|
Post by Sullla on May 25, 2011 12:03:18 GMT -5
Update for the last couple of turns: Here we are popping the Great Scientist on Education a couple of turns ago. It looks like I misremembered the lightbulb formula; apparently it's 1500 beakers base for a Great Scientist instead of 1000 beakers base. Not that big of a deal, although I was expecting to get around 2200 beakers instead of the 1890 we did get. Ah well. I popped the Scientist and turned on research. Here's what we looked like a turn later: We ended up a mere 4 beakers short of Education out of 3100! ;D I could have forced that tech discovery with some micro, naturally, however I figured there was no big incentive to get the tech a turn sooner. We'd be hitting Liberalism on the same date regardless, why not hide teams from discovering how close we were for a turn longer? So I left it there, and we'll be getting Liberalism on T156 anyway. While I have this picture, let me talk a little bit about this jungle region up here in the far northwest. We should be able to get 4 more cities here, as other teams aren't paying much attention to this weakish, no-food region. There is a settler in production for the rice/horses spot, and then I want to rush over to the sugars area after that. These cities are total crap right now, but they *CAN* become good with time. I've planned out an irrigation route through the jungle, and if we farm one of the four dyes resources, we can bring irrigation from that lake tile and get to the key +5 food/turn mark in every one of these cities. That makes them easily worth founding. So this will be sort of a longterm project running in the background, but I'm very much paying attention to this and trying to make some progress up here. No reason to let Moogle or mackoti or whoever steal these spots. We did discover Education on T151, the current turn: There's Liberalism finishing in 5t on T156, as expected. We have massive overflow from running a turn of 100% deficit science with 4 beakers left on Education. I enjoyed seeing nearly every tech on the F6 screen completable in one turn, heh. But Liberalism it is. With Nationalism tech in on T156, I'll start the first drafting cycle the same turn. We'll be able to get in the following draft cycles: 1) T156-161 2) T166-171 3) T176-181 Remember, the plan is to attack Adlain around T180. I offered him an NAP extention to that date, although he hasn't responded yet. The first cycle should get us about 15 maces, most of them without a promotion. We can use some of these as military police in outlying areas (like Nakor island). The second cycle should get us about 20 maces, most of them with one promotion from barracks + Theocracy civic (which we'll definitely have by then). The third cycle should net 20+ muskets, also coming with a promotion. That gives us tons of cannon fodder to throw at Adlain. All we have to do is build a crapton of catapults and some knights to go with them. His 10 cities just don't have the production base to keep pace, and we should be able to get a very large army before he even realizes what's going on. Add in Moogle as our likely ally from the north, and we should clean house. That's the idea, anyway... Now, with Education in hand we can build universities. We could go whole hog on building them, but there are a couple of mitigating factors: 1) We'll be drafting all our core cities in a few turns. Don't want to crush ourselves too hard with costly university whips. 2) On a Huge map, Oxford is a much less attractive national wonder. We'll still get it, but it takes 8 universities (will take some time) and is very expensive to build with no stone. Furthermore, we probably won't be in Bureaucracy civic much longer anyway, with Free Speech being superior. Plus, our capital is going to be building Taj for the immediate future, and can't even build Oxford until it's done. 3) We aren't in Slavery civic! Heh. Again, while we could change this turn, I really want to keep us in Pacifism at the moment. We're scoring 36 Great Scientist points per turn in Teo, for use towards our next lightbulb or Golden Age. OR civic is much more expensive that Pacifism, 30 gpt more, and it will slow our progress towards Liberalism if we swap civics now. So... here's my thinking here. We stick with our current civics for 5 more turns. This will allow Cherokee to build its university (5t) before we swap out of Bureaucracy to begin drafting with Nationhood. On T156 we swap to Nationhood/Slavery/OR and go into a major draft/whip push. All eligible cities get drafted, but we won't whip them all for universities. Just some of our best commerce cities and overgrown fishing villages. As long as we're careful and do some universities now, some universities later, we should be able to continue teching and slowly building up our military. Demographics from this turn (50% break-even research). Parkin crushes us in "GNP" but I'm pretty sure we're roughly even in actual beakers. He has an incredible amount of culture... Someone else is running 100% science with a huge deficit and has that #2 spot for now. Honestly, no one is really close to us and Parkin in research. Actually, that's not true. Nakor has a lot of tech too. Our tech score is 9043, Parkin is 7126, and Nakor is 6889. Next closest is luddite (5829) and that's largely due to his Golden Age which ran out earlier. We will be REALLY ahead in total beakers when we land Liberalism... We're hanging tough on Food with team who have more cities, since we work all improved tiles. Production is mediocre, but building stuff with shields is for chumps anyway, right? Everything else is about what you'd expect. Power is slowly going up as we build some units. Apache is cranking 2t horse archers, which I plan to do for a while. Other cities slipping in catapults wherever they have a break from infrastructure. Not much for now, at least until we get that draft and pop out 15 maces (15 x 9 = 135 "power"). Parkin proposed a map trade with us, which I happily accepted this turn. We have maps from Parkin, plako, luddite, and Moogle. All told, this gives us visibility on about 95% of the world's cities and population. I'll go throw in upcoming days and try to break down every civ one at a time, like I did for the Pitboss #2 game. Very useful to know what your opponents have in their cities. For the moment, here's the Total Pop score for everyone: plako: ~155 Parkin: 149 Our Team: 139 Nakor:~115 Moogle: 114 luddite: 113 regoarrarr: ~95 Adlain: 72 mackoti: 48 I'm very pleased with how we're doing here, since we have 21 cities compared to plako's 25, Parkin/regoarrarr's 24, and luddite's 23. Both regoarrarr and luddite have massive empires of extremely small cities. Tons of essentially junk cities. (Log into the game and check them out if you haven't seen them. City spam for sure!) regoarrarr's infrastructure is absolutely pathetic, and he has virtually no cottages because he spent the last 70 turns spamming settlers non-stop. He has lots of land, but... it's not developed at all. Just surviving on Great Lighthouse trade route spam, which won't last forever. His tech sucks too. It's really plako, Parkin, and our team in the lead by a wide margin. Parkin has the GNP edge, plako has the most Land/Food/Population, and we're lurking behind them both. Anyway, things are going pretty well. Try to look around when you have a chance, and let me know what you think. Oh, and one other thing: we need more workers. I'll be aiming to fix that in upcoming turns as well! (Going to let Anasazi starting pumping them out at 3t rate once it regrows to size 9.)
|
|
|
Post by maskeddetective on May 25, 2011 12:39:51 GMT -5
I’ve been waiting for the map knowledge that would allow the full Parkin analysis for a long time, and I eagerly look forward to your thoughts on the other civs. [Now I just need to watch my words to avoid spoilers] It’s fair to say Parkin’s played a good game to this point. As you’ve pointed out from his settling pattern, he adjusted very quickly to the map and his diplomacy has been focussed on supporting what you described earlier as an “extreme farmer’s gambit”. However, he’s clearly also been lucky; with some aspects of the map, the behaviour of his neighbours, and even the fact that all of those precious metal resources weren’t then when the game started. The map got looked over by a lot of people, so it’s a shame you still feel there are problems. One thing you didn’t comment on from that screenshot was plako’s east-west spread. If he’d gone north more (and not been warring), it would have boxed in Nakor less and either of them would have been able to settle the highlighted southern chokepoint at the very least. You can see from the other North-South boundaries that Parkin (and rego for the same reasons) have a few cities past “the equator”. Final thought on the map is that Warlord/WarriorKnight and Adlain also started with only one neighbour, and it hasn’t worked out quite so well for them so far. It looks like everything in your own civ continues to develop in line with your plan. You do come across as excited that the game is reaching the end of the unprecedented settler spamming, so I hope your hard work to this point means things pick up from here.
