SGOTM8 - Chunky

[chunkymonkey]

I don't know what everyone else thinks, but I think we are approaching OCN, and if this were a solo game that I were playing, this is where my next cities would go.

Obviously we need the cities in the east first to claim that territory before some other aspiring scamp puts a settler down first, and the ones in the north once that area is secure. If everyone is uncomfortable with this level of ICs this soon, then we can tone it down a little. If necessary, some these could be temporary towns and disbanded at a later date. We could use the unit support.

Also, looking at the save, it appears Greece have just learnt Monarchy, and they are currently in Anarchy now. China is a Republic.

I think we should try to keep the knowledge of HBR away from Greece as long as possible. This will delay them and give us a better chance of taking Beijing for ourselves.

And I just had a thought, since we are now in the Middle Ages, the Greeks may be having a little trouble with barb encampments up in their northern mountains. Good stuff!

 

[Mach]

Let me second that: really awesome work, Wet!

I agree, keep the war going, don't break any treaties. The horses are our goal.

I would say get Greece into the MA immediately, research what they get as a free tech, and then research that until Republic (and the deficit) gets it for us. But...there could be a barb hut by northern mountains (too much fog there), and we can't afford a barb uprising! Lets first make sure there are no huts around, and then we can gift Greece up. I'm not worried about Greece getting feud; they don't have iron hooked up, they don't even have it in their boundaries yet.

The reason we gotta gift them up, by the way, is that it saves us soooo much research time. I agree with chunky that eng next would be a good thing.

Another thing: our core is pretty much undefended. We're gonna want some sort of landing defense.

If we had a harbor, we could trade with Ragnar.

 

[Khan_Asparuh]

Great going guys!¨Pyramids on our island and MA too! Nicey.
I'll play either tonight or tomorrow.

 

[Greebley]

I really don't like breaking alliances. It means no more alliances possible for the rest of the game. That is way to big a hit to take. I only break agreements if the cost of continuing the war is high.

In any case since we can still gain from the war, I would definitely like to continue it.

 

[Khan_Asparuh]

Got it, playing now. Breaking alliances isn't something I like neither, it must be hell worth to do it.

 

[Khan_Asparuh]

SGOTM8

(0) 550 BC
Wow, I even have some soldiers to move. Great. I decide to head for Canton and Chinese horses, for obvious (greek) reasons. The Greeks have Monarchy. They lack any connected iron. I hate researching a tech that may be popped by a scientific moron so I sell them HBR, Construction, Viking contact (they would have met soon enough) and 105g for Monarchy. We don’t need it but otherwise I would have offered the techs… They pull Feudalism. No chance to buy it for now. Monotheism in 22 with -11gpt… Those archers cost us a lot. I swap a few builds to Markets and Temples for expansion (Indigo, Barb Impasse, Warrior Prayer - Temple, Mount Belle Vue to Market, Fort Chunky and WTF river to settler).
Sorry for all those changes, but we’re way better militarily than China (so says the babe in the F3 too) so I don’t think that we need all those military builds immediately.
(IBT) Damn. 24 Apache horses and a warrior come out of the fog mountain next to Northern Mountains. Hi guys…

(1) 530 BC
I’ll let them pillage Jungle Edge. I saw a barb! founded where the settler stands. Garrison Northern mountains and pull out every unit that may be threatened. Check this, nice isn’t it?

I wonder… Was it a single civ in MA needed for the uprising or 2? Because in the latter case it was me pulling up the Greeks that woke them. I hope they have the same fun too, the bad news are that we’ll face elite hoplites. Burn the treasury in research.
(IBT) Damn it! They go in all the senses!

(2) 510 BC
Fort Chunky settler – settler. I guess we priorize libs more than temples, as Indigo has one already. I change the builds around. Catapult takes off a point of the barb on the mined mountain, so we may not pillage. Wake a slave in danger. Advance on Canton with 5 archers and 2 spears and on Nanking with 3 cats, 3 archers and a spear.
(IBT) 4 barbs pillage Jungle Edge, taking 3g and a few shield. The worst thing is that the wounded one pillages our road and the capital loses dyes! It riots… I scroll ahead and fixe the other cities. What are those barbs!

