RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Sullla]

Here's a short update from Turn 113:



This was a very quiet turn for us, not a great deal going on. (Well, aside from still being at war with 4 other teams!) Whosit moved his galleys to the northeast, over by the barb city of Kassite; we should be able to see them again when Fredericksburg expands its borders next turn. I'll try to log into the game right when the timer ticks over tonight to get a picture of them before Whosit moves them off again.

The main news is that we turned on research this turn, and will finish Iron Working in 2t, as seen above. Because this is the one turn that we're going 100% research, we've chosen to push max commerce this turn at a slight slowdown in growth, so thus Fredericksburg is working the gold, Chancellorsville is working the furs, etc. That sent our GNP up to 155 for this turn (Average = 64), although of course that's not a sustainable rate. Pretty cool regardless.

And... that's about all I can say really. We're doing a lot of recovering and growing, which is necessary but not terribly exciting. I expect things will pick up again soon enough, as Jowy's starting to pile an army into Thebes. He's up to 3 phalanxes again, although we're not exactly scared of a phalanx-heavy army at this point between our horse archers and catapults...

[SevenSpirits]

Because this is the one turn that we're going 100% research, we've chosen to push max commerce this turn at a slight slowdown in growth, so thus Fredericksburg is working the gold, Chancellorsville is working the furs, etc.

Can you explain why you'd want to do that?

[darrelljs]

Science multiplier buildings make commerce more valuable when you have the slider set to 100% research.

Darrell

[T-hawk]

Science multiplier buildings make commerce more valuable when you have the slider set to 100% research.

I know this is going to sidetrack the thread, but I can't let this go unanswered. As I understand it, what's important is not the city's multiplier in absolute terms, but each city's multiplier relative to the national averages.

This situation is a different version of what I describe in that article. Rather than choosing to directly generate beakers or cash at a single instant, we choose to have a city favor beakers or cash over time based on when it works a commerce tile. Each city should work commerce when its multipliers for the current slider position are most favorable as compared to the national weighted average multiplier.

India has +0% gold multiplier everywhere, +25% in a few cities, and +75% in the capital with the academy. The overall science multiplier weighted by commerce is probably above +25%. That means Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville actually have a more favorable multiplier for gold, since that is exactly equal to the national average but their science multiplier is below. If they are going to work a commerce tile part-time, they should do it while the science slider is lower, in order to subsidize a higher science slider later for mighty Gettysburg.

Anyway, the magnitude of the effect is probably on the order of about two beakers so it's not a big deal.

[darrelljs]

The really funny thing is that as I was typing up my post, I was envisioning this identical reply from T-Hawk .

Darrell

[Jabah]

The answer is there

That sent our GNP up to 155 for this turn (Average = 64), although of course that's not a sustainable rate. Pretty cool regardless.

/joking on ... or not

They just wanted to show off
Telling all the other players that despite being dogpiled, they still can over-research them pretty easily whenever they feel like it
That is war propaganda (just need a big message in the public room as well)

/joking off

[Sullla]

Don't get too carried away, folks. Our position isn't as great as Jabah's making it out to be. Yes, we can still research at a very good rate, however Kathlete and Whosit have made great strides in their GNP over the past 20 turns. While we were fighting off massive stacks of units and whipping our cities, they were continuing to build and tech in peace. What's more troubling is the fact that we are going to start to fall behind soon because of our city count: the loss of Shiloh dropped us down to just 5 cities, and all of our enemies have equal or more than that. Kathlete and Whosit also have vastly more empty land to expand into, while we're pretty much stuck at 6 cities until we can get some naval power going and expand overseas.

So while we're definitely in much, much better shape than we were about 5 turns ago, our position remains rather precarious longterm. Unless we do something, we'll eventually be ground down by a combination of larger opposing empires. (Even if we have 6 really well-run cities, we're gonna lose if Kathlete and Whosit have 20+ cities combined!) The good news is that Speaker and I have a pretty good idea of how to "do something" to catch up, by first replacing the city we lost and then getting Metal Casting (triremes, woot) going for naval parity, if not supremacy. If we can keep expanding and adding more cities, we'll be able to keep up in tech and be OK.

For the current turn, I took a picture last night after the turn roll of Whosit's naval stack:



He unloaded the Praetorians, to attack the barb city of Kassite. Interesting. CivStats is suggesting Whosit captured the city and gifted it to Jowy; I guess we'll see for sure when we log in later tonight. We'll have to think about how to play this; it might not even be the worst thing for us, if Jowy has to stretch his defenses all the way over to Kassite. I'm sure Speaker will have some thoughts.

Because we haven't been able to catch up with Broker/plako online, I sent them a short email:

Dear Broker and plako,

I'm sorry we haven't been able to catch you online the past two nights. Speaker and I usually play our turns in the evening US East Coast time, and we will be online for Gmail chat if Broker happens to be available then. We may also want to schedule a formal time for discussion over this weekend; let us know what would work for you.

Thank you for sharing some of your thoughts on tech path with us. We will be finishing research on Iron Working this turn, and then plan to go on to Metal Casting, so that we can build triremes to counter the galleys that Kathlete and Whosit are sailing around our borders. Your tech path sounds very strong from an economic point of view. My one initial thought was that you might want to move Metal Casting up in terms of priority. I know that you had the idea of bulbing it, which is good, but triremes and forges would be very useful for an island-hopping team like yourselves.

Strategically, our team is very strong on land, but we have essentially no naval power; the city of ours that was razed was planned to be our big naval base. Your team looks to be somewhat weak on land, but conversely could develop into a very strong naval power, and control the sealanes around your island cities. It seems like maybe our teams could work together and push our relative advantage there - Speaker and I contributing ground units to defend your cities, your team having a fleet of galleys and triremes to clear the waters. Anyway, hopefully we can go over some of these thoughts in more detail in a chat session.

Dantski also gave us the impression that he wanted to remain neutral, but I don't see how that's possible given a large alliance of 4 teams working together. We've told him as such, and I think he's slowly coming over to our side. He's going to have to realize that dropping out of the other alliance in such dramatic fashion painted a huge target on his backside! We've also sent messages to IKZ, but in typical fasion, they haven't responded...

I think that our four teams will have to work together, or else we'll each get picked off by that opposing Whosit/Kathlete/Jowy/Nakor alliance one by one!

Cheers,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

We'd really like it if we could do some unit gifting back and forth with Broker/plako to help solve our crippling naval weakness. I dunno if they'd go for this kind of idea, but it seems worth mentioning.

And one last short message to IKZ:

Dear slaze and dsplaisted of IKZ,

We didn't hear back from you after our last message - I hope that you've been able to sort out your connection issues!

Just to reiterate, there's a clear alliance of Kathlete, Whosit, Jowy, and Nakor working together in this game. If the rest of our teams stand idly by, they will pick us off one by one. We would like to try and work more closely with your team, and create some measure of cooperation between the remaining four teams in this game. Please get back to us with your thoughts!

Sullla
The Killer Angels

[Ashain]

Roughly speaking Sullla, whats your main long term focus for getting more cities (aside from Shiloh). Are you planning on island hopping or aquisition via pointy stick?

[Speaker]

I finished our turn, Sullla, but didn't click the "end turn" button. I'll leave that for you, if you want to take a peek.

[Savage Seahorse]

Neptune shakes his Trident at Angels whom neglect him. Contract out the Navy with caution.