Mikehendi Pitboss 16 Thread

[WilliamLP]

Thanks for the reports! Third party reporter units and different perspectives on the game from different people are some of the most fun parts of Civ for me.

[Mikehendi]

Catching up here on the last two turns. Our scout saw this conga line of Gavagai units last turn as we moved into his territory. This was also the first view of Aztec catapults, so obviously Gavagai has Construction tech. I don't know if Noble / Gaspar have their own catapults, probably not since we haven't seen any of them so far.



This is where Gavagai moved his units on his turn. The catapults disappeared and the big horse archer stack shifted over to the west. I'm assuming that Noble's units are over in that area as well. We're still waiting for a huge confrontation between their two armies, I would be very disappointed if they signed peace without trading more units. (It's rather nervous having these large armies prowling around, either one would deal serious damage and/or force lots of whipping if they signed peace and came after our team.)



Bantams has a new city, his 5th city... on Turn 107. While this does claim a lot of resources, this city is going to take forever to be useful. Where does it get food before finishing a work boat (?) There's also no road to the city and no workers in the area. Not exactly ideal MP stuff here. This is a likely target for our team or Gavagai down the road. I'm hoping we can reach Gunpowder tech in about 30 turns, then cheaply draft out some musketeers and run over Bantams. With some catapults and knights for support, I think that would be fairly easy to pull off.



Using the Build Culture ability to pop borders. This has been very helpful, especially in the newest cities, they only have to work a high production tile for a few turns to get the expansion. Le Havre here will grow onto the cows and then onto 3 grassland hill mines, and build units as a production city. This is still our only city with a barracks.



Judaism remains the world's most popular religion, we have it present in about half of our cities. We still need to spread it to our northwest cities, the ones furthest away from the Holy City. I noticed something else here though: Confucianism has "None" listed as its Holy City. Apparently the razed Gavagai city was the founding place of Confucianism! That's got to hurt poor Gavagai, he'll never have a shrine and his religion has almost no following right now. Good for us I guess.

[Mikehendi]

Pictures from the current turn, Turn 108. We saw Gavagai's capital for the first time, unfortunately for him only at size 6. He has obviously had to whip a lot to deal with the current war. Gavagai is actually running Bureaucracy civic, he swapped to it along with Hereditary Rule last turn. The timing is great for our team, we get the bonus beakers for Civil Service right as we begin to research it. Even with a Bureaucracy + Academy combo here, Hydrogen won't be very useful until it can grow some more sizes.



Picture after Gavagai moved his units. It looks like the action is centered around this city to the southwest of the Gavagai capital, whatever this one is named. I think that there's going to be a big battle around here. Probably? We should know soon enough. The plan with these two scouts is to assign one to each stack of doom (one for Gavagai, one for Noble/Gaspar) and follow them wherever they go. We need to keep them in vision at all times for our own safety. Still have to track down the Noble stack again of course, I'm guessing it is near this area based on how Gavagai is moving his units.




We finished Code of Laws research this turn. It should take us 2 turns of saving gold and then 3 turns of research to discover Civil Service, 5 total turns or end of Turn 112. (With a little cheating by using Build Wealth on the last turn or two, probably.) The plan is to use that Music free Great Artist for our Golden Age on the next turn, using it to revolt into Bureaucracy and spend 7 turns in Caste System to get three Great Scientists, back to Slavery on the last turn.

Targeted cities for Great Scientists after some thought will be Rochelle (200 GPP), Aix (300 GPP), and Carcasonne (400 GPP). They should have enough food to get it done in each case, with five more turns to save up food before our Golden Age starts. We'll then use these three Scientists to lightbulb our way to a hopeful Liberalism prize. Where we go with our research after Civil Service depends on what our neighbors are doing, and how seriously we have to build up our military. I imagine that a size 14-15 capital with Bureaucracy + Academy, in a Golden Age, will be pretty good at this stage of the game.



Inside the capital. We only need a couple more cottages here, and to keep growing to ever larger sizes. Statue of Zeus will hopefully finish during the Golden Age, I think that will be a nice prize for our team. We may or may not go for Great Library after that, it will depend on how things look.



