Echoing on what scooter said, Oxford is very important for late era starts. You’re beginning with no developed cottages or other tile improvements, but you get access to Bureaucracy immediately from the start of the game, plus this national wonder that increases science in a single city by 100%. A strong capital with an early Oxford is the recipe for teching quickly in late era starts. Go back and read the Khmer thread from the Industrial game, OT4E was pushing heavily for early Oxford, and only gave it up to pursue the Taj and Kremlin instead. The thing that helps us in this game is the 6 city requirement, which will slow down any of the Philosophical teams from getting universities up and Oxford in place right away. Well, maybe Suleiman’s Imp/Phi will be able to work around that, but no one else will. That gives us a bit of a grace period in the early game, and I think we’ll pick up Education fairly quickly ourselves. My tentative guess at our ideal tech path would be Nationalism, Constitution, Education (lightbulb), Printing Press (lightbulb?), Democracy.
On that note, we should be thinking a little bit about whether we want to try and set up a lightbulb of either Nationalism or Constitution. Nationalism can be bulbed by a Great Artist, and Constitution will be the choice of a Great Merchant once Nationalism is researched (since it has higher priority than Printing Press). Then we could use the more efficient Great Scientists for the subsequent lightbulbs along the Education/Printing Press research line. The problem is that I don’t know if we’re going to want to tie up precious early population on running Artists or Merchants in a period where we won’t have Representation to buff their output. What does everyone think – worthwhile or better to just concentrate on expanding first and use the better-value Great Scientists for our first few lightbulbs? Need to play around in a sandbox here to get a better sense.
To follow scooter’s point on workshops, they don’t seem viable here out of the gate. Pre-Chemistry tech, workshops are -1 food/+2 production, and that’s dreadfully weak. We can get them to -1 food/+3 production via Chemistry, which makes them semi-viable, but still only as good as a grassland hill mine, which we all know is not an especially useful file. Workshops need Caste System to give them the extra +1 production… except that Imp/Org Caesar absolutely needs to be in Slavery, and to stay there for a very long time. We aren’t Spiritual, and we can’t afford to spend much (if any) time in Caste System until a great deal later in the game. So as much as this would be a neat idea, I also can’t see it working out, and Gunpowder/Chemistry won’t help a lot on the economic side of things. By the way, if I’m posting a lot about economy, it’s because I think we have the expansion side of things essentially wrapped up. We should be able to match or beat any other team with our traits, barring something weird happening.
For tile improvements, it’s going to be a lot of farms and cottages I think. We need more techs to buff up the lategame tile improvements: Chemistry and Communism for workshops, Replaceable Parts (and eventually Electricity) for windmills and watermills. I do think we’ll build a lot more windmills in this game, which was an oversight of our team in the Industrial game, however they kind of need Replaceable Parts before they become worthwhile.
I’m pretty happy with how the snake pick has been proceding. Aside from the run on the leaders that dominated the last game – anyone else amused by how Caesar and Gandhi and Khmer are all being valued so highly? Poor Montezuma!
- it’s mostly been what we expected to see. With no disrespect to Alhazard, I’m glad that he was the one to land Gandhi. Spi/Phi has a very high skillcap to play, and I’m hoping he won’t be able to get quite as much out of the pick as OT4E did in the last game. Mackoti with cataphracts is terrifying, but I’d rather see him take Byzantium and try to defend against them on this map that has ivory and iron right at the start, as opposed to mackoti landing the game’s best economic leader and snowballing us all out of the game with awesome macro play. Maybe we get lucky and he rushes plako or Nicolae? We can always hope.
We were discussing the Aztecs as a good pick for the Sacrificial Altar earlier, and I’m really hoping that we’ll be able to land that pick. The odds are looking pretty decent that it won’t be chosen; mackoti and Nicolae already have civs taken, and Alhazard/RMOG team have taken non-Organized leaders that don’t seem to have much attraction for the Aztecs. So if plako doesn’t take them (and they would be an odd choice with the third civ pick), I think we’re likely to have them as a possible option. The more I think about it, the better I like Sacrificial Altars for our strategy. They are cheaper than standard courthouses at only 90 production (81 production in this era), which means that with the innate forge and Organized trait they are almost a 1 pop whip (whip with Organized/forge bonuses = 67 production). More likely, a 2 pop whip with heavy overflow into something else. I also think that we absolutely can make use of the 5 turn whip anger duration here. Food costs are also reduced by 10% here in the Renaissance, so it doesn’t require as much food to grow… and we get free granaries in every city. Well, that’s kind of nice.
Remember that it was happiness that seemed to be the key thing holding back Dreylin/OT4E in the last game, not a lack of food for whipping. Sacrificial altar would dovetail very nicely with the general setup we have planned here.
Furthermore, this looks to be another very lush and green map in terms of resources. Fertile maps favor fast horizontal expansion, while food-poor maps tend to favor building up the few spots that have decent land with heavy individual city multipliers. (Food-poor maps are also about squeezing every drop of production/commerce out of tundra and desert hellholes, of course.) I’m hoping this map will play well to our Imperialistic trait. And you know, we’ve been saying that Cylindrical as opposed to Toroidal design is a nerf to Organized as a trait, but you know what? It’s a buff to Imperialistic! Fertile map + Cylindrical shape + Prince difficulty is an invitation to spam those settlers as fast as possible. That’s why I’ve been pushing for Constitution/Representation and the Statue of Liberty route, as it allows us to accumulate per-city bonuses in the form of free specialists. Just a good fit for our overall gameplan.
It looks like it takes about 23 or 24 food to grow from size 2 to size 4 (with a granary in place and the foodbox already full). That should make it pretty easy to run a 5 turn double-whipping cycle, as we only need about +5 or +6 food to pull it off, which is very manageable on this kind of map. That’s a knight or a library or a worker with some decent overflow, every 5 turns. Growing from size 3 to size 6 for the triple whip is about 40 food, which might be possible for a 5 turn cycle in very high food cities. Note that the capital can instantly complete a settler with a triple whip (Imperalistic + Bureaucracy + forge = 82 production per pop = 246 production on a triple whip), and we probably will want to do this once or twice. Then likely grow the capital on cottages after that. Any non-capital city gets 202 production from an Imperialistic settler whip, so we can get a settler out of any other city with 1 forest chop plus a triple whip. Like I said, I think the capital gets out a settler or two initially, and then the other cities will be able to take over. We can expand *FAST*. I’m really hoping we can land the Aztecs at this point – I want those 5 turn whipping cycles.
On that note, we should be thinking a little bit about whether we want to try and set up a lightbulb of either Nationalism or Constitution. Nationalism can be bulbed by a Great Artist, and Constitution will be the choice of a Great Merchant once Nationalism is researched (since it has higher priority than Printing Press). Then we could use the more efficient Great Scientists for the subsequent lightbulbs along the Education/Printing Press research line. The problem is that I don’t know if we’re going to want to tie up precious early population on running Artists or Merchants in a period where we won’t have Representation to buff their output. What does everyone think – worthwhile or better to just concentrate on expanding first and use the better-value Great Scientists for our first few lightbulbs? Need to play around in a sandbox here to get a better sense.
To follow scooter’s point on workshops, they don’t seem viable here out of the gate. Pre-Chemistry tech, workshops are -1 food/+2 production, and that’s dreadfully weak. We can get them to -1 food/+3 production via Chemistry, which makes them semi-viable, but still only as good as a grassland hill mine, which we all know is not an especially useful file. Workshops need Caste System to give them the extra +1 production… except that Imp/Org Caesar absolutely needs to be in Slavery, and to stay there for a very long time. We aren’t Spiritual, and we can’t afford to spend much (if any) time in Caste System until a great deal later in the game. So as much as this would be a neat idea, I also can’t see it working out, and Gunpowder/Chemistry won’t help a lot on the economic side of things. By the way, if I’m posting a lot about economy, it’s because I think we have the expansion side of things essentially wrapped up. We should be able to match or beat any other team with our traits, barring something weird happening.
