Sirian, if I'm reading you correctly (regarding ancient war), we should only be building defensive units during Ancient Times...so I'll stick to Spearmen (once we get BW).
As counterintuitive as it may seem, on Deity, there's no time to wait around on spears. If early war is needed vs a next door neighbor, there may not be time to wait around on swords even if you have the tech! 30 per instead of 20 per for archers, sometimes what you need most is raw numbers asap! Even warriors can sometimes suffice, depending on the enemy, and that's FOR WAR.
For military policing duty, exploration, and so on, warriors are often the best. Why? Because they are so cheap. Certainly this varies game by game, but the idea of "perfecting each unit built" does not hold as much water in reality as it might seem.
On lower difficulty you can get away with more, though, including making the idea of "building only vet units" or "building only upgradable units" work out.
Two things to keep in mind.
1) The AI doesn't count unit strength, it counts total units. It sees a warrior and a tank as THE SAME in its calculations about whether or not to be aggressive toward you. Thus, a civ with a lot of workers (which count as units) and cheap, even regular warriors, is LESS likely to be threatened and/or surprise attacked than a civ with more REAL military power, locked into fewer, leaner troops. The unfortunate part of this is that unit upkeep costs run higher for keeping more units around, but the more I move toward building more and cheaper units ASAP, the less ugly scrapes I seem to be getting into during the course of my games, WHEN my goal is peaceful early expansion. (For military game plan, this clearly won't work out. You need to build effective units for combat). The weak unit deal works sort of on the principle of the dogs who bark loudest get messed with the least by the other dogs. Ridiculous, perhaps, but there can be no doubt that it works.
2) There is no difference in the value of military units for quelling unhappy population via Military Policing (under governments that allow it), quelling resisters in captured cities, and serving as units to reduce flip chances in pressured cities. Since virtually ALL civs in any game plan will run up against some or all of these needs, at times when ANY warm body of units is as good as any other, it actually pays off for almost any civ not only to build a bunch of cheap, early, "militarily useless" regular and/or weak units, but even to KEEP THEM AROUND FOR THE WHOLE GAME, as there will inevitably be situations where it's enormously beneficial to plop a bunch of units into a city, for MP duty, for quelling resisters, or for protecting against culture flip. If you DON'T have any "useless" units around for these duties, you will have to tie up expensive, modern units for these "desk jobs".
I hate to disagree with old stalwart LKendter, but I've come to the conclusion that his passionate dislike of nonvet and weak units is one of his biggest limitations in moving to higher difficulty. I now not only allow myself to build some crap units, but do so repeatedly and intentionally as part of a grander scheme.
Now how that fits into the current Training SG is debateable. THESE AI's have no bonuses or advantages whatsoever, and won't pose the kind of threats around which my strats are based. Building spears (and vet ones) might well be even the best move here on Regent, to keep the economy lean by not supporting those "throwaway" units. On Deity, though, such a strat would qualify as
in my view. Since we're not aiming here at turning you all into Deity players, and have set more modest goals, I will do my best not to overjudge your moves based on how they would or would not fly on Deity. That's too harsh a standard, and so not appropriate. But I may, as now, interject some comments in that direction, just to let you know. And my critiques may not agree with those from other "veteran" players, since some of the things I do, or would do in solo games where I'm in complete control of everything and can thus take more risks, would be labeled :weed: by them for certain.
3500BC: Excellent planning of overall scout movements. In my own turn, I came to exactly the same conclusions for all three scouts, though I turned the Russian scout south immediately, without first going around Moscow. That's a judgement call, though. The main thing is that you decided to check on territory closer to home with that scout, to fill in, what for everybody else, remained a fog area.
3400BC: Hehe. That's why I chose English, to force all of you off any dependencies you may have formed on the "best" civ traits, religious, industrious, militaristic, scientific (in that order, IMHO). Note that this would make Egypt the strongest overall civ (IMO) not accounting for the UU's. Although maybe now you'll depend on scouts and no hostile goody huts, along with more commerce in all your cities! Haha! Well, that can't be helped. You should be able to adapt without scouts, I should think.
3350BC: Haha! You vetoed your own excellent idea of turning that W Scout south! Too bad.
You were on your way to extra praise for your scouting until then, although you'll still get one thumbs up for it.
3150BC: York finishes warrior? That's good. I did the worker first, but it's OK to get the military out there. Having at least ONE unit is a good idea in any game with Barbarians turned on. However...
