[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[Sullla]

Adrienler is correct; the Rival Average in Civ4 does not include your own numbers. (Unlike in Civ5, where it does.) However, I think scooter's point still stands: 90 production for us against 59-68 production for the non-Golden Age teams is a nice lead.

Not so nice: REM now has 9 cities! With less power than we have, mind you. Maybe Dreylin will go smack him around a bit. REM has to be overextended with more cities than units....

[Zed-F]

Assuming you guys are still looking for names for cities 6+, might I suggest Pasteurization?

[scooter]

Good catch there - yes, my brain glitched and I included our numbers in the rival average.

Yes, someone really needs to call REM on his farmer's gambit here. He's got to have a few undefended cities at this point, because yes his military is below ours. Dreylin gains the most from REM getting knocked down a peg (and he's got the means to do it), not to mention they're neighbors, so I guess we need to hope someone calls him on it. Our military is 7 land units (5 rifles, 1 MG, 1 Gren) + Galleon, and REM is below that. So I'd guess at most he's got 6-7 units for 9 cities. Doable with inland/core cities being empty, but it leaves him completely unable to respond if someone were to, oh I dunno, drop off 3 units next to a city of his.

Pasteurization sounds like a good choice, especially since our next city plant will have a cow.

[scooter]

Turn 280



Boldly closed borders with us to kick out our Explorer, and he offered a map swap in return. I didn't accept. We can re-offer if we care, but mainly this just leaves our Explorer totally trapped and stranded.



I suppose that was inevitable. Anyway, Dreylin will settle on that plains forest hill this turn (the second unit under the rifle is a settler), and that'll leave us trapped. The only way out that I see is to head south, declare on Dreylin, and try to slip by the former barbarian city and get peace once we're by. Or we could offer OB first. Only other option is to sit and wait for the whole area to get gobbled up culturally and see where we teleport when that happens. Any thoughts here?



Dropped the explorer as planned. Sullla you're right that the Galleon should return north, especially since we'll have settlers ready pretty soon. Speaking of - one of the rifles from Radio probably should start heading east next turn.



Steam Engine is just about ready to go golden next turn. Both of those 3/4 workshops will complete, the levee will complete, golden age will get fired, and over 100h will immediately go into a settler.



Pindicator settled a new city. For whatever reason the city we slipped by a few turns ago has the liberate label on it. That's odd.



Gaspar settled a pair of cities and pindicator added another, so I expected a bigger fall in the demos. The big news is that others are finally adding military. We just dipped to 6th just like that. I'm not worried, but we just can't afford to be sloppy.



So let's talk settlers. We've tossed out ideas, but it's probably time to revisit it with the latest info we have.

I'm tentatively thinking we send the Steam Engine settler to one of the east spots ("4" or "5") and the Telegraph settler west to fill in the gap to Radio ("3"). That would allow us to wait slightly longer to add more units because the city connecting to Radio would not need any military. Sullla, I'd really like to hear what you think about these next couple settlers. I'll have more thoughts tomorrow.

[Sullla]

Good stuff, scooter. These turns keep going fast, I'm looking forward to popping the Golden Age next turn too. I also thought the Demographics would look worse, given all the cities founded recently. (I noticed that a lot of the spoiler threads were updated in this forum yesterday, timed along with those new cities no doubt.) Here's the current city count for our dedicated lurkers:

REM: 9 cities (!)
Noble/Gaspar: 6 cities
pindicator: 6 cities
Dreylin: 5 cities (about to be 6 next turn)
Scooter: 5 cities
Donovan: 3 cities
BGN: 3 cities

But the Demos don't look that bad, do they? I think it's because most of these other teams are whipping heavily to get their settlers out. The only other teams with large core cities are Donovan and BGN, who are way behind in expansion. I'd like to think that we've been doing a pretty good job of matching the other (non-REM) teams in expansion while also pursuing our production strategy. Time will tell there, of course. The Golden Age is going to help a lot.

