[SPOILERS] Novice and SevenSpirits play Suleiman of Korea

[spacemanmf]

Heh, want do you want feedback on exactly?

[novice]

Heh, want do you want feedback on exactly?

How awesome/stupid we are and all the brilliant/moronic plays we're making? Or just spawn a metagame discussion like Scooter does.

Are we correct in considering Mackoti a runaway?

[spacemanmf]

How awesome/stupid we are and all the brilliant/moronic plays we're making? Or just spawn a metagame discussion like Scooter does.

Are we correct in considering Mackoti a runaway?

Well your tech pace is clearly good - it doesn't look like either of you are going to get away from each other on that front just yet, especially if you pop your golden age soon.

What would even the game up for everyone is if you took on mackoti with, say, a mass of rifles, built, whipped, drafted. But is that even viable? Presumably mackoti can have Rifling in a few turns too, so it would be a bloody war.

But you need to weaken him to bring the other two up to parity.

Another option would be to go after NobGas, which would probably end up with you and mackoti having similar land, I guess. Would that leave you markedly behind?

[novice]

The basic problem as I see it, which ties back to Scooter's pbem32 discussion, is that we're running a SE and Mackoti's running a CE. We're even in accumulated beakers and almost even in GNP. That's not good enough at this stage of the game, especially not when Mackoti's ahead on cottageable land. And remember, Golden Ages help Mackoti more than us. Losing MoM and Taj to Mackoti was not ideal.

[spacemanmf]

The basic problem as I see it, which ties back to Scooter's pbem32 discussion, is that we're running a SE and Mackoti's running a CE. We're even in accumulated beakers and almost even in GNP. That's not good enough at this stage of the game, especially not when Mackoti's ahead on cottageable land. And remember, Golden Ages help Mackoti more than us. Losing MoM and Taj to Mackoti was not ideal.

Ok, so war it is. If you essentially have a 1-city research facility then you can draft & slave the others into the ground. Doing the same will presumably hurt mackoti more than you.

[SevenSpirits]

Seeing our GNP last night did give me a bit of hope. We are 2-turning gunpowder effortlessly. We have a couple of options that don't QUITE work but almost do.

I think we could reach communism in 9 turns by burning our scientist on a bulb and merchant on gold. (Techs required: Gunpowder, Engineering, Chemistry, Scientific Method, Communism.) Then start a golden age with the spy and a new GP (due in 8) from our capital, swap into Nationhood and SP, and really kick things off. This also puts us right next to Biology which would just be insane with how many farms we have. We would have Kremlin farms and/or fully tricked out workshops.

If only Mackoti was in 9t of anarchy instead of golden age.

To defend easily against Mackoti right now, we need rifling, and we need nationhood. So an alternate plan is to get to rifling first, then trigger a golden age when we are within 5 turns of communism. The drawback of this is if we get the Communism spy it wouldn't be very useful.

But also we kind of need boats - which means steam power and steel at the very least, and combustion soon.

And Mackoti is not only a military threat but also a tech threat - he could probably even follow us to Communism and win the Kremlin.

So we have the following targets:

Drafted riflemen (requires golden age to unlock)
Ironclads for coastal defense
Oil ships
Communism for Spy (enables golden age, but only if first) and/or State Property (requires golden age) and/or Kremlin (only if first by a few turns)
Biology for a pure economic boost
Railroad (mostly for railroads)

Communism is the only one I see us skipping even temporarily. The others are all too critical, and they're interlinked enough that each one only requires at most 1 more tech if you have all the rest.

I am thinking to head to Rifling first via Gunpowder - RP, then Engineering-Chemistry and decide from there, while keeping the great people around for instant civic swap when we need it, but hoping to delay until it can get us to State Property. I believe we want to avoid war right now, and would like to get access to the extremely efficient rifle-drafting before producing more units (though, since Mackoti exists, we still have to keep producing units).

Also let's pick out a spot for the Globe.

[novice]

Also let's pick out a spot for the Globe.

At least this question was pretty easy to answer. Behold our perfect Globe City:



Hint: It's the one building a Theatre. At quick speed all you need is +10 food at size 5 to be able to draft every turn, so Tricycle Tie has the perfect amount of craptacularity. It doesn't have any obvious alternative uses that we'd be sacrificing, and its strategic location is ok.

It'll need a bit of time to set up, but it shouldn't be too bad with three chops available and overflow from Theatre and Barracks whips.

Amusingly, this means that the filler city of Vile Lasers will be even viler than anticipated, but who cares - the city is already making a profit at size 1.

[novice]

Turn 106 is in the cards and our forced peace with Mackoti has expired. We were pretty sure he would attack us actually since his power was a lot higher than ours, and he had his stack parked within striking range. But he didn't pull the trigger this turn, at least - maybe (but probably not) because we whipped some knights last turn to make our military seem a little less puny. At least we're #2 in power now.



We're triggering a golden age next turn to get into Nationhood and finish off Replaceable Parts and Rifling quickly (2-3 more turns), for national security reasons. After that it's probably on to Combustion by necessity.

While in the golden age Seven has planned his customary magic, so we'll pump out three great people using caste and pacifism. So our civics will be Rep/Nat/Caste/Merc/Pac.

Mackoti's completed his Oxford University and has started burning through his 2000 gold bank account. He picked up gunpowder this turn instead of Printing Press. That's interesting, if he was aiming for Rifling or Scientific Method picking up Printing Press first seems natural.

[Rowain]

Guess he is aiming for steel/Mil Science then.

[novice]

Guess he is aiming for steel/Mil Science then.

We were thinking along the same lines but this turn Mack picked up Printing Press. So I guess he changed his mind or wanted access to muskets one turn sooner.

Anyway, save came in earlier today, way past Seven's bedtime. Still, unbeknownst to me, he grabbed the save, declared war on Mackoti, revolted out of slavery and passed the save on to me to finish the turn. Thanks man, love you too!