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on May 29, 2011 10:31:24 GMT -5
Alright, well I would like to reiterate that overall I think this map is really interesting and well designed. And indeed, you can't predict some of the emergent behavior that takes place, like luddite completely ignoring everything to his east and plako getting involved in early wars. However, I still think that having "corner" civs with only one border to defend inherently gives them a major advantage. That's my one real suggestion, that I think those water barriers on the worldwrap shouldn't have been placed. The map would be more balanced if Adlain had a land border with plako, and Parkin has a land border with regoarrarr. This would have prevented the most extreme farmer's gambits we saw (Parkin and regoarrarr) or at least forced these teams to be more honest, even if they signed NAPs. When you give most teams 2 neighbors, and a couple of teams only 1 neighbor, it definitely does give them an advantage. This is exactly why Parkin/regoarrarr have cities "below the equator", because they each had only one neighbor to content with. Not a coincidence. Just because Warlord and Adlain played so poorly doesn't mean that the corner starts aren't a huge edge. Also, it's not really fair to say that plako could have expanded further north and cut it off from Parkin. Not really... That southern chokepoint I circled was all jungle. No one is going to settle north into jungle over settling east/west into non-jungle where they are competing with other teams for land. I would have done the same thing. I mean, I don't want to sound too critical on Parkin, but he has had an absolute ton of stuff break his way. Just to name a few areas where chance fell into his lap: - Huge map where Stonehenge would be more effective for a macro game. (And don't try to tell me he changed his strategy after seeing the map. He picked De Gaulle/Egypt. He clearly was planning on Stonehenge before the game started.) - No stone/marble on map. This is a giant stealth buff to Industrious trait. With those resources, it's nearly impossible to beat Industrious civs to wonders. - Corner start, closest neighbor over 25 tiles away (!!!), geographical water barriers making it extremely difficult to attack. This synergizes perfectly with an extreme farmer's gambit / wonder spam strategy. Basically, doing the things Parkin did would have gotten him killed in a normal game. So while I give him credit for recognizing that this wasn't a normal game, I'm not sure that it's deserving of too much praise. Anyone with some practice at this game can expand and build wonders when there's zero competition, zero pressure from other teams. I do think the map contributed significantly to this, even though (overall) it's a very fine job. Just a shame that those "corner" positions exist, since they make it infinitely easier to defend. Note that if we attack Adlain and kill him, then we will also be benefitting from a corner position. It will be nearly impossible for teams to attack us, with our backs to the bottom of the map and a water barrier on the west, should we pull that off. So we can use this too, of course... but it probably shouldn't have been part of the design, IMO. At the moment, there's very little going on of note in our civ. We are going to discover Liberalism in a couple of turn, and then we'll go into our next whipping (Slavery/OR civics) and drafting cycle (Nationhood). The biggest news was Parkin researching Nationalism tech before us, taking the odd path through Divine Right. He got the tech in just 3t, which says all kinds of bad things about his research. Now, he probably popped at least one Great Person to get the tech, if not two of them, because even Parkin isn't researching at 1000 beakers/turn! He may also be getting fed gold from someone else to run 100% science a few extra turns in a row. Parkin *ALWAYS* insists on ending turn last, so he can hide all kinds of stuff there with gold gifts and/or changing the sliders. Yes, this pisses me off to no end when people play these clock games, and it's a major reason why I have no intention of working with Parkin. Beyond him being our major competition, of course. Nationalism means that Parkin has a guaranteed Taj Mahal. We can't beat an Industrious civ to the wonder, not with no marble. (With marble we could try to do some crazy forest chop stuff, but not going to fly when you only get 45 shields per chop instead of 75.) Parkin also has Mausoleum already. So yeah, while this doesn't look so bad right now, it's going to look really bad after Parkin pops a Great Person and doubles up for 24 straight turns of Golden Age. If he's ahead now, where will he be after that? Sobering thoughts. We've mostly been talking with teams in diplomacy of late. A few points about the major teams: - We have NAP with Nakor to Turn 200. Otherwise we haven't really been particularly close or friendly. Nakor is a possible target to attack later. - We have NAP with Adlain to Turn 180. Plan is to attack immediately on that date. - We have a friendly discussion going with plako. The hope is to attack Parkin along with luddite at sometime in the far future, since they both have long-running NAPs with Parkin. We also need Astronomy tech to do much of anything over in the east. Collaboration against Nakor could also be a possibility eventually. - We have a rolling 10t NAP with luddite, and an agreement to stay on each side of the water barrier in our north. Luddite won't contest the jungle region in exchange for one of the dyes resources. Feels like we have a pretty good friend in him. I would love to have a three way alliance with plako and luddite, feels like that would be super strong. We'll see what develops. - We chat often with regoarrarr without too much of substance being decided. He may or may not be part of a move against Parkin. Not really sure what his stance is right now. - We are in talks with Moogle to attack Adlain together. We will do most of the heavy lifting and he will go after the northern cities. At the very least, it will draw some of the pressure away from us, and make it so Adlain can't do as much whipping. - Parkin wants to be friends, but I am not having it. Rather than be friends with Parkin, I would rather be friends with Parkin's enemies. I don't see anything to gain from partnering with him, since he is our biggest competition. It's a shame, because he seems like a nice guy and all, but that's the way things shook out in this game. - mackoti is crippled and doesn't matter very much. I expect luddite to reattack and conquer him at some point. That's all I can think of for now, when we actually start doing stuff again I'll post more pictures. Very quiet turns of late.
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on May 31, 2011 9:29:40 GMT -5
Finally: Liberalism/Nationalism came in exactly as expected. I think we did a pretty good job of planning this overall. Remember, we started setting up the Liberalism play even before we researched Code of Laws and founded Confucianism. Everything followed in order: Code of Laws -> Caste System -> Great Scientist (Philosophy lightbulb) -> Pacifism -> Great Prophet/Shrine -> Great Scientist (Education) -> Liberalism -> Nationalism -> Nationhood drafting -> conquer Adlain (?) I'll stop here before people starting claiming we're too arrogant again, but... I think it was rather nicely done overall. ;D I switched us at the start of the turn to Nationhood/Slavery/Organized Religion. Here on a Huge map, we can draft 5 cities per turn. (Because of the way the draft scales with map size, it's even better than normal on a Huge map. More cities, more drafting, super cheap upkeep cost with the "None" heading.) I went ahead and drafted the full 5 allowed by rule. It was fiendishly delightful to press that draft button and have a maceman pop into our cities instantly. At this point in time in the game, where production levels are still relatively low and most teams are in the medieval era, drafting 70 shield maces for 1 pop each is just crazy good. Before these five turns are up, we'll have a genuine army created out of nothing, as we can pull 17 maces out of 17 cities. And then we can do it again in another ten turns. (Note: I added a drafting chart to our Excel spreadsheet to keep track of which city has been drafted at which point in time. Check it out in our Dropbox if you want to, Speaker.) For our next tech I've decided to use the Nationalism research overflow to pick up the cheap Calendar tech. Yes, yes, I know - it doesn't get us closer to our key military stuff. But we do need this tech, and it's cheap, and 6 other teams have it to give us a further 18% research bonus. We're producing a city next turn to settle up here by the dyes (see screenshot) at the horses/rice location, and I'd really like to be able to build those plantations. With all of our drafting/whipping, the extra happiness will definitely help out. I also want to get another settler over to that sugars location ASAP (will possibly whip a second settler out of Carib) to lock down the rest of the jungle region. Moogle looks like he's going to settle by those cows in the north, but we should be able to clean up the other four spots, which will be very good in the extreme distant future. So let's just take Calendar now while we can so I can get started on those dyes. The following tech though is a really good question. We have three different priorities to pursue here. Speaker, I want you to tell me what order you want us to get these techs: * Theology (862 beakers): Opens up Theocracy civic, so that our draftees will come out with 2XP for a promotion. Will take about 2.5t research at our current pace. * Feudalism/Guilds (1207/1725 beakers): Guilds will allow us to build knights, probably the key unit for warring against longbows. Guilds also would allow us to put a grocer in the capital and Shrine city (would be worth about 15gpt in shrine city). However, these techs are pretty expensive. Roughly 3t to research Feudalism and then 5t to get Guilds. * Gunpowder (2070 beakers): Alternately we could skip Guilds and go straight for Gunpowder, which allows us to draft muskets. Less economic value but popping out 20 drafted muskets does have a value of its own. 6t research. So as our military expert, how do you rank these techs Speaker? My feeling would be to go Feudalism, then cheap Theology (so that we're guaranteed of having Theocracy civic ready when we do our next draft cycle), then Guilds, and then Gunpowder. This means that our second draft round will be maces and not muskets, but that's offset by having Guilds sooner, which IMO is more worthwhile (for knights and grocers both). It's also worth pointing out that if we get Guilds first, then it will decrease the cost of Gunpowder by 20% for