Sandkasten

Well, not to rub any sault in DMOC's wounds from the last game, but from early on it seemed everyone on the team was pretty darn positive they were going to win the oracle race. But they were in for a big surprise on T-55.

Rule #1, never underestimate your opponents

Very close!

But I think the precise text for rule #1 is:

"Don't underestimate the other guy's greed!"

Still, quite agree.

seeing this map im tempted to change stragegy completely

-> forget about wonders, go all out expansion to central landmass (if that is what we find)

because:
what good do us the pyramids + oracle, if we dont have barbships and neighbours that can disturb us + pyramids without foodrich cities with high pop an many specialists (or better said, without many cities at all)... ...bad

if there is a central landmass, there WILL BE some green and rich fields and for these we have to run

We can't really assume the existance of that central landmass though. We can't really win an expansion race either, and at least triremes will give us one edge.

I think MC is only more powerful now that we know a bit more. The Pyramids gambit... Don't know.

What are the possible revisions to the plan for the short term? We could panic and tech Fishing for an explorer WB, before BW, but IMHO that would be silly. I think we can just stick with our plan until BW is just about in, and reconsider the Oracle timeline then (i.e. speed up MC, giving up on the GE if that seems better).

Niklas said:

We can't really assume the existance of that central landmass though. We can't really win an expansion race either, and at least triremes will give us one edge.

Click to expand...

1. we need to send out a wb to scout ASAP
2. we might need sailing faster then planned
3. settler race can also mean: getting 5 cities up on the central landmass while others get 6-7 ... ...and avoid having only 2-3

-> i already played a demo game on a map with small islands and a central big landmass... ...if you cant get a fair share of the central landmass, you loose (neither mids nor oracle-mc helps, cause warfare isnt possible up to 1 AD +/- and at that point all civs have mc + lots of other stuff

pirate-barbs are a no brainer, cause they cant reach your island fogbusted right

-> now IF we can get oracle - mc - mids - mono - sailing and STILL get our share of the land... ...

agri-fishing-bronze or agri-bronze-fishing we should think about, cause knowledge is power

I was specifically arguing against Agri-Fish-BW. I think a WB is too much of a hammer investment that early just for exploring purposes. Can't imagine it ever beating worker-settler with chops...

The other option (Agri-BW-Fish) we should definitely test, though. Basically, Fishing might have to supercede the Oracle now (I'd still wait a few turns to map out the SW of our island). It's super quick with 2 gems, so I think we need to find the most convenient production slot for a WB and slot the tech in accordingly.

Hmmm.... I'm still in favor of going with the Oracle->MC->GE->Pyramids gambit-- it really sets us up for the long term. If we stick to that, and work a 3rd gems, how quickly could we research fishing -> sailing? Don't we get some sort of beaker bonus for researching techs that other civs already have?

My main concern is that if we divert resources away from our Oracle plan, we aren't getting anything tangible for it, unless we research Fishing AND Sailing. I understand that recon is important, but we can get that in a hurry after our initial phase is over and we begin Operation: Unit Spam (tm)

I'm still feeling like we should stay the course, and violently execute our Oracle/Pyramids gambit, then switch to Police State while we produce units (galleys, triremes), then switch to Rep when we get some more specialists set up.

Police state scouting... an interesting thought! Don't think WB qualifies as military, unfortunately... but the idea is well worth some thought?

BobRoberts said:

Police state scouting... an interesting thought! Don't think WB qualifies as military, unfortunately... but the idea is well worth some thought?

Click to expand...

I'm talking about axes, galleys and triremes, after the gambit, which means saving fishing and sailing for after Oracle/Pyramids is built. Work on settlers/workers/workboats while waiting for the GE to pop, then produce the military units once in Police State. The drawback is still the loss of early scouting, but we can try to make up for it in a hurry.

I think the utility of our Spiritual trait depends heavily on the Pyramids, and we have a strong opening that gives us a good chance of getting them.

Mids unlocks alot of civics, so yes it has synergy with Spiritual. I also was thinking we could use PS to speed up early naval units, at lest in 5-turn chunks.

