[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[Sullla]

Those are some good questions! To answer briefly before I have to head off for bed:

* I don't know how soon we'll have tanks on the board, but I think this game will definitely reach that point before it ends. Our tech path started with Steam Power, followed by Scientific Method -> Communism, and I expect that Assembly Plant will come after that (a very expensive tech, of course). After that, we'll need 6 techs for tanks: Steel, Railroad, Combustion (for oil wells), Physics, Electricity, and Industrialism. Given the exponential rate at which teching increases in Civ4, say roughly Turn 320 to hit that point? It's always hard to estimate that stuff so far out. But I think we'll get there, if we're still alive by then obviously.

* This game will almost certainly be decided by fighting. I think the odds of someone winning by Spaceship are low, maybe 20% or so. The map just isn't that big, and everyone has access to everyone else. Cultural victory seems extremely unlikely for that same reason. (Diplomatic victory is off for this game.) Someone will almost certainly hit a dominant position and win by virtue of concession from the rest of the field.

Now how much fighting will we see along the way? I expect a lot, and I think it won't be very long at all before we start seeing lots of brush wars break out. This is a very tough map for defense, as almost every city is vulnerable to attack. Galleons can boat cities from 4 tiles away in the fog, and transports have even more movement than that. We're running tight against the vest on military because everyone else seems to be doing the same thing, other than Dreylin/OT4E. It helps a lot that our non-Dreylin neighbors seem to be struggling in the game right now (Donovan, Gaspar/Noble, and pindicator). Anyway, I expect a lot of poking and prodding around for weakness to start soon, and we already saw the first case of that with Dreylin's grab of the barb city from Donovan.

* I can only speak for myself when it comes to sandboxing. I think the most important thing is trying to work on making efficient moves with your workers. You want as few wasted turns as possible, with the perfect ideal being every city growing onto an improved tile just as the workers complete it. Once you get in the habit of how to move workers around the map, you start to get a feel for where to place cities to line up with efficient worker micro. In Ancient era games, settling in places with usable resources tends to take priority, and non-Creative civs often have to make tough choices. In this game, we picked the Cotton Gin spot mostly to bring the pigs into range without having to wait for borders to pop at the capital. That may have been a suboptimal choice for this game, but it's the kind of thing that testing and sandboxing can reveal.

I try to test out some different scenarios when sandboxing. There's a limit to how much real-world time and energy one can commit, of course. Even a single pass sandbox often helps a lot though, as it forces you to think out your moves a few turns in advance. I often see better worker moves only a few turns into the future, which then allows me to go "back in time" using the sandbox and change earlier moves around to something better. It's also really important not to get too locked into your micro plan, and be unwilling to switch to something better when opportunities present themselves. Scooter's decision to change Telegraph to an earlier settler was a great example of that in this game. We're going to come out way ahead as a result of that move, and we arguably should have built at least one settler sooner than we did. Live and learn on that front.

Obviously these are really general comments. Like anything else, you can get a lot better with practice.

[scooter]

Yeah, it was a pretty disappointing finish to an otherwise hectic game. The good news for you all is that I ended up playing AND reporting tonight anyway. And hey, the turn(s) were good so there's that.

Turn 277-278

First time all game that I've been last to play. My PYFT score is back to very high levels.



We've got coal. I was kinda hoping it would be in one of our mines already, but this will work. I'm not even sure - does mining it in this case actually decrease the tile yield? I think it does drop it to 2/4 (as opposed to the 2/5 that tile will be pretty soon). I didn't see any other sources though, so we may not have a choice. Though we don't necessarily need it hooked immediately.



I spent a couple minutes trying to figure out why the hammer output was better than the microplan said it should be until it hit me that we're getting +1h from coal, and an additional +1h from modifiers. That's a happy surprise.



Quick micro note - this city is ahead of the spreadsheet by 1h for some unknown reason (overflow, not output). It doesn't seem to be behind on food.

Anyway, this city is doing a quick worker-monastery-missionary sequence so that we can get religion into our new city for the upcoming golden age. After that, military for new cities is probably the way to go as Sullla suggested.

