[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[scooter]

Turn 308

I went ahead and worked the Engineer this turn. It's not necessarily a commitment to the plan, but it does sound like we're going to move forward with it. If we do a stint in Pacifism, we ought to consider popping out at least one other great person (for 2-man GA insurance) if not two if possible. The great people are still relatively cheap right now all things considered. If it looks like BGN is going to win the Pentagon race, we can always use a different city to take the 400GPP person, and let Telegraph take the next one since it's closer. (I don't quite know what the next couple levels of great people costs are off the top of my head with the Industrial start scaling going on.) Here's a few cities that are possibilities:



This one looks like a solid option. We're working a few coast now just to squeak up to size 15, but we can hire 6 specialists without even running a food deficit, let alone leaking out a mild deficit. Even in the most conservative plan, we probably would consider getting a great person out of here anyway.



It's maybe not an ideal choice because we really want to be making the most of our hammer modifiers here. That said, I mention it because it has the second-fullest GPP counter behind Telegraph, and the food surplus is actually higher than it looks. 4 tiles are collecting a combined 1 food right now, so the city can actually support 5 specialists while maintaining a 1F surplus.



Probably the least likely candidate that's still technically doable. Only including it because I took the screenshot. Almost no GPP available, but it does have a decent 7F surplus which can support 4 specialists with a 1F surplus. Basically, it would require some starving to be especially useful.



(I shuffled tiles around just to illustrate, and then I put the good tiles back where they belong.)

This may be another good option. If it's handed the sheep, floodplains, and watermill it's got an 11F surplus, and it's not starting from near-0 GPP. Of course, those food tiles can only go here or to Steam Engine, so we can't really do both of these.


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I'll revisit all that stuff tomorrow. Here's a few other things.



Explorer poking around in Pindicator's land. Border cities are defended, but no big stacks behind. Pindicator has a scout in our land at the same time, so we should both be able to see that we both have border stacks and then nothing behind them. Hopefully this cements a peaceful border.



MFG continues exploding at a similar pace, but so does REM's. I'd say we're about to breeze pass him, and then I remember he's about to trip a golden age and likely tech Assembly Line very quickly. So we'll see.



Industralization is happening throughout. We're about to hit a serious health crunch between Factories, Coal, Power, and probably some Drydocks too. That reminds me, I ought to login and re-offer that trade with REM. We'll probably end up building a couple Grocers in the cities that need them.

[scooter]

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.

For what it's worth, if it looks like BGN's ETA on Pentagon is EoT314 (1T later than your current guess), we can have our Engineer one turn sooner (to rush and complete EoT313) if we starve Telegraph down one size. Sounds drastic, but it's really not that bad. I think of it like being equivalent to a 2-pop whip (1 pop down, plus "another pop" since the foodbox is empty). I wouldn't do it unless we're confident it would give us a win on Pentagon, in which case I think it's almost certainly worth it. Just a possibility to keep in the back of our head.

[Sullla]

Some more good information from early Turn 309. Let's start with the big news: BGN finished building something in his capital:



Why hello there - yes, that is a grocer. That means a full turn's worth of production invested into something that is not the Pentagon. As it turns out, BGN doesn't have the same number of resources that we do, and he was probably thrown off by the huge unhealthiness penalty at his size 16 capital. Either that or he has no plans to build the Pentagon at all and this has been an exercise in scaring ourselves for no reason.

Anyway, this naturally sets BGN back enormously in our race to the Pentagon (I'll assume for the moment that he is planning on racing us to the wonder). We can rush it to completion with a Great Engineer on eot 314 / start of turn 315. It's currently Turn 309 and BGN has no production invested in the wonder. Even with two potential forest chops, 6 turns is going to be tricky to do for BGN. I think that if he plays everything perfectly, BGN can get a Turn 315 finishing date, same as us. That requires him chopping both forests and averaging 140 production/turn for the next 6 turns, which I'm not even sure he can do since he has no levee in that city. We definitely want to go forward with the plan scooter outlined, as we don't need to invest the Great Engineer until the very last turn, and we're not investing very much until then. (Given this turn's development, I do not recommend starving Telegraph down a size to get the Great Person out a turn soon, especially because by running all those extra specialists we drop the Great Engineer chance from 95% down to something like 80%. It sets back Telegraph too far and opens up too much of a dice roll on the Engineer.)

