[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[scooter]

Is there another leader you would have selected in hindsight? There were few choices available but Gandhi of Khmer has to be worth a coin flip, right?

If I knew only one other person would have picked Gandhi, I would have taken the coin flip without a second thought. The chance to guarantee the win to Communism + Kremlin (and free Baray food on top of that) always seemed super powerful to me. Nobody can beat Gandhi to Communism barring something crazy or a mistake by the Gandhi player. He was top of my list from the very beginning of this thread, and I put Montezuma first in the interest of almost-guaranteeing getting one of my top-3. I think it was a fine decision at the time, but obviously my pregame sense that Gandhi was best has been more accurate than I even realized at the time. Despite thinking he was best, I still undervalued him a little bit. I figured he was best by a small sized margin, but now I think he's the best, and it's not close at all. So with that in mind, I should have ranked him 1st anyway even if I thought my odds of getting him were only around 25%.

I think Monty of Germany has still worked out to be a very good choice, though. I like it better than anyone else's choice - even REM's Julius of Japan. I do still think it's criminal that Genghis of America wasn't chosen while stuff like Darius, Boudica, and Peter were.

[scooter]

This is pathetic. 5 minutes, 0 whips. I did a quick scan of his Civstats page, and every turn leading up to the declaration (when he was at peace) he spent roughly 20+ minutes, so this is just flat-out quitting. This war began on the second half of T286 (AD1832). Since then Gaspar has played 5 turns and whipped 4 times. For comparison, Dreylin has whipped/drafted 13 times during that period. REM who is at peace whipped 6 times during that period.

I've seen super-green players who barely knew any better get blasted publicly for not even trying like this, but I don't think I've ever seen a quality vet not even bother to halfway defend himself. Pretty bad form to put it diplomatically.

[scooter]

For what it's worth, I see two things:

1) Gaspar's power graph hasn't gone up at all during this war, in fact it's gone down. We've passed him in power despite worrying that we don't have enough military.
2) Dreylin's war weariness is consistent with killing no more than 3-4 units. There have been no large battles.

So that gives you an idea of the kind of effort he's put into building units. He's had 5 turns and almost certainly produced less than 5 units.

The only thing I could figure that would explain this is that he's close to Assembly Line and has been trying to wealth-limp his way there so he could upgrade his handful of Rifles to Infantry and survive that way. If that's what's going on, then I guess I can chalk this up to poor decisions. I'm skeptical, though.

Alright, I've said my piece. I'll try to leave it be from there. Well, at least until Gaspar gets eliminated later this week, reads this, and probably gets really mad for some reason anyway.

[scooter]

I did notice the lurker thread lighting up over the weekend, and now I just went and blasted a popular forum personality here in our thread.



You're welcome, gang.

[Sullla]

And you guys thought I was the controversial one on this team!

(Yeah, I'm also pretty disappointed in Gaspar/Noble.)

[scooter]

I logged in to start the turn, and then I remembered I needed to test the barbarian thing. So here's what I did. I started an Industrial game and pressed enter 40 times to get to Turn 290. I then added a barb mech and our own warrior.



And we lost! Well that's disappointing. It should have worked though, so I started trying variations of this. I tried it on the first turn with the starting rifle, and we won. I then started a brand new game (to make sure we weren't tripping over an old seed), and I pressed enter 40 times. I opened WB, added a barbarian Mech, and then I attacked it with a starting Rifle.





So it seems like the free victory works fine as long as you don't world-builder in the units...? Any thoughts on this? Any angles I'm missing here, or are we confident that we'll get the win here? I tried this process 3 different times and it worked every time.

[scooter]

FWIW, I also tried a run where I drafted a rifle on T290 and attacked with that, and I got the win there as well. So the free win is not limited to your starting unit. I guess I'm pretty confident this will work - the only way I could get it to fail was with a unit that I WB'd in.

[Sullla]

I would go ahead and attack with the rifle. Your "rifle defeats mechanized infantry" was pretty convincing. Whatever magical protection our units get from the free win against barbs, I guess it doesn't apply to units Worldbuildered into the game. Over ten full years now and I'm still learning new things about Civ4.

[scooter]

Turn 290

Well I've got bad news about the free combat win.



rifle vs rifle: 32.6% free win

Gotcha. No bad news here, we won and collected a cool 4xp for our trouble. I promoted the Grenadier to C2 and immediately regretted not taking Pinch instead.

Gren vs rifle: 78.5% WIN



We won anyway.



No buildings survived unfortunately. I would say this is unlucky, but we saw this happen with a barbarian city earlier. Do barb city buildings ever survive? Or perhaps it's a quirk with "free" buildings? We should at least be able to chop out the Granary to get things going here. If all barb city captures come like this (sz2, 4T revolt, no buildings), then capturing barb cities is really not such a big deal. We're really only saving like 100h or so, not 330h. I'll still take it though.



We can drop the Explorer onto the forested hill next turn and hopefully get a look at the action. It did cross my mind later that perhaps I should have loaded up the 3rd unit and tried to steal those Gaspar workers since he obviously won't be using them. It looks like he's going to chop that forest and squeak a few hammers out of it, so I wouldn't want to prevent that. Donating a unit to him also crossed my mind, but that strikes me as pretty futile and also just asking for Dreylin to capture Antiseptic. Both ideas sound fun, but they aren't worth it I don't think.



Settled Induction Coil down here. Sadly we can only squeak 9 culture out of this city this turn. I made a note of Dreylin's Galleon here just to give us perspective on how close we are to Dreylin.



Communism bulb incoming next turn.



*mutters to self* "wow I sure hope he's building wealth."

