Lizzy's rise to greatness

[mzprox]

look at it this way: a plain hill mine gives 4Production (but also costs 2Food as the working pop needs to eat). If we draft and remove that pop we lose 4P/t we get 2F/t we get a slight increase in city growth (as a lower pop city grows faster), we get the unit imediately and we also get 3 unhappyness so this can not be done without a limit.
so that drafted population would make a unit in 110/4=27,5 turns and would eat 55 food in the process.
With drafting we get a unit at once and only for 15F not 55.

Obviously the situation differs if we draft away different tiles' workers. Quite common tile to sacrifice is a coastal one, 2F, 3-4 commerce. That way we get 110 P but one can argue that we lose infinite amount of money--because we will always be one pop less who will now not give us the money--, but this is not the case: 1-after drafting the city will grow faster so the difference between population will diminish, 2-the number of tiles are limited anyway, 3 it is very hard to estimatethe gain of that soldier, it may mean the difference in winning or losing a war. It is estimated that we will face 100+ military units very soon, and that army was raised partly by drafting, we can only defend ourselves if we do the same. And RB and cfc drafted maceman. For the same one population we will have the opportunity to draft janissary and very shortly after riflemen.

This is of course if we are serious about war. We ahve agreed with Aztec and India that we will not sign nap with RB, t170 when our nap ends is close. 10-20 units will not provide security, and we also need many units near the mayan border. We can hardly stay neutral in the coming conflicts and probably we shouldn't anyway. we need to get more land for ourselves and stop Egypt before it's too late.
So are we serious? It would be easy to promise that our tech level will always be amongst the most advanced, even serious drafting would not change that, sure it would had its cost, but I could optimize it to make the cost minimal. But our army strenght also needs to be raised if we want real chances in this game. Not just to conquer, but to avoid being targets and to be worthwhile allies for others (no one would like an ally who has no effective army).

[Dinner]

Soon we will be able to exchange 15-20 food into 110 production, the only limit is happyness.

You seem to be forgetting population which is one thing we don't have a lot of and which we are in dead last place in. Also you are forgetting the opportunity costs, that is how much production those drafted/slaved pops could be producing if we hadn't eliminated them. Remember that those costs compound out to infinity. In short, draft if you have to but do as little as possible because you're making huge long term loses doing it.

[mzprox]

I'd like to get that city spot and do the best to get it, but Egypt had already slved settlers and if they move there (most likely they will) then there is nothing i could do. (we have iron and wine btw)

no idea what civplayers are doing there, but civplayers have no big army so they are not a threat. besides it ould be stupid of them to attack us.

Avoiding drafting? no way. that's our best and only hope to catch up in army strength. Soon we will be able to exchange 15-20 food into 110 production, the only limit is happyness. despite our land lacks luxuries (we have only 4 types while others 6-10) I managed to secure us what we are missing and we don't really pay for it. Well to the aztec we promised units, the terms are still under negotiation, but considering we will fight against the same foe, it almost doesn't matter. Our fur and incense will be connected quite soon.
I also arranged possible loans from aztec and india so we could get rifling even sooner (note that upgrading a janissary to rifleman cost 110 gold, it's better to avoid it, yet we should start drafting asap)

I agree that we need roads when we start mobilizing our army, i will allocate workers for that.

[Dinner]

So bring on Nationalism, except we have considerable production capacity to exploit so if we could avoid drafting I'd better pleased.

I agree with that.

Getting calander will help as we do have luxury resources to develop and hopefully we can figure out a way to get both that wine and the iron. MZ has concentrated on improving tiles we will actually work, and that's good, but we also are still lacking a lot of roads which would be key to defending our lands. A few extra workers would help us get started on that. For new cities I would prefer to grab the vacant land ASAP, fill out the extra city spots we have on our mainland, and then try to grab some of those ice islands at least ones with useful resources. If we can do that while letting our cities grow and continuing to keep them working improved tiles then our score should go up nicely especially as we build some modern units.

[Hercules]

I had a look just now. We are in good shape tech wise. Each of the older techs are all within 1 or 2 turns of discovery. We will have calendar next turn for example. As RB didn't raze our target cities we have 2 spies in Wein xxx and 1 spy in another and a great spy in another. We have a new worker next turn and a settler in 2 and all of our cities are at optimum production of one kind or another.

Yes there are 4 Aztec / civplayers Horsemen in the area but we are good friends with them.

What we are missing atm is units with experience, otherwise we are in good shape I think, but not reflected in the score which suits us as it does not draw attention to us.

So bring on Nationalism, except we have considerable production capacity to exploit so if we could avoid drafting I'd better pleased.

[Dinner]

There is a wine resource and an iron resource just out there waiting to be claimed and currently we lack both so it would be a good idea to actually expand immediately before someone else grabs those things. Yes, we're building one settler right now but I'd like to see 2-3 settlers being produced because we still have places to fill out and there is prime land up for grabs for who ever gets to it first so dribbling them out one at a time isn't going to get us anything. I see we are also building one worker, that is also good, but we only have 15 workers to go with 19 cities. That's still a big improvement over what we had but bare minimum one worker per city is needed with 1.5 being the ideal number.

Lastly we does Civplayers have four horsemen lurking on our border? They're right on a hill so they can see if we send out any settlers or not so I suspect they intend to cut us off from the newly empty land so they can take it themselves. We will need at least 4 units to defend against their four horses and so far we still haven't built anything better than an axeman.

[Dinner]

We need that city site. BTW I'm glad we're still on track wrt espionage.

[mzprox]

Everyone will know that we stole because it will be shown in score anyway. I can't tell how annoyed they will be.. but I don't think they would cancel the NAP or declare war. I think te final voting allowed every type of spy actions. I was against it as was RB, but the majority wanted it.

I can see RB has slaved a settlers, that combined with their faster road movements could mean that they can rebuild the razed incan city faster.. if that's their intention I don't know. Doesn't really matter in 19 turns 90+% that we will be at war with Egypt , possibly sooner. that city will not help them, actually it will slow them down.

[Hercules]

update.
Egypt took and kept both cities, maybe i just worried too much, but i wanted to give us the best chance to be able to steal thouh it won1t be as cheap as it could had been. We will do the stealings in 3 turns from now, let's hope all 3 spies survives till then. Then one of them should be able to get nationalism, if we are lucky we will grab too more techs or just make something nasty with them (we could convert them to our religion for example..)

Good going. If we are successful in stealing techs from RB, will they know; that is from their techie squad and if so will they be annoyed or just accept it as fortunes of war.

Regarding doing something nasty I am thinking of that discussion about espionage at the beginning and how we disapproved of certain actions.

[mzprox]

update.
Egypt took and kept both cities, maybe i just worried too much, but i wanted to give us the best chance to be able to steal thouh it won1t be as cheap as it could had been. We will do the stealings in 3 turns from now, let's hope all 3 spies survives till then. Then one of them should be able to get nationalism, if we are lucky we will grab too more techs or just make something nasty with them (we could convert them to our religion for example..)

[mzprox]

i could spread taoism into the incan capital and moved a psy there. The other two waits in weil der stadt in case they won't destroy it. in 3 turns we will try stealing provided our spies will not had been caught or they will not destroy both cities. These all can happen and stealing is never a 100% chance, we will get about 80%.

[mzprox]

Because he lied to us earlier. He got called out, and then changed it, but then, as usual, went back to his original plan. Gunpowder was never on the menu.

I write it slowly so you too might understand:

We will not build a single janissary-we will draft janissaries.
-why?
because we need siege units too (some says 50% of the units shoul be siege), and siege can not be drafted, those need to be built.
But aren't catapults are obsolete?
No. The real upgrade (cannons) are too far away, we will go to war sooner and we will need sieges.
-ok, if we draft why don't we do it already?
because we don't have nationalism yet we will steal it or research it by t160 (now t155)
-Wy not sooner?
we could get it a few(1-2) turns sooner, but we agreed to switch to nationalism at the end of our golden age to get the most economical benefit from it.
Will we have both gunpowder and nationalism by t161?
YES.
-wouldn1t it be better to have gunpowder as soon as possible?
NO. gunpowder gives no benefit besides the option to build janissaries (which we won't build, but draft). Construction on the other hand allows to cross rivers without penalty, allows the building of colosseums and most importantly catapults.
-Then why did I say otherwise before?
it's just the fine tuning of the same plan. No drawbacks just possible benfits

[Ben Kenobi]

construction now allows the buildings of catapults

Why are we building obsolete units, instead of researching Janiseries. I bet that when t 170 comes we won't have riflemen and we won't have anything more advanced than ancient units.

I think we should start voting on tech plans from here on out.

[Ben Kenobi]

I know we are 1 turn from gunpowder but wonder why the swap around unless it gives us a turn or so ahead re more advanced siege units?

Because he lied to us earlier. He got called out, and then changed it, but then, as usual, went back to his original plan. Gunpowder was never on the menu.

[Hercules]

ok I agree move to Inca capital to steal tech.