World Wide Wonder

[cripp7]

Had a quick look at game, no real micro manage idea's..BUT!!!!

1) Why focus all espionage on Hammurabi?? I thought we were going to own Churchhill. Seems the best fit for Conquest. Use Spies to take down city defences, he only has 4 Espoinage to spend, while Hammurabi has 20 4 more then us.
2) Court houses, if not for Maintenance saving, the Additional Espionage is helpful, we should consider running a Espionage slider against Churchhill.

Good call there, seems like we'd learn something from The Bull game (at least me) Spies are cheaper than cats, preats/axes are better than Churchill's units.
with a couple courts and spy specs, but I would rather built couple more units and run a few turns of EP to build up for Church

3) I made a mistake about the off shore Islands, I assumed that we had the Great Lighthouse, its now only worth 2 trade routes, 6 Gold total at best. Though the bottom 3 are close to Rome, and would pay for themselves.

Those can wait for a bit longer, maybe the frozen fish we can get.

4) Time has come to Expand Via the Sword. Churchhill is just asking to gift us some cities, 2 Stacks, 1st to Take out York, Via a spy to drop defences, the 2nd being linked with 1st to take out London, and essentially crippling Churchhill. 2 moves, 3rd move we take York, Immediately move on London, while awaiting cultural expansion, linking up with 2nd stack, Take London, solves a lot of the Problems in the South.

5) Catherine Know's Currency, I'd sell it to Churchhill 1st, then sell it to all others for the cash alone. Better to get something then nothing, and Make a move on Churchhill after doing that.

Right now we only have 3 cities (excluding Rome) Antium, Ravenna and Neapolis. So just one stack would suffice, hit York then on to London. Need 4-5 spies, hopefully none with caught.

On the War, swapping Churchhill into No State Religion, which we adopt, after building the Attack force, would remove the Friendly status that he currently has with Both Hammurabi and Catherine, they are only Pleased with us.

That's something I didn't think about, good call. Are you saying we adopt No State Religion? We can change his religion since he has Hindu and Buddha, or is it cheaper for civics?

Wrangle some sort of Peace deal with Catherine on the Turn of War Declaration, we have 10 turns to do our damage. That should give sufficient time to take London, York, and Hastings, and move onto Warwick.

Looking at the Peace weights from the BTS Reference guilde Catherine can bribed at any status to attack, but will attack at Pleased. Hammurabi, won't declare or be bribed at pleased. Catherine is far enough away that she could be enticed to join in a war against Churchhill, if we move him to No state Religion, as we don't have any other religion to move him too.

Scout out that City of Hammurabi, to the NE of Churchhill, if only for the Additional trade routes from knowing a city.

We could gift her sugar for 10 turns then cancel it. He does have a city probably fish/iron needs to be scouted. As far as Cathy coming in, HAs/cats is her best and by the 10 turns Warrick will just be left.

 

[ifinnem]

Seems like mostly according to plan.

Not sure why we settled the silver sheep before sealing order borders up N from Hammy tho...

EDIT: Not sure why we are worried about Hammy being friendly with Church. As long as he is pleased with us we are safe. Cathy needs to be watched all the time of course

Ok checked out the save
First strategic thoughts
1) War probably needs to wait as Church will have Crossb in 1 turn and currently our praets only have ~60% odds vs cities. At the very least we need a lot of catapults...
1a) If we plan on war soon we should delay WIP praets and cats till we can switch to Theoc (post SP)
2) Diplo plan should be to keep Hammy happy but go after Church then Cathy (she is impossible to trust)
3) Civics: Bureau easily pays for itself. Cost = 5 . Benefit = +14

More detailed input
OMG - you could be reported to the workers union for mismanagement
A few examples: Worker is building a grass farm for Medio instead of farming irrigated rice?? Building a spice plantation that will not be worked while new cities worked unimproved tiles and Ravenna is about to grow without cottages built??
Chopping jungle on dye near Vandal instead of speeding up corn farm??
More farms for Arret when it already has 2 + pigs??

All in good fun

City by city
Rome: Agree SP->NE-Forum. Chop that dang forest NE (at Church border) to speed it up
Ant: Spam cats or use as worker pump if war delayed. Irrigate 1 N of Rome to chain irrigate wheat. Switch FP farm to plains forest. That will stagnate it and give FP for Ravenna cottage
Cumae: CH could be useful here soon
Arp: Work mine (vs farm) for 4 turns then whip granary. send worker to chop forest for Paya (see above) as plains mine can wait
Neap: Whip settler into something, worker? (CH soon here too)
Ravenna: take the FP farm from Ant and make it a cottage. It should ideally be working another cottage not the Iron mine too
Medio: Farm the rice first!
Arret: Work the pigs instead of farm! I still think this should be long term IW city. Hence no more farms for now. Whip infra here

I think we can lay off the libraries for now and focus on higher priority builds...

 

[Stochastic]

Cumae really needs a lighthouse. It could grow quite a bit working Colossus coast and really boost our commerce.

I agree on swapping into Theo (and get CRII Preats out of the box). Right now each civic swap costs one turn of Anarchy so I don't think there is any point on waiting for the Buro swap. As a side note, Hammy is building the SP, so when we finish it we should check for failure gold from him.

About the war plans. PRO Crossbows are a serious concern, but it looks like Churchill has only one source of iron. Maybe we could sabotage that? It would be nice to take a chunk out of Churchill now, if we refocus our EPS points we should have enough to get off two city revolts, so hopefully we can get away with only a few catapults per stack (and 4 spies- 2 per city). Since the cats would be used mostly for doing collateral, the second promo is less important so we should get as many cats now as possible and then build Preats after we are in Theo. I think the plan of attacking York and Hastings with a convergence to London is a good one, but we should try to get another scout of his land before attacking.

