SGOTM 11 - Fifth Element

I thought we all understood that going for a large early wonder like the Pyramids was going to delay us in other areas of our game, settler production and expansion being the most impacted. Knowing this, we all decided to try for the Pyramids with our eyes wide open. I hope we don't want to re-open this debate of whether to try of the Pyramids or not.

So, if we agree that we want the pyramids, it makes sense to focus on them during my turnset, which will allow us to get them between T133 and T135. Great! We're all on the same page.

Now, let's talk about some of our other goals.

1. Do we want a Great Prophet as our second great person? I think the answer to that question is yes, although Irgy has pointed out some benefits to getting a Great Scientist next. So, if we want to get a Great Prophet at decent odds (> 75%), we will have to run two priest specialist once the Pyramids are built or else the GE points will start to play a larger influence on what flavor of great person we get. That means that we will need a second temple in Delhi soon. One of our options has us whipping that temple, giving the overflow hammers into the Pyramids. The other option should build this temple after the Pyramids (5 turns) such that we can hire this second priest sooner. Not only does this increase the odds of a Great Prophet, it also allows us to get him sooner so that we can enjoy Bureaucracy sooner. As has been said several times, we can't fully leverage Bureaucracy while running so many great people. True, we can't fully leverage it, but it will give us an extra 2 to 4 hammers and 8 to 10 commerce even when running 4 scientists. This is equivalent to having an extra citizen working a gold mine, and who thinks that's a bad idea?

2. Do we want to get a Great Scientist as our third great person to bulb Philosophy? I thought that we had agreement that this is what we wanted to do. If so, then Delhi will have to be at a large enough size to be able to run 4 scientists after the second great person is born. This is what I did in my initial test that did not require whipping the temple and I thought this was our goal. Whether we whip the temple or not, do we want to stunt Delhi’s growth building settlers, delaying the time it takes to bulb Philosophy and get our fifth religion?

3. Do we want to build the Hanging Gardens in Delhi to help generate an eventual Great Engineer? I thought that many of us had supported this idea. If so, then Delhi will need to build an aqueduct and the Hanging Gardens. This should be started sooner rather than later. This is what I was doing in my test game in Delhi, not building settlers as Dhoomstriker says has been the plan all along (it wasn’t my plan at least)

So, if all three of the items above are important, then Delhi is going to be tied up for some time. I recall having read this a few times in our thread. So, I think we need to get our settlers elsewhere. I think Bedrock (@ 3 pops) and Wheaton (@ 2 pops with the wheat improved) are great places to do this. I just looked at the save is here is what we could do:

Silverado - Settler due on T143
Bedrock - Just grew to 3 on T133 - Switch to settler now - due on T158
Wheaton - Just grew to 2 on T133 - Switch to settler now - due on T163. We can get this closer to T150 if after the Pyramid chops we send two workers to improve the wheat and irrigate the plains forest (gives us a 30 hammer chop plus irrigates wheat).
Delhi (whip temple) - As of T133, grow to 7 pops in 1 turn while building something, switch to settler on T 143 - settler due on T144. This includes working 2 priests!!
Delhi (don't whip temple) - As of T135, Delhi is at 8 pops and can complete a settler on T143. This includes working only 1 priest, thus delaying our Great Prophet and Bureaucracy.

So, if we really want to push our expansion, we could have:

T143 - Silverado
T143 - Delhi (no whip)
T144 - Delhi (whip)
T150 - Wheaton (needs to be tested)
T158 - Bedrock

As you can see, if we focus Wheaton and Bedrock on settlers, we can have three settlers out in fairly rapid succession (T143, T150, T158). I don't think I would want to settle more than 3 cities in this short amount of time. It would kill our economy. Also, settling them a bit spread out allows us to leverage the workers we have without having to build 3 or 4 more (we could likely use one more, which may be good for Silverado to build once the settler is done).

If we agree that 3 settlers by T158 is acceptable (and we want to use Bedrock and Wheaton to help), then Delhi can focus on great people, Hanging Gardens, missionaries, an occasional worker, etc.

By the way, did you notice that Delhi with the whip gets a settler out just 1 turn later while still allowing us to work to priests? If we really want to get out 4 quick settlers and not delay our Great Prophet, then whipping the temple is the best way to do this.

Regarding binary science, I ran two test games. One had 4 turns where I was not running binary science and the other one had just 2 turns. These games turned out identical in terms of flasks / gold. I don't have time to test this today, but if going from 4 turns to 2 turns non-binary science didn't make a difference, I would project that going from 2 turns of non-binary science to 0 turns wouldn't make more than a flask or two difference. If you want to prove me wrong, please run a test game of your own because I don't have time today. Otherwise, I think the facts above show that at least in this case, running 2 turns of binary science as mentioned in my PPP will have a very minor impact to our total flasks while netting us Math (and the Pyramids) a full turn sooner.

Finally, regarding the granary in Delhi, there is no doubt in my mind that this is mandatory. With the granary, you will notice in my PPP that we grow every 3 to 4 turns. Without it, we will grow every 6 to 8 turns. This is a huge benefit that will catch up to the no granary option in about 10 to 15 turns and put us miles ahead beyond that. I don't want to test the no granary option because I see no benefit in doing this. If someone feels strongly that no granary is the way to go, please run a test game to show us that it’s best to delay the granary until after the Pyramids (or whenever else you would want to build it).

Discussion 1: Does anyone fear a war declaration from Zara? If so, I will not explore with warrior 3 during my turnset. If anyone fears this at the moment, I will plant warrior 3 in Wheaton. Plus, if we build a settler in Bedrock, we can afford to use that warrior to explore instead as Bedrock won't be growing into unhappiness for a long time.

Discussion 2: In order to get the Pyramids on T133, I didn't have a ton of extra worker actions. I put 2 pre-chops into the forest W-W of Delhi. I put 1 pre-chop into the forest N-NE of Delhi (not doing so would have lost this worker turn). I put 3 pre-chops into the forest N-NW of Delhi (if I didn't do this, I would lose those three worker turns as workers 1, 3 and 4 came back to Delhi from Bedrock). Worker 2 did 2 pre-chops on his trek west to the forest E-E of Delhi. I pre-cottaged the forest tile NE of Delhi for 2 turns. I spent 3 turns building a road segment toward Wheaton. I think all of these actions can be justified and I would be hard pressed to find something else for these workers to do knowing that they all have to be in position by T132.

What I suggest is that once the Pyramids are chopped, two workers can head toward Wheaton, building the road as they go. We want to get the wheat farmed and irrigated as soon as possible. The other two workers can start building a road toward our next city location. That way, they can be in position to quickly improve a tile once we found the city (hopefully we have Alphabet soon if we plan to settle the GP farm so that we can improve the cows in the small cross).

Discussion 3: In my testing, going from 4 turns of non-binary science to 2 turns of non-binary science made NO difference. So I would contend that if there is a difference going from 2 turns to 0 turns, it will be very SMALL (1 to 4 units of gold/beakers at most). I think this is a small price to pay for getting the Pyramids 1 turn sooner (2 turns sooner if we don't whip the temple).

Discussion 4: Whipping the temple seems to be the most contentious. The biggest issue has to do not with the size of Delhi but a) getting our settlers out and b) how soon can we generate our great people. I have shown that whipping the temple would allow Delhi to get a settler out just 1 turn after the non-whipping option. In addition, the whipping option allows us to run 2 priests, getting us a faster Great Prophet at higher odds (a win-win, no?). Now, I’m not a fan of using Delhi to pump settlers because it has more than enough to do, but if we choose to do so, the temple-whip option is NOT inferior to the no-whip option as Dhoomstriker stated as a fact. I would contend that it is in fact better since it delays the settler by 1 turn but meets our other goals better. Also, if we settler 3 cities so close together (Wheaton, Silverado’s settler and Delhi’s settler), it will be very tough to get these cities set up to run efficiently with 4 workers, so we’d need to produce more. Regarding great people, the temple-whip option gets the second great person sooner and would likely get the third great person at about the same time. As I said, I can’t run all of this testing today (nor do I want to do it as I feel the temple-whip option if better), so if someone wants to test this, please do so.

Here is my recommendation:

1. Explore with Warrior 2 once Wheaton is settled. Move the warrior from Bedrock to Wheaton to backfill his spot unless the team wants to bait Zara into attacking.

