RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Sullla]

Hey Speaker, apologies back to you, but I'm also going to insist on this issue. You said that those knights won't build themselves - well, I can equally apply the same logic to further missionaries. Where are we going to get them if not at Fredericksburg? I don't see any other good candidates. And we really need religion spread in our new cities, since we both agree on the importance of powering OR whips and forest chops. That's been one of our biggest advantages in this game, the way we develop new cities: they've always gotten a fast religion spread, then Fast Worker forest chops, etc. etc. The comparison between our fast development of border cities against the slow ones Dantski planted is pretty obvious.

I do value building knights - that's why we're planting our #1 city (Gettysburg, 3t knights) and our #2 city (St. Albans, 2t knights) and our #3 city (Hampton Roads, 4t knights) on military production. In a dozen turns, those cities will turn out a dozen knights! But after that strong commitment, no, I don't think we need to produce a stable-less knight when we're not at war, have no expectation of being at war, and just signed a long NAP with our border rival. There's a fine line between military readiness and excessive paranoia.

Can we please build a work boat out of Shiloh before trireme? The new city there needs something for its clams resource, and there's no other good candidate. Chikamauga will be tied up on its own infrastructure for the immediate future.

[Speaker]

I don't see missionaries for our two new cities as being extremely important at the moment, especially not the city on the central island, which has no forests to chop anyways. If we are being serious here, our biggest advantage this game has been our fast workers and our prodigious use of slavery and cottaging, not fast religion spreads, and I think your comparison at Dantski is pretty nonsensical. Do we really need to get into why our cities develop faster than his? Now, I don't really care whether we build a missionary or finish the knight. Neither choice is going to ultimately win or lose us the game. But I do feel the need to temper your builder instincts, which can get quite out of hand at times. If you want a workboat out of Shiloh, slave it. Do we really need to wait 5 turns, while working a coastal tile? We have more than enough happiness to spare, and will be adding another 3 sources (Incense, Dyes, Whales) in the near future. As the diplo emails from Nakor continue to heat up, and he has shown galley on the inner sea, you'll have to forgive me for desiring a full sentry net down there. I really think the workboat needs to wait a few turns in the interest of protecting our more developed cities.

Additionally, I wonder why we pushed to get Guilds if we aren't even going to build Knights, except where it is most convenient, and to date we have only built two. A mobile force will allow us to position our defensive units in a much more defensive manner, and protect our prone border cities, which are numerous at the moment, due to our long empire shape. I don't care how many NAPs we have, with whoever. I don't trust anyone in the game. I will keep our cities safe. Leaning on two or three hammer producers to eventually build units is not how I play the game, and it provides a very inflexible strategy. Building mobile units should be an "all hands on deck" project, with every capable city doing their part (and the hammer producers doing extra duty, of course), to get the job done faster, so we can move on to other infrastructure projects. Presence or lack of a stable does not matter, as even one-promo knights are by far the strongest unit on the field at this point.

[Sullla]

Well, not to repeat myself, but I happen to disagree - I think that getting religious spread into our new cities does a lot to help them develop faster, between border expansions, extra shields on chops/whips, and so on. Religion spread isn't something distinct from worker management and forest chops; rather, I'd contend that they're all part of the same process of tight civilization management that keeps the wheels of our empire running along at peak level. I also would argue that our management of religion in this game (between border spread, Organized Religion, and so on) is a major factor behind our success thus far, certainly better than everyone else's religious stuff other than maybe Kathlete. All you have to do is look at the Religious Advisor screen and see how every city is getting benefit from Judaism. Let's keep doing that!