We might be able to leave this city empty for a little bit FWIW (not yet, but when the settlers resume). I believe it can stomach the unhappiness, and commandos aren't a threat yet.



It was the turn of the great person. We landed an Engineer, so it's a good thing we committed to this Golden Age plan.



And here's the real news of the turn. We're at 5 cities! Caste is letting us run 3 artists for an instant border pop. Next turn the worker 3E of the city will complete a 3rd ring chop to complete the work boat, and the city should explode from there. I also moved the Machine Gun forward, so two rifles + Machine Gun should be plenty to keep this city safe while also covering workers. Optionally we could bring in the Gren from Telegraph too, but that may be overkill.



Progress! So that 142 number briefly horrified me until I realized it was Donovan who popped a golden age. At least, I'm almost positive it's him.



I think he can wrangle 142h out of this, yeah? At first I was confused because that requires him netting close 4h a pop which seemed impossible, and then I remembered the Bureau bonus. I had a brief panic thinking it was REM with 142h already. Here's the city counts:

REM: 8
Dreylin: 5
pindicator: 5
scooter: 5
Gaspar: 4
BGN: 3
Donovan: 3

Respectable. I'm guessing Dreylin and Pindicator will beat us to 6, but I think we can at least beat Pindicator to 8+. Dreylin's Kremlin will be tougher to keep pace with if he goes full-bore on settling.



Dreylin is also taking advantage of a western neighbor stuck on 3 cities, except in his case BGN didn't even settle the sheep/horse area like Donovan did by us. He's going to have a ton of settling room being neighbors with Donovan/BGN. He's been both lucky AND good in this game, and that's always a scary combination.



Final notes:

* The Explorer out east slipped by Pindicator. It loads onto a Galleon next turn, and then the Galleon will head through the fort to drop him off to sentry the southern island.

* I took the double turn to take a closer look at Gaspar's coast before darting back. No signs of him sticking boats on the water.

* I don't quite follow Donovan's plan. He fired a golden age, but he also went directly into Slavery. I guess he plans on whipping away population during the golden age? I think he's realized he's way behind on expansion and is getting pretty desperate. I'm hoping the Theocracy choice was purely for survival's sake. No reason to think he's aimed at us yet, as he made that revolt before our settler showed up.

[Dp101]

Any particular reason you didn't answer my question? Was it worded badly?

[Sullla]

Demographics looking very nice, at least for the moment. And it's good to be at 5 cities, although we'll be here for a little while before we can get out more settlers. Coal popping at our capital is another nice touch; I don't think we need to connect it for a while either. I'll have a look in-game after work tonight.

Dp101: I wrote the response before your post appeared on my screen, and it was a bit late at night to go back and write another post. Briefly speaking, the big advantage of a production economy is that it doesn't take 70 turns to grow cottages into towns. In a standard game, your core would tend to have the traditional cottage spam, and areas that were conquered or settled later (and didn't have time to grow those cottages / add commerce multiplier buildings) would get workshops and watermills. I think that would be the ideal case if possible.

[Elkad]

We've got coal. I was kinda hoping it would be in one of our mines already, but this will work. I'm not even sure - does mining it in this case actually decrease the tile yield? I think it does drop it to 2/4 (as opposed to the 2/5 that tile will be pretty soon). I didn't see any other sources though, so we may not have a choice. Though we don't necessarily need it hooked immediately.

It'll also put unhealthiness into Steam Engine if the Fish isn't hooked yet.

[Sullla]

First some random pictures from this turn, then a discussion of some bigger picture strategy.



We ended up getting a Great Engineer out of Cotton Gin at about 40% odds. It didn't matter what type of Great Person came out, since we decided to go with the Golden Age option in a few turns. However, we wouldn't have had the option of the Great Scientist lightbulb even if we'd wanted to do so. I'm glad that we discussed this potentiality a number of turns ago, instead of getting caught flatfooted with the wrong type of Great Person.

I also went ahead and moved the Great Engineer over to Telegraph, just in case some kind of horrible disaster took place and we would get attacked at Cotton Gin out of the fog. Let's pray that no such thing takes place.



There were some new techs either this turn or last turn since I last logged into the game. REM has finished research into Scientific Method, which comes as good news for us. This will make the tech even cheaper than before, and we'll now get about a 13% bonus from "known civ" discounting, on top of the 40% bonus from double prerequisites. We will probably have to invest one turn of actual research into Scientific Method, and our Great Scientist lightbulb plus trickling beakers from running Scientist and Artist specialists will finish off the rest. I'm loving how these other teams are going for Scientific Method first, letting us ride their coattails at a discounted price.

REM's tech call makes sense for his gameplan thus far. Generally speaking, I think you want to go Steam Power/levees if you're going for a "tall" build, and Scientific Method/Communism if you're going for a "wide" build. That's only speculation, of course, since we have so little evidence thus far on the Industrial start. I think it makes sense though.

Donovan also did the logical thing and finished research into Steam Power. It's a good fit for his large cities, and I expect he'll put up some levees soon. I believe that Donovan used a Great Engineer for his Golden Age, and that gave him the beakers needed to finish off the tech. Gaspar/Noble also finished a Great Engineer recently, so I wouldn't be surprised to see them also burn it for a Steam Power lightbulb. (They are the Dutch and they surely want to get their Dike building in play.) And BGN finished another Great Artist, which means Communism should be done via a double Great Artist lightbulb soon. We'll follow BGN and continue to benefit from discounted research on that tech path.



Here are the current civics. Looks like almost everyone else is favoring Slavery right now, aside from Dreylin who is in Caste System like us. With our gameplan, I don't think we'll be using very much Slavery outside of an emergency situation; we can already build rifles in 3t in Telegraph and 2t in the capital, and that's pre-levees. There's not much need for whipping at that point...

Note that Dreylin is also in Nationhood civic right now. I think we might want to pop into that civic ourselves after our Golden Age (roughly 10 turns from now) to pop out 4-5 rifles at a cheap cost. Is that worth giving up 5 turns of Bureaucracy civic in the capital? We'll have to decide down the road. Religious civics are all over the place with no consistency. Donovan is in Theocracy civic... but he has his state religion of Judaism in exactly one city, and he doesn't have a monastery to spread it, so I have no idea what he's doing there. Donovan's made some weird choices this game.

By the way, Donovan now has library + university + observatory + Academy in his size 13 capital. That's a lot of research power. However, he only has three cities and doesn't appear to be that close to finishing a settler, and that likely spells death in the long run. Maybe he'll try to whip some out, although whipping at high population levels is highly inefficient.



Here's a screen we don't show too often. We're not that far behind in Total Pop at this point; we have 32 pop and Donovan is leading with about 35 pop. That's better than I was expecting. We aren't even that far behind in Land either, somewhat amazingly. The numbers seem to reflect our status in roughly 3rd place at the moment.

Now let's discuss a strategy question about military unit positioning.



We have 7 total military units: 5 rifles, 1 machine gun, and 1 grenadier. Currently, we have two rifles and the machine gun over at Radio, one rifle each in Steam Engine / Cotton Gin / Haber Process, and the grenadier in the interior at Telegraph. This is probably fine for the moment, although I will point out that Donovan has slipped past us into second place on the Power graphs, and we're both noticeably behind Dreylin's team. (The fun of having the top two teams in power rating as neighbors...) I think we want at least the machine gun and a rifle in Radio, and we'll have to decide if we want to add a third unit on top of that.

The real question is what should we do when we start expanding? We'd like to get three settlers done during our Golden Age (Turns 281-288), of which two will come from the capital and one will come from Telegraph. My strong suggestions for those settlers are the island location to the northeast, our border city in the east with pindicator, and then maybe a safe spot for the third settler, like the deer spot to the northeast of Telegraph. Something like that.

The question is where are we going to get the units to defend these cities. So this is the question for scooter: do you like to gamble? Do you feel lucky?



