[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[Sullla]

Southern island:



I was thinking of planting our city on the red dot. I like being able to make use of the crabs and the grassland rice, I like the fact that this would be a canal city, and I feel somewhat safer having a city up closer to our borders. There's also the possibility of planting another city on the yellow dot later, so that we could make use of all the land on this island. The counter argument would be that replanting on Dreylin's spot gains the hill defensive bonus and being 3 tiles away from Kaplan doesn't mean as much in the age of railroads, where infantry can still easily move from one city to the next.

Super cheeky move: send our first settler to the YELLOW dot spot on the silver, then build another settler for the red dot location. Defending everything would be a strategic nightmare, but that's kind of the position we're in already. What's one more city when we have to defend a dozen of them?

On the next tech: I feel like the visibility of airships are more useful to us right now than Combustion's destroyers and transports. I would feel otherwise if we were gearing up to attack, but I think we want a little time to tech and build before looking to make another move. I just feel really vulnerable when our two big rivals can see everything we're doing while we remain in the dark. That's a bad place to be on a map this big. Plus Combustion has some penalties in the form of obsoleting whales (RIP game's worst happiness resource!) and introducing the oil unhealthiness penalty. If we grab Physics first, we can actually build destroyers and transports via the uranium unlocked at that tech. Obviously a very minor point but I figured I might as well mention it.



Tentative railroad plan I drew up. We should be able to have a railnet in place by the time our 10 turns of enforced peace with Dreylin are done.

[scooter]

I was thinking of planting our city on the red dot. I like being able to make use of the crabs and the grassland rice, I like the fact that this would be a canal city, and I feel somewhat safer having a city up closer to our borders. There's also the possibility of planting another city on the yellow dot later, so that we could make use of all the land on this island. The counter argument would be that replanting on Dreylin's spot gains the hill defensive bonus and being 3 tiles away from Kaplan doesn't mean as much in the age of railroads, where infantry can still easily move from one city to the next.

Hm. I'll think about this a little more. I really like the hill defensive bonus, but the possibility of settling a second city would be really nice. But defending both of those cities sounds like a nightmare. I dunno, my default is to take the hill defensive bonus and be done with it, but there's some upside here, and we need upside a lot right now.

On the next tech: I feel like the visibility of airships are more useful to us right now than Combustion's destroyers and transports. I would feel otherwise if we were gearing up to attack, but I think we want a little time to tech and build before looking to make another move. I just feel really vulnerable when our two big rivals can see everything we're doing while we remain in the dark. That's a bad place to be on a map this big. Plus Combustion has some penalties in the form of obsoleting whales (RIP game's worst happiness resource!) and introducing the oil unhealthiness penalty. If we grab Physics first, we can actually build destroyers and transports via the uranium unlocked at that tech. Obviously a very minor point but I figured I might as well mention it.

I don't really agree with this one. I think that vulnerability goes away the minute we're fielding Destroyers. We obviously want both techs, so the order is probably not too important. But if we get to Destroyers first, nobody is going to even consider touching us until they have Destroyers of their own. As for the minor points - we aren't struggling with happiness, so I don't really mind the whales, and you can't use Uranium until Fission IIRC, so I don't think that's really a factor here.

The only person we're really concerned about messing with us is REM (for the next 10T). By the time our peace with Dreylin expires, I think we'll have Destroyers either way. I'm assuming REM is also headed for Combustion here. If he gets there first, I don't care how many airships we have, his Destroyers will wreck any ships we have and force us to huddle in our cities. If we get there first, he won't be able to do anything to us. I just can't see a way where Physics first is worthwhile.

[Sullla]

We have a couple turns to keep thinking about the southern island city locations. I'm open to any of the options we've been discussing so far.

On research, I think I don't agree that Combustion automatically makes us safe. We could easily be attacked over land at a lot of our recent conquests. And galleons could always launch a suicide attack to raze one of our cities, although I do think that would be poor strategy. Anyway, Combustion is a surprisingly cheap tech, almost 1000 beakers less than Railroad, and I'm fine with researching it next.

