RB29d - Cultural Extermination

[mostly-harmless]

Ok, I got it but will not play in the next say 8 hours. That should allow for some more comments.

The ivory tribute to Nappy is still active, so I will cancel this. Pindicator probably got all excited about his extra 5 turns!
The prophet will come in ca.10 turns.
We should also steal some more good tiles (pigs from kyoto).

mh

 

[T_McC]

I think we would like Christianity to found in Yakutsk. If I understand how the Holy City is selected it should be either there or Yaroslavl', which wouldn't be bad either.

To clarify what Mutineer was saying: Lit is one of the optional pre-reqs for Music (part of an or gate with Drama), and we receive a bonus to our research for having both of the optional pre-reqs. The beaker cost of Music remains the same, but each beaker of research from a city counts as more than one beaker against the cost of Music. So researching Lit --> Music requires less raw beakers from cities than researching Music --> Lit.

Because of our particular economic situation, researching Lit first may not delay Music by very much. For the ~16 turns we require to research Lit we'll be building Courthouses and Libraries, and having Cottages mature. When we get around to researching Music we'll be able to apply the bonus to a higher raw beaker count, so I would expect we'll have both techs within the stated 46 turns to Music. So even though I'm not sure we'll be building the Great Library I agree we should switch to Lit before Music.

I believe we'll want to build multiple Shrines to support our economy, and should keep Novgorod as a pure Prophet GP source. This means multiple Temples and no non-Prophet wonders. If we can steal the Corn from Kyoto we can run 5-6 Priests at break-even food provided we have enough Temples.

We'll have the chance to start Sistine on this round. Because Paris has the Pyramids I think we should build Sistine in St. Pete. In the early part of uberfish's next turn Nappy will get a GE from the Pyramids and rush another wonder in Paris, so we'll have to keep up the cultural pressure in St. Pete. Nappy's GE-rush is also the trigger for when it is safe to trade Theology.

I guess we want to build the Corn/Sheep site N of Rheims. Probably the tile 1 NW of the corn. Ideally this would be founded after Christianity as we shouldn't need a religion to flip Nappy's cities in the area.

 

[uberfish]

NW of corn looks good. It will control enough space in 4th ring to prevent the AI resettling that area. We can just run a couple of artists there and let it do its thing while generating GA points.

I think we should cancel the Ivory deal with Roosevelt too, we'll steal the furs off him soon enough anyway, and don't want our neighbours to have elephants.

Remember that if Lyons flips we should disband it in order to place a city east of Paris in its 3rd ring, this is one thing I learned from reading the old game reports.

We are on 15 turn rotation basically because this variant is primarily a builder game and people will have a fighting chance to see whatever buildings they ordered up actually finished. (it's also kind of painful waiting 5 turnsets to see whether your team got that wonder or not) If anyone doesn't have enough time to play 15, or we end up in some sort of two front war (quite possible) it is ok to play 10.

 

[mostly-harmless]

And here we go:
Turn1/IHT: Looking around and doing some changes:
Switching research to Literature,
Canceling the Ivory tribute to Napoleon (can't cancel ivory/fur trade for another 9 turns),
micro St. Pete a bit, since it will grow unhealthy and I want to whip a granary there next (IIRC)

Turn2: Yakutsk border pop
And just before I whip St.Pete's citicens to death I see yummy pork on their plates. Looking around ... and... Rostov stole Japanese pigs!
One more pop point for St.Pete before maxing out on health.

Turn3: Rostov continues to inflate, stealing Rosie's horses!!
Another good tile for Rostov. Soon it will rock not suck!

Turn4: Things are getting better, as Yakutsk steals the already mined gems from JC
That let's me cancel the gems for fish deal with JC.

Turn5: We can run 50% science at break even and with a warrior-upgrade cash reserve of 126. The war in the east continues as Genghis is using Russian territory (openborders) to sneak up on Toku (no open borders). Already the Mongolian power graph took a hit.

