Speaker's super top secret thread for the purposes of world domination; Neener Neener

[Speaker]

Given this, why aren't you working specialists instead of the bare plains tiles?

Rather not starve right now. The extra beakers won't make much of a difference, but I do have some unhealthiness coming down the pike, in the form of 1-turn Factory and 1-turn Coal Plant.

I really do wish I could be in Universal Suffrage, but there was no realistic way to get it. Researching Democracy would only slow down the more important techs. Maybe with my next Golden Age.

[Sullla]

This was a pretty uneventful turn. In the west, Dave still hasn't moved past the desert hill tile with his big stack of drafted muskets. I'm not moving my units forward unless I can hit his units on flat ground, so no deal. We're each sitting four tiles apart from one another and waiting for the other side to make the next move. Still expecting Dave to put down a city over there, probably on this upcoming turn. Not sure exactly what tile he'll go for. I will land my own settler at the wines next turn and found the turn after that.



Speaker cleared out some Thoth units on the pigs tile this turn. We lost one cavalry unit at 70% odds, then the rest were all 95% after that. I believe the total trade was 1 cav + 1 catapult for 3 muskets. Not great, not terrible. Why the pigs tile? We didn't want Thoth doing any more pillaging operations. Taking over this tile cuts off his forward group (a couple of muskets, including a Woodsman II musket) from the rest of his units. Thoth will probably just retreat his units back towards his city. We don't really want to pick a fight with Thoth, just keep him from pillaging tiles. Speaker re-connected his gems at Lanewick, which helped quite a bit with happiness.

I have the Lewwyn garrison highlighted, and the Thoth garrison penciled in. There's a Woodsman II musket of ours moving on the two white tiles, watching both cities. It's all a bunch of medieval stuff: muskets, maces, and knights. Speaker plans to go in after Lewwyn as soon as he gets a stack of 8-10 cannons assembled, and that's not going to take very long with his amazing production cities. City Raider II cannons should win their battles (not even needing to be sacrificial) and then everything else will mop up from there. We've got a lot of very highly promoted cavs who will chomp on that stuff for breakfast. Our team wants very badly to annex Lewwyn's lands and transfer all those cities over to Speaker. Lewwyn is weak, has a bunch of excellent wonders, and has very little military tech. Doesn't seem like it should be that hard, unless there's a lot of units hiding in the fog. Perhaps?

Assembly Line in 2t. We can almost get it next turn, but come up about 500 beakers short. Lots of overflow into Railroads then.

A few thoughts on the individual teams here on this slow turn:

Team 3: Obviously our main rival, and the only competitive team. They are probably teching Steam Power right now, that or possibly Scientific Method. We are just defending against them for now, mostly buying time while waiting on factory production. I don't think we can break through their extremely heavy defenses without having Flight or Combustion techs. Not much going on with them right now, despite our rivalry. Neither team can effectively attack the other.

Team 4: This is the turtling team. Straight beeline to Rifling, then turtle up and draft rifles. Look like they are trying to survive as long as possible. Zero chance to win, but I don't think they'll be eliminated any time soon either. They have just enough units to serve as a military deterrant, and encourage us to hit softer targets.

Team 2: This team has baffled me from the very start of the game. Their tech choices have never made any sense. They built all these wonders to very little purpose. What in the world are they doing?! The only thing I can imagine is that they're going for Culture, which is so ridiculous that I've dismissed it out of hand for most of the game. Nevertheless, they did prioritize Liberalism, and several of them are in Free Speech civic, so who knows. They researched one tech in the last 20 turns (Feudalism). Are they really running the culture slider? That feels totally suicidal to me - I see no possible way to reach a victory before someone comes and kills them.

I guess I'll keep an eye on the Victory screen and see what's going on with their culture, but I really don't think it's a possibility. Last I checked, their #2 and #3 cities were at like 1000 culture. Unless there's 25 Great Artists hiding out there - which we haven't seen in the Event logger - this is the longest of long shots.

We will probably be killing Lewwyn's core cities in the next 10 turns. Calm before the storm right now.

[ssmagus]

Removed via Lurker discussion.

[Profane]

I assume there're no excess workers available at the moment to cottage those plains to grab a few extra beakers?
Also will the attack on Lewwyn be using freshly-built Infantry (will they be in time?) or mass-upgraded Rifles? Or just plain Rifles? Will mounted units play a significant role here if Infantry is used, and considering that Cannons can't keep up with them and the heavily jungled/hilled terrain on the approach?

[Speaker]

Removed via Lurker discussion.

How provocative.

I assume there're no excess workers available at the moment to cottage those plains to grab a few extra beakers?
Also will the attack on Lewwyn be using freshly-built Infantry (will they be in time?) or mass-upgraded Rifles? Or just plain Rifles? Will mounted units play a significant role here if Infantry is used, and considering that Cannons can't keep up with them and the heavily jungled/hilled terrain on the approach?

I won't cottage them. I will farm two and workshop one. The attack will combine my current Cavalry, Rifles, Cuirassier, and Catapults, with freshly-built Infantry and Cannons. I should have about 15 Cavalry for the attack because after the initial battle, I expect Lewwyn's back cities to be pretty empty, and a blitzkrieg should work well. Spending cash to upgrade units is not worth it for us at this point. One turn of income costs us something like 2000+ beakers.

[spacetyrantxenu]

How provocative.

It was a grey area as to whether the post was spoilerish or not so I think he erred on the side of caution.

