[PB58] Tarkeel and Amicalola's rule through fear

[Tarkeel]

I see that you used Serfdom during 2(?) golden ages. What do you think about this version of Serfdom? Would you switch again? Was it worth it for your civ? What are your thoughts about Serfdom outside the golden age?

We'll add that to the T200 report, but the short version is that we love it and have built our economy and research choices around it.

Edit: Here's a look at our most used improvements:

[Charriu]

Do you have a lot of food surplus in your cities? And how do you use it. Also love to see lumbermills being used.

[Amicalola]

I wouldn't say Serfdom has solo-carried our game or anything, but it's definitely been a major contributor to our comeback. It's largely responsible for our food growth (those are 40 windmills instead of 40 mines, and 50 farms instead of cottages), and the commerce is obviously not as good as cottages, but surprisingly decent also. Windmills in particular with Serfdom+Rep Parts are literally just mines with +1 food and commerce. I'm less surprised that Cairo, AT, or especially Jowy haven't used it, but Superdeath is really surprising.

We suspected it would be strong on this map due to high river+hill numbers and low food; the same reason we suspected it would be strong in our area of PB56. Then in 56 it turned out to be strong, which convinced us to use it here, and it's even better!

We basically used it by growing all our cities tall as possible, then using the hammers for production in the central cities, and the farm-food for drafting in the fishing villages. Serfdom in that respect also helped us make an army very quickly through drafting+production, probably as quick as Slavery would have (albiet with the tech requirement of Nationalism). Cities are growing less now, because they're tightly packed and also War Weariness is currently terrible. The use of lumbermills is almost a natural extension of Serfdom - if we can't whip, we need as many hammer tiles as possible.

It is worth noting that Serfdom would have been MUCH worse if we hadn't used Slavery between our GAs. We whipped out basically all the monk buildings, and other critical infrastructure, which let us take advantage of the food/hammer bonuses once they kicked in. That wasn't too important in the core, but it was massive for the (many) fishing villages.

[Tarkeel]

Turn 200 (1400 AD)
While the main stacks are advancing on Roy and Elan, there were some minor actions this turn. Is anyone interested in some shots of the three astronomy-archipelagos?

Assault on Bloodfeast
C2 Amphib Cavalry vs C1 Mace, 88.1%:
The city comes with 80g and a granary, but AT deleted the worker that was clearing jungle.

Charge at Haley
Vodka gives us 73% odds to take Haley with our 5 cuirassiers, which I find are acceptable odds when the city has been whipped to complete another grenadier.
C1 Shock Cuirassier vs Grenadier, 3.7% + 14.4%: loss, grenadier at 55 hp
C1 Shock Cuirassier vs CG1 Musket, 11.5% + 13.3%: loss, musket at 52 hp
C2 Formation Cuirassier vs Grenadier (6.6), 72.4% + 4.1%: loss, grenadier at 19 hp
C1 Shock Cuirassier vs CG1 Musket (4.7), 87.6% + 1.9%: Win!
F1 Sentry Cuirassier vs Grenadier (2.3), >99.9%: Win!
The city comes with 66g, granary, lighthouse, harbor, forge and market. It will be culturally crushed untill we free Roy, but with that infrastructure it's worth keeping. With most of AT's navy on the bottom of the sea and Roy under siege, the city should be safe to keep.

State of the Empire
In the 50 turns since the last major update we've had three golden ages, spammed hinduism and monk buildings everywhere with the monk wonder trio, amassed an army of cuirassiers (and later cavalry) which is still running amok in AT's lands. We've arguable gone from the back to the front of the pack, and while we aren't the clear tech leader we are leading in some areas.

It looks like we have the strongest economy and production right now. While the monk wonders is an important factor in this, we're also getting a lot of value out of mercantilism and representation, and after getting a late start on cottages we focused on various mills (more on this later).








We achieved all of the he strategic goals set at T150, and updated goals are:

• Secure our borders
  
• Finish conquering AT's core
  
• Build the Statue of Liberty for more free supercharged specialists
  
• Set up Fondor to produce commando cavalry / navigation-II galleons
  
• Reach AssemblyLine for infantry and cheap factories
  

Opponents
6th: Ruff (eliminated)

Ruff was the first opponent to be eliminated. I think he hit economic problems with his expansion, from which he never managed to recover. He also had some early border conflicts that later escalated into a full blown takeover from Jowy.

5th: AutomatedTeller (10 cities)

AT Expanded well, but ended up with an unstable border against us after the first war. He's been unable to leverage his extra FIN-commerce into relevant technologies, and was noticeably behind before the war started. After whipping hard during 15 turns of existensial war, his economy hasn't exactly improved. Superdeath and MrCairo both have joined in and taken cities on the other side, so his days seems to be numbered.
Relations: Hostile

4th: MrCairo (28 cities)

Serdoa took Ethiopia to an early lead, but was starting to stagnate around the time he handed the reins over to MrCairo. I'm not sure why he stalled out, but it might have been over-expansion in this case as well, or a lack of focus in the expansion plans. It certainly didn't help to build a large mounted army that never managed to make any gains.
Relations: Cordial

3rd: Jowy (28 cities)

Just a few turns ago I'd rank Jowy as the marginal leader of the game, but then Superdeath decided the game wasn't chaotic enough and attacked, and has so far taken several astronomy-islands and burned a core city. Technology-wise he's ahead on the steel/MilSci branch but behind on the Rifling.
Relations: Cordial

2nd: Superdeath (26 cities)

Superdeath has continued to tech away and build infrastructure, but also had enough navy to challenge Jowy's rule of the sea. I don't think he has the forces for a take-over, but he will be able to harass the coastal holdings and probably take most if not all of the astronomy-islands.
Relations: Friendly

1st: Us

We're currently leading in just about every demographics, and I think we have pretty decent relations with our neighbors.



Selected Planets Overview

I'm not going to post details on every city, as most of them are now fully developed and have the same level of improvements. Just about every city has granary, forge, lighthouse, library, barracks and hindu temple and monastery, while a few also has baray.

Coruscant
Our capital has finally found it's true calling as a great person farm, and has been building older wonders too boost this.

Kessel
After taking some plains watermills from it's neighbors, this is back as one of the top production cities in the Empire, and is currently building Statue of Liberty.

Fondor
Fondor has turned into the shipyard it was always meant to be, with heroic epic and three settled generals. We're planning on sneaking out west point here soon, for 18 xp horses and 11 xp ships.

Kuat
Kuat ended up as the Forbidden Palace city and also helped out on some monk-wonders, but has mainly been delegated to units for the western theatre.

Mon Calamari
Another early production city, which has been leading the buildup for the eastern theatre. (We caught it on a bad day, it will look much better once that colosseum completes)

Kashyyyk
Started out as a fishing village but has turned into a productive unit factory. Lost it's seafood to AT's pirates, which will be hooked back up next turn.

Sullust
Once crushed by AT's culture, the city is now growing like a germ and is drafting rifles every 3 turns or so, thanks to the globe theatre.

Eriadu
Tiny fishing village whose main contribution has been drafted rifles. Lost it's seafood to AT's pirates, which will be hooked back up next turn.

Cloud City
Tiny filler city to work some unclaimed tiles between cities, but has been two-turning catapults for most of the war.

Haven
Ruff's former city of Salmagundi is growing up into quite a decent city.

Map Musings
In short, I think this is one of the best pitboss maps I've seen, and it fit my expectations of the game perfectly. It gave everyone enough room to be able to expand and build, while still having close enough neighbors that you have to worry about them. Here's a list of which details I think made the map so enjoyable:

• The main contact points against neighbors were long, slender landbridges with jungle, making for stable early borders
  
• Having a large backline against the centre-spine to expand into, making early wars less profitable
  
• Meeting along the spine opened up more contacts, but there are still relatively few east-west passages
  
• Everyone had easy early access to copper, the main defensive resource, while ivory was early and secure
  
• Iron and horses, the offensive resources, were only available later on, limiting early rushes
  

I do have some very minor niggles:

• If the lake-whale had been inner-ring it would have made the choice to move or settle in place harder, especially if it was only inner-ring for settle-in-place. As it is, moving was the one right choice.
  
• Given how food-sparse the map is, that seafood we're forced to orphan on the eastern coast is just taunting. I get that everybody had the same choice here so it's not a balance issue, just something that feels bad.
  
• It probably would have been good to add gems to the astronomy-islands.
  

Civics / Serfdom
We first swapped into serfdom at the end of our first golden age, as we needed slavery to complete the TajMahal to trigger the second. We temporarily swapped out of in on the last turn of the second golden age to be able to whip out monk buildings, secure in the knowledge that we would soon have a third golden age in which to swap back into serfdom. We have stayed in it since, and don't plan on ever leaving. The main cost of running serfdom is the lack of whipping, but I feel we've covered this by running nationalism and drafting rifles preemptively.

The main draw for me is the boost to wind and watermills, of which we have quite a few. The map is quite low on food making windmills enticing, even more so when ReplaceableParts was just around the corner. The commerce bonus on farms alone isn't worth running serfdom for, but it does add up and is most valueable in a golden age. We've mainly been using the food surplus from farms to work other mills (both water and wind) on plain tiles. Other uses for the excess food has been growing, drafting and some extra specialists here and there.

As for lumbermills, we'd probably run more of them if we'd have more grassland forests in our lands.

