[SPOILERS] Small Wunders and Izzy of Inca: The fat lady sings

[MindyMcCready]

When I told you to fork defend it was more out of rule of thumb than actual belief that you'd be attacked. When you said that you weren't worried (because, duh Ichabod has no army,...) I was like 'yeah, can't argue with that'.

OMG, what the hell does Bacchus think he's doing? I can't understand why he would want to take a run at us. Hasn't he ever heard of 'enemy of my enemy'? What freaking game is he playing where hurting us gets him ahead? The revenge game? No that would be on Retep. The balance of power game? Well we're a good offset to his #1 threat Retep (who razed his city) as well as a limitation to the future superpower of Ichabod. There's no reason that I can think of that we shouldn't be the best of friends so long as Retep exists anyway.

Couldn't he guess that we're tying up a whole whack of Retep's troops? Gawd, if he looked at the power graph he should be able to see that all those axes that Retep's showing are probably not on his doorstep strictly because of us. And if we succeed against Retep in the future he'd have a good chance of getting some cities out of it via dogpile. Goodwill + allies and I don't think that I'd dispute a reasonable split of Retep's land. Bye-bye goodwill.

Man, if he would have razed that city it would have been hilarious! You would have stopped posting (and boy I can understand that!) so I would have dropped out as ded-lurker and told him that he's a freaking idiot.

I learned something today: I should definately push my point of view and not accept that you're the one playing the game. Its now clear to me that I haven't been doing enough of that :LOL:

[WilliamLP]

OMG, what the hell does Bacchus think he's doing?

I know, right! Maybe he just has no worries now with peace and decided to move some units around, not really intending to succeed but just grab something for free if we left it hanging. What was / is his best case? We had gotten an auto-spread and culture into Carmen, he got to take it over, and then we'd immediately take it back and kill his chariots? Or he'd raze and we'd re-settle?

Anyway, are you ready for a massive info dump? I have to say getting writing this early was kind of unintentional but the massive amount of map info we now have is pretty remarkable, together with the ability to control who gets it.




The incredible dearth of resources between us and Cheetah is great for us, since he probably won't prioritize setting that way. I don't see any horse. I have to say at first glance his immediate land isn't close to as good as ours.




Most of Ichabod. He has some very nice cities and note the marble / plain hill capital for a 3 hammer city tile!




His south, with horse and copper. I think we know roughly where his next two cities will be: for the horse, and for the awesome Gold / fp site to his immediate west. He is quite far away.




Amazingly Ichabod has great scouting of Retep's south! Bacchus's capital is 1SW of the horse, 10 tiles away from Retep. I can understand him being sandwiched. I guess by now we expected it was this bad just by his behaviour. His first city was for copper, directly away from us. I don't know if I've ever seen that many concentrated flood plains before. Needless to say that area is going to be extremely contested between those two.




Bacchus also has ivory in his capital.




Cheetah to us = 21 tiles!
Ichabod to us = 16
Bacchus to us = 17
Ichabod to Cheetah = 16 tiles

Holy crap, is Ichabod ever isolated! I can see why he'd run max Rexp. And Retep has every right to complain about the mapmaking, imo.

Our fourth city site is under no contention at all, as it turns out.

[WilliamLP]

Back to local view:




As it turns out despite screwing up with defense and underdefending, we dodged a bullet by fluke, so we still have a game! Basically if that archer hadn't killed a barb warrior the turn before and been able to promote to CG1, things might have been different! At any rate we really should have an archer or spear on that hill 2SW of Carmen for scouting, until the border pop, when the peak because a natural watchtower.

A spear is coming out this turn to sit on the fork tile. Worker micro in Carmen is shot to hell. City #4 will be planted in 3 turns: the settler is in Carmen now. And he'll go E-E-NE, then NE, then settle. Fortunately our eastern neighbours are so far (and no horse yet!) that all our cares are to the west at the moment.

