[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

conveying it to ginger i would do by either just walking them up to a border city during a cow/cow, or (more likely) having them follow the scout in the takayasu/kirishima area that ginger has been using to keep tabs on our border deployments for the last while. as long as ginger actually looks at that unit every turn, which i'm sure they do, i think it's pretty unlikely that they'd fail to get the message

re wars of conquest, i suppose that's true. if ginger attacks it would certainly be to conquer, and i think our territory is simply too large and too geographically spread-out for a blitz to make that much of a difference. maybe it makes a difference in how quickly kirishima falls, which is pretty relevant to OUR win probability in that situation, but i don't think it's that relevant to THEIRS which is what matters in terms of deterrence..... not to mention the serfdom commerce would of course up the timetable on when we can start spamming muskets in the border cities instead of longbows....

ok, i'm leaning towards a serfdom swap at the end of this GA then, coupled with civil service as our next research and then guilds-gunpowder afterward. i do wonder if we should attempt a brief diversion for poly/monotheism to get orgrel as well, so missionaries will pay back their cost over 160 hammers of infra development and help us spread around a religion to eventually get to theocracy in the second GA.... not sure that's impactful enough to be worth the extra civic upkeep cost and few hundred beaker cost of the techs though

another observation: now that we're going for civil service, it's getting close to time to fill in those last few plainsy filler spots we've been delaying, plus one more windmilly spot i have identified in the north kinbozan area (we can turn 2 of kinbozan's floodplain farms into 6 worked plains hill river windmills, seems worth doing). all told we need about 4-5 settlers in the nearish future if we want to do that. not sure if THAT is sufficiently growthy to justify coming off troops during a war or whipping during a GA though....

[aetryn]

conveying it to ginger i would do by either just walking them up to a border city during a cow/cow, or (more likely) having them follow the scout in the takayasu/kirishima area that ginger has been using to keep tabs on our border deployments for the last while. as long as ginger actually looks at that unit every turn, which i'm sure they do, i think it's pretty unlikely that they'd fail to get the message

re wars of conquest, i suppose that's true. if ginger attacks it would certainly be to conquer, and i think our territory is simply too large and too geographically spread-out for a blitz to make that much of a difference. maybe it makes a difference in how quickly kirishima falls, which is pretty relevant to OUR win probability in that situation, but i don't think it's that relevant to THEIRS which is what matters in terms of deterrence..... not to mention the serfdom commerce would of course up the timetable on when we can start spamming muskets in the border cities instead of longbows....

ok, i'm leaning towards a serfdom swap at the end of this GA then, coupled with civil service as our next research and then guilds-gunpowder afterward. i do wonder if we should attempt a brief diversion for poly/monotheism to get orgrel as well, so missionaries will pay back their cost over 160 hammers of infra development and help us spread around a religion to eventually get to theocracy in the second GA.... not sure that's impactful enough to be worth the extra civic upkeep cost and few hundred beaker cost of the techs though

another observation: now that we're going for civil service, it's getting close to time to fill in those last few plainsy filler spots we've been delaying, plus one more windmilly spot i have identified in the north kinbozan area (we can turn 2 of kinbozan's floodplain farms into 6 worked plains hill river windmills, seems worth doing). all told we need about 4-5 settlers in the nearish future if we want to do that. not sure if THAT is sufficiently growthy to justify coming off troops during a war or whipping during a GA though....

I think it's fine to have a couple cities build settlers even in a war as long as we're producing enough troops also. If nothing else, we might need a combat settler or two to raze some GT cities and replace them with our own (for cultural reasons, generally). I'd try to produce them before the GA if at all possible, but if not, eh, you have to do what you have to do for settlers.

[ljubljana]

oh hey there is a turn

one giant success on the GT front this interturn:



they used their combat workers to road up to and kill our sentry horse... so they are NOT in position to do likewise at lalibela, nor will they be next turn. and they have committed a stack to matara's defense which is substantial, but not so substantial that we can't crack it with full cat support. feeling much better about our chances to hold here now.

they also did not attack our little 4-unit stack SE of matara, so i think i can save it by cutting the road with the horse archer and moving back SE - awesome!

there is also one annoyance



they are going to pillage our new fishing boat at adulis with their pair of triremes.... i did expect this would be forthcoming but didn't think it was worth diverting hundreds of production into otherwise-worthless triremes to try, and most likely fail, to prevent it. but if they push onward to wakatakakage's fish it'll be a closer call... is 100 hammers of trireme worth preserving a 30-hammer work boat and also a crapton of food from not working the fish until GT is eliminated? i guess at this stage in the war it probably is.... i will START one in wakatakakage but i really hope they will be content with the one clam and won't go looking for more

with a native source of fur, we can now cancel this deal with ginger dating back to the ancient era



should we though? i feel like probably, forcing them to build extra military police without AGG is surely worth SOMEthing and i imagine it will be hard for them to find another ivory source while in runaway favorite status. but maybe it falls into the "small injury" category and we shouldn't do it to avoid pissing them off. i lean towards cancelling but will leave the floor open for yall to comment in case you believe that would be a diplomatic blunder



i did divert some EP from GT last turn to regain graphs on greenline and keep research vis on ginger.... greenline's soldiers are, yup, still worst in the known world by a solid margin (we have 1.7x theirs). and um... weirdly, despite ginger and i having invested exactly the same EP into each other, we have research vis on them and they DON'T have it on us?? what is going on here.... is the cost to reach these benchmarks a function of something OTHER than just the raw total EP both sides have invested in each other?

