[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[scooter]

Turn 301

We already covered a few things, but here's a few stray pictures from this past turn.



I'm thinking we should bring this guy home. No sense in irritating Donovan into closing borders. We can use him to keep a better eye on Dreylin potentially. Thoughts?



I pulled this Explorer back on this turn, but I think we should send him to the southeast portion of this land and watch for Dreylin boats that way. Any strong feelings on this? I figure this way we can watch both sides of the island.



This city is becoming very promising. We're about to hook up a couple more happy sources (plus religion will help too), so we should be able to grow it plenty more.



Haber settler gets chopped to completion next turn, and Steam Engine starts a 3T settler as well. I've marked "303" and "307" as our next two cities in this picture. Donovan is about to roll the turn pretty soon here, so we should get a turn in tonight. I'll have some thoughts on the tech situation too later.

[Fluffball]

If we don't land the Great Scientist, Physics would be a very poor choice indeed.

It is on the path to Panzers IIRC?

[Elkad]

Paradrop into enemy territory and then ride railroads up to 10 tiles in any direction? Pretty hard to defend against that.

Para's can't attack after a drop, so they are kinda limited other than as reinforcements or blockers.
They can pillage or take empty cities, both of which are useful at times.

[Tohron]

If we don't land the Great Scientist, Physics would be a very poor choice indeed.

It is on the path to Panzers IIRC?

But you need combustion for Panzers too (in order to get the Oil).

One more thing to note: Physics is on the path to Electricity, which would give a sizeable boost to a workshop+watermill - heavy economy (though probably not worth losing control of the seas over).

[timmy827]

Curious about west point, do you have a unit to enable it already? (otherwise you have to probably merge a GG right?)

I can't recall where you are on the GG exp chart, there's been little fighting right?

Are west point and Pentagon worthwhile (together) because commandos are such gamechangers? In my (basically-no-MP) experience they always seem like mediocre to bad deals compared to cranking out more units.

[scooter]

Curious about west point, do you have a unit to enable it already? (otherwise you have to probably merge a GG right?)

I can't recall where you are on the GG exp chart, there's been little fighting right?

Are west point and Pentagon worthwhile (together) because commandos are such gamechangers? In my (basically-no-MP) experience they always seem like mediocre to bad deals compared to cranking out more units.

Nah, we're not really close to unlocking West Point naturally. I think there's a good chance we'll have to use a GG to unlock it.

And yeah, I think Commandos are signficantly more valuable against humans. We've had several games here at RB whose outcomes were decided by Commandos. We're still about a war away from being able to churn them out. Basically, they're a nightmare to defend against. Against AIs you just stack your units up and go for the cities you want in the order you want. Humans can figure that out on defense, so it's way more important to stretch them out and force them to defend a lot of places at once. Plus humans have a greater tendency to mostly defend border cities unlike AIs who would have a medium garrison at each city. This is the better way to go, but it means there are normally a lot more openings available against a human.

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Ok, tech stuff. I was slightly tempted by Physics because 1) it's on the Panzer path and 2) Airships are pretty great right now (not just as recon, but also as stack softeners, particularly at sea). However... I don't think it provides nearly enough value unless we definitely land the scientist. And there is the opportunity cost of passing on the Fascism general, which REM would likely just take.

Basically, the one thing we cannot afford to do is get Destroyers a dozen turns later than one of our rivals - it has to be close. They just swing the game on this type of map so severely. I agree that we can likely divert for one tech, but not two, and Physics is the more expensive of the two. We do want Physics anyway for Panzers, but I think Destroyers/Transports are definitely more important to us than Panzers.

So it seems to me that the question is whether or not it's worth it to detour to Fascism. It does partially depend on when we think the opportune time to invade someone is. If before Combustion, Fascism next. If after, Steel next. Does that sound about right?

[abuzeus]

Are west point and Pentagon worthwhile (together) because commandos are such gamechangers? In my (basically-no-MP) experience they always seem like mediocre to bad deals compared to cranking out more units.

Absolutely. Against the AI, commando units aren't that useful because of three things: If you attack an AI it's usually to absorb their land, so you will only raze a city if it's in a shitty location. Against other humans, razing a city to deny a wonder or just to weaken them is nothing out of the ordinary. I don't play MP but I have seen several MP games been decided by a commando surprise push. Moreover, if you war against the AI you usually do it because of you have superior forces, so you can finish the campaign relatively quickly (for otherwise, that would not be an efficient war). Commando shenanigans aren't that useful if you have superior firepower anyway.

