TBS finds Superdeath's title Ominous

[The Black Sword]

Another archer to upgrade to a CKN. But might want to finish a caravel first. Should get working on improvements for its land tiles. 



Usually gives the farm to the eastern city and works the mine, but the mine is not worth it while we're wealth building this turn. 1 more size would be nice too. Caravels next turn, maybe even before finishing the library.



This city currently looks good but I think it probably gives away all its tiles to the cities around it long term. Certainly the Heroic Epic city has priority on any shared tiles, and I think the southern city can take the shared hills and build a forge since it has more other hammers. So this city probably doesn't need a forge itself and can just get out units, maybe a barracks first if we can afford it.



Probably caravel next turn, again, maybe before the library. Also a decent spot to get missionaries if we need to spread the religion. Can work the hill and give the farm to the south east city if we were not building wealth.



Cat is good.



This city is so productive and already has religion, so I'd love to build a forge here. Unfortunately it's just been constantly building boats instead and it should probably continue with caravels for a while longer. Also needs improvements for its remaining land tiles.



Cat is good here too. 



Would love to build some infra in this city, but given that I have about 2 healthy units in the area, I decided to build at least 1 more military unit in this CKN. Can see if we feel safe after that, though caravels are also a consideration.



Another place that would like some infra. I have a missionary to convert the city for the OR bonus too. But again, I want another military unit to feel safe before thinking about Forge/Lib/Barracks.




Similarly, this is a border city in a hot war so I put off the library. Could consider overwriting some farms with watermills in these areas, I just went farms first to get growing. Could also build caravels.



Original city in this are was burned, when I didn't pay enough attention to a potential GG trick. Grow onto the mine and keep building granary -> Lighthouse.



This place got pillaged unfortunately, I don't think it is worth trying to fix it up until we get some sea control back. So should probably just build caravels.



I think this makes sense as the main city in the are, taking a lot of the shared tiles. So it could use a missionary to build some infrastructure.



Border city with Lazteuq. Should probably just continue building its own land defenses/lighthouse. He's not giving off very friendly signals but also doesn't seem to be gearing up to attack anyone quite yet.



I have avoid growth on here for the extra granary value. So make sure to turn it off or it won't grow.

[The Black Sword]

Good luck, and thanks again for taking over. I guess I probably still missed some stuff, so fire away if you have any questions. And if you need me to play some turns just let me know.

[The Black Sword]

Also, my favourite screen this game:

[Donovan Zoi]

Wow, thanks for the detailed update, TBS. Also, I am really glad you'll be staying aboard in some capacity.

I just went in to look at the save and will be playing in a few hours.  Right now, I just wanted to run some thoughts by you in regards to tech/commerce choices, and will likely abide to many of your suggestions for individual cities above.

First of all, my thoughts on using the slider.

0% research for 3-4 turns:

I realize that this could set us back in tech momentarily but would get us +417gpt to immediately address our naval woes (we can switch just about everything but the HE city to Wealth and increase that to about 550gpt).  Upgrading Triremes to Carvels is only 50 a pop and would give us the necessary counters to the trouble spots..  At the 550gpt, that would allow us to upgrade 32 ships within 3 turns.

Going this route would depend on how are tech looks against our two rivals, as well as which cities are at most risk for a land invasion.  I am hoping we can go without military builds for a few turns since we may be able to just catch up by going back into Slavery and whipping many of the current builds (plus some Caravels) once we can revolt again (also 3 turns).

From there, these are some of the techs I like besides the two paths you mentioned:


Engineering (2 turns at 80% research)

We get the movement bonus, as well as cheap Walls/Castles for a trade route boost.  Plus Pikemen would be a great counter to current WEs and any surprise Knights.


Code of Laws (1 turn)

We would need this for Civil Service anyway, and since you were okay vacating Slavery for Serfdom we may also be able to get away with this as well.  Switching to Caste System would allow us devote more GPs to the GA cause as food allows and also to put our thumb on the scale for the next 3 specialists (GS, GM, GA) to ensure we get them for GA #3.  However, this tech would best be compatible with Guilds so we can get a better boost from Workshops.

