RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Sullla]

OK, some quick highlights from us on the current turn before we look at the new world map:

- Landed another settler on the central island. We'll have a new city there next turn.

- Worker produced in Gettysburg thanks to the forest chop and some nice Speaker micro, two workers will land at Vicksburg next turn. (Best to just land them directly inside the city for safety.)

- Captain Jack Sparrow was sunk by one of our triremes, and the fish resource reconnected at Hampton Roads. Now we need a second work boat for the fishes at Vicksburg (1t build) then back to knights.

- Speaker, we need to time the Great Person points carefully in Spartansburg. Look at the F1 city list:



We need to "slow down" Spartansburg so that it doesn't produce a Great Person before St. Albans. I have it set up so that St. Albans gets us a Great Person in 5 turns, Spartansburg timed to be just behind that at 6 turns. Hopefully we'll get a Great Engineer from the first, and either a Scientist or Merchant from the second. (Although we can put even an Artist to use, I have some ideas on that.)

- Nakor was the only one to discover a tech, finishing Engineering as expected. He switched over to Liberalism, which was showing 8t initially (at what I believe is the break-even science rate) but Nakor logged into the game and it changed to 4t, which is probably the 100% deficit research rate. We'll watch and see how long it takes him to discover that tech.

That out of the way, let's start looking at the new world map. Here's the F5 military screen, providing an overview and showing our own forces:



I guess this isn't a surprise, confirming the Donut map script shape along with a center island and a scattered outer rim of islands. Our military is fairly well balanced between different types of units, although we're going to lean heavily on knights in the immediate future since they're by far the strongest units on the board at the moment.

Here's Kathlete's land:



The biggest surprise was that he moved his Palace, from Coruscant to Endor, which was a pretty nice idea to reduce maintenance costs. I believe that Endor was the former Byzantine aggressive city that regoarrarr and sunrise planted way back when. All I can say about that is... really, guys? What were you thinking, planting THAT far away from your capital?!? And with WARRIOR defenders?!? I hate to say it, but that kind of move deserved to be punished. You can't pull off something like this unless you're up against the Templars.

Hoth is the former Byzantine capital, and so you can see how the current Ottoman domains mostly take up the space of what should have been Ottomans + Byzantine land, just as we take up the space of what should have been India + Greece. With all of these cities (14 total) and space for more expansion on the northern island and central island, Kathlete has excellent long term potential here. In fact, Kathlete and Nakor are pretty much the only two teams that have a realistic shot to win the game besides us. I think it's inevitable that we will have to attack and cripple or eliminate Kathlete before all is said and done. But hey, they *GAVE* us their map, so that will be a whole lot easier to do!



Moving further along the Donut, this is slaze's 13 cities. It's clear immediately that despite having a comparable amount of land, slaze's empire sits at a much lower level of development than Kathlete. There are no cities above size 8, jungle tiles abound because slaze doesn't have Iron Working and can't cut them down, and his cities lack much infrastructure. They each have terraces and courthouses (both benefitting from Mehmed's traits), and that's pretty much it. With a much better picture of events here now, we can safely say that slaze is not a real threat. He's got land, but he's just too far behind. Thank goodness that there's no tech trading, or he would be a major player.



Here's Whosit, who is in a world of trouble right now. Rome is down to just 6 cities, the last one offscreen in the dead center of the Donut. Nar Shaadaa, which was one of Whosit's best cities, just fell to Korea in a very bloody battle on both sides. (plako really should have razed this city, because they don't know if they can hold it.) There's a chunk of open territory to the northeast where slaze razed some Whosit cities earlier, and neither side has had the economy to settle since. Overall, Whosit will probably be able to survive the current round of wars (due to his protected inner island cities), but he's just about been reduced to a Jowy position of backwardness. Sooner or late he will be snapped up and eliminated by stronger, technologically advanced civs.



