SGOTM 15 - Unusual Suspects

kcd_swede · May 11, 2012

^OK Xcal, I agree with your sentiment that we are very unlikely to get Hatty de-hindued in time for the AP resolution.

Option 1: We could try anyhow, and if we failed then use the 13t AP to end the war and lick our wounds. Be sure to time it right, though, with the resolution. The whip is mightier than the lance. Steel, like you say. BTW- Hatty is already in war with Cyrus, but our stack near her capitol has her (rightly) a bit nervous, and they aint headed north. :lol:

Could Dow Cyrus and then ask Hatty to attack Assyrian, beat her to it, launch sea units from there. Or backstab the heartless beyatch.

Option 2: Outlined previously, go for a Hindu-love-fest inspired UN run. Flip'em all to hindu, often. Keep'em that way. Build the UN. 4 Friends would do. No DOW's by us, so the diplo stays simpler. Gift cities near the end if they are at +15 and still not friends. :lol:

The benefit of option 2 is that the peaceful approach does not reqquire a lot of real-time, and my judgement is that there is less chance something goes desperately wrong.

What's the active player prefer? Lets let AAA decide.

(1) A mad bellicose run to the sea at Assyrian, with possible backstab of Hatty to get to the sea in the east... watching for HC/MM to dow someone and thereby make possible OB by joint war, or else it will be amphibious assault there, to stubbornly stick to a religious vc?

or
(2) The spy who loved me: flip Liz/Shaka/GK/HC all into Hindu and keep them there. See what happens to the world political scene and react keeping everyone happyt at the same time... steal and out-tech everyone to Mass Media, build the UN, and tear our hair out when Cyrus demands we stop trading with GK or vice versa, etc.

Neither is certain to get us done before the deadline. Neither is certain to work. Just pick one and do your best. Should be fun, at least. And I've learned a lot about spy/AP synergy. Too bad Neil made a map designed to nerf our chosen VC more than any other. Its his fault, not ours. :lol:

Since the big 3 are getting the laurels most likely, lets not over-think this and make it tedious. just play. But if you see a better way, discuss.

What I'm sayin' is that AAA is green to do whatever he wants, from me at least.

Xcalibrator · May 11, 2012

Could we combine war and UN? We're only 5th or so in population, but if we capture a bunch of Egyptian cities and then concentrate on growth, maybe we could get to 1st in population and be the opponent of whomever builds the UN. This keeps the Religious option open; even if we can't get OBs with HC we might be able to gift a Hindu coastal city to him. That leaves only MM and maybe we'll be able to come up with some way to infect him. There's always the option of invasion, capture city, infect, give back. (Hey, I didn't say it would be easy, just that it's always an option.

)

AAA · May 11, 2012

kcd_swede said:
Can we flip Liz and at least one other FT to hindu before DOW and still capture Lahore/Tokyo/Satsuma before the resolution in 13 turns??? If we can, we should. If we can't, we should probably hold off and aim UN.

What say you AAA? You have a lot of experience with wars... do you think its do-able?

Ahhhhhh..........................................no :shifty:

Or at least quite unlikely. Hatty's stack is in the wrong location, so at best we will have to have two stacks, about 20 up north and 15-20 south. We are talking 1000-2000 in gold upgrading. I don't think the time permits this.

I would much prefer rifling to steel. Grens vs Knights is less than ideal, and while you can soften things up with canons, I much prefer units that just kill things with no questions asked.

I think now is the time to remove Hatty, while the unit advantage is so much in our favor. Also the best way to get Hatty to vote for us in the UN race is to wipe her/it off the map and vote with her population. A UN vote allows us to flip and hold Liz and whoever in Hindu while building more shared war dip points and becoming a five hundred pound gorilla (five hundred pound gorillas typically only need one or two AIs to vote for them - and five hundred pound gorillas win space races if everything else doesn't work).

The only thing I would worry about is Hatty pulling in Shaka or Liz against us, so we should flip those two and hope for the best. I would like rifling ASAP, can we steal it fast? In terms of shared war against Hatty, I would only want it once we have all the cities worth getting. HC and MM would be the UN opponents of choice.

