Lizzy's rise to greatness

[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]

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]

Given the turn 170 problem there is no way around but to draft but it would be nice to draft as little as possible.

[mzprox]

well, Egypt has sent their settler into the razed city's direction, i guess they will rebuild it just somewhat south of he original site. I think I still finish the settlers, but we will not be able to build city there, probably we will send it to the islands somewhere.
Or I could still switch to a worker and finish it in 1 turn as no actual productio went into the settlers yet.

[Dinner]

BTW do we even have iron working because I don't see any iron other than the one which Egypt is going to take because we were, once again, so slow. We should have had a settler sitting waiting to go just like we should have done something to be able to take the border city simply because we knew this was coming a month ago.

[mzprox]

We have iron under Edrine.
I think I told you about why we did not/could not attack Inca, you are right though that I could had anticipated that RB would destroy that city, but I didn't. Sorry about that, it's not easy to figure out what others would do.We arenot slow btw, simply we are not in slavery so we couldn't finish a settlers at any time like RB do.

[Dinner]

Oh, well. Let's go forward. I will log in and see if there are any half way decent places to plant that settler. I don't think we have the tech to build harbors yet so the islands really aren't a good idea yet. Some where on the main land which we can connect to our trade network would probably be better.

[Dinner]

It looks like you were right about the iron hidden under Edrine. I had to turn on the bubble thing to see it but it is there. As for the settler we have five city locations already picked out on the mainland and a sixth on the islands. I'd go with one of the five on the mainland. I see we have three turns left in our golden age so if we're going to get nationalism then we're cutting it close. Here's hoping it works.

[mzprox]

Stealing comes in next turn. hopefully all 3 spies survives, RB doesn't close border etc..
then we can try to steal nationalism for a moderate price, each try has about 75% chance to succeed.

or

I have an other plan prepared: I have sent an other missionary to Egypt, let's hope they will not detect it and close borders, but even so it can not reach the target city in it's normal move..but if we steal engineering first, then it can (engineering increases road movement from 2 to 3)

So: if we first try to steal engineering and we succeed, and we won't fail spreading the religion we could try to steal nationalism super cheap, and if we got it we can also try to steal liberalism super cheap.

Without going too much into details it looks like this: we reduce our chances to get nationalism from 98% to 93,5% but we could save 1000+ spy points which worth more than 1000 gold at current rate.
This plan has about 40% chance to be total success and 6,5% chance to be total failure. In the other about 50% events we can still get nationalism (either for cheap or for moderate price).
If we fail to get nationalism it means we will get to rifling 3 turns later so we will draft more janissary instead of riflemen, but I think the possible gain is well worth the risk.

In the last few turns while we were getting a technology in each turn, but we also built up a big overflow which allows us to get nationalism in one turn if we fail to steal it.

[mzprox]

I can report total success on the stealing missions!

It turned out that after using our great spy our chances were better than expected so I went on the path described above, and the result is nice. We have just stolen:
Engineering, Nationalism and Liberalism

more than 7500 beaker in cost for about 2600 spy points (we still have 1000 left on Egypt). we lost one of our spy but theother two returned home safely.

At this moment we are second in score (it will change a bit once we start drafting) and the absolute tech leaders with several thousand advantage on everyone.

We have gunpowder, the next tech is replaceable parts, with all the overflow this tech is almost finished. Then we will get rifling. it might turn out that two turns is enough, but 3 surely will be. so we will get rifling in t163, we will have 6 turns to draft a riflemen army before RB could attack us. I already started negotiations about getting a few hundred gold loan to get us rifling asap.

One alternative is to get constitution instead of replecabl parts so we could revolt into representation next turn (still free because of the golden age), but I believe getting rifling sooner is better-what do you think?

also I told others that we won't close our borders Egypt until the spy operatios are complete. Now that they are should we close borders? This would reduce their income but ours as well however most of the other nation already did it.

[Hercules]

Good news indeed and still with some overflow to spare.

I say go for Replaceable parts then Rifling.

If we close borders would the other civ cities not replace the income source or would we lose a lot of 'years of peace' bonus' I say close borders now anyhow. This will nail our colors to the mast however.


Edit: Otoh, Constitution is a very useful tech esp for representation which would we like as a tech orientated civ. It would be a question of when not if.

Probably needs you to do an evaluation. I suppose I am just anxious to getting an army in place.

[Dinner]

Don't forget to change governments before the golden age is over. Why close the border? If we can wait then wait.

The reason is we'd be making it perfectly clear we were going to war with them yet we still don't have an army built and they're going to see the drafting happening any way so why not just do it at a future time after we have an army. With luck they'll have moved their monster army to fight the other guys and we can move our forces in the back door with lighter opposition. Let's be strategic about this.

Personally, if I were them I'd say the tech stealing violated the NAP and just attack us now before we can draft an army.

[Hercules]

Don't forget to change governments before the golden age is over. Why close the border? If we can wait then wait.

The reason is we'd be making it perfectly clear we were going to war with them yet we still don't have an army built and they're going to see the drafting happening any way so why not just do it at a future time after we have an army. With luck they'll have moved their monster army to fight the other guys and we can move our forces in the back door with lighter opposition. Let's be strategic about this.

Personally, if I were them I'd say the tech stealing violated the NAP and just attack us now before we can draft an army.

Reasonable points.

I am not sure stealing tech violates the NAP because it can be difficult to attribute, though our score increases. NAP usually refers to military unit aggression.

[mzprox]

We will change to nationalism/slavery/org religion next turn.

I'm having frequent discussions with india and aztecs about possible plans against Egypt. we think we should not allow Egypt to consolidate their powers with their huge land. Now we will have a window of opportunity to attack since we will hve technological advantage, but we still need to see how big it is. Egypt might get on a different route, getting grenadiers which counters our riflemen (it makes our attack impossible, but they can't attack either). if this happens we will move on the next tier, infantries and in the meanwhile we might consider india1s proposition, that we together kill french/maya and divide their land.

I already had some talk with RB/egypt. they didn't seem to be very angry about the steals, but probably they just did not want to show. They asked again if we wanted to extend the nap with them to which i answered that we would not.

[mzprox]

NAP unless we stated otherwise only refers to military aggression. usually it involves that we will not gift/upgrade units to our partner's enemies also. But one can declare the nap violated anyway.. or just break a nap, it wouldn't be unprecedented.