[PB73 SPOILERS] scooter's Oracle

[scooter]

Well Yuris, I read you loud and clear that peace = never. But you're too late. So if you still wanna duel, let's duel. I'm falling behind Oxy because I have to defend against Phracts and he doesn't, and it's going to get worse before it gets better because he just landed Kremlin, so let's conquer the continent and see where that leaves us.





So I've finally pushed into the Jungle. Yuris was kind enough to build me some roads. Also got Machinery in, so you know what that means.





Let's go Viking some fools.

[Zed-F]

Cool. 2 boat loads sounds like a good start. We might need CoL soonish if we are capturing and settling non-coastal cities. Of course we need iron first though.

Is our northern galley off exploring Oxy’s back yard, or coming home to pick up more units?

Observed that a fort on the plains SW of Connor might be useful for transit, if we have spare worker turns.

[Erasmas]

The only thing that surprises me is that it surprises you. You toke out two of his cities when you had the advantage from your free tech, basically crippling him. But then, when he gets the advantage from his tech, you expect him to sit back because of Oxy? That sounds a bit naive. It is why I advocated to go all-in earlier. Yes, the game is about Oxy, but that also means to minimize the amount of resources you need to take out your competitor on your island.

Hopefully your zerks can take him out quick enough to get back in the builder race.

[T-hawk]

Can we get a screenshot inside Logan? Curious to see what the big Bureaucracy capital looks like at this stage.

[scooter]

The only thing that surprises me is that it surprises you. You toke out two of his cities when you had the advantage from your free tech, basically crippling him. But then, when he gets the advantage from his tech, you expect him to sit back because of Oxy? That sounds a bit naive. It is why I advocated to go all-in earlier. Yes, the game is about Oxy, but that also means to minimize the amount of resources you need to take out your competitor on your island.

Hopefully your zerks can take him out quick enough to get back in the builder race.

I wouldn’t say it surprised me at all. I’ve said a bunch in here that I’m skeptical he would take peace, and I’ve just been offering periodically because there’s no downside. Invading him was impractical prior to Machinery though. I spent time trying to figure a way out, and there wasn’t really one. My best units were 1-movers traipsing through the jungle 1T at a time with minimal vision on the way to a capital that was 13ish turns away, all the while running the risk of Phracts simply running past me. Sure I could load up elephants on boats, but then I run the same risk of him just running through the jungle. Also, he could just build Galleys of his own and attack. While his odds would be below 50%, his would be empty, so he’d have better overall expected value. There was just no practical way to actually fight him, a lesson Yuris has learned himself as 83T in he’s failed to even threaten a single city of mine.


However, the arrival of Zerks and Triremes (which you’ll notice I’ve been building a lot lately) changes the math considerably. Zerks are much more powerful off boats than elephants, and if escorted by Triremes cannot be killed by Galleys, so it’s now feasible for me to advance by both land and sea.

[scooter]

Cool. 2 boat loads sounds like a good start. We might need CoL soonish if we are capturing and settling non-coastal cities. Of course we need iron first though.

Is our northern galley off exploring Oxy’s back yard, or coming home to pick up more units?

Observed that a fort on the plains SW of Connor might be useful for transit, if we have spare worker turns.

Northern Galley is headed home-ish. I have 2 Galleys in the south that could load up. I'm not totally sure the 3rd will come all the way home, but one thing it could def do is chain-transfer, so that may be an option for sure. Agreed on the fort, though most of my boats are around the south already, so I'm OK for now. I'm also a little light on worker labor after shipping some over to the island, but that will be top of the priority list upon their return.

[Erasmas]

The only thing that surprises me is that it surprises you. You toke out two of his cities when you had the advantage from your free tech, basically crippling him. But then, when he gets the advantage from his tech, you expect him to sit back because of Oxy? That sounds a bit naive. It is why I advocated to go all-in earlier. Yes, the game is about Oxy, but that also means to minimize the amount of resources you need to take out your competitor on your island.

Hopefully your zerks can take him out quick enough to get back in the builder race.

