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Post by Sullla on May 1, 2011 11:08:29 GMT -5
Update for T121: Here's the overview shot of our empire. The main news for the turn was a large sequence of whips carried out, as I described in the previous post. I whipped: - Market in Chinook (4 pop) - Market in Chehalis (3 pop) - Worker in Olmec (2 pop) - Worker in Zapotec (2 pop) This was after double whipping a Jewish missionary in Teo last turn. Therefore we've whipped away 13 pop, which definitely hit our economy a bit. The good news is that all of these cities will immediately regrow their first pop point back after whipping (except the worker whips, which will regrow as soon as they finish the worker) and start reclimbing back up to their former size. I think we get 6 different pop increases next turn or something like that, to make up for the 11 we whipped this turn. Secondly, all of these cities are overflowing into forges, to take advantage of Metal Casting tech arriving. I have Navajo working Weath for one turn to take advantage of the same overflow from its forest chop last turn. Thus we'll be able to do a round of forge whips in about 10 more turns. All of our core cities will pretty much have market and forge at that point. I also made sure to get the Organized Religion benefit from whipping before swapping civics, and yes, that does carry over even after you switch out of the civic. I guess it would have to, you can't exactly whip a market to completion, and then suddenly not have it complete because you're no longer in OR civic! The capital did successfully get Taoism spread into last turn. Now this upcoming turn will see another dice roll, as we try to get Judaism in there as well. I'm building the Taoist temple now, and I'm going to start switching to Priest specialists next turn. We can get turns of 2 Priests, 2 Priests, 3 Priests, and 3 Priests before we swap back to Organized Religion = 60 Great Prophet points on this round of Caste System/Pacifism. Assuming a successful religious spread, I'll have the fourth temple completed for our next round of the civics, making for 4 Priests x 3 GPP x 5 turns x 2 (Pacifism) = 120 GPP. Two more such cycles would be 60 + 120 + 120 = 300. Finish a Great Prophet in 25 turns, around T146. Not bad micro, eh? Of course it all assumes that we can get that Jewish missionary to spread religion successfully, so hope we get that dice roll next turn... I think the odds are around 68% when you already have 3 religions. It's a shame you can't pay gold or something to ensure a guaranteed spread, sigh. We successfully founded Vandal this turn, our 13th city. I love that the name on the barbarian city list happened to be "Vandal", as we're kinda poaching this location away from Nakor. ;D Vandal forced an Artist after our swap to Caste System, and that will coincide with the time our workers need to hook up those pigs anyway. 5 food right off the bat as soon as it pops borders. There's also a Confucian missionary heading over here to spread religion - I don't want to wait for a natural spread here, as it's quite far from our Holy City. This is now our territory, and Nakor should not be able to challenge us here. Because our army is pretty small, Pacifism is an awesome civic for us to be running, quite aside from the Great Person points bonus. The "None" upkeep cost as opposed to the "High" cost of Organized Religion dropped our expenses by about 18gpt, basically a full tick on the science slider. Very nice! Of course, we don't get the production bonus while we're in this civic either. Nevertheless, if we can time our whips to get the OR bonus, I don't see any reason why we can't spend a lot of our other time in Pacifism. Stick in OR when we're building/whipping, stick in Pacifism when we're growing on max food. Makes sense, I think. What tech do we want to research next? The optimal economic play would be to go straight for Civil Service. However, it's quite expensive and will take about 10-12 turns to get there. Bureaucracy would indeed be awesome though... Alternately, Construction is also a good option, allowing us to cross rivers without penalty (would help with the workers quite a bit!) and build catapults, which won't go out of date for centuries yet. Iron Working is cheap and would let us see where iron is located, although it wouldn't be that useful to us now. What do you think? I can go in any direction. Those seem like our best options right now. Here are our Demos after whipping away the 11 pop. They held up better than I expected, and our Food was all the way up at 220 before we did that whipping. In terms of international tech, we saw this: T120 plako/mackoti: Metal Casting (both of them) T121 Moogle: Currency reogarrarr: Monarchy The regoarrarr team is burning through the cash from their Great Merchant, losing 120gpt at 100% science. They're down to 700g from their initial 1000g, and they picked up Monotheism, then Monarchy in 2 turns of research. Obviously unsustainable, but they'll get some techs while they have it. plako is hard to get a read on because he's getting gold from capturing WarriorKnight cities. That's allowing him to run some deficit research for techs. plako remains extremely worrying, as I'll detail more in a minute. Parkin made 55g last turn, at what I assume to be 0% science (can't be certain but would be logical). We make over 100 gold at 0% science, so our economy definitely looks to be better than his. But he does have 15 cities, which will be trouble. The other teams haven't done much on the tech front. Moogle's research, for example, is terrible. I believe it took him 10 turns to get Currency (based off of when he got Monarchy tech earlier and revolted to it) which would be pretty bad. OK, weird news of the turn: Moogle has declared war on Adlain! Wasn't expecting *THAT*, I'll say. Moogle does not have a large army (barely larger than our skeleton crew) and he doesn't have any advanced techs. He lacks Construction, Iron Working, and Horseback Riding... and Archery too, haha! All he can build are axes, spears, and chariots. Needless to say, that shouldn't pose a threat in this game at the 120 turn mark. However, Adlain has the smallest military in the game, so... who knows. I have emailed Adlain to ask him how things look. Adlain actually has Iron Working and Horseback Riding techs, so he certainly should be able to whip some horse archers and survive with no problems. Given the distances involved between their civs, and Adlain's core of high-culture cities (lots of 40% defenses) I really can't see Moogle doing too much here. A failed attack would be wonderful, setting both teams back while doing nothing to change the landscape. Thoughts on playing this situation? I can't see us going over to military ourselves and trying to fight Adlain, at least not right now. That would feel foolish to me. Would really appreciate your thoughts though. Finally, plako took another city off of WarriorKnight this turn. WK has 5 cities left and won't last much longer. Meanwhile, plako now has 17 cities (!) to our 13. Yes, his tech is a little behind ours, but not by much. We both have all Ancient Age techs, and we both had 6 Classical era techs (counting Metal Casting for us). We're basically ahead only the lightbulbed Philosophy. With so much more pop and land than us, and gaining more every turn from war, plako can macro his way to victory from this point. He has more food, more production, a MUCH larger army, and his teching is roughly equivalent to ours. I... don't have any answers here. All I really see is us waiting and hoping plako makes a big mistake somewhere down the road. Speaker, do you have any thoughts or suggestions? I feel at a loss on how to deal with plako. I'm not sure what we can do here. I feel like he's only getting stronger, pulling further away from the pack. He's snowballing too far ahead, like a fed champion in League of Legends. Can we do anything here? I'm happy with how I played so far, but plako has just been better.
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Post by Sullla on May 1, 2011 23:47:07 GMT -5
OK, Speaker and I had a chance to discuss things today and go over our plans for the immediate future. We are going to continue to play farmer's gambit right now, as we can't do anything to influence events over by plako, and that does the most to set us up for future success. We actually do have a stronger military than our two immediate neighbors (Nakor and Adlain), along with long-running NAPs with each. Should be pretty safe, as both of them came asking us for longer peace deals recently. I am going to speed up the pace of expansion a little bit as the city spamming of other teams does repesent a danger. We should be able to do this without too much trouble. Just one screenshot for this turn. Hope the detail level isn't too small. Cherokee grew to size 14 this turn, and assigned two Priest specialists for the first time. We'll finish the Taoist temple and assign a third Priest next turn. I'll finish the nearly-complete monastery after that, and do some combination of our final temple and forge next. In the biggest dice roll of the turn, we did get a successful Jewish spread into Cherokee! Very, very nice. I'll make sure we have all four temples done for our next round of Caste System/Pacifism after this one. Great Prophet should be done in 15-20 turns, and that's going to help us a ton in the long run. (Confucianism is the #1 most spread religion in the world! To say nothing of combining it with our UB stock exchanges, heh.) Anasazi finishes a settler next turn for the southern deer spot; workers are roading to the spot as we speak. Weakish location for a city, but we'll make it work, and we need to get that spot before the crabs location in the south. (Crabs location needs a workboat to do anything, and we can't really build a workboat in a size 1 city. Notice no forests to chop over on that eastern site. The deer city therefore has to come first, and build a workboat for crab city.) Grew 6 pop overall this turn, a nice recovery from the whipping we did last turn. Most of our core cities are going to be working on forges for the next few turns. That means we're going to get some settlers out of our weaker cities in the meantime. Navajo went onto settler this turn, with a lot of chop overflow from its library. We're chopping 2 more forests over there, which will finish it and get us the settler for the southern spot on the Adlain border. I could not have done this without the worker labor from the whips last turn, so those were definitely needed. Speaker suggested that we work on chopping all those forests in the west, and I'm going to have 4 workers doing exactly that for the immediate future. Meanwhile, Illinois is going to swap to a settler next turn (when 1t from growth) and produce a settler for the north through a combination of whipping and chopping. That will go to one of 3 different fish spots up there, which one we'll figure out later. After the forges get done, some of our older cities can take over settler duty again, and let the newer cities build their forges. Best way I can see to do it. You can see our tech choice at the top of the screen: Civil Service. We thought about what to pick next, and asked ourselves "are we going to be building catapults right now? Are we going to be chopping jungle right now?" etc etc. The answer to all those rhetorical questions were no, so we decided to go for the optimal economic tech in the form of Civil Service. Bureaucracy civic is going to be REALLY good for us here; Cherokee is a great city, with 8 cottages already being worked along with strong production. The four religions inside this city are not at all trivial either. One monastery isn't all that great with its 10% science bonus, but how about 4 of them for 40% bonus? That's practically another Academy! So if we get the commerce addition from Bureaucracy (+50% base commerce) and then stack that alongside our library + Academy + quadruple monasteries = 115% science. We can further add grocer and stock exchange later for the gold half of the equation, +110% gold. It will be pretty darn good. ;D Civil Service should take 10 turns to complete (we're only just short of it right now while running a nice little profit). What's also nice is that other teams will go ahead and discover Construction/Iron Working/Calendar/etc. while we're venturing ahead to Civil Service, discounting the price to research for us. Since we don't need those techs right now, we can delay them until we do. Internationally, the Moogle/Adlain war is already over! Well that was short. Moogle razed the Adlain city that he didn't like (Ianamus Zur) without capturing it, and they've already signed peace. About as good of an outcome as we could have hoped for. We have re-upped our NAP with Adlain until T160, which is around when we'll be gearing up for war ourselves. I have no idea what the exact date will be, but something in the T160-175 range feels right for me, and better to have the NAP end a little early than be ready to attack and not be able to. regoarrarr continues to city spam, now up to 16 total. There's no possible way he has the worker labor to support that, but economically he can Great Lighthouse trade route spam to sustain it for the moment. He has founded 11 cities in 30 turns, totally crazy stuff. We'll see if it works. If someone were to declare war, I suspect that whole effort would collapse like a house of cards. Doubt it will happen though. Outside of our own Metal Casting, the only tech discovered this turn was... Metal Casting, by Nakor. Heh. regoarrarr continues to burn through his Great Merchant cash at -150g per turn. Now down to 500g, and will likely get another tech next turn as he researches at a gigantic deficit. plako and Parkin both burned themselves down from 70g each to under 10g, and will have to run min science this turn to build up their coffers. I bet their break-even rate is probably around 20%. But they do have a lot of cities and population. Best estimate is that Parkin has about 90 population to our 75. (Although I have to point out that he's whipped a total of 5 pop the whole game, while we've whipped scores.) The GNP numbers, for what they're worth: GNP Rival Best 253 [Parkin running deficit research] Our Score 201 [#2 overall] Rival Aveage 145 Rival Worst 33 So that looks pretty good. We are also still in our customary #3 spot in Food, as we've been for ages. Can't catch up there so long as we're down in city count. Anyway, we're in a comfortable position, but we're not the leader. This will continue to irk me nonstop until we are the leader. Being in second or third is no fun. I want to be the runaway that everyone else obsesses over.
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Post by Sullla on May 2, 2011 11:04:09 GMT -5
We have another new turn already (T123) and we may get in another one before the day is over. While I love the fast pace, it does eat up a lot of time. I haven't been able to update the RB thread, because keeping this forum current and playing the turns has been all I can handle. Hopefully will have time to throw something up over there today. I'm going to make this pretty short. Here's our capital working the three Priest specialists as we push towards our Great Prophet. As I said before, with revolts into and out of Pacifism civic, it should take roughly 20 turns to complete. We'll build the fourth temple and work four Priests (at slight food deficit) next time we swap back into our current civics. Over at Teo, I have us working 4 Scientists at the moment. We could actually do 5 without issue, but I want us to keep at least slow growth in that city, plus we can't push Scientists too fast or they'll finish before our Great Prophet. Those Scientists helped our research rate markedly - we're now making 126 beakers/turn at a positive income of +11gpt. True break-even rate would be somewhere around 135 beakers/turn. Note that just two turns ago, when we carried out those massive whips, our research was break-even at 105 beakers/turn. Your cities grow back quickly, and whipping those markets definitely helped. We produced a settler this turn, who is walking down to the southern hill spot. Unfortunately there's a slight delay due to lack of roads in the extreme south, which means the city will be founded T126 (in three turns). I'll have workers there to chop a granary and improve the deer right away, at least get the poor location started out growing the right way. Navajo and Illinois should both finish their settlers in the next 3-4 turns as well. Hopefully we'll have 16 cities by Turn 130. Internationally, the big news was Parkin finishing Civil Service tech. I wish we had had Alphabet earlier, so I could get a read on how long it took him to research that... All I can say is that it took at least 6t. Parkin revolted to Bureaucracy civic, so we gain one turn on him from the Anarchy at least. (This after spending 2 turns to revolt into Christianity and Slavery/OR.) Parkin has a weird tech path: he has Theology and Civil Service in the medieval era, however his only Classical techs are Math, Currency, and Code of Laws. He clearly doesn't feel threatened, as his military is weaker than ours (heh). Parkin also ran his gold down to absolute 0 - literally not even one gold in the bank - so he'll have to accumulate some funds before he gets his next tech. The only other tech discovery was regoarrarr getting Metal Casting, as he lost another 150g this turn at max research. 430g left in the bank from that Great Merchant. It's definitely helped them a lot, althougth if that was their first Great Person and it delayed/stopped a Great Scientist from getting an early Academy, it came at a real price. Deficit spending time is nearly over for them. No clue what their real research rate is. Demographics. Parkin has been #1 in GNP for some time now, and drops out this turn because of the Anarchy. I believe the 227 is regoarrarr and his super-deficit spending spree. plako has taken another city off of WarriorKnight and now has 18 overall. WK has 4 cities remaining. That one's all done but for the screaming. I do think that plako is practically bankrupt right now, but once his economy recovers... it'll be trouble. At least Civil Service ETA has dropped significantly from last turn. The 3% discount from Parkin along with our own improved research rate has it down to just 8 more turns. Bureaucracy will help us a lot, as our capital is really good. Shrine will help even more, since Confucianism is the #1 most spread religion in the world. It looks like we would get about 20 gold right now from it, 25gpt with our market. That's worth a full tick on the research slider, ~25 extra beakers. It will be a huge difference maker when we get it. Shrine + Bureaucracy will catapult our economy ahead... I can't wait.
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Post by Sullla on May 3, 2011 11:32:49 GMT -5
It's another beautiful day in Pitboss land... ;D We finally found where WarriorKnight is making his stand. And he's got a pretty nice army, all things considered. A whole bunch of units in a city on a hill with walls. If he could get Construction tech and whip out some catapults too, it would be even more formidable. (I'm sure that's what he's researching now, but of course WK has a terrible economy with just 4 cities and a massive military.) Now plako can take this spot eventually, but not without suffering very significant losses. Perhaps this war will drag out longer yet. We are in talks with regoarrarr to try and organize something to keep WarriorKnight alive and plako curtailed as much as possible. If I were plako, I would sign peace now and come back to finish things later, much like we did with Jowy in the Pitboss #2 game. Remember, no tech trading in this game. WarriorKnight is hopelessly crippled. Sign peace, tech up to the point where those axes/spears/horse archers are hopelessly outdated, and then finish him off. But plako is refusing to sign peace, which is causing a lot of fear in all the teams near him. Maybe they'll intervene in some way. I'm trying to take part in the diplo talks, although of course I'll limit our involvement to just talking. Not going to send military or gold away for someone else to fight with. Here's the north, where we're considering which location to settle next. I actually think my preference is none of the spots here, but the location 2N of the pigs tile. That's one place where we don't need a border expansion to get the fish. The western spot is really quite weak, and I'd rather stay away from that jungle stuff for now. The island fish I think should be our next city in the north, not this one. However, this spot would rule out the clams location, so.... hmmm. We could always build 1N of the pigs, and then another city 3N of that, southwest of the clams. I'm moving our galley to defog those tiles, and we'll make our final decision after that. There's not too much more to say, as it was a quiet turn. plako discovered Code of Laws (4t), and Adlain discovered Monarchy (5t). plako's research is so hard to get a clean read on right now, as he gained about 200 gold from WarriorKnight city captures. I very much doubt he could have done Code of Laws that fast without running through his capture gold. In any case, plako has 1 gold, Adlain has 1 gold, and Parkin has 0 gold right now. No deficit spending for them in the near future! Parkin's interface reads +22gpt right now, which would be awesome if it's 0% science (we make +108gpt right now at 0%). Of course, he might not be a min science, but if he is, his economy is just about shot. Parkin is running some very expensive civics (Bur = High, OR = High, Slavery = Med) right now, and his costs should be substantial. We'll see. regoarrarr has only 286g left from the 1000g he received from the Great Merchant trade mission. As he was the only one to inquire about the tech we can see from Alphabet, I offered to sell him that information to relieve him of some of that gold. 100g for all the techs teams currently have, 250g to tell him what everyone has turn by turn for the rest of the game. It doesn't hurt us at all - everyone can already see our techs - and anything that would simultaneously drain his coffers and fill ours is worth going for. I have no idea if he'll accept or not. I would give it very serious thought, if our positions were reversed. Knowing what techs everyone else has is such a huge advantage. If we can make some money off of it, even better for us. We change civics back to Slavery/OR in 2t, which is perfect because we'll swap back to Pacifism/Caste System in 7t. Incidentally, Civil Service is due in 7t. Nice timing!
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Post by Sullla on May 5, 2011 10:05:19 GMT -5
OK, updating on the last few turns: We settled Goth in the south last turn, and workers have already done a good job getting it started. Meanwhile, as I was logged into the turn yesterday, Nakor messaged me and had a long chat. He said that we were not going to be happy with him, because their team was about to plant a city north of Vandal. Sure enough, there it is this turn, right on the same spot we were planning on settling a city. I made it very clear that we were not pleased with this action, settling a city past where we had already staked our claim. Nakor was apologetic, but more or less said that we would just have to deal with it, while reminding us that we have an NAP in place. The sad thing is that he really has us here. We can't fight with Nakor, not if we want to have any chance of winning the game. For metagaming purposes, we need him as an ally against plako, so we can go off and crush Adlain and annex all that territory in the west. Still, that doesn't mean that I have to like Nakor's style of play. Sorry if you're reading this later, Nakor: I don't like the way you run diplomacy. Spending the first half of our conversation stressing the need for cooperation against plako, then settling a city off in our backlines. Signing a long NAP with plako and giving him carte blanche to go off and kill WarriorKnight. Without that NAP, plako would at least have to think about being invaded by his other neighbor! Sigh. Oh well. At least we have a pretty good read on Nakor's personality. He always seems to shy away from confrontation unless he can work through (hide behind?) other allies. If we keep offering him NAPs, he'll keep taking them. I will try to lock him into peace long enough so that we'll have a free window to take over Adlain. But the downside is that we have to put up with that eyesore in the north. Argh. Anyway, Nakor more or less admitted that they were out of room to expand. That's exactly what we wanted, and a very good sign that he's getting squeezed on both sides with a mere 12 cities. Now we just need to direct the aggression which will result elsewhere, onto plako or Parkin. We still have room for plenty of cities; I get 21 by my current count, and that's not using the mass of jungle. Conquering Adlain successfully would get us to ~35 cities, if we can pull it off later. I believe that teams are starting to run out of space, even with a map this big. That's when the big wars with start to break out... Above is how I've dotmapped the north. We have a settler whipped this turn coming out of Illinois, and I plan to send this one to the spot 1N of the pigs. Yes, it's cramped with Saxon, but it'll have a fish tile and tons of water tiles to work, which is all that city needs. If we move it another tile further north, then we cannot get the clams spot. (If that clams location were a true island, it would be feasible, but since it's technically all the same landmass, the 3-tile spacing rules still apply.) The next city after that I want on the island next to Vandal, but since we need Caste System to expand borders there for the fish, and we're in Slavery right now, I'd rather go for the onshore location which doesn't need the Artist. Saxon is building a work boat next for that location. Carib just double-whipped a worker, and will regrow next turn while overflowing into (and hopefully completing) its lighthouse. In the south, we will be settling our 15th city next turn on the Adlain border. I have a grassland river farm ready so that spot can immediately get +3 food/turn, and a granary forest chop coming due shortly. That will get it off to a pretty decent start. Navajo (our other no-resources city on the Adlain border) is now a decent city with its +5 food surplus from three grassland farms, growing onto and working riverside cottages. Our other cities are mostly building/whipping forges right now. Our whole core should have forges completed (one way or another) in the next 4 turns before we go back to Pacifism civic. I'm just waiting to time them on the right turn. Teo got the first forge whip this turn, losing 3 pop this turn and regrowing 1 of that next turn. We are going to need courthouses next in our outer cities, as maintenance costs are really starting to hurt us there. Carib at size 5 was up to 8gpt in maintenance. Still, we've played this the correct way, I think. Forges and markets first in the core, then whip courthouses with the +50% bonus production from forge and OR civic. Core cities do market before courthouse, outlying cities do courthouse before market. Our military is pretty pathetic, but I will start beefing that up real soon. Several cities just need forge to go back to military. Other cities need forge + courthouse. But after that, we're pretty set on infrastructure for a while. We won't really have another key building until grocers/stock exchanges/universities. I'll try to use this upcoming period to do the initial preparations for war. That means researching Construction soonish, so that we can at least start stockpiling some catapults. Probably also Horseback Riding, so we can get stables going in a few key cities and train some horse archers (which remain viable units until cannons appear). After Civil Service, I think I favor Iron Working -> Construction -> Horseback Riding. We'll see. Our economy is rather weak at the moment, you can see just breaking even at 125 beakers/turn. We were doing about 150/turn earlier in Caste System/Pacifism. Because our military is so small right now, Pacifism is REALLY good economically. It cuts 20gpt off our expenses, allowing for a full 10% extra tick on the