SGOTM 16 - U'nu'sual S'us'pec'ts

[Benginal]

It looks like we have a few major issues up for group discussion.

1) Barb city now or wait for later?

2) Steal IW from Brennus or Ramesses?

3) Shooting for Glib? CS? Caravels?

4) Settle the copper city down south?

5) Road to Brennus / Road to Ramesses?

6) Attack Ramesses and take ToA off his puny 2-city hands which would mean beeline construction?

7) Shoot for CoL and Philo to keep another religion out of the hands of Ramesses and hope for love fest (he might very well go for Divine Right).

8) There are a ton of islands we need to explore / settle. We can start building triremes now, which will be much better against barb galley. (SGOTM 13 flashbacking)

9) Colossus?

Overall I want to sort of formalize our team goals before I start play testing. As always, anyone is free to micro along and propose plans.

 

[Revent]

I will try to do the map. Don't count on it however because we cannot trust my lousy skills

By the way, Brennus is settling towards us now.

Spoiler :

 

[Revent]

Also, I believe this is probably Brennus's capital. It's location may vary by one or two tiles at max but that is it I think. You can see you get darker shades of brown where the culture is older and more dominant so the capital must be there.

Spoiler :

 

[Revent]

Sorry for constant spamming! You have my apologies, but I'm currently in the process of making our map (or at least trying to).

I've got an AI combination that I think fits our conditions and I think would be a good combination for a tough(ish) game for Emp and meeting our requirements.

Earlier on, I made some calculations regarding possible AI based on soldiers and power ratings. You can see my conclusion in Chris's post on the first page.

Now, one possible option had concluded that 3 of our AI started with the wheel. These AI's are listed below:
Arabian
Byzantine
Egyptian-No Hatsephsut
French
Japanese
Mongolian-No Kublai
Ottoman

Now, taking away the French (if French in the game, our city would not be Paris) and we have met Rams, we are left with 5 AI. Now I just find it less likely personally that from the remaining four AI that two of them are going to be in this category resulting in four out of the seven civs starting with the wheel. Highly unlikely considering we do have like a million Civs in this game. (34 or so I think it was).

So I am basing our test games AI combination just on a hunch and probability for balance which I think is fair So I think the AI I think we might face are:

Pacal II, Saladin, Jao, Hannibal.


Note that this meets our requirements of at least 2 AI starting with Myst, one or two AI are Cha and our educated guess that we have one or two Exp leaders. Late wonder dates suggest no other Ind leaders hence only one Ind which is who we have met. Also to note is that these AI tend to be very powerful late game as well.

So if you happen to read this Neil and want to create a test game, feel free to agree or disagree with this
Anyway, I give up on making the map! It is SOOO hard! I honestly don't know how neil did it but the way I was trying to do it (tile by tile) it was taking forever! I did manage to create our continent with Brennus and Rams but then I rage quitted because I realised I forgot the other AI's and THEIR continent -.-

 

[neilmeister]

Im ok with your ai, you did much more analysis than me. I can have a go at a test save, but probably not until tonight or tomorrow.

To build enough chariots to take the barb city is going to take a while. I guess they are about 3 turns each from paris, so 15 turns to make 5, maybe more. So with our 4 current workers, we have 60 worker turns for our existingcities. This assumes paris does it by itself.

Production needs a galley. We need an offshore city asap, even if we have to put it on that single tile island.

Gp farm for settlers and a lib when we get writing. We really would like to make sure our second gp is a scientist.

 

[neilmeister]

Copper is too far away imo.

I think glib and astro should be our next goals. Glib first, hopefully helps with bulbing astro.

 

[neilmeister]

Great to see the culture map, it means clams is safely fogbusted from the south, it also means brennus has even more jungle.

edit: on my PC now, much easier to type and edit.....

I did not know that older culture was in a darker shade, great to learn that.

 

[Revent]

Spoiler :

I think this image denotes it a lot better. Maybe it's not OLDER culture technically speaking, but the BFC culture is darker and the inner 9 squares are even darker

 

[ChrisShaffer]

Stronger culture gets darker, not older culture, so while Revent is likely correct in this case, if the Brennus founded a second city and that city became the holy city, the extra culture from the religion could fool us.

 

[ChrisShaffer]

p.s. Revent, could you please put images in SPOIL tags? They make it really hard to read the forum thread on a phone when they aren't hidden in the post spoilers.

 

[Revent]

Stronger culture gets darker, not older culture, so while Revent is likely correct in this case, if the Brennus founded a second city and that city became the holy city, the extra culture from the religion could fool us.

Couldn't have This is not Deity so he only had one city at founding Buddhism.

and spoilered the images on this page. Will bear that in mind for the rest of the pages now

 

[ChrisShaffer]

OK, that works. Just clarifying the reason for the darker color - in this case, you're right, the holy city must be the capital, so the darkest culture will be the capital.

 

[Revent]

Oh okay, thanks! Makes perfect sense.
But anyway, I used the culture more as a guideline and just reverse engineered the scouts movements from turn 6 backwards.

