SGOTM 16 - Fifth Element

[BLubmuz]

I think we need to plan for the knights war now. The key economic tech we need before that is CS for Bureau. Everything else is nice, but problematic: we might lose the chance to war with knights (Waiting for renaissance to break out won't be a winning strategy IMO: a 20 city empire in 500AD that develops for 800 years is much stronger than a 20 city empire in 1300 AD where 12 cities have just been conquered).

Aesth->Lit would be good for the "epic" national wonders, Philo for slowing lib race and Caste system, etc. But all these could be teched while we build our army. I vote for CS->Feudalism->Machinery->Guilds (and horseback riding, but hopefully that can be traded)

If we squeeze in something, it should be after CS since Bureau will speed up everything.

So my vote goes to CS first, and then Guilds ASAP.

I completely agree with the spirit of this post. But i think that machinery must be researched right after CS. Philo can slow down the Lib race only if we can have it before anyone else and by the time we arrive to Guilds it can be gone, maybe LBd by some AI in the other continent.
BTW, we need also Med to research Philo.

I don't really know which kind of priority we can give to it. I'd like also Optics after Guilds.
We can probably skip music, but we can arrive to Lit. for the HE and NE. But if we prioritize the Guilds path, the HE can't be of much use for our war with Brennus.

On a last note, we need 7 turns each for Machinery and Feud and 12 for Guilds. Construction is 4 turns. Everything will be improved by CS, by the new cities and by the growing cottages, but we must consider the turn lost in revolt.

My proposal is:
- start Machinery right after CS in the hope to trade for construction
- in case we don't, construction after Machinery to start build cats
- then Feudalism, which is highly probable we cannot trade for
- finally Guilds and HBR in case we can't trade for, to complete our warring path. Archery must arrive somewhere before Feud, in trade or researched.
- then, 2 choices: Aesth - Lit - Med - Philo or Compass - Optics

we need to build an army from now, starting with some spear (i'm sure Brennus will have some chariot) and some axe. Possibly some chariots too.
I prefer to slow build units and keep the whip for buildings. We need more workers too and settlers for the island, along with troops to protect them and the cities there.

Have you noticed that the GLH is not built yet? Strange, it usually goes around 1000-500 BC.

 

[Folket]

I would rather give Brennus something for archery then spending time on it ourself. I think we should war with cats and maces. And get knights as reinforcements.

 

[ZPV]

I think we need to plan for the knights war now. The key economic tech we need before that is CS for Bureau. Everything else is nice, but problematic: we might lose the chance to war with knights (Waiting for renaissance to break out won't be a winning strategy IMO: a 20 city empire in 500AD that develops for 800 years is much stronger than a 20 city empire in 1300 AD where 12 cities have just been conquered).

The whole point of a late war is that cities captured in the late renaissance/early industrial age develop so fast that they're almost as strong as they would be from the earlier war, except you didn't have to pay for them for 800 years so you teched faster. If we conquer so fast that our path to Railroad is slowed down more than a few turns, we've gone wrong.

The only reason I suggested Knights over Cuirs was so we don't have to research Military Tradition.

Aesth->Lit would be good for the "epic" national wonders, Philo for slowing lib race and Caste system, etc. But all these could be teched while we build our army. I vote for CS->Feudalism->Machinery->Guilds (and horseback riding, but hopefully that can be traded)

If we squeeze in something, it should be after CS since Bureau will speed up everything.

So my vote goes to CS first, and then Guilds ASAP.

If Education is not a priority, then there's no point in teching Philo. The reason I suggested it was we can generate two GS faster than we'd otherwise get one.
But, why isn't education a priority? This is a tech race, not an expansion race.

I completely agree with the spirit of [Shaandore's] post. But i think that machinery must be researched right after CS. Philo can slow down the Lib race only if we can have it before anyone else and by the time we arrive to Guilds it can be gone, maybe LBd by some AI in the other continent.
BTW, we need also Med to research Philo.

