[PB70] The Cartographic Correction Committee convenes

[Tarkeel]

I for one find your diplo analysis very interesting, and that's coming from someone who's keeping up with the discord in real time.

One final aside - if anyone knows how to copy chat logs from Discord without including the timestamps, please let me know. It's sort of irritating clutter, but I'm not quite annoyed enough to do it all by hand or break out some regex or something.

That's one of the things Notepad++ is decent at: You can block select with alt-shift to select all of the timestamps at once. Not quite as good as not pasting it in, but at least easier to remove.

[scooter]

In theory this is true. However.




In reality, I just thought up a new way to win the game. People hate this One Weird Trick.

[scooter]

Since I see the lurker thread immediately lit up after I posted that, to be clear I'm joking. Well I did press the diplo victory button out of sheer curiosity, but I don't think it's actually possible and the idea just generally struck me as funny and is not a serious plan or anything.

[scooter]

2 turns until Sankore, and 1 more turn for the great person RNG. I'm more excited about Sankore. On the turn it finishes I'll have 14 Buddhist buildings for a cool 28bpt to go along with the 28hpt, and of course both of those numbers are pre-modifiers. It's going to take a bit longer before I can fit in Divine Right, but I'm still enjoying this mini-game.


The following graphs show a runaway.

The fact that there's so little global interest in doing anything about it is mind boggling. I'm thisclose to shifting gears and seeing if Mjmd just wants to split the whole world and just hope I can come out of those conflicts closer to him than I am now. Wouldn't it be sort of interesting if we just signed a 100T NAP complete with a "no propping up failing states" provision and go smash some heads? It sounds more likely to produce fun and less likely to produce a win. But the current path feels more narrow each turn.





One enjoyable mini-game I've had here is slowly pushing back Bing culturally. My Get Super Buddhist mission has a side effect of producing a bunch of culture, and I started tracking these tiles culturally every turn. The tile highlighted was 75% Bing not that long ago, but once I got some buildings in it started shifting. Humorously, I watched him slowly build this Lumbermill only for it to hit 50% the turn it completed so that I could work it. Thanks, man! I won't be giving that tile back either because it's getting double pressed.





I just hit the 100c threshold here, which means not only am I producing 6 culture a turn, but the +20 culture per ring thresholds move out further, which really accelerated the shift. Bing is in a tiny bit of danger of losing his first ring, honestly. I guess he can probably stop the bleeding once he hits 100c himself.





Meanwhile Shandong is about to hit 100c threshold too, which will put even more pressure on. If I do move against Bing later, this access will make the first strike much easier to plan.





Wouldn't you know it, but Chengdu is going to hit this threshold soon too, so I should get more push from the other side. To be clear, I wasn't explicitly trying to push him, but the fact that it aligned with my Buddhist buildings was... convenient.





Taoism landed in Ningbo - not that it really matters. Courthouses going up everywhere possible. I've got 4 done and a few more will be whipped in the next couple turns. I triple whipped two of them this turn in Shandong/Hangzhou which hurt, but it netted me 10gpt immediately, so that makes the medicine go down easier.

[scooter]

Feels nice to finally win a game here.

[Tarkeel]

I thought the religion had to be spread to all powers for the diplomacy victory to be offered?

[scooter]

I thought the religion had to be spread to all powers for the diplomacy victory to be offered?

You know, there's a lot of things that are confusing to me about this, but it says right here in this screenshot that I've won, so how could that be wrong.

Jokes aside, also this entire resolution is supposed to be disabled in CtH? But also clearly it is because while the prompt says it was successful, nothing actually happened.

[Commodore]

Yeah, resolution is enabled, it just does nothing.

Although I'd argue it probably *should* be available in a full-diplo game.

[scooter]

Sankore is in. Side note: one of my favorite things about Sequential Pitboss is bringing back the one thing I liked about PBEMs - seeing all your builds/tech/etc resolve instantly. It's satisfying.

Anyway, I've got 9 Monasteries and 4 Temples, bringing me to 26hpt and 26bpt from my wonder duo. One more gets added in each of the next 2 turns, and in the following 2-3 turns there's 1-2 more coming. Honestly, the payback timing is incredible now - especially for Monasteries. Thanks to PHI they cost 30h and produce 2b, 2h, +10% science, 2 culture, and the ability to build missionaries. Let's completely throw out the last 3 perks and just consider 2h and 2b. Let's also be super simplistic and say 2b = 2h. I know they aren't equal, but for our purposes here, it isn't that far off in this stage of the game. 30h to get back 4h per turn is profitable in just 8 turns, and again that's ignoring the other perks which have real value - especially the science boost is often enough to add a couple more beakers of value. That's a killer investment.


It's so good that Temples are suddenly not insane to build even if I don't care about the happy, which right now I don't. 60h to generate "4hpt" takes 15 turns to break-even. That's not so good that it's a no-brainer spam them everywhere ASAP, but it is good enough that it's a legitimately good investment when there's nothing else more pressing - especially in border cities that care about the cultural boost.





