[PB73 SPOILERS] scooter's Oracle

[luddite]

Tech screen? I'm curious how long it would have taken you to get to the next generation of military tech. In my testing, CS was amazing for the first part of the game but it does peter out later as the techs get more expensive and it's still just one capital. But admittedly you've still got those cottages and GLH.

I was hoping to catch up faster with cottage spam but that was just too slow to pay off.

[luddite]

Ah, I didn't realize you had Military Science! That is a big deal. Funnily enough, I did a thread once at civ fanatics (my account name there is pi-r8: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/a...sh.506511/) where I showed a military science rush vs the AI. But that didn't occur to me you were that far ahead in tech.

Out of curiousity, how long would it have taken you to get ironclads from here? The numbers in this game really throw off my game sense. Friggin 100 AD chemistry...

Oh yeah, surviving long enough to complete MilSci was my goal - I felt if I could hold off that long, I would start to turn the tides. Oxy was basically tech-off, and while my economy was massively damaged, it was still moving with FIN/GLH and a whole continent to myself + islands. Basically I was upgrading Zerks -> Grenadiers and my first Ship of the Lines were getting whipped right now, which was my plan to start whittling down his Frigates. If you read back a page or two you’ll see my gold for GPT offer was used to upgrade to two Grenadiers.


I’m not sure about Ironclads, but that wasn’t really something I was super worried about overall. My issue was Oxy just spammed so many Frigates that I could never build enough to fight Frigates-on-Frigates, but if I could get SOTL out, I could start taking fights. In general my tech rate was gonna depend heavily on how long the Oxy war took.

I see. In that case, I have to say I would have liked to see your war with Oxy go on a bit longer. I still think you would have *probably* won, but in my experience frigates vs SOTL is surprisingly closer than you'd expect. Especially when he still had a production advantage. But of course that depends on him being able to actually afford his units and not go on strike.

Did you have any plans to sneak attack me, or were you just fully focused on Oxy?

It definitely could have gone on longer, but keep in mind I didn't have to conquer Oxy. My advantages over him were more permanent. FIN/SPI are late-game traits, while Exp/Imp were mostly not useful anymore. GLH was still alive, while Colossus was obsolete. The only "permanent" edges he had (Pyramids/Kremlin) were deleted. And now I had better tech on both land and sea, and he was losing enormous amounts of gold at 0% science, while I was still comfortably in the green. In addition, this is Vanilla Civ4 war weariness, and Oxy had captured 3 cities and burned like 3 more and done enormous fighting in my borders, so he was likely crippled by WW. Also I had a core of green cottage spam FIN cities while his cities that I could see mostly went Workshops. He went all-in on defeating me and just didn't quite get over the hump. It was close though - I think it was a good bet from him.


So, it would have been totally valid for me to expel his army and settle the rest of my continent, get Steel, and then dare him to try to rebuild and come at me again, except next time without Kremlin + Police State to out-produce me. If you noticed, he had more or less stopped whipping, and I'm guessing that's because he could no longer afford to do so between WW and being on the brink of strike.


Finally, nah, I saw no need to ever attack you. In my mind, you would have to attack me, but you were very unlikely to ever get the tech to do so.

OK, I'm starting to get a better sense of the game now. It might have been funny for me to see the game go on long enough for him to go on strike, but I guess at that point you would have been well in the clear. Only thing that *might* change things is, at some point I would notice Oxy losing and then I might have gone after you with my hail-mary military strike that I was aiming at Oxy. Not sure that would have actually changed anything though. 6 galleys worth of arty and AT? Assuming they even made it through undetected.

We're getting close. I offered Luddite OB this turn. I think he'll reject because he won't benefit from them. If so, next turn I'll offer it with Copper attached and see if that persuades him. We've been very fortunate where I've thought I was at a dead end 3 times, and then careful fog-gazing has always made it clear that there's a bit more to follow. There's a million islands here which is phenomenal news for us long-term.

Man, you really did a good job with early scouting and demos! That's amazing. I think you knew my land and situation better than I did. And it's funny that this OB deal ended up such a big deal, giving you the circumnav bonus that lead to a critical tactical advantage for you. IIRC, I barely thought about this at all, I just clicked yes by reflex and then thought briefly "Oh yeah, this might be a bad deal to give OB for nothing" but I was too preoccupied with my war situation with Mr Cairo to really think about it much.

Also, you're copper gift absolutely saved my ass in this game. Plus the luxury deals (Oxy helped me there too).

