[SPOILERS]Acrid Pinot and other Pindicator anagrams

[NobleHelium]

Maybe on Drama, but I don't have much experience with drafting. I do think the age of draft camps is far gone and the current metagame does not require it. That said, drafting may be very valuable on an island map. I'm not sure it's worth teching right now though...I like theatres as a source of cheap culture more than anything else.

[Merovech]

You know, I don't think I've ever drafted a unit. It took me a surprisingly long time to figure out where the "Draft" button is on the city screen, so there is some excuse, but that's a weird revelation.

[pindicator]

Maybe on Drama, but I don't have much experience with drafting. I do think the age of draft camps is far gone and the current metagame does not require it. That said, drafting may be very valuable on an island map. I'm not sure it's worth teching right now though...I like theatres as a source of cheap culture more than anything else.

I don't follow what you mean.
Do we need production? CO can 2-popi whip eveey 3 turns if we build globe there. I'm sure other cities can do similar.

[NobleHelium]

Yeah I'm saying the Globe would be primarily for whipping, and may be worth building for that. But I don't think we'll need to do that much whipping in the near future, so it's probably best to get more important techs first. Although it does save quite a few breakers on Philosophy...

[pindicator]

Globe Theatre Analysis*

Analysis Note: This does not attempt to figure in opportunity cost.

Personal Note: In my last job I dumbstruck the company accountant by explaining opportunity cost when they were needing to describe it but forgot the term. "How does someone with an English degree know about opportunity cost?" they asked. "Civilization," I said, and left it vague.


1. Tech

Drama costs 300 base beakers, and Philosophy costs 800. If we know that we want to tech philosophy, how many beakers does teching drama cost us?

Breaking down the cost for our specific game:

tech	base	game	true/1	true/2
Drama	300	396	330
Philosophy	800	1056	880	755

base - Base cost of the technology
game - In-game cost after accounting for settings
true/1 - How many base beakers we need to research tech with 1 pre-requisite
true/2 - How many base beakers we need to research tech with 2 pre-requisites

If we tech Philosophy, we need 880 beakers (we'll actually need a couple more, unless we tech it in 1 turn) with 1 pre-requisite. Teching Drama first will give us 2 pre-requisites and lower the true cost to 755 beakers, saving 125 beakers on the cost of Philosophy. Since Drama costs us 330 true beakers and we save 125 beakers on philosophy, Drama will cost us 205 beakers. Right now this is about 1.25 turns worth of research at break-even.


2. Build

I am not going to look at the hammer cost of building theatres in other cities; at 50h apiece theatres are very cheap and easy to build. The culture output will be useful in border cities (CO, CM, HT, and SR, plus any cities towards the jungle hub jump to mind). Plus, with us securing dyes in the next 10 turns there will be the benefit of a cheap +1 building

Globe costs 300h and the theatre another 50h. Considering the city is going to be mainly used to whip units at 3-pop per whip, if we assume a forge and org religion in the city then we will make up the hammer cost of Globe in roughly 20 turns (it varies depending on the +fpt of the city we build Globe in).


3. Future Benefits

This is the big reason for building Globe, IMO. Just a few turns ago we were discussing the need to build more military: well, guess what the Globe city will do? Build us military. Whip and draft it, to be more precise. In the near-to-mid-term, a Globe City with a forge will be able to 3-pop whip the following units:

(30h x 3pop) x 1.25 modifier = 112h

galleon - 80h
musket - 80h
airship - 80h
cuirassier - 100h
cannon - 100h

Farther down the road, add in a dry docks (+50%), factory (+25%), and power (+50%) and we can 3-pop whip advanced naval units.

(30h x 3pop) x 2.5 modifier = 225h

destroyer - 200h
battleship - 225h


And of course we all know the draft benefits of such a city. At 10fpt we'll be able to draft 2 out of 3 turns.


