RMOG: Renaissance Men of Genius

[WarriorKnight]

Looked a bit more into the practicality of what we can accomplish with the 1 man GA, so I'll post that now.

First off, how many GP can we get out of this? We can probably get 3, which requires breaking the 450gp limit. Should be doable, 450 / 63 (base 3 x multipliers 3 x 7t) = 7 specialists which is doable in OS and JAO (plus that doesn't take into account current gpp). Combine that with the Artist we already have and that gives us 4 Great People to decide what to do with.

How do we spend them? A tl;dr summary of my rough opinion is:

• Trigger GA
  
• Bulb PP
  - Gap -
  
• Culture Bomb (Peaks)
  
• Bulb RP
  
• Bulb Sci Meth
  
• Academy
  

Going into a bit more detail:

• Trigger GA
  + Obviously essential to trigger the GA in the first place
  - Depending on the timeframe we're looking to trigger the GA in, we may have to use the Artist on hand. This isn't great since we may want to use it elsewhere, but not much we can do about it
  
  
• Bulb PP
  + Essential pre-req tech for Sci Meth and RP, it may not do much by itself but a GS bulb can practically give it for free
  - Slightly inefficient given 3 others know the tech, but we don't have the tech rate to spare so we should eat it
  
  
• Peaks Culture Bomb
  + Huge defense boost in the E, gives us control of the clam in Peaks and severely weakens Alhazard presence on our border
  - If we don't use the one we have already we'll have to hire artists for it which sucks, minimal economic benefit compared to other options, sure to piss of neighbor (not so concerned about the last one though   )
  
  
• Bulb RP
  + Best use of GE if we get one, which is likely given the amount of engineer contamination we have. Leads to key techs in Rifling and Steam Power
  - Gives minimal (for a GP anyway) amount of beakers on a non-priority tech, needs Gunpowder researched first, only going to use if we get a unwanted GE
  
  
• Bulb Sci Meth
  + Key tech leading to Communism/Physics, GSci bulbing gives max beakers
  - If not heading straight for Communism/Physics it is useless, those techs are too far away to reach anytime soon
  
  
• Academy
  + Cornerstone of pre-game plan, would be best boost to research rate
  - Need to do some serious quantitative analysis to estimate how worthwhile this will be. ATM it only gives 15bpt breakeven which is definitely not worthwhile, but sure to improve over time. Will there be enough turns in the game to catch up to a bulb? Doubt it...
  
  

Looking at it now, the options are a bit worse then I would have liked. It's still a bit early to think of bulbing Communism/Physics which is why I didn't include that here. Maybe we don't even need to produce 3 GP's with this GA? If so we might want to save the cheaper GP's for later.

Will post more info later on how to accomplish all this, but for now I recommend that JAO works a scientist instead of an engineer and OS, Peaks and JF work a citizen to minimize potential GE contamination. JAO might even want to work 2 sci and an eng to try and get another GP out before we trigger the GA, but I'll leave that decision to dave.

[oledavy]

We can talk more about this tonight, but I generally agree with your priority list. I think we have to use the Great Artist for the GA though, waiting for another will delay us by too much. 

I generally think we should focus on bulbs on the way to rifles/communism. You also raise an interesting possibility with GE/Constitution.  

The biggest things we need to resolve at the moment are:

1. The value of an academy
2. The value of a culture bomb

I don't know on the first. I like the second quite a bit, but am not sure it's superior to bulbing.  

We could consider settling a city in REM's face for fish southwest of JAO and bomb it, choke the island and the southern city.

I really need to login and see how things stand first though - most importantly, if Mack accepted peace. 

Either way though, we'll continue growing and getting missionaries out to make sure we're ready.  

A couple of asides: 

 - I wish we had more cities before tripping this GA - that to me was the advantage we would glean from switching to HR/OR early. However, Mackoti has ensured our "GA with more cities" will be a "GA with about the same number of cities as Scooter had for his."
 - Not to dwell upon our errors, but I think switching into HR/OR was a mistake. Not even for the turn in anarchy. I think conceptually, running an extra turn of anarchy earlier to get a later golden age was a sound idea. What we didn't think of was paying upkeep for HR/OR for all these turns without getting much benefit (they are medium and high respectively). We've used a little of the HR bonus to nice effect in PC, but we would have been okay without it due to how lush the map is. OR saves us building monasteries, but is that worth all the gold it's cost....eh? I don't think so. 

Anyway, something to note should we ever play Renn start again  

Oh wait, Civ 6 hits this weekend.... 

Civ4! It's been a hell of a ride.

[yuris125]

While there's almost no doubt Civ6 is a better game than Civ5, I'm not sold it will replace Civ4 as the MP game of choice on RB

Good luck with this game, I'm watching you!

[Krill]

CIV 4 pitboss took 8 months to arrive, and 5 years to take off. There may be time for another round of middel size PB games even if civ 6 is amazing, may be another 5 years. Who knows.

[WarriorKnight]

 - Not to dwell upon our errors, but I think switching into HR/OR was a mistake. Not even for the turn in anarchy. I think conceptually, running an extra turn of anarchy earlier to get a later golden age was a sound idea. What we didn't think of was paying upkeep for HR/OR for all these turns without getting much benefit (they are medium and high respectively). We've used a little of the HR bonus to nice effect in PC, but we would have been okay without it due to how lush the map is. OR saves us building monasteries, but is that worth all the gold it's cost....eh? I don't think so. 

