[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[Sullla]

Well, if you thought your unit plan was taking some risks...

I'm basically thinking along the same lines. There's no question that we want that city, and this is the kind of break that we need to go our way. In the south, if Dreylin/OT4E are going to sail a death fleet up north towards us, one grenadier in Cotton Gin isn't going to make much of a difference. Plus, as scooter said in his post, we have an explorer watching the waters for at least one turn's incoming warning, plus as a Spiritual civ we can do a civics swap into Nationhood/Slavery at any point in time for an emergency. With those two things in mind, I also think it doesn't matter that much if we leave Cotton Gin empty for the time being.

In fact, my thinking was even more aggressive in nature. I think we send the Haber Process rifle off to the east, to protect the border city we plan to find with pindicator. I don't feel comfortable having only one rifle over there, and I think we make a better show of strength with two rifles on the eastern border. We send the Cotton Gin grenadier and the Steam Power grenadier up north towards the barb city. We can get another grenadier out of Haber Process eot 287, so if I do the logistics math correct, we can load 3 grenadiers on the galleon Turn 288, unload Turn 289, capture Turn 290. That's not bad considering where our units are right now. With luck, we won't even be in a race. (I wonder if Gaspar even has vision on the barb city's borders? The forests/jungle southwest of Tiger Woods should block the view from culture.)

The tradeoff: Telegraph, Cotton Gin, Haber Process, and Pasteurization (cow city in the southwest) will all be sitting empty for a few turns. This would be a true cardboard cutouts situation, with our team feigning strength on the borders while the core city walls are manned by dummies. Of course, that would only last until Turn 290, when we finish Communism research and hop into Nationhood/Theocracy civics, then draft out 6 rifles to cover our behinds. But yeah, for five turns we'll be pretty exposed, albeit in places where we're extremely unlikely to be attacked.

Do you like to gamble? (We might wait to see what's going on with the Donovan/Dreylin/BGN war situation this turn as well before making any final decisions.) Interesting times indeed!

EDIT: Just realized we can shuffle the rifle or machine gun down from Radio to cover Pasteurization for a few turns when it gets founded. Since we'll be double drafting Radio, the unit that we move out will be replaced shortly. That makes me feel a lot better, as Cotton Gin/Telegraph/Haber Process are all relatively sheltered from attack.

[scooter]

Sounds like this thing is a go. I'll take another look in-game tonight/tomorrow and run through the plan to make sure we can pull this off in the proposed timing. I think we can even do this without disturbing your worker plan which is frankly hard to believe.

I'm totally on-board with some risk-taking here. We aren't going to keep pace with Dreylin/REM unless we take some. And like you said - if Dreylin comes after us for whatever reason, well we sure aren't going to win the game no matter what we've got in Cotton Gin.

[scooter]

Alright, so doing this will require some sacrifices somewhere as it's not quite as neat as we hoped. So here's what it will take to capture this city on T290.



We need to be staged on this tile all loaded up (or any of the tiles directly east of it). Unfortunately, doing that proves to be very difficult.



I put down some signs to show a modified plan that involves burning a worker turn to drop all the units on the city site which would our Galleon 2 moves and get it to that sign at end of next turn. Unfortunately, it looks like even that may not be good enough. The workers cannot possibly load onto the Galleon next turn (286), which means they have to load on 287 and unload on 288. The Galleon then needs to do all of the following on 288:

1) Unload workers on the island.

2) Load up all 3 Grenadiers. The Cotton Gin Gren is easy. The trickier Grenadier is the Steam Engine Grenadier. It can only get to the sign (plantation) EoT287, meaning the Galleon would have to swing by and pick it up.

3) Get to the horizontal column of tiles in line with the crab. It can be any of those 4 tiles.

As I type this, I think I just found the solution. However, it's getting late... So I'll type it up tomorrow. If anyone wants to try solving the puzzle, go for it... There will be a sacrifice made to pull it off, but my tired eyes are telling me it's doable.


Note: We can just delay the capture by 1 turn. I don't really want to do that, though. Every turn is precious here since Gaspar is much closer to this city. Maybe he can or can't see it (depends on where he settled his other cities), but every turn counts here.

[Brian Shanahan]

Ha! Brand new city too, with only 5% fortify bonus. Let's get a couple of grenadiers up there (one from the capital and one from Haber Process?) and go take it.

Also, I'm finding xenu's login name of Sigurdur Ingi Johannsson to be way funnier than it should be.

Don't tell me we've got the current Icelandic PM playing the game. Get back to work Xenu!

[Sullla]

What about this: send the Steam Power grenadier off to the east to help protect the pindicator city. That leaves us rifle + grenadier in the east. Send the Cotton Gin grenadier, the grenadier coming out of Haber Process eot 287, and the Haber Process rifle onto the galleon to head for the barb city. Does that make the timings line up better? I can play around with this later tonight.

Also, what's the current status on the wars taking place? Did anyone sign peace with one another yet?

[Kurumi]

This capture is going to be more ground-shaking than the dreylin/donovan one. You can use it a lot better, protect it a lot better and so on.
And it is crazy. Crazy good and crazy in terms of creating a nerve-wracking show!

[scooter]

What about this: send the Steam Power grenadier off to the east to help protect the pindicator city. That leaves us rifle + grenadier in the east. Send the Cotton Gin grenadier, the grenadier coming out of Haber Process eot 287, and the Haber Process rifle onto the galleon to head for the barb city. Does that make the timings line up better? I can play around with this later tonight.

Also, what's the current status on the wars taking place? Did anyone sign peace with one another yet?

Sorry, nobody signed peace as of last time I logged in. I'll check again pretty soon.

And swapping the Gren/Rifle is an option, but it doesn't solve it as I'll explain. However, we can do Plan A with a minor sacrifice. Here's how it works, using the old picture. If it's confusing, I can explain it better later with a fresh picture. Ignore the 286 signs because they are not necessary.



Galleon movements:

286: NE, drop rifle/settler. SE, drop worker. SW-NW. End turn on same tile it's currently on. This is the original movement plan, so nothing is lost here.
287: W-W-W. Load up workers. Move 1E. End turn on the tile 1N of the deer.
288: Workers unload onto plains hill before the Galleon moves at all. This delays both of them by 1T on improving the sheep. Galleon then moves W-W-NW-N. While moving west, the two Grens hop on board, and when it passes by Haber Process, the third unit hops on board. End turn on the marked staging tile.

So we capture the city on T290 at the cost of delaying the sheep improvement by 1 turn. The bottleneck is shipping the workers over because it cannot happen until T288, and the Galleon only gets 4 moves to pick up the units and make it to a staging tile. The tile 1S of the sheep (where we ideally want the Galleon to be on T288) is too far away because the best case scenario for the Galleon on that turn would then be SW-W-NW-N to end turn on the crabs, and we cannot get either Grenadier to that tile by T288 without some extra roads.

So with that in mind... I think the ideal solution is to delay the sheep by 1T by dropping the workers onto the plains hill which allows us to capture the city on T290. I think that's preferable to delaying the capture to T291. Thoughts?

[Sullla]

I agree with your unit logistics; dropping the workers on the plains hill tile was the same conclusion that I came to independently. How do we want to assign the military units? I think that I like 1 rifle / 1 grenadier in the southeast and 2 grenadiers / 1 rifle at the barb city more than 2 rifles in the southeast and 3 grenadiers at the barb city. Feels more balanced.

Continued war between the other teams and Donovan doing more whips on his turn is good news to me.

[Dp101]

If you successfully capture the city, will you change your dotmap at all?

[scooter]

How do we want to assign the military units? I think that I like 1 rifle / 1 grenadier in the southeast and 2 grenadiers / 1 rifle at the barb city more than 2 rifles in the southeast and 3 grenadiers at the barb city. Feels more balanced.

Yeah I think I agree. I have just one concern: what are the chances the barb city adds a third rifle between now and then? They only add it via slow-building, right? In that case, there's no chance it could scrape together the hammers in time. If you can confirm it works this way, I'm definitely in favor of keeping 1 Gren back in the southeast.

If you successfully capture the city, will you change your dotmap at all?

The western "c" definitely doesn't need to change. It's not a very good city, but its priority gets bumped up slighty for obvious reasons. The island "c" is the only thing that could possibly change. We could move it 1S and let the barb city solely take the rice, which would allow the "c" to actually work the silks. However, I think I'd rather just keep it in place. Sharing the rice will be beneficial early on, and the silk tile isn't an amazing tile anyway because we'd really prefer to workshop stuff so that these island cities are capable of building ships. So I think our dotmap probably stays the same.