SGOTM 12 - One Short Straw

[LowtherCastle]

I think if we gift Roosy up to SciMeth(+Astro?), there's a good chance he'll research Physics for us. We give up the GS, but it might be worth it, not sure. If he would research Physics+Elect for us fast enough, that would be huge.

Long term, basically, we need to get our research up to about 10,000bpt by T235. Our thinking and planning should revolve around that, imo. Before then, we need to spam SUshi, spam MIning, and spam factories to whatever cities we want them in. We also should consider what infra we still need, if any, in our cities. They should probably specialize for what they're going to be doing (space parts, hiring merchants, hiring sci, spamming GPs by starving down, etc.).

Some cities don't need to grow past pop17 or pop20 to work specialists full time and produce a GP, so they may not need any more infrastructure.

 

[mdy]

I think if we gift Roosy up to SciMeth(+Astro?), there's a good chance he'll research Physics for us. We give up the GS, but it might be worth it, not sure. If he would research Physics+Elect for us fast enough, that would be huge.

Normally the AI's prioritise the upper branch of the tech tree than the physics electricity branch, so I doubt he will research them for us. I think we should research these techs ourselves after railroad and steal the others from rooservelt. An extra scientist would also make it substantially easier to get our golden ages.

 

[bcool]

Maybe we can wait 1 turn before switching out of slavery and OR

We might want to build a confu missionary in any city without a monastery that can finish 1 in one turn.

The gold from the shrine will soon give 3 gold/turn and the religion itself will give +1 to a city in need.
Frees up Bermuda and Siberia, Moscow for more important builds after the switch out of OR (since these are the 3 cities with monastery right now right?)

Gives us time to set up any critical whips we want before the start of the GA and switch to Pacifism/Caste.

 

[bcool]

quick attempt at big picture
-building more settlers important for gathering up seafood/sushi resources
-building more workers for massive clean up and tile improvements
-executive spreading
-GP production
-research top priority
-using AI to our best advantages (espionage and trading)
--and conquest timing

Civic changes
I'm in favor of waiting one more turn for switch to Caste/Pacifism (we could start GA, but if delay switch of civics might as well delay GA 1 turn)
reasons
--Cuba can 2 pop whip missionary this turn
--Orleans can also 2 pop whip missionary
--Haiti can 1 pop whip courthouse next turn if works workshop
--Tours can whip courthouse next turn if works plains farm I believe as well
--Hastings could save pop on a courthouse whip next turn since it will have invested hammers into it this turn
--Moscow could whip a grocer next turn perhaps if invested in it this turn (use overflow for exective the following turn)

Missionaries we pop this turn can spread confu to
we want confu in London I assume at least has a shot at GP production, needs confu though and could use the happiness from it (not good odds though)
--not sure where else but I'm sure we can find an important city that needs it among or recent and near future conquests.

Fish should steal Gold mine from Moscow and run engineer. I think with GA bonuses it would be able to finish WS in 3 turns (even if we wait until next turn to start it)
--Doesn't seem worth whipping it for 2 turns extra of WS (~132 gold and 183 hammers for 6 pop) What can 6 pop produce? Plus unhappiness penalties

GP Farm can finish executive this turn without a whip, stop 2 farms and run a citizen plus hammer tile I think.

Rosey war
Prepare workers to build the great Rosey railroad. For his conquest. Haven't thought beyond this and need to look at Gandhi conquest option.
But Rosey will have rifles soon probably better to take him out before this. A modern army is expense to produce or upgrade too. The more we can do before he really gets hard to root out the better right?
Trying to get him to research Physics for us and Giving up the free GS seems a bit crazy to me, but the research savings justifies risking 1 GA. I thought 4 more GA was already a stretch.

 

[bcool]

Are we planning another dip into slavery for factory whips? Overflow into 3 gorges dam?

and perhaps whips to OF into SoL

 

[mdy]

-building more settlers important for gathering up seafood/sushi resources

I agree

We have 6 sites we would like to settle for there resources fairly soon:
1) A city to grab the fish and copper SW of crabs
2) 4E 1N of Bermuda
3) 3N of Bermuda
4) 3S 2E of pigs
5) the oil/clams site on the northern island
6) The clam island SW of Stalin

Sites 5 and 6 will have to wait till the galley by St Nick is no longer needed to help with capturing that city. Kamchtka can rapidly build 2 settler to found these cities when the time comes.

Bahamas can build 4 more settlers+1esceutive by T+10.

There are some other islands we can settle, but they will have to wait till astronomy.

-using AI to our best advantages (espionage and trading)
--and conquest timing

These issues are related, given that America will research several techs for us to steal, I think we would be better off leaving him alive to research techs for us whilst we go after Gandhi. As he will be relatively backwards we can crush him with fewer units allowing us to put more resources into infrastructure. America and Stalin can be rapidly conquered at the end of the game, at very little cost when we don't have to worry about tech/corporation spreading. Judging from the power graph the Ducks did this very successfully.

 

[mdy]

The gold from the shrine will soon give 3 gold/turn and the religion itself will give +1 to a city in need.

True, but at the moment we have far more useful things to build. Given how tight the GP situation is for our 3 GP golden age I don't think we can afford to delay pacifism/caste system by 1T. London should be able to run 8 prophets as it is-enough to
give it a reasonable chance.

 

[babybluepants]

GP production: we only need two mutts (mdy's plan for 3GP; Physics+2Caste+1mutt for 4GP; Fusion+3Caste+1mutt for 5GP). With Caste we can go almost pure odds otherwise. Siberia and Beijing already have some gpp into others, and Siberia is needed for the 4GP due to overlap with Fusion. London and Bermuda are good backups. I think we should aim for pure GA+GM+GA each golden age, rather than running mixed-odds in a place like GP Farm.

Confu: we only need it in GP cities from now on, as we'll be running Pac. Siberia could probably do those easily via monastery. No?

I wouldn't say our troops are spread thin. They are spread out in 4 stacks for the 4-pronged attack plan. We would need to attack Canterbury this turn and we can finish it off on T+1 since there are so many units there. The other two cities can be taken on T+1 as well.

I know, I just meant we'll be tied up for a bit if we want to take him all the way down, and we won't have many cannons in America in the short term. Roosevelt has a big stack, so we might need a sizeable initial attack force. Maybe leaving Churchill with the southern cities, after Canterbury and Newcastle is better, like you said. The 3 southern cities don't have any resources, once London steal that copper.

Prepare workers to build the great Rosey railroad. For his conquest. Haven't thought beyond this and need to look at Gandhi conquest option.
But Rosey will have rifles soon probably better to take him out before this. A modern army is expense to produce or upgrade too. The more we can do before he really gets hard to root out the better right?

That's what I would think. He has Rifling already, btw.

 

[bcool]

True, but at the moment we have far more useful things to build. Given how tight the GP situation is for our 3 GP golden age I don't think we can afford to delay pacifism/caste system by 1T. London should be able to run 8 prophets as it is-enough to
give it a reasonable chance.

How could London have any chance without Confu?
Confu missionaries are arguable the most important builds for the GA and while we can build them in Siberia, Bermuda, Moscow all of those cities will have more important builds (executives) after the switch

Also if we wait 1 more turn for switch we can whip 4 settlers out next turn. Whipping settlers with Kremlin and imperialistic is the way to go. Settlers stop growth anyways so arguably those are the best things to whip. Delaying 1 more turn I think will help us get the Great People we need for the GA. I don't think rushing the switch without 1 turn to think about how to optimize the last whips makes sense.

 

[babybluepants]

Looks like we can do RR in 5t at the cost of about 2800g, under GA. Probably in 4t, with more spec hires. We already have 2100g + 2-3 city captures, so it seems doable asap. The plan is to steal Steam next turn?

mdy,
We'll need to get out at least one Mining Inc. exec very quickly. How does that affect your Fish plan? In conjunction with a possible 1t Caste/Pac delay?

 

[mdy]

How could London have any chance without Confu?

One trick, if we really wanted a prophet, and had adequate GP production in other cities would be to revolt to hinduism/judaism which would boost GP production in London at the expense of other cities. This means we would not have to run non priests in London to generate a GP maximising the odds of getting a prophet there. We can't do this now, but later we may be getting enough GP's in other cities to make it viable. If we did go for Confunicism there we should easily have a gap in the build queues for one of our cities with a monastry.

Also if we wait 1 more turn for switch we can whip 4 settlers out next turn. Whipping settlers with Kremlin and imperialistic is the way to go. Settlers stop growth anyways so arguably those are the best things to whip. Delaying 1 more turn I think will help us get the Great People we need for the GA. I don't think rushing the switch without 1 turn to think about how to optimize the last whips makes sense.

Even getting 3 GP's in 12 turns is very tight as it is, delaying the switch for 1 turn can only make it more difficult especially if we want to try to generate a fourth in time as a reserve (I still can't find a way to do this).

We don't need settlers for the Northern islands immediately as we can't transport them to there destinations, and Kamchatka can build them in time. Similarly Bahmas can easily build them for the south, even if we whipped them transport limitations means we wouldn't really be speeding up there development.

 

[mdy]

mdy,
We'll need to get out at least one Mining Inc. exec very quickly. How does that affect your Fish plan? In conjunction with a possible 1t Caste/Pac delay?

Good point. If we hire enough specialists to get it in 4 turns we can build 1 quickly with the overflow from Wall Street. I'll look at the GP plan again. This means we will almost certainly have to generate the 1400 Gp in fish and starve pigs to get the 1600 GP.

 

[bcool]

Even getting 3 GP's in 12 turns is very tight as it is, delaying the switch for 1 turn can only make it more difficult especially if we want to try to generate a fourth in time as a reserve (I still can't find a way to do this).

How could getting 3 GP's in 13 turns be harder than 12?

 

[mdy]

How could getting 3 GP's in 13 turns be harder than 12?

It isn't. I was saying that getting 3 GP's in 12T is more difficult if we delay the switch for 1T. We have probably already delayed the switch longer than we should have-we don't want to lose a useful turn of an empire wide golden age.

 

[bcool]

Missionaries are very good for us.

Not just because they let us double the gpp in select cities.
3 gold/ turn for 40 hammers is much better than building wealth.
If we have ~50 turns left, Confu missionary now is ~150 gold for 40 hammers. Worth it even with a whip penalty for whipping with no hammers invested and one among several reasons that waiting 1 turn for switch to Pacifism/Caste makes sense to me.
The more missionaries we build now the less we have to build wealth later.
Plus they give +1 for the cities we spread it too. That is worth significant hammers/wealth/science too since it would mean we can grow 1 more in those cities before having to pump up the culture slider.

The confu missionary is one of the best builds I think we can make. And the window for convenient places to build them is closing...

Siberia will be making executives (also important, more important, than missionaries) Or perhaps the SoL (again more important) or perhaps 3 Gorges Dam (again more important) Or buildings to help it run the right kind of specialists (again probably more important)

Moscow will be making executives (military units?)

Bermuda will be making executives

I don't see too many other opportunities to build missionaries anytime soon.

 

[bcool]

We don't really know when the Ducks finished. The Ducks easily could have finished significantly later than we think. The last save has never been shown--we don't know their finish date. And shouldn't we play our game the best we can rather than play to the date we think we have to beat?

If we sacrifice too much to rush the GA and produce the GP for the other GA then we might end up delaying our launch.

 

[mdy]

I don't dispute the benefits of Confunisism, I just don't think it's worth delaying the revolt for 1T. We already have confunicism in almost all the cities where it will make a significant difference. The cap of 5 on the number of executives means we can expect to have the occasional gap in the build queue. If we go after India next we should also be able to interrupt the military builds in Moscow occasionally.

We don't really know when the Ducks finished. The Ducks easily could have finished significantly later than we think. The last save has never been shown--we don't know their finish date. And shouldn't we play our game the best we can rather than play to the date we think we have to beat?

If we sacrifice too much to rush the GA and produce the GP for the other GA then we might end up delaying our launch.

I also agree with this, however we have potentially 48 turns of golden age left. Given the rate we have been growing it is a very realistic possibility that we could launch before then, so in future every turn we are not in a golden age is potentially one we will never have until it is too late to do any good.

 

[bcool]

I don't dispute the benefits of Confunisism, I just don't think it's worth delaying the revolt for 1T. We already have confunicism in almost all the cities where it will make a significant difference. The cap of 5 on the number of executives means we can expect to have the occasional gap in the build queue. If we go after India next we should also be able to interrupt the military builds in Moscow occasionally.

It is just one of the reasons to delay the revolt

-missionaries
-a turn to figure out how to get the most our of our last whips
--whipping 2 more courthouses (that we couldn't otherwise)
--saving on another courthouse build (turn to invest hammers into)
--whipping a settler or 2 or 3 (whipping them is very efficient as an imperialistic leader even if we can't settle them immediately) and we need a turn to invest in their builds
--whipping workers even (we have a ton of scrubbing and tile improvements to do)
--carefully considering what buildings might be worth whipping given the chance to switch builds, etc.

---lets us either whip the mining executive next turn in Fish (or whip another building with OF into executive the following turn)

edit: also with 2 executive types to choose from soon, I don't think the 5 executive limit is going to interrupt our builds anytime soon.

 

[babybluepants]

Good point. If we hire enough specialists to get it in 4 turns we can build 1 quickly with the overflow from Wall Street. I'll look at the GP plan again. This means we will almost certainly have to generate the 1400 Gp in fish and starve pigs to get the 1600 GP.

I still think a marginally easier option is to get one from Beijing, with Sushi asap + artists, and merchants in Pigs. If you can work out Fish, though, that's better, since we save the likely Spy for a later GA when we need it.

Edit: we can't get it in 4t, btw. Need to steal Steam first, and we'll burn at least some cash on Sushi spread. You can hold the OF via wealth-building if needed.

 

[mdy]

Building the mining corp executive in Fish requires the following adjustment to the plan:

Capital: No change. Keep spy/engineer hired. Hire scientist when it grows.

Fish: works fish, all land tiles except gold. Hires merchant and engineer
T+1: grow and work lake
T+2: Hire an extra merchant and stop working the lake
T+4: Grows, Wall Street finished. Hire 4 more merchants. This gives us just enough production to give
T+5: Mining corp executive built. Hire 14 merchants (fire engineer),(temporaily starving fish)
T+11: GP generated

Pigs:
T+0: Hire 2 artists only
T+1: Hire 9 artists
T+2: Hire another artist
T+10: Hire max artists without starving

Should generate a GP on T+12

This plan will work if we delay the switch to caste system/pacifism to allow 1 more turn for whipping, but assumes that we start the golden age immediately.

It does assume we can found the corp on T+4 which is pretty unlikely. We can deal with this by building wealth to preserve the overflow from Wall Street, and by hiring the 14 merchants as soon as it is completed, temporairily firing 7 of them for 1T to complete the executive at the appropriate point. It won't change the GP timings.