[SPOILER] PB37 Dark Savant tries not to be a blatant MP n00b

[Dark Savant]

Turn 18 (3280 BC)

I woke up very early this morning.  Might as well play my turn 

Our scout's path is blocked by a lion.  We find a couple new seafood resources:



There isn't a compelling reason to plant in purple oval any time soon -- I was hoping to see more seafood on the coast than that.  Orange dot now looks like the best site for city #3, and I'm figuring on blue dot for city #4 currently.

It looks like there might be a narrow land bridge to our southeast.  We'll find out if there is shortly.

We grew to size 2 and produced warrior #2, who heads off to the southwest.  Frodo finishes chopping into a worker, due on t21.

C&D: No new technologies showed up; no one else is due for a tech soon other than Ventessel.  The other three Expansive leaders (CML, Gavagai, JR4) all also hit 2 pop this turn, which accounts for all the 3000 new soldier points that showed up.  I'm not expecting our dominance in soldier count to last.    CML probably finished a work boat last turn and is now working both the clam and the cow.

Reverse C&D: I wonder if someone is going to suspect that there's copper under a forest, just from the fact that we're now producing 7hpt.

[ipecac]

Suggestion: copper on a forest means the first to BM when no one else beelines BM has a non-insignifiant chance of rushing a neighbour with axes. That is, assuming you're not too far apart.

Blood! Blood!!!

[Dark Savant]

Suggestion: copper on a forest means the first to BM when no one else beelines BM has a non-insignifiant chance of rushing a neighbour with axes. That is, assuming you're not too far apart.

Blood! Blood!!!

Well, I suppose that's one way to leverage Expansive/Aggressive, yes.

Let's try to plan this and see how well it pays off.

I do not actually have to decide this until t28; I think my moves will be the same until then playing either peacefully or aggressively, unless I send one of my warriors to camp his copper.  I should have a reasonable guess as to what technologies Coeurva is actually completing -- it will be dozens of turns before it becomes hard to read precise techs, I think.

I'd probably want to rush out of 2 cities -- attempting to plant city #3 and rush at the same time is probably too slow to be called a rush.

It depends on what my scout turns up, but Coeurva would probably be a far better target than anyone else even not considering that he's the only rival we've met, because he's likely adopting a particularly long-term builder strategy.

It might be as many as 15 turns to Cowboy Rhapsody from Castle Ironfist, though, and that's assuming there's nothing tricky about the terrain.  Having mirrored starts makes guessing where to go much easier, though.

I'm just going to call the cities "c1" and "c2" below.  Here's a plan I'm pulling off the top of my head without simming (I'm not 100% sure automatic production upgrades work like this -- I really should be sure of this for later in the game):

• t28 - c1 completes settler, starts barracks, 2f/11h extra.  Revolt to Slavery this turn.  Frodo, on the just-chopped hill tile at 5:00 from c1, moves 1 tile west.   (NB: in a peaceful scenario, I probably want to catch that much overflow in a settler.)  Sam follows the settler to red dot as in the peaceful plan.
  
• t29 - Anarchy ends.  Frodo starts to mine this tile.
  
• t30 - c1 8f/16h
  
• t31 - c1 14f/21h; c2 plants, starts warrior.  Frodo completes mine, Sam starts pig pasture.
  
• t32 - The Wheel comes in, start Agriculture.  c1 20f/26h; c2 3f/2h.  Frodo starts road on cow.
  
• t33 - c1 hits size 3 and completes barracks, starts warrior, citizens on clam/oasis/copper, 2f/1h extra; c2 6f/4h.  Frodo completes road.
  
• t34 - c1 8f/7h; c2 9f/6h.  Frodo starts road on copper, Sam completes pasture.
  
• t35 - c1 14f/13h, citizens on clam/cow/copper; c2 15f/8h.  Frodo completes road on copper, Sam moves to forest east of c2.
  
• t36 - c1 production upgraded to axe, 20f/22h; c2 21f/10h.  Frodo starts road on tile outside borders between cities, Sam starts road on forest.
  
• t37 - c1 hits size 4, 0f/31h (and is now working the grassland hill mine); c2 hits size 2, 5f/12h, work plains cow.  Frodo and Sam both complete roads, connecting c2 to copper.
  
• t38 - c1 completes axe , 5f/8h; c2 production upgraded to axe, 11f/15h, whipped .  Frodo and Sam both start to chop the forest outside of c2.
  
• t39 - c1 10f/20h, whipped ; c2 completes axe , 17f/12h.  Workers complete chop and start road on plains SE of c2.
  
• t40 - Agriculture comes in, start Pottery.  c1 completes axe , 16f/27h; c2 hits size 2, 1f/34h.  Workers complete road on plains SE of c2 and start another road in that direction.
  
• t41 - c1 completes axe , 22f/1h; c2 completes axe , 7f/2h.  Workers complete another road and retreat back to peaceful building.
  
• t42 - after growing c1 1 more turn it goes back to settlers (it can crank them out in 6t), and c2 can whip  another axe this turn and finish it on t43.
  

We should be able to hit Coeurva with 5-6 axes (3 of them will have 3XP) on about t55.  I'm unsure just how strong a force this is in MP (it'd certainly inflict a ton of damage in SP on any level below Deity); maybe we could compromise and slip in more infrastructure and attack with fewer axes.  He should see our power starting to spike hard at around t40, so he'll have ~15 turns to prepare defenses.

The main trouble is that this may actually get us cities slower, even if we pull it off.  We can plant orange dot on t42 and city #4 at around t50 playing peacefully, with additional workers and better infrastructure.  Attacking Coeurva might get us 2 cities and a lot of breathing room, and Castle Ironfist could still produce a settler and plant on orange dot on t50, but we'd be short on workers and infrastructure.  I'm concerned the real winners would be Coeurva's other neighbors, who will get extra expansion room for no cost.  We'd also be behind in the settling race in our natural sphere of influence.

How many axes do you think we need?  And all this is going to depend on which techs he gets; if his next tech is Bronze Working, he'll have the copper connected before we get there; we may need to send a warrior soon to choke his copper.

[ipecac]

We should be able to hit Coeurva with 5-6 axes (3 of them will have 3XP) on about t55....  He should see our power starting to spike hard at around t40, so he'll have ~15 turns to prepare defenses.

Unless he managed to get BW and whip a couple of axes in time, 5-6 axes would be murderous. However 15 turns' notice seems a bit long, and it's true that the payoff isn't that big especially since capitals aren't that productive in this game.

It might be worth swinging the warrior SW towards Coeurva's land to see if he's unexpectedly close, but it looks like it's probably not a good idea.

A different idea would be to see if it's possible to cripple him by slipping an Axe onto that forested copper tile before he can mine/chop it. But as you say, weakening him also helps his neighbours for free.

[Dark Savant]

We should be able to hit Coeurva with 5-6 axes (3 of them will have 3XP) on about t55....  He should see our power starting to spike hard at around t40, so he'll have ~15 turns to prepare defenses.

Unless he managed to get BW and whip a couple of axes in time, 5-6 axes would be murderous. However 15 turns' notice seems a bit long, and it's true that the payoff isn't that big especially since capitals aren't that productive in this game.

It might be worth swinging the warrior SW towards Coeurva's land to see if he's unexpectedly close, but it looks like it's probably not a good idea.

A different idea would be to see if it's possible to cripple him by slipping an Axe onto that forested copper tile before he can mine/chop it. But as you say, weakening him also helps his neighbours for free.

He's going to want to burn his forests to chop settlers, the Great Lighthouse, and the Colossus, so he'll very probably have Bronze Working by the time he realizes an attack is likely.

And if other players have dotmaps similar to ours, it's going to pay off more than usual to plant reaches.  I'm hesitant to send even a single warrior to scout that far away, because our planned dotmap is so stretched out we can't do farmer's gambit things like covering three cities with one warrior.  It's got to be at least two, probably three.

Warrior #1 is probing the coastline east of Castle Ironfist (I don't plan to have it look that far away), and warrior #2 is covering the eventual advance of the settler and a worker to red dot (it can unfog a little of the coast while it waits for the settler to emerge). 

Coeurva might not actually have Sailing, if he spent a lot of time researching one tech and then swapped off to another.  If he did that, it'd be Hunting.  If he actually does have Sailing ... his worker doesn't have anything to do other than mine a vanilla grassland hill, though that would speed his first settler from t30 to t28.  He wouldn't have a warrior to cover it, though, just his scout, which isn't the worst risk for your first settler.

[Dark Savant]

Also, it's very unlikely I can get there before t50, which is when borders expand to 40% cultural strength.  That plus the hill is roughly enough for a couple plain axes to hold off 5 axes, even with 5 combat I and 3 shock promotions.

This isn't going to be worth it unless Coeurva pursues some weird technologies.

[Dark Savant]

Turn 19 (3240 BC)

The lion attacked our scout and lost (our scout is at ~65% health now), but I can't promote my scout with 2XP?  Is this different in MP?  I'm going to move him and promote next turn (I hope).  He finds a new contact:



Hello Gavagai!  I move our 4 EP/turn over to him.  (Coeurva hasn't switched espionage off of us yet.)

Our scouts are currently sharing tiles.  He has yet to move this turn, so our scout is at slight risk of being eaten by a wolf or panther.

You can tell his southern terrain is similar to but not quite the same as our southern terrain.  I don't want to rest my scout next turn, either; I'd like to move in and get vision on his capital before his borders expand on t25.  I can do that in 2-3 turns.

Our warrior scouting the eastern coast finds this:



It's still unclear if that's actually an isthmus or a peninsula, but I don't think we want the warrior to stray far enough from our capital to check for sure -- only far enough to see what seafood resources are on the jungle-tastic southern coast, then return to the area around Castle Ironfist.

C&D: No new population; Ventessel and Krill got techs; 10,000 new soldier points.

Ventessel has been researching long enough that the most likely possibility is Bronze Working, which accounts for 8,000 soldier points.  Could he do that?  He spent 12 turns building a worker, which would go farm the rice and finish on t17, then almost certainly started a work boat.  He'd have worked the flood plain for 5 turns (11 flasks/turn) and then the oasis/clam thereafter (13 flasks/turn, he's Financial), so he finished Fishing with 4 overflow.  Researching a one-arrow tech would have produced 15 flasks/turn for at least the next 11 turns, so he'd have 169/192 when the rice farm completes, and then his minimum research rate is 12 flasks/turn, so he definitely has the juice to have finished Bronze Working (just barely).

Krill is interesting.  He just researched a new technology in 3 turns.  There is no way he actually researched a tech from scratch in 3 turns.  He must have switched up technology research partly to deter C&D, and instead of any one-arrow technologies must have two first-column technologies, at least one of which is worth 2000 soldier points.  (Or, just possibly, Masonry plus a 2000-soldier first-column tech.  Super unlikely though.)  And we know he has no water tiles in first ring, so it's very doubtful he researched Fishing.  And he can't have The Wheel since that's worth 4000 soldier points.  So he likely has the other two first-column techs, Hunting and Mining, and either way, that covers both the 2000 soldiers he got 3 turns ago and the 2000 unaccounted-for soldiers that just showed up.

We should watch out for Coeurva having finished Hunting instead of Sailing, since we now know that one other player definitely was screwing around to foul up C&D efforts.

Could anyone else have finished a warrior (2000 soldiers)?  I'm guessing that most other people are building (or have just built) work boats, except for Coeurva who built a work boat first and probably just finished a worker, and Krill who is probably working on a quechua but is very unlikely to have actually finished it.

I'm the only one being weird and chopping out a work boat, though the only way you could make that work out well is to be Expansive, start with Mining, and research Bronze Working out the gate.

[Dark Savant]

Actually, it's probably safe to have the warrior scout a little into that isthmus/peninsula -- we can produce warrior #3 without having to whip it before either Coeurva or Gavagai can reach us, and you have to be very unfortunate at Monarch/normal-speed/normal-barbarians to have a barbarian warrior menace your capital before t29.  Or, let's put it this way: we currently have twice as many warriors as all eight rivals combined.  (It may seem like we're producing a lot of warriors right now, and we are, but I'm planning to set new cities on barracks and not warriors like normal, so that isn't going to last.)

I think we do want to recall the warrior and not push on to find other players (presuming that's an isthmus), since city #4 is currently slated to go somewhere in the jungle and we want a warrior to prevent barb spawning, and cover a worker then a settler.  We could also have warrior #3 do that, though -- we don't need to decide for another couple turns at least.  The main trouble is that I have no idea what might emerge from our northwest.

And now I really don't want to make a serious attack on Coeurva, since we need to plant a city at orange dot soon enough for its culture to compete with Gavagai's Creative trait (if it plants on t42, it can reach 10 culture by about t60).  We'll get at most one city beyond that peacefully.  We can send a solitary early axe or two down to visit Coeurva maybe, enough to punish a farmer's gambit, but no more.  I think it's more likely we can and should leave each other alone for a while, though he might well be alarmed that our soldier score has spiked so much.  (It's not going to go up again until t29 at the earliest, even if we do an axe rush.)

[Dark Savant]

I hadn't thought about this before, but in another case of CivLogic, somehow we have 17,000 soldiers with a total empire population of 6,000.  

(Okay, that wouldn't be impossible with mercenaries and a small wealthy city-state like Venice could in principle pull that off, but not before the Bronze Age has really gotten going.)

[ipecac]

Turn 19 (3240 BC)

The lion attacked our scout and lost (our scout is at ~65% health now), but I can't promote my scout with 2XP?  Is this different in MP?  I'm going to move him and promote next turn (I hope). 

You can promote him next turn.

You can tell his southern terrain is similar to but not quite the same as our southern terrain.  I don't want to rest my scout next turn, either; I'd like to move in and get vision on his capital before his borders expand on t25.  I can do that in 2-3 turns.

Just watch out for his warriors. It's possible that he might try to kill the scout.