Beyond The Sword

[mystyfly]

Uruk has more forests and I really want Parthenon. It is a static perma-boost to our GSpy generation which works well with Pacifism. We are probably not going to bulb Philo as that means generating a GS. But Philo should be available from Asoka as he chases both religions and Lib. (His fav. civic is unlocked by it and he also builds the Shwedagon Paya for adopting it ahead of time like Willem Fail-gold for us, though )

Uruk is the best place to pursue this wonder as it already has naturally abundant hammers to throw at it and forests available. And while I do admit we want to beat down Asoka, I seriously doubt he will be a threat. I think only Gandhi and Elizabeth have worse troop building tendencies than him. Kish alone should be enough to handle him, with Eridu chipping in. Uruk can send the vultures to see if we can leech the Barb city off Alex. This makes me think we should save the trees there.

That makes more sense I wouldn't advise to go after the Parthenon but I can live with it. It's not a perma-boost as it obsoletes quite early. You are wrong though, Parth does NOT go along well with pacifism. Same as Pacifism is less useful to philosophical leaders. Because: Non-philo leader, upon adopting pacifism, effectively double their GP output. Philosophical leaders, when adopting pacifism, get "only a 50% boost". I have trouble wording it so I'll give an example.

Assume 10 raw GPP.
non-philo leader: 10 GPP
non-philo leader with pac: 20 GPP
=> Factor 2

philo leader: 20 GPP
philo leader with pac: 30 GPP
=> Factor 1.5


That actually rather strengthens your point to build parth, since we're not philosophical. Either way, the decision to build the parth depends on our techpath. I would do Fishing > Sailing > Myst > Poly > Medi > PH > Alpha. Polytheism lets us partbuild the ToA for failgold which is huge with marble (has it been built yet?). To get a good shot at parth we'd need Fishing > Aesth wich would further delay ziggurats and spies. It's not a route I like, not at all, IMO it hinders growth too much. Also, I'm not sure whether we are allowed to selfresearch techs "on the alphabet line" at 100% (Revent?).

What do you think, Fearless Captain Revent?

 

[Smilingrogue]

The mechanics stuff I didn't know about. I always thought the bonus is cumulative. Good to know that it doesn't stack with other bonuses. Still, 50% extra from say, 1 AD to about 1300 AD (when we get Sci. Meth.) is not shabby when we are only going to have one specialist slot per city to work with. And by the time it goes obsolete, we should hopefully have Constitution and Democracy to give us extra slots, with Communism only one tech away, unlocking another building to hire more spy specialists.

I am not arguing we should build the Parthenon at all costs. It's a wonder I rarely bother with as Pacifism is available shortly after and I rarely build any wonders. But if we can work it into our plan for that extra edge, I don't see why we shouldn't try.

Why can't we just tech Aesthetics like a normal game and trade for Alpha before shutting off research? We have gold, we can fail the SP too for a tonne of er... gold.

 

[UnforcedError]

Lurker comment

@Smilingrogue: the bonuses of the Parthenon and Pacifism do stack, but they are cumulative, not mutiplicative. I think Mystyfly was referring to the fact that the bonuses you get will be less and less of a factor if you start stacking them. (They will, however, still get you GPs more quickly at this stage if you invest into the Parthenon.) (Other example: FIN leader: your riverside cottages and coastal tiles will be +3C immediately which is a 50% improvement over your non-FIN opponents' +2C yield. However, the +1C on a gold mine would be much less significant, so a gold mine for non-FIN leaders is almost as good as it is for you.)

End Lurker comment

 

[mystyfly]

Why can't we just tech Aesthetics like a normal game and trade for Alpha before shutting off research? We have gold, we can fail the SP too for a tonne of er... gold.

In the EE games I played so far (in SGs at least) we selfresearched neither Aesth nor Maths, HR or the other techs on "that level". I'm not sure we're allowed to do that here. Of course selfresearch would be nice, but that's not the point of the variant.

