SGOTM 15 - Maple Sporks

Yes, server was quite unstable yesterday.

Nice run again, but how many axes are with and without promos?
 
7 w/ promo + 2 w/ promo next turn + 3 w/o promo total.

Out of those 10 Axes in Golden Fleece next turn 8 are w/ promo and 2 are w/o promo.
 

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I noted in the test save that worker and settler both have movement on T50 while they don't in the real save. So for testing purposes don't use them the first turn! Also we seem to have like a turn invested already in masonry. For some reason in the real save it took longer to get where we are technoligcally. I think to mimic the real save you should invest one turn in something we won't be teching for now (HBR for instance) to be on par.
7 w/ promo + 2 w/ promo next turn + 3 w/o promo total.

Out of those 10 Axes in Golden Fleece next turn 8 are w/ promo and 2 are w/o promo.
That's pretty decent numbers. I got confused by the Oracle pic where you were still building barracks, so for a moment I thought you'd have a lot less with promos.

You did chop quite a bit in Stone Hill, right? We might want to save some for the mids...
 
I noted in the test save that worker and settler both have movement on T50 while they don't in the real save. So for testing purposes don't use them the first turn! Also we seem to have like a turn invested already in masonry. For some reason in the real save it took longer to get where we are technoligcally. I think to mimic the real save you should invest one turn in something we won't be teching for now (HBR for instance) to be on par.

I didn't settle nor used the worker on T50 but I forgot about Masonry. Maybe 1 less axe then since we'll get ~25 less gold.

That's pretty decent numbers. I got confused by the Oracle pic where you were still building barracks, so for a moment I thought you'd have a lot less with promos.

You did chop quite a bit in Stone Hill, right? We might want to save some for the mids...

Yep, right now it's just a matter of finding the ideal balanced distribution of our resources (by resources I mean food, commerce, hammers and worker turns)
 
I got rather similar results. :)

I did invest a turn in HBR to get even on tech with real save. That meant Oracle T63.





Note I produced a worker less, but have 12 axes here. In this run I researched pottery by the way.

I did a similar one with 11 axes on T71 and all 4 cities producing an axe next turn (72)... This was without pottery.

In any case, in general it seems to work out quite well.

I think the road network in the pic is the most efficient one. Note there's no need to road the bronze.

I'm thinking maybe we squeeze in hunting after writing to upgrade 2 warriors to spears instead of axes, in case Toku has some chariots.
 
Good job!

So many forests still around, I can't believe you built so many Axes :) Working Copper in capital helped, right? It's probably superior to working it in MarbleCrap. One less worker probably allowed you to get the extra axe. Did you manage to 2-pop whip axe into another axe? I always had too many hammers... I could be sustainable in GoldenFleece if we farm the Corn.

As for worker turns: maybe one less cottage in PbS and one more chop in MarbleCrap?

I suppose you built the Oracle in Golden Fleece as well?

I like the road network, saves a few worker turns.

To research pottery or not to research pottery? That is the question. One thing to factor in is that the rush recovery is going to be much faster w/ pottery.

Hunting I don't like that much. It blocks those cheap warriors... Pillaging copper is out of the question since it's one of our strongest tiles.
 
I´ve tried a couple of test runs without Oracle and I didn´t do that much better in terms of number of axes, maybe its because Oracle doesn´t make a big difference or maybe its because of my relatively poor micro.

While I appreciate that settling on marble is better in the short term in the medium term it does deprive Marbleborough of two food resources.

Hunting can be slotted in virtually at any point depending on whether Toku has chariots, if we´re producing warriors for upgrading then they could be upgraded to axe or spear iirc.
 
I hope we didn't silence the rest of our team with our testing enthusiasm, Ororo! :lol: The forum being this unstable surely won't help though. Edit: xpost! :D

Anyway as to your questions:
- Oracle in GF indeed. I WB tested yesterday the chopping outside the borders and indeed there is a difference. A tile within the borders at distance 2 gives 20h whereas the same tile outside the borders (before pop) gives just 13h. That indeed kind of discards PearlySwine.

- Didn't manage 2-pop axe whips either. In fact, did little axe whipping at all, but for PearlySwine that got whipped each time it reached size 3. Capital got a whip too once at size 5. Of course at a given moment a few turns before DoW we can whip all (or the eastern 3) cities regardless for the last units (cap overflowing into mids ;)).

- Note pottery got researched AFTER writing. I think it's probably worth it, at most it's one warrior-upgrade less. It means workers after their chopping and roading frenzy can go do something useful, while some cities can immediately start on granaries after their axes (PS for instance). Pottery goes after writing, as tech is more of a bottleneck to the Oracle than building it.

- The copper and flood plain got exchanged a bit between capital and Marble city. Marble being able to start off with copper tile is nice however!

What I found to be optimal for the workers in the beginning was the following.
PearlySwine worker: immediately mine gem (before finishing the road, hence we have gem a turn earlier), then finish road 1E of gem, then pasture. If moving from gem to pig immediately we can't start improving immediately. From the tile 1E of gem it's 1 turn to finish road, so from there to pig we can immediately improve pig.

