SGOTM 13 - One Short Straw

What is this cottage?

babybluepants said:

What is this cottage?

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I sense at least one player who is in favour of Oracling Metal Casting (early Workshops).

babybluepants said:

What is this cottage?

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Coin flexibility. 13cpt sucks. 14cpt rocks. For example, in Dhoom's PPP there's a turn in which it can be used at pop6. Workshops might never be useful in this game. If you're not a spooner.

What were you planning to do with the idle worker?

Dhoom, it's your turnset. You pause to ask us questions or discuss issues. How long you pause is primarily your decision in most cases. Sometimes it's long enough to get feedback from the first person who responds.

Agreed about pausing being up to the active player. I'm out of town for a wedding but feel free to move on without me as it sounds like everything is going smoothly

Tested a sailing first variant. Wb3/explorer1(T47), wb4/exp2(T52), wb5(T78).
Orleans settled T65
City3 settled T79

Using my nifty new MM spreadsheet, here are the overall production comparisons for T83: Sail1 doesn't have a granary or lh in Paris yet (hurried to get settler3 instead).

LowtherCastle said:

Using my nifty new MM spreadsheet

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I prefer "mini" table.

LowtherCastle said:

Sail1 doesn't have a granary or lh in Paris yet (hurried to get settler3 instead).

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Hmm... I think Pottery first still sounds better. No granary and no LH doesn't sound good longer term. I think this approach will fall behind for settlers #4 and #5.

Are you proposing this over Dhoom's lastest save or are you just throwing this out there for us to chew on?

LowtherCastle said:

What were you planning to do with the idle worker?

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Leave it idle, so my eyes don't hurt? Or I guess we can cottage it just for kicks. If I'm understanding correctly, we won't work a 6th tile until after the LH is complete on T79. Is that correct? I'm not sure why we would ever wanna work a grass tile, unless we actually make it to Guilds/Chem/Caste. A cottage takes 60t just to break even with non-Colossus coast, and I'm assuming we will Oracle MC and build Colossus.

Is there a current save file to look at for T82 or just the spreadsheet Dhoom posted?

Dhoomstriker said:

Uploading, huh? That's fine if you really insist upon it, but is there any particular detail that I could instead just give to you?

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I guess not. I was mainly stating my preference for scouting in roughly 10t increments, as I believe the directions we take with WBs require periodic discussion. As for uploading, I much prefer seeing the save to screenshots and we've done this very extensively in the past. It's easier to fog-gaze, for one thing. Could do without if you want, sure.

Mitchum said:

Are you proposing this over Dhoom's lastest save or are you just throwing this out there for us to chew on?

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I would imagine that LC is giving anyone, who may have doubts about researching Pottery before Sailing, a very compelling reason to stick with the current plan.

It seems that settling City 2 nine turns earlier, which is the fastest date achieved by a Sailing-before-Pottery test run (mdy #173), would have difficulty competing... if you value Commerce greater than Food and Hammers, you could come close with a really great City 2 location, but if you value Food and/or Hammers at this early stage as being equally useful as or more useful than Commerce--particularly when that Commerce is not being used to unlock a key tech--then Sailing-first is quite far behind a Pottery-first approach.

babybluepants said:

Leave it idle, so my eyes don't hurt?

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Hahaha!

If I'm understanding correctly, we won't work a 6th tile until after the LH is complete on T79. Is that correct?

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Actually, due to our whipping Unhappiness cycles, I imagine that we won't be working more than 5 squares at a time until after we hook-up a Happiness Resource or get lucky enough to receive a Religion.

I'm not sure why we would ever wanna work a grass tile, unless we actually make it to Guilds/Chem/Caste.

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Well, a 2 Food 1 Commerce square (a freshly-minted Cottage) is possibly better than a 1 Food 2 Commerce square (a non-Lighthouse-enhanced Coastal square), unless getting those 2 Commerce meets a Flask breakpoint and gives us a 3rd Flask in a case where the Cottage wouldn't. I haven't tested adding Commerce for any tech other than Sailing, but for the Sailing case, either a Grassland Cottage or a Coastal square would give us an extra Flask from passing a breakpoint, so then you'd look at how much you wanted that 1 extra Food instead of 1 extra Commerce.

Once we get a Lighthouse, it will be hard to justify working a Cottage if:
a) We only plan to work it occasionally and thus won't commit to growing it for the long-run
AND
b) We actually plan to put Moai Statues in the capital, which would increase the opportunity cost of working a Cottaged square

I'd say that more than anything, the Cottage just gives us the flexibility that we might want. For example, when I tried my "Sailing on Turn 69" test run, I worked a Grassland Cottage for 2 turns and a non-Lighthoused Coastal square for 2 turns, getting me just the right amount of Commerce while maximizing Food as much as possible. We're not going to use that test run's results, since it turned out that the Hammers from instead working a GH Mine were more important than getting Sailing 1 turn earlier, but that's at least one example where the Cottage could potentially be of use.

