[BTS] SGOTM 15 - One Short Straw

[Dhoomstriker]

So, against Liz, we'll ideally have:
- Maces + Longbowmen to deal with Redcoats
- A mix of leftover Pikes and War Elephants to deal with Knights (I don't remember seeing her having any War Elephants of her own)
- siege units out of the wazoo
- other leftover units

Until we can build Longbowmen, War Elephants will be our best bet of units to build. Once we can build Longbowmen, switch production to Longbowmen, and once we can build Macement, switch production to Macemen. Obviously, keep building siege units, but the point is that we won't really need to build more Crossbowmen/Pikes/Axes/Horse Archers.

[Dhoomstriker]

I suppose that since Shaka's City of Ondini doesn't have any of our units close to it, we could just take Music + Feudalism + Civil Service from him now. No point in dragging out the war longer just to kill 2 more units.

Spoiler:

Seeing as how we might as well use our Great Scientist in a Golden Age, I see no problem with grabbing Civil Service now.


Hopefully, the fact that we have 452 War Weariness with Shaka that will go away will relieve most of our Unhappiness problems for a good litle while.


Given that we have 4/6 Theatres required for The Globe Theatre, is there anywhere that we might want to build it? Perhaps Ulundi would be a good candidate (perhaps that's why you've got a Theatre selected there as the build item, since the City which builds it also needs a Theatre)?


Kyoto should probably swap the 2 Scientists for 2 Merchants. I don't foresee us Lightbulbing anything useful with Great Scientists and the less Great Scientists that we get, the more chances that we'll have multiple different types of Great People for successive Golden Ages, while a Great Merchant would, of course, be the ideal Great Person to spawn right now.


Don't forget to build 4 Settlers somewhere.


Also, don't forget to start building some Hindu Missionaries out of Marble City.


It looks like Harappan's Corn was pillaged (perhaps by a Spy?), so that'll need to be re-Farmed.


Vijay's Cottage is almost a Hamlet, so I guess that we might as well just accept the fact that it got worked instead of a Coast square and thus will continue to work it, despite the sign on that square that says otherwise.


Wow, is it ever going to take a lot of Forts to travel north of Karakorum by water. Oh well, at least it's still feasibly possible to do so. It looks like there is a narrow passage in the ice to the north of there, so, presumably, it actually makes sense to lay those Forts down, although it could be that we end up next to some Peaks when we arrive at the end of the pathway. Trickiness like that might delay the fighting against Mansa.


It looks like Huayna is about to settle another City on his west coast.


It does look like in order for us to get Guilds from Genghis, we may have to have our eastern army be prevented from going after Cyrus. I guess that that fact will end up being one of the costs of going for Banking. On the plus side, we'll have an excuse to garrison Turfan with a mega-army.


That Fort of Genghis' on the north on his Copper with a Crossbowman and Pikeman defending it is funny. "I will lose my Cities, but at least I will keep my Copper. Oh, wait, once I lose my Cultural precense here, I won't own the Copper anyway. Darn, I suck."

The mass of Caravels outside of Ning-hsa is rather comical, too.

Spoiler:

In fact, we could be really sneaky jerks with Shaka. First, we'll not only build him 4 Cities in his old Cultural area, but we'll also plan to gift him a third City... either built in the middle of nowhere or else we can give him one of our junky Cities. Wherever we make it, we have to be happy with him getting some Culture there, so Satsuma isn't a good place.

I would think that maybe Sakae (the other Barb City) would be a good candidate... it's out of the way, easy for us to recapture at the end of the game if we do end up going for Conquest, allows us to get the Capture Gold from the Barb City without the burden of a junky City... and what it does is that we:
1. First take all of Shaka's techs for Peace
2. Get a Hindu missionary to the Sakae area (which will have a 100% chance of spreading, since a Barb City can't obtain a Religion via auto-spread)
3. Capture Sakae
4. Spread Hinduism in Sakae at a 100% chance of success
5. a) Chop Sakae's Forest either into a cheap unit at Sakae and then gift Sakae to Shaka
OR
5. b) Gift Sakae to Shaka then Chop its Forest into Memphis/Tokyo before the City comes out of revolt
6. Before we declare war on Shaka, Liberate the 4 Cities in his old territory that we built for him
7. Declare war on Shaka and capture those 4 Cities and capture Ondini, but leave him with the junky City Sakae
8. In future, we can Liberate Ondini (since it's a terrible City with no obvious Food Resource other than the Corn it is parked on top of, although I suppose that there could be Seafood, too, we won't worry about that possibility; and since it's Culture is out of the way so it won't bother us), giving us 5 Cities to Liberate to Shaka each time.