Turn7: Hhhm, I ordered some chopping near Yakutsk and it promised 90 hammers (a full granary) so I switched to that, but then only 44 hammers are gained??? Hmm, so now we have a half finished granary and a almost finished theatre in a city that sucks production wise. Have to chop the remaining forest.

Very quite turns, infra building, and worker activities...

Turn12: Literature comes in and we go to Music next for 22 turns. The Great Lib seems sooooo expensive at this point in time, but the National Epic would look good in either St.Pete or Novgorod.

Turn13: The Great Prophet is born. Checking the religious and pop point situation ... seems safe to found Christianity... will go to Yakutsk most likely (pop 1 , no religion) ... and ... YES!

btw. the Alphabet monopoly is broken by JC. I did not start trading anything since we have still some work to do before we need IW. I leave the trading for discussion as I am notoriously bad at it.

Turn14: Rostovs border expand and we start putting culture into Tokyo.

Turn15: Toku asks us to join the war againste Genghis. Of course not. The war is still going on and keeps them busy.
As a last event, JC converts to Judaism. Everybody is in the same religious block now.

As for the rulership handover:
There is big army pile up in New York, but they are on Settler/Worker escort, so we should be fine.
I left the Christ missionary in Yekaterinburg, not sure where to go with him. I thought Novgorod for the additonal temple. He was on the move from Yakutsk anyway, so no turns lost.
I started the Settler for Northern WhiteDot in Moscow after it maxed out. The settler will be helped by a chop. After that Moscow can continue the Barracks. Already spend some hammers into that while waiting for the pop pop.
I put Novgorod from GP generation to infrastructure for the time being.
Happines and health will be a non-issues once we get the calendar resources.
Research wise, I suggest we consider getting Taoism as well, just because we can!
Next turnset will see border pops in all three western settlements and opening the fight for Cumae, Tours 7 Orleans
The scout found quite some land in the west, allowing Bismark to expand away from us.

Save and Culture Map attached.

 

[Galileo44]

Turn7: Hhhm, I ordered some chopping near Yakutsk and it promised 90 hammers (a full granary) so I switched to that, but then only 44 hammers are gained??? Hmm, so now we have a half finished granary and a almost finished theatre in a city that sucks production wise. Have to chop the remaining forest.

You are creative, so you have 2X production on theatres. So the 44 was doubled. However, when you switched to granary, the chop would no longer be doubled. If you have chopped for the theatre, the overflow would have remained doubled.

 

[mostly-harmless]

Ok, yes, that makes kind of sense. Thanks for the clarification.
mh

You see, its all about learning!
mh

 

[T_McC]

Looking good.

Interesting decision on the Christian Missionary. We definitely want to break up the Jewish lovefest. We've got a nice stranglehold on Rosie, Nappy, and Toku so we don't necessarily need to turn them (and if we go OR/Jewish, might as well make the neighbors happy). Khan already picked a fight with Toku so I don't think we need to put a target on his back. So we should try to turn either Biz or Julius. Biz is a bigger threat, but Julius is a more likely opponent to occupy Nappy.

Regardless of the target, I don't think we try to make them Christian. I think our 2nd best Shrine candidate is Reddotstov/Confucianism. Reddotstov is also a good choice for building missionaries. We could go for Hinduism (St. Pete), but I think St. Pete will always be building cultural stuff instead of missionaries. In fact, it will start the Sistine Chapel on turn 2.

So since I don't think we can turn anyone with the single Christian missionary I'll send him to Novgorod to open up another Temple.

 

[uberfish]

Wow, the entire world got converted to Judaism without us sending out one missionary. Never seen that happen before. This shrine is going to make us a fortune, I'm not sure we need another that badly. (note - a prophet will offer us civil service at this time too)

Let's not give them Christianity (potential extra culture for them.) If we want to convert anyone, use one of the religions that has spread already. I would be wary of Caesar, with praetorians he is a greater military threat than the others. Perhaps convert Bismarck, the most advantageous diplomatic situation we could have for the midgame is a Roman-German war. Napoleon is already dead, he just hasn't realised it yet.

 

[mostly-harmless]

Are we actually planning to build the Great Lib? I think for the variant the Parthenon might be a better choice if only for denial reasons.
Is Philosophy in any of the lightbulbing lists? Landing all seven religions would be really cool.
mh

 

[pindicator]

I think we need to get into OR within the next turnset or two. We don't need to pick a religion: we want OR mainly for the missionaries anyway and that part of the civic works even w/o a state religion. Then we can work on getting either Biz or Julius back to being Hindu, Genghis back to Confucian, as well as spreading religions for the oh-so-nice cathedrals we're going to be unlocking soon.

If you look at the Religion screen, Hindu is actually the #2 religion out there. And the shrine in St. Pete would certainly help for pushing against Nappy's wonder-fest.

Julius has Currency, so we can sell him Fish for his 2gpt.

I'd like to pick up Iron Working for clearing jungle tiles. And of course we could use more workers.

I know white dot is good because it is close and won't be high on maintenance, but I would like to propose two alternate sites that we should consider while they are still around:

#1)



We currently don't have any pressure on Bismark's cities. This would be an opportunity to push right into the heart of his lands.

#2 & #3)



Two choices here. The orange dot attacks the heart of Julius' cities (which may not be a good idea with Praets about to come into play) and the pink dot is the safer and closer dot to give us a better foothold into the southern part of the continent.

These are definitely more costly cities and will take more to defend, but they make up for it by being more aggressive. I'm fine with white dot, but I wanted to at least throw the idea out there.

 

[T_McC]

I'll very likely revolt into OR/Judaism with an eye toward hustling the Sistine Chapel along. Most of the cultural losses from picking a state religion are in our core and survivable. Trigger will be whenever Novgorod can start building Missionaries.

In #1 the turquoise dot has a real visual appeal, but is actually pretty useless for our variant. It puts pressure on 3 German cities, but is 4th ring to all of them. Moving it E-SE would be better as we need more pressure on Munich. I think Yaroslavl' can hold that spot for us even after the German borders expand.

In #2 the orange dot would be nice but I think we'll lose that very soon to a Colossus-inspired border pop in Rome. I would be curious about W-W-NW of Yakutsk to pressure Berlin and Neapolis. I can't quite knit the two pictures together to know exactly which tile we want.

But I think White dot first because Biz might settle that area soon. None of the other proposed city sites appear to vulnerable to other civs.

I was reluctant to suggest Hindu because I don't want St. Pete building missionaries. But all it takes is one from our other Hindu cities to get things started. So I'll try to get Caesar to Hindu.

If we want to use a Prophet on part of Civil Service we have to avoid Monarchy. May not be too much of a problem with all the Calender resources we own.

 

[uberfish]

more thoughts on GPs:

I think an artist would actually be more beneficial than any other GP type right now because a culture bomb fired at distance 3 against cities which are only at 2 cultural radius is devastating. We could use it to drive a wedge between Hamburg and Munich for example. Or use it to clear room in the east at Rostov. A settled artist takes 500 turns to generate 6000 culture, it gets better with multipliers but even with Free speech and sistine chapel it's 200+ turns (one would hope to have flipped the targetted cities before then.)

If we're going to Judaism, do we really want to make the strongest military civ Hindu?

 

[pindicator]

I don't think a culture bomb is the way we want to go with a Gr Artist. Settling the GA will get us 14cpt with Sistine's, and will be far better for continuous cultural pressure.

If we do decide to do a culture bomb, we want to make sure it's in a city that is already pressuring opposing cities. The culture applied from the bomb is applied to the tiles already under that city's cultural influence.

 

[Mutineer]

Uber, you logic is not complete.

