babybluepants said:
Maginot Line is still intact. We should disband it any turn now, but I'll think about that after figuring out the unit numbers for Asoka.
I'm still not 100% certain about this point.
One huge advantage of keeping the Maginot line in place is that Ragnar is effectively kept out of the war with us. If we get rid of our Maginot Line, we may not only have to face the odd Barb unit but we'll also be at risk of Ragnar marching a stack of doom up to our borders.
The cost of keeping a couple of extra units around within our Cultural Borders (a small amount of Gold per turn) plus the cost of having to build a couple of extra Military Police units (a couple of extra Archers) is probably gong to be worth not having any fear of AIs marching stacks at us.
In fact, we could possibly even toy with some of the AIs by using the Maginot Line... for example, once Asoka is marginalized, we could move a Warrior slightly out of the war, opening up the Maginot Line. At THAT point, we'd probably be more than happy to have Ragnar start marching some of his units out of his Cities, so that his Cities will be easier to capture. The hope will be that his units will not make it close enough to our area before can capture his main Cities. We could then optionally reform the Maginot Line like 10 turns later to potentially cause his stack to "get lost" and not know where to go mid-march.
In light of the possibility of soon being at war with 4 AIs (if the AIs from the north declare war on us), I'm thinking that we will want to keep the Maginot Line in place, be it 3 Warriors or 2 Warriors plus 1 Axeman.
babybluepants said:
We need a decision on future GP's. If we want one from Stone circa T140, we shouldn't whip there. Washington will keep running 2 Sci and eventually pop another one (circa T144 without Stone or T148 after Stone).
The important question becomes: what can we do with such a Great Person or such 2 Great People?
For example, I imagine that a Great Engineer will Lightbulb Engineering for us. What about a Great Scientist?
If a Great Scientist will NOT Lightbulb Engineering, then we can't take the risk of delaying Engineering that long just on the slim hope of generating a Great Engineer.
In other words, if a Great Scientist won't Lightbulb Engineering, we'll be self-teching Engineering.
A Great Engineer could otherwise be potentially useful for constructing the Taj Mahal, but Nationalism is a ways off and we might never research it. I can't think of any other compelling use for a Great Engineer.
A Great Scientist would help us Lightbulb toward Military Science, assuming that we first traded for any intervening techs, but I'm also not convined that we want that tech. One thought is that we might eventually need it if the AIs get to Rifling, but a counter-argument is that the AIs are teching quite slowly and we might just end up speeding up their tech path to Grenadiers if we go for Grenadiers ourselves (through AI teams piggybacking off of our research).
If we want a Great Person for a Golden Age, then we really only need to focus on generating one Great Person, while the other City can focus on whipping and regrowing.
So, which City should make the Great Person? Well, Washington probably is getting large enough and has otherwise marginal squares that whipping might not make much sense there. In particular, we'd get more bang for our Food by whipping in a smaller City like Stone City.
That said, the original plan was to generate the Great Person in Stone City so that we will get three 100% Great Scientists for Military Science. I think that getting Grenadiers would be "neat" by would be by no means necessary.
In fact, against a Wizard with Drill IV, Grenadiers would be of no help at all.
That said, Grenadiers could make for really nice stack defenders and could also help us in cracking Musketmen units... but there is a cost associated with them, which involves having 4 of our Cities focusing on not whipping away population points. Since we probably wouldn't whip Washington regardless, that's more like 3 of our Cities (Stone not whipping much or at all now as it keeps 2 Specialists hired, while 2 other Cities not whipping now while they grow for a future hiring of multiple Scientist Specialists during a Golden Age).
Personally, I think that having those 3 core Cities (Washington isn't counted since it likely won't be whipping at all, except maybe whipping a Forge) not doing any whipping is a pretty huge cost and will set us back in our warring. If we focus on whipping up a storm under Police State now, the AIs might not even make it to Musketmen. Certainly, with stacks of War Elephants, we won't really fear AI Knights all that much, and even Musketmen can be dealt with sufficiently with Trebuchets and the odd War Elephant stack defender that dies protecting the stack from an offensive Musketman.
So, overall, I would say generate the Great Person in Washington and be prepared to whip away our population points (after revolting to Police State) in any of our other Cities that it makes sense to whip in (i.e. don't whip away citizens working Grassland Hills Mines except for in an emergency, but do feel free to whip away citizens that would otherwise be working a Coast square).
