Strategy Discussion

[cav scout]

This is the thread where we can talk about our mid to long-term plans. The first issue I would like to raise is our tech path.

Right now our current techs are:

Fishing
Mining
Agriculture
Mysticism

We will finish Bronze Working this turn.

The next obvious tech is Sailing (100). But has any team grabbed a religion yet? We could go for Meditation (80) or Polytheism (100) now and do Sailing right after.

Either way, after Sailing I would work the top of the tech tree for a bit by going:

Wheel (60)-> Pottery (80)-> Writing (120)

This gets us cottages, granaries, libraries and the ability to open borders. It also sets us up for Alphabet, which can be huge if we meet multiple teams early and can broker trades. The only drawback I see is that other teams will be working the top of the tree also so there will be alot of techs in common and less trading opportunities.

Alternatively, we could go:

Iron Working (200)-> Compass (400)

This could reveal Iron, get us our UB Cothons (harbors with a bonus trade route) and give us tech that others will be wanting to trade for.

Finally, we could work the middle of the tech tree and do the religious route on the way to Monarchy. Or we could take a detour and pick up Animal Husbandry (100 ) to reveal horses, possibly followed up by Horseback Riding (120 ). I think these options are inferior the ones listed above though.

 

[Earthling]

If no one does found a religion, I could see getting Meditation next (regardless of whether we do Stonehenge). If someone has then we'd have to see, but I agree it could be worthwhile long term.

After the short term though, I much favor the top half of the tech tree, as you say; Math and Calendar are two I might pick up, (and again a reason I'm not so enthusiastic about SH, cause we get map centering at Calendar, and we want it for all the spices imo. Still Math is very valuable for forest chops and leading to currency and CS and so on) Though after Writing it really can be influenced by who we contact/who we can trade with and so on because a lot opens up after writing. I would like to dupe some team into trading us Alphabet if possible or something like that. If we don't end up with copper or horses maybe we invest in IW a little later.

As for Sailing - if we're building SH => settler there's no need for Sailing right away; faster Pottery/Writing would pay off. If we're expanding faster, we want it around the time we get the second city, so we can build a galley after that. And either way we could look at the religion, it is an interesting option due to other teams weirdly not founding one.

 

[RegentMan]

As for Sailing - if we're building SH => settler there's no need for Sailing right away; faster Pottery/Writing would pay off.

Makes sense to me. I don't have many thoughts regarding tech, but I can hop onboard this ship.

 

[galdarian]

No one has founded a religion as of turn 27

 

[TyBoy]

I'm inclined to just write off our UU on this map. It's already the least impressive thing about carthage and it's both an expensive tech and unit.

I like an early wheel > pottery, I'd reevaluate writing at that point to see if we don't need something else more.

We should probably vote on that religion thing. It's a gamble for sure and if we do it we probably need to do it very soon. And if we do, which one is the better choice?

 

[cav scout]

I agree on the UU. We don't have a pressing need for Animal Husbandry so we can backfill that later. Techs will be cheaper after we meet teams that already have them.

Sailing isn't that pressing either, we just want to get it by the time we found our 2nd city to get the trade route.

As far as trying to pick up a religion- I think we should. He who dares wins!

So we could go Meditation-> Wheel-> Pottery.

 

[Earthling]

I like Meditation too; if anything it will scare some people about the Oracle, but I also think getting the religion, if we do, pays off anyway - for happiness, and we're bound to get a prophet sometime, really the shrine is much better than anything else lazy prophets do.

Also that workboat dead end is annoying, and really speaks a lot about the map. I hope we didn't get some sort of wheel/hub situation going on now but I guess we'll see.

 

[galdarian]

Do we want to go for the Oracle? It's a bit early to say as to whether we found Buddhism. Assuming we do we would be the first be able to research Priesthood (60:beakers: ~ 3 turns with the second mine) then build the Oracle for 150 in about ~ 10 turns with a few chops?

 

[Earthling]

Well we couldn't get both it and Stonehenge obviously and I think some other teams may be intent on it/prechopping or something. After all this time talking I'd stick with SH - of course again if *nobody gets Oracle a little later we could but not rushing.

 

[RegentMan]

I'd rather get on with expanding personally.

 

[cav scout]

I think the Oracle might be biting off a bit more than we can chew.

I suspect that once Buddhism or Hinduism gets founded people will drop what they are doing and the race will be on. I wouldn't be surprise in the slightest if one or more teams (Sirius, Mavericks, Merlot) are already pre-chopping for it.

 

[cav scout]

So at some point we are going to need to decide a few things:

Civics- Do we want to convert to slavery, and if so when? What other civics are we going to want down the road?

Religion- If we found Buddhism do we want to convert to it, and if so when?
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I think we should convert to slavery and Buddhism, probably right after we finish our first settler. With our charimatic trait, Stonehenge mouments and a religion we will have great happiness. We can then leverage that to a.) grow our capital to happy cap and b.) whip our other cities like crazy.

We should deal with the anarchy while our first settler is moving to his city site. That way Stonehenge and the 1st settler don't get delayed and we shoulder the anarchy opportunity cost asap (before our civ grows more and the cost of missed turns increases).

 

[RegentMan]

Sounds good to me.

 

[TyBoy]

While the settler is moving is sort of an unusual sweet spot to deal with anarchy.

I normally wait on slavery until I actually want to whip something or I have another good civic like organized religion or hereditary rule to switch with it. If we think we'll be hitting one of those reasonably soon it may be worth holding off on that anarchy.

 

[galdarian]

Is the plan is still to research sailing and then beeline calendar? That being the case Hereditary rule and organized religion is a ways off yet (~25-30Turns). I'd like to be whipping up a storm prior to that.

+1 Cav_Scout. I already agreed with that plan in the turn discussion

 

[TyBoy]

If we are beelining calendar I think we might as well get all of our on-island cities founded before we bother picking one up overseas. With plantations all of those cities are going to be great and overseas cities are expensive and logistically impractical unless a good tactical need presents itself.

 

[Earthling]

Well yeah, that's what I would think. Except still the fourth city on island isn't going to have that much going for it that isn't overlapping with other cities. (I'm calling the 4th city the southwest one - the one right south of the capital is third). Overseas we get double trade routes in all cities most likely - 2 instead of one. Of course if we get OB with a foreign nation that supercedes this but we'd have to have trade contact. In other words - our fourth city on the island won't have infrastructure like libraries right away anyway, and cities two and three can work the resource tiles that overlap. Not that it won't be a good city, but still, don't want to miss out on opportunities to expand - as mentioned we might even need to settle some less than optimal areas for accessing some resources we may find or "canals" or something. Plus it seems like there's a city or two that have at least 2 clams and possibly more resources - really not bad spots to settle.

I do favor calendar as a general path though, or at least mathematics, if we don't have a specific tech to research because of diplomacy. Math improves forest chops and generally leads to many good techs, and if we're not specifically trading it's better than Alphabet, and I don't think we need to pursue monarchy/religious techs right away. The one wild card is Iron Working if we can't find any resources, which also leads to compass I guess. But I'd do writing first, and then going for Aesthetics and Literature or something too is a call we'll have to make. The one thing that is true is I expect the tech pace to be rather fast and tech trading is only going to speed that up, with everybody having lots of commerce and beakers to start.

I think I'm ready to see what is up this turn though, just think it's chopping forests and moving workboats and then we ought to have buddhism founded, so that's good news.

 

[TyBoy]

While it's true they will have access to a lot of the squares, I expect those cities to be happiness capped with a lot of excess food if they're actually trying to work all the bonus squares. A city really needs to have a balance of mediocre squares to work cottages or mines on and nice bonus squares to get the food to let it work those mediocre squares, all without working more than 8-10 squares total.

Any bit of extra commerce you get from oversea trade routes at this stage of the game is more than eaten up by overseas maintenance.

I think with all the forest on our island any city will be pretty much assured of getting a couple basic improvements built pretty darn quickly. The city will be totally defended by a single warrior for happiness too, while that first city overseas is probably going to need a substantial amount of support right away to keep the hordes at bay and may have to deal with pillaging anyway (and all that forest is another great reason to pursue math).

Basically I think as soon as we get calendar that city will give great returns for a minimal investment, while the city overseas will also give a good return, but it'll take longer to pay off and require a much larger investment. I don't so much see what we gain from founding the city overseas 4th and the on island one 5th or 6th instead of the on island one 4th and the overseas cities after that.

 

[Earthling]

Any bit of extra commerce you get from oversea trade routes at this stage of the game is more than eaten up by overseas maintenance.

If I remember right, I think the "vassals off" specifically removes the colonial part of overseas maintenance. That might not be right but I thought it was so since you can't actually spin off colonies. The first overseas city often gets trade routes of 2 to appear in all your other cities instead of one - of course, foreign trade would overwrite all of that, but until then it'll probably make up for a little maintenance.

But I can see the point - at the very least I want three cities on island first, I don't see a reason to change that now. Mostly, I just see a couple of those clam sites as potentially rather good resource wise especially as we look inland- and yeah, I'd finish up our "home island" by city #5 or 6 too.

Regarding city growth - I'm thinking we may run a scientist or two in our second and third cities and the happy cap (with religion, and monuments, and spices and silver, again that's without any other team trade or contact yet) is like 8 or 9 at least - more than enough to work all their resource tiles and a couple specialists.

 

[cav scout]

Cities- I also think the 3rd city will end up on our island. But the 4th city should follow quickly afterwards and be founded off-island.

We need a warrior over there pretty soon to look for resources. There is going to be important land up for grabs in the "shared" areas. We need to get a foothold soon, we just don't want it to be half-assed. So by the time we are ready for city #4 we should have our initial recon complete and a optimum location picked out.

Whipping- I think we should go through a period of major whippage in all our cities (except our capital). We will have the happiness to sustain a strong early whipping run so we should leverage that to get some key infrastructure (granaries, libraries, cothons etc.). We can then start thinking about running specialists down the road.

Chopping- Since we will probably be getting math sooner than later i'm tempted to hold off on all unneccessary chops until then. I could envision us finishing the one stonehenge chop and then waiting until math to start chopping again. There will certainly be plenty of tiles for our workers to improve before needing to clear forests.