SGOTM 11 - Fifth Element

Irgy said:

Dehli and GPFarm are growing at the start, so it's a bad time for Pacifism. I should have '5' marked on Dehli for four turns (which is 3 + 2 from the GLib), and 3 on GPFarm the first five turns.

In general, if we assume we can write off the 7GP plan as silly (which I think is a fair call, particularly since we have no use for the extra GP anyway as it comes late), then the only bit of timing that isn't nigh-on inevitable anyway is the race between Dehli and Three Clams. Everything else is highly robust to changing things around*.

That's why my later posts just talk about this race. Basically if we want a second from Dehli, we want Dehli to win the race. Otherwise it doesn't matter, and we might prefer to get the Three Clams scientist first (which will happen anyway if we leave things be). Although we might prefer Dehli to win just so that we know what we're getting from Dehli sooner, to let us plan around it.

EDIT - I should also point out that Pacifism and Golden ages won't affect this race particularly either. The only significant impact they have on timing is with GPFarm.


* We also need to make sure GPFarm gets the next (the 1500gpp) great person in all cases, but that should happen on its own unless we go out of our way to avoid it.

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Okay, let's see if I understand what you're saying here.
1. Grt Person Farm should get the next Great Person no matter which scenario we use. This fact seems to be supported by all of the options that you and Mitchum have presented, although it is possible that I missed an option with all of the Excel documents that I currently have open.

2. "A bad time for Paficism" doesn't mean that it is bad to run Pacifism, it just means that we won't gain as much from doing so during that time and that even if we do run Pacifism during that time, it may not speed up your scenarios. However, running Pacifism for those extra 5 turns also will not "mess up" your scenarios, either. Am I right on the latter part or will Scientists need to be juggled if we run Pacifism during those first 5 turns, just to maintain your Great Person spawning order?

3. If we do not run a Golden Age and if we switch out of Pacifism immediately and permanently, then both your and Mitchum's 5-Great-People scenarios actually only get us an extra 4 Great People within my suggested "40 turn" limit. So, the question becomes--can we make do with just those 4 Great People?

4. Spawning a Great Person in Delhi gives us a significant risk of spawning a non-Great-Scientist. Assuming that we spawn 2 Great Scientists as our next 2 Great People by not using Delhi as one of the Cities, it looks like the "leanest" case (i.e. no more Pacifism and no Golden Age) of the spreadsheets so far is to get the first one in Great Person Farm in 5 turns and the next one in Three Clams 8 turns later, in 13 turns. That would be Mitchum's "NO GA, No Pacifism" approach. We can possibly play around with the scenarios to improve upon these numbers, but assuming that these numbers are accurate, then our 2nd Great Person (hopefully, a Great Scientist) will be spawned just after my turnset.

In order to alter this date, we'll need to use one or both of Pacifism or a Golden Age, from what an initial inspection tells me, but I haven't really played around with the numbers yet.

5. A second Great Person from Grt Person Farm is far more feasible to achieve than a second Great Person from Delhi.


Please correct any mistakes in my understanding.

Dhoomstriker said:

Okay, let's see if I understand what you're saying here.
1. Grt Person Farm should get the next Great Person no matter which scenario we use. This fact seems to be supported by all of the options that you and Mitchum have presented, although it is possible that I missed an option with all of the Excel documents that I currently have open.

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Yep

Dhoomstriker said:

2. "A bad time for Paficism" doesn't mean that it is bad to run Pacifism, it just means that we won't gain as much from doing so during that time and that even if we do run Pacifism during that time, it may not speed up your scenarios. However, running Pacifism for those extra 5 turns also will not "mess up" your scenarios, either. Am I right on the latter part or will Scientists need to be juggled if we run Pacifism during those first 5 turns, just to maintain your Great Person spawning order?

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That's correct on both counts.

Pacifism won't hurt, it just won't help much either. The spawning order is basically quite robust to changes. If we do run Pacifism it might make sense to instead avoid growing in the cities I'd marked as growing on those turns, and save the growth for Theocracy.

The spawning order has an inevitability that is quite robust to changes, except for the race that I talked about between Dehli and Three Clams.

Dhoomstriker said:

3. If we do not run a Golden Age and if we switch out of Pacifism immediately and permanently, then both your and Mitchum's 5-Great-People scenarios actually only get us an extra 4 Great People within my suggested "40 turn" limit. So, the question becomes--can we make do with just those 4 Great People?

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I think we can make do, because we have the wealth of options I described, particularly since we still have the artist if we don't have a golden age. Many of the great people have other uses, but it's not hard to find four.

GPFarm will also generate a 5th great person very close to within 40 turns without running pacifism nor a golden age, this was the gist of my 5 great-person plan. It could probably be sped up to actually be within 40 turns by pop-starving even without running a golden age or pacifism.

