AT loves it when a plan comes together!! [Spoilers]

[AutomatedTeller]

it KILLS me that I have to refuse this deal:



However, he's who I'll buy it from later Wish I was allowed to say "need to save money so as not to die on War Elephants, catch me later..."

But I have to build up cash for a power run on Feudalism/upgrades of archers to xbows....

that said - i guess stick isn't getting all his own way on wonders. TT still has an engineer floating around, so looks like he'll snake MoM out from under stick and commodore so that's awesome.

Surprised HG hasn't fallen yet.




This is the plan for scouting out Jowy - this is his westernmost city, I believe. he picked it up for elephants and it's a small stretch for him right now. Seeing this makes me worry a little less, since he has to leave significant forces to defend a pretty exposed (and vital) city.

Anyway - I put in the tentative plans for scouting for the next 4 turns. I hope to know where he's massing troops soon - or, if he's massing troops. We may have time for more infrastructure, i dunno. The yellow and tan lines are, of course, dependent on the road network.

I have my other scout coming with cornflakes/commodore from the other side, though he won't get there for a some time.

[AutomatedTeller]

popped in to see what was up - cornflakes made two offers of calendar - for 175 gold and 5 gpt and for 175 gold.

yah... not happening. at this point, I'm doing nothing to help cornflakes and I'm probably closing borders with him relatively soon.

Also - pics later, but Virmire, Jowy's western city? Is nearly bordering Commodore, so that's nice - he has to protect that border now

[AutomatedTeller]

Turn rolls - no religion spread, but (unsurprisingly) TT got MoM - nice engineer use, there

[AutomatedTeller]

Jowy/commodore border:



Demos:



Power Graph:



in 4 turns, if we get an engineer and can bulb crossbows, I think I'm going to close borders with cornflakes



it's about 50/50.

In other news:

Cornflakes offered calendar for 175 again. I turned it down, agian. AI diplo means you can't reply, right? you can offer trades, but can't really explain why you offer or refuse, right?


There's trading going on - Commodore is giving Cornflakes stone - presumably, as part of a tech payment.
Jowy and Cornflakes are trading luxuries (wine for sugar)

I'm running the scout back over Jowy's territory. We'll see if we are A) totally screwed B) mildly screwed or C) not needing to worry. He might well have elephants for defense.

[NobleHelium]

No explanations.

[AutomatedTeller]

yeah, that's what I thought. Which, of course, is why i didn't reply to him.

[MindyMcCready]

It's probably 1/2 cost right now. Currency has 2 pre-reqs and was known by a lot of people, so the multipliers for it were pretty big. if you add in libraries, it woudl take some thing like 300 (raw) commerce to tech it. And Commodore's other choice was to hope Cornflakes didn't take the deal if it was azza, he might have countered. If he had countered with 20 gpt, I might well have taken it.

I've come to realize that getting techs for 1/2 price isn't a great deal.

Comparing by taking only the pre-reqs out let's assume currency costs the 640 * (1-20% - 20%) = 384. A civ that has researched the tech by expending 384 beakers has several options available to them.

1. Tech-for-tech trade. Assuming that they can trade a tech for 2 other equally valuable techs then the 384 beakers gets them 1,152 beakers. So each tech only costs 33%. If they can trade for 3 then a tech costs 25%.

2. Tech for gpt. Assuming that they can trade a tech for 1/3 of its price to 2 others. (say 13 gpt x 2) So for the cost of 384 they get 260 gold back. So they only pay 1/3 of the cost. If they can sell to 3 civs for the 1/3 price, they'll obviously get the tech for free. If they sell to 3 civs for 1/4 price, then they pay 1/4 of the tech costs.

So any deal that pays more than 1/4 to 1/3 of the after pre-req tech cost is putting the seller ahead of us in a relative sense. Of course the benefit of the tech to us is another way to look at it, but the seller also has the tech benefit there as well.

