New take on pre chopping, PRE-MINING

[Bleys]

The way it "should" be is to chop/whip the forge in your second city so the EP overtakes the PP .. 3 vs 2. Resulting in the first great person to pop is a GE. After the oracle you can construct w/e you want in the capital.

I guess I am not following this, SECOND city? Your building the Oracle in the 2nd city too? Otherwise, there is no Prophet points polluting the GPerson pool, its all GE points.

Also, I thougth the points themselves didnt matter. We just had this discussion in your game BurN. Its turns. So even if you had 20 GProphet points for 10 turns, and 3 GE points for 10 turns, the chances are 50/50.

I would have to see it done in a 2nd city though. First city builds the Oracle, fast-chop/whip the Forge and get a Engineer Specialist running ASAP to get as close to 50/50 as possible. Even if you fail to generate a GE, you still got a VERY fast GP to settle, thats plenty of "gambit" for me.

EDIT: Wait, I re-read and I get it now. 2nd city is generating 3 GE points per turn, 1st city is generating 2 GProphet points per turn, so you will get your very first Great Person in your 2nd city.

I gotta see it done on Emperor. I have enough trouble getting it to work in a single city on Monarch, but I am an admitted rookie.

 

[BurN]

We just had this discussion in your game BurN

EDIT: Wait, I re-read and I get it now. 2nd city is generating 3 GE points per turn, 1st city is generating 2 GProphet points per turn, so you will get your very first Great Person in your 2nd city.

Exactly, the point is to build a forge in the 2nd city asap.

I think you got the wrong conclusion out of my thread Bleys. I thought I made it clear what the original gambit was. In that online game, I'm doing the "unorthodox" version of it. I sacrificed the 100% chance for a faster great person.

 

[Bleys]

I think you got the wrong conclusion out of my thread Bleys. I thought I made it clear what the original gambit was. In that online game, I'm doing the "unorthodox" version of it. I sacrificed the 100% chance for a faster great person.

Sigh, no wonder I suck at it, I been doing it wrong, LOL.

It was clear, bro, I just read it too fast and went right into the game to start trying it.

Either way, its a blast to play, so its all good.

 

[obsolete]

Only "different" tech is getting pottery, assuming you needed the wheel to hook up a strategic resource. (marble/copper/whatever)

You're aiming at the snowball effect of not researching pottery and settling the GE. But consider the snowball effect of not having mids and early forges as well. I don't think I need to explain.

I don't know why people keep mentioning marble with this gambit. Marble means nothing. It costs too much in time & investment to hook up your marble and THEN use it for the oracle. The oracle has to be done FAST.

Again, seeing Oracle build around 3000 BC is not uncommon to me. What levels are people playing at that they can get all this time for that? I understand if you're playing settler mode, but such tactics are useless to me.

I'm not sure where this snowballing effect is going, but using oracle to choose metal-casting seems absolutely horrible. You should be taking a very viable tech like mathematics or Aesthetics. They are big and usefull. And when you're done with them, you can trade them with no worries.

But with the Metal Casting, you don't dare trade, because it makes all your partners much stronger, which is something you DON'T want.

I'm also very weary on gambits that are really a whole set of different gambits all wrapped up in one, where all of them need to work to pull it off.

I've been trying to think of cases where this strategy could be viable... but so far it seems to fail on every account I can think of. I'd much rather bulb 2 GS's on Education for a liberalism race on Deity, than use a GE for pyramids.

 

[Bleys]

How about using the MC slingshot with China? Getting to that awesome UU faster cant be bad. I doubt you can get a Machinery slingshot above Prince, but with MC your into it pretty fast.

Yes, I know you need iron, Archery, etc, but the time to research MC and Machinery is long, its one of the balance-things with such a powerful UU. Shortening it cant be totally wrong. I play on Monarch, and I can usually get a pile of CKNs out pretty fast compared to the relative speed of my neighbors.

 

[BurN]

I don't know why people keep mentioning marble with this gambit. Marble means nothing. It costs too much in time & investment to hook up your marble and THEN use it for the oracle. The oracle has to be done FAST.

Again, seeing Oracle build around 3000 BC is not uncommon to me. What levels are people playing at that they can get all this time for that? I understand if you're playing settler mode, but such tactics are useless to me.

I'm not sure where this snowballing effect is going, but using oracle to choose metal-casting seems absolutely horrible. You should be taking a very viable tech like mathematics or Aesthetics. They are big and usefull. And when you're done with them, you can trade them with no worries.

But with the Metal Casting, you don't dare trade, because it makes all your partners much stronger, which is something you DON'T want.

I'm also very weary on gambits that are really a whole set of different gambits all wrapped up in one, where all of them need to work to pull it off.

