RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[P&nny]

Sulla, Speaker,

It's about time I sit down and type a message,
I'm a long time MP friend of Speaker & we've been discussing this game when we have the chance (I read this topic only), have read it all, but haven't advised or asked anything yet

It's obvious you're in pole position, but nothing is certain yet, you did get beat on libe & mausoleum, so it's not all about you so far -not that those are 2 the most relevant things, but they're pretty strong-


I'm posting 'cause I've asked myself what I would do with the GP decision, and I've come to realize that you've got a shortcoming in rgds GP management if I dare say...
you clearly played your leader as a financial leader that is philosophical, and not the opposite, which is fine, but I don't recall reading a very clear long-term plan with the GP management !
I'd be interested to know what it is you have in mind exactly ?

If you really have no specific interst for a particular GP (which seem to be the case) you should let the city with the SLOWEST GP speed finish first the GP, so you get the second faster...unless you really don't care about that, and want to speed up the 3rd ! in which case you'd better do the opposite so you alternate the GP points pool to it's best.

What's your take on that, and more importantly future GP speed & Civics ?
Are you aiming at Democracy quickly for suffrage + Emanc (seems to be the financial game your playing) or will you ever use Repr+caste ? (Not my taste but possible since your phi) (are you going to use the synergy of Mercan, or stick with free market in both cases ?)

Seems to me, your not going for the later, as you've not shown any interest in caste, and don't even talk about merging specialist into cities,
But you've also taken a blow in regards of the suffrage use of just piling up 1+2+3 Specialist for 4 golden ages with Mausoleum :'(
Seems a bit random and short sighted to me (your overall GP management, with Phi, & the Epics going up, you could still get a very large amount of those), it shows by your Great artist of music, which, let's be honest, you don't find a good use for yet (Rest of the game is perfect though )

There is also a huge end-game aspect you haven't talked about (on the forum ) yet, it's corporations. Talking about that engineer, if you don't feel confident about getting another one, maybe you should keep it eventhough it's in a long time (the Mining corpis), same goes for an eventual merchant popping up IMO (Econ merchant is gone right ?)

What's your take on Corporations actually ? In this game ? in general ?
Are you expecting to HAVE to run State property with a large empire at the point of that choice (which would mean you capture large amount of land...meaning you're going war strategy mostly, which changes things)

Like I said, I think you've got the game on hand pretty much, but if you end up with the same amount of cities and land, how affraid are you of Organised just overpowering your combo ?
TBH, Holy Rome has the huuuge advantage to multiply efficiency of corporation, and there happens to be not only a holy rome, not only several Org leaders, but Darius of HR to do quite good in this game
Will you go as far as to rush the corpos, so you deny them to others ? (esp. HR) ? Would you even found them if you don't use them (switch SP afterwards)

To me, should you be equal on land (&tech) at the time and your best opponent to found 1 Production + 1 food corp just like you, you'd be lagging a little behind, that'd leave only 3 possibilities to "squeeze out" more of you civ then the simple yields of the tiles :
- GP integrated : Ruled out
- Corpos : You'll tell me your take on it
- Trade route : think you're establishing yourself well on outer islands for that purpose
- Additionnal outcome for buildings, namely, The Religious wonder trio.

If you're not going for a strong military option, I'd see the wonder trio as an excellent "safe" card should the game last, or do you feel you've got better on your hands ?
You're going build up now, what's next tech wise (I must have missed that message, because I remember reading something about PP) ? I have to say I'm surprise you didn't go for faster (cheap) universities, I usually bulb Educ with philo. Eventhough we must confess that you average tech rate is not THAT high (upside limited), and most importantly you had to take grece out as fast as possible (downside relatively important), so you probably made the best choice there.


Anyway good luck, not that you need any

[Speaker]

For those of you who don't know Penny, he's probably the best "Ironman" (full game) player in the history of the MP ladder, or certainly in the top 5 in any event. I don't have time to answer his excellent questions right now, but I'll give it the justice it reserves at some point today or tomorrow.

[Sullla]

Is that so? Maybe we should be taking advice from Penny then! But first I wanted to get back to T-Hawk's point from yesterday. True, lighthouses aren't free to build. That said, the increase in food is still significant for a coastal city, and saying "just one food" doesn't quite capture the effect that boosting food surplus can have on the overall growth curve. Going from, say, +9 food to +10 food each turn does very little - but in the most common case, single clams or crabs resource, the lighthouse takes a city from +4 to +5 food each turn, and that makes a great difference indeed. Growth comes 25% faster, powering more whips, and faster whips, which speeds along the development of everything down the road. So while a lighthouse may not have been completely necessary in all those cities of Kathlete, I still think it would have been a good idea at some point.

Plus, even at "just one food" each turn, after 100 or so turns you've definitely gotten your value back. I have to think that at SOME point in the last 180 turns, it would have been useful to boost the water tiles at Coruscant! (Not to mention, building a lighthouse makes Moai Statues a much more attractive option - I see the lack of lighthouses and Moai as a common issue.)

OK, let me try to tackle the subjects in Penny's long post one at a time. A lot of this stuff has been covered already at various points in time, but I hardly blame anyone for not seeing it all in the thousands of posts (!) in this thread:

- The subject of Great People: your point is absolutely well taken here. We're on Turn 178 and our team has produced exactly 2 Great People thus far, which is pathetic for a Philosophical civ. We've gotten virtually no value from one of our traits, urp! All that we can really plead here is being the victims of need and circumstance. If you'll recall, we produced a Great Scientist very early on for an Academy. We would have liked to emphasize more in that area, however we had to deal with that massive 5 vs. 1 war shortly thereafter, and anything other than bare survival was impossible. If we had had time and room to develop, our team would have gone for early Literature and the Great Library, which would have been worth 2 Great Scientists all on its own by now, and probably given us Liberalism too. But as you know from Ironman games, security has to come first. Don't die!

The Mausoleum was a similar case of competing priorities. Of course we could have built it, if we had made the wonder our top goal. We could have settled the offshore island, rushed to connect early marble, and then built the wonder in our Bureaucracy capital, and we would have gotten it. Instead, we chose to push to Guilds and Engineering techs, not settle the offshore island for a while, and build maces and knights in our top production cities. The payoff was killing Jowy and annexing most of his territory - but the opportunity cost was losing a desirable wonder. Unfortunately this isn't SP, and you can't do everything you want. I'd still make the same tradeoff again given the choice. Jowy was a security threat to our civ, and his territory made us a lot stronger.

Fortunately we've made major efforts to improve our Great Person situation and start getting value out of the Philosophical trait. It took about 40 turns to set up, but now Spartansburg is primed to be a perfect Great Person farm with National Epic and enough food to run 6 or 7 specialists at once. We'll get a lot of Great People in short order from there. Too bad we're getting close to the end of the useful lightbulb era though! (Once you start hitting the Industrial age, the Great People are generally more useful for Golden Ages than lightbulbs.) The one downside to using Spartansburg is that we can't control the Great Person type, but we can probably find value from whatever comes out.

- On that subject, we're already delaying Spartansburg's first Great Person so that St. Albans can produce its own Great Person ahead of time. Gotta do this so that the points built up in St. Albans (14 GPP/turn) won't go to waste and be dwarfed by Spartansburg (57 GPP/turn). So your point is very well taken here!

- On civics, Speaker is a big fan of Universal Suffrage for the production, while I'm more of a Representation guy for the beakers. Especially given our Philosophical bent, I think we would do well to leverage Representation + Mercantilism (and maybe with Statue of Liberty if we get lucky?) over Universal Suffrage. And while I love Caste System, I don't see us using it in this game. We probably don't need to target specific Great People at this point, and can go with the mixed results produced out of Spartansburg. Plus, our core cities probably have enough infrastructure to hire scientists or merchants as we desire them anyway.

I think Mercantilism is a clear winner over Free Market; with those island cities of ours, we'll get 2 commerce trade routes in every city just from domestic routes alone, and that's what most of our foreign routes are worth currently anyway. Paired with Representation (and Statue?), all those extra specialists would probably come close to breaking even on pure beaker count, and grant bonus production and Great People points for free. Perhaps most importantly, with Mercantilism no one would be deriving trade route income from our team, and as one of the biggest civs in the game, that would be a serious blow to foreign economies.

Slavery versus Emancipation is a much harder call. I'm not sure where I feel on this yet, because both would provide very strong value. We want Slavery at the moment for cranking out more units and building stuff in cities with low production - but I could see us going to Emancipation too if we're getting enough units from drafting. It's a shame we're not Spiritual and can flip back and forth every 5 turns, getting value from both at once!

With our size, I also think that Nationhood civic wins out over Bureaucracy. Much as we love the Big B, and even though we have a nice capital to take advantage of it, it doesn't beat drafting in every city. And Nationhood is a cheaper civic than Bureaucracy too; I think it's "Low" compared to "High", so there's some financial savings there too. Basically, we stick with Bureaucracy until we can reach the lategame civics at Constitution/Democracy techs, and then pull a big swap with a Golden Age freebie. Then start drafting and kicking ass.

