[SPOILERS] scooter's Industrial Revolution

[scooter]

Ah yeah, I forgot our maintenance will spike up further very soon. We can afford about 7-8 turns of current 100% if Haber swapped to Research which is why I was thinking we were close to the tipping point, but yeah that number shrinks with more cities planting. Carry on. Agreed with the settler plan.

And I just hope Donovan doesn't back out of his plan (assuming that's his plan) when he sees Dreylin get peace with us is all. But for our purposes, I'm definitely happy with peace.

[scooter]

Turn rolled, and since we're now free of a turn split, I took a quick look at Donovan with my Explorer just to satisfy my curiosity.





Figured I should make sure there isn't a stack headed our direction either. It's a decent chunk of units we uncovered, but his power suggests there's definitely more units somewhere. Could well be on boats headed to Dreylin, but he could also just be placing his units defensively.



Of course, Dreylin is still adding more units. Donovan is adding them too, but not as quickly. So maybe I should temper my excitement at the possibility of them fighting. Donovan may just be bracing himself for another Dreylin attack.

[Sullla]

Been working on updating the micro plan in the sandbox again tonight. Seems like I do that a lot of nights. The good news: we're on pace with REM's trade routes to finish Assembly Line on Turn 305. That's the start of Turn 305, or eot 304 as we also write it here. We'll have a turn to spend gold and upgrade rifles/grenadiers to infantry in key positions before Dreylin can potentially declare war again. Very good stuff.

I'm going to log into the game in a minute and post some screenshots with my thoughts on logistics and unit positioning. I think that will line up with your usual time slot for playing the turn, but let me know on Gchat if you need to get in there sooner.

[Sullla]

OK, let's start with the easy stuff:



I think this is a no-brainer trade to offer pindicator. We have an excess incense, he has an excess sugar, we offer to trade and both of us benefit. We also build one tiny more piece of mutual trust between our teams. I don't think we have any desire to fight pindicator, and if he wanted to go on the offensive, surely BGN would be a better target than our Aggressive team with the massive production base. I expect that pindicator would accept this deal, and I really don't think he wants to pick a fight. (Pindicator is also playing his turns pretty fast; he doubled up on the turns last night as last to play / first to play. That's often a sign that someone isn't focusing too closely on the game. His poorly updated spoiler thread also suggests as much.)

Now for unit positioning:



We currently have 3 rifles and our 1 machine gun on the border with Donovan. That surely seems like more than we need given the geopolitical situation right now. Donovan has been nothing but a good friend thus far, we have a very stable and fair border, and he even swapped into Free Market civic to lean more heavily on foreign trade routes. With Dreylin on his northern border, it's hard for me to see Donovan wanting a war with us. He's even letting us walk around in his territory with an explorer, and it sure seems like most of his units are either on the northern border, or positioned on zone defense in his core. I don't think we need this many units on our western border.

Scooter, I think that we should pull the machine gun and one of these rifles and send them down to the southern island city that we're getting ready to found. They won't land on the first turn, but we can have them there in plenty of time before our enforced peace wears out. Here at Radio, I think we build a rifle (which will upgrade in queue to an infantry) when we get close to discovering Assembly Line tech and have a better sense of our exact ETA. That will give us two rifles + one infantry + the ability to upgrade the rifles into infantry in an emergency, plus our hill defenses and 40% cultural defenses, and that will stave off anything other than a massive attack.



Next up is the south. We'll be unloading the two workers on the galleon onto the tile SW-SW of Cotton Gin so that they can begin a workshop before the city even gets founded. The galleon then moves to the white dot staging tile in preparation for next turn. The rifle in Pasteurization also leave the city to the south in preparation for loading next turn.

We load the galleon with settler and rifle next turn, then unload them on the hill tile T299 and found the city T300. We'll return to land the machine gun and second rifle from Radio a turn or two thereafter. We can then decide to upgrade one or both of the rifles to infantry after Assembly Line tech comes in. That would give us 2 infantry + 1 machine gun in a city on a hill, which will be enough to deter anything but a very serious attack. Hopefully we'll be able to sniff out a Dreylin attack before it arrives and concentrate defenses in the targeted area.



Then finally the north. This is the area that concerns me the most, since Dreylin has the bulk of his army just to the north across the water, and with galleons ready to ferry units further south after the Gaspar campaign ends. I plan to concentrate the bulks of our defenses up here.

