SGOTM 11 - One Short Straw

[Silu]

Hmm, now why did I think Paper requires Alphabet? I guess I should really try and play more nonstandard games... Just for reference, both ZY and Justinian trade maps at Cautious (even ZY's map can be of use with outstretching ocean culture).

Still, I wouldn't put Paper in front of stuff like Currency. I mean, we all want to know more and scout more, but what real short-term decisions would that map info affect? We might even see some of the stuff we need to control, but what use is that info right now? Anyway, here's a radical thought that just popped into mind: if we WOULD go Paper soonish, we could delay the WB scout completely for some time and rely on Justinian's map, which among other things would enable us to settle the much better Wheat spot. Yeah yeah I know, it's somewhat of a gambit and blah blah, but still interesting to think about. AIs just love their scouting. When we'd then send scouts later we'd know where to head, possibly know if we'd want to Galley a Scout up there and so forth. Though something that speaks against this is the fact that we need a ton of WBs soon anyway to actually do WB stuff EDIT: Oops, forgot we'd actually need something to GIVE him in trade for his map, which needs Alpha or Currency

So many juicy tech choices... Aesth, Currency, Alpha, Paper... I don't think I have it in me to bypass TGL with PHI AND Marble AND 'Mids, though, and wouldn't say no to Parth either if we could fit it in in some craphole that won't be popping GPs... Hmm... Or are we going to blaze through to SciMet so fast that the benefits of TGL and Parth are indeed not very big? Didn't think of that actually. Damn, really need to think outside the standard box more... What about Music? Do we want to fit that somewhere? Probably not since the trade bait aspect is much less useful on Emperor, even though it'd nicely give one of those sacrificial GPs. I guess we have a fair shot at each of Economics, Physics and Communism though to get random GPs as they're almost on the path, less so for Music and Fascism (or Fusion ).

 

[Mutineer]

The onl;y way out of this hole I see is:

Build settler in capital, overflow into worker,

MM worker for maximum overflow.

Whip worker for 2 pop, overflow into mids with stone connected.
Re-grow capital to size 4 with max speed,

Whip worker for max overflow, overflow into mids.

Use new worker turns to chop some forests into mids.
I do not have time to do tests , but may be whip 3rd worker at size 4 again.

Mids happiness will compensate for used happiness. I really do not want to loose Mids, we are happiness limited and will be limited for some time.

I would rather have cities size 8 with specialist producing 6 beakers when size 5 cities with specialists producing 3 beakers.

Loosing mids is too big loss in my book, so, we need to build it as soon as posible.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Zara Mystery #274

I just noticed that we have trade relations with Zara already. Did someone mention this already? The mystery is this: Zara has 2 cows?!?!? and...is not interested in one of our corns. WTH? How in the world does he have another cow and corn tile? Especially if we're to believe the Top 5 Cities picture of Aksum?

 

[mystyfly]

I Just notoced, stone is not connected yet????? WHY? You are forcing our hand with out discussion. WE agred to play 5 turns to get more information, not to force our hand. What point of discussion if you just ignore what some one else say?

ANd in all your discussions you are forgetting exploration wb. I want our first WB been exploration WB and so Wheat desert city is first.

I played as planned, I'm not ignoring anything. Stone quarry is as close to completion as was intened. Plan was to have overflow into SETTLER which is why the settler is done in 1t!!

Will do LCs movements as proposed in post #488 now as nobody seemed to disagree.

 

[mystyfly]

I uploaded the new save if you want to see yourself.

Good thing to do these moves:

Fistly the warrior moving 1W:

So there is yet another island to the west. Means we'll need more WBs. EVEN more than we need anyway... It doesn't make this site any better however.

Then; OB and moving warrior onto forest hill close to aksum:

So there's the other source of cows. I thought that he "has nothing to gain" means he already has corn. The scoreboard tells me he has 2 cities, the tiles we know that he posesses look mighty like he settled to the south, near the cow and horses. An (unlikely) possibility is that aksum's culture spreads onto another island and he has corn from there (possibly in BFC) OR what I think is the case, gets his corn from justinian which is only possible if he has another source of clams as we know he didn't trade away his cows. Since we don't have sailing we can't trade with just or see what resources he has/wants. Zara and just are pleased by eachother btw but don't have any modifiers for "years you've supplied us with resources" but that one usually takes a while to get anyway.
Or zara might know another civ to the east that couldn't reach us since they don't have OB with zara but I doubt that...

You see, 1 archer is all that is sitting in aksum, he probably just sent his settler + escort, either to Mystery Island or to the site we've been discussing earlier with all those green river tiles, I don't see why though.

