[SPOILERS] Woden and ljubljana like boats

[ljubljana]

Roland, what we did was this: I had 4 niter/turn in natural income and I had Woden send me niter 6 at a time. You get an in-queue upgrade if you cross over 20 niter, so we made sure I never had enough to hit this threshold. Instead, with Woden's gift I would end up between 10 and 20 niter, then upgrade a quad in the discount policy, which got me back down to under 10. I upgraded one quad per turn like that every turn for the majority of the midgame buildup period and definitely got a LOT of advantage out of it...

[Woden]

i thought though that as soon as you had the resources the build upgraded. so cancelling production ques would just see the upgrade produced.

IIRC that happened to us. when niter was transferred back.

In my example, you are not actually building units but buying units with faith. Once you clear the units out, there is nothing in the queue to auto-upgrade. 

As for sharing resources or stockpile capacity, I see no problem with it. You are not creating something out of thin air and you both are limited by stockpile capacity. Also, you can do it anyways with manipulating what you are building and upgrading. It is more of a strategy than an exploit.

[Woden]

Roland, what we did was this: I had 4 niter/turn in natural income and I had Woden would send me niter 6 at a time. You get an in-queue upgrade if you cross over 20 niter, so we made sure I never had enough to hit this threshold. Instead, with Woden's gift I would end up between 10 and 20 niter, then upgrade a quad in the discount policy, which got me back down to under 10. I upgraded one quad per turn like that every turn for the majority of the midgame buildup period and definitely got a LOT of advantage out of it...

Also, if you go over the limit (20) from a deal, the units in production won't auto-upgrade because you didn't have enough at the start of the turn.

[roland of gilead]

i thought though that as soon as you had the resources the build upgraded. so cancelling production ques would just see the upgrade produced.

IIRC that happened to us. when niter was transferred back.

In my example, you are not actually building units but buying units with faith. Once you clear the units out, there is nothing in the queue to auto-upgrade. 

As for sharing resources or stockpile capacity, I see no problem with it. You are not creating something out of thin air and you both are limited by stockpile capacity. Also, you can do it anyways with manipulating what you are building and upgrading. It is more of a strategy than an exploit.

got you makes sense.

[roland of gilead]

Roland, what we did was this: I had 4 niter/turn in natural income and I had Woden send me niter 6 at a time. You get an in-queue upgrade if you cross over 20 niter, so we made sure I never had enough to hit this threshold. Instead, with Woden's gift I would end up between 10 and 20 niter, then upgrade a quad in the discount policy, which got me back down to under 10. I upgraded one quad per turn like that every turn for the majority of the midgame buildup period and definitely got a LOT of advantage out of it...

we could pile niter into Sub because Jongs don't use it.

[williams482]

I admit I don't really see much difference between sending resources to a teammate and temporarily "hiding" resources in queued builds. Both are working around or leveraging the game:

1) Not giving you any explicit choice in how your extremely valuable resources are allocated, and

2) Giving a resource discount to upgrades that you simply cannot get by hard-building units, and

3) Making upgrades more efficient currency-to-milpower exchanges than any other method of acquiring units.

#1 is one of many, many silly examples of this game creating artificially obnoxious situations for no good reason, while #2 and #3 are just bad balancing of the policy card options. Retinues should apply to queued units same as it does for upgrades, and Professional Army shouldn't offer quite as steep a discount. #3 makes this thing more profitable than it probably should be, but I don't think that breaks the game.

The biggest problem I see with the permitting the queue ->purchase -> dequeue -> upgrade dance is that it's a sightly tedious thing that you would basically have to do every turn to keep up, on top of all the other should-be-unnecessary micro that this stupid game so strongly encourages. It's not much fun, and we do this for fun, so forcing everyone to do it isn't ideal. Of course I'd think it was ridiculous if someone attempted to outlaw production micro on the same grounds, so to be clear I don't consider this a very good argument against.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Religious civs get more out of this. The top-tier religious civs are Russia+Khmer. Khmer is already pushing it so I would ban it over this. So, the question is if this would cause Russia to be banned or not. If yes then ban this. If no make a choice to ban Khmer or not and keep this.

Being annoying isn't good enough due to limestone wall-overflow and general micro.

[ljubljana]

On reflection, and at the risk of incurring well-deserved CMF criticism, I daresay I might have overstated how disastrous the Classical Era war with TAD was for our team. Not because of the reasons I waged it, which were totally misguided, but because we gained one very important thing in this war which I did not plan for at all at the time and that I would be remiss in not mentioning: Embolon promotions on 9 biremes, which became 9 Embolon caravels (well, 8 and a 2-promoted Santa Cruz armada) that formed the core of our bulkhead against TAD's fleet and were among our biggest sources of CS advantage over their team in the Renaissance conflict. A short war would not have sufficed for that either, as a ton of those ships just crossed 15 XP on the last few turns of the war, so if it had ended with cession of WotW and not spiraled out of control like it did, I could not make a claim like this one. And the survivors among those ships eventually became the 2-promoted caravel fleets that shielded us against Russian privateers in Australia.

Was that worth 30 turns of lost development and making long-term enemies out of the team that would eventually drop that hammer on us...if that's true, then no, I would not say that it was. But actually I can find no real evidence in the TAD thread that they were motivated by revenge or metagame hygeine in the Renaissance attack...it appears to have been more that Australia and Phoenicia were the two nearest targets and we were the civ in that pair that hadn't just lost half its cities at the time. We seemed both like a bigger threat and like we could provide greater spoils, so it totally makes sense that they would attack. As for lost development, late lighthouses did hurt badly, but I would still have had to build a navy eventually. And while this way involved spending a lot of hammers on biremes that, you know, died, because mass caravel upgrades at Cartography are so gold-limited I actually think that, eg, building two biremes, of which one is sunk and one promotes and upgrades, is a better deal for us in terms of available resources (hammers + gold) to military striking power conversion than building just one bireme and keeping it safe at 0/15 XP. And, after all, we were playing Phoenicia and Norway with +50% zerg ship production to spend on exactly such logic.

Idk, I'm not saying my stated strategic aims were anything but ludicrous and the delayed development cost us a ton of gold that we could have used to just upgrade more ships. But "#1 worst mistake in the game", maybe I was being too hasty there.

[roland of gilead]

On reflection, and at the well-deserved risk of incurring well-deserved CMF criticism, I daresay I might have overstated how disastrous the Classical Era war with TAD was for our team. Not because of the reasons I waged it, which were totally misguided, but because we gained one very important thing in this war which I did not plan for at all at the time and that I would be remiss in not mentioning: Embolon promotions on 9 biremes, which became 9 Embolon caravels (well, 8 and a 2-promoted Santa Cruz armada) that formed the core of our bulkhead against TAD's fleet and were among our biggest sources of CS advantage over their team in that conflict. A short war would not have sufficed for that either, as a ton of those ships just crossed 15 XP on the last few turns of the war, so if it had ended with cession of WotW and not spiraled out of control like it did, I could not make a claim like this one. And the survivors among those ships eventually became the 2-promoted caravel fleets that shielded us against Russian privateers in Australia.

Was that worth 30 turns of lost development and making long-term enemies out of the team that would eventually drop that hammer on us...if that's true, then no, I would not say that it was. But actually I can find no real evidence in the TAD thread that they were motivated by revenge or metagame hygeine in the Renaissance attack...it appears to have been more that Australia and Phoenicia were the two nearest targets and we were the civ in that pair that hadn't just lost half its cities at the time. We seemed both like a bigger threat and like we could provide greater spoils, so it totally makes sense that they would attack. As for lost development, late lighthouses did hurt badly, but I would still have had to build a navy eventually. And while this way involved spending a lot of hammers on biremes that, you know, died, because mass caravel upgrades at Cartography are so gold-limited I actually think that, eg, building two biremes, of which one is sunk and one promotes and is upgraded, is a better deal for us in terms of available resources (hammers + gold) to military striking power conversion than building just one bireme and keeping it safe at 0/15 XP.

Idk, I'm not saying its strategic aims were anything but ludicrous and the delayed development cost us a ton of gold that we could have used to just upgrade more ships. But #1 worst mistake in the game, maybe I was being too hasty there.

Worked out ok for you in the end. Maybe despite that maybe not.

[ljubljana]

I see now that thrawn suggested their team mass quads during that conflict, which seemed dubious at first as quads are twice as expensive as galleys and only match their attacking strength with a GA while being way more fragile and having just 1 range anyways. But, imagine if one side in a Renaissance war could upgrade 10 Line of Battle frigates while the other is stuck with fresh ones. No...imagine if instead of fighting the other teams in the Classical Era, someone in this game had farmed barbs or city-state units with quads to get to LoB and then mass-upgraded those

Especially for Norway, I think that civ's ability to slug it out with galleys early and retreat to the ocean to save injured ships means its real UU might be not the longship but the t120 Embolon caravel that can pillage. Or at least, it certainly felt like that in this game...