News: WOTM 34 - Starts 8 February

[babybluepants]

RULE CLARIFICATION

AlanH has revised the submission script for this game. Winning entries which fail to meet the religion requirement will still be listed as victories and ranked according to score. They will not be eligible for any awards, medals or shields, however.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Should he ever abandon his beliefs by adopting another religion or, God Forbid, Free Religion, he will most certainly not be eligible for any special honours, medals or awards.

This statement does not exclude us from running Paganism from time-to-time, after we have switched to a different Religious Civic. However, I would rather not have my game disqualified from winning a Low Award should this omission be deemed to be unintentional, so now's the time to either allow or disallow the running of this Civic.


I am somewhat tempted to go exploring with the Great People. How many turns do we have before Barb Animals will start to spawn?


Also, if my eyes do not deceive me, it looks like we were (intentionally?) given precisely "good amounts" of Flood Plains squares, in that getting even 1 more Flood Plains square in either of our second or third Cities would have resulted in one additional Unhealthiness.


Stone is currently visible, but Marble is not. Perhaps, if you are going to save your Great Engineer for a Wonder, it would be best to use him/her on a Marble-based Wonder?


With only one Coastal City, is it worth it to build The Colossus and/or The Great Lighthouse?

@DS- GE can't rush a worker even if you wanted to. Only buildings IIRC.

In that case, you could consider spawning a Golden Age with your Engineer. Each City would get up to +2 Hammers per turn towards building its Workers.

Your Workers wouldn't be able to do much at the start, besides build Roads, but perhaps connecting-up your Cities super-early is a worthwhile pursuit.

 

[babybluepants]

This statement does not exclude us from running Paganism from time-to-time, after we have switched to a different Religious Civic. However, I would rather not have my game disqualified from winning a Low Award should this omission be deemed to be unintentional, so now's the time to either allow or disallow the running of this Civic.

No issue with that. Why on Earth would you ever wanna run Paganism instead of Pac or OR, if you have the choice?

This makes me think, however, that my statement didn't specifically disallow NSR, so I'll edit for that.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Why on Earth would you ever wanna run Paganism instead of Pac or OR, if you have the choice?

This makes me think, however, that my statement didn't specifically disallow NSR, so I'll edit for that.

Well, the change that you are about to make takes care of one possible reason... getting the effect of Free Religion's multiple Religions' Culture-spreading without actually running the Free Religion Civic.

Another reason would be that you want to run a Low-upkeep Civic. Let's say that it is early in the game and you have only the choice between Organized Religion and Paganism. You've already run Organized Religion for a while in order to pump out some infrastructure but now are pumping out Military Units and want to save on the additional Maintenance Costs of a High-upkeep Civic. Paganism would save you some valuable Gold per Turn.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Stone is currently visible, but Marble is not. Perhaps, if you are going to save your Great Engineer for a Wonder, it would be best to use him/her on a Marble-based Wonder?

There is logic in that. I guess my rationale for thinking he'd build the pyamids is that the pyramids is such a useful wonder early on, and it's going to take quite a while for our culture to capture that stone (50 turns after building a library or 100 turns after building a monument). I guess it really depends how early we could make use of the pyramids and how late we can leave building them before and AI builds them.

What about the parthenon? That will give us more great people, but at a cost that some of them will be artists. Will artists be useful if you're not going for a cultural victory? I guess it depends a lot on what resources we could capture with a culture bomb or two.

Great library? Potentially very useful, but comes sufficiently late that I doubt we'd have any trouble being able to build it first on prince level the hard way.

With only one Coastal City, is it worth it to build The Colossus and/or The Great Lighthouse?

Their benefits would seem quite marginal to me. Probably a case of, only if there's really nothing else useful to build...

In that case, you could consider spawning a Golden Age with your Engineer. Each City would get up to +2 Hammers per turn towards building its Workers.

You need two great people for the first golden age in Warlords :-(

 

[Fluroscent]

Nobody has mentioned settling the engineer? I think the bonuses from turn one are going to be better than rushing a wonder later. And we have stone (although we will have to work to pop borders fast in that city), so mids are easy to build anyway. And we do not need to build a lot of workers/settlers, so the cities should have plenty of time to build wonders.
I think settling both the prophet and the engineer looks best.

Also, techwise, sailing is needed to get routes to the other two cities, and probably will help autospreading islam?

Worker or monument first in the outer cities? None of their special tiles, except gold is in the inner ring. Of course we do have wheel, so they have something to do while waiting. But monument while growing may well be better.

 

[lymond]

Nobody has mentioned settling the engineer?.

Are you crazy? I'm going to bulb Mining!

 

[Dhoomstriker]

You need two great people for the first golden age in Warlords :-(

Well, you do start with 2 Great People...

 

[Xcalibrator]

I'd definitely settle the Engineer. Probably the Prophet too, although maybe taking a chance on the shrine and hoping for religion spread would be worth it. What about building Stonehenge in the stone city ASAP to pop the borders faster? You'd get the stone hooked up faster (unnecessarily?), plus get the GPPs and help with border pops in the 3rd city. Does Warlords have the Great Wall (and what type of GP points does it provide)? If so, there's another stone-wonder for wonder spamming.