[AutomatedTeller]

good points, all.

it's more complicated than that, of course, as an individual civ's beaker research multiplier varies. Ours is 1, currently - I'm guessing that cornflakes (who has an academy and several libraries) is closer to 1.25, without tech bonuses. Jowy's is probably over 1.25, with cheap libraries and an academy.

When we start getting libs, our research multiplier will go up.

Theoretical question:

What do you think of trading for aesthetics, researching lit and building the GLib with an engineer (if we get one) - assuming that we decide that the threat of Jowy isn't high - I don't have pics, but he's moving forces over to his west - he's got 2 axes, an archer and a chariot over there. Clearly not an attack force, but still - that's ~20K power. At least 2 civs have lit now - TT and Jowy (I think it's Jowy), both of whom get a lot of value out of the Glib (TT has rep, Jowy is philo), neither of which have marble. Picking up the Glib would be very nice for us...

[MindyMcCready]

I'm pretty happy with the preparations against Jowy. The LALaw chokepoint is a convincing deterrent, especially once walls are in. He'd have to throw the kitchen sink at us to make progress in that direction. That’s expensive enough that he'll likely look elsewhere or stay home and build. So I'm feeling comfortable there.

So I'm happy with our short term survivability.
-Cornflakes has to garrison his borders with Azza, 2metra and Commodore.
-Jowy doesn't have the army to break LALaw right now.

Short/Medium Term Risks:
-Jowy coming from the south. Do we have eyes down there yet?
-More medium term, Jowy boating our core.
-Horse city protects our core from boating and also provides eyes to the south. Once we land this city we're effectively secure there. Jowy's got little chance of challenging our control of the lake unless we're completely lax in that department.
-Cornflakes lands our key defensive locations.
-Dispute with Azza flaring up.

Once you close borders with Cornflakes, how do you see this game playing out?

[MindyMcCready]

good points, all.

it's more complicated than that, of course, as an individual civ's beaker research multiplier varies. Ours is 1, currently - I'm guessing that cornflakes (who has an academy and several libraries) is closer to 1.25, without tech bonuses. Jowy's is probably over 1.25, with cheap libraries and an academy.

When we start getting libs, our research multiplier will go up.

Theoretical question:

What do you think of trading for aesthetics, researching lit and building the GLib with an engineer (if we get one) - assuming that we decide that the threat of Jowy isn't high - I don't have pics, but he's moving forces over to his west - he's got 2 axes, an archer and a chariot over there. Clearly not an attack force, but still - that's ~20K power. At least 2 civs have lit now - TT and Jowy (I think it's Jowy), both of whom get a lot of value out of the Glib (TT has rep, Jowy is philo), neither of which have marble. Picking up the Glib would be very nice for us...

I like the Glib but this is an expensive, low odds play. There's a lot of forests out there that someone can chop it out in a hurry so i don't think that our marble advantage is going to matter enough. I think that we'd be chassing.

What about Parthenon? That's much more of a sure bet if it hasn't fallen already. Or Statue of Zeus. We have the monuments. I'd favour those over a low odds Glib. Or if you're serious about making a run down that tech path, Music for the Sistine Chapel even if we miss out on the Artist. Especially, if we're trying to develop peacefully.

Organized thoughts:
-If we can trade cheaply for Aesthetics, then why not land Statue of Zeus or Parthenon if they're still available. Heck, why not slow build Parthenon for the fail gold. I'm sure that the fail gold would exceed the cost of buying Aesthetics pretty quickly.
-Given others are taking this tech path, this greatly decreases the value of following. Landing an undiscovered new tech is, in a way, like landing 4 techs. I acknowledge that the multipliers make the calculation more complex. For the most part, I think that means you should pay even less for those techs. That's a pretty good reason not to follow the leaders down this path.

I'm not sure what else we should do with an engineer. Other than the Machinery bulb there's Moai in Mindy's Moai? Given the low value of tech, i think that getting those lake hammers quickly might be a decent play.