[PB64] naufragar's bingo parlor for assassins

[Mjmd]

Your math is a little fuzzy. Non coastal cities wouldn't get the +1 from GLH. Also, you could be saving up to 4!!!! gold from organized. Organized at monarch isn't quite the same that is for sure.

We believe in you!!!!

[naufragar]

You're foiling my attempts to craft a narrative through deception and innuendo! 

Ok, fine. Here's the truth:


I believe that this shows Amica's current gold per turn rate. It's possible that he's running some Sun Tzu genius-level deception and he's actually doing some trickle research while amassing gold to fool people, but I think this is his rate. With Currency and the Great Lighthouse and before I have any real savings from Org, he and I have economies of pretty much the same size.

Two massive caveats to that, though, before people never trust my reporting again. First, the Crop Yield graph I showed you isn't fake. Amica really is head and shoulders above the rest of the field in food, which means he can work more cottages and other good tiles. (And you can compare his good tiles, like grassland riverside gems, to my ice silver.  ) This turn he whipped off 5 population points which'll go into settlers, wonders, who knows what but his growth curve is going to keep climbing.

The second caveat is one I'll probably need to explain more in depth in my t100 report. Basically, I haven't been building cottages. I ran the math way back at the start of the game, and I think I came to the conclusion that a non-river cottage beats a Financial lighthouse coast after 40 turns. I can't remember my math, but I'll trust past naufragar. I made the decision to essentially ignore non-river cottages because the payback period was too long. I have four cottages throughout the entire empire. This means that if Amica and I both started working commerce tiles at the same time and he started working cottages and I started working coast, I only have a window, a long window admittedly, but a deadline before his tiles are better than mine.

Still, so long as I get to do my thing without interference, I don't hate my odds.

Mask back on. Dooooooomed.

[Cornflakes]

I think the FIN coast vs. non-river cottage is worse than 40 turns:

First 10 turns - coast +2
Next 20 turns - coast +1 (cumulative +30 for coast)
Next 40 turns - cottage +1 ... aka breaks even 30 turns in, or 60 turns total. And it's worse because the differential is front-loaded so the boost to early commerce helps you reach key techs quicker.

This is why I hate CtH FIN, and the latest Lighthouse implementation in particular. With base FIN the boring naked grassland becomes exciting. With CtH FIN the boring naked grassland is even more boring, and the coast is now aggravating (I've worked many a non-lighthouse coast as base FIN which are basically equivalent to a Wealth build on a grass mine but available prior to Currency).

To turn this into a positive post ... ORG is probably giving you a little more since rounding affect each of the four civics categories individually so you get up to 4 "bonus" gpt in addition to the advertised 50%. In practice you're very likely saving 5 gpt right now, possibly 6 gpt, and if you're really lucky even 7!

[naufragar]

Thanks for running the numbers! That past naufragar can't do math to save his life, but his instincts are ok. Yeah, if I didn't have the Org Lighthouse discount, I'd be tearing my hair out. On the other hand, I've been able to run really light on workers. Each coast tile I'm working represents 4 worker turns I didn't have to put into a cottage.

To turn this into a positive post ... ORG is probably giving you a little more since rounding affect each of the four civics categories individually so you get up to 4 "bonus" gpt in addition to the advertised 50%. In practice you're very likely saving 5 gpt right now, possibly 6 gpt, and if you're really lucky even 7!

Yeah! And the civic maintenance formulas are staggered, meaning the costs of each category (Government, Legal, Labor, Economics, Religion) don't increase at the exact same rate, so I suspect very soon I'm going to see maintenance skyrocket. (Good article here.) Plus one of these days I'll finally revolt into the High Cost Organized Religion, which was the reason for teching Monotheism 50 turns ago. 

[naufragar]

I made a mistake in my analysis last turn. Last turn, Amica had 1 gold in the bank and was producing +31. So how does he get to this number?


Obviously, I was very confused. It sure seemed like Amica had summoned up 6 turns of research from thin air. Well, if he built wealth everywhere and whipped stone walls with stone & Protective discounts for overflow gold... Whatever. It happened and it means that Amica essentially has way more money than me. Instead of being even, he is ~18 turns ahead (12 turns on Currency, 6 turns of research in the bank). Suddenly, our prospects looks really bad.

Oh well. Let's explore shall we. Oh hey look! We found Superdeath.


Man, that close to Amica he must be sweating. After all, Superdeath has the fewest cities and is Imperialistic, which won't scale well now, whereas Amica is very strong and rich and right next door. Poor Superdeath, he must be very worried about Amica.



