[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[scooter]

Turn 314

I decided to go ahead and play. I don't want to put pressure on you to play tomorrow, and I don't want to count on myself to play either.

What I ended up doing was setting all cities (other than those popping culture borders) to build research as planned, and then I experimented a bit with taking a few cities off research until I had a mix I liked that still allowed us to finish Fascism end of turn. I'm sure there is a slightly more efficient way to do this since we are ending with extra gold, but whatever.

If you find time tomorrow, and you want to login and tighten things up further, be my guest. I would leave a little bit of a buffer, though. I remember in PB18 somebody (TBS I think?) very tightly micro'd techs to complete via wealth/research builds, only for inflation to tick up on the inter-turn and make them miss the tech. So it seems always worthwile to have a slight buffer on the gold at the very least.



It looks like this. Battery, Dynamite, and Telegraph had factories/coal plants they needed to complete to be at full strength for the buildup, so I let them progress on those.



Dreylin captured this island city before I logged in. He then proceeded to log out and in several times while I was in (as if he was popping out to sim), and then he captured this city as well:



He actually kept this city too, which makes it look like he's very confident about this war. So Donovan looks like a goner to me. I'm sure he'll do his best, but that's probably not going to be enough. Due to the airships, Dreylin gets to make choices with essentially full map visibility, so it's not like Donovan can pull him into a trap.

I'm feeling less optimistic about our chances to snipe any cities, but we'll see.



I did take a peek at a random Dreylin city over by Pindicator. We really ought to get Combustion and just make Dreylin miserable by scanning up and down the coast with Destroyers/Transports and force him to try to defend everything.

One thing to consider: because we're aggressive and can easily produce 5xp (and more) units, that means any future Infantry we produce can take Amphibious out of the gate. All they need is 5xp and they can go C2-Amphibious. Just throwing that out there.



We also settled a city! One fun thing that's come out of this is that I enjoy looking up the suggestions I'm less familiar with (like this one) and reading some of their wikipedia entries.



Minor worker note: so we had a free worker turn available. Your worker plan thought we needed this worker to complete the workshop, but in-game we were 1T ahead on the workshop. There were no nearby tile improvements we were dying to have, so I moved him to this tile. The rationale is that we'd really like to complete that workshop at Cotton Gin. Your plan had that new worker there (V) putting the first turn into a workshop there. Fortunately, we had already put 1T into a workshop there back when we had to eat a worker turn, so it's actually at 2/4. By bringing this worker here, we can complete that workshop next turn, which will let Cotton Gin stagnate on it rather than its current setup.

Alternatively, this tile also brings it near Pasteur/Hydraulic which is the area that needs worker turns the most, so we have the flexibility to divert it to something else. It still can move 1 more tile, so if you think we care more about chop/mining that forested hill, feel free to login and move the worker 1S onto it. Better yet, it could mine the roaded grass hill to completion along with the worker pair 1N of the cows.

Hopefully all of that makes sense.



I bumped this Galleon back to this tile. What I wanted is to allow ourselves some flexibility if we do decide to interfere with Dreylin/Donovan. Our Galleons are all miles away, so we ought to at least start to reposition them. The fort completes next turn, so this was the ideal tile.

That's not saying we should do it because we need to see how the next few turns go (we can't do anything yet), but I think we ought to at least have flexibility.



I did not make this move, but I kind of think we ought to do something like it. So we know Dreylin is not interested in attacking us over here right now. I'm thinking what we ought to do is:

1) Move 1NE. Drop 1 Rifle in Power Loom, load 1 Infantry onto the Galleon. Maybe pick up a second Infantry if we're feeling adventurous.

2) Move into Penicillin with remaining 3 moves. Drop other Rifle, load up Infantry in Penicillin

3) Starting next turn, maintain a gold balance sufficient to upgrade at least 3 units in this region to Infantry as needed.

4) Hang in Penicillin for a turn or two until we feel comfortable enough and/or needed enough to move west. It's 4 tiles away from Power Loom, which means all units on board can get into both Power Loom OR Spinning Jenny in one swoop (move Galleon into Power Loom, then move 3 tiles along roads into Jenny).

The point here is to get the Galleon to start to trickle west with stronger units on board in case an opportunity opens up. There's no concrete plan in mind here, but I like flexibility. Dreylin isn't attacking over here, and we also will build some units over here to replenish any we take away. Something to think about. If you agree with me, go ahead and make this move. If not, you can leave it be until we get more time to discuss.

This would make Dreylin a little nervous, because if he's paying attention he'll see the units swaps with his Airship. I'm fine with him being a little nervous.



Hired a scientist for the turn since we lost the grass workshop.

[Cyneheard]

Since I'm Dedlurking I can only post this here - why is the field having so much trouble with loading their own threads? I think I'm seeing notifications almost daily of people opening the wrong threads.