Demos still look great, especially our GNP being #2 when we're sitting at 0% science. The one persistent issue remains the Sevenspirits team, now up to 15 cities to our 12 cities. We have two more cities getting founded in the next few turns, and we've largely managed to solve our worker crisis from earlier (up to 14 workers now), but the Zulu team's rate of expansion is the one thing that keeps me up at night. We'll simply do the best we can (we have more cities than every other team in the game), play our PHI trait into midgame lightbulbs and hopefully use them to win Liberalism, and lean on our FIN edge. That's all I can say for the moment.

Thanks for reading.

[mackoti]

Dont worry necesary about city numbers, research is very important as well i think you should plan to get comunism as fast as posible(doable somewere near 800-900 AD) and then go rampange on bantamas with knigs and transform all his land in workshops.I dont think getting nationalism is worth with liberalism,depends on tech i thin you should try for astronomy.Dont l know seven tech posibilities but he has no academy yet(or he has it? dont know), no fin trait so you could get that.

[Mikehendi]

Thanks for the suggestion! That is certainly one possibility, trying to take the Liberalism path to Communism as fast as possible. I see a couple of potential problems though:

1) We picked France for this game, and drafted musketeers are almost obscenely useful to have. Nationhood civic turns 1 pop point into 9 strength units with two movement. It's almost like getting to draft knights (musketeers = 9 strength and 80 hammers, knights = 10 strength and 90 hammers). I feel like we're not putting our civ to good use if we don't take advantage of this. Plus I was thinking that it would make a lot of sense to use a musketeer army to run over Bantams, that way all of the cities can build universities and then observatories salons instead of building knights.

2) I'm not sure that Bantams will still be alive that long if we wait for Communism before going after him. It's kind of a miracle that he's still breathing right now. My thought process was to push for drafted muskeeters ASAP (which I think could hit around Turn 130-140) to take him out. I am very concerned that Gavagai and his huge army of horse archers will beat our team to the Bantams prize.

3) We would also have a good chance at building Taj Mahal if we were the first ones to Nationalism tech via Liberalism. That's another strong incentive to go for the traditional tech grab.

The biggest problem is that we can't run both Nationhood and Bureaucracy civics at the same time, only one or the other. (One place where SPI trait would be a huge help.) Building Taj Mahal would help solve that a lot, letting our team swap civics for free a bit. In any case, I think it's still too early to make any decisions on this. We need to watch our eastern neighbors, they'll dictate a lot of what we do.

[Mikehendi]

Catching up here on the last few turns. Turn 109 was very uninteresting, our civ simply saving gold for the run to Civil Service. This was the best screenshot, showing off the doughnut hole in the middle of our continent. The scouts were looking for the armies of Noble and Gavagai, since we lost vision on them earlier. I thought they were on this border, but they weren't.

Noble's team also finished the Colossus the previous turn, in the same city where we knew it was under construction from production spying. Solid wonder for this map, a lot less scary in the hands of a non-FIN team.



Next turn, we flipped on research for Civil Service. It was a 5 turn tech in total along with the 2 turns of gold saving. This is a picture of the eastern border area, this settler was going to settle up by the wines to grab that resource and the inner sea seafood. We actually need wines as a luxury since we're currently trading our only wines resource to Goreripper for his dyes. There's also two workers on a forested hill gold resource at the bottom of that screenshot, getting ready to connect that one as well. Caen's making good use of the Build Culture technique in that screenshot too.



Chopping (and then whipping the next turn) a settler out of Bourges. If anyone is wondering what our original second city looked like, here it is. Sadly this location is too weak to be a great city, just a single rice tile. Not much of a Holy City. We've been using it for a lot of work boats recently to help the offshore cities get started.



The settler is going here, west of the silks tile. We can borrow the wheat tile from Toulon to get the city started, and use Build Culture to pop the borders for the crabs tile. I like the tile west of the silks for a city spot for the ability to share the wheat, and the fact that only 1 farm is needed to spread irrigation to that dry wheat tile. There's also room for at least one more city, if not two more cities, on this island, and then there's more goodies off to the east. The gems resource in particular would give us the gold/silver/gems trifecta that makes forges ridiculously useful. We need more exploration to the south, it's kind of sad how badly we've done here at sea. A second galley is nearly completed to help out with that.



There's a picture of the eastern islands from our perspective. The one with the silks looks like a fairly large island, I'm hoping to get a chariot down there to scout soon. If our neighbors behave themselves! That's not too certain at the moment.

[Mikehendi]

Now more or less catching up to the present turn. I will mention that Ad hoc built the Great Lighthouse, and that was a piece of good fortune. He is not one of the major competitors in this game, and it's very good to see a weaker civ building that wonder. I may or may not cancel Open Borders with him when it's possible to do so in a couple more turns. If I can fill all of our cities with overseas trade routes without Ad hoc, then probably. If not, then it's also likely not worth it to cancel. Ad hoc only has 7 cities and about 30 population (we have more than double that at 70 pop). He's not winning this game barring a miracle.



Here's the Noble and Gaspar stack of doom, we finally located it again on Turn 111 (it was still in the same place at the start of Turn 112). They are very heavy on horse archers, whereas Gavagai has a more mixed army with some axes and catapults thrown in. Our other scout found the Gavagai stack of doom on the other side of the border:



Gavagai also refounded Neon in the contested border region between their teams. Now we just need these two teams to throw their stacks at each other, with mass bloodbath on both sides! Only... that's not happening, because the two teams signed peace at the beginning of Turn 112. That was very, very bad news for our team. Both Noble and Gavagai built these huge armies of horse archers, and they mostly never fought each other. There was one point where Noble lost a half dozen units, and Gavagai had his Confucian Holy City razed, but they never traded the core of their armies. Now they are locked into peace for the next 10 turns, and they still have these huge armies with nowhere to go. Except after our team and Bantams! Uh oh.



This is not an encouraging set of bar graphs. We're fairly average in power rating, sitting more or less amongst the other teams that haven't been at war. Unfortunately Gavagai and Noble are #1 and #2 in the game in power, well above everyone else unless Sevenspirits has a huge army out there in the fog. Gavagai built his cheap ORG sacrificial altars everywhere and has been whipping units at virtually no penalty all over the place. Noble put his cheap IND mints everywhere, revolted into Police State, and has been building units all over the place. These are not exactly the neighbors that we wanted. As awesome as it's been having Bantams up north, our draw on the other two local civs has been less than ideal.

So the $10,000 question is what Noble's team intends to do now that they have peace. Are they going to go into peaceful builder mode for awhile? They do have the Pyramids and could revolt into Representation civic, for example. Or are they going to try and attack our team? That's probably the smartest move they could take right now. We do have two things working in our favor:

1) Noble's team doesn't have our bar graphs. They've never invested even 1 EP against our team. This is absolutely huge, they have no idea how weak we are militarily. If we avoid a war, that will probably be the single most important factor.

2) We've been a polite neighbor thus far, not settling aggressively, not making any moves against them during their war, accepting Open Borders when requested, etc. I have no idea how much this matters to them - it can't hurt though.

3) 10 turns enforced peace is still only 10 turns enforced peace. Noble can't talk to Gavagai in any way, they can't work out any long term arrangements. How can they know that he won't attack again? Noble did raze his Holy City, after all! Noble and Gaspar might be hesitant about picking another war when they have a huge army sitting on their northern border.



Here's our response to this dangerous situation. First, watch those monster stacks of doom. We have one scout watching the Gavagai units in Aztec territory, I want to know if they start heading west for Bantams. The other scout and this chariot are watching Noble's territory. Their horse archer stack moved on Turn 112, and I don't know where it went. It did not move directly towards our team as I feared. Hopefully it will turn up. In the meantime, I moved the chariot up to Bay of Pigs. Between the chariot and the scout (the latter unit moving between Whiskey Ring and Healthcare each turn), we should be able to see any horse archers a couple turns before they reach our territory. I doubt that would be enough to save Caen, but we'd have a chance to prepare something for them. We'll also make certain to play our turns after Noble right now - cheesy or not, we want the second move and a chance to react to them.



