SGOTM 03 - Team One

[mdy]

The following is an estimate of the current voting power of the civs.

Team one: 90 pop, 8.91% of total

Alexander: 8 pop, 0.79% of total

Fredrick: 30 pop, 2.97% of total, +7 (will rise to +8 with trade), can be bribed into war with Monty when we are closer to attacking him to give +11.BUDDIST. US favorite Civic

Washington: 30 pop, 2.97% of total, +1 JEWISH. Free Speech Faorite Civic.

Isabella: 46 pop, 4.55% of total, +1 (rise to +5 with open borders/fair trade relations). Favorite Civic Vassalage, raises it to +8, +11 with war. JEWISH.

Mao: 38 pop, 3.76% of total. -6, ISLAMIC.

Saladin: 42 pop, 4.16%, +10 (will rise to +14 with war/trade). Favorite Civic Theocracy, BUDDIST.

Toguwa: 67 pop, 6.63% +0 (will rise to +5 with mercantilism, +6 for trading resource, +10 with war) HINDU.

Monty: 56 pop, 5.54%

Cyrus: 62 pop, 6.14% +7 (will rise to +9 with trade/fair trade relations, +11 with vassalage). BUDDIST

Kublai Kahn: 72 pop, 7.13%, +6 (includin favorite civ bonus). I don`t think we can increase this. JEWISH

Gandi: 51 pop, 5.05%, +10( +11 because of Gandi`s boost). Favovorite Civic Universal Suffrage. HINDU

Louis 14: 45 pop, 4.46%, +1-I don`t think this can be increased enough to get his vote. Favorite Civic Hereditary Rule. HINDU

Victoria: 63 pop, 6.24%, -3- Idon`t think we can get her vote either. Favorite Civic representation, CONFUNICIAN.

Mansa Musa: 57 pop, 5.64%, +14, favorite civic free market, BUDDIST.

Huayna Capec: 59 pop, 5.84%,+10, Favorite Civic Herditary Rule, BUDDIST.

Julius Caesar: 92 pop, 9.11%, +6 (will ise to +7 because of resource deal, will rise to +10 with representation, and mutual war will rise it to +11).HINDU.

Hatty: 102 pop, 10.10%. Our rival.

Looking at the above Gandi, Saladin, Mansa Musa, and Fredrick will be virtually guarranteed to vote for us at the UN if we bribe Fredrick into war with Monty soon enough. This would give us about 26.73% of the vote.

If Caesar switshes to representation soon we should also get his vote, giving us 35.84% of the vote.

Taking Corinth will raise this to 36.43% (we will probably leave there arctic city alone, but we may want to stay at war with them in case the vote get`s very close and we want it. Alternativly we may be able to bribe someone into war with Greece.)

Killing Monty would give us 41.73%.

Cyrus vote could be got if we switched to vassalage soon enough. This gives us 48.11%

Huayna Capec is at +10 this might be enough to give us his vote, but might not. If it did we would have 53.95%

This still won`t be enough, but I believe we can get the votes by the following strategy:

At the beginning of the next turn set change civics to mercantilism and Theocracy to get the favorite civic bonus with Toguwa and Isabella. Then convert to Judaism. Give a gift to Isabella to get the +4 for fair trade relations. Sign open borders when possible. Wait until the Izzy`s attitude has increased enough to be incited into war with Monty then convert to Hinduism.
Sign open bordes with Togawa when possible, and then incite a war when possible. Then convert back to no state religion. This should eventually give us +12 with Togawa and +10 with Isabella or 65.13% of the vote. Enough to win. This will slow the tech pace down somewhat- but there is no point speeding to the UN if we don`t have the votes.

The situation can change of course, and hopefully we will get a few more requests to boost our relations.

To boost our vote I would start builing farms in all cities(even over cottages) everywhere except Moscow and our production centres to boost our population. We should also send a force to conquer Montezuma as soon as we can. I scouted the strength of the Aztec defenses with a caravel, and have attatched the screenshots of them.

 

[mdy]

More screenshots attatched.