I think the irrigation of the wheat S of Antium should be done with a farm 1E of the wheat. Yes that is a plains, but it is a corner of a river so we could build water mills on the grasslands when we get access to them.

Sounds like ifinnem's plan is very good, I agree on the sad workers.

 

[Brian Shanahan]

I have nothing much to add, except for the fairly sizeable island our SW that the trireme is scouting. It has Iron, Marble, Fish and Crab (that we can see). So I'm just wondering is it worth colonising or not?
It has no rivers and all city sites are essentially coastal, but there are some decent boni there if we want them.

 

[Thy_Spellcraft]

I have nothing much to add, except for the fairly sizeable island our SW that the trireme is scouting. It has Iron, Marble, Fish and Crab (that we can see). So I'm just wondering is it worth colonising or not?
It has no rivers and all city sites are essentially coastal, but there are some decent boni there if we want them.

This island is at least worth further scouting.. and as we already secured (and soon will settle) enough land on the main continent I think it's worth settling this island too even though the only reason might be to deny it to the AI..

 

[cripp7]

yes keeping it away from AIs is key, but it does need more scouting. atm keep the trieme going around the shore, I'd like to see the core of it though. if we put a settler on a boat, we'd need an archer or unit for barb protection to go with it.

 

[Brian Shanahan]

yes keeping it away from AIs is key, but it does need more scouting. atm keep the trieme going around the shore, I'd like to see the core of it though. if we put a settler on a boat, we'd need an archer or unit for barb protection to go with it.

Oh definitely yes on protection, you can see barb borders in the fog.

 

[ifinnem]

So are we going for war or not?

The islands can wait...

 

[Stochastic]

I think we should plan to go for a war to grab the three big cities and then, depending on whether scouting reveals another source of iron in his borders, consider grabbing that as well.

 

[Brian Shanahan]

We go to war I think, but read my caveat in the last post. I believe we don't have the numbers yet, but a good recruitment turnset will work.

 

[cripp7]

War is the plan, we have enough preats atm. Applying all EP to Church and using spies to drop defenses, cats for collateral damage. Need about 5 cats and 6-8 spies incase any get caught.

 

[Brian Shanahan]

War is the plan, we have enough preats atm. Applying all EP to Church and using spies to drop defenses, cats for collateral damage. Need about 5 cats and 6-8 spies incase any get caught.

Got my SGs mixed up, sorry, in Sengir-3 we're also plannign war, and that's where I've the big misgivings. Time to go to bed I think.

 

[ifinnem]

Who's up? Are we discussing a PP soon?

 

[Thy_Spellcraft]

As voting for war goes on I too will vote for war.. But I won't believe we'll collect enough EPs for three cities within a set without raising the EP-slider. Before doing something like that rather build a few more cats!!

 

[Brian Shanahan]

Who's up? Are we discussing a PP soon?

As regards who's up the roster is telling me that our glorious leader is next into the breach.

1. cripp -up
2. ifinnem -on deck
3. IPEX -
4. Brian -
5. Stochastic -
6. Thy_Spellcraft - done

 

[cripp7]

Yup I'm up, sorry I'm kinda falling away a bit from the SG, lots going on in the home. Let me take a close look at the save and I'll come up with a plan.

ppp
Apply all EP to Church
Rome: keep build Paya -> hindu monastery-> NE
Antium: cats -> spies
Cumae: wb -> lh
Naepolis: settler -> preats -> cats continue growing
Ravenna: library -> duct chop forest to the north for cottage
Last 3 just continue growth

Still need a few more workers, so I need to squeeze in a couple somewhere.
Tech path we need to discuss, beelining MM and trading for everything else?
We could steal Machinery from Church at the cost of 2 city drops, or just wait until war is done and then try it. Also we have a shot at Music for the free GA which would help with the economy, also Music is good trade bait!

 

[Brian Shanahan]

We do need a bigger army I think, we've 6 Praets free atm, and nothing else, so a build-up is a good idea.
On the beeline to Mass Media we'd go through th following after Civil Service:
Machinery; Compass; Optics; Paper; Prinitng Press; Astronomics; Scientific Method; Physics; Electricity; Radio and finally Mass Media.
That will give us access to (looking at wonders here): Sankore; Broadway; Eifel; Rock and Roll; Cristo Redentor; Holy Wood and UN. With a hard beeline we should get nearly all these. But, and it's a big one IMO, we miss out on renaissance & industrial army, Taj, Statue of Liberty, among many other useful techs around. Personally I thin we should start working towards it, but not to go tunnel vision just yet.

Finally on Music:

Spoiler :

Hammy has it.

 

[cripp7]

Missed that Music tech! As far as army goes, preats/cats will take care of JC & Cathy. I think it would be pretty smooth sailing hunkering down once we have all that land. We could divert to get a military edge if needed, or at least steal techs on our way.

 

[Brian Shanahan]

Missed that Music tech! As far as army goes, preats/cats will take care of JC & Cathy. I think it would be pretty smooth sailing hunkering down once we have all that land. We could divert to get a military edge if needed, or at least steal techs on our way.

You're probably right but I tend to feel naked getting to Mass Media territory without rifles, and I think we should really go for the Taj at nationalism, and look at Democracy (if only for the SoL).
I agree about work towards MM but I think it's a bit early for the hard bee line.

 

[cripp7]

True about TM, a free GA would be nice. I'll wait to see the other input on this