RB Pitboss #2 [SPOILERS] - Speaker and Sullla

[Sullla]

Turn 198: this was the last turn of our Golden Age, so that meant civic swapping time!



We posted this a couple times before, but the overall swap was:

Hereditary Rule -> Representation
Bureaucracy -> Nationhood
Decentralization -> Mercantilism
Organized Religion -> Theocracy

Economically, we were expecting this swap to more or less break even, not improving or decreasing our tech rate. The two real changes came from cutting off all foreign trade routes (ouch! going to hurt poor Korea in particular) and opening up the possibility of the draft. Theocracy against Organized Religion was the hardest choice; in the end, Speaker won out on that argument. We are planning on doing a lot of warring in the years ahead, after all.

After going through and reassigning all those Mercantilist specialists (and wow, the AI does a terrible job - it picked Spies in almost every city!) here's what things looked like:



Science @ 60% rate: 846 -> 870 beakers/turn
Gold @ 40% rate: -4 gpt to -10gpt

And those can be shuffled around depending on whether we pick Scientist or Merchant specialists in each city. Since it was all going to change anyway once our Golden Age ended, I didn't sweat things too much for this one turn. (Will spend more time looking at this tomorrow; probably try to break-even on gold with Merchants, then add extra Scientists wherever possible.)

With Nationhood civic we can now draft muskets, so I went ahead and drafted them from Chikamauga (Globe city, will be drafted every turn!), The Wilderness, and Shiloh. Those last two cities both had excess pop and a barracks, making it an easy call. We'll have to look at them all in more detail tomorrow and think about which cities we do and don't want to draft from. (We'll probably pop just about all of them, although just like whipping, drafting is most effective if you can time it right before growth back to the previous size.)

I just had time to check our Great Person popping the following turn (T199), and we landed...



Great Merchant, yay! That's perfect, it'll pay for all our knight upgrades (and anything extra going to fund more research). Speaker, we talked briefly about what to do with a Merchant last week if we got one, now we can start putting that plan into effect over the next few turns. Timing will be just perfect.

Will do more end-of-GA reshuffling of cities tomorrow; looks like we'll be at about 620 beakers/turn in "normal" mode, which is a HUGE upgrade over the 500 beakers/turn we were running just prior to the GA. (OK, maybe those civic changes really did improve our economy! )

[timmy827]

Will do more end-of-GA reshuffling of cities tomorrow; looks like we'll be at about 620 beakers/turn in "normal" mode, which is a HUGE upgrade over the 500 beakers/turn we were running just prior to the GA. (OK, maybe those civic changes really did improve our economy! )

Comon, don't be so intellectually lazy. I want a detailed breakdown of civic effects & costs vs. growth of cottages, growth of pop, finished buildings during those 8 turns :neenernee

[m4gill4]

I'm looking forward to the
My favorite Civil War battle is Fair Oaks (there were balloons*!)
These two statements are in no way connected
[SIZE="1"]
* a whole corps of them! "Sergent, deploy the balloon corps!"
[/SIZE]

[Sullla]

New turn stuff:



After fooling around with the free specialists some more, I ended up at 630 beakers/turn with a slight gold deficit. We have a bank completing in Chancellorsville next turn, which should take us close to even there, not to mention the Great Merchant's cash windfall due in a couple of turns. Considering the very, very large military that we're supporting at the moment, I'm pretty happy with our current research rate.

We had the opportnity to draft 3 more cities this turn, so I popped our Globe city for another free musket. Before I logged in today, Speaker went ahead and drafted Atlanta and Spotsylvania... which was fine, except that they both had barracks due in the next few turns. I'm not sure why Speaker didn't just waste 2t and get the extra XP point for a free promotion on those muskets, but I guess he really wanted them right now.

That raises another interesting question: did the other teams check the Event log to see that we swapped civics? I try to look at it every turn, but it's something you could have missed pretty easily if you weren't watching. Guess we'll find out later.



Spartansburg is probably the city benefitting the most from Representation civic, with all those specialists inside. I'd like to finish that temple (so that we can assign an 8th Priest specialist at 1 food/turn deficit) and then we can run a few turns of max food to draft this city and regrow it. We could probably draft here twice, although that +6 unhappy faces might be pushing it. Depends on what Speaker thinks is necessary.

Definite draft cities: Fredericksburg, Fort Henry, Spartansburg, Bull Run, Vicksburg
"Maybe" draft cities: Gettysburg, Antietam, Hampton Roads
Do not draft cities: Chancellorsville, St. Albans

If we push hard and draft all of the "maybe" cities, that's 8 muskets over the next 4 turns; add in a musket every turn from Chikamauga's Globe abuse, and that would get us a full dozen. We already have six muskets from the past two turns of drafting, which would give us a net total of 18 muskets to play around with by the start of the invasion. Yeah, that sounds about right. Let's work off of that assumption and avoid double-drafting for the moment unless we need it for emergencies.

We currently have 17 knights, and we should add about 4-5 more in the half dozen turns before our projected war with Kathlete begins. Thanks to our Great Merchant, we should have the cash to upgrade every single one of those units to cuirassiers; I'll assume that we will have ~20 cuirassiers to work with. My initial instinct would be to distribute the forces like this:

Western Island
3 cuirassiers (2 knights present currently)
1 musket (drafted from Vicksburg)

This should be enough to take out Alderaan in the initial alpha strike with two galleys. There's a single archer in there right now; this overkill shields us from bad dice rolls and/or nasty surprises.

Center Island
4 cuirassiers (1 knight present currently)
2 muskets
2 maces (both there currently)

Since Nakor has all those cities over here, we don't want to skimp too much on forces. My feeling is that we get another three knights/cuirassiers over here, and bring over a pair of drafted muskets to anchor the cities. If we make ourselves look strong, Nakor's less likely to get frisky.

Main Force
15+ cuirassiers
14+ muskets
??? catapults and old maces/spears for garrisons

Basically everything else we've got. This should be a good start. Really the question is what we send to the islands, because everything else is going to be hitting the Ottoman border hard. I hope Speaker will post something on his war planning thoughts here, rather than just tweaking the players in the PBEM #4 game where he designed the map.

Here's the one troubling thing about our southern neighbor:



Dantski's defenses in Kumbi Saleh, his frontline city, are all skirmishers and axemen. No, he still doesn't have Feudalism yet. If Nakor ever got serious, he could roll through Dantski while barely breaking a sweat. The good news is that Nakor doesn't have Military Tradition, so any attack force of his would be very slow moving. Having Dantski here is a nice buffer zone for our team, letting him take the initial pounding and then setting us up for a counterattack.

The only dangerous moment will be when we hit Kathlete with our initial attack. But given what we've seen thus far, I expect that Nakor will choose to continue teching rather than make a move, and by the time he has Rifling and enough units to be dangerous, we'll already be through shredding most of the Ottoman military. Hope it plays out that way, anyway!

We should be able to rely on our statics defenses on the southern border, Speaker. I think we should start moving the knights down there up to the Ottoman border (or onto one of the islands). What do you think?

[Speaker]

We had the opportnity to draft 3 more cities this turn, so I popped our Globe city for another free musket. Before I logged in today, Speaker went ahead and drafted Atlanta and Spotsylvania... which was fine, except that they both had barracks due in the next few turns. I'm not sure why Speaker didn't just waste 2t and get the extra XP point for a free promotion on those muskets, but I guess he really wanted them right now.

by me. I misunderstood how XP was applied when drafting.

We could probably draft here twice, although that +6 unhappy faces might be pushing it. Depends on what Speaker thinks is necessary.

There will be plenty of time to placate our poor citizens. A little unhappiness would do them good.

Let's work off of that assumption and avoid double-drafting for the moment unless we need it for emergencies.

We can double draft some of the southern and northern cities, and try not to double draft the core. It would be nice to have some muskets in our castled border cities for defense.

We currently have 17 knights, and we should add about 4-5 more in the half dozen turns before our projected war with Kathlete begins. Thanks to our Great Merchant, we should have the cash to upgrade every single one of those units to cuirassiers; I'll assume that we will have ~20 cuirassiers to work with.

Mmmmmm. That's a lot of killing power.

Western Island
3 cuirassiers (2 knights present currently)
1 musket (drafted from Vicksburg)

This should be enough to take out Alderaan in the initial alpha strike with two galleys. There's a single archer in there right now; this overkill shields us from bad dice rolls and/or nasty surprises.

Yes.

Center Island
4 cuirassiers (1 knight present currently)
2 muskets
2 maces (both there currently)

Yes. Kathlete has a couple Janissaries over there, that took out that Barbarian city.[/quote]

Since Nakor has all those cities over here, we don't want to skimp too much on forces. My feeling is that we get another three knights/cuirassiers over here, and bring over a pair of drafted muskets to anchor the cities. If we make ourselves look strong, Nakor's less likely to get frisky.

Sounds reasonable. I don't see Nakor finally attacking, but better safe than sorry.

Main Force
15+ cuirassiers
14+ muskets
??? catapults and old maces/spears for garrisons

Would love to get that ??? up to about 15 catapults.

I hope Speaker will post something on his war planning thoughts here, rather than just tweaking the players in the PBEM #4 game where he designed the map.

After the pain Whosit caused us earlier in this game, how could I not mess with him just a little.