Thought on civics: I see we're going Bureaucracy next turn. How about 5 turns of Organized Religion to build libraries while saving gold, then Free Religion for the next 5 turns? Seems like we get more efficient science that way.

[valaraukar]

At your current empire state, is there any significant difference in cost of civics free religion X organised rel.? E.g. does it costs less turns of 100% science?

Sent from my XT1039 using Tapatalk

[Sullla]

It must be a busy weekend for everyone in Pitboss 33. The turn rolled 16 hours ago and I'm the only person from any team to log into the game. Not sure what that says about me...



Dreylin and REM remain at war for now, although as I said neither one has logged into the game yet. Our hope is that they remain locked into war with one another for as log as possible. Dreylin still has this stack of infantry on the forested hill tile (which healed slightly from airstrikes between turns) and a larger mixed stack of cavs and infantry back by the city of Cats. REM's captured city of Silkmoths would be an obvious target of attack, although it is very well defended by this point. I believe that there's another former Dreylin city off to the northeast that we can't see:



The city of Dogs in this old screenshot, on the right hand side of the image. (My how things have changed up here in the last 7 turns!) I think that city is still there, although it might have been razed by REM. From what I remember, I thought he kept the city, but not sure. If it's still there, expect Dreylin to try to recapture it. Amazingly, we're rooting for Dreylin now in this war, since REM has now eclipsed the big blue menace in the overall standings.

We actually have more cities than Dreylin now, 19 to 18. Who would have thunk it?



Here's an overview of our military for the curious. We're heavy on infantry and naval units, the forces we used to make our attack. 25 workers is probably about right; we would have needed more if we hadn't been sitting in either Serfdom or post-Steam Power for the whole game. Capturing those two workers from Dreylin at the tail end of our little war was a nice bonus. If we'd known that we were going to sign peace so quickly, we could have gotten a couple more on southern island. Ah well.

I think that we should go ahead and use the Great General to open up West Point, just in case something unexpected would happen. I'd also move at least one of those infantry outside Haber Process into the city, just in case someone has a commando cav floating around. No need to take chances. Just as a reminder, make sure we have only *ONE* unit on the same tile as our Great General when we merge them together, so that we get all 20 XP onto the same unit. We need a unit with at least 6 starting XP to reach the 26 XP we need for West Point. My tentative suggestion is for a Medic III land unit but we could certainly do something else.



Now a quick discussion about our economy: it sucks! Imagine that, spending zero time investing in infrastructure the whole game gets you a poor economy. Never would have guessed that, heh. Now I'm not saying we made the wrong decision here - we needed to keep building settlers to keep up in expansion, and we could have done better since both Dreylin and REM ended up with more cities and territory than we did. And if you look at the most competitive teams, Dreylin and REM followed the same path, investing in units and settlers over building up their empires vertically. Donovan and BGN went the city infrastructure route, with the results that you see on the scoreboard. Neither one was ever much of a factor, even if BGN is still alive and kicking. (Poor Donovan went for a fast library + university + observatory + Academy combo in his capital, resulting in a really slow expansion pace and Dreylin/REM bullying him around mercilessly. His plan just didn't work in practice.)

Anyway, so I think we made the right decision, or at least a justified decision, but we really do need to rescue our sagging economy here. Our current break-even science rate is a little over 20%. This is less troublesome for an Industrial start because we can pump 1000 production into Research/Wealth at any time. Still, we should try to fix this. I pulled a picture of the Finances screen to demonstrate that city maintenance isn't too bad. State Property removes distance maintenance, and that means we just pay the 6 gold/turn cap on number of cities maintenance. It might still be worthwhile to build courthouses in some of our highest production cities, largely because they also provide the espionage boost, but I don't think they're cost-effective everywhere.

