[Spoilers] 0x49-y: Marxist-Joaoist Praxis

[Commodore]

Any questions people have?

Any more cities planned?

Hanoi: Why?

[Oxyphenbutazone]

1) Yes I have a couple settlers out for the island south of Guam, unfortunately I'm a little on garrisons for them so might get delayed a couple turns.

2) With SP it's a breakeven commercially, but it has significant strategic value. If scooter settled a city on that island as a canal it would give him a direct path to Gori and Rosario that his super-galleons could reach in 1 turn from out of the fog. By settling Hanoi, I force him to either go through a single tile strait or route around the island in a way that leaves him vulnerable to counter attack thanks to my own canal through it.

[Oxyphenbutazone]

Basically the same reason why China would love to control the Ryuku island chain even though they don't produce anything economically

[Tarkeel]

Thanks for a great overview.

[Oxyphenbutazone]

Yeah I'm having a lot of fun with this game, tho it's been bad timing- I have 15 grad school apps to do and am taking the GRE in 4 days but I spent 1.5 hours on this last turn

This is the first MP naval duel I've played and the intricacies of naval warfare in civ 4 are quite deep when going up against a skilled player. The game does a great job of mirroring the strategic logic of real warfare (well-placed islands are vitally important, rapid movement makes control of contested waters existential, fleet in being doctrine can pin land units to garrison multiple cities) while also adding some video game chaos into the mix (your 4000 year old city with 6 million people in it can be totally wiped out by a spearman walking into it)

[Qgqqqqq]

How do you feel about Communism and State Property as a pick?

[Oxyphenbutazone]

I don't think it was optimal—Scooter's civil service pick was definitely the best economic pick, while luddite seems to be slowly winning his grinding war thanks to artillery—but I chose it for fun and it's definitely been delivering on that. I think my early game plan to rush pyramids + metal casting to get out a great engineer for The Kremlin was instrumental to catching up to Scooter and, if I can pull off this beeline chemistry gambit, will lead me to victory in our coming duel.

The Kremlin compared to pre-industrial tile production is just insane. Right now my population is 40% higher than Scooters, but for the purposes of whipping out an army, it's really 110% larger—and that's before you get to the nonlinearities in whipping over time (it's much easier to repeatedly do 2 pop whips in a city than 3 pop whips). Now I fully expect Scooter to narrow our population gap over the next twenty turns, but there's no way he'll be able to get close to my military production between The Kremlin and Police State

[Oxyphenbutazone]

Scooter switched to caste system and is building settlers instead of military. He is saving up a lot of gold which I assume is for an astro run, fortunately I get research visibility in 2 turns. Things are looking good.



Mr. Faraday joins us as the first of 5 great scientists we'll birth in the double GA



Research towards chemistry is ahead of schedule, at this rate we'll be able to knock out 1/4 of steel as well before losing GA + colossus + rep + building a huge army destroys our economy

[Commodore]

What's the logic on the Intelligence Agency? I get to Communism rarely enough I don't even recall its benefits.

[Oxyphenbutazone]

+8 espionage, +50% espionage- along with a palace it's a free 18 ept which means I'll be able to maintain research visibility on Scooter long term without having to run spy specialists and helps make city visibility easier to achieve. I see the argument that it's not worth it but hey I want to get my money's worth out of the variant