Speaker's super top secret thread for the purposes of world domination; Neener Neener

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Shale plant's pretty good on OCCs, because you can get factory power and National Park.

[Profane]

[darrelljs]

Hey!

Darrell

[treskies]

Hey all-

Just found Realms Beyond, registered to post this.

Just wanted to say that I just arrived here after reading some of your writeups, Sulla. The amount of analysis and time you guys put into these posts are appreciated, even if not everyone shows it (I can't comment on any of the drama). I've learned a crazy amount just from reading them, and have been able to see a noticeable change in the strength of my playstyle. So PLEASE keep posting.

Anyways, back to the game. I feel like I've never seen a large multiplayer game get to industrial warfare. What are you guys thinking as far as attack plans? Is it better to focus on one front in this era, and leverage as many units as possible on one set of opponents to win a decisive victory quickly, or push on multiple fronts to avoid letting somebody put you on the defensive? Like you said, attacking gets very hard in this era, so the dynamic must change up a bit.

[Sullla]

Now that's a great post. Any discussion in the game thread is nice, but I vastly prefer posts like the one treskies added to some of the spam that's been appearing. Let me try to address this one.

The Industrial era represents a huge shift in Civ4's gameplay. The combination of factories, power plants, and railroads skyrocket production in cities across your territory. For most of the game, the food supply greatly outstrips production. This is why we produce so many things through whipping, because the conversion rate of food into production via whipping (with granary in place) tends to be superior to building things yourself.

But when the Industrial era hits, that dynamic changes. Let's do an example. An average city of size 12-15 will likely be sitting around roughly 15 base production. That's one or two food resources, a number of cottages, and a couple of mines. With a forge, that city can probably produce around 20 shields/turn. Now look at how things change in the Industrial era. We can build railroads (and a levee if it's on a river) to increase the base tile production, let's say up to 20 base. Then we add in factory and power plant: doubles actual production up to 40/turn. Suddenly whipping population for 30 production per pop point doesn't look so appealing any more. Even an average city can usually hit 50 production/turn with factories and power plants, which allows for 2-3t builds of contemporary military units. Think of how long it takes to build units during most of the game. We whip and draft because it takes too long. Not the case after the industrial revolution.

So the Industrial era shifts the focus of the game from one based around whipping/drafting (production through Food) to one based around actual building (production through... Production!) This de-emphasizes Food and emphasizes the Production stat instead. That's a major plus for our team in this game, as Team 3 has been riding their Food advantage all throughout the game thus far. Their military is almost wholly comprised of draft unit spam, which won't be very practical in the post-Assembly Line world. Drafted rifles are the best use of population in the game: 1 pop for 110 shield unit. Drafted infantry are a very poor tradeoff, as they cost 2 pop and can usually be built in 2-3t with factories/power plants. Advancing to this next tech should allow our "Tall" team strategy to counter the "Wide" team strategy of Team 3 better.

In terms of attack plan, we are going to defend against Team 3 and devote the rest of our resources to crushing one of the weak teams, likely Team 2 (which is nowhere close to rifles). We'll need to keep a decent amount of units along our shared border, but once we have railroads it will be very, very easy to defend. It will also be extremely difficult for Team 3's army (which will be comprised entirely of rifles and cannons) to do much against us once we have infantry (Assembly Line) and machine guns (Railroads). We slam 5-10 machine guns into any threatened city using our rail network. How do they break that? Uh... they don't? You kind of need air power or tanks to break through machine guns, and those are even further down the tree. Meanwhile, we should be fighting with infantry, cannons, and cavs against muskets and maces. LOL?

Again, the biggest issue would be Team 2 completely collapsing in the next 10 turns before we can get our factories, power plants, and railroads in place. We can't see what's going on over there, so we have to play things by ear. If it looks like Lewwyn and company are about to die, we can speed up our own movement and push the offensive. If not, it's better to avoid applying any pressure to allow them to hold out longer. Team 3 did not capture a city or discover a tech on this latest turn, which is great news for us. 4t to Assembly Line and counting.

[Sullla]

Speaker was traveling for work this weekend, so I played his turn as well. Noteworthy stuff taking place:



Dave appears to be making some kind of play in this narrow isthmus area. He's got 5 workers (2 of them Fast Workers), about 10 musketeers, along with 1 knight, rifle, and cannon. I'm not exactly sure what he's planning to do, but it's a decent sized stack of units. I still very much need to plant a city on the marked "X" tile for wines/clams purposes, and thus I intend to fight for this spot if at all possible. I'm not that intimidated by what I can see currently, since musketeer conscript spam is not particularly threatening out in the open field without city defend and fortification bonuses. Our knights, cuirassiers, and cavalry will get huge odds on all of those units. Unless another 20 units come racing out of the fog next turn - which is quite possible given Dave's humongous army - I have every intention of fighting to hold my desired city spot.

