[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[scooter]

Yeah I'm seeing this Dreylin/OT4E stuff too, but I think we have to continue to bet that they're aiming at somebody else. Donovan seems most likely, and Gaspar is more likely than us with his lack of military traits. I think if Dreylin attacked either of those guys, he'd win. If he attacked us, he might still win, but it would be painful enough that it might not be worth it. His other option is BGN who might be even easier than Donovan to take on as he sits parked on 3 cities, and they do share a border too. Our explorer should be able to see anything incoming at Cotton Gin next turn.

Pretty much no doubt in my mind that he's planning on attacking somebody. The question is just who. I think we are very low likelihood for both meta and geographic reasons.

I also don't think that Pindicator city changes anything for us either, so I think we're on the same page about that too.

[scooter]

Turn 283 - DREYLINWATCH



Is it panic time? Let's take a look at a few pictures that should help calm us down.



Here's Dreylin's two closest neighbors. We know he shares a border with both, and it's the two players who are lagging behind the most. BGN is Spiritual + Sacrificial Altar, but Donovan is Peter. Possibility he'll attack this way: high.



These borders look far, but every player in the game have expanded towards this isthmus because of how rich it is. I would assume that Dreylin and/or Gaspar have settled in this area since our maps were last updated. In that case, they're likely to be close-ish to sharing a border. Possibility he'll attack this way: moderate.



Compare those to this. I just see no way whatsoever that he'll attack up this way. It would leave him far, far too over-stretched. Possibility: low.

So I think we should just relax. If despite all this he sails a ton of boats across this lake to do this to us instead of those far easier targets, well we'll do whatever we can to make sure he takes enough pain in the process to make him lose . OT4E may be aggressive and all that, but I don't think he's stupid, and stupid would be passing up on that trifecta of much softer/closer options to take aim at us. (Famous last words?)



BGN ferried a Gren onto this horse tile. Guess he's just wanting to watch for an incoming attack from Dreylin. If we're worried, I'm sure he's downright freaking out right now.



Took a quick peek - no sign of Gaspar cities towards us. Seems like a good sign.



Here's a look inside the ridiculous Haber Process. The levee completes next turn with the aid of a chop, and next turn the workers will complete a watermill that Haber will neatly grow onto. After that it'll get us a little bit of military while growing. Perhaps we should consider slotting in a Cav just for some additional zone defense? I don't think Cavs have tons of use or shelf-life on this map, but we might feel better having a unit that can streak across our empire pretty quickly in case we need it to. Just an idle thought. We probably still want more Rifles/Grens first.



Settler for the island completes next turn. That city should be settled on T286.

Donovan plopping that extra EP on us was a one-off. He remained at 44ep, so we stopped at 43. We're just a few turns away from having Gaspar's graphs.



Whoever Dreylin is targeting is going to die so very badly.

[Sullla]

Not a lot of comments from me, scooter. Things look good so long as we're not about to get boated by a dozen Dreylin rifles. And if we do, then I'll say "I told you so" and we'll do our best to make him miserable for ruining our game.

Probably the most noteworthy thing from our perspective was the borders at Steam Power hitting 100 culture and expanding out to the third ring. This makes it a bit harder to boat us from the south, although Cotton Gin can still bit hit out of the fog. I'd love to have two explorers on that southern island, one in the east and one in the west, watching both possible sea lanes. We'll probably settle a city down there not too far down the road though (after this current trio of settlers are finished), so maybe the one explorer is sufficient.

By the way, who's the team with 223k power rating?! That's essentially no units built at all the whole game. Very odd.

I plan to work on extending the micro plan and sandbox further tomorrow night, as we're getting close to the end again. Thanks for all of the awesome screenshots.

[scooter]

I had another thought about the DreylinWatch issue, especially as Sullla mentions the 223k power issue. Who is it? So here's what we know.

* It's not us
* It's not Dreylin
* It's not Donovan
* It's almost for sure not ReallyEvilMuffin.

That leaves Gaspar, BoldlyGoingNowhere, and Pindicator as possibilities. I'm wondering if Dreylin already knows who it is, and that's who he's aiming at. It's harder to narrow things down from here, but if I had to eliminate someone, it would be pindicator just because it'd make sense for him to get some units out, and he did just capture a barbarian city while settling new cities. Plus he doesn't really make sense right now as a Dreylin target for both geographic and leader reasons.

So my best guess is either BGN or Gaspar have totally skipped military this game, and whichever it is, Dreylin knows and is targeting them. It's worth discussing because if it's Gaspar, we could be positioned to profit from it, although BGN is more likely. Although, if BGN has 3 cities and no military, what could he possibly be building? I'll dive in-game real quick and see who Dreylin has spent EPs on.

