Turn 114:
No attacks from Japper between turn. In fact, none of my units saw combat at all on the interturn. This turn wouldn't have as much fighting as the last one, but it was still pretty busy. Note that the 1000 gold I requested from Singaboy came in between turns. That treasury was going to see some use.
First things first, I needed to swap policies before I could play the rest of my turn. I dropped Limes in favor of Professional Army for the unit upgrades, Natural Philosophy for Land Surveyors to save a little money, and then Diplomatic League for Merchant Confederation to get the 2 for 1 deal at Geneva. I'll be swapping into Theocracy government next turn and dropping all three of these policies to go back to my normal policy setup.
I started out by dropping an envoy into Geneva for the doubling bonus, then the additional envoy that I picked up from finishing Naval Tradition civic to hit the 3 envoy tier. As I've been saying, if I can get a kill with a musket and add the two envoys from natural government generation, I'll be able to reach the 6 envoy tier for another big surge of science. Don't be fooled by the next few screenshots, my science rate went up by a lot, from the 86 beakers/turn shown here to 103 beakers/turn. And that's without Natural Philosophy running this turn, which was worth another 8 beakers/turn before I dropped it. If I hit the 6 envoy bonus at Geneva, I'll be tied with TheArchduke in science. He's only ahead right now because he has 9 total Scientific city state envoys for +6 beakers per Campus while Rome has 6 total envoys for +4 beakers per Campus.
Long story short: I am outscaling him with more cities and more total districts. TheArchduke only has 5 total Campuses while I'm currently at 8 Campuses (including Heart of Darkness under the occupation penalty). Get out of the occupation penalty there and capture Seoul, and I should take a clear lead.
Next I went to upgrade my legions into muskets, only to find that I lacked niter. Oh yeah, that's why I needed Land Surveyors this turn. I had to purchase this niter tile for 160 gold; we definitely need sources of niter for both Rome and China, and this was the only one that I could connect in any kind of reasonable fashion. The best I could do was save some money on the tile purchase. At least the tile itself is a really strong one for Ravenna at 2/4 yield. Ravenna is starting to become a really nice city - it will reach about 20 base production/turn when the two grassland hills are mined.
I also purchased a forest tile in the third ring at Firenze for Venetian Arsenal chopping purposes. That was 320 gold spent, argh.
But it would have been 400 gold without Land Surveyors in place; I was doing my best to save gold here. I do wish that Land Surveyors offered more of a discount than 20% though. If I were making suggestions to Firaxis, I would have bumped that up to 33% or maybe even 50%. Why not, right? We would certainly use the policy a lot more if it had a larger discount, and players should be rewarded for lining up discounted tile purchases with smart play. (This is also more proof that Russia's extra tiles on city founding is an amazing ability. We've had to spend a lot of gold on tile purchases.)
With niter in hand and Professional Army in place, now I could begin upgrading legions into muskets. Going from 40 strength to 55 strength will make a gigantic difference against Japper's remaining units, far more than the minimal change in numbers would suggest. Adding +15 combat strength causes a unit to deal about 85% more damage and take 85% less damage, changing an even 30 damage against 30 damage fight into a 55 damage against 15 damage rampage. These units should give me the power to break through Japper's defenses and take his last city.
I also had the chance to promote the knight that captured Heart of Darkness / Napoli. There's some really interesting choices here for the heavy cavalry line. I ended up promoting this unit with "Charge" because Japper has been fortifying his units in the jungle and this promotion will be perfect for killing them. However, Barding is a really nice option as well, and I plan to get some knights with both promotions to have some options on hand when attacking. Pretty much everything on this list would be great to have, with Breakthrough a really cool promotion if a unit could ever get there. Get on top of a ranged unit and attack it twice in one turn? Yes please. It's doubtful anything will ever get there though. I think Japper will be mighty surprised to find units that actually get STRONGER attacking his fortified units.
My only fighting was on the western side of the formation, where this Ngao Mbemba remained in place. I happily obliged by shooting it with my two crossbows in range. While they didn't do much damage at such terrible odds, 32 damage is better than nothing and these two guys kept racking up the XP. The highlighted unit is pretty close to hitting a third promotion, only one away from the godly "can shoot twice per turn" at the bottom of the ranged tree. The other injured crossbow at the top of the formation healed this turn by using a promotion. I also had my knights spend this turn healing, with the Great Scientist strategically placed to reach three of them at once. There's one knight at 60/100 HP who will be back to 95/100 HP next turn thanks to the Great Scientist. That guy is amazing, my knights are going to be back in the fighting almost immediately.
Elsewhere, I was also upgrading my galleys into caravels at the pricey cost of 135 gold apiece. Uh, that treasury dropped pretty darn fast. I upgraded 5 legions at 100 gold apiece, 4 galleys at 135 gold apiece, and then had to purchase those two tiles. That made for a grand total of... 1360 gold.
Ummm, I'm sorry Singaboy? Don't kill me. On the plus side, we now have a top-rate navy at our disposal and control of the seas for the time being. This caravel will go help us capture Seoul along with the battering ram coming out of Savoia. I'm going to send two of the six caravels off on deep scouting missions, exploring the two oceans we haven't reached yet to scope out where the cities of the other teams are located. We'll want to know that for potential use later on. The other four caravels can stick around for control of the seas. Hopefully we can add 10-12 frigates to join them in the near future, post-Venetian Arsenal completion.
I also harvested this wheat resource for a population point at Siena. I was only going to place a Commercial district on this tile anyway, and the extra population point can go right into the library next turn as a Scientist specialist. Now check out something else in this screenshot: my income has cratered all the way down to 21 gold/turn, yeouch! Military units are expensive, y'all. The good news is that it's not quite as bad as it might seem here. I'm not in Merchant Confederation policy at the moment, which is worth 14 gold/turn at the moment, so the drop is really from about 55 gold/turn down to 35 gold/turn. Not great but not as disastrous as it looks here. I will make more gold when Napoli comes out of resistance (it's a nice city for gold generation with those cocoa plantations), more gold when we capture Seoul, and and we're also close to unlocking Triangular Trade policy for 4 gold/turn on each trade route. I also have two Commercial districts queued up for my next forest chops, hopefully arriving in the next 5-10 turns. So it will get better, but my income is definitely shabby right now.
China is going to have to keep carrying Rome economically for the forseeable future.
Overview for Turn 114. I love the way things are set up at Milano and Siena, with two libraries finishing next turn and allowing Milano to swap onto a settler as Colonization gets slotted in, while Siena uses the library for a Scientist specialist. Venzia is still chugging along with its university for the Printing boost (with Roma finishing the other university). I'm going to go over 50% beakers on Printing this turn and then swap off it, which is slightly wasteful but I wanted the boost to finish the tech instead of just getting me close. Pretty much every coastal cities is queuing up a quadrireme to finish after Venetian Arsenal (hopefully) completes. The ETA is down to 7 turns now, still looking on pace for a mid-turn Turn 121 completion.
Roma is also still on pace, with the Campus district project 2 turns from completion. Here's a quick look at that race:
TheArchduke makes 14 Scientist points/turn so he will claim Emilie du Chatelet on his turn. Then it gets interesting. Woden only gets 10 points/turn so he will not be able to claim the following Great Scientist on Turn 115, and his team is broke and therefore won't be able to claim the dude with gold patronage. Roma's district project will finish Turn 116 and we will hopefully snipe the following Great Scientist, whatever it may be, away from Woden. Of course, then he'll simply get the third one unless the era advances, and who knows what's going on there. We still have exactly 4 players in the Renaissance era, one away from advancing the Great Person era. Hang in there Cornflakes! You just need to survive two more interturns for our team. The other one to watch is Woden, who may be deliberately avoiding an era advancement to keep the next Great Person in play for his team. It's also possible that EmperorK could advance to the Renaissance era as well, although he doesn't have as much science or techs discovered as Woden. This is getting to be a nervy few turns here.
*REALLY* hoping that we land this Great Scientist and hit the jackpot by winning the 50/50 chance for Isaac Newton to appear. I could use him for the Campus district in Genova, where I'm working a pair of 1 food / 1 gold water tiles right now for lack of anything else available. A free library and university in that city would be amazing, +6 beakers from the buildings and +2 beakers on the university per Newton's ability and +4 beakers from the Scientist specialists. A lot would have to go right for that to happen, but I can dream about it.
Here's the front lines in the south. All six of my knights will either be full health or over 90 HP by the start of next turn, amazing stuff. I'm going to send most of them around to the east of that mountain and try to flank Kinchassa from the west. I'll keep one or two in the center and help the muskets and crossbows push north through the jungles. Japper's westernmost Ngao Mbemba is going to die next turn if he doesn't move it. Maybe we'll get lucky and he'll keep it in place, even setting me up for a musket kill to earn the Square Rigging boost. We'll see what he does. His eastern crossbow is also very exposed, I'll be able to move a crossbow of my own forward and get in the critical first attack to chunk away 2/3rds of its health. What I wouldn't give for Logistics policy to give me +1 movement in friendly territory right now. That might be the next target after Humanism finally finishes soon, since Triangular Trade is also available at the same civic.
I'm going to poke around some more in the numbers tonight and see if I spot anything else interesting. I do have one important message for Singaboy: I sent China all of my remaining money at the end of my turn, 300 something gold. However, I still need to upgrade 2 caravels and 1 legion which will cost a combined 370 gold. If at all possible,
I need you to send me 370 gold again on your turn to finish the remaining upgrades. With my traded income and your natural gold generation, you should have about 1000 gold at the start of your turn. I could really use 370 of that back again on my next turn if you can spare it. I know I've been pretty terrible when it comes to borrowing money, but I think it's been working out for our team with Rome supplying most of the tech/civic boosts and China supplying the gold/faith income. At the very least, I REALLY want 100 gold to upgrade my last legion. I'd like to upgrade the remaining two caravels as well for a beefed up naval presence, but I pretty much have to upgrade that legion to help push on Japper's last city.
Oh, and we also picked up the boosts for Rifling, Replaceable Parts, and Exploration as a result of all those upgrades - you're welcome.
Good luck Singaboy.