SGOTM 14 - One Short Straw

[LowtherCastle]

It's hard to me to think with you guys without some big-picture concepts:
1. What's our estimated finish date now? 50t from now? That's where the Ducks are right now. Starting in 10t, that would mean 52+ cities in 40t. That would be pretty tight.
2. What's our warpath? Clockwise starting with Asoka, till we get through the first 4 AIs, maybe flowing a second wave counterclockwise if we develop an abundance of units? (Knowing where Oz is could change this so we end up with our units there.)
3. What's our warplan/tech needs for when AIs get Feudalism? Gandhi/GK will for sure.

Assorted thoughts:

1. Our victory date is entirely dependent on how fast we produce and transport units. We need HE asap.

2. How soon can we capture Madurai? If we keep it, it speeds up our capture of Bombay and gets us our HE sooner. It will expand its borders automatically to the fish. We have a 66% chance of keeping the lh, we can grow it and work coastal tiles and it produces cash for us. One other thing, if we leave it empty after capture, it's possible Asoka will send units from Bombay to try to recapture, as long as we don't have any units within 2 tiles of Bombay. I don't know the exact mechanics of this, so I don't know how to predict this, but I know it's an oft-used trick.

3. We desperately need to know about Asoka's spoke. Is there a canal city there already? If not, where do we want to put one and where will we build the settler? This is a short-term goal, although I haven't calculated when exactly. Asoka has 8 cities and Madurai was the seventh. I'm not conviced the fastest route to the others is around the east. In either case, we'll almost surely want the canal for Ragnar and shift our galleon chain westward asap.

4. I doubt we'll ever get DoWed by Liz/GK. They have to build up a SoD and then transport it to our borders. Unless Liz has a coastal city to our immediate SW, which is unlikely, her SoD will have to come by land, which will take forever or by sea which will also take forever. Plus, who knows how much bigger their SoD has to be since they're a team? I think our explorer should just defog Liz's eastern coast and then go to Asoka's spoke.

5. I would be reluctant to burn the GS on Optics. Pre-HE, I don't think it saves us that much and Engineering 20t sooner saves us a lot more in movement costs.

 

[babybluepants]

Good to have you back.

1. Our victory date is entirely dependent on how fast we produce and transport units. We need HE asap.

I'm pretty sure the fastest way would have been by attacking the barb axes at Phrygian.

Clockwise starting with Asoka, till we get through the first 4 AIs, maybe flowing a second wave counterclockwise if we develop an abundance of units?

I would think we'll be warring with England before we get all the way through Asoka and Ragnar. It'll take Liz and GK a while to get ready, but they will.

2. How soon can we capture Madurai? If we keep it, it speeds up our capture of Bombay and gets us our HE sooner. It will expand its borders automatically to the fish. We have a 66% chance of keeping the lh, we can grow it and work coastal tiles and it produces cash for us. One other thing, if we leave it empty after capture, it's possible Asoka will send units from Bombay to try to recapture, as long as we don't have any units within 2 tiles of Bombay. I don't know the exact mechanics of this, so I don't know how to predict this, but I know it's an oft-used trick.

I would think it slows down our capture of Bombay, as it gives him more time to get some units out.

5. I would be reluctant to burn the GS on Optics. Pre-HE, I don't think it saves us that much and Engineering 20t sooner saves us a lot more in movement costs.

In principle I agree. Would you stay in Rep 'till we get Optics? Do you delay attacking or build more galleys? Switching to PS will cost us about 2t and 70g comparatively, if my calculation is right. That's not a huge cost, but we also won't be in position to upgrade and we'll potentially have more galleys.

 

[babybluepants]

LC,
Can you guess where Bombay is?

Edit: if I look at an earlier save, 1SW of wine seems likely. It looks like we ideally wanna land 1W or 1NW from there, depending on the coast line. Is that right?

 

[babybluepants]

FYI:
If we wanted to capture Madurai, we could land 3WE (1 unpromoted) and 3 cats (1 unpromoted) on T+4, for an attack on T+5. We'd need to whip Marble this turn, or else it's only two galleys worth. If we're lucky we might get 2xp from one battle there. I need to test this.

I'm in favour of waiting for a full attack on Bombay, though.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Yes, Bombay is SW of the wines and it's on a hill. We don't know for sure we can even land to the west or SW but yes, that's what we would prefer to avoid the river. Of course, there may be another river there too.

If we're not filling 5 galleons till T+7, then I'm not sure capturing Madurai on T+5 will slow us down with Bombay. We won't even need all 5 galleons, having transported units by galley. Plus, if we don't capture Madurai first, Bombay will have about 3-4t to build units anyway, since we won't be able to land on T+0 and we'll need 2t to break down the defenses. (Let's pray he hasn't built walls there. They often don't in their capital.)

Btw, I would just go with 4 WEs in 2 galleys, capturing T+5. The two 5/2XP WEs attack first to give us the 3XP needed for the HE. Right now, an unpromoted WE shows 69.51% odds with 3XP for a victory. We can test to see if a CI promotion still gives us 3XP against the CGI archer.

Optics by hand gives our galley builds more hammers before becoming galleons and Engineering in 4t. With engineering and a fort at Gems City 1N, we can have a galleon chain from Pigs City, so that 2 WEs arrive at the front every 2t on the second turn. Without the fort costs us 2tiles via Panama.

I haven't done any calcs on whether the PS hammers are better than the Rep beakers for those 2t, but my hunch is Astro sooner the better.

I haven't followed all your whipping ideas, but a quick look tells me that Marble City should grow to pop5 asap because it can work another citizen. Ivory should grow to pop10 asap so it can also work the silk tile (which it should start T+0 as part of growing to p10). It's a pity Panama never got a border expansion. Waste of a good seafood tile. We should do something about that.

We still need to plan a settler somewhere.

If Liz doesn't have a coastal city west of Panama, I'm willing to bet you we never get DoWed... When did they go WHEOHRN?

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Okay, I think that you're right, bbp, in that Asoka's capital looks like it is SW of the PRiv Wine:

In particular, note that landing on any of:
On the PRiv Wine
1S of the PRiv Wine
1W of the PRiv Wine
ALL look like they will be over-the-River attacks.

The map was probably designed that way intentionally.

It does sort of look that if we land on the PFor that is 1S of the PRiv Wine, we could then move 1S or 1SW and possibly not have to attack across a River. Of course, it might also be possible that Asoka's capital was surrounded by Rivers. That said, the screenshot DOES make it look like if we move 1S or 1SW of the PFor, we can avoid the River-crossing penalty.

Of course, if his capital is the first City that we attack, we can potentially hit him from across the River before he is ready.

In particular, if we do aim to land on top of the PRiv Wine, while we will lose 1 turn getting our Galleons into place before the war (going NE + NE of Asoka's northern City), we could then land units on the first turn of war and attack on the second turn of war across of that River.

If Asoka still has Archers and if we were to catch him unprepared (due to us landing units so quickly on his shores), he might have a small amount of units so the River-crossing bonus won't help him that much. On the other hand, if he has Longbowmen, the first 2 or 3 units that we land will see that fact and we can just aim to drop off the remainder of our stack on the following turn either in a location that hopefully doesn't have a River-bonus (perhaps if we are lucky enough to be able to land somewhere to the north-west of his City) or can just land on the PFor square 1 turn later and then march the units for 1 turn.

So, the idea is that we could aim to land a few units on the PRiv Wine and if Asoka's City looks capturable, we can just land the rest of our stack on the same turn and capture his capital from across of the River on the second turn of the war.


As for Optics... well, LC, it was your plan to have us Lightbulbing Optics in the first place:

Optics (1 GS) 936 AVOID: Meditation and/or Code of Laws

Galleys aren't going to cut it. By the time that we can reach Asoka's capital, he'll have been able to whip several units.

Besides, the extra movement from Galleons (+2 movement) = 2 times the movement of our navy plus also allowing us to "cut corners" by not having to sail on Coast squares sure beats +1 movement on land = 1.5 times the movement of our land units.

While I see what you're getting at, we won't actually be marching stacks of War Elephants by land for quite some time... as you say, we want to set up a Galleon chain.

