[59] Miguelito and Rusten move stacks to berimbau rythms

[Hitru]

I'm following your reporting with interest. Have you tried any kind of diplo vs Piccadilly?

[Miguelito]

Thanks Kaiser, those have been great points to think about, although I fear I can agree with none of them :P. But I'll explain:

I actually meant that Piccadilly seems to be gambling on Civac (Top Power) playing as laid back as you describe. 
Sure, you have an eternal stalemate border with Civac, but he seems to be in a prime position to interfere with Piccadily who is running relatively low power for being perceived game leader. It is possible though that Civac does not perceive Piccadily as a game leader. 
In any case, you seem to be Civacs biggest military threat so he might not feel at ease to slow down piccadilly or tries to balance you and piccadilly as he could be of the opinion that you are 2nd runner up and he would just exchange a low power game leader against his biggest threat becoming game leader.

The issue is motivation. he best I can hope for from civac is that he stays passive, and signals so, until the end of the game. His turns have been increasingly short, generally below 20 minutes, and sometimes as little as 13. I read that as him queuing builds, moving units that need moving, and contenting himself with that. If we're lucky he will not attack Picc nor us, in order to not be kingmaker. Sadly, despite being second in city count he has no chance of winning, probably due to the lack of an economy trait.
We can't afford to fall behind in power too much between him, but I sent him fish+100gold / fish+100gold a while ago, basically telling him I don't want conflict until the end of the game. Recently the graph has been thus:


He's stopped adding any power at all. I suppose he's industrializing after completing AL, but actually I don't see factories in his cities yet. And apparently he doesn't even bother to draft infantry. So that doesn't look like he is after us. My hope now is to build some ships to equate his fleet, and from there hopefully stay at an equal power level. Also pictured: Amica's power increasing, finally. Curious what he's up to.
Sure Piccadilly has insultingly low power, but he has consistently been ahead of civac tech wise. Civac could probably still take the islands close by, but it would be stressful, he'd have to defend his island, and it would reek of kingmaking. So I assume he won't.
I do have wild dreams of raiding Piccadilly's coast, and I would love to get civac on board with the effort, but again I don't think he is motivated to do so. Regarding that ideain general, it is pretty unlikely for us to do as much damage so as to pay back on the investment. We would need a considerable fleet, some transports, and some units to put inside. The prize would be blockading his coast, maybe a few marginal razes, and forcing him to build units. But the time to do anything is running out, really. If Piccadilly strictly continues to not add any power, and we have good relations with civac, I might consider it in some 10 turns.

@Culture difference
If you read your own thread closely you will find who handed Piccadily this much culture/turn

I am not quite sure, but iirc conquered wonders don't give you culture. And even if they did there would still be a sizable delta.

@GNP difference
You are guestimating Piccadily's research power, can you not check top GNP and deduct 1100 culture/turn and your own espionage value to get a close estimate to his current research power?
It is difficult to do just based on the graphs without access to the numbers but you should be able to get a good understanding, but maybe I am thinking to easy here and binary research makes this mor difficult than I anticipate.

The issue is I don't really know his costs/break even rate. Maybe I could go over the graph from the last 1-2 dozen turns and figure it out, but I don't think I will. I do know that he's up Radio and Industrialism on us, with 1000g in the bank. The latter was finished this turn. Both lead to Computers (Internet) . Anyways, we keep trying.

@Civac strike force
Which benefit would Civac have taking some MJMD cities half around the world? Is taking cities in that direction in line with the "laid back" Civac assumption?

I already described how I think civac has resigned more or less. He can take that island just for the fun of it (as of this turn, the ships keep moving in that direction). And acutally, nobody will stop him: Us certainly not, and nobody of Lazteuq/Charriu/Donovan will be able to do anything against the destroyers. If he has some decent units on the transports he can even take the whole island for himself including Laz's part.

@Internet
2000h unrushable means that this could also be 2000h worth of research instead, is the Internet still worth it? (I really need to install CIV4 again so I can check some of these things myself).

Absolutely. For starters we'd get Biology already, that's something like 8k (or more?) beakers. And it would likely be a few more useful techs.

@Great Engineer
Do you still have one around? What is you plan for it? Bulb into a tech or keep him for space elevator or another late game wonder?

Nope. The two engineers went into Wall Street and Mining Inc. I think it was a sound investment. Certainly with the hindsight of having lost CR. We have spent all our Great People now. I was quite frustrated with all the turns where we kept multiple of them on hand. I think we'll get one more from Paraná before the game is over. There's a decent chance that it will be a Great Spy for whom we'd have 0 use, really.

