Foundation and Empire #3

[Um the Muse]

Fairly common for southern resources -- notice that the wheat and the pigs at Satsuma have the same problem.

So does the northernmost rice in your capital. Further evidence that it's the interference from the invisible interface, maybe.

I think it is just being covered up; notice that we have the same shape here as on the Sugar. Maybe that indicates that resource bubbles should be turned off for screen captures of the city?

On second look, I guess you're right. As long as the totals are right, I don't think that it matters whether you have resource bubbles inside of the city on or off. It does look less cluttered, but it's not a big deal, imo.

I'm just wary of times when the computer cheats you out of stuff. And no, that's not the only time I've discovered glitches. I once had this weird bug where my ships would bombard my own cities instead of entering them.

So, how's that "Play the Map" thread coming along? Just curious

 

[The Oz-Man]

"Tupac has completed Notre Dame" is the best part of that screenshot.

I know it's probably just a multiplayer game or something, but man, I don't even WANT an explanation.

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Math -> Sailing -> Calendar takes a long time; there wasn't going to be much time left on the clock, so I decided to push all the way through to T115.

Taking care of the suspense first:

The last few turns were a push to get from #2 in power to #1. In fact, according to the charts, all four of us on the island are pretty close in Power right now.

I've been running scouts around to get a sense for the map. Kublai Khan is in bad bad shape; his capital is on a peninsula with a desert between him and Chuck, and no room at all for a useful cities. He's got four now, but they aren't going to help him. He has managed to get some Kesheks up, so could potentially harass HRE a bit, but it won't save him.

Hannibal is a bit behind in cities, but us other wise doing reasonably - he flashed a catapult through my borders near the end of the game. But he's made been blocked by that southern city of mine, and probably won't be able to beat me to the other good lands there.

Red dot is my next target. The barbarians have archers on that hill, so I'm not in a hurry - if Hannibal beats me to it, so be it. That green river to the south east has sheep at the end of it, so there's a third city to place.

Charlemagne is the only real threat - he backwards, thanks to Imperialist expansion, but he hasn't been able to keep his GNP up. If he's given time to recover, he'll place second.

Here's a look at the capital, in now happier times

I replaced one of the two cottages on the dyes, and left the other because it was about 20 turns from promoting. There's already a team of workers at the second Spices.

Here's the overview for the rest

Here's a look at the builds thus far

The barracks is a bit weak - I'll want to have them when I run out of land to claim, but I've got at least four locations to try for right now, so my offensive war shouldn't be soon.

Still not enough workers, of course - I was doing fine until calendar hit, and then of course everything needed improving at once. Given where the happy cap is right now, it's not going to get better for a while.

Going forward, what next?

Code of Laws (due at T120) for a start. Primarily because it is on the way to Civil Service, but also because the religion is still available. Some courthouses would be nice, though they are still pretty expensive.

More settlers - two for the north, two for the south.

More workers - probably another 6. Ow.

More troops! Some spears, I think, although given that I'm in a commanding position it might make sense to get some insurance by researching for Archery.

Alphabet? Given the GNP of the other guys, there probably isn't much more than scraps to trade for right now, but it's another weapon to help control the diplomatic picture.

 

[The Oz-Man]

Now that it's not spoiling anything, I'll say that I played from the first save here and founded in roughly the same order. What was really funny on my playthrough is that Kublai ended up founding Judaism, which was the only religion on the continent for a looooooooooong time.The result was that Kublai--hemmed in on that lousy peninsula of his--ended up being the big dog on the continent just by leveraging shrine income.

Actual, not revealed yet map spoilers:

Spoiler :

Won by UN cheese in 1790. The other continent has Darius, who had been warring with Huayna and Monty off and on all game. Vassal'd the continent, ran Free Religion, gifted Lib to Darius, bam, favorite civic bonus plus trades all game plus phony war with his neighbors. Easiest diplomacy ever.

 

[cseanny]

@ VOU

Even though you've played through til turn 115 I'm still a bit curious if you gave any initial thought and actual planning for Monarchy instead? You just need to compromise some initial city placements to avoid the jungle till you get some good vertical, production, and research starts booming. The alternative, as you've already pointed out ends up taking quite a few turns to get sailing/math/calendar.

I know your trying for a simplistic, straightforward, and easy way to approach the game so the newer players can succeed but I'd still be curious as to your thoughts on it. I'll just say, that I don't think it was a bad tech path, after all, there are a lot of calendar resources out there......but I'm not convinced it was necessarily the best route with this particular map.

Would like to hear some REASON, lol (pun intended baby!)

Oh yea, I love your post and threads......always very informative and quite useful. Great learning tools.

I'll say that I played from the first save here and founded in roughly the same order.

I played from the beginning too but I opted for an early Monarchy path. Here's my AD 800 save if anyone's curious!, or not

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Even though you've played through til turn 115 I'm still a bit curious if you gave any initial thought and actual planning for Monarchy instead? You just need to compromise some initial city placements to avoid the jungle till you get some good vertical, production, and research starts booming. The alternative, as you've already pointed out ends up taking quite a few turns to get sailing/math/calendar.

I really didn't give it more thought than you saw here, but more for the opposite reason - if Calendar isn't strong than Monarchy on this map, then I probably need to take Calendar out of the list of choices at the fork.

Again, one of the reasons that I'm reporting on games, rather than writing a strategy article first, is to figure a lot of this stuff out.

OK, let's see what we can work out...

Monarchy has a lot of the same problems that calendar does here - it doesn't go anywhere particularly useful (Feudalism? maybe if we are thinking about knights, or vassals. Divine Right? no). The Priesthood path doesn't open anything up because there are no religions.

I suppose we could go up through Monotheism, since the religion was still available and Masonry isn't completely useless - but it's not a strong line if the religion has been taken.

Direct advantages that Calendar has over Monarchy
1) improved food in the capital
2) improved commerce in the capital (not as much as I had expected, of course, because the dyes had been cottaged)
3) trade assets

On a more strategic level, Hereditary Rule is about unbalanced amounts of happy -- you distribute your obsolete units among the cities that can best take advantage of growth, and leave your smaller production cities to simmer at a lower production cap.

The extra cap is going to be most important in cities with a long tail - lots of moderate tiles to run, it's going to be a lot less important in cities that are struggling for food.

I suppose you could argue here that it fits - Kyoto, Kagashima, and Magyar want to spread their wings, where Tokyo is constrained by food, Osaka ought to prioritize production anyway, and Satsuma is producing most of its awesome from a small number of resource tiles anyway.

With Gold, Gems, and Ivory, it may be that pursuing happy is the wrong choice anyway -- after all, we're at +3 on those resources alone, +2 more with a forge. I still like Calendar for the food in Kyoto and Tokyo, but the case is certainly weaker there.


Ultimately, it comes down to this: Calendar is the natural idea in a start where you are surrounded by plantation resources. If it's a mistake to play it, then I need to rethink the fundamental ideas of what I'm doing with this series.

 

[cseanny]

I see your points but I suppose I take different views on the little details, but once again, I see either path as reasonable. I'm sure some people probably think I'm even crazy for thinking about HR on such a calendar/gold/ivory map lol. Improved food in capital with Calendar..... it's going to take an additional 300+ beakers for Calendar then the time to actually improve the resources (with limited workers and jungle over most of calendar luxuries).

Monarchy offers an alternative of throwing down some farms, way before you even get to Monarchy so that you can time the completion of the tech with vertical growth. The same can be said about improved commerce. Early populations offers the ability to work more cottages, once again, improvements that can already be waiting as growth booms. I agree on the trade aspect view but imo it's not a huge importance on this particular map (few neighbors) and level.

I ended up delaying hunting and hooking up ivory so I could produce + chop quite a few warriors to use in all my cities and still make enough axes to take over barb city. Then again, I set up my 2nd city to grab the corn/bronze/and gold with some huge production potential, especially with irrigation (30H per turn w/ forge and settled GProphet).

As far as forges go, w/out an Industrious leader or w/out excessive food that is easily available in most cities I'm just not willing to sacrifice a 4 pop whip that early in the game. And yes, we eventually need it for the UU but its quite a sacrifice to research it at a point in time (imo) when it takes a lot of turns due to limited research. After CS your high pop capital and other cities can usually make MC a 3-5 turn tech. Plus it's just a matter of how much time and how many turns you have to work with for your chosen strategy. My chosen strategy was to beeline to Nationalism w/out Paper/Educ/Lib so I could draft/whip a large Samurai army. Forges are great for whipping but I just didn't have the time to make all the buildings you would ideally want. Actually, in most of my games I'm usually infrastructure light until after my 1st big drafting war. Usually just the basic granary, barracks, theater, and colosseum in draft cities and only a granary and library in commerce cities. The capital and one good production city will get a forge but thats usually about it.

