Thanks for all of the useful links, LC. Not sure what I would have done without them. haha
Should I take the info from our pre-game discussion and post it here for the peanut gallery?
EDIT: Relevant posts from pre-pre-game discussions via PM:
LC:
looking at the layout, it seems like most or all of our cities are going to have to pop borders asap. How do we want to go about that?
WT:
I know you want me to say monuments, but I won't.
How about this thought:
Short answer: Ignore all those city sites that require a border pop. Get out of this area fairly quickly so we can chop.
Long answer....
I assume we SIP. then we get gems
before IronW.
Then we settle double corn in the first ring(destroying a forest)
Assuming we don't find any path east past the desert...
Then we settle the Cow in the NW corner on the PH and build galleys to go West.
Why? cus we shouldn't chop our homeland and we really want to chop, so let's get outta here ASAP.
P.S. re: forests. There could be more in the east, past the desert, yes? or are we told no, we start with 47 forests? Either way, we can probably expect to grow enough to get to 50.
If there are a ton of forests in the east, then we an chop quite a bit and that changes everything.
LC:
Actually, I was wondering about beelining Alpha and building libraries. We need to generate some beakers also and other than furs, it's all coastal tiles.
Not so sure about abandoning the homeland. Maybe we let AIs develop some cities while we prepare to capture them and build a FP somewhere. Or move our palace and build FP here.
WT:
I did: Hunting, wheel, pottery, mining, BW.
1 worker, warriors, granary
deer, deer, fur, fur, roads
Grow to size 7, 3-pop whip a settler somewhere around turn 42
I got to size 7 before BW, so we might want to speed up research (1 deer, then 1 fur?) but probably not.
Capturing a worker would fix the problem.
Slow game.
I did: Hunting, wheel, pottery, mining, BW.
1 worker, warriors, granary
deer, deer, fur, fur, roads
Grow to size 7, 3-pop whip a settler somewhere around turn 42
I got to size 7 before BW, so we might want to speed up research (1 deer, then 1 fur?) but probably not.
Capturing a worker would fix the problem.
Slow game.
Mitchum:
I get that we don't want to chop the starting land (as defined by the start screenshot so it cannot get bigger) but I imagine that a few chops early will speed things up such that it outweighs the added 2 turns at the end. In other words, if putting a chop (or two) into a settler speeds up expansion by a few turns, that could lead to Environmentalism more than two turns sooner. Plus, if we chop intelligently to promote maximum forest re-growth, that early chop has a high probability of regrowing sometime during the game.
WT, would going Hunting, Mining, BW speed up the settler significantly to outweigh not getting an early granary? Do we need roads for happiness/health reasons?
Did you SIP? Is the gems juglified and a PH?
LC:
We can beeline htg-ah-wtg-alpha by t53 at the latest. Adding wheel delays it about 3t.
WT:
that beeline is always tempting if you can find the AI to trade with.
In my test I did SIP. Gems is jungle. It's not a PH in your test game. I didn't look closely at the real game.
Hunt, mining, BW wouldn't do us much good. We don't want to whip smaller than size 4, so we need to grow to at least 6 or 7.
I agree that we can chop a little if it seems important, but there's no way a couple chops will save 2+ turns on Enviro. I figure we will either get the regrow or we'd have to do 5, 10 or 20+ extra forest preserves out of our area. One way or another, we get it down to 1 turn.
In fact, we are
virtually required to get it down to 1 turn if we intend to kill everyone and be the only Civ running Env.
To go 2 turns, we'd have to gift all the tech and force an AI to switch which seems like a hassel, but is doable.
Mitchum:
I agree that we can chop a little if it seems important, but there's no way a couple chops will save 2+ turns on Enviro.[/qoute]
Really? So getting that snowball rolling a few turns earlier won't translate into saved turns at the end?
Good point. Let's just hope that there are enough forests outside of our defined starting area to get it down to 1 turn.
ZPV:
I'm a bit surprised the rules don't explicitly disallow this, to be honest.
Taking it even further, the rules only say "To do so you must force the rest of the world to run Enviromentalism for 100 turns!"
Not a peep about us having to run Enviro
LC:
Good spot, Mitchum! Everyone please update your test save accordingly before any testing.
