SGOTM 19 - The Shawshank Redemption

[Mitchum]

Got it.
I'll just do some reversible MM stuff and extremely obvious things like netting whales.

Great. So I assume we'll use this to estimate what our economy will look like from now until the end of the game, right? Try it running merchants vs. running no merchants (i.e. mostly citizens with engineers, spies, scientists where possible) so we can see the affect of Caste System vs. Slavery.

As of right now, we have one coal resource which is perfect.

As we guessed, there is coal way up in the NW and then on one island in the Central Sea.

Madrid has to pop its borders twice (i.e. 100) to capture the coal on the island. It will be in revolt for 7 more turns. Without artists and simply building culture, it will take ~5 turns if we build a PH mine and/or a workshop or two. Is that cutting it close?

We can expand the borders of Goto Jail on the final turn of the game to capture the coal up there so there is no need to pillage and then re-build the mine. We should probably more all units (2 workers + rifle) out of the area for other duties.

Fort #8 needs to be completed/roaded.

Should we put our EPs on someone other than KK now? Supporting a city revolt in Aachen will take almost all of our existing EPs on HC. Should we put more on him or divert them to Alex now?

Conquest is almost definitely our critical path right now, so I see no need to rush buy executives with 0H in them, right? Or do we have sooooo much gold that it won't matter? Or, if we do have soooo much gold, should we rush buy units on the front line instead? For example, Yeha could rush buy knights. Or we could spend some gold to upgrade some units. In other words, if speading ALU isn't our critical path anymore, let's expend some of our short-term resources (i.e gold, hammers, civics, etc.) toward Conquest instead at the expense of spreading ALU.

 

[WastinTime]

Turn Report T147.0 - 147.1

Whales online.
Captured Zaragosa (only 1 horse archer left)
I killed KK's scout, finished the fort and moved our boat into position.

I MM'd for engineers/priests/citizens showing what it would be like in usuff/slavery (but did not switch of course)
We have enough gold already for the 450 exec purchase.
238 in the bank, +233 gpt
(but Mitchum brings up a good point if exec spread is not critical. Do we wait a turn to save on this buy?)

We should get gold from Valencia yet too.

Madrid can buy a theater if needed. We'll be fine with 2 border pops.

I was wondering, along with Mitchum, why we have rifle+workers at HQ. Coal can't pop on a fur tile. Maybe the Rifle is there in case a barb city spawns at HQ-3W ...is that even possible? No, it is a visible tile.

Uploaded. (i forgot to pause again. I always do that).
I didn't check how much we could get if we did 1 more turn of Merchants. I'll leave that for someone else (edit: I count 42 citizens ~= 84 gold)
Remember, since beakers are worth nothing, you'd be better off working an unimproved rvierPlains than a merchant.
I'd bet thatCaste would not make even 100 gold. A merchant is only 2 gold more than a citizen.

Don't forget, we get 2 hammers! for our hundreds of, well, dozens of towns in USuff.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Is there going to be anywhere for a Barb City to spawn near Goto Jail if we abandon the area of units?
EDIT: If yes, we should visibility-bust the areas that are 2 squares away from Goto Jail.


RE: EPs & Religious Civic
Do we have enough to support a City Revolt in Barcelona? If not, are we anywhere close to the amount that we'd need? Note that it could become temporarily cheaper on the turn that we switch out of Free Religion into Paganism but before we switch from Christianity to Islam... or... have we given up on that approach (so that we can keep the Free Religion Happiness) since we have Stonehenge and thus will put Culture into any City of ours that we own?


I think it's still worth it to be reasonably aggressive with our Executive-spreading plan, since we seem to be keeping more Cities than expected. So, maybe don't rush-buy the Executive on Turn 0, but otherwise stick to the Executive plan by starting with with rush-buying on Turn 1.

