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

[Ceiliazul]

there's a point in dtay's power graph where it turns a corner and starts an arrow straight medium-steep incline. thats the same point his food begins a very slow steady decline. only one conclusion (which you've mentioned once before) about what he's been doing. whether its worth it remains to be seen.

[MindyMcCready]

I'm not that keen on the Grenadier's path. If Ichabod gets rifles, cavs aren't very far behind at all. Upgrade those 25+ knights to cavs and that'll blunt our grenadiers at least in the quantities that we can reasonably build anyway.

For any chance of an attack to work we'd need a lot of collateral support which is an opportunity cost to the grenadiers.

I still prefer Nationalism before Gunpowder:
-I still think that it's easier to draft 2 maces than it is to build 1 90H musket.
-I also think that 2 maces have better odds against 1 rifle than does a single musket.
-The deterrant effect in total power is key to surviving Ichabod while our new cities develop.

About Master Commdore:
-He's a risk for taking our island at this point, but not much more. Rifles are 2-pop drafts so he won't be getting so many of these so easily.
-Amphibous penalty C1 Rifles don't have great odds against a C1 full fort mace with (29% with 40% culture and 34% with 20% culture) or against LBs (26% with 40% culture and 30% with 20% culture). It would be pretty expensive for him to attack cities this way. So he'll either have to land or risk taking losses on his expensive rifles. We get time to reinforce (and/or spite whip/draft) or we come out with a favorable hammer exchange.
-2-pop drafting or 110H builds means that we've got some time before he could realistically invade our continent in anything other than a M.A.D. way.
-My feeling is that Master Commodore might try to harrass us on our mainland but he won't try a full invasion until after he snags that island. He's just needs too many naval units to make that happen.
-So the best way to keep our mainland safe is to keep stocking that troll-hill city with LBs. Each 50H CGII LB has 41% odds of killing off an attacking Rifle even after culture is removed.

About Ichabod:
-The real risk.
-As you pointed out we're now 5th place in land. We've achieved enough land that we have the potential to hold out until the end of the game.
-But we need time to develop to realize that potential.
-With Ichabod's production + pop + tech lead he could rapidly ramp up to the point where he could exceed our ability to defend.
-The best way to prevent this, in my mind, is to continuously produce power while we can do so easily (via Nationalism).

I know that you feel that drafting maces is inefficient. How much did you enjoy all those RB-mod nerfed whips during Ichabod's last attack? :LOL: If we don't continue to produce power (any why not the most easily way possible?) then that's exactly what we're going to have to do come Cuirassiers and/or Rifles and/or Cavs.

Given that a grass hill mine can't compete with a 30H whip, I'm pretty sure that even RB-mod caste can't complete with a single pop producing a 70-90H unit.

So I still recommend Nationalism for max drafts followed by Spiritual revolt back to more productive civics pretty much for the rest of the game. We need to survive this next round of 'offense having the advantage' which is coming soon enough. After that,....higher tech costs + paper bonus + land equalizer and we should be behind by relatively less.

I also think that settling those costal cities shouldn't be out of the question. While I recognize that they're a bit of a risk, a mainland costal city is still less risky than an island city.

Yellow dot: that 2 seafood/deer/silver city,...whip a lighthouse in there and those are 3/0/2 or 3/0/1 tiles even without fishing boats. If Master Commodore wants to park his navy there permanently who cares?
1. It's going to cost him more than its going to cost us,
2. It continues to spread out his navy allowing us some easy wins despite a tech disadvantage,
3. He's not choking Trovatore or threatening it with Rifles. Are blockades on here? If blockages are on, then him parking his navy outside of Trovatore has a major impact on our production.
4. We can grow on deer and onto windmill and wait for him to divert his navy elsewere. If we get just a little bit of peace that city can whip up a protective Navy pretty easily.