Secondly, I moved Nancy back a tile to be in a safer spot. This was going to go directly on the wines to make use of the fish, but I felt that it was too aggressive in that position. We still get a strong city in this spot, and hey, we even avoid wasting the wines (although now the workers have to build a plantation and road). The idea is that strategic considerations trump best possible city placement here. We're not infringing on Bay of Pigs at all, this is a good setup for a demilitarized border. I just hope that's what Noble and Gaspar want!




Finally, I dumped spears into the build queues of pretty much every large city. If we see a stack of horse archers on their way, we can 2 pop whip each of these into a pair of spears, and get up to a dozen or so spears pretty quickly. That's our best option for the moment, since we don't have Construction or Horseback Riding techs ourselves. (What I wouldn't give for Engineering tech, both for the road movement bonus and pikes!) We certainly don't want to whip these units unless we're certain that an attack is actually on its way. Still, we may as well throw the spears into the queue, they can sit there for 10 turns at no penalty. Won't cost us anything except a single turn's worth of production.

So that's all well and good... except that we're supposed to pop into a Golden Age next turn. One where we revolt OUT of Slavery and into Caste System for 7 turns. I suppose the timing could be worse, we could have popped into Caste already and be in serious doodoo as horse archers pour across the border. Now we can always delay the Golden Age, but again, that carries penalties as well, since every turn we wait is a turn that our size 14 capital isn't in Bureaucracy civic. It pretty much comes down to how much we want to gamble here. Do we really want to run the risk of swapping out of Slavery with the possibility of war on the horizon? I honestly don't know at this point. We'll wait and see what Noble does on Turn 113 before we have to make any final choices.

This would be so much easier if we could read their thread. Not knowing their plans is killing me. For all I know, they could be writing up details plans on how to kill us, or they could be ignoring our civ completely. I'd feel about ten times better if they revolt into Representation civic this turn, that's for sure.



Demos for the curious. Why yes, that is Sevenspirits and his 17 cities rocking the Food stat. I still think our chances in this game are pretty decent if we don't get attacked here. Hopefully this thread will remain nice and quiet. Hot war is not in our interests. We can probably all concede to Sevenspirits if our team does get attacked here, unless Goreripper manages to pull something off. He's also doing very well. Gavagai and Noble have likely knocked themselves out the running with their wars, and no one else is even close.

[Mikehendi]

When we logged into the game on Turn 113, we had this diplo window waiting from Sevenspirits. Finally, contact with the likely top dog competitor. Sevenspirits had exactly 17 cities, apparently we did track that correctly through all this time. The real question wasn't food or land though, it was where his economy stood. The good news is that Seven's gold generation rate was about half of ours, we were making 164 gold/turn in this screenshot, and I think he was making 78 gold/turn. If that was his 0% science rate, then we have a significantly stronger economy, as expected.



That's where contact was made, with an exploring Zulu work boat off to our west. I canceled out of the Open Borders offer (I think you should almost never accept a first offer without seeing the game state), and checked Seven's diplo status with the other teams. He had contact with most everyone else, I think Gavagai is the only team we know that he hasn't met so far. Seven also has Open Borders with everyone else, in most cases with Seven giving them a token 2 gold/turn in exchange for OB. Aha! That prompted a little lightbulb to go off in my head. So that's how he's doing it.

See, fertile map or not, no one can expand to 17 cities in 110 turns without crashing their economy. (Seven isn't even ORG either.) Seven's team should be down around 0% science under normal circumstances. What their team is doing is spamming cities everywhere at a fantastic rate, and then relying on intercontinental trade routes to carry the economy. Done properly, they can get a pair of 3 commerce trade routes in every city. That's 17 x 6 = 102 commerce (!!!) completely for free. Thank god they didn't land the Great Lighthouse. All of these other teams emphatically should not be granting Seven's team trade routes for free. His little 2 gold/turn payments for Open Borders are a total steal. Seven is playing their backwards teams for fools. Of course, the same backwards teams also should not be granting our team Open Borders either, that's equally stupid. We're also benefitting enormously, since we have almost as many cities.