York builds a Warrior..and grows. I order up a worker--but this can be vetoed by the next player.
Only if they want to add to their weed count! Haha!
As you can see throughout my critiques in the shadow thread, pretty much anything other than warrior/worker or worker/warrior up at York, after that first scout, got the weed judgement. I explained why in all the shadow critiques, but in a nutshell it boils down to the specifics of what tiles are available to York. It NEEDS to train a worker early to start improving those tiles! That you waited until after the warrior is OK, although in my game I deemed that the warrior could wait, and did the worker first. Still, you're the only player this round who dialed up the "best" combination of worker and warrior next at York, and that's worth some celebration (just don't get drunk while you're Up!)
Also thumbs up for noting to "next player" that York has possession of a tile it cannot be allowed to keep. Good job both noticing and mentioning it.
You're mistaken about getting York connected to London, that won't help its corruption at all. Corruption is a factor of distance from Palace (or FP) in combination with number of cities owned. All the warrior can do is to serve as Military Police (which would be needed in London soon) or as defense. As defense, your idea of keeping him "between cities" is unusual, and could backfire in not being able to get to where needed until the road is built, but even once the roads connect the cities, you'd have to CROSS A RIVER to get into either city, and that would leave you unable to fortify.
In this case, I think it would be best just to fortify in York, or else to go to London and fortify there to serve as MP. Either leaves one city exposed, but in THIS sitation, staying in the middle leaves both exposed, which would be worse. Without the rivers to have to cross, your idea would be more effective.
Should London build a spearman when done with the granary? I would definitely not. IF the third mine was done already, it would be seven shields per turn and done in three turns, worth doing! Since the mine is not done, a spear would be done in four turns with four shields wasted and warrior would be done in two turns but waste two shields. The settler could be done in five turns with no shield waste, AND still leaving the city at size 2 in the bargain, which would be ideal at 5 shields per turn for any kind of troop you like, AFTER the settler is done. Only cost vs the spearman is one extra turn of luxuries. One gold! Ha, that's not worth delaying city #3 by several turns, don't you think?
3000BC: Hit the wrong button? That's the one time when (IMO) it would be OK to reload from the autosave. This is the rule in the GOTM event, and something I do regularly when I botch my controls (as opposed to my game plan). This is not at all a problem if no military action happened on the turn. If the random seed is preserved (the new patch has the option not to save it in the save file, so it could change on reloading) then even if a small amount of military action took place, you could duplicate it EXACTLY and get the exact same results, so even then it wouldn't matter. However, if tons and tons of action took place, or more than you are 100% certain you could duplicate, or if the random seed is turned off, then you should eat the mistake. Make sense? Same if you think too much has been done and it's not worth your time to redo X amount of already-finished turn to undo one mistake. THIS early, that's almost surely not a problem, so it would actually have been OK (IMHO) to reload and redo that worker turn. And yes, for the record, at times I've redone as much as five minutes of game play to straighten out a button misclick (most often happens when handling a stack of workers and either the game surprisingly and unintuitively "jumps" to one not in the stack, or I miscount and issue too many orders).
Since you did not redo it, let it go this time. We'll eat the lost worker-turn. But just FYI, if I had done that and was not reloading to redo it (for whatever reasons), yes I would let the worker finish the road first rather than waste a turn (and delay ALL his future projects by one turn!) just to mine first. The mine first isn't quite that urgent.
I don't like your red dot location. It's too close to York, and there ARE other tiles with fresh water access further downriver. I won't suggest which I think best, and especially not since somehow you skipped revealing some KEY tiles in the home region before sending your scouts out. However, that tile with the red dot is surely not the best site for the next city.
I think RBD13 is the thread with my explanation about how to do a good dot map, what the factors and priorities are. That info would explain why I think your choice is not best in this situation.
Finally, yes, you too missed out on the London Growth vs Granary Completion problem. Fortunately for our official game here, that problem CAN be corrected by next player Up, if they understand what to do about it.
Overall Grade: C+
count: Four. (Scouting, Research, Analysis, York management)
count: Four. (Inefficient dotmap, iffy suggestions to next player about several things, parking military where it can defend neither city, London growth mismanagement)
- Sirian
PS: the next round is now open. Play and post as appropriate, and Mardoc can skip the 3000BC shadow turn, as he did not get his game in on time for this round. Hope you all are having fun and learning useful bits. The game marches on!
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I accidentally had the Worker build a Road (I meant to build a Mine)...and then I cancelled it, so now he can't do anything this turn! 