I think that we have a bit of conflict of interests brewing... are we keeping some of Kublai's Cities for gifting and re-razing or are we keeping them for Drafting? Both goals could be accomlished, but the timing will be important and the timing of these goals will compete with each other... i.e. we must raze any of Kublai's Cities, either by initially razing them or gifting and razing them, prior to eliminating Kublai, for any Cities of Kublai's that we will want to raze.

Sure, there's Drafting, but will a City like Zaragoza come out of City Revolt in time or are we just going to have to gift and raze the City anyway?


I don't feel comfortable spending Gold on Military Units. Corporation costs are going to get quite high. I do not think that we should spend any Gold on Military Units. This point gets even stronger for every AI City that we keep... and don't forget that we'll need far-off Cities that don't have Courthouses which will need an Executive spread into them. I have a feeling that we'll find ourselves in a deficit position even when building Wealth nearly everywhere at a 100% Gold Commerce Slider rate, so we should conserve as much Gold as possible.

50 Gold per Executive spread adds up quickly, especially when we lose GPT with every new Executive being spread and with every Coal Resource being connected.

Running out of Gold to support our empire may end up becoming our critical path. I'm definitely concerned with any plan that keeps additional Cities that are not needed for Coal. Razing Barb Cities can become a trivial task compared to paying an average of about 10 GPT per City for having 1 Coal Resource online.

 

[Mitchum]

Before we do anything, I think we need to lay out two things:

1. ALU spread plan ASAFP. ZPV has already done this.

2. Conquest ASAFP. ZPV had done this a while back but it probably needs to be updated, right?

From there, we can see which one is our critical path and we can expend more resources on that one until the two paths line up. It seems obvious that Conquest is the current critical path by looking at the save but I can't tell if it's 2 to 3 turns longer or 10 turns longer...

We also need a clear idea of which cities we raze, which ones we keep/abuse/gift/raze and which ones we simply plan to keep.

I wouldn't build a theater in Madrid just for +3/turn when we can build ~20/turn with another mine/workshop there.... unless we have gold coming out of our ears but I thing we can find other uses for that gold such as rush buying units.

@ WT When you were getting +233 gpt, were you building any units or Wealth everywhere? Also, about how much would this drop post GA? Down to +100 gpt? If we changed a few Wealth builds to units, what would it look like?

My feeling is that if our economy is doing this well (I thought it would be negative), we should be fine at ~0 gpt and letting city capture gold keep us going. We still have a LOT of cities to capture.

 

[Mitchum]

@ Dhoom

Keeping with our original executive spreading plan does two things:

1. It accelerates the negative impacts of ALU on our economy. The sooner we spread, the sooner we start paying corporate maintenance.

2. It takes resources away from Conquest which is our critical path at the moment as far as I can tell.

So keeping with our aggressive ALU spread plan actually puts more pressure, not less, on our Conquest victory.

IF our war effort won't be hugely affected by staying out of US and/or Slavery for a turn or two and IF we feel like we really need more gold, we could stay in Caste System for another turn or two and run merchants everywhere to stock pile a load of gold.

However, with a decent economy at the moment and piles of city capture gold coming our way, I think we'll be fine with gold even when our economy turns negative. We have to be sure that we always have enough gold to spread 5 executives/turn though.

 

[WastinTime]

I hadn't even gotten around to looking at the coal!

Toledo is now a keeper and will need to pop borders twice. Yeha now makes 2 execs if it wasn't already before.

Murcia and Santiago are razes.

Alexcoals will require 2 settlers. We need to raze all his cities.
Bursa(2turns) and Samsun(2 turns) could provide the execs for these. But Seville could also take over Samsun's if we want.

That's it! I'm glad to see not much coal in the ice.

 

[WastinTime]

I wouldn't build a theater in Madrid just for +3/turn when we can build ~20/turn with another mine/workshop there.... unless we have gold coming out of our ears but I thing we can find other uses for that gold such as rush buying units.