South Green Dot:
-I don't really see Scooter taking a stab at a city that we planted there. That constitutes a mainland invasion and they'd realize that they'd be replused by anything other than a mainland capable invasion force.
-I further argue that the risk is bigger of not planting that city. Master Commodore or Scooter could plant their own city there and then they'd be tough to remove with CG Rifles.
-With Rice + ivory it can get started even without the seafood.
-Again, this city would serve to distract Master Commodore from taking a stab at Retep's copper city which does have 2 seafood resources that would be nice to keep unpillaged. Between the copper city and that south green dot we'd have enough naval production that we might control that little area against anything other than a significant navy.

My preference remains Nationalism first.
Nationalism (3018)
--> Alpahbet (405) + Paper (805)
--> Gunpowder (2013)

Then,....don't know:
-->Music (805) --> Military Tradition (4025)

Well that certainly seems expensive. Music is very powerful if we weren't spiritual with caste. Not important here. Cuirassiers are a big step up but not as big as Rifles from Gundpowder:
--> Banking (939) --> PP (2683) --> RP (3623) --> Rifling (5635)

Yeah, between the shrine bank + PP commerce this seems like the better choice. WINNER! But we must produce continuous power in order to realize the advantage of taking this path.

Caravels might keep a few pockets of seafood safe. But my preference would be to keep our core safe and make some headways onto the high seas later.

[MindyMcCready]

I could have sniped Bacchus's worker but I didn't. (Do I think Ichabod would react to a war breaking out over here? Yup.) Unfortunately Bacchus is going to settle in the most awkward spot possible, the hill where the spear is. To be fair he doesn't have that many choices. But he's Creative (Sury) so pushing his first ring borders will be nigh impossible. (I actually don't rule out an artist bomb! But I'd also call that an act of war and we might be better off just killing him someday. )

Grrrrr,....that guy. What's he thinking? Does he really want to force a conflit over that site?


There's no advantage to peace with this guy. He's going to isolate our Madama (Madame?) Butterfly. He's also setting us up to be able to 1T any of 4 different cities (during our next inevitable conflit with Ichabod).

I'd say that we have 2 scenario:
1. We fight to prevent him from taking that site. Hopefully we can contain it to that conflict.
2. We allow him to settle that site. Later, good odds that we're fighting over Madame Butterfly. Losing Madame Butterfly means the future viability of those 2 green dots really plummets.

Given Ichabod's flat power I'd say that we let Bacchus know exactly how we (I :LOL feel about him planting there. Mavbe cease fire instead of peace so that he can't plant under forced peace until we can culturally control some of the tiles around it.

I now wish I'd considered resettling Yasod one tile to the west for a better settlement-chess dotmap. But we'd be down a settler, a terrace, and a religion spread. (The terrace actually gets the 1000 year culture doubler too, despite the fact that it was merely a granary for all that time!)

If we were going to have produced a settler we could have just planted On that hill that Bacchus is taking while it was still Retep's culture.

[WilliamLP]

I'm not that keen on the Grenadier's path. If Ichabod gets rifles, cavs aren't very far behind at all. Upgrade those 25+ knights to cavs and that'll blunt our grenadiers at least in the quantities that we can reasonably build anyway.

For any chance of an attack to work we'd need a lot of collateral support which is an opportunity cost to the grenadiers.

Cav's aren't that far behind after rifles, but they aren't immediate. He'd need Nationalism + Music + MT, which isn't a cheap path.

Gren's are also 1 tech away from cannons, the collateral support we need and maybe the ultimate defensive unit in the era. I think we might have a shot at getting to grens in time for rifles, and then cannons in time for everything else.

I still prefer Nationalism before Gunpowder:
-I still think that it's easier to draft 2 maces than it is to build 1 90H musket.

I strongly disagree with that, because you grow while building the musket rather than losing 2 pop. (Look at Dtay's pathetic food). At this stage in the game, with RBMod in particular, the value of each tile is rising fast with super-workshops and more infrastructure. I think we need to get to where we're working literally every valuable tile, as quickly as possible, and then the draft becomes amazing.

