[LURKERS] Mr. Gradgrind's Review

[Fluffball]

Another thing I'd love to see is an analysis of the payback time for Assembly Line. It's an expensive tech that unlocks expensive buildings(for non-Org/Germans) and I'm not automatically convinced of it's strength.

Well you have to have SOME upgrade to rifles. Are you saying you'd stick with well promoted cavs and what ... airships? Artillery?

AL is also on the path to tanks, if the game last that long, and it's looking like it will.

[Mardoc]

Do you guys agree with Sculla's increasing skepticism of Dreyote? I think they're looking at where Dreyote is right now and assuming they'll stay that way, but I wouldn't be surprise to see Dreyote seize a THIRD player's land while simultaneously building up the core.

I personally do not like their long term prospects, but then I am not nearly as warlike as they are being. I would never have seized Gaspar's lands and I would be solidly in last place instead of arguably first.

Honestly, no, I think Dreylin's in excellent shape here.

I don't think he'll be able to conquer a third person right away, but I do expect him to be able to throw his weight around and actually keep all of Gaspar's land. May be able to win a skirmish or two as well and push back his borders a little bit, if he wants, on top.

At the moment Gaspar-land is near worthless, because it's all in revolt or tiny without buildings...but it won't stay that way. Kremlin and general industrial-era will let them stand those cities up with record speed. Their demos may suck now, but they've got a ton of potential coming up any turn. On top, I feel Sullla tends to discount one-time production like bulbs, whips, and golden ages. Which means that Kremlin will keep surprising him with its effectiveness.

But also, fundamentally, I think Sulllla's underestimating the effect of sheer quantity when it comes to war. He says things like

We'll have infantry in 5 more turns, and REM won't be far behind us. I feel like this is the Industrial Age equivalent of building more and more and more axes after successfully hitting a neighbor.

but, well...2 unpromoted Cavalry vs an Aggressive, full-fortified Infantry already have pretty good chances: the first Cav probably bounces (although 30% retreat odds are pretty good!) but the second Cav has 40% win/40% lose/20% retreat odds. And honestly, how often do you have unpromoted Cavalry around? Half their value in in stables, and Dreylin's got a bunch of veterans, too. Plus, when it matters, DreyOT have definitely brought along siege. Bring a big enough hammer, and your attrition ratios are actually pretty good. Look at the exchange rates against Gaspar. Naively, fortified rifles in cities with cultural defenses get pretty good odds against Cavalry - but not when the Cav player has a big enough army and some siege.

Also important: When everyone's building hammer economies, the main thing that matters is pure land. Length of time owned doesn't matter nearly as much as if it were towns.

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I grant that tanks would be enough of an upgrade to change the fundamentals a bit. However, that's the other half to the power of land: Dreylin ought to be able to outresearch anyone once he gets Gasperia filled up, and make up for whatever tech deficit remains at that point. He's not actually far behind in tech, because of all the bulbs. Not teching now, true, but that's very deceptive in an era where most of the research power comes from hammers and can turn on/off like a lightswitch.

[Commodore]

Another thing I'd love to see is an analysis of the payback time for Assembly Line. It's an expensive tech that unlocks expensive buildings(for non-Org/Germans) and I'm not automatically convinced of it's strength.

Well you have to have SOME upgrade to rifles. Are you saying you'd stick with well promoted cavs and what ... airships? Artillery?

AL is also on the path to tanks, if the game last that long, and it's looking like it will.

It's a horrible idea. It's not a path to Destroyers. Destroyers>all.

[GermanJoey]

But also, fundamentally, I think Sulllla's underestimating the effect of sheer quantity when it comes to war.

...except when it comes to drafted maces, right?

(but yeah, I agree with what you're saying completely.)

and building on your post:

It's a horrible idea. It's not a path to Destroyers. Destroyers>all.

this. you can fight infantry with cavalry as long as you have some other advantages (numbers, higher XP levels, tactical tricks, GUMPTION), but you absolutely can't fight destroyers with ironclads or ships of the line. the difference is absurd, not only in base strength but also mobility. destroyers are maybe the one unit in the game (other than nukes) that absolutely cannot be fought with previous-tier units, and once railroads and artillery start to appear the only real way to attack anyone will be via boats.

Another thing I'd love to see is an analysis of the payback time for Assembly Line. It's an expensive tech that unlocks expensive buildings(for non-Org/Germans) and I'm not automatically convinced of it's strength.

