Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[Nicolae Carpathia]

I also propose we switch French Riviera to wealthbuilding because a courthouse isn't really that hot in a city 5 tiles away from our capital. And perhaps Eastern Dealers too, the Market is 13 turns away, and will we really want to work merchants if there's a risk of getting a duplicate great merchant? Besides, there's only enough food for one more specialist, and we already have a spy slot spare. And something tells me that more EPs will be valuable.

[Lord Parkin]

Checked in on the game earlier. A few notes and questions:

- We'll gain 23 gpt after moving our remaining army back inside our borders, so we should do that ASAP.
- Poly and Civplayers have an insane amount of espionage on us. How long ago did they start pumping it into us - must be quite some time now? Bit concerning that they can likely see into most or all of our cities (and share the info with other civs). Makes me a bit uncomfortable. If war appears imminent we should try to only move our stacks to "hidden" tiles for a reduced chance of them knowing our troop distribution... at least that'll require a Spy to see rather than passive visibility.
- Mano y Mano is the only border city that CivPlayers could 2-move on the first turn of a war. Should probably be more than a Mace in there, though I presume that's being rectified along with other cities. When does their NAP cooldown with us officially end, by the way? (Or has it already ended?)
- Our research situation is far from ideal. I can't help but wince at the amount of units we'll lose fighting Rifles with technology an era behind. Every turn we can shave off getting that tech represents a significant amount of hammers saved that can instead be invested in economic recovery. My inclination would be to notch up the wealth builds if we still have time. Which turn do we anticipate being attacked on - T175, T170, sooner?
- I would be inclined to plan for CFC being involved in the upcoming war unless we hear something tangible from them soon. Perhaps that's just me being overcautious... I don't have much familiarity with our past dealings with them.

[T-hawk]

Which means that wealthbuilding does not actually help speed us towards Banking.

I want to strongly argue against any thoughts of that concept. We should build banks instead of Wealth. The payback time is very quick. Adventure One is producing 90 commerce. Assume 75% gold slider in the near future. The bank would be worth 90 * 75% * 50% = 34 gold per turn. So it takes only 6 turns of operation to pay back its own 200 hammer cost. We'll get to Rifling just as fast with banks as with Wealth.

Mansa's Muse obviously wants a bank right away too with the shrine. Not sure about other cities, but probably any with at least 50 commerce or so should push for the bank instead of wealth.

[Zargon]

I think until we have solid evidence to the contrary, we have to assume CFC is in on turn 175. Well, actually, they'll run EP on us turn 175 and then revolt Starfall turn 176.

... What are we going to do if we get revolted out of nationalism before we make it to rifling? Is that no-spy-revolt treaty still floating around?

You also have to add the build time to the payback time. The equation isn't bank now vs gold now, it's bank in X turns vs gold over X turns (effectively now, as long as we haven't made it to rifling in X turns).

A bank in MM is amazing. It's probably as good as Oxford will be in AO. But it will slow our march towards rifling compared against building wealth, and that's worth thinking about. That said, it might still be worth it.

AO probably won't break even on a bank either by the time we get rifling, but it will probably come close since it can build it much faster, which might make it worth it. Conceptually, it doesn't have to pay back 200 gold, it has to pay back 168 gold since wealth doesn't get the OR bonus.

[NobleHelium]

That assumes we'll actually finish the bank...

[darrelljs]

If anything is going to screw us, its our lack of experience with Espionage enabled (especially given the EP ratios with our predicted assailants).

Darrell

[Ubercannon]

Would a revolt to mercantilism be worthwhile after banking? Getting a free spy in every city with a courthouse could generate a lot of EP.

[Sullla]

Turn 162 - 1020AD

The end of the German team. Six rivals remain.



Here was the situation at the start of the turn. The Germans somehow produced another spearman in Westheim after producing a catapult the turn before (still not exactly sure how they were able to do that in a size 3 city) and upgraded their quechua into a spear. They attacked out of the city with their new spearman and killed our isolated knight, then attacked our stack with their catapult, losing and dealing collateral damage. We had three knights and a war chariot in the area to attack the single spear inside the city. The dice were not especially kind to us here, as we lost the 50/50 battle with our knight, then cleaned up:

Westheim
C2 knight vs C1 spear 54% (LOSE, 1.5 health)
C2/pinch knight C1 spear 99% (WIN)
CAPTURE CITY, 88 gold, granary

knight vs crippled spear 99% (WIN)

Apologies again for the poor image quality, I had to pull that off the Livestream because I didn't take a screenshot while playing. We kept Westheim, picking up 88 gold in the process and a granary inside the city. Not too bad.

Still, that was only the appetizer for this turn. The Germans moved all of their remaining units inside the captured WPC city of Huron River. They didn't really have anywhere else to go, but this meant that they were an extremely easy target to focus, everything inside a city with no cultural defenses whatsoever. Here's what that looked like:

Unfortunately, the stack of units scrolls off the interface on the left side of the screen, making it difficult to see them all. There were almost 30 German units inside, a mixture of mostly war elephants, catapults, horse archers, and axes. Our big stack highlighted in the picture began the turn two tiles east of Willhelmshaven. We had six workers in the area lay down the three tiles of road leading up to the German city. This meant that every single unit pictured, plus about eight more knights, were able to get in on the action.

Huron River
CR cat vs CG3 longbow 2% (LOSE, no hits)
CR cat vs CG3 longbow 2% (LOSE, 3 hits)
CR cat vs CG3 longbow 44% (LOSE, no hits)
CR cat vs CG3 longbow 44% (LOSE, 2 hits)
CR cat vs war elephant 30% (WITHDRAW)
CR cat vs war elephant 50% (WITHDRAW)
CR cat vs war elephant 52% (LOSE)
CR cat vs war elephant 73% (WITHDRAW)
CR cat vs war elephant 73% (WITHDRAW)
CR cat vs war elephant 74% (WITHDRAW)
CR cat vs war elephant 77% (WITHDRAW)

We started out by sending in the catapults. Because the Germans were inside a city, we could get a sizable combat bonus by taking City Raider promotions on the catapults, which we determined would be more useful than Barrage promotions. In most cases, the CR promotion was taking us from 25% -> 44% chance to withdraw, or later on 40% -> 73% chance to survive. One of those jumping points in the combat odds, in other words. This was more useful than a slight increase in collateral damage; we cared much more about catapults surviving the battle to fight again, even though all these City Raider catapults will probably look really strange when we're fighting in the open later on. Better than dying though!

So the first 4 cats all died, two of them failing to get in any hits at all on the monster CG3 longbow. (Why didn't the Germans whip more longbows instead of elephants? I'll discuss this more later.) The third cat had 44% chance to withdraw and didn't get even one hit on the longbow, yeesh. After that, we hit on a huge string of luck, withdrawing at 30% and again at 50%, dying at 50% odds, and then hitting four withdraws in a row at 70-75% odds. The net result was that we ended up losing 5 catapults in total while weakening all of the top defenders and collateraling the living daylights out of the rest of the stack. This was a very un-Multiplayer style of combat, much more like Singleplayer where the AI will stuff everything into a city to defend.

But it worked, because after we sent in the cats, it was mopup time, and the rivers ran red with German blood:

C2 knight vs C2 spear 99% (WIN)
knight vs catapult 99% (WIN with 2 hp)
knight vs catapult 99% (WIN)
C2 knight vs catapult 99% (WIN)
C2 knight vs catapult 99% (WIN)
C1 mace vs catapult 95% (WIN)
CR catapult vs longbow 98% (WITHDRAW)
C1 mace vs C1/shock axe 95% (WIN)
C1 mace vs catapult 98% (WIN)
C1 mace vs catapult 97% (WIN)
mace vs horse archer 98% (WIN)
mace vs elephant 99% (WIN)
mace vs crippled CG3 longbow 99% (WIN)
mace vs horse archer 99% (WIN)
mace vs horse archer 99% (WIN)
mace vs axe 99% (WIN)
mace vs war elephant 99% (WIN)
mace vs axe 99% (WIN)
mace vs horse archer 99% (WIN)
mace vs horse archer 99% (WIN)
mace vs war elephant 99% (WIN)
mace vs GG war elephant 99% (WIN)
mace vs GG war elephant #2 99% (WIN)
mace vs war elephant 99% (WIN)
C1/shock war elephant vs war elephant 99% (WIN)
C2 knight vs war elephant 99% (WIN)
C2 knight vs war elephant 99% (WIN)
C2 knight vs GG medic chariot 99% (WIN)
medic 3 war chariot vs chariot 99% (WIN)

We did not lose a single battle in that sequence, most of them with combat odds well above 99% for our attackers. We also picked up a lot of experience and Great General points in all of those victories. The screenshot above was towards the end of this process, as we killed one of the THREE German Great General units that they had attached as a result of their slaughter of WPC's various crap earlier.

By the time the dust cleared, there was a single unit left:



This is actually not the same CG3 longbow from earlier, but a different C3 one. Amusingly enough, we did not have a unit able to kill this longbow - exactly one unit short! Which was fine, since the whole idea was to let WPC take the city anyway, it being theirs and all that. Still, it's a bit funny that it worked out so well.

Here's the full combat log, just for fun. As always, read from bottom to top.




Lot of green on there. Not a whole lot of red. I also enjoyed seeing my archenemy Gaius Marius fall at the tail end of the fight. Seven-time consul my ass, he never won the grass crown.



We also are more than halfway to our next Great General, gaining almost 50 points this turn in the fighting. It's too bad that this wasn't in our territory; with the Great Wall, we would have gotten another Great General for sure.

Here's the overview of the area with the Germans effectively finished. I mentioned before the war that the Germans basically had two cores, one along each of their two river valleys in the south and in the northeast. This is the second one, and the non-tundra cities are all very valuable. We need about 15-20 turns to grow these locations up to size 8 or so and have them humming along working their food resources and all those riverside cottages. Will we get that time to make this area productive? Not so sure of that.