We will have three targets to defend up here: Haber Process, Spinning Jenny, and the upcoming white dot city on the silks. We currently have 1 rifle in Haber Process, 2 rifles in Spinning Jenny, and 2 rifles + 2 grenadiers on the highlighted tile between the bananas and the deer. Here's where I would place them:

* Keep the defenders in their current cities.
* Use 1 grenadier to go back and pillage that road leading down to Haber Process one tile at a time. It's too big of a security risk at the moment, an invitation to come attack our core. When we get close to Turn 306, ferry this grenadier over to the white dot city.
* Use the other grenadier to garrison the white dot city. As soon as we discover Assembly Line, upgrade both grenadiers to infantry.
* Station the other two rifles on the galleon, and put the galleon on the yellow X tile. From that tile, we can unload those rifles into any one of the threatened three cities: Haber, Jenny, or white dot. We just have to make sure to play after Dreylin, which we should definitely do on the first couple of turns after peace ends!
* Guard that galleon with our frigate out of Induction Coil when it finishes.
* I also think we should have Spinning Jenny build a rifle -> upgrade in queue to infantry when we get close to discovering Assembly Line tech. We can make this swap when we get down to ~3 turns remaining, and we also have a forest chop incoming at the city to help out.

That will give us 3 infantry and 2 rifles on the island, plus 2 more rifles that can be landed at will. We will be able to concentrate 7 defenders in either of the island cities, and our units will have tech edge + defender's edge + promotion edge over Dreylin's units. It's not impossible for him to make a successful attack here, but it won't be easy either, and we'll have vision of that entire channel of water once borders expand at our cities. I'm just hoping I can get all those forests chopped in the next 8 turns to deny a landing party defensive cover.

Thoughts and comments?

[scooter]

Yeah I agree with all your proposals - I had similar thoughts all-around. Seeing Donovan's land has me feeling like we should just concentrate on establishing a secure Dreylin border over the next 10T so that he has no openings when peace expires, and then we can get our factories going.

I do want to check Donovan's eastern cities with our explorer before our units get too far away. I think I'll begin moving them, but before moving them next turn I'll have the chance to make sure Donovan doesn't have a stack building up near Radio. That doesn't seem too likely, though.

Our biggest weakness will be the naval situation. I'm thinking we may have a need to slip in another Frigate or two late in the peace treaty. Defending a few front cities is a lot easier when your opponent isn't free to fork your cities. Granted, the mere possession of infantry will be a pretty good deterrent. It takes a lot of rifles to knock off a pair of pinch Infantry on a hill.

[scooter]

Turn 297

I looked again, and we really weren't in a rush to send those two units out of Radio, so I decided to hold them just for this turn until I rolled the turn and could look at Donovan's east. I also offered that trade to pindicator. Other highlights from the turn.



Uh yeah, so good thing we took peace, huh?



Levee is now active here, so here's the obligatory shot of that.



Last turn of REM's golden age. After turn roll he remained first in MFG and GNP. The MFG was pretty close, but his GNP barely dipped at all. Yeesh.



Every single city that wasn't building a settler was either growing EoT or the following turn. Cotton Gin grew into draft unhappiness, so hopefully pindicator will accept the trade and stave that off.

Haber Process now has 2 stored chops with a 3rd planned, so a very fast settler will be available when we want it. The plan now is to start it on T300, but it sure would be nice to start it a couple turns sooner and get that island city up and rolling. The issue is all the heavy-lifting Haber is doing to get us to Assembly Line on time.



Rolled turn and moved the Explorer to ensure Donovan isn't stacking up near us, and he definitely is not. So we're definitely safe to demilitarize. I moved the MG/Rifle pair out of Radio accordingly, and they'll easily make it to our upcoming city before peace runs out.

[Sullla]

A few short thoughts from work. I also saw the Demographics post-turn roll after the Golden Age ended, and the numbers are intimidating. On the plus side, REM is barely ahead of us in Production with 12 cities to our 8 cities. And we are running well ahead of Dreylin in both Production and GNP, with their team having a whopping 14 cities.

The bad news is that REM is still at something like 500 GNP after the Golden Age ended. Now that's partly because he's researching Steam Power with a hefty known civ bonus of 22%, but it's still a bad sign. Statue of Liberty plus all those trade routes are doing real work for REM. Fortunately, when we settle our next two cities on T300, we go up to about 400 beakers/turn. And we are settling 5 cities in the next 7 turns, so that should make a big difference.