Dhoomstriker said:

4. Spawning a Great Person in Delhi gives us a significant risk of spawning a non-Great-Scientist. Assuming that we spawn 2 Great Scientists as our next 2 Great People by not using Delhi as one of the Cities, it looks like the "leanest" case (i.e. no more Pacifism and no Golden Age) of the spreadsheets so far is to get the first one in Great Person Farm in 5 turns and the next one in Three Clams 8 turns later, in 13 turns. That would be Mitchum's "NO GA, No Pacifism" approach. We can possibly play around with the scenarios to improve upon these numbers, but assuming that these numbers are accurate, then our 2nd Great Person (hopefully, a Great Scientist) will be spawned just after my turnset.

In order to alter this date, we'll need to use one or both of Pacifism or a Golden Age, from what an initial inspection tells me, but I haven't really played around with the numbers yet.

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That's correct. A golden age would bring the date forward as well as speeding up commerce-based research (which is still a significant contribution) to bring forward the date at which we could use the scientists.

Dhoomstriker said:

5. A second Great Person from Grt Person Farm is far more feasible to achieve than a second Great Person from Delhi.

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Both are feasible, but yes, it's easier from Great Person Farm.


The biggest unknown for me is the number of turns it will take to research the required fractions of Physics and Electricity to be able to bulb the rest of both with either 5 or 6 great scientists. Once we know that, we have a target date. We should be able to estimate it within a turn or two by our beakers-per-turn rate at break-even gold (plus a bit extra for the gold we have already).

Discounting Risaia from the Equation
Also, am I right in thinking that Risaia is essentially a write-off for getting a Great Person?

I mean, it looks like only in your "GPP-modified-Risaia and 7 GP" scenario do we actually generate a Great Person there, and if I understand things correctly, we essentially delayed our Great People elsewhere just to get one in Risaia.

So therefore, we can reduce the analysis down to just 4 Cities producing Great People for us. That way, I can hire Scientists in Risaia or grow it first as a step that is completely independent from the Great People generation.

What I'll probably do is grow during the last few turns of Scientific Method and then on the last turn of Scientific Method, just after we have grown 1 more population point there, I can hire a ton of Scientists there, while not really being concerned about the timing of running Scientists there during Philosophy or a Golden Age.

Grt Person Farm
After 40 turns (I guess we'll count the GPP value 40 turns after the current turn, so we'll say that this turn is T298 in the spreadsheet), if we do not run a Golden Age and switch into Theocracy immediately, then Grt Person Farm gives us the best total GPP on turn 40 in these scenarios:
Starve a lot
Starve a bit
Grow +2 Size First

and gives us more than 100 GPP less in these scenarios:
Food Neutral
Grow +1 Size First

So, am I going about this approach the right way? Or is it too complicated of an equation to perform math this way, since the timing of the Great People will affect exactly how many GPP we need, and getting excess GPP beyond the target amount is useless?

Or, is this analysis a useful one ONLY for this City, since it's a City where we plan to generate 2 Great People but it is also a City where we have a bit of a waiting time in terms of getting to the 2nd Great Person?


Now, I'm not sure which spreadsheet has the most accurate numbers. For example, when looking at Mitchum's spreadsheet on the "GPP - Dhoom's Scenarios" tab, I see 5 different scenarios for Grt Person Farm. However, none of those scenarios' specialist allocations match up with the Specialist allocation used for Grt Person Farm in Irgy's "GPP-modified-5 GP" document.

What I was hoping to do was to say, assuming that we picked the Grt Person Farm scenario that reaches 1500 + 2700 GPP (4200 GPP) first, then we could use that scenario in place of the scenario that Irgy used.

The closest match is Irgy having used the "Grow +2 Size First" scenario, which appears to match except that after the first turn, Mitchum worked 4 Specialists while Irgy worked a Food square, so other than that minor discrepancy, the number of turns of "8 specialists hired" appears to match up. From my spreadsheet, it looks like we can actually afford to run 4 Specialists for 4 turns instead of 3 Specialists for 4 turns. Combined with the fact that there is a formula change in Cell N49 of Irgy's "GPP-modified-5 GP" results, presumably an artifact from having tested to see what that "2" instead of a "1" did in terms of the National Epic bonus, we can save 1 turn on the 5th Great Person in Irgy's "GPP-modified-5 GP" spreadsheet just by using the updated numbers.


Now, if I understand things correctly, it appears that if we add 2 turns of Pacifism at the start, we can actually get that 5th Great Person (the 2nd one to spawn in Grt Person Farm) even 1 turn sooner. Repeating this process of adding 2 more turns gives it to us yet 1 more turn sooner, assuming that we use a different scenario than the "Grow +2 Size First" scenario, such as either the "Starve a lot" or "Starve a bit" scenario.

