Mikehendi Pitboss 16 Thread

[Mikehendi]

This thread suddenly became popular today. To clarify what I meant regarding Seven's team, I felt as though they over-reacted a bit. They wanted Open Borders, I didn't want to give it to them, and their response was to demand an absurd sum of gold (92 per turn!) and then immediately declare war. That had the net effect of killing any value of our trade routes permanently. I dunno, it just felt way over the top to me. Declaring war didn't allow their work boat to pass through either, they moved exactly 1 tile into our territory and then back out again. Since their work boat moved away to the north, I offered a peace treaty this turn, giving them a token 1 gold in the process. Seven again vetoed that offer, and we remain at war. Honestly, it's all a huge pain in the rear - I've got to follow a turn split every turn for this phony war. There's a difference between disagreeing with another team, and going out of your way to be annoying, and from my perspective it feels like they're doing the latter. You guys can feel free to disagree.

I don't know the math about PHI vs. Pacifism efficiency, I would just run both if I'm trying to generate Great People. We want to minimize specialist turns since they're pretty bad when not running Representation.



More dispatches from the Gavagai/Bantams front. I didn't see the horse archers when I logged in, so I thought they must have moved forward. Nope! They must have gone backwards instead, back into Gavagai territory. This small axe and catapult group pushed up a tile instead. I honestly don't know what's going on here. Still, more delay can only be to our advantage. The timer is ticking down every turn until we revolt back into Slavery and can whip again.

Will Gavagai move this little stack of one-movers northwest next turn or north? Remember, Bantams sees them if they go NW, he doesn't if they go straight west. Fun stuff to watch.



Great news here on the Noble border. We apparently passed a "trust test" that I didn't even know that we were having! Noble moved a chariot onto the same tile as our worker without attacking it and killing it. Of course his chariot would have died instantly to our spear, but he could have taken the worker. I had no idea that there was a chariot ready to move in, whoops. Nonetheless, that's a great sign from our eastern neighbor. It looks like they are happy with the quiet border we have right now. We'll try to make sure that it stays that way, and their scouting chariot sees lots of defensive spears.



These are our island cities, including the most recent city of Limoges. It will pop borders next turn from the Build Culture option, and we'll also connect the silks located there. We should be able to get two more solid cities down here in the south, one by the fish and one by the sheep/crabs combo. There's plenty of room for expansion in these islands, our failure to expand down here better has been one of the weaknesses of our game thus far.

We're using the Golden Age to build part of Moai Statues in Toulon. It's not a perfect spot with only 10 water tiles, but again, no stone on this map means it's not easy to build, and I think it's better to have it up sooner to make use of it. With Moai, Toulon becomes a very strong city, and will hopefully build the core of our future navy.



Demos for the curious. Got to run now, thanks for reading everyone. Glad people are enjoying the thread.

[yuris125]

To be honest, Seven's play is consistent with "have a lot of Impis leftover from early war, look into the border city, see a single Axe on defence, go prepare a naval invasion". You've been healthily paranoid thus far, don't stop now

[suttree]

"I don't know the math about PHI vs. Pacifism efficiency, I would just run both if I'm trying to generate Great People. We want to minimize specialist turns since they're pretty bad when not running Representation."

Not to muddy the waters, but it has interesting consequences to observe that specialists are always "pretty good" even outside of Representation provided you can make use of the GPP in a reasonable time frame. I think it misses something to model specialists as having a "GPP part" and a "Gold/Beakers/Hammers" part and conclude you want to minimize specialist turns because the latter part is small. Rather, the return on a specialist varies - if the return is high enough sometimes you want to maximize (productive) specialist turns.

So novice could be right - as PHI it might be a waste to invest in Philosophy if adding Pacifism doesn't change your propensity to generate great people. Running more specialists isn't a problem if they already have a high return and resources spent increasing their return could be better applied elsewhere. On the other hand, if adding pacifism increases the return on specialists such that you can/want to run even more of them, then pacifism might be a good investment.

If the return on gold/beakers is high and you can generate a GP in a reasonable time frame, a PHI specialist is like a gold mine on crack - you have reason to maximize rather than minimize specialist turns.

[mackoti]

"I don't know the math about PHI vs. Pacifism efficiency, I would just run both if I'm trying to generate Great People. We want to minimize specialist turns since they're pretty bad when not running Representation."

Not to muddy the waters, but it has interesting consequences to observe that specialists are always "pretty good" even outside of Representation provided you can make use of the GPP in a reasonable time frame. I think it misses something to model specialists as having a "GPP part" and a "Gold/Beakers/Hammers" part and conclude you want to minimize specialist turns because the latter part is small. Rather, the return on a specialist varies - if the return is high enough sometimes you want to maximize (productive) specialist turns.

