SGOTM 22 - Anti-TSR

Are you playing tonight?

I don't see us whipping Rome or HC. I could see us 20h-chopping HC, Gems, Fish in the near future, but that requires worker-turns. I'm not arguing against BW. I'm just not sure it's a big help right now and later we could steal it. A nice copper tile would be good.

Gluttonous Mecca we will whip non-stop, but we need to capture it first. I'm just looking at how to capture Mecca asap. An army will cost maintenance, which mitigates against teching anything, especially anything unnecessary.

WT, there is your reason not to research BW any time soon. 20.Hammer.Chops.

Mitchum said:

Are you playing tonight?

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Yea, I think I'll start in a few minutes

LowtherCastle said:

I don't see us whipping Rome or HC. I could see us 20h-chopping HC, Gems, Fish in the near future, but that requires worker-turns. I'm not arguing against BW. I'm just not sure it's a big help right now and later we could steal it. A nice copper tile would be good.

Gluttonous Mecca we will whip non-stop, but we need to capture it first. I'm just looking at how to capture Mecca asap. An army will cost maintenance, which mitigates against teching anything, especially anything unnecessary.

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I think we need to get math and BW if we want Mids and an army whipped/chopped. I would definitely whip HC.
What were y'all thinking we'd research after Writing?
HBR? Are we thinking of going to war with just chariots?

Turnset report

T42

T43
Darius : IW(16)

T44
Saladin shows the trade rt symbol

T45

T46
Zara, Darius : slavery
Sal, Darius : settle cities

barb warrior in SW corner of our expanded culture, otherwise, strangely quite. Must be the GW effect.

T47
Lion appears far to the NW
Darius : IW (9)

Everything looks good for settling next turn.
We need a build in Rome. Granary? Worker? settler?

Stopping. Most boring turnset ever. Even more boring than T0 usually is. At least you get to explore then.

Log: Paused Save uploaded.

WastinTime said:

Most boring turnset ever.

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As Captain, I have to look out for the interests of the whole team. I'm trying to learn from Mitchum's mistakes. As boring as it might have seemed to you, I hope you made before, during, and after saves every turn so you can learn from all our mistakes.

Btw, I'm done with the analysis phase. No more saves needed.

Speaking of what BP did, he also provided paths east and west composed of hill forests. Oddly, there's also a path of unforested hills going west. Any guesses what that's for?

We need to provide BSP with before and after settling saves, right?

After settling next turn, I would send our two 2XP warriors toward the lion. And watch the barb to see where he goes. If we can find the lion before he's disbanded, we could go for the 3XP I was talking about. Absolutely worth the risk, right dV? 73.2% odds to gain an instant Woodie II. The second warrior cleans up or protects.

LowtherCastle said:

We need to provide BSP with before and after settling saves, right?

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I suppose so, I would have forgot. Wasn't in my PPP. That was annoying last game too.

While we're on the topic. I've come up with this SG's:
Barely Legal, Dirty Trick.

There is a way to have, for example, a size 8 Rome and get 7 cities! instead of 4.
I'm not saying we will use this, but keep it in mind. Some form of it might come in handy. Like being able to grab a 4th city and 5th at size 6, 3 buildings, 6 defenders.

Rules state that we cannot choose to found a new city or choose to keep a one when given the Keep/Raze choice (whether captured or culture flipped).

However, there is nothing stopping us from having a city somehow fall into our hands if we are not given the option to reject it. We don't lose the game because a 5th, 6th, and 7th city come under our ownership.

I'm a little rusty on the exact mechanics without testing...as I often am, but I believe with a little culture and a size 2 city, we can, for example, gift Fish/Wine (probably after heavy whipping), capture and keep a new AI city, then recapture Fish/Wine with no option to say no. (and no loss of population, but risk to our buildings)

WastinTime said:

Barely Legal, Dirty Trick.

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No.

AlanH said:

All requirements have to be met whenever you get a new city in any way (founding it, conquering it, buying it, etc) after you founded your capital.

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Parsing "new" to mean something other than BSP's intent won't work either. It's clear what he means.

What you have figured out, if you're right, is what to watch for to not get us disqualified. We mustn't let that happen, whatever it is you're imagining.

Edit: Upon studying your post above more carefully, it's clear that BSP should make an announcement about this problem in the Maintenance thread, because teams need to know in advance if a re-capture is going to put them at risk. BSP tried his best to make a interesting and foolproof scenario. At this point, it's not too late for him to dictate this, as long as no team has done this and that would be nearly impossible.* You reading this, BSP?

*In SG5, Gyathaar had to make a special mod for us to play with the barbs. He even gave us a test save in advance. Klarius played it and discovered a divide-by-zero crash in the game. Luckily we hadn't started yet, so Gyathaar was able to fix it. Otherwise all of Gyathaar's hard work wouldd have been for nought.

