[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[Sullla]

I poked ahead two more turns in our sandbox. I'm reluctant to try and predict too far ahead right now given the uncertainty with the pindicator area and the barb city. Some questions/thoughts for scooter:

* Just as a reminder, we discover Communism tech with our Great Artist on Turn 291. We can actually run 0% science on Turn 290 and still have enough beakers to discover it, I checked in the sandbox. (We "waste" about 30 beakers, which isn't a big deal. I don't want to undershoot the tech by trying to micro it further.) The plan is to pull a triple civics swap into State Property, Nationhood, and Theocracy on the same turn, then draft a series of rifles to protect our, umm, currently empty cities. Then we'll swap back to Bureaucracy on Turn 296.

* I have us building a series of workers to take us up to 15 in the next few turns. We're jumping from 5 cities up to 8-9 cities in short order, and we need more workers badly. I also figured that it made more sense to get workers out before finishing Communism tech, as we'll want to be growing cities (i.e. not building workers) once we're getting that bonus food from State Property.

* What do we want to build in the capital next? I had us finish a very cheap barracks but that's eminently vetoable. I think we want to use the next few turns growing to at least size 14, and then start another settler after we revolt from Nationhood back to Bureaucracy again, which will be on Turn 296. Anything we really want in the meantime? Bank or observatory maybe?

* Similarly, we also need builds for our other cities. I think we want one of them to start on a settler; I think my pick would be Telegraph so that Haber Process can keep growing, which it does at a ridiculous food surplus after the State Property swap. So I'm tentatively thinking that we draft Telegraph, then go for the settler (I think it takes 8 turns?) after that.

Tentative builds:

Cotton Gin: galleon
Haber Process: frigate? more military?
Radio: barracks -> ???

Really curious about your thoughts. We can also build Research/Wealth too, which is never a bad option for our setup.

* Our Food/Production numbers are pretty insane under State Property. I should have taken a screenshot, we had something like 130 Food and 150 Production - and that was *NOT* in Golden Age. Raw beaker count does suffer from losing those Mercantilism specialists, but we'll also get the foreign trade routes (not in the sandbox currently) and the extra food will let us grow onto more specialists down the road. Plus we also save about 35 gpt in lowered maintenance costs. State Property is a big winner for us.

Long story short, it's looking really good for us if we can avoid getting attacked for a little bit here. We're jumping from 5 cities to 9 cities while also making that critical civics swap. Very happy with our situation at the moment.

[Fluffball]

I signed up on these forums just to say this is by far the most interesting civ 4 discussion I've ever seen, thanks for the great reporting!

[timmy827]

suggestions for now or soon -
Bessemer Furnace (Process might be more technically correct, but you've already got one) (This city has iron!)
Pullman Car (not so much of an invention, but I've always liked the name).

[scooter]

Wait... was that two consecutive signed-up-just-to-reply-to-this-thread posts? That's pretty cool.

* What do we want to build in the capital next? I had us finish a very cheap barracks but that's eminently vetoable. I think we want to use the next few turns growing to at least size 14, and then start another settler after we revolt from Nationhood back to Bureaucracy again, which will be on Turn 296. Anything we really want in the meantime? Bank or observatory maybe?

* Similarly, we also need builds for our other cities. I think we want one of them to start on a settler; I think my pick would be Telegraph so that Haber Process can keep growing, which it does at a ridiculous food surplus after the State Property swap. So I'm tentatively thinking that we draft Telegraph, then go for the settler (I think it takes 8 turns?) after that.

Tentative builds:

Cotton Gin: galleon
Haber Process: frigate? more military?
Radio: barracks -> ???

So I think we need to figure out the Dreylin/Gaspar situation first, because it'll inform how aggressive we need to be about getting units out. I'm pretty concerned about either of these scenarios happening:

1) Dreylin captures every single Gaspar city before anyone (including us) can snipe any of it. He then has double the land of anyone else and wins in a laugher.

2) We try to poach a Gaspar city or two that are furthest away from Dreylin. It pisses him off, and he runs over our cute handful of units with his horde when he's done with Gaspar to take the land we poach from Gaspar + the barb city. He gets it anyway, but we've now sunk a big investment into this and got nothing in return.

So somehow we've got to thread the needle between #1 and #2. In order to do that, we need more units up in the Gaspar region. Am I wrong about this? Do you agree or disagree that Dreylin taking everything easily so early is uncomfortably close to game over?

Anyway, if you agree... my thinking is this first wave to take the barbarian city is well and good, but ideally we need to be able to ferry over another group to hopefully poach and defend a city or two. Gaspar's southeastern cities would fit well with our empire considering we've prioritized the northeast island.