2. Keep worker options as described in the PPP.

3. Run non-binary research for 2 turns as stated in the PPP, netting Math 1 turn sooner and the Pyramids 1 turn sooner.

4. Whip the temple, netting us the Pyramids two turns sooner and our second great person sooner at higher odds of a Great Prophet.

5. Switch both Bedrock (size 3) and Wheaton (size 2) to settlers. This will happen on T133, the last turn of my turnset. So this decision can be made later.

6. Delhi builds a missionary after the Pyramids, and then starts on the aqueduct / Hanging Gardens. This will happen on T133, the last turn of my turnset. So this decision can be made later.

7. Two workers head to improve Wheaton and two workers start working toward improving our next city spot once the Pyramids are done. This will happen on T133, the last turn of my turnset. So this decision can be made later.

So, I vote yes on the first four items which affect my turnset. The next three items can continue to be debated as they affect unclethrill’s turnset, not mine.

Unless anyone has further arguments that need to be heard on the first four items or wishes more time to run test games, then I suggest that I play my turnset in 24 hours or once everyone has expressed an opinion on the four discussion points for my turnset, whichever comes first. As said in the maintenance thread, we are approaching the half-way point in the time we have to complete this game but we are not at the halfway point in our game itself. We need to keep this moving as best we can. I do not want to make major compromises now that will have a large negative impact on our game in the future. I think I have laid out a plan above that allows us to reach all of our short and mid-term goals without any major sacrifices. Please let me know if you feel differently.

I was caught by some doubts, it seems to be Dhoom's effect on me.

But, OK, stick to your plan.

But keep the warrior in Wheaties not Wheaton, please. True that we can afford a war with Zara and probably take his Capital, but this will delay our REX. Better invest hammers on settlers than in suicide axes. Also, better not weaken Zara too much. He's already pitiful. Use some other unit to explore.

And i wasn't complaining on anything, just that pointing out that we need the settlers i listed, and ASAP. I think that any size-3 city must contribute to this effort.

Fifth Element was already delayed by Pyramids in another game, but that was without stone. Now, let's go ahead with our plan, well tested and discussed, but let's keep an eye to our REX, which will be our next priority after Pyramids.

Two points:

1) Do we really want Hanging Gardens?
We only plan for one GE, so I am sure that over time we will eventually get one (also we can hire an engineer @ Delhi after we built a forge). The one we want is only useful at the end (to build the UN), so why waste good hammers now to get it faster? It is true that hanging gradens are pretty cheap, especially with stone, but why waste?

2) Don't forget we have to squeeze in AP sometime!!! Zara is good for nothing, and if the Budha camp builds it we are in deep trouble...

Mitchum said:

No matter what we do, a GE this early sucks.

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Sure, we have plans for it only later on so it is better not to get it now. But if we are confident we will get another one later we can use it to build a wonder we thought we wouldn't build. That will even out the score. For example great library will be a nice touch: with rep it will give us 12 beakers/turn + GS points. Over time this will yeild more flasks than a GS.

(btw, the +12 beakers/turn will be more then we will get from Bureaucracy early on, right?)

Still, better not to get it and stick to our plans. But even if we get it, it is not too bad.

Mitchum said:

The PPP has been updated with changes to my science rate and worker 3's actions.

So far, Irgy, unclethrill and BLubmuz have said "Yes" to three of the discussion points.

The only one that remains debatable is whether or not to explore with Warrior 3. I will wait another 18 hours for havr and Dhoomstriker to weigh in on this issue and the rest of the PPP. If no "substantial" comments come up, I will play my turnset with the "majority rules" approach to exploring with Warrior 3 UNLESS BLubmuz would like more time to convice us that this is unsafe or for Dhoomstriker and/or havr to come to his rescue and do it for him...

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It is maybe too late, but I say...


Too much detail for me to really comment. I am simple-minded.

havr said:

Two points:

1) Do we really want Hanging Gardens?
We only plan for one GE, so I am sure that over time we will eventually get one (also we can hire an engineer @ Delhi after we built a forge). The one we want is only useful at the end (to build the UN), so why waste good hammers now to get it faster? It is true that hanging gradens are pretty cheap, especially with stone, but why waste?

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Yes, we want the Hanging Gardens for two reasons. First, it increases every city by one citizen. This will really help jump start Silverado and all of our newly planted cities.

Second, have you ever tried to pop a Great Engineer in a diplo game (or any game)? It's not as easy as you think, especially if we get our GP Farm up and running soon. By the time Delhi catches up to the GP Farm, it will be late in the game. Eeven if it is running an engineer with help from the Pyramids GE points, the odds will be about 71% at best that we get a GE due to pollution from the Oracle. This assumes that we have a forge built and hire an engineer as soon as our third great person is born in Delhi. If we can't hire an engineer yet, our odds will be even worse. We could delay getting the GP Farm going and instead focus on getting a fourth great person in Delhi now with hopes that he's a GE, but we'd have to put him on ice for 2000 years. Not getting the GP Farm up and running is not a good option, nor is getting a GE now and saving him for 150 turns. Better would be to build the Hanging Gardens, giving us a geat person sooner with the extra GP points with higher odds of being a GE (78% if we can hire an engineer). No matter what we do, if we don't get a GE the first time we try for one, we'll pretty much have to shut down the GP Farm until Delhi can spit out another great person. This is a bad situation to be in.

havr said:

2) Don't forget we have to squeeze in AP sometime!!! Zara is good for nothing, and if the Budha camp builds it we are in deep trouble...

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Yes, we'll have to fit this into our plans somewhere.

Dhoomstriker said:

Now, I'm in the "I don't mind if Zara declares war on us" camp, because if he does I'll be pushing to switch into war-mode and take over his capitol, but if most of us want to avoid a war, then we shouldn't be leaving a border City (Riverdale or Wheaties/Wheaton/Wheatabix/Weavel/Whatever) undefended.

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I am in the "give peace a chance" camp at-least until we have build the 'Mids, AP and probably got Philo. That nice capital isn't worth ruining our strategy.

After those said goals, I may discover I have hawks feathers below the dove's mask. Or not. We will see what comes up.

Mitchum said:

Second, have you ever tried to pop a Great Engineer in a diplo game (or any game)? It's not as easy as you think, especially if we get our GP Farm up and running soon. By the time Delhi catches up to the GP Farm, it will be late in the game. Eeven if it is running an engineer with help from the Pyramids GE points, the odds will be about 71% at best that we get a GE due to pollution from the Oracle. This assumes that we have a forge built and hire an engineer as soon as our third great person is born in Delhi. If we can't hire an engineer yet, our odds will be even worse. We could delay getting the GP Farm going and instead focus on getting a fourth great person in Delhi now with hopes that he's a GE, but we'd have to put him on ice for 2000 years. Not getting the GP Farm up and running is not a good option, nor is getting a GE now and saving him for 150 turns. Better would be to build the Hanging Gardens, giving us a geat person sooner with the extra GP points with higher odds of being a GE (78% if we can hire an engineer). No matter what we do, if we don't get a GE the first time we try for one, we'll pretty much have to shut down the GP Farm until Delhi can spit out another great person. This is a bad situation to be in.

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OK, you convinced me we want the hanging gardens. But now two new points:

1) We want a lot: (5 religions), Oracle, 'Mids, Hanging Gardens, AP. The party will be over sometime. We cannot get everything we want. It might be better to decide ourselves what to leave out, or at least give a smaller priority. With all your fine points for the gardens I still think the AP is much more crucial for our strategy...

2) I want to understand the getting GE strategy you explained. Are we planning to get the GE from Delhi really late in the game and do it with only 75%? As I see it, to get it late in the game we will have to shutout the farm anyway, because delhi will never catch up with the growing size of GPs. And that shut-down will be for a merre 75% chance and if we fail we delay our end-date? 75% seems too low to place such a critical thing on it. It might be better to play it safe and get a GE early and keep it bored for 2000 years.

havr said:

1) We want a lot: (5 religions), Oracle, 'Mids, Hanging Gardens, AP. The party will be over sometime. We cannot get everything we want. It might be better to decide ourselves what to leave out, or at least give a smaller priority. With all your fine points for the gardens I still think the AP is much more crucial for our strategy...

