SGOTM 13 - Plastic Ducks

Regarding the army composition, Horse archers are a unit I haven't dismissed from the range of possibles, yet.
They are great raiders early on and have a long life span as support troops.


@ Pottery before Poly/Med :
Why not ? I don't think it is necessary to get the Oracle asap to make it safe. Or at least, I don't feel very nervous about it.

@ 2 scouting workboats :
They would bring us very important info on top of the (possible) circumnavigation bonus. So yep, that would be fine with me.

@ Oracle's pick :
- I'm back to the point where I favour Currency.
The trade routes bonus is a guaranteed +3 commerce per city. Instantly. This will allow us to research to any kind of military tech while setting up our production cities (be it via seafood or mines).
- Right now, due to the lack of strategic resource in sight, Construction is the soundest military tech. My stand is the following : How long would it take us to self research it after we have Currency ? 15 turns maybe ? 20 if we backfill some techs (Animal Husbandry) ? Currency gives us the research power to get there in time, building Granaries and Barracks. There will also be some border pops to get. So... Construction... I would not deem fit as an Oracle pick.
- If we want to get that kind of higher end military tech, I think Feudalism > Construction. Feudalism guarantees a sound ground unit + 2 civics (HR + Vassalage) and we could still research Construction in a reasonable time to back up Longbows with Catapults.
- Metal Casting. Last option. Brings us Forges that will be irrelevant to Orleans and Lyons at least (mid term). I love the Forge's bonuses but :
1) being charismatic offsets the happy boost (to some extent. We're not that desperate on the happy boosts) ;
2) Emperor level defenses offset the production boost (short term).
The Colossus is the main argument to go for Metal Casting, imo. Especially if we insert Pottery before Priesthood in the tech path anyways. We wouldn't have a granaries option vs no granaries option anymore.
The Currency option will have comparable infra to MC, and superior REx + research power.
The bad thing about Metal Casting is that the military advantage it can give us would cost us more than other options. Bulbing Machinery is possible but will prove troublesome with the Oracle's priest GPP... That's about it : if we need to research some other tech, Currency will get there faster.
Lack of apparent Copper, also. This is bad for the MC pick.

kossin said:

For instance, should we stick to 4 cities until we grab GLH or should we move up to 8 cities and grab GLH later?

The second case is in much better position to continue conquest.

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Agreed about 2nd case > 1st case. Ensuring we have strong production cities would be huge.

Compromise said:

What tech to research after Currency? Ironworking reveals our last near-term tile production resource and metal source, but could also be traded for (Currency?) with an AI with Alphabet.

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Waiting for an AI to get Alphabet... On Emperor difficulty... Can take a while
So I wouldn't subordinate our invasion to that condition.

As stated in my post above, I think that Animal Husbandry is a strong contender after Currency is in. Horses are cool.

Compromise said:

Would cities be ready for Construction if we tech it after Oracling Currency?

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If we stick to 4 cities, I guess yes.
But if we get to 6+... hmm... probably not.

In a long long time ago with a not not optimized test, I did this:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=10279485&postcount=195

Note, 4 cities with 15 pop total... no infra in those cities or little. I can't see it being possible to not stagnate our growth while building up troops right now. With the gold and plenty of traderoutes available, hammers become the limiting factor very soon. We're not too far from having all the necessary techs either so getting a tech that allows us to keep expanding ( = more hammers) is likely best.

As for Oracle... no wonder has gone as of yet. Granted it's still early in the game but also 2 of the AIs are not contenders (have just expanded), Ragnar doesn't go for wonders too much. That leaves only Catherine and the two missing AIs:
-we can almost assume Isabella (average wonder builder... might get stuck on Stonehenge) and 1 remaining AI. The competition isn't very strong at all, we'll get Currency 99%+ odds even at t110 I'd say.

T110 Currency with Pottery...
I'll see tonight if I can get it


Glad you feel safe about a later Oracle as well. I have very poor instincts (and mostly instincts ^^) judging that kind of things, "that kind of things" including completely unrelated stuff, such as diplomacy management and/or farm vs workshop or...

Well played, kossin!

Duckweed said:

Construction or Currency from Oracle? The only 2 meaningful and necessary techs.

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I guess we can shutdown research after these techs. After that it is all about war logistics ...

Duckweed said:

The only necessary infrastructures for every city is granary, LH and barrack! We probably don't even need a single library.

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Second that.


Workboat scouting - circumnavigating bonus
I think this is number one on the priority list! Since we know already 4 AIs and it seems we can Oracle Currency or Construction the limiting factor for achieving a fast victory is production and travel speed!


Horse Archers
I doubt that they are so useful in this scenario. Probably lots of cities are coastal and this means we attack directly from the ship or debark them beside the city.

Necessary techs to go
Iron Working
Construction
Currency

whats possible on infra (i did some tests a while ago up to t110)

4 cities with 4 lhs + 3 grans is possible but would leave us with only 1 scouting wb

i guess the best we could get to is 4 cities with 4 lhs and maybe 2,5 grans if we go for pottery next tech and want to have both scouting wbs out. if we want to expand still and get the needed war infra up, we might need construction around t120 to start whipping or at least prebuilding some catas.

pop 15 around t110 also seems realistic

the ideal case would be to take construction from the oracle i guess and research ironw + hbr while building up a stack of catas + the needed galleys.

...

question is, when this could/would be possible as oracle pick without krippling our early production too much (we would delay needed infra simply for too long for a quick war buildup)

-> speaking of currency:

if our goal is grabbing the glh up to t140-t150, i would skipp currency completely. we simply wouldnt need it any more in this game. because its a waist of beakers if we go for the glh early (4 traderoutes compared to 5 traderoutes per city isnt really that much better)

mc for triremes (protecting our galleys) or construction are better choices in this case. im biased strongly towards construction for the early ghl-strike now to be honest, but i usually try to avoid beeing luck based in my games (and pushing the oracle date back that much still seems like a gamble to me)

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-> infra in our cities before going to war:

it was mentioned before, but all we need is:
lh, gran, baracks (and in some cases) monument for happy and/or borderpop (see gold city).

hbr + stables would be also cool+ ah we should priorize anyways to see horsies. ironw should be also on our wannahave list

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sim with 2 scouting wbs (+ a possible mc pick in t101) up to t88 is on the way to kossin for posting:

1. pottery must be in end of t82 to make this all work

2. western wb leaves gold city t82 via lh whipped 1 turn before normally finishing it. ov finishes wb next turn, which is t82. we grow back for the gold in 1 turn, so this whip effectively costs us only 1 turn working the gold (but the missing 7 gold + the delayed growth (5 turns in total = 10 gold for working coast) kill the currency/construction plan t106 already)

3. eastern wb leaves capital t 87




edith adds:
so far, i have only kossin, bic and compromise included in my team email list. if you want to receive a copy of the saves also per email, -> pm

i have checked the possible techs we could pick from the oracle again, just to make sure we are not missing something:

t101: mc or theo

in our current setup, i would even rate theo higher then mc if we think about an oracle pick t101.

why?
theo gives us an instant boni via the extra promo for all units we build. only thing we must make sure is to have units we can build, meaning we need bronze/iron around t120


t110: currency or construction

construction, as mentioned in post above

t114: feuda:

if we want to risk delaying the oracle up to this point, maybe the best alternative (as mentioned already by bic)

- a no metal str. 6 unit with fs as promo
- 2nd promo for free
- we can go construction without a iw detour thanks to the lbs even when not finding bronze
- hr with mona (+1 happy for free in all cities)
- we can switch 2 civics at once (hr + feuda) which is always better then doing a 1 civic switch

Since we seem to agree that hammers are the limiting factor, there are 2 things to determine:

-fastest route to war techs (assuming we have Iron) -> Oracle Construction, tech IW
-how many cities we need to prepare for the first war (and keep going). 4 seems a low to me... how will adding these cities affect our research of said techs?

Theology I wouldn't consider because we need to spread the religion (60H per city) for the bonus only... no additional war benefit.

Longbows have a 'humph' effect early when you can get them plus we do get those CR2 catapults for free. However doing this pushes back Construction a while (Math+Construction). Finally, Swords upgrade to Macemen for once the AI does get its hands on Feudalism.

On that note, we'll probably want to cut trades with the AI and bribe war between them to slow their teching... would be fun to never meet any Longbows

I am at a loss... probably Construction will yield the fastest conquest but with more headaches because of slow tech until we acquire GLH... this should be a fun game

EDIT: I'd probably skip Polytheism for certain, it's likely we won't have the gold or hammers to spare for Literature+ the Epics.

I'll try to edit my test game up to t76 sometime.

Fair point about Currency being lackluster with the GLH "at hand".
Catapults + whatever unit we have the resource for can work. Especially if we expect a lot of coastal cities.