Honestly I think REM has now passed Dreylin as the top favorite. We are beating Dreylin handily in Production and research. REM is beating us in everything. Let's keep our fingers crossed for conflict between them.

[picklepikkl]

Just as a note, this thread got stickied somehow; I assume that was unintentional, but it seems like the sort of thing that might get unspoiled people accidentally clicking into it thinking it's the tech thread.

[BRickAstley]

Just as a note, this thread got stickied somehow; I assume that was unintentional, but it seems like the sort of thing that might get unspoiled people accidentally clicking into it thinking it's the tech thread.

Fixed. I've noticed it sometimes happens as an admin when replying to a thread. So I blame Sullla.

[Sullla]

Thanks for that fix. When posting via phone, I never have any idea what's going to happen. Let me go ahead and post the screenshot that I couldn't post this morning, the pre-turn Demographics for T298:



Like I said, we're doing quite well in GNP and especially Production, given that the game's top two empires have half again as many cities as we do. If it were just those two stats and Dreylin's big army, I wouldn't worry that much.

The real problem is the Food stat. We are... behind. I've read and played enough of these Pitboss games to know that a team which falls this far behind in Food usually ends up losing the game. There is some good news here, however. The biggest thing helping us is the map itself. Dreylin may have 14 cities and REM have 12 cities, but they're both running out of room to plant more of them. We still have good expansion prospects ourselves, somewhat surprisingly so. We're planning to settle 5 more cities in the next 7 turns: one on the southern island, one on the northern Textile island, one north of our capital on the mainland, one west of Haber Process by the oil, and one more, uh, somewhere we haven't decided yet. That gets us to 13 cities, and we realistically have a few more places to settle after that: the southern part of Textile Island, the filler southeast of the capital, the isthmuses to the north of Haber Process and southwest of Pasteurization. OK, we won't get all of those city locations, but I think we still have a great chance of getting to 15 cities. If we have 15 cities and Dreylin/REM have 18-20 cities, that's enough to be highly competitive.

We're still going to need some luck, however. We likely need Dreylin and REM to stumble somewhere along the way and give us an opportunity to catch up. There's a long way to go, and hopefully we'll have a chance somewhere to make a move. I'm starting to think that Dreylin might be our best target to attack down the road, as he's overextended and looks to be falling behind in tech. As I said before, I think REM is either about to pass Dreylin or has already passed him for the game #1 spot.

Some more assorted pictures:



Yeah, trade routes are pretty darn good in this game. I bet Dreylin is wishing he hadn't declared war on most of the world at this point. REM is making a mint off of trade routes with BGN, Donovan, our team, and Dreylin. We need more cities to take advantage of all these trade routes. Those are coming soon: 2 more cities on Turn 300!



It's been so long since I played a game in the Industrial age that I actually forgot that infantry units get +25% against other Gunpowder units. Rifles are completely impotent against these guys. Much of Dreylin's army is based on Nationhood rifle drafting spam, cheap units with no promotions. They won't make much of a dent against C1 + Pinch infantry, which we'll have with defender's advantage and cultural defenses in cities. The only units that can trade decent with infantry are cavs, and even C1/Pinch cavs still lose badly to C1 infantry. So I think that if we can get some of these guys up in our border cities, Dreylin will be inclined to pursue softer targets. Assembly Line will obsolete much of that huge army we have hanging over our heads to the north.

I also love that little Civilopedia quote: "use them to counter enemies with lots of gunpowder units." I think that applies here.



And while we're here... this is the German unique building factory replacement, the Assembly Plant. There are two differences from a standard factory: it allows for 4 Engineer specialists instead of 2 Engineers, and the thing builds 50% faster with coal connected. Mini-Organized trait, essentially. With that bonus, we should be able to get these done in 2-3 turns in the capital and Haber, then the coal plant that follows is a lot cheaper (only 120 shields). When we discover Assembly Line, I think we'll have the capital and Haber get their factory/coal plant done immediately, then have them crank out some military to cover our other cities while they do their own factory/plant combo more slowly. We will probably also want to make a run at the Pentagon, which I think we'll be able to get pretty easily barring random Great Engineer shenanigans. Obviously this is getting a bit ahead of ourselves here..

The game continues to be lots of fun. Never a dull moment here as we continue into unexplored territory for RB Multiplayer.