Mikehendi Pitboss 16 Thread

[Tredje]

I am enjoying these reports, sir.

[Mikehendi]

This was a pretty uneventful turn. Axe continued to chase after the barb warrior, cities growing, etc.



The current turn (Turn 70) was more interesting. The barb warrior moved northwest into the forest, which did nothing to stop our axe from killing him. Hopefully this clears the way for our scout to keep moving forward. I'll send the axe onto the grassland hill next turn to heal and keep watch for anything Bantams might be sending my way.



This is the overhead culture map. Bantams founded his third city at the end of Turn 68, and we don't know exactly where it's located. It can't be anywhere to the east of La Rochelle or we would have seen it. That means it has to be either west of Persepolis (most likely) or alternately off in the far east, right up against the borders of Gavagai. That would be our dream scenario, Bantams and Gavagai fighting and giving us a free hand to expand in peace. Probably unlikely though.

There was a very small detail in that first picture that I almost overlooked: we no longer have a little "question mark" next to the Hashoosh / Dhalphir team. Apparently we made contact with them this turn! Must have been when Hashoosh was logged in, since that wasn't the case at the start of this turn. They must have made contact with a unit and then pulled back, because their cultural borders aren't visible anywhere on our screen. I wondered if it was in the far east next to our scout, or if it was in the west across the water by Goreripper. Fortunately, we could answer that question by looking at the F4 diplo screen:



Hashoosh has no contact with Bantams or Gavagai, must be on Goreripper's landmass. Oh, and they've already been at war! The Ottoman team apparently declared war at some point in the past, and not that long ago because there was still 1 point of war weariness between them. They have since made peace though. In any case, no cities changed hands, and they've killed their mutual trade routes for the next 50 turns. I doubt we'll know what really happened until after the game ends.



Demos are about the same as they've been for a while now. I'm still extremely worried about Sevenspirits, who continues to grow and tech at a frightening rate. That team is the clear favorite to win this game, we're likely the second place team.

Making matter worse, Bantams is probably planning on rushing someone soon, and we are the most likely target. So he went barracks before granary in his capital and second city (still no granaries anywhere and only two workers), and he just finished two military builds this turn. I think that they are both chariots, it will show up on the power bar graph next turn. That would give Bantams 1 axe and 3 chariots if true, and you generally don't build a bunch of chariots if you're planning on playing peaceful. Also, because Bantams is playing as Persia those are actually immortals and not chariots, which doesn't make a huge difference but it does mean that archers are effectively useless against them.

I'm going to shift our sandbox plan slightly to get some more spears out, assuming the Demos show those builds to be immortals next turn. Instead of working on part of a library in the capital, that can turn into another spear. We have a spear in the queue at Rochelle (the most likely city to be attacked), and that can be double-whipped and be turned into a pair of spears across two consecutive turns. I can also turn some planned settler / worker whips into military if necessary. Obviously I don't want to do that, since it would slow us down in the expansion race against Sevenspirits, and we want to avoid war if at all possible. Attacking us with immortals when there are vast stretches of fertile land to be settled would also be an act of pure foolishness on the part of Bantams. But given the poor play we've seen thus far, it's kind of what I'm expecting.

In any case, I've got my eye on you, Bantams. You won't succeed in a chariot attack against our team. Go both Gavagai instead.

[Mikehendi]

Turns are starting to get more interesting.



Found another wines by the crabs off in the east. The other wine resource is right under the "Waiting for other Civs" text in that screenshot. One of these spots will be an uncoming city soon, it depends on what we see in the fog around them. I'm keeping the fingers crossed that this scout manages to keep staying alive. One tile at a time, slow and steady avoids the barbs.

The axe is going to hang out on top of that grassland hill for the time being. I'm planning to put a city over here in the near future, and right now the vision from that hill is very important. We'll be able to see any incoming Bantams units in time to prepare a defense. (One exception: the tiles on the easternmost coastline will be out of vision once the scout moves on.) I hope it doesn't come to fighting, but if it does, we'll be ready.



Work boat on its way to Goreripper, defogging trade routes just as we research Sailing tech. We'll be able to spot this coastal city's center tile next turn, and the capital the turn after that. The work boat will poke around for a little while after that, before netting the crabs at our western city of Cannes once the borders pop.

Obviously we need to get a settler down to that southern island as well. Once Sailing research finishes, we'll chop or whip a galley out of Bourges and ferry a future settler over. Hopefully Goreripper is more focused on his relationship with the Ottoman team than pushing to send aggressive settlers overseas. Nothing we can do for the next few turns down here.



Monarchy tech research is finished, and the only reason we're not revolting this turn to Hereditary Rule and Organized Religion is so that Bourges can finish its Great Scientist. I'm confident that we're going to be the first team in the world by a country mile to produce a Great Scientist. We'd better be, it would be embarrassing if the game's only PHI team was beaten to an early Academy. The timing works out nicely here, we get to save gold for this last turn at 0% science, then revolt next turn while moving the Scientist into the capital, and then we can go 100% research with Academy in place. In the sandbox, we hit about 90 beakers/turn on Turn 73. Even better, we'll land lucrative Goreripper intercontinental trade routes as soon as Sailing finishes (not in the sandbox), and then get "known tech bonus" extra beakers on Archery and Mathematics techs. They are widely known amongst the four teams where we have contact. In other words, we should be pretty set in GNP for the immediate future at least.

I'm also highly amused at the worker build with a grand total of 2 foodhammers here. Basically, we dump production into the worker on a turn where we weren't going to grow anyway, allowing us to whip at no swapping penalty a few turns later. It's going to be nice to work tiles down here again rather than specialists.



This is the main news for the turn. We knew that Bantams finished two builds in his cities last turn. I figured they were both immortals, and expected to see them show up on the power graphs. Instead, we got... this result, which doesn't make a lot of sense. Two immortals = 8k power in Civ4 BTS. It's easy to see 8k power increase because that's what you get for researching Bronze Working. It's very apparent earlier on this graph where our team and Goreripper both research BW and get the big 8k power spike. I don't need to be an engineer to see that whatever Bantams picked up last turn, it wasn't 8k worth of power. Obviously less than that. As best I can tell from zooming in and estimating, he picked up 5k power instead, and that doesn't make any sense. Bantams definitely finished two units, and they cost either 25 hammers or 30 hammers. He didn't have enough to build 35 hammer units. I thought that meant 2 immortals, but perhaps he built archers (3k) power instead? But even that doesn't work. Consider me stumped here.

Basically, there are two scenarios that I can guess, both of them rather silly. The good case: Bantams built an archer and an immortal, and then he lost a warrior on the previous turn. That's 3k + 4k - 2k = 5k. In this case, he's got 3 archers and 2 immortals and we're in absolutely no danger. The bad case: Bantams built two immortals and somehow lost an archer. That's 4K + 4K - 3k = 5k again, and 3 immortals / 1 archer overall. Weird as these sound, he had to have lost some unit somewhere along the road. He didn't finish any buildings and he's got too much power otherwise.

I also noticed that Bantams chopped one of his forests at the capital, which might be messing with his production numbers too. Now maybe I'm jumping at shadows, and this is all a lot of nothing. But it's hard to ignore the feeling that we've got this neighbor who 1) comes from a MP ladder background 2) rushed barracks in his cities 3) settled for horses and has been building units over workers/settlers 4) chopped at least one forest in the last few turns. If I build more units and nothing happens, then we've slightly delayed out expansion. (I crunched the numbers, and city #7 gets delayed from Turn 78 to Turn 81, three turns lost.) But if I do nothing and we get attacked, we can lose the whole game right here. Prudence dictates playing it safe.

Sigh. Ruining my beautiful sandbox.



Net effect: spear whipped for 2 pop in Rochelle this turn, the overflow will finish a second spear the next turn. Then we've got another axe mostly finished behind that in the queue, and we can easily convert 2 pop into 2 units as we please. In fact, any of our cities can easily double whip and pop out some combination of 2 axes/spears at minimal notice. Again, that's not how we want to use our pop in the early game, but I will absolutely pop out 6-7 spears in short order if I see immortals on the border. Bantams has no chance outside of some kind of absurdly lucky dice rolls. We've got granaries and high food tiles in all four core cities, plus we'll be in Hereditary Rule civic shortly which means that happiness isn't a problem either. Seriously Bantams, go bother Goreripper or something, you'll be going up against a brick wall if you try us.

