SGOTM 17 - Fifth Element

[Folket]

I was thinking Philosophy. It should be tradable for feudalism and machinery.

That was one turn of 100% research I saved by making the trade. So it was 200 gold saved in the bank which I think was worth it. Aest was already researched by Khmer so China would have gotten it anyway.

 

[Folket]

1230
Suryavarman completed the Parthenon.
1240
Great merchant was born somewhere.
1250
Great Prophet in Khmer.
Ankor Wat was built.

Hades Anvil lead to the new fortress of Hades Hammer. I lost 1 elephant, 1 catapult and 1 axeman attacking Hades Anvil. I have not put money into philosophy yet but we can have it in 4 turns.

China has engineering and are researching guilds. Unknown what Khmer are researching but it should be something expensive because he has not gained any techs. Perhaps divine right.

Shall I continue and capture Hades Hammer as well? And get philosophy for trades?

 

[Folket]

As you can see in the last picture there might be a passage there. I would not be surprised to see a long jungle road leading to other civs.

So the challange of the map is to decide the way west. I think we should continue to attack the hades route. I think it is more important to get west then to fight Khmer and China. We will tech past them soon enough and they are isolated.

 

[Folket]

I'm putting teh save up here as well.

 

[BLubmuz]

Hades Anvil lead to the new fortress of Hades Hammer. I lost 1 elephant, 1 catapult and 1 axeman attacking Hades Anvil. I have not put money into philosophy yet but we can have it in 4 turns.

You've also lost an HA
I recommended to use 2 cats, it could have been the best way.

Now, try to bring 2 archers, 1 cat and 1 fast moving unit. The latter is needed to explore and probably to capture a worker. The GG can wait.

I see a passage 2N1W of the chariot in China. Surely not a mountain, but maybe not a passage. Maybe we have both choices: through Khmer and China and through the Hades.

We have time to evaluate, since we're backwards on the military tech front. And we surely can't afford a war with clearly inferior units.
We're saved by WEs, so better have many of them to defend Goldfoot. My usual paranoia, you know

Philo as a trade tech is interesting. It's on the way to Lib, thus it can't be a complete waste.

Build archers, many of them. I've seen many cities without MP and if we wait we risk to be forced to LBs, which cost twice.

There isn't any unit spawnbusting E of Aachen. I noticed you settled that pesky red city instead of the crabs and of the other city for ivory

 

[Shaandore]

Sorry for not being around lately. I'll be very busy in the next month, but I will try to drop in from time to time.

I see you are thinking about philo, but shouldn't we plan for war instead? Trading for it looks like a better option, but are we planning to run pacifism in a war game? If not, what will we use it for? So I would trade fir it only if some very backward guy would give it to us for some outdated techs.

We should go for Machinery->Engineering now and we can war until some guys get to rifles, which will be far down the road. It's really not a lib race. We want conquest, and it looks like we have found our way to both the NW and SW corner, so from now on it's only a question of managing a medieval empire, while warring down the rest of the guys. We won't have a strong economy (we don't have one now: 75 gpt at break even...), but we reall only need these two techs, the capture money should be enough to keep us afloat and maybe get some techs in peace deals for the time remaining. Teching to lib won't get us a good date in this game.

Luckily the AIs are in groups of 2, so they will most likely not tech very fast.

With all that said, some observations (BTW Folket, you are doing great so far IMO)
1. we need some workers, maybe 3 or 4. Our new cities need some more worker force, while the old ones can use one or two still. With CS in, we need to start farm chains, and we still have a bazillion jungles to clear.
2. Vienna needs to work its cottagey. No whips here, and don't work the desert hill. The forge will be ready now, and working that only slows growth. It can slowbuild lighthouse or happy buildings, but food+commerce should be first. We will need some one more cottage 2S of Vienna as well.
3. Mainz:We could 2-whip an axe here into GLib at size 8. Make sure to put in only one hammer (because of forge, we need to put the citizens away from all hammer tiles to food to stay under 5 hammer.)
4. We are getting some GPP pollution in our cities. Please try to manage that. We really shouldn't be working specs anywhere now (except maybe Aachen, see #8) Unfortunately we need to cycle through cities before ending each turn...
5. We need to start setting up HE right now. I think Prague looks like the best candidate, with Djenne as a runner-up.
6. As soon as we have built/whipped the forges and garanries, (and farms) we should start light army whipping. I think trebs are far more powerful than cats, so I would stick to melee units until we get engineering.
7. Consider tarding for Drama instead of Philo when it becomes available. We could really use a globe city, it will give us endleess amount of troops. We could even try and research it oursleves.
8. We should try and get a GP. Aachen could get a GP in 8 turns. We shouldn't wait for Mainz here. We could get lucky with engineer/merchant, but a scientist would be fine too, if nothing else, we could settle it in Vienna.
9. Freshwater lakes are pretty good tiles. They are equivalent to non-riverside villages.
10. Augs could work one more cottage of Vienna so Vienna can start growing the cottage 2N1E.
11. Needless to say, but opening up roads to the rest of the AIs is one of our highest priorities. Maybe we can get some lucky trades that would help us a lot in the current economic situation. Note that most likely we won't reach Printing Press or Lib for Free speech, so our towns will be stuck at 4 or 5 commerce. So no economic power-ups in the near future. What we can rely on is growing our already built cottages, getting some commerce with those that we are peaceful with, and conquer money.

