SGOTM 15 - Kakumeika

[WastinTime]

I was just seeing how fast the wonders can come in. I'm not sure I want to do that. Our growth really suffers.

Also, I'm starting to fear for our safety. I want to slip bronze in there for some axes. I'd bet we have copper with this dangerous start. SG-14 you were given no copper, but free archery to make up for that.

I'm going to test Hunting, masonry, mono, bronz, wheel, ph, writing. Should still have Oracle by t65, or sooner with a chop.

EDIT: miscalculated. Oracle is way too late in this scenario.

 

[DanF5771]

If we do get the great wall and the great spy we might be able to gift a city (preferably with hinduism in it already) to the advanced AI team and thus dramatically reduce the espionage costs against that AI.

If the advanced AI is on another continent and has >3 cities, it will not accept a close -trap city, not even in peace deals!
Stolen techs cannot be traded with No-Tech-Brokering.

If we decide on an AP-DV strategy, I'm not too keen on getting TGW -- I'd rather cash in some heavy fail gold for it.
We just need to get one tiny AI to vote for us, we don't need to go all-out diplo-manipulation via espionage.

The map has 34% water tiles - I guess Optics is a priority tech. Thus I like Oracle->MC.

Could we use our GPs like this?

1. GPriest from SH -> Kashi for spreading Hindu to close neighbors without additional costs
2. GSc from Library -> bulb Machinery (needs Aesth, Math, Alpha, IW, no Fishing, no Theo)
3. GPriest from SH + Kashi/Temple -> bulb Theology (too late for AP?)
4. GSc from (Great?) Library -> bulb Optics (needs Fishing, Sailing, Compass)

The reason why I would spare the GSc for an Academy in Delhi is because we have 2*Gold + Gems = very good decentralized commerce.

BTW the Gems city could get Marble for Oracle without the Wheel, but I'd rather have that to get MC from Oracle.

 

[WastinTime]

Can someone explain exactly what personality we're dealing with? I assume Toku is Toku. But Hammurgawa, what does that really mean? Will he open borders like Hamm would or like a 2nd Toku?

 

[DanF5771]

Toku-Clone leading the Babylonian Civilization -> open borders @ pleased.

 

[WastinTime]

Ok, so are we praying for an auto-spread of hindu to one neighbor? or if not, what would be a plan to get someone pleased with us? shared war?

I just played BOTM and got Toku to vote for me, but I was able to use religion when it auto-spread to him, and a shared war. So can we get hamm to join us in a war with Toku? How can we test that?

 

[WastinTime]

I updated our test game with the NW land, but not the Toku land. Fixed a hill near the SE gold, too.

thx for the updated game. It's really easy to test scenarios now that we have all 4 directions cleared. However, one bug...
The deer is grass, not plains.

 

[mabraham]

I was just seeing how fast the wonders can come in. I'm not sure I want to do that. Our growth really suffers.

Sure. Worker first in the NW deer-gold city only cost five turns on TGW (though the deer plains error might affect that). Two fast workers were able to keep up nicely with the growing empire.

Also, I'm starting to fear for our safety. I want to slip bronze in there for some axes. I'd bet we have copper with this dangerous start. SG-14 you were given no copper, but free archery to make up for that.

Meh, TGW solves the barb issue. The marble border pop gets visibility of the whole southern coastline if we don't have TGW - our narrow strip of land works for us in that way. The sheep city culture and Toku's capital culture should stop a lot of spawn out that way. I'm not worried by an early DOW from Toku.

 

[mabraham]

Can someone explain exactly what personality we're dealing with? I assume Toku is Toku. But Hammurgawa, what does that really mean? Will he open borders like Hamm would or like a 2nd Toku?

He has the Toku personality with the Babylonian UU and UB. I forget about the leader traits, but that's easily seen in the game.

Ok, so are we praying for an auto-spread of hindu to one neighbor? or if not, what would be a plan to get someone pleased with us? shared war?

I just played BOTM and got Toku to vote for me, but I was able to use religion when it auto-spread to him, and a shared war. So can we get hamm to join us in a war with Toku? How can we test that?

TGW and/or AP works well here. We infiltrate the target AI for easy city revolts, having put our natural EPs on our intended friend. Mission cost is related to total EP spending, so the EPs on the target work to make missions on the friend cheaper. (So would doing it in a Hindu city closer to our capital with a trade route if we can get OB.) Espionage can flip our friend to Hinduism, which we time for an AP DOW of the heathen target. We flood missionaries to the large cities when we get to Pleased for OB. In the fullness of time we get him up to Friendly for the vote. Toku's predilection for a specialist economy usually leaves him quite backward.

Or we just infiltrate our intended friend to flip him out of Buddhism and use some judicious tech gifts to get him to pleased for OB, cue missionaries, etc. A city gift @ size 3 is good for the full +4 "fair trade" bonus.

