Grand Strategy Thread

[donsig]

What is this based on? I didn't come across anything in the main forum about Gong not wanting to play their turn.

This is based solely on my speculations. I should be careful what I say, but then again, I am an instigator.

What will FREE find when they open their save? How many GONG cities are now in FREE hands? Will be a very demoralizing turn for them I think. Our aerial recon didn't show much in the way of defense in the GONG cities. Warriors? Not good enough to stop cavalry.

Perhaps we should keep our carrier near GONG so we can do more recon and keep up to date on the progress of the war. Any guesses on how far FREE will go? Will they wipe out GONG? IF they do, then who will be BABE's best friend?

 

[Paul#42]

Well it looks like Prince is taking the situation with the necessary sportsmanship and played surprisingly quickly.

I'm not sure, there were a couple of cavs mixed in GONG's defense. I don't know how many Infs they got, if FREE kept most of their cities and rails, they will be easily retakable with movement-1-units due to culture overlaps of the ICSed GONG architecture.

But kuningas will have a decent strategy to cope with this. Maybe he razed most of the captured towns.

I can't stand the suspense.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

My comment is based on donsig's comment about "There's also now the spectre of two teams not wanting to play turns. "

and wondering if he meant GONG, not that I thought GONG was going to dump the game.

 

[peter grimes]

I definitely think the Carrier should stay close to monitor the action - perhaps we should try to see if there are any more troops on their way?

 

[Paul#42]

science
What should we research after we got Miniaturization?
Ecology, Space Flight, Nuclear Power are available after we got Rocketry from SABER.

Maybe SABER goes for Ecology to profit from buying a more expensive tech for 0.25 gold per beaker difference?

Nuclear Power for plants to keep our production up after GA ended?

 

[donsig]

How about space flight? It's the most expensive tech we can research. I guess we really need to hear what SABER will research.

 

[Niklas]

I can see two potential research paths for the short to mid run.

1) Space Flight -> Satellites. Satellites give us full view of the whole map, not to be sneered at. I don't see any immediate need for Space Flight though - we don't want to start building any Apollo this early anyway, doing that would paint an unnecessary bulls-eye on our continent. We should ideally build it a turn before we complete all the space ship parts in parallel.

2) Nuclear Power -> The Laser -> Robotics. This is the branch I favor, to get those Manufacturing Plants. I'm always wary of Nuclear Plants though, we should be sure to build them only where they would help us reach an important production threshold.

So my vote is Nuclear Power - though we should of course find out what SABER is doing.

 

[donsig]

we don't want to start building any Apollo this early anyway, doing that would paint an unnecessary bulls-eye on our continent. We should ideally build it a turn before we complete all the space ship parts in parallel.

We can't build SS parts until we finish Apollo so I guess you're suggesting we use pre-builds for all these parts? Will we have ten pre-builds that are big enough? If someone builds Manhattan we could use ICBMs as pre-builds. Scary thought.

 

[Paul#42]

This reminds me of someone who wanted to put together some plan for our space project...

 

[Niklas]

Yep, it's in the works. So hold tight, it should be up any day now.

To answer donsig, yes I suggest using pre-builds, and yes we will most likely have the necessary ones. As long as we have the resources...

 

[Paul#42]

Well if SABER sent Rocketry we'll know pretty soon where the aluminum is.

If we'd finally get the save...

 

[donsig]

Yep, it's in the works. So hold tight, it should be up any day now.

To answer donsig, yes I suggest using pre-builds, and yes we will most likely have the necessary ones. As long as we have the resources...

Will be interesting to see this plan. Technically, we don't need the resources for pre-builds. We just need the resources when we want to switch to the real thing.

 

[donsig]

Some may think this is a crazy question but I am serious. Should we build the United Nations?

SABER is pressing on against BABE (they have at least two cities on BABE's lands now), FREE is continuing against GONG and we've tried to covertly help BABE and GONG. These last two may look upon us with favor and also want to end the game quickly - so we might get their votes for a diplomatic victory. The risk of BABE and GONG voting for either SABER or FREE is very small in my opinion so I see little risk in building the UN. (Other than the 1000 shields we must invest in it.)

We could actually have the UN in two turns if we forgo the Internet. We could still go for the Internet after that. We might need to delay our tech deal with SABER a bit to ensure we could still build the Internet if the diplomatic ploy fails.

We could also go ahead and build the Internet first and then build the UN after that. It would take ten to twelve turns I think. The risk here is that either BABE or GONG might get eliminated before we can get a UN vote.

Comments?

 

[General_W]

Ha ha!
That's a wild idea...

I could certainly write a letter to GONG and BABE to feel them out on the subject...

But even if they both voted for us, we'd still be a few votes short, wouldn't we?
I can't remember how many votes you need in C3C. (2/3 ?)
But GONG has lost a LOT of population lately... and BABE is about to also.

So even if they agreed, we probably don't have the votes
Unless I'm missing something?

 

[donsig]

I think only two teams are eligible to get votes - the civ with the UN and the biggest civ (or second biggest if the biggest has the UN). Not sure if biggest is land or population or a combination of the two. Every (remaining) civ gets one vote (though it is possible to abstain). It's not like in where each civ gets a proportional vote.

So, if we get votes from BABE and GONG (and ourselves) we have 3 out of fine and would get the diplo victory. Oh, btw, diplomatic victory is enabled in this game right.

 

[Paul#42]

Even if it would work - it would feel like a second class victory

I won't be content with such a victory condition. That's not what I played for the past two years.
I'd rather fail attempting a real victory.

 

[Niklas]

I like the idea... but after the initial laugh, I'm with Paul. We've played to go to space, so let's do that.

 

[peter grimes]

I am strongly against diverting our attention from building the Internet. Even if we choose to pursue the diplomatic path, we should still build the internet simply to deny it to any other team that may try for space in advance of a pending UN victory.

Which thing, I'm still not sure about.... 1000 shields is a lot to invest in something that doesn't do us any good if it fails.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

Well, a diplo victory in a multi-team game is no cheap victory. If we could get one with BABE voting for us... how awesome would that be???

I certainly think we build Internet, then decide on UN. My belief is that everyone will abstain, though.

Apollo - to see that we've built Apollo, they will have to explore cities (or have a spy). To be honest, having space flight is a pretty big sign that we are or will build Apollo, so I really wouldn't worry about building the apollo program.

We should try to get Synth fibers relatively soon, btw - we need rubber to build thrusters and our only native source is on SCI.

 

[General_W]

In fact - if Saber says they are studying anything OTHER than Ecology - I'd personally vote to study that ahead of Nuclear Power.

We need to get Syth Fibers and get started on our Thrusters BEFORE Saber and FREE finish up their wars and start looking for other lands to conquer.

Hopefully we can turn them against eachother, but I'd still rather have our thruster builds started in case we lose SubCom Island.

Note: I'm taking A.T.'s word for what's needed for what SS parts... I don't actually know what techs unlock the parts and what we need to build them.
Could someone post all that info here by any chance? It might lend itself to a certain prioritization of techs in our research plan.