SGOTM 12 - One Short Straw

[LowtherCastle]

I was thinking about this too, I was just doubtfull about whether they would pay off in time in our low production cities. What does everyone else think.

THis is a very important question to be asked about all builds. Libraries probably pay off everywhere almost to the end of the game. Universities are a big question mark.

200h=200b

If a hammer-rich city's only commerce is trad routes, that's about 12cpt, let's say. The uni gives us 3bpt at 100% research. 200b/3bpt=67t. Too late. No unis in cities that will only build wealth from hammers.

So how much commerce should a city produce for unis?

200b/44t= 4.5bpt * 4c/b = 18cpt. A uni require 18cpt to pay off in 44t.

 

[Mitchum]

Not to open a can of worms, but on T+1 are we only planning on switching Castes/Pacifism? At one point, Bureaucracy was on the table... I haven't done the math, but since we don't plan to draft any longer, at least part of the benefit of Nationhood is gone...

I "think" we'll have all the we need, even without the 25% bonus. It may delay one or two of our near-term steals by 1t, but after that we'll have more epp that we know what to do with, I think. In other words, we'll have points on Roosevelt (and/or Gandhi) faster than he can learn techs that we want to steal. Again, I haven't done the math on this, but the 25% bonus is contributing way less than 60 /turn since the multipliers are additive, not multiplicative.

OK, OK, here is the math... Quickly, we're getting more than 80% of our espionage from Beijing, Bahamas, Bermuda and Guangzhou. Adding up the base in each city gives 34 + 34 + 10 + 10 = 88 * 25% = 22. So Nationhood is giving us less than 30 /turn or about 10% of our total.

So it boils down to +2 from the barracks and the reduced civics cost vs. the 50% bonus in Moscow. At 100% science slider, I'd bet the Bureau bonus could speed up RR by a turn...

Our current output in Moscow working all tiles is 51 and 53. In a golden age and running Castes, we'll have 71 and 64. That means the Bureau bonus will be 35 and 32 base = +96.

Is that worth the added civic maintenance cost of (252-194) * 1.39 = 80.62 gpt?

 

[LowtherCastle]

I would definitely spread Sushi to Bermuda. Especially if Moscow's building units, we want to pump out execs as fast as possible. Bermuda still has plenty of happy capacity, too. Barracks, market.

Don't forget one thing, guys, we want to have several offshore cities as large as possible to increase our empire's trade route income. Bermuda should push its upper limits as much as possible. TR income in general is something we could work on. Another reason to grow GP Farm asap.

 

[Mitchum]

THis is a very important question to be asked about all builds. Libraries probably pay off everywhere almost to the end of the game. Universities are a big question mark.

200h=200b

If a hammer-rich city's only commerce is trad routes, that's about 12cpt, let's say. The uni gives us 3bpt at 100% research. 200b/3bpt=67t. Too late. No unis in cities that will only build wealth from hammers.

So how much commerce should a city produce for unis?

200b/44t= 4.5bpt * 4c/b = 18cpt. A uni require 18cpt to pay off in 44t.

OK, that makes sense. The math on observatories is much easier. We need these in all cities because they are required for Research Institutes (laboratories), right? With Mining Inc., even hammer-poor cities can crank these buildings out rather quickly.

 

[babybluepants]

Ofc we're spreading to Bermuda. In fact, we're spreading to all cities.

200h=200b

If a hammer-rich city's only commerce is trad routes, that's about 12cpt, let's say. The uni gives us 3bpt at 100% research. 200b/3bpt=67t. Too late. No unis in cities that will only build wealth from hammers.

So how much commerce should a city produce for unis?

200b/44t= 4.5bpt * 4c/b = 18cpt. A uni require 18cpt to pay off in 44t.

Shouldn't be so simple. We'll be running specs everywhere with Sushi, will we not? We'll also likely be running culture slider.

 

[Mitchum]

I would definitely spread Sushi to Bermuda. Especially if Moscow's building units, we want to pump out execs as fast as possible. Bermuda still has plenty of happy capacity, too. Barracks, market.

Can't Bahamas handle the Sushi executive spread for now? If Bermuda is building executives, when will it build a market? We'll want to work all of the hammer/commerce tiles in Bermuda during the GA. Even if we work shop over the food tiles there, we'll have the "stunt growth" button pushed for quite a while while we wait for to go away. So, can Sushi in Bermuda really give us that much bang for the buck in the short term (-22 gpt)? Longer term it makes more sense, but we'll be growing to our happy cap on the very next turn there... Maybe the only benefit we get is the quicker build up of execs for the island and this is the only benefit we need to worry about at the moment.