(3) 490 BC
I use 3 archers to block the choke, I hope this will attract the barbs to the north… Lose an archer and kill 2 spears, archer in Canton. We sink a galley too. I like this, with our thin defences in the core… Then our cats redline the single spear in Nanking and the city is ours with 4 slaves. I switch Fort Chunky on spear. Found Dyes-see on the Dyes.
(IBT) Not much, two less barbs for 1 shield. I would give immediately 25 shields to get rid of them immediately.

(4) 470 BC
Cats advance on Xinjian. Pull out the warrior from I saw a barb, I should have done this earlier.
(IBT) 4 less barbs, including one killed while attacking Northern Mountains.

(5) 450 BC
Kill 2 spears in Xinjian losing an archer. The last attack was spear against 2hp spear. Lucky me. Capture a slave. “Only” 13 barbs in sight.
(IBT) 2 less barbs, including one in defence.

(6) 430 BC
Strike with archers and kill 2 more barbs, getting a promotion.
(IBT) 3 more barbs disappear, one promoting our archer. Xinjian flips with a spear in it! 1 turn after capture!

(7) 410 BC
Kill another barb. 7 left, with 3 that can strike next turn empty cities. 3 cats, 5 archers and 2 spears start the march towards Beijing, ETA 2 turns. Send an archer next to Xinjian. The greeks have sold our contact to Japan, they know England and Rome too. Japan are up to us. 2g+8gpt is doubtable for any contact, I’ll wait them to buy it. I can’t even buy WM other than Scandinavian. They have already bought the Greek one, that is updated from the Japanese, and we have a problem.

They have Iron too, but unconnected for now.
(IBT) 4 less barbs, including one on our archer.

(8) 390 BC
The ugly faces of Caesar and Betty show up on the F4. No offence meant, after this barb treatment all I see are ugly faces… Too good that I’m alone, I’ll turn off my phone. If my girlfriend calls me now, I’ll have to spend a fortune in flowers…. Anyways, they’re both down Currency, as well as Scandinavia. The last 3 barbs die, the camp is in sight. My archer dies against Xinjian spear. Scandinavia suddenly has some money, they get Currency for 47g and WM. This one gets us all the WMs and 25g.

Lux goes to 40% so I can fire quite some scientists. Embassies are a bit expensive right now…
(IBT) Nothing. For once. Except a redlined Chinese archer running away from some Greeks.

(9) 370 BC
We take 25g from the camp. We deserve them. Our SoD is next to Beijing.
(IBT) The Chinese dies, along with a friend of his, in exchange of a Greek warrior. RIP.

(10) 350 BC
Indigo market – spear, Warrior’s prayer library – market. Why do the Metal Kings need a lib? To read stories to their kids, of course. Switch WinAmp to The Warrior’s Prayer. “Grandfather, tell me a story!”
The cats do 3 hits on Beijing, only 2 spears inside??? And while singing “Hail! Hail!” in honour of the brave elite archer that died, we get this:

“They were the Metal Kings!”
I haven’t sold the granaries yet, feel free to do it. I fear that Beijing may flip, it has 10 chinese inside including 5 resistors.
We have first level WW, lux goes up to 50%. One turn left on the MA. The Chinese are willing to give 3 cities for peace, but not Macao (2 pop) or Tientsin (1pop) if we want some of them. We may want to proceed the war a bit…
Feel free to change the builds too, but I wanted some markets up for our economy.
That’s all folks, I need a beer…

 

[Greebley]

Roster:
Greebley
Wet
Khan - Just Played
Mach (played earlier in this round)
Baal - Up
Chunky - On Deck

Since I was getting confused, I thought I would post the roster. Correct me if I am wrong. I did go back and look at the players turns to get this.

 

[Mach]

Well, I went before Khan both rounds so far, so I thought it was more like this...

Roster:
Greebley
Wet
Mach (swapped with Wet this round)
Khan - Just Played
Baal - Up
Chunky - On Deck

And nice work Khan! Enjoy that beer, ol' boy, you sure earned it. Bummer about the barb uprising; I was really afraid we'd lose the FP build, but you sure handled that well.

I guess the MA with the Greeks will be up soon, so we could get ourselves out of this war when we want. (Getting into a war without an exit strategy? I feel almost...American...)

