[SPOILERS] naufragar and Rusten get nickel-and-dimed

[naufragar]

Back in PB38, I lost the Great Lighthouse wonder race to Plako by a turn. My response was (language warning, I’m quoting a foul-mouthed individual) "Motherfucker, fuck you, Plako!" At the bottom of that post, I wrote that I, of course, didn’t bear Plako any real ill-will. I was ranting for effect. I worry that I’ve worried people. I love Superdeath, Cairo, Boak, GeneralKilCavalry, all of ‘em. Glad to play Civ with them. There will be low points. I will get grumpy. I will express that grumpiness vividly. Sometimes, as someone has pointed out to me , I will exaggerate how bad my luck has been in my pity party. It’s all in the game. I do think my opponents have made occasional mistakes. I hope I’ve been transparent about my own mistakes. Still, I hope the lurkers (and players who eventually read this) know to take my emotional venting in the spirit in which it’s written.

On to the report:
Superdeath hasn’t yet killed the rest of our samurai. He retreated his horse archers out of view. This blew my mind. At least twice this game, he's taken very low odds kamikaze attacks. The payoff for killing our samurai would be huge, so I thought he'd swing. We're not safe yet. Our samurai are still badly, badly wounded and he might have just pulled his horses back so I couldn't hit them from the fog. If he doesn't attack this turn, I think we'll be able to heal up.

Here's the sugar area.


This spot must be the only spot still valid for barb spawns, so here's another. Very good thing that wasn't an axe. PBSpy says I spent a long time in the turn. 90% of that time was staring at the screen trying to figure out what to do with the settler. Settling for ivory this early would have been painful. It would have zero good tiles to work for a very long time. I really, really wanted to convince myself that I could move up and plant 1E of the sugar as soon as possible and be able to hold off Superdeath's horse archers. I could chop a forest for a spear and get that spear in 3 turns, I told myself. If the samurai that had killed the barb axe had been healthy, maybe I would have. Right now, I parked the settler next to Scylla's. I plan to move to the jungled hill with both spears to get vision on Superdeath. I'll heal up the samurai. If it looks safe-ish, I'll settle the city (1E of sugar. My sign is deceptive). At the start of this war, I said a few variations of "even a handful of samurai in someone's borders by turn 90 kills them." I wasn't that fast and Superdeath put paid to that notion, so my strategy has shifted. It is now "9 cities beats 3 cities." I will plant for sugar. I will build a settler for ivory.

I'm poking around with a trireme for seafood to pillage.


No luck yet. The strategy is to ignore these island cities. We've got a galley with two samurai on its way down, but we need to stay laser focused on the mainland right now.

Here's an overview:


More reinforcements coming down. We need to think long and hard about when we'll feel safe stepping onto flatland on our road to SD's copper city. The spears in the north and the trireme in the south should provide us with the necessary intel.

Miscellaneous stuff: I think boak/GKC started putting EP into us, so I've shifted EP focus to them. At this point, I don't think we care about tech visibility on Superdeath. (I hope...)

Capital settler should probably be a 3-pop whip. Finish samurai and grow to 6 --> settler.

Was this for the speed? With the overflow from the samurai, it's faster to dump overflow into settler, switch to another build and grow to size 4, two-pop whip. If you're thinking about cottage turns or something, we can grow to size 6.

I love Civ4. Truly.





Edit: I forgot something important! GeneralKilCavalry declared war on Magic Science! This means every player in the game will be respecting a turn split.

[Rusten]

I'm glad most of it is for effect, but my offer for you to silently retreat into the shadows still stands for the future. This game has been BS ever since the Borsche elimination.
I'm not sure MS being in a turnsplit matters. I've looked at PBspy most of the game and he's played last and then refused to play a follow up turn almost the entire game. There's no way all of those times were settler races. Brace yourself for 1T a day until the game ends, even with so few players.

3-pop settler suggestion was just for happy cap management. From memory the city has so much food that there's no reason to whip for less. It's one of those extremely rare cities with a real food resource.   I did not value completing it ASAP, but you might. Where's the overflow coming from? Did you whip the samurai for 1?

Settling sugar it is. Balls to the wall. I'm a little worried about him sending all his HAs over there and then heading even further if successful, but I'll leave the movement planning to you. All of those HAs got C1 or 2 + shock now, so even 2 spears can't reliably hold. Might want to reconsider settling on the hill, although I like it a lot less as a city and for our dotmap.

The good news is that if we hold the former Korean capital without losing our samurai we're in no real rush to move forward. We've got 2 very productive cities that are not hampered by Korean culture (yet anyway). We can build a nice stack of samurai+trebs before moving it without feeling bad about it.

edit: Looking at PBspy it appears SD did retake the city.

[Rusten]

And on a more meta level, I hope people realize that gifting someone important resources is not an innocent act. Still the right play in many situations I'm sure, but it shouldn't surprise you if people make you an enemy when you do so. It burned Commodore in PB44 (gifted copper to RegentMan) and who knows, it might burn Boak/GKC here.

I can assure you that if you gift something important to an enemy of mine, without even getting anything in return, I will take notice. Help them at your own risk.