Toku's favourite civic (Mercantilism) probably won't help us much for diplo.

One thing we want to start doing is noting what visible diplo level leads to Cautious and Annoyed with the AIs we know. That will allow us to infer what the hidden modifier is, which will be different for each Toku. This is critical for judging what we need to do to get Pleased and/or Friendly levels.

 

[mabraham]

The map has 34% water tiles - I guess Optics is a priority tech. Thus I like Oracle->MC.

Could we use our GPs like this?

1. GPriest from SH -> Kashi for spreading Hindu to close neighbors without additional costs
2. GSc from Library -> bulb Machinery (needs Aesth, Math, Alpha, IW, no Fishing, no Theo)
3. GPriest from SH + Kashi/Temple -> bulb Theology (too late for AP?)
4. GSc from (Great?) Library -> bulb Optics (needs Fishing, Sailing, Compass)

Another way to do this is to build Pyramids in the second/third city, add Forge and use the GEngineer to bulb Machinery. This avoids the need for heavy anti-GScientist tech to allow the Mach bulb before Theology. I'm not sure if it is faster, however. We'd need to use GPerson 2 and 3, and might run into GSpy pressure from TGW (if we build it).

Note that even if we attempt TGW, we have until the last minute to switch it off to back the eventual fail gold.

 

[mabraham]

Another way to do this is to build Pyramids in the second/third city, add Forge and use the GEngineer to bulb Machinery. This avoids the need for heavy anti-GScientist tech to allow the Mach bulb before Theology. I'm not sure if it is faster, however. We'd need to use GPerson 2 and 3, and might run into GSpy pressure from TGW (if we build it).

Yeah that seems workable. T48 SH + T65ish Oracle in capital gets first GPro to build Kashi, which gets a second GPro to bulb Theol ~T90. We need to organize forge engineer and Pyramids in the third city, and a library with two scientists in the fourth city before that second GPro pops, so that the GEngineer for Mach (third) and GScientist for Optics (fourth) beat the third GPro. With Hindu+OR, four chops and forge (which can be built before most of the Pyramids) the engineer city looks fine, and the library is not hard. The GSpy from T58 TGW doesn't get a look in unless we make a window for it if that looks right somehow.

This would set up for AP chopped in the capital and fast Optics to get the missionaries rolling. Pyramids for Rep combines with libraries and Philo to provide our natural beakers - the prereqs for bulbing Optics are noticeable, but not scary if we get Oracle->MC and Mach is bulbed. Fairly good tech trade potential from MC, of course.

 

[mabraham]

Note also that this kind of plan provides for getting Mach and AP, which work fine if we switch to a standard SGOTM military VC with trebs/whatever/galleons after bulbing out Astro. AP war might be useful for keeping the flanks fighting each other rather than dogpiling us.

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

If the advanced AI is on another continent and has >3 cities, it will not accept a close -trap city, not even in peace deals!
Stolen techs cannot be traded with No-Tech-Brokering.

If we decide on an AP-DV strategy, I'm not too keen on getting TGW -- I'd rather cash in some heavy fail gold for it.

We just need to get one tiny AI to vote for us, we don't need to go all-out diplo-manipulation via espionage.

Getting 2W per 1H invested in The Great Wall failure is a great return on investment, but having a Great Spy to infiltrate the advanced AI Team has an opportunity cost that may be too high. This AI Team should be sufficiently advanced to steal useful techs from for most of the game. It may be useful for us to have this AI Team as a friend to vote for our RL DV; it can be controlled via espionage induced civics and religious conversions.

The map has 34% water tiles - I guess Optics is a priority tech. Thus I like Oracle->MC.

Could we use our GPs like this?

1. GPriest from SH -> Kashi for spreading Hindu to close neighbors without additional costs
2. GSc from Library -> bulb Machinery (needs Aesth, Math, Alpha, IW, no Fishing, no Theo)
3. GPriest from SH + Kashi/Temple -> bulb Theology (too late for AP?)
4. GSc from (Great?) Library -> bulb Optics (needs Fishing, Sailing, Compass)

The reason why I would spare the GSc for an Academy in Delhi is because we have 2*Gold + Gems = very good decentralized commerce.

BTW the Gems city could get Marble for Oracle without the Wheel, but I'd rather have that to get MC from Oracle.

I like this plan, especially the Oracling Metal Casting, and the Great Scientist bulbing of Machinery and Optics. This will allow very early Caravels to explore the water and find overseas AI. After spreading Hinduism to AIs on our land mass, we can send Hindu Missionaries with the first three Caravels, assuming that makes sense.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[WastinTime]

Didn't y'all figure out we were on a highlands map? or was it global highlands?

