SGOTM 03 - The Real Ms. Beyond

LKendter · Feb 12, 2007

I just want to make sure everyone is aware of the deadline in case you aren't reading the maintenance thread.

I don't know if our pace will be good enough to finish on time. These will all be time consuming war turns, so we will be lucky to get 10 turns from each player. I think we need to play at the SG standard of 24 got it, and 48 hours to play to finish...

AlanH said:
OK. This is a formal deadline announcement. I'll publish the results and awards on 31st March. Teams will still be able to upload saves for inclusion in the statistics and graphs after that date.

If all teams finish or retire before that date then, of course, I'll publish the results earlier.

Kodii · Feb 12, 2007

Iainuki, please play as soon as possible. After your turnset, I'm going to start reinforcing the 24/48 rule for the reasons Lee mentioned above. If you know you will not be able to play within that limit, or have a doubt, please pass/switch.

grangerm · Feb 12, 2007

Hi guys, I wanted to say thanks for the well-wishes and the understanding. I should be OK to jump back in the rotation when my turn comes around again.

I've only been checking the thread and save periodically, so I'm not in the best position to comment. Feel free to ignore anything that I say

Compromise said:
Maybe that clinches it for Mansa? He'll give techs to anybody, so I wouldn't mind his demise.

That's a good point, killing Mansa will slow down tech as much as killing any AI.

If we build the UN, do we have any obligation to allow the diplo victory vote to occur? If so, and we build it before we have the votes, we run the risk (as unlikely as it may be) of the world banding together and voting for our opponent. My question is, do we build the UN ASAP or wait until someone else has the tech?

Anyway, good job so far everyone. As Kodii pointed out, the power graph shows our progress to be favorable compared to other teams at the same point in the game.

Iainuki · Feb 13, 2007

http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/civ4sgotm3/The_Real_Ms_Beyond_SG003_AD1770_01.Civ4SavedGame

Autolog Part 1

Spoiler :

Iainuki · Feb 13, 2007

Autolog Part 2

Spoiler :

Iainuki · Feb 13, 2007

I don't have time to write a proper summary and such right now. There's a lot going on here, so I'll try to get something together so the next player has a clue what's going on by tomorrow sometime.

1740 AD: I start off by trading Physics to Mansa for Steam Power, 480 gold, and his world map. We have lots of coal, most of it already mined, so Moscow gets an immediate production boost.

I start dealing with cities. I bring all cities under the governor, then start going through one by one and checking assignments. I put an engineer in St. Pete, since an extra engineer can't hurt at this point in the game. I set several cities up to be whipped because of unhappiness: markets in Yekaterinburg, Cumae, Guangzhou, and Vladivostok; colosseums in St. Petersburg and Shanghai; forges in Smolensk and Yakutsk. I do some drafting out of cities on Chinese/Greek island to provide garrisons for the new cities and future conquered cities. I remove boats from the queues of Cumae, Chengdu, Hangzhou, and Yakutsk: there's no point in throwing good hammers after bad. I'll let Lahore finish its frigate after the forge, since it's almost done. I reassign Orenburg from a forge to a harbor, since it has enough land to have real production.

I wake up the sleeping workers and start making necessary improvements. The Egyptian/Incan/Malinese island is in terrible shape, so I decide to whip out some workers from the cities there to get its improvements into some kind of reasonable shape. Our army is also pretty disorganized, with units sitting everywhere, a lot of them with no conceivable purpose. I wake them up and send them to the front.

1742 AD: There's so much going on I'm having trouble writing a complete turn log. Given the urgency of time, I'm going to opt for brevity instead.

I whip a bunch of buildings in the unhappy cities.

We're still having severe unhappiness problems, so I start running culture: tech is not the limiting factor here, so I bump us up to 20% culture. This leaves us with six turns to go on Radio, the same as 100% science. Running culture actually serves three purposes in our rather unusual situation: it decreases motherland unhappiness in civs that we haven't exterminated all the way, it help push back borders in places where we're losing them, and it gives us needed happiness. I'm going to prioritize more theaters and colosseums to take advantage of it during my turn set.