Or maybe he has decided to screw me. I had to walk away from my computer when I saw this I was so mad. Amica has 180 gold in the bank. Superdeath is getting paid 18 gold for 10 turns. Surely, surely even the First National Bank of Superdeath charges interest, right? Surely Superdeath isn't just giving all his damn money away to the game leader who is also his neighbor. Surely Superdeath has never thrown a game out of frustration and surely he isn't doing so again here. Surely Superdeath, after smashing my last game at no benefit to himself, is not doing so again. Surely, his lack of reporting the last few turns doesn't represent a lack of attention and a willingness to press whatever offer shows up on his screen. Surely Superdeath, who has himself broken deals as if they were graham crackers, appreciates that Amica can cancel his loan payments at any time and then challenge 5 city Superdeath to play the repo man.

Why, in the name of all things holy, does Superdeath want to give Amica a free tech? Because that's what this is. With 6 turns of research he should be able to get through Construction, at which point I have to prepare for catapults.

In case anyone's forgotten, here's the current food graph:



Thanks, Superdeath. This deal definitely increased your chances of winning. 

[naufragar]

The turn rolled quickly, so have a second mini-report.


Amica is moving a decently sized force near my two newest cities.

And his power is spiking.


So, uh, yeah.

Edit: Oh, I forgot this. Stop snitching, foreign advisor.



I owe Ginger the first duplicate luxury I connect.

[Mjmd]

What is your plan to defend vs Cats? assuming that A) is what Amica is going for and B) Amica decides to attack you.

I'm going to have to remember to look at the foreign advisor screen more if I ever end up in a good position. 

[naufragar]

What is your plan to defend vs Cats? assuming that A) is what Amica is going for and B) Amica decides to attack you.

It's sort of a better use case for Vultures as opposed to Axes. Vultures fight catapults way better. The problem is that my plans in the short term are really not resilient to shocks. I'm going for Calendar before Construction or Currency because that's how I plan to settle the Amica-side jungle pass. Plus I want to go from there straight to Monarchy and a Golden Age to swap to Judaism and Org. Rel./Hereditary Rule.

I'm currently making a round of Ziggurats but after that I'm going to queue up another round of Vultures and hope that's enough. Amica has Ivory, which makes a Construction-era timing attack just so darn scary. The only way I beat that is with weight of units. If I see him grab Construction, I'll have to consider abandoning my plans to follow him to collateral units. 

[naufragar]

Have you ever seen a pushier sonofabitch? I mean, he makes Mjmd seem reasonable! 


As expected, Amica is going for the irrigated corn. That corn could have fed two of my cities, instead, Amica is reaching 13 tiles away from his capital to steal the food off their plates and forking two of my cities in the process.

The spot is 13 tiles away from him but only 9 tiles away from me. So how is Amica able to rob me with impunity? Well, the tile is 9 squares away as the crow flies...


It's actually 12 tiles away from me because of that damned lake!    The terrain is perfectly positioned to screw me. In the south, you can see that Gavagai has resigned himself to creeping along the tundra wasteland rather than pushing into the rich center of the continent. He's a nice guy who doesn't want to take any land that could be going to Amica, I guess. 

In fact, he's the only player still trading with Amica. When Amicalola gives his victory speech, I hope he remembers to thank SD and Gav for making it all possible.


Are these smaller payments evidence of additional loans from SD and Ginger? Why would they want to loan money to the game-leader? (If there's anybody wondering why loans are often a bad idea, think of it this way: money is worth more up front. 100 gold on turn X is better than 120 gold on turn X+10 because you can get through techs quicker which give you more ways to make money, accelerating your growth even more. Basically, other players are letting Amica grow his economy to a position of (even greater) strength and then repay his debts when they matter less because his cottages have matured, he has unlocked better buildings, he's simply grown more pop and cities, etc.

Is it possible that Amica's creditors don't know this? Of course not. Look at Amica's GNP.


Great Lighthouse, Protective, free money from loans, lopsided trade with Gavagai. If the players in this pitboss were newbies, this would all be understandable, but everybody here is a pro. ("naufragar's bingo parlor for assassins" natch)

Moving on to the wider world, I found a Superdeath front city.


Well, more power to you. If you ever want to point those at Amica (you know, the guy currently winning and who is set to run over you with knights), that'd be cool.

