RB19 - True Cultural Challenge

[pholkhero]

I would definitely go w/ Stonehenge. GP Points. Shrines. Mmmmm, Shrines.

Stonehenge, too, might be good to use the GPs to found another religion or two (or three) ~ head up the top of the tree towards CoL or Philo, and use the GP on theo perhaps?? W/stone already hooked up, how can you NOT build the 'henge?!?

 

[Compromise]

Compromise checking in quickly.

Wow! Nice progress. Way to pop that scout Sullla! (Pause for joyful reminiscence of Epic 3......and we're back.)

More thoughts, but little time to write them. I like Mining as a next tech, though.

I may have missed it if someone already mentioned it, but I don't think we'd get culture from wonders that other civs build. If this is true, then Bismark is a wonder-competitor and we can't just take the ones he builds. We might need to cripple or eliminate him early. Berlin might be a good production site too.

 

[Sullla]

No, you do not get culture from captured wonders (why would you?); this is one of the rules that did carry over from Civ3. Our variant says nothing about fighting, so we may well decide to attack Bis at some point in time in the future. Probably too early to think too much about that now, of course.

Also, with regrards to blue dot, what would you say to a suggestion of moving it 1 tile SW. The difference is (I think. Hard to tell from the picture):
plains: -1
Grass/forest:-2
Grass:-1
tundra/forest:+2
Tundra/hills/silver:1
tundra/river:1

Good thinking, but look at your own analysis there. Giving up grassland and plains for tundra just isn't a good deal. We will plop a fishing city on the southern coast at some point in time to grab the silver, but that's a low priority at the moment.

 

[·Imhotep·]

Lurking - of course

 

[knupp715]

You're not the only one.

Lurker Mode ON/

 

[pholkhero]

Lurker mode: off

Probably too early to think too much about that now, of course.

What, no axe-rush??

With all the land there is btwn you and your opponents, i wonder how much land there is the west I've only played a couple of Ice Age maps; are there any continents or is it a solid belt of land??

LM Re-engaged

 

[Zeviz]

lurker's comment:
This will be an interesting game to watch.

Do Stonehenge Obelisks disapper when the wonder becomes obsolete? If they do, a self-built Obelisk at Medina is still a good investment if you intend it to be one of your culture cities.

 

[Compromise]

Do Stonehenge Obelisks disapper when the wonder becomes obsolete? If they do, a self-built Obelisk at Medina is still a good investment if you intend it to be one of your culture cities.

I think they stay, but don't double culture production after 1000 years.

Edit: As noted by Garath below, Stonehenge-provided obelisks disappear at Calendar.

 

[Garath]

No, they definitely disappear, I've regularly seen cities stuck on 8-9 culture when Stonehenge goes obsolete with bad timing. On the other hand, 2 culture per turn even for the entire rest of the game is only of dubious worth if we have anything else at all to do with Medina, it'll never amount to anything much at all. Especially since I think Medina may well not be a cultural city in the end, it's not going to have any production to build wonders with.

 

[SpriteSODA]

Lurkers Comment:
It will surely be a very interesting game! nice to see you playing again ,Sulla.

 

[Sirian]

...decide whether we're going to build obelisks in our future cities or not.

Why? I'd expect to do both, where possible. Obelisks built by cities will persist after Calendar passes, plus enjoy doubler for being ancient.

I think you have to have finished them before Stonehenge finishes, though. (Not certain on this. Been a long while since I checked this.)


- Sirian

 

[Blake]

Dotmaps:

NO question to me that Red Dot is the best spot for the next city.

Mecca can be our primary wonder center.
Medina will be our coastal wonder center, with GL and/or Collosus.
Red Dot can be our 3rd wonder center.

And that's our 3 culture cities . Medina might not cut it though... if we go for an early war an AI capital might be better. But Medina IS a very nice city, a lot depends on whether it can bag both the Lighthouse and Colossus, if it can then it has a good head start over captured sites.

The reason for Red Dot is food. A wonder city needs great food to work high yield tiles, but we don't have any great food sites. Red Dot is the best site, the horses are +3 food-free hammers, the cows provide +1 food +3 hammers, we should farm the elephants (not like we'll trade them away), so there's another 2 food-free hammers. That gives us a +3 food surplus for growth. We can then farm the open grasslands (another +2 food) and mine the hills (-4 food for +8 hammers). After that we are down to a +1 food surplus and the grassland forests and farmed plains, both of which only give +1 food-free hammer IF we have the health cap.
Basically red dot is at 16 hammers before getting into the icky 2-1-0 tiles, and I'm pretty sure that's a lot better than any other site (yeah red dot is still a fairly bad site by normal standards, but beggers can't be choosers).
We can chop some or all of the forests, but leaving them for health might be wiser, since once we run out of health we can't get any more hammers from growth, since farmed plains become 1-1-0.

