Micro Thread

[plako]

Yeah. Anything worth mentioning going on?

[zakalwe]

Don't think so. Save some more gold and build stuff.

Some precision is required near OTR to get a settler and two workers aboard the galleon.

[plako]

What about doing little micro management for a change? We could try to maximise our military might on T200. To make things simpler we could go our cities through one by one. Granted there are shared tiles involved, but I think we can get pretty far with just focusing on 1 city at a time.

Our civics and tech progress have considerable effect on things, but I think something like this is quite reasonable timeline assumption:
T179: Communism finished
T180: Gunpowder finished - Adopt State Property
T182: GA finishes at EOT
T183: Replaceable Parts
T187: Rifling at EOT
T188: launch GA - Adopt Theocracy+Nationhood
T190: Chemistry
T194: Steel - Adopt Vassalage, Slavery and Police state (this are the most questionable civic switch option e.g. I'm not sure we're enough happiness to give up Representation)
T197: MilTra

Goal is to maximise the usefulness of every city we have mainly in the point of view of military on T200, but taking into account also other short term needs. To make things manageable we should handle cities 1 at a time (probably skipping the new born ones like the silver islands). There are overlapping tiles, but I think to keep things simple I would keep pretty free hands for everyone willing to try optimization.

Let's start with the former TEAM cities. This is Red bull this turn



This city doesn't have that many constraints. We want to draft it at least once and possibly twice. Draft should probably be among the 1st ones we do since this city is furthest away from the front lines. It will also finish stables this turn so it would seem most natural to build mainly mounted units from here on.

It has massive +5 unhappy faces from slaving (46T unhappiness accumulated) so it can't grow much. In current format it produces 14 base hammers in golden age (17 with forge) and out of golden age it will produce 10 base hammers (12 with forge). Current food box is 28/36 and it will grow to happiness cap in 2T. and there are 44/60 hammers invested on Stables. Meaning 1 hammer overflow from Stables. If wou think this city should have a religion (for happiness/promotion purposes) add also that to the plan. You can expect that at the earliest city could be converted in 5T. We can't convert all our cities.

It is 15 road tiles away from front lines i.e. it takes 5T from 1 movers and 2 1/2 turns from 2-movers to move between cities. Goal should be maximising the amount of units on WIFOM at T200 so that they can still move that turn.

So what would you do with this city? I'll post my thoughts a bit later. Everyone is free to log in and post new cities under inspection.

Maybe this could be even competition. The on who posts largest amount of best plans i.e. the ones to be applied, wins .

[plako]

Red Bull plan - I try to keep things rough and focus only on hammers and ignore food, pop growth and happiness. However this city desperately needs hindu spread so I would put it high in priority order.

My idea would be this:
Treb up to the end of turn T183 when the goal is to have 44 hammers on it (2 pop slave under Police state on T195) This should be easily doable e.g. with following hammers (These would be easy to micro manage):
T180 - Start treb - 1+17 = 18 hammers
T181 - 18+13=31
T182 - 31+13=44
2 pop whip on T195 with close to max overflow to finish Cannon then.
After this Musket->Rifle and finish it normally. ~Max hammers most of the time. We're out of GA 1st so 12 hammers and then in GA 20 hammers.
T183-187 12*5=70
T188 90 + Draft Rifle
T189 110 Finish rifle

After this another Rifle and prepare it to be 2 pop whippable under police state
T190-T193 20*3 = 60
T194 Switch to Knight 20 hammers
T195 2 pop whip Cannon
T196 2 pop whip Rifle
T197 overflow to Knight/Cavalry that should finish at EOT (I didn't really count if we've enough hammers, but I hope so)

So this would yield
T188 Drafted Rifle
T189 Slow built Rifle
T195 whipped Cannon
T196 whipped Rifle
T197 Overflowed Cavalry

A bit too many rifles for my taste. We might want to reconsider whether MilTra before Steel would be better. My idea there is that Cannons are slower so it is better to have it earlier, but possibility to avoid upgrading Knights to Cavalries is pretty important too.