But to get back to the Open Borders issue, why would we give Sevenspirits Open Borders with our team? So that he can fill his city spam with even more overseas trade routes? We already have enough 3 commerce trade routes to fill all of our cities, we'd get no benefit. Plus OB would then let Seven's work boat scout out our territory (he's clearly going for circumnavigation), again at no benefit to our team. Accepting his offer would be stupid on our part. So I counter-offered Open Borders for 10 gold/turn. If Seven wants to pass that badly, he can pay for the right to pass through.

Seven was apparently not amused. He counter-offered Open Borders for 92 gold/turn from our team. If that number was supposed to be a message, I have no idea what it was. After I declined that, Seven offered straight Open Borders a second time, which I again declined. It's simply not in my interests to sign them, sorry. Seven can go around in a different direction, or he can pay for the right to pass through. I'm not giving away something that only benefits their team and does nothing for me. That would just be dumb.



We can also see Seven's techs because their team discovered Alphabet to set up their Philosophy lightbulb. Quick tech comparison:

Techs we have: Archery, Priesthood, Aesthetics, Literature, Monarchy, Civil Service, Music
Techs they have: Alphabet, Philosophy

That makes the total beaker count 7802 to 5924 in our favor. But even that's being a bit generous to Seven, since he used a Great Scientist lightbulb for Philosophy tech. It was a smart move, since it gained them a religion for their SPI trait, but they didn't actually research that. They have only researched 4692 beakers without that Scientist. So yeah, we're far ahead in tech and our economy is a lot stronger right now. This won't last forever, since eventually their size will catch up, but our position isn't that bad. Seven is not a threat to claim any of the "first to" bonuses like Liberalism or Economics.




I thought long and hard about pulling the trigger on our Golden Age this turn. Ultimately though, there was a small hole where our scouting units in Noble territory couldn't see, and it was possible that a stack of horse archers could have slipped through on the way to attack us. We could know with certainty if there was an attack force on its way by waiting one more turn, so I made that decision to hold off. Besides, saving gold for 1 turn before popping the GA wasn't terrible. However we would have to make a decision on the next turn, either whip out units and prepare to be attacked or go for the Golden Age. It was going to be a nervous decision either way.

[Mikehendi]

We still have a scout watching Gavagai's horse archer force. This group of 11 horse archers and a mixture of some foot units has been heading west for the last couple of turns now. It's pretty clear that Gavagai intends to attack Bantams with these guys while he's at peace with Noble. (This could be a dangerous move for Gavagai, since that peace treaty will expire in about 5 more turns with much of his army over in Bantams territory. We shall see!) This prompted a tech change from our own team though, as I swapped us over from Metal Casting to Horseback Riding. If Bantams looks like he's going down, we need to get in there and vulture some of the scraps for ourselves. So we'll tech HBR, get out 5-10 horse archers, and then sucker punch Bantams while most of his army is off fighting Gavagai. The geography is such that horse archers can move next to his capital before he has a chance to see them coming (if we road in the right spots with our workers). Anyway, no firm plans here as yet, but we need to be prepared to act. Can't let Gavagai claim all of Bantams territory.

After much thought, finally I did decide to pop the Golden Age. This was a major reason why:



The scout and chariot over here still couldn't spot any evidence of a Noble force heading our way, and if he was going to attack us, he would have sent the units by now (just as Gavagai is moving towards Bantams). Noble also moved a chariot in our direction, which tells me that he's looking to scout us out for info - not attack. Moving a single chariot out with nothing behind it signals information gathering, if I'm reading this right. Production spying also suggests that Noble is building Wealth in a couple of cities (I hope that I'm interpreting that correctly).

But the biggest signal of all is that catapult. Look at the direction that it's moving: it was just built in Healthcare, and it moved NE-N. The exact opposite direction from out team, and towards the Gavagai border. So maybe this will fall apart horribly in a few turns, but everything that I can piece together suggests that we're not a target here. And if we're going to win this game, we've got to take some chances. We can't play scared, Sevenspirits is going to run away with the game if we don't make intelligent use of our PHI trait. Since we researched all the way up to Music tech for that Great Artist, and we grew our capital to a huge size early on, let's make use of both of them.