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Yes, the AP is more important to our overall strategy, but Delhi will not be the place to build it. I think what you're hinting at is that we do not use Bedrock (or Wheaton/Wheaties) for a settler, but instead crank one out from Delhi. This will leave Bedrock (or Wheaton/Wheaties) free to build the AP once the granary is completed. If that is the case, I'd be fine with delaying the Hanging Gardens project for 10 turns to crank out a settler at the appropriate time. This is something that we should discuss and agree on so that when the time comes (not in my turnset), we've already agreed on where our settlers will come from, where to build the AP and whether or not to delay the Hanging Gardens.

havr said:

2) I want to understand the getting GE strategy you explained. Are we planning to get the GE from Delhi really late in the game and do it with only 75%? As I see it, to get it late in the game we will have to shutout the farm anyway, because delhi will never catch up with the growing size of GPs. And that shut-down will be for a merre 75% chance and if we fail we delay our end-date? 75% seems too low to place such a critical thing on it. It might be better to play it safe and get a GE early and keep it bored for 2000 years.

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I'd like to hear from others on this. I recall Dhoomstriker saying that getting a GE should be no issue later in the game. I've also heard someone else say that if we get an early GE that we should use him now since we can always get another one later. Now I admit, I've only played a focused diplo game once and I had a GE farm, complete with Pyramids, Hanging Gardens, forge and engineer specialist. It took a LONG time for this city to genarate a great person, and this was only with the help of running a few extra specialists, thus muddying up the gene pool a bit. Even though I focused on this GE city very early, my GE came very late in the game with about 85% odds. Had I failed, it would have added 20+ turns to my victory while building the UN the slow way.

Please enlighten me on how it can be so easy to generate a GE at a high enough confidence that we can all feel coformfortable that we'll have one to help complete the UN.

Usually if you want a GE you'll never get him.

Of course, over time we can have even 2 with 'mids and HG in a city, mainly if that city will run only the forge engineer as a specialist.

But we're talkin'bout things past this TS.

I ask if anyone can give a safe date for the HG.

For now, go on, time (RL) begins to be a factor.

BLubmuz said:

But keep the warrior in Wheaties not Wheaton, please.

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? They're the same city aren't they? We just haven't settled on its name.

BLubmuz said:

Fifth Element was already delayed by Pyramids in another game, but that was without stone.

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! People build the pyramids without stone? I hope you were industrious at least

Speaking of expensive wonders, I really don't savour the prospect of slow-building the AP. If we get a GE then fine, but otherwise it costs 4 settlers worth of hammers! Maybe we need to, and maybe it's worth it in nthe long run, but I'm not looking forward to it.

BLubmuz said:

Usually if you want a GE you'll never get him.

Of course, over time we can have even 2 with 'mids and HG in a city, mainly if that city will run only the forge engineer as a specialist.

But we're talkin'bout things past this TS.

I ask if anyone can give a safe date for the HG.

For now, go on, time (RL) begins to be a factor.

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Agreed. I usually get a GE in a game, but it's hard to get one when you want one.

I'd like to at least wait to hear back from Dhoomstriker before playing on. He was the most outspoken against the current PPP, bringing up additional points to consider. His MAIN point of contention had to do with settling the west, not specifically whether we whip the temple or not or whether we lose 1 or 2 beakers by not running binary science. I'm hoping that I've shown that we still have options for settling the west while whipping the temple and getting a quick 2nd great person at the same time, a plan that can meet all of our stated goals.

Note: I won't be able to play for another 18 hours or so. I've missed my window of play time today and there are too many distractions at home. This should give Dhoomstriker a bit more time to convince us that we need more testing or to give his approval to play per the current PPP.

So, I got time to do open the save games for a couple of experiments last night, and discovered a few things.

First, I would recommend getting Dehli to population 9 before stopping growth to build settlers. It should have caught up by at least the second settler compared to building one earlier. The no-whip game can get the temple built and to pop 9 on the same turn, T139 (I'm fairly confident we want to work 2 priests to get the GPro). The whip option is 3 turns behind in growth, getting to pop 9 at T142. In exchange for that delay, it has 8gpp (GEng) and 6gpp (GPro), and about 60-odd hammers in whatever it's building while it grows (that unfortunately isn't a settler or worker). So if there's anything else we want (such as, for example, an aqueduct for the hanging gardens) then it's a long way in front without needing to significantly delay the settler.

Second, I discovered that binary tech really isn't all that much better. This business about losing multiple beakers from different cities to libraries is not the case. You can see directly in the interface that the library bonus is applied to the fractional value, and that the fractional result is accumulated between cities. I could go into a lot more details, but the overall result of the experiment is that you lose *at most* strictly less than one beaker's worth of total commerce. And possibly a second fraction when the second set of bonuses (like prerequisites) are applied, but this is only helped by more turns at 0, not by more turns at 100.

Binary tech has exactly one thing going for it when it comes to rounding, which is that 0 is always an integer and won't ever get rounded down. As soon as you have specialists providing fractional amounts of beakers, going to 0% is not any better on average. If you end up with fractional gold from specialists somehow as well then going to 100% is not any better on average either.

On the whole then, binary is a safe option for good rounding for the most part, but often not any better, sometimes not optimal, and certainly not worth making major changes to your plans for.

Previous versions may have worked the way Dhoomstriker describes, but the interface itself along with my experiments indicate that currently the game is much better with keeping fractions and avoiding rounding problems.

OK. I just saw Dhoomstriker on line, but he didn't post. Either he's too busy, he agrees with my PPP, or he's so frustrated that he threw his computer out the window!

I'll be playing per my current PPP in about 1 hour.

EDIT: I will make the change of not exploring with Wheaties Warrior 3 until Bedrock's warrior can take his place.

EDIT 2: I just looked at Bedrock and it has a happiness cap of 5. I will NOT explore with Warrior 3 at all since I don't want to run into happiness issues in Bedrock (shouldn't happen as it will only grow to 3, but it's not worth it). We'll have plenty of time to explore Zara's lands later. A few team members have expressed concern about an early DOW from Zara, so I'll hold off.

I just finished the turnset. Everything went exactly according to plan.

Zara settled Lalibela E-E-E of Wheaties on T123. Hinduism spread to that city on the turn it was settled. Zara built a missionary and spread Confucianism there on T130.

Confucianism spread to Zara's second city (Gondor)on T124. I never saw a missionary, so I don't know if it was organic spread or a missionary was used.

Zara has a galley in Aksum, which was there the entire turn set. I have not yet seen a settler built in Aksum, but I watched for one every turn.

Zara learned Iron Working on T129 and started research on Masonry, which should be learned on T134.

The cows in Riverdale are still 53% Zara's. Gondor already has 97 culture, so he will begin to put extra pressure on the cow tile. I don't think we'll be able to win the culture battle over the cows unless we really focus on it, maybe even bombing a Great Artist there (4th or 5th great person?) if we really think it's important.

I'll post a test game once I am able to re-play it and recreate the religion spreads so that our test game is as close as possible to the real game.

No forests grew (at least none were reported) and no exploration was done, so the map is the exact same as it was before.

No workers have moved this turn, to unclethrill is free to do what he wants with them during his turnset.

Here is the Buffy autolog:

Here is the test save. There are two things to note:

In the test save, Silverado has a +2 trade route with Zara (got it on T132 in the test game). This is not the case in the real game. So our commerce will be off by 1 commerce/turn. Luckily, this didn't happen before T123 during our testing, otherwise we would have assumed that we could learn Math with zero gold to spare on T132 only to find out that we were a few short...

Again, the cows tile show 52% Zara's in the test, but they are 53% his in the real game. Don't work the cow resource, even if we get it in our testing as it could mess up our results. However, watch for it every turn when playing the real game so that we can switch to them as soon as we get them.

Batter up, unclethrill!!

Mitchum said:

OK. I just saw Dhoomstriker on line, but he didn't post. Either he's too busy...

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Yup, that about sums it up. If I were going to throw someone's computer out of the window, though, it wouldn't have been mine...


Anyway, thanks for the quick turn-around on the test saved game and based on your following comment:

I just finished the turnset. Everything went exactly according to plan.

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nice work!

A TS which went exactly according to the plan is a very good one!

What do we have to decide for next one?

UT, you're UUUUUUUUUUPpppp!

Great Job Mitchum!

So I should have time to run a couple tests in the next few days; not at the level that Mitchum and Irgy have been but tests nonetheless.

Can I get a shortlist on the goals for the next 15 turns?