Intersite Game - Turn Discussion Thread

[NobleHelium]

Right now the bank is a 4-pop whip. I checked and we would lose more gold whipping it than not whipping it right now.

No-one has been talking about a 4-pop whip of the bank in MM. I've been talking about a 2-pop one, probably on T172. Without hurting our GP generation there.

I am clarifying that we cannot enact that plan yet.

[MWIN]

For spies, is the plan still to run a counter espionage mission against CIVPlayers on turn 170? If so, we need to keep southern spy stationary for some turns... Also, northern spy, we should should move in and out of CP lands so it won't be caught during turn roll over (Sulla posted this some time back). No point going deep into CP lands... CP ran a counter EP last turn and any spy will have 100% chance to get caught in 10 turns...

[pindicator]

Thanks for the pictures, ASM. They got me thinking about some alternatives.

Costalot
Like you said, the city can't be hit by knights without warning. But what if we move in with catapults and drafted muskets on t170 and take advantage of them leaving that jungle tile unchopped? If they're going to wait until t175 then let's try to catch them unprepared. It would take a C2 or pinch Cuir to get odds on an unpromoted musket in the jungle, and it's very possible they won't have those by then.

How many muskets and catapults could we have ready to move onto the jungle tile NE of Costalot on turn 170?

Cempoala
That isn't CivPlayer's only horse resource by chance, is it?

[kjn]

No, CivPlayers have a second horse - I think it's 1NW of Texcoco. They did build HAs and chariots before they settled Campoala in any case.

Another target I'm thinking of is their fur. We could load Sian (our W2 axe) and a musket onto a galley, and go burn that tile improvement - both Apolyton and CivPlayers are quite short on happy resources, so I think it makes sense to go after them, either with spies or with regular units (regular units preferable), especially if we can do a concerted effort and hit several resources at the same time. Force them to react to us, and split their forces.

[darrelljs]

Let's see Darrell.

More helpful. Thanks for taking the time to clarify your questions.

1) If we turn off tech, what do we spend gold on? Upgrading garrison units that we can't move?

Nothing. We save until we are ready to turn tech back on.

2) We're whipping the bank to produce more gold, yes? Why are we in a hurry to do that if we're turning off tech?

We can save more gold, and tech longer when we do turn it back on.

3) Just because we've accepted the fact that we're going to fight the war with a tech disadvantage does not mean that we should not be trying to remove or reduce said disadvantage if it's in any way feasible to do so. And I've already calculated the estimated time to Rifling.

Which neglected to account for our declining population and still showed a date far enough in the future that turning off tech now and stockpiling gold until we have enough saved is a good idea.

4) If we do not have a reliable plan to stem the tide yet, why should we be worrying about things in the far distant future? How do you know we won't lose so many cities that we won't have less pop than we do now?

I don't. I think we should focus everything on stemming the tide. I don't think we can depend on Rifling to do that based on the estimates.

5) Did you know that a Golden Age helps us produce units and potentially get even more military tech?

Yes.

Darrell

[antisocialmunky]

You guys should keep in mind that this is more a discussion for killing time. They'll probably be ready for something on T170. If we want to do some offensive actions, we should focus on:
1) Moves we could do on T170 either way - boating with Galleys.
2) Things that would delay enemy stack movement.

@pindicator - I don't think that's necessarily a good idea to go all in on Costalot. Its definitely on the crazy gambit side of things because we'll lose all cities west of the lake if we lose the stack (I'm assuming this would be the stack to defend BbB and this isn't some sort of secret stack that Nobelium has been hiding from us).

@kjn - Do you have pics of Sian?

[Ichabod]

When does the Apolyton NAP end? If it's in turn 170, I don't think we can afford to commit units to use against Civplayers on that turn. We need the units to defend against Rifles. From what I can gather, Civplayers don't have much ways to hurt us that much, especially if they are indeed going for a mounted stack, not a siege one. I think the units need to stay put where they can defend from more than one threat (which is already difficult/impossible), and I don't see how attacking Civplayers would help us.

Regarding a counter-espionage mission against Civplayers, I don't think there's a point to it anymore. They have like 200 EPs on us after the Nationalism steal and I don't think they produce EPs fast enough to do some major damage. If they want to waste hammers on spies, let them do it. A city revolt isn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things, after all (and I'm not sure if they actually have the EPs for that). I think tryng to find Civplayers stack is probably the best thing we can do with that spy. Knowing if they are amassing catapults or knights/horse archers can be a big deal, in my opinion (that's is worthy information even if our spy gets captured after it).

[Cornflakes]

So I finally got around to installing the mod because I wanted to get some pictures of the border areas. I was able to log in through the point where the game downloaded. Then I got an error message that crashed out of Civ immediately before I had time to read. In the brief instant I think I read something like "The save you are ... [something] ... is protected ..."

We aren't under any mod-enforced turn split are we?

EDIT: I tried a 2nd time with the same result and attempted to screenshot the error but missed the split-second window for the screenshot. The logins did register on civstats.

[Cornflakes]

Maybe this is related to overwriting the autosave? If that is the case I could try a unique nic by misspelling RaelmsBeyodn.

[pindicator]

I left out an important caveat to my proposal to attack Costalot. Actually, two important ones:

1) If Apolyton and CivPlayers attack on turn 170 or look like they are going to then I agree we shouldn't use slowmovers against Costalot. But there's been a number of people assuming that they are going to wait until turn 175 and all three attack at once. I don't think we should give them that luxury and we should attack on turn 170 if it looks like they are going to wait.

2) We should accompany the initial DOW and invasion with a ready-made diplo message from scooter. I trust Scooter to manage the details of that but the goal is to get a separate peace and crack the dogpile.

I guess it should also be made clear that if we think that CivPlayers won't attack us at all then we shouldn't do this. But I don't think anybody believes that.

Also, once we burn Costalot, our slow mover stack will be on a road network inside our culture. So it's not really that out of positioning to defend against Apolyton.

It's also possible that this is the wrong way to go about cracking the dogpile. Scooter is probably the best to guage the reaction of each team and if CivPlayers would become defiant under pressure like this or may cave instead. All the same, I think it's an idea worth looking at.