The point about knights is a little bit disingenous. We went to Guilds because we wanted to use knights in our war against Jowy. When he chose to suicide and hand us the war in 3 turns, that took away the immediate incentive to produce knights. So we built other things - like grocers, also enabled by Guilds - and delayed them for a bit. If we had chosen, we could have had 10 knights by now, if we had ignored grocers in Gettysburg and Chancellorsville, and skipped the Forbidden Palace in St. Albans. But... who would we be using them on? We just signed the NAP with Kathlete, and our other nearby neighbors (Nakor and Dantski) are begging us to sign the same with them. I think we'd both agree it was definitely the right call to get those infrastructure buildings, especially the Forbidden Palace, before turning on the knight crank.

This whole thing speaks to some of the differences between Single Player and Multi Player gameplay. With SP (at least on high difficulty), your focus is entirely on the economy, because unless you make some kind of egregious mistake, you can nearly always whip or chop out enough units to defeat the idiotic AI if it chooses to invade. Anything that boosts research or commerce gets emphasized very strongly; look at all the SP games where people are teching Printing Press or even Democracy before Guilds (or Horseback Riding!) You just don't need that many units.

Whereas MP is the exact opposite - you only need as much economy as is necessary to kill your opponent, and what happens after that doesn't matter. I've seen some of those hilarious pictures of the Renny games where someone whipped out 100+ knights or cuirassiers and went and kicked ass while the cities at home were starving to death from unhappiness. In our current situation, I find your belief that we should have "all hands on deck" building knights to be as silly as you probably find my builder instincts to be. We've both had way too much training in what are different styles of gameplay.

Anyway, this particular case is obviously pretty trivial. I don't care that much what we do with these cities either. I'm fine leaving the builds as they are now - just so long as we can find a place to train some new missionaries too. Got any thoughts on that? We can indeed whip a work boat out of Shiloh as needed (which will be pretty soon!) and/or build the current trireme. I tend to look at the -4 unhappiness penalty we have there right now and get a little intimidated about further whipping, but Speaker's correct that we do have some extra happiness leeway. And I could talk about considering the long run, but in the long run the game will end and who really cares if the city has a 100 turn unhappiness penalty when we win, eh? Since Shiloh will likely never need to grow past size 10 or so, we can probably keep on abusing it for a while longer.

We had two emails:

Hi KA's

I believe our NAP runs out on T175 (3 turns time). I would be happy to extend it to T200 or T210 or whenever you'd like.

Anyhoo hope I won't be seeing stacks of Knights and Catapults outside my cities anytime soon!

-Dantski

I'm assuming we want to accept this, right? I personally wouldn't feel good about attacking and conquering Dantski, even though in a cruel Realpolitik sense it would probably be the best move to consolidate our position next. He helped save us earlier, let's try to stay friends if at all possible.

This one, I have no idea what to do with:

Dear Sullla and Speaker,

We are ok with your decision to not sign a NAP with us.
We feel sorry that you did sign one with the Ottomans, though, that doesn't make us feel particulary safe at the moment.
Those shiny knights must move somewhere....

Open borders are something we can agree on, but the threat of an invasion is still there... is there any way you can lighten our fears?

Regarding Centralia, we don't plan on settling further north then we have at the moment.

Hope to hear some encouraging words from you soon.
Nakor for HRE

Maybe we can ask for a map trade or something. Nakor appears to be planting quite a few cities on that center island... perhaps our next military campaign should be taking them away from him? Controlling the center island, and the inner waterway, would be pretty nice if we could pull it off.

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Does anybody else here Adam Baldwin reading Speaker's part in this discussion?

Boy, it sure would be nice if we had some grenades, don't you think?

[Speaker]

The poor fishermen who live in Hampton Roads have had a difficult life of subsistance. Their nets were torn up twice by Ottoman galleys, and now, they are being invaded by pirates!


On a serious note, that galley actually spawned *inside* our sentry net perimeter. Oops! It will be a bit of an annoyance, but we'll have the nets replaced, and the pirates hung from the neck until dead, pretty quickly.


There is also some barbarian activity on the center island, so I dispatched an ENTIRE LEGION of our Macemen to deal with it.

[pocketbeetle]

Savvy!