Korea's island empire; the island we want them to settle (north of Atlanta) is located in the southwest corner of this picture. Korea's 10 cities are strong economically, thanks to Great Lighthouse trade routes, but weak in terms of production. Given this paltry amount of territory, it's impressive how well they've managed to do. plako is worried that Nakor is about to declare war on them (well OK, technically they were already at war, but you know what I mean!) and start invading. If that happens, we may have to get involved. Hopefully not - we'll have to wait and see.



Nakor's core of cities, 8 on the main Donut, 2 on the outer island, 3 on the central island. The big difference that immediately strikes me comparing Nakor's territory to ours is the smaller sizes of his cities. The capital of Rolan is the only city above size 10! (Excluding Gettysburg, we have cities of size 16, 14, 14, 13, 12, and 12.) Smaller cities of course means fewer tiles in play, and overall fewer productivity from what territory you have.

Secondly - and this is not Nakor's fault - his territory is pretty much devoid of rivers, which is another stark contrast to the lush river valleys that dot our core. Dantski and Nakor were both pretty unlucky here. Because of the constrained spaces, Nakor has had to carry out expansion overseas, where he only has one city of any size or consequence (Queg, size 6). His other offshore cities really stink! We don't understand why Nakor didn't just whip out an army of maces earlier and crush Dantski, taking that land for himself. It wouldn't have been that hard to do, especially when our army was off fighting Jowy. Just teching and building up isn't going to work forever...



To complete the circle, here's Dantski's cramped territory. You know, he doesn't have much land, but he's actually done a pretty good job with what he does have. The original core of five cities (Timbuktu, Djenne, Kumbi Salah, Gao, and Walata) are all grown up to good sizes thanks to extensive use of Hereditary Rule - and resources that we have gifted to Dantski. (If we ever cut off our extra resource gifts to plako and Dantski, they would really be crippled; they are pretty much tied to us whether they like it or not!)

Dantski has also done really well with that island off to the west, although his city spots are very exposed to attack from slaze if Inca chose to get aggressive. The problem is that Dantski can't really go anywhere from here, except across to the central island... but he's blocked there pretty good by our cities and Nakor's. I'm not sure where he goes from here. The logical path of advance is through Nakor, but Nakor is way ahead in tech, making that difficult. Dantski should have attacked earlier, when he had a big advantage in military. Too late now though!



Finally, here's the central island revealed in full. We'll be planting our own toehold in the northwest starting next turn, to go along with the Nakor and Whosit colonies in the south. We would have been here dozens and dozens of turns earlier, if we hadn't lost Shiloh in the great fiveway war previously. Because of that, Nakor and Whosit had this area all to themselves for a very long time. But no more! Once we get our new city established, we'll have the option to go rough up Nakor and exercise some leverage over here. I doubt there's anything in Rillanon or Land's End that four or five knights wouldn't be able to run over!

I'll have some more thoughts to post on going forward a little bit later on. Been thinking about that all day today since seeing the big revealed map - knowing where everyone stands makes it a lot easier to make informed decisions about the future.

[Speaker]

Sullla, just be careful that Spartansburg doesn't grow while we are slowing down the great person by a turn to let St. Albans finish first. I think we want to keep it at size 12 with a full food box, that we can slowly empty by running 7 great people, and then swap back to 6 and slowly fill it back up.

Did you kill Captain Jack? Or did it actually attack our Trireme? I was dumbfounded when I moved the boats and couldn't find the galley. I thought maybe there was some AI trickery going on, but neglected to check the logs.

I think we may want to sneak in another settler pretty soon, to get a second city on the western island. Maybe we can do that after we get a couple knights out of Hampton? Of course we should wait until we have a few workers over there, since there will be plenty to do. I'd like to get the incense hooked up sooner than later, since the +1 happiness will help our whole empire, though of course we do not have happiness problems at all right now, and will also be adding Dyes to the mix soon.

[BobRoberts]

That was a great turn report - chock full of devourable detail!

Cheers muchly for the effort.

[Sullla]

It just said in the log that our trireme had killed a barbarian galley. I never saw the unit, and honestly I have no idea where the barb unit went last turn. Just goes to show what they say is true, you'll never catch Captain Jack Sparrow!

