Mitchum said:
+2 OB
So, we could have Qin to +11 40 turns after sharing a civic with him and Hammy to +12 10 turns later.
I'm pretty sure that it takes +25 turns per +1 of Open Borders, so it would still take 50 turns for either AI, according to your numbers.
Mitchum said:
We can revolt into Bureau for "free" when we also revolt to HR.
Not true. Once we have 13 Cities, it costs us 2 turns to revolt to 2 Civics.
We have 13 Cities thanks to owning Wine City.
Mitchum said:
2. Shared civic diplo bonus starts accruing ASAP as opposed to 18 turns from now.
So, that's a difference of +1.8.
If Astrononmy weren't a zero-bonus tech, I'd be more willing to self-tech it. But, getting even just 1 Lightbulb into Astronomy will be quite huge.
Mitchum said:
5. We'll be able to fund our research through city capture gold at the cost of fewer hammers spent on suicide cats.
Just with more Hammers spent on replacing Macemen, right? Because I tried out this no-Bombarding kind of a war and it was a mess. I did not try with Macemen, but we'd be fighting 30%, 40%, 60% battles with our Macemen, which would mean that we'd have to replace quite a lot of Macemen instead of Cats.
Mitchum said:
6. We can afford to build barracks in several cities so that when we can build macemen, they can be CRI promoted out of the gate.
Versus an AI like Brennus with reasonably-high attack courage, Combat I Maces are generally a better promotion than City Raider I. You get almost the same benefit when the City Defences aren't as high as you'll see with Castles, you can specialise your units (one goes Medic, one goes Anti-Archery, one goes Anti-Melee), and you can defend much better, even when wounded.
Mitchum said:
Our commerce will go up by 50% in Paris (50% of 19). This number gets multiplied through our library and academy bonus, which will increase our 100% science rate and could shave a turn or two off the 17.25 turns.
Let's make sure that we look at the benefit alongside of the cost of running a High Maintenance Civic.
Being objective here, how much of our Science comes from Paris? Can we really see a 2-turn decrease over a period of 17 turns?
Mitchum said:
Our science output will go up as our new cities (which should be mature with improvements) come out of revolt.
Let's be realistic here. We're going to be lucky to get Granaries in half of the captured Cities.
Going for capturing Cities now means Brennus won't have had time to build Courthouses or Harbours.
He cannot build Forges or Markets.
He can build Barracks, Duns (City Walls) Libraries, Buddhist Temples, and Buddhist Monasteries, but these Buildings cannot be captured.
We might get the odd Lighthouse, but he only has 3 Coastal Cities that know about.
If I missed some important infrastructure that Brennus might have built, please let me know, since I'm not seeing it.
Mitchum said:
To me, getting Qin and Hammy to Friendly trumps everything
If that is really true, then let's build them Cities which we will Liberate. Those can be Liberated in roughly 20 turns from now, rather than 50 turns from now.
The difference between Astrononmy (partially Lightbulbed) -> Civil Service and Civil Service -> Astronomy is not only in the total time that it takes to get those techs, but the amount of "free" Diplo credit that we can get.
For the cost of 4 suicidal Catapults, we can get +3 relations with an AI. That's not something that you can get later on in the game; it's a diminishing aspect of the game that we can take advantage of by getting Astronomy now instead of later.
Brennus dying 10 turns sooner, 20 turns sooner, or however earlier it is isn't going to significantly impact our end game, since we both seem to agree that getting the overseas AIs to Friendly status is what's going to carry us forward and set us apart from the other SGOTM teams.
Let's play to our strategy's strengths, which is a Trade Route economy.
SGOTM Teams that wanted Civil Service will have had it for a long time now and probably also own some of Brennus' lands. If we want to beat them, we need to do something that fits with our strategy, instead of doing what others likely did but later and not as well as they did it.
It's time to leverage Astronomy to its fullest effectiveness, which means grabbing a ton of overseas Trade Routes, Liberating Cities to the AIs, and having a more effective (time-compressed) war against Brennus a bit later on by assaulting 2 or 3 of his Cities from the sea.
I know that you want to try and smash his Stacks of Doom while you see them, but keep your eyes on the Astronomy prize and don't get distracted by Brennus' units' shiny armour. He can rebuild his stacks, but we can't get that permanent Diplo boost from Liberating Cities as easily later; yes, we can Liberate Sitting Bull's Cities, but they'll go to the AI with the nearest capital, i.e. probably all to Saladin.
You may feel that "+11 is good enough," but is it really? We have some whiney, demanding AIs in our game. We'll definitely be asked to switch to their Religions. Are we going to do so or are we going to incur penalties for refusing?
Certainly, Saladin is going to need some extra pampering if we trade with Hammurabi.