Current GF worker: goes immediately to bronze and starts mining. After that goes to tile 1S (forest NE of marble) and roads. After that roads tile NE of the former which coincides with:

Worker produced in cap: move SE and immediately invests 1 turn of chop in that forest. However, cancel that and next turn help the other worker finish that road 2NE of marble (=2SE of capital).

Why? Because same turn that road is finished the worker that is produced in GF finished its first chop into the Oracle and hence needs marble connected. :D

From that point all kinds of possibilities, but I think this is pretty optimal for workers until then. From here I finished the chop SE of cap into barracks. Then tile SW of cap should be roaded and chopped.

A lot of GF's micro will depend a lot on whether we get corn, though the test saves makes me quite positive that we will. :) Ignored the corn tile in the tests as we can not count on it. However, if we do get it, it means more whipping surely.

I had barracks only in cap and GF. So there are like 5 (?) axes from Marble and PearlySwine without promos.
 
I´ve tried a couple of test runs without Oracle and I didn´t do that much better in terms of number of axes, maybe its because Oracle doesn´t make a big difference or maybe its because of my relatively poor micro.

Yep, those chops are much better off invested into The Oracle thanks to the Marble.

While I appreciate that settling on marble is better in the short term in the medium term it does deprive Marbleborough of two food resources.

It might be in rather suboptimal spot but it makes the ursh preparations soooo much faster thanks to the immediate access to marble, high productio and saved worker turns. The rest of our cities are great long term sites so we shouldn't be afraid to settle one of our cities purely for short-term purposes.

Hunting can be slotted in virtually at any point depending on whether Toku has chariots, if we´re producing warriors for upgrading then they could be upgraded to axe or spear iirc.

Agree.

I hope we didn't silence the rest of our team with our testing enthusiasm, Ororo! :lol: The forum being this unstable surely won't help though. Edit: xpost! :D

Lol! I think that the forum unstability is indeed the cause of a this decreased activity. I noticed other teams posted rather sporadically so we're getting closer and closer to their postcount... :lol:

I'm ill atm so I have nothing better to do than spamming our thread :D

Anyway as to your questions:
- Oracle in GF indeed. I WB tested yesterday the chopping outside the borders and indeed there is a difference. A tile within the borders at distance 2 gives 20h whereas the same tile outside the borders (before pop) gives just 13h. That indeed kind of discards PearlySwine.

I thought so.

- Didn't manage 2-pop axe whips either. In fact, did little axe whipping at all, but for PearlySwine that got whipped each time it reached size 3. Capital got a whip too once at size 5. Of course at a given moment a few turns before DoW we can whip all (or the eastern 3) cities regardless for the last units (cap overflowing into mids ;)).

I like the idea of overflowing into Mids. Since the overflow too gets multiplied because of the stone it's superior to just working our grassland hills.

- Note pottery got researched AFTER writing. I think it's probably worth it, at most it's one warrior-upgrade less. It means workers after their chopping and roading frenzy can go do something useful, while some cities can immediately start on granaries after their axes (PS for instance). Pottery goes after writing, as tech is more of a bottleneck to the Oracle than building it.

Sounds good. And yeah, Pottery definitely AFTER Writing just to be little on the safe side (I doubt we'll get beaten to The Oracle but I've seen one or two games where it went before SH or TGW)
- The copper and flood plain got exchanged a bit between capital and Marble city. Marble being able to start off with copper tile is nice however!

What I found to be optimal for the workers in the beginning was the following.


A lot of GF's micro will depend a lot on whether we get corn, though the test saves makes me quite positive that we will. :) Ignored the corn tile in the tests as we can not count on it. However, if we do get it, it means more whipping surely.

I had barracks only in cap and GF. So there are like 5 (?) axes from Marble and PearlySwine without promos.


Great micro decisions, as usual. That early gem mine saves us 1:hammers: and 5:commerce:
As for barracks/no barracks, I've noticed you're building them in MarbleCrap this late. Imo starting on them this late is just not worth it. I think we're better of building and extra 1 and 2/3 of an axe.
 
Something occured to me. If we go pottery Oracle>MC and build/whip a forge quick enough we could get a GE which would bulb machinery without this complicated GS stuff.

edit: if we got forge and Pyramids in capital we may be able to fiddle our 3rd GP as another GE which could be saved for part bulbing engineering (or a wonder of choice).
 
Edit: xpost again!

^ Yeah I know, I just slotted in something in MarbleCrab that last turn, it happened to be barracks. Indeed not very sensible to produce barracks after your military production. :)

While I appreciate that settling on marble is better in the short term in the medium term it does deprive Marbleborough of two food resources.
I share the concern, but what Ororo said. It speeds things up tremendously (at least 6 worker turns for quarry + possibly 2 worker tuns roading) and if for one mediocre city build we get Oracle and the whole of Japan, I think we make a fair trade off.

It occurred to me that we might settle on the banana. It's the only tile to get crab and a 3 food city centre is quite nice. Crab with LH is 5 food like a banana plantation, so settling on banana actually gives more food overall and we don't need calendar to make it work. Banana town might make for a decent Moai city and naval centre.
 