Repeating this scenario of 2 more turns' worth of Pacifism one more time will give us that 5th Great Person 1 turn sooner, but only in the "Starve a lot" scenario, whereas the "Starve a bit" scenario is already giving us diminishing returns by requiring us to run Pacifism 3 turns just to save 1 turn on the generation of the Great Person.

The same holds true for the next iteration of the "Starve a lot" scenario, in that it requires 3 more turns of Pacifism just to get the 2nd Great Person in Grt Person Farm sooner.


SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...
Assuming that we do not spawn a Golden Age, we can benefit by running either 2, 4, or 6 turns of Pacifism, after which we can safely switch into Theocracy.

That's assuming that we care about the date of that 5th Great Person.


If we care more about the date of the 4th Great Person, then a different analysis should be performed.

Crabs
Another common theme of Irgy's and Mitchum's presented options, with the exception of the "GPP-modified-Risaia and 7 GP" scenario that delays GPP production in most Cities just to get a Great Person in Risaia, Crabs consistently appears to be the City in which we will generate our 4th Great Person.


We would need 2400 GPP to achieve our 4th Great Person.

Now, again, starting with the No Golden Age and immediately switching into Theocracy case, our best option is the "Starve" option, which nets us our 4th Great Person on T291.

We can immediately save 1 turn off of this date by running 1 turn worth of Pacifism.

3 turns of Pacifism will save us an additional turn.

4 turns of Pacifism will save us yet an additional turn, netting us this Great Person on T288.

6 turns of Pacifism will save us yet an additional turn.


So, when combined with the numbers for the No Golden Age scenario for Grt Person Farm's 5th Great Person's date, we can get the most efficiency by running either 4 or 6 turns' worth of Pacifism. That's assuming that we wouldn't rather just stick with the 0 turns' worth of Pacifism option--we really need to test the whole "how many turns of Theocracy are enough to get maximum Favourite Civic bonuses" test case...


Diplomatic Impacts
And, instantly, here are the results:
Within 40 turns of switching into Theocracy, we'll maximize our Diplomatic benefit.

However, we will not maximize the Diplomatic benefit of Buddhism until several turns after this point. To be precise, 60 turns for Justinian and 50 turns for Saladin. I think that 4 turns' worth of Flasks from our Confucian Buildings (by having Confucianism as our State Religion) isn't going to be worth the impact of a potential +1 Diplo relations point with both Justinian and Saladin.

This means that I should probably switch into Buddhism right away. I can still research Scientific Method at the same pace, as we'll get a few extra Hammers from our Monastaries and as well as our +10% Scientific bonus from all Monastaries.

However, we only have 6 Buddhist buildings, as opposed to 26 Confucian buildings, so there will be a slight impact to our Flask output as soon as we switch over.


Thus, I guess we need to weigh the possibility of a +1 Diplo modifier with Justinian and Saladin (4 turns sooner might or might not make a difference) versus the cost of 40 raw Flasks per turn for 4 turns plus bonuses. In all, I'll roughly say that the cost for those 4 turns will be 250 Flasks.

So, are 250 Flasks worth the chance of +1 (almost halfway to +1, which might be enough time to get us that +1) with both Saladin and Justinian?

After we learn Scientific Method, the differential goes down for a difference of 13 Confucian Temples to 3 Buddhist Temples, or a difference of 10 times 2 Flasks or 20 base Flasks per turn plus bonuses. Certainly, this cost is worth running Buddhism as our State Religion after we learn Scientific Method, we just need to decide if running Buddhism sooner for potentially +1 Diplo relations will be worth 250 Flasks.

I think that this cost is very cheap (we're willing to give up 200 Gold for +1 with just ONE AI, and we're talking a good chance at +1 with 2 different AIs here), so my tendency is to say that we'll switch into Buddhism immediately upon resuming play on T258.


Isabella
It also means that I should be trying to convert Isabella to Buddhism ASAP.


The Apostolic Palace
Here's a reason why using The Apostolic Palace to declare war on Mehmed won't work: it's because we're really pushing heavily towards Mass Media and will likely learn Mass Media before we've been able to capture all of Mehmed's Confucian Cities.

Once we've learned Mass Media, The Apostolic Palace is of no use to us.

In fact, when the next election comes up during Unclethrill's turnset, I suggest that we VOTE FOR ZARA to be the Leader of the Apostolic Palace.

The resolutions will run out shortly thereafter and there won't be much that he can propose at that point anyway, except maybe to stop trade with Justinian and Saladin, but since he likes them both, this scenario is unlikely.

However, by voting for Zara to be the Leader of the Apostolic Palace, we would get +2 Diplo Relations with Zara for "You Voted for us" for free.

