[SPOILERS] scooter peruses RB's Greatest Hits

[Tohron]

So what are your options/thoughts on having a Great Person on standby when Communism finishes so you can fire off a Golden Age right away?

[scooter]

So what are your options/thoughts on having a Great Person on standby when Communism finishes so you can fire off a Golden Age right away?

I haven't quite worked out yet what my ETA is for my next Masterclass GP, but it'll probably be around then. Then the other side of that is when I actually want to fire a golden age.


This reminds me: one of the things with Kremlin I'm struggling with is the value of State Property. It's much, much less of a game-breaker here because Mercantilism is pretty nice for us. Let's survey the changes we'd pick up hypothetically swapping away from Mercantilism:

No Distance Maintenance

This is a non-Toroidal map, and I've already got Courthouses everywhere. This is worth some gold, but not that much.

+10% production in all cities

I'm almost certain this does affect whips. If so, this is fairly useful. Otherwise, it's not worth very much.

+1f to workshops and watermills

This is usually the big one, but again it's softened a bit here. We aren't going to be getting away from Slavery anytime soon, so we won't be getting the Caste boost to workshops. Workshops can still be very good here, but I don't think I'll be paving every tile with them like I did in 33 since I plan to rely more on the whip for production, especially with Kremlin. Farms in a Kremlin world look much better to me. Watermills are still good and would still be full power here.

Foreign trade routes active

Only useful if a couple other people get away from Mercantilism. The island cities are less powerful and common here, so foreign routes aren't quite as uber as they were in 33.

Loss of 1 specialist in every city

I've got 16 cities, and I'll soon have 17 (I'll definitely add a couple more). Going with the 17 number, that's 102 base beakers on 17 scientists. A quick calculation says my average empire-wide science multipliers will be around 43% at that point, so that's 146 slider-independent bpt lost from the free specialist alone which will rise with more cities and/or science multipliers. On top of that, I would lose 6GPP/turn in Masterclass delaying future great people slightly.

(There's also the corporations issue. Mercantilism would let me use home-grown corps only, SP none.)

It adds up to a pretty hefty loss. I'll have to do some more math to figure out whether it's worth it or not. My blind guess is "probably," but I'm not completely certain.


This is all pretty hypothetical. Communism is nice for Kremlin + half of a golden age alone. It's just another thing to puzzle over.

[antisocialmunky]

I feel like this is a good time to start a discussion on how good ORG is in these late game starts. We did considered the advantages on ORG during the snake pick but we missed one thing: The hidden bonus towards free espionage(ESP) points that ORG grants via cheaper courthouses that you will almost always need to build to take advantage of the half the trait. I'll post Sullla's original run down of the trait here:

So Imperialistic still feels really good to me in this setup. One of the things that REM must have seen (and we didn't) is how well Organized synergizes with the trait. Cheap courthouses are exactly what Imperialistic needs to keep the economy humming along while expanding. (There's even a pretty good chance to grab a courthouse-based unique building like the rathaus or sacrificial altar to pair with this combo on the second half of the draft, making it even more appealing.) Organized loses out on factories coming later on the tree, but it gains by having the courthouse-relevant period of the game last much longer. One reason why I devalued Organized going into the last game is because I figured everyone would reach State Property civic relatively quickly, removing distance-based maintenance costs from the economy. Here in the Renaissance, that's a lot further in the distance, and cheap courthouses will certainly be a bigger factor.

It wasn't until a 3 pages in that we got some theorycrafting of the ESP bonus by Sullla:

* Finally, Org courthouses do provide another hidden benefit in the form of the passive espionage bonuses. REM got a lot out of this in the Industrial game, and I'd love to have the chance to get the same benefits from doing stuff we'd be doing anyway. There are a good number of "first-to" benefits in this period, and passive espionage can help a lot in snagging them.

It wasn't until 5 pages in that someone (Sullla again) mentioned a concrete application of how the ESP bonus could help the achieve the strategic objectives.

The rest of the Democracy path is unlocked by Great Scientist lightbulbs. Use one of them for Education, and the second one for Printing Press, and then go on to Democracy from there. We can think more about a Great Person strategy with time, but that seems like the best general setup. Since we will not have Representation civic at the start, working non-Engineer and non-Scientist specialists are pretty inefficient. I would rather use Great Scientists on useful techs, with the bonus Great Scientist lightbulb beakers, rather than trying to swing something with Artists or Merchants or whatever. Hopefully we have enough passive espionage going to watch the research of our key rivals, and we land Statue of Liberty without much competition. I genuinely wonder if other teams will try to head that route. Statue of Liberty was mostly ignored in the Industrial Pitboss game, and it’s much more off the beaten path here.

The fact that scooter has essentially the next best thing to a lurker's eye view of what his opponents are doing is allowing him to take most of the guest work out of what would normally be CnD based gambits. Here's what I'm theorizing: ORG with some investment into courthouses can transform into a late game version of the Creative trait (on the strategic level rather than the tactical level as in Creative's case) more so with the Sacrificial Altar. It helps you get many small incremental advantages over your neighbors over time.

