SGOTM 12 - One Short Straw

shyuhe said:

it is not the pure hammer cost that's prohibiting barracks - it's the lost turn of wealth builds that's discouraging it. So there isn't much of a difference in theater vs. barracks.

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Exactly. We can forget about hammer-costs now and look at only turn-costs. Barracks seems better than theatre to me. To me 1-2 unhappy in as city that's growth-curbed by health/spec-assignment already is fine, with ET and R&R coming. There is the matter of OF into research institutes, though, which may justify any small build.

bcool said:

I'm not sure Moscow should build R&R, Siberia could probably do it with only 1 turn delay compared to Moscow (even though it is finishing the 3 gorges dam) and that would allow moscow to continue to run as many scientists as makes sense there.

Hammer city should build the Eiffel Tower or R&R which ever is faster I suspect and let Siberia build the other.

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This is a tough one. One turn sooner on either R&R or Eiffel Tower means +2 one turn sooner. Without doing the math, it seems better to get +2 in all cities one turn sooner than running a few extra scientists in Moscow.

Plus, do we know that it is only 1 turn sooner? It could be 2 or more turns sooner (I don't have access to the game at the moment).

Did I miss some coal plants? If so, my apologies... I did slot in a few more executives. Ok, I'm going to go play now. I will double check barracks/theater pay offs and make sure I didn't miss any coal plants. Also, sell steel to Roos for music + gold and some non-military tech to Stalin for cash too.

Good luck, shyuhe!

Played 5 turns and posted. We are now at approximately 5500 bpt with superconductors in 1 turn (yeah, our bpt is rocketing upwards). I checked on F6 and calculated 13 turns of research left. Roosevelt unfortunately went for steam power -- railroad so no artillery freebie He did revolt to emancipation at one point which scared me (revolted him back immediately) as it hurts our empire a lot. So make sure we have spies ready to revolt him at any time - there are two stationary near Siberia.

I can post a PPP for superconductors(1)--artillery(1)--rocketry(1) as it's pretty straight forward (i.e., max research). Given our 13 turn estimate, it'll be pretty easy to tell which cities should build a research lab and which shouldn't. I'm assuming Siberia and Hammer City will build the really big parts, and I think we have more than enough satellite cities that can crank out the thrusters and casings in <5 turns. We should be able to start building some Marines in 2 turns as well.

I hope I didn't mess up too badly on the micro. I checked each city twice before hitting enter but still ended up building a knight somewhere that was left over in the queue (sent as garrison for steam).

Sounds like things are shaping up nicely. Can you put a PPP together for the next 4 to 5 turns with a goal of playing tomorrow? We need to keep it going... the logistics near the end will probably slow us down a bit, but I think we can crank out the space ship, which should be fairly straight forward.

looks good shuyhe.

A few minor but potentially important things to incorporate into the next PPP.

I would move 1 spy in Troy to Vlad. Having 2 spies in the same city dramatically increases the odds they will be detected and reduces the odds of mission success. It might take a turn or 2 to get the other spy over there but I think it is worth it.

I think it is also worth it to transport a spy to Stalin's Capital. The one in St Nick isn't doing anything useful. And a city revolt prior to a marine attack would make it almost 100% odds on the marines attacks reducing the number of marines we need to build.

It looks like you have the fallout cleanup in order. I assume you are using bbp guidelines for the number of workers in the various areas.

I didn't fully check the gpp situation but I see that we got a GProphet I noticed that Kamchatka is getting very close to popping a great person, was that one of the cities that we planned to use? I didn't think it was. Might want to keep an eye on some of the other cities that might accidentally beat a planned city to the punch.
I think we want to fire the priests in Bahamas now that we have a GProphet. A 2nd GProphet is probably the most useless one, so might as well switch priests to scientists.

If we use the culture slider this turn and next we break almost even. 10% cultural slider is equal to 16 more productive citizens. That is another scientist in Moscow another merchant in Fish and allows some cities to continue growing into the expected happiness from R&R and eiffel tower.

I would take a close look around the empire for any cities that you can grow in the next few turns. Stretching a bit by firing a few specialists this turn to grow for next turn is worth it. Grow even if they are unhappy since R&R and Eiffel tower are coming online. Or in cities that have no chance to grow, you might be able to switch a farm to a specialist as long as the negative food won't reduce the population before the spaceship launch.

We might want to go 80% research this turn (and perhaps 10% culture) and save a bit of gold (since many of the cities will want to immediately build research institutes and we will need to drop the slider) Might as well drop the slider this turn before we get the research bonuses from research institutes as long as we can still research superconductors this turn.

I would say no more sushi executives at this point, and probably no more mining executives. I don't think they pay off.

Also any city building wealth is probably better off with a scientist/merchant (depending on multipliers). If a city has 100% hammer production and no science/wealth multipliers then I guess the engineer is better but just 1 library makes the scientist better than the engineer even in that extreme case.

We should also consider another Gandhi war after the Eiffel tower and R&R is built. The extra workers we might capture and the wealth from 2 cities probably pays for the slight cost in unhappiness. (I think the WW has gone down slightly) --need to confirm or estimate what WW would cost us for a 2 turn war.

Capturing Gandhi cities give us 2 more mining resources at least.

A few notes - yes we got the prophet which is huge. So at the very worst, we should be able to trigger the fifth GA using the fusion engineer. I'll juggle the specialists to fire any priests that are out there.

I'll stop on the executive builds - we have enough for all of our cities (plus one extra ) so they're all good on that front. I was thinking that sushi culture would help us claim tiles in India to clean up fallout but I think we'll be ok regardless in that department.

The fallout clean-up is going well - we should have all of the non-owned tiles cleaned up by the time we launch so we're on target for them. We will probably need a few extra workers for America but that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

I'd like to maintain enough beakers to push through superconductors--artillery--rocketry in 1 turn each so I'll see how much gold I can bank this turn while maintaining that schedule. Thankfully artillery is cheap so I should be able to cram a few research institutes in without dropping our

Kamchatka will not produce a GP until after Rheims, which is pretty far down the line. I'll double check to make sure but fish--Bermuda (or was it Bahamas)--GP Farm is the order right now. GP farm may starve a pop or two at the end to push out the artist but it shouldn't be a problem. I'll clean-up the specialists hired in other cities too.

Beijing might want a Harbor (5 extra commerce and 3 health and it has an academy)

And I think the war with Gandhi makes sense after Eiffel tower and R&R. I think you want to look at the units and move them into place for war in 2 turns. (the knights can help with the city in the south, so move muskets to replace city garrisons perhaps). move the general back to Gandhi's lands.

I'm not sure that many infrastructure builds make sense in any of our cities if we only have 13 turns of research left. In fact, I don't think research institutes make sense from a pure hammer/beaker perspective. Therefore, I think we should only build RIs in cities that intend to build space parts. We should stagger the builds (building in the cities that get the biggest benefit from the 25% science boost first) so that we can keep the slider as close to 100% as possible.

Any other build should be justified. It either has to pay off in 13 turns with respect to research/spaceship building, it must help with clearing fallout or it must go toward eliminating Stalin. Those are the only three goals we should be focused on at the moment, right?

A harbor in beijing pays off in 8 turns

5 commerce * 2.25 research multiplier / 80 hammers invested
Plus 3 health would allow it to grow 1 more pop in ~8 turns
So 5 turns of a scientist adds another 13.5*5 =67.5

I'm only suggesting the highest payback buildings.

bcool said:

I'm only suggesting the highest payback buildings.

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Sorry bcool. My comment wasn't directed specifically at your harbor suggestion. I was thinking about research institutes, where they made sense and how many we needed.

My post just happened to fall right after yours, which made it appear that I was against the harbor build. I hadn't done the math on the harbor, which is why I didn't comment specifically on the harbor in my post; a post which was more generic in nature.

I've been thinking about the space ship build a bit. I'm not sure if this is possible, but we have so many cities with high production that it just might work.

What if we build wealth in enough cities to keep the slider at 100% until we're done with research. Researching our last tech (Genetics?) and building our last part (Statis Chamber?) is on our critical path, so the sooner we research that last tech the sooner we can win.

We can't win until that last part is built, so why don't we plan on finishing all parts on that same turn. This will allow us to build wealth longer and finish the research phase of the game sooner. We could revolt to Slavery once research is done so that we can whip any parts on that last turn that we won't be able to complete with hammers. In fact, it may be possible to whip all parts 1 turn sooner than they would be finished with hammers too. Some builds may have to start a turn or two sooner, but it should be possible with some planning.

Obviously, if we HAVE to build more than one part in any city, we'll have to adjust this. Or it may also be possible to have enough gold from building wealth to run 100% science and still have Hammer City and/or Siberia crank out 2 or 3 parts each and the rest of the parts spread out over many cities.

My main goal with this is to speed up research by keeping the slider at 100% (or at least as high as possible since we may have to drop it when building research institutes). Is this what others had it mind or is there a better way to do it?

When I go for a spaceship victory I frequently try to finish all the parts on the same turn (building wealth or research for as long as possible since the research seems to limit the launch date more than the part builds). However there usually are some big builds that can slow us down (engines usually)

But we can target the launch date and schedule builds around it. (for example launching 2? 3? turns after Genetics is finished). I'm not sure it is best to finish Genetics since the stasis chamber doesn't get Al bonus, but the alternatives aren't that great either.

Planning overflows and which city builds which part will be interesting.

We need 16 parts (siberia will build 2 at least) so we might need as many as 15 research institutes.

However you can't whip spaceship parts (only buildings and units unfortunately).

Only way to speed up space ship parts is to Maximize OverFlow. Which is what LC was talking about with whipping and setting up a chain of builds. But Maximizing OF for Spaceparts requires taking cities off wealth/research builds. Unless we can max OF building useful buildings like happiness or RI's.

We might be able to max OF with a spaceship Part build (come to within 1 hammer of finishing), then finish a building with max OF, then put all that OF into spaceship Part build, then we get 2 turns of Max OF into the 2nd part we build in that city.

Also might want to max OF into a few RI this turn if possible. I would recommend either maxing OF into a few RI or reducing the slider down to 80% this turn.

I've looked at the save and I have a few comments:

I don't think we can afford a war with Gandhi now for the same reasons that everyone was against it earlier. We can't afford the WW. Anything that delays our research and keeps us from running 100% slider has the possibility to add turns to our game. We can crush him after we launch (we only need to take two cities) and use his workers to help clean up the mess.

Running 10% culture slider converts 182 base commerce from base beakers to base culture. Doing this makes us go from 26 to 6 If all of those extra 20 pops are scientists, they only provide 20 * 6 = 120 base beakers. Of course, those citizens could be doing something else too, but science is the name of the game at the moment. I don't think running the slider makes sense at the moment.

Hammer city could use workshops on the dye (already started), two plains farms and rice. My guess is that every city that will build a space part has a few tiles that could be tweaked that could pay off in the end. We may want to start planning this so that we can build a few workers to do this work.

Now that we own the gold in Old China near Hangzhou, should we scrub and mine it?

I think it's better to build wealth than to build science. With extra gold, we may be able to keep the slider at 100% at a later turn or build an extra research institute and still keep the slider up.

Should we sell Stalin Music for 50 gold?

Should we sell Roosevelt Communism for 90 gold?

Awesome work getting the scrubbing started on the islands.

There is a landmass south of Steam/Rostov with impassable ice in the middle with fallout on it. I can count 5 fallout tiles there, but it could be more. What is our plan to get a boat there and to ferry a few workers over?

There are some unexposed tiles north of Stalin that could have fallout. It's not worth exploring right now, but we'll need to check it out once we learn Satellites.

We may get lucky and take over the last two fallout tiles near Churchill soon, which means that we wouldn't have to fight him (unless he attacks us).

We have to be at peace on the turn our space ship lands. That means that we have 12 (11? 10?) turns to do all of our warring. Gandhi, Churchill and Stalin will be easy. Roosevelt's units won't cause too much trouble, but the fact that he has 13 cities spread out on our land mass and two islands will make it a logistical nightmare, shuttling troops and workers around. Plus we need to build most of the units and many of the workers that will do this work while at the same time building our space ship.

We need to plan ahead if we are going to gift Roosevelt Ecology. Since we can only gift/sell him one tech per turn in the chain, we'll have to start early and gift him Bio (T-2), Electricity (T-1), Fission (T0, which is the turn we learn it) and Ecology (T+1). We should also try to gift him a few workers when we can spare the production and still keep the slider at 100%.

There is still a LOT of complexity in the remaining part of this game. Every single turn matters since it could be the difference between gold and silver. I'm a bit worried about us finishing at our best. We may end up rushing and playing a little sloppy. Does anyone have any ideas on how to mitigate this? Who has time this week to really keep the game moving forward, generating/updating a PPP and playing turns?

bcool said:

However you can't whip spaceship parts (only buildings and units unfortunately).

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I had suggested this about 1,532 posts ago and no one said anything then so I though it was possible. I had never tried it myself in a real game and was too lazy to test it when I wrote that. Thanks!

It looks like we still don't have a source of aluminium or oil hooked up. What is our plan for getting these?

