Other "Special" Resources and a Lack of the Calendar Tech for many of the AIs
No sign of dye and silk yet then? I guess not all the AIs we've met have Calendar yet though.
Only Saladin and Toku have Calendar of the AIs that we have met, so nothing conclusive on that front.
Still, with Toku having Ivory, I would not be surprised to see two additional AIs other than Toku having the Resources that we need (preventing any one SGOTM team from just declaring war twice to get all of the required Resources). That's IF the AIs settled where the game designer planned for them to settle...
Biology
Is Biology part of our tech path?
Not officially, no. It is quite a ways off of the beaten path, requiring Engineering, Gunpowder, and Chemistry, in addition to the already-planned-to-be-researched Scientific Method, before we can start to research Biology.
Chances are that the AIs will research Gunpowder, but would they be willing to trade us such a military tech? Maybe if we finally get Buddhism within our borders...
We can't really count on Lightbulbing these additional techs, either, as we'll need to save our Great People for the end of the game.
We should not need Biology to increase our voting count, like you might in a normal game. We just need sufficient population to be the largest Civ population-wise near the end of the game. Which just really comes down to having sufficient land.
A lot of our Cities will be half-coastal, so Biology won't necessarily add that much in terms of growth (say, an average of 4 to 5 Food per City per turn for what... 10 turns? How long do you want to delay our victory after researching Biology?).
I'm not totally against going for it, but I'd rather not chase after it until after we get Mass Media and only expect to get it if we can trade for a lot of its pre-requisites, minus maybe Chemistry being self-researched.
I've tested out Diplo games of Biology vs non-Biology and the non-Biology games always win out, because you can always be crafty in the way that you manipulate the votes and the extra time that you get is huge, allowing you to fail maybe two or three votes and still beat a date where you first beeline Biology. Unless we were playing on Deity and the AIs were helping you to tech a lot of the techs, we won't be able to expect much help in terms of getting the right techs in trade when we'd need them for a proper beeline to Biology.
If we're desperate for pop it opens up Medicine for sushi,
While Sid's Sushi is tempting, by the time that we can finally research the tech for it, we're still only going to see the benefit in one single City, unless we start pop-rushing Executives, which kind of defeats the purpose of trying to
quickly increase your overall populatoin points. Yes, your whipped population points would grow back over time and over time you'd get more population, but the time investment will drag the game out almost to a Space Victory time... way too late for us to be competitive.
I'm afraid that if we can't be #1 in population, we'll just have to take our chances against the #2 in the vote.
If we keep Toku out of Theocracy and if we get the positive bonuses for trading that he doesn't, say, by using Spies to destroy his trading deals and then with him being an AI and not seeing the value of "giving away techs just to be better liked," we will still have a chance over the course of several votes to win the game with a respectable date.
More Settlers
There's a lot of work to do spreading Buddhism, I'd be inclined to settle the cruddy ice crab site quite soon.
Okay, so it sounds like I will have to figure out from where I can spawn more Settlers.
Grt Person Farm isn't where I really want to build them, since we want to get that City to complete its required buildings and growing ASAP, so that it can turn around and start generating Great People for us.
Delhi, although I'm going to build 1 Settler there, really should stop building the Settlers.
Wheaties is going to be busy, and I've tentatively written Bedrock off to potentially build a Wonder (The Parthenon, Shwegadon Paya, or whatever).
Silverado and Riverdale are out, as both have too small of a Food surplus and hardly enough Hammers--both Cities currently have more of a Commerce-based focus and thus are poorly-suited as Settler-building Cities.
So, I guess we'll have to get Three Clams and Crab City building a couple of Settlers the "slow, hard way" soon. The plan will be to switch into Caste System soon, pop the borders, and then whip another Work Boat each, after which they can build Lighthouses, and then finally Settlers. That's a while off, but it's probably the best that we've got.
We could also just choose to "not complete" the Lighthouses or perhaps better, could aim to Forest chop them, so that we'd get their bonus Food (which would boost Settler production by a reasonable margin) without immediately shrinking the Cities' Sizes just prior to starting on Settlers.
Once we have buddhism, we can potentially then get another aid to our diplo plans by donating the city back to him.
That's a fair point, but I think that we'll probably even try and keep a Crab-based Iceball City unless we'll be certain that we can get to be the #1 population Civ without it.
i can wait max 30 minutes from now. Thanks to thinking at me.
