SGOTM 08 - Smurkz

I still think we should take it.
 
Not saying we don't need nongoma, but would we have connection through the north sea shore (can't open the save but...) ?
 
I think it would be hard to get open trade routes to João without Nongoma. And it is also the key to the south, if Shaka keeps it he could conceivably keep spamming settlers to send southwards. We want to be (as) alone (as possible) settling the bountiful south.

Chris, sure, I'll post the sheet in a while.
 
Without Nongoma, we could still connect to Joao by road (via Ulundi - Leiria, IIRC), but taking Nongoma would save us some turns of hacking through the jungle. Our workers have better things to do. Plus as Niklas says, it gets us better access to whatever we can grab of the south.
 
Joao has a city to the east of Leira, between Ulundi and Leira. It would surprise me greatly to discover that he has not already built the road network. There is Joao culture showing 2W of the horses on the peninsula. It has been a long time since our woodsman trekked through that area.

I'm not opposed to taking Nongoma, but it definitely is not required to establish trade routes to Joao, and if any roads are required (which I doubt) it wouldn't take many road builds to make the connection.

At any rate, Niklas makes a good argument for cutting Shaka off from the south.
 
Ah, thanks for the correction.
 
Just to break the silence, I've been work-wise quite busy these past two days, but what time I've had has gone to trying to figure out how to get 5 Unis up by turn 160. It works for Yo, Pura, Kwa and uM, and I have yet to figure out if we can do it in Ulundi given the short time frame from capture. I'll try to get some plans posted tomorrow for this.
 
So I'll take this opportunity to admit that I'm not the most skilled warmonger on the Civ4 front. If anyone has specific suggestions for the battle plan to take Ulundi and/or Nongoma, please speak up now.

Basic turn plan:

1) Take Ulundi and Nongoma
2) Research/bulb education, build 5 universities
3) Build Moai in uMu. Have uMu use cows near Ulundi. Chop forests for uMu. Mine the hill that is 1SW of the cows. Is this compatible with building a university in uMu?
4) Finish catapult in Hari, switch to HE, then build units

We need more workers. Where can we build at least one and hopefully two workers?
 
Niklas said he'd post what he has of a plan today, so hopefully that'll give us some ideas of where might be free. Workers don't get the HE bonus, do they? If they don't, we could build a couple in Hari first; with the bonus, it'd only take about five turns for both. We could also get one out of Nongoma if we like, instead of building the granary that's cued up -- that'd be six turns if I'm remembering the tiles there right. (We already took Nongoma; it came out of rebellion this turn.)

Edit: And the worker by Rockport will be free in two turns with nothing really pressing to do. We don't really have transportation available for it, though, not if we're planning to send that galley west immediately.
 
Ok, here's an attempt at a plan to get Oxford up as fast as possible. Thanks a million to Renata who got the sheet up to date, allowing me to look forwards instead. :thumbsup:

The five towns we'll use for this in my plan are those most likely to produce lots of research - Yo, Pura, Kwa, uMgung and Ulundi.

Yo: detailed in a previous post. Builds Axe (T140), Monastery (T142) and Colosseum (T145) interspersed with Sankore. Builds Uni as soon as Edu comes in, completed T152. Sankore completed T160, immediately starts Oxford which completes T170.

Pura: Builds Temple (T143) with whip, then Uni (T160) with whip.

Kwa: Builds Library (T145), then one turn of research (T146) then starts Uni on T146 when we get Edu. Chop one forest and whip two pop to get Uni on T160. Could chop two and whip one, or chop none and whip three.

uMgung: Whip one pop to complete Library on T147, then start Uni. Chop-mine the hill near the cows on T156 at the latest, then whip 3 pop for Uni on T160.

Ulundi: Very much dependent on what pop Ulundi is when we capture, and what buildings that remain to us. Assuming we capture on T141 with pop 4, it will come out of resistance on T146 with 3 pop remaining. If we retain both Granary and Lighthouse, we can build a Library on T152 and whip 4 pop for a Uni on T160. If we lose either one of the buildings then we must chop a forest to make it in time. If we lose both, we must chop three forests, which makes it tricky business.

I'll put up the sheet with data-copies after dinner.
 
An updated sheet, with raw values, can be found here. If I have some time later, I might put up some screenshots. Though everyone should be able to view that file (even if it requires #¤%& cookies :p).
 
Work just announced huge cuts and layoffs, so I'll be busy the next couple of days...

Lots of that goin' around. :( Good luck to all.

Niklas, nice plan. We really appreciate the huge effort you (and Renata) put into the spreadsheets. The only iffy thing I see is Hari immediately starting on the Heroic Epic. Is our warlord spear within our cultural boundaries? I haven't opened the save, but would guess he's with the stack beseiging Ulundi (among other reasons, so he can whack a crippled unit after our cats have attacked so he can get that extra XP and get the mobility promo).

Nice use of abundant whipping to get the uni's--that's what slaves are for. :whipped: It does, however, leave just Hari for unit production for quite awhile. I take it we're just going to hunker down, hope that Shaka doesn't have any cities south of Nongoma, and wipe him out later with trebs and maces? Speaking of Nongoma, how/when are we planning to take that?
 
I think that was changed in Warlords......

My only concern with Niklas plan is that ( here I go again ) it assumes a GS as next GP. there is roughly 10% changes of not getting a GS, and if we don't get it there are some queues that become somewhat underperforming ( see pura )
 
Ah, thanks for noticing rolo. The plan for Pura is wrong, we can't start Uni before we have Edu of course. It's easy to fix though, we don't whip the temple until one turn before Edu, i.e. T145 when we have 49 hammers collected, 31 left means 2 pop whip anyway. That also means that we don't need to make any decisions before we know if we have a GS or not.

Xc, I didn't look closely at Hari (nor Nobamba), concentrating on the Uni-building towns. I agree that HE right away isn't really needed, we should probably do what Renata suggested and build two workers in five turns before starting it. I've edited that into the plan now.

For the war, I envision the following. We capture Ulundi, then ask for a CF. During that CF we heal up and then march our units south towards Nongoma, and break the CF when we're in place. We capture Nongoma and then ask for a real Peace Treaty (can't be broken in 10 turns).

Some time around turn 170 I would like to see us revolt to CS+Pac, and start running Yo as the GP farm it truly is.

What about research after Edu? Some possibilities include:
- MC->Mach->Eng/Opt. Obviously these are all techs we want, my only hesitation here is that I would really really want to trade for them. There are bound to be AIs out there with MC, if only we could find them! That would save us quite a few turns on our end date, though if we need Optics to meet them then...
- Nationalism. Build Taj Mahal for a Golden Age during which we can build and research fast, generate GPPs fast, and that would allow us to switch civics without anarchy.
- Compass. Needed for Optics if we take that route. Gives us harbors to alleviate our health problems. They aren't as evident now after capturing the rice though. And this is another tech we could surely trade for.
- Currency. Getting it from Shaka would be optimal, but I'm not sure that's feasible.
- Calendar. We have no use for it (except possibly MoM) and would be better off trading for it after getting Optics.
- Liberalism. Obviously we don't want to complete it yet, but we could research until one turn remained if we had nothing better to do. But I think we do have better things to do.
 
If Chris can't play until Sunday, and unkle can't play, should you play instead Niklas?

I'm having a bad couple of days; will probably be able to think again tomorrow.
 
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