SGOTM7 - Team Chunky

[Mach]

Only have a sec to post, but Khan that looks great. We're in monarchy! That's awesome...

Looks like we have enough military to defend ourselves, and we'll have our island completely settled on my turns. What next? I guess I can start building an assault team for somewhere, but we need to decide what it will be made up of, what it's objective is, etc.

Also, I don't mind running a lux rate if it means we hit 15spt in some cities. Shields are more valuable than gold for us, IMO. I'll have to look good and hard at our mm and worker moves, and also at our mp situation to see if I want to disconnect that iron (now that we can use 3mps in each city)...

We want a leader and the FP pretty badly. Where shall we put our FP?

I can't play till tomorrow night at the earliest, maybe not even till Satuday morning, so we have plenty of time to discuss.

p.s. I hadn't been paying any attention to the scoring graph; since this game is so far over my head, I was just figuring on seeing how far we could get. But we're doing ok, aren't we? Also I see what you see Khan, Team Bede's score dropped, I hope they can recover...

 

[Baalzebul]

Good work done Khan. We are goin great, we' re still alive and will be at least for some more time.

I agree with Mach we can use luxuries. We need shields and more worked tiles mean more trade.

I think we must build a stack consisting many different units. Spears, cats, swords, and horses. But most of the units must be cats & swords.

 

[Khan_Asparuh]

Edirne can de 15 spt with court and hills worked, and a sheep too. But this will penalise Bursa and Uskudar, which will be unable to do 10spt and 2 turn workers respectively. I prefer 2 cities building horses every 3 turns plus a 2 turn workers in third immediatly than 2 cities building horses in 2 and 4 turns, virtually the same, but with some waste and without worker factory.
Also, this mountain in Indian lands can cause the death of many AC, but I prefer going there when feudalism is around. So let's visit Zulu lands IMO, with 3 spears and 3 swords plus a second wave (I presume that we'll have 3 galleys in 5 turns). The impis may retire but I prefer not facing AC with 2 defense units even on mountain.
Rebuilding the Iron road takes 4 worker turns, not so bad IMO, but I'm not sure if we don't prefer the spears for MP now, because of the upgrade path. So this is up to discussion. I vote spears.
We have 2 more spots to settle, will it be enough for a FP? If it is, I see no concurrence for Edirne for the FP. And in this case we may let it do more than 10 spt.

 

[chunkymonkey]

Yep good stuff Khan. I've got a really good feeling about this game, everything seems to be working just the way we want it to.

We can already build FP. I think that we should start it soon in Edirne. Location of FP in Conquests is of minor importance.

I have no doubt we can defend ourselves with the forces we have. I think we should commit all future forces to invasion.

I'd prefer to take out the Zulu now as well. They have no iron and horses and will be an easy target if we can destroy the Great Wall. As long as we can find a decent landing spot - like that hill, our wave attack will work since we are so much more powerful. They will only have archers and impi.

I think we should then go for India. I don't really want to be facing those AC and possibly elephants until we have pikes and medinf. Hopefully we can destroy India before they get muskets and elephants.

 

[Baalzebul]

Yes I think the same. We must first hit Zulu then India. And about the Great Wall catapults will be our friend.

 

[Mach]

I gave the save a good hard look last night, and I've found a plan to get Istanbul and Edirne to 15spt at size 7 without courts, Bursa to 10spt at size 6, and Iznik to 8spt at size 6, while Uskudar is still a 2-turn worker factory. We'll just need to run a 10% lux rate. On that note, I've decided to disconnect the iron and build some more warriors for mp duty.

So I'm going to be starting a lot of mm on my turns. The workers will have to finish roading the new cities in the south; that's priority number 1 for them. After that, I'm going to have most of them move north to re-work Uskudar then Istanbul then Edirne...

Yes we can build the FP now but I still think it's worth waiting for a leader to rush it.

If I'm understanding you guys correctly, I think landing on a mountain in Zulu territory just to kill troops isn't sufficient, since our troops won't heal in enemy territory -- they'll get killed by attrition. We need to take cities! Landing on the Zulu hill is fine as long as we push forward to take something quickly. For that, we'll need cats. Also, don't forget the power of horses -- they can jump out from a stack to kill someone, then jump back into the stack to hide. Swords get left out hanging if they kill a lone unit... Just wanted to mention that.

I have a map and spreadsheet of my mm plan, let me review them once more, then I'll post them so you guys can check my math.

Edit: I'd also like to add it's possible the Indian and Zulu lands are connected, in which case we'd see AC's even if we landed in Zulu territory, albeit at a slower pace. Maybe I can explore that strait a bit on my turns...