- On corporations: yeah, this is something we haven't discussed much. Whether to use corporations or go with State Property is another major issue to consider. If we stay at our current size, I think corporations are a no-brainer and much superior to State Property. However, I was basing my previous long post on this subject on the assumption that we would attack and conquer Kathlete, in which case we would have something like 30+ cities and absolutely crippling distance maintenance costs even before factoring in corporations. With us not being Organized in this game, I personally think we do better with State Property eliminating most of the costs of a bloated empire. Yes, we lose out on the very important bonus food and production and culture - but we also don't have to fool with spreading the corporation around either, and paying the gold to set up branches everywhere. That's a nice help there. And this being MP, no one can just trade for a gazillion fish from the AIs to power their Sushi corporation either.

It's a questing of which victory condition you choose to pursue. Corporations are generally better for Culture and Space, State Property is better for Domination. I think that if all things are equal, Speaker and I would rather go for Domination than one of the more peaceful conditions, knowing full well how tough that could be. There's also a minor bit of personal preference too - Speaker and I both think corporations are broken and poorly implemented; given a choice, we would probably rather crush our enemies with the awesome production of State Property than trade for extra gold resources to increase cultural output of our Creative Culture branch. One is a lot more rewarding and fun than the other.

Not to mention, very few people seem to realize just how much production you can get in the lategame using State Property with proper tile management. On this grassland-heavy map, we could easily get 100 shields/turn out of just about every city with a couple of Biology farms and a crapload of State Property workshops and watermills. Or Universal Suffrage + levees would turn all those riverside grassland cottages into massive shield producers. There's plenty of fun ways to take this into the later game still.

Building corporations just to deny them to other teams (Nakor essentially) could be a very viable option. Nakor's civ is perfectly setup to take advantage of corporations with his trait combination and unique building. Honestly though, I think the solution there isn't to found corporations ourselves, it would be to kill Kathlete, train up a gigantic empire and army, and then go raze whatever city founds corporations we don't like. But yeah, if we have the extra Great People on hand, sure, we might self-found corporations for denial value.

- Penny has a great part on the value of squeezing out extra value from your civ beyond tile yields, so let me repost that here:

To me, should you be equal on land (&tech) at the time and your best opponent to found 1 Production + 1 food corp just like you, you'd be lagging a little behind, that'd leave only 3 possibilities to "squeeze out" more of you civ then the simple yields of the tiles :
- GP integrated : Ruled out
- Corpos : You'll tell me your take on it
- Trade route : think you're establishing yourself well on outer islands for that purpose
- Additionnal outcome for buildings, namely, The Religious wonder trio.

I think I've already mentioned the Great Person topic, and how we're trying to improve there after a mostly poor performance thus far. (I'll post a picture of Spartansburg once the new turn is up to demonstrate further.) Corporations I just posted on. Trade routes, yeah, we're working on that too with our offshore islands. Basically, I don't want to rely on trade routes for much of anything in this game. Too reliant on what other teams are doing. Even if Mercantilism has lower commerce yields, you're not reliant on other teams keeping their borders open, and you can still do pretty well for yourself with domestic trade if you have those island cities.

And like so many other systems within this game, to get full value out of trade routes you REALLY have to devote yourself to them, building those harbors and custom houses and so on. We're just skipping this part of the tree, because the time spent building harbors is time not spent building ships and units and other, more important, infrastructure. You have to focus on certain areas of concentration, and we've pretty much decided trade routes isn't one of them - which makes Mercantilism the right civic for us.

Worth considering though is the religious wonder trio (Apostolic Palace, Spiral Minaret, Sankore). If we were Spiritual, I would definitely be arguing for this path. As it is, it's still an attractive option we might pursue. Assuming we get our Great Engineer from St. Albans, one option is teching Theology and rushing the Apostolic Palace. We would of course become the resident, and since Judaism has spread very poorly beyond our borders, we'd get the exclusive benefits of the shield bonus. And then Sankore and/or Spiral Minaret would follow logically later on, since we have stone to power both wonders. There are a couple of problems though:

- Not Spiritual
- We have no temples built currently. Zero. To get any benefit, we'd have to start from scratch.
- Monasteries are already getting close to the end of their lifespan (Scientific Method). And due to Organized Religion, we've built zero monasteries so far too! Heh.
- Stealing Taj away from Nakor is probably a better use of our Great Engineer than rushing the AP.

