Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[Sullla]

Apolyton not having Horseback Riding tech is a huge deal. This means that they currently have zero horse archers, zero knights, and zero stables. Yes, they can tech it now if they want, but they're starting from nothing, and any pop point put into a knight or stable whip isn't going into a drafted rifle. This is a major point, not some triviality. Apolyton's got a ways to go for cavs too: they don't have Aesthetics or anything behind it, which means they need at a minimum HBR, Aesthetics, Literature, Music, and Military Tradition, along with presumably paying back the several hundred gold they received from CivPlayers at some point.

We do not have Open Borders with either Apolyton or CivPlayers. (This is easily visible in the screenshots, FYI.) We currently only have Open Borders with CFC and WPC, which is why the overseas island cities are pulling so much weight for us. Both Apolyton and CivPlayers have a ton of EP on us (1100 and 1500 respectively) and we have about 25 EP invested in each of them. The ratios are hideously bad against both, it's about 160% with Apolyton due to their Great Spy usage earlier and about 130% with CivPlayers. They would both get huge discounts on anything espionage related right now. We will need to run counter-espionage missions pretty much non-stop with both teams; fortunately, counter-espionage mission is enormously effective both at making spy missions more expensive and catching spies. I will write more on the numbers of this when I have more time, maybe tomorrow. We're going to get a major surge in EP over the next dozen turns with so many courthouses finishing, and this problem will largely take care of itself over the long run, because EP is largely a case of more cities = more EP.

Zargon, I already have a non-Sentry war chariot scheduled to start moving through CFC's land in the near future, once it can get down there from the German front. We definitely want to be poking around and see what we can find. I disagree with nearly everything else in that post though; we're not swapping size 1 cities with one or two shields/turn over to catapults unless we're in a much more desperate situation than we are right now. And we'll get our espionage via passive EP gain from buildings, not running the slider. Commerce is our weak point right now, and it all needs to go into research, not espionage. We're up to 22 EP/turn right now from passive buildings, and that will continue to go up with time. For purely defensive stuff, it should be plenty.

[Bigger]

we don't have enough EP's to run counter-espionage into them right now, then

where have we been putting all our eps, then? surely not all into the German team?

[Nicolae Carpathia]

I'm not sure that Walls + Castles would be that worth it on our western front. Remember the EP lead they have on us, they can revolt us even with a stack of 2-movers. And I think they have good number of promoted 2-movers, they've had stables for a while and can chain-whip for a long time.

So, I propose our remaining war elephants take up zone defence near BbB, while our muskets take up zone defence near Gauntlet. While Gauntlet is going to fall, and will likely have to be abandoned, Apolyton's lack of 2-movers will hurt them as they won't be able to take advantage of cleared roads to kill our muskets on flatland.

Also, switch French Riviera to a Wealthbuild, as the Courthouse isn't that useful in a city that close to our capital. It's only what, 6gpt + 2eppt after it's completed, versus the 10gpt right now if it Wealthbuilds?

[Mardoc]

we don't have enough EP's to run counter-espionage right now

We don't have spies in place yet, either, though. A few turns to move them, 5 turns to get the discount, and we'll have enough. So long as they don't catch the spies, anyway.

where have we been putting all our eps, then? surely not all into the German team?

Until the past five turns or so when we've been building Courthouses, we've had all of 5 EP/turn. That's not a whole lot And how do you think we got graphs on CFC, CivFr, UniversCiv...

Courthouses might be enough if we only want to run Counterespionage against a couple teams and literally nothing else. Later on (like 20 turns from now) it may be worth building up a couple cities for serious EP production. I agree it's not worth running the slider, though.

[Ubercannon]

All our production cities should swap to cats unless they're finishing something this turn (like BbB's spy). Should we also swap cottage cities to cats? We'd probably have to whip them to get them out by turn 170 because most have like 5 hpt, but if they're waiting for turn 175, they'd come out in time.

I think it's a mistake to go heavy on cats here. The problem is, like I pointed out in the dark arts thread, , the game won't let you damage a rifleman past 70hp with collateral damage, and even at 70hp an unpromoted rifle has losing odds against a rifle. And to make things worse, getting all the rifles all the way down to 70 hp is difficult, since the collateral is randomly distributed and some will get wasted on targets that are below the threshold. It would be more cost efficient to build a relatively small number of catapults (maybe 1 for every 2 units they build) and put hammers instead into making sure we have enough hitters to 2v1 every rifle and 1v1 everything else.

