GO1 - The Tsarina

The plan was to go for The Great Lighthouse, in which case founding a Coastal City makes sense. As far as I am concerned, building this Wonder is still the plan, particularly since we have so many planned Coastal City locations.

Also, the two Wines will be partnered with the inland Corn Resource, so it's not like the Wines will go to waste.

Yeah, forget The Oracle.


If we're going to move the location of any City, it should be the one to the north of Yoshiville, which could get moved 1N. That location will make for a great Great Person Farm, since we'll pick up 1 more Grassland Hills square and will also pick up the square that is marked "Strat Resource" by moving the City 1N of the letter "C." Please update this particular sign when you play your turnset, so that future players don't forget about this slight change of location.
 
I still maintain the dot 1W of "Future C" is a better city. We already have 2 coastals and are planning many more. Those cities are also perfectly good candidates for TGL. As far as GP farms are concerned, this map seems very food rich to me, esp Moscow so getting many GPs in this game seems inevitable to me. Settling on the "Future C" spot seems a waste. We don't need that city to be coastal.

[EDIT] I will draw up a dotmap for review in a few hours and the raster can vote, methinks? [/EDIT]
 
So here is my proposed dotmap.

RED = Proposed previously
LIME = My proposed spots
BLACK = Existing cities
PINK = Possible alternate spots

This is the North:



This is the South:



I would like feedback regarding city placement before I post my PPP and play. Note, I really like "C" in the South. Very nice city that.
 
The power of The Great Lighthouse comes from making nearly every City a Coastal City.

The power of the Pig + Clam + Corn location comes from a high concentration of Food, which makes it an ideal location to place your National Epic. The weakness is not having enough production to be able to produce the National Epic in a reasonable amount of time. However, 1N of the "C" location catpures a Copper Resource, which WOULD help us to build the National Epic quickly and in an effective location.

Wines require Monarchy. Monarchy is a long way off. Wines do not make for a good early-game Commerce location.

In fact, Wines only offer +1 Commerce until they are improved... no different then many of the Calendar Resources.

The Pig + Wine location is pretty weak with or without Wine Resources. What makes it decent are the facts that:
a) It is close to our capital
AND
b) It has 1 solid Food Resource (the Pig), which isn't great, but does the trick
AND
c) Can be Coastal, to partner up with The Great Lighthouse, meaning that the City can essentially pay for itself, even though it will be mostly a "filler City," with or without the Wines.


The two Lime-coloured Cities that replace the closest City locations to the north make us miss out on some nice Grassland Hills squares inland. They also force us to mostly waste the western Corn by settling on it just to be able to use the Clam. They also leave us without a Great Person Farm.


Also, that Lime-coloured dot to the north-east for the Fish + Dye City is questionable, unless you are planning on building Moai Statues there. The screenshot is cut off, but when I look in the real game, there is no additional Seafood up there. So, why would we move 1N, which gives us more Maintenance Costs from being further from our capital, only to gain 2 Coasts and 3 Oceans in exchange for losing 2 Coasts, 1 Ocean, and 2 Plains Forest squares. Essentially, the net result is trading 2 Plains Forest squares for 2 Ocean squares and increases our Maintenance costs slightly. I don't see what we'd gain there.
 
So, I would stick with the east coast locations (Future C and C).

I would insert a "Production City" location 1S of the inland Corn. That grabs 4 Grassland Hills and even gets us your beloved Wines.

I would also insert a "Great Person Farm" 1N of the "C" location to the north-west, so as to grab +1 Grassland Hills square and the Grassland Copper. These two production squares will help in building the essential buildings, such as a Lighthouse, a Granary, a Library, and the National Epic.

Those same two production-based squares will be shared with a City to the north-west of there that gets a Fish and a lot of Grassland River squares... once we hire Specialists in the Great Person Farm, the production squares will not be needed, so it is very efficient to share them across Cities.



I have also placed several "Put a Warrior HERE" signs on the map to help you with spawn-busting placement.

We are late in getting spawn-busters out, so there are likely to already be several Barb units out there. Try to be careful in getting to the spawn-busting locations by trying your best to stick to Forests, Jungles, and Hills squares "on your way" to those locations.

Yoshiville will probably be best put to use in producing those Warriors. After we have made several Warriors (and extra Warriors to replace those that die), Yoshiville can pump out some Workers for our nation.

In fact, the Warrior in Yoshiville can probably head towards one of the spawn-busting locations, say, the one to the north-east, just north of the "Production City" location. Yoshiville will only need a Military Police unit at Size 4 and the City is currently at Size 2. It is nice to have a City Defender, but it is better to "meet the Barbs in the field" if you can meet them by defending from a Forest, Jungle, or Hills square.


The "Filler, maybe" City in the south actually looks like a great spot to build The Great Lighthouse. Since we don't have Sailing yet, we can't start on a Ligthouse immediately, otherwise I'd suggest doing so. Thus, we can start on a Work Boat first, then a Lighthouse, then The Great Lighthouse.

The Grassland Copper plus several Grassland Hills makes this location pretty solid for building that Wonder.


After settling the "Filler, maybe" City (which will become our The Great Lighthouse City), it's your call as to the settling order.

It is nice to get a Great Person Farm up early, since that kind of a City usually takes a long time to get its required infrastructure up. The "Production City" location kind of sucks until we get Iron Working, though, since all of the Hills squares have Jungle on them.

Likewise, the two Cities to the NE are only going to be "okay, but not amazing" before we get Iron Working.


So, I would tend to put a priority on settling either the Great Person Farm location or the Stone City location as our 4th City.

Make sure that Yoshiville keeps producing our badly-needed spawn-busters and actually sends them out.

Ideally, our spawn-busters will be in place BEFORE the Barbs get Archers, so that few to no Archers will ever appear.



I have attached the saved game since I put in the dot-mapping and signs in it. I also changed our tech path, since we seem to have queued-up Pottery to come before Masonry, which would have made it tougher to build The Great Lighthouse.

Further, I turned on the City Governor in our capital, as you noted, so that you won't have to remember to do so again.


The capital can probably continue to make Settlers and Workers for a while.


The Worker that the capital is producing should head directly to the Grassland Copper at The Great Lighthouse's City and start improving it and the Mines there.

I did not change the capital's build queue (oops), but I would suggest that you build Worker (in progress now) -> Worker -> Settler, even though a Settler is currently queued to come after the in-progress Worker. We will want that extra Worker to start building Roads to connect-up our Cities. The delay in getting the Settler out will mostly be made-up-for by having Roads for it to walk on.
 

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Oh, also: 'Production City' might make a decent hybrid with the wines (which will be self-sustaining in the way of food when they get wineries built on them).

What I do like about the jungle cities, though, is that there's lots of green. Decent for cottaging over, but fillers really.
 
Ok, I played my TS. I have settled 2 cities. St Petersburg with a settler that was heading South and Novgorod at the Pig site in the NE. We finished Sailing:



I built the WB in Moscow instead and have St Pete focusing on getting TGL out. We may have expanded a little early but whatever. Masonry is being researched, I assume we want TGW.

Our Empire:



And the save:
 

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  • General Olaf BC-1400.CivBeyondSwordSave
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Nice work! :goodjob:

woopdeedoo said:
Masonry is being researched, I assume we want TGW.
Masonry is a required tech for The Great Lighthouse, so that was the main reason for researching it.

We COULD also try for another Masonry-enabling Wonder, but since we have yet to settle the Stone City, we likely won't be able to complete The Great Wall using Stone before an AI does.

Since you built some spawn-busting Warriors, The Great Wall will be absolutely unnecessary anyway.

The Pyramids are certainly a strong option, though, once we get our Stone connected.


Yaaa! Roads were built on Forests that we will probably not Chop, or at least not for a while. At the same time, no Roads were built on squares where a Forest could potentially grow, i.e. no Roads on Unforested, Forest-eligible, non-Resource squares (building a Road on such a square would halve the chance of a Forest growing on such a square). It's a minor point, but one that I like to keep in mind, when possible.


I wouldn't mind switching the capital's Barracks to a Galley. We could do with an offshore City for improved Trade Routes (intercontinental Trade Routes). It would help if we could send a Warrior (or, preferably, a newly-built Scout to get better Hut results) to the island to the SE of us, to see if there is a Food Resource to partner-up with that Copper Resource.

Since we aren't rushing Alex and since we are building Warriors to spawn-bust (i.e. there won't be many Barb units appearing), there won't be much need for Barracks-promoted units for quite some time.


I cannot tell how many Warriors we have from your screenshot, but it might be soon time to switch Yoshiville to building a Worker or two. That "Pump out 5 Warriors" sign is out-of-date, but I'm not sure how out-of-date it is (i.e. it depends upon roughly how many Warriors we have already built).