science slider. We are all the way down in the #4 spot on GNP right now, after being #2 for a while earlier. Still, we're pretty much just treading water right now, waiting for Civil Service tech to finish. In 4 turns, we will swap over to Civil Service/Pacifism, and that will give us a giant boost in tech. I bet that we'll be able to crack 175 beakers without too much trouble, almost 50% higher than our current rate. Confucian shrine will come fairly soon after that. And as for our religion... well, Nakor is spreading around to all his cities. It's BY FAR the most-spread religion in the world. We're really lucky Nakor picked our religion to spread (via a free random spread into Horseland) over plako's Judaism or whatever. That shrine is going to be worth a fortune for us! I'll probably recommend we spend 10 straight turns in Pacifism actually, just to get it done faster, rather than go back to OR. Depends on how things look down the road. Internationally, the biggest news was the end of the war between luddite and mackoti. Luddite tried to capture mackoti's capital, and apparently lost the battle along with much of his army. Then they signed peace, awesome! ;D This keep a crippled mackoti in the game, and prevents luddite from becoming too strong. It also denies luddite access to the Pyramids/Representation civic, which he would assuredly use with his Great Library. Anyway, their way seems to have had three major effects: - mackoti was completely crippled - luddite was slowed down enormously, and left far behind in tech - Parkin expanded uncontested into a giant portion of the map Well, 2 out of 3 ain't bad, I guess... Yeah, luddite hasn't expanded east at all. Not even one city, from what I can see. That's why Parkin is so huge in size, because luddite spent all his time and efforts attacking mackoti. To be fair, it also put no pressure on our north either, although that jungle barrier may have done the same thing. But Parkin really has had the dream scenario, not even the slightest competition for land, and a Huge map with low happiness situation where his nutty Charismatic -> Stonehenge opening worked out. Since he blindly went with that opening before knowing what the map looked like (De Gaulle/Egypt pick), that was rather lucky. regoarrarr founded two more cities last turn. It's literally the craziest spam I've ever seen in a Civ4 game, 13 cities in 35 turns. A new city every 2.7 turns. Shouldn't one of his neighbors, like, attack him? There's no way he could defend that kind of spam. Crazy Pitboss game, I swear. Anyway, here's the current city count: plako: 18 regoarrarr: 18 Parkin: 17 Our Team: 14 (15 next turn) Nakor: 12 luddite: 12 Moogle: 11 Adlain: 8 mackoti: 5 WarriorKnight: 4 We're close enough that I don't feel too bad, although I simply cannot keep up with that insane level of spam. I refuse to found cities that we can't defend or have the workers to support. The good news is that plako is totally broke from war expenses; he continues to sit on 5 gold making 0gpt. His only recent tech discoveries came from city capture gold, which allowed him to run the slider at a deficit. Parkin is hard to get a read on; he has Theology and Civil Service, but in Classical tech all he has is Math/Currency/Code of Laws. Parkin is #1 in GNP, but what does that even mean with all his culture? I don't know. I really need to see his cities to find out more information. regoarrarr I got a clean read on though: he is making 61gpt at what is almost certainly 0% science. We make 115gpt at the same mark. So as expected, our economy is quite a bit better than his, which relies entirely on Great Lighthouse trade routes and Zulu ikhanda spam (with Aggressive trait, cheap barracks that fight maintenance). Overall, while we don't look that great now, I think we'll look much better once we can swap our civics in 4 turns. Hopefully...
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Post by Sullla on May 8, 2011 8:31:37 GMT -5
Not much happened the last few turns, so I held off on posting anything. Now that we finally reached T131, time to update: The big news is that we finished research on Civil Service (9t) and carried out our big civic swap. Before changing, I did two final forge whips, then sent us into our new combination of Bureaucracy, Caste System, and Pacifism. The combination of Bur and Pacifism significantly improved our research; we went from making 137 beakers at a loss of -8gpt to making 157 beakers at +11gpt. I predicted that break-even research would be around 175 beakers, and that's actually about right. Just shy of the mark, since we can't actually set 45% research or whatever. At 50% research, we make 190 beakers at -22gpt. Research/GNP has definitely improved. We're actually better than this looks economically, however. I whipped a total of 20 pop over the last four turns, getting forges done in every core city. After the turn rolls over, we'll have forges in 9 of our original 10 cities, and the only city missing one (Illinois) is because we triple-whipped a settler there instead. Could have been 10 out of 10 if we wanted. Anyway, having so many forges up and running will do wonders for our production, and help power our future whips that much stronger. Most cities are overflowing onto courthouses - that's really the one last city improvement at the moment, after which we can start training some military for the first time in pretty much ever. As such, I will start getting some military tech next. We have enough research + overflow to get Iron Working in one turn. It will be nice to see where the iron is on the map, finally. After that, I want to get Construction (3t) and Horseback Riding (2t) in some order. Both are heavily discounted from other teams knowing them, and we can use the bridges over river movement, stables, catapults, and horse archers. All useful stuff from cheap techs. After that... Machinery, maybe? We don't need Calendar until we have a city with one of those resources. I think the Aesthetics/Literature/Drama/Music line we can ignore entirely for the moment. We're not going for the wonders in this game (too many Industrious civs with no stone/marble), and we can safely ignore most of the stuff there for now. We'll want theatres and the two Epics later, but can hold off at the moment. Longer term, I really want us to make a play for an early Liberalism -> Nationalism grab. We'll have the Great Scientist to bulb Education, and with that tech mostly cleared, I don't think another team can beat us to Liberalism if we make a determined effort. Nationhood civic would be insanely good for us, as we could pop in and out of it every 5 turns. Drafting does scale by map size, so we should be able to draft 5 cities (!) per turn, if I remember correctly. We could theoretically spend 5 turns in Nationhood, draft 25 units, and then pop back into Bureaucracy or Free Speech for the next 5 turns, running our economic stuff. (Have I mentioned that Spiritual trait is awesome? ;D) I think that will be the best way to prosecute our wars, getting early Nationhood civic and throw a gigantic army of conscripts at someone (Adlain) who can't respond the same way. Just overwhelm them, it doesn't matter if we have drafted maces so long as they're backed up with tons of catapults and horse archers/knights. Anyway, that's getting ahead of things, but it's what we should be working towards, IMO... Say hi to Magyar, our newest city founded this turn. It's a pure fishing city designed to work the fish, some grassland cottages, maybe the grassland hill, and everything else from the sea. With +6 food, this will actually be a pretty decent city. A chop is due next turn to finish the granary, and a work boat shortly from Saxon. I wish I could have timed it so that the work boat was already sitting there for the new city, but unfortunately not quite. Notice that luddite has a trireme poking around up here. I'm going to hurry up and get the eastern two Xs founded soonish in this area. The spot by Vandal already has a settler underway, finishing in 5t. I'll probably get a settler from Apache for the island clams next. We're up to 16 cities now, which is good compared to everyone other than plako's 20 (!) Parkin still has 17, and regoarrarr has 18. Everyone else well behind us four (13 each for Nakor, luddite, and Moogle). Here's the capital in Bureaucracy civic, after we converted over to running all those Priests. Since we're 1t away from growth, and it won't slow down the ETA of our Great Prophet, I fired one of the Priests after taking this picture and put him on the cottage. That way we can grow to size 15 and work the one unused cottage tile. Now we do starve at -1 food/turn while running those Priests, but Cherokee can handle it for a little while. This city probably won't grow much past size 15 anyway, not until we get Biology at least for extra food. The Prophet will finish in 10 turns if we don't swap out of Pacifism. I'm going to suggest that we stick with Pacifism for those 10 turns, as I think the value of the Shrine will be gigantic for our civ. It's probably worth about 25gpt already, and still going up as our religion continues to spread. Since we have a lot more research multipliers than gold multipliers, 25gpt would translate in something like 35-40 beakers/turn right now. Which is a lot. I see no reason not to stay in Pacifism at the moment - we can even go into Slavery without Organized Religion if we really need to whip something, although I agree that it's a little suboptimal. Probably just let our cities recover and grow for 10 turns, which they need anyway after whipping those forges. Demographics stuff. Our GNP went from 223 last turn up to the 288 you see here. Good stuff. Production is almost up to "Average" status as we continue to complete those forges. I've never been much bothered by that stat, since we've been working cottages and whipping/chopping to build stuff. It will matter when we need to build an army, but not until then. We've been hovering in the 220-240 range for a while now on Food, as I keep whipping all of our big cities for forges. That number should go up pretty fast in the next few turns. We are just below Average in Power rating, and that will change quickly as I research the military techs with large point values: IW (10k), Construction (4k), HBR (10k). Parkin has been #1 in GNP for ages, yet his research is definitely slower than ours, so I don't know what's going on there. Lot of culture, probably. Building courthouses also gives GNP from the espionage points (and reduced costs), so that may also be it, even though markets usually do more to increase research. I'm more concerned about plako's crazy Food count, now up to 313! He does have 20 cities, and the ones that we captured came with some infrastructure intact. Even though plako's research rate is rather weak at the moment, I still say he's the much greater danger. Once he ends the war and sorts out his economy, he's going to be super strong. Good thing he isn't next to us.... We are still the definite tech leader. Parkin and our team are the only ones with any medieval techs; we each have 2 of them. (We both have Civil Service, and we have Philosophy to his Theology.) We have 6 Classical techs, which is pretty average, but we'll power through a bunch of them now at cheap, discounted tech rates. There's no question that we have the inside track to Liberalism at the moment. Internationally, plako continues his slow conquest of WarriorKnight. Just 2 cities left for WK, and it won't be much longer. regoarrarr tried to make a diplomatic effort to save WK, but it failed because none of the teams in the area were willing to do anything. Nakor seems content to sign NAPs with plako and make no effort to stop him from running away, sigh. Elsewhere, luddite build the Hindu Shrine and Adlain built the Buddhist Shrine. That makes Adlain even more of a juicy target, as Buddhism is a widely spread religion itself. Can you imagine if we conquer Adlain and have both shrines under our control? Spread the two religions to all of our cities, and we'll be getting an absolute TON of money to fuel expansion/conquest. I'm practically drooling at the thought already! Finally, Parkin completed Apostolic Palace for his Christian religion this turn. There was never any chance we could compete for that wonder, it was 100% guaranteed for his control ever since he beelined for Theology. Well played Parkin, certainly putting that Industrious trait to good use. However, we generated Scientists instead of Prophets for our civ, and that's going to give us control over Liberalism/Nationalism/Taj Mahal. We shall see what was the better choice in the end. Basically, this game is going to come down to one thing: can we successfully attack and eliminate Adlain? If we can do so in the late medieval/early Renaissance, we'll have a very good chance to win. If not, then we'll never beat plako. Simple as that. In preparation for that date, Nakor has foolishly signed an NAP to turn 190 (!!!) with us. I doubt he realizes that he's given us a total carte blanche to go and destroy Adlain. I see us attacking sometime around T160-170, so that should give us plenty of time to get the deed done. I'll see about getting a similiar NAP with luddite as we settle closer to him, just to ensure safety in the north. I've also been in some preliminary discussions with Moogle, who is interested in joining with us to attack Adlain later. Nothing committed yet, just early suggestions, but we can probably get an ally to make a war like that even smoother. Adlain still only has 8 cities. He's a juicy prize waiting to be snatched up by a stronger civ. Let's make sure that stronger civ is us.
