Rebuilding the Republic

[donsig]

Strider and BCLG100 recently had a discussion in the Gallic War thread about the direction we need to take. I thought it best to start a new thread so we can keep that discussion seperate from the war discussion.

We are dead last in all major categories: population, land area, GNP, manufacturing capability, etc. Our research efforts are at a standstill meaning we're on the verge of becoming a scientifically backward people. We need to give up all ideas of building an invasion force to land in Gall. We weren't even able to take an Iroqi city in this continent so let's not fool ourselves into thinking we can sail the sea and sack Gall. Let's concentrate on getting our population and our land area.

We have only three cities. If we're going to be a republic that doesn't get pushed around by the others on this planet then we need a strong army and to support it we need cities! We have to rebuild the cities we had to abandon because of the Gall invasion. We have to get those rebuilt cities and our western core cities up to size seven and we have to do it fast. They way to do that is to add workers to these cities. We need to put those irrigated flood plains to work for us to pump out workers that we can sent to Provobomb, Shilhanopolis, vbraunopolis, Carpetbomb, Grenadopolis and whatever cities we rebuild in the east. We need to send a worker to one of these cities, improve a tile if need be then add the worker to the city.

Currently, with three luxuries and our lux rate at 10% our three cities are:

Semtex: size 9 (5 happy, 1 content, 3 unhappy)
Dancing Banana: size 8, (4 happy, 1 contnent, 3 unhappy)
Dynopolis: size 7 (3 happy, 1 content, 3 unhappy)

Asuuming new citizens are born unhappy, Semtex can grow to size 11, Dancing Banana to size 9 and Dynopolis is stuck at 7 under the current conditions. We have two luxuries coming soon. The Greeks have said they will gift us furs and we'll have silks hooked up in about 5 turns or so. Our priority should be to lower the lux rate to zero. We can do this with the two new luxuries and our three cities should still be able to grow one more size above the maximums listed above.

Since Dynopolis doesn't need to grow we can leave it on military production. If we split the flood plains between Dancing Banana and Semtex then each will have two flood plains and a wheat flood plain. If all other laborers in these cities work tiles that produce two food each then both these cities will have a surplus of ten food using only three laborers and the city center. That would allow these cities to grow every four turns. By allowing these cities to grow to the maximums listed above they would be able to produce at least ten shields per turn each. So, in the four turns it would take them to grow they could produce 40 shields. In other words, they could produce two workers and two military units every four turns while remaining the same size. Perhaps with some micromanaging we could have these two cities working in tandem to produce two workers, a settler and a pikeman every four turns. This is a goal we need to focus on. Note that neither of these cities has a granary. Should we consider building any here?

The workers that come out of and Semtex need to be added to our core towns to get them up to size seven. It would be great if we had all the tiles pre-improved but that is not as important as increasing the number of size seven cities in our republic. We need size seven cities to reduce our unit support costs so we can afford to turn research on again.

Here are the current city screens for our three cities:







The other quesiton we have to answer concerns rebuilding our eastern cities. Shoud we rebuild on the same spots or settle in different places? We have a settler in Dancing Banana ready to head east. Where should he go?

 

[BCLG100]

Settle where the first city we gave up was, has acess to ivory and is on that coast.

If were just after military support then with each city we should wait until we have 3/4/5 readily availiable workers to add to them and then while were waiting for that we can be working the tiles around it, one improved tile will make all the difference to that city.

Also if we manage to get peace with KISS, change every city without a library to a Library, we need to get them up and running especially with our bonus trait.

 

[Strider]

I once again put this build order up:

Just took a look at the save. So here's a break down of a way to "balance" out our military, reconstruction, and improvement needs.

Fort Carbon just finished a library, start it on a worker.

Switch Shilhanopolis, vbruanopolis, and Fort Incendiary to workers. All three should finish next turn, we can move the workers down towards Fort Carbon, Fruitbomb, and torusopolis. Have each city build two workers (for a total of six new workers.. three next turn). Then switch them back to Immortal production.

Switch Dancing Banana to a settler. Semtax and dancing banana should switch between immortal and settler production.

Dynopolis, Provobomb, Carpetbomb, and grenadepolis keeps working on immortals.

Switch Fruitbomb from walls to a worker (should finish next turn).

-----

In summary, this will give us 4 new workers next turn. 8 new workers total in the next 10 turns... this should be more than enough to cut through the jungle in the southern reaches of our empire.

Semtax and Dancing Banana and switch between settler and immortal production.. most likely pulling out 3 settlers every ten turns using this method.

Provobomb is currently building a library, but once it's completed we can change it back to immortal production.. with dynopolis, Carpetbomb, and grenadopolis also producing immortals that should give us a reasonable supply of immortals incase anything comes up.