My biggest concern is Dreylin/OT4E's power rating, which is far above anyone else's in the game. If they came after us right now, we wouldn't die, but any chance of being a major player or winning the game would be over. I don't see a lot we can do about that right now either. Going max protection and stopping expansion to train a bunch of units would condemn us to second-rate status. This is just one of those times where we cross our fingers and hope Dreylin has other targets in mind. (Dreylin is much closer to Donovan and BGN than us, and we're hoping that they would be more appealing targets for aggression than our Spiritual + Aggressive + in a Golden Age combination. But we don't really know for sure.)

Other stuff from the turn:

* I don't see much of an option for our explorer to get out of that area. BGN was a bit foolish to cancel the Open Borders, as he's about to discover Communism tech and revolt to State Property civic, at which time he'd be getting one-sided foreign trade routes from our Mercantilism setup. We should not offer Open Borders to Dreylin for the same reason - no reason to give him even more income. I think we just fortify in the area for now and hope that BGN will give us Open Borders later on. I'm fine with paying the 1 gold/turn to keep that unit alive for possible use later.

* Donovan whipped his capital and his third city for what appear to be settlers. (They both have about 340 shields via production tracking.) His Holy City bordering us just finished a Jewish monastery. It certainly doesn't look like he's planning on attacking us any time soon, given these builds. That's a relief for Radio's sake.

* As scooter's pictures show, neither of the two new cities added by Gaspar/Noble (they went from 4 cities to 6 cities in one turn) are located on the northern island. That's a huge relief to me, and now I think we'll be in the driver's seat to claim some or all of that territory. We will have a settler done in 5 turns in the capital, and it can land in 6 turns, settle in 7 turns. Given that Gaspar/Noble's cities were just whipped heavily for those settlers, I think it would be tough for them to beat that timetable. I hope.

* Something I think we missed last turn: Gaspar/Noble used a Great Engineer lightbulb to finish Steam Power tech. We know that this happened because they gained 30 score points mid-turn, so it has to be a lightbulb. That's another argument against another settler coming out from them in the short term: I have to imagine they want to build Dikes in their water-bound core cities. (Small micro note: their Great Engineer lightbulb did not get the maximum beakers possible, since they had enough to get the tech mid-turn. They overshot how many beakers they needed to produce through actual research. I'm sure the difference was tiny.)

* Regarding where to settle. The first settler out of the capital (eot 284) is pegged for the northern island; I think that's pretty definitive at this point. Let me know if you disagree, but I'm going to argue hard for that spot. The other two settlers will come out at about the same time at the end of our Golden Age. I think the second one out of the capital goes off to the east to form our pindicator border city. Our desired spot might not still be available then, but we'll grab the best location still remaining. (We already claimed the fish/corn resources on the other side, so it's less critical that we secure copies of those resources in the east. It sure would be nice though.)



For the settler that comes out of Telegraph, I'm going to suggest this spot. It's a reasonably safe spot that won't need much defense (probably one rifle) and along with an explorer on the southern island, it will help insulate Cotton Gin from attack somewhat. As for the location itself, I prefer it to where we have the current city markers. We get to be on a hill for defense, on a river, add two resources that we don't currently have in the cows and whales, claim a pair of 3 food lake tiles, and very efficiently make use of the terrain already allocated to Telegraph/Cotton Gin/Radio. I think this is our "Pasteurization" spot.

There are two tradeoffs. One is that we don't make use of the rice tile across the water. However, that's only a 4 food tile anyway by virtue of being a dry rice, and I think we may end up planting a city on that southern island anyway in a defensive spot down the road. Hopefully we can claim either this rice or the rice on the northern island for health purposes down the road. Anyway, I don't find the presence of that rice resource compelling enough to move this city a tile south and give up the pair of lake tiles. The other tradeoff is that this spot largely rules out a filler city at the "3" location indicated above. I've thought about this and I don't think that there's enough territory there to warrant a filler city. If we go back to scooter's map from this turn:



We're essentially wasting those 4 tiles by setting at the spot I mentioned above plus the "6" spot in the far north. There simply isn't enough there to justify a city. What do you think, scooter?

I'll work on extending our micro plan for a few turns later today, since we've just about reached the end of it again. This game continues to be a total blast.

