SGOTM 14 - Plastic Ducks

[Snaaty]

congrats team, great finish bebe

...

yeah, the war turned out to be quite a bit harder then expected, and the eco did add another interesting factor to the game

...

@ duckweed:

congrats on your promo, so another contend manager for the duckies (still not exactly sure what your jobs will be, even after kossin explained, but surely looks nice and impressive there next to the nick)

 

[kossin]

Just a quick comparison between OSS' last save and ours closest to the same date.

PD T121
OSS T123

# of cities
AI PD OSS
Gandhi 6 7
Monte 6 8
Mansa 9 9
Shaka 7 6
Genghis 8 9
Elizabeth 6 5
Ragnar 5 5+
Asoka 0 8+

It's interesting that in 2 extra turns some of these numbers are far apart. Most of OSS's AIs have settled at similar rate, maybe slightly faster. This is good and bad: more cities to get to but later Feudalism from the AIs.

The biggest difference if of course Asoka, but not because ours was already dead... because he never expanded that much.

I'd say OSS's best shot at gold is to kill EAST witches, NORTH witches, some of SOUTH and maybe WEST then spam cities with settlers+CASTE+build culture to get enough land. Every city settled could get to 10 culture within 2 turns so if they ready the settler ahead of time and just mass-settle slightly before killing Oz, they'd be able to survive the economic hit better.

But then again, if they have a lot of free time and good logistics, conquest could work as well. They are at least 15 turns behind us at this point (2 turns + dead Asoka), but it'd be quite tight!

 

[Gumbolt]

Could make silver very interesting. If they get grenadier they could just spam them and attack from the ships. This would mean no trebs! Not sure how close they would be to this with bulbing.

You say 15 turns behind. Yet Duckweed figures you lost 15 turns in your wars due to strikes. So perhaps this could be close? I really doubt the Ai are far from feudalism. Even for emperor 200ad semms pretty late.

Your Asoka figures are a bit misleading as you don't show how many cities of theirs you destroyed. I assume 5-6. Although in 2-3 turns it will hardly matter.

The main problem OSS face is time. Rushing 50-60 turns in 10 days could lead to mistakes. On such a large map that is several hours of play! They need to be playing 5-8 turns a day and this is not happening so far.

 

[kossin]

Like I said, difficult to compare the Asoka expansion since we declared war on him ~10 turns before them.

They can also do less warring and more expansion as I said. The hard part is always land, never pop.

Time is definitely their biggest opponent yes.

 

[neilmeister]

Wow, impressive finish Ducks.

Watching your game, I was convinced that you went to early, but you proved me very wrong.

At one stage, about 30 turns ago, I thought you guys were toast. Very negative gpt, and seemingly not enough units to continue to conquer. It looked like strike and unit losses were imminent. I must have missed some hidden stacks because you didn't slow down, just sped up.

 

[kossin]

With all the galleons that we had, bringing new units to the front was not a problem, we just had to whip another stack or three But we did lose quite a bit of time due to finances and unit problems.

All in all, we lost 1 Mace due to strike - we thought there was a free turn of strike every time coming from the positive side of the coffers, which is obviously wrong.

 

[Bebekija]

Damn I'm feeling overwhelmed with all these threads to browse through all at once, I don't know where to start !!!

I think I will focus on following the progress of the last teams that still haven't finished , then maybe read Kakumeika's in depth because their diplo attempt is truly impressive.

On topic,
@Gumbolt, to be precise, Duckweed didn't blame *all* the 15 turns "delay" on our finish date on the crashing economy, he just pointed out that :
1/ Our war lasted for 15 more turns than it could have
2/ We spent "some turns" (his quote, #1585) solving the economy.

I agree with him.

In fact, the inexperience mistakes in troop management of Deity and myself, as well as the bad RNG luck on kossin and Snaaty, probably had more impact on our "late" mischief finish date.

If I had to guess a number, I'd say that solving the economy cost us ~5 turns max, definitely not 15.
What one has to consider is that not crushing the economy would mean either :
- not conquering cities as fast as we did = slower war pace = more resistance from the AIs,
- razing more of those cities = less troops for next war.
- less unit maintenance = harder to maintain 2-3 front and actually take the cities

It's kind of like when you go somewhere with your car, you can either rush at full speed and burn your fuel much faster, or slow down and optimize your mileage.
In this example, and all other things being equal, which one reaches its destination first depends on (the time it takes to fill up the tank of the first car) VS. (the time it takes for the slower car to catch up).