@Civics
Just some thoughts from my side:
- I like having a plan for excess population to use, from that I agree that Nat sounds better than Rep as it is more flexible as it allows for keeping up power while pushing research builds (Rep would become better in case of a global or at least Civac de-militarization, but I think this to be very unlikely)
- FS would be very space race focussed and in my opinion only worth if you want to go full steam (meaning US/FS/FR) with the military risks you already mentioned. Do you need the culture anywhere against Civac?
- Theo vs FR is more difficult but it boils down to how you think the Civac game will roll out. Getting out of Theocracy for FR might either encourage Civac to work on attack plans on you or signal him that you might be less interested in conflict with him so he might consider bothering Piccadily instead. Keeping Theocracy will almost assuredly keep the arms race up setting you even further behind piccadily but also has likely less risk of being attacked

While thinking over this I came to a realization that I feel is improtant: With Nat we get security that allows for more research builds, correct. But if that security isn't even needed because civac continues to be checked out and inoffensive, then Nat is just straight up worse than FS. Otoh if we do need more units we just have to put more Mining hammers that way, so we have flexibility both ways. With Theo/FR it is sort of the same. FR might mean that we need more units, but if we don't need any it is way better.
So in the end, I revolted just to FR and now we are running US/FS/Eman/FM/FR for the rest of the game. Liberal democracy ftw! (No, Capofrance is not a thinly veiled oligarchy in the hands of a cabal of Mining bosses, not at all. The fact that payments to the corporation are now the single biggest figure in the budget, accounting for over 40% of expenses doesn't mean anything).
That also means that we have no way of making excess pop useful, which means that we have to limit excess pop. Which can be achieved to a degree with paving over farms, so our workers don't run out of stuff to do for now.

I'm following your reporting with interest. Have you tried any kind of diplo vs Piccadilly?

Tbh no, my diplo efforts have mainly been about securing Mining deals. On that note, I am a bit offended by this:


This is new, but I had been offering the exact same thing to Charriu for a long time now and he always rejected. Where is the spirit of good neighbourhood?
But really, forming a coalition against Picc just doesn't seem realistic, because everybody in question appears to be just checked out of the game. I have talked about civac at lengths above. Ichabod has been mailing in turns for a very long time now, and Frozen is also playing them ultra quick, although of ocurse I can't quite argue with the results. On top Ichabod has actually sent hostile signals ur way, closing borders and ending our Mining deal. If I decide to send a fleet west I would try and find allies, but it seems pretty unlikely. Also I would not expect anybody to kingmake, and they all have had splendid relations with Picc as far as I can tell.

Fun fact: caravels still don't queue upgrade, that is only at submarines . You also see a pretty mismanaged city.



I had mentioned that industrialization is still ongoing, but as I said we're getting there:


Amica meanwhile has a factory and plant everywhere. His MfG has barely increased but with him it's all about the whips of course.

Demos in our last golden turn in this game, at 100%:


Picc has the slider at about break even actually Well let's just ignore the first row, shall we? Actually though we are still saving this turn while 5 research multiplier buildings finish in major commerce cities. With coalplants up there are a lot of multipliers incoming now in quick order, which is the source of my enduring hope. Next turn we start research on Industrialism, then pause at least until our ery late Oxford is built in Corta Cana. The bottleneck is the university in Wellerman. That city does not even have a library while being our third or fourth in raw commerce. But building a library this turn would waste a huge amount of OF, so instead it builds a Customs House - and probably next turn it will be the same situation again, so we'll build the bank and only then the library-> university. But we'll need to save a good long while for Plastics-Radio-Computers anyways.

[Kaiser]

Thanks Kaiser, those have been great points to think about, although I fear I can agree with none of them :P. But I'll explain:

Great, that and encouraging you to report more is enough for me.

I did not know about wonders not contributing culture when conquered, that is interesting and another reason I discuss with you as there is loads to learn for my SP CIV4 experience. Getting to the source of the culture/turn difference is a tangent anyways, as long as you have a good feeling of how much the culture difference influences GNP difference.

I like your reasoning to go all out GNP/Science while perceiving Civac as inactive, I am curious to see how this plays out.

[Miguelito]

First post GA demos:




Not too bad, but Picc is an awful lot ahead. He is 2 techs up on us on Computers (Plastics and Radio). Oh yes I also still expect a GA from him, probably involving the Fusion engineer. Otoh he has no IW city yet, and maybe he is more interested in building the Three Gorges Dam? I have to hope. MfG has still been increasing rapidly and is at 3600 now(t216) iirc.
Also after civac's power flatline for a while we are on the top spot right now (soon to be overtaken by Amica I suppose). I'm building just a few tanks and ships, but research builds are also starting in earnest.

Out of boredom I suggested to Charriu war with Lazteuq (if Charriu declared we would be safe to advance with limited forces and city visibility). He answered with fish/fish first, then this:



I really don't know what to make of it, am I supposed to accept? I didn't, but I'm sending it back for whatever.

BUG allows some interesting analysis:


Looking at the 5 rightmost columns, you can see that as of this turn all cities with a courthouse also have Mining Inc spread to them (and the one that is finishing in 2 turns will have a just-in-time executive). You also see how well we are doing with multiplier buildings for these hammers. I'm not sure however for how long we should continue building these. I made this graph of payoff times:


x-axis is the base hammers of a given city (mind that with Mining Inc any city has 26 mininum currently), y the turns required for the buildings to return positive hammers, including build time. Rounding is not included. Now even if the lower bound of my prediction of the game ending in 30-40 turns (which today is already reduced 25-35) is correct, at least the forge would still be worth it in all cities; but of course also the opportunity cost of not building other stuff first has to be factored in. For example in drydocks cities just building ships might be better, or in high commerce cities I'm building commerce multipliers over factories.

Also seen in the F1 shot are serious health issues that we are facing in several cities. Grocers mostly resolve that, but in Corta Cana I actually build Public Transport and an Aqueduct as well. So Exp is coming back roaring with its passive health bonus. The Aqueduct bonus sadly is a bit awkward as it is hard not to lose OF hammers while building one. It is also worth asking how bad leaving cities unhealthy really is, considering we are running out of tiles, and a Public Transport still costs 150h that could be beakers instead.

Also two former Mjmd cities are unhappy because they want to join the motherland. At Wellerman it's actually tough, because the one option left is a temple that we could build.... or actually, we could build Confucian and Hindu missionaries (only monasteries that we have outside of Tao), and reap the fruits of free religion .... yeah, going to do that.

[Miguelito]

greeted by this:


Remember, Charriu is selling his metals to Frozen instead of us. So I accepted, hoping to get a deal for us instead. Didn't work though:


Probably because these deals were younger than 10turns, so this is not a cheap trick to dissolve them? At least canceled their OB
little detail in that diplo window shot: Picc is 2 turns from Computers . That is, while he is saving 1100 gold, and has 2200 on the bank, so he might well shorten it to 1 yet. For us it's more like 12 turns on current breakeven? I'm exaggerating, maybe it's 11, and it will improve yet as our economy is improving rapidly and we add research builds. Might also get some credits. But it seems pretty hopeless. Our one hope would be superior production (still no IW city of Picc's visible), but while Internet is 2k, Charriu has left the 100% copper bonus in it (as opposed to all the wonder resource boni that went down to 50%. Not sure if that's intended).

Picc also wanted a corporation:


I doubt it's worth it, between spread costs, inflation modified maintenance, not very many turns remaining in the game, and generally limited usefulness of the corp. The opportunity cost for him is whatever a scientist would bulb him. But he might just be having fun with it, and we might never catch him on beakers anyways. There are 25 sugars on the map, 4 of which are controlled by us . Meanwhile I'm selling Amica grains for 3gpt each, the same rate that we're buying his metals at. Oh yes, that screenshot also is showing Amica dropping the hammer on superdeath. Tarkeel and Donovan are at war against each other, so that could work out pretty well for Amica yet.

A very, criminally, late Oxford:


At least two turning it (I put one of the merchants on that mill afterwards)

Viola is still producing too many hammers, even with tanks available:


If it were a port I think we would do ok with battleships (although it would also have a drydocks). This way it looks like we'll have to get nukes just to be able to work all the hammer tiles

[Ginger()]

Holy moly that maintenance is absolutely obscene. But so is the production. Corps are a funny thing

[Miguelito]

Holy moly that maintenance is absolutely obscene. But so is the production. Corps are a funny thing

I took the opportunity to run some numbers:

• Mining Inc maintenance currently is 998 gold (little below half the total costs), multiplied with 45% inflation that's 1447.1
  
• In addition we're paying 35*3 = 105 gold to other players for Mining resources (includes opportunity costs for not selling corn to Amica and exchanging it for iron instead), and 19*6= 114 for spreading the corporation (so they hopefully keep doing so. Actually I sent out 6 new offers this turn. Piccadilly gets none of course.)
  