Anyway, elsewhere Cannes had a forest chop finish its monument for a border expansion, need those clams in second ring. Calais is growing to size 7 for a settler triple whip. Aix is getting ready to double whip its library at size 3, although that too could be canceled for a unit double whip in a pinch. Still not even one free spread of our religion, a little unlucky there. We may have to do it manually with Organized Religion.

[Mikehendi]

One Goreripper city spotted. This was his second city, settled for pigs and crabs, with a granary and a library inside. (Note that we also have a granary and library in our second city, and we're size 5 to this city's size 3, and we popped a Great Scientist out of it already. Plus we don't get cheap CRE libraries or border pops!) We should spot the capital next turn, it's the tile west of the corn. It's too bad that we never had a shot at that crabs resource, would have made for a nice city with our dry corn. No chance though, not against a CRE civ settling 3 tiles from his own capital.

Future cities planned on our island for the tile east of the pigs, and east of the dry corn. We have other higher priorities first though. (Banking on Goreripper not trying to settle across the water in what's obviously our sphere of influence.)



We did finish our Great Scientist this turn, there he is moving to the capital. Our civ is almost laughably unhappy at this point, at least until we hit the revolt switch and swapped into Hereditary Rule and Organized Religion civics. All 3 of those cities will be back to normal happiness once the revolt is finished at the end of this turn. Demos are pointless to examine until we come out of Anarchy.



We're still trying to make sense of Bantams, this turn offered a few more clues. For starters, we have the bar graphs now for Gavagai, and he's amassed the most power amongst the civs we know by a wide margin. Maybe Bantams isn't thinking about attack our team, he could be worried about the Gavagai power spike instead. Gavagai seems to be doing pretty well for himself, with Food only a little below ours and the most Production amongst the teams we have graphs. His GNP is far, far lower than ours though, Gavagai is only slightly above Bantams in that regard.

I thought last turn that Bantams had maybe built two immortals (for a total of three), and then potentially was chopping out a fourth at his capital. That could mean as many as 4 immortals heading our way, and us with a single axe for defense in the border city. Not good. It doesn't look that bad though: Bantams didn't finish any more units this turn, his power bar graph was flat, and he's got 52 hammers into something in his capital right now. That includes the forest chop. What's he building there? Not a unit, too expensive. A worker or settler? A granary or library? (He gets the EXP and CRE bonus on both of them.) Could he even be thinking about trying his hand at the Oracle or something? I have no idea, but it's not a unit, and that's good enough for me. Even though that spearman whip last turn slowed down our expansion a little bit, I truly do feel a lot safer having 2 spears + 1 axe on the border to defend. I think it was the smart call, rather than trying to expand with virtually no defense at all.

[Mikehendi]

One other observation about this map. There are few forests, few hills, and not much in the way of luxuries. This seems to be affecting everyone, there's still no capitals above size 6 and only one wonder has been built (Stonehenge) here on Turn 72. We also know there's no stone or marble from the pregame discussion. I think this has thrown off some of the other teams. On the one hand, IND teams get a straight +50% bonus on everyone else for world wonders and natural wonders, and there's no stone/marble to boost non-IND teams past them. On the other hand, with no stone/marble and hills + forests both so scarce, wonders are EXPENSIVE to build on this map. This is not like one of those games where someone drops down a city on marble, chops three forests, and boom, instant Oracle. You're going to slow yourself down a lot in this game to build wonders, and it becomes a real sacrifice. I think that's good for our team, since we're basically ignoring wonders for the first 100 turns and making no attempt at any of them. I have yet to see any of the IND teams (ad hoc, Noblehelium, 2metraninja) do much of anything, and ad hoc sacrificed expansion very badly to get his Stonehenge build.

The lack of happiness resources is also a very big deal. I think that our early Monarchy tech / Hereditary Rule play is going to pay huge dividends in this environment. That's the hope anyway.

