SGOTM 19 - Also Sprach Sid

[Doshin]

^^^ thanks.

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The winning condition is as follows:

Spoiler :

Community Chest!

Please pay $50USD to the last active member of your team for his or her tireless efforts in the pursuit of liberty, freedom, and Democracy.

Well what can I say? The rules are the rules...

 

[Doshin]

Oh, and:

The extra condition is that every city must have a franchise of your monopoly corp, unless it has the Corp HQ of a competing corporation. This is communicated to team by PM after a save with Democracy is uploaded.

Two supplementary questions have been raised:

1) Does "every city" also include AI and barbarian cities?

2) Can we use the final turn (in between "One more turn" and save+quit) to spread the corporation?

kcd_swede responded "Yes" to both.

Please notify your team members, and good luck.

 

[pomthom]

Great play Doshin

Conquest VC it is

 

[Duckweed]

Great work Doshin!

We might be able to complete the research much fast than expected.

Chemistry 2 turns
Banking 1 turn
Optics 1 turn
Economics 1 turn
Corporation 2 turns
SM 1 turn
Biology 3 turns (might be able to make it 2 turn if we have enough OF from small techs)
Liberalism 1 turn

12 turn to end the research, which means that we are ready to found Corporations on T155.

What we need now is a detail plan of spreading, including which cities to be razed, gifted and razed, what size of cities are needed, which city should the HQ.

soundjata, are you ready to capture the greatest city in this game?

 

[soundjata]

Got it.
Will look at the save today and report (draft a plan) tonight.

 

[soundjata]

Well what can I say? The rules are the rules...

I never expected you to be so cheap

 

[Duckweed]

Took a look at the save, I believe that we could capture Prague on T144 as well.

There are 2 full health Cuis could attack Prague on T144 -- Cui45 and Cui19 (promote to march and then go with Nurse, plus ~4 other Cuis, pretty safe to take Prague.

In this case, we could delay the civic 2 turns until T145 so that we can switch to Mercantilism.

Our beakers could approach 1500bpt on T145

 

[soundjata]

What we need now is a detail plan of spreading, including which cities to be razed, gifted and razed, what size of cities are needed, which city should the HQ.

Fascinating problem

Some key data. (please correct if I am wrong)
1. A maximum of 5 executive alive or being built
2. With Scientific Method, an executive can travel across 6 tiles or infect a city 5 tiles away. (a little more with galley chaining maybe)
3. A cold whip of an executive is -5 pop.

To answer the question, I'd chose to keep only Sushi Cities and gift/raze all the rest, except maybe a couple of hubs (high pop cities) such as bacon sandwich.

With a target of 16 cities, It would take a maximum of 8 turns (7 turns may be achievable. Less I don't think so) after the incorporation of Sid Sushi to infect everything. T155+8=T163.

20 turns to play

 

[Duckweed]

1. yes.
2. yes. you mean Engineering. right?
3. yes, banking 3 forest chops will also produce the executive in 1 turn.

Would you try to raze our capital? which does not has any Sushi resource. Some cities in the middle does not need to be razed if they can produce executive immediately.

 

[Duckweed]

With the plan of ending the war with HC on T144

The tech order could be like this

T143 Chemistry
T144 Banking 1 turn
T145 Switch to slavery + Mercantilism, Economics 1 turn
T146 Chemistry 1 turn
T147 Corporation 1 turn
T148 Optics 1 turn
T149 bulb SM 1 turn
T150 Biology 2~3 turns
T153 or T154 Liberalism 1 turn

T154 Medicine is possible.

 

[soundjata]

1. yes.
2. yes. you mean Engineering. right?
3. yes, banking 3 forest chops will also produce the executive in 1 turn.

Would you try to raze our capital? which does not has any Sushi resource. Some cities in the middle does not need to be razed if they can produce executive immediately.

Made a test with SM as I thought it made the roads better. Maybe it's just a visual effect...

Assuming we want to give away 15-20 cities a few turns before the end. What would the process look like? Give all to the same AI? Share? I assume we'd have to be at peace for several turns for it to work. I am not sure how to test this...

 

[kossin]

Spoiler :

Yea, I think I used up all my luck in SGOTM11 to pop a gems from a mine in the capital. All downhill from there

@Duckweed

Like I said, cottages will take 35~40 turns to mature to village. The cutoff date I suggested is ~1AD or ~T115.
115+35 = T150, the point at which we'll have the necessary technologies for workshops.