And again, it's a subject of competing priorities. Yes, it's awesome to get the shields, gold, and beakers from temples and monasteries with the religious wonder trio. But it's a system which also requires a heavy investment to get working. Alternately, we could use the next 30 turns to build universities, banks, and mausoleums - and then use all the excess production to train a massive army to go kill Kathlete. The more we pour into infrastructure, the less killing power we have. It's all about the priorities.

So... I don't know exactly what we're going to do. Because we're pretty military oriented, we probably won't invest overmuch into any of these extra gameplay systems. This map is so exposed, you really have to be careful. (I think most of the Ironman games are played on more constrained maps, like Hub or something similar, with each player having a relatively safe starting area. In a game like that, it's more about leveraging a tech advantage through things like religion, trade routes, etc. than killing everyone else. Forgive me if I'm wrong, that's how things were a number of years ago.) What this all shows is how rich Civ4 is as a strategy game, with so many different viable options to be successful. It's wonderful how we can have such deep conversations about these game mechanics.

Speaker, I'd love to hear your thoughts on some of this when you have the time.

PS Oh, why didn't we lightbulb Philosophy or Education? Well, we never got a second Great Scientist! Our high-food cities were on military production instead of running Scientist specialists. Ideally, we would have flipped to Caste System and produced a Great Scientist to lightbulb Education and take Liberalism... but we chose to deal with Jowy instead. Competing priorities again!

[regoarrarr]

Nationhood is a cheaper civic than Bureaucracy too; I think it's "Low" compared to "High",

Nationhood is actually NONE I believe, which makes it even more of a huge savings over Bureaucracy, especially as you start getting into the late game where Inflation takes a big bite. Inflation cost * None is still....err....None

[Speaker]

Sulla, Speaker,

It's about time I sit down and type a message,
I'm a long time MP friend of Speaker & we've been discussing this game when we have the chance (I read this topic only), have read it all, but haven't advised or asked anything yet

Welcome. Penny and I have played many games together, and I even joined his clan (he is from Belgium and has played with mostly French players) for a couple CCCs, helping them win one.

It's obvious you're in pole position, but nothing is certain yet, you did get beat on libe & mausoleum, so it's not all about you so far -not that those are 2 the most relevant things, but they're pretty strong-

I agree with you. We are in a strong position relative to our biggest competition, but each of them are equal or close to us in at least one area:

Kathlete: Land + MFG
Nakor: Tech + Island coverage
Slaze: Land

I'm posting 'cause I've asked myself what I would do with the GP decision, and I've come to realize that you've got a shortcoming in rgds GP management if I dare say...
you clearly played your leader as a financial leader that is philosophical, and not the opposite, which is fine, but I don't recall reading a very clear long-term plan with the GP management !
I'd be interested to know what it is you have in mind exactly ?

Sullla answered this question pretty well. We would have liked to emphasize great people more, but weren't able to because of the 5v1. But to look at it from another point of view, we've done as well as we have while only leveraging half our traits. Now as we start cranking out great people and take advantage of cheap universities plus stone-hastened Oxford, our tech rate should blow up pretty quickly.

If you really have no specific interst for a particular GP (which seem to be the case) you should let the city with the SLOWEST GP speed finish first the GP, so you get the second faster...unless you really don't care about that, and want to speed up the 3rd ! in which case you'd better do the opposite so you alternate the GP points pool to it's best.

As Sullla mentioned, we are already doing this. We have wasted most of a great person in Hampton Roads, unfortunately, but delaying Spartansburg any further would seem like a mistake.

What's your take on that, and more importantly future GP speed & Civics ?
Are you aiming at Democracy quickly for suffrage + Emanc (seems to be the financial game your playing) or will you ever use Repr+caste ? (Not my taste but possible since your phi) (are you going to use the synergy of Mercan, or stick with free market in both cases ?)

Personally, I see Suffrage vs Representation as a question of whether we need MFG or Commerce. We don't suffer for happiness, so that's a non-factor in the discussion. Our core area will be full of towns, so Suffrage would be huge for our manufacturing. It would add 9 hammers per turn in Gettysburg, 7-8 in Antietam, 8 in Fredericksburg, 5 in Chancellorsville, 6-10 in Ft. Henry, and so on. Those cities are all river-heavy, so if the game lasts until Levees, they will be ridiculous. Representation with Mercantilism and Statue of Liberty would be great as well.