[Mikehendi]

Goreripper's capital of Thales. He has a granary and a library in there along with two chariots. We have visibility now on Goreripper's first two cities, and one thing I noticed is that we can't spot any cottages. There could be some out of our vision, but none in the tiles that we can see. It's actually hard to get a good read on Goreripper's GNP since he's got all that free CRE culture and then he gets cheap libraries on top of that for more culture and research bonus. In other words, he can look good right now in GNP without actually being in good shape long term. Hard to say right now.

Goreripper planted 2 cities in the last 2 turns to take him up to 6 cities total. I think he's doing OK overall, but I'm not sure his worker labor is keeping pace with his expansion. At least that will mean a trade route connection for all of our cities once we finish Sailing research.



Our civ after coming out of the HR/OR revolt. All of the angry faces are gone for the moment. We also have an Academy now in the capital, taking beakers/turn up to 87. It was 90/turn in the sandbox but that was before we whipped away that extra cottage at Rochelle for spears. So we have 22 total pop points at the moment, even after the double whip at Rochelle, and this is more or less our high water mark for the current whip cycle. Over the next five turns, we'll whip these cities for 2, 2, 3, and 3 pop to get out two settlers, a worker, and a library. That will hit the Demos fairly hard, and then we'll be on another major regrowth cycle again. There really hasn't been time or spare production to build anything other than settlers, workers, granaries, and the bare minimum military needed to defend them. Even the capital has an Academy and not a library, and I don't think we'll finish one anytime soon. Too many competing priorities. We'll get the library and a monastery at some point down the road.

The big news of the turn was of course the Noblehelium team finishing the Oracle and obviously taking Metal Casting for their free tech. This has to come as crushing news for 2metraninja, who was obviously going for the Oracle as well and now gets left with nothing for his crippled civ. It's unfortunate for the rest of us players - we'd all much prefer the Oracle in the hands of weak 2metraninja and not strong Noblehelium. 2metra even went so far as to post in his never-updated spoiler thread, which means he likely just missed it. Darn.

What Noblehelium gets out of this:

* Early access to cheap IND forges (mints).
* Guaranteed Colossus wonder (although even this only takes coastal tiles to 3 commerce, which FIN gets for free)
* Free Great Prophet in 50 turns for their Buddhist shrine

I believe that the third and last one is probably the most important. Getting forges on Turn 73, even cheap forges, doesn't feel that useful to me. They're too expensive to build when you only have a few cities. Build more settlers and workers instead. And yes, cheap granaries and cheap forges is a great combo. I'd still rather have FIN trait personally. Meanwhile, the Noblehelium team clearly sacrificed expansion to build this wonder, as they only have 4 cities at the moment, and even with the free Metal Casting tech, I believe our team has actually researched more beakers than them. Finally, Turn 73 isn't exactly a fast Oracle. What would have happened if 2metraninja had been a better player and finished it a couple turns sooner? The Mali team would have suffered a massive setback if their Oracle gambit had failed. Overall, the whole thing feels like a needlessly risky plan that could have backfired horribly and still doesn't make them a huge favorite when it succeeded. But at the very least, they're now a contender with Buddhism + early Metal Casting, rather than a middle of the pack team.



Our demos at their high point before we start the whipping pain train. Even though we're #1 in Food and GNP, I still feel as though I'm making way too many mistakes. This start has felt slow the whole time, that I should be expanding faster. (We are planning to found city #6 on Turn 77 and city #7 on Turn 81.) Then again, we have no traits that make anything cheap in the early game, no EXP / CRE / IMP / ORG / IND, and we paused our second city to pop out a Great Scientist, and we're still very close to the leaders in foodhammers while essentially destroying everyone else in beakers researched. I guess that's pretty solid, although I'm still not entirely satisfied.

[mackoti]

Great reports Mikendy and your therad is first thing which i read when i open RB.
Great play, i hope you dont mind if i have some litle observations, please dont be ofended.First i think not getting librarie in your capitol is not good(actualy i think is a big mistake) with your academy you gain justa 25% more then others which is not tthat much and you invested so much to get it.
Secont observation is that you should not whip capitol anymore , get cheap archery and build archers and grow capitol to maximum health capicity, other cities can take care of setlers production(slaving capitol is one of the worse habbits which i seen here at rb), course you get some cities slower but you must think long run not just shoort term and a capitol with librarie and academy is more valuable.
My feeling is if you whip you waste your great efort for GS and monarchy.

Hope I wasnt inapropriate and you dont feel like i patronize you but i just loved how you played till now.

[Mikehendi]

Of course I don't mind comments, I appreciate the suggestions from other very good players. Let me try to explain my thought process behind the capital's situation. I do want to grow the capital quickly using Hereditary Rule units and get a library (and eventually monastery) in there to stack up the beaker multipliers. The problem is that the other cities around the capital have been either weak or slow starting in this game, and they haven't been able to carry the load on producing settlers and units. If I go through them quickly:

Bourges: this is a weak city, just a rice resource and nothing else. It was a good choice to get an early Great Scientist, but it's never going to be that strong.

Rochelle: by far the best city other than the capital. It can take over some of the capital's duties now. However, it needed a border expansion (monument) + work boat + granary to reach this point, and that took a while. Slow starting city.

Aix: also a good city, it needed a granary and library (for border pop) to get started. Now can start to contribute more fully.

Cannes: will be a good city, very slow-starting. It needed monument + work boat to get its second resource tile, and it still doesn't have granary yet (will speed along with a second forest chop), and then it still needs a lighthouse at some point.

And remember, we don't have any traits that cheapen these early game buildings. No cheaper workers, settlers, granaries, libraries, lighthouse, etc. Everything definitely feels slow going. Basically, I do not want to fall behind in the expansion race to other teams, and that has meant that the capital had to carry a huge load so far. I am hoping to shift that burden away to other cities and develop the capital upwards further, but... well, you'll see what happened this turn in a minute.

[mackoti]

You must think expansion is not everithing,a powerfull tech lead can mean way more and having weak neighbours you can get some cities from them, if you have knigs by 1 ad for example lets say.I usualy , i remain behind in expansion because i grow a strong capitol and teach lead and after I conquer some neighoubor, is usauly what i do.

[Mikehendi]

We have been playing turns very fast the past two days. This is from three turns ago already. We whipped two cities this turn for two pop each. Bourges double whipped a worker, while Aix double whipped its library. The library is very important for this city to get the borders expanded; the oasis tile in the second ring is needed for Aix's development, because the dry corn is getting split off to a future city. Everything going according to plan.

Well, almost anything. A barb axe appeared over to the southwest. That was kind of rotten luck because there are only about a half dozen fogged tiles in that corner, and I certainly wasn't expecting hostile units to pop up from that direction. Anyway, I moved out two axes to deal with it, one coming down from La Rochelle and one coming west from the Aix region.



This is the capital getting ready to be whipped on the next turn; there's a turn of production into a settler already in the queue. Sorry mackoti.



Next turn. I triple whipped the capital for the settler, going to found city #6. Sailing research finished, and the trade connection to Goreripper gave me 3 commerce trade routes in every city. That was a huge increase, +10 commerce over the 1 commerce internal trade routes that I had before. I just barely had to tick science down to 90%, as 100% science cost -17 gold and we only had 16 gold in the bank. I wanted to finish Archery tech, however, since it's extremely cheap and archers will be needed for military police happiness in the capital.

The barb axe moved a tile closer, and I moved my own pair of axes up two tiles along the roads in response.



Scout in the east is still alive and kicking, found a gold resource over here that mirrors the gold resource I saw in the extreme northwest of this continent. We'll obviously want cities over here soonish to claim both the gold and wines resources. I still need to move the scout a bit more to finish dotmapping this area.



Here's how I decided to play the situation with the barb axe. Thought about this for a long time. I moved one axe onto the mature cottage, hoping to initiate combat with the barb axe. Because this is Prince difficulty and we get a slight bonus against barbs, we've got about 2/3 odds to win that combat outright. In the event that our axe lost, then we'd be able to clean up with the second axe coming down from the north. In the extremely unlikely case that BOTH axes died, I could even attack with the warrior in Bourges across the river to clean up a redlined barb axe. And then, just to be safe, I swapped Bourges to an archer, so that if all of those battles were lost, we could still whip an archer the following turn.

Paranoia, I know. There's no possible way that all of those battles could go badly, right?

Right?