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

[Old Harry]

BTW, welcome back Krill. You seem to have recently enjoyed taking over civs in hopeless positions or under major attack. Is that just because its something you don't normally get to experience?

Anyway, given our southern neighbour's current behaviour we may be asking for help ourselves...

[TheHumanHydra]

Basically, the turn you finish Guilds, any HA you would complete that turn are already in the build queue get turned into knights. So you don't want to build any HA until you are about to finish Guilds, the time line with starting them is city (and production/tech) dependent.

Sorry, I guess I worded my post poorly. I do understand the mechanics of it; I was just under the impression we were finishing Guilds in a turn or two, so would need the HA builds in progress now. Evidently I was mistaken, and it appears Old Harry altered his plans a bit also.

[Fintourist]

Dhalphir's comments are annoying me. I hope I was civil enough..

[Fintourist]

Quick comments about the actual game:

Mack's power increase is not really threatening yet, but yes of course every unit he adds makes attacking him less desirable. Obviously, the possible attack was always supposed to be based on fast initial strike, after which we would try to put him into positions where he could make tactical mistakes. It was never really about getting a huge power lead or even a minor tech edge

@Hydra: Those mace builds (apart from our HE city) are actually all auto-upgraded sword builds. In coming turns the new military builds will be indeed HAs that will turn into knight builds. The extent and timing of our military build-up is something that we are all the time pondering with the Harry. What is your opinion? Should we go all in immediately or do you believe that we should wait for a better change? Should we try to build an opportunistic knight stack without compromising our economy too much or should we just pull the trigger now (prepare now, whip everything after GA) and get 50 knights asap and then look who is weakest around us?

Mackoti getting paper.. Hmm.. I'm not too happy to hear that. This might mean that we need to alter some of our plans, but I'll need to wait for a reload and check stuff in game before commenting more on that.

Dtay is really enjoing his peaceful borders (us having hands full with suttree and mack) and TBSJ being passive. I would have loved to boost our power earlier by just building cats that are not going to obsolete for a good time. Well, suttree and geography did not really give us that option. We are assuming dtay will select Nationalism and go for Taj, our low odds GE would appear eot148/149, I assume we are not going to try to invade South City, delay the probable Taj build and steal the wonder, but I'm reminding of this option just for fun..

Scoopin-Nakor war.. Everything has been said..

[Old Harry]

Dhalphir's comments are annoying me. I hope I was civil enough..

He probably didn't need dignifying with a response. I was pleased I restrained myself from calling him Mr-Six-Workers-To-Chop-An-Unroaded-Jungle...

More seriously, with your firewall problems the way we're playing is pretty much the only way you can get a good overview of what goes on, so if he wasn't joking he can go jump in a lake.

Even more seriously, last time we looked Mack's stack was four Wellys, seven HAs, seven Cats and six Axes.


If we assume that all the power he puts on over the next eight turns will be knights what is our best force mix to defend Peterloo? Given that it's one tile from the border and on a hill.


If we assume that all the power is maces and boats or knights and boats what is our best force mix? And where do we put it?

Scoopin-Nakor war.. Everything has been said..

None of us believe that

[Fintourist]

Dhalphir's comments are annoying me. I hope I was civil enough..

He probably didn't need dignifying with a response. I was pleased I restrained myself from calling him Mr-Six-Workers-To-Chop-An-Unroaded-Jungle...

More seriously, with your firewall problems the way we're playing is pretty much the only way you can get a good overview of what goes on, so if he wasn't joking he can go jump in a lake.

I just could not help myself.. I'll try not to make further enemies in the IT thread..

About mack stack, there's no way that Peterloo will look attractive to him unless he really increases his power and we don't.. In 10 turns, without any special military build-up, we can put 40 units into city of which some are lbows, maces, cats and knights. Bows & spears will also be quite useful defenders in hill cities still for a good while.. But let's be a bit more careful about boats this time and make sure that Cannae and Omdurman can't be surprised. Boat sentries + hammers into lbow build is a reasonable approach.. But yeah, I'll need to do some Christmas shopping now, so I'll try to answer your actual question in the evening..

[Old Harry]

Turn 148

Okay, we're back, Mackoti's GA ended with a great engineer being born (I have a feeling it was something else last time around, but I didn't get a shot of the event log, so can't properly complain) and dtay used Liberalism to take...

Nationalism!

Terribly predictable. Anyway sabotaging production in South City costs 580 EPs right now, if I get bored I'll work out how many hammers that is. The forests we were expecting him to chop got chopped with catapults for cover, so we probably couldn't have interfered anyway... Taj won't be long.

I'm finished scouting plako with Lunch. If I move him to the bit of he continent nearest to us and close borders will he teleport over the water towards us or to the nearest bit of land on the same continent (away from us)?

We lost Mack's graphs this turn, so EPs are reassigned to him now. We think Mack is most likely to be going for the Economics merchant, he's ahead of us Paper and Guilds and perhaps Banking already but his Golden Age just finished. Can we do enough in the next eight turns to beat him? Fintourist is going to do some calculations

No pictures of demos and graphs because I can't figure out how to do them on this stupid laptop.