A cottage takes 60t just to break even with non-Colossus coast, and I'm assuming we will Oracle MC and build Colossus.

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Just because we build a Cottage does not mean that we will commit to working it a lot... it will just be there if we find a need for it. Alternatively, I could put a Road on every single square on our main island, but then I'd have idle Worker turns, so I'd prefer to build the Cottage to give us that tiny bit of potential micromanagement flexibility.

Is there a current save file to look at for T82 or just the spreadsheet Dhoom posted?

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See this message for the three relevant saved games as well as the same spreadsheet that I linked in the PPP.

It's easier to fog-gaze, for one thing. Could do without if you want, sure.

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I don't mind uploading the save, but I don't want doing so to cause our team to potentially be disqualified due to concurrent use of the saved game where one player accidentally moved the game forwards while I'm simultaneously playing more of the turnset. As a solution, if it seems that there would be value in uploading the saved game, I will upload the game and will also state a time limit on fog-gazing, such as: "you have 5 hours from now to fog-gaze." After that point I would expect that no one would open the save.

If, for some reason, you feel a need to open the save after that point (say, you saw my message a bit too late), then you'd need to formally request an extension in the thread and you'd have to wait for my approval... otherwise, it may turn out that I have already proceeded with play. I would be happy to give my approval if I hadn't started playing, but until I replied, you would have to assume that I had begun play again and thus would have to treat loading the saved game as "too dangerous to risk doing."

Hopefully, that somewhat-bureaucratic-sounding approach will give us the right mix of flexibility to fog-gaze while also avoiding an accidental situation where we'd have 2 players playing forwards from the same saved game.


As long as no one objects to me sending Work Boat Explorer #1 towards the Fish first, then probably the first natural pausing point will be when we've explored the "corner" of the island that the Fish is located next to. Until we see that corner, we won't know if there's a potential path to the east that we might want to follow-up on or whether there will only be a single path to take: going towards the Stone.

As per the SGOTM Progress page, it appears that Gypsy Kings and Plastic Ducks have each played another turnset.

Gypsy Kings have a bunch of Culture coming in sometime as of or after Turn 94, 1650 BC. I imagine that they built Stonehenge.

Shortly before Turn 90, 1750 BC, Maple Sporks also got an increase in Culture, which could be, say, from an early Library, or could just be that they built a Wonder like Stonehenge just before uploading their lastest saved game.

I'm not good at analyzing the Power and Score graphs, so I won't comment on those graphs.

Dhoomstriker said:

For anyone who is having trouble managing the pages and pages of messages in our thread, there is a forum option that can help. Specifically, you can change the number of messages per page from 10 to up to 40.

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Dhoom, the problem isn't about displaying
Good discussion, not much to add for now (I am part of the "pottery -> sailing" crew). (but really no need for pages about whether to work grass tile or unimproved coast - and to reply to Dhoom: the real question is whether you can use your one turn advantage on the completion of the technology - ok , maybe the need is real after all -)

Hope I can be more usefull once I have a bit more time

I think the 1t earlier settler is crucial here. New cities speed up our research. That and hopefullly finding a nice site with useful work for our worker, like a forest along with a resource tile or two.

Btw LC, what 's a spooner? I didn't get it in a dictionnary

edit: is that a "lamer"?

So Dhoomstriker has approval from 4 players (mdy, bbp, Ras and me) to carry forward according to his PPP.

LC hasn't given explicity approval (that I see) but has provided an alternate test run. I think he's on board with Dhoom's PPP but I don't want to assume anything.

How long do we wait for others to chime in?

I think Dhoom can play whenever's convenient. Looking forward to something actually happening in this game (exploration, that is)...

I'm ok with the PPP.

RRRaskolnikov said:

Btw LC, what 's a spooner? I didn't get it in a dictionnary

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Hint:I'm fine with teh PPP! Go for it, Dhoom!

That's really not what I think when I hear "spooner". You had me confused this morning. Who am I supposed to be spooning here?

babybluepants said:

That's really not what I think when I hear "spooner". You had me confused this morning. Who am I supposed to be spooning here?

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That was 'you' in the generic sense anyway. This may be the kind of game that can end quickly or drag on forever, depending on how advanced we let the AIs get.

Okay, it sounds like the quality of the conversation has slightly degraded, so I'm guessing that boredom and anticipation have set in. I'll aim to start playing in about 2 hours from now.