Also, are any of those Warriors just to the west of St. Petersburg Barb Warriors?


As for over-expanding... it won't be an issue as long as we are the ones to complete The Great Lighthouse. We could even continue expanding (say to the Stone City location, the Great Person Farm location, or to an offshore location that has a Food Resource), even if it wrecks our economy temporarily, as long as we're pretty certain that we'll be the first to completing The Great Lighthouse.
 
We still need more Warriors. Most notably to spawn bust our South. There was a number of barbs coming from that direction so I think it is crucial. Keep them coming from Yoshi...
 
Yaaa! Roads were built on Forests that we will probably not Chop, or at least not for a while. At the same time, no Roads were built on squares where a Forest could potentially grow, i.e. no Roads on Unforested, Forest-eligible, non-Resource squares (building a Road on such a square would halve the chance of a Forest growing on such a square). It's a minor point, but one that I like to keep in mind, when possible.

I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to say here. Forests are very handy for future builds (chopping) so I fail to see the problem...
 
If you road over a square with no forest and no resources, there's less chance of a forest growing there. So avoiding doing that gives us a bigger potential for forests.
 
If I'm not mistaken, Red_Spy is up now?

1. General Olaf
2. Yoshi
3. Mosher
4. hoplitejoe
5. woopdeedoo <--- Just Played
6.
7. Red_Spy <--- Up
8. Dhoomstriker <--- On deck
 
Yes, I will be able to get it tomorrow, or later today depending on who you look at it.
 
This thread is a learning experience :popcorn:

Every game played with Dhoom is a learning experience. :D I've learned quite a bit just by playing some teamers with him. :D
 
OK, RS has requested to be taken off the list due to time constraints. That means it's EDIT: Dhoom's turn. Any ideas as to how to play the next ten turns?
 
Okay that round went by surprisingly quickly.

woopdeedoo had already gotten a good number of our spawn-busting Warriors into position, so there wasn't much trouble with Barbs in the north.


In the south, however, we had a bit of a Barb threat to deal with. It looked like the Barb Warriors were "coming for us" and had thus decided to enter our Cultural Borders. I couldn't be certain, though.

So, I moved our St. Petersburg Warrior 1W onto the Grassland Forest. In this way:
1. If the Barb Warriors were going to enter our borders, they would either:
a) attack our Warrior that was defending a Forest
OR
b) Move to the barren Grassland square 1N of there (1NW of St. Petersburg), at which point we would have 2 Warriors (see that one Warrior will be completed in 2 turns in St. Petersburg), which would have given us the option of either attacking or defending using 2 Warriors

If the Barbs were not going to enter our borders:
2. In that case, the northern Barb Warrior might have moved 1N onto the Plains Stone square. We could have then had 2 Warriors closer to the Barb Warrior and could have "danced around" until we had 2 Warriors against 1 Barb Warrior.

As it was, the Barbs chose option 1. a), which gave us really good odds of winning the fight.

Incidentally, the second Barb Warrior also entered our borders and also suicided on that Grassland-Forest-defending Warrior of ours.


After those Barbs died, we pushed out some exploring Warriors to the SW, both to explore and to better spawn-bust the area as a preventative measure against too many future Barb units spawning in the area.


We had settled a City to the north of our capital but we hadn't sent a Worker there. So, I sent a Worker to the Pig. There aren't really any other squares that we can improve here other than putting Cottages on the Grassland squares. I would prefer to leave Forests on the Plains squares instead of putting Cottages on them.

At the end of the turnset, the Worker was 1NW of Novgorod. We will Chop that Forest, since it is in a decent location to encourage Forest regrowth after it is Chopped. To encourage this Forest to regrow, we will NOT build a Road 1NW of Novgorod... the square will simply be an empty Plains square after we Chop it, which gives us the best chances of having a Forest regrow there in the future.

After that 1NW Plains Forest is Chopped, we might as well put a Cottage on the Grassland Forest square NW + W of Novgorod. We could also then either put a Cottage on the Grassland Forest 1E of Novgorod or lay down a couple of Cottages 1SW of Novgorod or 1SW + S of Novgorod.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to get a couple of Farms in the area, but the only way I see us doing so is later chain-irrigating over top of a Cottage or over top of the Wine, so we may or may not do so... but that decision won't come up for a long time, until after we have learned Civil Service for chain-irrigating.