• total costs from Mining: 1666
  
• The HQ rakes in 308*3 = 924 gold. That actually balances the costs a lot better than I had supposed. The remaining gold cost is 742
  
• and we have 49 cities where it's spread, each getting 26 base hammers for 1274 total. 6 of those are lacking a forge, and 15 a factory + coal plant. With Emancipation, HE and IW I arrive at a hammer yield of 2395.9, and if all of that got converted to gold/beakers that leaves us with a net yield of 1654 per turn.
  
• Spreading the corporation cost 4900 hammers and ~3400 gold so far, plus the opportunity costs of not using the hammers for something else earlier. And the engineer of course (who however would never have built Redentor, but maybe Kremlin had we focused research that way)
  

So, it is a pretty nice yield, and actually I was expecting significantly less. But it is not so extreme that we can hope for it to win us the game alone.

Of course Piccadilly already has Computers this turn. I decided to still go for it, it is a good tech anyways. But I have truly little hope. The research by Piccadilly has been remarkably fast, with notably few turns of saving gold. I have come to the conclusion that he was using significant wealth builds, and likely has done so for a long time. I don't know if I should feel stupid for not committing to the same earlier, but otoh we have been building much needed economy buildings en masse, finally. Still, running for Computers on Research builds likely would have gotten us there faster.


But this turn I decided to go for it:


Every citiy not on the screen is building research, save Corta Cana which is finishing Oxford, and Viola (HE), where I can't help myself but to queue tanks. You also see that I could not resist finishing a few buildings, even though admittedly they likely will not pay for themselves until Computers.
Turns out that when we do this, we can also produce some nice numbers:


This is at 0% research . Probably still too late, but we'll see. 

Picc has added at least some power though:


However, I am not seeing any oil ships on his eastern coast (Cornflakes land). Either he has hidden them well or there are none (I did spot 2 destroyers by his capital far west. So I am debating sending a detachment of 8 destroyers his way, just to make him spend a few hammers on defense. We have no transports, so can't even bluff an invasion, but we could blockade a few cities, and pillage some nets and oil platforms, if he lets us / until he doesn't. Is it worth the turnsplit? I'd also expose the coast to civac again but he has been so completely passive (see the power graph!) that I'm not really worried. Also he returned our fish/fish.

Piccadilly has also started to spread the Standard Ethanol corporation. It gives him 1 beaker per resource, and I had forgotten that it doesn't only consume sugar, but also corn and rice (why no wheat? ). Going by our own empire, that might be like 12-15 beakers for him from his own resources. He's also buying elsewhere:


Pretty steep price. I have been buying metals at 3gpt (and just sold all our rice and corn to Amica for 3gpt each, but would not want Picc to have it anyways). Hopefully this doesn't give people ideas. The cost in the alt-F8 screen for Ethanol are 3-4 in our cities with 5 resources (why just 5? see below). So probably he's paying a bit more than his HQ is gaining in gold, but it seems like a good trade. Still not sure if it's worth the scientist?
Let's see, if he spreads it to 30 cities, and each has a science multiplier of 75% (I have not really seen if he has that many universities, but let's assume worst case), that's 1000 beakers per turn with 20 resources, and 1500 with 30. At this point he'd probably have significant costs though, but still a great trade I'm sure. Spreading cost for that would be 3k hammers and ~2200 gold, which would pay back pretty soon. So yeah, pretty good deal for him. And with laboratories he can actually increase his multiplier yet. I always chalked that corporation down as silly, but well I had mentioned before that I don't know much about endgame in general.

Amica was online with me, so we could get some momentum into the grain market:



fake edit: and now he also offered mutual fish/fish / Stop trading with Piccadilly, which I took, here are the demos afterwards:


Seems worth it, although we are racing to a tech that Picc already has, so not sure . I think Amica can offer OB to Picc right back? But I think they won't. And even if he did, us cancelling Picc's OB should be at least a zero sum result.

[klops]

Viola is still producing too many hammers, even with tanks available:

serious problems...


Maybe transportation is worth that one(?) turn to provide more health?
And yes, if you have too many hammers, go for the most expensive. Nukes incoming!

[Miguelito]

Viola is still producing too many hammers, even with tanks available:

serious problems...


Maybe transportation is worth that one(?) turn to provide more health?
And yes, if you have too many hammers, go for the most expensive. Nukes incoming!

So, two more fun facts:
1) Building a Public Transport (cost 150h) is actually much better here than the Aqueduct (cost 80h +100% fr us with Exp), as it loses a lot less overflow. (both buildings give +2 health)

--->not quite it seems. I finally came around to testing it, and somehow wasted OF gets converted to gold. I still don't understand how though. I made a city in WB that ended up with +335% production modifier, and would put 361h into a workboat. When doing so, it generated 149 gold from the 331 "wasted" overflow. I don't quite know how it arrives at that number. Debonifying 331/4.35 gives 76, which is close to 149/2 but not quite.
This indicates that building research still is much more efficient than converting hammers to gold via this mechanic, but maybe I can better justify losing OF hammers in that light, especially if the alternative is a spy specialist...
I think civac documented this somewhere. Probably in PB55? Might want to dig it up. Right now it's not super relevant as we're building mostly Research anyways.

2) But every turn that we don't build units there is a tank not built, so instead of building either I have passed to converting mines to windmills. Yes, this is in the HE city . With electricity riverside windmills are pretty good at 2/2/4. Might rebuild the mines once we have nukes though  


To the report. Smart move from Lazteuq:


I had seriously considered invading him for some excitement, conquest gold, and Mining resources. Of course with every resource he sells us my motivation to do so is reduced drastically. I'm offering him more trades.
Charriu is catching up in tech pretty well though. He has AL and RR and is about to get Combustion as well. Piccadilly is providing him with oil already. I decided to just give him oil as well, so ot1h he'll be aware that I am seeing his research and otoh it may direct him more towards Lazteuq, who is not really advancing. If he does that I'll have to reconsider. For now I'm sending some tanks to take Mjmd's island in the inland sea. He has a lot of collateral and some knights, but I hope that infantry and tanks will do well enough. However, I only have 3 galleons, so he might kill the first wave. Might be better to just attack amphibiously for a while? Uh, I should have declared and blockaded the island already, but what gives.
civac meanwhile takes Mjmd's jungle island cities, hopefully.



I'm trying to get a bit of a credit. The thing is, we might actually pull off Internet. We can rather easily finish Computers within 3 turns (making me wonder if we could have shaven off one more if we had completed Plastics already, but spilled milk...). If my math is correct we can build the projects in 4 turns, with a massive effort (ugly stuff, you'll see in time). He had the tech last turn already, but only this turn he completed IW in a former Cornflakes city:


To make Internet an 8 turn build he'd need 2000/4.1/8 = 61 base hammers. I'm counting 48 in the city from tiles. Known unknowns: The amount of hammers he gets from Mining, and how much overflow he can pass into it. But we are getting 26 Mining hammers with a larger empire and massive imports*. And I doubt that he put in a lot of OF, because if he had planned for it he would have been ready last turn, and also you don't want to overflow a lot on IW because of the debonification.
So, it is by no means a sure thing, but hopefully at least worth some nailbiting.

* I went in to check the trade screen. I believe he has 18 mining resoruces, that should give him around 6 hammers .

I actually went and sent 2 missionaries to Wellerman (Hindu/Confu):


Lovely city btw. And as I just realized we may need a few more, as we are about to obsolete fur (after whale and ivory), so happiness is becoming somewhat relevant again. I am trying to get Musicals from Frozen, but he has no real reason to give us (as he's getting spices from Donovan already and we have nothing else to offer - but maybe the corporationgold we're sending him has created goodwill?). Queued 2 temples and a market. Sadly we still don't have a single jewish city).

This seems like a bad idea:


Still doing it, want hammers. We can manage, but might throw away OF on an Aqueduct.

Demos, finally where we want them:


With more research builds that GNP could be at about 8700 or more, but I am weak. I also think that the gap to Picc will narrow again as he spreads his corporation and aquires more resources. He'll also be first to Superconductors, with Labs for +25% beakers (however, we would be able to acutally build them faster - but we could also run him for Fusion instead). We'll see if we can catch up. Internet surely would help.

[Rusten]

That mfg has been telling for a while, but that looks very good now. I've lost track of the game so I don't really know the diplomatic situation but you certainly look to be the front runner.