 

[hamfist]

We are not in military or economic shape for a campaign against Monty. I think our best bet is to not engage him and work on getting more people into war against him, except our UN competitors.

Strategy wise, who is our actual UN competitor? Huayna Capac? Tokugawa?

I would play low key, building as much food and military as possible until Mass Media, then attack if necessary.

I would avoid switching religions again until such time as we are at Mass Media and can turn of tech.

 

[mboza]

If we switch religions, will we instantly pick up negative modifiers with hindu and buddhists, and we we switch back, do they instantly go away?

StP is 21, 13, or 10 turns from a GE, with 0, 1 or 2 extra scientists. Moscow is 22 turns away as is. So I guess we leave as is?

Accept all trades, apart from with Hattie? Anyone that we should not be trading with to avoid the worst enemy modifier?

Take Corinth slowly to get someone to 17XP?

If we can get economics, should we revolt to Free markets imeadiately? Or are we following mdy's civics plan?

I agree with the farm everything.

 

[mdy]

If we switch religions, will we instantly pick up negative modifiers with hindu and buddhists, and we we switch back, do they instantly go away?

Yes they do go away immediatly.

StP is 21, 13, or 10 turns from a GE, with 0, 1 or 2 extra scientists. Moscow is 22 turns away as is. So I guess we leave as is?

Another GS is not very useful to us so I would leave it as it is.

Take Corinth slowly to get someone to 17XP?

Is there any reason why we need a unit at 17XP?

Accept all trades, apart from with Hattie? Anyone that we should not be trading with to avoid the worst enemy modifier?

I would also avoid Mao, Washington, Victoria,Kublai Kahn and Louis

If we can get economics, should we revolt to Free markets imeadiately? Or are we following mdy's civics plan?

Free Market would speed up our research, but as we don`t currently have the votes it won`t do us much good. If we follow my plan I would switch to mercantilism/theocracy mmediatly- Note in my previous post there is a mistake Isabella`s favorite civic is theocracy not vassalage. I would delay switching religion until the favorite civic bonus has had some time to accumalate.

We are not in military or economic shape for a campaign against Monty

Our economy alright and still will be after the civics change. Our military is not yet strong enough, but it can be built up relativly quickly.

 

[mboza]

Is there any reason why we need a unit at 17XP?

Are we still waiting for a lv4 unit for heroic epic, or did we finally get one?

Mercantilism will send our trade route based economy to pot, but I guess if we need the diplomatic bonus, we need the bonus soon.

 

[TDK]

Just looked at the game. We can now build the Heroic Epic in Pete but I don't see the level 4 unit anywhere, maybe it perished?
[edit] Silly me, level four is only 10xp(a unit starts at level 1, not level 0) so we have been able to build it for a long time, just to bad none of us saw it(except maybe mdy?).

Athens is working 2 unimproved coast tiles instead of the clams.

Mdy, couldn't we have gotten something like Gunpowder from the scientist, or Radio or Mass Media if we had not traded Guilds?

Haven't got time to go through all the diplomatic stuff right now, but it seems mdy really put a lot of work into figuring this out. Good work! That being said, I'm quite pessimistic about winning quick, there are too many uncertainties and close calls. I will just offer a few comments for your consideration:
-I think it is out of the question to attack anyone now but we need more pop, so we have to take out Monte.

-Now that we have Guilds, I think we should consider researching Military Tradition. Would defensive pacts help us in the diplomatic puzzle? Would Permanent alliances?

-We can ask Rome to change civic to representation for 360 gold, or even better; a tech for Representation and a trade embargo against Hatty.

TDK

 

[amh52]

Sorry I have been busy in the last few days...

Good job on the summary mdy. Thank you for doing it. It is very useful. I am not too familiar with all this stuff so I am very willing to try your suggestions. Personally I have the feeling we will need a lot more wars before we can have the vote.

Should we make a detour towards Gunpowder and Chemistry before we research Mass Media so we can have access to Grenadiers and Frigates? Or do we still want to try for a quick vote?

At this point I am also not sure about selling Techs to AIs. Sure it's great for research but we might regret it if we need to fight more wars. Also it seems like we picked up a lot of negative multipliers due to trading with worst enemy.