It's time to toss the dice.



Remember, we're revolting OUT of Slavery civic here and into Caste System and Bureaucracy. Plus we have two teams close by with very strong armies in Noble and Gavagai. This could go very wrong, very fast. That's why it's a bit of a gamble. Thank goodness Noble has never spent any EP against us, and can't see our bar graphs.



The capital in Golden Age mode, having swapping into Bureaucracy. Here we get to see the extremely rare 2 commerce FIN tile, only possible in a Golden Age. I built the plains cottage specifically to make use of it during the Golden Age, getting the bonus hammer and commerce. (The plains cottage also takes us to the sweet spot of exactly 16 base production while in GA.) We should be able to knock out the Statue of Zeus here in quick order, and that should be another major deterrent to other teams attacking us.



Then the Great People generation. We're trying to produce 3 Great People during this Golden Age, two Scientists and a Merchant. I was originally thinking 3 Scientists, but then I realized that we only needed 2 of them for lightbulbs on the Liberalism path (Philosophy and Education), and we could easily produce a Merchant to turn into gold for researching any tech we wanted. In fact, if this lines up correctly, we'll cash in our Great Merchant for 1200-1500 gold right as we pop the double Scientist lightbulb, which will hopefully win us the Liberalism race and catapult us forward to other important techs like Gunpowder, Economics, and Printing Press. We also have the option to pop a second Golden Age with Scientist + Merchant in a truly desperate situation. I think that the combo works better than creating 3 Scientists (the last of whom was only going to lightbulb Printing Press anyway).

Unfortunately generating those Great People is a bit of a pain, even with PHI trait. Having to drop those mature cottages was physically painful. Still, it's only for a couple of turns here. We want to get the first Great Person from Rochelle, since it's first in city order and has the most mature cottages. This city should spend the fewest turns running specialists. Next up is Aix:



Still painful. At least here we could trade one cottage over to Le Havre. The third city is Carcasonne, where I forgot to take a screenshot. It looks pretty much the same though. That poor city has to work 7 Scientists for a few turns at the end, in order to get the 400 GPP out by the end of the 7th turn of Golden Age. It can just barely do so without starving.

A good question to ask: should we have waited for Philosophy tech and Pacifism civic before popping this Golden Age? That would make the whole process a lot easier, certainly. But the tradeoff is then we'd have to research Philosophy tech itself (not cheap at 1200 beakers), and then we couldn't use a lightbulb for the tech. After all, the whole point is accelerating ourselves to Liberalism and later Renaissance era techs. Plus, every turn that we delay is a turn that we're not in Bureaucracy civic. So really the issue is one of opportunity cost. We could get a better Golden Age for Great Person generation if we wait 10 turns, but then we're waiting 10 turns, and that's the whole crux of the matter. Those 10 turns could be the difference in landing Liberalism, and in getting our cheap PHI universities at Education faster. I don't know if this is better, only that being PHI opens up some interesting opportunities that we wouldn't have otherwise. How valuable is a Turn 115 Golden Age as opposed to a non-PHI civ doing the same thing on Turn 125 or Turn 130? It's a good question.



The completely unfair and inflated Golden Age demographics. Our GNP went down from hiring 18 specialists, it was over 600 when we were working tiles. Goreripper is the one with the 401 number, and that's very impressive. He's doing quite well over there. It's a bit hard to tell how much of the GNP is culture though, with his CRE trait and cheap libraries. I don't know how much of his score is techs and how much is points from land. He's clearly one of the leaders though.

It was a pleasant surprise to still be #2 in Food with 18 specialists hired. Add 36 food to our total to see our normal value there. Seven is clearly in first, and he's got more settlers on the way, but I still like our situation if we can avoid getting attacked here. We have more cities than any other team in the game (we have 14 and the next closest is Goreripper with 12) and our economy is excellent. Just need to be left alone for another 15-20 turns, and get some of the Bantams spoils, and we'll be set.

[novice]

Pacifism is actually antisynergistic with PHI.