Nobles' Club 285: Mansa Musa of Mali

[AcaMetis]

Spoiler :

Anyone know the odds for this? My experience tells me that they flip "right away" after you get culture on the center tile.

I believe the way it works is that barbs don't get a second revolt before flipping, if a barb city revolts they flip right then and there. The issue is that the revolt chance isn't necessarily that high, even if their city is 95% yours by culture it won't have that high of a revolt chance, so it might never flip. I think you'd need to go into debug mode to check the actual percentage chance of a barb city revolting, though.

EDIT: Did some quick WB testing, and a city that was 4% American, 95% Indian with four Archers on it had a 0% chance to revolt. Remove one archer and it's up to a 1.33% revolt chance, 4% for two archers, 6.67% for three and 9.33% for no archers remaining. For reference three longbows are enough to bring that same situation down to 0% revolt chance. Two is 1.33% revolt chance and one is 5.33% revolt chance.

So apparently the odds of that city not flipping was 100%, because four archers are enough to completely prevent any revolts due to a city being only 4% yours culturally. It might be that it's different for barbarian cities or that using WB to test this messes it up somehow, but that's what my testing showed.

 

[konata_LS]

@jnebbe

Spoiler :

If you play further and get some techs through trade, you won't regret about your second city, because that city secures an important strategic resource .

@krikav

Spoiler :

6 workers captured! What a lovely gift from Joao

If I had known the land shape, I would have attacked Joao or at least tried some worker stealing like you did. In my game, I only met Izzy and Joao for many turns, that made me think it was a Continents map where 2 AIs and I shared a continent (like in the previous Mansa NC 262). In that case, if Joao died, Izzy wouldn't trade tech at all, and it would be impossible to know if Izzy was plotting or not (she can plot at Pleased). I even planned to take Astro with Lib. Many turns later, when I sent Swords to capture a barb city at the SE of Izzy's land, I finally met WK and Suleiman. I didn't meet Sully earlier, because in my game Sully founded Hindu but Izzy founded Judaism, so Sully became Izzy's WE and couldn't send a scout through Izzy's land.

@AcaMetis

Spoiler :

Agree with you about Izzy. In my mid-game, both Nappy and Brennus were Annoyed towards me, but I was not afraid of any eventual French or Celtic attack at all, because Izzy did not open borders with AIs of different state religions. In my game, Brennus and Nappy didn't even open border with WK.

The only downside was even I met Nappy and Brennus, I couldn't get anything from trade, since they did not open border or trade techs at Annoyed. But this offers an opprtunity to leverage SPI trait, because people could temporarily adopt no religion or free religion (after Lib), open border or trade techs with Brennus/Nappy, then switched back 5 turns later.

@sampsa

Spoiler :

In Pangaea or Inland Sea maps, scouting becomes less important, since you already know the map type. In Fractal maps, sometimes the scouting result may lead people to change the tech path or decision-making. During the first 100 turns, I didn't have spare units to scout Izzy's land and thought this was a Continents map where Izzy, Joao and I shared a continent. I didn't go for Aesthetics but researched Calendar because I was planning to lib Astronomy. Only several turns later, I met Suleiman (Izzy's worst enemy due to different religions) and WK, and realised my assumption about the map was wrong. There were not just 2 AIs in this landmass, and the map might not be Continents.

 

[soundjata]

Yes I do think the number of defenders is the reason a city (even barbarian) is not flipping

 

[sampsa]

@konata_LS

Spoiler :

In Pangaea or Inland Sea maps, scouting becomes less important, since you already know the map type.

I would go as far as saying on deity pangaeaish maps scouting AIs is of close to no value. On deity fractal AIs mostly will find you (they get scouting wb:s out fast) and/or you can usually see from if there are reachable AIs. So we do agree that on fractal there is some value, but like I said, paper is not that far away in the tech tree anyway.

On lower levels it can be completely different. There can be lots of land available for you to settle, AIs might not send out scouting work boats and so on, so the value of scouting goes way up.

 

[krikav]

Spoiler :

It might be that it's different for barbarian cities or that using WB to test this messes it up somehow, but that's what my testing showed.

