SGOTM 08 - XTeam

[rrau]

Anyone who agrees to be our vassal where it wasn't a condition of surrender can always cancel it. The one's where they come to me and ask to be a vassal are always weak civs who are behind in tech and facing a war with an advanced opponent.

So........Maybe bribes to keep other continent at war?

 

[leif erikson]

Anyone who agrees to be our vassal where it wasn't a condition of surrender can always cancel it. The one's where they come to me and ask to be a vassal are always weak civs who are behind in tech and facing a war with an advanced opponent.

So........Maybe bribes to keep other continent at war?

Keeping them at war, as best as we can, is probably a good strategy because it limits their army size, unless one of them gets more powerful than the others.

In recent games I've played, I have noticed that the easier the difficulty level, the faster a civ will vassalize to me; in some cases after taking only 2 or 3 cities. This tells me there must be some criteria that the AI uses to decide when to give in to becoming a Vassal by capitulation. Is this information available in the xml or?

If we can find it, it may help us make some decisions?

 

[Cactus Pete]

Any advice on (1) gold amount, if any, to keep in treasury as insurance against random events and (2) what to do in the event of demands made by various civs.

Except for research after MT, am feeling comfortable with plan. Are there any concerns out there about something I haven't covered?

 

[leif erikson]

Any advice on (1) gold amount, if any, to keep in treasury as insurance against random events and

I have been reading a list of the random events developed by Ori. They are located by clicking here.

It is quite long, 153 events and long list of Quests. There are a few zingers, but I'm not sure we should maintain a great deal of gold to handle them. The earlier ones seem to me to be the most devastating, although the Hurricane, Cyclone and Tsunami ones could be painful. But I don't think you can pay your out of those...

(2) what to do in the event of demands made by various civs.

Who do we want to maintain favor with? The smallest civ, with no wonders yet, is Pericles. If we want to nurture him along, we should give in to anything, except perhaps a tech on the road to Liberalism, like Paper, Philosophy or Education

Except for research after MT, am feeling comfortable with plan. Are there any concerns out there about something I haven't covered?

I think you are about ready to go and give Joao a headache.

 

[Cactus Pete]

Why are we building a temple in Marbleville?

 

[rrau]

Why are we building a temple in Marbleville?

It was what was slowly building when I got the game. I didn't change it.

 

[ShannonCT]

Is there anything in the XML that would help us to know how many cities, or what percentage of change in power, or some other factor that we need to achieve to convince an AI to become our Vassal?

Yes, there is. Pericles seems like the only candidate for peaceful vassalization, since he is small and wonderless. So there are a couple things about Pericles you should know: his "VassalRefuseAttitudeThreshold" value = Pleased, which should mean that he will refuse peaceful vassalization at Pleased or lower. We would have to get him to friendly. The other thing is that his "iVassalPowerModifier" = 0. I can't tell you exactly how to interpret this, but suffice it to say, Pericles is rather average in the amount of power disadvantage that he must face in order to consider peaceful vassalization.

I suspect that we wouldn't have a problem becomming powerful enough to get peaceful vassalization from Pericles, but getting to Friendly is doubtful.

 

[leif erikson]

Thanks SCT.
Good info. How about:

Is there anything about the chance, or what threshold we need to reach, of a civ we are at war with becoming our vassal? A real question might be, How many of Gandhi's cities must we take before he will Capitulate? Or, how much of a power differential must we create by destruction of Gandhi's cities and units to force him to Capitulate?

 

[ShannonCT]

Thanks SCT.
Good info. How about:

Is there anything about the chance, or what threshold we need to reach, of a civ we are at war with becoming our vassal? A real question might be, How many of Gandhi's cities must we take before he will Capitulate? Or, how much of a power differential must we create by destruction of Gandhi's cities and units to force him to Capitulate?

Gandhi's "iVassalPowerModifier" = -20, which means he is faster to capitulate than most other AI. Augustus = 20, Boudica = 10, Charlemagne = 10, and Joao = 0.

 

[ShannonCT]

Any advice on (1) gold amount, if any, to keep in treasury as insurance against random events and (2) what to do in the event of demands made by various civs.

1) There is an event where we could lose a forge unless we pay 50 gold.

2) Don't give anyone Paper, Education, or Philosophy. No need to make AI too happy when we will be killing them shortly. Pericles may be the only exception.

Why are we building a temple in Marbleville?

