[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[Cyneheard]

Totally agreed with all of this. That definitely seems like the way to go. Further down the road we could stick Red Cross in Haber Process. I'm envisioning a late-game final war where that city can very nearly 1-turn Commando Medic1 Mechs (which of course come with free March). That could be a little unfair . Even prior to that, free Medic1 on a lot of units could be very helpful.

That's one way to implement universal healthcare.

Your tax dollars hammers at work!

[Sullla]

* On the air strike issue: yes, I agree that hopefully we'll get some rules clarification on that shortly. It seems laughably unfair that a team could permanently prevent another team from using its own oil resource, which would cripple them in modern warfare. (A team going second could always use workers to reconnect the oil each turn, while a team on the first half of the split could never reconnect its oil before the production phase.) Disallowing air strikes against resource tiles seems fair to me. I mean, it's one thing if you can land actual units to pillage a resource - that's perfectly legit and allows for counterplay against the attackers - but unstoppable air units cutting a resource from 10 tiles away? Silly.

* Cristo Redentor: would be awesome to have, but I expect we have little chance. REM already has Physics and Electricity techs, meaning he only needs Radio to grab the wonder, plus he'll always have research visibility on us. If be some miracle we can get to Radio tech and the wonder is still there, then absolutely. I don't expect that to happen though...

* I really hope that the game lasts long enough for us to be popping out Commando/Medic/March mechanized infantry from Haber Process. That would be so cool.

* We had some good news this turn, about the second-best news possible. REM razed two Dreylin cities:



Both of these cities were in former Donovan territory; here's an old screenshot showing their location:



This is good news in the sense that REM razed both cities rather than capturing, so Dreyling and REM are continuing to trade units without REM claiming additional territory. That's good news for us. The bad news is that REM seems to be winning this war with Dreylin, and he continues to pull ahead. Fortunately Dreylin still has a *LOT* of units on hand, and Dreylin won't be going down easily any time soon. If we're lucky, Dreylin will find somewhere to strike back against REM and continue to inflict pain. We need them to keep going at it for a little longer, just long enough for us to keep teching and then prepare to hit someone else (probably pindicator).

Like I said earlier today, we're getting there, just need another 10 turns or so... I hope we get them.

[antisocialmunky]

Do you have any contingency plans for intervening against REM or even just feinting an invasion by massing transport units and your navy in his recon range (a fleet in being) to pin units to REM's coastal cities? Their war might be zero sum and razes reduce the sum but Dreylin is still losing all the same and the winner of the war will probably grab the free spots anyway.

[scooter]

Turn 329



Antiseptic is out of revolt. It's going to take some serious worker effort to get it up to speed, though, since Dreylin pretty much just used it as a whipping post.



Capital is finishing up the second settler for the south island, and then it'll 1-turn a University and follow that up with Oxford. We've already laid down a few rails here, so we've seen the base production tick up slightly.

Sullla - this is a spot I could see squeaking a great person out of during a stint in Pacifism. With a new health building, we've got a 2F surplus here + 4 tiles that don't produce any food, which means we could run 5 specs without any food deficit. A mild deficit would allow even more. I haven't run the math on how long it would take in Pacifism to get both this and Radio, so it's definitely further down the road, but I think it's our most likely option.



Sullla covered most of the other news for the turn, so there isn't much to add here. I did notice that despite the 66EPs, REM dumped nearly 80EPs into us on this turn (after I pressed enter). So he's definitely still trying to get city visibility on us. Here's a full set of graphs after hitting enter:

Yikes.

Somehow I missed GNP. REM is in a pretty commanding position.



Aspirin (former Sector 19) came out of revolt on turn roll. The Assembly Plant being intact was a huge break for us, and it's going to let this city be productive immediately. First order of business is to get some culture in here.

[scooter]

Here's my official opinion on the air power issue. I don't want to say too much in the tech thread. I've thought about this enough that I doubt my mind will change unless new info comes up. Or someone can convince me how with current login patterns we can make sequential work.

1) Ban any bombing of resources. Or better put: no bombing anything other than units or cities.
2) Revisit the sequential conversion later in the game if/when a couple more players are dead. If it makes sense, swap to that and MAYBE get rid of the rule.

I don't want to say the second portion much in the tech thread, because it could be read as a veiled way of saying "let's kill Donovan, Pindicator, and/or BGN" which isn't fair.

I have no interest in a 1-2-1 setup because, for lack of a better explanation, life is too short. Weakening of air units is a perfectly acceptable drawback to keep this game from morphing into a job, which it would if there had to be some other game phase that purely exists to clean up messes made by bombers.

In a perfect world, sequential is the best solution, but not until there are fewer players. I think this game would probably die if we did that now. Half of the players in the game login during the exact same window every day, and we don't have the luxury of lining those up perfectly. That's why I've concluded that a bombing ban is the least bad option. If we get down to, say, 4 players and we could be reasonably assured of a minimum of 4 turns/week, I'd be very willing to swap to that and unshackle the planes. Of course, changing rules mid-stream may not be tenable, so there's that.

To be clear: I'm not going to quit over any of these three outcomes, but I do feel the other choices may strangle the game enough that quits could happen anyway due to the painfully slow game pace.

[Sullla]

Thanks for the illustrations scooter. In response to some of the discussion going on at the moment:

* You make a good point about generating a Great Person in the capital. That definitely appears to be the best spot along with Radio, and we’ll get some trickling GPP from Oxford when it finishes too. However, there are three issues here. The first is that pulling population off of some of our amazing tile yields is going to hurt a lot in our capital; I don’t exactly fancy dropping an 0/6/1 tile or an 0/4/7 tile for a specialist. It’s going to be painful if we go for the Great Person. Secondly, there’s a real chance that both Radio and Steam Engine could end up producing Great Engineers, which would do us no good for a Golden Age. (Ha – too many Great Engineers! The curse of the Industrial start.) All it would take is one bad dice roll and then we’re in seriously bad shape. Finally, we aren’t close at all to generating a Great Person in the capital. We’re still about 300 GPP short right now; do we really want to spend 10 turns working a bunch of specialists in Pacifism, losing out on those really strong tile yields in our Bureaucracy capital all the while? For what might be a bad dice roll on the Great Person anyway? Well, we might at that, as we would dearly love a second Golden Age late in the game here. I just don’t want to twist ourselves into knots over this and end up doing more harm than good. We can think more about this.

* “Dreylin used the city as little more than a whipping post.” Yep! That pretty much describes all of his cities outside a couple in his original core. I think Dreylin is in pretty bad shape at this point. His whole economy is based on Kremlin-powered whips, and as we’ve been writing since the beginning of the game, whipping eventually starts to get beaten out by natural production. I stated before that I thought the breaking point for natural production was the arrival of factories/coal plants, and this game seems to be confirming that in practice. With the railroads that REM and our team are currently laying down, it’s only getting worse for Dreylin. He did a big whip fest last turn and his civ just can’t keep up. I don’t even want to think about how bad the happiness situation must be over in the Sudric empire. Now Dreylin is still going to be a power player in this game for ages to come, he’s not going to be eliminated any time soon barring something really weird happening. However, I think we’re past the high water mark for Dreylin and the tide is only going to continuing ebbing out to sea. REM has caught Dreylin on Food and we’re not far behind. Meanwhile, that Production bar graph is damning. Pindicator has higher Production than Dreylin now, sheesh.

I don’t think Dreylin has a serious chance to win the game any longer. Not enough production, not enough ability to tech. I’d rate the current winning odds like this:

REM: 70%
Scooter: 20%
Dreylin: 7%
BGN: 2%
Pindicator: 1%
Donovan: 0%

With our odds being poor, but a lot better than any other non-REM entities. I think we’ve pretty decisively put ourselves into second place at this point.

