SGOTM 14 - One Short Straw

[LowtherCastle]

I also don't exactly have all day to commit to it.

Bbp, just play as long as you feel comfortable. It's just a game. RL is important, this is not.

I've blocked the time out for this, so I can take over whenever you want.

 

[babybluepants]

I went pillage crazy this turn, after capturing Tabriz and Nongoma. I can actually avoid strike with some wealth building. It delays some potential settlers, though. I'd rather avoid deficit spending any turn we can. This is likely last one.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Priority 3: (military) attackers go before defenders

Do you mean where a unit is located (in a City or not) or the unit type (i.e. Archer = defender, Axeman = attacker, etc)?

Is there a certain unit type that we can spam (Warriors, Archers, or the like) that we can hope to use as bait for the Striking by building said units and pushing them out of our Cultural Borders?


As for distance having an effect or not... When I've spammed Jaguars or Quechuas, it seemed to be relatively consistently killing off the furthest units from my capital that weren't within my Cultural Borders.

Maybe there's a different factor, such as "earlier-built units die off first" but it really seemed to be distance-oriented.

THis means after 12 turns of GA we will have lost 42 units...

Actually, my hope was that with Capture Gold and the Golden Age and factors like a Forbidden Palace, we could reduce or remove the amount of striking during the Golden Age period.


I believe strongly that another factor involved with Strikes is the severity of your deficit... if I was losing a couple of Gold per turn versus 20 Gold per turn beyond the income that I could take in, I'd lose units faster in the 20 Gold per turn deficit scenario.


So, those are two reasons to build the Forbidden Palace: trying to reduce or remove Striking during the Golden Age period (Golden Age = increased Commerce but NOT increased Maintenance Costs) and also to hopefully reduce the severity of Strikes as much as possible.


I still have a lot to read in the thread but I wanted to get those ideas out there now.

 

[babybluepants]

LC,
It seems I'm even slower than you. Do you have time right now to tag in?

 

[LowtherCastle]

I went pillage crazy this turn, after capturing Tabriz and Nongoma. I can actually avoid strike with some wealth building. It delays some potential settlers, though. I'd rather avoid deficit spending any turn we can. This is likely last one.

Excellent. I agree. The bulk of our settlers don't really need to be built till transport time at the end.

 

[LowtherCastle]

LC,
It seems I'm even slower than you. Do you have time right now to tag in?

Sure. I'm really glad to took over at least for a while because that took the pressure off me long enough to think of those warrior pumps. This STRIKE is a nerve-racking thing, right at the end like this. Hopefully, we've got it wired now.

So just give me the word...

 

[babybluepants]

Uploaded.

We made a Combat4-Amphi WE in Nodwengu. It needs to make it to Emerald City, 'cause those promos are killer against the rifle. I had to use our units in Zululand to pillage this turn, so I haven't started any loading for the Wizard.

We can move on Wadan next turn, I think.

New Sarai should be doable next turn, as well, though we have a lot of injuries in that stack.

 

[babybluepants]

Let me know when you need a break.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Do you mean where a unit is located (in a City or not) or the unit type (i.e. Archer = defender, Axeman = attacker, etc)?

I was talking about archers and such defender types. But any unit, when it's the last in a city, is protected as a garrison.

But it's mainly better to use the post from DanF. He looked at the code. The only exception is with settlers, in my view.

Is there a certain unit type that we can spam (Warriors, Archers, or the like) that we can hope to use as bait for the Striking by building said units and pushing them out of our Cultural Borders?

As for distance having an effect or not... When I've spammed Jaguars or Quechuas, it seemed to be relatively consistently killing off the furthest units from my capital that weren't within my Cultural Borders.

Maybe there's a different factor, such as "earlier-built units die off first" but it really seemed to be distance-oriented.

Again, if you look at the DanF post, you'll see that the RNG plays a big role. That corresponds to my testing. The cost of the unit is another factor, so warriors are obviously twice better than chariots (although I don't know from the code it's "twice"). Then there's the promotions of the units. I assume that's all there is. DanF said nothing about distance and frankly, I didn't see anything related to distance factoring into my tests.

Actually, my hope was that with Capture Gold and the Golden Age and factors like a Forbidden Palace, we could reduce or remove the amount of striking during the Golden Age period.


I believe strongly that another factor involved with Strikes is the severity of your deficit... if I was losing a couple of Gold per turn versus 20 Gold per turn beyond the income that I could take in, I'd lose units faster in the 20 Gold per turn deficit scenario.


So, those are two reasons to build the Forbidden Palace: trying to reduce or remove Striking during the Golden Age period (Golden Age = increased Commerce but NOT increased Maintenance Costs) and also to hopefully reduce the severity of Strikes as much as possible.


I still have a lot to read in the thread but I wanted to get those ideas out there now.

I doubt there's any difference between 1g and 999g deficit. You lose it, you can't pay your bills, you units go on strike.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Uploaded.

We made a Combat4-Amphi WE in Nodwengu. It needs to make it to Emerald City, 'cause those promos are killer against the rifle. I had to use our units in Zululand to pillage this turn, so I haven't started any loading for the Wizard.

We can move on Wadan next turn, I think.

New Sarai should be doable next turn, as well, though we have a lot of injuries in that stack.

Thanks for the info. I'll figure out a quick plan for Oz and then we'll go from there.

Let me know when you need a break.

Okay.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

2. We could attempt to minimize losses by building chariots and sending them out of the city culture, but we will lose macemen, there's no doubt about it...

Factors that decrease the likelihood of a unit to be chosen for disbanding:

* high production cost
* city defenders

Hmmm, depending upon the definition of "city defenders" (does that mean a unit type or a unit's location), maybe building Chariots at the end is a good way to go.

Chariots cost the same as Archers, right? And we can hardly build Warriors anywhere, so Chariots would be a good sacrificial unit, if there is anywhere on the map that we can send them outside of our Cultural Borders once they are built.

Perhaps a few locally-stationed Galleons and Chariots near our core production Cities can be placed outside of our Cultural Borders as a "hope they die" type of effort.

Safe units: Settlers, GPs (not warlords)...
1. Don't attach the GG as a Warlord until the second-to-last turn.

I'm not really clear if a Great General that isn't attached is "safe" or not.

If Warlords without units attached are also not safe, then we'd want to keep the Great General within our Cultural Borders as much as possible during his travel time.

My testing also confirms that the STRIKE counter does NOT get reset when you leave the STRIKE. If you're money goes into deficit again, you immediately start losing troops at the rate determined by your total STRIKE counter to-date.

So, every turn that we can balance our books and get out of a Strike condition = A Good Thing, reglardless of the order of said non-Strike turns.

There might be some tricky bit about being able to go in and out of amnesty, as you called it (the first turn of a Strike?), such that the Strike counter doesn't increment for the first time of each Strike, but I kind of doubt that this effect is for anything more than the first turn of the game that you are in a Strike and thus the counter probably goes up but just rounds down to zero when divided by 2.

So much for my theory about the level of deficit... that said, I still think that the Forbidden Palace and optionally some Courthouses will be a good approach to use since with a high amount of City Captures on the odd turn, we can potentially rebalance our books for a turn or two when combined with our lower Maintenance Costs.

For starters, we can demand 100g from Monty.

I'm fine if we do so as long as we do not feel the need to attack him (perhaps for City Capture Gold) for the next turns, as we'll have a 10-turn enforced Peace Treaty. That's a pretty hefty price to pay (since we might otherwise be able to get Capture Gold sooner form Gandhi/Monte) but if we can't capture another City we may just have to pay it.

We can switch 4 civics for 4t and switch religion for the 5th.

Despite the length of the Anarchy, I still think that you'll need to wait [(Anarchy Period) + (5 turns)] before being able to revolt again. So, it's not like we can really do chaining of Anarchy.


Still reading the thread...

 

[babybluepants]

I've been discontinuing treb builds, btw. I think we have enough for another half dozen city captures or so, and they don't help against the Wizard. You can reconsider that, if you want.