A theater or harbor would make more sense there.

 

[Cactus Pete]

1) There is an event where we could lose a forge unless we pay 50 gold. Then my plan will be to ignore random event insurance unless I can end up with 50+ gold the next turn by just moving the slider one notch.

2) Don't give anyone Paper, Education, or Philosophy. No need to make AI too happy when we will be killing them shortly. Pericles may be the only exception. Okay, but are you sure we're going to be killing them? All this talk of vassals is inconsistent with Domination (though with conquest).

A theater or harbor would make more sense there.

Certainly does to me.

Schedule has changed . . . planning to play tomorrow morning, without objection.

 

[rrau]

We'll be taking their wonder cities and then trying to vassalize them.

One thing to be careful of is founding a colony with our captured cities. I was just reading some patch fixes and it says 'new' colonies don't count towards domination limit. Not sure what exactly that means, but if we're going for domination, it's something to keep in mind.

What I was trying to look for in the patch fixes are two things:

1) Have they fixed it so your vassals no longer spend their spies sabotaging you?
2) Did they release vassals to vote for whoever they want in elections? (for some reason I got this in my head that they did, but can't find anything so I may be making it up)

 

[Cactus Pete]

Would like to have opinions on which Portugese cities (other than Santarem, of course) we should raze.

 

[Frederiksberg]

As far as your estimate of 100 turns, have you taken into account that we will probably be able to trade for or extort techs like Feudalism, Theology, Guilds, Engineering, possibly DR, and possibly Banking?

If you can suply a better estimate of the development in beakers per turn for the next 100 turns, I can try and run a simulation with that. The bpt estimate should include beakers gained by tech trade (on average over say the next 100 turns), beakers gained from GP's (i.e. if we get 1 GP every 10 turns and he's worth on average 1000 beakers then add 100 bpt) and of course base beakers per turn for a tech rate where we are not loosing gold. Base bpt will likely be increasing due to maturing cottages, Printing Press etc. If possible include that WW and rapidly increasing unit maintenance will tend to decrease the base bpt.

On the current tech path discussion I would suggest not to spend any GS's on Biology for two reasons: 1) The finish date is likely to be determined by the time we reach MM so beelining makes sense unless there are very strong arguments for inserting other techs. 2) It looks like a considerable advantage to reserve Biology - Refrigeration for self research after MM because they can be researched in parallel to building the last and extremely expensive Wonders enabled by MM. Building the National Park (Biology, 300 hammers) and the Cereal Mills (Refrigeration, Merchant) can also be done in parallel with the MM Wonders.

 

[ShannonCT]

Would like to have opinions on which Portugese cities (other than Santarem, of course) we should raze.

The three cities along the north and west coasts seem pretty hammer poor, but we may want to keep one as a dedicated shipyard.

After X-ville grows to Pop15, shall we hire a preist so that X-ville can get a GP before Ulundi gets a second one? When two cities are due a GP on the same turn, the city built earlier gets the GP. It would be good to know where we stand with Prophets (if X-ville pops a Prophet, that makes 6 shrines, and the Blessed Seas quest can take care of the last one).

 

[leif erikson]

Would like to have opinions on which Portugese cities (other than Santarem, of course) we should raze.

I don't think Leiria provides us much, so it can go.
Lagos is a candidate, although it has some qualities that we could use, like a Courthouse, should it survive.

The rest seem to have enough food and the potential for hammers that I think we could put them to good use.

We must keep Coimbra as it is the religious shrine city...

Gandhi's "iVassalPowerModifier" = -20, which means he is faster to capitulate than most other AI. Augustus = 20, Boudica = 10, Charlemagne = 10, and Joao = 0.

This suggests to me the possibility that we make nice with Rome, providing he doesn't build any more wonders and we forgo the Great Wall, and concentrate on the others as a possible strategy?

I was also wondering if we should gamble on Gandhi, Pericles or Augustus being first to Divine Right and changing their religious affiliation to Islam to break up the cozy three way love fest?

The three of them, plus Boudica, can now research it. I'd probably put my money on Gandhi or Boudica getting there first, but one never knows. If we want it, we shouldn't dally.

 

[ShannonCT]

One thing to be careful of is founding a colony with our captured cities. I was just reading some patch fixes and it says 'new' colonies don't count towards domination limit. Not sure what exactly that means, but if we're going for domination, it's something to keep in mind.

I would assume that means that if we founded cities on new landmasses and then liberated them, they wouldn't count towards our domination population or land.

1) Have they fixed it so your vassals no longer spend their spies sabotaging you?
2) Did they release vassals to vote for whoever they want in elections? (for some reason I got this in my head that they did, but can't find anything so I may be making it up)

There's no mention of either of those things in the 3.17 change list.

On the current tech path discussion I would suggest not to spend any GS's on Biology for two reasons: 1) The finish date is likely to be determined by the time we reach MM so beelining makes sense unless there are very strong arguments for inserting other techs. 2) It looks like a considerable advantage to reserve Biology - Refrigeration for self research after MM because they can be researched in parallel to building the last and extremely expensive Wonders enabled by MM. Building the National Park (Biology, 300 hammers) and the Cereal Mills (Refrigeration, Merchant) can also be done in parallel with the MM Wonders.

If your assumption 1 is correct, then I agree. If we can capture all of the AI wonders and set ourselves up for some victory type before we can complete the Radio/MM wonders, then we should avoid Engineering until we've researched Physics and spent all of our remaining GSs on Electricity. By that time, we could probably trade for Engineering.

 

[leif erikson]

Rome has Engineering unique while Gandhi has the ability to research it.

If our plan is to attack Boudica first, then we may be able to acquire it through trade.

Once Boudica and Charlemange have Machinery, they will be able to research Engineering as well.

 

[Cactus Pete]

The three cities along the north and west coasts seem pretty hammer poor, but we may want to keep one as a dedicated shipyard. Okay, plan is to raze Leira and keep Lagos.

After X-ville grows to Pop15, shall we hire a preist so that X-ville can get a GP before Ulundi gets a second one? When two cities are due a GP on the same turn, the city built earlier gets the GP. It would be good to know where we stand with Prophets (if X-ville pops a Prophet, that makes 6 shrines, and the Blessed Seas quest can take care of the last one).

Will get a GP out in X-ville before Ulundi gets a second.

Sounds like PP after MT.

Wondering if we wouldn't make more gold from a GM by getting him to Rome or Delhi. Can this be predicted?

Read no objections, so planning to play soon. Will be checking thread and perhaps posting progress.

 

[ShannonCT]

Sounds like PP after MT.

I think I'm leaning toward the PP-SM-Physics-Electricity-Radio beeline as well. I calculate that we can get to Physics in 15-16 turns with the help of 3 GSs/GMs. That would give us airships in ~20 turns.

I did some calculations on the effectiveness of Cuirrassiers+Airships. Airships are able to perform airstrikes to reduce an enemy unit's HPs by 20% (there is a 20% cap on damage). So longbows and pikes would be reduced to base strength 4.8. Cuirassiers are gunpowder units so they ignore the defensive bonuses of walls and castles. They are only affected by culture defense, which will be 40-50% for the more advanced cities. I calculate that Combat3 Cuirassiers will be 80-90% to win vs. airship-bombarded pikes and LBs in non-hill cities. In hilltop cities, they will be 50-60% to win without seige support. So what we could do is attack non-hill cities with a Cuirassier-Airship blitz and send stacks of maces/cats/cuirassiers to attack the hilltop cities we want. And of course, coastal cities can be reached just as quickly by slow units as fast units.

With no promotions and against no walls or castles, cats bombard defenses at 8% per turn and trebs at 16% per turn. Accuracy adds 8 percantage points to each of those numbers. So accuracy trebs are 50% better than accuracy cats at taking down defenses, or take 2/3 as long. Walls reduce our bombardment rate by 50% and castles by another 25%. But still, trebs take 2/3 as long as cats to reduce defenses. Gunpowder based bombarders (cannons, frigates, etc) ignore walls and castles and are therefore better at taking down walled/castles cities.

Wondering if we wouldn't make more gold from a GM by getting him to Rome or Delhi. Can this be predicted?

In my tests, distance had no effect on trade mission value. What does increase trade mission value is if the AI city has a harbor (from 1300 gold to 1500). You could trade around Compass and wait for someone to build a harbor.

Edit: I also calculate that our nationwide gold->beaker conversion rate is 1.746. A 1300-gold trade mission is worth 1300*1.746*1.2=2723 beakers. That's much better than the 1700-1800 that we can get from a GS. Since it shouldn't take much time to burn through 1300 gold, I guess there's no reason to run scientists in Ulundi. Merchants are better.