Unfortunately, there may not be much we can do about it. Gaspar's response to the incoming threat was 1 whip and a quickly played turn, so... He looks pretty checked out already. That's pretty disappointing.

[scooter]

Turn 288

Last turn of our golden age. It was fun while it lasted!



So let's first talk about this first build.



I noticed your plan called for a Levee, but I'm going to need to be convinced on that one. I count just 3 tiles that will benefit from a levee. At 144h, the bonus Levee hammers would take dozens of turns just to break even, and the game could well be over by then. Is there something I'm missing? I think we'd get more value out of just about anything else. I tentatively swapped it to a Barracks build, but I'll check in tomorrow with you once you've had a chance to chime in, and I can switch it back if there's a reason I'm overlooking.



And we may as well talk about the other pressing stuff! We're still nicely on track to capture this city. Here's the Dreylin/Gaspar front.



Dreylin captured the horse/corn area city on the first turn of the war, and on this past second turn he captured the fish/copper site. His next targets will presumably be Tiger Woods and Tom Brady. He's also got a third city whose location was unknown to me until I typed this out and saw the road next to the sheep on the east coast. So I expect those 3 cities will be Dreylin's first targets. We'll take Phyrgian in just a couple turns, and I don't expect any resistance from either player on that.

The question is do we let him have more land than that?



Here's Gaspar's other 3 cities (he's only got 6 now). I have to imagine REM is eyeing Bush. Targeting Armstrong and/or Nixon seems like something that would be nice to do, but might leave us dangerously over-stretched. There's 3 options:

1) Don't bother. Hope REM takes these to act as a counter-weight. We'll still be a distant 3rd place to either player, but that may at least help prevent a runaway while we play the longer game and try to catch up.

2) Try to capture Armstrong (and maybe Nixon). It's a very strong city, and it would cement the south coast of this land as ours.

3) Burn some of these cities. We don't get anything but gold, but we prevent Dreylin from capturing cities with population/infra intact and force him to build expensive settlers and trek them way over here. Maybe he even gets disinterested and we can settle a spot of our own. Probably wouldn't require many units because Gaspar is likely funneling units forward to defend himself.

Any thoughts? If we go with either #2 or #3, I'm going to recommend we slip in a second Galleon at Steam Engine very soon. It will likely be able to 1-turn it depending on overflow.

Whew. Crazy times.



Final overhead shot of our empire in a the golden age. Sorry, I forgot to turn off resource bubbles. Also note Pindicator's explorer getting trapped. I think he figured he had a couple more turns to escape, but he wasn't quick enough. Though we're about to ditch Merc, so OB might not be so bad if he's polite about it. Plus some goodwill wouldn't hurt given that we're about to get a small "close borders spark tensions" ding with him.



I was happy to see we did crest 200h on the last turn of the golden age. That was fun. We've also climbed up to 4th in soldiers, which says a lot about the skeleton armies people are running. My guess is that REM is in 3rd.

Took a quick check of the city counts too.

REM: 10
Dreylin: 10
pindicator: 8
Us: 7
Gaspar: 6
Donovan: 5
BGN: 3

38 turns in, and already there's probably only 4 teams left that can realistically win. This game is brutal. Great discussion in here the last couple days.

[Sullla]

I had a chance to log into the game this morning. Let me try to cover some of our issues one by one.



So on the levee here, I agree that the payback for the building does take a while. I wasn't sure what else we wanted to build though, as we need the city to produce something while growing for the next dozen or so turns. If we want to go barracks -> units, that's OK with me. I'll leave you the final call.

About pindicator's explorer: I think offering Open Borders might be a good sign too. It would be a friendly gesture and we'll be able to use the trade route income. However, let's hold off for a couple of turns so that we can draft out some units. I don't want pindicator exploring through our core and seeing a whole bunch of empty cities. That might prove a bit too tempting.

Regarding the main issue for this turn, I'm not sure what to do about the ongoing collapse of Gaspar/Noble. If we wanted to intervene in the war, we would do it like this:



Fort on the tile northeast of Spinning Jenny, then send ships straight through and land soldiers next to Lance Armstrong. Unfortunately there's a few problems here:

* We don't really have the military forces to put an expedition like this together. We're badly overstretched just holding on to what we have right now. We have how much empty cities again - three, I think? Even with the drafting we're about to do, that's only going to provide enough units to protect what we currently have, not enough for an attack. We can train units but that will take some time. And I'm not sure that Gaspar/Noble are going to last that long.