@ WT When you were getting +233 gpt, were you building any units or Wealth everywhere? Also, about how much would this drop post GA? Down to +100 gpt? If we changed a few Wealth builds to units, what would it look like?

My feeling is that if our economy is doing this well (I thought it would be negative), we should be fine at ~0 gpt and letting city capture gold keep us going. We still have a LOT of cities to capture.

The theater also lets us run 2 artists, but I don't see a need for this. Madrid will be just fine.

I didn't change much of what ZPV had in the build queues. I think I put wealth in Sheep2N in front of the explorer, since this city doesn't need any execs built, but if we want to fogbust, go ahead and take wealth out. I even put culture in N.W. to keep the cows (41% barb) just to remember it. We should probably just do wealth now during this more critical wealth period.

Capture gold:
Yes, we have to capture just over 20 cities in ~13-14 turns, but a lot of those will go down on the final turn or close to it. Seems like we can count on 2000-2500 useful, early-ish, capture gold

 

[WastinTime]

Barcelona has a caravel

Good news: if we (edit: board 2 1 worker!) move 2N this turn and 2N next turn, it can't reach us.
Note: we must move 4N to that tile so we have 2 ways to reach the island and don't get blocked. Remember, we can't use that ocean tile. Unload on T149. Boat dies.

If there is a submarine, we can deal with that. Plenty of time, but let's take our shot at getting the drama over with.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Keeping with our original executive spreading plan does two things:

1. It accelerates the negative impacts of ALU on our economy. The sooner we spread, the sooner we start paying corporate maintenance.

2. It takes resources away from Conquest which is our critical path at the moment as far as I can tell.

So keeping with our aggressive ALU spread plan actually puts more pressure, not less, on our Conquest victory.

The trickiest part about our Executive plan is getting the first few Executives out to get the chain started.

So, let's say that we needed +10 turns for the Conquest.

Well, we could spend 1 turn at the start of the Executive-spreading plan by rush-buying the first Executive on T1.

We still want to get started on building Executives instead of waiting to start because it is the timing when we can produce close to 5 Executives per turn when the spreading really gets going.

So, getting Executives spread to the first few Cities can happen, then we can potentially have up to 5 Executives built which don't spread anywhere yet and could optionally even walk to the far-off Coal Resources, thereby "investing" any extra turns this way... by having several Executives exist but spreading to farther-away Cities.


In other words, we can build some flexibility into our Executive plan by still starting reasonably early.


EDIT: Similarly, we could spread to a City like Sheep2N using some of the extra turns, which allows us to more effectively use the Forests for Chops or the population for whipping in that City.


How many of the Cities that we will need to raze were settled within the last 50 turns and therefore won't give us the full amount of City Capture Gold?

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Just to be thorough, can someone confirm that when we open up the Goto Jail City screen that we see Coal as a Resource in said City? The last thing that we want to do is keep playing forward only to find out that Goto Jail cannot get access to Coal Resources (at least without some further trickery). The River should do it, but it's worth double-checking, right?

 

[Mitchum]

Just to be thorough, can someone confirm that when we open up the Goto Jail City screen that we see Coal as a Resource in said City? The last thing that we want to do is keep playing forward only to find out that Goto Jail cannot get access to Coal Resources (at least without some further trickery). The River should do it, but it's worth double-checking, right?

When I looked, an executive was a build option in the city screen. I wanted to verify that as well...

 

[ZPV]

Barcelona has a caravel

Good news: if we (edit: board 2 workers!) move 2N this turn and 2N next turn, it can't reach us.
Note: we must move 4N to that tile so we have 2 ways to reach the island and don't get blocked. Remember, we can't use that ocean tile. Unload on T149. Boat dies.

If there is a submarine, we can deal with that. Plenty of time, but let's take our shot at getting the drama over with.

I hear you re: the galley and caravel.

Why 2 workers? One will get the fort and road done in plenty of time, won't it?

 

[WastinTime]

I hear you re: the galley and caravel.

