[BTS] SGOTM 24 Unusual Suspects

nocho · Mar 28, 2017

Plan

Cities:
Cahokia: WE, WE (whip), market; try hiring scientists when prudent
PovP: barracks (whip after 1 turn), HAs
Mound: (fire scientists) WE, WE (whip), market
Fishy: Sword (whip after 1t), HA (finished with overflow), market
Stoned: Sword, sword
EyeLand: Market (whip at a convenient moment), Library
PhantLand: Worker (whip now), Market
PorkChop: WE (whip in some turns), LH
Clish: LH, Library (or Market?)
Chaco: (rename WorkerGraveyard), Granary, switch to worker at 4 and whip asap.

Army:
current
2 WE
4 DS
2 Spear
7 Cat

after
7 WE
4 DS
2 Spear
3 Sword
7 Cat
2 HAs

25 units, should be enough to start operations, I presume. Galleys reach tile 3N of Persepolis on T6 (if now is T0), so DoW would be on T7. Sure we'll be teleported 1N and not 2E of Ergili (=2NW of Tarsus)?!

Workers:
Worker 2 cut jungle, start on dye when calendar is in.
Worker 3&4 road to east.
New worker 5 at Phant will cut some jungles, workshop when MC is in.
New worker 6 at WorkerGraveyard will help with dye plantation and get city up & running.

Tech:
Compass, Calendar, Metal Casting, Aesth, bulb Machinery. Obviously subject to trading opportunities. Current Great Scientist on hold for bulb.

Trade:
Poly to Stalin for 70g
Maths to Bismarck for PH+Mono
Fish to Bismarck for Sheep
Look out for any new trades. No meditation!

EP:
Not much use keeping it on Darius anymore, so I'd put it on Stalin until we see his power, then Bismarck.

Would propose to play a first half-set with the 6/7 turns until just before DoW and pause, then a second part with some action :ar15:

say at least until capturing Persepolis.

Ronnie1 · Mar 28, 2017

Green!

ChrisShaffer · Mar 28, 2017

Green

kcd_swede · Mar 28, 2017

Green

neilmeister · Mar 28, 2017

Green from me. There is a formula for where units will be teleported, it will be in that sgotm kcd made where you had to teleport to get over a mountain range. It has a bias for moving closer to your own boundaries, but if that distance must be less than 2 times the distance to another available tile.

I will try look it up

edit: I was almost right

The formula is 2*teleport distance + distance to our nearest city (nearest from the destination tile).
1N is 9 tiles from Stoned, the tile 2NW of tarsus is 5 tiles (diagonals count as 1.5)

So, teleporting:
1N = 2*1 + 9 = 11
2NW of tarsus= 2*5.5 + 5 = 16

Therefore we will definitely teleport 1N. The further you are from one of our cities, then the more distance teleported is the bigger factor.

nocho · Mar 29, 2017

Thanks for diigging that up, neil! Very useful. With all the greens, I'll play later this morning.

nocho · Mar 29, 2017

All pretty much according to plan, but there are some (minor) issues. I guess we should just march ahead with our war plan, but as you can see Darius' border popped and now we'll be teleported 2 north instead of 1. That means we'll offload next to Persepolis a turn later so we'll be bombarding later as well. Galleys should be pretty save though, Darius only has the 2 lousy cities on the northern shore from which it would take ages to make boats (or anything else for that matter).

In any case, worse is that Darius has feudalism. In Persepolis there are no longbows (in the pic you see what he has in Persepolis), but I wandered off with a Dog and in southern Ectabana there was 1.

Spoiler :

Sooo, shall we just declare anyway? The longer we wait, the more difficult it'll get. Do we raze Ergili and Tarsus? In the former there's one spear, so I'd move in with 2 swords and keep a HA within range just in case. In Tarsus there's a spear and an axe but a variety of units will move in there, so of course easy prey.

In other news, Bismarck is located beyond Russia. Hopefully from here we meet more AIs.

Spoiler :

We may want to take the following trade. We don't really need monarchy, but we might want to have Bismarck connect his incense for us to get in trade to alleviate our happy issues.

Spoiler :

Save is uploaded and paused. Apart from the workers, all units are unmoved.

Spoiler :

nocho · Mar 29, 2017

A plan, moving forward.

