SGOTM 08 - Smurkz

like the idea of trading away stone/marble/copper strategically to encourage our future footrests to build wonders.

I wonder if a midgame conquest would be feasible? Will we really want to go all the way to corporations?

We will need to raze most cities that don't have wonders to avoid domination.

Two ways to go with expansive and barays: 1) build barays quickly, get lots of happies, and grow huge cities; or 2) skip barays since we already have +2 health and don't really need +4 health in most cities. Note that if we do play a long game, the +4 health would allow us to run dirty buildings - forge, factory and coal plant - for speedier late game wonders.
 
In general I agree with what both Xc and BL say (sorry guys, your names are simply too long not to be abbreviated ;)), and specifically what BL says about the Great Wall. The early Great Spy is very powerful, but I'm afraid it would hurt our longer-term potential. Since this is "only" Monarch, we can expect to out-research at least the majority of AIs, so we should be able to fill our needs through trade. Had this been Immortal or Deity, the early tech steals from that GSpy would have been really useful, but they're just not such a killer for us here.

AFAIU to win by Apostolic vote, all nations in the world must have at least one town with the Apostolic religion. We should have plenty of warning for that, and could cut OB if we're afraid to be infected. Still, the AP is a nuisance that could be a real problem, and if at all possible I would prefer that we build it ourselves. Too bad Theology is so off the beaten path though.

Great Library is pretty much a must-have in this game like in the previous. Too bad the Marble sits in such a lousy location.

Pyramids are always nice, but very expensive. But in this game the extra GE GPP may come in very very handy, GEs are always the hardest to produce. For that matter I'd like to take a shot at Hanging Gardens too. Both pretty much assume we have access to Stone though. It definitely wouldn't surprise me if Gyathaar has given some Industrious leader Stone and left us without...

If the map is as watery as what the starting screenshot hints, Great Lighthouse would come in handy. It generates GM points though which is probably the last thing we want. But that may be offset by the effect, we should consider it when we know more about the map.

Parthenon - another Marble wonder that comes with Aesthetics, and one that would be really neat to get our hands on. We probably want to be restrictive in trading Aesthetics, and hope to be able to snag both wonders. Yields GAs, we only need a single one of those for the entire game (which we could possibly get from Music). Still, one (misplaced) GA is a low price for the many extra GPP we'd get overall.

The other two Aesthetics wonders - SoZ and Shwedagon Paya - are also nice-to-haves. SoZ mostly because it sucks to fight someone else who has it. SP because OR without having to go through Monotheism would boost our production nicely, and early FR could boost research. I'm not really convinced about either though.

In general, despite the wonder-ful aspect of this game setup, I don't think we should expect or even try to get more wonders than normal during the early game. What we want is wonders that help us towards our end-game goals. In that light, my priority list would be Great Library, Parthenon, Pyramids and Great Lighthouse (if the circumstances call for it) of the early ones, but I certainly don't think we could hope to get all of those. To get all would probably require us to have Stone, and no Industrious opponents or opponents with Stone or Marble.

BL noted on IM something very very interesting - forts can connect resources. I'm of course thinking about the Marble, and it seems to me that a fort on that island is far less costly than putting a town out there on a two-tiler. I'm currently thinking about a scheme where we research Fish-BW-AH-Wri-Sail-Maths-Aes. Sailing would allow us to build a galley to get a worker out to the island (and enable trade on coast). Maths would allow that worker to build a fort to hook up the Marble, which we could then use to speed up GLib and Parthenon. Hmm, just realized we need TW too, otherwise the Marble still isn't hooked up. We'll throw it in there somewhere then. :)

We should probably also discuss settling locations. I need to get to bed though, so I'll leave someone else to kick that off. I'll just mention 2E as an alternative to settling in place...
 
The fort-to-connect-resources is being discussed in the BOTM10 pregame thread: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=290517 Note in particular Lexad's post #36. We would need Masonry (to build the quarry) and Sailing (to get the worker to the marble).

More importantly though, I am concerned about how long it would take to extend our culture over the sea to the marble from the original settler location.

