SGOTM 16 - Plastic Ducks

[Sun Tzu Wu]

I'm curious about Plastic Duck's strategy to ensure generation of a Great Engineer to match the completion of Railroad and founding of Mining Inc.

I understand that you generated a Great Engineer at 15% probability 26t before completing Railroad. What was your contigency plan had that GP not been a GE?

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[shakabrade]

GE from Bibracte (IW city). Since we didn't generate GPs until very late, we didn't need too many GPPs to do so, it was possible to do so even without GP pollution. Downside would be a few turns later WS, iIrc.

 

[WastinTime]

GE from Bibracte (IW city). Since we didn't generate GPs until very late, we didn't need too many GPPs to do so, it was possible to do so even without GP pollution. Downside would be a few turns later WS, iIrc.

I'm a little surprised that ya'all would be so casual about the GE. I see 13% odds! And not a great backup plan. Your next cities that would generate a GP are not even running engineers. This is a game breaker, and you can't just get one free from Econ like you can for sushi. If you didn't get that GE T180, I suppose you could've rolled the dice 2-3 more times. Too risky for me

minor correction: You accelerated your GP birth to get the GE T179

 

[kossin]

I think our GPP odds were rigged
Given the amount of low-odds GPs that were popped, the cumulative probability is probably closer to 1 in a million than 13%

In all seriousness, yes - the GE was not actually planned. Relying on probability with a ~(0.85)^x isn't safe but it usually seems to work out. Of course, the one time it doesn't, you start kicking yourself.

 

[soundjata]

Plastic Luck?

 

[Gumbolt]

Play the odds. If you run a engineer in most cities expecting a GP sooner or later you get lucky. Same for priests. How many teams got lucky there?

 

[LowtherCastle]

This is a game breaker

Well, it's not SSV, it's only FT1. Are you sure Mining Inc was all that important to their game? Their back-up plan, if you ask me, was having 437,431,985 citizens to work.

I'd like to see an analysis of the value of Mining in this game, if someone's up to it.

 

[Gumbolt]

Well, it's not SSV, it's only FT1. Are you sure Mining Inc was all that important to their game? Their back-up plan, if you ask me, was having 437,431,985 citizens to work.

I'd like to see an analysis of the value of Mining in this game, if someone's up to it.

It's about 50 hammers per cities with mining inc and all production multipliers. Times by 30-40 cities = 1500-2000 hammers a turn. 2000 hammers before you even account for workshops and other stuff. PD hammer chart says it all. 4000 hammers.

You don't need maths to work out what a huge boost that is. PR cleared nearly 2000 hammers with help of mining.

 

[LowtherCastle]

You don't need maths to work out what a huge boost that is.

I think you missed my point. Did PD need the boost to win? Was it a "game breaker"? They built nearly all of their Sushi without it. Was Sushi alone enough? How many turns slower would they have been without Mining? They won by 9 turns.

 

[Gumbolt]

Well they would of got the GE from the IW city. So maybe 10 or so turn delay? They would of had rep and a huge army of specialists by then. With all those cities too.

They had FT1 pretty early and were doing most techs in 1 turn anyway. Mya have slowed down the espionage plan a bit. Certainly no more than 10 turns I figure. They were whipping infra anyway.

 

[kossin]

You need to consider the cost of spreading Mining Inc Gumbolt, it's not that simple.
Each exec is 100H, costs ~65g to spread and is a net loss in terms of gpt even with Wall Street - until you start building wealth.

Instead of spreading Mining, we could immediately build wealth and get ahead in the beaker department compared to what was done here. With Mining Inc, we know that we wasted at least ~20,000 beakers by T235 due to the large research overflow, we had enough research as is to win on T233. So, the question is, how later than T233 would we have won without Mining Inc - research overflow would not be as large for certain.

 

[WastinTime]

Interesting. Mining may not have helped at all...or even hurt. It's the food that does all the work. Now I have some thinking to do.... Oh right, so with SSV you still need it. (dang, I was hoping to eliminate it from my newly forming SSV strategy.) Thinking done.

 

[Gumbolt]

Anyone can play on from your 1400ad save to see the difference it makes.

 

[kossin]

Anyone with ~30 hours to burn, certainly

 

[Duckweed]

@LHC

If this game is a competition to CS, then I will give your capital site credit of 10+ turns, however for this game when you are able to produce 10K bpt in the final stage, I'm not even sure about 5 turns. We discussed the advantage of popping gold, which also gives 2 much needed happiness coupled with forge. I only gave it 1~2 turn credit if it's available before T50, otherwise, no more than 1 turn.