Some proposed micromangement for next turn:
Carpet bomb has an unroaded hill... switch the citizen currently working the tile southest of the cows to work that hill. The city will grow in the same amount of time, and we finish the immortal a turn sooner.

Dynopolis has a citizen working an unworked grassland tile. Switch it to work the mined grassland tile south of the city. This will let us finish the immortal a turn sooner.

Dancing Banana has a citizen working an unworked grassland tile south of the city. Switch the citizen to work one of the forests... same growth time and we finish the settler a turn sooner.

Semtax has a citizen working an unworked grassland tile. Switch them to work the newly mined grassland tile northwest of the city(where the workers are sitting at the start of this turn). Basically the same as everything else.. same growth time, but we finish the settler a turn sooner.

Provobomb doesn't have many improved tiles. We have the horses hooked up north of Semtax, can we move atleast one of those two workers to provobomb to mine acouple of those grassland tiles?

That should handle our lack of workers almost immediantly, and allow those cities to focus on something differant.

As for the rebuilding of our cities.. I propose the following city placements:

East:

West:

South:

The remaining terrority in the South we should just allow our southern neighbors to get. I highly doubt we would want to expand that far down towards them anyway.

That is a total of 11 new cities, if we turn Semtax, Dancing Banana, and Dynopolis to settler production.. any estimates on how long it will take us to fill all of that in?

We will need ALOT of workers to get these cities productive fast. However, we can't just stop our military production. So maybe we can have Semtax, Dancing Banana, and Dynopolis switch between Settlers/Immortals.. while every other city we have in our "core area" switches between workers/Immortals. Any workers that aren't needed later can just be used to re-populate whatever city needs the boost.

We may also want to think about putting marketplaces in acouple of our core cities. Just to give us a commerce boost.

Basically, the plan is to build a massive amount of workers and quickly expand our borders (even past the stages before the war). Do it as quick as possible, using pikemen/immortals inbetween builds to boost the cities growth enough. After that, we start loading most of our cities up with libraries and marketplaces to boost our commerce and science. Use the workers to clear the southern jungle/marsh and get all of our new cities productive (and some of our existing cities more productive). Once these workers are done with there job, we can start using them to re-populate whatever cities are needed at the time, increasing our production even more. We might even think about putting our Forbidden palace somewhere in the Southwest, just to make those cities even more productive.

 

[greekguy]

i think we should have a tighter build in the West as most of those cities aren't going to reach high population levels for a long time, so we should capatalize on the good terrain by building more cities. here is what i proposed in a thread a month ago: (note, the map is old and some cities on the map are currently ruins)



my map would get us 7 cities in the west, instead of 4. i think this will help us make more money and produce units quicker, since we will have a lot more cities.

 

[donsig]

Should we also go back tot he tight build in the east? Both Unabomb and Horsebomb were low waste cities. The only trouble with Unabomb was it did not have access to fresh water and so needed an aqueduct to get to size seven.

 

[BCLG100]

So now the wars been going on for awhile wheres everyone dropped off too?

 

[Strider]

Should we also go back tot he tight build in the east? Both Unabomb and Horsebomb were low waste cities. The only trouble with Unabomb was it did not have access to fresh water and so needed an aqueduct to get to size seven.

We could possibly move the "New Unabomb" south one of the old location, that will give it access to fresh water. Also, what does everyone think of my immediant plan to bring us some workers?

 

[donsig]

If we want to build the new city south of the olf Unabomb site we need to decide now. That's where our stack is and if we're going to put a city there then there's no point in building a road on that tile, is there? We could just move the stack (including the workers) and move the settler close enough so he can reach the spot next turn. Or we could build the raod there anyway and settler the city next turn.

I don't like pumping out that many workers from our outlying cities. We need to let them grow up to size seven. We should be making workers in Semtex and beacause they are already cities and we have a lot of food there. We also need more pikemen. If we're going to rebuild our core cities and keep a stack of immortals pushing to the beach and defend our coastal cities from a Gall raid we need more pikes. The Galls are retreating and destroying the roads so we can't get at them.

 

[Strider]

If we want to build the new city south of the olf Unabomb site we need to decide now. That's where our stack is and if we're going to put a city there then there's no point in building a road on that tile, is there? We could just move the stack (including the workers) and move the settler close enough so he can reach the spot next turn. Or we could build the raod there anyway and settler the city next turn.

I don't like pumping out that many workers from our outlying cities. We need to let them grow up to size seven. We should be making workers in Semtex and beacause they are already cities and we have a lot of food there. We also need more pikemen. If we're going to rebuild our core cities and keep a stack of immortals pushing to the beach and defend our coastal cities from a Gall raid we need more pikes. The Galls are retreating and destroying the roads so we can't get at them.

They are not really outlying cities, each of the have enough population to build a settler. What they really need is the land around them worked, most of them have a citizen working an un-modified tile. Also, Semtax and Dancing Banana are needed to build settlers.. and if were going to expand very quickly (like we need to), then we need both of those cities pumping out as many settlers as possible.

 

[BCLG100]

If we need any reason for expansion we are going to need tiles worked and cities growing quickly, its bettter to have 5 size 7 or above cities than 8 or so sizes below that, 2 core cities should be building workers everything else should be building settlers. We'll probably get the same amount of settlers in the same time but will get more military units.

Also everything should be worker/military unit or settler/military unit. We are still at war with no idea what KISS might do next.

 

[BCLG100]

We should also build the new city one tile north east of where horsebomb used to be.

 

[greekguy]

we should build workers and settlers in as many cities as we can. we should build workers in Semtex and , and build settlers in the rest of our core cities, switching off with military units.

 

[BCLG100]

But were still at war! we shouldnt be switching off military production just yet!

 

[greekguy]

we shouldn't be pumping out military units in 100% of our cities, since we've eliminated the immediate threat to our civ. we need settlers to rebuild our core and expand our influence on our continent.

 

[BCLG100]

Yes i agree with you on that, that doesnt mean however that we should be turning off military production completly, did the russians turn off production of tanks in WW2 when they brought the german army to a halt? We still need more units, what if they land another stack, yes everyone can say they're not very likely too but they still could and personally id rather be prepared with a large military and maybe a smaller civ than unprepared with a weaker military but maybe a larger civ.

 

[donsig]

Yes, we do still need military units. We need pikemen for defense. There's no point in making lots of settlers if we're just going to build cities that are not garrisoned. The Galls still have at least five galleys out there that can land anywhere along our coast. If they land another stack of GSs near undefended cities then we'lll have to abandon them as well. We also need more pikes to defend our stack and the two workers with it.

I understand the concern about adding workers to cities when there are un-improved tiles. Would there be anyobjection to adding workers to cities if the tiles were improved first? Someone suggested we not add workers to a city till we had enough to get it up to size seven. We could take a mini-stack to a city (like Provobomb) improve a bunch of tiles then add the workers to it and voila we have a size seven city just like that where all the citizens are working improved tiles. In the mean time, we're making new workers in Semtex and so we can get another mini-stack to work on the next core city, etc. Is this acceptable to all?

We can use Semtex and to make settlers / workers / pikes in some alternating manner. Dynopolis can do strictly military. We let the other cities grow and work on libraries. If we get in a pinch we can always switch the library over to a military unit and rush it. I think libraries, pikes, immortals and horsemen are all 30 shields each. We need libraries in the core cities to expand borders.

We have to also think about building either markets or cathedrals in Dynopolis, Semtex and . Markets would most likely fit better with our strategy of having lots of luxes. Maybe once we're more sure the Gall threat is past we can get one of these cities working on a market then when it's done let another city build a market, etc.

We also need to think about when to start researching again.

 

[BCLG100]

Markets over cathedrals, we get the happy from the luxs but also commerce .

Think you should let all cities building military units finish their build so that way we'll have enough for awhile. Can then build libraries.

I think Semtex should be Settler/unit/settler/unit
DB and Dyanopolis Worker/unit/worker/unit


That way we get more units, more cities and more workers.

The stack idea is best imo opinion, if we get a stack of 5 workers then they should work the tiles for 6/7 turns before being added to the city.

 

[greekguy]

I understand the concern about adding workers to cities when there are un-improved tiles. Would there be anyobjection to adding workers to cities if the tiles were improved first? Someone suggested we not add workers to a city till we had enough to get it up to size seven. We could take a mini-stack to a city (like Provobomb) improve a bunch of tiles then add the workers to it and voila we have a size seven city just like that where all the citizens are working improved tiles. In the mean time, we're making new workers in Semtex and so we can get another mini-stack to work on the next core city, etc. Is this acceptable to all?

Yes, that is fine.

We have to also think about building either markets or cathedrals in Dynopolis, Semtex and . Markets would most likely fit better with our strategy of having lots of luxes. Maybe once we're more sure the Gall threat is past we can get one of these cities working on a market then when it's done let another city build a market, etc.

We also need to think about when to start researching again.

Markets are much more useful than cathedrals. Unless we are going for a culture win (doubt we are) or have happiness issues (not so atm), there's no point in building cathedrals.

 

[Strider]

Due to "recent" events (namely the settler), rebuilding the eastern portion of our empire is now more important than ever.

Basically, we have to focus on destroying the galls from the east and then completely rebuild the east.. even past the area it was before. We must give the galls no place to land another settler.

Of course, all of those new cities will require defense, so after building up a large enough force to destroy the gall city.. were going to have to build alot of pikemen.

 

[BCLG100]

So what are you proposing, we settle a load of cities before theyve got any defence and then build defence afterwards???