[Fluffball]

Since I'm Dedlurking I can only post this here - why is the field having so much trouble with loading their own threads? I think I'm seeing notifications almost daily of people opening the wrong threads.

I believe it's state law in many place to play civ 4 while drinking, especially on a long weekend.

[Sullla]

Scooter, I think you did the right thing on playing the turn. Between the pauses for playing order confusion and REM waiting to play his turn, I was able to log into the game before Turn 314 rolled anyway. Grim business right now in the game for us. Not our overall civ, which is looking great and rounding into a powerhouse position, but in the larger state of the game. Dreylin has already killed one of our neighbors, and is in the process of killing our other neighbor. One Donovan is gone, there will be no soft targets left for us to attack. If we had just 5 more turns before Donovan came under attack, we would have been in prime position to leap into the war ourselves and partition the land, which would have been fine. However, we only just finished industrializing, and it will take a few turns to build the actual military units to go to war. Now we have some decisions to make, and they are not going to be easy choices.

I love the game that we've played up to this point. We secured more than our fair share of the land, behind only a team that conquered its neighbor and the Imperialistic team. We were the first team to industrialize, we landed the wonder that we most desired in the Pentagon, and essentially tied with REM for the tech lead (he has Physics on us, we have Steel on him). If we were in REM or pindicator's location on the map, this would be pretty straightforward from a strategic perspective: build up the army and conquer BGN's land. Then we would be comparable to Dreylin and the game could proceed normally. But unfortunately we started next to Dreylin, Donovan, and Gaspar/Noble. The last team is dead, the second to last team is dying, and the first team is swallowing both them up. There are no soft targets for us to hit on the map, no easy place to gain more land.

So here is our critical question: what do we do now? I see three choices:

1) Attack Dreylin
2) Attack pindicator
3) Keep teching and attack later

There are merits to all of these options. I'll try to run through the advantages and disadvantages of each.

1) Attack Dreylin

Pros: We need land, and Dreylin may be the best team to get it from. Dreylin is about to surround us on three sides. Yes, he has a huge military, but they can't defend everywhere at once given our giant shared frontier. The best timing to hit Dreylin is now, while he's overextended and before he has time to consolidate his gains. We have an industrial economy, while he's still whipping and drafting for production. We have infantry, cannons, and ironclads over his military of rifles, cavs, and wooden ships. Most importantly, can we realistically win the game if Dreylin controls the homelands of THREE teams, and no one else has more than a single landmass? Probably not. Better to strike now than keep delaying endlessly and get trapped with 15 cities to his eventual 30 cities.

Cons: Our Power rating is 761k. Dreylin's Power rating is 1614k. And he has Physics tech up on us, which means that he'll be able to see any attack incoming ahead of time with airships. We do better to attack another target, pick up land that way, and deal with Dreylin later. He's technologically behind and we have plenty of time to hit with Combustion based ships while Dreylin does not. (Their team has Scientific Method/Communism and the lightbulbed Physics; they need 7000 beakers for Assembly Line and 9000 beakers for Combustion. Neither is happening for a very long time.)

2) Attack pindicator

Pros: Attacking pindicator is not our first choice. However, we can't reach BGN so we don't have much of an option. Pindicator does not have Assembly Line tech so he will not have factories available; our production is something like double his. He is currently running Representation/Bureaucracy/Caste System/Free Market/Theocracy, which means no civics that allow for rushed production, and as a non-Spiritual civ, he'll have to waste a turn revolting before he can get into Nationhood or Slavery civics. Furthermore, he would be drafting rifles, which are easily killable, and we've seen no naval units of his to date. Pindicator does not have airships for early warning, and a naval alpha first-strike of ours could probably take several of his cities before he had a chance to react. If we get in a successful first strike, pindicator's infamous pessimism sets in, and he half-asses his defense while we roll through the rest of his territory.

Cons: Pindicator has Railroad tech, and that means rails for defensive mobility and machine guns for defense. Machine guns are very nasty units, with their +50% bonus against Gunpowder units and their immunity to collateral damage. If pindicator spams them everywhere, it's going to make an attack difficult to pull off with infantry units. (The counter to this argument: machine guns cannot be drafted, they get terrible promotions where pindicator can't benefit from his Agg/Chr traits, and they don't get the free Combat I promotion.) Pindicator may have been sleepwalking through this game thus far, but a war declaration could get him invested into this game in a big way. And attacking anyone other than Dreylin forces us to leave large garrisons behind to defend against an attack from the blue monster surrounding us.

