[SPOILERS - El Grillo & Charriu PB51] One step at a time

[El Grillo]

It's certainly a tempting option, here's the checklist of what I'd need to make it happen:

A) Two Settlers, one for the marble and one for the chopping site. Springer Mtn is very close to producing one, and can build a second in time without it being rate-limiting. The opportunity cost here is not sending those Settlers to the rice-iron spot, and to a part of the floodplains valley that blocks Ramk from continuing southward.
B) A Missionary to speed up the border pop for the chopping site. This isn't strictly necessary because I plan to chop in an Obelisk first, but speeding up the whole project by up to 5t, accounting for travel distance, sounds pretty appealing.
C) A Galley and probably at least one real defender. That can be taken care of easily enough out of Olympic Forest and Victoria Peak, and I want a Galley soon to look for N-S circumnavigation routes anyway.
D) Five Workers to do the chopping, to get the whole project down to 4x2t from city founding, potentially sooner if I prechop, though I don't think I can get enough for it to shave off a full 4 turns. That would be one chop for the Obelisk and eight for the Mausoleum itself (I double-checked first this time and it costs 450h, divided by 60 is 7.5 chops). Conveniently enough, the chopping site has 10 forests, 6 in first ring. I have enough Workers in the south to do this, but the opportunity costs are significant when you look at how many uncottaged riverside tiles there area, how many mines I'd like to build, the overall lack of roads in the area, etc. It's likely worth the price if it means I can use my next Prophet in 20t to immediately launch a boosted GA to get into better civics.
E) Actually researching Calendar. As a baseline, with no wealth builds I can finish the tech in 12t. That's taking the added costs of two cities and the additional commerce from growth and calling it a wash, which may prove too optimistic, but I can add back in Wealth builds after the Galley/Settlers/units are done. The opportunity cost here is not getting another tech, but we unlock three more happiness resources so even if MoM was entirely off the table it wouldn't be that bad. That tech estimate roughly lines up with the timeline for getting the chopping site settled and its borders popped. It also really helps that the marble source is coastal so I can just settle on top of it and there's no need to bring Workers for a quarry+road.

So let's put all the napkin math together and say we could build the MoM in ~20t. That puts us in coinflip territory with Plemo's Great Engineer if he were to beeline Calendar, but I don't really see him doing that when he presumably wants Currency and Construction first, and that would easily take more than 25t at his current expense levels. The other players who have the research potential are Lazteuq, Ramk, and maybe Mjmd and giraflorens (maybe one or more of them already have it researched, I need to do the GNP trick next turn), but I don't know if they'd have the production potential. Ramk lacks Marble and forests, but I don't know enough to say for the other two.

Oh, and for completeness, some other risk factors:

- Plemo stays at war and decides he wants to whip out a dozen Axes, which would require empire-wide defensive whips. Given that he only whipped once this past turn, doesn't seem very likely, but over the next 15-20 turns? Who knows? He might want to come back with an Axe/Catapult army and really make me work to defend.
- Vanrober decides he wants to settle in that area, either preventing me from doing so entirely or making the prospect of having 5 Workers in the face of Impi not feasible. He recently settled two cities and has much higher-quality land closer to his borders still available, so this doesn't seem very likely either. Wandering Impi could still be a problem.
- Ramk decides he wants to settle in that area. This is slightly less far-fetched than vanrober, but still seems unlikely since he'd have to settle two cities in a straight line due south from his crappy desert hill city Niani. I probably want to recall my scouting WC from going further west through vanrober to instead keep an eye on movements in the area. I already have two fogbusting Warriors and a reserve Axe for barbs, plus the damaged Axe from the barb city raze.

[El Grillo]

T102:

Plemo agreed to a peace treaty. I lost 70h of units to his 35h and slightly over-whipped in hindsight, but kept the city and got my Great General. Let's call that a draw that neither of us are probably all that happy about.

I did some calculations and I think I can finish Mausoleum eot114, if my assumptions are correct. I'm tempted to build out a proper sandbox and test them, I really wish there were an easier to way to snapshot a gamestate into a sandbox (in a way that didn't leak any hidden information or allowed any RNG abuse, yeah it's probably a tall order).