In the Legal category, we'll go in Nationalism for a while to take advantage of every turn Globe drafting, plus our huge happiness cap, but I can see us going into Free Speech eventually as +2 gold per town (see number of towns above) will give our GNP a significant bump.

In the Labor category, we'll probably stay in Slavery as we continue to build buildings in the captured lands, but we haven't used much slavery in our core for quite a while as we have maxed out the city sizes, and so eventually Emancipation will be key, to speed up our commerce in the Greek land plus our more immature cities on the border with Dantski, and any other land we might capture later. End game, Caste System seems a likely bet, for the +1 hammers from workshops, and ease of great people.

Sullla has covered the Economics category pretty well: State Property will be godlike on this very green map, as we could easily have 2 workshops per city, which would add 6-8 hammers, depending on civics and timing, and because the distance maintenance post-Kathlete is going to be ugly. Having said that, I think Mining Inc. will be excellent on this map, as we already have 3 irons, and probably would add another couple by taking out Kathlete, plus we have copper, gold, silver, and could plant some island cities for more silver resources. But this requires Railroad, and I expect the game will be pretty much over that late, but maybe not. Sid's Sushi and Cereal Mills are also excellent, but there isn't enough enough of the requisite resources on this map, to base our Civic strategy around it.

Seems to me, your not going for the later, as you've not shown any interest in caste, and don't even talk about merging specialist into cities,
But you've also taken a blow in regards of the suffrage use of just piling up 1+2+3 Specialist for 4 golden ages with Mausoleum :'(

I was actually pretty sad that we missed out on Mausoleum, but Nakor has done nothing but build in this game, and only has 1 empire's worth of land. I'd rather have all of Greece's land and a secure border than that wonder, I think. Well, I'd rather have both, but....

Seems a bit random and short sighted to me (your overall GP management, with Phi, & the Epics going up, you could still get a very large amount of those), it shows by your Great artist of music, which, let's be honest, you don't find a good use for yet

Culture bombing our front city, The Wilderness, would have been an excellent option and put a ton of pressure on Kathlete, but after signing the post-war NAP, it just doesn't seem necessary. Grabbing that artist from Music only took a couple turns, since we were researching Literature and Drama anyways, and at least we are denying it as a weapon to other teams. And it will be nice to kick off our first golden age, eventually, so we don't have to use a better kind of gp.

(Rest of the game is perfect though )

Definitely not. Didn't you see how I mismoved that settler a few turns ago? :P

There is also a huge end-game aspect you haven't talked about (on the forum ) yet, it's corporations. Talking about that engineer, if you don't feel confident about getting another one, maybe you should keep it eventhough it's in a long time (the Mining corpis), same goes for an eventual merchant popping up IMO (Econ merchant is gone right ?)

What's your take on Corporations actually ? In this game ? in general ?
Are you expecting to HAVE to run State property with a large empire at the point of that choice (which would mean you capture large amount of land...meaning you're going war strategy mostly, which changes things)

See above. Here are my thoughts on corporations:

broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken broken

Seriously though, here is a picture of how I abused corporations in an Immortal SP game. I wish I had done this back when I was involved with the beta testing of Beyond the Sword, but I doubt it would have made much difference anyways. I ended up winning this game by culture, and if I had played another 25 turns, I would have had about 45 cities all reach legendary culture. And I was able to build 2 turn Mech Infantry in every city. The AI was trading me their excess seafood, gold, iron, etc for 10-30 gpt, with no regard for the value those resources held in my corporations.

You're going build up now, what's next tech wise (I must have missed that message, because I remember reading something about PP) ? I have to say I'm surprise you didn't go for faster (cheap) universities, I usually bulb Educ with philo.

We are actually researching Education right now, which finishes in 5 turns. Then we will grab Nationalism via Philosophy, Banking, and head to Mil Trad for Currasiers. Sullla mentioned that we haven't yet been able to get a second scientist for bulbing, but we should have good opportunites coming up, with Spartansburg producing so many GPP.

Eventhough we must confess that you average tech rate is not THAT high (upside limited)

Our tech rate is very high given the context of the game. We are making 350 beakers per turn at a sustainable 50% science, and I highly doubt that anyone other than Holy Rome is able to sustain anything close to 50%, given the maintenance costs (Monarch level + toroidal map). We've been the far and away tech leaders for the whole game and have the biggest cities, working tons of cottages, with libraries + markets + grocers + courthouses in all the key spots, so I don't think it would be possible to have a much higher GNP than we have at this point, without being Organized.

