smackster
SGOTM
Wow, we are going leader crazy, three in 10 turns. Everything sounds great from your turns, I will play tonight for sure, and tonight right be right now.
smackster
smackster
SGOTM3 Rome - Team Smackster
- Thread starter mad-bax
- Start date
Great job on leaderfarming. And there I was worrying the switch to Knights would lessen your chances... A few points re. the game:
1. Why did you build the army w. Legionaries? I would have guessed Knights to be the obvious choice.
2. The placement of the HE and Sistine's? Why place them in those cities. Both cities have full support re. "cultural" borders, while a closeby city like Aurelianorum have mountains in SE that requires cultural buildings for expansion. Also placement in choice locations on coastline would help but might be more dangerous to enemy landings.
3. Use of Workers. We need to shift workers north especially if we have to rebuild pillaged infrastructure. The only tile improvements that should be done around cities farther than 2nd ring should be irrigation for growth and roads, but roads just to give us connected cities. Corruption makes it a waste to put time and effort into such improvements. Planting forests is a known technique for "rushing" shields in faraway cities but as an example Cyrene will not need a Temple for expansion, another city on the coast and temples in coastal cities will fill the area with "our cultural borders". The worker at Seleucia will have planted/chopped the forest in 18 turns, since Seleucia finishes Temple in 22 turns this is also a waste and ties up a Worker for 18 turns too. Mining a hill at Nicomedia is also a waste as is the road built NE from Arretium, E from A. is another thing since that would connect with roadnetwork on the shoreline.
4. Mining Grassland in RCP planned areas. Should stop and be replaced with irrigation. I noticed a few such problemspots at Palmyra and Pisae. At Palmyra I had sent workers from the area of Gonzonium irrigating S but they have now reverted to mining!
5. Settlers!!! We need them and plenty of them. A few cities are building aqueducts? I would have guessed we'd continue shaving settlers from them when they approached size 6. Also our Settler factory at Antium is producing a Knight and at size 7????? I find this odd, especially since DH himself commented on the lack of Settlers being our limiting factor?
1. Why did you build the army w. Legionaries? I would have guessed Knights to be the obvious choice.
2. The placement of the HE and Sistine's? Why place them in those cities. Both cities have full support re. "cultural" borders, while a closeby city like Aurelianorum have mountains in SE that requires cultural buildings for expansion. Also placement in choice locations on coastline would help but might be more dangerous to enemy landings.
3. Use of Workers. We need to shift workers north especially if we have to rebuild pillaged infrastructure. The only tile improvements that should be done around cities farther than 2nd ring should be irrigation for growth and roads, but roads just to give us connected cities. Corruption makes it a waste to put time and effort into such improvements. Planting forests is a known technique for "rushing" shields in faraway cities but as an example Cyrene will not need a Temple for expansion, another city on the coast and temples in coastal cities will fill the area with "our cultural borders". The worker at Seleucia will have planted/chopped the forest in 18 turns, since Seleucia finishes Temple in 22 turns this is also a waste and ties up a Worker for 18 turns too. Mining a hill at Nicomedia is also a waste as is the road built NE from Arretium, E from A. is another thing since that would connect with roadnetwork on the shoreline.
4. Mining Grassland in RCP planned areas. Should stop and be replaced with irrigation. I noticed a few such problemspots at Palmyra and Pisae. At Palmyra I had sent workers from the area of Gonzonium irrigating S but they have now reverted to mining!
5. Settlers!!! We need them and plenty of them. A few cities are building aqueducts? I would have guessed we'd continue shaving settlers from them when they approached size 6. Also our Settler factory at Antium is producing a Knight and at size 7????? I find this odd, especially since DH himself commented on the lack of Settlers being our limiting factor?
smackster
SGOTM
It didn't take long before we lost our Legion army, but luckily the army on turn 3 that is a Knight army doesn't care and is slowly slicing up the earth. I never liked London, and its no more in this game (not really, I always like the real London).