Notice, also, that there is a Warrior to the NW + N of Novgorod. It is only really spawn-busting 1 square that isn't covered by the Warrior to the NW of there, which is the square that ie 1E of the Grassland Jungle Dye. At some point, Novgorod will grow and we will want a Military Police unit in the City. At that point in time, we'll probably put that spawn-buster inside of Novgorod as a City defender and just leave 1 square to the north where it will be possible for a Barb unit to appear. It's such a small area that we won't worry too much about a Barb spawning there later. By that time, our Cities will be able to afford to easily slot in an Axeman in the off chance that a Barb unit does appear up there.



Okay, it's the end of the turnset already. We learned Pottery and Masonry and have begun work on The Great Lighthouse.

We also just finished work on a Galley, which is why we were working Hammer-based squarse instead of Food-based squares... I turned the City Governor back on so that we'd be working Food-based squares again just after taking that screenshot, for the purpose of building Settlers more efficiently.

I loaded a Warrior onto that Galley which can unload on the island to the south next turn. Next, the Galley can return to pickup the Scout that you can see is S + S of Novgorod. The Scout will pop the Hut on the island to the south. Yaaa, fun for you, enjoy! :D

I figure that with 1 Warrior and 1 Scout on the island to the south, we should be able to explore it enough and spawn-bust it enough to be able to possibly settle down there. Look to see if you can pair up the Copper with a Food Resource and if you can, then it'll make for a good City to have, since it will mean +1 Commerce in each of our Cities, due to us getting Intercontinental Trade Routes.



I am pretty confident that it's another landmass to the south of our capital because we have explored to the SW and have fully uncovered the peninsula down there. I have marked off 3 City locations, one of which was already decided (the Stone City location).

The other two Cities are "okay but not great" City locations. Since we will be building The Great Lighthouse, they will be worth settling, but settle them AFTER we have settled an off-continent City or two; they are low-priority settling locations.

We're also building a Settler in Yoshiville (not pictured) which should be used to found the Great Person Farm in the north-west. The exact location is marked on the map with a sign. I did not update the dot-mapping because the BUG Mod was messing up for me so I played without using it. So, rely on the signs instead of whatever the dot-mapping may or may not say.



Our biggest issue is a lack of Happiness. The only early-game Happiness Resource that we have discovered is a Gold Resource by Alex, but he has already settled there. He also settled in a terrible location, completely missing the Gold Resource, so we'll later have to raze and resettle the City. For now, we should keep peace with Alex, since his Cities will offer us some Foreign Trade Routes and since we're in Rapid Expansion mode instead of war mode, to correspond with our building of The Great Lighthouse.


Since we're on Prince difficulty level, we could probably try for a whole bunch of Wonders, but I think that we should not do so. You won't learn a lot if you try and build every Wonder. Better would be to pick only a few of them and then learn to live without the rest.


For example, we probably COULD build The Oracle, but I will suggest that we ignore it.


For our tech path, it might take the entire rest of the set to learn Writing, since our tech rate will be hurting until we complete The Great Lighthouse. After Writing, if we do complete it, we should probably go for Alphabet.


I have just finished whipping a Work Boat, so it can probably go exploring in hopes of finding other AIs.


Writing will give us Open Borders with Alex, for the Trade Routes and to help us explore his lands with our Work Boat Explorer. Before then, perhaps the Work Boat can head to the south-east, to explore the islands down there.


There are two Workers near St. Petersburg. One is Chopping a Grassland Forest and can probably Chop the second Grassland Forest.

The other one should probably move to the Stone and build a Road, then maybe build a Road on the Plains square 1S of the Stone. After that point, our Cultural Borders will probably have expanded and we can start improving the Resources there, starting with the Corn.


You will also get to name the Stone City. I suggest that you build 2 Work Boats there, followed by a Granary and a Lighthouse. It already has a City Defender.


The capital should probably keep building Settlers, although once we learn Writing, we will want to build a Library for one turn, 3-pop-whip it, and then build a Lighthouse while we regrow. Since we might not learn Writing during the next 10 turns, the building of the Library may or may not happen until 2 turnsets from now.

Yoshiville could probably build a mix of Workers and Settlers, with more emphasis on Workers.

As for the other Cities, when in doubt about what to build, build Granaries and then Axemen. Barracks before the Axemen are optional.
 

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  • General Olaf BC-1000 Turn 75.CivBeyondSwordSave
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I've had a PM request from Toxicman007 to join the game. I'm adding him to the roster at number 6. If anyone would like to request a change in place on the roster, now would be the time to let me know.

:)
 
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