3) Keep teching and attack later

Pros: There's some very useful stuff near us on the tech tree. We've already seen that we can get about 1000 beakers/turn (post-modifiers), and we're close to 1000 beakers/turn base as well. That means that we can pick up techs quickly if we're willing to drop everything else and research:

* Physics (3432 beakers) has been discounted by known civ bonus, and would open up airships for recon purposes. They are also somewhat useful in combat for bombarding units.
* Railroad (3861 beakers) gives us machine guns for defense, much better logistics for moving units around, and +1 production on hillside mines, which we have quite a few of.
* Combustion (3088 beakers) opens up modern naval units, and is probably the most important tech on the board right now. We would be invincible at sea against any wooden navies once we picked this up.... and helpless against anyone else who got to it first.
* Artillery (3432 beakers), Flight (4290 beakers), and Electricity/Industrialism aren't too far away down the road either, although we're still looking at close to 20,000 beakers before reaching panzers.

Cons: All of that stuff is useful, but when exactly are we going to make a move to conquer more territory? Our gameplan to this point was to be first to industrialize, and then use early + highly promoted Infantry units to grab more land. None of the other teams except maybe BGN have built factories/coal plants yet. When are we going to have a better opportunity than this? We can sit back and build forever all we want, and that will be good enough to let us coast to a third place finish. But if we want to win, we're going to need more land.

******

I still don't have a great answer to this. I think I'm leaning slightly towards the "attack pindicator" option, as the least bad choice of the bunch. If we could pull off a successful alpha strike against him while he's checked out, I think we could take a big chunk out of his empire, especially since he has to waste a turn of Anarchy before getting into useful civics. If we make the initial attack, then pindicator has to waste the second turn of the war in Anarchy, then he whips the third turn of the war, and the new units don't pop out until the fourth turn of the conflict... well, that would give us a lot of time to work with. I dunno though. It's a huge risk, but we need to make a move somewhere, right?

Obviously it goes without saying that we will try to vulture anything we can get from Donovan's decaying body. I think we'll attack him in the next few turns and grab his border Holy City with us at the very least. No idea if we'll be able to get anything past that, but we'll see.

[Sullla]

Now for some thoughts on our impending military buildup. Let's look at individual cities:

Steam Power
* Base production: 51/turn
* With Modifiers: 107/turn (no Bureaucracy)
* With Police State: 125/turn

This is one of our best cities. I think we want to crank 1-turn infantry here (coming out with 3 promotions and 9 XP) and do that for a long time.

Telegraph
* Base production: 35/turn; will eventually grow up to 44/turn
* With Modifiers: 73/turn, eventual 92/turn
* With Police State: 85/turn, eventual 107/turn

This is our only land-locked city, so no ships to worry about here. Telegraph is a special city in that it's the only place where we can build missionaries outside of Organized Religion civic. I think that we'll build missionaries here until we have enough overflow to 1-turn an infantry, and then swap back. We can probably go missionary/infantry, missionary/infantry for a while here.

Cotton Gin
* Base production: about 10 turn

This city has given up all its good tiles to other cities. We'll build workers here and run specialists. Kind of sad but it did good work for us in the early game.

Haber Process
* Base production: 54/turn
* With Modifiers: 113/turn
* With Police State: 132/turn

1-turn infantry, yes please. I think we'll pop out an intelligence agency and a security bureau eventually when the overflow stacks too high. That would get us 40 EP/turn in this one city, and enough to start reaping some passive espionage benefits. But mostly, we just churn out 9 XP triple-promoted infantry for a while.

Radio
* Base production: 36/turn (can get a little higher, but pretty maxed out now)
* With Modifiers: 75/turn,
* With Police State: 88/turn

This might be a good location for a drydocks, although I think we might actually have too much production to make that entirely worthwhile. (We get 99 production/turn with a drydocks while in Police State civic, far more than we need to produce 72 production frigates and 64 production galleons.) On the other hand, we need some ships ASAP if we're going to make an attack soon, and we need those ships to come out of cities with religion already in place for the super sweet 10 starting XP. Radio can also potentially build ships until having enough overflow to 1-turn an infantry, and then go back to ships again. So I'm thinking a drydocks and ships to start, and maybe we can ship the drydocks role over to other, weaker cities later as they finish their factories and coal plants.

Spinning Jenny
* Base production: 47/turn; will eventually grow up to 61/turn
* With Modifiers: 98/turn, eventual 128/turn
* With Police State: 115/turn, eventual 145/turn

This city is really, really good. It's been a slow but steady process of improvement to date, and now Spinning Jenny is about to equal the capital in terms of production capability, with four more tiles still to improve. None of this is even counting railroads on the mines either! Anyway, this city would be wasted on naval stuff right now because it has so much production. It can already 1-turn infantry indefinitely, so I say that we do that right now. We should probably also use Build Culture for one turn, as we can pull 100 culture instantly for the third ring border pop, and that would be good from a defensive standpoint (visibility and +40% defenses in a worst case scenario).

