[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[Tohron]

Admittedly though, in addition to the failgold possibility, BGN might miss out on the wonder if Dreylin decides to go after him and overwhelms him maybe? Not sure how long BGN would be able to hold his capitol if Dreylin attacks in the near future.

[scooter]

We will be able to see how much production this city gets next turn via production tracking. Scooter, I don't agree that we should chase after the Pentagon if it's clear that BGN is going to beat us to the wonder. Our own capital produces well over 100 production/turn after modifiers, and there are so many things we can do with that better than spending 8 turns in futile pursuit of a wonder we aren't landing. If we conclude that BGN is going for the wonder, I'd like to use the capital to build a settler for the island and then a series of 1-turn infantry to back up our settlements on the island and elsewhere. That has a lot more value than a psuedo-Wealth build. (We've almost caught REM in cities and not coincidentally, we're also getting close to him in score! Gotta keep the expansion train rolling for the last few spots of open land.)

Admittedly though, in addition to the failgold possibility, BGN might miss out on the wonder if Dreylin decides to go after him and overwhelms him maybe? Not sure how long BGN would be able to hold his capitol if Dreylin attacks in the near future.

Unfortunately, these are both very good points, which doesn't make the correct choice especially obvious. We've got until tomorrow night's turn to decide. I'm leaning very slightly towards abandoning the Pentagon hopes, but I'm almost certain Dreylin is about to attack somebody, and to me it's a toss-up in likelihood between BGN and Donovan. In addition to Tohron's point, if BGN thinks he will get targeted, he'll likely abandon any pursuit of Pentagon so that he can get units.

I suppose there would be nothing stopping us from swapping to Pentagon if a Dreylin/BGN war seemed likely at all.

[Sullla]

I hope Dreylin does try to attack BGN. Boldly has a lot of infantry by now (he was drafting even at the 2 pop penalty for a while) and he can upgrade all of the rifles that he drafted to infantry if he chooses. Short of Dreylin attacking REM, that would be a best case scenario for us: Dreylin attacks BGN, gets bloodied, BGN stops building Pentagon.

A Dreylin attack against Donovan would be pretty good for us too. Dreylin would absorb the brunt of Donovan's forces, and then we would pile on Donovan and claim a lot of the rewards. Maybe even the bulk of the land if we played our cards right. Anyway, for the moment it's still the overall strategy we've been holding to since the early game: finish building factories/coal plants, and then re-evaluate from there.

[scooter]

So how about a different idea for getting Pentagon:



Never mind the specific great people being chosen, the point is the number of GPPs.

Telegraph right now has by far the largest pure GPP pool at 231/400 for Engineer. Assembly Plants have an extra bonus: 4 engineer slots as opposed to the normal 2. We could sink a couple turns into Pentagon at Steam Engine, and then switch to a settler.

In Telegraph, the current plan is to grow to size 13 this turn, but instead we could run 1 Engineer to bring us to 237/400.

Then starting next turn, we run 5 Engineers at Telegraph for 2 turns (Plant completes end of turn, nevermind the screenshot), bringing us up to 264/400. After that we'll be able revolt into Pacifism for 5 turns. We hire 3 more great people which will give us an Engineer end of turn 313 (dropping one of them the last turn). Breakdown here:



If Pentagon is still available, we rush it to completion on T314. I think that would beat BGN by about a turn if he went all-in. I haven't done the math on his completion date or anything, but we could extrapolate it pretty soon.

Caveats:

* The odds of landing the Engineer would be very high, but obviously not perfect. My quick math says we'll have an 88% shot at an Engineer. In that case we pick something else as our fall-back that would be useful anyway - likely scientist.
* There's a chance the wonder could come down to a coin flip. Or he could get there 1T sooner than the Engineer. In the latter case, we'd just save him for a 2-man golden age.
* I think the Engineer wouldn't 100% finish Pentagon. I can't remember the formula for Engineer hammers, so we'd have to check in the sandbox to see what we would need to pre-produce so it could complete it in 1T. I don't think it would be very much.


If we went ahead with this plan, we may consider making the most of Pacifism and see if we can squeak out another great person or two from other cities during this window and use that to fire a 2-man golden age to build up for a military attack. I don't know, either that or pop out a scientist to partial-bulb Physics. Sure it's not a pressing tech for us, but 1500b of a tech we'll want anyway (on the Panzer path, plus Airships) isn't bad for the investment. But this is all beside the point.

Alright, that's my stab at having our cake and eating it too. Any thoughts?

[scooter]

Quick note: my GPP math was slightly off, so I tweaked it and re-saved the image above in place. Also edited a few figures in the above post to match it up.