having a second tech pre-requisite. But let me know what you think, I'm fine with leaving this call up to you. As I said, having a round of drafted muskets instead of maces could be really strong too. I did not whip any cities this turn, although I will be doing so shortly. I wanted to get the drafting out of the way first, and then whip after that. I'm going to be a little less aggressive about whipping, since we're already skimming 17 pop off the top of our cities from the draft. Still, we should be able to get about 4-5 universities complete on this round of whipping, plus a lot of lower-tier infrastructure in our newer cities (lighthouses, forges, etc.) I just left the drafted maces in their respective cities for now. Feel free to move them around as you see fit. Thanks to our awesome map knowledge, here's an update on world population numbers: plako: 172 (26 cities) Parkin: 163 (25 cities) Our Team: 150 (21 cities) luddite: 130 (25 cities) Moogle: 125 (14 cities) Nakor: 114 (18 cities) regoarrarr: 108 (25 cities) Adlain: 83 (9 cities) mackoti: 54 (8 cities) We'll probably fall further behind plako/Parkin in the near future, as we don't have as many cities as they do, and those jungle cities we plant aren't going to grow very fast without food resources. Overall though we're doing OK here, if not spectacular. There are some huge discrepencies here between teams, with luddite and regoarrarr having tons of low-pop spam cities of poor quality. Moogle and Adlain on the other side of the coin have few, very large cities. Because of the way the game's "Population" stat scales with city size, look at the difference between Moogle and regoarrarr: Moogle: 9441k [125 actual pop] regoarrarr: 2575k [108 actual pop] The geometric stat makes it look like Moogle has quadruple regoarrarr's population, although he actually has about 30% more. Anyway, it's been reassuring to get the world map and see that all of this massive city spamming done by other teams... really was city spamming, and most of these locations are very marginal. mackoti's tiny empire actually has more tech than plako, regoarrarr, and luddite, which is pretty hilarious. Nothing much from other teams on the tech front since Parkin got that crazy 3t Nationalism. He hasn't discovered a tech since in the past 4t, so no idea what he's up to. Our Liberalism play has put us far into the lead in total beaker count: Our Team: 12,723 Parkin: 8966 Nakor: 7656 mackoti: 6045 luddite: 5829 Adlain: 5669 plako: 5530 regoarrarr: 5139 Moogle: 4825 While those are only approximations, it gives a sense of how much everyone has researched. Our double Great Scientist lightbulbs + Liberalism play were responsible for most of that difference (We've gotten over 6000 beakers from them!) Now we have to turn that tech edge into military victory. If we can do that, we'll have an excellent chance to win this game.
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jun 1, 2011 13:30:11 GMT -5
OK this is mostly going to be a diplomacy post, but let me throw out an overview shot of our civ first: Here's our civ. I drafted 5 more maces this turn. I've been able to time them pretty well so far, getting cities that are about to grow anyway so the regrowth is painless. Same size next turn, one free unit. A couple of cities (Carib, Navajo) are building barracks right now, and I'll draft them when they finish so we get the 1XP for free. No reason not to. We'll definitely get all 17 possible cities by the end of the 5t of Nationhood civic. I haven't whipped as much because of skimming off all that draft population. I will whip universities in several of these cities once they're 1t away from growth again (after being the same spot already and drafting). I actually do not want to whip Teoihuacan right now, crazy as it sounds, because I want to run 6-7 Scientists there when we go back to Pacifism for the last time in a couple of turns. So... hold off there for now, and then we'll whip that university when we get into Slavery the next time. It's not like we're close to 8 for Oxford right now or anything. Apache is using this OR period to construct Moai Statues. It will nearly complete, just be a little short when we swap back to Pacifism. I am holding Apache to draft on the very last turn of Nationhood, so we can get the maximum shield bonus from OR civic. After that, back to more cats/horse archers. Cherokee is going to use the OR bonus to get courthouse (eh, worth 3gpt and 2EP for a cheap cost, may as well) and then stable. We'll use Apache/Cherokee as our main horse archer/knight producers, and get catapults out of our other, weaker production cities. Maybe a stables in Carib and Vandal later on, they both have strong production too. Although I'm mostly going to use Vandal for ship building, since we need to have a decent fleet to protect those eastern waters... OK, let's talk diplomacy. Now that the map has filled up, everyone is trying to make alliances and figure out who their friends and enemies will be. At a very large scale picture, there are only three teams that have realistic chances of winning the game: Parkin (tons of wonders/culture) plako (most land and population) Our Team (best players ;D) There are two other teams with outside chances at winning depending on what happens: luddite regoarrarr They both have tons of land, but many of their cities are extremely weak, and their economies don't run off of many cottages. Luddite has been working a lot of Colossus-boosted water tiles, which obviously don't scale into lategame. regoarrarr has a bunch of terrible cities, running his economy off of Great Lighthouse trade routes and Expansive harbors. That also won't work into lategame, since all teams have to do is go into Mercantilism and he's screwed. They are both behind in tech and have many garbage filler cities. They'll both have a huge effect on the game, but probably won't win. The other teams likely can't win the game. Nakor is in the best shape of the rest by far, but his map positioning is terrible, stuck between us and plako. Where does he go? How can he expand? I don't see it. Nakor will have a LOT of influence on who does win, I just don't think it will be him. The others (Moogle, Adlain, mackoti) are too small and too weak at this point. Without tech trading, there's no magic pill that catches them up to the pack. Their best hope at this point is to stay alive as long as possible for a higher finish. We're basically being offered two different choices at this point: ally with Parkin, or ally with Parkin's enemies. Of these two, the latter seems like by far the stronger option to me. We make strong ties with several other teams while also slowing down/crippling our biggest competition to win. Normally, I don't post emails here, but we had two emails today which spoke to this subject. Here's the first one from Parkin: Very long as usual... Parkin gave away some interesting stuff there, like revealing that he mass-built Weath in order to get his Nationalism tech so fast. (He may also have burned a Great Artist on the tech too, not sure what Great People he had.) He also confirmed what we suspected ourselves, that his tech rate is roughly equivalent to ours. However, as for his actual deal... I'm not seeing the advantages. What do we get out of signing a longterm peace deal with Parkin? How does that help us? Are we really supposed to be scared of Parkin sailing an army over to attack us? LOL He's have to walk about 50 tiles overland to reach us, while passing through the borders of multiple other teams. So no, I'm not intimidated at this point, and I don't see the advantage in this. Here's the stronger move - look at this email we got from plako today: Hey, now that sounds a lot better! A four-team alliance with plako, Nakor, and luddite to more or less eliminate the rest of the competition. A long-term NAP with these teams would be amazing, giving us plenty of time to go and remove Adlain. I mean, I can't see us attacking any of them before T225 anyway, since it will take some time to work through Adlain and then integrate his land. We can make some effort to help them take down Parkin (couple ships or whatever) while pursuing our own goals in the west. To put it another way, who can actually hurt us right now in this game? - We are already attacking Adlain soonish. - Nakor and luddite are our closest neighbors. Can't attack if we sign this deal. - Moogle is next closest, and he has agreed to attack with us against Adlain. Seems to be a strong ally. - plako would be next most dangerous (he has #1 army by a good margin) but he would also become an ally. - Parkin, regoarrarr too far away. Would regoarrarr seriously move all his units through Adlain territory to fight us, while sharing a giant land border with #1 military plako? I very much doubt it! - mackoti too weak. And that's all the teams in the game. So... where's the downside to this? I'm not seeing it. I think we should take the offer. I said we were very much interested but I would check with you first. I say we accept the plako offer and send a polite refusal/non-answer to Parkin. We just get a better deal from the other teams. Nothing against Parkin either, he always seems like a nice guy (if a little annoying sometimes ) but it's more useful to work with his enemies than work with him. The only fear is that someone is lying and planning to screw us over (Nakor! Nakor!) I think we have to take that chance though. Not a good idea to try and fly solo in one of these games without friends. plako and luddite don't worry me: their natural enemy is Parkin (and regoarrarr for plako). Nakor though - don't see what he gets out of this alliance. Survival? Heh. So if anyone is going to turn on the rest of us, it would be him, as he's a natural ally of Parkin against plako. Just have to watch him and keep some units on our eastern border. EDIT: One last piece of news. Adlain is indeed running Vassalage civic, so he'll be whipping triple-promoted longbows. Ouch. But... he can't win long term. If necessary, we can and will grind him down through a war of attrition. His cities also took a terrible beating from whipping those units, still down 12 pop this turn even after some regrowths. If it turns into a slaughter, so be it. We can always pause and wait for drafted rifles redcoats (which we should have around roughly T190) which will slice through his medieval stuff like a hot knife.
|
|
|
Post by Speaker on Jun 1, 2011 21:15:35 GMT -5
I agree 100% with your view on things. Let's definitely take that alliance deal. What the hell, why not. If anything, it will spice things up a bit. I really think that if we take all of Adlain's land, plus that huge peninsula on the southern edge of the map, we'll have more than enough land to use in the near future. We can assess what happens next....at a later date.