I look forward to the turn when your trireme loses at 90% odds, and I get to post "This is the day you will always remember as the day that you almost..."

[Speaker]

4/22/10 9:12 am slaze Score decreased to 634
4/22/10 9:12 am Whosit Score decreased to 596
4/22/10 9:12 am slaze Score increased to 637

It looks like they are definitely still fighting, and Slaze razed one of Whosit's cities. I hope it was a bloody battle!

[Sullla]

That's some great news for us! Especially because slaze chose to raze rather than capture this Whosit city, so even if he takes the land he'll have to build up from scratch. For the life of me, I can't understand why slaze would be fighting and claiming more territory right now. He already has 13 cities and can't afford more of them due to his weak economy. He should be desperate to get peace and start rebuilding with markets and courthouses and lots of cottages. Oh well. At least this puts the Kathlete desire for war in more perspective: he probably feels that he needs to attack slaze to save Whosit. But that doesn't even include plako's simultaneous war against Whosit too...

Hey, the more these teams engage in war, the more our own team can run away with things. Pretty soon, Nakor will be the only one left who can compete due to technology!



Here's a wider shot of Captain Jack sailing in, and our own push to settle the nearby island. Next turn we'll land the settler/longbow pair, and found our new city on Turn 175. We're probably going to "Build Culture" here to get the borders expanded quickly, while workers chop some combination of granary, lighthouse, and theatre. Hamton also needs to build a second work boat for the new city's fish resource (in the second cultural ring), after it deals with the barbarian galley and likely replaces its own fish resource! Argh.



Here's our northeast frontier. We've forced border expansions everywhere other than Atlanta (where they aren't a huge priority) and nearly all of the resources have been connected or reconnected. The one exception is the iron at Spotslyvania, and Engineering tech's road bonus will allow the two Fast Workers near The Wilderness to move 7 tiles and begin re-mining there next turn. Love those Fast Workers! As cities like Atlanta, Spotsylvania, and The Wilderness continuing regrowing onto mature cottage tiles, they'll make a huge difference in our finances. We've also got plenty of forests to chop to speed up their infrastructure builds.

The other big news here is the imminent arrival of our Forbidden Palace at St. Albans, due next turn. I took some screenshots of our finances, so we'll be able to see how big of an economic impact the thing has. Usually the FP does little in Civ4, but we're hoping that our circumstances in this game (Toroidal maintenance, capital at extreme edge of territory) will make it more noticeable. Let's wait and see what happens.

We were also the first team to top the 1000 point mark in "Score" this turn, which means nothing but I guess is nice to see all the same. Meditation research finished, and we did get the full beaker overflow into Alphabet, so thanks for confirming that! Next turn we'll be able to see everyone's tech tree with Alphabet, and I'm hoping to get some great information by tracking tech discoveries. Then on to Paper and Education, so that Nakor has to cash in his Liberalism free tech on something cheap.

We agreed to renew the NAP with Dantski, so here's an acceptance message on that:

Dear Dantski,

We would be happy to extend our Non-Aggression Pact by another 25 turns up to the nice round number of Turn 200. Our team is very happy with our current relationship, and hopes to continue peaceful terms long into the future.

Cheers,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

Honestly, if Dantski wanted to remain friendly the whole rest of the game, I think that would be OK with me. Not that we fully trust him or anything, as Dantski backstabbed his allies earlier - we're building castles in both our southern border cities!

A short email to plako, as we send them the knights they requested earlier:

Dear plako and Broker,

We have two knights on the galley you gifted us, and are returning them back to you. Unfortunately the galley can't move over ocean in your cultural borders while it's been gifted to us, so we have to move along the coast just to your west. I think we can return the ship next turn or the turn after.

It looked like slaze razed one of Whosit's cities this turn on CivStats. Do you know where that was or how that happened? Sounds like some good news.