Something occured to me. If we go pottery Oracle>MC and build/whip a forge quick enough we could get a GE which would bulb machinery without this complicated GS stuff.

edit: if we got forge and Pyramids in capital we may be able to fiddle our 3rd GP as another GE which could be saved for part bulbing engineering (or a wonder of choice).
Getting a GE would be quite nice, that's for sure. However, the move for CoL/caste is rather nice especially as we're kind of forced to bulb philo soon (after clearing alpha+maths and maybe something else), after which pacifism of course doubles our 4 specs which would be 24 GPP/turn whereas forge+mids is only 5...

If somehow we can keep the pool clean in the cap we might however pop a GE at some point which would be good...

Which makes me think, maybe after T71 we should build/whip immediately a temple in GF to hire that priest and pop that GPr (together with the Oracle points) and save it for theo bulb. If GF doesn't get a hindu spread it either ends up as the confu holy city or if not the free confu missionary can spread it there. That's to say, we can be assured of a religion in GF on T71, just not whether it's hindu or confu. But that doesn't matter with regards to producing a temple.
 
Interesting strategy question. Are we going for trying to win with early medieval units (treb, pike, xbow) or going for the safer but potentially slower lib>miltech path.
If we´re going for the standard lib path then Col and philosophy are indeed the way ahead. If we´re going for medieval units then we need GEs to bulb machinery and engineering, a prophet for theology, maybe a prophet for a shrine and that about it for great people.
 
A lot of good stuff going on here (most of it over my head :D). I'm hoping to spend some time this weekend catching up and testing along what you guys are trying.
 
I hope we didn't silence the rest of our team with our testing enthusiasm, Ororo! :lol: The forum being this unstable surely won't help though. Edit: xpost! :D

I'm having a lot of trouble accessing the forums lately, I only just now managed to download the testsave, and it is pretty hard to follow the discussions/tests without at least having tried one run myself. And as I'm of to work now, I won't be able to test anything now either. Tomorrow should be better. I'll try some runs without the Oracle, to make sure we're not missing out on that option.
 
Something occured to me. If we go pottery Oracle>MC and build/whip a forge quick enough we could get a GE which would bulb machinery without this complicated GS stuff.

edit: if we got forge and Pyramids in capital we may be able to fiddle our 3rd GP as another GE which could be saved for part bulbing engineering (or a wonder of choice).

Interesting idea. But I don't think it's the stronger option here for 2 reasons:

a) it will severely nerf one of our strong cities. Because Oracle produces GP points, we will need to produce our forge really quick to make sure we outperform it. However, since Forge is such an expensive build, the only way to do this is at least double whip and double chop. That's sooo many hammers tht could have gone somewhere else. Engineer specialist itself isn't really a win, in fact it's weaker than a desert mine and can definitely not compete with 4 caste scientists which require no whipping/chopping.

b) it doesn't offer the research benefits that Caste system does. This is especially true once we build the mids and start running Representation.

Interesting strategy question. Are we going for trying to win with early medieval units (treb, pike, xbow) or going for the safer but potentially slower lib>miltech path.
If we´re going for the standard lib path then Col and philosophy are indeed the way ahead. If we´re going for medieval units then we need GEs to bulb machinery and engineering, a prophet for theology, maybe a prophet for a shrine and that about it for great people.

Actually, I still think CoL, Philosophy ->Machinery, Engineering might win here. After that myabe CS and Astronomy, if necessary (or even if it's not necessary since +2 movement and +1 cargo is a WIN!) and we're done. We can then start spending our gold for rushbuying/funding our conquests.
 
Fair enough. I´m just throwing in some ideas, I don´t know if they´re good or bad ideas but better to post them than say nothing.
 
Fair enough. I´m just throwing in some ideas, I don´t know if they´re good or bad ideas but better to post them than say nothing.
Totally agree! :)

All ideas are welcome, good and bad. Even the "bad" ones serve, as they force one to think and prove the contrary... That makes the final plan more solid. So please keep on commenting all ideas!
 
Hi Guys,

Great discussion, a pity I hardly have any time to follow, let alone contribute atm. So please put me a bit more to the end of the roster and put someone else up. Maybe Ororo, since he has tested this part in depth?

One idea I do want to throw out there. You guys are testing the best path to a certain number of Axes. On which is this number of Axes based?
have you tested how many we need to take different Togu-situations? In the beginning we were trying to figure out how the AI's had their high power rating to start with. Could a pre-placed wall/castle be part of this, and if so, could we be facing protective archers in a hill city with wall/castle? Better see if our number of Axes still suffices...

Hope to catch up later. Keep up the good work.
 
Actually, the next term starts for me tomorrow so I won't have access to my civ PC for the next 3 days. Which means ppp on thursday and playing the set during the weekend... Is that ok with you guys? I'm afraid I can't make it earlier.

In the meantime - we should decide on which approach we are going to use. I like nocho's one where he has 12 axes, pottery, Oracle on t63 and a lot of saved forests.
 
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