This can be scrapped for the short term if we find a pressing need to go back to Slavery after Serfdom.


Alphabet (1 turn)

Do we have enough of a tech lead to show our hand in return for seeing where Comm and SD are at? Just a passing thought, but not married to the idea.


Espionage

My last thought is to devote partial slider to EP at some point to remove whatever advantage SD and Comm have on us.  This will work for us if we have that tech lead, since their only to devote EP to us or stay with us in tech.


I still like starting with 0% > Engineering, so please let me know if you think I'm missing anything with those assessments.  We are in a good spot where we can even get Guilds in 2 turns at 100% once we have Feudalism...

[The Black Sword]

Upgrading caravels is a pretty good idea. At least in the south, we'd probably get some decent economic payback from pushing them away from our coast quicker. I'm not sure a mass upgrade is worth the gold in the inner sea or north though. It helps us hurt them, but I'm not sure it really improves our position relative to the leaders that much. Obviously if the situation gets worse more upgrades could bail us out though. Still, the C4 trireme, maybe the C2 ones as well, is worth an upgrade in the centre anyway. The first one or two upgrades in the north could be worth while since it forces Comm to either retreat or lose 1-2 units per turn. But facing a mass upgrade he will just sit in the city till he gets to Optics to upgrade himself. We'll have some manually built boats in a few turns to do this anyway though.

I'd try to stay away from wealth building if you can. This is almost the only turn all game I did it, because for 50h I could get Optics one turn earlier, which was already 100 gold, as well as access to caravels. In general if I'm wealth building a lot I ask myself am I working the right improvements - more cottages, less mines.

I don't really like Caste System right now. We don't have another city that Caste System would allow to complete a GP besides one of the current 3. And the current 3 have a decent number of specialist slots already and would have to give up some quality tiles to work more specialists too. For this benefit we'd be giving up 50gpt from Serfdom and it will start ramping up some hpt now too (Serfdom is just the easiest to compare it with, Slavery could obviously be better).

Engineering is a quite good tech and should be certainly be fit in somewhere. It would probably be my next choice after Astro/Civic techs, but I can see good arguments to move it earlier if you think it's worth it. My thought process would be 1. civic techs for the extra promotion everywhere, which is especially important for naval combat 2. Astro, since we'll need to be building a lot of boats, lets build ones that don't obsolete for almost ever. Guilds isn't super important if we are not planning a land invasion though, it's just nice to 1 turn 17xp knights from your HE.

I don't usually bother with alphabet or espionage for information purposes, but it is pretty cheap. I think we'll probably see some caravels quite quickly as soon as they get access to them. We can check the tile improvements of workshops in Comm's lands to know when he gets knights. Superdeath started running the EP slider against us a few turns ago and I just decided to give up his graphs. We have info from the size of his cities, he has less food and hammers than Comm(graphs confirmed this while I still had them). He often runs 0% science so you can get an idea of his tech rate (his shrine is keeping him afloat). His cities are constantly staying low sizes, they're being whipped for more units. We also usually have vision of his front city, and with all the current fighting going on I doubt he is hiding any units, they're heading to that front city asap. His power was about 40% more than Comms when I had his graphs, he probably dropped to about Comm's level after the squabble over Incense City.

[Donovan Zoi]

Turn 146

Thanks for posting your thoughts, TBS.  I've taken the above into account and have come up with a plan is hopefully seen as a good hybrid of both of our objectives/styles.

--So I did end up switching most cities from Wealth last turn after realizing its important to keep the units roiling out since we don't have the luxury of the whip atm.  I did leave a few island cities on Wealth for now, only because I wasn't really sure what I could do with 2hpt in a size 2 island city.
--From turn 145, the plan will be 3 turns of 0% research, then Feudalism > Civil Service.  I forgot that Feudalism was a prereq to CS until this turn, so a small bit of overflow went into CoL last turn. We should be able to 1-turn each of the two techs once the 0% build up is complete.
--Before this GA ends, I'd like to move to Vassalage/Slavery for the short term in order to whip 1-2 units per city (which if done correctly should get us enough hammers to produce a 2nd-3rd unit for each with overflow).  If each city sticks to this plan, it will net us an additional 50 or so units in a matter of turns.  And we will have Maces, Horchers (SD has many Cats we can flank to near oblivion), Chokus, Cats, Caravels and a few Galleys in strategic spots. 
--I'd like to find a way to get about 10 more workers so we can start rapidly building farms on the unworked grassland tiles, and get us ready for a move back to Serfdom plus Bureaucracy at the outset of the next GA.