Voting for Toku to be Secretary General
What happens if we own The UN, Toku gets elected as Secretary General, and then either Zara or Mehmd gets The UN?

It would be interesting to find out who would appear in elections--maybe we would be left out of the loop, maybe a new election would be forced, maybe Toku would control the voting option but it would be between us and the owner of The UN?

The answer will have certain strategic implications, so we should spend the time to test that stuff out using a test saved game.

It's not hard to open up a test saved game, give yourself Mass Media and 2 Great Engineers, exit the World Builder, and save your game as "UN Test" or something like that.

If someone wants to volunteer, great, as my eyes are closing on me and I am now off to bed.

Dhoomstriker said:

Discounting Risaia from the Equation
Also, am I right in thinking that Risaia is essentially a write-off for getting a Great Person?

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Correct. In my scenario, I chose the "Starve" option for Risaia because it gave us the most beakers early for our push toward partial Physics and partial Electricity. You could just as easily grow for 4 turns (or until SM is learned) and then starve a bit harder, which will concentrate our beakers during the time that we need them.

Note: I'm still for pushing to get Radio from Liberalism. I don't think the risk is that high and we can easily assess the risk by watching how quickly Sal researches Education. If he's researching Education aggressively, THEN we can fall back to a safer option. Why commit to falling back now (i.e. taking Electricity from Liberalism) if we don't have to? In my mind, that's playing for second place (or third or fourth).

Dhoomstriker said:

Grt Person Farm
So, am I going about this approach the right way?

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I think your approach looks fine.

Dhoomstriker said:

Now, I'm not sure which spreadsheet has the most accurate numbers. For example, when looking at Mitchum's spreadsheet on the "GPP - Dhoom's Scenarios" tab, I see 5 different scenarios for Grt Person Farm. However, none of those scenarios' specialist allocations match up with the Specialist allocation used for Grt Person Farm in Irgy's "GPP-modified-5 GP" document.

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I followed your scenarios to a T. If you look at Irgy's spreadsheet (if I'm thinking of the right one), he ran Pacifism for a short five-turn period and he monkeyed with the numbers a bit by hiring an extra scientist or two here and then firing them later. His spreadsheet is derived from mine, so they should be the same. If you put the same Golden Age, Pacifism and specialists per turn, you should get the same answer.

Dhoomstriker said:

What I was hoping to do was to say, assuming that we picked the Grt Person Farm scenario that reaches 1500 + 2700 GPP (4200 GPP) first, then we could use that scenario in place of the scenario that Irgy used.

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That's an option. As Irgy said, you could easily play with the numbers (i.e. specialist/turn) to speed up or slow down by a turn or three.

Dhoomstriker said:

Now, if I understand things correctly, it appears that if we add 2 turns of Pacifism at the start, we can actually get that 5th Great Person (the 2nd one to spawn in Grt Person Farm) even 1 turn sooner. Repeating this process of adding 2 more turns gives it to us yet 1 more turn sooner, assuming that we use a different scenario than the "Grow +2 Size First" scenario, such as either the "Starve a lot" or "Starve a bit" scenario.

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Now you're seeing the power of the spreadsheet. You can pull on all of the levers and see what the impact is across all scenarios for each city. Keep playing until you tweak it the way that makes the most sense.

Dhoomstriker said:

Assuming that we do not spawn a Golden Age, we can benefit by running either 2, 4, or 6 turns of Pacifism, after which we can safely switch into Theocracy.

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Keep in mind that we need a military soon and the +2 experience points would be a nice bonus. Let's not drag out Pacifism too long. I no longer think research and/or great people are the critical path. Getting our relations up with Sal and Justinian and securing a source of silk (silk, right?) could take more time. We need to have a plan to beat Toku for the Sec Gen vote...

Dhoomstriker said:

If we care more about the date of the 4th Great Person, then a different analysis should be performed.

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There are so many variable, but if we save the current Great Artist and one GE, then we only need 2 more. If we get a GG, which should be easy (but what do I know, I've only spawned one in my 4 BtS games), we only need to self-generate 1 more. Depending on how many GSs we bulb into Physics and or Electricity, we may need more or less.

It's a very complicated picture that will snap into focus as the game progresses and we better understand how much we can get from Liberalism and how many GSs we have to use to get it.

I think you should put together a plan for the next 4 or 5 turns. Pick one that gives us the best "general" situation with respect to science, GPP and hammer output. I think we'll know a lot more after this mini-turnset, like whether Sal is going after Educaton and how many turns it will take us to research part of Physics and part of Electricity.

I just though of an idea, what if we research Physics to within 1 GS bulb of completion (assuming we feel safe to do so based on what Sal is doing). Then, we could bulb 4 GSs into Electricity and learn it in 0 turns. So, we would bulb 1 - 4 rather than 2 - 3. Just a thought. If we fear losing Liberalism, we could always bulb the second GS into Physics at that time and then take Electricity from Liberalism...