Of course, he may just be going back to finish off Donovan, but it's something that crossed my mind.

edit: NOPE. Civstats says Sullla logged in about 2 minutes ago. So this will have to wait.

[scooter]

Sullla got out, so I jumped in. Looks like Dreylin's EPs have been on us, Donovan, Gaspar, but I'm not certain that he can see Gaspar's graphs yet as he's clearly working on those. So I don't think he's got graphs on any of the 3 possible stragglers. So perhaps there's not as much to my theory, and he's just going to kill Donovan when peace expires after all.

[Sullla]

I extended out the micro plan to the end of our Golden Age tonight. Our Demographics get a lot stronger when we plant two cities in two turns on Turns 287-288. My quick comments:

* We actually end up overshooting Communism tech without even trying for it. I was actually turning off science at the end of the Golden Age so that we won't waste the 1100 beakers coming from the Great Artist lightbulb. The upshot of this is that we can use the Great Artist that pops on Turn 290 to lightbulb Communism tech (with extremely minimal lightbulb overflow rather than wasting another turn) and immediately jump into State Property. I'm thinking we might want to sit in Nationhood civic for 5 turns as well, with the capital using that time to grow another size or two. I think we could reach size 14 without much trouble once we're in State Property; it's worth about +7 food at our capital with all those workshops and watermills!

* Related question, although this is getting further into the future: how about Theocracy for 5 turns alongside Nationhood? I don't think we'll need Pacifism for a while after the Great Artist pops out.

* Our roading in the southeast gets the second settler from the capital en route to its destination really nicely. However, I don't know how we're going to keep this hidden from pindicator, who has an explorer fortified on our iron hill tile. I think it's going to be really obvious what we're doing... Scooter, maybe you could input the worker action and then cancel it so that they don't have mouseover text saying "Building a road"? I mean, I don't think that's going to disguise very much, but we may as well.

* I like our how empire is developing in this sandbox. The problem is Dreylin/OT4E, who are running away with the game right now. They just settled two more cities this turn (8 total now), and their control of the Kremlin is essentially letting them whip out settlers at the same pace as REM's Imperialistic trait... plus they're Spiritual and Philosophical. They are also whipping out units at the discounted rate and continuing to build up that terrifying army.

I don't see a whole lot of options here other than hoping they falter at some point. One thing that we're learning from this game is that Spiritual/Philosophical is crazy strong for these settings. There's no way anyone can deny the Tah Mahal to a team with this combo, and then the free Golden Age translated into four more Great People = first to Communism = free Kremlin = free Great Spy. That might very well have been game over right there for the rest of us. Kudos to Dreylin and OT4E who have taken a very strong leader and shown the rest of us how to use it to the hilt.

I'm still having a lot of fun. I'm just hoping we're not all playing for second place.

[scooter]

Some quick thoughts...

* Related question, although this is getting further into the future: how about Theocracy for 5 turns alongside Nationhood? I don't think we'll need Pacifism for a while after the Great Artist pops out.

Funny, I was going to suggest the same. Drafting pinch rifles sounds pretty nice. I think that sounds like a good plan.

* Our roading in the southeast gets the second settler from the capital en route to its destination really nicely. However, I don't know how we're going to keep this hidden from pindicator, who has an explorer fortified on our iron hill tile. I think it's going to be really obvious what we're doing... Scooter, maybe you could input the worker action and then cancel it so that they don't have mouseover text saying "Building a road"? I mean, I don't think that's going to disguise very much, but we may as well.

Yeah, I cancel worker actions probably 85% of the time - only exceptions being central workers doing actions that will continue for a couple turns. I don't think it'll make much of a difference, but I'll still do it. I'm halfway wondering if we should start thinking about a backup plan if he really settles aggressively and we're left with a crappy city that we may want to deprioritize.


As for the Dreylin stuff - yeah, and I think it's going to get uglier when he runs somebody over. I think we just need to keep our heads down and play our game, and hope we can do well enough to have a puncher's chance late. Montezuma of Germany lets us put together an extremely formidable late-game army, and if we can keep from falling too far behind, we can maybe do some damage with it later. There's also the chance that REM thinks the same way and a dogpile occurs.

I think it's going to be important for us to gain some flexibility to react to what they do in upcoming turns. For example, if he makes a run at Donovan or Gaspar, we'll want to scrounge up some units to take a run at a city (both have perfectly reachable cities for us, although Gaspar is more of a reach). If he makes a run at BGN, we'll want to consider settling on his northeast island which is in the opposite direction and therefore will be neglected by them. I think if we play things perfectly, we can keep our odds of winning above 0%, and if they make a mistake, well all the better. I learned in the harshest way possible in PBEM34S what a pair of commando units can do to turn a dominant position into an also-ran, and we may just have similar windows of our own down the road. Fortunately we're both enjoying this, so keeping morale high enough to get there shouldn't be an issue.