I pulled back a bunch of mounted units to the forested tile west of the X in that picture above. My Fast Workers have roaded the area, and if Dave moves his stack past that desert hill in the west, I will likely try to attack it. His one knight in the area has Sentry promotion, unfortunately, which means Dave will likely not be baited into making any mistakes. We'll see what he does. I think there's an excellent chance that Dave will put a city on the Blue dot in the above picture - just feels like that's the incoming play from him. Why else move out all those units unless you're planning on settling something there? This would be bad because it would revert most of the tiles around Teleport Gank to Dave's cultural control (the old French culture is still stored on those tiles from when he owned the city). I'm hoping that no such play is in the works, but planning for the worst. I could probably still found my desired city in that case, and the settler is only a couple of turns away, but it would certainly become a lot harder.

At sea, Dave attacked my frigates yet again. He took two 67% battles, winning one and losing the other one. This was a fairly likely set of outcomes, perhaps slightly unlucky for Dave (4/9 odds he wins both, 4/9 odds we each win a battle, 1/9 odds he loses both). It looks like Dave wants to wear down my frigates through a war of attrition and replace them through his Heroic Epic city nearby. That's a good tactical plan, although I'm not a fan of how his city of Trafalgar is being managed. The Heroic Epic city is only size 6! And while that fort over there gives some extra mobility to the fleet, it means Dave is not working a 0/6/0 iron mine tile (worth 12 production/turn with Heroic Epic!) I guess he can still build frigates in 1t, so perhaps it doesn't matter, but it does feel a little bit sloppy.

I am basically trying to buy time over here against Dave and not lose anything critical while waiting on factories. My empire is extremely heavily on infrastructure, relatively low on units. I'm #1 in Food by a giant margin now and #2 in Production. (Speaker is #1 in Production despite being something like #8 in Food.) My cities are very large and very well developed. They only need a little while longer to finish their infrastructure, and then I can go 100% military and really start dominating. In the meantime, it's a bit of a song and a dance trying to manage against Dave and his massive conscript army of doom. Dave doesn't even have drydocks in most of his coastal cities - 5 of the 6 that I can see have no drydocks. I only have 3 coastal cities of note, all of which have drydocks or are about to complete them. The ironclads are rolling out of port as we speak, now they just need to steam on over there to the west... really wish we had the circumnavigation bonus for 3 movement speed here!

Speaker rushed his Ironworks this turn:



This city is going to be ridiculously good on Production. It will finish a levee in 1t next, and from there on to factory and power plant. We figured that this city can easily top 100 production/turn in the near future, which is almost a shame here on Quick speed. A lot of that production gets wasted, because you can't build units faster than one per turn. My idea is to have our team build Pentagon here: build units until Speaker hits the maximum overflow, then pile all that production into Pentagon for one turn. Then keep rinsing and repeating, getting 1t unit builds while also banking all of the overflow into the wonder. Maybe we'll do this, maybe not - depends on what happens.

Speaker, Thoth killed a rifle and knight in rather lucky fashion, getting very very high damage from a sacrificial catapult and then winning a musket battle at 30% odds. Not a huge deal, but he did come out ahead there. I moved the rest of the units back into Lanewick as requested. You should have enough military in that area to reconnect gems next turn. You also probably want to improve those two plains tiles in your capital ASAP, since they are now in play at your best city.

I have no idea what Dave will do next over there in the west. Should be interesting to see.

[Speaker]

My ridiculous capital. Totally OP, just like Shen.

(Yes, I know I am working 2 unimproved tiles. I had been working 2 specialists for quite a long time, and just grew a size and had resources to hook up. I am working on it.)

(Yes, I know I have maxed out overflow. Every single item is a 1-turn build).

[AutomatedTeller]

are you going to convert it to full hammers, or leave it with levee and towns?

[Speaker]

are you going to convert it to full hammers, or leave it with levee and towns?

(The city has Library, University, Observatory, and Academy, plus Market, Grocer, and Bank and Great Library....and can already build any unit in the game in 1 turn...what do you think?)

[SevenSpirits]

@AT, he is not going to bulldoze the towns as they are quite valuable and it's producing enough hammers for most purposes anyway.

(Yes, I know I am working 2 unimproved tiles. I had been working 2 specialists for quite a long time, and just grew a size and had resources to hook up. I am working on it.)

(Yes, I know I have maxed out overflow. Every single item is a 1-turn build).

Given this, why aren't you working specialists instead of the bare plains tiles?