The real game breaking techs in this game are 2 corporations and AL, each will add ~2000bpt with a big enough empire. Sushi has the biggest potential but pay the bill the slowest while mine is the opposite. I will usually prefer mine before Sushi since it helps the spread and also let you reach the other 2 techs faster. The only reason of going Sushi in this game 1st was considering the 2 LCs. Even for these 3 techs, 1 turn earlier of getting them does not mean 1 turn earlier to victory. The 1st one might give 0.5 turn edge, the last one only give 0.25 turn lead.

You and others are overestimating those early beakers. The true value of early beakers depends on the total beakers needed to the game-breaking techs. For instance, in SGOTM14, where the biggest tech we needed to research manually was Machinery, therefore the 1000 beakers from mids made it a much better wonder than GLH in that game. Burea gives the biggest boost to your economy in the middle age, and it's not game breaking in this game even you got it 20 turns earlier than us. The reason was simple, what burea gave you in those 20 turns were a drop in the way to the 3 breaking techs. Each turn of earlier to corporations is not easy. T190 might be the optimal date in this map.

 

[LowtherCastle]

@Duckweed:

I'm thinking earlier warfare, which Kaku could easily have done, even earlier than you, that is. Don't forget, by beelining Writing, we had OBs with Brennus very early and already knew that Bibracte was a great city. Tachy and I were lusting over it, but had a bunch of peaceniks to convince...

Plus, Sushi on T170. Sure, the empire would be smaller, but that's almost 30 more turns to fill it out with Sushi. That's where I think the Kaku settling site makes +10 or more turns.

 

[WastinTime]

Don't forget, our settling was also later. I doubt it had more than a 1 turn positive net-effect. 10 turns on normal speed? No way. It's no better than popping a Gold. I'm not sure we leveraged that great city properly. Too culture focused. And did we even put an academy there?

 

[kossin]

Don't forget, our settling was also later. I doubt it had more than a 1 turn positive net-effect. 10 turns on normal speed? No way. It's no better than popping a Gold. I'm not sure we leveraged that great city properly. Too culture focused. And did we even put an academy there?

imo, the PH settling is worth minimum 2 turns due to the accelerated worker. And then you can consider the better commerce for the first ~100 turns.

@Duckweed
Your analysis is very good on the overall impact, however the model does not consider the effect of achieving certain techs/buildings a turn (or more) earlier.

Getting Currency 1t earlier, for instance, is quite important early on when it gives a huge boost to empire.

Kremlin 1t earlier also has an impact due to earlier completed Fact+CP.

etc... adding these up, you get whole turns saved up. Certainly not 20 of them, but 5 is not too far-fetched. One of the problems we finished with so much research overflow is that we were always a few hundred/thousand beakers short in the T214~T220 range, which cost at least 1 turn.

There is an optimized path that exists, and it lies somewhere between PD's and Kaku's approaches. It's too big of a puzzle to solve with models and can only be estimated by testing.

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

Interesting. Mining may not have helped at all...or even hurt. It's the food that does all the work. Now I have some thinking to do.... Oh right, so with SSV you still need it. (dang, I was hoping to eliminate it from my newly forming SSV strategy.) Thinking done.

I agree, but I'd go further to say it definitely hurt the win date more than it helped. Sid's Sushi with The Kremlin, and later Factory/Coal Plant could very efficiently whip any necessary infrastructure without any help from Mining Inc and still support plenty of Representation specialists for sufficient Bpt to complete the end game techs at one per turn.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[kossin]

Assumptions: late game, 1H = 1b = 1g (once you're at 100% slider without bleeding gold)

Turn 225 Mining Inc analysis
PD: we had 33 cities with Mining Inc, 4 cities without power, but one city with IW ... so basically

(30 cities)*(2 H multiplier)*(25H/city) = 1500H = 1500b = 1500g/turn
Typical upkeep of Mining Inc is ~17 gold per city. Factoring in the WS 4*3 it's only 5gpt.
5*32 = 160g [the first spread costs a GE]

So the net output capacity of Mining Inc per turn is ~1340 b/g/H

Total cost for spreading to those 33 cities (neglecting the few failed execs) =
32 * [100 H + 65g] = 5280 b/g/H

5280/1340 = 3.94 ~ 4 turns

It would definitely not slow down PD's victory compared to not spreading it.

~~~

BTW, the only reason we did manage 10k bpt is because we had a GM trade mission and were bleeding 2,000 gpt for that turn. Our rate was much closer to 8,000 bpt at break-even.

Without Mining Inc, that falls to ~6600 bpt. Which is great, but not enough to 1t all the way through the end.

Maybe add ~3 turns to T233 for a ~T236 finish if we had not gotten a GE for Mining Inc.