I wondered about the Copper! I definitely tried to help you initially to keep Cairo from running away, and then later because I wanted your trade routes, so I basically tried to always give you what you wanted unless it was just not doable. Also the OB was valuable because I ran two Great Merchant missions to your cities - not sure if you noticed or not!

Yeah the copper game at the perfect time for me. I didn't have enough hammers to actually finish any arty early on, and mI also upgraded a few warriors. y copper was in an awkward location, but the gifted copper gave me axes that were just strong enough to hold off musketeers long enough to build AT. Your luxury deals also kept my cities going at a time when I had *no* happiness and a lot of whip anger.  It seems like we really had a mutually beneficial relationship in this game, pretty good for a no-diplo game. I noticed the Great Merchants but there just didn't seem to be anything I could do about it. I wish I could have made my own, but I just never got a chance to make GPP this game.

I'm still curious about the state of the war with you. Do you think you had enough ground units to hold Shiv? And was that your only source of copper if you did lose it?

If Oxy didn't have another wave on his boats, then yes I was going to hold. If he had a bunch more, maybe it would have been close? But I'm guessing he did not because 1) I just didn't think his soldier count was high enough for that, and 2) well he conceded so I figure that's my answer.

Technically was my only source, at least until re-settling Yuris' Copper, but also didn't really have a use for Copper at that stage of the game. I'm building Knights/Grens/Frigs/SOTL. That said, Shiv was my Heroic Epic city and a canal into my core underbelly, so yeah it was my second most important city. Losing it was probably GG. My Galleon mobility + fort spam saved it.

Yeah, tough to take that city. Well defended. I was wondering if you might lose from losing copper and iron, but I guess you had two iron sources. and plenty of luxuries. that is some crazy fort/lake spam though, I've never seen that before! It's cool the map gave you enough hidden lakes to protect.

[scooter]

Tech screen? I'm curious how long it would have taken you to get to the next generation of military tech. In my testing, CS was amazing for the first part of the game but it does peter out later as the techs get more expensive and it's still just one capital. But admittedly you've still got those cottages and GLH.

I was hoping to catch up faster with cottage spam but that was just too slow to pay off.

I set my tech to roughly break-even. It's painfully slow at this stage, though keep in mind that is with me down quite a few cities due to the war, not to mention having whipped off a ton of mature Hamlets/Villages/Towns. In a hypothetical world where we went Always Peace starting this very turn, I could probably triple that tech rate in under 20 turns. I'm just generally missing a lot of infrastructure due to the lack of time I've had to build in this game. For example, I have one market in my entire empire.

[scooter]

Tech screen? I'm curious how long it would have taken you to get to the next generation of military tech. In my testing, CS was amazing for the first part of the game but it does peter out later as the techs get more expensive and it's still just one capital. But admittedly you've still got those cottages and GLH.

I was hoping to catch up faster with cottage spam but that was just too slow to pay off.

Oh also, feel free to login to my civ to look around if you want. Password is "NEBU"

[Zed-F]

Looking back on how religion spread and how many buildings were built with organized religion, and the relative importance of faster tech vs faster civic swaps, was it correct to choose FIN/SPI over FIN/ORG?

[Mjmd]

IF you or someone else starts another one of these, would you ban bureaucracy?

[scooter]

IF you or someone else starts another one of these, would you ban bureaucracy?

No, because I think I would have lost next to Cairo. I think I had the generally best and most flexible pick, but I was next to a much slower starting version of the military rush, and I think I lose this game without those two early razes. I think the neighbor luck was really swingy this game. I do think CS is the clear best economic tech as the 50% hammer bonus gives you a production edge early to handle the incoming rush, but I think I had a ton go right for me in the Byzantine war too.

[scooter]

Basically, there's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma when it comes to the tech selection that's very interesting overall. That said, in a rerun of this game I would definitely tweak it. For one, I think stick it on a Pangaea or similar. Beyond that, I think you'd want to reset the tech choice meta in some way. I would just blanket ban all of the techs chosen in this game, for one. I think there's too many other cool choices that just can't hang with Gunpowder/CS/Artillery.


The other alternatives to banning these 5 techs specifically would be some sort of tech ban phase, or allowing a second tech choice rather than a capital starting location. Or perhaps allow folks to choose one military and one economic tech? I dunno, there's room to tweak this one for sure to avoid a straight rerun. I think we did a decent job of picking out the best techs, and a future game on the same settings would just come down to neighbor dice rolls.

[Commodore]

Now 2-tech combos would open up a crazy amount of cheese, sounds pretty good.

[scooter]

Now 2-tech combos would open up a crazy amount of cheese, sounds pretty good.

Satellites + Civil Service + Holkans let's go.