Transition Economy Space Race: Emperor

Ok, the goal of this SG is to attempt to showcase the Transition Economy. This means we will be running a Specialist Economy for the 1st 3 eras or so and a Cottage Economy for the 2nd 3 eras or so. We will be pursuing a space race victory. Our goal is to win before the 1800s.

Settings: Warlords, Emperor, Continents, Normal, Standard, Default

Leader: Napoleon (Charismatic, Organized, Agriculture, Wheel, Musketeer, Salon)

We intentionally avoided Philosophical, Financial, Industrious, and Spiritual, all of which arguably make a TE stronger. We want to show it off using less-than-ideal traits. However, charismatic and organized are still respectable traits and should help us out overall.

Check out our planning thread here for more pre-game discussion:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=219275

Without further ado, here is the start:



...and the save is attached

Roster:

Johnny Rico
Lasombra
Pigswill
Ungy
Futurehermit
Snaaty

I would like to approach this SG with the following time limits: 48hrs maximum for "Got it" and 5 days maximum for play-and-posted. Of course, it would be preferable to keep things going at a faster pace, but this way we ensure at least 1 round per week. If you need a skip, please just say so, no problem.

Before we start, we should come to some consensus on what our strategy will be.

In fact discussion will be mandatory to continue as a member of the roster. Also, rogue turns will not be tolerated. Let's work together Finally, when posting your turn results please use screenshots for illustration as they greatly aid in our discussions. Thanks!

Alright guys, how are we going to approach this?

No seafood. Bummer. Also sucks to be one square from the coast. Marble in the capital sure is nice for the parthenon. Lots of forest to chop for the early wonder also.

Not a lot of options for settling though. Trudging throught that forest will take time to find a good build site. I'd say the tile south of the warrior is nice, but wouldn't vote for settling in place. You can always move inland and settle back to the coast.

Start with mining?

Lurker's comment

fresh-water corn , flood plains , plain forest ,mines, heroic epic with buearcracy stuff.

Edit:Since you have only 2 resources so far in your fat cross there could be a possible 3rd one revealed if you settle in place. Of course it might just be uranium or aluminium .

Hmm...too bad your warrior is to the left of the settler, because I'd be very tempted to move 1W to the coast and that other resource (silver?) It would be nice to know if you'd be moving away from any food resources however.

As a lurker, I would like to make a request that at least some pics be features with the resource pointing out things enabled. It's sometimes hard to tell some of the resources without them.

EDIT: Didnt even see the corn...but nice to know a move would keep it.

We've currently got corn, 2FPs and two marble (which is possibly a world monopoly). Moving away from the river loses two health immediately. Settling in place would give us one naff coastal tile but is otherwise ok. Corn for growth, cottages on FPs, enough production, this looks like a good starting spot.

LURKER

If you move 2SW onto the Marble plains hill, youll have a capital with 2F3H1C...nice. As a bonus, youll keep the corn, floodplains and the computer doesnt put a blue circle on the coast unless theres a seafood. That Marble hill should do nicely. You lose 1 turn, but gain alot on early hammers.

@ Team:

Just had a look at screen... ...and the save

Moving warrior up the hill south should be first move, perhaps we will see something interesting (we WILL, I just did this).

Therefore my tip for capital is to found it on the plain-hill-marble 2south of warrior, which will let it start with a basic producition of 3 hammers (which is a BIG boost) and it´s costal

This production boost allows us to cank out early units/workers/settlers & a costal capital will have trade-routes of 7+ once it reaches size 6, so a costal capital can do a huge difference...

...

EDIT

@ Cabledawg:

crosspost, but your´s was faster... ...YES, I would also advise this

Snaaty said:

@ Team:
Moving warrior up the hill south should be first move, perhaps we will see something interesting (we WILL, I just did this).

Click to expand...

Ahh! I don't want to tell you how to run your game or anything, but isn't that a direct spoiler?

@ sunrise089:

ups, you are right... ...was dumb to move warrior that one tile... ...haven´t really thought about that

...

@ team:

sorry, won´t happen again

ok, let's move that warrior as suggestet and see what it reveals.

if nothing good comes up, I would suggest settling in place. I really like those 2 FP. and suggest the rogue teching to pottery right away. this way we can cottage them, city still grows and/or we can crank out settlers/warriors at a good pace while teching fast in the beginning. we also already have agriculture. afterwards I'd say mining & BW.

but let's see what the warrior reveals...

Snaaty: you're the man with the trade routes, so how valuable is it to have a coastal capital? I would rather not have it because of the ocean tiles. with less coast you can switch around more effectively.

Rico: never done the moving inwards thing.

I really like that starting spot, we got food, flood plains, production, forrests... and there should be more food east in the BFC

let's not try to get to much by moving the settler and then actually be worse off than before

Hey gang, I agree with moving the warrior and then deciding on where to settle.

I'd like us to come to some consensus on what our overall short-term plan is going to be though before we get into playing the turns.

With marble I think we can guarantee parthenon, great library, and national epic in a timely manner, which is great! Remember, we are trying to leverage the SE as much as possible.

Pyramids seems unlikely unless stone shows up somewhere to our east.