That Parkin email was so long and boring, I started skimming it half way through. Kudos to him for using "Build Wealth" to get Nationalism faster. That's a nice play, very common in MP games. Building wonders purely for "fail gold"....hopefully he's just joking about that.
Since we are just drafting maces, I think we can afford to take some losses. City Defense 3 Longbows will be a pain, but once they get bombarded, they lose strength fast, and thankfully, most of Adlain's cities are on flat ground, negating a good portion of their bonus. We'll just need to make sure we have *tons* of catapults. 25 or so should do the trick. Shouldn't be a problem, since the only "real" units we are building are Knights/Horse Archers and Catapults, to go along with our Mace horde.
|
|
|
Post by maskeddetective on Jun 2, 2011 12:10:54 GMT -5
The last few updates look like you're really building up enthusiasm for the fun to come. The difference that two turns of drafting has made to your relative power is rather telling about the size of standing armies being employed in this game I've been rereading the older stuff too, and realise my attempts to present an "alternative" view can come off a bit troll-like. So, thanks for humouring me with detailed answers! Looking forward to seeing the next grand plan spring into action, and I'll forgive a tiny bit of arrogance when you're A LOT of beakers ahead of the competition.
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jun 2, 2011 12:55:07 GMT -5
What's especially hilarious about this alliance is that plako has set up a private forum for our teams to discuss things. Heh. I had Locke respond by saying "a private forum, wow!" Funny on several levels. ;D
Before we pat ourselves on the back too much, I feel I should point out that several other teams have been teching well in the last few turns. Parkin finished researching Education (5t) followed by Alphabet (1t) so he may be going straight for Printing Press next. (Note that he still does not have Archery or Construction or HBR techs!) Nakor has finished Philosophy (3t) and then Education (also 3t), the latter with the help of a Great Scientist lightbulb just like us. Adlain was the first team to Guilds tech (6t), which is sort of a bizarre pick for him, although he may be planning on heading straight for Gunpowder after that. Among the tech laggards, luddite has finished Machinery (7t) and regoarrarr has finally picked up Civil Service (4t). The new beaker count looks like this:
Our Team: 13,037 Parkin: 11,120 Nakor: 9496 luddite: 6596 Adlain: 6436 mackoti: 6359 plako: 6297 regoarrarr: 5906 Moogle: 5592
You can really see how there's three of us out in front, and then a bunch of teams clumped together in a pack. Now I expect that Parkin's research rate will pull ahead of ours, if it isn't already, for the following reasons:
- More overall population - Much smaller army (we have significant upkeep costs now) - Forbidden Palace in good location (we are saving for Adlain capital)
We do have a Scientist lightbulb upcoming to knock out most of Printing Press tech, and that will be a nice boost for the economy. Of course, Parkin is probably heading there too, since he continues to give no sign of ever building a military. He'll really pull away from us when he pops his Taj/Great Person for a double Mausoleum golden age. But... that's why we have the alliance, no? Parkin will continue to sit in that GNP #1 spot, and everyone will be focusing on him. By the time four teams are done tearing him down, we'll be the clear leader and hopefully it will be too late to stop us from winning. That's the plan, anyway...
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jun 5, 2011 15:17:56 GMT -5
Updating for the last couple of turns. Here's an overview shot from the current turn: We finished Feudalism and I have us on (cheap) Theology as planned, so that we can draft 2XP units on our next run. We are back in Bureaucracy, Caste System, and Pacifism for the next 5t, as part of our "growth" phase of civics swaps. Pacifism is actually not cost-efficient anymore, as we have too many units. I'm using it one last time (most likely last time in the game) to get one more Great Scientist out of Teoihuacan, running 7 Scientists (42 GPP/turn) at a slight food deficit right now. That will lightbulb about 80% of Printing Press, giving us some nice extra commerce and one more step closer to Rifling. Our economy kind of sucks right now, because we killed off 37 pop over the last five turns via the draft and Slavery. I actually could have whipped even more, but I thought we had lost enough pop already. Since we're going to draft off another 20 pop shortly, we really need to emphasize growth right now. The good news is that we have a lot of regrowth taking place, and we're starting to get some universities up. We should be OK, just don't expect us to be running away in tech or anything. We'll be more like an "average" team until we can convert our huge military costs into territorial gain. Moogle took one of our planned city spots in the north. Sucks but that's life for you. I shifted our placements slightly to accomodate. I'll have to work something out with Moogle to get irrigation to our cities; I can probably swing that. We just need to get two farms, one NE of Siesta and one E-E of Siesta, and then we can work off of that. Hun has already been founded, and I whipped another settler to lock down the southern dyes spot. We'll end up with 24 cities before fighting Adlain, just slightly shy of the 25 I was hoping for. So long as we can get the farms off of that lake up here, we'll be in OK shape. The big news in the game continues to be the coalition against Parkin. We're part of a bigtime alliance with plako, Nakor/Gaspar, and luddite. We even have our own forum, which you should go check out for fun if you have time (http://z15.invisionfree.com/Placiv/index.php) They have named the group "The Parkin Violation" which is pretty funny. I've posted fairly minimal stuff over there, just confirming our membership and throwing out some suggestions. The overall plan is a massive land and sea assault starting around T200-T210 when the NAPs that those other teams stupidly sign start to wear off. We can get some galleons from Nakor (if we haven't already teched Astronomy then) and sail over a bunch of redcoats to mess with Parkin. Hopefully we can raze a bunch of cities and coastal blockade the living daylights out of the rest, to set him back. The real question now is whether Parkin can run away with the game enough to stop this alliance. He just finished Spiral Minaret and Taj Mahal this turn, which he was guaranteed to get, and also landed a Great Prophet. Say hello to a 24 turn Golden Age.... Now, if we all attacked *RIGHT NOW* then Parkin would fold like yesterday's laundry. But where is he going to be after 24 turns of Golden Age production and research? He might just be too far ahead to catch up at all. I have no idea where that might be. We have to hope that Parkin has no idea how to defend against a real MP attack from humans. If he's smart, if he techs Astronomy and Rifling and drafts rifles + builds craploads of frigates, there's nothing we can do. So we'll see what happens. Maybe there's just nothing we can do to win this game, and sometimes that happens. (Couldn't really influence the complete opposite side of the map!) Now, over in our part of the world, Adlain apparently was *NOT* whipping units when he went on that binge spree. Instead he was whipping... settlers (?!?) Adlain planted 6 cities in the last four turns, apparently in the nooks and crannies between his other cities. I have a scout returning from Nakor territory to find out where they are. I have no idea if this is even good or bad. More cities we have to fight though, but on the other hand... maybe he's saving us the effort of building settlers ourselves? Heh. His Power has not moved at all on the chart: We only have 19 more turns before the war starts, and that isn't a lot of time. Every turn that Adlain isn't whipping longbows makes it that much easier for us. So... maybe he still doesn't realize we're coming? The other teams all seem to assume that we're attacking, but I've never confirmed it to anyone other than Moogle. Perhaps that's helping, I dunno. I have no intention to say anything to our allies until a couple of turns before we declare. Loose lips sink ships and all. Oh, one last point. Look how Parkin has the highest score, best GNP, all the wonders... and a tiny military. I swear, the teams near him are all goddamn fools for signing those NAPs. If we were near Parkin, you can darn well believe we wouldn't let him get away with that! Also, it's come out in that private forum that all these other teams LOATHE Parkin, just can't stand the guy. I don't feel that way myself, even though he's a bit irritating, but I find that detail amusing. Our best hope for winning the game is that Parkin/plako/luddite all do massive damage to one another and allow us to slip a late victory. While I don't think that's likely, it's better than nothing. We can always try to sneak a culture or diplo victory if we have no chance at space. (Very much doubt anyone is winning for domination or conquest on this map!)
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jun 13, 2011 16:25:47 GMT -5
Well, this has gone a long time without an update. I've just been so super busy with work of late, merely playing the turns was really pushing me for time. I'll try to explain where we are now and what we're doing, as we hit the important date of T170. The short story is that Parkin has been running away with the game. I predicted back when he got Nationalism tech that it was a really, really bad sign, because it guaranteed him a double Mausoleum Golden Age (24t) and since he was already in the lead, it would only surge him further ahead. Well, Parkin has surged through the first 9 turns of his Golden Age (with at least another 15 still ahead, if not 27!) and has done incredibly well on the tech front. He's researched the following techs: Printing Press (3t) Music (1t) Feudalism (1t) Guilds (1t) Banking (1t) Economics (1t) -> free Great Merchant Compass (1t) Optics (1t) We're estimating his research rate to be somewhere around 1200 beakers per turn. It's rather hard to know, since Parkin insists on playing his turn last to make sure no one can ever see what he's researching via Espionage. (Even though I wrote the rules to discourage that sort of behavior, and we can see what he researches the very next turn. Seriously, screw you Parkin! Stop playing these darned clock games every turn!) The good news is that Parkin still appears to think he's in some kind of Single Player game, as he has made absolutely no effort whatsoever to build a military or research military techs. Say what you will about Speaker and I in the Pitboss #2 game, we may have acted like dicks some of the time, but when we were on top, we ALWAYS had one of the strongest militaries in the world. Teams were reluctant to fight us later in the game because we had so many units. Parkin's playstyle of pure teching with no regard for defense whatsoever has been completely baffling in this game. plako and luddite are complete fools for signing those NAPs with him. (Luddite has some defense because he had to deal with an aggressive mackoti, and plako was in a large war himself, but still. The NAPs they signed were like 80 turns in length, with a neighbor who had no units, was teching quickly, and seemed intent on building every wonder in the game. I mean, come on.) Parkin has also managed to make himself widely detested by the other teams, to the point where Nakor is willing to throw away all chance at winning just to take him down. I can't say that I feel that way myself, but it's an interesting development! We have spent the last 10 turns continuing to build up our army via the draft. We are now #1 in the world in Power by a large margin, with 773k Power score. plako is second with 690k. Adlain and Parkin are both essentially tied for last with 323k (not sure which one is actually lowest on this particular turn). Since Parkin is getting well over 200k Power just from his techs/wonders/population, it should give you an idea of how completely undefended he is, relying on NAPs to survive. If I were luddite or plako, I would probably just say "screw that NAP!" and go attack. Honoring deals is very important, but when someone literally leaves cities undefended on his border, and is running away with the game financially, they deserve to be punished for it. In terms of our own research, we stuck with the tech path I outlined before: Theology (2t) -> Guilds (4t). This allowed us to draft a full round of maces with Theocracy bonus, so we have about 15 of them with a free promotion. We also managed to get quite a few catapults built with double-promotion 5XP as well. After Guilds, I burned our Great Scientist on Printing Press: This got us most of the tech, and we finished Printing Press in 2t. I really considered using this on a Golden Age, and just didn't think the moment was right. We'll want to fire off a GA when we're doing a hard infrastructure push (factories? levees? stock exchanges? etc) and not when we're building lots of units. Also, this was literally the last tech where lightbulbing was cost effective. From this point on, all Great People will be used for Golden Ages. Printing Press itself helped us out a great deal, taking our research from break-even at the 325 beakers/turn area (roughly) up to break-even at 390 beakers/turn. I think it was worth it, as there's still plenty of time to get use out of Golden Ages in this game. We are now going Gunpowder (4t total, 3t remaining) followed by Banking (2t). We need Gunpowder for redcoats anyway, and it will let us draft muskets on the next round. Banking is a pre-requisite for Replaceable Parts anyway, and we want some early stock exchanges in key cities soonish (especially the shrine city, where I plan to whip one for fast completion). After those techs, we should probably just beeline for Rifling, which will take quite a while (looks like 6-7 turns for Replaceable Parts and then 8-9 turns for Rifling itself). I do think there's strong value in both the Astronomy line and the Music line, but this game is going to turn bloody very soon now, and redcoats crush everything until machine guns show up. We can have them right around T190 if we push to get there. Let's do it. ;D In the northern jungles, Moogle took the sugars spot we wanted. While that was a bit of a downer, we still secured most of the rest of the area, and are missing only our final dyes location E-E-NE of Jute. (I haven't rushed to get a settler here because the spot is useless without irrigation, and it's very safe.) I sent the above picture to Moogle, and we worked out a deal whereby he'll irrigate the two blue Xs to help bring farming to our cities. In return, we agreed to send one of our dyes for one of his sugars. So overall, not too bad at all, so long as Moogle keeps his word (and I think he will, since he has no real reason to turn on us). As bad as these cities look, there's just enough room to get 3 grassland farms at each spot, and that will carry these cities from "awful" into the "passable" range. If the game makes it to Biology, they'll actually be pretty sweet, heh. Preparations for the Adlain war are coming along nicely. Adlain hasn't made any real attempt to build up his military, and time is nearly running out in that area. Instead of building units, he whipped/produced the settlers for 9 additional cities, all of them crammed inside his pre-existing territory. It was... baffling. I have no idea what he's thinking with this play. It's something he should have done about 50-75 turns sooner! While this does increase the workload for conquest a little bit... honestly, it doesn't do all that much, because chewing threw size 2-4 cities with no infrastructure isn't that bad. He has founded nearly every city on hills, so perhaps he intended to use them just for defense (?) But if that's the case, then why is Adlain not whipping units constantly? He even has a completely undefended cities on our border! I don't get it. In any case, I have two scouts mapping out Adlain's territory. They've already found most of these new cities, and Adlain hasn't tried to kick them out or anything. Nor has he tried to scout our own territory. Huh. Moogle is whipping up a half-decent army of his own, which I've pictured above. This warrior is just going to hang out with them and watch the Moogle army move when war is declared. Adlain is going to make this rather painful, but we have far superior numbers, and we'll wear him down over time and grind him into the dust. Hopefully he'll give up after the first few cities go down and turn it into a formulaic exercise. regoarrarr may be joining the war too, or he may not. I asked Moogle not to say anything to regoarrarr, but apparently they've been talking about attacking Adlain for ages, and he felt compelled to pass on some news. Whatever. So long as we can make sure that we get the capital and the heart of Adlain's territory, we'll be OK. That capital has the Buddhist shrine, and is worth a fortune. Adlain's territory is actually pretty hard to invade from the north, so if we strike directly west, we should get to the capital first. plako, Nakor, and luddite are all preparing for a huge invasion of Parkin at T200. We're going to be part of that as well, with us sending redcoats on galleons (likely provided by Nakor). I have not told them yet of our war against Adlain, although I will soon. We have to hope that Parkin goes down to this combined assault... although at the same time, hoping that plako/luddite don't get massive empires out of it. It's a tricky balancing act, and a decisive result for either side (Parkin or plako/luddite) would be bad for us. Anyway, we really do want to commit to this attack, because otherwise Parkin will just win the game. We can sort out the postwar situation later. Our teching rate is still good, but it's not #2 anymore. Nakor, luddite, and even plako have done a very strong job of catching up, and are not competitive with us. This is mostly due to the fact that luddite and plako have more total population than us (and we've drafted so much of it away recently). plako/luddite have two things working in their favor: they both have shrines (like we do), and they both have well-placed Forbidden Palaces. I've held off our building our own FP so we can place it in Adlain's capital. Perhaps that will be too late to make a difference (?) But I don't know where else we would have put it, our northern cities aren't so great enough to justify it. The far northern cities have really horrendous maintenance, which has hurt our science a bit. Overall, I guess it's the same story as always: we must annex Adlain's lands ASAP. They'll take us from 25 cities to 40 cities, and put us on an even footing (or ahead) of plako/luddite. So these have been quiet turns, but it'll be heating up very quickly soon. Once I've got Adlain's territory mapped out (should be another 2-3 turns), we can start planning our tactical moves, Speaker. We should have 35 maces, 20-25 catapults, 5-10 muskets, 5 horse archers, and 5 knights in our initial attack force, with more muskets/cats/knights trailing in as reinforcements. Let's see what damage we can do with that! EDIT: Oh, almost forgot to mention about our civics. We've been in Nationhood/Slavery/Theocracy for drafting purposes. I'm about to swap us again next turn. We'll go to Slavery/OR this time and do some city whips; I've held off on whipping to get the OR benefit. If you remember earlier, we were swapping Slavery/OR with Caste System/Pacifism and doing whip/growth cycles. Well now Caste System and Pacifism no longer hold value, so I will swap us between draft (Theocracy) and whip (OR) cycles instead, using Slavery for the latter. Perhaps we can replace Slavery with something else in the former (?) I'd use Emancipation there if we had it, actually. I was looking at what to replace Nationhood with, and I actually think we KEEP it for the moment, even when we're not drafting. Bureaucracy really is not worth it, even with the sweet capital. One city on a Huge map does not justify the "High" upkeep cost. I'd love to go to Free Speech, but we only have 17 towns right now (I counted) and it's not cost-efficient. We need about another 10-20 turns there to grow some more villages into towns. So for the moment, Nationhood is the best option IMO, because of the "None" upkeep cost. That saves us about 40gpt all on its own, which is not trivial. It even gives us a minor espionage boost too, ha! So stick with Nationhood for now, and go into Free Speech probably on our next draft cycle in 10t (when we reach T181). Thoughts?
|
|
|
Post by Speaker on Jun 14, 2011 8:08:41 GMT -5
Thanks for the big update. We'll catch up tonight on IM. I have logged into the game several times over the past week and have watched the war build up. I'm looking forward to plotting our war strategy. As of now, I think we should more or less head straight for the capital, and then work out way outward from there. Like you mentioned, we really want the capital, with the shrine and its central location.
CEO's Sprite -- Greater Profit -- Capital
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jun 15, 2011 15:33:30 GMT -5
Here's an overview image from this turn: We're waiting on the timer to tick down to zero, as mackoti did not end his turn for some reason. (Perhaps he plans to attack luddite? That wouldn't work, althought it might be amusing.) Our civ went back to Organized Religion, and I'm whipping some infrastructure with the OR production bonus. We should have just enough time to whip a couple of stock exchanges before going back to Theocracy for the next drafting round in 5t. Adlain still does not appear to be adding military, and he's virtually out of time to do that. His last four techs after getting Guilds: Compass (3t) Optics (4t) Theology (3t) Paper (3t) Interesting.... Maybe Adlain really doesn't think we're attacking (?) Well, no news is good news for us in that department. We just about have his territory mapped out, so when Speaker gets back from traveling this weekend, we can sit down and draw up our tactical plan for the war. Moogle's got a pretty nice stack of his up building up there in the north (he had about 10 maces, 10 cats, and some knights trickling in) which will draw attention away from us. Hopefully Adlain will go down very fast. On a related note, regoarrarr sent one of the most hilarious diplo messages I can recall. Here it is: Oh yeah, sure, we'll build the army, we'll take the military risk of capturing the cities, but then we'll share the results equally with someone who didn't do anything. Sounds like a plan! Where can I sign up for that? Seriously regoarrarr, you're a great guy and all, but come on dude. That is not happening. I wanted to write back a message saying: "Thanks! That's a great idea! In the meantime, can you send us 50gpt right now? It's not fair for you to be the only one who benefits from those Great Lighthouse trade routes, after all!" But I'm going to leave it with a polite mention that we'll discuss it after the war. In other words, hell no. ;D More seriously though, I wanted to use this post to think longer term about endgame scenarios. Yes, our immediate focus is conquering Adlain and absorbing most of that territory for ourselves, and then we'll need to make a major contribution to the anti-Parkin campaign. But what then? This is a game with specific victory conditions, and we want to be thinking about how we plan to win this one. And the earlier we start thinking about this, the better. I'm going to assume that we successfully beat Adlain and end up with at least a sizeable portion of his land (if that doesn't happen, we have no shot for victory anyway!) Now after that, there are basically three scenarios on how the Parkin war can play out: 1) Parkin defends successfully and the war is a complete failure. If this happens, then Parkin will almost certainly win the game by Spaceship. We can't out-research him without the impending invasion dealing major damage. 2) Parkin takes a lot of damage, but manages to stay in the game and preserve his core. This is the best result for us, dragging Parkin back to the pack without creating a new runaway. We have to try to work towards this. 3) Parkin gets absolutely crushed. This is good in preventing Parkin from winning, but bad because then plako will become the new runaway, as he'll get most of the rewards from victory (him and luddite, but Parkin is further ahead overall than luddite). This is obviously what plako is going for, and he has Nakor on board as his sidekick in the endeavor. We have to walk a bit of a fine line here to try and knock Parkin down to size without creating another superpower in the process. plako wasn't all that pleased to hear that we're going after Adlain - he wanted all of our maces to be over with his army in the invasion force - but that's something we couldn't afford to do. Let's be honest: there's no way we're getting land out of a war with Parkin. plako and luddite will clean up everything. They stand to gain everything, so it's no wonder they are pushing so hard for cooperation on this! Although we do want to help them out (to avoid flatout losing to Parkin), we can't afford to commit too much either. A tough balancing act. Now, how is this game going to end? I expect that the game will likely end sometime around T300, depending on the speed of the tech pace. (Keep in mind, during the last 70 turns we went from researching Monotheism to Printing Press.) Here are my thoughts on the victory conditions: - Conquest and Domination are not going to happen. The map is just too big. The game would end through concession before these conditions could be achieved, and I don't think that will happen. - Diplomacy could very well take place. This is pretty much backdoor Domination, with some help from your friends. The best defense here is just to amass a whole lot of population. Still, this is also a tough victory condition to achieve, because humans are not AIs and will rarely vote someone else the victor. - Spaceship is the most likely way that the game will end. Perhaps we can build the best economy and out-tech the other teams to space. However, I'm not at all sure that will happen either. If scenario #1 or scenario #3 takes place above, we'll never be able to out-build the dominant Parkin or plako empires and reach space first. Our expansion opportunities post-Adlain don't really look that good. Moogle has been a good friend, and I don't want to fight him. Who else could we attack? Going after luddite's massive empire would only ensure that both of us lose the game. Nakor could be a possibility, but plako would surely intervene (either on his side, bad, or against Nakor, also bad with him taking most of the spoils) and that looks dicey. Maybe we could do something with regoarrarr, although again plako could intervene and gobble up most of the territory. It's hard to say. So that leaves.... Cultural victory? It's not as crazy as it might sound. You can win by culture much faster than winning by space, as the RB Epics have demonstrated time and again. We have a huge in-built advantage for Cultural victory by virtue of being Spiritual. Half-cost temples and fast civic swaps into whatever we happen to need. The biggest obstacle to a cultural victory is getting 3 good cities for Legendary status. Outside of the capital, I don't even see 2 other cities! We need cities with mass cottages (for running the Cultural slider), as we don't have Sistine and are not Philosophical, making the mass Artist specialist route a poor choice. Maybe we can get some nice spots out of Adlain's empire. Honestly, I think this might well be our best shot for victory. The key to a cultural victory is starting early: getting religions spread around and temples built for cathedrals. We have six religions in our territory (everything except Islam) and so in theory could build six cathedrals in Legendary cities. Heck, we can cash-rush cathedrals with Universal Suffrage if need be. Add in the Free Speech civic, and that's 5x the cultural bonus in each city. Best of all, it's unlikely anyone would even realize we were going for culture until it was too late to stop us. So we would just go about our normal business, researching the expected techs, still drafting units or whatever to stay on top of military, all the while spreading religion and building temples/cathedrals, then all of sudden we slam the culture slider to 100% and we're 30 turns away from victory, with no one even aware of what we're doing until it's too late to stop. Anyway, nothing changes for the moment: we need to defeat Adlain first before anything else. However, once the war is over we should re-evaluate this and decide whether to go for culture, because if so we need to start spreading our minority religions quickly. The closest example I can remember was Dreylin's civ in the Pitboss #1 game, where he almost won by Culture. But Dreylin basically waited until the Modern age started, then thought "oh yeah, I'll go for culture" instead of planning from an early point in time. Done correctly, culture should beat space to the finish line by a good margin, especially with that "wait for the ship to arrive" nonsense in Beyond the Sword. Even better if we can sign NAPs with our neighbors before they realize what we're doing! Thinking out loud here, but it may well be a plan worth pursuing.