NOTE: the above moves will set us back globally for the short term, but we should be rewarded by claiming more land and conquest gold (or at the very least making our situation a bit less "ominous.").  The cities will recover quickly via growth, and this method may also provide us a solution for a Commodore naval retreat.  If we descend on a city that is sheltering his ships, we can subject that city to a Mace attack and give Commodore the choice of fighting our Caravels (I would propose to upgrade these once the Mace force is ready) or allowing them to fall with the city.

Other things of note:
--We were rewarded with a 3rd trade route in most cities, which must mean that our circumnavigation via map trades is finally in place.  That gets us about another 90 gpt (total of +468 this turn on very minimal Wealth builds)
--We lost graphs on Comm this turn, which means I may want to dust off an old spreadsheet calculator to see what both he and SD have on us.  I just want to make sure they don't have city view if possible.
--I opened borders with Dullland and Piccadilly, the former in order to continue east with our WB (though this probably doesn't matter as much now the we have the additional CN trade route).

My next post will outline our situation on various fronts.  I was also able to give Comm some ample playing time this turn, so I think I am finally getting a handle on things here. 

[Donovan Zoi]

Turn 146 Details

South Sea

So let's start with some good news...we were able to completely remove the SD threat from our southern coast without upgrading a single ship.  I was able to coax SD to attack us this turn by defending the CrabCity crabs with 4 Triremes and a Galley.  By the time he was done, that seafood tile was being defended by a 0.0/2 (!) Trireme.  I had considered leaving the Galley from that defensive stack, but it looks like having it there helped us preserve the Crab net.

But last turn, I also moved the 4 Triremes NW out of Crabisland so that could have a shot at anything that remains.  And sure enough, we took the rest of his injured stack in 4 consecutive wins.  With this area somewhat secured, I am sending the 2 Cats from CrabCity towards the eastern theatre.




Panning out though, Comm still remains a threat here, adding a 4th Trireme + a Galley to his advance from the south.  This concerns me here because Crabisland is defended by 2 mounted units and we just lost our only Galley in the immediate region to move in more troops.  What to do, what to do?


Inner Sea

Originally, I was going to refrain from upgrading any ships so that we could tech faster.  But SD moved within 3 turn range to the east of my standoff with Commodore so I thought it would be best to throw our weight around a bit here.  So we now have 6 Caravels facing down Commodore's 5 Triremes and 1 Galley.  SD had the exact same composition of ships, so this is how I hope things go:

--Commodore will need to retreat to either upgrade his ships or avoid being killed, giving us a free shot at another stack of SD's ships.  Then we just have to hope that SD doesn't catch on and retreat his own ships after scouting (it's not the end of the world if he does).  We still have the other 3 Tri's in the bay that we can upgrade should Commodore have the means of matching us here.




What is cool about this is that it could make Comm think twice about moving on Crabisland in the south now that he knows we have Caravels.  He was definitely aware of the 4 Tri's previously there until they vanished from his view.  So even though I used them to mop up the SD stack, he may think that I have hidden Caravels waiting for him.  I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Sorry, in both cases above, I didn't pan out enough to show the full situation.  But we are definitely in the process of taming the seas, I hope. This also invites a discussion of Engineering v. Astro as our next tech after Civil Service.


Incense City

I have a feeling I didn't play this one right, and really didn't get a chance to get your thoughts on it before I played.  Right now, my plan has been to just retreat injured units back to Kunming so they could heal faster.  I probably could have also picked of the 4 units currently holding IncenseCity, but SD has a crazy amount of Cat's just outside of the city, so I really think we need to wait for him to come to us.  It's another reason I'd like to have a bit of a whip frenzy -- so we can start nipping some buds.

I also decided to suicide a Horcher in order to check for any surprise units that may be waiting on any fog tiles further back.  And there was indeed another stack (of units I was previously aware of (and not much new), but his whole advancing force consists of only WEs and Cats, with one HA.

I don't have time to MacGyver a screenshot that includes all 3 stacks, so here are 3 separate screenies to show the same

Incense City - 2 WE and 2 Cats



NW of Incense City - 3 WE and 5 Cats (plus Tarkeel gawking)



Farther back - 4 WE, 9 Cats, 1 HA, 1 Axe, 1 Chariot (Med I) - some injured




So right now, I count 19 Immediate units for us against the 28 we see here.  But more are descending on the region and should be able to engage for cleanup.  I am waiting to send our 2 GG Axes into battle until I can get them a free upgrade to Mace soon.  Fun times are coming!

Anyway, let me know your thoughts on the above.  I may have one more set of screenshots to share in a bit.

[The Black Sword]

Good job on the southern seas! Looks like a very nice trade for us there.

I think retreating from Incense city was the right call too, that was my thinking at the time anyway. Do we really only have 19 units in the area? I thought we outnumbered him, just that our units were scattered about and needed to heal.

The 2nd time I retook Incense city I was able to station my stack on the Incense tile, when his stack was 1E of the city. This meant I got the 25% defense bonus from the river if he attacked me, which it turned out was enough that I still got a good trade despite him getting to catapult me. So he couldn't attack. He couldn't defend at the city - we could move 1N and attack with no river malus. And he couldn't sit still either - we could take the city, then use the city's road to hit his stack. He was forced to retreat, we took the city, borders expanded and our stack was safe.

A similar plan might work in the future, but it depends on us having a strong enough stack that it can survive his catapult hit and be strong enough to hit him back, which is hard to judge.

Anyway, Vassalage and Slavery sounds like a good path to me.

I'm not sure we really need more workers though. Our cities are all working improved tiles(at least those not under attack) and there aren't too many tiles left to improve, at which stage our workers sort of go semi-obsolete. Even if a city grows onto an unimproved tile for a turn or two, it's not that bad, only losing 1 or 2h, and we can even whip off that unimproved tile in slavery. There is some value in being able to switch tile improvements quickly but each worker costs 60h and ~0.5gpt, so try see how it is going to get that value back before you build each one.

[Donovan Zoi]

Thanks! Fingers crossed on bringing good news from the Inner Sea next turn as well.

My count of 19 was for troops in the immediate vicinity of Kunming, but I think we will have another 7-8 joining the fight by the time SD approaches it (if he even tries). I switched our HE city to Horchers for the moment, for their speed-to-front and flanking abilities. This won't be for too long, as we will soon be switching to Macemen there.

The one good thing about SD's stack is that there are only 10 units (I am leaving out the Axe and the Medic) that can kill one of our units or take a city. So I have confidence that we can do enough damage/death to those 10 to make it a non-factor to get shelled by his Cats. My guess is that SD knows this as well, and it will be us approaching Incense City to initiate hostilities at the appropriate time. We are adequately prepared for either outcome, I think, so time will tell.

I see your point on Workers, especially when I am proposing a good amount of whips in the coming turns anyway. I may revisit this when we make a move back to Serfdom in the near future, you know, once we've moved from it for a spell. Plus Workers in Macau are done with that island, and will be back on the mainland in just a few turns. We'll keep the whip strategy to units for now, and I'll take a closer look at Workers in our run-up to GA#3.

Theoretical question. It's much better to have three C1 units come out of a city than to have two C2 units, right? I was considering whipping Barracks in many cities before the units themselves, but that seems to be a waste when you take that math and multiply it by about 20 cities = 20 less units. The promo from Vassalage should suffice for now.

[The Black Sword]

Yeah, 3 units are better than 2 units with an extra promo for sure. But of course you have a barracks giving promotions to further units in the future too. I'd think of the Barracks like a production multiplier building - sort of an equivalent to a 10-20% hammer boost to military units. So for big cities with a lot of production, the barracks will be worth it for the future, but if you're whipping some island cities with no hammers of their own then you could skip it (and let those cities without barracks focus on boats too if possible).