Hi guys, I guess we can officially declare we have survived the expansion phase and the "mid game" alarums and excursions. So we need to focus on the endgame phase now. Now to get to domination as quick as possible. For that we need two things, settlers and settlers... 
With Knights added for offensive actions. And Galleys for transport. We can manage with Galleys if we "ship hop" between eg. "England-India". We will lose a few Galleys in the ocean tile they end up in but no troops.
I am not sure the decision to go for MT (and Navigation i guess) was the correct road to take in this game but since it is made we play it that way. MT will cost us about 30 turns of research, right? At present we are making about 170 gpt, translated into Knights that is roughly 25 Knights! Not to mention cost for libraries we build in the process. BTW, on another issue, building libraries for cultural expansion purposes should be switched to Temples (80 shields vs. 60 shields) and since Libraries will not give any beakers in those cities anyway I cannot see the reason to build them.
We need to discuss settlements in the Eastern "barbarian" territories. To get to domination I believe this territory to be a key issue to address.
We are (including expansion into domination counted tiles) at 650 tiles now. About as many are available on our home continent in enemy territory. After that we will need another 900 or so tiles to reach domination. I wounder how many of those tiles are available in barbarian lands?
This game do have another complication, the population limit for domination. Maybe we need to target choice locations on the other continent to lower total population?
I would also like to put down a target date for domination: 1000AD.
With Knights added for offensive actions. And Galleys for transport. We can manage with Galleys if we "ship hop" between eg. "England-India". We will lose a few Galleys in the ocean tile they end up in but no troops.I am not sure the decision to go for MT (and Navigation i guess) was the correct road to take in this game but since it is made we play it that way. MT will cost us about 30 turns of research, right? At present we are making about 170 gpt, translated into Knights that is roughly 25 Knights! Not to mention cost for libraries we build in the process. BTW, on another issue, building libraries for cultural expansion purposes should be switched to Temples (80 shields vs. 60 shields) and since Libraries will not give any beakers in those cities anyway I cannot see the reason to build them.
We need to discuss settlements in the Eastern "barbarian" territories. To get to domination I believe this territory to be a key issue to address.
We are (including expansion into domination counted tiles) at 650 tiles now. About as many are available on our home continent in enemy territory. After that we will need another 900 or so tiles to reach domination. I wounder how many of those tiles are available in barbarian lands?
This game do have another complication, the population limit for domination. Maybe we need to target choice locations on the other continent to lower total population?
I would also like to put down a target date for domination: 1000AD.
Rushing sistine to break the AI cascades is a must imho, the next set of wonders should be safe for us now. I was a bit stumped on the legion army myself, why use str3 attackers when you have str4, with retreat?
Workers: First priority is roadwork to the front, secondly getting the FP area productive, and third irrigation all outside RCP10. We're going to have to rush some aquaducts in these cities though.
Crosspost edit: Agree that we need settlers, settlers and more settlers. We need to start setting up an advance force to land, I figure we need 15 galleys: 5 for first hop, 10 for waiting in the middle. They should ship a settler, 4 muskets and 5 knights (just a suggestion), and set up a beachhead. I think we need to get caravels though, navigation will do us more good then cavs here.
Workers: First priority is roadwork to the front, secondly getting the FP area productive, and third irrigation all outside RCP10. We're going to have to rush some aquaducts in these cities though.
Crosspost edit: Agree that we need settlers, settlers and more settlers. We need to start setting up an advance force to land, I figure we need 15 galleys: 5 for first hop, 10 for waiting in the middle. They should ship a settler, 4 muskets and 5 knights (just a suggestion), and set up a beachhead. I think we need to get caravels though, navigation will do us more good then cavs here.
Tarkeel said:
I am not sure we will ever be in a position to build any wonders. The game should be over by then. Maybe Magellan's but that is a big maybe. Now the AI's have ceased to throw shields into Sistine's with only one of them getting the benefit from it. So on the whole I guess we lose out on having Sistine's...
