Nothing like the Prodigal Sons: The Odd Couple actually play as themselves.

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Fast and Furious might be a good name since you razed so much so quickly.

[Gaspar]

I think Gavagai's first diplo message from a few posts back is telling you to settle the sheep city in his face 35 turns ago.

No idea on the Iron/Iron + Bay of Pigs trade. Maybe he wants a city on that body of water? In which case, he should just build one. I dunno.

Nice smash and grab job on Mike. A few more spears would have been prudent on his part, for sure. Good job getting peace, too. I agree with Corrupt Bargain as the replacement name.

I think Machinery, Aesthetics, Literature, then on to Guilds. You're going to be building units forever unless Gavagai is going to be satisfied with his position after eating AI Bantam. Do you think this is likely? I don't. Also, yuris is going to want to make a better showing than what he's been forced to endure so far, so look for him to retake some ground in the future. Will he draft maces or wait for muskets? I'd guess maces unless you get some maces of your own in position quickly. Either way, you'll want knigs sooner rather than later. That makes any invasion a super dicey proposition this side of rifles. By that time, hopefully 7 has already launched his space ship.

Good stuff, Boldly. I think I need to do a more thorough state of the world post though because some of your military stuff is definitely coming from incorrect assumptions that we had made earlier in the thread.

Point #1 - Mike probably actually was winning this game before we punched him in the mouth. Yuri might still be in the lead. That's how bad Seven's economy is in the toilet. Krill as a dedlurker is pretty much the worst thing ever, he throws out all his bad ideas, and doesn't mind losing like he would if he was in charge. He's making like 20gpt on 0% right now and techs something about once a millennium. France on the other hand is one tech from Muskets and I'd gander he could tech it pretty fast. He and Goreripper are both WAY ahead of us, like probably in the vicinity of 7000 beakers for Mike/Yuri and maybe 5000 for Goreripper. Gavagai is probably 3-4k ahead of us, whereas Seven might only be 1500 beakers ahead. Yes, all that land is going to pay off and he's going to be the eventual winner because he has a continent to himself and nobody's going to invade him, but if the right people were in charge of France or Greece, he might be far enough behind on tech that they could be invading him with Rifles against Impis and Horse Archers. Unfortunately, Yuri is going to come after us and Goreripper is going to sit around and whine about how he can't do anything rather than ACTUALLY do anything.

The brass tax of this is that I'm not so sure Knights are actually the answer to our problems, because our problems might include Rifles before we can get to guilds. I don't think Yuri is invading with maces though. Best case is with Musketeers in 10t. Worst case is with Rifles in 20t. I'm not entirely positive we have an answer to that in either case. Regardless, I can't see any scenario in which we can tech something other than Machinery next, even though I'd much rather have Calendar. What really would have been ideal is to have had another 10t or so to grow before firing the Golden Age, because part of our issue right now is we're in Representation and soon Bureau and have just increased our happy cap significantly between trades with Seven and settling happy resources. In an ideal world, we'd grow onto all our best tiles and then stagnate all our cities with specialists. Unfortunately 1. We don't have many specialist allowing buildings in most cities 2. We can't grow as much as we'd like because we need foodhammer units because we're in a belated expansion phase 3. We need to build a bunch more units because we now have two fronts rather than just one. None of those priorities are particularly meshing with growing and working specialists.

So it goes.

[Gaspar]

Alright, so here's a little walkthrough what we know about the three players we've met who are still competitive. Let's start with Seven, since I talked about him a bit in my last post.

Here's the main issue with Seven:




The pink rectangle generally speaking is his continent, of which he is all alone. So it appears the map goes something like this:




I've said enough about the map. But on what planet is it fair that one continent has 4 players and the others all have 2? I mean Jesus Christ, EVERYONE, EVER, FOR THE REST OF ALL TIME. HAVE SOMEONE REVIEW YOUR MAPS. K, enough about that.

Anyway, that's why those who are aware of the map think Seven can't lose. Imagine if the situation was similar and we eliminated Gavagai on t50. We still would have had to deal with Mike. Whereas Seven, la-di-dah. Ugh, so stupid. Regardless, let's look a little deeper at Seven's situation. Diplo screen:




So Seven is on 24 cities. For comparison's sake, we have 12.

Techs:


He's up on us: Civil Sevice (1232, though we finish it this turn), Alphabet (462), Calendar (539) , Philosophy (1232)
We're up on him: Priesthood (92), Archery (92), HBR (385), Construction (539)

So he's up on us 2357 beakers, roughly. I'm not counting CS because he might finish something useful this turn, hard to say.

Current Deals:


He's been a good friend.

Bottom Line - he's overexpanded. I'll touch on this in greater detail when we look at France, but there's a legitimate question as to whether his economy can recover sufficiently. Or rather there was before we took 4 cities off France.

[Ichabod]

It's easy to underestimate how a new city will affect your economy. Let's say you have TGLighthouse and you settle a new island city. You may think after looking at the city screen: "well, we are already on a profit, we make 10 gold at 100% gold slider, while the city cost 8 maintenance". Than if you start thinking about how much that city costed for all the other city you have, it's a bit scary. Maintenance costs go high real quick with new cities.

PB13 Spoiler:

I was making like 1100 beakers with -500 gpt at 100% science before my cities got razed/captured. After that, I was making 850 beakers with -250 gpt. I was pretty amazed at that.

Not that you don't know all this already, but I wanted to get that out of my chest.

[Gaspar]

So here's a quick look at France. I won't repost a map, we know Mike/Yuri had a quarter of our blob, roughly exactly. Before we declared war, they were on 16 cities. Here's where they stand now.



So 12 cities now. He's making more gpt than we are in a golden age, though. He played a very nice game, if an outdated one. Essentially, the old read Sullla's PB2 thread game, where you skimp on military to the lowest extent possible, tech to Rifling and draft an army which you then use to plow through your weakest neighbor. He executed this quite well, as the look at techs will show:



Add Gunpowder to the can research pile, I'm not screenshot editing just to get one tech in.

He's up on us: Monarchy (462), Civil Service (1232), Aesthetics (462), Literature (308), Music (924), Alphabet (462), Calendar (539), Philosophy (1232), Machinery (1078), Paper (924), Education (2772), Liberalism (2156), Nationalism (2772)
We're up on him: Nothing.

So he's up 15k beakers. So yeah, well-played game. And don't rule him out entirely - we've set him back a bit, certainly. But he's still in good position and the clear leader on our continent. If he was more experienced, he probably could have held us off. For example, he built SoZ which is a deterrent to nobody in his capital. SoZ is 300h, let's assume he has OR and a Forge. So 120 base hammers. That will get him 4 spears. If he puts those 4 spears, let's say 2 each in Le Havre and Caen, probably all of his cities are still standing. And that's not a surprise to him, he had eyes on our stack pretty much for the last 25 turns. He just went all in with the plan that worked 3 years ago but doesn't work anymore because we've learned not to be scared of units that don't exist yet. PBEM14 taught me that lesson, so this was like PBEM14 for Mike. I don't think we'll see him play here again, though, since if you don't have the stomach for fighting off some Horse Archers as the leader, you're probably not up for Realms Beyond MP.

Anyway, there you see the map difference. Mike's played a dominant if incredibly risky game, and he has 12 cities. Seven has 24. There you go.

[Gaspar]

It's easy to underestimate how a new city will affect your economy. Let's say you have TGLighthouse and you settle a new island city. You may think after looking at the city screen: "well, we are already on a profit, we make 10 gold at 100% gold slider, while the city cost 8 maintenance". Than if you start thinking about how much that city costed for all the other city you have, it's a bit scary. Maintenance costs go high real quick with new cities.

Not that you don't know all this already, but I wanted to get that out of my chest.

Yeah, I mean its still generally a good idea to build those cities, but I think this is another game trope that isn't always true: Land is power. Land will be power, once you get some key infra in your city, the appropriate techs to defray costs/increase profits, get the appropriate number of tiles worked. Before then, its mostly just a drag. Mike showed the power of a vertical strategy here, but also its limitation. The one thing wide has over tall is build queues.

For the most part, I think you want to expand in stages. Settle a couple cities, stop, get them up and running. Settle a couple more, so on. We've definitely expanded slow here and there are a lot of reasons for that. One of the big ones is how late we delayed Currency. When every city starts with 6 CPT, well, yeah - more is definitely better. But Seven hit those 24 cities nearly 10t ago. He might be better off to have built a few less and gotten more courthouses and multiplier buildings up. I can't say, honestly. But I do think there's probably something suboptimal about his play. You can afford that, of course, when you're comfortably the best player in the game and you own an entire landmass to yourself.

[Gaspar]

So Noble and I had a quick chat about the game that I thought was worth posting:

Gaspar: so do you think if mike was still playing
NobleHelium: you paused the game on krill
Gaspar: he could win?
NobleHelium: yeah i think so
Gaspar: yeah me too
NobleHelium: i mean
i'd say he physically would be capable of winning
i'm not sure if he mentally is capable
physically being potential skill
mentally being like paying attention enough to reach his potential
something like that
i realize those terms don't really make sense
Gaspar: well he was paying a lot of attention
he was just very myopic
what would you do now if you were france?
NobleHelium: tech gunpowder, build some muskets, build the taj, swap to nationhood during the GA, draft a bunch and then swap back to bureau
Gaspar: then...
NobleHelium: fortunately there is no marble on the map
taj is really hard to build without it
well then i would attack us with the musketeers
Gaspar: yeah, that is what you would do
and its probably what i would do
i dont think its the right play though
NobleHelium: what's the right play, continue settling the rest of the islands and tech away?
Gaspar: yeah, i think when you're as far in front in terms of tech
NobleHelium: attack seven?
Gaspar: as he is
you have 2 options
one, expand until there's no room left
then crush the weakest neighbor
NobleHelium: normal expanding is not necessarily faster than conquering
Gaspar: its faster than conquering us or gavagai
which are his two options
NobleHelium: well i'm not sure about that
we are pretty behind atm
Gaspar: sure
NobleHelium: and if i were him i wouldn't be playing mali :P
Gaspar: but we're pretty good at defending
lol
NobleHelium: well he could try to kill his southern neighbor
whoever that is
seven is his western neighbor i assume
you're right that muskets are not really stronger than maces
Gaspar: i think theres a lot to be said for attacking seven if you're him
NobleHelium: and we are going to have maces in 10t
Gaspar: but i think i would just build more military
NobleHelium: yes
attacking seven is possible
Gaspar: but defend
NobleHelium: but seven is going to have maces too
Gaspar: and honestly just tech to fucking marines and kill everyone
NobleHelium: i don't think his lead is so unassailable that he can get that far with his current amount of land
his lead is based largely in part on not building any units
obviously that can't happen anymore
Gaspar: no, but we dont know how much else he can settle comfortably
yeah, but hes 12k beakers up on seven
thats a lot of wiggle room
NobleHelium: we were up 25k beakers up on the world in 25
er 45
and that was with cheaper techs, so it amounted to more techs
Gaspar: yeah, and...
did you win?
NobleHelium: yeah we did
Gaspar: well
there you go
NobleHelium: i'm saying that was a much bigger lead
and we had the most land
and highest current tech rate
Gaspar: im saying his leads going to get bigger before it gets smaller
NobleHelium: i disagree
Gaspar: hes going to land taj
he has a size 17 cap
in bureau
surely an academy
NobleHelium: well the cap production is better here than 45, yeah
Gaspar: no doubt hes wasting hammers on universities everywhere for oxford
NobleHelium: we couldn't build the taj in 45 until we settled marble
literally could not build it
22 turns to build
Gaspar: forge, OR, bureau
id guess with these caps
he can do it in 12t or so
which is long, but tenable
NobleHelium: yeah 12t is ok
i'm just concerned that he may get both wonders
since for some reason
people have allergies to building wonders this game
Gaspar: i cant fucking believe nobodys built mom
if i had known this
i might have argued to tech calendar before civil service
and just built the damn thing before we GAd
but literally everyturn i log in
im expecting seven or goreripper to build it

[NobleHelium]

Okay, I lied, we were only up 6k beakers on scooter in 45. (But we were still sitting on at least two GPs.) Not sure how I remembered that as 25k beakers. But still, we don't know how many beakers Mike has on Goreripper and Gavagai.

[Serdoa]

Anyway, there you see the map difference. Mike's played a dominant if incredibly risky game, and he has 12 cities. Seven has 24. There you go.

Not the maps fault. Mike could have 18 by now with a much stronger economy. It is no the maps fault that you attacked him nor is it the maps fault that he didn't build 4 more spears. Nor is it the maps fault that Seven is free to expand wherever he wants because everyone around him played a bad game.

[NobleHelium]

Well, if you actually did create one continent of 4 and several continents of 2, please explain your thinking after the game. The rest is not the map's fault, sure.