SGOTM 18 - Kakumeika

[WastinTime]

Even if mining inc is the best strategy in the end, a early communism is a very very close second.

I agree. Either way could have gotten the gold. It really comes down to other factors.

If you're dead set against Liberalism, (or 99% against like we were,) then Mining is the only choice.

 

[WastinTime]

Thx for the many hours, days, years, playing together bcool.
You were a great captain.
I'm sure we'll see you back some day. I hope so anyway. I think Kakumeika was yours and should end with your departure.

 

[Kaitzilla]

Thx for the many hours, days, years, playing together bcool.
You were a great captain.
I'm sure we'll see you back some day. I hope so anyway. I think Kakumeika was yours and should end with your departure.

I totally agree.
Thnx for being great captain past 2 years

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

Thanks bcool for being a great captain these past few years!

I don't agree that Kakumeika should be disbanded, because bcool no longer has time to play SGOTMs.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

I agree with WaistinTime that the optimal strategy for this game is beeline Steel and liberalize Railroad. Scientific Method -> Communism is an unecessary distraction. To get the Great Engineer early enough, we should have worked only Great Engineer GPPs in one city, with an Engineer, Hanging Gardens and another GE wonder.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[WastinTime]

That one was me and we had way over 100% .

Over 100% would be impossible. There's always a chance of failure. I (very roughly) calculate we had ~91% chance of success. I think that's one attempt at 55% and 10 attempts at 15%.

To get the Great Engineer early enough, we should have worked only Great Engineer GPPs in one city, with an Engineer, Hanging Gardens and another GE wonder.

Sounds good on paper, but it's hard to do when you get the GreatLibrary... and when the Pyramids have been pre-buit. 92% was not a guarantee. Let's look at the GreatLibrary closer. Over the course of it's life, it will produce enough GPP to get us one extra GP that we would not have had, and it has the effect of bringing each GP to us a bit sooner. Still tho, only 1 more GP in the game. We used that extra GS to get us Education -- perfectly timed with CS/bureau trade, so I think it was well used. However, if we had just skipped Aesthetics/Lit and GLib investment, we would have probably gotten to Edu at the same time using only one GS bulb. So really, our GLib value was used just to make up the ground we lost pursuing it.

 

[Mitchum]

Scientific Method -> Communism is an unecessary distraction.

I'm not sure that SM fits in the "unnecessary" category since it's required for Mass Media.

Regarding Communism, sure it wasn't mandatory for this game (assuming you were going for corporations and not State Property). However, for 4,550 you get a GSpy (3,000 or a mongrel (i.e. non GS, GArt or GM) for a Golden Age) and the ability to build Intelligence Agencies. So it allows you to convert to , which wasn't a horrible trade off in this game.

 

[Mitchum]

Sounds good on paper, but it's hard to do when you get the GreatLibrary... and when the Pyramids have been pre-buit. 92% was not a guarantee. Let's look at the GreatLibrary closer. Over the course of it's life, it will produce enough GPP to get us one extra GP that we would not have had, and it has the effect of bringing each GP to us a bit sooner. Still tho, only 1 more GP in the game. We used that extra GS to get us Education -- perfectly timed with CS/bureau trade, so I think it was well used. However, if we had just skipped Aesthetics/Lit and GLib investment, we would have probably gotten to Edu at the same time using only one GS bulb. So really, our GLib value was used just to make up the ground we lost pursuing it.

I always struggle over whether or not to build the GLib in my space games and I usually go for it if I have the chance for a few reasons:

1. Aesthetics -> Literature are not a total waste because they are good for trade bait. So you are often able to get quite a few techs from these two.

2. Literature also opens up the Epics, which I'm sure that you guys built quite early in this game.

3. The GLib allows you to run 2 "free" scientists without slowing down any of your cities from building infra, settlers, workers, units, etc. So it gives you an early-game GS for either an Academy or for bulbing.