Buddhism

I agree with your analysis. I think we should revolt to Buddhism now. Stop spamming Confucianism to Isabella. Either Sal or us can convert her to Buddhism, but we should do so soon so that we can hopefully get her vote too.

However, with the world united under Buddhism (except for Zara), I think it makes sense to go up against Zara for the diplo vote unless we can keep the war going between Toku/Zara and Mehmed.

I don't think we'll need the +2 for voting for Zara. He could mess us up as leader of the AP, right?

Mitchum said:

Note: I'm still for pushing to get Radio from Liberalism. I don't think the risk is that high and we can easily assess the risk by watching how quickly Sal researches Education. If he's researching Education aggressively, THEN we can fall back to a safer option. Why commit to falling back now (i.e. taking Electricity from Liberalism) if we don't have to? In my mind, that's playing for second place (or third or fourth).

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There is a very likely risk, it's just not as big as what you're thinking of. The risk is that we are left stuck with a bunch of great scientists that we don't need, while having spent too long researching part of Physics manually.

In 8a in particular, we're left stuck with 3 great scientists we have no use for. We already have enough for the final four between the Crabs GP, the Dehli random GP, the second Engineer, the Artist, the second GPFarm GP and a potential Great General (that's six). Some of them could be used for other things indeed, but we certainly don't need 3 more scientists.

Basically, as soon as we research past the point of spending 3 GS on Physics, we're committed to either getting Radio for a big profit, or losing turns researching more of Physics than we need to only to finish up with a spare scientist at the end. If we use the Artist for a golden age trying to get to Radio quicker then we also lose the chance to burn a scientist on the golden age later and save the Artist for Mass Media, which puts us a couple of turns back as well.

That's the risk that we avoid by just taking Electricity now. I'm not saying Radio isn't worth the risk, I'm just explaining what that risk is.

What we need to know to make the decision is:
* The number of turns required to tech the parts we need to tech if we're going to get Radio
* Saladin's rate of research.
* We only need to speed up the Three Clams great person if and only if it's going to take longer than the manual research
* Knowing what sort of great person we're getting from Dehli would help too, although we can probably just assume it's a final-four person.
We have until we research past the 3-scientist point of Physics before we're committed to one option or the other.


As far as Civics go, it seems like the biggest risk left in the game is not being able to beat Toku in the SG vote. If that's the case, then running Buddhism and Theocracy for the rest of the game seems like the best option to me. I don't think the 2nd GPFarm great person is going to be the holdup, so I don't think it's worth spending more time in Pacifism to speed it up.

UN Opponent

Mitchum said:

However, with the world united under Buddhism (except for Zara), I think it makes sense to go up against Zara for the diplo vote unless we can keep the war going between Toku/Zara and Mehmed.

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Actually, if we want Zara to be our UN Opponent, we need Zara and Toku to STAY at war with Mehmed for longer. Otherwise, the Mutual Military Struggle value will partially disappear and Toku will treat Zara as his Worst Enemy.

While it's true that we may NEVER get rid of that -4 Traded with our Worst Enemy, if we're to have a hope at all of any of that amount wearing off, we can't gift a City to Zara when Toku treats Zara as his Worst Enemy.

So, to be honest, if the war against Mehmed is SHORTENED by one of those two AIs, then MEHMED actually looks like the better UN Opponent, unless we can later bribe both Toku and Zara back into war with Mehmed (after the Liberalism race and we have a tech or two that we don't mind giving up).


Apostolic Palace

I don't think we'll need the +2 for voting for Zara. He could mess us up as leader of the AP, right?

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What can Zara do?

"Please stop trading with Justinian"
"Please stop trading with Saladin" (which will only be possible after Mehmed and Saladin meet each other)
"Stop the war against Zara"

Well, we can easily vote "no" to any of those options.

Since Zara currently will not even take a bribe to stop trading with those two AIs, I do not see how, if the Apostolic Palace was coded anywhere close to how it should have been, his programming would allow him to raise such a vote.


I kind of doubt that Mehmed and Toku would vote "yes" to stopping a war against Zara, but even if they did, at half of the votes of our current total (from switching into Buddhism), we would still control more than 64% of the vote. If we vote "no," then it's a "no," regardless of what anyone else voted.


Since we're going to obsolete the Apostolic Palace before any useful resolution can come to pass (only if we capture all of Mehmed's Confucian Cities can we once again see an option to either "Declare Holy War on Mehmed" or "Open Borders with all Members"), there's no harm in making Zara the Leader of the Apostolic Palace.

If we do choose to get Zara's vote for a Diplo Victory, he'll be late in switching into Buddhism, so those +2 points could be the difference between getting his vote on the first Diplo Vote or not.

