Gaspar and NobleHelium - More Arguments About Buildings & Food.

[NobleHelium]

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the effectiveness of building monasteries. I struggled with that in PBEM17. Then, as you are now, I was SPI so in that case, AP cheap temples seem like no-brainers, especially if you build the UoS and SM.

But I'm not sure about Monasteries. It seems like you guys are moving through the tech tree pretty fast and I don't know how far away SM is, but that's the one I always struggle with.

Okay, so about monasteries. While we are in a very precarious position at the moment and thus may die a horrible death before our investments pay off, I think they're pretty good. I also don't think we're moving through the tech tree pretty fast. This has been a very slow game by RB standards (besides the greens games). Certainly the land does not compare at all to 17 which was very green and had lots of easy commerce from trade routes.

So here's what I like about monasteries.

1) They give 2 culture. This is not to be underestimated in border cities.
2) Three monasteries add up to about one library in terms of beakers. They cost twice as much, so that's bad but they pay off their hammer cost in 16 turns with the AP. A 16 turn payoff isn't great, but combined with the beakers it becomes decent.
3) They become a lot better with UoS, which is generally easily accessible and buildable with Stone. If we didn't have Stone I doubt we would have built the AP. The 44 base beakers from UoS might be a 30% increase in our bpt if we were to tech Paper next. Of course only half of that is from monasteries.

The most unfortunate thing about monasteries is that they obsolete at Scientific Method, but we're not really concerned about that because this is a very slow game as stated.

[Gaspar]

Because I'm up for no good reason and thinking about it...

Noble sort of touched on the crux of this game right now - the tech pace. We're on T91 and we're the second civ to get Civil Service. To our knowledge, nobody else is appreciably deeper in the tree. I believe the main players have between 10-12 cities and just about everybody is completely out of room.

After saying this I poked around a bit at my old games to see if the tech pace was appreciably different. And really it wasn't. PBEM14 was actually a little slower than this due to everyone being in crazy wars and me running the worst opening ever but the other games ran roughly at a similar pace. The thing is, this is usually around the point in the game where the tech pace takes off - the main-expansion phase is concluded, people are getting infrastructure down, the folks with SE's are bulbing themselves silly, the CE guys are starting to see towns pop up with greater frequency, everyone starts firing off their first golden ages, etc. And all that is happening here. Still, I expect the tech pace to be suppressed for three reasons:

• Nobody has enough land to go crazy.
  
• Because we're all cramped, everyone will have a larger standing army than normal ratcheting up expenses AND prioritize military techs over economic ones more than normal.
  
• There's little free commerce.
  

Unfortunately for us, we have absolutely the wrong set-up for this map. We're still running a cottage focused hybrid because we missed out on mids. Ultimately, because there is less commerce all around, the 3 FIN guys +1 matters a lot more than it would on a map with lots of IC-TRs to be had, lots of land to take advantage of using better, etc. I think we made some wrong calls - maybe we should have gone after GLH, but I actually think we've played pretty well. Our micro has been tight, we've had one focused goal after another. We missed Mids but we made a conscious decision to try and land it without crippling our development - Dave crippled his to land it. He might catch up due to metagame concerns, but that's not something to be relied on.

What we've tried to balance this with is nickel and diming stuff. We've run a lot of wealth. We're tweaking here and there and pushing specs on the edges to nail down key techs just a bit faster. We decided to go the monk route because it pays on the edges. We went for a Bureaucademy because its the easiest way to steal some commerce on a map without a lot of it. Little things like that. And we've competed to this point, we're 100-ish beakers ahead of Dave, probably a tech or two-ish behind Commodore and Ichabod. At the end of the day though, we probably can't win without screw ups on our opponents part for the following reasons:

• Its obvious we're going to blood feud with Commodore all game, resulting in sub-optimal tech choices, a heavily militarized border and every game decision having to be made through a prism of fear. The other blood feud in the game is between Ichabod and Yuri, which is laughable because Ichabod will clearly clean him out without difficulty. Dave gets off scot free.
  
• Fin is very powerful on map with limited commerce.
  
• We need the free Taj GA to make up for the above shortfalls, and there's pretty much no way we can land it and not get killed by Commodore because we neglected military tech.
  

So anyway, right now we're still pushing our rock up the mountain but it just sort of feels like wrong leader, wrong opponents, wrong map. If anyone has any suggestions we're super open to them.

[NobleHelium]

We are the third civ to Civil Service. We are slightly behind davy now because he bulbed Philosophy.

[CFCJesterFool]

I don't get the *fear* aspect at all. Globe Theatre + Cho-ku-nu + seige = bye bye Commodore. Beeline Machinery->Engineering then research Drama. Whip Theatres into units if you have to but get GT up. The main reason GT is so important is so you don't have to destroy your economy to put together an overwhelming army. You can whip non-commerce tiles from the majority of your cities to contribute but the bulk would come from the GT city which you whip every turn. Hit Commodore with 30+ units and take his land...much better than waiting for him to get an insurmountable tech lead.

[Gaspar]

Well, we're spiritual, so the revolution really evaporated, Mr. Kafka.

I don't get the *fear* aspect at all. Globe Theatre + Cho-ku-nu + seige = bye bye Commodore. Beeline Machinery->Engineering then research Drama. Whip Theatres into units if you have to but get GT up. The main reason GT is so important is so you don't have to destroy your economy to put together an overwhelming army. You can whip non-commerce tiles from the majority of your cities to contribute but the bulk would come from the GT city which you whip every turn. Hit Commodore with 30+ units and take his land...much better than waiting for him to get an insurmountable tech lead.

Wanted to touch on this first - Noble and I bantered a bit about this during this turn. I think the only reason I'm not all over that is that CKNs are pretty darned nice and versatile units but they're just shitty crossbows on defense. And nobody wants to get stuck with X-bows in the open against Knights. Which is what I forsee happening - probably take Kiki, get murdered on the way to Sasha. I'd actually like to get some opinions from others though - am I underestimating CKNs?

The real crux of this issue is this:



Hmm, let's see which of your neighbors would you be aiming to attack? Mr. Purple and his nice flat power line or us?

Anyway, news of the turn:



We did the double swap to HR/Bureau. HR really won't have any impact for us this game unless we have to go crazy slaving somewhere before the game is out. Bureau on the other hand - handy. We went up about 20 beakers breakeven, 40@ max slider with the switch. So that's good. Here's the Bureaucrapital in all it's mediocre glory:



We're running the peculiar 30% slider atm because we can 2t Paper at roughly 55% so we're running 30% this turn followed by something like 90% next turn in case someone techs it and gets us a discount, plus a couple monasteries completed this turn. Or as I like to call it, NobleScience®.

This is probably mean, but I found this hilarious. Borders resolve at full EOT, so this happened:



The funny part is really that that's the only food resource that city has and he just gets to improving it in time for us steal the tile with a city we planted later's THIRD ring. Just a testament to why you shouldn't play 5 games at once and spend 7 minutes a turn.

Here's demos. Considering Ichabod's in a GA, we're really not in terrible shape. Its just the tech issue - ours looks better even @30% there because Paper is a double arrow tech.

[CFCJesterFool]

Umm...knights don't fare so well against pikes. That's why I said beeline Machinery->Engineering. I suppose my meaning would have been clearer by saying "cho-ko-nu + pike + maceman + treb". I don't particularly like medieval war (prefer Cuirs) but it is quite effective when done right. Cho-ko-nu's just make it much easier (you don't need to sack as many trebs since the Cho-ko do collateral themselves).

[Merovech]

Why are you so sure Commodore will attack you? If you were in his position, you wouldn't, right?

[NobleHelium]

Just noticed that Commodore is sending Sugar to davy for Spices. And he doesn't even have a second source of Sugar. What the fuck?

We're pretty sure because Commodore has been an insufferable jackass all game. For no discernable reason. For example, he spent 120 EPs on us before spending them on anyone else. And then he kept spending them on us again later before getting graphs on everyone.

[Gaspar]

Why are you so sure Commodore will attack you? If you were in his position, you wouldn't, right?

Just noticed that Commodore is sending Sugar to davy for Spices. And he doesn't even have a second source of Sugar. What the fuck?

Second quote pretty much answers the first. Logically the thing for Commodore to do is tech Knights and eat Dave, who is frantically trying to catch up and has built no military. Not to mention he has the second best wonder out there to capture in his capital (in fairness, we have the best.) If we saw evidence of that happening, we'd probably shift gears and go clean up Yuri which is logically what we should be doing rather than worrying about Commodore.

The problem with Holy Roman-Chinese relations is basically twofold:

• Commodore knows he pink dotted us and hence is waiting for the other shoe to drop. Then Commodore being Commodore means he'd rather sell out for attacking in an unproductive war for sure rather than gamble on the chance he'd have to defend in one.
  
• Commodore pink dotted us and hence we'll always want to kill him given the opportunity, so he's right to feel that way about us.
  

So until we can collectively decide to be rational and realize we have better things to do with our time and hammers, we'll be in this giant Mexican standoff.

And really as far as slaving ourselves silly to kill Commodore - I think that will happen before the game is over, but I see it being more along the lines of Cuirs or Cavs. Time will tell, I suppose.

[Merovech]

So until we can collectively decide to be rational and realize we have better things to do with our time and hammers, we'll be in this giant Mexican standoff.

And in an AI-only diplo game, neither of you would ever be able to truly trust that the other has become rational, forcing both of you to waste hammers and beakers and eventually food. That stinks.