Here's my notes on the mm. (Sorry the spread is a screenshot; I don't yet have excel.) Let me know if you guys find any errors...
map
spread

 

[Khan_Asparuh]

Your plan looks tempting, Mach, I've never been good in spotting stuff so complexe.
Units can heal in the ships, so if we keep some galleys next to the mountain, we can pull off the wounded. But I agree, 3 galleys won't be enough for this. Maybe Istanbul must help in the navy constitution.
I prefer killing impis in defense on a mountain than in the cities, so a raid for a leader and some kills must be done before the strike.

 

[Mach]

I think we can get Istanbul (and maybe Edirne, with a court) to 20spt someday, but not comfortably until we get more luxes. Having 15spt is pretty awesome; we can build almost anything with little to no waste, the big exceptions being MI's and trebs. Even muskets are 60s. Also I tried to get cities over size 7 for the unit support, but only ones with fresh water, as I'm not excited about building aquaducts yet.

Yeah, if we're gonna use ships to heal, we'll have to stack ships since ai's like to attack single ships but they avoid stacked ones. So we'll need a bunch. I'd guess that half our troops would be healing at any given time, so that's a force of a dozen troops we'll need on that hill. Plus cat support, hopefully. We could hang out on that hill until we have enough cats built up to go take/burn some cities. Can we build fortresses yet?

I'm a bit torn about our FP; if we wait for a leader, Konya or Ankara?

Edit: On this subject, what happens if I get a leader, and decide to stop and discuss the situation with you guys? I would save the game at that point, post, and wait for a response. Should I upload that save to the server, so mad-bax wouldn't think I did a reload?

 

[Mach]

Well guys, I was on the last turn of my set when my computer crashed. I don't know what to do about this, I have the last autosave but I don't want anyone to think I reloaded, so I posted a question in the maintenance thread. I guess I'll have to wait till I get an answer before I do anything...

Lost my turnlog and everything. It's been doing that randomly lately, I think it's been overheating...

Edit: Sorry, second-to-last turn it was...

 

[Mach]

Ok so here's my turnlog off the top of my head.

Early -- we got currency on the first IT, which made us midieval, and we got mono as our free tech, meh. Fought off an immortal in the south, no losses. Started workers moving toward our core. Zulu get a hold of some iron. Disconnected our iron and built some warriors for mp.

Middle -- Worked the core, settled two cities. Fought off two immortals in the south, lost one unit. Built some galleys.

End -- Finished my mm plan, surprisingly. I didn't think I could get it all done. Fought off two more immortals in the south, lost three units. Got some cats down there to help our kill ratio. Mine was 5-4, not good. Reconnected our iron. Americans get feud.

Sorry for the inconvienience, but not much happened on my turns anyway, mostly a bunch of mm.

City report: Istanbul is at 15spt, Edirne is at 15spt, Bursa is at 10spt, and Uskudar is a 2-turn worker factory. I did not start a FP prebuild, since I'd rather wait for a leader to get it in a good place. Cities are pretty much building units. We're getting a new horse/sword every turn out of our two main cities. We have 17 workers.

Military report: Three galleys in Istanbul, and one just outside makes four. I was trying to get a force together there for invasion, but I had to divert the cats south, so there's not much there. We have the capacity to build one in a hurry, though -- our spears aren't doing anything in other cities, so we could collect them, all we need is more cats and horses. The persians keep sending immortal galleys along the south coast to land near Sinop and Salonika -- it only takes them 3 turns to get there due to this funky naval movement they got going. I reccomend we keep a stack off the coast and the cities lightly manned, so they keep landing there predictably. Our troops there are a bit wounded right now. Got no promotions on my turns. Saw neither hide nor hair of Indian or Zulu galleys.

We have 15 warriors, 6 archers, 8 spears, 9 swords, 7 horses, and 7 cats.

Economic report: We're at 10% lux. I skirted 40gpt in unit costs my whole turns. We should get river cities to size 7 for support. We're at +28gpt right now, and I think that'll only go down as we build more units. We'll need to invade and get more cities to really help our economy now...

 

[chunkymonkey]

Hey, don't worry about the crash. These things happen. Looks like you've set everything up quite nicely for me to take a little trip to Zululand.

I'm not going to be able to play until tomorrow evening, so plently of time to discuss opening strategy for Zulu war.