I've been trying to think of cases where this strategy could be viable... but so far it seems to fail on every account I can think of. I'd much rather bulb 2 GS's on Education for a liberalism race on Deity, than use a GE for pyramids.

I said twice in the same post that it's gamble, a risk, a gambit. So why are you arguing about the point that it can fail? No one is saying it works 100%. I used it .. 4 times out of +-35 games or something. Three times successful, one time I failed. As for difficulty level, I rarely lose a game on immortal. I think you have a problem thinking out of the box of your own strategy obs, there's plenty of ways to win the game. And I don't know about deity, I lost my two tries. (and those were not with mc gambit )

But I can agree that mc isn't the best for trading.

Anyways I play vanilla but I don't see how mc slingshot for mids wouldn't work in bts. I got bts but I won't install it till I finished my online vanilla game. (where I "wasted" a GE on mids!)

 

[JBossch]

As BurN said, this is a gambit and doesn't work in all circumstances. Seeing Oracle built in 3000 BC would seem to shut down any possibility of getting the oracle at all but I've never seen it this early. I play mostly on emperor where I win maybe 60-70% and I have only won once on immortal out of maybe 4 or 5 tries. I have definitely seen oracle built pretty early by the AIs but this circumstance doesn't negate the validity of the MC slingshot - it eliminates the possibility of doing anything with the oracle at all.

I think obsolete's strategy is more about getting wonders done early so that other wonders can be started immediately. The MC slingshot is about getting two wonders (oracle and mids) before the AIs but not necessarily any earlier. Yes, obsolete can probably build both in fewer turns but that is not the point. The engineer rushes the mids, not to get the mids particularly "early," but to get the mids without investing any hammers in them. Instead, the hammers go into military (for me) or whatever else you want to build. It is a great gambit for any warmonger SE, I can tell you that.

And yes, it works on BtS.

 

[obsolete]

Later on this week I'll try and run some comparison tests.

 

[Morgrad]

If you are a philisophical, non-industrious leader without stone, but the scouted land around you screams tons of food for a SE, then it's a gambit worth taking.

The settled engineer without pyramids = 3 science per turn (and some sweet, sweet hammers - I usually settle my engineers). Netting the pyramids means an extra 3 hammers from every specialist in your empire for a long, long time.

As far as using two scientists for education before using a GE on the pyramids - that's obviously untrue - you used a GE for pyramids in one of your walkthroughs. Why? Because, based on your own words at the time, the payoff was worth it in that specific scenario.

The gambit (which is nicely detailed in one of the ALCs, though I don't remember which one) isn't about getting the pyramids faster than usual, it's about concentrating your production into other things and getting the pyramids anyway.

Industrious? Build 'em.
Have stone? Build 'em.
Not philosophical nor industrious and don't have stone? Skip 'em.
Philosophical, but without stone? Consider the gambit.

As a side note, I'll state that I go for the pyramids *maybe* once in every 15-20 games - so it's not like I'm all hot and bothered for them - but the gambit is still viable, and it's fun and exciting when you pull it off, to boot!

 

[obsolete]

I just ran a test on this, normal speed/deity. What a disaster. I quit before the BC years were even over.

I suppose, if I kept reloading eventually it would work sometime. But I gave it a shot, and now I'm going back to my roots.

 

[Bleys]

Diety? Who the heck said anything about Diety?

Obsolete, I have an incredible amount of respect for you and your insightful views of this game at the higher levels, but I wonder if you havent lost sight of some of those exact roots.

Root 1: HAVE FUN!!

This gambit is a BLAST to play. It hones chopping and hammer management skills to the extreme. It has all the earmarks that make people enjoy games, risk, anticipation, and almost zero level of certainty.

Why dont you try it a few times on Immortal. Heck, play China, too, so you can justify it a LITTLE by convincing yourself its a quicker way to CKNs. Or . . . just keep taking boring old CoL with the Oracle. After all, winning Deity MUST be all about the Chicken Pizza! (LOL, that was one of the best comments ever in one of your games, heh, so amusing to see people say "you're kidding, right?)

 

[Morgrad]

By the way - it's ALC 7 where the gambit was detailed.

 

[Gone Dark]

Again, seeing Oracle build around 3000 BC is not uncommon to me. What levels are people playing at that they can get all this time for that? I understand if you're playing settler mode, but such tactics are useless to me.

Just curious, is that on deity? I've followed your games and you aren't building the Oracle much earlier than I am (prince mostly and I usually build it 1500 - 1200 BC), still you always seem to get it. I've had noble games were the Pyramids was built 750 BC so it seems there is a lot of variation here, I guess the other leaders beeing a big factor determining how early wonders are built.