Anyway, there's no harm in it, and besides, even if we DO manage to capture all of Mehmed's Confucian Cities (right now just a Size-4 City or two Cities that add up to 4 population points), Zara will likely vote for the Holy War option, since he'll already be at war with Mehmed and will want "free war buddies."

So, Zara will already propose the resolution that we would want, thus it makes sense to give him the Apostolic Palace Leadership, especially since it'll probably last for one to two voting rounds at most, before his position gets obsoleted.

Great Artist

Irgy said:

If we use the Artist for a golden age trying to get to Radio quicker then we also lose the chance to burn a scientist on the golden age later and save the Artist for Mass Media, which puts us a couple of turns back as well.

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I'm really leaning towards spawning a Golden Age immediately.

We're going to switch into Buddhism for certain. If we spawn a Golden Age, we can still see a lot of the same efficiencies for running Pacifism for 4 or 6 more turns (since the Golden Age gives an equivalent bonus) while building up our positive Diplo modifiers from Theocracy that much sooner.

So, we'll put the focus on pleasing the AIs as much as we can. Hopefully, that will do the best that we can towards a "normal situation" Secretary General vote. Obviously, if we can find a way to get around going up against Toku, such as having our UN captured in a war, it would be ideal, but let's just plan to play it the "normal way" and the best thing to do there is to impress the other AIs (Saladin and Justinian) as much as we can with a Shared Religion and a shared Favourite Civic bonus.


Now, if the primary alternative of that Great Artist is to use on Mass Media, then consider the fact that a Great Artist Lightbulbing will net us nearly 1000 less Flasks than a Great Scientist Lightbulbing will.

Sure, if we have a TON of extra Great Artists (which we won't have, but if we did), then Lightbulbing with some of them could still help. But, a Golden Age will help us MORE.


A Golden Age NOW helps us on an area of weakness--getting our initial military forces out and on their way to Mehmed.

Speeding up Mass Media later, only to find that we don't own a Silk Resource, will just mean "hurrying up and waiting" by spending a Great Artist on Mass Media.


Also, Irgy has made some strong points about how we'll get our Great People and I think that if we GET INTO WAR FASTER with Mehmed, we'll have a much stronger chance of getting a Great General. So, we use up a Great Artist to speed up our GPP production, improve our Commerce output, get our war machine moving faster, and essentially netting us a Great General in return that we otherwise might not have fought enough to earn, and we will come out ahead for having done so.


Great Person Spawning Order

* Knowing what sort of great person we're getting from Dehli would help too, although we can probably just assume it's a final-four person.

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Okay, now that's both Irgy and Mitchum claiming that Delhi is unlikely to give us a Great Scientist next.

So, I'm strongly favouring a Great Person plan that gets us our Great Person from Delhi later, even if the implication is that we won't get 2 more Great People out of there. Not a problem--we got one at the start of my turnset and we'll get a second one soon--aren't 2 of them already enough? How greedy do we really need to be?

Partial PPP for the next few turns
T258 (1130 AD)
Revolt from Pacifism to Theocracy
Switch Religions from Confucianism to Buddhism
Use a Great Artist to spawn a Golden Age


Use the following scenarios for getting our Great People:
1. Use the "Starve a lot" scenario for Grt Person Farm to generate Great Person #1. This scenario gives us the most GPP during our Golden Age. It also gives us our second Great Person from that City (our 5th generated Great Person from now) on T295, less than 40 turns from now.

2. Use the "Starve Slower" scenario for Three Clams, which will net us Great Person #2 on T267, at the same time as the "Starve to get GP here next" scenario but with a tiny bit more Food left over. After this point, we can run our "Food Neutral" value of 6 Scientists for research purposes. After Liberalism comes in, and Flask output is less of a priority, we can consider the option of growing the City (if we need more votes) versus continuing to run Scientists (for a bit faster tech rate).

3. Use the "Starve a bit" scenario for Delhi, which will net us Great Person #3 on T271, one turn faster than the "Food Neutral" option. This City is our primary Science-outputting City, so up until the end of the game, we'll keep running Scientists here.

4. Use the "Starve" scenario for Crabs, which will net us Great Person #4 on T285. If we were to use the "Grow +2 Size First" scenario, we'd delay our Great Person by a large margin, not getting it until T292, which would actually mean that Grt Person Farm would beat it to spawning Great Person #4 and we would not end up with Great Person #5 until turn 40. So, the extra growth is not warranted and the "Starve" scenario it will be. Once Liberalism is in and once we've generated Great Person #4 here, we can choose between growing the City for more votes or continuing to run Scientists for a faster research rate on the remaining techs.

5. Great Person #5 will come from Grt Person Farm on T295, well within our targeted 40 turn limit. At that point, Liberalism will most certainly have been learned and we can decide between growing the City or continuing to run Scientists.


