SGOTM 19 - The Shawshank Redemption

[ZPV]

@Dhoom: I see no value in trying for the AP or keeping any more cities except temporarily for movement. It will take longer to spread to all of Alex and Asoka's cities and prise Alex's coal from him than to run over Alex with 1-movers.

@WT:
I'll firm it up this evening, but at the moment I'm estimating the war will take until about t162. We might be able to shave a turn by getting the last city with fastmovers, but I don't think t159 will be achievable.

 

[ZPV]

Does anyone know the endgame sequence for Conquest? I thought it was "Capture the last enemy city, and the movie plays immediately."

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Well, how hard is it to fit Aachen into the Executive plan? +2 Happiness in all Cities on the same continent (aka all of our Cities) when we've been Drafting, Whipping, and incurring War Weariness could turn out to be extremely beneficial.

For example, it could be worth +1 Draft (-3 Happiness and -1 population point... 2 angry faces... offset by 2 Happiness).


You have to end the turn in order to win Conquest. I just finished confirming as much.

 

[WastinTime]

Makes sense to temporarily keep Aachen for +2 happy. But we will gift/raze it, so there's no sense talking about Aachen and the executive plan in the same sentence.

 

[Mitchum]

You just did.

 

[ZPV]

War plans:

a) Spain:
We'll send everything except the kitchen sink from Madrid to Barcelona, with the intention of razing it at the earliest opportunity.
I'll manufacture opportunities at Valencia and Murcia on the same timescale.
Then, the remaining medieval units will regroup before going after Salamanca. These can also be relied on to capture Mainz, I think.
We'll have to gift Cordoba away, and raze it, before tipping over Salamanca.
I don't think we have time to extort MilTrad from Kublai, even though it would be cool. I'll set it as our research, however, in case we have a bunch of free beakers from AlumCo.

Holy Roman Empire:
We'll march right up to Aachen. Since he vacated it with half his stack, I don't see capturing it with Rifles being a problem.
Fine, we can play with Aachen for a little bit. But we can't keep him, okay?
Then the fastmovers will move straight to Florence. The rest will go to a combination of Nuremburg and Prague, before taking advantage of the unowned tiles to hit Kufah.

I don't have a plan yet for Augsburg and Ulm, but they are uncultured and close to our cities.

Alex:
We need to mass a stack of ~15+ rifles and put it on convenient defensive terrain, so that we can resist his stack. I'll send a unit immediately to follow it so we know where it is.
The plan is to DoW on t151 or 152, once our Florence settler is clear of his land.
We'll then take 2-3 turns (at some point during the process) to sap him of his units, before taking expedited paths through his land.
One to the south, building a road south from Bursa to Basra+Damascus, meant for slowmovers.
The other will crunch through Baghdad and Medina the slow way, and then the fastmovers, and any stragglers from the north will rush up to Mecca.

Where will the units come from:
I will take no prisoners with drafting. Edirne and Istanbul will probably end up size 1 with 81 between them.
They'll both whip something if they're going to starve
A few rifles will return from Spain.
Drafts:
t147
Addis, Gaul, Ankara
t148
Edirne, Istanbul, Ankara
t149
Edirne, Istanbul, ???
t150
Edirne, Konya, ???
We have 5 rifles already walking.
If we have extra gold, we'll upgrade maces so they turn into city killers to keep the endgame rush going.

FYI, I made an irreversible move by mistake (a rifle destroyed a maceman), although it's one I'd have made anyway, so I've uploaded a new paused save.

 

[WastinTime]

Sounds like a good plan. It'd b nice to slowly start executing once you get enough approval. I approve.

 

[Mitchum]

War plan looks good.

What is the plan with civics changes?

I thought WT made some moves (like netting the whale) as well...

 

[Dhoomstriker]

I agree that I'd rather see us play a couple of turns at a time and pause for feedback than to rush it all at once.

Do note that you might only get 2 to 3 additional Drafts out a City that is already extremely unhappy (Istanbul and Edirne, I'm looking at you) and then the rest of the population points will starve.


Let's see a clear plan for Civics + Religion in terms of what we'll pick and on what turn.


I'd be extremely hesitant to spend Gold on upgrades or rush-built units. If anything, I'd suggest spending it on the Commerce Slider in the short term to fascilliate (if possible) an extra Draft or two from a couple of Cities. Even that idea scares me a bit, as I think that our game has a very serious chance of failing due to a loss of Gold.

Nothing else can really break us... sure, we might lose a couple of turns off of the Executive plan if we forget a step or off of the war plans if we get some bad luck, but that'll just be a couple of turns. If we run out of Gold, though, we'll be absolutely sunk. I'd be highly in favour of only spending Gold on our Executive plan and nothing else.

We have to consider these factors:
- 250 Gold spent per turn where we need to spread 5 Executives
- Rush-built units will cost some of our Gold
- Our Golden Age is about to end
- City Capture Gold can help us, but it is a limited and unpredictable Resource
- We don't have Economics or the Corporate HQ to offset the cost of Corps
- A rough average of -10 GPT per City with our Corporation in it, per turn
- As soon as we connect-up additional Coal Resources, our economy is going to break
- Very likely more things that I didn't think of over the course of a couple of minutes


As goofy as it may sound, if we switch into a Civic like Paganism and have Christianity as our State Religion, we can earn 4 GPT from a whipped Christian Temple if we keep Aachen (2 Gold and 2 Hammers going into Wealth). The whipping operation is Happiness-neutral (although it probably provides positive happiness since the loss of population points can remove other sources of Unhappiness, such as War Weariness).

 

[WastinTime]

War plan looks good.

What is the plan with civics changes?

I thought WT made some moves (like netting the whale) as well...

yea, I hope ZPV got the latest after that.

 

[Mitchum]

If not, we'll have to pm AlanH.

What exactly did you do that was irreversible other than the whale nets?

Edit: did you reload?

 

[LowtherCastle]

Plan looks fine to me. Hope we've got a spawnbusting plan too.

 

[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)

the report has most of it.
I think I moved some fort workers too.

If ZPV didn't get the latest, it'd be way easier for him to redo the one accidental move he made

 

[ZPV]

yea, I hope ZPV got the latest after that.

Yeah, I did it with your netted save, fortunately.

 

[ZPV]

Plan looks fine to me. Hope we've got a spawnbusting plan too.

I'm looking at it. I'll post some more detail before I play, but I'm well aware of the need to fogbust.
The focus will be the SE first (from Asoka eastwards), then the rest of the south.
We have units up by the north of Spain which can handle the area until cheaper fogbusters arrive.
I don't care if a barb city spawns somewhere we have roads (like south of former Ottoman lands), except on the last couple of turns, so they get less priority.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

EDIT: OOPS! Chrisitian Temples don't work with the AP.
So... Taoist Temples for up to 6 GPT with Taoism as our State Religion or up to 4 GPT without Taoism as our State Religion, since there aren't many Cities with Taoism in them
Christian Temples as our State Religion for up to 4 GPT with Christianity as our State Religion

I'd probably say Christianity as our State Religion under Paganism and then we can whip both types of Temples for 4 GPT each:
2 HPT from the AP for Taoist Temples / 2 GPT from The Spiral Minaret from Christian Temple + 1 HPT and 1 GPT from a Priest, since we will have 2 Specialist slots.

It's only technically +3 GPT for the second Temple in a City that already has a Forge, but the cost of Temples is also cheaper in a City with a Forge.

Spoiler :

I did some more thinking in terms of Paganism + Christianity:
We would actually get 6 GPT from a Christian Temple!

Considering that we'll have population points to burn (probably unhappy from Drafting, War Weariness, etc) who will be angry citizens, otherwise doing nothing, that's a pretty good return... 6 GPT and +1 Happiness in exchange for a few lost Unhappiness.

Specifically, when you have a few sources of Unhappiness, whipping away 2 population points could easily give you 4 Happiness back. You'd take another -1 for whipping but it would be countered by the +1 from the Christian Temple.

Specifically:
2 GPT from The Spiral Minaret
2 HPT from The Apostolic Palace
1 GPT + 1 HPT by hiring a Priest Specialist in place of a Citizen Specialist

That's +6 GPT, which is what our empire needs a lot of.


Free Religion gives us Happiness everywhere (the extra boost to Flasks is pointless without Representation and while at a 0% Science Rate), but Christianity also gives us +1 Happiness in Christian Cities.


A Christian Temple in Free Religion would give us 4 HPT (we'd still get the AP Hammers but not The Spiral Minaret's Gold, while also still being able to hire a Priest Specialist).


So, either way, a Christian Temple is a great item to whip, as we'll have free Specialists becoming Citizen Specialists everywhere as soon as we slip out of Caste System, thanks to the Statue of Liberty, and depending upon our Civic choice, that'll be worth 4 to 6 GPT.

That amount of Gold may not seem like a lot, but if we get to a point where we're at -200 GPT, we may need to reduce that amount sufficiently such that that amount, added to City capture Gold, can allow us to spread, say, 2 or 3 more Executives on that turn, followed by losing units due to Striking on the following turn.

 

[LowtherCastle]

We need to be careful putting city culture into cities we plan to raze.

 

[Mitchum]

We need to be careful putting city culture into cities we plan to raze.

Right. As we've already discussed, we plan to keep the original AI alive so that his "massive" culture dwarfs our own making it no issue. That's what we're doing with KK, right? Keep - whip - starve to 1 pop - gift - raze. Doing this also keeps the number of tiles owned higher to minimize barb city sprawl.

 

[Mitchum]

@ ZPV What is your schedule/plan for playing? 2-3 turns in the next several hours?

 

[WastinTime]

We are staying in FreeReligion, correct? for the extra happy?