Yes, we started our warring relatively late due to going for Astronomy... now's not the time to change gears and start trying to go to war with Galleys. We need to make up for lost (aka invested) time by:
a) Attacking by surprise, i.e. landing as soon as possible after war
AND
b) Attacking the key Cities (like Asoka's capital) first, so that less population points will be whipped
AND
c) Attacking in sufficient force to be able to capture a City with 0 or 1 turns of Bombarding, so that much of our stack can reboard our Galleons and move on to the next City, possibly after a bit of healing

With the current map layout, we don't have access to Asoka's capital with Galleys.

In fact, we can completely ignore attacking Asoka's northern City and still arrive at his capital at the same time as if we owned his capital, due to Galleons being able to move diagonally SE to the east of his northern City and then diagonally SW when passing his northern City.

I see absolutely no gain in capturing his northern City other than possibly luring other units. However, the "trick" usually requires you to station a unit there. The AIs are "suspicious" of undefended Cities... if you want them to try and recapture a City, leave a unit like a Warrior or a badly wounded unit there and the AI will swarm that City... leave it empty and the AI will suspect a trap and generally avoid it. Besides, we want to capture his capital ASAP so that it stops producing Flasks for him (maybe we can delay Feudalism) as to take away population points from him (so that we can whip those population points instead of him).


I'm not really a fan of keeping tiny Cities, since they will take a while to get set up. Usually the biggest advantage of capturing AI Cities is getting their population base for free... captured Buildings help, too, but it's the population (under Slavery) that really makes keeping (instead of razing) Cities very worthwhile.

Keeping the northern City would give us 6 extra land squares... not a very huge margin... and yet could likely be a drain on our economy. The saving grace is the fact that we would have 3 Domestic Trade Routes instead of 1 Domestic Trade Route, so we'll probably keep that northern City, but it can totally be captured at a later time. Besides, Asoka might just feel inclined to try and reinforce that City what with so many of our units "threatening it" by sailing near it as we actually sail past it to attack other Cities... which would serve the purpose of luring AI units into the open.


Since we are almost certainly not going to get our 8 Experience Point unit from Madurai, I'd say Asoka's capital has to remain our first target.


It's nice to have more units (ala Heroic Epic) and it's nice to attack early, but these things can quickly be outdone by an AI spamming units... i.e. striking as quickly after declaring war as possible tends to be a far more powerful move than taking a couple of weak Cities and then allowing the AI to build up/whip from its larger Cities. Go for the throat and leave the limbs for later.

I wouldn't even make Madurai the 2nd or 3rd City to be captured, but maybe the 4th.


As for how long it will take us... I have no clue. That's a weak point of my game--figuring out when the game will end.

What I do know is that we want to start soon, but when we do start, we want to start in force, so that our wars end quickly and Cities are captured in a small amount of time. To that end, we want to attack with Galleons and we want those Galleons as soon as possible.

We also want our units as soon as possible, which to me means switching into Police State immediately, which won't speed up the first round of whipped units but will speed up all future rounds of units.

Warpath would be Asoka and possibly a key City or two of Ragnar's, especially, as you say, if we can get a spoke City. We might then make peace with him in order to reduce Ragnar's focus on units and we might leave Asoka with a City or two just to not have to worry about cleaning him up immediately. Then we'd want to focus our southern stack on the eastern AI of the two AIs from the south, who will have easier-to-capture Cities than Ragnar will due to not having spammed units for a while.

At the same time, we'll open up a front on the AIs from the north, who will be trickier to deal with since we'll have to get to the west side of Elizabeth's hub before we can do much damage.

From there, our southern army will probably push on to the western of the two AIs of the south while reinforcements trickle in and form a new stack to take on Ragnar, whom we will redeclare war on.

We might not even need to take on both AIs from the north in this manner, as that'll be 5 AIs already.


Is the plan to spam Settlers and colonize the middle of the map at the end of the game or are we looking to get almost all of our additional Cities via conquest (plus the possibility of building the odd canal City along the way)? That part I'm not too certain about.

Due to captured Cities experiencing turns of revolt, it might be just as fast or faster to send Settlers down a Road and/or Galleon chain and then hire an Artist Specialist + build Culture in newly-founded Cities than it will be to wait for newly-captured Cities (captured at the end of the game, I mean) to come out of revolt and have their borders expand.


When the AIs get Feudalism, we'll just land larger stacks. It sounds like bbp is going to try and get somewhere between 12 and 15 units for our initial assault on Asoka's capital, which should just about do it if he has, say, 4 Longbowmen and an Axeman defending there.

Eventually, after we learn Engineering, we'll build Trebs instead of Cats (Cats can still be built in low-production Cities or whipped in new Cities). Other than that, we'll probably mostly have War Elephants and Axemen for quite some time, optionally switching to War Elephants and Longbowmen once all of the AIs have Feudalism and we get it in trade ourselves.


I see what you're saying about the Explorer, but I don't really feel comfortable giving the AIs from the north a chance to come at us.

There will be a small window where the Explorer can explore a bit to the south-west, since we have a bit of knowledge thanks to our Work Boat lure that no Galley force has been sent out from the AIs of the north toward us yet:

Lightbulbing Optics should give us even a bit more visibility, but we'll have to assume that whatever coastal square to the west of our Work Boat we cannot see is a square that contains a stack of boats from Genghis. Then we just need to count how many turns' worth of 2 movement points that the Galleys could make it to the east, and then figure out how many turns we have available to us to send our Explorer to the south-west and then back north-east in time to spot any such potential fleet.

Assuming that we don't Lightbulb Optics, then Genghis could have a stack of boats NW + W of our Work Boat lure (or if we Lightbulb Optics, 1W of there). That gives us about 6 turns of movement with the Explorer, so the Explorer could follow some Roads toward the south-west for 3 turns before heading back to the north-east.

The idea is that we are leaving our Cities empty... yes, knowledge of Asoka's area would be nice, but having our Heroic Epic City razed would be a game-wrecking event, since you can't rebuild a National Wonder once it has been lost. We're already pushing the envelope just by leaving out Cities defenceless... let's at least allow ourselves some advance warning of a possible attack so that we won't lose any Cities unnecessarily.

If you really want to argue it, then I would counter that by not having Military Police units, we have extra land units, so a stack of two of these units could feasibly be landed on Asoka's spoke to both explore it and to potentially Pillage any key Resources that they come across, due to the fact that we have more units to spare by being able to keep our core Cities defenceless thanks to our Explorer.

We might not get declared upon by the AIs from the north but they "know" (at least Elizabeth does--I don't think that they share map knowledge) that many of our Cities are defenceless, thanks to her Scout. The AIs do take this fact into account when deciding where to attack. I doubt that they'll take it into account in terms of deciding WHEN to attack, but once they have decided WHEN, you can count on them coming in and razing our undefended City at the worst possible moment (think of the fact that the game deadline is looming and we'll start to get careless with these kinds of details). On that note, the Explorer should not get Fortified or Sentried or anything and after it does it's little detour to the south-west then back north-east, we should end its turn manually each turn, so that the screen will actually jump to showing us the nearby area... no point in having a scouting unit if we aren't going to monitor what it reveals.


Another random thought: Are we building a Work Boat for Bridge City's Crab anywhere? Note that Police State speeds up the construction of Work Boats, so if not, we can always build one after our initial rush with a bit of a cost savings (as long as the City that produces it makes 4 or more Hammers per turn).

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Btw, I would just go with 4 WEs in 2 galleys, capturing T+5. The two 5/2XP WEs attack first to give us the 3XP needed for the HE. Right now, an unpromoted WE shows 69.51% odds with 3XP for a victory. We can test to see if a CI promotion still gives us 3XP against the CGI archer.

A War Elephant getting 3 Experience Points from a single battle could change things slightly, but consider the following:
If we're at war for an extra 2 turns, Asoka will spend 2 more turns whipping units. If nothing else, that will be at least an extra Longbowman in his capital, but likely more units empire-wide. Is getting the Heroic Epic a couple of turns sooner worth having to fight additional units?

