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

[haphazard1]

Thanks for the reporting - following this thread has been both fun and educational.

If you have time, could we get a peek at sunrise's territory? We have seen a fair bit of Sullla's lands and some of Speaker's, but not much of your third civ. How have his lands and cities been developed?

[Speaker]

I wonder if they are going for some sort of Kremlin-whip strategy, or if this is purely state-property fueled, or if they have some other plan all-together. They are still very far from Combustion, or any other use of Oil, so I can't even think of what else it could be. All I know is that my MFG (and by extension, power) is going to explode in the next 10 turns, as I grow back onto my hills that I drafted away, and finish factories.

[Sullla]

I'm sure that they're going to build Kremlin. No doubt about it. But as we've said a bunch of times in this thread, the era of whipping and drafting is almost over. Even with Kremlin in place, whipping cities for production winds up inferior to strong, developed cities with factories and power plants. An average city with forge/factory/power plant and railroads in place can do 50 production per turn without much trouble. Whipping with forge + Kremlin would be 35 production per pop point, and you can only whip once every 6t to avoid stacking unhappiness penalty. 300 production/turn over that same span with factories... you'd have to whip 8 pop to get the same result, and obviously you can't grow that back in 6 turns. I think it's pretty clear cut which comes out ahead, and that's not even counting the fact that Assembly Line *ALSO* gives us infantry, while Railroads adds vast mobility to our units.

In any case, we'll see soon enough which side is correct. Experimentation in action here.

[Bigger]

Thanks for the reporting - following this thread has been both fun and educational.

If you have time, could we get a peek at sunrise's territory? We have seen a fair bit of Sullla's lands and some of Speaker's, but not much of your third civ. How have his lands and cities been developed?

aye, please. I've been following and have no idea what Sunrise's territory looks like, or what he is doing.

[Gaspar]

aye, please. I've been following and have no idea what Sunrise's territory looks like, or what he is doing.

If you find that newsworthy, clearly you've never lurked sunrise before.

[Speaker]

Sunrise's land sucks. Why would you want to see it?

[spacetyrantxenu]

Sunrise's land sucks. Why would you want to see it?

Doesn't everyone slow down to look at a car wreck? It's kind of the same thing. Alternatively, everyone likes to look at a really nice car, too. So which is it?

</CarAnalogies>

[Speaker]

If Sullla's land is a Rolls Royce, and mine is a Corvette, Sunrise's is this:

[spacetyrantxenu]

At least it isn't on fire.

[Sullla]

OK, a little bit more detail for you:



There isn't too much to say about sunrise's territory. He's been stuck on 8 cities forever, as we didn't get any land to the east of his starting position. Yes, we wish that hadn't been the case, but WarriorKnight was Aggressive Rome and settled towards us in the early game over here. We couldn't make much of a move against that combo, and by the time we had Civil Service/Machinery, much of the land was already gone. I do think we could have placed on more city between QQ and Parrrrrrley, on the plains hill tile sticking out in Roman culture. That's probably it though - really couldn't settle the floodplains area safely.

The job of sunrise's civ is to supply my civ with gold to finance deficit research, and his civ does that quite well. He gets just shy of 400 gold/turn, which then gets converted into 1450 beakers/turn over with my India civ. We would honestly like to get a few more cities for sunrise, but where? Where do they come from? There's no space. We'd have to go through Rome, and with their many defensive cannons and massive garrisons, that's just not going to happen. Therefore it's stalemate city over here, neither side able to attack the other.

What we can do is tie up huge numbers of Roman units on garrison duty, preventing them from being used elsewhere. The three cities in the picture above all have tons of units inside them, as we could attack by sea against any of those points. (And our attack earlier showed that we were willing to go after a perceived weak point.) Meanwhile, two coastal blockades deny Rome all of the water tiles in this region. The only ones not blockaded are the two little white circles. Note the ironclad sitting up there next to Parrrrrrrley. In a situation where everyone has frigates, and there's not much room to manuever, the ironclad is actually a pretty big deal. Team 3 has no counter unit until they research Steam Power themselves. Combat II ironclad = 14 strength, pretty decisive against strength 8 frigates. Worse than that if the frigates are the ones attacking!

