SGOTM 15 - One Short Straw

[Mitchum]

We don't need Hunting until religion spread or monument done plus 10 turns. That's a long time from now. I doubt the deer will be in the inner ring.

 

[ZPV]

We don't need Hunting until religion spread or monument done plus 10 turns. That's a long time from now. I doubt the deer will be in the inner ring.

The deer is in Delhi's third ring, which we'll get in a couple of turns.

I'm provisionally against Hunting because
a) I'm not sure we're going to settle the city with the deer in the BFC (could be gems, or could be gold-corn).
b) The deer is worth working, with a camp and without, whereas a pasture turns a tile we'd only work if there are no improved tiles into one we'd always work.
c) It's a tech we don't *need*. Yes, it provides some benefit, but really, haven't we got better things to spend our beakers on? It's got to be better to get the power techs sooner, so we can get our empire off the ground, and then backfill, even if it costs a few (and we're talking maybe 20) extra beakers.

 

[Mitchum]

I forgot about deer being in Delhi's third ring. Gold city with pre-camped deer would mean that we could start working that gold tile a soon as it's mined...

 

[Mitchum]

So where do we go from here? It seems that testing is required to see how far ahead we could be if we researched Hunting, pre-camped the deer, and settled Gold City to capture the deer, gold and sheep vs. skipping Hunting and going straight for AH, BW or Wheel and settling Gems next.

What's hard about the comparison is that we'd have to assume in our testing that there are no horses but there could be in the real game. This assumption of no horses would penalize the research AH next option.

On the flip side, we can't get a good dot-map of the east to know how best to use the corn, sheep, gold, deer and cow until we do a bit more exploring. If we go Hunting next we'd be forcing ourselves to settle somewhere to get the gold and the deer, which may not be optimal.

Regarding the worker, he won't have much useful to do other than farm a FP (are we planning to cottage this) or mine a hill that we won't work for some time. With Hunting next, he can camp the deer and then mine the gold as soon as Gold is founded. The city should grow quickly to two pops and work the gold. If we research AH after Hunting, we get the 20% bonus and the worker can pasture the sheep right after the gold. This will give us a very strong second city quickly.

As bbp said, settling toward Toku may be the better way to go. If we settle Gems next, we may lose the corn and/or gold. Toku scouted the gold so I assume that his first settler will head that way, right?

I'm confused...

 

[LowtherCastle]

Maybe the question boils down to when and where Toku is likely to settle the corn/sheep area. I took the liberty of moving the warrior near Toku to the hill. (I meant to do this before uploading but forgot.) Two interesting details:

1. This is a fish city TOku could settle.
2. There is a mountain range ALL ALONG THE SOUTHERN FRINGE OF THE MAP!



I recall klarius saying AIs prefer to settle at Dist = 5 from their capital. The fish site is D=4 and there are a couple corn/sheep sites, D=5.5, D=6. In any case, they don't stop us from settling the gold to include the deer and sheep, but if we have to settle there, that rules out the deer+cows site for us.

By my calcs, we'll settle City2 about T33 and City3 about T43. Toku is likely to settle City 2 before T43, but east or west? If west, Fish or Corn?

 

[LowtherCastle]

Btw, Mahbodhi researched BW on T16 and poprushed something T20. He's going to accelerate the dates when barb units (15 cities worldwide) and cities (20 cities worldwide) appear. Currently, we're still at 11 cities worldwide.

EDIT: The Poly religion is still available. That means: 1) agri first is a viable gambit for PDs/Kakus (which means Neil fkdup, abandon SG15, wait for SG16, in my books) and 2) SH, GW, and Oracle might go a reasonable dates despite uber-Mahbodhi and the 2AI team.

.

 

[Mitchum]

Hmmm... I thought the AI were willing to settle further away for a high-value resource like copper, horses and iron. Does gold also fit into that category? Am I wrong in thinking that an AI will go beyond a distance of 5 from its capital?

