RMOG: Renaissance Men of Genius

[oledavy]

Turn 250

The big two five 'O' is finally here, and after a couple whips, we kicked things off with a Civic Switch



We turned up research, gunpowder in 2. After that, we save while putting scientist beakers in printing press and waiting for our first GS.  

On that note, WK, did you numbers of scientists for each city include the mercantilism scientist? They all popped the same turn, although I suppose DR's would pop first due to settling order. Nevertheless, followed the plan, but with one extra scientist in DR.  

Checked the configuration out of all our cities to get the most out of the GA. I'm doing a settler out of Plains Cow because I could not figure out how to finish Jungled Fish's settler before leaving slavery. I'm now moving a worker to chop the forest so we can four pop whip it after. The PC settler will go to the stone location for Oxford, and the JF to another southern spot. I have not decided where our third one is coming from yet.  

No though, it should have been working on more infrastructure, but it could also 1t missionaries, so I used it over the last bunch of turns to get religion into all our cities for Pacifism and then OR bonus after the GA.

.......

CRAP I FORGOT TO CONVERT TO CONFUCIANISM BEFORE ENDING TURN.  
(I'm editing post and now it makes sense why your the numbers didn't add up) 
 

.......

(Deep breath)

Okay, I know what I'm doing first next turn.....

Back to editing the post. 

........

Unfortunately, I don't think we can finish the bank until after Oxford, so our build will go something like: settler -> university -> Oxford -> Infrastructure.  I don't want to build any more settlers out of it after this and just grow it to pick up the remaining cottages.  

Note: Get workers into the south for the stone city.  

Queued up three EI's in the east and west. Completing a couple knights and catapults as well. I still want more pikes and catapults and will be happier yet when I can get out a few muskets.

I don't think we'll get a shrine either, but I also think WS will be one of the harder NEs to get up before this game ends. I think we can very feasibly get HE, NE, GT, and Oxford though. I'm moving a worker down to the marble so we can get started on that soonish.  

Maybe I just have my tinfoil cap firmly screwed on these days, but I can't help but jump at the shadows abroad:



I presume Scooter declared war then offered peace immedietly to get 10 turns of guaranteed peace. I can only assume this means he want to attack someone....

....And we don't have his graphs.....

Needless to say I'm moving forces from the Mackoti border to JAO. We can't fend off a determined attack at this point, but hopefully it won't come to that. 

No though, yay for being 2nd in demos! While in a golden age!   In our defense, our GA demos are actually better than Plako's, who tripped his own Golden Age this turn (and is doing the same Pacifism thing). However, REM is still far and away the big dog, and now, Mackoti has more cities than he can shake a stick at.  

I for one welcome our new magical overlords.  

I'm so mad at myself right now

Mackoti Delenda Est (in like 30 turns).

[WarriorKnight]

sigh...

Well at least the other teams will either be confounded by the move or think we're so that we're absolutely no threat whatsoever.

We should still be able to get 3 GP but we will need to do a bit of starving to do so. BTW I converted to Confu when I logged in.

I'll crunch the numbers and get a new plan up. BTW, the specialists numbers include the merc specialist.


New plan:

DR works 3 this turn and 4 next turn.

OS works 7 this turn, and 8 for 3t after that. We shouldn't lose any pop, although it'll be a lot closer.

JAO works 5 this turn and then 6 for the next 5t.

[WarriorKnight]

BTW, how many beakers would a GS give? If we're going to put scientist beakers into PP then we probably won't want to waste them by going over.

Can you compare the beaker count from a GS (1500 + 3 x pop) with how expensive PP is? Cause if a GS can bulb PP outright we'd be better off putting the beakers into Nationalism or something.

[WarriorKnight]

T253:

Been a while since I had to play the turn. Since we're starting to fade into mediocrity, it's amusing to see just how far behind everyone we are becoming. scooter finished his beloved SoL this turn, while mackoti triggered his 1 man GA in that massive empire of his. But do not fear, we have own secret weapon:



2 of our cities are in the Top 5.    Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!

...

In all seriousness, we popped our first GP, a Engineer. Kinda hoping for a Scientist but the first one was always heavily skewed in the Engineer's favor so it's fine. Will bulb RP once we get PP.

mackoti has got Alhazard down to 2 cities. One of them is a treasure island which mack has no access to yet (one would guess that REM may try to snipe it himself, but he's sending Al a bunch of resources so probably not). The other is this one, surprisingly:



Guess we get a front row seat at Al's final stand.   mack must be bombing the city out of our vision so we can't really tell what's going on, but one would hope mack would raze this city. Hard to see what it'll do for mack with Death Knight where it is (unless mack wants to culture bomb it as a way to crack Peaks to break us open...) but we've been wrong on most things so far so what do I know?

[oledavy]

Turn 255

Having difficulty with screen-shotting in Civ4 right now, so a text only report this time around. I'll figure out what's going on with that before t256.

Had a busy weekend, apologies for the paucity of reports. WK graciously stepped up on short notice to get t253 for me.  

This turn, we bulbed PP and RP, and will finish RP at EOT. Almost to rifling. Just need to make it a little farther without dying to someone and we should be fine. Mackoti finally reduced Iron Man last turn, leaving Alhazard at one city. For some reason, Al accepted peace. I would have stayed at war to increase Mack's unhappiness, but eh, whatever. I'm gazing to the east a little worried about Mackoti reneging on his NAP, but hopefully he's too busy digesting Al. He kicked off a golden age this turn, but he does still have a few turns of enforced peace with Scooter and REM. What Plako is doing also remains unknown in all of this.  