Remember with a wonder race it's ALL about how many hammers you can get in ONE city, it's no good spreading those hammers over multiple cities. So we simply found the best possible cities first and stick the others wherever there's some room.

Blue Dot might work as a specialist pump, or we could found it on the river where it has some hills in radius and it could function as a unit pump. I guess it might be worth considering using a "Blue Dot" artist pump as one of the Big-3 cities, since the artists will generate a fair pile of culture, especially with Sistines helping.


On Stonehenge:
Well I hooked up that stone for a reason! . If I thought stonehenge was a terrible idea I've "veto'd" it by running the worker far away from the stone instead of hooking it up . But since I went with a 2nd worker, my vote is to get those 2 cities developed and cranking out wonders.

I think the best mid-term plan will be to get 3-4 cities and focus on grabbing every wonder we can. After the early wonders are gone, we can acquire the additional cities we need. These cities hardly matter other than for making up the numbers, all that matters is the top 3 cities. Thus we may as well let the AI found and develop the extra cities.

An alternative plan would be to go take an AI capital for Culture city #3. I suspect however that the hammer cost of the army and the higher upkeeps might ruin our chances of getting to techs like Music/Theology first + getting the wonders for those techs.

 

[Qwack]

Got it, ill post my thoughts and have the turns played tommrow.

 

[Sullla]

I like Blake's dotmap better than the one I drew up, as well as his analysis. (See, this is why SGs are so much fun to play!) Let's get those first three cities up and cranking ASAP. All other cities really are pretty much irrelevant, only allowing us to build more cathedrals in the Big Three later on. Red dot above looks like the best spot.

Sirian's point about the obelisks is well taken. I don't think we'll have time to put one in the proposed red dot before Stonehenge finishes, but we certainly should let the one in Medina complete.

(By the way: Blake = Grater for our lurkers. )

 

[Compromise]

I'd like to say that I'm glad we're not following the vanilla Monarch strategy here. We might very well have opened with mining and bronzeworking, conquered our island (Cultural cities would be Mecca, Berlin and Rome) and gone happily on our way to a massive tech lead which would allow us to get to the mid- and late-game wonders first. I think the play in the opening rounds, exemplified by Sullla not pouncing on Bismark's worker on turn 12, is in the spirit of this variant and quite refreshing.

I'll be studying the posts to this point as Qwack plays. Am interested in hearing opinions about priorities as my turn approaches.

 

[Kylearan]

lurker's comment: Hi,

I'd like to say that I'm glad we're not following the vanilla Monarch strategy here. [...] I think the play in the opening rounds, exemplified by Sullla not pouncing on Bismark's worker on turn 12, is in the spirit of this variant and quite refreshing.

I'd like to second that! And it's a good read with some very nice discussion so far, too.

-Kylearan

 

[Qwack]

Ok, if you don't expect to be able to build all 7 cathedrals, you don't actually need 9 cities.
Let's say you only expect to build 4. That means you need to have 36 temples total in your empire, so if you can get 6 religions spread, you only need 6 cities. If you can only get 5 spread, you'll need 7 cities (although 1 will need to get a 6th religion). And of course if you only can spread 4, you'll need the 9 cities
It's get easier if you only want to build 3: 27 temples is all you need, and that's easily done with 6-7 cities.

My point is: 9 cities is only necessary if you expect all 3 cultural cities to have the same cathedrals. But that doesn't have to be the case if you're not building 7.

I hope that made sense.

I missed this post. .

Anyways, as far as I know, you can only build a cathedral of a religion if you have 3 temples of that religion. So lets assume we get hindiusm into 9 cities, this means we can get 9 temples, which translates into 3 cathedrals. It would be the same with other religions as well. So if we get 4 religions, it would still be optimal to get 9 cities so we can get 3 cathedrals per religion we have.

I think we are talking about different things though here. What I was trying to say is that spreading the 5th, 6th and 7th religion into cities is a difficult task and requires alot of extra missionaries. I personally find it easier to just work with 9 cities and 4 religions rather than 6 cities and 6 religions or some other combo...