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Post by Sullla on May 9, 2011 11:18:14 GMT -5
Eight posts in a row now... Well I will keep updating here for my loyal reading audience of two people. Our expenses increased by about 10 gold/turn, even though we didn't whip anything or have much in the way of city growths. It must have been a turn where inflation ticked up; global GNP was down this turn for everyone, so I guess it hit everyone. Unfortunately that meant our income went from +20gpt to +10gpt. Nevertheless, we are still in the green on income and producing 167 beakers/turn. Out true break-even research rate is probably about 180 beakers. At the next tick up at 50% science, we make just over 200 beakers/turn at -20gpt. Once we have the shrine up and running (8t to Prophet then 2t for movement to Olmec), we should be able to manage that level of income without too much trouble. The north is developing quite nicely; Carib is a real powerhouse with its double food bonuses. For all of the land that we've settled, we have extraordinarily few cities with double food bonuses. I think we have the capital, Teo, and Carib. Two of our cities have no food bonuses at all! We've been doing a lot of making bricks without straw here. Anyway, the one drawback to our civic swapping is that some of these cities really could benefit from whips, but we're not in Slavery civic. Nor can we change back for another 8t, as we need Caste System and Pacifism right now for Great Prophet generation and Artist border expansion in new cities. Some of our upcoming colonies need that Artist or they'll be crippled. It really is a shame you can only change civics every 5 turns - otherwise, I'd be flipping them even more often. We have 3 total iron locations. The first one you can see by Illinois; we built a cottage over it and are replacing it with a mine. The iron makes Illinois a significantly better city, although it will still never be great. I'm thinking of mining one of the hills there, letting it work iron + hills = 8 shields/turn -> 10 shields/turn with forge, then do endless Confucian missionaries. We can work cottage/lake tiles for everything else and whip out buildings occasionally. Seems like the best use of a marginal city to me. Just need forge + monastery and it will be good to go. That aside over, the next iron happens to be located at Angle, our no-food city on the Adlain border. We actually settled this spot without even knowing the iron was there, and then had it appear in the first ring borders. Heh. Lucky over good? Well, our workers are mining it now for a second source of iron. I agonized over whether to force the Artist at Angle to expand borders; I really wanted to wait until size 2, so it could at least keep growing at +1 food/turn while the borders popped. However, we need the border expansion to get a second grassland farm in place (irrigating off the nearby lake tile), and we also can't chop any forests until borders expand, so... I bit the bullet and used the Artist. Sigh. That slows the city a bit now, but we can chop out a lighthouse with the remaining 2 forests and then the city will have grassland river farm (3 food) + lighthouse lake tile (3 food) + lighthouse whales tile (3 food) = +5 food surplus. Grab the food-neutral iron tile at size 4, and suddenly we have a semi-decent city over there. Now anyone can make a good city out of one of those disgusting corn/pigs/gold locations, but I get the most pleasure out of developing marginal land like Angle. Remember, it's always about the food. If you can feed a city and get growth going, everything else follows from there. Our final iron is in the southern tundra, near the crabs and silver. It will be in range of our second city down south of the capital which we haven't founded yet. Goth, the city that does exist, is about to hit size 2 and is about halfway done its lighthouse. We'll go lighthouse -> work boat there and settle that other crabs spot as soon as the work boat is ready to go. No point in settling the city until we have some kind of food tile for it to work. I'll get a settler out of the capital for that, probably as soon as we're done with our Priest games in 8t. One settler is nearly done in Anasazi (2t), and another one is set to follow in Apache (probably 5t from right now). I've been doing a song and dance up there in the north trying to make sure every city has defenders and work boats ready, and moving our one galley into the right spots. Anyway, skipping the mundane details, we should have the island spot next to Vandal settled T138 (5t) and the island clams spot settled T140 (7t). This gives us just enough time to pop borders with an Artist at the island fish spot before revolting back into Slavery civic again on T141, the same date we finish our Great Prophet. Note that I'm settling the island clams spot over the western fish because the former does NOT need a border expansion, and we won't be in Caste System when it gets settled. Whew! Juggling pretty hard here, but it's a lot of fun. That would give us 18 cities in 140 turns... I feel like that would be really good, even though other teams have been even faster. But unlike what I've seen others doing, we won't settle cities that don't have defenders and/or workers to support them. Check out Nakor's two island cities if you log into the game: Dashboard Light is buried in jungle, no workers nearby, working a 2/0/0 jungle rice tile because nothing else has even 2 food. Big waste there. Don't settle the spot until you have workers there to cut the jungle. Speaking of jungle, here's my preliminary dotmap of this rough area to our north. I'm bringing back our scouting warrior from the Nakor island to go check this out, but I'm pretty sure it's all still unclaimed. I see no sugars or dyes connected on the inventory screens of Adlain, Moogle, and regoarrarr, plus luddite doesn't even have Iron Working tech. Looks like a safe area for the moment. The key to this region is that yellow location over in the west. It's the only spot with fresh water, so we can theoretically cut all this jungle down and bring farms to the east now that we have Civil Service tech. Obviously we need more information here, especially finding out if there are any seafood resources south of those red and blue dots. Nevertheless, hopefully we can get a further 4-5 cities in this no man's land region. We should be able to get 25 cities without even needing to attack someone... maybe as many as 40 cities if we successfully conquer Adlain later. He's not using his land nearly as efficiently as he should, and it's a big map. Parkin has settled another city, and he now has 18. regoarrarr has 19 and plako has 20. The bad news is that plako gets 321 Food to our 240, and he has roughly 127 total pop to our 89. Yikes! The good news is that these other teams have kind of crushed their economies through overexpansion. plako's research has falled off drastically since his war started with WarriorKnight; aside from city capture cash, he hasn't been able to research much of anything. (Want to know something truly insane? There are still 2 more Greek cities to capture, and I saw plako moving another SETTLER around in his territory. Jeez, man!) Parkin and regoarrarr both make about 50gpt at 0% science. Well, we make 150gpt at 0% science! So yes, we have fewer cities than them but our economy is *MUCH* stronger. We'll see how this turns out in the end. I love the classic "Food vs GNP" match though - always the most interesting scenario in Civ4! (At least, interesting up until we take out Adlain and have both the Food and GNP lead, haha.) Not much going on in research right now. You should feel free to check out the Excel spreadsheet for the game, everything in it is updated aside from the Power chart (too much trouble to do until we're actually ready to fight). I picked Horseback Riding over Iron Working for one reason: I wanted to get the 3% bonus beakers from WarriorKnight knowing the tech, and I was afraid he might die if I did Construction first. Heh. Well, we'll get HBR next turn (2t research) and then Construction in 3t after that. Thoughts on the following tech? I will probably go for Machinery, just because it will open up maces if we really need them. Pretty soon though, I want us to push for early Liberalism. All we need at this point is Paper (1035 beakers), Education (~1000 beakers with Scientist), and Liberalism itself (2415 beakers). 4500 beakers total, essentially. We should be able to finish it around T160, roughly. Truthfully, we don't want Liberalism as much as we want Nationalism, which we'll take for free. Early Nationhood civic + Spiritual will be INSANELY good in this map, full capital letters intended. All we have to do is get the tech early, and then we can roll out an unstoppable gigantic army of maces/muskets/redcoats to swarm over whomever we wish. That's how I see us beating Adlain, building a bunch of catapults and horse archers/knights and using drafted maces as the grunt foot soldiers. If we can do it fast enough, he won't even see it coming. Think that's the next longterm goal to shoot for in research... The closest team to us in research is Parkin, and he's off doing weird stuff again. We both have Civil Service, and he has Theology to our Philosophy. After getting Metal Casting and Iron Working, his next tech was... Aesthetics. Interesting. Parkin still does not have Monarchy, Construction, Horseback Riding, or Archery techs. I feel as though he's trying to play this like some crazy Single Player game: the early Stonehenge, the lack of Slavery civic until very recently, the heavy investment into religion, the Temple of Artemis, going after Aesthetics now, ignoring military techs, etc. It's a very strange way to play a competitive MP game. I feel like someone should be attacking these team with massive land and no military... right? Am I missing something? Our military rating is on the upswing now that we're researching military techs and starting to train some units. I'm quietly trying to get at least two units in all of our border cities. Apache will be size 11 next turn, and ready to start building some cats or horse archers after it does its settler. We were #1 in GNP this turn while still researching with positive income. That's the best news of all. Our economic edge is slowly starting to manifest itself.
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Post by maskeddetective on May 9, 2011 12:11:31 GMT -5
I'm still reading, enjoying the contrast with the RB updates, and pondering what I do in the still hypothetical event that there is a whiff of suspicion expressed by the lurkers.
Everything is looking good and I'm keenly watching the minimap fill with colour. I bet you're looking forward to putting some actual knowledge alongside your suppositions about Parkin.
I was quite suprised to find Speaker made more posts in your previous thread. It just shows how different the two games have been so far.
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Post by Sullla on May 9, 2011 13:27:50 GMT -5
I mean, there hasn't really been that much to discuss so far. We're playing a macro builder's game at the moment. Speaker and I have talked about any major decision that's arisen, but we don't need to chat over the minutiae of what to build and such. Either one of us can do that. It's certainly a far cry from the other game where we were getting attacked relentlessly in the early game. The larger the map, the longer it takes to settle the land... and most wars don't break out until one side is out of places to settle. Then the trigger fingers start getting antsy. There's also such little diplomacy taking place. regoarrarr and I have both been griping to one another about how little most teams are saying. Fortunately the pace of the game has been excellent - we're playing about 1.5 turns per day! It's right on the limits of what I can handle, perfect to keep my interest in the game running high. I think that my ruleset is helping there, as no teams have any incentive to run down the timer. (There were major advantages to fiddling with the clock timer in Pitboss #2, which we certainly took advantage of as well.) When everyone plays quickly, interest level remains high, and it's a more enjoyable game for everyone. I can't read the spoiler threads at RB, but I can see from the view count that Pitboss #4 is the most popular game taking place at the moment. If you want to take a look at my Excel chart for the game, here's the link. It's my Holy Grail for this endeavor, I'd be completely in the dark without it. Careful with that info though, it's highly classified at the moment. dl.dropbox.com/u/19563179/RPBP4.xls
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Post by Speaker on May 9, 2011 19:59:34 GMT -5
I was quite suprised to find Speaker made more posts in your previous thread. It just shows how different the two games have been so far. My participation has been pretty meek in this game so far. I've been busy with work; the spring is my peak season (pun intended, Sullla). In the first game, I was an equal player. In this one, I pretty much agreed to be more of a dedicated lurker, cheerleader, advisor, whatever, due to my work demands. When things start to heat up militarily, I'll definitely peek my head out more, and I'll have more free time after the next month. Also, whenever I go to post, I usually just chat with Sullla on IM or Teamspeak instead. I do appreciate your informative posts, Sullla, if you want to keep making them, or if it's too much work, no problem.
