SGOTM 21 - Phoenix Rising

[Fippy]

Had to test something sorry, playing a bit now..

Willy settled, with culture showing like this:

Spoiler :

My little slider adjustment did not work sadly, few beakers short of writing.

I would think Deer can still be ours, if we settle 1E of it.
Also this makes barb problems very unlikely.

Rock island has 2 fish..! (and Crab island nothing else)

Spoiler :

If it's either fish or deer city now, i could move the galley one step further (but it's unlikely we find more anyways).

There's also if we want to chop crab island or improve Fur first, depends what we like more..10 palace hammers or something for Crab island later.

Stealing the tile should be easy, 1st ring vs. his 2nd he has no chance unless he founds a Reli (but Judaism is already gone too).
But it's 5 turns travelling time.

 

[Izuul]

So he settled like 1NW of that tile that has culture now?

Rock island is definitely our first island settle whenever we do that. Whip creative library and run scientists immediately. Well maybe LH first, maybe...

I guess the big question is deer vs fish. Deer will require stealing the tile since he will get it first, but the sooner we start the better if we really want that site.

So fish can be settled 3T earlier, but needs WBs. We have 1 coming in 5T which would easily be in time for the border pop onto fish. If we want a galley out of here it would need to be whipped and it has a lot further to travel, so that's the down side. It would also give us a big immediate boost to trade routes.

Deer city blocks off land, would give us 3 forests instantly and probably some more once we took them from Willem, grabs a 6F deer tile, and is a nice launching point for a boat or two. If we want deer city we should go for it now and try to get a 2nd settler quickly for fish.

Chop the forest i think.

 

[Fippy]

Well we can decide that when we have our settler, with corn city out for now i will play to a stopping point and maybe get more info.
What do you prefer, chop or Furs? I would prefer chop, Palace can use those hammers i am sure.
Not really bothered with keeping that forest for Crab island.

3! fish lol.

 

[lymond]

3 fish!...I think we found our NE city

We could pre-chop that forest, but we might keep it for a luck forest spread 1N of furs. I'm fine either way or just get the furs up and running. Not sure how long the worker will be there.

I like deer too. Was hoping we could settle it 2E, but that is out and LH really otherwise not that useful there. Still a pretty good city and coastal.

Guess LP can start whippin' some Settlers. (we goin' Pottery next) Setup a nice whip into a Library

Actually forest chop may setup that settler whip in LP or used after to finish off Library.

We can get a Library in Deer pretty fast too with all that forest, to help with culture..should not be a problem.

 

[Fippy]

Spoiler :

Turn 51, 1960 BC: Pericles has completed The Great Lighthouse!
Turn 51, 1960 BC: Stonehenge has been built in a far away land!

Turn 52, 1920 BC: Love Palace has grown to size 6.
Turn 52, 1920 BC: Surf n' Turf has grown to size 2.
Turn 52, 1920 BC: Surf n' Turf can hurry Warrior for 1⇴ with 15ℤ overflow, 7ℴ added to the treasury, and +1⇤ for 10 turns.
Turn 52, 1920 BC: Shaka is the worst enemy of Elizabeth.
Turn 52, 1920 BC: Lady's BFF will grow to size 3 on the next turn.

Turn 53, 1880 BC: Love Palace can hurry Settler for 3⇴ with 11ℤ overflow and +1⇤ for 10 turns.
Turn 53, 1880 BC: Lady's BFF has grown to size 3.
Turn 53, 1880 BC: You have discovered Writing!

Turn 54, 1840 BC: Will Sign Open Borders: Elizabeth, Shaka, Willem van Oranje

Brain storming time.
I already whipped the settler, there's really no point delaying either of 2 cities.
OF could go directly into the next settler, and at size 4 we would need 1 turn more to whip again.

Opened borders with Willy & Lizzy, 2 trade routes from Willy.
Did not with Shaka yet, in case we want to keep his archer out.

