SGOTM 13 - One Short Straw

Cathy has a monopoly on feudalism and will not trade it around.
That is true, however:
1. As more AIs learn Feudalism, the monopoly value of it will decrease, which may cause Cathy or another AI to trade it around simply because she knows it
AND
2. It allows the tech to be slightly cheaper for other AIs to reserach, due to piggyback Research, which increases the other AIs' chances to self-tech Feudalism
AND
3. Cathy is not very long away from being mutually Friendly with Ragnar and/or Willem. Being mutually-Friendly with Willem could mean an almost instant trade, which of course reduces the monopoly value of the tech. As for Ragnar, I'm not sure if being Friendly will trump the "dumb kid on the block" shunning behaviour or not.


I'd rather hit Izzy now, especially Madrid, before she gets feudalism. We will be razing all of her cities, I think. She had one of the least powers of the AI (no metal) so she will only have archers (and maybe mounted units who are no threat).
She does have access to Horses, but at least for now, lacks Horseback Riding.

I still think that we should raze the western Gem City while we get a few troops created out of Willem's Cities.

I'd also strongly advocate for as high of a Cultural Slider as it needed in Willem's Cities to prevent population loss over the next few turns, which is a criteria that will go away after a couple of rounds of whipping due to there being less people who will want to remain Unhappy.

For a City like Utrecht that is pretty large, I wouldn't bother with Archer overflow initially, so that we can whip it down to size faster, but Rotterdam, for example, might start to work on an overflow Archer.

We might be able to get away with not needing a Military Police unit for every City in Willem's ex-core after doing some heavy whipping, such as possibly not needing one in Rotterdam after it has whipped a couple of more times.


The sooner we hit her, the sooner we can break her tech (and Madrid accounts for a bunch of it). So I'm ok with mdy's suggestion of skipping gems and going straight for Madrid.
I don't think that we're quite there yet in terms of the number of units, and I think that we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot if we were to empty Willem's ex-core Cities of Military Police units just to drum-up a short-term army while losing 56 Hammers per population point lost in the process.

I still think that we're a couple of turns away from launch, but I would advocate building a Galleon in Utrecht as preparation for the launch on Isabella.
 
The hill squares next to Yaroslav meaningless - we will only want troops made by the whip at this point.
Mines may have meaning near the end of the game when we've run out of turns to be able to get troops to the front lines but want to build Wealth to avoid going on Strike.

I sincerely doubt that our finances will ever be in trouble sufficiently for us to be near a Strike, but it's nice to have a bit of flexibility should we need it.
 
@shyuhe

Are you going to try to play tonight or tomorrow before Dhoom takes over? I think we have the game in hand, we just need to finish it out before time runs out...
 
By the way, Isabella loves her siege units (think of her Citadels as being one of the reasons behind this programming), so we should expect her to have a bunch of Catapults. Thus, going in with sufficient troops (i.e. I figure about 4 Galleons' worth) will matter, particularly since she:
a) Is running Theocracy
AND
b) Has several Cities in which to house a larger army
AND
c) Has several Cities out of which to spam troops, and given that she is running Slavery, we should expect her to offer the best resistance yet


Ideally, she will go after Engineering instead of Feudalism, which would be ideal because she'd have to learn Machinery first, putting it further away on the horizon.
 
Okay, and how many Cities can you capture before she has a chance to whip Theocratic units in every other City at least once?

The point is that we should expect to see Cats suiciding against our units, so it will be nice to have sufficient units that not every Maceman will need to be wounded after every City capture, to survive such counter-attacks and to even discourage them.
 
Okay, and how many Cities can you capture before she has a chance to whip Theocratic units in every other City at least once?
This number doesn't change between 3 and 4 boats. Unless you're going to split the 4 boats into two 2 boat stacks, we will run into the same number of whipped units (since the amount of time spent conquering each city doesn't change).

The point is that we should expect to see Cats suiciding against our units, so it will be nice to have sufficient units that not every Maceman will need to be wounded after every City capture, to survive such counter-attacks and to even discourage them.

I think we've seen a grand total of 0 catapults built by the AI (except Ragnar). I just don't see Izzy having much of an army right now. She may have a few CG2 archers but that will probably be it. Plus, if she whips up archers, she will slow down her research towards feudalism (if that's what she's going for). I'd rather face more archers than a few longbows as archers are easy kills. And no, she won't upgrade archers --> longbows that fast. Emperor AI are notoriously slow at upgrading units.

I'll check to see how much EP it costs to see Izzy's graphs. If it's <1 turn worth, it may be worth taking a look to see if we can hit her with 3 or 4 boats.
 