In ORG's case, it can get you advantages in:
- Grabbing first to bonuses
- Tech Route planning
- Strategic Initiative (the ability to execute on your master plan) and Strategic deterrent.*

*I'll also be curious to see how much city visibility is deterring Aztec's opponents from coming after them knowing that scooter can see what they are doing after the game is done.

Which is roughly analogous to CRE's ability to:
- Grabbing tiles and resources
- Uncontesting a contested boarder
- Defensive buffer and Tactical Initiative in war

To support my argument, here are some examples: So far in this game we know exactly what REM and Mackoti, the game leaders, are doing so it helps skimp on military technology and hammers diverted that way. It made the SoL gamble not even a gamble. Its making the Communism gamble increasingly not a gamble because we know the strategic positions of everyone and what they are researching far.

All these small decision based incremental advantages are adding up to a lot it feels like. I'll even go so far to say that ORG seems to have been undervalued heavily (see first quote) when combo'd with a courthouse UB if we consider the strategic initiative that its hidden ESP bonus grants. Of course we are running a supercharged version of the normal ORG trait with Sacrificial Altars so its been more impactful earlier than normal but my point still stands: The hidden ESP bonus acts like a late game version of the Creative bonus. It gives the player small passive and incremental advantages by helping him play his hand better because he knows what everyone else's cards are and can plan accordingly.

[Tohron]

+10% production in all cities

I'm almost certain this does affect whips. If so, this is fairly useful. Otherwise, it's not worth very much.

All production multipliers affected whips in my tests.  They produce 30 hammers/pop base, and that would go up to 45 with the Kremlin.  Throw in powered factories later, and each pop whipped will be worth 90 production.  That's a lot of military potential, if the game gets to that point.  Throw in +10% from State Property and +25% from Police State and that's 105.75 production/pop (I have tested this).  That's a LOT of military potential.

[Epoxy]

THE DAILY ROLL

TURN 256: HATCH A PLAN

The Aztecs have formulated a most devious device for stealing the Kremlin with minimal notice to their opponents, it entails partially researching the prerequisite techs of liberalism and the scientific method, then completing them and researching communism with the resulting overflow, followed by a rapid construction of the wonder. There are only a couple of turns before the decision has to be made, but already the Aztecs yearn for the sight of the Kremlin and Statue of Liberty together in their capital. Yonder ago, the Byzantines seemed assured in their bid for the whip-empowering wonder, but they have since diverted their research efforts in order to better fortify their borders against the Khmer Empire. The Aztecs' superior espionage has prevented every foreign nation from seeing their research and interior, while they continue to have unfettered access to their projects themselves. This advantage is going to be exploited decisively in this contest for the Kremlin, which will guarantee the economic competitiveness of wanton slavery for centuries to come.

[Tohron]

Just one more detail, if you're still thinking about getting Mining Inc sometime, the corp maintenance for getting +10 hammers (20 hooked resources) is 20 gpt in each city it's in. If you get Wall St. + Bank + Market + Grocer in the HQ city, that'll offset 12gpt for each of those cities, so once you're industrialized, you'd be trading 8 gold for 20 production. At the +5 hammers level (10 hooked resources), you're trading 12.4 gpt for those 5 base hammers, which the corp HQ can basically offset.

So, past the level of 10 hooked resources, each extra resource hooked gives you +0.5 hpt (pre-multipliers) for 0.75 gpt. Seems favorable, though it with the slavery econ you're planning, it isn't strictly necessary, and it's open to interpretation whether it's worth burning a Great Engineer, getting all the gold-boosting buildings in the city where you founded it, and building a whole bunch of executives for 90 hammers or so each.

EDIT: DERP! Forgot that your sacrificial altars would halve corporate maintenance, which would thus be effectively 10gpt for +10 hammers (with 20 resources hooked), so if you had all the +gold buildings in your HQ city, you'd be making a net profit in addition to all the production. Considering that, Mining Inc. starts to look pretty attractive (especially since +5 base hammers (for 10 resources hooked) in a city with only the forge multiplier add up to enough for another executive in only 15 turns - a pretty good payoff time).

Also, amusingly, if you use those extra hammers to Build Wealth in an industrialized city, each 3.75gpt in maintenance gets you 10gpt in output. So you literally need to spend money to make money.

[Nekira Sudacne]

If that's true, then I wonder, is it even possible to loose money with Corporations as HRE with Rathus's -75% mantiance, provided you build HQ in Wall Street City?

[Tohron]

I just had a realization: REM cannot build modern naval units without Scientific Method (which reveals oil), so a push for Combustion (which, incidentally, would give Mining Inc. access en-route), would force him to choose between invalidating half his monk economy or completely losing control of the seas. Just another thing to consider.

[shallow_thought]

I just had a realization: REM cannot build modern naval units without Scientific Method (which reveals oil), so a push for Combustion (which, incidentally, would give Mining Inc. access en-route), would force him to choose between invalidating half his monk economy or completely losing control of the seas.  Just another thing to consider.

Which is one reason I assume someone will soon be getting a big pile of galleons/rifles/cavs in the face as REM tries to turn his GNP edge into a land edge...

[Epoxy]

Farewell thee Ottomans.



Edit: The next Daily Roll will have an obituary.