I just noticed that we have trade relations with Zara already. Did someone mention this already? The mystery is this: Zara has 2 cows?!?!? and...is not interested in one of our corns. WTH? How in the world does he have another cow and corn tile? Especially if we're to believe the Top 5 Cities picture of Aksum?

What trade relations do we have with zara? We have +1 from peace, not trade.


@shyuhe: You said, since we're far ahead of the others you fear we might have overlooked something... We have 3rd highest posts per turn and we had this big set mut played through the CS sling. With that posting pace we're still keeping up it's not surprising at all that we're racing through that game imo. I don't think we really missed anything

edit: I like teching aest > lit after sailing.

 

[mdy]

The onl;y way out of this hole I see is:

Build settler in capital, overflow into worker,

MM worker for maximum overflow.

Whip worker for 2 pop, overflow into mids with stone connected.
Re-grow capital to size 4 with max speed,

Whip worker for max overflow, overflow into mids.

Use new worker turns to chop some forests into mids.
I do not have time to do tests , but may be whip 3rd worker at size 4 again.

Mids happiness will compensate for used happiness. I really do not want to loose Mids, we are happiness limited and will be limited for some time.

I would rather have cities size 8 with specialist producing 6 beakers when size 5 cities with specialists producing 3 beakers.

Loosing mids is too big loss in my book, so, we need to build it as soon as posible.

We aren't in a hole, the chances of losing the Pyramids if we build in on T131 are effectively 0. No AI built it before then when I did the tests for the Oracle date either, so no AI has built it before then in 20 individual tests. In the 10 tests I have just done Stonhenge was built earlier than 1525B.C. on 9 separate occasions, and the 10th was on the same date. For the Great Wall they were built earlier about half the time. This suggests, as babybluepants pointed out that we have no wonder of here, and the map has been designed such that a wonder based cultural strategy is fairly easy. This just makes the Pyramids even more secure.

Rushing the Pyramids will delay our Rex, exploration and other city development and won't get us any real advantage in return. When would the GS be generated in your plan, if we don't generate it before the Pyramids we risk getting an engineer, whilst we do want one eventually getting one now would be very suboptimal.

I think it is important to remember that we do not have a choice between having cities size 8 with specialist producing 6 beakers when size 5 cities with specialists producing 3 beakers, because even if we build the Pyramids on T131 as I outlined none of our cities will have been able to grow above size 7(which is our happy cap, not 5 because of the silver and religion), and then this will only occur in the capital. Other than possibly popping borders we would not be running specialists between T118 and T131 either as our GP farms will need to get the infastructure up first. Rushing the Mids will actually delay us running specialists by delaying the Rex and devoting more worker turns to chopping the capital.

I see it as a choice between a strong rex and a safe Pyramids on T131, and delaying the Rex and building an early Pyramids which will not give us anything to make up for slowing down the Rex.

 

[Silu]

It's interesting to note the route via which our ZY trade network connection goes. It's down river from Delhi, to the lake, from the lake to the ocean diagonally... Never knew that it works that way. Also interesting to note that we do not have a trade network connection to Justinian. Either he doesn't have Sailing or the full fog south there obstructs the trade network connection.

Oh, and I invented an upside to making the Wheat city coastal: we get room for a semi-crappy inland city, which we can plant and leave unconnected in case we screw up with not building enough Warriors (or getting them killed)

And about progress speed, well, Plastic Deityducks is at 1800BC so they didn't stop for a long while at least.

 

[Mutineer]

No connection is our capital ro river on east - to zara.

Are we misising something?

One More wander we absolutely need to build. Wander which is open with calendar, need gold for double speed and give civ ability to use every religious civic.

WE need to deny it to AI!

 

[Mutineer]

We aren't in a hole, the chances of losing the Pyramids if we build in on T131 are effectively 0. No AI built it before then when I did the tests for the Oracle date either, so no AI has built it before then in 20 individual tests. In the 10 tests I have just done Stonhenge was built earlier than 1525B.C. on 9 separate occasions, and the 10th was on the same date. For the Great Wall they were built earlier about half the time. This suggests, as babybluepants pointed out that we have no wonder of here, and the map has been designed such that a wonder based cultural strategy is fairly easy. This just makes the Pyramids even more secure.

Rushing the Pyramids will delay our Rex, exploration and other city development and won't get us any real advantage in return. When would the GS be generated in your plan, if we don't generate it before the Pyramids we risk getting an engineer, whilst we do want one eventually getting one now would be very suboptimal.

