[SPOILERS] Scooticator and Pindooter give a sporting try

[NobleHelium]

By the way I'm convinced that Zed-F knows more about the empire than either of you individually, if not combined.

[pindicator]

By the way I'm convinced that Zed-F knows more about the empire than either of you individually, if not combined.

This is so true. We read & write reports and then forget what we were doing. He remembers all


Edit: Speaking of which, I jumped into the game and switched Valiants to a work boat since scooter forgot about that

[Zed-F]

Going back to reread a time or two does tend to jog the memory

I don't find the spammy nature of the thread to be a large barrier; short spammy posts without images are very skippable.

[pindicator]

It looks like machinery will finish in 5 turns, just as quickly as our great person is done.  So when we start the golden age we'll want to start building zerkers with our GA production, and continue building zerkers until we get Guilds.  Per last turn's screenshot our breakeven GNP is 171bpt at 50%.   We should be almost done with machinery before the GA starts.  I think we'll get close but fall just short.

Lets say that we can average 300bpt with bureaucracy and the golden age.  (That's a 75% increase over our current bpt so it may be a bit on the high end of estimates, but bureau-cademy capital plus a few markets and courthouses finishing may get us there.)  If we average 300bpt during the golden age that will give us enough beakers to come close to finishings Guilds but not quite there - something like 1 or 2 turns short.

After that the problem becomes quickly getting a bunch of knights built so we can attack.  I think we can either:

• build HAs and upgrade them (but upgrades are [hammer cost] x 2 + 30g, so that would be 130g per HA upgrade)
  
• use wealth builds to speed up our tech rate
  
• start the attack later while we naturally build knights
  
• swap out of caste at the end of the golden age to slave knights
  
• use HAs in the first strike and follow-up with knights.

I don't like using wealth or swapping out of caste.  We'll have lots of things to build so i think we need to use hammers for hammer-things.  And swapping out of caste seems like a long-term losing proposal.  So my vote is to use primarily HAs and a handful of knights in the opening attack (along with the zerkers and boats we're already planning on).

I think this also means diverting to Theology to adopt Theocracy at the end of the golden age is out.  There aren't enough beakers to do it unless we delay guilds by another 2 - 3 turns.  And really, keeping Org Religion may be better considering we're going to need to build some missionaries later on.

Btw, dtay swapped to Bureaucracy last turn.  His GNP is now double ours.
In a way I'm glad - let him be the tall poppy.  But still, super strong showing from dtay early on.  When the t125 power rankings come out there's no doubt who will be #1

[Zed-F]

Didn't Noble propose Construction instead of Theology and cats instead of HAs awhile back? Did you decide against those?

[NobleHelium]

I didn't really propose, I thought cats were already part of the game plan.

[pindicator]

They could be, but that's a different strategy for an attack.  And I suppose if we aren't going to wait for Guilds then we will want to go to Construction for some catapults.  (And if I really want to get technical, I'll say that my original idea was to go Construction -> Engineering after Machinery but I'm deferring to my partner's preference of Guilds.)

Really, it's coming full circle to the HA vs. Knight question again:

Option 1 - blitz on the opening turn with HAs and zerkers against the 3 border cities.  Follow up with zerker/HA/Ele/catapult stacks and zerkers on the coast

Option 2 - tech to knights.  Blitz the bordering cities with knights instead of HA and continue to race to the capital

Really, scooter's been advocating #2 all along.  I just keep trying to subvert it into #1 because we won't have Guilds until after the GA is done and I'm impatient to conquer Nakor (we had already eliminated him by now in pb8!).  Funny thing is I didn't realize that was what I was doing until I wrote this post.

So since I've agreed to #2, we'll be teching Construction after Guilds I think.  But I still don't think we're going to have a lot of spots where cats are going to be useful.  They'll be useful where he choose to bunch up forces and make a stand, but aside from that we will want to use the speed of knights & HAs so he isn't able to have time to put together a defense.

And this has me re-thinking putting some Wealth builds together to speed up Guilds.  Not sure where those would come from but research is the main bottleneck for this plan.

[SevenSpirits]

I didn't really propose, I thought cats were already part of the game plan.

[Ceiliazul]

lol! he's so getting slapped

[Zed-F]

I dunno, my daughter would go for that kind of proposal if she were old enough to be interested