SGOTM 23 - Turbo Ants

WastinTime said:

Stalin has 40 gold.
what tech to trade him? And he's willing to do lots of other nasty things. Stir up trouble?

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I wonder, can we get him to peace vassal down the line? We could use some turns of common war (vs Gandhi, Darius, etc) to help the diplo.

Don't give him Aesthetics or Calendar. It would be unfortunate if he built MoM or Parthenon before we're ready to take them.

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as usual, taking a break, and specifically sleeping, brings new ideas.

1) We can't build missionaries without a monastery after the Pacifism switch
I still like conquest, but to keep the AP option open, we'd need a monastery or two.
I'm building a monastery in Alexa, but that was for the beakers. Not a great producer or a great location for miss. to pop out of.

We will likely need to spread to Church, Stalin, Mongols and kill everyone else. Maybe a northern city that's not scheduled for GP farm, like Fredburg should have a monastery?
For Stalin, we might be able to gift him something like Hamburg with Islam in it.

2) Up until this turn, we've needed to put out some critical HAs. The final ones were all born this turn along with our goldcity settler. Now might be the perfect time to adopt Islam. Or maybe next turn after Jersualem's borders pop. We need to consider that we don't get any culture from other religions, but I think only Jerusalem will use this for one turn and it would be fine without it. We'd lose 5 to building culture. What else do we gain an lose?
Happy gain: probably no value there.
Anarchy turn. We lose all the hammers, food, beaker, culture for 1t, but all our units still move and workers work. We'd lose ~250 final-bpt.
So all the gains come in the form of OR buildings/wonders and failgold. We'd want to get Islam into Berlin (forge, rax, HE) and especially Athens.
We need to build Parthenon, MoM, Aqueduct/HG, Moai in several cities and other failgold on wonders. Would 15 turns of OR bonus be worth the anarchy?
Can Athens produce Moai, MoM, ?also Parthenon? and still grow to be a GP farm? I didn't study this yet.

I estimate we would only save about 200h raw (50h of that converted to gold) using the OR bonus.
Probably not worth it, so it's probably time to figure out where the wonders can go.
How about Thebes putting the overflow into Aqueduct/HG instead of Moai gold or a Islam missionary. It should be able to handle that and grow. The north can do further needed missionaries.
I didn't analyze if Thebes can actually do that and get to size 14, nor did I analyze Athens yet.

Oh yea, as usual, I'm forgetting to pause the saves so be careful. I keep thinking I'm going to remember to do that.

Athens can do Moai + 1 other. Getting both others seems really tight at best, without calculating it. Popping a GP shouldn't be difficult though.
EDIT: We'll end up at pop 10 or 11. The hammers for Moai+MoM are fairly relaxed - we only need one of the two available chops.
Moai+MoM+Parthenon isn't going to happen.

EDIT:
Oporto seems doable at a stretch for Parthenon. 4 chops = 114*2 = 228h, plus 22hpt at size 3 (Fish+Cow+Iron) for 8 turns.

If we want to win AP, we also need to not have too many votes, right? We'd achieve that by spreading Islam to multiple Russian cities.

WastinTime said:

I estimate we would only save about 200h raw (50h of that converted to gold) using the OR bonus.
Probably not worth it, so it's probably time to figure out where the wonders can go.
How about Thebes putting the overflow into Aqueduct/HG instead of Moai gold or a Islam missionary. It should be able to handle that and grow. The north can do further needed missionaries.
I didn't analyze if Thebes can actually do that and get to size 14, nor did I analyze Athens yet.

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Thebes can build Aqueduct-HG, and get to size 14, just about.
I've examined two sets of micro - one with a 2pop Aqueduct, and one with a 3pop Aqueduct. The 3pop looks like it comes out 2 hammers ahead but loses out on a fair bit of commerce due to running at lower population.
EDIT:
In fact, not whipping at all seems even better. The strategy is just to run max growth to pop 13, and then 6 or 7 mines for 26-30 base hpt.
This also saves on whip anger.

This is all assuming we have enough health and happiness. We currently don't have enough happiness to run all the mines at the end.
+1 pop from HG puts us at 15 pop - do we need the 15th or was it really just 14 pop we needed?

EDIT: We don't have time for a forge in Thebes.

EDIT: Agreed, religion is not worth a revolt at this point.

Oops, Thebes works 4 fish which supports 10 sci, but one is free from Merc, so it only needs to be 13.

When we throw in GPP from HG,Thebes will likely be going too fast. It's going to have to pace itself, so it's probably fine even if it was only size 10 or 11 before HG. It will have time to grow in the golden age I think. I'd have to re-check the GP plan.

We have wine, gold, and incense coming plus religion happy. Then there is trade for silk, spice island? etc.

WastinTime said:

Tomorrow, I plan to take Edirne t100, Lisbon t101 and upload. then end Turnset.

Anyone ready to take it?

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I think I should be able to play again. I've been reading along and sort of following the train of thought. Would it be possible to get a summary of:

our tech path
the GoldenAge and civic change plan
the GP plan
the wonder build plan, including failgold plans.

tech is easy: Machinery, (free Monarchy), Feudal, Guilds, Banking, (philo trade/steal/research)

GA: All along, we've been using my pre-game estimate of T115, but what we should really try to work out is when can we finish that tech path above, plus our desired wonders, and start the GA then. Every turn earlier we can start the GA is probably 1 turn earlier we can get to railroad which may or may not affect our win date.

Civics: when the GA starts: Rep, Vassalage, Caste, Merc, Pacifism, and also adopt Islam

GP plan : laid out in pretty fine detail a few pages back.

