[SPOILER]PB58 - Mr. Cairo residing over the remains of Serdoas Library of Knowledge

[civac2]

Thanks. That is a good explanation.

[Serdoa]

Updates:

1) We are at peace again. With Tarkeel
2) We are at war again. With AT.
3) We built the shrine. And gained 6 gold - as expected as my religion has not spread to others.

Currency before T100, Cities soon. I wanted to take pictures but work is stressing me... (have to switch back and forth all the time). Maybe later.

[Serdoa]

My updating is bad, I'm sorry. I've written several drafts but could never finish them and then so many turns had gone by that it seemed pointless as what I was talking about was already history...

Lets try to run through it real quick. No pictures, maybe in the T100 update, but I hope some of what I write is interesting still:

It is T99, I'm up to 14 cities, 61 pop (which is 21.11% of the total of 289 worldwide). I wanted to get to 15 but I had to delay more settlers for defensive purposes and tech-pace as I wanted to get Currency. Also workers being in short supply still. Enough to get everything done but I certainly need some more now that the empire gets bigger.

The empire getting bigger is also one point I want to stress: As far as I could see several players apparently decided to plant cities far apart. And while it is correct to settle strong cities first, settling your second or third city 8+ tiles from your capital is certainly costing you speed. I believe my decision to settle good cities but closer to my core so I could share tiles, forego some roads and get my workers faster to where they have to go was key in expanding more quickly then the others.

As for the others: SD has 58 pop and is second with that. Taking his and my pop numbers and subtracting them from the total we are left with 170 pop for the other four or around 42 per player. That is surprisingly low I feel. Ruff has 9 cities, I can see 6 of them which have a total pop of 28. Assuming the others being a little smaller with 4 pop each he should still have around 40 pop. I think that Tarkeel also have just around 40 pop and Jowy and AT are around 45 each. I could be that AT also is only around 40 and Jowy has 50 but both seem to have grown their cities. Still, everyone besides Ruff has 12 cities, so that leads to an average of 3-4 pop per city? Well, sounds about right. They all have only 2 happy resources while Monarchy provided me with a third (Wine) which I could trade for a 4th, so naturally I can grow my cities bigger. 

In tech I think we are all pretty similar. AT got Currency and IW, Tarkeel got MC (and Colossus) and SD I believe got Currency. Interestingly enough his tech-rate seems bad still, he's making 38 gold at 0% (well, I assume he is at 0% while saving gold). Though that seems plausible as he is EXP/CRE ad without and economic trait I certainly think that expansion has to sting pretty bad by now. No one has Construction or HBR. I'm not sure what Jowy is teching, maybe Monarchy as he got Monotheism before? 

I myself got Currency as well. Currently sitting at ~80 gold at 0% though I run some scientists which could instead work coast and up that to around 92.

So, TLDR: Got Currency, have twice the happiness-resources of everyone else, have two more cities and more pop.

[Serdoa]

Next turn played already.. or next 2? T102 started now ... I think if this speed holds up we will get in front of PB56 in one or two weeks. Crazy, though the pace certainly has me more engaged.

Foreign news:

- Jowy decided to spend two turns in Anarchy to go to HR, OR and Judaism.   With the happiness-situation being as it is I can understand wanting HR soonish, but he should get a GP soon, so why not start a GA instead and save the two turns Anarchy? The amount of commerce and production and growth he just lost makes me shudder.

- SD got a GS, I assume to build an Academy

- Tarkeel got a GM. I think if he sends that one on a trade mission he can easily fuel 10+ turns of research, which should be huge for him

- AT built another city close to me, but now at the northern part, while the former one was at the eastern one. Not really something I can blame him for, it is basically the same city I planted towards SD.

[Zed-F]

What is your next step on the path to victory? Get a key wonder? War with a weaker neighbor? Something else?

[Serdoa]

That is a good question. I'll try to go through my thought process on that one:

1) Warring with a neighbor. I do have the highest soldier-count right now and will have Catapults in ~3-4 turns. I do however not see a reason for war right now, there still is unclaimed land. I am up to 14 cities and still have I think 11 spots to settle. And only two of those are in competition with others. 

Of course, that might be a choice I'm not making in the end. AT has 2-pop whipped 5 cities last turn after connecting Iron as well as starting to spend EPs on me again. I expect to see 40k more soldier points for him because Praets are 8000 per unit. I had already started preparing Axes in anticipation of this and have already 8 to form a stack together with some spears. That is on top of the city defenders. That stack will grow in numbers to match his Praet count while being accompanied by some catapults in some turns. He has to wade through quite a bit of my culture to actually reach my cities if he comes from the east and I will have ample warning if he comes from the north as that is a narrow passage that I keep scouted. Both locations can be defended by the one stack I'm building up. By my count, he can't reach me in under 9 turns from now on - and that would be with just the 5 Praets he whipped and maybe some Axes / Spears. 

I think using Praets is not the right choice here. I understand that players want to use their UU as long as it is strong (if it ever is) but the circumstances have to be right as well. For UB it seems to me that most players do understand that concept (hence why nobody builds Aqueduct-UBs in all cities just because they are their UB) but for UU we see it time and again that players will force their use even if it is not in their best interest. 

But.... he might not even target me. Which potentially makes them a much smarter choice then I give credit for. I am the most technologically advanced of all players as far as I can tell. Others might not be as close to Construction as I am and are certainly not teching as fast. I think AT borders Tarkeel already and should be close to bordering SD, though I think that will be a sea-border while Tarkeel should be land-border (basically Tarkeel is to him what AT is to me). Tarkeel has a much lower power than I do - and most of that is pop, tech and buildings (Forges, potentially Moai as he had Stone before I razed his city). In short, I think Tarkeel has around 120k power with

20k in pop
20k in buildings (5 forges each 2k and Moai for 10k)
30k in tech

which leaves him with 50k in units, which I believe are

5 warriors (10k)
3 Axes (18k)
4 Spears (20k)
1 Galley (2k)

which if he does not improve that soon will just be run over. The same is true for SD btw.

AT also leaped me in land with him now having 161k Land Area while I have just 157k. Which makes me third, I guess Jowy also has more land? These guys are still settling ridiculously far apart. Jowy settled a few cities recently, just look at this picture:



He settled the one down south on the stone first. Then he settled 1NW of the next stone and now he settled 3N1E of the rice. I just don't think that is a viable strategy long term as defending that will be a nightmare - he probably would already have lost cities if not for the fact that SD apparently decided to forego his northeast and be ok with Jowy taking all that land and that in the north the same happens with Ruff.

So, where was I? Oh yeah, winning...

2) Key wonder: I think there are several wonders that make an impact and that you should or can gun for. But I do think they can get overvalued. On the other hand that I got SH made a big impact for me, especially due to its amplified effect via the Stele (my Monument replacement UB). I pop borders faster than I would normally, probably at least twice as fast as I do not need to chop a monument and I do get them within 8 turns due to the Steles 1.25 multiplier. In many cities I would not even be able to chop a monument for a lack of forests and would have had to wait for growth and whip - which would in turn delay Granary or Lighthouse. I think this had an immense impact on my game and was key to me being where I am.

All that said, I do plan for wonders. MoM would be nice if it is still available when I get around to it. Apart from that there is nothing in the short-term coming up that greatly interests me. 

3) Something else: Yes this one. My next step will be settling out to 25 cities till T120. We have now T102. I will be up to 16 in the next two turns, 17 in the next 3 or 4, can't remember. I should reach 20 cities by around T112. Not sure I can do the 25 by T120, but I've basically built up my cities enough that I should be able to expand very fast. Every city still adds ungodly amounts of costs but also 2 TRs each for 2 gold plus the gold from the city center and many can work a 3 gold coast tile with sea-food right at the start. And with a total of 8 gpt they are not immediately profitable but well enough that just with 2 pop we tend towards break-even. 

So, doing that. Getting Optics maybe for the circumnavigation bonus? I haven't thought about that much but I think we will have many naval battles so getting these techs early might not hurt. 

I'm also producing my next GP so I can start a GA and swap Civics. I really want to be in HR and OR (if I had researched Mono...) and adopting my religion and maybe other Civics because Slavery isn't that great any more. But I won't eat several turns of Anarchy for that, I don't think that would pay off and I can get by with the happy I have right now and will get soon. I also need to get MC and Forges in some cities, especially those producing 16+ hpt.

[Serdoa]

All that said, I do plan for wonders. MoM would be nice if it is still available when I get around to it.

Well, apparently in the two turns from T102 to T104 nothing came up and so I got around to it and finished MoM EoT104. 3 pop-whipped it at the end which hurt but I think Tarkeel got Calendar and he settled for Marble as well - which he had not when I made my T102 report IIRC (might have checked T101) - so no way I would wait to finish it naturally and then lose it by a turn. I would have been able to get it done in 2 more turns by natural means but would have had to follow a different micro plan since some turns.

That micro plan is interesting enough to talk about. When I made the decision to get MoM for earnest we had T95. I was finishing my Currency research at EOT96 and I knew I could get Calendar in 6 more turns afterwards (EOT102), maybe even 5. I had two cities available, one on 8 pop (Kierkegaard) and with 5 forests, one on 3 pop with 7 (Hegel). I chose the one with 5 - mainly because you need some natural production as well (if you are not IND or have OR and forges). Marble was available from earlier when I settled for it for the Oracle.

I had also already started a Library in Kierkegaard with around 54 hammers in it. I set it up so it would have 89 hammers at EOT98. When it reached that it became clear to me that I could get Calendar EOT101 already. I also got increasingly nervous about other players snagging the wonder - having Math and getting Calendar at around T100 should be doable for everyone and several players had not gotten Currency yet, which made me uneasy that they would delay it for Calendar. Therefore I decided to start a Chariot on T99, putting 15 hammers into it. On T100 15 more followed together with a one pop whip for a total of 60 production (30 overflow). These hammers were put on T101 into the Library that sat at 89/90 and together with another 1-pop whip it led to a total production of 165 hammers. Calendar was finished at EOT101 and 75 hammers overflow put into MoM on T102. That overflow together with the marble bonus set me right at 136 hammers on the first turn of production. T103 all the chops followed (which in itself was a micro-management disaster as I fucked up twice while doing the worker moves), putting the build at 383/450 hammers. Which is exactly enough to 3-pop whip it on T104, what I did.

Now, I'm not writing this to brag that I built MoM in 3-turns with just 5 forests and only Marble-bonus (only a little) but to illustrate the use of overflow-cascades. I could not have gotten the hammers into the build with just normal overflow. Even a settler would get me at best ~40 hammers, I could nearly double that. With enough time and forethought one could include even another step for even more overflow, but I have not seen overflow-cascading mentioned much (if at all) in the threads I read so I thought it might be a neat trick that some might not even consider / think about the possibility.

With IND, a forge and OR that would be even more extreme. I had ~90 hammers on the first turn without bonus which would have been 225 with all these bonuses. Setting the chops up for the first turn as well and just 3 chops would be enough to 1-turn it. Even with just IND and Marble getting 5 chops would be enough to 1-turn it.

[vanrober]

Really interesting the overflow cascade. I dont really understand how it works.

So you had to put 1h in the library and you had 165 hammers so it would be 164 as OF right? But from all those you ended up with just 136. Can you explain me more please?, im such a noob.

I know that if it has more hammers than double it becomes gold, but this is not the case right?

[civac2]

It's conceptually simple. You want to finish a bunch of items in a row with a lot of overflow each. So that the overflow keeps stacking up. Now there is the problem that modified overflow is capped by the build cost of the item you finished (not quite true but the edge cases are not relevant until late game). So if you finish a library your maximal overflow is 90 hammers. You also remove the modifiers after the fact. So for a CRE civ the maximal overflow is 45 hammers. You want to finish progressively more expensive items that can sustain the growing overflow.

Er, I don't think I'm explaining this well. Take Serdoa's example:

He put 15 hammers production into a chariot. Next turn he 1pop whipped and added another 15 from natural production. That's 60 hammers, 30 of which will complete the cariot and 30 overflow, the exact maximum the chariot build will allow.
He also had a library pre-built to 89/90 hammers.
With another 1-pop whip the 30 hammers overflow and 16(?) hammers production we reach 89 + 30 (chariot overflow) + 30 (whip) +16 (production) = 165 production, 90 of which finishes the library and 75 go into the Mausoleum (multiplied by 1.5 due to marble).

[vanrober]

It's conceptually simple. You want to finish a bunch of items in a row with a lot of overflow each. So that the overflow keeps stacking up. Now there is the problem that modified overflow is capped by the build cost of the item you finished (not quite true but the edge cases are not relevant until late game). So if you finish a library your maximal overflow is 90 hammers. You also remove the modifiers after the fact. So for a CRE civ the maximal overflow is 45 hammers. You want to finish progressively more expensive items that can sustain the growing overflow.

Er, I don't think I'm explaining this well. Take Serdoa's example:

He put 15 hammers production into a chariot. Next turn he 1pop whipped and added another 15 from natural production. That's 60 hammers, 30 of which will complete the cariot and 30 overflow, the exact maximum the chariot build will allow.
He also had a library pre-built to 89/90 hammers.
With another 1-pop whip the 30 hammers overflow and 16(?) hammers production we reach 89 + 30 (chariot overflow) + 30 (whip) +16 (production) = 165 production, 90 of which finishes the library and 75 go into the Mausoleum (multiplied by 1.5 due to marble).

Ohw i see the problem that i had. I didnt count the 89hammers that were already put into the library and i thougth that there were 165h + the 89hammers, so i thought there would be 164h OF. 

And then i wasnt seeing how from 164h OF turned into 135 with the bonnus of marble. I feel stupid. Thanks civac for the explanation. I really apreciate!