SGOTM 14 - One Short Straw

[Dhoomstriker]

Looking closely at the 'Ducks Score and Power graphs, I'd say that they went for an early Galley rush against Asoka and then used his population points to fund a massive explosion of units.

Since I suspect that they Oracled Civil Service, it is likely that they Lightbulbed their way through Philosophy + Education and used Bureaucracy-powered teching plus Liberalism to take Astronomy.

Not a bad approach if I'm right, but fortunately Asoka is still a pushover in our game at this late stage, so we weren't really hurt by delaying our first war.

 

[babybluepants]

I think we may as well invest cash in some Bieber records now. Though the Black Keys are coming out with a new one this week...

We only have 9 days left. I somehow had it in my head that the deadline was the 20th. The game is fairly straightforward at the moment. I think you should keep going as much as you can tmr. I have some time on the weekends, but next week should be pretty intense at work.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

eventually we'll hit our poprushing limit.

Does it at all make sense to whip the odd Forge in order to get +3 Happiness?

Without the Happiness, the Hammer investment probably won't pay off, but with it, that's an extra 3-whips' worth of production in a City that grows reasonably quickly... still probably not worth it... but if we factor in War Weariness potentially crippling Cities to the point that they might otherwise shrink, it might be worth it... but then again, facing so many Archers instead of Longbowmen means less losses and less War Weariness... so, probably "no" to Forges in most cases, but maybe Ivory City will need one for Happiness purposes if we don't have too many more Happiness Resources available to come online... we should get Wine soon though, right? There's a Wine by Bombay if there isn't one near our core area.

Meh, Forges probably won't help us sufficiently except in border cases like Ivory City, but it's worth considering such a building if we're at a point where we might otherwise go into Unhappiness... maybe... it's not like we get a production bonus to buildings while we already get one to units... yeah, it's too hard to tell without seeing what our Cities look like but my gut instinct says that I'm rambling about something that we're not going to build.


What tech comes after Music?

If we're going to get Civil Service in trade then we don't mind getting Theology, since we would no longer care about unlocking Paper for Lightbulbs, although Theocracy won't be of all that much use since most of our Cities have no Religion and many of the Buddhist ones are too tiny in size to contribute much in the way of units.

We don't really even need unit promos desperately anyway now that we know that the Wizard pales in comparison to our test games.

There's Drama... the Cultural Slider might come in handy at times.

We don't really need Paper now that we have found Oz, particularly if we're sticking to Domination (for Conquest, you might want to get map trades so that you can find every last AI City without having to hunt for all of them).

Philosophy is of no practical use unless you want to go for Nationalism but likely the Taj Mahal and its unlocking tech would come too late to be of much help.

So, I guess I'll say Music -> Drama unless we find Buddhism spreading to our core Cities, in which case we could consider grabbing Theology instead.


Are we still trying for 1 Great Person in Stone City and another Great Person in Washington, to give us two Great-People-fueled Golden Ages?


Do we want to consider sending a reasonably-sized force ahead to Ragnar to capture any Cities that potentially hug the eastern side of the map? Nah, it's probably too early to do so, since we still won't have revealed a path to the AIs from the south across the Ocean on the south-east part of the map. So, yeah, carry on with the focused assault on Asoka.


Did I type anything of use here? Probably not. Bed time.

 

[LowtherCastle]

We only have 9 days left. I somehow had it in my head that the deadline was the 20th.

Yikes! I don't know what I had in my head, but good thing you mentioneded that. I didn't realize it was that tight.

an extra 3-whips' worth of production in a City that grows reasonably quickly... still probably not worth it... but if we factor in War Weariness potentially crippling Cities to the point that they might otherwise shrink, it might be worth it...

This is a good idea. We just wait till the city can't poprush anymore, then we get a free forge which gives us a bonus 2, after subtracting that poprush. Later the forge will give us a bonus on settlers.

----------------

I need to study the map a bit, but these last five turns have reminded me of the power of the war economy. We're averaging 50gpt from warring. That won't be easy to keep up against lbms and/or maces. Both Gandhi and Mansa have MC now. We need to step on the speed.

I have an idea for that: We chop the MoM asap. We might not get it, because it should fallen already, but with the +4t GAge is not just about commerce and hammers. It's about the chain reaction of golden ages caused by the gpps. In other words, one GA leads to the next to the next and we're in a perpetual golden age from now on. We can complete MoM in Bombay on T+9 or on T+8 if we start a GA near the end. The problem with starting a GA before MoM is that my testing shows that it won't exgtend an existing GA. Does anyone have any experience with that?

Another excellent idea is Dhoom's thought about settling our GGs and switching to Vassalism. Since our WEs' most useful promotions are combat I, II,..., with the third promotion we could take amphibious. I'm thinking just about settling in Ivory, btw. This will speed up our conquest significantly.

Grenadiers are still part of the equation for me. A CII amphibious grenadier would make mincemeat of lbms and maces. My hunch is that with MoM + the Music GA, we could produce enough GPs for grenadiers AND 3 consecutive GAs, starting very soon. Wouldlnt' that be killer?!?!?

The war economy enables MoM enables GAs enable grens enable faster=better war economy enables surplus economy for domination at the end. Speed becomes acceleration. Acceleration warps time.
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[babybluepants]

Why does Ivory need to grow further? It can already work all of its hammers, so the only gain is 4cpt from silk. We give up 54h from this point to grow 1pop and we could just lose that extra pop to WW at some point anyway.

It's unfortunate we don't have MP in all cities. That's costing us some happy, but I'm not sure how to fix it. If we pillage the roads around Agra, would it be connected to the network via that lake?

There's no worker on the Madurai wheat, but we have one roading at Bombay.

I would have said we slow-tech Drama and forget about anything further.

 

[babybluepants]

A quick Wizard test. Can't really see in the screenshot. Was it CG3+Drill1?
C2 or C3 + Amphibious looks good to me after a Flanking2 hit.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Why does Ivory need to grow further? It can already work all of its hammers, so the only gain is 4cpt from silk. We give up 54h from this point to grow 1pop and we could just lose that extra pop to WW at some point anyway.

It's unfortunate we don't have MP in all cities. That's costing us some happy, but I'm not sure how to fix it. If we pillage the roads around Agra, would it be connected to the network via that lake?

There's no worker on the Madurai wheat, but we have one roading at Bombay.

I would have said we slow-tech Drama and forget about anything further.

Cpt is going to rapidly become a problem. 4cpt * 50t = 200c. It adds up.

We should build MP before Feudalism, but not yet because we've had horribly bad luck with our siege and are suddenly down to 1 treb and 3 cats. I'm still going flat out on attack units (siege + WEs). Can't let up yet.

The Bombay worker just got captured last turn. I had nowhere to put him and the WE needed 1t to heal so I just built the road for a turn. I'm thinking he'll go chop. I was thinking I'd leve him isolated, finishing the road, to lure the HA out of the Horse City, but I changed my mind.

If our finish date is 45t from now, it's almost impossible to get GPs for 3 GAs and grenadiers. I guess we make a run for it without grens, sadly. We could have done it if we had grown our pop more, but that's the trade-off for warring. So I guess we just need to make a ton of siege and suicide like crazy.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Was it CG3+Drill1?

Yes.
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[LowtherCastle]

I also think this no-barracks plan is mega-false savings.

 

[LowtherCastle]

It's unfortunate we don't have MP in all cities. That's costing us some happy, but I'm not sure how to fix it. If we pillage the roads around Agra, would it be connected to the network via that lake?

No, of course not. You're thinking of a warrior pump? That's a good idea. I'll pillage those roads. Agra has pigs also, btw. We captured it this turn (T128) losing 2 more siege. The only problem with Agra as a warrior pump is that it has no hammers other than forests and poprushes, so I guess we could go siege-warrior-siege-warrior. Or just let the overflow turn to gold, which also doesn't hurt particularly.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

The problem with starting a GA before MoM is that my testing shows that it won't exgtend an existing GA. Does anyone have any experience with that?

You are correct. Ownership of the MoM is required at the time of launching the Golden Age. You are free to lose the MoM after that point since it's only that one timepoint that matters for the extra-long Golden Age.

I'm okay with you trying to build it outside of a Golden Age. It's doubly good as Wealth for Failure Gold and we can potentially just aim to capture it if we are beaten to completing it (although likely Gandhi/Monte will be the ones to build it).

I'm thinking just about settling in Ivory, btw.

Well, we'd get instant Amphibious with Vassalage and 1 settled Great General there, or two settled Great Generals without Vassalage.

Alternatively, 1 settled Great General plus 1 XP gained from the first fight, but I admit that it would be nice to have Amphibious War Elephants rolling off of the production line.

The only hook with Vassalage is that we have to get Feudalism... and the longer that we delay getting that, the more Archers we will face (including Barb ones).

So, I would still prefer to delay learning Feudalism until all AIs know it, then only using Vassalage as a bonus at the end of the game (or never at all if we still have some AIs with Archers).

Interestingly... if Ragnar and Asoka don't learn Feudalism, it would help to leave them the one surviving AI out of those two AIs with one City and take a Cease Fire (or Peace when said AI has a couple of Cities and get a City for free for Peace)... that way, we'd have another player besides us not knowing Feudalism and the Barbs wouldn't be getting it anytime soon.

Grenadiers are still part of the equation for me.

Then you can't take Civil Service, since taking Civil Service unlocks the Paper -> Education Lightbulbing line.

You can't have it both ways. Maces OR Grenadiers, not both.

I honestly don't see us having enough game-years to get the number of Great People that it would be required to launch the Golden Ages (3 Great People) plus get 3 more for Lightbulbing, at least not without focusing our economy wayyyyy too much on Specialists.

War Elephants will be good enough... if we have to spend the odd turn dropping off Trebs and War Elephants instead of amphibiously attacking, doing so will still be much faster than stunting our production of units (by hiring Specialists).

I would aim for a total of 3 more Great People... one from Music, one from Stone, one from Washington... and let the extra GPP that we get during a Golden Age be darned.

Here, I don't see it as one of those "impossible things to do that I am challenging you to do," since I know that you love to take on those challenges. This time, I'm injecting a practical opinion that I don't even want us to try and figure out how, since I don't think that the investment will pay off more than simply spamming War Elephants (and possibly Macemen) will provide in terms of long-term value.

It's unfortunate we don't have MP in all cities. That's costing us some happy, but I'm not sure how to fix it.

We should build MP before Feudalism, but not yet because we've had horribly bad luck with our siege and are suddenly down to 1 treb and 3 cats. I'm still going flat out on attack units (siege + WEs). Can't let up yet.

We should probably pump out a couple of Archers somewhere as soon as we can afford to do so. They're pretty cheap.

I would like to keep the Maginot Line in place, though, as we don't want to see our core Cities threatened by a large land-based stack of units.

There WAS one Warrior at the northern part of our core area... it was spawn-busting Barb Galleys but are we really afraid if a Barb Galley shows up? We can just build a Galleon in a nearby City if one does show up, right? If so, that's 1 more Military Police unit available to us.

I would have said we slow-tech Drama and forget about anything further.

As fun as Grenadiers might be, I have to side with bbp on this one. We have already played an awesome game. That's part of the problem... as a person who likes to optimize things (I know that LC is the same), it's hard to sit back and just say "wow, we met with a few stumbles but overall our plans have worked and will contiue to work and don't really need a lot of changes to them."

If every team had to face a Drill IV Machine Gun, we would have plenty of game time to get to Grenadiers. However, since the Wizard is going to be easy to kill, the game is only marginally different from a regular game. As such, the optimal path is not going to be slowing down our war machine just to get to the next tech--we're at the tech level that we need and can just keep pumping until the cows come home.

I don't think that we even need Maces but we can optionally get them on the off chance that a team learns Machinery -> Engineering for Pikes.

Can't really see in the screenshot. Was it CG3+Drill1?

You are correct. Drill I = only 0 to 1 First Strikes (less First Strikes than an Archer gets).

If our finish date is 45t from now, it's almost impossible to get GPs for 3 GAs and grenadiers. I guess we make a run for it without grens

Yup, thanks for being practical about it. As I said, if we had have had an uber-Wizard, EVERY team would have finished much later (100+ War Elephants do not take a trivial amount of time to build and you'd need even more of them since my tests did not involve an amphibious assault). However, since the Wizard is relatively easy to kill compared to our testing, we don't have the luxury of game-time.

It will be frustrating to see us getting extra GPP during a Golden Age that won't go to use, but admit that this fact happens in every game and you'll get over it.

I also think this no-barracks plan is mega-false savings.

Trollololol. Well, we had to get started at some point. What's the cost of a single Barracks? Roughly two Police-State-built Catapults?

Eventually, in the medium term, we'll miss those Barracks, particularly for the lack of Amphibious War Elephants, but we don't have Organized Religion in our Cities and we don't have Forges and we don't have a long-drawn-out game, so some Cities (particularly the ones making Galleons) would not have benefitted.

Yes, there might be a window where we'll need to build some Barracks, particularly if the AIs get Longbowmen, but for now while the pickings are good (where Swords, Horse Archers, Spears, and Archers as our main opposition), let's just keep on the unit-building pressure.


Honestly, Amphibious War Elephants would just be icing on the cake and are by no means necessary for killing the AIs or the Wizard.

No, of course not. You're thinking of a warrior pump? That's a good idea. I'll pillage those roads.

Uhhh... I can't see the map with that City, but note that you can't pillage Roads once they fall within your own Cultural Borders. So, you've got to do the pillaging either before capturing the City or between capturing it and the City's Cultural Borders expanding.

A City goes into revolt upon capture for a number of turns that is roughly based on the City's population level, so if it's a small City, you'll have less turns to pillage post-capture than if it were a larger City.

 

[babybluepants]

I agree with LC on barracks, but it doesn't matter too much at this stage.

Yes, I meant warrior pump. Don't particularly wanna build a bunch of archers right now.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Yes, I meant warrior pump. Don't particularly wanna build a bunch of archers right now.

We are being so cheap... but does it help us to be so cheap?

22 Hammers for a Warrior versus 37 Hammers for an Archer, if I recall correctly.

That's roughly 3 Warriors for every 2 Archers.

Do we really need to build so many Military Police units? I mean, we only need 1 per City and not every City needs one.

So, what's that, like 6 more Archers? Instead we could have built 6 Warriors and saved:
(6 * 37 = 222) - (6 * 22 = 132) = 90 Hammers?

And those are "final Hammers" (i.e. after Police State's bonus), which, seeing as how you're more likely to average a 20% bonus from Police State than a 25% bonus, means roughly
90 * 0.8 = 72 base Hammers

How many base Hammers do we lose by Pillaging a Pig plus all of the intervening turns of having Unhappy people while we work toward building and shuttling over Warriors?

Each Unhappy person costs, say, roughly, 2 Food and 2 Commerce per turn (the average marginal Coastal square)... those 2 Food could be roughly translated into 3 Hammers.

So, we're roughly losing 3 Hammers and 2 Commerce per City that has an Unhappy person for every turn that we delay getting a Military Police unit there.

In fact, the issue will get worse before it gets better... we might actually be better making a couple of Archers before siege units, since, after fighting a few more battles, we might see 2 or 3 Unhappy people in Cities, at which point it will cost us even more to build the Archers at that later point in time.


Also, if we are trading away a Happiness Resource for 2 Gold per Turn that we could otherwise be using and we have 1 or more Unhappy faces as a result, we're actually losing out on that trade, aren't we?


My point is that if we're already suffering from Unhappiness issues, we probably should just bite the bullet and make some Archers, to bring down the cost of the issue getting worse before we spend our Hammers on those Archers.

Yes, we'll stall our advance, but won't we stall it even more if we start seeing 3 Unhappy people per City and only then start to build the Military Police units?

 

[LowtherCastle]

T129
Capture Agra, pop5, granary, bananas, pigs, unirrigated corn. Lose a cat and a treb. Our WEs all take a beating, but we're still 2 ggpts short of our first GG, so I'll upgrade one WE to medic. Another WE peaks at Vijanagara (Viagra, for short) to the south of Agra. On a hill, has walls, pop10 and is the capital now. This will take some work. Our bad luck with siege has us all out of balance so I"m building lots of trebs and a cat.

Agra will be easy to turn into a warrior pump because it only has three roads out of town and all three can be pillaged without pilaging resources. I will also pillage a couple of cottages while I'm at it. Why not? Cash is cash.

After my various contemplations, I've decided to just go all out for warring. Forget MoM. We'll just take 8t GAs as needed. Meanwhile, peddle to the metal.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

EDIT: Cross-posted with LC.

Let's look at it another way.

If we didn't build MoM but built Archers instead, couldn't we argue that each City that received a Military Police unit could be saving roughly 3 Hammers and 2 Commerce PER Unhappy person PER turn instead of just for 8 extra turns' worth of Golden Age?

Isn't that a better investment?

Besides, we can capture MoM but we can't capture a handful of Archers.

Another way to look at it is get those Military Police units built ASAP, so we don't necessarily need to build them all in the same City like we would with production for a Wonder but could build 1 or 2 here or there in various Cities so as to get to maximum Happiness efficiency ASAP.

The difference between the cost of MoM and those 72 base Hammers for more Military Police units can be spent on more siege units out of Bombay.

Similar cost savings in terms of bonus Hammers and Commerce... a Golden Age still gives us Anarchy-free Civic-switching should we want to use that feature regardless of Golden Age length... and we don't care about the extra GPP from a Golden Age.

Done. No need for MoM, we get our Military Police Archers now, and we still have some production left over for siege units by not building MoM.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Agra will be easy to turn into a warrior pump because it only has three roads out of town and all three can be pillaged without pilaging resources. I will also pillage a couple of cottages while I'm at it. Why not? Cash is cash.

That approach is fine, just get those units out quickly.

I see nothing wrong with: Build a Warrior for 1 turn, whip it the next turn, complete a Warrior on the following turn, complete a Warrior on the turn after that, build another Warrior for 1 turn, and repeat...
Giving us:
Turn 0 (which may not be the current turn) Nothing, since we just start building a unit
Turn 1 Nothing (we're whipping)
Turn 2 Warrior 1 plus some Gold
Turn 3 Warrior 2
Turn 4 Nothing (starting a new Warrior)
Turn 5 Nothing (whipping)
Turn 6 Warrior 3 plus some Gold
Turn 7 Warrior 4

If we need more Military Police units in the short run, then squeeze in some Archers somewhere and/or use the Warrior that is spawn-busting our core Cities' north-west area.

 

[LowtherCastle]

I don't think we're in a panic for the MP. Agra also has several chops. It has so much food and a granary that I'd rather 2pop than 1pop. We'll be fine.

T130
Asoka seems to be having a death spasm. All sorts of units came fluying out of the woodwork. Viagra now has about 8 units. A horse archer threatened Agra. That gave us Sun Tzu in Silver. (Talk about an invisible leader.) Four units are threatening Cows. We chain 3 WEs, 2 trebs and a cat into Bombay. They'll join a huge stack that will move toward Viagra (I withdrew the others because I felt they were underdefended.)

I don't know why, but we lost our trade connection to the Zulu this turn. Odd. Maybe a barb city got spawned or maybe one of Asoka or Ragnar built a city somewhere. Not so good.

.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

If you are feeling threatened by Asoka's units and if he'll talk with us, there's always the option of taking a Cease Fire (i.e. no Gold or techs or anything being offered on either side as part of ceasing the hostilities) and optionally then spending a turn or two to get our units into ideal position before redeclaring... that is, if Asoka/Ragnar will talk with us.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Okay. I played to T134. Uploaded.

The South and West have Feudalism. Liz just completed Machinery. We captured Viagra. We have a woodsman super medic. I could have played better. My main mistake was not building a high enough percentage of siege. That's corrected now.

The Apostolic Palace just got completed to. The vote was between the South and the East, so I decided to vote South rather than abstain. If East gets it, they'll probably insist on DoP.

We finally have TRs with Zulu. I'm not sure how or why. There's no doubt that Ragnar's culture blocks the southern route, so it must be the northern route, although it could somehow go through the hub, I suppose, but I don't see it.

Looking forward, we have to plan our warring forward. Our cash reserves are doing well. Do we start on Liz while she still doesn't have lbms? I think we'll lose all our TRs and resource trades. That would put us seriously into negative economy, but our warrring might cover the difference. Or do we beeline Ragnars southernmost cities? Or what? We need to take at least 5 minutes to figure this out...

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Good work so far!

One possible attack approach:
Asoka -> Ragnar while building a Settler for the area to the south of Elizabeth (as long as we really do have a spot to settle where a canal is one-square-wide there or as long as we can send 3 Workers with it if the "canal" requires a Fort) and then try to settle that City partway through going after Ragnar.

At that point, we'll work on building a northern front to go after Elizabeth... 3 full Galleons places to the west of her starting area should do the trick, with us either using a self-built canal City or else sailing around the north of her area to get into position by her main Cities.

By the time that we declare on Elizabeth, we will have revealed a path to Shaka's Cities, hopefully, but soon after we'll want an Ocean-based path (if possible) revealed toward the west, as our Ragnar stack will land at Shaka once Ragnar is all but finished.

AIs from the east, AIs from the north, plus Shaka... that'll be 5 AIs... after Shaka we take a Cease Fire with Mansa and go for the Wizard... while our northern stack optionally goes after Gandhi.

Once the Wizard is gone, our southern stack can go after either Monte or Mansa until we trip Domination.


An alternative is to build Settlers near the end and Galleon-chain them to the front lines, whereby we raze instead of keep Cities that we capture... we'll probably have a better idea on what to do in regards to that decision as we get closer to that period of time.