SGOTM 09 - Xteam

Only managed to play 2.5 turns and even that took a long time :eek:

Anyway, we are in good shape, Vilcamba, Khangela and Ondini are captured and the science slider is back to 100%. I'm relying heavily on building gold postponing the factory builds until we are closer to 3GD as SCT suggested.

Here's an intermediate save:

1540 AD
 

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Looks good Fred. I feel your pain.

I looked at the save and here's what I noticed:

You can build a Mining Rep in Corinth.

There's a barb galley near Athens.

If Justinian gets Industrialism he can give us Aluminum and we wont have to bulldoze a windmill.

We can attack the barb city in Australia this turn and airlift the settler. Liberating the cities next turn from the city adviser screen should create a new vassal.

Babylon needs to have forest preserves in its control to get the free specialist. Now that Wall Street is finished, Akkad doesn't need the preserve.

Shaka is due Rifling in 7 turns. Taking some of his big cities should delay this. We don't want to be fighting riflemen and paratroopers.

We can get Plastics in 3 turns with research at 80%. You can change a few cities from wealth to a factory build. Looks like 3GD will finish in Sippar in 7 turns, 4 turns after Plastics. Sippar can use the copper mine if needed.
 
Agreed, it is looking good.

We are near 40% on the domination limit. :scan:
We'll soon be picking up almost 60 tiles in old Korea. More in old Zululand.
Should we begin to prioritize what to take and what to leave? :mischief:
 
Here's some mm suggestions that could save about 20 gpt.

Piraeus: switch engineer to merchant +1gpt

Argos: would the hammer overflow of 9 additional hammers be more valuable than working say a coastal tile. We could increase total hammers to 267 from 258 without affecting the gpt, but this would slow the growth so it may not be beneficial.

Babylon: switch the spy and engineer to merchants +6 gpt, unless we are trying to offset the odds of a GMerchant.

Akkad: same deal except with 2 priests, so we get +6 gpt by switching to merchants unless we want a Prophet after the GMerchant

Coimbra: picks up about 9gpt by switching to the 2 6hpt tiles instead of the 2 1f2h2c tiles, growth still in 1 turn

Machu Picchu: +3 gpt switch engineer for merchant

Oporto: +4 gpt switch from forest plain to copper mine

Evora: +4 gpt switch from grassland to 1f3h3c tile, growth still in 1 turn

Braga: switch from coast to 1f5h tile, no loss on gpt but speeds up courthouse by 1 turn, small impact on beakers

These changes should drop us from -221gpt to about -200gpt.
 
Keep up the good work, Fred. Would think that successive turns will get a bit easier. Hoping you'll play ten or more to a logical stopping point.

We're at 38% domination, with six cities coming out of anarchy soon and more to be conquered shortly. Which ones are we holding?

Notice my frigate bombardment of Atlantis has been discontinued. There's only one longbow there now. Seems (along with Vandal) like a source of gold, once our paratroopers have finished their work elsewhere.
 
ShannonCT said:
You can build a Mining Rep in Corinth.

That figures since the last thing I did was to spread Mining Inc in Sippar (after one failed attempt)

ShannonCT said:
There's a barb galley near Athens.

Will take appropriate action.

ShannonCT said:
If Justinian gets Industrialism he can give us Aluminum and we wont have to bulldoze a windmill.

Allright.

ShannonCT said:
We can attack the barb city in Australia this turn and airlift the settler. Liberating the cities next turn from the city adviser screen should create a new vassal.

Yes, that is the plan now that the barb city has not been reinforced.

ShannonCT said:
Babylon needs to have forest preserves in its control to get the free specialist. Now that Wall Street is finished, Akkad doesn't need the preserve.

Didn't know that. But isn't there some preserves being worked by Dur also? (Don't have the save)

ShannonCT said:
Shaka is due Rifling in 7 turns. Taking some of his big cities should delay this. We don't want to be fighting riflemen and paratroopers.

Yes, it's a good thing that we didn't wait with the attack, when Shaka gets rifles the war will be much more difficult. Hope to capture a good number of his larger cities before he gets there. An attack on Noabamba will come soon with the reinforcements coming from Korea.

ShannonCT said:
We can get Plastics in 3 turns with research at 80%. You can change a few cities from wealth to a factory build. Looks like 3GD will finish in Sippar in 7 turns, 4 turns after Plastics. Sippar can use the copper mine if needed.

There is a very nice timing of the IW and Plastics so I suppose we should postpone DR to after Plastics even when it means that kwaDukuza will have to wait 2 turns with starting on Versailles. Might mean a few extra turns of high maintenance in Zulu cities coming out of revolt...

Anyway, I will start factory builds in cities that need 7 turns or more to complete.
 
Cactus Pete said:
Keep up the good work, Fred. Would think that successive turns will get a bit easier. Hoping you'll play ten or more to a logical stopping point.

Thanks. I think 10 turns will be the maximum number I can play because I have to finish my set by Thursday afternoon when I will be leaving on a short vacation (Back Monday).

Cactus Pete said:
We're at 38% domination, with six cities coming out of anarchy soon and more to be conquered shortly. Which ones are we holding?

As many as possible, I think. We can always liberate later to keep a distance to the domination limit. What is a safe distance? 1%? 2%?

Cactus Pete said:
Notice my frigate bombardment of Atlantis has been discontinued. There's only one longbow there now. Seems (along with Vandal) like a source of gold, once our paratroopers have finished their work elsewhere.