The northern cities are much more recently built and therefore less developed, but they're starting to come online. This is basically the entire reason I'm "so far" behind Mjmd despite only having one fewer city. He has 0 cities like Chongqing that just got its Granary or Loyang that does not even have one. If I'm looking for a silver lining here it's that once developed, I actually possess more land tiles and better maximizers (like the Monk stuff), but it will take time to catch up enough that I can actually pay that off. The nervy part is that he'll be able to leverage that current power spike into an edge I cannot make up.

This is in a nutshell why I'm angling for this aggressive Astro play. I think his break-even tech rate is probably double mine right now during his Golden Age, and it's been overall better for ages. However, I wouldn't be shocked if I have more raw beakers teched if you were to count the Education 2/3 bulb that I haven't done yet (but could if I wanted). That's because he's funneled his great people into Golden Ages, and I've funneled mine into 1) Wonders and 2) Bulbs - Machinery, Education, and a Trade Mission that was worth well over 1500b and so was functionally a bulb itself. That is around 4k beakers of value.

So, if my feeling is that I might be OK long-term if not for the fact that Mjmd has a power spike now that I can't match, then it makes sense to go for the biggest power spike I can get my hands on that matches my bulb-centric strategy. In this case, that's push for Liberalism to get another 3100b burst and a tech that is a military game changer that will take other players quite awhile to be able to match. There are tiles that can fork 5-6 cities with Galleons for nearly every player. It's a nightmare. The game will come down to who can best leverage their power spike. Mjmd's is easier to execute - just use the eternal Golden Age to build a ton of strong stuff and get a lead, then hit someone with your lead. Mine is tougher to execute, and I don't love being forced into it, but the upside is undeniable.

ANYWAY.




In contrast to the northern cities, the southern cities are much more mature. I know they look smallish in size, but Kaifeng, Shandong, Hangzhou, and Xian just collectively whipped 11-12 pop in the last couple turns getting Courthouses (saving me around 20gpt in the process), and Chengdu is about to do the same, but the infrastructure is otherwise ready to go in all of them which is why CKN builds are finally cropping back up. Interior cities are going to be relied on heavily for CKN production, while coastal cities will obviously need to chip in navally. Initially I will probably just have CKNs because they're my best units, but the first tech after Astro will be Civil Service so I can mix in Maces. I sort of feel like the best way to get value is to use the naval force to extort someone first diplomatically, and then actually use it on someone else.

I'm trying my best to monitor opponent techs. If you're in the Discord, you've seen Charriu and I somewhat obsessively try to work out what Superdeath and Mjmd are teching with limited success. The real news is that Monarchy, Machinery, and Construction were all finished once each, but we aren't sure which ones belong to Mjmd and which to Superdeath. Before you say "oh figuring it out is easy, just check X" - go read our chats - we probably already discussed it . One extremely funny thing is we realized Mjmd has 0 non-diagonal roads across rivers in his entire empire. This is funny because if he had a single one we could look to see if there was a visible bridge there, but he doesn't have one! Charriu proclaimed that Mjmd is a genius if that's intentional, but surely it has to be a fluke.

Anyway, we learned the following.

* SD said he completed Archery last turn

* Monarchy was completed at the same time, plus when I sort of trollishly poked Mjmd about it, he semi-admitted to planning an HR swap.

* SD does have places where you'd expect bridges to be visible, and they are not, and Bing is teching Construction right now according to Charriu.


So - official guess is Mjmd completed Construction and Monarchy, while SD completed Archery and Machinery. The latter fits well too as he probably wants the ability to build some crossbows. Overall this is great news as it seems much more unlikely either can challenge me to Liberalism. I suppose Mjmd could, but it would require bulbs on his part which might cost him a Golden Age. That "great news" comes with a caveat though - as it puts both players closer to Guilds.





Is Organized OP? The civic boost alone would be worth 35gpt to me with 0 investment needed. Not to mention the city maintenance where a cheap Courthouse in every single city would be worth around 80gpt, and the cheap Lighthouse is necessary in the vast majority of cities. I think Organized is by far the best trait on this map with this mod, and I think it's probably got to be the best choice on nearly any map with a good amount of water. I haven't followed enough of the CtH maps to know what trait meta has formed, but is calling Organized the best controversial at all?

[Tarkeel]

I'm trying my best to monitor opponent techs. If you're in the Discord, you've seen Charriu and I somewhat obsessively try to work out what Superdeath and Mjmd are teching with limited success. The real news is that Monarchy, Machinery, and Construction were all finished once each, but we aren't sure which ones belong to Mjmd and which to Superdeath. Before you say "oh figuring it out is easy, just check X" - go read our chats - we probably already discussed it . One extremely funny thing is we realized Mjmd has 0 non-diagonal roads across rivers in his entire empire. This is funny because if he had a single one we could look to see if there was a visible bridge there, but he doesn't have one! Charriu proclaimed that Mjmd is a genius if that's intentional, but surely it has to be a fluke.

At what point does Alphabet become viable just to avoid the uncertainty?

E: Also, timing and amount of score increases should be a tell.