[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[WarriorKnight]

PPS. Is there a reading order for PB6? There's like a live blog and really spotty reporting.

The live blog at Sulla's web site covers the period where Sulla wasn't posting at RB around the middle of the game. Otherwise it's all in the RB thread.

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

+1 I've been seriously considering sponsoring/playing a new Ren game myself when I get some spare time around a month from now. That's not a promise but I would certainly be interested in participating at the very least.

[scooter]

If the Ren game can wait until this is over, I will be in. Unfortunately, it's difficult to predict when this will be over. We're almost 48 hours into this turn and nobody has ended turn, mostly because Dreylin hasn't logged in yet, and everyone is waiting for him to end turn. This game has the makings of a game that could end rather soon or stretch out for quite awhile. Hard to say which it'll be.

[Fluffball]

This game has the makings of a game that could end rather soon or stretch out for quite awhile. Hard to say which it'll be.

If I don't get to see Montezuma lead a Panzer charge, I quit, I just quit.

Also sort of off topic, one of those mediocre news channels like CNN or something did a story on the Aztec death whistle. Part of the story was an audio clip that simulated thousands of Aztecs using the whistles while leading a cavalry charge. I was like, uh, guys, the Aztecs had never even see a horse, pretty sure they didn't have a cavalry division. Maybe lay off the Civ4 for a while, writers.

[scooter]

Turn finally rolled and played, but report is going to have to wait until tomorrow. Hopefully this next turn will take less than 4 days.

[Sullla]

Scooter, we had this offer from Dreylin when I logged into the game:



I did not accept so that we can discuss. Trade routes will be worthless given our recent war, but we may want to provide Dreylin with the ability to move through our territory for tactical advantage. Worth a conversation. (We could also discuss Closing Borders with REM, who is basing his airships in our cities to great advantage right now.)

We also need to figure out our economic plan for these peaceful turns. I have some ideas - can post more on this tomorrow. And we also need to decide where the settler that just finished in Steam Engine is going on the southern island.

REM is looking stronger and stronger right now. He just finished teching Railroad himself, picking it up in 4 turns. We don't have any techs up on him, while he's up Physics and Electricity on us. Not a good sign seeing as how REM is also tops in production, up about 300 production/turn on us in the Demos. And he's also #1 in number of cities count... We probably now need to work with Dreylin against him, heh.

For the record, Dreylin also finally picked up Steel tech this turn. (BGN also finished researching Physics, and pindicator got... Scientific Method?! Yep. He was still missing it.) At least Physics will now be heavily discounted when we go for it next.

[scooter]

Turn 326

Finally got to play my portion of the never-ending turn. Hopefully that was just a one-off.



Donovan immediately accepted peace and immediately re-offered our old rice-for-gold deal. There's no way on earth that a couple food for one city are worth 6gpt, but Donovan is understandably on auto-pilot, so I immediately said sure why not. I suppose I should have checked to see if there's anything else he needs us to sell him.



Seems like Donovan's Zoth city has been officially ceded to Dreylin over here which isn't too surprising.



So this is what I'm going to do with the GG unless Sullla can convince me otherwise. Not super crazy about a Medic3 in our situation. Primarily because the only land units that can get enough XP to unlock West Point are Infantry, so it'll be hard to keep it from defending in a situation where we wouldn't necessarily want it to defend. By giving it to a 10xp Frigate, we unlock West Point, but more importantly we'll get a free upgrade to a super-Destroyer the minute we get Combustion. That seems pretty valuable to me.

Still time left to convince me of an alternate plan.



Bureau and OR it is.



We have Infantry, Factories, Coal Plants, but almost no Libraries. LEARNIN' TIME.



So I'm thinking we ought to consider attacking Pindicator in the future. Pretty much all his cities are defended like this. Now, he does have Assembly Line, Railroad, and he's a tech away from either Destroyers or Airships, so this is perhaps a little further down the road. We definitely don't want to fight him at tech parity given his possession of Boudica. But at this stage, I think he's fallen behind even BGN, and more importantly he's the only weak player we neighbor. It's either this or try to attack REM, and we don't have access to much REM land anyway.



I'm thinking we tech something like this: Combustion-Physics-Electricity-Industrialism, then we go all-in on military before REM gets too far away. The Panzers will be nice, and so will be the Marines. The combination of the two would allow us to invade amazingly fast. The war would 1) give us enough land to win and 2) give us a few more GGs, which would open up the gates to a possible commando factory, which gives us a tool to possibly extract a concession if the pindicator invasion somehow goes amazingly well.