The bigger culprit is civics maintenance, and the sad thing is that we're not even running stuff that's all that expensive. The difference between High and Low Upkeep is about 16 gold/turn, which is noticeable but not extravagant. And of course we end up paying for cities maintenance and civic upkeep a second time in the form of inflation, which adds 35% to our costs. This is where REM's Organized trait is killing us economically. He gets his civics costs cut in half, and then that leads to a further reduction in inflation. Furthermore, REM also built a series of courthouses in his cities due to their cheaper cost, which tipped them over the cost-efficiency line. Even leaving aside the courthouses, I would estimate that Organized is saving him a good 80 gold/turn due to civics upkeep and inflation. We always say that Organized is a lategame trait, and this is where it's really pulling its weight. Throw in the cheap factories, and I think it's clear that I underestimated the trait. I would now say that Spiritual and Imperialistic are the best traits for an Industrial start, with Philosophical and Organized not far behind. The other traits are significantly weaker. Aggressive did great work for us, but I have to say Organized is probably better.

So what exactly should we do now? I think for starters we want to get libraries up everywhere. They're very cheap to build and they provide the same 25% science bonus as observatories and universities. I also want to get the espionage buildings in our top production cities (Steam Engine, Haber Process, Spinning Jenny) to counter REM's own espionage production. After that... well, I think we could use some banks in our high production cities as well. Banks would help out a lot when we're saving gold at 0% science, and if we get 6 of them we could build Wall Street. I don't know if we'll have time to do this, but getting Wall Street and Oxford in our capital would help out a lot. We currently have 0 banks and 0 universities though, so... Still, I think they're useful enough that we should seriously consider pursuing them. As a final note, REM has also built some Custom Houses for the trade route bonus, and that might also be worthwhile in some of our top production cities. The danger there is that foreign trade is inherently somewhat unreliable, and the commerce bonus isn't quite as large as you might think. I believe it would take our 5 commerce trade routes and turn them into 6 commerce trade routes (?) Either +1 or +2 commerce per trade route. The argument in their favor is that trade routes add base commerce, and they would always be working in our favor regardless of the slider settings. I think I would still favor some banks instead though.

Overall, with Statue of Liberty and Organized trait and Electricity-buffed watermills, REM's economy is definitely better than ours right now. We need to hope that Dreylin will slow him down with continued warfare and give us a chance to catch up. The good news is that REM ran 0% science last turn and only picked up 150 gold/turn. The war is proving expensive for him too. This might be our best chance to catch up. At least we're even in terms of tech: REM has Physics (EDIT: and Electricity) and we have Railroad. The danger with REM is less what he has right now, and more where he's going to be in 10-20 turns if he gets out of war and starts really teching.

Scooter, I wrote down some suggested worker micro in our Google docs spreadsheet. If we do decide to make a play for Wall Street, feel free to swap Radio from an observatory to a bank. I'll take a look again after you play the turn. Plan is to swap into Bureaucracy and Organized Religion this turn, right? The OR bonus will definitely help in some of these cities. Have fun!

[antisocialmunky]

@Sullla, @scooter I have a couple questions:

1) What do you think about industrial era start warfare now that you've fought one? The main difference seems to be that there aren't tons of Ren. units being mass upgraded so way fewer cavs and highly promoted CG infantry.
2) What do you think think is the optimal tech path in industrial start generally? Are there multiple viable ones? Do you think you would have changed the ordering on research?
3) How would you rank the industrial start National Wonders by importance? It seems like the ones based on commerce are much less good than normal due to lack of cottage cheese.

[Sullla]

Those are some good questions. Let me try to provide some responses:

1) What do you think about industrial era start warfare now that you've fought one? The main difference seems to be that there aren't tons of Ren. units being mass upgraded so way fewer cavs and highly promoted CG infantry.

