SGOTM 13 - Phoenix Rising

[vranasm]

well actually in the test game you provide I had no issues with barb galleys very surprisingly... but that can really change in live game and I really don't want to rely on galley defense, since it basically is 1:3 for barbs usually...

whoever thought out this barbarian mechanic should be shot.

 

[lymond]

whoever thought out this barbarian mechanic should be shot.

In the stomach, so death is slow and painful

Heck, I don't know how many times I've had tiremes lose to galleys - on defense - which just makes me

 

[cripp7]

I'm with the same thinking you guys are, settle 1N of the stone then go for gold. I don't like the trireme vs galley either, makes it really irritating when you lose triremes like that.

Skip AH atm, Writing no brainer, I like the IW > Machine route. We need to find Cathy to see what we're up against.

 

[Kadazzle]

I prefer 1N of Gold, 1N of Stone. Both sites are amazing, but Gold should be settled first (obviously) for the commerce. We need that up ASAP, with a Worker roading/mining the Gold. Writing before AH - we need to beeline the Military techs we need. Unless we need to Pasture something, I'd hold off on AH until we finish some of the more important techs (Writing, Alpha, Currency).

We also need to think about getting a Tireme or two out, as well as a couple workers. We should be thinking about whipping the Settler for the Gold site, as the Gold can't be whipped until it gets to 3 pop (we must always be working Fish + Gold).

Having a grassland hill Gold is sexy.

 

[Gumbolt]

Okay Awilder seems a good job but bit suprised to see galley so far from paris albeit 1-2 turns. Shame you didn't map out the stone but good to see a fish there!! We are 1 turn earlier on oracle. (Good job! think the delay on whip helped this.)
The gold island looks good. I would agree about 1N. We should not be settling on hills on a island map!!! We need all the hammer/commerce tile we can grab. Settling 1N of gold may waste a forest but will have use of gold and fish. Should help us spam more cities and will be useful for whipping settlers at size 4-5. Moai Statute could work well here.

This make orleans a settler/worker whipping city for me. We need to rex like crazy!!

1N for stone seems good to use hills on Paris island. Trouble for me is no food in BFC! I don't think it will have 2 fish.

Gold versus stone. We need stone for Moai and Mids. More important is the TC. Alas TC with no copper.

A few thoughts on barb galleys. They arrive 300bc onwards!! Let's not panic yet!!

Overall key decisions next are:

Gold vs stone city.

Builds for our 2 cities!!! Workboats?? Worker? settlers? forge? warriors? Galley? Then perhaps libraries.

When do we build TC?

Do we go for mids?

When to chop the forest??

What techs? Writing then??

In terms of strategy we need to decide what is best rex and war strategy and how to mix these two effectively. Grabbing resources for now seems key.

We need to decide an exploration strategy.

My thoughts on what to do next.

If we build gold city we need that fish up and running and a workboat should be used. I think 2 workboats next but using overflow from settler/worker whips. We could consider a second galley.

Note the team at 1300bc still have 3 cities.

 

[lymond]

anyone considering settling ON the gold is ...

that should not even be a topic of debate....at all

arguing settling gold vs. stone first does have merit though, but I think gold site is pretty much a no brainer unless Mids was just absolutely a must play for us, but I don't think it is. We still may get it anyway.

 

[awilder]

My vote (without testing mind you) is to switch the corn to a 3 yield tile in Paris and whip settler next turn, giving 43
OF, more than enough to finish the WB. Settle gold first, and have the OF wb improve the fish.

I don't think we have the infra at the moment to justify committing our worker to do all the work necessary to get the mids going.

 

[vranasm]

will you update test lymond? would be nice to get some time for testing purposes...

we could make another wave of 50T projections best... where we try settle gold first, stone first and how to approach best the Colossus problem...

I really think it should be properly tested!

 

[awilder]

Re: galley it does have 2 movement points left. Sorry if it's not where ppl wanted. I wasn't very satisfied with my scouting :/

 

[lymond]

hmmm....I just had a thought looking at the map.

If you settle on the desert hill, you can get 2 fish and 1 pig. That's some serious food and gp farm potential. The issue though is almost all hammers would come entirely from food until workshops come online. Not too bad really with marble for NE. All that food will also be useful for units whippage during war prep. The stone city could be settled on the jungle tile and share the fish at times to grow and may very well have more land tiles just to the east. I'd really like to see more of that area tough first to see if it is worth while. Something to think about though. That island has a bit awkward layout.

 

[Gumbolt]

hmmm....I just had a thought looking at the map.

If you settle on the desert hill, you can get 2 fish and 1 pig. That's some serious food and gp farm potential. The issue though is almost all hammers would come entirely from food until workshops come online. Not too bad really with marble for NE. All that food will also be useful for units whippage during war prep. The stone city could be settled on the jungle tile and share the fish at times to grow and may very well have more land tiles just to the east. I'd really like to see more of that area tough first to see if it is worth while. Something to think about though. That island has a bit awkward layout.

Few thoughts.

The desert hill site would need a specialist to become useful! Without a boder pop it would be a marginal city for 15 turns+

The Jungle site has similar issues. What would it have in it's inner ring??

I would reject both those locations on that basis. I would rather go 1N and get the stone asap. Awilder is right about resources. We don't have the resources for the stone to be worked. I do like the pigs fish site. If we are delaying AH it should be left for now.

Which asks the question should we be building a worker/another build in paris instead of a workboat? I think a workboat is important if only to scout.