[naufragar]

3-pop settler suggestion was just for happy cap management. From memory the city has so much food that there's no reason to whip for less. It's one of those extremely rare cities with a real food resource.   I did not value completing it ASAP, but you might. Where's the overflow coming from? Did you whip the samurai for 1?

I hope I didn't. I think it was a 2-pop whip but can't remember.

Settling sugar it is. Balls to the wall. I'm a little worried about him sending all his HAs over there and then heading even further if successful, but I'll leave the movement planning to you. All of those HAs got C1 or 2 + shock now, so even 2 spears can't reliably hold. Might want to reconsider settling on the hill, although I like it a lot less as a city and for our dotmap.

I might slow down on the sugar city. I planned to settle it when I thought that Superdeath was pulling his horse archers away from his old capital. He had five wounded horse archers. Some very badly wounded. I'll know more when I see the combat log. Depending on how many we killed when SD retook the cap, we might still be able to go for sugar. I'm very worried about how he retook. We had 6 units, including two healthy axes (and our Medic Scout). My current theory is that I miscalculated the experience he needed to promote because he settled his first great general. Even then, he would have had to bring up an additional horse archer. The absolute worst case is that he brought up a whole bunch more horse archers (although surely the maximum possible is 3, right?). Because then he could press on to threaten Draft Dodger or try to sneak into our core. We'll know more when the turn rolls, I guess.

And on a more meta level, I hope people realize that gifting someone important resources is not an innocent act.

I don't think B/GKC intend it to be innocent. One of their gifts to Superdeath is a symbolic iron. We're a threat to settling their continent plus the more dissension on the Big the better. We're in a state of cold war.

[naufragar]

Superdeath retook his capital with seven horse archers and lost none in the process. The capital's culture did some stuff I wasn't expecting:


It grew to 4th ring last turn. It never came out of revolt for us, so we must have taken it the turn before its borders were going to pop. We had been lucky.   Because the cap popped its borders we lost the sheep at Draft Dodger, so I couldn't whip the spear this turn. I also couldn't reinforce with our 2 samurai + treb. I don't feel like posting the combat log. Superdeath won a 51.5, won a 64.3, withdrew at 71.6 and then the rest of the battles were in the high 90s. The odds of us not killing a horse in those first three battles (i.e. killing as opposed to forcing a withdrawal) were 34%. You can do the math yourself or trust mine. 1-in-3s happen often enough that my mind is telling my heart to take it in stride. (Thanks for the advice, AT. )

My annoyance with GeneralKilCavalry is costing me.


I moved the galley two tiles back while I toyed with screwing with the Vikings. I'm being punished for bad play. So be it. I've had our samurai cut a road on Superdeath's elephant. By the way, this kills our settling plans. He has cultural control over the ivory, so no point to settling that, and we can't pink dot him with 2 spears while he has 7 horse archers.

Here's an overview of the south.


Our trireme found crab, so I can be a bit spiteful. The other thing is that I think I've miscounted Superdeath's cities on the mainland. I really thought I'd be facing 6 horse archers. He must have enough city and this is why my force estimates have been so routinely wrong. We dropped to 3rd in power.

Edit: I should add that war weariness is starting to hurt. We weren't able to whip Gaon this turn because we gained an unhappy face so we didn't grow.

[naufragar]

Edit: I should add that war weariness is starting to hurt. We weren't able to whip Gaon this turn because we gained an unhappy face so we didn't grow.

Does anyone know if Civ tells you your own war weariness score? I know I can see the war weariness of others in the foreign advisor. I ask because we're getting +1 unhappy at every city above size 3 and I want to see how Superdeath's doing. (Did I mention his three free luxuries, recently?)

[Rusten]

I thought you only saw your own war weariness.
SD should be near 0 and not affected. You don't get any war weariness when fighting in your own culture.

[naufragar]

I thought you only saw your own war weariness.

Hmm. I'll have to check when I'm in game next because I'm pretty sure I can see war weariness between Magic Science and Cairo and that can't be ours. I'll look around.

But you're right about this:

SD should be near 0 and not affected. You don't get any war weariness when fighting in your own culture.

[naufragar]

The turn after I posted my diagram with how I could get a galley past B/GKC's scout, they stopped fortifying it and started patrolling with it. They also added a trireme sentry.


Guess they intuited the danger. Oh well. In the words of the AI, we have enough on our hands right now. I offered a silks for gems trade to them, since we've built another gem mine. I don't know if they'll accept it (given the, you know, cold war), but it's a net positive for both of us.

The men are readying for a dash out of the trenches into no-man's land.


I've reinforced so that there are 7 samurai and one treb on the tiles you see. I don't know how many horse archers Superdeath has. Pessimistic absolute worst case is 11, although that would be truly the worst case. 11 would be bad, but there isn't much to do. We have to cross flatland. The goal is to reinforce Draft Dodger. (Which, by the way, has a 5% revolt chance. I'm recording that here so I can fume later.   ) We have a choice to make if Superdeath takes Draft Dodger next turn. It will presumably grab all its culture back out to third ring. This would mean the samurai couldn't link up. I'd have to see how many horses there were and decide if I march on the city (again) with divided stacks. He will have had three turns to heal up (112-114) so his stack should be fully healed once we step out.

[thestick]

What are the current defenses in Draft Dodger, and what will it be if the 3N1W and 2N2E stacks link up?