[PB59] Charriu welcomes all the townfolk

[Charriu]

I've been looking through all the trait combinations. There are

3 = That I can't get anymore
28 = That I definitely don't want, among those all PRO combinations, because on this large map with that many players there will be more then enough foreign trade
12 = That would be fine I guess
12 = That would be awesome

[Charriu]

I've been looking through all the trait combinations. There are

3 = That I can't get anymore
28 = That I definitely don't want, among those all PRO combinations, because on this large map with that many players there will be more then enough foreign trade
12 = That would be fine I guess
12 = That would be awesome

After thinking about it some more I drop this down these:

3 = That I can't get anymore
29 = That I definitely don't want, among those all PRO combinations, because on this large map with that many players there will be more then enough foreign trade
18 = That would be fine I guess
5 = That would be awesome

Main reason is that I don't like to play some traits in this game or only with specific combinations. After all the trait combo should not only fit the starting position and civ, but also should be fun to play.

[Coeurva]

1 - (29/52 * 28/51) ~= 69.1% -- but of course, this might be counting phantom outs if other players have similar ideas about which leaders would be fine, or awesome.

I'm imagining being PRO when our UU is the Phalanx. Yeah. I'm only concerned by how much work SPI has to put in as both our economic trait and defensive trait until we get profits from forges. And by how utterly predictable our tech path will be. AGG or ORG might not be exciting, but AGG/IND and ORG/IND would keep our neighbors guessing when exactly we go for forges (well, ORG might be more constrained, but it's still a choice between fast courthouses or fast forges depending on what we find ourselves constrained by). SPI/IND, it's clear we're going to want them early such that our traits start doing things.

[Charriu]

The good thing for SPI/IND is that with around 115 tiles per player there should be enough room and time to get to forges before any major conflicts erupt. The Phalanx will also serve in protecting us to get to our traits. The only unit that can harm it is the axe and if our phalanx is on a hill it is a 50v50 situation.

[Charriu]

I've been thinking for this a long time. I'm quite happy with SPI and IND will be a new experience. I also fear that I might get something worse. So...

I will lead Ramesses to Greece

[Coeurva]

Thoughts:

I think we should not preserve our forests for wonders (we'll need something, anything to accelerate our early game) and instead aim to hit a key wonder (but not Henge/Oracle) with a very early MC / GEng while protecting ourselves with a phalanx / axe mix. Wheel -> Pottery -> MC -> Sailing (maybe Sailing before MC if the map is convenient to it), have workers in position to chop a 1t forge at some already-designated city (preferably not capital) immediately after discovering MC and train the GEng, cottage and avoid whipping the capital to compensate for our delayed Currency. Don't fret too much over falling behind in the number of cities, we most assuredly will, but our lead has to be in tech, workers / vertical growth, and particularly that fast lane to knights.

If key wonders (Colossus / Mids / MoM) are all taken or our economy turns out to demand that we can't slot in Calendar before Currency, we can bulb Machinery. It's a waste of beakers vs. bulbing later-era techs, but if we're first to both forges and knights, those beakers will come back to us (NobleHelium said something akin to this in his PB56 thread -- technically it was about considering how many turns of tech you're getting from the bulb, but conquering cities gets you turns of tech 20t down the line -- think it's not a PB56 spoiler since it's not directly related to anything in that game). I've read that CtH has Serfdom at Monarchy and we'll need Feudalism (and HR), so we should probably mass-deploy watermills (with planning ahead of where to cottage, where to mill, from the start) and alternate between Serfdom on the rising edge, Slavery whipping off the mills on the falling edge of the whip cycle since we're SPI. There's going to be some tipping point where building wealth/research off said tile improvement becomes more efficient than laying down a fresh cottage when you abstrahize this game to "get Guilds, then knights". Not sure if we should do that, depends on our neighbors' plans. If they get Engi early then no.

Maybe SPI kind of conflicts with the odeon -- we need Monarchy for Feudalism for Guilds, we're not penalized for switching into HR, we want early tall cities. Non-CHA odeons cost more than 2 axes/spears. Could be missing something.

GEngs have kind of a non-permissive bulb order, IW is high on it and I take it that it's not that useful for us early. It might be possible to bulb Feudalism (or Engineering -- how good are trebs in CtH? -- or if we find ourselves in a hole and need to play the Medieval Age defensively after all)

Calendar might be worth less than Monarchy. Depends on how many more Calendar resources we find, and whether we can land MoM while also getting the second GP _and_ Feud->Guilds early enough. We should keep in mind the option of skipping it.

I'm trying to put forth a midgame plan this time. Feel free to propose / play anything else.

[Coeurva]

Btw, you're spreadsheeting / sandboxing on Emperor/Huge, right? TBS' tech thread post alerted me to it, I had been sleeping on it completely. It might be worth arguing for lower tech costs if it's still in the air, but your call.

[Charriu]

I did sim on emperor and huge. It's already decided, so we can't change it anymore. I will come up with my game plan in the next days.

