SGOTM 19 - Also Sprach Sid

[soundjata]

Can't we give back Santiago / Nuremberg / Augsburg to Capac? These cities won't help much imo and they have none of our culture.

Then I'd try to give Mycenian & Yeha to Nappy, hopping he can overcome our 20 culture and 13 culture respectively.

 

[soundjata]

Put Guild on the table and ask. I believe our kill/loss ratio is enough. Doshin's last battles and yours are pretty good.

It worked. We got guild (but not guild + drama)
HC is willing to accept any of our cities...

Edit: Napoleon has 160 gold for trade. We sell Optics or Paper?

 

[Doshin]

Four losses is a good result.

HC must be close to Guilds... does he still have a Scout by out southern Spice city? We could kill that for more war success. Are there any Workers we can capture.

Otherwise, we can only send more Cuirassiers to threaten his last city. The units need to spread across multiple tiles, not stacked, and they can be no more than 2 tiles away from his city. I am not sure if diagonals count as 1.5.

Edit: woooh. Guilds.

 

[soundjata]

We should go all in on science shouldn't we? (science instead of wealth everywhere)

1 turn earlier biology is the easiest thing to control ATM. We can always revert back to (just enough) wealth on the last turn(s) before biology.

In five turns will be too late to cry about this!

 

[pomthom]

I am delighted you lived up to your reputation soundjata


Although you could have done better on Prague! Not even a Granary

 

[Duckweed]

We should go all in on science shouldn't we? (science instead of wealth everywhere)

1 turn earlier biology is the easiest thing to control ATM. We can always revert back to (just enough) wealth on the last turn(s) before biology.

In five turns will be too late to cry about this!

Try to switch the wealth to science, you will see that our gpt is hitting -500. We won't have enough cash to support 10 turns of 100% slider if there are 2 GSs to bulb.

Some Comments on the save

Workers around Aksum should farm and then change the mine to windmills. We need Askum to grow to size 18 by the turn of founding corporation if it's the HQ. The other possibility of HQ is AA or DH, depending on the final spreading plan.

BS is another important hub since it needs to spread to quite a few cities in the north pole. You need to send some workers there to farm the plain tiles.

BTW, if a city can't grow over size 10 in a dozen turns, cottage on plain tiles is the best choice.

When I suggested the above, I mean cities like Mycenian and Yeha.

There are also some city tile management like water tiles needed to be worked in Barcelona and a spy in Sheepish. I think you will check every city then.

 

[Duckweed]

War with Alex

We have a bit less than 30 Cuis around NW corner. The most important thing is to monitor the movement of Alex's stack, send the 2 workers if his stack enter a tile without road again. Moreover, the defense in Khur also decides how many Cuis are needed to take this city.

Spoiler :

We could attack on 146 or 147 depending on the movement of Alex's SOD.

NE stack -> Khur 4~5 Cuis (1~2 level 4 units)
South stack -> Baghdad (all the reinforcements from south rally there
Major stack -> To Mecca, hopefully they do not need to deal with Alex's SOD. T149 or 150, Mecca should be fallen.

Edit: Move the spear in Madrid to Mainz

 

[Duckweed]

Can't we give back Santiago / Nuremberg / Augsburg to Capac? These cities won't help much imo and they have none of our culture.

Then I'd try to give Mycenian & Yeha to Nappy, hopping he can overcome our 20 culture and 13 culture respectively.

This 2 cities are likely hopeless.

We need a detail spreading plan as soon as possible to determine issues like this. If razing the cities saves 1 turn of spreading, then we should raze.

 

[Doshin]

For healing on T143, I would suggest you move the Super Medics:

Spoiler :

Also promote Cuirassier 41 and 46 to Combat II, while they heal in place.


----

Between T143-44 you should look to move these units into Nuremberg:

Spoiler :

Horse Archer 14
Cuirassier 35, 31, 44, 45, 3, 46, 16, 32, 25

After the 10 units are inside, attach the Great General to HA 14. Then move the Angry Nurse medic into this city.

Promote any units that need more than 1 turn to heal. Upgrade the Horse Archer.

8 out of 9 Cuirassiers will receive a promotion with 1 or 2XP from the Great General. The HA14 will receive a free upgrade. We will have 8 fully healed units on T147, which can attack Najran.

 

[Doshin]

We need a detail spreading plan as soon as possible to determine issues like this. If razing the cities saves 1 turn of spreading, then we should raze.

To add to this: another consideration is the new owner, his culture, and the timing of the gift... e.g. gifting Nuremberg now would rob us of a healing center, and gifting this to HC swamps the area in the wrong culture. It'd be better to gift them to Nappy or Alex at the last possible moment.

Even 13 in Yeha means that the AI needs 53 to let us raze it.

Cities like Santiago/Augsberg/etc. with 0 of our culture will depend on the spreading plan.

----

On an unrelated note: run 4 Scientists in Case Depart this turn. They are needed for the last GP, after Constantinople.

Will it be best to stop working tiles here, rather than Villages or the Marble/Copper?

 

[kossin]

Time to re-estimate research.