Anyway good luck, not that you need any

Thanks! Keep following us and check in with another list of questions sometime in the next era. Your questions today made me think more concretely about the next phase of the game, and I really appreciate that.

[Sullla]

Alright, let's get back to the current turn. The end of the previous turn saw slaze capture another Roman city:



With Kuat changing hands we no longer have visibility on the city, but we know from earlier pictures that it's located on the yellow dot. (Those Roman borders no longer exist either, of course.) Losing Kuat just about seals things for Whosit, as I believe it was his Heroic Epic city and big unit producer. This is where he built those galleys which sent Praetorians to attack us early in the game. Can't say I'm shedding a tear at seeing it fall. Hey Whosit, next time maybe you should focus on building up your OWN territory, rather than sailing Praetorians all over the map and making enemies out of nearly everyone. :neenernee Good riddance.

On the other hands, Kuat adds another city to slaze's territory, and he founded 2 more on the previous turn. He now has 16 cities (tied with us for most in the game) and will soon overtake us for most land overall. I have no idea how slaze expects to pay for this, but he's going to have a whole lot of territory. Bears watching. Maybe we'll get lucky and Kathlete will actually attack slaze, although my best guess is that Kathlete was just lying to us to get that NAP.

With Whosit collapsing, we may have some options on the center island:



We now have 6 knights (I renamed them after various medieval monarchs for fun). Whosit is just about dead, so why not transfer 4 or 6 knights over here and go after the Roman cities on the center island? Even if we don't want to keep them, we can benefit from the razing gold and unit promotions. If we leave them alone, they'll either be captured by slaze or gifted over to Nakor, bad outcomes for us.

What do you think, Speaker? We can get knights over here pretty fast even with just the one galley to do the ferrying.

Since we discussed Spartansburg so much, here's a picture:



Right now it's timed to produce its Great Person just after St. Albans. We'll get 48 Great Person points this turn, for 177 total, and then we can add a sixth specialist to get 57 GPP/turn. So the city will go 129 GPP, 177 GPP, 234 GPP, 291 GPP and come up just short of the 300 mark, letting St. Albans produce its own Great Person. After that, we work the three food resources, two farms, and seven specialists for 66 GPP/turn, which gets us a second Great Person in two more turns, and a third Great Person eight turns after that. Summarizing:

T182 Great Person #1 (St. Albans)
T184 Great Person #2 (Spartansburg)
T192 Great Person #3 (Spartansburg)

With a fourth arriving sometime around Turn 202-03 (even faster if we trip a Golden Age somewhere during this span). That's a nice increase over our previously slow pace! Anything other than Great Artists would be good pops.

Just so Speaker knows what I'm doing with the workers on our eastern border:



Look at this verticle row of nine forest tiles! Most of these tiles are in danger of being lost to us when Kathlete's cities expand their borders to third-ring. Rather than lose out on all these shields, I have five workers over here assigned to clear-cut this region over the next few turns. That will provide a major bonus to The Wilderness and Chikamauga's development, especially getting Globe Theatre up and running at the latter. (I'll have it timed so 2 chops complete as soon as we whip the forge and have Organized Religion present, for ~90 shields into the Globe Theatre right away!)

Why should we let Kathlete chop these forests, eh? It will also be nice to clear out lines of attack for cuirassiers later on...

Two techs discovered this turn, Machinery from Dantski (as he told us he would in diplomacy) and Civil Service from slaze. More interestingly, Nakor continues to run at 100% research on Liberalism without losing any gold. His treasury actually increased this turn, so either he's mass building Wealth (which would be bizarre, and unbelievably shortsighted!) or someone else is feeding Nakor gold. I don't quite understand what's going on, to be honest. My best guess is Whosit gifting Nakor some money in a "screw you!" move before dying, but that could be totally wrong. There's nothing coming from Kathlete, who ran 100% gold last turn to pump up his own coffers, and slaze/Dantski/plako were all running 100% research, so there's not a lot of other possible candidates. Dunno what's going on with this.

Fortunately, Nakor's 100% research rate is only marginally higher than our 50% break-even rate! My best guess is that his 100% rate is about 420 beakers/turn, give or take a little. (Our break-even is 350 beaker/turn.) Education tech and our cheap universities (plus a quick Oxford!) should increased our research significantly further ahead. We can probably get the tech in 3 turns, not 4, by spending some of our gold on the last turn of research. I'll see how it looks there next turn.