 

[pholkhero]

Lurker comment
@ The Poopman ~
I think the key w/6 cities-6 religion thing is that you don't build the same cathedrals in all the cities ~ Personally, 4 religions/9 citiies is the easiest way for all the reasons outlined above [sidenote: qwack, i've spent the day re-reading Rise of the Queen Mother ~ what fun that was!)

 

[Qwack]

How many turns am I supposed to play? Ive played 10 already but if im supposed to play more ill play them also. Anyways, ill post the report here, and my thoughts of the situation.

Started off by setting research on mining and starting stonehenge in Mecca like discussed. This is clearly the best choice At the moment as it will give us the early prophet for theology or shrine and some nice culture in our capital.

Obilesk completes in Mecca, I finish up the warrior in Queue while growing to size 2..


Mining is done in 6 turns, I start research on fishing immediately afterwards... I queued up a settler in Medina while waiting for fishing to finish. My reasoning was htat we cant waste time in Mecca on settlers right now since we are probably going to build pyramids there. While this is going on, Stonehenge is done in Mecca like expected.

We meet Qin in 1560, he is the one who founded Buddhism. I was developing a little plan here but meeting him and finding out he found buddhism made me seriously think it over. Ill explain below.. We met him since Buddhism spread to Medina, thats good, we now have 2 religions for the cathedrals.



So heres the situation. We have work boat coming in 4 turns at Medina, Pyramids will be out in 18 in Mecca, I was thinking we can probably stop in-between to build a couple of chariots there.

So heres my thoughts:
After Work boat is completed in Medina, we should either let it grow to size 3 or build a settler there immediately. While doing this, we can research Montheism and Priesthood. Switch to buddhism and adopt organized religion for +25% bonus, and start the Oracle.

Now you may think im crazy, and yes I am. Im somewhat addicted to oracle , and i think we 'Might' have a slight possibility at snagging it. Qin may as well beat us to it though.

Heres why im up for this
#1 - We wont have anything else to build for a while at Medina anyways, unless we are going for Great Lighthouse, but I prefer not to go for it on this map, and would rather go for colussus.
#2 - Medina at size 3 with organized religion has a production of 13 hammers per turn (11 base + 2 from +25%), which means we can build oracle in 11-12 turns depending on if we can get overflow of a previous build.
#3 - This means we can build oracle in 16 + 12 = 28 or 27 turns from now, while building another settler for a third city, while building pyramids in capital.

Theres 2 real problems with this plan, first Qin with his +50% wonder bonus and the fact that he found buddhism means he might get there very fast. The second our military will be very weak for a little while, atleast until pyramids in done in capital and we can start cranking out some army.

An Alternate route is also possible where we dont research Organized Religion, go to preisthood straight. This will probably cut down our oracle by 6-7 turns but it means we wont get another settler out before it.

By all means, veto this idea if you dont like it. Im pretty aware im strectching it out an extreme amount . I just thought I would put it up there. You can call me a Oracle-Holic.

Ill playt more turns if I was supposed to, otherwise here is the save:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=130147&d=1150499348

 

[Garath]

You have 5 more turns, we're playing a 30/20/15/10/10... so that the turnsets finish on nice rounded dates.

Stonehenge is complete and we're working on the Pyramids already? Nice work, but we really do need to get a couple of Chariots out sooner rather than later, both for defence and for sending out at least one new scout to the west. Fortunately we're in no danger of losing the Pyramids for a while yet, so we can afford to pause that construction for a while and get a couple of Chariots.

I'm guardedly in favour of trying for the Oracle simply because the potential gain is so large compared to the loss if we fail, though getting it at this late date is relatively unlikely since we can't chop to speed it up and don't have Marble. I'm pretty sure if we try to fit Monotheism in before Priesthood we'll lose it, but I'm in favour of going straight to Priesthood NOW (before Archery, since we can use Chariots instead of Archers once the pasture on the horses is done, if it isn't already). Can we get to size three in Medina before Priesthood would come in? While it would be nice to get our third city up, if it has to wait for the Oracle then it has to wait for the Oracle. Ideally we'd be able to get Monotheism while working on the Oracle and then use the free tech for Theology to get back on our religious push, perhaps, as well as switching to Org Rel for the last bit of the Oracle.

Bear in mind when thinking about Organised Religion, though, that every turn we spend with a State Religion, especially one that is not one we founded, we are losing culture. We need to be sure the benefits are worth that cost. Being Spiritual we can flip backwards and forwards at no cost, of course.

I might have more thoughts in the morning, I suspect I'm starting to blither now since it's late here, so I'll sign off there.

Garath