[SPOILERS] swans will bite u

[williams482]

Well shit, here they come.

The thing to remember here is that while we need to survive to have a chance, we also need to outpace Thrawn/Krill economically to stay in this. If Thrawn is warded off from capturing (and keeping) any subsequent cities, and finds very few pillage opportunities, then he will eventually stall out, lose the race to Cartography, and be overpowered. Those are big ifs, but almost as bad is that the one civ that can get away with a farmer's gambit plan right now is Sumeria. Given the rapid settler builds and literally 9 milpower, that's clearly exactly what they've been doing and I expect it to continue. Proceeds of which might get funneled into a war cart swarm, or rapid research towards cartography/square rigging with Norway drifting in their wake.

Here's the case for optimism, though: obviously, OBVIOUSLY, Norway does not have the capacity to construct a navy which can defeat what six other civs combined can put in the water. Those 11 longships (with more every turn) are a terror for any civ they bump into, but spread out they are manageable and concentrated against one opponent they create vulnerabilities the non-targeted teams can exploit, or permit opportunities to destroy them in a massive pitched battle. As long as it is possible to get to all the other civs along coast, a loose, informal coalition will probably win out against the Norwegian fleet.

If there isn't easy coastal access to the other civ's islands, we're dead. 100% dead, no point in continuing. If Thrawn can mass all his ships against one opponent without endangering his core he will, and he'll defeat each team in detail until the last ones give up. Without so many profitable shipbuilding centers under his control trying to 2v1 a full team might have been a tough ask, but surely-soon-to-be six city Norway probably can pull it off.

Strategically, we want to plan to be extremely aggressive. If Thrawn declares war on another team and isn't showing a lot of strength around us, we want to move aggressively against his core with our fleets. If we're lucky and Thrawn is overconfident then we may be able to capture/burn his city states and cut off reinforcements to whoever got attacked; if Thrawn plays things safer and takes significant defensive action then the threat to his target will likely be greatly reduced. In any case delay favors us, provided we can get something resembling normal infrastructure down to allow our team combined to out-tech Sumeria.

If Thrawn is as unhappy about probably taking on a global coalition as he indicated in his thread, he's done exactly what he needed to do to maximize the chances of that happening. If he had four or five longships and a campus, even with the same number of city captures, I don't think my instinctive response here is anywhere near as extreme.

[ljubljana]

yup yup yup, hard agree with this sentiment, thanks so much for taking the time to write out such a detailed analysis <33

unfortunately i do not think it will be enough just to survive but leave thrawn on 8 cities or however many they have when the dust settles.... their next move from that position would likely be to drop harbors everywhere, free inquiry, crush all comers in the race to cartography, and finish us off with a military alliance which they are also on pace to be first to by a mile. no, they MUST be thrown back onto their home islands at least, if we can't do that i don't think victory is possible. so all builds have to go to either settlers (slash monumentality) and optimizing fleet strength on the decisive turns. and to be honest even the settlers leave me feeling uneasy....

one thing we DO know is all the civs must be reachable by coast - thrawn got shipbuilding only this turn, they had to have reached both us and CMF/inc coastally.

however, i think the question of if thrawn can outfight the other teams combined is an open one, sadly. woden/banzai may be too far away to help effectively, and thrawn has 5 cities (with a 6th certainly on its way in their last home CS), TAD and CMF lack combat bonuses, and thrawn is already as big as me and inc combined, plus they have production bonuses and tactical flexibility on their side to create lopsided engagements.

it really depends on how many more CS they capture in the next 10 turns. if the answer is 0, the rest of the world miiight be able to outproduce them and outfight them. if it's 4, they will crest 1000 milpower in 15 turns and it's gg. we have to, have to, have to at least force them to raze moga and hong kong, and chev must do the same, as i think a 10-city thrawn on turn 50 actually does outproduce the entire rest of the world in terms of effective naval striking power and wins in a rout.

but of course we can only win if preventing that scenario is possible, so let's pretend it is, yeah?

