[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[Sullla]

Yeah, it would really help us if REM would Close Borders with Dreylin, but at least Dreylin can't get them from anyone else. We need more cities to take advantage of trade routes. Good thing we have a bunch of settlers finishing soon.

Don't forget to draft our three targeted cities (Radio, Spinning Jenny, Pasteurization) before revolting to Bureaucracy / Free Religion. Let's hope we can get the 10 turns of enforced peace later this turn.

[shallow_thought]

Yeah, it would really help us if REM would Close Borders with Dreylin, but at least Dreylin can't get them from anyone else.

Are you able to send "please stop trading with our worst enemy" spam like the AI does in SP? Or is that considered bad form?

[scooter]

Some player thoughts for a slow afternoon. With Dreylin getting short-lived Antiseptic and apparently all of Gaspar's land, and REM landing arguably the strongest wonder for this setup, it seems like a good time to review everyone's positional ranking in this game. I'm going to compare Dreylin/REM a lot because I think they're both ahead of us, and it lowers the bias of evaluating our own position.

1) Dreylin/OT4E - I think these guys are clearly in first place, but I'm becoming less convinced that they're a true runaway. One thing I wondered about that became very clear when we captured Antiseptic is that settled cities are massively superior to captured cities. Antiseptic was captured on the same turn that we settled Induction Coil. Here were those two cities last turn:



Size 3, 6 buildings, 3.5 improved tiles, borders able to pop a second time at any moment if we pushed for it, and already capable of production a modern military unit in a reasonable time frame. About to grow to size 4, and the granary box will be full.



Size 2, 0 buildings, 0 food in the box, 0 improved tiles, nowhere near being able to product a modern military unit in a reasonable time frame.


The point here is that while Dreylin will lead REM in city count, REM's cities will contribute far, far more quickly. Dreylin has also sacrificed settling some key spots in return for capturing Gaspar cities. I believe he made the right choice, but it's important to state that this does not give him 2x REM's land who has been able to focus on grabbing available spots which requires far fewer hammers to secure. He may have 2x our land, but that's a different discussion. Anyway, the point is that he's ahead of REM, but not by that much. (Gaspar's former capital with its massive population is likely the exception to this.)

I also think these guys are slightly more likely to fumble the strong position than REM. That's not really meant as an insult (I would say the same about us vs REM). If OT4E steps away, I could see Dreylin losing some focus because this strategy they've followed has OT4E's fingerprints all over it. Dreylin is a more conservative player, but the track they're on may demand more aggressive play. If OT4E sticks around and continues to set their plans, I could also easily see his penchant for aggression blowing up in his face. I'm predicting it will happen, but it wouldn't surprise me. REM's track record at RB is smaller, but it's remarkably strong and steady so far. So Dreylin/OT4E get the nod for now, but it's still pretty tentative for me.

2) ReallyEvilMuffin - I think his teching is something like 1.5X stronger than ours at the moment (hard to say when he's in a GA), and our teching is like 3X stronger than Dreylin's at the moment, so... He's spent fewer bulbs which puts him behind us in raw beakers, but the gap should narrow very quickly. I wouldn't be completely stunned if he beat us to Assembly Line.

I said most of my piece on him in the above section, but basically he's got the best of both worlds going on right now - the pile of cities and the high tech capacity. Statue of Liberty will be extremely good for him.

3) Scooter/Sullla - I think we're the only other team with a legitimate shot at winning. REM landing SOL left me with very mixed feelings. Him being stronger drops us out of the spotlight and gives Dreylin a bigger person to worry about. However, him being stronger also lowers our chances of winning because obviously. If we're going to compete, we need the following to happen:

* We avoid a conflict until Factories while nabbing a handful of other solid cities

* We assemble a strong army and go make some serious gains to keep us competitive with Dreylin/REM in size. The "who" is up for discussion. I don't really know the answer yet (Gaspar would have been the ideal really), but we can cross that bridge when we get there. I don't see a need to get hard-wired into targeting someone specific.

* Dreylin and/or REM fail to conquer the world before that happens.

