[SPOILERS] scooter peruses RB's Greatest Hits

[scooter]

Turn 249-250

I took a stab at the math to figure out his tech rate, and I think his max tech rate is at least 40% higher than mine, and I'm definitely second highest by a lot. I can cut the deficit roughly in half with the Statue, and I can almost close it with Oxford, but that doesn't account for the fact that he's about to have free rein of the map with Rifles while people run around with longbows, and that's before I close the gap. Not pretty. My raw beaker lead is sort of a mirage in that I doubt anybody else will tech Democracy, and Economics won't be on anyone's radar for awhile either.

What is your tech rate right now? Could you go over your infrastructure some in your next milestone post?

Sure, coming up shortly. Can you coerce REM into providing the same numbers? I have a guesstimate of his research ability, but it's tough to guess for reasons I'll explain in a second. As for infrastructure, I don't have visibility on some of his cities still, so I actually can't count them up myself. Not that I would if I could . I'd be interested to compare how we stacked up at this stage post-game. If he has comparable economic buildings in addition to his religious buildings, that would be extremely impressive.

3) Nobody noticed I was accidentally working a grass farm rather than a rice in the capital huh? (I did fix it.)

I did, but was confused by your comment about it not being worthwhile to grow to size 10. Unable to puzzle it out, I concluded you were either way overthinking your game or so much better at Civ than me that I couldn't possibly comprehend what you were doing. 

Yeah, that was more in reference to not running mines in order to pick up the grass farm and the food Lurker Killer is currently borrowing in order to grow up a size and increase the Engineer yield. 20h is very little in a 200% modifier world, so it's better to max-hammer it out at this size is all that meant.

I am looking forward to after the game when I can look into Muffinland and see just how in blazes he got a GNP like that at this point in the game.

Monk economy. It really can be that powerful. It's just that in ancient era mp games going monk takes you too far away from the snowball, so we don't see it that often.

There is one big factor here - REM wasn't "supposed" to get the Taj. I figured monk economy would be pretty good for a Spiritual civ (pretty bad otherwise). But I also really expected either Plako or Alhazard to get the Taj because they were both Philosophical. It sure looks to me like Plako was going for it, but he wasn't willing to speed it up by either revolting into Pacifism (eating an extra 2T of Anarchy) or more realistically polluting his GPP pool slightly.

I fully expected him to pollute his GPP pool, which is exactly what REM did I assume. In theory REM should have been behind on a thing or two, but having free rein to take the Taj AND the first monk wonder effectively locked them all up for him while also giving him a "free" golden age. I think the golden age was the real kicker here. I think he would still be in a strong position without it, but I think the gap would be much more narrow, and/or he would have had to sacrifice a bit more (like expansion).

As for Mackoti, I genuinely think he made a mistake because he also could have beaten REM to the Taj and/or Monk wonders. He did some great people stuff early, but instead he opted to get an Academy first. I think he'd like to have that one back. The Academy helped him early, but it's useless if your costs have you choked and unable to run a high slider, which is where he's at now. I think if he had a do-over, he would have either raced for Taj or locked down the Apostolic Palace.

So basically what I'm saying is that with the leaders/players in this game, REM shouldn't have been able to clean both of those up early like that. I think that's making it look more ridiculous than it should really be. (Also, Organized is crazy good here. More on that in my overview post.)

[scooter]

Turn 251: Report + State of the Empire

This update will be a big one.



Alhazard has like 3 cities left, and LL is about to fall as it just has a single longbow in it. Total blitz here. REM is showing 3T to Rifling. Get ready for some popcorn?



I'd expect REM to go for Military Tradition next for some Cavs to complement the Rifles. Mackoti would have some challenges dealing with that combo. Unless of course he goes for RMoG instead. I'm doing my best to get ready to do something. I sense an opportunity is coming soon, but I don't exactly know what it's going to be.



Went ahead and burned the Engineer this turn, so we are 2T out. (The workshop was likely unnecessary, but that tile is worthless for any other improvement so it's there just in case. I had the spare worker turns for it.)



Plako's golden age already popped one out. I'm not sure of anything specific he'll do with this engineer. He might use it to pop two consecutive golden ages actually.


----------------------

T251 Stats

Here's the essentials:

Cities: 16
0%: +129g, +89b
50%: +1g, 225b
100%: -127g, 421b

Courthouse savings: 60gpt
Civic Savings: 36gpt
Inflation Savings: 19gpt

Total Organized Savings: 115gpt

Um, yeah, I think Organized was better than Financial here, and it's not particularly close. (I understand the 115gpt figure is not a fair 1-to-1 comparison.) This is before the Factory bonus becomes a thing, which I think has a good chance of factoring in before the game is over.

Anyway, yeah my 100% rate is 421bpt. I believe REM's is somewhere over 600bpt right now, although I'm also pretty sure he completed Oxford already. I forgot to check. Anyway, I'll conservatively estimate that SoL will score me about 100bpt (post-modifiers), and Oxford I think can get me almost that much. So maybe I can get close to him? But by the time I do, I wouldn't be surprised if he breaks 700bpt. It's really difficult to figure out REM's tech rate. Here's why:





I may have way more total EPs than him, but the EP/turn is actually about the same for both of us now. He's also pulling down an obscene amount of culture due to all the religious stuff, so it does inflate his GNP quite a bit. It looks worse than it is, but it's still pretty bad.

(I also realize that break-even total is more important, but I'm guessing our costs are very similar. We've got about the same number of cities, courthouses, and military units.)

Also notice how Mackoti seemingly just built his first Courthouse. No wonder his GNP is atrocious.



He's currently dead last in the non-corpse division. I'm sure the high end of his tech rate is very good with a large capital, good cottages, and academy, but I'm guessing his break-even slider is down around 10-20% or so. I'm imagining REM isn't going to let him absorb all that land and turn things around? That seems like a big mistake if he does.

Cash and infrastructure:





I've got an altar in every city. 4 cities are missing a library still, but 3 of those are building right now. The one city that went Barracks before Library is an island city where I was building a Pike and decided I wanted a promotion on it. But every city needs a library with SoL. The 6th university is about to complete, but I delayed it for something else since I was sitting at 0% tech anyway and wasn't going to be starting Oxford for a few more turns. I probably won't be building anymore Universities anytime soon since I'm about to unlock cheaper Observatories which also give me an additional scientist slot. Cities with high food surpluses and/or cottage cores will probably get those.

Couple extra demo charts:

T251 Domestic Overview



Pink Dot and Rage Quit are perfect for specialist spam and/or whipping posts. They don't have much else value, and I settled Rage Quit too late for cottaging it to really make sense. Pocketbeetle is about to 2-pop whip a settler out for the northwest tundra location. It's a really great location for the scientist/whipping eco with double food and coast.



The Caravel out of Culture Victory may be odd, but there's some sense to it. I'm building a Fort currently S-SE of Lurker Killer. That'll get the Caravel into the water where REM has a couple islands. I don't have visibility on anything in that water yet, but he has 3 cities on it. I really need to be super aware of that area as it's among my biggest vulnerabilities. So I'm going to get myself visibility on those cities ASAP. We'll see if he allows it.

Never Happened and Border Conquest have gotten the food & farm diet again. They can both regrow population extremely quickly.

Also notice the sign on the desert tile. That's not as crazy as it looks. While it's foodless, Lurker Killer will not need a couple of those grassland tiles which are farmable. And south of the landbridge RMoG's dotmap has meant 2-3 grassland tiles have been left unclaimed, and wouldn't you know they're all lakeside. I could squeeze in a city with a pretty solid food surplus there, and I probably will soonish. It would also allow me to bulldoze that fort and put that green tile to use. But basically I just really need more port cities.

I'll also probably stick a filler city in near Mackoti soon. I would just farm a bunch of tiles and do nothing but build military out of it. Disposable buffer city is the idea pretty much.



Masterclass is my largest city because I had the nerve to not whip it for like 6 turns. It's working 4 mines and an extra specialist too. I'll probably try to get an Observatory in here for the scientist slot, and otherwise just run a mish-mash of specialists and see what pops out. Mobility Wins is getting farms because it needs to be able to whip naval/military units constantly or else it will die as soon as soon as REM looks at it funny.

There's no grand plan with the War Elephant builds. I just want a few of them. They're basically Pikes except worse defenders but more versatile. Plus I can get them a second promo due to the stables.


So that's the state of things. I'm afraid to ask this, but, uh, any questions?

[Commodore]

So that's the state of things. I'm afraid to ask this, but, uh, any questions?

How do you feel about the Aztecs choice vs, say, HRE or France at this point?

[scooter]

So that's the state of things. I'm afraid to ask this, but, uh, any questions?

How do you feel about the Aztecs choice vs, say, HRE or France at this point?

Well, I'm having fun, and I don't reget it. So honestly, that's your answer. That said, here's an attempt to rate it vs a few options:

Ottomans: Glad I passed on this. There's been so much happiness here that the Hammans wouldn't be all that useful. Also they're boring. The map makes Gunpowder an underwhelming tech.

France: The map also killed this one in retrospect, so I'm glad I avoided it. If I was next to Alhazard, I might have wished I had them for a Knight/Musketeer combo attack timed around when Mackoti went for his attack, but any sort of serious rush was definitely not an option here, and an early attack doesn't make much sense given my neighbor quality/geography.

HRE: This is probably the best option I passed on. The Rathaus would be getting me something like 30gpt right now. I wouldn't say I regret passing on this, but it would probably be a little better.


That said, the Altar has been pretty nice so far, and its potential going forward is higher. For example, the 6T settler whip cycle that the capital ran for awhile did a lot of good. I have something like 4-5 different cities right now with +2 whip unhappiness, and at least 1 of them had +3 this past turn, and that's with 5 turn decay. I'd have to be a tad lighter on the whip if I had 10 turn decay, even with the Hamman I think. The extreme map lushness has boosted the Altar a fair bit I'd say because regrowing is lightning fast in nearly every city.

But yeah, the real thing will be if I decided to whip out a ton of units in a short span which the Aztecs will allow me to do without crippling myself. If/when that time happens, that'll be a better barometer of whether or not it was worth it.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

So that's the state of things. I'm afraid to ask this, but, uh, any questions?

Care to riff on geopolitics in the next 20 turns?
What are your immediate weaknesses/vulnerabilities? How likely are these to be exploited?
What are your most likely opportunities? How can you advance your interests with respect to these opportunities?

Economic forecast: Long term outlook of your Farm and Whip economy vs. the Monk economy vs. Land is God economy

[Nekira Sudacne]

I am looking forward to after the game when I can look into Muffinland and see just how in blazes he got a GNP like that at this point in the game.

Monk economy. It really can be that powerful. It's just that in ancient era mp games going monk takes you too far away from the snowball, so we don't see it that often.

Can someone give me the 101 on the monk economy? It's something I only ever played with when I was just starting Civ 4 on the lowest difficulty, where you pretty much have to try to lose and I had no idea what I was doing, so the science behind it was kinda lost on me. +2 hammer, beakers and money per temple seems pretty sweet, but also a huge investment, even if you do get an engineer to knock out one of them, it SEEMS like it'll take too long for the 2 per turn to pay off

[Tohron]

So, tech-wise I'm assuming your next tech is Gunpowder, since that would open up several options. From there, you could go straight Replaceable Parts -> Rifling -> Military Tradition, or fit Chemistry in there somewhere for Frigates and the workshop boost. I'm guessing you've ruled out going Liberalism->Sci. Method -> Communism at this point, since plako has too big of an effective lead there?

Edit: Maybe it might work to fit Corporations in there early too? With 15+ cities, getting +1 trade routes in all of them would be pretty significant, though it might delay critical military techs too much to be worth it.

[Tacitus]

Can someone give me the 101 on the monk economy? It's something I only ever played with when I was just starting Civ 4 on the lowest difficulty, where you pretty much have to try to lose and I had no idea what I was doing, so the science behind it was kinda lost on me. +2 hammer, beakers and money per temple seems pretty sweet, but also a huge investment, even if you do get an engineer to knock out one of them, it SEEMS like it'll take too long for the 2 per turn to pay off

Temples cost 80 hammers base. Monasteries cost 60 hammers base. REM is spiritual, so for him temples functionally cost 40 hammers. If he uses OR and forges, he can functionally reduce the cost of these buildings further. Once that you have the religious trifecta (AP, Sankore, Minaret) each temple and monastery produces 2 beakers, 2 gold, and two hammers. The temple produces some happiness, and both buildings produce culture, but those are minor effects on this map. So the cost per city for REM is 100 hammers for +4Hammers per turn, +4Beakers per turn, and +4Gold per turn. Since you can convert hammers to gold/beakers at a 1:1 ratio, this is equivalent to 8hammers per turn sunk into wealth/research builds and 4Hammers per turn normally. So the payback window versus wealth/research builds is 100/12 = 8.33 turns. Everything after that is pure profit. If you have multipliers in place it gets better. Considering that REM had basically no opportunity cost to research the techs for the wonders, and was able to engineer rush at least one of them, this is really good.

[Tohron]

Another thought, since you're a bit cool on dogpiling makoti with REM (since that is likely to benefit REM more than you), might it be good to start pushing EP toward city visibility on plako? With an anti-makoti dogpile ruled out, that basically leaves a high-speed, high-efficiency amphibious strike against plako (ideally grabbing the Kremlin for yourselves) as a major alternative (although pushing south to dogpile REM with makoti is still another option I'll admit). On a related note, do you think a culture bomb in a Kremlin city on the turn-of-capture would be enough to grab control of the first ring (preventing a counterattack with cats the following turn)?

[Nekira Sudacne]

It's a longshot, but Kremlin-powered alter whips might be enough to trun the tide. You clearly arn't in a position to make it YOURSELF, buuuut the only thing wonders lose on capture is Culture