In terms of mids. We do still have the engineer strategy. I think we should play this as a if we get it we get it strategy. This would require a forge in Paris asap. We could for instance use the settler OF into a forge and use worker to chop 1-2 forest.

Orleans could be used for a worker and use OF to build a workboat. Lots of tinkering. We need to do some testing. Do think outside the box though!

Oh we need to explore lots more!!

 

[lymond]

Awilder is right about resources. We don't have the resources for the stone to be worked. I do like the pigs fish site. If we are delaying AH it should be left for now.

Not sure if I understand this logic here. Wherever we settle the stone site, it will have the stone itself to work until fish comes online. Grassland Hill stone is a very strong tile in and of itself and honestly I think it's a "cooked" tile. I don't recall over seeing stone or marble on a grass hill before.

 

[Gumbolt]

Not sure if I understand this logic here. Wherever we settle the stone site, it will have the stone itself to work until fish comes online. Grassland Hill stone is a very strong tile in and of itself and honestly I think it's a "cooked" tile. I don't recall over seeing stone or marble on a grass hill before.

By resources Awilder meant workers turns to spare. Better to have 2 workers to work the stone so the city is up and running faster. You could mine the hill near paris so the stone city is working a mined hill from turn of settling.

Overall we don't want cities working unworked tiles. Very wasteful.

Whilst our score is 8 ahead of closest rival in terms of date I am wondering where the extra 2 on their score has gone. Looks as if they have 2 pop whipped Paris already or perhaps teched a lower tech already. Has everyone gone for TC?

Plus side of gold site is the galley can pick up the worker and settler same turn. Then galley can search for 3-4 turns.

 

[awilder]

^yeah I meant we don't have worker turns to spare and also worker hammers to spare imo. Whatever city we settle will probably need to be on worker/WB/settler/galley duty for a while before starting mids makes sense.

 

[Gumbolt]

Lets pause for now!

So do we concentrate on wb/worker/settlers/galleys for now??

When do we go for the forge and TC? How long can we delay it and do we go for a GE strategy?

What should be our main goals before 1ad?

Where is our short term and long term direction for now?? We don't have the cities for war yet. We do have the resources and cities to expand and build an empire.

We need to decide what to do when we reach writing. Do we build up gold till:
A) we have libraries.
B) So we can rex and use the built up gold so we can rex like mad and run economy at loss. Lots of cities to whip will make a big army and stop barb galleys spawning.

Lets think about what we really need next!!

 

[vicawoo]

Barb galleries can't enter ocean tiles. Even if they can reach some islands, if you like to micro ever turn, move a workboat onto a coastal tile (attracting the barb galley). When the galley gets near, move the workboat back onto an ocean tile. Galley runs back. Repeat.

Or, another easy way, since they prioritize sea targets, run them into an AI city.

 

[whats a navy]

I like settling the gold site first and then the stone. Gold raises happy cap and the city site is just awesome because it can get that forge out quickly.

Writing should come next for trade routes with AI, which are very important on watery maps, and we don't want to trust the AI with researching that vital of a tech for us. We get libraries for GP if we can't get a forge on time to beat the Great prophet. We do not want a great prophet in a conquest game and a great scientist will come a lot faster than a great engineer.

For future plans I we need to see how far off the mainland/ next AI we are. If there is a good bit of land surrounding us we could rex. Scouting seems to me the key though because it answers how early we want to war and if mids should be in our plan or not.

 

[vicawoo]

Ok, I've finally caught up with the posts, but the only sources of saves I see are lymond's. I'd like to know the total hammer output of our empire, because it looks like we're going to be pumping out workboats. Unfortunately that's going to keep us very hammer poor, and along with Pyramids and/or libraries, we might have trouble sparing hammers for expansion.

 

[lymond]

Vicky with only one city is a bit odd...something must be a bit nerfed about her start or she had a little barb trouble

I"m working on the test save now and should have it posted in a little while.

Vic - Not sure what you are looking for in terms of saves. If you want to look at the "live" save, you must download it from the progress page. We don't post the live save in this thread to ensure that we are always loading the latest save when playing for real. I'll have a new test save for you shortly.

 

[lymond]

UPDATED TEST SAVE​

Ah!...it's good to have uploads working again

Few notes on the test save:

1) Honestly, I had a little trouble following AW's plan in hindsight. There were parts that appeared copy/paste but not actually in sync with what could happen. For instance, putting a turn into Mids on T77 in Paris. As a result, I put 1 turn into Oracle which may have thrown things off. Let's all make sure we read through the plans carefully now to double check things and ensure the plan makes sense. Parallel testing is always good too. (I guilty of this as well)

2) Also, I did not really know what tiles Orleans was working. LH did not get to 1T at the point mentioned in the plan, so it was whipped with 2turns left. The result is that Oracle is 3turns from completion in the test. This obviously throws things off considerably and I need to try to reproduce it but this is the best I can do right now. I'm going to wait for AW to provide more insight into what really happened before trying the test save again. Producing the test save require probably even more meticulous detail than the live game and lots of manipulation.

3) Research went mostly as planned, although it started to get a little off at Masonry. I can manipulate the Gold though to kinda fix things. However, based on the test, I'm little confused as to why we lowered the slider to delay PH by 1 turn when we had enough gold to finish it in 5 turns.

On another note, I'm a little confused about the galley position now after reproducing the test and really knowing what is happening next. With the Settler done next turn according to plan and the worker finishing his chop, why is the galley so far from Paris. Shouldn't it be ready to pick up the Settler and worker?
.
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worker/galley management is a bit of a bear this game
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