Speaking of Nakor, he's our featured civ for this turn, which I will post on in a little bit.

[Sullla]

Nakor's core:



Rolan (15): Palace, Granary, Barracks, Library, Forge, Lighthouse, University, Academy
Nakor's capital and unquestionably his best overall city. None of the other cities are even close to Rolan's 15 population. Pretty much a commerce city, especially with the Academy, although Bureaucracy civic and three hill tiles provide average production. Nakor popped gems at this city, which was a stroke of really good luck. There are no gems anywhere else in the world that we can see!



Krondor (11): Monument, Granary, Barracks, Library, Forge, Rathaus, Con. Monastery, Bud. Monastery, Mausolleum
This was long Nakor's production city, although its land really isn't that great for shield output. Copper and iron made this key in the early game, when he stole this spot away from Dantski. Now Krondor is more of a hybrid city with all those cottages. Looks like Nakor has been doing a lot of missionary training here, given the two monasteries. This is also where he built the Mausolleum - slowly!

Sethanon (10): Monument, Granary, Library, Rathaus, Con. Temple, Con. Monastery
Judging by the farms here, my guess is that Nakor tried or has been trying to produce Great People out of Sethanon, despite its low food surplus. Perhaps this is where he got his Great Scientist for the Philosophy lightbulb (?)

Crydee (9): Monument, Granary, Barracks, Library, Lighthouse, Rathaus, Con. Monastery
Border city with Dantski, thus the emphasis on culture with the needless monastery. Otherwise just a commerce city. Very nice micro to bring irrigation to the wheat tile!

La Mut (9): Monument, Granary, Barracks, Rathaus
With its farms and mines, La Mut appears to have taken over from Krondor as a major military center. Not sure why it lacks a forge though.

Stardock (9): Monument, Granary, Lighthouse, Rathaus
The most puzzling of Nakor's core cities. Despite being an old city, with double food bonuses with fish and sheep, plus a gold resource, there's extremely little infrastructure here. Not even a library to take advantage of that gold tile! This city was planted 75 turns ago on Turn 104 - that's 20 turns before we captured St. Albans and Fort Henry - and it still has only the basic buildings. Pretty weak.

Land's End (6): Monument, Granary, Lighthouse, Rathaus
This city is the light purple dot on the center island. I didn't realize Nakor had been over there for so long - this was his seventh city! Given that fact, and the awesome triple food setup of fish + clams + rice, the development of Land's End is a huge disappointment. He founded this city roughly the same time that we founded Spartansburg, and you can see from the screenshot how vastly more developed our city is. Granted, Land's End is on another island, but that's no excuse for having such little infrastructure.

Yabon (5): Monument, Granary, Forge, Rathaus
This looks to be another shield powerhouse, but it's still getting up and running. No barracks yet, so I guess it's not being used for military production (?)

Port Natal (5): Granary, Library, Lighthouse, Rathaus
A nice coastal commerce city, with a few hills for production. This is one city I think Nakor is managing well.

Queg (6): Monument, Granary, Lighthouse
Another fine coastal commerce city, this time on the offshore island to the south. Tile improvements look good, but I have to wonder why a city this recent needed a monument as one of its builds. Surely Nakor could have just spread religion here to pop borders, rather than wasting 30 shields of early development on a soon-to-be-obsolete monument...? (This is why researching Drama and Music are not wastes - yes, it is helpful to have those theatres and be able to Build Culture!)

Carse (3): Granary
This will be a very fine site with its quadruple food resources once it develops further.

Rillanon (1): none
Ylith (1): none
Just getting started.

Overall Stuff
Total Population: 90 (#3?) -> 148 (us)
Food: 240 (#3) -> 371 (us)
Production: 120 (#3) -> 165 (us)
Total Beakers: 10,061 (#2) -> 10,522 (us)
Soldier Count: 463k (#5) -> 656k (us)

Soldier Count Breakdown
Population: 45k
Technology: 62k
City Improvements: 18k
Units: 338k

The overall breakdown tends to show what we already knew (that Nakor has focused on research and not much else) but adds some nice details. Nakor appears to be third in Total Population, although he and slaze are pretty close to one another there. The fact that we have half again his Total Population (148 to 90), and Nakor is in THIRD place, tells you something about the rest of the field...

