SGOTM8 - Chunky

[Khan_Asparuh]

This is a conquest game, and it'll be quite boring if we spend our time waiting for helis and then go on total war... What can we do if we don't strike Greece soon? Their land will help us getting across the seas/researching faster...

 

[chunkymonkey]

I would prefer to war wth Greece sooner rather than later. Of course if this requires using lonbows then so be it. At this stage, even though Greece is scientific, they will be of little use to us tech-wise, except maybe a couple of lower/upper branch MA techs which we could get from anyone, and their IA freebie, which we can pick up easy enough in a peace deal or something when we get there.

And horses are way better than archers specifically for their retreat ability, whether they cost 10s more or whatever. I don't know what the odds are for a vet horse v. redlined hoplite are, but i'm pretty sure they would be in our favour.

All in all, propping up greece is unnecessary, IMO. In all the Emperor Space/UN games I have played where I am trying to get to the Modern Ages ASAP, I try as hard as I can to get AI to research useful things for me by gifting them techs, luxs etc. and for what? They maybe research one or two useful MA techs and one useful IA tech. Saving of 14-15 turns - yes... but I often wonder how many turns I would have saved by just eliminating them straight away, irrigating their lands and hiring gazillions of scientists. Not to mention the fact that we invite AI into the wonder cascades for our 'must haves' - eg. Copernicus, Newtons, ToE, UniSuff...

 

[Mach]

Okie dokie, sounds like I'm outnumbered here. We'll go after Greece with horses.

As an aside, I've been doing some easy math. Consider a vet horse against a 2-hp hoplite (def. 4, given that it's fortified in a village). The horse will, on average, lose 2/3 of the 'battles'. The only way retreat is possible is if it loses 3hp without taking any off the hoplite; the chances of that happening is about .67*.67*.67 = 30%. Then retreats happen 50% of the time...so when comparing horses or archers, the horse will stand a 15% better chance of not dying in this case. (Actually this is an overestimate, since the archer might win the "battle of the redlines".)

So our choice between horses or archers is something like: 15% less casualties, or 50% more units. Will we have enough cats to get most hoplites down to 2hp? I dunno...

Anyways, we've all done the horserush many times I'm sure. The combo of a 2mp unit with retreat is powerful, since you can attack from afar against fully healed defenders and still avoid high casualties. But horses escorting cats (i.e. attacking wounded units) really drops the retreat chances...

 

[WetSawdustDemon]

I reckon we should only be building horsemen from now on, by all means keep and eventually upgrade the existing archers to longbowmen but the real limitation for us right now is the unit support cost, an archer and a horseman are both going to be costing us 2 gold a turn each so I know what I’d rather have. Also it’s a long way from our core to the Greek territory, horses will get into the action faster. Plus the horsemen will be better for defending our shores as they can react quicker to units landing on our shores.

 

[Khan_Asparuh]

Wow, guys, just saw the QSC stats, we're looking quite nice! Come on, we can have this foolish golden laurel! Wacken can be taken, we've more techs compensed by more workers! that's a deal!

... Too happy again. Remember SGOTM7? We weren't bad at this point...

 

[WetSawdustDemon]

Something that I'm interested in is that Wacken seems to have missed the slingshot, as they have Code of Laws and Philosophy but not Republic. They do however have the Colossus which in this game is a huge advantage. Mind you those 11 warriors are of little use . I'd say we're still rank outsiders for this but if we can take the rest of the starting landmass soon and as much of Greece's and China's overseas empire then we might be in with a chance, but lets not count our chickens just yet.

 

[Baalzebul]

Turn 0
Some MM
Decided to change WP Marketplace production to aqueduct.

Turn 1 330BC
Egdon Mire Worker-->Catapult
Greeks are building TGL.

Turn 2 310BC
Alex offered alliance vs. Chinese I refused.
Beijing flipped as we guessed.
Bombed and killed spear losing 2 archers.
Recaptured Beijing.

Turn3 290BC
Barb Impasse Market -->Aqueduct
Dyes See Worker-->Spear
Our archer killed a Chinese archer and became elite.
Found Mosquito Town.

Turn 4 270BC
Indigo spear-->Spear
Nanking worker-->Spear

Turn 5 250BC
Northern Mountains finish Forbidden Palace --> Aqueduct
I Saw A Barb worker-->worker

Turn 6 230BC
FC Horse-->horse
Indigo spear-->spear

Turn 7 210BC
Mount Belle Vue Library-->Aqueduct
Jungle Edge Worker-->Spear
Rome found engineering.