Ginger has declared war on Comm. Here's the non-Amica part of the world:


Comm's dead. He has had the lowest power in the game since I got his graphs. He has half of Ginger's power, and Ginger has Crossbows, so nothing Comm has even comes close to trading. I'm not sure how it got this bad. I recognize the plan: stay in your shell, use Colossus and Great People to build up a tech lead, wait for an opening. But that plan requires, well, a shell. An axeman on a hill behind a Celtic Dun does trade against a Gingerian crossbow, so there are things Comm can do or could have done to make himself pricklier, but from my (admittedly fog-of-war heavy) perch, Comm's about to be headed home. I'll talk more about this in the player overviews.

THE PLAYER OVERVIEWS

There's this weird phenomenon in the multiplayer civ games. I like all RealmsBeyonders. (Yup, all.  ) but my primary interactions are via the game and therefore adversarial. And it's not like pickup basketball, where you play for a bit and then go your separate ways. To play successfully, you have to try to get inside your opponents head, you have to get invested in your own plans only for an opponent to wreck what you've built over a hundred hours. So there's a weird split. I love all of you and everyone on this list. But naturally, I hate everyone on this list and want to dance on their graves. What made me think of this? Oh right!

AMICALOLA


Amica is a really great guy, and in my last two games he and I have been set up to be archnemeses. It's a pity because, if I weren't in this game, he'd be at or near the top of my list of people to cheer for. He's very good and makes and executes plans well.

In this game, he's far and away the favorite. He has a massive amount of land to expand into naturally, and he's able to take a bunch of mine because I'm being strangled to death by impassable terrain and ocean. Amica is a natural pessimist, so I wonder how he evaluates his position. He was on the top of the leader board by a massive margin until he whipped off something like 11 pop in 2 turns. (Yes, I'm worried about what all that could have been.) That whip spree pulled him back into the pack, but that's just an illusion. Luckily for him, it's an illusion that the rest of the players seem to take comfort in believing.

I've mentioned a couple times that I think I can outscale Amica's growth, but Amica, not content to be static, has made plans to counteract that. I've mentioned a few of these. The loans were a stroke of genius (that no one should have been foolish enough to accept, but still). He's at his worst point right now. Very large territory but not so many cottages or infrastructure buildings. Those loans will tide him over until his gigantic empire is profitable. The other thing he has done is push me back into my tundra hell. I assume Gav is also letting himself get pushed, hence Gav's iceball city rather than anything in the main of the continent which Amica is rapidly taking over. What does Amica need to do now? He knows I'm always going to be a thorn in his side. He should probably try to kill me. He has way more hammers and pop than me, so building/whipping a slow moving army and just smashing into me might be a good idea, but it's a painful prospect, so he might not. If I were him, I'd be getting Cats and Elephants together. I wouldn't trust that I could get to Guilds far enough ahead. On the other hand, I don't really know Amica's western border. I'd bet he could eat Superdeath at his leisure and Gav's looking trapped between Ginger and Amica and eventually will die to a combination of the two. All that said, Amica has to deal with me somehow in order to win. Either he deals with me directly or he bottles me up and tries to outscale.

GINGER

Continuing down the leader board, we have our resident ladder veteran. I don't really know what's happened in distant lands this game. As best I can tell, Ginger exploded out to an early and impressive lead before Gav caught him with his hands down. I really like the way Ginger played his early game. He grabbed Oracle into Metal Casting and then apparently hard-teched Engineering. (I admit I haven't been paying too much attention to Great People births.) He didn't take Gav's attack lying down, and those two have been trading territory back and forth ever since. Ginger now fields Protective Crossbows.

If Ginger weren't neighboring Commodore, I'd count him out entirely, but his northwestern neighbor built the Colossus and no military. Ginger has literally twice the soldier points of Comm. Ginger can hold his Gavagai-border and take four Comm cities plus Colossus and be right back in this game. That's incredibly annoying for me. I liked having a de-fanged neighbor to my east, so I could focus on Amica to the west. And yes, I admit, I was planning to one day take the Colossus for my own. That's going to be much more difficult if Ginger holds it. I was always going to have to contend with Amicalolan interference when I attacked. Now, their combined strength would be too much. On the other hand, Ginger stopped trading with Amica, so he's in my good books. Past events have proved your good nature.

Ginger has looked like he was in a rough spot, but I like his position third best (after Amica and me). He has clear expansion prospects through Commodore. He can greatly improve his economy with the Colossus. And Gav is or soon will be completely gassed, and Ginger can outgrow him and try to eat him (if Amica doesn't do it first).

GAVAGAI



Oh Gav, why can't you just do what I want? Gav was dealt a difficult hand: wedged between Superdeath, Ginger, and the ocean. He carved out a niche for himself by sheer willpower. I can't count him out because he seems always ready to throw a punch that tends to land quite effectively. On the other hand, he has made enemies, and that's going to catch up with him, I predict.

I don't really know enough about his position to predict what he's going to do or how he can get into a better spot in this game. He has been scouting me (and therefore seeing my underdefended cities) and he has a sneaky southern city within a handful of tiles of a few of my own. I've posted a guard, but if he just turns around and marches all his horse archers at me, I'd be in trouble. I'm confident I could beat him back. I'm confident he wouldn't profit much if at all from the attack. But I'm also confident that Amica could turn that attack on me into a game-ending advantage. I don't know what Gav does. It seems apparent that he can't push through SD or Ginger. He has shown no willingness to challenge Amica (and is going so far as to be his only foreign trade partner). So maybe he does swing at me. We shall see.

Superdeath


As with Amica, I love Superdeath dearly. And like with Amica, it feels like every time I turn around I'm being foiled intentionally or unintentionally by something SD's done. I didn't discover SD until a couple turns ago, so I truly have no idea what's gone on in his part of the world. He has locked horns with Gavagai a bit, and from what I can tell he's come out the better in it. He has the fewest cities despite being Imperialistic, which might be due to a weird land formation. I'm not sure. He's Financial, but that's not going to save him when he has half the cities of Amica.

Since I don't know his position, I have no idea what he needs to do to advance. But I don't think he does either. It looks like he's playing short, checked-out turns. Oh well. Good for Amica, bad for me. That's just the way the dice roll. The question is, will SD be eaten by Amica, Gav, or Ginger? I'd be shocked if he survives to the end game. But you never know; Superdeath has proven an excellent defender in the past.

COMMODORE

As I've already mentioned, Ginger has declared war on Comm. This makes me sad, because I always like it when Comm does well. He had a decent plan to leverage Colossus into relevancy. The map did not cooperate. He was screwed from the start.  He proposed a random game, and a random game he got. 

NAUFRAGAR

I feel like I've already explained my own situation and plan well enough. Every time I think I'm accelerating faster than Amica, some new bullshit arises that keeps him in contention. I need to hold on to my land, build more soldiers, and wait for Organized to kick in. Then I need to build units that are a better hammer:strength ratio than my opponents can. The original plan was to eat Commodore when I had stabilized against Amica, but that looks unlikely now. The newest plan is...? No idea. It's going to be incredibly difficult to take cities off Amica ever and my east is now unpredictable. As always, we'll play it by ear.


And now, the moment you've been waiting for and why you're all here. An in-depth look at the build queues of every city in the empire.

My poor misused capital. It's a gigantic city for us as size 5. That changes next turn when we whip a settler. You might wonder why I'm building a settler with coast instead of a mine. I worked the mine for a couple turns at +11 foodhamers and now I'm working the coast at +9 for a little extra gold. We need to money, especially if I need to grab a quick military tech or two. I can't decide if this is a bureau capital. It's pretty solid. The two spices will be amazing tiles once they get plantations. A theme throughout the empire is that we have no hammer tiles. This one, with one mine, counts for significant industry.

This settler is the one that finally settles the jungle by Amica. I have messed up the Calendar timing a bit, but oh well.

If I lose this game, it's this city's fault. I was a colossal idiot and founded my second city for no new food resources. This damaged my growth curve by some inestimably huge amount. Oh well, it's done. I thought about not starving this city and just working two scientists, but I want to convert to Judaism and start building missionaries as soon as possible. With this spy specialist, I'm at +12 espionage points. Right now, they're all going into Superdeath to quickly get his graphs, but I'm optimistic I can start winning the espionage war against Amica soon. I'm building a spear because I'm worried about elephants from Amica and maybe even sneaky horse archers from Gav.

Another city with only one hammer tile. This is the Jewish holy city and I'll start working a priest next turn. Should get a Great Prophet to shrine this in ~60 turns. Well, at least it gives me time to spread the religion around. I plan to build a few mines for this place (after all, I'm not building grass cottages) and I'm saving that one forest for a forge.

You can tell I didn't know what to do with this city. My note tells me to whip a Ziggurat next turn. This way I could grow back in one turn. I decided that I needed to whip now. Either way, the overflow completes the Vulture and I'm starting to feel the heat, so I'd prefer to get a unit one turn sooner than grow a city a bit faster. This city is emblematic of my entire empire. Small, weak, decently infrastructured. Compare my solo plains wheat to all of Amica's irrigated grassland grains and you can understand why he's in such a dominant position. Oh well. We just have to trust in our economy.

The Commodore compromise city. Shows what I know. I backed off to foster good relations with Commodore, who's going to be dead in a minute and donate his gems to Ginger's forges. Whatever. You can also see the borders of another barb city to my north. Lucky? Me? No, sir, never.    Although this city does prevent trade with Amica, which means I can't check his resources to see when he hooks up horses etc. 

You can tell that I'm feeling the military pressure. I wanted a monument in here to get some extra furs and start trading them around. More important to militarize the south before Gav gets funny ideas, I think. I can settle that plains hill to the west at my leisure. I'll have to run the math on it, but I think it's one of the rare cases where it'll be better to build a lighthouse before a granary since there are no food resources around it. Again, this is sort of emblematic of my game. I've got city spots I can settle but they are absolute trash compared to Amica's. (I have exactly 0 cities outside the cap with 2 food resources. Amica has many, many such places.)

One day, if I'm given enough time, this will be a production center. Probably the only production center in the empire. And, as with everything in this game so far, "if I'm given enough time" is the key bit. Other than that, nothing special. You will of course notice another 4food tile. We don't do that whole 6 food tile thing here. For that you'll have to go ask a certain other player at the top of the leader board. 

I'm not going to complain about a free city, especially in a spot I was planning on settling, but this city is just such garbage. It only has a 4food tile (notice a theme?) and it's about to be crushed by Amica's pressure to the north (who is going to steal the 6food corn). The lakes are terrible, since I can't put a lighthouse here, and the spot is incredibly awkward to reinforce against either Gav or Amica. Oh well. If we don't keep planting cities, Amica does and we die.

Little Cistercia is fine. It's got a decent food resource and a couple of hills. More importantly, it gives vision into the heart of the continent, which (because Gav apparently doesn't want it) is going to be Amica's territory in a second. If I ever feel comfortable with this spot, I might put Moai here and bring our production center count up to 2. (Two whole cities with hammer output! How decadent!) More likely, I never feel confident because Amica's going to be one turn away from destroying this spot for the rest of the game.

He has parked a warrior on the jungle tile looking into the city. He's not being particularly subtle. "I am going to constantly watch your garrisons so that I can attack the moment I am able." Ok, pal. Nothing I can do about it, so I'll just carry it. I guess I should appreciate Amica's honesty. He has absolutely no intention of ever ratcheting down the tension between us: planting cities in my face, moving two axes up to what he thought was a defenseless spear of mine, parking permanent sentries on cities that are 15 tiles from his capital but 6 tiles from mine. Amica wants to be my enemy. Fine. If that's what he wants.

Phew. Never doing another turn 100 overview again this game.

[naufragar]

It's been a very Civ-y Saturday, so have another update.

I opened the turn up to this.


I take this to mean "if you declare war on Commodore, you get to keep Comm's gems city." Tempting, but I don't have the units to do that. My power is almost as low as Comm's right now. Remember that payment from Amica to Ginger I showed you last turn? I think that was Amica bribing Ginger to close borders with me. (Otherwise, Ginger did it all on his own, which would hurt my feelings.) This gave me cover to refuse. Instead, I sent back an open borders request with a fish gift thrown in. The message hopefully being "let's get back to a state of friendship, and I won't interfere with your conquest." The truth is, I'm in no position to interfere either which way.

Here's the power graph:


Yeah... Let's just hope nobody looks at us funny over the next several turns.

I got a bit of a scare when I met a Gav chariot:


Notice that the combined garrison for all 3 of my southern cities is... 1 warrior. I don't have a trade connection with Gav, so I can't offer him a fish for fish. I pulled my vulture back. If I were Gav, I wouldn't try to push in along the south. It's too far away from him to capture or hold profitably, and it stretches him too far away from his enemies, Ginger and Superdeath. On the other hand, this entire game he has demonstrated that he prefers Amica's friendship to mine, so who knows?

Speaking of Amica, what's he been doing with Superdeath's treasury?


I can't figure it out. He and Commodore are the ones with Currency. (Poor Comm, teching Currency right as Ginger comes to bury him.) Superdeath and Gav are the ones with Horseback Riding. Ginger and Commodore are the ones with Metal Casting. What path is Amica on? He has done the whole Great Lighthouse into Great Library in other games, so maybe that's in the cards. I'm a little perturbed that I can't track him. Tech visibility is still a few turns off.