SGOTM 22 - TTfkapr

[shulec]

OK, I want to see how settling the Ivory now is a good play. What tile are you suggesting? You say that a tundra city settled on Iron is a slow developing city. I agree. However, I see any jungle city as being slow to develop as well.

Even if you are talking about construction with elephants, how could this ever be better that construction with Preatorians?

I see the best jungle site as a great GP farm 5W3N of Rome. I wouldn't want a Jungle City to swap tiles with Rome... so I see the best strategic site for elephants to be 5N2W of Rome.

To put a jungle city elsewhere looks weak to me.

 

[yyeah]

Quick test i steal ( right away) Construcion at 175 and HBR 300AD 2200 spy points left.
Its 400AD i have 5 Cats and 5 Prets nobod have MC yet oh wait only Mansa.
Didnt settle 5th "Elephant" city becouse i shrink Rome and had GS, and jsut didnt manage to grow at size 10.
Anyway attack date could be around 500AD with Prets Cats and WE's.

 

[shulec]

The point has been made that expanding north is better to get us closer to the lands we intend to conquer. However, the obvious risk that has not been mentioned is that it takes us closer to Darius with another difficult to defend city.

 

[elitetroops]

Note that there's an error in the test game, there's no forest between deer and fish in real game, so settling on top of iron is really horrible. No forest to chop within cultural borders, would have to chop only BFC forest for 20 hammers into monument and work 1 hammer ice hill to finish it. If we're going to settle iron it should definitely be with all 3 resources in inner ring. But I really don't like the amount of worker turns we'd have to waste to get there and get that arctic iron hooked up.

An ivory city I'd put 3N1E of Rome. It's not the best spot, but there are no other good spots either. I don't see any problem with sharing tiles with Rome. Getting ivory for happiness is great help, as that allows us to settle 5th city sooner.

Test game seems to be not completely accurate around cows either. NE of cows should be forest, not hill, and fog-gazing reveals more forests. For example 1E of cows has 11 BFC forests. This would be a pretty decent spot to pump out units. In addition to all those choppables, it could work 5 grass hill mines at pop 7.

 

[shulec]

Iron city's strength come from its iron, it's deer, and it fish. You'll get no argument from me that it sucks. I just think it sucks a whole lot less than a jungle site for a long time.

 

[yyeah]

Well Iron city can 2 pop whip HAs preety fast, my vote is for Iron settle 1SE from deer horse bulids workboat for it.
I dont want to argue about does this or other city sux , for me on this map there isnt good city spot if we include resetrictions, fish and Rome are just decent( offcourse all of them are good in normal game but this is not a case here).
Why iam voteing for Iron is, regardless of usefulness or how good/bad this or other city is.
We are at war with 1 ai, 2 another ais are ploting against some1, and we have archers .
I dont buying that we can defend with HA's becouse if some1 showns up with WE's its gameover, if some1 showns up with horsearchers or cats defense wont be ezy and its basicly allso gameover becosue if they dont kill us they slow us down like totaly.
I rather to play safe.

 

[Gumbolt]

Another point to think about.

WE str 8 60 hammers. No CR. Combat 1 and 2.
Praets Str 8 45 hammers.

Religion may spread to iron city anyway. Sal has the shrine and keeps sending mish our way. We should have coastal trade routes too? Agreed only forest to chop would not have full 30 hammers. Tiles outside iron would not be great either. 1h or 1f2c. Gambling on the religion spread? The key is to get iron asap as we have many Ai plotting war here.

Darius - would he change course if we built ivory city?? Possibly. Once the Ai select a city at start of a war do they change course???

For philosophy we need currency and COL. So a GS could be possible.

To grow capital best way here would be to build farm and improve on happiness. Ivory and wine. We could trade for silver too?

So what is our tech order here?? What did Arabs last tech??

With no tech brokering can we still beg 40-50 gold? This could delay any Zara war?

So for war main techs for me are. Construction, MC, machinery and engineering. Maybe CS for mace too. (Assuming iron). If we get a GE maybe bulb machinery or engineering.

Alphabet too if we plan to steal techs. Currency for economy.

Test game was never going to match exactly. The more cities we plan to build now could slow down our war date. That and encourage darius to send more and more units. So is it better to go for more units now or expand number of cities and spam units from 5-6 cities instead razing all cities.

 

[Gumbolt]

So are we suggesting settling on iron or using a worker? We really don't have that many workers. Hmmmm.

 

[yyeah]

Another point to think about.

WE str 8 60 hammers. No CR. Combat 1 and 2.
Praets Str 8 45 hammers.

I dont know why you consider Prets or WE's(prets are better).
WE need Preets and WE's.
Becosue if we go for war we wont stop soon thats for sure probably we will be at war to the end.
We need Prets for attack and WE's for defend. Prets are bad defending agaist HA's and Ha's can do a tons of dmg to our cats. Allso if they hit machinery we have def against x-bows and maces.
Prets and WE's or overpowered.

 

[shulec]

I see Iron building library, switch to whip worker, library, spies. Wandering WB can go to fish.

 

[Gumbolt]

So we don't plan to settle on iron judging from Shulecs comments? This would delay iron.

@ Yyeah. I had already decided on iron. Just pointing out the difference. If we want both we will need a 5th city. No way to get 2 border pops in Rome. Or trade for it.

 

[shulec]

I am still arguing iron vs ivory. If we decide on iron, we may want to try to keep our options open between iron or next to iron.

 

[Gumbolt]

Does anyone still want the ivory site?? We could settle both long term. Perhaps Elite could post a test game for that.

If we don't intend to settle on iron this changes game slightly as it is a lot of worker turns to make the iron connected. Vs a lot of turns to make the city useful. Which is the greater evil?? If Brennus shows up with a big stack one option suddenly becomes a terrible idea. Switching between 2 involves some worker planning.

I need to get some sleep here but will try testing iron later.

Would it really be a terrible thing to beeline astronomy here once war starts? Galleon chains could speed up the war?

 

[elitetroops]

If we go for iron, then I think getting monarchy should be a quite high priority. We need to keep capital growing, hooking up wine would be great, can also trade extra wine for more happiness. I just learned that stealing techs isn't like trading, you can steal techs even if you got the prereq only the same turn, so in theory we could steal our way to monarchy in one turn. Total EP cost for myst, med, PH and monarchy was about 370 in test game with 5 turns stationary spies. Not sure if it's worth stealing the cheapest techs though because of risk of getting caught. But there's time to think about that. Success odds ranged from 78% to 98%, not sure where the big difference comes from.

Ideally testing at this point should go further than 4th city. Testing to 5th city would reveal more about the results of each option. I'll do some testing later to see how soon we could settle iron as 5th city if we go ivory first. Then maybe compare to iron first approach.

Sal is already in HR, so you can add monarchy with prereqs to Toku in test game if you want to steal your way there.

 

[shulec]

We will get more value stealing more expensive techs. The hammers that go into spies, turns to move to Trojan, turns waiting in Trojan, and spies detected can make stealing techs more costly than at first glance.

It will need to be tested, but I believe it is possible to get the stationary bonus while on a galley in Trojan, without the detection risk.

With multiple spies are in one city, spy detection increases. The success rate of a mission goes down when more spies are present.

 

[Gumbolt]

Testing here to 5th city holds less value as we will have too many factors that will change our plans. Switching back to monarchy will take a lot of time.

Steal techs using spies in galleys worked well for me on previous test game. I got -42% for espionage spending. Lost 16% for distance. Galley certainly speeds up distance to the trojan city. Do we want the full discount is another matter. Maybe first 1-2 techs we could take less?

Teching monarchy just for the wine seems odd. Better to just use HR? We may be able to trade for resources too?

 

[elitetroops]

I disagree. We specifically need more long term planning. We've been drifting back and forth between different ideas without any clear goal for too long. Skipping planning because something might happen to change the plans is not a winning idea.

Monarchy is the most important economical tech here after currency. All our cities have wine resources to work and we have a surplus of 4 resources to trade for more happiness, or sell for gpt. On top of that, with monarchy we can steal feudalism as soon as it's available and say goodbye to any fears about AI attacks for good. At the rate the AI is teching, feudalism could be available to steal already by the time we get iron hooked up.

 

[Gumbolt]

Yes I would steal monarchy not tech it. We do still need all the pre quisite techs. This is why I was questioning teching it. We need to start stealing some techs and this will require a lot of spies. May be better to tech the cheaper techs? Or just steal 1-2 techs at almost full cost?

Problem with long term planning here is we are likely in short term to be at war with at least 1-3 AI. With little chance of a peace deal any time soon. Best kind of defence in my opinion is attack. We need to up our power rating to reduce risk of Ai attack.

I think the general opinion is we have to pump out units and conquer the map. What the quickest way to do this is another matter. Galleons, phants, praets, pults and trebs? Phants would require a 5th city. At some point Rome will need to build 7 world wonders. We are 5 short for now?

I have been burning up here all day. Otherwise would of tested more. Bugs from holidays can be a pain.

My gut techwise is alphabet for now and then plan to steal techs while focusing on war techs. We will have monarchy, construction and other techs soon enough. Alphabet will help us see which techs the Ai definately have.

 

[elitetroops]

So ivory first I could settle iron as 5th city t127, that's 30 turns from now. Could be done faster if we don't want to run scientists. Was up to about 100bpt by then, ignoring the GP we'll get in between (got GSpy, didn't do anything with him). This could for sure be improved, didn't focus much on micro in fish. Also screwed up tech order, did myst, med and PH before currency, should go currency first because we'll have them all before spies are in place to steal monarchy anyway.

I'd still like to see how an iron first approach compares to this. Might be better, don't know. That ivory city is actually quite crap as well...

 

[shulec]

I think we would be better served as having our 5th city be a great city location, whether it be in the jungle by bananas/sugar/ivory, or by the cow if there are goodies revealed, or an AI Capitol.