(September 27th, 2019, 15:06)Rusten Wrote: How far are you intending to go with the galley? Having a quick look in the southern unknown seems reasonable, but come wartime we'll have better things to do. The earlier you drop off the axe the more scouting we'll have time for. Even an empty galley can freak out superdeath (or MSCC for that matter, if he continues a farmer's gambit he may get struck).
edit: We also need to send the worker back at some point so we can't go too far.
The axe gets dropped off next turn, but we can have the galley stick somewhat close. I assume we want the worker by Lander (overseas city) to mine both the hills in the city's BFC before he returns.
Quote:I wonder how many of our opponents will be savvy enough to realize our tech is MC. I mean, mathematics or alphabet is way more normal. A GE being born later tips our hand obviously, but by then we've already prepared. SD will be able to see the forge on the map/city center, but I'm not sure he'll think to check that.
Perhaps I have the bad (pompous?) habit of just basing my opinion of other players off myself, but I wouldn't notice that we were teching to MC, but I would immediately understand once the GE is born (and bulbs). I couldn't tell you what our neighbors are teching, so I assume they've been similarly lax, but this might be incorrect.
I think out loud about the attack below.
But first, the report!
A surprise axe! It's been fortifying for four turns, so it's not a sneaky trap for our scout. Nevertheless, I moved the scout backwards. I didn't turn on resource bubbles, but note the spices. Superdeath's land is very appealing. 3 unique luxuries.
Here's the power. Nothing much happening.
Here's the civ at large.
So, here's why I'll never be a great civ player. I don't think in large plans. I think in immediate puzzles. We've got a few. Puzzle one: Does New Viron get a forge? Next turn, I whip the granary, which means we don't get immediate benefit from it... Then I put one turn into a work boat. I think I switch off this the turn after when Metal Casting comes in to get a forge up. We resume the work boat, which improves Lander's fish. I think I let Lander produce the work boat for its clams on its own. I
think we have enough time.
Puzzle two: Does Gaon whip its barracks next turn? This is a lesser puzzle. I think its time for the barracks. There's a spear behind it in the queue and I'm ready to start putting hammers into that. Goan, I believe, should not get a forge any time soon. It has very few hammers but lots of cottages, so it wants maybe a couple units (civilian or military) and then to build a library.
Puzzle three: The more important puzzle. How do I build Pajarocu's forge? I decided against bringing the northern workers down. It doesn't really save us much time, especially compared to losing time on all the improvements they need to build. The worker down there plus the worker about to be born move west to chop those two forests and then move to the plains hill and chop that forest (60h). When the worker completes, it dumps 14h overflow into a 12/35 axe. I think I turn around and whip this axe. (Axe completes at 59/35.) This dumps 24h into the forge. 24h + 60h = 84. Easy two pop whip to finish. This whips Pajarocu very hard, and it doesn't have great food tiles, but it does have a granary.
I was too quick to say that the capital could get a forge. It next produces a settler for gems. I think we get Writing done shortly after that settler completes, so we have to decide if we want a library first. It may be the case that library first means we don't have time for a forge before samurai. I'm not really sure, but I wanted to flag this, since I sounded so sure about the forge before.
Ok. War plans. It's getting time to at least start thinking.
Based on distance and quality of land, I'm still thinking about Superdeath. Perhaps MSCC presents a vulnerability. I was fooling around with Cyneheard's combat calculator, and surprisingly, archers are very annoying for us. A samurai without a barracks promotion has a little less than a 75% chance to kill a fully fortified archer on a hill city with 40% cultural defense. That's worse odds than I imagined. Promos on our samurai only realistically bring this up to 80%. Gross. Weirdly, everything else gets slaughtered, including horse archers. (Another reason to look at Superdeath over MSCC. The extra 50% vs melee on bowmen doesn't really matter for the combat odds, but it incentivizes building bowmen, whereas Superdeath might prefer units with higher base strength that we can chew up.) I don't know if its visible in the map above, but there's a path of rough terrain that takes us straight to Superdeath's capital.
Thinking about higher level strategy, I said somewhere that I'm of the opinion that even a handful of samurai in someone's borders by turn 90 kills them. The archer math makes that sketchy (plus we'll miss the t90 deadline). I still think I value speed over mass, here. It'll take a while to produce a bunch of samurai, in which time our power spike will be obvious and people can crank out archers to make the hammer exchange just barely favorable. Right now, I'm thinking about ways to put two axes in each city's build queue, whip the first when it's nearly done, push it down the queue so it doesn't complete, whip the second when its nearly complete, and have the Machinery bulb queue-upgrade two axes per city. This way, hopefully, we get ~8 samurai two or three turns after Machinery is done. It's brutal on development, but it should be fast.
This is the
maximum number of samurai I want before we declare war. Obviously, I'll still be building samurai as the war is underway. (A lesson I learned from Commodore who made it explicit: keep building units while at war. I know it sounds simple, but it takes remembering.) Because I want to declare war with ~8 samurai, we should have some chaff units mixed in. Unfortunately, with how long it'll take to get each of the two axes ready to upgrade, it means we need to start working on units very soon. That seems to be the next empire project.
There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.
Nope. That was just a random assumption on my part. I always under-explore. Happened in PB41 against you and in PB38 with regard to my own land. I'm ok with changing the barracks to a work boat, so I can correct this tendency. I can get to this in several hours. There's a risk the turn will roll, although turns have been running longer lately, so if you want to grab the turn, you're welcome to. 
Hopefully we can settle it with food. The northern landmass looks to be worth checking out too. The colouring of the sea shows that it extends all the way. The scouting work boat will be busy. 
How do you feel about also assigning the galley to scout duty after it drops off the axe?
