RBtS1b - The Thief Economy

Kirby said:

lurker's comment #2
You could cap Memphis with a Spy using Support City Revolt which will make the city revolt for one turn. A revolting city looses all culture-based bonuses, effectively completely removing the 40% bonus for one turn.

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this is a good idea and one that although I was aware of I've never used and maybe that's why it didn't occur to me.

The argument for peace is probably still good--Hat has 4 cities one well defended and one on a hill so don't think we can run her over.
I also like the idea of getting as much of her tech as possible to keep relations good with Persia.

This I think makes sense when we redeclare as we likely will want to do that pre-cats. So I think build a mess of spies and get some of Hat's cheap techs, then get spies in position and declare and use that revolt feature.

BTW thanks for lurking--you've added some good ideas.

Roster

Kodii
pindicator
sunrise089 (on the run til 2 Sept)
Swiss Pauli - up
ungy - on deck

I'll take a look at this again, focusing on tech options, then report back and ask for input before playing. I think peace with Hatty for now is clear, as the revolt feature can fail and I doubt we've enough troops to polish her off.

Had a quick trawl through the CFC forums and couldn't find a comprehensive guide to spy activites in terms of % chance of identification, caught but succeed, etc., so I've put something together from my experience, plus darrell's post and thread on the Pie Bomb.

Here's the deal on stealing Meditation from Darius in Gordium:






The significant factors here are the amount of discount for distance, and the EP spending discount. Stationary discount can be ignored, as we'll always go at 50%.

In each of the above games, the Pie Bomb has been used (and the speed and difficulty are the same) so the comparison should be pretty true. I'd like to see how long we can stretch the EP Spend discount aginst Darius. In darrell's test game, it declined quite rapidly, but he was actively researching tech, unlike in this game (http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?t=2342).

From the screenshots in darrell's thread, it looks like he's founded another city on Hatty's border, and thereafter, success % has gone up from 58 to 75, with only a fractional decrease over time, so proximity to our borders (and not our capital) seems an important factor in success, even with a 'local' target. Thus Darius founding a city just south of Mutal should not have much impact as we're only one tile closer to this city than we are to Gordium, but we'll find out soon enough.

From my half a dozen BtS games, enemy Spies are easily thwarted by stationing one of my own in each city; I'd say 90+% fail. I've not counted the positive IDs, but I feel it's about 1 in 5 that give away their civ.

In summary, stealing from Darius will be more likely to succeed and cheaper than stealing from Hatty until such time as we've spent our bomb points.

From pindicator's post, here are the options:




What do we need? In my opinion, happiness is most critical at the moment, but none of the techs on offer give any happiness boost. The cheapest path to some happy is Medi => Priest.

There might be a case, however, for Poly => Priest: Poly allows Monotheism and running Mono will allow us to spam ourselves Jewish. Darius has a missionary in Hatty's lands and I wouldn't want her to go Jewish, leaving us out of Darius's magic circle (Wang and Shaka have +6 bro n sis already). Whichever way we get there, we need the happy from Priesthood's temples.

ungy had suggested Currency for the commerce it provides, but I can't see this paying out until we can support cities large enough to build markets, seeing as we have no happy resources for a market to boost, and as long as we enjoy a large EP margin on Darius the commerce is not so desperately important.

Darius is podering his research options at the moment. Let's hope he goes Maths => Construction. Ball courts and catapults would be very useful.

Kirby The Lurker's post #3

I actually downloaded the save this time, just to take a "closer look"

Here are my thoughts and observations:

1. Egyptians.
Hatsepshut has two more cities that are not visible on the map: Alexandria and Pi-Ramesses. They can be seen as a trade route at Tarsus (Darius) and Gordium (Darius), respectively. So she's not so weak as she seems

2. Happiness.
5 out of 7 of your cities have Hinduism, you even have the hindu super-building, yet you didn't switch to Hindu yet. That's +1 happy face in 5 cities (if you make it your gov religion ofc). I know it will worsen your relations with Darius, but Darius is strong in defence (Longbowmen, ugh), not in offence (for now). If Hatty stays Hindu (no reason why she shouldn't), you get extra good relations with her, and to be frank ...

