RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Sullla]

OK, we are up and running again, with a little more than 9 hours left on the timer! First things first: the new turn will roll over tomorrow morning sometime around 8 am EST, and I'll login a little before then to check out what Nakor's doing and make any last-minute changes. (CivStats claims that we've already ended our turn, but it gets majorly screwed up on reloads, so ignore that.) I'll have it covered Speaker, so no worries.

Moved our Sentry horse archer up to the border and back again, snapping this picture:



One longbow. That athlete sure is a trusting fellow, eh? It's a drastic contrast to the massive military garrisons we have all over our eastern (and southern!) borders. We basically trust no one and take nothing for granted. Dunno if that's absolutely necessary, but it did save our bacon once earlier. I think we can see inside Kathlete's other border cities with that Sentry unit, so I'll probably check them out too over the next few turns. Probably one longbow in each city, with most of the Ottoman units off fighting slaze.

The only technology discovered this turn was Gunpowder for Kathlete. Yes, that does mean janissaries. However, that's really more in the way of bad news for slaze, not us. Janissaries slaughter all outdated units, while doing relatively little to contemporary units. They get no bonus at all against muskets (or any other Gunpowder units), and only break even versus cuirassiers. True, janissaries annihilate macemen - but we won't be attacking with maces by that time! That bonus against Archery, Melee, and Mounted units doesn't look that scary come the Renassiance era. Just affects our cuirassiers, basically.

We also have to get back to diplomacy:

Greetings KA,

Since we haven't spoken in a bit, I figure I should drop you a line,
see how things are going you know. I'm curious as to why you've
started spending ep's against me. Didn't we have an agreement to keep
them at 43? There are still others in this game that you can spend
them on. I had hoped to pursue friendly relations with you, yet I am
not certain that you really want to do that. Is it possible Slaze has
managed to talk his way back onto "your side"? I guarantee he's the
one who actively pursued the opportunity to attack you, not me.
Let's keep the lines of communication open.

Athlete
The Rebel Alliance

He sent this two days ago actually, but I wasn't even checking email with the game down and nothing taking place. Here's my proposed response:

Dear Rebel Alliance,

Sorry for not responding earlier, we weren't checking our email while the game was down this weekend. Anyway, we turned on espionage spending because we wanted to keep an eye on what techs you were researching. Our prior 43/43 agreement came from much, MUCH earlier in the game - we didn't intend it to be a gamelong binding agreement. I'm sorry if there was confusion on that part.

You don't need to worry about slaze trying to talk his way back onto "our side", as you put it. He's sent us exactly one email since your war began, and that was responding to our request to exchange world maps. That's it. Honestly, if I had to guess, I think he's more or less checked out of this game as far as diplomacy goes. We thought he would come emailing us for help... but slaze hasn't, for whatever reason.

Thanks for the email,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

I'll send it tomorrow morning if Speaker doesn't object. The second paragraph is a good example of lying by omission: slaze has indeed only sent us a single message, but *WE* have been contacting and supporting him frequently. And slaze doesn't "email" us, he just contacts us directly in-game with whatever he wants us to donate. I wonder if athlete even realizes to check the F4 trading screen and see that we're sending slaze 3 happiness resources (?)

Sorry when you read this eventually, athlete. But you chose to make us your enemy the minute that first Ottoman horse archer rolled across our border.

We're probably going to lose Taj to Nakor, for reasons I'll explain tomorrow. But that's not a terrible fate, as we can turn our Engineer into the Apostolic Palace as a runner-up prize. Combine that with University of Sankore (and possibly Spiral Minaret), and we can pull some incredible value out of the monk temple economy. We're also close to some civic swaps which will make our economy MUCH stronger, which we'll detail in upcoming turns. Speaker, I'll talk more about this in the upcoming days, but I think the way to go will be Representation for about ~50-75 turns (letting more cottages mature), and then Universal Suffrage for the rest of the game and our victory push. We just need Representation to power through the tree up to Assembly Line, Communism, and Steel, then we go for max shields everywhere and it's GG.

[Sullla]

Hey Speaker, if sunrise would be able to get the game up tonight, feel free to go ahead and turn on our Nationalism research + end turn. I'm going to be out until very late, and at this point I just want to move on to the next turn. Who really cares if Nakor sees us turning on our research again?

[Speaker]

Game is still down as of this morning.

[Sullla]

OK, hopefully we are back up and running again, so I logged into the game and finished our turn. That more or less consisted of turning research on for Nationalism tech, which will finish next turn:



As it turned out, we were exactly 13 beakers short on finishing Nationalism tech at 80% science rate. I figured the best course there was to swap Chancellorsville over to Research for one turn (preserving the build overflow, by the way) rather than bump up the slider to 90% science. This saves us 70 gold, and means that next turn we can run 100% gold and instantly repay all of our borrowed money to Korea. I'd rather get that out of the way ASAP and move forward, even if it means a slight one-turn delay on the university in Chancellorsville.

Ideally the remaining teams will play and we'll get a new turn sometime tonight, but I guess we'll see what happens.

[Sullla]

According to CivStats, Nakor (technically DMOC) has just double-whipped one of his cities. I don't even have to log into the game to tell you that he just whipped the Taj build to completion. Go ahead, click on their spoiler thread right now - I can see that DMOC just posted there. Tell me I'm wrong, I dare you.

We're really not interested in playing clock game shenanigans with these guys anymore. Let's just get this show on the road and move forward.

[Issus]

Lurker Idea: You don't actually have to do this but... wouldn't it be hilarious if you used a great person on a Golden Age! Imagine the players confusion when the event log reads:

Nakor Has Completed the Taj Mahal!
Nakor's Golden Age has Begun!
Sullla's Golden Age Has Begun!

[Jowy]

Issus, 'lurker ideas' belong in the lurker discussion thread.

[Speaker]

Lurker Idea: You don't actually have to do this but... wouldn't it be hilarious if you used a great person on a Golden Age! Imagine the players confusion when the event log reads:

Nakor Has Completed the Taj Mahal!
Nakor's Golden Age has Begun!
Sullla's Golden Age Has Begun!

Well, unfortunately it wouldn't quite read like that because there are other events in between, and spawning a golden age with a great person would require us to log in to click the button. But a funny idea, nonetheless.

Sullla, I queued up a settler in both of Antietam and Chancellorsville. I was thinking to plant the Iron/Clams city above Gettysburg, and the second location on the western island, and then we'd be pretty much finished with city founding, and could move on to bigger and better things. Our tech path for the very near future will be Banking (2 turns), Theology (1 or 2 turns), Constitution (5 turns?) and then I guess we'll want to launch our 1-person golden age, and quadruple swap into Representation, Nationalism, Mercantilism, and Theology. Printing Press would be a pretty nice tech to get as well. And we'll need Gunpowder to start drafting muskets and Mil Trad to build Currasiers. Hmm. What do you think?

[Sullla]

Yeah, pretty humorous but it wouldn't have worked out. (By the way, let's keep on attacking lurkers and pushing "CODE OF CONDUCT" in their faces over and over again. Must make this game as unentertaining as possible for everyone. )

So Nakor of course completed Taj Mahal, as we knew he would from production detective work and watching CivStats last turn. In an idea world, here's how we would have played this: revolt to Caste System civic at some point earlier, run 6 Scientists in Spartansburg for a guaranteed Great Scientist, lightbulb Education and use that to be first to Liberalism, then slingshot Nationalism and use that edge to build Taj first. That would have been ideal. But there's a couple problems with that:

- We aren't Spiritual, so we can't do fast and easy civic changes. (Or, conversely if we were Spiritual, we'd be getting slower Great People and not getting those fast universities/Oxford from being Philosophical.)

- If our third Great Person had been a Scientist, then it wouldn't have been an Engineer.

- At the time we would have had to be doing this, we were at war with Greece, and in the process of increasing our civ's size by 50%. That's why we chose to go for Guilds and Engineering (combined beaker cost of 3000+, more than Education) instead of a Liberalism beeline. We felt it was necessary to get those miltiary techs first for safety.

In other words, we could have done better here, but only at the cost of trading off other priorities. Against humans, you can generally do anything one thing that you want, but you can't do everything that you want. (Because the other guys are too good!) Naturally that won't stop us from trying to do some of everything, but in this case we came up short. Oh well. Better luck next time.

First some screenshots from this turn, and then I'll get to moving forward and planning ahead:



The overflow from Speaker's whip last turn just about covered half of the cost of Oxford (192 out of 400 shields). With a chop on the forest tile remaining, we will finish it in 3t total, wrapping up on Turn 191 just as predicted earlier. Nine total turns from discovering Education to producing six universities and Oxford. I love being Philosophical at this stage in the game!

Speaker, to answer your question, here's our definite tech path for the immediate future. After one turn of 0% science (to pay back plako with the 400 gold we owe them), then we'll go:

1) Banking (2t)
2) Theology (1.5t)
*Trigger Golden Age with Artist*
3) Constitution (4t or 5t)
4) Gunpowder (2t)
5) Military Tradition (4t)

Our current rate at break-even 50% science is 438 base beakers/turn, which rises to 525/turn with the normal bonus multiplier of 20%. With more universities and Oxford completing, plus a Golden Age to trigger, that should go up... but how much exactly, I don't know. I'm guessing these estimates will be more or less correct.

We will revolt on the final turn of the Golden Age into Representation + Mercantilism + Nationhood (and possibly Theocracy too, depending on what Speaker wants). Use the Golden Age to knock out building the remaining universities, banks, and maybe mausoleums, then onto pure military. The GA's end should just about coincide with us discovering Gunpowder, so we can start the mass drafting of muskets to serve as the grunts protecting our siege units and defending cities. (The Mounted units will be the main attackers, naturally.) We can leave Military Tradition until last because knight to cuirassier is a fairly cheap upgrade (50g each) and do a mass upgrade right before attacking. Looking at the current turn numbers, we should have just enough time to get all of these techs, draft a dozen muskets, and upgrade our knights about the time that Turn 206 arrives and we can go on the attack again...

I'm hoping we'll get a Great Scientist from one of the next two Great People out of Spartansburg, which would lightbulb Printing Press (most of it, anyway). If not, we'll research it after Miltiary Tradition en route to Rifling. Have to go for the other stuff first though, too important to pass up.

The Great Engineer will now obviously go for Apostolic Palace in Spartansburg, so we'll have to get some temples in our cities too. (We can do that during the Golden Age.) Here's a refresher course on how it works from CivFanatics (since neither Speaker nor myself have much experience with the wonder): http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=319452

OK, as for what some of the other teams are doing:



Nakor planted two cities this turn, and gifted one of them over to Kathlete. (He actually named this city "Gift", according to the event log, and then Kathlete renamed it Dagobah due to all the jungle in the area. Clever.) There is a barb city called Yayoi on the hill tile one north of the iron, with three archers inside. It would be nice to raze that one, but kinda tough strategically for us. Kathlete will probably end up controlling that one too.

With Nakor and Kathlete starting to fortify the center island, I completely agree with getting our second city here, which should go on the hill NE of the bananas, SE of the whales to the east of Malvern Hill. We'll just fortify our corner of this island, try to take away Kathlete's city here in the near future, and worry about Nakor's southern part of the island later on.

Two other odd tidbits:

- Kathlete did significant whipping, five double-whips in his cities this turn. That's almost certainly a bunch of janissaries (after discovering Gunpowder last turn), so slaze will have to be on his guard. Better for us than Kathlete pushing more infrastructure.

- Dantski has slowly amassed 1200 gold (!) in his treasury, so here's either about to start some massive deficit spending, or he's going to pull a mass upgrade of his old axes to maces. We just have to wait and see, I guess. My money would be on the latter, given how vulnerable Dantski is militarily.

No new diplomatic messages. I just sent one off to plako explaining what happened with Taj and that we'd pay them back 400 gold next turn. Less chit-chat is probably good for us at the moment.

[Speaker]

By the way, let's keep on attacking lurkers and pushing "CODE OF CONDUCT" in their faces over and over again. Must make this game as unentertaining as possible for everyone.

Sullla, can we please try to take comments about the lurker comments to the lurker thread? thanks!