The thing that lets me pull this off is the mechanic where I can chop a forest into a Wealth build that stores the hammers indefinitely until I assign the city to a real build, at which point I get the production bonus modifier. This way I can front-load chops even before I finish teching Calendar and hooking up marble, then complete the actual build in 1t. If someone else finishes it first, then I can keep the hammers banked for another wonder.

The current milestone turns are:
T106: Chop site is founded, Obelisk is chopped in @eoT
T108: Missionary spreads Buddhism
T110: Two chops complete (2/8)
T111: Chop site borders pop, two chops complete (4/8), ETA finish of Calendar tech (I can finish it without any more Wealth builds in 9t from T102, I figure this leaves more than enough buffer for the new city expenses)
T112: Two chops complete (6/8),
T113: Marble city is founded
T114: Two chops complete (8/8), assign city to build Mausoleum

Assuming I understand all the mechanics involved correctly and haven't overlooked something dumb (admittedly, fairly likely), I'm 100% on-board to try this. EoT114 is a finish date that Plemo can't beat with his Great Engineer, and likely competitive enough with the better techers. The difference between my previous plan is that it uses 6 Workers in total, which happens to slot in the Worker I just captured from the barbs. I don't need to whip or do anything else too extraordinary.

Ramk actually does have a city that could be set up to build the Mausoleum, his second city of Djenne:


Three choppable forests plus enough mines to get up to 15 base hpt, which is enough for a 9t build with marble hooked on his border with GKC. Ramk certainly has good reason to tech Calendar, with his banana, sugar, spices, and dyes. I can keep an eye on the production in the city via the Espionage screen (though I'll need to read up on how exactly that works), and if he decides to build it there then perhaps we could have another means of obtaining the wonder...

There's just one other minor sticking point which is that a barb Axe showed up around the chop site, where I have a C1 Axe and two Warriors. There's a good chance I can prompt the barb to suicide into my Axe in defensive terrain, but if I can't then the whole thing might be delayed one or two turns. It's really too bad my C1 Shock Axe took so many hits from the last Warrior attacking the barb city at >99.9% odds.

Scouting:

I see an opportunity for circumnavigation, hopefully that island is part of a chain connecting all the way down to Lazteuq/Plemo's northern coastline. We revealed vanrober's capital, which has a +12f surplus with wet corn and two lake clams.

I'll say it again, during game setup I honestly thought the +1f for greens bonus was +1f net early surplus which is why I was okay with it, but giving them a whole extra food resource for an extra +3f net early surplus seems a bit much. Well it is what it is, lesson learned is to ask these questions earlier and not assume.

Moving on, superdeath and Mjmd have what looks like a very wide front of 3 cities each to stage from. It's pretty neat that our two scouting WCs are pretty close to meeting back up. I'll probably send them back around the long way to defog everyone's territory in full, if they'll let me.

Demos:

Graphs:

[Sullla]

Just wanted to say that I really appreciate the quality of the reporting in this thread. Do you have a plan for the future tech path following Calendar? And any long-term strategic goals that you're working towards in this game?

[El Grillo]

Glad to see that you're still following the thread, while reporting is fun and I've made shortcuts for some of the tedious bits, it's good to know that I'm not shouting into the void.

My long-term strategic goal is to maintain the stalemate in the northeast such that we keep Plemo from coming after us, and potentially attack him when decides to go after GKC or Ramk. That includes showing peaceful intentions to Ramk (he has a Scout in our land and has seen one of our Catapults) and permitting him to expand south/southwest in the short-term. No point backing him into a corner and leaving our overextended cities over a really wide front as the path of least resistance. Meanwhile, we grow tall and out-tech vanrober, then take his land with Knights.

As for the future tech path, I'm not sure if what I have in mind is feasible, but: Our next Great Person is on track for ~t120, so if all goes well and we land the Mausoleum, we launch a boosted GA for Monotheism/Monarchy/CoL and run specialists for two more Great People. That second Golden Age then powers our research through Guilds. I have some idle thoughts about getting Shwedagon Paya in the process somehow so that I can run Philosophy and later Theocracy, and eventually get to Literature for the Epics, but I haven't calculated yet if the timings are at all feasible. I used up my focus double-checking the moves and counts for the Mausoleum plan I think all my math is right, the things that could screw it all up are the barb Axe winning against two of my Axes, the island marble getting settled in the next 10 turns, or vanrober declaring war.

T103:



Hmm, this new barb city is awfully tempting, fits my tentative dotmap, and grows in 8t. It would definitely be a point of tension between us and Ramk/vanrober, and I originally had intended to only settle the floodplains area. I don't have a capable unit in the area for a few turns though, so we'll see if vanrober decides to just raze it with Impi first.

Scouting:

N-S Circumnavigation is looking more and more likely.

Demos:

Lazteuq overtook us in score this turn, which is well done of him. He's managed to pick quite a bit of land for himself between superdeath and giraflorens after a not-particularly-fast opening, and superdeath seemingly hasn't decided to call him on it yet.

Graphs:

I forgot to mention it last turn, Mjmd settled city #9 on T101 and superdeath settled city #9 on T101. Here's a quick recap of city counts:

Plemo: 14
Us: 12
GKC: 11
Lazteuq: 10
Ramk/Mjmd/superdeath: 9
vanrober: 7
giraflorens: 6

As evident from the tech thread and ongoing turnsplit, GKC and giraflorens remain at war, and they seem to be continuing to trade units based on the WW and GKC's flat power chart.

[El Grillo]

T104:



Here you can see some of the mess of notes I made in-game while calculating the Mausoleum ETA. Also, two of the risks I highlighted earlier:

- the barb Axe decided to not attack my Axe on the silk forest, so I decided I had to whip a WC. My Workers are already committed to the plan (there are 3 Workers and a Settler on the tile 1W of wines) so it wasn't really a choice, that Axe has to die.
- vanrober has an Impi sharing the tile with my injured Axe on the highlighted tile. Hopefully he heads north to scope out the barb city, but if he keeps heading east I don't know if I want to give him the tempting target of 6 Workers chopping...

The good news is that Djenne finished building something, so I could probably afford to delay a turn or two for safety, unless someone else is on an even faster clock.

Scouting:

4 tiles to circumnavigation, don't let me down...! Also, vanrober's dedlurker should probably nudge him about how important chopping forests is, his land looks like he's barely chopped, if at all.

Demos:

Graphs:

Plemo's population swapping off of mines for cottages is unsurprising and effective. He must have finished Currency for wealth builds as well, there's no way he's managing +80gpt purely from the slider.

Superdeath's power spike stopped well short of what I was expecting to be honest. That's what, at most half a dozen Praetorians? Did he read up on Commodore's Maxims and decide to use them as an exclusively defensive force?

I should probably stop bothering with Mjmd's graphs and focus on Lazteuq who is clearly in the upper pack with us and Plemo, GKC, and superdeath. Ugh, sunk costs.

[El Grillo]

T105:



Vanrober can potentially make a nuisance of himself here, but alternatively he just wants to explore our territory like we've been doing. The barb Axe did die attacking ours, but with some hits taken, and if he stays in the area we can't cover all of our chopping Workers at the same time. Ideally he just keeps moving east and into our borders. At least for this turn nothing is in range to tempt him when he plays after me. If he travels along the coast we can hide the Workers in the northern clump of forests without putting the chops behind schedule. For future military posture, I think I want to bring down some more Axe/Spear pairs into this region and just fortify in cities, while we emphasize Catapults and WCs in the north for more flexible defense and opportunistic counter-attacking..

Vanrober also has a C2 Shock Axe that must have traveled all the way up through Ramk's territory to show up by our capital, but I'm not too worried about that. Ramk has an Axe from Niani on its way to raze Hsiung-Nu, he's welcome to it.

Scouting:

We uncovered Mjmd's capital, and unless there's more food in the fog it doesn't seem like moving T0 ended up working for him. I'm guessing he started on the plains hill N-NE where he would've had wet wheat, grassland forested deer, and plains hill sheep. Though that spot isn't on the river, and from the looks of it might not have had freshwater at all, so maybe not.

Demos:

I don't like how low our GNP is without the wealth builds

Graphs:

Abroad, Lazteuq founded city #11 on T104.

[Suite]

If you somehow get the Mausoleum, your priority should be the Taj Mahal and securing the way towards it. Your strategic position here is very good and the clock counts in favor of you. A "free" 12-turn GA (in the sense that all following GA's are cheaper GP-wise) with approximately 8 cities more (part of them being still flood plain heavy) would be strong enough to give you the techlead into the modern era. That means no Aesthetics before Nationalism, probably no Guilds (maybe Engineering depending on the geopolitical situation, especially of your neighbors) and planning the construction well ahead of time.

