SGOTM 15 - Kakumeika

WastinTime said:

I'm trying to remember the danger of using this trick. I think there is a way to lose beakers. I want to say it happens when you meet another AI. If they know the tech you're researching, you get a boost, but if you're doing the trick, you don't.

I could be off, does anyone know off hand, or should I research?

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I agree with WastinTime. There is a loss of beakers by not committing to a technology, but I like-wise don't remember the details. However, as I recall, the # of beakers lost was significant (maybe as large as ~20%).

WastinTime, please go ahead and research it. I'm sure no one else will be remembering the details of it, otherwise they would have posted them by now.

Sun Tzu Wu

Sun Tzu Wu said:

I agree with WastinTime. There is a loss of beakers by not committing to a technology, but I like-wise don't remember the details. However, as I recall, the # of beakers lost was significant (maybe as large as ~20%).

WastinTime, please go ahead and research it. I'm sure no one else will be remembering the details of it, otherwise they would have posted them by now.

Sun Tzu Wu

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Isn't it just a matter of playing about 10 turns of a game and seeing what happens?

mabraham said:

Isn't it just a matter of playing about 10 turns of a game and seeing what happens?

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Yea, I didn't say it would hard...
Anyway, I found the post (from 2005). A really good explanation (I thought) of research which warned of possible beaker loss by not picking a tech. Turns out this is misinformation, and even worse than that. It's not just wrong, it's the opposite. There is an additional GAIN of beakers. Sometimes a substantial one. (one test showed 70 beakers instead of 62).

@WastinTime

Since you are same caliber as Jesusin and Lexad, what is your general opinion in regards to a cultural victory? Competitive or not? All I can tell, 1000 AD is the absolute limit.

Tachywaxon said:

@WastinTime

Since you are same caliber as Jesusin and Lexad, what is your general opinion in regards to a cultural victory? Competitive or not?

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With my experience w/Culture, I might be able to give you and estimate of when we can finish that VC. Most of y'all would come to roughly the same date on your own. That VC is not effected much by these crazy, sometimes unique setups. You're asking if Dom/Conquest/Religious have been hosed enough so that they take longer than Culture.

My gut says Culture will not be the fastest unless the mapmaker specifically tried to block all of those VC's.

Tech extortion = nice to have sugar on the cake. Main point of making peace is to enable city swapping for maintenance reduction.
And to simultaneously stifle the AI opponents with culture pressed junk cities far from homeland (you can send AIs into STRIKE ) yet keeping them in the game for XP/GG-milking.

City gifting is actually very easy to handle. The best part is the <=3 cities - give me anything - condition.
This can be used to 'set a seed point' anywhere on the map for the nearest city <10 tiles away - condition (note: nearest city must be on the same landmass).
AI-Financial-Trouble can be circumvented by max-GoldPerTurn+resource gift ... and self-pillaging the resource during the same turn after the city gifts for instant cancellation of the deal in the next IBT (no gold lost at all = great trick in itself, also for lucrative resource deals). The farthest cities = most costly for an AI should be gifted when they are still in revolt.
Also an AI will happily accept a city that it has owned at some point before -- even during STRIKE.

I have great difficulties to imagine how the mapmakers could have designed the game to make all victory conditions equally competitive in terms of finish date (AP<->Space?).
I agree that Culture is probably the most 'autarchic' self-contained victory. Conquest requiring complete kills (oops also impossible in Icy Izzy scenario, only way I see is Paratroopers from nearby islands) of all opponents with 'Vassals off' should always come later than Domination, unless there is a huge amount of land somewhere that cannot be settled and thus equalizing Conquest and Domination ... In that case and with red_herring-spoiled AP-cheese I could imagine (war heavy?; Lib->Radio with slooow AIs possible?) UN-Diplo to be the fastest win competing with Culture. What is a reasonable finish date for Culture with No Tech Brokering and AggAI (wars generally more likely)?

DanF5771 said:

Since my gut feeling is AP-Win == Red Herring, and my experience with Culture Wins is rather limited, I was looking more into the fast military approach (c'mon we are Gandhi ) -- mainly Domination.

If we have at least 2 other AIs on our landmass and the layout would be ...