If it's highlands based, I don't like Optics/caravels. I'm concerned there are just large seas and no real ocean. I also don't like the look of those mountain ranges. I feel like it is going to be a maze where you have to go thru one AI to get to the next one.

Maybe a spy is the MVP of this one...to figure out what's up with this map.

 

[shulec]

Tech Masonry=>BW=>Wheel=>Preisthood=>Pottery

Stonehenge T38
TGW T 55
Border pop T 57
Marble Quarry T 59
Oracle T 62

3 Workers
3 Cities
2 Gold mines
Chopped about 4 forests.
3 pop whipped Oracle
51/100 for settler

 

[shulec]

I used alternative worker actions to get the quarry one turn earlier with the following result:

Tech Masonry=>BW=>Wheel=>Preisthood=>Pottery

Stonehenge T38
TGW T 55
Border pop T 57
Marble Quarry T 58
Oracle T 61

3 Workers
3 Cities
1 Gold mines
Chopped 5 forests.
No whip of Oracle
To get Oracle on T61, must starve for extra hammer. Redoing micro should squeeze and extra hammer or food out to get oracle on T61 without population loss.
51/100 for settler

 

[DanF5771]

Yeah Forge+Pyramids->GE->Machinery is also a clever way. If only the Mids weren't that expensive.

I don't know, I guess after SH + (TGW->fail gold?) + Oracle + our REX I'd rather spend hammers on more Settlers to start the gift/liberate-city-avalanche.
This is where Slavery and Forges from Oracled MC come in very handy.

Here is a screen shot from another test re RL DV I ran:



We don't need any Hindu friends. On the contrary - we better be the only Full Member (=Resident) and everybody else just at Voting Member status so that we are the only candidate for Religious Leader.
And we just need one Toku at +10 visible = pleased. With the -2 hidden modifiers the resulting +8 are enough to let him vote for us.

The problem is getting Hindu to all players without easy open borders. If they are all Tokus we need +6...+7 modifiers to overcome -2 hidden plus -1...-2 from heathen religion to get them to pleased.
That's not easy, we need something more than the +4 from fair trade plus +1 for peace time. Therefore a very early Kashi together with quick roads to connect neighbors for auto-spread (works through closed borders) is imho very useful.

I also don't see how espionage could help us here, but I'm not that experienced with the spy-business, so I'd be glad to be taught.

 

[DanF5771]

Didn't y'all figure out we were on a highlands map? or was it global highlands?

If it's highlands based, I don't like Optics/caravels. I'm concerned there are just large seas and no real ocean. I also don't like the look of those mountain ranges. I feel like it is going to be a maze where you have to go thru one AI to get to the next one.

Maybe a spy is the MVP of this one...to figure out what's up with this map.

The highlands guess was motivated by the rather low average food yield per land tile and the many hills in the close vicinity of our starting plot. But as we can see now the number of hills isn't really that high and instead the plethora of peaks that were put in by Neil to design our 'torture chamber' is responsible for the low food.

The other aspect is the ratio of water-tiles / land-tiles (34% water!) which we could determine more accurately in the later saves.

Imho it's not a highlands map and we should prioritize Optics.

 

[mabraham]

shulec and WastinTime have shown some Masonry-first test games without Hunting. I have just played one that did Hunting after Masonry, and I think it is clearly superior to approaches without Hunting.

I teched Masonry-Hunting-Wheel-BW-PH-Pottery with a view to SH+TGW+Oracle->MC. I got my wonders and border pops at the same dates shulec reported (T38/55/61), with one extra city (populations 4, 3, 1, 1), one extra deer camp, one extra mine, gems mine started, only used 3 chops, zero whips, and a turn plus Hunting ahead on tech. Also three workers. The second city built a worker immediately, and used him to put up an extra improvements and a chop for TGW. Progressive saves and final screenshot attached.

I think much of my improvement is due to settling a better site (NW with deer and gold) than shulec did (1E of the southern deer) because he had to wait a while before he got any good improved tiles there.

The value of Hunting is that we have the NW city up to a sound size to either pump workers, TA fail gold, or units. We also have an extra prereq for AH to get the fourth through sixth city sites moving.

I am slightly skeptical about this approach because it sacrifices some chances of settling the gold-sheep-corn site in order to get fast SH for fast Oracle. We could judge that this is an acceptable risk. Toku might settle the other way, or he might settle only for the corn, or we can fall back on a deer-gold-(sheep) site.

 

[mabraham]

Do we have enough consensus on Masonry and settling in the NW to allow WastinTime to play on accordingly?

Burke will need to head north, and can afford to do so via pigs. Eiffel has time to finish the corn farm and put 2 turns on the floodplain farm, before he heads north to start to improve the gold the turn the city plants. Cook scouts long. Amundsen heads SW to the coast and then back to the hill near the corn to bust fog for the second settler?

 

[mabraham]

Fixed the NW deer to be grassland in the test game