[SPOILERS] swans will bite u

[ljubljana]

turn 49 - japan



four longships at MoM, and 700 milpower before turn 50. jesus what more is there to say?

we have a chance to save the city, but it requires thrawn to delay attacking so my galleys can show up. not sure they're likely to do that, to say the least...

they even took the last charge from TAD's builder. and i'm not quite sure what's going on with TAD's galleys - are there two in MoM right now due to the blockade? i don't really know what the game does in that situation...

at mogadishu:



as expected thrawn beat the shit out of TAD's galleys and is going to take the city with no losses in the face of what was TAD's entire fleet at the time. we did buy a few turns though and there is some chance they will have to pause to heal, in which case we maybe did cost them the 2-3 longship builds they would have made here in the meantime. that's pretty cold comfort though

TAD has built literally not a single thing besides galleys, builders that chopped galleys, and the second city settler over the entire course of this game and is getting annihilated, AND norway is probably doing the same to CMF/inc on the other side of the world. only real question is how much of a pain in the ass i can be to them the answer might actually be "a significant one" as i should be able to step up galley spam pretty quickly in monumentality, which i think is guaranteed now if i play my cards right, and am just 9t from poliphil. so if thrawn does not kill us outright in the next 10t i can start spamming victor galleys that trade favorably with longships and maybe preserve at least the japanese core.

and the awful reality is that, even if TAD loses MoM and drops to just their (ironically-named) capital, we will still be the largest non-thrawn team..... amusingly enough i actually think we might even be favored from here if the rest of the world were magically able to beat thrawn back. as long as TAD can get up to 3 or 4 cities and crawl towards cartography, portugal will be able to pretty much do what it's supposed to do - 8 free TRs times feitorias is their main strength and that is independent of civ size. and as a team we are still leading the non-thrawn pack in both expansion and average city strength, as far as i can tell. too bad there is no real chance of thrawn losing from here

[ljubljana]

after a protracted search i have definitively identified the world's saddest mechanical question....

if thrawn takes MoM and it drops to size 2, will that plus its one religious citizen turn on Crusade?

debating whether to buy the plains hill at Asa to speed up the GP. lemme think about it real quick and see how the math works out...

also still not sure if we want it over the plains farm or the maize... maize is a stronger tile in generic circumstances and leads a stronger campus late-game, but we really need the hammer right now. leaning towards maize (despite the pin) but i'll think about it later

i am also going to have to find some way to keep thrawn from making the runaround and showing up at shodai :| we have some good chokes over there, thank goodness, but i'd need to divert ships from the main front to man them... but on the other hand if thrawn does have more ships around and is moving that way, they can probably get there before its galley build finishes if i do nothing

[ljubljana]

lol, OR i could buy the third-ring PFH at asa for just a little more. how stupid is that? actually maybe not stupid at all if the bare plains hill is next on its cultural pickup list, since the city i was going to put there is now a very low priority. and it even gets asa to the magic 3t galley threshold with the plains hill! or the 4t threshold without it as soon as i hook up this cotton. ok, actually that might be a really good idea, i will pitch it to TAD

god i have bought so many damn tiles in this game. but i dunno, they have mostly seemed pretty justified? i mean, in this case, 110 gold for 3 hammers is a really good investment, it's as good as a bought builder in the short term but at half the gold cost. and at 8.1 hpt after amenities asa would get the discounted GP done in just 5 turns, fast enough to credibly threaten to boost any galleys i chop out of hakuho

[ljubljana]

actually, check it out: with just 2 builders and a trader purchased in monumentality, we will actually be making 1.5 galleys per turn starting at the era change, and a third of them will come with a promotion:

hakuho: plains hill mine + PFH + GJH + stone quarry + city center + palace + Asanoyama trade route + urban planning = 3 + 3 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 1 = 17 hpt
terunofuji: PFH + bare plains hill + sheep pasture + reef + city center + urban planning = 3 + 2 + 2 + 1 + 2 + 1 = 11 hpt
asanoyama: PFH + diamond mine + bare plains hill + plains farm + city center + urban planning = 3 + 2 + 2 + 1 + 2 + 1 = 11 hpt
shodai: 2 grass hill mine + PJH + horse pasture + city center + urban planning = 4 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 1 = 11 hpt

i count 6 builder charges needed - one at shodai for the 3 tiles there, and one at hak/teru to mine a plains hill, pasture the sheep, and quarry the stone. and it looks like i can afford one chop in hakuho as well, as long as it's the GFH and not the PFH, so this incoming builder will go for two chops, into galley/campus at hakuho and holy site at fifth city, plus the cotton plantation. so as long as we can live, like, 20 more turns, i think we can spit out enough ships to man the chokes around my cities + TAD's capital more or less indefinitely and perhaps stabilize the situation. and we will probably bank enough faith to make those three purchases immediately on turn 61

that is, if we can hold all of those cities until we can get rolling, which is definitely an open question...

[ljubljana]

ok, here is my best shot at a defensive scheme:



if supplied effectively, i believe this position can hold out even against infinity longships. with just one attack per turn and no combat strength advantage, i do not see how they can realistically break through. that is, except at terunofuji and in the west which are gigantic gaping holes, but the supply lines to attack there will be very long, especially if we can block the channel west of mogadishu. and if we can't hold at terunofuji forever, we can at least extract a heavy price from the norwegians with ancient walls and a divine wind catapult or two.

i am expecting to open up the turn tomorrow to discover that MoM cannot be held. if this happens, i'll probably start repositioning my ships to occupy these tiles and the mogadishu channel to try to buy us enough time to get our ship spam configuration up.

i also may move the pinned city six northeast to make it easier to wall off. and i am reconsidering our friend the geothermal vent city :D

i think i tentatively want to unconcede until thrawn proves over the board that we can't hold this position. if all the other teams can find defensive lines like this and avoid being outright conquered, perhaps thrawn's enormous swarm of longships will end up sitting around unable to do anything once they mop up the exposed city-states. maybe team rest-of-the-world will have a chance under those circumstances?

[ljubljana]

ok, so to summarize, checklist for tomorrow:

- beg TAD for 5 gold for asanoyama's PFH, start GP on probably the maize. then, if thrawn has attacked and MoM can't be held:
- eastern galley probably goes south to make them go around mogadishu
- northern galleys take up defensive positions around shodai and pinned city 3, with perhaps one heading south to block the north approach to hakuho
- asanoyama's galley does...something? it could go south to scout for choke points around mogadishu, but it is probably more urgently needed at shodai as that's where thrawn will probably go if they eat MoM and it will be exceedingly difficult to reinforce
- try to keep morale up as best you can

[TheArchduke]

My game just crashed on me, because I forgot the combination to force end turn.

Building galleys and awaiting the inevitable doom.

[TheArchduke]

@Ljubljana

This game is lost.

There is no way Thrawn is not burning down MoM and coupled with stunting our growth we are not going to come back into this game.
His economy, science, culture and military is a lot stronger then ours.

And as we play no-diplomacy, yeah nothing is going to happen to help us out here.

[ljubljana]

well, re no-diplomacy, there is NO way all the other major powers are not already planning forever war with him. it is blindingly obvious that doing otherwise will immediately lose the game - if you were in CMF's position, that's what you would be doing right now, no? it would be one thing if we were playing with only noobs but Woden and CMF are both among the very best players at Realms Beyond, and they are not dumb enough to not know what this means.

if/when thrawn does raze MoM, everyone will know about it immediately from the scores, and it will either prompt a) concessions or b) immediate plans to DoW on them and fight for any chance of victory for a non-thrawn team. if it is concessions, i'll concede too, there is definitely no chance if everyone has given up and no point forcing others to play out a game they think is lost. but in case b) i think we should fight on as defiantly as we can for our new alternative win condition of "anyone but our conqueror winning"

[ljubljana]

woden in particular i do not think is going to concede without a fight, especially since i believe they aren't even in contact with thrawn yet. there were multiple times in PBEM20 when the situation seemed to me to warrant concession and woden talked me down from it. if woden of all people has given up, then yeah it's definitely time for us to concede too. but if they want to play on, so do i, mostly to establish in the minds of any FUTURE conquerors, in future games, that if someone tries to kill me i will make their lives at miserable as possible in so doing

and re stunting our growth curve: yes, this will absolutely happen relative to where we were. but...at 6 cities we WERE the #1 non-thrawn team in expansion. when thrawn razes MoM we will just drop back into a tie with CMF/inc who have 5 cities according to my score tracking. and on turn 52 we will pull back ahead unless they also found or conquer another city. true, we will be highly HIGHLY unbalanced as a team in terms of expansion for the rest of the game, but...my read of PBEM20 is that that's actually kind of a good thing. are we sure that position is unsalvageable if we can prevent further losses? i know it seems very implausible now but, all portugal would have to do is achieve a comeback similar to marco's in PBEM20 and their feitoria trade routes can still be fully online, which is most of the point of picking them.

i don't know if you ever saw this, but here is what my core looked like towards the end of PBEM20:



if that position was salvageable, i personally believe this one is at least worth playing out

maybe i have too much of Epic 12 Sirian in me (that report IS the reason i'm on RB, after all) but i think nothing in these games is more fun than holding on by the skin of your teeth for spite's sake alone. i think we should try it, even if it's just to improve the chances of other teams that aren't us. although i will not keep the game going against the will of the other players if they are conceding, if the other two teams are planning a defiant last stand, i highly encourage you to do so as well