These 5 Cities will only marginally impact the Culture of nearby other Cities, at least until Shaka has owned them for a few turns with Hinduism in them, and even then there won't be a major impact on the nearby Cities, which allows us to keep all of his other Cities for our own uses.

Angle, in and of itself, isn't an amazing City, but at least it has a Spice Resource within its 1-square-radius and it is one our pathway to Cyrus, while most of Shaka's other Cities are halfway-decent.


Good idea with the Fort to the NE + N of NC, to get Delhi's Trebs coming faster to the west coast (which is probably where we want to send them for now, given that our eastern army is soon going to stagnate if Genghis' last City blocks us from reaching Cyrus).


Akkad might as well switch its G Cottage to the G Pig, particularly now that we're going to take Peace with Shaka.


Sippar can also work the Sheep instead of a Coast square.

Sippar will also need an Archer soon and may want to consider building itself a Lighthouse.


I would trade, at least temporarily, Nippur's GCow to Nongoma, then have Nippur work a GHRiv Mine, since Nippur growing quickly before it completes its Granary doesn't really help us out much, but Nongoma could put that Food to better use seeing as how Nongoma has a Granary.


Ulundi and Karakorum having Academies and settled Great Scientists is pretty cool... we may slowly make our way toward Banking without TOO much manual research.


UMgungundlovu could probably use a Granary once it comes out of revolt. The same could be said of Angle.


Angle will soon be under Cyrus' Cultural precense... I forget how the timing of Cultural Border expansion works, but perhaps next turn we can park our stack 2W of Ectabana and then declare war if, my understanding of Cultural Border expansion is correct, Cyrus' Cultural Borders will expand the next turn... which would put our advancing army 1 turn ahead of where it could be... but then again, perhaps we want to heal our army first in place and forget about that extra turn.


Either way, Sun Tzu should move form Bulwayo toward Angle (perhaps keep him with our stack 1W of Angle, rather than inside of Angle only being defended by a lone Horse Archer, in case Cyrus gets any fancy ideas about attacking us in between turns).


I suppose that it would be too late to bring Galleons to help out at the northern part of Cyrus' area, although it might be worth sending 1 or 2 Galleons from the west just to see if they can help to save some time in capturing one of Cyrus' final Cities.


Don't forget that by getting Civil Service, we can get extra Food by chaining Farms to some of our Corn and Rice Resources (I think that our only Wheat Resource already has irrigation, via its River). There are some in Hatty's old area and probably that Corn by Harappan, then wherever else you can find any.

[Dhoomstriker]

Also, we will need to remember to leave Cyrus with a single Buddhist City, then Cease Fire him instead of making Peace with him.

[Dhoomstriker]

I wonder... if Liz will just ignore a stack of 60+ units... could it be worth it to march such a stack through her lands right up to the gates of London and then capture London, while we have large stacks of units blocking her other units from leaving her area, except for her eastern-most City? Errrr, I guess we'd have no way of getting Peace or a Cease Fire with her once we captured London, so maybe that's not so hot of an idea.

[Dhoomstriker]

If we can get Shaka Friendly enough soon, we could even get Open Borders with him... then, every City that we capture from Liz can be gifted to Shaka, hahahaha! That way, we won't have to worry about losing the Cities back to Liz.

In fact, maybe we'll be able to bribe Shaka, who we'll make Hindu, into Closing Borders with LIZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Toku is easy to bribe into Closing Borders with someone.

That way, every time that we make progress against Liz, we'd gift a City to Shaka and Liz would be totally blocked from that square, and we could confidently march our stack forward... and those units of ours which we wanted to heal could just hide in Liz's ex-Cities in relative safety. HAHAHAHAHA!

[Dhoomstriker]

The only downside is the possibility of Culture Flips back to Liz, but given that a City must go through 2 flips, we should be safe from that possibility getting in our way.

[Dhoomstriker]

For the next AP vote, we might even allow it to be "Peace with Cyrus," since that's a better option than having to gift back a City to Shaka or Genghis. It's hard to say now--it'll depend upon how much progress we've made against Cyrus by that point in time.

