Sid Spaceship Game

[Own]

I like the way you played it, especially the trade for slaves, and I like the area around the capital, but the surrounding land doesn't look great. Land to the east could be different, but to the north, there's jungle, and in the west and south there's riverless plains and desert. I'll take it and play another ten and see where we are.

What do we want for city spacing? I'd go as wide as possible. We can only build so many settlers before the AI swallows up all of the land around us, so we want each settler to take the maximum amount of land possible. Also, we're commercial, so going CXXXC or even CXXXXC won't cause corruption problems in the first ring.

Would anybody have a problem with building a worker in the capital? It'll give us some exploring ability and will make the settler factory operate from 5-7 instead of 4-6, so we'll have more commerce.

 

[Bucephalus]

Would anybody have a problem with building a worker in the capital? It'll give us some exploring ability.

lurker's comment:

Exploring with a worker? Unusual strategy, to say the least.....

 

[Own]

Ah, a typo. I meant warrior .

 

[Spoonwood]

A warrior would mean that we'll have each settler come out two turns later. Maybe it's best to put out a settler or two, then a warrior, and then settlers. Exploring with a worker reminds me of the Finally Ready for Regent game. Anyways,

Buce,

I'd love for you to join us in this game. That is, if you have time to do so, of course.

 

[Own]

So should I go ahead and play?

 

[Bucephalus]

No, time's not an issue, although weekends are not good. It's just that I'm blowing a bit 'hot and cold' with Civ at the moment; this week it's 'hot', next week - who knows?

And my record with Sid is less than brilliant - it took twenty-or-so attempts before I won my one and only game.

I dunno. Let me sleep on it, mate.

 

[Spoonwood]

Don't worry about a "less than brilliant" Sid record Buce. We might not win this one no matter what we do, but we'll have tried valiantly.

Go ahead and play Own...
Team Sid Spaceship roster:
Spoonwood-just played
Own-At the plate
I. Larkin-On Deck
Bucephalus-In the hole

We can have more players if we have someone else (with high level experience) wants to join.

 

[Own]

Pre-turn- I change nothing.

IBT- The Aztecs learn The Wheel.

1.Lux goes up to 30%. Slaves finish a road, and I send them to a plains 1 SE to set up future settling locations to the east.

IBT- Nothing

2. Worker finishes road and moves east to build another road and explore.

IBT- The Zulu build a town near us, and we know them.

3. 001 settler > warrior. The Zulu don't know alphabet. They give us The Wheel and 26g for alphabet. Horses are right by 001! Settler goes north. Lux down to 20%.

IBT- The Zulu learn CB

4. Settler moves into settling spot. It will be CXXC simply because there's no other reasonable place to settler, but in general I like CXXXC for sid.

IBT- We meet the Inca, who are up BW, Masonry, CB, and HBR.

5. 001 warrior > settler. Found 002, and it works a roaded river BG. Lux goes up to 30%. Warrior explores to the east.

IBT- Zululand learns HBR

6. Warrior discovers decent land to the east.

IBT- Aztecs learn CB

7. Nothing

IBT- nothing

8. 10 gpt and 78g buy us HBR from the Zulu. I then sell HBR to the Aztecs for Masonry (palace prebuild) and 4g.

IBT- nothing

9. 001 settler > settler. The settler goes east.

IBT- A huge number of Zulu troops are traveling south. It doesn't look like they're coming for us, which is very good.

10. 002 warrior > worker. The warrior explores NW. Settler is in place to found 003.

 

[Own]

No, time's not an issue, although weekends are not good. It's just that I'm blowing a bit 'hot and cold' with Civ at the moment; this week it's 'hot', next week - who knows?

And my record with Sid is less than brilliant - it took twenty-or-so attempts before I won my one and only game.

I dunno. Let me sleep on it, mate.

I know exactly what you mean by the hot and cold. I think you just have to be open about it when civ interest takes an unexpected dive.