[El Grillo]

Thank you for the perspective, and I should’ve clarified that I don’t expect to be competitive for Taj against Plemo’s Great Engineer in reserve, especially when I expect him to want Nationalism sooner than later for AGG drafted units. That’s part of why it is so crucial to deny him the Mausoleum.

Perhaps if he uses it on another wonder or golden age first, and the geopolitics develop in a very favorable way... I feel like putting off too many military techs carries the real risk of Plemo deciding he has a window to kill me. Part of my reason for wanting Knights is to maintain strategic flexibility and prickliness. At the rate things are going I could probably still conquer cities from vanrober primarily with Maces and Catapults, but 2-mover flexibility gives me some breathing room with an increasingly wide front with Plemo and Ramk.

[El Grillo]

T106: The race is on!

As mentioned previously, I've been keeping an eye on Djenne as the most likely Mausoleum competitor. Well, that preparation paid off this turn:



Ramk has Calendar tech, with dyes newly connected.


Djenne has 198 hammers in the queue. He must've started building the Mausoleum a few turns ago but it wasn't yet clear to me, now it is.


One forest was chopped on T105, since Ramk played after me on T105 and logged in for T106 after I took this screenshot. That let me do the math in the signs (which assumes his city stays at size 5 working rice + 4 mines for 15 base hpt or 30 with marble), which shows that his ETA with two chops and no whips is eoT111. I'll be checking every turn to see if his actual production matches the forecast, of course.

Now that handily beats my previous ETA of eoT114, and I spent some time thinking about what I could do. I decided that I really want the Mausoleum, so I bit the bullet and revised my plans to achieve a eoT110 finish date. I believe he could whip T110 and prompt a coin-flip, but I doubt it as he should have effectively no clue what I'm up to, with no vision on the chop site, and me not planning to show Calendar or marble until the very last possible moment. Now, will I feel silly when someone (Lazteuq?) builds the Mausoleum on eoT109? Moving right along...

Changes:
- The marble Settler was 2-pop whipped this turn out of Springer Mtn, enabling the marble city to be founded on T110. This delays the first Golden Age quite a bit, unfortunately, but the second Settler finishing was the real rate-limiting piece of the puzzle.
- A forest recently grew in the inner borders of the chop site, bringing it to 7 forests in borders, which means I can skip the Obelisk chop and instead just chop those 7 and one 2nd-ring, out-of-borders forest for 468h, finishing on T110. I needed to bring in one more Worker, who had been farming in preparation for the next floodplains cities, to chop as well.
- With basically every city building Wealth, we can finish Calendar eoT109, allowing us to put the banked hammers into the Mausoleum on T110. If you've been following closely you'll see that our treasury took a hit this turn, well that's because unfortunately vanrober moved in a way that made me want to dissuade him from trying anything this turn, so I upgraded a Warrior into an Axe in the new city.

That leaves us here, with our newest city of Sunol Wilds.


If vanrober wants to declare war this turn, his Impi will get bounced back and has to face one of our two Axes, with no Workers in range. I really hope he also thinks that this is just a friendly scouting expedition and goes on his merry way further east. I'm pretty sure he has no reason to suspect just how important this site and Worker actions are to me right now, outside of an intuitive sense that this many Workers must be up to something. The Missionary that had been headed down will probably go to Olympic Forest instead to bring another hill mine in range there.

Scouting:

1-2t left to go on circumnavigation. It's really fortunate that Mjmd founded this city one tile off the coast, which probably means I don't think I have to worry about him settling the marble before I can. The island also looks too small to spawn barbs, so that shouldn't be an issue either.

Demos:

Wealth builds make the demos look a bit better, but Plemo keeps extending his food lead about as quickly as I can catch up.

Graphs:

[El Grillo]

Huh, I thought I had read some documentation about the minimum number of tiles a landmass had for it to spawn barb units or cities (I want to say 38 for some reason), but now I can't seem to find it anywhere, and I didn't see it implemented in the code for createBarbarianUnits() in CvGame.cpp. Have I confused this with something else, and does anyone else know how this works? I must have forgotten the exact search terms I used when I first read up about it, "civ4 barbarian mechanics" and "civ4 barbarian spawning rules" isn't turning anything up.