 

[Ronnie1]

Does Warlords have the Great Wall (and what type of GP points does it provide)? If so, there's another stone-wonder for wonder spamming.

Yes..> 2 GE points!

 

[shyuhe]

By the way, I don't think it'll happen but do you lose by default if the UN forces you into free religion? Thank goodness this isn't BTS where you can use spies to change someone's religion Not that I've ever seen the AI try to change my religion...

 

[Conquistador 63]

Great game concept, it will be even more fun (and resemble RL history) if Isabella starts near Cordoba. Having the Romans, Vikings, Mongols and Zulu in the game would also help to spice things a bit, for those willing to go for the otherwise easy peaceful cultural victory.

 

[adrianj]

Nobody has mentioned settling the engineer?

It's definitely been mentioned. I'm pretty certain this is the route I'll be taking. And settling the Prophet also.

What about building Stonehenge in the stone city ASAP to pop the borders faster?

This sounds like a very good idea to me

 

[babybluepants]

By the way, I don't think it'll happen but do you lose by default if the UN forces you into free religion? Thank goodness this isn't BTS where you can use spies to change someone's religion Not that I've ever seen the AI try to change my religion...

Man, you guys are such lawyers. If this happens to you, shy, AND you win a fast-finish award or a medal, I'll personally make sure the results get corrected in your favour.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

What about building Stonehenge in the stone city ASAP to pop the borders faster? You'd get the stone hooked up faster (unnecessarily?), plus get the GPPs and help with border pops in the 3rd city.

Okay, first of all, you are assuming that we won't need to build a Galley in Cairo in order to get units from our capital to our other two Cities.

Then, you're talking about walking the Engineer across the map for what looks to be about 50 squares' worth of distance (you could probably figure out a better approximation if you looked up the Inland Sea Map Script to see the map's dimensions).

That's too far to avoid Barbs, so you'll need to send your Warrior with the Great Engineer, meaning that you'll only move 1-movement-point per turn and it'll take you roughly 50 (or more) turns to get there.

By that time, you could have had 50+ Culture from an Obelisk.


So, if you're going to build Stonehenge, you'll probably be better off building it in the capital, in which case you will just have to suffer with waiting on the Obelisks in your other two Cities for border-popping.

Does Warlords have the Great Wall (and what type of GP points does it provide)? If so, there's another stone-wonder for wonder spamming.

I believe that the Great Wall provides only 1 Great Engineer Point. It's not 2 GPP to prevent you from being uber-lame with spawning early Great Engineers and gobbling-up all of the Wonders--or losing out on the same approach to an AI that builds The Great Wall first.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Man, you guys are such lawyers. If this happens to you, shy, AND you win a fast-finish award or a medal, I'll personally make sure the results get corrected in your favour.

Does this allowance apply even if you are the Secretary General and are the one to call the vote which just happens to "force" you into Free Religion?

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Okay, first of all, you are assuming that we won't need to build a Galley in Cairo in order to get units from our capital to our other two Cities.

Then, you're talking about walking the Engineer across the map for what looks to be about 50 squares' worth of distance (you could probably figure out a better approximation if you looked up the Inland Sea Map Script to see the map's dimensions).

I'm not sure XCalibrator meant using the engineer to build Stonehenge.

If I was going to use stonehenge to grab the stone, I'd build it the long way. Have Stonehenge be the first thing Cairo (the stone city) starts building right from the start, while Baghdad pumps out a couple of workers to mine the hills around Cairo. Depending on the worker actions, I imagine that should give you stonehenge by about turn 35-45.

I'm not sure whether having the stone that early would be worth the extra time it takes Baghdad and Cairo to become productive though (in particular, the delay in either city border popping to use their high-production tiles).

 

[adrianj]

I've thought about it some more. Other than the culture, which in most cases is only really interesting for a cultural victory, Stonehenge will only ever amount to 3 monuments since we're limited to that many cities. 120 gives 3x 30 monuments +8 +2(?). Not to mention the monument in the capital is basically redundant anyway. Doesn't sound particularly attractive... but I guess it's not like we have to build settlers...

Edit: Free monument from Stonehenge may also be redundant in Baghdad, if we plan to build monument here very early to expand its borders to claim the pigs.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Kinda agree. If it was just the first border pop that was relevent, then it'd be a lot cheaper to just build two monuments in Cairo and Baghdad. The real culture benefit of stonehenge is just 12 turns after it's built, it'll give you a 2nd border pop to grab the stone (if you build it in Cairo). Depending how much you value the stone, that might be worth going for, as I can't think of any other way to get the stone so early. Of course you also get an early great prophet - I'm not sure if that's an advantage or a disadvantage (a 2nd settled prophet ought to handle city maintenance costs nicely).

 

[adrianj]

Some guesswork

Building Stonehenge might complete turn 40. In which case you claim the stone something like turn 53.

Or, build monument immediately, ASAP (@3/turn = 10 turns). Completes in 3600 BC? Culture output doubles after 1000 years, which is only 25 turns at this stage of the game. Total turns to 100 culture is 10@0 (no monument), 25@1, 38@2 = 73 turns.