I think it's less about upgraded units per se and more about having a production base to work from. While we do see units getting upgraded sometimes, more often when someone is going on a knight/cav spree they're generally whipping them out en masse. Especially in recent RB Pitboss games which have tended towards big maps; if you have 25 cities and you whip out 1.5 knights on average from each, there's your 40 knights to go crush a backwards neighbor.

Here in this game with the Industrial start, we didn't see a ton of cav warfare because teams didn't have the cities and food/production base to pump them out. Don't get me wrong, it's not impossible or anything like that, but generally speaking you do better building more settlers than cranking out cavs when you only have 3 or 4 cities. It's hard to whip cavalry when they cost 3 pop apiece and you only have like 25 total pop for your whole empire in the early game! Dreylin was the one exception that that rule in this game, and his team was able to do that largely because the Kremlin bypasses the normal whipping rules. Even then, it was a pretty big gamble and could have failed if Gaspar/Noble had put up a better defense. (I still think that an aggressive rifle whipping/drafting campaign could have bogged down that attack and made it into a losing move instead of a near-game winning move. But we can't read all the threads here, so maybe I'm wrong. Hard for me to know.)

Anyway, we didn't see a lot of cav/rifle warfare because each team needed to build up and develop first, and by the time that everyone had expanded, we were almost to the next generation of military tech. I think it's rather like how the RB metagame has generally moved away from Ancient warfare, and focused on medieval attacks instead. Fighting early is generally not cost effective, and this game has played out in the same fashion.

It also bears repeating what scooter said earlier this weekend: cavs are nerfed on this map due to almost every city being located on the water. When you can build 4 move galleons from the start of the game, and every city is coastal, there's much less reason to sink your production into 2 move cavs.

2) What do you think think is the optimal tech path in industrial start generally? Are there multiple viable ones? Do you think you would have changed the ordering on research?

I think there are two main research paths and both are viable. The main one would be a quick push to Communism tech for State Property civic and a potential Kremlin (plus the Great Spy). The other one would be some combination of Steam Power into Assembly Line or Steel into Railroad. I think we saw the power of the State Property path in this game from Dreylin so I won't go into much more detail there. We didn't see anyone go down the second route in this game, but I think Steam Power into Assembly Line could be pretty powerful for an Organized civ with their cheap factories. Maybe. Spiritual/Organized or Philosophical/Organized would be the ones to try that. Alternately, a team could potentially do well on a heavy water map by going Steel -> Railroad and founding Mining Inc corporation. Pindicator kind of went that route in this game, but not really. That would open up drydocks and ironclads for an early naval lead, then machine guns for virtually impregnable defense at Railroad tech, plus the railroad mobility, plus the Mining Inc production bonus. And then you're one tech away from Combustion while no one else is likely even close. On a heavy naval map, you could be in a really strong position there.

I honestly don't know if we would have tried to change our tech path if we tried doing it again. We weren't going to be first to Communism in this game, so I don't think our early Steam Power was a bad play. We got a lot of mileage out of that tech between the worker bonus and the ability to put up early levees. In a game where there wasn't such excellent levee terrain at the capital, I would definitely downgrade the early Steam Power rush. Fortunately, I think that the Industrial era choices are varied enough that there isn't a single correct path - obviously assuming that one team can't double up on the Taj Mahal -> Communism Great Spy -> Kremlin path that Dreylin did here. If that's available then yes, it's the best choice. I have a feeling that Gandhi + Khmer will not be available in future Industrial games to abuse that particular path...

3) How would you rank the industrial start National Wonders by importance? It seems like the ones based on commerce are much less good than normal due to lack of cottage cheese.

We have not really been building the national wonders thus far, and I don't have strong feelings on this issue. Probably something we should have been focusing on more, to be honest. Iron Works and West Point are probably the best, both of which we're planning to put in Haber Process. Oxford and Wall Street are both heavily devalued because of their building requirements (which are non-issues in normal games but major pains here) and the fact that no one has been building cottages. I think all the top teams realized that there just wasn't enough time in this game to develop cottages, and therefore the traditional commercial multiplier buildings are a lot weaker. (We are only 74 turns into this game, believe it or not. I still maintain that we're unlikely to get too far past 100 turns before someone wins.)

