Short fun game (immortal)

So am I the only one in favor of southern wheat now? If so, I'll acquiesce and send the settler north.

Honestly, I think the two wheat sites are somewhat interchangeable on their own merit. The northern is a slightly better city and coastal, the southern has much lower maintenance + gold. I think the main point is the settling order and speed. The northern block needs to be completed fairly quickly if it's gonna work, so I wouldn't go southern wheat next, as that virtually guarantees we lose a chunk of the north to Mao. Without northern wheat, we'd need to settle something around copper fast, as well.

Off the top of my head, I have no idea what our potential settling timeline is... Is the more ambitious plan even realistic? I think we might also drop a bit too far back in research. At this pace we'll be lucky to have COL pre-1AD, and I'm not sure how we make it up in trades from there. We're setting up for a potential Philo bulb, but need to farm a GS in reasonable time, too, so we'd need to slow-build in Moscow past a certain point.

Seems like my set was quite unpopular...

shyuhe said:

Cottage before roads here is a bit questionable given the game speed, but otherwise I think everything is fine.

Tentative plan:

Moscow: grow to size 6, then swap to settler and whip it. Re-grow while completing the library.

St. P: grow to size 4, then swap to worker and whip it. Re-grow on granary.

Novgorod: change to worker (5 turns), then back to granary.

Research - turn off until Moscow finishes its library, then turn on to 100% and complete meditation--PH.

Southern worker roads corn then starts roading towards wheat. Northern worker finishes corn then moves to the grass hill to chop and mine it. New worker at St. P roads the city to the network, then farms, then roads towards pig. New worker at Novgorod worker pastures cow then farms.

Click to expand...

Pretty much exactly what I had in mind


Regarding the lack of workers and settlers I produced during my set... You must see that those cities need to grow after getting the monuments (WHY where they not built in the first place??), thus the granaries. Plus, we're running a SE so granaries are important for whipping and (re)growing, even more than in a CE.

Regarding the worker actions I ordered... I find cottages high priority now as we're about to finish the library. I agree, the lacking road on the corn hurts but I also connected the gold (higher priority as moscow always was around -cap) and I don't like losing that many worker turns. Those tiles always are rather far away from each other so I built cottages (again, priority as well imo).
That St Pete is not yet connected is not that bad imo lol, we lose 1C per turn, no more, it is neither at -cap (remember the ? can work wonders to "combat" ) nor would it build any chariots just yet.

I don't recall any other unpopular choices made by me during my set. If there are any please say so and I'll post my reasons behind them. I'm playing a squash tournament tomorrow though... first one in more than half a year so probably no comments until evening...

I wouldn't farm GP's in Moscow - St. P is probably the best place. Pig + corn + 2 FP is good. Although our first GP may have to come out of Moscow because St. P will take a while for a library. Our infra development is way behind where we would like it to be, but can't do much about that since there's lots of prime real estate to grab.

So where do people want city #4? Please list your preferred option and a second option so that we can get some ideas

My #4 - north of southern wheat, secondary is SW of northern banana.

shyuhe said:

secondary is SW of northern banana.

Click to expand...

That's interesting... What do you imagine for a dotmap then?

shyuhe said:

Although our first GP may have to come out of Moscow because St. P will take a while for a library.

Click to expand...

That's what I thought.

@mysty - Your set (for me) was fine - just a few fine points I would have played differently - roads are more important on quick.

@bbp - I'm assuming Churchill will settle near the southern banana, probably 1S of it. So we get the northern one, another to grab the copper/gem area, and a third to cover the southern green area (whatever's left). I'm not too keen on grabbing the non-resources area since the jungle will take forever to cut down.

I don't have very strong feelings about #4 (so feel free to count me as abstaining...) and it depends a lot where Churchill is going to settle...

If he takes the east banana:

#4: north banana/south wheat
#5: south wheat/north ivory&sugar&pete_the_pig/north wheat, depends a lot

If he goes south:

#4: east banana or secondarily east banana
#5: north banana

As settling is postponed already I think we should produce settlers at the cost of getting the first GS late. We certainly don't need a quick bulb-trade-crutch here to "catch up" and the land is very contested.

^mysty: Hmm, running a SE? IMO as a term that's pretty vague, especially with this kind of capital we don't really need a bias towards any kind of metagame, can just focus on good yields, be they hammers, specs or whatever.

We need one of the wheat sites, for sure. Frankly, I don't care which, they both have pros and cons.

EITHER (my dotmap from this morning):
#4 - WNW of north banana
#5 - SW of north wheat
#6 - S of south sugar

OR (shyuhe's dotmap):
#4 - SW of north banana
#5 - N of south wheat
#6 - copper/gems

I think north banana has to be first, since I expect it to be contested sooner than our 5th settler.

I'll play 3-4 turns tonight until we whip the settler in Moscow to see where Churchill goes with his settler. The only point of discussion from my previously posted (and edited) plan seems to be where to send the settler.

Go ahead. The only other thing mentioned was potential OB w/ Churchill and some exploration? Do we want that? I'm for.

Played per the plan, and Moscow now has a settler. Churchill settled in a horrible spot:



We're also weak (shocking):



I'm really tempted to settle the southern wheat now - it'll cripple Bismarck's growth and make him very easy pickings later. The only hitch is the barb archer wandering around - we'll need to send our chariot down to intercept if we're going to send the settler in that direction. Also, Moscow will be able to crank out another settler once it grows back to size 6 (I think it's 5 turns), which shouldn't be long with the FP tiles. So maybe it's better to settle north to avoid the archer while we send the chariot down, then send a settler as city #5 for the wheat/gold?

Random MM question - is it better to whip the worker in Novgorod at size 2 so that overflow goes into the granary?


North:



South:

I'd vote for your proposed 1SW of north banana, followed by south wheat. It'll take the settler 8t to get there, and we can have the next one on its way by then. If we go south wheat first, that's approx. 15t to get to north banana, which is somewhere around 400 BC - too late imo. If we decide to settle north, I think it's better to send the chariot that way. Moscow can grow to size 5 cap in 2t, then build another settler. We should have it in time, as I still don't think Biz will ruin our plans with his next settler (I may very well be wrong ).

I'd whip Novgorod right now, and complete granary, like you said. It'll grow in 1t after and then start benefiting from granary.

The priority here IMO is to carrol the AIs to settle spots that we're not after. I think it's more possible that Churchill will take the east banana than Bismarck the Wheat with their next settlers. Since Churchill is offering the east banana to us on a silver platter I don't see a reason to not take that. #5 could be the south wheat if it's still available (should) and #6 #7 up north blocking if they're still available (probably, at least to a degree).

When you say east banana, where is that city exactly? If you mean east of the mountains, I don't like it - it's not much of a city and doesn't do any blocking. I think getting 7 cities out in the short term would be a strain. 6 seems more realistic to me. After that, we'd still have the fish/cow/ivory and probably another marginal infill city at west banana, plus barb stone. That's a pretty reasonable base empire, I'd think - 9 cities and most of them quite decent.

With east banana I mean south of the Sugar (= your original (3)). There's a possibility Church will steal the Banana but still mass grass and 2 Sugar will make for a decent city. I've again changed my mind about the order and think if we want to go north we need to go that first. I think that's better than "take the south wheat and then whatever's left of the north". IMO there's a decent chance to get almost all of the north and south if we go #4 east banana #5 south wheat #6 north wheat/north banana.

With a capital Gold + mass cottages I don't see how we could settle too much strain on us. Certainly we can't manage to strike ourselves and anything less is acceptable IMO.

I'm ok with #4 going at bbp's original (3), south of the southern sugar. I would still prefer #5 as the southern wheat to block off Bismarck. It'll make him that much easier to take out later.

Well... We're close to agreed, it seems. Maybe wait for RRRaskolnikov and mystyfly to state their preference, too? I like:
#4 - SW of north banana
#5 - N of south wheat
#6 - something in gems/copper/ivory

I think my original dotmap was too ambitious and Mao will split our line if we go for north wheat. He might've jumped with Guanzhou just to get horses, but it's possible he doesn't have anywhere else to go but south. The east banana could and probably will get taken over by Churchill soonish, and I don't think it's such a necessary tile. shyuhe's proposed site (#4 above) is a great city all-around.

I'm cool with S of south sugar, if that's the consensus, but I prefer the above.

I don't think planning 3 cities is in order... too much depends on the AI's behaviour.

I'd settle gold/wheat towards biz as planned in order to get wheat quicker, having a city that is easily defended (against barbs), and have another good source of commerce (gold) online soon.

Next few cities should be up north, sealing off as many good sites and resources as possible. I think this should work quite well as there is lots of jungle to slow down the AIs and there is a convenient patch of desert between us (our future land I should say ) and mao.

I think we're in a very good position here and the layout of the map and AI distribution will get us an interesting game... I'm curious to see how we do it

When do you plan on playing shyuhe?

I plan on playing once half the team agrees on where to put city #4 I of course prefer the southern wheat but I'm ok with the north.

Seems like we have 3 opinions for #4 (south-of-sugar, north banana, south wheat)... From a landgrab POV I still think we should take the south-of-sugar first, but from a yields&resource POV the south wheat works first too... in either case I think the other should be #5. So you can count me as 0.5 southwheat 0.5 south-of-sugar, just to work towards an agreement