[plako]

After seeing this I suspect that most of the cities will include pretty similar build structure. Prepare for 2-3*2pop whips so that you get 3 strong units ~T194-199 (depending on the distance from the frontlines) to maximise police state bonus. Now the question is how much do we value Cannons versus Cavalries. In the above plan we could finish Knight instead of rifle and then prepare to upgrade it later. However I'm afraid we won't have enough money to do many of these upgrades. If we go other way round timeline would be ~this:
T179: Communism finished
T180: Gunpowder finished - Adopt State Property
T182: GA finishes at EOT
T183: Replaceable Parts
T187: Rifling at EOT
T188: launch GA - Adopt Theocracy+Nationhood
T190: MilTra
T194: Chemistry - Adopt Vassalage, Slavery and Police state (this are the most questionable civic switch option e.g. I'm not sure we're enough happiness to give up Representation)
T197: Steel

I think I like this more. This would allow us to exchange one of the Rifles to Cavalry. Cannon might be too slow to get in place from here, but they would be able to do it from many of our cities.

So Red Bull wiht MilTRa before Steel:
We've at max 150 hammers to allocate 180-189 (Assuming we don't work Engineer out of Mercantilism). I would put 89 hammers (just to prevent it being finished) on Knight and 44 hammers on Treb (2 pop treb) during that time period Knight hammers should be done before Treb hammers (to avoid decay). There are 1 T worth of hammers that could be allocated towards Musket/Rifle during this time period. Then T190-192 I would finish Cav a manually and start Rifle and build it 2T (keep it 2 pop whippable ~60 hammers) and 1T for cavalry. Then on T196 2-pop whip rifle on T197 2-pop whip Cannon and overflow towards Cavalry. It should finish on T198.

So this would yield:
T188 Drafted Rifle
T192 Slow built cavalry
T196 whipped Rifle
T197 whipped Cannon
T198 Overflowed Cavalry

This feels superior so I think we should be going MilTra->Steel and follow the pattern described here at least for the cities that can hit ~15-20 base hammers on GA and ~10-15 out of it.

[zakalwe]

Good stuff, Plako. Red Bull is coastal, so it could also prebuild a caravel > frigate.

Do your whipping numbers factor in the Kremlin? I agree that it might make sense to build trebs instead of knights early on, until we can switch to cavalry production. The trebs are cheaper to upgrade and need longer to travel to the frontlines.

What would be nice is to have some general guidelines for what to build, i.e. build trebs to 44/90, etc. If you want to do detailed plans for each individual city, that is obviously even better, but I'm not sure I'd trust my turnplaying to keep up with it.

In any case, we could probably use the following:
- A tech plan.
- A golden age / civics plan. What's the logic for firing the next golden age on T188, exactly?
- A GP plan??
- Rough guidelines for what to build.
- A drafting plan for when to draft where.
- An attack plan. <-- let's not forget this one

You've already covered most of that, but I just wanted to enumerate all of it to keep things structured. I think if we had all of the above, we wouldn't necessarily need detailed plans for each city.

Anyway, sounds like you're getting quite engaged again now that another war is looming. If that means you'd like to take over turnplaying too, that would be perfectly fine with me. Just say the word.

[plako]

I'd prefer to keep my advisor ststaus at least as long as PB8 is rolling. 2 end game wars would just be too much to handle at the same time.

I'll give easy answers now and think about others a bit longer. I didn't yet take Kremlin into account. If we also have Police state those whips will be very productive. It is good idea to think all unit types through and what are the hammer counts needed to preserve 2 pop whip. Some care is also needed to avoid too much overflow that would be lost.

I see 2 main alternatives for tech plan. IMO we want Rifling 1st so we could start drafting early. Then the question is between Steel or MilTra after that. I didn't take Frigates into account, but that gives a 1 more item to put in the queue so it would make Steel 1st a bit more appealing.

I'd like to finish our Golden age on T200 and convert back to best economy civics we have. I'm not sure when is the next time after that to do it. Of course if we can be certain to get Cristo Redentor we've other options as terminal civics and could be more flexible with the timings.

4 man GA will be hard to get so I would prepare to generate Scientists or Merchants for bulbing and trade missions. While preparing for war I would keep only HN in the Great Person duty and focus everything else to other tasks.

Builds should be trebs/cannons, Knights/Cavalries, Muskets/Rifles and Frigates. Main point is to prepare good whips for the era when we've police state. They could be also 1 pop whips. It might actually be best to convert ASAP to Police state after 5T of drafting i.e. T193. That would give more room to bring units to front line in time.

I don't have attack plan. Their border cities are very exposed so we probably can snatch something right in the beginning and then go straight to capital with big SOD. Of course something more innovative should be at minimum considered.

We need to also make sure which units upgrade from the queues. e.g. Caravels won't be upgraded to Frigates. Knights and Muskets are upgraded. I'm not sure about trebs.

[plako]

I'm starting to get pretty decent idea what I think we should be doing. Here is yet another wall of text.

So basically Kremlin decreases whip costs 33%. This means ~50% more hammers/whip (Not this simple since also other multipliers affect to this). So typical 1 pop whips are (Civ does trunc to all these, but decimals are needed to evaluate slaving with more than 1 pop involved):
* Normal 30 (yeah I know )
* Forge or Police state 42.5
* Kremlin 44.77 (i.e. 30/0.67)
* Kremlin + either Forge or Police state 55.97
* Kremlin + both Forge and Police state 67.16

Kremlin magnifies also the effect of Forge and Police state. This means we've a quite hard time keeping things 2-pop whippable. I also tested what happens to trebs and they're automatically upgraded to Cannons.

Civic switches: T180 (State Property - Free Religion) - T188 Golden age (Theocracy - Nationhood) - T193 (Vassalage - Slavery - Police state) -T199 (Some useful "terminal civics")

Tech path: Gunpowder - Replaceable parts - Rifling (~T188) - MilTra - Chemistry - Steel (We should be here ~T196-197 - No guarantees though. Some of the civics are not that useful for our economy so we might need to do some optimization pre T193 when we've Representation still running)

As a reference here are hammer costs of key units:
Treb 80
Cannon 100 (upgrade from Treb->Cannon is the cheapest we can get so finishing few trebs is not bad idea)
Knight 90
Cavalry 120
Musketman 80
Rifle 110
Frigate 90

I suggest these as the potential tasks of a typical city:
T180-T189 Main alternatives:
* Build Knight up to 89 hammers
* Build treb up to 12 (Forge) or 24 (no Forge) hammers or alternatively build treb up to 79 hammers or finish it (Cannons are coming last so cities furthest away are best of finishing them so that they can be upgraded on T199 near the frontlines). Finishing should be done post T188
* Build Musket up to 42 (Forge) or 54 hammes (Rifle whip later)
* Draft sparingly so that there are still room for 2 pop whips later.
T190->
* Finish Knight as Cavalry
* Focus on getting 2 max overflow whips available in the era T193->
* Knights and trebs/Cannons should be highest in priority on in land cities
* In coastal cities queue Frigates after Chemistry, 22 hammers is enough for cities with Forge and 34 for cities without to enable good 2-pop whips
* Draft up to T193 - Not nescessary to Draft full round every turn. Kremlin whips are very effective also

[zakalwe]

Ok, I take it you are sure about all those whip numbers? They look very unintuitive to me.

Do we switch back to slavery now? Maybe not, as we're in a golden age and rarely want to whip anyway? But we do want OR until we switch to theocracy, right? Which means that spreading religion everywhere should be very doable. (Not sure whether or not to bother with the silver islands, though.)

[plako]

Kremlin makes things unintuitive. Basic 1-pop whip formula is 30*(1-1.5 i.e. production modifiers summed up)*1.4925 last number is 1/0.67 i.e. How Kremlin affects. At least things seemed to work like this in couple of tests.

I think we should stick with caste. However we could take also Free religion. We're building mostly units and that 10% more research could be quite useful. Pasifism is also not that bad in case we want to generate great persons, but that is the point where I gave up further planning.