Astronaut without sin confounds press, invites trio to control civilization

[SevenSpirits]

For those reading along, here's how strong the Kremlin is going to be.

Say we want to whip a building in a city with Forge, Factory, a Power Plant, and Organized Religion. Every population gives 20 * 2.25 = 45 hammers. Pretty nice right?

But we don't have Assembly line yet, just Forges and OR. If we throw in the Kremlin, how much do we get per population? 20 / .66 * 1.5 = 45 hammers. Just the same.

Can you imagine if the Three Gorges Dam came an era earlier, had one third the price, and also gave you a free Factory and 5 health in every city? Well there's one big caveat, it only works on whips, but yeah. The Kremlin.

[novice]

No Nationhood for the next 12 turns?

[SevenSpirits]

We can afford it in the 112-116 set. (It wouldn't slow the Kremlin.) I guess if we need it then we can swap into it.

The riskier move is eschewing both slavery and nationhood for the next 7 turns. But it seems like we should be OK. And it's this move that allows us to get the Kremlin so soon.

Drafting is at a low point of efficiency right now because we're still only getting maces (and will be for a while still). And meanwhile we'll soon be able to whip a pop for 30 hammers (37.5 with forge) which makes a catapult or a pike, which is at least twice as good. So I'm not so interested in drafting until we at least have Gunpowder for units that don't die to shock.

After these next sets of Bureau, though, I think we should just plan to stay in Nationhood for the rest of the game.

[SevenSpirits]

Upon further inspection, we could do Nationhood/OR in the 107-111 slot, instead of Bureau/[FR|Theo], and not lose any turns.

We could also do Nationhood/Theo in the 107-111 slot at the cost of just one turn. Or instead of forfeiting a turn we could chop a resource forest or bulldoze one of our villages/towns.

[novice]

Lots of civic options. Spiritual fun fun fun.

The riskier move is eschewing both slavery and nationhood for the next 7 turns. But it seems like we should be OK. And it's this move that allows us to get the Kremlin so soon.

Would we not be able to finish Kremlin just as soon with Slavery instead of Caste? Or are you planning massive workshopping at Titan?

Luckily, no need to decide on civics just yet. I agree that the time is getting ripe to sign peace with Mackoti. If negotiations finally succeed, we can probably run pure peacetime civics.

[SevenSpirits]

Would we not be able to finish Kremlin just as soon with Slavery instead of Caste? Or are you planning massive workshopping at Titan?

No (just one shop on the unimproved tile, which is only necessary to save a turn in certain cases), but caste would be very nice for teching, and getting that merchant in Io. And we don't really want to slave right before Kremlin anyway. There are also some minor settlement plans that assumed we'd stay in caste.

[novice]

Gotta love AI diplo only:





(Not a got it.)

[SevenSpirits]

Very exciting. I'll be around in a few hours as usual.

[SevenSpirits]

Truly a doozy of a turn.

We enter the industrial era! Our farms and workers and everything now look modern. Weird. I micro our cities and we're set for Liberalism in one at 10% science. Woot!

Now, the important part. How to react to the rapidly changing political situation. (If world war counts as politics...)

Step one: declare war on Luddicator. This has a few purposes.
1) Get him really really extra scared. We want him to defend better vs Mackoti, by whipping down to the ground.
2) Deny opportunities to Mackoti. Like this one:

We had this galleon with a chariot sitting at the double circle. I did some math to figure out how teleportation would work out, moved it two spaces, and declared war. And behold! It did exactly what I expected.

So I moved it the remaining two spaces and captured the empty city of Commando. Sadly this was only worth 24 gold, but hey, it's something! And it's a city that Mackoti won't get now, and a city that Luddicator will not have to waste troops defending anymore.


As you can see in the first diagram I also wiped out a work boat. And below, two more galleys were currently scouting out Luddicator territory - the one by Charon, previously parked in Scavenger Hunt to block Mackoti from parking a galleon there, loaded up a spare chariot and moved around the cape there to threaten a couple cities.


And the other one killed a galley, earning 2xp.


3) Extract concessions! I offered the choice of two peace deals to him - I hope he's scared enough and takes either one.



The bad case (not terrible though - he can't threaten us AT ALL) would be if he took peace with Mackoti and not with us. But we both have similar power and Mackoti would presumably ask a lot more for peace, so I don't think that's likely.

[oledavy]

Now, the important part. How to react to the rapidly changing political situation. (If world war counts as politics...).

"War is the continuation of policy by other means."
- Carl Von Clausewitz