India in west, AI A in the middle and AI B in the east,

... maybe the following city-swapping strategy to facilitate early war with the given game options might work:

1. DoW AI A, pillage all improvements except around capital + very few very good cities.
2. Conquer all cities except 1 in the east near AI B.
3. Make peace with A, extort techs.
4. Whip units in all pillaged cities until city size = 1.
5. Gift pillaged cities to AI B (needs thorough testing).
6. DoW AI B, proceed as above (pillage weak cities) but conquer all cities except of course the gifted ones.
7. Gift the pillaged + whipped cities of B to A.
8. Make peace with B, extort techs. (maybe conquer the last original city of A?)
8. Focus on culture (religious buildings + Sistene Chapel, spiritual caste Artists) in the few new good cities.
9. A and B should not be able to make any sort of successful comeback due to pillaged lands, size 1 cities and culture pressure.
10. Disband revolting junk cities, or keep the better ones, when they become affordable (forbidden palace built).

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It's an interesting and creative idea, but it does partly hinge on the ability to disband culture-flipping cities. Do we know this is possible?

Is all of this chicanery superior to pillaging the land of the bad cities of A that we don't want while/after conquering the good cities, extorting techs for peace along the way, then repeating the dose for B? Dan's approach offers us the option of whipping the low-XP units to conquer B out of the population of A, but we have to use(=lose) more of our units to conquer A's poor cities to even get into that position. The kind of approach I'm suggesting here is one I think I suggested earlier in the thread - take key AI cities to nerf them, leave the rest until the final stages.

One way Dan's strategy can be made to work is if one of the neighbours has so little land that they'll be stuck on 3 cities (maybe we refuse OB to trap them). We conquer A as in Dan's plan, gift a central-ish crappy city to B so that it will be happier to accept the future gifts of those cities within 9.5 tiles of the fourth city. After all, it'll take time to whip and pillage the whole empire, so a mass gift of cities to B is not realistic.

DanF5771 said:

11. Redeclare at will and farm XP / GG (?)
11. In a finale sweep conquer all remaining cities to reach domination.

Vassals are off, so no problems with peace-vassaling of the weaklings (also no colonial expenses when repeating this on another continent).

Another crazy idea? Should I better go easy on the craziness-spam?
What do you think?

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I'm all ears for creative ideas.

DanF5771 said:

Tech extortion = nice to have sugar on the cake. Main point of making peace is to enable city swapping for maintenance reduction.
And to simultaneously stifle the AI opponents with culture pressed junk cities far from homeland (you can send AIs into STRIKE ) yet keeping them in the game for XP/GG-milking.

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Traditionally, fast SGOTM conquest/dom just goes and does it with lots of the lowest-tech cheap units that can do the job. The time taken to farm GGs and XP is time not spent conquering stuff. Now that's not necessarily a problem if there's a delay of estimateable length until we get Astro and/or our final military tech. But if knights and trebs are enough tech, is it not faster to have the army moving on taking AI capitals and good cities ASAP, and relying on a follow-up swarm of units to take the remaining cities in the last few turns?

DanF5771 said:

City gifting is actually very easy to handle. The best part is the <=3 cities - give me anything - condition.
This can be used to 'set a seed point' anywhere on the map for the nearest city <10 tiles away - condition (note: nearest city must be on the same landmass).

Click to expand...

Hmm, so under normal map conditions (i.e. no cornered AI we can cap at 3 cities), at the point that B has at most 3 cities we have to be able to diagnose that this strategy is workable, and organize a settler near where A will later have cities we'll want to pillage, and give that city to B ASAP. Then organize an army to mostly kill A, gifting pillaged cities to B. Are there other workable variations?

DanF5771 said:

AI-Financial-Trouble can be circumvented by max-GoldPerTurn+resource gift ... and self-pillaging the resource during the same turn after the city gifts for instant cancellation of the deal in the next IBT (no gold lost at all = great trick in itself, also for lucrative resource deals). The farthest cities = most costly for an AI should be gifted when they are still in revolt.
Also an AI will happily accept a city that it has owned at some point before -- even during STRIKE.

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Good points, we can certainly exploit this (after due testing).

DanF5771 said:

I have great difficulties to imagine how the mapmakers could have designed the game to make all victory conditions equally competitive in terms of finish date (AP<->Space?).

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We don't really know that was even an objective of the map maker...

DanF5771 said:

I agree that Culture is probably the most 'autarchic' self-contained victory. Conquest requiring complete kills (oops also impossible in Icy Izzy scenario, only way I see is Paratroopers from nearby islands) of all opponents with 'Vassals off' should always come later than Domination, unless there is a huge amount of land somewhere that cannot be settled and thus equalizing Conquest and Domination ... In that case and with red_herring-spoiled AP-cheese I could imagine (war heavy?; Lib->Radio with slooow AIs possible?) UN-Diplo to be the fastest win competing with Culture. What is a reasonable finish date for Culture with No Tech Brokering and AggAI (wars generally more likely)?

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Dunno about your question, but the point that the AIs will be teching slowly seems sound to me. This seems to suggest against the kind of TGW fourth-city-gift tech-stealing trickery we used in SGOTM14.

Yes, flip-disbanding is tested and confirmed.

The main purpose of this city-swapping idea is to quickly gain the upper hand in + really soon truly dominate the cultural battles in the new areas. We install size 1 cities for B in A's homeland and vice versa. If we leave cities unswapped, they will culture press our new conquests, increasing the need of garrison units and stealing precious tiles.
Gifting cities also earns us brownie points which may come in handy, e.g. if we plan to halt conquest of A the moment they only have 3 cities. Then deal with B and return to A later ...

mabraham said:

Is all of this chicanery superior to pillaging the land of the bad cities of A that we don't want while/after conquering the good cities, extorting techs for peace along the way, then repeating the dose for B? Dan's approach offers us the option of whipping the low-XP units to conquer B out of the population of A, but we have to use(=lose) more of our units to conquer A's poor cities to even get into that position. The kind of approach I'm suggesting here is one I think I suggested earlier in the thread - take key AI cities to nerf them, leave the rest until the final stages.

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One major difference between your suggestion and Dan's plan will be culture pressure from the undesirable cities and the need for garrison's to keep them out of revolt. If we attack early enough, this won't be a problem. This could be a fallback if we can't give the cities away.

Hmm, so under normal map conditions (i.e. no cornered AI we can cap at 3 cities), at the point that B has at most 3 cities we have to be able to diagnose that this strategy is workable, and organize a settler near where A will later have cities we'll want to pillage, and give that city to B ASAP.

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I think under most circumstances sacrificing a precious settler won't be necessary, because A will likely have a city in a plot distance<10 from B's closest cities. Or just proceed as mentioned above (halt conquest after NumCities(A)<=3.)
BTW plot distance is described here.

I created this game so people who want to get a feel for the games requirements. Obviously, the map has no insight beyond the opening screenshot.

This should give us a chance to try SGOTM-15's usual settings to see which victory condition will generally result in the earliest win. Of course, we will have adjust for any scenario variations in land/water/terrain, unrestricted leaders, etc. It will be especially interesting to see how DanF5771's domination plans work using shulec's test game. Thanks shulec!

Sun Tzu Wu

Ooookay. I am already seeing weird stuff. Already settled AI with kinda a big GNP! Could be a mixture of higher rates of culture and spy points, but better assume it is pure commercial output.

Oh ha! No time to waste! Mahabodhi already built, Poly ASAP.
No doubt the AI with the highest GNP, that is 37, includes the 1 8 (or more if all AI's already have the same religion) and of the shrine, plus other stuff.

Isn't that sweet? We are the world black sheep and everyone loves everyone. Dogpiling...decent tech exchange (although no tech brokering)...etc.
Kashi? Screw that.

So, it make 8 plus 9 (religion cradle plus shrine) for a total of 17 non commercial GNP.
The rest would be 20 GNP. Kinda weird for a one pop city. There is something else...
The palace provides a 10 GNP, this the resulting is 10 GNP. Still very high. No I'm the one who is high... Take a look at DanF's GNP analysis.
The good thing in all we have a cylindrical map, which means not flat lands, which helps our possible militaristic projects.

No special tech gifted for a particular reason, we start as the usual indian civ (Mining and Myst.).