Move WE6 past Ergili and declare on Darius.
Sword 1&4 to move SW of Ergili.
HA1 stays put for possible clean up work to do at Ergili.
9 unit stack (4 Cat, 2 WE, 2 Sword, Spear) 2E1N from Stoned to move 1E, SW of Tarsus.
HA2 joins those units.
Teleported Dog joins those units.
WE3&7 to move east where stack was.
Galleys after teleport to move 2S (where they currently are) and unload T+1 on pigs, start bombarding.

T+1, raze Ergili and Tarsus. Probably use 1 cat on Tarsus to soften up spear+axe and possibly immortals from Persepolis.

Direct units towards Persepolis as first main obective. I think Pasargadae should go next.

Finish roading towards east. The tile Tarsus occupies isn't covered by Persepolis' culture, so a useful tile to road as well to finish our W-E connection. Beware of immortals coming out of the fog to harrass our workers so protect at all times (with trailing elephants).

Tech: aesthetics (should be doable in 2 turns with some raze cash), bulb machinery, start optics (rather than bulbing optics with next GS, I assume we want to save it for astro just to be able to get more beakers out of it).

Make the mentioned trade Monarchy+5 for Calendar with Bismarck.

Builds:
Forges! I think basically all cities that currently have markets selected should go forges first. A forge gives 1 happy instead of 2 from the market, but is cheaper to build and especially makes subsequent whips better (37.5 hammers instead of 30) apart from giving some more hammers (and the option of hiring an engineer of course). So all cities go forge, except EyeLand to finish its library first (just 1 turn), Stoned to continue WE or maybe whip an extra catapult at size 4, and except WorkerGraveyard which will continue granary-library. At convenient moments those forges will be whipped and where applicable the markets will continue.

ChrisShaffer · Mar 29, 2017

Yes, go forward with the war. We are committed, do it now before he builds more longbows. I'd take that trade with Bismarck too. Plan looks good, green.

Ronnie1 · Mar 29, 2017

As Chris said, we are committed! Green!

Deckhand · Mar 29, 2017

Green

My experience is that every archer will be a longbow by the time you reach it.

kcd_swede · Mar 29, 2017

Green... the LB annoyamce will not get better with time. Also, the geography mandates that Darius dies first and fast.

nocho · Mar 29, 2017

2 greens, eager to kick some b*tt, not much time the coming days to play and 2 more greens now I report back. I played on a bit.

And in general good tidings I bring, to you and your kin.

Ergili got auto-razed, Tarsus was hand-razed as it was just too awful. But it must have grown at some point and have given workboats for Darius' northern sea food, that we'll eagerly exploit.

The war brought us these two nice cities this far.

Spoiler :

And this is what the field now looks like. With the demise of Darius we just got enough EP threshold for city view on his other cities.

So we now know for instance Ecbatana is only defended by 1 single longbow. Maybe we can send some units from Persepolis after they are healed. All in all we did quite well with the war on the unit front. Unfortunately we did lose 5 of our 7 cats, but I can't recall having lost a single kill-unit. We also just got a great general.

Spoiler :

We *could* take peace. This is what Darius will offer right now. Of course we don't want meditation just yet, but CoL would be pretty nice to get.

Spoiler :

In other news, we met this guy and made a trade which bumped him to pleased.

Spoiler :

Note we're an inch away from circumnavigation! :goodjob:

Spoiler :

And we got the other GS. I tentatively hired an engineer in PovP to see when we could get a next great person. The settler hired is just an idea, we could use it for Long Island. The whale starts to look tempting now that we're close to optics and are building markets.

Note Bismarck got Music. Also note Darius is researching Civil Service, maybe we can also extract that.

Spoiler :

Ronnie1 · Mar 29, 2017

Looks good nocho! :cool:

I think we definitely want to take Ecbatana asap. Darius is getting copper from Biz for furs, taking it will possibly negate that trade and take his only other metal source.

I can't remember being this deep into a game where none of my cities had a religion. :think:

Love that the exploring WB is still running free!

Not sure about peace for tech at this point. The spices at Susa help us for sure in the short run. It would be great to get Ecba + Susa + the one in the middle and then peace.

Starting to wonder if we are Stalin's intended target also. Seems he could/would have DoW'ed Darius by now given that he is so much stronger.

kcd_swede · Mar 29, 2017

We need to watch ut for Darius capitularing (vassaling) to an opponent, If we see he is ready to cap, we need to peace deal him for tech and whatever we can get. Come back later to finish off. Generally, I wouldn't think about peace deal until he is to one city, but with Feud on the table, we need to check every turn, now that his capitol is toast. Get the circumnav bonus, please. Music gone seems very early, so I do not think this is a cakewalk until I see all that we are up against. Very nice playing.. cats are meant to sacrific. Just make more. GG should become medic, if you are wondering. Chariot, if we have one.

