I think it will delay Priesthood. Priesthood will come up 18 Gold short, that is a one turn delay. Working the Fish decreases the beaker count in Ironsite from 11.25 to 3.75 BPT, so it has to delay?
Yes, I agree we can do this now. Gives us a CR2 Sword for use at Carthage. And I thought it was the Carthagians, not the Spartans, we were fighting there.
So it's probably better to build the Henge without waiting for the stone - or is it? The Henge is not all that useful since we need to research Calendar fairly soon. Maybe we should try to get it cheap by delaying the chop until after Masonry?
This is an interesting point. How is Stonehenge most useful to us? As a culture expander or as a source of much needed Gold? Let's build it to nearly finish and let someone else complete it? Then we get a mound of Gold!
This is an interesting point. How is Stonehenge most useful to us? As a culture expander or as a source of much needed Gold? Let's build it to nearly finish and let someone else complete it? Then we get a mound of Gold!
I think it will delay Priesthood. Priesthood will come up 18 Gold short, that is a one turn delay. Working the Fish decreases the beaker count in Ironsite from 11.25 to 3.75 BPT, so it has to delay?
I don't think so. If you switch to the fish tile and check the Science Advisor Screen you will see that it's 5 turns to Priesthood anyway. Remember that the 2nd turn of research that completes Polytheism also generates a big overflow of beakers into Priesthood.
I don't think so. If you switch to the fish tile and check the Science Advisor Screen you will see that it's 5 turns to Priesthood anyway. Remember that the 2nd turn of research that completes Polytheism also generates a big overflow of beakers into Priesthood.
It is close though. Working the Fish, we generate 41 BPT. Once Priesthood completes, we will have 5 beakers overflow. Working the Gold, we generate 49 BPT and would have 21 beakers overflow.
Working the Gold, we miss getting Preisthood in 2 by a 4 crummy beakers.
This is an interesting point. How is Stonehenge most useful to us? As a culture expander or as a source of much needed Gold? Let's build it to nearly finish and let someone else complete it? Then we get a mound of Gold!
I'd just as soon finish the Henge if we can. The gold that we would get from not finishing it isn't much more than we get from a single forest using the hammers-to-gold exploit, which will become available to us after we finish Masonry.
We could always MM York or London to get Preisthood one turn sooner but it doesn't look like that will get us Oracle a turn sooner since our workers aren't going to be able to chop 5 forests that soon.
Severe weather has altered travel plans, so I get to kibitz until Sunday.
Great to get Athens, much better than Carthage if no route east. Glad to hear comments regarding protecting our cities.
Like the present plan. Agree with SCT that we should try to complete Stonehenge, though perhaps just after we connect stone, as it will allow us to keep the Slavery civic and still expand cities without builds. Calendar is not at the top of my priority list.
"Maybe we should try to get it cheap by delaying the chop until after Masonry?" How much cheaper?
Have we explored all the alternative placements of the GG. London may indeed be the best option, but there will almost certainly be some conflict of interest having it in a city that is trying to produce Great Scientists?
I agree that it would be ideal to save hammers into SH until we have stone hooked up. But although we have stone in Athens, we won't get access to the resource until we have discovered masonry. We can't wait that long to complete SH since it is already way overdue to be built by the AI.
Note: Tim was working unimproved hill because CP set it up to finish the granary 1 turn before it grew to win us some food. Granary just finished so I will put back to food tiles.
I will play the next 6 turns until Oracle then post another update for discussion.
I just had a thought that we could keep Sparta around for a while and milk out the great general points from keeping them in a constant bait-n-kill archer loop
I agree that it would be ideal to save hammers into SH until we have stone hooked up. But although we have stone in Athens, we won't get access to the resource until we have discovered masonry. We can't wait that long to complete SH since it is already way overdue to be built by the AI. Right.
I just had a thought that we could keep Sparta around for a while and milk out the great general points from keeping them in a constant bait-n-kill archer loop
Well, I have stopped for a moment as the Oracle was built IN A FAR AWAY LAND in 625BC (2 turns before it would have been ours). Bad fortune, but we knew it was risky since we went for it late. We haven't wasted any chops, and it is likely we will research to CoL soon anyway, so not all is lost.
There is one turn to go on priesthood, but we should change to masonry to allow chopping into gold.