I don't really know which kind of priority we can give to it. I'd like also Optics after Guilds.
We can probably skip music, but we can arrive to Lit. for the HE and NE. But if we prioritize the Guilds path, the HE can't be of much use for our war with Brennus.

On a last note, we need 7 turns each for Machinery and Feud and 12 for Guilds. Construction is 4 turns. Everything will be improved by CS, by the new cities and by the growing cottages, but we must consider the turn lost in revolt.

My proposal is:
- start Machinery right after CS in the hope to trade for construction
- in case we don't, construction after Machinery to start build cats
- then Feudalism, which is highly probable we cannot trade for
- finally Guilds and HBR in case we can't trade for, to complete our warring path. Archery must arrive somewhere before Feud, in trade or researched.
- then, 2 choices: Aesth - Lit - Med - Philo or Compass - Optics

we need to build an army from now, starting with some spear (i'm sure Brennus will have some chariot) and some axe. Possibly some chariots too.
I prefer to slow build units and keep the whip for buildings. We need more workers too and settlers for the island, along with troops to protect them and the cities there.

Have you noticed that the GLH is not built yet? Strange, it usually goes around 1000-500 BC.

If the team is dead set on devoting our economy to war, I'll have to switch to something like this.

I'm sorry to put it like this, but slow-building low-tech military units is just wrong. It's better to work food tiles now, use the extra commerce to research faster, and then build them all in one burst when we can (e.g.) switch to Theocracy.

Those tech numbers rely on 100% research. If we stop building wealth (which we will, for the most part), we can only afford 50%, so it'll take twice as long (or maybe 1.5 to 1.7 times as long once you account for Bureaucracy).

 

[Shaandore]

On one hand, I agree that building out of date troops is a bad idea. (catapults for example). But let's be honest, we won't go to war before cuirasiers if we tech Education before starting to build an army. By the time we hit edu and the military tech, Brennus will get engineering, which pretty much means a cuir war or a cannon war.

The options that have been proposed:
1. "The ZPV way": Try to expand to >10 cities while keeping ahead in tech. Do a renaissance breakout using a base of ~10 cities. By this time, our enemies will also have more than 10 cities.
2. "The Shaandore way": Stop expansion with the second barb city. Tech CS, go for knights. Kill Brennus, or let him live with few cities, until we tech for a renaissance war, starting form a base of 15 cities, that takes over our continent without an effort.
3. "The Blubmuz/Folket way": Start building army now with 1 move units. The siege would be catapults, since we don't want to tech to trebs.

Number one has the advantage that we can gain the biggest tech advantage between us and our enemies. The disadvantege is that Rammy+Brennus will have at least twice as many cities as us, so we need to fight their hammer production. What I'm afraid of is that we can't take them both in the Renaissance, or at least we will need rifling for Rammy. Not having our continent conquered after renaissance would be quite disappointing. I might be wrong about this though. It depends a lot on how many turns of tech we can gain over these guys.

Number two is my preferred way, but it slows down our tech pace to education. Good news is, we can aid that thing with one or two great scientists, so I think that this is a good era to do a (relatively) quick 2-move war.

Number three is problematic, since it slows down our economy now, so teching the prereqs to Edu will be slower. The other issue is that we find ourselves building 30 sucide cats for those LBs that Brennus will have in no time. All those hammers can not be reused in later wars. Brennus will put up a decent fight with all those cites and land, and we won't have a tech edge over him.

My preference goes like this:
Most preferred: 2
I'm okay with this: 1
I don't like it at all: 3

EDIT: I wonder what does the rest of the team think about this (unclethrill, BSPollux, Mastiff, Meow)

 

[Shaandore]

Now that I think about it Oxford is really our main goal. I think that Duckweed is one of the best players (or the best), and his guide about space ship victory is well applicable to our situation. I start to like the ZPV way more and more.

How many cities can we grab? I can't open the save now.

If we choose to postpone war, my tech suggestion is CS->Philo->Aesth->Literature->Paper->Edu->0%science until OU is built

 

[Folket]

I do not like option 2 at all.

I'm fine with option 1 and 3.

