[PB73 SPOILERS] scooter's Oracle

[scooter]

Kendall growing to 6 in a couple turns -- are we planning to triple whip a settler? Seems reasonable.

It does look like we are proposing to take an axe on a boat ride after all. I do like the idea of trying to surprise / fork Yuris's east coast; even if we just delay/forestall an axe invasion by threatening to do real damage it's still a worthwhile result, and if he is planning an all-in axe attack, I think we can probably hold off a base trade and still cause havoc in his back lines.

Yes, planning to do exactly this. I think this settler will also go for the eastern island(s) around Greg. Though I’m starting to consider getting IW and pushing into the Jungle now that Yuris is looking less threatening. Will think about it. But I also really would like to get a full set of 4 islands for the trade routes, plus I want to get those cities growing so they can get up to speed so I can really control the waters.

I couldn't resist global lurking with everything - sorry!

No worries, have fun!

I'm curious about what we can learn from Oxy's recent score increases. I'm guessing it's got some culture inflation due to Terrace, but what else might be driving it? He hasn't been researching or building wonders faster than us, he hasn't settled more cities than us (yet)... but his cities are bigger on average. Does pop growth in larger cities give a bigger score increase than pop growth in smaller cities?

I think it’s just land and population, though you did prompt me to login and check if he built a wonder . Actually, looking at my notes, Oxy settled a city 20 turns ago. So there’s some land points, and he did whip some recently, so you’d expect some regrowth. (Plus his super-capital is now up to size 10.)

[Cyneheard]

Mobility kills. And it looks like we had a ~50% chance of also picking off the chariot and THREE workers (that was a massive risk Yuris took there as well - because while "boat hits Adrianopole from the fog" might've been something he overlooked, "galley with one unit nets 200h" was a risk he very much should have considered).

[Zed-F]

That's just the way to pin Yuris's ears back we were hoping for! Awesome. Now we just need to take care of any crack-back. Since we just lost a couple military units, we probably look a little weak on soldiers right now... we're back to the 'is Yuris just going to rush us with whatever he has now that he's lost a city?' question. I'm tending to think getting a barracks in the capital would be prudent; none of our other cities are on military (not counting galleys) and we'd rather be whipping settlers out of Kendall and Shiv than military units right now. I'd be more sanguine about building Moai if I were more certain our other cities were in position to take up any slack on military units.

Looking further ahead, getting another island city or two in the east seems like a good plan. I see we're building a couple more galleys, which seems timely; we'll need one to explore west and having two in our east seems good, especially if one of them wants to take a peek at Oxy or we want to stretch out to the bigger island.

You know how we were talking about what's next after Currency before? Here's another argument for MC (e.g. potentially after Iron + Calendar) -- triremes. The next phase of the game is going to be (a) containing Yuris on land, and (b) containing Oxy on the seas. Not only do triremes help us harass Oxy, now that we know we can get to his westernmost cities with faster ships than him, they also force Oxy toward the bottom of the tree and away from the economic techs that might help him keep up with our tech rate. It also would force him to militarize and stop focusing exclusively on expansion. If we can get a good exchange rate for a modest investment due to being able to outmaneuver him on the sea, that's a good deal for us.

[scooter]

Mobility kills.

Yep. I’ve had a lower power than Yuris for basically the entire game, but I had chariots and super-Galleys, and he had axes. That’s basically it. Mobility is everything in MP.

And it looks like we had a ~50% chance of also picking off the chariot and THREE workers (that was a massive risk Yuris took there as well - because while "boat hits Adrianopole from the fog" might've been something he overlooked, "galley with one unit nets 200h" was a risk he very much should have considered).

Not going to lie, I very briefly wondered whether capturing 3 workers was worth more if I could get them out. I dismissed it quickly, but 3 workers sure would have been nice.

That's just the way to pin Yuris's ears back we were hoping for! Awesome. Now we just need to take care of any crack-back. Since we just lost a couple military units, we probably look a little weak on soldiers right now... we're back to the 'is Yuris just going to rush us with whatever he has now that he's lost a city?' question. I'm tending to think getting a barracks in the capital would be prudent; none of our other cities are on military (not counting galleys) and we'd rather be whipping settlers out of Kendall and Shiv than military units right now. I'd be more sanguine about building Moai if I were more certain our other cities were in position to take up any slack on military units.

Looking further ahead, getting another island city or two in the east seems like a good plan. I see we're building a couple more galleys, which seems timely; we'll need one to explore west and having two in our east seems good, especially if one of them wants to take a peek at Oxy or we want to stretch out to the bigger island.

You know how we were talking about what's next after Currency before? Here's another argument for MC (e.g. potentially after Iron + Calendar) -- triremes. The next phase of the game is going to be (a) containing Yuris on land, and (b) containing Oxy on the seas. Not only do triremes help us harass Oxy, now that we know we can get to his westernmost cities with faster ships than him, they also force Oxy toward the bottom of the tree and away from the economic techs that might help him keep up with our tech rate. It also would force him to militarize and stop focusing exclusively on expansion. If we can get a good exchange rate for a modest investment due to being able to outmaneuver him on the sea, that's a good deal for us.