Heroic Epic will pollute gene pool in StPete. I think it will be minimal but maybe we should pop the GE first.

I believe Defensive Pacts and PAs would hurt our diplomatic position in general.

 

[TDK]

I have been surfing the forums for a bit and I found a really usefull Excel spreadsheet. According to this, there are invisible diplomatic modifiers for all kinds of things:
-Relative rank.
-Base attitude towards other players etc.
-Warmonger solidarity!!!

I'm trying to make the document more easily readable, so far I've removed the leaders not in our game from the spreadsheet. Take a look, very interesting reading... Totally changes our position as far as I can see. Will try to compile some data later.

TDK

 

[mdy]

Mdy, couldn't we have gotten something like Gunpowder from the scientist, or Radio or Mass Media if we had not traded Guilds?

Unfortunatly not. The next tech on the GS tech path is fission, which is useless for us.

-Now that we have Guilds, I think we should consider researching Military Tradition. Would defensive pacts help us in the diplomatic puzzle? Would Permanent alliances?

-We can ask Rome to change civic to representation for 360 gold, or even better; a tech for Representation and a trade embargo against Hatty.

Defensive pacts do boost relations with the civ your allied with, but give you a -1 modifier with peolple you don`t have a pact with, so it is unlikly that one would help us. It might be useful to have the option though, just in case.

Rome will probably switch to representation on it`s own next turn, if they don`t we can bribe them.

Should we make a detour towards Gunpowder and Chemistry before we research Mass Media so we can have access to Grenadiers and Frigates? Or do we still want to try for a quick vote?

If we beeline directly to the UN we will get it before we have enough votes to win, so I think a detour to gunpowder, military tradition and/or chemistry would be worthwhile.

Heroic Epic will pollute gene pool in StPete. I think it will be minimal but maybe we should pop the GE first.

I agree that we should wait until the GE is popped before building the Heroic Epic.

I have been surfing the forums for a bit and I found a really usefull Excel spreadsheet. According to this, there are invisible diplomatic modifiers for all kinds of things:
-Relative rank.
-Base attitude towards other players etc.
-Warmonger solidarity!!!

I'm trying to make the document more easily readable, so far I've removed the leaders not in our game from the spreadsheet. Take a look, very interesting reading... Totally changes our position as far as I can see. Will try to compile some data later.

I am aware of the base attitude modifiers, these were taken into account in the strategy I proposed. I don`t know what the relative rank modifiers are or how they would effect our strategy though.

[edit]: I have just checked the spreadsheet it seems to indicate that the warmonger respect and relatitive rank modifiers apply to AI civs only, does anyone know if this is correct?

 

[TDK]

As I read the document we have the following hidden modifiers with other civs:
Gandhi +6
Mansa +5
Cyrus +5
Frederick +5
Kublai +4
Louis +4
Washington +4
Saladin +4
Tokugawa +3
Isabella +3
Huyana Capac +3
Hatty +3
Julius Caeser ø
Victoria ø
Alex ø
Mao ø
Montezuma -1

If we add the visible modifiers, we get the following:
Mansa +19
Ghandi + 16
Saladin +14
Huyana +13
Cyrus +12
Frederick +12
Kublai +10
Julius Caesar +8
Hatty +8
Louis +5
Washington +5
Isabella +4
Tokugawa +3
Victoria -3
Mao -6
Alex -8
Monte -9

More to follow, something is not right. We have +16 with Gandhi but still he is only pleased, only Mansa is friendley. My guess is there is a base negative modifier between all players from the agressive AI?

TDK

[Edit] It is the line in the spreadsheet called: "iBetterRankDifferenceAttitudeChange. Each leader has a factor 0-4. Multiply this number by the difference in ranking, eg. Cyrus has a factor 2 in the spreadsheet and is 9 places below us, this would give us a modifier with him of +18. Ufortunately, there is a cap on the modifier +4, so that's what we have with him.

 

[hamfist]

I'm not sure if a tech detour is worth it. If we stay on the beeline, we will have Scientific Method, then Electricity, and later Radio to trade for follow on techs. We can probably get gunpowder,Chemistry, and Military Tradition just by trading scientific method. Once we have Mass Media we can quickly backtrack to grab Biology.