On a side note, my turnset should be over now.
Packers next in Rota, if you have time

Yep, am in favor of 2 fast settlers from Palace.
Then other cities can take over. Surf will be rather nice soon.
With GLH and the good spots we still have, they should be more valuable than the library currently.

Royale /w Cheese..hmm probably too long still

Rota and history updated, i feel so american when typing stuff like surfin' ~~

Sleep well or have fun on TV
lol nites

 

[lymond]

Yeah, maybe so. Library makes those hammers double though, almost 50% build this turn, plus 20 from chop. Still getting that island settled is huge.

Of course this next settler whip may give us some good hammers for library. how many turns to grow in LP?

Great work, My!

Yep, and speaking of workers, we probably want another one soon. Maybe cow can build one at size 3 or 4 after cow improved.

Are we planning a boat to scout SW>W too?

Yep, 2nd settler now is definitely the way to go. This will really pay off for us later

we can probably get a 4th worker out of Cow at size 4 ..whip into Library. hmmm we also need to gift something to Willie, but not sure if that is a pressing matter

(ha...I guess BSP is redeemed himself a little with 3 fish city..we shall call it Royale with Cheese )

ha..and nonsensical..but that makes it kinda funny...our team's little inside joke

hey..we need to name worker 3

Friday night TV..ha

Nites...your just a All-American Girl there, My

 

[Izuul]

3 fish is pretty insane. I was already thinking about going settler > settler here in palace and just rolling the OF over into the next one. That seems even stronger now. First to deer, 2nd to triple fish? Deer could maybe take cow worker after that is improved and the other worker can improve gems. Nice thing about fish city is that it doesn't need any workers, because we are already getting stretched thin here. We need the guy off fur island fairly quickly.

Think I'm gonna go watch some tv and then go to bed. I'll look at this with a clear head in the morning.

Friday night Netflix.. watching Sherlock.

 

[Packers5280]

Yeah, I can take over now.

Probably to chop a few workers out from Deer as well, along with a library. I wouldn't mind knowing a quest for Liz. At the very least it would give us an idea on what to expect for quests.

2 fast settlers seems the way to go from LP. As for the fish city, I was thinking Something's Fishy...

Something else to think about is do we want to try for a GS in LP? Or are we fine with a GM? 22 turns for the GM atm. A GM would be nice for a trade route to get some cash to buy the quests with money once currency is in.

 

[lymond]

You know that may not be a bad idea to get a worker in deer to gift Willie. Maybe after we get deer and a mine up first just to get the city growing. We probably want a library in there fairly quickly too.

Deer would have good production to pump worker gifts to Willie to get our info.

Kinda prefer gifting workers over gold, but initially with they way BSP has it worked out, at least one cheap gold gift may be worth it.

Friday night Netflix.. watching Sherlock.

Ah..good show. I highly recommend "The Fall" with Gillian Anderson if you haven't seen it yet. The first season is great, and the 2nd just came on Netflix. She's done some great Brit stuff in the past. "Peaky Blinders" and "Happy Valley" are very good as well.

 

[Gumbolt]

Don't forget we need to post save at T60 for comparisons.

GLH in and looks like we may of had many turns to spare.

Dutch have horse. I also think that grassland near Dutch 2nd city is iron. So early worker stealing here had big dangers.

Need to explore horse/fur site more.

Triple fish site looks amazing!! NE and or Moai site? Hammers on ocean would be good. GP points not so good.

Do we know where Dutch second city border pop will end up? May scupper Deer.

Great job on fog busting too. Not lost a single unit to the barbs.

Don't forget a GM ignores closed borders too. Which could be an issue with Shaka. Not checked.

 

[BSPollux]

So you like that little island in the east?
I wouldn't leave you without any good city locations. It's no fun if all you cities have that 'meh' feeling.
Lets see how long you'll be able to keep that spot.

