SGOTM 12 - One Short Straw

@ Mitchum

Yes, there is absolutely no hurry to push Mao out of St Nick, especially if were not interested in Mil Sci soon. But still better to only CF him, for flexibility.

Churchill doesn't have Optics yet--no caravels.
 
I'm pretty sure Bureau is worse for us. With an empire as large as ours the increased maintenance of Bureau makes it worse than Nationhood. The + :) happiness from barracks is actually helping us as is the espionage bonus and the ability to draft. Nationhood in my mind at least is here to stay.

To review the tradeoffs:

We only have 3 barracks right now (Moscow, Fish and Paris), so the +2 :) is negligible. Paris is the only city that really needs this +2:) right now.

Bureaucracy costs 126. Nationhood costs 85.

Moscow has 55 max base hammers and 60 max base commerce. Bureacracy would provide an extra 27 hammers and 30 base commerce at a cost of 41 gold.
 
Couple other details I thought of:

* Any thoughts about our caravel exploration?
* What will we do with our next GG? Settle it in Moscow again?
* I'd not bother with the cannon in Fish. COuld be a wb for the clams, a harbor, a courthouse...
 
You also need to multiply the Bureau +41g *1.33 for inflation.

To me we don't want to just look at the coins but also the big picture an dask if the extra cost advances our strategy further. I'm not sure about before Sushi, but it's obvious to me that after Sushi we'll be in Bureau so we can produce 1 exec per turn.
 
In fact, I'm already wondering how many more muskets we need to draft. We've got a ton of units already. Roosy won't know what hit him.

I agree on not upgrading the trebs. Regarding muskets, they are good to help our maces take out city defenders and then to stay behind as military police. I think we'll need quite a few more if we plan to take on Roosevelt any time soon.

EDIT: with that said, whipping maces instead of drafting in GP Farm is pretty compelling. 2 every 3 turns I guess.
 
* Any thoughts about our caravel exploration?
* What will we do with our next GG? Settle it in Moscow again?
* I'd not bother with the cannon in Fish. COuld be a wb for the clams, a harbor, a courthouse...

There is a land mass just south of Pigs that I'd like to take a look at soon.
GG settled in Moscow sounds good to me for the experience and the +3:science:
Agreed about the cannon in Fish. I'm building wealth for a turn and then a grocer there.
 
To review the tradeoffs:

We only have 3 barracks right now (Moscow, Fish and Paris), so the +2 is negligible. Paris is the only city that really needs this +2 right now.

Bureaucracy costs 126. Nationhood costs 85.

Moscow has 55 max base hammers and 60 max base commerce. Bureacracy would provide an extra 27 hammers and 30 base commerce at a cost of 41 gold.

You don't mention the espionage bonus which is significant, and trust me with war weariness the happiness from barracks will be a factor. Something that might even convince us to build a barracks in a city just for the +2 happiness. And LC already mentioned the inflation adjustment to your numbers.
 
You don't mention the espionage bonus which is significant, and trust me with war weariness the happiness from barracks will be a factor. Something that might even convince us to build a barracks in a city just for the +2 happiness. And LC already mentioned the inflation adjustment to your numbers.

I think the espionage bonus is going to be minimized once we've stolen the next 5 techs in T+4 or so. We should accumulate enough passive espionage with our IAs and CHs to steal whatever comes up in the near future without having to touch the espionage slider much.

True, WW could become a big issue soon and barracks would be a cheap +2:). Escalating WW is why I threw Police State out there. Agreed, Representation is awesome. But if we do run Slavery for a handful of turns, we won't be running that many specialists, right?

I forgot about the inflation. Thanks for pointing that out. :cool:
 
I played through a war with churchill, I think we will need upgrades...

Yes, you're the only one that's played this game any further than where we are right now, so your insights are extremely valuable here. Why do you think your experience was so much harder than what LC predicts? Some ideas:

  1. Churchill had more units in the test game because he was gearing up for a a war but hadn't fought it yet.
  2. Churchill had more longbows in his cities.
  3. Churchill had access to maces sooner in the test game.
  4. ...

By looking at what we can see right now, Churchill looks pretty easy once we've taken care of his stack in Marseilles, but maybe we're missing something.
 
Speaking of upgrades, if we do run into a situation like bcool's talking about, in contrast to healing, we can move our unit into our city or culture and upgrade it the same turn, if it still has at least .3/1 movement remaining. This might be useful to continue the assault, as bcool mentioned.
 
I had a decent number of muskets die, I don't know the numbers but even with cannons, I lost a number of them and i lost muskets too against weakened defenders. Churchill has a number of cities and at least his capital has levees and Moai, so he produces units quickly.

I was sloppier with my war plans walking down to London rather than jumping down with the galleys so that could make a big difference.

Churchill in the test game had 2 GG settled in a city and I faced at least a few CGIII D1 longbows that would really cause our trebs problems and caused cannons issues.
 
I think the espionage bonus is going to be minimized once we've stolen the next 5 techs in T+4 or so. We should accumulate enough passive espionage with our IAs and CHs to steal whatever comes up in the near future without having to touch the espionage slider much.

I think the bonus is going to help us.

Rosey in the test game teched military tradition (which we will want)
And maybe Replaceable Parts, Democracy, Riflery?

Churchill's Steam Power isn't going to be that cheap unless we plan ahead on that one (we need to think about getting a spy in place sooner rather than later I think. I doubt we will get him to 3 cities by the time we want steam power).

Stalin still has some unknown tech(s) (fission perhaps?) even if we don't want military science any time soon

Heck maybe Gandhi will tech something for us too.
 
We should accumulate enough passive espionage with our IAs and CHs to steal whatever comes up in the near future without having to touch the espionage slider much.
Churchill's ep spending is already down to 78% and Steam Powere currently would cost us only 912 eps. :cool: The lowest it could get would be 585. :cry:

:king:

One interesting detail about this game I've noticed is that no AI has built the Heroic Epic yet. Isn't that interesting?

But France and China have built two capitals... :mischief:

xpost w/bcool
 
Churchill's Steam Power isn't going to be that cheap unless we plan ahead on that one (we need to think about getting a spy in place sooner rather than later I think. I doubt we will get him to 3 cities by the time we want steam power).
We can always gift him Marseilles, because he has owned it. That would currently cost 1008eps, with a minimum of 646eps. Not much more than St Nick, really.
 
@LC I like your plan a lot, but I have a few questions about the first few turns of it, which is what I'm planning right now.


Your trebs should begin at above 50% odds.

After the cultural defenses are down, I assume.

1. You capture Nanjing on T+2 no matter what, unless he happens to build walls and you can't tear them down in 1t with the two accuracy you have there. You can add one of those three trebs to this stack if you want, but more is surely overkill, imo. So here I don't really change anything except that if you tear down those walls on T+2, you finish the job, even against those 5 lbs. No probs. (BLame it on me if not...)

This should be doable, but we only have 4 full-strength maces and two of them are combat + cover and one of them is combat + medic II. we may end up with some 60% battles with the wounded maces unless a few of the longbows get red-lined by seige.

2. All the seige in Orleans, including the cannon, go to Marseilles-3W next turn.

The can't get to Tours-NW from here...

Add to this stack two trebs from near Shanghai, if available (you might have sent them to Shanghai).

Three trebs, right? Or were you thinking to do something else with the third?

Also add to this stack the musket from Orleans and 3 more from the Marseilles-2W stack.

That only leaves 5 muskets 2W of Marseilles, a wounded musket and mace in Orleans, an axe in Rheims, an axe W+NW of Marseilles and a musket south of Marseilles to deal with Churchill's stack there. Is that enough? Most of his units are combat promoted, so I assume most of them will head out.

On T+2, DOW Chruchill and move this stack to Tours-NE.

NW, right?
 
My PPP for the next three turns is nearly done. I still have to fully assimilate LC's Churchill attack plan first. Using four galleys for worker stealing changes getting the backup spies to Vlad/Troy (which is secondary to the Churchill war effort in my opinion). I'll post it later tonight once the kids are in bed. I'm not counting on Slavery (although I'd like it), but I haven't started on any banks yet in the next three turns either. We can plop them in where/when it makes sense...

EDIT: Things seem to be coming together nicely. Thanks for all of the valuable input for this turnset, the most import one of the game! :D
 
@LC I like your plan a lot, but I have a few questions about the first few turns of it, which is what I'm planning right now.

After the cultural defenses are down, I assume.
All defenses down, yes. You can see the odds right now, if you want by clicking on your choice of unit, hovering the mouse over Nanjing and pressing Alt. RIght now it's 22.97% for a CRII treb, but note that the strengths are 4.00 versus 5.45. That's with tehlb getting only -10% off the 6.00. After the culture is gone, it will be -50%...

This should be doable, but we only have 4 full-strength maces and two of them are combat + cover and one of them is combat + medic II. we may end up with some 60% battles with the wounded maces unless a few of the longbows get red-lined by seige.
I'm assuming all the lbs will be red-lined. Except, as I mentioned after the 5th treb, where you might still have one lb who did pretty well and it might be more favorable to attack with the CRIII mace. BUt you still have 2 more trebs at that point, so you should beable to red-line all of them.

The can't get to Tours-NW from here...
Sorry, I meant Tours-N, not NE.

Three trebs, right? Or were you thinking to do something else with the third?
Well, I thought you wanted to send them to Nanjing as T+3 backups, so I said that I thought one was more than enough. I personally would send all three to Marseilles-3W (if you don't have to use them to defend Shanghai, of course, after luring lbs out of Nanjing).

That only leaves 5 muskets 2W of Marseilles, a wounded musket and mace in Orleans, an axe in Rheims, an axe W+NW of Marseilles and a musket south of Marseilles to deal with Churchill's stack there. Is that enough? Most of his units are combat promoted, so I assume most of them will head out.
You have one S of Marseilles arriving T+1, another arriving from GP T+2. If you send a galley down from the Orleans area on T+1, it can pick up the T+1 and T+2 GP muskets and drop them in Marseilles on T+2 before DoWing and they'll teleport somewhere close, the galley will teleport to Stalin back up. Then you also have a steady diet of cannons coming through ORleans as well. I think you're covered.

But of course you want to be smart about it. YOu don't necessarily have to attack them. If they're coming towards Orleans, for example, you might just want to move them all into Orleans on the first turn, then attack only the axes on the second turn. I'm pretty sure you'll have a turn before they attack, because the cats will bombard first, and the walls will slow that a bit. After he loses his axes, his spears hopefully won't do much. You also have that axe there, btw, and he'll defend well against the spears too.

Also don't forget to build walls in 2t in Rheims, if the stack goes toward it.

NW, right?
N. (Sorry.)
 
One note on Orleans:

Please be careful if CHurchill's stack or any unit goes toward Orleans. Theykill all our galleys in those forts. :eek::eek::eek: Especially the pillaging units, like the CII spears maybe or that one Drill II lb. Carefully scan the terrain before moving any units to make sure you didn't overlook some isolated pillager/attacker.
 
Back
Top Bottom