SGOTM 22 - Xteam

[leif erikson]

If Rome is so useful in conjunction with our capital, how long do we think we can delay gifting a city to the ai? Perhaps we should found a fourth city specifically for gifting?

Should we have some cultural development in the city we are gifting?

 

[Htadus]

@CP.
we should not gift the city to the selected AI until we must and it has some of our culture in it to get an espionage discount. So Rome would need a monument. Unfortunately we do not have too much time left to delay things and may need to gift it without a monument. Saladin should be the recipient since he has most GNP, Food and Production. Then we need to put all our esp point to him.

I am not sure if you guys already talked about this or not but we should address health of the Capital.

The limiting factor with respect to the growth of the capital is going to be not only the limited food but also lack of health resources. I know you guys will think I am nuts for suggesting this but it may be a good idea for us to not to chop 4 of the 5 forest the capital has within the BFC. Right now it has 8 health and two of it come from the forests. Just saying.

Our next city should have food and commerce or hammers. For me it would be to east of capital with 3 wine(2 farmable soon), grassy cow and 5 hills. The other choice is the horse and clam city to SE. This city also give us 2 health points. This is only if we can not find horses to the north.

So before the next player get going we should decide if we want to gift the city or not and do it asap. unfortunately I can not check to see if Sal would except the city or not due to the fact my keyboard does not have a pause button. So I would appreciate if someone can check that.

Later.

 

[Cactus Pete]

Neil, did you test gifting city scenario?

Is leif's suggestion of a third city for gifting practical within the time available?

 

[Ronnie1]

Without writing, city gifting is not possible, testing is currently not available in the real save.

In the test game, once writing is learned, it could be doable, but not sure if that data can be extrapolated to the real game because of all the unknown factors that are surely different.

 

[Cactus Pete]

Can test when a third city can be founded efficiently and get an idea if it is soon enough to be gifted.

 

[Folket]

Let us consider a occ approach intill we secure 7 wonders. We just need to found a couple of religions. Once we are certain we Will get 7 wonders we can go amok.


Skickat från min iPhone med Tapatalk

 

[neilmeister]

Everyone
I love everyone putting ideas forward, but some more tests saves would be great. I played mine out to t100 and I will probably play a few more trying everyones ideas but if you have an idea you believe in then please do not hesitate to put forward a test save showing it off. I play my tests quick & sloppy but they give a good indication on the value and problems of a strategy.


@ Htadus
Health is an issue, but happiness is a bigger one right now. Unhealthy takes away 1fpt, unhappy takes away 2fpt. Deer will help in the short term, but as you say the Corn/Clams city will help a lot more. With a Granary & Harbor, this is +4 health, but health problems are a while away. If we build an aqueduct (and we should, just for HG) then the Cap can have a pop of 8 without health problems (assuming we get Deer & chop all the forests).

@ CP
Sorry, didn't test gifting a city. The mechanics are simple though, if an AI has less than 3 cities it will take any city, anywhere. Otherwise a whole bunch of calculations come in but basically it has to be close to them. In other words I don't think it is predictable, and with No Tech Trading & Monarch level I somehow doubt it would give us a lot of techs anyway.... but its hard to say right now

@ Folket
We already have 2 cities, so if we found a religion it will very likely never be put in the Capital, therefore founding religions (and then somehow getting a Prophet to build the shrine) will not work. Simply being the holy city does not create a Great Wonder.

Spoiler :

	for (pLoopCity = firstCity(&iLoop); pLoopCity != NULL; pLoopCity = nextCity(&iLoop))
	{
		if (!bStarting || !(pLoopCity->isHolyCity()))
		{
			iValue = 10;
			iValue += pLoopCity->getPopulation();
			iValue += GC.getGameINLINE().getSorenRandNum(GC.getDefineINT("FOUND_RELIGION_CITY_RAND"), "Found Religion");

			iValue /= (pLoopCity->getReligionCount() + 1);

			if (pLoopCity->isCapital())
			{
				iValue /= 8;
			}

			iValue = std::max(1, iValue);

			if (iValue > iBestValue)
			{
				iBestValue = iValue;
				pBestCity = pLoopCity;
			}
		}
	}

 

[leif erikson]

Ok, tried gifting a city and it worked well enough. Built the city west of Capital, chopped a Library and, while waiting for it to expand its borders, a lighthouse and then gifted it to Arabia. As Arabia does not have The Great Wall, also gifted him an Archer to protect it.

Takes a lot of turns though. In the test game, Arabia is hemmed in by two other civs, limiting their ability to build new cities. Not sure what will happen in the real game?

edit -Barb cities spawn all over, but never in the best places. If we can get Iron, we could harvest Barb cities for gold.

 

[Cactus Pete]

Couldn't we locate the gift city where it will soon be protected from raging barbs by our cities? What about south of the gem city site?

Please explain why the need to build a library.