It must be completely different for barb cities.
I have done this many times, they usually flip right away or only a few turns after the culture reaches their city center.

Spoiler It did flip. :

 

[AcaMetis]

In that case I've got no clue how culture flipping cities work differently for barb cities. Short of debug mode I wouldn't know how to test it either.

 

[Fippy]

I just recently had a game (regular no wb stuff) where a barb city did not flip for ~10 turns.
I had 4 culture/turn on it's center, 4 Archers + 2 workers inside.

 

[CarpoolKaraoke]

Spoiler Updated: T155 :

Well, I eventually did build 2 scouts, although probably not what anyone (or I) expected. A Settler! And an Explorer (because I'm dumb and forgot that turn to not trade for compass).

The settler goes to this nice piece of land between Wang Kon and Suleiman:

This gift brings me up to Friendly with Suleiman, unlocks trade for Machinery, and trade to Joao for Engineering. World map shows Celts/French under Judaism, where at least the Celts are already at war with the Koreans.

I'll meet them soon.

Key Tech Points from T110:

125 BC Civil Service
50 BC Music (Got the Artist!)
100 AD Philosophy --> (2x Merchant, 2x Scientist)
150 AD Paper ( Trade - Isabella)
250 AD Education (1x bulb)
350 AD Machinery (Trade - Suleiman)
375 AD Engineering (Trade - Joao)
640 AD Steel (via Liberalism) - T142
660 AD Printing Press (1x bulb)

Excess gold from Great Merchant was used to support tech to Rifles while building cannons + converting trebs.

880 AD Rifling (T155)! Second Great Merchant cashed in, so excess gold will go towards teching Infantry, I think. Either that or to Railroads + upgrade some swords. 15 cannons ready thus far.

Overall tech situation at T155:

 

[jnebbe]

demigod to 103

Spoiler :

Very painful to see, bella already has a monument, in order to keep the fish I'd have to settle on the hill, kill the forest I'd need for a workboat, and not be able to share the cow




On the plus side, we have horses+iron

Was thinking/hoping I could steal the barb city with just skirmishers but bella kept suiciding spearmen and giving all the barb archers free upgrades






Pull the trigger and trade aesthetics. A critical error was me not being sure if I wanted to give it away just yet, only for bella to demand it next turn. I denied and she started plotting immediately







And she settles the clam spot
Rush to construction to see if I can get an army out in time before she declares,

One very big annoyance was being sandwiched between 2 religions and not getting it spread until T95, and then not spreading to any more of my cities. Was hoping the northern city would get a borderpop without a monument/library for the marble but that never happened




I did not

Maybe should've been whipping troops a little earlier, growing costs less food the smaller the city so I could've gotten a couple of extra whips

Never met Brennus but he was eating up napoleon. Suliman's at 10 cities and hasn't even touched his island yet.

Fun game tho, couple key mistakes snowballed into being in a rough spot

 

[krikav]

@CarpoolKaraoke

Spoiler :

I think thats really fast!

I would ignore all commerce and all tech for now (well, not ignore it, but drop all emphasis on it.)
Swap tiles from 2F6C to things like 2F2H.
Upgrading costs 3 gold per hammer, and in cases where you upgrade a short hammer distance as treb->cannon, the cost is in fact 4 gold per hammer. So I would value commerce at tops at the third of a hammer.
Stuff like whipping away villages/towns also make sense imho.

Likewise I would try to figure out any means necessery to convert gold to hammers. Skirmishers -> Rifles is a better deal than treb->cannon actually.
I would keep doing this until I get more land.

There is countless of games where I have been in a good tech situation and then got stuck in sort of a loop with "Oh, I can get that one too really fast! Then I'll be unstoppable!" and it rarely works out to my satisfaction.
So I would say, you got an edge now so completely focus on that now and drop plans of AL!
Making these sharp pivots can be really hard mentally so I like to play tricks like envision yourself 50-70 turns in the future having taken most of 2 AIs lands when my previously primitive foes have catched up and surpassed me in tech and I'm still rolling onwards with an doomstack still consisting of rifles/cannons.