Lurker comment

@Smilingrogue: the bonuses of the Parthenon and Pacifism do stack, but they are cumulative, not mutiplicative. I think Mystyfly was referring to the fact that the bonuses you get will be less and less of a factor if you start stacking them. (They will, however, still get you GPs more quickly at this stage if you invest into the Parthenon.) (Other example: FIN leader: your riverside cottages and coastal tiles will be +3C immediately which is a 50% improvement over your non-FIN opponents' +2C yield. However, the +1C on a gold mine would be much less significant, so a gold mine for non-FIN leaders is almost as good as it is for you.)

End Lurker comment

Absolutely correct. The bonus is the same and does stack but it's impact is deminished. Like the comparison with gold tiles for FIN leaders. Actually, I'd say it's even wose with GPs than with commerce for FIN leaders, because GPs get pretty expensive soon (though I can't remember how their price (in GPP) is being calculated).

 

[Smilingrogue]

So if our GPP rate is 'x'. Then Pacifism makes it 2x and Parthenon makes it 2.5x. Is that right?

As for Alpha, if we want to self-tech it, I think we should tech it straightaway after Fishing and Sailing, forget Aesthetics and convert those forests into galleys for ferrying spies to Montezuma. In this situation, infiltration becomes better. We want techs from Monty and even Asoka who, I am pretty sure took MC. The longer we keep de-touring from Alpha, the more we will have to catch up as we won't have any monopoly to barter off in trades unless we steal one and that's going to be mighty expensive without infiltration.

Odd how Asoka and Monty seemed to have switched places this game. *Goes to check if random personalities is on. *

 

[Revent]

I will vote against pig city.

Increases cost for every city even at break even

 

[Smilingrogue]

@ Revent

This is why Democracy sucks!

I will play until the Great Spy shows up in six turns.
Plan:

• Whip the library in Uruk and put the overflow into a couple of Vultures.
• Finish connecting Uruk to Kish, Kish drops the worker and starts pumping Vultures.
• Connect to Alexander from the West. (I intend to put a road on the hills anyway to make our Vultures get to the Barb city quicker. Will direct that worker to road into Alex when that is done.)
• Tech fishing once Uruk's library is online. Uruk stays on Vultures.
• Eridu builds Vultures. Will send one up to Ur just to be sure, any other Vultures it makes will be put between Kish and Eridu to play zone-defence.
• One worker hooking up Iron to Kish will road to Eridu to speed up reinforcements between the two cities. The other two will chop Vultures in Kish.
• The worker who quarried Marble will road into Asoka. Will be sure to manually direct him and pull him back to road to Ur if Asoka makes a move on that city.
• Unsure on what the worker in Uruk is supposed to do. If we want to save forests for later, will let him chop till he is one turn away from completing and move him onto Uruk's forested PH, chop there and mine that. If he is to chop Vults for stealing the Barb city from Alex, worker will continue his de-forestration drive.
• Both new cities will build granaries for the time being.

I need a decision on Uruk's forests and what its worker is supposed to do. If other points are fine, green-light on the plan.

 

[mystyfly]

So if our GPP rate is 'x'. Then Pacifism makes it 2x and Parthenon makes it 2.5x. Is that right?

Yes.

As for Alpha, if we want to self-tech it, I think we should tech it straightaway after Fishing and Sailing, forget Aesthetics and convert those forests into galleys for ferrying spies to Montezuma. In this situation, infiltration becomes better. We want techs from Monty and even Asoka who, I am pretty sure took MC. The longer we keep de-touring from Alpha, the more we will have to catch up as we won't have any monopoly to barter off in trades unless we steal one and that's going to be mighty expensive without infiltration.

Why!? We have zero hammers to spend on spies let alone galleys. I thought we agreed on settling the GSpy. Also, it doesn't matter (much) whether we start stealing in 10 or in 20 turns but Ziggurats will help us from the very turn we get them.

Whip the library in Uruk and put the overflow into a couple of Vultures.

ONLY whip if you have a 2pop whip (don't recall how many hammers are invested yet, we're creative so doublespeed libraries...)

Finish connecting Uruk to Kish, Kish drops the worker and starts pumping Vultures.

Make sure to leave it in the queue so we don't forget about it.

Connect to Alexander from the West. (I intend to put a road on the hills anyway to make our Vultures get to the Barb city quicker. Will direct that worker to road into Alex when that is done.)

Hold on with that, we need worker turns for other things atm.

Tech fishing once Uruk's library is online. Uruk stays on Vultures.

You can switch right away.

Eridu builds Vultures. Will send one up to Ur just to be sure, any other Vultures it makes will be put between Kish and Eridu to play zone-defence.

I don't know how exactly you mean that but try and station as many as you can in the cities so they get the fortify-bonus.

Unsure on what the worker in Uruk is supposed to do. If we want to save forests for later, will let him chop till he is one turn away from completing and move him onto Uruk's forested PH, chop there and mine that. If he is to chop Vults for stealing the Barb city from Alex, worker will continue his de-forestration drive.

Like I said before, I'd rather finish the chop that is being done. I don't think we need to prechop just yet, we'll have plenty of time to get those chops in if/when we get started on the parthenon.

 

[Revent]

It looks like a 3 way ahahaha
I still am sold on SY at the moment but could be persuaded otherwise if we get a tech plan up otherwise I think settling is the way to go.

As for infiltrating, I vote no for any AI. Settling or SY will pay off in long game. Actually, just looked at what you get for settling. Settling gets my vote. (3 beakers and 12 EPoints makes the GSpy actually a very strong settling unit!!)

Pre-chopping Parthenon isn't necessary imo. Plus, it's not THAT good anyway.

 

[Smilingrogue]

On the plan:
Uruk has enough hammers invested to OF 45 hammers.
The worker on the Western border doesn't have much else to do. Might as well get the trade routes going.
As for the chops, I really don't like the idea of putting chops into Vultures in Uruk if they are already being built one every two turns. One turn saved per Vulture doesn't look enough of a reason to chop to me.

On GSpy:
My main concern is, the more we chase stuff like Zigs and OR ourselves, the more we are falling behind the AIs. We are replicating all the research they already finished. By teching Alpha ourselves, we won't have anything to trade to them.

If this were a no tech-trade game, settling and even SY with the first spy are far better. But since tech trades are on, we will gain more if we steal techs and then trade them off for even more techs. If we settle, the returns are certainly greater over the long run, but it will take a really long time for the points to actually pay off. Both Monty and Alex spend EPs reasonably and Asoka spams courthouses. So the +12 we get might become well over thousands of EP by the end game. But it will only be a marginal amount of beakers compared to infiltration and stealing right now. I think we are overvaluing EPs when the end goal should be to get Beakers. I like more beakers immediately over more EPs later.

Consider the scenario where we can steal MC or CoL off Asoka and immediately barter that off to get Zigs and OR techs from Monty and Alex. We get fair trade bonuses from the two AIs we want to keep pacified, we get techs we want sooner and the EPs banked by infiltration will stay until we use them all up with Asoka having no way to counter them in the early game as he will have to spend a lot on EPs to catch up and he doesn't do that. On the other hand, just two courthouses running a spy each will already negate the + 12 EPs we get from settling.

 

[Revent]

This is a space game Smilingrogue Settling ALWAYS pays off that early in the game! We also get beakers which isn't bad!

Well, one extra vulture may be whether or not we take a city. In an EE game, GP points are not CRUCIAL to the game. What matters is the slider and our multipliers!

 

[Smilingrogue]

The more I read up on EE, the more I am in favour of infiltrating with our first GSpy. Ungy 01 in Mysftyfly's sig also infiltrated their GSpy and there's some good arguments for why it is better in that thread. But here's my arguments:

1. Unless we plan on running scientists or other specialists, Great Spys are all we are going to get. We can pile them all into Uruk after a SY is built and they will give us a nice chunk of EP and Beakers. But the first GSpy is up against a mountain to climb when he is settled or building a SY. Unlike other settled specialists who give a static boost to the city or empire in a vacuum, our GSpy is fighting against the EP spending of our rivals and that + 12 really starts looking bad when it becomes + 6 or worse relative to what our rivals are spending.

2. All we really need to get back to tech parity right now is Alpha. (Build a spy, infiltrate Asoka, steal his MC and CoL, barter it around for Zigs and other nice stuff) This in turn converts that one spy into multiple Zigs and more spy points empire wide in shorter time that self teching Fishing, Sailing, Mysticism, Med and PH will get us to Zigs. And just two CHs with a spy specialist each match one settled GSpy. If we can burn him to get 5 or six CHs + Spy Specialists sooner, we should do it.