[SadGit]

Could the overshot on techs be due to unexpected "known tech bonus" after you got steam power?

[scooter]

Good comments all-around as usual. I'll reply to the bigger issues.

My biggest concern is Dreylin/OT4E's power rating, which is far above anyone else's in the game. If they came after us right now, we wouldn't die, but any chance of being a major player or winning the game would be over. I don't see a lot we can do about that right now either. Going max protection and stopping expansion to train a bunch of units would condemn us to second-rate status. This is just one of those times where we cross our fingers and hope Dreylin has other targets in mind. (Dreylin is much closer to Donovan and BGN than us, and we're hoping that they would be more appealing targets for aggression than our Spiritual + Aggressive + in a Golden Age combination. But we don't really know for sure.)

I'm just going to take solace in the fact that out of all their possible targets, we are the least appealing target by virtue of our traits. I think they'll look elsewhere, but it's still something to keep an eye on. If OT4E has as much influence as it seems, they won't hesitate to take an opportunistic stab. This is especially true with other neighbors lagging behind.

* I don't see much of an option for our explorer to get out of that area. BGN was a bit foolish to cancel the Open Borders, as he's about to discover Communism tech and revolt to State Property civic, at which time he'd be getting one-sided foreign trade routes from our Mercantilism setup. We should not offer Open Borders to Dreylin for the same reason - no reason to give him even more income. I think we just fortify in the area for now and hope that BGN will give us Open Borders later on. I'm fine with paying the 1 gold/turn to keep that unit alive for possible use later.

Yeah, this is fine with me. I think if we declare war and try to skirt through, he'll just get killed anyway.

* Something I think we missed last turn: Gaspar/Noble used a Great Engineer lightbulb to finish Steam Power tech. We know that this happened because they gained 30 score points mid-turn, so it has to be a lightbulb. That's another argument against another settler coming out from them in the short term: I have to imagine they want to build Dikes in their water-bound core cities. (Small micro note: their Great Engineer lightbulb did not get the maximum beakers possible, since they had enough to get the tech mid-turn. They overshot how many beakers they needed to produce through actual research. I'm sure the difference was tiny.)

I'm guessing it was intentional so that they could immediately get the benefits of Steam Power. That sounds like a worthwhile trade in most cases, especially since they haven't been in Serfdom.

* Regarding where to settle. The first settler out of the capital (eot 284) is pegged for the northern island; I think that's pretty definitive at this point. Let me know if you disagree, but I'm going to argue hard for that spot. The other two settlers will come out at about the same time at the end of our Golden Age. I think the second one out of the capital goes off to the east to form our pindicator border city. Our desired spot might not still be available then, but we'll grab the best location still remaining. (We already claimed the fish/corn resources on the other side, so it's less critical that we secure copies of those resources in the east. It sure would be nice though.)

For the settler that comes out of Telegraph, I'm going to suggest this spot. It's a reasonably safe spot that won't need much defense (probably one rifle) and along with an explorer on the southern island, it will help insulate Cotton Gin from attack somewhat. As for the location itself, I prefer it to where we have the current city markers. We get to be on a hill for defense, on a river, add two resources that we don't currently have in the cows and whales, claim a pair of 3 food lake tiles, and very efficiently make use of the terrain already allocated to Telegraph/Cotton Gin/Radio. I think this is our "Pasteurization" spot.

Yeah, we're on the same page about the island next. The spot nearer to pindicator is a bit riskier for less upside, so the island gets priority I think. I think our "ideal" spot may well be taken by then, but it's alright. Happy to let Boudica/Russia get the land they want and take a safer border with them. Would much rather take land from those who can't do as much about it.

Your alternative Pasteurization spot is pretty interesting. I'll think it over and take a closer look tonight, but I think I like it.

[Sullla]

Sandbox has been updated to reflect the current turn.

I also updated the micro plan through Turn 285, halfway through the Golden Age. A few comments from what I've been seeing:

* The research is a little bit weird, and doesn't line up as perfectly as we would like. The limiting factor is how quickly we can get out the Great People for lightbulbs, especially the Great Scientist out of Cotton Gin. The fastest that I can do that is eot 284 (by running 6-7 Scientists at starvation deficit), allowing us to lightbulb Scientific Method on Turn 285. Unfortunately, this means that we're saving up gold for the first half of our Golden Age instead of doing research, but there's no way around this. Even sitting at 0% science, we still go over what's needed to discover Scientific Method with the Great Scientist lighbulb and end up "wasting" beakers. Fortunately it's pretty minor, losing out on 30-40 beakers or something like that. And we only have a single library in our whole empire, so it's not like running gold versus doing research makes that big of a difference. Ideally, it could have been lined up better, however.

As far as discovering Communism tech, it looks right now like it will complete about 2-3 turns after the Golden Age ends. Figure slightly after Turn 290 more or less. We will get the Great Artist out of Radio two turns after the Golden Age completes, so eot 290, and I suspect that we'll be able to complete the tech with the lightbulb at the same time. That feels pretty good to me, plus we'll still have a lot of gold in the bank to start saving for our next long run to Assembly Line.

* For city builds, the capital can do something really interesting. We build the first settler in 4t, then we can actually build a grenadier in 1t, followed by building the second settler in 3t, completing on the last turn of the Golden Age. We cannot do this with a rifle, as we come up just barely short. Of course, we could slip a rifle in there and simply delay the second settler until the turn after the Golden Age if we want. What do you think here scooter?

Telegraph's settler takes 7 turns and it's not close enough to micro it to complete faster. I have the workers preparing it to go to the cows/whales spot in the southwest at the moment, unless you think we should go somewhere else. Cotton Gin is building a work boat for that spot.

Haber Process is absolutely nuts, finishing the levee on the fourth turn of the Golden Age, then completing the barracks from earlier, then it can do a 2t rifle after that. It's an insanely good city.

* One worker is preparing a road to the southwest cows city. Another pair of workers starts roading towards the eastern border with pindicator. We're going to need to position the galleon so that it's NE of our incense tile at the end of Turn 284, so that it can load a rifle/worker/settler trio at the beginning of Turn 285 and move out for the island. I'm not quite sure how we'll be guarding all of these spots. Here's my suggestion:

- The second rifle at Radio starts moving east, and will eventually go over to the island. That leaves machine gun/rifle to guard Radio.
- We leave the grenadier to guard Cotton Gin, with an explorer on the south island to watch for Dreylin ships, and cross our fingers that we get left alone. Telegraph gets emptied out completely.
- The rifle in Cotton Gin along with the unit that comes out of the capital guard the workers roading to the east/the pindicator border city.
- The Haber Process rifle starts to shuffle down to the south in a few turns, and provides the defender for the cow city. Haber Process finishes its own replacement rifle eot 286.

It's a song and a dance for sure, but we can stand up some real defenses in a hurry behind our initial settler plants. Telegraph and Haber Process have a ton of production, and our capital will be a monster even out of the Golden Age. (I think we can get about 60 production/turn there even out of GA mode.)

Let me know what other thoughts you have, or what things I'm overlooking.

[scooter]

Alright, I've had some more time to think. I also went into the game and renumbered/moved a few signs to indicate the updated plan.


* I'm definitely on board with these next 3 city sites in the order you've noted them. I'm good with the proposed white dot. I think we're going to want a presence on the south island anyway (perhaps a more equitable split with Dreylin than the admittedly greedy plan near Gaspar), so we can still get that rice. Anyway, the main appeal to me of white is that we can lighthouse those lake tiles. The extra 2F more or less offsets the lack of rice, and it's far safer from any theoretical shenanigans from Dreylin. I don't think a super-late filler city (where the "3" sign is at in your picture) is totally out of the question, but it's debatable and extremely unimportant. Given how expensive settlers are, it very well may not be worth it ever.

* Looked at your plan and tried it, and I really like the settler-gren-settler 8T plan in Steam Engine. That looks perfect. I'd just as much prefer to have the Gren given how many people have Rifles at this point.

* For all the shortcomings of Cotton Gin, I'm really happy with how Haber Process and Radio are turning out. They're so strong that they become contributors immediately. For the lurkers - from T281-284 these two cities will both grow 3 pop each. Radio will have grown 3 sizes (including filling the Granary) in just 7 turns.

* I don't think saving on 0% during a golden age is a problem at all. Keep in mind that really we get more bang for our buck at 0% given that all of our cities have markets. You know, we'll have hoarded so much gold when this is done that we could always pop into Suffrage for 5T if we really want. Might help us get a post-GA settler out of Telegraph quickly or something. I don't know, just a random thought that popped into my head. It's probably not worth it. The 600g that we'll have won't last that long. And besides, the techs that are upcoming are all important. Factories will be amazing for us. So I think I already talked myself out of this one. (edit: I came up with a more creative gold usage suggestion down below)

* Speaking of Assembly Line, we should definitely try to build the Pentagon if we get there roughly first-ish. But that's a little ways off. Even if we were to lose to an Engineer rush, the failgold (with all our hammer multipliers) would be a great consolation prize. But possessing the Pentagon just makes a commando factory that much easier to pull off.

* Your plan for the unit shuffle sounds fine with me. Everybody except Dreylin is doing the same thing, and we're equipped enough to defend ourselves against him that I think he'd rather take on the lower-hanging fruit. He's neighbors with both Donovan and BGN (not to mention Gaspar), so he's not lacking for targets.

* Speaking of, their growing power is making me wonder if they still do intend to finish Donovan off when the 10T of peace ends. Fortunately our stranded Explorer may just be able to catch a glimpse! Anyway, this still has me thinking about the possibility of snagging Bombay if it happens. I don't think we need to concretely plan for it, but just something to keep in the back of our heads. It sure would be a welcome boost. Donovan collapsing would make Dreylin and REM neighbors too, and I think that would be a generally good thing too just so that they hold each other in check.

* Here's a slightly offbeat thought. We'll be stockpiling all this gold - what if we felt out Dreylin to see if he's interested in taking a loan from us. Given his use of Suffrage, he's the only one who would really care about geting a big chunk right now since he can get returns on it much better than other players. Something like 250 gold for 30gpt (20% return for us). He'd probably say no initially, but it would at least pop the idea in his head while he sees our treasury grow larger and larger. It would be helping him, sure, but it does help us too, and I view REM as the slight leader right now, so with that in mind, it helps us both keep up with him.

[Sullla]

OK, that mostly sounds good. I actually forgot that all our cities have markets, making the 0% gold push for the first half of the Golden Age arguably more efficient than 100% research with a single library. You can't say that in a normal game...

Also, going UniSuff after we reach Communism tech isn't quite as crazy as it sounds, since we'll be giving up Mercantilism civic to run State Property. Representation civic isn't nearly as strong once we drop Mercantilism's free specialists. But that said, I think we'll still be running a lot of Scientists at Radio for the indefinite future, and gold is likely better spent pushing for factories than buying stuff. Still, it's something we might want to keep in mind for an emergency.

The Pentagon would be really, really good for our team (or pindicator), more so than the other teams in the game. It's also an extremely expensive wonder at 1250 shields and no doubling resource. Let's see where things stand down the road; our capital can definitely hit 100 shields/turn with factory and power plant, and it might be worth taking a run at the wonder. Still a ways off though.

I'm a lot more worried about Dreylin targeting us than targeting Donovan. We'll have plenty of time to poach a city if war does break out, even Dreylin won't be able to punch through two large core cities of Donovan quickly.

I'm a lot less sanguine about the proposition to float a loan to Dreylin/OT4E. Number one, because it does help them expand or do whatever more quickly, and they're already ahead of us and don't need the help. Number two, because it would be awful tempting for us to send them lump sum gold for gold/turn, and then for them to turn around and declare war to break the agreement. That would be a jerk move but hardly illegal. I don't want to put any incentive in their minds where declaring war on our team would be economically beneficial. Another neat idea though, and maybe something to consider for the future.

Looks like we just had a new turn pop up. The Golden Age should be fun.