SGOTM 07 - Xteam

[DJMGator13]

Good discussion, lots of things to consider!

Roster:
Gator - UP
leif - On Deck
ShannonCT
Jimmy Thunder
Cactus Pete
Frederiksberg
Mad Professor
rrau - Just played!

Mistfit -

I like that power graph.
Seems like some of the teams are holding back a little.

Off to re-look at the save with so many ideas!

I’m back from my conference. The power graph looks amazing. I need to catch up on all the postings from the week as I ended up with no internet connection. Looks like everything is progressing well.

 

[Frederiksberg]

Good set rrau .

Eliminating Lizzy is an important milestone and it probably means that we won't be fighting any units that are stronger than rifles and grens.

I'm in favor of revolting to State Property now as suggested by CP. This should be accompanied by a conversion of our towns and villages to work shops.

Bribing Fred and Julius to war sounds good too.

We have an unsolved problem we must consider and that is getting the population required for domination. There are 18 cities on our continent and 22 in the rest of the world. What did the test games tell about required pop percentage for dom? I believe JT estimated that it would be around 50% and if that's correct we will not even be near the threshold when Asoka captures the last city on our own continent - at least as things are now. There are quite a lot of high pop cities on the other continent while wars have decreased the population considerably on our own. This means that we must act to fix this problem somehow. I can see several possibilities:

• Research Biology and build a lot of farms - particularly around Asokas cities.
• Help improve the land around Asokas cities and build some work boats for him.
• Start some overseas wars where we attack to starve and raze cities thus decreasing the total population
• Try to get Asoka to capture overseas cities e.g. the ones on the island.

The first two bullet points have the advantage that we can do this in parallel with our war effort while the last two bullet points requires that we start an entirely new front and build our navy.

Perhaps our GS should be used towards Biology?

Good idea, but we should probably wait a while and see what happens - Asoka might change civics at some point.

Once our workers have finished their improvements toward a production city, they can certainly help Asoka by roading pillaged tiles, but I'd like to also utilize them one at a time to help with our attacks -- either as sacrifices to lure units out and/or as advance scouts.

While the worker sacrifice is certainly useful in most games I think there are good reasons not to use it in this particular game. First of all because our workers can improve the land around Asoka's cities (and not only build roads) so there will be plenty to do - particularly now when it looks like we are in need of growing population fast. In a normal game you often get a sacrificed worker back, but since Asoka is doing all the city capturing he will be getting the workers and it's not likely that he will follow our master plan. Finally the worker sacrifice has less impact when attacking a city with a large number of units inside.

 

[leif erikson]

We have an unsolved problem we must consider and that is getting the population required for domination. There are 18 cities on our continent and 22 in the rest of the world. What did the test games tell about required pop percentage for dom? I believe JT estimated that it would be around 50% and if that's correct we will not even be near the threshold when Asoka captures the last city on our own continent - at least as things are now. There are quite a lot of high pop cities on the other continent while wars have decreased the population considerably on our own. This means that we must act to fix this problem somehow. I can see several possibilities:

• Research Biology and build a lot of farms - particularly around Asokas cities.
• Help improve the land around Asokas cities and build some work boats for him.
• Start some overseas wars where we attack to starve and raze cities thus decreasing the total population
• Try to get Asoka to capture overseas cities e.g. the ones on the island.

We have the capability to start some wars over there now between the inhabitants. Would that help to decrease their populations enough?

If not, then perhaps we need to form a group of Artillery and SAM Inf to go over and simply raze some cities? I think that would require three Galleons with 5 Artillery and 4 Inf. units supported by several Frigates? That is a fairly high price at the moment, and we would also need to consider unit replacement. However, delaying domination because of pop would be even worse.

EDIT - With 12 Cannons and a Cat that can be upgraded on our current continent, we probably only need worry about unit replacement for now, as we could form two groups out of this. We should probably build, or upgrade, a couple of infantry units to support the Artillery. For me, this means that we can be ready to begin building a group for overseas duty in about 8 or 10 turns?

How much longer do you think we have before we need to act on reducing the pop on the other continent? I think we have things relatively under control on our continent, especially if Fred and Julius beat the heck out of each other.

EDIT2 - Murky just posted another save and it looks like they have signed a PA to me, in the BC's!

 

[Frederiksberg]

We have the capability to start some wars over there now between the inhabitants. Would that help to decrease their populations enough?

I fear that this is not enough, but I really don't know. It's important, I think, to get the pop percentage required for domination from a test game so that we know what our goal is.

How much longer do you think we have before we need to act on reducing the pop on the other continent? I think we have things relatively under control on our continent, especially if Fred and Julius beat the heck out of each other.