Turandot is "slow building" a terrace, but it will actually be done in 2 turns from this screenshot. I want to focus on getting cities to the happy cap now, which won't take long at all. As I see it Turandot will be specced as a pure production city, working farms and mines, while Barbiere will get some cottages. This isn't the usual way. In the long run maybe it's not crazy to consider moving the capital, and making Turandot the HE city? Its production potential in full glory is pretty good.

It's maybe a dumb question, but I suppose you'd advise against trading maps with Bacchus right now? The full view of his empire would be interesting but we have an amazing advantage seeing the whole continent to the west.

[MindyMcCready]

It's probably obvious, but I assume you have cottages growing (to hamlet, village, town) in your model for computing total commerce? In practice, I don't know if anyone would actually start a whip cycle as soon as city finished a granary - they'd probably wait for it to grow to the happy cap first, but who knows, with a city that had a massive food surplus (like a farmed flood plain site) maybe it's even a good idea, I don't know.

Yes the spreadsheet calculates cottage growth. Basically since the tiles worked are in a specified order and the sheet tracks city size then the cottage 'knows' if its being worked each turn, has a turns-worked tracker and knows the commerce from the turns-worked.

The whip cycle starts in order to 1-pop whip complete the granary to completion (so 30H in the bank). If you're interested I can run the 2-pop versions. For the farms scenario that meant whipping on T19 (Szie4) and having a granary on T20. The FP scenario meant whipping on T22 to get the granry on T23.

If you want to add some more realism to the sceanrio (forest turn chop? what size you'd want to work the horse? build in borders pop) I can do that pretty easily now. Go-go sabermetrics!

Since our happy-cap is pretty high or should be once we get silver-furs-religion-temple online you'd basically be running the no-whip sceanrio if you wait to get to the happy cap first. For commerce that works pretty well and I can certainly investigate that if you want. Also, you've never actually posted the 'insides' of your cities so I'm just guessing at what the happy cap is.

I had the thought that I think we can now tell when retep roads the staging tile, because the graphic for the road on the plains hill south of it should change! Indirect scouting for the win, then.

OMG, so smart! That's awesome!

The N axe was diverted yet again on a heroic quest, but she killed another warrior and will get a promotion out of it, and will eventually get back to Barbiere.

Yay! Please feel free to name a unit in my honour. I have contributed pretty close to nothing to the arts in my lifetime -but I'm working on the Art of War. Try not to get me killed.

Questions:

1. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but what do you think about rushing a city next that claims wines somehow? Either tweaking the location of marble city (bleh) or trying to get a site like 3E1S of Carmen? (That would be "only" 8 tiles from our capital, fwiw.)

I don't want to. Looking at that map you posted that came from SlowCheetah, once we take that gold-corn location and block off the West from Retep we're in a commanding position for quality land relative to our 4 neighours anyway. Definately have what it takes to be a regional power. Anything that provokes Ichabod into an earlier confrontation with us (before we deal with Retep anyway) is going to hurt our chances of getting back into a winnable position.

2. What would you research next? The two main options are Math (for forest chops, and cornerstone tech for most of everything) or Poly->Mono (for free switch to Organized Religion and building multiplier, build missionaries). I'm kind of torn. Trying to blitz out Retep's capital with a catapult total war is an all or nothing play, obviously. And the way things are going now, it doesn't seem like cats for defense are going to be needed immediately.

Math for sure. As per above we have a good chance at this game due to land setup despite our Retep setback (and Bacchus' attempt grrrrrr). Whether we take an all-in to eliminate or substantially reduce the Retep threat or if we choose to develop while acting defensively I think that math route is better either way.
100% markets > 25% OR bonus
+2 happy from markets (fur + silks) > +1 from religion

Then add
+2 happy from calendar (silks + spices)
+ cats if needed/wanted.

My recommendation: Math --> Construction --> Take a bite or more out of retep --> Currency --> Other (Calendar for +2 happy, Mono, Monarchy, Aesthetics/Literacy, COL for Caste).

The case for construction:
If I were retep I'd be going 100% for military tech. That's his only way to have a chance at this game or at least have some fun. This is the calm before the storm while he pumps out settlers to get up to 4-5-6 cities to provide the basis for his military conquest attempt. Despite his focus we can still beat him to the military techs because of our 2 golds + development advantage.

I think that we should beeline construction and take his capital. That city is the only one that's going to have any real amount of culture in it, so we should be able to push the borders pretty quick if we can capture it. Then see what happens from there. Flanking damage looks to have been reduced relative to BTS so he'll have a tougher time taking us apart with HA should he go there first. So a beeline to catapults will be a distinct military advantage that we won't have for too long given my assumption of his dedication to military and military tech.

We have a couple advantages over our neighbours as I see it:
1. A natural land advantage in both size and quality
2. Cheap markets
3. High happy cap.

Grand strategy we need to grow & hold our land while expanding into our back-fill areas which is an advantage that our neighbours don't appear to have. Hurt retep when we have a military advantage; back-fill and grow our cities tall when we don't. Invest in our land-advantage cottages + cheap markets while strongly protecting our border with Ichabod while pressuring Retep.

As part of this I'd recommend saving those forests around Turandot in order to chop out a catapult army very quickly (plus you get the 50% hammers from math).

[WilliamLP]

Ready for the triple-post? We also have a full set of graphs of our neighbours now:




I intend to try hard to stay on top of this. I think GNP is king in this kind of game.






Note Retep switching to food-spec over prod now.




You know, it's kind of crazy to think that what we see is less than 25% of the world! This is a big game. Just imagine the micro involved trying to win this by domination.

[MindyMcCready]

Retep wanted no part of peace.

I'm really happy about this. I really want to prevent him from settling to our West. I see no advantage to peace - we're still going to have to respond 100% to any military build up. This is especially true now that we have great map knowledge.

We also may have a chance to raze his next city. It's likely that he'll be moving toward the horse site. We could be waiting for him there when he has no culture and probably isn't thinking that we'd make this move.

Bacchus's chariot threat and me saying "oh shit" and panicking threw my worker management way off - I moved a few back to make sure he wouldn't steal them if he took the city, which will slow some things down, unfortunately.

The next game I play (and hopefully more than 7 tiles from someone) I'm going to try and plan worker movements exactly more than one turn in advance. It's been a huge area that needs improvement for me, this game shows.

You won't hear any criticism from me on this. People in glass houses and all that. Well the worker management anyway. Had Retep accepted peace and planted some cities in awkard places you might have gotten an earfull. :LOL:

[MindyMcCready]

The incredible dearth of resources between us and Cheetah is great for us, since he probably won't prioritize setting that way. I don't see any horse. I have to say at first glance his immediate land isn't close to as good as ours.

Most of Ichabod. He has some very nice cities and note the marble / plain hill capital for a 3 hammer city tile!

Yeah, Cheetah is our new BFF. No disputable land between us, but disputable land between him and Ichabod. That's really good for us. Ichabod's land is very, very good and he's expanded to claim it all so quickly. That 3H plant,...wow.

This expanded map makes me think even more that construction first is key. We need to get Retep under control in order to dog pile Ichabod when Slowcheetah's good and ready.

His south, with horse and copper.

Damn him!

Amazingly Ichabod has great scouting of Retep's south! Bacchus's capital is 1SW of the horse, 10 tiles away from Retep. I can understand him being sandwiched. I guess by now we expected it was this bad just by his behaviour. His first city was for copper, directly away from us. I don't know if I've ever seen that many concentrated flood plains before. Needless to say that area is going to be extremely contested between those two.

Oh, man that's worse than the worst case scenario. He's really got nowhere to go. It's pretty surprising that he sent his troops in both directions.

Ok, so this means that Retep will only be getting to 4-5 cities before he has to resort to the military solution.

Bacchus also has ivory in his capital.