[scooter]

Turn 284

The turn always seems to roll at my preferred playing window, which means I always seem to be first to play. It's nice - plenty of time if needed.



No sign of incoming Dreylin death-fleet. I moved 1N after taking this picture, and that also revealed nothing of note. May as well keep scanning up and down this coast. If he's coming, it's through this channel. Still highly doubt he's coming for us.



We're being very closely watched. It'll be very obvious to pindicator that we're headed this way. No huge whips from pindicator in quite awhile. I'll be on the lookout for a triple whip from him. I took a few pictures of some backup plan possibilities in case pindicator takes this area in a way that makes settling it very soon very unappealing. I'll cover that in a follow-up post.



Our poor city of Cotton Gin is doing some serious work for us right now, with the Scientific Method bulb coming next turn. Between the scientists and the bulb, we'll have researched it completely without ever once going over to 100% science. Really happy with the early return on bulbs with the setup given how cheap those first few great people are between the 80% scaling and the easy access to Pacifism.



Gonna go ahead and pretend those ominous top food and power numbers don't exist.

Donovan's golden age is over by the way.



Settler and rifle pair load up next turn. Our second wave of city settling is coming up in the next half-dozen turns, and it cannot get here soon enough.

[Sullla]

More great reporting as usual. I have some additional thoughts but they'll have to wait until tomorrow evening, when it's not pushing midnight my local time.

For those following along with our thread: we're going to discover two techs and plant three more cities in the next 6 turns. Hopefully our position will look a lot better after that... although to be honest, we're doing quite well in the non-Dreylin category.

[scooter]

Backup Plans



I have this nagging concern Pindicator is going to settle something very aggressive because he's Boudica. If he settles on the plains hill above the fish, that's no problem. We'll just bump our sign back a little bit and take what we can get. However, if he comes up and actually settles on the "3" we're aiming for, we're going to need a new plan fast. That sheep would hardly be a sure thing since pindicator would be able to use two cities to pour culture onto it. Maybe we would just want to plant on the iron in that spot, but that feels like a very middling spot, and it's also one he wouldn't dream of contesting, so we wouldn't be in a race for such a mediocre spot.

So here's some other options that I'll throw up against the wall to see what sticks. Full disclosure: I think about half of these are no better than just settling on iron and being done with it. But I find humoring every option (even the bad ones) is pretty helpful, so here goes.



This "c" here is hardly a great location in terms of land quality. Nothing better than a 4F tile - it's basically Cotton Gin: The Sequel. That said, in a State Property world (which we'll be in around the time this settler would be ready), all land is good land. And more importantly, there's a ton of tactical value in this spot. If piling on Donovan is an option, the value of this spot goes way up. Not to mention it helps shield us from a Dreylin naval invasion by giving us a bigger buffer to our core. It'll also already have worker support in the region, so that's a nice bonus.



The southern island pair are both valid options. The crab will likely go to support the super levee city, so both cities have just a solo food tile to go on, combined with a severe lack of land tiles. They are thoroughly mediocre cities. Mediocre on this lush map is really equivalent to just plain bad. That said, the value for each of these cities is primarily tactical. They'll give us full control over this ocean, and they shield our capital much better than settling on iron does.



I'll throw this one out there because it's a decent city despite the fact that it gains us nothing in terms of new land. The main value here is if we find Gaspar an attractive invasion target in the future. I see this city as improving the resources and workshopping everything else and being a solid shipyard after that. It's in a nice geographic spot for something like that. The double food makes this a faster starting city than the others we're looking at. That said, I have a really hard time settling this so soon when land begs to be claimed.



Finally, here's the northern options. The isthmus spot is a very weak city, but it's got immense tactical value as it joins two bodies of water. The bigger winner I think is the silks spot on the island. We're already settling over here for the levee city, so workers will already be in place. There's two quality foods here (rice can be chain irrigated), plus the sheep can be borrowed if needed. 3 forests to help kick-start things doesn't hurt either. I like this spot in general regardless of when we slot it in. In general, if we have to change plans on the fly, this is the spot I slightly prefer at the moment.

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I'm hoping this is a pointless exercise, but we'll be settling a lot of these spots in the future anyway so it's always worth a look. I left off anything on the south island for now just because that is near the guy running around with the mammoth military, and it doesn't seem too wise to entertain that idea at the moment.