BTW, has anyone done the math on how quickly we'll sink our economy by spreading Sushi too quickly unless we start hiring massive merchants and/or building wealth? Does it make sense at all to slow roll Sushi as we can afford it?

For Mining Inc., I think it's pedal to the metal. However, I'm not that familiar with Sushi, especially with all of the seafood we have, but it appears that every spread puts us deeper into a hole...

Good point on trade route income.

EDIT: I guess this all comes down to my lack of experience with Sushi. I'll trust you guys but our economy appears to be sinking right now... I'm sure it will pick up with non-stop GAs though!

 

[LowtherCastle]

Our current output in Moscow working all tiles is 51 and 53. In a golden age and running Castes, we'll have 71 and 64. That means the Bureau bonus will be 35 and 32 base = +96.

Is that worth the added civic maintenance cost of (252-194) * 1.39 = 80.62 gpt?

10% research cost 83g and provides 91b, a measly 109.6% muliplier.

There's more, really, though. The extra hammers allow us to build the cannons working fewer hammer tiles, so we could hire more scientists. Comparing:

6b sci * 3 = 18b + 18gpps

5h mine * 2.75 = 13.25b
7h iron mine * 2.75 = 19.25b
6h1c wkshp * (2.75 and 1.5*3) = 17.5b + 4.5b = 22b

So it looks like Bureau is better if you consider the EPs to have trivial value and you add the Moscow hammers. It's certainly something we could consider switching in and out of.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Shouldn't be so simple. We'll be running specs everywhere with Sushi, will we not? We'll also likely be running culture slider.

That's true. So the "18cpt" should include TR income and beakers from specs.

Of course, the 44t assumes that the uni is done T205. MOst will be done later...

 

[mdy]

Also, things are going to get tricky soon with both Mining Inc and Sushi executives to build. Can you provide a general plan for how you plan to spread each corporation. Plus, it would be good to infect Roosevelt with both of them too

We can only have 5 executives at any one time, so my plan was to build them in our highest production cities. Bermuda would spread it to the island, Siberia to the France/China area, and Rheims to the England/China area. If we have a few gaps in those cities where we can't build units due to the limit, then we take the chance to build infastructure in those cities. Later once we have spread mining corps we can add Bahamas/Hammer City/Orleans to the cities building executives. In general I plan to have 5 Sushi executives either in existence, or in production at any one time, the same for mining corps later on.

Do we really need Sushi in every city right away? It currenly cost 44.41 gpt (22 w/courthouse). That's pretty expensive. If the city can't grow much or use the extra food, do we really benefit? As an example, can Bermuda leverage Sushi right now? Sure, we could stop working the pig and sheep tile and work shop over them, but we're at our happy cap already as it is...

There may be a few outlyer cities where it would never be worthwhile, other than that I think every city can use it. The early spread to Bermuda is mainly because it is the best place to build executives for the island cities.

Why the engineer? With all of the wealth multipliers, I think we should hire merchants all the way. The odds of a GE are so low if you only hire one and he'd be used on our three person GA whether a GA or GE, right?

When I did the calculation I thought we needed the extra hammers to build the mining corps executive in 1T, however I neglected the extra hammer workshops got from Caste System so we can replace it with a mercahnt.

I haven't done the gpp workout all the way to the 4 GP golden age, but with the GA being launched this turn and then revolting to Castes, those workshops are going to be very tempting to work... Also, please put a levee in your build plans.

We may well want to work the workshops instead of GP's there later. There are more than 3 cities that can generate a GP for the 4 people GA (the GS from physics can provide the 4th). I was not suggesting that we should stop working all the workshops and hire specialists, only mentioning that this option will be available with it. I'll add the levee to the wish list, however as that city will have to build executives more or less continuously after the ironworks to spread mining corps it will hav to wait a while.

Churchill is effectively iceballed already. We could just leave him in Warwick (or Steam) if we wanted (would we even keep that city?), although we would want to scrub the tiles in the area with units to protect them in our next war so that we don't have to worry about it later.

I guess we could leave him with steam for now, and prioritise a univerity?

Again, if no GP from here, we should favor merchants/scientists.

I was thinking that we might work coastal tiles here while it grows as it is a long way down the corp spread list. The engineer was to give it some production to build the market, and the spy to help with espionage.

On T+1, right?

The plan for this city changed while you were posting

Then what? This city is going to be cranking out hammers soon, so you might want to plan a bit further ahead here.

