[SPOILERS] Donovan Zoi and AdrienIer: Slümhund Millionaires!

[Donovan Zoi]

Commodore accepted the straight up OB without the gpt. We did get a nice boost in Salmon Falls, from 4 gpt in trade routes to 11 gpt. I think there were only two of our cities that didn't get a gpt bump, so I guess it is a good thing that Commodore has all those cities?

As far as a GA goes, I know we are storing up for another Great Prophet in Salmon Falls. So we may be able to run some specialists there in order to get any kind of GP to force the GA. I don't see it happening until the second set of Civics changes (OR/HR) but we can convert the religion at that time as well. I'll check it out though.

[Donovan Zoi]

Turn 129 - 350 AD

Time for a quick recap:

- We discovered Machinery in T128 and will get CoL next turn with the help of only 1 wealth city.

- Many of our cities have built every improvement except for Aqueducts and Collosseums. Courthouses will obviously be the next venture for just about all of them.

- Joey has unveiled 2 more wonders, meaning he has gotten the last 4. Those wonders are: Pyramids, MoM, SoZ and the Great Library. So he had definitely been putting that pinched Marble to good use.

- HAK has joined in to help Gavagai take out Borsche. With only 5 cities left, the foodies may allow Gavagai to become available to his next victim sooner than expected.

I would like to go for Engineering after we get CS. Here are the reasons why:

- We can get it faster than the long road to Guilds, and gets us an immediate defense against possible Knights from any of our 4 neighbors.

- Castles: Even with the bombardment nerf, this building will provide more defense and an extra trade route (meaning we may have to grab AB). Plus a more effective ESP slider if necessary.

- +1 road movement: This will be great not only for quick response to emergency situations, but will also allow us to hide units easier for a sneak attack.

- Pikemen: After Engineering, I may put the slider at 0% for a few turns to upgrade our military where needed most. A big part of that would include bumping Spears up to Pikes.

[AdrienIer]

Doesn't that delay the switch to Bureau ? I don't really mind going for Engineering for pikes and +1 road movement, but castles will only be worth it in our island cities IMO. These things aren't cheap. How is Elkad's power graph ? If we go engineering after COL can we field a combined WE/swords/cats stack to attack him ?

[Donovan Zoi]

Things have gotten pretty interesting over the last few turns.

It looks like it is all eyes on Joey at the moment, with HAK declaring on Joey and then suing for peace to get a city out of the deal (the one on HAK's continent). Then Commodore joined in and took one of Joey's recently acquired Dutch cities from the island. So currently Joey is at war with Elkad and Commodore.

Incidentally we also met HAK recently, who has 17 cities! Commodore is up to 20 now. So it is really time for us to take action I think. Any one of our opponents is available at this point, but I think that Joey's land provides the largest spoils. We can pretty much Sherman's March from Creole to Black Eagles and pick up Marble, the Pyramids, Great Library and SoZ. Then double back to capture an isolated Harrapan with MoM. However, since it would be awhile before Commodore could reach our part of the continent, I am not sure what kind of resistance Joey will have against us. In the meantime, I have switched some Courthouse builds to Axemen with the intent of possibly upgrading to Mace before we go binary for Engineering.

Incidentally, the plan was always to get ENG after Civil Service (you may have thought I meant CS = Caste System?). Right now we will get CS at 5 turns at 70%, using only 2 cities for Wealth. I almost had it at 4 for 80% but that went away after optimizing for production.

In other news Moai is finally built in Yorktown! This city will grow pretty quickly now and be a vital part of the empire.

Feel free to jump in and look at the save. Sorry my reports have not had the usual pics etc, but I have had a lot going on for the last few weeks and that will probably continue for about another month. I do want to present one of those nice geopolitical summaries at sometime soon though.

[AdrienIer]

I'll take a look after the Total War weekend ends.

I somehow missed the moment you said you wanted engineering AFTER CS. So yeah forget what I said.

Go Yorktown go !

[AdrienIer]

Argh ! 70% research ! Heresy ! The gods of binary research are angry, because of that I fear the RNG will go against us now. Sacrifices will probably need to be made to salvage us.

More seriously, I put the slider on 0%. After that you should go 100% for 3t and see where you stand then. Most likely it'll need 1 0% turn and one 100%. You spend a lot of time playing the turns to optimize stuff (which is great ) but I swear that a great way to optimize research output is using binary research. Doing the maths at 70% is useful (that way we know we most likely need 2 wealth builds) but then go the 100% route.

I think Oswego is suffering from too much food (feels weird to say that...) It's using 3 farms but one should be enough. You should probably start cottaging the farms now, the cottages will appear once the city has finished growing (more or less). Are you sure Duquesne should work those coast tiles ? Working the mine and the farm instead is an exchange of 2 commerce for 3 hammers, which is REALLY beneficial. Red blood will start using the workshops next turn which is great. I think Carillion should be using the cottage instead of the lake, it has much better long term potential (2t for a hamlet).

About our geopolitical situation I have changed my mind and think Gavagai is a valid target. Thaenae is defended by a warrior and Kerkouane by an archer, if we take them plus the other island city and Hadrematum we'll be good there. His army is in Borsheland and it would bring us closer to Commodtay. This sounds like a bad thing but if you want to win this game it could be useful to have an opportunity to strike them, which means bordering them somehow. GJ is also a valid target because he seems to have mostly fought over the eastern island, so his armies in the west should be reasonably sized. If we could take most of his mainland we'd get an interesting position. In the end I'd probably favor attacking Joey but by the time there's an actual stack in the southeast ready to strike maybe you'll want to change your mind and go southwest instead.

Whoever you want to attack (I think attacking someone is now a necessity) you don't want to build axemen now, we're getting maces in 5 turns and upgrading them will cost way too much. I changed the builds to crossbows, you can change them back if you want to (or I can do it if you can't). We have crossbows, WEs, catapults (we need more than 3 so maybe I should change the builds to catas instead) and swords, axes are becoming really obsolete as they get beaten by all of these (swords only in cities).
So yeah it's either crossbows because you want the anti-melee or catapults until we can build maces. Remember, the Indian production numbers are pretty high building an army of maces won't take that long we already have 9 axes to upgrade if you really want to go that route.

Edit : sorry I went in thinking "look but don't touch" in case I would disrupt some things but I just couldn't resist. I also moved a galley south to take the workers after they where done planting the incense. And why did the capital build 3 quarters of a courthouse ? It only has 4.5 maintenance it wasn't worth it.

[Donovan Zoi]

Argh ! 70% research ! Heresy ! The gods of binary research are angry, because of that I fear the RNG will go against us now. Sacrifices will probably need to be made to salvage us.

More seriously, I put the slider on 0%. After that you should go 100% for 3t and see where you stand then. Most likely it'll need 1 0% turn and one 100%. You spend a lot of time playing the turns to optimize stuff (which is great ) but I swear that a great way to optimize research output is using binary research. Doing the maths at 70% is useful (that way we know we most likely need 2 wealth builds) but then go the 100% route.

More on this debate in a moment. In the meantime, I have moved the slider back to 70%.

I think Oswego is suffering from too much food (feels weird to say that...) It's using 3 farms but one should be enough. You should probably start cottaging the farms now, the cottages will appear once the city has finished growing (more or less). Are you sure Duquesne should work those coast tiles ? Working the mine and the farm instead is an exchange of 2 commerce for 3 hammers, which is REALLY beneficial. Red blood will start using the workshops next turn which is great. I think Carillion should be using the cottage instead of the lake, it has much better long term potential (2t for a hamlet).

Yes, that is an odd comment considering we lost our Pigs. Otherwise I would have had those river tiles as Cottages for sure.

However, I totally understand what you mean. I too am not a big fan of farmed grasslands, at least until Biology, but we are in a weird spot where we have more happiness than we know what to do with. Many cities have more than a +6 surplus of , which is awesome. But now we have to decide how we want to use them. Do we want to grow our cities to max out our happiness, or exploit our citizens' love for us by whipping away the surplus? If the latter, it will mean rethinking our move into Caste System in 5 turns and maybe only switching to Bureaucracy, but this keeps our vast network of workshops left wanting. I think I would still want to go into Caste, so that means growing our cities even with the so-called crappy coastal tiles. Say what you want about them, they certainly are helping to fuel our research. And city growth to use more of the good tiles.

About our geopolitical situation I have changed my mind and think Gavagai is a valid target. Thaenae is defended by a warrior and Kerkouane by an archer, if we take them plus the other island city and Hadrematum we'll be good there. His army is in Borsheland and it would bring us closer to Commodtay. This sounds like a bad thing but if you want to win this game it could be useful to have an opportunity to strike them, which means bordering them somehow. GJ is also a valid target because he seems to have mostly fought over the eastern island, so his armies in the west should be reasonably sized. If we could take most of his mainland we'd get an interesting position. In the end I'd probably favor attacking Joey but by the time there's an actual stack in the southeast ready to strike maybe you'll want to change your mind and go southwest instead.

I really am in no rush to border Commodtay. But I do think that if we play our cards right and continue to buffer ourselves from them, the endgame becomes a showdown between us. I am also of the mind that if we keep OB with Commodtay and HAK (that also hapened recently), then each of our 4 neighbors is up for grabs, perhaps simultaneously. If it were possible, I would love to be able to strike 2-3 places at once, with our later conquests having the false reassurance that we are at war with 1-2 others. But that plan will fail if we are not able to time peace after short term objectives are met on a case by case basis. We'll really have to see how army grows over the next few turns.

I have been eyeballing the Gavagai situation for some time, and I am cautiously optimistic about our tech/production advantages. But I really think that Joey would not expect the Sherman's March Wonder Tour and may even ragequit to our advantage given his recent comments. Either way, it would be the best ROI for us and we could possibly grab a lightly defended Hague on the way through.

Whoever you want to attack (I think attacking someone is now a necessity) you don't want to build axemen now, we're getting maces in 5 turns and upgrading them will cost way too much. I changed the builds to crossbows, you can change them back if you want to (or I can do it if you can't). We have crossbows, WEs, catapults (we need more than 3 so maybe I should change the builds to catas instead) and swords, axes are becoming really obsolete as they get beaten by all of these (swords only in cities).
So yeah it's either crossbows because you want the anti-melee or catapults until we can build maces. Remember, the Indian production numbers are pretty high building an army of maces won't take that long we already have 9 axes to upgrade if you really want to go that route.

I am OK with this change. My idea was to whip as many Axes as I could before we went into Caste System and then slowly upgrade them, but I agree that 9 Axe upgrades is more than enough. We also have 7 Archers we can upgrade to XBows at 125 a pop, but some of them won't be necessary. I don't think we should upgrade the Swords right away, just to ensure they are lower in the stack so they can be effective against cities.

Edit : sorry I went in thinking "look but don't touch" in case I would disrupt some things but I just couldn't resist. I also moved a galley south to take the workers after they where done planting the incense. And why did the capital build 3 quarters of a courthouse ? It only has 4.5 maintenance it wasn't worth it.

I am fine with the changes you made. After all, we are a team. I still feel bad that my last rant seemed to disenfranchise you a bit so I really don't want to make that mistake again.

Not done with the FWs in Chesapeake though. They still have at least 3 tiles to build Workshops on. Where were you thinking of sending them? I can see maybe sending two to Ste Foy, though that city may be getting some FWs from Frontenac shortly.

Re: Courthouse in capital. Hey why not? It would be quick and also get us additional EP. At they time I started the Courthouse, Joey wasn't as vulnerable so that why it is only a half-build.

[Donovan Zoi]

OK so here is a discussion that I feel needs to be had because I still don't understand why we would need to spend 88 more gold per turn to still get a tech in 5 turns. While I do see where binary research can help us, it certainly seems that the additional maintenance that is currently plaguing our empire is keeping us from optimizing it the way Adrien would like.

Here are the premises we are working with:

- At both 90% (-94 gpt) and 100% (-123 gpt) research, we can get CS in 4 turns.
- At both 70% (-35 gpt) and 80% (-64 gpt) research, we can get CS in 5 turns.
- We currently have 228 gold.
- We have two cities on Wealth that are supply a total of 40 gpt that are figured into the calcs above.
- Since we have at least two ways to get CS in 5 turns, I really won't accept a research time longer than that.
- There is no way to get CS in 4 turns without putting 1-2 more cities on Wealth, to the detriment of other needs.

I am removing 80% from this discussion since we cannot get CS in 5 turns at -64 gpt. Here are the rest:

70%

Current gold: 228
gpt at 70%: -35

Turn 1: 228 - 35 = 193
Turn 2: 193 - 35 = 158
Turn 3: 158 - 35 = 123
Turn 2: 123 - 35 = 88
Turn 3: 123 - 35 = 53

90%

Current gold: 228
gpt at 90%: -93
gpt at 0%: +172

Turn 1: 228 + 172 = 400
Turn 2: 400 - 93 = 307
Turn 3: 307 - 93 = 214
Turn 4: 214 - 93 = 121
Turn 5: 121 - 93 = 28

100%

Current gold: 228
gpt at 100%: -93
gpt at 0%: +172

Turn 1: 228 + 172 = 400
Turn 2: 400 - 123 = 277
Turn 3: 277 - 123 = 154
Turn 4: 154 - 123 = 31
Turn 5: 31 - 123 = -92

The way I see it, we will have more gold left at 70% (53) than we do going the 90% route (28) once CS has been discovered. 100% research is far too costly to even be sustainable. I understand that stored research is also a factor but from what I could see, the surplus was not much different between 70% and 90%. I'll present more on that in my next post.

[Miguelito]

The trick is to use 100% for 3 turns, then only the last turn when you run out of gold you finish the tech with a lower slider. That way only during the last turn you lose to round-off. IMO the ideal rate for the last turn is 50%, if it gets you the tech and you can pay for it, that way all cities with an even number of cpt don't lose a commerce.

[Donovan Zoi]

OK so let's take a look at research surplus. In order to illustrate this, I chose to develop a research turn simulator to give an idea of how many beakers would be left at the end of a researched tech. This simulator will replace the fingerpinch screen hop effective immediately.




In Game Research Simulator

Using the simulator: The idea here is to adjust the size of the in-game map grid to match the breadth of research showing at the top of the screen. Then line up the grid with the amount of the current turn's research and count the squares. I find that the < ^ > arrows work best.

70%

As you can see, we can just get Civil Service in 5 turns at 70%. This is likely the reason the remaining 53 gold is so high in this case. So a perfectly executed plan, making the most of the lowered gpt to get a tech cheaper than usual. Well done, Donovan!




90%

Now let's check out 90%, with the first turn at 0%. So only 4 turns of research here. The difference in surplus is not really staggering enough to lose the 25 gold in my opinion. Seems like a wash.




100%

Last we can look at 100%. Yes we are short 92 gold going 4 turns, but there is a huge surplus left on the 4th turn. This is enough to convince me to try binary research and that we may be able to optimize enough to parlay some of the beakers into Engineering, even if we are short on gold.

So, research has been set back to 0% while I intend to review the amount of remaining gold against the amount of stored research 5 turns from now.

Surprised? Let it be known I am nothing if not open-minded. We'll see how things lie in 5 turns.