Stonehenge will be done in 3 turns, so waiting for stone won't speed it up. It will be very useful for us now we have missed Oracle for growing borders in Ivoryville, Athens and eventually Carthage.
I will prechop the forests around ivoryville and mark them before splitting up workers for improving Ironsite, Ivoryville and Athens. May keep one worker to build roads east from ivoryville to speed up the conquest of Carthage.
Workboat still has not found anything.
I think our plans should be capturing Carthage, a second eastern workboat to explore, chopping forests to gold in Ivory, Athens and Carthage, and concentrating infrastructure for research in all cities except for Ivoryville (including the start of our GS production). Our units should spread out to protect cities and improvements from barb activity. I am currently building an axe in London since our defences are pretty thin and building a library in Timbuktu.
I think we want masonry, priesthood, CoL next to get started on GS's.
I don't know about growth and how many more cities we want to plant on our own island. I think we might not need anymore, although the northern spot next to horses that we originally favoured still has many forests to chop into gold once we have idle workers. My feeling is that we don't need much more production and that our research speed to Astronomy will be our primary goal. (To be fully confirmed by our continuing workboat exploration).
Here is turn report for these five turns:
Spoiler:
700BC:
Set research 100% for Polytheism 685BC:
Carthage (still size 6) builds second archer, so move our axe and sword away from city
No archer built in Athens, move CP's raiders into position 670BC:
Capture Athens with 3swords 3 axes and lose 2axes + 1sword, 76 gold plundered
Timbuktu builds granary->sword (set to work food tiles)
Great General settled in London 655BC:
London builds sword->axe (for barb defence)
Timbuktu whips 2 pop into sword build 640BC:
Discovered Polytheism, only two turns until Priesthood instead of the 3 we predicted (must be a hidden 20% bonus to our research for having the prerequisite Poly)
Lose warrior south of Timbuktu to barb warrior
Timbuktu builds sword->library (Tim now has 2 sad faces from slavery and needs to wait a while before next whip unless in danger)
Ironsite set to fish 625BC:
Oracle build in a land far away (couldn't they wait for two more turns??)
Well, I have stopped for a moment as the Oracle was built IN A FAR AWAY LAND in 625BC (2 turns before it would have been ours). Rats! A turn ealier attacking Carthage and 2 turns here -- just demonstrates the importance of maximizing efficiency in the early game.
There is one turn to go on priesthood, but we should change to masonry to allow chopping into gold. Yes
Stonehenge will be done in 3 turns Let's hope.
I will prechop the forests around ivoryville and mark them before splitting up workers for improving Ironsite, Ivoryville and Athens. Why mark, if you pre-chop all of them? May keep one worker to build roads east from ivoryville to speed up the conquest of Carthage. The sooner we get Carthage, the better.
I think our plans should be capturing Carthage, a second eastern workboat to explore We'll need one for Athens too, perhaps first.,
I think we want masonry, priesthood, CoL next to get started on GS's. When would Sailing be in order? Will it be cost effective to build Lighthouses to increase seafood production and allow more GP's?
I don't know about growth and how many more cities we want to plant on our own island. I think we might not need anymore, although the northern spot next to horses that we originally favoured still has many forests to chop into gold once we have idle workers. My feeling is that we don't need much more production and that our research speed to Astronomy will be our primary goal. (To be fully confirmed by our continuing workboat exploration). At Prince, my sense is that at least eight cities are usually beneficial.
I guess we knew that we were late for the Oracle. Still, it's highly unusual that the Oracle is the first Wonder built, Stonehenge and the Great Wall usually come first.
Anyway we have other means of converting hammers to beakers. One problem I see right now is that we would want to do the chop for gold but we can only do this once in each city building walls and thus the optimal conversion is achieved by waiting until border expansion in order to be able to chop all forests in the fat cross. So the question is: Do we wait for border expansion in Ivoryville before we do the chop or do we need the gold immediately? If we get the Henge we need only wait 18 turns.
If we need Astronomy for domination we are in a situation where we have to spend our hammers on something else than military units for a while and thus we should try to estimate the cost efficiency of the infrastructure as CP puts it. Since most buildings contribute value per turn we also need an estimate of the time to Astronomy. As an example, if we know that a courthouse will reduce maintenance by 4gpt we can evaluate the gold earned by multiplying with the turns needed to get to Astronomy and divide by the hammer cost of a courthouse to get a gold per hammer ratio. Similarly, a lighthouse would provide for an extra scientist in a city working 2 sea resources or 3 bpt.