I agree that building more executives won't pay off, the same is true of most of the infrastructure.

Now that we own the gold in Old China near Hangzhou, should we scrub and mine it?

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Yes, it will give us +1 hammers in most of our cities.

Should we sell Stalin Music for 50 gold?

Should we sell Roosevelt Communism for 90 gold?

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We may as well-it cant do us any harm now.

We need to plan ahead if we are going to gift Roosevelt Ecology. Since we can only gift/sell him one tech per turn in the chain, we'll have to start early and gift him Bio (T-2), Electricity (T-1), Fission (T0, which is the turn we learn it) and Ecology (T+1). We should also try to gift him a few workers when we can spare the production and still keep the slider at 100%

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Given the limited number of turns left I doubt America will clear many of his fallout tiles for us now.

I don't think we can afford a war with Gandhi now for the same reasons that everyone was against it earlier. We can't afford the WW. Anything that delays our research and keeps us from running 100% slider has the possibility to add turns to our game. We can crush him after we launch (we only need to take two cities) and use his workers to help clean up the mess.

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I agree. The only AI which can cause us difficulties is America. Given the logistical situation I think we may have to start this war before we launch.

So I did the math out, and this is what it looks like:

Superconductors(1)&#8212;artillery(1)&#8212;rocketry(1)&#8212;satellites(2)&#8212;fiber optics(2)&#8212;fusion(2)&#8212;composites(2)&#8212;genetics(2)
Siberia builds Apollo(4; can maybe do 3 turns with good overflow + an additional shop or two)&#8212;wealth(1)&#8212;aqueduct (1, for overflow)--engine(4)&#8212;stasis chamber(3, should be able to do 2 with chops + overflow).
Hammer city builds &#8211;wealth(1)&#8212;overflow building--engine (6)
Bahamas builds docking bay (8)
Rheims builds thruster(4)&#8212;casing(4); hire specialists to hit 86 base hammers
Orleans builds thruster(4) &#8211; casing (4); terraform so that it has 86 base hammers
Hastings builds thruster(4)&#8212; casing(4); terraform so that it has 86 base hammers
Bermuda builds thruster(4) &#8211; casing (4); hire citizens and terraform to hit 86 base hammers
Moscow builds thruster(4) &#8211;casing(4)
Bcool island builds life support (5)
Cockpit can pretty much go anywhere that can build it in 8 turns&#8230;

Basically, we can't build casings faster than in 4 turns, and we can't build thrusters faster than in 4 turns. So unless we can trim the research time needed for either satellites, fiber optics, or fusion to 1 turn, there is no point in building excess RSI's since we'll be production capped. That means we would need to hit a bpt of about 7000 and overflow another 3000 beakers or so. If we get the gspy in bahamas and the artist from gp farm, then we can potentially bulb the gscientist to trim one of the techs down to 1 turn, allowing us to pick up the gengineer from fusion to kick off the last golden age. With this in mind, I'll try to figure out which cities can and should build a RSI.

@mdy - I'll hook-up the aluminum south of rheims - there are four workers in the area that can hook it up in 2 turns (i.e., before rocketry is completed).

Okay so the war weariness is worse than I thought. If I understand this formula and it hasn't significantly changed for 3.19 then a 25 pop city would have 9 unhappy citizens with war with Gandhi.

So would need 40% cultural slider (assuming a theater in worst affected cities) which would cut research by 724 raw commerce. There is no way that 400 gold and 2 more mining resources would make up for that.

WW Unhappiness in a City=
Pop x Active WW/200
x (100% -25%(Jail)-25%(Rushmore)-50%(Police State) )
x World Size Modifier
__Duel=150%
__Tiny=130%
__Small=110%
__Standard=90%
__Large=70%
__Huge=50%
x 50% if Multiplayer game
x 50% if Always War or Permanent War/Peace Options
x AIs Modifier (100% at Settler..10% lower for each level up)
x (100+AI Per Era Modifier * Era)% [-1 for everly Level above Noble]
0 if you are a Barbarian

A few other minor things I noticed

We can trade for another 3 gold / turn 1 from Roosy, 1 from Gandhi and 1 from Stalin.

And I agree with Mitchum that we should trade Roosy Ecology and he makes a good point about giving him Biology, Electricity, Fission, Ecology over 4 turns. Why not give it too him. None of the techs make him significantly harder to destroy after the spaceship. Every tile he clears is a tile we don't need to. He would have ~12 turns to clear fallout before our spaceship is launched.