* Speaking of REM… the bar graphs do not provide much in the way of good news. REM is ahead in every category, which is more or less what we knew. Still always a stark reminder to see the actual bar graphs though. Espionage looks horrifying but it’s not quite so bad; REM has been spending 100% of his EP on us for some time now, I suspect ever since he obtained city visibility on Dreylin. If he’s generating 80 EP/turn right now, then we’re just about matching him on our end. We produced 66 EP last turn, and Telegraph was about to finish an intelligence agency at end of turn which added another 16 EP/turn to that. So we should both be producing about the same number of EP going forward, a little bit under 100 EP/turn for both of us. Of course, REM still has a very large advantage in “total EP ever spent against anyone”, and that’s one of the biggest numbers in all the espionage calculations, but at least we’ve stabilized here, and we’re not falling further behind.

I know that REM is still outresearching us at present. We need Dreylin to get in a good attack somewhere, or at least trade a big stack of units in one-for-one fashion to compel REM to build more units. We can’t win the game by hoping to match REM in both military and economy right now, he’s just too far ahead, not to mention ahead in Production to boot. We’ve been pausing military training to divert our production into economy, and that’s been helping our formerly dismal GNP by a lot. But it won’t be enough on our own; we need REM to get punched in the face by Dreylin somewhere to have a realistic chance of catching up. I do think that our “run 100% science at all times” plan will maximize our economic efficiency, and building Oxford is going to help a ton. I just hope that we can get some additional help somewhere from one of the other teams… Maybe BGN will jump into the fray and try to snipe something from REM. We can always dream, right?

* Going back to ASM’s earlier question about intervening against REM: it’s a possibility that we need to have on the table, although I think it’s not our desired outcome. One thing I would support is having some units and ships in a position off to the east of Textile Island, in a place where we can be in position to hit either pindicator or REM (at Silkmoths) if an opportunity would present itself. We can look into the tactical details of this at greater length later. Scooter and I would both like to have destroyers + airships before making another serious attack, or better yet panzers, but we may not have that much time. And I’m sure that someone is writing in the Lurker thread right now that if we don’t intervene to stop REM soon, then the game will be over – and they may very well be correct! Again, so much depends on how well Dreylin is able to make his continued defense. Dreylin and REM are still tied for the Power lead so I’m not terribly concerned yet.

* Finally, on the turn timer issues: I prefer a simpler solution like making a gentleman’s agreement not to air strike resource tiles over the other options being discussed in the Tech thread. Everything else seems a lot more complicated, or a measure which will drag this game out endlessly (splitting this into a Sequential Pitboss with 6 players seems like a recipe for a neverending game). But I’m not the one playing the turns, so I’m content to go with whatever the final decision may be, whether that’s through group consensus or admin decision or whatever.

Also another reminder: I will be leaving on vacation this Thursday and will be traveling throughout the month of July. While I will have a Civ-capable computer with me, my access with be a lot more limited. I was initially hoping this game would be finished before July rolled around, but it turned out that we all survived the Dreylin/OT4E juggernaut and we’re still standing here. I guess I’m not too sad about that, haha.

[Sullla]

Some pictures from pre-Turn 330:



Here's the bad news: REM now has Combustion tech. He is currently has Physics, Electricity, and half of Combustion up on us. REM also just researched Combustion in 3 turns. It's not an especially expensive tech or anything but that is distinctly bad news. Any hopes that we would be the first ones to field an oil-based navy are now dead. Ummm... help?

Since scooter forgot to post the GNP bar graph, here it is:



Note how terribly low our German gray line was for a span in there. That's when we pushed everything into producing units for war, and I think it served us well to do so. Dreylin's potential runaway status was reigned in, and we claimed enough land to produce 6 more cities for ourselves. However, it's hard to ignore how far ahead of us REM's economy is sitting on that graph, even with how deceptive GNP can be as a metric for research strength. Yes, we're making progress - but it still ain't pretty.