3. Too long borders.
You are too stretched out. Your have a HUGE border to Darius. If you keep Hatty a friend, at least you don't need to worry about your southern borders as well (religious connections should help in that). hatty has plenty of room to expand to South and West, she won't attack you for pure land shortage.

4. Why I would still take Memphis before making peace with hatty.
There are 5 resources in Memphis' fat cross and four of those are luxury!!! Once Darius focuses his attention on you, you won't have time to play games with Hatty. I say take it now when you have the chance, foget the jungle chopping. I doubt she will leave her capital undefended EVER again. Now the luxury wouldn't be a problem, but considering the resource spread on your continent, EVERY civ if short on luxury. When Darius' and Shaka's cities begin to grow, they will have their eyes on Memphis as well

5. Darius has iron.
Darius is willing to trade Iron, which means he has it. I suggest never letting Darius laying his hands on it. Ivory, horses, iron, tech lead. *Coughelephantscough* You get the picture Spies can destroy tile improvements at trivial costs. He has an iron mine somewhere and we must not allow... a mine shaft gap!

One thing I am near certain that reduces stealing costs is a shared religion. IIRC, it is something like -25%. I would go with Judaism for that alone.

Kirby has some good points above. In fact, that's a good argument for taking Memphis, considering we have happiness issues.

I have to say I agree with ungy on Memphis: the gems will be under Egyptian control even if we keep Memphis (and we can't mine them until we steal IW). The others are all Calendar resources, and could be subject (sugar excepted) to cultural pressure from Hatty's hidden cities. We should stop now; until we can wipe her out, take Memphis will only weaken us.

Allying with Hatty would be folly, so Judaism is the way to go, but not until more cities are under it (we'd lose the culture and Thebes). If Darius does decide on war, the amount of offensive troops he has doesn't play a part: it's only when he's built enough that he would declare.

I'm still for stealing the small techs from Hattie. Yes we may pay a little more but keeping our relations good with Darius as long as possible is more important IMHO.

We should take Judiasm as soon as we get needed border pops at the latest.
Pretty much nothing in civ is as important as avoiding a war not of your choosing.

If we can keep good relations long enough with Darius, then he will trade us ivory (he'll do that now for a steep price). As soon as we can get the tech, then we take that if available no matter the cost. Jumbos are really important for us as we can't control the tech path so well and will likely be behind Darius in tech forever.

I'm all in favor of finishing Hattie, just don't think we have the ability right now.

So build up a bit, use spies to knock culture down, steal her cheap tech to avoid problems with Darius, and then redeclare would be my recommendation.

Make peace with Hatty and swap some builds around. In the interturn, Darius founds Ergili. A couple of turns later, I whip the library at Chicken (for the NE later) to get rid of angry pop.

On turn 173, Poly is stolen from Darius. So far, so good. A couple of turns later, Hatty becomes Darius vassal; I'm very glad we're not still at war with her, but this does complicate matters (unless she breaks free).

Our next theft (Priesthood) fails at 77% odds. To make it worse, Darius knows it's us.

We lose our pasture and our copper (the latter is now almost restored):




Our next theft (Priesthood) fails at 77% odds. Thankfully, Darius doesn't know it's us.

Our next theft (Priesthood) fails at 77% odds. To make it worse, Hatty knows it's us.

Our next theft (Priesthood) succeeds at 77% odds, but our spy gets caught. Thankfully, Darius doesn't know it's us. That's 2 thefts out of 5, which is a pretty bad RNG streak.

Temples are ordered up all round, and some have already been whipped. The heavy loss of spies means some more need to be trained. I was a bit non-plussed with their failure and forgot to replace them one for one. It's definitely the right idea to go after Hatty for the cheaper techs as the success odds were the same in Memphis as in Ergili.

Not a turnset I'll remember fondly, that's for sure!

Aside from this, I scouted Korea and Wang's not got very handsome lands and he even missed out on the barb city on his borders (to Big D).

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/96651/RBtS1b_AD-0175.CivBeyondSwordSave

Let's hope ungy is more lightfingered than me...

ungy said:

So my top priority would be to keep good relations with Darius until we digest Hattie and are ready for him. To me that means Judiasm and steal as much as possible from Hat.