-I also think that 2 maces have better odds against 1 rifle than does a single musket.
-The deterrant effect in total power is key to surviving Ichabod while our new cities develop.

I don't feel like combat looks like that. If rifles can take down the top defenders, they do that, and then they sit and heal with a M3 unit for a couple of turns, and then do it again. The highly wounded rifle vs mace fight we'd want simply wouldn't occur. I think we need single top defenders that have decent odds. Maces aren't that bad of a body at strength 8, but having no ability for CG or Pinch, and coming out with no promos really makes them kind of useless at this level in my opinion.

About Master Commdore:
-He's a risk for taking our island at this point, but not much more. Rifles are 2-pop drafts so he won't be getting so many of these so easily.
-Amphibous penalty C1 Rifles don't have great odds against a C1 full fort mace with (29% with 40% culture and 34% with 20% culture) or against LBs (26% with 40% culture and 30% with 20% culture). It would be pretty expensive for him to attack cities this way. So he'll either have to land or risk taking losses on his expensive rifles. We get time to reinforce (and/or spite whip/draft) or we come out with a favorable hammer exchange.

Yeah, he'd definitely land, but we're very far away from anything that can think about attacking into a rifle (grens are closest).

-2-pop drafting or 110H builds means that we've got some time before he could realistically invade our continent in anything other than a M.A.D. way.
-My feeling is that Master Commodore might try to harrass us on our mainland but he won't try a full invasion until after he snags that island. He's just needs too many naval units to make that happen.
-So the best way to keep our mainland safe is to keep stocking that troll-hill city with LBs. Each 50H CGII LB has 41% odds of killing off an attacking Rifle even after culture is removed.

Yeah I agree he really isn't close to invading, to the level of a few turns. And he's likely to go after Magic Flute first, I feel.

-The best way to prevent this, in my mind, is to continuously produce power while we can do so easily (via Nationalism).

On the deterrant value of the graph, sorry, I'm just not feeling it. It assumes he's an opponent who doesn't understand that not all power is created equal, and I don't like underestimating someone and being unpleasantly surprised.

I don't think he's going to attack before rifles at this point, and still see a single drafted mace as simply a loss, both in happy for the opportunity cost, and even the population point. We may need to forever agree to disagree on this.

How much did you enjoy all those RB-mod nerfed whips during Ichabod's last attack? :LOL:

Whipped knights allowed us to attack from out of vision and win! Then the exact same units allowed us to take the island from Commodore. Then the same units, yet again, allowed us to take out Retep about 4-5 turns before what would otherwise have been possible, and C3 knights have much better odds against his archers than even C1 or C2 knights would have. All those units could traverse the whole empire in a couple of turns. I enjoyed that a lot. Many of the same units are still around and have 3 promotions and will be useful still, even as knights or in the age of Cuirs.

Knights were, when we whipped them, state of the art in the world, and more highly promoted than most of the world. There were (and still are) useful for attacking some top defenders with odds, without siege support.

Zero promo maces are basically a warm body. They could be used for soaking collateral or suiciding. Cats are much better for both of these things unit for unit. The circumstances where they could attack anything and win are very unlikely at this point.

If we don't continue to produce power (any why not the most easily way possible?) then that's exactly what we're going to have to do come Cuirassiers and/or Rifles and/or Cavs.

We're going to make 1 knight per turn out of Turandot anyway, and quickly get our cat force to 25-30 at least, while growing onto all tiles in the empire at about +6 food per city.

Given that a grass hill mine can't compete with a 30H whip, I'm pretty sure that even RB-mod caste can't complete with a single pop producing a 70-90H unit.

I think you're discarding the quadratic function of the food allowing a city to keep growing onto more and more tiles. The mine vs whip calculation gets worse for the whip when you don't have a happy cap, the cities get larger, and the tiles are better than grass hill mines. (E.g. watermills or caste 1/4/0 grass workshops.)