After we did all the hard work, WPC swept in and finished off the Germans as planned:





We are down to six competitors remaining in the game, and with WPC being totally irrelevant, there are basically five other teams to consider. Three of those five teams are thinking about invading us in the near future. I love full diplo games, don't you? The reward for outplaying other teams is getting dogpiled. Every. Single. Time. Well, we'll get into our response to all of that next turn.





Demographics from before and after the Germans were eliminated. As expected, the Rival Averages went up significantly once they were removed.

Let's take a minute here and reflect on this war before we move forward. Our longterm strategy worked out more or less exactly the way that we expected. We signed an NAP agreement lasting for roughly 80 turns with the Germans way back on T70 or so, designed to last through Turn 150. At the time, the Germans were fighting off WPC's early (stupid) attack and were eager to get a peace deal with their southern neighbor. We planned at the time to expand in peace to the natural frontiers of our civ, then tech to Nationalism and draft an army to eliminate our northern rival. Because the deal was so long-lasting, the Germans appeared to completely forget that the NAP would run out on T150, and didn't initiate their own buildup until about T148. We allied with WPC and hit the Germans from both sides. They were not ready, they were significantly behind in technology, and did not fare very well.

How do we grade the German performance? I would give them something like a B- or C+ on the American grading scale. Adequate to mediocre, I would say. They received a gift of ivory from CivFr, researched Feudalism on about the third turn of the war, and then revolted into Vassalage civic (Spiritual civ). For whatever reason, they chose to whip mostly war elephants instead of longbows, which was a huge mistake. What they should have done was 2 pop whip longbows every other turn from every city. They could have piled up 25+ longbows in a real hurry, all of them with two promos for CG2, and made our life a living hell. Keep a big stack in each city, force us to march our slow moving catapults + maces up to each city... and then right when we're going to attack, leave one longbow in the city and retreat back to the next one. Keep making us do that over and over again, stalling for time, and continue to whip out more and more and more longbows. We would almost certainly have had to sue for peace and exit the war if they had done this.

Instead, the Germans mostly whipped war elephants instead. Those units were good against WPC because of their higher base strength, but elephants get no defensive bonuses and had little chance to hold German cities against a determined attack. The Germans also stopped defending their cities against us halfway through the war, or only had a token defense, allowing us to blitz through them with knights and maces, albeit at heavy losses sometimes. We barely used our catapults until the final turn of the war, opting instead for speed, speed, and more speed.

The results were staggering in the end: we captured all 15 cities in the course of 13 turns, and effectively captured a 16th city in the form of Huron River. This wildly inflated our city count; when we settle our polar city next turn, we will plant our 35th city of the game. No other team has more than 20 cities. Our team made a major gamble, effectively risking our tech and population lead in a play to gain more territory. This could have backfired horribly in a failed attack - we would have given away our lead in the game built up over the first 130 turns. But it didn't, and we came out huge winners, now with overwhelming leads in everything except GNP. It will take ~25 turns to repair the economy, after which time our lead in every category should be virtually unassailable.

But we have to survive and hold our current territory first, and the other teams finally seem to be coming after us in a desperate attempt to slow us down. The next two dozen turns could quite possibly decide this game's fate. Stay tuned...

[SleepingMoogle]

If anything is going to screw us, its our lack of experience with Espionage enabled (especially given the EP ratios with our predicted assailants).

Darrell

Yes and no.. our NAP agreement with CFC basically rules out sabotage from them if the war's on at T175, and Apolyton is in Nationalism already. The one danger right now is CivPlayers, who has also invested a lot of EP in us and they haven't adopted Nationalism (or at least I don't recall reading anywhere that they do).

And even then, so far neither CivPlayers or Apolyton seems to have done a serious military buildup yet and CFC is still at war with CivFr. This can change of course, but the current state is not one of doom and gloom just yet.

[Sullla]

Darrell is always a pessimist. Here's the biggest reason for our team to look on the bright side:

Cities / Population
Realms Beyond: 34 cities / 196 pop
CFC: 20 cities / 151 pop
CivFr: 20 cities / 144 pop
UniversCiv: 18 cities / 141 pop
Apolyton: 19 cities / 124 pop
CivPlayers: 18 cities / 100ish pop
WPC: 10 cities / 73 pop

Note that we have 15 cities at size 1 or size 2. Room for growth. And this:

Beaker Count
Apolyton: 38.8k
Realms Beyond: 33.6k
CFC: 23.0k
CivPlayers: 22.6k
CivFr: 22.1k
UniversCiv: 21.1k
WPC: 4.8k

We lead everyone other than Apolyton by a wide margin, and Apolyton is only ahead because they used their Great Spy to steal 8000 beakers worth of tech + have been getting gold gifted to them each turn by CivPlayers. And there's also this:

Power
Realms Beyond: 914k
Rival Best (CivFr): 652k
Rival Average: 434k

We are still in really outstanding shape.