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Definitely. With my dismal failure at tech stealing, I think I went the wrong way with Poly: Meditation would have allowed Monastries to get the Jewish missionaries out of Lakamha at a good clip. And notwithstanding that OR is probably too costly to run, so a poor call on my part, sorry guys.

Ok a quick look at the save.

I really think you guys underestimate the value of currency. To get to monarchy we had to steal 3 techs. Currency is one which will almost double our net commerce after expenses.

Darius will trade us ivory for 2 health resources, and shaka will give us OB and trade wheat--I'll do both of those.

Picking up ivory gives us 1 happy--not sure if that makes me want to divert from monarchy to currency--maybe we can delay monarchy till next theft getting the extra happy from ivory.

Build more spies and divert all espionage production to Hattie. We want to be able to steal stuff from her. Tank w/Darius is pretty full. We need I think at least 6 spies to keep things rolling.

Should we take Judiasm? That pretty much burns our bridges with Hat, who is currently willing to trade with us, but gets us set up with Darius. ATM I think we have nothing to worry about, but the religion bonus builds over time and we might need to start it soon. I think I'm leaning to it as we don't want him to cancel the ivory trade if we get another - or 2.

I think our plan should be to jump Hat if she let's go her vassalization but that isn't likely too soon. So I think we have to build infra and spies and grow our cities.

After currency and monarchy prioritize the jumbo/cat techs.

I'll play tomorrow so get your comments in.

If we can get the Ivory trade, then we can afford to delay Monarchy. I think I gifted him a spare fish for the relationship bonus, but I don't know whether it's still active. Darius has gone Maths => Calendar, so we can probably look to steal Currency next, with Maths and Construction further down the line. Monarchy can be slotted in as happiness needs dictate.

If we can get Mono/Medi from Hatty then we can probably make a 'pre-emptive' switch to Judaism. If Darius rumbles our spy again soon, then we have to accept an early switch to Judaism to preserve the realtionship.

Tough luck on the RNG rolls. At least we're not getting to the point where the spies are detected the moment they roll into the AIs territory. That happened to me in a personal game and just frustrated the hell out of me.

I agree that we shoudl divert EPs to Hatty. With my understanding of the tech steal bonus for having more EPs than a rival is that it is based off of your total EP spending, not just the spending towards that particular rival. So we might as well steal from Hatty as much as possible before turning our attention towards Darius. (Let me know if I'm wrong; if I am then it makes the whole pie bomb even more unbalanced early on. Meaning you get an insane discount off of every AI, which I think is where we are at this point.)

The happiness techs are definitely important, but we also want to prioritize CoL to get courthouses and increase our EP rates. And Wang Kon has CoL.

Swiss Pauli said:

A couple of turns later, I whip the library at Chicken (for the NE later) to get rid of angry pop.

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I am really not getting why we want NE in this town. There are plenty of other candidates that have a better food, and we won't be able to run spy specialist with any type of decent return until after Constitution. Why make this choice now?

We only have 1 spy. Half a dozen at least sounds like what we will need. (It also sounds like quite a hammer commitment.) Hatty, being Darius' vassal, may end up getting all of the technologies that he has. If he does supply her, then we may end up getting a free ride in relations with stealing: incur all the wrath on the vassal, stay chummy with the master.

Something I should have noticed in my turnset: we are 1xp away from a GG. So once our next war starts...

"Pies like Us"

Mine Shaft Gap.

pindicator said:

Tough luck on the RNG rolls. At least we're not getting to the point where the spies are detected the moment they roll into the AIs territory. That happened to me in a personal game and just frustrated the hell out of me.

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That's our nightmare scenario...

I agree that we shoudl divert EPs to Hatty. With my understanding of the tech steal bonus for having more EPs than a rival is that it is based off of your total EP spending, not just the spending towards that particular rival.

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I think you're correct on this: IIRC we're at negative EP with Hatty, but can still steal with good success and fairly well discounted, too. So whilst most of our bomb is intact, we only need enough EPs to afford the target techs

I am really not getting why we want NE in this town. There are plenty of other candidates that have a better food, and we won't be able to run spy specialist with any type of decent return until after Constitution. Why make this choice now?