Let me know if you agree/disagree with the above.

 

[Folket]

Sorry for not being around lately. I'll be very busy in the next month, but I will try to drop in from time to time.

I see you are thinking about philo, but shouldn't we plan for war instead? Trading for it looks like a better option, but are we planning to run pacifism in a war game? If not, what will we use it for? So I would trade fir it only if some very backward guy would give it to us for some outdated techs.
Noone has Philosophy so it should be a good tech for trading. Better then teching machinery ourselves.

We should go for Machinery->Engineering now and we can war until some guys get to rifles, which will be far down the road. It's really not a lib race. We want conquest, and it looks like we have found our way to both the NW and SW corner, so from now on it's only a question of managing a medieval empire, while warring down the rest of the guys. We won't have a strong economy (we don't have one now: 75 gpt at break even...), but we reall only need these two techs, the capture money should be enough to keep us afloat and maybe get some techs in peace deals for the time remaining. Teching to lib won't get us a good date in this game.
But if we tech philosophy we can get philosophy, machinery and feudalism for the same price as just machinery.

Luckily the AIs are in groups of 2, so they will most likely not tech very fast.

With all that said, some observations (BTW Folket, you are doing great so far IMO)
1. we need some workers, maybe 3 or 4. Our new cities need some more worker force, while the old ones can use one or two still. With CS in, we need to start farm chains, and we still have a bazillion jungles to clear.
I have started to chain farms. But I can agree.
2. Vienna needs to work its cottagey. No whips here, and don't work the desert hill. The forge will be ready now, and working that only slows growth. It can slowbuild lighthouse or happy buildings, but food+commerce should be first. We will need some one more cottage 2S of Vienna as well.
Never had plans to whip Vienna.
3. Mainz:We could 2-whip an axe here into GLib at size 8. Make sure to put in only one hammer (because of forge, we need to put the citizens away from all hammer tiles to food to stay under 5 hammer.)
Sounds like a good idea.
4. We are getting some GPP pollution in our cities. Please try to manage that. We really shouldn't be working specs anywhere now (except maybe Aachen, see #8) Unfortunately we need to cycle through cities before ending each turn...
5. We need to start setting up HE right now. I think Prague looks like the best candidate, with Djenne as a runner-up.
I would prefer to have one scientist or a merchant instead of working a unimproved tile. But I'm fine with anything.
6. As soon as we have built/whipped the forges and garanries, (and farms) we should start light army whipping. I think trebs are far more powerful than cats, so I would stick to melee units until we get engineering.
Makes sense.
7. Consider tarding for Drama instead of Philo when it becomes available. We could really use a globe city, it will give us endleess amount of troops. We could even try and research it oursleves.
The plan is to get philosophy to trade it for machinery and feudalism.
8. We should try and get a GP. Aachen could get a GP in 8 turns. We shouldn't wait for Mainz here. We could get lucky with engineer/merchant, but a scientist would be fine too, if nothing else, we could settle it in Vienna.
What are we going to use the engineer for?
9. Freshwater lakes are pretty good tiles. They are equivalent to non-riverside villages.
[COLOR="DarkGreen"agreed[/COLOR]
10. Augs could work one more cottage of Vienna so Vienna can start growing the cottage 2N1E.
[COLOR="DarkGreen"]will have a look at that[/COLOR]
11. Needless to say, but opening up roads to the rest of the AIs is one of our highest priorities. Maybe we can get some lucky trades that would help us a lot in the current economic situation. Note that most likely we won't reach Printing Press or Lib for Free speech, so our towns will be stuck at 4 or 5 commerce. So no economic power-ups in the near future. What we can rely on is growing our already built cottages, getting some commerce with those that we are peaceful with, and conquer money.
Priority is given to fight through hades then.

Let me know if you agree/disagree with the above.

Comments in qoute.

