[BTS] SGOTM 25 - Home Slices

T35 Head to southwest of Gau shoreline to unfog coastline to open up trade to AI out west.
I don't know about this. The bomber can do in a couple of turns what the Spy will take forever and a day to do.
There is also a decent chance of a barb city having spawned somewhere on that coastline and blocking trade routes.
 
I realize my advice/questions are coming in a bit late, and I'm not as tuned in as I should be, but why a library in Yanan? or for that matter, why a settler? We already have gold, so we're just talking about a city that will some day (probably around T50) grow to size 3 and work 2 gold tiles. We have to invest many worker turns for granary chop, pasture, mine, mine, and movement costs.
I suppose if we have the workers to spare, and we're saying our eventual goal is domination or we just need the land%, then we need cities. It's a pretty good one to invest in. Is there nothing more urgent? more army for example?

@Kaitzilla : Bigger picture, can you quickly describe the progress you intend to get on your turnset, when you might hand off, and then a sentence or two about what you envision the next poor sucker has to accomplish? I want to hit the ground running.
 
Last edited:
Alphabet: careful what you wish for. Often an AI with alphabet will bribe others. We don't want that Janissary turning on us.
If case anyone's not aware, I believe the biggest chance of them bribing is on turn 1 of the DoW. IIRC, chances are cut in half on turn 2, then get very small.
 
Interesting. I always thought that any turn you're not trading resources there is an X% chance it decays. Sounds like it's not random after all.
Pretty sure it's not random.


I fail to see the value of these pavilions. I thought we had a reasonable excuse to build one but I can't recall rt now. But spamming them?
In that post I said in our two cultural cities that aren't the LC. For the cultural victory condition. In pop7 Shanghai it's because it pays off radically to expand the BFC in 4t instead of 10t. Not sure what I said to make you think we'd spam them, but it wouldn't hurt to get up to the 6? we need for Globe. But with Kremlin and any captured city of pop2 or more, a whipped pavilion is definitely worth considering to pop the bfc faster.

This is fastest finish, not Granny finish.
 
In pop7 Shanghai it's because it pays off radically to expand the BFC in 4t instead of 10t. Not sure what I said to make you think we'd spam them, but it wouldn't hurt to get up to the 6? we need for Globe.

Yea, Shanghai was the one I figured we had a good reason.
Good point about Globe.

My protest was mainly about "asap":
In any case a pavilion asap for our two biggest culture cities after our LC.
ASAP seems a bit soon, and how much are these 2 really going to contribute anyway?
 
Green light on the latest turnset.

I'm going to ramble on about winning the game. I think it may provide us with new short term goals once we figure out the critical paths.
LC's bookkeeping in post #3 has given us 8 nice links to review our thoughts on the big picture (thx, LC).

I think they all boil down to this minimal tech approach, the 8th post, which sums up our goal.
If we kill 6 AI (JC, Mehmed, Stalin, DG, Toku, Bismarck), we only need 52% land and 52% pop for 100 military points. That isn't even enough for domination, which is why I was wondering about the potential for an AP win earlier. Or we can just complete domination...
100 military
100 culture (147k in one city + 3k Beijing/Yan'an - GA bomb + 75 successful missions = 147k)
91-95 civil
58 diplo
28 tech
40-44 construction (10-11 wonders)
If we can complete the Medieval tech era, we need 3 less wonders.
So I want to get plans meet each of these goals, individually, as fast as possible. As if it were our only goal. Any team member can feel free to grab one of these and run with it. Just post so we won't duplicate effort. I'll claim #1 rt now and pretend that on my turnset we need to kill everyone as our only goal.

1. kill all but Roosy
2. get 150K culture
3. settle ~52% of land
4. Get Theo, build AP, become leader
5. get all classical techs
6. A dozen wonders
 
ASAP seems a bit soon, and how much are these 2 really going to contribute anyway?
Probably only 1 spy mission's worth, but if it means we need one less city gift cycle, it could shave some turns.

For the record, I'm not crazy about all the builds either. I would still prefer that we just tech HBR and go knock some heads in Europe.

Edit: xpost with WT. I could look into the wonders.
 
Last edited:
Kill em all (well, 6 of them)

I'm surprised to see that HBR is 9t (so probably could be done in 8t)
Our slow army can finish up as Kait has planned. If we were really going to fastest possible kills, we'd probably leave the easy, close AI cities and head west ASAP. We may consider leaving Tsing untouched for this reason.