 

[Jersey Joe]

Ok, tried gifting a city and it worked well enough. Built the city west of Capital, chopped a Library and, while waiting for it to expand its borders, a lighthouse and then gifted it to Arabia. As Arabia does not have The Great Wall, also gifted him an Archer to protect it.

Takes a lot of turns though. In the test game, Arabia is hemmed in by two other civs, limiting their ability to build new cities. Not sure what will happen in the real game? Saladin may be tech leader. In test game I had to "help" him get Buddhism. I looked in the real game logs but only saw 1 reference to a city being build and that was by Saladin in 2960. Is there a BUG or BUFFY setting you have to turn on to get those messages recorded?

edit -Barb cities spawn all over, but never in the best places. If we can get Iron, we could harvest Barb cities for gold.

Iron would be ideal so we could get our UU but copper for axemen would work.

 

[Htadus]

Let us consider a occ approach intill we secure 7 wonders. We just need to found a couple of religions. Once we are certain we Will get 7 wonders we can go amok.

You referring to getting access to build wonders right? I think the better option is to head to Literature since the path enable us SoZ for which we have the bonus ingredient in Ivory and the undisputed king of Wonders in Great Lib. But we need alphabet first for 2 reasons. One to track what the AI can research next and for tech stealing.

@ Htadus
Health is an issue, but happiness is a bigger one right now. Unhealthy takes away 1fpt, unhappy takes away 2fpt. Deer will help in the short term, but as you say the Corn/Clams city will help a lot more. With a Granary & Harbor, this is +4 health, but health problems are a while away. If we build an aqueduct (and we should, just for HG) then the Cap can have a pop of 8 without health problems (assuming we get Deer & chop all the forests).
You are speaking of right now. This game and the capital in particular will not have happy issue if we use HR. (Unless we get the Mids, we we definitely will run HR.) But there are no simple solutions for health. Gem city is simply a junk city we would waste for just 1 happy and one more useful health point. But it is a waste in this game since we can only have a few cities. The -2 hpt is temporary until we get HR and also represents available hammers to builds conversion. I would support the gem city if this was a normal game. This is not.

@ CP
Sorry, didn't test gifting a city. The mechanics are simple though, if an AI has less than 3 cities it will take any city, anywhere. Otherwise a whole bunch of calculations come in but basically it has to be close to them. In other words I don't think it is predictable, and with No Tech Trading & Monarch level I somehow doubt it would give us a lot of techs anyway.... but its hard to say right now
I think in this game, the winning team will have tech stealing, learning and bulbing to get to the finish line faster. Also it is quite apparent that Arabia has been given a very generous capital. So they will learn a plenty of techs. So why not piggy back on them while we can during the early to mid game? Of course once they become useless, we can take the capital from their cold dead hands. Sad part is that our gift city will increase Sal's maintenance and as a result we will also slow him down and that is a good thing.

@ Folket
We already have 2 cities, so if we found a religion it will very likely never be put in the Capital, therefore founding religions (and then somehow getting a Prophet to build the shrine) will not work. Simply being the holy city does not create a Great Wonder.

Also I do not think the shrine count as a wonder either.

By the way, our other option is to go after Sal first and take his wonder capital but we have no clue where he is.

Ok, tried gifting a city and it worked well enough. Built the city west of Capital, chopped a Library and, while waiting for it to expand its borders, a lighthouse and then gifted it to Arabia. As Arabia does not have The Great Wall, also gifted him an Archer to protect it. we are/may be running out of time to gift the city to Sal. So we need to do that asap. After writing.

Takes a lot of turns though. In the test game, Arabia is hemmed in by two other civs, limiting their ability to build new cities. Not sure what will happen in the real game?

edit -Barb cities spawn all over, but never in the best places. If we can get Iron, we could harvest Barb cities for gold.

I like this and we can add other AI cities to go along with this.

Going back to Folket's idea of OCC, I do not think this is a real option for us for several reasons.

• We need to build units along the way and it is the job of our few support cities,
• we need to find cities along our attack paths to cheaply gather our army toward the front to reduce unit supply cost,
• we need a dedicated commerce city to support high tech rate and unit maintenance,
• we need a dedicated production city to build units,
• we need to found cities to aquire resources, and
• we know larger empires gets the job done faster.

The reason I want to gift Rome is its proximity to our capital and that is the biggest discount. BTW, we really need Iron because of our UU. HA are fast but Preats last longer at this level and win more fights even against LB's.

 

[Htadus]

Couldn't we locate the gift city where it will soon be protected from raging barbs by our cities? What about south of the gem city site?

Please explain why the need to build a library.

We get an espionage discount if the city we are stealing from has our culture. If we give Rome and it does not have our culture right now it is not a big deal since it will be within capitals spear of influence as the Wonder culture increase and we can perform spread culture mission first.