We should be able to rely on our statics defenses on the southern border, Speaker. I think we should start moving the knights down there up to the Ottoman border (or onto one of the islands). What do you think?

There are just 4-5 knights still down in the south. They can hang tight a little longer, until we get a few muskets down there. I don't think anything is going to happen, but I would hate for Gettysburg to be threatened because we jumped the gun and moved all our units out.

[Sullla]

OMG, it's Turn 200!!! :2dance: My how the time flies when you're having fun... and not dead.



Here's a large screenshot showing our original core. Most cities are doing something military-related, although there are a handful of infrastructure builds here and there. Lots of units trickling up to the northeast border as a result of drafts or builds completing.

Speaker, if we're going to draft Gettysburg and Antietam, next turn is the time to pop them for muskets. They have just enough time to reach the front lines by Turn 206 if we draft them next turn, but we can't wait any longer. I'm about 50/50 on whether we should draft the cities, so I leave it up to you. If you don't want to draft those two cities, Spartansburg and Fort Henry are also ripe for drafting. (I am assuming of course that Chikamauga gets drafted every turn, leaving only 2 cities free for drafting!) Something tells me that you'll probably go ahead and get the extra units from our original two cities though!

I'm planning on moving the pair of knights as indicated. Between the muskets queued up in Gettysburg, our ability to emergency draft as needed, the ability to emergency upgrade units in desperate straits, our castle/cultural defenses, and our ship-based sentry net... well, I'm not that worried down here. We can move out our knight units to see service elsewhere without much room for concern.



Here's the northeast, including Speaker's vehement note to keep workers up by the front lines (which I have followed). Our cultural strength at The Wilderness has opened up some additional tiles to our control, one of which I roaded this turn, the tile in red. I'm going to get the other "road" tile next turn, when we can hopefully minimize exposure of our workers right on the borders.

Speaker has identified how we can hit three different Ottoman cities at the outset of the war, as well as hit Hoth on the second turn of the war by moving to the tile north of Bothawui with a cuirassier stack. (My personal preference is to use slow-movers to move next to Cloud City, while the cuirassiers/horse archers raze Bothawui on their way to the monster city of Hoth. But Speaker might prefer to take out Corulag - which is located on a hill - before Kathlete can mass defenders in there. Also a good option.) Our great advantage here is that we have full visibility on all three of the Ottoman border cities (with our Sentry horse archer in Spotsylvania) so we can choose our target depending on how many defenders are present. That's a huge advantage, and it should translate into multiple enemy cities falling on the first turn of the war.

Note that plako has landed a Great Merchant near Atlanta, who is probably going for a trade mission in Gettysburg. Good luck, guys!



How did we get all this culture for those border expansions? Speaker assigned double Artists in The Wilderness, getting us up to an impressive 20 culture/turn. And with each Artist producing 4 beakers/turn, it's actually pretty good for our economy too. (The real tradeoff is in production; we could get up to 17 shields/turn by using the workshop and a free Engineer specialist.) But securing those critical extra tiles on the border is a better use of our people. We'll shortly steal the yellow tile in the above picture from Cloud City, which protects Spotsylvania from being double-moved... although there probably won't be a border there for much longer...

Other random stuff:

- I whipped the granary in Malvern Hill this turn, as the city had half the food box full (the perfect time for a granary whip). We'll be able to whip the lighthouse there pretty soon, once the granary is in place.

- We now have our units in place on the western island, 3 knights + 1 horse archer + 2 longbows (and one planned drafted musket). Speaker is building a couple more triremes for added naval security; Vicksburg already gets an impressive 20 shields/turn! Good city there. I'll post pictures of both the outer and inner islands next turn.

- We ended up with 17 knights total; at 50 gold per upgrade, that's 850g to turn them all into cuirassiers. Fortunately, the Great Merchant will cover that for us... Generally speaking, I think that spending gold on upgrades isn't a good use of funds in this game, but a mass upgrade of fast-movers that the enemy has no real counter for, paid for with essentially "free" gold, is one exception. (Just don't go wasting money upgrading maces to rifles. Better off just drafting conscripts instead.)

- Don't end our turn early on the next turn, Speaker. We have End Of Turn Hijinx to play out...

[spacemanmf]

Just don't go wasting money upgrading maces to rifles.

I dunno, City Raider III rifles cut through most things like knives through butter.

[Sullla]

Hey, upgrading a handful of elite units is usually a good idea, and getting the ineligible City Raider promotion on Gunpowder units like rifles and muskets has always been sort of a special case. You also saw Speaker and me upgrade a couple of key axes (ones with Shock promotion) to maces as part of one of our earlier attacks. What I'm discounting is a mass upgrade of units to rifles; I've seen players before turn off science for 5-10 turns to upgrade every single Medieval-era unit to rifles. That's a waste of money, IMO - you'd be better off just swapping civics and drafting some of those units at cheap cost. As I'll show in a minute, the effects of our draft are really starting to pile up.