 

[Shaandore]

But if we tech philosophy we can get philosophy, machinery and feudalism for the same price as just machinery.
I'm afraid we can't really rely on them trading away Machinery. If we can be sure somehow (We should check the mechanics of Sury and Qin) then it would be a good plan.
4. We are getting some GPP pollution in our cities. Please try to manage that. We really shouldn't be working specs anywhere now (except maybe Aachen, see #8) Unfortunately we need to cycle through cities before ending each turn...
I would prefer to have one scientist or a merchant instead of working a unimproved tile. But I'm fine with anything.
Yes, better than unimproved, but then instead of working unimproved it's better to whip a worker. Besides non-rep specs are pretty weak. (freshwater lake is much better...)
5. We need to start setting up HE right now. I think Prague looks like the best candidate, with Djenne as a runner-up. <- Prague or Djenne?
7. Consider tarding for Drama instead of Philo when it becomes available. We could really use a globe city, it will give us endleess amount of troops. We could even try and research it oursleves.
The plan is to get philosophy to trade it for machinery and feudalism.
I think Feud is not that important, we want to attack, not mass lbs. I would give priority to Drama first.

 

[Folket]

Drama does not have a trade value. I could setup a testgame and see if suryavarman or Qin wants to trade away machinery. I would expect them to since we will have monopoly on philosophy.

 

[BLubmuz]

Until yesterday afternoon i was thinking that the discussion was dead. Then i've seen Shaan's post, but has to go.

I do not quote.

First off, i disagree with Shaan about the non use for Lib and that we can stick to medieval. It can be true, but if not we can be in bad shape. We must be prepared to arrive to the industrial era.

About whipping units, melee are already obsolete if they have to face maces. Cats are not. They can be used for bombardment or before the - expensive - trebs start the real attack. They are also better in case of field fights or active defence.

We need archers for MP, that's sure and it will be my mantra until LBs arrive.

About Feud useful for defence, i remember to you that it opens guilds, which in turn opens a units which is not intended as defensive.

Then, i think that researching Philo + Drama to try to use them for machinery and feud is a good idea. It can or cannot work, but in any case we need it to try the lib race, which we can or cannot win. But this it the difficulty of this scenario.

Speaking of which...
I'm almost sure that the gold hill and the clams were placed there by the mapmaker to have the Khmer settle a city where we settled Goldfoot. For some reason this did not worked and we did. I'm sure we must push the advantage we have due to this situation. The stone island could have been placed close to crabs to delay its border expansion and our ability to move and explore south.
To summarize, everything was set up to force us to have Astro before being able to sail south, but even then to put us in big disadvantage to take a foothold.
As i said above, we must push this advantage.

The Hades route was surely thought to be taken and to bring somewhere. But attention, there's the dom limit behind the corner. We surely need to keep both barb cities to move West, but we must be very careful in what to do later (aside exploring, of course).

About the rest of Folket's ideas, i more or less agree with him, with some of the proposed variations.

More later.

 

[Folket]

Dom limits are a reason why I do not want to conquer Khmer and China yet. I would like to know how much margin we need.

 

[Shaandore]

Drama does not have a trade value. I could setup a testgame and see if suryavarman or Qin wants to trade away machinery. I would expect them to since we will have monopoly on philosophy.

You are right about Drama, it's better to trade for it, but I would try and get it before Feud (in trade). If we pop a GS from Aachen (very likely), we could just bulb philo, and save up more money for researching engineering.

From Civ illustrated:

7) Will trade techs that __% of the other AI know describes the message "We don't want to start trading this right now." This is governed by the spreadsheet value iTechTradeKnownPercent. It should be considered a rule of thumb and not accurate info. iTechTradeKnownPercent is only the beginning of the calculation of whether the AI will tell you "We don't want to start trading this right now." Mansa has a value of 0 and will always trade monopoly techs to the player. Tokugawa has a value of 100 and will only trade techs when every other AI that he has met knows it first. Between these extremes, AIs will trade the tech to you after calculating what units it unlocks compared to the strongest land unit in the game, what buildings it unlocks (even the unique ones!), and what uncompleted wonders it unlocks. These various values modify iTechTradeKnownPercent greatly and confuse the final answer. Perhaps someday someone will unravel the mystery in totality.

The numbers are 30 for Qin and 50 for Sury. I'm not sure we will be able to trade for Machinery. Folket, if you could run a test, it would be cool!

@Blub: As usual, we don't agree about the usefulness of LBs, but it's true that knights are nice to have. OTOH, one can do a succesful medieval war with trebs/maces, but suffer many losses if using knights without siege, especially post-engineering. So our objective should be engineering.

Liberalism: I would like to convince everybody that starting a Lib race is a mistake here. We would need to pass on medieval warfare, and finish the game with Cavalry. Our empire is not set up for a lib race now, we overexpanded.
Trebs+maces+knights can finish this game just fine, they don't have any problems up to muskets. Even a few cuirs can be handled with veteran pikes. Our main enemy is rifling, but I'm pretty sure that the top and middle of the pack teams will finish the game before that. Of course, it is a possibility that there is some spot on the map that can be reached only by paratroopers/Galleons, but I think that it is unlikely given that we had routes to everybody using only pre-astro units. But we will find it out soon enough, and we can still adapt. We just need to explore the west ASAP. Until then I would try and work it out the way we have planned: long medieval war with conquer money to sail our economy towards the end.
So to sum it up, I'm saying that we should gear for war now, with a strong emphasis on exploring the west to see what we are up against. If we find out that we will need more serious military techs than Engineering, we can still change back to empire growing and economic techs. We will be able to get some trades with bulbs, we will even have a shot at Lib by 2xbulbing Education. (We will have a monster GP farm). Otherwise we can just stick to our original plan and get a nice finish date.

 

[Shaandore]

Dom limits are a reason why I do not want to conquer Khmer and China yet. I would like to know how much margin we need.

We can count the tiles, but I think we are below 30%. We can have two quarters without a problem. BTW we will raze all cities but the ones that can whip a rathaus immediately after coming out of revolt, or have a nice shrine, or lots of commerce so they can pay for themselves.

 

[Folket]

The numbers are 30 for Qin and 50 for Sury. I'm not sure we will be able to trade for Machinery. Folket, if you could run a test, it would be cool!

We knwo they will trade machinery by just speaking to them. Bulbing philosphy sounds interesting. Perhaps sagve money for guilds.

 

[BLubmuz]

We can count the tiles, but I think we are below 30%. We can have two quarters without a problem. BTW we will raze all cities but the ones that can whip a rathaus immediately after coming out of revolt, or have a nice shrine, or lots of commerce so they can pay for themselves.

Just mouse over a tile tells us where we are. The map ranges from 180E to 180W as any other map, but only from 15N to 15S.
The exact middle of the map are:
- E/W (Greenwich) Hades Anvil. To be accurate, Anvil is 3,32E and the coast 1W of it is 3,30W.
- N/S (Equator) the sea. Our South coast is 0.30N, the ocean is 0.30S.

So, even if we arrive to cover all our and former Mali lands, we're below 25%. The last save posted by Folket, shows 17.51%, but we must add 3 cities soon to 2nd borders, Anvil and even Hammer and we arrive slightly over 20%, because water tiles do not count.

Sury has 10.00% and Qin less. Considering both we can arrive at most around 40% and the limit is 64%.

So we have a good margin if we're forced to settle some city to move through something or we want keep some city for wonders and such. We must be careful, nothing more.

Then, i'm not proposing to fight a war with knights, which are expensive and wulnerable to pikes. A classic war with maces, WEs and trebs with some mixed unit to support is surely safer.

But i'm not thinking to tech to - as you said - cavalry just to count on a powerful unit.
I'm thinking to combustion or paratroopers to be able to reach the last AI. We must be prepared. If not, we risk to fail.

This must be our long term plan. If we discover that arrive to rifles or even knights is enough, the better, otherwise we are prepared.

Now, i see both you and Folket are very good in MM and short-mid term tactics, but i think we must share a vision on what is - or can be - needed by the end. This is probably the real trap the mapmaker prepared.

Glad to see more discussion on this matter.

 

[Shaandore]

We knwo they will trade machinery by just speaking to them. Bulbing philosphy sounds interesting. Perhaps sagve money for guilds.

Are you saying Guilds before Engineering? I'd go for Engineering first to get the trebs ASAP. Knights can easily catch up later to our stacks.

 

[Shaandore]

Just mouse over a tile tells us where we are. The map ranges from 180E to 180W as any other map, but only from 15N to 15S.
The exact middle of the map are:
- E/W (Greenwich) Hades Anvil. To be accurate, Anvil is 3,32E and the coast 1W of it is 3,30W.
- N/S (Equator) the sea. Our South coast is 0.30N, the ocean is 0.30S.

So, even if we arrive to cover all our and former Mali lands, we're below 25%. The last save posted by Folket, shows 17.51%, but we must add 3 cities soon to 2nd borders, Anvil and even Hammer and we arrive slightly over 20%, because water tiles do not count.

Sury has 10.00% and Qin less. Considering both we can arrive at most around 40% and the limit is 64%.

So we have a good margin if we're forced to settle some city to move through something or we want keep some city for wonders and such. We must be careful, nothing more.

Thanks for verifying, it's like I thought it is, the 4 quarters have roughly the same number of land tiles.

Then, i'm not proposing to fight a war with knights, which are expensive and wulnerable to pikes. A classic war with maces, WEs and trebs with some mixed unit to support is surely safer.

But i'm not thinking to tech to - as you said - cavalry just to count on a powerful unit.
I'm thinking to combustion or paratroopers to be able to reach the last AI. We must be prepared. If not, we risk to fail.

It looks like we basically agree. I'm just saying that our priority should be gearing for war instead of lib race, because we can still tech to paratroopers later if we find the need, and we will see it soon if we concentrate on exploring. Or in short, going for paper->Edu now instead of Engineering and Guilds feels like choosing a tech path for something that has a very low probability, but sacrificing a lots of turns when we could do succesful medieval wars.

By going for lib techs (paper->edu->lib) now, we would choose to narrow our medieval warfare window so much that it won't even be worth to go to war before cannons/cuirs. It's kind of what happened in the previous game, we ended up attacking with muskets, which was okay there, but won't be a winning strategy here IMO.

This must be our long term plan. If we discover that arrive to rifles or even knights is enough, the better, otherwise we are prepared.

Now, i see both you and Folket are very good in MM and short-mid term tactics, but i think we must share a vision on what is - or can be - needed by the end. This is probably the real trap the mapmaker prepared.

Could be... but clearly there are 4 quarters, and we are present in two, and it certainly looks like that we found the way to the two western quarters.

Glad to see more discussion on this matter.

I agree, it's an important decision now, so if Pangea/unclethrill/Mastiff could post their opinion, it would be nice.

 

[BLubmuz]

Are you saying Guilds before Engineering? I'd go for Engineering first to get the trebs ASAP. Knights can easily catch up later to our stacks.

So, Folket's proposal still makes sense. Its only problem is a degree of risk that any of the 2 is researching philo and that it can't be used as trade money. Let's try to see pros and cons:

pro:
- it's one tech we need if the game is long tech wise and which surely we can't have in trade if we research machinery
- Tao is already founded, so the chances they will go for it are low
- we can have feud from one and machiney from the other, so we spend research to 1 tech to have 2
cons:
- there's the risk both Sury and Qin research it. Low chances, but still...

This said, our main objective mid-term has to be Engineering, for 3 reasons:
- units movement
- trebs
- our UU, which i never used but seems to be promising.

The question is: by researching this tech we risk to fall behind military-wise if we're not able to trade for machinery. If we're successful (trade for both Feud and Machinery), we've put both 1 tech closer to Lib, which is not needed for anything if not the free tech. The free tech can be Nationalism or Astro as usual. We don't care Astro for a long time and Nationalism is interesting for the Taj. Combustion does not need it, but Fascism (paratroopers) does. Do we think we have a chance to win the race? i doubt. Do we think we have a chance to build the Taj? maybe.

It's sure that we need to research engineering ourselves and that Qin probably already has it (F4).

So, if we decide to take the risk and if we're successful, our research path can be: philo - engineering - paper - edu - Lib for Nation if we can see a chance.
If we decide to not take the risk, Machinery - Eng and we'll see later how things move.

I'm for take the risk.

Our economy will recover soon or if you prefer, we will soon have an economy. We have the biggest empire, so it's just a matter of time. Which is not a small problem... we need not only to build units, but to move them to be ferried and to ferry them.

We must also verify the need to build a road from Hades Hammer to... somewhere west. 2 workers and 2-3 units to protect them from barbs. More gpt needed to maintain those units, but they can reveal to be one of the keys to a fast victory.

 

[Shaandore]

Machinery is prereq for Engineering.

How about my bulbing philo proposal? we get a GS with ~75% prob in 8 turns. Then we could save up money, and see if we can trade for MAchinery. If not, we research it, otherwise trade for it and put our money into researching Engineering.

 

[BLubmuz]

Machinery is prereq for Engineering.
That's the basics maybe you overlooked "if we're successful"
How about my bulbing philo proposal? we get a GS with ~75% prob in 8 turns. Then we could save up money, and see if we can trade for MAchinery. If not, we research it, otherwise trade for it and put our money into researching Engineering.

75% is not bad, while is not a safe bet. The question is: what do we research in the meantime? paper or Drama? at 0% to save gold for Eng if we're successful in a) have a GS, b) trade for Machinery?

edit cancel anything.
I just verified in game and we can have a GS with 44% chances (which we can increase) but in 21 turns. Too much, i think.