Anyway, something to note should we ever play Renn start again  

This game was always going to be an experiment. Plus since we aren't the best players it's only natural we'd make a few mistakes. It's all for the good of the community, and hopefully have a few laughs at ourselves along the way.

I bought this up in chat with dave but didn't post here, a GE can bulb Constitution if we have Gunpowder but don't have PP. A good option if we get more GE's then we want, Gunpowder is super cheap to get.

If we are considering GP's for Rifling/Communism, then I should point out Artists can directly bulb to Communism. Once we have Nat we can bulb Liberalism and if we get MT we can bulb Communism itself. Not sure how much of a priority either should be though.

Comment on the rest later (once we can confirm peace).

[Sareln]

While there's almost no doubt Civ6 is a better game than Civ5, I'm not sold it will replace Civ4 as the MP game of choice on RB

Good luck with this game, I'm watching you!

1st, it has to have MP :P

[greenline]

Even if the MP support is great there will still have to be good modding support to make big games work out, unless they can balance the game well enough on launch and with patches.

[WarriorKnight]

After some discussion, we're going to aim to focus entirely on GS's during the 1 man GA, accepting any GE's that come our way should we get them. We won't go for an academy, not going for a culture bomb, and will skip Constitution/Representation for the moment so we can't bulb anything useful with Artists either. We want to primarily aim for PP, RP and Sci Method with this round of Great People en-route to Communism, Rifling and Steam Power. Any extras can be saved for the 2 man GA. Now have to figure out how best to implement that plan.

Some key moments from the chat:

I'll have plenty of time to chat in ~5h if you are available then
also good job on securing lurker posts with a controversial comment. They took the bait hook, line and sinker.  
yes, yes, all part of my plan....

I would actually love to birth an engineer to freak out Scooter come to think of it
why? scooter is rushing SoL but we wouldn't be going anywhere near Nat
shhhh
Just let me imagine him looking at the event log and not our tech for one second....and freaking out as a result
lolz, ok then ill give you a moment
and there you go
moment passed
It was lovely while it lasted
I dreamed of fleets of East Indiamen
of burning Byzcoti cities
it was enrapturing
dikes everywhere
SO MANY HAMMERS
twas a good dream

Basically, rifles soonish
before someone (REM/Sulla/Mack) looks at us and be like:
yo I heard yo um, had some pretty nice land
mind if i take it?
of course you don't
(proceeds to wreck us)
Life goals:
Don't be invaded and overrun by Sullla
and have it immortalized in a write up for drooling fanboys to read over for years to come
we should be good in that regard, mackoti is terrible at reporting in detail
Exactly
Plus, he's basically a god who descends from strategy game heaven to play video games
So nobody will blame us for losing to him

Also, as one last aside, I love how all our content posts get no response, but the moment I say something slightly controversial, the lurkers appear /ranting about lurker attention over
WHY WONT YOU LOVE ME
the truth hurts
Just a little  

[WarriorKnight]

And we got peace with mackoti.  

Now we have 10t before mackoti takes some more cities. Let's enjoy it while it lasts.  

[WarriorKnight]

Alright got the plan together for the GA, this is what we should do. As an aside, I considered the possibility of trying to push out the GP at 540 gpp, which would give us 4. While it was probably possible, it would sacrifice too many other objectives in its pursuit so settled for 3.

The 3 cities we will use are DR, OS and JAO. In order of birth:



The main reason we use our crappy 2nd city for this is because it already has a substantial amount of GPP. We can easily get the 270 GP by running 4 specialists for 3t. Once we get that we can return to whatever it was that we were doing here.



We need to put a substantial amount of effort into cracking 360 GPP in here before the golden age is up. While this city does have the food to run the required amount of specialists, it currently doesn't have the population. Getting this city up to size will be the main bottleneck in terms of when we can trigger the GA. However once we get to 9 pop we can work 7 specialists for 5t to rush one out.



Has the same amount of surplus food as OS, but it's head start is what makes this ideal to create the 450 gp. It will probably need to work less specialists so OS can outpace it, but then crank them out in the final few turns of the GA. Will also need to grow some more pop before starting, but has less demand than OS so isn't a huge concern. If we work 5 for 5t (until OS produce the 360 one), we can put 6 or 7 in there to push out the last one before the GA ends.

These numbers aren't final, because we will still make some gpp between now and when we trigger the GA, but give a rough idea of how we'll produce the 3 GP. It'll take something like 5-6t for OS to grow to size 9 so pencil in T250 for triggering the GA.

TODO list:

• Spread religion to JAO
  
• Grow JAO and OS to appropriate size (9 for OS, JAO is about the same)
  
• Do NOT whip any of these 3 cities until the golden age is over
  

Other thoughts:

• Do we want to run artists in Peaks anyway, regardless if we aren't trying to push a GP out of there? The only issue I can see is that each artist we work is a pop not working a 2/0/4 tile, but that may be worthwhile in a border city. Getting the clam and securing the banana would be excellent.
  
• How do we want to prepare the rest of the empire for 6t without whipping? I'm at least thinking that JF can 4 pop whip a settler before triggering and grow back on GA coast. I haven't looked at the rest of the empire yet, but we should probably whip most cities before we trigger it anyway.
  
• Not sure what else, will let you know if I come up with anything.