[SPOILERS] Small Wunders and Izzy of Inca: The fat lady sings

[MindyMcCready]

I feel like there's a very large disparity in how we see the utility of drafted maces or muskets.

Yeah, it's looking like there's a disparity. :LOL:

The conversion factor is fantastic but the problem is I don't see a 0 promo mace as being useful for anything at all at this point of the world's tech level. Certainly not for ever attacking a longbow behind a wall or defending against a knight or better. When cannons come out they're simply free experience.

Yep, definately not seeing it this way.
-Volume matters. 2 x 8 maces have a fair chance of beating a LB behind a wall. The binary hits means that they do damage.
-More units absorb more collateral and stop the top defenders from taking as much damage.
-They look just as scary in the power graph.
-Unpromoted maces can kill collateralled Knights. Or they can damage Knights to the point that they can't attack.
-Once everything gets pinch promotions, maces can do a relatively high amount of damage. Strangely, they're pretty good at attacking machine guns for example.
-Counter-attack. After Knights/Cuirassiers kill off LBs volume may mean an effective counter-attack.

Drafting the filler units means that you have one less build type to worry about and production cities can exclusively focus on fast movers and collateral units.

A 0 or 1 promo musket, again it's a unit that's much worse than a knight for attacking, and defensively it's no world beater.

Sure, except they're not mutually exclusive. We can build Knights and draft maces. They might not win individual battles but they can help to win larger battles.

When you draft, the bottleneck is the happiness, since each one gives you three points for 10 turns. Having to wait a few turns to start this isn't such a massive opportunity cost as it seems. The X units per turn (X=4 here I think?) isn't the right limiting factor to look at - you very quickly run out of cities with spare happiness to tap for that. I wouldn't draft without a very clear and immediate reason why the units being drafted are obtaining a goal. Certainly burning this happiness on a mace seems like a bad idea to me. (Again, not in general terms but at this specific point of this specific game.)

We have enough happy in most cities for drafting don't we? And we certainly will in any new cities that we plant.

Well sure we run out of cities to draft from....then since we're spiritual we swap civics for a bunch of turns. I would honestly draft every size 6-10 size city every 10T until what I see to be the end of our game. I would also draft some bigger cities.

Also, I believe that drafting Rifles is more expensive in RB-mod? If that's the case then the musket is your best draftable unit really.

Here's a non-specific goal that drafting enables: draft all of your cities while building infrastructure. We get infrastructure that we're really behind on while providing more 'graph power' than taking those same units and producing units could. How many ciites can crank out a 80-90H units every 10T while simultaneously building infrastructure?

Commodore is going to have Astro quite soon I bet (and beat us to Chemistry by miles). And we're well at the point of our "relationship" where spitefully pillaging nets is going to happen for sure. So not only are coastal cities on the west a bad investment, unlike the island it doesn't even deny Commodore anything or prove anything but that we're stupid in throwing away resources, imo.

This is even with optics, I'm starting to think working anything on the seas is near pointless.

Ok....so if that's how you see things unfolding then I think that the answer is clear that 'if we can get peace' at the cost of giving up the island then we should do so. Two permanently unproductive cities (now that forests are gone anyway) are costing us from establishing multiple high-food costal cities. At this point Master Commodore may want to hurt us or he may just want the island.

Rename the city to "Tribute" and we might be spared his harrassment for the rest of the game. This would allow us to focus on protecting/developing our core.

Again, I want to defer even thinking about it much until we see if this crazy knight attack works or not. If it does and we can actually get Commodore off the island completely, and actually improve tiles there, it would change the story a lot.

Well that's the other choice - WIN!

I'm clearly casting my vote on focussing on those Bacchus cities. If Bacchus really does get into trouble with Plako, we stand to gain much and I'd like to be able to leverage that opportunity rather than being endless tied up garrisonning costal cities and/or whipping all our population into caravels.

If we get peace caravels become sentry units.

It's quick, yeah, but we're going to be in a Golden Age, and Bureau with a very nice commerce capital. We got CS in close to 3, it's not a crazy estimate at all.

So your quoting 100% science rates from the looks of it. Sounds like we're delaying the draft more than by that estimate.

