Jumpmasters 1B: Power is Knowledge (Vanilla, GOTM mod - Emperor - No research)

[AlanH]

Diplo: Baekje has gained Iron Working, and is still down 4 techs! Trade Masonry and The Wheel for Iron Working and his lucky gold piece. I could have traded him Masonry, Pottery and 18 gold for it, but I'd rather gain money than lose it.

Good trading

There is iron west of Canton, and northwest of Beijing. Nothing practical for us. I think archers to crush or cripple the Han before he gets iron are in order.

Or horses. It's a long way to China.

I need to apologize here. I just now saw the discussion that Alan wanted our third ring out at 11 or further

Not me! Where? When? I said no to RCP outside our five ring because they'll all be corrupt to a significant extent. The emphasis once we've built the two rings we have identified it to build on sites that can grow now and be productive later, if we build an FP in Almarikh. With a Palace in Beijing, say, with it's nearest town at radius 5, all towns at 5 or nearer from Almerikh would then be at minimum corruption. So I recommend we look for high food sites within radius 5 of Almerikh and use them for workers or pop rushing horses.

Han just developed writing. Will trade it for IW and 302 gold, or Myst +246. Strangely (to me), he'd need Myst + 10gpt +67gold for it. Seems he'd prefer straight cash. Maybe he's hostile.

No. They always add about 10% to gpt to insure against possible breach of the deal, or as interest.

I'd rather not see us give him IW, the odds of him noticing the Korean or the Baekje are slim, since the AI won't watch the straits.

Agreed we should trade Myst. I doubt if it will delay his Iron for long though. He'll be working on it now in all probability. But Myst will speed the path to Monarchy, which we'd like asap.

I think I'd prefer archers -- they'll upgrade to Khorchin for us. Mobile artillery/attackers rolled into one.

Horses are far beter now. Khorchin don't come along for a while, but we need our best attack unit now if we plan to do some enforced tech and iron trading with Han. Horses can get to him faster than archers and they can retreat. If we built archers now they'd mostly die before they upgraded.

 

[Mistfit]

Good turns Grunthex

http://www.irfanview.com/

I use this for resizing. For paint I use a bought program.

Edit: I vote for getting our rings set up before moving out to get other space. So fill in our RCP 5 then move out in a OCP fashion from there

 

[Karasu]

Looks good! :thumsup: Good trading with Baekje (btw, Baekje first appeard in GOTM24; they belong to Korean history).

I agree with completing the distance-5 ring to the north -with a new priority on the Horses town now that we know that Iron will not be available for a while; it would also be nice to settle those few cities south of KK to complete our core.

And, of course, start planning our attack on the Han.
I would favour Horsemen too, both for the immediate survivability and for the future upgrade.
So, a first sketchy idea could be:
- Stop building warriors: there is no short-term use for them; we will most probably get back to them when the MA approach and we want to use that upgrade path.
- Hook the horses and start building chariots; cross our collective fingers hoping someone discovers Horseback Riding in a reasonable time.
- We can build a few Archers as a backup in case HR is not available and we decide that a strike on the Han is absolutely necessary. As Alan said, we can expect only few of them to survive to the future upgrade.

A horsemen-based attack would be my preferred option too, in any case.

--- Roster ---

- AlanH
- Nikof
- Karasu
- Grunthex: done
- DJMGator13: UP
- Mistfit: warming up

I also alerted the iMac refugee... Expect to see him pop into the thread one of these days.

 

[AlanH]

I think I see the source of confusion. I wrote:

The next cities after yellow and green will be rank 11 or greater.

That's (corruption) RANK 11, not RCP RADIUS 11. I was trying to emphasise that RCP probably won't do us a lot of good out there. Once we get to corruption rank 11 there's not a lot of difference between 11, 12, 13 etc, so it becomes more important to place cities to grab good food (food is not subject to corruption). Then, once we get to an FP and Disc City Placement it's no longer important to keep cities at equal radius, we just want a good number of them to be at least as close to the FP as the Palace is to its nearest city.

Here's a possible dot map showing the towns we haven't settled yet (green and yellow) and some blue locations that are radius 5 or less from Almerikh. We have plenty of work to do before we start on the blue ones

Remember that any city that Han puts down will be ours some time, and represents one less settler we have to find. Don't fret about grabbing resources that we'd take a long time to hook up and may not make good use of anyway due to corruption. Doing that would just detract from our efforts to build our own core infrastructure and strength.

 

[Mistfit]

My plan for expansion would be as follows:

Ring five cities to the north:
Settle these next. Which one 1st dependent on where the settler is coming from. Although I would prolly go for the horse city 1st.

#4 and #5 cities: Finish up our 3 ring. I also think I would plan on an irrigation project to bring water to the south from Ta-Tu

6th City: Finish up our 5th ring.

After that go after the highest population possible cities.

I like the idea of letting others build our cities for us.

Workers: My plan for workers is to 1st connect all cities, and maximize unit movement between cities. 2nd connect any resources and lux. 3rd improve our core and work out.

I know that you guys know this stuff. I’m writing it to get feedback to see if my thought process is correct, to improve my game

 

[AlanH]

Agree on all except the irrigation project. I think I'd leave that until we are nearer to Monarchy. We'd have to irrigate 4 tiles, three of which don't do anything for us yet. That's 16 worker turns to add one fpt.

Oh, yes. Horses next. We need to start building our mounted research and iron exploration team.

[EDIT] Re prioriies, I'd still put food higher priority than anything else, as that's what gets us everything else. That means getting those flood plains irrigated. Roads are important, but if we road any tile we walk over then the network should happen.

 

[Karasu]

Good points, Mistfit. I will try to elaborate a bit on these...

- Settle first the closest spot to our wandering settler.
- Second spot would be, imho too, the horses. This can be the settler from Ta-Tu.
We can then start building chariots rather than warriors. We could build a couple of Archers in the meantime, I see no point in having more warriors, or defensive units for that matter.
- At this point, we could go for your '5th' spot, then '6th' and '4th' in any order.

The reasoning here is: Kazan has no more workable forests, so settling north of it won't improve its shield output -that is, the border expansion we get from founding the new city won't be too useful for our core. (EDIT: Of course it would be for the city itself...).

It is therefore more efficient to close our first ring.
As you say, bringing irrigation from Ta-Tu is probably the best way. Founding in '5th' will shorten our path to irrigating the southern wheat considerably.
This means that our worker need to move towards Ta-Tu, stopping for the necessary improvements along the way, and proceed irrigating where you marked, cross the new city and on southwards.

The improvements we need along the way south are probably the wheat on FP -which may not be a 'must', but since we are there... -and mining the grassland next to KK to turn it into a 4-turn settler factory at last.

A second group of three workers, we could mine a hill within reach of Kazan to let it get a few more shields, and proceed with improving Almarikh and our northwestern area.

 

[DJMGator13]

My official got it. I'll start playing in about an hour.

I'll back the settler up the one tile to the RCP5 location. Looks like 2 settlers are near completion to get our horse city up.

Agreed we should trade Myst. I doubt if it will delay his Iron for long though. He'll be working on it now in all probability. But Myst will speed the path to Monarchy, which we'd like asap.

Since Hans are probably researching IW after I trade for MYST should I try to get our money back by trading him the IW?

 

[AlanH]

Founding in '5th' will shorten our path to irrigating the southern wheat considerably.

True, I'd forgotten abou that city. But that means we certainly shouldn't irrigate or road in that direction until we are nearly ready to settle that city, as we mustn't waste any worker turns on the city tile. I still think irrigating to the wheat is a waste of turns, however, as you are irrigating two tiles that can't benefit for a while yet.

 

[AlanH]

My official got it. I'll start playing in about an hour.

I'll back the settler up the one tile to the RCP5 location. Looks like 2 settlers are near completion to get our horse city up.



Since Hans are probably researching IW after I trade for MYST should I try to get our money back by trading him the IW?

I'm not sure. I haven't d/led the save. Can we tell how much he values it? If he doesn't have enough cash for it then we could wait for the price to fall, or for his reserves to increase, until he does (ie when we can't take him for all he's got). If we do that the only danger is, if he meets the Baekje, we lose the deal.

 

[Karasu]

Yes, this is what I mean too.
I haven't really made any calculation on turns needed and such, but the general idea was to have our worker group (and not our entire workforce) move southwards from the furs improving tiles along the way, so that it should reach Ta-Tu by the time we are beginning settlement of the southern area.

---

Gator, you are probably right regarding IW. You can try to check their offer for IW in consecutive turns to see if it decreases, just to make sure.

 

[DJMGator13]

Can we tell how much he values it? If he doesn't have enough cash for it then we could wait for the price to fall, or for his reserves to increase, until he does (ie when we can't take him for all he's got). If we do that the only danger is, if he meets the Baekje, we lose the deal.

Based on the turnlog: "Han just developed writing. Will trade it for IW and 302 gold, or Myst +246." I'd say he values MYST higher than IW. Which is strange because TechCalc shows IW is worth more than MYST. Is it safe to assume he is researching IW currently? Would the better trade be the IW for 302gold and then sell him MYST at a monopoly price and get back hopefully half the gold?

The Hans only have 38 gold but if we trade for writing will give him alot of gold. KOR is down MYST but only has 25 gold. BAE is down POT & MYST but have 0gold.

 

[nikof]

TechCalc? Do tell! I figured there must be a utility like this around somewhere, but haven't come across it yet.

Nice playing Grunthex, and have fun DJMGator!

I have no ideas to add, other than that I fully agree with the Horse plan.

 

[AlanH]

Yeah, I'd say that clinches that he's researching iron. I must say I'm very bad at knowing what techs are worth, so please check anything I say in that respect. Where is TechCalc? If it's a PeeCee utility I guess that's why I'm not up to speed.

I've just d/loaded the file and had a peek. The iron is a looong way from his main cities. Knowing the AI it'll take them forever to hook it up. Sometimes they never do ....

I don't think it makes any difference which order you do the trades in, the net cost of Writing will be 89 gold if we give him Myst and IW as well. The only way to make it cheaper is to wait for Writing to show up somewhere else, so that we're not paying monoply money for it. But equally we could lose our monopoly price for Myst as well, and for sure the value of IW is falling as he researches it. I thnk my vote is to trade both our techs + 89 gold for Writing, but I'd be interested in Karasu's take on this. I'm here to learn as well

 

[Mistfit]

My comments on the irrigation project were for down the road when we settle city 5 and 6. Also, once we are out of despotism for the irrigation to the wheat. I think some of your comments on my plan will be very helpful.

 

[DJMGator13]

I thnk my vote is to trade both our techs + 89 gold for Writing, but I'd be interested in Karasu's take on this. I'm here to learn as well

I think that is a good plan. I'm finishing up my turns in another SG and will play this one later. So I'll see if Karasu has any different ideas.

Here is a link to TechCalc it's set up for CivIII, PTW, C3C and the individual conquests within C3C. Not sure if it's PC only.

 

[Karasu]

These discussions are the reason I love SGs... ...it almost looks like we were back at SG GOTM23 which is probably the one I enjoyed the most.

And the learning -I am here to learn too, certainly not to teach (as you probably know by the amount of unrestrained brainstorming I let myself into... ).

Regarding Tech trading... it's a nice question. This is my first experience with the 'no research' restriction, which does remove one degree of freedom from our choices.

In particular, I am not sure that we want to speed up the tech pace much -quite probably, for a military win, we would want the research to stop at the beginning of the middle ages.
Beside the tech pace, actually, we have to worry about how to steer the AI's research in the direction we prefer -by carefully trading and/or gifting techs, which is not going to be trivial.

In this sense, we should probably try to make as many contacts as soon as possible. Which means MapMaking, which in turn means that we want Writing to be around.

This, together with the fact the Han are most likely researching IW right now (I'd bet on it too), would prompt us to make full use of its trading value and get Writing right now.

Waiting for another AI to research Writing will loose us Iron Working, and I am not sure that the price drop of Writing at that point will compensate for our inability to use IW in the trade (I really don't know).

So I would be tempted to make the deal -I agree with Alan that buying Writing for Myst + IW + money should be equivalent to getting it for IW + money and taking some money back with Mysticism right after.

So the point is whether we want to save Mysticism for a later trade or not -or conversely, whether we want to give the Han a lot of gold or not...

But -to conclude this long ramble- I would do the deal and sell or gift Writing to all we know. The most likely thing that can happen is that they all start researching MapMaking, which we will be able to purchase at second or third tech price. But that's already looking a bit too far ahead.

Talking about Writing, are we playing with the 'old' rules, i.e. Writing allows trading for contacts? ( I don't remember) In this case, we may have to reconsider -even though having map trades available with MM would probably help us.

 

[AlanH]

Tech pace? probably as fast as we can go until we get to Chivalry and Invention, then stop it in its tracks if we can.

Good point on contact trade rules. It's my guess that Writing will allow them, but I don't know either. I doubt if we're going to keep them to ourselves for long whichever way it's set up. That channel is very narrow. I assume Korea and Baekje know each other, so we're looking at when one of them will meet Han. After that they'll find a way to trade Writing and swap contacts if that's allowed.

Mapmaking is where we need to get to next, and Writing will help us get there. Let's hope suicidal galleying can give us a trading edge. Should we be pre-building for a Lighthouse? That might be enough to get us a place as intercontinental tech broker?

 

[Mistfit]

When do you start planning on recruiting some "suicidal galleys"?

 

[AlanH]

Right after we get map making? Trading's the name of this game until w get to the point where our UUs can destroy the world. So we need people to trade with. So far we know three. The F10 screen says there are lots more. If suicide is the way to find them then so be it!