Pasteurization
* Base production: 36/turn; will eventually grow up to 52/turn
* With Modifiers: 75/turn, eventual 109/turn
* With Police State: 88/turn, eventual 127/turn

In Police State right now, this city can build 3 infantry every 4 turns, and it will get closer to 1:1 as it continues growing onto more tiles. I think that we either do that or build a whole bunch of 1-turn cannons here, which the city can also do with no trouble. How about 1-turn cannons until we have enough overflow to 1-turn an infantry, then rinse and repeat? (If we attack pindicator, we won't need too many cannons though, since we'll be facing some machine guns.)

Induction Coil
* Base production: 35/turn; essentially capped here, maybe 37/turn with an Engineer
* With Modifiers: 73/turn
* With Police State: 85/turn

This is an easy call: build a drydocks here and then crank the naval units. Production is 99/turn in Police State with a drydocks, and the location is well suited if we were to attack pindicator. Also has religion already present for the 10 XP ships.

Battery
* Base production: 21/turn; will eventually grow up to 30/turn
* With Modifiers: 44/turn, eventual 63/turn
* With Police State: 51/turn, eventual 74/turn

This is our naval base for the south seas; with a drydocks, it can just barely 1-turn galleons, and soon frigates too (in Police State). We'll want to get a missionary in here soon for the Theocracy bonus. We'll need ships here whether we're fighting pindicator, Dreylin, or simply trying to defend our own coasts.

Contact Process
* Base production: 15/turn; will eventually grow up to 25/turn

This city is still building its coal plant. I think we add a drydocks here and then use it as a naval base down the road.

Dynamite
* Base production: 20/turn; close to capped out at this point

Same thing as the previous city. As these newer cities get finished with their infrastructure and start building ships, we can likely shift places like Induction Coil onto land units. But we'll need those ships ASAP if we're planning on attacking soon.

The remaining cities are still in the midst of their development, and they won't be contributing units any time soon. Give them 10 more turns to bake though, and they'll become quite strong. With our current techs and civics, basically any land whatsoever is worth having. Give us a single food bonus and a couple of grassland tiles, and that city can be producing 50 production/turn in short order. Land is all. We wants it. Give us more!

Let me know your thoughts on all this scooter. I don't see us building cavs at this point because we'll be making all our attacks from the sea, and frankly infantry are just better units, especially with the Aggressive free promotion. (The ease with which we can take Amphibious promotion will be really nice too. Every infantry unit is its own berserker! We won't be wasting time moving over land; you see Dreylin doing the same thing is his war. As I wrote way back in 2006, walking is for chumps and suckers.)

[Sullla]

Oh, and finally, I did not move any of the units in the Power Loom area pending discussion on what we see our team doing next as part of our big picture strategy. We will be moving our units differently depending on whether we want to attack Dreylin, attack pindicator, or just defend and tech.

[Tyrmith]

The lurkers cry for blood! More blood! All must die! (I think you know what we want... )

[picklepikkl]

Sod you, this lurker cries for laid-out strategic and tactical analysis so he can learn!

(I guess blood is ok too, if you can get it at wholesale rates)

EDIT: Oh hey, the discovery of blood types happened in the Industrial era, which made what was previously a quack treatment into a cornerstone of modern medicine; shame that Blood Transfusion is 17 characters.

[Reverent]

Blood Transfusion may breach the character limit, but Blood Bank doesn't!

[Athmos]

Is there a chance of inflicting significant damage to Dreylin by striking where his army is thinner (maybe in ex Gaspar land) during his war with Donovan ? I'm guessing it would probably imply razing cities and gaining land might be more important than inflicting damage, but if you could surprise boat a city or two, might it be a significant enough blow to his strength on the eastern sea to justify it ? I don't know if this is even possible -specially not knowing how much of his airship force is on the Donovan front- but obviously the best moment to strike is while he's already fighting elsewhere...

Or would you otherwise be able to grab at least one city from Donovan, like the one directly one Radio's Frontier ? Any city you can snag from Donovan would be one less for Dreylin as well... If Donovan is focusing on inflicting as much damage as he can on Dreylin, maybe it could be achieved with a smaller force than previously envisaged ?

Basically I'm worried that while we need land, Dreylin needs to be slowed down as well, or we face the risk of him having his army free to attack us while we try to conquer someone else. With perfect intel from airships, it would be the perfect opportunity for him to try to overwhelm us. I'm thinking we would need railroad to have a mobile enough defense to be able to wage war on another target without providing him with too much of an opening.

What is the ETA for the next techs ? Have you decided what to get after combustion ?

Edit : What would be a pessimistic estimate of the time Dreylin would need to gobble up Donovan ? An optimistic one ?

One more thought : Would it be possible to send a boat-loaded army looking to strike at Donovan remnant and use it to take back an ex-Donovan city from Dreylin instead ? Like Ant-Zen or Nettwerk ? Or do you recon even his wounded forces would be to numerous to take out ?