And finally, and most importantly, presence of commando units affects force distribution dramatically. The AI will usually build a gazillion of units so there is no hope of snatching an unprotected city via commando, let alone defending it. Humans tend not to guard well their core cities if they are deemed safe (we all know the one token, outdated defender in the capital). Of course, veteran players know about commando tricks and won't guard the capital with a lone warrior (or rifle, in this case). However, even if you expect a commando push, it's still a nightmare to defend against. You probably know how strong it is to fork two cities and force the defender to either wipe out the attacking stack or have credible defenses in both cities. With a commando two-mover, in the age of railroads, you can fork half a civ. And since the attacker gets to decide where he strikes, the defender must err on the side of caution and keep credible defenses in every possible target (or block rails on the way, which is hard to do). If scooter's team can get to somewhat routine commando units (or commando panzers), that will tie up a huge amount of defenders for the other teams just by virtue of them being on the battlefield.

edit: scooter beat me It's your show after all (and by the way, I'm enjoying it).

[Elkad]

Vs the commando solo or duo from GG promotions, defending isn't so bad. If nothing else, you can block key rail tiles with sacrificial workers. And you put maximum effort into killing them any time they are in range.

Vs a city that is cranking them out nonstop, it's terrible. You can mitigate somewhat with very careful railroad building, but every city within 10 rail tiles of the front, or within 10 tiles of any vulnerable coastal city is vulnerable on it's own. Since you can't pillage roads/rails in your own culture, you can't even undo the problem if someone gets a commando factory online. Which means you almost can't play a defensive war at all. All you can do is try to smash the other guy's stack, and if he can hold it a couple tiles back in his own culture, without your own commandos you might not even be able to do that.

[scooter]

Turn 302

Another fairly quiet turn. Somehow I missed a screenshot of our loaded up settler, but I'll get that next turn when we drop him off on the silk tile. There was another minor worker mishap.



So the plan was for "Q" to continue east while A completed the chop and C put a turn into a mine. I could have sworn I canceled Q's chop last turn, but somehow it didn't take, and Q completed his chop of this tile rather than putting a turn into the pasture.

Thankfully this doesn't really hurt us since we weren't finishing the pasture this turn anyway. I ended up putting 2 turns into the mine instead of 1 since A and C couldn't do much else. We still have enough worker labor to complete both the pasture and workshop next turn as planned. The only thing we miss is the sheep is not hooked next turn (the road will be 1/2 completed), which isn't really a serious loss for us. Just thought I'd make a note of this. Sorry about this, but thankfully this wasn't too damaging.



Back-to-back turns showing this city, but I did notice we're now pulling in our first 5c trade route. I have no real clue how base profit is determined, but I'll take it.



I started bringing this guy home, and I was happy to see Donovan is keeping this border fairly light like we are. We seem to be keeping a pretty mutually content border here. As much as Donovan probably didn't love Radio, the other two big guy screwed him far worse than we did, so he probably doesn't mind us too much.



For whatever reason Dreylin's power graph took a dip even though the demos every turn have shown him steadily increasing. That must be some sort of quirk with when the power graph snapshot is taken - after whips but before the production phase maybe? I don't really know. It's not really important - the gist is that his military is rather large still and will continue to be indefinitely.

Our GNP and tech rate are at all-time highs, but it's a little deceiving with all the research we're building. It's gone up at about the same rate as our MFG, and that's not a coincidence.



Up around Contact Process we've got the Galleon holding the settler, and it's preceded by a Frigate. We almost certainly won't get a shot at Dreylin's Privateer (for one, we can't get into his waters up there to loop around the north side of the island), but having our Frigates up in that area should at least help signal to Dreylin that we plan to defend this area pretty seriously. He could probably try (and maybe even succeed to some extent) to overwhelm us in sheer numbers 5 turns from now, but I think we'll have enough to make it very, very costly, and it almost certainly won't be worth it to him. That's my bet anyway. This will be the "famous last words" if we're dead by the end of the month.

Our oil city gets settled next turn, and silk the following turn. I believe that'll bring us even in city count with REM if he doesn't settle a city of his own between now and then. We should be able to get up to around 16 cities without firing a shot.

[Dp101]

Any chance we could see the inside of each city? I'm interested in how well the production plan is working in the less commonly mentioned cities.