It can help with spreading corporations in the short term

These cities give us 1 extra seafood each. Will they pay off in 45 turns? I don't know the answer, but it will take some time to build granary -> ch -> library -> university -> etc... Mining Inc will help, but these cities would likely be pretty low on the list of cities to get Mining Inc quickly. Clam Island will also take quite a few worker turns to set up...

As the benefit for the extra resources is felt by every city I think it is worth it, though it may never be worth spreading corps to these cities.

We can take Marseilles before the CF as long as we're sure Churchill didn't settle another city. I guess it's six of one, half dozen the other.

Are you sure we will still be able to gift steam to him if we do this?

The risk here is that Stalin settles a fourth city in those 5 turns...

O.K. I guess we better steal this first. The big risk with not stealing astronomy from Gandhi is that we won't be able to get it for free by the time we need it (which is fairly soon).

Don't understand why we're mixing genetics so much. Fish should only run merchants. GP Farm should only run either scientists or merchants (depending on other plans). It's easier to plan the future GA's if we can count on Caste types at near certainty (plus, they are more useful for turn-by-turn benefit).

The point is we can't be guaranteed that we will get the GP's we want in those cities, as we will have to run a substantial number of sicentits/artists/merchants there. Running some other specialists in other cities gives us some insurance against not getting a spy/engineer when we need it. it looks like only the 3 GP golden age is going to be tight. For the rest we should be able to generate more GP's than we need.

I think that after the caravel has scouted just a bit east to make sure that there are no islands over there (looks safe but who knows), he should hang out north of Stalingrad to make sure that he doesn't send a settler party up there.

I'll do this



I have edited my original plan.

 

[LowtherCastle]

I think Mitchum's right about Bermuda. It doesn't need the Sushi for growth right now and can't really build execs until it finishes some happy builds, like market, barracks, and jail.

On the other hand, Bermuda with Sushi would be an excellent settler pump if we want to produce a bunch of those without poprushing elsewhere.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Siberia:

Build levee if can't build any mining corps executives due to limit.

Sorry, but as I explained before, I think this is a huge mistake.

Mitchum has made some additional points on the expense of spreading Sushi so fast. This levee will almost single-handedly cover the 70g expense of spreading to a new city.

Furthermore, after Ironworks, it will only take 2t to build. I very very very very very strongly think we should build this as soon as the IW is done.

 

[mdy]

This is why I want to get GP Farm going on GP spamming. And some other cities too. If we can get a head of the game, by spamming 5 GPs, for example, before we need to pick three of them for the 3-GP GA, then we'll be able to pump up our reserach even more with only GS's.

How are we supposed to generate 5GP's in 12T I've had a look and I can't see how it could be done. Ideally I agree with you about preferentially running scientist/merchants, but as it is we have to spread our bets.

BTW, has anyone done the math on how quickly we'll sink our economy by spreading Sushi too quickly unless we start hiring massive merchants and/or building wealth? Does it make sense at all to slow roll Sushi as we can afford it?

Wall street, combined with the hiring of 14 merchants in fish will go along way to dealing with these problems. By my calculation by T+4 we should be getting another 170 gold from this city.

So it looks like Bureau is better if you consider the EPs to have trivial value and you add the Moscow hammers. It's certainly something we could consider switching in and out of.

O.K. it look like CS is going to be the best for now then, but aren't we planning on moving the capital fairly soon?

Maybe the only benefit we get is the quicker build up of execs for the island and this is the only benefit we need to worry about at the moment.

This is the main reason yes, due to the limit on the number of executives we can have at one time it can't build executives continually, so it builds the market in the gaps. 2-3T should be enough in a GA.

Mitchum has made some additional points on the expense of spreading Sushi so fast. This levee will almost single-handedly cover the 70g expense of spreading to a new city.

Furthermore, after Ironworks, it will only take 2t to build. I very very very very very strongly think we should build this as soon as the IW is done.

We can build this without delaying the mining corps execs if we take the missionary out of the build queue.

 

[mdy]

I've had a look at the logistics of building executives in Bermuda/Bahamas and the difference is a lot less than I thought, so I now think we should build our executives in Bahamas, and settlers/infrastructure in Bermuda.

 

[LowtherCastle]

How are we supposed to generate 5GP's in 12T I've had a look and I can't see how it could be done. Ideally I agree with you about preferentially running scientist/merchants, but as it is we have to spread our bets.

With that I'm talking about the 4-GP GA, but I typed 3-GP GA, my bad. In other words, I'm talking about the GA after the one you're planning for now.

We can build this without delaying the mining corps execs if we take the missionary out of the build queue.

Basically, we should have a Confu Miss in London in 10t, wherever it comes from, Bermuda or Siberia.