Questions:
Who should be in the first landing party?
Where should we land?
Does that plains tile within our cultural borders N of Iznik look like an awesome place for a fortress, pickup and dropoff point to anyone else? It would take 3 workers 2 turns to build one IIRC. We could hang out there, piling up forces and leader fishing until there is a lull in their attack, and then go on a killing spree.

 

[Mach]

You are correct about fortresses, they take 6 workers turns for us.

I was placing the galleys in Istanbul because I didn't know what direction they were gonna go in, so I figured Ist was a good compromise.

But now that I got my head out of mm mode...yes! That plains spot in Zululand is perfect. Our galleys can move troops there in 1 turn from Iznik! Pick up troops from the city, move 1 tile, drop the troops off, then move back into the city. Also the Zulu don't have that tile roaded up, so they can't easily reach it. The only downside is that forest next to that tile -- we can't attack and retreat in 1 turn to there. Besides that, though, it's perfect...

Our four galleys can move 8 troops, so as a first pass at this I would say...

Turn 1: Land 3 spears, 2 swords, and 3 workers. Since there are no roads, we can probably expect little resistance on turn 1.
Turn 2: Land 5 cats, 2 spears, and 1 horse. (Too many cats?) The horse is to scout a bit, or to kill wounded and still be able to retreat. Attack weaker stacks with the swords (don't leave our tile, though!), fortify the spears, start the fortress.
Turn 3: More attack units, especially cats, and replacement spears.

Then we let them gas themselves, sending whatever units we can spare from homeland defense. I think 6-8 spears should be enough to defend the spot, with cat support. When the time comes to go after Zulu cities, I think we can expect our 4-bombard cats to get maybe 50% hits on spears behind walls, so we'll want a lot of them.

Come to think of it, since we'll be doing combined arms in Zululand, I think we'll want more swords (or MI's ) than horses. When the time comes, we'll be wasting shields on MI's in Ist and Edrine, though. Maybe there's a way to mm it, giving the extra shields to Bursa, so we can have 3 cities on 3-turn MI's...

Edit: Also, I had considered building a lib in Iznik on my turns, to bring in that bg near there. We may want to do that now, maybe even rush it, so we can secure cultural grasp on our foothold tile. That Zulu city has expanded once, obviously, and I'd hate for it to expand again and we lose that tile...

Edit2: I'm cleaning the house and I keep getting ideas. After the fortress we should build barracades. I've never built them before, but I believe they are +100% defense...

 

[chunkymonkey]

Your invasion plan seems similar to what I was considering Mach. However, I may alter the ratio of spears/swords/cats as the turns go on and I get a feel for the sort of resistance that the Zulu put up. Since we have no way of knowing what horrible stacks they'll have i'll just play it by ear.

I'm hoping that artificial stupidity will set in, and they'll just rally all their troops to the adjacent tiles giving me small stacks of archers to deal with at any given turn. Once I see the lull, and have a stack of roughly 10 swords/4 spears/10 cats (overkill?), I will move towards the nearest city. I may hang back and leader fish depending on the situation. An army would be particularly awesome.

The Great Wall is in Zimbabwe. Should we attempt to take this out first? And are we gonna go for raze and replace (even Zimbabwe?), or capture? Seeing as how we are gonna need some mass unit support from now on, should we stick strictly to cxxc, or move towards ICS on our conquered islands (this would give us mucho cash, and be easy to protect)? How would this affect corruption in our core?

I'm gonna build that library, maybe part-rush, in Iznik. We need that tile. After the workers have built their fortress, i'll definitely set them building barricade. Another two turns can't hurt for 100% defence!

I'll gonna play tomorrow morning now. I'm a little tired after work and I don't want to screw up our first invasion.

 

[Mach]

Sounds good. I imagine they won't attack with those attack-1 impi so much. They may just park outside our fortress, so we'll have to take them out ourselves. Take your time and whittle them down.

I'm not too good at this stuff, but troops heal faster in cities, especially ones with rax, right? Maybe you can rotate redlined troops back to Iznik, if they would heal faster that way. Also we may get feud soon, if the Amercans sell it to the Persians. Then you can rotate wounded troops back to upgrade.

An army would be awesome, but we can't really use one until we have a city on the island -- we can only move an 'army of one' with our galleys. I would rush the FP first, so we can get add more core city to our repertoire.

Let's wait a bit before we decide whether or not to ICS. I think the cities just across the straits from Istanbul will be core productive cities, so maybe we'll want to ICS the far side of those islands, but not the near side...

I think we should raze/replace all cities. The GW only works for the continent its on so I don't think we'll get all that much use out of it.