There's the matter that he caught us with two thirds of our total force out of position.

Yes, and that could happen again of course especially if we take a stab at Bacchus and keep on keeping on with Master Commodore.

I don't think the draft will be relevant in the later case anyway because the units themselves just die easily.

Disagree. Total power will be just as relevant. Streams of expendables followed by the real units --> worked for the Soviets in WW2. :LOL:

[WilliamLP]

Sure, except they're not mutually exclusive. We can build Knights and draft maces. They might not win individual battles but they can help to win larger battles.

The disparity is still here about how useful drafted units are for us in this situation, trust me. I'm not against drafting muskets situationally, if there's a good reason why we need the numbers.

We have enough happy in most cities for drafting don't we? And we certainly will in any new cities that we plant.

I'm less optimistic that the game will still be going by the time any new city gets to size 7. (RBMod nerfs drafts, they must end at size 6 so you have to be size 7 for a musket, and rifles cost 2 pop.) We will certainly have Gunpowder by that time. Our tech rate is faster than I think you realize it is.

Lots of cities can spare 3 unhappy citizens, but not so much +6, +9, etc. It doesn't take very long at all (3 turns?) to give every eligible city its 3 unhappy citizens.

Well sure we run out of cities to draft from....then since we're spiritual we swap civics for a bunch of turns. I would honestly draft every size 6-10 size city every 10T until what I see to be the end of our game. I would also draft some bigger cities.

I think we want to use every tile in our empire. Growing cities to that size is the first priority to me. After that, the excess pop can all be drafted, sure.

As always the goal of combat units is to pay for themselves both in the up front cost and the GPT cost. You either build them because you need them to stay alive, or because you can make gains with them. In either of these situations I'm happy to use the draft. In neither of them do I want to draft a single mace, because the opportunity cost for each one is one fewer musket that could be had only 2 turns later, plus the draft cost itself (-1 tile, 1 gpt from unit support).

Ok....so if that's how you see things unfolding then I think that the answer is clear that 'if we can get peace' at the cost of giving up the island then we should do so. Two permanently unproductive cities (now that forests are gone anyway) are costing us from establishing multiple high-food costal cities. At this point Master Commodore may want to hurt us or he may just want the island.

Bring the pain. If he wants the island, he needs to show me he can take it. This isn't vindictive, but it is indeed a metagame play. I can't imagine anything that could get convince me to give up an island for free, that is mine by geography, simply with the hope of goodwill. Neither the ongoing cost or the units we have there are worth very much, really. The knights are, but they'll be sent back if their plan isn't working.

If we get peace caravels become sentry units.

Believe me, I actually would like to put a scout on one and go check out Mackoti's tile assignments just for my own education!

So your quoting 100% science rates from the looks of it. Sounds like we're delaying the draft more than by that estimate.

Nope. We got CS in two turns of 100% and 1 turn of 10%. I stand by 2 break-even turns for Gunpowder once in a golden age and after regrowing onto some cottages, switching to Bureau, and after a round or two of economic buildings finish

Anyway, we can debate small things forever, and I agree and think the draft is great, but I feel quite strongly that drafting maces when the world is at rifles is a colossal waste of happiness and a terrible play.

[WilliamLP]

Retep war:




Angkor Thom had only a whipped archer, and of course went down easily to a knight at 99.4% odds. I kept it and it came with a Terrace. (Nice!) There is no city to the west to claim the ivory.




It's not a very complex plan at Suit Up: finish bombarding, attack with all the cats (a few can get CR2), kill the defenders. If we can save attacking with knights, even, it would be good to use them at full health to finish the push to Yasodharapura.

NW Island:




Bathurst has 3LBs, a spear, and potentially 2 knights. The mace and crossbow are out of position. We have 2 longbows, 3 pikes, a spear, and 6 knights, 4 of them with 3 promotions. Versus the fully fortified (but unpromoted) top defending longbow a C2 knight gets 63%, a C3 knight gets 68%.

It's nice that a trireme always seems to be the top defender against a Carrack at the same promotion level, instead of a loaded galley. He can move 2 north with his boat and block two of the knights from unloading, but we can kill his boat first if he does this.

I've said this before (more than once!) but he might lose Bathurst next turn if he doesn't have some serious tricks.

Oh, shown in the SW, barely, is Dhalphir's galley, at about 10% health! I don't know if it's a scout or if he has a desperation settler onboard. He lost his second last city to Plako this turn. I think elimination is very soon to follow.

We finished CS, and we're doing a stint in Bureaucracy and Serfdom. The watermill hammers are great (we have quite a few of them) and so is building grass farms in 3 turns. Aesthetics finishes in 1 turn at 80%, partially fueled by capture gold.

Turandot under Bureau:




The shrine income and the ToA + Castle trade routes are both great! And with HE it's finally going to fulfill it's promise as a power production city.

World techs:




Commodore still lacks Engineering, so no pikes unless he gets it this turn.

Ichabod has Education and Paper now, and is showing Printing Press.

Plako is up a lot of economic stuff: Education, PP, Banking, Econ.

Dtay is still in that weird place without Feudalism.

Harry seems to have Printing Press, but other than that isn't as far ahead of us as some others.

Scooter has everything Plako has, plus Compas and Optics.

And Mackoti has all that, plus also Philosophy, Gunpowder, Astro (!) and Chemistry (!). So... yeah. He's up quite a few thousand beakers on the next in line.

One thing that hasn't been in my consciousness: Paper doubles the known tech bonus! The RBMod mechanic is that all techs that enable map trading multiply the bonus, and those are Writing, Paper, Corp, Sci Meth, Steam Power, Electricity.

Back of the envelope, for a tech everyone knows, the Writing research bonus is 25%. With Paper too the bonus would be 50%. So it would roughly increase the research bonus from 45% (assuming 1 prereq) to 70%. From 145% to 170% is a 21% gain. Paper is 600 base beakers, so it would pay for itself after (about) 3000 worth of additional research. That actually means it's correct to get it before our run at Nationalism / Gunpowder / Military Tradition!! (Since most people in the world know the techs we're going to follow, or will by the time we get there).

Latest in our graph collection: Dtay. (We long lost Commodore, since he has multiple courthouses and has been putting a lot of EP on us.)




For a guy who got Lib and the Taj about a thousand years ago, he appears to be floundering, honestly.




It shows how much we whipped here. I'm sure Bacchus must be in a GA since that's what his graph screams out. He's doing surprisingly well compared to us on all metrics.




Bacchus is consolidating his newly captured lands.






An interesting culture bomb by Harry. I assume it was a defensive move vs Mackoti.

[MindyMcCready]

Retep war:
Angkor Thom had only a whipped archer, and of course went down easily to a knight at 99.4% odds. I kept it and it came with a Terrace. (Nice!) There is no city to the west to claim the ivory.

You might think about cutting the road SE of the city. No use Retep getting frisky with all those spears vs Knights. On the other hand, anything not in Suit up is good.

Bathurst has 3LBs, a spear, and potentially 2 knights. The mace and crossbow are out of position. We have 2 longbows, 3 pikes, a spear, and 6 knights, 4 of them with 3 promotions. Versus the fully fortified (but unpromoted) top defending longbow a C2 knight gets 63%, a C3 knight gets 68%.

I've said this before (more than once!) but he might lose Bathurst next turn if he doesn't have some serious tricks.

Third times the charm? :LOL:

Looks good. Happy that his culture/walls defenese is so low still.

We finished CS, and we're doing a stint in Bureaucracy and Serfdom. The watermill hammers are great (we have quite a few of them) and so is building grass farms in 3 turns. Aesthetics finishes in 1 turn at 80%, partially fueled by capture gold.

Turandot under Bureau:

That is a hilarious amount of gold for a city without a single cottage. :LOL:

And Mackoti has all that, plus also Philosophy, Gunpowder, Astro (!) and Chemistry (!). So... yeah. He's up quite a few thousand beakers on the next in line.

Wow! I guess I've never lurked a Mackoti thread; I didn't realize he was that good. I mean, I heard that he was good, but I hadn't considered him on the Krill/Seven level.