I still think we are going to fall behind on the LCs unless we start with them soon. So I would like CS -> Music -> Edu or CS -> Machinery -> Music -> Edu.

But consensus is that we are not to get music.

 

[ZPV]

Not sure yet, after the forge. Possibly Wealth or a Barracks.

Barracks. I'm a bit worried that we don't have enough when the time comes. And it's not too far in future.

Apache:
double-chop into a granary, then a forge.
The workers will then build a winery and a pasture before some move on to Uzbek.

I think the first duty for the workers are 2 roads on the forest and on the forested hill. If you can let our victorius units heal, you can gain a couple turns. In any case, we need to road that path.

Uzbek:
If we get it, improve the gems, then chop the sugars.
I'm tempted to farm some of the other grassland.

Can you delete the "if"? and substitute it with "when"?
...
Yes, it's a good idea, unless you can milk a sword to 10 XP on Uzbek. What about a settler for that island? I like the dotmap, but we need to know exactly the land before to decide.

Noted. I'll look again at building a road at Apache. It'll either be three road tiles or one.
I plan to build worker->settler in Lyons. There's definitely a worthwhile site there somewhere, so we don't really need to know exactly where it is until we settle it.

 

[Folket]

3 road tiles was my plan.

 

[BLubmuz]

Nice discussion, which makes me think to another solution:
Let's forget Feud and Guilds, we can probably trade for them with other continent. BTW, never researched them myself i think.

Machinery after CS, then the path to Optics, then to Edu. The path to Optics can be postponed after Edu, MC gives us an advantage good enough over all the AIs and we're first in GNP, ATM.

War with 1 move units, sure. Cats are cheap even if you consider to lose 1 half of the ones you build. IIRC, 1 cat costs less then half a knight and surely the first 2 attackers will die if you don't set he cultural defences to almost 0 first. The secret of a cat+maces war is a huge number of cats, backed up with a good number of other units. We can start on 2 fronts, 1 in the barb cities area and one in the double gems area, then move both to Bibracte and divide again for Tolosa (IIRC) and the cities we can't see now.

This will be not much penalizing our OU race, far less than researching Guilds.

Another point is our chosen VC: If we are sold on Space we can ignore Music for awhile, otherwise we must try for it (and this would change what i say above). But since i'm convinced that the race is already lost, i don't consider this a viable option. There's the Sistine, sure, but if we go for culture we can set music after Edu.

 

[ZPV]

It's not a race to Oxford. It's a race to Railroad + Corporation. That is the crucial time when our empire's power will explode. Oxford is just a step along the way.

It's also not really a question of how much the war will cost in terms of units. The cheapest option would be to build a dozen cannons in Theocracy, and roll over both Brennus and Ramesses without losing a unit.

What matters is, when do we want to capture the cities, relative to our tech path? That tells us which units to use.
I think my view has been clear - late in the Mining Inc beeline because we don't want to slow the tech to that point down, but do want to have the cities by the time we get there.
Blubmuz - you want it significantly earlier than that, but I don't really understand why.

The timing of the war affects which techs we should pursue more than anything else.
I'm now convinced Philosophy is worthwhile, as a peaceful tech. We could generate our GE, GS and a Great Merchant (for a trade mission in Temple-of-Artemis-containing Thebes) with it.
Just because we're not spiritual doesn't mean we shouldn't employ short civic bursts.

 

[BLubmuz]

ZPV, i know it's not a race to OU, it's a race to FT1. But as you well know there're milestones between CS and FT1. Edu and the OU is (are) one of those.

My experience tells me that the sooner you capture a city, the sooner it starts to contribute to the economy and to the research, despite the increase in maintenance Empire-wide. Am i wrong? It's true that we have cheap libraries, but we need cities not much large to avoid happiness problems. And if we wait too much we need to wait again because we're on military tech parity (that's why i propose Machinery immediately, followed by Construction if we can't trade for it and only after those techs the path to Edu in case preceeded by Philo). And there's a lot of stuff to build before they are fully productive.
If we avoid the path to Music and to Guilds we have a great advantage in research and we can probably sqeeze something big from Lib, maybe SP. And our economy can afford an offensive army once we have CS and more developed cities.
In my Space games i usually build almost any structure in any city. I know many players don't use this approach, but i obtained good results with that.