Sullla
The Killer Angels

Finally, here's a proposed message for Nakor. I sent the other two, have not sent this one yet:

Dear Nakor and DMOC of Holy Rome,

We're happy to hear of your settling arrangements on the central island. Our focus at the moment is on settling and building up unclaimed territory, not attacking other teams. Now that we've secured peace with our immediate neighbors, we don't see much point in going to war when virgin land is out there for the taking. Our military is busy defending what we already have.

Here's three different potential options for improving relations:

- Signing Open Borders (with no-scouting clause mentioned earlier)
- Exchanging world maps
- Agreeing to shift all espionage spending to other targets

We would be happy to accept any or all of these options, as a sign of further thawing relations (reaching detente, perhaps?) Please let us know what interests your team.

Cheers,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

I'm sure it can be written better, but that's my initial stab. Maybe Speaker will have some ideas here.

[Speaker]

That looks pretty solid to me, actually. I don't really care about the Open Borders part, but would love their world map, and to be able to shift espionage to Kathlete. And to pass that off as a sign of friendship would be even better!

[Sullla]

With Speaker's endorsement, I did send off the Nakor message yesterday. No response there, we'll see what happens. Let's get to our own busy turn (T174):



Unfortunately I have to start with something a little bit unpleasant. When I logged into the game, I saw that there were three of our workers cottaging a tile no city can work, and even worse overriding a farm I just laid down to bring irrigation to Chikamauga's rice farm. Umm, what? Thankfully this unwanted cottage didn't complete, or we would have had to re-farm the tile!

I'm guessing this was a misclick from Speaker last night. (One reason why I don't like to group workers is that it helps to prevent you from wasting multiple worker turns on a misclick.) In any case, I'd just like to request once again to Speaker, please let me move the workers each turn. I know the game is boring right now, I know that there's got to be a great temptation to take over and start doing stuff - but please let this SP noob do his building and cottaging in peace, thanks!

There will be plenty more enemies to kill before this game is over - we've still got Kathlete and Nakor on "the list". Whosit's doing a good job of killing himself without our intervention!

OK, in more interesting stuff St. Albans finished the Forbidden Palace. Here's a comparison screenshot of our finances between turns:



In the income department, notice how we saw a net gain of 7 beakers, 4 culture, and 7 gold. Not too shabby. The real action, however, is over in the Expenses column, where the FP shaved a clear 30 gold per turn off of our costs. And we'll actually save more money with the passage of time, as city maintenance costs are directly tied to size. (For example, Chancellorsville costs about the same as The Wilderness in maintenance, because one is size 14 and one is size 3).

Put another way, we were losing 21 gpt previously at 50% science. This turn we are now making 18 gpt at the same 50% science! And the difference between 50% science and 40% science is very noticeable; we make 320 beakers/turn at the former and 250 beakers/turn at the latter. As a rough estimate, I'd guess that the Forbidden Palace was "worth" something like 50 beakers/turn for us at the present moment due to cost savings. I'd say that was well worth building!

Now back to more knights. St. Albans needs one more workshop to hit the plateau for 2t knights, and then we'll be off and running. (Argh! Stupid silver resource dropping us from 20/45 shields to 19/42 shields per turn! )

We also discovered Alphabet tech this turn, with Speaker indulging my wish for more foreign tech information, so here's what that looks like:



The extra techs cut off by the picture were edited into the left side, letting them all be seen in one go. Now the picture alone can be a bit overwhelming and not that useful, so here's a more useful display of the tech information and where everyone stands:

Nakor
Techs up on us: Paper, Philosophy, Education
Techs missing we have: Aesthetics, Drama, Horseback Riding, Literature, Engineering, Guilds, Music

Nakor is our clear tech rival. We've know this for some time; the good news is that he is much weaker in non-tech terms, far behind in Food and Production. Nakor's also missing a lot of military techs (HBR, Guilds, etc.) and some useful culture stuff (no Drama = no Globe Theatre, no Literature = no Epics). He is currently researching Engineering tech, and will probably go for Liberalism after that. (If he tries for something else, Liberalism would be in danger!)

plako/Broker
Techs up on us: none
Techs missing we have: Meditation, Monotheism, Aesthetics, Calendar, Drama, Literature, Engineering, Music

These guys are clearly the #3 research power, which is kinda shocking considering where they were 100 turns ago. They have gone the HBR/Guilds route and can now build knights themselves, although they are missing the top of tree Classical techs. I expect they'll probably go after Compass/Optics next to strengthen their naval power base. Building the Great Lighthouse was a game-saving move, kudos and well done!

