SGOTM 13 - One Short Straw

I have a slight preference for fur, as it gives us more whipping flexibility. If it turns out that we lack iron, then we can just plant city #7 on the copper.

Probably the most convincing argument will be playing out each City's growth for an equal number of turns and seeing what such a City nets us.

I currently have the real game open paused and don't really have much, if any, playing time until really late this evening, but if anyone wants to run such a test, they could grab any previous test game (because all that we really need is the layout of the Cities) and then settle the Cities:

Fur = 1S of the southern Fur

Copper = 1NW of the Copper (there's no point in settling Copper so early if we're going to plop our butts down on top of the Copper Resource and waste its potential)

You get 1 Work Boat for free (it is already in existence and is hanging around Paris in a relatively City-selection-neutral location (i.e. it can go to either City in time).

You also get the use of 2 Workers, with the first one being able to land right away, while the second Worker may not land for another turn (for Copper City) or another 3 turns (for Fur City).


Nothing else in the empire matters, expect for possibly being able to borrow Stone City's Magical Fish in Copper City, so honestly, anyone could pick up such a testing idea if they have time and play each City out for X number of turns, presumably assuming no whipping (we might get lucky and be able to whip a Lighthouse in either place in the real game, but assume that situation not to be true).


Actually, someone could even just work it out via a spreadsheet:
For Fur City, we have available:
Crab = 4 Food (5 with a Lighthouse), 2 Commerce
Tundra Fur = 1 Food, 4 Commerce
PFor = 1 Food, 2 Hammers
Multiple Coasts = 1 Food (until a Lighthouse is complete), 2 Commerce

After we get 15 Culture in Fur City and our Cultural Borders expand, we can also start to improve (with a Worker) and then use:
Tundra Fur #2 = 1 Food, 4 Commerce
Plains Workshop = 0 Food, 2 Hammers (3 Hammers using Caste System)



For copper City, we have:
Magical Fish = 5 Food (6 with a Lighthouse), 2 Commerce
Magical Fish #2 = 5 Food (6 with a Lighthouse), 2 Commerce
Grassland Copper = 2 Food, 4 Hammers
Coast = 1 Food (until a Lighthouse is complete), 2 Commerce


After we get 15 Culture in Copper City and our Cultural Borders expand, we can also start to improve (with a Worker) and then use:
Grassland Workshop = 1 Food, 1 Hammer (2 Hammers using Caste System)
2 more Grassland Workshops that first have to be de-Junglified = 1 Food, 1 Hammer (2 Hammers using Caste System)

Worker actions take this long:
Camp Fur City's Tundra Fur (only if we take Hunting in trade) = 8 turns
Road Fur City's Tundra Fur = 4 turns
Build a Workshop on Fur City's Plains square = 9 turns
Chop the Plains Forest (would we really do that?) = 5 turns for 30 Hammers (44 Hammers after Math)
Chop the Grassland Hills Forest on the nearby island = 8 turns (counting the turn to load a Worker onto a boat, the turn to unload from the boat, and the turn to get back on the boat) for 16 Hammers (24 Hammers after Math)
Build a Mine on Copper City's Grassland Jungle Copper square = 12 turns
Build a Road on any of Copper City's Grassland squares (including the Copper square) = 3 turns
Build a Workshop on Copper City's Grassland square = 9 turns
Build additional Workshops on Copper City's 2 Grassland Jungle squares = 15 turns

Don't forget that it also "costs" 1 additional turn to move onto a Jungle square or a Forest square unless your Worker directly lands on that square from the boat.


Our Foodbox fills at 33 Food, 36 Food, 39 Food, 42 Food... always +3 Food for each population point.


A Lighthouse costs us 45 Hammers and a Granary costs us 90 Hammers.


Good luck!

Here's a quick Copper calc:


We have 43t to 1 AD, minus turns of revolt, minus turns to actually found the city. So, the list is up to 300-400 AD. It's not super awesome, but it's something.

I think the fur's value is purely in the +1 happy. The city itself isn't useful, esp with the Caste kick. So, the question is how badly we need that extra happy pre-Rep. I'm not as familiar with the city micro as some of you guys, and can't really comment on that.

babybluepants said:

Can we make the city decision today, so we can proceed to Alpha quickly? I think most of the active players have voted.

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Sooo, it's currently 3 versus 2 for Copper instead of Fur.

Does anyone plan to offer any further arguments for settling Fur City as City #6? I.e. Do you want to try and make a case to convince people to switch their votes?


So far, I see it as:
Fur City nets us marginally more Commerce and has the possibility of using up to 2 Forests to speed up some early Production.

Copper City nets us more Food and more Production, with the extra Food eventually leading to even more Production.


If we settled Copper City first, then later, Fur City will also give us +1 Happiness. That +1 Happiness will, of course, be useful, particularly when Astronomy kills the Happiness coming from our Monuments.