Regarding where we settle east, it's a pity that our borders haven't popped yet to see whether there is a good cow/deer location.

I also just saw from the screenshot that the sheep would be outside the BFC if we settled a gold, deer and sheep site.

Based on what we know now, where would we settle a gold city? At gold-1E, we get gold and sheep in the inner cross and corn in the BFC . If we settle gold-1N, we get the gold and deer right away but need a border pop to get the sheep. Plus, we basically give up on getting the corn as I'm pretty sure that after settling gold and gems that Toku will have taken the corn by then.

 

[Mitchum]

Btw, Mahbodhi researched BW on T16 and poprushed something T20. He's going to accelerate the dates when barb units (15 cities worldwide) and cities (20 cities worldwide) appear. Currently, we're still at 11 cities worldwide.

If we're considering an Oracle sling, we may need to set our sights fairly low. I expect the Oracle to go quite early in this game...

BTW, if we settle Gold and Gems as our next two cities, it will be many turns until we have marble settled and hooked up, right? What does this mean to our sling chances?

 

[LowtherCastle]

I don't know the code, but clearly it's flexible on how far they can settle from the capital. It has some weighting system based on distance, # of resources, and I don't know what else.

Marble is going to be very problematic for the slingshot.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

Regarding the worker, he won't have much useful to do other than farm a FP (are we planning to cottage this)

We will Farm the Flood Plains square, as far as I am concerned. Regrowth after whipping is faster and if and when we need to reduce growth, we simply switch to working a Grassland River Cottage.

Faster Food when we need it, less emphasis on Food when we don't need it.

If west, Fish or Corn?

Wherever Toku settles, we will have to live with it, even if it is one-off from a Fish Resource, since we can't raze a City.

SH, GW, and Oracle might go a reasonable dates despite uber-Mahbodhi and the 2AI team.

I guess that we're not going to go for Polytheism next? Doing so might greatly delay the time that we can build The Oracle and The Temple of Artemis, since the AIs could avoid these Religious techs for a long time if none of them research Meditation/Polytheism for a while... as... Monotheism would be a far way off in terms of the pre-requisite techs required and thus they might not even "think" to try and tech toward it.

Now, before you go telling me that we're not playing for a Cultural Victory, what would happen if by researching the first two Religions, we ended up delaying the AIs from researching up the Monotheism + Priesthood line for quite some time? What we might see is the AIs never going after Monarchy... which means that as long as we don't trade away the Religious techs, we could be facing only Archer opposition from the AIs for centuries.

Some teams that chase after the Religions could end up benefitting this way, while a team that tries to "efficiently" ignore the Religions could end up facing a lot earlier Longbowmen.

Based on what we know now, where would we settle a gold city?

I guess that it depends upon what we plan to do with the Fish... will it go with the Corn or not? If not, then we'll probably want to use the Corn with Gold. If Corn + Fish, then it's still not clear whether or not we want the Gold City to share that Corn or not.

 

[LowtherCastle]

Options:
1. AH next. City2=Gold1E.
2. AH next. City2=Gems.
3. Htg-AH. City2=Gold1N. (EDITED)
4. Htg-AH. City2=Gems.
5. TW-htg-AH. City2=Gems.
6. BW next. City2=Gems.

They all pose worker problems, some more than others. Note that Gems will be D=4, so that maintenance increase as City2 is likely to be 2gpt instead of 3gpt, depending on map size.

If we settle Gold1E first and beeline SH, then we could conceivably get to 100 before Toku settles the corn, thus essentially preventing it. He might think that was unneighborly, of course...

 

[LowtherCastle]

Now, before you go telling me that we're not playing for a Cultural Victory, what would happen if by researching the first two Religions, we ended up delaying the AIs from researching up the Monotheism + Priesthood line for quite some time? What we might see is the AIs never going after Monarchy... which means that as long as we don't trade away the Religious techs, we could be facing only Archer opposition from the AIs for centuries.

Some teams that chase after the Religions could end up benefitting this way, while a team that tries to "efficiently" ignore the Religions could end up facing a lot earlier Longbowmen.

If we're going for cultural, what do we care whether AIs get lbm?

Speaking of cultural, initially we don't need any more worker techs to settle both Gems and Gold, since we can mine and work both commerce tiles. Do we have a feasible dotmap for cultural? We could settle Bananas1E for a mini-GPFarm. Gold1E has lots of hammers and river tiles.

If we can delay the Oracle somewhat, that would help.

Don't forget, one way to farm GPs is to grow the ancillary cities to some massive population and then simply starve them down during a GA. They'll each produce a couple GPs. A primary GP Farm is not the only way. With all thes hammers around, we should be able to put together a lot of cathedral multipliers.

Judging from all these mountain ranges, it seems like domination is probably slowed down by requiring serious border expansion.

 

[Mitchum]

@LC Shouldn't option 3 be Hunting -> AH. City2=Gold1N? If we settled Gold1E, researching Hunting now wouldn't make much sense.

So how do we pick between the many research / city settling options we have? Do we run tests assuming no horses and no other resources in the fog?

 

[Dhoomstriker]

If we settle Gold1E first and beeline SH, then we could conceivably get to 100 before Toku settles the corn

Would we be worried if he settled a junky City as a result? (I suppose we wouldn't care as long as said City didn't block another City due to the can't-settle-with-a-2-square-radius-of-another-City rule, as we could just allow him to stay alive with such a City.)

If we're going for cultural, what do we care whether AIs get lbm?

My point was the following:
Some teams will go for Cultural and thus they are likely to chase after the early Religions, which, due to the human team learning the early Religions, may discourage the AIs from teching these techs for so long that Longbowmen are delayed globally. However, those human teams won't care.

On the other hard, teams that you see as competition to us for Domination are very likely to ignore chasing after other early Religions, whereby if my hypothesis holds true, these teams are missing out on a chance to delay the AIs researching Feudalism.

If your hypothesis holds true about the AIs delaying Priesthood in general, and in particular, if my hypothesis holds true of us researching Polytheism such we end up greatly delaying the AIs going after Priesthood + Monotheism, then the AIs will be unable to learn Monarchy for a long time (since Priesthood and Monotheism are Monarchy's 2 potential pre-requisites).

No Monarchy means no Feudalism.

Thus, there is a potential opportunity to, by learning Polytheism next, keeping the AIs building Archers for a much longer time than any other Domination games will see, thereby giving us a competitive advantage.

Meanwhile, if it turns out that we do decide to go for Cultural, we'd have a good chance at getting most or all of the Religions (we only need to learn 6 of the 7 Religious techs and Buddhism can be captured with a trivial effort).


As for Legendary-to-be Cities, my rules of thumb are:
- 2 Food Resources are very nice to have (at least our capital has essentially two 5-Food Resources due to having one 6-Food Resource in the Corn and one 4-Food "Resource" in the Flood Plains square)
- At least 12 Hammers of base production with 10+ Grasslands for Cottages
- Closer to 20 Hammers of base production with 6+ Grasslands for Cottages

A Gold square can be good if we have sufficient Food to work it and still are able to maintain 5 or more surplus Food per turn. Essentially, we want 5 surplus Food (or more) after all of our Mines are worked... although you could choose to not work every Mine as long as the Mines that you do work meet the above criteria (12 Hammers or 20 Hammers, based on the number of Grassland squares available).


Most of your other Cities are best settled by Food, I find (such as near the Bananas, as you mention)... Temples and Missionaries can be whipped with Food and then later, Artist Specialists can be run with the Food.

You really don't want any Cottages in your non-Legendary Cities (except where the squares overlap with Legendary-to-be Cities, in which case you definitely want Cottages on these squares so that your support Cities can help to "build up" said Cottages), so it's nice if you can get your support Cities some Farms (via Rivers, Lakes, or Civil Service spreading irrigation).

Judging from all these mountain ranges, it seems like domination is probably slowed down by requiring serious border expansion.

I haven't seen the new Peaks in the south that you were talking about, but I would believe that Domination is very possible... just a lot harder than on an average map. Will that fact really matter once we get warring momentum? Not really, except that other Victory Conditions start to look more viable than they otherwise would.

I still think that it would be neat to go for a Cultural Victory and it would be one of the few Victory Conditions where we won't be thoroughly map-dependent. That said, if some AIs started on top of Stone and/or Marble, we could be in for a bit of a challenge, but beyond building a few of the early Wonders (like Stonehenge), it often isn't really worth it to spam too many Wonders in a Cultural game, since the relative cost of the Wonders keeps going up due to the Wonders' costs being higher in the later game.

Philosophical fits well with having several mini-Great-Person-Farms, regardless of which Victory Condition we pursue, but those mini-Great-Person-Farms are quite handy in a Cultural game... I mean, mid-game, it already sucks to get a Great Scientist, but mid-game Great Artists are pretty awesome for a Cultural Victory, and it's around the mid-game where we'd really start to see the Great Person spam occurring.

We should be a competent enough team to survive multiple AIs declaring war on us, particularly if we've manage to keep them away from Longbowmen and the follow-up tech that comes after Feudalism: Guilds (i.e. no AI Knights).

 

[Mitchum]

Updating test save now with the land/resources that we can see for testing purposes. I do not plan to add Toku or Ham near our starting location at this time, although knowing them should speed Hunting and possibly AH in the real game... or does our beaker output need to be higher than 10 to get this bonus?

 

[ZPV]

Testing/spreadsheets help to see which options come out how far ahead in terms of beakers, etc (and almost certainly the best beaker option is gems first).
We also need to work out our goals.
Is it "maximize use of the walled-in resources"?
Is it "establish a core and then capture Kyoto ASAP"?
Both? Something else?

 

[Mitchum]

Testing/spreadsheets help to see which options come out how far ahead in terms of beakers, etc (and almost certainly the best beaker option is gems first).

Why do you say gems first is the best beaker option? It can work the gems mine at T+4 (the time it takes to complete the mine) at pop 1 while slowly growing to 2 pops at +2F/turn. Settling gold such that you can work the gold mine at T+4 or T+5 at pop 2 because the city was working a high-powered, pre-camped deer resource and grew to 2 pops while the worker was building the gold mine seems pretty strong in the research department to me.

Again, we need tests and/or spreadsheets to prove this. My point is that gems first isn't a clear cut winner in the research department.

 

[Mitchum]

Here is the test save. I believe it is 2 turns behind the real game. LC, can you play it forward. I forgot what you did and I'm too lazy to go back and check...

 

[LowtherCastle]

My calcs were that Gems is about 45 beakers ahead of Gold, because of the delayed gold mine and because of not connecting TRs. But I also used Gems at D=5 instead D=4, so that might add 4 beakers. They would be the same if Gold works the gold from the beginning, as in settling Gold1E.

Dhoom, you can see the peaks in my screenshot above.

 

[Mitchum]

EDIT: The Poly religion is still available. That means: 1) agri first is a viable gambit for PDs/Kakus (which means Neil fkdup, abandon SG15, wait for SG16, in my books) and 2) SH, GW, and Oracle might go a reasonable dates despite uber-Mahbodhi and the 2AI team.

I missed this edit the first time through. True, Poly is still available in our game. It's possible that if you research Agriculture first that an AI may go after Poly and Hinduism. They didn't do that in our game because Poly was already founded.

Regarding Kakus, it looks like they have not completed a tech in their T11 upload. That means that they went for Hinduism via Poly. If they researched Agriculture first, they should know it by T11, right? PD hasn't uploaded a turn yet...