The red dot is where most of sunrise's units are hanging out, able to cover QQ or his capital easily. They could also reach Parrrrrley without much trouble. This will be even easier once we get some railroads on these tiles. I don't think either side could do much to attack here. Even if Team 3 were to send in 50+ units, we could always turn off research for a turn and upgrade everything to infantry (Assembly Line next turn). Our cannons hit their stack, our cavalry flanks away all of their own cannons, and rifles/muskets fare very poorly against infantry. I'm not seeing it happen. Looks like more stalemate to me.



Here's the western sea. Dave pulled most of his units back, keeping a small force on the desert hill tile where you see the rifle fortified. He has a Sentry knight there, in a nice position for him. It's not worth losing units to kill it though. We have our own Sentry knight on the little two-tile island just above him. Both sides have nice visibility here, and it will be tough for either side to surprise the other.

I pull my frigates back into one of the island cities for a turn, to allow the injured Combat I frigate that I had to finish healing. Dave has been building his own frigates out of Trafalgar (which has a drydocks), so I'm a bit hesitant to commit my original unpromoted frigates into a fight against the ones that he's building with an extra promotion. His odds are too good to win 1 vs 1, even with the defensive 10% bonus. I have 4 ironclads slowly steaming their way over from my own coastal cities, and I'd prefer to save my frigates until the ironclads can protect them. No sense having them die to no point - the frigates are very useful for reconaissance, and can still bombard down city defenses. My main need for the frigates at the moment is to keep tabs on what's inside Dave's coastal cities, so that I don't get surprised by an attack. The island cities have rifle and musket defenders, plus could be cash-upgraded to infantry after next turn, so they feel relatively safe. I just need to watch and make sure that they can't get boated instantly in one turn by 3-4 galleons full of units.

I've landed a settler on the X spot and will found another city there next turn. This spot has two wines and a clams resource, all of which are very much needed to combat health/happiness issues. The spot is as defensive as I can make it, almost impossible to be boated directly and on a hill for the extra bonus. We want to put another city on the tile where Speaker is pinging in the above picture, but it's not safe enough right now. That has two more clams, which Speaker and sunrise could definitely use.

The island city of Teleport Gank whipped a forge, and next I'll whip a drydocks as soon as it becomes available. That gives +75% production modifier for ships, or 35 shields (Quick speed) per pop point. I should be able to whip a naval unit every 6 turns for the forseeable future, and that's probably the most productive way to use this spot. The other island city had its seafood pillaged earlier, and so it's lagging badly. Need more naval power to reconnect it safely. Hopefully when the ironclads get here, or possibly not until Combustion. I'm hoping that roughly 5 ironclads will be enough to hold me over until we get oil and more modern ships.

We wound up 600 beakers short on Assembly Line this turn, so next turn it shall be. I'll finish my turn before Speaker, and let him use his final Golden Age turn to overflow into factories in all his major cities. He should be able to get factory and power plant done VERY quickly in his four key cities: Permaban Shen, Junglewick, TurboScorpion, and AP Galio. Then we go on the attack... Railroads due in 3t after Assembly Line, and then on to Scientific Method and Combustion.

I'm sure there's at least one post in the lurker thread picking apart my previous post about factories versus Kremlin whipping. It's not that I think going for Communism is a bad option - State Property is very strong, and you can get a lot of production from the workshop/watermill route. My own preferred lategame civics are Universal Suffrage/Free Speech/Caste System/State Property/Theocracy. Hopefully I can get a final Golden Age to revolt into that eventually. My argument is rather that going for Communism at this current point is counterproductive, as it gives up the huge benefits of the Steam Power/Assembly Line group. Cost/benefit analysis:

Benefits (for them)
Free Speech/Free Religion civics
Kremlin
State Property civic
Can see oil

Benefits (for us)
+50% worker speed
Ironclads
Ironworks national wonder
Can see coal
Factories
Coal Plants
Infantry
Pentagon

These tech paths are actually roughly even in beakers too: Liberalism + Scientific Method + Communism = 6600 tech cost against Steam Power + Assembly Line = 8200. OK, obviously more expensive for us, but still! My point remains.

So long as we can emergency cash-upgrade units to infantry while Team 3 can't attack with units better than rifles, it's going to be extremely hard for them to hurt us. And railroads will only make this that much more difficult.