RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Speaker]

My second post in a row, Darrel style!

I thought about whether we should whip the mace in Chancellorsville - but now I think it's better to let the city build military naturally. It will grow to the next size in 2 turns, where it can grab the plains hill tile and produce 17 base [21 forge] shields/turn. Once you reach that much production, whipping is pretty counterproductive. With the city at size 12, it takes too long to grow back whipped population; better to just build things the old fashioned way. What do you think, Speaker?

I tend to agree, though I wouldn't mind whipping some population off when we get Guilds. 10 Knights would provide a great mobile defense that would keep us pretty safe as we build Grocers, Banks, and Universities, finish Courthouses, and build some small wonders (Forbidden Palace, and the Epics). I am actually thinking that it would be nice to upgrade our city defenders in our more prone cities (Hampton, Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, Shiloh, Bull Run) with Longbows, to provide some sturdy defense moving forward. Since Maces will take so long to get from Gettysburg, Antietam, and Chancellorsville to the front, and it's sort of pointless to build more Horse Archers, with Knights so close, it wouldn't be a bad idea to train a half dozen Longbows in the next few turns, since they are a good deal cheaper than Maces. This would free up our older, trashier units (unpromoted axes, spears, archers, etc) for sentry duty on the various islands, and provide some warm bodies for any colonies we might plant.

As for our tech path....

After Guilds, how do you feel about cleaning up the top of the tree and grabbing Aesthetics, Literature, and Music (if the artist is still available). Then go back and grab Banking (grocers and courthouses should be done by then), and then head to Education and Gunpowder.

so: Guilds --- Aesthetics --- Literature --- Music (optional) --- Banking --- Paper --- Education

Hrm, we also should consider Engineering in there too. The 50% increased movement is very valuable, and with stone, Notre Dame is a very nice wonder.

[Sullla]

OK, I'm fine with us playing things more straight with Jowy. Let's try sending him this message instead:

Dear Jowy,

We are indeed satisfied with what we've witnessed in recent turns, and were happy to receive your latest offer. However, we must decline the proposal of an extended Non-Aggression Pact at this time. Good luck and best wishes.

Sullla
The Killer Angels

I will wait a little longer to see if Speaker has any further comments, then send it off tonight (when Jowy is asleep on European time, heh). I don't like being dishonest with other teams either, and Speaker's right that there's virtually nothing Jowy can do at this point. It's Turn 156, about to start Turn 157, and we're planning on declaring war on Turn 160.

OK, we'll upgrade the last shock axe to a maceman. Note that this doesn't slow down our planned Guilds research at all, which is still due in 6 turns. I don't think we need to run another turn of 0% science for "money in the bank" emergency upgrades, as we'll get a lot of gold from city capture/razing at the outset of the war.

Fine, we'll build the trireme at Shiloh, since Speaker compromised on a couple of my builds earlier (like the Colossus, the Jewish missionary out of Gettysburg, etc.) But then we've got to get some culture in there!

Agree on getting a sizable "zone defense" knight force once we have Guilds; 5-10 knights would indeed be enough to shred incoming armies for quite a while, especially with their flanking ability. The idea of training some longbows is intriguing - I think we'll wait and see there. Definitely would be nice to have some expert defenders for our border cities. We actually don't have too much infrastructure to build in the immediate future - mostly grocers (Guilds) and then theatres for Globe Theatre purposes - so we should have some extra production available for turning the unit crank.

Speaker's proposed tech path is pretty close to what I envisioned, although I think we also need Drama for theatres/Globe and possibly Alphabet for tech spying (unless we can get plako to keep emailing us what everyone's got). Since Aesthetics and the like are already 2t researches, and our beaker production continues to go up, we shouldn't have to compromise too much here. We can just grab everything in short order.

[Sullla]

I didn't see any further comments from Speaker, so I sent the message to Jowy and ended our turn. Hope we didn't have anything else planned for this turn!