We have almost no cannons in the area of the ongoing conflict, and no frigates, either. The frigates are annoying blocked off by Frederick's culture (I thought culture couldn't extend across the water to separate land masses? Oh well.), so I need cannons. I start building cannons, but it would be nice if sometime I'd have bombardment units at the start of my turn set.

1744 AD: Units arrive next to Cuzco.

1746 AD: St. Pete births a great scientist, whom I merge there. I start the process of bombarding Cuzco.

1748-52 AD: I bombard Cuzco down, then take it with the loss of two cossacks (bad luck; one died at over 95% odds).

1754 AD: I refuse Cyrus Steel and Louis a declaration of war on Victoria. Cyrus has Representation as his favored civic, but we already had -3 from declaring war on his friends, and if I don't miss my guess, we're going to accumulate some more minuses that way before this game is done.

We enter the modern age with Radio. I turn off research and start storing gold for the run on Mass Media.

I decide that we have enough units to crush what's left of Huayna, so I start moving units west to deal with Mansa.

1756 AD: Isabella declares war on Huayna! I'd wondered what her boats with troops were doing in the vicinity. (Looking at our power versus that of the other AIs, I don't think there's any AI crazy enough to attack us at this point.) I'll have to time the assault on Corihuayrachina more carefully, now.

I start gathering our frigates and galleons together: one thing the geography has prevented us from doing before, but which we ought to do now, is the naval blitzkrieg: use frigates to bombard and galleons to land troops adjacent to cities, rather than walking everywhere.

I start the Eiffel Tower in Antium and Rock 'N Roll in Beijing. I apologize for taking up our drydock cities with these wonders, but those are our best production cities and we could really use the increased happiness so we can start maxing out the population in our largest cities. I'm building drydocks in other cities.

1758 AD: I bombard Corihuayrachina.

1760 AD: Isabella's gone on a pillaging rampage outside Corihuayrachina, sigh. I lose a lot of grenadiers in attacks on the city, even after sacrificing a catapult, partly due to bad luck and partly having to trade units for time. (I didn't want to spend the time dragging even more cannons up to the city, since there's still Huamanga to finish off and speed of conquest is important here.) We sink Huayna's navy and capture two workers.

With the cash from our latest conquests in hand, I start research on Mass Media, due in four turns.

1762-1766 AD: I advance on Huamanga and move troops into position for Mansa.

I also spend some time scouting out Tokugawa's defenses, and I discover that he still has mostly medieval units. This is an opportunity I definitely think we should capitalize on, but I will have to leave that to the next player.

1768 AD: I take Huamanga with the loss of a grenadier at 89% odds. (Grrr!) Huayna is dead, only the second AI to go out of this game.

1770 AD: Gandhi asks me to declare on Mao again. I figure there's no real harm to it, so I say yes.

Mass Media comes in.

LKendter · Feb 13, 2007

Compromise (UP)
LKendter (on deck and hoping for the game before Thursday, as this weekend is bad for me to play)
grangerm
Sir Bugsy
Kodii
Iainuki (just played)

Compromise · Feb 13, 2007

I will play later today or tomorrow. If I don't hear from Iainuki, I'll try to deduce the best moves from his previous posts.

Compromise · Feb 13, 2007

Okay, I've looked around the save a bit. I notice that Mansa and Kublai have artillery. I still can't believe the tech pace in this game. I have a couple questions:

1) Mansa is our next target. Do we think it's worth it for happiness to wipe out Mansa completely even though some of his cities are crap for food? Same question for Hatty, I guess.

I lean toward no, just because we can always go back and get that land later.

2) Do we want to found out own cities wherever we can? There's a spot N of the uranium on the west side of our starting city. There are a couple places in Egypt/Inca land too. None of them are great, but they will certainly increase our pop/land percentage ratio (which is getting close to 1.0 again).

I lean toward yes, because I'm worried about our pop/land ratio.

3) I'm sure we have enough population now that there is no danger of any AI getting voted diplo victor. Do we want to get the UN built and start passing resolutions?

