the GA, at which time wakamotoharu can start growing onto moai coast and will be free from food-limitation-hell. and then it will start endlessly cranking units, of course

[aetryn]

You can never really predict who will get most of the spoils in a 2-on-1 - it always involves making assumptions about what the defender will do, which might not be founded. We've got 2 cities - it's okay for Nauf to take some too. We'd love to get their capital, but it might not be realistic. That's okay too.

I expect Nauf will be friendly for a while and is a decent candidate for long-term ally. We just helped him a ton by coming in on the other side and if he makes gains in this war, its gains we helped him make. Superdeath is on his other side and at some point I think his aggression plus Nauf's tendency to paranoia will end up with a war on that side. Ginger's in a very strong - perhaps dominant - position and Nauf isn't going to want to weaken us when we're next to Ginger. Let's be honorable and non-threatening to Nauf and I think we have no trouble with him unless it's the point of them attacking us or us outright winning the game.

Ginger heading to Taj already is very ominous. I'm not saying we abandon the GT war - at this point he's probably been hurt enough that we can't leave him alive because he can't be trusted not to take revenge on us at the worst possible time - but we need to be prepared to help contain Ginger. We MAY not have an opportunity if he strikes at Dreylin first while we're busy, but we need to be thinking about that gamestate eventually.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Ginger and Dreylin both signalling peace makes sense to me. Ginger is racing ahead in research and has no need to fight a war now, while Dreylin is, well, his neighbor and needs to prioritize containment. Ginger will want peace from you as long as he can get it, I expect, while Dreylin will be hoping you wrap things up with GT as rapidly as possible so you can join him in a leaguer against the Ottomans. That's how I read it, anyway.

Agree with aetryn that this probably means Nauf is going to be friendly, especially since Superdeath is at peace and you know he gets restless quickly whenever that happens, so Nauf has to be looking over his shoulder. All in all he makes a natural ally. Gav/MJMD are wild cards and I don't know how they fit into the geopolitics just now. Maybe get into a slapfight with each other.