[Zargon]

Er, yeah, if we can't get a cat out of the city before turn 170, don't bother. We've got 2 production cities in north Egypt, and I figured it would be worth it to ask. I don't know how fast they're adding hpt as they grow.

When I said run 10% espionage, I meant for one turn. We obviously wouldn't run it more than necessary to get out our counterespionage missions. Isn't the base cost like 100? Aren't we falling short here, even making 22 ept? We don't have the luxury of waiting 5 turns for the discount, either, unless you're willing to risk about 6 or 10% odds (depending on whether they CE'ed us) of getting caught per turn.

The point of wanting less cats and more hitters is fair enough, but it seems to me that
1) We can't easily trade cats for hitters. What we can draft is pretty much independent of how many cats we build. Sure, if we're hard up for more hitters, we can trade 2 cats for a knight, but there's no reasonable way to trade cats for muskets.

2) We aren't just building cats for the poly front, we're building them for 3 fronts. The back of the napkin tells me if we drop everything and build cats like I'm suggesting, we'll end up with somewhere around 40 by turn 175. Less by turn 170. Is that enough to stop 3 worst-case-size stacks? My intuition tells me maybe. It doesn't seem like a crazily high number, but that could be my inexperience talking.

So if the people better than me at Civ 4 deem exchanging cats for knights at 2:1 to be worth it, then let's do it. If it's a good deal to exchange a few cats for pikes to counter potential mounted units from CP and CFC, then let's do it. All I want is to not exchange things that will help us repel 3 stacks for things that won't. Generic cottage city with 5hpt? Won't produce anything in time, so do whatever. AO? Units please. MM's bank is the only exception I like.

And now a hopefully brighter observation: combat 1 pinch knights get good odds on rifles after only a little collateral, and are our best hitters by a mile, and we'll have a few on hand due to HF's 3 cats 1 knight rotation, and at least one will come back from the war with those promos. No idea if there's any other knights coming back who can still promote into pinch. If we want to trade cats for knights 2:1 as mentioned, we can set BbB to knights, and if we want more, HF can do it.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Draft thoughts for this turn:

Starfall - obviously draft
Gourmet Menu - draft
Seven Tribes - draft
Brick by Brick - don't draft. I would generally prefer to avoid draft/whips in this city because it grows onto the PH mines so slowly.
Cutting Edge - draftable, but this is the sixth best option in my opinion. Draft next turn, regrow, then swap the cottage to Tree Huggers for the PH mine (max hammers) and build units.
Frozen Jungle - draft. Let's hold off on the Courthouse until we know what CFC is going to do w/r/to the NAP. This city is a low economic priority with a very good food surplus (+10 at size 6, max food). We can draft hard here (until the happy cap, and even beyond in a pinch) without hurting our overall economy.
Let It Snow - draft.

Let's keep a preference for drafting first in cities furthest from the presumed front lines, so that as T170 gets nearer we can get a second draft from back lines areas to the front in time for the invasion. Also, would it be possible (or worth the effort) to get a table listing happy cap in draftable cities with a countdown timer for when the draft unhappiness ends? Last thing, where do we anticipate stacking our defenders against CivPlayers and separately against Apolyton? I'm assuming that Starfall is our Maginot Line against CFC. I'd like to have a clear idea of where and how far we have to send our drafted units so we can get a true timetable for when drafts would be expected to be "in time" to defend and so where we need to concentrate on sending our forces each turn. Mobilization logistics. Bleh.

Thanks for whatever info we can scrounge up from players logging in. Also, that picture that Ceil put up a while back listing which tiles are safe to hide units during transport movement to keep our stacks away from opponents with city visibility would be a good thing to have handy and keep in mind when moving our troops. I'll edit it in if I can find it.

Other stuff: When is the stone deal with WPC over?

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Edit: This post.

[waterbat]

must have somehow missed that post! thanks much Ceil / BGN!

[pindicator]

Yikes, with that kind of EP ratio they definitely have sight in our cities.

[Ceiliazul]

CivPlayers has had "investigate city" ability on us before ~t100.