Nakor also sits in third place in Production, although the disparity is a little smaller there. His real strength lies in research, where Nakor is just a bit behind in Total Beakers, and of course he'll jump ahead when he slingshots something with Liberalism. Of course he got "ahead" by skipping a lot of important side techs (no Horseback Riding, no Guilds, none of the techs at the top of the Classical tree, etc.) and by popping some techs with Great People. With what we're doing at Spartansburg and upcoming unversities/Oxford, I don't think Nakor will remain in first for long.

Nakor's army is middle of the road. He's built few units and basically never fought anyone, aside from the six units we slaughtered earlier. This is extremely obvious from the "City Improvements" part of the Soldier count score, so let me expand on that in more detail. Watch this fun comparison:

City Improvements Breakdown [our team]
11 Granaries [14]
8 Rathauses [6]
8 Monuments [5]
6 Lighthouse [4]
5 Libraries [7]
4 Barracks [7]
3 Forges [9]
3 Confucian Monasteries [0]
1 Confucian Temple [0]
1 Buddhist Monastery [0]
1 University [0]
1 Academy [1]
0 Theatres [6]
0 Walls [5]
0 Markets [5]
0 Stables [4]
0 Grocers [3]
0 Aqueducts [1]
0 Castles [1]

1 National Wonder (Palace)
1 World Wonder (Mausolleum)

Where do we even begin here? I'll start with the monuments, which Nakor has way over-built in this game. He has a self-founded religion (Confucianism) which he's had since early in the game, Turn 91. Nakor had 5 cities when he founded the religion. Yet instead of expanding borders with missionary spread, Nakor continued to build monument after monument in each new city. You never want to build monuments unless you have to - they're an early game necessity to be avoided if at all possible. Certainly you shouldn't ever be building 8 of them unless you're Charismatic. And doubly, no triply so if you have a self-founded religion!!!

Next, despite having spent nearly the entire game at peace and concentrating on research, Nakor only has 5 libraries throughout his 13 cities. That's hard to believe for someone in his situation! It's great new for us though, because Oxford University is about a million years away. Nakor doesn't even have 6 library, much less 6 universities, and for his non-Philosophic civ those things are gonna be expensive! This is a curious omission.

Furthermore, Nakor only has 3 forges - I mean, come on, dude! Forges are so, so important for speeding up the growth curve of new cities. We've been hammering home this point over and over again with our own territory, and the absence here really makes for a nice contrast. Compare to Kathlete, who has 9 forges and 13 (cheap) libraries - it's pretty obvious to me which one has been doing a better job of running their empire!

Despite having had Currency for about 80 turns now, Nakor hasn't built a single marketplace. Zero. Again, what?!? I know his costs are lower, and he likely can run a much higher percentage on the science slider, but I've seen Holy Rome doing min science, 0% research, to build cash over and over again. Markets in some core economic cities would make a big difference there.

Zero national wonders again other than the palace. You'd think with all these coastal capitals, people would have at least built Moai Statues!

Finally, it's blatantly obvious that Nakor's not been paying much attention to military stuff. Only 4 barracks, no stables (no HBR tech), no city walls, no castles. He's basically been playing a game of SimCity thus far. Given that no one has ever shown much aggression towards Nakor, his infrastructure is just not good enough. He should have better stuff than this. About the only thing that Nakor's been good at building has been cheap Organized Rathauses, which to his credit he leveraged everywhere. But that doesn't require much skill or planning, to spam a brokenly-powerful building on this map all over the place.

After looking at Kathlete and Nakor, I'm strangely much MORE impressed at the job the Ottomans have done, and much LESS impressed with Holy Rome. Kathlete's infrastructure is simply better. They are the more dangerous team, hands down. Frankly, Nakor just lucked into an extremely strong leader/civ pairing and had the good fortune to avoid aggression from every other team. There's little evidence of any real strategic planning here, just Rathaus spam taking advantage of cheap maintenance costs.

I think we'd do much better to worry about Kathlete and even slaze than Nakor; Dantski and plako can probably handle Nakor themselves. I honestly think he'll collapse very quickly if we can ever convince our two friends to go on the offensive together!

[Krill]

Reminder to all lurkers that read multiple spoiler threads, please read this update and abide by it...those posters that only read this thread, this doesn;t apply to you.

http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3854

[David Corperial]

Do you guys plan to go after a great prophet heavily to get your shrine?

[Speaker]

It's not really possible to go after a great prophet "heavily." Even if we built 2 temples in our National Epic city, and thus worked 2 priests, it would take quite a while to get a great person. Is a shrine really necessary, since our religion is only present in our cities? 15 or so gold per turn isn't that much, all told, and isn't worth slowing down our great person rate to be sure to get a prophet.