SGOTM 14 - One Short Straw

Believe it or not, I'm only at the end of T158 so far. I've been thinking a lot about the warring. I can now see from GK's land that we almost surely don't need that settler+fort. The fort will be covered soon enough by Old Sarai and GK is dead meat very very soon.

I've uploaded the save so you guys can look at it. Not much new really, eacept our cash is taking a severe hit since we didn't capture any cities this turn. We may have to seriously consider extreme financial measures. In fact, I think we need to rapidly analyze how many more units we really need. I think Shaka will fall pretty rapidly too. So we'll need to decide whether we just go down on Mansa or what?

Mitch, now we be a good time to take the latest upload and get a domination count. GK's land is pretty much what we see. The fogged area looks like coast, excpet maybe for a tile or two. I've changed the dotmap (ctrl-X) to red because for me it's easier to distinguish lines. COme to think of it, maybe I should be turning off the grid for that. Then it might be a lot more visible. I've never tried that.

I'm continuing...

In contrast to thinking about the minimal number of units, we could optionally look at the financial problem as one where we should try and squeeze out as many units as possible and then aim to attack more targets than needed, using more City-capture Gold and less building of Wealth (but still building Wealth in the last couple of turns when units can no longer reach the front lines) as a means of keeping our economy alive in the last couple of turns of the game.


Either way, the less Settlers that actually need to "sit down" before the last couple of turns, the better, so that we only incur the really high Maintenance Costs at the very end of the game.


I don't suppose that any of the AIs have built a Holy Shrine that we want to target capturing?

Dhoomstriker said:

I don't suppose that any of the AIs have built a Holy Shrine that we want to target capturing?

Click to expand...

Speak of the Devil! We just captured the Temple of Soloman in Karakorum for 29gpt. Dare I say a mere pittance?

OK. I have to stop for the moment in my tile counting. Here is where I am so far:

Our current tile count is 394. The total land tiles is 1321. We need 68% or 899 tiles.

If we were to just let our borders expand naturally (with some culture building), settle cities 2 and 4 as shown on the map, and capture Phrygian (barbs), Usngungundlouu (size 12), Nobamba (size 6), Nodwengu (size 5), Nongoma (size 8) Ondini (size 8), Otrar (size 2) Karakorum (size 10), Tabriz (size 2), Tiflis (size 2) and Turfan (size 10) and all of these cities came out of revolt and expanded their borders once, we'd have 710 tiles. That's still 189 tiles short.

I picked these cities to start with because I knew that we could capture them quickly and they could come out of revolt in time. We can capture many more cities but some of the larger ones may still be in revolt, so we'd have to raze them and plant more settlers in their place.

If we control all of the Milanese peninsula tiles (109 by LC's count), we're still 80 tiles short (710 + 109 = 819). The western part of the Zulu peninsula that I hadn't counted already adds another 23 tiles (819+23 = 842). Still 57 tiles short. Settling all of the spoke and a few more cities to caputure tiles here and there, I think we'll still be a tad short.

Gandhi has about 100 tiles in his area and Monte has about 136 tiles. That's 236 or 17% of the total. We should be able to leave them alone and make it easily. I'm not sure where the 1321 - 842 - 100 - 136 = 243 are. That's a lot of missing tiles. I've noticed in games past that the tile count doesn't get updated immediately. Let me quickly count our current tiles to see what I come up with... a quick count gave 305 which is nearly 90 short. Sigh... I must have missed an entire peninsula. I have to run now!!

I'm not sure if this helps. I hope to have more time tonight or tomorrow but we're still living out of boxes after our move and my wife has a LONG list of things I have to get done by Sunday or else...

"Done playing."

Uploaded. We're done with our golden age and we'll go into deficit spending this turn. I'm not sure what to do next. I don't have any experience with such matters. Not sure we want to start a GA if it's going to mean units dying off. My dot map calcs show that we can settle as per the ctrl-X dotmap and capture all of the Mansa hub cities and the Ax... city on his spoke and we'll make it, even without taking the Monty city in the hub. Maybe we should just focus on that, sending our stuff to Oz after finalizing Shaka and utilize civic revolts to keep our units alive. The question is, do we currently have enough units? I don't konw. It's pitty we've run out of time.

Good luck, bbp.

If we happen to get GM next turn, we could skip the GA, go for the trade mission in Delhi, and use the GArtist to blow open a resisting city with lots of surrounding land at the end.

If it's not a Great Merchant, I guess we'll be launching a Golden Age immediately, right?