I won't be able to look at the save tonight. But from here, I agree with Khan that Bejing's gonna flip. We should spend 1 turn in the city to quell (a city can't flip the turn it's captured), then starve it and post troops next door to recapture when it does flip. We should make peace with China when we can get all her island cities, and when the flip chances on Bejing drop. Maybe if we're lucky, Greece will finish China off for us someday, so we won't have any flip chances...

 

[Khan_Asparuh]

Mach, the idea of this roster was to keep an American after European so the game can move faster.
I agree on Beijing and general chinese strategy. WW is not that bad yet and we risk the pyramids if this city flips. Let's have some more fun with the war.

 

[Mach]

Mach, the idea of this roster was to keep an American after European so the game can move faster.

Yep. But we can't so much because me an' Greebley are the only two Americans. (Right? Two in England, Baal in Turkey, and a Bulgarian in Paris?) Of course, it just occurred to me y'all might want Amer Euro Euro. I'm sure Chunky will tell...

 

[chunkymonkey]

Most outstanding Khan . I knew we could get Beijing before the alliance ended.

Beijing will undoubtedly flip (CA2 shows possible 4.5% chance). It needs to be quelled immediately, then starved, whilst troops are stationed outside. I therefore propose we stay at war with China until one Chinese citizen remains. We need to hold onto the Pyramids. And since we don't know when Beijing will flip, don't sell our home-built granaries just yet.

We should press on until we are certain that we can pick up all remaining Chinese island cities in a peace deal, and Beijing flip-risk is eliminated, then sign peace. Greece will finish off the Chinese capital (shanghai?) for us - if not, we'll get them later.

Remember, the alliance with Greece needs to be cancelled manually with Alex.

One thing, i thought we would be researching Enginerring -> Invention instead of Mono, for the longbows, we shan't be able to take Greece with mere archers. Maybe we can do it with horses/cats, i suppose we have the time... This will leave us the opportunity to concentrate on all the precious things that come from the top half of the tree... (Universities/Copernicus/Newtons etc.) We should statrt thinking about a pre-build for Copernicus.

Re: roster, its not really important since at this stage we are taking more than a day in between turnsets to discuss, so any order works really. The initial roster was quasi-arbitrary anyway. So whatever, lets stick with the initial one, i.e. Mach's roster for now, unless circumstances prevent this from being appropriate.

Great work once again KA, we're making brilliant progress.

 

[WetSawdustDemon]

Really well done Khan, and I’m so sorry you had to deal with all those barbarians, I really didn’t know that reaching the middle age caused uprisings until now. But you’ve done a great job taking them out and still maintaining a strong offence against China. I hope you enjoyed that beer mate!

Globally, if we can take all the rest of our land mass we’ll be bigger than everyone else so we should try and keep wars to a minimum after that, as we don’t want one civ to take over another if we can avoid it.

For now though I think we should build a harbour in Fort Chunky after the Marketplace and connect up the second gems so we’ll have something to trade with. I think there’s a dark spot to the south where barbarians might appear, so it maybe it’d be worth moving a spearman down there for a few turns. I think it’s very important we get all three of China’s overseas cities, maybe if we take another city from them they might be more willing?

Our workers up north are building roads right now, which is okay, but it’s faster to chop the jungle first and then to road it, so maybe we should get a stack of six workers to start clearing out that land? (Mind you it’ll be faster for them to do that if the jungles are roaded so I guess it’s a good use for our slave workers in any case).

As for the research I think the top half is the way to go, the AI likes to research the bottom part of the Middle Ages so it’ll work well for speeding up the global tech pace.

Oh and Mach’s roster is fine with me, I promise I’ll be prompt for my turn from now on.

 

[Greebley]

Either roster is fine with me. I sounds like the concensus is for Mach's roster so lets go with that.

[Edit: One way to speed up tech is to irrigate corrupt lands and use scientists. For that we have to clear a lot of jungle and for that we need to have a lot of workers. Try to build workers whenever you can. If a town needs a scientist then consider popping off a worker.

