Possible Victory Paths

Hey everyone

As you know, the current game situation is that we are in the last place, just behind Sirius. I am confident we can manage to get up to at least third place, but it should be a good possibility for us to get 2nd as well. If our tacticians and strategists are good enough we can even perhaps consider trying to get 1st!

I will be putting up some screenshots and some thoughts on the current situation later this evening, and I would like us to use this thread to discuss the possibilities we have right now in the current situation, and then use the Turn Discussion for further discussion on a turn to turn basis after we've decided what our goals are.

A short synopsis of the current situation is that we are close to losing one of our major production centers on the southern arm of the middle continent due to culture flip from CDZ (It's at 51% Quatronian and 49% CDZian ). The city is currently producing a Buddhist Stupa to get more culture by itself. Because of that I have run our culture slider up to 50% at the moment, in a hope that we may be able to avoid losing the city there. We also need to make sure that our newly aquired cities on the south-western arm (known as Comet from Team Amazon) grow their cultural borders as soon as possible. For that reason I have set those cities to producing temples, and I even whipped one temple in one of the cities there because it had no culture-producing buildings at all and was at 0 culture. The screenshots will explain the situation better.

Team Amazon has full espionage insight into everything we do at the moment, down to seeing everything that's going on inside our cultural borders and cities. This also somewhat poses a problem in regards to the possibility of betraying the ETTT (We may have to consider declaring war on CDZ).

Hmm... I would like to at least try and negociate with CDZ, at least in hopes of not appearing as the aggressor to Amazon, in hopes that they support us. If we can successfully get Amazon backing, I would take all of CDZ's continental possessions, and then attack Sirius to try and put us over the domination limit. If we don't receive Amazon support, I would say we conquer once and for all the peninsula between us and CDZ, and go for Spaceship.

And how did he Sirius war go? What did we gain?

My comments to the screenshots are below the screenshot-spoilers.



Quatronia Home Island. I am building Broadway in Continuum in an attempt to deny it to Team Amazon. 8 turns may not be enough though, so we may just get an influx of gold when they've completed it. The other cities are respectively building commerce buildings and a Factory.



Pulsar Plateau is the city we are in danger of losing. As you can see from the picture the city tile itself has 51% Quatronian, 48% CDZian culture. I am building a Stupa here in the hopes that it can save the city for us. We have lost several tiles around the city the past 3 turns, so I suspect CDZ has been running their Culture slider very high for several turns. We may have to further up the Culture slider and go in a treasury deficit to save the city.



These are the 5 cities we gained from the war with Sirius. I am building temples in all of them to expand the cultural borders in the area. I whipped a Christian Temple in Orion (cost us 3 population, but the city was in starvation because the cultural borders were at the very minimum, and the city is not producing any culture at all so we would lose at least 1 pop there anyways).



Our current civics. I recently changed from Theocracy to Organized Religion for the hammer bonus, and we need to spread Buddhism to all our cities. If we decide on taking the war route vs CDZ we need to change that back though.



Our current military situation.



And finally a detailed rundown of what all our cities are working on at present.

I can also provide a screenshot of the Demographics if anyone is interested. Let me know if you guys want/need anything else. Now, let's get down to business on what we should do. Keep in mind, I am not a very skilled player as I have warned some of you about, so I will need your help and advice for us to pull this through! But I have full faith that we can, together, make a decent attempt at this!

Great to see you are around, Bowsling! This pleases me greatly!

Mind you all, by the way: I am really not fond of the idea of betraying a deal that the team went into with honour. If we are to declare war on CDZ, I personally would prefer that it was for a reason. However, I think that if we wish to pursuit that, their rather obvious attempt at culturally flipping our second best production city is a good start. Just my own two cents about that..

That is what I am thinking. We can use the carrot on them, perhaps offering them some gold to relieve the cultural pressure on our cities, and if that doesn't work, pull out the stick and start whacking them with it.

Personally, it would bring me a good deal of pleasure to take those CDZ (atro)cities, and rename them to something better.

Here's a thread you may want to look through, Caledorn:http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=379703. That area of the peninsula has a long history of culture-warring (this nearly split up the ETTT while you were on Merlot). Basically, we did not communicate with CDZ about our settlement plans, which caused both teams to feel as though the other team was infringing on "their" land. That kicked off a race towards music, which we won, but elected not to use a culture bomb to preserve the alliance.

I suggest sending CDZ (whoever is playing it) a message stating: "The city of Pulsar Plateau is one of Quatronia's more useful cities. While we regret the divisive history behind it's founding, the New Quatronian Government will not tolerate a culture flip there. If the city does flip, we politely request its return."

What's going on with Sirius? We should ally with them. If CDZ is putting all that effort into culture, it's basically because they are relying on Amazon's military, can you confirm this?

I have no idea what the email security question answer is, we should just use PMs.

If you want us to look at micro, we'll need screenshots of each city. For now, I recommend switching from Broadway, which you think we'll lose, to something more useful, like a factory, military or research building. Finish the commerce buildings and build productive buildings (like factories) and military.

As for actually winning, we can't win a cultural or spaceship victory as things stand right now. We need to prevent Amazon winning a space victory (with nukes) and CDZ winning a cultural victory (with conventional military), and go for domination. We're not ready for war yet, and neither of our opponents are close enough to winning yet, so we need to build our military and solicit Sirius.

EDIT: Keep the culture on for now until we can talk to CDZ, afterwards we can tech for ICBMs.

Demographics above - then our cities below:

CharlemagneXLII said:

Here's a thread you may want to look through, Caledorn:http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=379703. That area of the peninsula has a long history of culture-warring (this nearly split up the ETTT while you were on Merlot). Basically, we did not communicate with CDZ about our settlement plans, which caused both teams to feel as though the other team was infringing on "their" land. That kicked off a race towards music, which we won, but elected not to use a culture bomb to preserve the alliance.

Click to expand...

I read that thread yesterday actually, and this is one of the reasons I mentioned the third victory alternative above.

CharlemagneXLII said:

I suggest sending CDZ (whoever is playing it) a message stating: "The city of Pulsar Plateau is one of Quatronia's more useful cities. While we regret the divisive history behind it's founding, the New Quatronian Government will not tolerate a culture flip there. If the city does flip, we politely request its return."

Click to expand...

Please see the Embassy to CDZland for a suggestion for a letter to them.

CharlemagneXLII said:

What's going on with Sirius? We should ally with them. If CDZ is putting all that effort into culture, it's basically because they are relying on Amazon's military, can you confirm this?

Click to expand...

I believe allying with Sirius is the best course of action too. Amazon is too powerful, and I'm not really interested in being their puppet state, even though Sommerswerd is a very nice guy (if a bit .. direct and lawyer-like in his posts).

CharlemagneXLII said:

If you want us to look at micro, we'll need screenshots of each city. For now, I recommend switching from Broadway, which you think we'll lose, to something more useful, like a factory, military or research building. Finish the commerce buildings and build productive buildings (like factories) and military.

Click to expand...

I actually think we have a 75-80% chance of building the Broadway. I don't think Amazon has cities that can compete with the hammer output of Continuum.

CharlemagneXLII said:

As for actually winning, we can't win a cultural or spaceship victory as things stand right now. We need to prevent Amazon winning a space victory (with nukes) and CDZ winning a cultural victory (with conventional military), and go for domination. We're not ready for war yet, and neither of our opponents are close enough to winning yet, so we need to build our military and solicit Sirius.

EDIT: Keep the culture on for now until we can talk to CDZ, afterwards we can tech for ICBMs.

Click to expand...

I agree!

Ok, stick with Broadway if you think we'll get it, happiness is always good. Let's transform Continuum into a tank factory after.

What do you reckon will happen on the way to spaceship victory, as regards the ETTT?

Depending on whether part production can keep up with research, I'm wondering whether spaceship might turn into a lottery of timing for all teams, as to exactly when it makes sense for each team to break from the treaty.

hmm... interrupted, post rest later...

Still waiting for the rest of your thoughts, whb *nudge nudge*

Sorry... not much sleep been had in the whb household these last few weeks. New baby etc.

Roughly, the thought was that the timing might be interesting in a space race. I don't know if production can keep up with tech under the ETTT, but this was assuming it does.

Nobody's going to want to give you the last tech you need to launch your rocket. But given under the ETTT we've got four teams researching differently-sized techs, the last tech you would research yourself if everyone did freely share that last-needed tech might not actually be the last tech you need.

ie, under perfect trading it might be
- T1 (given)
- T2 (researched, given to others)
- T3 (given)
- T4 (given)

The last one you would have researched is T2, 3 techs from the end.

So that means the ETTT will break down some time before the last tech.

But how is going to be interesting. If any team makes a break too early, they're up against the combined research efforts of three other teams. In the example above, witholding T2 leaves Team Hypothetical having to research T3 and T4 themselves, as they've clearly already broken the ETT, during which time two teams that feel closer might decide to share their last techs just to overhaul Team Hypothetical (and have a production race to sort out which of them wins). Two techs is perhaps an ok margin, but if they were to break the ETTT on the previous tech they researched, there'd be maybe 5 or 6 techs left in the queue, probably many with space parts attached.

At a (sleep-deprived) guess, I wonder if this means that if the ETTT were to last near the end, teams will be trying to time it so that they get to research Fusion, and near the end. Fusion is a big tech with a big part; it's the ideal one to make a break on, and it's big enough that hopefully while you've been researching it, others have given you most of the techs you need. And in turn teams won't believe that whoever is researching Fusion will trade it away...

Anyway, upshot of all this sleepy crazy talk is that space might depend less on research output, and more on a combination of production output (keeping the parts up with the research rate) and politics around how many techs from the end teams are left when the ETTT breaks down. If it breaks down early, and one team clearly has a very fast research rate, I expect there'd be an ETTT among the other three teams to overhaul them.