[BTS] SGOTM 25 - Home Slices

August 2017:
I had been aware of EPs given to colonies, but here's the moment I got my first evil thoughts on the idea for EP replication:
It was all in the open forums. Discussed more than once. Not really a secret.

@Kaitzilla, remember you were there ? (from Aug 23rd 2017):
EP's and Wealth are given to new colonies?
Oh my!
Sounds like it is time for some testing.
 
August 2017:
I had been aware of EPs given to colonies, but here's the moment I got my first evil thoughts on the idea for EP replication:
It was all in the open forums. Discussed more than once. Not really a secret.

@Kaitzilla, remember you were there ? (from Aug 23rd 2017):

Ya, but I thought it would require a large 3 or 4 city island to do it.
That's not something every map has.

But it really only requires a 1 tile island :)
 
I didn't really do much of the early game (before T42), but you guys amazed me at how fast you were taking cities. Way faster than I imagined. It will be interesting to see the difference in the progression of cities (not population or score). The graph just shows score. I think you guys rocked the early game. :rockon:
Doesn't look so good early on:
Spoiler :

T29 - 900 BC - end of LC's turnset
Phoenix Rising: 9 cities (Tsingtao, Manchou, Mongolia, Hong Kong, Chongqing captured), 25 pop, 10 workers (3 built)
Home Slices: 6 cities (Mongolia, Hong Kong, Shaghai captured), 19 pop, 7 workers (4 built)

T43 - 550 BC - end of Kait's first turnset
Phoenix Rising: 12 cities (Tokyo, Shanghai captured - total 7 AI cities captured), 46 pop, 12 workers (3 built)
Home Slices: 11 cities (Tsingtao, Manchou, Chongqing captured - total 6 AI cities captured, New York also spawned), 37 pop, 14 workers (5 built)

T57 - 200 BC - start of our golden age
Phoenix Rising: 19 cities (Moscow, St Pete, Mumbai captured - total 10 AI cities captured), 74 pop, 18 workers (5 built)
Home Slices: 20 cities (Tokyo, Moscow, St Pete, Hamburg captured - total 10 AI cities captured), 77 pop, 20 workers (5 built)
 
And yes, use the GPro for the GAge and get the 2 artists+2 spies going earlier.
Don't forget that we would have 3 spies in this scenario, since we would not be burning one for the golden age. It would, however, have been difficult to generate the base :gp: too much earlier, and using the extra :espionage: would require an earlier army of spies and earlier Korea.

I was the main proponent of the shrine, thinking that the 4 points is too big to pass up. To be fair, we didn't know about the culture trick... In retrospect, I have no idea why we didn't just sit on the GPro for a while and decide on whether to golden age or shrine it later. The only reason I can think of is a brain fart.
 
Hiya,
yep it's true, i was bitter when we found out about those barb cities.
Did lots of micro for those win dates, first 100 or 125AD not sure which, then 200AD,
i was feeling bad about how much real life time i did put into a plan, that now actually worked against us as cities were abused too much with no way to bring that back.

My original "20 turns plan" started when Elite woke us up, saying we can win this much faster than we think.
That plan was for i think 100AD (would not have worked ofc).

If i know we aim for 200AD, or 225AD (aware of barb issue), my cities plan would have been much more "gentle".
We whipped very hard for especially Spies (for stationary) early, and also wonders.
And Great Peoples too, everything..we would not have needed Paci anymore 1t before golden age ends, and save so much gold ~~

They could have been much bigger, i dropped many food tiles for squeezing out EP and beakers.
Settlers could have been added, many possibilities to counter barbs imo.

So do i believe we would have won in 200AD if aware of barbs, and giving us those extra 4t, before abusing cities..
yep, 90%.

:banana: :goodjob: :thumbsup: on your great game,
special cheers for Kaitzilla, i have become a big fan of your posts.
 