Optics by hand gives our galley builds more hammers before becoming galleons and Engineering in 4t.

Are you talking about under Police State or under Representation though? Under Representation, we'd actually get less Hammers over the same amount of time, regardless which units they are being stored into. If the thinking is that we'd stay in Representation and whip under Representation, then you could argue that in the very short term, we might come out relatively even, due to not losing production for 1 turn of Anarchy, but realistically we'll fall behind on production by not immediately switching to Police State since we get almost the full 25% bonus to Hammers when whipping.

If you are suggesting switching to Police State and manually completing Optics, then we might be short on Gold for upgrading our 2 Galleys to Galleons.

Okay, yes, I can see the argument that since we don't quite have all 3 Great Scientists yet, we could spend some turns self-teching Optics, but I'm less inclined to self-tech Optics if we can't learn it at the same time as we get our next Great Scientist or sooner, and even further less inclined if we can't be in Police State during that same time period.

With engineering and a fort at Gems City 1N, we can have a galleon chain from Pigs City, so that 2 WEs arrive at the front every 2t on the second turn. Without the fort costs us 2tiles via Panama.

Cool idea to build the Fort and we should definitely aim to do it.

Without Engineering and with 2 extra Galleons (thanks to the bonus Hammers from Police State), we could also get a similar chain (starting from the north-west of Ivory City). Alternatively, we could just get our War Elephants to the front lines 1 turn later (spending 2 turns to walk to Pig City).

Is it worth delaying our initial war just to get some future units 1 turn faster to the front lines?

Besides, with the way that Galleon chains work, they have to move forward and back, so there's always a 2-turn cycle with them instead of a 1-turn cycle (unless you are doubling-up on the number of Galleons, which probably isn't a practical idea). So, that savings from Engineering might not actually add up to much of a gain at all.

I haven't done any calcs on whether the PS hammers are better than the Rep beakers for those 2t, but my hunch is Astro sooner the better.

Are you saying that we can get Astronomy faster by NOT Lightbulbing Optics than by Lightbulbing Optics? In that case, then perhaps you have a point about self-teching Optics.

There is the cost of having less Galleys becoming Galleons by way of upgrade Gold, but if we can find a way to get Astronomy faster by 1 turn, then sure, I'd actually be okay with a couple of turn delay on Police State. And no, I'm not flip-flopping, I just want Astronomy to come quickly. If self-teching Optics gets us Astro quicker (which is counter-intuitive, but okay, I'll bite), then let's get Astro quicker this way, even if it means delaying the switch into Police State. If it comes at the same time AND we can switch to Police State immediately, then okay, let's self-tech Optics even if it means getting our 2 Galleys upgraded a bit later.

If, however, Astro comes at the same time by self-teching as Lightbulbing Optics, then I'm not really convined that self-teching Optics is the way to go.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

the little red fists in the screenshots... It's as of this turn.

Turn 106, 225 BC: The AIs from the north went into WHEOORN mode (hands full mode):

 

[LowtherCastle]

In particular, if we do aim to land on top of the PRiv Wine, while we will lose 1 turn getting our Galleons into place before the war (going NE + NE of Asoka's northern City), we could then land units on the first turn of war and attack on the second turn of war across of that River.

If Asoka still has Archers and if we were to catch him unprepared (due to us landing units so quickly on his shores), he might have a small amount of units so the River-crossing bonus won't help him that much. On the other hand, if he has Longbowmen, the first 2 or 3 units that we land will see that fact and we can just aim to drop off the remainder of our stack on the following turn either in a location that hopefully doesn't have a River-bonus (perhaps if we are lucky enough to be able to land somewhere to the north-west of his City) or can just land on the PFor square 1 turn later and then march the units for 1 turn.

So, the idea is that we could aim to land a few units on the PRiv Wine and if Asoka's City looks capturable, we can just land the rest of our stack on the same turn and capture his capital from across of the River on the second turn of the war.

Bombay has 60% cultural defenses and is on a hill. That makes fortified archers with no promotions:
3 base strength
1 first strike
25% fortified
50% city bonus
25% hill
25% hill bonus
60% cultural
25% river
210% total
Modified strength = 9.3 + 1 first strike

The best we can do is a CII WE at 9.6 modified strength. Of course, we'll have some cats, so the archer would be some less.

Without the cultural and river, it's:
125% total, mod str = 6.75 + 1st str

We'd much rather attack 3 extra, unfortifed archers than across the river without taking down culture.

BUt I don't know why you guys think he'll go on a whipping frenzy if we don't have any units within 2 tiles. I don't think he will. He might whip if he was planning to anyway. By my plan, we should be able to drop our units where there is no river to the west (hopefully) the same turn we DoW. So I think it's less likely he'll have reinforcements than under your plan. And that's not even including leaving Madurai empty (yes, empty, but test it if you want) and potentially drawing his units there.

As for Optics... well, LC, it was your plan to have us Lightbulbing Optics in the first place:

Not really my "plan," but just one option. I was also assuming more aggressive GP spamming. As it is, we should leave the GS that will complete in 26t for a GA, in case we want to spam a bunch more GPs.

Galleys aren't going to cut it. By the time that we can reach Asoka's capital, he'll have been able to whip several units.

Besides, the extra movement from Galleons (+2 movement) = 2 times the movement of our navy plus also allowing us to "cut corners" by not having to sail on Coast squares sure beats +1 movement on land = 1.5 times the movement of our land units.

We'll have Astro in about 4t anyway, so we'll have our galleons very soon. My plan gets our warring underway sooner, so we build HE sooner, capture a city sooner, get a bunch of our units over to Madurai so we don't even need 5 galleons in T+7, so we don't need the cash to upgrade the galleys yet. Everything speeds up.

Also we'll switch to PS in 4t (I imagine) so we'll get the bonus on our whips. The drawbacks are not having 4ts worth of bonus hammers from raw production and using up some gold to research Optics at 100% instead of upgrading galleons. I think Engineering much sooner more than makes up for that, not just because of the 50% movement and trebs, but also because we won't need to research Engineering. Thnk about it, without Rep, Engineering will take forever and will force us to use coins for research rather than using it to cover maintenance costs for our army. While warring, we not only prefer, but might have to run at 0% research.

While I see what you're getting at, we won't actually be marching stacks of War Elephants by land for quite some time... as you say, we want to set up a Galleon chain.

The +50% movement bonus helps our units getting from our cities to our galleon chain, primarily.

Yes, we started our warring relatively late due to going for Astronomy... now's not the time to change gears and start trying to go to war with Galleys. We need to make up for lost (aka invested) time by:
a) Attacking by surprise, i.e. landing as soon as possible after war
AND
b) Attacking the key Cities (like Asoka's capital) first, so that less population points will be whipped
AND
c) Attacking in sufficient force to be able to capture a City with 0 or 1 turns of Bombarding, so that much of our stack can reboard our Galleons and move on to the next City, possibly after a bit of healing

We're going to do all this. All the more so when we get HE.

With the current map layout, we don't have access to Asoka's capital with Galleys.

In fact, we can completely ignore attacking Asoka's northern City and still arrive at his capital at the same time as if we owned his capital, due to Galleons being able to move diagonally SE to the east of his northern City and then diagonally SW when passing his northern City.

Not sure what you're saying here. We will load galleons to attack Bombay on T+7 whether we research Optics by hand or not (I assume--I'm going on bbp's T+7 calculation).

I see absolutely no gain in capturing his northern City other than possibly luring other units. However, the "trick" usually requires you to station a unit there. The AIs are "suspicious" of undefended Cities... if you want them to try and recapture a City, leave a unit like a Warrior or a badly wounded unit there and the AI will swarm that City... leave it empty and the AI will suspect a trap and generally avoid it. Besides, we want to capture his capital ASAP so that it stops producing Flasks for him (maybe we can delay Feudalism) as to take away population points from him (so that we can whip those population points instead of him).

I think you're wrong on leaving a unit in Madurai, but it could be tested. As I said above, I think my plan gets to Bombay less defended than yours.

