SGOTM4 - Game Thread.

Hi everyone, and welcome to your game thread.

Here is the start position.
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/SGOTM4.jpg

Note: EVERYONE has to install the correct resource graphics whether or not they have played this scenario or GOTM before. If you haven't done it yet, you had better get a wriggle on.

The saves will be available once the timelock has been released tonight (19th September).

Here are some links you might find useful.

The original GOTM28 Announcement. (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/games/gotm28_india.shtml)
The Draft Constitution (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=1733966&postcount=61)
The GOTM Reference Thread. (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=71788)
SGOTM4 - Maintenance Thread (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=100194)
Download latest Save. (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/submit/sgotm_submission_list.php)
Upload a Save. (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/submit/sgotm.php)

This Months' sponsored variant is 5 City Challenge the rules for which are as follows.

1. You may not end a turn with more than 5 cities.

Team Leaders: It would be a good idea to PM your team mates to get them all checked in here as soon as is possible. ;)

Good luck everyone! :)

signing in

our roster:

-grs
-Gozpel
-WackenOpenAir
-Offa
-Klarius
-NorthernPike

Checking in.

Hi there, me too !

Hello everyone.

I'm checking in as well.

I guess we need to work out whether to play the variant and an order of play etc....

edit: I just read from the maintenance thread that we are plating the variant.

5CCC right ? :D

5CCC!

I hope so, because I had a vivid dream the other day where I got an award for 20k in a similar game ;)

Checking in.
Ok, it looks like there is a strong tendency towards 5CCC :D .
Just to repeat:
I don't think that 5CCC will stand a chance for the gold laurels, if any team goes through the boredom to go for 20k.
That's the reason I contacted you all, so I don't end up in a team of people going for the gold by all means.
20k (especially on monarch; Diety or above would be something different) is IMO totally inappropriate for an SG.
So 5CCC is fine with me.
The alternative I saw, was going for a non variant game. The interesting point I saw there, was to try to get a result as good as one of the top-notch domination/conquest players.
I don't think anybody of our team would be able to challenge these results alone. It would be interesting to see, if we could do it as a team.
And BTW, I think we still could decide to play the variant or not and tell mad-bax so (it was always said that this would be a team decision).
But, if now all teams are going for 5CC, we should also do it.
So 5CCC is what I vote for (and the count looks like that's what it is :cool: ).


I have no preferences on roster position. I can go first or last or somewhere else.
I also see no R/L constraints within the next week.
I haven't played GOTM28, so I don't know where Ainwood hid the goodies.
But I also think that that doesn't make a difference, because mad-bax will have changed the map somewhat.

For the starting move, I would recommend worker E and look. Maybe somebody should do this move and post a screenshot so that we can discuss the first city position some more.
I think a settler move will be necessary.
First I want to have as many river tiles as possible in our first city radius.
Second I don't like city positions directly adjacent to mountains, if not absolutely necessary.

5CCC is ok with me. Worker e is a no brainer imho, as it is the best tile visible. If that gives no incentive to move the settler I'd settle on spot. I will be a long time till we need to work all tiles and at size 12 a mountain is not a bad tile.

I think 5 city conquest would be a worthy goal. I see Gozpel has already played this as a 20k so that is something else in favour of conquest.

It doesn't seem so straightforward to me to move the worker east, why not move him onto the mountain. Do we have any good cow sniffers in our team?

I haven't played a 5city game before. What are the rules? Especially: do we have to keep the same 5 cities throughout, and are we allowed to capture towns if we disband them before the end of a turn?

@Grs
I have no problems with mountains in the 21.
It's just the potential defense bonus for attackers in the 9, I tend to avoid.
I would probably settle SE, even if the worker move doesn't show anything special.
There's at least 1 more river tile, probably more, to win (we may lose something in the N also).
Settling E on the BG may also be justified, depending on what we see from the worker move.
This is only Monarch.
We won't be overrun by the AI, when we delay settling 1 or even 2 turns.

Edit: (cross posted) @Offa
The rule is 5 cities at the end of turn.
We are allowed to have as many cities as we like during a turn and then decide, which to abandon before hitting enter.

Guys: I have another player who I will be adding to this team. His nick is Northern Pike and I have played may SG's with him. He plays to your standard, and wants to play 5CCC.

We may switch towns and have more than 5 during ouir turns (armies!)
1. You may not end a turn with more than 5 cities.

I can't sniff a cow, but I would not move the worker to the mountain, just to get a look around.

Busy thread, I think I have to get faster ;)

@Offa
The worker move NW is possible, but if nothing is revealed it loses 3 worker turns.
That's just a bit much for a small chance to find something really great in the N.
It looks like we already have a decent region and we don't need a settler pump in 5CC.

I am OK about moving the worker east but just don't think it is the only option. It does look greener to the east which is in favour of moving the worker that way, otherwise I would climb up the mountain for a peek. I have definitely had games ruined by missing the right start spot, whereas a couple of wasted worker moves, while annoying, has never seemed so crucial.

whoa, i go to work half a day and the first page is filled !
This is good :D

So how about the play order, order of sign in to this thread?
-Grs
-Gozpel
-WackenOpenAIr
-Offa
-Klarius
-Northern pike

Espescially in the beginning, lots of discussion would be nice, also between the turns. So that we play those turns kinda together.

edit: deleted

@WackenOpenAir

The discussion of information from spoiler threads relevant to the original game is not permitted.

In this http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=1733966&postcount=61

Also note that mad-bax did some changes to the original map in the last few SGOTMs.

oh sorry, didn't notice, ill edit out my post.

While discussing it is illegal, i suppose reading them is not? (some probably have even played the gotm)

oh sorry, didn't notice, ill edit out my post.

While discussing it is illegal, i suppose reading them is not? (some probably have even played the gotm)

I don't think it is encouraged: I won't be reading the old spoilers. I may have glanced through them back in February (I didn't play this game), but I will endeavour to ignore any information gleaned back then. You can read the old pre-game discussion I suppose, as that isn't a spoiler.

I think mad-bax changes stuff around anyway.

Yeah, i suppose he changes things, but i immage the form of land mass remains the same.

Yes, reading those spoilers feels like cheating to me too, but on the other hand, there are people who played the gotm and other people who did not play it but now read it because it is not illegal, so why should those have an advantage?

Well, enough on this subject now, i know roughly the form of the land shape in our immeadiate surroundings, not even more than that. I will not read more of it and leave it at this.

So, do others agree with my proposed play order or have other idea's?

Also, i did not yet play a 5CC(C) before. Are there any specific, not obvious things i should know about it? (concerning strategy)
I will now start a training 5CCC game for myself on the current Cotm map. :D

I think the order is fine: any order is fine by me in fact, although anyone who has detailed map knowledge should go later to avoid benefiting from it.

On opening the save I wondered it there was something funny about the tile 2 to the SE, but I am never very good a fog gazing. It does make me veer to agreeing to move the worker east, so unless someone disagrees soon, we may as well try that.

I can start us of, like proposed, if this is agreed. I would do that in about a day from now. Just some things that are important for us imho, feel free to correct:

We want no overlap of our cities at all, if possible.
We should do the republic slingshot to become a republic as fast as possible, so we can keep up with research.
We should buy the wheel and iron working as soon as we are safe the AI wont beat us to philosophy.
We should max out infra when we can. We should make use of temples for happyness because a) they are cheaper for us and b) with only 5 cities temples can be quite cost efficient. I think of cathedrals too (at a later stage).
We should scout our close surroundings fast and with priority over getting far away contacts even, to be able to plan our initial cities together.

We do not want any granaries, nor any ancient age wonders. We should not build any regular units after a few initial exploring warriors.

Edit: I have no knowledge of the map as I did not play Gotm28.

Why no granaries?

The rest is totally logical to me.

In the training game i just started, i started by building granaries in every city. (after a few workers and all 4 settlers from capital b4 granary) 4 of them are at rivers though, so that makes a difference of course, does the need for granaries not depend on the rivers we are gonna find ?

Why no granaries?
4 settlers to build.

We should do the republic slingshot

I believe this is PTW. No slingshot.

oops......

Ok, we research the same order but add republic then.

I just opened the save...it say Catharge!?

granaries aren't only to build settlers right? i like having my cities reach size 12 by 500BC or so :D
In fact, i reason as follows:

Normally you invest much more in growth by building many cities. Now, we cannot make that investment in cities. Granaries is a similar investment though, not an extra city, but a city growing twice as fast. Therefore i would build granaries. (you want them anyway at some point, you dont want a the 40 or 80 food box to fill without granary)

Also would i prefer building as much of the city improvements we will build before chivalry. (granary,market,library,barracks,aqua) so that when we have chivalry, we can build knights without being disturbed by the need for city improvements.

If you worry about the upkeep cost, we could even sell them by the time the cities are size 12 as it will take a long long time before we can grow beyond 12.

Supposing the granary is ready at city size 4 and the city grows to size 12 in 36 turns (4 surplus) instead of 70, and every citizen produces only 1 shield, that still is a return of rougly 136 shields(70-36 = 34 for the last citizen, 0 for the first = 17 average per citizen between 4 and 12. Means 8*17 = 136) So even if you sell the granary, it has payed back itself twize counting only the shields. It gets more rewarding if you have less surplus or more shields per citizen. Of course, without river it only works if we have construction fast enough to build aquas.

I won't say I'm an expert on 5CCC, but I have participated in 3 SG's on deity (2 wins, 1 loss)

A couple of points:

No granaries before we have our 5 towns, please. We want those cities up and running as early as possible.

Remember, if we build a town and we don't like it later, we can abandon it and replace it in a better spot. It doesn't co9st much, just remember to sell off all stuff before abandoning.

Always work on commerce, river-tiles, roads, markets. This is crucial, because the AI always will out-research you, even on Monarch. We will need heaps of gold for trading.

Exploration is a must. Every contact will lower the tech-price and 2-fers will be our goal.

Keep the AI happy, always! Demands of petty gold or stuff is nothing compared to seeing that horde coming over the hill :)

We want quality military ASAP, we won't be able to afford regulars.

We only need one coastal city, depending on the map. We want maximum shields, so be careful with city-placements. If they are lousy I will abandon them and replace them during my turns :lol:

I'm sure there is more, but I only had one cup of coffee.

If you haven't read the last LK 5CCC game, you can find it here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=96264

I can start us of, like proposed, if this is agreed. I would do that in about a day from now. Just some things that are important for us imho, feel free to correct:

We want no overlap of our cities at all, if possible.
We should do the republic slingshot to become a republic as fast as possible, so we can keep up with research.
We should buy the wheel and iron working as soon as we are safe the AI wont beat us to philosophy.
We should max out infra when we can. We should make use of temples for happyness because a) they are cheaper for us and b) with only 5 cities temples can be quite cost efficient. I think of cathedrals too (at a later stage).
We should scout our close surroundings fast and with priority over getting far away contacts even, to be able to plan our initial cities together.

We do not want any granaries, nor any ancient age wonders. We should not build any regular units after a few initial exploring warriors.

Edit: I have no knowledge of the map as I did not play Gotm28.

I have no problems with you starting off.

I have some slightly different opinions on your points.

No overlap is fine, if we have the dirt. But I think 5 strong cities early is more important. We can relocate a city later, if it gets too crowded.

Republic is a bit of a question. As I understand this is republic with 2g unit support cost. We will need quite a few more units than the free ones in republic.
If we should be religous after all :confused: , I would definitely recommend to go for monarchy first.

I think our goal should be to get contacts as fast as possible for trading. This includes oversea contacts, so map making is a high priority.
As I understand this game is with differential naval movement. This may make the Lighthouse very valuable. But anyways in all Ainwood games I know (except one Pangea), the Great Lighthouse was useful.

Temples, if they should be cheap, is ok. Cathedrals I see only as useful if we really should lack luxes. But that's far in the future anyways.

I think at least a worker pump with a granary is still necessary. That's the fastest way to pump up the other cities, when they grow over size 7.

I won't say I'm an expert on 5CCC, but I have participated in 3 SG's on deity (2 wins, 1 loss)

A couple of points:

No granaries before we have our 5 towns, please. We want those cities up and running as early as possible.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=96264

Of course, i mean to build granaries after 4 settlers are in production (the cities don't have to be founded though) and a few (5) workers.

@gozpel
Don't overestimate the research of Monarch AI.
On the last few Monarch GOTMs I always was able to reach Writing first (with less than 5 cities).
Even in the cases where I had to research pottery first or had to trade for alphabet.
I just researched 100% all the time, taking out loans from the AI. And I did never cave to a demand (there weren't many anyways).
Also later it's still cheaper to research yourself, if you have libraries, than to pay monopoly prices. But that really depends on the contact situation what's the best at a given time.

Science and techs are not a problem in the ancient era on Monarch. The Middle Age is different though, when techs are getting more expensive and with 5 cities we won't be able to research many techs first. Not even if we have libraries and universities, because an AI with 15-20 cities will be faster. This is the time when we will have to rely on the 2-fers.

There are a couple of things that can make it happen though, like picking the right tech to research and also by making other civs fight each other.

Do we want to build any wonders? If we do I believe Colossus and the Lighthouse are of great use. They are usually the only ones I go for early on, if I go for any at all.

Also in 5CC, culture is a good thing, both for happiness and wide borders, so the AI can't sneak in cities where we don't want them.

I don't think the amount of culture is very relevant. Even with only a library, you will get 2 border growths. Getting 3 requires so much you wont get it until very late anyway.

For happiness, the happiness buildings cost about the same in upkeep as you need to spend trough the tax slider. IMO, the only real advantage of them is when you want to research at 100% while having the AI pay your maintainance. So i don't really like those buildings. I prefer only building those to fill in the differences between cities that would cause money to be wasted on the lux slider.

Reading Gozpel's post, i assume we will go the money road rather than the research road and thus will build banks etc.... If we build banks, we should obviously not build universities. But how about libraries, by the time those would be built, we are at the end of AA and going MA. Should we not build those either? (and have temples for our border expansion)

At what point will we start using bombardment? immeadiately? trebuchets? artillery? never? Normally on this difficulty the answer would of course be never, but now?

Did PTW have the tourist attraction thing ? And if so, does collosus become one? If both yes, i think that would be the only wonder really worth building (since as gozpel sais money is gonna be important) Else, i am in doubt if any AA wonder is really worth it.

I suppose we also need to build a good amount of workers quickly as most likely we might need to build collonies with possibly long roads for resources (and maybe luxuries).

for research and militairy comparison, what difficulty could this 5CC be compared with? (for me, no self research starts after emperor, artillery at emperor, catapults at deity/sid)

about governments:
republic will always be better economically than monarchy in PTW.
PTW republic is only 1 gold per unit (no free) not 2 like in C3C.
Monarchy gives 2-4-8 free unts, thus saving that amount of gold but by the time a city is a city (as opposed to a town), it has 7 people working, thus gaining 7 commerce from the republic bonus, with 1 corruption or so, still 6 gain vs 4 loss remaining. More gain as it grows. Same for metro size.
Weariness is an issue though, mostly depending on our way of fighting. With the bombardment method, losses are minimized and weariness is not so much of a problem.
So its warweariness vs ~30-35 commerce at 5 x size 12. As 30-35 commerce can buy 6-7 guys happy per city, i think republic is the way.

@Gozpel
I agree that Colossus and Lighthouse are the only really useful wonders for 5CC Monarch. If we are trying to hand build wonders we probably cannot get more than one of these, because I don't think we will have more than one coastal city. My preference is the Lighthouse.

Still being PtW we could also consider an early leader fishing war to build wonders. I typically don't have much luck (or lack the skill ?) , with such an approach.

Culture is a good thing, but I consider the culture of one building to be enough for a city in AA.
It's looking like we are not religious, so I would go for only libraries.
Temples at 60sh are overprized IMO. They still cost 1gpt maintenance, so save next to nothing from their happiness effect.

@WackenOpenAir (cross-posted as usual; I'm much to slow)
I would say we shouldn't think the 5CC to be any different in the beginning. Our production and commerce ability will be similar with 5 somewhat bigger (hopefully) well developed cities as compared to 10-15 small cities.
And by that I think cats (and maybe also trebs) are not needed.
The difficulties really start, when we have to fight much larger empires and the unit support really starts to hurt us. It also depends on how far away the others are and if we need a large fleet for reinforcements.
My gut feeling is still that it's better to have more fast fighting units, than slow bombardment, but I may be wrong.

EDIT:
Re Republic.
As I understand it this is not a pure PtW game, but a GOTM modded according to this:
http://gotm.civfanatics.net/games/gotm28_features.shtml
And by that the unit support is like C3C.

klarius: You are correct about the modding. The same mods apply to SGOTM4 as to GOOTM28

At all cities size 12 and giving 60 extra commerce in republic. 50 after corruption, 75 after market places+ libs.
monarchy 20 free units, republic 10 free units. 20 gold difference.
55 remaining for republic after 20 units.
turning point at 75 units.

at size 6 (with no libs/markets): 30 extra commerce, 25 after corruption.
monarchy 10 free, republic 5. 10 gold difference
15 remaining after 10 units, turning point at 25 units.
libs+markets move the turning point to 37 units.

At all cities size 12 and giving 60 extra commerce in republic. 50 after corruption, 75 after market places+ libs.
monarchy 20 free units, republic 10 free units. 20 gold difference.
55 remaining for republic after 20 units.
turning point at 75 units.

at size 6 (with no libs/markets): 30 extra commerce, 25 after corruption.
monarchy 10 free, republic 5. 10 gold difference
15 remaining after 10 units, turning point at 25 units.
libs+markets move the turning point to 37 units.

In fact it's 3 unit support for republic at size 7+, so that looks quite good.
The point was really for early on, especially when I still thought we would be religious and 2 government changes wouldn't be a problem.
We still have to consider war weariness.
We have to keep real wars short.
Because we will need our reputation, we cannot afford alliances in wars where the enemies can really hurt us.

Yikes, I'm playing with living calculators :lol:

I never bothered to crunch numbers like that and still I do pretty well. But maybe I'll learn something here :)

I am not a number cruncher, but monarchy will leave us no chance to keep up research wise. I am not that pessimistic about keeping up on research with 5 good towns in republic. We did keep up in mic-3 (while having slightly more cities, but playing on emperor). We will need some good trades, but besides that we wil be able to research some techs first and I even think we may get the tech lead in late middle ages - early industrial.

Ok, so we are Catharge and we are industious and commercial in ptw (if I remember this correct). That does not influence research that much (still have alphabet and should go for republic), but temples/cathedrals will get more expensive. I would still prefer building them, though maybe a bit later.

@Grs
Industrious and commercial is correct.

Writing is high priority anyways. After we have it, we can see how our tech and contact situation looks like.
I generally don't research any military AA tech, the AI comes up with these pretty quick.
I would probably do pottery@max->writing@max.
It's quite frequent that you can trade in pottery and the 53 beakers @ monarch aren't a big investment. Even if the first contact has pottery, buying it is typically more expensive.
We have already the most expensive starting techs, so starting with writing directly is also an option. Still I would go max even though it will say initially 40 turns @ max.

Temples/Cathedrals I would at least delay until we see how our lux situation looks like. So trading/researching CB has low priority for me and could be delayed until we have several contacts.

Whould republic be our first priority in this game?
Normally it is the only priority in AA for research and the rest is tradable.
However, now, it will take a take a little more to be rewarding and we also need to build libraries, markets and aqua's asap. So maybe we should do some of those techs before rep. (literacy, currency, construction).

I would not research math though, as that is pretty likely to be tradable. Writing first is a good thing, but then both col, philosophy and republic in a row i'm not sure, maybe we should do literacy first (which we are sure the AI wont do for us) then hope we can trade col and or philosophy (and math) before going for republic.
Depending on how fast the AI is in research, we might even research construction/currency and trade republic from them instead of researching it.

Of course, not too much to say about it now. I don't know how we will do compared to the AI in this 5CC, i don't know how the AI contacts and thus trading will be. It will all be more clear in the game. I just think we should not blindly beeline for republic without a second thought6.

Temples and cathedrals are completely useless before marketplace. After marketplace, they are of slight use (temple 0.5 gpt, 1gpt with bank). They are even more useless than courthouses.
I think we should build them temples only when we don't have anything better to build. (can't afford the upkeep of having more units and no better city improvents (which pretty much means no city improvements)

In short, i agree with klarius :)
although pottery might not be needed as it is almost always tradable and we will be building granaries only after the settlers and some workers (if you guys even agree on building them at all). I havent installed the mod things and looked at the save yet, but maybe we could look what opponents we have with the spaceship screen (if that is legal), see the amount of opponents with pottery and thus estimate our chances to trade it.

Also do we need to think about the numidian mercs. This depends mostly on the amount of BG and river IMO. if we have little of it, a despotic GA isn't that bad or maybe even good. If we do have many BG or river (despot "maxed" gold/shield) i think we should definately prevent a despotic GA.

btw, i am already happy with this team looking at the discussions going on here. :goodjob:

@Grs

I would probably do pottery@max->writing@max.


This discussion, while laudable, is racing beyond our immediate concerns. I will therefore add a bit more to it: Why race to pottery if we don't intend to build granaries? are we sure about granaries, surely it depends on the local food resources?

I think we need a little more real info before we can make concrete plans. For now our main concern is founding our first city in the right spot.

Our conquest plans will presumably ultimately depend on geography: Ainwood's maps have a tendency to include large oceans which are tough to cross, but if we find ourselves on a Pangea then not so much research will be needed. I was anticipating conquering with elephants (not likely now we turn out to be Carthage) +/- cavalry but I suppose bombardment may be needed if things go slowly.

I would have thought that 5 cities favours Republic over Monarchy even more than my normal ICS, but I haven't really worked this out. Talk of cathedrals etc is premature, we can decide about that in a months time.

Anyway, there comes a time for action, and that time is now. So please make a move, even if it is just to move the worker, and by all means lets talk again with the news that brings.

Yes i think it is time to move something indeed. GOGO Worker !

So the question if we want granaries is still to be agreed on.
Also if we go pottery or writing.

As i explained, i am for building granaries after the settlers and some workers. While i suggest researching writing first and trading for pottery.

Ok, won't comment on the pottery idea...strange... I also do not think we should play 1 turn and discuss. Anyways I did the first 20 before reading that proposal.

Settler east, spots cow. Catharge settled on spot. Catharge builds 3x warrior, 1 settler. Lux to 10% in 3250BC and back to zero in 3050BC when settler spawned. Research was 20 turns writing on min, 20 turns left.

Worker did road and irr. bg on the river, road and irr. cow, change bg to mine and road and mine another bg on the river.

In 3000BC we spot a red border, but no contact is possible.

I had some crashes in the civlopedia, could not even check what kind of resource sheep are :(

Below a proposed dotmap. We have cramped corners so everything is suboptimal. We either get overlap or waste resources. I would settle red, blue, green. We will need to refound later on.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/sgotm4-offa-3000bc.jpg

Save (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm4/offa_SG004_BC3000_01.SAV)

Edit: Heavens, I replayed the last 2 turns due to the crashes suboptimal. One turn research was wasted and put into worthless lux instead. Please remember to lower lux. I really love those gotms with modded resources :mad:

Yay, we started ! :D :goodjob:

I think we should make use of the city ring placement advantage if possible.

@Grs
Did you download the latest install pack.
mad-bax did an update with the missing civilopedia icons some days ago.

@all
I don't think we should put all cities in the rather shield poor north.
We could get a very nice 2-sheep city (btw sheep is +1s +2f, like cow).
Or maybe we could even get a city down to the wool (the best of the GOTM resources +1s +2f +1g and a lux).

3 tiles south of the capital may also be a nice place. We should look first with a warrior how the tiles in the fog look like.

I like the dotmap, but if we want it to look fancy like that we need border expansions. And I stick to what I said about early temples, if the upkeep start to bankrupt us ;) we can always sell them after we've got the borders expanded.

The towns placed like that will have a pretty low shield count, but they will have 3-4 BG's to work of and that's not too bad.

No way we want a town close to those red borders down there, that's to beg for trouble.

Who's up and how many turns for next player, not much happens in the beginning.

Btw, Carthage should build settlers only now, until we have 5 towns, it could be done in something like 20-25 turns? Calculators, can you check this? :)

-Grs
-Gozpel
-WackenOpenAIr
-Offa
-Klarius
-Northern pike

So it's gozpels turn now.

With 4 food, growth in 5 makes 10 turns per settler. 30 more for 3 settlers.

I agree only settlers should be build in capital. Workers can be build in the other cities for now.
They can do without temples for quite a while. Their borders will connect to the capital, giving them extra tiles. They will have 11-12 tiles available without temples. libraries will be early enough to provide the culture needed.

@gozpel
I don't know why you want to stay far away from the red border.
This is not deity. If we should have a small early war, that's no big problem.
Also the extreme fast settler production is just your style.
It isn't mandatory and I wouldn't do it.
There is no reason to play the beginning of a 5CC any different than a normal game. I play more towards a balance of expansion and tile improvement, which means I would look to get another worker soon.

Looking closer on the dot map, I don't think we should have so much water in our cities. Every city should have 12 tiles able to produce at least 1 shield. That's getting tight with the red dot, which gets it only by overlap.
There's no need to settle a city to pull in the spices. These will be inside our culture, by the second culture expansion of the capital anyways.

I would move the red dot NWN, forget about green and first look to the south for 1-2 good river locations with high shields. Only if we don't get the southern locations I would settle another city to the north.

Our industrious worker (remember in ptw it's even better) is more than enough for now. I 100% agree with 3 or 4 settlers next. Each new town can start a worker first and that may already be all workers we want for the rest of the game.

I propose next player 15 and 10 from there on. It seems to be the usual to me.

@Grs
Did you download the latest install pack.
mad-bax did an update with the missing civilopedia icons some days ago. Probably not and that's what I really do not like about these mods.

Sorry about that grs. But hopefully I will get the mod stabilised for SGOTM for the next game and no further downloads will ever be required. In fact it is stable now, I am just scared to death I've made a mistake so I keep checking it over and over.

Our industrious worker (remember in ptw it's even better) is more than enough for now. I 100% agree with 3 or 4 settlers next. Each new town can start a worker first and that may already be all workers we want for the rest of the game.

Absolutely not my opinion.
Even with industrious workers you should have more than cities early.
Especially when we settle in the southern mountains, what we should do in my opinion. Later when we have enough tile improvements we can merge them into the cities.

By making settlers like crazy we will keep the capital small and cannot work the good tiles there. At the same time we make new cities, which work unimproved tiles. And the northern cities don't even have river tiles. Our total shield and commerce output is much lower.

And in fact seeing the need for workers now, I would even would put priority to get a granary in one city. That may take some time, because we may not get pottery very soon.
A worker pump is always good, early you need the workers, later you use the workers to pump the other cities to size 12.

Another small remark:
A sheep hill is 2s 2f in despotism unimproved, already as good as a mined BG.
It goes to 3s 2f mined in despotism and 4s 3f in republic. We should definitely try to get such strong tiles, instead of settling cities with mainly grass and water.

Another small remark:
A sheep hill is 2s 2f in despotism unimproved, already as good as a mined BG.
It goes to 3s 2f mined in despotism and 4s 3f in republic. We should definitely try to get such strong tiles, instead of settling cities with mainly grass and water.

I agree the sheep spot is alright, but no cities should be further away than that. Even a small corruption is a waste with only 5 cities.

Also, the point of getting those settlers out fast is to get them going now and not later. I know, it's my playing style to spawn like crazy and not even my promises to myself seem to stop that (GOTM etc.) BUT with 5 cities only, you do want them get into gear right away. Barracks will be a priority and libraries will suffice for culture. This is only Monarch, but I do not underestimate the AI and the RNG and stuff.

I simply want to prepare and be prepared for whatever we will do later on.

And if stuff doesn't look good later on, we can always relocate cities...even to the other part of the continent

I can't play before the others had their say, I don't want to run my own agenda.


(Even if I know I'm right, this time) :mischief:

@Klarius:

Ok, we could discuss this matter for ages and won't agree, so I will again start a different discussion:

The northern area I dotmapped holds many more shields than any other we see. Each city includes at least 2 hills (3 shields) and 2 bgs (2 shield) and has the potential food to get enough population to work them!

There is just one nice spot in the south I can see and this is the hill on the river next to the sheep (or whatever that is). The wool (I guess it's that) near the red border may be nice too, but we won't get it before attacking.

@Klarius:

The northern area I dotmapped holds many more shields than any other we see. Each city includes at least 2 hills (3 shields) and 2 bgs (2 shield) and has the potential food to get enough population to work them!

There is just one nice spot in the south I can see and this is the hill on the river next to the sheep (or whatever that is). The wool (I guess it's that) near the red border may be nice too, but we won't get it before attacking.

The northern towns will only come up to speed with an aqueduct. That's quite some time till then. The sheep town has a river and can even be a powerhouse at small size. But I would settle there either w of the sheep hill, or even w of the plains sheep (needing border expansion to get the hill).
Then there is enough food for pop 8-10 in republic and about 18-19sh (if I counted correctly). The little bit increased distance corruption shouldn't be a big problem as rank 3-4 city.

I also don't see another great spot besides the sheep and the wool up to now.
But there could be still enough in the fog s of the oysters (which is fish in disguise), to make a good city 3s of the capital.

With respect to the wool, we should consider that we want it anyways former or later. It's a lux resource in addition to it's awesome other features. But I also think we will not get it peacefully. That is not necessarily a problem ;) .

Edit:
Looking again on the screenshot, I think 2 towns in the north would be better than 3. And I don't think both need to be coastal. Then one to grab the sheep. Last town to decide only when all the fog up to our neighbor is lifted.

I'm done reading this and will play and settling the proposed spots as per the dotmap.

I understand this is only Monarch and we can settle far away and grab what we want and so on. But we don't know anything yet, not even the red civ. So before we get all over ourselves, we should build a civilization! Not with cities in the middle of nowhere, but as a decent ring.

Then, after we built some infrastructure and when/if the foot doesn't fit the shoe, then we decide what is best. Right now, quick expansion and growth is top priority.
I'm a master of growth and early expansion and I know it IS needed in every game. Just to look at weaker civs or difficulty levels are no excuses to not expand.

Give me ONE reason to not expand and I will consider it. Right now I know I'm right.

Just so you know klarius, we might move our whole empire to another continent in the future. Nothing is impossible, just don't get stuck on small things for now. Let's grow and prosper for a few turnsets, until we know what to do.

The dotmap is great, a 5th city will be somewhere close to the sheep, might even be a good spot one day. I though, will expand to the north.

Hello, gentlemen. Good to be playing with you all (and with Grs for the second time). Please excuse this late check-in, but due to Murphy's Law you knew I was on this team 24 hours before I did. :D

I'll acquaint myself with the discussion (already impressively detailed) and the 3000 BC save now.

@Northern Pike: Hello again, I am happy to play a game with you again after SGOTM1, which was quite a success!

I do think it is good to build at least one more settler before workers, the capital is improved enough for now, and the initial worker can now work for that first city we made. Also, cities is an investment with a greater return on investment than workers. I would prefer building only settlers in capital and workers in the other cities. i already explained my granary fanaticism and completely agree with klarius on the importance of growth and expansion.

I do agree with the dotmap as it is except if it can be improved to benefit from city ring placement. I do not think we should settle south of the mountains for corruption reasons. I do not think we should settle into the mountains for food reasons. so remains the area between mountains and capital.

I do not worry about the sea tiles. We use virtually all land tiles on in the area (except for those spices we are just missing out) so production simply cannot be improved, only shifted from one city to another. I rather not shift it from one city to another if that means more overlap.

The sheep spot: if we settle on the hill that is next to both sheep, we will get:
2 grassland that can be irrigated = 6 food
1 sheep plains irrigated = 4 food
1 sheep hills = 3 food
1 hills = 1 food
maybe there is more food under the black area, else the city wont get past size 7.
So that is not a good spot.

I think the hills 3 south is the best spot unless something better is discovered in that area.

Pre-turn - Our city looks good :lol:

Swap to settler.

Lower luxes and we gain another gold - 4gpt atm. 21 turns left of Writing, 100% will be the same, so we continue the long road of 10% science.

2950bc - Move the settler to the coast.

2900bc - Utica founded -> warrior

We meet the Romans - Masonry, 2gpt and 96g would give us BW and WC. I settle to trade Masonry for Warrior Code and 10g.

2710bc - Carthage settler -> settler. Send him toards the NW spot and spices.

2670bc - Utica warrior -> worker. The second cow is irrigated, so Utica got 4 food/turn.

2550bc - Our southern warrior tramples through Roman lands, annoying Caesar.

Settler is in place to found a city next turn. Let Carthage build 2 more settlers, please.

11 turns left on Writing, we have 161g and make 8gpt atm.


http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/sgotm_offa.jpg


The Save (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm4/offa_SG004_BC2550_01.SAV)

Nice round. :goodjob:

I don't know much about the AI tech pace at monarch, but should we be thinking about archer-rushing the Romans before they get legionaries built? I'd build a barracks in Utica after the worker, anyway, and perhaps one in Carthage before the last settler.

Monarch tech pace will mostly depend on the number of contacts the romans have. Their own research is not necessarily faster than ours.

I don't think Carthage should build any more settlers.
Utica can do settlers every 10 turns while Carthage is growing.

If we don't grow Carthage, we will have steenkin' bad commerce, when writing comes in and we should start max research.

And we will have to buy BW first then, so that we get some value out of the trade with writing (IW).

Rome is researching IW ATM with very high probability. Legions are defender and attacker so IW has highest priority for them. They will probably have it at the time we get writing.

We need IW then to see where the iron is. It is important that we lift the fog everywhere in Roman lands to see where their iron sources are.

I wouldn't go for a war against Rome, if they don't attack. It looks like they have no other contacts (they didn't have any first tier techs except their starting and BW for which they had enough time to research). So it looks like they are our only trading partner for some time.

I settle to trade Masonry for Warrior Code and 10g. I would have preferred bronze working, as it gets us closer to iron working. But we can still buy it with the gold saved from minimum research.

Let Carthage build 2 more settlers, please. Yes, please :)

If you really want to continue this fast expansion, then don't let Carthage build the two settlers. One out of Carthage and one out of Utica would be much faster.
Utica has 9 sh in the box anyways wasting 1 on the worker. It can be micromanaged for a settler in 7 (maybe 6).

Edit:
And BTW, Gozpel, you missed an opportunity for your fast expansion there. Starting a settler right away in Utica would have allowed to have the last two settlers on the same turn. :D .

I will play tonight. Do you guys agree with founding that fourth city in the south exactly where the warrior is standing or do you have reasons to place it elsewhere?

Can't check the Oysters and stones right now, are they really that good? I'd prefer the 4th city in the north and the fifth city in the sheep (is it sheep?) valley.

The question should not be where the next city goes, but where the last two cities go.
I don't like half-hearted play.
Either delay the next settler for 10 turns to get our population and commerce up, or go for the full expansion mode which means 1 settler in 5 turns and the next 1 turn after that from Utica.
I don't see that the position under the warrior would be very strong. We have no food bonus before either harbor or republic (Oysters +2f +1g, Rocks +1s ). I would only settle it, if not settling in the north.
We can get some more population there later than by the sheep but only by working the plain coastal tiles. It will never get the shield powerhouse the sheep positions could be (and BTW it is 8 population on the hill there and 10 on the grass, you have to account for the city center).

Edit:
BTW, if the decision is, to not settle 3 cities in the north, then the second shouldn't go to the position where the settler is. It then should grab all the hills.

I agree with founding our third and fourth cities according to the dotmap, and the fifth where it can claim both sheep, not where the warrior now stands.

Klarius, I take your point about northern expansion: there's room up there for two excellent cities or three compromised ones, and it's painful to take the latter course. But where would we put our fifth city if we didn't found three in the north? This is a bad map for a 5CC, but we have to work with what's available.

Klarius, I take your point about northern expansion: there's room up there for two excellent cities or three compromised ones, and it's painful to take the latter course. But where would we put our fifth city if we didn't found three in the north? This is a bad map for a 5CC, but we have to work with what's available.

We started towards the three cities in the north so we should stick to it.
I personally would have put two cities in the north, one 3 south of the capital and one west of the sheep hill.
My comment was just an if Wacken.. likes the warrior position so much, I wouldn't want to forfeit the sheep.

So you guys want a city that can't grow beyond size 7 ?

Btw, i was talking only about the last city, i thought the 3 in the north are clear. With fourth, i meant fourth settler we produce.

edit: Oh yes, i forgot about the centre tile. That makes a difference.
well, luckilly i won't need to make the decision for that last city in my turns....

It very much seems we are alone on the island with the romans.

Writing can be traded for iron next turn i hope, and maybe get back the 153 gold i payed for bronze working.

Now we have a kind of technology problem. We have only rome to trade with and we badly need many techs:
currency, construction, Liturature and Pottery were needed already, but now maybe map making should get a high priority so we can meet other intelligence.

I suggest researching pottery first, then map making so we can meet other intelligence.

While pottery is researching, you could use barracks as a prebuild for the granaries. I understand we want barracks as well, but better have the granary first since else you are paying upkeep for a barracks while you are building the granary. (and the rax are being useless when not building units)

I think we should discuss if we want to archer rush or not. My instinct says we should not because i like to power up in early game by building granaries. The idea of clearing our island from AI right away sounds tempting though. Also do i doubt if we will have construction and aqua's in time to really benefit from granaries. I am really in doubt between granaries and archer rushing.

If we don't archer rush, we should build granaries, since else the cities might be forced to build more units than we want to pay upkeep for.

IF we archer rush, i think presence of iron in roman area should decide if we do it with or without barracks. If they have iron near, i think we should either go right away without barracks or not at all. Waiting for barracks might give them time to start legion production.

Workers are doing their work, if you wonder why i road before mining near leptis: without roads the city wont get the 3th shield anyway due to corruption, with roads it may do so.

I suggest settling the next city 3 tiles south.
-it is close than the sheep, so less corruption
-it can be connected by road many turns earlier and with less effort. roads lower corruption a lot as well.
-A close city is easier for logistics (moving units and workers)
-It has 3 hills and 3 grasslands in its radius, plenty of opportunity for production.
But Iron working might render this discussion pretty useless. :D

The worker in the northern city can be seen as placeholder. I did not select a worker yet because connecting the road will probably increase the cities production to 2 per turn so the worker would be ready too early.


http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm4/offa_SG004_BC2150_01.SAV

sorry, no pictures, MS paint only alows BMP, i need to find myself a jpg editor.

Oh and please don't start golden age by using numidians.

I say it again, though nobody is listening. We need our commerce up, so settlers out of our only good commerce city (Carthage) are bad. Utica could have made these settlers nearly as fast, losing much less commerce.
The next settler may even bump research of a cheap tech like pottery from 6 to 7 turns.
And also again, this is not deity. We cannot expect to buy every tech we need, we need to research ourselves.
Cash by min research is not the way to go.

We need more contacts ASAP. So I would recommend beeline to MM now. Pottery is a precondition for this, so that's what we should research next. And I still want one granary (in Utica).
Going for republic first, which I would do in a normal game, could turn out to be a big delay. Sometimes the AI on monarch needs very long to get MM, if you don't speed them up enough.

A war against Rome would be only beneficial, if we want to fish leaders.
Removing them would be very bad. We shouldn't kill any civ, before we know the majority of the others. We also want them to build roads down in the south, otherwise we will have to do that ourselves later.

A general remark about trading:
I never give cash to other civs on monarch or below, if I can avoid it. I always pay with gpt and even buy gold with gpt. I use the gold to finance the negative cash flow.

There isn't much money around and I don't want the others to burn the money on upgrades or later cash rushing.
If they declare at some point, they lose the gpt payments and are in a bad position.
OTOH if they have my gold, they may upgrade or rush units, having nothing left for the peace treaty and the money is gone forever.

Why are you panicking klarius? Are you gong to buy an early space ship for the gold or what?

By looking at the scores on the submission page we are doing alright and we will research at a nice pace when we have the 5th town down. Then we can concentrate on your issues and we will listen to you then. :) But not before we have 5 towns.

Remember early score advantage in a game like this can win us the game. But that would take culture to expand our borders to increase the score (owned territory) plus happy citizens. It seems like I was over-ruled on the culture idea and I leave it with that.

You were right about Utica, we could've built a settler there, but we also need workers and somewhere it was suggested that town was going to build a few workers and I followed that. Remember, with all those workers the commerce will kick in sooner than you think.

150 or so gold is nothing to worry about either, what can they do with it except upgrading 2-3 legions or build an embassy?

I do understand your concerns though in some aspects, but I don't think Whacken and grs (and I) want what we want for silly reasons. Strangely enough we haven't heard from Offa concerning these discussions, he is a great planner. (Kinda rude to leave out NP, he will have his say soon enough.)

Now klarius, if you can get over the commerce and early settlers, perhaps you can do some calculations for the 5th city. Since we want it fairly close to the rest of the empire, the sheep spot is alright, but it won't ever get 12 pop. Another great spot is 3S of the capitol, it will have 6 food tiles available and that spot is on a river, it would also grab the oyster and the pearls which will give more with harbors.

There are actually 3-4 spots S or SSW where we could plant a city. I shouldn't really discuss this too much since I'm biased.

I competely agree to research Mapmaking ASAP.

Let's get over this Polish Parliament and play.

After searching for a kind of turnlog for some minutes; I guess there is none and I can't look at the save now :(

I see no point in repeating the settler/worker discussion for ages. I hope this won't lead to a democracy game :p, so I keep myself short on topics:

Archer rush - no - we don't need more land - just war for resources or vastly better locations.
Map Making - yes, we need more contacts.
City - found it where it looks best longterm, I am not sure we will need to relocate soon

I prefer turnlogs too, but this early it's not totally important, as long as players do the right stuff.

I'm not in favor of early archer rushes either, I rather build temples to grab further territory, even sea-squeares count. Not ocean tiles though.

What i'm trying to say is, we will only get 5 cities - EVER and we need to culturally expand those borders to the maximum to even have a chance of getting a decent score....if other solutions doesn't resolve that. Like a conquest victory.

I think a lot of teams will have problems gaining that, so we want max points early to give us a headstart. The points in non-conquest games with few cities are limited, which you know if you played OOC games.

We can't treat 5 cities differently, so we need to push those borders right away or some smarter team will streamline past us. Right now I see one team that did what I wanted to do and they are racing, they probably built one warrior at the start and then settler and got ahead of us. I still think our plan is good, we could've cut down on one warrior, but 2 points won't make us win the game. But 100 might.

Next city is 3S of the capitol by my calculations. It's on a river, which will be important longterm.

I'm not panicking. I still think we can do quite well.
What I didn't like is the inconsistency.
IMO we needed either workers or settlers, not both at the same time.
But OK, this will smooth out soon.
I'm also not worried by the little bit money now.
I just wanted to point out, how I generally deal with monarch civs.

Well, here some lengthy considerations on city placement.

For the 5th city there are several things to ponder.
One thing is that this will be the town, which will be most likely relocated, if we ever get into this (we may need a city on another continent at some time).
If we don't relocate, it would be good to have no overlap, if you look on score. We could get quite a bit territory between the capital and a more southern city.
There are three major possibilities, I see:

The 3s city, can grow to size 12 and above with a harbor, it's as near as Utica so will have low corruption, but will increase the corruption in the other 2 cities. It's easy to connect. The overlap means, that we lose quite a bit territory, especially after the second expansion of the capital. The maximum shields are lower than the other options, but it will be a commercial powerhouse after a harbor.

The hill north of the sheep hill will be much better for score. The second expansion of the capital (soon) will already link to it. It can grow to max size 8 before rails. The plains sheep will only be available after a culture expansion, so it needs worker turns very soon. The shield potential is very high.
It has the same distance as one of the northern towns, so corruption shouldn't be much of a problem.

