RR17 - Team A

[vanatteveldt]

@Thrar: well the vassal won't gift it to us, so we either don't get the tech; research something to trade for it; pay the vassal; or pay someone else. ATM, I think the best plan is to quick research RR and trade it with our vassal, but I'd rather buy his techs than someone elses

r_rolo1
Thrar
LKendter - just played
vanatteveldt - UP (swap)
Sengir - on deck (swap)

 

[Thrar]

It was my understanding that a vassal has to give in to anything the master asks, or declare war. Is that not so?

 

[vanatteveldt]

No, as far as I understand this only applies to resources. So, we can demand coal and he has to give it, but not so for techs...

 

[vanatteveldt]

The plan:

Tech: 100% tech, get RR -> AL, trade for SciMeth and possibly physics

Edit: Builds: I think we should rushbuy univeristies in Boston and Philly before moving to 100% science. This will delay RR two turns, but should probably be worth it?

Micro: build lots of railroads! The new cities also require some worker love, and some of our old land does as well, so I hope HRE has some workers stacked for us...

War: finish HRE as quickly as prudent.

Eastern army currently consists of 4 cannon and a grenadier next to Mainz, 3 grens, 1 rifle, and 3 more injured cannons in Nuremburg. Plan: The grens+rifle will move south next turn (unless Mainz is still only guarded by one rifle, in which case I'll just get it immediately) and capture mainz the turn after.

Western army is 1 cannon, 6 cav, 1 gren between Prague and Augsburg, 3 cavalry, 1 rifle, 1 gren between new york and Augsburg, 3 healing cav and 1 rifle in Prague and some more cannons on the way. Plan: use the workers to build a desert road so the cannon + gren + rifle just within our borders can reach Augsburg, guarded by 2gren plus 2 rifle. Turn after, bombard while bringing in some more troops. Turn 3, take Augsburg.

After Augsburg, a small detachment of slow units plus the cavalry moves south while the rest moves west. Use one or more units to explore Khmer territory, and decide on DOW immediately or after assembly line.

 

[Thrar]

Sounds good.

Unless the Khmer have significantly more defense than HRE, I think we should hit them asap. RR and AL are not actually that important, most of all we need to keep our momentum going and not waste turns building up. Unless our opponents get to AL, we're fine with just grens and cannons. We can use our money to buy infra and army, with all the new cities I'm sure we can put it to good use.
Boston should absolutely have a uni when we turn research back on; that's like 40-50 right there. If we still have that GS sitting around we could consider an academy as well.

If we can, I think extorting Physics from HRE would be nice. If we leave them with one or two cities we can always knock them out with a handful of infantry later.

 

[vanatteveldt]

@Thrar: HC already has AL and infantry, that's why I will scout their land in the turns I need to clean up HRE.

To extort physics I will need to have SciMeth, which means paying 1600 gold or waiting 5 turns so we have RR; I favour the latter but this does mean halting the advance after capturing the first two towns. What I will do is capture these towns, move a small detachment south, try to extort physics, and if not crush the last town (unless he build a 4th town in the meantime to give the expeditionary force something to do while waiting for railroads. )

I can also take Augsburg a turn quicker with higher losses (only 2 cannons next turn, so would probably bombard and suicide one, leaving most defenders with decent health), but I don't think the turn is crucial and Augsburg has 4 defenders..

 

[vanatteveldt]

Switched to 100% research. Set Boston and Philly to universities, rush bought next turn. Decided to switch to research anyway because we can use the momentum in the coming trade/extort rounds.

1913 Mainz was still guarded by a single riflemen, so captured immediately. Got a
volunteer for the railroad construction crews.

1915 Augsburg was a tougher nut with four defenders. Decided to wait a turn to get more cannons in line, but had bad luck with the cannons, losing three (the last two at
decent chances).

1916 RR is in, research set to AL. Founded mining inc in Boston (wall street).

Traded with washington for RR-SciMeth and to get more resources.

Mining is now worth +6, with Lisbon coal due to come online. HRE has two resources in its last city, which might be a good reason to just capture it. Persia settled a sattelite city south of us, set NY to produce a settler to backfill the last remaining spot.

Constructing lots of railroads with all settlers and moving the army east, except for a small group of physicists near HRE's new capital and last stand of Ulm. The settler turned explorer in Khmer lands found HC's SoD:

(The capital was guarded by 3 infantry). So, Khmer will not really pose a threat. Still, it might be wise to wait the 4 turns needed to get AL and upgrade (part of) our army...