I'm not really a fan of keeping tiny Cities, since they will take a while to get set up. Usually the biggest advantage of capturing AI Cities is getting their population base for free... captured Buildings help, too, but it's the population (under Slavery) that really makes keeping (instead of razing) Cities very worthwhile.

Keeping the northern City would give us 6 extra land squares... not a very huge margin... and yet could likely be a drain on our economy. The saving grace is the fact that we would have 3 Domestic Trade Routes instead of 1 Domestic Trade Route, so we'll probably keep that northern City, but it can totally be captured at a later time. Besides, Asoka might just feel inclined to try and reinforce that City what with so many of our units "threatening it" by sailing near it as we actually sail past it to attack other Cities... which would serve the purpose of luring AI units into the open.

I'm not a big fan of keeping Madurai either, except that it's reasonably close to Washington so its maintenance won't be killer and it speeds up Bombay. It can grow relatively quickly and produce quite a lot of coins. Not every city needs to be a unit-whip-factory. SOme cities can be for commerce. Of course, we might lose the lh, which would slow it down quite a bit. I'm willing to take the risk since we have so few cities at this point. It has a forest we could chop and already has buddhism.

Since we are almost certainly not going to get our 8 Experience Point unit from Madurai, I'd say Asoka's capital has to remain our first target.

We'll easily get our 8XP here, as long as we win one of the first two 70% battles.

It's nice to have more units (ala Heroic Epic) and it's nice to attack early, but these things can quickly be outdone by an AI spamming units... i.e. striking as quickly after declaring war as possible tends to be a far more powerful move than taking a couple of weak Cities and then allowing the AI to build up/whip from its larger Cities. Go for the throat and leave the limbs for later.

I wouldn't even make Madurai the 2nd or 3rd City to be captured, but maybe the 4th.

I understand what you're saying. We want to slaughter the living bejesus out of Asoka so fast, he doesn't know what hit him. Right now the HE shows 5t in Ivory, excluding the forest chop. If we get 8XP on T+5, then our HE will be done on T+9 or so. Bbp has us loading galleons on T+7 as I understand it. That means Ivory will be cranking out WEs by the time our galleon chain is ready for reinforcements, by my plan, so our warring can continue on after Bombay. With Eng, our WEs need 2t fro Ivory to Gems, w/o Eng, it's 3t. If we want to mass attack Asoka, AFTER Bombay, we'll need fast reinforcements.

We also want our units as soon as possible, which to me means switching into Police State immediately, which won't speed up the first round of whipped units but will speed up all future rounds of units.

We do PS on T+4 in my plan.

Warpath would be Asoka and possibly a key City or two of Ragnar's, especially, as you say, if we can get a spoke City. We might then make peace with him in order to reduce Ragnar's focus on units and we might leave Asoka with a City or two just to not have to worry about cleaning him up immediately. Then we'd want to focus our southern stack on the eastern AI of the two AIs from the south, who will have easier-to-capture Cities than Ragnar will due to not having spammed units for a while.

At the same time, we'll open up a front on the AIs from the north, who will be trickier to deal with since we'll have to get to the west side of Elizabeth's hub before we can do much damage.

From there, our southern army will probably push on to the western of the two AIs of the south while reinforcements trickle in and form a new stack to take on Ragnar, whom we will redeclare war on.

We might not even need to take on both AIs from the north in this manner, as that'll be 5 AIs already.

I don't think we can afford to plan this erratically. I think we kill 1 team at a time, because of war weariness and do it as fast as possible. And we send all our units in one direction at least until we've created so many that we've reached a saturation point and the extra units have no purpose. Then we can open up a new front (Liz+GK). We want to win this game asap, whether it's through conquest or domination. I'm thinking probably conquest, judging from how slow the AIs are teching, but that remains to be seen.

Is the plan to spam Settlers and colonize the middle of the map at the end of the game or are we looking to get almost all of our additional Cities via conquest (plus the possibility of building the odd canal City along the way)? That part I'm not too certain about.

We don't really know if we want to go for domination yet. Preferably not.

When the AIs get Feudalism, we'll just land larger stacks. It sounds like bbp is going to try and get somewhere between 12 and 15 units for our initial assault on Asoka's capital, which should just about do it if he has, say, 4 Longbowmen and an Axeman defending there.

I'm assuming he won't have Feudalism yet. If he does, that'll suck, but we'll just have to suicide cats.

Eventually, after we learn Engineering, we'll build Trebs instead of Cats (Cats can still be built in low-production Cities or whipped in new Cities). Other than that, we'll probably mostly have War Elephants and Axemen for quite some time, optionally switching to War Elephants and Longbowmen once all of the AIs have Feudalism and we get it in trade ourselves.

This is why we would research to grenadiers. Not for Oz for for COnquest. With grens we could just slam cities from the sea. They'd fall 1t at a time, galleons hopping from one to the next in between turns.

I see what you're saying about the Explorer, but I don't really feel comfortable giving the AIs from the north a chance to come at us.

There will be a small window where the Explorer can explore a bit to the south-west, since we have a bit of knowledge thanks to our Work Boat lure that no Galley force has been sent out from the AIs of the north toward us yet:

We're going to be producing a tone of units in Ivory. We're in no danger of being caught defenseless. If you want we could stick an archer over there to give us a few turns advance warning.

Frankly, since we're on the same landmass as Liz/GK, I doubt they would even plan an amphibious attack. They'll want to come by land. Unfortunately, I don't know the code to check that out. I kind of doubt the code would tell them to attack by sea if they can by land. Ofr course, our Maginot Line might open up that possiblity for them.

I think after some more turns, they'll switch out of WHEOORN, but I don't know when exactly.

Lightbulbing Optics should give us even a bit more visibility, but we'll have to assume that whatever coastal square to the west of our Work Boat we cannot see is a square that contains a stack of boats from Genghis. Then we just need to count how many turns' worth of 2 movement points that the Galleys could make it to the east, and then figure out how many turns we have available to us to send our Explorer to the south-west and then back north-east in time to spot any such potential fleet.

Assuming that we don't Lightbulb Optics, then Genghis could have a stack of boats NW + W of our Work Boat lure (or if we Lightbulb Optics, 1W of there). That gives us about 6 turns of movement with the Explorer, so the Explorer could follow some Roads toward the south-west for 3 turns before heading back to the north-east.

The idea is that we are leaving our Cities empty... yes, knowledge of Asoka's area would be nice, but having our Heroic Epic City razed would be a game-wrecking event, since you can't rebuild a National Wonder once it has been lost. We're already pushing the envelope just by leaving out Cities defenceless... let's at least allow ourselves some advance warning of a possible attack so that we won't lose any Cities unnecessarily.

NOt gonna happen. You guys are too paranoid from SG10...

If you really want to argue it, then I would counter that by not having Military Police units, we have extra land units, so a stack of two of these units could feasibly be landed on Asoka's spoke to both explore it and to potentially Pillage any key Resources that they come across, due to the fact that we have more units to spare by being able to keep our core Cities defenceless thanks to our Explorer.

NO!!! Don't pillage anything!!! Those are our resources we'ld be pillaging. But YES! we could send some other units down there to explore. They might get there faster than the explorer even, I don't know. We just need to defog it and have a canal when the time demands it.

We might not get declared upon by the AIs from the north but they "know" (at least Elizabeth does--I don't think that they share map knowledge) that many of our Cities are defenceless, thanks to her Scout. The AIs do take this fact into account when deciding where to attack. I doubt that they'll take it into account in terms of deciding WHEN to attack, but once they have decided WHEN, you can count on them coming in and razing our undefended City at the worst possible moment (think of the fact that the game deadline is looming and we'll start to get careless with these kinds of details). On that note, the Explorer should not get Fortified or Sentried or anything and after it does it's little detour to the south-west then back north-east, we should end its turn manually each turn, so that the screen will actually jump to showing us the nearby area... no point in having a scouting unit if we aren't going to monitor what it reveals.

We need to explore Asoka's spoke. I don't care which unit does that. We can leave the explorer at Liz if we want.

They won't DoW us until their SoD has arrived at our borders, by land or by sea. That's how the code does it. (That's how the AI "decides" when to DOW.)

Another random thought: Are we building a Work Boat for Bridge City's Crab anywhere? Note that Police State speeds up the construction of Work Boats, so if not, we can always build one after our initial rush with a bit of a cost savings (as long as the City that produces it makes 4 or more Hammers per turn).

Bridge City (Panama) hasn't expanded its culture to the crabs.

A War Elephant getting 3 Experience Points from a single battle could change things slightly, but consider the following:
If we're at war for an extra 2 turns, Asoka will spend 2 more turns whipping units. If nothing else, that will be at least an extra Longbowman in his capital, but likely more units empire-wide. Is getting the Heroic Epic a couple of turns sooner worth having to fight additional units?

Yes.

Are you talking about under Police State or under Representation though? Under Representation, we'd actually get less Hammers over the same amount of time, regardless which units they are being stored into. If the thinking is that we'd stay in Representation and whip under Representation, then you could argue that in the very short term, we might come out relatively even, due to not losing production for 1 turn of Anarchy, but realistically we'll fall behind on production by not immediately switching to Police State since we get almost the full 25% bonus to Hammers when whipping.

No whipping military units until PS.

If you are suggesting switching to Police State and manually completing Optics, then we might be short on Gold for upgrading our 2 Galleys to Galleons.

We won't need 5 galleons for the initial attack. Madurai will give us some gold (not much). Going 0% research, because we already have engineering will give us more cash to upgrade the galleons, if we decide to do that.

Okay, yes, I can see the argument that since we don't quite have all 3 Great Scientists yet, we could spend some turns self-teching Optics, but I'm less inclined to self-tech Optics if we can't learn it at the same time as we get our next Great Scientist or sooner, and even further less inclined if we can't be in Police State during that same time period.

How are you going to pay for warring and researching Engineering under PS?

Is it worth delaying our initial war just to get some future units 1 turn faster to the front lines?

Yes, but that's a false dichotomy. We can have the units faster without delaying our initial war. In fact our initial wars starts several turns sooner.

Besides, with the way that Galleon chains work, they have to move forward and back, so there's always a 2-turn cycle with them instead of a 1-turn cycle (unless you are doubling-up on the number of Galleons, which probably isn't a practical idea). So, that savings from Engineering might not actually add up to much of a gain at all.

No. Ivory produces 1 WE/t. The galleon arrives at Pigs on T+0 and the T+0 WE loads. On T+1, the T+1 WE loads and the galleon sets sail. On T+2 the galleon returns and the T+2 WE loads. And on and on. Plus, hopefully another unit from other cities will arrive every 2t to make it 3 units per 2t.

Are you saying that we can get Astronomy faster by NOT Lightbulbing Optics than by Lightbulbing Optics? In that case, then perhaps you have a point about self-teching Optics.

It's the same if we can research Optics in 4t manually, which I think we can.

There is the cost of having less Galleys becoming Galleons by way of upgrade Gold, but if we can find a way to get Astronomy faster by 1 turn, then sure, I'd actually be okay with a couple of turn delay on Police State. And no, I'm not flip-flopping, I just want Astronomy to come quickly. If self-teching Optics gets us Astro quicker (which is counter-intuitive, but okay, I'll bite), then let's get Astro quicker this way, even if it means delaying the switch into Police State. If it comes at the same time AND we can switch to Police State immediately, then okay, let's self-tech Optics even if it means getting our 2 Galleys upgraded a bit later.

Yes, lost upgrade gold is a cost, you're right. But we already have a bunch of units transported to Madurai, so we don't need as many galleon initially. Plus, we get engineering on the same turn so we can save gold by running 0% research and we get a few coins from Madurai.

If, however, Astro comes at the same time by self-teching as Lightbulbing Optics, then I'm not really convined that self-teching Optics is the way to go.

I hope I've convinced you by now...

But if not, I'll throw this out: Suppose Aoska gets Feudalism soon. Wouldn't we rather be building some trebs to suicide than cats?

 

[babybluepants]

Panama is "Canal City". Bridge City is the one called Bridge City. Gems built its WB, which will net in 1t.

My initial plan for Panama involved an immediate monument, until you said to start with a granary and maybe pop borders with a library later. Dhoom later insisted on not building any further infra anywhere. I think we specifically had a talk about that seafood and decided to give it up for now, as the city has good food already. I sort of regret not having a border pop, but I also think we could whip it pretty aggressively and it has the food for that.

Loading galleons on t+7 involves finishing research on T+4. Then you have: revolt to PS - whip - complete build - move into position for loading. Self-teching Optics delays this by at least a turn, it seems to me, gives up upgrade cash for two galleys and hammers from earlier PS. In exchange we get Engineering right away, as opposed to 15-20t from now (I haven't actually calculated this). It's not a bad trade from my perspective.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Okay, I'm probably okay with LC's plan, since:
- We apparently do have a good chance of getting an 8 Experience Point unit (I thought that we would need to win 2 battles for such a thing to happen).
- He makes a good case for continuing in Representation and the unspoken part is that if we aren't whipping units while we stay in Representation, we won't be missing out on too many Hammers. Most of our Police State bonus comes from whipped Hammers--not all of it, but a significant portion of it--so if we can delay whipping for 4 turns AND still have enough units, then we can delay revolting for 4 turns. The sticking point here is that if we can't get the units without whipping, then we probably do want to switch to Police State sooner... maybe a compromise would be to switch Civics after 2 or 3 turns (if and only if we need to whip a lot in order to create our army in order to meet bbp's timeline). I mean, we almost certainly don't need Representation for the last turn, do we? I guess it's a matter of whether or not we need to whip earlier in order to meet our unit quotas.


As for war weariness, it's better to make peace for a while in order to allow war weariness to cool off. That and allowing Ragnar to send out his units elsewhere are part of the reasons for planning on peace with Ragnar before doing too much damage to him (or perhaps capturing a few of his Cities and then getting an immediate peace so that he can't counter-attack any Cities that we only barely managed to capture). In other words, abusing peace (or even a Cease Fire) can be a potent weapon... and it CAN be abused because of the fact that the AIs are on teams, meaning that we'll have been at war with Ragnar for long enough for him to actually be willing to talk about peace with us... which is an aspect that is different from a normal game. If nothing else, we should at least consider the strategic option that this situation presents to us.


Okay, well if we're going for Conquest (I thought that we were set on Domi but plans can change), then sure, Grenadiers start to make a lot more sense.

However, you'd better speak up soon about which Cities should not be whipped in order to meet your aggressive Great Person plan... perhaps we CAN whip our Cities and just use an AI capital or other large City captured from an AI to run 6+ Scientist Specialists? Certainly doing so sounds more probable than trying to grow Marble City to a large size. Also, relying on an AI City, two, or three would mean that we can both aggressively whip and plan to generate those 3 Great People during a Golden Age.


Our Maginot Line shouldn't block the AIs from the north (Eliz/GK) UNTIL we are at war with them, at which point it will block their path to us. I'm not 100% rock solid certain but I'm pretty certain.

They won't DoW us until their SoD has arrived at our borders, by land or by sea.

Okay, and what happens if we have a two or three turn War Elephant cycle in Ivory City and we just happened to have completed a War Elephant that moved out when the AIs declare war? Will our Cultural Borders give us enough visibility? (Actually, now that I think about it, once we get Optics, our Cultural Borders just might give us enough visibility). Since we should be "safe" for 6 turns from a Galley assault (except for from a possible south-eastern City of Elizabeths, then yeah, I guess we can say that:
IF Optics will give us sufficient visibility that an AI naval stack can't unload units into Ivory City on the turn that they declare war or at least with us being able to see them coming one turn in advance thanks to Optics' visibility, then yeah, we can send the Explorer away.

I WOULD like to see someone check in a test game that Optics will let us see any such naval attack before we commit to running the Explorer away though.

No whipping military units until PS.

Agreed. The outstanding question then becomes if we push the date into the future when we can start whipping, will we be able to build enough land units for our assault in time?

How are you going to pay for warring and researching Engineering under PS?

I was thinking that we'd just get Engineering after like 40 turns or so. Obviously, it's better if we can get it earlier; now we're just trying to iron out what the costs associated with getting it earlier are and doing our best to minimize those costs.

Yes, lost upgrade gold is a cost, you're right. But we already have a bunch of units transported to Madurai, so we don't need as many galleon initially.

Assuming that you are right that Asoka won't spam units if we don't get too close to his Cities, will we march units to his capital across land (thereby threatening him for a longer period of time) or will we just use two trips, with some shuttling of units that had landed next to Madurai loading up and then disembarking? If we can take Madurai without provoking Asoka to whip in his capital, I'll feel much better about the whole "going for Madurai first" approach.

Dhoom later insisted on not building any further infra anywhere.

I still think that it was the right call to focus on units. We needed to get into the "spam units mindset" and if we allowed ourselves an exception in one City, we might have come up with exceptions for nearly every City and we'd be greatly delayed on our attack.

That said, if we want a Monument, using LC's plan of self-teching Optics gives us time to put Hammers into one, whip one, and complete it before Astronomy arrives. Since, by LC's plan, we won't be going into Police State immediately, we're not losing out too much by whipping a Monument there instead of a unit. That is, if the City is at Size 2 (and thus whippable) already. I don't want to make other exceptions (not even for Barracks) for other Cities for a while yet though.

Self-teching Optics delays this by at least a turn

Okay, so that claim doesn't seem to be the same claim that LC is making. Maybe LC has some super sneaky plan up his sleeve, like hiring even more Scientists temporarily to get Optics a turn sooner through self-teching? I'm not quite sure.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

By my plan, we should be able to drop our units where there is no river to the west (hopefully) the same turn we DoW.

I'm not sure how our units can land next to Asoka's capital such that they aren't landing on the Plains River Wine square (the one with the River defence) on the first turn of war. The second turn, sure, but not the first turn. Feel free to explain how, though... maybe you were thinking that we have circumnavigation or something (which we can't get on this map type)?

 

[babybluepants]

We could currently have about 17 base hpt from PS. So, if we delay for 4-5t we lose one WE + a bit, but gain Engineering. From that perspective it's worthwhile.

How are you getting Optics in 4t? We have all the available Sci hired already. We'd need 195bpt. @80%, we're at 196bpt, but losing 69gpt with 226g in treasury. That's 50g short. Are you thinking of selling a tech to Shaka? Lit?

I don't know why you guys think he'll go on a whipping frenzy if we don't have any units within 2 tiles. I don't think he will. He might whip if he was planning to anyway.

Because he'll be in hands full mode, whereas now he is not. With a capital on a hill, any unit less is huge. If he only had 2 units in there now (fairly likely), we could potentially jump him with just 3-4 if we attack there first. If we give him several turns of wartime production, it could be 6 easily. Perhaps there's a way to lure the units towards Madurai, but still. What's the real gain? We could be attacking Bombay in about 10t with only 1t of warning, or we could give him 5-6t of warning with an attack on Madurai, which we'll capture quickly anyway.

I would think domination is much easier here. It's a no vassal game, and there's already a whole lot of cities we'd need to take. No, WE+Treb won't do for conquest, but I think it just about would for domination. We don't even really need to war with Gandhi/Monte or MM/Shaka. We'll kill the other 4, spam some settlers for the hub and then attack one of the remaining teams with overwhelming numbers to push over the limit as needed.

Edit: we have 110 tiles in our mainland, with another 25 in the spoke. Monte and Liz seem to have about the same, making the hub itself approximately 240 tiles. We need 899 for domination, which is taking out two teams along with their spokes and grabbing a further 220 tiles roughly. So, the entire hub with 12-15 settlers or we go after a 5th AI, or likely both.

Edit2: granted, we'd have to keep a lot more cities, but I think anything coastal with a food source could be worth keeping in this game. That's a lot of tiles to hold, I realize, but GLH makes it easier to do so. I figure if I can typically do this for 600 tiles in a standard game, why not for 800 with GLH?

That said, if we want a Monument, using LC's plan of self-teching Optics gives us time to put Hammers into one, whip one, and complete it before Astronomy arrives. Since, by LC's plan, we won't be going into Police State immediately, we're not losing out too much by whipping a Monument there instead of a unit. That is, if the City is at Size 2 (and thus whippable) already. I don't want to make other exceptions (not even for Barracks) for other Cities for a while yet though.

We'd still need to build in WB in Pigs. That's 60h total, plus lost mine in Panama, so about a Galleon with PS. We currently have +9fpt at pop 3 there. The extra seafood would make it +11fpt at pop 4, but we could just be whipping units from pop 4 for some time and have mines to potentially work. I'm not opposed, but I would like to eliminate anything that's not really necessary from here on.

 

[babybluepants]

I haven't followed all your whipping ideas, but a quick look tells me that Marble City should grow to pop5 asap because it can work another citizen. Ivory should grow to pop10 asap so it can also work the silk tile (which it should start T+0 as part of growing to p10). It's a pity Panama never got a border expansion. Waste of a good seafood tile. We should do something about that.

Ivory could grow to 10 in 5t, at a loss of about 20h. At this stage, the gain is extra commerce from the silk plantation, since it can't work any more hills. I switched it to all hammers recently, in order to get this first batch of elephants out.

Why grow Marble? It was your idea to just get it to pop4 and run two Sci. We could benefit from a GH mine there, I guess, but workers have been occupied everywhere else and I thought we would be whipping it aggressively from here on.

 

[babybluepants]

Btw, we have about 25 days left. I think this game is another 60-70t roughly. That gives approximately a 10t set every 3-4 days. The more time we spend right now, the easier it will be, but there is also the Wiz to deal, which could be tricky later on.

I'm ok with self-teching Optics. I was initially play-testing this way, but Dhoom convinced me to rush military production as much as possible. If we have to delay a touch initially, but gain Eng, it's a great trade-off. I don't think grabbing Madurai now is the right move. So, I'll propose the following for your arguments:

1. We self-tech Optics, and try to do so in 4t. If we have to sell Lit to Shaka to make it happen, so be it. He might as well waste hammers on NE and beakers on Music. I'm not sure that will be enough, but it should be close enough to make some micro moves possible. Open to other ideas as to how we can shave that one turn.

1b. After Eng, we need to tech something. I suppose our path to GP is via Guilds, which requires Monarchy-Feud. It also unlocks Knights, which we could use to catch up with siege later in the game. We could get Monarchy from Gandhi/Monte right now, but Lit is not enough. They want Compass. Otherwise, I'm not sure what to tech. Self-teching Feudalism seems crazy. I guess we'll be at 0%, but we'll still be running a lot of Sci beakers.

2. We revolt to PS in 4t, whip 3 galleons on T+5, get ready to attack from "look for here?" on T+8, for a landing on T+10 (ideally somewhere convenient west of Bombay).

3. I'm not convinced we need further GP spam. Stone could get the 600 in 26t (including the 1t revolt), which is T143. Washington could get the same one 1t later, if we chose to do that. Gems, if it keeps running the 2 Sci, could be set up to get the 700 in 7t of GA. Pigs is slightly behind that pace already. I would prefer to whip Stone and Gems, but not getting a GP from Stone seems like a bit of waste right now. Gems can really help with galleon production in the short term, though. So, I'd say we keep the option to get 3 more in Stone-Pigs-Wash for now.

4. We can make the call on the explorer after we map out England for a few turns. I don't disagree with LC, but if she has a usable eastern port I'd like to keep it there for scouting.

5. City development: I think stuff like growing Ivory and Marble and border-popping Panama can be avoided for more hammers into short-term troops and more short-term beakers. I'm ok with it, if that's what you guys want, though.

6. HE: I still think we should have done it via barbs. It was pretty easy, but I delayed getting started by 2t, and now we wouldn't be getting those units back in time for Asoka. If we could spare 4 units or so from the initial Asoka stack, I think it would still be worthwhile. Madurai is the next best chance. Are you sure it gives an instant 3xp, LC? When I was testing the barb attack, I got 3xp a couple of times, but also 2 on some occasions. Attacking Madurai has consequences elsewhere, though, and I don't really like it from the entire Asoka war perspective. Not really sure. Since we'll have two galleys we can't upgrade and they can't keep up with galleons, perhaps we could send 3-4 galleons to Bombay, and simultaneously land 4 units at Madurai? Wouldn't that screw with his initial defensive response at Bombay? That way, we'd get HE unlocked T+9 and possibly catch him with his pants down in Bombay.