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Post by maskeddetective on May 10, 2011 12:46:05 GMT -5
Speaker, my comment was mainly to emphasise the completely different tone of this game to PB2 (and even the Apolyton game). Sullla's reflections on the lack of action for you guys means a detailed to and fro in this "private" thread would be overkill. I'm sure Warriorknight envies your quiet life.
Although I'm unable to confirm or deny any of the details in the spreadsheet, I can very much appreciate the effort required to track all that information. Sadly, I couldn't really spot any places where adding some logic or automation would help ease the burden.
Do you think detailed C&D will be as important in this game with so much larger empires?
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Post by Sullla on May 11, 2011 15:48:54 GMT -5
Is the information worth it? Yes, without a doubt in my mind. Having accurate intel is worth its weight in gold in these games. If you know what other teams are doing right now, you can predict what they're going to do in the future with a high degree of accuracy. And if you know what they're doing now and what they're planning to do later, you can make your own moves to counter them. I've said this before on a number of occasions: you can usually stop another team from whatever they're doing if you have warning ahead of time. Granted, nothing saves you if you're WarriorKnight facing another team with double your population and production, but intel helps prevent you from being in that situation in the first place. A lack of intel on plako is a major reason why Warlord and Metallian screwed up that conflict so badly to start. Here's a great example taking place right now in the game. I screenshot the tech trading screen every turn, which lets me do two things. First, I can see what techs get discovered every turn. Secondly, I can track the ebb of flow of each civ's treasury, as the same screen shows how much gold each team has in the bank at that moment. It's very easy to see when teams are spending 0% research, 100% research, and make inferences about their economic strength. So recently I watched luddite slowly accumulating a lot gold, and Parkin research the Aesthetics/Literature combo. This told me that both teams were planning to go for the free Great Artist at Music tech. Now we would much rather have that go to middle-of-the-pack luddite than Parkin, so I emailed luddite and told him to start spending his gold right now if he wanted to get the tech. He was indeed planning on racing for the Great Artist, and is on pace to get the tech in 2t, which should beat Parkin to the same tech without any real problem. (I offered to lend luddite some gold if needed, which he said wasn't necessary.) If things go according to plan, we helped an ally get a Great Artist while denying it to one of our rivals. Even better, both luddite and Parkin are spending a lot of time and resources pushing down a fairly weakish portion of the tech tree. Unless you're taking the Great Library and Music Artist (as luddite is doing), there's better stuff to be researching in the Classical era. Parkin mucking around up there is a big, big win for us. (The one nice thing there for him would be National Epic in his capital city with three wonders. Let's see if he goes for it.) There's other good stuff from information too, just knowing the strengths and weaknesses of every team, and having a sense of what they are doing. For instance, regoarrarr was whipping a ton of pop recently. I was wondering what he was doing. Then I checked the techs researched column, and saw that he just got Metal Casting. He also just revolted into Buddhism/Organized Religion. Bingo: he's whipping forges with the OR bonus. Useful to know. I also know that we have exactly 100 pop right now, and plako has 125-130. That's a sizeable lead on us, which is why he is still such a danger even with a weak economy. This sort of thing then informs the diplomacy that we choose to make, who we ally with and against, etc. When you don't know what's going on in the game, you make bad decisions. I've seen it happen over and over again in other Pitboss/PBEM games. When you can make informed decisions, and anticipate your rivals, the odds of winning increase dramatically. Anyway, as far as what's going on right now: This is the first turn where we could swap back to Slavery/OR civic. I'm choosing to keep us in our current civics for now though, as I want to finish that Great Prophet in the capital (due in 5t). Most of our cities are still recovering from a whip duration anyway, so this doesn't hurt us too much. The one area where it really hurts is Carib/Illinois, both of which could really use that forge whip. They just have to suck it up for the moment for the greater good. Even with Spiritual trait, I still feel constrained much of the time on the civics! We are making just under 200 beakers/turn now at break-even rate. I chose to bump us up to 50% science at a slight less here for one turn, since we had accumulated a little extra gold. What tech do we want next? I'm thinking Machinery tech just so we can build maces if needed. We'll also need Calendar soonish, since we're getting close to placing a city at the dyes. However, after those two techs, I think we should push straight for Liberalism. No need to take any chances there, and the sooner we can start our Nationhood drafting cycles, the better. Other key medieval techs (Engineering, Feudalism, Guilds) can wait until after that, IMO. There's a settler in the boat above, who will land next turn on the island. We'll then pick up another settler for the clams spot. Two more cities will be founded on T138 and T140, both with work boats ready for the seafood resources. That gets us up to 18 cities, which keeps us within shouting distance of the leaders. Cherokee will also build a settler for the tundra crabs location as soon as it finishes its Great Prophet. We'll have 18 cities on T140, and should hit 20 cities before T150. That feels pretty fast to me... I think that's all for now. Let me know if you have any thoughts on tech path, or city builds, or whatever.
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Post by maskeddetective on May 12, 2011 12:00:04 GMT -5
Thanks, Sullla, for articulating that so clearly. The luddite example in particular shows how important all that can be, even in a situation where tracking individual cities would just be impossible.
That also highlights the amount of diplo you've been doing, and I'm aware your exchanges never really get covered here. Given that was an area where you got some criticism in the last game, I'd be keen to hear how you think it's going as your alterego.
As always, feel free to carry on and play the game without me interfering. I'm just trying to pick up things others might find interesting if you open the forum, or you might refer back to in one of your giant writeups.
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Post by Speaker on May 12, 2011 14:13:48 GMT -5
I think Sullla is far better off writing his diplo emails off the cuff, rather than posting them ahead of time and making sure they are "perfect." Oh, and he would be wise to resist using exclamation points. They sound ingenuous!!!!!111!!!!
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Post by maskeddetective on May 13, 2011 12:15:53 GMT -5
That wasn't my intention, Speaker. If I want to read long emails and chat dumps, I can go to rego's thread. ;D It just seems a bit odd that there is so little mention of diplo when it can be quite important. I thought the added complexity of "in character" might make it an interesting topic while your game meanders along.
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Post by Sullla on May 13, 2011 15:24:18 GMT -5
Diplo is important, and I do work on it. At the same time, there's a vast amount of irrelevant background noise going on in most diplo exchanges. You might need to exchange 10 messages to get one or two points of agreement. I don't post the actual exchanges because I find them to be incredibly boring; when I read other spoiler threads, I always scroll past email chats and long message chains. They're boring and tedious. Anything important that we've agreed on, I've made sure to post here in this thread. Here's what we have in place currently: - NAP to Turn 160 with Adlain - NAP to Turn 200 with Nakor - A couple of EP spending agreements with various teams. And that's it. Almost everything taking place in diplo is chit-chat which doesn't ultimately mean that much. Yeah, sure, I've sent quite a few messages back and forth with regoarrarr. Does that mean we wouldn't attack him if it looked like the right move to make? Of course not. Talk is cheap. We have a good rapport with pretty much everyone in the game. No one hates us, and I don't think we have any real enemies. I'm not sure what else to say beyond that. I try to contact everyone pretty often just to say hi. Neither side commits to much of anything, and we keep playing the smiles game. If someone came to us with a major proposal, or we had a major request of someone else, I'd go over it with Speaker in this thread. The only thing of interest I can think to add here is that I suggested to Moogle that we might one day in the future want to cooperate against Adlain. He cautiously said that sounded like a good idea. We'll revisit if/when we're getting prepared to attack Adlain. Again, not much more to say there now. Apologies if that's low on information, this game is moving at such a fast pace, it really runs me ragged sometimes. Anyway, as far as this turn (T138): We founded Khazak at the island fish spot. I have forced an Artist there so that the borders will expand in 3t, right before we swap out of Caste System. Work boat is ready to connect the fish once it's within our borders. Our galley will be dropping off another settler at the clams spot next turn, founding our 18th city on T140 as planned. We have a further settler in production for that last fish spot on the west coast. Three more turns to build and then three turns to move to the spot, so it should be founded T144. With another settler out of the capital for the southern crabs spot, we should hit 20 cities a little after T145. I point this out because the other teams are still spamming away cities out in the fog, and we have to try to keep up. Updated city count: plako: 21 regoarrarr: 21 Parkin: 20 Our Team: 17 Luddite: 16 Nakor: 15 Moogle: 13 Adlain: 9 mackoti: 6 WarriorKnight: 2 That's right, WarriorKnight founded a new city just north of Adlain, humorously named "Zion". Looks like he'll be sticking around in the game a little while longer, haha. Anyway, in the past few turns, Nakor has founded two cities, regoarrarr has founded two cities, Parkin has founded on city, and Luddite has added four cities in the last 7 turns. Even though I feel like we're settling pretty aggressively, we're just barely managing to keep pace with all this city spam. I wonder how everyone can afford the costs (?) Even with cheap civics and a strong economy, we still lose money at 40% science. regoarrarr does it with Great Lighthouse trade route spam. plako... doesn't manage costs, since he hasn't discovered a tech in over 12 turns now. Parkin, I have no idea. Seems to have a good research rate even with all those cities. Maybe it's because Parkin seems happy to settle border cities, in plain view of luddite's current territory, with no roads leading to them and no defenders inside. Pure craziness. Why someone hasn't slapped down his extreme farmer's gambit remains a mystery to me. Here's our southern cities. Our population has been growing very nicely in this period of Pacifism, since the last use of the whip. We'll swap back in 3t as I said before. This next round of whips will mostly complete courthouses, which will also help the economy significantly. Out outlying cities are hitting the 10gpt mark in maintenance, and that's about when courthouses become really valuable. Newer cities are still adding forges or growth-boosting infrastructure (granaries, lighthouses, etc.) I'm going to make Apache our horse-training center, getting a stables in there next and building nothing but horse archers for the double-promotions. Most other cities can skip stables for now; probably get them in the capital, maybe Olmec/Carib, and definitely Angle. Little Angle has almost no commerce potential (all the riverside tiles there are being worked by commerce city Navajo) so we'll farm the grassland and mine the hills there. With the 2/4 flatland iron tile, it will be a pretty good military pump. The other city I have special plans for is Illinois, our other grassland iron city. We'll finish the forge there with an (Organized Religion) forest chop, and then I plan to whip market. Once those buildings are out of the way, Illinois will build a Confucian monastery and work the cows, iron tile, and one grassland hill mine = 1 + 2 + 4 + 3 = 10 x 1.25 = 12 shields/turn production. That's a missionary every 3.3 turns, a nice rate for a middling city without any real redeeming features. I'll probably squeeze out a few missionaries from other cities using OR civic while Illinois is getting set up, but longterm that will be our main missionary center. Remember, 3t for our Great Prophet, 5t for our Shrine after movement gets factored in. I think it will be worth almost 30gpt at this point, as Nakor has really spread the religion around quite a bit, in addition to our own spread. (We have religion in 11/17 cities. Will work on that in upcoming turns!) Here's an update on where everyone stands technologically, compared to our civ: Our Score: 5669 Have: All