Hmmm, that's a good question. I'm interested in the answer to this myself... the tech is a lot cheaper here than in other games I've played in, but you'll have less cities ready to plunk down factories so the payback time might be pretty high, actually? I could run some numbers by essentially converting the tech cost into hammers, but lemme ask you this first: how much of the tech price should they need to pay back? The full price, or the difference in the price vs something else? (e.g. Physics or Steel)

[Gaspar]

* Something I think we missed last turn: Gaspar/Noble used a Great Engineer lightbulb to finish Steam Power tech. We know that this happened because they gained 30 score points mid-turn, so it has to be a lightbulb. That's another argument against another settler coming out from them in the short term: I have to imagine they want to build Dikes in their water-bound core cities. (Small micro note: their Great Engineer lightbulb did not get the maximum beakers possible, since they had enough to get the tech mid-turn. They overshot how many beakers they needed to produce through actual research. I'm sure the difference was tiny.)

Small micro note: By bulbing mid-turn Gaspar and Noble got access to Steam Power 1t earlier. Their workers became 50% more efficient, they got bonus hammers from coal and they could start their levees earlier. It's possible to work out how much beakers a bulb will give too and end last turn exactly that much off, though whether the effort is worth it is debatable.

FWIW, we did the math precisely so that we got full beaker value. One of the very few things we did this game that worked out correctly.

I don't really have much to add - I did have a lot of thoughts on how everyone played their starts, etc. but given that I'm little more than a skidmark on this game, I've already let them largely leak out of my head. I think REM played a really strong start, which is what we wanted to do with JC before we talked ourselves into the Dutch.

I already addressed the mackoti abuse in my thread but I'll reiterate that mostly it was done for humor and agree that it was probably over the top.

Lastly, I think the biggest win from this was the organizer dictating the setup. I've argued about this basically every time it comes up but there's a lot to be said for the primary actors not getting much of a say in the setup. There's always at least one player who wants to fight for every tiny thing to go their way which then results in a lot of tears once the game gets going. I do think the map could have been checked a bit harder but otherwise thought Brick did a great job here.

Cheers.

[Fluffball]

I think airships are being drastically understimated as well.

But there is no doubt infantry are going to be devastating to a dreyote attack (and it seems likely given dreylin's last post.) Will it STOP the attack is the question, and what happens with REM while dozens of cavs slaughter themselves on infantry? REM takes out whichever opponent he wants?

REM is looking more and more like the favorite the way I see this playing out. I think OT4E is just thinking too aggressively. They could probably win the game by just sitting back and building at this point.

[The Black Sword]

Yeah, I'm pretty confident that all the major competitors will get to Assembly Line at some point. It's a question of opportunity cost. The most obvious economic consideration is Physics first. Does the earlier factories beat the free GS (I guess this is the easiest comparison to make GJ)? Or as others have mentioned, the military option of Combustion and destroyers. There's also some pseudo-economic stuff there; Ironworks, railroads and drydocks give a similar bonus to factories when building ships.

Some other candidates; Electricity(post physics) - free GNP boost that doesn't require a hammer investment, Biology - again free food, no hammers required, or Medicine and Railroad for Sushi and Mining.

I just haven't seen anyone really compare the options in their threads.

Regarding infantry, I agree with Mardoc that they aren't that much of an improvement over Rifles against Cavs. A rifle is roughly 17.5 strength, an infantry is 20 strength and more expensive. Actually it takes 2 pop to draft an infantry, so it's twice the cost via draft. The biggest advantage of infantry is that they pretty much never obsolete IMO.

REM is looking more and more like the favorite the way I see this playing out. I think OT4E is just thinking too aggressively.

Dreylin hasn't committed to any further attack yet. It would be stupid to get into a full scale war with scooter so I don't see it happening. They might try something small scale(like the island) to push the borders back a bit and underestimate scooter's reaction though, that does seem their best way of losing it.

[Mardoc]

But also, fundamentally, I think Sulllla's underestimating the effect of sheer quantity when it comes to war.

Wow, today's post is a much better example.

And that extra promotion gets us Pinch on the infantry, which essentially makes it invulnerable against enemy rifles (if not cavs). Base strength 20 with +50% against Gunpowder against base strength 14? Yeah don't bother.

I plugged that exact scenario into a combat calculator. Str 20 Infantry with +10% Combat, +50% against rifles, with unpromoted rifles attacking. True, the first rifle has 0.5% odds. But the second rifle has 14% odds. The third rifle has 46% odds. This isn't a 'don't bother' scenario...this is a 'bring friends' scenario! Assuming, of course, that an opponent who knows you have Infantry brought the worst possible unit along, they still can wipe out your Infantry so long as they brought enough Rifles.