So do i believe we would have won in 200AD if aware of barbs,
The best we could have done was 175 AD without going back to the beginning and doing it all over again. We woulda had to do the point squeeze like you guys did, but we weren't up for it. We were locked into a cycle that took X amount of time to generate culture. The decision on our end date had to be made early. Somewhere in the early 40's.
Like several people have said, and I often preach: Knowing your end turn is so important to making plans. If we had known the game could be won before T70, we would have changed a lot. Like Elite wrote in your thread, settling the GSpy wouldn't have been done if you knew T70 was the target.
 
Gspy would not have been settled, certainly agree.
Settled Prophet allowed us a quicker start, making coastal city more productive (faster worker, granary),
i think that one was okay. But always difficult calculating those snowball effects.
 
Shrine. My gut reaction is no. or even 'no way', but I suppose there may not be a better use for it. Other than golden age. Let me think out loud...

Trying to make it sound like a good idea....
If we average +5gpt over 100 turns, that's 500.
If religion auto spreads a few times, I suppose that has value.
wonder points

but build a Market? not likely.
Religion won't spread a lot if every city has religion, right?

looking back at the shrine decision. It was the wonder points that sold me. Otherwise, I was 'no way' on a shrine.
(Notice that I was using 100 turns as an estimate back on T0, but I was trying to make the shrine sound good.)
A mid-game golden age woulda been the right choice IMO.
 
looking back at the shrine decision. It was the wonder points that sold me. Otherwise, I was 'no way' on a shrine.
(Notice that I was using 100 turns as an estimate back on T0, but I was trying to make the shrine sound good.)
A mid-game golden age woulda been the right choice IMO.

50% of our final Great Person on Turn 65 was Great Prophet points.
Those points came entirely from our early shrine building up +1GPP each turn, and later running 3 Priests for 3 turns during Golden Age.
Great Scientists were a no-no.

I'd say that shrine got us 8 points, not 4 points. :yumyum:
Our last Great Person coming T70 from a different city might not have had any use at all.

Don't forget the 4:culture: per turn (doubled after 1000 years), the steady :gold: per turn all game, and the 2:hammers: in our bureau capital once AP got built.
Gold City should have gotten free Tao spread.

Still, the Great Prophet Golden Age would have meant 9000:espionage: instead of 6000:espionage: for our colonies. :hmm:
Doesn't help much on Colony 1 and 2, but it would help a great deal getting more points on Colonies 3,4,5, and 6.
Probably slightly stronger ya.
 
Hiya,
yep it's true, i was bitter when we found out about those barb cities.
Did lots of micro for those win dates, first 100 or 125AD not sure which, then 200AD,
i was feeling bad about how much real life time i did put into a plan, that now actually worked against us as cities were abused too much with no way to bring that back.

My original "20 turns plan" started when Elite woke us up, saying we can win this much faster than we think.
That plan was for i think 100AD (would not have worked ofc).

If i know we aim for 200AD, or 225AD (aware of barb issue), my cities plan would have been much more "gentle".
We whipped very hard for especially Spies (for stationary) early, and also wonders.
And Great Peoples too, everything..we would not have needed Paci anymore 1t before golden age ends, and save so much gold ~~

They could have been much bigger, i dropped many food tiles for squeezing out EP and beakers.
Settlers could have been added, many possibilities to counter barbs imo.

So do i believe we would have won in 200AD if aware of barbs, and giving us those extra 4t, before abusing cities..
yep, 90%.

:banana: :goodjob: :thumbsup: on your great game,
special cheers for Kaitzilla, i have become a big fan of your posts.
You folks played a great game as usual and I felt you were probably ahead of us throughout. And you were. You keep beating us in the opening. :mad: :goodjob:
 
looking back at the shrine decision. It was the wonder points that sold me. Otherwise, I was 'no way' on a shrine.
(Notice that I was using 100 turns as an estimate back on T0, but I was trying to make the shrine sound good.)
A mid-game golden age woulda been the right choice IMO.
I think it's a question of acceleration. The Shrine gave us back-end quality but little front-end acceleration. Considering we knew very early we were going to have a boatload of good cities, I think the optimal decision would have been a Golden Age as soon as those cities were fairly useful. What PR did was even more early acceleration, as shown by bbp's statistics. Wow! But I'm thinking we might have sped that up by beelining HBR. I think those were the two key factors we missed. Speaking in terms of redoing from the start, of course.

IN the real game, we played to our strategy very well, I think. We just waited too long to go from What optimization of ministries? to Optimizing ministries.
 
We pretty much caught up by T30. Couldn't the apparent lag be that we chose to go for HongKong (with galley) early?
Dunno. I'm too old to remember three months back... :old: I don't know when HAs would have been helpful but they're faster, excellent for whipping in this scenario. Just seem more powerful. And we knew that and had the cash to tech them while warring. We just didn't pull the trigger.

Some games I don't feel like we missed POWER MOVES, some games I think we did. Here I think we did and I need to know why I missed the obvious. I wanted to delay.
 
Congrats Slices on a magnificent game. Thread is an interesting read, as usual!
The best we could have done was 175 AD without going back to the beginning and doing it all over again. We woulda had to do the point squeeze like you guys did, but we weren't up for it. We were locked into a cycle that took X amount of time to generate culture. The decision on our end date had to be made early. Somewhere in the early 40's.
Like several people have said, and I often preach: Knowing your end turn is so important to making plans. If we had known the game could be won before T70, we would have changed a lot. Like Elite wrote in your thread, settling the GSpy wouldn't have been done if you knew T70 was the target.
I am actually a bit surprised that we got that close. Like Fippy said, our wake-up was quite late. T50 workers were happily building cottages around capital and people were discussing whether to save fresh GSpy for infiltration or build SY. That's when I made a (very) rough estimation that all individual goals could be met in 20 turns, and Fippy went ahead and somehow managed to do all of them simultaneously in that time :bowdown: (had it not been for us missing the barb pop and not understanding capitulation rules correctly). Our early game must have been pretty strong. I wouldn't know, I wasn't around much to mess that part up. :lol: I think the settled priest might have helped a lot. We quickly had two armies wreaking havoc both north and south.

Regarding capitulation:
Looks like they got capitulation figured out.
Mean old Roosevelt will only talk peace in 2 turns, and England will indeed cap with a lot less power needed if Land Target is activated. (their testing seems to indicate this)
Actually, my testing found the opposite. Land Target had no effect in my tests. And then I found this in code:
Code:
       if (isAtWar(eTeam))
       {
           doLotsOfCalculations;
       }
       else
       {
           if (!GET_TEAM(eTeam).AI_isLandTarget(getID()))
           {
               iMasterPower /= 2;
           }
       }
Looks very much to me like the halving of MasterPower if no land target happens only when not at war (= peace vassal). If land target plays a role in capitulation, I'd be curious in knowing how.

And another related question (quoting from our thread):
fyi, 1.4 is just Churchill. Each AI has a different multiplier in the XML.
This must be iVassalPowerModifier, which for Roosevelt is 0. I was looking at this a lot, and reading capitulation code, but couldn't figure out what this 0 means in practice. Where does 1.4 come from? I noticed this modifier corresponds to "Resists Capitulation" in Know Your Enemy, all Ai with 0 in XML says 4/10 in KYE.Should I look at the number in the latter and add that much to their average power demand? So requirement for Sitting Bull is that average power needs to be at least twice his power?
 
What PR did was even more early acceleration, as shown by bbp's statistics. Wow! But I'm thinking we might have sped that up by beelining HBR. I think those were the two key factors we missed.
We teched HBR T52... Once we decided to win in 20 turns, it was the first thing we did. Early on it was all Swords with some Chariots, then Chokos added to the mix.
 
Kremlin was 33 and HBR was 38. HBR maybe a couple turns later than it could have been, but no sense having it before Kremlin.
 
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