[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[scooter]

Turn 330

I logged in to see a defense pact offer from BGN. I can't think of a reason it's worthwhile, so I declined. Would rather not trash trade routes unnecessarily.





The crazy thing is he's still cranking out units unlike us. So he's out-teching us while building military. I'm slightly concerned.



Unfortunately with this peace he's going to nab another city too it looks like. That's just too easy.



At turn roll I saw him complete a Transport too along with another settler. I don't see where he would need a settler currently, so I fear he's about to go wreck either BGN or Pindicator.

The painful part is that we can't do a whole lot about it. I started shuffling a few units and boats towards the REM/Pindicator area so that once Combustion rolls in we could possibly threaten a few cities if we needed to, but we have so many units tied down on Dreylin fronts that there's only so much we can do. REM has the luxury of having most of his borders secured by much weaker players while we have an enormous front with Dreylin.



It took 5 turns to drop this 2%, so it'll be a little longer before we're dying for culture, but this is just a reminder that we need to keep an eye on this. We can always slip in a SPI temple just to stave this off until we capture those pindicator cities.



This tile on the other hand we are almost certainly going to lose. I suppose we could chop in some cultural buildings, but he's just got more to work with here.



If Dreylin decides to revenge-attack us in 5 turns, it's probably concession time. I really don't think he will, but REM's lead is large enough that setbacks can't really be afforded.

If REM manages to use this peace to gobble up some land before we can, I don't see a path to victory. Any thoughts?

[scooter]

On a lighter note. (bottom-to-top)

6/29/16 12:08 am Dreylin Score decreased to 2119
6/29/16 12:08 am Donovan Zoi Score increased to 1102
6/29/16 12:06 am Donovan Zoi Logged in

Donovan's never going to be free of this game.

I also genuinely have no idea how that happened considering Dreylin got peace with REM.

[Sullla]

Some thoughts on scooter's post and then some pictures from early Turn 331.

* I agree that there's no reason for us to sign a Defensive Pact right now. Trade routes are simply too valuable to lose them without us having a say in the matter. If REM decides to go for a conquest of BGN, then we'll probably make some kind of move in response, but we want to be the ones having a choice, not leave things up to an auto-war declaration. I also don't think that signing a Defensive Pact with BGN would actually deter REM from acting if he's already made up his mind to attack, for what that's worth.

* So let's talk about REM. He's going to found at least one more city to the northeast of Zipper, and I'll bet that he has space for another city or two around the map in former Dreylin territory. We are actually pretty close to REM right now in city count; I think he has 23 cities right now and we're about to plant #21 this turn, with another filler going to the unused corn resource near the capital for a potential #22. We are also less than 10 tiles away from having the lead in Land area right now. That means if this were a static map, we'd be in pretty decent shape vis a vis REM. However, the problem as scooter posted last night is that REM was able to continue building military for the last five turns while we were forced to detour for economy. REM is now the city count leader and the production leader and the tech leader and the military power leader. This is clearly not good news for us or the rest of the game.

I agree with scooter that there's not a terrible amount that we can do in the next few turns. We should continue shifting some of our units over towards the east, where they will be in a position to strike at either pindicator or (heaven forbid) REM if conflict breaks out. Unfortunately, we have to keep most of our forces stationed along our enormous border with Dreylin, which has always been a problem for us. REM had the good fortune to land a starting position surrounded by Gaspar, Donovan, BGN, and pindicator: what proved to be all of the game's weakest teams. We've been relatively lucky in this game so far with neighbors, but Dreylin has caused a lot of headaches.

I also agree that if Dreylin decides to attack us when the current peace treaty wears off we might as well concede the game to REM. We need to keep enough forces around so that Dreylin stays honest, but there's no need to go crazy buildings units to defend against a full force assault. I agree that Dreylin/OT4E are smart enough to know that attacking us right now ends the game. It would also be a bit silly to invade a team that has rails for defensive mobility, plus machine guns, plus oil-based ships. Then again, I also don't see much of an alternate path for Dreylin. Pause and focus on the economy for a bit, perhaps? That might be the smartest course. Dreylin has a massive army, but it's getting increasingly outdated technologically, and his team is essentially out of soft targets to hit. Maybe Dreylin just finally kills off Donovan, although it appears that Donovan just took one of his cities, so who knows?

