SGOTM8 - Wacken

[Xevious]

My worry about allying the Greeks against China is, China might steamroll Greece and make themselves even bigger. Greece is still very small with only 5 cities, and they have no resources.

I assume a harbour is up next for Boston, but I would really like to build a library first to get at that hut. A free MA tech would be very nice, but the possibility of a free city would be even nicer. If we build harbour, then library, I wouldn't be surprised if someone else gets to the hut first.

 

[WackenOpenAir]

greece has hoplites, noone is gonna steamroll them.

And if the chinese do, that is good for us. It will cost them many units and make the cities much easier for us to take.

You don't get MA techs from hut. The chance for a city is minuscule.
Yet, i Library is very possible. When Philly has its harbor, it can use more sea tiles and leave 8 non mountain land tiles for Boston to use. This will enable it to grow 2 more citizens with no problems before needing a harbor. It will also increase its production so that both tha harbor and the Library are done faster.

It will however delay the opportunity to worker join Boston to a bigger size and it will decrease Philly production for militairy purposes.

 

[Wotan]

A lot of changes to team plans without discussion! Not too happy about the execution of this last turnset of yours Wacken. We agreed during SGOTM7 to avoid this in the future and stop playing in order to discuss changes or at least give the rest of the team an opportunity to make their opinions heard. Short memory????

We had a discussion re. culture in Boston at an early stage but no such build has been done. Now we are into the MA so no chance of a tech from the GH. I do not know if there is any chance of a settlement from popping it? If so we could still benefit from popping it...

Settling another city? Cannot remember any decision about that???

We need to start fighting China!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If we do not go in soon we will face Pikes and Riders!!!!! With Archers... I am up in 10 turns. If you want me to fight China with a rag tag band of less than a dozen Archers, fine. We need to deny China that Horse!!!

EDIT: I had a look at the northern area. Why have you not started to cut the "frontier" jungles? When we go into China we want to link up ASAP. Also I can understand mining around SF but not why we mine indiscriminently around the otther cities there??? There are several hills and with non BG tiles it is more cost efficient to mine hill and irrigate the grassland? Besides we need a lot of food for these cities to grow. At least stop mining non BG tiles.

 

[Offa]

Settling another city? Cannot remember any decision about that???

Actually that was my idea: it lets the FP city use a mined hill square. So the discussion point was "out", although it wasn't discussed much.

I agree that we ought to attack China now, with the Greeks as allies. I think the chance of the Chinese steamrolling the Greeks is very close to zero. Our chances of getting a MGL if we don't go to war are definitely zero.

Overall I think that as usual Wacken played a great set. It is tough to try to do everything at once, and our cities need lots of expensive improvements.

On reflection I think it would probably have been better to try to get a courthouse in the FP city, if only because we could have avoided this punishing 60% tax rate, but even now it isn't completely clear.

 

[WackenOpenAir]

A lot of changes to team plans without discussion! Not too happy about the execution of this last turnset of yours Wacken. We agreed during SGOTM7 to avoid this in the future and stop playing in order to discuss changes or at least give the rest of the team an opportunity to make their opinions heard. Short memory????.

Sorry wotan, i did wait trough a day before playing, indeed could have waited longer i guess.
If the changes would have been a more difficult to evaluate, i would also have waited longer, The delay of attacking china i must admit i didn't even really think about that it would need much discussion. It would have been an obvious and tremendous mistake to attack china during my turnset instead of building the aquaducts and i think everyone can see that. Attacking China earlier would have been a nice plan that i fully supported, but the opportunity simply wasn't there.
Again, sorry i should have waited longer.

We had a discussion re. culture in Boston at an early stage but no such build has been done. Now we are into the MA so no chance of a tech from the GH. I do not know if there is any chance of a settlement from popping it? If so we could still benefit from popping it...

At the beginnin of my turns, there was no prebuild and Construction was being researched. At that point, this issue had passed.

Settling another city? Cannot remember any decision about that???

This was proposed by someone and i agreed to it. Noone else commented on it, so i assume the rest agreed.

We need to start fighting China!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If we do not go in soon we will face Pikes and Riders!!!!! With Archers... I am up in 10 turns. If you want me to fight China with a rag tag band of less than a dozen Archers, fine. We need to deny China that Horse!!!

Indeed, we need to start fighting, very soon we Do have the opportunity to attack them. If we don't succeed in taking most of them before they have pikes, longbows will do a good job.

EDIT: I had a look at the northern area. Why have you not started to cut the "frontier" jungles? When we go into China we want to link up ASAP. Also I can understand mining around SF but not why we mine indiscriminently around the otther cities there??? There are several hills and with non BG tiles it is more cost efficient to mine hill and irrigate the grassland? Besides we need a lot of food for these cities to grow. At least stop mining non BG tiles.

We have a road connection to china right now, that connection is not an issue.
All priority was for SF.
You are right though, i should have irrigated for St.Dman. instead of mining the north. I hope the next player will correct my error and irrigate the 3 tiles that are now being cut around there. For the other cities it is not really feasable to irrigate since there is no water near. (irrigating SF tiles to get water there is IMO not a good option since SF needs to build that frickin FP)
Looking back, there would have been other options allowing to bring water from the river to other cities, but in the beginning i was not at the 60% lux yet and i thought every river tile was needed for SF to provide commerce and thus happiness. In the end it proved not enough and lux needed to go to 60%.
The one mined hill certainly is extremely cost efficient. It provides extra shields for SF. These extra shields speed up the FP by multiple turns. Each FP turn is worth 70 gold and a bunch (2-3 dozens or so) shields.

 

[WackenOpenAir]

On reflection I think it would probably have been better to try to get a courthouse in the FP city, if only because we could have avoided this punishing 60% tax rate, but even now it isn't completely clear.

It would have been better if we had rushbuilt it yes. However, i don't think money was available during your turns and Dmans turns. When my turns came, the build was already so far that when i would have the money, the courthouse would have been mostly handbuilt.
I do not think the corruption reduction would be worth the handbuilded shields and think those would better be used for the FP.
Also, at this moment we do not urgently need any technology, but we had some important technology to research back then and gathering the money for a rushbuild would have been tough. I think we all did the right thing here, you in not foregoing research for that rushbuild and i in not building a handbuilt courthouse.

 

[Wotan]

Please do not get me wrong here. I think the turns played by Wacken were great, it was just the lack of communication I was a bit miffed about. We had a discussion in SGOTM7 about "code of conduct" and I just felt a bit annoyed that was not followed. Lots of changes and no discussion... We are in no hurry so time is not an issue, thus it is not wrong to stop playing and talk before making changes... So in the future if you think about making changes to builds or any other game plans make them public before doing them.

On the mining issue. There are a surplus of mined tiles around SF so irrigating a tile just to "spread" irrigation to NW and SW is not a problem.

Re. Boston, I am not saying it was your decision Wacken. It was just an observation, OTOH we might be real lucky when it eventually pops, a city would be great...

Settling of city, sorry about that I must have missed out on that discussion...

The road to China is there but I am talking about a road through the jungle to hook up the horse when we take that city! Please start cutting the jungle in the next turnset and build road there.

 

[dmanakho]

While you were arguing i forgot what the roster was...

so it is nice to post it once in a while and here we go:

Wacken-> just played
Xevious-> up
Wotan-> on deck
Dman
Offa
Grahamiam

Have fun Xevious!

 

[Xevious]

I should have said I got it in my previous post. Just have to find some time to play it today. I'm supposed to be spackling and painting today. I'm leaning towards waiting until tonight to play to let any more discussion take place.

From what I've gathered so far, it seems to be a good idea to gift Greece into MA in return for an MA against China. This, of course, means I have to spend some of our cash on an embassy with them. What are your collective thoughts on research? It is likely they will research Feudalism first, unless they get it free of course. Also, I assume I should attack China BEFORE signing the MA?

With some serious MM I can speed up the harbour in Philly by a turn at the cost of 1fpt, finishing in 4 turns at no loss of pop. Then MM again to get Boston working on a library faster. About that hut, if it pops a city that will slow down the FP build slightly, being closer to Washington, so maybe it would be better to build a harbour first. Need to discuss that a bit.

With all the coastal tiles connecting islands on this map we might get lucky enough to do some lux trades soon.

@Wotan: It's more than one horse. There's also a horse under Canton I believe it is. At least going to war with them will deny them connecting that iron through Greece.

 

[Xevious]

BTW, looking at the culture graph, it would seem at least 4 teams made the slingshot (or have revolted with no culture buildings), and CDZ seems to be coming on strong.

 

[USMC]

BTW, looking at the culture graph, it would seem at least 4 teams made the slingshot (or have revolted with no culture buildings), and CDZ seems to be coming on strong.

Where can I find these charts? I didnt realize that there was a scoreboard.

 

[Xevious]

At the bottom of the Submission Page. You can change the dropdown from score to culture and redisplay.

 

[WackenOpenAir]

I don't think we got much of a preference for any tech ourselves. There is an excel shart somewhere out here that tells the likelyness of the AI researching each tech. The only thing i remember is that the AI will almost surely research Gunpowder and i think also Invention. We should find this chart and just research that was is least likely to be researched by the AI.

I have just calculated, at this moment, we have 6.56 uncorrupted shields in SF, rounded to 7. Every small bit of extra corruption will make it 6. That will be quite costly for us, it will increase build time with 2 turns.

Also, even if we get that city, we cannot do much there. It is a small island. We need to build a second city to get those horses. 2 cities there will increase the corruption by 6% or so for every city in our second core. And horses we can get from the Chinese anyway. The corruption in those 2 cities themselves would be rather high as they have a bigger distance and no connection to the capital until we build a harbor there.

So all together, i think that city will do more harm than good.
On top of that, we have probably significantly less than 10% chance to get a city there, so i would not go build culture for a small chance on something that might do more harm than good.


Edit: And here is that chart:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=73596

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=104456

Some more about that excel thing:
On top is a number that is 10 by default. This is the the amount of turns per base cost needed for the AI to research a tech.
If it researches a tech in 10 turns that has a base cost of 40, enter 0.25 (probably a realistic number for MA now)
This number is a huge guess, but luckily it doesn't have a great influence on the results.

Feudalism is a huge favorite indeed. For Greece it is less of a favorite, but it still is favorite for Greece as well.
Mono and Engineering doesn't make very much of a difference.

Invention, Gunpowder and Metallurgy are almost sure to be researched by the AI when they can.

Other than that, significant (but not as huge as the former 3) favorites are Astronomy and Magnetism.

 

[dmanakho]

Whatever we decide to research we've got to make sure we skip all the optional techs whatsoever. That includes chivalry, printing press etc..

@Team: Should Xevious start building the Great Wall to kick our GAs or we don't really think it is feasible for us to get it built in time.

 

[WackenOpenAir]

Whatever we decide to research we've got to make sure we skip all the optional techs whatsoever. That includes chivalry, printing press etc..

@Team: Should Xevious start building the Great Wall to kick our GAs or we don't really think it is feasible for us to get it built in time.

I personally doubt it will be feasable with the AI cascading that is bound to happen.

 

[AlanH]

Where can I find these charts? I didnt realize that there was a scoreboard.

I know I sound like a broken record, but there is an enormous amount of valuable information about the SGOTM competition in the SGOTM Reference Thread. mad-bax has packed a few posts with goodies, including pointers to things like the results page. They are there to help, and I don't know why players, and lurkers, seem bent on avoiding them. I strongly recommend you read them.

 

[WackenOpenAir]

As i was bored i made this little excel that converts AV score to real score. (It really is a very little simple thingy, please don't expect anything impressive when you click that link)
Klarius and CDZ also seem to be in control of most of half the jungle now. Only to hope they were not able to take it so coordinated and that they only have the southernhalf instead of the northern half like we do.

Of course, they are also not expected to have such an amount of workers like us to cultivate the jungle.

Note, the file is RENAMED to ZIP, it is actually an XLS file so just rename it back if you want to use it.

 

[Offa]

Score depends on population and land area. It isn't therefore all that surprising that other teams have caught us up, as we have made no efforts to expand in area for a long time. It would be a little disappointing if we are not ahead in population though. In particular our current score rate is being boosted by our abnormally high lux rate, so the true position may be that others are already ahead of us in land/pop. I agree that it is likely that our jungle is more improved than the other teams.

I do worry about our science position. We are essentially giving up on science until the FP comes along and may already be trailing, based on other teams successful slingshots.

 

[WackenOpenAir]

Score depends on population and land area. It isn't therefore all that surprising that other teams have caught us up, as we have made no efforts to expand in area for a long time. It would be a little disappointing if we are not ahead in population though. In particular our current score rate is being boosted by our abnormally high lux rate, so the true position may be that others are already ahead of us in land/pop. I agree that it is likely that our jungle is more improved than the other teams.

I do worry about our science position. We are essentially giving up on science until the FP comes along and may already be trailing, based on other teams successful slingshots.

Our main competition i think are
Klarius
CDZ
Jeffelamar

Klarius made the slingshot
CDZ i think did not, their revolt was similar to ours

Land area does much more for score therefore, i usually do not count the population too much as a factor.

It is not suprising at all, i just hoped that with them being behind on expansion they'd have to fight for that jungle and either they are building units or they are only getting part of the jungle that the AI leaves for them. Looking at the culture graph it looks like Klarius has been building libs rather than units.
Therefore, i hope to see Klarius rise in real score come to a halt very soon indicating they didnt get enough jungle to even have the opportunity for building a second core.

We will probably be behind now in science a little, or if not, during the rest of the FP build we will be. But after that, we will have insane research assuming they did not get most of the jungle, build a crapload of workers like us to cut that jungle, got their FP built as well AND build it in the right place. Also de we have the Colossus and it looks like they do not.

I think it is unlikly for them to be in such a situation so probably we will soon have twice their research.

 

[Offa]

It is good to see you are so upbeat Wacken. I hope you are right. We are at least pursuing a strategy that has been thought out, and hopefully we will be OK. A big problem for us is if other teams get an early leader and build a FP that way. I don't think it at all unlikely that teams could have seriously dented China by now, as so they could have been lucky.

I do agree that we will be in a strong position once the FP is built, China is broken and we start to ICS in the north of the island.