I think it is important to remember that we do not have a choice between having cities size 8 with specialist producing 6 beakers when size 5 cities with specialists producing 3 beakers, because even if we build the Pyramids on T131 as I outlined none of our cities will have been able to grow above size 7(which is our happy cap, not 5 because of the silver and religion), and then this will only occur in the capital. Other than possibly popping borders we would not be running specialists between T118 and T131 either as our GP farms will need to get the infastructure up first. Rushing the Mids will actually delay us running specialists by delaying the Rex and devoting more worker turns to chopping the capital.

I see it as a choice between a strong rex and a safe Pyramids on T131, and delaying the Rex and building an early Pyramids which will not give us anything to make up for slowing down the Rex.

Wrong, rushing piramids does not delay our rex, not pass our ability to improve ties for rex. Actually otherwise, Mids happiness let as use whip more early, speeding up our rex.

If you actually did experiment, instead of claiming something like fact, you would see it.

 

[Silu]

No connection is our capital ro river on east - to zara.

Hmh, actually it's both. Dunno how I missed the diagonal river corner -> other river jump there. Here's the picture. I think this means Justinian doesn't have Sailing as we'd get network connections through Aksum.

Spoiler :

Are we misising something?

One More wander we absolutely need to build. Wander which is open with calendar, need gold for double speed and give civ ability to use every religious civic.

WE need to deny it to AI!

You mean Shwedagon Paya, the one that's opened with the combination of Aesthetics and Meditation? And you mean we need to deny this in order for the builder to not use FR? I wouldn't worry, we can always bribe/spy them back to a religion, and the way things look we don't exactly have FR lovers around. Building the SP without Gold is very very inefficient.

 

[mystyfly]

I agree with silu, no shweda... but let's now focus on the next few sets. What do we want to tech?Fishing>sailing is given, but what then? Aest>lit keeps the trade-for-abc option open and SIGNIFICANTLY boosts GPP, I prefer that. Other techs we'll want soon are currency as basic eco tech as well as trading for gold, MC for forges (they give +1 for now) and machinery/compass/optics eventually for caravels. I think GPP first, then exploration when our cities are set up, and finally the lib route, by then we should have all the GSs we need to bulb along.

Even more shortterm is the overflow in delhi. Having it forthe mids is silly as we can build it very fast once we have stone and we should focus on getting our cities now. So its Worker vs Settler. IMO with fast workers, the amount of seafood tiles and the whipping we wont need many improves tiles just yet to get our cities working, so we should get out that settler. Remember that we fired scientists in order to get exactly that much overflow to build the settler in 1t so we can regrow quickly. To me settler is much better. We have one for the fish site, the whipped one can settle wheat to make sure we don't lose any sites we might want to zara while the bombay settler can settle clams/marble.

 

[Mutineer]

you missundestand my post or did not read it.

Seens we do not have stone connected, we are forsed to build settler and grow.

But we do need worker, so, we can whip 2-3 workers at size 4 for 2 population trowing overflow to Mids.

 

[Silu]

^ For me, overflow to Settler, Aesth->Poly->Lit->Currency (barring decision-changing happenings) after Sailing.

What about OB with Justinian? Normally we'd want to postpone that until we get Sailing to not bleed TRs, but here IMO we actually WANT the others to tech in order to have stuff to trade, so maybe take it already?

 

[LowtherCastle]

Notes:
1. Epic GS bulb is 2250b + pop*factor (I forget the factor for epic)
2. After Sailing, we go 0% research till we get the academy, ~T116. Still get beakers though, so we have to decide where. Currency also gives us build commerce, which is useful for our research and for delaying overflow, if we want to.
3. 3NE of our warrior is a coastal tile.
4. Zara must know someone else, because the relations screen doesn't show him trading seafood for corn with Justy.
5. Stone is hooked up next turn.
6. The Delhi settler build gives 0h overflow.

 

[Silu]

4. Zara must know someone else, because the relations screen doesn't show him trading seafood for corn with Justy.

I don't think this holds. To my experience BUG only shows trades in relations if the trades were made during a time when the player has vision on both of the trading Civs' resources (i.e. they're known and connected to the player's trade network). It certainly doesn't always show them.

Fun fact: 102 unclaimed tiles on our landmass. Hope Erkon's curse doesn't manifest and plop a barb city NWNW of 2-fish next turn while it's still possible

EDIT: About Aesth/Currency next, I'm still hoping we'll get Alpha in a trade relatively soon, so we could research Currency with a boost. Not sure if this is wishful thinking on Emperor though.

 

[LowtherCastle]

I have made a few rough tests, using the test save. Basically, I see no problem getting our academy, 3 more settlers, and the Pyramids, all by T118. At that point, we almost have too many workers (you never have too many... ), and our MM challenge becomes how to get our GP farms running and 6 unis for Oxford, along with exploration and all the fun diplomacy that goes with it.

These are my observations and test notes:

1. We cannot really REX too fast, we can REX too slowly.
2. City builds
Delhi settler-mids-settler-mids. At pop4 work 2f1h. At pop5, hire 2sci.
(Mdy's academy GS solution works perfectly: GS-settler-Mids. T117-T118.)
Bombay worker(2pop on T103 BEFORE REVOLTING TO CASTES)-settler-worker
2-fish granary
Wheat wb-wb-wb
Marble granary
FP wb-?
2.5 We would be wise to only build buildings in 2-Fish and Marble. Build all workboats in Wheat and FP.
3. We want Sailing asap for trade route cash. Then 0% research till Academy. This plan frees us to REX insanely.
4. Both warriors should work together to ensure the barb warrior doesn't slow down settling Wheat.

5. Worker actions:
T100 (T+0) CANCEL STONE WORKER ACTIONS!!!
T101 wkr(Copper 1S) quarries stone !!!
*all three workers pasture horses asap
*first worker after horses goes to chop forest hill at wheat
*other two workers go to pasture 2-fish cows (+1t of road along the way)
*Poprushed Bombay worker goes to chop Delhi-NE, then Delhi-E, then Delhi-S
*when cow pasture done, wkr1 goes to chop Delhi W-W-NW, then helps with Delhi-S
*when cow pasture done, wkr2 pastures pigs, then goes to new city (Marble or FP)

6. Wheat City: Before Mutineer goes apoplectic (along with me ), let us clarify where we want Wheat City. I'm pretty sure we want to

>>> settle Wheat City on the desert tile between the oasis and the coast <<<.​

Doing so allows us to irrigate the wheat and farm the other three plains tiles pre-electricity (...cough...cough...). Note that Mysty marked a different location on the game save. EDIT: Look slike there's some general disagreement on this, so let's resolve this somehow.

 

[Silu]

^ Note that many of us have been talking about "Wheat-coast" for a while, which means the PH 1NW of the desert tile. This in order to get a scout WB out much faster, along with a bunch of much faster WBs for the Clam city (possibly even 2-Fish). This sacrifices a bunch of longer term usefulness, but there has been arguments that it's still "good enough" (as it can easily get Lib+Uni faste enough) while providing the needed early coastal prod, plus if we want we can fit a filler for the Cow and some leftover green.

 

[LowtherCastle]

I don't think this holds. To my experience BUG only shows trades in relations if the trades were made during a time when the player has vision on both of the trading Civs' resources (i.e. they're known and connected to the player's trade network). It certainly doesn't always show them.

Okay, I haven't paid that much attention to such details.

Fun fact: 102 unclaimed tiles on our landmass. Hope Erkon's curse doesn't manifest and plop a barb city NWNW of 2-fish next turn while it's still possible

I count 95. I think you're counting seven tiles in the far SE that are actually claimed by Gondar, which has expanded its borders already (it has 24, according to F8).

 

[LowtherCastle]

^ Note that many of us have been talking about "Wheat-coast" for a while, which means the PH 1NW of the desert tile. This in order to get a scout WB out much faster, along with a bunch of much faster WBs for the Clam city (possibly even 2-Fish). This sacrifices a bunch of longer term usefulness, but there has been arguments that it's still "good enough" (as it can easily get Lib+Uni faste enough) while providing the needed early coastal prod, plus if we want we can fit a filler for the Cow and some leftover green.

Okay, I see that.

Wheat-coast
Pros:
wbs start 2.5t closer to Justy/Marble
Builds +1 wb after 45t
Includes one incense in btc
Cons:
If Zara settles where Silu suggested, then we probably lose the oasis tile.
Loses 1 forest civ-wide, but both have 5 forests in bfc.

Oasis-coast
Pros:
Forces Zara to pick a bad site if he wants the cattle tile and won't steal our oasis tile.
wbs start 2.5t closer to Zara
+6f at pop2
slightly better re-growth after poprushing, especially if Wheat-coast loses the oasis.
Cons:
wbs start 2.5t farther from Justy/Marble

Both cities can have 14hpt, including 2 farms and the oasis, although Oasis-coast has +2f at 14hpt. Both cities can have 16hpt with two 4h workshops (need Guilds).

I'm not sure what I prefer. In my tests at oasis-coast, the wbs seemed to come out fast enough. That's the main downside to oasis-coast. The main downside to wheat is if it loses the oasis.

 

[Silu]

Oh, Oasis-coast My bad, not sure why I thought the Oasis desert suggestion was inland and that there was no sensible spot on the coast other than the PH. (I blame the blue font that's hard to read for my CFC theme!) I might even be the only one talking about the PH tile... The Oasis is probably better. Sorry for the confusion.