Looking at the screenshot, I propose moving the scout onto the hill - maybe there's another seafood resource? In any case, I believe we should seriously think about settling on the tile the scout is on (1SE of settler). That location keeps all the visible resources and puts the marble in the capitol city radius so we can actually work the tile. It also lets our first workboat go to fish instead of clams, which would be a nice early game boost. We are expansive so can afford to settle away from the river, though we do give up late game health boosts. We also trade two land tiles for ocean tiles. I think the benefits might outweigh the drawbacks.

p.s. you need Math to build forts - and Masonry comes *much* earlier.
 
I was thinking along the same lines as Chris. 1 SE (the scout tile) has the same advantages as 2E from what I can see (fish and marble on the same coast as the capital, marble in the BFC rather than needing three expansions to reach), and fewer disadvantages (doesn't give up as many forests or river tiles; more land tiles in general). Both options do give up some land/forest/river compared to the starting position (as well as losing at least one hill), both lose the river health and the ability to build river-linked stuff in the capital, and both sacrifice the first turn of the game to movement.

The scout has a couple of options, too, and which way he goes probably depends on what we think we're most likely to do with the settler. Namely, he could go to the gold hill, or go to the tile SW of the settler. Having him move west may shed more light on the reason for the blue circle. I think I see jungle on that tile NW of the blue circle, though, so that area may not be the best in the short term.

Is any tech needed to build forts, or can you do it right off the bat? Edit: I see you need mathematics. @ Chris -- masonry alone won't do it, I don't believe. We'd be able to improve the marble with just that (which is good; it's a good tile), but we wouldn't have access to it for wonder purposes without a linking fort, either on the marble itself or on the tile just below. (Better the latter way if we move the settler SE or 2E; we'll have our second border expansion in plenty of time to put that tile in our territory.)

And as for GMs, we will need at least one (not counting the free one from economics) if we want to get all corporations, so some GM points are not a horrible thing.
 
I prefer scout on the either hill (SW or gold) as it will help decide between founding the initial city 2E or 1SE. Moving the scout 1SW of the settler won't reveal (potential) ocean resources.

Won't we have the marble with masonry simply because it's in the city radius? I thought you only needed a fort if it wasn't in your initial radius.
 
I don't believe so; otherwise Lexad wouldn't have needed fort+road to hook up the stone in that screenshot of his. It'd be great if someone could prove me wrong, though!
 
OK, I checked, and you're right - to get the marble we need a fort.

Option 1) Build a fort/road on the marble, which prevents building a quarry. In this case, we'd be better off settling in place. However, we'd need an unobstructed sea route to the marble island, which is not guaranteed on the northern shore.

Option 2) Build the fort/road 1S of the marble, building a quarry on the marble.

Both options require waiting until the 3rd expansion, but hey, we're creative, right?
 
I'm (slowly) writing a longer post, but just to clarify regarding the forts. BL did a few tests, and the following is true:

* We can connect the Marble to "itself", i.e. the Marble tile, with a Road and either a Fort or a Quarry. Only the latter gives the boost to tile yields, which matters if it's in our BFC.
* To connect the Marble, it must be within our cultural borders, and there must be a route from our town to it. A fort creates a "harbor" to allow a route to enter/leave the island.
* However, that Fort doesn't need to be within our borders. So we could build the Fort on the tile 1S of the Marble, with a Quarry on the Marble and road between them, and have access to the Marble even if the Fort is not covered by our culture.
 
Here's the longer post. :)

From the starting shot I see five locations that would potentially make for good capitols. Some things to keep in mind in general, some of which have been brought up by others, but I'll repeat them anyway:
  • We have two coasts, and we don't know how far a WB would have to travel to get from one to the other.
  • The southern coast is (from what's visible) more worth than the northern, due to Fish>Clams and the Marble.
  • We will likely fit more towns both (north)east and west of whichever location we choose.
  • We have +2 health from Expansive.
  • We are Creative so our borders will expand fast, both the first and second expansions will likely come before we're ready to make (strategic) use of e.g. Marble or Gold.
Here are the locations I'm thinking about:


1. Green site
Spoiler :

Settling in place gives us the following tiles in the BFC:
Cows, Clams, Fish, Gold, 5 coast, 4 Grass hills (1 on river, 3 forested), 4 Grass (2 on river, 4 forested), 3 unknown land (3 forested, 2 potentially on river - any fog gazers around?).