REM did launch a golden age. We'll highlight that in the demos in a bit.



I queued a second work boat here for Antiseptic. This city cannot wait for State Property.



The aforementioned power graphs. It appears I was slightly wrong - Gaspar has raised his power during this war by about 1 Rifle. Good work!

More importantly, it appears Donovan stopped building military the minute he got peace with Dreylin, and Dreylin is noticeably winding down the military production. I'm guessing Dreylin plans to transition into some specialist spam so that he doesn't fall too far behind in tech. I half-wondered if he might turn around and just conquer somebody else while his army was relevant, but that doesn't seem likely.




Growth configs turned on everywhere as we prepare to draft a little bit, plus we need our production trio of Steam/Telegraph/Haber to go up a few sizes. City counts:

Dreylin: 12
REM: 11
Us: 9
Pindicator: 8
Donovan: 5
BGN: 4
Gaspar: 4

It's kind of amazing that we have that much disparity in city counts after just 40 turns.



REM in a golden age matched our golden age MFG peak. That's a pretty nice measuring bar, actually. We pretty drastically swapped into a food config which distorts things a bit. Also looks like Gaspar leap-frogged us in power on the inter-turn, although at this point all that probably means is some extra XP for Dreylin.

[Sullla]

Great stuff scooter. I was working in the sandbox tonight, then I checked in-game to see what was going on. Here's a few comments.



I made one change, both in the sandbox and in the actual game. I swapped the capital from Barracks to Observatory; we both agreed on getting the observatory in here, and there didn't seem much point to constructing the barracks if we weren't going to train units. Going observatory here sets up some very nice timings in a few turns; we finish the observatory eot 292, then we spent T293 building Wealth to preserve overflow while growing to size 14, then we swap to settler on T294 and build a 4t settler. After we go back to Bureaucracy civic on T296, we're essentially equaling our former Golden Age production in the capital. It's really crazy how awesome it gets, just wait and see!



The event log shows REM triggering his Golden Age. I thought he would use it to swap into his state religion, but instead he's gone Free Religion. REM will probably adopt his state religion at the end of the Golden Age. Note as well that he picked up Caste System; expect REM to pop out a Great Artist for a Communism lightbulb before the end. Unfortunately, this makes it very unlikely that he'll be attacking Gaspar/Noble or Dreylin anytime soon. Teams generally don't swap out of Slavery right before declaring war.



Civics dump for the curious. Not a lot to say here, other than Dreylin's somewhat odd setup with UniSuffrage, Nationhood, State Property without Caste System, and Organized Religion. Basically, it's all of the civics that allow for rush-production in some way or another. A good setup for a team with the Kremlin, and probably no one else.

We are swapping to Nationhood civic next turn, along with Theocracy... plus this little civic, you may have heard of it: State Property. Scooter, I probably don't have to remind you, but just to avoid silly errors: make sure to use the Great Artist lightbulb before swapping civics. We would look quite foolish if we messed that up, hehe.

I have us set up to draft Telegraph, Cotton Gin, and Haber Process next turn. Make sure to spread religion in Haber Process with the missionary out of Telegraph so that we get the Theocracy bonus experience on that unit. In future turns, we'll be drafting Radio and Cotton Gin a second time. We can double draft Radio as well, but we might want to avoid that to let it keep growing further; I'll have to examine that further in the sandbox. Happily, both Pasteurization and Spinning Jenny will hit size 6 in time to be drafted before we swap back to Bureaucracy on T296. So that's 7 rifles at minimum, and 8 rifles if we decide to double draft Radio. That should keep us relatively safe for a while. I'll look at the logistics of where to place them all tomorrow. (I think we want another rifle at Radio, another rifle at Induction Coil on the pindicator border, and probably 2 more rifles at Antiseptic, the former barb city.)



Tech screen. I don't think we commented on this before: BGN picked up Steam Power at some point. He has the same three techs that we're about to have, the trio of Steam Power, Scientific Method, and Communism. His teching has therefore been pretty sharp. If BGN wasn't so far behind in cities, he might be more of a competitor.

Unfortunately, this means that REM and Dreylin will both get a nice discount on their own Steam Power research from known civ bonus. Nothing we can do about that though...

Finally, I've been playing ahead in time in the sandbox, and I need to say a few words about how amazing State Property civic really is. You don't see the benefit with small cities, but once the cities start to get to about size 7-8, and especially when combined with a levee... everything just explodes into ridiculous production. Cities have tons of food - we're talking +8, +9, +10 food surpluses - and every new size grows onto 2/4 or 2/5 grassland workshop tiles, which then get further boosted by +35% production from forges and State Property's innate +10% production bonus. Our GNP falls when we swap out of Mercantilism at first, and then it starts to take off, especially when we change some cities onto Wealth/Research builds.

Here are the "future" Demographics from Turn 296, after swapping back to Bureaucracy civic in the capital:



Go ahead and compare to the Demos from the current turn a couple posts above in this thread. Yeah, this is only 6 turns from now! We'll increase Food by 35% and nearly double Production in that span. Production higher than REM is getting in his Golden Age, with fewer cities to boot.

I was also estimating our ETA for Assembly Line, and even though that tech is all kinds of crazy expensive, I think we're looking at a finishing date around roughly Turn 307. It's hard to project that far into the future, since we'll be adding more cities. We also will have foreign trade routes, hopefully, which I haven't added to the sandbox as yet. With luck, we'll be getting our factories ready in a little more than 15 turns from now.

At this point, I don't even care if Dreylin/OT4E wind up having an insurmountable lead over the rest of the field. (And we don't think they do, at least not yet!) This game has been a total blast to play, win or lose.