[Amicalola]

So as usual Tarkeel is very thorough/accurate so I don't have much to say. I agree with basically all of the above, also as usual. I guess only interesting diversion for me is our opinion on Superdeath's position. Tarkeel sees the tech and naval lead, and puts SD at a close 2nd (as seen in the above tier list), while I see the low food/production and put SD in a clear 4th, behind Cairo. But I can also understand 100% the pros from which Tarkeel gets his assessment, I guess we just put more weight on different aspects. So it will be very interesting to see what happens there.

[Tarkeel]

Superdeath currently has the initiative in his fight with Jowy, but barring third-party intervention I doubt either will make much advances on the others mainland. The main reason I'm ranking him ahead though is technology. While both have steel and MilSci, Superdeath also has Rifling and can/should research MilTrad for cavalry. SD is currently researching SteamPower and is actually pretty close to AssemblyLine (and might get there before us!), he's lacking only Constitution, Corporation and SteamPower. Jowy on the other hand is lacking ReplaceableParts, and isn't even close to getting Nationalism on the way to cavalry. I agree that Superdeath is lacking production and growth potential, but if he'd had those I'd be ranking him ahead of us as well.

[Tarkeel]

Let's talk about traits for a moment, specifically INDustrious. The big draw is supposed to be the bonus to wonder production, but I think that is misleading. Who gets a wonder is mainly decided by commitment, most often in researching the relevant technology first. Let's go through the wonders that we didn't build this game, as seen from our perspective:

• Stonehenge: Built by Serdoa; committed heavily by researching Mysticism early and chopping several forests that could have gone into early expansion instead.
  
• Great Wall: Built by Superdeath; likely without any competition, as this is even more pointless in a game without barbarians.
  
• Pyramids: Built by Superdeath; we didn't compete for this as we didn't rate the late game civics as worth it. Representation did eventually become good, but only about when we got it the natural way.
  
• Mausoleum of Maussollos: Built by Serdoa; this is the only wonder where we invested but still didn't get it, as Serdoa pulled out a very comitted worker effort to snag it.
  
• Great Library: Built by AutomatedTeller; who researched the technology long before us.
  
• Notre Dame: Built by MrCairo; we skipped Engineering for a long time and didn't compete with this one.
  
• Sistine Chapel: Built by MrCairo; we actually lost out on this by a single turn, but we didn't try very hard for it either.
  

In short, the bonus didn't make much of a difference for most of these. We don't know anything about how close the competition was for the wonders we did build, particularly Colossus and Lighthouse, where the bonus possibly made a difference.


When we look at national wonders, the picture is slightly different. The list above isn't 100% complete, in particular because we've just taken AT's forbidden palace, but we have mapped most core cities. The only wonders we didn't build first are Heroic Epic and Oxford, both of which are due to tech choices. Moai in particular stands out, and we've talked a lot about how good Mon Calamari has been for us. Jowy and SD have both opted to build this in their capital, while MrCairo built it on a small inner sea island.

The biggest draw though is the bonus to forges. With IND, this goes from an expensive building you need to work to get in core cities to something that can be whipped out anywhere. There's a huge difference between being able to whip this at size 4 versus size 8; most of the time we didn't whip them directly but let overflow from other whips (granaries and lighthouses) accrue here. Having forges everywhere then let us build other infrastructure; with forge and OrgRel whips are suddenly 45 hammers, making libraries 2-pop as well.

Which finally leads me to the conclusion: What can be done to make INDustrious more appealing? I see three options:

1) +100% production of National Wonders
This should give a small boost throughout the entire game. Yes, there's not that many national wonders you want to build, but several of them are best built in low-production cities where the bonus nevertheless is meaningfull.

2) +100% production for levees
This will give a small boost in the later stages of the game. It will not make a difference for most games, but it should turn levees into something that is worth building.

3) Workers build tile improvements 25% faster
This will give a small but noticeable boost in the early to mid game. It should make farms and mines complete in one fewer turn, while leaving roads and chops at normal speed.

The last one might be a bit controversial, and I'm not even sure that IND needs an early game advantage, but this would be a fitting way of achieving that.

[civac2]

1) and 2) are not impactful enough. Levees are already worth building if you have some river tiles but they come too late to matter much. 3) might do it but is not close to home.

You can just reenable failgold which is probably sufficient and also close to home. Apparently, many players here are against that but I have been unable to figure out why. This is particular baffling in light of the fact that CTH includes the BUG fix/change to allow for failgold from overflow.

[Miguelito]

I like 1), even if it may not do the whole job. Your point about NW often being built in hammer poor cities seems valid.
2), shrug.
3) seems very strong, and isn't close to home. It affects everything besides roads and chops.

The issue I have with failgold is that it just feels cheesy to exploity. Also diminishes the value of Currency, which I don't know is a good or bad thing.

[Charriu]

Please direct the discussion towards Tarkeel's proposed points towards my mod thread:

https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...#pid783035

We are running two discussions of the same thing right now, which is contraproductive.