600BC: Worker at Havana switched to Archer. (Rationale? Pottery due in three turns! Archer will finish in three turns. ... You'll see why.)
575BC: Confucianism (from Oracle) founds in Santa Rosa. I send the missionary to the capital (although with four religions already present, he may have a tough time getting folks to listen!)
Swap state religion to Christianity.
525BC: Discover Pottery, start Sailing. Archer trains in Havana, start GRANARY. Swap to Granary in all cities.
475BC: Our mission to Havana FAILS. The folks there, already content to worship the Hydra, were disinterested in the latest fads.
Yes folks, it becomes increasingly difficult to spread religion, the more religions already present in a city. NO chance of failure if the city has no faiths, but more and more chance, the more faiths already present. I've gotten all seven religions to spread to a city on several occasions, but typically, four or five is a more practical ceiling. If you are running a multireligious strategy for extra happiness, you may tend to push harder at cities with richer food sources. Slow growing, low food cities won't need as much happiness, why burn shields trying to force feed new beliefs to them? (Missionaries cost 40s apiece!)
The key thing for us here will be to build a shrine to each Hydra head and concentrate on spreading those three faiths to every city we own, and only spreading the "extra" faiths to large cities that can use the extra happy -- as needed.
Then Wall Street will work wonders (no pun intended) with the Shrine income!
ph34r the might of Clerics With Portfolios(TM)!
Chief Sirian orders intensive use of forced labor to construct a granary.
The happiness penalty (which lasts ten turns) will fade away before the city could feel any pinch. So we are trading one population point for some shields. It's a pretty good bargain at small towns, but you have to be running Slavery civic, which means you can't be running Serfdom or Caste System. Slavery is my favorite of the early labor civics, because I tend to push harder at expansion than most, and you need to whip those granaries, obelisks, courthouses, etc, to get those new colonies up to speed faster! That is, if you have food bonuses around. (Slow growers, the whip is too painful!)
You can't overdo the whip, though. If I whip again next turn, it's more penalty! The "clearing away" of the second whip penalty doesn't begin until the first one is gone! So if you whip three times in three turns, you will take thirty turns to clear it all away! The Whip is a good strategic tool for the early game and even in to the early industrial period, if you are continually expanding to new cities as your economy allows. Higher difficulty levels, it becomes more valuable because your cities cap out sooner: less "free" health and happy, less chance to found a religion, more trouble competing for resources.
450BC: Complete Granary in Havana, start Archer.
425BC: So much for "White Dot":
Still, gaining Pink Dot at expense of White Dot was a great trade for us.
Vicky may get itchy once she has no more room to expand. Notice that she is aleady connecting her Horse source at York? I'd feel a lot more comfortable if we had some Spears in our front line cities! After Sailing, I'm going to go for Iron Working.
I whip the Granary at Santa Rosa, then will wait for the city to regrow before starting a worker.
400BC: Train Archer in Havana, start Warrior. (I'm -way- bigger on early military than Sulla realizes! At least for this situation!)
375BC: Discover Sailing, start Iron Working. Train Warrior in Havana,
start Lighthouse.
A warrior? WTH is that? Well... You'll see. We'll be running Hereditary Rule for a goodly while, when we get to it, and the extra units bring extra happy in a location of your choosing! Plus they are good "emergency backup" for surprise attacks. You may need a big wad of dough to do it, but I've upgraded Warriors with guns and been -very- happy to do it, pulling an extra unit out of thin air, more or less, when attacked unexpectedly.
Meanwhile, this warrior is sent east to set up as a lookout in the hills, to spot barb threats sooner and "establish our presence in the area". (Does that actually mean something?? Well, yes!)
I also have a warrior in the north, perched on a forested hill, keeping watch up there. Right before he arrived in position, though, a barbarian warrior spawned up there, and so good thing we had EXTRA archers around to respond to this invader!
350BC: Since Sulla ran overtime, I'm not going to play nine turns. I'll just go ahead and play fourteen, get us to some round numbers that make sense, and we'll see how that goes.
275BC: Invading barbarians engage our archers near Green Dot. We win.
Santa Rosa trains Worker, goes back to Barracks construction.
250BC: Havana completes Lighthouse, starts Archer. Swap to max food!
Sulla wants to chop those forests, but I don't see the point. We have FIVE 3/0/2 plots on the lake, and the farms he wants to build would be 3/0/0 plots until the end of time (Biology tech!) I think we should instead not chop any of those forests! Each one is worth 0.4 Health bonus, so you get a free health at 3, 5, 8 or 10 forests in range of your city. Ten is like incredible, and you'd have to chop some, I'd think, but I've seen 8. 5 is doable. We have four here to start, and no pressing need to get rid of them. The time to burn forests for mad early chopping is usually earlier than this. Can be worth to chop them ALL down in some cases, but you really have to make it count.
Instead, my hope is to let the forests grow. There are four different forest plots who could "expand" to the green-circled plains plot, if we avoid building anything (even a road) there. If it doesn't happen, we can chop one of the four forests, probably the one on the hill.
Free health may mean free food! If we can gather the happy to match. Not doing us any good now, but neither will Sulla's farms.
Note you can only build a Lighthouse if adjacent to SALT water. To get the 3-food lake tiles, you have to be adjacent to the ocean, plus also have some lake plots in range.
At max food, Havana grows to max happy in just two turns. And yes, we have a granary in place, so half of that new food will be saved.
Santa Rosa still has three more turns of Slavery Memory.
So I time it to grow in three turns, as well, at which point I recommend starting a Settler. Santa Rosa is better as a specialized city churning workers and settlers for us for a while than producing military or missionaries.
How can I tell there are three turns to go on the whipping memory? Other than having written down the turn on which I whipped? The slavery button near the bottom of the city zoom. It will say 10 turns if there is NO memory, and anything higher than ten shows turns left until the memory is gone. 13 shown in that box means (13 - 10) turns to go, or three turns.
Does the game feel well paced, compared to Civ3 ?
(Just kidding!) Monarchy is next for Hereditary Rule, which we'll need for sure with our general lack of happiness resources here. As for iron, do we have some?
Thanks for all of your hard work!