That really makes SIP a lot more powerful.
htg-tw-pot-wtg-alpha t54 (or t53 if we delay 3rd city)
2 wkrs, 2 warriors, 2 settlers, plus some hammers in granary or 3rd settler
city2 on t38 (cahokia-3s1e)
Cahokia builds settlers pretty fast
tw is obligatory if we build a second worker. Workers can road forests endlessly, not a waste. They speed up settling and improvements.
WT:
I like that better than waiting to 7->4 whip. I'm not sure why it's so much better. But I didn't have the PH tile in my test.
When do you do the 2nd worker? I'd like to skip it if we can since we are not chopping much if at all.
I guess we don't need the gems happy if we're not going to grow/whip, so it's nice to skip mining for probably the first time ever. The only problem I see it that Alpha is useless if we don't find any AI. Also writing/OB is not important if we can't explore AI land or get foreign TRs.
LC:
The second worker starts almost immediately, only building a warrior long enough to grow to pop2. With some MM fine-tuning, pop3 is simultaneous with furs1 and pop4 with furs2. Then settlers. I haven't tested it, but my guess is the second wkr is essentially for free, especially with an alpha beeline, because we have nothing else to build and slightly faster growth doesn't help much either (just working the lake a few turns). Settling City2 at Cah-3s1e (for example) is 3t faster with roads and gives instant TRs. Then all the other cities are settled sooner. The cow pasture and cornrows will be roughly twice faster and we don't have to sacrifice a trading partner for the dubious and belated second worker-slave.
And we get war roads to the east built in advance. We want all our roads to go through forests to maximize our chances for forest growth, so that's more worker-turns.
Think of it this way, we start knowing that there are no AIs within 10t or more of our warrior so an early slave is a very remote chance and will require an escort through the barb animals.
As for trading partners, we can plan some contingencies if we don't meet AIs, like building an early wb to explore west or to get around a mountain block to the east. Plus we don't have to commit ourselves to alpha for a long time. Writing is good for libraries to expand borders, and then for running 2 sci in our cities to speed our research, assuming we want GSes, which we do, right? The one thing we know is that we can settle 4-6 cites with enough food to run 2 sci. Probably our best research engine early on.
Beelining alpha also gets us IW asap.
WT:
GLH? Oracle for...? Machinery? We could Xbow rush the world using totem poles for 5 first strikes
LC:
GLH seems like a no-brainer. How about an archer rush?
I know what you want me to say, build totem poles . . .
WT:
I wouldn't settle 3s1e, but the roads to corn finish in time for the settler, creating city2 on t39
Alpha might be 1t later cus we'd need cash.
Mitchum:
Luckily, Hunting, TW and Pottery seem to be fairly obvious first techs so we don't have to decide on the Alpha beeline for quite a few turns. Are there any other techs we should consider? Or is H->TW->P the best option (it's what both of you did anyway)?
LC:
A slower beeline is htg-tw-ah, but it reveals horses and lets us pasture the cows. Pottery lets our cities start on granaries instead of foolishness.
Where would you settle the cornrows? Which other cities would you settle? Are we going to settle several asap and just take the temporary research hit?
WT:
.... 4e
pigs are jungled, so not there.
cows on the PH, if we had AH
I'm not a big fan of sharing the deer/fur at 3s1e
So I guess the next best spot is 3s4e next to clam.
There's also the fish spot north. We'd have to destroy another forest tho.
I'd like to get out of this area.
LC:
We should bear in mind we'll have to enculturate all the forests eventually.
All coastal cities are good with GLH.
My thinking:
The ph+cows is a hammer city, good for the GLH, galleys, and whatever else. We should plan to have that settled and pasturing the cows on AH + t0.
3Fish is an excellent GP farm.
3s1e is less maintenance than 3s4e and sharing the deer and fur speeds up its growth nicely and dovetails with whipping Cahovia, running scientists, working some hammers or whatever.
Pigs should be improved IW + t0.
That would give us a decent research engine pretty rapidly running 2 sci in each city. You want to get out of this area. With how many cities and how? Warring or settling? The problem I see with settling cornrows second is no wb to explore west.
Pollina:
Doesn't that mean that we have to run Environmentalism to be able to reduce the number of turns?