4. The science output from the 2 scientists isn't insignificant, especially if you're running Representation. Those "free" flasks often come when your research slider is at 0% after the early expansion phase and allows you to limp along until you are able to increase the science slider again.

So are you saying that the GLib is rarely a good wonder? Or was it something specific about this game that made it a bad choice? Do you build it in your typical Space games or avoid it like the plague?

 

[Seraiel]

TGL is a very good wonder, and I often go for it, when I have the chance. I don't usually make the effort though to research Aesthetics myself, because Currency -> CoL -> CS -> Paper -> Education imho are all more important, but with i. e. Mansa researching it, I often make a short detour around Literature just for the Epics and the GL.

Biggest problem I see in spacerace-games is, that the GL obsolets so fast (the reason why I try to cut on the effort on getting it) and that the other alternatives are really strong too. Oxford 1300 BC as tought by WastinTime somehow changed my games.

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

By saying "Scientific Method -> Communism" is a distraction, I meant Scientific Method earlier than necessary and Communism in this game is suboptimal for earliest victory in this game. State Property takes a lot of Worker turns to leverage versus Mining Inc spread which actually quite easy; need only build one Mining Inc Executive per city spread which is quite easy with up to 30 Mining Inc resources with Factory and Coal Plant alone provides 60 Hpt in each city. One needs only 20 raw Hpt from other sources like workships to build an executive every turn in up to five cities and spread them the same turn. Ramping up Mining Inc is much easier than some players suggest. The Great Spy from Communism isn't particularly useful and Intelligence Agencies come pretty late and aren't needed at all if one avoids Liberalism to avoid the requirement to adopte Free Religion.

I agree that early The Great Library is almost always the right choice for victory conditions that require a lot of research, sometimes (OCC at least) even for mass media beeline strategies.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[WastinTime]

So are you saying that the GLib is rarely a good wonder? Or was it something specific about this game that made it a bad choice? Do you build it in your typical Space games or avoid it like the plague?

It's a good wonder. I only avoid it if I'm playing a really gigantic game with an awesome start and that game requires early Mining Inc. I don't want to gamble on the GE in that case. So, yea, the space races mostly, probably big score games,...and this SG game. Although I personally would not have gone GLib, I didn't fight that hard against it because:

1) We planned to focus very hard on the GE very early and should have been fine.

More importantly:
2) This game can delay SciMethod much longer than I do in say, a big score-sushi game. So the GLib didn't obsolete as fast as it usually does.

The issue was not so much the GLib, but the tech delay it caused. Specifically HorseBackRiding delay.

 

[Mitchum]

The Great Spy from Communism isn't particularly useful and Intelligence Agencies come pretty late and aren't needed at all if one avoids Liberalism to avoid the requirement to adopte Free Religion.

Can you elaborate on this? Why are IAs not needed outside of Free Religion?

We used the GSpy on an infiltration mission. It turns out that we didn't need it because we had enough EPs at the end, but that's only because we built so many Intelligence Agencies. Without the IAs, I think the infiltration mission would have been needed for our strategy although I haven't done a thorough analysis on it. Since we beelined Communism, we got IAs soon enough to have an impact. Looking back, we should have use the GSpy to launch the 3-person Golden Age freeing up one of the others for a different purpose such as the GArt to bulb part of Mass Media which could have shaved a turn from our research.

I guess I need to read to see how you guys got all of the EPs required without IAs or infiltration...

 

[Seraiel]

Let's just simply all blame bcool for us not having gotten Gold. I'm sure him research 1T into AH in the beginning was the main reason for us being 5T late in the end.

Who's with me?

 

[Kaitzilla]

Let's just simply all blame bcool for us not having gotten Gold. I'm sure him research 1T into AH in the beginning was the main reason for us being 5T late in the end.

Who's with me?

Kaku had a really great run.
We may not get a Gold but always we put on a good show

 

[Seraiel]

Come on, 5T, that's ridiculous.