The hill west of the sheep hill has the same features as before, pop 8 and the same shields. Corruption will need a courthouse ASAP, then it should be ok. If we would keep it until itself has a second culture expansion, it could give us a lot of territory linked to the capital. The plains sheep, means a simple irrigation can speed up it's growth. It also features a nice potential kill zone for Romans, needing only one mountain to block.

But we could also think of going farther south into the real good land. This would probably mean war.

BTW we should also consider to have enough cities at some point (not the end of turn), to build the FP. It would be really nice to jump the palace around at leisure :D

Good round, WOA. :goodjob:

I now agree with founding a city three tiles directly south of Carthage. WOA and Gozpel have made strong arguments.

Edit: Cross-post with Klarius's thorough discussion. I still like the site three south of Carthage. If later on we find we desperately need more shield production, we might be able to abandon the least useful northern city (the middle one) and re-found it elsewhere. Klarius, your observation that we could build the FP despite playing a 5CC is most ingenious.

The problem with leaving the Romans alive to trade with us is that they're no research monsters, but they are a strong military civ. For every unit of time in which we let them survive they'll get a good deal stronger without advancing much in technology, so I'm not sure it's a good exchange from our point of view. I'd like to wipe the Romans out or at least reduce them to one city as soon as possible. Of course, if we are alone on an island with them they'll come for us pretty quickly, so this may be an academic argument.

That said, I think the time has passed in which an archer rush without barracks could work. We need to prepare for a long and conclusive war with the Romans, meaning we should build barracks first, then swordsmen or archers. If this were a solo game I'd try hard to have catapults before going to war with the Romans, though I know that their utility is a controversial point.

BTW, we are intending to win by conquest, are we not? I don't recall much discussion of this.

BTW, we are intending to win by conquest, are we not? I don't recall much discussion of this.

That's what we said in the beginning. And by that I also think the Romans are our smallest problem.
I don't see that we gain anything by removing them early. We only open up land for barbs at first and other civs later.
I would be perfectly happy with leaving Rome for last.

And by that I also think the Romans are our smallest problem.


Possibly, but they're the problem we can solve now, or soon. Assuming we are sharing an island with just the Romans, ___ knows when we'll be able to make a serious military effort against any other civ.

To have other civs found cities on the land we'd cleared of the Romans would be irritating but not very threatening, since such cities would be unproductive, and could be swept up in a couple of turns at the end of the game. On the other hand, imagine what would happen if the Romans attacked us with their full strength while we had most of our army overseas fighting distant wars. Even at monarch, that would be a problem.

Just a little note on score, because some people (including me :blush: ) were talking about it.
The green laurels are given to the highest Jason score.
That doesn't make much sense, if playing 5CC.
The Jason milking bonus is so high that the base Firaxis score is quite irrelevant (5CC will have only a few 100 base Firaxis).
As an example:
To get the same Jason score, if finishing by conquest in 1405 as opposed to 1400, you would need 28 points more base Firaxis.
So the green laurel is essentially awarded to the fastest finish overall, with a few turns modification for victory condition.

The gold laurel is awarded for the best finishing turn relative to Jason best date. That makes even less sense, because 5CC influences the different victory conditions differently.
As I stated already several times I don't want to aim for the gold, because I think only a boring 20k has a chance.

So our goal has to be to conquer the world as fast as possible. Firaxis score doesn't play an important role.

I've just realized it's my turn. I think all this strategy discussion is very worthy but I do like to read turnlogs too.

After a quick look at the save and read through comments I think the plan is:

Build a town on hills 3 to south of capital. This will be unpleasant to defend in some ways because of adjacent mountain but should be OK. I would probably have moved closer to Rome left to myself.

Learn writing next turn, and hopefully trade for iron. Then research full on for COL with a view toward Republic or full on towards Maps ?

Cross fingers that we have some iron: otherwise the Romans could be tricky.

Grow the cities and connect lux.

I would like to take out the Romans or at least hurt them. Playing 5CC seems to me to encourage this as we won't be concentrating on expansion. However, it may be tough to do, especially if they get iron connected and we don't. Probably not much to do re this in the next 10 turns anyway, but I may start building barracks. I think if we really wanted granaries we would have researched pottery at the start and built one in the capital before now (right after the first settler). Since we didn't I think we should back up our initial judgement and do without them for longer.

Trigger Golden Age with num mercs (just kidding).

I will play tonight, but will wait a while to give people a chance to disagree with my plan first.

Good plan, go ahead :)

about the turn log: so little happened in these early turns, i didn't think it was usefull to make a turn log. I just founded 2 cities (you can see the year in the city screen) and made 2 workers. Thats about it.

I don't see why you wouldn't like to build both workers and settlers. Settlers cost more shields than workers, the capital provides those shields (in fact, it provides them at exactly the needed rate with its growth). So to me it seems totally logical to build the settler their and the workers in the other food bonus city.
Or would you suggest building the settler in the second city and not building workers at all :confused:

about score: all teams play the variant. Some teams might go for the culture score, some might go for the conquest score. conquest will be decided by fastest victory, not by the few points from territorry.

That is also the reason removing the romans seems attracktive to me. If we don't do it now, they will be taking all of the island around us and we will have to bother with them for a long time. This will also slow us down in clearing the rest of the world as we have to defend ourselves against them. If we do clear them out, sure others will settle on our island, but as stated, they will just be some corrupt cities and also it will take a while before they start settling on our island, certainly before they start to get close to us.

I don't think we have any other option in research than to go for MM now.

Replacing towns doesn't seem good to me, but since i never played 5CCC, i might be wrong. Giving up a city to place one on another continent seems rediculous to me though. That city would be completely corrupt, thus effectively making it a 4CCC.

I think 5 workers is enough for now (until we reach size 6).

I won't comment any more on the city placement and the amount of granaries to be build, i think i did enough of that :D

I don't think we should do catapults now for different reasons:
-we would need more than when we go just archers, thus giving the romans more time to get their legions.
-they need to be defended, i prefer not to use numidians for GA reasons.
-I used archer rushes succesfully on deity, why would it not work on monarch?

the luxes shouldn't be to much trouble, 1 is directly within reach, the other just a few road tiles away. should indeed be done fast to prevent the need for the happiness slider and thus faster map making.

@Offa
I think our commerce is too low to efficiently start the course to republic. I would rather go pot->map in the hope that we can soon find some new friends.
After that we will be grown quite a bit and have the commerce to attack the CoL-Philo-Republic path.

And still again, I like a granary in one town as a worker pump.
Utika can then pump out a worker every three turns. These can be merged into the cities, which would need 10 turns to grow. That's a much faster growth rate overall and also allows all cities to be at approximately the same size.

Later when our cities reach size 7 we anyways should grow them with merged workers and keep the worker pump at size 6.

@WackenOpenAir
The limiting factor on settlers was not shields, but food. Utica was also able to get a settler in 10 turns, when starting at size 2.
The capital is already wasting the shields from the growth turn, when starting at size 1. There were 3 improved tiles from very early. Waiting once for 10 turns and doing a settler at size 3-5 would have greatly improved our commerce and would have allowed to produce some units in between. If at the same time a settler would have been made in Utica the total delay would have been negligible.
We wouldn't have the workers, but these can be made quickly at bigger sizes.

Re cities on other continents:
It may be our only option, if we lack a critical resource. The AI is so damn slow to connect spare resources, so that waiting till we can trade it may take a long time.
And it's not sure that a city on another continent is completely corrupt. The major effect for making cities corrupt is rank corruption. Our cities will never have a high rank.

I agree with Map Making as our next research objective. We should be thinking about pre-building the Great Lighthouse, though I know this won't combine easily with preparing for a serious war.

WOA, I don't think it's realistic to assume that we can fight the Romans without using our Numidians. We don't want to advance on their legionaries with stacks defending at two (if we have iron) or even one (if we don't have it--remember, we don't get ordinary spearmen).

One advantage of catapults would be that the city producing them wouldn't need a barracks, so the first two cats (forty shields, representing the unbuilt barracks) would in effect be free.

http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm4/offa_SG004_BC1750_01.SAV


2150bc Nothing to change. I feel a little uneasy about building another settler in the capital, but I have decided to carry on with it.

2110bc Writing discovered. Start on pottery at 100%, due in 5. Leptis Magna finishes a worker and starts a barracks. Spend 40g on an embassy with Rome. It is defended by one reg spearman, has no improvements and is building a settler, due in 6 at 4spt. Rome has iron connected which is bad.

Trade Rome writing for Iron working and 28g.

There is iron on the hill right next to Rome but we don't appear to have any.

2030bc Rome has the Wheel.

1990bc Barb appears from ivory in N. I had sent up the warrior there to discourage this but... the warrior kills the barb without damage or promotion. He is right next to the camp now in the extreme NW.
Decision time re the settler in the capital, I take the option of building the settler.

1950bc Disperse barb camp in North and warrior is promoted.
The settler is finished in the capital and I have to bump science back up to learn pottery next turn.

Settler is moved south with a warrior escort. Workers are positioned to build a road down there.
Everywhere is building barracks.

There is quite a lot of movement round the southern barb camp in the mountains but I don't fancy attacking it.

1910bc Pottery learnt, start on Maps at max. This is 32 turns at present, but as we will be growing our population now it should reduce. Roman archer kills barb camp in south and our warrior fortfied on the next door hill survives an attack by barbs.

I switch the capital and Utica to granaries. Please note that they can be switched back to barracks after my turns if so wished.

We still can't afford the wheel.

1870bc Spot another barb camp in mountain to SW.
1830bc Hippo built 3 to south. Utica grows and lux has to be bumped up to 20% to avoid riot.

1790bc. Rome has a worker for sale. I can't resist this but haven't quite got the cash to buy it. I don't want to give gpt as that would mean reducing science so I am afraid I gave him a ROP. Overall then ROP and 95 g for a worker.
Spice is connected so lux back down to 0.

And that's it. Mapmaking is due in 18 turns. Utica has been swapped back to a barracks but this could I suppose be changed to a granary. I prefer the barracks myself. Barbs are looking threatening just to the south and I have pulled back troops accordingly.

We have no iron, and Rome now has our money. At least the demographics screen looks good. I guess we ought to connect up the northern ivory with a colony soon. The Romans have a right of passage, :blush: but I think they will miss their worker.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/1750bc.jpg

Good work. :goodjob:

Well, it's no surprise that we don't have iron, given that this is a designed position.

Do we care about getting the Great Lighthouse? If the answer is no, fair enough. But if we want it, Utica should switch to a Wonder pre-build immediately, before completing a barracks which would be useless during its GL drive. This decision has to be made right now.

Please note that I specify a Wonder pre-build rather than the palace, because of the ongoing forest chop near Utica. If we're building the palace when the chop completes, the shields will be credited to the palace, and we won't be allowed to switch to a Wonder.

We should try to get the Lighthouse, but not in Utica. Utica has a food ressource and would reach it's max size 6 fast.
Again the best use for Utica is worker pump. We can pump up one of the other coastal cities and then let it prebuild.
It probably has to be Theveste. We can get it up to over 10sh quite quickly (merging in workers and improve the tiles).

I don't think we need so many barracks now. I would rather have one in Carthage and maybe one more.
Carthage alone may be enough. It cannot build anything else than units in the near future and will soon be up to a nice production.
And the only unit that makes sense in the moment is archer. It doesn't look as if we could upgrade warriors anytime soon. And NMs shouldn't be used for a long time.
We cannot afford to go to war in the moment anyways, so there's no use to build many units.

BTW I got it and will play today.

And another small thing. I will stop the forest chops immediately. We need forests because these cities are shield poor. I think we shouldn't chop any before we have engineering to plant new ones.
There are also a lot of other tasks the workers can do.

You can of course stop the woodcutting if you wish. I was trying to hurry things along with a view to having an early pop at the Romans before the south is crawling with Legionaries. Without iron this game may be tricky, and I think hitting the Romans as early as possible could ease our worries.

The Great Ligthhouse would potentially be very useful I agree, but it seems hard to spare 20% of our production for it just now.

Please let us not build wonders by hand in a 5cc in ptw. Either rush them with a leader or leave them. We can't put one of five cities on a wonder. Beware the ROP might cost us the elephants, so I would not renew it later on.

Difficult choises indeed.
No horses on the island, the only iron source right next to rome and connected.
(btw, with the fog back over it, it might seem like their is land, but at the southeastern part of the island, there is only coast line.)

The lighthouse might be crucial to get our contacts and possibly trade horses.
I don't think we can reasonably exepect to build the lighthouse as well as an army big enough to destroy the romans though, so i think we need to choose between:

A: Army to destroy the Romans.
Finish those raxes, build archers from all cities, destroy the romans. Only granary in the capital.

B: Hurt the Romans.
Build Lighthouse and 2 granaries, raxes in the other cities. Start producing archers from the rax cities. (and raxes+ archers after those granaries) Destroy Roman cities that are unconnected and thus not building Legions. This way, we keep the Romans a bit weak and we can get our money back and some tech in peace negotiations.

C: no real army (sure a few units for defence)
Building the lighthouse, and granaries. I don't really like the idea of having one city produce workers with the sole purpose of them joining other cities that have no granary. It effectively takes out one city's production while we don't have much better to do than build the granaries everywhere. Therefore i'd like granaries everywhere if we don't go to war. (workers @ size 6 (where also they probably cost only 1 turn) to be joined after aquaducts seems like a very decent idea though)

Contact others asap.

Chance to trade horses from them is extremely small though (because they need extra connected and have a connected harbor) So i don't expect horses.
We could take out the romans when we have medieval infantry and trebuchets.

I think we should research literacy after map making since that will certainly give us a tradable tech when we meet other's.
Also in case we choose to go for no real army, will it give our cities something to build (libraries) while we are waiting for the middle ages to come. (can't build too many units due to upkeep)
I think republic is not our first priority this time.

Offa, we have RoP with the Romans.
That means quite some time before we should even consider a DoW.
If they make only a few legions in the meantime, we will not make any progress with archers. We would probably need everything to hold our front. And with no spears to block mountains it's difficult to get the attackers in nice kill zones.
The ten shields of a forest chop are really not a big thing. Carthage for example will soon make more than 10 spt.

Grs, I don't see where we should get leaders in the next 20-30 turns. The Lighthouse may turn out crucial, so we should try to get it.
I also don't see for what we should use our production nearterm. We shouldn't pay upkeep as long as we don't are at war. We have an allowance of 20 units. For some still some time there should be quite a few workers (I also don't see where we should get a lot of slaves).
Carthage will soon be able to make an archer every 3 turns a little later every 2. Another city (Leptis Magna) will make units in 4-3 turns soon.

My intention would be to be on good terms with Rome at least until we have more contacts and can broker. This is at least 30 turns in the future. But really I would like to have peace until we have a stronger attacker. The earliest possibility seems to be longbows. Now that's quite a bit more in the future.
And before somebody comes up with it. Catapults will also not help much. We would need a lot of mountain roads first to use them effectively. They are also already quite ineffective against legions.
I don't see any alternative to stay peaceful as long as Rome lets us or we are much further in the tech tree.

Everything you gentlemen say about the high opportunity cost of constructing the Great Lighthouse in a 5CC is true, but I'd still vote to build it. The problem is that we can explore with suicide galleys, but we can't use them to send troops overseas, and if we have to wait for caravels to do that we'll probably fall hopelessly behind the pace of some of the skilled and aggressive teams in this game. Also, looking for the silver lining in the cloud ;), we should be able to build as many units as we can afford from four cities anyway.

I'm not as pessimistic as some of you about our prospects fighting the Romans with one city devoted to a Wonder. This is only monarch, and I assume we're all much better tacticians than the AI. We have to set aside the notion of conducting that war without using our Numidians, though. How we do against the Romans will probably be the single greatest determinant of where we place against the other teams, and additional production for the Roman war will be a perfectly acceptable use of our GA--not least because they'll probably be in their GA too, of course.

What do you think about research? agree on Literature?
(will also help our culture borders)

Also, i think it would be reasonable to have construction before republic. In fact, we could possibly go for trading republic with construction. This way we can get our aqua's building before we swich to republic and have our workers join as soon as we are republic. Without aqua's, we will have only 5 free units under republic. If we get our cities size 7, it will be 15, quite a difference.

-Grs
-Gozpel
-WackenOpenAir
-Offa - Just played
-Klarius - Your turn
-Northern pike

Gozpel what are your idea's about all we are discussing now?

I am a little sorrry about the ROP, as it may hinder our plans a bit, but we aren't exactly ready to attack the Romans right now. I can't believe it makes much odds about the ivory: the AI always act as if they have an ROP anyway, and any Roman town in the north will be easy meat. I was very keen to get the worker though as the AI don't build many and so it may hinder Roman efforts at connecting more cities to the iron.

WOA: I couldn't afford the wheel, so I don't know about the availability of horses yet.

I think it is early to decide about the Lighthouse, although it may indeed prove crucial.

If we think it practical I think taking out the Romans is the way forward. It will make the rest of the game much easier.

Well, I played. The save (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm4/offa_SG004_BC1500_01.SAV)

Turn log:
Preflight
I stop the workers cutting trees. I think we need the trees.
The worker on the Utica forest starts roading. This tile will be used alot after we have a granary, if we micromanage correctly.
Change Utica to granary.
Theveste to palace as prebuild.
I would have liked Leptis Magna more, but there is already a forest chop in the box and this forest is also missing, it would have been needed for the max shield potential @ size 6.
Put science slider to 0 and dial up Caesar.
I trade 8X 1gpt for 17 gold. That will hurt him if he should try a sneak attack.
Science back to 100%, we are now at -8gpt. Fine that looks more familiar.
Hit enter.

IBT: A barb walks towards Carthage. Hey people you are talking about taking on Rome, I even will have problems to defend against the barbs.

Turn 1 (1725):
I merge a worker in Theveste so it can work all 3 mined BGs it's now at 5 uncorrupted shields. Warriors from the south head towards the homeland to defend against barbs and also we will need MP soon.
I make another 1gpt-17g deal qith Rome.
Carthage switched to barracks. I thought of completing the granary here, but we need some units for the barbs and I don't want regulars.

IBT: Barb nicely turns around (Carthage has a warrior now). Rome disperses barb Camp

Turn 2 (1700)

I merge the Roman slave into Carthage. I now that's not optimal, but Carthage is way to small and that allows for 2spt and 2gpt more.
Another 17g-1gpt trade.

Turn 3 (1675)
MM around a little. A few worker and warrior moves. There are again barbs in the north
Ans again 17g-1gpt.

Turn 4 (1650)
Some more MM. Barracks complete in Leptis Magna->warrior. I would like an archer more, but we have a barb problem in the north.
Granary completes in Utica-> warrior. I want some food first before starting a worker.
I changed Hippo to barracks. That may be a prebuild for a galley or harbor already.
17g-1gpt

IBT: A barb attacks a warrior in the north -1hp. There is still another.

Turn 5 (1625)
Barracks in Carthage->archer.
Attack two barbs. One flawless victory, one warrior lost.
17-1

Turn 6 (1600)
Utica warrior->worker to complete on growth. MM for max gold, because we don't need so much shields.
Find barb camp in north

Turn 7 (1575)
Disperse a barb camp. Warrior -2HP. MM Carthage and Utica.
17-1

Turn 8 (1550)
Utica worker->workers. I would like to keep the pop higher, but after that it will start a galley prebuild. Carthage archer->archer. Archer stays we will need the MP in two turns.

Turn 9 (1525)
Whack-a-barb. Still some around. MM towards gold where possible.
17-1

Turn 10 (1500)
Not much a few workers and warriors move.

After action:

I tried hard to get our commerce up. I micromanaged every turn. Especially Utica and Carthage need attention, because they can trade shields for gold.
Utica also doesn't need +4f every turn so can be MM to use the forest. Because it grows every 3 turns it will effectively use the forest every turn, if you MM the growth turn to 4f.
Utica and Theveste need MP the next turn. I messed up a little and Theveste currently has a scientist. This should go to the forest as soon as the MP comes. As soon as the mine completes one could merge in the worker, but then we would need lux tax. Maybe better mine the hill first to get it to its max shield potential at size 6.
The granary builds are thought to be prebuilds. I don't think we need more granaries. Just let Utica build workers and merge them in the other cities where needed. The barracks in Utica could either complete or serve as galley prebuild.
Map making in 3 turns. Start to find some new friends. I don't think Caesar will like to attack us. We owe him 17gpt in 17 different trades. I would keep continue to take out a loan every turn, but that's probably just my style.

I still haven't traded for TW. I think we should find other contacts first and get steenkin' rich in the trades.

WOA, Literature suits me as our next tech choice.

Offa, I think your decision to deprive the Romans of their worker was exactly right.

Edit: Excuse me for not commenting here on your turns, Klarius. Another cross-post.

The slave we bought could have been used to build a colony on the ivory. That would also remove the need for specialists. Please avoid using them. I am very uncomfortable with this series of gpt deal we did with Caesar. I know what the idea behind this is, but I don't like this banker strategy - it ties us up. Another please: use workers in groups, you will finish projects faster. The way it is now all workers work on different project, that all finish late.

All this may just be my personal opinion, but what really bugs me, is that we are playing at least 2 different games. We are more that 5 pages into the game at 1500BC, this tells of a lot of discussions, still we move in totally different directions.

The slave we bought could have been used to build a colony on the ivory. That would also remove the need for specialists. Please avoid using them. I am very uncomfortable with this series of gpt deal we did with Caesar. I know what the idea behind this is, but I don't like this banker strategy - it ties us up. Another please: use workers in groups, you will finish projects faster. The way it is now all workers work on different project, that all finish late.

All this may just be my personal opinion, but what really bugs me, is that we are playing at least 2 different games. We are more that 5 pages into the game at 1500BC, this tells of a lot of discussions, still we move in totally different directions.
There was no chance to build a colony as long as there are so many barbs around. Only towards the end of my turns would we have enough units to control them.
Our commerce and production was so stinkin' bad at that time that the 2gpt and 2spt made a big difference.
The specialist was only because I messed up and the MP arrives one turn too late. The next turn the MP will make it unnecessary.
I still think we have no chance to attack Rome now. If you want to, the 19 turns it takes for the deals to expire will allow some forces to build up. Carthage can now get 10 spt (BTW this wouldn't be so if there would be 1 less citizen), so an archer every 2 turns. But still, I think, our next goal is contacts. With Map making in three rounds we should concentrate on galleys now.

Using workers in groups is wasting turns, if you have to make roads. We cannot afford to waste turns and I made sure that the needed improvements came in time. We have only very few workers and grouping them will even waste more turns, because there will be empty moves from city to city.

1250 BC, end of turn (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm4/offa_SG004_BC1250_01.SAV)


[I'm sorry that you'll have to scroll horizontally to read this, gentlemen. It wasn't my choice that the screenshot should be crammed into the same post as the prose. [pissed] ]

1500 (0): Granary placeholders switched to barracks in Hippo, archer in Leptis Magna.

Science rate cut to 90%, MM still due in three turns.


1475 (1): Utica and Theveste get military policemen.

Our warrior in the northwest defeats the attack of a barbarian horseman.


1450 (2): Map Making --> Literature, due in 25 turns at 40% science, -4 gpt. We can't go on with research at large deficits right now.

Utica switches barracks build to galley.

Carthage archer --> archer, Hippo barracks --> archer.


1425 (3): The Romans are insulted by the idea of trading the Wheel for Map Making, so plainly they're about to discover MM themselves, and the question of whether we should trade MM for the Wheel and gold becomes moot.


1400 (4): Our northwestern warrior defeats the attack of a barb warrior.

Carthage reaches size six, and I have to increase the luxury rate to keep order there. On the positive side, I can now MM the city for more gold production while keeping it at 10 spt.

Carthage archer --> archer, Utica galley --> barracks.


1375 (5): Nothing much.


1350 (6): The Romans have Map Making.

Our galley makes its first probe into deep water, and finds nothing before returning to safety. This procedure is much easier with GOTM differential naval movement, since a galley starting on a safe coastal tile can move sea-ocean-sea-coast in one turn.


1325 (7): Our northwestern warrior defeats a third barb attack, this one from a horseman. He hasn't promoted to elite, though.

The Viking capital of Nidaros completes the Colossus.


1300 (8): Carthage archer --> archer.


1275 (9): We spot two barb galleys off the northwestern peninsula.

Oho, our galley finds the water getting shallower (ocean, then sea) off Hippo.

I allow our RoP with the Romans to expire. Caesar remains polite.

Theveste reaches size six, and I have to increase the luxury rate to 20%.


1250 (10): One of our archers, having finally reinforced our beleaguered warrior in the northwest, disperses the barb camp there for 25 gold.

The Romans have Ceremonial Burial.

With just ten archers and five warriors, we're rated "strong" relative to the Romans. Probably we should get some Numidians built and attack them in 10-20 turns.

I haven't sent our galley into the sea tiles east of Hippo, because I don't believe in suicide runs before the safe exploring has been done, especially given that we'll probably get the Great Lighthouse. But if the rest of you disagree with this approach, the galley is still in the area.

Carthage is about to reach size seven, so its next build should probably be the long-contemplated granary, which it can complete in five turns.

Before long Utica will be a size-six city with a full food box, at which point a worker should be skimmed off its population.

Carthage and Utica are not set up for maximum shield production, so make sure they're micromanaged as you want before they start their next builds.

Theveste's worker should road the forest when it finishes roading the hill, since we have to work the forest to get maximum shield production there.

[What is this ____? Does the forum merge consecutive posts by the same person into one now? So much for letting the user format his materials in the way he finds appropriate. :mad:]

The eastern seas:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/SGOTM4-Offa-1250BC.JPG

Few comments:
about the gpt thingy, i feel similar to grs. It doesn't feel right to me, but i wont condemn it cuz i have no experience with it.

We might prefer using one of our own workers for the Ivory as the slave costs no upkeep, i think it would be nice if we get as many slaves as possible.

Stacking workers is not a good thing unless roads are already there. With stacking them, 2 workers waste a turn on one tile. It reduces worker efficiency. Only if you really need a tile fast, stack some. Try to prevent that though. The more you do stack, the lower your efficiency and the more you will need improvements fast. If you don't stack them, your better worker efficiency makes all works done earlier after a little while than when you do stack.
I do make exceptions for clearing jungle. The longer a job takes, the less efficiency is wasted by using multiple workers. Doing it for our industrious workers is a reasonably big loss in efficiency though (normally mining(3) and roading(2) would cost 6 turns including the 1 worker movement. it costs an extra worker move if you do it with 2 workers, reducing efficiency with 17%.

At the moment you noted the romans are researching MM, i would have immeadiately traded it for any gold you could get for it.

When 3 turns from completing a science, just leave it at 100%.only lower it to the minimum for one turn on the last turn. It will save the same amount of gold and there is just that chance your income will grow and you could have it in 2 turns instead of 3.

-Grs- Your turn
-Gozpel
-WackenOpenAir
-Offa
-Klarius
-Northern pike - Just played

At the moment you noted the romans are researching MM, i would have immeadiately traded it for any gold you could get for it.

This would have gained us a quantity of gold certain to be minor, while speeding up the moment of Roman contact with the overseas world in a way which would probably have had minor effects--but we don't know.

About the workers....in ptw:

2 industrial workers road a tile in 1 turn or 2 tiles in 2 turns
2 industrial workers irrigate a tile in 1 turn or 2 tiles in 2 turns
3 industrial workers mine a tile in 1 turn or 3 tiles in 3 turns

Would you rather wait for them to finish all jobs at once or use the ealier tiles sooner? I leave the answer up to you. Before NothernPike played we were working unimproved tiles.

Got it.

About the workers....in ptw:

2 industrial workers road a tile in 1 turn or 2 tiles in 2 turns
2 industrial workers irrigate a tile in 1 turn or 2 tiles in 2 turns
3 industrial workers mine a tile in 1 turn or 3 tiles in 3 turns

Would you rather wait for them to finish all jobs at once or use the ealier tiles sooner? I leave the answer up to you. Before NothernPike played we were working unimproved tiles.

Got it.

you forget they need to walk to the tile they work.
I might not always be sure i am right, but in this case i am the complete full 100% sure.

to explain better:

turn1: worker 1 moves to tile 1; worker 2 moves to tile2
turn2: worker 1 starts road; worker 2 starts road.
turn3: worker 1 still road; worker 2 still road.
turn4: worker 1 starts irrigate; worker 2 starts irrigate
turn5: worker 1 still irrigate; worker 2 still irrigate.
turn6: 2 workers ready for next job

Turn1: both workers to tile 1
turn2: both workers road
turn3: both workers irrigate
turn4: both workers move tile 2
turn5: both workers road
turn6: both workers irrigate
turn 7: both workers ready for next job.

About the gold for MM, i know. I understand your reasoning and am not saying it is a mistake, just stating i would do it different since they will soon have it anyway. The thing about the science slider also is merely a minor comment and little advise. Maybe the tone of that post was a bit wrong.

Before long Utica will be a size-six city with a full food box, at which point a worker should be skimmed off its population. I am not sure I understood what you want, but it is too late for skimming of a worker without losing a pop - it will fall back to size 5, not stay at 6.

I looked into the save and have a few recommendations as usual. Probably different to what others think, also as usual.
I still see Utica as worker pump to get our population up in other cities. Especially if you want to grow Carthage past size 7 this is much more efficent than a granary there.
But in the moment Hippo would be the town that would need it most. There are several tiles already that could be worked, if we had more pop there.
I also don't see why we research at only 40%. We have enough gold to research full, to reach literature earlier, even w/o taking out new loans from Rome (which I still would do, but ok nobody likes it).
With literature so near, I would make several workers in a row in Utica, so we don't lose so much food while we build a library there (it's the town which really should have a border expansion). Spare workers could be merged in Leptis Magna also, or finally get to road to the ivory.
But note a ivory colony will need to be guarded. First against barbs and also against Roman settling parties, which could also come in a galley. This will need several units to prevent landings.
I would have liked more galleys and suicide runs, but now we probably should wait how the Lighthouse build turns out.

About the gold for MM, i know. I understand your reasoning and am not saying it is a mistake, just stating i would do it different since they will soon have it anyway. The thing about the science slider also is merely a minor comment and little advise. Maybe the tone of that post was a bit wrong.

No problem. :) That refinement concerning the science slider is clever.

I am not sure I understood what you want, but it is too late for skimming of a worker without losing a pop - it will fall back to size 5, not stay at 6.

But only for one turn, provided the food box is full, and then it'll be back at size six. This is the basic technique for skimming workers off a city stuck at size six or size twelve, and I'm sure you've used it--we must just be talking at cross purposes.

I also don't see why we research at only 40%.

Well, we can't research everything at a large deficit relative to our resources, and IMO there isn't the urgency about getting to Literature as quickly as possible that prevailed with Map Making. In any case, Grs can always use the money I saved to boost the science rate now if he thinks it's important.

I looked into the save and have a few recommendations as usual. And I already played :)

Probably different to what others think, also as usual. Not as much as usual ;)

I still see Utica as worker pump to get our population up in other cities. I produced 2 workers there, we don't need more. We now have a granary in Leptis, so we don't need workers to ship pop - it would be a big waste of shields.

I also don't see why we research at only 40%. Neither do I.

But note a ivory colony will need to be guarded. Not by more than a warrior. Rome will have other problems soon.

Turnlog:

1225BC: MM Utica to let it get the worker in 1. Put lux up to 80% - literature in 6 at -14gpt, while we have 144 gold.

1200BC: Leptis Magna will finish its granary in 4 without waste :goodjob: We road the forest we work at Theveste. Utica is size 5 now, missing 1 food, so I will pull of another worker.

1175BC: --

1150BC: We have improved more tiles than we will work, so I send a crew to connect the ivory.

1125BC: --

1100BC: Research to 30% - literature in 1.

1075BC: We trade literature to Caesar and get the wheel and 45 gold in return. No horses visible anywhere. Research set to code of laws - we finally need a decent government.

1050BC: We have to attack a barb galley to avoid sinking and win at -1 hp, but get sunk by another barb galley on the ibt :(

1025BC: Ivory connected - lux down to 10% and research up to 90%. All deals with Caesar expired. We can attack him to extort techs.

1000BC: By poking the seas like suggested by NorthernPike (I played very few games with these naval movement rules, so thanks for the tip!) we spot a grey-blue border. Though we won't make it in one turn I give it a try. We contact Xerxes in Hittites colors. He is up ceremonial burial and horseback (as the Romans, but it seems very improbable they have contact). We could trade with them and I'd do it, but I leave that to Gozpel.

Utica has borrowed a shield from Theveste and needs it for one more turn (because I did not rework the cow in time). After the IBT you can give the mined bg back, because the mine will be finished.

The warrior is where it is intentional, it has to uncover the fog.

I would get out at least two more galleys to cross the gap asap.

We have a dozen archers near Rome, I did cancel all numidians as they would either have to left behind or trigger our GA in despotism. We don't need them probably.

Just a note on the gpt deals. In hindsight the timing was good; they ran out at about the time we were ready to attack. BUT: Caesar is up techs and has 326 gold. Which is more than I normally would expect. I have no hard figures, but that's why I don't like this deals - just my feeling about it.

and the save (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm4/offa_SG004_BC1000_01.SAV)

Just a note on the gpt deals. In hindsight the timing was good; they ran out at about the time we were ready to attack. BUT: Caesar is up techs and has 326 gold. Which is more than I normally would expect. I have no hard figures, but that's why I don't like this deals - just my feeling about it.
]
Grs, most of the gold he had already before, because of other trades. The gpt deals did cost only 51g (3 per deal). He could have easily tried to extort that much gold at a time we would have had to cave.
OTOH I had to take out some loans anyways to continue 100% research, when the first city improvements came in. I got the game with 10g cash.
I have to admit that I deviously continued to take out loans after the first. These were not really necessary, but I really thought we should not try anything earlier.
And I just like this strategy. It has worked for me many times, greatly improving my research rate.

But still, I see no reason for war now. We can trade techs now :goodjob: [dance] . We could wait until we have some better attackers.
There are a lot of scientific civs around. If we can contact some of them, we should get good trades and hopefully all MA starting techs. That's the time I would really consider big wars. Longbows and NMs can be a quite efficient combination.

I like the efficient way you've set our cities up to produce archers, Grs. :goodjob: But it looks as though Carthage could work the grassland/river/mine tile rather than the forest tile, and get one more surplus food at the cost of a useless shield.

The gap in the Roman cultural boundaries gives us a choice between starting with their border cities and striking directly for their capital and the iron. I'd strongly advocate the latter.

I looked into Xerxes' diplomacy screen in the save.
He has a spare horsie :cool: .
And it looks to me like there is a sea route to him. So cross your fingers for our Lighthouse.
We should get a harbor somewhere soon, though we may have to wait quite some time till Xerxes (or somebody else on this landmass) builds one.
Thinking of spare luxes as trade bait, could also not hurt.

:goodjob:

-Grs - Just played
-Gozpel -Your turn
-WackenOpenAir
-Offa
-Klarius
-Northern pike

So someone wake up Gozpel :D

This looks very good to me. Whatever else is true we have been playing very quickly, and are now several hundred years ahead of the other teams.

I am still not entirely clear whether we have all decided to attack the Romans although we certainly appear to have played with this in mind. I would definitely attack and the archers all seem very eager for action.

I presume we researched Literature with a view to trading it.

It looks like the Lighthouse build was a good call, as we have as many military as we can support anyway. A war with Rome will help to reduce our military cost in the future :nuke: .

1250 BC, end of turn (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm4/offa_SG004_BC1250_01.SAV)


[I'm sorry that you'll have to scroll horizontally to read this, gentlemen. It wasn't my choice that the screenshot should be crammed into the same post as the prose. [pissed] ]



I have to say that your post fitted just fine on my screen. I hope that this doesn't mean that people have to scroll constantly to read my posts.

I am still not entirely clear whether we have all decided to attack the Romans although we certainly appear to have played with this in mind. I would definitely attack and the archers all seem very eager for action.

I believe we're all committed to attacking the Romans soon except for Klarius (against) and Gozpel (not recently part of the discussion). That's as close to a consensus as we're going to get with this team :D, so let's do it.

Yes, we researched Literature to trade it, though I assume we'll want libraries. The Persians will give us Ceremonial Burial, Horseback Riding, and all their gold for Literature right now.

Maybe I should clarify.
I see no reason to go to war, but also have no objections.
I would rather build up our infrastructure now and go explore the world. For our final goal it's important to know everybody and get all techs out there.
But if the others really want to put a dent into or destroy Rome, go ahead.

I have to say that your post fitted just fine on my screen. I hope that this doesn't mean that people have to scroll constantly to read my posts.

Thank you; that's useful to know. What resolution do you use when you're on this board?

I haven't had a problem with any of your posts so far, but I don't believe any of them contained an uncropped screenshot, which is the crucial issue.

I am awake. Went to Melbourne yesterday and come back here that you all are not only chatterboxes, you actually play too. :lol: My turn already, fantastic!

Screenies are always welcome and if you have trouble making them look for Irfanview, a very simple free prog.

I will have to look at the save before I give my comments, but so far I'm content from what I read. The options of builds are fine and we found another civ. So we have to poke Caesar in the eye, but all that gold will make him upgrade a few legs and I never liked them.

Gpt-deals and worker-actions are minor stuff that goes outside my boudaries, which everyone that played with me before must have noticed. I care very little about minor stuff and still I do well most of the time. Perhaps I should implement those things and I might end up with a medal somewhere one day. :)

At this stage I would continue favor exploration too, the more civs we meet, the cheaper the techs will be. My comments on all this after I had my morning coffee and when that byzzing noice stopped in my head (from my 2 braincells trying to connect) :)

Back soonish.

Thank you; that's useful to know. What resolution do you use when you're on this board?



1280 x 1024: the default for my flat screen, fairly high therefore.

@gozpel
Look into Carthage when you declare. There is a roman citizen who may get a little bit unhappy (yeah that was me who merged him).
Nobody has merged in workers after my turns. So Leptis Magna and especially Hippo are smaller than they could be.
Utica is hitting its max size soon. Even if not using it as 3-turn worker pump as I intended, a worker should come out soon.
I would recommend to not produce more archers now. Use (and lose) what we have already. We pay already 10gpt unit support.
In our current situation republic would completely kill our economy. We have quite a bit research up to there, but still we need much more population, before we can consider the switch.
Libraries everywhere, harbors in Utica and Hippo and some galleys could be really useful in the long run.

Ok, I will take on Caesar and see what I can do with what we have.

Libraries and harbors sounds good.

I tell you what happened within the hour.

My comments are unnecessary, so I just played through my turns. Tele-portation ON.

Pre-turn - The Lighthouse due in 9 turns, thats good.

CoL due in 5t at -16gpt with 81g in the kitty, also nice.

Carthage can work mined grassland and still get 10 shields/turn, 4 food is better than 3. Notice the roman worker in town, he will be unhappy soon.

All those archers in the mountains make the decision easy, we will have a go at Caesar.
Move some archers out of towns that aren't needed for MP. We have 14 archers moving towards Roman territory, with more to come the next few turns.

Diplo-check reveals nothing interesting.

975bc - Our scouting galley sinks.

Utica archer -> worker.

950bc - Carthage archer -> library.
Utica worker -> galley.

Theveste can work one of Utica's BG's and save a turn on the Lighthouse.

Archers are in place to declare next turn.

925bc - Hippo archer -> galley.

Switch Leptis Magma from archer to galley.

I declare and move 7 archers to Antium and 4 archers to Pompeii.

900bc - A settler runs out of Antium before the attack.

2 archers dies doing nothing against spear in Antium, promoting him to elite, 3rd archer 2/4 finally kills him. Town is autorazed, we get 16g and a worker.

2 archers goes 1/4, but kills a spear each in Pompeii.
Autoraze the town and get 17g and a worker for the trouble.

Science to 70%, CoL next turn and luxes to 20% because of that roman dude in Carthage.

875bc - We learn CoL -> Philosophy at 50%, due in 7t.

Utica galley -> library.
Leptis Magma galley -> archer.

Archer dies against archer with settler, next archer got him, promotes to elite and get 2 slaves.

Checking diplo, Xerxes would give CB, HBR and 90g for Lit, no need to get any of them yet.

850bc - Greece completes the Oracle.

We kill an archer.

825bc - Nothing.

800bc - Archer defends against elite warrior.

Leptis Magma archer -> galley.
Theveste Lighthouse -> worker.

Archer dies against spear guarding settler, archer kills warrior and elite archer kills the spear and we have 2 more slaves.

Galley finds roman galley, attacks it and loses doing 2hp damage.

Send galley on east-coast to explore.

775bc - Romans send out another settler pair, they must've been hoarding them.

Kill the spear guarding the settler, 2 more slaves.

Carthage library -> archer.
Hippo galley -> library.

Caesar is willing to talk, I wait and send in 5 archers to Ravenna.

750bc - Theveste worker -> library.

East-bound galley finds land.

We lose an archer, then kill 2 spears straight. Elite tries his luck against reg archer and we get a leader! We destroy the town and get 18g plus 3 workers.

We still have 14 archers in the area, a couple are hurt. Do we continue to push on or should we build a colony on the wool and deny Rome to settle there? We got 11 roman slaves during this excursion, which will road the mountains, use one to build a colony.

If we push on, I suggest we find out if we can trade for horses soon or at least build another handful of archers. If we want horses we need a harbor.

Rome will give heaps for peace, many different options here:
5 towns
4 towns and Maths
4 towns and 275g
and so on.

What are we doing with the leader? If we want the FP we can get those towns when the leader is home in a few turns and build FP in Theveste. Then abandon all the roman towns. They will be busy filling in the spots again, I reckon.

Or do we want an army?

Leptis Minor have to build another galley or two, to explore Persian lands, I sunk the only galley we had on that side.

Philo due next turn at -17g with 21g in the kitty.

Xerxes have 95g, CB and HBR if we want to trade away Lit.

The Save (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm4/offa_SG004_BC0750_01.SAV)

I sure want the FP. Armies are not very useful.
But I don't want it in Theveste, but in a new town in the south.
Hippo is quite underdeveloped anyways and can go.
So I would recommend:
Rush a settler in Hippo.
Raze Rome, it's building a wonder currently and cannot pop-rush. So it should fall to our archers.
When the settler arrives in the south (I favor the tile 1 south of Rome), settle.
Bring all native workers along to quickly get some population. What we still need in the north can be done by slaves.
Make peace. Should get all his cities.
Rush FP in the new town.
Abandon all Roman towns and Hippo.
Kill Caesar or not, depending how dastardly you feel.

Plan B:
Still Rome first.
Then peace.
Start to hand-build the FP in Utica.
Save the leader.
After FP is build make the town in the south and jump the palace there.

Plan C:
Total empire reorganisation.
Rush FP in Utica. Build two towns in the south. Free palace jump into one. Abandon also Leptis Magna and Hippo and resettle near current Carthage.

And please don't forget to explore the seas in the meantime.

I never do palacejumps, so I didn't consider that option. It's one of the worst exploits of the game, but still allowed in GOTM and HOF. So if the team decides we do that, I shut up.

But I do like the FP where Rome is and another town closeby. Very clever idea. The placement of such city might be discussed, there are 3 wools to work on the hills SSW of Rome.

Fantastic work. Archers worked much better than I expected.

I would like to press on while we have all these archers: what else can they do. We really want that iron to get better troops and eliminate the Roman legionary threat. If we do take all the small towns for peace, Rome itself will acquire a lot of defenders.

Surely we can make a wonder with our leader. Even the Great Library is more appealing than a forbidden palace, which we could hand build easily enough. Even the pyramids!

Is the rank corruption bug something we have to worry about in a 5 CC? Otherwise a palace jump to 1 square NW of Rome looks tempting to me.

I think we can be fairly sure the Romans haven't met anyone else. Therefore we can do what we like to them without hitting our reputation, provided we destroy them.

So I would recommend:
Rush a settler in Hippo.
Raze Rome, it's building a wonder currently and cannot pop-rush. So it should fall to our archers.
When the settler arrives in the south (I favor the tile 1 south of Rome), settle.
Bring all native workers along to quickly get some population. What we still need in the north can be done by slaves.
Make peace. Should get all his cities.
Rush FP in the new town.
Abandon all Roman towns and Hippo.
Kill Caesar or not, depending how dastardly you feel. Full ack!

Please don't do the dreaded palace jump exploit I really don't want to use it. No idea why it is still allowed in gotms.

Fantastic work. Archers worked much better than I expected. I am not that surprised about what Gozpel could do with them - therefore I already moved them close to the target ;)

Even the pyramids! I take that as a joke - we have 5 cities of which 2 already have a granary.

I lost 5 archers and a galley which is a lot, considering what we have. 5/12 ratio isn't exactly what I had in mind, but 11 slaves makes up a bit of those losses.

I would like an empty army for future use, swords are good enough in an army, knights would be beautiful.

If we build an army (I would prefer the fp in "New Rome") please rememer to put only 1 unit in it till we have caravels.

This is what I propose for New-Rome. I know it is on a bg, but imagine the quality of this city with a fp. I even agree on building a granary and shipping pop there, just because it is that awesome.

Wonders would be only useful for denial IMO. That's worth a thought, but only if we all get comfortable with palace jumping.
We should not restrict ourselves to our mediocre position in the north. If we hand build the FP, which is no big problem in the core, we should anyways jump the palace later.
And I don't see any exploit. In a 5CC you never win a lot on corruption by palace jumping.

A PtW army is not worth it. With it's healing problem it can only be used for covering, if far away from the next rax.
We will have more leaders later and may make an army then when we have better units to fill it.

Another point which just comes to my mind.
No matter which course we go, we will have a small problem when we extort cities and abandon them.
Caesar will have pop-rushed in the cities besides Rome.
The unhappiness will jump from city to city and end up in a city we keep.
I never applied it, but have read somewhere about the idea to gift the last city to somebody else.

The unhappiness will jump from city to city and end up in a city we keep.
I never applied it, but have read somewhere about the idea to gift the last city to somebody else. Huh? I did not know that. You mean if I have pop rushed in city 1 and abandon it, the unhappyness penalty jumps to city 2 and so on?

I don't care about corruption when it comes to palacejumps, it's just wrong. I never play my games with jumps, resource-denial and ship-chaining.

If we don't build an army I want the FP as grs proposed, it's the most logical thing to do. Wonders won't help us much.

Remember to build a colony on the wool and beware for barbs in the fog, I sent an archer there to protect our new workers.

Huh? I did not know that. You mean if I have pop rushed in city 1 and abandon it, the unhappyness penalty jumps to city 2 and so on?
Yes ;)

@gozpel
I know some people don't like palace relocation and there's no way to change that. I have a different opinion, but the discussion of that would get lengthy and fruitless (and you probably had it already with other people ;) ).

I'm fine with the FP in the south. Grs' site is nice.
Now just the small problem, if Rome is cooperative and burns. :D

The Pyramids was a joke :p , but I really don't like the army idea.

I haven't any moral problem with the Palace jump, but it would be quite an undertaking here (because of the 5cc). I agree that a new city near the Rome site would be very good. I had thought about 1NW of Rome, but the site catching the sheep probably is better. So the leader could make a Forbidden Palace (would a Palace be forbidden ?? ). It is difficult to think of a wonder we want much now anyway, apart from the Lighthouse which we have nearly built anyway. Leo's in the future will be nice but it is too long to wait.

Curiously, as Gozpel will recall, the game has a close parallel with SGOTM1, in which we hand built the Lighthouse, only to get a leader just before it completed.

Losing archers in these attacks does'nt matter too much: does anyone really want to take on the rest of the world with archers/longbows?

@Offa
The Lighthouse is already finished, so no complete parallel.
And we have found already two landmasses, which can be safely reached with Lighthouse/galleys. So we should be the trader kings soon.
It also looks to me that we will not even need navigation at all (ok that's quite bold with the little bit of the map we know).

I also agree that we should burn our archers.

Still we have no horses and have to think what to do about that.
Xerxes has spare horses, but may take forever to build a harbor. And then there is still the small problem that we want to kill him somewhen (soon groucho ) .
So we should also look for one more city relocation into Persia. It's still quite near to the suggested FP location and could be a productive city.

Edit:
Still another point.
We are on the course to republic, but it looks to me like we cannot afford to revolt before aqueducts. I think we should still research republic, but look to it that everybody else gets math fast, so they can research construction. Either we get math from Rome, or some other contact and distribute it around.

Great stuff, Gozpel. :goodjob:

I haven't had time to study the save yet, but I agree with the ideas that have emerged here: of course take Rome, and use the leader to build the FP in Grs's proposed super-city.

Somewhat later: Perhaps we should discuss the rather tricky mechanics of getting the FP built on Grs's proposed site while remaining within the limits of a 5CC. I assume that we'll only be able to start the FP on the turn when we grant the Romans peace and receive several of their cities in the peace settlement. On that turn, then, we'll need to have a settler on the projected site, unless we've founded the city already. It appears that we won't be able to get a settler from Hippo to the site by land in fewer than ten turns, even allowing for some road construction. (The sea route would be riskier without being much faster.) So if we're committed to founding this city and building the FP there, we should switch Hippo to building a settler right now, and even consider pop-rushing, though the time saved would be modest (three turns if we pop-rush right now at a cost of two citizens, two if we wait a turn and expend one citizen).

AFAIK, we need 8 cities for the FP @ monarch standard.
So we need only 2 from Rome, together with our current five and the newly founded.
We could even afford to raze some more after Rome in the time it takes for the settler to come, for some more slaves.
The sea route is not really dangerous, because we have the Lighthouse and can end our turns on sea. But I don't think it saves much. There's still a long way from the coast to the city site.

No, you need 1/2 the OCN of the worlds size independent of the level; that would be 10 on a standard size map. What makes this interesting is, that the world size is "mystery" so it could be small and 8 would be ok. Currently Rome would give us 4 cities and that would be enough in any case, but I would not raze any more.

Well, Grs, I got the FP message after 8 cities in GOTM 35.
I think the OCN is dependent on difficulty level.

K before i play, i am gonna await some more discussion:

As far as i know, the palace jump IS illegal. Even if not though, people in the team not wanting it is enough i think.

I don't think a city on another continent will ever really be productive (<50% corrupt). It would also be an option to save the FP for another continent where we need resources from.
-Do we really want to use the FP to settle in the south or save it for another continent if needed for resources?

Assuming we do take the south. What city to abandon. Hippo is an obvious favorite because it is the least developed and only moderate production opportunities in the future. Utica however is also not a very perfect city since it has 4 overlap tiles and thus can only get size 17. Replacing 2 cities is also an option.
-Do we want one or more cities replaced?

It will indeed take 10 turns before the settler rushed from Hippo can be there. There are different options on what to do in those 10 turns:
-make peace with rome, granting us 3 techs and all their gold, alowing us to research more advanced techs, very importantly construction. aztecs can't provide math, romans can) We then could move our armies in place to capture 2 Roman cities after 10 turns (assuming they didn't meet anyone and thus no reputation problems, else it needs to be 20)
Advantage of this is that we might be able to trade mysticism, we get math and a lot of gold. math will alow us to research construction and Currency,, giving our cities new things to build instead of upkeep costing archers.
Disadvantage is if they meet someone, we need to wait longer or take a reputation hit.

-Attack Rome capital with our archers, weakening their defences and losing some archers (upkeep). The risk would be destroying Rome, but even then we should be able to get 10 cities at 1 turn for the FP (if we need 10).
Advantage is that we are more sure we can succeed with the plan in 10 turns. Disadvantage is that some of our cities are forced to build units (or unneeded courthouses) because we miss out on some tech's for 10 turns.

-Do nothing, just wait 10 turns then proceed with the plan.
Advantage: we are most sure it will work.
Disadvantage: we wont be losing units, we are forced to build more and drown in upkeep.

Edit: the civilopedia says we need 8 cities on standard sized map, do we trust it?

Since we would like that city connected by road (for resources and luxes) i don't think it would even be that bad if it takes a little longer. Hippo could meanwhile build some workers that can be joined to the city when we found it. I think i favor peace with the romans so we get math and research construction. If we assume we only need 8 cities, that will never be a problem anyway. Capturing 2 in 1 turn is not a problem.

Oh and yes, i think OCN certainly is dependand on the level. Isn't this what causes the difference in corruption between difficulty levels?

Well you pretty much summed it up - go ahead :) I don't think it is important which way we go. We should end with New-Rome and a fp in it.

If I had to chose I would use option 3. Just put the archers on hills/forests and kill anything Rome sends, till the settler is there. I would not delay it though, but rush it. We should not trash our rep that soon.

The plan of attacking Rome sounds good to me too, although building the forbidden palace may be complicated. Are we sure that Rome will offer enough towns for peace when the moment comes? I thought these offers tend to weaken if you haven't inflicted damage recently.

We can always build another forbidden Palace later if so desired, we just abandon the existing forbidden palace town.

Palace jumps are legal, but not compulsory. As a team, we seem to have decided to rise above the temptation to indulge in this, but in GOTM it is still OK. It is exploitation of the rank corruption bug (PTW) that isn't allowed.

I think we have to push on and raze Rome immediately. The Romans have enough other cities that we'd still be able to pull off the FP manouevre, surely. And we shouldn't underestimate how hard it might be to take Rome if the Romans are given another ten or twenty turns, during which the city would probably reach size seven, to finish the Pyramids and start building legionaries.

Are we sure that Rome will offer enough towns for peace when the moment comes?

If we raze Rome, I'm sure it will be considered "enough" :lol:

I think we have to push on to clear the spot, remember archers against legions is quite tough. If Caesar build a few, our window of opportunity might be gone.

Turn0:
Ok, i decide not to take any risks by signing peace with the Romans. Therefore, since i won't be getting any tech from Rome for 10 turns, i decide to trade techs with Persia.
Ceremonial Burial + Horseback Riding + 95 gold is traded for Literature.
Persia also has mysticism, we'll get that later from them.

Since we have units too many already and the luxury slider is needed for Carthage, carthage build is swiched to a temple.

A settler is rush build in Hippo at the cost of 2 citizens.


Turn1:
Hippo Settler -> Worker.
With math to be expexted in 10 turns from the romans for free, mysticism to be expected tradable from Persia, those certainly shouldn't be researched now. Only thing that remains is Republic. Since we can't afford republic anyway without marketplaces and size 7+ cities, i decide to put research at 0%. after trading math i will go 100% on construction then Currency.


Turn2:
Meet the Vikings, trade from them Mysticism and 67 gold for Philosophy. They don't have Code, Literature and Map making.


Turn3:
Utica Library -> Harbor.
Leptis Magna Galley -> Library


Sorry, lost turn log from here to turn8 as i was typing it in this window swiching between game and forum, touched some wrong button.

Turn4-8:
I destroy rome at the cost of 2 archers. there was only 1 legion.
I meet Scandinavia, Celts and Germans, all are 4 techs behind and have nothing to offer.
Carthage has nothing more to build, it produces Numidians to replace MP warriors. They are not build to fight, only because nothing else there is to build and archers are such a waste with 16 production.


Turn9:
Peace with Rome, they give us all their cities, ALL their gold(246) and their only tech, mathematics.
I build new rome, rush build the FP and connect Iron.
Since the unhappiness would probably jump to New Rome, i just give them back their cities.
Research on construction started at max.

Turn10:
New Rome FP -> Barracks.
Threveste Library -> Palace prebuild for aquaduct.
Contact Ottomans. They have nothing to offer.


I advise the next player to join our own workers into new york and keep the slaves to work for us.
Rome could start a prebuild after 8 turns before construction is ready for a colloseum. Leptis Magna can start a prebuild for aquaduct after its library and uthica after its harbor.

-Grs
-Gozpel
-WackenOpenAir . . . .Just Played
-Offa . . . . . . . . . . . Your Turn
-Klarius
-Northern pike

Excellently executed but:

Since the unhappiness would probably jump to New Rome, i just give them back their cities. Why? We should have killed them now, that way we will suffer the unhappyness of warring them again.

Edit: Oh, I see it is because this unhappyness jump from whipping. I still think we should remove them better soon than later and that means as soon as peace expires.

@WOA: Excellent work. Now we have iron and Rome is crippled the game is looking good.

Are you sure that New Rome would have taken on board a load of unhappiness if we razed those towns? I suppose it won't be too hard to kill them later, we might even get another leader. Certainly if you are correct, it would have crippled New Rome for a long time.

We look to be in a very strong position now. I won't get to look at the save until tonight, and will play then. I guess though that we want to settle down and consolidate, build up infrastructure etc.

How practical is another war in the near future?

:goodjob: on getting our FP down.
I had a small peak in the save, before going to work.
I would have done some things different.
Their new capital position hurts us so it has to go ASAP. I would have even delayed settling of the FP city a few turns to remove it first.
I'm pretty sure it was not necessary to give them back all their cities. It looks to me like two cities could have been abandoned first, giving them back their unhappiness with only two cities.

We should even consider to remove Rome now, before the peace expires. I don't think they have any contacts :confused: , so we could still keep our reputation.
Or has the team strong feelings about using this exploit (which IMO is worse than intelligent capital management, but I still use it in GOTM ).

OTOH we now have a nice sparring partner to train our troops in 20 turns and do some leader fishing then. They are no threat without iron and also fill the land so the barbs don't get too bad. We could even consider to keep them around into the MA so they can help with the massive uprise.

I think the best course is to connect the iron, build some swords and have a war and training session in 20 turns.
We will have to disband warriors and veteran archers as we build up swords.
Warrior upgrade is not necessary. Carthage can churn out swords in 2 turns and has nothing else to build for quite some time. So we can use our money on research.
This course hampers the development of our FP city somewhat relative to immediate war, but we can live with that.

There are no obvious routes to other continents, except for us that have the Lighthouse.

Build some troops and kill off Rome NOW.

We're building barracks in New Rome now (it will be finished by the time our new army get down there), colonize the iron and upgrade our reg warriors at home and send them there. At least I think that's the best way thinking of klarius "the Tightwad" :lol: He would love the use of units that would be disbanded otherwise. Reg swords can take on what Rome have.

Carthage is building Nums to exchange MP's.

Some magnificent execution there, Wack. I couldn't believe it would be that easy, but fortunately for us Romans were building their silly wonder :)

I also agree that you should've razed at least a couple of towns. Now we will meet more popped defense or offense, if we are not quick enough.

But no complaints really, great job.

from Offa - How practical is another war in the near future?

Science to zero, get what you can get from other civs and upgrade our regulars. Go for it! Consider a sword or 2 from Carthage as well, we can handle unhappiness if you colonize a wool.

There are no obvious routes to other continents, except for us that have the Lighthouse.

Build some troops and kill off Rome NOW.


There is a possible (even likely) route to the Persian continent in the fog. You have to consider the differential naval movement.


We're building barracks in New Rome now (it will be finished by the time our new army get down there), colonize the iron and upgrade our reg warriors at home and send them there. At least I think that's the best way thinking of klarius "the Tightwad" :lol: He would love the use of units that would be disbanded otherwise. Reg swords can take on what Rome have.

I think the rax is a waste now. We should build a library first for faster second culture expansion. The vet archers could be disbanded to speed it up.
And as I said I don't see why we should waste money on upgrades. Carthage can build swords in 2 turns. What else should it do nearterm (I don't want a colliseum, it's inefficient).

Edit:
If you want war now, then don't wait for swords. All the cities given back are empty now. The MPs will now leave the capital to get back there. Archers could pick them off and take the undefended cities. It's a bit tricky, but I think it can be done.

I think the rax is a waste now. We should build a library first for faster second culture expansion. The vet archers could be disbanded to speed it up. It has the fp so it does not need the library for culture - though we will need one anyways to keep up research later.

If you want war now, then don't wait for swords. All the cities given back are empty now. The MPs will now leave the capital to get back there. Archers could pick them off and take the undefended cities. It's a bit tricky, but I think it can be done. I agree. Better use up the archers now than disband them later. It won't be that hard, we took all their other cities with archers too.

It has the fp so it does not need the library for culture - though we will need one anyways to keep up research later.

I want to get to 100 culture ASAP. With a library we get 5cpt total and will have it already 20 turns later.
As you say we want the library anyways. Then a rax first will only cost maintenance but doesn't have a benefit.
We will have the first culture expansion after 5 turns already. Then it can get 5fpt 11spt, if we merge in 6 workers (and we should get rid of our native workers now, because of unit support).
So infrastructure build-up can be fast.

Good work, WOA. :thumbsup:

Sorry, lost turn log from here to turn8 as i was typing it in this window swiching between game and forum, touched some wrong button.

The forum is extremely treacherous about things like this. :mad: For posts any longer than this one, I use Wordpad and then copy and paste.

I reviewed the tech situation using CivAssist (which I have at work ;) ).
Everybody is quite backwards except Persia and Rome. I would recommend to take out their few gold pieces and trade math to everybody. They may research currency for us.
There's no use letting Persia and Ottomans get rich by the math trade.
I also think a declaration on Persia and MA with India would be a good preparation for our assault on Xerxes.
We should declare and MA early always, so that we can make peace at any time we want.

I think it is pretty possible for rome to have contact with Persia.

before breaking any deal, please build an embasy and check if they have contact first.

Else i think we should kill them after 20 turns, shouldn't be hard.

There is enough gold in stack, please research construction and currency at max possible.

I think we should now concentrate on infrastructure as i suggested with the prebuilds. Somewhere in between, a few more units can be made to destroy Rome. Besides the easy destruction of Rome which won't really require any effort, i think we should delay other wars till medival age (knights if we get those horses, else longbows)

Trading a tech like math for some gold, even if its not very much seems ok to me, but i personally don't like mass tech gifting to speed up the tech race like some people do. I like backwards civ's that are fighting my knights with spearmen and archers :).
I have been in doubt for a second though, the only thing i would trade them would be COL + philosophy so they will research republic for us. If we now research construction, chances of them doing currency in that time for us are very very small. If we give the col and philo, chances of them doing republic for us are a lot bigger i think.

I wanted a colloseum in carthage because that is the only city needing the lux slider and it has nothin better to build. Also do we have the money to support 100% science, but lux prevents that. So we could spend money on upkeep, increase science and run a bigger deficit.
The coloseum would alow a lower lux slider and thus more science.

Swiching to library in New Rome sounds good to me. Library->Market->barracks sounds like a nice build order, but of course future situations can change everything.

" also think a declaration on Persia and MA with India would be a good preparation for our assault on Xerxes.
We should declare and MA early always, so that we can make peace at any time we want."
I am kinda against MA, it ties you up to stay at war 20 turns.

Trading a tech like math for some gold, even if its not very much seems ok to me, but i personally don't like mass tech gifting to speed up the tech race like some people do. I like backwards civ's that are fighting my knights with spearmen and archers. Yes, please don't give aways techs for a few gold, if we are the tech leader.

I wanted a colloseum in carthage because that is the only city needing the lux slider and it has nothin better to build. I would never build a colosseum anywhere, but in a 20k or 100k game. The foreign citizens error will be corrected when Rome is out and besides that we will have more cities of equivalet size soon.

Oh and, i am against every MA as long as there are more than 3 civ's in the game. Same here.

Contact can be checked already because we have an embassy in Rome. Every civ we have contact will show a line, if having contact with Rome, when you click on Romes leaderhead.

WackenOpenAir, you shouldn't try the normal strategies on a 5CC. Middle Ages will still take quite some time, because our research isn't as good as normal.
At the same time infrastructure builds will soon be completed. Carthage alone can get us more military than we can support and the only building it still needs nearterm is a market (6-7 turns).
What should we build then. We cannot support a lot of military for later use, but should use it up as we build it.
So a war against Persia should come on the agenda before MA. And we should have a close look into his land, if we find a nice spot for a harbor city.
I would give up Leptis Magna for that. So infrastructure builds there are of limited use.
We shouldn't rely on Xerxes or Ghandhi to build a harbor. So we have to do it ourselves, if we want horses before navigation.
Yes miltary alliance is tying you up for 20 turns. That's why I say do it early. If we do it now, we can attack in 15 turns and still make peace, when we think it's time. We have not much to fear from an AI on another continent, even if there is a save route. They will send their typical invasion force of 1-2 units.

Edit:
And especially if you want a slow tech pace you should always look to it that the AI tech leader is at war.

Yes, please don't give aways techs for a few gold, if we are the tech leader.

Math is already available on two continents. If we don't trade it, the tech leaders there will do it at some time. Then we have to get the gold from them, by trading techs we don't want to trade. We are up 3-4 techs on the poor people that don't have math. So if they should acquire some gold (which they won't before MA), we still can trade them something.

The question of what to do about the Romans now is difficult. I think it's very important that we should eliminate them soon, and not after a twenty-turn delay. On the other hand, the risk to our reputation would be greater than some of these comments assume, because Klarius is right that there could be a safe route to our continent for AI galleys, beginning in the fog northeast of Tarsus. So it boils down to how important our reputation, or more specifically our ability to make gpt deals, is in a game of this sort. I don't claim to know, although if we think we're going to move into the tech lead soon, getting other civs to accept our gpt payments may not be vital.

We need to think ahead to the moment when we'll carry the war overseas, or we'll lose a fatal amount of time. In the next twenty turns Carthage will produce, presumably, ten swordsmen. We have to make sure that in the same period, we build five galleys to carry the swordsmen and move them (the galleys) to the coast west of Carthage. Failing to do this, and building nothing but improvements in our three coastal cities, would be a bad error.

In the best case, this plan would allow us to land a substantial force of ten swordsmen next to Madras in about 23 turns. Of course, things could work out differently, especially if we have to send swordsmen south to finish off the Romans. But as long as we get the new galleys built and positioned promptly, we'll be able to pursue whatever strategy seems appropriate without loss of time, and that's the absolutely crucial factor in this game.

Edit: The above was written before I read the last few posts. When we all contribute to the discussion this enthusiastically, I'm afraid cross-posts are inevitable. :D

I disagree strongly with an infrastructure push which would keep us from assembling the force mentioned above, and with waiting for knights. IMO this competition will be won by a team which is almost always on the warpath, not one which permits gaps between its wars. To put that more theoretically, our military effort can never be intense, due to the limitations of a 5CC, so it has to be continuous.

I'm not dogmatic on the question of whether we fight the Persians or the Indians as our first overseas foe, but we might get to the Indians before they have elephants, whereas the Persians already have Immortals unless they lack iron.

I would prefer to attack a civ on another island, just research our own way to knights and then trade horses with persia (or maybe someone else might offer them by then).
This way we don't lose production by replacing a city to another continent and while we will have knights somewhat late, They will fight outdated units and can take full advantage of their power and speed.

If we go to the other continent and gift techs to reach chivalry faster, we lose production and the knights will only be moderately advantagous to us. If our opponents are in MA as well, we would need trebuchets and thus barely benefit from the knight's speed.

Btw, i think we need to cherrish every foreign worker we can get. While razing other continents, other civ's will try to take the space that comes free. We should have roads all over the world to destroy new settlements quickly. (and i guess respawn is on as usual). Also do i think we should place foreign workers to scout the worlds we have conquered so that we can keep track of settlers moving around. We must prevent ending up with 1 uber civ who takes all the ground from the civ's we destroy. This is all far future of course, just sat here thinking about the future of this game.

All together, while it is said we are moving different directions, i do really like the way this sgotm is going. Everyone indeed has different idea's, but i like it this way. The difference in idea's opens my eyes to different roads. I thought i knew enough of this game, but learned to look at some other options as well.
The game is progressing reasonably well, i see only one real downside. We should have gone imeadiately for construction/currency instead of COL/philosophy.

and i cross posted with Northern Pike, so now a reply to him:
I strongly favor infarstructure for now. You can expect this game to last well beyond 1000AD, on long term infrastructure is needed. Hurting the aztecs is of much lesser importance on long term. Since the game still has a long way to go, long term is priority now. We must prepare to fight the world rather than hurt one out of 10 civs.

We are tech leading now, and we can be in the beginning of the middle ages still. I do think we can research chivalry first. After that, our tech lead will quickly decline however, and i don't think we will have any chance to get to MT as tech leaders. This game might last into modern age, so here again, long term we need to think about. Long term, i do not want to risk our reputation at all.

ATM, the persians DO lack Iron. never know for how long of course.
I think some good thinking and reasoning is needed before we decide who to attack. Before more thinking and reasoning though, i am gonna get myself some food and a nice smoke (i live in holland :goodjob: )

I see absolutely no amount of gold at the AI worth trading. Trading could be done if you really think we should speed up the tech race rather than researching ourselves towards chivalry. If we do that, i think we should open up the way to republic for them so we can later trade republic for construction/currency. If we should gift them depends on our estimation, how long do we expect to have monopoly on chivalry if we do not gift techs?

I agree building a coloseum might not really be a good idea. It is also not a good thing long term. Swordsmen would be nice, whether it is to take out Rome or to go overseas.

Before more thinking and reasoning though, i am gonna get myself some food and a nice smoke (i live in holland :goodjob: )

[party] :smoke: [party]


:lol: :lol: :lol:

@WackenOpenAir
Self research to chivalry will take us still a long time. We are missing 3 required techs for MA and the AI will not help, if we don't speed up their tech.
The much more expensive techs in MA will even take longer.
If we cut back Xerxes by this time we can gift him to MA without danger and at least acquire his free tech. Then kill him off.
I had many games where the AI didn't build any harbors well into the MA. I don't want to rely on them for the horse trade.
The production of Leptis Magna is not needed. Carthage and later New Rome can supply the units we need. Utica and Theveste the navy. And BTW please don't do any irrigations any more. They are neither needed at Carthage nor at New Rome.
A new city in Persia can be 12-14 tiles away from the FP. It will have a little bit over 50% corruption initially. With some workers merged in we still can get a decent production (4-5 shields after corruption) probably. As soon as the harbor completes the corruption will go below 50%, because of the connection. A courthouse and better government can let it go down to about 25%. So after some time this can still be a very productive city.

K, you convinced me about the city on another continent, if it can be that close, and it can be brought to 25% its nice. If it has to be so far, we can't get it below 50%, i don't like it though)

I wasn't planning to try and stay ahead any further than chivalry. I would just like to have a period of monopoly on chivalry. I see it as a kind of golden age, when everyone has chivalry, we have no advantage anymore, just like before it was around. We only have a real advantage if we have monopoly on it. So it doesn't really matter if its late or early, we just want the advantage.

If however you think the AI will catch up with us before we have chivalry, then gifting would be good.

After chivalry, i expect we have to go for 0 tech somewhere during the MA and start cashing.

The other civs will catch up, very probably.
There are 2 scientific civs we know down in the south. Two more (from F10) are somewhere on the map and maybe also coastal linked to the southern landmass, but we don't have contact now.
Very likely they will get all starting MA techs and swap them as soon as they reach the MA. Then at least some will research chivalry. We can probably stay ahead in the AA, but will not research the MA techs before the scientifics reach the MA. So I think we should not research immediately in the MA, but rather trade with the scientific civs. This can be pointy stick with Xerxes, because he is conveniently located.
For the others we have to look what to do, when we know the map better. With a 5CC we will not be able to have more than one real war at a given time (we can have a few phony wars), so we have to select our targets.
I would even recommend to not research chivalry, but go for military tradition. We will be able to buy chivalry in the meantime and do some knight warfare. But some time into the MA knights will get inefficient and we will need MT for any war we want to wage.

But by that timme (between chivalry and MT) i think our research will drop to far to research ahead of the AI.

Ok with gifting them COL and philosophy. You probably have more experience than i to estimate our chances for a chivalry monopoly.

I have looked at the save now and will play tonight. My instinct would be to kill off Rome at once, but this looks a bit tricky just now as we have only 10 archers left and a lot of troops tied up as military policemen. New Rome would be vunerable to a counterattack. I will at least try to build up the military (swordsmen) and get ready to attack. Building up New Rome will take a little while as most of our native workers are still up north.

I don't believe the AI will have met Rome, The diplo screen gives no indication of contact.

Ok with gifting them COL and philosophy. You probably have more experience than i to estimate our chances for a chivalry monopoly.
I don't want to gift anybody now. Not before we know everybody.
I want to give out only one tech to get all the rest of the money out there.
Math I think is most useful for this, because it's already around and may lead to somebody research currency in time for us to buy.
Edit:
And I don't want the AI to research republic. That shall be our monopoly to help acquire MA techs.
That may not work, because philosphy and CoL is already in AI hands. But with the delayed contact trading we may still pull off the important trades, because phil and CoL don't get distributed that fast.

No, they have not yet met.
But we really should not ruin the reputation. I think we should only attack if we have some forces gathered at their borders that can take at least the cities on the west coast both in 1 turn with 95% certainty and take the rest of the Romans within just a few more turns. So to reduce the risk of them ever seeing anyone while we are killing them.

It would also be nice if we can patrol the seas around them before we attack to see if any other boats come near. Do we have any boats near for that?
BTW, didn't i see a roman boat earlier?
I think i did, we must destroy that before backstabbing them, it might even have a settler on board.
(i am too lazy now to open the last save and check these things)

With this amount of posts I fear this will be soon moved to "Off Topic"...

:goodjob:

It's a close race with team smackster :D

I have looked at the save now and will play tonight. My instinct would be to kill off Rome at once, but this looks a bit tricky just now as we have only 10 archers left and a lot of troops tied up as military policemen. New Rome would be vunerable to a counterattack. I will at least try to build up the military (swordsmen) and get ready to attack. Building up New Rome will take a little while as most of our native workers are still up north.

I don't believe the AI will have met Rome, The diplo screen gives no indication of contact.
I also think it's better to wait a bit. And then we can wait all the 20 turns. In this time Carthage can build 10 swords, which is more than we need for Rome.
Please, get the workers down to New Rome ASAP. There is no need for tile improvements in the north. We have already much more improved tiles than population there.
If we should need another worker there, note that Utica is able to churn out 2-turn workers after it's harbor completes.

With this amount of posts I fear this will be soon moved to "Off Topic"...
We are far behind XTEAM in the all important post/turn category. :lol:
We have 1.7 posts/turn they have 4.7 posts/turn.

Obviously eliminating the Romans now would be the neatest solution--but if you just don't think we have the forces, Offa, it's your call. I can't argue with your observation that we don't have much strength in the war zone.

However, if we choose not to backstab the Romans now, I don't think we should attack them in twenty turns either. This game will be decided by the pace of our overseas conquests, not by what we do on our home continent, now that we've secured the iron. It may be possible to finish the Romans off quickly with spare forces later in the game, which is not something that will ever be true of the overseas civs. Getting started against the Persians in about twenty turns could put us on the road to victory; whereas if we wait twenty turns and then attack the Romans, all we'll achieve at the end of the process is a rather slow conquest of our island, which will probably leave us too far behind those teams who've done the same thing more quickly.

I may, of course, be treating the alternatives as more mutually exclusive than they are. Perhaps we could attack the Persians with about eight swordsmen and the Romans with about four at the same time, and succeed in both campaigns. But I do strongly believe that putting off overseas operations for the sake of finishing off the Romans can't be right.

I think we would at least get rid of the Roman capitol a soon as possible, so the FP-city can avoid cultural friction.

Another thing I thought of, why not send a worker over to the other continent and let him have a stroll to see what the land looks like. As long as we don't have any more than one peaceful unit in their territory, he won't get kicked out for some time. It can happen though, if we have a galley inside borders too. Just an idea as I'm curious of the layout.

I want the AI as backwards as possible for as long as possible, we can trade techs that will be known to others, like Maths, but we should keep the more expensive ones.

I really hate being without horses, I always favor fast units and play like a newbie with the onestep dudes.

Another thing I thought of, why not send a worker over to the other continent and let him have a stroll to see what the land looks like.

I thought more of a recoinaissance mission of 6 swords. :lol:
If a few cities should be razed accidentially that wouldn't hurt. ;)
We only need to know the region around Tarsus. We shouldn't go further away with our city. Horses can then be traded or connected by a colony.

Well I have played: a pretty quiet set of turns.

550bc: I would like to finish off the Romans but our remaining militery is pretty weak. Only 10 archers left, and some of them are wounded.
I will wait.

I switch Carthage to build a swordsman and plan to carry on building them.

ibt: our galley near India is hit by 3 barb galleys but survives.

530bc. I move a few workers around. Mainly I want to get native workers to join New Rome and slaves to improve New Rome. There are a few guys on GoTos though who have different ideas. There is little work to do up north.

The richest AI Persia has 27 gold so trades are not tempting.

510bc Utica: harbor finished, starts a galley.
Carthage: swordsman and starts another.

Barb camp spotted on road between north and south right next to the wool. Our iron colony is not defended so I withdraw an archer here.

IBT. Rome moves a stack of 6 reg spearmen next to Veii. They also have a couple of archers wandering around. Not that easy to kill off. Did they get free defenders when we gifted them the towns back?

490bc Kill off barb camp.

470bc New Rome culture expands on the same tun as Veii and annoyingly Veii gets the 3rd wool, leaving us with none.I swap New Rome to a library to speed up culture. I decide to sacrifice a worker to build a colony on the wool between north and south, but then have second thoughts as I wonder whether wool and ivory are the same.

450bc. The wool to the SE of new Rome flips over to us, I guess because our FP produces more culture than Veii's palace.

430bc Ottoman have Construction. I buy it for COL literature and get 24gold as well. I switch Leptis Magna and Treveste to aqueducts.
Start currency on max.
Workers finally start arriving in new rome to build it up.

410bc wool connected. It is a third luxury. Reduce lux to 20% by making a scientist in Carthage: still gets 15 shield a turn so no major loss.

390bc No real action.
370bc all pretty much the same.
350bc. Disturbing news: there is an Indian settler/spearman pair on our island (just next to the sheep in the centre of the island) and the Indians have contact with Rome. It looks like we should honour our peace deal with Rome after all.

Treveste finishes its aqueduct and I merge a worker there. Switch Carthage over to Colosseum as pre build for marketplace, this can always be changed back.

Roman units are swarming all over New Rome, and a Roman archer is blocking the road just to the north of New Rome. Roman slaves are trying to improve New Rome which is fairly productive now.

Our galleys have explored a fair bit now and are trying to go home.

War with India is tempting. I think an early war with Rome during my turns would have been tricky and would probably have trashed our reputation. Our army is pretty powerful now though just to sit around looking good.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/350bc.jpg

http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm4/offa_SG004_BC0350_01.SAV

We should keep something around on the middle of our island to scout the are so that no barb camps apear there i think. 2 captured workers could do that job.

The growing cities that only have one MP might have another one.

If we are gonna settle on another island, i think uttica should now make workers to grow the other cities to size 12 and also some to grow the new city in the other side. Then a settler, then be abandoned. No aquaduct needed in a city that is to be abandoned.

HORSES ARE FOR TRADE from persia.
You could try trading them with an extra collony on a luxury (wool or ivory).

I haven't looked into the save except with CivAssist.
Some strategy considerations:
I think we should urgently start to trade actively, not just buy what is available with everything we have. We have fueled the research of the tech leaders with all the trades in the last two turnsets. By that we soon will see the scientific civs get into MA.
We urgently need to know who has contact with whom and spawn some wars to interrupt the tech trading, so quite some gold has to go in embassies.
We have also the problem now that we have not researched republic and will not have it in time for the MA starting tech trades. I have doubts that our economy will be good enough to buy us into the brokering position.
With this in mind we should really try to be able to have pointy stick research on a sci civ, when the MA starts.
The only conveniently located sci civ is Persia.
They are 2 techs away from middle ages like the Ottomans. They may research republic now, but still I expect that both will enter the MA within 20-40 turns.

After these lengthy considerations, my conclusion is that our next target has to be Xerxes, even though he could sell us horses. We could buy it now to build some horses, but after that we should have a war with him and get our own harbor over.
Or we could go immediately to war with him and try to get a city down there. In the first case I would attack India and MA Persia against them. In the second I would let India settle and MA them against Persia. The decision has to be taken now, even though it will take some time till we can do some real war. We don't have enough galleys in the right positions just now.
In both cases I wouldn't do much about Rome. Just take Veii when the peace expires and maybe one city more. Their cities don't hurt and in fact help against barbs. We cannot afford to have many units hunting barbs and BTW workers don't help against barb spawning.

There may be also a peaceful trading option, depending on contact situation (and we still have to find Babylon urgently). That is, gift everybody in MA, when we get the ability. Then there will be doubles in free techs.
We don't have to pay monopoly prices, but may be able to get monopoly payment, due to our better contact situation.
Still it's a bit tricky and I have the impression that most of the team isn't really interested in good trading strategy.

I would normally have tried to start wars between the AI, but didn't do that because I think some sort of team agreement should be established first.

I presume if we do war against persia and later made peace, provided we left them with their harbor city, we could get horses via a colony on their island. This strikes me as preferable to abandoning one of our towns, at least in the medium term.

It does seem very slow making aqueducts and marketplaces, but once complete we will have a lot of production and cash, which we will probably need.

I presume if we do war against persia and later made peace, provided we left them with their harbor city, we could get horses via a colony on their island. This strikes me as preferable to abandoning one of our towns, at least in the medium term.


We would have to contain them, needing a lot of units.
Unit support cost is one of the biggest problems with 5CC. So we have to either stay peaceful (a few small wars don't hurt) with them and save them for last, at least up to navigation.
Or we get our own harbor. I'm for own harbor and that means start the action ASAP. We have already two high productive inland towns and two coastal towns that will come to full speed soon.
We could even consider to capture their harbor city and hope that it stays. It's a bit risky because it may flip back, but would get a nice head start if the harbor is still there.
And the city is at the closest location to our FP we know of.

I already have a personaly preference for swords over horses.
(Swords have a multiple times higher chance to win. In 1 fight, chances to lose the unit are about even, but the lower win chance for horses (retreat) causes the horses to need more battles and thus lose slightly more units)
I think we will be able to produce enough horses for knight upgrade if we get horses just 10-20 turns before chivalry.

Therefore, i prefer attacking Persia now, rather than first trade the horses and attack them later.

Also, both Persia and India are still small civ's, we should be able to raze them completely. Of course we don't know if there might be islands between, but it seems like this island is isolated from the large one, so maybe noone will settle on the india/Persia island for a long time if we clear it.

If we start with the Persia, the timing might be just nice to use that pointy stick idea on India after Persia.

I don't think destroying Rome is so difficult. We of course should destroy their capital. The cities on the western coast could be destroyed then. There on that coast, the units could imeadiately board and be shipped to the other island.

Edit: if the version we are playing still has 100% retreat, that would change my oppinions.

Edit: if the version we are playing still has 100% retreat, that would change my oppinions.

That version disappeared a long time ago, but made horses very powerful while it lasted. Horses will have standard retreat chances in this game.

I wouldn't be tempted to pay for horses just yet. Swordsmen and medieval infantry later on will do for now. We can't really afford the time, money or shields to stockpile horses now for later upgrade. Ultimately of course horses will be very helpful.

I imagine that Klarius is already playing, but anyway, I agree that we should go to war with Persia as soon as possible.

Well, I don't play up to now.
I looked into the save. Xerxes would give horses+57g for ivory+wool. We could connect extra resources for this, so it wouldn't cost cash or gpt.
But I'm still not comfortable to trade with him, because I think we should war with him before MA.
I delay this anyways because we will get another wool as soon as Veii is destroyed.
We have still a little bit pop-rush unhappiness in Carthage, which we inherited from Hippo. I have to check the MM options.
I think I also will let India settle now. They pose no threat, can soak up some barbs and maybe we need them.
Still the big question is, if we want the war route with Xerxes. Then we could ally Ghandi now and I think the MA would expire around the right time.
We have one backwards scientific civ, Germany. That's good, we can hopefully gift them later and get their free tech.

I would like to see Rome removed first. There is no point keeping them in the game and they are in our way anyways. The longer we wait, the more they will resettle.

But, we would need to gift Xerxes Into MA before we declare. After that, it would take 20 turns before we can discuss peace to get their free tech if we make an MA with Persia. Meanwhile he will trade it to anyone he knows and the techs will spread all over the world.

If we make an MA against Persia now, we will make peace after 20 turns.
Then gift Xerxes to MA.
Then fight him until we grow tired of doing so and get his tech.

@grs
I really don't see the point in removing Rome. Veii and Cumae are disturbing and I will set up for them. The other cities nicely block places where barbs could appear. But anyways we will be at war with Rome when the peace expires, so we can decide then.

@WOA
I'm pretty sure Persia will know nobody else besides India.
It doesn't look like there is a save route to the others and astronomy is quite a bit away.
I think he will reach the MA on his own (he will get a golden age, hopefully by killing Indians, not our troops).
If not we can still trade with him later.

Ok here is my turnlog:
http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm4/offa_SG004_BC0150_01.SAV

Preflight
Change Theveste to galley, it will not build units in my turnset, so rax is not necessary.
MM a little around, Rome gets a scientist while still producing enough shields, lux can go to 20. Currency in 4 instead 5. But maybe up again.
Build an embassy with Ghandi. He has a nice capital with horses in range. Contact with Persia and Rome as expected.
Embassy with Germany. He knows Ottomans and Greece. Not nice that the sci civs are clinging together. Declare on Ottomans and ally Germans. Bismarck even throws in 33g.
Embassy with Greece. Ally Greece against Ottomans for construction and take out their 36g.
The tech leader has now a nice two front war against the other sci civs. That should slow them all down a bit.
So now what. Decide Persia needs a war also. DoW and ally India.
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/sgo_350_1.jpg
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/sgo_350_2.jpg
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/sgo_350_3.jpg
IBT
Indian settler pair moves away from our archer.

Turn 1 (330BC):
Boot out Roman troops. He caves and leaves.
Merge a worker in Theveste. Two workers in New Rome.
Whack-a-barb, but still a barb horse in camp.

IBT:
India settles Karachi staying away from our roads.
Archer would anyways not have gotten the settler pair.

Turn 2 (310BC):
Library completes in New Rome->courthouse (market prebuild).
Disperse barb camp, sword redlined.
Throw out Romans again.
Galley finds the route to the Persindian continent and blocks it for the moment.
There are horses between Tarsus and Pasargadae. Tarsus should be our first goal in Persia. If the harbor stays, we should keep it. Otherwise settle a new city. It's just all too conveniently located. But that will be not in my turns.

Meet Babylon. They already have polytheismus. I trade Math for 79g and CoL and Construction for Poly. We are the tech leader now and will enter MA first.
Babylon knows Germany and Greece. Really a sci civ convention down there.

IBT:
Persepolis builds Great Library. Nice that they don't know the right people.

Turn 3 (290BC)
Diplomacy check. Babylon has now literature. Strange they must have self researched. Not good our trade bait is gone.

Theveste Galley->Courthouse (prebuild).

IBT: Currency and MA

Turn 4 (270BC)
Science->Republic (11turns) maybe we have still a chance for the trades. Nobody else is in MA.
Carthago,Theveste and New Rome prebuild->market. Leptis Magna aqueduct->sword.
Boot out Romans again.

Turn 5 (250BC): Units move, nothing important.

Turn 6 (230BC): India gets CoL for worker+19g
Carthage market->sword

Turn 7 (210BC)
Leptis Magna sword->sword
Utica aqueduct->settler

Turn 8 (190BC)
Carthage sword->sword

Turn 9 (170BC)
20 turn over, declare on Rome. Kill a speer.