Our workers are pretty busy during this next 10 turns, but we could easily redirect some for a couple roads to Moscow. All chopping planned for GLH would go into HorseArchers.

So with HBR T37...
Note: you can't whip a chariot and have it become a HA on T37 because chariots are not obsolete. Bummer.

T36 whip a barracks with maxOF. Optionally 2pop whip chokos, etc. for OF.

T37 build HAs or chop them and whip more.
The HAs are moving T38

If we wanted to make use of the last choko...
T44 choko from Yanan can capture Moscow (along with many HAs), but the point is, if we whip a Choko T36, it takes 8 turns to capture using that unit.

Let's assume we get 4 HAs moving on T37, then the closest city, Yanan, starts one T38, whips 39 and moves 40. This one would be fast enough to arrive with early ones making a group of 5-6 to DoW T42, capture 43 or 44 (depends on if there's forests blocking our path next to Moscow)

4 workers would go with the army to continue to road west. They will road
Moscow capture turn: SW, SW,
M+1 : SW, SW,
M+2 : SW (just one because of desert tiles)
M+3 : SW, SW
M+4 : W, NW (towards Berlin)

Istanbul capture ~T48

M+5 : NW

Berlin capture ~51
Rome ~53
and then paris.
And we have to clean up all newly settled cities out west.

Meanwhile, we have taken out nearby Tokyo, Chongqing, Mumbai, etc.

Now there's London :think:
By the time Moscow comes out of revolt, and chops a galley, there's no time for it to sail to London even if there is a path.
Rome: also too slow.
The fast way is to bring a settler along and chop a galley or two.

Game over by T60 (if we only needed to kill 6 AI)
 
#4 Religous

Theo is about 14 turns out. T43.
The AP can be chopped in Chongqing, Shanghai, or Moscow, but Moscow is probably in revolt for a while.
400:hammers: Requires an ungodly # of forests, so we want to use a city like Shanghai that is out of revolt and can do whip OF. Its 7 chops are 204.

(again, this is only if we wanted AP ASAP. I doubt we will actually use Shanghai for the AP)

I see no reason we can't get AP leader before T50 if we had to.
I assume we will not research Theo yet, but instead have several whip overflows ready to build the AP very quickly after Theo.

So goal #4 is simply planning to get Theo early enough, but no too early. Ideally we could steal it instead of tech it. Or bulb it?
anyway, moving on to a more interesting goal.
 
Last edited:
Goal #3 52% land

I estimate we need 30 settlers to fill out the ~850 tiles.
That's after capturing the existing cities + 5 more newly settled AI cities.

The conquer goal was already set at ~T60 to get London.
So once we have enough army, we'd have to get settlers out very fast so they can get into place and have time to pop borders, but I can see meeting this goal at the same time our last captured cities: Paris, London come out of revolt.
If we had to, we could even raze those and re-settle to avoid the revolt wait, but I think we have plenty of other things holding us back (culture, tech, and wonders)

update: bbp points out we will likely have 100 points without more than ~10% land and we will have that without any effort, so this goal is not slowing us in any way.
 
Last edited:
So I did the 3 goals that are probably the fastest and we're left with the critical paths: tech, wonders, and culture.
Makes me think that once we have the good cities close to us, we slow our war efforts for more important things.
Our chokos can finish up Chongqing, probably Moscow (remembering that distance is not an issue for expenses).
See if the AI can do some of the roads for us.

Leads me to believe we don't need/want HBR yet either.

It's too early to build settlers, and we don't need an army yet. What are we going to build? Maybe we need Aesthetics sooner rather than later? We can't build spies until Alpha. :hammer: I'd hate to research that!

Maybe talking thru the other 3 goals will shed some more light.
 
6. A dozen wonders
Is started on this, but no time to finish right now. Here are my unedited first thoughts:

On this timeline, we’re probably not capturing many wonders...

How many wonders and which ones is Roosevelt likely to build in Washington? How do we discourage him from doing so? What if we just DoW him repeatedly? Will he spam units and then go capture some barb cities, or does he not build units in Washington if we are not threatening him there?

Are we going to run OR, and spread Taoism to potential production cities like Shanghai? Do we want forges (they are relatively easy to whip with Kremlin and give us +2 happy)?