[LowtherCastle]

Originally Posted by Dhoomstriker

Actually, given that you can just Liberate your way to victory, you don't necessarily need to be that goofy... just build the AP yourself and be done with it... your Voting Buddy could just as easily be Buddhist as them being Hindu when the AP was Christian/Jewish/etc. So, super simple... just abuse Liberating, and it's a cake walk. Either way, Liberating not having a cap is exploitative. Probably the only reason why Neilmeister didn't jump in and stop us (like he did for our Perpetual Anarchy via Religion + Civic swapping idea last game) when we pretty much said in our thread that it was exploitative, was that other teams were likely already talking about doing the same thing.

If we had konwn about the liberation plusmods at the beginning of the game the simple solution would have been to:

0. REX all possible cities and grow them to max happiness.
1. Oracle CoL.
2. Bulb/research Theology and build the AP
3. Bulb Astro so we could settle a Hindu city and gift to each AI. This is a no-brainer before knowing anygthing about the map because we are Philo and because we want to settle Hindu/AI cities asap, whether they're overseas or not.
4. Warmonger asap using the best possible units, but the only real goal is to beat down on our Voting buddy (Hammy) and open up our shipping lanes to the world.
5. Select as our Voting buddy the first AI to DoW us so we have minimal negmods with him. In our case, this would have been Hammy. Beat him down to 1 Hindu city so he doesn't like AIs enough to get negmods if we DOW them. Then LIberate his cities back to him for the vote.
6. Win.

[Mitchum]

The game is looking good so far... It's going to be a lot tougher than I though. Liz is kicking our butt!

Sorry for my absence. I've been away too much the last few weeks and work is backing up. I won't be able to play and turns but I'll be here for moral support.

I'm starting to think that Domination will be the fastest if the donut minus Liz plus HC and Mansa will push us over the land limit. My guess is that it should easily since Liz is contained in a small area. The only issue could be all of the mountains which count as land tiles but we cannot own.

IF... and that's a capital IF... we think we can take out Liz and capture the AP, that could be quicker. The biggest drawback is that HC/Mansa cannot be our opponent (if I read Dhoom's post correctly) so it would have to be someone on the donut and someone who is not liked by our voting buddy.

Tough times... Can we finish?

[ZPV]

I just don't see any value in maces Dhoom - yes they're our strongest unit against redcoats, but we're not trying to win a straight fight - just collateral them to death. They also prevent us building any more cheap(ish) junk units.

There is a possibility I overlooked.

If by some series of events we are able to extort Gunpowder from Cyrus or someone (yes, he has to research it first), our population is large enough that Chemistry and Mil.Sci are pretty much single bulbs. We would still have our large stack of siege+junk, but we would be able to make it go further by adding a few top units whipped (or possibly GG-upgraded) at the last minute - much more effectively than highly-promoted maces would.

[ZPV]

Victory conditions:

AP: Huayna currently has 182 votes. We need three times that - i.e. 550+ pop. It'll be hard to get that far, without beating down on Huayna.

Conquest: Domination is likely to be faster.

Domination: We could do: outer ring + Mansa/Huayna or try and do outer ring+Liz. I *think* there's enough land on the inner donut, if we capture it all.

Warring vs Liz: we're surprisingly close to being ready - we need some 30 more cats, and some lbows for city defence and other junk killer units, but it's not a million miles away.

[ZPV]

We're relatively close to a resolution-blocking vote. I'll start working on spreading Buddhism a little, to get us over the line as we beat down on Cyrus. It'll be nice not to have to worry about forced peace any more.

[Dhoomstriker]

Originally Posted by Mitchum

IF... and that's a capital IF... we think we can take out Liz and capture the AP, that could be quicker. The biggest drawback is that HC/Mansa cannot be our opponent (if I read Dhoom's post correctly) so it would have to be someone on the donut and someone who is not liked by our voting buddy.

Tough times... Can we finish?

We have several possible opponents:
1. Liz herself, once we own the AP
2. Huayna + Mansa, once we declare war on them (or once they learn Astronomy, upgrade their Galleys to Galleons, and declare war on us)... we just need Mansa to switch out of Free Religion, which he'll gladly do once he's at war, thereby putting him in Buddhist Theocracy
3. Cyrus, if we keep him alive

So, there's no lack of opponents.

Originally Posted by ZPV

We're relatively close to a resolution-blocking vote.

Great news! Perhaps it'll be worth 5 turns worth of Organized Religion, as long as we complete the Missionaries (not just whip them without completing them) before switching out of Organized Religion.

Originally Posted by ZPV

I just don't see any value in maces Dhoom - yes they're our strongest unit against redcoats, but we're not trying to win a straight fight - just collateral them to death. They also prevent us building any more cheap(ish) junk units.

In Forests, Maces will hold their own against Redcoats.