Alternatively, we go for Flight right after Combustion/Physics and do the thing with Fighters. That honestly might even be better. We saw how great Airships were...



Pindicator has two choices here. He could keep teching and have a tiny military, or he could do a wave of military building, and we'll be ahead of him in tech. Either way, we would be well-positioned. He's also super checked-out of the game. BGN seems to at least be trying - he's scrounged his way up to 14 cities or so and industrialized them.

Any thoughts here?



Now I do think our GNP is vaguely undersold by our lack of culture and ep-producing buildings, but yeah, it's still not especially pretty.



* Rails are going up in a few places right now.

* We settle the south city T328. I'll have more on that in a few minutes.

[scooter]

Ok, going back to Sullla's image here:



Screw it, let's go for the double-city setup. We need cities. Now, I fully expect Dreylin to be racing us for this spot. That means if we settle red, he might take his settler and plop it on yellow. That means we need to settle yellow first, which we can definitely do. Might as well take advantage of the peace treaty. We can go straight onto another settler at Steam Engine next, and we have tons of units in the area for defense. Having airships in yellow will let us see literally all of Dreylin's land, which will let us see very easily anything funny incoming. So Sullla - unless you've changed your mind, let's go with your suggested plan here. We can load up on the Galleon this upcoming turn, and then move the Galleon to the fort tile. The following turn the settler can get to the silver in 5 moves (everything is roaded), leaving just enough left to settle the city.

[Sullla]

That turn definitely took forever! However, it seemed like Dreylin was having some issues with sickness in his family, and I don't think anyone wanted him to prioritze his Civ turns over that. The one comment that I will make is that I think too many of our players are trying to join multiple Pitboss games at once, and I think that's a recipe for trouble from a scheduling perspective. Dreylin's in two games, OT4E is in three games, REM's in three games, BGN is in at least two games, Donovan's in three games, pindicator was in two games, abandoned one of them, and is now joining another one... I'm reminded of when people would overcommit and sign up for too many succession games at once back in the day, and then everything would wind up getting delayed as they had to rush through a turnset for three games at once. Anyway, hopefully we'll be getting back to a more normal schedule now.

First I'll repond to scooter's posts from yesterday's turn, and then I'll get to some larger economic thoughts:

* I'm okay with the decision to use the Great General on a 10 XP frigate for a free destroyer upgrade. I still think that having a Medic III unit on hand for fast healing is a stronger choice, however; that frigate is going to become something like a Combat II/Navigation II destroyer, so the only real benefit is the free upgrade. My feeling is that having a unit on hand that can heal all our nearby units at double the normal speed is much more valuable than getting a single free upgrade of a destroyer. But the main thing for me is just to use the actual promotions and unlock West Point before something goes terribly wrong with that Great General. I'm always afraid of an enemy unit somehow appearing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

* I think we went from 1 library in our whole empire to 8 libraries last turn. LEARNIN TIME indeed!

* Regarding pindicator: I also think that an attack against him is looking more and more likely down the road. Pindicator has been so checked out in this game, playing a whole bunch of 5 minute turns recently, that I think he would fold pretty quickly. Scooter's correct that pindicator can either tech or build units, but he can't do both. Pindicator's power is by far the lowest amongst the non-Donovan entities in this game, and his research rate has been poor the whole game. I mean, he has Railroad and Assembly Line techs, but he only just picked up Scientific Method this turn. And that's with no Fascism or Communism either - ouch.

I agree that our current best plan seems to be teching to Combustion, then Physics -> Electricity -> Industrialism, followed by building panzers and going for the jugular against pindicator. My fear is not pindicator himself in this scenario but rather Dreylin and REM; we would have to be very careful to avoid getting attacked by one of them while making a move. I don't think we can count on the two of them remaining locked in war indefinitely. So that's the real trick: how can we attack and conquer some or all of pindicator without getting hit by Dreyin/REM? I have no answer to that question. We'll have to figure this out as we go. I agree that we would like to get some more combat experience to produce two more Great Generals for our potential commando factory.

* I don't think we need to go for Flight in the immediate future. Yes, fighters would be really nice to have, but the truth is that airships can do most of what they do without requiring us to research an expensive side tech. (Flight is one of the very few techs in the game with no prerequisite bonus, which causes it to be effectively 20% more expensive than it looks.) Fighters can intercept enemy planes, although that only stops air strikes and air bombardment, not recon missions. Fighters can deal more damage to enemy units, reducing them to 50% of their max health, while I believe that airships can only reduce them to 80% of max health. And fighters can also reduce city cultural defenses, which airships can't do... but on a map where ships can so easily bombard out city defenses, that's a lot less valuable. Anyway, we definitely will want planes eventually, however fighters are an incremental upgrade over airships, while tanks represent a giant leap forward in offensive technology. I definitely say Industrialism before Flight.