Turn 8 190 BC
FC Spear-->horse
Indigo spear-->spear
Oyster Bay library-->aqueduct.
We killed a Chinese archer.

Turn 9 170BC
Zzz

Turn 10 150BC
Greece & China signed peace treaty.
Indigo Spear-->spear
Romans are building Sun Tzu.
Romans finished Hanging Gardens.
Greeks are building Sun Tzu.
Japanese are building Sun Tzu.
Monoethism is 1 turn away.
Tsingtao will fall this turn I think.

I'm off now... I can tell more tomorrow I think.

save

 

[Greebley]

A few random comments:

1) I notice we have a lot of single workers doing work. While this is efficient for building roads, it is less efficient for clearing Jungle and mining mountains.

For example, If I have 3 workers mining 3 mountains, none of the mountains are useful for 18 turns. Better is to have the mountains available at turn 6, another at turn 12 and the last at turn 18. Not a huge deal, but it seemed worth pointing out. We are also clearing a few jungle squares outside our territory. We should at least be working on a culture building so we can actually use those squares. (specifically, near Egdon - its actually hard to see that it is outside the borders).

2) It would be kind of nice to get Tientsin as part of a peace deal. China owns exclusive rights to that island and it is one we can defend. I am worried that Tatung will cost too much to adequately defend and that even if we do, the chances are good we will just lose it.

3) Being threatening can get you better deals. I don't think we should go for peace immediately after taking Tsingtao. Why don't we stack the troops outside of the capitol. We may even be able to get all 3 off continent cities which would be ideal.

4) We are making some regular spears. I usually try to avoid doing so. In this case we have cities building aquaduct so not much Military. I would like to wait for the Greek war until after we finish the Aquaducts and give those towns real defense. Regular spears just don't do very well. That 4th HP really seems to increase survivability.

 

[Greebley]

Roster:
Greebley - On Deck
Wet
Mach
Khan
Baal - Just Played
Chunky - Up

 

[Khan_Asparuh]

Too bad that Alex captured Xinjian. I know that the city is under his cultural pressure but am a bit angry about its flip 1 turn after capture.
I definitely agree on the roading before clearing strategy, actually the slaves I got were sent alone on tiles like this to road...
How's the WW going? A flip doesn't help it too much...
Go on Chunky get those Chichies.

 

[Baalzebul]

I think in a few turns time war weariness will begin. So we can't contunie that war too much.

Canton and Beijing are building temples for avoiding flips. So saving some money and rushing them might be needed.

We are building regular spears because our cities are empty. Yes I will prefer veterans too but I don't like empty cities which are captured easily. Especially when many ships are around.

Most of our core cities have veteran spears now but a few horses around would be useful for our defense.

Fort Chunky can be turned into a 2 turn horseman factory after finishing horseman production. I used those sea tiles to get more commerce.

Our core cities need a bit more infrastructure before going to war. Aqueducts, courthouses, harbors and markets are needed. And the outer cities need courthouses. I think we don't need to hurry a war against Greece. With a better economy we can crush them easily later.

 

[Khan_Asparuh]

Well we have several markets and libs already.
As for the regular spears, I prefer several (veteran) horses assigned on home protection than a spear in each city, we can't afford this kind of protection. Reduce the building of defensive units at minimum IMO; usually 2 horses covering 4 cities can do better than 4 spears.

 

[WetSawdustDemon]

Good stuff Baal if you look at the territory graph we are ahead of everyone at this stage, we’ll have to work hard to maintain that in the coming turns, but it’s a great position for Chunky to play from!

Some ideas for Chunky’s turn:

Lets build a harbour somewhere and connect up the 2nd gems south of Barbarian Impasse. We can hopefully trade for more luxuries, which will let us reduce our entertainment slider and speed up research.

I agree with Khan we don’t need spearmen other than to guard large stacks. Lets just build horsemen from now on. There’s really nothing to guard against for the moment and, as I said before, we can defend our shores much more effectively with a few horsemen than we can with many spearmen, which of course helps keep the unit support cost down.

Perhaps we should build marketplaces before aqueducts? Otherwise we’ll have to spend more money on entertainment to keep our growing cities happy. Also I think Libraries are quite important in our case and maybe we should build these first too?