I see us trying to get to CoL in a timely manner, say around 500BC or so, and have a GS on board to immediately lightbulb philosophy. At that point, make the switch to caste system and pacificism running scientists in our GL city. With marble, we should be able to build GL and then NE in a reasonable time frame. The difficulty will be teching to lit then col in a timely manner. I think this is where we really need to plan things out because I see this combo as being the best way to leverage the SE early on: GL-NE-CSys-Pac. With the parthenon (polyth is on the path to lit), we will have an additional advantage in generating our GSs (must ensure it is not in NE city though or too many GAs will be born).

I think we also need to strategize on pursuing mercantilism and perhaps representation as well. For example, maybe we can self-tech nationalism and use liberalism on constitution. This will help our specialist research during the transition (as mentioned in the planning thread we should probably transition our cities one at a time).

Anyhow, I don't want to get ahead of things here, I just want to stress that we should make a plan before we take off in 20 directions at once

sunrise089 said:

Hmm...too bad your warrior is to the left of the settler, because I'd be very tempted to move 1W to the coast and that other resource (silver?) It would be nice to know if you'd be moving away from any food resources however.

As a lurker, I would like to make a request that at least some pics be features with the resource pointing out things enabled. It's sometimes hard to tell some of the resources without them.

EDIT: Didnt even see the corn...but nice to know a move would keep it.

Click to expand...

Sorry about that, I normally always take screens with the resource bubbles. Won't happen again. Those are both marbles.

Re: settling on top of the marbled-hill. It gives us 3 crappy coast tiles and 2 crappy ocean tiles. It does have some advantages, like the trade routes, etc., but we have to consider the long-term as well.

The loss of fresh water health would be offset once we build a harbor, but I am more concerned about its commerce production mid-to-late game. Of course we can always move our capital at some point...

Maybe Johnny Rico can play his first turn and move the warrior and give us another screen shot. I'm on board with starting mining first. Does the group agree with that idea? I'm uncomfortable about pottery given the tech priorities we have (lit, col), but will bow to the majority. I agree that getting cottages down on the floodplains (assuming settle in place) would increase our tech pace, but that has to be measured against the number of turns it costs to research pottery in the first place.

I would say an early decision we need to make is if we are going to try for oracle. In any case I'd be inclined to go pottery first. Getting a couple of cottages up early is pretty big. I generally prioritize the strategic resources and usually that means oracle is no longer a viable option. Even forgetting masonry to get pot, min, bw, ah (not sure about that order), myst, med, priest is a lot to get in time to start oracle.

I'm probably inclined to settle in place assuming there is one seafood by the marble hill. If by chance we see two seafood that might swing me. Although I confess to little experience with 2 extra hammers early--that has to be huge and I might be undervaluing it.

Ooh! I should've grabbed this last night, didn't realize I was up first. Presumed hermit would start us off. Anyway, are we starting out at 20 turns or 10 turns before passing?

I already got the save, I looked at our starting turf last night. I will move the warrior 1s and post a screen shot tonight. My time zone is GMT -5 or central time U.S.

Regarding techs, I'm a lttle torn. FP's in the capital usually merits going straight to pottery but on emperor, I'm a little leery of barbs and such so I prefer to have mining/BW/AH online to know where my copper and horses are.

The settlers starting spot is intriguing. I don't see a lot of room for other resources cropping up. With the marble, corn, FP, and all that forest, I'm not certain we'll see anything else. I'd be willing to bet if we chopped some of those forested hills and mined them, we'd see ore out of one of those hills eventually but that's a gamble and only a prediction.

Snaaty et al: I'm at work and will be for the next 9 hours, if anyone else can get a screen shot of the warrior moving 1s during today, I'd say do it and let's discuss. When it comes to me actually running the turnset this evening, I'll move the warrior 1s to start the game for consistencies sake. I bring this up because tonight is a good night for me to play. After today, I'm looking at Thursday or Saturday.

I would say 20 turns, then 10 afterwards, once we have a plan in place. If anything important happens though, it would be good to pause and check in with the group before finishing up.

I'm also torn between pottery and ah/bw. I tend to go ah/bw. barbs are somewhat of an issue, although with a near-coastal start fog busting tends to be easier. but i am mainly concerned about the # of turns we are putting into researching things that then pushes back our getting other things like lit/col. of course this involves weighing the amount of beakers given to us by pottery vs the # of turns it takes us to get it in the first place.

i tend to avoid oracle because of a number of reasons. 1) prophet points; 2) bad timing of prereq techs (i get them later); 3) need to be building other things to claim land. however, a free tech is pretty big, so again it is a cost-benefit analysis kind of thing.

depending on the amount of food we have in capital, it might be preferable to put farms down on the floodplains...

Its difficult to tell at the moment but coastal cities rarely make great capitals; half the circumference is wasted on ocean which had an impact on distance maintenance. That's a longer term issue of course but one to keep in the back of our minds.

It looks as if the coast is beginning to turn just at the edge of the northern fog. I think that our best option is settle in place; there may well be a decent coastal city to the south of the marble with one (or two) seafood resource(s) but we could build that later oncewe have a clearer picture of the neighborhood.
If we're settling in place then pottery is worth getting early (as we start with agric and wheel); maybe worker first while working FP. Instead of asking which tech(s) we want early on it may be as useful to ask which techs we don't want early on.