* Big picture strategy thoughts: much as I dislike having our fate out of our hands, I think we need to play reactively for the moment. We can't clash with REM head-on, we will simply lose. We also can't sit back and compete with REM in a purely economic battle, as he has the superior Statue of Liberty + Organized combo, not to mention he's about 2.5 techs ahead. That means we need... something else. We basically need some kind of exterior event, REM making a mistake or another team providing us with an opportunity. I suggest that we keep our heads down and be ready to react to events elsewhere on the map. Build some destroyers starting next turn once our oil comes online, build a fleet of airships for vision once we have Physics, and otherwise mostly keep teching.

Our tentative longterm goal should be an invasion of pindicator with tanks. Since pindicator has Assembly Line, Railroad, and Combustion techs, we currently have no tech lead on him. I don't think attacking him with the same generation of military tech would be a good idea, especially because that would be an open invitation for REM or Dreylin to come smack us while our military is otherwise occupied. We want to be the ones jumping into an existing war to vulture away the spoils - the same coup that we managed to pull in the REM/Dreylin conflict. And the one piece of good news is that our economy really is humming along now, which I'll detail more in a minute below. We're the only ones that can tech at roughly the same pace as REM. Let's push for tanks while being prepared to jump into an existing war if the moment looks ripe.

Now for some images from the current turn (T331):



A quick word about Zipper here. I think that we may actually have a chance to hold this city's second ring away from REM, and even if not, the pigs resource is worth contesting. We should Build Culture in the city this turn and worth the pigs + grassland workshop tiles. With religion present, that should get us to 6 culture/turn, which might be enough to hold the pigs. I think the tile was 4% our team versus 5% REM last turn, which means that it's pretty close. (We held on to the tile due to the wonky way in which tiles get assigned culturally; I believe the tile gets assigned first, then afterwards the culture for the turn gets added.) I'll also have some of the workers in the area try to chop out a theatre or do something else to provide more culture. More population for working more specialists would also help a lot. Those two contested tiles are very important both for city development purposes and defensive purposes, and worth emphasizing.



Look at this, apparently we had enough overflow saved up from our university build that we can 1-turn Oxford University. Not bad at all. I'm even more amused that this was an accidental result and not set up ahead of time. Well, I guess that does happen occasionally. We should still be able to complete the wonder even after swapping out of Organized Religion, possibly with the need for an Engineer specialist. It's close but I think the math works out that we get the national wonder done without the 25% bonus.

Scooter, a little note here that we should swap into Free Religion civic this turn. Organized Religion was absolutely worth it, and we got a great 5 turns worth of use out of it. We're completing most of our buildings now, however, so time to pop into a cheaper civic that also boosts research by 10%.

I realize looking at these screenshots now that I apparently managed to cover up the beaker output of our civ in all of them. Uh, sorry about that! We are hitting about 865 beakers/turn right now, and Oxford should add a good 75 beakers to that next turn. This is at 100% science of course, although Wealth builds allow us to run that pretty much indefinitely now. It's going to be a hard call on how much of our production to allocate into science/wealth versus how much to put into military. I probably lean more towards the economy route and getting to tanks sooner, not least because Electricity tech is on the way and will be very helpful for us with the windmill/watermill bonus. I also think we have to take some risks while playing right now, and that means leaning on economy to catch up to REM while hoping we don't get blindsided by an attack.

REM picked up 400 gold last turn at presumably 0% science. No clue how many Wealth builds he was running along with that. I wonder where he'll head next; probably Industrialism to open up his own tanks now that he has oil unlocked. Depending on how aggressive we are with Wealth/Research builds, we're looking at roughly 1 turn to finish Combustion, 2-3 turns for Physics, and then 3-4 turns for Electricity. Probably 7 total turns to reach the point where REM is right now. That's a significant hole in a game this late on the tech tree, sadly.



There's better news when it comes to espionage. Our investment has paid off and we can finally see the bar graphs of every team for the first time in the whole game. They generally show REM continuing to dominate and BGN making an amazing recovery from his early game disastrous start. BGN has no chance of winning but at least he's a legitimate competitor right now, a far contrast from being so far behind. Now that we have bar graphs with everyone, I think we should start getting research visibility next, start with Dreylin. My thought is to spend enough EP to get tech visibility on Dreylin, pindicator, and BGN (leaving out Donovan who is dying and REM who requires too many EP) and then we can decide what to do from there. We can get city visibility on Dreylin pretty easily if we want it. However, it might be better to keep spending against REM to deny him city visibility against us and possibly get his research visibility. Any thoughts here scooter?