Before we dismiss the Epics I think we should try to calculate a scenario where we bulb Alphabet with the first GS and self research Litterature. We do have marble down south in the tundra. And for the later wars Heroic Epic might also be useful. With the Nat. Epic in our best GP farm we could probably produce all GS's in that city freeing other cities to specialize for commerce. Not easy to evaluate...
I think our plans should be capturing Carthage, a second eastern workboat to explore, chopping forests to gold in Ivory, Athens and Carthage, and concentrating infrastructure for research in all cities except for Ivoryville (including the start of our GS production). Our units should spread out to protect cities and improvements from barb activity. I am currently building an axe in London since our defences are pretty thin and building a library in Timbuktu.
Yes, we need to take Carthage as soon as we can. Depending upon what units we lose, we should replace what we need and get defenses set for Barbs and keep up the recons.
I don't know about growth and how many more cities we want to plant on our own island. I think we might not need anymore, although the northern spot next to horses that we originally favoured still has many forests to chop into gold once we have idle workers. My feeling is that we don't need much more production and that our research speed to Astronomy will be our primary goal. (To be fully confirmed by our continuing workboat exploration).
CP recommends eight cities. Now to look at where we should place the remaining ones. And then there is Sparta? To keep it or not? If we can tease it until CoL's comes along, perhaps?
Thought a bit more about cities and placements. Decided to put up a proposal to start the discussion.
We currently have six cities: London, York, Timbuktu, Ironsite, Ivoryville and Athens. We, hopefully, will soon take our 7th city, Carthage. It was interesting to me that London, York and Tim are in the northern part of our world while Ironsite skirts to the south and the others are all south. If we add Sparta, then the majority of our cities will be in the south.
With eight cities and six courthouses, we can build a Forbidden Palace (if we get that far) and this could be built in Ivoryville? We then might consider building additional cities if needed.
I propose adding, at some point, two more cities, Gold City and Marbleville, per Fred's idea. I thought about these because they would pay their maintenance and add more as we research on. In addition, Marbleville provides a southern canal between the east and west. Gold City would help tie Timbuktu to the western cities. Gold city also contains five forests within the expanded cross for more gold mining and is on the water to provide another place to build ships for invasion.
I don't know about growth and how many more cities we want to plant on our own island. I think we might not need anymore, although the northern spot next to horses that we originally favoured still has many forests to chop into gold once we have idle workers. My feeling is that we don't need much more production and that our research speed to Astronomy will be our primary goal. (To be fully confirmed by our continuing workboat exploration).
I think we should try to analyze how much gold we can get from chopping. If it's enough to cover our deficit when running science at 100% more cities will always mean faster research. I find leifs proposal for new cities interesting and I would like to include the northern city with the large number of forests. Marbleville is mainly interesting if we decide to shoot for the Epics. Ideally I would wait with capturing Sparta until we reach a point where we can see that keeping it will not slow down the final date of Astronomy.
Why is that? Besides the fact that our monuments will go obsolete Calendar will offer extra gold (dyes) and food (bananas) in Timbuktu. I agree that CoL and Sailing are probably more useful.
I guess we knew that we were late for the Oracle. Still, it's highly unusual that the Oracle is the first Wonder built, Stonehenge and the Great Wall usually come first.
I guess someone got marble. Not a big loss though. Metal Casting wasn't going to be immediately useful. And the five forests we save convert to 660 gold, which will be worth even more in beakers with libraries.
Anyway we have other means of converting hammers to beakers. One problem I see right now is that we would want to do the chop for gold but we can only do this once in each city building walls and thus the optimal conversion is achieved by waiting until border expansion in order to be able to chop all forests in the fat cross. So the question is: Do we wait for border expansion in Ivoryville before we do the chop or do we need the gold immediately? If we get the Henge we need only wait 18 turns.
I'm thinking that either Ivoryville or Athens needs to chop it's forests into a wall before the border expansion so that we can continue to research at 100% and get to CoL sooner. This would sustain our research for enough turns to allow Athens's and Carthage's borders to expand. Those two cities have a total of 15 forests (=1980 gold) in their fat crosses. Plus there are several other sites on our continent that could be settled and milked for more gold. If we chop some forests as soon as we get Masonry, we should be able to run 100% research all the way up to Astronomy.
If we need Astronomy for domination we are in a situation where we have to spend our hammers on something else than military units for a while and thus we should try to estimate the cost efficiency of the infrastructure as CP puts it. Since most buildings contribute value per turn we also need an estimate of the time to Astronomy. As an example, if we know that a courthouse will reduce maintenance by 4gpt we can evaluate the gold earned by multiplying with the turns needed to get to Astronomy and divide by the hammer cost of a courthouse to get a gold per hammer ratio. Similarly, a lighthouse would provide for an extra scientist in a city working 2 sea resources or 3 bpt.
I think your point about courthouses should be highlighted. A courthouse costs 180 hammers or 4 forests. 4 forests are worth 528 gold. If the courthouse reduces maintenance in a city by an average of 4 GPT, it would take more than 132 turns for the courthouse to repay its investment (this is not even with discounting the value of the future payments). This is certainly a bad investment of forests. I'm thinking that with our abundance of forests on this continent, we shouldn't be wasting a single hammer in building a courthouse.
Buildings like granaries, lighthouses, libraries, and barracks are trickier to evaluate but my instinct is that every city should start with a granary, GS cities should next get a library and then a lighthouse if coastal. Non-research cities (Ivoryville) should follow a granary with barracks and start building units for a future invasion. Research cities that won't be growing GSs should probably still build a library and then barracks and units.
Before we dismiss the Epics I think we should try to calculate a scenario where we bulb Alphabet with the first GS and self research Litterature. We do have marble down south in the tundra. And for the later wars Heroic Epic might also be useful. With the Nat. Epic in our best GP farm we could probably produce all GS's in that city freeing other cities to specialize for commerce. Not easy to evaluate...
I am working on updating Leif's practice map from the 1810BC date that Fred posted. It will take some time to get everything to match so it might be a day or two before I post it. Stay tuned.
I will look at the save sometime today and post more informed thoughts, but these ideas came to mind overnight:
Now that the pressure to build the Oracle is off, do we need to commit to Astronomy right away? Sailing (for either lighthouses or galleys) is a tech that we need soon in either scenario.
In addition to the Marble-city/National-wonders approach, I'm interested in testing using our first GP to research Philosophy and converting to Pacifism.
Knowing how much building we'll be doing if we have to head for Astronomy . . . Monotheism, missionary training, conversion, and Organized religion should be considered. Once our cities grow, are converted, and much building done, convert to Pacifism for GP production.
I'm thinking that either Ivoryville or Athens needs to chop it's forests into a wall before the border expansion so that we can continue to research at 100% and get to CoL sooner. This would sustain our research for enough turns to allow Athens's and Carthage's borders to expand. Those two cities have a total of 15 forests (=1980 gold) in their fat crosses. Plus there are several other sites on our continent that could be settled and milked for more gold. If we chop some forests as soon as we get Masonry, we should be able to run 100% research all the way up to Astronomy.
I fully agree with this! The more I think of it the more it strikes me that chopping gold must be the most important consideration when planning the future turns. And I have a feeling that 8 cities in total is a much too conservative number if we deliberately settle cities where there are lots of forests to chop. Looking at the map I toyed with an example where we settle 6 more cities (including the gold city proposed by leif). Including the gold chops from Ivoryville and Carthage we should be able to chop around 8000 gold - enough to keep our science at 100% for 160 turns even if city maintenance is increased by 150% due to the extra cities (I don't know if that is realistic). We need those cities anyway to get domination and the more cities we have the higher beaker production per turn we get. So my feeling is that a very aggressive REX (workers & settlers) is the best strategy from where we are now.