That said, I believe that the plan is to whip our Cities immediately after Lightbulbing Astronomy, so even the loss of Monuments won't be felt immediately after Caste System is no longer in use and will only be felt when our Cities regrow. If even one of our Cities whips a Settler, then we can still get that +1 Happiness from Fur City.


If we settled Fur City first, then later, Copper City could give us access to Copper but might not be settled so as to give us decent production from the Grassland Copper square (i.e. the suggestion was to settle directly on the Copper if we settled this City later).


Production seems to be our big deficit here, while even 1 Fur Resource provides less value than a single Specialist--and we're shortly going to be hiring many Specialists.


I don't really see us needing Fur City's bonus Commerce in the long run and for me, the biggest thing that settling Fur City now offers, in my opinion, is the ability to chop Forests... but if we Chop the Plains Forest, then the City will have virtually no production squares and will just end up being a weak Commerce City.

Having "yet another City that can work Commerce-based squares" doesn't really sell me.

Does anyone plan to make further arguments for Fur City or run a test scenario for it?

Also, how long should I wait?

mdy said:

For Maori to be useful in coper we would have to build at a minimum granary+lighthouse+Maori+barracks. With only 1 production tile I can't see how we can get all this built before we are ready to go to war as we will spend a lot of the intervening time in CS. In the circumstances, if we built this city I think whipping units here would probably be more efficient than Maori.

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BBP has provided a non-Moai scenario for Copper City, with a focus on getting a Forge instead.

If we were to go with this approach of skipping Moai in Copper City (regardless of when Copper City gets founded), do we want to consider building Moai in Stone City? If yes, then I should probably get started on Moai after we build the Warrior for Pig City. Note that this Warrior is due to complete about 2 turns prior to The Pyramids completing.

That would be 8 base Hammers per turn going into Moai Statues, which has a cost of 375 Hammers. 8 * 2 (for Stone) = 16; 375 / 16 = 24 turns, starting from approximately 2 turns prior to completing the Warrior for Pig City.

Copper City, assuming that no whipping occurred for Hammers going into Moai, would make 5 base Hammers per turn. 5 * 2 (for Stone) = 10; 375 / 10 = 38 turns to complete Moai, but that's only after first building a Lighthouse and a Granary, which, as BBP demonstrated, would take 32 turns without whipping to complete the both of those 2 buildings.


While Copper City, in my mind, makes for a better long-term Moai location, Stone City makes for a decent Moai location and Copper City would arguably take way too long, unless we had access to the Whip to help get us going faster. Now, we can definitely try to squeeze in some whipping in Copper City whenever we aren't runing Caste System, but yes, it will still take quite some time to complete Moai Statues there.


Thus... Moai in Stone City, so that we at least build it somewhere?

Well, it's too late for me to play tonight, so I guess we'll see if anyone has responded by tomorrow.

If not, then I'll be forced to go by the current results of the voting.

If there is a response, then at least we'll have a chance to hear the strongest pro-Fur-City arguments aired, which would potentially be used to sway popular opinion towards Fur City.

It looks like forge+whip will give us more hammers than Maori in stone.

We could consider building the Maori in the capital (only finishing it after it has finished generating a GP for us of course). With bureaucracy we would get more benefit from the hammers there than anywhere else, happinees issues would prevent us utilising all the food there for whipping. By hiring an engineer and by working a mine for some turns after the capital generates a GP we could built it here before we are ready to revolt back to slavery. I can't see anywhere else where maori could possibly pay off in time.

The difference between fur and copper is pretty small, so I am OK with you playing on assuming we will found copper next.

I agree that the difference between the two is not huge. Let's settle copper, unless someone strongly objects, and let's get to Alpha (that's the more important matter).

Moai in Copper just doesn't work for us, IMHO - too slow. Stone's better, and I do think it pays off easily. Moai in Paris is a great idea, though. I'm down with that.

I'm ok with either city spot. Moai in stone sounds good -- I'd like to keep Paris available for other duties.

If we didn't build the Maori in stone we could whip 90 base hammers every 15 turns, and have a base production of 8 hammers. We would also be able to build a forge there if we didn't build Maori. This would give us an average production of just over 17 hammers per turn. In order to beat this with Maori we would need to grow to size 12 and work the stone+mine. This does not look like a realistic possibility over a timescale that would be useful.

mdy said:

If we didn't build the Maori in stone we could whip 90 base hammers every 15 turns, and have a base production of 8 hammers. We would also be able to build a forge there if we didn't build Maori. This would give us an average production of just over 17 hammers per turn. In order to beat this with Maori we would need to grow to size 12 and work the stone+mine. This does not look like a realistic possibility over a timescale that would be useful.

Click to expand...

Okay, so the math of the situation only really supports Moai Statues being built in the capital.

