1. How to capture Tours-Hastings-York-London asap,
2. How to get Medicine asap,
3. How to mobilize for the Roosy Campaign asap.
Here is my current thinking. There are bound to be tons of xposts while I typed this, but I want to get this out there for comments.
Mao Campaign:
T0: Build settler in Siberia. Move musket out of Shanghai but still within our culture (trying to draw out LBs from Nanjing).
T+1: Move stack NE of Nanjing. Settler moves to end of road NE of Siberia. If Mao takes the bait, move musket and enough trebs back to Shanghai to make sure we dont lose it.
T+2: Bombard city while injured units heal. Settler moves to ice ball # 6 location. If LBs left the city and there are no walls, we can consider taking Nanjing on this turn.
T+3: Capture Nanjing. Declare CF. Settle Glace de Mao. Gift Glace de Mao.
T+X: As soon as St Nick grows to 2 pops, redeclare on Mao. Capture St Nick. Sign CF as soon as possible.
Alternatively, we could redeclare on T+3, after gifting him Glace de Mao, and capture St. Nick, which may auto-raze if it is still size 1. The benefit of this would be to get a CF that much sooner so that we dont have compounded WW for as long.
Do we know when St. Nick will grow to 2 pops?
We could also settle Glace de Mao somewhere else if we plan to let him hang on to St. Nick for a few turns. This gives the settler more time to get to another location.
Churchill Campaign:
I plan to use the Mao stack to take Tours while using our other stack to keep an eye on Marseilles. After taking Nanjing, the Mao stack should have 8 trebs (lose 3? attacking Nanjing but add three more that are 3W of Orleans), 1 cat, 7 maces (one will have to stay in Nanjing) and El Cid. If we take Nanjing on T+3, this stack wont be in position and healed until T+6 at the soonest. We can add to this the units healing in Orleans: 4 trebs, 1 cannon, 2 muskets and 1 mace. These Orleans units will sit 2W of Marseilles until the turn before we plan to declare so that we can protect our cities if Churchill moves on us first. That would give us a total of 12 trebs, 1 cat, 1 cannon, 8 maces and 2 musket attacking Tours on T+6.
The stack watching Marseilles and protecting both Orleans and Rheims will consist of the current stack there: 8 muskets + 1 treb + reinforcements (1 cannon and 1 musket) coming every turn from Moscow and GP Farm. If he declares on us first, this stack and the one in Orleans should be able to pick off his attacking army in the open. If we declare first, with Orleans open, he should move his attacking army out or Marseilles and we can either take it out in the open or fortify our stack in Orleans, whichever makes the most sense at the time.
After Tours, our army will continue south taking Hastings, York and London. We can use galleys to move our army quicker along the coast with trireme protection. With the circumnavigation bonus, we can load our troops onto galleys inside the newly captured cities. On the next turn, the galleys can sail and unload right next to the next city, so our units will never be sitting on galleys in open water IBT.
Risk: Guangzhou, Beijing and Nanjing are all at risk from a naval assault by Churchill. The first two dont currently have a garrison. When will be have 10% culture in these cities to be able to draft muskets there?
Roosevelt Campaign:
We need to be thinking about this now, but the actually planning is beyond the next six turns, which is all I plan to play in the first portion of my turnset. I plan to build non-stop cannons and muskets unless we decide to build a bank in Moscow. Depending upon how the war with Churchill goes, we can start diverting some of our units toward Roosevelt.
Espionage:
With some MM, building wealth and selling Paper to Churchill for 140 gold, we should be able to run the espionage slider at 100% this turn. That will give us approximately 1304 + 793= 2097 epp. We need 425 (Guilds from Troy) + 324 (Banking from Vlad) + 595 (Econ from Troy) + 850 (Constitution from Troy) + 680 (Corporations from Troy) = 2,874. Without Corporations, well need 2,194; about 100 epp short. So, we have two options:
- Steal Guilds + Banking + Economics on T+1, Constitution on T+2 and Corporations on T+3. This puts our spies at risk of detection on T+2 and T+3.
- Wait until T+3 and steal all techs at the same time.
Regardless of which option we use, we have 6 spies and we want 5 techs. If more than 2 spies fail, it will likely by T+4 or T+5 before we can afford to steal Corporations. I will move two spies from Old China into Vlad and Troy as a safeguard.
Also note that if the epp differential changes from 1.08 to 1.03 or lower (which is possible if we run the slider at 100%), then we might just barely be able to steal Constitution as well on T+1. Attempting to steal Corporations will have to wait until T+3 no matter what we do unless we get a huge sum of gold and can run the slider at higher than 50%.
Medicine:
Its hard to predict exactly how soon we can learn Medicine due to many factors: gold trades available, drop in commerce when not running a golden age, civics, how many scientists we run, if we build wealth or infrastructure, etc.
If learning Medicine is on our critical path, then all non-critical builds can be put on hold and we build wealth instead. If we do this and build wealth in every city but Moscow (cannons), we can run the slider at 100% right now at +87 gpt (this is during a golden age, of course). This could give us Medicine in 7 turns + 3 turns using espionage slider + 2 turns due to not being in Golden Age = 12 turns. Of course, this delays Wall Street, National Park, infrastructure, etc.
If we dont prioritize Medicine and set the science slider as high as possible after were done with our tech stealing (T+3), I would guess that we could learn Medicine 10 turns (current estimate at 50% slider) + 3 turns using espionage slider + 4 turns due to not being in a GA = 17 turns.
If 17 turns is acceptable, then great. We can build infrastructure, gear up for our wars, and set ourselves up for the Sushi spam. If 17 turns is too long, we probably get it in 14ish turns by not going to the extreme of building wealth everywhere but delaying non-essential builds until after Medicine.
from the GA. Futhermore, slavery comes best at the tail-end of our GAs, because we want to run our GAs at our population peaks, not population valleys.
).