3. That bank on EPs will never diminish unless we spend it all. Even if Asoka has 200 EPs against us, we will get about 2000 instant EPs to spend on him with nice discounts for the difference in EP spending. It will take a really long time for our settled GSpy, even after he is backed up a SY to match that. Late game, sure, stacking GSpys and SY is the way to go, right now, it's meh! A good analogy would be water mills. They are great late game with State Property. But before levees and electricity, not so much.

Since Civ IV is all about getting the most bang for buck right now so the advantages pile up instead of being better later, I strongly urge we infiltrate.

 

[mystyfly]

As for infiltrating, I vote no for any AI. Settling or SY will pay off in long game. Actually, just looked at what you get for settling. Settling gets my vote. (3 beakers and 12 EPoints makes the GSpy actually a very strong settling unit!!)

Pre-chopping Parthenon isn't necessary imo. Plus, it's not THAT good anyway.

Great minds think alike, or so they say My thoughts exactly.

One turn saved per Vulture doesn't look enough of a reason to chop to me.

That's not what it's about, it's about 20 hammers invested in vultures. Whether that's in a 1-hammer-per-turn city or in Uruk, it's the same!!

1. Unless we plan on running scientists or other specialists, Great Spys are all we are going to get. We can pile them all into Uruk after a SY is built and they will give us a nice chunk of EP and Beakers. But the first GSpy is up against a mountain to climb when he is settled or building a SY. Unlike other settled specialists who give a static boost to the city or empire in a vacuum, our GSpy is fighting against the EP spending of our rivals and that + 12 really starts looking bad when it becomes + 6 or worse relative to what our rivals are spending.

We had much better targets to steal from. Here we have 2 options: A 4-city asoka who'll fall behind very quickly and a notorious warmonger. Neither is worth infiltrating. Monty, on his island is too costly to steal from in terms of hammers. It really does look like you're overruled on this one.

2. All we really need to get back to tech parity right now is Alpha. (Build a spy, infiltrate Asoka, steal his MC and CoL, barter it around for Zigs and other nice stuff) This in turn converts that one spy into multiple Zigs and more spy points empire wide in shorter time that self teching Fishing, Sailing, Mysticism, Med and PH will get us to Zigs. And just two CHs with a spy specialist each match one settled GSpy. If we can burn him to get 5 or six CHs + Spy Specialists sooner, we should do it.

But infiltrating, teching alpha, build spies, wait for the -50% etc does NOT get us zigs earlier. Selfresearching up to PH does. If your argument is that infiltrating gets us more raw esp pts sooner then it's wrong.

3. That bank on EPs will never diminish unless we spend it all. Even if Asoka has 200 EPs against us, we will get about 2000 instant EPs to spend on him with nice discounts for the difference in EP spending. It will take a really long time for our settled GSpy, even after he is backed up a SY to match that. Late game, sure, stacking GSpys and SY is the way to go, right now, it's meh! A good analogy would be water mills. They are great late game with State Property. But before levees and electricity, not so much.

I don't see the analogy, care to elaborate? Infiltrating with spies is like bulbing with GS, that loses it's worth also (though maybe a bit earlier) as the game goes on. But what does that have to do with watermills?



There are 2 benefits of infiltrating: 1) We get a huge amount of spy points RIGHT NOW. 2) Because of that our missions are a bit cheaper. But since we don't have a good target I'm clearly against it. Otherwise I guess I'd agree with infiltration.

I keep repeating myself, what is limiting us right now is the hammers, especially with war at the door. We must build units for selfdefense and to get the barb city, but you want to build a (a mediocre one, at best) wonder, more settlers and a ton of spies (and even galleys). That just doesn't work.

 

[Smilingrogue]

I admit the watermills was a bad analogy. I don't think I got what I wanted to say across well.

I didn't say we should build the Parthenon now. (We can't, without teching considerably.)
It was a long term throwing stuff at the wall to see if that's a good idea.
It's ridiculous to say I want to build spies and galleys ignoring war at the door when we don't even have the technology to do either. Uruk is actually set up perfectly to whip into Vultures and in the eight turns I played, everything I did was to hook up Iron and build more Vultures. It is a complete coincedence that Asoka went into WHEOOHRN mode. Everything from this point going forward till the end of war with Asoka (Should it come, he may still declare on some one else, yet) would have been directed to handling it.