How many turns of bombarding do we need to remove the cultural defense? I don't expect the attack on Atlantis to come inside my turn set anyway, so there should be time to resume the bombardment. Vandal may be a city we can keep once Versailles is built in kwaDukuza.
 
DJMGator13 said:
Babylon: switch the spy and engineer to merchants +6 gpt, unless we are trying to offset the odds of a GMerchant.

We are trying to maximize the chances of getting a GSpy, GProphet or GEng. That's also the reason behind building a jail. We need this GP to start the 4th GA (along with a GM, GA and GS).

I will have a closer look at your other suggestions when I have the save available and probably implement most of them.
 
We're considering DR to get Versailles? DR is off the tech path. Has someone done the calculation to show that sinking beakers into DR and hammers into Versailles is a net positive relative to just building wealth and staying on the tech path with only 40 turns remaining? Approximately how many beakers per turn would Versailles save us once it is built?
 
Grover22 said:
We're considering DR to get Versailles? DR is off the tech path. Has someone done the calculation to show that sinking beakers into DR and hammers into Versailles is a net positive relative to just building wealth and staying on the tech path with only 40 turns remaining? Approximately how many beakers per turn would Versailles save us once it is built?

It's a relevant question and it's hard to answer. If we want to keep some of the captured Zulu cities there is no doubt that Versailles will pay for itself very fast because city maintenance is so huge without it. So the real question is if there will be time enough for the captured cities to produce enough gold and hammers to make up for the hammers and beakers invested. My guess is, that there is, but all depends on how many turns we have left of the game. The alternative would be to gift all captured cities to Justinian, but that probably means that our decision to build such a large army was wrong to begin with. So we are somehow committed to pursue this strategy of keeping cities hoping that it is profitable...
 
I'd like to attempt a rough calculation of the beakers/turn savings that would be Versaille's break even point. Please bear with me and feel free to point out the mistakes in my reasoning.

Kwadukuza comes out of revolt in two turns, a turn before Plastics comes in, and two turns before we could have Divine Right. So that'll be two turns it can spend building a forge, at something like 13 hammers/turn.

Whether or not Kwad switches to Versailles when DR comes in or finishes its forge first, we're likely going to be limited by worker-turns to get those forests chopped. There are enough forests around to finish or nearly finish Versailles just from the chops (with the marble bonus), but they'll take some time to chop. Maybe we need a total of 40 worker-turns to get the chopping done. We have 3 workers on the scene, and two more arriving by galleon soon. Shaka also has a couple workers we could grab near his city to the north. But probably we're talking 8 or 9 turns, at least to get those forests chopped.

So let me ballpark...2 turns to come out of revolt, 9 more turns to finish forge and Versailles. That leaves about 40-11=29 turns in the game. But the Versailles savings doesn't really apply to all of those, only to the turns where research matters. Let's say it takes us two turns to finish the final components after the last tech is researched, so the Versailles savings is really only relevant for 27 turns or so.

The Versailles cost, in beakers, is 1201 for researching DR plus 536 hammers/225%(hammer bonus rate for the wonder) * 150% (hammer bonus rate building wealth, say) = 357 beakers, for a total of 1558 beakers. Spread over 27 turns, that's 58 beakers per turn.

Will our maintenance per turn be at least 58 lower with Versailles?
 
Forbidden Palace alone is saving 100+ gold per turn in our Incan cities. If we end up with several of the big Zulu cities, Versailles should pay off.

Edit: I calculate that we can research DR now and still have enough beakers to get Plastics three turns from now. This would let us start Versailles earlier. A forge isn't much help when we get the 100% marble bonus. We can speed up Versailles by airlifting a Mining rep to kwaD.
 
Wow. If Versailles is also going to save us that much, then probably Kwad should switch out of the forge and start on Versailles as soon as it can, and finish the forge afterwards. And probably forge chops should be forgone until after Versailles is complete.
 
Played a few more turns. We are now at war with Stalin and Smolensk is captured. So is Nongoma and Ollantaytambo. Noabamba has been reinforced and can't be captured this turn (T147). Plastics and DR are both researched. 3GD is due in 4 turns, Versailles in 5 but this can probably be brought down to 3 with some chopping. Standard Ethanol is founded and is supplying 30 bpt for free in Akkad.

1570 AD
 

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Looks good :goodjob:

Here's a couple more mm ideas to pickup about 9gpt.

Babylon is the next GPP city (in 4 turns) so Piraeus, Coimbra & Machu Picchu can switch their spies to merchants for the +9gpt. Babylon can also hire 2 more engineers in 2 turns when the factory completes which is prior to completion of the next great person.

Pyongyang is starving but still doesn't have enough food to support itself, so after it loses 1 more pop put all the artists back on food. Cultural border is about to expand which is why Fred has them on Artists.

Cheju is starving but can support itself by switching off the coast and onto either the 4f2c tile or the 2f2h3c tile.
 
Great job Fred!! :goodjob:

It looks like you are swapping wealth cities to build Factories and then back to Wealth. :thumbsup:
It looks like building Factories in nearly all our home continent cities, along with Mining Inc., would produce a great deal of Wealth. Cities needing Factories include:
Sparta, Mycenae, Pharsalos, Ephesus, Nippur, Borsippa, Evora, Coimbra, Guimaraes and Lagos.

In Pharsalos, we could swap a citizen from working a coastal tile to working the Forest Preserve just west of the city.

Looks like Evora would make a good Sid Sushi city. Then we could build Workshops over the cottages on the plains tiles north of the city?

EDIT: We've jumped up to 45% on the domination limit! :scan:

Keep up the good work!! :cheers:
 
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