SGOTM 02 - Xteam

[Capt Buttkick]

Woohoo! I have internet conn at the inlaws

I'd like to put up a few suggestions:
1) Maybe we could decide on where to move the warrior, move it and post another screenshot for discussion? I'd move the warrior to the hill for the best possible view.

2) I agree we shouldn't settle the FP. FPs are power squares in cIV as it was in Civ3, albeit with a commercial emphasis rather than pure growth.

3) With 2 cities right away, CS sling should be doable. We could try the following research path:
Mining --> BW --> Pots --> Writing and then up the Myst path to CoL.
With BW we whip a Lib in Kyoto at the first possible opportunity (I'd grow the city to size 6 (1 unhappy) when we can do a 3-citizen whip and do the whipping on the next turn) and set it up at size 5: 2 fish, 1 crab and 2 scientists. We may also consider whipping a work boat in Kyoto if the city doesn't grow fast enough.
Our second city could then push out military at least until we get writing (after that consider building a Lib for scientists and border exp and then start the Oracle, which probably should be whipped on the same turn we get CoL).

This research plan may put us awful close to other AIs finishing the Oracle.
However, should we succeed (and I think we have a good chance at it, considering my test games where pretty close and I never had a second city then) we should be firmly in contention for the laurels.
I propose the following builds:
Kyoto: Work Boat --> WB --> WB --> Lib
Osaka: Worker --> Warriors until we can hook up Bronze or else just warriors all the way until we can start the Oracle.

 

[Capt Buttkick]

Our settler represents our second city. Kyoto is on the island with the Crabs and Fish.

Which does bring up another point, what do we want to do with Kyoto? Lots of food and 2 Hammers. Surrounded by ocean tiles, no commerce connection until Astronomy? Looks like we'll need Bronze Working to have Slavery and pop rushes. We'll need 4 Work Boats for sure, but prolly not all at once? Great Person factory, as suggested by rrau I believe?

I think this could be a very good chance to test out Caste System. We'll have +12 food in Kyoto iirc (or is it even one more with Lighthouse? ). Once we get a theatre, we could control unhappyness with lux rate and have 6 specialists. We could either use the GLs for GAs (something I've never done unless in a tight space race) or just pop out Scientists for research.

 

[rrau]

Different GP's research different towards different techs. Great priests, great artists, great scientist and the great economists/trader all research different techs. Although a Great Economist also gives a food and gold bonus in the city you put them in, so might be nice for the GP factory city if needed to get another GP. I'd probably vote towards them researching techs.

 

[leif erikson]

Different GP's research different towards different techs. Great priests, great artists, great scientist and the great economists/trader all research different techs. Although a Great Economist also gives a food and gold bonus in the city you put them in, so might be nice for the GP factory city if needed to get another GP. I'd probably vote towards them researching techs.

I think we may need to do some of this. There is a spreadsheet around with the necessary data on it but I can't find it atm and my daughter is playing runescape on my computer that has the spreadsheet. If anyone needs it, I can attach it later. Also, there is this thread that talks about using GP to discover techs.

We may also be able to use some GP to provide research, gold and hammers if we think that would be good.

I think this could be a very good chance to test out Caste System.

If we use Caste, Slavery is out as they are under the same category, Labor.
Perhaps we start with Slavery and, once we have ourselves established and expanding, we can change to Caste?

1) Maybe we could decide on where to move the warrior, move it and post another screenshot for discussion? I'd move the warrior to the hill for the best possible view.

If there are forests to the east of the Settler, we won't see much to the south from the hill, I don't think. Moving to the southeast will see more tiles?

3) With 2 cities right away, CS sling should be doable. We could try the following research path:
Mining --> BW --> Pots --> Writing and then up the Myst path to CoL.

The problem with 2 cities is the maintenance on the second. Until it is up and running, we may have to run 90 or even 80% science rate which may actually slow research a bit. Hope not?
I agree with your ideas of the slingshot if there is Copper available to us with Bronze Working. Then we can defend ourselves against those raging Barbs. But, as Grahamiam said, we can cross that bridge when we get there.

Redbad made an excellent point after our last game. That we need to consider specializing cities more and decide what should be built in each, and more importantly, what we should not build in each. This will be especially true in hammer poor Kyoto, but also in cities we found or capture. What we build will also depend upon our goals. And the name of this game is Conquest!!

 

[rrau]

Some late breaking news about your game:

1. We now know that there are seven rivals on the map (not including the barbs).

2. Much pixel-counting effort has been expended to try to work out the distance between Kyoto and the settler. To settle the debates, and to help your strategy discussions move forward, we'll divulge that the second city, if built where the settler stands, would cost 7 gpt in maintenance.