I wouldn’t say it surprised me at all. I’ve said a bunch in here that I’m skeptical he would take peace, and I’ve just been offering periodically because there’s no downside. Invading him was impractical prior to Machinery though. I spent time trying to figure a way out, and there wasn’t really one. My best units were 1-movers traipsing through the jungle 1T at a time with minimal vision on the way to a capital that was 13ish turns away, all the while running the risk of Phracts simply running past me. Sure I could load up elephants on boats, but then I run the same risk of him just running through the jungle. Also, he could just build Galleys of his own and attack. While his odds would be below 50%, his would be empty, so he’d have better overall expected value. There was just no practical way to actually fight him, a lesson Yuris has learned himself as 83T in he’s failed to even threaten a single city of mine.


However, the arrival of Zerks and Triremes (which you’ll notice I’ve been building a lot lately) changes the math considerably. Zerks are much more powerful off boats than elephants, and if escorted by Triremes cannot be killed by Galleys, so it’s now feasible for me to advance by both land and sea.

Good points. I must confess I am not that deep into the details as you are / were. I just thought that you were building a lot of shiny wonders while ignoring a neighbour that would become a nuisance once he had his UU on-line. But you have obviously given the tactical part of it much more thought than I did.

[scooter]

The only thing that surprises me is that it surprises you. You toke out two of his cities when you had the advantage from your free tech, basically crippling him. But then, when he gets the advantage from his tech, you expect him to sit back because of Oxy? That sounds a bit naive. It is why I advocated to go all-in earlier. Yes, the game is about Oxy, but that also means to minimize the amount of resources you need to take out your competitor on your island.

Hopefully your zerks can take him out quick enough to get back in the builder race.

I wouldn’t say it surprised me at all. I’ve said a bunch in here that I’m skeptical he would take peace, and I’ve just been offering periodically because there’s no downside. Invading him was impractical prior to Machinery though. I spent time trying to figure a way out, and there wasn’t really one. My best units were 1-movers traipsing through the jungle 1T at a time with minimal vision on the way to a capital that was 13ish turns away, all the while running the risk of Phracts simply running past me. Sure I could load up elephants on boats, but then I run the same risk of him just running through the jungle. Also, he could just build Galleys of his own and attack. While his odds would be below 50%, his would be empty, so he’d have better overall expected value. There was just no practical way to actually fight him, a lesson Yuris has learned himself as 83T in he’s failed to even threaten a single city of mine.


However, the arrival of Zerks and Triremes (which you’ll notice I’ve been building a lot lately) changes the math considerably. Zerks are much more powerful off boats than elephants, and if escorted by Triremes cannot be killed by Galleys, so it’s now feasible for me to advance by both land and sea.

Good points. I must confess I am not that deep into the details as you are / were. I just thought that you were building a lot of shiny wonders while ignoring a neighbour that would become a nuisance once he had his UU on-line. But you have obviously given the tactical part of it much more thought than I did.

I think I’ve talked about wonders in here more than I’ve actually built them, and maybe that’s affected your perception. I’ve actually built fewer than Oxy. In fact, the only wonders I’ve built since crippling Yuris was a 1T Henge build on the frontline that had tactical benefits and the (national wonder) Moai in capital which has quite fast payback. (And I did not actually put any hammers into Colossus at all.) Meanwhile I have the largest soldier count in the game by a fairly solid margin right now before building any Zerks.


I definitely have been a bit torn/split on how fast to push military. I’ve felt like I’m between a rock and a hard place a little bit where keeping up with Oxy and dealing with Yuris are a bit opposed but both necessary, but I’m pretty committed to this path and have been heading this way for a little bit now.

[scooter]

Can we get a screenshot inside Logan? Curious to see what the big Bureaucracy capital looks like at this stage.

The second Silk came in this turn which gave me happy cap wiggle room again. I squeaked out another 2T settler because it kept me under the cap a bit longer, and it ended right when Machinery came in which let me overflow into a 1T Zerk. More importantly, with this particular configuration, I produce 45h/turn (47h if I grow onto a coast) which is good for approximately 2 Zerks every 3 turns indefinitely. I wish I had found time to get the commerce multiplier buildings in here, but frankly beakers/gold is not the bottleneck at the moment. (This is also why I'm configured more for production here than Commerce.)

[Zed-F]

After a Zerk or a couple it seems possible the capital could switch back to Market (and maybe Temple? MoM?) when it needs more head space, and let the other cities pick up slack on reinforcements; we should have barracks in Gerri soon enough and most of our other non-island cities already have them. Then Tom and our islands can supply workers/settlers/boats once they finish their trading posts.