Why 2 workers? One will get the fort and road done in plenty of time, won't it?

hmmm... I was thinking it was an ice tile (12 turns). yea, I guess 1 worker does it. Even on ice it might have been ok

 

[Dhoomstriker]

A Coal on an island must be Forted, not Mined, in order to access it--just in case we were thinking of trying to save Worker turns.

Also, we'll want to remember not to actually finish connecting-up sources of Coal until the end of the game, so it is important to avoid completing the Fort until the end of the game.

Earlier testing showed that you need both a Road and a Fort on an island Resource, but completing them in any order would give you access to the Resource.

Spoiler Unrelated to our game :

It is only Trade Routes themselves, when they need to be set up via a Fort, where the order matters for Road or Fort first (I'm not sure which one should get built first, but that case won't apply to our game).

 

[ZPV]

I'm updating my exec spread plan on page 1.
The city sequence is there already. I'm working on the MM required to get the execs done.
I'll post a copy in a new post when it's done.

 

[ZPV]

Spoiler Turn by turn sequence :

t148
start Goto Jail

t149
rush @Goto Jail --> Gondar

t150
Goto Jail1 travels
start Goto Jail2

t151
rush @Goto Jail --> Hamster
Build Gondar1 --> Aksum

t152
Goto Jail2 travels
Build Gondar2 --> Yeha
Build Aksum --> Addis

t153
Build Hamster1 --> CNip
Build Yeha1 --> Madrid
Build Addis --> Gaul
Build Aksum2 --> Lalibela

t154
Build Hamster2 --> NW
Hamster1 travels
Yeha1 travels
Build Gaul --> Edirne
Build Yeha2 --> Toledo

t155
Build Hamster3 --> Trumpster
Build Madrid --> Seville
Build Edirne1 --> Istanbul
Build CNip1 --> PTIgloo
Hamster2 travels

t156
Build Istanbul1 --> Bursa
Build Edirne2 --> Konya
Build Lalibela --> Spicy Deer
Build Trumpster1 --> Sheep2N
Build NW --> Sarmatian

t157
Build Konya --> Samsun
Build Istanbul2 --> Ankara
Build Trumpster2 --> LM
Build Sarmatian --> Fool's Gold
Lalibela travels

t158
Build Fool's Gold --> Free Willy
Build Seville --> Florence
Build Bursa --> AlexCoal1
Build Samsun --> AlexCoal2
Build Spicy Deer --> Stone City

t159
Seville travels
Bursa travels
Samsun travels
Fool's Gold travels
Build CNip --> Adriana

t160
Hopefully we win.

Spoiler Individual city requirements :

Goto Jail: n/a
No MM necessary

Gondar: build execs t151, 152
Build knight 147-9, 2whip t150. 4 chops

Aksum: build execs t152, 153
We can raze Murcia so there are 2 chops.
147 knight 65+31/90
148 explorer 0+38/40
149 knight 48/90
150 explorer 80/40
151 2whip knight

Hamster: build execs t153, 154, 155
I'd need to spend at least 4 pop, probably 5, to set up whips for overflow. Might as well just 5pop two of them.
Build an explorer t147-8 for overflow.

Yeha: build execs t153, 154
147 put 7h in Explorer
148-50 put 14h/turn in Treb
151 2whip Explorer
152 2whip Treb

Addis: build exec t153
147-8 14h/turn mace
151 2whip explorer
152 2whip mace

Gaul: build exec t154
152 put some hammers into explorer
153 2whip
154 2 chops

Madrid: build exec t155
5whip

Edirne: build execs t155, 156
6 chops. We can save up the chops in wealth for a few turns.