Early turn Demos are... pretty encouraging? Our recent span of peace has done amazing things for the economy, and we are temporarily the leaders in GNP. That number should only get better after we swap into Free Religion. The real test, of course, will be what REM is getting when he turns research back on this turn or next turn. I still think that with Oxford finishing we have a pretty good chance to be competitive with REM on research, at least so long as we have some of our cities feeding Wealth into the economy to keep us at a permanent 100% science. The real boost is going to be in about 5 turns when the capital finishes Iron Works and then plows 200 beakers/gold per turn into our economy via Build Research/Wealth. Hopefully that will allow us to catch up at least a little bit.

We're roughly keeping pace with REM when it comes to Production; we're now at 80% of his number, which I think is slightly closer than it used to be. We are really closing the gap in Food and Land Area, where the top spot is with reach. Military is the one bugaboo stat that keeps me up at night, hoping that we're not about to be invaded by either one of Dreylin or REM's huge armies. That is the one fragile aspect of all this. We absolutely had to stop building units and rescue our economy or REM was going to get unreachably far ahead, but we are running a risk to do so.

This certainly turned into a long enough post. My one regret about leaving for vacation tomorrow is that I won't have as much time to devote to this game. It's been such a fun journey, and I hope the ride keep going a while longer. We haven't gotten the chance to hit anyone with our panzers yet!

[scooter]

Yeah, I just don't see anything that we can do right this minute. Our number of spare units is just too small - almost all of our power is tied up in either 1) city defenders by Dreylin and 2) boats that are laughed off by Destroyers.

Once we can get a few Destroyers out on the eastern waters, I can set some Galleons/Transports up to force him to defend himself more, but we can't really do that right now because he could just effortlessly kill any boats we put out there.

I think REM is going to attack either pindicator or BGN very soon. If he attacks BGN, we probably need to try to burn some of REM's backline cities that border us. If he attacks Pindicator, we need to figure out the right way to approach that.

There's better news when it comes to espionage. Our investment has paid off and we can finally see the bar graphs of every team for the first time in the whole game. They generally show REM continuing to dominate and BGN making an amazing recovery from his early game disastrous start. BGN has no chance of winning but at least he's a legitimate competitor right now, a far contrast from being so far behind. Now that we have bar graphs with everyone, I think we should start getting research visibility next, start with Dreylin. My thought is to spend enough EP to get tech visibility on Dreylin, pindicator, and BGN (leaving out Donovan who is dying and REM who requires too many EP) and then we can decide what to do from there. We can get city visibility on Dreylin pretty easily if we want it. However, it might be better to keep spending against REM to deny him city visibility against us and possibly get his research visibility. Any thoughts here scooter?

Do you know the formula to figure out if REM has city visibility on us or not? That's my main concern. I don't want to shift EPs away from him if doing so will let him see everything.

[Sullla]

Here is the formula:

Passive Missions
Base Factor * (100+How much they have against you)

Demographics=0.3
City Visibility=1.2
Investigate=2
See Research=0.75

We should be able to figure out what REM needs by working backwards from this. I can check in-game tonight.

[taotao]

Here is the formula:

Passive Missions
Base Factor * (100+How much they have against you)

Demographics=0.3
City Visibility=1.2
Investigate=2
See Research=0.75

We should be able to figure out what REM needs by working backwards from this. I can check in-game tonight.

That might be the base of the formula, but there has to be a distance factor or something as well, as different cities require different amounts of ep for visibility...

[scooter]

Turn 331

Well this turn ended up being fairly unconventional. Hopefully Sullla won't be too horrified.



Ooooookay, REM is definitely attacking Pindicator very, very soon. He's got several boats lined up here. I decided we have no choice but to react here. A couple more shots:





I missed another screenshot where there were more units lining up, but suffice it to say it seems pretty obvious that REM is going to hit pindicator.

I had already started shifting things this way, but I decided we've got to intervene here. We need to be setup to pressure REM here in the same way he pressured Dreylin as Dreylin tried to complete his Donovan conquest.

I also decided I need to do whatever I can to convince Dreylin to at bare minimum leave us alone when peace expires in 4 turns. So here's my stab at it.



I sent this to signal something resembling a 20T NAP, but I decided to one-up that.



I GIFTED him a unit. A medic unit, specifically. I'm hoping there's some "repair the relationship" symbolism here. This may seem pretty extreme, but if it keeps him from attacking us in 4T, it'll be the most worthwhile unit loss we've had all game. Who knows, maybe he'll return it. I'm operating under the assumption here that him attacking us in 4T is GG anyway, so why not go all-in to make it happen?