We've been DoW'ed! Catherine vassaled to Khmer and they proceeded to kill our poor little worker. Our army is moving west but is not really there yet, so we will probably need to take it easy a couple turns before we strike. Since AL is 3 turns away, I am tempted to get it before going in.

Of course, with no more techs to extort from Catherine, we might as well show the world what happens to people who pick the wrong masters:

In retrospect, I should have extorted SciMeth and traded for Phyisics with Washington, but who knew that Catherine was going to make such suicidal choices.... I mean, she could have lived 10 more years by playing nice...

1920 - AL is in and traded for physics with our good friend Washington. HC is the only civ knowing electricity at the moment. Set research to artillery but at 0% to get upgrade money. Upgraded the first batch to infantry, our army is ready to head south:

The east-west RR is almost done. Worker pairs are ready to finish the RR, connect the mines and lumbermills, and improve the HRE lands.

I'm building culture in the new cities to get them expanded asap. NY and boston are building mining executives, not sure whether that's the best decision.

r_rolo1 - on deck
Thrar
LKendter
vanatteveldt - just played
Sengir - UP

 

[LKendter]

Sounds like another round of strong progress. Cathy gone, rails in progress, mining inc, and about to strike the next target.

 

[Thrar]

Silly Catherine.

Excellent progress there, van. If we prepare a few settlers for the empty space, the Khmer might be the last we need to take for domination. Or is it actually easier to go through for conquest considering the price of settlers? If we take vassals as soon as they're willing to it might be doable relatively quickly after AL.

 

[vanatteveldt]

@Thrar, LK: Cheers!

There is a settler underway to settle the south eastern peninsula. One more settler and some culture building should claim most of the space there.

We are currently at 34% of land (64% required). Khmer has only 12%, so we will certainly need some more than that, even with the HRE cities coming out of revolt and popping borders. It might be a good idea to put some troops on a boat and capture the barb/AI cities on the big islands south east, that should be easy extra land (A galleon is almost half the price of an infantry, and I would expect the island cities to be very lightly guarded)

 

[Thrar]

Under those circumstances, I'd say conquest should be faster. Our production is mainly limited by number of cities (one unit per city per turn), not hammers. With Physics, tanks are only 2 techs away, then we can overrun everyone quickly.
By vassalling everyone asap, we can minimize the time spent on conquest war. For domination on the other hand we need to take a lot of cities, wait for them to come out of revolt, and build some culture. Add to that the time lost on the islands and I think domination would take a fair bit longer.

 

[vanatteveldt]

@Thrar: makes sense. We can even reach dom limit before conquest as vassals land counts for 50%. I think we should first run 100% cash for a while to upgrade all our troops, so tanks will take a while.

I've been working on spreading Mining, but is it actually useful? It gives +7 hammers, which will increase a bit still, but do we need those hammers? It costs 100 to build (not counting the 70 or so gold), so ROI is 10-14 turns. OTOH, the hammers come from new york and goes to the weaker cities, so it might help boost production by spreading hammers around.

On a related note, should we pause to spam/buy factories?

I don't think we can really build 1 unit per turn in most cities. Infantry costs 120, artillery 150, tanks 180. New York can manage that with 50 base, +125% ironworks+forge, and +50% academy, but after that our cities have more like 50 hammers per turn. So, 1 unit per turn requires rush buying without starting the unit, which costs a lot of gold: infantry without hammer investment costs 500 gold; at 100% cash our income is 700 gold. This money is better spent upgrading our grens+rifles and later cannons, and rushbuying factories after investing hammers.

 

[r_rolo1]

Good solid progress. It looks that we started war in the right time

I agree with Thrar that it will be most likely faster to go conquest. Apparently the Khmer are the strongest of the remaining AI and look at their sorry state If that is true , it will be quite easy to put them all down.

 

[Sengir]

Played a short set (8 turns).
Spread RR around, and lay rails, stomped on Khmer who was unwilling to talk for way too long.

He's willing to cap now, now that I've got troops in position to stomp on him some more

Spoiler :

Here's the overview of the Khmer lands:

Spoiler :

We can take Vandal with the Cavs this turn and his new Cap next turn.

We won't be able to kill him off in two turns though, as he has another city, but maybe we can take another city and extort a tech? Anyway, I moved everything (I think) except for the front units, so we can still decide to
a) cap him now and start on the next target
or
b) take another city (or two) and extort a tech.

Point in favor of capping now, is that we are starting to feel some WW.
Didn't start on Arty yet, though we might want to soon. Not that I met with a lot of resistance, but still.

