SGOTM 10 - One Short Straw

[babybluepants]

I'd like the worker to go 1SE, and start chopping on t1. This gives us two workers ready to go in 1305 AD. Are we gonna explore the little peninsula up north with the N LB, or send it right back down?

I still like Caste better, but I'm totally ok with Bureau / Serf / Merc / Pac, as you suggested earlier.

We need fogbusters to stop barb cities forming as we can't take any before nukes. We will need to buils something other than settlers while the capital grows to size 5. Other than a library we don't really have anything else immediatly useful to build there.

Sure, but can we build a library first? We do need a happy fix unit early. If we chop a worker in Moscow, we can have a warrior for this purpose with overflow.

3 workers + serfdom is massive overkill, we simply won't be able to work that many improvements early on.

A third worker would cost us 4t of growth in Moscow. I'm not sure it's worthwhile, but I think we really need to carefully micro this before we do anything. I figure a bare minimum of 27t for a single worker in Moscow to get the 5 resource improvements, and 29t in Peter to chop WB's, hook up iron and chop/mine a hill. The cities can both grow to size 6 in 23t and 24t, respectively, but they'd probably be running a scientist at that point. There will be unimproved tiles throughout for the occasional few turns. We also wanna stay ahead of happiness problems - we need to hook up gold right after corn/cow. Where I have a problem with it is the second order of business, which should involve getting a bit more prod (meaning hill mines) for settlers/workers, hooking up ivory once in cultural borders, hooking up health and chopping for settler(s). We'll have to do some juggling with two workers at that point.

The free tech is more expensive. It slows down the AI's tech rate. We can't guarantee that we will be able to trade for education, and we don't really want to encourage the AI down the democracy path by trading nationalism/constitution to them.

I agree completely.

 

[shyuhe]

I see the choice as caste + 3 workers or serfdom + 2 workers.

 

[Soirana]

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[Soirana]

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[Soirana]

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[babybluepants]

Does not cause faster. Does your testing tell opposite?

Re serfdom and second city:
My concern is not GE but need to suppres having another. At any rate first GS should make academy any turn without it and not on zero slide is loss of up to twenty.
I played with capitol acting as settlers pump while second being focused on GP. The only place i see for that is on phants for double seafood and

I find that I can get an academy and an Educ GS in time with Caste, but not with Serf, unless I go for really low odds. That's fine. Serfdom does give a slight margin in expansion, which is probably more important.

What's wrong with the second city as we've been discussing? It has a lot of food. My issues with the ivory / seafood city are that it requires more worker turns early to get going (as opposed to WB's) and that it doesn't leave room for a third in the current screenshot. It basically puts the fish to waste.

I also suggest changing discussion toward: i suggest a because of b which is due to testing showing...
If you want go on with untested feelings it is okay. Just PM me plan and i make a turnset in november. (i am known troll on some forums so i suggest not overreacting to mind posts)

I'm assuming everyone's been testing. We probably should be posting some numbers, though. I just tried 3 workers with 1W of gold and 1W of fish, bureau/serf/merc/pac and an extra turn for adopting religion. After 27t (1420 AD), I get:

Moscow: Pop 7, 23/45 Food, 99/342 Settler, 5fpt 22hpt 45bpt 3gpp (builds: Work, Work, Warr, Lib, LB, Sett)
Peter: Pop 7, 36/45 Food, 0/61 Trireme, 5fpt 12hpt 17bpt 12gpp (builds: WB, WB, Warr, Lib, WB, Trireme)
Tech: 1077/2721 Nationalism; 61bpt
Improvements: corn, rice, cow, gold, gold, iron, gh mine, ph mine, 2 more gh mines in 1t, a few roads

I had a couple of minor misclicks, but all it would change is maybe 1t sooner to the same thing. I would actually almost switch to Caste/HR at this point, since Peter could easily start running 4-5 specialists and the first whack of improvements is done.

I don't have any time for Civ 'till tmr night most likely. shyuhe or mdy, can you try running through it with 2 workers so we can compare?

 

[shyuhe]

I won't have time till this weekend unfortunately Super busy with work.

 

[mdy]

Moscow: Pop 7, 23/45 Food, 99/342 Settler, 5fpt 22hpt 45bpt 3gpp (builds: Work, Work, Warr, Lib, LB, Sett)
Peter: Pop 7, 36/45 Food, 0/61 Trireme, 5fpt 12hpt 17bpt 12gpp (builds: WB, WB, Warr, Lib, WB, Trireme)
Tech: 1077/2721 Nationalism; 61bpt
Improvements: corn, rice, cow, gold, gold, iron, gh mine, ph mine, 2 more gh mines in 1t, a few roads

That's significantly better than anything I can get with 2 workers so I now think that caste system would now be better than serfdom. I'm still doubtful about pacifism though, we can get 2 scientists in time for an education bulb without it and it would avoid diplo prblems with religion. Depending on the map we may also need some more fog busters as well.

 

[babybluepants]

I like caste, but I also don't think serf for a while - maybe even just 25-30t - followed by a switch to HR/Caste is bad. 3 workers in serfdom for 25t more than make up for a turn of anarchy. HR is useless until that point, but pretty decent after.

