TR02 - Losers move up to Emporer

[Mach]

And now I see the turns. Doh! Sorry everyone...

 

[dmanakho]

I just love to be right, cause usually i am wrong .

Admiral, take that paper bag of your head.

I have come up with another dot map...
I think it better positions city in relationship with capital and we have better river use.

My order would be:
dark blue
pink
light blue
green
...
i am sure there will be better locations west from us...
...
red

 

[Admiral Kutzov]

@ team - I'll take my lumps for the almost unilateral decision to send the worker west. however, we got pottery for no cost; we're the tech leader and we're about to grab a lux and get boats in the water to meet new marks. Popping the hut with the worker was no risk since we didn't have any military units. I know I'm an idiot, but I'd rather have the tech than the pump at this time on emperor. IMIO, it's more important to get the tech lead at this point than to get a settler pump up. If we get a tech lead, we can tie the AI in knots with deals. This game is not going to be a horse rush, slam the AI. It is going to be a trading, warring with legions slam the AI. Forgot to mention, after the settler, Rome should build more warriors for exploring and then build a settler for #2 just before it grows to size 3. I almost never research at max.

@ d-man: feel free to disagree with any of this. Me likes to converse.

 

[Admiral Kutzov]

x-post with D-man on the prior post. didn't know how tight the team wanted to go on builds. River (pink) is better for growth and still lets us get the boats out. Re light blue - was thinking on NE on the gold, but I'm flexible. I like the tight city placement. I feel very strongly that we should not go max on writing to save coin to trade later. Need some team discussion on this in 10-20 turns.

 

[dmanakho]

@ team - I'll take my lumps for the almost unilateral decision to send the worker west. however, we got pottery for no cost; we're the tech leader and we're about to grab a lux and get boats in the water to meet new marks. Popping the hut with the worker was no risk since we didn't have any military units. I know I'm an idiot, but I'd rather have the tech than the pump at this time on emperor.

IMIO, it's more important to get the tech lead at this point than to get a settler pump up. If we get a tech lead, we can tie the AI in knots with deals.
.

It's okay with your decision to settle in place..
But there is a fatal flaw on thinking tech is better than settler plan.
There is no such thing as tech lead in AA, you can be very last in tech but get ahead of everybody in a single turn as I showed in previous game.
But if we have settle pump and build more cities than AIs this game will indeed
become a horse rush, slam the AI. Well, that is my style of playing. I don't do all this complex gaming until Diety level...
Emperor AIs are still quite weak. We need to grow as fast as it is possible.

This game is not going to be a horse rush, slam the AI. It is going to be a trading, warring with legions slam the AI.

Sure, if we don't have horses around that is. . But seriously we will see how things will go.. If we can fight before Republic we will have to use horses.

Forgot to mention, after the settler, Rome should build more warriors for exploring and then build a settler for #2 just before it grows to size 3. I almost never research at max.

Agree, we also need more workers. but send settler to the wheat and start granary.
I've never done writing research at max before myself, but after i've read that piece of info i sometimes do if i want to gamble and get to the tech before AIs.

@ d-man: feel free to disagree with any of this. Me likes to converse.

Already have

 

[dmanakho]

x-post with D-man on the prior post. didn't know how tight the team wanted to go on builds. River (pink) is better for grow and still lets us get the boats out. Re light blue - was thinking on NE on the gold, but I'm flexible.

Green is also a coastal city and with pink and green we will control both fish and dyes..

@team: No temples, colliseums, caphedrals and other crappy builds..
We will need in level of importance:

1. barracks.
2. markets
3. few libraries just to get us to Mil Trad.

 

[dmanakho]

I feel very strongly that we should not go max on writing to save coin to trade later.

I know what you mean...
And i felt exactly the same... But what i learned... All we need is to meet as many AIs as we can and simply wait..
Doesn't matter how many techs they know and ahead of us..
All we need is to get a single tech before them - philosophy.
Grab another tech for free and with two techs that we have and nobody else does we will be able to trade everything Ais have plus all their money.
It does work - "as seen on TV" and better .
Republic slingshot - that is the best, AIs will sell their mothers for Republic.
But it is a big gamble on emperor level and i would not go for it.

 

[Admiral Kutzov]

Damn, x-posts. Good points. We have different styles, that's why I wanted to play this. I agree we need a pump to expand fast but I wasn't worried about getting it up before city 3. I agree we shouldn't get locked into a plan this early (i.e. horse v. legions). I've usually done archer rushes before horses simply cause the civs I usually play are more suited for that. Shouldn't we start acting as Aristotle and start axing the trainees what we should do?