You're completely correct about Spartansburg; I did set it up not to grow, and we should be able to manage that by working the hill mines. At worst, we could work a couple of Citizens for a turn. We'll make sure it doesn't grow to size 13 - size 12 running 7 specialists is definitely better.

More settlers would be great! Any time I can pry one of our military cities off knights for settlers or workers is music to my ears.

OK, here's a little diplo from plako:

Hi,

Nar Shaddaa has been captured, but RNG hated us this time. We had odds ranging from 65-88% with our Knights for 6 fights and only won 1. HRE has reasonable stack close by (~8 Maces/Praets + 6 cats + 4 axes) so we almost certanly had to retreat from Nar Shaddaa. It might have been better to raze it after all.

Whosit is probably now very thin elsewhere, but we aren't in a position to take advantage of this because of HRE.

Best regards,
plako

plako grabbed me today while I was on Gmail and chatted shortly, basically saying the same thing in the above message. I guess we'll see what Nakor does. One option would be sending Nakor a message demanding he leave Korea alone "OR ELSE", but we'd really rather not get dragged into a war right now which has little to do with us. Maybe we should offer to mediate their war instead. Seems like plako has gotten just about everything he can from that conflict, and signing peace might be the best move now. What do you think, Speaker?

Here's a short response to Kathlete. They can dream on about us giving them gold for the map, but we can be polite about it:

Dear Rebel Alliance,

Thank you for agreeing to exchange world maps this past turn. We appreciate your sharing of information with our team.

At the moment, I doubt there will be any tension between possible city locations on the center island. Our planned city will be across the inner sea from our current cities, and away from your borders. We might plant another city eventually further east, but no time soon.

Cheers,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

I don't think Kathlete will be expanding into the center any time soon. He's got that island just north of his territory which still remains untouched, and the possibility of claiming cities from slaze. That is, if the whole Inca war thing isn't a giant load of bull, which is entirely possible!

Now that we've got the revealed world map and can see everyone else, here's what I'm thinking as a possible plan for the future. It's based on attacking and killing Kathlete, because absorbing the Ottoman territory and adding it to our current stuff would give us 50% of the Donut and make us prohibitive favorites to win. Step by step:

- Finish researching Education tech, then build our cheap universities and get a fast Oxford University in Gettysburg. (Since we also have stone, we should be able to do this very quickly; let's save the final forest at Gettysburg for Oxford.)

- Then we need to research 6 techs, probably in the following order: Banking, Philosophy, Nationalism, Gunpowder, Military Tradition, Constitution. We use the time researching these techs to build universities and banks in our core cities, along with knights and a few catapults in the barracks towns.

- If we pop a Great Scientist during this time, we lightbulb Printing Press. If we pop a (second) Great Artist, we lightbulb Divine Right for the pre-requisite discount on Nationalism tech. If we pop a Great Merchant, we send him by sea to plako's capital for a trade mission to fuel more research.

- When we are near the end of this research, we trigger a Golden Age with our saved Great Artist. On the last turn of the Golden Age, we do a massive civics swap: Hereditary Rule to Representation, Bureaucracy to Nationhood, Decentralization to Mercantilism, Organized Religion to Theocracy. With our overseas cities, we'll lose almost nothing in trade route income while gaining a free Mercantilist/Representation specialist in each city. And militarily...

- We start drafting muskets in huge numbers. With the Globe Theatre, Chikamauga will be able to draft nearly every turn, and all our other cities can support 1 drafted unit every 10 turns. With Theocracy and barracks, all conscripts will have one promotion, normal units will have 5 XP for two promotions, and Mounted units will have 7 XP with stables. We upgrade all our accumulated knights to cuirassiers (and that's a very cheap upgrade, only 30g each, I think) and get ready to rock.

- Crush Kathlete with our massive army of drafted muskets and cuirassiers. I leave the details of this to Speaker. Kathlete will get Gunpowder for janissaries at some point, but we'll have Rifling pretty quickly after Constitution ourselves (only 2 techs away), and drafted rifles + cuirassiers will slice up his cities pretty good.

