SGOTM 17 - Kakumeika

@WastinTime

It's good to have you back.

If it is proved that there are only one AI on this continent, we do need to consider a later attack. In order to get the fastest tech rate on this continent, we'd better control Mansa's tech rate the same as ours or a little bit lower than ours. Attacking when he has 7 cities may be a good choice. His units are more scattered and he still has the power to research after the war.

Regardless of when to start the war, GLH is still needed IMO.
1. It can support more cities with more libraries and specialists eventually.
2. It's an investment of 3 cities to get at least 3 more cities by T100.
3. Because of the happiness cap, most cities will stop growing at pop 5~6. This gives more advantage to a IMP civ with more cities.
4. It's unique and we may not have it in 150 turns if we lose it
5. The time to get Astronomy is important, but the city# when we get Astronomy is also important.

I'm going to try to test out a few different mid term strategies for the GLH to see what might be best for us. I have a bit of time now, and will have more time in 7 hours or so and then all of tomorrow to test out strategies.

I'll try to play on Monday evening about 50 hours from now assuming we get consensus on the micro plans I hope to develop today and tomorrow.

I'm open to all suggestions about the details. I think we have more support for the GLH than not, but if WastinTime or others wants to show us how much better we might be without it I'm happy to consider not building it.

In my opinion, we should pursue building The Great Lighthouse, even though we may get mainly domestic trade routes worth just 1 Cpt per trade route per city. We should found all our cities on the coast to take greater advantage of TGL. We should of course try to establish trade networks with every AI we meet when that is possible; that will effectively double a trade route's value for each such foreign city we can connect to.

City 3 SW of Aachen can become a powerful cottage city with all those river tiles. It should eventually work maximum cottages and probably no specialists. (This would have been a good Bureaucracy capital site, if we could have been assured of its existence.) We can also build a few cottages in other cities as well.

Any cities with higher than normal commerce should build Libraries and possibly work two Scientists each.

As mabraham mentioned, we could settle on Silver to increase our happiness cap somewhat later in the game without needing Iron Working. We also have plenty of sites that don't need Iron Working to become effective.

Sun Tzu Wu

My testing so far suggests...

Mansa might not accept a ceasefire if we capture just 1 worker. Our archer probably should go NE rather than NW to hunt for workers, although I don't know how accurate the worker movements in the test game mirror the real game.

We might as well save our gold until we finish at least one library. It will be hard to finish mathematics if we settle C3 and C4 soon by going 100%.

barbarians seem like they will be an issue.

I don't think we should wait that long to kill Mansa. He will have horse archers pretty soon and that will make the war significantly more difficult.

Perhaps we can use a great scientist to bulb alphabet before the war with Mansa.

I tried settling C3 between the banana and sharing the cows and pigs with Woodsville. Got GLH T56 in C3. Results were not as impressive as mabraham's test game with C3 on the jungle river tile next to railroaded desert hill and FP and he built the GLH earlier in Aachen T53 (although I had some barbarian issues.)

Seems from this limited testing that GLH in the capital might be better.

I still kind of favor The Great Lighthouse. I don't really see this game being over quickly with immortal difficulty and flat map.

Barb city or two should appear in a few turns.

A barb axe might appear near the end of the turnset.


I expect Mansa's borders in his capital to pop in a few turns making working stealing more difficult.

Can sometimes see it on the victory screen. The top 3 culture cities might tell us how close Mansa's capital is to 100 culture.

Okay, it is hard to compare test games mabraham's suggestion of getting 5-6 cities, GLH, 8 catapults and 4 axes in Woodsville is a good one. I've yet to play that far yet however.
(all my test games assumes we can steal 1 worker from Mansa)

I've played a few test games and it seems informally that
-building the GLH in C3 is better, so that we can continue to bank gold until the library in the capital is finished.
-C3 NE of the FP and NW of the desert seems better (sharing all of the food between Woodsville and C3 didn't work out that well)

Advantages of building GLH in the capital -- can build it there faster.
I'm assuming that the GLH won't go that quickly. Not sure how to evaluate the cost of delaying GLH to T60.
Building it in the capital definitely seems to be faster than C3 by 4-5 turns and saves some forests.

Play Test #1

Settle C3 between bananas and sharing cows and pigs with Woodsville
Built GLH in C3
Got GLH T56
Construction T65


Play Test #2

Settle C3 1N1E of the floodplain (&1N1W of the desert hill)
Got GLH in C3 T60
Construction researched by T61

mabraham's test game
GLH in the capital
C3 NE of FP NW of desert
GLH T56
construction T65?

Okay I'll develop a PPP that shoots for T60-61 GLH and construction

seems library builds in Woodsville and C4 make sense before granaries. Shaves 3-4 turns off of construction. I have to assume that is worth it since war with Mansa seems all good to me.