We will want to trade our techs to get the +1 You shared discoveries bonus.

Are we sure that we want to do all that anarchy to get in Tokugawa's and Isabella good books? They will probably be asking us to go to war shortly thereafter. Tokugawa is a warmonger and Isabella is a religious zealot that doesn't share religion with anyone.

Do we need a space race contingency or are we in good shape to go for it if diplomacy fails?

 

[TDK]

I have just checked the spreadsheet it seems to indicate that the warmonger respect and relatitive rank modifiers apply to AI civs only, does anyone know if this is correct?

I agree the formulation is unclear, but I think it refers to the fact that the human player doesn't have modifiers to anyone as such. I don't see that the AI shouldn't have numerical relation to the human player though.

I also found this interesting answer from Ori, he seems to know what he is talking about, he created the spreadsheet:

Agressive AI does two things:
all AIs have a -2 relations modifier against any human player.
all AIs multiply their own power by 4/3 (i.e. they overestimate their own strength by 33% - not 50 ) when contemplating a DoWar decision

 

[TDK]

Just found another post by Ori:

There are a whole lot more modifiers - some of them hidden

eg.
-2 for Aggressive AI option
+2 for settler, +1 for warlord, 0 for noble and -1 for all levels above
-1 to +2 base attitude depending on leader
0 to -3 (per rank/total civs) if your rank is worse than the AI's
0 to +4 (per rank/total civs) if your rank is better than the AI's
and so on...
The leader specific values are in the LeaderHeadInfo.xml and an Excel spreadsheet of this can be found here

This makes me think that the attitude modifier for Cyrus might be: rank difference/total civs*leader modifier(9/18*2)= +1.

I've sent hem a PM asking how it is calculated.

TDK

 

[TDK]

Got this reply from Ori:

Hi,
actually the calculation is:
iWorseRankDifferenceAttitudeChange*RankDifference/(NumberOfPlayersEverAlive+1)
i.e.
if there are ten Players in your case that would be
4*9/11 which would be rounded to 4
if there are 18 Players it would be
4*9/19 which would be 2...
I'll change the files soon to reflect this...
Oh and this applies to all relations, i.e. AI vs. human as well as AI vs. AI
Regards
ori

So, the above example with Cyrus would give us 9/19*2=1.

TDK

 

[mdy]

That`s interesting, and will change the analysis of our situation. Does anyone know how many plus points are needed overall to get the AI to vote for you?

The rule of thumb that I have been followin is that anyone with +11 (explicit, not hidden modifiers) is guaranteed to vote for you, anyone under +7 won`t vote for you, and if it`s inbetween it depends on the circumstances. I assume this is caused by the hidden modifiers TDK mentioned. Agreesive AI could raise this to +13 and +9, which could make things much more difficult.

 

[mboza]

Nice work on all the diplomacy stuff.

I was hoping to play tonight, but life has intervened. So I will play tomorrow, unless someone else wants to take it first.

 

[hamfist]

I'm not that great of a number cruncher but see clearly that winning a Diplomatic victory is going to be very difficult. I wish I had more to offer on this but I'm a Space Racer at heart and I've always preferred Diplomacy at gunpoint. As best I can tell it's my turnset and I'm wondering if I should take it now or if we need to dicuss more (Edit: just noticed it's mboza's set) . If I take the turnset now, I'd like team opinion on the principal moves over the next 10 turns.

It looks to me like Space Race could be faster at this point, but as mentioned I'm not a Diplomatic Expert. I will listen, hopefully learn, and do my best to follow the team lead when taking my turnsets.

 

[mdy]

This game can be easily won either by diplomacy or space race, the question is which will be quicker. It is looking like that if we go via diplomacy we will have to conquer the Aztects and probably 1 or 2 more civs. Space race means teching a long way into the tech tree so I suspect diplomacy will still be quicker.

 

[ori]

lurker's comment: Ask and ye shall receive answers Note: it might be regarded a fair move to post this link in the Maintenance thread