SGOTM 04 - Trash Team

[Cam_H]

I must say in my test game that I let Nidaros go over the happiness cap a lot myself for whipping purposes ... but then again it was also working the Pigs because I didn't have a Midas city a few tiles to the west!

I too would have whipped as Cabert did to get what we now have.

 

[cabert]

I must say in my test game that I let Nidaros go over the happiness cap a lot myself for whipping purposes ... but then again it was also working the Pigs because I didn't have a Midas city a few tiles to the west!

I too would have whipped as Cabert did to get what we now have.

I must say the double scientists was thought to slow down regrowth for a good use.

 

[pigswill]

Disagree strongly re construction!

As I see it our overall strategy remains independence day style emigration (after conquering continent then handing it to Gandhi on a plate).
I posted earlier that astronomy is a twin beeline for optics and calendar. AIs are good at researching calendar beeline (as well as stuff like CoL, monarchy, feudalism, alphabet) and usually not so good on optics beeline. The fastest way is to reach astronomy is to research optics, discover the rest of the world and trade heavilyfor the missing techs.

While pursuing this we'll still essentially be building up our cities and defences. War vs GK is premature at this point. Maybe expand south but no attacks. Chances are if GK attacks us he's likely to send keshiks pillaging. HAs get 50% vs cats, I think keshiks do as well (tho haven't checked). At the moment we can defend with spears vs keshiks and axes vs melee.

Once we've done our overseas tech trades we can then think about building a bunch of cats and wiping out GK.

 

[remconius]

Combining views into the dotmap:

GK currently has 6 cities. He'll probably settle a few more soon. We currently have 3 cities and 1 settler ready. Too speed things up I agree with Cam to take the barbarian cities (Cap'n: "both reasonably placed but not optimally placed").

Meanwhile we settle "I" with the current settler and "F" with the next. Then we can start thinking about taking out GK.

In order to get G to meet others we need to head out there and share Optics/Astronomy. If Judaism gets spread to us we should try to convert the rest of the world. This will need to be done aggressively before theocracy is adopted. Maybe even before we take out GK.

Btw, did you guys check out Delhi :O Gyathaar sure helped out the big G... 12 resources!!

 

[Cam_H]

Disagree strongly re construction!

Ouch! OK then!

... but we will have nothing but Classical Era units ... and Explorers.

Did we get a policy on post-Machinery Archery for the X-Men?

(Thanks Remco b.t.w. for the dot maps - they're great! )

 

[stuge]

I think that remco's dotmap above is as good as a final draft.

No construction? Aye aye cap'n. Let's really hope that we can trade for it. I support a brief pit-stop at archery before machinery. Crossbows will eat pretty much any classical unit for breakfast.

 

[pigswill]

Off topic (but could become very relevant later). I'm playing wotm6 and going for space victory (don't think that counts as a spoiler). Just got a DP with someone; thinking about a PA.

If you have a PA when building a spaceship does each partner build a spaceship seperately or do you build it between you?

Back on topic. Archery is a minor deviation from beeline so I'd support it for crossbows myself.

If we trade with civs before they know Gandhi do they get diplo penalties with him for trading with worst enemy (us)?

Cam's Echo: thanks remconius for the dot maps, they're great.

 

[patagonia]

While I acknowledge the importance of the Astronomy beeline, it's worth raising the subject of the bottleneck we're about to hit. Nidaros will give us our first GS (for compass) in 12 turns assuming we keep 2 scientists hired. It'll then take 50 for the second (for optics) unless we get CoL for caste system making a total of 62 turns.

While we're building the colossus, we'd probably benefit from having the two scientists there work plains hill mines for 8 extra hammers/turn, which adds more time to the scientist generation.

The alternative is to research compass ourselves, save GS1 for Optics and use GS 2 and 3 simultaneously for Astronomy, leaving us 52 turns of research at the current rate. This works out slightly faster, but could cause us a few problems.

The first problem we've got is that both Khan and Gandhi have HR (the other AIs will too) meaning large cities and better research and production. It's an 8 turn detour in total at the current tech pace, but teching to priesthood (via polytheism to avoid unlocking philosophy) opens up both monarchy and CoL to trade for, at least one of which Khan will be able to provide once he's picked up alphabet. Is making that detour acceptable?