Paper doubles the known tech bonus! That actually means it's correct to get it before our run at Nationalism / Gunpowder / Military Tradition!!

That is a pretty huge consideration of course.

Don't take this as trolling but you feel that that known tech bonus will pay for itself before we can get a new city to size 7? It does seem that we have new life after surviving Ichabod, but once he gets PP he'll be able to get very quickly to Rifles with that tech rate of his.

[WilliamLP]

You might think about cutting the road SE of the city. No use Retep getting frisky with all those spears vs Knights. On the other hand, anything not in Suit up is good.

Yeah, I did think about it, but if he starts moving anything in that direction I think we can remove the culture from Suit Up and then just wipe it up with knights. I did check the fogged tiles by moving a knight SE of Angkor Thom and back as well, and there's nothing there.

Also note one peculiar mechanic: Notice we can see the archer 2S2W of Suit Up? We have a sentry chariot on the attack stack 1NE of Suit Up, but I have no idea why it can see 3 tiles over the hill of the city. Notice it sees 3W over the hill too. But not 3W1S or 3W2S. I should learn or figure out the precise rules for this, because small advantages in knowledge like this can turn whole wars in this game.

That is a hilarious amount of gold for a city without a single cottage. :LOL:

Yeah, on this map full of distant overseas civs ToA was a great deal, though it came at a time when the opportunity cost was high.

Wow! I guess I've never lurked a Mackoti thread; I didn't realize he was that good. I mean, I heard that he was good, but I hadn't considered him on the Krill/Seven level.

There isn't really much to lurk unfortunately! His language barrier is what makes him mysterious. And some of his comments run against the grain of conventional wisdom. But if you check the PBEM results list, every game he's in reads like "then Mackoti did x and ran away with the game". Also somehow he single-handedly brought CFC team from behind to ahead of the RB team of micro geniuses in the inter-site demo game.

That is a pretty huge consideration of course.

Don't take this as trolling but you feel that that known tech bonus will pay for itself before we can get a new city to size 7? It does seem that we have new life after surviving Ichabod, but once he gets PP he'll be able to get very quickly to Rifles with that tech rate of his.

Also not in my hasty analysis, only Dtay knows Nationalism right now, and Philosophy is not so widely known either. So the known tech bonus man not factor into those much at all anyway.

I want to defer debating about the draft for a few turns, anyway. I feel like I'm starting to go to the idea that mounted is superior to all, that most top players seem to have. Cuirs are the more interesting path to me, but they run through Nationalism anyway. And Philosophy is probably next after Lit. The Drama prereq is debatable since it cheapens both Philo and Music on the way to Military Tradition.

If Ichabod is going rifling, I think the grenadier beeline deserves some serious consideration as well.

A very large strategic consideration is whether to try for a peaceful relationship with Bacchus or not. Shocking development, I'm starting to lean to the passive ideas. The problem with war is, as always, the two fronts we have. After finishing Suit Up we don't have all that much time to get our 1-movers back in time to potentially defend against a second wave from Ichabod.

And Bacchus and us both have a lot to gain from peace with each other with very dangerous neighbors. I'm thinking signaling to him with an olive branch trade, sheep for sheep or such. If Plako starts attacking Bacchus, of course opportunism may take over. I don't expect Mindy to be head over heels enamored with this thinking.

[WilliamLP]

More general thought from Mackoti commenting in another game:

You must think expansion is not everithing,a powerfull tech lead can mean way more and having weak neighbours you can get some cities from them, if you have knigs by 1 ad for example lets say.I usualy , i remain behind in expansion because i grow a strong capitol and teach lead and after I conquer some neighoubor, is usauly what i do.

This seems to match what he did in this game: he conquered mostly_harmless very early, presumably with a large tech lead. He also seems to like vertically growing a capital very early with a library + academy, and says whipping the capital is a big mistake made on RB. He also likes Music a lot for border pops and its warfare value.

This is interestingly contrary to the strat of whipping everything into workers and settlers and trying to grow horizontally like a weed, that I see a lot of here.

[MindyMcCready]

Also note one peculiar mechanic: Notice we can see the archer 2S2W of Suit Up? We have a sentry chariot on the attack stack 1NE of Suit Up, but I have no idea why it can see 3 tiles over the hill of the city. Notice it sees 3W over the hill too. But not 3W1S or 3W2S. I should learn or figure out the precise rules for this, because small advantages in knowledge like this can turn whole wars in this game.

Isn't that religion in Suit UP + hills visibility?

That explains the 2S2W of Suit up Archer.
2W of Suit Up is blocked by the hill.

The non-symmetry of the N2W and S2W of Suit up,....
-I don't think that We should be able to see either of these tiles under normal hill top rules....So the S2W seems to make sense. Meaning that somehow the sentry unit is seeing S2W? Interesting.

[WilliamLP]

Isn't that religion in Suit UP + hills visibility?

That explains the 2S2W of Suit up Archer.
2W of Suit Up is blocked by the hill.

The non-symmetry of the N2W and S2W of Suit up,....
-I don't think that We should be able to see either of these tiles under normal hill top rules....So the S2W seems to make sense. Meaning that somehow the sentry unit is seeing S2W? Interesting.

We definitely don't have vision on the city. Retep is far ahead of us on EP. All those units appeared in vision when the sentry chariot moved, including the axes W and SW of Suit up.

All I can think of is some weird rule like a sentry unit on a hill can see 3 tiles, and over a single hill, but not over 2 hills.

[WilliamLP]

Trying to puzzle out what the rules are.

Case 1: Sentry unit on flat land




- We can see hills 3 tiles away, over flat land. Otherwise we see flat land 2 tiles away.
- Adjacent hills block vision, even of other hills.




- Diagonal hills block vision only along the diagonal.
- The hill a knight move away (chess not Civ, lol) 1S2E blocks vision of two hill tiles otherwise visible.
- A combination of 2 hills 1W and 1NW blocks the whole triangle, which is actually more than the sum of what each hill blocks individually.

Case 2: Sentry unit on a hill




- We see flat land 3 tiles away.
- We do not see a hill 4 tiles away over flat land.
- We see over adjacent hills as if they were flat land.
- But we do not see over hills 2 tiles away!




- Even two adjacent hills seem to block nothing.
- The knight-move hill blocks the same two tiles that it did over flat land.
- The hill 2S2E blocks only the single diagonal tile one step further.

This is a weird set of edge cases! If someone has a grand unified theory of this I'd love to know. Maybe I'll have to be like our heroes Seven and T-Hawk and be brave enough to go into the C++ functions.

Applying this theory because I have a rich and fruitful life:




The hill tile at "X" blocks the two tiles shown. The hill at "Y" would block the blue tiles shown but we have vision from our culture. Everything else toward Retep in the 7x7 square is visible just from the single sentry unit. And none of the adjacent hills block vision at all.

[WilliamLP]

The game is currently laggy to the point of being unplayable, but it's good to mull this over a bit anyway.

Commodore got some bad luck on the seas:




So Commodore's annoying Carrack is removed in the most convenient way possible: by a 20% dice roll. (I can't feel too guilty about that, Commodore has obviously been on both sides of these rolls many, many times.)

His forces:




His 4 knight stack has 1C2, 2C1, and one unpromoted. His western knights are unpromoted.

I don't know why he moved his 4 knights forward instead of into Bathurst. I think pikes that are allowed to attack out into an unguarded stack of knights are as happy as pikes can ever be.

Relevant odds:

C2 Formation knight vs C2 knight: 75%
C2 Formation knight vs C1 knight: 80%
C2 Formation knight vs unpromoted knight: 90%

C3 knight vs C2 knight: 67%
C3 knight vs C1 knight: 72%
C3 knight vs unpromoted knight: 76%

C3 knight vs Longbow +75% (walls and fortify): 67%
C2 knight vs Longbow +75%: 50%

C2 pike vs C2 knight: 77%
C2 pike vs C1 knight: 79%
C2 pike vs unpromoted knight: 89%

I think the most basic plan is probably best: attack with pikes first, then clean up with knights, and it's pretty likely we have 5 knights to attack Bathurst. If we get lucky and take it, razing it feels like a no-brainer now.

The decisive battle for Suit Up should also happen later. Stay tuned.