Gaspar and NobleHelium - More Arguments About Buildings & Food.

[NobleHelium]

All right, so we played turn 144.

We kind of underestimated the force that Commodore could bring to bear on our Kusari invasion stack, and we suffered pretty big casualties...



He did definitely get lucky though, killing the Infantry at ~45% and all the others at 70%ish odds. He also offered peace, which we promptly accepted. davy also re-offered Banana for Dye, that we offered him last turn but he declined. We accepted that too. Anyway, this lets us get back to our regularly scheduled programming:



Unfortunately I don't think there's any way for us to fully rectify that food deficit next turn at DG, so it will probably starve down to 9. Assuming this is the case, we'll just run a bunch of specialists for one turn before working food tiles again. We'll get a grab bag GP out of LM in 3t as you can see. With the war going on hiatus, we should be staying in OR until most cities are done with Coal Plants (and Grocers if needed). Then we'll build some MGs and Infantry for defense.



Commodore is definitely heading to Assembly Line. We estimate he'll take 5-6t to get there. Mist got Steel recently. davy has not been teching, although he has a decent gold stockpile now.

[NobleHelium]

Played turn 145.

Extremely mundane turn, haven't had a turn this boring since before we attacked yuris I think. Built railroads, built buildings, blah blah. We are pillaging down a village near the Aylee ruins that is currently in our borders, in case Commodore decides to refound the city. Let's take a look at the rest of Commodore's land which we've taken the opportunity of peace to explore.




One more coastal city to the northwest of Herti. That long horizontal border is very reminiscent of the American-Canadian border (which by the way actually deviates quite a bit from a pure straight line because the surveyors did not have accurate equipment). I also realized that we were being stupid and not using our two extra build queues in WC and KD to build Spies, so we're going to do 3-4 Spies out of them before going back on Wealth. We were lamenting our lack of appropriate cities to build them, basically.



Commodore finished Constitution. We finished Astronomy at 40%. We might want to do Fascism next to make sure to snag that GG. Depends on whether we can afford to delay Physics and/or Combustion by 2t, really. We have over 1000g stockpiled now, but full burn costs ~250g so it's not that much.

[NobleHelium]

By the way, we definitely got lucky in our attack on Commodore. Lucky in the sense that he didn't make the optimal moves. He could have bulbed Railroad with his Engineer (I realized this when we got the crucial turn in), which would have let him build enough rails with his idle workers to get enough units in the city. We would have had to retreat in that case. Or likely worse, he could have slammed all his siege into our stack. If we were making the choice again I'd probably not be in favor of attacking at that point.

I also didn't think he could prebuild an MG and have it autoupgrade. I thought since the Maceman upgrade tree went through Grenadier to Machine Gun, he would have needed both upgrades for Grenadiers (the other one being Infantry) to obsolete the unit, which isn't the case. In retrospect our own Macemen obsoleted before we got Railroad. I guess a unit goes obsolete when you can build all of its upgrades or at least one of each of its upgrades' upgrades.

[NobleHelium]

Micro notes for next turn (I haven't done these in a long while):

1) Stonefort should dump its overflow into the Coal Plant then swap to a Harbor. We get the EXP bonus on the Harbor so building it before the Coal Plant finishes will cost very few actual hammers. This way we avoid losing any food to unhealth and also hammers to overflow cap.
2) Horde should go 3W and railroad.
3) Mortar and RD should go 711 and railroad that mine. Give the mine back to Cathedral and work that over the Copper (should have done this last turn but I didn't notice it until after I played).
4) FC should go SW and railroad.
5) Plagued should go 12 and railroad.
6) Molten should go 8887 and railroad.
7) Vortex and Fast should go 144 and railroad.

That should be most everything. AC should probably start a Forge. Not sure about OR - it's kind of making too many hammers for MGs right now. We could do an Infantry or a building. Building choices are Bank, Observatory or Grocer. Bank is obviously theoretically most valuable per hammer cost, but unfortunately I'm not sure if we're going to run gold for a while so the Observatory may be more worthwhile. Grocer preemptively solves our health problem when we hook up Oil.

Edit: Actually an MG in OR would be fine. We would only increase overflow by 3h per turn building MGs, and the current situation will change before we hit the cap. Or we'd dump the hammers elsewhere. May be better to do another building while we're still in OR without Pentagon though.

I think next turn we do highest possible slider on SM without finishing it - then we can optionally take Fascism in the 2t after that in order to overflow back into SM through to Physics or Combustion.

Oh and we need to swap merchants and spies for engineers in the cities that finished Factories.

[pindicator]

Mace obsolete when you can build both Rifles and Grenadiers or Rifles & Machine Guns. So he can use a mace as an auto-upgrade to get hammers towards a MG.

[NobleHelium]

QUESTION FOR LURKERS: If I pre-hook Oil with a fort and then research Combustion, will our cities with Factories get the additional unhealth for that turn? I.e. do I need to make sure we have enough health or food to cover that? I'm guessing yes. Would be funny to accidentally starve a citizen because of this...

[pindicator]

I'm not so sure. I know that you can auto-upgrade privateers -> destroyers by having oil pre-forted or pre-settled on. So it depends if the game checks food before it checks technology. And I believe it calculates food first; T-Hawk did a breakdown of how the game settles end of turn stuff but I don't remember where that post is.

[NobleHelium]

That reminds me, we should clearly build a privateer to pillage Commodore's seafood before retreating into the ocean where his ironclads can't touch it.

I'm pretty sure food is calculated at the same time as hammers, which are both after gold/science. That's why you get the food and hammer production of the new citizens in subsequent cities on the turn that you build HG.

[NobleHelium]

Turn 146.

Moving onto Coal Plants in some cities. Realized I was being stupid pushing out the GP in LM so early, we just need it to pop before DO's. So I slowed it down and it'll pop at the end of the GA now. Now LM is growing again. Jewish Temple -> Courthouse in DG next I think. Decided on Bank -> Observatory -> Grocer in OR (all 1t). Building more railroads. MFG still climbing rapidly.



Commodore finished Corporation. Power shows no movement whatsoever, so he's probably not building anything until he gets AL. GNP is inflated since we have both SM prereqs.

[pindicator]

I'm pretty sure food is calculated at the same time as hammers, which are both after gold/science. That's why you get the food and hammer production of the new citizens in subsequent cities on the turn that you build HG.

HG works like it does because of the order of production: the first city in your list resolves production, then the second, and so on. Completely different than whether food resolves before or after hammers. Same as getting multiple GPs in one turn.

I'd just wb test it at this point: make a city thats health capped and build a coal plant. See how or if it impacts the food total