Yeah, I’m already starting to think about Oxy, and getting a few Triremes out is another notch in favor of Metal Casting, not to mention denying him Colossus would be nice. One thing that’s occurred to me is that Oxy is surely targeting Hanging Gardens. He gets the Aqueduct cheap and has Stone, so it’s a rare wonder he can build cheaper than us. Actually… Vanilla Expansive does not get cheap Aqueducts apparently? Am I hallucinating that this was a thing at one point? So maybe forget all this.


Overall I’m not that worried about army count right now, though I’m definitely going to slip in some units now after losing both the Chariot and Axe for this expedition. The holy city culture just gives me so much warning. The problem for Yuris now is how does he build Cataphracts? They still cost 90h. In order to double whip them, you have to invest 30h first, and then you have to have the population to whip. Or you could triple whip them, but:





Constantinople is at Size 4 right now. I do see his Worker chopping, so maybe he’s about to settle the horses, finish HBR, and then chop + double whip the capital to product a Phract. Ok. But then he still has to regrow 2 pop and find 30 more hammers OR grow 4 pop to triple whip. He only has one other city, and he just double whipped that one this past turn. So I think he has like, what, 6-7 pop in his entire empire? Logan alone I think is outproducing his whole empire. Let’s say next turn he finishes HBR and resettles horse, which I think would be a bit faster than I’d expect. How long would it take his empire to produce 6 Phracts? It might seriously be 15-20 turns..? Plus where does he get the happy to support so much whipping? It’s a really tough spot for him.


The one consideration would be whether it’s time to shift gears and go all-in on military and try to finish him off sooner than later. That would look like finishing HBR and building/whipping/chopping Barracks/Elephants out of every city. Do an attack that is blended both by land and sea and try to get a KO and then settler-spam this continent. I think it’s worth considering. The only reason I hesitate is I sort of want to hoover up the islands now because they’re just so inexpensive to settle, and then come back for Yuris later when I can just roll over him with Zerks off boats. That’s pretty much the fork in the road right now.

[Zed-F]

Right, we know he has ~3 axes, a chariot, and probably a spear in addition to the prospective Cataphract. Right now I think we have 1 chariot for land units. We have a lot of warning, but we're also pretty far behind on land units. If we're confident that even if he sends his infantry now and plays catch-up with his mobile units, potentially including a prospective Cataphract, we can still build enough units in time to stop him, cool. We'd have to give up something, though. Maybe we'd rather give up settler whips in Kendall and delay that settler (and probably the galley in Roman), in lieu of further delaying Moai or whatever Logan would build in lieu of the barracks.

I don't think we really need to go all-in on Yuris, so much as we need to make sure we have our ports covered. Yuris is on 2 cities (maybe 3 soon) so I don't think we need to bend over backward to finish him ASAP. Definitely we should have at least 4-5 island cities in case we can't get a trade deal with Luddite going again. Our inland cities will be a lot more expensive (no Great Lighthouse bonus and we don't have courthouses yet) so we really should be making sure almost everything we found is coastal. We can maybe work our way up the east coast, settling, and maybe settle corn+seafood on the west side if we have iron and think Yuris can't stretch that far. But I think we wait to settle the interior of the continent until we can cut our expenses, maybe except for a city to get sugar. What's Yuris going to do if we just keep nibbling at his edges with moderate forces on our part, that require serious commitments from him to respond to?

[scooter]

Right, we know he has ~3 axes, a chariot, and probably a spear in addition to the prospective Cataphract. Right now I think we have 1 chariot for land units. We have a lot of warning, but we're also pretty far behind on land units. If we're confident that even if he sends his infantry now and plays catch-up with his mobile units, potentially including a prospective Cataphract, we can still build enough units in time to stop him, cool. We'd have to give up something, though. Maybe we'd rather give up settler whips in Kendall and delay that settler (and probably the galley in Roman), in lieu of further delaying Moai or whatever Logan would build in lieu of the barracks.

FWIW the Galley in Roman is more or less a placeholder of sorts. I'm just slowly building it while whip anger wears off. At the time I wanted something I could slowly put hammers into while staying in double whip range. Can quite easily pause it and put a couple hammers into an axe/spear, double whip, overflow into a second one, and get all that done in time to come back to the Galley before it begins decaying. Connor I'm prechopping two forests right now. I was considering finishing them into a 1T Stonehenge on T70 since it's lingering way too late, but also yes, that can easily be 60h straight into Barracks/units. Logan can obviously build stuff quite fast, and Kendall's overflow (if I stick with the settler plan) can be units as well. Even the Shiv Galley can be delayed since the invading Galley can come home now.

I've been holding off on pulling the trigger on any of this until I saw what happened with my expedition, but I could flip the switch pretty quickly thanks to my population. Tomorrow I'll probably spend a little bit of time considering the Total War route and see whether it's viable or not. I'm a little skeptical as it seems unnecessarily high variance given my position, but it's not crazy.

[Zed-F]

Yeah we will have to see how Yuris reacts. If he panics about home defenses in the face of 4-move galleys, or delays further to try to build Cataphracts, that's ideal for us, and we can grab Stonehenge, which will speed up a GPriest and eventually help us settle the continent's interior without needing to be quite so urgent with the missionaries.

I agree that total war doesn't seem to be the right call at the moment, but a little analysis to back up instincts is probably worthy of due diligence.

[Zed-F]

Now that we have met Oxy, do we have any idea from the tech screen if he has any techs we don’t, or roughly where he is / what he’s working toward tech-wise, or is Currency still our best guess?

[Krill]

Someone put the not safe for work tag on this thread please. This is disgusting.

[scooter]

Someone put the not safe for work tag on this thread please. This is disgusting.

Yeahhhhh... There's a reason the Civil Service Slingshot was about the biggest Civ4 controversy around pre-BtS, and moving it up to T0 really breaks things. Keeping pace with Joao of Inca with Mansa with a worse capital while also building enough units to raze two cities... It's sort of funny looking back that I called CS a "sleeper pick" in my first post. It just took me one test-run with it to rocket it to the top of my list. I really wonder if anyone else tried it. I literally just rolled a random start and played 40-50T super casually 3 times - once with CS, once with Steam Power, and once with nothing. It took me like an hour. The gap was enormous.

Now that we have met Oxy, do we have any idea from the tech screen if he has any techs we don’t, or roughly where he is / what he’s working toward tech-wise, or is Currency still our best guess?

Funny you should ask... Well, first off, Yuris completed HBR this turn. I'm 1T away from Currency, so I went ahead and finished it, and then I'll finish HBR next turn.


No turn yesterday in what's become a weekend tradition, so I didn't touch the game, but I spent a fair bit of time thinking about the gamestate. I more or less concluded I need to filter my strategic decisions almost exclusively through the "me vs Oxy" lens because that's what this game is building towards. So if I were Oxy, I think I would bet that I could keep pace or even beat me on expansion for obvious reasons. So he wouldn't be concerned about growth. He'd be concerned about keeping up in tech. Therefore of all the classical wonders, Colossus is the one to target for him. Colossus + Pyramids on this map I think would be enough to tech quite well. I don't think it would quite match FIN + GLH, but it might do enough. So that along with some of Zed-F's comments kinda sold me on Metal Casting. Getting Triremes, Colossus, and putting me next to Zerkers sounds really ideal. Then I login today and...







Well, I certainly predicted correctly which route he'd take. The problem is I now don't think I can beat him to Colossus. (Also note he is surely rushing a Forge and running an Engineer in Pyramids city to then GE-rush Kremlin.) This makes me wonder about a brief detour to instead claim MoM and/or Great Library. That said, even without Colossus, getting a couple Triremes and getting one tech away from Zerks also sounds really important, so I may still proceed. But I'm hesitant to draft behind him and watch him cleanup the classical wonders. I also should probably take a look at Hanging Gardens, to be honest. It's profitable now, and it would get my islands online faster. Basically I think if he's going to claim Pyramids-Colossus-Kremlin, I cannot allow him to also claim 2 of the MoM/HG/GL trio. Hmmm. I still really want Zerks though, as I could feasibly harass him with Zerks + Galleys and do some serious damage long before Astronomy.





Currency in. It increased my 0% savings and 100% tech rate by 17 gpt/bpt. I shifted some builds around. Logan I think is going to 1T the Barracks, though that has 0 hammers invested so I have a day to think about it. HBR would be in next turn, so I could go straight into an elephant after if needed. Shiv I put on a Catapult which may seem weird, but that puts it near the double whip threshold to overflow into a Galley, and I'm going to want them eventually, so why not. I'm considering linking up my Galleys and sending them at Yuris empty in order to force his units to stay home. He would see 2 Galleys coming rapidly and be forced to prepare for 4 attackers. At least in theory. I'm hoping I can get away with the Kendall settler triple whip, but if I have to shelve it for a few turns I'll live. Roman will double whip a Spear and max overflow into ... I think an axe. TBD. I figure if I can get out this round of units (cat, elephant, axe, spear) that'll buy me another 10T or so. I also may slip in Archery at some point, largely to get myself cheap island defenders.

Connor I'm still leaning towards chopping out Stonehenge. Those forests are now 1/3 chopped, so if it's still there on T70, I can 1T it. If it falls before then, I dunno, may just road the forests and save them for MoM or something?





Currency + GLH Good.