Not saying that upgrading troops is worthless, mind. There's still value in forcing the enemy to find that quantitative advantage, and still value in inflicting more attrition. Every bit counts. It's just that Sullla's talking as though they're a win button, and they aren't.

[Tyrmith]

I'm about as far from an MP expert as you can get, but I'm assuming they're planning on going with more than one infantry per city. How many infantry do you need to make your trade simply too bloody? They have good production, so I'm assuming they can toss out a lot of infantry? 5 infantry would take ~20 rifleman according to your post, that doesn't seem too crazy to me per city, particularly if you go nuts with drafting and I'd think losses like that would gut your army pretty fast.

[GermanJoey]

Yeah, I'm pretty confident that all the major competitors will get to Assembly Line at some point. It's a question of opportunity cost. The most obvious economic consideration is Physics first. Does the earlier factories beat the free GS (I guess this is the easiest comparison to make GJ)? Or as others have mentioned, the military option of Combustion and destroyers. There's also some pseudo-economic stuff there; Ironworks, railroads and drydocks give a similar bonus to factories when building ships.

Some other candidates; Electricity(post physics) - free GNP boost that doesn't require a hammer investment, Biology - again free food, no hammers required, or Medicine and Railroad for Sushi and Mining.

I'm also amazed that nobody chased after Sushi or Mining. I wonder if Donovan will score the latter? He'll be the first to RR and IIRC he mentioned something about another Great Engineer on the way...

Here's an optimistic-ish estimate for Scooter/Sulla's repayment time for AL vs Physics:

Code:

Cost of Factory + Coal, w/ OR: 200/2.6 + 120/1.85 = 77 + 65 = 142

AL = 4290
Physics = 3432
free GS worth = ~1800 beakers
(4290-3432) + 1800 = 2658 beakers to repay

convert to hammers:
2658/1.2 = 2215 base beakers
2215/1.25/(1.35/1.25) = 1641 base hammers worth of wealth
    - the 1.25 term is the forge
    - the 1.35/1.25 term is my guess for their empire-wide science-mult to gold-mult ratio, assuming they use FR while teching. they *really* should have some
      universities or at least some more observatories... a hammer-economy loves science multipliers since you rock 100% science slider all the time.

Next, the buildings. Assuming they use OR to build them, and that they don't need any additional grocers (although I think they will), we get:

    200/2.6 + 120/1.85 = 142 base hammers per city.
    
It looks like they'll have 8 cities possibly ready to start building factories, so that's (142*8 + 1641)*1.25 = 3472 hammers to repay

Their base production has been growing rapidly; lets assume their base MFG (not including factory+coal) from their 8 factory cities would
average around 450 for the duration of the repayment period, based on their current MFG and growth rate. Dividing out the forge makes 360 hpt. Thus,
factory+coal will give 270hpt.

so, the total repayment time is: 3472/270 = 12.9 turns for repayment, starting once factory+coal is complete. Figure that's ~7 turns from now on average... so, they're breakeven within 20 turns.

That seems quite good, actually, assuming that they can keep out of war for the next 15-20 turns and aren't too late to Combustion.

As far as opportunity cost... denying the Physics GS would be a huge win against the Khmer, but I don't think they realize that. Maybe it's REM's burden to deal with them anyways, especially as OT4E already seems eager to keep pushing eastward. OTOH, I think that Germans' plan for following AL by snagging the Fascism GG is really smart, and that's a big plus in AL's column IMHO... I didn't think about this before, and I think it's just dawning on these guys too, but that GG is a huge deal because of West Point. Ordinarily, you wouldn't even think about the WP XP requirement because if you're still alive by the Industrial era, then you've probably fought several wars by now and can clear the XP requirement easily. However, if they wait until they've produced a natural GG to build West Point, then that would mean a.) most of their units would be low XP and b.) they'd then need to build West Point in the middle of a war. That sucks. Probably not even worth building it by that point. Thus, scoring the Fascism General might be their only chance to get a Commando pump. (not that they'd always want to use it just for Commandos... 17 XP Panzers (can sideline pinch to not get chumped by Anti-Tanks and still take CR2) and Transports are awesome too). Getting Rushmore up early and having the Police State option are no joke either. War Weariness is gonna be a bitch.