The Demos are actually a lot better. Note that our economy is starting to get cranked up, and we can now run a sustainable 1100+ GNP figure. That's with some Wealth builds, of course, but I have no doubts that REM has been doing plenty of Build Wealth/Research himself. We are shockingly close to the lead in Food and Land Area. Unfortunately, to make this research push happen, we've now fallen 800k behind the leader in Power; I'm not sure if that's REM or Dreylin, they are both quite close in soldiers right now. Dreylin, we could really use a successful attack against REM somewhere on the map right now!

Scooter, this will be our last turn in Organized Religion, so I plan to queue up more Hindu missionaries in Power Loom (for Photography) and Dynamite (for a southern island city) after the current two do their work in Zipper/Antiseptic. We are actually pretty close to having libraries/observatories/universities finished across all of our core cities. I also queued up a settler in Pasteurization for the corn location east of the capital which we both agreed was worth settling. We're also going to have to start squeezing some units out of our cities sometime soon; I think we should push to at least Combustion first and probably Physics before we do that though. We need at least a couple of destroyers to ward off REM and airships would be hugely beneficial.

Also, I realized after looking at REM's territory that I've been a bit of a fool with regards to tile improvements. We should be building more windmills for our low-food cities, especially Kaplan Turbine. For some reason I got way too locked into thinking hill tile = mine, and that was pretty dumb. Most of our existing tile improvements are fine, but I'll be working to fix this moving forward. Another little lesson learned - hopefully.

Dreylin is marshaling a lot of cavs and infantry north of Silkmoths. I hope he has some kind of plan there, as we'd love to see REM lose a whole bunch of units. I don't see a good opportunity to attack though, not with REM having rails for mobility now...

[timmy827]

Also, I realized after looking at REM's territory that I've been a bit of a fool with regards to tile improvements. We should be building more windmills for our low-food cities, especially Kaplan Turbine. For some reason I got way too locked into thinking hill tile = mine, and that was pretty dumb.

+1/1/1 is almost always better than +0/2/0. Of course most games you don't start with windmills or the RP boost so understandable. I've been reading this thread most of the way and didn't really think of it (even though I was playing an offline game recently where I spent a lot spare worker turns in the Ren/Ind ages convering mines -> windmills)
it's interesting you're changing tack after RR (when +0/3/0 for mines looks a lot more competetive, especially for larger cities where it's a lot of food to grow and maybe not a good tile to grow onto).

and building Oxford is going to help a ton.

Is it really that strong since you have no cottages? from the pic your capital has 114 BPT, can't see the whole building list but think you have Lib/Uni/Observatory there for +75%, so oxford adds maybe 65 beakers/turn if you can keep 100% science, something like 10% of your current beaker output. Do you have a rough estimate of the total BPT from all the unis/oxford (and thus a payback compared to just building more Research)?

[Sullla]

We don't want windmills everywhere, just in our low-food cities where mines cut into growth too much. We don't have enough worker labor free to replace existing mines all over the place anyway. This is just one of those things that I probably should have spent more time thinking about earlier in the game, ah well.

The picture earlier of our capital:



The city has library and observatory in this screenshot (we are building a university this turn). I'm looking at the math now and I think that's 50 base commerce, multiplied by 50% for Bureaucracy, multiplied by +50% science for library/observatory. Oxford should add about 75 beakers/turn right now, and that's very substantial for an empire making about 650 beakers/turn at max science rate (without using Build Research). Oxford will be further boosted by building a customs house (should add about 6-7 base commerce) and then by researching Electricity for the watermill bonus (worth 8 commerce). They take Oxford up to about 100 beakers/turn in benefit.

So agreed that it's not the same as a cottage cheese capital with a dozen mature towns, but in this game it still qualifies as a pretty big addition. I mean, it's not like our rivals have cottages all over the place either.

[scooter]

Turn played (and rolled), screenshots later. Dreylin and REM are now at peace, which is pretty disappointing combined with the news of REM getting Combustion.