Other things to do:
Start building Buddhist Missionaries for Isabella.

Try and set up a Caravel + Galleon chain to Isabella, as we'll need to send her at least 3 Buddhist Missionaries and the sooner that we can do so, the better.

Try to estimate Saladin's research rate on Education.


Reasons to pause play
Pause play if an AI Demands Paper or Education.

Pause play if an AI Demands that we go to war with another AI.

Pause play if any more wars start.

Pause play if Saladin (or any other AI) actually learns Education.



Okay, I think that, thanks very much to the help of awesome teammates, I will soon be ready to go forward and play with that plan. It would be nice to get some feedback, but if I don't hear any dissenting comments, then I'll aim to play later on this afternoon (a few hours from now). If I hear some dissentive comments, then I won't play forward until the issues are resolved.

Dhoomstriker said:

Great Artist

I'm really leaning towards spawning a Golden Age immediately.

We're going to switch into Buddhism for certain.

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I agree with the GAge immediately. And also with the religion switch (i think the last one).
If we can delay to switch to Theo for a couple turns, better. Otherwise, np.

I already stated my reasons: the GPerson burnt on the GAge will be replaced by one that we can have before turn 300. And it also will help to spawn a GS (which we need now) in a city with high chances. I think i've never seen a chance >90% not give the higher chances GP, but i know it can happen.

How much will a few turns of Pacifism help? How many turns are "a few turns"?

BLubmuz said:

I agree with the GAge immediately. And also with the religion switch (i think the last one).
If we can delay to switch to Theo for a couple turns, better.

Click to expand...

Now that we've isolated the Great-Person-ordering across various Cities and have chosen specific scenarios to run, it's not too hard to check out the impact of remaining in Pacifism for a few more turns will be. It still took some work, but now that work is done, so enjoy the results:

1 turn of Pacifism compared to 0 turns of Pacifism:
Great Person #2 comes 1 turn faster
Great Person #3 comes 1 turn faster
Great Person #4 comes 1 turn faster
Great Person #5 comes 1 turn faster

2 turns of Pacifism compared to 1 turn of Pacifism:
Great Person #3 comes 1 turn faster

3 turns of Pacifism compared to 2 turns of Pacifism:
Great Person #4 comes 1 turn faster

4 turns of Pacifism compared to 3 turns of Pacifism:
Great Person #2 comes 1 turn faster
Great Person #3 comes 1 turn faster
Great Person #4 comes 1 turn faster
Great Person #5 comes 1 turn faster

5 turns of Pacifism compared to 4 turns of Pacifism:
No change

6 turns of Pacifism compared to 5 turns of Pacifism:
Great Person #4 comes 1 turn faster
Great Person #5 comes 1 turn faster

7 turns of Pacifism compared to 6 turns of Pacifism:
Great Person #3 comes 1 turn faster

8 turns of Pacifism compared to 7 turns of Pacifism:
Great Person #4 comes 1 turn faster
Great Person #5 comes 1 turn faster

9 turns of Pacifism compared to 8 turns of Pacifism:
No change

10 turns of Pacifism compared to 9 turns of Pacifism:
Great Person #4 comes 1 turn faster


Great Person Replacement?

I already stated my reasons: the GPerson burnt on the GAge will be replaced by one that we can have before turn 300.

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That's not true. If we stick with the "40 turn limit," which I think is a fair limit for getting our Final Four Great People if we want to be able to transport them to the Fur (wherever it is) on time, then we will still only get 5 Great People regardless of whether or not we run a Golden Age.

So, please do not agree to running a Golden Age for the wrong reason.

We do, however, stand a good chance of EARNING a Great General that we might otherwise not have done, due to more production leading to a faster start on our war against Mehmed.

But there is no clear "one for one" trading--we won't get an "extra" Great Person by the turn 40 mark in order to "make up" for the Great Artist that we will spend on a Golden Age.


Spawning Great Scientists

And it also will help to spawn a GS (which we need now) in a city with high chances.

Click to expand...

And here's the crux of the argument. We'll get our 2nd Great Person, which has high odds of being a Great Scientist, somewhat faster by using the Golden Age.

That extra bit of speed plus the extra Commerce from the Golden Age is going to be a helpful factor in getting us the pre-Liberalism techs that much faster.

So, this reason is a valid reason for launching a Golden Age now.


Great Person Odds

I think i've never seen a chance >90% not give the higher chances GP, but i know it can happen.

Click to expand...

We received a Great Artist in Delhi based on a 5% chance of receiving one. So, it happened just after the end of your turnset (after I advanced past the inherited turn, we got our Great Artist).

If you can lose a 99.9% battle, you can spawn "the wrong" Great Person with 99.9% of getting the type that you wanted.

On average, more players see more battles than they will generate Great People, which is probably why you haven't seen a large enough sample set yet to see this kind of a result. Or, perhaps you encountered such a result but it happened late in a game when you didn't care what type of Great Person that you got, as you just needed one for a Spaceship Race Golden Age, so you didn't even bother to check the percentages. The fact that we can see the percentages for battles is a curse that way, as it puts the fact that you lost at 99.9% odds "in your face."

I assume you put the GAge in your math.
So, i think that 1 more turn of pacifism is what we need. 2 more (or 1 more, counting the 1 i mentioned below) can be an option, no more.

I probably forgot something speaking of the "replacement GP". No matter if we can still have the "FF" on time.

Build a large military, don't forget some treb, pike and Xbow and let's move after Mehmed.

Dhoomstriker said:

Great Artist

I'm really leaning towards spawning a Golden Age immediately.

Click to expand...

I've been thinking about the barb island and I'm a bit concerned about it. If Fur city is so heavily guarded, why haven't the barbs moved some of these stonger units from Fur into their northern city? Maybe it's because the can't...

What if we capture the northern barb city only to find out that the southern barb city is completely surrounded by peaks and ice? The only way to capture such a city would be to do so culturally. As soon as an AI culture border touches a barb city, said city flips to that AI. Could DS have set it up such that this is the only way to capture the barb Fur city? Stranger things have happened.

If this is the case, the quickest way to capture Fur would be to culture bomb the northern city once we capture it. Then, we would need to learn Flight and build an airport to transfer the missionary, warriors and great people to Fur. Sure this is pretty whacky, but it could happen.

I guess if this is the case, we'd have plenty of time to get another Great Artist since we'd have to research all the way to Flight.

So I guess I answered my own question. Even if this far out, whacky setup exists, we can safely burn our GArt on a Golden Age now.

Dhoomstriker said:

Okay, now that's both Irgy and Mitchum claiming that Delhi is unlikely to give us a Great Scientist next.

Click to expand...

To be clear, we'll still have > 50% odds of getting a GS in Delhi. But, 50% << 95% and I'd hate to base our strategy on a coin flip.

BLubmuz said:

I assume you put the GAge in your math.

Click to expand...

You assume correctly.


The Make-up of our Army

Build a large military, don't forget some treb, pike and Xbow and let's move after Mehmed.

Click to expand...

Trebs and Pikes will be built for certain, but do you have some way of justifying a Crossbowman being better than a Maceman?

The only ways that I see a Crossbowman coming out ahead are:
1. A slightly cheaper cost
2. It can get a City Defence promotion
3. Fighting an enemy Maceman that isn't inside of a City (a Maceman's City Raider promotions will make it a better City attacker)


Mehmed doesn't have Civil Service and is unlikely to self-tech it for a long time, so he can't have Macemen. He doesn't have Machinery, either, which, incidentally, means no Engineering.

Probably the scariest techs that he could research are Guilds (for Knights) and Gunpowder (for his Janissaries). He'd have to research Guilds before he could research Gunpowder.

I'd rather have War Elephants in place of Crossbowmen to help defend our stacks and Longbowmen plus Pikemen to guard the Cities that we capture.


Running Pacifism alongside a Golden Age

So, i think that 1 more turn of pacifism is what we need. 2 more (or 1 more, counting the 1 i mentioned below) can be an option, no more.

Click to expand...

Running two turns of Pacifism doesn't make sense according to the numbers.

The best efficiencies are seen out of 1 turn of Pacifism and 4 turns of Pacifism.

So it sounds like your vote is for 1 turn of Pacifism.


"Replacement" Great Person

I probably forgot something speaking of the "replacement GP". No matter if we can still have the "FF" on time.

Click to expand...

The "Replacement" Great Person, which we saw in Irgy's "GPP-modified-6 GP" scenario, requires us to spawn a Great Person in Delhi as our second Great Person.

Spawning Great Person #2 in Delhi means that we have a strong chance of getting a "random" Great Person at a time where we really could use a Great Scientist. Getting the "wrong" Great Person early on is not worth getting an extra Great Person later on, in my opinion.

The "GPP-modified-6 GP" scenario also has us running Pacifism up until T270, while we are currently at T258 (so that would be another 13 turns before we could switch into Theocracy).

Again, it seems like it would be better to switch into Theocracy sooner for the Diplo modifiers.

So, the hoops that we would have to jump through in order to get a "replacement" Great Person will cost us too much.

But, as Irgy pointed out, we should have other ways of getting our Great People on time, so we shouldn't need to worry.

Mitchum said:

So I guess I answered my own question. Even if this far out, whacky setup exists, we can safely burn our GArt on a Golden Age now.

Click to expand...

Thank you for the entertaining story. I'm glad that you were able to convince yourself.