The goal isn't to win battles but to increase our odds so that Liz has passes less "courage checks" to attack us.

As you say, on defence, we're losing out, but if we can convince her more often than not to NOT attack our stack, then we can focus on staying on offense most of the time.

I'd be okay with Lightbulbing, but honestly, a lot is riding on:
a) not getting a Great Artist
AND
b) somehow getting Gunpowder, which I don't really see happening, unless we Lightbulb it ourselves, in which case we won't have a Great Scientist for a later tech

Unless you can conclusively put together a plan where we can extort Gunpowder, I'd say that we just skip that approach, get some Maces, and use a Great General to give us more powerful Maces.


Maces will also be the 2nd best unit to scare away Liz's siege units, after Musketmen, but Maces can be had right now without needing to trade away a Golden Age like we would in order to Lightbulb Gunpowder now.


Please build the Settlers and Hindu Missionaries for Shaka... even if we don't use him as a Voting Buddy, it'll actually be really useful to have him take Cities off of our hands if we can get him up to Friendly (or even Pleased, I think) so that he'll be willing to Close Borders with Liz.

[Dhoomstriker]

If we're honestly serious about Domination, we should probably pause to count squares on the map that we can feasibly get within our Cultural Borders. I don't really know how that all works, but what I do know is that when I was playing, we had less than half of the World's required Land Area. So, I'm thinking that Domination is a LONG ways off.

Huayna doesn't look to be too hard to get to, but getting to Mansa could require quite the winding Galleon chain, at least that's the impression that I was getting from the Ice that I saw to the north of Karakorum, although there might be a better entrance on the western side of the map.


Let's say that we ignored Liz and went for Domination... and found that we couldn't do it, only to see that Liz has Airships + Cannons + Infantry + Machine Guns + Railroads connecting her Cities. Fun times. I still think that she should be our next target (after Cyrus) and if our western army weren't blocked, I'd even say before Cyrus. In fact, we may have to eliminate Genghis just to get our western army to Liz... which means possibly not taking Guilds or else wasting turns at Peace just to be able to have the benefit of Mercantilism later.

[ZPV]

Originally Posted by Dhoomstriker

If we're honestly serious about Domination, we should probably pause to count squares on the map that we can feasibly get within our Cultural Borders. I don't really know how that all works, but what I do know is that when I was playing, we had less than half of the World's required Land Area. So, I'm thinking that Domination is a LONG ways off.

Huayna doesn't look to be too hard to get to, but getting to Mansa could require quite the winding Galleon chain, at least that's the impression that I was getting from the Ice that I saw to the north of Karakorum, although there might be a better entrance on the western side of the map.


Let's say that we ignored Liz and went for Domination... and found that we couldn't do it, only to see that Liz has Airships + Cannons + Infantry + Machine Guns + Railroads connecting her Cities. Fun times. I still think that she should be our next target (after Cyrus) and if our western army weren't blocked, I'd even say before Cyrus. In fact, we may have to eliminate Genghis just to get our western army to Liz... which means possibly not taking Guilds or else wasting turns at Peace just to be able to have the benefit of Mercantilism later.

Donut+Mansa+Huayna is definitely enough - between them they have 20% of land. Donut+Liz is close - I'm not sure if there are enough tiles there, or if we'd have to add a few from the AI team.

Remember, we do have two civs' worth of land already to come out of revolt and pop its borders. Domination isn't as far off as it looks.

I expect the entrance to Mali is in the west.

[ZPV]

Originally Posted by Dhoomstriker

We have several possible opponents:
1. Liz herself, once we own the AP
2. Huayna + Mansa, once we declare war on them (or once they learn Astronomy, upgrade their Galleys to Galleons, and declare war on us)... we just need Mansa to switch out of Free Religion, which he'll gladly do once he's at war, thereby putting him in Buddhist Theocracy
3. Cyrus, if we keep him alive

So, there's no lack of opponents.

We don't need an opponent in the vote. We only need <75% and someone to vote for us.

In Forests, Maces will hold their own against Redcoats.

The goal isn't to win battles but to increase our odds so that Liz has passes less "courage checks" to attack us.

As you say, on defence, we're losing out, but if we can convince her more often than not to NOT attack our stack, then we can focus on staying on offense most of the time.

I'd be okay with Lightbulbing, but honestly, a lot is riding on:
a) not getting a Great Artist
AND
b) somehow getting Gunpowder, which I don't really see happening, unless we Lightbulb it ourselves, in which case we won't have a Great Scientist for a later tech

Unless you can conclusively put together a plan where we can extort Gunpowder, I'd say that we just skip that approach, get some Maces, and use a Great General to give us more powerful Maces.


