A Record of Joey's Journey to Immortality

[Boldly Going Nowhere]

Thanks for the excellent report. Much appreciated.

[GermanJoey]

T216.

Hmmm, after a 9 day hiatus, dtay has spent 22 minutes playing the last 3 turns. Total.  Before this, he was spending an hour+ per turn. 

So I think the end is nigh...

I'm just halfway through my GA, 2T from Communism. Dtay is 6T from Railroad, but at least 20T from Destroyers if he doesn't have a GA. I'm down about... 17k beakers total, but should be within 15T from Destroyers, I think.

[dtay]

I have skimmed the thread, but my big question is... how exactly did you get so much production?! lol

[GermanJoey]

I have skimmed the thread, but my big question is... how exactly did you get so much production?! lol

GG man!! I will read your thread tomorrow and comment then, but to answer this now real quick: I kinda hyperoptimized my empire for production. Felt like this game would have a lotta parallels with PB22 in terms of what an empire would need to succeed, so I applied some lessons I learned there here. The story goes like this:

1.) whipped tons of forges everywhere early. IIRC I had something like 34-35 forges.

2.) built lots of extra workers around when I invaded China, not only to get that land up to quality fast but also to micro-optimize some existing unused land. e.g. plant farms everywhere, convert them into watermills, and then convert those into workshops once a city neared its max-pop.

3.) got levees, ironworks, and factories up asap; saved hammers in the queue as soon as I could build them. i also bonsai-treed some cities like in PB29, e.g. letting cities with levee-access swallow up tiles that more-developed cities were using, etc.

4.) some of that production wasn't real - I had any city making less than 20hpt (other than a few special cases) set to Wealth, and then let higher-hpt cities make my actual units. that's sorta why I never had many cannons or cavalry compared to what you might expect - most of these cities were producing scrambling to produce boats, and often switched to wealth to get key techs done early. an exception is Anchorage, which was making like 280hpt at the end there, which was also set to semi-perma-wealth. (because it actually produced too many hpt and woulda wasted most of it if it actually tried to build anything).

4a.) also, in a few places (maybe 5-6 tiles total), i let cities work plains workshops instead of rep/caste merchants, even though the rep/caste merchant was worth very slightly more bpt, because i knew it would make my demos look scarier.  

5.) i made up for my fake production with a.) Heavenly Star, my very early Moai + HE combo that put out around 85-90 units by itself in the last 100 turns of the game, and b.) heavy drafting, including out of my Globe Theatre city. so i always had plenty of units, so you probably didn't realize i was running wealth so heavily. (except near the end, where I wasn't running much at all - busy getting up factories/cps/jails/IAs/grocers/harbors/etc)

[dtay]

1.) whipped tons of forges everywhere early. IIRC I had something like 34-35 forges.
...
4.) some of that production wasn't real - I had any city making less than 20hpt (other than a few special cases) set to Wealth, and then let higher-hpt cities make my actual units. that's sorta why I never had many cannons or cavalry compared to what you might expect - most of these cities were producing scrambling to produce boats, and often switched to wealth to get key techs done early. an exception is Anchorage, which was making like 280hpt at the end there, which was also set to semi-perma-wealth. (because it actually produced too many hpt and woulda wasted most of it if it actually tried to build anything).

Yeah i think I approached these two reasonably differently (especially 4). I think we amusingly made oppositely-wrong assumptions about each other, a lot of the places where it looks like you assumed i was running wealth to get that GNP (e.g. run up to knights) I actually had managed to get that GNP naturally (don't think I turned on wealth at all until I was optimizing getting chemistry -> lib -> steel). But never remotely had the production capacity you had, and i think it showed towards the end when I had to forgo infrastructure just to keep pace on having enough troops to hold you off, conquer C, have a navy, etc.

I suspect this is a suboptimality in my play overall, not quite enough usage of tactical wealth pushes.

[GermanJoey]

also: made up for hammer economy's weak tech rate by heavy GP usage. 4 GAs, plus IIRC at least 5 great merchants trade missions (and had another GM about to pop from my NE in 1 turn, IIRC, and another in like 15 turns) and a couple of great-scientist bulbs. I think I rushed something with a GE too, can't remember what right now though. Great People were something I thought I did pretty well this game, IMHO. i remember i was kinda ho-hum when I landed the Parthenon (as I had been slow-building it for fail-gold) but that wonder ended up being pretty swell for me.

[GermanJoey]

1.) whipped tons of forges everywhere early. IIRC I had something like 34-35 forges.
...
4.) some of that production wasn't real - I had any city making less than 20hpt (other than a few special cases) set to Wealth, and then let higher-hpt cities make my actual units. that's sorta why I never had many cannons or cavalry compared to what you might expect - most of these cities were producing scrambling to produce boats, and often switched to wealth to get key techs done early. an exception is Anchorage, which was making like 280hpt at the end there, which was also set to semi-perma-wealth. (because it actually produced too many hpt and woulda wasted most of it if it actually tried to build anything).

Yeah i think I approached these two reasonably differently (especially 4). I think we amusingly made oppositely-wrong assumptions about each other, a lot of the places where it looks like you assumed i was running wealth to get that GNP (e.g. run up to knights) I actually had managed to get that GNP naturally (don't think I turned on wealth at all until I was optimizing getting chemistry -> lib -> steel). But never remotely had the production capacity you had, and i think it showed towards the end when I had to forgo infrastructure just to keep pace on having enough troops to hold you off, conquer C, have a navy, etc.

I suspect this is a suboptimality in my play overall, not quite enough usage of tactical wealth pushes.

I'm actually glad to hear that happened to you at the end, as it was the crux of my entire strategy, what with sending galleons loaded with drafted crap at every odd angle of you empire. Stress you out so you gotta keep pumping units and can't free develop. I figured that if I let you make use of all your new land and catch up in infra, even just to the point that our empires were about equal here, then I was actually dead meat simply due to stuff that I didn't have like the Agg maintenance discount and the Ikhanda, even if I took more land from somewhere. 

I don't think not-running wealth was bad for you, (I didn't run very much until Chemistry either) but IMHO you might have rode that Colossus coast a bit too much. (FWIW, i was so salty about losing that wonder to you, as i was SO SURE that nobody else but me had MC and thus didn't really optimize my completion date of it, like, at all. )

[dtay]

Yeah I think the parthenon is underrated in the current RB meta given how late and casually people will let you land it here.

[GermanJoey]

be back in a few hours, but if you wanna login and take a look at my cities production or whatever, my password is "agua"

[Dark Savant]

One bit of drama you may not have realized existed: you only beat me to the Great Lighthouse by one turn.

I chose to build it in a rather suboptimal location -- third city of Castleview, right on the tense border with Gavagai; I didn't have a better location, but I had enough scouting to know that most players couldn't be competitive.  I thought you and JR4 were the only players who could be seriously trying when I started, and while I had the project underway, my scouts soon watched JR4 focusing on getting out a quick first island city out of his most likely city.  That left you.

I had scouts poking around Seven Mysteries (you probably noticed them), and figured I had you beat by one turn if you didn't have great tiles I couldn't see.  Whoops, you did!  If Gavagai was watching me, he would have seen me enthusiastically getting workers chopping, then suddenly give up just before you built the Great Lighthouse.