What else is there? Heroic Epic, National Epic, and Moai Statues are disabled for this start. Forbidden Palace is useless with everyone running State Property. I can't see Global Theatre or Hermitage doing too much. Mount Rushmore is useful enough that we'll build it somewhere once our stone is connected; it's probably a 2t build in Spinning Jenny with stone. If we ever get Medicine tech, we'll build Red Cross somewhere for fun. I think that's just about everything for national wonders.

The biggest thing that I would do differently is spend more time in Slavery civic and whip out a few more settlers. We never returned to Slavery civic after the first 5 turns of the game. I underestimated how effective a 3 pop settler whip would be (pop 6 -> pop 3) and we could have expanded faster if we made use of this. Chop a few forests, triple whip, and settlers can be reduced down to roughly 100 production. We lost valuable time by building all of them manually. That's the biggest thing that I learned from this particular game, along with a better sense for valuing the different leader traits.

[scooter]

Wow. I just had myself a moment.

I realized I forgot to offer Donovan peace last turn, which means we're still locked into a turn split. So I logged in to offer him peace. I click his name and... well, turns out the game is paused.



Needless to say we are now diplo-locked.

* I'm pretty sure REM razed Dogs early on in the war. He definitely razed something in the first couple turns.

* Yeah, I think a short stint in OR is probably worth it. It's maybe a tad questionable, but there are enough buildings that we need to likely make it worth it. Bureau definitely seems worth it to me.

* So I think Custom Houses will be worth it in our biggest cities. Steam Engine, Haber, and perhaps Radio, but I'm skeptical it's worthwhile past that. I could have sworn Imperialistic got a bonus on Custom Houses, but I looked it up, and it looks like they don't? Was that an addition to one of the various balance mods or did I hallucinate that bonus?

* A lack of National Epic, Heroic Epic, and Moai are pretty disappointing. I don't quite see the rationale behind leaving those out for Industrial start. Is it just an issue with how everything gets scaled down in cost? Whenever this game ends, I'm hoping we can get a Ren game going as a sequel. I know the Epics are buildable on those. I'm not quite sure about Moai.

[Gawdzak]

I could have sworn Imperialistic got a bonus on Custom Houses, but I looked it up, and it looks like they don't? Was that an addition to one of the various balance mods or did I hallucinate that bonus?

That is a RtR mod change.

[antisocialmunky]

I would actually love to see a Ren game next for comparison.

Speaking of which @Sullla, did you balance the later age starts at the same time or after balancing the tech tree all the way from ancient start when developing Civ 4? Or more simply, was doing the later age starts mostly just figuring what techs and buildings were already done rather than tweaking some techs for the start specifically?

PS. One more thing. I finally got around to reading your PB6 reports and saw this quote:

PB6 spoiler if anyone actually cares...

So the Industrial era shifts the focus of the game from one based around whipping/drafting (production through Food) to one based around actual building (production through... Production!) This de-emphasizes Food and emphasizes the Production stat instead. That's a major plus for our team in this game, as Team 3 has been riding their Food advantage all throughout the game thus far. Their military is almost wholly comprised of draft unit spam, which won't be very practical in the post-Assembly Line world. Drafted rifles are the best use of population in the game: 1 pop for 110 shield unit. Drafted infantry are a very poor tradeoff, as they cost 2 pop and can usually be built in 2-3t with factories/power plants. Advancing to this next tech should allow our "Tall" team strategy to counter the "Wide" team strategy of Team 3 better.

Does this idea apply in industrial games since you start from scratch and don't really have the infrastructure to support the food -> hammers(minus Kremlin + free food shenanigans)? How does this apply to the 6->3 pop settler whips?

PPS. Is there a reading order for PB6? There's like a live blog and really spotty reporting that interleave in some inscrutable way.