The last challenge -- Team game -- Deity trial

Looks ok. I wonder where we're going to settle that second city. 1E of gold on the hill would provide safety but it's certainly not the best spot in other respects. Inland sea means a map with a sea in the middle of it surrounded by land iirc, played it once. But if the sea we're looking at is an inland sea this map is huge.
 
Nice straightforward set Bestsss.

I think now could be a good time to discuss how many cities we want. Do we want to rex and block off as much land as possible or do we want to target a smaller number of cities and focusing on hitting a military tech with enough lead time to make use of it (something I can't do when I overexpand at the start).

I'm a bit concerned that the AI tech rate is going to go balistic to the point where we can never get a solid advantage, in which case we're better off with 6-7 good cities (and early globe), drafting/wipping/building a solid army and then trying to cripple one team.
A more immediate situation is do we whip the settler now, or let it slow build.

I'm in favour of the whip to bring the gold mine online 4 turns sooner. The settler overflow should get us another worker in -edit- 4-5 turns(but I'll need to check).
 
There is so much good land commerce wise that i would try to grab as much land as possible as long as it's safe to do so. As long as diplo isn't such that we're safe from an attack we need to be cautious of course.

It's very likely that if we go to war it'll be at tech parity. And then 10 cities >> 6.
 
Hmmm, what strategies do we have available to avoid an early war dec? With team relations so problematic it will probably take a war bribe and to get an early enough bribe worthy tech we can't afford to gimp our tech rate by over-expanding.
I wonder if Aesthetics would be enough to set Monty on Toku.

Having Monty and Ragnar at war with Toku and Joao would be ideal, Willem just doesn't build enough units to withstand a dogpileno matter how sturdy churchill is (and in team play the advantage is even greater for the civs on the attack due to stacking SoD's while the AI still defend like idiots).
 
2400BC the great wall was built in Kyoto...

Uh-huh... told you Jap was going for it. I also warned we would never get it also, that would have been a disaster for us.

BTW, maybe it's just me, but in the future you may want to post your shots with both Grid and Tile-Yield turned on. The reason being, when looking at high-view shots like this, it is not instantly clear the distance from certain points. But more importantly, very similar looking tiles like plains/hills vs plains/deserts look extremely similar, but one is 2x as powerful as the last. It's easy to make a mistake when glancing over by just textures alone.

Maybe it's not a big deal since I will always manually check out the save anyhow for more in-depth analysis anyhow. I don't know, what do the others think about this? Do I micro-analyse too much?
 
@PK, don't think aest would be enough, think that team will have picked a target by then. A war between Toku_team and Monty_team would be ideal. It's not likely however, i think Monty_team will target Willem_team or us. Pity Toku is on team with Joao. I'd trust Joao but Toku will feel the itch somewhere before 500 AD i guess.

It's likely we'll have to build some military force, we may well be forced to defend what we build so we probably need to be cautious.
 
Dirk, I highly doubt there is any land that barbarians have not claimed (or are just about). I definitely forgot to mention different units from Monty and Ragnar passing around, supposedly to some barb. targets. They helped not losing units, though.

>>I wonder if Aesthetics would be enough to set Monty on Toku.
No, since they wont have border contact, unless they grab some barb cities to enable that.

====
We have to meet Willem/Churchill to know the diplo relations.
There is almost no chance Joao's team to consider war vs Ragnar, the average distance power ratio is 60% (i.e. Rangar's team must have at most 60% of the power of Joao's team).

about the great wall, when I mentioned it, I never included Toku in the deal.
 
I decided to go over the map in detail now, and here are some of my conclusion/suggestions:

First of all, I warned you that all this fancy smanchy settler optimization goes right out the window as soon as the barbs show up, and that’s what’s happening now. We have only 2 archers… sadly both are not where they need to be and both are hurt and healing. Another barb is ready to wonder into our territory and pillage us. And it’s just a damn warrior for now, things will get much worse.

Now what… we got a settler ready to 2-pop whip in an optimal time and in fact it has just set us back more turns because we can’t even move him for quite some time now as we don’t have enough MP units (I knew we needed more of this!).

Anyhow, now the next person has to deal with this problem and whatever new ones will arise… What I want to get into now is our next city (when ever the hell we can get around to it!!).

I have marked a spot where I think we should place it. I already though of this spot over 2 turn-sets ago but didn’t say anything because I felt we may find something further east of that gold. Unfortunately, nothing there is interesting. So I think we should settle here, and have it as a simple Auxiliary city. This is connected by river, will get future levee bonus, and can use the cows for growth and hammer production. Our capital pops borders in 7 turns, so get worker ready to improve that starting turn #7.

This city should work cows to grow while building obelisk first, then work gold second… and thirdly, work a mined plains-hill in the radius.

DO NOT try to do any more fancy-smachy optimal things like cottaging or farming any green tile and trying to grow it.. Useless!! We don’t even have a god-damned granary. Production is the most important thing at this stage, leave the fancy stuff for later. It’s fine to stagnate this city at growth of 3.

This 3-pop city will give us:

10c and 10h per turn. That’s good enough for an early auxiliary city. It will be a helper for many things. Even with 0 O.F. we can get:

Fast Worker - 6 turns
Archer - 2.5 Turns
Setter - 10 Turns.

Do not waste time with barracks, that cost 5 turns and we don’t need it now. We really need protection, etc.

Go archers as soon as obelisk is done, and keep the petal to the metal with them until our needs are met, and then burn off 6 turns here or there to get another UU out there.

I think the second auxiliary city is pretty much standard. Bonus production hill and it can also borrow the cows at a later date. If it turns out there is another food by that plains/hill we can definitely borrow the cows when the time comes to turn it into our draft-whip factory. Also, if Toko decides to do a typical stupid dagger-mode, we may be able to get a high kill-ratio on that hill, letting us get peace before they send a REAL ARMY out to kill us easy.

Tech wise… I am not so sure on roads anymore. I think it is rather unfortunate that we did not start off with fishing in a way. Take a close look, our one hill is a double-riverside, which connects the two rivers which cover so much of our territory. I think it is well worth it to skip roads first, to get our river routes. This means we can get everything connected without roads, not just our cities, but also to Monte. We can already trade resources to Monte, but I’d like to get commerce routes up as well.

Right now we only have one Worker, and we simply do not have the resources to build any more while we can’t even keep up with frieken archers needed! Despite it’s 6 turns for wheel, but 4+10 turns for sailing, sailing still wins out because our worker has too many other things to do than have the luxury of building roads this whole time. We are in effect, trading off tech-time for free INVISIBLE roads.. These roads are actually un-pillagable as well. I think it wins outright and we need to keep being aware of thinking out-of-the-box. (as long as its not ridiculous like going after Stone-henge too!)

Our third city may be near the horses at top to block off the true north but it is too early to plan that in detail now, as we probably need to beeline down south to further get protection up. If Togo attacks, I sure hope it’s a weak Dagger so we actually have a chance to survive. So we should indeed look for decent plains-hills to settle on.

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>>I wonder if Aesthetics would be enough to set Monty on Toku.
No, since they wont have border contact, unless they grab some barb cities to enable that.

When/IF Monte decides to DoW, it will become significantly cheaper to bribe Tuku onto that team, or that team's victims. But before then, we will probably get the same old "Ho-ho-ho!! But we have nothing to gain you Jackass!"

The problem, is their distance. But at least if we could even get them into a FAKE war, that would really cause some messed up diplo between them and slow down a lot of trades.

And speaking about messed diplo, Monte already is at -3 with his own team-partner! LOL.

---

An important issue now is the turn-order. I have scanned through the logs and pieced together most of the data: It seems the order goes :

Tuku --> HumanVictim --> Monte --> Ragnar

Unfortunately, TECHNICALLY Joao hasn't done anything yet that we could see, so I can not tell where he fits into this list. I can only assume he either MUST go right before or after Tuku. Also of importance, when we first met Tuku's scout, it was JOAO that appeared in the pop-up window and NOT Tuku. Perhaps this is an important clue, or just another bug.
 
>>>Also of importance, when we first met Tuku's scout, it was JOAO that appeared in the pop-up window and NOT Tuku. Perhaps this is an important clue, or just another bug.

It means Joao turns are before Toku. CvTeam::getLeader() returns the 1st alive leader in the team iterating throughout all the players.
 
In that case, I also suspect the Glance-Tab works on the same principal since that's how it is currently arranged. Thus we know all the pieces of this puzzle (just about). Willem will go before Churchill, the only thing that remains unsolved is in which slot does Willem's team go. We'll find out soon enough.

Also, since we did not pop copper in our BFC, I assume we have much higher chances now for Iron there. Shall we go for it? There is a barb city on a river not too far off on the East. I think we could take it before Monte does with a sword (or two). Unfortunately it is not located in the best of spots (not 100% sure until fully explored), but it is generally much better to take the city, instead of razzing and then losing the entire spot later after spending another 100 hammers on a new settler and all that time going out the window. Already Toku's team has EIGHT cities and we are tuck with only ONE! I told you teams are god damn hard, no one believes me.

That barb city, while I am not 100% certain, seems to be on flat-land, at least that is my guestimation from the surrounding tiles and corner. We could build a barracks in Gold-City, and then a sword for CR-I. If we don't get unlucky on the first attack, we keep healing and attack to not just capture the city, but also get that sword to exp-10 for HE. I still suggest a second sword because if the first takes mass damage and no fresh unit is there to protect, archers will attack out of the city to kill it. Also having a second sword is handy in case Monte shows up and we have to take that city down ASAP or lose it.

Also, swords will be handy for other barb cities, it may be very advantageous to go after iron sooner than later. I think in 3.17 fishing alone should connect db-riverside tiles? In that case, we may want to trim off sailing from the tree at the coast of non-coastal routes? I don't know...

Those coastals should give us some nice foreign routes though, I think it makes up the lost time. Then again.. an arguement could be made for going Aesthetics BEFORE IW, and THEN trading it around for Ironworking, etc. Argggg...
 
Very detailed proposal, Obs, but it is against all the game concept in my mind. ;)

I'd whip the settler now and let the overflow go to the 3rd archer, at size 4 we can produce the 2nd worker.

2nd city site is still my 1st impression -- 1W of the gold, claim the gold in the 1st ring is very important since it also let the capital hire 1 more citizen beside its huge boost of early commerce. Also I don't like the hill site 1E of the gold as Dirk proposed since it loss a 11 hammer levee and +2 health bonus. If Monty DOW us, imo game is over then. Fighting 2 aggressive deity AIs without protective trait is just hopeless.

3rd city would be the copper/rice/FP site, we need axes as soon as possible to claim barbarian cities. Axes are less effective than sword, but 2 Axes can do the same job.

Regarding the tech path, wheel next for sure to connect the gold, pottery and Writing for cottages in the 3rd city and getting our 1st GS. Foreign trade route through sailing is nice to have, but it only gives us 1 more commerce per city, the benefit is no match to earlier GS.

Roster

Bestsss -- just played
Shyuhe -- UP
Pauliskhan -- On deck
Dirk1302
The Rook
Duckweed
Obsolete
 
On defence:
Looked at the save. How about switching production to archer? If a plains forest is worked for 1 turn it could be built in 3. The turn the archer completes, Delhi should grow into unhappiness. Revolt to slavery and whip settler for 2 pop the same turn. Then depending on the circumstance the overflow could go into another archer or a worker. If the warrior threatens the pasture next turn, promote the archer to combat 1, and defend it. Also send the warrior down from the forested hill to the plains forest, ready to mop up the barb warrior just in case he defeats the archer. The barb may also attack our forest warrior instead (probably better). Alternatively, if the barb heads straight for Delhi we will at least have another archer built the turn the barb can attack.

On settling:
If we are serious about getting the gold, I think we should settle it inside the inner culture ring. Monty is close, and I wouldn't want him to get any ideas about stealing it. If we settle 1W of the gold we would still be on the river (unpillagable roads as obsolete mentions). We'd miss the cow, but after 1 border pop we would cut off Monty from our northern territory. I also think there could be merit to Dirk's thought of settling 1E of gold on desert hill, sacrifices the river, but superior defensively, would also cut off the north after 1 border pop. Though as Duckweed says, an early dow from Monty would probably be futile anyway. I prefer the look of obsolete's proposed southern site on a plains hill. Also, I think a city near the copper should rank as a priority soon, it's a great location, and axes will help in the likely event of a dow from Toku/Joao, and may even catch us a barb city.

On tech:
Like Duckweed, I'd be inclined to go for wheel next, regardless of rivers as substitute roads. It leads us to granaries, connected happy resources, potential foreign trade routes, faster movement, libraries and pretty much everything else.
 
@Obsolete:
I'm quite sure rivers make a trade network without sailing if they're within your cultural borders along the way. That would mean sailing is only useful for the overseas TR.
 
If we settle on the river, no tech. need if the cities are in culture borders (fishing doesn't help trade routes).
(doh I wrote that from my girlfriend sister's laptop, but I guess it didn't go through)
 
Few things came to mind regarding iron working:

after pottery/writing I wish to tech it before popping the 1st great scientist (I mean w/o turning off the research and waiting for). Provided we claim some copper and if we find iron, that's quite likely given the capital didn't have neither horses nor copper we have a good chance to trade the copper to some of the AIs for very good resources/gold.

If we dont claim the copper it's one more reason to go for. I support settling 1W from the gold. It adds trade routes immediately.
Just whip the settler and overflow into archer, build a worker at size of 4.


Also claiming the barbarian cities will sponsor good 100% research for a lot of time.

Swords will be more efficient that settling and protecting the land on our own. And we can unlock the HE. Of course we might not get the best spots.

On a side note: it's possible to have oil in the BFC w/o jungle tile.
 
I'll look at the save tonight and post some thoughts.

So where do people suggest for city #2? I'm not a huge fan of obs's spot since it'll take a monument + 10 turns to hook-up the gold. If we plant a city right next to it (maybe 1W or 1E), then we'll get the gold happiness a lot faster making Delhi stronger. I'd prefer 1W over 1E because of the river connection and better tiles (3 FP for whipping).
 
I prefer 1W of the gold as the city site, irrigate the floodplains while working the gold mine.

I like Obs southern production powerhouse city (that now has sole access to the cows+wheat). Obs is right in that we can't afford to neglect production early on.

-note- I'm pretty sure the gold city river system is different to the capital river system, we'd need to road the connecting land tile betweem them?
 
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