I hope we get eng soon; I like trebs, but more importantly it would be nice not having to worry about the rivers in our territory when maneuvering on defense...

Good luck, CM!

 

[Khan_Asparuh]

Looks nice guys.
Why should we consider a FP in Ankara or Konya? This is 1.22, isn't it? We get only OCN bonus, that's why I offered Edirne... Please clear this point out for me...

 

[chunkymonkey]

I seem to remember, from somewhere, don't ask me where , that the best place to build FP was in a productive city in the general direction of expansion. This would suggest Konya.

Although I would prefer just to build it in Edirne. FP in Conquests has minimal effect on distance corruption (hence, if you can build it a little further out of your core, then do), and mainly serves to increase OCN. That's what I thought anyway. I'll try and find the article which discussed it.

Here it is... Linky

The Forbidden Palace acts as a second Palace for distance corruption calculations, but not for rank calculations. The Forbidden Palace itself will have low corruption, but if there are many cities closer to the Palace than the Forbidden Palace, the cities around the Forbidden Palace will have high rank corruption. However, even though it doesn’t provide a new set of city ranks, the Forbidden Palace reduces rank corruption throughout the empire by increasing the optimal number of cities.

So, it doesn't actually matter a great deal as long as we get it built sooner rather than later, as is my understanding of this.

 

[Mach]

Oh, I see the confusion here. You guys are forgetting the other quality of the FP in Conquests, the one that does affect placement -- it makes the maximum corruption in that city 20%. That's why I mentioned 'adding another core city to our repertoire'. We should place it in the corrupt city that has the most potential. I haven't really looked closely at this question. Is there another city we can get above 10spt if it's corruption was 20%? Now that I look...Izmit? If not, it's possible we might find a good spot in Zululand, although hopefully we'll get a leader before then.

As far as building it in Erdine...I'd rather have units with those shields. But I'll go with the team's decision, of course.

 

[Baalzebul]

Building another core city at Zululand would be cool but there are 2 points.

1- We' re losing turns (so shields & trade) not building the FP.
2- Then first we won' t build an army and heroic epic for a better chance of creating MGL's.

 

[Khan_Asparuh]

Well we all agree on one thing, the city that will build the FP must have high shield potential. Edirne has 4 hills with bonusses, a sheep, a goats desert and 2 mountains. Don't even mention the plains. This city is by far the most productive we may ever have. It has a river too for commerce.
Right now Edirne is not very corrupted so the FP won't help it a lot corruption-wise. But we're playing for a domination; this means that we'll hopefully have many cities that will cause a lot of corruption before communism (if we go there).
So to resume. I think that we must build the FP in Edirne because:
- it will be the most worthy there - next to the capital, can pull many small or even great wonders being protected by the surrounding cities.
- it has by far the best shield and gold potential of our empire.
- it won't require a leader, that I definitely want to use for an army
- the FP can be built in about 12-13 turns so will help our corruption earlier
That's what I think about the FP, I guess that we'll have something like the referendum here in France to decide it.
I think we want some markets before proceeding on units, at least in some big cities. Don't you?

 

[Mach]

Again, I'll go with the team, but I simply don't understand, you'll have to explain... I calculate that Edirne currently has 24% corruption, so building the FP there will gain that city at most 1spt, I think. If we build it somewhere else our OCN will increase, and Edirne may still get that same 1spt. So let me say this clearly: if we build the FP in Edirne we utterly waste its 20% max corruption ability!

- it will be the most worthy there - next to the capital, can pull many small or even great wonders being protected by the surrounding ciies.

This will be true about Edirne whether or not it gets the FP.

- it has by far the best shield and gold potential of our empire.

Again, the FP doesn't change this.

So only two arguments hold water: because it's better to have the FP early to increase our OCN for our corrupt cities early, and because we want to use our first leader on an army. But I figure we can't move armies with our galleys, thus their usefulness is reduced (they would be nice for defense, but we'll do okay there). And I think it's better to gain another core city later then do decrease corruption a bit in our corrupt cities earlier; that's a judgement call, I can't give you numbers on that. (In other words, we should wait so we can use the whole effect of the FP, both its max corruption ability in that city and it's OCN increase ability.) And I think spending 200 shields on the FP now will hamper our Zulu offense -- it'll mean 1/2 or 1/3 less swords in our attack...

(I feel the same way about markets -- it's either them or the Zulu attack, not both, even if you build them one at a time. Taking Zulu cities will help our economy too...)

Well, I can't put my arguments any clearer, so I'm done talkin'. Now I'll go with what the team decides...