I mean, I'd rather have our potential turns of Anarchy happening AFTER we have built more units (i.e. after a Golden Age) rather than before then... i.e. use the time now to build units, Culture, Theatres, Settlers, etc, then use the last few turns of the game in Anarchy (if necessary) while our Galleons, Military Units, and Settlers move around the map.

Doing so makes far more sense than going into Anarchy now, since going into Anarchy now stops the production of Settlers, Military Units, Theatres, building Culture, etc, and doesn't "buy" us any time for Cities that have yet to be captured to come out of revolt.

Anarchy at the end could buy us some turns where we'd otherwise lose cash while waiting for Cities to come out of revolt.

I think constant anarchy to avoid strikes is a banned exploit. Strike aren't the end of the world. I think you lose one unit a turn for the first few turns, two units a turn for the next few and so on. I don't think you can predict which units get disbanded first, so we just need to be sure that each stack is bigger than needed. bbp said that settlers don't disband, but I'm not sure. I've only been in a strike situation once and that was a test game when I wanted to see what happened...

Mitchum said:

I think constant anarchy to avoid strikes is a banned exploit.

Click to expand...

It's also an obsolete banned exploit. In the code, a 5-turn period between Civic switches was implemented in order to close the exploit. There is absolutely nothing wrong with what we are proposing, since we can only do it once (twice if you count switching to a Religion, which we may not want to do as doing so reduces our Cultural output) within a 5-turn period... meaning, essentially, once (or twice counting a Religion switch) in our game, given the amount of turns that are left.

I believe its the furthest unit (presumably from your capital) that is outside of your Cultural Borders.

If we could somehow Chop a new Palace that is closer to Emerald City, then we might be able to have units like our Warrior that is at the northern part of our core area get disbanded as part of a Strike instead of our units that are near the Wizard.

Palaces are cheap to build, so it might be worth doing... we'll almost certainly incur EVEN MORE Maintenance Costs but at least we could then feasibly "protect" the units that are close to the Palace... i.e. the units on the western side of the map if we can build our Palace on the western side of the map.

That's an idea that's worth testing just to confirm it is based off of our Palace's location, as if it works based off of our Palace's location and based off of units outside of our Cultural Borders, we might be able to have the "farther away units that we don't care about" being disbanded and we might even intentionally sacrifice some Military Police or other units by moving them outside of our Cultural Borders on the far side of the map away from our Palace.


I don't suppose that any AI team founded Islam, did they? I.e. Is there a team that might be close to completing Versailles for us to capture?


We're getting to the point where the deadline is looming and just completing the game (even if it means taking Silver or Bronze) is better than going for Gold and not finishing at all... it depends upon how much time people have to commit to playing, but there's only just over 24 hours left and both LC and bbp must be getting burned out by now.

Wazzup bbp?

Has anyone tried to contact shyuhe, ZPV, or mdy?


In regards to Great People: let's launch a Golden Age regardless of what we get. The Great Merchant and Great Artist ideas are nice but we've already committed... had we really wanted to use the Great Artist for Culture Bombing, we would have saved our Great Engineer and used him to launch our second non-MoM-enhanced Golden Age.

However, we've now invested in MoM so a Golden Age just makes sense. The extra Hammers that will come out NOW will be of use... if for no other reason than to have more units at the end that we can lose to Strikes.

I'm siding with Mitchum that we can probably survive Strikes without Anarchy, even though turns of Anarchy are a legitimate tactic.

All that we'll really lose are units... one or two after the second turn of Strike and then maybe 3 or 4 units per turn thereafter...

If we can aim to take down the Wizard while we're still running the Golden Age, we won't really care THAT much about random units disappearing from the map since we'll have killed the Wizard.

Otherwise, we'll just want to park our Wizard-killing stacks in the Cultural Borders of a nearby City until we have a large enough Wizard-killing stack built up that can sail out while possibly losing a few of the stack's numbers to a Strike.

During a Strike, we can still build Culture and still hire Artist Specialists. The City Governors might even auto-hire Specialists until we get our first 10 Culture.


We might consider whipping a Market in the City with a Holy Shrine before switching to Caste System at the end of our Golden Age (right now I'm thinking switching to Caste System while we're still in our Golden Age and forgetting about Anarchy being our best move), maybe some Courthouses... maybe not.

We'll have to be careful not to overwhip our Population points so as to still be able to achieve Domination, but larger Cities that are farther from our Palace will cost us more in Maintenance than will larger Cities that are close to our Palace or Forbidden Palace.

