SGOTM8 - Tim

[joethreeblah]

Why wait to pop the hut, Sesn? Afraid a tech might come out?

My current idea for settling the south:



I hate to waste a BG, but these choices seem to fit better with the land we have. Moving the orange city SE would leave two unavailable grassland tiles between it and Boston and scrunch the green city.

To the east of Washington, I think we have one tile due east of that last visible forest to place a city on; I doubt there's anything more in that direction. Also, it appears there may be more to the south past the mountains.

I would settle one more city to the south before starting a northward push. But with Greece and China at war, we can really capitalize on a northward push, so something like 4 cities north of the mountains can easily be obtainable I think.

As for my suggestions what to do over the next ten turns, I would definitely pop a worker out of New York after this next warrior finishes; it needs to develop and DC needs to get settlers out.

I like your ideas, and it seems like a good plan. I'm wondering if we should push north sooner to try to monopolize all that luxary thing up there. The other thing I'm worried about is Boston producing another scout. Do we need this? It seems the areas we need to explore have a lot of mountains and forests and what not.

 

[pindicator]

Going north right away is very tempting. I'm thinking I'd want one more core city built first, but it may be the better choice to go north right away and fill in to the south afterwards, picking up the most land.

 

[mr. Y]

My ideas - short version:
no more scouts, change the ones that are being built.
settle north first; try to monopolize the lux.

Even shorter version:
I agree with Joe

What is a BG?

Long version:
- change Washington to settler. We must not waste turns building military in our settler factory. keep a close eye on it, micromanage for optimal results (don't unnecessarily loose shields when build completes.)
- Change boston to warrior
- send the warrior in the south to pop the hut and after that on exploration south.

 

[pindicator]

First of all (and this is so important that I am kicking myself for not doing it during my turns) go to the governor and turn on emphasize production. Set this as default for all cities.

BG = bonus grassland

Do not switch the Warrior in DC, and I'll tell you why as well as in great elaboration.

Currently DC has 4 food left until growth and 8 shields in its production box. It pulls in 7fpt and 4spt.

If you switch to a settler immediately, you can track DC's production and growth as follows:


Turn | Food | Shields

0 | 16 | 8
1 | 19 | 12
2 | 20 | 18 -- New citizen from the pop growth will work forest tile for +6 shields only for certain if we have emphasize production turned on.
3 | 13 | 23 -- New citizen switched from forest to plains (currently being irrigated)
4 | 16 | 28
5 | 19 | 33

Which drops our pop down to 1 for a turn and wastes 3 shields. Granted, after the pop change you can keep the citizen on the forest tile and get the settler out a turn earlier with no wasted shields. But you now have two turns that DC is at pop 1.

If you keep DC on the warrior and then build a settler, you get this:

Turn | Food | Shields

0 | 16 | 8
1 | 19 | 10 -- MM DC citizen off of mined BG and onto roaded flood plain to pick up additional commerce. Warrior completes IT.
2 | 20 | 6 -- New citizen from the pop growth will work forest tile for +6 shields only for certain if we have emphasize production turned on.
3 | 12 | 12 -- Keep new citizen on forest tile for first two turns (explained later)
4 | 14 | 18
5 | 17 | 23 -- Switch DC citizen working forest onto the irrigated plains.
6 | 20 | 30 -- On growth, new citizen will work forest for +7 shields this turn.

Now, by keeping the warrior first we have several important differences. First of all, DC never hits size one. I don't think DC should ever hit size one pop if we can help it. If we had a luxury around I'd say it should never hit size two, 2 luxuries then size 3 and so on. The idea is to keep DC at the highest population possible while it pumps out settlers so we pull in the most amount of commerce and production while the settler factory is running. Secondly, there is no shield waste at all. Third, we get an extra warrior out for MP duty / exploring / barb defense at a cost of only 1 turn. It takes a little MM to do, but it is definitely the best course of action IMO.

We can and should set up DC as an 8-turn settler factory by keeping this pattern:

Turn | Food | Pop |Shields

0 | 10 | 2 | 0
1 | 13 | 2 | 4
2 | 16 | 2 | 8
3 | 19 | 2 | 10 -- warrior completes
4 | 20 | 3 | 6
5 | 12 | 3 | 12
6 | 14 | 3 | 18
7 | 17 | 3 | 23
8 | 20 | 4 | 30 -- settler completes

As you can see, DC is currently on turn 2 of this pattern. Please do not de-rail it as it is our quickest way of efficiently getting settlers out.

 

[mr. Y]

wow, nice work.
insightful, elaborate and convincing.
I do want to elaborate on this though, putting trade into the calculations, and extending them to span more cycles. In the first example we build a settler in 6 turns instead of 8. That is a huge difference (25%). In this stage growth (quick expansion/settlement) is the key factor. I don't care that much about a warrior, but the extra trade seems important. So I'd like to make some calculations as to how big the difference is. I'll post again in <12 hours.
Joe, please hold off playing until then, if you haven't already started..

 

[joethreeblah]

wow, nice work.
insightful, elaborate and convincing.
I do want to elaborate on this though, putting trade into the calculations, and extending them to span more cycles. In the first example we build a settler in 6 turns instead of 8. That is a huge difference (25%). In this stage growth (quick expansion/settlement) is the key factor. I don't care that much about a warrior, but the extra trade seems important. So I'd like to make some calculations as to how big the difference is. I'll post again in <12 hours.
Joe, please hold off playing until then, if you haven't already started..

Mr. Y,
Sorry I've started already...

 

[joethreeblah]

Mr. Y,
Sorry I've started already...

I should have my thing posted by tomorrow. As soon as I get up the nerve to tell you all my screwups. You might as well burn your charts though.

