Turn 89, 800 BC

[nbarclay]

Government report:

ND - Republic
GoW - Despotism
RP - Monarchy
Vox - Despotism
Lego - Despotism

The religious civs have all switched. The nonreligious civs are all still in Despotism.

[nbarclay]

Team scores:

183 (+4) Gathering Storm
191 (+4) Demogyptica
159 (+3) Glory of War
192 (+3) Role Play
131 (+2) Vox Controli
193 (+3) Legoland

ND and RP are both about to pull ahead of Lego.

[nbarclay]

I think 30 gold or 2 gpt would be a better cost differential for getting the tech sooner. Higher than that looks like price gouging.

[Shiber]

Yes, you have a point. We want to lure them forward, not to scare them off back into the basic deal.

[nbarclay]

What if we go ahead and boost science spending to 80% this turn, and then if we don't get sufficient interest in early delivery, we can back off our science spending to get our gold back? Does that sound good?

By the way, if we push at 80%, we'll end up with about 120 gold when we're finished.

[DeepO]

we would lose 170 gold, only to gain a possible 120 from others? Doesn't sound like a good deal to me. Let's keep us at 8 turns to feudalism, and don't make any of the proposed deals more difficult to get. We still don't know anything from other civs, maybe they don't like the deal we propose, and want something considerabluy less. If so, it wouldn't be good if we burned cash in the mean time...

As to not offering firm proposals to Lego: sorry, Nathan, I just saw your message, proposal has been sent before reading it. I thought it was fully discussed, though, and we're still in proposing stage, things can change, or be retracted.

DeepO

[nbarclay]

Also, do we want to leave our Palace prebuild in place or go ahead and switch to the Pyramids? We've pushed about as far as we can if we don't want it to be possible to guess that our palace value is now 400 shields.

[Shiber]

Seems good to me, unless we've got some spendings to do very soon.
Btw, how long can we keep up at 80%? Is it be actually possible to make it in as little as 5 turns, assuming that we don't get paid ahead for our research?

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by DeepO
we would lose 170 gold, only to gain a possible 120 from others? Doesn't sound like a good deal to me. Let's keep us at 8 turns to feudalism, and don't make any of the proposed deals more difficult to get. We still don't know anything from other civs, maybe they don't like the deal we propose, and want something considerabluy less. If so, it wouldn't be good if we burned cash in the mean time...

Our ultimate cost to research Feudalism is the same whether we research it quickly or slowly. Researching faster, we burn through gold faster, but we also get our payments from other teams faster, so those two angles balance out in the long run. And if researching faster lets us get other teams to pay a higher percentage of our research costs, we come out clearly ahead. (Although your line about how much it costs us might be worth trying on other teams. )

Nathan

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by Shiber
Seems good to me, unless we've got some spendings to do very soon.
Btw, how long can we keep up at 80%? Is it be actually possible to make it in as little as 5 turns, assuming that we don't get paid ahead for our research?

At 80% science, we lose about 35 gpt, so we'll have about 120 gold after five turns. By the way, it looks like our 5 gpt from our earlier deal with ND has expired.

[DeepO]

I only partly agree. The problem is that whenever feudalism is distributed in the world, a next race starts: the race towards chivalry. Again, we can easily be first to get it, selling it to the rest of the world. But we can't if we first need to save cash because our treasury is empty, and we want to rush some things. So those 170 gold can be seen as a loss, or at least a partial loss, it is the price we pay for making it more difficult for others to build decent reserves and infrastructure.

If we would want to save additional cash (on top of what we are going to receive from this deal), we should do it before others can start on chivalry.

Most likely, we get in a similar situation with the next tech, which we should be able to sell to everyone, as nobody can research as fast as us. If we can keep this up for 3 or 4 techs, we automatically push ourselves forwards to the point where some of the teams can't afford our price anymore, and gets behind in tech... wars will certainly play a part in that. By not doing it with chivalry, we lose the advantage we have, but with short term gains (more immediate gold).

DeepO

[DeepO]

Re: Masking pyarmid build. I agree that it may be best to keep all our intentions to ourselves, only switching to Pyramids the last possible moment.

I also think we need some kind of public story surrounding it, propaganda if you wish, to get rid of the secretive tag.

DeepO

[nbarclay]

In the race for Chivalry, though, we'll be funded in large part by the proceeds of Feudalism, while our competitors will be slowed down by what they pay us. [Edit: And the more they pay us, the more they'll be slowed down.] If even one team pays us up front, we should have what we need for the aqueduct in Tempest. If not, we can suspend research for two turns before starting the race for Chivalry, and we should still be able to win by boosting our research to 80% and using our income to pay current expenses. (And if we win the race for the Pyramids, we'll enter our GA just as we start research again, which will make winning the race for Chivalry essentially trivial.) After we get Chivalry, we can decide how we want to balance research against rush buying.

Nathan

[Shiber]

Originally posted by DeepO
I also think we need some kind of public story surrounding it, propaganda if you wish, to get rid of the secretive tag.

I'm not sure where you're getting at. Have you anything specific in mind?

[nbarclay]

We're almost finished with our green hours, so unless someone has a strong objection, I'll go ahead and put us on a pace to finish Feudalism in five turns for the moment and we can get the gold back next turn if we decide we don't want to push ahead so quickly.