Tarkeel said:
No Aqueducts please, they cost 100 shields (1.5 Knights). Better shave a Settler/Worker off them when they reach 6 and build a new city/start working the lands. Also part of the reason I tried to plan for cities to be built on rivers/fresh water, to avoid building them.
What's done is done... Having legions army is not as good as Knight army, but hey.... we are not in position to complain.... we had zillions leaders already we couldn't even dream about when we just started this game...
I do agree on tile irrigation. Many grassland tiles in our core cities should be redone from mines toirrigation and leftover hills should be mined to increase population -production.
All tiles around corrupted cities should be irrigated to increase population and we should build temple-> marketplaces in those cities to increase happiness and score.
Another wonder we must target to build - Bachs.... it will increase happiness therefore our score...
If there were any medals to the team with most wonders built i am sure we have won that title already. This game probably should be played in concuests to limits our abilities to rush wonders, but then if we had a conqest army for each leader we generated we would have won by now...
I think we still can build couple of aqueducts in some of the core cities, but not too many, we probably have only 4 cities or so worth building aqueducts in.
Don't pillage roads on mountains with gems, this will be our land soon and we don't want to spend extra 10 turns building roads and connecting extra lux.
DH, You have had a great warfare campaign and you should be promoted to the rank of whatever top general rank was in Caesar army
. Good job on crushing english.
And also as of today we are officialy on the top of the score graph with a nice lead.
EDIT: Antium switched from settler factory and building a knight. I think we should keep that town as a settler factory at all the times, unless there was a decision not to do it and i missed it.
MORE EDITS: I believe Smackster finished playing his set of turns, and had a long long night, He must be still in bed recovering from nightly battles.... Can't wait for his write up... Looks like he made another army, I wonder what else has happened.
I do agree on tile irrigation. Many grassland tiles in our core cities should be redone from mines toirrigation and leftover hills should be mined to increase population -production.
All tiles around corrupted cities should be irrigated to increase population and we should build temple-> marketplaces in those cities to increase happiness and score.
Another wonder we must target to build - Bachs.... it will increase happiness therefore our score...
If there were any medals to the team with most wonders built i am sure we have won that title already. This game probably should be played in concuests to limits our abilities to rush wonders, but then if we had a conqest army for each leader we generated we would have won by now...
I think we still can build couple of aqueducts in some of the core cities, but not too many, we probably have only 4 cities or so worth building aqueducts in.
Don't pillage roads on mountains with gems, this will be our land soon and we don't want to spend extra 10 turns building roads and connecting extra lux.
DH, You have had a great warfare campaign and you should be promoted to the rank of whatever top general rank was in Caesar army
. Good job on crushing english. And also as of today we are officialy on the top of the score graph with a nice lead.
EDIT: Antium switched from settler factory and building a knight. I think we should keep that town as a settler factory at all the times, unless there was a decision not to do it and i missed it.
MORE EDITS: I believe Smackster finished playing his set of turns, and had a long long night, He must be still in bed recovering from nightly battles.... Can't wait for his write up... Looks like he made another army, I wonder what else has happened.
dmanakho said:
OK, forgot about Bach's, might be possible but do we want to divert resources to research the tech?
Re. score... Only if we are going for both laurels (gold and green) do score come into the picture. The variant (gold) laurel is for fastest victory, nothing to do with score according to game announcement.
dmanakho said:
Why, we need so many settlers letting them grow beyond 6 is really not worth it. Besides at RCP3/6 the room to grow beyond 6 is rather limited, we will not really see many large cities. And since we have plenty of cities at rivers/fresh water we can channel the available tiles to let them grow instaed of building expensive aqueducts in the few that would need them..
@Wotan... You do have a point, but if you open the save you will see there are many cities building aqueducts at a time.. If Smackster hasn't changed production order many of the aqueducts should be completed by the end of his turns, if not we need to have a team vote on this...
EDIT:
@Wotan... I wouldn't specifically divert resources on Bach, but may be rather have AI reseach that technology 1st so it becomes cheaper for us, and may be after we get MT research bachs tech in 4 turns or so...