City Raiding riflemen are my favorite unit

Xcalibrator · May 11, 2012

Gotta disagree about cannon vs riflemen--remember Osaka--seige units give human players an almost unfair advantage that we must use. 10 rifles vs a stack of knights, etc. will kill 8 or 9 knights and then several more of your now-wounded rifles die in the counterattack that uses his untouched units; any other units in your stack would be attacking at not-great odds. 10 cannon with a few defensive units on good ground vs a stack of knights, etc. will weaken his entire stack to the point where they offer no counterattack threat at the cost of maybe 2 cannon. If they're weak enough after the first turn of bombardment you can throw much of your stack against his, while keeping a few strong defensive units at full strength. Heal if necessary, while his feeble counterattack wastes more of his units against your strong defenders, and then soften him some more and mop up. With our 3 GG cities pumping out 9XP units, after their first battle they'll usually get enough healing from using the 10th XP on a promotion to continue fighting without pause--but they have to live through any counterattack to use that promotion. Brute force (smash a stack with rifles) works great if you have more units than they do. We don't, but we have a quality advantage, and need to use it carefully.

Enough pontificating (and there's a slight chance I could be wrong :mischief:

). We can do both. Research Steel ASAP, then trying gifting it (plus other?) to Shaka to DoW Hatty. Meanwhile we're building up EPs on Liz and once we get Steel we throw the slider to EPs and start building/whipping cannon--move them to the fronts. Steal Rifling, and if speed is urgent, upgrade some units already at the fronts and join the fight. (I believe that Liz does not yet have Steel--only MM/HC). If Shaka won't DoW and/or we don't need rifles RFN then take a few turns to build some.

Good point about the CR rifles--we should build 9XP maces while we're waiting for Steel. Once we have Rifling (since we have grens) we won't be able to build them any more. And we agree on wiping out Hatty and gaining votes through population.

I still think we can win Religious but the path for that and UN is much the same for a good while.

kcd_swede · May 12, 2012

Like Xcal said, just do it all.

Note, Hatty's worst business for our grens would be the knights, and you can defend the stack of grens with very cheap Pikemen if rifles not available. Quantity is its own quality.

Anyhow, I think AAA needs to use his judgement as to what will work best... but... I usually don't think riffles are much of a quality improvement if you already have grens. With enough cannons, you don't even need the grens. Pikes/LB's/mace will do the job. You'd only need enough grens to protect the stack. I would probably not waste the time to upgrade much at all, other than the seige. But I'm not in charge of this turnset... so do what's best and if its something different the rest of us learn somethng!

Diplomation it is. BTW: if we build the UN, it guarantees that HC/MM are the opponent, the team is about twice the pop of anyone else.

AAA · May 12, 2012

OK

the PPP would be

finish calender tech steel - steal rifling
switch into theo
build units - update as necessary
get stacks into place
switch Liz and Shaka into Hindu
trade techs for useful techs and dip points

then
Squash Hatty

What would be the pause conditions, and how far should the war go?

kcd_swede · May 12, 2012

AAA said:
OK

the PPP would be

finish calender tech steel - steal rifling
switch into theo
build units - update as necessary
get stacks into place
switch Liz and Shaka into Hindu
trade techs for useful techs and dip points

then
Squash Hatty

What would be the pause conditions, and how far should the war go?

Sounds good. If HC/MM DOW Shaka, Cyrus, or GK, pause to discuss... that would enable infecting them after we get Satsuma. If HC/MM Dow Hatty, that would be so great you don't need to stop... the plan as written works, just add "get OB with HC/MM" if we have common war. Don't bother pausing if they DOW us, they can't do any harm until we have satsuma, and we might want to let them take it anyhow. Don't bother stopping if they implausibly dow Liz. We aren't going to DOW Liz, at least not yet.

You are right to concentrate on stealing techs now. We'll blow EP on flipping to hindu later, if it still makes sense.

Take as much of Hatty as you want. I might suggest leaving her a city between us and GK to avoid close border penalties... but sometimes it just feels right to eliminate. I'm awful at those kinds of decisions, myself.

If you want, you may pause after taking Satsuma and we can all look at the save and discuss. Don't have to (imo) if you know what to do... when she is without hindu we can make it a dogpile on Hatty (via next available AP vote) and get some nice diplo points.

I'd also suggest you don't take it farther than 20t without a pause, less if you feel uncomfortable with some decision or other.

9 days to deadline... lets go! We probably can only manage 3 more turnsets considering a day or more for discussion. I'm hoping the last session doesn't have to take 80 turns.

AAA · May 12, 2012

Should I wait for some more greens?
or are we too rushed?

ChrisShaffer · May 12, 2012

Green, please play.

Trystero · May 12, 2012

Green from me.

Xcalibrator · May 12, 2012

Even though we're very close to finishing Calendar, speed matters so I'd go straight to Steel and then come back for Cal. Try to bribe Shaka into attacking Hatty; I'd be willing to give Steel for that since he couldn't trade it away, it's very unlikely we'll be fighting him, and it might make Hatty move her big northern stack N of Babylon, which would help us immensely. When you start, please make a pass through each city--there's a lot of reoptimizing that should be done. And after capturing Satsuma (and other coastal cities) remember to see if we can gift it to HC (after infecting with Hinduism, of course). If we can somehow infect MM then Religion is still our best shot. Maps are always nice, too.

Green, and good luck!

AAA · May 12, 2012

OK I thought, I'd post for comment here.

It the beginning of 1550 four turns in.
I deviated slightly finishing calender, aesthetics, lit, and music while building up esp points. A number of the Gawas didn't have music so I thought I could get some money and dip points cheap with music.
It worked better than I hoped. MM gave me 300 gold and plus 4 dip and then Open Boarders, for music.

We have the last OB, does this change our plans?
With a turns tech or maybe cash on hand we could get Astro from Cyrus, is this important?

Also how do you know how many esp points are required to steal a certain tech - all I can get out of Liz at the moment is Drama...................I can't kill anything with Drama.

Should I post the save?

vra379971 · May 12, 2012

Well done. The solution here is to find the route to the Indies as they say, and get there as fast as possible.

Trystero · May 12, 2012

Good going AAA! I would post the save to let someone more familiar with the AP approach than me take a look.

Trystero · May 12, 2012

AAA said:
Also how do you know how many esp points are required to steal a certain tech - all I can get out of Liz at the moment is Drama...................I can't kill anything with Drama.

The techs won't show up under the "steal technology" option until you have enough EP to steal it. So you'll have to keep EPs focused on Liz until you can see Rifling.

AAA · May 12, 2012

My choice from here would be an AP win that looks more like a UN.

I think we should switch Liz and Shaka into Hindu now and drop a few missionaries in enough of their key cities so that they won't bother to change out. Hopefully this would also allow a DOW on Hatty with no dip hit from them. Pull them into the war with Hatty - she won't last long. Once Liz or Shaka or both are friendly (we may have to move on to DOWing GK) dump enough Hindu into MM/HC and switch them into Hindu so that they are the opponent in the victory vote.

Then with luck win. :king:

AAA · May 12, 2012

Posted the save

Here is a log

Spoiler :

Xcalibrator · May 12, 2012

Nice work with the Music! Haven't had time to open the save today but I'll look tomorrow morning. We still need to get some Hmiss's to HC/MM somehow. Do you think Steel would be enough to bribe some AIs into war with Hatty? Any chance we can get a map that shows MM/HC?

kcd_swede · May 13, 2012

AAA said:
My choice from here would be an AP win that looks more like a UN.

I think we should switch Liz and Shaka into Hindu now and drop a few missionaries in enough of their key cities so that they won't bother to change out. Hopefully this would also allow a DOW on Hatty with no dip hit from them. Pull them into the war with Hatty - she won't last long. Once Liz or Shaka or both are friendly (we may have to move on to DOWing GK) dump enough Hindu into MM/HC and switch them into Hindu so that they are the opponent in the victory vote.

Then with luck win.

This is what we call... a bad idea. (I think). The beauty of the AP is that we can do victory votes where we are the only candidate. We only need one friendly face to get a victory, because we control the votes (would even have to whip down our pop to prevent going over 75%).

Flip them to hindu to try to avoid the diplo hit... it might work. But it seems like wasted effort to try to get an unliked opponent when we could get no opponent. I wouldn't spread more to them. They will either spread themselves as hindus, switch back to budda, or go free religion. Flip them back if they go Budda too early.

My advice, anyhow, do as you see fit, you seem to have a good handle on things, even if you like to deviate :mischief:

. Remember that gifting cities gets could speed up the hindu-ization of MM/HC. Need a beachead at Satsuma.

Have fun!

AAA · May 13, 2012

kcd_swede said:
This is what we call... a bad idea. (I think). The beauty of the AP is that we can do victory votes where we are the only candidate. We only need one friendly face to get a victory, because we control the votes (would even have to whip down our pop to prevent going over 75%).

Flip them to hindu to try to avoid the diplo hit... it might work. But it seems like wasted effort to try to get an unliked opponent when we could get no opponent. I wouldn't spread more to them. They will either spread themselves as hindus, switch back to budda, or go free religion. Flip them back if they go Budda too early.

My advice, anyhow, do as you see fit, you seem to have a good handle on things, even if you like to deviate. Remember that gifting cities gets could speed up the hindu-ization of MM/HC. Need a beachead at Satsuma.

Have fun!

I understand it sucks,...........I just don't think we'll reliably get them to friendly any other way.

And if we are to give up on the exclusivity we might as well go all the way.
Can you control who your opponent will be in a AP victory vote?

SGOTM 15 - Unusual Suspects

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