Since we probably have lots of gold I find the idea of Philosophy+Pacifism very interesting. I also discovered that Alphabet is not easily bulbed in Warlords which makes the Epics path less attractive. Here is the relevant part of the GP tech preference lists:
Great Scientist:
Writing
Mathematics
Scientific Method
Physics
Education
Printing Press
Fiber Optics
Computers
Laser (BTS)
The Wheel
Alphabet (BTS) Philosophy
Chemistry
Fission
Fusion Optics
Paper Astronomy
Biology
Electricity
Flight
Genetics Compass
Satellites
Aesthetics (BTS) Sailing Alphabet (Vanilla & Warlords) Calendar
Medicine
Ecology
Advanced Flight (BTS)
Iron Working Metal Casting
Great Artist:
Literature
Drama
Music
Polytheism Monarchy
Mass Media
Radio
Mysticism Monotheism
Divine Right Alphabet (Vanilla & Warlords)
Aesthetics (BTS) Meditation
Great Merchant:
Currency
Banking
Economics
Corporation Metal Casting
Code of Laws
Mining
Constitution
The Wheel
Alphabet (BTS)
Pottery
Sailing
Paper
Railroad
Industrialism Monarchy Civil Service
One interesting thing I notice is that we can get Monarchy from a GA if we stay away from Alphabet. If we self research Currency a late Merchant could give us CS. And as we already knew, a GS can give us Philosophy if we self research Meditation - otherwise we could get Compass (maybe self research), Optics and Astronomy as already planned. What we need now is an estimate of how fast we can generate Great People - with and without Pacifism.
Well, I looked at the save and don’t have as much more to suggest as I anticipated. I do still think that the Pacifism route is worth serious consideration.
If we’re going for Pacifism, we need to get a religion in all our GP cities. We’ll probably get one or two when we research CoL. I suspect that Organized Religion will be worthwhile, although it will require enduring anarchy once for religious conversion and again for changing civics, plus researching Monotheism (and Masonry) and building missionaries. We’d need to build a monastery otherwise. Wouldn’t OR add to the gold from chopping walls (in addition to the 25% hammer bonus on regular buildings)? If so, the sooner we start taking advantage of it the better.
Carthage and Athens would certainly benefit from Lighthouses, and if we limit our initial Great Scientist production (for Philosophy ) to one city, then we can concentrate on growth and building a LH in the others. Do we want to research Sailing first in case we contact another civ? Otherwise, I like Col ASAP, and perhaps Masonry and Monotheism next.
Regarding additional cites. I don’t think gold support is likely to be nearly as critical in this game as the last. On the other hand, I'm not experienced in chopping for gold and thus don't have a good feel for the benefits derived. It surpises me that Fred thinks it's so valuable that we should rex. It could well just be my ignorance, but I am concerned with sacrificing other production and city growth to produce settlers. That concern makes me reluctant to rex cities. Would it be possible to analyze rexing vs. perhaps build as many as we can when settler production in a given city is least disruptive and additional gold is needed for research. Also, if Sparta produces a settler, we might want to let it settle (not sure how long we should wait for this, though).
Just a reminder: If we get in a position to pop a hut and have decided AGAINST the Pacifism route, then we probably don’t want to do it and risk getting Meditation.
The short version of the argument in favor of REX is that the option of chopping gold removes the main restriction that normally prevents you from unlimited REX'ing which is the lack of funds to cover the increased city maintenance.
As a rule of thumb we get 135 gold per forest and 25 overflow hammers (In total) when we chop walls. In reality we get a little less because the hammers going into walls and overflow decrease the gold output a little.
As long as we only settle cities with access to at least 4-5 forests we should be able to pay the increased maintenance and keep science at 100%. In order to maximize beakers we need to start working as many gold producing tiles as possible. I think this goal can best be achieved by founding new cities for the following reasons:
1. New cities often grow faster than old cities.
2. Total growt is proportional to the number of cities.
3. If placed properly new cities could have better commerce tiles than the tiles in our old cities that are not already in use.
An example is the Gold City proposed by leif. It has 5 forests that can be chopped for a little over 600 gold and it can work the rice and the two gold hills for a total of 16 bpt (@100% Sci) when it reaches size 3. Without the forests we would have had to deduct gold going to maintenance because we would have to decrease the science slider but in our case the 16 bpt are additive because our treasury can cover the deficit.
In other words we can more or less get all the gold we want and the bottleneck is more likely the transformation of gold in the treasury to beakers and this can be done faster working a lot of tiles with high gold output.
Clearly the REX should stop or slow down at some point and the pace will also be limited by worker availability since we need to improve the land around the new cities fast to get the full growth potential. Chops need only to be done when we need the gold.
I think it would be a good idea to draw some dot maps looking for city cites with at least 4-5 forests and with commerce/growth potential.
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(must be a hidden 20% bonus to our research for having the prerequisite Poly) 
It was worth a try. 
Now to look at where we should place the remaining ones. And then there is Sparta? To keep it or not? If we can tease it until CoL's comes along, perhaps?
