SGOTM 14 - One Short Straw

[Dhoomstriker]

To get two players to appear in an Apostolic Palace Resident vote, one player (or in this case Team) has to own the Apostolic Palace. Another player has to be running the AP's Religion (Buddhism) as their State Religion.

Possibly, with AI Teams involved, both members of the non-AP-owning AI Team will have to be running Buddhism as their State Religion in order to come up as a voting candidate, but maybe not.

It could be that such a partial-Buddhism team could be eligible for AP Resident elections but not for the AP Victory resolution--I'm not quite sure how teams factor into things, but that reason could be one of the troubles that LC has had with test games.

4. Not sure what happens when we eliminate Ragnar. He's the Resident. Does that mean a new election immediately or no election till the 50t cycle completes?

There are two types of Residents: one that is Resident due to owning the Apostolic Palace and one that had Buddhism as his/her State Religion. It is possible for an AI to satisfy both of these conditions.

If an AI only satisfies the first condition (i.e. Hinduism is their State Religion and they own the Apostolic Palace), then by capturing the Apostolic Palace from them, you totally mess up the Apostolic Palace so that until the next round of elections comes up, no resolutoins can be passed.

If, however, the Resident satisfies both conditions, then he stays as the Resident after capturing the Apostolic Palace.

Similarly, if he doesn't own the Apostolic Palace but got elected as the Resident when he had Buddhism as his State Religion, if you can get him to convert to a different Religion (say, we converted during a Golden Age to a competing Religion and then got him to switch Religions as part of a PEACE Treaty (not Cease Fire), the Apostolic Palace would be "messed up" again and no further resolutions could be proposed until a new Resident gets elected. I'm not sure if an AI is hard-coded to refuse to switch Religions when they are the Apostolic Palace Resident--that kind of code might make sense but it's also the kind of code that the developers would have forgotten to add, since the whole Apostolic Palace functionality was a botched-up rush job.

As for the Resident being eliminated, it will likely fall into the same two subcases: the Resident either losing Buddhism as his State Religion (by dying) as well as losing the Apostolic Palace
OR the non-Buddhist Resident losing the Apostolic Palace... either way, the resolution process should get messed up until a new Resident election occurs.

Note that if we RAZE the City which contains the Apostolic Palace, then no further Apostolic Palace resolutions will be possible, either.

The problem is, though, what if Ragnar proposes that we return Bombay, for example, to its rightful owner, rather than one of his own cities? Is that possible?

A possible way (probably test it first to make sure that it works) to counter such a proposal would be to revolt to Buddhism ourselves--we'd do so on the same turn that vote comes up to return the City, by revolting after the voting option but before ending the turn.

Just pick "No" or "Abstain" or whatever instead of Defying the resolution and it should (hopefully) auto-fail due to us having switched into Buddhism after the vote and thereby us no longer satisfying the requirement of not being a Full Member for our City to be assigned away.

What do we research in 6t when Drama is done?

I guess it depends if we are taking Civil Service (say with trading Music + possibly something else) or have already taken it... in which case we don't care if Paper gets unlocked so we might as well go after Theology for a possible Golden-Age-switch to Buddhism + Theocracy.

Theology is not really a necessary tech, though, so we could research something else like LC's proposal of going after Paper if we preferred.

EDIT: On Philo, we might decide to switch to Pacifism during a GA cycle for more gpps, although it would cost us a fortune in maintenance.

I see no point. In the Cities that we might justify doing so (because they already have some GPP), they don't have a Religion. Even if they did, the hiring of Specialists is not a good idea. For one, we don't really need the extra Great People (it's not like we're Lightbulbing up to Grenadiers anymore and it's not like we'll get 3 more Great People for a 3-Great-Person Golden Age so extra Great People will be pretty much USELESS except for a Great Merchant). We also can't switch out of Police State (too much Unhappiness would appear) for Representation, so we wouldn't be teching a lot and we wouldn't even have anything useful to tech anyway.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

It would be worth finding out whether or not an AI Team has to have both members running Buddhism in order for them to:
a) Be eligible to be elected as the AP Resident if they don't own the City the AP in it
OR
b) Be eligible to have their name come up for an AP Victory if they don't own the City with the AP in it

If we capture the AP (instead of razing it), we may or may not get additional strategic options that could help us out (such as forcing Open Borders with the few surviving Cities of Asoka/Ragnar) or getting one AI Team to declare war on another AI Team or something along those lines.

 

[LowtherCastle]

T143. Uploaded.

Golden Ages
We have a GE. Spending him on the MoM is equal to a GA if we run 2 GAs, so we get 24t for 4 GPs instead of 6 GPs. That's what I think we should do and we should start the GA with the GS born in Washington in a few turns, saving the GArtist for the next GA. Build the MoM in Washington this turn and complete with the GE.

Cease Fire
As I understand things, we CF as soon as we're down with any mischief this turn. There's no need to move units that will be teleported because then they can still move after teleporting. We have captured a second Ragnar city, near his capital, in hopes he'll demand it as rightfully his, rather than the spoke city.

Ragnar's Spoke City -- Jute
We have just completed the fort and it comes out of resistance next turn. I have galleons there in case we have to take our units out to sea to re-capture it next turn. Hopefully, that won't be necessary. Meanwhile, Ragnar's SoD has returned so we have some fun on our hands. If Ragnar doesn't reclaim Jute next turn, then we should DoW Liz.

DoWing Liz
I have 3 SoD mini-flotillas ready to go down on Liz next turn. York, Canterbury, and the Barb City. The biggest is for York because I forgot to check what's in there when GK DoWed us and because that SoD wants to go to London which has walls. Canterbury has a single sword defending it. lol The barb city has a very strong mace and 2 unpromoted archers, plus anything she's added recently. It will go to 20% any turn now. This stack can hopefully survive well enough to capture that city a bit NW of it next.

Settler
Gems is about to grow to pop6 so that we can 3pop a settler for Liz's spoke. There are two choices for its location--either to get the fish in the FC or where it's a true canal city. The second choice misses the fish but covers more land for our domination.

Ragnar
Our two southern Asoka cities are seething with galleon-loads of attackers. We just need to decide how to best use them to massacre Ragnar rapidly. He could be closing in on Feudalism, although he hasn't built many archers, so it's not really an issue. If our Spoke City needs reinforcements, they can come from here.

Great General
Our latest GG is parked in Viagra (Vijayanagara) because I suggest we do Dhoom's idea of making NavI galleons. That city came with a settled GG, so adding another already gives us 4/2XP galleons. My thinking is that sea travel is the one time factor that we really cannot control with raw hammers. Land units get plenty of promotions sooner or later, but not really galleons. This might make a significant difference in the endgame. We could even settle the next one here and adopt vassalage for NavII.

Production
I'm thinking that our homeland now produces for the Liz campaign and Aoska produces for Ragnar/Zulu. I've been producing mostly trebs, except for Ivory making maces and some WEs and certain cities producing galleons. Panama, Stone, and Silver have barracks so they should make trebs mainly, as does Washington. Marble and Bridge make galleons non-stop. Gems and Pigs whatever's needed.

Agra and Bombay have barracks so they are making trebs non-stop although they could also make maces, if needed.

Madurai, Ahmedabad, and now Lahore have been building a couple archers and chariots. We have two chariots for plundering cottages. Be sure to do that, as it adds up. Other Asokak cities haven't come out of resistance.

Ragnar's Cities
Ragnar has some humongous cities. It might be wise to keep a couple of them huge for the TR benefits they'll give (2cpt TRs).

Exploration
We still haven't defogged the Zulu southern coast and that could be a mistake, if ithappens to be landlocked. The exploring galleon got tied up with Jute. This needs to be corrected asap. Our scout has just made it up to Monte's land. The explorer is heading back to defog Zulu. The southern wb simply couldn't get past a damn barb galley so I gave up and decided it was more useful parked over by Emerald City. It can keep us apprised of the state of Oz.

Endgame
We only have 31 turns left to win and win. That's nothing. My turnset dragged a bit too much, but I think we're well set up to move rapidly forward. We just have to think ahead of time and play really smart. Somehow, we need to wrap up our main warring in 20 turns. That seems really fast, but it's doable. We just send out waves and waves of mini-flotillas. Something like that.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

We have a GE. Spending him on the MoM is equal to a GA if we run 2 GAs, so we get 24t for 4 GPs instead of 6 GPs.

Okay, I was wrong. A Great Person other than a Great Merchant could be of use if it were to come at the correct time, as this one did.

Which Cities will produce our two Great People, though? Washington one of them in a few turns, you said. Will Washington also produce the following one or will another City do so?

Will it help to whip a Forge in Washington soon so as to be able to run an Engineer Specialist in addition to 2 Scientists (plus The Great Library's 2 base GPP and 6 base GPP from its Specialists)?

There's no need to move units that will be teleported because then they can still move after teleporting.

Sounds right.

Do note that Galleons within enemy Cultural Borders may get teleported to inside of a City that is within an AI's Culture if the AI's Culture surrounds one of our captured Cities, which, seeing as how we won't get Open Borders, could feasibly trap our Galleons temporarily. I'm not sure if this situation exists anywhere, but it's something to double-check for at least.

I have galleons there in case we have to take our units out to sea to re-capture it next turn. Hopefully, that won't be necessary. Meanwhile, Ragnar's SoD has returned so we have some fun on our hands. If Ragnar doesn't reclaim Jute next turn, then we should DoW Liz.

As long as the Galleons aren't inside of the City if and when he attacks the City, we won't have to worry about losing our Galleons.

I'm confused, though, as to us Cease Firing on the current turn but also being afraid of Ragnar's stack doing anything to us.

Canterbury has a single sword defending it. lol

Ahhh, you have got to love Cease Fires as well as attacking from the sea!

Gems is about to grow to pop6 so that we can 3pop a settler for Liz's spoke. There are two choices for its location--either to get the fish in the FC or where it's a true canal city. The second choice misses the fish but covers more land for our domination.

Distant Cities cost us more in Maintenance if they are larger in population. Other than whipping the odd Archer, I don't foresee a Fish Resource helping us, especially if we have to wait for our Cultural Borders to expand there in order to use it.

I say go for the "true canal" at this late stage of the game and just be happy that lower population points = slightly less Maintenance Costs.

Our latest GG is parked in Viagra (Vijayanagara) because I suggest we do Dhoom's idea of making NavI galleons. That city came with a settled GG, so adding another already gives us 4/2XP galleons.

That idea is fine by me as long as Vijay either has a good amount of population points to whip plus some reasonable Food for regrowth or a good amount of raw production.

We have two chariots for plundering cottages. Be sure to do that, as it adds up.

The pillaging can be done after capturing a City as long as we do the pillaging before our Cultural Borders expand over said square (i.e. you get the same amount of Pillage Gold for pillaging improvements in neutral territory as you do in AI territory but with the nearby AI units dead, your Chariots have a better chance of surviving if you wait to Pillage until the nearby City is captured).

Ragnar has some humongous cities. It might be wise to keep a couple of them huge for the TR benefits they'll give (2cpt TRs).

Oh, you mean that all or most of our OTHER Cities will get a 2 Commerce Domestic Trade Route from any such City that we capture. Hmmm, yes, that situation would be nice.

Still, it may be better to whip, whip, whip, depending upon how long it will take to bring the units to the front lines.

Endgame
I'm still not sure which approach is best:
i. Capture more Cities than we'll need for Domination once the Cities come out of revolt and use the window of time between the Cities coming out of revolt and expanding their Cultural Borders to their respective fat crosses to take down the Wizard

ii. Take down the Wizard a bit before then and aim to be building and Galleon-chaining Settlers during the last 15 turns or so of the game to settle where we had razed some AI Cities that would have taken longer to come out of revolt than it would have taken to ship a Settler there, as well as land the Settler and spend even 1 more turn actually creating the City

I have a feeling that unless some of the last Cities that we capture are much greater than Size 10, the Settlers approach might not be as quick as just capturing the Cities in MOST cases but that we'll probably be able to finish slightly faster if we aim to have a FEW Settlers coming in to replace the last couple of razed Cities or Cities that were just really huge (Size 15 or so that would have otherwise been captured within the last 10 turns).

 

[LowtherCastle]

I just didn't want us both playing.

Let's use a system. We need turns played. No PPPs. If you have time to play a turn or two or more, post "Playing." Wait 5 minutes to see if there was a freak cross-post with the other guy posting the same. Then play. When you'ree done, upload and then post "Done playing."

Since we're in 9-hour different time zones, we should be able to get some turns done.

We've got five days. Pedal to the metal.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Playing.

 

[LowtherCastle]

After all that, I almost forgot to CF with Asoka...

I'll hit <Enter> and see what happens. If you're online, bbp, let me know if you want to take over and bdeat down on LIz a bit. I'll be back in a few minutes.

 

[babybluepants]

Have to run to work shortly. I'll play in the evening.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Hm... Ragnar proposed that we give Bombay back to Asoka, the selfless btard. We can either go with Dhoom hypothesis that a DoW will cancel that resolution or we can try capturing Asoka's remaining city. I think he's got a spear and a chariot in there and I could muster a mace and a WE. He's got 20% culture and amphibious. If the WE has to go against the spear, I think our chances are minimal.

xpost Okay.

 

[babybluepants]

I doubt we can pull that off. It'll be WE vs spear.
Not sure. We might just have to give the city back, and recapture with reinforcements later. We really need to capture most of their votes in the next cycle.
Edit: we'll certainly test Dhoom's hypothesis, but I could swear I've had to give a city back while I was at war.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Okay. I remembered wrong. The city has a chariot and a . . . Buddhist Missionary. And we have a mace + 2 WEs. Think we're good to go. In Bombay we'd lose a treb and the barracks along with probably one of the granary or lh. Not good.

Have a great day at work! Check in from time to time if you can.

 

[babybluepants]

Yeah, 3 units against a chariot and a missionary is a bit better than 2 against chariot and spear.

 

[babybluepants]

Did we kill him?

 

[babybluepants]

Remember Silu explaining barb tech progress at some point? I'm wondering if we can figure out roughly when Emerald City archers would get upgraded to LB's.

 

[babybluepants]

A second border pop in Agra would gain us quite a few tiles, btw. Whipping a theater right away would do it. We should look into this more globally, I think.
Edit: no need for a theater yet. I'll tally up the tiles today and do some sort of summary.

 

[LowtherCastle]

A second border pop in Agra would gain us quite a few tiles, btw. Whipping a theater right away would do it. We should look into this more globally, I think.
Edit: no need for a theater yet. I'll tally up the tiles today and do some sort of summary.

I've done a bit of work on this too, thinking exactly the same thing. That's one reason I wanted Drama. We're right at a window where theaters are cheaping than building culture and 1cpt isn't enough to get to get to 100.

I've been developing a dot map on the real save (ctrl-X turns it on and off). For 100 cities I've been using the alt-x function to add the third cultural expansion.

Btw, Mansa and Zulu have Guilds. Luckily for us, Zulu doesn't have any horses, for now anyway.

We got the MoM and we'll whip a market in Pigs so we can get the third GP in time. That'll help with and commerce a bit too.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Did we kill him?

Yup, Asoka is officially DEAD.

Remember Silu explaining barb tech progress at some point? I'm wondering if we can figure out roughly when Emerald City archers would get upgraded to LB's.

Yes, klarius talked about it in SG5 too. There's an equation. Would be smart to wire that.

 

[babybluepants]

I've been developing a dot map on the real save (ctrl-X turns it on and off). For 100 cities I've been using the alt-x function to add the third cultural expansion.

Ok, I missed that before. I'll have a look later. Transporting into the hub would be a lot easier with roads and some pre-established fogbust, as well. We probably don't have resources for that, but I'll also look into what we can muster up in that respect.

Market in Pigs sounds ok.

How far along are you now?

 

[Dhoomstriker]

We're right at a window where theaters are cheaping than building culture and 1cpt isn't enough to get to get to 100 .

Do you guys have any idea exactly how many squares we need within our Cultural Borders to trip the Land Area requirement of a Domination Victory?

I doubt that maximizing the expansion of our Cultural Borders at this stage can hurt us--only help us--so go for it, but as we near the very end of the game, we'll have to balance the timing of Cultural Border expansion with killing the Wizard. Other than that small edge case, I'm fine with whipping Theatres.

We also don't need to calculate down to the very last turn such that we whip Theatres only at the very last minute... we don't want to cut it so close that something accidental (switching Civics or a Religion outside of a Golden Age, for example) could push us into winning too late. We also don't want to have a targeted end date in mind and then accidentally end a turn before whipping a Theatre that had to be whipped on a particular turn to meet a deadline. Although, if you want to give us, say, 2 turns' worth of breathing room on your targeted end date, go ahead. Also, we do have the flexibility of building Culture for the last few turns of the game in a few Cities if we do mess up the timing, so you do have a "saving grace" option (there would also be increasing the Cultural Slider) if we had whipped the Theatres too late. So, it's all relative anyway and maybe your exact calculation compared to our targeted end date will work out just fine anyway, using Build Culture and the Cultural Slider to save our butts if we mess up the timing at any point.

Btw, Mansa and Zulu have Guilds. Luckily for us, Zulu doesn't have any horses, for now anyway.

Knights aren't TOO bad with a primarily War Elephant army.

After Guilds comes Gunpowder. Muskets aren't too bad if we first land and pour the Trebuchets on 'em, but we wouldn't be doing as much amphibious attacking and we might have to lose a stack defender or two in each stack.

Recall that if you have:
i. A War Elephant with Combat I + Combat II
AND
ii. A War Elephant with Combat I + Combat II + Amphibious attacking

then the "ii." War Elephant will become the stack defender... so, we need to be careful about not sacrificing our Amphibious attackers by accidentally using them as the stack defenders that may die when a Musketman/Maceman/Knight/War Elephant of the AI's attacks and wins the fight... i.e. if our top defender is an amphibiously-promoted War Elephant, it may be better not to land that unit, unless our stack would otherwise get heavily attacked without said War Elephant defending the stack.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

How do barbs acquire their techs?

* Their real research rate is almost guaranteed to be 0, since they aren't allowed to have a Palace (8 commerce) and thus suffer from high maintenance (but they don't lose units via STRIKE).
* So they merely receive the 1 free beaker everybody gets (BASE_RESEARCH_RATE) for their current research plus 3% (BARBARIAN_FREE_TECH_PERCENT) of the cost of a tech scaled by the percentage of players who know it for each technology each turn. Hence, if the majority of the players in the game knows Sailing, it won't be long until the first barb Galleys come visit your fishing grounds.

Ok, try to klarify barb research:

The barb team (in other words we) gain

floor((c * floor ( ( 3*nw ) / na))/ 100)

c = cost of tech
nw = number of teams with tech
na = number teams alive (not counting us)

beakers per turn on every tech.

That means when na=7
1% if 3 teams have the tech
2% if 5 teams have the tech
3% if 7 teams have the tech

all percentages are rounded down. So e.g. 1 beaker/turn for fishing in the beginning (3 civs know it = 1%; cost around 120)

It hasn't anything to do with what we or the barbs research.
As monarch AI start all with archery we get 3% of the cost of archery every turn and will learn it after 35 turns (because of rounding down). We will learn it even w/o having the prerequisite hunting and by that unable to research it.

BTW killing one AI would be nice, as already then it would be only 2 AIs with the tech necessary to get beakers.

The longer we don't research techs known to the AIs the more beakers we get for free. As the starting techs get researched pretty quickly, we should restrict ourselves to only research those we absolutely need.

The second benefit of waiting is that when we finally research a tech (we will not wait for all to come for free) we get a bonus on our research if more civs know it already.

You can see the beakers the team gains by just going into the tech adviser and hover over the techs. Even after one turn you will see that we have gained beakers in fishing, mysticism and archery, even if we research something else.
BTW, that's the team beakers (also in normal games for PA or MP teams) what you see here. When the barbs start to research, their measly beakers will also get added there immediately.

What I get from all of that is:
1. We don't really know what tech the Barbs are researching, but they only get 1 Flask per turn from manual research, so it hardly matters for techs that are as expensive as or more expensive than Feudalism.

2. Essentially, it will take the Barbs 35 turns or more to learn a tech from the time that the first team (an AI Team or us) learned a tech. If we can recall the first turn that an AI Team learned Feudalism, we should, according to the info above, have at least 35 turns from that turn before the Barbs can upgrade their Archers to Longbowmen.