Kathlete
Techs up on us: none
Techs missing we have: Aesthetics, Alphabet, Drama, Literature, Engineering, Guilds, Machinery, Music

Kathlete is the opposite of plako, strong in Food/Production but relatively weak in terms of research power. While they are strong in Classical techs, having most of the useful stuff there, Kathlete has made little progress in the Medieval era, just the two basic techs of Feudalism and Civil Service. They still can't build crossbows or maces or knights, which makes their army a lot less intimidating. Not sure why they think they'll do any better against slaze if they attack again... but Kathlete might just be lying to us there for all we know.

Waiting for a further technological edge and then crushing this team with cuirassiers (or cavs!) is pretty much the plan here.

Dantski
Techs up on us: Compass
Techs missing we have: Meditation, Monotheism, Alphabet, Drama, Literature, Metal Casting, Engineering, Feudalism, Guilds, Machinery, Music

Yes, Dantski has actually slipped into the #5 tech spot, although that has more to do with the poor performance of the last two teams than any great effort on his part. Dantski has done a very solid job with the Classical techs... with the one glaring exception of skipping Metal Casting tech. He still doesn't have a single forge built yet - wow! And the consequence of this is that Dantski has only a single Medieval tech (Civil Service) while lacking all the other critical stuff we've been researching of late. Still no longbows, no maces, no crossbow, no knights. You can see why Dantski wants an NAP with us, because we could crush his Ancient age army like a bug!

I have no clue why he researched Compass recently. Metal Casting is actually cheaper than Compass, and forges would seem to be way more useful than harbors. Maybe he needs the health bonus (?) I still don't get it.

Whosit
Techs up on us: none
Techs missing we have: Alphabet, Calendar, Horseback Riding, Monarchy, Civil Service, Engineering, Feudalism, Guilds, Music

Now we're really getting down into the dregs... Whosit has most of the Classical techs too, although unlike everyone else he has Aesthetics/Literature/Drama, thanks to his earlier run to the Great Library. Of course, the consequence is that Whosit lacks Monarchy tech, which is complete inexcusable for this late in the game. Remember, he was in a great position 100 turns earlier, with tons of land to expand into and complete military security. Poor Whosit, how did it all go so terribly wrong for you...

Whosit has one Medieval tech, Machinery, which he beelined to presumably to build crossbows. Of course crossbows fare poorly against knights, which plako will have now, so I see some hammer time if they continue the war.

slaze
Techs up on us: none
Techs missing we have: Meditation, Aesthetics, Alphabet, Calendar, Drama, Horseback Riding, Iron Working, Literature, Metal Casting, Civil Service, Engineering, Guilds, Machinery, Music

Wow, this dude is in some serious trouble! I think I overestimated slaze before based purely on his number of cities and strong Food count. He is a full era behind our team, if not more so. We have 14 techs he lacks, yeesh! slaze's only real asset is his Feudalism tech, and so long as the era of longbows goes on he'll be safe from destruction, but eventually teams will tech up into the Renaissance and then slaze will be doomed. The fact that he still lacks IRON WORKING - with tons of jungle tiles visibile in his territory - pretty much says it all.

We wanted to ally with slaze and help him out, but he threw that offer back in our face, just because we actually were going to play things smart and not crash our economy with overexpansion like he did. So - have fun with that, slaze! Sucks to be you!

