[Spoilers] Fintourist and Old Harry have nothing to see here

[Fintourist]

Disturbing news:

Scoopin captured 2 cities from Nakor..

..

Scoopin now have a total WW of 30...

..

Global power dropped 21k (new cities and whips roughly balance each other, but real power drop was probably even a bit smaller)

..

WTF???

Why can't anyone f***ing defend their cities!!!!

This is just unbelievable, I really really hope that this has some kind of an explanation. If our main contenders everywhere keep getting free cities at some point I start to cry.. Like this..

Oh well, nothing we can do about that.. I guess we just need to do the same and take a city from suttree after killing the minimum of 5 spears, 15 axes and 15 cats behind city walls or just target some of our easier neighbors (mackoti? dtay?)

Domestic stuff:

Did one tile switch between Agi and BoP
Kept Agi at Garden build
Went with Monestary in P
Whipped longbow in N
Did random chariot movements (checked defenses of Eridu)
Ended turn

There is one longbow N of Jamestown, I did not know what you had planned for him so he is still there..

[Old Harry]

Let's wait for Lewwyn and Commodore to weigh in before worrying too much about a runaway on PB8ania. Nakor had so much culture pressure from Pindicooter on those cities it wasn't worth defending them, I hope he'll draw the line at losing three (Smoke Springs is doomed).

Domestic stuff:

Did one tile switch between Agi and BoP
Kept Agi at Garden build
Went with Monestary in P
Whipped longbow in N
Did random chariot movements (checked defenses of Eridu)
Ended turn

There is one longbow N of Jamestown, I did not know what you had planned for him so he is still there..

Great - all sounds good. The longbow was just keeping TBSJ's chariot honest around our workers. Grocers in Agi and Cannae are another good reason for going to Guilds.

Thinking about valuing our Great People the options are (extremely roughly):

Golden age: + 8 x (40 + 16) hammers and + 8 x (100 + 16) x 1.2 beakers + Great People Points (our pop is 117 - we get about 1 hammer-generating tile per three worked and 1 extra beaker per pop. I've no idea how to value the extra GPPs) = 450 hammers and 1000 beakers
Academies: + 13 beakers per turn at break-even (more with Bureau, but not a whole lot)
Bulbs: + 1250 beakers (lower than actual because of known tech bonus - front loaded for immediate benefit)
Trade missions: + 1500 gold = 1800 beakers (assuming x 1.2 conversion rate)
Shrine: + 26 gold per turn (+7 for market/grocer +13 for a bank and +26 for Wall St) = 31 beakers per turn

So how do we value 13 beakers per turn against 1250 beakers immediately against 1800 beakers over the next ten turns? And where do the 450 hammers come into it? This analysis makes the golden age look like pretty poor value for money compared with running two trade missions, as we're SPI we don't need it for the civic switches, would it be good RB variant play not to bother with any more golden ages?

I've got a feeling Fintourist has a better handle on the economics of immediate return vs ongoing benenfit. So I wait expectantly...

[Fintourist]

I have my last exam in couple of hours, but after I'm done with it I'm happy to analyze this as well Quick comments:
- Academy indeed sucks at this point
- GS beakers seem too low (if beakers were converted to gold, 1250 gold could make sense)
- With GM you might want to take library bonuses into account (if you want to translate it into beakers)
- With Shrine you also need to take multipliers and future spreads into account making it the most complex calculation. I can try to quantify it later today unless you are faster.

[Old Harry]

Turn 143

Commodore offered straight OBs - right now he's only got OBs with YM and Azza who have about 20-25 overseas cities, Com only has 11 mainland cities so he doesn't get extra trade routes from us. We'll get an extra gpt from Ottawa and Quebec, and perhaps from other size ~10 cities... So I'll just accept. (It got us +3 gpt). Also William cancelled the marble gift and offered back marble for sugar, I turned it down. Do you want to cancel OBs with him out of spite


While we have stone from Pindicooter are there any cities where we want walls? Peterloo is on a forge now, but we could build a spear or cat? I've got Dunkirk on a settler right now, but it could do a catapult instead.


Fintourist thinks the Taj will be going into South City. We could unload some units onto the wheat SW of the city or to capture the workers on the forests the turn before he gets Liberalism to try and prevent this... I'll try to get our chariot over here to see if that's feasible. We could unload axes onto the forests on t146 or onto the wheat on t147. There are four axes SW of Hastings - should we move them all/a couple of them up just in case?


Demos and power

[Old Harry]

Thinking about the crazy attack plan a bit more we suspect that dtay will get Liberalism around t148, we'll get our (possible) great engineer eot148, so if we save money until then we can complete Nationalism about eot155. This means we'll need to take the city or defend some forests for seven turns. These both sound unlikely, but our chariot will be in the area to see what sort of defences South City has in two turns, so we'll keep the plan on the back burner until then.

Meanwhile should Dunkirk build a settler for this banana? I like settling site B, allowing us to settle D eventually, but I can see points in favour of A (shares more food), C (banana first ring) and of settling D first (banana first ring and really piss Suttree off). Any thoughts? Perhaps that we should be focusing on military builds instead right now?

[TheHumanHydra]

I wouldn't take any aggressive action toward dtay. We don't need another enemy, and we can't really stop him from landing Taj, just delay him. It's an extremely risky play for little-to-no gain, so it's goal is only the deprivation to an opponent of one city or a few workers, without anything more substantial won for us. I am very strongly against this play. I advise you to focus on the main chance, which is using overwhelming force to seize a substantial amount of land from a chosen target. Please, don't commit us to a war by half-measures or without hope of significant success.

[Fintourist]

I wouldn't take any aggressive action toward dtay. We don't need another enemy, and we can't really stop him from landing Taj, just delay him. It's an extremely risky play for little-to-no gain, so it's goal is only the deprivation to an opponent of one city or a few workers, without anything more substantial won for us. I am very strongly against this play. I advise you to focus on the main chance, which is using overwhelming force to seize a substantial amount of land from a chosen target. Please, don't commit us to a war by half-measures or without hope of significant success.

Yeah, we are not doing it, I guess we both just like to type out crazy ideas. But just to clarify, it would not be done because of workers, it would be done, if we would get a low-odds GE out of Agincourt.. The idea is to delay dtay just that long that we get to Nationalism supported by our saved money and GA-boost and steal the Taj.. It's a crazy plan and I like it already for that, but it's 99 % sure that it won't be realized

[TheHumanHydra]

I see what you're saying now. But yeah, I'm not sure that's very likely, with a seven-turn window for dtay or someone else to build it. But yes, that is very creative. I didn't realize you had wanted to steal the Taj.

[Old Harry]

Yeah, I think I agree with you THH, but I want to someone so badly...

[TheHumanHydra]

Yeah, I think I agree with you THH, but I want to someone so badly...

Just remember: