[PB29 Spoiler] In which Joey, then mackoti, swing happy go lucky

[GermanJoey]

yep caravel upgrade to frigate.triremes as well.

oh, I just realized that Astro does not obsolete triremes! I can have those prebuilt if I need them; Eng+Chem should be 4 turns after Rifling.

[GermanJoey]

Anyone have any questions?

[GermanJoey]

T147.

lmfao, what in the blazes is this



(forgot to post this last turn!)

Gunpowder is in T147, and I have queued up a billion muskets. Haram 1T to Astro, meaning that he will have Frigates by the time our treaty expires.

[GermanJoey]

Tech race update:

Us
927 gold
-

Haram
490 gold
+Theology (882), +Nationalism (3736), +Engineering (1932)
Printing Press (3275), Gunpowder (2372), Liberalism (2820), 1 turn from Astro (~1300 beakers??)
3275+2372+2820+1300-882-3736-1932-(927-490) = 3654 beakers behind

Fennbandit
1458 gold
+Engineering (1932)
Printing Press (3275), Gunpowder (2372), Liberalism (2820), Astronomy (4202), Philosophy (1502), Education (3736), Economics (2820), Alphabet (491), Aesthetics (491), Literature (322)
1292+2820+3275+2372+2820+4202+1502+3736+491+322-882-1932+(927-1458) = 19487 beakers behind

TBS
305 gold
+Music (1085), +Engineering (1932)
Monotheism (170), Alphabet (491), Paper (1085), Astronomy (4202), Philosophy (1502), Education (3736), Printing Press (3275), Gunpowder (2372), Liberalism (2820), Economics (2820)
170+491+1085+4202+1502+3736+3275+2372+2820+2820-305-1085-1932-(927-305) = 19773 beakers behind

Dreylin
531 gold
+Engineering (1932)
Banking (1292), Economics (2820), Printing Press (3275), Gunpowder (2372), Liberalism (2820), Astronomy (4202), Philosophy (1502), Education (3736), Aesthetics (491), Literature (322), Paper (1085)
1292+2820+3275+2372+2820+4202+1502+3736+491+322+1085-882-1932+(927-531) = 21499 beakers behind

Jowy
361 gold
Meditation (105), Philosophy (1502), CoL (586), Aesthetics (491), Literature (322), Education (3736), Horseback Riding (398), Construction (586), Optics (1085), Gunpowder (2372), Astronomy (4202), Liberalism (2820), Economics (2820)
105+1502+586+491+322+3736+398+586+1085+2372+4202+2820+2820-(927-361) = 21591 beakers behind

Borsche
136 gold
+Theology (882)
Banking (1292), Economics (2820), Printing Press (3275), Gunpowder (2372), Liberalism (2820), Astronomy (4202), Philosophy (1502), Education (3736), Aesthetics (491), Literature (322), Paper (1085)
1292+2820+3275+2372+2820+4202+1502+3736+491+322+1085-882-(927-136) = 22244 beakers behind

Tsargon
605 gold
Banking (1292), Economics (2820), Printing Press (3275), Gunpowder (2372), Liberalism (2820), Astronomy (4202), Philosophy (1502), Education (3736), Aesthetics (491), Literature (322), Paper (1085)
1292+2820+3275+2372+2820+4202+1502+3736+491+322+1085-(927-605) = 23595 beakers behind

interesting that everyone else is in a tightish cluster around ~4000 beakers from each other...

[GermanJoey]

How does Jowy have fucking Printing Press, yet skips Construction and even HBR, the latter despite having w/ Guilds ????? You don't get Guilds for the grocers, boyo!

[mackoti]

Did you got economics as well?

[GermanJoey]

Yeah I got it, I was just too late with it to get the merchant. It's worth a lot of commerce to me, between the civic and a CH in my capital, so it will pay itself back soon enough. My next GA won't be for awhile, so I either needed to get it in that GA or not at all.

[Aurorarcher]

How do you have such lead over your opponents (except Haram) regarding techs? Is it because of the wars or have you just played better in that area and focused more on research? Have you had more GAs than your opponents? 20k beakers to me sound like a very big lead! Or have your opponents skipped some of those techs intentionally?

[GermanJoey]

Hmmm, wars? No, well, with the exception of TBS; I think he is definitely behind on research because of his wars. First, whatever happened with Jowy messed him up bad, and I think he's been scrambling ever since. He's only thrown 2 GAs despite popping a billion great people, one every half dozen turns or so, so that means he's bulbing a lot of them. (We've also thrown 2 GAs; Haram's thrown 3, everyone else just one, I think?) For everyone else, the warring has just been either very recent or very mild. We carried an adequate standing army (we were consistently 2nd power for a long time), so its not like we farmer's-gambitted our way to the top either, relatively speaking.

Um, I did focus on research a lot and we are Fin w/ cottage spam, but that's not the big deciding factor, I think. For example, Haram is not Fin yet has very good research, but Jowy, Fennbandit, and Tsargon are all Fin and all spammed cottages, but are far behind. We focused on research because I felt like Astro would be a very very key tech on this map, to the point where war pre-Astro would not be very profitable, and, of course, having good research in Civ4 games never tends to turn out poorly. And yeah, 20k is a lot of beakers; we have one of the best economies in the game and that'd be, what, like 16-17 whole turns of break-even research for us? Some of that isn't that vital, like Liberalism itself, though. Some of those other techs people have skipped intentionally, and I think foolishly. A big one is Literature; Haram skipped this to more viably compete for lib, but then he had the MoM+Taj to get his great people. Dreylin and Fennbandit both skipped this despite throwing early GAs, and now they've been sitting on a great person for like 40 turns a piece because they don't have an NE.

We had the most land in the expansion phase, but not significantly more than average I think. Haram was really close for a long time and then passed us, and Fennbandit and Dreylin were very close too. I think we managed our land a lot more efficiently than most others, other than Haram, who managed his probably as equally well, but more biased towards his traits, just as we biased more towards ours, and TBS, who again had priorities other than growth. As far as what that means, I guess you could say that its a combination of better dotmap and better tile management? Better worker management too? Like, I don't have a map in front of me right now, and a lot of these have been cottaged over, but we had a lot of key farms in our territory, which helped us whip harder. We had to manage our happy-cap super carefully in every city to get that to work. OTOH, in other players areas', I saw lots of mines, which aren't so efficient in the early game. (Mines/workshops only become preferable to the whip when you can work a LOT of them in one city) We also didn't brainlessly chop all our forests down early, saving them to build new expensive stuff faster. The only other player I saw develop similarly was TBS, and we were neck-and-neck for a long time, until he started going down the military route. Haram didn't whip as much but he got a bunch of other accelerators (early Ind forges via Oracle, Stonehenge, Ziggurats, Pro workers) and also managed his forests carefully, from what I could see.

Hmmm, how to explain it. Basically, my main theory of civ goes something like: land => power. Yes, everyone on this site has this same theory of Civ4. However, I have something specific in mind for those two terms, where "power" means "you get stuff that you want" and "land" means something besides just actual land tiles. The equation is more like this:

(actually worked tiles + specialists + static bonuses) * (infrastructure + civics + traits) * time = stuff happens

On the left side, you got the input, and the right side, you got the output: Stuff. Then you gotta use your brain to make the stuff that happens be the stuff you want to happen. Often times, what you want is to make the stuff that happens increase the numbers on the left side of the equation so that even more stuff happens later! (btw, static bonuses means stuff like AP hammers, Fin commerce bonus, courthouses, etc)

Anyways, the main point is that its actually three terms that work together here to make the "land" term from the simple equation. The first is the actual physical land, but I also include specialists and static bonuses. Here, we only actually consider land that you have a city working - having a tile of land in your borders doesn't do much for your economy, though it might be useful for other reasons. That's why I put a lot of stock in the CY graph for the first 100 turns or so, because I see it as like an aggregate indicator of a civ's health. In other words, its a graph that says how much stuff is happening in a civ, for better or worse, according to what each player wants. And, we crushed that graph, so therefore, we got more stuff that we wanted, which was, in the end, beakers.

Two other important terms of the equation are infrastructure and time. Time refers in-game time, i.e. TURNS, not how long you stare at the screen. Time implies that the longer you have stuff-generating stuff, the more stuff happens. It's like that ole physics equation, "Power = Energy * Time." We had the most "time" out of all the other players because we planted our, for example, our 8th city before anyone else planted their 8th city, same for 9th, 10th, etc, all the way down the line to even that last straggler, our 20th city. That's important because the longer the city exists, the more you can do with it. Our Imp trait helped with this, but we also had to sacrifice other stuff to make this happen; we did not even try for any wonders (other thank Sankore! ) and didn't have a single cottage until, I think maybe T60? I think other players put cottages down too early and this stunted their growth. We had to put a lot down in parallel to catch up and were quite behind in tech around the T90 mark because of this. Or, to put it another way, we had to sacrifice the chance to get any of the good ancient/classical wonders because we had to build hamlets instead, to compensate for our early expansion.

Finally, the last term is infrastructure. Infrastructure "multiplies" your land. Like, for example, my size 18, heavily cottaged capital has a +200% Beaker modifier. So, when I'm running 100% science slider, its like I have 2 extra copies of this great capital, with the most carefully cultivated land in my empire, sitting right next to the original, and I don't have to pay maintenance on it! That's really good. It's certainly some of the best land on the entire map, so having more of land like that is better than having pretty much any other land. (although note that there's nothing that says those two things are mutually exclusive!)

I think a lot of players on RB ignore infrastructure way too much. Yes, sometimes you just need a city to get units built, and a city like that doesn't need much buildings. And we have some cities like that. But sometimes you need to build a monument in a city so that its feasible to settle in a spot that has better long term potential, and sometimes you need to queue up a library in that same city at size 4 even if you kinda need a worker too, and even though the city is only bringing in 8 commerce at that point and the "pay-back" time will be long, because 60 turns later you're in a dead-even race for Liberalism and that city is now bringing in 90 commerce per turn. You gotta have some stuff that pays back fast, but you will fizzle out if you don't have stuff that pays back big. You just gotta be careful that you don't putz around too much and build stuff that has no point; its only because we had those cities we brutally whipped nonstop (I have one special such city that I will be highlighting soon ) that we could afford to pamper some other cities with nice things like libraries and markets or whatever.

Anyways, yeah, there's a lot of small things, and I think I'm also really good with micro, but the real answer is pretty much buildings. We have a lot of buildings. Haram also has a lot of buildings. Other players don't have so many buildings. That's where our tech lead comes from.

[GermanJoey]

You just gotta be careful that you don't putz around too much and build stuff that has no point; its only because we had those cities we brutally whipped nonstop that we could afford to pamper some other cities with nice things like libraries and markets or whatever.

*smokes a shitload of weed* "Like, wow, man, it's totally, uh........" *takes a break to eat a dozen individually-wrapped chocolate chip granola bars in one sitting* ".......its just like, just like, its totally just like society, man!"