For tile improvements, it’s going to be a lot of farms and cottages I think. We need more techs to buff up the lategame tile improvements: Chemistry and Communism for workshops, Replaceable Parts (and eventually Electricity) for windmills and watermills. I do think we’ll build a lot more windmills in this game, which was an oversight of our team in the Industrial game, however they kind of need Replaceable Parts before they become worthwhile.
I’m pretty happy with how the snake pick has been proceding. Aside from the run on the leaders that dominated the last game – anyone else amused by how Caesar and Gandhi and Khmer are all being valued so highly? Poor Montezuma!
- it’s mostly been what we expected to see. With no disrespect to Alhazard, I’m glad that he was the one to land Gandhi. Spi/Phi has a very high skillcap to play, and I’m hoping he won’t be able to get quite as much out of the pick as OT4E did in the last game. Mackoti with cataphracts is terrifying, but I’d rather see him take Byzantium and try to defend against them on this map that has ivory and iron right at the start, as opposed to mackoti landing the game’s best economic leader and snowballing us all out of the game with awesome macro play. Maybe we get lucky and he rushes plako or Nicolae? We can always hope.We were discussing the Aztecs as a good pick for the Sacrificial Altar earlier, and I’m really hoping that we’ll be able to land that pick. The odds are looking pretty decent that it won’t be chosen; mackoti and Nicolae already have civs taken, and Alhazard/RMOG team have taken non-Organized leaders that don’t seem to have much attraction for the Aztecs. So if plako doesn’t take them (and they would be an odd choice with the third civ pick), I think we’re likely to have them as a possible option. The more I think about it, the better I like Sacrificial Altars for our strategy. They are cheaper than standard courthouses at only 90 production (81 production in this era), which means that with the innate forge and Organized trait they are almost a 1 pop whip (whip with Organized/forge bonuses = 67 production). More likely, a 2 pop whip with heavy overflow into something else. I also think that we absolutely can make use of the 5 turn whip anger duration here. Food costs are also reduced by 10% here in the Renaissance, so it doesn’t require as much food to grow… and we get free granaries in every city. Well, that’s kind of nice.
Remember that it was happiness that seemed to be the key thing holding back Dreylin/OT4E in the last game, not a lack of food for whipping. Sacrificial altar would dovetail very nicely with the general setup we have planned here.Furthermore, this looks to be another very lush and green map in terms of resources. Fertile maps favor fast horizontal expansion, while food-poor maps tend to favor building up the few spots that have decent land with heavy individual city multipliers. (Food-poor maps are also about squeezing every drop of production/commerce out of tundra and desert hellholes, of course.) I’m hoping this map will play well to our Imperialistic trait. And you know, we’ve been saying that Cylindrical as opposed to Toroidal design is a nerf to Organized as a trait, but you know what? It’s a buff to Imperialistic! Fertile map + Cylindrical shape + Prince difficulty is an invitation to spam those settlers as fast as possible. That’s why I’ve been pushing for Constitution/Representation and the Statue of Liberty route, as it allows us to accumulate per-city bonuses in the form of free specialists. Just a good fit for our overall gameplan.
It looks like it takes about 23 or 24 food to grow from size 2 to size 4 (with a granary in place and the foodbox already full). That should make it pretty easy to run a 5 turn double-whipping cycle, as we only need about +5 or +6 food to pull it off, which is very manageable on this kind of map. That’s a knight or a library or a worker with some decent overflow, every 5 turns. Growing from size 3 to size 6 for the triple whip is about 40 food, which might be possible for a 5 turn cycle in very high food cities. Note that the capital can instantly complete a settler with a triple whip (Imperalistic + Bureaucracy + forge = 82 production per pop = 246 production on a triple whip), and we probably will want to do this once or twice. Then likely grow the capital on cottages after that. Any non-capital city gets 202 production from an Imperialistic settler whip, so we can get a settler out of any other city with 1 forest chop plus a triple whip. Like I said, I think the capital gets out a settler or two initially, and then the other cities will be able to take over. We can expand *FAST*. I’m really hoping we can land the Aztecs at this point – I want those 5 turn whipping cycles.