 

[babybluepants]

Rough estimates...

Current troops:
5 War Elephants
4 Catapults
1 Axeman

Washington:
16hpt / 20hpt w PS / 36/50 Catapult
3xp Catapults at T+1 (2h OF), T+4 (0h OF), T+8 (10h OF), T+10 (0h OF), T+13 (10h OF), T+15 (0h OF), T+18 (10h OF), T+20 (0h OF)
20t = 8 Catapults

Ivory City:
21hpt / 26hpt w PS / 47hpt w HE&PS / 41/60 WE / 1 chop remaining
5xp War Elephants at T+1 (3h OF), T+4 (6h OF), T+8 (24h OF), T+10 (16h OF), switch to HE for T+13 with chop (9h OF), WE T+14 (7h OF), T+16 (41h OF), T+17 (28h OF), T+18 (15h OF), T+19 (2h OF)
20t = 9 War Elephants + HE + 49h, less 20 base hammers if we grow

Pigs City:
8hpt / 12hpt in 1t / 15hpt w PS / 54/60 WE
338 unit hammers by T+20 = 4 catapults + 2 WE + 18h (0xp units)
-30 base hammers for Panama WB
+60 base hammers for a 2pop whip
Approximately, 5 cats + 2 WE in 20t, with also a WB

Stone City:
9hpt / 11hpt w PS / 22/60 WE
If we keep running the two Sci for a GP = 2WE + 2 cats in 20t (0xp)

Silver City:
2 chops available
6hpt/7hpt @ pop 4 / 10hpt/12hpt @ pop 5 or pop 6
Regrowth 4 to 6 in 6t, gaining 57h in the process
4 unhappy faces to give, 5 with MP warrior
3 whips every 6t results in 518h by T+20, or 5 WE + 4 cats

Total = 23 WE + 23 cats in 20t.

Other cities probably mainly whip galleons, but could also contribute units. We keep running gpp in Washington, Pigs and Stone.

 

[babybluepants]

And, I'll take a bow for post #4000. I seriously doubt I'll ever make it to 5...

Spoiler :

I do realize you two are killing me in this department.

 

[babybluepants]

Ummm... Holy crap, I think I'm going blind or just plain stupid.

Spoiler :

Is that what I think it is, and did we really seriously see it 20t ago? Edit: :suicide:

 

[babybluepants]

Teams that have definitely finished so far with penultimate save dates:
Phoenix Rising 1310 AD (T+74)
Misfit Gypsy Nuts 1525 AD (T+98)

PD are at T+52 and moving very slowly. Have to think they are about done.

I don't think those dates suggest anything better than mace+treb is needed.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

We could currently have about 17 base hpt from PS. So, if we delay for 4-5t we lose one WE + a bit, but gain Engineering. From that perspective it's worthwhile.

Okay, I can see that, particularly if we don't need to be whipping during those first 4 or 5 turns.

Because he'll be in hands full mode, whereas now he is not. With a capital on a hill, any unit less is huge. If he only had 2 units in there now (fairly likely), we could potentially jump him with just 3-4 if we attack there first.

That scenario will be highly unlikely if we don't drop units off next to Gandhi's capital on the first turn of war. Granted, as I suggested earlier, we could land 2 or 3 units on the Plains River Wine just to see and if he already has huge defences there, the rest of the stack can stay on the Galleons and either land on a different square next to his capital or potentially even sail on to another large City, hoping that Asoka, already being at his "max defenders" in his capital will remove some defenders... we could optionally leave our landed 2 or 3 units in place (getting the River for bonus defence for our War Elephants--the only way that War Elephants get improved defence) or else load them back up and sail on to the next City so as to lure Asoka into leaving his capital relatively undefended.

That said, I'm more of the belief that you have, in that Asoka is going to have very few units in each of his Cities on turn 1 of war and likely can scramble at most 1 additional defender for turn 2. If we have 12+ units, of which 3+ are Cats, it doesn't matter how big his Cultural Defences and River defence are, as we can just immediately toss our Cats at his Archers and then take the City, unless, as I said, he has like 6 Fortified defenders, which he is highly unlikely to have, or unless he has several fortified Longbowmen (which could happen but we can still play the numbers game with collateral damage and possibly the Longbowmen won't be fully Fortified, as the Fortification bonus needs to be re-earned after upgrading a unit.

I would think domination is much easier here.

We are well set up for it: not needing additional techs, already knowing Code of Laws for whipping Courthouses, having The Great Lighthouse on a map that consists of mostly coastal Cities, having Galleons so that we can play the Vikings and arbitrarily war from the high seas...

Conquest requires cleaning up every single AI City, while Domination does not.

If we were going to struggle financially to keep a lot of Cities, then we could raze a lot and hope to win via Conquest. Somehow, though, with AIs already setting Cities in the middle (Monte was, anyway), I feel that other AIs will just have Settler Parties waiting to fill in any gaps that we create. This fact leads me to believe that we'll probably be better off keeping the Cities anyway, Conquest or Domination, and that difference is the major difference between those victory conditions: keeping or razing Cities.

I don't care which option we choose, but since we'll probably need to keep most Cities regardless of which one we pick (to avoild having to reconquer City locations multiple times via a Conquest game), it seems that the map's situation does lend itself more naturally to Domination.

If you want to compare against other teams: are their Score graphs going up over time by quite a bit? If yes, then they're likely going for Domination/Diplomation.

Being able to take Vassals would change the equation considerably... kill off one AI in a team and capitulate his partner... then rinse and repeat. Unfortunately, that option not being available to us, it doesn't seem to me that we'd play a Conquest game much differently, except that we'd probably end up accidentally triggering Domination with it anyway, essentially skipping the Settler-spam stage in favour of more warring, and not obtaining Conquest due to needing to keep Cities to prevent other AIs from resettling, due to the AIs having very few places left for their Settler Parties to go to.

We'd still need to build in WB in Pigs. That's 60h total, plus lost mine in Panama, so about a Galleon with PS. We currently have +9fpt at pop 3 there. The extra seafood would make it +11fpt at pop 4, but we could just be whipping units from pop 4 for some time and have mines to potentially work. I'm not opposed, but I would like to eliminate anything that's not really necessary from here on.

Hmmm, yeah, when you put it that way, I guess we will skip the Monument and can just hope for natural spread of Buddhism once we open up borders to its Holy City (only a trade ROUTE connection is required but I'm pretty sure that Open Borders increases the chance of auto-spread and we'll have automatic Open Borders once we own the City--Asoka's capital).

Ivory could grow to 10 in 5t, at a loss of about 20h. At this stage, the gain is extra commerce from the silk plantation, since it can't work any more hills. I switched it to all hammers recently, in order to get this first batch of elephants out.

If we're going to self-tech Optics, then other than possibly working a Silk in order to get Optics in 4 turns instead of 5, I'd rather focus on Hammers over Commerce in anything but the short term.

With Engineering (self-teching Optics) or without it (Lightbulbing Optics), I would think that we'd stay at a 0% Science Rate as soon as we learn Optics. Since the extra Commerce would then equal extra Gold (other than possibly equaling Flasks for 4 turns, which could be worth considering if it speeds up Optics to 4 turns instead of 5 turns), it would be a silly trade off: more Hammers from our core Cities = more City capture Gold due to faster AI City captures and more successful AI City captures with less losses.

Why grow Marble? It was your idea to just get it to pop4 and run two Sci. We could benefit from a GH mine there, I guess, but workers have been occupied everywhere else and I thought we would be whipping it aggressively from here on.

Even with keeping open the possibility of a Golden-Age-fueled spam of 3 Great Scientists, I don't see how we'd ever want Marble City to be one of the Cities to generate a Great Person. It just won't grow quickly enough. Therefore, Marble City's best use IS as a relatively small unit-whipping factory.