 

[vanatteveldt]

I would say one more turn of war is a decent price for electricity as it is a prerequisite for tanks. Certainly capture vandal now, if he's still unwilling to give electricity (and it's not easy to obtains otherwise) just capture the holy city next turn. If he has shrined it it might even be worth the hassle...

Feel free to play the extra turn and finish the war. If we continue with one dead AI per turnset we'll be done before our next set

 

[r_rolo1]

Unless Sengir actually wants to finish the war ( and I agree that it will be better to capture Vandal ), I'll get it in 24h

 

[Sengir]

You can take it, I don't have time to play tonight.

 

[r_rolo1]

Well, I played a smallish set ( 8 turns ), but it was a action filled one

We started by capturing Vandal ( there were no cav losses due to heavy use of flanking II promos ) and we got this as a peace deal:

Spoiler :

A little to the light side, but I had more to do that beating some tech out of him ( especially after the experience on RR13 where, it was easier to get a civ to vassal or even to give cities than to get them to toss a tech out :/ )

Anyway, I had no time for nonsense with the Khmer and moved out to the Persians:

Spoiler :

To be honest, I should had started this war in the previous turn because Asoka discovered Artillery and started to upgrade his cannons IBT. Oh well ...

In t2 of the war, and with already two cities captured ( as you can see in the backround of next pic ), we actually discovered arties ourselves. As oil is pretty much needed for everything upstairs in the tech tree, I decided to get combustion :

Spoiler :

And in t5 of the war we captured the persian cap:

Spoiler :

That made Asoka finally willing to talk and to vassal:

Spoiler :

I gladly took Combustion out of the peace deal ( he would not part of any other tech ... ) and changed research to flight. Industrialism is Ok and all but we still need 2 techs to get there. And flight gives us planes, that are invaluable in stripping cultural defesnes before our army gets there ...

Anyway, I ended the set in the next turn, after moving all of our troops towards the next target Some pics:

Spoiler :

First of all, the troops disposition. Our army is in where the active airship is, so we can hit Mutal in 2 turns ( most of our stack is ready to move in the save below ). I strongly suggest to do that in parallel with a cav hit on Chichen Itza.

Tech screen:

Spoiler :

It is not obvious from the screen but Wash will get Biology in 1 turn, so maybe it would be a good idea to change research for Bio before hitting the red button to make it cheaper ( I pretty much expect Wash to trade it for Arties + some pocket change as it is now ). I also sent Asoka to research Rocketry ( he will get there in 10ish turns ) and let HC slog into rails for the whole set ( in hindsight I should had gave it to him, even if to make him railroad his territory instead of me ).

BTW and as a end note we got a GG and a GM during the set. I'm not sure if any of the things we can do with them to the end of the game will matter much

Thrar is UP , LK is on deck

>>Save here<<​

 

[LKendter]

If I had know the AI would have been this wimpy, I would have pushed for a water / wind mill economy and just pumped troops from turn 1 to increase our power rating.

I am not impressed at all with the AI and industrial starts.

 

[vanatteveldt]

Yeah... after we started I played some advanced games and reached the same conclusion. The AI just doesn't handle quick buildups well at all. I guess the unitprob idea just doesn't work in late starts because you need less infrastructure and the quick availability of good siege makes attacking a viable option more than in normal starts (excepting the rush, which the AI also handles very poorly).

I had a very brief look at the save. it seems that we can just continue pumping units and cap the remaining 2 AI. BTW, it seems Roosevelt actually built a decent amount of units, so it's good that he is last in line.

An alternative to flight could be industrialism if we sell our right arm and first born sun to HC. I think tanks would be quicker than airplanes plus infantry, but quick rebasing will help even with railroads, and it will take a while before we have enough tanks to get a city without siege. So I guess I actually agree with flight

Tactics wise I think we can cap Lincoln in three turns. We need three turns to get to his capital because of all the forests/hills, so we can send the bulk of our slow units to the capital, a small detachment of slow plus some cav south, and the bulk of the cavalry to the west. T2 we capture Chichen, T3 Mutal and (if they don't capitulate yet) Lakamha. After that they will quite probably capitulate. No need to rest the army, there are quite a lot of sufficiently health units to kill 2-4 defenders per city. With some luck this will bring us over the dom limit (we need 10% extra and will get extra tiles from Persian cities. If not, we should just attack Roosevelt asap and be done with it.

I am tempted to play a shadow game to see how much quicker a hammer based approach would be...