Normally, we might also want Artillery tech in there somewhere. Once again though, on a map where we'll be attacking amphibiously off ships most of the time, artillery units are significantly nerfed due to their need to land before attacking. Artillery will be great to sit in our territory and counterattack against someone trying to hit us, less effective if trying to attack someone else. I'm never quite sure how to value Artillery as a technology. I think going for our panzers first makes more sense though.

* Regarding the cities on the southern island, I am fine with the cheeky double city plan. Going to be an absolute nightmare to defend, but whatever, we have railroads and hopefully Dreylin has other targets on his mind. I'm genuinely wondering if we may be able to cultivate Dreylin as an ally against REM at this point. He did offer the Open Borders and resource trade to us. And strategically, Dreylin attacking our team would 100% end the game and result in REM winning. I think Dreylin and OT4E are very savvy players, surely they must realize the same thing. What do you think scooter? Should we try to Open Borders with Dreylin and initiate potential cooperation? Do we want to think about Closing Borders with REM? It would surely hurt REM but it would probably hurt us just as much, especially if we later went to war with pindicator. But if we could replace those trade routes with Dreylin trade routes, after enough time (30 turns) the war penalty having worn off... I'm not sure. Lots of things to think about. Would love to get your thoughts on these issues when you're not exhausted.

Now, let me get into a discussion of how to rescue our economy. The Industrial era is a different beast from your normal game, with our team having oodles of production without much in the way of traditional commerce. We have exactly zero cottages in our territory, and REM/Dreylin appear to be in pretty much the same boat. With the ability to inject huge quantities of money or beakers into our economy via Build Wealth/Research, we can do some unusual stuff here. I was thinking about this for the last few days, and here's my best effort at optimizing.

- For starters, we want to build custom houses in our high population cities. Our largest cities attract the trade routes from the largest cities of other nations, which makes them the most valuable ones to get boosted by custom houses. I think the best trade routes are worth 1.8 commerce right now at a base rate, which will turn into 3.6 commerce with the +100% bonus fromthe custom house. Spinning Jenny has three of these trade routes, so that's another 5.4 base commerce - effectively like getting a gems tile for free each turn. Very much worth it. While I don't think it's worthwhile to put custom houses in all our cities, the largest ones should definitely do so.

- With Build Research/Wealth, we can effectively run the slider at any setting that we want. In order to do this most efficiently, we should probably be running at either 100% science or 100% wealth at all times, which will allow us to skip all of the building multipliers of one type: either skip all the wealth buildings or skip all the research buildings. I don't think we have time to do both sets. Therefore I came to this conclusion: we should construct the research multiplier buildings and set up enough Wealth builds to run 100% science at all times. It should be very possible to pull this off. Our current expenses are a little over 300 gold/turn at 100% science, which sounds like a lot. However, we produce just over 1000 production/turn - we can divert some of our smaller cities into balancing the budget and still have something like 700 production/turn left over! I believe that we produce roughly 400 base commerce/turn at the moment; if we build libraries and observatories all over the place, along with 6 universities for Oxford, we should be able to reach a global +50% science multiplier. That would take us up to roughly 600 beakers/turn, which is not even counting the beakers from Representation specialists, which are adding another 100 beakers/turn right now. OK, so that would get us to something like 600-700 beakers/turn, at a budget-neutral rate. Not bad.

But wait, it gets better than that! We still have the rest of our manufacturing left over, that other 700 production/turn. We could use it to build units to gear up for war, or alternately, we could channel it back into science via Build Research. That adds another 700 beakers/turn if we want to push for a key tech. Now we're pushing 1500 beakers/turn, before modifiers, and that's at a budget-neutral rate, not the deficit splurge that we were doing previously. We could push even higher if necessary by burning through the treasury. (It's kind of amazing that we were able to get 1200 beakers/turn with zero libraries and other science buildings across our empire a few turns ago.) Anyway, the real key is to avoid wasting the commerce multipliers. Build only the research modifiers and then sit permanently at 100% science via Wealth builds. I think that's the most efficient way to play this moving forward, now that we have the industrial base.