@ Joe,
Iron can build all three and if we do not claim Iron to build our UU, it should only happen if BSP did not provide any within our starting area. Which he may have done to frustrate us. If that the case, we will use cats and Phants. I have a feeling that Iron will be available just like other 2 but may not be anywhere close.

 

[Cactus Pete]

"We get an espionage discount if the city we are stealing from has our culture." Sorry for my ignorance, but what does "has our culture" mean? Apparently, not our religion?

"I think in this game, the winning team will have tech stealing" Concur.

 

[Jersey Joe]

@ Joe,
Iron can build all three and if we do not claim Iron to build our UU, it should only happen if BSP did not provide any within our starting area. Which he may have done to frustrate us. If that the case, we will use cats and Phants. I have a feeling that Iron will be available just like other 2 but may not be anywhere close.

It would not surprise me to find iron about as many tiles away from Rome in the western hills as copper is tiles away in the eastern hills.

In several of the test games I have played the barbs seems to like settling 1E of the horses which affects tiles to settle in to get the copper. So it would be nice to see iron in the west.

 

[neilmeister]

Yes, you guys are probably right about the espionage strategy.

If Gems is a junker city with only short term benefit (and this could be very true), then isn't it a good candidate for gifting?

Rome can build Archers exclusively so gifting it will be no huge loss if we gift it away.

I think we all agree that Writing -> IW is our initial tech path, after that it could splinter in so many ways... If Iron is underneath Rome then we simply are never gifting it away!

btw, Shrines are in the list of Great Wonders, so would count, but founding a religion in our Cap would basically require us to have only 1 city.... and that doesn't solve us getting a Great Prophet to build it.

 

[Cactus Pete]

"I think we all agree that Writing -> IW is our initial tech path, after that it could splinter in so many ways... If Iron is underneath Rome then we simply are never gifting it away! " Can we wait until we have researched Writing and IW to gift?

 

[Htadus]

"We get an espionage discount if the city we are stealing from has our culture." Sorry for my ignorance, but what does "has our culture" mean? Apparently, not our religion?

It is the same old culture we get from a culture building or from our religion. But the culture registers under the civilization. Like when you capture a city, the cities populations identity for a time (long usually) reflect that of the original civilization it belonged to until they are gone via conquest. The city center tile is the same.

"I think in this game, the winning team will have tech stealing" Concur.

It would not surprise me to find iron about as many tiles away from Rome in the western hills as copper is tiles away in the eastern hills. I hope it is in a direction where the AI are at.

In several of the test games I have played the barbs seems to like settling 1E of the horses which affects tiles to settle in to get the copper. So it would be nice to see iron in the west.

Yes we need to do some more exploration to west and north.

Yes, you guys are probably right about the espionage strategy.

If Gems is a junker city with only short term benefit (and this could be very true), then isn't it a good candidate for gifting? The problem I see is that we are running out of gifting window.

Rome can build Archers exclusively so gifting it will be no huge loss if we gift it away. And the capital will get to use the pig sooner.

I think we all agree that Writing -> IW is our initial tech path, after that it could splinter in so many ways... If Iron is underneath Rome then we simply are never gifting it away! That would be interesting. I do not think we have that long of a time unless barbs take an AI city.

btw, Shrines are in the list of Great Wonders, so would count, but founding a religion in our Cap would basically require us to have only 1 city.... and that doesn't solve us getting a Great Prophet to build it.

I wonder if I knew that before; the shrines being wonders. Very likely not since I never cared to build them and have built pretty much all others. Since that's what a builders do.

 

[leif erikson]

Seems to me we know that we are going to complete Writing and go to IW next. Also seems we are going to whip a Worker with overflow into Great Lighthouse. So think we can proceed up to completion of Writing as it is only then that we can seriously discuss gifting a city for espionage purposes? Although I did hear the suggestion that we know where Iron is before gifting, although do not know if we have the time?

The other issue is gifting Rome or building a separate city for gifting?

 

[Jersey Joe]

If we are going to gift Rome, should we whip a granary, as planned, or try and produce as many archers as possible by whipping and chopping?

Currently, our 4 EPs/turn go into 4 AIs should we put all 4 into Saladin?

For what it is worth, here are the techs (@1480bc) the AI's know in the test game that we do not.

Saladin, Brennus, & Zara Yaqob
MYSTICISM
POLYTHEISM
PRIESTHOOD

Gilhamesh & Hannibal
PRIESTHOOD
IRON_WORKING

Darius I
PRIESTHOOD

Note: In the real game Saladin has adopted OR & HR so he also knows Monotheism & Monarchy. Also, with the GLH we have an 80% chance of getting a great spy.

 

[Ronnie1]

My testing Saturday went away for a number of reasons.

I agree we play up to writing and then we can discuss gifting options more closely.

Since Sal has Monarchy already, he will probably have Feudalism very soon. That seems to be the "normal" path for the AI in my experience.