SGOTM 10 - One Short Straw

[shyuhe]

I played a bit from save in Fifth element thread [my position it is their problem to post it in open thread and CRC seemed to uise similar save alonf with their owns last time [unless my russian failed]]
You might say i am running ahead of horses but i will leave for vacation tomorrow and if i say to my girl that Civ is comming with us... Well, there are less painful way to suicide

Back to business:

I tried choking Issy by placing longbow on a hill two tiles away from her city. Worked well. Not only she stopped expansion towards me, but she also paid 20 gold to end this... Now aggresive Ai's might be different.

Overall, if we really play against aggresive AI [as said in opening Alan's post] than they behaviour will dramatically change from the ones on Fifth element save.
I got feeling [although it needs to be verified] that aggresive Ai's actually expands slower [probably due to building more untis].

I also tried diffent tech path - i adopted caste+meracntilism+pacifiim from get go to generate Great Artist [non capital city with granted religion].
i took artist early cause to run in for fewest turns. Although he is significantly worse than engineer he allowed me to bulb nationalism. Second GS made academy in double gold cap. third bulbed Education [by that time i had finished nationalism i believe]. This clearly leads to lib into democracy with very early representation.

That felt very very very good. I actually self teched Economy for GM with ease. Trade mission ensured i will run 100% slider for ever. keep in mind this is small map - we need five cities for Oxford, but representation hapiness is not scaled down still three happy for all five cities we need early on. [combined with+2 from gold [via free forge] and one from phants this solves hapiness nicely.]

Religion spread: in all tests [about four] i had no problem in religion spreading to capitol naturally. Honestly i view chance of having to religions more as problem as the bonus.

Oxford: Clearly expansion will be stopping factor not tech as it can be bulbed.

Lib techs: i like democracy against SM as less GP are needed - in worst case 2 only. Representation boosts scientists which are insanely good compared to early cottage.
If we want cottages anyway we are one tech from emancipation which is the only reason cottages came into any competition.
We loose only around 600beakers and this is really looks risk free affair.
SM can be easily bulbed [once+probably finishing with hard research] later on while Democracy needs to researched hard way unless you involve some strange bulb pathern.
Minuses - early artist does not give hammers [later workboat comapred to engineer employed, honestly is till runned GE before pasifism for fiorst boat as it gave very samll chance of failure] or beakers [these are less of concern].
I tired variants of libing biology but these:
A) require trading for gunpowder which is damn hard with adopting own religion [and without pacifism i do not get enough great people]
B) needs rather a lot GP [education, pinting press, probaly two for chemistry and SM - 6 total]. Although biology and National Park is good, but that does not go well with early expansion.
From what i understand in civIV bulbing democracy is good move

Barbs: don't know maybe i run to less land in mine earlier games i got very early annoying barb city this time and since we can't take them [and AI will believe me] it is probably better to think about fogbusting. Although more testing on this is needed.

More about barbs:

I looked back at autosave does not look like it was produced in barb city afterall.
I also had same issue in my Sid game, so that might be something within 3.19. So far i have not noticed them attacking workers [well, i kept mine out of reach] and they look to move like Ai scouts -- two moves at once not changing direction in middle to get your worker they have not seen before or something like that.

Overall if discussion appears later i am for GArtist bulb and libbing representation.

Soirana.

10char

 

[shyuhe]

It sounds like constitution from liberalism sounds pretty good using the nationalism bulb. It will also allow us to get a good shot on the Taj (assuming we can get enough cities by then for Oxford) to revolt into representation. Or perhaps we want to revolt separately?

Any thoughts as to OR being better than pacifism, at least until our first GA? We won't need many endgame golden ages this game so I think we should use them to speed up crucial stretches of research and military builds.

Good point about barb cities - fogbusting will be more important than usual to prevent the barbs from founding inconvenient cities.

There is quite a deal of great engineers being born on AI side, so Taj might be tricky.
On other hand i thought of diluting pool [second city] with GE points since two hammers from enginner helps early builds anyway. Ideally we could rush Taj in such way to get organized slavery for rushing universities and switch to representation in end.

Honestly i do not like early caste [either slavery with intsa granaries and whipable population in further cities or serfdom given we start with four population working uniproved thing and one worker looks better to fast start]. But since epic gives only two civic changes per turn of revolution i see no way arround it.

I have not tried organized from go, guess would be close just without academy [but let say faster university - although i did settlers/workers], guess that needs further tests in order to balance horizontal growth with teching.

Another possibility is make academy+ bulb education while self teching nationalism. I am not sure that if AI goes for Education>liberalism we will get there in time. [although double gold]

10char

 

[shyuhe]

Any thoughts as to OR being better than pacifism, at least until our first GA? We won't need many endgame golden ages this game so I think we should use them to speed up crucial stretches of research and military builds.

I'm not sure what you mean... How does OR help you with that? Wouldn't you wanna get more GPs faster, if you're not using them in the end-game?

I've been thinking about the religion civic. I think it depends on our general expansion and development strategy. If we were settler, worker, wb spamming towards early OU, we wouldn't get much out of the OR build bonus until the university spam. With bureau + free eng + forge the initial library or what-have-you is scary quick anyway. Also, in my two tests so far, the religion spread to Moscow quickly without the need for a missionary, same as Soirana's games.

The second civic switch is tricky. I'm imagining a building spree after an initial expansion/development phase. Would that happen pre-constitution, or immediately after? If it's before, we might need an extra revolution into OR, which may be coupled with a brief switch to HR (if we do all 5 switches initially, that's an extra turn of anarchy, and we don't need HR for a while, with at least +3 happy from resources and +1 from religion). If it's immediately after, than building Taj just in time for a Rep + OR switch into a university spam would burn a golden age on the Oxford build... I don't know. My sense of timing is way off with this advanced start...

10 char

 

[shyuhe]

There is quite a deal of great engineers being born on AI side, so Taj might be tricky.
On other hand i thought of diluting pool [second city] with GE points since two hammers from enginner helps early builds anyway. Ideally we could rush Taj in such way to get organized slavery for rushing universities and switch to representation in end.

Honestly i do not like early caste [either slavery with intsa granaries and whipable population in further cities or serfdom given we start with four population working uniproved thing and one worker looks better to fast start]. But since epic gives only two civic changes per turn of revolution i see no way arround it.

I have not tried organized from go, guess would be close just without academy [but let say faster university - although i did settlers/workers], guess that needs further tests in order to balance horizontal growth with teching.

Another possibility is make academy+ bulb education while self teching nationalism. I am not sure that if AI goes for Education>liberalism we will get there in time. [although double gold]

Yeah, the beginning of the game reminds me of Civ 3 wonder cascades, with all the GE's popping up. The Taj does come a little bit later, though.

I've never used serfdom before in my playing career, but I tried it here, and it's pretty awesome. I liked building a library immediately for the 2 scientists. You'd be hard pressed to get much more than that right off with Caste anyway. It's something to consider...

10char

 

[shyuhe]

I did another quick test, going with Bureau/Serf/Merc/Pac to start, and switching to Caste/HR at some point, then Rep/OR after Lib. Things to note:

- Lib/Const seems relatively easy. I self-teched Nat, spent 2t on Educ before completing with a GS bulb, then self-teched Lib, dropping an academy in Moscow when Lib was about halfway through. I played kinda carelessly, and I still got it with something like 15-20t to spare against Musa. I think we should gather some data on what a reasonable Lib date is, so we can maybe delay it...

- I think that early expansion is the real limiting factor here. It takes forever to get 5 cities up and running, while rushing to Lib. Consequently, I don't get much out of the Rep sling, since I have to settler and worker spam after it, and can't get to Oxford for quite some time. I was hanging at 125-150bpt for a very long time. If we go with the 2-gold bureaucracy capital and the monster-seafood GP farm, I would consider rushing settlers out of the food-heavy city early, while running the capital at full research capacity.

- Barb galleys are a real nuisance. I lost 3 fishing boats at various times. The continent was really snaky and awkward, and I could have done a better job of getting Triremes out...

- I saw every barb unit imaginable, but they are easy enough to deal with. Horse Archers might be a bit scary if they manage to flank the fog-busting unit, but I only saw one and it immediately suicided against a Longbow on a hill. I got a mace to 4 promos pretty easily, too.

- Starting with Pacifism, it's basically impossible to avoid the first GE. In this game I burned him on NE and started running multiple scientists immediately, which almost makes up for it. Also, after two previous successes and reports of similar success from Soirana, I didn't get religion auto-spread to Moscow this time.

- Musa teched Economics after Education, so no free GM. I could trade Nationalism for it and 200g. The Econ GM would be nice for a mission to support the initial expansion, but I don't think it's worth delaying the more important techs, unless we're rolling out a whole pile of GS's early.

- I played through to the 1700's, and still no Taj. Looks like everyone went Education first, but in a previous test I did have a few go after Nationalism.

peace, m.

10 char

 

[shyuhe]

Specialists/workshops look like the best way to fuel most of our economy, but a cottaged city with Oxford might be useful if we have a good enough site.

Agreed. I think the 2-gold spot might prove to be a very nice bureau/Oxford capital.

Grabbing as much land as we can in the early game is going to be crucial, as this is all we will get for a long time. This means our economy will probably not be strong enough to get a really expensive tech from Liberalism, Nationalism looks like the best bet if we bulb Education with 2 GS.

Also agreed. After a few tests, I think this is really critical. I only needed one GS for Educ (IIRC it bulbed something like 2400/2800b). Does anyone know how the bulb beakers are calculated?

10 char

 

[shyuhe]

I didn't post all the messages but I think that's most of it.

 

[mdy]

Also, Soirana and RRR are out on vacation so how do we want to proceed? I'm inclined to play test various strategies for now as we need to figure out a big picture strategy before we start playing here.

I agree. The saves won't be available till the 7th anyway. Has anyone made a test map?

 

[shyuhe]

I think we were borrowing the test map that was posted on one of the SGTOM9 threads. I'll see if I can find the time to generate a test map for us.

 

[babybluepants]

I pounded Enter a bit while watching TV, and I got the following for the AI Lib date (with random starts at the same settings):

Test 1 - 1660 AD Victoria
Test 2 - 1670 AD Wang Kon
Test 3 - 1675 AD Justinian
Test 4 - 1655 AD Cyrus
Test 5 - 1625 AD Wang Kon
Test 6 - 1710 AD Alexander
Test 7 - 1645 AD Unknown
Test 8 - 1600 AD Darius
Test 9 - 1625 AD Isabella

First AI tech: Education (25), Gunpowder (4), Nationalism (3)

 

[shyuhe]

So what are people suggesting as possible liberalism goals?

 

[PaulusIII]

If we're still shooting for a specialist-heavy economy, I think we should consider getting Constitution as our free tech. We should not get too ambitious but we have some room on account of the aggressive AI.

 

[mdy]

I agree with constitution. With the heavy rexing we will have to do I doubt we will be able to get anything deeper into the tech tree, and nothing else immediatly available will be more useful.

 

[babybluepants]

Constitution does seem like the best move. It's pretty easy to get pre-1600 with our start, so we don't really have to sacrifice expansion and development. It probably doesn't give as much of an immediate research boost as one might expect, but out of the techs we have a shot at it's the only one that gives any kind of direct benefit. Also, unlike SM and other scientific techs along its path, Const is not easily bulbable.

I think it's easy enough to test. We should try both Const and SM, and play through to where we have both. I'd expect the Const sling to be quite a bit faster.

Edit: Didn't see mdy's post. I guess we're basically all in agreement on this one...

 

[shyuhe]

The other big question is, how do we time expansion with getting Oxford online? I imagine the capital will still get cottages (bureau?).

 

[babybluepants]

The other big question is, how do we time expansion with getting Oxford online? I imagine the capital will still get cottages (bureau?).

That is a big question! Do you expect a definitive answer?

I've been assuming a 2-gold bureau capital (looks like there may be some FP's to the south), and a monster GP farm with seafood / corn / rice. What have you guys been thinking? We'll have the start file in a few days... We shouldn't do much of anything with the game for a while, but I think moving a couple of units (explorer and south longbow, for instance) relatively early to get a glimpse of the entire potential BFC's might be useful...

Without emancipation, non-financial cottages will need some time to mature. I guess they'd have to be online very quickly. A riverside bureau cottage is almost immediately a good tile, especially if we can cover off most of the early maintenance with Merc merchants elsewhere and run the slider at 100%. We get more out of specialists early, though, with the Rep boost... I don't know. Intuitively I would think that the faster we get the requisite 3 cities out for Oxford - the better, but there's also value in growing and developing the two great cities we might already have.

How do we proceed with test games? So far I've been just playing random games to get a feel for the settings. I'm by far the least experienced player here, so I'd like to ensure that my play contributes to the team knowledge base somehow. Oxford seems like a pretty useful point to test to, and there's a number of subtly different ways of getting there.

 

[mdy]

The other big question is, how do we time expansion with getting Oxford online? I imagine the capital will still get cottages (bureau?).

I think we will have to expand as fast as possible and delay Oxford until we have the spare production capacity. We probably can't tell what will be best for the capital until we have done some exploring.

 

[Soirana]

Check in. Seems my mobile can handle forums.

edit: biggest mistake ver since i cannot handle teamwork.

 

[Soirana]

deleted into oblivion

 

[babybluepants]

Thx, Soirana. Bulbing Edu and teching Nat is definitely better, also 'cause it lets us run serfdom early.

How would we end up with an early GM? Other then teching Econ first, which is silly... Libbing Const seems much better. Also on that note, Nat seems tradeable for Econ + 150-250g just after Lib, which can be useful.

Regarding Oxford, it is bloody slow to build. I'm finding that I can zoom through to SM using bulbs, but hit a bit of a snag at Bio. An Oxford boost would be good around that time, also in preparation for NP if we're still thinking of an Oxford / NP city.