 

[Admiral Kutzov]

here we go again with the xposts.

All we need is to meet as many AIs as we can and simply wait..
Doesn't matter how many techs they know and ahead of us..
All we need is to get a single tech before them - philosophy.
Grab another tech for free and with two techs that we have and nobody else does we will be able to trade everything Ais have plus all their money.
It does work - "as seen on TV" and better .
Republic slingshot - that is the best, AIs will sell their mothers for Republic.
But it is a big gamble on emperor level and i would not go for it.

that's why I mentioned my pref for trading on the IT when we get Phil. Concur the slingshot is too risky on Emperor. My reason for min research is that nobody knows Alpha at this time. I think we can get away with min research on writing and then max on Phil.

 

[eldar]

Agree with going for Phil straight away - though with the Alpha monopoly, going for Republic might be on... safety first is the order of the day.

Now, means we'll be hand-researching our Govt - so we'll want at least one Despotic war during that time.

Is it too early to plan the demise of China (who are best dealt with very early on, I have learned).

Neil.

 

[Admiral Kutzov]

Is it too early to plan the demise of China

not at all. Where are they?

@ team - d-man and I have been going round in circles about how to approach this. What does everyone else think? IMHO, we need lux at this level due to the happy face thingy and my research ideas have been detailed ad nauseum above. IIRC, this is a trainer, not a dictator, so state your thoughts! your assignment is rep. vs. mon. why one or the other and how to get there.

 

[dmanakho]

We can always figure our a common solution...

I found the place where I've read about research at max..
It was here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=111377&page=3&pp=20

Just scroll to the middle of the thread and start reading DocT. Renata and Dynamic posts...
It actually makes sence to get writing at max.
And if we get writing faster we can actually gamble and go for CoL before Philosophy depending on situation.

We have one lux secure already... We definetely need to go for republic...
monarchy only pays of if we play AWE... Also monarchy corruption level really hurts military production. Also, forget self-research in monarchy.
Human republic can easily outperform AI in research on emperor level.


Oh, i certainly didn't mean to sound as a dictator... I mentioned in previous game - i am very politically incorrect person.... Please bare with me... I am really nice person inside.

@team: please throw your thoughts into the thread... lurkers are also welcome.

 

[Admiral Kutzov]

Oh, i certainly didn't mean to sound as a dictator... I mentioned in previous game - i am very politically incorrect person.... Please bare with me... I am really nice person inside.

didn't mean to imply you were a dictator, but thought we should let the trainees speak before we argued ourselves to death. Like I said our styles are different so this should be interesting....

If you really want to see PC incorrectness, give me a few posts and I'll go from there

Let's sit back for a bit and let the rest of the team post their thoughts and why.

 

[Mach]

Yikes! An entire page of posts in two hours! So much to comment on!

So people want an aa war, eh? We're arguing on units & targets already? (And did someone mention military tradition?) Ok. I would wait to see what we see out there, civ placement & resource availability. But we are militaristic...so youse the bosses on this one.

Ok, so I would have done writing on max since we're the only ones with alpha, but ok. I think republic slingshot is out because we did min on writing, although if still nobody has alpha when we get writing (unlikely...), then we could take a shot at it. So...continue min on writing, don't trade alpha while we have a monopoly, and do either CoL or philo after writing at max (depending on the monopoly status of alpha). That's my vote.

But I could be convinced to try the slingshot no matter what.

Dotmap. I'm nervous about the settler factory; it seems so shield-poor. Now that we've built a settler, can we move an mp out of Rome on to that hill 2 west of dark blue dot, before we settle that spot? Using the road, the warrior can get to that hill before the settler could reach the dot. If we see a bg in reach, we can move our factory 1 spot west.

Also green dot -- could we move it se onto that forest square, to reduce overlap, and to grab some nice ocean commerce? I don't think it hurts us in the short term...

Rome's gonna be a nice strong city -- we can get it to >20spt, I think. Sweet.

I agree with the settling order -- dark blue dot then pink dot. Then we'll need workers, so squeeze 2 of them out of Rome. Hopefully by then the settler pump will be up and running.

That's all I can think of for now.

 

[dmanakho]

Also green dot -- could we move it se onto that forest square, to reduce overlap, and to grab some nice ocean commerce? I don't think it hurts us in the short term...

