[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[Sullla]

Extra thought: we should offer a corn resource for free to pindicator, since we have two and we stole his corn. It costs us nothing and it's a nice gesture.

[scooter]

Turn 292



While I was in, Dreylin logged in and accepted peace. I did confirm that it was a 10T treaty, too.



I moved the Explorer here, and I think I'll pop into Gaspar's land and watch the siege next turn. If Dreylin wants to declare and trash potential trade routes for an explorer kill, he's welcome to do so, but I suspect he's got bigger fish to fry.



Just noticed Gaspar is sitting on a bunch of gold. So he could have swapped into Nationhood AND Suffrage and spit out that many more units. He probably could have built an extra 7-10 rifles this way. I'll leave it at that.



On the bright side, his power picked back up. Judging by this with his much lower population and fewer Barracks, he should still have roughly as many units as us, so... I'm hoping he's sitting on roughly a dozen rifles still and can cause Dreylin some grief here. Fingers crossed. It seems likely that Dreylin needs siege to crack Gaspar's capital, so that may be why it's taking longer - he's got to trudge all those units forward. He played this turn in the last hour, and he did not capture the city.



REM is definitely finishing SoL pretty soon. That number went up a good deal.



I'm sorry, I just always post screenshots of cities pulling down a 14F surplus. Anyone got a screenshot from an RB game with a bigger surplus than this pre-Biology?



Sullla mentioned this, but here's a highlight. The corn is ours comfortably and won't be an issue due to the free 20 culture. The sheep will take longer, but I think we can definitely get there.

I did offer the corn to pindicator. It's not useful to him at all, but it's more about the stab at a friendly sentiment.



State Property does wonders for the food situation. I'm assuming Dreylin is in first, and that means we're just 13F behind a guy who farmed everything and is producing stuff entirely with food-powered Kremlin whips.



Random other notes:

* No idea what's up with the pindicator trade screen. Normally that comes from an offer that was invalidated by something else during the turn. I can't think of anything that might be. Lurkers - if it was a significant offer (he did post in his thread today right after the raze), this may be a time where it's worth intervening and making a comment about it to him, because it seems like a technical glitch may have caused whatever he was offering to fail. If he didn't mention it in his thread, it's probably not important and can be left alone.

* REM may have partial-teched Steam Power with the idea of finishing it with a Merchant and then swapped to the SciMeth path? That's my best guess.

* Gaspar is probably planning on chopping that forest on the orange dot. He should get a few hammers out of it so might as well. Would be really nice if he gifted them to us, but my guess is he'll delete them.

* Wait, here's an idea. How about we load a unit onto the Galleon at Antiseptic now (the Galleon is in the city right now - it transferred and unloaded the Haber rifle this turn), and if they're there next turn, we declare and steal them?

* I think I'm leaning very slightly towards not offering the routes right now to Dreylin. He may offer them to us pretty soon if he's dying for some commerce which I suspect he is (his GNP is pretty terrible). If so, maybe we can counter and ask him to sweeten the deal with some gold/turn. I don't know, we'll see. Would be nice if some other people would leave Merc soon.

[Sullla]

Yeah, Gaspar/Noble have been running 100% wealth for some time now. I noticed it and kept forgetting to post about it. I'm also puzzled by their strategy here; maybe it's worth it to stay in Bureaucracy and keep cranking units out of their Dike-boosted capital - maybe - but surely UniSuff cash rushing is better than amassing gold to no purpose at all. Right? This is silly.

I'm also looking forward to getting a view of whatever's taking place at Lance Armstrong next turn. Seeing how things are playing out will help us make more informed decisions on what to do next. I'm hoping that Gaspar/Noble have a bunch of rifles in there, and Dreylin is being stymied by the hill + cultural defenses. We shall see.

The REM Statue of Liberty build went from about 830 production to about 905 production this turn. At about 75 shields/turn, he should take roughly 4 more turns to finish the wonder. We're accumulating 51 production/turn in Haber Process towards the wonder ourselves, and that should get converted at a 1:1 ratio if I remember correctly. Or is it half that, does anyone know? I think we'll get enough gold to change some of the Wealth builds in the sandbox into Research builds and accelerate our Assembly Line timeline (which is roughly Turn 307) somewhat.

At Induction Coil, we'll have the sheep in another 3 or so turns. Don't be fooled by the percentages, pindicator has no culture in his southern city and it will be easy to flip that tile. Then we just need to defend ourselves successfully against the kind of city razing that happened to Dreylin. More seriously though, I'm not that worried. I think we have a pretty stable border with pindicator forming up, and there have to be softer targets for him to pursue than the Aggressive + Theocracy Germans.

The Demos are really good for us right now. Let me repost to emphasize this point:



Remember, REM is in a Golden Age at the moment. The non-REM average for GNP is 125, and we're at that number while running 0% science, while not in Bureaucracy at our awesome capital. The non-REM average for Production is 106 shields, so we are definitely #1 there outside of Mr. Golden Age. And despite having three fewer cities than Dreylin and REM, and one of them still sitting in resistance, we're only 13 points off the Food lead too. We've even caught up completely in Land area, now only 4 tiles off the game leader (Dreylin or REM). The numbers are demonstrating that we're running close behind Dreylin/REM for top status... and we're significantly ahead of both of them in tech as best we can tell.

Declaring war to steal Gaspar's workers would be a total dick move... but we really could use those workers. We probably should do so. Let them finish the chop next turn, then grab them? Gaspar is dying and will never live to see a non-Mercantilism civic, so killing the long term value of trade routes is irrelevant. I guess we probably should.



Another small development. Donovan planted this city on the island to the north of Radio. This is probably good news for us, as it denies some of the territory on this island to Dreylin. Both teams will also have to keep sizable armies here to defend their claims. This is also not land that we were looking to claim, as it would have been really tough to defend. Even as Dreylin captures cities from Gaspar/Noble, they're losing out on the opportunity to claim land peacefully. We're taking the northern Textile Island without opposition right now, and I think one of our next batch of settlers (due in about half a dozen turns) will likely grab a spot on the island to the south of Cotton Gin. While the cat's away in Dutch territory, the mice will play.

These turns are so much fun to play. Hoping for a fast turnaround tonight for another turn tomorrow.

[scooter]

Declaring war to steal Gaspar's workers would be a total dick move... but we really could use those workers. We probably should do so. Let them finish the chop next turn, then grab them? Gaspar is dying and will never live to see a non-Mercantilism civic, so killing the long term value of trade routes is irrelevant. I guess we probably should.

I logged in and reloaded the new Rifle back onto the Galleon so that we at least have the ability to do so next turn.

I think Gaspar may well delete those workers after next turn anyway, so they may not be there. This forest is (I believe) the last one he can chop and get hammers from, and he probably doesn't want Dreylin to capture them. So yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if they aren't even there next turn. If they are, though, it'll do basically no damage to Gaspar at all unless he somehow survives this attack, so we might as well. I guess I should wait until we get sight on the attack first. If it looks likely to fail, we should let the workers live. Otherwise, there's no real harm in grabbing them.

[GermanJoey]

Turn 292
Just noticed Gaspar is sitting on a bunch of gold. So he could have swapped into Nationhood AND Suffrage and spit out that many more units. He probably could have built an extra 7-10 rifles this way. I'll leave it at that.

Maybe you'd want to ask him if you could login to play for him? I'm sure he'd be grateful.

[Sullla]

Quick picture dump after the turn rolled. I left all units unmoved; we may need to preserve a potential turn order with Gaspar/Noble, if we're going to declare war and take their workers, and we played after them last turn.



REM offered us a map exchange. I closed the window without accepting so we can discuss, but I think we should repropose the same deal. We only have vision on about half of REM's cities, and we've been pretty free about trading our map throughout the game. What do you think?



Here's the big news for the turn: Donovan adopted Free Market civic at the end of last turn! That's GREAT news for us, really really good stuff. It's worth a lot of commerce immediately:



21 commerce/turn, and we picked this up last turn as well since Donovan swapped civics on the previous turn (burning an Anarchy turn to do it too). But what's even better is that we're the only one to get the trade route income from Donovan! Dreylin can't get it because he declared war earlier and nuked their trade route income. BGN can't get the income because he also very briefly declared war on Donovan. No foreign trade route income for them with Donovan. And everyone else is in Mercantilism civic. We are the only ones getting that sweet trade route income. (Aside from Donovan himself getting our trade routes, of course, but he's not in State Property and he's a million miles from Communism tech.)

I'm going to update our sandbox tonight and see how these trade routes affect our research timing. Without even running the numbers though, you can imagine that 40 extra commerce/turn is going to do amazing things for our Assembly Line finishing date. Turn 305 here we come?

[scooter]

Yeah, I think we should re-offer the map swap. Would be nice to get some more visibility. Awesome news all-around about Donovan swapping into Free Market. If REM ditches Merc in a few turns, I think we'll easily be able to hit Assembly Line by T305 if not sooner.

[scooter]

Played turn, pictures much later tonight if Sullla doesn't beat me to it. Things worth noting:

1) Worker misclick! Ah well. One of the workers at Spinning Jenny accidentally put a turn into a farm because my finger slipped. So that tile has 1T of farm and 1T of workshop in it right now. The workshop will either be 1T behind, or optionally we could complete the farm next turn and use the extra food to maybe get us to sz6 in time to draft before we leave Nationalism. I haven't done the math to see if we can make it on time, so this isn't a concrete suggestion.

2) On the bright side, we did steal the Gaspar workers after they finished chopping. That brings us up to 17 workers, and the additional labor should be a boost to Spinning Jenny and/or Antiseptic.

3) Gaspar's capital looks likely to fall tonight. He's only got 8 rifles in it, and the defenses are down. Dreylin's stack isn't too intimidating, so if Gaspar had just built/whipped about 2 cats he probably could have wiped out most of Dreylin's stack last turn because it is split slightly, but I wouldn't expect a mere veteran player to pull off such an advanced tactical maneuver. Dreylin doesn't have overwhelming numbers himself FWIW (and much of his army is still wounded), but eyeballing it I think his odds of capturing it this turn are around 75-80%. He's got 9 healthy (mostly promoted) hitters this turn + 2 more wounded Cavs to go with 3 suicide siege. Against 8 unpromoted rifles with no cultural defenses, that's close but a fairly likely win I think.

4) I did re-offer map trade to REM.

[Sullla]

On the worker misclick, we'll just eat the lost turn on a farm. I can't see us wanting a 3/0 tile over a 2/4 tile here, not when Spinning Jenny has plenty of food. And it doesn't make a difference when it comes to drafting, as workshops don't add food to a tile - we're just working a grassland forest or coast tile for one turn instead of a grassland workshop. I'll update the sandbox and micro plan to compensate.

I have to think about where to put those captured workers to do the most good. They help a lot with our chronic shortage of worker labor.

Here's the situation at Gaspar's capital for dedicated lurkers:



There are 8 rifles inside Lance Armstrong, with some degree of fortify bonus and the hill defensive bonus. None of them have any promotions... Meaning no offense to Gaspar and Noble, but this has not been a very impressive defensive effort. They could have used UniSuff to buy units, they could have used Nationhood to draft units, and they definitely should have gotten a barracks out to give all these units some kind of promotion.

Anyway, after sacrificing the catapults and trebuchet for collateral damage, I imagine that Dreylin's units will clean up with minimal problems. He'll lose some units but not as many as we would like. Gaspar/Noble will be gone before Turn 300, possibly before Turn 295.



I also wanted to show a picture of Induction Coil. With the theatre + religion + Build Culture, we can hit 100 culture in 5 turns. I think we'll want to use the Build Culture option until we gain control of the sheep, and probably even after that for a bit. Hitting 100 culture is a huge deal, as it locks in our permanent control of the corn and will likely give us permanent control of the sheep as well. Throw in the 40% defensive bonus and how fast we can get there with Build Culture, and it seems pretty straightforward to me.

I also looked at REM's city building Statue of Liberty earlier in the turn, and he's just over 1000 production now. Statue of Liberty costs 1200 production here in an Industrial era start, so figure two more turns until it's done. We're getting 60 production/turn into our own build at Haber Process, which should get converted at the 1:1 ratio. I figure about 250 failgold from the whole thing before we're done. Between the extra gold coming in from BGN/Donovan trade routes and the unexpected failgold, I'm planning on shifting some of our Wealth builds over to Research builds going forward. Again, need more work in the sandbox to test this and see how the numbers come out. That will probably have to wait until tomorrow, but we won't be getting another turn until tomorrow anyway, so it should be fine.

Scooter, we might as well offer peace to Gaspar/Noble if we haven't already done so to get out from under the turn split rules. I'll be working on this today/tomorrow and come back when I have something to report.

[scooter]

Turn 293

Well I don't have much from this turn. Sullla's two screenshots were two of my planned screenshots, and I somehow neglected an overview shot. So this will be very brief.



Sniped the two workers. The nice thing is there's a decent chance Dreylin won't know why we did this. I waited until after the wardec to move our Explorer into Gaspar's territory. If Dreylin didn't notice our 1T of Open Borders with Gaspar, he may assume we declared to get that hill. Those two chopping workers of Gaspar have avoided Dreylin's vision I think.

Civstats says Dreylin took the city by the way. No surprise. I agree that we may as well offer a cease fire, but I don't really want to sign a peace treaty just in case.



REM is getting a lot of good value out of that golden age. Seems like he timed it really well.