SGOTM 09 - Xteam

[ShannonCT]

With Plastics in, there's no particular tech that we're in a hurry to get. You can start building factories everywhere in the Americas now instead of wealth.

Shaka's 4 turns from Rifling now. There's no time to waste in capturing as many Zulu cities as possible. Don't hesitate to build a few more paratroopers if they're needed.

We need about 9000 GPPs in the next 24 turns to be able to start the 4GP golden age in time. Babylon needs to maximize GPPs now rather than expediting factory. It also needs to take back control of the forest preserve Akkad was using. It should be producing 300 GPPs per turn right now. Even at 300 GPPs per turn, Babylon can only make 7200 GPPs in the next 24 turns. We either need to find another city to produce one GP, or switch to Pacifism as soon as factories are built, or research Communism. Pacifism is cheaper than OrgRel even with the 1 gold per unit cost. Maybe switch to Pacifism/Free Market in a few turns.

 

[Frederiksberg]

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

Will look into this. Some cities have had an angry face due to canceled fur deals and that's why the city governor has acted on his own when we got some happy resources back from Justinian through demanding. Btw. is there any risk that Justinian will refuse a demand for resources and declare war?

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.

Factories are probably very profitable in all these cities. Spreading Standard Ethanol to our tech cities is probably the most profitable deal we can get right now - even more than spreading Mining Inc. In Akkad and all cities like it (with Lib+Uni) we get 30 bpt for free because maintenance is covered by the gold earned in the HQ. In Athens we get 70 bpt.

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

I will go over the cities before continuing. There could be more places where the city governor has acted on his own.

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?

I have my doubts that Sushi is profitable there considering the limited time there is left of the game. We have a Sushi exec headed for Wonsan and I think this is the last city where we will spread Sushi.

With Plastics in, there's no particular tech that we're in a hurry to get. You can start building factories everywhere in the Americas now instead of wealth.

Yes, that's more or less the plan. Is there any benefit of getting started reasonably fast on the Apollo Program?

Shaka's 4 turns from Rifling now. There's no time to waste in capturing as many Zulu cities as possible. Don't hesitate to build a few more paratroopers if they're needed.

We can probably slow down the time to Rifling, but I doubt that we can prevent it. Considering the limited time there is left of the game I'm not too keen on spending more hammers on military. When Shaka gets rifles we can still capture cities from him, only we should prepare for casualties and a slower speed. We can no doubt capture Noabamba and probably also Ulundi before he gets rifles.

We need about 9000 GPPs in the next 24 turns to be able to start the 4GP golden age in time. Babylon needs to maximize GPPs now rather than expediting factory. It also needs to take back control of the forest preserve Akkad was using. It should be producing 300 GPPs per turn right now. Even at 300 GPPs per turn, Babylon can only make 7200 GPPs in the next 24 turns. We either need to find another city to produce one GP, or switch to Pacifism as soon as factories are built, or research Communism. Pacifism is cheaper than OrgRel even with the 1 gold per unit cost. Maybe switch to Pacifism/Free Market in a few turns.

Do you mean it's necessary for Babylon to work the tile or only to defog in the city screen? We can easily get to Fusion within the next 24 turns so that will give us a GE. How does that change the calculation? We could do the switch anyway since we won't be building that much infrastructure when our factories are done but Free Religion could also come under consideration if we can get the GPP's we need.

 

[Frederiksberg]

Btw. Murky and Misfits are done. Murky must have achieved a very competitive launch date (Unless, of course their last set was 50 turns long ).

 

[Frederiksberg]

Planning to resume play in 2-3 hours.

 

[ShannonCT]

Do you mean it's necessary for Babylon to work the tile or only to defog in the city screen? We can easily get to Fusion within the next 24 turns so that will give us a GE. How does that change the calculation? We could do the switch anyway since we won't be building that much infrastructure when our factories are done but Free Religion could also come under consideration if we can get the GPP's we need.

Just to defog the tile.

We only need about 7300 GPPs with the free GE from Fusion. And in that case, we can get all other GPs from caste, so there's no hurry on the factory.

 

[leif erikson]

Good Luck Fred!

Teach Shaka some humility...

 

[Frederiksberg]

Getting ready to play...

 

[DJMGator13]

Will look into this. Some cities have had an angry face due to canceled fur deals and that's why the city governor has acted on his own when we got some happy resources back from Justinian through demanding. Btw. is there any risk that Justinian will refuse a demand for resources and declare war?

I think a vassal will give you 1 free demand without the risk of refusal or war. After the 1st demand I'm not sure what formula is used.

 

[Frederiksberg]

Played some more. I was interrupted during my play so we are only a little further ahead. Noabamba, Bactrian (barb), Emangweni and eThekwini are captured and Versailles is built in kwaDukuza. 3GD is due in two turns as planned.

1590AD

I'm planning on letting Rushmore finish now. WW is growing and we could use the cash to raise the science slider while building factories.

 

[ShannonCT]

I think a vassal will give you 1 free demand without the risk of refusal or war. After the 1st demand I'm not sure what formula is used.

From my experience, a vassal will give in to all demands for a while. At some point, he may cancel some/all of the free resources. If you then redemand a resource, the vassal will declare war. So demand anything you want from our vassals for now.

 

[leif erikson]

There is going to be quite a spike in Hammers when 3GD completes.

Sippar turned out pretty well for a junk city!

Would it be worth spreading Sid Sushi to Delphi, as it has a nearly completed a Factory, has a Courthouse, Forge, University and Library, it can only grow and add more hammers to take advantage of 3GD? There are fopur Workers nearby to build some Workshops on those juicy plains tiles?

Once a few more factories are completed, a Power Plant in Cuzco?

Should we gift the Worker in India?

Who shall we give those northern Zulu cities to, Justinian or Asoka?

We're creeping up on the domination limit.
Now at 47.84%.

EDIT - Thinking we should switch Espionage points to Stalin? Not that it'll make that much difference at this point...

Nice work on Shaka!

 

[PaulisKhan]

From my experience, a vassal will give in to all demands for a while. At some point, he may cancel some/all of the free resources. If you then redemand a resource, the vassal will declare war. So demand anything you want from our vassals for now.

Yup. If you find your vassal spontanteously cancelling all demands then re-demanding the resources results in an instant war dec.
However it's easy enough to get around simply by trading for their important resources if they cancel the demand. They will quite happily trade away their iron/copper/coal/gold/silver at very cheap rates.

 

[Frederiksberg]

I need to finish the set this afternoon because I'm leaving on a small vacation so I'm planning to play 1-2 turns more and then stop. That means we will see the completion of the 3GD and we will see what our situation is when Shaka gets rifling.

Will resume play in about 2 hours if noone protests.

 

[Frederiksberg]

I have ended my set and the save is up. Don't have time to do a full write up. 3GD is built in Sippar, Shaka has Rifling and somehow managed to build a paratrooper simulataneously (how is that possible?). Novgorod is captured.

1610 AD

Some issues to discuss for the next set:

1. What to do with the war on Shaka now that he has better units.
2. Where to build the Apollo Program
3. Where to build laboratories for space parts
4. When to stop building infrastructure and switch to wealth only
5. When to switch to Free Market. I think we must be close to the point where FM is best.
6. When we swicth to Free Market we loose 6 health in all cities. This can be critical in some places so we must decide where we need Public Transportation and/or grocers to compensate.

Spreading Standard Ethanol and Mining Inc is probably profitable until very late in the game. Remember that SE and Sushi are competing so a city like Delphi is better served with SE because it has lib+uni. Spread SE to all cities with lib+uni. My hunch is that Sushi is not profitable anywhere now that we are close to the end of the game.

I think the war on Russia can continue as planned (going for the western part of Russia where there are metals and corn for our corporations) and we can probably also capture and keep Vandal (maintenance should be reasonable with Versailles so close. I don't think we want to liberate any of the Zulu cities now that we have Versailles.

Will be back Monday.

 

[leif erikson]

Nice work Fred!