I hope we get leader in time to ruch Bachs... AI on our continent have to weak infrastructure to build it in time before us and AI on other continent are technologically behind, so I wouldn't worry much about somebody building bachs before us.. We can also think about prebuilding it.. and if we manage to get a leader to rush Bach, we can use that prebuild for maggelans, or smiths. As a matter of fact, i think if nobody else does it before my turn, i will start prebuild during my turns, we have many cities and if one prebuilds wonder we won't lose much.
@Tarkeel: With us been such blabber mouths I am surprised you had to dig only 6 pages back
EDIT:
@Wotan... I wouldn't specifically divert resources on Bach, but may be rather have AI reseach that technology 1st so it becomes cheaper for us, and may be after we get MT research bachs tech in 4 turns or so...
I hope we get leader in time to ruch Bachs... AI on our continent have to weak infrastructure to build it in time before us and AI on other continent are technologically behind, so I wouldn't worry much about somebody building bachs before us.. We can also think about prebuilding it.. and if we manage to get a leader to rush Bach, we can use that prebuild for maggelans, or smiths. As a matter of fact, i think if nobody else does it before my turn, i will start prebuild during my turns, we have many cities and if one prebuilds wonder we won't lose much.
@Tarkeel: With us been such blabber mouths I am surprised you had to dig only 6 pages back
What I am concerned about is if we lose focus in the game. Speed is everything in the variant game. Everything we do should be put to the question of what we chose not to do by each build order. When building an aqueduct we turn down 1.5 Knights or 3.33 Settlers. The question need to be asked: Do we really need that aqueduct? I can only come to the answer: NO!
The same question should have been put when we decided to go for MT. Do we really need it to finish the game at the cost incured? At 25+ Knights (rushed) I am doubtful.
We are winning this game, there is no doubt about that. But we need to focus on getting us there in as few turns as possible. Else we might end up with a great score but too many turns played for the gold laurel and too low a score compared to the non-variant teams.
The same question should have been put when we decided to go for MT. Do we really need it to finish the game at the cost incured? At 25+ Knights (rushed) I am doubtful.
We are winning this game, there is no doubt about that. But we need to focus on getting us there in as few turns as possible. Else we might end up with a great score but too many turns played for the gold laurel and too low a score compared to the non-variant teams.
dmanakho said:
Please don't prebuild any wonders. The shields are better used for Settlers/Knights. How would Bach get us to end the game faster? 8.67 Knights or 20 Settlers would and that is the cost of Bach, right? 600 shields?
And resources for Smiths? First of all it will come into play much too late in the game and secondly it will drain resources from our mission objective: To finish the game ASAP. Wonders: Only by GL rushing, please.
@Wotan, yes you are probably right about aqueducts. Technology wise... well.. i am not sure....... if we stop researching and put all the money on rushing knight... well... that is one way to go... will it be fastest way to win??? I don't know.. lets see what the rest of the team thinks....
I don't think we use workers correctly, we have workers mining hill near totally corrupted cities on former greek lands... This is total waist of labor and turns. All workers need to do the - irrigage BG...
Everyone probably know this trick, but just in case it is worth repeating it...
Lets say you have a grassland plains tile you can't irrigate due to lack of fresh water.
What you need to do is irrigate those tiles near the fresh water, all the tiles next to the irrigates ones WILL BECOME IRRIGATABLE (spell???) even if they don't have direct access to the lake or river by themselve. You can chain those tile and eventially irrigate each and every tile. That is what we should do to get population hike in corrupted cities, with temples and aqueducts rushed. I know i know... I am missing the point that it doesn't matter for fastest win. But hey, who said we can't hit both Golden and Green Laurels...
Anyways, my point is do not road hills or mountains around totally corrupted cities.
I don't think we use workers correctly, we have workers mining hill near totally corrupted cities on former greek lands... This is total waist of labor and turns. All workers need to do the - irrigage BG...
Everyone probably know this trick, but just in case it is worth repeating it...
Lets say you have a grassland plains tile you can't irrigate due to lack of fresh water.