I'll update the micro plan to incorporate scooter's plan from yesterday. In the meantime, one other suggestion related to unit logistics:



We should reconfigure the units slightly on Textile Island. The city that's in danger is Power Loom, which can be attacked instantly from out of the fog directly off boats in Dreylin's northern city. In contrast, Spinning Jenny is safe against anything other than a unit landing with a Great General attached, which then promotes to Morale and moves again after landing (neat trick that). We should have a rifle and grenadier in Spinning Jenny so that we have two units present, and the other units should all be in Power Loom; I think that leaves us with 2 infantry + 1 rifle in Power Loom. I think that's enough to hold off an attack directly off the boats, and for anything that gets landed, we'll have a turn to respond by shuffling units / upgrading / drafting etc.

At Haber Process: I want us going on to settler next, but we don't want to start it this turn because it will take 4 turns. We need to build something that will let us overflow into settler and have it take 3 turns. I picked a jail for this, as we can't finish an infantry and follow it with a 3 turn settler. I want to get jail + espionage agency in Haber (and a couple other high production cities) because I'm sick of not being able to see anyone's Demographics and this is an area where we can make passive espionage a real advantage for us by investing in it early. Feel free to suggest other ideas.



I'll also look at the best build order for the capital. I think we can build an infantry this turn (while growing to size 15), then build a 3 turn settler T310-T312, then back to the Pentagon for the 200 production we will need to finish the wonder on Turns 313 and 314. Have to check that in the sandbox.

[Brian Shanahan]

That's great news on BGN building the grocer. It's always best to prepare for the worst, then your surprise if you're wrong is pleasant.

[scooter]

Turn 309

First off - amazing news about BGN. Maybe he isn't pursuing Pentagon after all. It also makes me wonder if he's pursuing Fascism. We might have to reconsider that after Steel if it hasn't fallen. I'd hate to leave our ticket to early West Point hanging.

Here's a quick update on the hammer explosion. There was a little lull in there, but the Industrialization is doing wonders for us the last few turns, and it's only going to continue.

296: 219
297: 248
298: 260
299: 279
300: 293
301: 311
302: 323
303: 332
304: 350
305: 351
306: 373
307: 386
308: 427
309: 531

How's first place in (non-Kremlin-whip) production sound? Until REM fires his golden age anyway.



Sorted by hammer producers. I've been so crazy busy this weekend that I wasn't able to do any other great person planning, but I still kind of like the idea of a 2-man GA in the near-ish future for the purposes of cranking out an army and wrecking someone. Sullla - what's your general feeling here? I'm thinking we get these last few cities we have planned, and then it's time to use our window of overwhelming production to get ourselves some more land. I'm also really afraid Dreylin will go conquer Donovan too, and our next easiest target will no longer be an option (after Dreylin extinguished any hopes of us conquering Gaspar). More on this at the bottom of this post.

At the very least, I wouldn't mind queueing some catapults right before Steel comes in so that we can have a few Cannons quickly. We don't necessarily need to finish them either while in Pacifism. As Spiritual, we could near-complete a couple units, and then finish a bunch in a row in Theocracy. Just an option.



Pindicator is likely aiming for Mining Inc with one of those Engineers. Perhaps he'll use the other to bulb along that same line? I think that makes sense for him. He's lagging behind in other ways, so he may as well zag with corps while the rest of us zig with State Property.



Dreylin settled a border city here. He hadn't quite finished his turn at this point, so I'm sure he'll defend it.



135% production is fun.



Things are happening. 5 Engineers running in Telegraph as planned.