[ljubljana]

Turn 44 - Portugal + Japan

Well, at least my "guess thrawn's moves" sensors have been working pretty well this game. For all the good that does me, having been unable to come up with actual counterplay to said moves



Somewhere out there in the wide world, thrawn murdered Nan Madol this turn, taking them to the prophesized 6 cities. And they attacked Mogadishu for 57 damage, which I assume will be 37 after healing. So we have roughly 4 turns to see if we can do something here. Wow, it is really unfortunate that of all our neighboring city-states, this is the only one to not finish an early galley... We can also see that they have added 2 more longships this turn for a total of 13, and are well on their way to the "more milpower than everyone else combined" threshold, if they are not there already.

Can we try to do anything to stop the Mogadishu attack? Well...we "can" in the sense that we can have ships down there before they take the city, but I am not sure there is a way for us to actually stop them. Our lead galley will die in 2 hits to the longships in the fog if we move it 3SW next turn, which is what we would have to do to attack them in 2t... Perhaps if we wait a turn and then move all four ships up at once, we can grind them down, but with just one tile of access to their attack I don't really think it's feasible, and even in the best case TAD will take losses without inflicting any on Norway just to force them back to the ocean to heal for a few turns.

SHOULD we try to do anything? I don't know - I noticed this turn that thrawn and krill have contact with Hong Kong, which was NOT true on turn 40, so they must have scouts in the area and we can probably expect an attack there very soon as well. So it is too late to prevent them from reaching the ocean tiles NW of HK...and, um, I wish I had realized this when I was playing the turn, but that means MoM is in danger as well and we probably have to pull back anyways. As I'm writing this, I have suddenly been seized by a horrible feeling that my forward deploy this turn has lost us the game - if 3 longships appear at MoM this turn we cannot hold the city. We just have too many points of vulnerability here - I think we may have no choice but to concede Mogadishu, hope they raze it, and pull back to defend TAD's cities, with Hong Kong as a stretch goal. At least HK's galley, which did not move out of the city, should complicate a Norwegian conquest as well, and if we can survive long enough to bring my ships into play and get a Crusade missionary out, things should start looking better.



In Japan, I hook up the gems to finally fix our amenities problem and shave a turn off Teru's galley build as promised. And apparently my weird move with TAD's injured galley, which I spent so much time freaking out about after last turn, seems to actually have been correct, as we needed that ship at home this turn to defend the trader, and I imagine we will need it here next turn as well to start repositioning for a defense of MoM.

The singular bright spot from this turn:



Vatican City does not spawn a galley and my own ships roll VERY well to take it into the red. Norway actually apparently has contact here, too, even (!), though krill inexplicably does not, so I'm not sure what the deal is with that. Hopefully thrawn just met their scouting galley and does not have longships in place to contest this, which they have exactly one turn to pull off. The galleys in the east and west scouted one tile NE and W, respectively, this turn (the latter via teleport-move when I declared), so VC's own galley is too far out of position to interfere, and if thrawn has ships in position to do so, they would have to be exactly 4 tiles away and deliberately waiting just out of sight in order to pounce. They totally could be doing that, but they will need more than just one longship in position to save VC, so hopefully even they can't reach THAT far this quickly. Concerningly, though, the contact suggests that we will need to leave ships on defense even this far in the backlines, which would stretch us even thinner than we already are...

Foreign policy: I just noticed that Krill has weirdly high faith for Sumeria, and made 4 more last turn. Where is that coming from, and why did they invest in it? It's not a holy site as their empire score has never shown the 2-point jump that would indicate completing one, and while I haven't checked the GPP screen in a few turns (oops), only Chev had points on t41 or so when I last did.

One little mistake that I do think thrawn has made so far in this game: why is krill not contributing to this war effort? Clearly they know they are all-in against a global coalition at this point, and while Krill's galleys and warcarts would probably not be decisive, they certainly could help out. Even with no production bonuses, TAD has contributed 138 milpower in galleys to our cause, and I'm not sure what builds their team considers more important than doing the same... I do not think this farmer's gambit is the right play - right now their team is basically committed to either forcing concessions in the next 20 turns or being conquered, and long-term considerations like krill's economic strength probably will not change the outcome. Otherwise, their play has been perfect - with respect to Norway itself there is nothing I think should have been done differently, and the fact that even extremely minor economic builds from their opponents have led to what looks like an utter rout in their favor strongly suggests that either Norway should be banned on water maps or we need to drastically tone down CS profitability and accessibility in future games...