anyways, of all the times to run a spy specialist, i have to say that right now when we are pushing for city vis on GT is certainly not a bad time. we need 260 points and while that cost will certainly increase, i think we are still on our way to getting their before the end of the war even with them spending on us with equal dedication. maybe EP is garbage as a currency but that one guy represents a fully 25% increase in our civ's total output of it....

tech tree sitch now that we have machinery, so we can see just how far behind we are



ok, so it really looks like it is specifically ginger who is lapping the field, and not us falling behind, at least relative to the other second-tier research powers that i presume to be dreylin/nauf/superdeath/greenline. we were second to feudalism but sixth to machinery and monarchy and i imagine those + ginger are likely the other folks who have been beating us (swapping someone for GT in the machinery case). we also know ginger is NOT the second person with engineering since we saw them hit construction right before they started nationalism.... i would guess it is not nauf either or we would expect to see at least one or two pikes in their stack (i guess? although GT has shown zero mounted units this whole war). no castles in the greenline or drey border cities that i can see either though that's significantly less determinative....



ministack saved. there's a chance that i try to make an eventual attack at matara happen from this SE direction, at least for the 1-movers and cats, as the northern route is really exposed due to that line of plains tiles and the fact that we will be heavily reliant on specifically longbows to cover us against counterattackers. but shifting our cats all the way to the south sounds like a nightmare...

i also finally realized why we shouldn't whip walls at lalibela.... because in the golden age working grass windmill + plains hill mine it can just hand-build them in 2 turns lmao. adulis is in the same position and i think would rather just spend 5 turns hard-building the granary than whip half its pop now that it is about to no longer have a food source

[aetryn]

Espionage effects are a function of the points both sides invested in each other and also the total points each side has generated total (invested in whoever), but I couldn't give you the exact formula. However, here what this suggests is that we have generated more total Espionage points than Ginger, probably by getting Courthouses up faster or in more cities. In other words, because we have generated more espionage than Ginger, our research visibility to him is a lower threshold than his to us. This is what makes it tempting to sometimes run the Espionage slider in a key situation, not only to generate points against a person, but also inflating your total points generated by a big chunk, pushing their thresholds up. This is also one reason I like Sumeria's Ziggurat - it comes so early that you can usually get a huge lead in total generated Espionage that will give you an advantage for a while.

I think you're probably fine to cancel the fur deal because of redundancy. That's not really a small injury, that's a "this is no longer a worthwhile trade to one party" thing. If they have something else spare you'd like you could offer for it, to communicate that we're not averse to trading with them, we just don't need fur anymore.

Generally the strategy used on defense when you can't really make a stand is to trade space for time - to posture but cede the borders and fall back into your center while whipping everything to death. The idea is to collect a stack eventually as all the defenders come together that can eventually do something against the invaders. It looks like GT is not following this strategy - any defenders he has at Matara (a 1 pop city?) seem like they'd be much better allocated to other fronts, say the one that Nauf is advancing on. Those forces could simply be diversionary though to buy him a little more time by making that city seem hard to take.  Either way, looks good for us to hold Lalibela. It'd be nice if we could push on the capital soon but that doesn't look to be immediately possible.

[ljubljana]

yeah.... i've been thinking it over and i'm wondering if taking control of the water might be less of a distraction than i initially thought and might actually be how we can start making progress in this thing again. if we could drop off a few of our upcoming guerilla 2 longbows on the hills next to aksum, we will gain visibility into the city in such a way as will be really inefficient for GT to deny.... we can then start cutting the roads around it to deny their movements, and possibly apply some amphibious macemen (which we will be able to make at will once we have CS) at an opportune moment. similarly the hills S of lalibela and SE of matara are crying out for G2 longbows, which can even serve as cover for sentry horses in the former case... once we have permanent vision on the next line of GT cities, coupled with the ability to sacrifice 2-movers to cut strategically significant road junctions, maybe then we will be able to make progress against their cities again.... the defensive stack at matara, and i think the one we last saw in aksum as well, does die to our current forces, but we have to attack it when we KNOW that a major GT stack can't reach the city to reinforce in time (especially one containing the still-missing cats which could forebode a stack wipe).....

or maybe we will get city vis from espionage points sooner than i am expecting and won't need to rely on such tricks

[Tarkeel]

I think you're probably fine to cancel the fur deal because of redundancy. That's not really a small injury, that's a "this is no longer a worthwhile trade to one party" thing. If they have something else spare you'd like you could offer for it, to communicate that we're not averse to trading with them, we just don't need fur anymore.

In these situations I often like to cancel the trade and gift the resource, to make it clear that it's a gift. Not sure if you want to do that here though.