[Charriu]

So here is the game plan that I've came up:

I want to go for an early MC, pop an engineer, which in turn pops preferably the pyramid. With SPI this wonder is a must have and I will be very disappointed if we don't get it. This plan is absolutely predictable, but that's not necessarily bad. It may prevent somebody going for pyramid because of the advantages on my side. The problem with this plan is that the great engineer will take at least 34 turns to pop.
The capitol will be cottaged, because we will use bureaucracy on and off again thanks to SPI. But if I hit Pyramids I want to go the specialist economy route thanks to Representation. That will mean building some more farms, which is good because we will use Serfdom more often then others and with it the farms produce 1 commerce, which might help the economy a bit. This of course will require Monarchy which is an important tech in this regard. While we are already deeper into the religious tree I want to get a religion of my own, preferably with a shrine too. Because we are IND/SPI I want to go heavier into the religious tree and start up a monk economy, which also ensures taking up some more techs with new civics (Theology, Monotheism, Philosophy). We will also see some more Great Prophets in this game. One for a shrine and one to bulb Divine Right for Spiral Minaret later. This bulb is one of the better bulbs for Great Prophets and fairly easy to do.
Religion will also take care of any border pops, which is why I prioritize Stonehenge a little bit less. All of this will be carried by defending with Phalanx early on and add longbows later. With all of this setup we are good to go for two things:

- A culture victory: For this I want to focus three early cities for culture and also go for Music and the Sistine Chapel
- Forego guilds and knights and try to get to cuirassiers on Military Tradition for a later conquest.

Here is the list of wonders in order of prio:

Pyramids = For Representation and Specialist Economy
Sistine Chapel = Prereq for any culture victory attempt
The Collosus = If there is enough water. We have a good setup for this with IND and early MC
Apostolic Palace = Monke eco
Spiral Minaret = Monk eco
University of Sankore = Monk eco
Temple of Artemis = Less danger to lose to others and provides Great Prophets and Great Merchants
Statue of Zeus = Absolutely nobody will build it, because of the no WW comment in the tech thread. But it has +10 culture on it and is fairly cheap. It should be fairly safe to build in one of our culture cities.

As for the other things Coeurva mentioned:

I do agree that Odeons and SPI-religion are in conflict with each other. But for our three culture cities the Odeon will supply easy +3 culture and more artists. Machinery is actually one of the better early bulbs because of it's higher cost. I remember that Noble made those comments back then about bulbin Mathematics and/or Currency, which both are a lot cheaper then Machinery. Bulbing Engineering or Feudalism is possible, but it will always require to get rid of Machinery first.

Yes Calendar might be less desirable compared to Monarchy. MoM's use is also a bit diminished, if you don't require golden ages for civic swaps and because it obsoletes with Natiionalism, which is a rather important tech if I go for cuirassiers. But then again Calendar gives us access to the two incense tiles, which are both little gold tiles worth 6 and 7 commerce. The scout will reveal more uses of Calendar.

[Coeurva]

Some comments on the parts I have anything to add on:

If you want religion -- we're not going to get Hinduism/Buddhism/Judaism, I think, and if we want a GEng first, the Philo bulb is also out. It will be CoL or Theology. But we will be going down the path to Monarchy early after MC, so you could go for dirtying the GP pool with a priest from a SPI temple. If we get a GEng, we get Mids/MoM/Colossus. If we get a GP, we bulb Theo and don't care for Mids/Rep because we have HR and the Christian shrine amounting to about the same. If we get the GEng, just forget self-founding religion and go knights imo, other people will probably get early prophets or early CoL (if Aztec or ORG HRE are here, for instance, or if the Henge/Oracle builders miss Hindu/Buddh/Juda) as well.

The whole CE vs. SE vs. HE thing is bit of an exaggeration, it's not like Rep specialists obsolete cottages or wealth-build bursts at all. I don't object to Serfdom farms as such, but 2/2/1 is a better tile than 3/0/2 and I strongly encourage you to prioritize watermills over farms where applicable. Of course, we could shoot for having enough worker labor to farm first at Monarchy, then replace some with mills at Machinery.

I'm really not convinced on playing decidedly for a culture victory from the start, aside from it influencing GP order planning (but influencing, not setting in stone). We can't live that long without conquest (and neighbor interaction). We don't need to do that via knights, but cuirs I think is too late.

Cuirassiers are generally much worse to shoot for as a monopoly unit than cannons. Knights are good enough that cuirs are a small advantage, any opponent will have knights at the point that we have cuirs. Nationalism is a good tech for Taj and the draft, and MoM has certainly been nerfed, but the use of MoM will be to magic up 10-20 (?) additional knights from 4t more of Golden Age forges across the empire, in exchange for some city-local food surplus (the trigger GP (+ GEng for MoM itself)), which isn't an effect SPI can replicate. Everything else is just gravy, and just because SPI invents gravy 4000 years early doesn't mean our civ can skip on the meat. Yeah I've won many SP games on the backs of cuirs, but that's SP (where AI also tend to forgo knights iirc, and couldn't use them well anyway).

I'm even more opposed to the forgo knights for cuirs plan than to the cultural victory from T0 plan, tbh. I'm fine with leeway and wild magic on the path to Guilds, but not skipping Guilds altogether or emphasizing the Aesthetics lane over it.

True that Machinery costs about double Maths or such, but it's still a bulb/GPP you could be spending on something like a Steel monopoly or defensive Engi instead -- unless you're China, Machinery gives you no good offensive unit right away -- and afaik it still wastes a good few beakers from the bulb.

Re Calendar, the issue is simply that those Cal resources will first have to pay back Calendar itself as a blank if we don't get MoM. We'll have to see how fast it goes after we've scouted, yeah. If it doesn't speed up Guilds, we have HR, and MoM is or will be taken, it's a skip, and otherwise it's a high priority.