[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[picklepikkl]

I tossed out a suggestion a few pages ago, but I like Haber Process too

[Honk]

Next turn can't come soon enough. We also need to name this city if anyone has any suggestions.

Haber Process? Essentially responsible for the explosive growth in human population of the early 1900s.

[scooter]

Haber Process and Radio sound like solid choices for our next two cities.

Sullla's state of the world post the other day was really great, and I thought I'd do a little spin-off that, especially since a few things have changed since then. Let's revive the PB13 gimmick and do Power Rankings. I'll rank all 7 players as they stand right this minute and try to justify it with a brief explanation. Reminder: in real life, all power rankings are 30% real analysis and 70% trolling for comments, and this is probably going to be about the same.


1) Dreylin/OT4E - 5 cities, free spy, best leader/civ combo available, top power, and one of the best wonders in the game. They've done a great job. I was unsure going into this game how much influence OT4E would have, but he seems to be active, and whatever their balance is, it's working well for them. Their traits should give them tremendous staying power, which is why I'm giving them the top spot.

2) ReallyEvilMuffin - Well there's a reason Imperialistic was paired with mostly middling traits/civs. He's technically in the lead right now, and he's only below Dreylin because his traits mean he has to be in the lead at this stage. He did plant a seventh city this turn... So yes, he added 4 cities before we settled 1. At this point I'm just hoping that's not the game right there.

<large drop-off right around here>

3) Pindicator - We know the least about him so I'm giving him a bit of a reputation nod because his micro sense has always been excellent. Approximating his population based on score suggests he's roughly kept up with Gaspar's expansion without having to whip as harshly, so he's doing something well, which is why I'm giving him 3rd place for the moment.

4) Scooter/Sullla - I think this is the right spot for us right now. Sullla's broken down our game pretty well, so I won't rehash. I don't think we've played perfectly, but I do think we're above the other 3.

5) Gaspar/Noble - Well they're slightly ahead of us in expansion, but they've sacrificed a ton to do so. I'm putting them behind us on their lower future potential.

<another drop-off>

6) Boldy Going Nowhere - Whiffing on the Communism prizes is pretty devastating for him because he was obviously banking everything on it. 3 cities, and he doesn't appear to have any settlers in production either. Doesn't look good, so I think he's well behind the middle 3 now.

7) Donovan - 3 cities, 0 settlers in production, no Slavery/Suffrage to speed that up, a war with the top military in the game, and two traits that won't help with either of those problems. After we settle the western spot, he'll have 3 players encroaching onto what may have been "his" land. I just don't know what he's going to be able to do from this position.


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The biggest question now is which of the middle 3 will best be able to leap into the top group. The top and bottom 2 seem pretty set for the forseeable future. I'm still optimistic.

[SadGit]

Haber proces seems a good deal for an empire that wants to grow tall, but pasteurisation might be handy too if you want to prevent spoilage whilst growing.

[Sullla]

More great stuff scooter. I've been out all day so I don't have a lot to say right now. I should have some more time to look over this and add some thoughts tomorrow. Quick responses:

* Yeah, Dreylin/OT4E are definitely the #1 team in power. When we get their graphs next turn, I'm pretty sure this will confirm it for us. I snapped a picture of their civics, and they are in the rather bizarre configuration (for this war) of Representation/Nationhood/Caste System/Mercantilism/Pacifism. And they just switched civics at the end of last turn so that they could do their drafting. This means three things:

1) They can't swap civics for 5 more turns
2) They do not have Slavery civic available for this war
3) They revolted civics one turn *BEFORE* discovering Communism tech. No State Property for them.

So... was that a mistake? Were they really going to Communism just for the Kremlin and the Great Spy? My only guess is that they want to pop out some more Great People, and thus are sticking with Mercantilism/Pacifism for the time being. But this is really weird to me. They've played so brilliantly thus far, and I can't figure this situation out.

* Your suggestion about being ready to poach territory in the case of a imminent Donovan collapse sounds good to me. We don't need to change anything in terms of the builds, and we can re-evaluate Telegraph after it finishes its settler (I was thinking worker next with the overflow, but we could definitely do grenadier). Your plan to shuffle the units are slightly works for me.

* Scooter, the tiles are set up the way I intended at Telegraph. Thanks for making sense of my micro plan. When in doubt, go with the food/production numbers over the exact tile readout - I'm much more likely to make a mistake when listing all the tiles being worked.

* I concur with your thoughts on the leading teams. Dreylin/OT4E and REM are the dominant teams right now. We're not out of it this early on, but it will be an uphill struggle.

Will post more tomorrow. Hiking for 8 hours today has left me tired.

[scooter]

Turn 275



We're finally at 4 cities which feels pretty nice.



1 quick turn of building culture, and then I'm thinking Barracks first, then Levee. Open to other ideas. We may need to build wealth or research instead as I'll explain later.



Donovan and OT4E/Dreylin signed peace unfortunately. I did spy this Galleon which may suggest why Donovan decided to bail out - he may have been afraid Dreylin would simply sail past him and wreck his core. Anyway, perhaps Dreylin is going to switch to settler mode instead. So the dreams of sniping Bombay may be nothing more than dreams for the time being. Still though, nothing lost by being prepared.



I found where Pindicator recently placed a city. Shouldn't prevent us from settling that eastern spot we want, but it'll be worth watching to see if he keeps settling in our direction. I'll be able to get a look at his city tile as we walk by.



I also stole a glance at Gaspar here. Doesn't look like he's focusing on the south coast very much. I retreated both units after taking this picture.



So I swapped Cotton Gin from research to wealth, because we didn't have enough gold to run 100%. It doesn't look like we'll have quite enough juice to finish Steam Power next turn, but the turn after that we should be good.