I lean toward building it and passing single currency, open markets and no nukes. Wide open to opinions though.

Iainuki · Feb 13, 2007

The Executive Summary

Huayna is dead.
I've teched through Radio and Mass Media. I've set the tech to Railroad, but haven't passed the turn yet. We don't have enough cash to start deficit research on the next tech yet.
Kublai has Railroad(!), but won't trade with us because we're his worst enemy. Victoria and Mansa have Artillery(!).
I've been running culture as a temporary solution to our happiness issues. Unfortunately, by the time I finished with Huayna, the war weariness was so bad I was up to 30% culture and still had many unhappy cities.
Broadway has 10 turns to go in Yaroslavl'. I apologize for taking up our dry dock cities, but since we need culture and happiness badly, I started Rock N' Roll in Beijing (33 turns to go) and the Eiffel Tower in Antium (25 turns to go) because they were our best production cities. I started the UN in Moscow (23 turns to go), but haven't invested any hammers yet. I haven't started Hollywood, but I think we ought to pick a city and put it somewhere.
I have dry docks started in two more cities on the Chinese/Greek island, Nanjing and Shanghai. They can start producing ships for us soon. If necessary, we can add one to Athens and whip out some ships from it, too. I've specialized most of the Egyptian/Incan/Malinese continent for pumping out military: most of the older cities (the ones that we didn't capture during my turn set) are either started on military, or have a few turns on infrastructure and can start on military.
I think (I hope?) we have enough workers now. I've finished most of the improvements in the pillaged regions of the Egyptian/Incan territories. I preserved towns where possible, though there's one place where we might want to consider bulldozing a village town to shorten an irrigation chain at Machu Picchu. I've been emphasizing workshops, farms, and watermills: once a city has enough food, I've been workshopping unimproved terrain and cottages/hamlets, on the theory that we need production more than we need commerce now.
I've replaced most of Moscow's immature cottages with farms, and some of its towns, with workshops, farms, and watermills. I think we ought to consider replacing the rest.
I have a large stack of loaded galleons and frigates positioned right outside Mansa's territories. There are even more units on land nearby. I could have declared war a few turns ago, but I decided not to for three reasons: I wanted to consult the team on a possible plan for a two-front war, I didn't want to start a war only to pass to the next player, and I didn't want to stack even more weariness on top of what we already had from Huayna.
I've scouted out Mansa's and some of Toku's defenses. This intelligence is current as of two to three turns ago.
We can declare war this turn. I left most of our military unmoved for this purpose.
Gandhi declared war on Mao this turn and asked us to join in; I agreed. Watch out for any boats Mao might have to pillage seafood. We might consider sending Gandhi some help: if he exterminates Mao for us, it will help a lot with happiness in the former Chinese territories.

Questions, Answers, and Proposals

Ok, here is my big plan for the next turn set: we declare war on both Tokugawa and Mansa. Our military positively dwarfs all our enemies', and is growing larger with every passing turn. Moreover, most of Tokugawa's cities are still guarded by medieval units. So, I propose we split our forces: our cossacks, which aren't much use against rifles except for guarding stacks and cleaning up annoying units, we send against Japan; meanwhile, we take most of grenadiers and use them to conquer Mansa. Tokugawa has good land, so good he's still second in score even though he's behind in tech, and another happiness resource. His isolationism has put him behind in the tech race, and I think this is an opportunity we can't miss.
We should start conducting amphibious warfare, using galleons to land troops adjacent to cities rather than walking up, and frigates to bombard. We may need more boats.
Do we want to trade for Artillery before taking on Mansa? He seems to want both Biology and Electricity for it.
What's our next tech? I'm not a big fan of shooting straight to Artillery, and if we trade for it, we won't need to research it ourselves anyways. Railroads will let us railroad all our mines (lots of special resources, on this map), increase our overland movement, and open up Combustion for destroyers, transports, and submarines. Assembly Line opens up factories and coal plants, which will greatly increase our production at the cost of a large up-front cost, infantry, the Pentagon if we want to build it, Fascism for Mount Rushmore, and Industrialism for tanks, marines, and battleships.
Where do we want to start Hollywood?
Minor point: Beijing is unhappy and not growing. We should probably whip something there and send the overflow to Rock N' Roll.
Compromise's first question, about Mansa: I think we should wipe him out, for reasons of geography. Awadaghost, Hsung-Nu, Niani, Timbuktu, and Kumbi Saleh all have good food. However, to get to those cities and remove culture pressure from them, we have to take Walata, Djenne, and Gao.
Compromise's second question: I lean against building cities that won't get bonus food of some sort. I think it will take too long to grow them to any significant size. Our population/land percentage is bad right now only because we added a huge amount of land by conquering Egypt and Inca, but those cities haven't grown back yet. (Take a look at Machu Picchu, for instance: that city has tremendous potential, but is only size 2!)
Compromise's third question: I think we ought to build the UN. However, crazy idea: we have an engineer, and finishing it ASAP isn't urgent, as far as I can tell. How do we feel about keeping Moscow on military (the Iron Works and West Point is a powerful combination), while building the UN somewhere else while using the Engineer to help? The obvious candidate is Novgorod. As for resolutions, open markets will help us much more than our enemies; the others, I feel, are sort of a wash.

