RBPB4 [SPOILERS] - De Gaulle of the Egyptians

[Irgy]

FWIW I don't agree with Senseless here. For military, having a shortage is good. It saves you money and allows more hammers to be allocated to expansion and wonders. You have NAPs, make the most of them.

Wonders I think help expansion in the long term. For the gardens, increased health cap will serve you well into the late game, and the +1 population will easily pay back the hammer investment into the wonder.

Over-expanding is a mistake anyway. There's a certain rate which optimally balances the short term economic costs against the medium term production and long term economic gains. If there's room for a wonder while keeping at that rate then there's no reason not to build it.

Only thing I agree on is the diplomacy, which I raised specifically earlier. But how important that is is another question.

[Ellimist]

FWIW I don't agree with Senseless here. For military, having a shortage is good. It saves you money and allows more hammers to be allocated to expansion and wonders. You have NAPs, make the most of them.

Wonders I think help expansion in the long term. For the gardens, increased health cap will serve you well into the late game, and the +1 population will easily pay back the hammer investment into the wonder.

Shortage of military units + possession of desirable wonders... What could possibly go wrong?

[Lord Parkin]

It'll be interesting to compare your early moves with other players' in particular detail, to see why it is that you're out expanding them despite building a wonder. There's something you do which puts you in a good position like this every game, and honestly it's still not entirely clear to me exactly what it is even reading your spoiler thread.

I don't think it's particularly anything special that I do, but perhaps something that other players fail to do. Basically, this early in the game I go with the rule of thumb that if you're not building a Worker or a Settler in a city, you'd better have a darned good reason for it. I suspect that a lot of other civs have prioritised military more than they really needed on such a spacious map. For instance, we've seen Chariots from SleepingMoogle, and Nakor's power is way ahead of everyone else's that we've got graphs on. Maybe they have their reasons, but I think with careful diplomacy they shouldn't need to worry that much about defence this early on this map.

Perhaps some players have also got lost in building buildings unnecessarily early. Barracks are probably the main culprit here (it's often an enticing trap for less experienced players to build too many too early), but Granaries could also potentially be to blame - sure they're a good building, but in some situations they're just not needed right away. For instance, we haven't bothered with a Granary in our capital yet because for the last ~25 turns we've been stagnant while spamming Workers and Settlers and nothing else there.

A Granary would have been necessary if we had a high-food low-hammer capital, in which case whipping Workers/Settlers would have been more effective and a Granary would have quickly paid its worth. However, with the hand we were dealt, an early Granary and whipping the capital simply didn't seem the right move. (I haven't worked out the exact numbers, so if anyone wants to do a comparison of whipping vs not whipping Workers/Settlers for this start, I'd be interested to see it. I tend to go more with "gut feeling" than exact analysis for that kind of stuff.)

Anyway, hope that's of interest. No idea if my theories on why other nations didn't expand as fast are correct, we'll have to wait until after the game to see. However, one thing is for certain: the ones who are now behind definitely had hammers which they could have spent on Settlers/Workers which must have gone into other things.

[Lord Parkin]

We're not that far ahead anyway I guess, at least compared to some. We'll found our sixth city in 3 turns. Here are the current city numbers for everyone else we've met:

Plako - 5
Mackoti - 5
Nakor - 4
Luddite - 4
SleepingMoogle - 4
Rego (just met) - 2 (!!!)

Most of the other civs seem to be sort-of keeping up in city count, even if they're a bit slow getting there. Rego is the main exception... ouch, going for the Great Lighthouse that early seriously hurt them! It's going to take them a while to recover from that, even with the extra trade routes they've got. Not sure if that was a wise move for them to rush it out so early... guess we'll see if it pays out later on in the game.

Will we beat Plako to 6 cities? I doubt it, but it'd be kind-of hilarious if we did.

[Bruindane]

How much better off would you have been if you didn't get Stonehenge?

Mostly asking, because you seem to think it set you back.

[Lord Parkin]

How much better off would you have been if you didn't get Stonehenge?

Mostly asking, because you seem to think it set you back.

No, I think it was worthwhile getting. But I think the route that we took set us back more than I would have liked - rushing to get it when we realised Mackoti was going for it, and delaying our second city and consequently our first Gold resource and Great Prophet in the process. I still think that overall it paid off rushing out Stonehenge (especially considering we would have lost it if we didn't), but I would have preferred if we'd been able to build it to the original plan - i.e. settling our second city a dozen or so turns earlier.

To be honest I'm still a little annoyed at Mackoti for his 2-week lack of response to our initial greeting while he sneakily built Stonehenge. Then again, perhaps I could thank him, because his silence tipped us off to his little plan (whereas a lie might not have).

[Lord Parkin]

Shortage of military units + possession of desirable wonders... What could possibly go wrong?

The key thing here is that you have to analyse the situation and the risks associated with invasion separately for every individual game. You can't just apply a general rule of "if you have X wonders and Y cities then you need Z military units". It's almost as silly to focus on military when there's little risk of anyone invading, as it is to fail to focus on military when there's a high risk of someone invading you.

If you fail to build enough military and someone invades, you lose your empire (or at least a part of it), which is obviously a major issue. But if you build too much military when it's not necessary, you stifle your economy and expansion for no benefit to yourself, which is also a significant issue.

There's never a 100% certainty of safety, with the exception of an isolated island start in which case you're safe until others get to Astronomy (or Optics for the Portuguese). We don't have that here though, so we have to analyse the risks associated with our geography and our neighbours.

Sure, there's the possibility that Luddite could betray us and send a stack of Horsemen (or something) our way in the near future. However, given the diplomatic feel for him I've developed over the past weeks, I think that's a very unlikely possibility. And it's not just because he seems about as friendly and open as could be hoped for in a neighbour. There are also the geographical facts: the large unsettled gap between our borders means that the risk of a stack being sighted prematurely is large, the expenses in sending a large stack that far would be immense, and the inability to reinforce such an army would make such an invasion very unlikely to succeed.

So both the geography and the loss of a friend would make a war with us extremely counter-productive for Luddite right now. Especially since he's already behind in expansion. Thus, I am not worried about over-defending our western border from him right now. On the threat scale of 1-10, he barely registers a 2.

As for our eastern neighbour: Rego is across a sea, and hasn't even discovered a route to us yet. We both surely have our own land to expand into on opposite sides of the sea, and early naval warfare is even more costly and counterproductive than long-distance early land warfare. Plus, he only has 2 cities right now - he's even further behind on expansion than Luddite. Any invasion he attempted against us right now would not only fail, but would be suicide for him. Thus, I'm not at all concerned about Rego in the forseeable future.

As for Plako and Nakor to our south, we have cordial relations with both civs, and they're twice as far from us as Luddite is. A war declared on us by them this early would be even more stupid than a war declared from Luddite would be, and that'd already be a bad idea for him. Thus, I think there's really no threat there for the near future either.

There's also the fact that if we're talking about desirable civs for people to attack, Luddite and Plako are still likely to be more pressing concerns for everyone than us. (Especially Luddite once he gets the Colossus + the Great Library.) We have the advantage of other players near us being slightly taller poppies than we are, so that should hopefully take some attention away from us.

Overall, I don't see any reason why we need to worry about a military at all right now, beyond keeping a token force around to discourage attacks of opportunity. These are really the only realistic declarations we could see anytime in the near future - e.g. if passing Warriors try to steal Workers or something. And that won't happen, because we won't be stupid enough to leave Workers undefended on borders where rivals are exploring.

So basically, I'm quite comfortable with our defence situation right now. We will of course be putting more emphasis on defence once our borders start closing in with our neighbours, but that won't be for a while yet.

Hope that explains my position on the matter.

[Lord Parkin]

Again, sorry for the long delay in between posts. It seems like a lot has happened since I've last checked.

No worries.

Looking at our position, I would prioritize expansion and military over more wonders. I've got a few reasons for this:

1. Military: We have no defense as of right now. This has paid off in a big way, in the form of nabbing stonehenge while keeping up with Plako in terms of cities. However, our score is starting to reflect this, and our open borders arrangements will soon tip our neightbors off to this point. Yeah, it's a big map but as the Plako/DrWarlord conflict has shown, an early war is very real possibility.

I explained most of my reasoning about military in the post above, I think. I'd add that with the size and length of the empire we have at present, it'd be fairly impossible for anyone to mount an effective invasion right now. Even assuming they can get the units to our border without us noticing (and I've explained above why that's against their interests right now), then as soon as we notice them we can whip out a large enough army to counter them, and effectively render their whole invasion pointless.

Basically, you've got to examine the possible motivations of your neighbours to decide whether there's really any threat of war. Unless they're completely unpredictable and bizarre (and there are a few of these players around, but not in this game I think)... then they're most likely to do whatever's in their best interests. If I were Luddite or Rego, I'd be wanting to expand ASAP right now. A long-distance war would be the last thing I wanted. As for Nakor and Plako, while they may be in a better position to war, they've also got much closer and more preferable targets than us right now.

We'll definitely be improving our military situation at some point in the near future, but right now the low risk of invasion simply makes it a bit pointless to sacrifice our expansion for military units. The military can come later.

2. Expansion: We have a ton of good land. Grassland plains galore, food resources, ivory. We also have several rivers near our capital for commerce cities. If we were cramped, I might agree with using our industrial trait to get more wonders

No argument here. I definitely want us to be at 8-10 cities by turn 100. We do need a slight breather from turns 67-81 so we don't delay Maths and Masonry by increasing maintenance, but after that we can go wild again before the Hanging Gardens.

3. Diplo: We know that other industrious civs are keen on getting some of these wonders. Building them could be antagonizing them unnecessarily. Plus, any hammers that go into wonders are not going into axes. Given that we've out-expanded them up to this point, this seems like a good thing for us.

I'm reasonably confident I can avoid much antagonising through the right diplomacy. Plus, worst case scenario, even if we do antagonise the only other person trying to build the Hanging Gardens, they're about as far away as they could possibly be from us. No need to worry about any retaliation for a long time, and by that time most of the bad feelings about losing that wonder way back at the start of the game should have healed anyway. Anyway, that's my thinking on the matter.

So, overall I think the play is to expand and start cottaging up, while teching to and building libraries/forges. It's the safer play, and it sets us up for the long game. Why risk getting in a wonder race we might lose now when we can sit back, tech, and beeline towards a different wonder later?

The thing is, the Hanging Gardens is the one wonder that most rewards us for expanding liberally in the early game. It easily pays for itself as soon as it's built, so it's worth trying for - especially if we have 8-10 cities at the time it's built, which we will. It's not worth us throwing away the Hanging Gardens for even more Settlers, because any cities beyond 8-10 are going to be a drain on us this early, further slowing our tech pace. Plus of course, there's the benefit of the Great Engineer points from the wonder, which are well worth having. Think of it as a potential investment in another, later wonder.

As for Metal Casting, I'm starting to think we're better off delaying it until after Civil Service. It simply seems the better option economy-wise, and it should even be roughly equivalent production-wise. (Thanks to the bureaucracy civic that can be adopted instantly upon finishing the tech - no build time required!) I think +50% commerce in the capital (and - hopefully - Academy) city as well as +50% hammers in the best city in the empire is preferable to +25% hammers in multiple lesser cities. Of course, the Metal Casting route is cheaper, BUT it's also much quicker to research Civil Service then Metal Casting than the other way around (due to the Bureaucracy bonus). Plus all other techs after Civil Service are reduced in cost as well. Anyway, that's something to think about in the future.

[Lord Parkin]

FWIW I don't agree with Senseless here. For military, having a shortage is good. It saves you money and allows more hammers to be allocated to expansion and wonders. You have NAPs, make the most of them.

I agree with you, Irgy. Although it's not so much the NAPs but the distance and empty space currently between empires that makes me feel more secure. NAP's can be broken and betrayed, but there's no getting around the geographical distance between empires on this map, which makes early war unattractive - especially with us, as we seem to be one of the most isolated civs.

Wonders I think help expansion in the long term. For the gardens, increased health cap will serve you well into the late game, and the +1 population will easily pay back the hammer investment into the wonder.

Yep, indeed.

Over-expanding is a mistake anyway. There's a certain rate which optimally balances the short term economic costs against the medium term production and long term economic gains. If there's room for a wonder while keeping at that rate then there's no reason not to build it.

Couldn't agree more. For us that limit is about 8-10 cities for now, assuming we settle towards the Gold in the south and the Silver in the north. Settling beyond that this early starts to hurt us more than help us.

Only thing I agree on is the diplomacy, which I raised specifically earlier. But how important that is is another question.

Yeah, we'll certainly have to carefully consider our diplomacy when the time comes. However, that's still a while off yet... plenty of time to think about it.

[Lord Parkin]

Right, so here's the turn 64 report.

Writing is 2 turns away, as is the Settler being produced at the capital. Finished hooking up the Corn at Tigris.

Switched Magadan to finish off the Warrior at 14/15 hammers before the hammers decay. It'll go back to the Barracks next turn.



Deer hooked up at Felidae. Growth next turn.

Worker due in 3 turns at Evermore.



Shifted a potential city site down south 1S of its former proposed location, due to the discovery of a Clams resource in addition to the Fish.



That road between Nakor's cities looks like a good place to sit and wait to get Open Borders. Should minimise the time for us to meet Locke once borders open in 2 turns.



Met Rego's scout at the city of Dream this turn. Apparently Adlain and WarriorKnight are also nearby, which is great. Hope to meet the rest of the civs in the near future.