BLubmuz said:
Why not steal a corn from Dehli, grow to 2 while building a granary or anything, then switch to a settler?
Part of the reason is that doing so will not noticeably speed up the production of the Settler.
What square would we work at Size 2? A GFor for 2 Food + 1 Hammer and the PHRiv Silver? That would net us 1 extra Hammer per turn, at the cost of greatly delaying the Settler and somehow having to build the Granary first, too. If we don't build the Granary first, then growing just to work a 3 (Food + Hammers) square is a very wasteful approach, instead of just a somewhat-wasteful approach.
Maybe a Lake? Well, we won't yet have Fishing, but assuming that we did, that would be 2 Food + 2 Commerce, which would not speed up the Settler production at all. We'd of course delay the Settler's date by exactly the number of turns we would spend on buildng other things (a Granary, and whatever else after the Granary that we build while growing), while it would still take us the exact same number of turns to complete the Settler.
The whole point of suggesting a Settler now is that we will be delaying growth in Silverado in order to work the Silver Resource for a long time to come, anyway. Producing the Granary but not growing afterwards, which was our current plan, doesn't offer much in the way of benefit to our empire.
What Unclethrill is saying is that we CANNOT afford to switch away from the Silver Resource anytime soon, in terms of our research rate, thus it will be a long time before we are actually able to switch away from the Silver Resource.
Yes, eventually we want to make Silverado a good City.
Yes, once we have Hunting, Fishing, and Sailing, Silverado will be able to grow and build better buildings (a Lighthouse and Moai Statues). Yet, until that time, there's not much better for the City to do.
A Courthouse won't even be worthwhile at Size 1, anyway, so that building a Courthouse is a bust--I only started to build it because we had "nothing better to build" while waiting for the Granary. Yet, after doing the calculations related to the Granary, we'll end up building it way too soon, as well, making the act of building it immediately not being of much use.
There would be ZERO sense in building a Granary and then building a Settler immediately aftwards, as if we build a Granary, we'll want to complete it before we grow to Size 2, in order to make use of the Granary's effects, so we'd still be at Size 1 if we went for a Settler right after a Granary. All that we'd accomplish with this approach would be to get the identical benefit from our Granary while losing out on time that we could have settled a new City with the Settler.
Delhi also needs that Corn for the foreseeable near future, in order to:
a) Get our Settlers out ASAP
b) Regrow after whipping the Granary
c) Feed multiple Specialists, especially when we switch into Caste System for our hoped-for Great Scientist as our 3rd Great Person
Note that the Granary has 0 Hammers invested into it, as I just switched to building it on the same turn that Irgy will start his turnset. So, switching away from the Granary now is a good time to do so in terms of not worrying about potential loss of invested Hammers in the Granary (since there are no such invested Hammers in the Granary).
As for the Courthouse, I believe that we built it for a total of 3 turns. At 4 Hammers per turn, without us netting any benefit from Organized Religion, that's 3 * 4 = 12 Hammers invested.
A building's Hammers decay at a rate of 1 Hammer per Turn after 60 turns have passed * 1.5 for Epic = 90 turns. Add to that number 1 turn for every turn where we complete a build item and have the Courthouse queued after that item.
So, instead of putting the following in the queue:
Settler -> Granary -> Courthouse
we can put the following items in the queue:
Settler -> Courthouse
That way, we will get at least 91 turns before the Courthouse's Hammers expire, and we can still put it in Mitchum's PPP to add a Granary to the Build Queue on the turn that the Settler is complete, such that 0 further Hammers will need to be invested into the Courthouse--we'll just leverage the game's "checking mechanism" of checking at the start of the turn for whether or not to subtract Hammers from a partially-built item in the build queue not being the "next item," while the Hammers for a turn actually won't be added until the end of the turn. For every other item that we build before the Courthouse using this technique, we'll add 1 more turn to that 91 turns of delay before Hammer decay occurs.
Even if Irgy leaves the Granary in the build queue, as long as we take it out of the build queue before the Settler is complete, we will still get that 1 extra turn on top of the 90 turns before the Hammers decay, so I don't even worry about how he queues up the items, as the queue order won't even matter for a couple of turnsets anyway, as long as the Settler is the item currently being built.
I can see a case being made for not building a Settler there now, building the Granary to completion, and then sometime later, well after the 23 turns that it will take to build the Granary, growing to Size 2. In this way, we might grow to Size 2 marginally quicker.
It's just that we gain a greater opportunity to grab another City when our empire can afford to do so if we build that Settler starting now, whereas we hardly gain anything by getting the Granary first and what we do gain can't be made up for if we have to either:
a) Lose a City location to Zara
OR
b) Lose Trade Routes with Zara by Closing Borders with him