As for the arguments about settling vs. Infiltration. I really fail to see why we don't want to use the Spy for large amount of one shot EPs when doing so can net us about 2000 beakers worth of techs by spending only about 500 beakers. The spies won't interfere with war as they can't be built yet, Vultures will still get built in the meantime. The research for Alpha is a good investment in my opinion as we need it anyway for this variant and I fail to see the logic behind insisting we invent the wheel again when we can just steal the know how in fewer turns. Infiltrating Asoka doesn't preclude us from switching focus onto another AI. We can simply strip Asoka bare of his nice haul of techs and wipe him off with EP focus switching to Monty, Alex or anyone else out there who is going to be a better target later.

Regardless, I would like to withdraw from this game. I don't think I am contributing anything to this game and this game is giving me a strong sense of Deja Vu from when I first played EE and learnt a few things that I am not able to convey appropriately here. I would like to thank Revent for having me and wish you best with the game.

Edit : Just read the SGOTM thread, a belated Birthday wishes to you Revent! Hope you have many more!

 

[vranasm]

@smiling

I am currently out of touch with your game, but as I read it the problems with infiltating are

1) Asoka will probably war against you and you should be able to extort techs
2) That Greece weirdo probably won't have anything useful to steal.

I am still a bit wonky with the EE games and there are some things I still don't fully grasp about EP spending influencing the costs, but it seems to me that building scotland yard will be better once you will work with slider on leaders in other continents.

Sitting on GSpy for ~50 turns waiting for another continent is really not good way of using him.

 

[Smilingrogue]

@ Vranasm.

Asoka will not give up any big techs unless we really crush him militarily. He will probably give us Poly or something. If we infiltrate, we make off with whatever he Oracled, CoL and then we can broker those techs for whatever techs we may have gotten out of Asoka as a peace declaration anyway.

Secondly, I have been reading up increasingly on EE and every single game I have come across advises that the first GSpy on Emperor + should be infiltrated as neither SY nor settling pay off as quickly as a major haul does that early, combined with the brokering of stolen techs. The only exception to this are OneLeggedRhino's absolutely brilliant write-ups. But as you are aware, OLR played with tech trades off on Marathon.

And I primarily want to quit from SG as I am starting to think I am not suited to it. I am more of a "Push buttons and see what happens" sort of guy and the need to plan extensively and rigidity in terms of how crazy I can get is not something I am able to adapt to well.

 

[Revent]

SmilingRogue, the reason why I think Infil is bad is because we will be wasting most of the EPs. Soon, Asoka will fall behind us.

As Gumbolt says, once you have the land, Immortal AI will struggle! Soon, Asoka will have no land and all our EPs we had on him will go to waste. We get 3000 EPs on him. Let's say you want to steal CoL; with the discount it will cost you roughly 100 EP (around 50% discount because of the high EP we have and a 50% fortify discount, OB and distance tend to cancel out)? CoL is the most expensive tech you mentioned there and we only have a couple of things left to steal afterwards which are all cheaper. This means all that EP is going to waste since Asoka is going to fall behind us soon!

Also, with settling, we can control how much EP we give to each AI which is always nice

Sucks that you would no longer like to play, however, I will take this chance to offer you some birthday cake for carrying on Your input is great and very helpful It does let us consider all the options there are as well which is nice. I'm sure Mystyfly would also agree with me here!

 

[mystyfly]

I definitely agree, Revent! The most important and interesting part of SGs is discussion, and that doesn't happen without disagreement. I hope you reconsider and jump back on board!

 

[Revent]

Anyway, if Smilingrogue does decide to opt out, would you still be interested in carrying this on?
We definitely would like to have you on board though, it is so much more fun the more players we have as we get different views, etc..

 

[mystyfly]

Anyway, if Smilingrogue does decide to opt out, would you still be interested in carrying this on?
We definitely would like to have you on board though, it is so much more fun the more players we have as we get different views, etc..

Yeah, why not? Game looks very interesting. If Smilingrogue doesn't want to rejoin I'll play sometime tomorrow. Otherwise he's still up