1. Palace
2. Great Wall
3. Tao shrine
4. Kremlin

5. GLH (Shanghai) - 182 base-h
6. Colossus (Shanghai) - need to capture Tsingtao copper, requires forge and 107 base-h
7. Hanging Gardens - 143 base-h / 127 base-h with either forge or OR
8. Apostolic Palace
9. HE - as little as 77 base-h depending on multipliers, needs lib + barracks + XP
10. NE - as little as 96 base-h depending on multipliers, needs lib

If we get 1-2 GP's, we will have holy cities to put shrines in. Since we are not going after Roosy in this strategic approach, we only need 1 GA, 1 more GSpy, and no GS. We could use Yan'an to run some artists and priests.

What great people do we need, and can we get some GPs for shrines?
Spoiler :

If we are not going after Roosy, we don’t need Astro. Hence, we don’t really need any GS. We need one GA to jump-start the 147k city, and additional Spies would help. Other than that, we only need GPs for shrines and we will likely golden age whoever else we get. Yan’an has a 2GP points already, and could run some priests, as well.

Potential shrine cities: Istanbul, Moscow, Berlin, Paris.


I think Shanghai could be our wonder spam city. It could go: Forge / GLH / Colossus / Aqueduct / HG / etc. Or start with GLH, if we are afraid of losing it.
 
Classical Era Techs
IRON WORKING
LITERATURE
HORSEBACK RIDING
MATHEMATICS
MONARCHY
DRAMA
AESTHETICS
ALPHABET
CONSTRUCTION
CODE OF LAWS
CALENDAR
COMPASS
CURRENCY
METAL CASTING

Let's throw in Music too. And of course Theo.
(edit: on 2nd thought, after reading bbp's post on wonders, GArtists are easy to make and we don't need Sistine, we have too many other wonders available, so drop Music.)

Alpha, Monarchy will be free leaving the following (in the somewhat prioritized order and showing some reasons):
CURRENCY (tech rate)
AESTHETICS (3 wonders)
HORSEBACK RIDING (conquest)
CALENDAR (happies?, wonder)
LITERATURE (3 wonders)
Music (seed culture, wonder)
Theology
CONSTRUCTION (bridges?)
COMPASS

With, for example, Theology alone taking 14 turns :eek: right now, tech is looking like one of the two the problem areas (along with culture). And we're just talking about classical techs! We're not getting free Mids anytime soon from the AI, so now I'm thinking it might be our #1 next goal.

How can we make use of the GS's we're likely to get if we do a mids/scientist tech strategy?
bulb Compass, Calendar, and/or Aes?
We can do that after free Alpha, but before we get Theo (or steal CS) otherwise Paper blocks us.
Calendar and Aes would normally work, but we have machinery which means Optics comes first,
so just Compass bulb

leaving 7 techs:
CURRENCY
AESTHETICS
HORSEBACK RIDING
CALENDAR
LITERATURE
Theology
CONSTRUCTION
 
Last edited:
List of wonders available with classical techs:
Spoiler :

Forbidden Palace (unlocked already) - requires 6 CH / 200h (no multipliers)
Globe Theatre (unlocked laready) - requires 6 Pavilions / 300h (no multipliers)
Heroic Epic (Literature) - requires library, barracks and 10XP unit / 200h (marble 2x)
National Epic (Literature) - requires library / 250h (marble 2x)

Angkor Wat (unlocked already) - 500h (stone 2x)
Apostolic Palace (Theology) - 400h (no multipliers)
Chichen Itza (unlocked already) - 500h (stone 2x)
Shwedagon Paya (Aesthetics) - 450h (gold 2x)
The Colossus (unlocked already) - requires forge / 250h (copper 2x)
The Great Library (Literature) - requires library / 350h (marble 2x)
The Great Lighthouse (unlocked already) - requires lighthouse / 200h (no multipliers)
The Hagia Sophia (Theology) - 550h (marble 2x)
The Hanging Gardens (unlocked already) - requires aqueduct / 300h (stone 2x)
The Mausoleum of M (Calendar) - 450h (marble 2x)
The Parthenon (Aesthetics) - 400h (marble 2x)
The Pyramids (unlocked already) - 500h (stone 2x)
The Statue of Zeus (Aesthetics) - requires 3 monuments (ugh) / 300h (ivory 2x)
The Temple of Artemis (unlockerd already) - 350h (marble 2x)

+4 shrines

+4 existing wonders (shrine, palace, GW, Kremlin)

That’s a total of 26 potential wonders.
 
Ltech is looking like one of the two the problem areas (along with culture).
We could just build more wonders or something? If we're not able to trade/steal enough techs to complete the classical era, then that 14pts seems kinda expensive.
 
We could just build more wonders or something? If we're not able to trade/steal enough techs to complete the classical era, then that 14pts seems kinda expensive.
yea, maybe we see if we can steal most of it. And only research hard if we are close to finishing the era. Make up the difference with wonders. I didn't realize we had access to so many.
So maybe Mids is not high priority yet. We need the cities and population to make good use of it.
 
The GSPy will find them this turn. I think they finished the eastern mine this or last turn, so they need to pick a new tile to improve. I'd cottage the fp, but I'm not Tokugawa. He might go to that dry grass hill.

Yeah, go with the whip. We might need a chariot to capture workers on the far side of the city (make sure they're on a road). You could also send the archer to make sure we can capture the workers, especially if they're in two places. Use the cultural slider for happiness as needed.


Whip the Swordsman in Beijing?
Send the Archer? hmm

I don't know about this. The bomber can do in a couple of turns what the Spy will take forever and a day to do.
There is also a decent chance of a barb city having spawned somewhere on that coastline and blocking trade routes.
It will take around 12 turns for the Great Spy to get down there.
There is nowhere for the Bomber to base from the investigate down there now that Churchill hates us.

Barb cities?
The mapmaker may have eliminated barb spawning in our game somehow.
Haven't seen a single barb spawn yet, 29 turns into the game.
Spoiler :
**Edit**
If we settle on the west of Toku's island, we can just keep that city 1 turn to run a Bomber recon mission.
However, if we get a religion spread the very 1st turn and get +1:culture:, that would ruin the (Liberate) opportunity.
Maybe Gua's 3rd Settler could travel to that Corn to found a fat city for us and the Galley could fogbust the coast?
A Workboat would get the city off the ground fast too. :hmm:


I realize my advice/questions are coming in a bit late, and I'm not as tuned in as I should be, but why a library in Yanan? or for that matter, why a settler? We already have gold, so we're just talking about a city that will some day (probably around T50) grow to size 3 and work 2 gold tiles. We have to invest many worker turns for granary chop, pasture, mine, mine, and movement costs.
I suppose if we have the workers to spare, and we're saying our eventual goal is domination or we just need the land%, then we need cities. It's a pretty good one to invest in. Is there nothing more urgent? more army for example?

@Kaitzilla : Bigger picture, can you quickly describe the progress you intend to get on your turnset, when you might hand off, and then a sentence or two about what you envision the next poor sucker has to accomplish? I want to hit the ground running.
The Library in Yana makes good use of the 16:commerce: that our Palace and river tiles and trade route provides.
The 1 Great Prophet point in the capital also makes it very attractive to run 2 Scientist specialists.
Another Shrine would be very helpful for us.
Plus, being able to run Scientist Specialists for 1 turn means we can put 1 or 2:hammers: into a Settler build at Size 4 or Size 5 (Citizen specialist can't do this!) , and then do the legendary 3 pop whip with 44:hammers: base overflow. :D

The Settler is also a good build because we can chop a Granary with 1 forest, and we have Kremlin.
With 35% production bonus, any city we get to Size 2 can turn 11:food: into 59:hammers: by 1 pop whipping a Worker!
Every single city we found next to 1 source of food and 1 forest instantly becomes a nice Worker pump. :)
Being able to produce Workers to road west and then grow to Size 3 to retire on 2 gold mines is a good little city site.
Finally, if we don't connect the city to our empire, the overflow can go into making Warriors.

You and the rest of the team are doing good work trying to figure out where our game's bottleneck is. :goodjob:
The Bottleneck is our key problem to figuring out to get a good finish date estimate, which allows us to make the best strategy decisions.
 
Last edited:
It will take around 12 turns for the Great Spy to get down there.
There is nowhere for the Bomber to base from the investigate down there now that Churchill hates us.

Barb cities?
The mapmaker may have eliminated barb spawning in our game somehow.
Haven't seen a single barb spawn yet, 29 turns into the game.
I forgot that we can't rebase to Mumbai now... nvm
It's more about where and when we need the Spy to infiltrate. 12t down and how many back? That's a long time.
Note that we also need to reveal a bit of coast near Rome before we get TRs.
 
Yep, library is good there. And settler. 2nd green light.

RE: bomber recon and Gspy
Maybe we should just be happy with internal trade rts? A 2nd island takes care of that. (not needed until currency and/or until GLH.) Then we need 4 islands.
That would also make Merc attactive and it is available...sorta.
Tokyo is not going to do much research for Toku. We could gift him a junk city (if we want him alive) and take Tokyo.
 
Top Bottom