 

[pindicator]

well, that's the funny part about planning. You get into the game and it can all be for naught.

I'm trying to understand what your argument is, Mr. Y. The limiting factor on building settlers is the rate of food from DC. We cannot build a settler faster than every 8 turns. And as for keeping commerce high, that's why I was stressing not letting DC drop down to 1 population while making settlers.

 

[mr. Y]

I should have my thing posted by tomorrow. As soon as I get up the nerve to tell you all my screwups. You might as well burn your charts though.

Lol!
Don't worry about it too much.
I managed to walk past two huts without popping them

@ pindicator:

I am still convinced that growth is far more important than commerce and military at the start of the game. So I'd be willing to give a lot of that up for a bit of extra food or building a settlement one turn quicker. But before I give anything up, I want to know how much I give up and what I get in return.

So I just wanted to have a complete picture, your 8-turn cycle is very elegant because it is a closed cycle. It also seems efficient. But the fact remains that in the other system we'd pop out a settler 2 turns sooner. I wanted to extrapolate a bit further and see what happened in the ~10 turns after that, how quickly the next settler after that could be built, and how much less trade it would yield in total - taking into account we'll have a settlement 2 turns earlier which will refund some of the lost trade etc.

At this point I lack the tools and the knowledge to do this study very quickly. I am still figuring out what happens exactly when a town grows - it seems the new shields are processed but the new trade is not. Also kicking the governor into production does not seem to make a difference in my tests. How do you come to the conclusion that we cannot build a settler in less than 8 turns?

Ah well, the question has become academic now anyway. After joe's turns we'll have only 1 city left. j/k

Is it perhaps a good idea to build a second granary somewhere fast to have a second city that can help in expansion?

edit: grammar

 

[joethreeblah]

Can someone explain how to get a picture into the right place

 

[mr. Y]

Joe:
when preparing a post, scroll down for "Additional options".
Choose manage attachments, browse to your image, upload it, post the message et voilà.

 

[joethreeblah]

Inherited Turn
Boston: Changed to Warrior
Changed the governor to emphasize production

1) 2110BC
Washington: Warrior -> Settler
Sent the northern Warrior and Scout northward, and the southern warrior NW to hut.
Now my biggest mistake was right away. I forgot that the second citizen is sad, and I thought there would be an extra warrior in New York for when I sent the Washington Settler north eventually. So I figured it would be a good idea to send this new warrior in Washington to the east to explore a little bit.

2) 2070BC
Popped the hut in the south, giving me a "map of the region", which showed another hut on the next continent south, not much else.
My wandering Washington Warrior decided to have a peek over the mountain to the east.

3) 2030BC
At this point, I reckon I've totally thrown off the pattern, because I had to calm the citizens.
The wandering warrior heads back west.

 

[joethreeblah]

4) 1990BC
New York: Warrior -> Warrior
Washington Warrior gets back to work making citizens happy.

6) 1910BC
Boston: Warrior -> Warrior
Now there is one more citizen due in Washington next turn. I think he will cause a riot so I start one of the other guys telling jokes and such, and now this delays things by a couple turns.
Our scout meets a friend up north.

 

[joethreeblah]

7) 1870BC
Barbarian kills scout

8) 1830BC
Our warrior down south comes accross a couple savages


9) 1770BC
Warrior kills both barbarians and gets promoted.
Washington: Settler - > Settler
Settler heads north.

10) 1750BC
Southern warrior runs into some more barbarians.
Southern warrior also discovers another luxury to the east
Settler arrives in New York

 

[joethreeblah]

I'm having trouble fitting my pictures in here. Obviously there is a better way, I'm having to cut them way down. This is the south east.

 

[joethreeblah]

This is the south west area, where a hut gave us a map of their region.
If someone wants to post the entire maps i'll remove these. Not sure how to reduce the size without cutting around everywhere.

 

[joethreeblah]

This is the link for the next player
http://gotm.civfanatics.net/saves/sgotm8/Tim_SG008_BC1750_01.SAV

 

[mr. Y]

Joe:
The problem is that you are posting bitmaps (.bmp). This format is always _very_ big.
Use your graphicsprogram to save them as jpg's, this will make a huge difference. You will have no problems anymore.

That didn't go so bad did it? You didn't even loose a town.
I'll check the save later.

 

[joethreeblah]

Joe:
The problem is that you are posting bitmaps (.bmp). This format is always _very_ big.
Use your graphicsprogram to save them as jpg's, this will make a huge difference. You will have no problems anymore.

That didn't go so bad did it? You didn't even loose a town.
I'll check the save later.

Thanks for the optimism. I felt like a jerk though. Maybe you can get some good pictures of our current cities up there. I think we might need to change New York to building a Temple..?

 

[pindicator]

Some thoughts from the save:

First of all, no big screw ups seen. Nothing worse than I do to my games, at least You had me scared I was going to see armaggedon in civ-form, joe.

Switch DC to a warrior. After the warrior finishes, then build settler to be timed to growth to size 4. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Why is our worker irrigating tiles that DC will not use? It will finish its current irrigation on the next IBT, so go ahead and let it. But DC is pumping settlers and probably will not get above size 4 until it is done doing so. Other more imperative tasks include improving the tiles around NY and roading to the future town site across the mountains.

New York does not need a temple yet. Instead it should definitely put out a worker next. We are losing production and growth by leaving it unimproved.

Slider can go to 50% so we don't waste beakers when writing comes in during the IBT. That will earn us 4 extra gold.

Wow, that's a lot of mountains to the south. I thought we'd be putting a city or two down there, but peering at the fog it looks like that is all for the south.

The Settler in NY should go N, N, N, NW and settle there, just across the mountains.