One additional advantage to building Moai Statues in the capital is that Paris is the only City that has a Forge, so it's somewhat more efficient to pump out Moai Statues there.

Given that we will certainly want to run Bureaucracy, there is certainly a case to be made for building it there.

However, I will note that since the entire point of this turnset is to bring us to the completion of The Pyramids, deciding whether to "build Moai Statues in the capital" or "not to build it at" all can wait as a decision for the next turnset. Feel free to discuss and argue it now, but I won't let the lack of a decision hold me up from playing.


Also, it sounds like we're going to go ahead with settling Copper City as our City #6, which will get placed 1NW of the Copper (now is your last chance to object to this placement).


We seem to want to play ahead until Alphabet arrives in Willem's hands, but then we'll need to pause play in order to make a decision about how to proceed.

Then, we'll probably want to play forward until we get Alphabet ourselves and agian pause play, to decide what trades we will make after having learned Alphabet.

If we were to go for multiple rounds of tech-trading (such as if we were to get Hunting and Archery), we'd probably want to pause yet again. Since we likely do NOT want to take Hunting and Archery yet (we can get them whenever we'd like in the future), and since we already have the Fishing -> Sailing pair, and also have most pre-reqs to other techs that might come up in trade (i.e. we have Bronze Working so Iron Working is a one-step trade not a two-step trade of Bronze Working + Iron working), then probably the only tech that we might need to pause for at that point would be Monotheism (two AIs are already running Organized Religion--Cathy and Isabella). Of course, Monotheism might not even be up for trading with only 2 AIs knowing it (although I admit that maybe more than 2 AIs could know it but haven't switched Civics--I haven't checked for certain), so we might not even need to stop then.


I only have a few minutes available right now (just enough to read what was written and to write this message) but will aim to play late this evening (well, evening for me, anyway), approximately 8 hours from now.

I'm at a three-year-old birthday party and just had a scary thought, what if the hokey pokey is what it's all about?

Mitchum said:

I'm at a three-year-old birthday party and just had a scary thought, what if the hokey pokey is what it's all about?

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Why not? Kids certainly know how to have fun a lot better than we do.

If people didn't feel so embarassed or "too cool" to participate in such activities without the presence of kids as the "excuse to fall back on," they, too, could be enjoying a similarly fun activity at social gatherings.

Just think how much more pleasant this world would be if people could open up to each other a little more easily, instead of letting prejudices, judgment of others, and fear of being judged getting in the way of joining together and supporting each other in such a friendly, relatively-harmless, and mutually-enjoyable activity.

Note that while I am here, I am still trying to find a website to host files.

I was hoping to find a website that would allow free hosting and hot-linking of files, but so far I haven't found one with sufficient storage space (for example, I am currently hosting more than 20 Megs of data, which is an amount that you are usally asked to pay for).

Likely, I'll just end up signing-up for some kind of an image-hosting service, then moving only the images to there. I'm still looking for one, though, so yeah, it might be a while before I start playing (unless you really want me to play with just walls of text as your updates without pretty pictures to make things more interesting ).


EDIT: Oh yeah, I'm also trying to find a site that doesn't require me to log in every 30 days. What kind of a silly rule! It'll be no good if the images go down 30 days after our game is over!

Okay, I reviewed the files that I have been hosting and have found a .zipped file of images from the Turns 44 through 63. I have no idea if I still have a link to that file in a message in our thread, but I'm not about to hunt for it and am just going to nuke that file, potentially breaking the link.

Nuking that .zip file should give me sufficient file storage space to store images for the rest of the turnset (hopefully), so I can push off the problem of finding a new host until another day.

That fact means that I should be able to begin playing soon.

It is Turn 131, 725 BC.

Last turn, I remembered to adjust the citizens in Paris so that the Settler would remain a 3-pop-whip. This turn will get the 2nd turn of Hammers going into the Settler, after which we will switch back to The Pyramids for a turn, grow to Size 7, then whip Settler 6.


I made a command decision and loaded-up both Workers onto our Galley. They will have time to land on the Copper next turn while the Galley will still be able to get the Settler to Copper Island on time. I didn't run a test with the Workers, but they were "out of things to do" as per the spreadsheet PPP and were just "goofing around building a Workshop that we might not need," so I figured that they could at least get into position and start Roading the Copper, with the hopes of being able to Chop it soon.


Alphabet is due in 1 turn, while Confucianism spreads again... to another of Willem's Cities. That's not where we wanted it to spread, but at least our Religion is becoming relatively dominant.



Oh yeah, I also remembered to whip the Lighthouse in Stone City, which gives us near-maximum overflow into a Granary.

Another thing that I have been thinking about is the possibility of switching into Caste System early.

Other than Copper City possibly needing to whip a building, a City for which BBP has provided a suitable non-whipping scenario, we'll be done our whipping in 3 turns.

In 4 turns, Gold City will grow into Unhappiness, which will last for an additional 5 turns. Presumably, we could switch into Caste System, temporarily hire MORE Scientist Specialists than needed there, then go back to working Food-based squares when the Unhappiness is about to wear off.


We may not want a Great Scientist too early, since Lightbulbing him might just make Taoism appear sooner, which would could just get in the way of Confucianism's spreading, but it's an idea.

An alternative is to temporarily switch to building a Settler when Gold City grows to Size 9 and only going back to finish work on Trireme #2 when the Unhappiness wears off.


Since each Civic switch will cost us 1 turn, even if we group them together, it can't hurt us to switch into Caste System early if we don't have a use for Slavery. Something to think about.

Here's a Demographics screenshot from T131, 725 BC. In it, you can see that we have the most population but the least land area. Go figure.

We're also clearly running a very opposite strategy from the 'Ducks, seeing as how we're even behind all of the AIs for our Soldier count!



It is now T132, 700 BC. The moment that you have all be awaiting with baited breath has arrived. Note that I have NOT made a trade, I am just showing you our options:
Metal Casting for Alphabet, Metal Casting for Alphabet + Hunting (a trade that we don't want to make since we want to keep building cheapo Warriors), or gifting Priesthood (no screenshot for this last option, as I don't need to "ask" if an AI wants a gift--they will ALWAYS say yes, WFYABTA be darned).




So, now the debating can begin.


In other news, my days of Privateering may be over. I don't see a Barb Galley, although we saw one last turn that was only 2 squares away from us.

It should be noted that the Barb Galley ended its turn within range of Ragnar's 3-movement-point Galley. Likely, they had a fight. Very likely, Ragnar won, but it is, I suppose, possible that the Barb Galley chose to Heal instead of follow us, had it won.

I don't see a good way of finding out for certain this turn, without risking suicide, but there is a way out:
I can move 1S, 1N, Skip turn.

That way, I can ensure that we'll be safe to stay where we are (meaning that the Barb Galley didn't randomly move 1N and then decide to Heal). I can do so for a turn or two, after which, if no Barb Galley appears, then I will have to go under the assumption that Ragnar won.

In that case, then the Work Boat might as well finish exploring to the north and then head east, to explore around Dyes + Horse Island.

As with any Work Boat exploration at this point, our Work Boat could die at any time by meeting a new Galley, but I don't see any other good options at the moment, and it wouldn't hurt to see if there is a Food Resource to pair up with that Horse Resource.

Willem's Personality Flavours are:
Primary Flavour (valued at 5) = GOLD
Secondary Flavour (valued at 2) = SCIENCE

Along with a random number and the number of techs that an AI away is from a tech, these Flavours are used to help weight an AI's tech selections.


Priesthood for Willem is given a value of 5, while Monarchy is double that, at 10. So, he has a greater chance of going after Monarchy if we give him Priesthood than if he has to first decide to learn Priesthood on his own. The primary concern is that any AI that gets Monarchy is only 1 step away from Feudalism, which is a tech that they get a 10% bonus to research on--which is yet another factor that gets weighed in the AIs' tech-selection decision, and is, of course, the deadly Longbow-unlocking tech.

A second concern with gifting Priesthood is that as soon as any AI learns Monarchy, we will have to gift that AI Alphabet, otherwise Willem will make a 1-for-1 trade. However, if he doesn't have Priesthood or Monotheism (and we can see that he doesn't have Monotheism, let alone its pre-requisite Tech, Polytheism), then he cannot receive Monarchy in trade and he will be unable to make such a 1-for-1 trade. So, in this way, we can delay the time that we will have to gift/trade away Alphabet to any AI that learns Monarchy. Again, to remind you, if we don't gift/trade away Alphabet, then an AI that knows Alphabet (like Willem) will simply trade Alphabet for Monarchy, and then BOTH AIs will have Alphabet and Monarchy. If we do the gifting (or trading, if there is something to get in return), then both AIs will end up with Alphabet while only one of them will have Monarchy. That's the difference, and it is a big one in terms of slowing the global tech pace towards Feudalism.


In case it was not obvious, I am pushing for trading Willem Metal Casting in exchange for Alphabet (but not Hunting).

Also, just to give you an idea of how much that 10% bonus to research on a Tech for AIs has in influencing their Tech selections, think about how often the AIs research the techs from the following list, which is a partial-list of Techs where the AIs get a 10% bonus to Research on them:
Archery
Feudalism
Machinery
Guilds
Gunpowder
Rifling
Artillery
etc

These Techs are frequently researched by many AIs... there is often talk of the AIs "beelining the bottom of the tech tree" during the Renaissance Era... it's no coincidence that multiple techs from the above list are on that tech path.