Here's an interesting tidbit: Vicky has her hands full. She will not Declare War when Pleased towards a player, so Joao is immune to the declaration, as are we.

She may be going after her recently-weakened Worst Enemy: Cathy.


By the way--we should probably switch to building a Treb or a Mace (or even a Pike if we really care about Isabella possibly getting Horse Archers mid-war) out of Amsterdam and whipping it, followed by using the overflow Hammers into an Archer--rather than spending 2 turns to complete the current Archer build item manually.
 
Could Galleon 7 (Stone) move to S + S of Marble City, in order to pick up the Worker that is in limbo right now? It could spend 1 turn going 1W on the following turn, in order to manually drop off the Worker (but not dropping off the Maceman, of course) on the SW Horse Island. That way, the Worker could do something useful, like building a Fort and a Road on the Horse Resource.
 
Some math:

Our power is 450,000

Rival best is 188,000 which is likely Ragnar.
English are 166,666.
Portugal is 132,352.
Dutch are 96,000 (worst).
Average of rivals is 147,166.

So that means there are 882,996 troops amongst the AI, leaving about 299,978 unaccounted for between Cathy and Izzy. So Izzy can't have that many troops (about as many as the English at best).
 
So Izzy can't have that many troops (about as many as the English at best).
Careful here.

The number of troops is not directly represented by the Power value.

Isabella, for example, could have less Barracks but more troops.

She might, on the other hand, have Barracks and Walls everywhere and have less troops.


Another consideration is that Cathy has a few additional Military techs--Machinery, Horseback Riding, and Feudalism, meaning that if, say, the two girls had equal Power, Isabella would have a higher unit count.

Cathy also doesn't have a lot of troops.

Cathy's Longbowmen are also valued higher per troop, meaning that Isabella would have more troops given a similar Power level that only counted troops counts and did not include Buildings and Tech.


Also, there is an assumption that Ragnar has the highest Power, but what if that assumption isn't correct? What if that value belongs to Isabella? I mean, we have been sinking most of Ragnar's troops and he only has 4 Cities. We saw recently that he has the following troops in Ivory City (according to a sign on the map):
1 Sword
1 Catapult
1 Archer
1 Chariot

That's not really a huge stack, so perhaps he is not the Power leader afterall.
 
In the east, we now have 3 galleons, 4 maces, and 5 trebs built. Next turn, we will get a galleon and two maces, bringing our total to 4 galleons, 6 maces, and 5 trebs. So we need to move our fleet east and get ready to set sail. Iron will crank out the last mace that can hop on the ships as they sail by.

For the Dutch area: Amsterdam (treb--archer--treb), Utrecht (treb--mace--archer), Rotterdam (mace--archer--mace), and Hague (mace--archer--mace). Maybe mace--mace--archer (didn't calculate overflow).

Culture 0% this turn, 100% next two turns to pop Dutch cities.

Northern troops:
T+0: promote Moscow mace to C2.
T+1: All but C2 mace board boat (assuming Cathy shows no troops).
T+2: Unload troops north of Yaro.
T+3: Conquer/raze Yaro.

Southern troops:
T+0: promote mace to C1 and garrison St. Pete. Rest of troops hop on boats and head SE. Mace near Utrecht hops on boat
T+1: consolidate troops at sea and sail towards Madrid.
T+2-3: one galleon goes back to Utrecht, others sail towards Madrid.
 
Hmm... Looking at the map, I'd be ok spending 3 turns razing the gems city before heading towards Madrid too. If we do that, we can get another full boat's worth of troops from the Dutch lands (total 4 boats), which can pretty much take out half of Izzy by itself.

edit: I guess the question is whether Izzy will research feudalism within the next 7-10 turns or not.
 
In the east, we now have 3 galleons, 4 maces, and 5 trebs built. Next turn, we will get a galleon and two maces, bringing our total to 4 galleons, 6 maces, and 5 trebs. So we need to move our fleet east and get ready to set sail.
So, do we have time to shuttle the Worker that is south of Marble City to the SW Horse Island without delaying the eastern front or is the answer: "no, we won't have time"?


Hague (mace--archer--mace). Maybe mace--mace--archer (didn't calculate overflow).
Well, if the overflow looks to be too much for a Maceman at the time, then you could consider getting a Treb as the second build item, if doing so will let the Treb remain as a 2-pop-whip.


Utrecht (treb--mace--archer)
If we aim to build a Galleon, then we can Galleon-chain the units to the 4th Galleon, saving a turn on arriving at Isabella's area. If it appears that we might have more than sufficient land troops (12) to fill 4 Galleons, then doing so would be my suggestion.