Once our Golden Age is about to run out, we might whip some Buildings (not if we're very close to the Domination Population limit), switch Civics, then start building Wealth and hiring Merchants (not Artists--they look similar as each other) in most of our Cities, since, thanks to running the Golden Age, we should have sufficient units except for perhaps Settlers... and Settlers won't die to a Strike.

TO TEST:
I'm not sure if Galleons can Strike or if the units on board a Galleon can Strike... it would be good to know the answers to these questions... as well as what happens if you have a Galleon with units stacked together with a Galleon that doesn't have units and the Galleon with units goes on Strike--do the units transfer over?

Been testing STRIKEs.

1. Turn-by-turn losses are:

Turn 1: Amnesty
Turns 2/3: 1 unit disbanded
Turns 4/5: 2 units disbanded
Turns 6/7: 3 units disbanded
and so on...

THis means after 12 turns of GA we will have lost 42 units...

2. There is clearly a prioritization of what units get disbanded, but it's a been complicated. I didn't look for the code, no time, but I'm pretty sure it's roughly this:

Safe units: Settlers, GPs (not warlords), last defender in a city, galleons with settlers or GPs

Priority 1: military units go before non-military (not 100%: I saw workers outside cultural borders go before military inside)
Priority 2: units outside cultural borders go before those within
Priority 3: (military) attackers go before defenders
Priority 4: (military) weaker units go first (this probably has some randomness) EDIT: This may not be a factor at all
Priority 5: (non-military) workers go before scouts
Priority 6: Distance has some effect, but within some sort of random limits EDIT: This may not be a factor at all
Priority 7: Galleons seemed to be spared until free military units are gone, subject to the cultural factor.

Caveat: All of this is based on limited testing.

in progress

STRIKE Conclusions:

1. Don't attach the GG as a Warlord until the second-to-last turn.
2. We could attempt to minimize losses by building chariots and sending them out of the city culture, but we will lose macemen, there's no doubt about it.

I found this:

DanF5771 said:

A quick look at the code shows (BTS 3.17): Every player has a counter starting at 0 and incrementing every turn his units are on strike, it appears there is no way to reset this counter. In case of strike and counter > 1 the game will disband up to counter/2 units (disbanding will stop if break even is reached).

Units safe from disbanding: transports with cargo, GPs, single military police

Factors that decrease the likelihood of a unit to be chosen for disbanding:

• high production cost
• high XPs + level
• city defenders
• currently in home territory

Units sorted according to Type/AI from least likely to most likely to be chosen for disbanding:
Sea Explorers, Settlers, Work boats, Scouts/Explorers, Spies, Workers, Missionaries, City defenders, non offensive Navy, ICBMs, non offensive Air Force/Missiles, all other units (mostly offensive).

So maybe producing cheap low xp Warriors/Archers/Chariots and moving them out of one's territory quickly to "sacrifice" them might help to keep those valuable CR3 Swords/Maces/Trebs at the front alive. Still, the choice of the units for disbanding is sort of a Russian Roulette, since -no surprise- the RNG has quite an impact there too...

Click to expand...

Settlers definitely didn't get disbanded in my tests.

My testing also confirms that the STRIKE counter does NOT get reset when you leave the STRIKE. If you're money goes into deficit again, you immediately start losing troops at the rate determined by your total STRIKE counter to-date.

So the basic strategy is:

Before our units die:
1. Clear all tiles necessary for domination.
2. Kill Oz.

Once the above is done, we don't care about STRIKE, as long as we don't lose our galleon chains for transporting settlers:

Keep a settler in each galleon as long as the chain is needed. (This is difficult to do.)
BUild settlers and settle everywhere possible and expand cultural borders to achieve domination.

LowtherCastle said:

Wazzup bbp?

Click to expand...

Sorry, dude. Last night just disappeared on me...

Looking now. I think we definitely need to take some emergency measures. ZPV was saying this would be a high maintenance map and our empire is quite spread out. I don't think I've ever experienced this much financial trouble at this stage, let alone with GLH.

Let me think about it for a bit...

I'm going to take a quick look at the map and get back to you with my best thoughts. Whatever we do, we need to start soon.

For starters, we can demand 100g from Monty. That'd get us to the next turn. We're so close to paying for this turn, it'd be a bummer to lose all that cash and still pay a STRIKE turn.

Then we'd see if we get a GM or not. I'm fairly convinced we don't want to go with a GA at this point. We need to keep the flexibility of revolting while we do our warring.

Well, we can capture uMgun... That should get us to next turn. Demanding from Monte should be fine, too.