 

[ChrisShaffer]

The utility of a test game goes down the longer the game lasts. I'm not sure its worth creating another test game at this late stage, rather the time would be better spent updating the current test game to make it similar. Most land that's outside the range of our core units / cities isn't worth making "correct" - the main utility of a test game is figuring techs, worker actions, city builds, etc. - stuff inside our empire.

That said, if someone wants to invest the time on creating a new test game, go for it.

 

[Revent]

You are right about the usefulness decreasing. Too much of a large factor of RNG. Oracle may go at turn 40 in our game and ToA at 100 and GLH goes before we can build it. Barb city forms where we were gonna settle, etc..Too much RNG.

However, I felt that maybe adding Rams into the map could've been somewhat of a help as a better indicator.

Anyway, I will just re-do the micro in our real game in the test game. And also, just to note, I haven't finished the turn, so we can move that woods 2 warrior now that we know the area is pretty much safely fogbusted from Brennus.

 

[ChrisShaffer]

My personal preferences:

1) Barb city now or wait for later?

Later - it would take too long right now to get the five chariots needed from Paris. The barbarian city isn't going anywhere. And if Brennus takes it, we benefit from the trade routes and eventually take it from him. The wine resource isn't useful yet. Let's wait.

2) Steal IW from Brennus or Ramesses?

Yes, from whichever seems easier. Probably Brennus. Did somone analyze the espionage changes during Revent's turnset? Did we gain on Brennus, or lose ground to him?

3) Shooting for Glib? CS? Caravels?

I think we should beeline Great Library and Astronomy. Civil Service will come when it comes, not a huge hurry with our strategy.

4) Settle the copper city down south?

No, too far away.

5) Road to Brennus / Road to Ramesses?

Road to Brennus should be a high priority. Road to Ramesses isn't worth figuring yet - we don't even know where his cities are.

6) Attack Ramesses and take ToA off his puny 2-city hands which would mean beeline construction?

Nah, a big war early won't help us and he seems to be quite far away.

7) Shoot for CoL and Philo to keep another religion out of the hands of Ramesses and hope for love fest (he might very well go for Divine Right).

We should try to get one religion. A love fest would be nice, but not essential. If Ramesses founds a religion, he will use his priests to make a shrine, which is fine - and we can stay religion neutral and encourage Brennus and Ramesses to fight each other. I'd almost rather see them war with each other, though the tech benefits of a love fest are good too.

8) There are a ton of islands we need to explore / settle. We can start building triremes now, which will be much better against barb galley. (SGOTM 13 flashbacking)

Yes, and we need to make settling on an island a priority.

9) Colossus?

At this point, I'd say skip it. We really aren't working that much water spaces.

I agree that we need to coastal settler spam.

 

[ChrisShaffer]

You are right about the usefulness decreasing. Too much of a large factor of RNG. Oracle may go at turn 40 in our game and ToA at 100 and GLH goes before we can build it. Barb city forms where we were gonna settle, etc..Too much RNG.

However, I felt that maybe adding Rams into the map could've been somewhat of a help as a better indicator.

Anyway, I will just re-do the micro in our real game in the test game. And also, just to note, I haven't finished the turn, so we can move that woods 2 warrior now that we know the area is pretty much safely fogbusted from Brennus.

Oh, well, really good mapmakers play the whole game through turn by turn and use worldbuilder to found the wonders on the correct turns, found/destroy barbarian and AI cities, force AI to meet (or not meet) each other and the player on particular turns, etc. You can even prevent the AI from building wonders by using regular autosaves and going back a few turns before they built a wonder and taking away the techs that allow the wonder to be built. All that is time consuming, but it can be done...

 

[neilmeister]

Returning to grand strategy....

Tech Steal
The limitation to steal a tech is going to be the espionage points, not when we get Alpha. I can't see us getting enough points on Brennus to steal IW easily. We probably will have to wait for Courthouses.
Astro is completely out of the question. We are going to hopefully bulb it at least 1000 years before anyone else gets it.
Physics seems almost as bad, though by that stage we could do Communism after SM for the spy who would give us the required points to steal it from anybody.

At this point, ALpha is likely to give us access to: Spies, Hunting, Poly, Archery and maybe IW. That's it.

Ramesses does not have a single EP on us, he is focusing them on Brennus and/or whoever else is out there.

Goals
Great Lib - requires Poly, Aesthetics & Literature.
Astro bulb (with GS from GLib) - requires Maths, Calendar, IW, Compass, Machinery, Optics

Note there is no Alpha or CoL required, but we will need IW. This is a massive contradiction.

Question I have is: Do we wish to continue with targeting IW? I am not sure anymore, but I am thinking Physics might be a better option.

edit: I have to learn to type faster to avoid these epic x-posts

 

[ChrisShaffer]

Can we focus espionage on Ramesses and steal Iron Working from him?

 

[Revent]

Here you go guys. Test save attached with the latest micro.