Culture 0% this turn, 100% next two turns to pop Dutch cities.
Do we really need 100% for 2 turns?

I think that the goal should be to have a high enough Cultural Slider on the first turn to expand the borders of The Hague and Utrecht in one turn... the two eastern Cities can optionally wait a couple of additional turns, since they do have Confucianism and won't be high-population-Cities that don't have sufficient squares to work.

Also, I realize now that I made an error: I forgot to count Trade Routes in the Commerce. So, it's likely that a Cultural Slider closer to 80% for 1 turn could work.

For the second turn, I'd prefer to keep the Cultural Slider high enough to avoid population loss, but not necessarily go any higher. That way, we could potentially sustain this Cultural Slider value for a couple of turns, until the population points get used-up, rather than spending 2 turns at higher-than-needed values only to risk running at lower-than-needed (to prevent population loss) values on future turns.



Northern troops:
T+0: promote Moscow mace to C2.
T+1: All but C2 mace board boat (assuming Cathy shows no troops).
T+2: Unload troops north of Yaro.
T+3: Conquer/raze Yaro.
I'm assuming that you'll also promote:
- The City Raider II unit that has 8/8 XP--Maceman 3 (Paris)--to CRIII
- Pachacuti (our GG) to Medic III

Wouldn't we rather that at least the 7/8 XP City Raider II Maceman take the time to heal under the guidance of our Medic III?

The soon-to-be Combat II dude--Maceman 6 (Marble)--could get on the boat alongside the soon-to-be CR III dude--Maceman 3 (Paris)--giving us 2 Macemen on our Galleons, alongside our Trebs.

T + 1: We could take one of the Galleons that has a wounded Treb loaded onto it and unload that Treb by moving our Galleon directly into The Hague, where the Maceman 5 (Gold) would join the party, leaving the slightly-wounded Treb to act as a Military Police unit.

Assuming that you want that Treb back in your hands as soon as we have a replacement whipped Military Police unit in The Hague (or even if you wanted to take its whipped replacement from The Hague so that the veteran Treb could go to Isabella), then:
T + 1: We'd move one Galleon [the one that didn't go into The Hague out of Galleons 3 (Pig) and 4 (Iron)] to be relatively close to Yaroslav' (although maybe not too close so that the City is not threatened?) so that after that Galleon unloads, it can return towards The Hague to be able to pick up the Treb that we dropped off or else its whipped replacement.

That plan gives us a chance to make use of our Medic III unit as a temporary defender of Moscow and allows it to heal the City Raider II unit, while still having 3 Maces to attack Yaroslavl'.



Southern troops:
...
Looking at the map, I'd be ok spending 3 turns razing the gems city before heading towards Madrid too.
We have 4 Macemen, one of which is severely wounded and is currently residing in St. Petersburg.

We lose nothing by still doing the following:
T+0: promote mace to C1 and garrison St. Pete.

On T+1, we'll probably want to go by land instead of by sea to hit the western Gem City.

So, here's the gambit:
Since we only have 4 Macemen in the area, we can finesse 3 of them to go to the western Gem City, while leaving the extremely-wounded City Raider unit to defend St. Petersburg.

To do so, we'd first move 1 unit onto the GHRiver Sheep, to see if there are any incoming units from the NW, and if there are, then just keep the C1 unit in St. Petersburg but march the wounded City Raider unit into battle.

If nothing appears, then we have the option of sending the C1 unit into battle and leaving St. Petersburg poorly defended.

Actually, I just looked again, and that extremely-wounded unit only has 0.8/8 Health--it would probably die if it lost even 1 dice roll--so, no, it's not a good candidate to bring with the stack.


So, we might as well not bring that extremely-wounded City Raider with us. Instead, it will just be a decision between bringing the C1 unit or going west with only 2 Maces. I'm leaning towards leaving the C1 Maceman defending St. Petersburg while the City Raider Maceman heals there. Being 1 dice roll (10% of its Hitpoints) away from death makes the City Raider Maceman pretty bad at defending--no point risking losing a Maceman AND the City.

While we'll only have 2 Macemen going to the western Gem City, we WILL have 4 Trebs, which, given that it was a later-founded City, should be sufficient units to capture the City.


I guess the question is whether Izzy will research feudalism within the next 7-10 turns or not.
It will be nice to take down the Gem City, to reduce the pressure off of a counter-attack on St. Petersburg and to give ourselves a bit more time to gather troops for Isabella. We don't really have enough troops to fill 3 Galleons yet even, anyway, so we might as well put our troops to use by marching on the Gem City.

