SGOTM 14 - One Short Straw

[LowtherCastle]

Hey guys! Progress! Looks like all the rats abandoned ship (including me)... I'm not sure there's any point in capturing the barb city right now. We need the 8XP but we don't need to burn units on barbs when our production capacity is tame anyway. We can pull back the Panama City warriors now. Let them go garrison Ivory and any other critical city. Hopefully, one of the barb axes, preferably the Combat I will come to attack us and our WE can get him in the open.

No sight of Oz yet. Hm... maybe he is in the SW corner, walled-in alive. That scout should lead the wb so we can hopefully get 3 more TRs asap. What I mean is, the scout can defog the coast from the next AI backwards, while the wb defogs forwards.

We definitely want to prebuild galleys for galleons. I don't see why we're building WEs in non-barracks cities when we could be building cats or galley pre-builds instead.

Excellent job on teching.

We want to go down on Asoka/Ragnar as soon as possible since they already have Monarchy. Hopefully beat them down before Feudalism.

 

[babybluepants]

LC! Nice to see you, my man.

The barb city capture is almost no risk, for an almost certain 8xp. I think that's worthwhile, as we won't really even slow down the other attack so much (we still need other units). Axes are considerably better to face on a hill than archers, and obviously much better than spears. We get 70+ odds even without siege suicide with Combat1 WEs, and they get either 2 or 3xp instantly. They can heal with the second promo and attack again the next turn for a certain 8xp. I could also risk one CR1 cat (which will be about 35% withdrawal chance), to get over 80% for the WEs. That reduces the chance of 8xp very slightly.

 

[LowtherCastle]

At 70% you need 6 WEs for 4 axes, preferably 7. You should lose 2. I don't see why we want to give up those 2. Plus, the Panama and Silver WEs won't have any promotions. Right now, an unpromoted WE is exactly 50% against the CI barb axe.

What good is the barb city to us? We'd rather have the fish+horses site anyway, which requires a settler and 10 and we can't build monuments anymore (soon). It'll add a chunk of maintenance change. It's also a sort of barrier from land attacks from other AIs. I'm just throwing out some reasons. I haven't thought it out carefully. Mainly, I just don't want to slow down our attack on Asoka.

 

[babybluepants]

No, there's only one C1 axe, the others are much better odds. In testing I did it a few ways with 2 WE, 2 Cats and 1 axe, without even using all the units and losing none, though I should count on losing a cat if I use it. It takes two turns to attack. We can get those units over in time to start the attack T+5 and finish it T+6.

That said, I haven't really thought it out carefully myself. We always agreed that we'd take it, as far as I remember. I was thinking it would be another city to contribute some units and HE returns a WE every 3t.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

As far as the Barb City goes, do we like its placement enough to keep it? Even if the answer is "yes," unless it is large in City Size, it will probably drain us more than help us at this stage:
1. We have zero Courthouses
AND
2. If it doesn't have a lot of population, all that we'll likely be able to whip there is a Granary
AND
3. It doesn't really hurt us and as LC says possibly helps us being in the hands of the Barbs--blocking AI pathing by land and/or giving us early warning of an AI stack coming toward us by land.

Unless it is Size 9 or larger, we won't be getting a Courthouse in it anytime soon, so I would just treat it as being equivalent to a City that can be settled later--something that we can safely ignore in terms of ownership.

The capture Gold is tempting but we'll get some of that soon enough against the AIs. I'd rather keep that City in the hands of the Barbs mostly just to not have to worry about major land-based assaults from AIs. It's one thing to protect our coastline but it's another to also have to worry about a stack of 20 land units marching up to our borders before we see them.

If an AI does capture a Barb City, it'll stop several of its units to rest and heal while others march forward, essentially breaking up any stack of doom into more manageable chunks, plus also alerting us to the fact that such a stack is coming, plus incurring high Maintenance Costs for the AI that captures the City.

In other words, I think that it's a good idea to get the 8 Experience Point unit but I'm not convinced of the value of actually killing all of the Barb units in the Barb City.

As LC says, if we can lure a Barb unit to leave the City by breaking up our Maginot line, we might be in better shape for getting our Experience Points more safely.


I do wonder how a Maginot line works against an AI that is plotting a war against us... will they potentially NOT march an army by land against us if we maintain the Maginot line? Or will they simply ignore such a line until after they are at war with us, which defeats the purpose of a line of Warriors since the AI wouldn't declare until it is adjacent to our borders anyway, meaning that it would probably be close enough to just auto-attack the Warriors? I.e. Unless we proactively declare war, I'm guessing that the Maginot Line won't be of use against AIs and thus can be safely broken up now that we have units to deal with incoming Barbs.

something like 70% WE 30% Cat

I'd still stick in the odd Axeman in there if we haven't planned on doing so... Axemen may marginally help if there are AI Spearmen and can actually get defensive bonuses to act as decent City defenders. Their only weakness, Chariots, will hopefully have their attacks absorbed by healing War Elephants in a captured City.

A single Medic unit does wonders for a war, so we may also consider turning one of our 3-Experience-Point War Elephants or Axemen into a Medic after the unit wins its first battle, due to only needing 4 Experience Points to get that second promotion.

Axemen can go up the Combat promotion line otherwise--City Raider promos will not be the way to go, particularly since we'll have the Axemen more for defence than offence, but also since there isn't much difference between those promos when attacking a City in many cases.

We haven't scouted India in a while. I'm not even sure where we're landing our troops. Should we maybe invest in a WB for scouting their coast?

We'll probably just have to go in blindly. If you really do want a unit to scout them, build a Trireme somewhere, then pay to ugprade it to a Caravel a turn or two after scoring Optics (i.e. after we have saved up succifient cash to upgrade said unit). A Caravel can actually go and scout the coastal Cities belonging to the AIs from the east, while a Work Boat won't even reveal the contents of a single City due to us not being able to get Open Borders.

Also, Genghis should be the faster of the two

What makes you say so? Is it because Genghis has 6 Cities to Elizabeth's 4 Cities? That fact would likely be the biggest factor that I can see, unless we know the AI Personalities that these Leaderheads actually embody.


If we do sell techs or do any more tech trading, just be very careful--I wouldn't even ask what an AI would offer us--we don't want to accidentally have them put Meditation on the table. Likely we won't even see a large enough lump sum of Gold available, so the issue will be moot, but if one does come available, then just manually click on the Gold and ask for it all as a safety measure against an accidental misclick giving us Meditation.


As for LC's idea about the Scout going to meet up with our exploring Work Boat, yeah, we could probably do that... scout toward our Work Boat... but doing so also means going back to moving the Scout 1 movement point at a time, including when we go 1NE of Tlaxcala, just to avoid dying to wandering Barb units.


I don't really care if we build unpromoted War Elephants, unpromoted Cats, or unpromoted Axemen--we just need quantities of units, not quality of units, so my opinion is that you should feel free to build all of the unpromoted units of whatever type you feel is appropriate all that you want.


As I have said before, I'm fine with you killing the updating of the testing game. It can be useful for certain things, like seeing if we can still build Galleys after learning Astronomy, which would affect whether or not Galleys in the build queues would get auto-upgraded after a turn of knowing Astronomy. If Galleys do get auto-upgraded, the only tricky point is that you don't want to whip the Galleys on the turn of learning Astronomy, as the Galleys won't get completed but will turn into Galleons that probably don't have sufficient Hammers to be completed without a second whipping action (i.e. two times the Unhappiness).


I suppose that since you might want a Caravel for a Great Merchant, it can't hurt to plan to build a Trireme to upgrade into one (although a test game should also check what happens when we learn Optics with a Trireme in the queue--will it remain a Trireme or not?). If we don't get a Great Merchant, the Trireme upgraded into a Caravel can be of use to scout out Asoka's capital and can even then sail on toward the unexplored water to the south of us, giving us advance info for our Galleys/Galleons.

If we do get a Great Merchant, than we probably won't have Optics in time to upgrade the Trireme into a Caravel for scouting out Asoka, so the Trireme can then just be used to upgrade into a Caravel later in order to shuttle around a Great Merchant... i.e. either we'll get Optics and a Caravel for scouting out Asoka or we'll get a Great Merchant and we can hang onto the Trireme until later... or even just use it as stack defence for our Galleys until after the initial assault.


Remember another key point: if we upgrade Galleys into Galleons when they are inside of a captured AI City, any units ON the boats will NOT defend the City... thus, any units on said boats should be unloaded into the City, then boarded onto the Galleons on the following turn when the Galleons have movement points available to them. Yes, we won't be able to unload units on the same turn, but we'll also not have our army accidentally wiped out in one fell blow, either, so losing that turn of movement from our units needing to re-board the boats will be worth it.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Research:
We currently have 2 GS sitting. Gems is popping a roughly 50/50 GS/GM in 4t, and Washington a pure GS in 8t. We still need MC+Mach+Optics+Astro.

So, I guess that the plan here is 1 turn with a 0% Science Rate on Metal Casting, then 3 turns on a 100% Science Rate, but watching for Metal Casting to potentially come available in trade and then deciding whether or not taking it in trade will be worth the We Fear You Are Becoming Too Advanced hit based on how close we are to completing research on Metal Casting? Obviously, if it doesn't come available for trade, we won't even have to decide whether to take the tech in trade or not.


As for what to do with the Barb Galley and our Work Boat, if you want feedback on how exactly to handle that situation, I'll want to see a screenshot depicting our Work Boat, the Barb Galley, Resource bubbles enabled, and the coast around the English Cities that we can see... I'm sure that you can figure it out yourself if you'd rather not take a screenshot.

 

[babybluepants]

Ok, let me think about the barb city more.

How many troops would we want to initially attack Asoka with?

What makes you say so? Is it because Genghis has 6 Cities to Elizabeth's 4 Cities? That fact would likely be the biggest factor that I can see, unless we know the AI Personalities that these Leaderheads actually embody.

No good reason, I guess. We refused his demand just before the WHEOOHRN, so I assume he initiated it and dragged Liz in. Also, he is larger and there was a slightly quicker power spike in his graph (though, in all honesty, neither has done real buildup yet).

I don't really care if we build unpromoted War Elephants, unpromoted Cats, or unpromoted Axemen--we just need quantities of units, not quality of units, so my opinion is that you should feel free to build all of the unpromoted units of whatever type you feel is appropriate all that you want.

I know. We have barracks/stable in Ivory and barracks in Washington. I wasn't gonna build anything but units now (except to complete a granary in Bridge and eventual HE in Ivory).

I do wonder how a Maginot line works against an AI that is plotting a war against us... will they potentially NOT march an army by land against us if we maintain the Maginot line? Or will they simply ignore such a line until after they are at war with us, which defeats the purpose of a line of Warriors since the AI wouldn't declare until it is adjacent to our borders anyway, meaning that it would probably be close enough to just auto-attack the Warriors? I.e. Unless we proactively declare war, I'm guessing that the Maginot Line won't be of use against AIs and thus can be safely broken up now that we have units to deal with incoming Barbs.

I can't imagine the line would work against AIs, but I have no idea. Didn't know it would work against barbs either.

So, I guess that the plan here is 1 turn with a 0% Science Rate on Metal Casting, then 3 turns on a 100% Science Rate, but watching for Metal Casting to potentially come available in trade and then deciding whether or not taking it in trade will be worth the We Fear You Are Becoming Too Advanced hit based on how close we are to completing research on Metal Casting? Obviously, if it doesn't come available for trade, we won't even have to decide whether to take the tech in trade or not.

Something like that.

 

[babybluepants]

Ok, so it seems to me like the fastest mini-stack we could have is 4 galleys with 5WE and 3cat loaded 1S of Bridge in 8t. We could sub in an axe for one of the WE. That would require whipping away the 2Sci in Marble, which I don't particularly like just yet. The units from a barb city capture could be back there for loading in about 12t, and we could line up Galleon whips by that point and get HE going. If you guys think that speeding this attack up by 4-5t is worth more than instant 8xp and capture cash, we can do so.

One other option would be to just get 8xp with two battles and not even capture the barb city.

Edit: I think attacking with Galleons is just better. We can jump on his capital in 1t.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Edit: I think attacking with Galleons is just better. We can jump on his capital in 1t.

Am I correct in assuming that by this comment, you are implying that it takes us 2 turns to drop off units next to his capital using Galleys?

One other option would be to just get 8xp with two battles and not even capture the barb city.

That situation was my original expectation with the Barb City. However, here are some things to consider:
a) If it was a choice between capturing the Barb City and Asoka's capital, I'd want to capture Asoka's capital
AND
b) If we rush to getting an 8-Experience-Point unit now, while we WILL unlock the Heroic Epic, building the Heroic Epic takes away from unit production in the short term. We're all about the short term right now, so we should probably stick with the short-term focus
AND
c) 8 units landing at Asoka is about the absolute minimum and therefore is risky. We could get lucky if he only has Archers or if he only has 3 defenders, but if he have Longbowmen OR more than 3 defenders, we'll just be starting a war when we can't even capture a City, meaning that a team of AIs will be building up stacks of units


Thus, yeah, going after the Barb City doesn't really fit with the short term attack plans.

Is there a way to get 10 or even 12 units to be able to land if we ignore the Barb City?


There is a small window of time to hit, either just before Feudalism is learned or during the 5 turns following it being learned (1 turn to upgrade Archers, 5 turns to fortify the Longbowmen, such that attacking during the 4th turn of Fortification is better than attacking during the 5th turn of Forticiation, for example). We could get lucky and the AIs from the east might not go for Feudalism for their next 5 techs. Alternatively, they might have already learned it. It will be hard to know when they will get Feudalism until after they have learned it and we start to see Civic switches into Vassalage and/or Serfdom (although BtS AIs tend to hate Serfdom, unlike Vanilla AIs who all loved it).


The way I see it, we really need to push for an all-out short term attack (i.e. delaying the building of the Heroic Epic even) OR else we need to resign outselves for a tough war against Longbowmen.

If we're resigning ourselves to a tough war against Longbowmen, then it means waiting for Galleons to attack.

A third option is just to plan to send our stack of 8 units against the AIs from the north (although I'd still say ignore the Barb City and try and get more units involved in the initial attack).


The biggest problem with attacking the AIs from the north is that at most, we have one City on Elizabeth's eastern coast and all of the rest of their Cities are far from our Cities (higher Maintenance Costs) and are far from our Galleys (taking way too long for a Galley war to be incredibly effective).

Thus, we really do want to wait until we have Galleons before attacking the AIs from the north, so that we can at least land at 2 or more of Elizabeth's Cities on the first turn of war.


Therefore, if we're going to stick to the short-term attack plan, then I say that:
a) Skip the Herioc Epic, which means forget about the Barb City
AND
b) Muster as many units as we can (if we can get 12 units by whipping 2 Scientists into a 6th Galley, let's do it)


If 12 units is not feasible, then if we can get 10 units, I'll feel a whole lot better about our early attack than by going in with just 8 land units.

An 8-Experience-Point unit can come easily enough from our fight with Asoka and can come at a time when we can actually afford to stop producing units in Ivory City temporarily. It might come just a bit later than ideal, but better a bit late than coming too early and thereby messing up our attack on Asoka's capital.

I mean, what are 5 War Elephants going to do if Asoka is defending the City with 5 units? The answer? Fail to capture his City before additional reinforcements of Asoka's arrive.


Again, Asoka and/or Ragnar might send troops at us by land. Therefore, having a relatively unscathed Barb City between us and them (i.e. if we don't attack the Barb City) may help us a lot by delaying any potential AI land-based attack on us.


As for the Maginot Line... in an Always War game, it works just as well against AIs as it does against Barbs. Thus, if we are going for the short-term attack, we could seriously consider keeping our Maginot Line in place for a while longer, so that:
a) We can send all of our other land troops into battle against Asoka, without needing a non-Warrior defender or two to stop the Barbs advancing on us. We would probably need to save a land-based defender or two to counter any Barbs that were to come at us if we were to move our Maginot Line's Warriors, thus by not moving our Maginot Line's Warriors, said Axeman/War Elephant or two can go directly into battle with Asoka
AND
b) Our Maginot Line will deter the AIs from attacking via land, which may cause them to focus on building Galleys + Triremes (which will be great since we'll shortly have Galleons)


Yes, it may suck not to have Military Police units (the Warriors from our Maginot Line not being available to act as Military Police units for now) due to potentially receiving temporary Unhappiness when we switch into Police State, but honestly, Archers will be better Military Police units for our western coastal Cities (to deter amphibious assaults or to at least help to keep our City alive when one occurs), and these Archers can be built sometime after our initial rush on Asoka takes place.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Ideally, we'll capture Asoka's capital and then hold it with land-based units as our Galleys return to pick up reinforcement land units for the assault on the next City. By then, we may have Astronomy and may have set our Science Rate to 0% for a bit, so as to get Galleons, which could potentially upgrade inside of Asoka's captured City or back within our Cultural Borders of one of our own Cities, whichever makes more sense at the time.


If we're really going for the short-term attack, then it's all about the fight for Asoka's capital. Nothing else matters. The Heroic Epic won't matter. Defending our western Cities (hopefully) won't matter, especially with our Work Boat (the one luring the Barb Galley) being able to give us advance notice of all but one possible attack vector. A bit of temporary Unhappiness from having 0 Military Police units won't matter. Nothing will matter except getting as big of a stack as possible in a short period of time to use against Asoka.

If we can get 10 units two turns or more faster than 12 units, then go in with 10.

If we can get 8 units something like four turns faster than 10 units and if we can make 6 of those units War Elephants/Axemen and only 2 of them Cats, then go in with 8 (Cats are nice but they can't finish off a wounded unit that is defending a City).

I'm just using rough numbers here, with the attack model being that "attacking sooner is better within reason, but if we could get 2 more land units by only attacking slightly later, we should increase our odds of success by getting those 2 extra land units."

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Another thought:
Would it really hurt for us to switch into Police State immediately?

I mean, would we be facing immediate Unhappiness issues?

Sure, our research rate would suffer, we'd have 1 turn of Anarchy, AND our whipping might get messed up (a 2-pop-whip could easily get turned into a 1-pop-whip), but maybe it will work out better.

I mean, an Axeman will definitely become a 1-pop-whip, but if we will still have a reasonable amount of excess Happiness in some of our smaller Cities, maybe we can really bleed them dry.

I mean, a City like Marble City that has 2 Scientists hired--those Scientists are only there to add to our Research.

What if we said "who cares if Galleons come a few turns later"?

What if we stuck at a 0% Science Rate on Metal Casting for a while? EVEN IF WE DID get a Great Scientist in 4 turns, nothing says that we HAVE to Lightbulb with it right away. The loss in Research could potentially be made up for by getting Metal Casting in trade a few turns later, and if not, then the progress that we make in the war could make up for it.

What I'm getting at here is... could a City like Marble City contribute BOTH a Galley AND an Axeman if we whipped it from Size 4 down to Size 1 under Police State? If yes, then I think that our short-term approach is BEGGING us to do so. We really should have the Happiness available to do so... and that's what that City was built for... to give us our investment back on our initial Settler. Let's cash in on that investment now.

Let's squeeze the crap out of our empire in terms of military units.

Obviously, if we're going to get 2 or 3 Unhappy people in each of our largest 5 Cities by switching Civics, we won't switch, but if we're only talking about up to 3 Unhappy people or less empire-wide, let's pull the trigger now. Taking down Asoka's capital is just that important for getting our initial offensive going.

 

[babybluepants]

Ok, I'll have to rethink this a bit. Let me see how fast I can possibly get 5 or 6 galleys full.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Asoka's capital has a lot of culture so we should have 4 (or 7) cats to get the culture down to 0 rapidly. They don't need to be promoted.

The basic logic for warring should be our rate of unit production and arrival at the front. This will require:

1. Heroic Epic
2. Galleons for chaining (forget warring with galleys).
3. Possibly settlers for spoke cities.

If our warring goes fast enough, we shouldn't run out of money.

One other consideration: We still haven't found Oz so we don't know our victory condition yet. We won't need domination if Oz requires very late techs. We also might not need domination if the AIs continue to research so slowly. Finding Oz remains a very high priority obviously as does defogging all land tiles. Sooner or later, an analysis of the domination requirement might make sense.

 

[babybluepants]

Ok, should we aim to whip 3 galleons in 8-9t when Astro is done and attack then? It'll be difficult to get a reasonable stack in advance of that date. We currently have 2 galleys + the one that's supposed to carry the explorer. With 3 more galleons (Marble, Panama and Gems) we can have 13 units in the first stack, which could be something like 7+6 or 8+5, attacking in 10-11t. We should then be able to do reinforcements quickly after that.

Do we really need the explorer?

LC,
Are you back playing now?

Edit:
As long as we're not attacking Phrygian and we're disbanding the Maginot Line, I would prefer 1 WE over 1 axe for defence down there. They can take axes out in the open easily. We could also use the axe as a stack protector in India.

Washington can do a catapult every 3t. Ivory can currently do a WE every 3t. Stone will whip a WE/cat pair in 1t. Silver can do 2 units in 4t. Pigs will do a unit in 5-6t, even with the explorer. That would give us 6WE+6cat+axe boarding in 9-10t.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Okay, the way I see it, we have two options:
Option A] Galley War
- Switch to Police State now
- Expect that we'll get a Great Merchant so stick at a 0% Science Rate in hopes of getting Metal Casting in trade
- Even if we do get a Great Scientist, we'll be attacking with Galleys, so we don't care about when Astronomy is learned
- Be willing to whip Scientist citizens into additional units once we're in Police State--probably only in Marble City but possibly in other relatively marginal Cities, too
- Put everything into the initial assault so as to hopefully hit Asoka pre-Longbowmen or at least before his Longbowmen have fortified heavily
- Ignore the Barb City completely, since we'll get 8 Experience Points on a unit from attacking Asoka
- Keep our Maginot Line in place
- Possibly don't whip the Explorer and build him later--we can whip an Axeman post-Police-State instead or something
- Don't build a Trireme (to be upgraded into a Caravel). Every Hammer counts and since Asoka's team doesn't know Metal Casting, we won't be facing boats any stronger than a Galley. If you're super worried, you can unload the 2 units from the first Galley (so that the first empty Galley will be our naval stack defender). You can either plan to have a War Elephant and an Axeman on that boat or else you can just unload those 2 units from any boat and then click on the units in the first boat and have them "load" from the first boat to whatever other boats the War Elephant and Axeman disembarked from. If we don't have an Axeman, then 2 War Elephants could be landed. The idea is that those 2 units won't be adjacent to Asoka's capital but can walk there... if it takes 1 turn to walk, they'll meet up with everyone right away, and if it takes 2 turns to walk, then the other units will be Bombarding for a turn anyway, so they'll still meet up with the stack on time. I'm suggesting 2 units so that we can hopefully lure Asoka into suiciding a unit against ours (one less City defender) due to our stack not being TOO large, but having at least 2 units to avoid our units from dying (you could also drop off 3 units in such a stack if you felt more comfortable doing so).


Option B] Galleon War
- Keep building land units without Barracks in most cases, as per the plan, since we still want stacks of land units
- We can be more flexible with things... we won't be aiming to launch an attack until we've built up a stack of at least 12 land units that can fit on Galleons, so while we still want to produce a lot of units, we probably won't be whipping any other than the Explorer for a few turns
- Do whip the Explorer, since we have time to make him and to get him over to the AIs from the north
- Do break up the Maginot Line sometime over the next few turns when we are prepared to have Barb Axes moving toward us. The Maginot Line can become Military Police units in our largest Cities
- Recall that Galleons can carry 3 units each, so technically, we only need 4 Galleys/Galleons to begin with
- If we get lucky with Great People, we'll have Astronomy early, but we won't have Gold reserves to upgrade our Galleys... perhaps the best thing to do here is to stick at a 0% Science Rate. If we get a Great Scientist in 4 turns, we'll have a bit of Gold and can probably finish self-teching Metal Casting in 6 or 7 turns or whatever at a 0% Science Rate, so as to have some Gold to upgrade our Galleys. If, instead, we get a Great Merchant, we will probably finish Metal Casting too soon and have nothing useful to dump our excess Flasks on. Therefore, if we get a Great Merchant in 4 turns, switch to Police State at that time, to reduce the fact that our Scientist Specialists will "over produce" Flasks. Hopefully, we'll be able to drag out the research of Metal Casting to 8 turns, but if not, then pick some arbitrary tech to dump our additional excess Flasks into, like Civil Service, even though we'll probably wait a long time before researching said tech. I have no idea when to switch into Police State with the "received a Great Scientist in 4 turns" approach, but probably immediately then, too, thus, I guess just plan to switch to Police State in 4 turns regardless of what happens?
- Do aim to get an 8 Experience Point unit from fighting Barb units, but don't aim to capture the City
- Do build the Heroic Epic as soon as possible (in Ivory City, obviously)
- Since we only need 4, maximum 5 Galleys/Galleons (4 should be plenty, though) to start the war, and since we'll have a bit more time, we can probably for certain get our 12 land units, although we'll be attacking later than if we attacked with Galleys
- Do build a Trireme somewhere, so that we can upgrade it to a Caravel that will contain our Great Merchant (if we don't get a Great Merchant than the Caravel will be empty). Said Caravel can also (carefully, avoiding ending its turn on a Coast square, to avoid dying to surprise Barb Galleys) scout out Asoka's capital a turn or two before we attack, so that we'll see what we're up against.


Pros and Cons
Option A] gives us a chance of attacking before Asoka is ready with fully-fortified Longbowmen. We want to hit with 10 or 12 units, to mitigate the risk of finding out that there are big defences there, which still takes some time, but will be faster than the Galleon approach since we'll be cutting corners (leaving our Cities without Military Police units, ignoring the Barb City, not building the Explorer for now, whipping units after an immediate switch into Police State meaning that the units will be ready sooner, etc). Attacking sooner gives us a greater chance of there being less units to defend the AI Cities or at least a higher composition of Axemen, Swordsmen, and other non-Longbowmen units, which will be a good thing to see.


Option B] gives us the element of surprise (landing on the turn that we declare war). It also gives us the option of potentially forking an attack to a different City. It also gives us the security to not worry about enemy boats. However, there is a bigger cost factor: the AIs will definitely have Fortified Longbowmen, we won't be facing Triremes with our Galleys anyway so the enemy navy isn't a big concern that we really need to be worried about so we'd be overprepared with naval force, we may have to wait for upgrade Gold in order to get our Galleons, we'll have slightly less Hammers going into units (a later Police State), and we'll get started a whole lot later... the 'Ducks have already started warring in their game a few turns ago, by the looks of it... the Wizard may complicate things, but generally, the sooner that you get a successful start on your warring, the sooner you'll finish. On the plus side, we'll have the Heroic Epic being built faster and we'll have the flexibility to drop our units at a different City should Asoka's capital look too tough to crack with our initial assault.


Either approach will likely work. We just need to pick one and stick to it. My vote is for you to do whichever option you feel most comfortable with. If you want to try and squeeze as many units out of our empire as possible and get the hurt laid on Asoka as soon as possible, go with Option A]. If you don't feel very comfortable with unit micromanagement, then go with Option B].

 

[babybluepants]

I think it's a matter of timetable, Dhoom. Even if we were to whip up a storm right this moment, it takes us almost as long to get units to the front as it will with T+8 Astro. Units from any of Ivory, Stone or Silver will need 5t to get to Bridge after they are built (which is a few turns), and galleys will need 5t or so to get to his capital. I'm proposing that we do the following:
T+8 Astro learned
T+9 PS revolt done, whip galleons
T+10 move galleons to Bridge and load units
T+13 land at Asoka's capital (roughly)

That's basically the same timeline. Worst case scenario (we pop a GM and research slows down), Option B is about 3t slower at this point. Best case scenario, it's even or 1t behind, but gains the element of surprise and we don't have as much upgrading to do on galleys (right now, I think hammers are much easier to come by than cash). I'd understand this discussion if we were talking about 10-20t difference, not 0-5t. In my mind we passed up Option A a long time ago. That would have been a Construction beeline and a much earlier attack with axes.

I don't understand what you mean with this:

If, instead, we get a Great Merchant, we will probably finish Metal Casting too soon and have nothing useful to dump our excess Flasks on. Therefore, if we get a Great Merchant in 4 turns, switch to Police State at that time, to reduce the fact that our Scientist Specialists will "over produce" Flasks. Hopefully, we'll be able to drag out the research of Metal Casting to 8 turns, but if not, then pick some arbitrary tech to dump our additional excess Flasks into, like Civil Service, even though we'll probably wait a long time before researching said tech.

If we get a GM, we need faster research, not slower. Then we'll need to self-tech Optics, instead of bulbing it.
Engineering is the tech we want next, aside from the Astro beeline.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

We can research MC in 7t @ 0% or 3t @ 100%. Gems will get its GP in 4t. Might be good to line those up. If that GP is a GS, we could just bulb Machinery-Optics-Astro right through. The last Washington GS still needs 8t, so that's our target date.

I guess I am confused here...
If the Great Person that comes in 4 turns is a Great Scientist, does that mean that the Great Person that comes in 8 turns will not be needed in order to Lightbulb Astronomy?

How does Optics fit into things?

Okay, let me put it a different way:
Scenario A: Great Merchant in 4 turns, Great Scientist in 8 turns
Scenario B: Great Scientist in 4 turns, Great Scientist in 8 turns

Question 1. In which of those Scenarios are we Lightbulbing Optics?

Question 2. In Scenario B, do we get Astronomy in our hands in 4 turns or do we still need to wait for the 8 turns Great Scientist?



As for Galleys versus Galleons, as I said, I'm fine if we go with the Galleon approach, so let's do that. As I suggested, we can probably still do a lot of the things that we talked about:
- Whipping the Explorer
- Building a Trireme to upgrade into a Caravel, primarily so that we can Scout out Asoka before declaring war but also to potentially simultaneously ship around a Great Merchant (the Caravel will be invincible for a while yet as long as it doesn't end its turn next to a coast)
- Breaking up the Maginot Line so that they can be our Military Police units while putting whatever units you want down there (your War Elephant permanently and more units temporarily during our quest to achieve an 8-Experience-Point unit)


I'm not really sure about how the Great Person stuff works... I thought that I knew and thus that's why I made my comment about Police State potentially coming earlier, but by your confusion I see that it's likely me who doesn't get what's going on and thus my potentially wrong suggestion about when to switch into Police State.

 

[babybluepants]

We have two GS waiting. They are for Machinery and half of Astro. The one that's coming in 8t is for the other half of Astro. The GM/GS could bulb Optics, if it's a GS. In that case, we only need to research MC. Otherwise, we need to also research Optics. Astro won't happen before T+8 either way.

Let's also see what LC says about the timing of the attack.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Okay, so if we do get a Great Scientist in 4 turns, then we CAN switch to Police State at that time, right?

I mean, all of this talk about potentially needing to tech up to Radio, etc, for the Wizard is grand and all, but nothing stops us from switching back into Representation some time in the far future (50+ turns from now) after we have conquered a couple of the AIs.


Also, where do we want to send the Great Merchant if we get one? I was thinking that putting him in a Caravel that would simultaneously scout out Asoka's capital for us could be of use, and sending that Caravel down toward the south would give us much-needed info about the area down there, and our Caravel should stay incredibly safe as long as we don't end our turn next to a coast. That situation would leave us likely sending the Great Merchant toward the AIs from the south (with the hope that the map wasn't modified to block ocean access down there)... would that AI team be an one to which to send our Great Merchant?


The City that contains The Temple of Artemis would probably be the ideal location but I'm not sure where that City is located... do we know? That said, one of the biggest factors with a Great Merchant's value going up is the population size of OUR capital... so, we definitely won't want to whip in Washington (which we probably wouldn't do anyway) and may even want to consider switching from Mines to Farms (if we have any to switch to) in the interim time between receiving a Great Merchant and "spending" him on a Trade Mission.


I'm thinking that BtS only lets you shift-click a Great Merchant (keeping the shift key held down) so that you can hover your icon over top of the Trade Mission icon if and only if you have visibility of said AI City (such as our Work Boat being near it)--such that even fog-of-war Cities won't give us said info, but I'm not sure. Without said info, we might as well just try and "spend" the Great Merchant at the AIs from the south, since it'll take too much exploration to figure out the ideal City to spend him in. If, however, I am wrong and you actually can see the value of a revealed AI City that is in the fog-of-war using the shift-click (plus holding down the shift key), then by all means, figure out the best spot to send him. A test game should tell you quickly enough (pop into the World Builder and give yourself a Great Merchant from the bottom of the list of available units) whether or not AI Cities that are hidden by fog-of-war will give us the info that we seek or not.

 

[babybluepants]

What talk of teching to Radio? I'd like to end research altogether with Engineering, though I'm not sure that'll be possible.

I actually think Phoenix Rising may have finished already. Their last save is 1310 AD, so I don't think we need to worry about the Wiz tech requirement too much.