The map is standard world size as I expected. But the counterpart is the sea level is set to low, thwarting in the process dom and conquest victory as usual.
Kinda interesting setting is the climate: tropical. That is why the lands is lush and rivers are abundant. Going on the stone would close in the jungle belt.

The whole word has 1784 land tiles. We need 1070,4 which round up (I think) to 1071 tiles to attain domination land limit! Hmmm...

At first, I didn't convince anyone about settling on the stone, but after some gazing, stone location is definitely a sweet rivery place (look at screenshot). Hmmm... BUT taking account what we found about Buddism and the high GNP (if I didn't forget something...which wouldn't surprise me), SIP is a strong alternative choice, if not the choice.

I did push further the fog gazing; no interesting facts. No new hidden hills, forests, fresh (lake) water tiles, etc. Thus I have only one screenshot on fog gazing.

I let the studies of the demographics under the care of another team mate and other conclusions as well. All I can tell right now, we might have a coastal AI capital with 6 land tiles out of the initial 9 ones.

Nice analysis so far, Tachywaxon.
A couple of things I noticed looking at your screenies:

There are 9 AI opponents! (We have a rank=10 in everything in the demo screen).

AI Power: Max 24000; Min 20000; Avg 22222 -> should result from ( 2*24000 + 6*22000 + 1*20000 ) / 9

Default Emperor AI Start:
Hunting(2000) + Archery(6000) + 2*Archer(3000) = 14000
Optional: Mining(2000) Wheel(4000) Skirmisher/Bowman(+1000)

-> AI seems to have 2 extra Archers or more techs (Sailing, Animal Husbandry?).

GNP: 9 AI cities, the Buddhism Holy City with Mahabodhi surplus amounts to 18, 37 - 18 = 19
4 Espionage + 2 culture from palace; 19 - 6 = 13 from research (modifiers active) or less if the AI is creative
-> that's nothing unusual

I can't see a possible trade connection of the 2 rivers in the screenshot for linked cities without roads, that would require a dual river tile which I cannot detect?

Question: How can we conquer Mahabodhi ASAP?
Let's hope this AI is nerfed somehow (very little land available) ...

DanF5771 said:

There are 9 AI opponents! (We have a rank=10 in everything in the demo screen).

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We have only 8 rivals left, so there must be a team of AI.

DanF5771 said:

There are 9 AI opponents! (We have a rank=10 in everything in the demo screen).

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I have noticed the 10 rank, but I thought it was some sort of generalization...hmm...looks like we have a team amongst the AI's.<

You are right, I missed a lot of points in the GNP. I did the calculus a bit too fast.

I can't see a possible trade connection of the 2 rivers in the screenshot for linked cities without roads, that would require a dual river tile which I cannot detect?

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Ah! I misinterpreted the whole thing! It is not about two tiles along rivers that touch, BUT two commons tiles by rivers. My mistake. I wished more than it would.

Question: How can we conquer Mahabodhi ASAP?

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Given the twisted mind of the mapmaker, I wouldn't be surprised, just like the barb wizard (rifle) we had to kill for winning in the last SGOTM, the civ that has the Mahabodhi must be far, out of reach.
Although...the map is cylindrical.

Could this be a MinorNation? Not really familiar with that, I think normally everybody would be at war with them from the very start, but the mapmakers could have changed that somehow. They would increase the rank-count but not the number of opponents.

No idea how these minors affect victory conditions (AP?).

all AIs except the Buddhism founder have a GNP of 19 -> 12 from beakers.

the power distribution could be different from my suggestions above

there is no charismatic leader in the game, right?

Any info on health-bar lengths?

DanF5771 said:

Could this be a MinorNation? Not really familiar with that, I think normally everybody would be at war with them from the very start, but the mapmakers could have changed that somehow.

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At war from the very beginning...hum...share war diplo points gone for diplo useless after all. We can have the same as the AI's, but will vote each other because of the lovefest.

Team AI's look probable because Neil seems to have a love for them. Do you have an argument against teamed AI's?

Sorry not much time this morning, but I assume that the AI who founded Buddhism was only given meditation. So that AI would have to tech mysticism and poly before also founding Hinduism