[williams482]

Wakatakakage's fish is completely safe; it's on an ocean tile (not coast) and is unreachable to anyone except you until caravels come into play.

[Tarkeel]

Wakatakakage's fish is completely safe; it's on an ocean tile (not coast) and is unreachable to anyone except you until caravels come into play.

Caravels can't even pillage, only block the tile from being worked.

[ljubljana]

Wakatakakage's fish is completely safe; it's on an ocean tile (not coast) and is unreachable to anyone except you until caravels come into play.

ohhhh. well. in that case we have to think even more about if i'm making triremes or not, as yesterday it seemed reasonable but this throws that into question.... i was all set up to whip some out of wakatakakage but i guess that's an overcommitment huh

Turn 140 - Zululand

lalibela defenses report



so in 4 turns since the city was captured, of the 25% chichen itza defenses, we've recovered.... 3%. so walls would triple that to 9%.... doesn't really feel like a worthwhile ROI at this point.... so you can see i'm thinking about doing something very silly here instead. if we want lalibela to contribute militarily, i suppose a boat is the way to go as we don't need an ikhanda for that. and if the triremes continue east in search of pillages, we would not need much of a grace period to drop a couple longbows next to aksum, check out their defenses, pillage the pigs, etc



let's see if we can't assess GT's willingness to attack longbow pillagers.... if they don't, we can move to the quarry and interfere with their ability to hit an attack coming for matara. if they do, we most likely get a great general and take out at least one of GT's units in exchange (1 for 1 trades obviously favoring us in an attrition scenario). as long we we're not ALSO risking weaker units' lives in the process i think this is ok... just wish i had thought to do so last turn



i am getting pretty worried about the pace of nauf's advance... they have a large stack 2N of Qohaito now and are consistently streaming in knights from the core. i am not sure i quite understand WHY they feel so confident advancing with a stack that could probably be wiped or at least seriously damaged by GT's catapults + the zulu-sized army they have within what is surely no more than a 2t march from this position. but perhaps nauf's approach relies on metagame knowledge that i don't have yet.... if so and if they manage to take Qohaito with this and move onto working Yeha and Gondor behind it, we could end up seriously behind the pace with respect to picking up GT spoils..... is there any way for us to pick up the pace here? maybe time a thrust at matara to coincide roughly with nauf's attack so they can hit only one or the other of us, and hope for the 50/50 that it is not our stack that gets annihilated?



idea number one, i guess, is the "take control of the seas" approach.... whip a few triremes and the galley in lalibela, drop some g2 longbows off next to aksum, and attempt to cut the roads linking it with the rest of ethiopia. we can add impis as well, and, at a critical moment, reach out from the aksum hills to cut the road on that corn farm to cut off the capital from gondar completely. i believe even an 11-unit aksum garrison should still die to our full stack without reinforcement or cat support, which we could hopefully then concentrate on it all at once for the decisive turns. but if GT realizes we're going for a plan like this, they can kill it by attacking our LB/impi pile in the hills, which is inefficient for them from an attritive standpoint but would set us really far back in terms of the execution of such an attack...



idea number two, on the assumption that with 5 longbows in lalibela now it is unlikely that GT will attempt a recapture, is to just go for it at matara, hoping that at least SOME of the defense stack there is shifting west now to cover the naufragar threat, and in particular that the bulk of GT's catapults have done so. this seems likely to work in present circumstances, but if we are wrong and GT shows up with cats and reinforcements when we are one turn outside matara i think not only have we wasted a ton of time but also there's a good chance our stack just dies?? that doesn't exactly seem right either

[williams482]

Does Nauf have vision on your stacks? I wonder if they are basically just gambling that GT's stack moving away means they have better things to do with it (such as defending their capital), and trying to take advantage while they can. In which case the move for you would be to play this very conservatively, let GT and Nauf fight undisturbed, and sweep in once you see the power graph shark fins.

I am intrigued by the idea of whipping a galley to drop off a brace of Guerrilla II longbows next to Aksum. That gets you vision on a useful spot, and a lot more information about the situation RE that doomstack. Unfortunately just getting the units there is four turns out:
- t140 start galley
- t141 galley 10/50, keep building
- t142 galley 20/50, whip
- t143 load longbows on galley and STAY IN THE CITY, because UNLIKE CIV III, on loading the units will have no movement left and cannot subsequently unload
- t144 galley sallies forth und unloads longbows.

... which feels like a substantial delay on doing something. It's yet more delay to bring the galley back, load at least one impi on there, swing back to drop that off, and then move into position to cut the road. Or you start with a longbow + impi, which is more likely to get swatted right off the bat.

If you do want to try the galley drop off plan, you presumably want to move the full stack out of Liabella on the same turn you drop off the longbows, so you are as well positioned as possible to take advantage o any new information you might learn. There's even a case for doing that a turn earlier; GT can't hit the stack with collateral out of the fog until it reaches the grasslands tiles 1W+1W or 1W+1NW of Liabella. I think the aggression level there mostly depends on what your scout and the power graphs have to say about the situation on GTs western front.