Speaker's super top secret thread for the purposes of world domination; Neener Neener

[Speaker]

Holy shit, Sunrise made a post!

[Profane]

As a final note, my doomed scout actually beat a warrior from Shoot the Moon at 4.5% odds between turns before dying. RNG luck for the win!

How many points till the first GG, now?
What will it likely be used for?

[Speaker]

I am 11/30 so far, after killing an explorer with a Keshik.

[Speaker]

[NobleHelium]

Wouldn't it have been better to build it with the PHI civ?

[Speaker]

No because Sunrise will be running 0% tech the whole game and he couldn't have built it as fast. Part of the reason why we even bothered was because I had 3 forests to chop, and the forge, and huge production.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

I don't think the former is an issue considering specialist research is independent of the slider. Unless Sunrise is intending to stay in Caste forever and not even build a library for the +25% beakers.

Personally I'd take the +100% on the GPPs than the +25% on the raw beakers. Fair enough about any availability issues, of course.

[sandroba]

Well, my guess would be it was mainly for denial, since I don't think sunrise had the forests or the worker force to complete it in the same time frame. The optimal location would be in sunrise's high food capital, but not being industrious and having very few forests available (if any, been a while since the last time we've seen sunrise's land) means they risk losing this imba wonder to another team.

[sunrise089]

First, I'll be at 0-30% research for most of the game, so libraries may be quite rare. Second, as others have said I had no forests. This was purely a chop-grab-fast wonder.

[Sullla]

In response to those posts - would it be more ideal to have the Great Library built in sunrise's city where he's running lots of Scientist specialists? Well yeah, obviously. But that's the thing about ideal conditions, just because it's ideal doesn't mean it's practical. We had no realistic way of getting Great Library in sunrise's territory, because sunrise has no forests to chop. Here, I'll repost that picture from last turn to demonstrate:



While these cities are nice and all, there's not much Great Library potential there. Meanwhile, Speaker has this monster size 13 capital, with Bureaucracy + Forge to play with, and he was in the process of chopping 3 forests. With marble, that's 60 base production x 2.75 = 165 shields. Great Library costs 233 shields on Quick, so that was indeed a 3t build, with a fair amount of overflow.

I totally agree that Great Library was somewhat wasted in Speaker's capital. He gets 6 beakers for the two Scientists, which becomes 10.5 beakers after Academy and Library bonuses. Not that much. Still, it was basically a question of having Great Library in Speaker's capital or not having it all, and the denial factor to other teams was a big deal. Plus those Scientists will likely be there for the rest of the game, every turn, and will continue to stack with universities + Oxford later. When factoring all that into the decision, I maintain that this was a pretty strong play.

Oh, and we already have Great Library, FYI:



Got it when Speaker ended turn, so no sitting around waiting and hoping with fingers crossed any more. Hopefully we spiked someone else's wheel pretty good, although we won't know until later when the game is finished. Most of the forests are been cleaned out of this area now - we turned these forests into a bunch of settlers, workers, and Great Library. Team 3 turned it into settlers, workers, and Hanging Gardens. I like their play a little bit more than ours, but we still haven't settled that stone resource yet, and it was never in the cards for us.

We also finished Engineering research. That was our fourth tech, and we've established a pretty big research lead:



I have the 171 GNP number. Speaker has the 156 number. Unfortunately we can't see who our closest rival actually is! Oh well. But Team 3 just finished Feudalism tech on their turn, so we can compare the research done so far by our teams:

Our Team
Music (T94)
Civil Service (T106)
Machinery (T112)
Engineering (T119)

Team 3
Civil Service (T95)
Machinery (T108)
Feudalism (T117)

That adds up to 5478 beakers researched for our team, and 3887 beakers for Team 3. This is a little rough because of the weird sequential turn research stuff, but in total we've discovered about 40% more total beakers thus far. Which is a lot. Team 3 is ahead in Food though (Shoot the Moon is #1 and WarriorKnight is #2), thanks to their Hanging Gardens, so they are far from finished. We think that our bonus research will ultimately give us the edge, and we'll be able to catch up in cities/population rather quickly, with Speaker spamming out some Imperialistic settlers for the rest of us from his monster capital.

We are on Paper tech next, which takes all of... 3 turns. Nice. That means our team is averaging about 360 beakers/turn in total between the three of us. We'll hold off on Feudalism for the moment and push towards Education/Liberalism, then once everyone else gets Feudalism (I predict that the other teams are likely going for it right now) we can backtrack and score it with the 20% research bonus from known civs. We have Engineering for road movement and pikes, so someone rushing knights is not scary. Later, we are planning to use our early Engineering to land Notre Dame, which will be *HUGE* on this happiness-starved map, giving us all +2 smiley faces in everyone's cities. Just need to settle that stone first (which I am doing next).

Should be all for now. More later as we continue to play.