VoiceOfUnreason
Deity
- Joined
- Dec 5, 2005
- Messages
- 3,663
Somewhat agree with Lymond that you are over thinking the reporting. Nonetheless, I Have Opinions[tm], so I'll be responding to the meta as well.
Anything that exposes your thought process is a great method. Among other things, it saves a bunch of questions when the audience identifies a mistake that you recognize -- we can skip past all of the "what were you thinking?
" and get on with the analysis.
META: I'm not too keen on screenshots of the tech screen -- it's really not all that well designed for presentation, and we readers don't need to click on it to produce queues of techs to research. The resulting picture is not worth 1000 words.
Much better for us to just list the techs, and number them when you are describing the sequence.
Good. Here's a question to consider: how does researching Pottery contribute to your plan to rush Shaka?
Pottery is a tremendously important technology to discover. But is it urgent? An important principle -- especially at higher difficulties -- is "that which can wait, must wait."
Broadly, when you ask yourself if a technology is urgent, you normally find an answer in one of three categories
1) Yup, it's urgent.
2) Nope, it's not urgent
3) Nope, it's not urgent, but nothing else is either, and this is the best path to the next milestone.
In the opening, a city can hit diminishing returns on food fairly quickly, because the size of the city gets throttled by the happiness cap. So I often try to sneak in an early warrior to keep the citizens from getting cranky.
In a start with lots of food, working all the improved food tiles to train workers and settlers can be strong. In games where your early plans are peaceful expansion, improved food can be swapped to another nearby city -- as a matter of efficiency, it's important to "always" work your best tiles, but it's not so critical to always work them in the closest/strongest city.
"Food is life." But for rushes, the limiting factor is normally hammers. Surplus food can be converted to hammers, up to a point, but spending more hammers to get more food than you can convert into hammers isn't maximizing your hammers. (there's some mitigation, of course, since you'll want that surplus food eventually).
Slavery doesn't offer any passive benefit, you you can wait until you are ready to enjoy the active. That means, among other things, having builds that you want to produce with the whip. Warriors and scouts generally aren't worth it.
Anarchy craters your city production and yields for a time, but your units are unaffected. Ideal times tend to be immediately after producing a worker or settler -- you get the immediate benefit of the unit, and the production benefit for the next unit.
For Spiritual leaders, I generally advise new players to sneak into slavery immediately. Playing anybody else, I've been known to put a sign on the map so that I see it as the unit travels past it.
On chopping: the health benefit from the forest is about the only thing a plains tile is good until the mid game, so I normally chop those tiles later (if at all).
Some things to consider when choosing which tiles to chop.
1) The improvement that will replace it. My usual ordering in the opening is grassland+riverside+hill, grassland+hill, grassland+riverside, grassland. Mines are usually stronger than cottages, so I'll prioritize those tiles.
2) Movement - two move units like open tiles. This is less of a concern when the road network is in place.
3) Overlap - as mentioned previously, overlays are shared by cities. So those forests in the overlap have count their health bonus (and happy bonus, if you preserve them) twice.
4) Defense - it really sucks when a forest is protecting an enemy stack right next to your city.
After choosing which tiles to chop, I worry about sequencing them. If the mines are more urgent than the hammers, I'll normally go hills first (which also saves a turn moving into the forest a second time). If the hammers are urgent, I'll look at the fastest paths, and usually pick one that ends on the right hill.
I think either the plains+hill tile northeast of the horses, or the grassland+hill tile southeast of the horses.
Both put the horses in the inner ring, and save you a road. That translates to making sure you can build Immortals in the capital right away.
The north east location gets a free hammer/turn by settling on the brown hill, and is a little bit closer to the target. The south east location can work the bananas (eventually) and has green tiles available -- it's not going to be a total drag on your nation until Biology comes in.
I'd go south east, myself, guessing that if you can't capture Ulundi with the green hill, then you can't capture it with the brown hill either.
