SGOTM 10 - Murky Waters

[klarius]

The question what we need, depends a lot what we will face (how far will the AI come). As a test I killed nuked rifles with knights easy enough. Note a nuke will do 80% damage to all units on average. There still might be the freak getting only 30% damage (though only with 1/2500 probability ). Cavs against infantry should still be Ok under these conditions.
If the AI gets to electricity and builds bunkers, the damage is halfed. Then one would rather have something of similar or greater strength than the defenders.
Anyway I would rather think along the line of paratroopers than tanks (rocketry via flight?).
Another idea is bombers. Airstrikes before nuking will greatly increase the number of units dying directly from the nuke.

Edit:
Or attack with artillery before nuking and walk into the empty city with a chariot . A unit down to 30% strength will die for sure when nuked (w/o bomb shelter). Even at 50% it's very likely.


Still another thing: Will we go to assembly line and if so when. Infantry will need a turn more to attack, but still the nuked units will not be completely healed. And thinking about 10000-20000 hammers needed for the nukes, factories-plants don't look such a bad idea.
If we do AL anyway we should consider to do so before fusion and rocketry.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Hi folks! Welcome DMOC! Good to have fresh energy!

I think we need to think minimalist because this is conquest. How can we minimize the beakers and hammers needed? You guys have already provided a lot of possible answers. This is my first attempt at a minimalist strategy:

1. MinBeakers: Research only techs required for nukes. SE with Rep asap and NE with lots of bulbs. Trade for AI techs, like GP, chem, nationalism, etc.
2. MinHammers: Astro asap and minimize AI settling with knights. (Fewer cities = fewer nukes.)​

Thoughts:

0. Gyathaar usually protects teams from early barb/AI attacks, so my hunch is we're (semi-)isolated on the small landmass.

A. Testing may be vital to gold
1. do we really need the hammers from AL?
2. can we minimiaze AI settling with an astro bee-line?
3. do we need oxford?

B. SE requires lots of pop + lots of
1. HeredRule? Preserves? Trade/settle happy resources?
2. How soon do we need Constitution?
3. Whipping, building settlers/wkrs, and hiring scientists all slow growth.

C. Warring
1. Minimal tech path gives WEs, knights, rifles, airships, artillery, and nukes. Enough?
2. We need to explore asap to find horses, happies, maybe marble, stone, etc.
3. We could settle a 0%-foreign-culture city on the big landmass and after final tech trades go ALL-WAR to ruin AI economies with their WW-causing suicide attacks.

D. Tech path and trades
1. Bio bulbs before Electr if we know Chemistry. We could go astro-scimeth-physics-elect and hope to trade for GP + chemistry afterwards. If we're bulbing scimeth the 20% bonus from chem isn't significant anyway.

E. Alternatives/additions
1. Bee-line bio and put NatPark in unchopped, preserved capital?
2. cottages in capital and fp city?

 

[klarius]

Hi folks! Welcome DMOC! Good to have fresh energy!

A. Testing may be vital to gold
1. do we really need the hammers from AL?
2. can we minimiaze AI settling with an astro bee-line?
3. do we need oxford?

1. We don't need AL. But the question is what's faster in the end. There is for sure still quite some time building nukes after research is finished. Early AL could also pay part of it's cost by building research for some time.
2. Well in my test map you don't even need Astro, which is anyway no problem to achieve. But there is a problem building units. Between the need for buildings and the expensive settlers, I get even problems to get up a minimum defense and some scouting units.
3. Pretty sure it's beneficial. We will have less cities than in a "normal" game so 1 super science city can provide a higher percentage of our science.

B. SE requires lots of pop + lots of
1. HeredRule? Preserves? Trade/settle happy resources?
2. How soon do we need Constitution?
3. Whipping, building settlers/wkrs, and hiring scientists all slow growth.

Pure SE will never work. Not in this game - not in any other game.
1. We will have HR in the beginning. Settling resources is very limited.
Preserves ? I don't think we can afford such lousy tile improvements nad we need the wood to get our empire started.
2. Maybe never . Anyway if we don't make it a priority (and it looks like there might be other priorities), it will be very long until it's available.
3. You also have something new to say ? But the one difference in this game is the settlers at 342h, which will stunt growth just too damned long if they cannot be helped along by chop/pop-rush. OTOH workers at 81h are pretty cheap

C. Warring
1. Minimal tech path gives WEs, knights, rifles, airships, artillery, and nukes. Enough?
2. We need to explore asap to find horses, happies, maybe marble, stone, etc.
3. We could settle a 0%-foreign-culture city on the big landmass and after final tech trades go ALL-WAR to ruin AI economies with their WW-causing suicide attacks.

1. In principle it's enough. In fact nukes and knights is enough if you nuke every city twice . But that's probably not the most effective way. There is also the fact that tactical nukes are only half the price of ICBMs, so radio (submarines) to get them into position may be worth it.
2. Exploration isn't a big problem, IME. There is the starting explorer and possibly also map trades.
3. We don't know anything about the lay of the land. Sure it would be nice to have cities near the AI, but that may not be possible by the time we could consider it.

D. Tech path and trades
1. Bio bulbs before Electr if we know Chemistry. We could go astro-scimeth-physics-elect and hope to trade for GP + chemistry afterwards. If we're bulbing scimeth the 20% bonus from chem isn't significant anyway.

There is the question how many GS we have for bulbing at all. We still can bulb 2 GS into fission if we miss on the electricity option.

E. Alternatives/additions
1. Bee-line bio and put NatPark in unchopped, preserved capital?
2. cottages in capital and fp city?

1. Definitely no.
2. Probably yes in capital. If we ever get a fp city is a question.

 

[Erkon]

It's not even clear when we will settle our capital . ...
We have a lot of useful civics we can revolt to, so delaying settling isn't that bad. But it's still the question which civics and how many immediately. The only no brainer is that we want bureaucracy immediately. HR and religious civics are not immediately beneficial.
Mercantilism does give an immediate benefit, but w/o caste we cannot use scientists immediately. Labor civic is really the big question. Slavery to immediately pop-rush both cities for a worker and work boat? Serfdom and chop a second worker?
When we get a religion on the 5th turn, will we convert? If yes, go caste and pacifism?

What to research? The first tech will take forever to finish.

Two civic changes => 1 turns anarchy
Four civic changes => 2 turns of anarchy
Five civic changes => 3 turns of anarchy

So we can revolt to Bureaucracy and Slavery for one turn delay, or HR + Mercantilism/OReligion/FReligion for two turns.

 

[klarius]

Two civic changes => 1 turns anarchy
Four civic changes => 2 turns of anarchy
Five civic changes => 3 turns of anarchy

So we can revolt to Bureaucracy and Slavery for one turn delay, or HR + Mercantilism/OReligion/FReligion for two turns.

One problem is, if we will know on the first turn after moving the units where and when we want to settle. So maybe do a 2 turn revolt first leaving out caste/pacifism to at least after we have a religion, but maybe even later (GS generation will anyway get only real going once we have the pop for 3-4 scientists). Problem is that we either forfeit the free mercantilism engineer for a citizen in our will be GS farm, or live with gene pool poisening.
OTOH it's then still not clear what the initial labor civic should be. Slavery for just a few turns will just give a 1 pop rush (which is nice to have for an immediate worker and work boat). A chopped second worker in the capital isn't slower with serfdom and we still have 2 pop in our cities. To really rex we would need to keep slavery for an extended time giving up the idea of an early GS.

Another idea would be to do bureau, caste, merc, pacifism initially. Keep this until the first GS then do slavery - HR for a rex phase. At a later time go back to caste (and representation?).
Maybe totally ignore education . Go nationalism (build Tadj for the later revolt) and try for liberalism only if education gets on the trade table early (needs probably Mansa ), else do constitution.
Liberalism for some expensive tech is risky anyway and contradicts rex. Liberalism for a relatively cheap tech like astronomy isn't really a big benefit considering that liberalism itself should be easily tradeable at some time (so it's less then 1000 beakers net worth).