CNip build execs t155, 159
153 put 19h in Rax(?)
154 2whip, work 21h
155 work 26h, plus one chop
156-7 put 49h in cat
158 1whip, work 21h
159 work 26h, plus one chop

Istanbul builds execs t156, 157
6 chops

Lalibela builds exec t156
t153 almost build a knight
t154 build an explorer
t155 finish the knight
1 chop t156

Trumpster builds execs t156, 157
Manipulate Theatre to get 30ish overflow during the golden age. Then 5whip, and run 27hpt

NW builds exec t156
154-5 generate overflow with Explorer
2 chops t156

Konya builds exec t157
3 chops
(If that's not possible, can switch to 2 chops + 1 whip overflow)

Sarmatian builds exec t157
4 chops, including the one in neutral territory.
No prebuild.

Fool's Gold builds exec t158
4 chops.
No prebuild.

Seville builds exec t158
Not sure yet.

Bursa builds exec t158
Prebuild Explorer to 39h
Prebuild Treb to 49h
Grow to size 5
2pop-1pop-1 chop + hammers.

Samsun builds exec t158
2 chops.
Need one whip overflow. Will decide closer to the time.

Spicy Deer builds exec t158
1 whip overflow needed; get it over with so we can hold chops in wealth.

Here's the updated exec spread plan.
War planning will have to happen tomorrow. It will consist of massing units to be able DoW Alex in about 4-5 turns (I wish) and repel his stack, and then ploughing through his land.
It'll also have a more detailed plan on how to clean up the leftovers of KK and HC.

 

[WastinTime]

I would like to dial back the whole plan 1 turn by purchasing the first exec.
How much gold are we talking about 150? I suppose if you are saying that there is absolutely no way to finish conquest by T158, (win T159) then we can leave it.

Seems like an excellent plan.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Does it possibly make sense to declare war on Alex prematurely so that we can fight his stacks in our lands?


As one possibility, if we gift border Cities to Asoka, even just temporarily, and Alex doesn't have Open Borders with Asoka, we can "funnel" Alex's troops to certain areas.

Even without doing so, we can start addressing Alex's stacks as they move deeper into our territory, possibly giving us siege advantage or at least selecting our battleground... attacking from a Roaded Hills square or a Roaded Forest square onto flatland, as one example.

We could potentially use siege initiative, if we have any Cats remaining.

We could at least heal more quickly in our own territory.


Since Alex (the last that I checked) had his hands full, he's already in Military-Unit-production mode, so it's not like we'd really ramp up his Military Unit production by declaring war on him.

 

[WastinTime]

Alex does have OB w/Asoka.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Our Scout is better off visibility-busting the bottom left corner. The last thing that we want is a Barb City spawning in the very corner of the map. Don't forget that Alex's Cultural Borders are doing visibility-busting for us right by where the Scout is currently standing.


I wonder... Conquest or AP Cheese? We should do some testing regarding the timing of capturing the AP from a non-AP-State-Religion-running AP Resident in terms of when we'd be able to call for a Religious Victory vote. At least figure out what our options are and then decide whether to keep or raze Aachen.

Aachen does have 2 Holy Shrines, but they won't contribute any Gold while the City is in resistance.

Aachen is the Holy Paradise... if we had a ton of Christian Buildings, they'd contribute Hammers, Flasks, and Gold. We'd also be able to hire Angkor-Wat-enhanced Priests, which act like Engineers that give you free Gold. We're not really going to see much benefit there.

However, we will benefit from +2 Happiness everywhere form Notre Dame. This Wonder is likely going to make it sufficiently worthwhile to keep the City, to help us in dealing with War Weariness against Alex.

Prague contains The Sistine Chapel... not good if we want to raze captured Cities, but we're soon going to be at a point where we won't have that option anyway... and we probably want more of a measure of control over when Cultural Borders in Cities like Goto Jail pop, so I'm totally in favour of razing Prague, but I think that keeping Aachen makes sense for its +2 Happiness everywhere.


It seems that we left the saved game in a state where we have a ton of Cities with Citizen Specialists being hired. We should remember to fix up our City micro if we're going to stay in Caste System.