Maces will also be the 2nd best unit to scare away Liz's siege units, after Musketmen, but Maces can be had right now without needing to trade away a Golden Age like we would in order to Lightbulb Gunpowder now.

I'm honestly not concerned about scaring away her stack. Every redcoat that attacks one of our units is a redcoat that isn't fortified and fully healthy in one of her hill cities.

How about, I avoid Civil Service now, and if Cyrus has Gunpowder I'll take that from him; otherwise Civil Service and you can have your maces, albeit last-minute.

Please build the Settlers and Hindu Missionaries for Shaka... even if we don't use him as a Voting Buddy, it'll actually be really useful to have him take Cities off of our hands if we can get him up to Friendly (or even Pleased, I think) so that he'll be willing to Close Borders with Liz.

You mean, we could give former English cities to Shaka so that Liz can't recapture them? That's probably a good enough reason to keep Shaka alive.
Settlers and chain-liberating though are a whole other scale of investment.
I don't think Closed Borders would make much difference - the only reason to make that investment would be as a voting buddy, and I don't see us as having enough votes ever - we're a long way off the 550 population we'd need.

[Dhoomstriker]

Originally Posted by ZPV

How about, I avoid Civil Service now, and if Cyrus has Gunpowder I'll take that from him; otherwise Civil Service and you can have your maces, albeit last-minute.

Agreed.

Originally Posted by ZPV

You mean, we could give former English cities to Shaka so that Liz can't recapture them? That's probably a good enough reason to keep Shaka alive.
Settlers and chain-liberating though are a whole other scale of investment.

It's not that hard to whip a few Settlers once Shaka's ex-Cities come out of revolt.

Unfortunately, the two ideas go hand-in-hand. For us to get value out of gifting Cities to Shaka, we'll have to first bribe him to Close Borders with Liz. For that to happen, we'll need to Liberate Cities to Shaka in order to get us on his good side.

There's a lot less value in gifting Liz' Cities to Shaka if we can't get Open Borders with him but Liz gets to keep it with him.

Certainly, it's still workable compared to having to defend said Cities, but we could put ourselves in an awkward situation if those Cities come out of revolt and they mess with our reinforcements, not to mention we'd lose the otherwise-awesome healing ability of Cities that are impervious to Liz' units. She may even go haywire trying to figure out how to attack said units and thus might not send stacks out toward Turfan or our other Cities.

[LowtherCastle]

Gifting Lizzie's cities to a primitive AI immediately after capture seems like a great idea to avoid having to defend them while moving onward. Even if Lizzie puts her units back in those cities, we could CF her at the appropriate time and re-capture them from Shaka or whoever without having to attack her units.

THe best choice might be someone she's Friendly with so she can't DoW him, but someone would have to check the XML to see if TOku can DoW at Friendly.

[ZPV]

AD1160, cont'd

We make peace with Shaka, for Feudalism, Music, and he revolts to Barbarism and Paganism.
War weariness decreases, and I have some MMing to do, including some Culture-building.

IBT:
Cyrus is elected AP resident

AD1170:
We capture Ning-Hsia, and then make peace, in exchange for Guilds and Genghis's world map. News: there's no northern passage around Cyrus, and there's no access to the canal, except by Cherokee and Canterbury.
I'll plan out the Cyrus war now. I expect I'll DoW this turn to take advantage of the forced unowned tiles.
We do indeed DoW Cyrus.

IBT:
We've got trouble. In the form of an Elizabethan DoW. Oh well.

AD1180:
I'll do what I can. We still have more power than Liz so if there are no huge losses then we might be able to get a CF when she talks.
We capture Ectabana, and mop up a few English stragglers.

IBT:
Liz doesn't advance.

AD1190:
We have at least 60 units in former Mongolia. I'm considering marching on Coventry to save time later, but it'll have to wait for a few units to heal.

IBT:
We pop Copper at GEL.
Liz has only 3 redcoats in Coventry. Now I'm really tempted.

AD1200:
The our English stack prepares to advance. Coventry is a chokepoint we can hold easily, and we'll have a cacophony of siege weapons on its doorstep.
I'll pause briefly to let my computer cool down.

[Mitchum]

Looking good so far, ZPV. Maybe Liz declaring on us is a blessing in disguise. Otherwise we would have debated for about 100 posts whether we were ready for her or not...

EDIT: Can you upload a save to the upload site?