In symbolic form:
Ulundi + Greenhillville >> Ulundi + Brownhillville >>> !Ulundi + Greenhillville
Anything that exposes your thought process is a great method. Among other things, it saves a bunch of questions when the audience identifies a mistake that you recognize -- we can skip past all of the "what were you thinking?
" and get on with the analysis.META: I'm not too keen on screenshots of the tech screen -- it's really not all that well designed for presentation, and we readers don't need to click on it to produce queues of techs to research. The resulting picture is not worth 1000 words.
Much better for us to just list the techs, and number them when you are describing the sequence.
Good. Here's a question to consider: how does researching Pottery contribute to your plan to rush Shaka?
Pottery is a tremendously important technology to discover. But is it urgent? An important principle -- especially at higher difficulties -- is "that which can wait, must wait."
Broadly, when you ask yourself if a technology is urgent, you normally find an answer in one of three categories
1) Yup, it's urgent.
2) Nope, it's not urgent
3) Nope, it's not urgent, but nothing else is either, and this is the best path to the next milestone.
In the opening, a city can hit diminishing returns on food fairly quickly, because the size of the city gets throttled by the happiness cap. So I often try to sneak in an early warrior to keep the citizens from getting cranky.
In a start with lots of food, working all the improved food tiles to train workers and settlers can be strong. In games where your early plans are peaceful expansion, improved food can be swapped to another nearby city -- as a matter of efficiency, it's important to "always" work your best tiles, but it's not so critical to always work them in the closest/strongest city.
"Food is life." But for rushes, the limiting factor is normally hammers. Surplus food can be converted to hammers, up to a point, but spending more hammers to get more food than you can convert into hammers isn't maximizing your hammers. (there's some mitigation, of course, since you'll want that surplus food eventually).
Slavery doesn't offer any passive benefit, you you can wait until you are ready to enjoy the active. That means, among other things, having builds that you want to produce with the whip. Warriors and scouts generally aren't worth it.
Anarchy craters your city production and yields for a time, but your units are unaffected. Ideal times tend to be immediately after producing a worker or settler -- you get the immediate benefit of the unit, and the production benefit for the next unit.
For Spiritual leaders, I generally advise new players to sneak into slavery immediately. Playing anybody else, I've been known to put a sign on the map so that I see it as the unit travels past it.
On chopping: the health benefit from the forest is about the only thing a plains tile is good until the mid game, so I normally chop those tiles later (if at all).
Some things to consider when choosing which tiles to chop.
1) The improvement that will replace it. My usual ordering in the opening is grassland+riverside+hill, grassland+hill, grassland+riverside, grassland. Mines are usually stronger than cottages, so I'll prioritize those tiles.
2) Movement - two move units like open tiles. This is less of a concern when the road network is in place.
3) Overlap - as mentioned previously, overlays are shared by cities. So those forests in the overlap have count their health bonus (and happy bonus, if you preserve them) twice.
4) Defense - it really sucks when a forest is protecting an enemy stack right next to your city.
After choosing which tiles to chop, I worry about sequencing them. If the mines are more urgent than the hammers, I'll normally go hills first (which also saves a turn moving into the forest a second time). If the hammers are urgent, I'll look at the fastest paths, and usually pick one that ends on the right hill.
I think either the plains+hill tile northeast of the horses, or the grassland+hill tile southeast of the horses.
Both put the horses in the inner ring, and save you a road. That translates to making sure you can build Immortals in the capital right away.
The north east location gets a free hammer/turn by settling on the brown hill, and is a little bit closer to the target. The south east location can work the bananas (eventually) and has green tiles available -- it's not going to be a total drag on your nation until Biology comes in.
I'd go south east, myself, guessing that if you can't capture Ulundi with the green hill, then you can't capture it with the brown hill either.
In symbolic form:
Ulundi + Greenhillville >> Ulundi + Brownhillville >>> !Ulundi + Greenhillville
