RR17 - Team A

Didn't mean to use it now, as it won't finish it right away, but if we want it, we might as well start SoL soonish.

Emancipation: we can cope for now, but if more AI's switch, we'll get in trouble.
 
Played the rest of the set.

Build Philly on the red dot and popped it's borders. It's now building a WB.
Build rax and units in Wash and NY; we probably should start on the SoL after the current build to have a decent chance on it.
Boston is slowly building an Observatory.
After hooking up gold the Emancipation anger became manageable. We still might want to switch soonish as we're nearing the point that our workers can keep up, so serfdom will be less usefull and we've got quite some cottages around. It'll also allow our cities to grow more.

Scientific Method is around for trade, we're nearly done with Steam Power.
We got a mini-stack (gren + 2 trebs), needs some work obviously :D

Overview of our lands:
Spoiler :
RR17_1_overview.png


Save is attached
 

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vanatteveldt is up if he can get it already. Otherwise I'll pick it ...

I think we need to move fast to get the barb cities ... so if possible, in the next set we should start working on that .

Well, techwise we could probably try to get Sci Met out of trade ( there are 2 AI that have it ) when we get steel ( maybe we need to self tech some turns as well ).

In military terms ... we already have HC with hands full. I would bet it is going for Wash ( worst enemy and the Portuguese are clearly the worst in game at this point ), but we need a eye even if he goes Wash...
 
Got it!

Will post/discuss a plan tomorrow and play Tuesday.

Edit: do we really want to keep those cities? Their placement is not exactly top notch...
 
I'm back! :D
Can you slot me back in after Rolo for the next round?

On the game, is SciMeth important to us at this point? I'd rather not trade a relatively expensive monopoly tech for something we don't need. Steel->RR would make sense to tech next imo, both for mining and the railroads. Alternatively we could go for AL for factories.

I think we should switch to Emancipation soon, could even do it immediately. With 50% worker speed from Steam coming up, we don't need Serfdom any more. I don't see any value in other civic switches but the cottage growth should make up for the lost turn pretty soon anyway.

The barbarian cities (Magyar and Mauryan) are both placed well enough imo, sure they're on top of resources but there aren't many better options nearby either.
Mauryan is riverside, has 4 nice resources and plenty of grassland, could be a nice cottage city with half-decent production too.
Magyar is lakeside and a farm or two can mitigate the lack of food well, especially once we get Bio. The holy city culture will help ensuring that those gems stay on our side of the border. Sure, 1N gets the corn, but also a lot of useless junk tiles, I think it's not too bad where it is.
 
Lurker/offtopic-ish:

I have never seen a barbarian holy city, is that normal on advanced starts? Do the religions/holy cities get randomly assigned or something?

Anyhow, nice progress, and fun variant to follow! Keep up the good work :goodjob:
 
The cities are decent enough as they are and we don't want to build settlers to replace same, so capturing should be the plan.
 
The cities are decent enough as they are and we don't want to build settlers to replace same, so capturing should be the plan.
I agree 100%
 
Some observations:

- Washington of Portugal (confusing!) has free market, so switching to free market from merc should net us some juicy trade routes. I would assume it should give at least 4 commerce (1 extra national trade routes plus 3 upgrades from national to foreign, more with lasting peace?), so it is probably worth the specialist?

- We currently have 2 trebuchets +1 almost done, 1 grenadier, and the 4 garrison riflemen. That should be enough to capture the barbs one by one if we leave the cities undefended, which should probably be fine at this stage.

- There is another GP, presumably GE, in 8t. We could double rush the SoL? The GE is worth 660, the SoL costs 1200, so it is not a lot of waste; we could also keep one for Mining inc.


Very brief outline:

- move troops to barb1 while finishing treb, bombard, sacrifice at least 1 treb, capture, repeat
- switch to Emanicpation, Free Market after finishing treb (1 turn - room for more but US and FS are not worth it yet)
- Steam power -> Steel -> RailRoad -> Assembly Line (?)
- cottages!!!

Will post more detail tomorrow morning, will play tomorrow evening european.
 
I don't think Free Market is worth it. Our free engineers produce 2 :hammers:, 3 :science:, plus 3 :gp:. I don't think the trade routes can make up for that.

1 gren, 3 trebs and those rifles won't be enough for the barb cities. If we use the rifles, we'll need at least 2 more grens imo. I don't like sending our garrison to war either, we need them for police duty. So I'd say we should get 5 grens altogether, possibly more after the first city falls depending on losses.

GE-wise, I'd prefer keeping one for Mining. They're hard to get reliably later on.
 
I really like the idea off mining inc. We have a short time frame to work with, and those extra shields will really help.
We can revisit free market the corp time. The maint discount changes the value.

I don't want to use the rifles. I don't think we can afford the no mp penalty. Keep two cities pumping troops like crazy.
 
Hey guys,

Good advice. The reason for switching to FM now (or at least together with emanciptation) is that the output will be not so much less and it saves a turn. We could also put off emancipation, although at least one city is hurting for happy.

I will set research to RR for mining, and keep the second GE for that (or the first, if the second is a GS).

So, the plan is to start with building more trebs and grens, and attack if we have something like 4 or 5 trebs and 4 or 5 grens?
 
I agree with LKendter and Thrar, Merc is still stronger then FM at this point, especially without overseas trade.

And I'd like some more grens instead of using our garrison. GE for mining sounds good.
 
I will set research to RR for mining, and keep the second GE for that (or the first, if the second is a GS).

So, the plan is to start with building more trebs and grens, and attack if we have something like 4 or 5 trebs and 4 or 5 grens?
That's sounds about right I think
 
I've looked at the happiness. Washington is fine but NY and Philly are at the happy cap and 1 or 2 turns from growth. There is no easy happiness to come by (no trades possible and no unimproved happy resource in our borders except for a +1 spices in the southern jungle which will be too little, too late vs the emancipation penalty). So, emancipation will allow us 4-6 pop growth (although boston already has serious health issues)

On a related note, since each city starts with a market and forge, we should get some more +2 happy resources: fur, ivory, whale, silver, gems.

Magyar (Eastern barb city) has gems but in a contested location (but holy city helps and khmer is non-creative)
Mauryan (Western barb city) has ivory and sugar
The south-eastern jungle has gems in a nice (but far) coastal location with clams or banana

Fur, whale and gems will have to be traded for

--- City micro ---

New York: Is the plan to make NY a NP city (8 forests plus 1 clean green)? If so, I will avoid roading non-forested tiles and only improve them if actually needed. NP is two techs away but en route to sushi for which we can easily control 3 rice plus 2 seafood and is a nice complement to mining inc.

Boston: Boston is getting another farm but if we assign all citizens to fp-cottages it still has +9 food, which I think is fine given that the emancipation-raised happy ceiling s only 3 away; even with a citizen on a mine is has +6. It is probably better to work all cottages to speed up maturation? BTW, I would be in favour of working another cottage rather than a mine, infra can be rushbought or mining inc'd later, we need to let the cottages!!! mature?

Washington: Has a bunch of cottaged FP's but will never be a science powerhouse. Isn't it better to farm over those plains for quicker growth / more miners, and specialize in production? OU/Academy won't go there anyway and we will leave bureau at some point for the +2 cottage commerce (but not until we get another cottage city with enough mature cottages I think, so it will be a while; but it feels a waste to let those cottages mature and then bulldoze them...)

---

Edit: will play tomorrow after micro discussion (if any)
 
I don't think we'll bulldoze the Washington cottages at any point. With US and FS, they're getting an extra hammer and 2 extra commerce, making them very strong in their own right.

With Boston, I think the idea was to turn it into a Globe-powered GP farm. Cottages here might not be so good because we do might eventually tear them down. Maybe watermills in the meantime?

I'm not using NP much normally. Is it worth it? Does that mean we'd turn NY into our GP city? If that's the case I agree with you on Boston, cottages there would be a good choice.
I thought of NY as another cottage city, as it's riverside and has plenty of grass. It would still have fairly decent production for infra as well, even more so with lumber mills.
 
Hmm, I prefer to specialize cities if possible/obvious, and Washington would be a perfect production city; but I guess the cottages are there now, we can leave them be.

Boston is our FP-cottage city, I'm pretty sure we don't want to make it a GP farm.

NP will give NY at least 9 free specialists, which is nothing to sneeze at. Normally the problem is that it comes too late for core cities to have any forests left, so if it is used it is usually on a 'Sibarian' city and too late to really matter. In our start, it is only a couple techs away, and we don't have another obvious GP farm.
 
I rarely think about NP either, but in this game I agree to build in NYC. Keep those forest alive ;)

Keep the cottages are Boston. That city will become an economic monster.
 
Ok, fair enough, let's see if NP can actually make a difference this time!

Once we get to US, the Washington cottages will only have one hammer less than a watermill would (or is it even the same?). And in the meantime, they give us some big commerce thanks to Bureau (later FS). We have plenty of food there, so no need for farms on the floodplains.
Since we're not planning to run SP either due to corps, a food-rich production city like Washington looks fine to me even with those cottages.
 
OK, so:

Micro:

Will keep cottages in Washington
Will keep forests in NY
Will spam cottages in Boston if more are needed

Production:

Will build up 4/5 grens plus 4/5 trebs for barb assault in wash and NY
Will build infra in Philly
Boston will really need a levee (plus US towns and mining) to get any decent production. Do you agree with maturing cottages at the expense of infra until US towns and/or mining come in and slow build levee until then?

IS the plan to postpone extra settlers until after the military is done? Boston could build a settler after growing to post-emancipation happy cap... There are plenty of good (longish term) jungle cities. Or will we let the AI cut the jungle first...?
 
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