Does anyone even know if we can get 7gpt at the beginning? *goes to start a practice game to see*

Edit: Screenie of what it would take to get 7gpt. I'm not sure it's do-able. Maybe we need to grow the capital first?

 

[rrau]

Osaka: Worker --> Warriors until we can hook up Bronze or else just warriors all the way until we can start the Oracle.

I'm not sure I agree with this build order with these settings. In my practice games, losing the growth of the capital at the beginning hurts us too much. In most games I do make a worker first, but I don't think that's the way to go in this one as I end up losing my town to barbs because I can't make enough warriors to picket by time the rush comes. I usually only have 2 or 3 warriors in town at this point and I lose all the workers improvments anyways.

 

[leif erikson]

Does anyone even know if we can get 7gpt at the beginning? *goes to start a practice game to see*

Edit: Screenie of what it would take to get 7gpt. I'm not sure it's do-able. Maybe we need to grow the capital first?

This is even worse than I thought it would be!!

We need to discuss any ideas anyone has about this. It puts us in a tough position as we can't build Warriors, or anything else for that matter, until we build a city and building it will cost us dearly in maintenance and tech development. However, without a sufficient number of warriors, we will lose that city to raging barbs!

Guess I'll on it and then, tomorrow evening, try to create a practice game and see what happens?

We have 4 days until the save is released...

 

[Redbad]

I’ve got a moment to pop in and comment. I am not checking in as I don’t know if I can pop in again before the 23th.

Rrau calculation is a little off as we’ll have 2 cities:
Kyoto: 8 commerce from palace, 1 from citycenter and 2 from fish/crab = 11 commerce
Osaka: 1 from citycenter and 1 from floodplain = 2 commerce
Totalling 13 commerce
This will give 7 coins and 6 beakers at 50% research.

Kyoto:
Has happy boundary at size 7. Will have culture expansion after 8 and again after 75 turns. That means that we can sail to the mainland after 83 turns when there are no more then 4 water tiles in between (3 will be within our culture and the fourth will be coastal water). I really don’t expect Kyoto to be further from the mainland as that. In that situation we can establish a base from Kyoto. Meaning Kyoto initially has to build something like 4 workboats, a settler, a worker, 2 warriors and a galley.
Having bronze would enable us to rush things in Kyoto and make a good decision on where to settle from Kyoto.

Osaka:
I don’t think we should start with building warriors in Osaka. We have nothing to fear before the barbs arrive. When building a worker first we can farm the floodplain and mine the hill. I would advice to have both the floodplain and a hill within the starting 9 tiles, I even prefer it to being on the riverbank.
I don’t think we should gear Osaka towards commerce. With the raging barbs it’s much safer to optimise Osaka for production, and frankly we don’t have much time in the beginning to research something like pots. Even if we find copper, I think mysticism and sailing come before pottery IMO.
We have a long way to go for research. Building an initial small army not only protects us against the barbs, it also enables us to snatch an AI capitol. AI capitols are often excellent research sites. Besides it even takes quite some research to have substantially better military as the axeman.
With bronze we’re able to chop somewhere down the line an obelisk for culture expansion. (Though it would be very pleasant to capture us a religious city.)

Have to go now and good luck with the start.

 

[Capt Buttkick]

This is even worse than I thought it would be!!

Yeh, I thought it would be 3-4 gpt
This certainly throws things around. If I was playing this by myself, I would consider searching out an AI rival with my warrior/settler pair and snuzzle behind their borders until I'm ready to whip the Oracle in Kyoto Guess that's just a little too Besides, I've only ever won monarch games in which the CS slingshot worked and that's an addiction I need to get over
So I'm ready to try anything new It would surprise me if none of the others went for the CS sling and I still think the best teams will make it.

@Redbad: The reason I suggested Pots, is that it's the fastest route to Writing for libs and scientists.

 

[Capt Buttkick]

Different GP's research different towards different techs. Great priests, great artists, great scientist and the great economists/trader all research different techs. Although a Great Economist also gives a food and gold bonus in the city you put them in, so might be nice for the GP factory city if needed to get another GP. I'd probably vote towards them researching techs.

Reason I mentioned scientists, is that they give 50% more research, but it'll be a while until research is too expensive for other GLs to completely research a tech.