What's our longer term plan? Survive deficit this turn, then look to initiate 5t of anarchy? We'll need to whip some settlers. This either has to happen before the anarchy, or we can't switch out of Slavery, or we still fire off a GA and do a Caste-Slavery-Caste switch. How long is the revolt wait after a 4t anarchy?

If we were gonna burn the Artist on a culture bomb, where? The mountain pass north of Xachicalco seems ok, if we can take some of Monte's tiles. I never know whether I'll get tiles in that situation, though. Otherwise, it would need to be in the middle of the hub, to eliminate some settler need. What do we do with the GS in that case?

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Warriors, however, did seem to go early. Maybe that 15h is a big enough difference in cost.

Well, we could replace our Warrior Military Police units with Archers and then send the existing Warriors on Galleons out to sea.

The Warriors would have:
- low XP
- a big differential in cost
- hopefully not be counted as "defensive units"

Err, wait, LC is already far ahead of me with planned locations from which to spam Warriors.

I'm not convinced that we should settle the Warrior pumps just yet... I'd hold off until we're certain that we absolutely cannot balance our books on some of the game turns.


If I didn't say it already, maybe we can whip a Market in the City with the 29 Gold Shrine once it comes out of revolt. We don't actually get the 29 Gold until after coming out of a revolt, so that'll be one of the rare Cities that saves us money once we start paying Maintenance Costs for it.

We currently have 476g in treasury and a whopping 628gpt loss this turn.

That doesn't sound absolutely horrendous... I mean, a Golden Age could probably get us out of that deficit... for a turn... then we'd just need more Capture Gold every few turns to reduce the total amount of Striking.

We might even skip Shaka's last city for now

If we don't kill Shaka's last City then Shaka's Stack of Doom will still be alive to potentially harass us. Kill his Cities and his Stack of Doom disappears.


As for the Golden Age... it's basically an extra-long Golden Age (which could help us in building more Courthouses in distant Cities, for example) versus a single Great Artist. Since we can always raze and resettle Cities at the end, I'm not convinced that a single Great Artist is THAT valuable.

I'm hoping that during the Golden Age, we'll be able to:
a) build Wealth on turns where we've captured Gold... remember the shortcut for this approach--click on a City's name on the main game screen so that the name and Food bar and Hammer bar are highlighted and so that you see the units/buildings that can be produced in the City but such that you do not actually "enter" the City screen. The shortcut is to hold Ctrl (or Alt--one is for "all Cities on this continent" and the other is for "all Cities," but both are pretty much the same on this map) when you click on a City's bar without entering the City (single click and not double click). If you got it right, you should see white-coloured highlighting around all Cities. From there, queue up Wealth by holding down Ctrl and clicking on Wealth. To reverse the effect on a following turn, again Ctrl or Alt click on a City's bar so as to select all Cities and then click on the Wealth build in the build queue to remove it from the build queue. You can micro individual Cities away from Wealth (such as Ivory City) but it's easier to mass-build-Wealth on turns where it will help and mass-stop-building-Wealth on turns where building Wealth won't be sufficient to push us into positive income. Note that you want to Ctrl + click on Wealth so that you don't replace the "0 Hammer builds" with Wealth... you want Wealth to appear above those build items so that when you remove the Wealth build, the other build items in your build queues will reappear again, without requiring you to micro them. SOME Cities that have Hammers invested will automatically "push" the current build item down if you don't press Ctrl, so it may look like it worked without pressing Ctrl when clicking on the Wealth build but you definitely want to click on Ctrl when clicking on Wealth, trust me.
b) build units on turns where we can't balance our books (build useful units in most Cities, plus Chariots in other Cities, Warriors where possible, and possibly extra Galleons in order to carry the Warriors and Chariots out to sea if there isn't somewhere outside of our Cultural Borders that they can just walk to)
c) build a few Courthouses and definitely the Forbidden Palace

Note that even if we have already revolted outside of a Golden Age, launching a Golden Age will cancel the Anarchy.


The whole point about "not worrying about Strikes" was not that we'd plan to Strike every turn but that we'd try to balance our budget on some turns and build units on turns where we couldn't balance it and thus the "not worrying about it" part was just that if we couldn't balance the budget on a turn, we'd allow the Strike to happen at relatively full force but with building extra units to try and compensate.


