[SPOILERS] scooter peruses RB's Greatest Hits

[Nekira Sudacne]

Well think of it this way: Not every city in a golden age needs to be optimized if the tradeoff is better. by that I mean, a city that dosn't have a ton of improved commerse/production tiles is only getting on average an extra 3-4 commerse per turn during a golden age. Take Masterclass as the one i'm looking at: with potential access to 2 wet corn, plains cow /and/ fish? it if it borrows the rice for fish+rice+rice, that's +9/10 food per turn, and more importantly it won't really get anything from a golden age because those are food tiles being worked, which golden age won't effect. You could quickly grow to size 6, triple whip, then use fish+rice during the golden age to quickly regrow, and you'd be out only...what? an extra 3 CPT and one HPT? It's too new to be dedicated to running specalists for a great person during said golden age, so sinse it's not going to be terribly useful during it, getting a settler out of it seems worthwhile. Is getting a city or two up and running 15 turns sooner worth about 20 hammers/commerse in a new-ish city that only has food hooked up? I definatly think so, as Sulla loves to say, Civ is a snowball game. especially sinse those new cities can put golden age production right into their own growth curve :D

Remember, Whipping during a golden age is not bad. whipping off improved, productive tiles in a golden age is bad. if your city has nothing but food, then you are losing almost nothing while gaining new cities, which in this case is an unquestioned good. 3 CPT vs 15 turns on a new city? I don't know about you, but I like that tradeoff

[Nekira Sudacne]

Also: mackoti spammed out that many settlers WHILE building an eairly library for an eairly great person WHILE pumping reserch, WHILE not being imperalistic. Unless he has somehow broken the law of averages, something has to have been traded off in return for all that. he is either behind on worker labor, or basically no infastructure as he pumps out nothing but workers and settlers.

[Krill]

Well, there are implicit assumptions that might not hold...

[Nekira Sudacne]

Sure, we don't know exactly what he's doing, but it's physically impossible to do everything at once all the time, so he has to have traded off somewhere, even if he has plans to make it up later on.

That, or we're about to see a huge wave of Cataphracts in 20 turns about to rush over the border, in which case GG

[antisocialmunky]

Well he's not doing everything at once, he's clearly not killing someone with Catanks yet, that's the trade off

Besides, he's not pushing as many settlers as Scooter is able to. As I mentioned before the city counts are deceptive since they appear in waves and we are nearing the next wave of settler spam. So a better metric here is total settler production including fractional settlers that are still in the queues.

Plus there's the fact that altars are going up everywhere and scooter is leading in EPs isn't being factored into the discussion.

[scooter]

Nekira, I'm certainly not 100% ruling out any sort of golden age whips ever, but you have to remember we're going to spend most of that golden age in Caste. Also, I agree Masterclass is the best candidate of the smaller cities. The timing is what I'm trying to solve currently. I think I might be able to whip a settler out of there before we swap into Caste, but I'm not 100% sure yet.

Also: mackoti spammed out that many settlers WHILE building an eairly library for an eairly great person WHILE pumping reserch, WHILE not being imperalistic. Unless he has somehow broken the law of averages, something has to have been traded off in return for all that. he is either behind on worker labor, or basically no infastructure as he pumps out nothing but workers and settlers.

Eh. I think he has a lot less workers, but that's not necessarily a problem for him.

1) He's spent a lot of time in Serfdom and therefore needs fewer workers.
2) He's Financial, which means his coastal cities can just sit and work coast without much worker attention. This is a pretty big one that is really easy to overlook. I think this was a pleasant surprise for him given the total lack of water in the starting screenshot. FIN coast is a pretty solid tile to work early on. It has the added bonus of boosting his research.
3) He's Spiritual, which means at minimum he got a 1T head start. It also means he got access to Organized Religion, meaning it saved him the cost of a monastery that we had to build for the future.
4) It's also very possible he simply made better choices and squeezed more out. That's very difficult to determine given our drastically different leaders, but it's very much possible.

Honestly though, it doesn't really matter too much. All we can really do is try to execute the plan perfectly and see where that gets us.

FWIW, I still think REM is in a better position. I estimate the positions to be something like this:

REM > Mackoti > scooter >>> Plako > RMoG >> Alhazard

Very, very highly subject to change.

[Sullla]

Scooter, for what it's worth, I like the idea to grow Masterclass right now and run a bunch of Scientist specialists during the Golden Age more than triple whipping it for another settler. Great Person production is one of our weaknesses as a non-Spiritual civ, so I like the idea of maximizing our opportunity during a Golden Age. It's your call of course, depending on what makes the most sense in-game.

[Nekira Sudacne]

Scooter, for what it's worth, I like the idea to grow Masterclass right now and run a bunch of Scientist specialists during the Golden Age more than triple whipping it for another settler. Great Person production is one of our weaknesses as a non-Spiritual civ, so I like the idea of maximizing our opportunity during a Golden Age. It's your call of course, depending on what makes the most sense in-game.

But would that produce enough GPP to get yet another Scientist?

also, with a potential +11 food surplus, i'm not sure it can't triple whip a settler AND regrow to farm GPP. that is one of the most ludicrously fertile city placements i've seen in a while. the fact has two grassland silver mines to work with all that food surplus is only icing on a very rich cake.

[scooter]

Turn 223-224



REM's golden age concluded. He rejected my map trade offer, but someone else accepted it (I made a few), which gave us a couple more cities worth of visibility.



We also picked up a couple more Mackoti cities. Interestingly, it looks like at the time he made this map trade, he had yet to even explore the area to the north.

scooter: Nationalism (Constitution next)
Plako: Nationalism (Education next)
mackoti: n/a
RMoG: n/a
REM: Nationalism (Constitution next)
Alhazard: Astro, Education, Printing Press

We've got tech visibilty now on two players, and we'll have it on Mackoti soon too.



Here's an overview shot after T223. Island settler is en route here. On the next turn:



I'll drop the longbow SW first and see what that gives us. Demos in spoilers:

The games are down right now, so we'll see when it comes back up so I can see what else is on that island.

[scooter]

Extra seafood! Pretty nice to see those clams there. Anyway, I think I should probably still settle where the longbow is located, but if anyone can make a compelling case for a different spot, now is the time.