SGOTM 12 - One Short Straw

Off-topic

My unofficial graph analysis has at least 6 of the ten teams settling on the horses. :( Xteam hasn't played a turnset for 17 days. I'm afraid they might have figured out they're a bit screwed. Especially with copper in our fat cross but not theirs... At 1280 BC they probably wouldn't konw that we seem to be playing a pangaea minus Stalin, which further lowers the value of GLH. No oversea trade routes with AIs.

This appears to be a competition between 4 teams now. If that's true, it's nothing to celebrate about, really. But that's not our problem, is it? :)
 
We have to make a decision sooner or later. Are we going to try to get Gandhi to Friendly and have him reserach advanced techs for us or not? If so, we need every possible pluspoint we can get. The problem is, we already kind of screwed that foreve when we DoPed with Roosy. Gandhi always takes -2 for declaring on his friends. So I think we're probably stuck with never gettnig Gandhi to Friendly and planning to ice-ball him also eventually. IN this case, I see no need to give in to his demands. We don't get a negmod from it, just miss the plusmod.

When is an AI considered a friend? Rosey has a -3 modifer against Gandhi for trading with his worst enemy (us). We can increase that to -4 probably. And if Rosey gets a different religion than Gandhi, they definitely wouldn't be friends right?

Edit: Sorry I guess it is how Gandhi thinks of Rosey rather than the reverse that is important. Gandhi is pleased with Rosey so that would definitely give us the -2 modifier for declaring on Rosey.

Edit#2: any way we could change this? Spread a different religion to Rosey?

Edit#3: Is there no way to get Rosey to friendly? He was the best researcher by far in the test game, and I suspect he would be similar in the real game (although there definitely is more fallout in the real game than the test game).
 
At this point I'm hoping we can end up sharing religion and trading with both of them (for a good chunk of the game anyway). DG, Mao and probably Churchill are all closer and more likely war targets.
 
We get zero negmods from Gandhi for denying a demand.
I think I asked this already: why? Is this a Gandhi-specific thing? If that's really the case, I'd be inclined to hold back Currency.
 
I just ran a quick test using our test game. Once an AI has 3 cities or less, they are willing to take any city in trade or as a gift, no matter how crappy it is. I had to WB each AI down to three cities and they all accepted an Ice Ball city. De Gaulle was willing to take an Ice Ball right now even though he has more than 3 cities (due to proximity since it said "Liberate Ice Ball" rather than "City of Ice Ball"). Stalin was willing to take an Ice Ball for peace, something we should consider doing to screw with his maintenance costs...

In any event, we can easily fit 5 Ice Balls in the north (assuming the test save is somewhat close to the real save up there) and still settle the 2 or three cities we want. We want to make sure that the Ice Balls are land locked so that we don't have to worry about a rogue caravel or a settler sneaking off our continent.

I suggest we leave the fallout up there so that the AI can never grow past 1 pop. We can then clean up the fallout up north later in the game. Their archers can watch as our worker stacks clean up the fallout protected by Modern Armor. :D

Also, it should be very easy to direct enough espionage points to the right AI at the right time such that we can steal whatever late game techs they have. They will only be generating 4 epp/turn...

Do we want to prepare an Ice Ball for De Gaulle soon since he'll take it? I'm thinking that we should give it to him the turn before we start our major war campaign against him. That way, we don't have to pause our war in order to gift him the city.

Once we've settled Pigs and GP Farm (and maybe an off-continent city or two), I think we need to start our war effort in earnest. That will be the best way to continue our expansion and secure the best city sites available. We can start with De Gaulle and Mao followed by Churchill, Roosevelt and Gandhi. We'll keep the most useful (i.e. trade routes, tech trades, etc.) AI around the longest.

Based on the settings of this game, do we have an estimated date as to when we can eliminate De Gaulle? Macemen and Cats? Or something else? Should we beeline Machinery after Calendar or should we go for the GLib first?

Attached is a possible Ice Ball Scenario. I've only messed with the north in this save. Image that all of the other cities on our land mass are RED.
 

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One potential problem with the ice ball plan is that it will trigger trading with our worst enemy modifiers (at least with Gandhi if we gift De Gaulle a city).

I think it will take a while before we can conquer several AI's, but I think we should keep this idea in mind if we are about to take out an AI. Although I'm not sure if this is valuable enough to risk our relations and trading with Gandhi (and potentially Rosey).
 
Do we want to prepare an Ice Ball for De Gaulle soon since he'll take it? I'm thinking that we should give it to him the turn before we start our major war campaign against him. That way, we don't have to pause our war in order to gift him the city.
Good point.
One potential problem with the ice ball plan is that it will trigger trading with our worst enemy modifiers (at least with Gandhi if we gift De Gaulle a city).
True. We'll just have to deal with it. If Gandhi turns out to be a useful trading partner for us, then we'll be trading enough to keep the plusmods up, I would assume.
 
When is an AI considered a friend? Rosey has a -3 modifer against Gandhi for trading with his worst enemy (us). We can increase that to -4 probably. And if Rosey gets a different religion than Gandhi, they definitely wouldn't be friends right?

Edit: Sorry I guess it is how Gandhi thinks of Rosey rather than the reverse that is important. Gandhi is pleased with Rosey so that would definitely give us the -2 modifier for declaring on Rosey.

Edit#2: any way we could change this? Spread a different religion to Rosey?

Edit#3: Is there no way to get Rosey to friendly? He was the best researcher by far in the test game, and I suspect he would be similar in the real game (although there definitely is more fallout in the real game than the test game).
For the purposes of DoW negmods, a "friend" is anyone at Pleased or above. Gandhi has a hidden +3 or +4 (not sure which yet) for Roosy. So he needs to drop to -1 or -2 to be a Cautious. Different religions is the normal way for this to happen. Roosy could DoW Gandhi, I suppose.

Getting Roosy to Friendly: Roosy would actualy be the "easiest" to get to Friendly, even without Mercantilism. He has zero hidden negmods for us and that's unlikely to change, so he needs to be at 10 visible. That could be, for example:
Code:
Roo Gan
 -2  -2 nuked us
 -3  -3 DoWed us
 +0  +1 hidden
 +4  +4 trade
 +1  +1 peace
 +2  +2 resources
 +2  +2 OBs
 +3  +4 Share Religion
 +3  +2 Share War
--- ---
+10 +11 Total

+10 +10 Required for Friendly
From this it would appear that Gandhi is easier, but...BUT...we can bribe Roosy to war at Pleased, but not Gandhi. Gandhi must be Friendly first. This explains why an additional +1 from Gandhi (caving to his demands) would be necessary. Another possibility would be the plusmod from giving him X number of techs.

Note on the shared reli and war, those values may be +1, I'm not sure. This would make it easier for both.

I think I asked this already: why? Is this a Gandhi-specific thing? If that's really the case, I'd be inclined to hold back Currency.
True for Gandhi, not sure about any other AIs. Been this way since Vanilla. I'll try to remember to save it, next time it comes up in a test save.
 
In the long run I think that confining the AI's to an arctic city is a good idea, but there is no hurry to build one in the near future. We have more important things to build and there is a risk he might not take it before we attack him - making it a useless drain on our resources for a while. Once De Gaulle has been reduced to one city we can sign a cease fire agreement, gift an arctic city, and then redeclare war the next turn, so it wouldn't slow us down.

If we do things right we should be teching much faster than the AI's so we should not need to do enough trading for WFYABTA to be a problem. This would leave us free to gift ice ball cities to De Gaulle etc without worrying about getting a couple of negmods.

Do we want to start assigning our espionage to civs other than India once we can see his research?
 
One potential problem with the ice ball plan is that it will trigger trading with our worst enemy modifiers (at least with Gandhi if we gift De Gaulle a city).

I think it will take a while before we can conquer several AI's, but I think we should keep this idea in mind if we are about to take out an AI. Although I'm not sure if this is valuable enough to risk our relations and trading with Gandhi (and potentially Rosey).

One way around this trading with the enemy issue to to get an AI down to one city and then give him an Ice Ball as terms of a Peace Treaty. Sure, it delays our war effort against said AI by 10 turns. However, we can use these 10 turns to consolidate and heal our stack. Or we can use the 10 turns to go after another AI. The 10 turns won't be lost, I'm sure.

I agree that we're not in a rush to produce an Ice Ball right away. However, if we plan on doing this, we at least need to be thinking about it now so that we can send one or two poor workers up north to scrub the city sites if required. We may also want to build one long road up that way to speed up our settlers...
 
Do we want to start assigning our espionage to civs other than India once we can see his research?

I was thinking/dreaming about this last night... :sad: I think we need to start assigning EPP toward the first AI that we'll be stealing a tech from. It would also be nice to start assigning some points toward De Gaulle so that we can see into his city before we launch our attack (and steal Military Science).
 
We may eventually do something like that, but I don't really wanna waste resources any time soon. It's largely irrelevant until we can actually mount an invasion force against DG. We'll have workers in the north for a long time, with Siberia to be followed by at least Silver and Corn/Fish.

Edit: x-post
 
@LC

What is the threshold, assuming no hidden modifiers, for each transition in AI relations? For example, at what value does and AI go from Cautious to Pleased? Pleased to Friendly?
 
lurker's comment:
< -10 = furious
-9 to -5 = angry
-4 to +4 = cautious
+5 to +9 = pleased
> +10 = friendly
 
Stealing Technology from my testing.

Note that newer versions (BUFFY?) seemed to have nerfed somewhat the overpowered potential of stealing technology. So this post from DanF seems to be out of date.

Unless my testing is somehow incomplete, there seem to be very few factors that stiil affect stealing tech:



-15% for state religion means the AI is in one religion, we are in another, and our dummy city has OUR religion in it.
+4% distance seems to be the minimum distance cost. We can achieve this by puttin gour dummy city at Moscow-2S-1SE.
-50% stationary spy is havin g our spy in his city for 5t
-50% for espionage point spending. We won't get it down to 50%, but a GSpy could get it down below 70%, which is decent.

My rough calcs for Nationalism and Constitution at 70% are that we'd need about 1500epps (somewhat less). The GSpy gives us 3000epps, but only for one AI of course.

If we build a lot of chs, which we should anyway for our corporations, we could accumulate a lot of epps without a GSpy, but maybe too late for Nationalism and COnstitution, but not for MilSci (if we care) and whatever CHurchill has.

I wouldn't worry about our EPPs for now. Leave them on Gandhi.
 

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lurker's comment:
< -10 = furious
-9 to -5 = angry
-4 to +4 = cautious
+5 to +9 = pleased
> +10 = friendly
<= -10 = furious
-9 to -3 = annoyed
-2 to +2 = cautious
+3 to +9 = pleased
>= +10 = friendly

The code:
Spoiler :
Code:
CvPlayerAI.cpp

AttitudeTypes CvPlayerAI::AI_getAttitudeFromValue(int iAttitudeVal)
{
	if (iAttitudeVal >= 10)
	{
		return ATTITUDE_FRIENDLY;
	}
	else if (iAttitudeVal >= 3)
	{
		return ATTITUDE_PLEASED;
	}
	else if (iAttitudeVal <= -10)
	{
		return ATTITUDE_FURIOUS;
	}
	else if (iAttitudeVal <= -3)
	{
		return ATTITUDE_ANNOYED;
	}
	else
	{
		return ATTITUDE_CAUTIOUS;
	}
}
 
lurker's comment: Sorry LC... apparently we played a whole SG with wrong data back in Ruff08 :S
 
In the last SGOTM, Dhoomstriker and I ran some extensive testing to find the best time to whip a granary. Dhoomstriker had read an article stating that the food that overflows when you grow in pop after building the granary also counts as being put into the granary storage. Let me explain with an example, which was done at Epic speed.

Assume that we start with a city at size 2.

Test 1:
T0 - 12/36 - whip granary - 12/33 +5F/turn
T1 - 17/33 - +5F
T2 - 22/33 - +5F
T3 - 27/33 - +5F
T4 - 32/33 - +7F (I worked a higher yield food tile to maximize the overflow)
T5 - Grow to 2​
On the turn I got the granary (T1), I had 17 food. 33 - 17 = 16. Perfect. The granary should have 16 food in it when I grow from 1 to 2, right? Wrong!! On T4 I had 6 food overflow (32 + 7 = 39; 39/33 leads to 6 food overflow). So, on T5 my granary actually had 16 (max granary storage) + 6 (overflow food) = 22 food, not the expected 16 food. That 6 food overflow on T4 actually got added to the granary storage. Nice!!

Test 2:
T0 - 16/36 - whip granary – 16/33 - +7F
T1 - 23/33 - +7F
T2 - 30/33 - +7F
T3 - Grow to 2​
Conventional wisdom states that since I completed the granary on T1, the granary would only have 10 food in storage (33 - 23 = 10) when we grow on T3. However, the overflow on T2 also gets put into the granary storage. So, the granary actually has 7 (food from T1) + 7 (food from turn 2) + 4 (overflow from T2: 37/33 leads to 4 overflow) = 18!! It appears that the expected 10 food in the granary storage actually grew to 18 food.

So, how much food do we want in Moscow’s granary when it’s completed?

I ran a quick test and this is what I found:

T90 - 3/30 - 66/100 in settler - +31 hammers
T91 - 3/30 - 97/100 in settler - +31 hammers
T92 - 3/30 - 0/60 in worker - +44 hammers (14 overflow)
T93 - 3/30 - 44/60 in worker - +23 hammers
T94 - 3/30 - 0/60 in granary - +24 hammers (4 overflow) +6 food (Moscow moves from gold to rice; Fish works the gold)
T95 - 9/30 - 24/60 in granary - +18 hammers - +6 food
T96 - 15/30 - 42/60 in granary - +18 hammers - +6 food
T97 - 21/30 - granary done - +6 food
T98 - 27/30 - +6 food
T99 - grow to 6 pops - 15/32 (6 from T97 + 6 from T98 + 3 overflow from T98 = 15 food).​
So we get the expected 15 food in the food basket even though we actually completed the granary with 21/30 food. Conventional wisdom says that we would have only had 9/32. Not true!

What happens if we slow grow Moscow for a turn as suggested?

T96 - 15/30 - 42/60 in granary - +22 hammers - +1 food (work gold rather than rice)
T97 - 16/30 - granary done - +6 food (switch back to the rice)
T98 - 22/30 - +6 food
T99 - 28/30 - +6 food
T100 - grow to 6 pops - 19/32 (6 from T97 + 6 from T98 + 6 from T99 = 18 (cap is 30/2 = 15 + 4 overflow from T99 = 19 food).​
OK, by slow growing we aren’t necessarily better off because we grow to 6 pops one turn later and only have 19/32 food. In the first example, we would have 15 + 4 = 19/32 on T100 as well. The extra turn on the gold mine on T96 is made up by growing a turn sooner and working the gold on T99. In this case, we could go either way depending on if/when Fish can work the gold. Also, in the case of slow growing by working the gold, we actually end up losing 3 food due to the granary storage capping at 15 turning our possible 18 food into 15.

However, what happens if we try this:

… follow first example until

T98 - 27/30 - +8 food - switch from the horses to the farm (trading 1f/4h/1c for 3f) !?
T99 - grow to 6 pops - 19/32 (6 from T97 + 8 from T98 + 5 overflow from T98 = 19 food).​
So, by working the farm rather than the horses for a turn, we aren’t trading 4h/1c for 2f as it appears at first glance. Due to the overflow food in the granary, we are actually trading 4h/1c for 4f!! (15/32 in the basket vs. 19/32). Is 4f > 4h/1c? I think so…
 
Neat stuff, Mitchum. ZPV talked about that to us in SG10, so I knew there was something there, and your explanation seems to have cemented my understanding. :goodjob:

Couple questions:
1. Seems like your last comparison should be +4f versus +6h1.5c because of Bureau, right? To me the question of which is better has more to do with what does the 4f gain us (pop7 1t sooner?) versus what does the other gain us.
2. What about Fish? Does this mean we should hold off on 2popping the granary? That would mean that the ensuing poprushes might be delayed as well. How does all that play out?
 
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