I also swapped a bunch of builds around to queue up 4 Frigates that will auto upgrade to Destroyers end of turn. Only 2 of them will complete unfortunately, but it's better than nothing. REM has just 1 Destroyer on the waters by us, so I'm hopeful we can control these waters quickly.



It's not much, but I loaded up a couple Galleons up here. They can't actually do anything next turn since the only tile it can reach (SW of Yaks) is covered by 3 boats with a Destroyer behind it. My thinking here isn't so much about actually attacking anything (although I'll happily burn something if we can), but to force REM to defend himself up here. I believe I can add an additional Galleon next turn.



3 nearly full Galleons down here. My thinking is to try to defend pindicator with these units. I can take advantage of his rail network and cultural borders to make things difficult on REM if needed.

To make this all happen, I've shuffled some units from our western border eastward. All our Dreylin borders are still defended, but definitely more lightly than I'd like. We've got 4 turns to rectify this, but I'm hoping the diplomacy attempts above will help too.



More diplomacy! I wanted pindicator to know I'm trying to defend him here. I was afraid he'd see boats lining up and think I was just going to pile on, which I don't think is the right choice for us right now. REM has more units and is better positioned, so he'd surely come out ahead. I'd rather scare him into backing off (or damage him badly while he invades) and reserve pindicator for our own needs later. Anyway, I'm hoping this message allows pindicator to commit all his units east without fear of a knife in the back. (Not for awhile anyway, hah.)

So that's the gist of my plan. Sorry Sullla for not taking the time to discuss this, but it looked pretty obvious on login what REM is up to, and this seems like exactly the type of thing we need to be reacting to. If REM takes this land without much of a fight, it's definitely game over. It's a tightrope here. If we stay out, I think it's probably game over. If our commitment to intervening draws Dreylin in against us, it's probably game over.

-------

Alright, a few boring domestic things.



I nearly neglected to mention that BGN and Pindicator signed a defensive pact, which honestly is pretty good news. There's a good chance REM may back off when he sees attacking may result in a 3v1. That would be a pretty good outcome I think.

Anyway, I offered OB to Donovan. I'm vaguely concerned he may simply attack into this city now that he's got a free run at it, so I'd like to be able to check and see what he's got over here.



This pushed us up close to 1k beakers before I swapped our sole research build to wealth to account for the Frigate builds.





Popcorn?

[scooter]

Oh right, I knew I forgot something.



How could I forget that?

[AdrienIer]

From the OP of the tech thread :

House Rules:
Banned: Nukes, Blockades, Active Spy Missions, Air units bombing tile improvements
No: Huts, Events, Vassal States, Tech Trading, Unit/City Trades, Diplomatic victory, Exploits (i.e. culture bug)
Double Moves and Diplomacy:

Diplomacy: "Pitboss-AI-diplo"
You can make any offers for any item the trade window allows you to make, excepting cities.
Any trades offered to another player are treated as valid trade offers.
You my not communicate using: chat box in diplomacy window, unit names, city names, outside communication, in game chat, anything else in this vein.
You may not gift units to or trade cities with another player.

Double moves: "Don't be a jerk."
Peace time or when you're not planning to start war: play as soon as you are able, no need to worry.
During war preparation turn (at least 1 turn before) and during war, double moves are not allowed. When you declare on your opponent (and then end turn), he must complete a turn before you can play another one.
When going to settle a city, and you see that another player has sent out a settler in the general vicinity as well, you must attempt to alternate turns, to avoid double moving someone to claim a city site.
If there is a situation not covered above, where a player gains a clear and 'underhanded' advantage over another player in an area of contention due to a double move, that situation can be appealed to the game admin, who can determine if the game needs to be reloaded or is fine to carry on at his discretion.
If there is a problem with play windows making it impossible to observe a turn split, or a tangled web of wars that need to be straightened out for turns to be practically played, please PM the game admin for assistance resolving the situation.

Gifting that rifle is unfortunately against the rules...

[Sullla]

I'm fine with moving some of our units into a threatening posture; let's not actually declare war on anyone without having a chance to discuss it though, OK? Two other quick comments:

* AdrienIer is correct, unit gifting is not allowed under the rules of this game. Somewhat minor here but still disallowed.

* We don't have oil connected so those frigates aren't going to auto-upgrade to destroyers, right? Since we're likely going to have to replay this turn, let's avoid building a bunch of largely useless wooden ships.