It's not so much the educ GS - we can get that easily. I'd also like a first GS for an academy, especially now that we're going with a 2-gold bureau cap. In my example above, acad would already give 18-20bpt in Moscow which is a pretty significant boost.

My argument on pacifism remains the same: if we skip it, we're getting slaughtered by other teams going with it. In my testing with Pac so far, I'm getting roughly as many beakers if not more from bulbs as I am from actual tech rate going to SM and probably further. With the amount of rex-ing we'll wanna do, it'll be pretty hard to get far above 100-150bpt sustainable rate before all the infrastructure is up - which is pretty far along.

You're right about fog-busting, but barbs don't really show up 'till a bit later than this... I've been thinking that in the current scenario, a third city at ivory/fp could be a decent unit pump early on. That might be a touch late, though... This is something we can decide on a bit later, too, since it will depend quite a bit on map setup. I don't think we should delay the worker/wb force or libs for it at this point.

 

[RRRaskolnikov]

Hi guys,

I can't access the web till the 5th of september (3G card broken) contrary to what was planned at the beginning wallbash. So go on with the game if Soirana comes back before me, I wouldn't want to penalize the team.

Cheers,
Raskolnikov

 

[shyuhe]

I am basically waiting for agreement on the civic choice and worker movement at this point. As I mentioned earlier, I won't have time to test until this weekend though...

 

[Soirana]

deleted into oblivion

 

[shyuhe]

We currently plan on putting the second city to claim the fishing resources to the north.

 

[mdy]

I like caste, but I also don't think serf for a while - maybe even just 25-30t - followed by a switch to HR/Caste is bad. 3 workers in serfdom for 25t more than make up for a turn of anarchy. HR is useless until that point, but pretty decent after.


My argument on pacifism remains the same: if we skip it, we're getting slaughtered by other teams going with it. In my testing with Pac so far, I'm getting roughly as many beakers if not more from bulbs as I am from actual tech rate going to SM and probably further.

with 3 workers the benefits of serfdom are actually pretty small. Unless we plan on only building 2 CS looks better. If your tests show that pacifism is that big an advantage we will have to take the risk to be competitive. We should be able to switch out of it when we revolt to representation if it looks like it will be a big problem. If we do this we should avoid hereditary rule to avoid a turn of anarchy, we should have enough happiness without it.

You're right about fog-busting, but barbs don't really show up 'till a bit later than this... I've been thinking that in the current scenario, a third city at ivory/fp could be a decent unit pump early on. That might be a touch late, though...

My tests indicate that this will be much too late. Perhaps we should play the first 10 turns, once we have done some exploring we will have a much better idea how much trouble fogbusting will be.

 

[babybluepants]

with 3 workers the benefits of serfdom are actually pretty small. Unless we plan on only building 2 CS looks better.

How's that? I figure that the more workers we have - the greater its cumulative benefit. I just tried the same start with caste instead of serfdom and got:

Moscow: Pop 6, 25/43 Food, 101/121 Library, 9fpt 14hpt 35bpt 6gpp (builds: Work, Work, Warr, Lib)
Peter: Pop 6, 21/43 Food, 82/40 WB, 5fpt 6hpt 15bpt 18gpp (builds: WB, WB, Warr, WB)
Tech: 1107/2721 Nationalism; 49bpt
Improvements: corn, rice, cow, gold, iron, DH gold in 4t, 2-3 roads

That's much, much worse in every respect. If I now took a turn of anarchy in my first example, I'd be easily 10-15t ahead in expansion. I did, however, get an academy already and the second GS is well under way - that's the benefit of caste. I think it would take some careful micro, but the best start is probably something involving serfdom and still getting 2GS before we're done Nationalism.

If your tests show that pacifism is that big an advantage we will have to take the risk to be competitive. We should be able to switch out of it when we revolt to representation if it looks like it will be a big problem.

Well... I'm not arguing for pacifism based on any hard test data. I'm not even really sure how we would test it with any accuracy, since the only conceivable reason not to use it is a potential DOW and we can't really know whether that will happen. In the games I've taken further along I played kinda poorly, so I don't know how representative they are for total number of GP's.

The value of a bulb is proportionally much higher early in this game, and there's a long string of techs bulbable by GS then (edu, pp, chem, astro, sm, bio, phys). Once we're past communism with, hopefully, around 10 cities, we can easily hammer out the rest. I just figure pacifism gets us to comm and bio quicker.

 

[babybluepants]

I am basically waiting for agreement on the civic choice and worker movement at this point. As I mentioned earlier, I won't have time to test until this weekend though...

I think we can wait for a few days, for Soirana to be fully back online. Hopefully, Paulus also shows up. Three of us seem to be happy with city placement, with Soirana opposed, and two votes missing. Everyone's down with Bureau and Merc, but we're divided on Serf/Caste and Pac. Correct? Stage some sort of vote after the weekend?

 

[Soirana]

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[Soirana]

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[Soirana]

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[Soirana]

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