Well that's good. It'll help him be an idiot more.

Holy crap, is Ichabod ever isolated! I can see why he'd run max Rexp. And Retep has every right to complain about the mapmaking, imo.

Our fourth city site is under no contention at all, as it turns out.

Wow, Ichabod really does have good land. We have almost as good of a natural land split but he'll got more than his fair share of SlowCheetah's land and we'll have to be in a continuous battle with Retep.

One option: suggest an alliance WITH Retep against Bacchus. If Retep believe us (unlikely but possible) and heads fully in Bacchus' direction it could be a win-win as we head in Ichabod's direction. Not sure how in no-diplo that could be achieved.

PS: If we ever get into a war with Bacchus I really want to name one of the units "2 Chariots" or "2 Chariots and a Scout" to let him know what an idiot he was for that move. He totally could have avoided an international incident by using only the scout to peak at us.

[WilliamLP]

I'll tell you right now that I have a personality flaw where I don't accept the results of any calculation, especially a complex one, unless I've done it myself. So I'm interested in your spreadsheet stuff, but I'm unlikely to change my mind on anything based on it. If we considered it at great depth, and you got me to understand every single number and formula precisely and I had the chance to challenge every assumption that could change, but I'm not sure I have the energy for that in addition to simply playing this game.

Please feel free to name a unit in my honour. I have contributed pretty close to nothing to the arts in my lifetime -but I'm working on the Art of War. Try not to get me killed.

Sure!

I don't want to. Looking at that map you posted that came from SlowCheetah, once we take that gold-corn location and block off the West from Retep we're in a commanding position for quality land relative to our 4 neighours anyway. Definately have what it takes to be a regional power. Anything that provokes Ichabod into an earlier confrontation with us (before we deal with Retep anyway) is going to hurt our chances of getting back into a winnable position.

Does seeing how far Ichabod is, and seeing he doesn't have horse hooked yet, change your mind at all? I'm wondering if we can afford to let him decide where our eastern border will eventually be. That being said, we may have time to establish near cities and still push east some more.

Math for sure. As per above we have a good chance at this game due to land setup despite our Retep setback (and Bacchus' attempt grrrrrr). Whether we take an all-in to eliminate or substantially reduce the Retep threat or if we choose to develop while acting defensively I think that math route is better either way.
100% markets > 25% OR bonus
+2 happy from markets (fur + silks) > +1 from religion

Then add
+2 happy from calendar (silks + spices)
+ cats if needed/wanted.

Just devil's advocate:
- Poly + Mono is 100 + 120 adjusted beakers. Math 250, currency is 400, construction is 350. In relative terms getting the religious base first doesn't set us back that much.
- Missionaries help the spread of culture in new cities, and also speed the terrace for an immediate boost in city growth, whereas a new city won't build a market for a very long time if ever. (It's far from free though - missionaries are 40h)
- We are SPI so the switch to OR is free.

Still, cats are probably the most game changing war unit in the early ages. And currency is arguably the best economic tech. I've never been sold on markets as being a good building except in very exceptional cities (high commerce capital, shrine city) but I guess at 75 hammers it changes. So math next it is. I'm not sure about pure economics, but the clincher is that Monotheism has no game-changing unit attached.

I think that we should beeline construction and take his capital.

I wonder if we actually could do this. I'm not well versed at early game total war. But at the very least I'm guessing we could do some damage.

Grand strategy we need to grow & hold our land while expanding into our back-fill areas which is an advantage that our neighbours don't appear to have. Hurt retep when we have a military advantage; back-fill and grow our cities tall when we don't. Invest in our land-advantage cottages + cheap markets while strongly protecting our border with Ichabod while pressuring Retep.

I still question whether early warfare can ever beat someone who can just grow and lightly defend, and then bulk up with mace / cat / knight, but admittedly we're going to need an extremely strong military presence in this game no matter what happens.

As part of this I'd recommend saving those forests around Turandot in order to chop out a catapult army very quickly (plus you get the 50% hammers from math).