 

[Mitchum]

Are you sure we will still be able to gift steam to him if we do this?

The requirement for an AI to take a city is that a) the AI has three cities or less OR b) the city is within 9 tiles of an existing city. So, if Churchill has not done something funny with his settlers and taking Marseilles gets him to 3 cities or less, you can safely capture Marseilles before the CF and then gift Steam to him.

O.K. I guess we better steal this first. The big risk with not stealing astronomy from Gandhi is that we won't be able to get it for free by the time we need it (which is fairly soon).

Is the rush for Astronomy so that we can settle far off islands, observatories or both? My bet is that Roosevelt will have it before we have the spies in place long enough and the epp to steal it...


You seem to have a pretty good handle on which cities will generate GPs and which will not. Can you tell me which cities you think will generate a great person, when and which type you're trying to get for each? This should help me visualize the big picture. It will also make it clear to everyone (especially those that play after you), which types of specialists to hire in each city.

We should also create some kind of matrix (or a set of rules/guidelines -> i.e. no universities in cities generating less than XX base commerce, library in every city, etc.) showing which infrastructure we want in each city. I know that when I was playing I built more than I had originally planned in my PPP and I had to wing it in a few cities by building what I thought made sense. With this matrix, we can all better plan our turnsets and switch to building wealth at the right time.

For example, if we know a city eventually needs a market for happiness, why not build it now instead of building wealth? That way, we'll also get the 25% bonus sooner, which may allow us to inch up the science slider sooner rather than later.

 

[Mitchum]

Wall street, combined with the hiring of 14 merchants in fish will go along way to dealing with these problems. By my calculation by T+4 we should be getting another 170 gold from this city.

OK. So each spread of Sushi currently costs us ~22 gpt (will go up with more resources). Of course, this assumes the city has a courthouse. I don't think we want sushi in a non-courthouse city. We also get +4 gold in Fish -> 12 gpt after multipliers. So each spread of Sushi actually costs us ~10 gpt.

I guess it's easy to see that the extra food supports 8+ specialists (eventually as it grows), which more than covers this 10 gpt.

BTW, have we considered work shopping over the ivory camps in Fish? Seems like a no-brainer, but I forgot to do it during my turnset.

 

[Mitchum]

Research

What is our research plan, BTW. We keep putting 0% beakers into Astronomy, which could go to waste if we steal it, but that's a separate issue. I assume that once we steal Steam Power it's 100% toward RR. Then what?

BTW, I'm excited for RR and Mining Inc. Every city that has both Sids and Mining is going to be a MONSTER!!

 

[babybluepants]

^^ Maintenance cost is a function of city population, so it will be higher for more mature cities and quite low for new cities. It will also obviously go up as cities grow with Sushi.

In fact, sub-10Pop cities probably make money via Fish. This is why it's always valuable to spread - with Sushi and Mining we can set those cities up to produce by the time their maintenance gets substantially negative.

No Sushi w/o CH. Mining can actually build forge-CH rapidly in a new city, so that's less obvious.

 

[mdy]

Is the rush for Astronomy so that we can settle far off islands, observatories or both? My bet is that Roosevelt will have it before we have the spies in place long enough and the epp to steal it...


You seem to have a pretty good handle on which cities will generate GPs and which will not. Can you tell me which cities you think will generate a great person, when and which type you're trying to get for each? This should help me visualize the big picture. It will also make it clear to everyone (especially those that play after you), which types of specialists to hire in each city.

We should also create some kind of matrix (or a set of rules/guidelines -> i.e. no universities in cities generating less than XX base commerce, library in every city, etc.) showing which infrastructure we want in each city. I know that when I was playing I built more than I had originally planned in my PPP and I had to wing it in a few cities by building what I thought made sense. With this matrix, we can all better plan our turnsets and switch to building wealth at the right time.

T+6 London-anything except a merchant or an artist
T+11 Fish-merchant
T+12 pigs-artist

We have a chance of about 7% of getting 2 GP's of the same type.

I mainly want astronomy because it will open up physics after railroad, though they would be a pre requisite for any invasion of India as well.

Right now it looks like any city except the ones which are working almost entirely workshops will benefit from a university because of Sushi. I agree that if we know we need some infrastructure it is better to build it before wealth.

BTW, have we considered work shopping over the ivory camps in Fish? Seems like a no-brainer, but I forgot to do it during my turnset.

We probably should, but as we will stop working them for a while in 4T there is no hurry to do so.

 

[babybluepants]

From BOTM 37:

@OSS

Enjoy the deadline! hehehe