I'll probably be able to briefly respond again later this afternoon, but for now I have other things I need to do.

LKendter · Feb 13, 2007

I've replaced most of Moscow's immature cottages with farms, and some of its towns, with workshops, farms, and watermills. I think we ought to consider replacing the rest.

Why are we destroying valueable towns? We already destroyed the mines for windmills in order to get more food. I know we talked about specializing Moscow but IMHO this is going to far. I don't want to cripple our research ability and have the AIs get ahead of us militarly.

Also, if we already have the need techs through the UN, then what in the world do we need more engineers for? The other wonders are nice, but are they worth hurting our economy for?

Compromise · Feb 13, 2007

I don't see Rifling on Toku's tech wish list; does that mean he has it? I think we're too late to crush him with just cossacks. Also, he has "enough on his hands" right now. Maybe we should let him declare on somebody before we sneak him.

I do think we (that is, I) should attack Mansa this turn. No sense delaying the inevitable.

Also, it looks like Caesar, Fred, Hatty and Saladin will take cities from us. Should I go ahead and just take Mao's last couple cities? At least his capital. That will reduce pressure on that westernmost formerly-Chinese city (so it can stop building a University!).

Also, I want to beg for cash from anybody who's "pleased" with us. Does anybody know the details of requests of the AI? Maybe I should also demand cash of a few civs, including Toku before he upgrades to Rifles. Is there any compelling reason not to do this?

EDIT: Also, is anyone reading autologs? I'm not, so I'd rather not include them in our reports.

Iainuki · Feb 13, 2007

LKendter said:
Why are we destroying valueable towns? We already destroyed the mines for windmills in order to get more food. I know we talked about specializing Moscow but IMHO this is going to far. I don't want to cripple our research ability and have the AIs get ahead of us militarly.

Also, if we already have the need techs through the UN, then what in the world do we need more engineers for? The other wonders are nice, but are they worth hurting our economy for?

I think the big wonder we want to look that's still in the game is the Pentagon: two promotions for just-built units from all cities (and three promotions for units from Moscow) could be quite useful.

I think you're seriously overestimating the effect that Moscow's towns have on our research rate. Moscow is not special for research anymore: it's an ordinary city with an academy and library/university/observatory. However, we have tons of cities with academies now and many also with libraries/universities. If we need more tech, we just build more libraries/universities/observatories. However, Moscow is special for production: it gets +100% production and has West Point, so units we build there are much better than anywhere else. That's why I think we should push production there.

Our tech rate is honestly fine, and will only get better as we add more cities. We just plowed through Radio and Mass Media, an extremely expensive tech and a cheaper one, in the time it took the AIs to get through Steam Power and one modern age tech (Artillery and Railroad). This was with Egypt and Inca still mostly unconquered or in revolt. Now that those areas are growing and reimproved, we'll be doing even better. Also, we're going to be conquering more AIs, which will add more cash to fuel deficit research.

Iainuki · Feb 13, 2007

Compromise said:
I don't see Rifling on Toku's tech wish list; does that mean he has it? I think we're too late to crush him with just cossacks. Also, he has "enough on his hands" right now. Maybe we should let him declare on somebody before we sneak him.

If he has it, I don't understand why we haven't seen him start upgrading to Rifles. If he did just develop it, it's a shame.

Compromise said:
Also, it looks like Caesar, Fred, Hatty and Saladin will take cities from us. Should I go ahead and just take Mao's last couple cities? At least his capital. That will reduce pressure on that westernmost formerly-Chinese city (so it can stop building a University!).

I'd lean against it, but it's up to you. I really don't want to end up stuck with ice junk like that, and there's no way to know for sure until we actually tried giving someone a city, which is too late to take it back.

Be careful about prioritizing military over improvements. We have tons and tons of units right now. I honestly think we ought to think about splitting our forces to take on two AIs, since a lot of the units I was moving to wipe out Huayna weren't engaging the enemy, they were just walking from each city to the next and never fighting. The limiting rate on our conquest seems to be more movement than adequate forces, at this point, and we have all those Egyptian and Incan cities pumping out units, too.

Kodii · Feb 13, 2007

@ AI tech rate

Solution? :sniper:

I agree that we could probably be going for two AIs at once. We need to be wary of the land threshold, which has already been mentioned. I think we need to get rid of most of the AIs who have speedy tech rates. Mansa should go next, and maybe we can extract from techs from him. If Tokugawa's garrisons are really that weak, then we can go for him too. Washington has some tasty looking cities that we can go for without adding too much to our land percentage. Since he is rather backwards, we can save him for later. At this point, I think we should just make a list of AIs to go for, in a particular order, and focus on growing our cities. The game SHOULD be almost done.

Iainuki · Feb 13, 2007

Mansa is the biggest AI tech problem, and he's next on the hit list. After that, we'll only have Kublai and Victoria on the cutting edge of the AI techs. I still don't think that wiping out Victoria will be worth the effort when there are easier targets around (digging redcoats out of cities with grenadiers and cannons falls on my short list of least-fun Civ4 activities). I still lean towards taking out Tokugawa: he'll be a good stepping-stone to Izzy and Kublai, and he has a lot of food.

Compromise · Feb 13, 2007

All right, I'll try to open up two fronts when I resume hostilities tomorrow.

Also, is it just me, or does it look like the Geezer team has stopped playing around 1830 or so. That might be our upper limit and it's not far away.

Swiss Pauli · Feb 14, 2007

Compromise said:
Also, is it just me, or does it look like the Geezer team has stopped playing around 1830 or so. That might be our upper limit and it's not far away.

I reckon so: big score jump from where they were in 1810. Faster, Ms. Beyond, kill! kill!

Iainuki · Feb 14, 2007

Does anyone remember when the next slowdown at epic speed occurs? We're at two years per turn right now; does it stay that way through the 1800s? A back-of-the-envelope calculation seems to say, "Very soon," so I guess not. Pretty soon, we'll be approaching the limit of conquests we'll be able to rebuild for max out our population in time if the Geezers have stopped at 1830 AD. However, we're also pretty close to done, one way or another; we just need to focus on growing our latest conquests as fast as possible, then maybe making a final rush to put ourselves over the top with cities in rebellion that won't pop their borders.

Compromise · Feb 14, 2007

If we're trying to finish in the next 40T or so, should I discontinue wonder-building (building troops instead) and use the culture slider for happiness?

SGOTM 03 - The Real Ms. Beyond

Exterminate, exterminate, exterminate!!!

Ka ICE

Warlord

Warlord

Warlord

Warlord

Exterminate, exterminate, exterminate!!!

Emperor

Emperor

Warlord

Exterminate, exterminate, exterminate!!!

Emperor

Warlord

Warlord

Ka ICE

Warlord

Emperor

Emperor

Warlord

Emperor

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