So novice could be right - as PHI it might be a waste to invest in Philosophy if adding Pacifism doesn't change your propensity to generate great people. Running more specialists isn't a problem if they already have a high return and resources spent increasing their return could be better applied elsewhere. On the other hand, if adding pacifism increases the return on specialists such that you can/want to run even more of them, then pacifism might be a good investment.

If the return on gold/beakers is high and you can generate a GP in a reasonable time frame, a PHI specialist is like a gold mine on crack - you have reason to maximize rather than minimize specialist turns.

I might dont know to use specealist as good as novice or you sutree but many times i found that having Philo when in GA and using pacifism would have helped me alot:less starving of cities workin more tiles in GA .Even you get same number of great perosns you work more tiles so there is a net gain so i wont call it antysinergic , or perhaps i dont understand what that means.

[suttree]

I might dont know to use specealist as good as novice or you sutree but many times i found that having Philo when in GA and using pacifism would have helped me alot:less starving of cities workin more tiles in GA .Even you get same number of great perosns you work more tiles so there is a net gain so i wont call it antysinergic , or perhaps i dont understand what that means.

Believe me, mackoti, I'm not pretending that I know how to do anything when it comes to Civ4. Here we have two excellent players (you and novice) saying different things about specialists and I'm trying to show how they link together. I had the chance to think about this stuff in another game, so it's fun to write down what I learned.

I really like how you highlighted that sometimes generating a GP requires you to starve a city. So it is true that - if you can avoid starving a city - the return on something like Pacifism can be greater than you would expect. On the other hand, if a city is large enough, starving isn't necessarily a bad thing since you get more food in the form of specialist turns from starving than you invested in the starving citizen.

It remains, however, that novice is correct that PHI and pacifism are anti-synergistic in this sense:

Let's suppose I want to generate only a single GP. To keep the numbers simple, let's say it costs 900GPP and we're in a GA. If I'm PHI, it costs 900/9*2=200 food. If I'm not PHI it costs 900/6*2=300 food. Now, let's add pacificsm. If I'm PHI, it costs 900/12*2=150 food - I save 50 food that I can spend working more tiles during the GA. If I'm not PHI, it costs 900/9*2=200 food - I save 100 food that I can spend on working more tiles during the GA. In both cases I pay the full cost of the Philosophy tech, but with PHI I save only half as much food. In both cases the Philosophy tech has a net positive return, but the return on investment is less for the PHI player - this is what it means for PHI and pacifism to be anti-synergistic.

Therefore there might be situations (say when you can meet you GP goals without Pacifism) where the PHI player (as opposed to the non-PHI player) would prefer to spend those Philosophy beakers on something else - in those situations Novice would be right. On the other hand, food during a GA is pretty valuable, perhaps better than any other investment available, so Mackoti would be right.

In some games you will build the Parthenon, run Pacifism, and pump great people during a golden age all at the same time and this will be the best choice. In other games one of the Parthenon, or Pacifism, or an early golden age might not be worth the investment. PHI increases the likelihood of the latter case.

[Mikehendi]

Gavagai picked out the correct tile for his attack. This is the spot where he wouldn't be seen, unlike the tile north. Poor Bantams only needed to move his immortal on the hill one tile north and he would have seen the whole thing. Bantams even has Open Borders with Gavagai, and he made no attempt to explore and see if the team with the massive power bar graph next door might be coming to invade. But then again, if Bantams knew what he was doing, he wouldn't be in this position. Such a shame. I was hoping that Gavagai would mess this up, but it seems we weren't quite that lucky.



Scouting chariot over in Goreripper land. I'm a little surprised that this city wasn't placed on the coast, a tile east would have seemed like a stronger location. It certainly helped us, Cannes is happy to have that clams resource. I believe that we've managed to land all of the seafood resources in this water channel that we had a reasonable chance to get. (Not counting the crabs taken by Goreripper's second city located 3 tiles from his capital, for example.)

Rochelle was set to pop out its Great Merchant at the end of this turn, and the plan is to ferry it right on over to Goreripper's capital for an early trade mission. Load on the galley on Turn 119, unload in the capital and use the trade mission on Turn 120. I don't think there's any value to waiting longer to cash in the Great Merchant, since we're racing for Liberalism right now and gold is more valuable when we have no gold multiplier buildings like markets or banks to get gold from the slider. We should be roughly 10 turns away from Liberalism if all goes according to plan. I don't think we have any serious competition, but we won't know for sure until we get Alphabet tech in a few turns.



