[SPOILERS] swance bitten, twice shy

[ljubljana]

Tarkeel: Thank you so much for the detailed trade route overview! From the map settings, it sounds like island cities are likely to be few and far between (though if we're talking "modded highlands in which water matters somewhat" that may mean the mapmaker will add in more islands than mapgen would generate specifically to avoid nerfing PRO. Still though, I don't really want to rely on that and will probably be hesitant to pick it on a "land-based" map. Even with available islands, opening myself up to major economic damage from losing one city is probably not something we want if avoidable...

Do you have (even a vague) sense of how good this unit maintenance reduction of AGG turns out to be in a "typical game"? It seems like it'd be quite strong midgame in the SP Deity context I've been practicing on, but it's hard to tell whether the lower costs on Monarch will outweigh the need for a much larger standing army than vs the AI...

CMF: This seems highly accurate, thank you for the chill pill At least in Civ6 it was true that rushing someone actually won you the game more often than not... reading about Superdeath's PB63 where they didn't even really end up growing larger than their neighbors, let alone running away with the game, after a successful rush was pretty eye-opening. I, uh, I guess this "maintenance" system actually kinda works as intended lol (assuming I am correctly reading "the intent" as to kill ICS and create a staggered pace of expansion).

Tarkeel 2: Whatever happened to the early CtH idea of moving Slavery to Masonry? I briefly, erroneously thought that this post represented an up-to-date changelist and was ngl a little relieved to not have to worry about how to run starts with a nerfed BW

thrawn: Thank you for sharing your oppo analysis, and for calling out that labeling someone a "scary vet" when I don't know enough about them to actually inform my decisions is probably just an on-ramp to an anxiety loop lol. I'm not sure I'll have the time to do enough deep analysis of others' threads to form a useful impression of their playstyles, though...but we'll see what I can pull together

Yeah, the framing of the civ trait value as lying largely in "mak[ing] the sneakiest transition from not-a-threat to dominant and unassailable position" is similar to how I was thinking... if the ease of dogpiling and more developed diplomatic meta means "early runaway" traits tend to get cut down to size in the midgame by neighbors, you'd expect games to be generally won by whoever pulls this off first. Certainly that's very different from Civ6's "maximize early snowball at all costs" meta... But equally it seems like catching up in tech in IV is more difficult than in VI (with, at the very least, fewer somewhat-gimmicky game elements for doing so along the lines of Free Inquiry/Norway pillaging) and falling behind more devastating (in VI iirc two promotion levels roughly equates to one tech level in terms of unit fighting ability and a highly promoted Renaissance fleet is still useful against Industrial Age opponents, while in IV even all 5 combat promotions won't enable a musket to trade favorably with a rifle). So perhaps if the meta is that everyone feels they need to take at least one econ trait (which is kiiiinda what I'm gathering?), then we will indeed need to take one as well to not descend into backwardness?

I'm not really sure how the traits really play out on this criterion, though. I'm still liking AGG in the abstract as you'd think it would be generically helpful at most of the unit tech breakpoints where we'd expect the transition to "unassailable" to happen (rifles, cannons, not knights but maybe we pair it with France?). But then again promotions are seemingly less impactful than in VI by quite a bit (imagine if there was a Civ6 trait that gave a free promotion on all builds of three different unit classes for the entire game ) so I don't know how to assign a magnitude to this intuition. And I've really still done very little thinking about most of the specifics of most of the traits lol

PS re TBS's focus on a general game plan/"becoming strong" rather than optimizing for specific points, I wonder if that's a symptom of the different strategic conditions in IV? At the very least, for specifically the military case, it sounds like optimizing for something like "as many promotions as possible on my catapults" at the expense of everything else, which would arguably be strong in VI if you replaced the word "catapult" with VI's go-to OP unit in "frigate", is more likely to lead to diminishing returns IV and to possibly be less worth the opportunity cost...

I think my research project for the immediate future should likely be to go through the other CtH snake-pick games, see what got picked and if I can understand why, and maybe get a sense of whether this theoretical "transition from not-a-threat to unassailable" phenomenon is actually how most games are won...

[Tarkeel]

PRO shines in the early game (before foreign trade is a thing) and the late game (with many routes and most players in MERC). The islands are just extra icing on the cake.

AGG is a pretty worthwhile eco trait, but only in the late game.

I don't think any CtH games were played with changed slavery, it was too far from home. Latest changelog is here.

I'd take a look at both PB66 and PB63 as they had similar amount of players for their snake picks.

[aetryn]

Tarkeel: Thank you so much for the detailed trade route overview! From the map settings, it sounds like island cities are likely to be few and far between (though if we're talking "modded highlands in which water matters somewhat" that may mean the mapmaker will add in more islands than mapgen would generate specifically to avoid nerfing PRO. Still though, I don't really want to rely on that and will probably be hesitant to pick it on a "land-based" map. Even with available islands, opening myself up to major economic damage from losing one city is probably not something we want if avoidable...

Do you have (even a vague) sense of how good this unit maintenance reduction of AGG turns out to be in a "typical game"? It seems like it'd be quite strong midgame in the SP Deity context I've been practicing on, but it's hard to tell whether the lower costs on Monarch will outweigh the need for a much larger standing army than vs the AI...

CMF: This seems highly accurate, thank you for the chill pill At least in Civ6 it was true that rushing someone actually won you the game more often than not... reading about Superdeath's PB63 where they didn't even really end up growing larger than their neighbors, let alone running away with the game, after a successful rush was pretty eye-opening. I, uh, I guess this "maintenance" system actually kinda works as intended lol (assuming I am correctly reading "the intent" as to kill ICS and create a staggered pace of expansion).

Tarkeel 2: Whatever happened to the early CtH idea of moving Slavery to Masonry? I briefly, erroneously thought that this post represented an up-to-date changelist and was ngl a little relieved to not have to worry about how to run starts with a nerfed BW

thrawn: Thank you for sharing your oppo analysis, and for calling out that labeling someone a "scary vet" when I don't know enough about them to actually inform my decisions is probably just an on-ramp to an anxiety loop lol. I'm not sure I'll have the time to do enough deep analysis of others' threads to form a useful impression of their playstyles, though...but we'll see what I can pull together

Yeah, the framing of the civ trait value as lying largely in "mak[ing] the sneakiest transition from not-a-threat to dominant and unassailable position" is similar to how I was thinking... if the ease of dogpiling and more developed diplomatic meta means "early runaway" traits tend to get cut down to size in the midgame by neighbors, you'd expect games to be generally won by whoever pulls this off first. Certainly that's very different from Civ6's "maximize early snowball at all costs" meta... But equally it seems like catching up in tech in IV is more difficult than in VI (with, at the very least, fewer somewhat-gimmicky game elements for doing so along the lines of Free Inquiry/Norway pillaging) and falling behind more devastating (in VI iirc two promotion levels roughly equates to one tech level in terms of unit fighting ability and a highly promoted Renaissance fleet is still useful against Industrial Age opponents, while in IV even all 5 combat promotions won't enable a musket to trade favorably with a rifle). So perhaps if the meta is that everyone feels they need to take at least one econ trait (which is kiiiinda what I'm gathering?), then we will indeed need to take one as well to not descend into backwardness?

I'm not really sure how the traits really play out on this criterion, though. I'm still liking AGG in the abstract as you'd think it would be generically helpful at most of the unit tech breakpoints where we'd expect the transition to "unassailable" to happen (rifles, cannons, not knights but maybe we pair it with France?). But then again promotions are seemingly less impactful than in VI by quite a bit (imagine if there was a Civ6 trait that gave a free promotion on all builds of three different unit classes for the entire game ) so I don't know how to assign a magnitude to this intuition. And I've really still done very little thinking about most of the specifics of most of the traits lol

PS re TBS's focus on a general game plan/"becoming strong" rather than optimizing for specific points, I wonder if that's a symptom of the different strategic conditions in IV? At the very least, for specifically the military case, it sounds like optimizing for something like "as many promotions as possible on my catapults" at the expense of everything else, which would arguably be strong in VI if you replaced the word "catapult" with VI's go-to OP unit in "frigate", is more likely to lead to diminishing returns IV and to possibly be less worth the opportunity cost...

I think my research project for the immediate future should likely be to go through the other CtH snake-pick games, see what got picked and if I can understand why, and maybe get a sense of whether this theoretical "transition from not-a-threat to unassailable" phenomenon is actually how most games are won...

The islands thing is more to smooth the economic transition. In IV you tend to expand until your economy crashes, then rescue it by getting over various economic thresholds, then expand more until you crash it again, all the while not trying to crash so badly you impede your ability to get to the rescue point. One of those rescue points is getting transcontinental trade routes by settling an island city. In PB72, which was played on a Highlands map, we had no islands, and couldn't uncrash at a point where we normally would, so the opening dragged a bit as we limped to the next rescue point. Making sure all players have at least one island to settle fixes that problem.

Military-wise, collateral is the biggest problem with land warfare in IV. Even the humble catapult can make an attacking stack suffer well into the industrial age if sufficiently massed.

The other thing is that you want to be aware of how other players will see your picks. Xist picked AGG/CHM Rome mostly for defensive military potential, but me playing as FIN Mali with an enormous longer-term economic advantage I assumed he would be attacking (since all his advantage was military) me, mistook a stack that was just claiming a border city site for an invading force and started a war. If you pick front-loaded or military-focused traits/leaders, people will assume you're going in early. If you pick all long-term stuff, people might see you as food early. It's not a bad strategy to try to get something good for early-game and something good for late-game if you can, just to seem unremarkable.

[Tarkeel]

The islands thing is more to smooth the economic transition. In IV you tend to expand until your economy crashes, then rescue it by getting over various economic thresholds, then expand more until you crash it again, all the while not trying to crash so badly you impede your ability to get to the rescue point. One of those rescue points is getting transcontinental trade routes by settling an island city. In PB72, which was played on a Highlands map, we had no islands, and couldn't uncrash at a point where we normally would, so the opening dragged a bit as we limped to the next rescue point. Making sure all players have at least one island to settle fixes that problem.

That's absolutely true for non-PRO players, but with PRO your internal ICTRs become as good as foreign ICTRs, except they apply to every city. Plemo & Piccadilly were running some pretty extreme routes in PB66.

Military-wise, collateral is the biggest problem with land warfare in IV. Even the humble catapult can make an attacking stack suffer well into the industrial age if sufficiently massed.

Quoted for truth. Collateral is the great equalizer, and a stack of 20 catapults will shred a decent stack of even rifles. More rambling about PB66 in spoilers.

When we finally invaded Alhazard in PB66, we knew he had 17 catapults, 18 knights (most of them with 3 promotions) and a smattering of older units. Our forces were about the double; 20 catapults and 32 knights, and as many older units as we could muster, but also 10 pikes and 18 wellies that did serve us very well in that engagement.

Here's the full battle report. He went in with the catapults first, but we had enough units (and importantly, siege units) to soak most of the collateral so our units did not get redlined. Building a sim to test out how bad we'd be mauled was important here, as Vodka has limited usefulness in fights such as these.

I do think you're short-selling promotions a bit earlier. Yes, they won't allow a unit to fight off future generations with impunity, but they might trade favorably hammer-wise. Muskets vs rifles is a very bad comparison though, as rifles are designed to counter muskets. Due to how a unit's hitpoints also affects it's fighting strength, they quickly lose combat ability when facing multiple attackers. Units that have taken the promotion that counters their opposition can also tip the odds distinctly in your favor. Shock (anti-melee), cover (anti-archer), charge (anti-siege) and pinch (anti-gunpowder) are all available after C1, while formation (anti-mounted) also requires C2. Note that mounted units can not take cover, which means in hill-cities longbows are often better defenders than pikes. Pikes are excellent for attacking out though.

[aetryn]

The islands thing is more to smooth the economic transition. In IV you tend to expand until your economy crashes, then rescue it by getting over various economic thresholds, then expand more until you crash it again, all the while not trying to crash so badly you impede your ability to get to the rescue point. One of those rescue points is getting transcontinental trade routes by settling an island city. In PB72, which was played on a Highlands map, we had no islands, and couldn't uncrash at a point where we normally would, so the opening dragged a bit as we limped to the next rescue point. Making sure all players have at least one island to settle fixes that problem.

That's absolutely true for non-PRO players, but with PRO your internal ICTRs become as good as foreign ICTRs, except they apply to every city. Plemo & Piccadilly were running some pretty extreme routes in PB66.

Right, but with no islands (on default settings of Highlands) nobody gets any ICTRs at all. Plus, from my understanding, the idea was that you could get the boosted trade routes at Sailing, which is probably before you have any foreign routes at all (due to difficulty defogging or just no roads built). 

I guess the sum up is that PRO seems pretty good on a heavy land map like Highlands whether there are islands or not, because getting foreign trade routes at all is hard and foreign ICTRs will be VERY minimal if they exist at all. This assumes the mapmaker doesn't connects enough of the seas to make actual separate continents, which seems unlikely (why use Highlands if you're going to do that?). In the expected scenario, it's highly unlikely the island city will be vulnerable to sniping - in fact it's quite likely to be very HARD for the enemy to take since they'd have to have a coastal city to build boats to reach it. But either way it won't affect your evaluation of PRO. PRO is equally good with or without access to ICTRs.

[Amicalola]

haha, well, i have my own record of being a "useless" dedlurker in the past

I thought you were very useful as morale generation for the first 50 turns. :3

[ljubljana]

im very sleepy but a few extremely cherry-picked responses:

the late game (with many routes and most players in MERC).

wait....should i be surprised to learn that merc is standard? even if no foreign trs are available it seems like it generally only cleanly outproduces free market in representation or the new emancipation, or if you believe the extra GPP are significant even though most of them seem like they would come in cities that will never generate a great person anyways. or is the idea that rep and emancipation are themselves so standard in the endgame as to bootstrap merc? i'm a little surprised by that too, the hammers from unisuff seem to usually represent a much higher percentage of base hammers than the beakers from rep outside of a dedicated specialist economy and in MP games i'd expect that to matter even more than usual due to the giant piles of military everyone will be keeping around. and i'm told slavery is also strong

i'm also curious generally about how many great people are typically born / how much civic swapping gets done in these games for non-spi folks. in sp tests it seems typical to see something like one early for a capital academy/bulb/shrine, one around CS for some combination of bureaucracy / org rel / hed rule, and two by democracy to fix emancipation. admittedly that's without phi and on deity and therefore mostly without building wonders but surely the amount of those we're likely going to build in an MP game isn't going to result in a full three marginal GP for another golden age... don't tell me swapping civics even with anarchy is considered sometimes worthwhile??

tbh i'm a little bit into the idea of picking spi even though it's obviously the highest skill-cap trait just because anarchy annoys me (this is a joke and i will strive to not actually follow vacuous logic like this in any decision-making processes)

If you pick front-loaded or military-focused traits/leaders, people will assume you're going in early. If you pick all long-term stuff, people might see you as food early. It's not a bad strategy to try to get something good for early-game and something good for late-game if you can, just to seem unremarkable.

yeah, i'm currently thinking something along these lines, double military traits seems to focus too much on conquest which seems to not be game-winning until the mid/lategame, and double econ seems to require your neighbors to come at you before you get out of hand, not a recipe for winning in a game with a developed meta and where typically there is enough military parity that you can't just pull a thrawn and fight off the rest of the world by yourself on turn 50 lol. and i'm guessing coupled with one or more power spike-producing minor synergies along the lines of "UB + trait that boosts UB" or "UU + free promotion on UU". that doesn't really FEEL strong enough but i think that's civ6 brain disease talking, clearly this is not the kind of game that, with optimal play, will ever be decided in one player's favor based just on the combination of civ + trait + map conditions

but i still haven't done my research so :salt: <- envision a smiley pouring grain after grain of salt onto a plate in an ever-accumulating pile

Building a sim to test out how bad we'd be mauled was important here, as Vodka has limited usefulness in fights such as these.

um.... how does one build a sim in situations where vodka is of limited usefulness? don't tell me this involved actual coding i am theoretically technically capable of doing that but it is certainly one step up even from spreadsheeting lol

I guess the sum up is that PRO seems pretty good on a heavy land map like Highlands whether there are islands or not, because getting foreign trade routes at all is hard and foreign ICTRs will be VERY minimal if they exist at all. This assumes the mapmaker doesn't connects enough of the seas to make actual separate continents, which seems unlikely (why use Highlands if you're going to do that?). In the expected scenario, it's highly unlikely the island city will be vulnerable to sniping - in fact it's quite likely to be very HARD for the enemy to take since they'd have to have a coastal city to build boats to reach it. But either way it won't affect your evaluation of PRO. PRO is equally good with or without access to ICTRs.

hm, but if you have no ICTRS, isn't that the difference between "pro makes your domestic ICTRs outproduce foreign land routes" and "pro makes your domestic land routes about as good as foreign land routes and therefore is mostly wasted"? i assume even if all players can build 3 strong island cities that won't be enough to give full foreign ICTRs to all your cities, especially in conjunction with inevitable warring and OB refusals