* Let's say that we do put together a military expedition to capture Lance Armstrong. What then? We can't hold the city, not against the huge force that Dreylin has assembled. They could easily run over anything we send up there. The numbers on the Demographics screen are terrifying; they have 370k more power than we do! That's something like 10 rifles and 15 cavs more than we have, and even if all of them aren't on the front lines, it's still more than we have any prayer of stopping. Why wouldn't Dreylin just declare war on us and take the city for himself? That leaves us with burning the city down as the only option, and it's asking a lot to invest resources into an expedition just for denial purposes.

How about this: let's start building up some military and see how things develop. We can watch how the war plays out and decide what to do. I think we might end up having to sit on the sidelines for this conflict, not because we want to do so, but because we don't have the resources to intervene. The logistics of trying to get units into position to attack Gaspar/Noble are not going to be easy.

Demographics bar graph picture dump for the readers:

[scooter]

I wish I could disagree with you, but I don't think that I can. Every time I look in-game to try to come up with a logistical plan to snipe these cities, I come up empty unless Gaspar can somehow Dreylin longer than I think he will. I'm in agreement that we should get some more military and see where that leaves us, but I'm not super optimistic. I think we really need to hope REM somehow gets involved and that creates some tensions between the two. In the meantime, there's still plenty of attractive city sites for us to grab. Spinning Jenny gave us a very large trade route boost, so more island settling sounds nice to me.

I've been growing very nervous about Dreyling running away, but maybe I'm looking at things the wrong way. The one thing Dreylin has massively sacrificed to do all of this is technology. He has no Steam Power, and the only reason he got SciMeth and Communism was bulbing - he's poured all his gold into getting himself into this position. Which was probably not a bad idea!

But all of this means his tech situation is pretty bad. He hasn't been in Representation at all because he's had to be in Suffrage, so he's not getting that much out of Mercantilism. He's got no Steam Power and no Serfdom, so integrating all these cities will take some time, and his research capacity has to be pretty bad right now.

Meanwhile, our strengths are the opposite. Our production capacity is exploding right now, and even outside of our golden age we'll likely be tops once we switch into State Property. Of course, Dreylin can keep pace with that by whipping, but what he can't do is whip beakers. Once State Property comes in, we can get ourselves some Rifles via drafting/building, but more importantly we can get ourselves to Assembly Line fairly quickly with some wealth/research building. We might find ourselves in a situation where we've got Factories and Infantry, and Dreylin is 20T away from being able to say the same.





That "c?" city right there gives us a canal right into the heart of Dreylin's land. We'd be able to easily fork a half-dozen cities, and I'm not quite sure what he'd be able to do to stop it. If we build some EP buildings, we could probably get city visibility on him pretty easily too. I'm definitely not advocating a full-scale invasion of Dreylin, but I am pointing out that if he gets into runaway territory, we're going to have a window coming up where we can put a serious dent in him. So maybe I just need to take a deep breath and remind myself that we don't need to panic just yet.


So more generally, maybe we just need to keep our heads down and play our game. Assembly Line is going to be huge for us, and we should be able to push a serious tech edge over Dreylin. He's going to need to choose between tech and production, but we can do both. I can see a gameplan that goes something like this:

1) Draft a couple rounds of Rifles while slow-building some more.
2) In a few spurts, build wealth/research to propel ourselves to Assembly Line.
3) At Assembly Line, turn off research, and build factories in our MFG cities and wealth in the others. Do a huge upgrade of Rifles -> Infantries while building more Infantry.
4) Capture ourselves some land and/or knock Dreylin down a peg.


Consider that written in extremely erasable pencil, but it's a start. Sullla, I'm very interested to hear your thoughts on how the next 25T might unfold.

[Sullla]

Scooter, I'mean thinking along the same lines. I'm on my phone now, but I'll type something substantial tonight in a few hours.

[Sullla]

OK, strategy metagaming post incoming here. I'm going to piggyback off of scooter's post and suggest how I view the state of the game right now, and where we might be going in the next 25 turns.

In the short run, I think it boils down like this: we would like to intervene in the Dreylin/OT4E versus Gaspar/Noble war, but we don't have the resources to do so. The logistics are bad for our team, and we don't have the military to challenge the game's runaway leader in units. While we don't like the idea of sitting on the sidelines and doing nothing, we might not have much of a choice. As scooter said, our best hope is that REM or pindicator decide to intervene themselves and slice off a corner of Gaspar's territory for themselves. I think we can handle Gaspar's territory being sliced into thirds, we just don't want to see it get swallowed entirely by the #1 team.