Hope you enjoy your vacation.

Updated Roster:
leif - UP
Cactus Pete - On Deck
ShannonCT
Frederiksberg - off for vacation.

PaulisKhan - moving to a land far, far away...
Grover22 - Ticking up the participation!
rrau - How are you doing?
DJMGator13 - micromanager par excellance!

 

[ShannonCT]

I'll also be out of town for the weekend.

I looked at the save. We have 56000 beakers remaining to research. We're currently able to sustain ~3300 bpt (with the 20% prereq bonus) and that will be 4000+ bpt soon. We should be finishing research in ~15 turns. The main infrastructure we need now are factory-plant-lab in cities that will build SS parts - cities that either have a lot of base hammers or that have a lot of forests.

The wars now won't gain us any cities that will come out of revolt in time to be of much use. We could accept capitulation from Stalin now to get some resources, and take peace from Shaka in exchange for a city with a resource.

Workers need to hook the remaining Mining/Ethanol resources and start prechopping forests.

We only need 2 more GPs out of Babylon. Two more golden ages is all we can use. I'd like to hear PK's opinion on the best tech order for the end game.

 

[Cactus Pete]

Fred's done good.

The wars now won't gain us any cities that will come out of revolt in time to be of much use. But capturing cities brings in gold. We could accept capitulation (need to be aware of our 50% dom'n . . . Isn't a corp generating culture?) from Stalin now to get some resources, and take peace from Shaka in exchange for a city with a resource. We're closing in on Ulundi (with Broadway . . . Is the happiness of any value?) and Bulawayo and could probably get exactly the city we want if we capture them before extortion for peace.

Perhaps frigates should be moved to bombard Vandal after peace with Shaka.

 

[PaulisKhan]

Tech path that I would normally use: (but I tend to just muddle my way through here, Shannon already did a better job of this in his one space gauntlet)

Fusion->Composites->Genetics->Ecology

that path picks up all the key techs along the way

Our best hammer cities should be able to finish the engines before they're needed for the last two components.

Our ironworks city should be able to finish its engine before it's needed for stasis chamber.
I tend to get better results if I build the stasis chamber (second to last tech) in the ironworks city (if it has a tree or two to chop) and life support system gets built in the city with the most trees+laboratory for a 1 turn chop completion (when the last tech comes in).
When it comes to deciding where we should build our casings and where we should build our thrusters, the minor cities with trees should be saved for the casings (which come in very close to the end) while the thrusters can be started in cities without trees if we're short of chops.

That should allow us to launch one turn after the last tech comes in.

We should take captiualtion from stalin and make peace with Shaka, the remaining resources won't change anything now.
Khangela should run 3 artists for a two turn border pop to claim the resource.

 

[leif erikson]

Keep the ideas coming!

Been working on a spreadsheet of our cities to help decide what needs to be completed where and to try to determine a priority. I'll post it when it is completed, hopefully later this evening.

We have cities, like Athens, that built a Coal Plant. Is there a way to remove that building since we have 3GD and power is provided. Coal Plant gives minus two healthy faces and it might help to remove them before we go to Free Market?

EDIT - Losing the 6 health in our cities is going to be a problem for many of them. We'll need Grocers and some Hospitals and, I think, Public Transportation in Athens.

Working on a plan now.

Spreadsheet is attached.

 

[leif erikson]

I'm a bit lost in all this, as usual. So please set me straight where I need it.

Tech Path:

• Complete Radio
• Fission
• Computers
• Fiber Optics
• Fusion
• Satellites
• Composites
• Ecology
• Genetics

City Builds:
Athens - Complete Std Ethanol Exec, Hospital, Grocer, Public Transportation
Piraeus - Complete Observatory, Grocer, spread Std. Ethanol, build Std. Ethanol Execs.
Delphi - Complete Factory, set to Wealth and spread Std. Ethanol.
Sparta - Complete Mining Inc Exec, Harbor, Grocer, Mining Inc Exec, Wealth if we need it.
Corinth - Hospital, Public Transportation, Laboratory, Wealth or Space Ship part
Thebes - Complete Laboratory, Harbor, Wealth, spread Mining Inc and Std Ethanol.
Argos - Complete Chariot, Hospital, Harbor, (Observatory and Laboratory?), resume Chariots for MP?
Knossos - Complete Observatory, Laboratory, spread Std. Ethanol.
Mycenae - Factory, Wealth
Pharsalos - Harbor, Grocer, Laboratory, Hospital, Wealth or Space Ship Parts
Ephesus - Harbor, Grocer, and spread Mining Inc and Std. Ethanol.
Babylon - Complete Grocer, Wealth.
Akkad - Complete Std. Ethanol Exec, Observatory, Std Ethanol or Mining Inc Execs.
Nippur - University, Wealth, spread Std. Ethanol
Borsippa - Harbor, Grocer, spread Std. Ethanol
Tiwanaku - complete Forge, Factory, Coal Plant, Wealth, spread Mining Inc.
Sippar - Complete Apollo, Grocer, Hospital, perhaps Public Trans., Laboratory, Wealth or Space Ship parts.
Coimbra - Grocer, Hospital, Laboratory, Wealth or Space Ship parts.
Cuzco - Harbor, Grocer, Coal Plant, Laboratory, Wealth or Space Ship parts, spread Std. Ethanol.
Lagos - Complete Factory, University, Observatory, Wealth, spread Mining Inc and Std. Ethanol.
Machu Picchu - Coal Plant, Lighthouse, Observatory, Harbor, Wealth, spread Std Ethanol and Mining Inc.
Wonsan - Complete Coal Plant, Wealth.
Seoul - Complete Factory, Coal Plant, Granary, Grocer, Wealth, spread Mining Inc.
Lisbon - Grocer, Observatory, perhaps a Laboratory, Wealth or Space Ship parts, spread Mining Inc and Std. Ethanol.
Oporto - Complete Factory, Wealth
Guimaraes - Complete University, Factory, Grocer, Observatory, Wealth, spread Mining Inc and Std. Ethanol.
Evora - Complete University, Factory, Harbor, Observatory, Grocer, spread Mining Inc and Std. Ethanol
P'yongyang - Complete Forge, Lighthouse, Factory, Coal Plant, Granary, Harbor, Wealth, spread Mining Inc.
Braga - Complete Library, Harbor, Granary, Wealth.
Leiria - Complete Factory, Lighthouse, Forge, Wealth.
Dur-Kurigalzu - Lighthouse, Harbor, WQealth, spread Sid Sushi and Mining Inc.
Namp'o - Complete Library, Factory, Coal Plant, Forge, Wealth, spread Mining Inc.
Cheju - Complete Courthouse, Factory, Coal Plant, Forge, Wealth, spread Mining Inc.
Pusan - Complete Coal Plant, Forge, Wealth
kwaDukuza - Complete Forge, Factory, Coal Plant, Wealth.
Khangela - keep Artists hired until we claim the Copper, complete Courthouse, Factory, Coal Plant, Wealth, spread Mining Inc.
Ondini - Gift to Justinian?
eThekwini - Gift to Justinian?
Nongoma - Complete Granary, Factory, Coal Plant, Forge, Wealth.
Nobamba - Complete Forge.

Please check builds as I wasn't sure how far to go. Also, I chose hammer rich cities to build some laboratories for the +50% for Space Ship builds. Not sure I chose the right cities?

Workers:
From SCT's post - Workers need to hook the remaining Mining/Ethanol resources and start prechopping forests.

Questions,
Do we want to risk taking Ulundi before peace?

Any other Zulu cities we want/need?

I count 81 tiles controlled by Russia, we are currently at 50.10% of domination? Ready for Capitulation?

We will need health resources, would be nice to claim the only Banana in the game south of Nobamaba?

Do we need to take Atlantis? Gold is the only reason I can think of?

EDIT - Where are we on Golden Ages, how many Great People will it take to start the next one? Will 2 Artists and a Great Merchant be sufficient?

Time for some