Settled our 13th city, CalendResources this turn for stone(it was too many characters to completely spell it out). I'm feeling pretty good about our economy at the moment. We're about to wrap up the GA, and will be set to get Oxford up. I have 5/6 theaters we need for Globe being built as well. NE will also follow in short order. I think if I can get courthouses in everywhere, we should be good to go. Our research cap is looking better and better, but we're lagging on gold multipliers. For now though, we're basically at tech parity with the big dogs. 

Once we get rifles, we can look at getting revenge on Mackoti with EIs + Rifles if we feel like it. I'm viewing the 30 turn length of time on the 'NAP' as more of a suggestion than a rule. Saying this, I'm not going to have a lot of room to complain if Mackoti backstabs us in the next few turns. That being said, it's hard for me to muster much sympathy for him if we were to attack him before the deal ends, considering how he took our cities, bullied us into peace, then ate another player.  

Mackoti Delenda Est.

[WarriorKnight]

I'm not worried about mackoti attacking right now, he offered 30 turns for a reason so it's very unlikely he'll come our way (even if our PP/RP grab told the world we're enroute to Rifles).

I wouldn't be opposed to a mackoti stab but there are a few things we need to keep in mind:

• We need to adopt a high drafting policy before we can think about it. We've sorta agreed that Nationhood trumps Bureaucracy once Rifling comes in, despite our concentrated research capital. Fortunately Nationalism is cheap to research. Very high chance that mackoti gets Rifling and Nationalism himself before we begin, but nothing we can do about that.
  
• We need backup from REM + scooter. There's a decent chance they do something anyway considering the land edge but AFAIK neither has Astro and they are still some turns away from Rifling. Have to wait and see how likely it is either will jump in.
  
• Unless mackoti researches Chemistry (unlikely) we should be able to dominate the seas. We should still be vigilant however, as galleons still have decent movement and if we succeed in taking island cities we will have a lot more territory we need to cover.
  

Do we have a firm plan for the JAO GP? (only thing that comes to mind is SM bulb, but that won't be helpful to us right now) Cause if we don't, maybe we should save it for the 2 man GA and plan to trigger that sooner rather than later. We could use it for free switch into NH/Rep, the boost in hammers for war prep and boost research to Steam Power/Communism perhaps??? If so, then KND should run Merchants (or artists I guess but Merchants give a higher yield) for now to get some GPP for it while the GA is still going, once we know what type it is we can work Eng or Sci instead.

[oledavy]

I'm not worried about mackoti attacking right now, he offered 30 turns for a reason so it's very unlikely he'll come our way (even if our PP/RP grab told the world we're enroute to Rifles).

I wouldn't be opposed to a mackoti stab but there are a few things we need to keep in mind:

• We need to adopt a high drafting policy before we can think about it. We've sorta agreed that Nationhood trumps Bureaucracy once Rifling comes in, despite our concentrated research capital. Fortunately Nationalism is cheap to research. Very high chance that mackoti gets Rifling and Nationalism himself before we begin, but nothing we can do about that.
  
• We need backup from REM + scooter. There's a decent chance they do something anyway considering the land edge but AFAIK neither has Astro and they are still some turns away from Rifling. Have to wait and see how likely it is either will jump in.
  
• Unless mackoti researches Chemistry (unlikely) we should be able to dominate the seas. We should still be vigilant however, as galleons still have decent movement and if we succeed in taking island cities we will have a lot more territory we need to cover.
  

Do we have a firm plan for the JAO GP? (only thing that comes to mind is SM bulb, but that won't be helpful to us right now) Cause if we don't, maybe we should save it for the 2 man GA and plan to trigger that sooner rather than later. We could use it for free switch into NH/Rep, the boost in hammers for war prep and boost research to Steam Power/Communism perhaps??? If so, then KND should run Merchants (or artists I guess but Merchants give a higher yield) for now to get some GPP for it while the GA is still going, once we know what type it is we can work Eng or Sci instead.

Good call on KND. I was just thinking yesterday that it might be better to save the probable GS for our two man versus bulbing SciMeth. I think I will start running merchants in KND this turn to set us up to that end. I was planning on getting a market/grocer in there soon after Uni, so we could keep running merchants after our GA. If it ends up being a GE, we'll just run scientists out of there instead.

[WarriorKnight]

What is mackoti's power graph like? He literally whipped a dozen cities this turn. If he plans to win the game before anyone reaches rifles then any idea involving war with mackoti (stab or not) is a pure pipe dream.

[oledavy]

I'll check next turn. I recall it holding about steady (at it's grossly inflated level). REM is spiking though. He also built a road to our west. Not to our border yet though so I'm not ready to freak out yet. He has rifling, and I think it's more likely he's going after Mack, but I'm watching.

[oledavy]

Turn 258

Seems Nic is going to put Al out of his misery.  



He has chemistry now as well, so we may have an uphill battle to control the western sea.  



The golden age is now over. Our final GP ended up being a GE, so we have the freedom to run scientists in KND for our two man.  

Back in slavery and OR, and to celebrate, I killed a lot of people: 



Oxford and Globe will be starting in the next few turns. 5 turns to rifling. After that I think we target either Nationalism and Constitution and go into our two man early, or go to steam power and wait until Communism for our two man. We need to get some more specialists into KND to speed up that GP though. A market for merchants would probably be best.

Immediate Priorities:  

 - Getting courthouses everywhere. 
 - Getting libraries everywhere.
 - Getting barracks everywhere.
 - Getting banks into commerce cities. 
 - Settling our last two primary spots in the south (both settlers queued). 
 - Building military.

I'm still worried Mackoti's whip fest will dissuade REM from attacking him, and he'll look to attack us. At any rate, we need to make sure we're as prickly as possible. A GA to pop out two GP and get universities everywhere was a gift. The moment rifling comes in though, we need to stock up and state of the art defenders to make sure we can actually survive an assault by one of the big three. 

Mackoti Delenda Est.