 

[krikav]

@jnebbe

Spoiler :

Thats rough!
If bella would have asked me, I would almost certainly have given her whatever. Losing out on a trade was not the end of the world, could always go for the next tradebait. Commerce is good here but situation would have been different if say we where playing Genghis Khan without a single river in sight and no gold/gem/fur etc. Then getting good trading value out of something can litteraly mean life or death.
Here, getting Faithful Bella to not consider you a despicable heathen is kind of important.

I really think you got shafted by your first few cities being in weird spots much more than any other possible mistakes though.

Would encourage you to try again and see how a different approach would work out.
I will for sure try out the early game with settling on the silk and not fooling around with Joao once I'm tired of this current playthrough.

 

[konata_LS]

Spoiler From T205 to T268 :

Settings as below. No huts.


Research RP-Rifling. Built Cavs and delcared on Suleiman and WK. And once again everyone was warring.
Oh why must I often end up in a chaotic situation like this? ...


Several turns later, WK broken free from Suleiman. When WK was willing to talk, cease fire with him and concentrated my attack against Sully.
Sully capitulated on T235


Then DoW WK. He capitulated on T246


Luckily, Nappy converted to self-founded Taoism. This made Brennus's attitude towards Nappy drop to Cautious. So when I DoW on Nappy, I wouldn't suffer "you declared war on our friend" penalty on Brennus' side.


To prevent Nappy from bribing Brennus in a war with me, I converted to Brennus' religion, adopted OR (his favourite civic) and beg 1 gold. SPI was such a nice trait


Declared on Nappy the same turn. 2 turns later, Brennus started plotting


In 1780 AD, Brennus dogpiled Nappy


And Nappy quickly capitulated :


Next turn, domination


Built many units. A useful way to deal with unit-spammers is to become a unit-spammer. Who cares about Rifles. Build Cavs and zerg everything. Just charge.


All the Rifles and most Knights killed came from Nappy. AI Nappy spammed units, as always. Once again, I felt the luckiest thing in this map was I didn't start next to Nappy .

Thanks for the map .

 

[konata_LS]

@sampsa

Spoiler :

Yes, you're right about the scouting and difficulty levels. From Emperor level and above, AIs start with a free scout, so AIs find the human player quite early and scouting is not very useful. For Monarch and below, AIs don't have free scouts; sometimes I meet the AIs on the other side of a Pangaea map after 100 turns .

@CarpoolKaraoke

Spoiler :

Your situation looks really good! Rifles + Cannons would be a solid combo of attack.

@jnebbe

Spoiler :

You've got some back luck indeed . Izzy didn't found her religion, which made her more aggressive because she built units instead of missionaries. Being sandwiched into two religious blocks made the situation even more unlucky.

As @ krikav has suggested, I also encourage you to try again. NC games are for learning purpose; they are not competitive games or HoF. So nothing wrong if you play a NC map for the second or third time.

 

[dorhin]

Spoiler To 1 AD :

Settled on the silk 1S and teched Agriculture->AH->BW->Pottery-> Writing->Aesthetics

I got boxed in early at ~1000 BC but was able to get out 7 cities before that. I expanded a bit too fast and was really short on workers, so the development of my cities was delayed a bit
The marble helped a lot to generate failgold and thus keep research going, I am also quite satisfied with the amount of beakers I generate.
I built The Great Library in the capital as well as the National Epic. This allowed me to get out 2 Great Scientists up to this point, one was used to bulb philo, the other will be used to partially bulb education.

Since I don't have horses, I think I will go for canons (I might also trade for horses, lets see).
So far, I met only 6 AIs, Suleyman looks a bit scary with 13 cities and he is plotting. His stack is at Wangs border, hopefully Wang can defend himself and will not vasal immediately

State of the empire

I am mainly trading for gold at the moment, my happy cap is nice and I will soon hook up spices as well.

Techwise, no AI is running away yet. I think I will be able to be the first to Lib, hopefully being able to get Steel from it.

The game is a bit of a lovefest, my close neighbors are not very likely to attack me due to the shared religions. Most people also like Wang, despite him being in Hinduism, noone likes Napoleon

 

[soundjata]

Update 725 BC (T86)

Spoiler :

There is a romance going on between Mali and Spain, although Portugal is liked more (friendly) and his cities get converted instead of ours .