An early war does not diminish the results of running Pacifism and Philo can be researched right after Machinery and before Paper-Edu, if you think we can gain something worth the - almost - detour despite the civics change.

There's a question opened yet:
- we seem to agree that 1 VC is military (we'll see what is better between D or C)
- but the 2nd VC has to be decided. After some reflection I think Space is the way to go, but if it has to be culture, the sooner we start warring, the better if we want to use some of Brennus' cities as LCs. In case of Space, IMO it's not much different.

 

[BLubmuz]

Another point. I suggest you play until we can see how the capture of Apache goes and which economic situation we have after the revolt to Bureau (which is great but expensive). The 2 things should be roughly time-paired, thus i think you can play the 5-6 turns needed, set research to some placeholder so we re-start our discussion from a good point.

By doing so, we can maybe see if some tech becomes tradable and better build our plans.

To start build units for the war we need more advanced techs, so if you build some for MP and as a deterrent to be attacked you ruin nothing. If you don't, let's just hope we're not attcked. BTW, do you remember if Brennus attacks at Pleased? He's aggressive, so maybe he can do it. In case, we have only a few units in the barbs area.
I's like to see some axe and spear in our cities. Better some archer if we manage to trade for archery.

Then, please remember that the units need to be moved to the front and this requires time, mainly on Normal speed.

 

[ZPV]

ZPV, i know it's not a race to OU, it's a race to FT1. But as you well know there're milestones between CS and FT1. Edu and the OU is (are) one of those.

My experience tells me that the sooner you capture a city, the sooner it starts to contribute to the economy and to the research, despite the increase in maintenance Empire-wide. Am i wrong?

You're kind of right, and kind of wrong.
You're right up to a certain number of cities, for a given tech level. After that number, they don't contribute quickly enough, and your empire would be better served by waiting for the next tech level before capturing more.

As an example, cities become very very productive in the industrial age - when corporations, factories, and biology-boosted farms kick in. At that point, every city is worth it.
Capturing those extra cities early delays the point at which they produce like industrial-era ones (because the techs are delayed while the cities develop), rather than bringing it forward.

It's true that we have cheap libraries, but we need cities not much large to avoid happiness problems. And if we wait too much we need to wait again because we're on military tech parity (that's why i propose Machinery immediately, followed by Construction if we can't trade for it and only after those techs the path to Edu in case preceeded by Philo). And there's a lot of stuff to build before they are fully productive.

Managing the happiness cap to get the most out of our cities is key. With all those calendar resources they will be able to grow large before long. 80 population spread out among 10 cities are better than 80 spread out among 15.

We do have windows in the game where our tech and production advantage make war cheaper and easier than at other times.
The classical rush window lasts until longbows.
The classical-medieval one lasts until engineering.
The next one is the renaissance-early industrial one (working with either cuirs or cannons) which lasts a long time.

So yes, if we don't attack relatively soon, we'll have to wait for better tech.

If we avoid the path to Music and to Guilds we have a great advantage in research and we can probably sqeeze something big from Lib, maybe SP. And our economy can afford an offensive army once we have CS and more developed cities.
In my Space games i usually build almost any structure in any city. I know many players don't use this approach, but i obtained good results with that.

Steam Power? I'd certainly hope for something around that part of the tech tree.
The question is not whether you obtain good results by building every building in every city. You are a good enough player that you'll get pretty good results either way. It's whether you'd get better ones by avoiding some of the buildings you don't really need.

Guilds is on our path, unfortunately. It's needed for Steam Power (Guilds->Banking->Replaceable Parts->Steam Power). It should also wait until after Education for the multipliers. We'll have some decisions to make after Education about how many side techs we might be interested in, like we have after Civil Service.

Music is one of those decisions.

An early war does not diminish the results of running Pacifism and Philo can be researched right after Machinery and before Paper-Edu, if you think we can gain something worth the - almost - detour despite the civics change.

