Mikehendi Pitboss 16 Thread

[Mikehendi]

We moved this spear out to scout the garrison inside Tarsus. Gavagai moved 5 horse archers over here; Tarsus had a spear, an axe, an immortal, and an archer inside. I thought that Gavagai would attack, but he chose not to do so on his turn, and actually moved these horse archers back to the north. I guess he decided he'd come back with better odds later. That was likely the smart move - a few bad dice rolls against the spear, and these 5 horse archers could get slaughtered without killing much of anything. These units moved back into Sodium.



Gavagai has a lot of horse archers. He's been 2 pop whipping these things out forever. In this picture, there's 6 horse archers + 1 chariot + the Great General axe inside the city of Sodium. Then there's 4 more injured horse archers + 1 axe healing together on the tile to the east. The tile to the north has another horse archer + 2 cats + 1 axe + 1 spear. And then there's 1 final horse archer guarding Gavagai's worker road crew off to the east, out of sight range of this picture. That's on top of the horse archers he lost in the attack on Pasargadae / Sodium! Hopefully it's clear why we've tried to avoid fighting this guy thus far, we'd lose quickly unless we're willing to mass whip horse archers ourselves, and that's a losing game against someone with cheap ORG sacrificial altars everywhere.

I think Gavagai has mostly played this well so far. My biggest criticism is his city setup: if he was going to do this mass horse archer plan, he should have put stables in all his core cities. He doesn't have a single one that we've spotted thus far, and that's a major mistake. All of these 1 promo horse archers could easily be coming out with 2 promos instead. He's also healing his heavily damage horse archer stack one tile outside Sodium, outside his culture - he'd probably get them back to full faster if he healed inside the city. Still, this has been a strong move to get some land out of the huge army that Gavagai built to fight Noble and Gaspar. Unless...



Unless Noble reopens the war against Gavagai. Their 10 turns of enforced peace ends next turn, and Gavagai's army is wildly out of position to defend his core cities if Noble decides to fight once again. Our other scout found the Noble horse archer stack of doom here; they've also got a ton of catapults up near the Aztec border. Noble's team has never revolted out of Police State civic, and they've continuously cranked out military units during the whole peace treaty. Their actions make no sense unless they're planning to go to war once again, and I don't think our team is the target. (Going by our peaceful demilitarized border, and all of their catapults moving north towards the Gavagai border as they're built.) So I'm hoping and praying that Noble is going to renew the war with Gavagai next turn, and kick off another bloody round of fighting between them. That would help our team immensely, as it would give us free reign to settle most of the north unopposed, continue teching, and advance further towards Gunpowder, Military Tradition, Astronomy, etc.

Come on Noble and Gaspar! Your big rival has most of his army deep in Bantams territory on the other side of the continent! You won't get a chance like this again.



The Great Merchant arrived on schedule for his trade mission, cashing in for 1300 gold. That's solid for this stage of the game, I was working off of the expectation that we'd get 1200 gold. With this influx of money, we have enough gold to run 100% science for the next 7 turns, and that should get our team to Liberalism just as it runs out. Liberalism ETA should be Turn 127 or Turn 128. I would be stunned if anyone beat us to that targets, for the following quick reasons:

* No one has Paper tech (and thus no one has Education tech)
* Sevenspirits is the only team with Philosophy tech, and he lacks Civil Service

Unless a team can somehow get Philosophy, Paper, Education, and Liberalism in the next 7 turns, we should have this in the bag. I am cautiously optimistic.



Poor Carcasonne, taking one for the greater good. It was going to starve one size no matter what, so we waited until the last turn and ran 9 Scientists to get that last Great Person. This city has no library, which means we couldn't run 2 Scientists on the last turn after revolting out of Caste System or whatever. Keep in mind too that we're going to use this Great Scientist for an Education lightbulb on Turn 122 - we can't wait for a library to finish here. Carcasonne, we appreciate your sacrifice.

Finish Paper this turn, finish Alphabet on the last turn of the Golden Age, then use double Scientist lightbulbs on Turn 122 for Philosophy tech and 1800 beakers of Education tech. That turns Education into a 1t tech, and we use the remaining 1000 gold in the bank to plow through Liberalism in 4-5 turns. So far, the longterm plan that started with grabbing the free Great Artist at Music has been working as planned. Hopefully Liberalism is the next step.

[Qgqqqqq]

This is a case where I think that a peaceful border genuinely benefits both of our teams.

In general, a peaceful border almost always benefits both teams involved.

[WilliamLP]

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.

Well said!

[mackoti]

Do you plan to get any city from bantams?How fast you think you'll get some Musketeers?
Do you plan to get into nationhood eating 1 turn of revolt?