[Sullla]

We did manage to go over a few things last night, so no problems on our team coordination right now. Speaker even managed to log in and move our units very early this morning before leaving for a work trip, at something like 5am - now that's dedication!

More war preparations for us, first Gettysburg has reached our target of size 16:



By cutting its growth potential, we can get the city up to 19 base / 33 total shields per turn, while still working a full NINE cottages! We will go back and emphasize growth again after the war, but for the moment, cranking out some very fast horse archers, longbows, and maces seems like a strong investment.

Here's a shot of the F1 city screen, demonstrating how our civ is geared up for military matters:


Pretty much units everywhere at the moment. Cycling between rounds of infrastructure and rounds of unit production tends to work well in this game, especially if you can flip your civics around to match them. (If we were Spiritual, we'd definitely be taking advantage of the trait!) Also note that Fort Henry and Spartansburg just completed mace whips this turn, and will overflow into more maces to be whipped next turn. They'll be ready just in time for Turn 160.

Internationally, slaze seems to be holding out OK at the moment in his war. At least, we've seen no further cities fall on CivStats, and the one Kathlete attack that we were watching at Fetret Devri with our trireme seems to have been a failure. Not that slaze has been too forthcoming with the emails updating us on his current status... Overall, that war has gone pretty much perfectly for us so far, with slaze having to do some drastic whippings but otherwise holding on very well, and Whosit/Kathlete losing lots of units and making few territorial gains. There were 2 Great Generals born in the event log from last turn, one likely from slaze and one from Kathlete or Whosit, so there are foreign units fighting and dying somewhere!

plako sent one email to us, and one to the larger alliance:

Hi,

I don't have excel installed to update the tech chart, but here are the new techs as far as I can tell:
Whosit: MC
Nakor: Alpha, Philo
Athlete: Monarchy
slaze: Construction
Dantski: Calendar

Whosit is going towards Machinery (7).

plako

I've sent him back the updated Excel file along with our thanks. (We are keeping the tech info largely to ourselves, not seeing the need to tell everyone this important advantage.)

And the group:

Hi all,

Whosit is heading for Machinery and gets it in 7T.

Can some of you consider doing me a favor and loaning me Horses and/or Iron (Horses would be more useful at this point)? I can live without these, but if possible I'd like to build couple of X-bows and sentry Chariots. This would leave me in debt to you, but I can probably help you later e.g. with providing Caravels and later galleons. I'm beelining towards Optics next so Caravels could be online in ~12-15 turns depending on the civis I choose to run.

Regards,
plako

Here's the response back to plako:

Dear plako and Broker,

Thanks very much for the updated tech information. I am attaching our Excel file again with the new additions.

Our previous offer of iron still stands, for as long as you would need the resource. I believe that we only have one sources of horses, which we do need at present for building horse archers, but we hope to conquer a second source soon, which we would naturally make available to your team.

Whosit going for Machinery before Civil Service seems like a strange decision, but perhaps he has some way to lightbulb the tech (?) Or maybe he is content to build Praetorians and not macemen!

Cheers,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

We also had a new email in from Nakor:

Dear Sullla and Speaker,

Thank you for your honest words.
Korea is has been our friend througout this game as well and we are sad to find our two nations at war now.
I've had a good conversation with Plako about this and we feel that this war won't spoil our friendship to much.
Plako understood that we had to get involved in this war and accepted that.
We did agree on some rules regarding our war.

Please talk to Plako first before becoming involved in a war that might appear to be more then it is.
What would you consider an "attack" on Korea that would get you involved?
We still hope to resolve this situation as peacefull as possible, siging some sort of pact with you guys still seems like a strong way to go.

Congratulations on the Great Engineer!
You used him to grab Machinery, I pressume?
So there might be Knights coming our way soon then.

Hope to hear from you soon!
Nakor for HRE

Well, the good news is that they still want peace with us, and are clearly worried that we will be coming their way. Our misdirection in that regard still seems to be working. The bad news is that I have no idea how to respond to Nakor's messages. Maybe Speaker will have some ideas when he gets back late tonight/tomorrow?

Think we know what Nakor's plan is though: stay at peace while everyone else fights, race to Liberalism, slingshot something good (Nationalism? Gunpowder? Astronomy?) and then conquer from there. There's a good argument to be made for NOT letting them NAP themselves into security and then tech their way into a strong position...

EDIT: Did the calculation on Whosit's Machinery research, and if plako's number is correct, Whosit is only producing about 120 beakers/turn (base) at his current level of research. If that's true, wow, we're really a VERY long way ahead of Rome on the economy front...

[Speaker]

Here are a couple pictures from T158.

First, here's the center isle, as we have explored it so far. So far, the only resources we have found that aren't available elsewhere are Banana and Dyes, so nothing gamebreaking. I doubt we'll plant too many cities in the middle because of defensive difficulties. With all the jungles to chop, and a lack of rivers, it's just not great land. It would be exceptionally lame map design if all of a certain strategic resource (Oil? Aluminum? Uranium?) were located here.



And just something to whet your appetite. There are still another half dozen units or so who will be joining the party, but this is the bulk of our attack force.

[BobRoberts]

Thanks for the updates! A thoroughly enjoyable read seeing the preparation for warfare!

Going into that conflict I was wondering if you had had any feeling about how long it should take to kill him? An ETTC as I'd call it - Estimate Time To Crush!

[Mr. Svinlesha]

Gotta a question -- something I've been wondering about for a while, actually. Might be a bit off-topic given the war preparations, but anyway...

What's the rationale behind your binary research strategy? I've read the article a couple of times, but not really understood it, and anyway, the author never suggested that one run 2 turns of 0% research, one turn of 100% research, and 3 turns of 20% research... or how you've been doing it now. So how do you figure out your optimum research speed?

[Sullla]

For those who missed athlete's post in the email thread, we're waiting for him to play his turn before the game can proceed. (It is currently Paused.) slaze can't play until athlete goes, so it's a bit of a back up at present. Hopefully we should be back to the normal schedule starting tomorrow.

I'm not exactly sure how long it will take to defeat Jowy. It depends on exactly what units he has defending, and how Jowy moves them tactically. In an ideal situation, we'd finish right around Turn 170 (when our NAP with Kathlete wears off) and could be in a position to exert some pressure on the Ottomans to negoatiate a peace deal favorable to slaze. But given the distances involved, and the need to walk our main stack from one city to the next, it will probably take more like 15 turns for the whole deal to play out. And that's assuming no foul play from other teams getting involved!

Mr. Svinlesha, there are basically two rationales for binary science research. One is to run either 0% or 100% science to avoid losing beakers/gold to rounding errors (this was essentially fixed in the expansions, although it remains a concern in non-expansion Civ4). The second rationale is to accumulate gold first, and only then research your desired tech quickly at maximum rate, which has a couple benefits:

- You can change your tech if circumstances change ("hey we need Gunpowder now, not Printing Press!")
- You can benefit from other teams discovering the tech in the intervening period, which offers a slight research discount. In this game, each other team that knows a tech gives us a 3% bonus to beakers. If all 7 surviving teams knew a tech that we were researching, it would give us a 1.21 multiplier.

For the most part, however, the benefits are pretty minor. I did the comparison calculations, and it was on the order of 10 beakers out of 1000, very little stuff. At the moment, we are not running binary science at all though! We have been sticking with whatever the break-even rate happens to be, because it's a superior way to "disguise" our true GNP on the bar graphs. If we were to use binary science, we'd keep jumping up to 400+ something, and the other teams would see the peaks on the Demographics. We already got into trouble earlier in the game doing that.

But at 50% break-even rate, we don't look particularly intimidating... until it's too late.

[regoarrarr]

My question was on the spearmen in the stack. I understand if they are just leftovers from earlier, but are there scenarios where a spearman would defend over a maceman?

[Mr. Svinlesha]

Sullla:

Great. Thanks for the info.