Btw good job with GLH @t51

 

[Gumbolt]

Perhaps a check could be made and comment put in lurker thread for when we finish to see how close we were with Ai on GLH. Just out of interest. Wasn't intending to question it just intrigued Izuul. Safe than sorry!
In any case these types of games the teams tend to rush to COL, currency and astronomy to meet the other AI.

I do wonder if we have left our workboat scouts a bit too late? On a plus side it should be pretty easy to spawn bust barb galleys this game.

Nice turnset Mylene. Pretty much secured the land and cleared up the barbs for now.

We may have to start thinking when we plan to actually start getting winning objectives. I think the game planners have done it so Elizabeth will have a fun early objective. Then the other AI not so close will have later objectives. We know there are no barbs here so expect resources, destroy AI X or set up x amount of buildings. Could also be the ladies must all be pleased by end of game?

 

[Izuul]

First question. Is it better to just built this settler or whip again?

Slow build - I think we can get a 6T settler using 4T of wheat and 2T of the current configuration. This keeps the capitol at S3 so we can grow and maybe whip a 3rd settler.

Whip with no OF - With no OF we could do 2T of settler with chop coming in on the 2nd turn, then grow for 2T (would need wheat), then whip. 5T settler so this is 1T faster than slow building, but if we aren't getting OF out of it I'm not sure 1T is really worth whipping our capitol down to 2 and getting even more unhappy.

Whip with OF - If we want to go for OF it would be settler > settler > grow > grow > settler > whip so 6T settler. Wheat needed for at least 2T to grow, and it helps the other turns as well to get more OF. This would be the same speed as slow building the settler and 1T slower than whipping with no OF. We could get something like 30-37 OF doing this depending on how many turns we use wheat.

I think i would be fine with either slow building or going for whip OF. I do not think 1T faster settler is worth whipping the capitol down for no OF.


Next thing is settler and worker timing with new deer city. Settler can still move this turn, so it can make it to the forest 1E of deer in 4T and settle in 5T on T59. Lymo will finish pasturing cows on T56, could be on a forest on T58 and start chopping for deer city on T59 when it's settled. Not sure how long it will take us to get the deer back. Willem has an 8-9T head start, but it's only 2nd ring for him and 1st ring for us. It might take like 10T.. that gives Lymo time to chop 2-3 forests, so i doubt we really need more than 1 worker up there. Gumbo can improve gems which will finish on T62. I think we want to chop + mine here not chop then mine.

I don't want to hear about delaying GLH for settler. We all agreed on the decision based on the information we had at the time and the risks associated with not getting the wonder here. There's no point at all in 2nd guessing. You know the old cliche - "hind sight is always 20/20."

Early cities:

• Palace - Early on we want to use the food to build settlers, but it could be used for commerce or specs later. Could get 8 grass cottages here (4 riverside) + furs + a few commerce from crab, river mine, and corn. That would be pretty good. The advantage of commerce is that it frees up food to share with other cities, but disadvantage here is that we don't really have helper cities to grow cottages. Specs would be good too, but i guess we will need to evaluate Caste vs Slavery here. It depends on how many hammers we need early (war?) because we don't have a lot of raw hammers here and will need to whip quite a bit if we find ourselves needing a lot of production.
  
  
• BFF - Will probably need some farms just because it's food poor. Commerce/hammer hybrid. Not great at either, but the strength of this city is the early commerce boost. Will need a library.
  
  
• Cow - Definitely a hammer city (17HPT working 4x grass hill + gems + cows), but also has some decent commerce. Probably want quite a few buildings here. LH makes that lake 3F in addition to helping the crab, and we would also want granary, library, and eventually a forge.
  
  
• Deer - Mostly production. 3 grass hills and a lot of forests. Doesn't really need any early buildings other than a granary whenever we get Pottery.
  
  
• Fish - Obvious GPP farm. Want quick LH and library whips here. 2hammer capitol will help with buildings a little bit, but lack of forests will make NE a little more challenging. Could work PHs for some hammers eventually, but i don't think we should bother mining them early. Food will give us all of the production we need for library and LH.
  