There's no absolute way to decide! Indeed, in our game, we clearly went too far on the war side during the first part of the war, but after spending a few turns adjusting the micro and 2 turns of bankruptcy, we were able to go all-in again and *then*the economy was never a problem anymore.

 

[Gumbolt]

Firstly I actually thought it was good that PD took on some new players like you and Deity! No team should ever exclude new players. Perhaps you made some mistakes but I think most teams did.

I lost our team a city to the barbs! We lost turns to fog busting too! We had to capture 2 barb cities using 6-7 swords. I am sure we lost some turns to troop management too. Troops sitting around doing nothing are wasted turns!

Other teams failed to get GLH wonder. For Kakumeika this cost them over 3000 beakers!! If OSS play an absolutely perfect game I will be amazed. They are already 15 turns late on yourselves war wise.

Some teams i think were slower teching as they advanced to 15 or so cities too soon. Turns get lost in these games. Sometimes to bad strategy other times to mistakes or bad plans.

Overall if you don't have a strong team there for the game you will lose focus. TNT and RK are showing this now. TNT due to lack of players. RK because they are having to rush the game and play with little planning.

The question is if you asked all team how many turns they lost most might guess 10-15. That being said PD are used to planning to perfection. Even so the most perfect plan can still fall flat on it's face.

 

[kossin]

Other teams failed to get GLH wonder. For Kakumeika this cost them over 3000 beakers!! If OSS play an absolutely perfect game I will be amazed. They are already 15 turns late on yourselves war wise.

To be fair, 3000 beakers is a drop of water when you're teching all the way to Mass Media, even though the total cost is likely higher with delayed Education and such.

Might be 5 turns if we're generous.

But yea, everyone's going to make mistakes - that's for sure!

 

[Duckweed]

Firstly I actually thought it was good that PD took on some new players like you and Deity! No team should ever exclude new players. Perhaps you made some mistakes but I think most teams did.

I lost our team a city to the barbs! We lost turns to fog busting too! We had to capture 2 barb cities using 6-7 swords. I am sure we lost some turns to troop management too. Troops sitting around doing nothing are wasted turns!

Other teams failed to get GLH wonder. For Kakumeika this cost them over 3000 beakers!! If OSS play an absolutely perfect game I will be amazed. They are already 15 turns late on yourselves war wise.

Some teams i think were slower teching as they advanced to 15 or so cities too soon. Turns get lost in these games. Sometimes to bad strategy other times to mistakes or bad plans.

Overall if you don't have a strong team there for the game you will lose focus. TNT and RK are showing this now. TNT due to lack of players. RK because they are having to rush the game and play with little planning.

The question is if you asked all team how many turns they lost most might guess 10-15. That being said PD are used to planning to perfection. Even so the most perfect plan can still fall flat on it's face.

Luck factor is part of the game mechanism, we just have to face it. RNG of battles is the easy one to handle. If you want to be safe, bring more and stronger troops to the battlefield, otherwise, it's totally player's own mistake. Some examples:

I launch the 1st battle with Toto vs a lion since it block my way of scouting and more important, I wanted the WoodmanII promotion so that Toto could scout westbound faster and have a much better chance of surviving. I did not think losing Toto was a big deal at that time since he had done the scouting of surrounding area that time, he would die easily when scouting further if he did not get the WoodmanII promotion.

The battles outside Tiflis. I did not notice the existence of Tiflis and misjudged that the moglolian stack was heading for the canal city OS, so I suggested kossin to march our stack toward Besh. Unfortunately the moglolian stack attack our stack and caused heavy casualty. Although we could suffer less loss if the RNG is not that unfavorable, this loss could be avoided if I made the right judgment.

There are other lucky factors that could affect the game more, such as the decision of pursuing a wonder, and popping the expected type of GP from a polluted pool. We took a careful evaluation of gain and cost if we succeed or fail the Oracle. We also took a safer and slow way of producing GPs because of the polluted pool.

In conclusion, I'd never complain about the RNG, mostly it's player's own decision of whether to take the risk. When I'm looking for improvement, I mostly took into consideration the bad decisions of players rather than bad RNG.

 

[Bebekija]

I would think that 10 fully-loaded Galleons (filled with 30 War Elephants) should be more than sufficient to take down the Wizard.
.

Overkill alert !
It's strange though to plan on using WE on a unit with +25% against mounted, especially when WEs can't get CR promotions... They seem to be confident that they won't need to tech Civil Service, which would turn out to be a great mistake I think.