I don't think an unpromoted mace is actually worth 70 hammers here. I think a cat is a better unit 1 for 1 right now.

But the draft certainly can't be ignored. I'd be happy to be using it when it's muskets, and when the city being drafted is working all its good tiles and still has a food surplus.

I also think that settling those costal cities shouldn't be out of the question. While I recognize that they're a bit of a risk, a mainland costal city is still less risky than an island city.

Yeah, I agree with this. I am feeling like we should wait until we're on top of the very large new holdings in terms of worker support though. There's really no hurry to plant new cities that aren't going to get worker love immediately. (Admittedly I could have planned this better... I was too single-focused on just winning wars. )

Yellow dot: that 2 seafood/deer/silver city,...whip a lighthouse in there and those are 3/0/2 or 3/0/1 tiles even without fishing boats. If Master Commodore wants to park his navy there permanently who cares?

If the destiny of the city is to work unnetted fish as its best tile I don't think it's a positive return. Given that a 2/0/1 tile is zero worth - the pop point costs about a gold per turn in maintenance, and adding the flat maintenance costs of the city I'm pretty sure it's just a significant loss. I'd definitely want even the brown dot (NE fish) before it in that case.

South Green Dot:
-I don't really see Scooter taking a stab at a city that we planted there. That constitutes a mainland invasion and they'd realize that they'd be replused by anything other than a mainland capable invasion force.

I think I agree on this one and can make putting it down a goal for the Golden Age.

Yeah, between the shrine bank + PP commerce this seems like the better choice. WINNER! But we must produce continuous power in order to realize the advantage of taking this path.

It is clearly the best economic path if we don't die. At issue is the question of whether the draft can keep us alive long enough. I'm not sure.

A gren / cannon army can be quite strong. Mackoti used it to great effect in the Intersite Demogame recently. I have a feeling he's going to get good effect with this composition once again, in this game!

At any rate, I think we have to agree to disagree on Gunpowder before Nat, and it also doesn't shorten any pathways since all useful military paths require it. It allows us to start building promoted muskets very soon, and I'll consider very carefully either revolting back to Vassalage in cycles or maybe even picking up Theology for the +2 xp, so we can get either CG2 or Pinch out of the gate.

Caravels might keep a few pockets of seafood safe. But my preference would be to keep our core safe and make some headways onto the high seas later.

I agree in principle, but shutting down Comm's ability to ferry units around may be part of keeping the core safe. And thinking about it, as Portugal, carracks are a disincentive to him researching Astro soon so Caravels will remain pretty good against him for a long time.

[WilliamLP]

Grrrrr,....that guy. What's he thinking? Does he really want to force a conflit over that site?

I'm not sure what else he has left to play for, to be honest.

There's no advantage to peace with this guy. He's going to isolate our Madama (Madame?) Butterfly.

Either one works. The short story and several movies are "Madame". The Puccini opera is "Madama". (The most famous bit of it.)

I'd say that we have 2 scenario:
1. We fight to prevent him from taking that site. Hopefully we can contain it to that conflict.
2. We allow him to settle that site. Later, good odds that we're fighting over Madame Butterfly. Losing Madame Butterfly means the future viability of those 2 green dots really plummets.

Given Ichabod's flat power I'd say that we let Bacchus know exactly how we (I :LOL feel about him planting there. Mavbe cease fire instead of peace so that he can't plant under forced peace until we can culturally control some of the tiles around it.

I'm not that far from there. In my calculation though we have a chance in the long game and Bacchus doesn't. And attacking right now with significant force could mean just flat out dying to Ichabod right now. So I'm at #2. And maybe sadly, after I skipped Drama, Butterfly is our first city that really wants a theatre.

[WilliamLP]

Commodore is playing now and I just realized I might have screwed something:




If he has a unit in his Carrack (like a warrior) he just unloads and kills the trireme in the fort for free. Oh well we'll see what he does.