[Athmos]

Well, I'm only lurking here (thanks again for the awesome thread BTW), but I hate the idea of forfeiting every hope of wonders or First-to bonuses at the first sign of concurrence. Of course we won't get it if we don't go for it. Pentagon has been discussed as our key wonder since the start of the game, it still fits very well with the aggressive trait on the way to a commando factory...

If there's no chances of getting it oh well... But this new approach at of going for it looks like even if we ended up missing it, we'd get nicer compensation for the effort, and it looks promising for making up for the late start.

Getting the Pentagon would also denies the possibility of BGN getting it only for it to fall in the hands of Dreylin...

[Tohron]

Another reason why winning the Pentagon race would be very nice would be that BGN would be left with a bunch of failgold to Suffrage-rush units if Dreylin attacks him. That alternate plan looks cool.

[Sullla]

Scooter, that's a really cool plan. I sat here doing the math to see if it looked viable, and my best guess is that BGN will finish the Pentagon on... Turn 314. Heh. I have him building the wonder at the same rate as we're building it (about 145 production/turn), which would be 7 turns from now, plus the forest chops cutting 1 turn off of that, for a Turn 314 finish (six turns from the current turn of T308). Scooter, this is not entirely clear from your writeup, but it looks like we would be producing the Great Engineer on Turn 314, rushing the Pentagon so that it finished eot 314 / beginning of Turn 315. That's still not going to be good enough to beat BGN, I'm afraid. I think we still lose this race.

The argument in favor of this plan would be that the opportunity cost is small. Telegraph just works a bunch of Engineer specialists (which are still pretty decent with Representation) and starves some food, no big deal. We can choose whether or not to use the Great Engineer that pops out on T314, and if it looks like we can't win the wonder race (or if Pentagon has already been finished), well, then we have a Great Engineer which is half of what we need for the next Golden Age. So you could argue that it might be worth starting the plan at the very least and see what production tracking is telling us about BGN, then we can decide how to play things as we go. Maybe that's the best answer here, I don't know.

The Great Engineer is worth 800 production (!) towards the Pentagon, which means that we can have the capital pop out a settler the way I like while we pursue this project. I'm kind of mad at myself here, as we very likely could have set things up to have a Great Engineer on hand to rush the Pentagon when we discovered Assembly Line. I just didn't think we'd be in a race with anyone else, given how none of the other game leaders were pushing for Assembly Line. BGN has been such a non-entity in this game that I never thought he would come up with the tech at the same time as us, and then also have the Spiritual/Organized combo to perfectly get factories done faster than us. Ah well. My mistake on this one.

This post has been more rambling than I expected. Let me continue to do number crunching and see if I can come up with anything else.

[Sullla]

OK yeah, I don't see a way to speed up the Great Engineer any faster than what scooter suggested, short of mass starvation at Telegraph or something silly like that. Let's hire the one Engineer for this turn, see what BGN's city looks like via production tracking next turn, and go from there. I should be able to calculate an exact BGN finishing date in two more turns (needing another turn since the first turn will contain some overflow from the coal plant build).

I'll update the micro plan and sandbox accordingly. Great idea scooter.

[scooter]

I should have thought of this sooner myself, but like you, I wasn't expecting any serious competition for it. I should have put some thought into what BGN's gameplan would be. It's easy to forget him because he's behind and far away from us.

Scooter, this is not entirely clear from your writeup, but it looks like we would be producing the Great Engineer on Turn 314, rushing the Pentagon so that it finished eot 314 / beginning of Turn 315.

Yeah sorry if it's unclear - the chart is meant to show that EoT313 we hit 402 GPP and spawn the Engineer, meaning we're free to rush it on 314. I haven't done lots of math on his city myself, but my guesses on what turn he would land it on are anywhere from 1T before to 1T after. It's hard to tell how many workshops he's got down.

I didn't track the foodbox closely in this plan (I just know we wouldn't starve in the above plan) or have time to try any variations, so what I don't know is how easily we can shave another turn off this arrival date. I can try that out in an hour or so if you don't beat me to it.

The argument in favor of this plan would be that the opportunity cost is small.

And yeah, this is basically the biggest reason I like it. We probably want another golden age in the not-so-distant future anyway, so why not? The worst-case scenario of straight-building it is we end up with some gold and have delayed settlers. The worst-case scenario is that we have a great person for very little cost.

The other thing is it will allow us some time to figure out exactly when he'll get the Pentagon. We can watch forests and track his production, and within a few turns we'll know exactly when he'll finish it, at which point we could slow down the plan if we can see we're not going to win it.

So unless you see any reason not to, I think we should definitely at least start this by working an Engineer in Telegraph this turn rather than growing. We may as well start this off with a full foodbox. I'm not going to play this turn for a couple hours though so that there's time.


EDIT: crossposted