* We make the correct tech choices


These are all doable, so we still have a shot. But the chance has narrowed slightly. I think we need a small amount of help or imperfect play from the two ahead of us.

4) Pindicator - I don't think he can win, but I wouldn't exactly mock the possibility either because demographically he's not far off from us, and I'm assuming we aren't out of the running, so yeah. I just think his window to really use his traits may have already passed. I don't think he's played badly at all, I think Boudica just doesn't work here.

5) Donovan - He definitely cannot win, but he definitely can impact the outcome. If he goes for revenge on Dreylin, that would qualify as some of the "help" we could use. Dreylin may have a bigger army, but if you subtract out the units that are in Gaspar-land... Donovan could do some serious damage to him I believe.

6) Boldly Going Nowhere - I'm afraid he'll just be easy meat for the other guys. I don't think he'll throw in the towel right away like it seems like Gaspar did, but his civ is just so far behind.

7) Gaspar - RIP.


My current winning likelihood guess:
Dreylin: 40%
REM: 40%
Us: 19%
Field: 1%

[scooter]

Yeah, it would really help us if REM would Close Borders with Dreylin, but at least Dreylin can't get them from anyone else.

Are you able to send "please stop trading with our worst enemy" spam like the AI does in SP? Or is that considered bad form?

I thought about this, but I don't see a way to easily do it. I also think REM pays pretty close attention to the game, so I don't think he just flippantly signed OB with Dreylin. If he maintains it, it's because he thinks it's worth it (even knowing we haven't done it), and random AI diplo messages aren't likely to sway him even if he figures out what in the world I'm trying to say.

[Ichabod]

Considering the current position, which victory condition do you think will end the game? Space? Concession? Conquest?

Edit: Sorry if this was answered already, I admit to not having read all the thread.

[Sullla]

Scooter, I think you are overestimating REM's research rate. It will pick up a lot now, with Statue of Liberty and trade route income, but REM's research has been awful up to this point. It took him 46 turns and a Golden Age to research the very cheap, heavily discounted by known civ bonus techs of Scientific Method and Communism. REM is extremely far behind us in the Assembly line race. There's no way he is getting 7000 beakers in the next 10 turns. REM is way ahead of us but it's in land and pop, not tech.

Pindicator basically equals us on land and pop and military, but he only has Steam Power tech and nothing else. That's why we have a chance to win and he probably doesn't, that and our Spiritual trait.

We definitely have an uphill struggle though, and need some luck to break our way. I agree with scooter's percentages, with Dreylin 1A and REM 1B and us a trailing third.

[Sullla]

I tweaked the micro plan to reflect the fact that, uh, we're going to lose a city this turn and workers are fleeing in terror. I don't want to go beyond the current turn until we figure out exactly what Dreylin is planning to do. One of the annoying things about an unwanted war is having to play within a turn split, and we've been waiting on Dreylin for the last 12 hours or so. Hopefully they'll make their decisions in time for scooter to play this evening.

One other addition to scooter's thoughts from earlier that I couldn't type while I was on my phone at work. Donovan has Steel tech and that means he has access to cannons (and ironclads for what that's worth). If Donovan has upgraded some catapults or built some cannons, he can absolutely put a hurting on Dreylin/OT4E while their army is off in Gaspar territory. No idea if that's in Donovan's mind, we can only hope so. Donovan is also only one tech away from Railroad tech (he already has Steam Engine) while will unlock machine guns for very strong defense and rails themselves for added mobility. While Donovan probably can't win the game himself, he will play a huge role in who does win this game, with his strong army and (small) core of large cities.

Ichabod, we are expecting this game to end with a concession per usual Realms Beyond Multiplayer. Diplo victory is turned off for this game (although the UN is enabled), and it's hard to see anyone winning by Culture given the compressed time frame. I would be seriously surprised if anyone could finish the tech tree and win by Spaceship before one of the teams becomes dominant enough to win by concession.

[scooter]

Turn 296



We have peace. Dreylin elected to burn the city, and it looks like he intends to plant on that hill. That's more than a little uncomfortable for us because it canals him directly onto our waters. Plus it's on a hill for defensive purposes. On the bright side, we've got 10T of peace to push for Assembly Line. I did briefly wonder if we made a mistake, though. The reason....



Those units are very... specifically placed. (The marked cannon was facing northeast FWIW.) I'm tempted to offer him a gold loan so he can upgrade some of those catapults. He's lined most of those units up on the tiles that would allow him to park next to Dreylin's former barb city. Looks like a good chance he's going to try to go get himself some revenge. Sure hope so anyway.



Finished our last round of drafting, and I think we've got enough land units now to tide us over until Assembly Line while planting a few cities.



New civics after drafting. Big tech boost for us.



RUN AWAY. Couple of these ought to head south with our plans for a south island city.



Post-revolt demos.



Haber can probably swap to build research pretty soon given our gold buffer.

[scooter]

Scooter, I think you are overestimating REM's research rate. It will pick up a lot now, with Statue of Liberty and trade route income, but REM's research has been awful up to this point. It took him 46 turns and a Golden Age to research the very cheap, heavily discounted by known civ bonus techs of Scientific Method and Communism. REM is extremely far behind us in the Assembly line race. There's no way he is getting 7000 beakers in the next 10 turns. REM is way ahead of us but it's in land and pop, not tech.

Kind of, but in fairness we bulbed 3500 of our beakers, and I think he's only bulbed once. If we were looking at beakers researched via commerce, he'd be pretty close to us. If I inflate his bpt right now at the same scale as his lead over our GNP, he's probably pulling down 380bpt or so during this golden age. That's obviously a very imperfect way of estimating it, but it probably gets us close-ish. If he were to pop out a GP during this golden age and use it to bulb, he might suddenly be pretty close to us. But you're right in that I'm probably at least overestimating his chance to beat us to Assembly Line.

[Sullla]

No, peace was definitely the right call for us. If Dreylin gets caught up in a war with Donovan, we can always come back and whack him again in 10 turns. There's no way that we could win a conflict right now with our cities building settlers or Wealth/Research everywhere. We don't want to pick a fight with the guy who's been whipping rifles and cavs everywhere, while he has Kremlin and more cities and we don't have factories to compensate. And as much as we'd like to see Donovan do well, we certainly can't be gifting gold away while we're using it to burn towards a crucial tech. Good luck and godspeed Donovan.

Scooter: we need to pillage that road that we built up towards Antiseptic before it was razed down. We don't want a road in neutral territory leading an invasion route straight into our core. I would leave one grenadier to work on removing that, and we can bring the other units back into our territory for reassignment elsewhere. And yeah, while it's not great that Dreylin's city will provide a canal into our ocean, he could have built one easily anyway with his workers. More potential incentive to come back and try to attack Dreylin later, if we can.

By the way, Haber Process is providing 44 gold/turn via its Wealth build right now. I don't think we can swap it onto research, not with us planting a whole bunch of cities soon (and adding more maintenance costs). Let's keep it on Wealth for the moment and see how things look in four or five turns. By the way, the plan is to get settlers out of the capital on T298, T302, and T305. We will also get a settler out of Telegraph on T300, and I think we should start a settler in Haber Process as soon as that's done, with the two cities swapping settler/Wealth duty. We also have three forest chops that will land at Haber Process in the, erm, process of mining its river tiles. The city grows to size 13 on T300, where it can get about 64 foodhammers/turn. Add in three forest chops and we're looking at another 5 turn settler. So we should be able to churn out 5 more settlers in the next 10 turns while also pushing towards Assembly Line research, which should finish around Turn 306. I don't know where that will leave us, but hopefully in a pretty good position.

EDIT: Well yeah, but Steam Power is also a lot more expensive than either Scientific Method or Communism, and we have that tech in hand plus another thousand beakers towards Assembly Line. I agree that REM is on the rise and he's ahead of our position, just trying to put that in context. Also REM has never been in Serfdom civic prior to last turn (and he has no Steam Power worker buff), plus he's done nothing with religious civics either. We do have some advantages going for us.