Ancient techs, Alphabet, Code of Laws, Construction, Currency, Horseback Riding, Iron Working, Math, Metal Casting, Monarchy, Civil Service, Philosophy Parkin: 5278 tech score Has: Aethetics, Calendar, Literature, Theology Missing: Archery, Alphabet, Construction, Horseback Riding, Philosophy Doing the best of the other teams. Recently, he picked up IW (1t), Aesthetics (2t), Literature (2t), and Calendar (3t). Parkin is teching quite well despite all of those cities, surprisingly well to be honest. I'm not sure what he did - must be a farmer's gambit or something. He got a huge influx of gold (~200g) from a failed wonder build; plako completed Great Wall, and Parkin must have deliberately left himself just shy of completing it for the refund gold. Very clever. All of the other teams researching fast have way less cities (and much lower costs). Nakor: 4197 tech score Has: Calendar, Feudalism Missing: Archery, Alphabet, Construction, Horseback Riding, Civil Service, Philosophy These guys are probably next in economy after Parkin. Nakor has ton a pretty solid job, and isn't that far behind us. He just picked up Feudalism this turn, which took 6t to research (we can do it in 5t, as it costs the same as Machinery). Nakor also revolted to Vassalage, which seemed a little strange to me even though he's Spiritual. Oh well. We have that insanely long NAP, so can't say I'm too worried. Adlain: 4120 tech score Has: Calendar, Feudalism Missing: Polytheism, Monotheism, Alphabet, Code of Laws, Metal Casting, Civil Service, Philosophy Would you believe that this guy is next in tech? ;D His costs have to be almost zero, since he has only 9 cities and the Buddhist shrine. This is clearly a case of 90% research from a small base amount = 40% research from a large base amount. That works for a little while, until the big guys get their markets/courthouses/etc. up and running, and then the little guy gets crushed. Heh. He is Financial too, which I'm sure helps. Recently did Feudalism in 7t and Calendar in 3t. Has a lot of military techs for a weakish civ, strangely. Worried about Moogle attacking again? I still think it's weird that a heavily invested religious civ like his would have ignored Monotheism/OR civic. Whatever. regoarrarr: 3744 tech score Has: Calendar Missing: Meditation, Alphabet, Code of Laws, Civil Service, Philosophy Got a big spate of techs from running 100% science at a massive deficit from their Lighthouse Great Merchant. Since then, research rate has gone into the toilet, and little progress has been made. regoarrarr makes about 50gpt at 0% science, so he can probably only run 20% at break-even rate. Maybe not even that! They have been stockpiling gold for a while for another run at something at 100% science rate. HBR tech took them 5t, and they haven't discovered anything in the last 7t. A weak economic team. If someone were to raze their capital and burn down that Great Lighthouse... heh. Wouldn't be pretty. plako: 3507 tech score Has: Nothing we don't Missing: Alphabet, Iron Working, Civil Service, Philosophy plako was one of the tech leaders for ages. Then he went the last 14 turns without discovering anything (!) He's still not in terrible shape, as he has all of the key Classical techs for infrastructure: Currency (markets), Code of Laws (courthouses), and Metal Casting (forges). The tech score tends to overvalue later-era techs, which is why plako is so low in this ranking. Honestly though, he's whipping courthouses all over the place, and it's only a matter of time until his economy recovers. And while regoarrarr/Parkin might have a similar city count number, plako captured enemy cities which came with extra population and infrastracture. Not the same thing at all... He's still very dangerous. Moogle: 3430 tech score Has: Calendar Missing: Meditation, Alphabet, Construction, Civil Service, Philosophy Moogle's economy has been pretty weak for a while, but it seems to be recovering lately. He recently picked up Metal Casting (6t), Archery (1t), and Horseback Riding (2t), which again suggests some trouble between him and Adlain. Maybe, maybe not. In any case, we'll be watching with interest what happens there. So nice of all these backwards teams to discount Calendar tech for us though! mackoti: 3039 tech score Has: Nothing we don't Missing: Polytheism, Monotheism, Alphabet, Iron Working, Monarchy, Civil Service, Philosophy He was doing well until he got wrecked by the war with luddite. We'll see the other side of the coin in a minute. mackoti hasn't finished a tech in 7t now, so he's probably going for something expensive, likely Civil Service. With his tiny empire, costs are low but so is overall research capacity. We're fortunate that one of the giant empires doesn't have the Pyramids. Forced Representation Scientist specialists could be really good on this huge map. luddite: 2725 tech score Has: Aesthetics, Literature Missing: Archery, Monotheism, Alphabet, Code of Laws, Construction, Horseback Riding, Iron Working, Monarchy, Civil Service, Philosophy The other loser of the mackoti/luddite war. (The winner was Parkin, of course!) Look at how poor luddite crippled himself in tech by fighting that long war. He did further damage by spending so many resources on the top of the tree. Yeah, he has the Great Library and will take the Music Great Artist, but he's been set so far behind on infastructure. Remember, he Oracled Metal Casting early on, so he didn't even have to research that one. In the Classical era, he has Metal Casting, Aethetics/Literature, Math, and Currency. That's all. He still has virtuall the whole Classical era to research, while most teams are pushing into the medieval period. Not a good sign. WarriorKnight: 1783 tech score OK, not going to go through this one. He's missing 11 techs that we have. WK just has Math and Horseback Riding in the Classical era, and that's it. Obviously he is finished for the purposes of this game. Overall you can see we're in good shape. I still worry about the game though: we remain 80 Food and some 25 or 30 pop behind plako, while we cannot seem to pass Parkin in GNP no matter what we do. We'll remain stuck in 3rd place until we manage to conquer another civ. The war against Adlain, whenever it arrives, will decide our fate in this game. Can't possibly win without eliminating someone else, and Adlain has the short straw in this game.
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Post by Sullla on May 16, 2011 11:55:08 GMT -5
Updating with what went on this weekend: We finished our Great Prophet in Cherokee. ;D Now just moving him over to Olmec, will have the Shrine in 2t. Cherokee goes to settler for the southern X spot by the crabs. We have revolted back to OR/Slavery civics, and our expenses took a major hit. Organized Religion costs us about 25gpt extra over running Pacifism right now. I'll keep us in this current civics combo for 5 turns, get in the whips we need, and then go back to Caste System/Pacifism. Our research is significantly better when we aren't in OR civic, so just keep popping into it for our whips. Since we went back to Slavery, let me just break down the planned whips/builds at each city: Cherokee: not going to whip here. Settler, followed by some missionaries in the immediate future. Anasazi: whips market in 2t, overflows and finishes library. Can probably go back to military after that. Teoihuacan: whips courthouse in 2t. Goes back to running max Scientists for Education lightbulb next. (We have 300 GPP saved up already towards Scientist.) Olmec: I think we leave this city alone. It's nearly done courthouse, and it won't need any infrastructure after that for a while. I plan to finish the courthouse and then train military. Zapotec: will whip courthouse in 3t. Actually, I should swap that to courthouse now, for the OR bonus, and then let the overflow go into catapult... will do that when I login next. Chinook: triple whipped courthouse after this picture was taken. Apache: building military. Archer is to serve as MP for next city up in jungle. Will do stables next while we are in OR for the bonus, and probably start training horse archers. Also will probably get more settlers out of here soon. Chehalis: single whipped the courthouse to completion. 45 shields for 1 pop that immediately regrows, one of the best deals in the game. Overflowing into barracks for future drafting. Illinois: will finish forge in 2t, and get forest chop (boosted by OR and forge) on the following turn. Then whip market to completion and overflow into monastery. This will be our missionary production center. Navajo: chop finishes courthouse, then will triple whip a market. Carib: whip courthouse to completion next turn. Forge should be done with overflow + forest chop. That city alone costs us 11gpt maintenance, so the courthouse will be a huge help. Saxon: whip forge in 2t. Vandal: just finished forge this turn. Will let library complete naturally and then triple-whip courthouse. This is another location with 10gpt maintenance, and courthouse will really help. (Went library second despite little commerce potential because we must win border war with Nakor city here. Will actually do monastery next after library. We lose only source of gems if Nakor culture ever pulls ahead...) All other cities are pretty immature and will be getting standard whips for granaries or lighthouses or whatever. Goth is building a workboat next for the crab city, should have it done just about the same time that city gets founded. Angle is building a galley next so that we can start shipping settlers across the water in the far south to poach cities in Adlain's tundra. I have 2 more workers on our galley heading over to the island (4 total workers there now) to help Khazak get developed. We'll hit 20 cities on T145 and then the only remaining spots are the far south below Adlain and that mass of jungle in the north. One little micro note: I waited until Parkin moved his exploring warrior next to us, and then moved our workers on top of his warrior. (That's the tile we wanted to move to anyway, to build a road.) He actually can't capture them, as his warrior will be teleported away if he tries to declare war. He would have to move his warrior off the tile, declare war, then move back onto it, and that will take 2t... which will be time for our defending archer to move and cover our workers. Not that I think Parkin would declare war anyway, but we're actually quite safe from him trying to snipe us. Our GNP looks awful this turn, thanks to our expenses going up and a whole bunch of teams running deficit research. Parkin, plako, and regoarrarr were all researching at major deficits, plus luddite took the Music free Great Artist and burned it for a Golden Age. I'm slightly concerned by those figures, however I think we're going to look really awesome in about 5 turns after we gain 25-30gpt income from our shrine combined with cutting 15-20gpt off our expenses from whipping courthouses. Once we get back into Pacifism again and recover from this round of whips, our research should fairly explode. I hope! In Food count we are now only 45 behind the leaders. That's a very encouraging sign, and our Production is starting to climb up there as well. Soldier count is very much "Average" at this point, another far improvement from before. Still, we have some trouble, Speaker. We are starting to get visibility on some of Parkin's cities, and the guy has really fertile land. For some bizarre reason, the mapmakers also made it so that there are very few entrances into Parkin's territory. He has water to his east, and regoarrarr does not border Parkin. I guess that luddite was supposed to be the major competition for land... only luddite spent the whole first 130 turns of the game expanding in the opposite direction and attacking mackoti. Oh crud. Parkin has a massive expanse of high-quality land, and no one's really even in a position to challenge him for it, except maybe luddite. Parkin is building lots and lots of temples/monasteries. He already has Apostolic Palace, and will get the shield benefit for all of them. Now he has made the smart decision to tech Paper, and as a result has a guaranteed University of Sankore wonder. There's nothing we can do - we can't beat an Industrious civ who gets the tech before we do. So he is going to clean up the AP/Sankore combo with temples/monasteries in 20+ cities. That's a huge bonus right there... He's also virtually guaranteed to get a Great Prophet for a Christian shrine at some point for even more of a religious advantage. Honestly, we're in some trouble here. Parkin's farmer's gambit has been better than our farmer's gambit thus far. True, I think his land was better quality and all, but that's a worrying sign. I have no idea what we do about it right now, other than at least be aware of it. plako's awful research since he crashed his economy has dethroned him as the runaway civ. Parkin is actually the strongest civ in the game right now. I'm planning to tech Paper next, since we don't need Calendar and Parkin went ahead and discounted it for us. Probably Paper, Calendar, and then Education (lighbulb) -> Liberalism. We'll build up some gold while going for Education to hide what we're doing until it's too late. The good news is that I don't think it's possible for someone else to take Liberalism from us. Even if Parkin went straight there on a beeline now, the 2000 beakers we get from our Scientist lightbulb should be enough to let us win the race. Since Parkin still has no military techs (no Construction or HBR or Feudalism or Machinery or even Archery!) I don't think he can afford to spend then next 15-20 turns chasing Liberalism. We'll see what he does though.
