RBPB4 [SPOILERS] - De Gaulle of the Egyptians

[Lord Parkin]

HBR is in, and we've got enough overflow to easily 1-turn anything. Astronomy, here we come. (Or should we go for something else instead?)

My earlier estimate might actually have been somewhat conservative. At the current rate, I think we should be able to keep up the 1-turn techs in a row for at least a dozen techs quite easily. (HBR being tech #8 so far.)

We've got research visibility on Locke, who seems to be 2 turns from Gunpowder. Might adjust the research time for that tech so we can make use of the slight known tech bonus. Hey, it shouldn't make a difference to when we get Rifling, so why not make use of the few extra beakers.

[Lord Parkin]

Next turn we'll have a Bank in at Evermore (our Shrine city), which will be worth a cool 32 gpt. A couple of turns after that and our Grocer will bring in another 16 gpt. Not bad.

Someone's GNP (Plako's?) is over 1000 now, so we're starting to get some competition. Not sure how much (if any) wealth he's building to achieve that. (We're building none, incidentally. )

Locke's power is through the roof, well ahead of Plako's. Guess Adlain isn't much longer for this game. I'm slightly wary that there's a chance he'll try to attack me instead, but I severely doubt it. He'd do no damage anyway, since he has to come by land right now (no Astronomy) and we can easily draft him to oblivion.

Also seeing power jumps from several other civs, most notably Rego (whom I semi-trust not to attack us), Moogle (who's probably after Adlain or Mackoti... too far from us), Mackoti (no surprise there, also no threat), Plako (bit more concerning), and a little bit from Luddite.

Plako got a Great Scientist. Wonder what he'll do with it. At this point I'm guessing a Golden Age would be best for him, but we'll see.

[Lord Parkin]

By the way, something that always bugs me... in the F1 city list screenshots like on the previous page, what does the black timer-looking thing just to the left of the "Producing" column mean? I always ask about it, then get told, then promptly forget again, to randomly remember at some later date. Hopefully this time I won't forget.

[novice]

By the way, something that always bugs me... in the F1 city list screenshots like on the previous page, what does the black timer-looking thing just to the left of the "Producing" column mean? I always ask about it, then get told, then promptly forget again, to randomly remember at some later date. Hopefully this time I won't forget.

It's the garrison size, you're probably not too familiar with that concept.

[Lord Parkin]

It's the garrison size, you're probably not too familiar with that concept.

Ah, that's right.

As for the other comment, troops in cities are troops not at the front, right? Besides, there's enough happiness in most backline cities that they don't even need a garrison.

[Gazzahk]

Thanks for all the screen info.

Double the second highest GNP and triple/almost four times the rival average wouldn't seem to be much of a worry.

Good to go, it seems.

Which victory do you intend to go for? I am assuming space ship, but I am probably wrong - my guesses have not be good so far.

Is it yet inevitable, do you think?

[Lord Parkin]

It's still far from inevitable, and we're still far from the point where we can just pick a victory and go with it. Plako just entered a Golden Age and his GNP shot up to 1700, so we're no longer that much in the lead. Plus, worst case scenario, we're going to be encountering a 5 to 8 vs 1 in the not too distant future. Survival is still - as always - the key goal right now, and I'd be silly to focus on anything other than that for the present.

I will say that Conquest and Diplomacy are probably out of the question on this map... and Domination would be tricky too. So that doesn't leave too many options. But we'll deal with that when the time comes.

[Lord Parkin]

Okay, so Astronomy is in. Started Observatories all around. The options at the moment are probably Constitution, Gunpowder and Construction.

EDIT: Cut out the rest of the post because it's a mess as the forum is screwing up my posts by removing paragraphs. ("Enters" become "spaces" when I click "preview" or "submit".) What the heck is up with that? Any ideas on how to fix it?

EDIT 2: Okay, seems it's a problem with the "enhanced WYSIWYG" view. After I changed it back to the standard view it seems to work okay, except smilies are disabled for some reason. Incidentally, before I was getting a whole bunch of other random crap, like HTML tags entering themselves whenever I tried to edit my post. Random.

[Lord Parkin]

So... as I was trying to post before, the options at the moment are probably Constitution, Gunpowder and Construction.

- Constitution would give us the option to switch to Representation in 2 turns. This would give us an immediate boost of ~50-60 beakers per turn; much more post SOL (which we should be able to build without much or any competition).

- Construction would allow us to gather overflow beakers to be put into the next tech. It's also useful because it removes the movement penalty over rivers, enables Catapults, and enables Engineering/Chemistry... which are both obviously useful in their own right (as well as being prerequisites for Infantry).

- Gunpowder obviously leads us on the path to Rifling and Riflemen, mostly to make use of the draft under our ridiculous happy cap. Obviously important for military reasons.

Incidentally, I'll do a more exact calculation on the draft later. But roughly speaking, if we switch to Nationhood post-Rifling we'll lose about 20 hammers per turn and 150 beakers per turn due to no Bureaucracy (which is ~10% of our breakeven research), in return for gaining 550 hammers per turn in drafted units (which almost doubles our production capacity). Of course there's also the 5 pop lost per turn, but that's almost negligible when spread over the whole empire. And there are the unhappiness effects too, but they won't start showing up for a very long time with our happy cap, especially spread over 30 cities.

So basically, we're talking gaining ~500 hammers per turn at the cost of ~150 beakers per turn. As long as we're drafting max Rifles per turn, that's well worth the trade-off IMHO. Especially since it almost doubles our production capacity as we build up troops while only siphoning off ~10% of our research. Seems a no-brainer decision really. Any thoughts are welcome though, especially on things I may have missed.

[Lord Parkin]

I'm rather annoyed at Luddite... once again, he's agreed to something and then gone and done his own sweet thing right afterwards. This time it's espionage. We only just recently agreed to turn off espionage against one another, in no uncertain terms:

Luddite: I'm OK with switching off EP's. Elkad told me that I had fallen far behind so I spent some on you, but we can both switch off it it's roughly equal.
Me: Okay, cool... let's keep our EP's switched off then.

Now this turn I notice that he's dumped a whole lot into us again. A small matter compared to his earlier betrayals (the city site he agreed not to settle then almost immediately settled, not to mention his threatening us by parking most of his army on our border)... but it still pisses me off. If you want to do something, then fine, but don't agree not to do it and then do it right afterwards anyway. That's just plain cold lying.