 

[Capt Buttkick]

Apologies for the triple post, but I thought of another option: we scout with our warrior/settler until we get BW, then move to the nearest bronze site and plop our settler on top of it.
Another (tm) idea from CB inc

 

[rrau]

Actually, I was thinking we'd wander/scout with our warrior/settler pair and when we find Bronze, plop down on it (or right next to it to get the extra hammers from the improved tile - depends on how bad the barbs are) and it would be good if it was right next to an AI capital . That way our army doesn't have too far to walk for the first war.. With the high maintenance we'll have on our cities, we'll need to move the capital as soon as we can while still maintaining war momentum.

 

[leif erikson]

In case anyone is intersted, I produced a save that, kind of, sort of, mirrors Gyathaar's piece of art. I'll attach it below.

For some reason, the world builder wouldn't let me place Rice where I wanted, so I used Corn. In addition, I discovered the Warrior must be on a hill as in my first try, I couldn't see the Fish, so I changed it to a hill and voila!!

Last thing is that, for some reason, the area showing for resources, food and hammers, etc., is for where the original units were located before I moved them. So, when the settler comes up, you see too much in th e"fog". I'm not as talented as Gyathaar??

 

[WillowBrook]

Will there be maintenance costs for the settler/warrior pair if settling is delayed? If so, that would reduce the effective cost of settling early compared with waiting to settle.

 

[leif erikson]

Will there be maintenance costs for the settler/warrior pair if settling is delayed? If so, that would reduce the effective cost of settling early compared with waiting to settle.

Not initially. The maintenance costs for units wasn't really a problem. I built a second city and, after building a worker, built a small army of Warriors (5 or 6). They handled the Barbs fairly well, although some got through and pillaged all the improvements.

The real maintenance problem starts when cities are built. I built 4 cities, 1 near the capital (copper source) and another near where our settler was. The maintenance went from 7 to 11 and for the second city it was 12 GPT. It totally bankrupted us, no research. Then I started losing warriors until the GPT covered the maintenance costs. This was also the time Axes started showing up!!

The biggest problem I see is GPT and research!! We are really going to have to decide what we want to research anduse it well. Tangents are going to be very, very expensive in this game...

I'll try another map tomorrow and give it a shot and see what happens.

 

[leif erikson]

With the high maintenance we'll have on our cities, we'll need to move the capital as soon as we can while still maintaining war momentum.

I think this will depend upon whether we can find land near our capital or not. With a little pop-rushing, the capital is fairly productive. I built 4 workboats, a settler, 3 or 4 warriors, a worker and 2 galleys before the change of BC to 0 AD.

We might want to think about sending the 3rd or 4th workboat on a little recon before we use it to build a fishing boat?

Wouldn't it be interesting if we can get to a land mass near Kyoto? If Redbad's assumption is correct, it would be interesting indeed.

 

[rrau]

Here's another trial. I played the other one, altering variables, a few times and needed another one. (Leif, there's a reveal tile button in the worldbuilder. After clicking it, I think you right click on the tiles you want to be hidden from where the original settlers were.)

 

[leif erikson]

Here's another trial. I played the other one, altering variables, a few times and needed another one. (Leif, there's a reveal tile button in the worldbuilder. After clicking it, I think you right click on the tiles you want to be hidden from where the original settlers were.)

Thanks, I'll have a look. It was my first time in Worldbuilder. The hardest thing was getting that dang river in the right place.

Off to play!!

 

[leif erikson]

I played it a couple of times. My first attempt was to minimize the number of cities built and I got surrounded by the Aztecs, not good.

The second time, I built an earlier settler and settled near the Gold Hill, figuring it would offset the maintenance costs, and it did. The lesson is that we will need an economy and Cottages will have some importance. Also, I made a run at Stonehenge and losing it provided some much needed gold, not a bad idea if we don't have too many Barbs coming at us.

My research went: Mining, Bronze, Mysticism, Pottery, Iron Working and then Agriculture and Animal Husbandry to Writing in the second attempt. I did that because I realized that I had to try something when Copper didn't show. And to get to Iron Working, I needed some Gold for research.

The early worker is fine and in your game, I hardly faced any Barbs as The Aztecs were so close to the south. Problem was that then I had to worry about being encompassed by them.

And I don't have any idea how we are even going to attempt a run at the CS slingshot????

 

[rrau]

In all my attempts, I've failed due to the slower research rate. Sometimes the oracle was even built before I could research mysticism (had to research IW in all of those cases, though). Maybe we need to just focus on economy instead and build an army and go chopping our neighbors to bits? Get them down to one city and extract techs and finish them off when the peace treaty expires.