I can count the errors we made that costed us 5T.

I'm still reading the other's threads, I can't believe that we lost to PD by 2T, what I heard we were way before them most of the time.

I'm something like 99% sure that our main error that costed us the Gold was playing so extremely slow and without any real fun in the beginning, and then having to play a way too hasty endgame.

But I agree about the good show, and at least we went through every that happened together and noone ragequitted and left his / her team behind like in another team .

 

[kossin]

Well guys, I know it is a bit early to think about the next sgotm. However, I wanted to give everyone a heads up that I taking a break from sgotm. My work has gotten busier in the past couple of years and I don't think I can maintain the focus to participate in a high level game next time.

So if you guys want Kakumeika to survive you might want to start thinking about who is going to be captain next time and recruiting some new members.

Great effort on everyone's part, I'm sorry we didn't get the gold.
I'm not entirely convinced that mining inc was the way to go even if we got the early great engineer, the benefits of a very early communism certainly add up. The lack of food on this map really hurt the growth of our cities.

The difference in the top 3 games will be bit hard to tease out since there were so many choices along the way. Differences in what the AI researched, how they expanded, who they declared war against, etc.

Even if mining inc is the best strategy in the end, a early communism is a very very close second.

Good show bcool. It was fun playing against you. Take care.

Next game will look a lot different team-wise.

There's merit to be said of each approach. Return on investment is the most important factor to consider late game.

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

Intelligence Agencies come so late in this game they really don't have time to contribute enough espionage, especially when one avoids free religion by avoiding Liberalism. By avoiding Liberalism, one can a state religion and assuming one has the holy city of this religion, one utilize the state religion -40% espionage discount. This espionage discount drastically reduces the total espionage needed to bring Swinger's Pad to legendary culture. We estimated 20000E down to 12000E. This more than makes up for no late Intelligence Agencies.

Obviuosly, one wants Code of Laws for Courthouses somewhat early for both reduced city maintence and the 2 Ept plus the Spy specialist slot. Next get Nationalism as soon as possible to adopt Nationhood for the +25% Ept. Next one should get Constitution as soon as possible to build jails for the +50% Ept. Trade for Engineering and possibly built walls/castles with stone for the +25% Ept and extra trade route; I don't believe we did this at all in our game, which may have been a mistake, but castles obsolete with Economics which is mainly why we avoided them in this game. That's already +75% Ept without castles or +100% Ept with castles.

Intelligence Agencies come to late in the game and force one to forgo the state religion espionage discount of -40% due to Liberalism being required for Communism.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

One of our mistakes was whipping more military than necessary. It complements the mistake of starting each war with every Civ getting its unique unit or longbowmen shortly after we started the war. Our lower populations got really low trade routes - not sure whether other teams had this issue or not.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[Mitchum]

@ STW

Thanks for the explanation. When we decided on the Communism beeline from T0, I pretty much ignored the -40% state religion bonus on EP missions. Of course having that would have taken EP generation way off the critical path in this game. Although, we didn't get that bonus and EPs were no problem for us either but we had to build IAs (which came with our Communism beeline ). In addition, we captured Swingers Pad really early and had ~6.5K of our own by the end of the game, so that was another way we reduced the EP needs for the end game.

For military, we stopped our major warring very early and after that we only built units out of Pig (our city west of our Capital with pigs and horses), which had the HE, our only barracks, and 2 or 3 settled GGs. So we did very little unit whipping once we had Joao and GK down to 2 cities, which happened ~500 BC IIRC. We did whip a lot of settlers though for our post-Communism REX phase and for liberation bonuses.

 

[WastinTime]

We got Swingers later, but we also still got about 5000 too, I think.

You wouldn't believe how many times I said "Don't build any more military..anywhere...expect the HE city" (also PigsCity). An earlier faster world war, like you guys did, was what I had hoped for. 30+ cities and Mining Inc before T140 was the (very realistic) goal.