I will post screenshots and update the spreadsheet, but I'm definitely holding the next turn until TAD gets back, we need their expertise badly here, and I don't feel comfortable committing to either an all-out defense of MoM and Hong Kong or a long-shot attempt to interfere at Mogadishu on their behalf. My last few moves have left us badly out of position on the Portuguese front, I think, and I do not want to be the reason TAD loses this game...

[williams482]

The city states contact list is bugged and completely useless; it lists the civs that you have met, irrespective of who the city state met. Dumb as fuck and been like that since release.

Nan Madol was in this game? What the heck?

Mogadishu is dead, dead, dead. There's no reasonable possibility of defending it or recapturing it, and that assumes Thrawn will actually keep it instead of just burning it (loyalty will probably be fine to start out, but will not be long term. If there is a long term).

And this is an unhelpful sentiment, especially for a lurker whose job is in part to offer slightly more objective, distant advice, but:

I'm kinda pissed off about how this is going. Thrawn wanted to play a game like PBEM20, everyone else involved felt the same and instructed the mapmaker to build something similar, which as far as we can tell more or less happened. Thrawn picked a civ combo that has a frankly brilliant synergy, clearly with the intention of pursuing a plan which would either A) end the game far before any of the interesting stuff from a PBEM20-like game could happen, or B) preemptively terminate Thrawn's game via a three team dogpile, again preventing him from being involved in most of the interesting stuff from a PBEM20-like game. And he had the gall to complain in the tech thread because he anticipated that the map might be less favorable to this obviously game-shortening strategy than he anticipated? What the hell! If this really is the end of civ 6 PBEMs, then it's a major letdown of an ending and was always going to be.

I don't know if Thrawn was considering that factor or merely the probable dogpile and his fears about the map when he asked to change civs.

Thrawn, when you read this, I get that you're competitive, and I get that you always want to do what you think is the win-maxing thing at any point during the game. Most of us are trying to do that, although without your rather extraordinary technical efficiency. But you had to know that this strategy with this civ combo and your reputation was never going to produce a PBEM20-like game with your civ still present to play a major role, and if that was your objective you didn't prioritize it very well, especially with the map lobbying from earlier. If your fears about city states had been realized we would have been quite a bit more likely to actually get PBEM20 2.0, and you would still have been a preemptive favorite.

Anyway. Protect your ships and cities as best you can, keep building more, and don't panic. Not because it's unjustified, merely because it's neither fun nor helpful.

[ljubljana]

Well, I suppose what I can say in my qualified defense is this: if the right move here is to concede Mogadishu and Hong Kong and pull back to defend MoM, and Chevalier is in a similar position on their side of the world, that would give thrawn 10 cities, as many as our two teams combined, and a position from which there is no question that they can outproduce both of us combined and just roll us over. So maybe the truth is that if thrawn already has longships in position at MoM, our game is over already full stop, and the only move that retains a chance to win is to assume we have until this next round of galley builds to get a defense in place there and desperately attempt to stop at least the Hong Kong conquest...

[ljubljana]

The city states contact list is bugged and completely useless; it lists the civs that you have met, irrespective of who the city state met. Dumb as fuck and been like that since release.

will respond to the rest in a minute, but oh my god, are you serious? PLEASE tell me you're serious, that makes me feel SO much better about all this. If there is still a chance to defend MoM and defend (and someday take) Hong Kong our game may indeed not be over already...

[ljubljana]

Nan Madol was unbanned for this game because they are one of the (very few) changes in the Realms Beyond the Storm mod, which altered them to give only one culture per district. In all honesty, I think even in their original form they might have been okay in the context of this game, as it looks like optimal play on this map produces a game dynamic that moves so fast that keeping any city-state around instead of adding it to your snowball ASAP is a losing move.