As I stated earlier, T + 2 we'd want to move onto the Grassland Road instead of onto the Plains Hills Forest square, so that our units will be able to board Galleons without needing to move for a turn first. If our stack gets counter-attacked, it will probably be a good thing, since that could mean one less defender in the Gem City.


If we really want to speed up the attack on Isabella, then get an extra Galleon out of Utrecht (say, instead of the initial Treb build a Galleon), so that we can have a 1-turn Galleon chain.

We will probably want to sail more troops towards Isabella anyway, so it's not like such a Galleon will go to waste.
 
Let's also take care of Willem's Trireme that is on the Coast between Utrecht and Rotterdam. We have a Galleon nearby, and if we are okay to go after the western Gem City before going after Isabella, then our Galleon has nothing better to do for now. We might as well fight this 98%+ battle, which would prevent Willem's Trireme from potentially Pillaging Rotterdam's Fish Resource--a Fishing net which is is worth 3 Food--which itself is worth a lot more than 3 Hammers per turn.
 
Hmm... Looking at the map, I'd be ok spending 3 turns razing the gems city before heading towards Madrid too. If we do that, we can get another full boat's worth of troops from the Dutch lands (total 4 boats), which can pretty much take out half of Izzy by itself.

edit: I guess the question is whether Izzy will research feudalism within the next 7-10 turns or not.

I think this is a good idea. We might want to whip a pike or 2 in the Dutch lands instead of maces for the Izzy front, just in case she gets horse archers.

think we've seen a grand total of 0 catapults built by the AI (except Ragnar). I just don't see Izzy having much of an army right now. She may have a few CG2 archers but that will probably be it. Plus, if she whips up archers, she will slow down her research towards feudalism (if that's what she's going for). I'd rather face more archers than a few longbows as archers are easy kills. And no, she won't upgrade archers --> longbows that fast. Emperor AI are notoriously slow at upgrading units.

I'll check to see how much EP it costs to see Izzy's graphs. If it's <1 turn worth, it may be worth taking a look to see if we can hit her with 3 or 4 boats.

I agree. It would take 1T with the espionage slider at 70% to see Izzys Demographics, as we can easily afford this we could do this next turn if people are worried about Izzy's strength.

I think that the goal should be to have a high enough Cultural Slider on the first turn to expand the borders of The Hague and Utrecht in one turn... the two eastern Cities can optionally wait a couple of additional turns, since they do have Confucianism and won't be high-population-Cities that don't have sufficient squares to work.

I agree.

That is true, however:
1. As more AIs learn Feudalism, the monopoly value of it will decrease, which may cause Cathy or another AI to trade it around simply because she knows it
AND
2. It allows the tech to be slightly cheaper for other AIs to reserach, due to piggyback Research, which increases the other AIs' chances to self-tech Feudalism
AND
3. Cathy is not very long away from being mutually Friendly with Ragnar and/or Willem. Being mutually-Friendly with Willem could mean an almost instant trade, which of course reduces the monopoly value of the tech. As for Ragnar, I'm not sure if being Friendly will trump the "dumb kid on the block" shunning behaviour or not.

We could sign a cease fire with William and Ragnar to avoid them getting more + modifiers for fighting a common enemy, and reduce the number of units they will build. Attacking Izzy early is probably the best thing we can do to reduce the chances of another AI getting feudalism.
 
OK, sounds like we're more or less in agreement. I'm going to play shortly.

@Dhoom:
The galleon can't pick up the worker - it needs to head straight east. Gold is building another galleon that can deal with the worker.

I'll look at the troop shuffling you propose for the north. If it doesn't slow down the plan to hit Novgorod (which is more important), then I'll do it.

For the south, I plan on leaving the wounded mace alone if Cathy doesn't send any counter-attacking stack.
 
Played a quick 3 turns. Save uploaded.

Whipping spree continued. Gold no longer has a :mad: at size 4 because of the dyes + gems :lol: That'll change soon though. I made a slight error and didn't whip enough boats in the core. Gold and stone should probably both whip galleons next (and maybe pig-fish and/or iron too). We can set up a nice galleon chain if we do.

I've scouted Cathy's remaining cities since I had a spare galleon. They're very lightly defended and shouldn't be an issue for the remnants of the northern stack.

I've taken cease fires with Willem + Ragnar to make them stop spamming troops. Especially Ragnar.

I took Yaroslav and razed the gems city (it was coastal but still worthless at size 2). I lost a treb assaulting Yaroslav but that's it for losses.

I haven't ended the turn since we can start attacking Vicky on this turn (Hastings) and I wanted to put that issue up to the team. I think we should declare and unload this turn to capture Hastings on T+1. This will open up a canal to allow our second wave of boats to hit London quicker.

 
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