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jun 19, 2011 8:43:22 GMT -5
We finished Banking tech, and stock exchanges were queued in many cities. Speaker, I have us set on the straight beeline to Rifling next:
Replaceable Parts (5t) -> Rifling (7t?)
If you want, we can go for Engineering (3t) before heading down that route. Let me know. Hopefully we can go over some game-related issues tonight when you get back from traveling.
|
|
|
Post by Speaker on Jun 22, 2011 16:04:58 GMT -5
Sullla, can you try and catch up with me tonight? I'll be home around 10ish.
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jun 22, 2011 20:14:28 GMT -5
Yes - I was planning a big post for today to catch us up on all that's going on in the game right now. Here it is. I'll start with our own civ. We are of course about to attack Adlain, just two turns away from the current turn. I was able to get a good screengrab of our forces assembling above. After including all reinforcements, and the two muskets we'll draft out of Olmec/Navajo next turn, the total initial invasion force looks like: 13 muskets 30 maces 21 catapults 4 knights 4 horse archers We have further knights, muskets, and catapults trickling in behind that initial wave, but that will be our main striking force. Moogle will also be adding roughly 10 knights, 15 maces, and 12 catapults on his end. As for our opponent, Adlain did not whip any units this turn, or the previous turn, and continues to sit with extremely low power on the graph. He is 8th out of 9 teams (Parkin continues to taunt everyone by sitting in last place... which is absolutely unbelievable, but whatever). We have visibility on all of Adlain's cities, and his military is extremely dispersed all over his territory. He has not teched either of the two things that would make our life really tough: no Engineering, no Gunpowder. We are #1 in Power by an enormous margin, 1034k points with plako #2 at 813k points. Adlain is around roughly 400k points. In other words, we're as well prepared as we possibly can be for this conflict. Adlain doesn't appear to have prepared at all. Who knows what will happen when the war begins, but we've set ourselves up for success. Speaker, all these units are set up to move to the staging tile 1E of Navajo next turn. If you want to do something different with the Mounted units, or make a play for that Adlain city on our border, feel free to go for it. I leave the tactical unit movements up to you. The overall strategic goal is a straight drive to Adlain's capital and the Buddhist Shrine as quickly as possible. I'll also make sure to play right at the start of next turn (T179) to be within the timer rules for the game. Then we also play right at the start of T180 and make an honorable war declaration. Shouldn't be too tough to do that. The immediate goal is to use this huge military buildup to remove Adlain. Then next we need to join our allies in the fight against Parkin. We're teching Replaceable Parts (5t) -> Rifling (7t?) next as part of that move, even though it's pretty suboptimal from an economic standpoint. But we need the redcoats to do much of anything against Parkin. I want us to focus on eliminating Parkin's coastal cities with Nakor's galleons, as control of the western ocean would be enormous in both establishing our own safety and opening up Parkin to invasion. If we burn down all of Parkin's cities over there, he can't build ships and he can't counter us, no matter how much tech he has. plako wants us to fight on land with luddite, which I think is a weaker strategy, and unfortunately everyone assumes that "Locke" doesn't know what he's talking about. Hopefully it will work out though. Establishing control of the seas first is paramount in taking down a difficult opponent, since it's almost impossible to defend against cities being forked if you don't have that sea control. This is plako's plan, which he posted in the team forum: So plako is going to go all military, including firing off a second Golden Age and building mass Weath in cities for rifle upgrades. This is awesome news for us, obviously! It looks like the Parkin/plako war is going to get extremely bloody, and even with a tech advantage, Parkin is going to take some major losses. If we can raze a bunch of coastal cities, things are looking rather good over there, and plako's mass military strat will set him back economically. Meanwhile, mackoti (Parkin's vassal) is going to attack luddite, so he will be somewhat tied up there, before bringing his own stack against Parkin when luddite's NAP ends on T210. (Yes, luddite was foolish for agreeing to an NAP that lasted until T210. I think it was something like 70-100 turns when he signed initially!) Anyway, this game is going to get extremely bloody in a few more turns, and only figures to get more and more violent as we go on. Here are the alliances: Our Team plako luddite Nakor Moogle (sort of) The top four of us are bound together in a pledge to fight Parkin. Moogle is more or less in our camp, although not a formal member of the alliance. He's going to help us fight Adlain and also close borders with Parkin. More or less on our side. The other alliance is pretty much: Parkin mackoti (unofficial vassal) Adlain Adlain might not even realize he's tied in with the others, but he'll be part of their group soon enough once we attack him in two turns. As our enemy, he's grouped in with Parkin by default. Notice that these are the two weakest teams in the game by far, along with Parkin the runaway. regoarrarr/sunrise are sitting on the fence without joining any camp. We are hoping to get them on our side and cause more problems for Parkin, but no one really knows what they'll do. Possibly just sit on the sidelines and tech away while everyone else fights, heh. As I said before, the ideal result would be a long, grueling war of attrition where Parkin is slowly ground down by plako/luddite/us with massive losses on all sides. We can absorb losses to drafted units, as they're extremely cheap to raise. The other teams, not so much. We also won't contribute as much as plako/luddite, and with good reason: they stand to reap nearly all of the benefits from a successful war. They will get all of Parkin's land. I totally agree that we need to work to stop the runaway, but we're not going to kill ourselves so that plako can get all of those cities. We'll do our part to help out, and that's that. So that leads me back to our other goal moving forward: building towards our future Cultural victory. We're committed to this as our best chance of winning, and by starting our planning now we can put ourselves in a nice position later on. There are two main things we have to do for a cultural win: - Get all six of our religions in the three legendary cities - Build twelve temples of each religion so we can build six cathedral in each city The temples themselves are pretty easy, just shy of a one-pop whip for our Spiritual civ. The issue is spreading a crapload of religions around to 12 cities each. Confucianism/Buddhism are easy, as we'll have tons of cities with both of them after conquering Adlain. We need to focus on spreading our four minority religions around a bit: Taoism, Judaism, Hinduism, and Christianity. I'm taking some early steps now to set up a couple of cities as missionary centers for these religions: Taoism = Saxon, Christianity = Angle. I think Carib will be a nice Hindu spreading center, once I get religion in there (Magyar is the only Hindu city at the moment, plan to whip a missionary when we go back to OR civic). Judaism is in the capital, so I can spread it somewhere else pretty easily; maybe Goth would be a nice spot? I'll figure it out. Anyway, I'm starting the first stages of this at the moment, which means setting up the missionary production cities and spreading all six religions to our three legendary cities (so they can get started on temples, monasteries, etc.) Here's a quick look at them: The capital is pretty much set up already. We have four religions to date here, just needing the last two (Hindu/Christianity). We also have four temples and four monasteries here! Cherokee is probably going to build a lot of missionaries down the road to help out our other cities. Olmec is the weakest of our three cities and will need a lot of help. It only has six cottages/towns, although I will probably build a seventh one on the unimproved plains tile soon. There are two things going for this city though: - It's the Confucian holy city with shrine = 10 culture/turn for free. - It's on the coast. We can build (Expansive!) harbor along with customs house, which will give us a ton of foreign trade route income. That should help offset the fewer land tiles to work. We only have Confucianism in here right now. I am currently building monastery -> temple -> Hermitage, as this is the city that needs the most help. We will probably have to do a lot of cathedral cash-rushing here with Universal Suffrage, since this city has the least production potential. Only one food bonus is the enduring problem... Speaker correctly pointed out that Zapotec was the best spot for our third city; we stole the rice tile away from Anasazi (crippling it, sigh) but making Zapotec infinitely stronger. Anasazi is actually starving right now, although I'm going to build some windmills there to get it back into the positive range on food. Anyway, this is a strong city location, and will eventually have a full 9 cottages (have to run some Emancipation to grow them into towns faster!) I'm turning the one grassland farm into a cottage as we speak, as Zapotec now has plenty of food. This city also has excellent production potential, and will be able to put up cathedrals in a real hurry. I'm going to let it grow while building that stock exchange (and while we wait to tech Rifling before going for Drama/Music) before swapping over to full time culture. We should finish Rifling tech right around T190, and then the Music line of techs is our next goal. We should be able to get there around T195, and then I want us building cathedrals immediately in our top three cities. Ideally, they'll just alternate temple/monastery/cathedral constantly across the six religions, although in practice I'm sure that won't quite happen. We will probably never tech past Scientific Method in this game (since it obsoletes monasteries, and that's a full 24 base culture/turn getting obsoleted!) but that's not as bad as it might sound, as even without Sci Method we can still get Assembly Line (factories/infantry) and Railroads. I can't imagine us teching much past that anyway, as we'll have to swap over to culture at some point around then... probably before then, to be honest. Six cathedrals plus Free Speech civic gives a 5x multiplier on culture. We can run 100% culture no problem with other cities building some Weath for us (and with Confucian + Buddhist shrines giving us massive income!) That means our target goal is roughly 100-140 base culture/turn in these cities, which multiplies to 500-700 culture/turn. Some culture from corporations would be amazing, but we can't count on that happening, and I'll assume we're not going to get them. An ideal timeline would look like this: T180-200 Attack and conquer Adlain T200-230 Global attack and slow attrition of Parkin T200-230 (Concurrent) Massive missionary spread and cathedral building T230-300 Turn culture slider to max and wait to win game It's a very risky plan, as we'll be highly vulnerable to people teching when we're not. However, it's unquestionable that cuture will outpace space to the finish line, all other things being equal. I will try really, REALLY hard to get everyone in our "alliance" to sign some kind of long NAP if the Parkin war goes well, saying something about let's all race to space peacefully or whatever. The whole idea is that no one sees the danger until it's too late to do anything about it, when they're all under NAP and such. As I said, it's risky and all, but we're not winning this game by traditional means. We may as well go for it. If the game gets to T300 and we're not invaded, I think we'll probably win. OK, that should have us up to date. We'll talk about it in an hour or two.