Another City (possibly an AI City) could be used for our Military Science Lightbulbing, assuming that we even end up needing Grenadiers. I'd rather whip more now nearly everywhere (even Stone City) and just get Great People from having captured additional large-sized AI Cities near the start of wars before the AIs had the opportunity to whip said Cities down before we could capture those Cities.

1. We self-tech Optics, and try to do so in 4t. If we have to sell Lit to Shaka to make it happen, so be it. He might as well waste hammers on NE and beakers on Music. I'm not sure that will be enough, but it should be close enough to make some micro moves possible. Open to other ideas as to how we can shave that one turn.

Okay, let's go for it. If it ends up taking 5 turns, so be it.

Note that when you sell a tech, only the AI that received it will appreciate the sale. So, if there is one AI on the Mansa/Shaka team that you want to impress more than the other, sell it to the AI that you want to impress. I'm not sure that it matters, and if it doesn't matter, just pick someone.

Also note that selling a tech ASAP might give the AI team more time to build up more Gold for a second possible sale.

Working squares like the Silk for the very short term might just help in giving us sufficient Commerce.

There is also the small possibility that we have a Wonder (an Aesthetics one?) that we could invest some Hammers into at a double-the-rate Hammers (from having a Marble, Stone, Gold, or what-have-you bonus to production) but it would be risky, as we'd need an AI to complete said Wonder in order to realise the gain in Gold.

We don't have Currency for building Wealth, but we do have Alphabet for building Research. Again, doing so cuts into our Hammers, but at least it's our pre-Police-State Hammers.

Then there's always the possibility of working other Commerce-based squares in place of Mines... I think I saw that the capital's Spice Resource might be improved soon.

Also, there is the concept of hiring an extra Scientist in a City at a Food deficit... as long as the City shrinks down to 0 Food, it will not lose a population point... if it shrinks down to -1 Food, though, it will lose a population point... we definitely don't want to lose a population point in any of our Cities from hiring Scientists.

2. We revolt to PS in 4t, whip 3 galleons on T+5, get ready to attack from "look for here?" on T+8, for a landing on T+10 (ideally somewhere convenient west of Bombay).

I still think that it's worth trying our luck by attacking from NE+NE of Madurai, so that we have the option of landing a stack on the Plains River Wine on the first turn. Landing 2 or 3 units there won't be the end of us if after landing, we realise that we'd rather spend an extra turn at sea with most of our units before landing at a different location.

If there are 2 Archers (or possibly even 3 units there), we could strongly consider dropping off the whole stack on the Plains River Wine and hoping that Asoka won't reinforce the City sufficiently so that we can just attack the City with its full defensive bonus on the following turn.

3. I'm not convinced we need further GP spam. Stone could get the 600 in 26t (including the 1t revolt), which is T143. Washington could get the same one 1t later, if we chose to do that. Gems, if it keeps running the 2 Sci, could be set up to get the 700 in 7t of GA. Pigs is slightly behind that pace already. I would prefer to whip Stone and Gems, but not getting a GP from Stone seems like a bit of waste right now. Gems can really help with galleon production in the short term, though. So, I'd say we keep the option to get 3 more in Stone-Pigs-Wash for now.

If we can win in roughly 50 turns, then we'll thank ourselves later for not having saved those population points.

Capturing 3 medium-sized Cities from the AIs could lead to us whipping a Library and just hiring 2 Scientists in them permanently.

Also, we'll need to check Lightbulbing preferences, but what would happen if we did learn Meditation + Philosophy but not any other techs (for now I guess that we'll dump some Flasks into Civil Service with no intention of learning it)? If we learned Philosophy via trade (or even slowly via self-teching... probably a better use of our passive Flasks than a Civil Service tech that we won't ever want to complete research on), would our Lightbulbing to Military Science strategy still hold?

If yes, then having 2 Scientists hired in each of 3 AI Cities could help us to slowly get Great People there... and... during a Golden Age, we could get three times the GPP, thanks to having Buddhism in our AI-captured Cities + running Pacifism.

I'd rather use our citizens in this manner... we then wouldn't need to build Barracks in those 3 Cities captured from AIs and would just slowly grow those Cities with 2 Scientists being worked in them for an eventual late-game Caste System + Buddhism + Pacifism run.

To capture these Cities effectively, though, we'll want to give up on GPP production in all but Washington and just focus on spamming units, so as to capture the AI Cities with more population points in them.

If we don't end up needing Grenadiers, we'll definitely come out ahead by not having used our citizens in our core Cities for further Great People production (other than in Washington).

4. We can make the call on the explorer after we map out England for a few turns. I don't disagree with LC, but if she has a usable eastern port I'd like to keep it there for scouting.

Since we have the turns to move the Explorer to the south-west for a bit safely now, we can definitely hunt out any such south-east-coast City safely, then decide for the next turnset what to do with the Explorer.

5. City development: I think stuff like growing Ivory and Marble and border-popping Panama can be avoided for more hammers into short-term troops and more short-term beakers. I'm ok with it, if that's what you guys want, though.

More troops! More Hummers (sic)!

6. HE: I still think we should have done it via barbs. It was pretty easy, but I delayed getting started by 2t, and now we wouldn't be getting those units back in time for Asoka. If we could spare 4 units or so from the initial Asoka stack, I think it would still be worthwhile. Madurai is the next best chance. Are you sure it gives an instant 3xp, LC? When I was testing the barb attack, I got 3xp a couple of times, but also 2 on some occasions. Attacking Madurai has consequences elsewhere, though, and I don't really like it from the entire Asoka war perspective. Not really sure. Since we'll have two galleys we can't upgrade and they can't keep up with galleons, perhaps we could send 3-4 galleons to Bombay, and simultaneously land 4 units at Madurai? Wouldn't that screw with his initial defensive response at Bombay? That way, we'd get HE unlocked T+9 and possibly catch him with his pants down in Bombay.

And here-in lies the biggest cost of the self-teching Optics plan: 2 Galleys that won't help us. 9 units won't be enough to take down Bombay. We definitely want 4 Galleons unloading there on the first turn of war (if the first Galleon unloading spots only 2 or 3 defenders in Bombay), while 5 Galleons would be ideal for a relatively surefire capture.

Let's say that we went in with only 3 or 4 Galleons and LOST the fight. Then we'd be totally hosed. Is Engineering worth that risk?

What if we compromised and aimed to self-tech Optics in 5 turns? Could we get 5 fully-loaded Galleons into the fray? 3 fully-loaded Galleons won't cut it at all and 4 would be the bare minimum. 15 land units may seem like a lot but I'd rather go in with extra than have our game fall apart due to bad random number generation rolls.

And that's the real kicker: LC is pushing the Madurai attack because self-teching Optics (thereby spending our upgrade Gold) doesn't mix very well with a Galleon-based attack on Bombay. What I'm not sure about is if 1 extra turn can make up the difference for an extra upgraded Galleon.

It may be that if we go with the self-teching Optics route, we could end up with no choice but to go for Madurai first.

Is that what I think it is, and did we really seriously see it 20t ago?

I'm not really sure what you're seeing there... the possibility of building a City on the PHFor in order to make boat travel times faster? Will the travel times really be faster if we have to go north on the eastern side of that hub and then south again on the western side of that hub? Probably not... so we'd need a lot of canals... but maybe I'm missing something here.


So, overall, I see three options:
A] Forget about Engineering for 20+ turns, plan for a 15+ unit attack on Bombay as our initial war target (switching to Police State right away)

B] Self-tech Optics and attack Madurai, planning for a tough fight at Bombay and expecting far less capturable population points in most of Asoka's Cities along with far more units defending Asoka's Cities

C] Self-tech Optics (probably in 5 turns) and see if we can somehow muster at least 4 Galleons or miraculously 5 Galleons worth of troops for an initial attack on Bombay

If we can somehow pull off option C], great... otherwise we are probably forced to decide between a smooth capture of Bombay (option A]) versus getting Engineering and delaying the attack on Bombay for several turns (option B]).