What you need to do is irrigate those tiles near the fresh water, all the tiles next to the irrigates ones WILL BECOME IRRIGATABLE (spell???) even if they don't have direct access to the lake or river by themselve. You can chain those tile and eventially irrigate each and every tile. That is what we should do to get population hike in corrupted cities, with temples and aqueducts rushed. I know i know... I am missing the point that it doesn't matter for fastest win. But hey, who said we can't hit both Golden and Green Laurels...
Anyways, my point is do not road hills or mountains around totally corrupted cities.
Wotan said:
Now it won't get us to the end of the game faster... But again who said we can't get both laurels.... So far we are primary candidates to win green laurel and Bach will alow us to increase those chances. Yes, you probably right, i didn't put much thought and by the time smiths and any other post Bachs wonder come in picture game will be over.
EDIT: Let's wait for the smackster to show up and have a team meeting... At this time we should have a clear picture on what to do next, and every team member should follow this common goal... At this point it looks like everyone is going in different directions and it won't help for the fastest win... So lets gather together to talk a little before continuing the game. What do you say team?
Wonder prebuilds are absolutely useless to us.. Slack me still haven't had a look at that crossing, but can someone post a screenie of it? I don't think we need to research much more, money should go to rushing boars and start ferrying to barb island atleast.
DeceasedHorse
Prince
RE: Legion Army-I didn't have any knights handy, and the city they were in was not roaded, making getting enough knights over quickly more difficult. I guess I am still stuck in 'conquests' mode-I thought that the Legion army would have two moves, for example. My bad.
What I meant was that the MOVEMENT RATE of our settlers was what was slowing our expansion down-we had plenty available, but they were just spending most of their time en route; there was no lack of settlers.
RE: Chemistry-Cavalry are pretty much the last word when it comes to warfare until tanks, as I'm sure you are aware. They will take less casulties versus musketmen and the additional move enables them to reach the front that much faster and move through enemy territory quickly.
What I meant was that the MOVEMENT RATE of our settlers was what was slowing our expansion down-we had plenty available, but they were just spending most of their time en route; there was no lack of settlers.
RE: Chemistry-Cavalry are pretty much the last word when it comes to warfare until tanks, as I'm sure you are aware. They will take less casulties versus musketmen and the additional move enables them to reach the front that much faster and move through enemy territory quickly.
There is an old proverb about someone unable to choose between two things and by trying to keep both end up losing both. I do not want us to be that someone Let's focus on Variant game VC, and if we do get both then Kudos to us. I would hate to see us milking the game for a few extra turns and lose out on both VC's.
BTW, one of the areas where I feel my own gaming have developed most is to have a better focus during the end game. I used to research too many techs, or develop cities to much. But playing Gotm's and especially by following the threads and to read up on what the best players did got me to the point where I disiplined myself into always asking the question. Do I need this to get to my VC? And to focus, focus, focus. I still wander off in games but they are more well played than a year ago.
Let's focus on Variant game VC, and if we do get both then Kudos to us. I would hate to see us milking the game for a few extra turns and lose out on both VC's.BTW, one of the areas where I feel my own gaming have developed most is to have a better focus during the end game. I used to research too many techs, or develop cities to much. But playing Gotm's and especially by following the threads and to read up on what the best players did got me to the point where I disiplined myself into always asking the question. Do I need this to get to my VC? And to focus, focus, focus. I still wander off in games but they are more well played than a year ago.
Tarkeel said:
I believe Smackster will show up any time now with new save and new screen...
He is still probably sleeping, it's 1pm on east coast here.
@Wotan: Yep, lets focus to made Golden Laurel our primary goal, and make some improvements to achive higher score at the same time, while not hurting the primary goal. (like increasing pop in totally corrupted cities, for example, it doesn't hurt as since all we need to do - irrigate tiles, but score is getting higher... and we will have tons of totally corrupted cities). BTW, There is an old russian proverb: if you hurry to catch two rabbits you won't catch any. So please no milking, just straight to the victory
.