Thanks for the update.

[Speaker]

OMG SULLLA LOOK OUT, THEY ARE COMING FOR YOU WITH 1000 MUSKETEERS, 2000 WAR ELEPHANTS AND OVER 9,000 IMMORTALS! THEIR ARROWS WILL BLOT OUT THE SUN!!!!!!!1

Not much of a grey area, really...

[Sullla]

Redacted posts? Oh no, it's the return of Dr. Nomadic!!!!!! (Seriously, if he did come back, I think I would leave the forums for another two months.)

After Team 2 failed to research yet another tech on their turn, and they built Spiral Minaret, I decided I would look into the whole culture thing. So let's talk about culture under these settings:

* Three cities of 25k culture needed to win. Note that this is significantly less than needed on Normal speed; it should actually be 33k with correct scaling for Quick. This makes it quite a bit faster to win by culture on Quick.

* Great Artists provide 2670 culture with a bomb. This is correct scaling, 4000 * 2/3 = 2667 culture.

* The three Legendary cities must be from the same civilization. You can't have one 25k city per civ, they all must come from the same one. I tested this in Worldbuilder to make certain.

* Gifted cities do not transfer culture. You can't get a city to 25k, then gift it to another player with culture intact. All culture on the city's center tile is reset to zero when a city is gifted.

So if Team 2 is actually serious about this culture thing, they would need three 25k cities all from the same player, and they wouldn't be able to gift cities around to make it happen. They could gift Great Artists around for culture bombs though, at slightly over 2500 culture per bomb. Where are they right now? We can check using the F8 victory screen:



Lewwyn, the orange-colored India player, appears to be the one with the most culture. I took a picture on our turn, and then again after they played. The results are highlighted:

Milkshake: 7269 culture, +377 per turn
Delhi: 1879 culture, +91 per turn
Calcutta: 1095 culture, +72 per turn

This is not very threatening. At its current pace, Milkshake will need 47 more turns to reach 25k culture, and that's by far the best of the three cities. The other two are somewhere between "longshot" and "never' to reach 25k. Now I have no doubt that there are some Great Artists sitting around if this team plans to win by culture, but they only add 2670 per usage. Right now, Team 2 is about 65,000 culture short of what they need, and increasing by 540 per turn. That's 120 turns turns at the current pace. Even if they TRIPLED their current pace with Artists and such, we would still have 40 turns before they won. And I do not expect Lewwyn to still be alive in 40 turns, since their tech is totally stagnant and they are just drafting muskets each turn for defense. (For comparison's sake, 40 turns ago we were still researching Education on our way to Liberalism. We've discovered 18 techs since then, the entire Renaissance era!)



This is the top five cities list. One city from each of Team 2 shows up in the top three spots, one from their India, China, and Ottoman players. (They log into each other's accounts so often I have no idea who is the primary player on each civ.) I wonder if they realize that just having one 25k city per civilization is not going to work? That would be clever and all if it did work, essentially getting three Hermitages for free, but it doesn't work that way. All three Legendary cities have to be the same civ, and they can't be gifted around and preserve their culture. If this is their plan, they will be in for a big disappointment.

Milkshake has seven wonders in it: Colossus, Hagia Sophia, Chichen Itza, Sistine Chapel, Spiral Minaret, Notre Dame, Sankore. The last four would be completely awesome for us to capture. We don't know the exact location, but it has to be in Lewwyn (orange India player)'s territory somewhere. Most likely north of his capital. None of these cities should be very far away from Speaker's current territory. We can see both of Delhi and Calcutta, the other cities listed on the Victory tab for culture. Hopefully we can fight our way to this awesome spot eventually, and claim Notre Dame/Sistine for ourselves.

I still dunno about this whole culture thing though. Would they *REALLY* go for culture in an Always War teamer game? It feels completely suicidal. I honestly don't know. I guess I'll keep an eye on that Victory screen for the time being and see what happens.

[Speaker]

Team 3 got Scientific Method this turn, Sullla. FYI.

[Sullla]

YES! That's perfect. It means they're going for Communism/State Property. Again, a very solid choice in its own right, but it puts them a very long way away from our own tech path. I don't see anything else valuable on the Scientific Method path: Physics has a Great Scientist and that's it (airships banned for this game), Biology has some extra food (nice I guess), Electricity has... uh, improved watermills. Perhaps some kind of super watermill/workshop strategy with State Property? Maybe? Our own Assembly Line/Railroads path feels far stronger to me. Whatever!

They still need Music/Military Tradition to build cavalry (or even cuirassiers) and Steam Power/Economics/Corporation/Assembly Line for factories and infantry.

EDIT: Other side note. It took them 3t to get Scientific Method, which is a relatively cheap tech (4240 beakers) and also gets 1.4x research modifier. This means that their research is slightly weaker than I was expecting. I honestly thought they had gotten Steam Power (5654 beakers) when I saw the tech on CivStats. I'll revise my estimate of their base beaker per turn rate down to about 1300/turn, down from the 1500/turn I was expecting. (If it was 1500/turn, then they would have gotten Scientific Method in 2t. 1500 * 1.4 multiplier = 2100 per turn). This is all very good news for us. Our base beaker/turn rate right now is about 1850/turn, which becomes 2200/turn with standard 1.2 multiplier. So our effective research rate right now is close to 50% higher than Team 3, probably something like 40% faster.

As I said, it's all good news for us!