Also, I don't see why we shouldn't be profiting from the sale of nearly every tech by 20 to 30 Gold at a time (and more as time goes on and this limit increases).
You say that we probably don't want to drag too many overseas AIs into wars, and that's probably going to be more of a fact of us being unable to bribe them easily, other than Qin, dictating that fact. Fine, no worries. We'll get Qin Friendly quickly via City Liberation, Tech-gifting, and a Shared War with Brennus.
Besides, this whole +1.8 Shared Favourite Civic bonus assumes that the AIs will revolt... they often do, but they might not. If they are bribeable into switching, then holding onto some techs will be of use for such a bribe. If they aren't bribeable, then you'll just have to sit there waiting patiently for them to revolt.
What you were talking about earlier with ignoring Bombarding when attacking Cities is far more effective when we have Trebuchets in our army. You could mostly ignore Bombarding at that time because Trebuchets are JUST THAT POWERFUL. Cats, however, are not that powerful, and generally require Bombarding and Collateral Damage to be highly effective. You could also play through the war almost at Epic Game Speed with Engineering's bonus movement points, Trebuchets, and Pikemen (if we stay out of war completely with Brennus for now and don't start pillaging his potential source of Ivory), should we get Engineering in trade from a Friendly AI.
I'm not saying that Civil Service is a poor option. It's a good option. Most top teams probably got it much earlier and thus have benefitted from its use for much longer.
Astronomy, however, is an even stronger option that fits better with how we've been playing our game.
Just looking at the numbers alone, Astronomy won't give us +9 Commerce in Paris, but will give it +2 Commerce and +4 Commerce in most of our Coastal Cities, all without a High Maintenance Cost. Plus, you have to find a way to come up with 20% more Flasks (the math doesn't quite work out that way, but it's roughly 20%) due to having to self-tech all of Astronomy's Flasks instead of less than half of them, without any bonus to research that we players just normally take for granted.
Capturing Brennus' lands is a dead end and while we need to do so eventually, our economy is not really in a solid position to do so. Plus, Bureaucracy's High Maintenance Cost doesn't mix particularly well with an expanding empire, as we'll incur more Maintenance due to capturing Cities.
Yes, Bureaucracy also gives us some extra Hammers in Paris, but they are just additive, not multiplicative, with the Forge, so they are nice to get, but are just one more minor factor that don't really address the issue of getting the overseas AIs to Friendly ASAP and high enough in Friendliness that they'll vote for us above all other AIs, regardless of future AI - AI Friendly relationships and regardless of negative Diplo modifiers that we might incur.
You're the one who said look at SGOTM games for examples... the top games are known for innovative strategies... gifting away an early City and using it heavily for espionage, building Warriors that can get disbanded when your economy is collapsing, blocking off strong Barb units from entering your lands using a "wall" of Workers/Warriors, capturing land and gifting it to Gandhi so that he can fly to Space faster, etc and so on. So, no, you're not going to be able to point to earlier games for specific examples of the same innovative strategies being used, because the SGOTM tends to bring out innovative strategies that haven't been tried or at least have not been widely-publicized.
So, don't discount this City Liberating approach so easily. You've played enough Diplo games to know that it can be a close race if you have a bunch of AIs that are relatively Friendly with each other, but if you can aim to get a few EXTRA Diplo points earlier, you can get the AIs to the minimum amount of Friendly Attitude earlier on and later, you'll have a buffer to play with (say, so that we CAN declare war on Sitting Bull without brining Hammurabi down to Pleased status and thereby bring Saladin up to Friendly status by Liberating some of Sitting Bull's Cities to Saladin, etc).
Heavily gifting techs to AIs that we want to enable has been our grand strategy from the start. Let's make sure that the decisions we make going forward best support that goal. Liberating Cities to overseas AIs before they settle the land themselves works toward that goal. Capturing Brennus' lands sooner rather than later (and I challenge this claim, since Galleons will make a later-war more efficient, and that's not even assuming that we'll get extra units like Trebs to make our job more Hammer-efficient and thus giving us units that will accumulate promotions for re-use against Sitting Bull, instead of dying) isn't really helping toward the goal of getting the AIs to Friendly status.
In fact, I claim that we cannot risk dragging Qin into a war with Brennus if we beat down on Brennus too much now, but we can afford to drag Qin into a war later if Brennus still has a large enough empire not to capitulate. Whether we'll need to drag Qin or not will depend upon how many Cities get Liberated to him instead of to Hammurabi or Saladin.
).
It's also as bummer that we can't get the trades to work correctly in the test game. But, I think I have a decent suggested change in direction. First, let me address a few comments:
) cultural defense city with walls (Dun).
. Two of them from being hit once in battle and the rest from collateral damage.