We have the option of bulbing alphabet so we can trade with Mansa before and after the war if we don't meet anyone else.

Detailed PPP T19 to T29

research
Mathematics 0% (saving gold until we finish libraries, we have no forest chops planned until we chop them for the GLH so we can delay math until we have 1 or more libraries finished)

city builds
Aachen
T19-T21 settler
T22 settler 1 pop whip (work banana mine)
T23-29 library (work pigs) (add banana mine when grows to 2 pop)
rough plan after turnset
eventually 2 pop the library and then start an archer


Woodsville (C2)
T19-T24 warrior cows (add copper when grows to 2 pop)
T25 start library (grow to 3 pop before starting settler--gives worker(s)more time to improve tiles, might be able to prebuild a road so C4 is only delayed 1 turn)
T29 start settler (after grows to 3 pop)

(settler would finish T32 without a whip if it was started at pop 2), (settler finished T34 with a whip after growing to pop 3, you get 2 more hammers per turn at 3 pop working a settler because of the forest takes raw hammers to 8 and we are imperialistic. This seems better in testing.)


C3 (will be settled T26 on jungle next to river NE of FP and NW of railroaded desert hill

T26-T29 start lighthouse (working banana river tile)

mabraham's plan for the GLH seems good to me
working banana then FP then forest then desert mine
get lighthouse mid 50s (should be about time grows to 4 pop)
switch to worker (max OF 2-pop whip worker)
whip lighthouse (so we get 60 OF hammers into GLH next turn)
chop 4 forest and work the desert mine to finish GLH about T60-61 depending on worker support

worker goals
Eiffel
T19-T22pasture cows
T23 move to copper
T24-27 mine copper
T28 ??? road copper
T29 move to cows?? (depends on if and when we steal a worker from Mansa)

stolen worker
move and road for 1 turn, wake up, repeat until back home if it makes sense
Help with copper mine/road if possible

diplo actions
declare war on Mansa to steal a worker if seems safe
reopen borders with Mansa if it comes up
open borders with any AI that I meet.

civic changes planned
None planned

espionage
Keep espionage on Mansa (even if we reduce him to 1 city eventually we will want to see his research)

If we have enough to see his research (unlikely) then split espionage with 1 and only 1 new AI that we might meet. Don't share with more than 1 AI if we meet more than 1.

general war plans
Worker stealing, and cease fire as soon as possible
** cease fire likely won't be possible until T40 or so
depending on how our strength compares to Mansa in the real game

stopping points
worker steal goes poorly
jungle grows over pigs

Units
Boone(scout)
T19 2S2E moves 3, 3 on number pad
T20 3
T21 3,3
T22 3,2 to forest next to river pigs
T23 2,1
T24 2 to jungle railroad tile to prevent barb animal riding the railroad and killing our settler
T25 rides railroad to fog bust silver area eventually hanging out 6,6 from silver (2E of silver)... heads towards planned location of C3 (will not stop on the pigs because I don't want the scout eaten by a surprise panther)

warrior Renamed "THE MP" (built in Woodsville)
moves onto jungle west of pigs if safe, moves onto pigs to prevent jungle growth

Taishi Ci
T19 moves 9 on number pad
T20-T29 hunts and steals a worker from Mansa and escorts worker back to our culture

(in the test game Mansa worker heads thru the new city and to the grass tile SE of his new city, there is a good chance of stealing the worker there in the real game too. I will watch for the border pop in the capital, if it happens then I will stake out the grass tile SE of his new city.)

new archer in Capital
renamed Archie
heads for southern land bridge and scouts for more AI.

Every turn
Save game
Demographics screenshot
Use global culture view to see if AI culture is near
Take notes on AI and animal positions

I could play today if I got consensus from the active members today. Otherwise I will plan to play in about 35 hours.

PPP looks OK on a first glance. I should be around for a few more hours today, but have a few other things I should do too. Will try a test game along those lines.

Ideally we'd get fail gold for our TGL build, so I'm all for delaying it to t60 (or later). I would even rather build any other wonder for fail gold. Do we know if any wonders will get built before t60?

I'm not a big fan of building a lighthouse in a city with no seafood.
It's also a river city which means it probably won't even use the coastal tiles where a non-river city would. What about putting TGL in the original Crab starting location (C4 or C5)?

WastinTime said:

I'm not a big fan of building a lighthouse in a city with no seafood.
It's also a river city which means it probably won't even use the coastal tiles where a non-river city would. What about putting TGL in the original Crab starting location (C4 or C5)?

Click to expand...

Building the GLH in C4 (at least where are currently planned C4 (SE of the marble) wouldn't work.

Building the GLH in C5 (near original starting location) might be possible but I have to imagine it would be delayed 15+ turns. Plus the original starting location is far from the heart of C2,C3, & C4 which means we lose some travel time for the workers (they would most likely have to chop several forests). We would also have to build a monument to get the full value of the forest (although perhaps it makes more sense to chop them outside our culture since the monument is more than the lost hammers from chopping outside our borders.)

Sorry, no time for a test game.

I like the strategy and micro. Boone might consider ending turn on the pigs if the warrior is not out yet. Captured worker should try to get back ASAP if safe... hard to plan for that. Scout camping on pigs and THE MP heading north could have merit depending on timing of C3 and steal.

Yes, the C3 lighthouse is a bit useless... just think of it as a 60- negmod on the GLH? Plus before we clear all the jungle we might get a turn or two of value working a lighthouse-coast. Stretching the frontier out to the crabs site will make us hugely vulnerable to barb axes, as well as costing a lot of worker time.

We could settle C3 1S of pig to have access to Pig, Cow, Banana, Marble (but then it's not coastal.)
I hope we are not choosing less-than-optimal city sites simply because they're coastal. That would add to the 'Cons' list of building TGL.

Then C4 could go back to the original crab spot. We don't need a C5 (yet). There might be some great spots up north for C5, C6 +.

Do you realize that we still don't know what other teams may have revealed on t0 with a worker move to the north. Since we know some of them settled t1 that means there could be something there (gems?). Maybe the Swede wanted to attract us all there so Mansa would get the copper. Denying him copper is a huge advantage we might have over other teams. Let's look north for horses (or even elephant!) since Mansa may not have spears, etc. Who cares if he gets horse archers.

mabraham said:

Stretching the frontier out to the crabs site will make us hugely vulnerable to barb axes, as well as costing a lot of worker time.

Click to expand...

I always forget about barbs, but wouldn't the empire stretching help spawn-bust?
We can easily deal with barbs if we build more military (and no TGL

Our scouting has been hampered by jungle spawn-busting. Is there a plan to scout/spawnbust North and NE? maybe put out another miltary unit (Is a warrior strong enough?) to scout.

WastinTime are you willing to play the test game and implement some of your suggestions?

I think it would be helpful to see the longer term results of your suggestions, perhaps play out to T60 and we can discuss things more fruitfully?

I think there is something valuable in WastinTime suggestions... can another help me by playing out a test game?

separate but related issue...
Playing with the test game suggests we need to build more units. I think instead of starting a library in C2, we should build an archer after the warrior.

Okay here is a test game with what I believe are WastinTime's suggestions...
T65 construction
T63 GLH (had to 1 pop whip the GLH so perhaps can do better than this)

it is competitive with the other games. The GLH and construction come a bit later, primarily because I felt we needed more military units to protect everything. Scouting to the south is delayed however. So build the GLH in a city that can benefit from the lighthouse for a few turn delay in GLH and construction?

What do people think?

Here are some thoughts on a scouting WB, TGL, Barb city spawn busting, and a map insight.

Scouting workboat: This is an early must. It will help determine the value of TGL. We need to know if there are more seafood tiles that would make coastal cities more attractive. More importantly, we need to see the extent of the sea to our south and see if it part of an ocean dividing the map. This may help us determine if we need astronomy. Excellent catch on mabraham's behalf to see the ocean tile. DIGRESSION: This is a mistake or KCD f-ed and made a poor decision. If this is designed to be an impassable water tile, it should have an ice cap. He has altered the game in an unnatural manner that will throw of some teams. The screw up would be this: if it is a non-lake water tile adjacent to land, it is coast, and therefore, passable.
We need to send a boat around the south side of the sea and see if it is passable down there. This screenshot could be very important:


If this is part of an ocean divide to the map, it is navigable via galleys. We need to know if these are seas or part of an interconnecting ocean. If the water south of us is a land bound sea, then we can use the WB to fog bust and eventually try to put it on the seafood in the sea to the east. By the way, the two coastal corridor at the top of the map is enough to create intercontinental trade routes if the water completely divides the map. That would/could make the AI reachable before Astronomy, and give IC trade routes before astronomy.

TGL: If we can get international TRs with TGL, it is worth getting. If not, I don't like it since there may not be much seafood for coastal cities. Seafood tiles make coastal cities and their trade routes much more valuable. As it stands now, I don't want TGL for anything more than fail gold.

Barb City busting: It is only two archers, not four like deity. Those barb cities also fog bust AI units. I oppose city spawn busting as Wastin'Time suggests. bcool is right, it is four archers!

Map Insight:
Look at the view of the previous screenshot from a different perspective:


This could be a heavily armed barb city we need to get to. Getting a coastal city on that west coast could be pivotal, so lets build that exploring WB!