[SPOILERS] - social distancing with pindicator

[NobleHelium]

Remembered this beauty from 38, courtesy of Lewwyn:



(Not saying this is applicable to your current situation.)

[pindicator]

142

Noble, that is exactly the question for the next few turns: which cities build wealth? Which build units?

Machinery finished at end of turn, and I believe we're the third civ to research it, behind Jowy & Superdeath. Guilds is in 14 at breakeven (20% lol) but it won't take much Wealth to get that to 30% and 10 turns. I had a few cities where we whipped markets: Clatsop where I whipped off a lake and bare cottage, and Clackamas where we whipped off two grass hills. I also whipped the forge in Yamhill and with the forge finishing in the capital I moved that to finish its catapult build. At first glance this feels wrong - the capital pulls in 55 commerce and so a market would be huge here. Yet by the time the market actually finishes then it's time to turn on the slider for Guilds and so a market won't actually do anything for me. That's why you won't see me start any markets now; by the time they finish it will be too late.

Guilds in 10 is very doable and quite possibly what I go for. After all, the other half of this is I want to have an overwhelming number of units.

Superdeath has the half dozen catapults & 2 cho-ko-nus that I have seen plus probably at least that much that I haven't seen. His power is up with Mr. Cairo's, and so here is Mr. Cairo's stack as I see it moving towards AT as a comparison:




I know superdeath has more than that by just from what I've seen. In any case, I need to have a stack with such numbers that the collateral won't be able to hurt units all that much. My goal is 50 units: 20 assorted slow-movers, my 10 numids, and 20 knights. I've got most of the slow-movers and all the numids already, so I really just need the knights. Everything I can add to that is gravy. But the knights are going to be the tricky part because they're 90h apiece.

With forges almost everywhere, what I'll be doing is getting numidians to either 12/50 for 2-pop whips or 49/50 for 1-pop whips, though 12/50 is preferable. Then the turn I research Guilds I whip everywhere. Two pop whip gets 75h immediately, putting the numid at 87/50, switching over to a knight at 87/90 and then completing right away. I have 12 cities that have forges ready for this, and then also Belisarius which doesn't have the food support to be able to whip but still make a decent 20hpt. For cities without forges - really just Coos since it's had to build triremes - we'll get to 49/50 and then whip up to 79/90 and then finish over 2 turns. Then right after these first whips we get to 15h and 2-pop whip right away again. That should get me 26 knights easy. The farthest will take 3 or 4 turns to stage from whipping.

I am a bit lighter than I wish I was on catapults right now too. I'd like to get 10 of those at least. So I guess I'm aiming for 70 units lol.

Of course, losing 4 pop in every city is going to suck a lot so I'll try to get as many cities to go for the 49/50 setup with a 1-pop whip. That still gets a knight at end of turn with the whip since the whip goes to 86/50 for the numid. But really this needs to be the knockout push. I'm tired of this war. It needs to be over.

Meanwhile, superdeath thinks his triremes are escaping.




I blocked the route away and put Coos back to a trireme because I want to mop these up before we start the knight push. If I can get superdeath building boats instead of land units then that will be good for me.

PRO: 45 (1787)
FIN: 45 (1538)

[pindicator]

143 & 144

So i think Superdeath just got Engineering as I finished this turn, which makes me a little frustrated. Why am I not researching? Why are my expenses so much higher than everyone else?




Mjmd and Mr. Cairo are both in golden ages, and are burning through their gold reserves. They both are burning about 200gpt. I'm at about 10-20% more power and only 2 more cities, yet my burn is at 300gpt. Superdeath should not have nearly any kind of tech rate near mine, although it seems hard to judge the rep scientists.

In any case, the plan remains unchanged. We build as many units as we can. Knights still fair well against pikes. I still out-produce everybody, although Mjmd does take a lead for his golden age. I'm still going to spam units and mix in Wealth builds until Guilds and then spam units after Guilds until the deed is done.

Superdeath pushed in a mini-stack.




Most my defenses are nearby. He might pillage a plantation but then I'll have catapults in range.

I'm fairly sure I can get Guilds in 7 turns: 4 more turns of building up to get to 900g and then we burn through it all in 3 turns. So the tough part is figuring out how to get my cities to juggle both the wealth builds and get their numids in the ready position. I think the answer is to have the heavy lifting of the wealth builds done now by the production cities, although cities still may come up a little shy of the whip targets. I really didn't want to sit in game for 2 hours and figure it all out for certain.

In the meantime, I'm still feeling good about hitting those targets of 20 slow-movers, 10 numids, 10 catapults, and 20+ knights. Would like to get more catapults and longbows/crossbows if there turns out to be any free hammers between now and Guilds.

PRO: 45 & 45 (1877)
FIN: 41 & 44 (1623)

[GeneralKilCavalry]

Is it the unit costs that are prohibitively high? Strange that you're experiencing such a drastically higher amount of expenses.