Wonders : HG is planned. We're working on what Athens can do and what needs to be chopped out somewhere like Persepolis or Berlin.

Failgold: I feel like we need to be very aggressive here. As ZPV said, it would be nice to have a ton of gold to spend on knight upgrades, but we're barely staying above water on research. I've already started putting chunks of hammers into Moai since we don't have Marble. I see us completing Moai in Athens and getting at least 500 gold hopefully 1000. Moai help us with wonders there.

When my turnset is over, I'll have a lot of time to be online and discuss my thoughts on each city and the GP plan. I just can't play any more after Thursday.

I just counted our research and now that we have monarchy, we can get all the way to Banking T113 including manually research Philo.

So I guess we should up our plans for pop growth and probably split wonders into different cities. Like maybe SQ builds one so Athens can still grow.

We don't get Marble until ~T105

Yea, SQ has 2 chops left and should probably do MoM (450h)--the bigger one. It can set up some nice max OF whips from now until T105 marble.

Athens does Moai(250) + parthenon (400h).

ZPV said:

If we want to win AP, we also need to not have too many votes, right? We'd achieve that by spreading Islam to multiple Russian cities.

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No, ideally we either whip our cities down or gift them so we don't have to build missionaries.

ok, no whipping in thebes. Thx for the analysis. I'll send 1 worker to slowly mine it after the cows in Jerusalem.

I feel we have a good vision of the near future to move forward and end my turnset where I planned--with the capture of Edirne and Lisbon. I'm going to cancel OB with Joao this turn, DoW 100, capture 101.

Oporto for Parthenon is an option (thx ZPV). SQ still looks good to me to. Next player can decide.

My fantasy for Oporto was that we leave it with Joao running 3 sci and steal philo from Joao when he pops a GS. But my recent check on our tech pace shows we can research it. Maybe it's better we take Oporto and use the forests, etc. since we have an army there.

WastinTime said:

ok, no whipping in thebes. Thx for the analysis. I'll send 1 worker to slowly mine it after the cows in Jerusalem.

I feel we have a good vision of the near future to move forward and end my turnset where I planned--with the capture of Edirne and Lisbon. I'm going to cancel OB with Joao this turn, DoW 100, capture 101.

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No whipping was based on the somewhat extreme requirement to grow up to pop 14.
It still seems to work though - you're trading turns at high population (when you run around 30hpt) for extra turns regrowing the whipped population.

Thebes might need a 2nd worker to get all its mines at some point - including the jungle plains hill.

I'm happy for you to play

So any comments on the Stalin trade?
I'm planning CoL for 40 gold plus some mischief....like having him cancel trades with someone.
- He's getting silver from darius but so are we.
- He's getting Marble from Memed, that deal is going away soon.
- Pig from Khan, but for some reason we don't have trade connection with Khan, so we wouldn't be able to get the Pig.

Ah ha!
Mao's Rice to Stalin for Iron.

We can get Mao's rice +2 for one of our 3 wheats. And as a bonus, we deny Iron to Mao.
Crap! They are pleased. Stalin will cancel deals with anyone except Mao

Ah ha!
Mao has another Rice he's trading to Memed for Sheep. Edirne has 2 sheep. So we should be able to get rice. Back to the mischief....

We could get Stalin to DoW anyone including Mao. The price is steep.
Do we want to share a war? against Joao?
As always, the price is pretty cheap if we are already at war so we'd want to save that bribe for T100.
We could get him to war with Memed for nothing..included free in the Col for 40 deal. I suspect we don't want him to take Memed's last city for us do we?

ZPV said:

Thebes might need a 2nd worker to get all its mines at some point - including the jungle plains hill.

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I wasn't thinking you meant ALL mines...like ALL TEN of them.
I'd like to find a happy medium where we work ~7 of them. New mines go only on the plains-hills and we skip the jungled one.

WastinTime said:

I wasn't thinking you meant ALL mines...like ALL TEN of them.
I'd like to find a happy medium where we work ~7 of them. New mines go only on the plains-hills and we skip the jungled one.

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Umm I was just going on the 7 plains hills needing ~20 worker turns to complete.
EDIT: Didn't read that properly. We might need the jungled one, depending on how soon we want to accelerate our golden age.

WastinTime said:

So any comments on the Stalin trade?
I'm planning CoL for 40 gold plus some mischief....like having him cancel trades with someone.
- He's getting silver from darius but so are we.
- He's getting Marble from Memed, that deal is going away soon.
- Pig from Khan, but for some reason we don't have trade connection with Khan, so we wouldn't be able to get the Pig.

Ah ha!
Mao's Rice to Stalin for Iron.

We can get Mao's rice +2 for one of our 3 wheats. And as a bonus, we deny Iron to Mao.
Crap! They are pleased. Stalin will cancel deals with anyone except Mao

Ah ha!
Mao has another Rice he's trading to Memed for Sheep. Edirne has 2 sheep. So we should be able to get rice. Back to the mischief....

We could get Stalin to DoW anyone including Mao. The price is steep.
Do we want to share a war? against Joao?
As always, the price is pretty cheap if we are already at war so we'd want to save that bribe for T100.
We could get him to war with Memed for nothing..included free in the Col for 40 deal. I suspect we don't want him to take Memed's last city for us do we?

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Yeah, the opportunities for Stalin just aren't jumping out at me. Setting up a peace vassal still seems like the only big opportunity - he'll do it at Pleased, but we'll need to amass quite a lot of power and wipe out some weak AIs before he'll do it.

Stalin capturing Mehmed's last city would probably be inconvenient if we need to run some quick conquest on him later on.

+Diplo for shared war? Might as well.