  
• Corn - Cottage city. 7 river tiles. A few are plains, but that's OK i think. Also provides 5 forests for early chopping. Library here, and granary when we get Pottery.

I also see at least 5 more city sites that will be worth settling at some point. Horses, fur island, northern fish, sheep, and filler between corn and deer.

Having a hard time wrapping my head around this BSP quote:

Lets see how long you'll be able to keep that spot.

O RLY? Am i supposed to believe that the AI is going to make an intelligent naval attack on our fish city? With ocean to the east no less?

 

[Gumbolt]

Where did Willem settle second city? If on the grassland tile we will not get the deer? Plus likely settling on metal. Would seem strange for him to skip the deer. Plus it has not had 5 turn border pop? In any case we should move warrior before moving settler.

With wheat settler shows as 7T. 6T with chop of 10H. Yep so whipping and growing adds little here. Virtually no OF. 2 or so hammers.

Plans for next worker? How urgent is this really? For now we have gems, mine and cows to work. For now we have gems, mine and cows to work. Possible forest to chop near BFF and SnT. Until we want roads maybe not too urgent. With a chop BFF could whip a workboat at some point or do 2 pop whip for worker?

Mountain island may not need a workboat for 7-8 turn. (5 turn for border pop). BFF could easily slow build the workboat til size 4. Maybe chop towards worker in BFF. Then OF workboat.

We could easily set up library quickly in fish city with growth. We need to think about capital long term. Cottages? Or specialist economy? Or a mix of both. Are we sure about GM first? We still have a lot of forest if we wanted to chop a wonder like mids. No stone would be a pain. Are we intending deer city even if Willem's border pop takes the deer?? Okay I figured we had a plan. Maybe he will even work the deer resource for us too with a camp.

Personally I hope the Ai get Oracle soon. Save us planning a late grab of it. 8-9 turns for PH at 100%. We could afford to run tax at 100% for a bit. Willem science might be quicker with only 2 cities. I doubt he has the commerce resources. Then again if another Ai has has alphabet chances are Willem may know them and get a discount on the techs.

With Phil trait would a lit beeline be useful here? No marble. Alphabet - currency with GLH would be very strong. Trade for monarchy/maths later. Unlikely to grab mids here without stone. In any case be suprised if the Ai don't have oracle soon. Jud went 600 years ago. Someone must have PH. HBR seems unlikely with impis and need to keep Willem alive. In any case we have cities to spam.

Do we military tech with Shaka about? Hopefully trade for IW.

 

[Fippy]

Hmm whipping settlers always creates some OF, cos after you whip that turn still creates hammers on all tiles you have left

Here we would have ~20 OF.
Not saying it's best (no idea yet), but better than you might think.

I think Willy settled 2 turns ago, so in 3 he starts getting some culture on deer.
We would start in 5 turns, so it's rather fast. Latest when we reach 10 culture.

I think pottery is less important without worker turns available for cottages, and with much easier libraries.
Usually you whip granaries, but you can also just keep your pop if you are satisfied with what you can work.
If i knew none of these guys go for Alpha, i would surely tech it now.
But how would you know

Thingy about Alpha is, we maybe could trade for Oracle techs too.
Anything can happen with Imm AIs, Isa could build that in 3 turns from now or it's not gone for 30 more..who knows.

For tech trades, Willy is awesome. 15% required only and low wfyabta. Lizzy also low, but 40% required here so not that great.
Shaka useless ~~

I agree that maths is very good, if we go for forest cities next.
Pyras are just too many hammers, unless somebody suddenly trades us stone.

What we do know, neither Lizzy or Willy had writing last turn.
So they probably have no chance to tech Alpha yet.

We can see what Willy techs in a few turns.
If we need 2 gold gathering turns anyways, we should probably do them now.
Unless we really want pottery.