I'm growing more and more worried that OSS won't finish in time though. Only 9 days to go, and they're still doing 2 turns turnset with 3 pages of posts in between....

It's really a shame, I'd rather have them beat us by one turn than lacking our most experienced competitors

 

[Duckweed]

: They seem to be confident that they won't need to tech Civil Service, which would turn out to be a great mistake I think.

IMO that's a right decision. They could get CS from trade some time. One of the reason why I mentioned that we underestimate the economical situation is that we should not research CS ourselves. WEs/xBows/Pike can just do almost the same as Macemans. The saved cash from CS would help our war pace.

 

[dingding]

Congratulations, Ducks!

Have been lurking for a month or so. Really nothing can stop you guys!

Good job for the map, neil! It's quite balanced that any victory can be reached at almost the "same time". However, the next SGOTM should give more panalties to the warmonger way so these warduckies can't abuse it once again!

 

[Bebekija]

Fair enough.

OTOH, they're researching Literature + Music (same beaker value than CS)

What's your opinion on these choices?

To me, Heroic Epic seems like a reasonable option (lots of units to build == return on investment), and I suppose they chose Music for the ability to build culture, it will help for Domination. It was almost useless for us since we went for conquest.

 

[Bebekija]

Congratulations, Ducks!

... Really nothing can stop you guys!

Thanks dingding, but I think OSS have a good chance at "stopping" us, .... if they finish that is !

I had noticed you checking at the forums, I figured it was to follow us. It's a shame you couldn't join though, that would have been fun

 

[dingding]

Thanks dingding, but I think OSS have a good chance at "stopping" us, .... if they finish that is !

I had noticed you checking at the forums, I figured it was to follow us. It's a shame you couldn't join though, that would have been fun

It's always been fun playing with players like Duckweed and kossin.
But I have to stop making silly mistakes like I did in SGOTM 12.

Bon maintenant j'ai même pas un ordinateur fonctionnaire pour jouer. Tranquille.

Also pretty happy to see you guys using Excel to play the game

 

[Duckweed]

Nice to see you around, dingding!

I don't remember there's any mistake you made in SGOTM12, wait a second, you abandoned us, we would have no problem of getting that gold if you were with us!

 

[Duckweed]

Fair enough.

OTOH, they're researching Literature + Music (same beaker value than CS)

What's your opinion on these choices?

To me, Heroic Epic seems like a reasonable option (lots of units to build == return on investment), and I suppose they chose Music for the ability to build culture, it will help for Domination. It was almost useless for us since we went for conquest.

If we research Music, that could be a better choice than CS, at least it could help the border pop faster. I'm not sure about the usefulness of HE in our game, mainly because that we did not settle a strong site for HE. Researching Music is more meaningful for OSS since they can earn the free GA as well.

 

[kossin]

Also, they seem intent on Domination, which is a good idea to try to gain turns.

Heya dingding!

You're welcome to lurk any time

 

[Bebekija]

Looking closely at the 'Ducks Score and Power graphs, I'd say that they went for an early Galley rush against Asoka and then used his population points to fund a massive explosion of units.

Since I suspect that they Oracled Civil Service, it is likely that they Lightbulbed their way through Philosophy + Education and used Bureaucracy-powered teching plus Liberalism to take Astronomy.

Not a bad approach if I'm right, but fortunately Asoka is still a pushover in our game at this late stage, so we weren't really hurt by delaying our first war.

Another proof that trying to read the progress graphs is only reliable in the beginning of the game...
However, maybe his point about not suffering from the delayed war will prove right. The AIs will have more cities, that's for sure, but I have the feeling the AIs are teching slower in their game, I'll have to check that with the saves.

We only have 9 days left. I somehow had it in my head that the deadline was the 20th.

It is time they figured that out!!

It's strange though, it doesn't look like they're willing to commit 100% to the war :
- they intend to use 3 GP for 2 consecutive Golden Ages, maybe chop the MoM for 4+ turns, but will these GAs be worth it if they whip their cities to death and work mainly food tiles?
- they don't seem to plan on turning the slider down : after Music, next tech would be Drama, and now LtC is making the case for Grenadiers (they just spotted Oz, so they should know better?....)

The war economy enables MoM enables GAs enable grens enable faster=better war economy enables surplus economy for domination at the end. Speed becomes acceleration. Acceleration warps time.

I'm not convinced, what am I not seeing?