Mogadishu, I agree, is almost certainly indefensible unless they spawn a galley next turn. If they do spawn that galley, though, perhaps we will not regret being in a position to interfere, although I am still skeptical that we could change the outcome. Longships may be unkillable once they have ocean access, but they do take quite a bit of time to heal up after an engagement, and it could be the case that even sacrificing two of TAD's ships while getting no kills would be worth it if it delays the conquest long enough for Japanese ships and a Crusade missionary to show up. I don't know, I will leave that to TAD to decide, I think...

With respect to what thrawn does with the city, I would be surprised if they razed instead of capturing. If the game ever reaches a position where we are a threat to retake it, it's probably over for their team anyways - I'd guess that it's better to add another strong city to their snowball.

With respect to the ethics of thrawn's play... I personally am not really salty about the way things have played out, despite the admittedly sodium-enriched tone of some of the posts upthread  We saw this attack coming literally before the game even started, so comprehensively that we even did sims of it as Norway with what appears to have been thrawn's exact build order and saw that it would be strong, and other than my dubious involvement in a religious race with Chevalier, I think our entire gameplan so far has been narrowly and correctly focused on countering it. If, after seeing the game dynamics in advance and receiving every indication from C&D that our assumptions were correct, we still lose because I misplayed by building two holy sites, 1.5 shrines, and two district projects (as now seems likely) I will consider myself fairly bested. And I'm actually genuinely really appreciative that thrawn is following their notions of optimal play instead of sandbagging, as I think my own sense of good play is best developed by getting my butt kicked by others who are playing the best game they can come up with. And, um, by that metric, I'm definitely learning a LOT from this game

Moreover, I am not above admitting that, since I am confident thrawn is not sandbagging, the fact that I think I do see some mistakes in their team's play seems that much more meaningful. Norway has committed none of these, but as this game goes on, I am becoming increasingly convinced that the Sumeria pick is win-more-y and was not correct for this map and gameplan (if it is indeed true that their bonus CS and pillage-sharing does not turn on until Civil Service, as our tests suggest). The individual pick with the highest win percentage for this setup seems to clearly have been Norway, and a Norway played exactly as thrawn is playing them...but taking that pick and playing it correctly meant the game would be decided for their team in the t40-t60 range, way before Civil Service. Sumeria is blank until this time other than the Ziggurat (probably not worth working this early) and the War-Cart (expensive and hard to mass early due to civic requirements). The best pick would probably have been a civ that can contribute to Norway's attack by rushing Shipbuilding as well and adding early military of their own, either galleys (though they could safely assume no such civ was ever going to drop to pick 8) or embarked land military - anything else is too slow-burning to meaningfully impact their odds IMO. Sumeria might be this pick if they had rushed Shipbuilding and built war carts, but they haven't done that - other contenders are Nubia, Cree (Okis require no diversion from Shipbuilding, are super fast, and have 150 effective HP from the free promotion), and especially the Aztecs who actually do have a combat bonus on galleys, albeit one that takes some time to fully turn on.

I also don't believe for a second that this will actually be the last Civ6 PBEM, for what that's worth. I don't think someone like TAD, for instance, will be so upset about this experience that they will sour on the whole concept of Civ6 MP, and it seems clear to me that we still have a long way to go before the meta becomes solved and the game stale. Personally, for all my prevaricating in the tech thread, I'm pretty sure the only thing that could get me to stay away long-term is Civ7's release

I am pretty concerned that there will be lot of anti-thrawn sentiment expressed in the other threads, following the lines you've laid out here - while I definitely respect and sympathize with those sentiments, I personally don't share them and desperately hope thrawn sticks around, especially since it looks like I will end this game still looking for my first competitive effort against them. Even the map drama doesn't really bother me tbh - I think the map we got is pretty much what I expected pre-game, and even if they had derived some small amount of advantage from it, I'm not-so-secretly probably masochistic enough that I wouldn't mind the challenge

[ljubljana]

Anyways, since it now seems like the game will be decided by galley spam without end, here is the least resource-intensive build order I can think of that guarantees Monumentality and Victor 3 while pumping as many ships as possible:

Hakuho: settler, builder to chop a galley via the forest 1W of the city, +3 campus on top of the resulting hill, galleys
Terunofuji: galleys, with finishing the shrine a possible exception sometime in the future
Asanoyama: galley, GP (possibly buying the plains hill to accelerate these), galleys
Vatican City: monument repair for PP, galleys
New city from Hakuho's settler: +3 holy site (chopped with the builder if necessary), galleys

builder plan: chop galley in Hakuho, hook up cotton, probably chop holy site in new city

Monumentality plan: first a builder to fix Hakuho's tiles to hit 17 hpt for 2t galleys, then another builder to fix Vatican City's tiles for 3t galleys, then settlers

how does this sound? notably it forfeits quite a lot of campus adjacency at the capital so we don't have to buy a third-ring tile (and can buy TAD's trader or Asa's plains hill instead). it's not very long-term optimized but i'm pretty sure that's not a thing we get to do right now

[ljubljana]

wanna hear something awful? if thrawn gets hong kong, and probably even if they don't, we will have literally zero prospect of ever advancing into their core until cartography, no matter how many galleys we build. i don't mean "probably zero" i mean "literally, exactly 0.0" - the reason is because of the way galley warfare works. look at this picture:



with just 5 longships and a trickle of reinforcements, thrawn can seal off all access to the northeast permanently. one NE of mogadishu and one SW of Hong Kong are literally unbreakable with one galley attack per turn and a backup longship in the city, as they will always outheal the damage we can do with our one attack, akkad-style. then there is a one-tile choke and a two tile choke that, if occupied and backed up by a few more longships for support and to rotate in to replace damaged ones, will also be unbreakable with galleys. thrawn has enough ships to accomplish this right now if they were to teleport to their blocking positions this turn.

so both mogadishu and hong kong are lost until cartography if thrawn gets there first. and we should temper our expectations about attacking their core as this will become literally impossible as soon as thrawn has longships at the choke. and the same is true on chev's end. the absolute best-case scenario for us unless thrawn makes a colossal tactical blunder is to capture hong kong and not lose more cities, not to help chev, except insofar as we can help by drawing some of the heat away.

so once thrawn takes two CS from both of our teams and gets to 10 cities, even if they can't make further progress, they probably plan to stuff all their longships in the chokes, outheal any damage we do by rotating in fresh ships and healing the injured ones behind their lines, and race us to cartography. they will surely win that race by a mile as they will drop 10 harbors down as soon as they block the chokes and have 100 bpt overnight in free inquiry. THEN they kill someone with a mass-upgrade and a military alliance, and that's why sumeria makes sense

so the best-case scenario is this: we protect hong kong until we can take it, spread crusade to all of TAD's cities with a very fast missionary, and build out enough galleys asap to occupy chokes of our own that even infinity longships can't break. examples of such chokes can be found at asanoyama, which can be defended vs attack from the sea indefinitely with five galleys in the little bay to its NE, and our capitals, which can be defended forever with just 4 galleys and which thrawn has no hope of taking unless we are enormous idiots or they bring a land army. eventually, we retake moga either through loyalty flip or by landing ground troops. and then we have to outbuild them to cartography after all that.

well, at least we're portugal and japan! i guess...

[williams482]

100% serious and certain about the city state contacts thing. Ignore everything you see there.

I should clarify that I'm not mad at Thrawn. I'm annoyed that the game has developed in a way where it's probably going to end prematurely, and I'm confused why Thrawn pursued a course likely to create that when the supposed plan was to mimic a much slower developing game. But the answer is pretty obvious: a dedicated Norway rush is crazy powerful on a water map if there are city states to capture, and there were city states to capture. And Thrawn plays to win, as everyone else in this game does. Certainly there are no ethical problems in play here.

I guess I'm mostly unhappy that a early rush plan seems to be working enormously well, because that pretty much always produces worse games. Same deal with PBEM19, or PBEM16 to pick a game Thrawn had no involvement in.

I think your general plan sounds pretty good, and the tradeoffs will hurt if there is a lategame but definitely improve the chances of having one at all.