I do not remember reference, but amount of culture poor in surround ties is:

20*(MaxRank – rank) + culture/turn.

Meaning after 750 culture, which it could get fast it will pour 20 + 12 + (other city culture) culture/turn in last culture zone + 12 + (other city culture) culture/turn in space it can not claim.

Work of art bomb will pour this 20 + (other city culture) straight away, but it is fast to ritch 750 culture with help of GA.

In short, you will loose a lot of culture in fouth + rank if you use culture bomb, but achieve good pressure up to rank 3 instantly. So, question is, do you want to pressure cities in rank 4+ using GA or in rank 3 uning instant bomb?

Bomb will put 6000-750 = 5250 culture in thurd rank instantly.

 

[T_McC]

260 AD (0)
Start by trading CoL to Caesar for Archery, IW, and his 90 gold. Could have had Calender, but we can flip CoL + Meditation for that when we want to expire the Stonehenge Obelisks.

We have Iron at Moscow and Yekaterinburg. Northern White dot will also claim an Iron. With the 90 gold I bump research up to 60% and shave three turns off of Music.

290 AD (2)
Whip the Courthouse in Reddotstov. Khan goes Confucian on his own. Xi Ling Shi born in Paris ... Great Scientist. So no free Wonder for you, Nappy!

St. Pete still builds Sistine.

320 AD (4)
Yekaterinburg has a border pop, and start to threaten Orleans.

335 AD (5)
Khan wants to trade Calendar for CoL, I say no. Rosie demands Alphabet and I give it to him. The monopoly has already been broken and we can't trade it for anything in this part of the tech tree. Besides, I don't feel like a war right now.

350 AD (6)
Yaroslavl' has a border pop. Isn't pressuring any enemy cities yet.

365 AD (7)
Yakutsk has a border pop and Orleans is now under attack on two fronts. It sits at 91% French. I see we've been allergic to roads. As workers are freed up I'm trying to connect our cities. We need about 5 more workers.

I whip the Courthouse in Novgorod.

410 AD (10)
The Parthenon is BIDAL. How many cities don't we know about? Settler has completed for White Dot. It receives a Chariot escort until we can get a better road network up and running. Moscow does not build Barracks, instead it starts on a Worker.

425 AD (11)
Caesar wants to trade HBR + Cash for Drama. I say we don't. Nappy demands we switch to Judaism. Ho-ho, You're the Boss!

So I'll be swapping to OR once Music comes in.

440 AD (12)
Somewhere in there we stole Nappy's Copper at Orleans.

455 AD (13)
WhiteDot is founded. Nappy is building a road on the Sheep. Shame he won't be able to use that road in 5 turns. Founding the city does put a bit of a damper on our economy.

We stole a river Spice from Rosie.

470 AD (14)
mmmmm .... Culture.



Revolt into OR. Research is set to Compass, to necessitate discussion of where we go from here.

485 AD (15)
After the Anarchy, we lose the Spices back to Rosie. We should get them back in the next couple of turns. Yaroslavl' should be ready to whip its Courthouse next turn. Novgorod will do better at Missionary building after growth next turn.

As usual, we can't seem to get a free spread of Judaism in our cities. Reddotstov would make an attractive target for the 2nd Missionary built/whipped in Novgorod, to act as a 2nd Missionary source. The first should go to St. Pete to get the 25% boost on the Sistine Chapel build.

We are paying 6 gpt in unit costs and have some disbandable unpromoted Warriors. I'll leave that up to the next player as it would be much easier to disband the units if we were going to build replacements. If we're going to have a slowdown in military builds we may not want to disband as many units.

Almost all of our workers are building roads to connect our cities.

Here is the tech situation:



I have been avoiding Calendar so as to not expire our Obelisks, but we do have 5 Calendar resources. Should be easy to trade for when we want it.

We most definitely do not want to research Compass, but I'm not sure what we do want to research. Currency is always good for the economy, Construction allows us to build Jumbos to stop any pillagers and Cats to thwack cities. Metal Casting hasn't been discovered yet and we could always use Forges (+2 Happy). We could also research Paper on the way to Liberalism. Civil Service could be researched in ~25 turns so I don't think we need to generate a Prophet for it. If we don't want to save the option of lightbulbing CS with a Prophet we can trade for Monarchy and get the Wines on-line. I'm leaning towards Currency as we could really use the extra 10 trade routes.

We're making headway on tiles, but no other city flips are imminent. Orleans will almost assuredly be the first French city to flip. Lyons is 51% French right now but it's only shrinking slowly.

To answer a question uberfish asked: Yes, I think we do want the most militarily powerful opponent to be the odd-man-out. Increases the odds he'll get involved in some war, and the odds we can organize a dogpile if we so choose. Having said that, I still didn't build the Hindu missionary needed to convert Caesar.

I'm intrigued by the idea of bombing a city between Hamburg and Munich. If the cities have only had expanded borders for ~20 turns their city squares should only have ~500 culture in them (you get 1 unlisted cpt just for being there, so even before the city builds a library or gets a religion it's generating 1 cpt for purposes of calculating tile influence). That'll push the city square % down to < 10% German and hopefully trigger a revolt. But if this is going to work it has to work quickly because it'll be quite a few turns before we can generate 20 cpt in our new city. Basically we would be gambling that we could flip one or both of the cities within ~30 turns.

Toku and Khan are still fighting, although I couldn't see any progress by either side. I think Khan may have pillaged a tile. Somewhere in there Khan demanded a Fish. We weren't using it and I wasn't going to sell it to our strongest competitor (Caesar), so I gave it to Khan. Cancellable ~ turn 5.

Infrastructure rounds on Epic speed are dull. But at least I got to found a city.

 

[uberfish]

I'd be in favour of trading for calendar as it will be worth some cash at our western cities. Currency seems quite attractive right now as it will both pay for another city immediately and let us take excess AI gold.

The main question is what to do with our artist now that we have him; do we settle a city in gaps between German lines and use it to attack Bismarck (and if so do we merge as a specialist or bomb), or simply merge artist at Rostov to push Tokyo, Kyoto and NY? I think our aggressive settling has seriously weakened the eastern AIs already by cramping their growth and forcing them into bad terrain, and there are arguments for starting to work the other front.

 

[T_McC]

I'd attack the Germans with the Artist and would be inclined to try the bomb. Biz has too much room to grow over there and a single bomb may flip both of Hamburg and Munich. We'll know pretty much right away whether it will work. If we only get the city centers down to ~30% German it'll be a failure.

We already control the tile necessary to attack Berlin from the SE and the bomb may open up tiles in Berlin's third ring to the North. If that is true, then a bomb is definitely the way to go. We do not have a Settler currently in production. I'm guessing we're heading for the desert tile N of the oh-so-inconveniently placed mountain.

 

[uberfish]

I'll wait for more input. If Mutineer's figures are correct I don't think we will get the two cities down to flippable with one bomb (and we would be taking over mainly random grasslands in this position sadly, no resources.) Will also look for better spots that might actually have a food resource to take over allowing the city to get up and running quicker.

 

[mostly-harmless]

Very busy at work currently so just a thought:
Even if we do not flip the cities immediately, we will start putting our culture into them (even small ones from religion or theatre) right from the start, or not?
A merged artist will take ages to get the border pops before we start piling culture in the rival cities? Mutineer? Anyone?
mh

 

[Mutineer]

750/14 = 50+ turns, less with improvements.
150 = 11 Turn, from 150 you will put same culture where you want.

In my personal opinion the best time to use culture bomb is when city hit 1500 culture. Tehn 6000 put it strigth to next rank, jumping city flipping power a lot. In my personal opinion the best it to settle artist in the most into anamy face city and bomb is when it hit 1500 culture, really claiming space and flipping cities.

Just my 2 cents.