4. Candidate Cities

Ideally we want a city with high food and no other useful tiles. The amount of food is going to tie directly to frequency of whipping or drafting. A 12fpt city will make up the cost of building globe in something around 15 turns by whipping every 3.5 turns; a 9fpt city will make it up in about 25 turns by whipping every 4.67 turns. (Comparing to a city that 3-pop whips every 10 turns.) I don't think we would want to go any lower than 9fpt, otherwise the horizon is too far out, but we have a number of cities that fit the 9fpt requirement.

So here are some ideas:



Civ One was my first thought because it can reach +12fpt easily post-civil service: City (+2), Corn (+4), Crab (+3), Sheep (+2), Grass Farm (+1) gives us 12fpt at size 4. But the drawback is Civ One has some other good tiles to work: namely the Fur (-1) and Grass Hill Mine (-1).



I think a better city for the Globe is the jungle city in the south. The 3 tiles we would want to work are Crab (+3), Banana (+3), and Dye (0). Farm the grass tiles south of the lake and we can have a city that runs at +9f at size 4, +10 at size 5, and +11 at size 6. Simplifying the math a bit, we'll say that averages us +10fpt between sizes 4 -> 7 and then 3-pop whip every time we hit size 7. Not working the dye would make it a little more efficient. That would give us a 3-pop whip every 4.5 turns, and would see us make up our hammer investment on Globe a little over 20t after building the wonder.

I also like the location for whipping out a fleet: being at the canal it would be able to bring ships to either the west or the east in a timely manner. Similar to building Moai out west, building Globe in the south would let us increase our influence over the jungle hub, an area that is bound to cause friction later on as civs contest these areas. Plus it is close enough to the core that units will only be a few turns away from the center of our empire.

And the ideal spot for Globe has to be in the middle of the hub itself:



So I think we definitely should look to build Globe. Honestly, I was a bit surprised that you don't seem to like the idea of building it, especially in a game where hammers are so scarce. Are there specific reasons why we shouldn't that I am not thinking of?



*This is what happens when I don't have anything to do at work

[NobleHelium]

Analysis Note: This does not attempt to figure in opportunity cost.

Personal Note: In my last job I dumbstruck the company accountant by explaining opportunity cost when they were needing to describe it but forgot the term. "How does someone with an English degree know about opportunity cost?" they asked. "Civilization," I said, and left it vague.

But I am thinking in terms of opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is the name of the game. I see way too many posts extolling the virtues of early libraries because "libraries improve our beaker output, so that helps." Well duh, having libraries is obviously better than not having libraries. But are they better than what you could build in their stead? Most of the time they're not. Another one is "building libraries helps me defray the commerce loss from expanding so quickly" which is even worse. Libraries become less effective the lower your slider is, and are generally not worth building early on in the game unless it's a really high commerce city like a rivered capital, you're CRE (or possibly PHI), or you're using them to run specialists in a city with 2+ food resources that can't be given away. But anyway, that's a big tangent.

In my experience building the Globe isn't really easy, being 300h with no doubler. And I'm still too focused on Globe = drafting, which I think we want to avoid if at all possible. I like your analysis and I agree that having a dedicated whipping city in the future for units would definitely be very useful. It's just that right now we need to be growing basically all our cities except for a few of the newer ones (so that we can keep using them to pump foodhammer units) so that we can run a lot of specialists during the GA. So I don't think we will be able to make use of the Globe for quite a while. But you're right that Drama is really quite cheap when taking into account the beakers we save on Philosophy, so maybe we're best off just teching it after CS even if we won't be able to build the Globe that quickly. The jungle city sounds good right now, but it'll still be a while before we can get the thing up - we'll need at minimum a forge and granary before we start on the Globe. And a ziggurat sounds like a good idea too.

I'm going to go over our cities soon and see what size we want each to be at when we launch the GA, and how many specialists we'll be able to run from them. Then we'll get a much clearer idea of what kind of GPs we'll get, which will help inform a lot of our decisions in about 20 turns.