Pros:
  • Settle on turn 0.
  • On river.
  • 3 food resources + gold in BFC.
  • 10 forests in BFC for chopping.
  • Many hills for good production.

Cons:
  • On the northern coast.
  • Getting Marble takes 3 border expansions.

2. Cyan site
Spoiler :

Settling 1S of the starting spot gives us the following tiles in the BFC:
Cows, Clams, Fish, 5 coast, 2 Grass hills (1 forested), 5 Grass (4 forested, 3 on river), 4 unknown land (4 forested), 1 unknown coast.

Pros:
  • On river.
  • On the southern coast.
  • 9 forests in BFC for chopping.
  • 3 food resources in BFC.

Cons:
  • Settle on turn 1.
  • Settle on forest.
  • Settle on hill (yes I see this as a negative in this context).
  • Fewer hills for lower production.
  • No Gold in BFC.

3. Yellow site
Spoiler :

Settling on top of the Cows give us the following tiles in the BFC:
Clams, Fish, Gold, 7 coast, 3 Grass hills (2 forested, 1 on river), 5 Grass (4 forested, 2 on river), 2 unknown land (nothing at all known).

Pros:
  • Settle on turn 0.
  • +1 Food in CC for faster initial growth.
  • On both coasts! Even gives us a canal from north to south.
  • 2 food resources and gold in BFC.

Cons:
  • Lose a 4F 2H tile for the longer run.
  • Only 6 forests in BFC.
  • Many low-yield coastal tiles in BFC.

4. Red site
Spoiler :

Settling 1SE means we'll have the following tiles in the BFC:
Cows, Fish, Clams, Gold, Marble, 7 coast, 3 Grass hills (2 forested, 1 on river), 4 Grass (3 forested, 3 on river), 1 unknown land (1 forested).

Pros:
  • On the southern coast.
  • 3 food resources in BFC.
  • Gold AND Marble in BFC.

Cons:
  • Settle on turn 1.
  • Settle on forest.
  • Many coastal tiles in BFC.

5. Purple site
Spoiler :

Settling 2E gives us the following tiles in the BFC:
Cows, Clams, Fish, Gold, Marble, 5 coast, 2 Grass hills (2 forested, 1 on river), 2 Grass (1 forested, 1 on river), 3 unknown land (totally unknown), 3 unknown coast.

Pros:
  • On the southern coast.
  • 3 food resources in BFC.
  • Gold AND Marble in BFC.

Cons:
  • Settle on turn 1.
  • Settle on forest.
  • Few forests in BFC.
  • Few hills for low production (though Marble helps).
  • Many coastal tiles in BFC.

Conclusions
I think settling in place is not the most attractive option, due to the late access to Marble. We should remember though that we need Sailing, Maths, and a galley and worker to hook it up regardless of scenario, so it will not be fast no matter what.

Red does appear better than Purple on pretty much all accounts.

What I would most of all like to know is whether the NE land is just a small peninsula. If it isn't, I would seriously consider yellow, on Cows. For that reason I want to send the scout to the Gold.

Cyan doesn't really appeal to me.
 
If we are going to settle on turn one OR on cows (Gosh, one of my favorite tiles ever...) we could also use the settler to scout north (E-NE) and scout to go West.

Question: wouldn't a fort on yellow site grant us a Panama-like canal anyway ? Of course you cannot have this and a pasture...
Would city on green site + fort on the red grant us passage ?
 
I think one of the main attractions of sending the scout to the gold is to figure out whether there's any great advantage to settling a canal city in the first place, so we'd have to go check that out before deciding where to send the settler.
 
Dang--much harder to decide on where to settle than in SGOTM7.

So far we've been talking about a fairly standard game but with more concentration on building wonders and on capturing a bunch at the end. No doubt the other teams are, too. What's our clever idea that will let us beat them? Getting an early victory, whether by setting the world afire (a la Murky in SGOTM7) or via diplomacy (Smurkz), probably isn't the best approach this time.

Just to stimulate out-of-box ideas, let me push this strategy in a riskier and weirder direction: only build wonders that directly help us build a powerful tech-advanced civ that can crush the other civs late in the game. Encourage the other civs to build wonders for us by keeping the peace and trading them resources and some carefully selected techs.

