Industrial Research with GoW

[Arrian]

I'm not all that concerned with telegraphing our tech plans. They should be pretty obvious. After all, doesn't everyone want ToE?

Speaking of which, did we decide to do a ToE prebuild without a factory, or with one?

/me goes to look at the Smith thread...

[asleepathewheel]

i wonder if anyone is going for smith's anytime soon

we could always go for econ immediately after steam.


There might be some benefit to detouring slightly, if only to slow the advent of marines. Ideally we would stay at least one turn ahead of the nearest competitor and manage to time our wonder builds accordingly.

[vmxa1]

I am writing this extemporaneously, so it may be full of holes.
I agree with Arrian that we need not lose sleep about revealing our plans. It makes sense to be cautious and not give them away, but they are smart enough to see what our options are.

So we do not have any plans to get MT anytime soon do we? I mean we do not have saltpetter.

[Cort Haus]

No, no plans for MT.

[Arrian]

Sleepy, I assume the "Sistine" in Legopolis is actually a Smith prebuild. They have exclusive rights to the Sistine, and they have Bach + 7 luxuries right now. In other words, no rush on completing the Sistine. They won't really get much use out of it until they have hospitals.

Ok, I looked at the other thread and...

Tempest is currently either 38 or 18 turns away from finishing at ToE prebuild. The first is a tad too long (and will likely drop by a turn or two if we have coal and can boost production via rails), and the second is too short. The first, however, allows completion of Newton.

Newton is nothing compared to ToE. Therefore, unless we have another city that can do a ToE prebuild in ~25 turns, we should forget Newton's in Tempest and start reducing Tempests' shield count, as Cort suggested.

-Arrian

[vmxa1]

The reason I asked about the MT, is all the talk about upgrading to Calvs and joining sides. I guess that was on the premise that someone would want to give us MT and saltpetter to aid them.

Is that really a possiblity? I would think that would be an act of desperation.

[asleepathewheel]

yeah, that was the assumption. Our knights won't do much good, so if they really want us in,they would have to give us both. Unlikely

[Cort Haus]

Arashi finishes a bank in 5 turns. It has 19 spt, could get 20. Possible ToE?

[Arrian]

Ah, thanks for that tidbit. 19spt, 5 turns until Bank. How many shields does it have built up now (76?)?

If it starts after the Bank, it needs 37 turns to get to 600 shields (most likely a couple less, due to RRing). Call it 35. Too many, if we expect Sci Method in 26-32 turns.

So we would probably want to switch it right now. If I'm right and it does have 76 shields built up now, then it would need 28 turns to get past 600, again likely less due to RRing. That sounds pretty damn good, Cort.

-Arrian

[Cort Haus]

re: Arashi, turn 174

Originally posted by Arrian
19spt, 5 turns until Bank. How many shields does it have built up now (76?)?

If it starts after the Bank, it needs 37 turns to get to 600 shields (most likely a couple less, due to RRing). Call it 35. Too many, if we expect Sci Method in 26-32 turns.

So we would probably want to switch it right now. If I'm right and it does have 76 shields built up now, then it would need 28 turns to get past 600, again likely less due to RRing.

-Arrian

The Uni finished in Arashi on T170, so yes, 76s in the can.

So with no tech trades, and no Industrialisation, Arashi is currently on the right trajectory to build ToE.

er, we need this on the other thread

[OPD]

In terms of the IA things are likely to get very interesting with new game issues coming into play.
Things can also take an even more dirty twist, yes I think it is possible for the game to be played in a way that is even more dirty than it has been played so far. .


- First off there's mobilization, which is pretty much a production GA. Also it is of course possible to set non-mill builds then mobilize to build them before getting peace when the builds have to be changed. I suppose we have our on/off switch.... Perhaps we should get some sort of discourse going with the other teams concerning mobilizing and exploits of.
Also it's likely that one or more teams, probably GoW, could mobilize then just stay mobilized for the rest of the game, giving them a big production advantage, infact GoW may be getting all their domestic builds done now while they can before going all out for Armageddon. If we saw everyone else mobilizing with amphibious warfare approaching I doubt we could afford not to do the same.

- There is also the issue of espionage, a spy seeing some elses millitary forces is extremely valuable, someone will probably steal the Lego map at some point also. I don't understand espionage too well myself, is it easier to plant a spy if you're the only one with espionage? GoW would likely be the ones to benefit most from having an intel agency first, so perhaps that's what they're building in Imperial.

- Stealing tech, like espionage but doesn't require a spy, unless you're at war, in the IA it becomes cheaper to steal a tech rather than research it (at least I'm pretty sure it does ) then when you consider the possibility of selling it to the other nations aswell doing any research at all may not be worth it. I can remember reading a report from one game where 2 players were in a space race, one of them made a ToE/hoover beeline while the other went for espionage and horded money. The turn the first guy build ToE the other one stole all the techs off him, which was not only cheaper than the reseach but also left him enough gold to sabotage his hoover pre-build and build it himself.

- Infinite attack range on land using railroads. Even if you attack someone who hasn't got RR set up, it is possible to build them as you go. Taking all but a few of someones cities in one turn becomes very realistic.

All in all things will at least be interesting.

[asleepathewheel]

I agree about a discussion about mobilization.

Will it be considered an exploit to mobilize for a while, then declare war and peace on the same turn with an ally?

Is there any way to tell via embassy if someone is mobilized, I can't remember how the shields are displayed.

I don't htink having espionage influences spy rate, I think only communism does.

[Cort Haus]

OPD, I've been worried about Espionage since I read your observations on this feature in MP somewhere - over at MZO, I think.

It throws a mighty and depressing spanner into our plans for tech-power.

[vulture]

Does espionage work differently in MP - aside from the obvious fact that other teams get to chose whether to declare war over an incident or not (or to take other sanctions).

Realistically, I'm not sure that we have long term potential for tech power. Lego has already overtaken our output, and ND will as well if left to their own devices. We can get temporary tech power by getting ToE to get Hoover, but before too long after that we are going to keep up only by taking advantage of tech depreciation or espionage. OTOH we can keep up via that, and start gearing our cities towards massive industrial output for spaceship parts production with the benefit of hoover (which will hopefully let us get enough military alongside infrastructure to defend ourselves).

As far as needing several monster production cities for the spaceship goes (if the game goes that way), what potential do we have for reducing the number of inland cities (or drastically shriking the size of some of them) to get some size 20 cities going to compete in late game production races? I know it is throwing away a lot of development, but in some situations a few mega cities trumps a greater number of lesser cities none of which can reach top-tier output. (plus fewer manufacturing plants and nuclear plants to build).

[OPD]

Originally posted by vulture
Does espionage work differently in MP - aside from the obvious fact that other teams get to chose whether to declare war over an incident or not (or to take other sanctions).

The main difference is that there is no pop up telling you when someone steals or fails to steal a tech from you.

If you were take the example of ToG the tech cost is 68 and it will cost us about 1600 beakers to research unless I'm mistaken. We could wait for Lego to reseach it and steal it from them for about 1900 gold, I can't remember how effective a tech steal is, I think it's 2/3's of the time if done safely but I'm not sure.
On the other hand if you were to consider nationalism, steam power or industrialization at a tech cost of 120, would probably cost us about 3000 beakers to research, I think the cost of tech stealing may go up in the IA but I don't think it'll be as high as 3000 gold. Then consider that Atomic theory is a cost 200 tech which means around 4500 beakers to research....
Although the real danger would be teams pooling gold to steal.

Of course this is not really that different to other teams simply paying one team to do the research (which would also be discounted if someone else would already know it) although stealing simply offers a more immediate way to do it. The idea that ToE would guarentee you hoovers is unlikely as is the possibility of getting a serious tech lead over the other teams(assuming the other teams are aware of the stealing opportunities that is)