RR16A -It's tax day again ...

[astre]

real question as in the theoretical part, i'm still a noob:
i don't get your figures, how can combat I (+10%) can be more interesting that city raider I (+20%)?

for pyramides:
we have stones nearby (south of amsterdam)
We will not be able to settle the all world because of our horrible economy ( no library, no market, no zigura, no lighthouse ...)
it give free GP person (Great Engineer for bulbing metal casting)
HR could be very important to have no limit to city size

and the most important part:
we are going to spent a lot of time waiting for alphabet online.

but i agree that it is not a priority, just a "mid" term project (after 1st stettler and granary)

[Thrar]

The combat X promotions are added to the attacker's strength. All other promotions are subtracted from the defender's strength instead. So C1 adds 10% or 0.6 to our vultures, while CR1 subtracts 20% or 2*0.3 = 0.6 from the defending archer.

It's true that we won't get markets, ziggurats etc as soon as we normally would, but as soon as someone has Alphabet and Currency, we'll get there. Even with someone just having Alphabet we can do pointy-stick research or beg. You can take a look at the original SG by Rusten, rolo put a link in the first post. It's a very good read.

[astre]

As we have no news from Imotep, i played this round.

I stayed on AH, next one should be masonery

I used a jedi mindtrick to put 2 archer out from amsterdam
I put our army 1 step away from the city. The settler left with his escort (2 archers).
I stay away one more turn.
then next turn, I came to see the harbor of amsterdam.
2 turns after, amsterdam is ours with 2 workers inside and 2 vulture missings.

turn 51, a have a score based on land.
We are 6 (left) on this map.
We are the last one based on land.
I whip the settler, continue with boat.

turn 52, i have a settler ready to move, i see 4 slots.
I've post the save and a picture to chose location of our next city.
I proposed some placements but others can be chosen.

[Thrar]

Very nice.

Where do all those workers come from? Did Willem already have two more?

Should we focus our EP on the fat man for a couple of turns? Would be nice to see his demographics.

Regarding settling sites, I'm in favor of 1E of A or 1N of B. B is too weak imo, it has plenty of food but too much unusable land. The site 1N would make a perfect blocker too; once it expands its borders we can settle the north at leisure.
1E of A is a far stronger site, it can share Uruk's corn (Uruk has plenty of food anyway) and has lots of hills, an excellent production city. Our rivals seem to be pretty far away, so we might not need a blocker city just yet. The proposed A, imo, lacks food. With just one FP (+2) and one plains cow (+1) we won't have enough food to work all those nice hills.

My favorite is 1E of A.

[astre]

the second workers come from the settler willem did make come back for "safety".
another information (as i have trouble to stop quiting civ): there is a deer 2 W from marble making 1N of C quite decent (but overlap with 1E of A). Maybe a good idea for the fourth city.

city B have a phant and a gold mine in their BFC that are not clearly displayed on the screen.

If you open the save, i tried to explore south but still no sign of ragnar, but he shouldn't be that far.

[nocho]

Sounds good! Is rolo up or do we wait for Immy?

1E of A looks good indeed. The B area is subpar in any case, but with gold and elephants could just cut it for me where it is.

[r_rolo1]

If Immy is not avaliable for playing it until tomorrow I'll get it .

Anyway, I still think we need to discuss how we are going to shape our economy, since a lot of decisions are dependent of that , including how much we expand now and if we destroy more neighbours or not.

[·Imhotep·]

Go ahead King of Thyself. I'll catch up on the weekend .

[astre]

we have 2 extreme choices:
expand as mutch as we can while we rampage with vulture and end up with a +0 gc/turn at 100% gold but with less oponents: IMHO, this is only acceptable if all 6 civ are in the same continent (no tech gap between oponents).
In that scenario, I supose we can destroy 1-2 civ before burnout and pray we got a critical tech by strenght at this point.

stay at 3-4 cities and wait until someone teach us something good then play a specialist economy (and then rule the world).

in both scenario, we have 30-50 turns until alphabet become online and change our gameplay.