We can potentially free up units to defend our settlers by clearing them out of existing cities. Telegraph doesn't need a defender at all; it's in the middle of our territory and we have enough happiness to leave it empty without causing a revolt. We could put the grenadier in Cotton Gin, which is unlikely to be attacked, and I wouldn't even feel that bad with an explorer on the southern island to serve as a spotter. If we kept a rifle + machine gun pair in Radio, that would leave us with 2 rifles to play around with. We could build a rifle between settlers in the capital, allowing us to send 2 rifles to the eastern pindicator border city, and 1 rifle to the northern island city. Haber Process should also be contributing units by the end of the Golden Age as well, enough to cover a city somewhere. And we only have to hold out on minimal defenses until the Golden Age ends, at which time we can pop into Nationhood civic and draft out 4-5 rifles to cover our behinds.

The problem, of course, is that we'll be playing with fire if someone tries to attack us during our Golden Age. That wouldn't be the end of the world necessarily, as we can always switch into Slavery/Nationhood and produce a lot of units in a hurry. And does anyone really want to pick a fight with Aggressive/Spiritual Montezuma while he's running a Golden Age? Probably not in the early stages of the game. Still, there's some real risk in leaving cities empty or very lightly defended in order to push settlers out faster.

What level of risk do you want to take here, scooter? It would be useful to know as I prepare future micro plans. I think most of the RB players are going to play this one cautiously, so I'm inclined to press our luck a bit and go settlers -> rifles instead of the other way around.



This is the Donovan front lines. We are going to want to chop that forest southwest of the city ASAP; I have the workers removing it immediately after improving the copper and corn. Multiplayer 101: you do not want enemy teams to be able to sit next to your city while enjoying a 50% defensive bonus.

Donovan will always be able to hit our city with 2-movers from inside his own city of Sector 19. We'll get some safety from 1-movers, however, because we'll eventually control the tile north of the horses culturally. It's second ring for us and third ring for him, plus we'll be producing a ton of culture from running a bunch of Artist specialists in Radio during the Golden Age. Unfortunately we will never get control of the horses for the same reason, barring a capture or razing of Donovan's city. Getting boated from the sea is another real concern here. Fortunately we'll have more vision after the borders expand, and get at least a little more warning of incoming units/ships. The jungle hill tile south of the fish will be really nice for vision purposes, and it will pop into our borders next turn.

Scooter, how many units do you want over here? Rifle + machine gun is probably sufficient for now, given that we'll be size 6 pretty quickly and able to do an emergency draft if needed. Thoughts?

[scooter]

Good call on the Engineer. The thought crossed my mind earlier today, and I was planning to do exactly that with this next turn.

To speak generally, I have a pretty high risk tolerance with planting cities and stretching military. I'll put it this way: I have 0 interest in finishing 2nd or 3rd in this game. I've done a ton of that, but wins keep barely eluding me. So I'd rather push out settlers and count on our traits to convince people to stay away. We could keep up a strong military and make sure all border cities are super defended, and it would probably make it pretty easy to finish on the podium here, but I want to win.

For the very short term we can keep two rifles + MG around Radio until we get it deforested, but I don't feel a need to keep that many there unless Donovan escalates things. So one rifle can definitely be pulled east pretty soon. Like you said - sz6 is the magic number that will allow us to revolt and draft at any time - any city that hits that threshold is pretty safe from a minor attack.


Turn is up, so I'll play that now.

[scooter]

Turn 279

You know, after a bunch of pretty exciting turns, this one feels like a dud. Not a whole lot happened! We moved some workers, mined a copper, and chopped a forest. But here's a few pictures anyway.



This city is going to be ridiculous really quickly. Right now it's got a +3F surplus despite working no improved foods and a 0F tile. Next turn that jumps to 6F. Shortly after that the corn comes online, which will be another jump. Assuming we farm the tundra to irrigate the corn, at size 6 we can work the copper and still have an 10F (!!!) surplus. Longterm I see us running loads of scientists here to make for a GP pump of sorts, but in the short term it'll produce us 1k beakers in exchange for a handful of turns running artists here pretty soon. We've only got 4 workshoppable tiles, and Moai isn't available (can you even imagine?), so the only production this city will be good at is drafting. Or maybe even a brief foray into Slavery if some weird whip cascade opportunity opens up later. It'll be awfully hard to give up Caste for even 5T though. Anyway, point being, this is definitely a GPP/scientist city. We'll want to build the science multipliers in here to maximize the value of the scientists.



Back at the capital we're paving over the farms that have helped us grow Steam Engine to size 12 (EoT). That highlighted tile will be a 1/6/2 tile in a golden age, and that'll be worth 10.5h into settlers after modifiers. So yeah, we definitely want that workshop. The tile 1SE of Steam is getting one too. State Property cannot get here soon enough.



Demos look pretty sharp. Food is nosing above average, and that production number is better than it looks. The average may be 75h, but if you remove us from the average and Donovan (since he's in a golden age), the rest of the field is averaging just 56h right now. All 5 of our cities are in growth configs right now, so it's not as if our hammer count is artifially high either. We'll probably break 200h during our golden age.

Everyone else is still whipping for MFG basically, and I think that's why we're still seeing a relative lack of settlers from non-REM players. They're just insanely expensive to whip.



Stray notes:

* Explorer by BGN just entered his territory since we've got OB with him. May as well take a look through his land.

*East explorer is on a Galleon. You can just see it off the edge of the screen. I'll drop it on the south island next turn and swing the galleon west briefly to watch the west side of the island for incoming boatings while the Explorer scouts out the island. Does that sound good?

* I covered the worker on the tundra by Radio with a rifle. The city itself has a Rifle + MG in it.

* Cotton Gin is the most vulnerable city right now really. What do we think about sliding the Telegraph Grenadier down into it so there's a second unit in it? That should prevent OT4E from boating it out of the fog. They're the only team with enough military to spare an attack force right now, and OT4E is developing a bit of a reputation...

I think that's it. I'm feeling a lot better about our position than I was before we did the Telegraph settler swap. I think we're firmly in third place right now, and our strategy hasn't even fully hit its stride yet.

[Sullla]

Yeah, the Demographics are looking shockingly good compared to where they were about ten turns ago. The two new cities are both ridiculous powerhouses and they help enormously. I agree that the call to accelerate the Telegraph settler was an inspired choice. And as far as whipping versus "natural" production, I think that our strategy is slowly starting to bear fruit. Most of the stuff in an Industrial start is just too costly to make slaving very effective, and our size 10+ cities (with levees) are about to pull away from the teams that have size 3-5 cities trying to whip stuff. Maybe we weren't crazy after all.

* I'm fine with moving the grenadier in Telegraph down to Cotton Gin for the time being. Unlikely to matter but better safe than sorry.

* I think my preference is to have the galleon serve as another spotter and watch our eastern isthmus to keep an eye on anything pindicator is doing over there. This also has the advantage of revealing any galleons Gaspar/Noble might try to slip into the eastern sea south of their cities. This feels more useful than sending the galleon further south, where we'll have an explorer in a pretty good position to watch for ships coming north from Dreylin/OT4E. What do you think?

By the way, for anyone watching this game: Dreylin's team is currently winning the game right now. But their score is somewhat misleading; they have 32 points from wonders and 70 points from two techs, which were both researched using heavy Great Person lightbulbs (three in total). That's not a knock on their team, as they do get to use those techs and those wonders! However, we actually have more total population than Dreylin right now, and the Demos are pretty close (he has more Food, we have more Production).

I also think things are looking very good for the moment.

[AdrienIer]

that production number is better than it looks. The average may be 75h, but if you remove us from the average and Donovan (since he's in a golden age), the rest of the field is averaging just 56h right now.

I'm not getting the same numbers as you, are you sure about that ? The number on the screen is rival average so I think you're not included in that number. Therefore the rival average without the leader is : (75*6-155)/5 = 59h. (well those 3h won't really change how you interpret the number, but they're there)

If you also discount the lowest production guy you get a production average for the other 4 of 68h.