We should all agree where our new cites are going to go, otherwise we might waste worker turns clearing jungle tiles that we are going to settle upon. Egdon Mire and Dye-see seem to be about 50% corrupt right now, so perhaps we should try infinite city sprawl north of those two? This means lots more settlers of course, but that can only be a good thing. I made this rough plan as an idea of what we might do:

 

[Mach]

Looks real good, Baal! Just piping up to say I agree with most of what's said. Let's continue against China until we get all her island cities. Then we can turn on Greece, and sign China up against them -- hopefully Greece will finish China for us, wasting units in the meantime.

Let's not build regular spears; skim settlers for ISCing instead maybe. I'm not sure about the anti-flip temples...

It looks like we'll be the first to mono -- hopefully that'll get us the feud/eng 2fer. What are we researching next? Invention? On one hand we can use the bows, on the other hand invention is often researched by the ai's...we could instead push toward Cop's.

Our unit support costs are up to 44gpt. Anything we can do about that? We're gonna get two new ducts soon, that'll help. (Wet, that's why ducts are better for our economy right now, rather than markets. Our non-river cities aren't making all that much gold; the market right now will barely pay for themselves...) Maybe we could merge in a worker or three, since we have a bunch of slaves? I dunno if that's a good idea...

Yeah, let's get a harbor soon.

At a glance, I agree with Wet's dotmap. It does indeed look like Edgon Mire and Dye-See will be productive, so mine those. Irrigate all cities above that, to make specialist farms.

 

[WetSawdustDemon]

I was thinking the marketplaces would be better for entertainment really, as growing Northern Mountains and other such cities past size 6 will make them hard to keep happy, unless we have marketplaces there first. But I guess it’s not that big a deal, just so long as we build marketplaces straight after the aqueducts.

 

[WetSawdustDemon]

Just to clarify above, we should soon have our 2nd Gems connected up (In addition to our 5 excess dyes) and we can trade Greece for their wines (at least until we take it from them) Plus when as we have a harbour we can trade for Roman Wool and Fur and Japanese Silks (plus maybe Ivory) and if the English get their act together with roading we can trade them for Incense. All these can be obtained in the next few turns and make a good case for building marketplaces.

 

[Mach]

Yeah, being able to get more luxes would be a very good thing. The only thing I'd like to point out is...

trade Greece for their wines

Wouldn't that delay our war, though? IIRC (though I could be wrong) Greece has horses. I think if we're gonna attack them, we'd better do so before they get iron and chivalry. A few knights could make mincemeat of us. (I'm not so much worried about the iron alone; it would mean MDI, but it would also mean more expensive pikes...)

 

[chunkymonkey]

Great turns Baal, and great discussion guys.

I would like to reiterate Greebley's point about merging workers to improve roaded tiles. This is very important, as even though we are industrious, we need to make sure we are optimising as high a percentage of our worked tiles as possible, as soon as possible, all the time.

And yes, I would like to pick up those remaining offshore Chinese cities in the peace deal, so I will press on, war weariness permitting.

I'm not too keen on those temples to prevent flips. They won't really do that much, we're better off just getting American citizens in Beijing ASAP. Do I have permission to change them? Flip chances aren't that massive anyway now that we've starved Beijing down.

I guess many of the decisions I have to make depend on when we want to go to war with Greece i.e.

We could trade for wines - 20 turn deal.
We could research the peaceful MA path and ensure we get the decent wonders, let the AI research the bottom tree for us. If we know we have saltpeter then we can race to MilTrad, and roll through Greece quite simply.

Or.. do we want to take them now, whilst they are sort of weak from Chinese explots, and they don't have iron connected, and have no knights. This will be harder and more a war of attrition, but we can do it. If we did this, I would be inclined to research Invention at full speed, just to give us that edge.

AI research between Theology/Invention is generally 50/50 in my experience.

I'm gonna play tomorrow, so any extra thoughts/ideas would be appreciated

 

[Khan_Asparuh]

For the wines, if we do a pure per turn deal (2 lux for 1 or the like) we can declare and keep our reputation. So just dont ask for cash while doing it and it'll be fine.
About the Greeks I think that we can attack them really soon, as core cities can quickly provide what we need in army.
The spear building cities can get some cats.

 

[Greebley]

One nice thing about a high culture. We could actually try propoganda to flip cities on another continent. I haven't tried this, but its an idea.