Future Strategic Blueprint, or How to Ground Enemy Bones to Dust

[Krill]

OK, we have two economic threads that are in use, one of which is mainly a mincro thread, with a smattering of macrostrategy, and the other is basically a thread detailing the current economic plan for the team to check out. What we are lacking is direction, a general strategy thread that isn't dealing with numbers, but the ideas of how to win this game. We are currently in the driving seat of this game, and we need to make sure that we stay there.

So, this thread has been created to decide what our research aims should be, when we should start spamming cities, if we want to try and push out for a land grab into someonees backyard in 20 turns time, general, long term strategy that goes beyond the current CDP plan. The Wargaming thread is going to be limited to micromanaging the aims that we decide upon in this thread into the next phase of the CDP, after the current CDP is finished.

In other words, what should we be doing in 21 turns from now?

So, post away

 

[regoarrarr]

My opinion would be to grow ASAP to the happy cap in IS and CK. I like the Great Engineer / Pyramids suggestion too.

I also think that we should be expanding towards our opponents as much as possible. I thin that with our economy running like a fine-tuned machine, that we can afford to do so.

 

[Memphus]

we want to spam cities and grab as much land as possible using our advantage culture
we DO NOTwant to be in the first war. we want to WIN the second one.

 

[1889]

Agreed, we are ahead now no need to antagonize our opponents further or give them cause to unify against us. Lets just grow and wait for our opening. Not really much more I can think to say on this topic until we have a clue about were the other teams our. In my mind it makes a big difference if our nearest, and most easily accessable, neighbor is say Saturn or Kahzahkstan. So I guess exploration should also be a high priority right now.

 

[Krill]

If we want to expand as quickly as possible, do we want to get the gold hooked up soon then? We have two possible city sites for that, on the desert east of hte gold if there is seafood there, or to use the clams.

1889 raised the issue of sending out 2 triemes, or possible galleys to scout with; we could use 2 galleys to ferry units over to gold and clear the coastal route, thus scouting out the possible Moai sites to see if there is seafood east of the gold, then bringing them back, placing an axe on each (more if we wanted) then scouting east and west.

 

[Memphus]

gold city should be city #7 IMO

#4 Sheep
#5 My choice for IW but also another cottage site
#6 Gems (deep in the jungle) as this adds a bonus to our economy right off the bat (working the gems)
#7 Gold
#8 Roadblock city. by then we will have the required troops to support.

 

[Ronnie1]

Part of MY problem with coming up with a long term strategic look at this game is that we still don't know the map very well.

IMO, we need to get more exploring done ASAP, both by water and land. Once we know more about the lay of the land and our trading options, it will be a lot easier to come up with long term plans.

So in the short to medium range plans....Libraries where we have food to run 2 Scientists to get at least 1 academy, and possibly bulb Philosophy. We need to target the wonders that we think will speed our tech pace and/or help our economy in general. I wonder if any of the other teams have access to stone or marble, I find it a little odd that we have seen neither.

Gotta run...I will post more later.

 

[Krill]

Just a quick point: in this game, with so few teams, and fewer still that, strategically speaking, we'll want to trade with, bulbing is alot less useful than in an SP game. Admittedly, running 2 scientists in a city that we've farmed to grow to size asap, if we rush the pyramids, is tempting, but we would have to balance that to growing to the happy cap of 12 (13 with calendar).

 

[Ronnie1]

Just a quick point: in this game, with so few teams, and fewer still that, strategically speaking, we'll want to trade with, bulbing is alot less useful than in an SP game. Admittedly, running 2 scientists in a city that we've farmed to grow to size asap, if we rush the pyramids, is tempting, but we would have to balance that to growing to the happy cap of 12 (13 with calendar).

I think this argument actually SUPPORTS bulbing in specific circumstances.

For instance...Philosophy...is needed to open Liberalism, founds religion, opens Pacifism,...a very valuable tech for the 1st team to get it, it forces the other teams in the Liberalism race to either bulb it also without the religion benefit or research it the old fashioned way. Then there is Education....mostly the same argument here...in the race for Lib...the 1st to have both Philo and Edu will surely win....

 

[Krill]

Remember the lesson of the Oracle: hiding ones' intentions from the rest of the teams means they can't plan for the unexpected pwnage one is about to perpetrate on their sorry arses. Bulbing too soon gives away our intentions, and adding a GS to a city with a lib and an academy while running representation gives (9*(1+.5+.25))= 15.75 (round down to 15) beakers per turn, which is 1000 beakers in 67 turns (plus 67 hammers). Maybe adding a GS gives a little fewer beakers in the short term, but it'll keep on giving afterwards forever (add in oxford+uni and a GS gives 27 beakers per turn, it only takes 60 turns to beat the best possible amount of beakers one would get from bulbing a tech). EDIT: Admittedly, bulbing can be worked into a strategy, when it works for our agenda. Saving 2 GSes, and bulbing philo the turn before we finished paper would then allow us to burn the other one into education the next turn (or the next few turns, whenever) letting us go straight into lib. It'd require us to research less than 3000 beakers of what should be a 6680 beaker beeline (philo+edu+lib)...Actually that could be possible before t180

And the first to lib isn't necesarrily going to win; it depends how that tech is leveraged. Most it will likely give is 2500 beakers, which should be less than 10 turns research to us by that stage of the game, hopefully it's more like 5 turns (JD @ size 15 working 10 river towns, plus 3 river cottages, cow and plantationed sugar = 74 base commerce, multiply by 1.5 for 109 base commerce due to bureaucracy, times 1+0.5+0.25=192 beakers at max science, never mind all our other cities. And that is, I think, fair for turn 180, we could also beat it).

 

[AutomatedTeller]

Not only that, a GS adds a terribly needed hammer to a hammer poor city that will have to build stuff later.

 

[Krill]

Well, back to focusing slightly on the nearer term future...

Looking at the eastern lands, we have very little food there, so it looks like all of that needs to be irrigated and not cottaged. The dotmap below has two cities on it, both coastal, one of which seems to be a decent produiction city (blue) and the other one a half decent commerce producer that gets gold (red). Unfortunately, which ever way we split it, we have to use the wheat tile for a horse city, and if we do that, then we are left with 1 coast city, and another inland city that basically is building land units in a part of the map where it'll take them a minimum of 10 turns to get to a front city; it's doubtful we could even use both cities to launch a navel invasion without getting ships fropm IS/sheep because the gold city is frankly an awful hammer producer. We would have though, to good naval production cities on the eastern and western most edges of our empire, in sheep and blue respectively.

If we went with a single city to grab both horses and gold, then we are left with very few irrigateable tiles to use, and limit ourselves to one city as we could no longer plant a city for the clams.Also, as soon as we get a city down for the rice east of IS, we would only need one unit to fog bust the tiles between the eastern cities and our core.

A downside to this: if we settled city 5 at the site Memphus suggests (which is the better long term site, and cottage, site) we would have to wait until the second border pop of city 5 to grab horses. This is somewhere between 35 and 50 turns, ie between t110 and t125, unless we found a food resource near the southern horses and could settle a city there (I think Sullla may have purposefully put the strategic resources in pretty naff spots though that lack food, hoping that we would all have a nice pleasant game where no one got hurt...) Admittedly, from t81 we are looking at just throwing out a settler every 4 turns that we need to out of CK, so our only problems with settling cities are paying for them, but a happy cap of 13, JD and city 5 working 10 cottages apiece kinda makes that not so bad (and if we really need to, we can get the collosus and just work the water tiles in sheep/IS/any otehr coastal city)

Spoiler :

 

[regoarrarr]

What about a city 2W of the gold that takes horse / wheat / gold.

Or possibly a Moai city 2E of the gold.

Or both (possibly also including your blue dot)

 

[Memphus]

This would be my proposal, where the "blue" city gets set up at a later date. But Red is a higher priority city. Yes we lose the clams but so what?
Even working just the Wheat, Gold and horses, that is still a strong city, it can then "slow gow" at +2 using coastal tiles ( lighthouse) and add commerce (colossus plug again)

 

[regoarrarr]

Right - Memphus's Red Dot is what I suggested (2W of the gold). As for Memphus's blue dot, I guess we want to think if we want one stronger city or a few smaller cities.

Not to mention that for all we know, there may be a way to get to the tiles south of blue dot that make sense for us to found a city down there.

But agreed - red now and something in the bluish area when we know more about it

 

[Krill]

Problems with that are:

• Red has 6 coastal tiles, and blocks off a city for the clams (which we need for health in our cities at size 9 before we hook up rice and corn). It has the horse, which is +1 food and +1 gold over a plains hill, but steals a +5 food tile from blue which leads me on to:
  
  
• Blue has no food. Zero, nada, needs to use 3 irrigated grasslands; quite frankly, it's naff, it's not going to be a good production city, and only has 5 coastal tiles. We'd be building it simply to stop anyone else from having that space.
  

So in that scenario, we have no eastern naval production city, and the red city is no better a gold producer than the blue city in the picture I posted (worse at size 7+). 10 coastal tiles and 1 sea tile in that picture, max with collosus of 43 gold from the sea.

In the the scenario I posted, we have 12 coastal tiles and 7 sea tiles (3 gold w/collosus), max of 69 gold from the sea w/Collosus. Clams for health/trade after we hook up rice and corn, but more importantly gives us 2 productive city sites. We can get both up and running quickly using 2 workers and a workboat, using them both to fund our expansion, especially if we build the Collosus (I'm going to post a new take on that shortly as well). Red in mine isn't a drag on our economy after a granary and lighthouse are chopped out (and there are 4 forests to use to that end). Red in mine is capable of 25 hammers per turn at size 12, without a forge, or could be placed into a commerce configuation making 31 commerce per turn (plus trade routes) from the sea.

 

[Krill]

ON the issue of the Collosus or getting a GS out of Sheep:

If we are going to expand quickly, using CK to build settlers and IS to build the military to protect them and workers, then we are going to have to fund the expansion someway. Producing a GS to use as an academy, when we have our science slider down at 30% isn't that good, the collosus otoh to give us up to an extra 30 commerce per turn from the sea would be much more useful. If we don't go for the HG in IS (and if we are expanding, we won't have time to) then we would have longer to get out a GS before the second GE popped, so we could use JD to make the GS, but when we get a raised happy cap we could stop using the scientists for a little bit to grow quicker to the happy cap and then reapply the scientists, thus limiting the slowed growth of our cottages. This would be best if we went IW>writing (we've still not decided for sure yet, and it is far enough off that we could change to Sailing, though personally I don't see a reason to), as we could get the lib out quickly with 1 chop if necessary.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

That's all pretty marginal land - I think the city that gets clams and gold is a good one. Beyond that, a city SE of the horses and SW of the wheat, or even between them, will make a decent production city - can build a granary and cats until we get windmills and grow it larger.

That leaves a coastal city for later, which might be conquering a barb city. With our UB, marginal coastal cities become reasonably powerful.

 

[Krill]

That's all pretty marginal land - I think the city that gets clams and gold is a good one. Beyond that, a city SE of the horses and SW of the wheat, or even between them, will make a decent production city - can build a granary and cats until we get windmills and grow it larger.

That leaves a coastal city for later, which might be conquering a barb city. With our UB, marginal coastal cities become reasonably powerful.

Alot of our looks to be marginal because of the lack of food; south of that eastern copper has no food that we can see (we might get lucky and find some next turn), the eastern annex has 2 visible food resources, that little northern desert may have sea food, and if it does, it's a possible contender for Moai (if not then IMO clams would be the next best contender).

However, other parts of our land look to be very good, for example a plains hill city south of the gems with corn and banana looks to be a very solid border city to get planted and growing asap; it could easily build a force on it's own to defend that corner of our empire, maybe it is even a contender for the IW as it has a minimum of 5 grass hills and 2 plains hills, and plenty of food.



Now, regoararr commented earlier that we should grow towards our enemies; that would require us to plant cities to the south of city 5, and south of CK (gems, and ultimately that city site), but we also need to consider others settling our eastern lands by a naval route, especially if we are taking their land as proposed. So, we would need to annex the eastern lands in fairly short order. Our economy could probably support 8 cities, more if they were easily cottageable cities, but unfortunately for us we don't seem to have easily cottageable land. But what we do have are a couple of nice coastal city sites, the Financial trait and up to 30 turns of being the only team with Metal Casting Each population grown in the eastern two city sites can work coastal tiles while growing, and there are enough forests to chop to get a granary and lighthouse in both very quickly, and that, combined with JD and city 5 being cottaged is enough to support 12 cities without courthouses, should give us an economy larger than any other two teams combined.

Which brings me to the Collosus: the numbers I posted earlier in the thread for the different levels of commerce generated by Mine and Memphus' proposals were calculated with the Collosus being present. Here are the numbers without the Collosus:

Commerce

Memphus: 31 commerce (43 with Collosus) (gold size 7)
Krill: 42 commerce (69 with Collosus, representation) (gold size 11, wheat size 9)
40 commerce (63 with Collosus only)


So, as you can see the Collosus doesn't make a massive difference to Memphus' plan (39% increase), but does in mine (64% increase with rep, 57.5% without). This doesn't take into account the increased commerce in sheep (an extra 7 commerce) when it is working all of the coast while growing.


And AT is right, that what are mediocre coastal cities are going toebcome alot more powerful the longer this game goes on with the dyke, and when astro comes around we are going to want alot of coastal production, which is much better than relying on IS to build all or the majority of the boats. A city without any food in the south part of that eastern land is not going to be a good production city, it really needs that wheat to be a competitive city. So here are the production numbers:

Production (without bio, with windmills as required, working the gold)

Memphus: red, 16 hammers, blue, 13 hammers (assuming full fat cross)
Krill: blue, 11 hammers (without Moai), red, 24 (all mines).

And as my proposal has more coastal tiles, the production increase from the dyke would favour my proposal more. Also, My blue site has 11 coastal tiles (7 coastal, 4 sea), making it a possible Moia city (only city that could have more coastal tiles is a city on the northern tip of the desert with 14, 9 coastal, 5 sea), whereas Memphus' have (5+1) coastal tiles in the red city and 5 coastal tiles in the blue.

 

[Krill]

Has anyone not figured out the arguments against this plan yet? I can think of at least 3, with a fourth being a collorary.