[SPOILERS] swans will bite u

[williams482]

Oh shit, I know what happened on t18. Krill got a Relic out of that barb camp! That explains the rapid faith progress and the fact that they immediately jumped from #4 to #1 in culture: nobody else is generating any tourism, but they are! Relics are such a nice pickup in the early game, that was a really lucky roll for them.

Good analysis all around, I think. We do know that Krill has no war carts for lack of era score. They may well be planning to chop out a bunch, at 55h with +50% production you get roughly one per chop with some overflow losses, not terrible if carefully timed. And Thrawn certainly likes to go for the throat when he sees an opportunity, so the fastest possible time between "war cart era score" and "war carts attacking someone's cities" is going to be attractive.

My general preference here is to stick with the most secure option: bet on Chevalier's typical excellent read of the foreign situation leading to him building boats instead of holy site projects, and prioritize securing Geneva. As far as broader strategy our goal should be survival and rough parity with our opponents: we don't want to be a target early and we'd like to be strong enough to project some foreign influence, but we aren't going for an early rush and we have good reason to believe we have an advantage if this game reaches the industrial era.

For Victor vs Pingala, how many turns off Oligarchy is Pingala actually going to save? At pop 3 he's worth 4 clefs per turn, which almost doubles our empire's culture output. That will drop to "only" a 40% decrease once we buy a monument in Teru, which is what, 15 turns out? to t42, ish. While Pingala looks to be recruited on t35(?) and thus established on t40. On t35 we'll be done with Early Empire and mostly done with Craftsmanship, so we'll have 42 culture to crunch through to get Pingala's +1 culture per pop promotion, then another 66 culture for Political Philosophy.

I'm stymied slightly here because the game's culture income numbers look wrong? From the very beginning of the game, a palace (1 culture) and one population (0.3 culture) in the capital produces... 1.2 culture? what? Throw in a monument and another pop, and what "should" be 3.6 culture is actually 3.5. But settling Teru provides the expected +0.3 culture, bringing the total to 3.8. Is there some floating point nonsense going on here, or do I not understand how culture is supposed to work?

[ljubljana]

Turn 29 - Japan

heroic measures = i put civ6 on my mac and played via cell phone hotspot at a cafe in palo alto lol... still a 4-hour turn but would have been a 6-hour turn otherwise

anyways



no HS from chev, and we are now first in dom rankings! that'll send a signal to thrawn all right i'm interpreting this as thrawn beginning their CS attack rather than us actually having more ships out than them, but that's decent news for us too as it should preclude interference at Geneva.

inc founds a second city and completes a bireme! sweet, we were on the mark about that one and they are taking thrawn at least somewhat seriously

woden has a third tech, so not bronze working? cool, the longer they delay apprenticeship, the more time we get before the crazy Gallic power spike

missed banzai's scores this turn due to an annoying mac thing:



and don't have time to fix it right now, so keep that in mind for next time

re pingala: it's not reeeeeally about oligarchy (though it would shave probably 5-6 turns off that i'd guess). it is more about theology, DT, recorded history, and the whole line of civics down to mercenaries, which i tended to struggle to get together in time in testing. and also for following TAD's coattails to cartography which is how to decisively close the door on both longships and probably an early jong push as well. hakuho will also be growing veeery quickly with shrine and temple in place, so i expect pingala to scale pretty well into the midgame too. but we would have to survive thrawn having delayed victor until DT which is sus

i am only having second thoughts about victor first, btw, not completely turning my back on the idea. +7 on galleys could easily make the difference in both thrawn survival and thrawn deterrent, and while it delays cartography, it does give a significantly more powerful caravel fleet once they are up and running...

[williams482]

That damned screenshot popup appears with a fullscreened game too? Ouch. Fortunately it is possible to disable that feature.

What is TAD doing for governors? I think there's something to be said for Japan taking the culture Pingala path, while Portugal goes Victor-3 immediately and starts pumping future Naus. It's more important to get promotions on the Portugese ships because they don't have the coastal +5 and do have a very valuable city state to protect, and Japan stands to get more benefit from Pingala than Portugal would.

[ljubljana]

well, TAD does have one major gubernatorial demand that I do not have - Amani for suzereignty of Mogadishu. still not sure if we take her first though :/

victor will have a larger force multiplier for TAD medium-term due to the Nau experience bug, wherein we reeeeally want to upgrade Naus from already promoted galleys so they don't have to wait a billion years for the second promotion. also pingala is less strong for them as their capital will stay smaller for longer. but on the other hand, it's hard to overstate how dependent portugal's power is on Cartography time, and Pingala remains the fastest route to Mercs-upgrading a bunch of Naus and filling my homeland with Feitoria

on the other hand, as the game goes long, it'll be Japan that races down the tech tree and tries to put the game away with super early Embolon DW ironclads. if i take pingala before victor, i may not have much time to build up a ton of promoted galleys with victor before Cartography comes along and obsoletes them :/ 30 turns of Victor is worth something like 10 galley promotions, approximately, which judging by the scale of the PBEM20 battles is basically an entire caravel fleet...

btw you guys will love my plan for actually winning this game once we are in Monasticism as it is very funny. the plan is: get our joint income to 1000 gpt or so with Portuguese TRs (they will seriously have 20 of them worth 50gpt apiece) and FtW pop working Feitorias, get Japan's science up into the 300ish range with campi + bought libraries + science specialists + galapagos, rush advanced flight, then buy 8 bombers on t140...

[ljubljana]

as for feasibility of the advanced flight rush, let's say my assets on t101 are 6 campi with average adjacency of +6 (+12 in doubling policy) 6 libraries w scientist specialists, Pingala in a size 10 capital, a Galapagos city with 20 bpt from tiles, and 40 total pop. that is roughly 150 base science = 262.5 science in Monasticism. the techs between cartography and advanced flight are

square rigging = 600 beakers no boost
massprod = 294 beakers with boost
industrial = 567 beakers with boost
education = 201 beakers with boost
astro = 360 beakers with boost
stirrups = 216 beakers with boost
banking = 324 beakers with boost
sci theory = 930 beakers no boost
flight = 1250 beakers no boost
radio = 1370 beakers no boost
advanced flight = 1480 beakers no boost

7592 beakers all told, which at 262 bpt will take only 29 turns. and in the best case there are other levers like universities and hildegard available as well.

it is plausible that the solution to FtW amenities is actually this: STOP expanding after 8 self-founded cities (6 on the home island, 1 in the channel for feitoria, and 1 at galapagos) and laser-focus on going chopped HS -> shrine -> monument -> campus at the 4 new home island cities while hak and teru crank out ships. use monumentality for 5 settlers first but then builders to get the new cities hammer tiles for the campus. if we are aiming to force concessions in the mid-t100s new cities beyond that will likely NOT pay back the beakers they cost in amenities, let alone the hammer cost from amenities PLUS the escalated cost of the settler...

note that early pingala is not reeeeally crucial for any of these timings as 30 turns of him is, like, one turn of monasticism research lmao. the question in my mind really boils down to whether our survival odds are better with a swarm of victor galleys on t70 or fast mercs + cartography around t100. phrased in that way victor does seem like a pretty obvious answer

[ljubljana]

this general gameplan, i should maybe mention, is the other reason besides harbors that i'm obsessed w FtW - our speed is determined primarily by the time to the 6 megalopolis campi and secondarily by the growth of the galapagos city. the first means get the cap to size 7 and the new cities to size 4 ASAP, and the second is really hard under generic circumstances but easy with FtW - just make it our first offshore city and buy the shrine and temple and it'll hit size 8 in no time, plus have the food to work all 8 galapagos tiles harbor or no harbor

[williams482]

Is eight bombers on t140 actually a winning edge if the empire that produces it has eight cities and whatever fleet eight cities can build? They only have 10 tiles of range, and each of them can only kill one unit per turn. You'd be basically impossible to invade, but your potential invader wouldn't really care because you aren't going to be able to reach their cities without forward bases that your navy will be hard-pressed to capture.

Maybe I'm underrating the bombers here, as you probably could "walk" your bombers between islands, always keeping your fleet within the 10 tile umbrella where the kill ratio for any engagement starts out at +10 per turn in your favor. And battleships, the unit that allows your opponents to hit back, shouldn't be showing up for quite a while so you can afford to take it slow.

Actually the real problem is that 250+ beakers per turn when everyone else is sitting in the 100-150 range, plus a small number of cities, likely an undersized navy, and an economy built on trade routes, makes you both a fat target and tremendous long term danger. But maybe we can build more ships than I'm thinking, and maybe the diplo situation will be chaotic enough for you to get away with it. Worth consideration, for sure.

[ljubljana]

With respect to fleet production, I think we'd be okay - in PBEM20, it seemed like the limiting factor for the size of a Renaissance fleet was not production of galleys and quads but acquisition of funds and niter for upgrading. If TAD and I each invest in 15 or so promoted galleys before Cartography to keep the Vikings away, that already represents a strong enough caravel fleet to outmuscle what most teams were able to put together in that timeframe in PBEM20. Then the rest is quads, but I can only upgrade at most one quad per turn anyways due to niter, so if one or two of our cities spam them the others will not have many high-impact shipbuilding tasks, and the lost marginal production from foregone colonial plants should not be too impactful. Plus we have TAD's whole empire to spam Naus to keep our milpower numbers up. And re bombers vs Renaissance ships, it's not just that the kill ratio will start out at +8 in our favor, but that we will kill their 8 best units before they can do anything...so, between half and all of their LoB frigates, most likely. I can't think of any major battle in PBEM20 between comparably-sized navies in which such an edge would not have been decisive.

re being a giant target: yuppp, we will have to see where the diplo sitch stands at that time. but one nice thing about the bomber rush is that it contains a built-in ironclad rush via square rigging -> massprod -> industrial -> steam power (which i forgot to include in the calcs above, oops). if we can get a 10-turn head start on ICs and all our ICs are promoted and Divine Wind-boosted, we should be pretty resistant to murdering during that timeframe by anything less than a full dogpile. and while we quite likely would incite such a dogpile from any team strong enough to do anything, we have a secret weapon that could help with that - we are last in the turn order, which means our DoF offers will look awfully attractive to our first strike-minded foes. I can see us managing to sneak in a DoF or two in the t95-t100 range before the scope of the threat becomes obvious, especially since Chevalier will be in their power period at that time. Perhaps our opponents will not immediately grasp that in doing so they are committing to facing bombers when they do get to attack us

also, the inverse of the statement that "250+ beakers will make us a big target, and is therefore bad" is "deliberately suppressing my science rate will keep others off our back, and is therefore good", which i am hesitant to endorse. i am not sure we can win the game without first seeming like a threat to win the game to experienced players like chevalier, thrawn, and woden - i imagine the team that wins this will be the one that becomes a threat so quickly and so overwhelmingly that even some coordination between other teams will not be sufficient to keep them down. thrawn's window for that is the longship rush, chev's is jongs, woden's is gaul-ing out a huge galley + quad fleet and mass-upgrading with English gold while being first to stuff like fleets and wars of religion. i think a big science push is the best way to leverage portugal's gold-based instant production + japan's adjacencies and Monasticism setup to create such a window, although whether it should end in ICs into bombers or ICs into battleships is admittedly an open question...

edit: and re airbases for bombers, there is something of a ready solution for that, thank goodness - military engineers can build airstrips in neutral territory and require no extra tech to research we might have to do some amount of island-hopping to operationalize that thought but it would be tough for opponents to stop that without risking a first strike from both ships AND bombers...

[williams482]

Having a massive empire with a ton of production queues makes a really big difference (obviously). Russia was niter- and coal-limited for relevant units, but was able to churn out an enormous number of caravels and privateers. 17 single caravels takes a bit to chew through but isn't actually all that dangerous to a serious renaissance era force. Russia's Diomede fleet would have crushed that even with equal frigate numbers: the turn before initial engagement I had the equivalent of 27 caravels and 10 ironclads, plus reinforcements.

Further, although a lot of those caravels had minimal impact on Diomede Phase I, in Phase II that mass of disposable ships was what made it possible to swarm and grind down Woden's far superior ironclads. I needed those ships: pretty much every caravel I had either took damage at some point in there, or was positioned such that it could easily have been targeted.

Obviously Work Ethic is a massive factor in making so many of those cities productive enough to be viable shipyards, but having so many queues to work with definitely made a major difference. I'm therefore very nervous about any plan that boils down to hoping we can build the same number of ships as the other guys but with less cities to do it.

[ljubljana]

hmmm yeah these are fair points for sure. it is just one team member who would be stopping expansion at 8 cities (10 with 2 hopeful CS captures), and if in doing so we can keep the amenities situation from spiraling out of control that will mitigate the hammer impact. but yeah, you are right and i should not turn down strong offshore plants (especially ones that come with luxes) if i can find them (although we SHOULD give such plants preferentially to Portugal if we can for amenities reasons). i am mostly thinking about stuff like Runic and Oracle Bones from the last game which were horribly weak and would never pay back their settler + amenities cost for Japan in this game.

re hammers though, if we survive to Feitoria our fleet will not be as undersized as it might seem. if the average Portuguese city has 2 TRs to a 7-Feitoria city they will get 7 * 1.5 * 2 = 21 free hammers/turn from them, which are work ethic numbers... which incidentally is the other reason i kinda fear delaying science Pingala for TAD even though the security situation is precarious and Naus absolutely loooove to begin life as Embolon galleys...