Revolting a lot is also an alternative but I'd also like to see someone test it out... I have a feeling that turns of Anarchy don't count toward the revolt countdown timer such that we'd probably have 10 turns of non-Golden-Age Striking in between all of these revolts and we'd produce a far lot less units (and would get less Culture in our Cities, too).


Still reading...

 

[Dhoomstriker]

The mountain pass north of Xachicalco seems ok, if we can take some of Monte's tiles.

Culture Bombing in BtS sucks hardcore compared to Vanilla.

I think that we should test out this scenario, but I'm almost certain that in BtS, if you Culture Bomb a City in revolt, it does a terrible job... basically, from what I recall, you will steal exactly 0 squares that belong to an established competing AI City. So, we'd get 0 squares from Monte unless we ALSO captured the City or Cities of his which are outputting said Culture.

Essentially, from what I recall, when you Culture Bomb a Revolting City, you'll only get credit for squares that no one else has a City giving them control over the relevant squares.

It's definitely something to test (world build yourself into a war, world build yourself some units next to an AI's City including a Great Artist, attack, then Culture Bomb on the next turn).

Culture Bombing is great in Vanilla but I have a recollection of it totally sucking hardcore in BtS in terms of stealing squares--in essence, don't except to steal any squares unless the squares are currently unowned by anyone.

 

[babybluepants]

That doesn't sound absolutely horrendous... I mean, a Golden Age could probably get us out of that deficit... for a turn... then we'd just need more Capture Gold every few turns to reduce the total amount of Striking.

Not really. We've recently captured a lot of large cities and had plenty to pillage. No such luck in future turns. Also, our costs will probably increase by a good 50gpt per turn, as cities come out of revolt and we capture more increasing civic upkeep. I don't think we can keep afloat for much longer, if at all. The issue is that we need to preserve the Wizard stack for quite some time, so we need to buy any turns we can without units disbanding.

 

[babybluepants]

Culture Bombing in BtS sucks hardcore compared to Vanilla.

I think that we should test out this scenario, but I'm almost certain that in BtS, if you Culture Bomb a City in revolt, it does a terrible job... basically, from what I recall, you will steal exactly 0 squares that belong to an established competing AI City. So, we'd get 0 squares from Monte unless we ALSO captured the City or Cities of his which are outputting said Culture.

Essentially, from what I recall, when you Culture Bomb a Revolting City, you'll only get credit for squares that no one else has a City giving them control over the relevant squares.

It's definitely something to test (world build yourself into a war, world build yourself some units next to an AI's City including a Great Artist, attack, then Culture Bomb on the next turn).

Culture Bombing is great in Vanilla but I have a recollection of it totally sucking hardcore in BtS in terms of stealing squares--in essence, don't except to steal any squares unless the squares are currently unowned by anyone.

I suspect you're right. The city would be newly settled (not in revolt), and we're not at war with Monte, btw.

 

[babybluepants]

btw, LC, Agades had one knight defending last turn, and no other units. Forgot to put a note down.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

If we:
a) Don't settle the junky Cities (yet), such as the Warrior pumps
AND
b) Raze all Cities that aren't going to be large enough to whip a Courthouse (Size 12 before capture to allow for Size 11 after capture and Size 10 after 1 turn of shrinking)
AND
c) Launch a Golden Age
AND
d) Build our Forbidden Palace

Do you think that we can avoid Striking for a while?


I.e. We aim to replace the razed Cities with Settlers later?

 

[Mitchum]

The bad thing about being in revolt is that we can't build any units and culture output is zero. Keep that in mind as new troops will be ZERO, so only existing troops will be disbanded. Some cities really need a culture expansion and too much revolting could be an issue.

 

[Mitchum]

We may have to raze/replant bigger cities anyway because they may not be out of revolt in time to expand their borders and claim tiles. That means we may need quite a few more settlers for Mansa's peninsula.

EDIT: It would also help with keeping our immediate costs down.