[pindicator]

145

I think I'm boring superdeath and he keeps sending in small sortees here and there to keep himself interested. This turn they went in too far and they were mopped up.




The triremes up north. We had 6 triremes against his 3 triremes and 1 galley and I decided this was good enough to go in on. I had 3 coin flip attacks with my C1 triremes against his coastal defense ones and only won 1 of them, but the rest was mop-up.

Code:

C1 trireme v trireme (50%) - WIN
C1 trireme v trireme (50%) - loss, 3 hits
C1 trireme v trireme (50%) - loss, 3 hits
trireme v galley (88.1%) - WIN, GG born
trireme v 40hp trireme (99.6%) - WIN
trireme v 40hp trireme (99.6%) - WIN

Down south he pushed in towards the dyes, but I had already shifted my defenses in that direction




Sent in a Drill 2 catapult to soften up the top elephant and the other units, and then it was all cleanup after that. Except lost a 72% elephant, which I really can't replace right now. And I messed up by not giving the GG medic the mop-up kill to get its next level up.

Code:

D2 Catapult v C2 War Elephant (19.8%) - loss, down to 40hp
C2 War Elephant v 91hp D1 Cho-Ko-Nu (89.9%) - WIN
C2 War Elephant v 91hp Cho-Ko-Nu (91.2%) - WIN
C1 War Elephant v 92hp War Elephant (72.8%) - Loss, down to 8hp
War Elephant v Catapult (88.0%) - WIN
C1 Spear v 91hp horcher (95.7%) - WIN
Oliver Cromwell (C2 Spear) v 40hp C2 War Elephant - WIN
C2 F1 Numidian v 8hp War Elephant (99.9%) - WIN

And for all those wins I earned another Great General: Cao Cao born down in Klamath.




In order to get Commandos I need 26XP: Barracks, Stables, Theocracy, Vassalage, and West Point get me to 13, so I need 7 Great Generals settled in the West Point city. We have 1 already in Belisarius, but is that where I should put the rest of mine? I need to identify where my Heroic Epic & West Point cities should go, but for now there aren't really any stand-out options. My best production site is sadly landlocked and I would really really like this to be a coastal city.

Demos, because Mjmd's GNP is rather impressive.




And finances because I hate these expenses





PRO: 45 (1922)
FIN: 47 (1670)

[NobleHelium]

Already planning to have 7 GGs settled seems rather ambitious.

[pindicator]

Already planning to have 7 GGs settled seems rather ambitious.

Well, I'm either going to settle him or make a super GG unit. And settling seems like the better play to me, so I might as well see if there's a best spot to start settling them all at.

If I can't figure out anything I'm just going to stack him in Belisarius with the other settled GG I got when I conquered Gira and vanrober. I'm not sure what that city will be able to do later in the game, but it can hit 20hpt right now.

[pindicator]

Well, my friend says she's running late so a little time to kill. Let's look at Belisarius:




It just finished a longbow and I was going to have it just keep pumping a few longbows out but then I counted up the XP here:

+3 Barracks
+2 Settled GG
+2 Serfdom

So if I build a stables here and settle the GG here as well then we're looking at 11 XP mounted units. I think I very much like that for knight production.

It's a pity that I have to get to Biology before this city can go above 20hpt.

[pindicator]

I can't play this turn.




EDIT: Tired ranting and raging at the thread put in spoilers.

If i have to play this turn tonight I'm just going to rage quit.

How the fuck am I being out-researched by a civ that's half my size? When did I forget how to play this game? How is everybody leaving me in the dust with research? AND WHY THE FUCK ARE MY EXPENSES SO GOD DAMN HIGH?

I'm never going to get to Guilds. I got baited south - kudos for superdeath for that. But I just can't deal with this tonight and I"m going to sleep.

[pindicator]

146

So now that i've had the benefit of sleep - and sleep I did, putting in a good 10 hours worth! - let me more maturely express my frustrations. When I conquered Gira and limped in to Currency, I had 12 cities (after settling Curry), expenses of -100gpt and a break-even of 20%. Now, 45 turns later, after focusing on economy instead of trying to kill Superdeath, I have 18 cities, expenses of over -300gpt and a break-even of 20%. Despite growing my cities, growing my cottages, building cothons and a couple markets, I've only managed to tread water. Now I'd blame it on the number of cities except I see Mjmd with 16 and Mr. Cairo with 17 and both of their burn rates are under 200gpt.