It's doesn't diminish them, but it does delay them. With a burst in Pacifism+Caste we'll want to generate great people from several cities.

There's a question opened yet:
- we seem to agree that 1 VC is military (we'll see what is better between D or C)
- but the 2nd VC has to be decided. After some reflection I think Space is the way to go, but if it has to be culture, the sooner we start warring, the better if we want to use some of Brennus' cities as LCs. In case of Space, IMO it's not much different.

The cheapest is diplo, if the situation suits it. It might be we can't get a suitable vassal arrangement easily. If it doesn't, then we'll resort to either Space or Culture.
Space will probably cost us 1 or 2 turns on the end date, waiting for the big parts to finish and the spaceship to travel. We'll need to plan one or two ultra-production cities for that.
Culture could cost quite a bit more than that, if we're struggling for Great Artists.

 

[ZPV]

Another point. I suggest you play until we can see how the capture of Apache goes and which economic situation we have after the revolt to Bureau (which is great but expensive). The 2 things should be roughly time-paired, thus i think you can play the 5-6 turns needed, set research to some placeholder so we re-start our discussion from a good point.

By doing so, we can maybe see if some tech becomes tradable and better build our plans.

That's sensible. I'll plan to do that tomorrow, so we can make better informed decisions.

To start build units for the war we need more advanced techs, so if you build some for MP and as a deterrent to be attacked you ruin nothing. If you don't, let's just hope we're not attcked. BTW, do you remember if Brennus attacks at Pleased? He's aggressive, so maybe he can do it. In case, we have only a few units in the barbs area.
I's like to see some axe and spear in our cities. Better some archer if we manage to trade for archery.

Then, please remember that the units need to be moved to the front and this requires time, mainly on Normal speed.

Brennus does not attack at Pleased. Neither does Ramesses.

 

[unclethrill]

Personally, I like the idea of teching as fast as possible. If we have significantly advanced units, warring will be quick and painless. We will lose less units and therefore less hammers will be wasted. So I am not a fan of focusing on warring right now but rather on expansion and quick teching.

I like getting to Education fast and getting OU up and running sooner than later.

 

[ZPV]

I'll play up to the revolt to Bureaucracy now.

 

[ZPV]

200AD:
Cancel the fish for gpt deal with Brennus to renegotiate... and fail. He now won't trade us any gpt - he must have bumped his slider up a notch.

IBT: Great Lighthouse BIFAL

225AD
IBT: Ramesses builds a Buddhist AP

250AD
The swords move towards Uzbek.

300AD
Capture Uzbek. I didn't feel comfortable trying to milk a sword on the city with two Celtic attack archers hovering nearby, so we have 3 swords at 7/10 XP

325AD
Revolt to Bureaucracy.

350AD
We make 118bpt @breakeven

 

[Folket]

Can the computer change his slider during our turn. Or did an extra unhealth cause him to reassign citizen during our turn? Should have tried to gift him fish and see if you could trade deer for 3 gpt after that.

 

[Folket]

Well played, so we did not loose any swordmen?

Seems like unclethrill has ended the stalemate and we have consensus for going towards education. Will you make a new PPP for the next 10-15 turns?

 

[BLubmuz]

Well played, so we did not loose any swordmen?

Seems like unclethrill has ended the stalemate and we have consensus for going towards education. Will you make a new PPP for the next 10-15 turns?

No, we've lost only 1 warrior from the beginning (look F9).

Not even the time to post about it and GLH is gone. Not that it would be a great benefit for us at this point.

Education straight now means 7+24= 31 turns of research. We can probably improve, but it's a long time. I'd prefer to finish Paper and insert Machinery before it. We can even think to build Sankore. We're running a religion and we can consider to build some temple.

Then, i'd like to keep 2 units in Uzbek. 1 even if good, is not safe. It's right in the border. To try to gain some XP in the island 1 sword is enough and the chariot can be used to scout.

After the settler for the island can we consider one for a city in the desert tile W of Uzbek?