My rule of thumb for Monarchy revolves around when I think I can trade for it in conjunction with what the map offers (equally as important as the level you play imo). On Emperor and below if you want it early you usually end up having to research it yourself. If the map offers some nice happiness luxuries, not too much jungle, and lots of room to expand then I'd dump Monarchy in most cases and just grab all the land and catch up later, otherwise I think it's normally a better idea to aim for early growth.

I noticed your turn 115 save and I was looking at some of my saves and the closest I have is turn 123. I'll attach so we can see the strengths and weaknesses of both tech paths, both of which are perfectly fine paths imo too, lol!!

Anyways, I'd be curious to see what your thoughts are, just in general about my response because it's something that I and I'm sure, a lot of other people struggle with. The struggle would be choosing the correct tech path after writing........

 

[Um the Muse]

While I agree that Calendar was superior to Monarch at this point, I found it interesting that you didn't even bring up the diplo aspect to HR, which I consider the tipping point on whether or not HR is worth using.

Speaking of diplo, what happened that made you discount CoL for the religion, like you'd suggested? Were you building the Oracle?

Caste would probably have been worth considering here, too. Course, it might violate your "keep it simple, stupid" principle, so your call whether you even want to discuss it. But you've got low food except for two spots that require border pops to get fish. Sounds like it'd be worthwhile.

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

Monarchy offers an alternative of throwing down some farms....

That's so - on the other hand, reducing the complexity is part of the objective here.

I set up my 2nd city to grab the corn/bronze/and gold with some huge production potential, especially with irrigation (30H per turn w/ forge and settled GProphet).

Yup - and grabbed the early Stonehenge, which is a good play. Out of bounds for me, but reasonable.

As far as forges go, w/out an Industrious leader or w/out excessive food that is easily available in most cities I'm just not willing to sacrifice a 4 pop whip that early in the game. And yes, we eventually need it for the UU but its quite a sacrifice to research it at a point in time (imo) when it takes a lot of turns due to limited research. After CS your high pop capital and other cities can usually make MC a 3-5 turn tech.

To a large degree it's related to the earlier question on Monarchy - are you trying to lift everything, or are you emphasizing some cities at the expense of others.

Earlier CS goes especially well with a mega capital, and the fact that you took the time to pop a Great Scientist -> Academy reflects this. But if you aren't going to make that play (and I believe a review of these articles will show that GP tend to be rather sparse on my line), I think it's a lot less clear.

Anyways, I'd be curious to see what your thoughts are, just in general about my response because it's something that I and I'm sure, a lot of other people struggle with. The struggle would be choosing the correct tech path after writing........

I think the problems in choosing the tech path after writing are generally the same problems that players have everywhere.

1) What's my plan?
2) What are all of the moves in support of that plan?
3) Can the plan actually succeed?

(1) is where I see most new players get stuck; they are making fun moves, until all of a sudden Monty is rolling in to capture all of their pretty toys

2 and 3 are where the complexity come in; and that's largely about understanding a lot of different game mechanics, which is where things become overwhelming (take a count at the number of articles in the war academy).

Some of it is familiarity (ie - knowing that one possible idea is to make a super capital), and a lot of it is experience (should I take path A, or path B? Path A worked better this time, but is that general, or an accident of these particular circumstances?)

Come to think on it, that may have been why I was having trouble at that point in this game - letting the happies distract me from the main plan (LAND).

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

While I agree that Calendar was superior to Monarch at this point, I found it interesting that you didn't even bring up the diplo aspect to HR, which I consider the tipping point on whether or not HR is worth using.

Keep it simple, stupid. I've been considering diplo off the table (which is also why Alphabet hasn't gotten any attention)

Speaking of diplo, what happened that made you discount CoL for the religion, like you'd suggested? Were you building the Oracle?

A few things happened. One is that I didn't recognize how much I was going to expand until later. Courthouses aren't particularly appealing to me at 2g/turn; I'm not going to use caste (complexity), and I wasn't proceeding directly from there to Civil Service. I wasn't playing Roosevelt again

The first point is probably the largest - I didn't re-evaluate it after T70, or after I founded Satsuma and discovered profitable lands in the south.

Would I have changed the plan? I'm not sure. The upside of a mono religion is that the diplomatic picture gets easier. But what's not clear is whether it's going to help the neighbors more than it will help me.

As it happened, when I continued playing through the next few turns, the religion was still available when I hit CS. :eyeroll: