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

[Krill]

It's the top 5; only cities that need the happiness are Sheep, city 5, JD, and the 2 eastern coastal cities, all for working coast or cottages except possible 5, for working specialists; CK and IS can sit at size 7 and 10 (size 10 in IS forge for gold+gems, ivory), working just hills and food (and the engineer in IS).

 

[Krill]

Here is a screenshot of the lands we have discovered, at a slightly better resolution than the previous ones, so we can erefer to it more easily for dotmapping purposes. Thanks to Memphus for taking those screenshots yesterday, I corrected a fair few mistakes in the sim, and used the greater resolution to make larger map.

Spoiler :

Our build orders and worker orders are pretty much locked in until around turn 78/79 for IS and CK respectively, after that we don't have anything writen down. We need to decide where the next few cities are going to go, how we want them to get there, how many defences we want for them, get a basic idea of the numbers of workers we will need, and how much effort we want to give to scouting.

OK, so, that's quite alot. But we will have quite alot of production to throw around. We should have a solid plan in place for t71, because that is the turn that IW finishes and we start researching for writing, or sailing, whatever. The fifth city should be planted on t74, with any luck.

So discuss:

 

[Dreylin]

Well it seems to me that a serious scouting effort is in order in the not too distant future.East and South of the Banana should be a priority to uncover, and then another strip of land to the South to help us finalise our immediately Southern city sites.

We have one long-distance explorer out West, and I agree with M_H that we should send another South along the river - I think that is our best bet of finding another civ via a lands route.

We might also want to be thinking of getting a WB or Galley up to the NW, as we have not found a land route to the next civ anti-clockwise from us.

 

[Krill]

I'm currently thinking that 3 galleys should do the trick; first one sends and axe and a settler to gold, and returns. Second one takes 2 workers, returns, third one takes another axe and settler, returns.

After returning, the first galley takes axe and scout to the west, the second one takes and axe and scout to the east, third one we can use to protect the western border, and IS can get out 3 triremes, two for the east, one for the west.

Downside is that it would take until turn 100 to get this stuff started, but that's just the coastal scouting; that would be in conjunction with scouting the land with other units. Whichever way you look at it our cities are busy until around turn 80 anyway, and only way to change speed up scouting is to slow settling city 6 and getting the gold online etc. But it'll take to turn 81 to get sailing unless we go IW>sailing (and if we do that, then we may want to build a worker in JD at size 6 before it goes unhappy).

 

[1889]

How many scouting units can we afford?

 

[Krill]

Afford as in paying gold for them? We are already paying 1 gpt for our units, we need to expand so we don't pay as much.

Afford to build? Depends how fast we want to expand; the slower we expand the more scouting units we can afford. Between t79 and t102, we make something like 1000 hammers worth of production out of IS and CK, so we can afford to build quite alot.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

I'm not sure that sending a ship to our east and then south is all that important - we already know that Kaz is down that way and a scout going south along the river is going to run into them or the other team they have contacted before we can get a galley that way. Eventually, yes, we'll want that covered, but I think we want it covered by a trireme to kill the barb galleys we'll get.

a ship to the west makes more sense and will allow us to send our western scout more SW. I'd prefer a trireme to a galley - I think we can do with 1 galley for short range unit shuttling. Galley's die to barb galleys a distressing amount of the time...

 

[Krill]

The advantage of a galley to an trireme is that the galley can carry two units, one to drop off and start exploring deep into the land fromn another start point, and a scout/archer to just pop out onto hills to give a better understanding of the coastal lands, whereas the Trireme just shows the basic coastal route. We will definately want triremes at the borders of our lands however for defense.

Oh, and I may show you guys something special over the weekend...just need time to perfect it a little, and finish the god damned essay...

 

[Krill]

Here are some pics of what we are capable of by turn 115, 1AD, 13-14 tuns after completing Collosus and Pyramids. The last city was settled t104, I think we can improve on that...also, all of the cities except the one settled where they should be IMO, except for the horse city; that should be settled whereever the food is around that horse, so should probably be settled more to the south. CoL and masonary pre t101, anarchy t102, get a lighthouse in sheep asap, and boom, no more commerce problems. Had to get 2 workers out of JD when it got stuck at the happy cap, but tbh there isn't anything else it can really do, and it does need a lot of worker attention...

Spoiler :

 

[Krill]

OK, that I have scraped together that essay...

The above pictures show what we are capable if we really push ourselves to the limits; there is almost no leeway in the build orders if we want that. The only extra resources we would dedicate to scouting if we wanted to expand that fast would be a lone axe and a galley or three over 25 turns. So, we need to decide, what gives?

How much do we want to dedicate to scouting?

Just how far are we willing to push expansion?

Exactly where between the two do we want to aim for?

 

[regoarrarr]

I would think that we wouldn't need a whole lot of scouting besides the units we already have there. We only need to meet 3 more people (who are also searching for us).

We do need to do some scouting for city sites, and then we can start scouting around the lay of other team's lands, but I would lean much heavier towards the side of expanding

 

[Memphus]

I go with Regoarrarr here.

we have 1 scout to the far West. in jungle cover.

Our Eastern scout is invincible (pretty much) in the jungle can follow rivers south to find otehr people.

 

[AutomatedTeller]

I don't have any problem with expansion, but I would worry about that expansion - sure, it's nice to get good land, but without CoL or currency, crashing our economy that much seems like a really bad idea. I'd just as soon keep some cities closer - NE of the cap get a coastal city with the rice, for instance. I'd worry, a lot, about getting beat up in research.

 

[Krill]

That economy hasn't crashed (OK, except for one turn before we get the Collosus). In a little over 10 turns it's capable of 100 bpt. We would have CoL before turn 100; representation and caste system = plenty of beakers.

Also, the rice city sucks. It needs CS to be viable, so we can farm all of the grasslands and either work specialists or the hills.

 

[Ronnie1]

That's a pretty solid result...the only thing I see is that we are a little under the economic threshold I normally target. I am not opposed to go that low on the science slider for a little while, but I normally try to keep it above 40% at the low point.

There are advantages to growing quickly though. If we intend to end up in a true CE, the early cottages obviously pay off later. The alternative is to beeline Democracy to cut the cottage growth in half. Then go on a mid game settling spree, which is how I would probably do it in single player mode. If I were targeting the Pyramids, then I would try to get the high food cities up fast and run Caste system with lots of specialists.

 

[Krill]

The slider only matters if it is at 0% and we are losing gold. If we can tech through specialists, then the slider ought to be at 0%-20% so we can grow like a weed and outproduce everyone.

The only city sites that make sense to cottage pre liberalism (well, around then) are JD, Gems (which we could do after irrigating to get it to the happy cap) and city 5; city 5 though is the best city we have for running specialists in, and is also the prime candidate for IW, so investing in cottages that in the short term aren't as good as specialists only to find out that later on we need to raze them is counterproductive. Personally I'd like to cottage city 5 after we get a few scientists out of it if we can find another suitable IW city.

So, most of our land sucks for cottages. It is, however, prime land for windmills (CK, eastern city for copper, clams/gold, possibly corn city could run a hybrid if we don't need it on production duty). We have an overabundance of hills that are useless without farms to support them; the farms also support specialists as and when required. Later on we should definately change over to cottages, but in the short term, this land needs to be farmed for maximum growth and output.

 

[Memphus]

win in MP

as long as we don't crash to the poiint where we fall an era behind, we are ok. Our diplomatic skills will have to keep us in the teching loop.

Also 1-3 properly managed cottage city is all you need to be at the top. (palace jump to JD for example) Oxford, etc. it is all in what each of the cities do.

Think of it this way:

3 cities @ 80% produce 100 together for 80
10 cities @ 20% produce 100 together for 20 but also have 10 scientists (5 cities with 2 each) for 60 = total 80

I know which route i would choose.

*the final advantage to runnign an effective SE / CE hybrid is if you get caught of guard with a war, you can you SE cities since they grow back fast.

 

[Ronnie1]

win in MP

as long as we don't crash to the poiint where we fall an era behind, we are ok. Our diplomatic skills will have to keep us in the teching loop.

Also 1-3 properly managed cottage city is all you need to be at the top. (palace jump to JD for example) Oxford, etc. it is all in what each of the cities do.

Think of it this way:

3 cities @ 80% produce 100 together for 80
10 cities @ 20% produce 100 together for 20 but also have 10 scientists (5 cities with 2 each) for 60 = total 80

I know which route i would choose.

*the final advantage to runnign an effective SE / CE hybrid is if you get caught of guard with a war, you can you SE cities since they grow back fast.

I basically agree with this thought process....that's why I like the Mids/SE approach. I just think Currency and CoL need to be acquired fairly early to help mitigate the expansion costs.

With all that being said...I would probably trade A city for earlier exploring. Then it is just a matter of how early do we want to explore. IMHO, we are already behind because Kaz has the advantage of trading at least 2 ways to our 1. If they leverage it well, they will catch up quickly.

 

[Krill]

We can research maths, calendar, currency and CS by turn 130 without any trades.

As to scouting, we have 2 galleys to go east and west, an axe to scout with along with Stuy and Barentz. The only other units that would be nice IMO are two axes and 2 scouts to put on the galleys. Otherwise, I'm happy to wait a bit to get chariots or HAs out to scout with after t102, which wouldn't take long to overtake a prospective axe in exploration.

RE: Overtaking us in the tech lead...it doesn't matter that much, so long as no one discovers MC, or CoL by t95; we'll have 1200 beakers worth of techs to wheel and deal that are important, so ideally all we need is for Stuy and Barentz to find us some other prospective traders.

 

[azzaman333]

The economy isn't crashed until you're losing gold at 0% slider. I have no problem pushing it to the limit.