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

[MindyMcCready]

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.

Hahaha, I have the same disorder which is why I had to build the spreadsheet. And yeah, only built the spreadsheet because I wasn't playing any games.

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.

It does a bit, but I still perfer not sticking our necks and resources in that direction.

I'm more concerned with having to work hard to re-take our West than own one more streteched out city. Planting that spreads our military thinner and will make it harder to for us to exert miltiary in Retep's direction. Icahbod's going to be in a dispute mode with SlowCheetah. I guess that i'd prefer that he spends his military in that direction while we spend our miltiary in Retep's direction.

Later, we could take a run at Ichabod with the intent of capturing any city he plants around that location. Or wait until Ichabod and SlowCheetah start having at it and try an opportunistic stab at that point.

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.

Markets are really good in this game because of the +2 happy (post Calendar and furs hookup). 2 MP axes cost you 70H for +2 happy but have maintenance. A missionary cost 40H for +1 happy (+ other benefits - auto spread opportunity cost). Half price temple costs you 40H for +1 happy (we need one of those to get our Great Prophet started).

This is the cheapest happy that we can get our hands on (edit: well I guess we have Quechas but I prefer to not lose my military flexibility in happiness + maintenance costs) so I'd disagree that we wouldn't want one in all of our cities very quickly. And when we crash our economy, the 25% multiplier times high % on commerce (or high amount of time on 0% science) will provide more beakers than a 90H library can provide. So I suspect that every city should have a market almost immediately after the granary and before a library or courthouse.

So full steam ahead towards the crashed economy!

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.

I have ONE experience with offensive warfare. When I ded-lurked AT in PB9 he wasn't much for going on the attack but we did take a couple of failed runs at Jowy. We failed (ie retreated) for a couple of reasons:
- Our army consisted of mainly defensive longbows going up against Str8 elephants.
- It took quite a few turns to march through Jowy's culture giving him time to reposition and whip like crazy. Defender advantage is substantial if given enough time to react.
- With tech trading on, other nations interested in maintaining the balance of power would feed him tech so we couldn't maintain any military tech advantage
- Jowy had the ability to make cats and Horse archers so if we stayed too long to drive down the 100% culture we ran the risk of a total stack loss.
- During the 2nd battle, Ballista Elephants slaughtered our invading Knights. Knights just couldn't be a factor in any offensive battle.
- Without the ability to use 2-movers you can't fork his cities. This means that you must take on his full power and overwhelm it and that's difficult with the defender advantage. AT and I had some options to fork via navy but disagreements on how and when to execute the battle complicated things.
-Being a pacifist AT wasn't very committed to war. The decision to go to war must be an economy-wide decision. All or nothing,....battles are decided on critical mass and AT didn't really have that mindset.


So the keys to success wll be:
- hit him before he has cats
- hit him before he has ballistaphants
- hide our power by 3/4 building a bunch of units and then whip them all to completion giving him very little time to react to our power.
- use our forests to very quickly get an army in place for fewer turns until the battle begins.
- fork his cities if at all possible. Make him split his defenses.
- attack with speed.
- commit the whole economy for a short period of time.
- Ensure that we are at war prior to our invasion to ensure that he can't see our unit positioning.
- If we can prevent him from chopping his forests that removes much of our risk of a stack loss.

I'd say that if we're serious we can break his capital. And judging by his map his 4-6 future cities will be really, really vunerable after that.

I still quesion 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.

We almost certainly can't keep up with someone who can just grow and lightly defend. But we don't have that option in my opinion so a successful war is our next best choice. Especially if it's on our terms. This will probably be or only chance at a war on our terms once he gets ballistaphants.

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.)

Sure. My point is that those forest and the immediate power build up they provide could make all the difference in critical mass. Retep will see us whipping our cities like mad. Military-timed forest chops will not be so obvious. Especially chop forest into axe, switch production, chop forest into chariot swtich production, chop forest into catapult switch production. Whip them all out and move them to the front lines. This is very tough to defend against and could mean the difference between a swift decisive taking of Retep's 4-6 cities and being bogged down in a game killing war.

To me that trumps most other considerations.

[MindyMcCready]

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.

Alright, I'll calm down. Its just that his move seems so counter-productive to me its frustrating. He didn't move those chariots there by accident,...I consider that he took a look at the dice but didn't like the odds. To me this is no different than declaring war and razing our city. He would have done it if he could have.,...and for virtually no gain whatsoever either relatively or absolutely. That is the definition of spite.

Its true, I would be a highly vengeful player to those who attacked me. For the most part it'd be role-playing rather than getting mad. But the real Mindy McCready would have uttered some *serious* profanities in this, or any, situation. :LOL:

[MindyMcCready]

Retep/Pedro whipped last turn. I repeat my warning that we're underdefending Barbiere.

[MindyMcCready]

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.

Let's come back to this later. I might have answered a little hastily before really looking at the map. 4E-1S on the wines is a very good city and we can protect all 3 cities from 1 defensive fork location. We'd have the ability to react but we could still be overwhelmed though sheer numbers due to our military requirements guarding the Retep border.

If you're interested in an all-in offensive war with Retep, then I'd still lean to not over-expanding in that direction. If instead you're hoping to peacefully out-expand Retep then it could be planted and hopefully defended.

[WilliamLP]

I have to think about the big war. I will say that this is about as interested in a war near turn 100 as I ever could be. The starts are kind of aligned for it. I don't care to play for any goal other than having a good relative standing in the world, so that's the real question to me.

It matters that the east neighbours are so far away to make a counterstrike hard, and also that there's nobody to the west to grab land while we're fighting, and if (big if) we could take him out we'd have a monopoly on a large and really nice chunk of the continent. Also catapults vs no catapults is about as big an edge as there ever is in Civ 4.

As it is, we still have to focus on economy right now anyway, since math alone at 100% is taking 11 turns right now.

[WilliamLP]

Oh man this game...







Well Cheetah isn't really our problem. He just got owned by barbs!

But what the hell is this?




What does Ichabod think he's doing over here? He's going to settle on that hill I think with just a warrior! Now I'm a reasonable sort of person but there's no way I'm going to let that fly. An axe is heading over, and Carmen is going to chop and whip an axe or two instead of a terrace first. Barbiere will double chop a couple of axes, and Turndot will build an axe after its Terrace finishes this turn.

Unfortunately I didn't notice the settler until after moving our settler, which was not a good move. It's on the gold with an archer, so the archer is tied to defending it from cheetah's warrior. My preliminary scan of the map was too hasty. Another chance for me to learn from noob mistakes, or something, heh.

At home we're kind of under-defended, but we do have 2 axes and and archer, with the ability to whip walls. And we have more to come soon, and we don't face the 1-turn attack threat since we see the road.

[MindyMcCready]

Well Cheetah isn't really our problem. He just got owned by barbs!

Gawd, jeez,...any hope of him balancing out Ichabod is getting remote.

But what the hell is this?

Oh, man just don't go there guy. Audacious and all but at least I understand why he's trying to do it unlike Bacchus.

Options:

1. OPERATION CLEAR SIGNAL:
DOW him right now to let him know exactly how we feel about that attempted plant. He might back off. While this would be ideal for our city plant, it let's him off the hook which I'd probably prefer to hurt him the 180H if we could.

2. OPERATION WIN-WIN
Let him settle. Then offer 12 gold per turn in exchange for the city while we simultaneously show up with our assembled axes/units. We might get to keep our axes + the city and Ichabod's feather's might not be so ruffled.

3. OPERATION DOUBLE DOWN: After running OPERATION WIN-WIN, we can use our other settler to plant the wines since the settler and the troops would be in the area. I'm pretty sure that we'd need to heavily guard that border after that :LOL: as well as make a whole bunch of troops to guard against Retep. Definately a high-risk play, but one that been handed to us.

4. OPERATION ENTRAPMENT: A variant on OPERATION DOUBLE DOWN.
Let him settle. Move our settler to the wines location. This is our new front line city with Ichabod. Then run OPERATION WIN-WIN. Demand the city for 120G. Ichabod will have a heck of a time trying to keep that city either before or after we get construction. I'd settle on the wines for a nice, flatland killing field in front of that city but it depends if he settles on the Plains hill or the desert hill or other.

5. OPERATION STRAIGHT UP
Go in fast with the archer + 2 quechas. A 0XP archer has 40% odd on a C1 warrior in city with hill. 74% odds on the warrior if we can catch him before the city is settled.

6. OPERATION PUNISHER
Optional expansion to any of the above miltary solutions. Send the quechas to scout. If he's not thinking about us being Inca we might catch some incoming archers on flatland. He's almost certainly going to settle on either the plains hill or the desert hill so he'll probably be bringing archers. There's not many but a couple of forests which might give our WII quecha its 10XP. But we'd have to be mindful of chariots.

An axe is heading over, and Carmen is going to chop and whip an axe or two instead of a terrace first. Barbiere will double chop a couple of axes, and Turndot will build an axe after its Terrace finishes this turn.

We really need the terrace in Carmen. That city's really vunerable until we get culture. Do we have any alternatives? And our requirements will depend on what option you'd lean towards.

Remember that Ichabod has horses and that Chariots would be his fastest way to reinforce the city. I'd start moving the spear in that direction.

so the archer is tied to defending it from cheetah's warrior.

Yeah, I don't doubt that Cheetah would take a swipe at us the way this game is going despite us being natural allies against Ichabod. It's that darn score of yours. In retrospect Bacchus probably just looked at the score and said 'that's the guy to kill' without assessing our ability to grow and hold land relative to Ichabod. If not for his warrior it would be pretty clear what we need to do. There's nothing that we can do to force 10T of peace is there? DOW Cheetah and immediately offer peace? Offer 1 gold for peace? Will that bind him?

My preliminary scan of the map was too hasty. Another chance for me to learn from noob mistakes, or something, heh.

At home we're kind of under-defended, but we do have 2 axes and and archer, with the ability to whip walls. And we have more to come soon, and we don't face the 1-turn attack threat since we see the road.

If we suddenly see a road there we have only 1 turn to react. Well 2 turns to move units but only 1 turn to whip before the hammer drops.

[MindyMcCready]

Regarding the DOW on Cheetah + reoffer with 1 gold. We're not at war so you could log in anytime without this being a double move. I think,...?

[MindyMcCready]

Thinking this over again, we desperately need the Terrace in Carmen. We need the defensive bonus, we need the cultural vision and contorl and we need those horses. That's a lot of production demands from strictly existing in our own sphere of influence. :LOL:

[MindyMcCready]

Next consideration: Ichabod is Shaka of Greece.

This is a really, really strong combination probably overall better than our combo and certainly better for this time period. Aggressive super culture building barracks + the awesome expansive that we share. Aggressive is really overpowered: The culture alone on barracks would have probably been enough but the -25% city maintenance means that he's not going to be hurt by the expansion as much. And he'll also get cheap stables when the time comes. Jeez.

Then there's the Phalanx which will make chariots useless. We'll need horse archers to deal with these effectively and/or our pre-determined catapults. He's definately got a military advantage over us in the near term.

It would be nice if we had a cultural advantage over him with the Terrace, but we don't (or else a modest advantage).