I'm also not 100% sure where I should be focusing our production during my turns. We want the colossus (obviously), but Khan will probably switch into war mode relatively soon, meaning we could probably do with some spears first. Another worker or two wouldn't be a bad thing either, and we'll want the iron city built and border-popped by the time machinery comes in for xbows (at that point, archery's a 1 turn detour that'll be very useful to us). We also want another couple of workers sooner rather than later.

As I see it:

Nidaros - axe for new city, forge, rax, 2-3 spears, 2-3 axes, colossus.
Haithabu - library (or monument if a mysticism detour is OK)
Uppsala - grow to size 5 while building rax and military, then build a couple of workers

Since I think we should use the settler in Nidaros for the iron city, I'd be in favour of keeping both Phyrgian and Avar, because I'm not sure where we'll be able to get another settler from sufficiently quickly. I probably won't try and take Phyrgian until near the end of my turnset once it's grown and we've got a couple more axes down there.

With the GM contamination in Nidaros we'll get from the colossus, I'd be inclined to generate GS2 in Uppsala (a forge there and gems connected will do the trick of raising the happy cap to 7), with GS3 coming from Avar (at size 6 that city can run 4 scientists under caste system).

I'll play in a day or three once people have voiced their opinions and there's a consensus on the best course of action.

 

[patagonia]

Off topic (but could become very relevant later). I'm playing wotm6 and going for space victory (don't think that counts as a spoiler). Just got a DP with someone; thinking about a PA.

If you have a PA when building a spaceship does each partner build a spaceship seperately or do you build it between you?

Answer in spoiler form in case people don't wannt to see it:

Spoiler :

No, the team only has to build one spaceship (something we took advantage of in SGOTM3).

The catch is you have to make sure you start production of parts immediately in your good cities to avoid your AI partner beginning them in lousy cities.

 

[pigswill]

Patagonia: thanks for answer on spaceship.

I shall now really upset the team by saying Forget Colossus! Let's Not Build It. It's Not Essential!!

I realise that this is going against the grain so I shall add some substance. Colossus adds 1 commerce per water tile worked per turn until astronomy. It would be useful for Gandhi to acquire astronomy sooner rather than later (ocean trade routes, observatories). In the long term land tiles are more useful than water tiles (cottages, workshops etc) so it makes sense to me to give Gandhi inland cities rather than coastal cities.
In the short term not building Colossus allows us to keep Nidaros building units while running scientists. (It would be good if we could start a second source of GS points soon because they overlap without problems). If we were using for instance 10 water tiles before we get to astronomy throughout our civ Colossus would only generate +10 commerce which imo is not a good return and I think its unlikely that we would be working much more than 10 water tiles anyway.

Edit: In sgotm3 trash team struggled at the beginning because we were half-doing too many things. We got on much better once we focussed on a strategy and kept to it. Is Colossus an intergral part of our strategy or an optional bonus?

 

[stuge]

Well, we originally pulled off independence day without the colossus. On the other hand, with us going here without cottages, it would be a major boost. We can work as many water tiles we want when, for example, racing to astronomy.
A good production city like Nidaros can probably build it in ca. 10 turns.

The northern fishing village will be great for getting scientists. It can support four of them at size 6 with a +1 food surplus. That'll require caste system, obviously.

 

[cabert]

Patagonia: thanks for answer on spaceship.

I shall now really upset the team by saying Forget Colossus! Let's Not Build It. It's Not Essential!!

I realise that this is going against the grain so I shall add some substance. Colossus adds 1 commerce per water tile worked per turn until astronomy. It would be useful for Gandhi to acquire astronomy sooner rather than later (ocean trade routes, observatories). In the long term land tiles are more useful than water tiles (cottages, workshops etc) so it makes sense to me to give Gandhi inland cities rather than coastal cities.
In the short term not building Colossus allows us to keep Nidaros building units while running scientists. (It would be good if we could start a second source of GS points soon because they overlap without problems). If we were using for instance 10 water tiles before we get to astronomy throughout our civ Colossus would only generate +10 commerce which imo is not a good return and I think its unlikely that we would be working much more than 10 water tiles anyway.

Edit: In sgotm3 trash team struggled at the beginning because we were half-doing too many things. We got on much better once we focussed on a strategy and kept to it. Is Colossus an intergral part of our strategy or an optional bonus?

colossus is not essential at all.
If we did a strong beeline to astronomy, it would be a waste.
If we do a bit of side tracking (needed for semi useful invading units!), it's good to have it on our side.
With the colossus we don't need to build any cottage!

 

[Cam_H]

I agree that it's not essential, but I think it would be helpful. I appreciate Pigswill's reasoning, but I personally think that it's too good an opportunity to bypass. Our objective is to get to Astronomy (pretty well) asap provided that we can construct a sound empire around that pursuit. Coastal commerce imho is an important source of getting us to Astronomy in addition to the lightbulbing.

I think The Colossus offers very good value ... +10 X 100-ish turns X City Building Multipliers. It's a cheap Wonder and we have double rate production because of the Copper.

The risk for me is contaminating the Great Person pool in Nidaros - although +2 points per turn, even though directed to Great Merchants, isn't too bad. If it's considered too sloppy, then maybe we take a chance by building it after the Forge in the Iron City once the Copper's hooked up? Its might help the Iron City resist flipping - which as much as we want Gandhi to get a foothold on our side of the continent, I suspect we don't want him to take our Iron source before we're ready with our Berserkers!

 

[pigswill]

I quite warm to the idea of founding a city purely to build Colossus; next question would be where to put it. In my limited experience Colossus ain't usually an AI priority.

 

[MrMahk]

Well, I'm a little late here for my input- all you Europeans are up at 6:00 AM my time .

First, I totally agree with Stuge/Remco's new dotmap. It means we only have to get 2 settlers out, which is good. Also, final point rehrygian- if all of you say no to a corn/marble (which I oppose now too), then there is no other way we would be able to even work the marble, so keeping Phyrgian is the only way we could work it.

Next, about Colossus. Right now, it would take about 12 turns in Nidaros, less if we change the scientists to hills. However, looking at the new dotmap, there would only be 3 seafood sources in our lands, and the lake at Nidaros. That makes a total of 4 water tiles that we would definetley be working. But besides those, there really aren't any others that we would work, only a couple 2 4 coastal tiles maybe. This, of course, is after building a trading post. In my opinion, it really isn't worth it, because of the lack of water tiles, and that the new cities (which would be the ones working water tiles) should be working tiles with hammers to get infrastructure built up, not working commerce.

As for research, I'm thinking archery then machinery. But I'm not too passionate about it nor very knowledgable about this beeline, so whatever you guys think will work best.

 

[patagonia]

One thing to consider with the astronomy beeline:

We obviously want optics ASAP so we can explore the world and decide which civ to target for expansion. However, we don't necessarily need to evacuate at the same time and it'd be a mistake to leave our current continent before destroying the Mongols. We can expand overseas as early as we like, but the timing of our evacuation will be dictated by India rather than ourselves. Once we've got optics, a certain abount of deviation from the beeline therefore likely (even neccessary). The only limiting factor is that we need to pop astronomy before discovering meditation or civil service.

If we build the colossus, the best time to pop astronomy would be the turn before we discover CS, which means we'll need two great scientists saved up by then.

Having the colossus will speed things along a bit. I just wonder if we'll gain more from it for the limited period it'll be viable, than we would by having Nidaros build research? Obviously I'm far too lazy to try and calculate that and we've got much more important uses for production than that, but in light of the issues pigswill has raised it's something to consider when deciding whether to build it or not.

 

[pigswill]

That's pretty much the way I was thinking about it. Get machinery first. It will depend on how we fine-tune GS production because we'll need one for optics definite, possibly one for compass (though GS produces more beakers than compass needs so in one sense its wasted research) and at least one, preferably two for astronomy. Once we've got GS for optics lined up we can leave the beeline and start researching other stuff. Its useful to research cheaper pre-req techs because it appears that WFYABTA is based on the number rather than the value of techs traded.

On the other hand this is still a few sets away. Immediate issue remains Colossus. I see three options:
1) Built it in Nidaros.
2) Build it somewhere else.
3) Don't build it at all.

If we decide to build it we have another set of issues around how soon we start on it (orat least the prereq forge) compared to other things we could be building.

 

[remconius]

I think we can put the colossus to good use. That means working a high number of coastal tiles to speed research. It's effectively a grassland village which would take a while to develop. If the colossus does not take that long (10-12 turns) we'd only have a few units less. I dont mind either way, we could put it to good use or leave it.

If we dont build it we could use the extra production of not building it to build missionaries, but we are still praying for Judaism...

 

[pigswill]

We could for instance go for Colossus, research compass and pop 3GS instead of burning a GS on compass.

 

[cabert]

If you don't lightbulb at all, we can leave academies to gandhi!
3 gold mines + an academy is a good way to increase science.