[pindicator]

Well, opportunity cost implies something is built in place of the globe, so we'd have to have an alternative before figuring it out.
That's my confusion: what would it be in alternative? And how would you compare the two?

As for timing, we won't be able to get it built before the GA. We're starting that at as soon as we finish CS then, right? That is going to be t119 i think... Feud (112), CoL (114), CS (119). So GA starts 120, jungle city won't be ready to start building Globe until at or near the end of that GA because jungle city gets planted t117.

[NobleHelium]

Yeah, I think it may be the best build in the jungle city after granary, forge, and likely a ziggurat. I don't think we'll have time to build it in CO due to burning the food running specialists during the GA. That's the main thing I was thinking about when I doubted the usefulness of teching Drama before Philosophy.

[pindicator]

Turn 111

All the cool stuff happened overseas this turn:



Any bets on what wonder Ichabod takes? Smart money is on Pyramids, but I'm thinking he goes TGLib on us, just for the hell of it.

Since Ruff just finished the wonder, we thought we'd try to offer 5gpt for stone again. So we also ran Wealth in SR to save it's overflow for a turn. Next turn we'll chop a tree to go with that overflow; if Ruff gives us stone that will be 135h into Moai. If he doesn't, it's still 75.

Another turn of growing and teching. We chopping 3 trees, 1-turning a granary in Info I Trust, and completing half of a settler in SBT. And that was about it. Our capital topped 100bpt this turn, that's kind of cool. And at end of turn we grew 6 more population, and (briefly) took the crop yield lead back from Ruff. Of course, he still has double our MFG, but i'm okay with that. Just gotta watch his power...

Total Population & City Count:

Ruff: 13 cities, 71 pop
Us: 12 cities, 63 pop
Rego: 12 cities, 55 pop
Scooter: 10 cities, 49 pop
Ichabod: 9 cities, 42 pop

Still pretty happy with us here. I think we're going to just try to grow as much as we can while doing the necessary whips, to get as much population as we can before kicking off the golden age on turn 120.

[SevenSpirits]

2. Build

I am not going to look at the hammer cost of building theatres in other cities; at 50h apiece theatres are very cheap and easy to build. The culture output will be useful in border cities (CO, CM, HT, and SR, plus any cities towards the jungle hub jump to mind). Plus, with us securing dyes in the next 10 turns there will be the benefit of a cheap +1 building

Globe costs 300h and the theatre another 50h. Considering the city is going to be mainly used to whip units at 3-pop per whip, if we assume a forge and org religion in the city then we will make up the hammer cost of Globe in roughly 20 turns (it varies depending on the +fpt of the city we build Globe in).

I think a better city for the Globe is the jungle city in the south. The 3 tiles we would want to work are Crab (+3), Banana (+3), and Dye (0). Farm the grass tiles south of the lake and we can have a city that runs at +9f at size 4, +10 at size 5, and +11 at size 6. Simplifying the math a bit, we'll say that averages us +10fpt between sizes 4 -> 7 and then 3-pop whip every time we hit size 7. Not working the dye would make it a little more efficient. That would give us a 3-pop whip every 4.5 turns, and would see us make up our hammer investment on Globe a little over 20t after building the wonder.

I don't know how you're calculating this, but I don't buy it. Globe isn't magically producing hammers. If Globe is letting you whip about once every 5t instead of once every 10t then at best it's producing 90h every 10t, or 9h/t. That's fairly bad for a 350h building.

But also! You aren't just getting those hammers for free. You are spending pop each time, and you had to work farms to get those pop. At the sizes you're talking about, grassland mines or equivalent tiles are only slightly less efficient than grassland farms being 3-whipped. I haven't done the math here but I'd be surprised if the Globe is really giving you more than 1-3hpt, which is just atrocious compared to anything else you could build. I think it can really only be worthwhile if you're in nationhood for extended periods of time.