So what's the culprit? Do I just not know what I'm doing any more or is something actually happening? Because it is driving me nuts. I picked a specific strategic choice to not all-in on Superdeath because I figured I'd be able to grow my economy better. But I don't seem to be able to do that and I've in essence wasted the last 40 turns. I will say I did go back and look at my Inflation expenses from my F2 screenshots over the last 50 turns. They are a little alarming:

T100 - 3
T109 - 6
T131 - 32
T138 - 43
T145 - 49

But again, I have no referene for inflation in a normal game. And if you look at all my expenses my biggest cost is city maintenance which is costing me almost 150gpt. But I don't seem to be more sprawled than Mr. Cairo or Mjmd from what I can see of the mini-map. Perhaps it's just my capital is on the edge of my empire and there's is more centralized? Not really anything I could do about that, I expanded where there was food which was really just one direction on this map. GKC, if you had expected me to expand west at all this game then you should have put some food in that direction. There's just a lot of plain grassland and jungle grass. Or is this a flaw in my settling priorities? If you have an opinion or criticism I'd love to see it, either here or in the lurker thread.

Anyway, with Superdeath pushing in now I'm guessing he's pushing the action with an all-in because he's tired of this and wants it over one way or the other. Cornered opponent is the most dangerous. (Let's go back to complaining about the map! Nah, already beaten that dead horse.) I think this is all his stuff because I saw 13 elephants before and there are 14 in this stack now and he hasn't had engineering long enough to have a lot of CKNs.

Here's the screenshot again from the last post:




A smart play by superdeath to lure me south by sacrificing a smaller force - well in this case a couple of smaller forces. Engineering let him move in from the fog with slow-movers too. You saw the one stack that I cleaned up last turn, and just off this screenshot to the south there is another mini-stack of 2 CKNs and 1 spear. I think he suspects that CKNs are going to be hard for my Numids to take on and I'd have to commit slow units to them or I would have to go ignore them and bring everything north.

All those units I was building for a thought of pre-builds into knights got whipped this turn. Actually anywhere that was making a unit got whipped just because I still have all this happiness and if I can't ever grow to happy cap then I might as well bring the happy cap to my city levels. No more Wealth Builds - Guilds drops from 5 turns to 7 turns ETA - but I just need to have everywhere building units. We're going to clean up this stack and this time we're just going to keep building units until either superdeath or myself is eliminated.




I did pull everything out of Coos because the point of having Coos is to have a crumple zone to allow me to react. I need to treat all my border cities this way: minimal infrastructure and just to slow down opponents while he comes in. Either Superdeath is going to have to put his stack into Coos again or he is going to have to push into my territory - both will give me the time to react and get all my units moved into position. I actually expect him to burn Coos this turn, if he is given the opportunity. I'm not sure how the culture mechanics play into this or just how much culture of his is still in Coos.

I also decided that I wanted to kill the mini-stack with my Numids. I'd have odds in every fight, but Numids would be able to move quickly north again while my slow movers are going to take a turn or two to get into position. I've had very little success so far this game with Numids actually withdrawing from battles but this time they performed exactly as they were intended: the first two Numids had odds around combined 65% chance to win or withdraw and both retreated, and then the next 3 attacks mopped up. The spear, which is a unit you expect to do well against mounted, is actually useless against Numids, as my shock Numid had near 80% chance to win or retreat that fight. And then I used the garrison archer from Benton to mop up because that's not a unit I am pulling north to the main event. Really thought about giving my super-medic that extra XP point so it could level up but then at the same time I don't want to risk pulling another unit out of position.

Code:

F2 C1 Numid vs C1 CKN (27.2% win / 36.4% withdraw) - withdraw, CKN to 64hp
F2 C1 Numid vs CKN (32.6% / 33.7%) - withdraw, CKN to 5hp
F1 C2 Shock Numid vs Spear (73.0% / 8.1%) - WIN
F1 C2 Numid vs 64hp C1 CKN (88.7% / 3.4%) - WIN
D1 CG2 Archer vs 5hp CKN (99.9%) - WIN

Now I do have some wounded units down south that need to heal a bit, but my GG super medic is down there and I think I'll be able to get stuff into fighting condition by the time Superdeath's stack gets to my capital.

Here's how things stack up




I'd feel better if I had about twice as many catapults. So I'm building a bunch of them now because I'll need to replace what I have regardless.

Also, it bothers me that I haven't seen a GG unit yet. Speaking of GG units, Cao Cao is moving north to merge. While 10XP numids were a nice thought, everything is needed north and I think I'm going to need a super-unit before this is over. Plus, if I survive I'm going to certainly get another GG.

From here I've got two big ideas. 1 is to play for as much time as possible before hitting his stack as it comes to the gates of Tillamook. 2 is that if things look lost I will move all my Numidians in to go after Boil It and burn that city. I doubt that will happen. But really, it also means that if I can clean up the stack before using the Numids then I have the option of a swift counter-attack.

Finally, Mr. Cairo founded Taoism and swapped over to Org Rel and back to Slavery. Meanwhile, AT & Mr. Cairo sign peace. Jowy and Charriu also signed peace. Major major kudos to Charriu to fight off a 2v1 and recapture some cities in the process.


PRO: 45 (1967)
FIN: 49 (1719)