Note that scientists are better than Taxmen. You get 3 units instead of 2. It is unaffected by buildings so whenever you are researching always use Scientists. The beaker get converted into gold because you can reduce the %science on the last few turns. Additionally, I have found that when your empire is growing it can be worth staying on a higher science rate until the last 2 turns. The reason is that you can grow enough to get the tech a turn early. if both 60% and 70% science were 6 turns for example, I keep it at the higher rate until I get close. The other way is to increase science at the end, but that can be harder to remember)]

 

[Khan_Asparuh]

Well I think that the roster stays this way (Mach version):
Greebley
Wet
Mach (swapped with Wet this round)
Khan - Just Played
Baal - Up
Chunky - On Deck

About the scientists, this is what I always do... Actually quite some research on Mono is due to them.
I think that we can leave 2 archers and a spear next to Beijing and send the other (2???) towards the other chinese cities. With cat support of course.
We can take Xinjian too. There's an archer in Canton that will heal next turn, an 2 others going north from the small Barb party. This should be enough, the chinese don't have enough money to rush any defense.
About the wars. We must get rid of Greece quite fast (with horses online really soon, when the mountain road is built, go for some horsies and a bunch of 10 cats must be OK). We can't kill them off but we can get some ressources and reduce them a lot. So let's start building towards that war. They haven't connected iron yet. Our core cities have not much choice in builds other than military so this is the way to go.
One last thing. We must keep the rest of the world peacefull so that they can research for us.

 

[Baalzebul]

So we have the pyramids. Great stuff Khan..

I agree with Chunky about staying at war with the Chinese till Beijing and Canton are safe from flipping. And if we can take a few more cities they will be more willing to gift their island cities.

I think it's my turn now. I can play tomorrow night.

 

[Mach]

I actually was able to look at the save...

I agree with what's been said so far about the Chinese war and stuff.

I like the libs we've been building, even in wartime. But we're building markets in places that don't need them yet, I think, like Warrior's Prayer. I think it's good to build markets in our strong-economy river cities (Fort Chunky and Indigo), but WP is only making 2gpt at our current sci and lux rates, so a market probably isn't warranted. We should probably build lib first, then aquaduct after that, and then market. With the pyramids, early aquaducts would be awesome.

I'm leery about a future Greek war -- horses against hoplites will be wasteful, and we want to keep the sci civ around to speed things along. Hopefully we'll have salt (they wouldn't have denied us horses, iron, and salt, would they?), and then we could take it to the Greeks with cavs. On the other hand, we're gonna have lots of cultural pressure in Old China from Greece...

I think maybe if we want to continue against the Greeks, we should continue the archer/catapult attack, with only a few horses mixed in for variety. The extra movement point would be lost for the horses since they'll be escorting cats. The only advantage horses have is the retreat possibilty, but that doesn't seem worth the 10s a pop. But people probably disagree with this...

 

[Khan_Asparuh]

If warrior prayer gets a harbour it can pull quite some commerce... And archers vs hoplites will cost too much, horsies retreat... It's definitely worth 10s IMO.

 

[Mach]

Yeah, like I said I dunno about that. We could have 3 archers for the price of 2 horses. The chances of retreat might be lower than you think; it's 50%, except that they won't ever retreat when the defender is redlined, which will often be the case since we'll be using cats. I'm not saying we should avoid horses; I'm just saying let's not concentrate on them either. Maybe 50-50 horse/archer ratio...

I forgot about harbor, that would be nice too. Maybe we could trade!

 

[Greebley]

The reason for a Greek war would be to nab the Iron before the tech advances too far.

We can wage war with Archers or Horsemen if we have a decent size stack of Catapults. Why don't we start building them now and maybe have a Greek war in 30-40 turns? We may even have Invention by then for Longbows.

 

[Mach]

The reason for a Greek war would be to nab the Iron before the tech advances too far.

Huh, I hadn't considered this. Bah. For what do we need iron? To build military? But the only people we have to fight are the Greeks, whom we have to fight first to get the iron...it's a circular argument.

We'll need iron to build railroads, of course, but...that's getting a bit ahead of ourselves. We could easily trade for iron by then.

The other thing we could do to get iron is sign RoP with Greece, send up a force of workers and a small anti-barb force, and get a colony on that far-northern iron. IIRC, that spot won't be in Greece's territory for quite awhile. Then we'll have free iron so long as we have a trade route.