1-Banking 1137
2-Economics 2275
3-Corporation 2600
4-Chemistry 2925
5-Sci Method 3900
6-Biology 5850
7-Liberalism 2275
Medicine 0(7312)

Total: 20,962b

Scenario 1: 1x bulb a GS, 1 trade mission

Spoiler :

1x bulb Chemistry/SciM :~2244b
18,818b
---
Remove 20% discount
15,598
OF beakers: ~1500b
---
14,098b

Turns to complete research:
10 turns: average 1410 bpt >> very easy
9 turns: average 1567 bpt >> doable with Mercantilism+Corporations
8 turns: average 1763 bpt >> maybe possible with heavy research building and micro

Scenario 2: 2x bulb a GS

Spoiler :

Turns to complete research:
10 turns: average 1223 bpt >> very easy
9 turns: average 1359 bpt >> easy
8 turns: average 1529 bpt >> doable with Mercantilism+Corporations

Scenario 3: 1x bulb a GS, 1x bulb a GM

Spoiler :

Turns to complete research:
10 turns: average 1286 bpt >> very easy
9 turns: average 1428 bpt >> simple with Mercantilism+Corporations
8 turns: average 1607 bpt >> maybe possible?

The slowest we should do is 9 turns (start of T153 we are done), 8 turns (start of T152) would be the best possible result.

Q: How much longer do we have in Caste? I went through the save and optimized for end-game and could get an extra 200bpt over what we're currently doing (not even building research).

Considering Mercantilism may be worth 150~200 bpt, and Corporation 40~50bpt, then that brings us in the 8-turns window.

If not, just play easily with 9-turns which is pretty much guaranteed.

 

[Doshin]

I was thinking about the merits of Caste vs. Slavery too.

If we stay in Caste, we can switch out of Pacifism. Constantinople will need to lose a pop, and CD will have to stop working some good tiles for a turn or two (replaced by Great Scientists). But we'd save ~40GPT in Paganism.

We'd gain Scientists and Merchant slots in cities that lack infrastructure. We'd lose Libraries and CHs in cities that are ready to whip.

 

[kossin]

Libraries are too late now, not worth the whipped population. CH is only good for lowering cost of Sushi upkeep, but that can be left off for later.

Paganism doesn't save a huge amount of money, as I recall, Pacifism isn't a straight military unit >> 1gpt conversion.

As cruel as it seems, Aachen would have best been razed

 

[kossin]

Unfortunately I can't really apply Graph Theory to this because not all cities are able to continuously produce executives. Otherwise there are some neat little transportation programs that could optimize this

Spoiler :

Some colours are wrong in the West because I changed the scheme as I went (was first doing 3-4-5-6+ but it looked like a mess). The 2 top left blue should be green.

The more cities we can get rid and raze in the west, the better. The logic is simple: with 5 executives maximum at a time, it takes 1 more turn for each 5 cities.

Assuming Aksum is the HQ...
4 turns to capital Const
4 turns to RP via DH+BS

7~8 turns to Aachen
(2 turns to Toledo and/or Barcelona)
(3 turns to Madrid)
(4 turns to Seville)

---

If we're unable to get rid of a lot of cities to the west then I suggest a more central city would be Barcelona (5~6 turns to Aachen, 6~7 turns to RP/CD).

The pros for Barcelona are the forests.

We could do something like...

T0 (1) 
	Barcelona
T1 (2)
   	Barcelona>Toledo
T2 (4)
   	Barcelona>Madrid
	Toledo>AA
T3 (6)
	Madrid>Seville
	Barcelona>Santiago
	[B]AA>>Constantinople[/B] [2t]
	[B]Toledo>>Aksum[/B] [2t]
T4 (11)
	[B]AA>Constantinople
	Toledo>Aksum[/B]
	Madrid>Cordoba
	Aksum>DH
	Santiago>Nuremberg
T5 (16)
	DH>BS
	Nuremberg>Augusburg
	Aksum>Lalibela
	Cordoba>Napoleon City
	[B]Constantinople>>CD[/B] [2t]
T6 (20)
	Constantinople>CD
	BS>GS
	Constantinople>Thessa
	Augusburg>Aachen
	Seville>Mainz or something similar
T7 (25)
T8 (29~30)
T9 (33~34)

At most it should take 11 turns. 9 turns seems improbable even if we raze a lot of cities: there are too many cities which require a 2-turn trek and this slows down spreading.

 

[soundjata]

Time to re-estimate research.

Did you take into account we are currently carrying a 1700ish beaker overflow?

 

[Duckweed]

The bottleneck of spreading is the NE corner barbarian city since it needs 3 turns travel from BS, on top of that, BS needs to produce 2 more executives to another north cities. The spreading and HQ site should plan around this.

All HRE cities can be gifted back later to HC as Doshin mentioned.

 

[Folket]

How can we gift them back to HC. They would be counted as liberated so we can only gift one.

 

[soundjata]

^ yes and then we conquer (destroy) HC and no more liberation bonus

 

[Doshin]

Restrictions: 1) Culture VC cannot use espionage to spread culture to legendary city; 2) You may not have more than +1 diplo modifier for "you have liberated our city" with any civilization remaining alive; and 3) You may not offer nor accept peace or cease fire in any war declared by you until an enemy city is captured or one of your cities is lost by capture, or the war is ended by UN/AP resolution.

It's ambiguous: "remaining alive..." at the game end, or while the game is still underway?

I had understood it as the former, i.e. as a means to stop mass liberation as a tactic to win an AP or UN vote.

It doesn't matter, does it? We could gift HC's cities to Alex or Nappy. Huayna's capital is closer, so they won't be liberated.

 

[soundjata]

I disagree it is ambiguous.
Remaining alive obviously means at the end of the game. Otherwise it makes no sense.

Maybe we can try to summon kcd_swede ITT to get a confirmation