On Monarch it shouldn't be too hard to take the power/tech lead by conquering a nearby civ or two. That gives us lots of room and also gives us Great General points. The GGs are key (and the Great Wall would help with its 100% increase in GG emergence rate) because we want to settle them in our Heroic Epic City as military instructors. As has been pointed out in a Deity-level strategy article, a neat trick is to build lots of City Raider macemen (CR3 would be really sweet, but CR2 is still good) and then upgrade them to Rifles and Grens when we have the required techs.

Early on we would concentrate on building a powerful civ via a bit of conquest, then settle down for several hundred years to build up our tech and production capacity (and steadily crank out CR maces) and let the other civs build wonders for us (while building some appropriate ones ourselves). When all is ready we launch a City Raider Gunpowder blitz to conquer as many Wonder cities as possible and win by Conquest. At least, that's the plan :)

This is certainly not the best plan, but I hope it will help us think of something better. As for relevance to deciding where to settle, we wouldn't need to worry as much about the marble. It would be nice to have it for building the Great Lib, but we probably don't have to make a mad rush for it.
 
Chris: I'd like to see an estimate of when the AIs will build each wonder. That would let us estimate how many points a 1,000 AD conquest would score (for example).
Click to expand...

Me too. It would be a bit tedious, but would people be willing to look through some old saves, preferably Monarch/normal speed/std size, and record the date of each wonder? Unfortunately I usually play small or tiny because my computer is CPU and graphically challenged. Also Emperor or Deity, but one can probably renormalize the dates without too much error. Map type will also have an effect--Big and Small is probably middle of the road.
I volunteer to compile and graph the data if y'all are willing to gimme Wonder/year numbers.
 
I'm actually working on some of that right now, but super distracted trying to get my son to take a nap. :) Niklas was doing it too but had to leave for a while. I should have some numbers in an hour or two.
 
Late, but checking in :p

Besides deciding where to settle :p, I think we need to decide to what end time we are aiming. For that , we need a good grasp to when AI gets wonders in Monarch.

I can see 4 possible strats:

- try to win really fast, like circa 1600 in worst case scenario ( possible with AP ).
- Win at the dawn of industrial age, probably with drafted units
- Win at Electricity/Radio wonders
- Win with TGD/Space elevador

If I had to bet I would choose to win in the industrial ages, but again we need data from Monarch games with this script/size/speed. And I don't play Monarch for a while :( . I tried , by Niklas suggestion, to run some games in AIAutoplay Mod, but the presence of a human changes the game a lot ( especially in city placement... yuck ) and I don't think that results from there are worthy of trust. Will wait for better data ;)
 
Xcalibrator said:
On Monarch it shouldn't be too hard to take the power/tech lead by conquering a nearby civ or two. That gives us lots of room and also gives us Great General points. The GGs are key (and the Great Wall would help with its 100% increase in GG emergence rate) because we want to settle them in our Heroic Epic City as military instructors.
Click to expand...

This is only true inside your own cultural borders. Great Wall does nothing on offense. And as stated earlier, Great Spies are not the best Great People to be popping in a game like this. I would save the hammers for something else (Perhaps chopping out mids?)

As for our settling location, I vote either in place or red. Settling in place gives us a nice blend of food and production, while Red would see a slight commerce increase long-term. As for the debate about the marble, by the time we have all of the prerequisites to hook it up (sailing, masonry, wheel, mathematics, galley, and a spare worker to burn for a number of turns), our capital's border will have expanded the necessary 3 times to nab the marble.
 
I think I agree with BL about the Great Wall; however, the utility of GG's to produce CR swords and maces for upgrade is still good to remember, I think. CR rifles cut through city defenses like butter.

Regarding the question of "when to stop", I wasn't able to get very far due to some sort of browser issue with the GOTM logs I was looking at (BOTMs 2&7's spaceship victories, if anyone's interested). Niklas got through several, though, and the consensus does seem to be that the wonders per turn tends to keep rising almost to the very end, excluding the space elevator and maybe the three gorges dam. The logs don't contain national wonders, of course, and typically most of the corporations and at least half the shrines don't get built, but I would think those would follow the pattern of the rest of the wonders more or less, with the national wonders coming mostly in the mid-game and the corporations following them up towards the end.

Given that the shrines often don't all get built -- would it be useful to build something with prophet points somewhere, so we can hopefully pick up a few of those ourselves?
 
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