I didn't show the outer islands last turn, so here they are this turn:



We now have three knights on the north island, sitting on the staging tile 1E of Vicksburg. Without Open Borders, Kathlete shouldn't be able to see that tile from anywhere, even with a Sentry unit. The knights will probably be upgraded to cuirassiers next turn, and then we'll add a drafted musket from Vicksburg, for our 4 units that go on the boats to attack. Our second galley will be loaded up with a pair of workers next turn, and drop them off while moving onto the staging tile with the other galley. We have a veritable fleet of triremes in the waters over here (two visibile in the picture, three more north of this island, another trireme to the south in Dantski waters) to sink any naval ships that Kathlete intends to send in our direction.

We can now see a janissary north of Alderaan, but that's not going to do Kathlete any good unless it moves into the city. Not entirely sure what the point of that is... They did upgrade the archer inside the city to a longbowman, but that won't be enough to stop us from taking the city unless some other defenders get piled in there. We're just going to have to wait and see what Kathlete does here. Having a Sentry horse archer on the galley, giving us visibility on all those tiles, just makes a huge difference!



The terrain makes things very complicated on the center island. We currently have 1 knight and 1 horse archer over here, with 2 more knights in ship en route. (There's one more knight that could be moved over here from the mainland, depending on what Speaker wants to do.) So we'll have either 3 or 4 cuirassiers in our strike force here, plus one horse archer for cleaning up wounded defenders and/or sniping workers.

We had outdated map information here, making my former attack plan pointless. The forest tile in the southwest is actually within Kathlete's borders (as I should have seen from looking at the fat cross!), so we cannot road it and get at the city that way. Whether by accident or design, Dagobah is also very well protected by the gold hill tile to its northwest. If that were jungle or forest, we could chop it with our Fast Workers and get at the city that way, but no dice! That means we have to do this the hard way.

Next turn, I can road the tile in white with our Fast Workers. That becomes the new staging tile, and unfortunately both Nakor and Kathlete will have visibility on it due to the galley/borders across the water. Hopefully they won't deduce what we're planning on doing, not having faced Fast Workers in MP before! On the actual turn of the attack, we road the tiles in yellow and hit Dagobah from the east. You have to do the unexpected in warfare!

So why the big focus on hitting the city on turn 1 of the war? After all, we could move onto the gold hill with ease, and presumably capture the city on the following turn. Well, Speaker and I expect that Kathlete would do a cheese gift of Dagobah to Nakor if we look like we're about to capture the city. We'd rather avoid that, thus the effort to take it immediately. That's one rule I'd argue should be put in place for future RB MP games: no cheese gifting of cities just to avoid capture. Especially not to players who are on your team in other Pitboss games!

Speaker drafted Antietam and Fort Henry this turn (along with the always-drafted Chikamauga), taking us up to 12 conscript muskets so far. We agreed not to draft Gettysburg, so next turn we should hit Spartansburg and Vicksburg, and then probably will want to lay off drafting in the non-Globe cities for a bit. We started on Turn 198, so we'll be getting close to the start of a second draft round at no penalty anyway.

The net result of all our drafting:



We topped 1 million in Soldier points for the first time this turn. Nakor is the #2 power at 636k, and Kathlete is a decent bit below that. Discounting points from Technology and Population, our military score is double that of anyone else in the game. Now numbers aren't everything, but I'd say that puts us in pretty good position for our upcoming attack.

Also stacking up pretty good with the Golden Age numbers of Nakor - we're actually ahead in Production! Pretty sweet.

EDIT: One more thing. Speaker, don't know if you're aware of this, but Nakor still doesn't have Horseback Riding. He has zero two-movers of any kind! What in the world is he thinking?!? Means we don't have to worry about any fast attackers on our southern border. Also, Dantski just discovered Gunpowder (without getting Feudalism, haha) so maybe he won't be a complete punching bag.

[Speaker]

Also, Dantski just discovered Gunpowder (without getting Feudalism, haha) so maybe he won't be a complete punching bag.

I forgot to mention that I had a quick IM chat with Dantski the other day and told him that Nakor was headed straight toward Rifles. Dantski said he would go straight to Military Science for Grenadiers, in response. Uh, good luck with that.

Sorry I have been pretty out of it forum-wise on this game. It's been a very busy period of RL for me, and since nothing much has been going on, I've been sort of checked out. You'll get my best now though. I've got a score to settle.

Military plans coming soon, though probably not posted in full publicly. Sorry guys! Go complain in the Lurker Thread, if you must.

[darrelljs]

I'd love to see a power graph just before you declare .

Darrell