I think the main thing to discuss is what exactly we want to use our MFG explosion in a few turns for (after the settlers and the smaller cities finish their coal plants). The options that I see:

1) Invasion of Donovan or someone else
2) Mass research build to race to a tech
3) Infrastructure build-up (we're hilariously lacking in science/gold multipliers empire-wide) - including things like Oxford.

I'm obviously leaning towards #1, but I could definitely be convinced of 2 or 3. I just think our only chance at winning this game rides on making a big gain while our gameplan is at its peak performance level relative to our opponents - they will all industrialize sooner or later too. Otherwise I fear we'll coast to a 3rd place or maybe 2nd if one of the others falter.

[Sullla]

Yeah, I agree that if we're serious about winning the game that we're going to need to invade someone and steal some of their land. One of the interesting things that this Industrial start has demonstrated again: in Civ4's lategame, basically all land is worth settling. Take that southern island location that I'm pitching. There are no food bonuses there, or any resources worth mentioning, but with State Property watermills and workshops, that city can produce 65 production/turn. Heck, with railroads on the mines, it will probably be able to reach 75 production/turn. Similarly, we've crammed some cities into marginal locations with a food bonus and 4-5 flatland tiles. That's worth 20-25 production/turn base, which becomes close to 50 production/turn with factory + coal plant + Engineer specialists. Land >>>>> everything else. Dreylin/OT4E understand this too, that's why their team keeps throwing down cities everywhere. We're going to pass REM soon in land, but we'll need to do something about Dreylin, and sitting around building up our existing territory won't be sufficient.

I think that Donovan is the team that draws the short straw. Dreylin is too big and pindicator is too strong / has too heavily promoted units. One of the side benefits of pindicator swapping into Free Market is that we don't really need Donovan for trade routes anymore. So anyway, right now we're on our current trajectory that lasts until about Turn 315, with the following goals:

1) Try to land Pentagon
2) Settle three more cities as outlined earlier in this thread
3) Research Steel tech
4) If Fascism is still available, then have all cities build Research and 2-turn it for the Great General

Let's see how many of these goals we can achieve. With luck, we'll land most or all of them, and then we revolt into Vassalage/Theocracy with our humongous production base and start cranking out 9 XP land units / 10 XP naval units (if we land Pentagon) and run over Donovan before he gets the appropriate units and production base to counter us. We can probably do about 5 infantry per turn, each coming out with 3 promotions, and that will be mighty tough to stop. If Donovan techs Railroad, then we just build cavs instead to counter machine guns. And we should be able to do enough 3-promo naval units that our units can move with impunity over water.

Hopefully this isn't just a pipe dream. We shall see!

[scooter]

Sounds like we're on the same page then. I agree on all counts.

I played around a little bit with generating great people, and I'm softening on the idea slightly. Sort of. We seem slightly more likely now to land Pentagon, in which case we have less of a need for a backup plan for the Engineer. I also don't think we'll need the production boost to win a war. In that case, maybe it's better just to set up a couple cities so that we could pop out two great people later with relative ease. Something like work a few specialists during the Pacifism stint in Radio/Steam/Cotton to get them closer to the threshold, but then later we could actually complete the great people when we feel we need the boost more seriously.

Also - if we do end up grabbing Fascism, a short stint in Police State sounds like a nice possibility.

[Dp101]

Do you have any way of tracking GPP so that you can be sure BGN isn't also going for an engineer? Or is an engineer from him so impossible to get this fast that it doesn't matter?

[Cyneheard]

Do you have any way of tracking GPP so that you can be sure BGN isn't also going for an engineer? Or is an engineer from him so impossible to get this fast that it doesn't matter?

He's Spiritual, so it's difficult to say "he couldn't do it."

How many GPP has he created, though? Getting a 100% Eng pool is difficult.

[Athmos]

Great news all around indeed ! But I think if you want the pentagon, you should push hard and make sure to do your best to land it, or run the risk of missing the window. The same could be said about the fascism run, I'm worried you are considering many interesting possibilities but not making enough choices. Hesitations often proves costly...

The grocer build from BGN put you back in contention, let's not waste this opportunity !