Macro Thread

[darrelljs]

This map is a nightmare to defend on if we get dogpiled, which I am starting to think is likely.

Darrell

[plako]

It will be a challenge yes, but we've nice cultural advantage on Gillette. I also trust that our tactical skills are better than current competition.

I would put Taj on Ramune in case we get Engineer. That city is very important having Zeus in it (all bigger fighting in our land will become very costly for them) and potentially could pressure 2 TEAM cities. If we can secure it from being 1 turned that would be great too. Horse's Neck is also important city, but I don't see it claiming new tiles from holy city any time soon. Of course if it sems like we need to keep current ones then HN would be ok candidate.

[plako]

Our tech path after the Liberalism is still undecided. I think we should take Construction and HBR right after Liberalism so that we can start putting cats and HAs on our build queues and really focus on landing Paya so that we can finish the builds in Theocracy. After that we need to decide what units we want to draft and depending on that tech either Machinery or Gunpowder. At the moment I favor Machinery. It just makes us being closer to our important middle term tech goals i.e. Astronomy, Guilds, PP and Engineering whereas Gunpowder pretty much means we need to also had to research military tradition that is a dead end tech. Cuirassier's are fine units, but we should do ok with Knights for now.

[spellman]

OK, so since things are kinda at a crossroad again with the T160 imminent attack, what do people think our overarching plans should be for the next 30-50 turns?

I assume try to get peace so we can get back to our economy. We're doing a decent job of forcing a nasty war in the north to force concessions without our sunkcost army, but they seem willing to duke it out until they have reinforcements (3M? Construction speeds?). Gillette is obviously clammed up tight.

Major tech breakpoints?

[zakalwe]

Some musings about our economy.




We're still making a ton of beakers at 100% research, so our issue at the moment is that we have to save gold for 5 turns to finance a single turn of research. So I think we need to focus on reducing our costs. In general, reducing costs is a very efficient way to improve our economy, as it both increases our gold income per turn and reduces the number of gold we need to save per turn.

I think the first thing we should do is build courthouses all over the place. If we can cut the 171 city maintenance to, say, 100, then we'll go from +69 gpt to +140 gpt. At the same time, our costs would then drop to 294, so we'd suddenly be close to running 100% research every third turn.

Then there's the unit costs, which we can reduce by more warring and by settling more cities. This isn't really something to "worry" about.

Finally, we should evaluate which civics we really want to be in, and consider when to time our next golden age. Pushing out a new pair of GPs from the capital and Ramune shouldn't take too long. And they are virtually guaranteed to be of different types.

Bureaucracy is probably still the best economic civic in the government column, but Free Speech could become very competitive in the future. A riverside Bureaucracy town gives +9 commerce, and a riverside Free Speech town gives +8 commerce. Off river, it's +7.5 commerce vs. +7 commerce. Factor in the savings in civic upkeep, towns outside the capital, and the +100% culture and Free Speech becomes very attractive. Nationalism is also good if we want to do more warring, of course.

We should also consider dropping Organized religion for Free Religion as our cities mature. Though there is almost always something useful to build in terms of infrastructure, so I'm not in a great rush there either.

What about Mercantilism? Is that something to aim for? Corporations are off, so I guess we want State Property eventually, too.

In short... let's figure out our planned civics, and our tech path. Then time our next golden age in accordance with that.

Sorry for the useless post.

[darrelljs]

I'm a big fan of whipping Courthouses, but then I'm not a min/max players so I'll defer to the twins and plako .

Darrell

[zakalwe]

I'm not sure what a min/max player is, really? If you want X courthouses in the next Y turns, I can tell you how to get them. But whether or not to whip a specific courthouse is really a macro question, which requires a deeper understanding.

In other words, we should wait for Macro Man to chime in.

[novice]

I'm all for courthouses, I don't want to whip them when we have improved tiles going unworked due to previous abuse, though.

[zakalwe]

We don't have a lot of mature cottages or resource tiles going unworked, though. Since worker labor isn't a bottleneck at this point, you can just think of every tile as improved. I think whipping away two or three grass mines / farms for a courthouse would be a good choice in many cities. In many cases, a courthouse can save on the order of 1 gpt per citizen. (Which may intuitively sound like +1 gpt per citizen, but is in reality even better.)

[zakalwe]

Some city shots:










All these are prime examples of cities that really should just whip out a courthouse at the earliest possible opportunity. (Cuba Libre should really get a missionary first, though.)

Cuba Libre is costing us 12 gold for 5 citizens, and Elephant Beer is close behind. Neither city has any particularly fabulous tiles to grow onto. Whipping courthouses in these cities therefore looks like a no-brainer from an economic standpoint.