RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[novice]

http://fgk.hanau.net/articles/ironic.html

EDIT: Oh yeah, and this gem: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1925705

[Sullla]

OK, kidding aside, let's respond to these emails. Dantski is just on a different page than our team - we want to send him a polite refusal:

Dear Dantski,

I think that our teams have differing views on the value of a Great Prophet. No offense intended, but we have no desire to trade two Great People for a Prophet. You should probably just go ahead and use your Prophet if you have something in mind for him, since we won't have another Great Person for a little while longer. Sorry that we weren't able to work something out to both our satisfaction.

Sullla
The Killer Angels

It's a shame we couldn't work something out, but Dantski wants way more than we're willing to give him. (Admittedly, a Great Artist is sort of a lowball offer. We don't have any other Great People though!) We'll have about 10% odds on each Great Person out of Spartansburg to get our Prophet, and we can probably live with that. If we get one, nice; if not, no biggie at this point.

Now, as far as responding to Kathlete... here's what I'd like to say:

LOL we are comin to get u

Sounds great! Just gift your army over to us, and we'll take care of slaze for you. Don't worry, you can trust us!

OK, more seriously now. How to write this without laughing my behind off...

Dear Rebel Alliance,

That's a pretty long message; let me try to go through it one section at a time.

On combat in this game, I'm sure you've seen by now how much harder it is to attack humans than the AI. You generally need to have a major edge in units and/or technology to defeat other human teams. I don't think there's a huge secret to how this works, or some master trick that only Speaker and I happen to know. From what we can see at a distance, you had trouble attacking slaze because he had the proper defensive unit (longbows) to counter your attacking units, and then he spammed them by whipping all his cities like crazy. There probably isn't a whole lot of tactical advice we could give you that would change that... Anyway, we both have Paper technology by now, so you could send us screenshots if there's any specific question you want to ask. Up to you if you want to go that far, naturally.

As far as combining to attack slaze, I don't want to waste your time or mislead you: we are not going to send our army halfway around the world to attack slaze. Assuming that we were able to conquer cities from him, what would be the point? Taking cities which would be nearly impossible to defend, and cost a fortune in maintenance? I'm sorry, but it's just not a good deal for us. I hope you understand.

I'll have to talk to Speaker about your other point, on purchasing units from us. It's a possibility - we've made deals of that kind in the past with other teams - but the going rate would be pretty expensive. We went with gold = 2 * shield cost of unit in the past, so knights would be 180g each. Like I said, let me talk it over and we'll get back to you on this. [1]

Other things we could do to help... umm, maybe trade world maps again (?) I'm not sure. It looks like you have basically all of the same resources we do on the trade screen. Any specific ideas?

Cheers,
Sullla
The Killer Angels

[1] Note: we are not selling Kathlete units under any circumstances. This is a stall for time tactic.

I'll leave that posted for now and see what Speaker thinks. We won't send any response back until tomorrow, to let us stall through another turn cycle before replying. Honestly, I'm just kind of shocked that Kathlete - KATHLETE! - would send us something like this. Like, you do realize that you've opposed us every step of the game thus far, right? Do you think we've already forgotten how you brutally stabbed slaze in the back and attacked him with his own gifted army? How dumb do you think we are?!?

The Ottoman come-uppance is long overdue. We want revenge, slaze wants revenge, even the ghosts of Byzantium are crying out for vengeance. Not going to be able to talk your way out of this one, athlete.

[Speaker]

I'd rather just flat out tell him that we will not be giving, selling, loaning, trading, or otherwise doing anything with our units (aside from, well, you know...). Let's not mislead him. And as for helping him tactically....just tell him that I'd be willing to help him after the game, but during the game it wouldn't be fair. I'd rather you not give him the idea to mass whip a bunch of Janissaries, Sullla...

[Sullla]

I don't want to be dishonest either, Speaker - but if we send back a message saying, "screw you, we're not having anything to do with you!" it's kind of going to tip off our intentions pretty clearly. I think we have to be a little bit more opaque than just rejecting all of Kathlete's suggestions.

What if we tried this instead (new text in gold):

Dear Rebel Alliance,

That's a pretty long message; let me try to go through it one section at a time.

When it comes to combat and giving out tactical advice, I'm afraid that we're going to have to wait until this game comes to a close before sharing information. (We actually have a lot of posts on tactics in our spoiler thread from earlier, which will be open viewing after the game ends.) We don't really want to give away possible advantages to competing teams right now!

As far as combining to attack slaze, I don't want to waste your time or mislead you: we are not going to send our army halfway around the world to attack slaze. Assuming that we were able to conquer cities from him, what would be the point? Taking cities which would be nearly impossible to defend, and cost a fortune in maintenance? I'm sorry, but it's just not a good deal for us. I hope you understand.

We are not interested at this time in trading units for gold, but we're open to further map exchanges or possible resource trades (although I think from looking at the trade window that you already have pretty much everything we do). Please let us know if you have any specific suggestions.

Cheers,
Sullla
The Killer Angel

Keep in mind that if we signed a resource deal right now, we'd be able to cancel it and declare war in 10 turns. (I don't plan on signing any such deal, but I left the line in there because it would at least be possible and not mess up our plans.) I hope this version sounds better. If not, we can do draft #3 tomorrow, cause I'm not sending anything out until then anyway!

[Speaker]

Funny picture for the day:


Slaze actually voted for us? I guess he doesn't like that Abstain guy.

Interesting choices coming up Sullla. We'll have to take a good hard look at each city and decide if we want to build a bank or mausoleum. We don't have time to build both in all our core cities before we attack. I would like another 10 or so Knights/Currasiers and half dozen Catapults. I also think we should strongly consider building University of Sankore in either Gettysburg or Hampton Roads. That would give us quite a lot of beakers, since we have already build the temples and monastaries.

[Sullla]

You agree on building Sankore - awesome! I thought I'd have to twist your arm to tie up one of our cities on a wonder rather than cranking out more units. We may even decide to go for Divine Right and Spiral Minaret later on to complete the religious wonder trifecta. I'll get to which city I think should be building Sankore in a little bit.



Founded Fort Donelson, our new city on the center island. I should have turned on the resource indicator, which would show that the main function of this city is to secure bananas. It's also on a hill for good defensive cover, and offers a nice avenue of attack against Dagobah. (We might be able to road and move in with Fast Workers/knights from the southeast corner, because if we do the conventional thing and move onto the gold tile northwest of Dagobah, you just *KNOW* that Kathlete will gift the city to Nakor before we can capture it.)

Fort Donelson benefits from the Golden Age in buiding Culture to expand its borders; we get 2 shields from the center tile, and 2 shields from the one grassland forest tile, and we'll get a final 1 shield from a Citizen specialist once we go to Mercantilism this turn. That's good enough for 5 culture/turn, so border expansion in 2 turns, just about coinciding with our work boat's arrival at the clams (and our workers' plantation on the banana tile). This is a good reason why researching Music tech wasn't a waste of time for us - we've gotten very good value out of the Build Culture option! Who says you need to be Creative?



I wanted to check on Cloud City with our Sentry horse archer, and yes, it's still got just the single longbow inside. That's... interesting. I realize that Kathlete could have some more units hidden just behind the city, but even if true, that's not going to save him from a first turn alpha strike, now is it? Speaker, I'm going to check on the other Kathlete border cities (Corulag, Ord Mantell) with our horse archer over the next few turns, then return him back to Spotslyvania.

A number of cities are starting to complete the Jewish temple/monastery combo, so here's a picture of that in action:



St. Albans in Golden Age mode is pretty ridiculous. We should have enough overflow from the temple build to get 1t knights for the next four or five turns. We'll have a further 2 shields this turn from a free Mercantilism Engineer specialist, and that gets the city to 38 base shields/turn, or 85 shields/turn after multipliers are added - yikes! I know that's artificially boosted by the Golden Age, but the city still gets 29 base, 65 modified shields/turn in normal times. That's... a lot!

On the subject of banks and mausoleums: obviously only strong commerce cities need banks, so our unit producers (St. Albans, Hampton, etc.) can skip them. Due to all of our happiness resources, I don't think we need that many Mausoleums right now either. They would be most useful in cities that are size 15 or larger (since war weariness scales up higher in big cities). Right now, I'd say we only really need mausoleums in Gettysburg (18 ) and Fredericksburg (17). The other cities should be OK, unless we have really crippling war weariness - and if we do, then we'll just build or whip the mausoleums then. I mean, it's a nice building, but it's still just a glorified jail in the end.

Since Hampton doesn't have a great need for mausoleum, I swapped it over to a galley. The other strong build here would be library, if we want to hire a Scientist specialist instead of an Engineer one. (Depends on what we want, more research or more production.) If we could have two galleys sitting around outside Kathlete's island city, doing nothing for many turns on end, it will allay suspicion for when we actually invade. I'll post on this in more detail a little later on.

But mostly, Hampton should probably be building knights or some other kind of military unit for our upcoming attacking. The city that should build Sankore is Chancellorsville, as it has no stables and wouldn't be a great knight/cuirassier builder anyway. After Chancellorsville finishes its current bank, it can build Sankore in 9 turns. There's nothing else of importance to build in the city; seems like a natural fit to me. And it leaves our best cities free for military duty.

Last question: Organized Religion or Theocracy civic? I think we agree on the other three swaps (to Representation, Mercantilism, and Nationhood) but this one's not clear to me. It's a wash on cost, as Theocracy is only 7gpt cheaper (whoop de doo). More experience would obviously be nice, but we continue to get a lot of value from OR, especially in our developing cities. I'm not sure that Theocracy does as much for us, especially since our main attackers are Mounted units which already have 5 XP out of the gate. Would be nice to have double-promoted catapults, and drafted units with 2 XP for one promotion, but is it worth giving up that OR boost? I dunno. Give me your thoughts before we make the civics swap this turn.

There's plenty of time, as we are Paused for slaze right now.

[Speaker]

I was thinking that maybe we should wait until the last turn of the GA and swap into Representation, Nationhood, Mercantilism, and Theocracy. I would like to get a couple double promo Trebuchets and Catapults, and one promotion is pretty crucial on all the drafted Muskets. Economically, I think it's a relative wash (using very rough, "back of a napkin" calculations, keeping Bureacracy + Extra Trade Routes for another few turns, versus Representation+Mercantilism. So let's get the free hammers for a few more turns as we finish one more round of buildings, and then go into full war mode. We can swap back to Organized, if desired when we launch our 2-person GA later.

[T-hawk]

Economically, I think it's a relative wash (using very rough, "back of a napkin" calculations, keeping Bureacracy + Extra Trade Routes for another few turns, versus Representation+Mercantilism.

The other part of the Merc vs FM question is what do your rivals get out of trade routes to you and does it benefit you to shut that down?

[Speaker]

Sullla, were you ready to end the turn? I'll be out for most of the day, so feel free.

[Sullla]

I'm fine with the civics plan you outlined Speaker, so I'll login and end our turn. (T-Hawk's point is well taken though - some of the other teams are going to be hurting once we cut off their trade routes with us! Poor plako...)