[Mikehendi]

Sorry about not posting the last few days. It was a combination of several different things. The whole Bantams situation had me feeling pretty disappointed, I still don't particularly like the idea of replacing one of the teams in this game with an AI civ. It's probably the best of a bad set of options, but it did a lot to kill my enthusiasm for the game when one of the teams clearly doesn't care at all. The whole thing was a downer.

Combine that with a busy work week and the Realms Beyond server being down when I tried to log in, and I didn't have a chance to write anything. I will go through the last few turns now that I have a chance to write a little bit.

[Mikehendi]

This is going back a few turns to Turn 121. We just finished Turn 124 today, this is from earlier this week. Our team discovered Paper tech at the beginning of the turn, and that opened up the option to trade maps. We might even be able to get circumnavigation in the cheapest way possible by trading for it through map deals. I offered 10 gold/turn to both Hashoosh and 2metraninja for their maps in one sided-deals. I have zero intention of giving away our map to anyone else right now - we've explored a lot of territory, and no one has explored us much at all. Out of these two deals, Hashoosh accepted and 2metra did not. Par for the course I'd say. That led to this screenshot:




An overview of the island that Hashoosh and Goreripper share together. Now this is old news for you lurkers, but this was critical information for me. I knew that all of the teams were divided up along separate islands, however I thought that we were placed in three islands of 4 teams each. After all, that's the situation on our continent. But apparently no, that's not the case, the game has one main continent with 4 teams (our continent) and then four smaller islands with 2 teams each. So our game setup is actually:

Mikehendi / Bantams / Noblehelium / Gavagai
Goreripper / Hashoosh
Wetbandit / Kuro
Sevenspirits / Retep

With Sevenspirits having the island to the west of Hashoosh and east of Noblehelium to himself, since he already killed retep at the start of the game. This setup was... not what I expected, to say the least. And look, I don't want to complain too much about the map design, since that's the oldest thing on these forums. I think all of the starting positions are very nicely balanced, and the super-fertile setup makes for an interesting and memorable game. The one thing is though, this duel setup enormously magnifies the luck aspect of which neighbors each team happens to draw. I remember Commodore wrote over in his Pitboss 13 thread how the single biggest thing that determined who won Pitboss game was the availability of weak neighbors to attack and conquer. That's certainly true.... and a map that's designed as a series of island duels magnifies that about tenfold! Starting next to Sevenspirits on an island is a "You Lose" button, while starting next to Bantams or Kuro is the reverse "You Win" button. There simply isn't much counterplay here, since most teams have only a single neighbor, and you can't really influence anything that happens on another island. And then there's the weird thing where the teams on our continent have multiple neighbors instead of one. I don't know if that's a better or worse situation, but it's certainly not symmetrical.

So... I don't want to complain too much, I'm just not entirely sure that I like this idea. It takes the luck factor of weak or strong neighbors and magnifies it too much. If we had started alone on an island with Bantams, I think we'd be 100% guaranteed to win right now, just due to dumb luck. (And if we had started next to Seven, we'd have virtually 0% chance to win.) Plus we're in the annoying position right now of having as neighbors Gavagai (#1 in power), Noble (#2 in power), and Goreripper (#3 in power). You can't ever control the luck factors of strong and weak neighbors when designing maps, it's always going to be there, but creating these dual islands makes it a lot worse. Anyway, enough said.

[Mikehendi]

We finished Alphabet tech at the start of Turn 122. I'll do the tech comparison for the current turn though, and come back to this in a couple posts.



This move didn't make any sense to me. Goreripper declared war on us - Goreripper? WTF?! I can't understand this one for the life of me. What does he think he's going to accomplish by doing this? At best he could raze a city on my continent, but he'll never be able to keep and hold territory there. I assumed that an attack would be coming against my island city near Greek territory, but nope, nothing has shown up there in the last few turns. No units have appeared at all since the war declaration 3 turns ago. I mean... if Goreripper wanted to attack, then why would he declare war before he had units in position? He could have sniped my island city easily if he waited to send a bunch of units, then moved in and attacked all at once. It's baffling.

So this war makes no sense at all, and it also killed our extremely profitable mutual trade routes. It's not a coincidence that we were the first two teams in the game to get an overseas trade connection going, and we're also the top two teams in the game in beakers researched. We also had a mutually profitable dyes for wines deal going on. I have zero interest in attacking Goreripper's stuff, ever. I've asked him for peace several times now, and he continues to refuse. This action doesn't make any sense. What is he thinking here?! Seriously, just sign peace and go bug someone else.



Using the first Great Scientist for the Education lightbulb. I did this at the start of the turn, before whipping away a fair amount of pop in some overdue whips, since Great Scientist lightbulbs are worth 1500 beakers + 3 beakers per pop. (I almost forgot to revolt back into Slavery civic on the last turn of the Golden Age. That would have been embarrassing...) Along with our overflow from previous techs, this insta-completed Education tech.



Sevenspirits was right in the tech thread: Bantams AI is actually doing a better job of defending than Bantams the human. It's still not going to be enough though, and a capable human player could probably stop the Gavagai attack fairly easily by whipping a bunch of spears. However, this is better than what Bantams was doing. Bantams was moving units out of cities, and he whipped a barracks in a city under attack.

A human player would move all of its units over to defend the capital, right? So our plan was to slip in and capture Ecbatana when Bantams moved to defend Persepolis. Unfortunately...



Uh, what are all these units doing here? These were not built by the AI. This was the Bantams garrison when the AI conversion took place. So Bantams doesn't feel the need to defend his capital city, but he does feel the need to stuff 4 axes, an archer, an immortal, and a warrior in the westernmost corner of his empire. I'll just say that I'm confused. Again.

It's bad news for us though, since the AI won't move these units out. Depending on what Gavagai does, and how long he takes, we may have a chance to attack here with horse archers (or better, musketeers). Out scout is keeping an eye on it. For now, we have to deal with Goreripper first.

[Mikehendi]

Turn 123, we fire off the other Great Scientist for instant Philosophy tech, all of the overflow beakers went into Liberalism. It was due in 3 more turns, Turn 126 or end of turn 125. While I'm going to hold the celebrations for the moment, I think our grand strategy involving PHI trait + Great People has been working well so far.



Now this moment was just awesome. We've asked Sevenspirits for peace about three different times, and every time he refused. I knew that his work boat was still scouting out in search of the circumnavigation bonus, and due to the shape of the land north of Bantams, Seven had to head in this direction. I guessed that his work boat would be over here, sent a galley down, and made the perfect interception. I have to say that they deserved this - they turned down a peace treaty multiple times. Serves you right!

This should be a significant delay in Seven's quest for the circumnavigation bonus, and we may be able to land it ourselves if we can get a unit over to Kuro or Wetbandi and trade for their world map. I again requested peace with them after killing their work boat, they countered with peace for my world map, which is laughably uneven. Fine, have it your way, stay at war. (They earlier killed our scouting chariot in Greek territory with a random exploring impi. This was a nice piece of revenge.)



Capital with the forge done, immediately moving on to university. Finally we get our one and only building discount of the game! (This is a major reason why we want peace right now: build our cheap PHI universities, not units that will soon be obsolete.) We'll go from the university on to Taj Mahal here next, which we should land easily so long as no other team pops a Great Engineer. It's going to be a long wonder build though; the max hammers we can get is 42 per turn, that's in the capital with 21 hammers base and +100% bonus from Bureaucracy, forge, and OR civic. It should take about 16 turns at that rate. There's no marble on this map, and all wonders are very expensive. But it's a free Golden Age, obviously we're not going to turn that down! Certainly worth chasing after.



Finally the current turn, Turn 124. Gavagai has started to bombard the defenses in Persepolis with his catapults, and bring over more maces from the east. I'm getting some settlers ready to claim land freed up to the south of Persepolis when the borders disappear. We'll have musketeers to defend by the time Gavagai finishes with Bantams, and that will hopefully discourage him from picking a fight.



The first movement that I've seen from Goreripper thus far in our "war", this galley moving into the water. It's got Combat I promotion, it could attack one of our galleys at 50/50 odds if it wanted. I've stuffed Nimes full of horse archers as a "go away" message to Goreripper, and reoffered peace yet again. I even threw in a nice prize of 100 gold to sweeten the deal. I really want this idiocy to be over; Goreripper can't attack with anything better than horse archers and crossbowmen, so it's not going to work. Let's go back to mutually beneficial trading, ok?

We also planted Montpellier this turn for our 15th city. Yeah, it's a bit cheeky founding an undefended city in this situation. If horse archers jump out of the Greek boat and get in a position to raze it, meh, we can always refound without any real loss.



Toulon is where I thought we'd be attacked. There was a single axe on defense here when that war began. So far though, nothing. We have axe, spear, and archer inside at the moment, on a hill, with the culture defense bonus. I've set it up to double whip an axe next turn, then overflow and complete another spear. I think that leaves us in solid shape, although if the war continues I'll probably whip city walls as well. We're about 6-7 turns away from Gunpowder if I'm estimating it correctly, and musketeers in a city on a hill simply will not fall to the kind of units Goreripper can currently build. He'd have to get Guilds for knights, and then we'll have to take him more seriously.

I still fail to see how this war is helping Goreripper in any way.

[Mikehendi]

Finally the tech situation. We can see everyone's techs except Wetbandit and Kuro, since we don't have contact with them.



We have all 17 Ancient techs, 12 Classical techs (everything except Compass and Drama), 4 Medieval techs (Civil Service, Music, Paper, and Philosophy) and 1 Renaissance tech (Education). We'll land Liberalism and Nationalism in 2 more turns as well. Right now that means we have 14,809 beakers in total. It's the most by a wide margin, and about to get even larger.

Goreripper: 15 Ancient, 9 Classical, 2 Medieval
Has: Feudalism, Machinery
Missing: Meditation, Monotheism, Aesthetics, Alphabet, Literature, Civil Service, Music, Paper, Philosophy, Education

Goreripper has 8342 beakers, which is the second most. He's doing quite well and produces a lot of GNP, although much of that comes from CRE culture and cheap libraries and odeons everywhere. He ignored Civil Service to go for Feudalism and revolted into Vassalage civic. Maybe he's planning on attacking with knights somewhere.

Gavagai: 15 Ancient, 8 Classical, 2 Medieval
Has: Machinery
Missing: Polytheism, Monotheism, Aesthetics, Alphabet, Calendar, Literature, Music, Paper, Philosophy, Education

Gavagai is third at 7926 beakers. It's pretty amazing how well he's researched despite having almost no infrastructure and whipping horse archers endlessly. Darius is insane. He has Civil Service/Machinery for maces and that's all in the medieval era. He's also missing Calendar tech for some reason.

Sevenspirits: 15 Ancient, 6 Classical, 2 Medieval
Has: Nothing
Missing: Archery, Priesthood, Aesthetics, Construction, Horseback Riding, Literature, Metal Casting, Monarchy, Music, Paper, Education

Seven's team is actually fourth in beaker count right now at 7156, although their GNP is lower than anyone else except Bantams. This is partly due to getting 1200 beakers from their Philosophy lightbulb. They picked up Civil Service last turn, which took them about 10 turns to research. Obviously they will only get stronger as the game goes on.

Hashoosh: 15 Ancient, 6 Classical, 2 Medieval
Has: Feudalism
Missing: Meditation, Priesthood, Aesthetics, Alphabet, Calendar, Iron Working, Literature, Metal Casting, Music, Paper, Philosophy, Education

Hashoosh is in almost the same position with 7048 beakers, although he's gone for Civil Service and Feudalism for his medieval techs. Oddly does not have Iron Working or Calendar techs, apparently doesn't have jungle in his territory.

Ad hoc: 17 Ancient, 8 Classical, 1 Medieval
Has: Theology
Missing: Aesthetics, Alphabet, Code of Laws, Literature, Civil Service, Music, Paper, Philosophy, Education

Ad hoc sits at 6724 beakers, and has been running a decent GNP lately. This is largely due to the Great Lighthouse wonder. He just doesn't have enough cities though, he planted his 8th city last turn. Ad hoc is an also-ran civ, not very interesting. Really wish that he and 2metraninja had been on my continent instead of Gavagai and Noble.

Noblehelium: 16 Ancient, 7 Classical, 0 Medieval
Has: Nothing
Missing: Monotheism, Aesthetics, Alphabet, Calendar, Literature, Monarchy, Civil Service, Music, Paper, Philosophy, Education

Noble and Gaspar are seriously behind in science at only 5308 beakers. They only picked up Code of Laws last turn, amazingly, and they don't have basic stuff like Monarchy and Calendar. They are being badly out-teched by our team and Gavagai. It's only a matter of time until their skirmishers, horse archers, and catapults are obsolete. They should be going to war now, while they still have a chance. I really don't understand why they continue to sit in Police State, building units, not fighting anyone. (I mean I'm glad! Just saying that it's a losing move.)

2metraninja: 15 Ancient, 5 Classical, 0 Medieval
Has: Nothing
Missing: Archery, Meditation, Aesthetics, Alphabet, Calendar, Code of Laws, Horseback Riding, Iron Working, Literature, Civil Service, Music, Paper, Philosophy, Education

2metra is at 4507 beakers. He's played a poor game, way too much focus on wonders, little expansion or teching. Looks like he needs to play games with tech trading on, since he can't develop his own economy.

Bantams: 15 Ancient, 3 Classical, 0 Medieval
Has: Nothing
Missing: Polytheism, Monotheism, Aesthetics, Alphabet, Calendar, Code of Laws, Construction, Currency, Horseback Riding, Literature, Metal Casting, Civil Service, Music, Paper, Philosophy, Education

It's Bantams. He's researched 2844 beakers. Does this honestly surprise anyone?

Whew. Finally updated on the current situation. Ask away with questions.

[novice]

What's your planned tech path after Liberalism?