:goodjob:

neilmeister · Mar 29, 2017

Looks great! Cats are there to die...thats why we built lots.

I am still worried about Stalin, so i feel we should take the south coast city then take the peace deal. We have almost run out of Cats and i would like to keep our decent units alive in case of Stalin attacking.

Peace soon also gives us 2 chances to extract techs, once we have built up a few more cats.

Love the timing of our wb discovering new ai with Astro not too far away

Edit: "clish is size 10"....maybe it should be whipping wonders

nocho · Mar 30, 2017

For now I don't think Darius can vassal to anyone, the master should have feudalism (otherwise there should be a capitulation-option right now for us, even if redded out, which is absent) and of the known AIs only Darius himself has it. Stalin doesn't even have monarchy yet, so that's still way off.

Having said that, I also think that for now I'd maybe grab Ecbatana and call it a day for now. We'll need new cats (or trebs maybe if we go engineering after astro?) and they may take a while to get to the front. Getting CoL out of Darius would be nice already and as mentioned gives the option of a double tech extraction. I also agree that we might want to keep a buffer against a potential Stalin DoW.

Some notes, I queued forges in Persepolis and Pasargadae, but I think we should go libraries first to get all those cottaged tiles within our borders asap and because it'll be good to get some culture running asap. In Stoned the mine got sabbotaged so it should be mined again. Silly Darius spending EP on that giving us visibility. I think in Cahokia I accidentally deselected one of the furs on the last turn, I'd take it for the forest.

Note we can only run 20% science at break even. Once we have those markets maybe we should run some merchants. It's also why I'd like to get CoL.

Neil, what kind of wonders would you build in Clish? Only MoM and Parthenon are available really, but without marble will be a major pain to build... Colossus would've been an option, but as we go astronomy not much sense to build it. We do have to discuss if and where to build the National Epic and Heroic Epic.

neilmeister · Mar 30, 2017

I was just kidding about wonders.... I haven't opened the save I just saw that line I quoted in the log.
But... I doubt it has that many decent tiles to work..... so maybe it should be being whipped?

edit: but seriously, it was a flippant remark of mine, you played a great set and I am a little shocked just how few units you lost.

nocho · Mar 30, 2017

neilmeister said:
I was just kidding about wonders.... I haven't opened the save I just saw that line I quoted in the log.
But... I doubt it has that many decent tiles to work..... so maybe it should be being whipped?

edit: but seriously, it was a flippant remark of mine, you played a great set and I am a little shocked just how few units you lost.

Haha, don't worry, I certainly diidn't even consider it might be criticism (maybe I should have :mischief:

), you just got me slightly puzzled.

Case in point, yeah, there's certainly whip potential. And possibly it's good to keep (or have kept) it as potential. Whipping forges and markets certainly has its uses, but it also doesn't give that much immediate benefit in many cases. You get extra happy for pop you just whipped away so it might even defeat its direct purpose. Also, the thing with representation and the top 5 cities having +3 happy can be confusing at times, I think it was MC which I like 3-pop whipped for a forge as it had an unhappy face, only to have it get 2 unhappy faces after the whip.... O darn, not a top-5 city anymore.

So then I didn't whip as much if there wasn't unhappiness and just let it grow. Clish ain't unhappy just yet... And about the potential, I'm now thinking it might be a good place to whip new cats from, overflowing in forge and then market. It now has grown big and doesn't have the rather large accumulated whip anger places like Fishy have.

In general our cities (at least those that have granary and 2 food resources, so basically nearly all

) tend to regrow faster than whip anger fades, at least with 2-pop whips. So that's also a reason to grow bigger and then contemplate higher-pop whips so as not to incur in too much accumulated whip anger.

Well, all this rambling is just to point out that our whipping business is a delicate issue for which I'm not quite sure what's the optimal approach.

ChrisShaffer · Mar 30, 2017

No need to worry about Darius capitulating to someone else.

AlanH said:
Options: No vassal state, no goody huts, no random events

In other news, I will have my laptop back next week. Some good samaritan turned it in to the lost and found and it's being shipped to me. I'll be able to run Civ4 again!

[BTS] SGOTM 24 Unusual Suspects

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Procrastination at its finest

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Lentils have feelings too

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