Ranamar and Lewwyn, ministers for Bismarck of Mali

[Ranamar]

Ranamar, I wasn't going to say this but it's really hard to read your text sometimes due to the excessive use of commas. Please stop doing that.

I'll try to ramble less. I'm afraid that's more or less how I think, though.

[Ranamar]

Played turn.

Set tech for Constitution. Well, sort of. Set tech to that because I could. Actual tech being researched was Nationalism; Constitution is next. After that, I'm thinking we'll probably have overflow enough to finish Combustion in one turn, and then we can do Corporation. Once we finish with all those Cs, we'll move on to Assembly Line.
The other option is to skip Combustion until we need it and go for Assembly Line first. (probably about one turn earlier) The earlier factories could be handy because we can build them while waiting to unlock units. Thoughts?

A bunch of machine guns finished. Like, a ton of them. I started an airship or two and some miscellaneous minor infrastructure. I also started a few more machine guns, because we're still short a couple if we want to cover every city. I also started Edoras pre-building the Eiffel Tower so we can get some failgold out of it when we build it in Barad-Dur. We're starting to be low on cash again, after all.

I also looked at all the cities and mucked with the tile assignments and governors a bit. Notable things:

• The Barad-Dur governor seems to insist on running two engineer specialists instead of paying attention to a grass town currently assigned to it unless I insist on commerce or food, so I reassigned the town to another city. (Falls of Rauros, I think? The one to the west of it.) This swapped from the Incense to the town, and, in 2 turns, will be another size larger and able to work both the town and the incense and go back to stable population. Considering Barad-Dur is still be GP producer, I figure this is win-win. (Next great person is in 7 turns. 33% chance of artist, 21% chance and presumably rising of engineer. Less than 15% chance of Scientist. Oops.)
  
• Lorien can't build anything but machine guns, right now, because it loses overflow on anything else. I assigned a permanent merchant specialist. (It has a better gold than science multiplier.) This was sufficient hint to the governor that I didn't want an engineer, and it went with two merchants for the two specialists.
  
• One of our conquests was running a spy specialist and an engineer specialist. I told the governor to focus hammers, and the spy specialist went away. Now that we're getting +24 total espionage, we're probably fine, for the moment.
  

[SevenSpirits]

Cool.

I think it's a bit better not to queue up multiple techs - that way the other players don't see us with as high a GNP (and they can't see what we're teching if they have research visibility).

An alternative tech path is Rifling-Corporation-etc. This lets us pop into Nationhood and draft 6 rifles if we want. And then we'll be able to build Infantry/Marines, too.

No matter which way we do it, we should ALMOST finish corp, then - if we're doing combustion or rifling first - almost finish that, then finish it with max overflow; and only then finish corp with max overflow and move directly on to assembly line and industrialism. It's similar to Scientific Method - Corp is going to hurt our economy and won't provide any benefits of its own.

[Ranamar]

Played another turn...

I suspect we have too much built-up overflow to do most of Corporation without completing it. Anyway, Constitution came in EOT at 80% science, which, intriguingly, runs us a small profit (~10gpt). (90% runs us a ~130 gpt deficit) We're probably going to want to just barrel through Corporation and into Assembly Line, in that case. I'll make sure to record the drop in commerce.

For all my "I bet we're pretty much done building buildings," I queued up more buildings than units, these past turns. On the other hand, the machine guns that are coming out will all get the extra 2 exp, which is something.

Incidentally, Barad-Dur is past its health cap now. If we want, we could delay (probably...) Cristo Redentor by a turn to build an aqueduct. I'm inclined to do it, because I have the Eiffel Tower building in Edoras for failgold, and that'd give us time to put one more turn into that. It went into starvation at the same time, but I swiped an unused windmill from Khand for the moment. This trades 3 GPP for 2 commerce, which seems worthwhile anyway.

Yuris got a Great Artist.

I need to remember to look more closely at what I saw with recon runs. They happened, and the my brain shut down and was like, "Yup, done," instead of looking.

[SevenSpirits]

Played another turn...

I suspect we have too much built-up overflow to do most of Corporation without completing it. Anyway, Constitution came in EOT at 80% science, which, intriguingly, runs us a small profit (~10gpt). (90% runs us a ~130 gpt deficit) We're probably going to want to just barrel through Corporation and into Assembly Line, in that case. I'll make sure to record the drop in commerce.

For all my "I bet we're pretty much done building buildings," I queued up more buildings than units, these past turns. On the other hand, the machine guns that are coming out will all get the extra 2 exp, which is something.

Incidentally, Barad-Dur is past its health cap now. If we want, we could delay (probably...) Cristo Redentor by a turn to build an aqueduct. I'm inclined to do it, because I have the Eiffel Tower building in Edoras for failgold, and that'd give us time to put one more turn into that. It went into starvation at the same time, but I swiped an unused windmill from Khand for the moment. This trades 3 GPP for 2 commerce, which seems worthwhile anyway.

Yuris got a Great Artist.

I need to remember to look more closely at what I saw with recon runs. They happened, and the my brain shut down and was like, "Yup, done," instead of looking.

You should take screenshots!

Too much overflow. Hm, you mean because we were at max possible research? Ah well. So, I'd guess the loss is around 60 bpt after multipliers. Let's not just walk right into that. How about we dump the overflow into Rifling at 0% (assuming this doesn't finish it, lol), then almost finish corp, then finally max resesarch into Rifling, Corp, and then Assembly Line? (And then Industrialism and then Plastics.) We want Rifling anyway to build Infantry/Marines, even before we have oil.

If the overflow is going to finish Rifling, instead do that at zero percent, then get corp almost done over TWO turns of mostly saving gold, then research corp at 100%, etc.

For health, I think delaying cristo for an aqueduct would be silly. We can build that later, like, during eiffel tower construction. For now, I just asked yuris if he'd trade a deer for a musical or clam, and he said sure (but needs to check which he prefers). So hopefully he offers one of the those trades; if not, bug him. Btw I hope he's been giving us $20 every turn as promised.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

How does beaker overflow work? I know techs get a +20% multiplier for each arrow pre-requisite, and a +x% multiplier for everyone who knows the tech (all of which are additive), but does the overflow get divided when it moves on to the next tech or something? Does that mean if you're starting a chain of 1-turn techs, you should start with the low-multipliers and finish with the high multipliers?

[spacemanmf]

Aaaannndddd, I've read through your entire thread. I have to say: very nice work getting yourself in this position.

[SevenSpirits]

How does beaker overflow work? I know techs get a +20% multiplier for each arrow pre-requisite, and a +x% multiplier for everyone who knows the tech (all of which are additive), but does the overflow get divided when it moves on to the next tech or something? Does that mean if you're starting a chain of 1-turn techs, you should start with the low-multipliers and finish with the high multipliers?

It gets multiplied when you start a tech and divided when you go on to the next one, so it really doesn't matter how you try to finagle things. Aside from rounding errors of 0-1 beakers, the order doesn't matter for how many beakers you get.

[Ranamar]

Played T130.

It turns out that we would 1-turn Rifling at 0% research! This means we would have thoroughly blown away Corporation... Fortunately, Combustion costs somewhat more, so I managed to get it down to "almost complete" at 50% research. (0%, because of a few specialists and such, would have taken only 54 turns to complete. ) Next turn, we can do the same thing with Corporation and, the turn after that, we could probably do it with Rifling, too. Then, we'd have another nice overflow snowball to throw into Assembly Line. In the meantime, we made something like 500 gold this turn.

Health and trade report:
Yuris offered to trade deer for clams. I don't know if that was to get something equitable or because he doesn't have clams. (He has also been paying his taxes on time. )

I also got a new bright idea for health in Barad-Dur, though. Supermarkets are available at Refrigeration, which we can research whenever we want. Refrigeration also will give +1 move to our transports, making them not merely fast, but obscenely, ridiculously fast. (Like, can keep up with trains, almost, fast.) On the other hand, the reason to build a supermarket is that it gives +1 food, but we're going to be building at least one more sick-inducing building, in a factory, very soon, so we should probably just build the aqueduct and be done with it. Refrigeration is still something to consider researching after Flight, I'd say.

Reconnaissance summary:

GES:


Yuris:



As you can see, we have a paucity of intel on Commodore, right now, due to holes in our airship network. I'm working on patching that ASAP and have left notes to that effect.

As for what the reality is on the ground... Yuris is mostly defending with obsolete (axes, warriors) or obsolescent (knights) stuff, for the most part. He's got Janissaries on traditional borders, but I suspect that's mostly because that's where he left them when his campaign against GES ended. (There are a few stacks of them in the center... and on land borders, which is amusing, because I expect we will ignore land borders again when we make our next attack.)

GES has somewhat more thorough defenses... where he has them.

This is typical of a city defended by Riflemen:


This is typical of a city that is not:


You can, of course, see which cities are or aren't defended by riflemen just by looking at the map. Most of the rifles are unpromoted, and it looks like it's because they mostly don't have any experience.

[Ranamar]

Played another turn. It looks like we might have some sort of impromptu blitz going here...

I was wondering why our foreign trade routes were disappearing, and I discovered why, this turn: Last turn, GES adopted Mercantilism too... and this turn, so did Commodore!
Those protectionist bastards! In the Confucian People's Republic of Middle Earth, we would never exploit the working class like that! (Well, just so long as you do what you were born to do... everyone has their part to play. )

Also, we researched most of Corporation at, again, 50%. The question is, do we forcibly take two turns on rifling next turn. Ah... might as well. Then we'll have the gold to research at 100% for the foreseeable future, unless we decide to do something goofy like, say, upgrade our galleons or ironclads.

Lorien is near health cap and needed to burn off some overflow, so it's (just barely) completing an aqueduct in one turn. Next turn, we can go back to building ... some sort of military unit ... there, again. I've been building ironclads lately, but I wonder if I should switch to galleons or build more machine guns. (We have, as far as I can tell, one in the queue and one in every city. Do we want extras?)