 

[Erkon]

Looking at the map, it seams like there is coast north of Iron and Fish (requires a bit of image manipulation to detect the trace of the blue). A city to the NE will thus be coastal. The LBM-N (north) can go NE to reveal a lot of tiles, then NW to completely reveal that part of the coast. On T2 we will know if the plains 1E of Iron is good to settle, or even the hill. The scout could go SE-SE, and the LBM-S (south) can go 1SW. After that we can decide if we want to settle on T0. The advantage with settling on site on T0 is that we can start chopping right away. But we don't need to decide right now

Still - what kind of cities do we prefer? Food, hammers or commerce? Shall we go for a long term capital or do we plan to move it later? Is commerce relevant at all in the beginning? We could/should run 0% research for a very long time. Surplus food will then either go to city growth, poprush or specialists. A site like the starting tile is then excellent for early REX, but too rich on food for a capital. Perhaps settle capital 1SW of gold, and second city on starting tile?

 

[Erkon]

Post #3 updated with suggested roster. Please comment (and repeat absence plans )

 

[klarius]

Looking at the map, it seams like there is coast north of Iron and Fish (requires a bit of image manipulation to detect the trace of the blue). A city to the NE will thus be coastal. The LBM-N (north) can go NE to reveal a lot of tiles, then NW to completely reveal that part of the coast. On T2 we will know if the plains 1E of Iron is good to settle, or even the hill. The scout could go SE-SE, and the LBM-S (south) can go 1SW. After that we can decide if we want to settle on T0. The advantage with settling on site on T0 is that we can start chopping right away. But we don't need to decide right now

The real question is what's south and east. East can be revealed on T0, but we cannot really see far enough south (there could be additonal food resources, so that corn and rice are not necessary for a gold city.
We don't need to settle a city to start chopping. We only need to know where we will settle and that the chop will be in culture when it finishes. There is really no gain in settling T0 as the revolt to bureau is cast in stone and the worker either chops in place or has to move losing a turn. But we need to know on T0 if we can settle the capital within 1 or 2 turns and chose revolt acordingly.
BTW, we should as an option also consider to not settle any of our 2 cities at the settler starting location. That gives some more options for a golden capital, though the second city would then have less food.

 

[klarius]

Post #3 updated with suggested roster. Please comment (and repeat absence plans )

Well, I have no problem with starting.
But note that the release is planned for a friday (morning CET usually). I'm working on this day so it would take until the evening to have screenshots with first unit moves, if I should do them.

 

[DMOC]

Proposed moves. It's a lot easier to decide where we should settle based on early exploration. These should reveal plenty of tiles.

[I created a simulation in worldbuilder so I could test out this start myself, or what we know of it already. I'm still pondering on what's the best "general" strategy (such as using cavalry+nukes, beeline Oxford, etc.).]




By the way the tile under the worker should be a grassland hill not a flatland.

 

[Erkon]

I agree with the moves proposed by DMOC because (s)he's a genius (actually because I proposed the same)

How about these wild ideas:

• DoW the AI early to keep them from researching/advancing
• No tech trade to prevent the AI to advance
• Nuke their capitals at once to prevent the AI to advance. Capture much later.

The less cities they build, the less nukes we need to build. And capturing the actual cities have never been a problem for Team Murky Waters^TM. It's the path up to War that we have to get better at

 

[FiveAces]

Problem is that we either forfeit the free mercantilism engineer for a citizen in our will be GS farm, or live with gene pool poisening.

There is some value in 1 GE - in what I think is order of decreasing value, either for a 3rd or 2nd GA, to rush manhattan, to rush late Oxford if we skip edu initially, found mining inc (this value increases if we have lots of resources nearby) IIRC a GE is only _1 plus the gpp compared to a citizen, right? so not a big loss if we forego it?

OTOH it's then still not clear what the initial labor civic should be. Slavery for just a few turns will just give a 1 pop rush (which is nice to have for an immediate worker and work boat). A chopped second worker in the capital isn't slower with serfdom and we still have 2 pop in our cities. To really rex we would need to keep slavery for an extended time giving up the idea of an early GS.

This might not be a bad idea - I am starting to see the value of rexing as opposed to trying to frantically bulb to get an expensive tech out of liberalism. and if 1st GS is for academy, running at 0% for a while means delaying is ok - plus of the early GS bulbable techs
- edu gives Oxford, but we won't have 5 cities with libraries ready if we bulb it, and it will become tradeable at some point.
- PP gives nothing and is one of the techs not withheld by the AI
- astro gives obs and ocean trade routes, but is blocked by PP
I'm not sure how much an early GS really helps if we're not trying to slingshot scimeth of higher

Maybe totally ignore education . Go nationalism (build Tadj for the later revolt) and try for liberalism only if education gets on the trade table early (needs probably Mansa ), else do constitution.
Liberalism for some expensive tech is risky anyway and contradicts rex. Liberalism for a relatively cheap tech like astronomy isn't really a big benefit considering that liberalism itself should be easily tradeable at some time (so it's less then 1000 beakers net worth).

We can't be sure of Taj unless we us a GE. On your map one of the AI beelines it and rushes it, I'm sure in the real game 1 or more will try the same.

Still - what kind of cities do we prefer? Food, hammers or commerce? Shall we go for a long term capital or do we plan to move it later? Is commerce relevant at all in the beginning? We could/should run 0% research for a very long time. Surplus food will then either go to city growth, poprush or specialists. A site like the starting tile is then excellent for early REX, but too rich on food for a capital. Perhaps settle capital 1SW of gold, and second city on starting tile?

Why all 3 of course But immediately I think food, commerce hammers in that order. We need the hammers later. As long as we have enough initially with chops and poprush to REX we should be ok. We get a free granary and forge and really only need to build some fogbusting/defenders, wb's and lib/uni's initially. Early commerce is the same gold as late commerce (we're not building banks etc. are we?) so it has the same absolute value, but the relative value is more since late commerce is more beakers. So yes, it has value, up to the point where we can run 100% until we start capturing cities.

The real question is what's south and east. East can be revealed on T0, but we cannot really see far enough south (there could be additonal food resources, so that corn and rice are not necessary for a gold city.
We don't need to settle a city to start chopping. We only need to know where we will settle and that the chop will be in culture when it finishes. There is really no gain in settling T0 as the revolt to bureau is cast in stone and the worker either chops in place or has to move losing a turn. But we need to know on T0 if we can settle the capital within 1 or 2 turns and chose revolt acordingly.
BTW, we should as an option also consider to not settle any of our 2 cities at the settler starting location. That gives some more options for a golden capital, though the second city would then have less food.

Note the NW plains hill also has all 3 seafood in the BFC plus whatever's in the fog, and opens the starting position up if the capital goes S.

I agree with the moves proposed by DMOC because (s)he's a genius (actually because I proposed the same)

How about these wild ideas:

• DoW the AI early to keep them from researching/advancing
• No tech trade to prevent the AI to advance
• Nuke their capitals at once to prevent the AI to advance. Capture much later.
  [\list]
  
  The less cities they build, the less nukes we need to build. And capturing the actual cities have never been a problem for Team Murky Waters^TM]. It's the path up to War that we have to get better at

• 
  
  I agree with the unit moves too.
  * No. We do not want to encourage tech trade war bribes and shared war relation points amongst the AI.
  * depends if Mansa's in the game, also remember they will all have different religions so not as eager to trade what we give them amongst themselves anyway
  * needs the expensive ICBM's vs. tacts, but not a bad idea. Note again the concern with getting everybody united against us and trading techs towards AL or elec or nukes of their own

 

[DMOC]

I agree with the moves proposed by DMOC because (s)he's a genius (actually because I proposed the same)

How about these wild ideas:

• DoW the AI early to keep them from researching/advancing
• No tech trade to prevent the AI to advance
• Nuke their capitals at once to prevent the AI to advance. Capture much later.
  [\list]
  
  The less cities they build, the less nukes we need to build. And capturing the actual cities have never been a problem for Team Murky Waters^TM]. It's the path up to War that we have to get better at

• 
  
  I'm a he.
  
  I just put them in screenshots since screenshots are much easier to read than words. Wait...read...
  
  I do like the idea of declaring war on the AI early and just choking and/or pillaging them. Don't declare on all because of MMS but maybe the closest 2. Just a thought.

 

[Erkon]

FiveAces, can you really rush Manhattan? I thought that was a project...

DMOC, what does MMS stand for?

EDIT: FiveAces, once we nuke their capitals, their research will halt. Destroyed improvements, reduced pop, destroyed buildings.

Some of the cities may be coastal, which means we can invade on the same turn we land a nuke...

EDIT2: I forgot to mention that we can perhaps bribe the AI to war against each others...

 

[FiveAces]

FiveAces, can you really rush Manhattan? I thought that was a project...

DMOC, what does MMS stand for?

EDIT: FiveAces, once we nuke their capitals, their research will halt. Destroyed improvements, reduced pop, destroyed buildings.

Some of the cities may be coastal, which means we can invade on the same turn we land a nuke...

EDIT2: I forgot to mention that we can perhaps bribe the AI to war against each others...

ooh you're right i forgot makes the GE less useful
I'm not worried about the guy we nuke - it's what the other guys do while they wait their turn
klarius - I think somewhere in the civilopedia it says that there may be diplomatic consequences of using nukes - is there something in the code that either gives us neegative relations or triggers a DOW if we nuke somebody?

 

[Erkon]

FiveAces: yes, you get a negative modifier for using nukes.

 

[klarius]

It's -2 attitude value per nuke for the one nuked and -1 for his friends (people pleased or better with him). Dows aren't directly influenced, just via the worse attitude, but if we have enough power then, still nobody will dare to DoW.

 

[DMOC]

FiveAces, can you really rush Manhattan? I thought that was a project...

DMOC, what does MMS stand for?

EDIT: FiveAces, once we nuke their capitals, their research will halt. Destroyed improvements, reduced pop, destroyed buildings.

Some of the cities may be coastal, which means we can invade on the same turn we land a nuke...

EDIT2: I forgot to mention that we can perhaps bribe the AI to war against each others...

Mutual military struggle diplomacy points.

 

[ZPV]

Hi everyone! Welcome DMOC!

I've just gotten back, and will need to take the time to flesh out my ideas fully, (and read all of your posts), but here are my initial thoughts:

Definitely revolt to Slavery immediately - surely it's faster than anything else.

Probably settle in place, using food + HeredRule for an Oxford+NatEpic capital (moving the capital later, if appropriate). Lightbulb a large number of techs, I think 7 scientists could usefully help us on the Fission line.

One super production city with Ironworks + Heroic Epic (+Bureaucracy?) can produce almost one tactical nuke per turn - so we don't need to worry so much about the time it takes to build the nukes; this is a tech race.

With the initial revolt, we can explore with our settlers as well as the other units, so I'd move one of them 2SE, and the other SW, sending the explorer SW as well. Then the explorer can move again (and open up some of the southwest terrain) before we have to make any settling decisions.

Expensive settlers: in the capital, they still only take 4 chops, or a 4-pop whip (with a free granary) to build. Rexing should not be as hard as 342 hammers sounds.

Initial builds: worker chops immediately regardless. Whip+chop can get us worker+workboat by turn 6 in the capital.

More to come. maybe

 

[ZPV]

Placeholder post, for the game summary