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Post by Sullla on May 18, 2011 9:56:27 GMT -5
We actually have a turn taking nearly the full 24 hours for once, which gives me time to update here. Much as I love the fast pace, it's nice to get a slight break for a change! The big news was the completion of our Confucian Shrine. There are already 29 cities with the religion (!!!) so it was worth 36gpt with our market. Amazing stuff. We went from -15gpt to +21gpt at the 40% science seen above. I am so glad we went for the shrine, I think it's going to be a huge difference maker over the course of this game. Now we make 21gpt while producing 205 beakers/turn. If I increase our rate to 50% science, we lose about 20gpt while producing 255 beakers/turn. We should be able to sustain that rate with ease once we go back to Pacifism in 3t, maybe even flirt with 60% science. OK, probably not since we're also founded two more cities in the next couple of turns. But we'll be making well over 250 beakers/turn at break-even science rate, which feels really good for this stage of the game. Let's see... Paper will be done in 3t. If we were to keep that research rate constant, it would take about 11-12 turns to get Education and Liberalism. So Liberalism/Nationalism before Turn 160? Looks like it! ;D Our cities are using this period of Organized Religion to get their whips done, as expected. So far I have whipped 16 pop across 7 cities, and we're about halfway there. Courthouses are helping out a lot in our more far-fling cities. We'll found two more cities in the next two turns, taking us up to an even 20. Beyond that, we have another two cities that should be ours, and maybe a few more after that. Looks like we'll max out at 22-25 cities without having to fight someone, and that should be as good as anyone else. I hope! Parkin and luddite have 20 cities each (luddite having founded 8 cities in 12 turns, which he really can't afford once he comes out of Golden Age) and plako/regoarrarr have 22 cities. Parkin built Statue of Zeus, apparently as part of his plan to build every wonder in the game. That could be a pain later. I think Parkin is teching at about the same rate as us, although it's hard to tell since he has been receiving so much gold from failed wonder builds in recent turns. plako finally researched a tech after 18 turns, and it was... Feudalism. Interesting. Lots of teams discouting that tech for us. He even spent a turn revolting to Vassalage. It might even be worth it economically since his unit support costs are so high, but I don't know if I would have spent a turn of Anarchy for that change. When you think "man, I really need an economic tech!" you generally don't think of Feudalism. regoarrarr did something very smart, researching Compass as his next tech. Perfect for an Expansive team whose entire economy runs off of Great Lighthouse trade routes. Even with Lighthouse, his economy is pretty terrible at the moment (10t to research Compass?! heh) but it might get better with time. He does have an awful lot of cities. The three teams closest to us (Adlain, Nakor, and plako) now all have Feudalism. Heh. Still not that concerned. Our GNP continues to sit in the #3 or #4 spot. I guess it's because we aren't running 100% science (?) We are definitely researching faster than anyone other than maybe Parkin. Oh well, makes us look less dangerous on the bar graphs, which is very nice. We were as close as 40 Food behind the leader (plako) before we started whipping. Now a bit lower, still in the #3 spot there. We've risen to the #4 spot in Production though, after being in the dregs for ages. Forges have made a difference there. Military power is #5, almost exactly average. We won't make a big jump there until we start drafting. Speaker, any thoughts on diplomacy/alliances? Very little going on there right now. We have the long NAP with Nakor (Turn 200) and an NAP that's ticking down with Adlain (T160). Probably won't be attacking Adlain for a little longer though, need time to draft and tech knights. We have some tentative feelers out with Moogle and regoarrarr to attack Adlain later. Should I do or say anything else at the moment? Lots of dead time at the moment to build up agreements if we want. Let me know what you think.
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Post by Sullla on May 20, 2011 14:50:09 GMT -5
OK, updating us through a few more turns (T146): We finished our 5t of Organized Religion/Slavery and have now gone back to Caste System/Pacifism. This helped out our finances significantly, and we are now making 273 beakers/turn at a slight profit. That number should actually go up over the next few turns as our cities recover from their whippings. It was a very successful civic swap despite the temporary cost to our economy, with lots of courthouses, forges, and markets going up around our empire. We whipped a total of 28 pop across 12 cities during those brief 5 turns. Now our mature cities are pretty much set on infrastructure for the moment, and can start building military for our upcoming war. I'm going to build mostly catapults (since we'll need them and they won't become outdated) and a few horse archers in cities with stables - our grunt soldiers will be drafted maces, and it's silly to build them for 70 shields when we can draft them for 1 pop in a little bit. We are 99% safe to get Liberalism at this point. We now have Paper tech, and we need only to tech 1/3 of Education and Liberalism itself. Parkin is the only other civ with Paper tech, and he would need to tech Philosophy, all of Education, and Liberalism before we can get those two techs. Even though his research rate is equal to ours or possibly slightly ahead of us, he can't get 6900 beakers in the span of time it takes us to get 4000. The only way I can see him taking Liberalism first would be a Golden Age plus other civs gifting him huge amounts of gold, and why would they do that to help the #1 civ? It doesn't make sense. So we should be very, very safe to land the tech... which is good because Nationalism/Nationhood civic are integral to our plans for the future. If by some chance we wouldn't get Liberalism/Nationalism, we'll be really screwed! Here in the south we have founded the city of Burgundian at our crabs location. There's a work boat ready for its seafood next turn, a tiny bit slow in getting there. Ah well. Still not too bad, I think. We actually had a Confucian missionary fail to spread religion in Goth this turn, argh! Can't complain too much though, since we got the spreads into Cherokee earlier with secondary religions Taoism and Judaism. Those were much more important dice rolls. I'm going to have the capital produce some missionaries at the moment while Illinois is still working on its monastery (4t). Capital has all the infrastructure it needs at the moment, except for a courthouse (do we even need that? Probably will get it to save the 2gpt because it's cheap to build.) I am saving forests at Cherokee in the third ring for use in chopping Taj Mahal. It pretty much has to be the capital for that wonder, our other cities don't have the shields production. No marble on this map. Even with Bureaucracy, it will take ~20 turns, and we won't be in Bur much of the time, since we'll be swapping to Nationhood. But Taj is obviously worth it, and we shouldn't have any real competition if we pull off the Liberalism slingshot successfully. At least that will let Cherokee continue to slowly grow upwards. Bad news in the north, where luddite founded a city at the rice spot. Our planned location is now illegal, and our dyes location won't have any food bonuses. We'll still found the city for another happiness resource, but it will be really weak if we can't find a way to get some irrigation over there. I've looked around the map, and honestly, our jungle patch is really terrible. The other jungle areas are pretty luxurious, with lots of bananas and gems and stuff. We have a huge patch of jungle with absolutely no food. Just feels like something the map makers missed, since the overall world is so large. Well... we'll make the best of what we have, as always. Not trying to complain too much, we do have a lot of good land here, it's just that other teams very clearly have better land than us, particularly in terms of their tundra south and their jungle north. I have a warrior scout heading to see how much of this area has been claimed by other teams (our map knowledge in the jungle is outdated) and we'll base our city plans around that. The settler being built in Apache will instead go to the southern fish location below Adlain, as our galley will complete in time to ferry it over. The land we have in this screenshot honestly isn't that good. We're maximizing what we have on hand here, but... once again, inferior in quality to much of the rest of the map. We are very heavily reliant on the sea here, and everything other than Saxon and Vandal are glorified fishing villages. Carib is maybe our best city here, based off of a fish + unirrigated rice. Heh. Not exactly world beating, and still the best of the bunch! Nevertheless, all of these cities will be draftable and can work the coast for some commerce, which is enough for now. Remember, our two cities on the Adlain border have no food bonuses at all! Fun stuff and all, just wish the other teams didn't have quite so many food bonuses. For research, we don't need Calendar next because we'll be passing on the dyes location for a little bit. I am going to run normal science this turn, then turn off spending next turn. I need to see exactly how many beakers of overflow we got from Paper, and then spend accordingly. We have 5 Scientists in Teoihuacan right now, and with their 30 GPP/turn running, we'll get our Great Scientist for Education in 3t. I plan to micro things so that the Scientist will ALMOST lightbulb Education, then flip on spending at a high rate and get huge overflow into Liberalism. We will get Education in 4t, and Liberalism 6-7t after that. We're looking at having Liberalism in just over 10 turns essentially, somewhere around 900AD. Not bad for a No Tech Trading game, eh? I expect we will tech Calendar, Feudalism, Guilds, and Engineering after our Liberalism adventure. We'll have to wait and see, of course. The Demos for this game have been frustrating. It feels like we're running on a treadmill without ever making much progress. Our Food goes up, their Food goes up. We found cities, they found cities. Sisyphus in action. Nevertheless, our GNP really has gone up with the latest civics swap. It's really just us and Parkin right now in terms of the research lead. He's probably ahead of us, sad to say... We'll need to beat Adlain to change that. Food is in the same #3 spot as always. Might be in trouble there now that we're running out of room to expand. Production has improved massively from the old days, when we were commonly #7-8 on the charts. We are now above everyone other than Parkin, plako, and luddite (who is in a Golden Age at the moment). Military rating is quietly climbing upwards, slowly getting prepared for the future. My greatest source of frustration has been the city count. We just founded 2 cities, and we made up absolutely no ground on the competition. They all founded more cities too. I'm really starting to wonder just how much longer this can go on. I know it's a big map and all, but seriously... Updated count: regoarrarr: 24 Parkin: 23 plako: 22 luddite: 22 Our Team: 20 Nakor: 17 Moogle: 13 Adlain: 9 mackoti: 7 WarriorKnight: 1 regoarrarr just plants all cities on the coast for Great Lighthouse trade route spam, then whips ikhanda + courthouse for maintenance costs. His economy still stinks, but with that many cities, it could be trouble later on. Luddite has planted 12 cities in 30 turns (!) He had 10 cities on T115, and had 22 cities on T145. I just don't see how you can support that kind of spam. Where would you get the workers? Where would you get the defenders if someone attacked? Teams have played so very reckelessly in this game with their expansion. Even with our NAPs, I don't ever think we were in a position where we couldn't defend ourselves. I watched the Power charts the whole time, and we were never worse than even with our neighbors. Anyway... luddite comes out of his Golden Age next turn, and we'll see how well his finances hold up. He was one of the weakest techers in the game, before his Golden Age let him power through Code of Laws, Civil Service, and Monarchy in the span of 7t. I think he's going to have some trouble paying for the 5 new cities he's added in the last 5 turns. We'll see. plako has written and asked for closer relations between our teams, which sounded fine to me. Parkin is far and away ahead of plako at this point in time. It took plako 4 turns to tech Aesthetics, which can do in 1.5 turns at current research rate, so... he's rather behind on tech. I wrote to a whole bunch of teams asking for a map exchange, hopefully we'll get some of their maps. I really want more vision of the map's design. We will have to renegotiate the T160 NAP with Adlain soon. Any thoughts on when we would plan to attack, Speaker? I'm thinking around T175-180 myself. Our first drafting round should start just before T160. We can indeed draft 5 cities per turn on a Huge map, so one round of drafting should equal about 20 maces. I figure we do two such rounds of drafting, some knight upgrades/whips, and hit Adlain with 30+ maces, 15-20 cats, and 10 knights around T175-180. How does that sound? Will also have to decide whether we want to go in allied with Moogle, regoarrarr, both, or neither. Hmmmm.
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Post by Sullla on May 22, 2011 9:00:07 GMT -5
Here's a relatively short update for the Pitboss game through T148. There isn't all that much happening with our civ, just growing and building at the moment. We will be landing our Great Scientist next turn for Education: Ah, the power of Caste System + Pacifism. We get to play pretend Philosophical and produce exactly the Great Person we want at a very fast spawn rate. I actually pulled an extra citizen off the hamlet and forced a 6th Scientist after taking this screenshot. We can work the cottages when we aren't in Pacifism, we may as well get the maximum Great Person point generation while we're getting the 100% bonus. So next turn we'll have our Great Scientist, he should give us about 2250 beakers towards Education (formula for normal speed is 2000 + 2 * total pop beakers, all other Great People give half that, 1000 + 1 * total pop beakers). I've been running max cash the last two turns so as not to invest extra beakers into Education. We'll pop the Scientist, swap to 100% science and finish the tech, overflowing into Liberalism. 4t Education research, and it actually could have been done in 3t if we had had the Great Scientist a turn sooner! Liberalism should be 6t, I think, finishing on T156. Now we want to think about our following Great Person. When we're in Pacifism/Caste System, I'll run all Scientists in Teoihuacan as seen here. Another Great Scientist would be really nice, for use in lightbulbing Printing Press. Gets us one step closer to Rifling (drafted redcoats!) and has a ton of economic value with all our villages/towns. When we're not in those civics, I'll run the max 2 Scientists allowed + 1 Engineer. This lets us get more Great Person points flowing in, and we wouldn't exactly be mad if we popped a low-odds Great Engineer. Would be nice to have our pick of a wonder of our choice! (I would probably save for Statue of Liberty use if we got one. That wonder will be insane on this map. 30, 40, 50 cities all with a free specialist?! Wow!) We currently make 280 beakers/turn at a slight profit (50% science). There are 36 Confucian cities, making our shrine worth 45gpt with market. That has been a very big deal so far! We will probably not swap civics again until the Liberalism path is done, then go into Nationhood, Slavery, and Organized Religion together. Might as well get all our whipping/drafting stuff done at once. We last swapped on T146, so if we swapped again on T156... would line up pretty well, just as previous whip penalties wore off. Think that would be the best way to play things. WarriorKnight was finally killed off by plako last night, while I was in the game actually. I was surprised it took so long, as plako needed 15 turns to take the final city. He said in-game to me that he attacked with too small of a stack and promoted all of the defending units earlier. Heh. Anyway, one civ gone, and it makes my life a little bit easier because only 8 enemy civs fit on the tech screen at once. Moogle was always cut off the bottom of my screenshots (argh). Now I don't have to worry about that. And hey, at least we don't come in last place! Warlord/Metallian kind of screwed up their game badly... We have a lot more map info after trading for some world maps. We currently have the maps of plako, and luddite; we are in the process of trading for Moogle's and mackoti's. I offered to trade with Parkin, regoarrarr, and Nakor - all of whom refused. regoarrarr may still decide to exchange with us, but he said he was afraid of giving out info of where his many coastal cities were located. Well OK and all, but then why let us explore your territory with units, eh? We'll map them all out anyway in time. Seems needless to me, might as well get maps in return. Trying to deny other teams map knowledge isn't worth the hassel, IMO. Just hurts feelings and strains diplomacy over something rather petty. Like this message from Nakor: Hey thanks, buddy! Screw you too! Not only is Nakor wrong here (we have very good map info since we've traded for a lot of world maps), he comes off sounding like an ass. Here's how not to keep a friend and ally: settle right on top of their cities, refuse to gift resources you poached away from them, refuse to trade maps, and send borderline insulting messages. Speaker wants to eliminate Nakor pretty badly, and after we deal with Adlain, I think we'll look more closely into that. Depends on what's going on then, of course. There's a lot of emails going around now. The rumor mill is that regoarrarr and Nakor are thinking about attacking plako together. I think that would be an incredible foolish decision: plako has a massive amount of territory and population. He has Vassalage civic, longbows, horse archers, and catapults. At the current level of tech regoarrarr and Nakor can field (medieval units) they won't be making much of a dent in plako's 23 city empire. All it would really do is ensure that none of those teams are winning the game. I'm rather ambivalent about the whole thing. If it happens, it's good because it hurts quite a few of our rivals and ties them up for a while. But at the same time, it would be bad because Parkin would once again sit back in his corner of the map and tech away in peace and safety. So - I dunno. Maybe nothing will happen anyway. I've suggested to regoarrarr that he should look into attacking Parkin instead (as he still has no military techs!!!) but geography makes that tough. See below. We've restored a bit of a friendship with plako lately, which bodes well for the future. Actually everyone seems to like us right now, heh. Easy to be friends when you aren't acting aggressively and have an average military. Here's what we've learned about Parkin from the map info: There's his territory, or at least the bulk of it. Now I've criticized the map team about this area, so let me clarify what I mean. It's partially not the fault of the designers why Parkin was able to clean up so much land. They obviously intended for Parkin to be competing with luddite for that central region. Instead, luddite went west and fought a long, destructive war with mackoti, handing everything in the middle to Parkin. See O'Hara on the map? Luddite didn't plant that city until T120, when Parkin already had 15 cities. That's emergent behavior that the map team couldn't control, so that's not their fault, although it does suck for everyone else in the game. HOWEVER, the map team did make another error here. It's simply too difficult for other teams to enter into Parkin's territory. Notice the peak barriers in the northeast and east. The only way to enter Parkin's land is over water in the east. That gives him way, WAY too much safety from attack in the early game. The only one who could even remotely attack would be luddite, who started 23 tiles away (!) and in reality even further than that, because more peak tiles block the direct route. Furthermore, the two paths that do exist into Parkin's territory run through narrow 1-tile choke points in the far west and deep south (circled in yellow). These locations are extremely easy to defend. For the life of me, I don't understand why Parkin's and regoarrarr's territory doesn't connect. Because they both had only one land neighbor, they both played out extreme farmer's gambits. I don't see how that's fair, when we had two neighbors (and significantly wider fronts!) to contend with. It is nearly impossible for anyone to attack Parkin pre-Astronomy tech based on this geography. So yes, I do blame the map team for that, and there should have been significantly easier access into his territory. Here's the order in which Parkin settled his cities: 1) Parkin City 2) Magadan 3) Evermore 4) Felidae Yes, he settled in a straight line south. For anyone reading, this is a terrible play in competitive MP because you cannot possibly defend your cities. But since the map design and luddite gave him absolutely no competition for land, I guess it worked out. For the record, mackoti did exactly the same thing, settling cities in a straight line where they couldn't be defended, and he was attacked and knocked out of the game. If luddite goes east instead of west, then Parkin is crippled and/or eliminated from the game. So nothing against Parkin, but please no one try to tell me that he had some amazing Cha/Ind strat that none of us saw before. He was lucky, pure and simple. This kind of play gets you eliminated in most games. Now, to Parkin's credit, he took his huge advantage of having vast, fertile lands to expand into with no competition and made himself the game's top dog. His infrastructure is very good in all the cities we can see. He has built Christian temples/monasteries everywhere, piling up the AP shield bonus. He will unquestionably get University of Sankore for even more benefit, as we can't beat an Industrious civ who discovered Paper before us. He already has the following wonders: Stonehenge Temple of Artemis Apostolic Palace Statue of Zeus Mausoleum (just finished this turn) Parkin has also made excellent use of his national wonders. He built National Epic in his capital (synergizing off his wonders there, although he'll get mostly Artists and Prophets). He built Moai Statues early on in his second city, with lots of water tiles. He already has Forbidden Palace in Felidae (we are saving our FP for construction in Adlain territory). He has built his civ well. His one huge issue is that he seems to think this is a Single Player game: building huge amounts of wonders and completely ignoring military tech. Parkin is #2 in tech behind us, while still lacking Construction, Horseback Riding, Feudalism, Machinery, and freaking Archery! If he didn't have these geographic advantages, he would be getting rolled so hard by someone... sigh. He's researching something very expensive right now (no tech for 7t), likely either Education or Divine Right. If he thinks he can get Liberalism, well, he'd better think again. If I had to guess, I'd say his plan is to go for Liberalism and slingshot Divine Right. Now... is it a smart idea to go for Liberalism in a MP game when you can't build archers, catapults, horse archers, longbows, or maces? You be the judge. Somehow, this is working for Parkin right now. (Criticize us all you want, but I made sure we had Construction, HBR, and Machinery before going for Liberalism. If someone tried to attack, we could whip and respond with cats/ha/maces.) There's always one team who has chance break their way in these games. In the Apolyton game, it was Imperio: obscenely fertile land, ability to play kingmaker in diplomacy despite making no real effort to email other teams. In Pitboss #2 it was Nakor: teched and built uninterrupted for 200 turns, did nothing to help others yet was gifted 1000s of gold and several cities. In this game, it's clearly Parkin who has had chance break his way. He hasn't played badly, but the stuff he did would have gotten him killed in a normal game. If you swapped our positions, well... let's just say he wouldn't be on top of the scoreboard. Anyway, the good news is that Parkin's western cities are on the same sea as our cities. Post-Astronomy, we're going to need to make a huge effort to control that body of water. That will give us an avenue of attack if needed, and few teams understand the importance of establishing naval dominance once the age of frigates/galleons arrives. Remember what we did to Nakor in Pitboss #2? Heh. Opportunities will be there, we just have to wait and seize them when they arrive. Finally, these teams are just about out of land now. I though they would never stop expanding...
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