I also swapped the Gren and Machine Gun. Next turn the Machine Gun can cover Haber, and that'll allow us to pull the Rifle over to Telegraph, which will free up the Gren.



GNP is heavily inflated by two wealth builds + a culture build.

Finally, we got Dreylin's graphs. I swapped EPs to Gaspar since I think we care about his slightly more than pindicator's. Let me know if you disagree. Below are the full set of graphs in spoilers:

[Sullla]

I feel much better with 4 cities too.

The quick end to the Dreylin/Donovan war is a very good outcome for Dreylin's team, and a lot less beneficial for us. The smart play there was a quick snatch of a border city, rather than a grinding war into Donovan's core. I agree that this likely rules out any chance that we'll be able to snatch one of Donovan's cities. (Remember, Donovan's city close to us is his Holy City, and it will have 40% culture defenses.) That said, this has slowed down Donovan significantly, and Dreylin's team has only picked up a size 1 city with no infrastructure. It's not as bad as it could be. With luck, Donovan will hold a grudge and try to get back at Dreylin later. At the very least, we're not about to see Dreylin run over Donovan's core cities and effectively end this game.

Within our civ, we definitely want levee first at the new city of Haber Process. There's no need to stop and do the barracks first, we just want that amazing levee ASAP. We can build Wealth there next turn to make sure we finish Steam Power at eot 276. With the Great Engineer lightbulb and some fiddling with Build Wealth/Research, we will finish that tech at the end of next turn. We have 1433 beakers invested into Steam Power now (which is actually 5 beakers ahead of the sandbox), we'll get 136 more beakers at end of turn (1569 beakers), then the Great Engineer is worth 1000 + 2* pop = 1056 beakers. That's 2625 beakers out of the 2745 beakers needed, and I think we can manage ~120 beakers next turn. So yeah, we'll have Steam Power at the end of the next turn.

Nice job spotting pindicator's fourth city as well. It will be nice to have city visibility there next turn. Note that pindicator is not settling on rivers either; I still think that a lot of the other teams are underestimating the power of levees.

The Demos are pretty solid for this point in time. The Food number looks worse than it should because we are running such a heavy production configuration at the moment, both in Telegraph and in Haber Process. I'm amused by how insane Dreylin's bar graphs look due to their Golden Age + running all those specialists. Well, we'll be doing something similar in our own Golden Age a bit later, with the capital and Telegraph going all production and Cotton Gin + fifth city working a whole bunch of specialists. I'm grinning at the thought of generating the Great Artist for our Communism lightbulb by running a whole bunch of Artists in our Donovan border city. We'll actually have more culture than his Holy City by the time we're done.

Scooter, I'll try to update the micro plan and sandbox a bit to reflect the changes in-game over the last few days. All things considered, I'm pretty happy with how things are playing out.

[Sullla]

Here is a link to the current sandbox save file for Turn 275. I verified that it correctly matches everything in-game up to this point. Now to test the next couple of turns moving forward...

[Sullla]

OK, going to work on the plan more tomorrow, but there's a few interesting things to report going forward:

* We can found our fifth city on Turn 278, which is a turn sooner than I was expecting. It involves roading the forested hill tile where the city is going, but having that city up and running a turn sooner is definitely worth the worker investment. The micro also lines up really nicely; we run three Artists on the first turn (T278) to pop borders - yay Caste System! - then we have a third ring forest chop complete along with a copper mine the next turn (T279) to finish a work boat for the fish on the second turn. And from there, the city is off and running. We'll be running lots and lots of Artist specialists here to generate a Great Artist for a Communism lightbulb. (Plus pushing back against Donovan's culture won't hurt.)

* As part of that plan, we need to get religion into city #5. That has me producing a 1t worker in Telegraph after the settler finishes with the overflow, followed by a monastery, followed by a Hindu missionary. We need to have Pacifism in there during the Golden Age to make that aspect of the plan work, and we have just enough turns to make it happen.

* Military units: we'll be running on the thin side. In fact, we might need to scale back the plan to build three settlers during the Golden Age and do two settlers instead, thus allowing us to train more workers (which we'll desperately need) and additional defenders. Alternately, we might be able to go with three settlers and use one of them for a "safe" backlines spot that won't need much of anything for defense. We'll have to decide as time goes along. I'm definitely thinking that we want to settle the island and the #4 location in the east along the pindicator border for two settlers; we probably don't need to rush for other city spots after those two.

* Next turn (T276), don't forget to revolt into Caste System at the end of the turn, after our workers do their thing. We'll finish Steam Power at eot 276 and therefore never lose out on the faster worker speed. We also need to move up the rifle on the copper hill next turn (to cover the workers moving to the forested hill on Turn 277), and of course remember to pop our Great Engineer for the lightbulb.

More simming/sandboxing to come tomorrow. Let me know if you have any more thoughts on what's in the plan right now (still Plan Five).

[Sullla]

One last thought before going to bed: are we concerned at all about Dreylin/OT4E loading up some units on ships and trying to boat one of our southern cities? I noticed that they drafted two more times this turn, which seems like more military than they would need. We do know that their team has a galleon, in a different body of water true, but it could be canaled up to us. If it were just Dreylin, this wouldn't be a fear of mine. However, OT4E has shown from past games that he's willing to pick wars with multiple opponents at once, even at times when it doesn't make a lot of sense strategically.

Do you think there's any merit to this fear scooter? I'm just wondering why they would feel the need to draft even more units after signing peace with Donovan and already being the #1 team in power rating. (We're still in second, fortunately.) Of course, Dreylin/OT4E also border BGN and Gaspar/Noble too, and they both should have a lot less power than us...