Yeah I guess if we're going math next it's worth saving some. I don't feel like there's any better time to use forests than to get an earlier start with workers and settlers though - the net hammers gained down the line seem to me to be more than what the forest would give to a military build directly. (Wonders might be different since timed hammers are much more precious, and whips uneconomical.)

[WilliamLP]

One option: suggest an alliance WITH Retep against Bacchus. If Retep believe us (unlikely but possible) and heads fully in Bacchus' direction it could be a win-win as we head in Ichabod's direction. Not sure how in no-diplo that could be achieved.

Yeah, I'm not sure if that's possible. Accepting peace might have been a start. Is there a "declare war on X" trade option with human diplo screens like with AIs, I wonder?

PS: If we ever get into a war with Bacchus I really want to name one of the units "2 Chariots" or "2 Chariots and a Scout" to let him know what an idiot he was for that move. He totally could have avoided an international incident by using only the scout to peak at us.

I don't think I can ever take these games personally. Full diplo could change that. I'd feel much more if he declared war, or tried to roll the dice but he didn't. If his intent was just to shake up our econ and micro a bit by making us react, he succeeded, and I might have done the same. I don't know if his chariots would be doing much otherwise. I do wonder how much he has to his south though.

[MindyMcCready]

At any rate we really should have an archer or spear on that hill 2SW of Carmen for scouting, until the border pop, when the peak because a natural watchtower.

I would advise just a spear 2SW of Carmen. 2-movers can't sneak up and kill a spear and 1-movers can't sneak up on a spear. Its the best unit to see something coming.

The other reason to keep it to one unit is that I am more concerned about Barbiere. We just don't have enough defense in there. Retep is completely able to concentrate his military from the new map info and he'll be resuming war before he makes it to 6 cities.

I also think that we need to lighten that west PFH down to only 1 unit (archer). Our military's are equal but we're spreading ours out a lot more while landing these 2 new cities + controlling our West. We're becoming more and more vunerable to an equivalent power Retep.

If Retep gets the info that we have, then logically this is his best time to attack Barbiere. Equivalent power might not be enough if we're spread out and our army is out of position.

A spear is coming out this turn to sit on the fork tile.

Great.

Just wondering about defense order now that Chariots have made an appearance. If we have both an archer and axe defending Barbiere who defends against an axe attack? My spreadsheet suggests that the axe defends, which is good but I want to be sure. The worse thing is if the archer defended allowing retep to follow up with chariots vs Axes.

Turandot is "slow building" a terrace, but it will actually be done in 2 turns from this screenshot. I want to focus on getting cities to the happy cap now, which won't take long at all. As I see it Turandot will be specced as a pure production city, working farms and mines, while Barbiere will get some cottages. This isn't the usual way. In the long run maybe it's not crazy to consider moving the capital, and making Turandot the HE city? Its production potential in full glory is pretty good.

Yeah, it's a great production city. SilverCity will be a distant memory if you spec the capital for HE. The gold-corn city could also be a decent capital. It should have more production available to build the palace then Barbiere if we go down that road. Hopefully, the safety of Barbiere won't be an issue when we come to that decision.

It's maybe a dumb question, but I suppose you'd advise against trading maps with Bacchus right now? The full view of his empire would be interesting but we have an amazing advantage seeing the whole continent to the west.

Putting aside Bacchus' questionable tactics and my own ruffled feathers,...I'm not sure what we gain by seeing Bacchus' West. Bacchus' scout met us very early so that's probably where he has the most map info and he's been a little busy since then by losing his city to retep. Also, presumably he sent those 2 chariots (+ scout) in our direction because he didn't have a softer target to his West. We are close to #1 power (although we may never be able to retaliate) so I'd have to guess if he had anyone else they would represent a softer target than us. Presumably then, he won't know anyone else or he's a bigger dum-dum than I'm currently estimating.

Aside from map info, we don't gain anything else do we? TRs?