(December 23rd, 2013, 18:23)Old Harry Wrote: Okay, we're back, Mackoti's GA ended with a great engineer being born (I have a feeling it was something else last time around, but I didn't get a shot of the event log, so can't properly complain)
Good catch. It seems really probable since that must be a low-odds roll. Mack should not have the opportunity to steal Taj from dtay though because he does not have Philosophy. This is nice, because I prefer dtay getting the wonder.. (I would prefer someone, who is not our neighbor over dtay though.. Sigh)
Quote:We think Mack is most likely to be going for the Economics merchant, he's ahead of us Paper and Guilds and perhaps Banking already but his Golden Age just finished. Can we do enough in the next eight turns to beat him? Fintourist is going to do some calculations
Well, mack could be going for Gunpowder, printing press, Astronomy or basically anything and we are just paranoid (maybe we should actually be more paranoid about janissaries and galleons)..
But yeah, the point is that we do not want to put 7000 beakers into Education+Economics if we don't get the Great Merchant as a price. Universities and free market civic are not worth it (free market is very nice, but still not nice enough for that kind of an investment considering our squeezed position).. If we lose Economics to someone we have miss-played our hand and we would have been better off not birthing a great scientist for a bulb and should just remain relevant longer by grinding towards draftable rifles (or something else) supported by 4 trade missions and 2nd GA.. And yeah, we need to decide this by t150 and while mack is clearly closest to Economics from our opponents he is the most relevant comparison point. (we should be able to beat dtay if we want and nobody else has Paper). Mack has finished Guilds, Paper, Banking and has 770 gold in savings so he is clearly ahead of us if he is going for Economics. If we convert that gold into beakers he is only missing ~6000 beakers (I don't think he has much beakers in any tech currently). Meanwhile after we finish Guilds next turn we still need ~9000 beakers.. So we are 3000 beakers and 2 turns of break-even research behind the leader of the game.. Sounds grim, right?
However, we will most likely get 1800-2000 beakers from GS bulb and ~1500 gold from a trade mission and we are in a Golden Age so the possible race is closer than it seems. Unfortunately mack has m_h's cities, very strong ORG trait (btw Krill: .. and mack has m_h's wonders, Colossus and Paya, which are both boosting his economy. Consequently I think mack's normal economy is probably close to our GA economy (which is just sad) and therefore I'm again a bit pessimistic whether we can win this race.. So yeah. I'm trying to come up with some kind of an estimate whether we would win or lose Economics-beeline (estimate our and mack's ((and dtay's)) ETAs) and then we can decide what we believe and whether we want to gamble.
I think after seeing our start + surroundings and leader I said that we are more or less out from racing for any first-to-reach bonuses, which I think was more or less correct forecast. We had 0-chance for Liberalism, it's kind of surprising that we can even dream about this Economics GM and I think we should be happy that we got at least Taoism.