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jun 23, 2011 15:43:07 GMT -5
Update for the staging turn: I made sure to log in right at the start of the turn, so that we can play fairly within the double move rules. Our big stack is sitting on the staging tile, ready to move in next turn. CEO's Sprite first, and the straight west to the capital: Greater Profit, Two Grand, Seizewell. Meanwhile, Moogle's force looks like this in the north: This scout will be following them along to track their progress and keep an eye on the other end of the war. (I also have warriors or scouts moving to watch the luddite and plako fronts in the upcoming Parkin war. Very important to have eyes on what the other teams are doing.) I'm still not sure if he's going to attack in the east or west on his front first. We'll see. Adlain discovered a tech this turn after 5t of research, which means he got something expensive. I was really worried until I checked and found out that he teched... Printing Press. Nice. ;D Is he really that clueless? He certainly hasn't done very much to prepare for war thus far. Hopefully he will fold quickly, although I personally think this war is going to be long, due to our lack of mounted units and the distances involved. Once his core cities start falling though (the ones that are not size 3-4) his production capacity will be greatly diminised. Power chart. Adlain did have a minimal tick upwards, which I believe was about a half dozen units. (Maces? Camel archers? Some kind of mixture?) It's rather miniscule compared to our drafting though. We have fully 200k more Power than anyone else in the game at the moment, 1061k to plako's 842k. Adlain has less than half of our power rating. Yes, it's much easier to defend than attack, but numbers of that quantity have a quality of their own, as they say. Still not sure how much this all matters though in the end... Parkin teched Replaceable Parts in 1 turn. He's so far out in front now it's just crazy, a full era ahead of anyone else. (We have the second most "tech points" according to my spreadsheet, and we are sitting at 20.5k compared to his 31.3k, fully 50% more beakers researched than the next-closest team in the game.) Even worse, Parkin still has another 20 full turns before anyone is willing to attack him. So he will be even further ahead by that point in time... He will probably just be too far ahead and coast to a space win. I'm still royally pissed at how all the teams bordering him signed those ridiculous NAPs, and then refused to break them afterwards. Seriously - plako, luddite, and regoarrarr, this one is on you if we all lose. You were all complete morons to sign those deals. For the moment, let's hope the Adlain war goes well. It will start sometime tomorrow evening, and hopefully we can be online then to get things started (although we're pretty much just moving units in one big Ctrl-A grouping, haha!)
|
|
|
Post by maskeddetective on Jun 24, 2011 0:02:56 GMT -5
Good luck with the war, guys!
It's also great to see a solid victory plan. Can't wait to see the reaction when the other guys work out what you're doing.
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jun 25, 2011 10:09:00 GMT -5
Well, we are at war now as planned: I made sure to log in and play mere minutes after the turn rolled over, to stay within the double move rules and avoid confusion. We now have the first 12 hours of the turnset to play. Moogle later joined us in declaring war, so it looks like that's all set up. In the picture above, an Adlain warrior was teleported out of our territory and onto the forest tile you see there. I decided to take one of our maces in Navajo (which had 1/2 XP) and use him to kill that warrior, to pick up a promotion and prevent Adlain from upgrading the unit into something more useful. Unfortunately the mace took a couple of hits during the battle (when the odds were overwhelming to win without damage) but the unit should still be fine. Notice how atrocious Adlain's road coverage is up in this area; he has a single road tile on the pigs, which has now been occupied by our units. There is no road SE of the city, and if he wants to send his camel archers to go attack a mace on a forest tile (or send workers to road the tile and move units out of his besieged city) he's welcome to do so. That mace isn't exactly valuable or anything. Here's the inside of Adlain's city. I promoted two knights to Combat II for defensive purposes, and promoted one horse archer to Medic along with another one to Sentry. It doesn't look like there are any units behind CEO Sprite, unless they are on the tile SE of Greater Profit. Navajo still has 2 muskets + 1 mace + 1 spearman, in a city with 40% cultural defenses. I think we're fine there. The absolute best thing would be Adlain trying to make a stand with these units in this city. We would crush them very easily. If he retreats them back into his territory, he can make things a bit more difficult for us, trading territory for time. Adlain did whip his cities at the end of T179 (although not as crazily as you might think, only 9 cities for 14 pop) so presumably he'll be in war mode from now on. I'm curious what he will decide to do. We're swapping civics next turn, out of Nationhood and into Free Speech, out of Theocracy and into Organized Religion. Some whips for buildings have been waiting on that change. Our income went down by about 50gpt from moving all these units into foreign territory, which is going to hurt science in the immediate future. (Although not as bad as I had feared, actually. ) We'll hopefully offset that with some city capture gold, temporarily at least. Still on pace to get Rifling tech right around T190. That's all for the moment. Tonight we'll see what Adlain does and hopefully can take this first city.
|
|
|
Post by Speaker on Jun 25, 2011 14:03:44 GMT -5
Looks lovely. What time EST are you planning to play, Sullla? I may extend my stay until tomorrow, but I can check in with you via AIM.
|
|
|
Post by Sullla on Jun 25, 2011 14:45:03 GMT -5
If everyone ends turn, we'll do the next turn tonight. But if people refuse to end turn (as has been common lately) then we'll do it tomorrow morning. I'll be around tonight and tomorrow morning, so whenever is fine for me. (Actually, I'll be watching a friend's dogs for a couple of hours tonight, so if I'm not online, that's what's going on.) Update after Adlain played: He promoted his units in CEO Sprite and that was it. No reinforcements coming, nor did he give up the city. Huh. Also note that Adlain emptied his city on our border in the south, New Deal. I think we might as well take it, since he's offering it to us, and stick some drafted muskets in there. I really, really do not think Adlain is going to do much attacking out of his cities in this war. Our scout is standing on the same tile as Moogle's main stack, 3N and 1NW of Profit Share. It looks like he's going for Profit Share first, which makes sense because it's the best city up there. The stack on the left is moving towards The Vault, although I have to believe that Adlain will have enough units to stop that. If he can't hold a city on a hill against a mace and knight... well... Anyway, that's probably more of a defensive move than anything else from Moogle. He wants to make sure that nothing slips past and reaches his cities. We should be able to effectively cut off Moogle and limit his gains to those 4 cities in the north, with us cleaning up everything else. Adlain whipped two cities, one for 1 pop and the other for 3 pop. And... that was it. Not exactly the "slaze" defense here. I don't think he's too into this game, which makes sense since he's pretty screwed. Anyway, we will definitely get this first city (just have to take down two CG3 units) and then we'll be moving on. Should be able to set things up to take the little southern city on the following turn. So far, so good.
|
|