Edit2: I pmed BSP about this. Non-trivial in my book. This goes beyond a trick, imo it is an exploit for the purposes of this scenario.

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All your actions should be dictated by the main goal of keeping Rome well and protected. Therefore you may only found a city (or keep one you got from another nation) if:
(bla bla bla)

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What you found isn't a way to have more cities, but a problem that may lead to unavoidable disqualification*. I will warn the other teams

*Maybe you think "if we can't deny it it's not our choice and we can't be held responsible" but this doesn't apply here because you can decide when to recapture the city.

But it's not a good SGotm if we don't find some way to push the limits in a new way. I say congrats! BSP on leaving us a loophole to figure out.

Just looked at the save. A few decision to make:

1. What to tech after Writing?
2. What to build in Rome?
3. What to build in Horse City?
4. What to do with warriors?
5. What to improve first with worker?

Did I miss anything?

Regarding exploration, should we consider an exploring WB out of Horse City? If so, when? It could uncover a lot of the coast line quickly, open up coastal TRs, and find out if there are potentially any unreachable-by-land AIs.

Regarding the Mids, should we consider putting hammers into them without Stone? If not, when can we possibly get access to Stone? The stone to the NW looks appealing because it settles toward the AI, but it would require a sh!t ton of roading through the jungle and it would be dangerous with raging barbs. The stone in the south looks easier to get but it would take a long time to march a settler down there and the city would SUCK!

So, is the shortest path to Heredity Rule via the Mids (which also gets us a WW) or Monarchy?

BSPollux said:

What you found isn't a way to have more cities, but a problem that may lead to unavoidable disqualification*. I will warn the other teams

*Maybe you think "if we can't deny it it's not our choice and we can't be held responsible" but this doesn't apply here because you can decide when to recapture the city.

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Yea, that's fine. I figured you might say that. That's mostly why I posted it. I didn't want to post it in the maint. thread just in case you would allow us our fun.

WT, you get to take credit for preventing some team from accidentally screwing up BSP's scenario. I would like to thank and congratulate you.

Mitchum said:

Regarding exploration, should we consider an exploring WB out of Horse City? If so, when? It could uncover a lot of the coast line quickly, open up coastal TRs, and find out if there are potentially any unreachable-by-land AIs.

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This is an interesting idea, especially with barb galleys not coming online for a long time.

Here's a thought combininig Mitch's wb and WT's fish city. Channeling WT's inner criminal mind, we develop 4 cities before Rome gets past pop6. Gift Darius GemsCity+worker so he improves the deer+gems while we save maintenance (and maybe get a 2c TR). HC wb (12t travel time) instantly gives FishCity magical fish so it develops much faster. We get Rome to pop8 somehow* and re-capture Gems. Voila! Maybe our warring isn't even slowed down because we have more time to find Sal, build roads, and rapidly mobilize with 4 cities, costing us less unit maintenance over time. Also gives us more time to research some techs maybe.

We lose the gems 20h chop. Big deal--WT doesn't like us to chop 20h, so we'll let Darius do it instead.

Quick draft idea
Rome: wkr2(4)-settler3(partial)-SalChariot1(3)-wkr3?-settler3(5)-granary(4)-settler4(5)-library
HC: wb1(partial)-SalChariot2-wb1-chariots

1. SalChariots attempt to defog coastlines for TRs, although we need Sailing too for that. Find Sal.
2. Eventually we need to send 1 warrior to stone tile to safeguard Gems City for Darius.
3. Wkr3 would start roading somewhere, if we decided to start that sooner.

*Rome pop8 takes 5t with 4 farms and full granary. For example, pop5: 27/30f + 10f; 2x8f; 2x6f = pop8.
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Tested: HC and Gems will have TRs with only the corners of coastal tiles touching.

Edit: This means we can control our GEms destiny a bit more, if we gift to Darius. We can campt the deer and place the worker on the gems. DON't know if he'll send the wkr back to road the camp, but I doubt it. He'll still complete monument-archer, but we'll be able to re-capture the worker the turn he completes the mine so he doesn't get a border expansion and doesn't get a second archer from the chop. We can build the sentry warrior while camping the deer.

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Note: Run 0% research slider this turn. We get a bonus beaker at 15bpt after settling HC.

LowtherCastle said:

Note: Run 0% research slider this turn. We get a bonus beaker at 15bpt after settling HC.

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Normally, that's wise, but IIRC we are very close to Writing(3). I think we will get it, but 0% will surely make it Writing (4).

I think we have to run 60% this turn (+4 gpt)
then 100% (-2 gpt)