Beyond 1AD, workers shouldn't be adding cottages, but farms and workshops (maybe pre-improving workshops/watermills/windmills for a fast switch too).

State Property is likely to be used for the economy, we need Democracy+Corporation+one of Railroad/Medicine/... if we go there quickly [as in Lib>Communism], Kremlin becomes a good investment too.

FWIW, these are the remaining technologies:

Optics		975
Guilds		1625
Banking		1137
Constitution	734
Liberalism	2275
Economics	2275
Democracy	4550
Corporation	2600
Chemistry	2925
Sci Method	3900
Biology		5850
Medicine	7312

Total: 36,158

Assuming Lib>Medicine: 28,846
Remove 2xGS bulbs: 24,586
Factor in 20% discount: 20,488

Provided we can keep the slider high (trade missions 3,000 gold + current stash 1565 + ~200 trades + city captures ~1500 = ~6000 is good for 15 turns without building wealth) then...
At current pace... 20 turns to complete research. [T158]

Assuming we extort Guilds: 19 turns [T157]

With more research emphasis we can go even lower. It seems most energy should be spent on optimizing the war and land capture. (workers can try to optimize road networks so that troops always move at least 1 tile to the west etc.)

Like I said earlier, T160 should be the easy goal

Assuming we do go for Medicine... these are the techs and beakers left (before discount... so divide by 1.2 for base cost and remove some from trades)

Spoiler :

^^Few wonders and Caste Artists to pop borders. Without Oracle, Pyramids is the only arguable wonder that can speed up Education ASAP... TGL ends up being a detour.

HAs will upgrade to cuirassiers, so any hammers invested into HAs will be invested in Cuirassier builds once Gunpowder completes.

~~~

Regarding game finish: I would prefer to get the Taj early as well (not only for the bug, but for the fact that my estimates are usually conservative and 120+10+13+12 = 155; we can always spend a few turns at one point outside GA without too much loss)

GPs:
3 for last GA
1 for Corporation (GM?)
extra GMs/GSs for trade missions/bulbs
---
5~7

We get Economics one for free so 4~6
900~1200 gpp.

I'm eating a bite but will think about it this evening.

If...
Lib>Medicine
44k beakers -> 36,700b base

With consecutive GAs, Oxford empire growth, Rep, Mercantilism, GM trade missions, bulbs ... I expect 1,000 beakers per turn average should be possible and so around 40 turns is reasonable.

Lib>Democracy
46.8k beakers -> 39,000b base

Using the same premise as above, maybe a few extra turns... say 42 turns.

~~~

What we need: assuming we can maintain gpt expenses at around -250/turn, then we need around 10,000 gold total, or an extra 7,400.

2 trade missions = 3,000+: need 4,400, we're really not so far anymore given city captures AND I am not even considering trades for Machinery/Engineering etc.

40 turns should be upper boundary given we can get some trades in... a great finish date would be ~T150 as I was saying earlier in the thread.

The good thing with Sushi as target Corporation is that we don't need to take as many cities so we're not limited by military conquest, only beakers.

~~~

Graph referred to by Doshin.

By the way, getting some map trades would be nice and also revealing the last few unknown tiles in the south for strategic placement of resources.

I wasn't too far off it seems. Of course adding in the hidden objective couldn't be factored but seeing as that may add ~8 turns based on soundjata's estimate, research will indeed be the limiting factor of the game. (maybe a bit more turns)

~~~

We'll need to test the gifting/razing very well, I think if we can gift some gpt to the AI they may accept more cities.

Originally Posted by kcd_swede paraphrased by kossin
The extra condition is that every city must have a franchise of your monopoly corp, unless it has the Corp HQ of a competing corporation.

This includes AI and barbarian cities

We'll need to fogbust (not spawnbust) the map carefully to avoid problems with the AI.

 

[Duckweed]

Made a test with SM as I thought it made the roads better. Maybe it's just a visual effect...

Assuming we want to give away 15-20 cities a few turns before the end. What would the process look like? Give all to the same AI? Share? I assume we'd have to be at peace for several turns for it to work. I am not sure how to test this...