(Keep your eyes on Dutch Empire when you end turns, Packers )

I think the Literature line is weak without marble, and with PHI (Music artist worth less).

Pottery is okay, difficult decision really.
Imo shows us that we should not be tempted by triple fish first, and get our scouting city first.
If we can meet more AIs we should hurry. Also probably best to send Bear west.

I think this settler should be last from Palace anyways?
Surf will be ready for one, and i would probably also rather whip BFF for another after letting it have wheat.
That's an advantage of whipping, BFF gets more turns of wheat.
As long as we can work both gems afterwards, i would have nps with that.

BFF no big plans here, so maybe helping with expansion would be it's best use.
There's 1 forest left that could be used for speeding up a settler.
Palace should get a library after this next settler, research bonus and GM points combined with scientists.
With no obvious academy city, a quick GM for gold and probably endless 100% research should be better.

It's tempting to use Gumbo for BFF chop before gems, while he cannot reach them this turn.
BFF could whip a settler in ~7 turns with a chop and wheat.
It's also closest for a corn city settler, adds some value for getting him from there.
Without GLH we would have to think more about having workers ready for new cities, but with..all are good early as poss, esp. if we will also get a GM.

Yep that's what makes our tech decision difficult, we are not building granaries anyways for now.
Palace prefers library, BFF umm probably same..Deer busy with galley and so.

Will be out tonight, so let's give all this another day of thinking and maybe also testing imo
Actually i should get ready about now, will see you all tomorrow probably.

 

[Packers5280]

Regarding the deer city, the deer will be in our inner ring, if we settle 1E of it. Willem's culture may grab it, but we would be able grab it back fairly quickly.

Where do we want to go from here tech wise? As nice as pottery would be, it is about that time to head for a tech to trade for alpha. Liz and Willem could research alpha fairly early.

Another thing, is the mids. Do we want to try for the mids at all so we could run REP scientists? Could be a possibility in deer. If we want it, maths could be a viable next tech. No stone/IND though, so probably not.

I was thinking we could try for alpha, but I've seen Willem and Liz go for it about this time before. So going for some trade bait could be better.

That's true for WvO and Liz with no writing. Maybe alpha next would be better. Would be 11 turns at 100%, so about 15 turns for alpha.

I don't think there's an urge for pottery right now. As you pointed out our workers are busy and we wouldn't have many worker turns for cottages. At least not until alpha should we go for it now, which I am starting to like more and more.

Yeah, the lit path does not seem favorable. The only reason to go for that is the NE for now, and the 3Fish spot isn't high on hammers so getting the NE there would take some time.

Well it would be some time before we would get an granary up in Fish. 5-6 turns for the settler. 2 turns to get there. 5 turns for the border pop. If we would trade for pottery soon after alpha we would delay granary in fish for 3-4 turns max. And we could go for a lib or wb first there so I don't think delaying pot would hurt the fish spot too bad. At least not compared to getting an early alpha.

Yeah, I don't think there's too much planned for BFF. Library for sure, but other than that, not much else.

 

[Izuul]

Mids is too expensive without IND or stone IMO, and we don't really need it. So much else we could do with 500 hammers.

Skipping TW and Pottery might dictate researching Alpha ourselves so that we can trade for them. The granary is still the best building in the game and should not be ignored. Also need TW at some point to connect our furs. Don't need them quite yet, but we will want them fairly soon. If we self tech TW that would allow us to connect furs while our worker is already over there so that we wouldn't have to ship one back later to do it.

Yeah.. no OF in palace with fast whip was a little bit of hyperbole on my part. I could try to come up with a good comparison of what we gain and lose with each approach. 1T faster settler would give us fish city 1T earlier which would probably result in 2H + 5F more in fish city, 14 extra commerce, but would also cost us 1 extra turn of increased maintenance (not sure how much). We would get about 18 OF. That might be better than another turn of hammers for OF. Or we could not whip which would lose us the same things listed above, but we would preserve pop in the capitol to get the next settler faster and continue working our good tiles. Whipping the capitol down to S2 really slows regrowth because we can't work all 3 good food sources at S2.