I think we still have some time and starting an overseas war should obviously be balanced against the need for units for our war campaign on the home continent. In some or maybe all cases we could choose not to capture and raze but simply pillage food supply to induce massive starvation. That might require fewer troops. Anyway a bigger navy will be required.

 

[Cactus Pete]

"While the worker sacrifice is certainly useful in most games I think there are good reasons not to use it in this particular game. First of all because our workers can improve the land around Asoka's cities (and not only build roads) so there will be plenty to do - particularly now when it looks like we are in need of growing population fast. In a normal game you often get a sacrificed worker back, but since Asoka is doing all the city capturing he will be getting the workers and it's not likely that he will follow our master plan. Finally the worker sacrifice has less impact when attacking a city with a large number of units inside." Yes, scratch the sacrifice workers idea.

If we are going to war on the other continent eventually, then we do want to start an intracontinental war or two. We also need to get a unit over there to explore (and determine where best to attack, and from which coast to launch it.) about the time we're ready to attack Julius. Galleons will become a priority as soon as we have enough units to complete conquest of our continent. I expect that with enough galleons we will be able to raze a few coastal dities pretty quickly./COLOR]

 

[rrau]

EDIT2 - Murky just posted another save and it looks like they have signed a PA to me, in the BC's!

Ouch.

 

[ShannonCT]

EDIT2 - Murky just posted another save and it looks like they have signed a PA to me, in the BC's!

I'd say that's near impossible. Their score isn't high enough. The techs that are required for a PA and the techs that would get one to a PA faster should give a lot higher score than they have now.

It looks like they are just building up their military and probably trying to get started early on domination. The thing they have to be careful of though is having their intended PA partner become too strong before they can sign the PA (which I can't see happening much before turn 134). If the intended PA partner captures several cities and consequently becomes number 1 in power, they wont sign a PA. So there should be a limit to the effectiveness of fighting before the PA is signed.

It does however highlight the pace that we're going to have to conquer at. I think that planning for an overseas venture is going to slow us down on our home continent. If we can avoid sending land units overseas, we should. It might be a good time to divert to Biology, with the help of the GS, who wont likely be needed in Cuzco. Our workers will only take a few turns converting towns to workshops, and then they can get cracking on some farms.

 

[Frederiksberg]

I played a little with the world builder to see how the pop percentage requirement for domination would change but I didn't really get anywhere. It didn't seem to have much connection with the land percentage so there may be reason to believe that the percentage required will not be far from the 39% that is listed now under victory conditions. I wonder why JT was thinking it would be closer to 50%? The ~40% requirement seems a lot easier to meet and right now our continent has 42% of the world population so we might not even need Biology if we make an effort to keep Asokas cities growing by improving the land around them.

EDIT: Then again, looking at some of the old saves you see that the pop percentage limit has increased from 32% to 39% during the game but it's hard to see a pattern. There's certainly no simple linear relationship between the land percentage and the pop limit. Conclusion is right now that we don't know if we have a problem. Does some of you have test game saves where you are close to domination? looking at those might provide some information...

 

[Mad Professor]

I played a little with the world builder to see how the pop percentage requirement for domination would change but I didn't really get anywhere. It didn't seem to have much connection with the land percentage so there may be reason to believe that the percentage required will not be far from the 39% that is listed now under victory conditions. I wonder why JT was thinking it would be closer to 50%? The ~40% requirement seems a lot easier to meet and right now our continent has 42% of the world population so we might not even need Biology if we make an effort to keep Asokas cities growing by improving the land around them.

EDIT: Then again, looking at some of the old saves you see that the pop percentage limit has increased from 32% to 39% during the game but it's hard to see a pattern. There's certainly no simple linear relationship between the land percentage and the pop limit. Conclusion is right now that we don't know if we have a problem. Does some of you have test game saves where you are close to domination? looking at those might provide some information...

I'd be a little surprised if the pop % requirement went as high as 50%+ - is there a particular reason why that figure was mentioned? I'm only going on how the percentage normally slowly changes over the period of a domination game - it doesn't go up by that much. then again, I've no experience on domination games with 18 civs where the percentage is still so low at this stage.

I've deleted the practice games I was playing earlier unfortunately and I don't remember how the population percentage acted as the game went on. SCT's save is still there back in the post he originally put it in. One could download it again and play it for a while to see how the population percentage for domination acted. I can't do that in the next day or so , but if it's still an issue after that, perhaps I could.

I think we can easily do things like encouraging war on the other continent to reduce population there, and farming around cities on our own continent while getting Asoka pointed towards Biology without seriously slowing up our war effort, so let's do these things. As for launching a war on the oher continent, perhaps we should do some testing to be really sure that's necessary first - that will take quite some resources, between the galleons, frigates and units.

 

[Jimmy Thunder]

I'd be a little surprised if the pop % requirement went as high as 50%+ - is there a particular reason why that figure was mentioned?

The 50% wasn't an accurate figure. In a practise game I saw the pop % go up as the game progressed and i thought it was getting close to 50% by the end.

I don't have the practise game with me at the moment to check it out. I remember in some HoF games I've played that the pop % would constantly change as you took over more cities, but never came accross any formula or idea of what the % change was dependant on.

 

[DJMGator13]

I'd say that's near impossible. Their score isn't high enough. The techs that are required for a PA and the techs that would get one to a PA faster should give a lot higher score than they have now.

It looks like they are just building up their military and probably trying to get started early on domination. The thing they have to be careful of though is having their intended PA partner become too strong before they can sign the PA (which I can't see happening much before turn 134). If the intended PA partner captures several cities and consequently becomes number 1 in power, they wont sign a PA. So there should be a limit to the effectiveness of fighting before the PA is signed.

I'd agree with this. Even in the Noble level game WastinTime barely managed to get a PA in 100 turns. With the higher tech cost for deity this seems unlikely. If they did manage to push the tech pace through actively trading away monopoly techs, they'll be facing a tougher AI, especially once they get hit with the 39% added tech cost.

If they have gone the unit building route and somehow manage to not crash their economy, they need to consider that they can't be #1 in power also, not just their PA target.

(I'm about halfway through the week's postings.)

 

[Cactus Pete]

"It does however highlight the pace that we're going to have to conquer at. I think that planning for an overseas venture is going to slow us down on our home continent. If we can avoid sending land units overseas, we should. Of course, but I'm not convinced it will slow us down that much. I think we're likely to get to the point where we won't need any more land units several turns before we weaken the last city (possibly the last two), plus it will take several more turns for the last city to get out of anarchy and expand. In that time we can build and load and sail multiple full galleons to raze a city or two.It might be a good time to divert to Biology, with the help of the GS, who won't likely be needed in Cuzco. Our workers will only take a few turns converting towns to workshops, and then they can get cracking on some farms."

Would seem wise to hold off on clicking on the GS until we're more certain he won't better serve to accelerate culture. We can go ahead and research Biology regardless.

BTW, it's important to ask Fred to fight HC before we ask JC to attack Fred, since an embattled Fred probably cannot be bribed to declare on HC.

 

[leif erikson]

I went back to the practice games played and found:

In 1645 AD (turn 231) with HC owning the entire continent, the pop domination limit is 34% with a land area requirement of 51%. In that game, 5 civs were sent to history's dustbin.

In an intermediate save, on turn 201 in 1410 AD, the domination limit for pop is 35% with a land area limit of 51%.

Doesn't seem to change much?

Our current number (turn 164/ 1040AD) are 39% for pop and 51% for land area. So I went back to see how it is changed, or not? On turn 142 (640 AD), the domination limit for pop was 37% and land area remained at 51%.On turn 134 (475 AD) the domination limit for pop was 36% and land area was still 51%.

After checking, there aren't too many wars we seem to be able to start on the other continent? Catherine will declare on Montie (for three techs), Hattie or Mansa (for Communism in each case). Salad, Cy, Louis, Hattie and Montie do not seem very interested in starting a war.

 

[ShannonCT]

I went back to the practice games played and found:

In 1645 AD (turn 231) with HC owning the entire continent, the pop domination limit is 34% with a land area requirement of 51%. In that game, 5 civs were sent to history's dustbin.

In an intermediate save, on turn 201 in 1410 AD, the domination limit for pop is 35% with a land area limit of 51%.

Doesn't seem to change much?

Our current number (turn 164/ 1040AD) are 39% for pop and 51% for land area. So I went back to see how it is changed, or not? On turn 142 (640 AD), the domination limit for pop was 37% and land area remained at 51%.On turn 134 (475 AD) the domination limit for pop was 36% and land area was still 51%.

I went and looked at the same thing. The population requirement fluctuated between 33% and 39%. It looks like 39% will be the maximum population that we will need to acheive. I would expect that the land area will take longer than the population, but researching Biology after Rocketry would be a good insurance policy.

 

[leif erikson]

BTW, it's important to ask Fred to fight HC before we ask JC to attack Fred, since an embattled Fred probably cannot be bribed to declare on HC.

I was thinking about this. I think the most important war we can start is Julius versus Fred. Will having Fred declare on HC first affect whether Julius will declare on Fred?

 

[Frederiksberg]

I went and looked at the same thing. The population requirement fluctuated between 33% and 39%. It looks like 39% will be the maximum population that we will need to achieve. I would expect that the land area will take longer than the population, but researching Biology after Rocketry would be a good insurance policy.

It seems that this approach is sufficient. When we are closer to the finish we will know if we also need to starve or raze an overseas city.

I think we should consider building 1-2 work boats for London to prevent starvation here when it comes out of anarchy. We have 42% of pop on our continent right now, but this percentage will most likely go down during the war if nothing is done to prevent it.

Would seem wise to hold off on clicking on the GS until we're more certain he won't better serve to accelerate culture. We can go ahead and research Biology regardless

.

I agree with this approach. We will get our next GP 16-17 turns from now and he may be a merchant. It's not likely that we will get more GP's before the game is over. Building an Academy in the last captured cities may save a couple of turns and that will probably have more of an impact on the finishing date than shaving 3-4 turns off Biology.

How about splitting our stack at Athens? In order to increase the speed of capture we need to attack in multiple places simultaneously. We already have a plan for attacking Sparta using galleons so maybe we should leave some of our wounded units in Athens for later pick up and move the healed ones in a stack headed for Cuzco (via Indian land so that some units can be upgraded).

 

[leif erikson]

Murky just posted another save for 250 AD. Their power graph continues to climb. Will be interesting to see what happened, if we can ever wade through it all...

 

[rrau]

Murky just posted another save for 250 AD. Their power graph continues to climb. Will be interesting to see what happened, if we can ever wade through it all...

All we can do is play our best and then wait and see.........Their power graph didn't rise as much this last turn set of theirs, so *shrugs* maybe they're running into trouble with powerful AI's----if they truly have even gotten a PA already.

 

[DJMGator13]

Okay, I'm caught up on the happenings of the past week. MP took out Washington and riled up Liz. Then we sent in rrau to show Liz who the real Queen is.

I'll try to start putting a plan together for my turnset tomorrow night. Good comments have already been posted.

 

[DJMGator13]

Gameplan (Most of this comes from Fred's post, supplemented with other points):

Eliminating Lizzy is an important milestone and it probably means that we won't be fighting any units that are stronger than rifles and grens.

I'm in favor of revolting to State Property now as suggested by CP. This should be accompanied by a conversion of our towns and villages to work shops.

Bribing Fred and Julius to war sounds good too. We can get 180 Gold from Louis for Liberalism, that is a Cannon upgrade. Mansa and Hattie both have 60 Gold and we have a few obsolete techs that they could get.

I think we should consider building 1-2 work boats for London to prevent starvation here when it comes out of anarchy. We have 42% of pop on our continent right now, but this percentage will most likely go down during the war if nothing is done to prevent it.

How about splitting our stack at Athens? In order to increase the speed of capture we need to attack in multiple places simultaneously. We already have a plan for attacking Sparta using galleons so maybe we should leave some of our wounded units in Athens for later pick up and move the healed ones in a stack headed for Cuzco (via Indian land so that some units can be upgraded).

Sparta Plan: We can start moving part of our stack toward Cuzco and declare next turn. I wonder if we can also send about half of our big stack to Sparta. Greece should be quite weak right now. Alex doesn't have Gunpowder yet so a few artillery with escort should be able to kill the defenders. Frigates can move toward Sparta next turn after Lizzy is gone.

Sparta Plan by Sea: I think we should send a couple of our archers to London now. Gift them to Asoka, and he's likely to put three units on his galleon and sail them toward Sparta if we declare on Alex. We can declare on Alex as soon as our frigates are ready to bombard. Follow the frigates with a couple galleons full of our artillery/grens picked up in Athens. If we can get there one turn before Asoka's galleon, we can kill the defenders and let Asoka take the city. Rinse and repeat on Tiwanaku.

Techs: We can get Constitution from Cathy right now. Then onto Biology. (Saving the GS for now.) Astronomy is already known by some on the other continent, so we should sell it to Cyrus for 190 gold and/or use to start some wars over there again.

(Tomorrow night is the last softball game. I'll plan on playing Wednesday unless anything comes up.)

Combined bpt without London is at 714 right now. We could have railroads in about 20 turns, but would still need to lay the tracks. Currently it will take about 6-7 turns to move artillery to the south end of the map over land.

I'm wondering are the 11 turns it will take to learn Rocketry better invested in the Steam - Railroad path and trying to speedup the troop movement? Especially since Asoka has fast workers. As London and Athens come online the research time may come down by a turn. We can always hit Rocketry later, but the real fighting is going to be done mainly with the artillery from here on out.