3 AIs are available to gift, not a big problem, Nappy could accept cities like Yeha, Adulis and Mycenian before the DOW. Many cities can be gifted in the last couple of turns.

We'll need to test the gifting/razing very well, I think if we can gift some gpt to the AI they may accept more cities.

Time for to start the spreading plan, I'll take a break and

 

[Folket]

When I did the calculations I could spread SM to 32 cities in 8 turns. If the first city produces 3 executives and some produces 2. I think this could be done with some planing. We can spread it to 17 cities in 5 turns.

 

[Duckweed]

Some comments on city micro:

Muricia: Wealth, hire 3 merchants
Fish ships: Wealth, hire 1 merchant
Lalibela: resume Cui
Capital: Cui
Barcelona: Settler

Send 1 worker 1E of Santiago and 1 worker 1E of Cordoba to road the tile 2E of Mainz next turn so that Alex's stack can fight with Nappy sooner.

 

[kossin]

Yup, spreading can follow this like Folket said.

T0 - 1 city (1 exec)
T1 - 2 cities (2 exec)
T2 - 4 cities (4 exec)
T3 - 8 cities (5 exec)

Conditions:
.HQ city has 20+ pop (or 19/18 and can grow once/twice) or a ton of production and forests
.Each city is within 5 tiles of each other.
.City #2 has 15+pop (or 14 and can grow once) or a ton of production and forests
.Subsequent cities are 10+pop or a ton of production and forests
.Enough gold to pay for expansion

There are already some issues that can be seen such as
.our core cities (far East) being a bit far away
.some Sushi cities will be far from the cities we keep

 

[kossin]

I've begun looking at what the AI finances should look like to accept more cities.

It looks complicated at first glance but the rule seems tied to their gpt. So if we can maintain a large gold surplus, we can virtually gift almost all of our cities to one AI on the last turn, DoW and raze all of them. I'll try to get an idea of the numbers required later.

 

[Doshin]

A few micro observations:

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1NW of Gazianstep should receive a road in the near future:

Spoiler :

This is a lower priority than moving Alex's stack to fight Nappy sooner.

Constantinople is working the wrong Village. If we stay in Caste, the Specialists need to change too:

Spoiler :

The tile 1E of Aachen should receive most Cuirassiers. They will then move 1NW, 1S. Two Workers can road the Forest tile, for any leftover units:

Spoiler :

Edit:

Send the troops around Augsburg and Nuremberg to 2W of Augsburg so that they can attack both cities. Of course mainly for the Prague, they can still provide some help to clean Aachen if battles do not go well in that direction. Raze Prague.

We could move the Shock Cuirassier (1W of Augsberg) 2W, to destroy a Catapult before it enters Aachen.

Cuirassier 36 should move west through Alex's territory towards Prague:

Spoiler :

If this area does not have roads, it is better to know this now.

Mycenian:

Spoiler :

The western Worker should move 2N, Cottage for 1-3 turns, and cancel.

The two eastern Workers will chop 60H into a Courthouse, leading to 22H +8HPT + 90H = 120/120H.

One of the eastern Workers then needs to chop the last remaining Forest in Thessalonica.

The other eastern Worker should chop the last Forest in Mycenian into a Cuirassier. It should then move west, finish the Cottage, and at size 4 we can whip this city.

 

[Doshin]

Here was a rough, worst case test against 6 LK with a 25% fortification bonus each. I say worst case, because HC only has 4 LKs + 1LB + 1 Sword in the real game (probably 1 more LK on T144), and not all of these have the +25% stationary bonus.

The test:

Spoiler :

12 healthy Combat II Cuirassiers, and 2 Flanking II HArchers:

Wins (3/10):

Spoiler :

Losses (7/10):

Spoiler :

The current stack in our game, with the Super Medic Cuirassier, takes us to 13 healthy Cuirassiers (1 @ 11.8/12), 1 hurt, and 2 HArchers:

Spoiler :

What we have should be enough, but you may choose to supplement the stack with 2-3 injured Cuirassiers for mopping up. It will depend on what you want to allocate for Prague. I think we have enough in Aachen.

Especially because...

I should have done this on T143 :

Spoiler :

We should Pillage HC's Iron. 2 fewer LKs for us to face.

 

[kossin]

Please... no more cottages.