THH - Is there anything that would help you get a better handle on how things are going at the moment? (I'm going to be asking a lot more advice with FT away)

[Fintourist]

Okay, we're back, Mackoti's GA ended with a great engineer being born (I have a feeling it was something else last time around, but I didn't get a shot of the event log, so can't properly complain)

Good catch. It seems really probable since that must be a low-odds roll. Mack should not have the opportunity to steal Taj from dtay though because he does not have Philosophy. This is nice, because I prefer dtay getting the wonder.. (I would prefer someone, who is not our neighbor over dtay though.. Sigh)

We think Mack is most likely to be going for the Economics merchant, he's ahead of us Paper and Guilds and perhaps Banking already but his Golden Age just finished. Can we do enough in the next eight turns to beat him? Fintourist is going to do some calculations

Well, mack could be going for Gunpowder, printing press, Astronomy or basically anything and we are just paranoid (maybe we should actually be more paranoid about janissaries and galleons).. But yeah, the point is that we do not want to put 7000 beakers into Education+Economics if we don't get the Great Merchant as a price. Universities and free market civic are not worth it (free market is very nice, but still not nice enough for that kind of an investment considering our squeezed position).. If we lose Economics to someone we have miss-played our hand and we would have been better off not birthing a great scientist for a bulb and should just remain relevant longer by grinding towards draftable rifles (or something else) supported by 4 trade missions and 2nd GA.. And yeah, we need to decide this by t150 and while mack is clearly closest to Economics from our opponents he is the most relevant comparison point. (we should be able to beat dtay if we want and nobody else has Paper).

Mack has finished Guilds, Paper, Banking and has 770 gold in savings so he is clearly ahead of us if he is going for Economics. If we convert that gold into beakers he is only missing ~6000 beakers (I don't think he has much beakers in any tech currently). Meanwhile after we finish Guilds next turn we still need ~9000 beakers.. So we are 3000 beakers and 2 turns of break-even research behind the leader of the game.. Sounds grim, right? However, we will most likely get 1800-2000 beakers from GS bulb and ~1500 gold from a trade mission and we are in a Golden Age so the possible race is closer than it seems. Unfortunately mack has m_h's cities, very strong ORG trait (btw Krill:

I don't say it in RBMod-thread during this game, but I don't think AGG should be nerfed. It is now a nice trait, but I think it still loses in the direct comparison e.g. to ORG.
- ORG Savings > AGG savings for most of the game. I think AGG very seldomly if ever exceeds the ORG savings even for a single turn and especially late in the game State Property kind of kills the AGG maintenance bonus, while ORG still rocks. AGG's anti-synergy with courthouses is kind of annoying/weakening as well.
- Courthouse + Lighthouse (+ Factory) bonus > Barracks (+ Stables + Drydock bonus)
- C1 promo is nice, but not enough to make AGG better, maybe close to even.
- Obviously, in some situations AGG can be stronger than ORG (and other way around) so I think the overall balance is nice. I just wanted to point out that nerfing is IMO not needed.

.. and mack has m_h's wonders, Colossus and Paya, which are both boosting his economy. Consequently I think mack's normal economy is probably close to our GA economy (which is just sad) and therefore I'm again a bit pessimistic whether we can win this race.. So yeah. I'm trying to come up with some kind of an estimate whether we would win or lose Economics-beeline (estimate our and mack's ((and dtay's)) ETAs) and then we can decide what we believe and whether we want to gamble.

I think after seeing our start + surroundings and leader I said that we are more or less out from racing for any first-to-reach bonuses, which I think was more or less correct forecast. We had 0-chance for Liberalism, it's kind of surprising that we can even dream about this Economics GM and I think we should be happy that we got at least Taoism.

[Ceiliazul]

if you were grinding toward rifling, how much different would your tech order be?

[Fintourist]

if you were grinding toward rifling, how much different would your tech order be?

If we go for Economics the tech path is:

Banking (1127 beakers) -> Paper (966 b) -> Education (3621 b) -> Economics (3381 b)

If we go for anything else, we don't want to waste those ~7000 beakers, here is one possible way to tech to draftable Rifles:

Banking -> Paper -> Printing Press (3240 b) -> Gunpowder (2415 b) -> RP (4347 b) -> Rifling (6762 b) -> Nationalism (3621 b)

This is just an example of course. Our neighbors actions (and our guesses) will determine the order if we go for Rifles. But as you can see instead of "wasting" beakers for E&E we could have PP, Gunpowder and some beakers into Replaceable Parts when we finish Economics...

However, I'm most definitely not saying that draftable rifles should be our military/tech target (despite RBMod-nerf for a SPI-leader draftable rifles are still pretty hammer-efficient way to organize your defenses though). E.g. Cuirassiers give lot more flexibility if we don't know where we want to strike and obviously totally different attacking speed. Aaand you can also make a case for naval techs or cannons.. I'm interested to see, which way Old Harry chooses when the time comes

The main point is just that we are already now couple of techs behind the tech leaders and the gap will increase unless someone gifts us his land. Therefore we really need to be careful in our tech path selection. Edu+Economics pays a significant part of its tech costs back thanks to Great Merchant and Free Market and my hypothesis is that it might keep us relevant a bit longer, but if we lose Great Merchant, it means that we will simply reach other key techs ~10 turns later, which is just bad..

Tech-wise we still have time to decide what our path is. Banking and Paper are kind of solid anyways.. The reason why we need to know already t150 whether we go for Economics is that we need to decide if we produce 2 GS + 2 GM or 1 GS + 3 GM. If we don't bulb Edu the 2nd GS is weak. Academy at this point is just bad with our city options..

My contribution to this game is nearing to an end. I will provide the promised Economics-race analysis tomorrow or on 27th..