Spoiler from annoyed to cautious :

100% luck again thank you RNG.

Spoiler happy trades :

Joao went on a wonder spree (Wall + Mids + Lighthouse) without being hindered by a swarm of skirmishers .

Spoiler Time to trade away MC :

I went for Metal Casting in order to bee-line Civil Service + Engineering. (there is no peaceful way)

The plan:
1. Get into the trading game with a worthy chip (metal casting)
2. Trade stuff (Math, Sailing, Calendar?)
2. Tech CoL and Civil Service on our own.
3. Trade for Machinery
4. Tech Engineering
5.

Getting Calendar from Spain will be tricky because if we trade MC for Math + Sailing now there is a good chance Isabella will get MC for Calendar IBT. On the other hand self-teching Sailing takes 2 turns and we can't risk losing our quasi monopoly on MC for so long...

Spoiler Situation :

Skirm died poor guy was just sitting on a brown hill doing nothing T_T

We still haven't met anyone outside the Buddhist block but we are about to trade a lot and @CarpoolKaraoke is right: increasing the WFYABTA counter for everyone is not desirable at this point.

Thoughts?

Farms or cottages?
Forges or no forges?
Failgold or infrastructures/units?
Academy or Golden Age?

 

[krikav]

@soundjata

I liked your critique about not scouting alot and adressed the issue asap.

Spoiler :

Regarding your game:

Spoiler :

I think that if you plan on going on a medieval rampage, mass forges is probably not a good idea, even though they do add +10% gold (gold multiplier buildings are at their best in medieval attacks imho) and add +2 happines due to silver+gold.
Perhaps one in capital and one in Djenne...?

Looks like leaving Joao to his own business was a nice option too! I would have loved to get my hands on those shiny wonders.

Academy makes less sense in medieval since it usually ends in having the slider down at 0% for a very long period after reaching the key techs.
But maybe it's still the best option? It's permanent and will give you a boost later too.

I like farms alot since it helps whipping. But I try to have cottages too, especially around capital where I try to get a market.

The divide failgold vs infra/units is a false one. Best is to whip units and put overflow into failgold, that way you get the best of all worlds.

 

[krikav]

I'm having a rough case of cold and civ4 suffers both from lack of playtime and lack of quality.
Played to T159 yesterday but haven't checked the situation properly.
Quitted early since I noticed I was stumbling on basic stuff like keeping military police in core cities. >_<

Spoiler T159 :

Didn't delay the attack on Joao for long. He has quite a few cities now but it looks like only 3 are reachable by land. This will make it hard for him to put up any form of meaningful defense.
I also start to build some galleys in Crab/Deer/Wheat-town where heroic is.
First to music.

Joao has two scouts which serve as excellent target practice for my siege units. They stand paralysed and try to heal up and the catapults can attack once each turn, gaining nice xp for themselves and building up toward more GGenerals.
Appart from these two, he had a third one further south too, and I went at those 3 for milennia.

Did a round of whipping of buildings, then swap out of organised religion. This makes the overflow to be divided by 1 instead of being divided by 1.25.
I then roll overflow for 5+ turns before swapping into OR again and getting the bonus. A lovely trick only really available to SPI leaders.

Example: Put 8 raw hammers into a barracks with OR for a turn. This makes the barracks reach 10/50. Then whip the barracks and get it up to 85/50.
If you just finish it, you will get (85-50)/1.25 = 28 hammers overflow.
But if you instead swap out of OR and finish the barracks, you will get the full 85-50 = 35 hammer overflow.
Roll those onwards in wealth for 5 turns and then swap into OR again and put them into a forge and you will get 43 hammers toward the forge.

The same trick can be done in an even more extreme form with Burocracy, where you can whip with a 1.75 multipler, and then get insane overflow.

The scout @soundjata meets the others. I get machinery from Brennus and feudalism from Napoleon right away.
Only Sully gets mildly disturbed by this since he hates Nappy. Bella is more disgusted by Wang.

This demand REALLY REALLY hurt me. I agreed because I thought I could get at least part of the cash back by selling him some tech, but no. Not a single gold I got back.
Techrate suffered tremendeously by this. Bella later held a AP vote to stop trading with Nappy too, so I really shouldn't have cared about getting cozy diplomatically with him.
The same turn, Brennus asks me to join the war against Wang and that I too agree with. No harm in that since everyone hates Wang, he will be a irrelevant vassal before I can do anything about it too.

T136 I get a GSci and partially bulb Education.
Target practice is still ongoing. Looks like I'll have access to a huge amount of CR3 cannons eventually.

Carefully checkign each turn what they are up to. Noone seems to be going for lib so I rush out the next GSci and partially bulb printing press which I finish. The plan was to try get another GSci and finish gunpowder and possibly partially bulb chemistry (can't bulb chemistry if you don't have PP).
T146 I did a 4-pop whip of Taj in capital since Sully have had nationalism for too long for comfort. That hurt alot since the capital is so slow to grow.
Went into natinalism for 5 turns while it regrew abit (since it was crippled anyway the opportunity cost for nationlism was less) and drafted a bunch of maces.

This makes gunpowder easier to tech. Around here I'm 100% confident Bella is on her way to MT which she usually does (I think it's her UU that calls her there early, even though she seldom gets gunpowder early.)

Got GLib+Natepic in that fish/corn spot and the chemistry-guy is out.
Poor Walata which I settled to share the fish haven't had a serving of salmon for pretty much the entire game. Should probalby have farmed alot more for that city.

Lib->Steel and bella offers up MT.
My head was basically cotton at this point and I just did the trade. Was probably dumb since alot of other AIs already had MT too, and this almost certainly ruined any chance for getting communism first.

I got first to economics at T159 too, and called it a day then, not sure how the situation looks.
But I'll sure have a stack of epic CR3 cannons thanks to Joaos tireless scouts. If I can only get some proper support units to not get slaughtered by conqs, I could probably just start sweeping the map clockwise.

 

[CarpoolKaraoke]

Spoiler T159 :

Joao has two scouts which serve as excellent target practice for my siege units. They stand paralysed and try to heal up and the catapults can attack once each turn, gaining nice xp for themselves and building up toward more GGenerals.
Appart from these two, he had a third one further south too, and I went at those 3 for milennia.

What an odd bug! I would've thought that the scouts would go back in the city, but I guess the command was to explore and that's not feasible with fully closed borders.

 

[krikav]

What an odd bug! I would've thought that the scouts would go back in the city, but I guess the command was to explore and that's not feasible with fully closed borders.

I'm not complaining!
Perhaps this is more common than I have thought? I think my normal urge would have been to just run them over asap. Not sure why I thought of trying to keep them alive but I'm glad I did.

 

[CarpoolKaraoke]

Update 725 BC (T86)

Spoiler :

There is a romance going on between Mali and Spain, although Portugal is liked more (friendly) and his cities get converted instead of ours .

Spoiler from annoyed to cautious :

100% luck again thank you RNG.

Spoiler happy trades :

Joao went on a wonder spree (Wall + Mids + Lighthouse) without being hindered by a swarm of skirmishers .

Spoiler Time to trade away MC :

I went for Metal Casting in order to bee-line Civil Service + Engineering. (there is no peaceful way)

The plan:
1. Get into the trading game with a worthy chip (metal casting)
2. Trade stuff (Math, Sailing, Calendar?)
2. Tech CoL and Civil Service on our own.
3. Trade for Machinery
4. Tech Engineering
5.

Getting Calendar from Spain will be tricky because if we trade MC for Math + Sailing now there is a good chance Isabella will get MC for Calendar IBT. On the other hand self-teching Sailing takes 2 turns and we can't risk losing our quasi monopoly on MC for so long...

Spoiler Situation :

Skirm died poor guy was just sitting on a brown hill doing nothing T_T

We still haven't met anyone outside the Buddhist block but we are about to trade a lot and @CarpoolKaraoke is right: increasing the WFYABTA counter for everyone is not desirable at this point.

Thoughts?

Farms or cottages?
Forges or no forges?
Failgold or infrastructures/units?
Academy or Golden Age?

Spoiler :

I think in general a commit to slow-teching Engineering is better accommodated by bulbing Philosophy and using that to trade for Civil Service/Machinery. You might need spy points in 1 person only to confirm the timing though.