Let's back up a bit further and think about how Dreylin/OT4E reached the position that they're in. Here is an overview shot of their territory:



We picked up these maps a few turns ago from BGN; I'm not sure how recently he was able to exchange maps with Dreylin. It's possible that the tile improvements we can see here are out of date. However, the city's center tile always updates in real time along with the city sizes. We are seeing an accurate depicting of Dreylin's core in terms of population, and none of his cities are over size 7. That makes me more inclined to think that this map info is relatively up to date, as there wouldn't be a need for lots of tile improvements if all of these cities have been remaining small in size. Based on what we can see, Dreylin has lots of farms and not much else. We're certainly not seeing a whole bunch of workshops and watermills, tile improvements that take a long time to build if you're outside of Serfdom and don't have Steam Power tech.

How exactly did Dreylin's team get their giant army? Well, they've been using a combination of Kremlin + Slavery pop rushing and Kremlin + Universal Suffrage cash rushing to produce units in record time. The Kremlin allows them to finish production very quickly, and they've done an excellent job of leveraging that into a massive military. To me, this has OT4E's fingerprints all over it. He was one of the best players at competitive Multiplayer over at CivPlayers, and I'm sure that he played some Industrial starts back in the day. Those games were typically played with two teams, 3 vs 3, and it was quite common to see teams push out an initial series of cities, then go all-units endlessly from there. The strategy that Dreylin/OT4E have been employing would have already won the game in a 3 vs 3 ladder game. Rush out the Kremlin, whip/buy a huge army of cavs, and then crush the other team.

However, there's a crucial distinction here: we aren't in a 3 vs 3 duel environment. This is a Free for All environment instead, and crushing your neighbor with a huge army of whipped/bought units doesn't necessarily translate into victory. We've seen this with OT4E in other games here at Realms Beyond; I'm going to spoiler this one because it's an active game:

Pitboss 30 Spoiler:

This game was the perfect example; 2metraninja and OT4E launched an early decapitation naval strike against Old Harry, and captured his capital something like 50 turns into the game. But then they kept attacking other teams too, over and over again, spreading chaos and destruction across the game. The net result was that they ruined four other teams completely - but they also ruined their own game, with a crashed economy more than a full era behind the tech leaders. I think that same scenario could be in play here.

In other words, I think Dreylin and OT4E have sacrificed a lot to reach their current position. Like scooter said, they've been in Universal Suffrage for most of the game, and that means not benefiting from the Representation bonus to specialists. They have also made heavy use of Slavery civic, which again means no Serfdom for faster workers. Their research rate has not been especially impressive; they burned three Great People to be first to Communism tech, and they do not have Steam Power right now. The GNP bar graph says they are one of the last place teams currently:



Granted, we're in a Golden Age right now, but even our pre-Golden Age 0% research was higher than their current rate. Their teching has got to be pretty sad. Like scooter said, I think we can beat them to Assembly Line without much trouble, potentially by quite a good margin. They have also been converting cash into units via Universal Suffrage, which again is great for conquering one neighbor, but a real setback for the long run.

Another good metric for evaluating the overall strength of a team in Civ4 is to look at the resources screen. More resources connected to the trade network means a stronger team. We were way behind some of the other teams in the early going, when we were only stuck at 3 cities, but now look at our comparison with Dreylin/OT4E:



We are tied with them on resources, 14 apiece. Perhaps they have some resources in their borders that have been improved but aren't connected to the trade network - but we also have some resources in our borders that are improved and aren't connected, so that's probably a wash. Then there's also war weariness to factor in:



The diplo screen also presents this information in somewhat confusing fashion. That score of 59 war weariness is Dreylin's war weariness relative to Gaspar/Noble, not the other way around. (Gaspar/Noble has zero war weariness because they've been fighting inside their territory the whole time.) Even though this war will likely be a net gain for Dreylin's team, he will still be losing units the whole time, not to mention the cost of investing so heavily in units. Honestly, I think it's a bit of a questionable play to focus so much on military, with large parts of the map still to be claimed. Dreylin/OT4E could have used Slavery civic to whip out cheap settlers and focused on developing their territory instead of pushing for the army. It's a winning strategy if you only have to defeat one other team. But when you're playing against six other teams? Well, it becomes a high risk / high reward play.

Don't get me wrong, I think Dreylin/OT4E are in first place right now, and are the favorites to win the game. I just agree with scooter that our chances long time are better than they might seem. It wasn't that long ago that we were trailing along in fifth or sixth place. Now we're a definite third place, and potentially competitive with REM for second.

Speaking of REM, let's discuss his team next. I'm going to split that off into a separate post due to length...

[Dp101]

What does the 59 WW actually mean in terms of unhappiness per city?