[Hashoosh]

The Magic Flute's a late in the name-cycle island city

I don't know how Wolfgang would feel about that :P

[WilliamLP]

The Magic Flute's a late in the name-cycle island city

I don't know how Wolfgang would feel about that :P

We have Don Giovanni on the mainland at least, as a fortress that held out against Ichabod's attack! Le Nozze di Figaro may show up if we get enough time to settle filler. Cosi fan Tutte and La Clemza di Tito, probably not, unless we get a bunch more cities from Bacchus or something.

[WilliamLP]

We spawned a Great Scientist at low odds - Albert Einstein! Unfortunately for him, his role in our story will be more like a patent clerk than a physicist because his purpose is to trigger a golden age and any GP would work.




As shown, we can 1-turn Paper at a deficit if we want. There's no rush so I'm going to save a bit of gold first for emergencies.

We revolted to Pacifism and Caste. It turns out Pacifism is expensive with a lot of military, who knew, right? Still, ironically it's a good time to build units since it sacrifices the OR bonus. My plan is for 3GPs in this golden age, 2 for another GA, and a Merchant for Banking.

Mindy will hate me but I'm seriously considering slipping in Compass -> Optics before Gunpowder (let alone Nationalism). We can 1-turn them both at break-even. The rationale is we have a Moai city coming online very soon and it wouldn't take long at all to get enough Triremes to wrest control of our channel back. And it would be a disincentive to Comm if we could fight his boats with parity. (Or more since we're SPI and can produce 2-xp boats a lot more easily than he can.)

The other factor is that we have a lot of units we can produce right now - cats are still very useful and become more useful the more of them there are. I'd like to get a stack of at least 30 or so... We're at like 13 now.

Gunpowder would be about 4 turns. Paper helps it because nearly the whole world knows it and so it would give (nearly) another 25% bonus for the known tech rate. Nationalism would take about 7 turns right now.




Ichabod's finally settling the forest paradise. With 11 forests to chop and a lovely river network I don't see why he waited so long. (Even, imagine getting a National Park / National Epic city set up there!)




There's Bacchus's expected thorny city coming up on the grass hill. He may be leaving the worker out there unguarded to test our intent. Unfortunately Ichabod has a real window to do damage (though I hope he doesn't realize it) so we can't really afford to think about contesting this border at the moment.

Ichabod could declare next turn, but I doubt he's planning to strike. He'd probably have played longer than a 20 minute turn if so.




Wrong direction for our line, but it will start picking up again!

Demos at 100%:



Barely above average hammers in a GA isn't fantastic. Food is also down because of GP starvation.

Some pictures of the world for fun:




Foreign conflicts: 3 island cities contested between Scooter and Mackoti are to the south. Dtay is 2 cities away from kicking TBS off his continent. Azza doesn't have a lot left against Bigger either. Suttree is basically where Retep was, checked out of the game several months ago but still pulling the strings on the animated husk of his 3-city empire.

Our side:




Dhal has 3 citizens to his name. Strategically, Plako has exactly one logical next move to make, if he wants a shot at making a run at this game from 3rd place. And it's plowing north into a sea of orange. This is also one of the best thing that could happen for us.

Slightly less fortunate for us, Scooter and Commodore have been best friends for the whole game (huh?) and Ichabod and Harry/Tourist have played for a positive sum peaceful island border like little angels.

Bacchus has played a pretty solid game in the last 50 turns, in my opinion. I wonder if he's getting advice from Gavagai or something? That guy is the dark horse newcomer of the Alae Pitboss crowd and seems to know his stuff and probably beats me in a fair game if I'm not able to overanalyze and troll the larger situation better than he does.

[WilliamLP]

Also... I'm just going to put it out there that if Ichabod grabs the first half of the timer next turn and declares it would be in the letter of the law but an extremely cheesy move. I've been playing before him perhaps literally 175 out of 178 turns in this game.