[Spoilers] PBEM 62 - Ichabod's Thread, feat. Mardoc and retep

[Ichabod]

Food!

And one we can improve with Agri, in case we want to go wild on the tech path and forgo AH for some time.




More comments later. I'll probably go BW next, so if someone wants to post a better micro plan that goes pottery next, you have to do it now.

[retep]

Sorry for o being around but I got promoted at work so spare time is a luxury right now.

Anosmia: Hey, Is all about rasing awareness. I can taste but I can't feel flavors. As an example if I eat a chocolate bar I can fel that is mostly sweet. If you eat a chocolate bar appart from sweet you actually feel the chocolate flavor (AT least I have been told that chocolate has a unique flavor like almost everything in life) . I guess that was more confusing that helpfull .

Micro: I try to look the spreadsheet but I couldn't some kind of protecction stuff, so I have ask permission, I'm guessing to you.

Map: Looks good, very green could use more rivers but such is life.

Tech: Religion is important. Getting forges not so much. MC is expansive as well as forges. Are you thinking on getting MC before currency? I don't think that would be a good idea. I could even buy MOnarchy before currnecy but not MC.
Aldo are you planing in mining the grass hills? Have you consider mining only one and cttagins the others?

[Ichabod]

Congrats on the promotion.

About anosmia, it's certainly hard to explain. But I think I understood what you mean.

About the spreadsheet, I gave you permission to edit, a to everyone that can see the link as well. I'm not very familiar with google docs, I thought it was public already. I'll be holding turn 6 for a bit, if you think there's a chance that we could go for something different than BW after Agri.

MC fast doesn't make sense really. If we want a big multiplyer just for the Capital, going for CS makes more sense. Prioritizing Monarchy makes sense. If we can't settle a lot of cities, currency loses a bit of its value. Starting to grow our Capital very soon could be a good move, especially since every extra cottage we work can be compared to another TR.

I'd really like a religion. But I'm scared of going for the early ones. It's certainly a topic for more discussion.

Cottaging the hills seems a bit crazy. Well, if we are going to work cottage hills, it'd only be after all the grassland tiles and riverside tiles are being worked. That's size 13, counting the food tiles, so we would start working the hills at size 14. We could have the hills mined before that and I wonder if windmills aren't better improvements for the late game. But I get where you are coming from, a powerhouse Capital can be really good in this game.

[retep]

Spreadsheet: A quick look (while eating )

Could you explain T18? the number doesn't seems right

Edit: You pass from 17/40 worker to 49/40 worker.

Chop= 13fh
You work: Corn 6fh-Fish 3fh-mine2fh-1forest1fh-capital 2fh= 14fh + bonus worker 1fh =15fh

That is 17+13+15=45/40

Not to mention that you can get 1 more hammer if you work the forest plains hill. Anyway do I missing something?

[Ichabod]

Spreadsheet: A quick look (while eating )

Could you explain T18? the number doesn't seems right

Edit: You pass from 17/40 worker to 49/40 worker.

Chop= 13fh
You work: Corn 6fh-Fish 3fh-mine2fh-1forest1fh-capital 2fh= 14fh + bonus worker 1fh =15fh

That is 17+13+15=45/40

Not to mention that you can get 1 more hammer if you work the forest plains hill. Anyway do I missing something?

I think it goes like this:

20 hammers (13 from chop, 3 from mine, 2 from plains forest, 2 from city tile) -> 25 hammers with the worker bonus.

+

7 food (6 corn + 3 fish - 1 mine - 1 plains forest)

=

32 + 17 = 49/40

Working the 0/3 or the 1/2 doesn't make a difference in this case.

[retep]

I forgot to add the bonus to the chop

I blame the spreadsheet.

[Ichabod]

I forgot to add the bonus to the chop

I blame the spreadsheet.

[Ichabod]

Turn 6 was played and I have a suggestion about the next scout moves.




Why would we backtrack in that direction? Because there's a big river running there:




There's a chance this river is contested land and I want to know if that's the case. Settling rivers is better than settling dry land and that area seems more easily acessible for us than what's on the south. So, I think the scout should go there. We can use our warrior to explore in the red line, so that we can be sure about the best placement of the second city near the corn, so there would be no harm.

Thoughts?

[Ichabod]

I didn't receive a turn yesterday, just this morning. We started building the WB. Here's what the scout found:




Fog gazing reveals that the white square is a jungle tile. That made me change my scouting plan to what is showed above. If we have jungle to the south, that's as far as I want to explore right now. We aren't settling jungle anytime soon, so we can do it later.

These scout moves will make it possible for us to make a totally informed decision regarding where to place the second city. Right now, I'm thinking 4W of the Capital, 1NW of the corn. That would probably be a production city in the future, so I'd probably farm those lake irrigated tiles. This plant only grabs one food resource, so that's not an ideal second city, but there's really not much we can settle besides that. The only way to get two food resources with one city is to have both these resources on the second ring and that's suicide. At least settling 4W gets us ivory. Ivory make it possible for us to grow to size 6 and 3-pop whip a settler in the Capital. I was going to do it anyway, eating a turn of unhapiness (citizens revolting don't eat food when building a settler), so it's not like the ivory is a must. But it's better than nothing.

Right now, it seems going Hunting > AH after pottery is a strong option. We can settle the third city 1W of the pigs and that city will get a lot of river tiles to cottage. It's also settled on the direction of the river, which is where I want to expand to, as said before.

The other tech option is gunning for a religion. We have 5 players, only one mysticism start. But going for a religion with India is a bit suicidal, especially considering the bonus you'd get back from it (no SPI for easy revolt, no chance of a huge shrine like a big PB game). So, perhaps we have a good chance of getting it. That'd mean delaying AH.

If we had a 2 food second city, coupled with the ivory, we could put the second city in a 6 -> 3 whip cycle to get settlers. But the options we have are really low food and it makes that difficult. I don't want to keep the Capital in such a cycle, because I want it to grow on the river tiles and never look back...

Do you guys have any thoughts about second city placement? Next turn will bring important info on this, beause the tile 2S of the corn is the only spot left to uncover that could have food that enables a 2 food on forst ring plant for a second city. But I'm assuming we won't have food there, so we might as well discuss what to do if that's really the case.

By the way, looking at demographics showed that there are some landlocked Capitals, so they are not mirrored.

[Ichabod]

For those that didn't want to look at the micro plan I posted, here's the short version of it.

After the worker, I'll start a WB. The WB will be microed to be ready in 6t. The logic behind this is: we need to be at size 2 when the WB is done, because the first pop will be working the corn. So, the best strategy would be to finish the WB in the same turn we grow to size 2, especially if we grow as fast as possible. 5t is the fastest we can grow to size 2, but there's no way we can do this while finishing the WB at the same time. So, we will grow to size 2 in 5t and finish the WB in 6t, which is the fastest possible way for us to be working the 2 food tiles.

After that, we grow to size 4 on a warrior, which finish at the same turn we reach size 4, working max food. At size 4, we get another worker in 2 turns, aided by EXP + chop. Then, we start a settler and whip it for 2 pop when we are 1t from pottery. We overflow the whip into a 1t granary (the city doesn't grow on the turn we finish the granary, to avoid loss of the food bonus). After that, it's debatable, but I probably grow the city to 6 working food and cottages to 3-pop whip the next settler. Likely with a worker thrown somewhere.

The worker finishes the farm. Than, as we can't build roads and BW isn't finished yet, he moves to the grasshill 2S of the EG. He will start chopping/mining on the turn we get BW. The chop will go in the worker. After that, it depends on the place we settle our second city, but it's likely that he roads to the place. He'll improve the food for the second city (aided by the second worker) and build cottages + chop a granary for the second city (likely).

Tech goes Agri -> BW -> TW -> Pottery

What is the logic behind this plan?

Well, the first thing I wanted was to get the city working the best food tiles, so that means tech Agri and get a worker and a WB.

After that, I think we had two options. Get pottery and get cottages/granary or get BW and chop. Getting pottery early wasn't good for the granary plan, because without BW we'd have to slow build the granary (or wait for BW anyway). Slowbuilding a granary is not good in most circumnstances, because while the city grows without it, you don't get its bonuses. So, I wanted to either whip it or chop it, both options required BW.

We could get pottery for the cottages, but getting them so early would mean a commerce advantage against a food/hammer one from the faster development we get from BW (chops and whips). This is a debatable point, but so early in the game, without any set objective, I valued the faster development more.

So, getting BW, we get to chop the second worker, making it only a 2t build, which is nice, since we avoid wasting too many turns without growth. That's why we get the worker at size 4, to synchronize with the chop. Getting another worker earlier wasn't that good, because he'd only be able to chop/mine/road, which aren't things we really need so early.

The settler at size 4, followed by the whip is due to the fact that growing more right now would mean working unimproved tiles and growing without a granary, so there's not much sense in growing more. By whipping the settler, we not only get a fast second city, but we also get a granary with the overflow. After the granary is done, we can get a pop growth from 2 to 6 every turn. The workers will have cottages ready by then, which is also nice. So, we grow onto this cottages and we whip our growth into a settler, most likely.

The plan for the second city is: get a fast granary (my current plan has it being chopped when city is size 2, but maybe I can think of something better), work cottages for the Capital when the Capital can't, grow to a decent size, whip something, start again. The 2nd city with the corn + ivory can't be more than a whip city and later a farm + mine production city, so i'm not too worried about its long term development. We have to use it to get faster development to better sites.

I'm not planning that much about what to do with the second city because I still want to see where copper shows up and what the scout finds to the south. Things can change easily based on this info.

--

Anyway, I'm trying to think about what other ways there's to play this. Problem is, once I settle a plan in my mind, I get stuck with it and nothing else seems to make sense. I need to be more open minded or I won't make any progress. So, if anyone wants to suggest a different path, fire away. Then I can test it and see what happens.