- After successfully eliminating or crippling Kathlete, we pause to rebuild and consolidate briefly again. Outside of the military techs, the key one to target will be Communism for that magnificent State Property civic, which will be godly powerful on this map. No distance maintenance costs at all! Every city costs 6gpt, 3gpt with a courthouse! The ultimate civic for a bloated empire, which we should be, and if we're the first ones there we'd even get a Great Spy to serve as a permanant scout in enemy territory who could never be caught. Awesome.

- End the game by crushing slaze and annexing his land. That, along with the central island, would surely be enough to trigger Domination (or at least backdoor Domination via the UN or something like that). There won't be any need to face Nakor unless he's on the verge of winning some kind of victory.

Why Kathlete and not Nakor? Having seen both their land, I think that Kathlete poses the greater danger long term. His land is just better, and his leader and civ (Willem/Ottomans) are better too. Now if we had easy access to Nakor's land it would be a slam dunk to go in there and take it over, but given the geographic situation, it doesn't make much sense to go fight a war and let Dantski/plako get the rewards. Better to let plako and Dantski contain Nakor's expansion, and absorb the first blow if Nakor goes on the offensive, while we help ourselves to further expansion at Kathlete's expense.

A lot depends on whether or not Kathlete actually goes to war with slaze; that would be a godsend for us, and a crazy stupid move on his part. They would wear each other down and slow Kathlete's tech progress, allowing us to swoop in later with a superior force and reap all the rewards. So come on, Kathlete - use our NAP to go punish Inca! You know you want to!

[Cyneheard]

if we're the first ones there we'd even get a Great Spy to serve as a permanant scout in enemy territory who could never be caught.

I think you'll want a ruling from Krill, but I was under the impression that Great Spies could never leave your territory; they're settle or Golden Age only.

[Krill]

Yeah, Gspy can't leave the territory IIRC. It was part of the decision to ban spies.

[novice]

Great plan Sullla, and great to see up to date pictures of the entire donut. Much appreciated!

[Speaker]

All sounds good, except for the Great Spy bit, which as others have pointed out, is against the rules we set in this game. I'm split between Universal Suffrage and Representation, but we can run some numbers when the time comes. It's mostly a question of whether we want to prioritize MFG or Tech.

Let's see if it will all work out this way.

[Rowain]

If you had made the map yourself you couldn't have given you a better position . Lots of rivers for your financial civ and on side neighbours without many rivers and the other without copper forcing him to research expensive IW. I know that the starting positions have been randomized but I wonder what you would have said (towards the mapmakers) had you gotten Jowy's copperless start or the plain-ridden dryness of HRE.

[Speaker]

Two emails that came through today, regarding Holy Rome:

Hi,

We've signed real peace with HRE and can now concentrate fully to Whosit at least for the next 10 turns. This probably means Whosit has essentially given up.

We don't have NAP yet agreed, but we've made preliminary commitment to sign one. I think most flexible alternative they seemed to agree was indefinite one with 15T cool down period. Any opinionson this? Dantski, what is your position currently? If you're afraid HRE might attack we could probably suggest clausule that gives us opportunity to cancel NAP immediately, if you get attacked. If you've plans to attack please let us know well in advance so that we could cancel the NAP.

Best regards,
plako

That was some mutual protection pact. This is why I've been taking every diplomatic agreement in this game with a grain of salt, and trusting nothing but out ability to defend ourselves. A human player will always do what is to their best advantage, and to think otherwise is silly. You can only count on yourself. Constant vigilance!

Hi

Currently if HRE went all out and focused on one of my frontline cities then I'd lose it. I get Maces next turn and will be in a better but not completely secure position in 5-10 turns.

However I don't think HRE will attack me, they have been very paranoid in the past about India helping me to take Krondor and thats probably still their primary concern. Add on my double speed GG production and Statue of Zeus, and that makes any war with me appear less appealing.

-Dantski