Nobles' Club 254: Mehmed II of the Ottomans

[Tobiyogi]

Spoiler Some thoughts :

Interesting that your astro date is miles before mine, but our lib dates were about the same. I'm not sure on this map with such great land and stone, is one to beeline a super early astro?

Another option for another time: when you have such a good island as this I think it's very doable to go for space without ever declaring war (at least on immortal)

Spoiler :

As I didn't have GLH, astro was not only meant for invasion but also for much better trade routes. However I was shocked how many centuries it took to leverage that tech advantage. It's true, the AI techs very slowly on that map. Could still go for Space, it's not lost yet, but I should at least hurt Charlie before because he is at tech parity.

How did you realize culture without marble? I find it extremely difficult without having Sistine and/or Parthenon.

 

[Nick723]

Spoiler :

Regarding cultural victory without marble / Sistine. I mean I’m no expert (this was first one I’ve done in ages) but I did the following:
- 3 cities build all cultural buildings, including 3x cathedrals. Work towns for max commerce and run cultural slider as high as possible (post lib and rifles for defence)
- other cities build missionaries / temples to spread 3 religions and enable cathedrals. Then build units for protection. Where possible run artists / golden ages to generate as many great artists as possible.

I think in isolation at least, stone is actually better than marble for culture. You have to found your own religions in iso, and the techs that do that don’t overlap with the aesthetics line. I don’t think you have time to do both. Stone then makes all of the religious wonders half price (UoS, Spiral Minaret, even Angkor Wat). These produce quite a bit of culture in their own right as well as turbocharge your other buildings.

Culture in isolation vs non iso has the disadvantage that you have to run a heathen religion (making you much more likely to be attacked) but has the advantage that the AI isn’t so hot on naval invasions. In this game I repeatedly got DoWs, but was able even at the end to fend off infantry / artillery with rifles and cannons due to superior numbers.

 

[scheines]

Spoiler :

My earliest culture victories are with stone > marble (sure, both is strongest, but how rare is that?). Building the pyramids lets you rush buy your temples in low hammer cities. You could also whip them, but this is detrimental to growing for cottages, artists long term.

Culture win here really depends on your game's shakeout IMO. It depends on you founding a late religion and grabbing one or two extra, otherwise your multipliers will be low when you run the culture slider.

Personally I have never built any of UoS, Spiral Minaret, Angkor Wat, Sistine, etc. Just seems pretty trivial payout compared to having the cash.

 

[Nick723]

Spoiler :

My earliest culture victories are with stone > marble (sure, both is strongest, but how rare is that?). Building the pyramids lets you rush buy your temples in low hammer cities. You could also whip them, but this is detrimental to growing for cottages, artists long term.

Culture win here really depends on your game's shakeout IMO. It depends on you founding a late religion and grabbing one or two extra, otherwise your multipliers will be low when you run the culture slider.

Personally I have never built any of UoS, Spiral Minaret, Angkor Wat, Sistine, etc. Just seems pretty trivial payout compared to having the cash.

Spoiler More thoughts on culture fun times :

Oh nice - interesting that stone > marble even on non iso! I’d never thought of rush buying temples, will have to give that a go!

Agree on the religions, I think you want to self found at least 2. In this game I founded Confucianism, Christianity & Islam (and would have done Taoism if I hadn’t popped a great merchant rather than a scientist). I think with rep scientists getting the tech lead to get the later religions is normally ok (you might lose one to a bulb but otherwise the others you’ll get).

On the religious wonders, I think especially with stone you should take a second look when going for culture? You’re already building 9 x temple, 3 x monastery and 3 x cathedral so that’s min 15 buildings that will benefit (these are sunk costs so don’t need to consider the hammers for those). Combined the AP, UoS and SM cost 950 hammers (with stone) and with 15 buildings essentially payout roughly 90 per turn. That’s only an 11 turn payback which I think is pretty good. It also gives you the option to build monasteries in your other cities for again a ~11 turn payback. And on top of that, the wonders themselves generate pretty decent culture.

 

[scheines]

Spoiler :

True, when you phrase things as "X turns for payoff" it seems worthwhile. But definitely don't underestimate the effect of just reaching a milestone earlier (classic bulbing vs. academy debates, etc.etc.).

I do think sistine merits some reconsideration. Especially when one or more of your culture cities will be specialist driven. Could easily ramp up close to 100 pt with 3 cathedrals and the hermitage.

Conversely, 2 or per building seem negligible for culture wins. Beakers especially. By the time they're accessible, you're basically done teching (I usually stop after lib + nationalism, perhaps printing press if all my culture cities are cottaged), and can just build wealth in most cities to break even. Maybe it's more arguably worth it when you have to tech Divine Right for a 3rd religion.

BTW - I would rarely build a monastery in a culture win. Maybe after I am done with everything else (missionaries, temples, cathedrals). You absolutely must be in organized religion for awhile mid-game to get your 18 - 24 temples and 6+ cathedrals (or more) going , and the hammers saved by skipping monasteries only further incentivizes the civic. The 2pt they give is marginal compared to ramping up your slider earlier - which should yield a few hundred per city. It can help shave off a turn or two at the end, but not worth delaying the slider IMO.

 

[soundjata]

Deity 1AD (no cottage)

Spoiler :

Pyramids built 1800 BC at 2 cities
Failgold from TGW and Colossus.
Academy in cap (built by T. Edison, don't ask how )
Hopefully a great scientist in city 2 (or else ) for ASTRO T125​

Then IDK what I'm gonna do but there is a continuous flow of great generals spawning in this game

Spoiler :

 

[Fish Man]

Deity 1AD (no cottage)

Spoiler :

Pyramids built 1800 BC at 2 cities
Failgold from TGW and Colossus.
Academy in cap (built by T. Edison, don't ask how )
Hopefully a great scientist in city 2 (or else ) for ASTRO T125​

Then IDK what I'm gonna do but there is a continuous flow of great generals spawning in this game

Spoiler :

You are taking this no-cottage way too far, aren't you? Iso now? What's next, playing a Lain map but no cottage?

I love it. Keep us updated!

 

[soundjata]

The farm strategy is starting to show its limits @ turn 137 (540AD)

Spoiler :

Istanbul is unhappy

 

[soundjata]

would you rather Notre Dame or 500 ?

Spoiler :

 

[Nick723]

Spoiler Notre Dame? :

In this game, I’d much rather the gold. As far as I remember, our island is very rich in a delicious source of mutton which doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world.

 

[soundjata]

How should we proceed with the war preparation ?

Spoiler :

We have a nice population base : 67 good citizens.
Since the recent discovery of irrigation, we can pursue our serious goal of improving the farm count

Political system is representation, bureaucracy, caste system and paganism.

Spoiler :

The most promising way of freeing the poor citizens from the evil AI empire seem to be a swift steel beeline, with possibly liberalism on the way.

Spoiler :

AIs are still missing paper ; Charlie and Ham have astronomy ; Wang has guilds.

Spoiler :

We still have a great scientist in reserve. He's a real dude, his name is Nabu-rimanni.
Time to think of a "great people plan" ; the simple option is to target a couple of golden ages in succession.

I think we will need ~20 turns before reaching steel ; what should the cities be doing in the meantime ?
Just slowbuild maces, janissaries and galleons ?

Accounting for the current overall hammer production (125 /turn roughly, before golden age), we might be able to produce 3000 worth of units in the next 20 turns : 10 galleons + 10 maces + 10 muskets... Not enough for a good punch through...

Then whip 30 cannons and 10 extra galleons/frigates ?
4000 is roughly equivalent to 100 population points...

There is another alternative to consider : we could slowbuild trebuchets and use for upgrade...
This would mean getting at least one great merchant on top of 2 different already required...

Current GP ceiling = 500. Next are 600 and 800 if I am not mistaken ?
So we need roughly 1500 on top of what we already have

Spoiler :

Might have to starve down a few pops here and there Snaaty be with me

 

[Nick723]

Spoiler Some thoughts - lots of possible ways to go! :

Agreed with steel being the way to go here. For iso games it often feels the best route as an attack will be much later than on a Pangea.

If you’ve got 20 turns to go to steel, I would consider whipping a couple of times during that rather than just slow build. Hard to say how much impact that will have on your research rate but I think production is the bottleneck? With useful things to build I think I would build galleons/Janis rather than trying to upgrade units as that’s pretty inefficient and you’ll want to keep teching post steel?

On the other hand, I might bulb part of chemistry? Think this would be more impactful than a golden age at this stage and help you get to steel faster? I’m not sure I see the benefits in aggressively targeting the next set of great people here?

I think the other question is whether to get nationalism and draft the Janis. Hopefully you might be able to get it from a trade but I think that might be the way to go? Pre steel - build mainly galleons and then after steel whip cannons / draft Janis?

 

[civac]

Spoiler :

Since he needs Machinery for Chemistry and has Paper a Great Scientist will prioritize Printing Press over Chemistry.

 

[Nick723]

Spoiler :

Since he needs Machinery for Chemistry and has Paper a Great Scientist will prioritize Printing Press over Chemistry.

Ah nightmare - yep scrap that one then!

 

[soundjata]

thanks for the comments @Nick723 @civac

Spoiler :

Indeed, great scientist bulb order is printing press before scientific method before chemistry.
This will be a bulb-free beeline .

And yes it would have been possible to bulb chemistry by avoiding paper.
The beeline would be feudalism > guild > gunpowder > bulb chemistry

Instead I went engineering > paper > education > ?
This brought a few benefits like failgold for Notre Dame, mapgold for paper, a university in Instanbul...

But yeah, retrospectively, the latter approach looks counter productive for the fact I have been trading for for (assigning rep scientist to mines and getting gold in return)


Is production or research the bottleneck ? That's an interesting question.

Intuitively, I was thinking we need to reach steel as quickly as possible and go "all-in" on GP generation.
But Nick is correct that having researched steel is not an autowin and we might need to go further down the tree (fission ? )

I also like the draft suggestion, although I'm not to keen on trading to much atm.
However Wang has nationalism and could give it to his master Charlie for astronomy...
Maybe it would be better for me to do the trade.

Attached the save (earlier post) for reference.

 

[krikav]

Deity, NH/NE
Won't play this one out, but too many crazy things happend not to share.

Spoiler T139 :

I dug up another isolation game.

This one was completely crazy.

I wanted to go for CoL as the island was loaded with food, and I was building pyramids. So I took an interesting gambit and went there through poly, then I had alot of failgold from the wall, so I just took a cheapshot at judaism, and got it the same turn I built the pyramids.

But wait, there is even more crazyness going on! After that, I was going to writing/CoL, so I postponed pottery abit and went to priesthood first, put two chops into the oracle, which by some strange miracle wasn't built yet.
Then I founded confucianism too.
After this, I went into a expansionist spree, spamming out settlers from Istanbul/Edirne while Ankara built workboats in rapid succession. Copper city got to build workers and which then chopped out alot of more workers.
Half price granaries where chopped out in cities which popped borders either for free with religion autospread, or with hired artists.

Why not continue a good trend and found Taoism too?
After this, I was abit tempted to go theology too just to spite the AIs, but I came to my senses and started to crawl to optics, but I also took CS.

Hired alot of specialists in capital to get a GA-guy in a timely faschion, start a GA next turn and swap to Judaism/burocracy/pacifism. Was already in rep/caste from a revolt.
Starved out 3 GScientists which bulbed paper and education and then self-teched liberalism.

@Optics Doing 292 beakers per turn, but I still lose cash at 0% research.

Found Charly+Wang, traded for calendar and alot of small stuff. Charly will hate me eventually due to religion and I don't care about his WFYABTA so I just trade everything.

State of the empire. Cottages everywhere because there is probably too little production to fuel a hammer-based endgame war machine. If one wants to go war, then the whip is the way. Securing kremlin should be a cakewalk.
Cottages open up the possibility for a comfortable culture victory too, Istanbul+Edirne as cottage cites and Konya as the GP one.

Mr 2800BC oracle himself in the game and I got it that late, must be something once under a blue moon.

Should I have libbed divine right?

 

[sampsa]

@krikav

Spoiler :

12 cities and 580AD astro? Nice.

 

[krikav]

@sampsa

Spoiler :

I played pretty fast and with rather bad micro too!

I think there was almost perfect synergy here.
Pyramids for rep, oracle for early CoL.
And then expansive to get granaries up easy in cities even when in caste...
And then org to top that off with cheap lighthouses and also reduced upkeep.
So dead easy to get alot of cities up, and easy to get them productive right away.

After this, I think I must sift through @Lain's thread for some map to get me down on the earth again.

 

[sampsa]

Spoiler :

And then org to top that off with cheap lighthouses and also reduced upkeep.

Yes, I was thinking this when looking at those screenshots. While I'm not a massive fan of ORG, here it helps both due to number of good city spots and cheap lighthouses.

Also, getting to settle capital on plains hill stone/marble always seems to make the expansion phase very swift and pleasant.

 

[krikav]

Spoiler :

Yes, I was thinking this when looking at those screenshots. While I'm not a massive fan of ORG, here it helps both due to number of good city spots and cheap lighthouses.

Also, getting to settle capital on plains hill stone/marble always seems to make the expansion phase very swift and pleasant.

Spoiler Regarding settlement of capital :

Here, in hindsight, I think settling by that oasis / gold etc is way superior.
But I went on the stone, because I thought it might be problems with exp bonus hammers resulting in a "very slow" worker there as there might be no 4 hammers the first 5 turns.
I might have been able to guess the oasis from freshwater, but didn't think about it, and also that second sheep wasn't visible. But it was annoying having to build a monument in that city to gain the sheeps under culture. The reverse order settlement (sheep/gold first, stone second) would probably have been way better.