-fastest route to war techs (assuming we have Iron) -> Oracle Construction, tech IW
-how many cities we need to prepare for the first war (and keep going). 4 seems a low to me... how will adding these cities affect our research of said techs?

Click to expand...

Fastest route to war techs :
Construction is ok for me. If we scout the southeastern landmass, I would prefer AH before IW, though.
AH brings free hammers : It saves 45 for a workboat and another 45 for a Lighthouse. I can't see super fast war preparations if we keep on relying on seafood + whips (whips are okay). AH also opens the Chariot. It never hurts to have some variety in a stack.

Question about the real save : we are connected to 2 trade networks, can the military advisor inform us about those AIs' units ? I doubt any AI is resourceless but it may be worth checking... Only Napoleon on the isle of Elba could be deprived of strat resources ^^


How many cities do we need :
Short answer : 4-6.
Less short answer : depends on the production sites we scout.
Longer answer : We really need to define our objectives, here. What do we need our Catapults for ?
I think that if we get, say... 8 cities, we can go on a conquest spree and never stop. 10 is definitely comfortable. Starting conquering, though, should not stop us from building our own settlers.
So there is that critical mass of cities we need to chain wars.

Completely separate issue is that of the GLH. We just need 5 units fortified in Moscow to secure the GLH, not the entire Russian Empire. However, we want Moscow asap.
How to balance those two objectives is entirely map dependent, imo. We don't know what city spots we have, yet ! I do hope we find something better than the Fish east of Paris (+1 for Snaaty's plan to scout with the Worker).

Synthetic answer : We should settle a maximum amount of cities before capturing Moscow, as long as it does not delay the capture itself. Then, if the map allows it, we should REx rather than going further into Cathy's territory so as to reach a critical mass of production to take on AI after AI as soon as possible.


The above being my humble and not definitive opinion...
I lack a lot of experience waging war in Civ4.

funny thing i just discovered while testing:

despite me thinking the whipped wb in gold city would slow our research down by loosing a total of 17 commerce (gold tile for 1 turn + 5 turns * 2 gold of coast we work less) it doesnt, due to the extra income from the trade routes once we open borders:

given we go:
pottery-poly-priest-writing we should be with our own wb at the borders of the nearest ai´s when discovering writing. so we gain 4 gold a turn asap, once we open borders and start finding cities. if this is around t 100, we gain 4 gold per turn so we should be at least even at the final beaker count

...

i also did a short test on pottery-poly-priest-writing-mona + oracle feuda:

i got it t113 without too much mming, simulating again i would be with the wb already at the borders of an ai the turn writing comes in.

this can be sped up further by going:

1. pottery-WRITING-MEDI-priest-mona if we can find the ai faster and open borders faster, so getting writing earlier can only help
2. swapping poly with medi, cause i agree with kossin: no need in poly since the game should be over fast with the ai that close (no need for a aest-lit detour)
3. production of the oracle isnt a limitating factor since we could get it already t101, so delaying priest a bit doesnt really hurt
4. by doing all this, i guess it could be possible to oracle feuda around t111 (without testing it right now)


same goes for construction btw. similar to the feuda approach it should be possible to get it fairly early, say at t 108/109 even with pottery next and both wbs sent out.

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as a summary of this i guess its save to assume we can play another short turnset before finally deciding which road to head down tech-wise.

-> up to t90 everything can be the same in no matter what we wanna take from the oracle. then, in t90 we would have to decide if mc at t101 is still an option or not, since we would have to change in t90 1 mine to a coast in paris (in t 91 both mines have to go to coast) or we are missing either food for pop 6 or a few hammers for whipping the oracle in t100

-> t90 we have scouted the remaining 1 tile island near our starting spot with the returning gally (after scouting a bit more direction south) and our worker can be unloaded on the stone hill or the hill next to it. like that we should see the ara there nicely.

-> together with the wb from the capital sailing around the desert fish from t87 on + the borderpop in the capital, we finally can see all island and importand coastal and sea-tiles next to our starting island and then can say for sure if we have bronze near or not + define the next spot to settle.

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number of cities and such:
to what bic wrote. not possible to say right now how many we should settle or when we should go "all in" on conquest

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so i put my vote down for playing another short set up to turn 90 to see all the surrounding islands + hopefully already see kathys border in the west (its great btw that shes exactly towards the direction we can have a scouting wb fastest. besides, i would be going medi, not poly, after considering it (bic could play it, then he doesnt have to get the oracle for us)

I completely agree with the above posts.

So where do we end the next set?
Pottery>Writing>Medi>PH is a lengthy set as the turns start getting longer.

i wouldnt go pottery-writing directly, for two reasons:

1. we would have to decide to rule out mc at t101 right now, since we need priest earlier if going down that path. and second (and more important)
2. having priest earlier, we can already ov whip the settler for city 4 into the oracle, converting abundand food into precious hammers. delaying priesthood we cant do this

so i would prefer to go pottery-medi-priest for the next set, putting writing behind them. this also leaving the full: "what to pick from oracle discussion" open up to then and we can play another quick turnset.

teching up to writing should time nicely with t90, so i would put the next stop at t90 fixed, cause this is when we unload the worker near/on the stones and have everything scouted we need scouted. if priesthood is done earlier, we simply go a turn or two into writing untill t90 (or switch research off, depending what whe have left in the banks)

the western scout-wb wont find cathys borders anyways up around t90+, so there isnt much we can loose with putting writing behind priesthood and the hammers gained by ov whipping the next 2 settlers into the oracle are more important id say

I could take this turnset to turn 90


Hmmm... What's left to define ?
Cities' micro is Oracle's dependent. We want to prioritize 2 Workboats : they will be whipped, right ? Size 2 in city2 and size whatever in Paris (4 is my guess).
I didn't re-read thoroughly but I think there already are some detailed plans for this.


Scouting paths are set ? No, I think they aren't !
Where should the Galley head while we make the quarry ? iirc we have 8 full turns for scouting.
If we scout the Stone with worker + galley on T90, then there's only south to scout now. Or am I missing something ?
Is it troublesome to wait for T90 to have knowledge of the Stone area ?



Tech path may be subject to debate ?
Is there any argument in favour of Polytheism ? Avoiding the Philo bulb or securing marble wonders seems irrelevant at this point.
Is there any debate about Pottery first ?


Under what conditions should the game be stopped before turn 90 ?
- potential city spots ?
- copper ?
- not much ?

@ bic:

general:
i will try to post a detailed summary of the game up to t90 today, with whipping points, city builds and such. short version for the wbs:
gold city doesnt whip the wb. we whip the lh 1 turn before it finishes and build the wb via ov. like that we dont work the gold only for 1 turn.
capital slowbuilds the wb to regrow after the gran whip
basically following the markers in the testgame up to t88 where all should be covered. research has to be changed for pottery-med-ph + it should be binary research to gain a few beakers (kossin needs to answer the exact research behavior, cause i havent looked into that)


scouting:
i had some scouting path marked in the testgame up to t88 also (you should have recieved that via email). not much to change or add really to that i guess. only thing we might think about (but for that we also need kossin, this time as "fog gazer"):
going with the galley + worker towards the stone further to the south, if there is a save passage to see a bit more of the land there

Research: ok, I'll look into it. Right now, pure binary is probably best simply because we have an odd # of commerce.

Scouting: sure, I will see if we can gain more knowledge to help the wb's scout.

@ kossin:

it would be great if you could update our testmap for tonight, then i can do the writeup up to t90.

if you dont have time, i also could do it (tonight), but i would need 2 more info:
1. exact beaker ov eot 76
2. exact gold eot 76

then i can try to put a testgame together that comes as close as possible to the real one.

-> if anyone has experience in how to replace ai-nations with other ai nations, let me know. saving the actual file via wb and editing the .xml directly would be my first attempt, but having exactly 0 experience doing this isnt helping much. if that would be possible it would be great. if not, we might have to live with not fitting neighbours, because i dont know if i have time (and motivation) to redo the whole map right from the start

if i have to put together the testgame, i very likely dont have time for the sim and writeup up to t90 tonight and you would have to wait untill tomorrow night for that, so any help on that would be apreciated

Sure, I'll do it tonight, I have a few hours free.

Changing the AIs is best done at t0 as editing the game via WB resets everything in-game (hammers, GPP, etc.). I saved a copy of the 4000BC test game I had.

Having the exact AIs isn't super-necessary but it is handy. I'll put Izzy as the 5th but I'm not certain who should be #6?

6th ai:
maybe holland/germany/rome? hre is out i guess, or poly would have gone earlier...

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for the new testgame

I'd say Germany is likeliest... Bismarck?

bismarck