TT01: Beating Demigod

Do we want a dotmap before I play?

Yes, I think that would be a good idea. I did not have any time today so I could not make one myself and now I'm sort of dead at 3:20 in the night. I think we cannot afford too many mistakes in this game, so we need to work together on a plan and a dotmap is part of that. I agree that we need to get the settler factory going in Amsterdam a.s.a.p. DWetzel, if you can make that dotmap that would be great!

And now for something completely different - sleep. See you tomorrow.
 
Feel free to tear these apart, of course. I've made two. I personally think the first one will be much better, but I defer to the group's judgment (mostly because I won't be settling many of these, haha).

In both cases, the two westernmost dots are a little problematic, as you can't quite make out the coastal features there and that would be VERY handy to know. :confused:

I also haven't numbered these. It seems fairly clear to me to grab the dyes with our next city, whichever spacing we use.

Apologies for not keeping colors totally consistent between the two.

Tighter spacing:

Spoiler :
Here, Blue Dot on west coast should maybe (probably) move to the coast depending on terrain features. Yellow Dot could go where it is, across the river to the NW, or to the W or SW one space depending on terrain.

Not pictured would be an additional city on the flood plain river, either 3NW of Purple Dot or NW-NW-N of Purple Dot.

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Looser spacing:

Spoiler :
Here, Teal Dot and Yellow Dot can (and perhaps should) move to the west a space, depending on terrain. Blue Dot (on the dyes) could move 1SE, though that takes it off the coast.

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lurker's comment: You might want to wait on those dots in the east; there is a Persian (?) city right near Amsterdam. Personally, I would say just expand westward and north and then have a little rumble :evil:
 
I don't disagree with that at all, ansar. Always good to plan ahead for when there's a little more vacant land though. ;)

I'd hope to settle the dyes first, then the town west along the river from Amsterdam, then maybe (MAYBE) grab a flood plain city.
 
I made a variant of the loose dotmap making it slightly tighter:

Spoiler :
dotmap1-1.jpg


I moved blue on the coast (an extra coin) and green on the dyes. Squeezed in an extra town 2W of Rotterdam, to compensate for the closeness to Rotterdam I moved white dot (original spot of purple dot) 1 tile away. I removed orange dot for Ansar's reasons and I moved pink one tile back. Pink is still tricky since before long there will be a flip risk. Whether or not we found pink dot, we'll want some warriors in that area (3) to block Persian settlers that will be coming towards our W and NW.

We need a second curragh in the water a.s.a.p. so our next city should be coastal I feel, I'd say yellow dot. In a solo game with similar settings I missed out on writing by 7 turns on my own continent, but my curraghs had already found the other continent, where writing was still unknown, but they did know math, which was unknown at my own continent. This way writing still netted me some 7 or 8 techs.
 
Depending what's in the fog, I'd move Yellow 1NW to capture the third BG; early war with Persia is very much on the cards, IMO, and that looks like the only opportunity for a half-decent military pump. I would certainly like to see that dot settled first.
 
Well, if we settled Green Dot in my tight spacing picture first, that town would have three BGs to play with (including the one between it and Rotterdam) and a few forests to chop as well. That looks like a fine military pump to me. Plus it's coastal, filling the need for another curragh.

If I had to vote I'd go with that Green Dot first, then yellow (which is also a fine all-around city), and then fill in from there. Grabbing the dyes has to be a pretty high priority, and I don't see what that space sacrifices compared to yellow.
 
Grabbing the dyes has to be a pretty high priority, and I don't see what that space sacrifices compared to yellow.

It would sacrifice shields to waste/corruption; also, the dyes are not under any immediate pressure from another civ, and are useless to us until we can spare the worker turns to connect them.

I cannot stress enough that early war will happen whether we start it or not; experience tells me to concentrate on that as a priority, which means shields.
 
I agree with Buce, yellow dot first, and 1 tile NW is that is not a BG, else on the spot where it is.
 
I'll go with you guys. I'd just say I'd feel a lot more secure in that decision if I was sure we were near the end of the continent there....
 
I like ThinkTank's dotmap with Bucephalus' change, and yellow dot first. Then we can get a barracks up and start cranking archers, and pray that persia doesn't get iron quickly.
 
I cannot stress enough that early war will happen whether we start it or not; experience tells me to concentrate on that as a priority, which means shields.

*scratches head* Maybe I should shut up before I sound like a jerk.
 
This doesn't look good. Maybe I've gotten too use to playing on huge maps or with an isolated start, but I almost think we should burn those dot-maps above and seriously consider ICS for a bit. You'll see why I say this from below, hopefully.

Spoiler :


Pre-turn Change settings to how I like them. Please do this yourself and hit ctrl+P before you play... of course probably everyone here knows this. Anyways, I DID change the governor setting in the capital to "emphasize production" with "yes" checked. This often helps with settler factories. Even though it seems less than ideal, I buy WC from Portugal as siggested. Their attitude goes up to Polite. I raise the lux. slider to 10%, and move the warrior out to explore.

1-2950 Persians start the Pyramids. Persian spear attacks the barbie and wins. Warrior in the NE ends up next to a barbie. Find out we have more land in the south. The worker roads

2-2900 Spot gems via curragh.

3-2850 Magyar barbie attacks our warrior and we win taking no damage. I thought I saw a Portugese warrior nearby, but when I check MapStat I see we now have contact with... Scandinavia. They have The Wheel. Portugal also has The Wheel, but Persia doesn't. Scandinavia doesn't have Masonry. I think we're in luck. Ragnar is annoyed with us. I buy The Wheel from Portugal for 7 gpt and 52 gold (they had the best deal). Persia won't trade tech for The Wheel... not even Bronze Working... they won't even give us 50 gold for it. Maybe I should have seen that coming.. if so... my bad. Lux to 20%. Amsterdam uses the spice forest since we want the granary 1 turn before Amsterdam hits size 5. Send warrior back to Amsterdam for MP duty (and to help our economy). Spot horsie near Rotterdam.

4-2800 Amsterdam-curragh-granary. Unsurprisingly, Persia now has The Wheel. Spot flood plain wheat.

5-2750 Rotterdam-warrior-warrior. Scandinavia now has Masonry. Chop spice forest.

6-2710 lux. to 10% as warrior returns into Amsterdam.

7-2670 Portugal has Ceremonial Burial.

8-2630 Portugese start The Colossus.

9-2590 Sheilds returned to Amsterdam as it grows. Switch from forest to use the now grassland spice. Lux to 20%. Scandinavia has CB. Mine spice square, as we'll need production even for the 1st settler. At least we'll get the granary right on time.

10-2550 Rotterdam-warrior-worker. Spot a barbie camp.


The save and some screenies. I spotted another island. I suspect Ragnar will grab the land before we can get there. Maybe we don't need ICS, but we don't have a whole lot of room in the north... or soon enough we won't.
 
Lurker's comment: This looks about as cramped as the maps I'm usually playing! Yup, not a lot of space, but at least space for 5 more towns minimum. Sometimes that's all you get on these levels. At least you've got Horses, You'll probably put a town on the hill just next to them. Two lux + Horses; that's not bad.
 
To the team/next player,

Thinking over this we might want to set Rotterdam to wealth for a few turns... or maybe send that warrior over to Amsterdam so we at least break even. Once we get the spices hooked up, we'll probably do O.K. Sorry about the bad money situation... I thought we might get Masonry and Bronze Working from buying the Wheel, then selling it to the Persians for Masonry, and then selling Masonry to the Scandinavians for Bronze Working. I didn't check DaveMcW's list of AI favorite techs beforehand, but afterwards I checked it and it says that the AI favors ceremonial burial over The Wheel. I guess we just got unlucky or something.

Optional,

I don't think we have horses. I think Scandinavia's town will soon enough have them in their cultural borders.
 
Too bad about the tech deal but never mind. The Ports where probably researching the wheel already with a fair amount of beakers invested in it, and there's no way to tell that beforehand. This is the only reason I know of that causes the AI to estimate the trade value of a tech very low.

Huge maps play very differently form standard ones. I'm not sure we need a new dotmap, in the shadow game I'm playing I had 8 cities before I was boxed in.

In Amsterdam, we need 2 more shields for the settler factory to work, 1 at size 4 and 1 at size 5. This means the second wheat should be mined and the BG just S should be mined. Our worker is mining the silks right now, it should stop doing that and instead road it (to help with the money situation). This means at least 15 worker turns (2 mines and 1 road), so I think after the granary Amsterdam should build another worker before going on settlers.

Roster.

ThinkTank - waiting
Doug.Lefelhocz - just played
Bucephalus - UP
TheOverseer417 - on deck
DWetzel - warming up
killerkid - will join in August
 
Maybe we don't want to mine the silks now, but if we don't eventually mine them, we won't end up using them when Amsterdam produces settlers.
 
Well, guys, I hate to be contraversial (especially at this late stage) but I wish to propose a change to the dotmap.

Having had a long look at the save, I feel that the previously agreed position for TT's 'yellow dot' will benefit from a move 1N - for three reasons.

1) In the position that I propose, the city will have access to 15 land tiles, including 4 BG's immediately available to it and access to the bananas with expansion, whereas in the other position it has access to only nine land tiles. I realise that this will require tinkering with Amsterdam's Settler factory, which I think is an acceptable trade-off given that there is not much expansion room on this map - it just ain't a 'Settler factory' kind of map, IMO.

2) We need to build tighter all round, IMO; we are 30 turns in and already more or less touch borders with three civs.
War is inevitable, and soon; it looks like a fairly small and crowded landmass, and I would expect us to own it sometime in the Middle Ages. Building just a touch tighter will allow us to push out more units, and give us increased unit support; it seems to me that this game won't last until the Modern Ages, so we are unlikely to miss the impact that big metro's can have. In short, I think a tighter core is appropriate for the kind of game that we are facing.

3) I've forgotten what the third point is :blush: :lol:
 

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A further point I want to add regarding the 'Settler factory': Aside from us not having much expansion room, I don't think that we can afford to ignore Amsterdam's potential for producing military; currently, it represents 50% of our cities, with only the next settled city (wherever we decide to put it) a likely candidate for a military pump. Two cities producing military? and frankly Rotterdam isn't looking good for shields, in the early game at least.

IMO, Amsterdam should finish it's granary, knock-out a Settler then build barracks, after which it should be used primarily as a military pump, only creaming off Settlers as growth allows; I feel our expansion is going to come at the point of a sword, this game.
 
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