I considered the alternate case: running 100% wealth and then using Build Research for science. The problem here is that we don't actually want to pile up a massive amount of gold. When I tried to turn this into a practical exercise, we just ended up with thousands and thousands of gold, since any time that we weren't using Build Research our economy would just pile up gold rather useless. In order to use that money, we had to turn science back on, and then the gold multiplier buildings were useless. So even though every city starts with a marketplace for free, I don't think the reverse case makes sense. We want to be at 100% science permanently and use Build Wealth to balance the economy, supplemented by Build Research while pushing for key techs - not the other way around.

I think we need a few more turns of building libraries and observatories before setting this in motion. While we're in Organized Religion, we might as well use the +25% bonus. We'll also need to get six universities in place so that we can unlock Oxford University; I'm thinking Steam Power, Haber Process, Spinning Jenny, Radio, and Pasteurization for sure. I'll have to look in-game to see if there's another location that fits for the last city. Oxford itself should probably go in the capital to benefit from Bureaucracy, plus there's a bunch of watermills there which will soon be benefitting from Electricity's bonus commerce. As far as what cities should build Wealth, Telegraph is the perfect candidate: poor commercial potential due to being inland, which means no need to waste time on additional science multiplier buildings. I'll poke around and try to figure out which other cities we should pick, probably some of the smaller ones that can manage 50 production/turn, enough to pay a good chunk of money via Build Wealth but not enough to turn out modern units quickly.

- We should also use the time in Organize Religion to finish spreading the faith to our remaining cities. I'll try to queue up a few missionaries for the hard to reach island cities.

- Finally, we also want to have enough espionage points (EPs) to counter REM's espionage dominance. The best way to do this is to stack up the espionage multipliers in individual cities. Haber Process is about to finish this by building an intelligence agency this turn. It already has the jail and security bureau, which all together will add up to 40 EP/turn. Our entire civ has been producing 4-10 EP/turn for most of the game, so that should give you an idea of the benefits there. The capital is another place where we want to build the full trio, since we also get 4 EP/turn from the Palace. It already has the jail done. I'll probably try to slip in the jail/intelligence agency combo in some other high production cities when we get an opportunity to do so. It's important to invest at least some resources into espionage so that we can see REM's bar graphs and prevent him from ever getting city visibility on us. If REM gets too big of an advantage, his spies will be able to walk around with impunity in our territory, never getting caught. With luck, we'll also be able to get research visibility on the other teams, if not REM, and glean more valuable information that way. REM's espionage has been very helpful to him throughout this game, and we need to make at least a small investment to counter.

Whew. Apologies for the wall of text, I am away from a Civ computer right now which prevents me from illustrating with pictures. Hopefully there's some good stuff in here to digest

[rho21]

I agree that our current best plan seems to be teching to Combustion, then Physics -> Electricity -> Industrialism, followed by building panzers and going for the jugular against pindicator. My fear is not pindicator himself in this scenario but rather Dreylin and REM; we would have to be very careful to avoid getting attacked by one of them while making a move. I don't think we can count on the two of them remaining locked in war indefinitely. So that's the real trick: how can we attack and conquer some or all of pindicator without getting hit by Dreyin/REM? I have no answer to that question. We'll have to figure this out as we go.

One obvious answer to this is to try an attack ASAP (presumably for only a partial conquest), while they're still at war. It's a big risk to take, though, and it would cost you a lot of trade route income.

A question I'd be interested in your estimate for: if you wait for Panzers, what chance is there that one of the other leading teams will have already attacked Pindicator? Is a defensive pact a useful thing to stop this?

Despite these thoughts, I'm in favour of the longer term attack plan. I'm slightly more optimistic about the chance of attacking Pindicator without an immediate REM / Dreylin counterattack. You don't currently have a huge border with REM, and as you say Dreylin attacking you would be a ticket to an REM victory. I suppose it's possible they might work together if you looked like getting big enough. Is it plausible that attacking Pindicator would just result in REM joining in and trying to steal as much territory as possible?

[scooter]

Lots to unpack here!

* I'm okay with the decision to use the Great General on a 10 XP frigate for a free destroyer upgrade. I still think that having a Medic III unit on hand for fast healing is a stronger choice, however; that frigate is going to become something like a Combat II/Navigation II destroyer, so the only real benefit is the free upgrade. My feeling is that having a unit on hand that can heal all our nearby units at double the normal speed is much more valuable than getting a single free upgrade of a destroyer. But the main thing for me is just to use the actual promotions and unlock West Point before something goes terribly wrong with that Great General. I'm always afraid of an enemy unit somehow appearing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I'll take another look. I'm just not super crazy about a Medic3 that's likely to be a stack defender due to promos. That may well still be worth it. Plus we could tack on Morale which would be handy on an Infantry.

* Regarding pindicator: I also think that an attack against him is looking more and more likely down the road.

<snip>

My fear is not pindicator himself in this scenario but rather Dreylin and REM; we would have to be very careful to avoid getting attacked by one of them while making a move. I don't think we can count on the two of them remaining locked in war indefinitely. So that's the real trick: how can we attack and conquer some or all of pindicator without getting hit by Dreyin/REM? I have no answer to that question. We'll have to figure this out as we go. I agree that we would like to get some more combat experience to produce two more Great Generals for our potential commando factory.

So part of the benefit of swapping the game leader from Dreylin to REM is that this is easier than it sounds. Metagaming time. Rho touched on this a little bit in his post, but let's expand on this.

In my mind, whenever there's a clear leader, 2nd and 3rd place do not want to attack each other. All that does is hand the game to 1st place, and they won't want to do that unless there's some hardcore bad blood involved. That said, 1st place is perfectly happy to opportunistically stab either 2nd or 3rd place if the opportunity arises. They don't want to encourage a 2v1, but if, say, 2nd place is about to make a big gain elsewhere and they can bring them to their knees with a backdoor attack, 1st place gains a lot by doing so. Dreylin being the runaway was such a huge danger to us because our front with him was completely insane.



Probably 75% of our land borders Dreylin. If Dreylin has motivation to opportunistically attack us to prevent us from gaining land (like he did earlier being in 1st place), he has all the opportunity in the world. This was a big part of the reason we chose not to attack pindicator earlier. Pindicator's land is the one place Dreylin isn't, so attacking him while fending off Dreylin would have been a nightmare.

The good news is now the story is different. Dreylin has no motivation to attack us because doing so would likely hand the game to REM. REM is the one with motivation to possibly attack us, but his opportunity to do so is drastically lower. A wider shot from a few turns ago:



REM has just two cities on the coast of waters we inhabit. Silkmoths isn't on the coast, but I'm also not so sure he's going to be able to hold that from Dreylin. If he loses that, he'll have no route to attack us via land at all.
His only chance will be on the sea, and fortunately it's the same sea where our navy/army would be anyway if we were to attack pindicator. There's no stabbing us in the back while we fight on the other side of our territory in this scenario. The only danger REM could pose is contesting pindicator's other land and trying to take some from us and force a conflict on land that way. If that happens, I'm good with that, because:

1) It means our invasion of pindicator is successful and we've gained more land.
2) It means REM still stays slightly ahead of us which deters Dreylin from attacking us.

Basically the gist of it is that the gamestate deters Dreylin from attacking us, and the geography deters REM from attacking us. (This is the same reason I haven't seriously considered turning around and attacking REM the minute we signed peace with Dreylin where normally I would be more tempted.) With that in mind, we have a unique window here to possibly take advantage of that. It's entirely possible Dreylin decides to stab us anyway and truly hand the game to REM (or maybe he can execute it so well that it does help him), but the only way we wrangle our way into a winning position is by taking some risks.

* Regarding the cities on the southern island, I am fine with the cheeky double city plan. Going to be an absolute nightmare to defend, but whatever, we have railroads and hopefully Dreylin has other targets on his mind. I'm genuinely wondering if we may be able to cultivate Dreylin as an ally against REM at this point. He did offer the Open Borders and resource trade to us. And strategically, Dreylin attacking our team would 100% end the game and result in REM winning. I think Dreylin and OT4E are very savvy players, surely they must realize the same thing. What do you think scooter? Should we try to Open Borders with Dreylin and initiate potential cooperation? Do we want to think about Closing Borders with REM? It would surely hurt REM but it would probably hurt us just as much, especially if we later went to war with pindicator. But if we could replace those trade routes with Dreylin trade routes, after enough time (30 turns) the war penalty having worn off... I'm not sure. Lots of things to think about. Would love to get your thoughts on these issues when you're not exhausted.

I addressed a fair bit of this above, but at the very least yes, we should definitely sign OB with Dreylin. At minimum it'll help him against REM, and that's something we both benefit from. I'm on the fence about canceling OB with REM, but obviously the idea will grow more attractive as our routes with Dreylin recover. I'm tempted to offer Dreylin some sort of gold-gold type deal to signal we don't plan to attack him when peace is up. I don't want him trying to get out of the REM war in 5-6T for fear of renewing the 2v1.


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I won't quote all the economic stuff, but I'm definitely in agreement on all that. We can't afford to waste time on the gold multipliers, so it makes sense to try to be efficient with what little natural commerce we have. There's also the additional benefit of making Free Religion more useful.