Agree we don't need the Aesthetics > Lit path. Monarchy trade also isn't a huge priority here. We can already get S6 cities and S7 capitol with our happy resources and we will have extra gems to possibly trade for more. Plus we aren't trying to build up an early super Bureau cap.

Well what's the advantage that we expect to gain by delaying Pottery? Faster what? Alpha probably won't net us a Math trade this early. We could get IW via trade, maybe Oracle techs. I guess technically we could save some beakers by trading for Pottery with Alpha. Granary would help growth in Fish immensely.

What do we really need BFF to grow for? Plan? Library whip maybe?

Not trying to be a pain here, just trying to play devil's advocate and get everyone thinking from both sides.

Was there ever any debate about fish before deer? I thought this settler was 100% going to deer so that we could chop a galley? 2nd settler to fish.

Agree on GM. Meant to write that earlier this morning.

Actually i think we can tech Alpha and trade for Pottery in time for when we really need it in Fish city. Alpha is nearly 10T and we might get that down to 9T - not sure. 2-3 of saving gold so 11-13T Alpha. Fish city won't be settled for another 7T at the earliest and then 5T for border pop onto fish. We will lose some base hammers into granary, but we can put them into something else like LH or WB instead. I wouldn't mind going straight for Alpha here. Biggest downside is delaying the fur hookup because we need that worker back. Even so, it seems like the best move...

I think I'm sold on Alpha next. Also opens up Currency which will be pretty strong here if we are spamming cities. Getting IW to see if we actually have metal would be beneficial as well. And hopefully Math trade at some point.

@Gumbi - Willem will trade Math as soon as he and 1 other AI that he knows has it, and both he and Lizzy are pretty good techers so it might not take them too long to get there. Alpha at least gives us the chance to trade for that which would be a pretty significant tech to pick up via trade.

 

[Gumbolt]

5-6T vs 11 for alphabet. Of course this is at 100%. So expect Alphabet to take a bit longer even with third gems. Although i think the fur and other cities will speed up science. Especially with foreign trade routes that may require us exploring Willem's capital. The island cities will also help science.

In terms of pottery for next 6-10 turns capital will be building settlers. BFF will need workboats (Settlers) for the new city. New city maybe needs another exploring WB. So maybe Pottery is not so urgent unless we plan to put chops into granaries and use a whip OF for WB.

I think Shaka knows a 4th Ai so we have more exploring to do. We can tell this by his espionage. Unless Shaka already knew elizabeth perhaps he is more north then west. Pretty sure he would of found us quicker otherwise.

Alphabet over maths too?? Hmmmm. I don't mind alphabet. Maths chops are useful but then we may still have to go back for TW and pottery. @ Izuul. Mere checking we all considering all options.

Oh I am off out too in just over an hour. We are way ahead of other teams anyway.

 

[Izuul]

I need to check my math on this again (mostly unsure about how many hammers we get from that chop), but i think i found the best solution for the capitol settler build.

T54 - Settler (use tiles like they are)
T55 - Library (farm instead of mine) - chop comes into library
T56 - Library (same tiles) - growth to S4
T57 - Settler (take wheat back from BFF, give farm)
T58 - Settler (same tiles)
T59 - Settler whip (work deer + clams, give wheat back)
T60 - Library completes at 90/90

It is 6T vs 5T if we whip with no OF, but the result is the library comes online A LOT sooner. After library the city can probably grow back out while building WB for Fish City.

Edit: tested and the chop was 10H like Fippy suggested earlier.

@Lymo - I did see your references, and i wrote them down! Thanks

 

[lymond]

Sounds like a good approach, Iz. I like the chop hammers going into the Library even if small, as we get more bang for buck there.

I like Alpha too here. We have some trade partners at least to pick up some techs maybe and Currency would should rock here.

(hope you like em)