Finally, after updating all this info in the Excel chart, I decided to get a numeric estimate of each team's total tech value. I took the number of techs each team had (already tallied in the table), and multiplied that by the average era value of each tech: 77 for Ancient age techs, 314 for Classical, 733 for Medieval, and 1528 for Renaissance. Thus our team's value would be 17 Ancient age techs (17 * 77) + 13 Classical (13 * 314) + 6 Medieval (6 * 733) = 9789. For all the teams:

Killer Angels: 9789
Nakor: 9328
plako: 6913
Kathlete: 5601
Dantski: 5028
Whosit: 4868
slaze: 3535

While these are just rough estimates, and overlook the fact that some techs in each era are way more expensive than others, it's a fun way to quantify where everyone's research stands. Since this ranking is based on beaker value of techs discovered, you can see that the teams at the bottom are falling REALLY far behind...

A couple last points:

- Yes, the work boat at Hamton was pillaged by Jack Sparrow, argh!

- As such, I think we'll probably want to get our Great Person out of St. Albans, not Hampton. The GP comes out 1t faster in St. Albans anyway, and forcing further starvation in Hampton is not good for the city. St. Albans will give us about 85% odds for a Great Engineer, which isn't bad. Then our next GP will come out of Spartansburg, which is already up and running with National Epic and prepared to start turning out Great People at a sickening rate.

- We need to whip the work boat next turn in Shiloh for the new inner island city, so I made the switch this turn.

- Nakor will discover Engineering tech in 3t, according to our espionage. If that is correct, the tech would take 6t total to research; that works out to roughly 250 beakers/turn (after multipliers) or about 200 beakers/turn base. Now if THAT assumption is true, we're getting 50% more true beakers than our chief research rival!

One message in from plako:

Dear Killer Angels,

Thank you for the Knights. I really hope we can get them in to use. However Whosit might offer us so good a deal that we might had to accept it.

I think the city in question was somewhere close the inner sea. If i have understood correctly, next city Slaze is heading is Whosit's Heroic Epic city that is in inner sea. Battle was apparently quite bloody, but it probably weakened both of them considerably.

We've also got a peace offer from Whosit that contains now Nar Shaddaa. We're considering it. It seems Athlete and also Nakor are trying to force peace between us. Especially Athlete's role seems strange as a "friend" of slaze.

If we find peace I suspect we had to sign also long NAP with Nakor and Whosit (they offered T300, but that feels way too long to me maybe T250 could work). If we can find acceptable terms how does this sound to you?

Kind regards,
plako

We definitely don't want them signing an NAP until some ungodly late time like Turn 250 - or Turn 300! Here's my first thought on responding:

Dear plako and Broker,

Happy to help out with the knights. If you don't need them immediately, feel free to save them for the next campaign. We also saw that both slaze and Whosit popped Great Generals at the end of last turn, so it sounds like the fighting was bloody indeed. Next turn the Demographics will tell the story.

On the subject of the peace offer, we would encourage you not to accept any kind of long NAP offer they propose. Whosit is clearly losing the war, and he is desperate for some kind of settlement. The ball is in YOUR court, not the other way around - you don't need to give in to their requests! If I were in your shoes, I would follow the pattern we did in eliminating Jowy. Try to get peace with Whosit for roughly 25-30 turns, and no longer. Then you can use the intervening time to build up a large army of knights, repair your economy, and then come back and finish the job for good. The only reason they want a super-long peace is so that Whosit can do the same rebuilding job that you did earlier. Don't fall for it!

Of course, obviously you have to go with what's best for your team, but we really think Whosit is on the ropes. If you can get a city now for peace, you can probably eliminate him a little later. Then after that, if Whosit is gone, we can start thinking about hitting Nakor 3 vs. 1 with you and us and Dantski. Wouldn't that be fun!

Sullla
The Killer Angels

I'll see what Speaker thinks and if he has any changes before sending.

[...]

Wow, that was a long post! I think that would have been like 10 from darrell or regoarrarr.