[Thrar]

At the moment, it looks like the closest opponents are rather far away. There's plenty of land for 2-3 turnsets of peaceful expansion, after that we hopefully know more about the lay of the land and can reconsider.

Vultures stay useful pretty long, they're very cost-effective. If we want we can probably use them until our opponents get longbows, and with catapult support even against those.

I'd base our economy on cottages rather than specialists. It will be difficult to get specialist slots early on since the only ones that are really useful to us are merchants and engineers.

[JujuLautre]

Lurker's question

Originally Posted by Thrar

I'd base our economy on cottages rather than specialists. It will be difficult to get specialist slots early on since the only ones that are really useful to us are merchants and engineers.

With the current set of rules, aren't you allowed to have scientists ?

[·Imhotep·]

Well, Scientists are quite useless at the point we have researched the allowed techs. Merchants, Engineers and Priests are the only sensible specialists to run as we only can buy techs from that point on. Hence the Pyramids is not really worth the effort. I think Caste System is the high priority instead - merchants galore!

[astre]

according to the final rules :

- 100% cash after getting this techs:

Fishing
Agri
Wheel
Hunting
Mining
Myst
AH
BW
Masonry
Pottery

- No Rep civic before Constitution

- No research build

scientists are acceptable.
We just need writting to get the specialist economy running.

[nocho]

Well, bulbing with GSs isn't disallowed under the rules...

Edit: beaten to it by astre

[Thrar]

According to the rules, we can play this game as a plain old regular SE. Which, imo, would be rather boring. I'd prefer not to use scientists and get our techs in other ways.

[r_rolo1]

Ok, officially GOT IT

2 or 3 quibbles:

- I really don't like the marked city spots in the FP area ( see astre attached pic ). B spoils a grass tile when we have servicable desert tiles right next to it ( B is not riverside so 1W or 1E are basically equivalent ) and D spoils a resource tile.

- The north is definitely unconfortable It looks like we started near the north pole. That is somewhat ok, since we can't tech IW anyway, but as we know rags is in the south, we might even refrain of going too much south to let him clean the jungle down there

- I assume that we want Masonry ->Myst next ... not that we have much of choice. BTW. We still have to discuss if we reallywant to make the Mids or any other early wonder ( that is, give the variant, Henge, GW and Mids )

[nocho]

I'd consider settling on the hill 1NW of B. It gets all the flood plains and the grass and is riverside for extra health. We could possibly leave the elephants for a pig/elephant/banana/gem city to the south, especially if there's no sea food around that coast near the pigs for a coastal GP farm. We're agreed on 1E of A for another city, right?

I'm fine trying for mids if we hook up the stone asap. HR and later US might prove useful. If we're not interested in wonders myst>mason is obviously better than the other way around.

[astre]

The letters were just propositions
At least the letters could be used for easier description of where to place the cities

for mids, i explained my reasons.
other wonders will vanish too fast to expect build them. They are always the first build wonders.

for future economy, I'm for the extend as mutch as we can and try to recover with writting and priesthood get from quick bargain (or strenght if needed)

[Thrar]

I don't think any of the wonders does enough for us to justify its cost. Either way we cannot wait for getting stone online, that will be too late. Unless we're just in it for the fail gold.

Without stone, I don't see where we'd get the 600 hammers for the pyramids. We might get them, but I'd rather take the 4 settlers we can get for the same price. We are creative, so SH does nothing for us. GW helps a bit against barbs, but if we use those hammers for settlers, being creative we can fogbust so much that they won't be a big issue anyway.

Do we want to play this as an SE or as a taxman game like the original? There's nothing wrong with either, but it's a fundamental decision we need to make.

[astre]

I've tried the building of pyramid in Uruk doing nothing else (for no spoil).
It took 22 turns without stone.

I'm afraid HR is necessary for the time before we have techs again.
we can't have lot of little cities because of our horrible economy and, without HR, we can't have big cities either.

For me it is the best solution by far (and it bulb MC also)

for SE or original taxman, the answer is in the common thread.