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As I wrote, it was as much as to get rid of angry pop (two rising to three) as for the NE. One reason to build the NE in the Chicken is for Merchants in the early game (then Spies later), but the other factor that makes it more interesting than our other cities for the NE is that it can't have many cottages, so the economic trade off is less painful, and, with all the wars we'll be fighting, I think we'll be in Slavery, not Caste System, so we won't need to support too many specialists. That's the argument for Chicken as NE, but we're not committed to this choice by any means.

We only have 1 spy. Half a dozen at least sounds like what we will need. (It also sounds like quite a hammer commitment.)

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Yeah, they kept getting caught. There's a couple on the way and ungy (with some help from better RNG) will increase their number considerably.

@ungy - looking at some screenshots I took, we don't have trade routes with Ergili, so it would be better to send future spies to Gordium ( was -20 trade routes, +4 distance) until Ergili pops up with a trade route - which may never happen given its low growth potential. I think getting Currency sooner (2 turns, as opposed to 8 or 9) will compensate the extra cost, but that's just a gut feeling.

EDIT: there's a workboat that's nearly done. Forgot to mention it in my report, but it's for scouting Shaka's coast.

I'm back. It will take me a bit to catch up fully, but things are looking good.

EDIT: Oops, forgot to read a page...

OK here we go:
basic plan is build a bunch more spies and steal what we can from Hat.
175 AD trade corn for wheat with Shaka.
trade cow+clam for ivory with Darius.
switch most cities to spy.
IBT Taoism founded in Pusan.
190 Uxmal spy-spy, Mutal spy-spy.
convert to Judiasm. We need this for LT relations. In our back pocket is that when we go to war w/Darius, we want to first bribe Shaka to attack him.
205. Steal currency from Darius (77%) no repercussions. OB with Zulu.
220 whip spy in chichen, Lak. I confess I'm not sure what to do with all our workers.
IBT hat wants to trade tech with us.
Darius gets a prophet.
235 whip temple in Thebes--spy.
IBT Darius build temple of Solomon.
250 disband warrior in Mayapan--in retrospect maybe a mistake as HR very soon. Still we're running in the red at 40% and we have a lot of not too good units.
Darius is sending missionaries to Hat--she'll convert soon. He will likely do our work for us.
IBT HG built in Zulu.
265 Mayapan spy--I guess continue WB just in case it turns up something interesting. Trade Darius sheep for 6gpt.
280 whip temple in Chichen--market. Maya WB-market.
295 Mutal spy-market.
310 whip spy in Uxmal--overflow to market.
325 ...
340 We try to steal monarchy from Darius--only 57% for 379. Success
We can sell tech to Shaka--I check to see if this is OK with our variant. My take on the variant is that we can only acquire tech by theft--we can still trade tech away. Hope this is correct. Sell poly to Zulu for 100g, trade cow to Zulu for 3gpt.
Revolt to HR as cannot get 2 civics for 1 turn anyway.
IBT Christianity FIDL, Jud--Mutal.
355 we're ready to steal from Darius. Choices are Feud, Math, IW and the little techs. I go for Feud at 75% Success again and no discovery.
We are up to steal w/hat. Choices are HBR, IW, Math and little techs. Hat has taken Jud so we OB. I go for IW... success but she is on to us.
trade her marble for 2gpt. This trade should be canceled when marble needed.
We have iron but it's not in a great spot--we'll get it by expansion in 24t.
Darius is building missionaries for us.
370 Lak temple-holk (partially done)
IBT Hat-vassalage. This was a gift from Darius
385 We're up again with Hat. Choices are HBR, Math, arch and little techs.
choose math. We fail
I'm sending a spy to Pusan as I think we should shift resources to Wang and try for COL on the next set.
whip spy in Maya--overflow into market.
400 ...

Note to next emperor:

1 spy will be ready in 2 turns in each of Egypt and Persia.
Sent a spy on a long trek to Korea.
We should take feudalism asap as I think CS a long way away. We get some % due to free upkeep and we'll soon be ready to get the military going.

BTW I'm pretty lame tech wise and don't know how to place or remove markers--marker is in Ergli from last set.

save is here: