SGOTM 15 - One Short Straw

29 cities now. (28 on t57)
 
Excellent job on clearing out the barbs, Mitchum. I don't think the Zlat warrior would have done anything differently, moving earlier. I have us at 28 cities WW now. So I'd leave the warrior where he is one more turn and then just move him onto the forested chokepoint.

Well done on getting another chop. That'll speed up our library. In fact, that might argue for an earlier farm, except that if we grow to pop4 with 1 whip:mad: we'll run into unhappiness without a connection to gold.

Toku hasn't even researched mining yet?!?!?!?!?!?!? lol What in the world is his worker doing? Roading everything from here to Kawasaki?

EDIT: Toku gained 4k power from Alpha, not from building an archer plus poppoints. Toku built his 5th archer.

His research is still slow, he's just been researching Alphabet for an eternity. It looks like we have a decent chance of catching him without slavery. Maybe we should attempt to calculate what he'll trade for DoP. We've known him for a long time and as I recall from SG11, that lowers the trade value. If we can get it in trade, maybe no point in researching it.

Osaka has 29h in its build, so it's not a monument (plus he doesn't have Myst). He had 30ish hammers iirc in another build, so he's working on a granary or a library (or a wonder).

Note that the Chandi chop sequence is now reversed: Chop the SW forest first, then we can farm 1t on the way to chopping the 1E forest.

I don't think anything changes in your PPP. (I hope...)

As for warrior movements, I suppose the warrior at Marble-1E could go 1S to make Dhoom happy and allow for forest growth at Marble-1E. :)

I'm okay with you playing on.

xpost with ZPV: My 28 cities could easily be wrong. I wasn't certain.
 
At 29 cities, maybe we should go ahead and play it safe and move the warrior to the chokepoint this turn. If the barb goes there next turn, we're kind of screwed.
 
Here are my calcs:
Code:
size	"pop"	t58	1800	92		t57	1697	88
1	1	5	5	5		5	5	5
2	6	5	30	10		5	30	10
3	21	3	63	9		2	42	6
4	48	3	144	12		3	144	12
5	90	2	180	10		2	180	10
6	150	3	450	18		4	600	24
7	232	4	928	28		3	696	21
								
totals:		25	1800	92		24	1697	88
to those 24, 25 we need to add our four cities, to make 28, 29.
 
At 29 cities, maybe we should go ahead and play it safe and move the warrior to the chokepoint this turn. If the barb goes there next turn, we're kind of screwed.

Do you think we'll get the 25% river bonus in the real game? If not, what do our odds become?

I'll wait for Dhoom, ZPV and/or magnusmarcus to chime in first before playing.
 
Do you think we'll get the 25% river bonus in the real game? If not, what do our odds become?

I'll wait for Dhoom, ZPV and/or magnusmarcus to chime in first before playing.

I don't think we'll get the river bonus - I think it's probably a worldbuilder relic.
Our odds are 90.1% without it or any fortify bonus, similar with 5%, and go up to ~96% with 10% fortify.

Those odds aren't great - if Toto happened here, we'd be royally screwed.
I think I'd prefer to let the warrior wander away, if it will. If it doesn't, and instead beelines our city, we give it a) the chance to suicide across the river on the way, or failing that b) the chance to attack us in the city at the same odds (warrior has +25% city defence, and city defence vs barbs also gives us +25%).

edit: when you're ready, go ahead and play. I'm not going to wade through all the worker moves at the moment.
 
Okay, I agree with ZPV. Let the ZLat warrior wait a turn and hope for the best. If the warrior moves to the chokepoint, then we're at 31 WW cities. Stop and we figure things out.

ZPV, could you give me you T56 calcs too. I'm getting things screwed up here and it looks like my calcs from the skipped turn are all messed up.
 
Okay, I agree with ZPV. Let the ZLat warrior wait a turn and hope for the best. If the warrior moves to the chokepoint, then we're at 31 WW cities. Stop and we figure things out.

ZPV, could you give me you T56 calcs too. I'm getting things screwed up here and it looks like my calcs from the skipped turn are all messed up.

Here's my best guess. I'll have another look for a T56 solution that only has one size 7 city, too.

Code:
			t56	1698	86		t57	1697	88		t58	1800	92
1	1		3	3	3		5	5	5		5	5	5
2	6		4	24	8		5	30	10		5	30	10
3	21		2	42	6		2	42	6		3	63	9
4	48		6	288	24		3	144	12		3	144	12
5	90		1	90	5		2	180	10		2	180	10
6	150		3	450	18		4	600	24		3	450	18
7	232		2	464	14		3	696	21		4	928	28
8	337		1	337	8								
			22	1698	86		24	1697	88		25	1800	92
						found 2 cities			found a city			
						whip 8->7,4->2			grow 1->2,2->3,6->7			
						grow 4->5,4->5,5->6

Edit: the ranking for the top 5 cities is on:
iTotalCityValue = ((pCity.getCulture() / 5) + (pCity.getFoodRate() + pCity.getProductionRate() + pCity.calculateGoldRate())) * pCity.getPopulation()
I don't know if gold means gold (I assume it does), and I'm pretty sure population = 1,2,3,4,etc.
 
LowtherCastle said:
Let the Zlat warrior wait a turn and hope for the best.
Agreed.


I don't have time to review Worker actions tonight, so if you want to play on, go for it. I do really want to have the Zlatorog Worker improving Zlatorog instead of coming down to Delhi, unless there is no way that we can swing it... it kind of depends upon how the other Workers have committed themselves to date.


Here's a random thought: If Toku doesn't build another City of his own, could we whip a Settler somewhere and settle a City in a location that we wouldn't mind having in the long run (such as by the Fish to the SW of Toku's capital) and then let him waltz into the City?

Recall that he can't raze it, so we only need to found it and then he could even capture it as soon as at the end of our turn. Doing so could be a far better way of luring his Archers out of his capital than letting him keep Kyoto, and it would give us a chance to stay at war with him and slowly kill off Archers/Workers until he is finally willing to give us Alphabet for Peace.

We'll build the army first, though, and a Settler can be potentially built near the end of our military unit production.
 
58 1680
GEL finishes worker and starts barracks
A minor point: If we start on a Warrior, will we be able to return to this build item 10 turns later? If so, I'd rather start on this Warrior (keep it in the build queue, though, so that it will auto-upgrade to a Spearman instead of having its Hammers lost), and get a Spearman than put Hammers into a building that we won't complete for a while.
 
I know that there is sentiment to "rush to The Oracle," but unless we've done some Granary-testing, there is probably some room for optimizing which of Marble City versus Delhi works which squares in the last couple of turns of the turnset... enough that we probably can afford to have the Zlatorog stay at Zlatorog, either Chopping or Camping... perhaps it makes sense to stop for the night on Turn 62 before moving the Zlatorog Worker, then update the test game, so that we can try and figure out the best way to do these two things (Granary completion timing in terms of Foodbox sizes versus getting Zlatorog online sooner with little to no sacrifice in Delhi, if possible).
 
I *THINK* that settling Marble City will spawn-bust fog-bust most or all of the south for us, but be sure that now that Toku's Archer has made the kill that we're actually properly spawn-busting the south in the interim turns... we don't want to have yet another Barb unit appear just because Toku moved to a location that we didn't expect.

Note that the Barb Archer was doing a good job in spawn-busting since he was shy about moving next to our Cultural Borders, while Toku's Archer will act differently and will seek out walking by our Cultural Borders... just make sure that we've got solid spawn-busting coverage.
 
Well, I've lost control of the worldwide city count. I'm not even sure we were at 27 on T56, because I have found a way of making it 28 also. If we get to 31 WW in the IT and some number of Hammy barbs start beelining our cities, then they might start arriving NW of our chokepoint the same turn as our warrior gets there if we wait for the barb warrior to commit himself and he comes at us. If no fortification is basically the same as 5% fortification, and there's a 50% non-31WW chance that he gives us a chance at 10% fortification, how much are we improving our odds of survival versus the odds that 2 more cities get founded?

I'm thinking that having the barbs take even a step or two toward us could be catastrophic.

Either way, we should probably send the first free warrior from teh south to Zlatorog to help choke that point.

So, Mitchum, it's your turnset, you go with your best guess. We need that point choked asap.
 
OK. I'll play tomorrow.

Dhoom, you have some time to optimize the granary stuff. As it stands, Delhi gets its granary done when the food box is half full, which is good. If we get it a turn later, we lose 5 or 6 food IIRC. No need to wait for a test game. Just follow my PPP and make adjustments as you see fit.

I'm not crazy about building a warrior in GEL. We're only talking about 4 hammers and I can't guarantee that we'll finish it in 10 turns. Plus, I'd rather have axes/cats coming from GEL than spears. Until Toku learns BW and hooks up metal, we're in good shape there. Unless I hear others wanting to switch from a partial barracks to a warrior/spear, I plan to stick with the PPP.

The warrior will stand his ground this turn. On the next turn, if the barb moves anywhere but toward Zlatorog, the warrior will move 1N and fortify. If the barb moves toward Zlatorog instead, I'll move 1E and hope that the barb attacks me in the forest across the river rather than moving to the deer tile, which I think barbs can't step on anyway without an improvement there...

If I've moved 1N and the barb steps back next to me on the following turn, I'll upload saves for a quick estimate on the city count.

The warrior in the SW and SE should be free to move IF we trap Toku's archer in the SW. If the archer gets out, we'll need to defog the tile at banana-1N (from memory since I don't have the game on this computer). But they (EDIT: our two warriors) won't get anywhere close to Zlatorog before we reach 31 cities.
 
@ Dhoom

When I played my test game against Toku, he didn't move a single unit out of any city even though I had warrior bait all over the place. I think that if attacked, Toku will turtle and only produce city defending archers. But I could be wrong of course. In any event, I'm not a fan of the build-a-city-to-bait-Toku plan. I'd rather spend hammers on cats/axes.

EDIT: Shouldn't you be in bed, LC?
 
One last thing before I forget. When I was testing our odds against the archer in the NW, about half the time the barb moved next to my warrior and then moved away the next turn. I'm not sure at what odds the barbs avoid battles, but 3.3% odds must make them think twice before attacking.
 
Another thought:
Zlatorog has 0 Food and after the Worker has been completed, will have 0 Hammers. While it sucks to have a City get captured, can we complete the Worker before the Barb Warrior could reach our City if it started beelining our City now?

If yes, then I think we'll be fine, even if more Barb units come.

Anyway, Barbs have a high chance of attacking a unit on the way to a City, so it's not really a difference of 0% Fortification and 5% Fortification, but a difference of 0% Fortification and a 25% River Defence bonus.

There is, of course, the risk that the Barb Warrior would walk past our unit onto the Der, but if it did AND if we could complete the Worker before the Barb Warrior could reach our City, then we would have the choice to abandon the City and guard the chokepoint versus trying to defend the City and possibly losing our chock-point-blocker in addition to losing the City temporarily (basically until we get our first Axeman).
 
Gah. I keep thinking about this game when I should be doing other things. :D

Dhoom, before you spend too much time worrying about Zlatorog, think about this. When I ran my longer test, Delhi was a monster. It has a lot of food and a lot of production. It built 4 or 5 of the units in my initial army. Zlatorog built 1... if that. Zlatorog is slow and steady. It will be a great city, but not in time to help with the Toku war.

So what is our priority? Make our star a bit shinier or give our turtle a small push? Delhi is ready to go and a granary takes it to the next step by making the whip more efficient. A granary and a single pop growth in Zlatorog will take a lot of worker turns and time. Too late in my opinion. I say we send one worker back to Zlatorog after Delhi has it's granary.
 
Mitchum said:
In any event, I'm not a fan of the build-a-city-to-bait-Toku plan.
The point was that we'd just get the City eventually anyway but wouldn't have to pay the Maintenance while keeping Toku alive. If Toku has built a 3rd City by then, we can scrap the idea... but the gain was mostly to be able to capture Toku's 2 good Cities while also having a shot at getting Alphabet for free. From that perspective, it could be very much worth it.


Our SW Warrior may now be able to move away from blocking a square's worth of Forest growth.


As for Barbs attacking... they have the biggest variance of any enemy Civ... they will randomly be very shy or very courageous about attacking, while the AI Civs will have a smaller random component and thus are more predictable (Monte is more suicidal with his unit than many other Leaders, for example).
 
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