We will need that forest for shields, if we move green dot city to forest we will minimize our shield tiles and that city will have to be one of the major "military factories". So I would say leave it where it is, it is still a coastal city.
In this particular situation ocean commerce will only help at the later stages of the game when you can afford to put an extra citizen on sea tile..
It is okay for overlaps. I prefer tight city build...
Remember we won't need more than 12 tiles per city... ever...
So overlaps are ok and encouraged. The closer cities are to capital the less corruption.
If we play this right we will finish this game way before hospitals are invented... and i hope before anybody enters IA.



EDIT: TO learn how to play Rome on emperor level please go to the SGOTM forum and lookup Team Smackster and Team XTeam threads.. Those were classic cases of playing as Rome. While won't exactly apply in our situation due to specific variant and PTW version of the game it still will give a pretty good idea on how to play. Oh, and i acted as a total looser those old good days.

MORE EDIT: I agree that city is pretty low shield city.. We might want to use pop-rush strategy there...
I would suggest to build granary in Rome anyway... We don't have the "best" startup location

 

[Admiral Kutzov]

Here's the hospital rant (hopefully people find it useful like the temple rant):

hospitals are evil because they cause polluition. If you need hospitals, you've spaced your cities too far apart. If you need a hospital, you need all those cultural happiness thingies that cost gold. hospitals are bad cause you need mass transit and recycling.

@ team - did dman's required reading. go with writing on max. See the thread he suggested if you'ins need 'splainin'.

 

[Minute Man]

OK, who invited the Admiral? It is a little bit of a shame about that flood plain wheat, but then I never really know what to do with those cities anyway - they never seem to have enough shields.

I do have one minor quibble, though - why haven't we irrigated any of those flood plains yet? Having more food is good, right?

I agree with dman's first two dots. I think we need to get the wheat online soon, then found on the coast and build a boat or two. The other dots are a little tight for my taste, but with the river and coast placement, that's probably unavoidable. We might want to move the red dot to the other side of the river (for the free jungle chop, if nothing else), but we can worry about that later.

I like the suggestion of checking out the terrain NW of the blue dot before we settle the city.

On Republic vs. Monarch...is there really even a question? Republic has much better income, and WW shouldn't be a big problem if we plan our wars properly.

I'm inclined to agree that we should have done max research on Writing and gone full speed ahead toward the Republic slingshot, but admittedly I don't really know how feasible that is at Emperor level. Since we started with a monopoly on Alpha, though, it probably would have been worth a shot.

Is it worth cranking up research on Writing now, or did we miss our chance? The alternative would be to finish the min run on Writing, research Philo at max, and take whatever looks best at that time as our free tech. Then we research our way towards Republic as fast as practical, and when we get it, trade it around for tech parity (if we're not already there).

EDIT: Boy, you guys post a lot. Two more while I was writing this post...I actually like green dot where it is, since it has more possible shield-producing tiles - the commerce from the ocean is nice, but the production is nicer.

 

[dmanakho]

I'm inclined to agree that we should have done max research on Writing and gone full speed ahead toward the Republic slingshot, but admittedly I don't really know how feasible that is at Emperor level. Since we started with a monopoly on Alpha, though, it probably would have been worth a shot.

It is possible on Emperor but it is a big gamble... Then we don't know how lucky AIs will be hut popping... We have Russians and Arabs who expansionist...
We also don't know land mass but it already looks like it is big continent or pangea so AI research rate will be from fast-to-very-fast.
Let's meet all the neighbours 1st, get writing (at max) and then have a deep breath before deciding.

We might want to move the red dot to the other side of the river (for the free jungle chop, if nothing else), but we can worry about that later.

Absolutely... Not a priority but we have to remember to update dot map to make sure city goes on jungle tile.

 

[dmanakho]

hospitals are evil because they cause polluition. If you need hospitals, you've spaced your cities too far apart. If you need a hospital, you need all those cultural happiness thingies that cost gold. hospitals are bad cause you need mass transit and recycling.

I promise i won't argue with each post of yours , but there are some exeptions for hospitals (as well as there are some exceptions for temples).

1. When you can not grow horizontaly (territory-wise) and have to grow vertically (pop-wise). Happens often on high difficulty levels and when you want to do self research. Those taxmen and scientists help.
2. When you play for score like in HoF. I think it is stupid but score you get when you win the game proportional to number of happy people/specialists in your empire.. So hospitals help greatly..

But Admiral is right... warmongers don't need no stinking hospitals.

 

[Admiral Kutzov]

This is my first try as a trainer, so I try to exhaustively detail my thoughts.

Is it worth cranking up research on Writing now, or did we miss our chance?

No we haven't missed our chance. (hopefully) that's been the point of d-man's and my dicussions. Only 20 turns have been played. This game is wide open. Go have fun.