Turn 10 (150BC)
Raze Veii, Lose some archers on Cumae

Our South:
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/sgo_150_1.jpg

Persian interesting region:
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/sgo_150_2.jpg


Do with Rome what you think, but keep in mind Persia.
Their troops should be mainly on the Indian border, so a small landing party should be able to do quite some damage. 3 galleys are down in the south.
I would still like a city in Persia. A settler is near Carthage. If we should decide against it we can merge it into one of the smaller towns.
Utica is currently on worker. I thought to make a few before growing it over 6 to pump up Theveste and also store a few to grow Utica faster after size 7.

We are in MA and tech leader. Republic in 5. After that we should stop science and closely watch the situation of the sci civs.
We should be able to get all starting MA techs one way or the other, but can't prevent that the southerners will also have all soon.

:goodjob:

only a micro tip:
If you mine the cow for rome, you have one extra shield making it 20 after corruption. 20 instead of 19 is important i think you do not doubt.
The food shortage of 1 this creates can be solved by moving the laborer from the mountain to the not yet worked forest.

Leptis Magna could use some more growth i think, although that would give up the 10 shield magic number, so just see if you think its worth it. (considering we can also feed it workers from Utica)

Very nice putting them up against eachother and preparing the boats for takeoff :goodjob:

damn, Persia is the strongest AI military (only average one)

Got it. Nice start against Rome, Klarius. :thumbsup:

I won't be playing for at least twelve hours, so there's time for another three pages' worth of discussion. ;) Do we all agree on suspending research after we get Republic?

Do we all agree on suspending research after we get Republic? I guess the idea is to buy the free techs of the scientific civs before starting research again. That may fail if they trade on their turns before we get a chance. Republic won't buy us Mono or Feudalism unless they are known to more civs. I would not gift any techs. If you can pull it off do it.

I think the more important question is: do we revolt immediately - and I say a clear Yes here. This way you'll have your reseach pause, too ;)

Yes, i think we should go republic right away.
We have market places and will soon have 4 size 12 cities. this makes >60 extra gold in republic. With 13 unit support vs 20 and 2 gold per unit, republic is favorable as long as we have less than 60 units.

Also, get a numidian ready for a golden age as soon as we are republic.

Persia is not gonna reach MA by itself very soon, since it needs 2 more techs. waiting for that will simply take too long. Signing peace and then trading techs will take just as long. It would be 20 turns before we can attack them again.

I think will have to proceed research. If we have rupublic and a golden age, those MA techs might get below 10 turns. If we go straight for chivalry, we should be first to have it, in around 40 turns from now.
By that time, i think both the Persians and the Romans could be destroyed. It would be nice to destroy India before they get to build elephants, it would be extremely nice if they can be destroyed by the units we build before having chivalry.
Also should Utica be replaced during those 40 turns.

Then, when we do have chivalry, we could bring our knights to the other continent. If they don't have MA defenders yet, we would be able to wreak havoc uncontested there. preferably starting with the civs who have both Iron and Horses, and disconnecting their resources to keep our powerfull knight advantage.

While we research one of the MA techs however, i think we could gift Persia to MA just as we finish our first MA tech. (Preferably after bringing them to one city) Then we could trade their tech (if it is not the one we researched) and get to chivalry in 30 instead of 40 turns.


The other option would be to indeed set science to 0, but that would be for quite a while before we can extord those techs. (since we need to wait out those 20 turns) During that time we could make money and produce horses.
There is however a chance they get a tech that doesn't lead us towards chivalry.

I still think we shouldn't research the starting techs. And I don't think we have to watch our reputation on the Persian/Indian continent.
I see our strategy as:
First cut back Persia, then go for India and hope that Persia,India and Rome are removed before anybody has astronomy.
After our first war with Persia, I would ally with them against India. Then at a convenient time backstab Persia.

As soon as one of the scientific civs reaches the MA, we should gift the others. By that we can do the brokering and they don't swap among themselves. We should be able to buy us in the brokering by gifting Germany. Literature, Republic and maybe a little gold should do it.

If we don't want to trade, we should spawn more wars. Babylon knows Ottomans (I did think about it now, that's how babylon got literature). They should be at war also, because they could reach the MA at the same turn.
I should have done it already, when we met the Babs, but didn't want to spend the money for the embassy. But we have the money and if we do a few turns zero research latera we can get more money easily.
Then there will be no immediate swap, because the others will take longer to reach MA.
The non-sci civs are not as important currently, but we could use them also to slow down the tech leaders.

I would wait with republic until we see how our adventure with Persia turns out.
Also all cities should be at least size 10-12. We will not reach this in 5 turns.
But calculate please, if it really gives a benefit in the situation.

Also I would like the GA later.
I don't know for what we should use the production boost as long as we can make only 30sh units. A horse, sword or NM out of Carthage every turn will soon kill our economy with unit support cost even in GA.

I agree on delaying the GA. We should use it when new infrastructure buildings are available (i.e. cathedrals and/or universities). I wholeheartly disagree on gifting techs.

@grs, I see you don't like gifting techs.
But not gifting is no better, with all the sci civs around. They will reach MA at some time, before we can do anything about it.
If we don't control the trades, the tech leaders will benefit even more. We may keep Germany backwards, but the others will trade. Then they will reach tech parity shortly into MA and we have no benefit.

One more point, which came just to my mind. We are able to gift Persia w/o making peace. They have the great library, so they get any tech we would gift/trade to India. Keep this in mind and don't just make peace in 10 turns for peanuts.

Polish Parliament again and I'm totally confused.

grs and klarius have their ways of explaining their anticipations during their "rundens"

Sound like a cackle in the old chook-shed to me. :lol:

Ok, I want Republic ASAP.
I'm happy with the fake wars.
And I said before I want the AI backwards as long as possible.

So gifting techs, as much as I like it in normal games, is not for our purpose in this game. I rather spend time researching what I want, while whacking the enemy. We only have 5 cities, so keeping down the freebies will givew us time to research on our own. Yes, it might take longer, but we don't want to meet knights and MI's, when we go at them.

Swords and horses are good for our next neighbours, and they have to be gone before Chivalry.

IF we gift all the scientific AI's in to MA, we will meet pikes and MI's. Not a problem to me, in a normal game, but this is not normal and we have to be very careful. 5 cities can still build quite a few units and be over the limit, by choosing the right civ to trade stuff to. We will/have to get rid of mostof our neighbours though, which give us the delicate problem if we can trade to anyone else soonish?

I suggest:

Republic right away.
Almost kill of Persia and India.
Keep continuancy on the overseas wars, change alliances etc.

At this point, no freebies to the AI.

I have played 10-15 SG's and NEVER met a better bunch of turkeys.

Gobble-gobble -> to infinity

But I love it anyways, it shows dedication and skills. But it doesn't take us closer to the goal, which is to win by conquest.

So calm down and smarten up!

We need ONE focus right now. (except Republic)

Shorten down your ramblings and get to the point, I hate when people blabble for no reason, but for their own good.

Now get serious!

Even if it hurts me to the bone, I suspect a town on the next continent will do us great goodness in the future.

Utica has to go for that town.

Now I crawl back under my rock and sulk.

ahh Gozpel, don't be so harsh on us :( , we're just having fun :cool:

Republic in this situation and with a few more units to be build:
35 units (27 right now) with 13 free means 44 upkeep. vs 7 upkeep now. - 37.

Not counting Utica (which will be abandoned) we will have about 42 total citizens in the remaining 4 cities. only few workers to be joined for that (made from utica) means 42 more commerce. we have libraries and market places (not all markets yet, but we are researching not cashing so the libs count heavier now) makes that ~60 worth in gold. +60.

We currently have a few MPs, 6 or so ? so they will need to be replaced by gold, costing us another 6. -6.

total -37 -6 + 60 gives us a positive result for republic.

So i do definately think we should go republic immeadiately.

About the trading stuff i feel the same as Gozpel, hold on to any advantage we have. I still would like to have a monopoly on chivalry for a while. As i explained and gozpel also seems to think about it like that, destroy Persia, India and Rome before chivalry. Then use the knights for the other continent. I guess that is when you want to start the GA, which is good.

I think we should make the AI fight as much as we possibly can.

And gozpel, i love this sgotm, and i don't think our discussions are for no reason. We state our ideas just like you just did, only we do it continuously and dont hide under a rock :) . In fact, except for the delay GA and trashing of reputation on this island, i think you pretty much said the same thing as i did make my scenario. Maybe you can just put it to words better so i need more posts to make my idea's clear.
We do need one focus, but isn't it good to voice all possible options before deciding what the focus will be? (else you'd need a dictator or something to decide)

I do agree with the trashing of reputation and think if we do that anyway, we should benefit from it maximally. We can let them pay cities for peace and disband them except one as long as we don't have our own city on the island (since it would take the unhappiness) This could greatly speed up our conquest and since we are talking about only a dozen cities on that island, i think it could be cleared pretty easilly.

the only risk is that there is a way for them to contact under the fog in the northwestern part of the map. That chance is very small.

btw, it's ein Runde, zwei Runden. Not Rundens :D :p

Well, I like the AI backwards also. But we have no chance to avoid pikes, MI and I think even muskets and knights, when we go for the 4 sci civs in the south.

Three of them will reach MA soon. It would be strange if there isn't feudalism around then.
If we spawn a war between Babs and Ottos, we can avoid the initial trading between these two. But at some time there will be peace.
We can end up in the situation, where all three starting techs are around and they trade and are researching different paths. Then even gunpowder will come long before we can kill them all.
I still think we should try to get the techs by trade. That will speed up the distribution only by a few turns.
Look to it that everybody is at war after that, so that their MA research is slow.
And I also think we should research directly to MT.
Chivalry only if we can buy it cheap.
We will need cavs for sure later. We need quality, because we cannot support quantity.

Edit:
I still think Leptis Magna is the town to give up. The high commerce of Utica is more important than the shields of Leptis Magna. We have enough shields in Carthage and New Rome, but gold will always be a problem.

If we are gonna trash our reputation anyways, we should have multiple ways of getting Persia's free tech.

I really would like chivalry because it can whipe out some of the civ's and a some fast units can help us disconnecting AI resources. Also as stated, we need quality not quantity. Knights is quality, longbows are not.
Comparing knights to cavalry would insinuate that you want to delay fighting on the large continent till MT ?

Comparing knights to cavalry would insinuate that you want to delay fighting on the large continent till MT ?
Probably, we first have to clean out our neigborhood (Persia/India), then we could go for the backwards not sci nations.
That all takes quite some time especially as long we can use only galleys for transport.
And note it's no continent, it's several islands. That makes the logistics even more complicated. And they probably settle even more in the meantime.
A small note more. There is a one tile island around. If we can manage it in time, it would be nice, if we could block it with a slave, before somebody settles it.

Edit: forget the last sentence, it is already settled.
So, everybody watch out that no capital jumps to one tile islands.

yes, that would be nice, however, we can achieve our conquest very well without claiming it. One tile island cities are usually pretty easy to obtain in peace nagotiations.

cross edit: OK :D (aren't we good gozpel?)

-grs
-Gozpel
-WackenOpenAir
-Offa
-Klarius
-NorthernPike -Your Turn

It looks as though RL is going to keep me from posting until tomorrow. If that "twelve hours" got anyone's hopes up, my apologies. ;)

@Northern Pike
No problem.
If we play too fast the fun would be over soon and we lose the oportunity to spam more posts.

@All
I just looked again into CivAssist.
Now I noted that Babylon is not scientific. So no need for a war between Babylon and Ottomans just now.

After we finish this game within 2 weeks ;) we could of course play it again as 5CCC AW :D

And gozpel, i love this sgotm, and i don't think our discussions are for no reason. We state our ideas just like you just did, only we do it continuously and dont hide under a rock

Don't think for a second that I don't like your spammings, I love it. You're a bunch of living calculators and skilled players, that vastly exceed my experience. But I always have a focus and possibly in a game one-to-one I would beat you senseless. :banana:

So take out Persia and India now, we want Persia's free tech before we destroy them though. Reputation is a myth, this will be AW more or less from now on anyways.

Just so you'll know, I highly respect your opinions and are a bit dazed by your ramblings, but I do like it. :)

And I also think we should research directly to MT.
Chivalry only if we can buy it cheap.

No way, we want knights right away, we will take 2-3 civs with knights only if we disconnect the iron and build horses for upgrade. We can't sit and wait for 60 turns, we have to act NOW if we want to win.

Don't think for a second that I don't like your spammings, I love it. You're a bunch of living calculators and skilled players, that vastly exceed my experience. But I always have a focus and possibly in a game one-to-one I would beat you senseless. :banana:

So take out Persia and India now, we want Persia's free tech before we destroy them though. Reputation is a myth, this will be AW more or less from now on anyways.

Just so you'll know, I highly respect your opinions and are a bit dazed by your ramblings, but I do like it. :)

Thanx :D.
Yes you would beat me senseless indeed, i have not yet played civ multiplayer ever. :)
Also do i not exceed your experience :p

gozpel + beer = moron :mischief:

Well, I have less posts on this page than even gozpel, so I just add one of my dreaded long term strategy views. :D

The reason I want to bee-line for MT is that we have to get it anyways and earlier is better than later.

This game will still last for well over 100 turns (we are about 100 turns away from ADel's best conquest date in the original game).
In this time several of the enemies will reach MA, some may reach gunpowder and maybe all lasts even much longer due to the 5CC and we see even rifles.
Due to the variant it doesn't help if we eliminate weak targets first and let the strong enemies move in.

We probably can control our island and Persindia w/o even using knights, but the push to the rest of the world should best be in one fast campaign.

Cavs are the most effective troops for that from the middle MA well into the IA if necessary. And well, I just like them :crazyeye:

It would be nice, if we could acquire chivalry, so that we can build knights to upgrade to cavs later, but I don't think that's crucial.

So my proposal is:
War with Persia as soon as possible, even w/o destroying Rome (they are no threat anymore and can provide some help with the massive barb uprise coming soon).
Do enough damage, gift them into MA by gifting India. Then acquire their free tech.
By that time the first other sci civ may also have reached MA. Look what trades are possible. It doesn't help to hold back any MA starting tech, because they may trade among themselves down there.
Then go for India. I would even ally Persia for this, if they have made peace in the meantime. India is then in MA, but still quite far away from chivalry.
Pikes can be taken on by swords and even by horses and they will not have many. Maybe there would be even some use for a few trebs, though I nomally despise artillery (at least before the real stuff in IA). We lose a lot, but also can produce quite a few.
Then a lot depends how the tech situation evolves, but I think at the time we are through with Persia and India (maybe changing sides again), we could see MT already at the horizon.
We definitely don't want to trade away any tech towards MT, so tech acquisitions in the upper path should be done by gold and hopefully could pay by brokering. But we really would want to get Astronomy, if somebody else researches it. Caravels would be much better for transporting our cavs ;) to the far away lands.

Sorry this is too complicated for me, so only a short answer.

Attack and remove Rome, then attack Persia.
Do not gift techs and research to chivalry asap, then bottom path to military tradition.

Your reasoning is sound. Indeed, whatever we raze on the other continents will be retaken by the other (stronger) civ's. However, with our limited cities and unit support, i think you cannot expect to take the continent in one run with cav's. I think your plan will only delay the game so much that cav's will not win us the game and we will need tanks. Certainly since the AI will soon be out researching us and thus have cavs as well when we do.

If we raze cities with cavalry, sure they will be replaced, but at least the replaced cities will be small new and weak while the razed city was developed already. So it does give an advantage.

I do think we need to be as agressive as possible with the knights and just keep razing stuff. Maybe it is a good idea however not to take the weakest civ, but simply raze the strongest cities. (capitals, wonders etc). Also should we be doing a lot of pillaging.
Who to attack on the other continent is not an isue now however, we can see that by the time we do have the knights and the Persian/Indian island cleared.

Persia and India i really don't think will be difficult. just go for it, get that free tech without bothering our reputation there and whipe them out.

Also see if we need to bring workers to the other side. We don't want to have the island cleared just to find out we still need 20 road tiles to connect the horses.

Also note that because of increasing tech costs, researching chivalry will only make a few turns difference for MT if even that. (maybe it will make no difference at all if the AI catches up with our research and we are gonna be trading to MT together with the AI)

So i'm with grs and gozpel.

Since we are not gonna bother reputation, Persia should be gifted to MA (if they won't be there by themselves) when they only have a few (their weakest) cities left and their resources disconnected. We can then immeadiately redeclare and take their tech by signing peace for their last city (which we raze 1 turn after)
We can even gift them at the moment they have only 1 city remaining. While they wont give us a tech without destoying cities (which we cant since they only have 1 left), they will accept gpt in peace nagotiations no matter our reputation. Set all expenses to 0, offer them all our gpt for their tech, then destroy them.

I also prefer keeping our own research going while we fight persia, 66% chance we are not researching the tech we get for free.

@WOA
I still think we can finish this with cavs, if we apply a good strategy. But for that I want to have them ASAP.
With nobody really wanting the gifting/trading course chivalry will be quite a bit of a delay.

It's only monarch and there isn't so much land around. But we have to watch out not to generate a big civ. Then it will take a long time for any AI to reach the industrial age.

Again, we don't need to make peace with Persia, if we should want to gift them. They have the Great Library. Any tech we trade/gift to India will end up in Persia also.

Edit:
One point with our reputation. I agree that we don't need it with our first three enemies. But the others should not know of our evil nature. It makes extorting cities much harder or even impossible. And we need the 1-tile island.

@WOA
I still think we can finish this with cavs, if we apply a good strategy. But for that I want to have them ASAP.
With nobody really wanting the gifting/trading course chivalry will be quite a bit of a delay.

We don't want to trade before chivalry. Probably half way MA we will have to. I expect MT to cost us 40 turns at max research or so. (does anyone have a "price list" for the techs? then i could make some calculations.....
(if we'd know we wont be first on MT by our own research, we should not invest heavilly on it at all and possibly stop research right after chivalry)

Again, we don't need to make peace with Persia, if we should want to gift them. They have the Great Library. Any tech we trade/gift to India will end up in Persia also.
Hmm, yes, but i'd prefer to Gift India only after some of it is destroyed. Taking Pikes with AA units really isn't very feasable...

Indeed, the others should not know. Don't tell them !

Why is everybody all of a sudden so concerned about pikes. :confused:
Nobody objected to take on Rome with archers, while they had the ability to build legions.
India has only 6 cities currently. They are probably having big trouble with the Persians. They cannot build a lot of roads currently so I pretty much doubt that all cities are connected.

Rome had only 1 legion (luckilly)
Early AI units are more likely to be only regular, now they are most likely building vets (and that is a HUGE difference).
They may have size7 cities.
since horses were tradable already from persia, why would india not have it's cities connected yet? 6 cities are not so hard to connect :)

Edit:
Btw, Gozpel, your avatar is the best avatar i have seen yet.
(so i decided to get one myself as well, (al lot less cool though))

The AI still is not very likely to have many barracks. They normally start only in MA with that and even then they only build very few.
Delhi had no rax when I established the embassy.
Also looking on that screenshot it doesn't look like there are many roads. One city is for sure unconnected. That's the one on our island ;) .
And BTW India has no iron hooked to the capital currently, as you can see from the trade screen.
In fact I think, we urgently need to help them against Persia or they may go down before we can kill them. :lol:

A more clear explanation why not to skip chivalry:
-By the time we are gonna build knights, we have our cities size 12. When we are at MT, we still have them size 12. We will not gain much in power during that time. The AI definately will. Our opportunities will be declining rather than growing.
-Conquered land will be retaken, but weakening civs will always be better than not weakening them. What else would you like to produce in the 100 turns before MT?
-Conquered land will be retaken, but a small number of civ's retake less land than a large number of civ's. We must take out Civ's.

Yeah, i thought i'd spam some more on the same topic :)
Well, it would just be nice if we can all agree on the long term strategy, so why not try to bring some more arguments to change people's minds :mischief:

btw, i am not really so concerned about pikes. I have little concerns about that whole pathethic island anyway. Just like to make it as fast and easy as possible :D. So lets hope Persia is close to destroying them by the time we attack Persia :p (including wasting their own army on the Indians)

Well chaps, you certainly can't be accused of not trying to look ahead. This is very good, and not looking ahead is one of my failings in Civ. I think more planning about the short and medium term and less about the end game would be good.

Having said that I will also post about the longish term: I think we should get knights as soon as possible and not hang around for mil trad. On most previous occasions when I went for cavalry I later regretted it. Going for cavalry is best when you have very fast research; do we think we are going to have fast research in this game? In addition, by waiting for mil trad we will lose much of our Great Lighthouse advantage.

With our 5 big cities our production and science is pretty strong, not that much worse than in some normal games, and we can do some serious damage to the AI with a bit of luck. Our unit support will be fine if we play aggressively, especially if we aren't researching. We appear to have got off to a very good start and should roll along as long as possible.

@WOA
Why 100 turns to mil trad, if not researching chivalry? I'm more looking into 50-70.

@Offa
On the one hand you say we have strong science, on the other hand you think we cannot go for MT :confused:
I'm pretty sure we can get MT first and then have better attack ratio as with knights in 20-30 turns.
And we have then the speed advantage.

What advantage do we have of the Lighthouse in a war with the far away islands. We can reach them now, but still only with galley transport capacity.
I don't think you really fear AI invasions, so everybody having astronomy doesn't really change anything.
If somebody researches Astronomy and we can trade for it, we could use caravels and still have an additional movement point.
That could give speedy transport of cavs :lol: .

But overall I think we will be take quite some time to deal with Persia. This could speed up in the end by knights.
But then we have knights have to transport lots of them to the stronger civs. We may make a dent into them, but especially Greece which is producing hoplites since very early will take a big toll.

And my experience with cavs is quite different. I always have good results ignoring chivalry. Not the highest scores, because my empire doesn't grow much in the meantime, but quite early dates, due to the quick finish.

[QUOTE=klarius]@WOA
Why 100 turns to mil trad, if not researching chivalry? I'm more looking into 50-70.

If one can provide me a pricelist for techs, i will make a calculation on the number of turns the techs are gonna cost us. Even if it is 50-70 though, what would we do during that time ?

Oh and research: in early game, it is better than in a normal game because you didnt invest everything in expansion (all cities small, little city improvements). Later in the game, research will be lower, in a normal game your cities (many more) would alse be developed then.
probably at this time it is about equal with what it would be in a normal game.
So our research looks very good now, but there will be an end to that.

There are several tools to calculate tech cost in the Utility Programs section of this board.

But easiest to use is currently
CivAssist (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=2147355#post2147355)

Ainwood's new do-everything thingy.
In one of the tabs you find the cost for all techs for this specific save. You can also find a lot other useful information using this.

deleted ...

Well I did assume that we go in republic at some time.
That we optimise for gold while researching.
And that we will keep Utica, where I count a maximum of nearly 40gpt in republic w/o taking away any river tiles from Carthage.
Carthage and New Rome have similar potential with less corruption.
Theveste around 30.
A coastal city in Persia will also add some, but that's still unclear and will take time to come to speed.
This is before corruption, sliders and libraries.
I intended to get around 150 beakers. This will probably not be possible, because the trade methods I would apply are not well liked in the team. Still 120-130 beakers should be realistic.
And I did hope to get some free techs.

(I did it by head, am i a living calculator now? :D )

Yes, you are.

I actually thought about suggesting to you guys that you might like to work this out, but thought, hey, one of them will do it anyway. Good work. :goodjob:

Regarding tech costs, how can we know them in advance: won't they reduce if for example someone else knows them.

Of course my poor head is reeling a bit, but I think you are supporting the knights idea?!

Klarius, when I said we have strong science I was referring to now, and the medium term future. As things get more expensive we might fall behind a bit.
Galley transport is admittedly slow but probably workable: the earlier we attack the fewer troops we need.

Y
Regarding tech costs, how can we know them in advance: won't they reduce if for example someone else knows them.

These costs are in the current situation with nobody knowing the techs. If we beeline to MT nobody will catch up and this is the real cost.

Even if we delay, there is not much to be expected from monarch AI. But it depends on the free tech distribution. Maybe one or two techs could be reduced in cost by 10-20%, or could be even bought.
The only way to really speed up things would be aggressive trading and gifting to steer the research of the AI in the wanted direction. That's a bit tricky and probably not well suited for an SG.

Oh sorry guys i did make a TINY mistake. :rolleyes:
I forgot to include republic :p

Would need a whole new calculation, with assumptions on the amount of units we can have and the gpt deficit we can run.

Sorry, too lazy :blush:

So lets just ignore the calculations for now :D

rough estimates are of course possible. going from the 106 in despotism.
If republic would not cause extre expenses, we would get 150/160 science (instead of 100), making it 70 turns. Now the expenses need to be substracted, so my rough estimation is that it is between 70 turns and whatever more turns. That much depends on the gpt deals we could have from the AI.

So if we can sell good for gpt, your 70 estimate is possible.

So let's get back to the discussion where we started, knights or cavalry. I vote knights asap ! :)

50 AD, end of turn (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm4/offa_SG004_AD0050_01.SAV)

150 (0): My main goal for this round is to get a force of eight swordsmen landed in Persia. For this I'll need four galleys, so I switch Leptis Magna to a galley build. I'll pursue our war against the Romans, of course, but only with secondary forces.

I reinforce the swordsman outside Cumae with two archers from New Rome.

Four Roman units move towards New Rome, no doubt because it's empty now.


130 (1): Our swordsman dies attacking Cumae (a hill town). There are at least two spearmen in the city, so it's no use continuing the attack with the archers.

We destroy all four Roman units exposed in the open (two spearmen and two archers) without loss.

The Ottomans and the Greeks make peace. The cost of bringing the Greeks back into the anti-Ottoman alliance isn't trivial, so I don't do it immediately. The Ottomans still have the Germans to fight.

The Persians begin the Great Wall.

Carthage and New Rome swordsman --> swordsman.


110 (2): No combat. We get swordsmen and archers moving towards Neapolis.

Theveste marketplace --> barracks, Leptis Magna galley --> marketplace, Utica worker --> worker.


90 (3): No combat, except for a ridiculous attack by a barb warrior against one of our veteran swordsmen--on a mountain. :lol: We close in on Neapolis.

Carthage and New Rome swordsman --> swordsman.


70 (4): We pick off a Roman settler/spear team outside Viroconium, acquiring two more slaves.

We raze Neapolis, but the RNG is against us and we lose two swordsmen and two archers to defeat the garrison of just two spearmen.

We destroy a Roman archer outside Cumae.

Science rate down to 10% (from 80%), Republic still due in ein runde. ;)

I merge a worker into Theveste.

Republic --> Feudalism.


50 (5): No combat. Eight swordsmen move towards their galleys.

Carthage and New Rome swordsman --> swordsman.


30 (6): Four galleys carrying eight swordsmen assemble at their rendezvous point north of Cumae.

We revolt and get three turns of anarchy.


10 (7): We land eight swordsmen next to Pasargadae.


10 (8): We raze Pasargadae (a hill town), losing one swordsman to defeat the garrison of two spearmen. We spot furs two tiles from the town's ruins.

A moment later we spot furs two squares from Tarsus, too.

Two swordsmen making their way down our north-south highway defeat barbarians (a warrior and a horseman).

We pick off a Roman archer approaching New Rome.

An Immortal appears out of the fog and defeats one of our depleted swordsmen.

A Persian settler/spear team moves into position to re-found Pasargadae, one tile northeast of the ruins.

Our civ becomes a republic, going from 45 gpt in despotism to 86 gpt now, both at 8-0-2. Even better, New Rome can now produce a swordsman a turn.


30 (9): We raze Tarsus, taking it from its garrison of one spearman for no loss.

We destroy the Persian Immortal and their settler/spear team, losing one swordsman in the process.

Our full-strength elite galley sinks attacking a Roman regular galley off Cumae, before another of our galleys finishes the job. I switch Utica's build to a galley to compensate.

We destroy a Roman archer outside Cumae.

We disperse a barb camp for 25 gold.

In the first new development on the tech front this round, the Babylonians now have a world monopoly on Monarchy.

The Persians move another settler/spear team into position around the ruins of Pasargadae.

Theveste barracks --> swordsman, New Rome swordsman --> swordsman.

We get the "massive barbarian uprising" warning, for Carthage. I change Carthage's build to a Numidian.


50 (10): The Ottomans are in the Middle Ages and have Engineering. We would have to give them Republic, 321 gold, 16 gpt, and of course peace for it. I assume we'd rather wait.

The Persians have Republic.

I move a Numidian along our north-south highway in a pattern which I assume will reveal the massive barbarian uprising, but it doesn't happen. The uprising may be in the mountain tile five directly southwest of Carthage.

We attack a Persian archer on grassland with a full-strength swordsman...and lose. :mad:

We destroy the latest Persian settler/spear team, without loss.

We get our first war weariness. Increasing the lux rate to 30% solves the problem, for now.

We have galleys in position to deliver two swordsmen and a settler to our beachhead in Persia next turn. The third galley in the same stack should go to the coast between Cumae and Karachi, drop off the workers it's carrying, and pick up the swordman and elite archer waiting there. I assume we'll want to found our overseas city directly north of the wheat, where it'll have both horses and furs in its first ring.

There are various things you can do about the massive barbarian uprising before you press Enter, depending on how seriously you take it--change any of the builds in our northern cities other than Leptis Magna, move the Numidians from Theveste and Utica towards Carthage, etc.

The Romans will give us two of their three cities for peace, so if we're going to carry out a massive backstab it might be easier to include them in it than to take their remaining towns one by one.

WOA's idea about micromanaging Carthage up to 20 spt is still a good one. I haven't implemented it yet because as long as we're building 30-shield units there, the necessary switching around of citizens would cost us a little commerce to no benefit.

New Rome is crammed with workers. I had them labouring during most of my round, but now there doesn't seem to be much reason to expose them.

I've left our Numidians home so far so as not to trigger our GA, although the tactical consequences have been troublesome. If we change our minds about this and decide that we want our GA, it'll be easier just to build a Numidian in New Rome (in one turn) than to move one down from the north.

The Persian front:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/SGOTM4-Offa-50AD.JPG

I'd prefer not to take and abandon any cities when we have cities near. The same goes for Persian cities when we have already settled there.

Looks very good :goodjob: . I especially like that you prioritized the Persians, our real enemy currently.

We are now again able to act flexible with diplomacy.
For Rome I would recommend peace. It's no use to bear the war weariness from them. We can destroy them when we find the time.
I would recommend to take their 2 cities, gift them to India because of pop-rush unhappiness.
We can then soon declare on India and destroy the empty cities. This should be at the time we make peace with Persia so we can ally Persia against India.

With Ottomans in MA we should now urgently look to manage the scientific Civs. We should do a round of gifting/trading.
After that we would be free to make phony wars at leisure, so they don't get their infrastructure up.
Especially Greece who is on the course to become the top dog, needs a war soon.

We should not allow them to get into MA on their own, while they are at peace with Ottomans. They could swap, if they get a different tech and we have no benefit. They can reach MA every turn, because they could trade for the missing techs using republic.
The only reason they haven't done it yet, is that they value republic too high @ 2nd. This can change every turn now.
If we gift them now they either get the same, which reduces the price so that we can easily afford it. Or they get a different tech and we can pull off the twofer.
Not gifting them will delay them only by a few turns (maybe even none at all, if they trade the next interturn).
We should have gifted Persia via the GL already. They are a big asset, because none of the other sci civs know them. If they should get the same tech we can buy cheap from the others. If they get a monopoly we can get it later by pointy-stick and don't have to give it out to the others.

Another small point. Even if you want to go for chivalry, engineering is an important tech. The river crossing ability greatly helps movement around Carthage and New Rome. We can then also plant trees for Carthage, Utica (which I still think we should keep) and New Rome (we may not need it for max production, but we can optimize gold by working river forest tiles instead of non-river BGs).
And note you can plant a forest on a cow or wheat keeping the bonusses. A forest cow is 3sh 3f in republic.

Edit:
Another small point on Greece. They have already shot their reputation, by the early peace. They will need cash or techs to buy something in the future. Exception is, when they have an alliance against us.
We should always look to it that they don't accumulate to much cash. I would do this by Moonsinger's banker strategy, but I know that's not very popular.

Got it and will play sometime on the weekend.

Pre: Theveste changed to 15spt and 0fpt. It will grow by the settlers from the town we will abandon - and that will be Leptis Magna which is far worse than Utica in any respect, but overlap. None of our towns will get past size 12 in this game. Change Theveste and Catharge to sword. Peace with Ceasar gives us 19 gold both of his towns. I abandon them both getting one unhappy pop. Research to 60% - feudalism in 8.

IBT: Persia and India sign peace

70AD: --

IBT: Persia shows Immortal and Archer.

90AD: Join settler to Theveste. I would have really liked to get more pop out of Leptis Manga, but we need the territorial advantage to fight Persia, so improvements are sold, Leptis is abandoned and Sabratha is founded.

110AD: Redeclare on Rome.

130AD: Kill an immortal.

IBT: Archer from Hispalis attacks, but dies.

150AD: Kill 2 spears in Hispalis, raze it and Rome is out. Join 3 Roman workers to Utica. Move a stack of units next to Persepolis.

IBT: Ottomans and Germans sign peace. Numidian mercenary kill 5 horses.

170AD: 4 Romans workers joined to Sabratha. Kill 3 spears and 1 immortal in Persepolis, but 1 redlined spear remains :mad:

IBT: Xerxes has more immortals, we lose 2 swords...it hurts us he has peace with Ghandi now.

190AD: Lose 1 archer, kill the remaining spear with a sword and raze Persepolis with the Great Library, though I am tempted for a moment. Make peace with Xerxes for all his 39 gold.

210AD: --

IBT: Feudalism - monotheism

230AD: Rush a harbor in Sabratha with slaves and gold.

IBT: --

250AD: We can now build horses.

If you want to gamble for "gift and trade" you can do now. Otherwise we will remain the tech leader and can trade once the others arrive in the middle ages. There are 3 Roman slaves in Utica, please join in 2 of them to get it up to pop 12. Sabratha dearly needs an aqueduct and a culture building. A court would be nice too. Our rep with India is trashed so feel free to attack them or Xerxes again if it fits. The Ottoman war is pointless - did they declare or we?

The Save (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm4/offa_SG004_AD0250_01.SAV)

:goodjob:

-grs
-Gozpel . . . . . . . . . .Your turn !
-WackenOpenAir
-Offa
-Klarius
-NorthernPike

Good work getting Sabratha established. :thumbsup:

A Carthaginian peace, but imposed on the Romans--most appropriate. :lol:

I assume we'll want to return to the Persian war as soon as we get our swordsmen in Persia upgraded to MDI, since there's no other way to make progress, and we need to take twelve cities (six Persian and six Indian) before news of our treachery reaches the rest of the world. So we'll need to rush a barracks in Sabratha (156 gold) and then upgrade seven swordsmen there (all but the elite; 140 gold). This will require us to drop the science rate to zero for a few turns.

As part of a peace settlement, the Ottomans will give us Engineering for Feudalism and 4 gpt. Our discussions of trading strategy have gotten extremely abstruse ;), but I think we should do it, since the opportunity will be lost if the Greeks reach the mediaeval era and draw Feudalism as their free tech.

Carthage is at size twelve with a full food box, so we can skim off a worker there right now. Then we could merge this worker into Utica, saving one of our precious maintenance-free Roman slaves.

Why are MDI so neccesary ?
They don't have 3 defence units yet. And MDI won't do better against their 4 attack.

I thought you were the number cruncher :p

Attack 3 vs Defense 2 (fortified, flat land) is 55% win (both veterans).
Attack 4 vs Defense 2 (fortified, flat land) is 70% win (both veterans).

Just on a sidenote: we are 2 techs away from knights, so we should mix horses (in towns with close to 15 or 30 spt - like New Rome) and MDI in towns with about 20 shields (like those in our northern core).

Yes, of course we should produce like that.
Of course MDI have a better chance to win, i just feel like swords have a decent enough chance to win and rather not delay chivalry.

Of course MDI have a better chance to win, i just feel like swords have a decent enough chance to win

Not decent enough so far. ;) We've lost a fair amount of momentum due to substantial losses in sword-vs.-spear attacks. We aren't finished attacking hill towns, either.

Ok, I got it.

I don't care what you say, I will head for Chivalry ASAP and build horses only. MI's and stuff is fine if you fight in a limited area, but from here on we want speed and knights are my fav weapon. I'm happy with normal horses, but against strong defenders they tend to die a lot. Knights won't!

End of discussion! ;)

What I really mean is that we have to start shipping units soon to other continents, like Vikings and Celts to wipe them out. MI's and swords will be way too slow.

I also consider to gift the AI's in to the next age, so we can do some trading. Mono will make us go straight for Chivalry and with some proper management I believe we can get it before next player. Typically I'll miss out on the great fun as usual, but ah well.

After we get Chivalry, there's no need to research anything for a while, so we use the money to rush stuff.

Offa must remember who begged, crawled in the dirt and nearly pulled out his hair in vain, wanting knights in SGOTM-1.

Now I have the choice and I won't be talked out of it. :)

Well, I just try to adapt and put a few thoughts to this course.
Gozpel, after trading, I would recommend some new wars.
I would go for a dogpile on Greece now, so that they have other business than fast research.
One devious tactic would be to combine the peace treaty with Ottomans with an alliance against Greece. If they should then make peace with Greece before 20 turns they declare automatically against us and we get some war happiness.
We have to clean out our neighborhood first. For that I would now DoW India and ally Persia. Then backstab Persia, when their units are gone.
And I still think we need cavs fast.
By the time we get to the big ones like Greece, we will face big cities with pikes or hoplites and maybe even muskets.

Rushing units is not much use. Our high production cities are quite fast producers already. And we can get us a golden age, if we want.

I would not gift them to MA when not needed or when they won't be there by themselves by the time we get to them with knights. The less pikes the better.

I think you can make a few more MDI in our capital because they are good enough for our war against Persia and we wont have enough gold to unpgrade very many horses anyway. We will be able to produce enough horses for upgrading from just 2 cities.

When we have knights, and hopefully i will get to do some upgrading and rushing, rushing needs to be done with care and consideration.

Rushing from 0 is obviously not an option. after producing 1 turn of 20 shields, one could rush to the full 70, but that wastes 20 shields still because it will take another turn anyway. Therfore, if money needs to be burned, just rush an MDI or temple or whatever after one turn, swich back to knight and have it produce shields for 1 or 2 more turns.
What to rush exactly and when will depend on the exact spt from the city. I will see when i get to do it.

Also do i prefer keeping some money in stock. We may someday use it to do some research at max or some brokering. Therefore, i prefer only rushing small amounts of shields that have great effects on the production. The best example here is to rush a 20 shield unit after 1 turn of production in a city with 17 spt while producing knights. This way you rush only 3 shields to get the knight 1 turn faster.

Well, Gozpel, whatever decisions you make about research and upgrades, I hope you aren't planning a peaceful round. The Persians are the enemy we can hit right now; we're listed as strong relative to Persia; and our local reputation is ruined anyway, so more bad faith doesn't matter. We need to resume our war with the Persians as soon as we can set up a profitable stab.

I hope we'll all focus on the simple fact that we're competing against twelve other human teams, some of which, by skill or just the law of averages ;), will finish very quickly. Waiting around for the optimal techs and units, losing five turns here and ten there, won't hurt us against the AI, but it will kill our chances in the broader competition.

First The Save (http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm4/offa_SG004_AD0350_01.SAV)

I did plan for a peaceful round, it's not fair for the next player if I start a war and it is different than what he had in mind. So WOA get to start it how he likes it :)

Pre-turn - MM Utica so it grows next turn.

Sell Poly to india for 1gpt and 44g.

Decide to help Greeks and Germany in to next age for 40g all together, they both draw Monotheism. Germany hands that over for Republic and I don't have to exchange Feudalism with anyone. :banana:

Now on to the research of Chivalry, max possible is 80% in 6 turns. -58gpt and 124 in the kitty, this will be fun. We have a couple of barbcamps that can help us keep it up.

Give peace to Ottomans for 60g.

260AD - New Rome and Utica horses -> more horses.

Join Roman worker and Utica is pop 12.

Sword take out barbcamp.

Xerxes get wool for 41g.

270AD - New Rome and Carthage horses -> horses.

Xerxes learnt Currency IT and went into MA, he drew Mono, so no pikes for him yet :)

280AD - Babs declare on Greeks.

Theveste court -> horses.
New Rome and Utica horses -> horses.

Dispose of 2 barbcamps.

Lower research to 70%, 3 turns to Chivalry at -50g with 114 in the bank.

290AD - New Rome and Carthage horses -> horses. Ah well, won't repeat this as our 4 main cities only build horses from now on.

Science to 60%, Chiv in 2t at -36, we have 64g.

300AD - Sell Currency to Babs for 1gpt and 22g. Is this game modded, they didn't get a free tech? Anyways, Chivalry due next turn!

310AD - Germany want us to sign alliance against Ottomans, we decline and they sign peace.

We learn Chivalry -> turn down research to zero, we make 84gpt.

320AD - Nothing.

330AD - Sabratha barracks -> court.

Carthage and Rome builds our first knights! :)

Knight attacks barb and promotes to elite. Horse take out the camp

340AD - Sell Mono to Babs for 8gpt and 45g. They will only give that gold to someone else.

I really want to rush a library in Sabratha to expand its borders, but 300g is almost 4 knights and I leave the decision to next player. I think we should declare on Persians in a couple of turns instead.

350AD - Not much.

We can let New Rome work 30 shields per turn and after the first 30 shields we can shortrush a MI for 40g/10shields anbd we have a 2-turn knight factory. But I think upgrades and buildings in Sabratha are more important right now.

Next player have 418g and 87gpt to play around with.

Upgrade some knights and start the war on Persia, we need to clean up the island so we can concentrate on the other civs. I also want the Golden age now, if we can manage to get it.

When upgrades are finished and necessary buildings done in Sabratha, we can head on towards Cavs. I don't think it will take too long before we're there.

I didn't even think so far as to declare on Greeks or anyone, but it's not too late to do it now.

Have fun.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads8/Sabratha.jpg

Will look and play tonight !

Nice job :goodjob: on getting the trading on, though I hoped we could profit more.
BTW I mentioned some posts above and in the maintenance thread that the Babs are not scientific. Ainwoods CivAssist does give you this information.
But giving them currency after everybody else has it was anyways right.
I'm a bit surprised that everybody got Mono, like in vanilla.
Are you really playing PtW with the latest patch?

We should look to get engineering soon. Utica and New Rome could profit quite a bit from some new planted forests (on cow and one river grass in Utica, wheat, cows and river grass in New Rome).
The river crossing ability would also help.

If I look into our empire, I see unit support cost already killing our economy.
In 5CC one shouldn't build units for later use, but use them as they are built.
Also upgrading or short rushing is not the way to go IMO. We have high productive cities to build knights directly.

In the current situation I would recommend to disband swords and archers in Sabratha.
Now that we have knights we shouldn't use the slow units at all. They would end up in the middle of nowhere and would have to be disbanded without giving shields back.
Only the elites should be used for some aggressive leader fishing.

Build an aqueduct first for the added unit support and more pop. The city has enough food for 10 pop, even w/o border expansion and irrigation.
Library, courthouse and market should also come soon. No units nearterm, please.

I still think there aren't enough wars going on between the AI civ's.
We will not come to the others within 20 turns, so we are free to declare and make alliances. But watch our reputation there.
Also I don't see any benefit from Persia being at peace with India. Our reputation in this region is trashed anyways, so alliances and backstabbing are no problem.

In the current situation I would recommend to disband swords and archers in Sabratha. Do not disband them :hammer: them on Persia, we will lose some of them anyways. Disbanding is waste.