GNP bar graphs. Goreripper is probably the biggest competition here, his GNP has consistently been at the same level as ours. I am uncertain how much of this is actual tech and how much is CRE culture, still he's definitely doing well. Gavagai is also surprisingly competitive given his small city sizes and complete lack of libraries. His cities all have granaries, barracks, and UB sacrificial altars, and that's about it. And yet he's still one of the GNP top dogs due to his leader pick. Darius (FIN/ORG) is absolutely disgusting on this map. I would strongly suggest putting him in the ban pool for this type of game in the future, at least on a heavy water + Toroidal map setup. I think that Darius is stronger than the banned Willem for this particular game; if Seven had picked Darius with the first selection in the snake pick, instead of the Zulus, this game would be completely over.

[Mikehendi]

These pictures are from the turn that we played today. Gavagai moved in after Pasargadae, with his main stack of 13 horse archers and following slow movers. He should attack immediately if he's smart and not wait for those catapults. Pasargadae will surely fall, and the real question will be where Gavagai moves next. I'm hoping that Bantams can hold out for about 5-6 turns, that's how long we need to get back into Slavery civic, whip some horse archers, and then get them up in the north to vulture some territory. A lot depends on how ineptly Bantams defends this, which will likely be pretty inept. The other huge issue is what Noble's team is going to do when their enforced peace wears off in about 3 turns. If Noble redeclares war, Gavagai might suddenly run home with the 20 units he has up here, which are a thousand miles away from the Aztec/Mali front lines. Where's that popcorn smiley again?

By the way, Gavagai has been playing before Bantams every single turn until this one, when he waited until after Bantams played to move in. (And of course since Bantams never logs in more than once, he didn't see the invasion and didn't whip anything.) There's no double move there or anything, or more technically Bantams double-moved Gavagai, but I do think Gavagai should have played after Bantams on his previous turns, done his best to synch up their respective turns ahead of time. A minor point for anyone reading.



This is our hopefully demilitarized border with Noble and Gaspar. They seem to be happy with the situation right now, and we're overjoyed that they haven't tried to attack us. (We wouldn't be killed, but we would lose at least one or two cities, and it would likely end any chance we have to win the game.) This is a case where I think that a peaceful border genuinely benefits both of our teams. Noble's team has been building a lot of catapults, they have to be around a dozen of them by now. Those cats keep walking to the northeast, up towards the Aztec border, so unless this is a crazy fakeout, we have to assume that Gavagai is their intended target. Over on our side, these cities have produced a bunch of spears (and we made certain that Noble's exploring chariot saw lots of spears!) and are now getting horse archers ready for use against Bantams. As I said, figure about 6 turns needed to get those horse archers out and moved into position up in the north.




Overview of the middle of our territory. Great Merchant on its way over to Goreripper, researching Paper at an outstanding rate in Golden Age mode, etc. (No one else has Paper tech yet, according to GNP spying, unless wetbandit or Kuro somehow got there.) The turn has rolled since taking this picture, and we did indeed get Statue of Zeus in the capital. Hopefully that's a big "GO AWAY!" sign to all the other teams to leave us alone.



Golden Age inflated Demos. We'll get a better sense of where we stand after the Golden Age runs out in 4 more turns. Obviously it all looks great right now.

I should also comment on the Sevenspirits team, which continues to plant cities at a fantastic rate. They added four cities last turn (!!!) and then another city this turn, taking them up to 23 cities in total. Again, we have the second-most cities in the game with 14 cities. I'm not sure whether to be intimidated at this point or simply shake my head in confusion. Certainly population = power in Civ4, and eventually all those cities are going to become highly valuable. But I'm not sure of the wisdom of planting so many cities at such a fantastic rate, even on a map this fertile. We can see Seven's techs since they have Alphabet tech, and they've discovered nothing since we met them six turns ago. They were making 30 gold/turn at what I presume is their 0% science rate compared to our 165 gold/turn back before we entered our Golden Age. At some point, crashing your economy has to be counterproductive, right?

Perhaps they will still have the last laugh on this, we'll have to see. But if we can field frigates and galleons and rifles while they're still using galleys and muskets, can't we simply take as many cities as we want away from their team?

[WilliamLP]

By the way, Gavagai has been playing before Bantams every single turn until this one, when he waited until after Bantams played to move in. (And of course since Bantams never logs in more than once, he didn't see the invasion and didn't whip anything.) There's no double move there or anything, or more technically Bantams double-moved Gavagai, but I do think Gavagai should have played after Bantams on his previous turns, done his best to synch up their respective turns ahead of time. A minor point for anyone reading.

I feel like etiquette for when to declare is a little fuzzy here, but why do you think they should have done this?

At some point, crashing your economy has to be counterproductive, right?

In the long run, more cities and land means a higher tech rate too. So for this rapid inflation to be a bad idea there would have to be a period where being behind in tech presents a specific disadvantage. Does it here? (I'm really wondering... It seems to be a key piece of game feel, how much to extend and how closely to flirt with stagnation, that separates good players from great players here.)

[Mikehendi]

For the first question, I think it falls along our guidelines of being a good sport about turn splits. While Gavagai didn't double move Bantams, he played before Bantams every single turn until the last one when he finally declared war, at which time he changed over to playing after Bantams. As I said in the last post, Bantams actually double moved Gavagai in this case. I'd say it's simply a case of avoiding reload headaches and minimizing confusion. No, it didn't matter here because Bantams is a poor player and his civ is so weak, but what if he had spotted the attack coming when he got the unintended double move? And then whipped extra units or did something like that? We'd have a huge hairball on our hands. It seems to me that Gavagai should have simply played after Bantams ahead of time, and made that a non-issue. That's my only point there.

On the second point, yes, more cities and more pop eventually comes out ahead. I think we all know that. At the same time, they also mean more expenses too, at least until those cities become productive. That's the balancing act of Civ4 that we all struggle to figure out. I know that the Sevenspirits civ is going to be a monster eventually, I'm just not sure that putting down so many cities in such a rush was necessarily the best move. They have to be sitting around break-even research at something like 10-20% science, and they haven't discovered any techs in the 8 turns since we met them. Maybe that won't matter at all, and they'll whip out a bunch of courthouses (and ikhandas!) and they'll be totally fine, and they'll run everyone else over. But it's also possible that they'll stagnate technologically, lose all of the "first to reach" bonuses on the tree, and struggle against teams which had fewer cities but better economies. For example, we're in good position to clean up the following free bonuses from the tech tree:

Music (free Great Artist, already achieved, turned into "free" Golden Age and 3 Great People)
Liberalism (free tech -> Nationalism)
Taj Mahal (free Golden Age, from Liberalism play)
Economics (free Great Merchant, another Golden Age with 1 more Great Person)
State Property (free Great Spy)

And so on. In addition to the freebies from the tech tree, we also get access to more advanced civics (like Bureaucracy, Free Market, State Property, etc.), better and more cost effective units (especially drafted musketeers), the crushing advantage from superior naval tech (can capture virtually anything with frigates/galleons vs. galleys, etc.), and the stuff that inherently makes your civ better from more advanced tech (like Civil Service spreading irrigation, and Printing Press powering up your advanced cottages). So yeah, pop and cities matter a lot, but tech matters a lot too! That seems to be the advice from mackoti in this thread, don't obsess about number of cities, get a tech lead and then use it to take cities away from someone else. I think we have a good chance to do exactly that.

Long story short, I have no idea whether Seven's approach to this game or our approach to this game will come out better in the long run. It will probably be decided by the other teams as much as anything we both do. One way or another it should be fun to watch though.

[Mikehendi]

Catching up from the last few turns here, I did not have time to post yesterday. This was the Bantams defense in Pasargadae on Turn 119.



This was the aftermath. Four injured horse archers here, and then two horse archers + 2-mover GG axe + 1 chariot inside the captured city. It looked like a fairly bloody battle from what our scout could see, a spear with full fortify defense and 40% cultural bonus is tough for horse archers alone to defeat. The diplo screen showed Gavagai with 33 war weariness afterwards. When I tested in my sandbox, that was 8 war weariness for capturing the city and the remaining 25 war weariness indicated nine units lost. I don't know if it's the same calculation for MP, but that was the case against the AI. It's not going to stop Gavagai from running over Bantams, hopefully the losses will slow him down a little.



Here is the plan for the western part of the continent. We are preparing a strike force of roughly 8-10 horse archers to swipe some of this land. I don't think we'll be fast enough to go after the Bantams capital, and I don't know if it would be a good idea to challenge Gavagai's army for that prize anyway. However, I think we can make a play for Ecbatana over there to the west. With roads in place, we can stage in Lille and then move four tiles NE-N-NW-NE onto the sheep tile. From there, it's a single turn's move into Ecbatana. We move after Bantams, he gets no chance to whip defenders, and the city falls, ideally at the same time as Persepolis falls. Hopefully Gavagai isn't looking to provoke yet another war so soon after concluding two earlier ones, and we poach away the westernmost prize.

The instant Persepolis disappears, we're also throwing down cities on the two white dots, taking advantage of the opened up culture. (We might or might not be able to get another city further east.) Basically we take those spots, use the "Build Culture" feature to pop borders immediately, and dare Gavagai to come attack us on our turf. This would also secure our control over the western coast of the north, which is worth another 3-4 more cities beyond what we've drawn in here. Now this could all horribly go wrong here, but that's the working plan in theory.

Goal for research this turn was to spend ourselves down as close to 0 gold as possible, and knock out 95% of Alphabet tech. This lined up nicely. With a Great Merchant finishing a trade mission next turn, we'd be in position to go back to 100% research with a lot of overflow from Paper and Alphabet techs.