If we were financial I'd be a little less apprehensive about scrapping our powerful Mids plan. But as is, with out traits, I think throwing out Mids plan here is going to make things much worse. If we lose it due to a race that's one thing, but if we lose it on purpose, it's our own fault.

I am going to need a lot more convincing here to throw away a 500 hammer wonder, the most important one in the first half of the game anyway.

Don't we get some sort of beaker bonus for researching techs that other civs already have?

Click to expand...

NO, you need to make contact first.

It would be around 3% per civ.

BobRoberts said:

Police state scouting... an interesting thought! Don't think WB qualifies as military, unfortunately... but the idea is well worth some thought?

Click to expand...

To my knowledge, yes it does... It's a "bug" that is fixed in the PIG mod, among others. Interesting thought to use PS for this stuff.

I remember exploiting the WB-PS bug by accident once, but I thought the last time I tried it in an online game, that was patched up.. Are you sure it isn't already in 3.17? Ahh hell I might as well test it again later.

Anyhow ------------------

I have been doing some more thinking. Yup, I just don’t want to lose the Mids here, no way.

With our Phil trait, and TGL we’ll get 2 academies up asap in our first 2 cities.

Now.. With just that alone (and including a cheap library), we can get 100 beakers a turn with just running an additional 7.5 scientist. It should be noted, this is assuming we have slider on 0, and have no settled specialists or any other science income such as trade-routes, etc.

Needless to say, we could quickly make those 3 gems and other commerce into a lot of extra beakers early as well if we want to jack up the slider again. I think it’s very important to have the mids here. It also lets us really abuse things. We can tech up to key mile-stones, and then immediately use PS & Forge for 50% bonuses on all our ships & Military units.

If it so happens that we end up losing a bit of land because of this (you can’t be sure), we have other means at our disposal, especially war. If for chance the Amazons (rookies) are near us, I’d actually be happy to give them the WAR they were looking for.

As soon as Mono/Pottery is done, we head straight for Fishing& Sailing…. We can get that workboat at the end of fishing, and then get our galley ready when sailing is in. We can already have a settler & units standing by as soon as the gallery comes off the assembly line.

Anyhow, to re-emphasis a military point… If our mids strategy works, we’ll have….

A large naval lead golden-age for quite some time…
Half price navies
Half price armed forces
Half price military buildings, etc.
Tech speeds to crutial military techs (iron working, etc&#8230

We can find ourselves into a very nice GOLDEN-AGE opportunity for war here… I would really like to use war to extort land from nearby opponents who may wish to content for islands.

Tested it, and yes, PS (and HE, Military Academy) still speeds up WB production in 3.19.

Agree with obs about the benefits of the mids.

The other kicker is the boosted happy cap of rep - which with the forges we should leverage out into a seriously boosted expansion curve and have a stronger economy to support it?

Although it's 2/3 price rather than half?

I think it's still a good plan, see if it survives contact with the enemy?

Great. Fortunately, (or unfortunately) it takes 17 turns to get that GE, so it won't come into play for the workboat. Both others will be only 20h, even if in other cities on other continents +.

We should time things, so when we turn off rep to run PS for 5 turns, we have ALL cities working on the same RELATIVE builds to maximize civics. Thus our capital (Naval Yard) works on ships during that shift, and our secondary city would immediately revert to sword or axe-men during the next 5 turns. Then we switch back into rep and resume off as before...

This means, we should try to squeeze in a barracks early in our secondary city. We get to skip wasting hammers on a useless obelisk, so it's almost like a free-bie, especially with Mono & forge. I'm liking this very much.

Fortunately, (or unfortunately) it takes 17 turns to get that GE

Click to expand...

I don't know what I've missed here but when I gave this a go I got a GP from the Oracle before the GE, which then increased the required amount of GPP needed for the engineer, meaning it was more than 17 turns.

You need to get the Forge going fast enough for the 3GPP from the Engineer to beat the 2GPP from the Oracle.

Indeed, the timing on the GE is critical so that what you describe doesn't happen. The forge with Eng must be up fast enough to outrun the Oracle GPP.