(wait, am i wrong in thinking open borders has an effect on trade route math at all beyond that it is something other than war lmao)

also i could be incorrect but heuristically i'd kinda expect it to be worth more when the flat-ish per-city additional commerce it produces is greater as a percentage of total commerce, eg when nobody has ICTRs and the map is commerce-poor generally. but if true that logic applies to (commerce-producing) economic traits as a whole, not just protective, and it is worth noting that while i haven't done much simming i feel like highlands is among the most commerce-poor map types... maybe i should give a look at someone like a ragnar or even a tokugawa? wow is that ever heretical coming from base bts (but tokugawa has indeed seen some play in CtH yes?) of course picking him does commit me to sumoposting which fills me with an indescribable dread

I thought you were very useful as morale generation for the first 50 turns. :3

<3333

i remember i also posted a long and incorrect rationale for why a hut should or should not be popped, but luckily too late for it to actually influence your decision-making lmao

i'm sure i'll greatly appreciate the same, tbh. i tend to suffer from not so much fatalistic demoralization (at least not while games remain genuinely undecided) as generalized anxiety and something closer to splitting, wherein i alternate between viewing our prospects as great or as hopeless with little grey area, and tend to hyper-focus on individual game elements and linear strategies without really grasping the strategic whole. if anything that's even less defensible here than in civ6 where things are imbalanced enough that linear strategies actually do win loads of games (UU spam + classical age player or mass CS rush, work ethic, and you could maybe even semi-reductively call "be the first player with 5 frigates" a linear strategy by what seems to be the civ4 standard) so i would love to be trouted judiciously should you or CMF or anyone sense me falling into such patterns

[Tarkeel]

I'm answering these slightly out of order.

i'm also curious generally about how many great people are typically born / how much civic swapping gets done in these games for non-spi folks. in sp tests it seems typical to see something like one early for a capital academy/bulb/shrine, one around CS for some combination of bureaucracy / org rel / hed rule, and two by democracy to fix emancipation. admittedly that's without phi and on deity and therefore mostly without building wonders but surely the amount of those we're likely going to build in an MP game isn't going to result in a full three marginal GP for another golden age... don't tell me swapping civics even with anarchy is considered sometimes worthwhile??

You usally get one early GP bookmarked for the first GA, in which you usually swap into stuff like HereditaryRule, Bureaucracy and OrgRel. You often want to run Serfdom (or Caste and Pacifism) during the GA itself though. It's not uncommon to trigger a second GA in the late medieval period, mainly to push out a knight army, but then you need to plan ahead to generate three different persons for the all-important industrialization GA. Especially the second and third GA should have cities running caste/pacifism boosted specialists for future great people. You're likely to generate a few spare great people that you can profitably spend on stuff like trade missions, shrines, academy, and even bulbs, just don't overdo it and plan ahead.

As for the other questions, swapping civics without a GA is usually only done for slavery, while the first settler is moving, but there are situations where it's worthwhile. Especially HereditaryRule and Religion+OrgRel can pay off nicely.

tbh i'm a little bit into the idea of picking spi even though it's obviously the highest skill-cap trait just because anarchy annoys me (this is a joke and i will strive to not actually follow vacuous logic like this in any decision-making processes)

The benefits of SPI are slightly harder to harness and not as obvious as other traits. One of them is that you don't really need to trigger that first golden age at all, and you can swap into others as they are researched. This canmake you go for techs that unlock civics earlier than usual. You can also afford to swap out of slavery and run serfdom most of the time, only swapping back to do waves of whips. It usually entails going for religion to make the most out of those civics though.

wait....should i be surprised to learn that merc is standard? even if no foreign trs are available it seems like it generally only cleanly outproduces free market in representation or the new emancipation, or if you believe the extra GPP are significant even though most of them seem like they would come in cities that will never generate a great person anyways. or is the idea that rep and emancipation are themselves so standard in the endgame as to bootstrap merc? i'm a little surprised by that too, the hammers from unisuff seem to usually represent a much higher percentage of base hammers than the beakers from rep outside of a dedicated specialist economy and in MP games i'd expect that to matter even more than usual due to the giant piles of military everyone will be keeping around. and i'm told slavery is also strong

To recap the economy civics:
Mercantilism gives a free specialist in every city, at the cost of no foreign trade routes or corporations.
Free Market gives an extra trade route in every city, and reduces corp maintenance by 25%.
State Property boosts workshops and watermills, reduces maintenance, and nullifies corporations.
Environmentalism gives health as well as commerce on water and windmills.

Non-SPI players usually get to choose which economy civic to use when they are burning the industrialization GA, and then only Merc and FreeMarket are available. The extra trade route is usually not possible to fill with foreign trade, so you're looking at +2C base, and most cities can get more benefit than that from a base specialist, making Merc something of a standard. This has an amplifying effect as then other players get less foreign trade, and so on. Note that Merc also has the double-edged sword that you can't run foreign corporations: This is bad as you can't run foreign MinInc in cities that need it, but also good that the MinInc owner can't spread it to your cities that don't need it, just so you pay to feed their HQ.

State Property and Environmentalism are both later in the tech tree, but especially Environmentalism is now something of a viable choice in certain situations. State Property can also be reached in time, and is often run with workshops to feed the war machine. Swapping into them without SPI or Cristo Redentor is an issue though.

Building a sim to test out how bad we'd be mauled was important here, as Vodka has limited usefulness in fights such as these.

um.... how does one build a sim in situations where vodka is of limited usefulness? don't tell me this involved actual coding i am theoretically technically capable of doing that but it is certainly one step up even from spreadsheeting lol

In this parlance, a sim is using the single-player worldbuilder to set up a game that looks like the pitboss, and then test what you want in there. Many people like to "sim out openings" which means recreating the 5x5 from the screenshot on a proper-sized world, and then playing out to see which civ/leaders and worker improvements are best. In our case, it meant adding in 60ish units on both sides with the correct promotions.

(wait, am i wrong in thinking open borders has an effect on trade route math at all beyond that it is something other than war lmao)

You need open borders to even get trade routes to that player's cities.

maybe i should give a look at someone like a ragnar or even a tokugawa? wow is that ever heretical coming from base bts (but tokugawa has indeed seen some play in CtH yes?)

Plemo & Piccadilly played Tokugawa of Rome in PB66 to great effect. You also get some really scary gunpowder units.

[aetryn]

Here's my understanding:

If there are no islands, than PRO gives you internal trade routes that are as good as most foreign trade route, with some exceptions. On Highlands, this can be better than you might expect because with non-connecting seas, you have to run all your trade routes by land, which means that you have to road right up to the other person's territory and they have to road to yours. i.e. it will be slower than expected compared to a normal map where researching sailing is enough to get routes to at least some people. Foreign trade routes to non-neighbors depend on using the roads through your neighbors lands, and while it's true that at Sailing usually a neighbor can block naval routes, at least those eventually get freed up at Astronomy, whereas with land routes you'll always be vulnerable to trade routes being easily cut. It also means you can freely run Mercantalism and don't care if your neighbor or trade partner goes into Mercantalism particularly (or declares war, or closes borders). All of this means that with PRO you'll always have the buffed value of trade equivalent to foreign trade without any of the hassles of actually doing foreign trade. In PB 72, which was played on exactly this kind of map, for the entire first third of the game I had trade routes to nobody, as one of my neighbors was initially hostile, and the other players on the map didn't have a land route to me. There was then a period where trade routes were good, before another round of wars kicked off and my remaining trade partner went into Mercantilism (he had the pyramids and paired it with Representation). I'm not sure PRO would have better than FIN - I leaned heavily on the coast tiles and did pretty good with maturing cottages to make FIN work, but PRO was a pretty good trait in that game.

If there are islands and you settle 2, then PRO gives you as good of trade routes as foreign trade routes to their islands. This is even better, as you can re-use your domestic routes to every city in your empire, while your foreign partners can only trade with one city each. It's still likely that you'll have tenuous trade routes as mostly the seas don't go anywhere - there just big lakes, and it MIGHT happen that you have a neighbor on the coast of the same salty lake, but it's still pretty likely you're running all your routes by land. So you get the same benefit as above, but in addition you get the boosted routes everywhere, and not just at the 4-5 cities that have foreign islands to trade with.

GPs it really depends on what you're trying to do (and whether you are running PHI or America or some other GPP booster). It seems like often you can afford to divert one early GP to some other purpose (key bulb, early shrine), and still have a fairly decent first GA, but generally your GPs are for producing GAs and maybe starting corps late-game if you get that far.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Despite having twice as many replies as any other thread, this one has unaccountably been left dormant for NINE days! Where's the wild theorycrafting? Where's ljub veering madly from "this insane plan will DEFINITELY work" to "my opponent's insane plan will DEFINITELY doom me" and back again? The long posts on sumo history?? C'mon, people, let's step it up in here!