SGOTM 13 - T'dr'duzk b'hazg t't

Good point. I will try again with Corn & on the PH, but this time I will go all the way to Colossus.

My main problem with settling on the corn is that it will make late early game and middle game growth a real pain.

Trying to get from size 8 to size 15 with 7f surplus (assuming not working any of the mines and no food in the northern fog) is going to be painful.

Benginal said:

My main problem with settling on the corn is that it will make late early game and middle game growth a real pain.

Trying to get from size 8 to size 15 with 7f surplus (assuming not working any of the mines and no food in the northern fog) is going to be painful.

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This would be especially undesirable in a city where we plan on building the Colossus, and are therefore going to want to work as many water tiles as possible pre-Astronomy. To me, this means as much food as possible and running HR.

That said, water maps are pretty production poor, and it is possible that we'll need to use island cities to produce an army. In that instance sacrificing size for hammers might be worth it as a short term measure (given that we are going to move the capital in most scenarios). I will take a look at Alaman's plan before I say for certain that I prefer the PH site, but I am strongly leaning that way because of the better long term potential.

I usually favour production than growth, which might be a mistake mind you, so 5 food surplus doesn't bug me that much.
I agree that we need strong land cities, and that this city is only our starting point. I don't count on it being our capital for very long.

I'm not familiar with the colossus-ocean tiles-HR strategy, but 3 commerce, 2 food and 0 hammers doesn't really strike me as an uber powered tile. It would be good if we were financial, but here, it's average at best : how much does an extra population point costs us with the civics we want ? Won't we have to pay maintenance for the warriors too ? Or have to pay for it in the sense that they'll gimp our free-unit pool for the actual army we'll want to build ? Ultimately how much does any of these ocean tiles really brings us ?

If anyone have some figures, I'd be very interested.

I should run two test games to compare the beaker output of all out coastal cities vs hammer building currencies and specialists on the other hand.

A few lunch hour thoughts I had:

Re: The Colossus. Does it offer a non-Financial civ an overwhelming advantage? Probably not. However given an island start it does at least 2 things: 1. Gives us a source of commerce to boost research, since the number of cottages will be limited and we only have the clam tiles available for early commerce. Of course we will have at least 5 other tiles we'll probably want to work before water tiles. 2. It works well with the Moai Statues if we build them in the same city (especially if we run Bureaucracy). 3. It denies this wonder to the AI, one of whom will start with the GLH at turn 0 and therefore will also have an early GM. If the admins really wanted to make life hard they could have given the GLH to a FIN civ. If someone had the GLH and The Colossus on a water map, things could get ugly. Lastly, in a competitive SG it (and its culture) boosts our score. That said, I'm not of how much we should prioritize building the Colossus. We probably don't want to sacrifice expansion too greatly to build it.

Re: Warriors for HR happiness. I've played a number of games using this approach and I've not had problems with unit cost (not that this strategy will necessarily work well on a water map). I think we will want to prioritize Currency at any rate for the trade route income. Apart from that though, HR seems like it will be the only immediate way to increase our happiness as there are no happiness resources immediately visible on the map. This could all change with map exploration of course. I just like planning for a worst case scenario.

The strategy of Colossus/early HR is being dictated by the map. Normally I build quite a few cottages to keep my economy going, we do not have that option here. As you said yourself, the primary goal is to get a toehold on the mainland. Once we have done that, we can move our cap, and go hammer mad. We will have to tech Cavalry to conquer al of the AI, so we will always need a good commerce base.

So, in the meantime, with our lack of decent production, we will struggle to get numerical superiority. With lots of commerce available, we should instead aim for technology superiority. I still like teching towards Mace's, most of the techs are essential anyway. If we can tech towards and then whip a decent force of Cats/Maces we can get our toehold before Longbows.


@ Colossus:

You are right that it is not the end-goal in itself.

We want it because it will allow us to expand to a large number of island cities. So, I agree that we don't want it at the expense of REXing, the trick will be to manage both. This is why we want 1 settler, at least, out before we build Oracle. After Oracle, ideally the cap will be building settlers/WB's for a while and city 2 or 3 can then build the forge/colossus. I don't think we will need many workers.

In a tiny island zone, I think we can expect a maximum of 3-5 land tiles per city. In HR, once each city is at pop 10, it will be working 5-7 water tiles, giving an extra 5-7 raw commerce. Multiply this out to 10 or more cities, and you can see the benefits.


@ HR

Yep, completely agree. As long as we do not research Hunting, we can abuse Warriors to grow very large, this works very well when every extra tile gives 2f 3c. I do disagree with the 'No Courthouses' part of the strategy, islands will mean higher maintenance costs.

neilmeister said:

@ HR

Yep, completely agree. As long as we do not research Hunting, we can abuse Warriors to grow very large, this works very well when every extra tile gives 2f 3c. I do disagree with the 'No Courthouses' part of the strategy, islands will mean higher maintenance costs.

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Yeah, it's obviously intended for a more standard map setting. It also relies on a cottage economy for commerce, which is obviously not going to work for us. I think my main point is that HR + warriors + food lets us grow big and maximize the advantages of Colossus. If we have to pick between settling for production or happy resources, HR frees us to pick the production site.

Edit: And just to be clear: When I said I played through a number of games using the early Monarchy/HR approach, I meant other games, not test games for this SGOTM.

I've revised my micro, we get a second city out on t73, and we 1 pop whip Oracle on t93. I went the Polytheism path, so we could 2~3 pop whip it on t90 if we went Meditation.

After that I played the game through a bit. We are in the hole, bigtime. I went straight for Alpha after Pottery, while I sent the galley out exploring. I met 4 AI by the time I got Alpha, and 2 of them already had it. Still got a handful of techs from the others. MC on the other hand got me everything else, once I had almost built Colussus of course. Built it in city 2 while A-M built galley-(settler-WB) x 3 or 4. Having said that it had copper, but settler 3 was out before Colossus was started, so I hope we will have it. A city with 2 GH mines would do the same job. Barbs were a problem, so I should have inserted a trireme in the build order somewhere. They built a few cities, so hopefully they put them in good locations.

So, I was at tech parity, and dead last in score. The money from the islands was pouring in, and it seemed it didn't matter how many cities I built I could sustain 70-80% tech.

This will be a very hard map for warfare. I think we will have to wait for Cavalry unless someone is reasonably close, then the traditional Cat/Mace in large numbers on little islands theory applies, regardless of the defensive tech level.


EDIT: So, I think we have as a group pretty much decided to settle the PH. It gives us more options IMO, concerning where resources appear and more flexibity around where we settle cities 2 and 3.

I will play the first 40 or so turns tomorrow unless there are major objections.

Nice work Neil.

I'm getting a little antsy to see this game started! We can obviously keep discussing later game concerns, but I think it would be beneficial to focus on the very first few moves until we research some sort of consensus.

I think settling on the PH looks like the way the team is going. Are we agreed on researching fishing first? Are we going to start with a worker that we build to completion or switch to a workboat when fishing comes in?

Edit: No objections here to you getting started tomorrow.

Its a carefully laid out tech order

Fishing - because A-M doesn't have anything else to build after a worker.
Mining - so that it is in before the worker finishes the corn farm, and the 2 mines are finished as A-M grows
Sailing - So A-M can build galley and lighthouse after it finishes the WB's
Myst-Poly/Med-PH - To build Oracle
BW-Pottery - To get MC
Writing-Alpha - To trade for as many backfill techs as possible.
????

???? = Monarchy?

Maybe even before Alphabet. It really depends on who we meet. MC makes good trade bait so we could get Alphabet or Monarchy with it. It depends on how close we are to getting The Colossus.

But I think this is putting the cart before the horse. I am in agreement about the rest of the tech order, at any rate.

In the test game I traded MC for Monarchy, among other things, not long after learning Alpha.

But it all depends on how many AI we meet and their circumstances.

I'm too busy IRL to spend hours trying to defend the corn settling theory (which even if I was right would only prove marginally better).
Let's hope the mapmaker haven't been extremely evil and put copper under the forest.

I'm just wondering if the ability to settle near copper isn't better than gaining 16 or 17 turns of Oracle (BW before Oracle techs). But if you have a third settler ready, it's probably okay.

I'm all for you starting to play the 40 first turns.

Last tiny minor point : which direction are we going to start exploring ? Circles around the capital, or go straight east (supposing the mapmaker followed some kind of historical/geographical guideline) ?

We should check all the Islands visible from the start position. We are looking for (nearby) copper after all.

Why do Alphabet, rather than something you can usually trade for Alpha like Aesthetics? Since Alpha (and Monarchy) are high priority techs for the AI, I almost never self-research either. I'd do Aesthetics and then maybe Math/Currency/CoL.

By the time I got it, several AI had Alpha, but they also had a number of other techs. CoL, Monarchy, Calendar, Maths and Aesthetics had all been learned by at least 1 AI. So, I think it a little risky to target a trade tech like Aesthetics without knowing we can trade well with it. Alpha is less exiting, but should guarantee we can trade for most of the filler techs.

BTW, we already have a tech that the AI will trade almost anything for, MC.

We will have to keep an eye on this. If we meet no AI, then Alpha is a waste, if we meet lots, then I think it should be the priority. But its waaaay to early to tell.

I've yet to see a situation where Alpha is better for trade bait than Aesthetics. While you might have one other AI with Aes, you'll normally have multiple ones with Alpha rendering it almost worthless for trading. Conversely, I can pretty much always get Alpha for Aesthetics, and then either trade Alpha around, trade Aesthetics more, or both.

I'm not sure when we are planning on getting started, but I will be out of town (and away from the internet) for the weekend, starting tomorrow. I will be back on Sunday night, so I will be available to play my turn set after Neil.

BTW, just an observation. I've seen posts indicating at least some of us are assuming that the other AIs will be on a continent. All we know for sure is that they have more land easily accessible than we do, which is a far cry from any continent. We don't have any idea how literally the scenario designer tried to recapture Napoleon's return, so it could be anything from a big continent to everyone being on their own larger island. Depending on the map, we may not be moving our capital after all.

If we don't move it, would you rather be on the corn, or the PH, for the rest of the game?

Got us started, not much happened.

There are a few resources around us, including stone on a GH. At least its a source of hammers. Fish is also a good resource.

We have just finished Sailing, and I have selected Mysticism. Second WB is being produced in 4 turns, growth to pop 4 in 2 turns.

Interestingly, Hinduism hasn't gone yet.

Screenies:


Turn log: