There are a few things I am not totally clear about however, ... why CC switches to the settler on T109.....why not just grow to size 6 ASAP and switch to the settler at T110?
It's actually equivalent for production in CC. All the same tiles are worked. Generating the
person a turn earlier is free (because we're building a settler) but makes no profit either. I suppose we should look at the cost of city maintenance too... A city at size 6 pays a little bit more.
There are three reasonable schemes for whip cycles, assuming we're happy at size 5:
1) Grow to 5, work settler, 2-whip it. Bleah, horrible.
2) Grow to 6 and immediately work settler (avoiding paying
for the
dude), 3-whip it. Nice.
3) Grow to 8, costing (say) 3 turns at -2
/turn and 2 more turns at -4
/turn, so 14
. Switch to settler, 3-whip it and we're still at size 5 working all our tiles. (Hopefully we didn't take
losses at size 7, either...)
However, strategy 3) is right only if our 4th and 5th dudes are working such good tiles that their existence brings in
more than 14
profit over the 4-5 turns it takes to re-grow to size 5. Over 5 turns, that means they need to work tiles that pay for their own 2
and then produce at least 3 more
. We don't have enough 5-
tiles to make this possible.
Because we can share tiles, it is better to use 2) and try to keep the whip cycles somewhat "out of phase" with each other and hope that one city's growth can cover the several turns when the other city is at size 3. Unless you whip both cities at about the same turn, you don't drop below 7 population, and that means that the worst-case scenario is you give up a turn or two on some mine. In fact, that's what the current plan does - give up several turns on one Gmine or the other. We could slow down the first settler out of CC by three turns (say), paying 2
/turn for the privilege of whipping down to a size where we don't have to give up a Gmine during T113-115, but getting the settler out three turns early seems to me to produce enough equity to cover the difference.
If we do switch to settler on T109, why waste the CF by not working it in FH for that 1 turn.
All the food tiles get worked every turn. We occasionally give up a turn or two on one or other Gmine. The "Good tiles worked" row computes a checksum automatically across both spreadsheets of the five food resources and three mines.
I actually am not very clear about the PDF....
Page 2 FH
"Tiles Worked B,PM,GM B,PM,GM,Cit
Tiles Changed -N,-CF,+PM +Cit"
What is "B"? Shouldn't it be "N" for net so we regrow to size 4 for T109? I don't see a reason to starve it.
Nothing's starving, ever.
If you mouse over improved fish, you will see that it is actually "Fish boats". Long term, I knew I might need to be able to draw a distinction between working Clam
Nets, Fish
Boats and unimproved fish. The first two produce different amounts of food, so being precise is important. So I set up a nomenclature that wouldn't need to change in future. Sorry for the confusion.
I think we should use the food tiles ALL the time, even if it results in a
a little sooner. We have plenty of food, and I think it will allow us to whip a little sooner if we use all the food all the time.
Agreed, about working the food all the time in the shared-tile context. The underlying philosophy of bc's approach is to regrow fast, switch and whip maximal overflow
-things onto wonders, and not to worry about accumulating
. At about T180 we'll have to stop whipping and control regrowth to our long-term size (11 in CC) so that we maximize outcomes then, but there's plenty of time for whip-
to decay. AI-trading for gold/gems/silver resources will give us a free run, also. Or there's that gold resource out to the east.