And by the way, 1/20 beats 2/1000 by a lot. And one of mine was on islands as the Byzantines, which greatly takes away from the true Sid experience. I guess you could say I have experience on Sid, but not many laurels . Good news is, everybody's play improves in SGs.

 

[Own]

Right now with horses and HBR, we can build MWs. I don't know how we want to go about this goal of getting a sizable MW force. Should each new city build its own worker and then go rax>MW>MW... or should we make 001 a 2-turn worker factory after all land is taken up and have each city just immediately go rax>MW? I'm in favor of the second option, even though our most productive city won't be making MWs for a while. Or we could even do both if we feel we really need workers badly.

It really looks like the Zulu are going to war and not with us. We should take advantage of this opportunity and get in a fight with either the Zulu or their enemy. 20 MWs and spears in front cities should be adequate. Hopefully we can prepare this force before the AI to AI fighting comes to an end or the AI gets Feudalism. Getting a decent force together before pikes and MDIs is something I almost never manage to do in solo Sid games, especially ones on pangaea. I guess we just have to hope that a neighbor is without iron or that the early wars will slow down the tech pace enough.

Or we could scrap the whole war idea and concentrate on one city's ability to build the GL. In my solo Sid pangaea experience, however, even after building the GL yourself, you'll quickly be left in the dust once again in the tech pace, because you won't have time to put to use all of the new cool buildings you can build or governments you can change to. A good trading opportunity may appear, but you might just not have enough cash to buy the necessary tech, because they're so dang expensive, and you're probably not gonna have much land to get a decent economy from.

Sid standard pangaea almost seems impossible. Fighting early is crazy difficult to do, as the human has such a tiny time frame in which to prepare a decent force, and the strength of the AI is just brutal. Even a hit and run type war will last too long for the AI to not eventually gain the upper hand and trounce us, and a long-term war would require a military alliance, which would lock us in for 20 turns. On the other hand, not fighting early puts you in a position that is near impossible to recover from. Does anyone else have ideas for how to go about winning this game?

 

[Bucephalus]

Ok, guys, I'm persuaded.

My experience of Sid - limited as it is - is that winning requires a large chunk of luck. My one victory had just that - in spades; I started far enough away to have room to grow a little (IIRC, I managed to get down 7 cities before being boxed); I had both Iron and Horses; my two neighbours went to war almost immediately, and kept at it right to the end, even when I joined in; of the remaining three tribes, only one had Iron, and one had Horses. My strategy from there was to keep them fighting each other while I took cities one at a time with a large stack of trebs and maces, hidden underneath an Army gained in the first war. Capturing the GLib helped here as I could devote all my income to alliances.

I'm sure better players than me could win from less promising positions, but that's the kind of template that I'd be looking for. For me, AI - AI war is the key; Sid seems a little less intimidating once the surplus of units is gassed.

My pessimistic nature says that the land we have here is not good enough, and we are far too close to two civs. If we are to pull this off, it might require a few attempts.

Strategically, in a nutshell, I'd say to play it as a conquest game and launch unapposed.

 

[I. Larkin]

OK, got it...
Some preliminary thoughts:
At Sid Rank corruption is huge, so later on we will disband CxxC construction in order to have 21 tile per City at IA, i.e. no overlap. However second and third are going to have overlap with capital. Are we going to abounded it in IA?

Also looks that zulu will kill us in a next few turns. Can we do something about that?

 

[Spoonwood]

I wouldn't worry about the Zulu. That stack might just be out exploring. Remember, we have least aggressive settings? We also have other tribes nearby that they already know, and they're polite towards us. I don't like the idea of disbanding towns later. I really advise we place cities on the basis of terrain and not city placement schemes. If they come for us, I doubt there's much we can do, and the game will end quickly.

I think 002 should get started on a granary/palace pre-build for a temple now, as hopefully we can pick up CB from another tribe around here soon enough. It probably needs a temple to prevent a flip. Then it can go palace pre-build-Great Library. If we don't pick up CB in time, put it on the Palace as a pre-build on the FP or GL. I think it's better to build the Great Library, then build up a MW force and try to attack the tribe around who doesn't have iron (or it's not hooked up)... or just go with libraries. The AIs will have to pay in full also for Feudalism.

 

[I. Larkin]

I don't like the idea of disbanding towns later. I really advise we place cities on the basis of terrain and not city placement schemes.

I am afraid it is the "only option". Alternative is to move core somewhere else, at IA, but it is "expensive procedure" . I think 001 and 002 will build Barracks and units, that it. Proper scheme at Sit is CxC at start and CxxxC at finish. Are we going to TGL? I think to capture it later on is better for us. MWs can do that even vs Pickmans.
Are we going full speed writing? Or we do minimum sci ?
I can't find Spoonwoods's turn-log.

 

[Own]

Don't worry about the Zulu. The way their troops are moving, they're definitely going after someone else.

I don't think we should build any temples. If we were REL, I would be in favor, but 60 whole shields... Since the Zulus seem to be a war, they would be a reasonable target, and I'd rather invest 60 shields in 2 MWs to help take that city to completely eliminate the flip risk.

Going GL to MW raid on ironless civ seems like a good plan.

We are in fact doing minimum research on writing.

For the city spacing, let's go cxxxc in the west, south, and southwest.

 

[Spoonwood]

Min science towards Writing. I didn't do a proper turn-log since it was the first 20 turns and not much happenend (other than the Aztec trade). I don't see why we would need to abandon core or near-core towns in the industrial age. We can build courthouses and soon enough police stations then. Also, how many beakers do we lose by having another city? Remember, we get one free commerce unit for each extra city no matter how bad of corruption we have and can always use specialists. Plus, if we have more towns, the AIs have less, so they become less of a problem. I feel more concerned with launching, than launching fast here, so even if we lose a turn or two, as long as we launch I wouldn't sweat it.

I suppose we could pop-rush MWs and spears in 001 to deal with a Zulu attack, but I don't think it's coming, and we'd have to raise the luxury slider a good bit.

I admit I don't like MWs vs. pikes, because it seems like such a waste of shields. But, maybe there's something else we might try...
1. We first try to find the tribe X that doesn't have iron.
2. We build up a force of MWs.
3. When we learn Literature we trade Literature away (for as much as we can get, of course) to X, and hope they finish the GL first.
4. We then capture the GL from X.

The problem comes as that X might trade Literature away right away, or before the ToA cascade and some very strong tribe builds the GL. Then again, IF it worked, it would probably put us in a better position than any other strategy we have so far.

If the Zulu doesn't end up as tribe X, we'll need some culture (maybe the Forbidden Palace) in 002... and we'll probably need some culture in any border towns with tribes other than the tribe we attack first. We don't want multiple fronts, or flips. Hopefully, we can pre-build libraries with granaries in these border towns instead of temples.

 

[Own]

Your five-step plan sounds good. Good news is that if X doesn't build the GL, we can still attack X just for their territory. If X is on the other side of the world though, that's bad news.

By the way, I think new towns should probably go warrior > barracks, and 001 will handle the workers later. 001 isn't gonna have a whole lot more settler production to do, unfortunately, because all that empty land is gonna get swallowed up quickly. So we'll get our workers pumping soon enough, and we could sneak in a worker instead of a settler every now and then.

 

[I. Larkin]

I don't see why we would need to abandon core or near-core towns in the industrial age.

Rank corruption work this way that removing City with rank 2 or 3 reduces rank of the rest by one. As a result whole empire has big benefit. But as I wrote we may consider abandon capital instead.

 

[Spoonwood]

Your five-step plan sounds good.

It's a 12-step plan. It's ALWAYS a 12-step plan.

 

[I. Larkin]

Played 6 turns. AIs have writing. Is it reasonable to trade and go Phylo full speed?