Since my reporting hasn't been quite as thorough lately, I thought I would do a final State of the Empire post, as honestly my empire is in a pretty interesting spot in a hypothetical alternate universe where someone wasn't an era ahead of me and accelerating. More on that in a minute.
Here's the north. I replaced Tianjin and Yangzhou as those were burned in The NapStabbening. It seems bad that so many of these cities are only now building Libraries, right? Well, yes it does. As you'll see in a moment though, some of these cities have been
busy. Also, realistically my break-even tech rate has hovered from 0-20% for like 40 turns now, so honestly they were of limited value. Yes, unlock Rep scientists, but work them with what population? These cities are all quite small for a reason - they're either recent or whipped. The build order was often something akin to Granary -> IND Forge -> Lighthouse (if necessary) -> Buddhist Monastery. There were exceptions here and there, but that's pretty much the gist. The Monasteries were honestly quite fun - half price and instant +2h +2b, plus culture along borders.
A better look at the core. Beijing was finally getting Oxford. The basic plan was to save gold while building, then turn on the jets. Go Monarch -> Divine Right, build Spiral Minaret, then get some naval techs. These core cities aside from Beijing/Shanghai really ought to be bigger, but again, whipped pretty hard. New Macau was a replacement for the former Moai city. That one was the saddest one to lose in the Stabbening because it had really come online and was a powerhouse. I didn't bother trying Moai here again as it didn't make sense the second time around, but I had been whipping infra in here recently to try to get it up to snuff for the later game, and that was after whipping a few boats out of it too.
Demos had really turned around in some ways. On a foodhammer basis I was vaguely competitive, but that is largely on the back of Apostolic Palace + cheap Forges everywhere. The thing this screen doesn't show is the tech screen, which is where the real problem lies. Let's look at that.
Let's put some things in perspective so you understand how truly awful this is compared to the runaway. Mjmd I think just got Rifling, either that or he swapped away from it onto Steel while 1-2T away. If I set tech to break-even, I am
FIFTY turns away from Rifles. F-I-F-T-Y. And that's assuming no detours, like DR for Spiral or any naval techs, which I remind you I'm behind on naval techs too.
Speaking of, naval techs. Chemistry I'm not
that far away from - could probably be had in 5ish turns if I went straight there. However, that would only bring me to tech parity. Remember, Mjmd already has many of those, and he's now onto the next generation of naval tech. So, I'm
22 turns from Military Science to unlock SotL or
27 turns from Steel (or like 40ish from both). It really is that bad. Now, yes, there are things I could do to bring these numbers down. However, imagine I could double my break-even tech rate, which def could be possible. So what? Cut all those estimates in half, and Mjmd still has Factories, Infantry, and maybe Destroyers by then. TL;DR my death was just whenever he got around to it.
Now, let's look at some cities. Not all of them of course, but I picked out some cities that I felt were interesting. Please don't analyze tile assignments or builds too closely as in the last 10ish turns things were getting more lax, shall we say.
The capital. I was in Bureaucracy largely because this city was able to produce so much military that way. I did have a sleeping Scientist in here. I still had not gotten a 2-man GA, so I had 2 plans. One, swap him for a Prophet from Superdeath, or two, get a GP out somewhere soon for a 2-man. THe latter was harder than it sounds given how many I generated over the course of this game, but it was def possible before long. The problem was going to be the high likelihood it was also a scientist. I'll be honest, I have no memory of building an Observatory here. That must have been very recent. That's the only one I have in my empire.
To be clear, I haven't whipped this city in like 13 turns
. My coastal cities got absolutely wrecked by the whip this game out of sheer desperation. If the war had continued, the whipping would have continued I guess. Anyway, I got a
lot of units out of this city, but it's a shame it never lived up to its potential.
My favorite city. Eventually stagnated it at size 7, and it just sat and built units forever. 32h was perfect because it meant I could 2T CKNs indefinitely. I probably built 15 CKNs out of this city alone without so much as a whip. Zero commerce buildings, because why would I ever need one here?
Hangzhou sort of inexplicably got whipped a ton. This peaked in the low 60s of whip anger. Really what happened is this city got its basic infra and to size 6ish right as war was ramping up. However, it had few tiles (could share a lot with its neighboring bigger cities), and it had no real natural production (the lumbermill is recent and mine belonged to Shandong), so it was the proverbial work cottages and whip thing. Except, instead of every 10T, it was more like every time it hit size 6. Poor city. But hey, it did produce a lot of units, and from a good spot because they could go to either front.
Again, I have not whipped this city in like 10T. You notice a trend with the west coast cities being brutalized. Anyway, this was where replacement Moai went in. I sort of hated having it in a city that was always going to burn at some point, but this city had a bunch of overflow and some mines available, so I could build it fast. Also the very high food surplus here meant I could actually grow it too, plus this allowed Hangzhou to have a couple tiles.
My replacement for Moai city. Here the whipping is honestly more infra-related. Basically Guangzhou was utterly tapped out on whips, so I gave this city GZ's seafood to provide an enormous food surplus. I figured that was the best way to get this city online while mitigating the fact that GZ was too whipped to grow taller. I skipped Barracks here which was actually pretty common in coastal cities which mostly built boats. My plan was to let off the whip and let it grow some more, mostly to let the anger wear off so that it could be whipped again whenever the next war kicked off.
Sensing a theme here? If you're a coast-working city with a strong food surplus, you will be whipping some boats. Baoding did exactly that for me. This was in those wave of Library cities. The main reason for trying to finally get Libraries up was if the game extended, the only thing I could think to do was mass scientists/specialists in these coastal cities like this, so that meant Library time.
And Baoding's neighbor, also whipped quite hard, but again, food surplus + coast. Similarly I planned to swap into scientists here soon.
And that's it for cities, but if you're curious about any others let me know, and I can login and show them. Now finally, stats.
At the end I had 48 CKNs, 17 Muskets, 15 Galleons, 14 Privateers. Keep in mind I had 30 Galleons a couple turns before peace - the kamikaze attack had its costs. These numbers are pretty rough in the Rifle era, but what are you gonna do, you saw my tech situation.
Lots of fun stats here! You can really see the Monastery/Temple number. Keep in mind a few of those were razed, but I really did get some mileage out of the Monk Wonders, just not enough. Also the 31 built Galleons undersells it, as I also upgraded a bunch of Galleys to Galleons too - 2 of my own and like 4 of Superdeath's. One of the biggest problems I had was insufficient cottages. This is largely a byproduct of Pyramids + Colossus + mass war, honestly. Also notice the huge number of Hamlet/Villages but relatively small number of Towns. That really drives it home - my cottage growth was just behind more than the raw number of them being a huge issue. This is honestly again a function of whipping. The stab led to way harder whipping than planned, which meant I was whipping off cottages and then whipping again before regrowth constantly, so a lot of them idled a ton. It was incredibly painful, but I did survive and get to the end with the second-most cities, so it was worth it, I guess.
Numbers at break-even. Organized would have been worth 66gpt in Civic savings alone, nevermind the Lighthouse/Courthouse savings.
And that's it! Interesting game to say the least. Hope it was entertaining.
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In this game that's going to help us because he's going to go to the negotiating table with twitchy eyes and slightly too wide a grin and terrify the neighbors into favorable border agreements, one-sided tech deals and staggered NAPs."